Regrets in Life

None of us can predict when we might be lying on our deathbed thinking back on the life we've been leading. But if you were lying there thinking of things you've done or not done in life, where would your questions take you, exactly?

Like many people with a morbid propensity for self examination, I've thought along these lines a few times. Thanks either to God or evolution, we are faced with so many choices every day it is almost inevitable some of us experience regret over choices made in the past.

So here's a sampling of things to think about on your deathbed. You might find some of these topics a bit colorful, but that doesn't change the fact that for many people they ring true.

Driving to work

It is a sad fact of life that so many of us engage in long commutes to earn a living. I once commuted 31 miles one way to work. That meant I spent two hours a day in the car, round trip. That's 10 hours a week. 40 hours a month. 480 hours a year. I did that for 8 years. That's 3,840 hours or 160 full days of my life spent in the car.

I listened to a lot of radio. Learned what a liar Rush Limbaugh can be. Heard so much Classic Rock I never want to hear the Doobie Brothers again. Tuned in to Public Radio to hear the liberal voice of reason. But in the end, that was all survival mode. To really think during those two hours a day, I had to turn the radio over to a Classical music station because those are the only sounds that allow the human brain room to think.

There were other problems as well. All that commuting gave me a wicked mix of hemorrhoids, back problems and road rage. Stress and frustration were a daily part of existence. Quality of life became a serious issue at times. People would dole out supposedly helpful hints like, "Have you tried books on tape?" to which I wanted to respond, "Have you considered choking yourself with a cell phone charger cord? Because I'm willing to help."

Yes I tried books on tape! I tried everything possible to make the commute shorter and more tolerable. In the end, nothing really changes the fact that you live at Point A and have to get to Point B in order to go to work. To make matters worse, I was ultimately assigned responsibility for 5 regional offices in 5 different counties. Some days I reached 250 miles of round trip travel. I put 100,000 miles on my Toyota Matrix in 3 years. I couldn't help it. My former boss took comfort seeing my face each day in that little desk outside his office door even though most of my job dealt with partners and clients strung out across a 5-county region.

I finally quit the job and got another job because it paid more money. But the office was a mile farther and in the same general direction as the old job. What was I thinking? It didn't last. Now I work 7 miles from home but make less money. Am I happy about the shorter commute? Hell no. I have 15 minutes every day to consider the fact that we're slowly going broke.

Looking back when life is short, there may be a few regrets like these as to where we spent our time. So let us continue by addressing how much time some people (men especially) spend on that most personal habit. masturbation.

Masturbation

It's true that many men (starting as boys, sctually) spend quite a bit of the first half of their lives masturbating. Somewhere between 10 and 12 years old the "midsection" takes over men's minds and their hands become a permanent form of entertainment.

Let's do some simple (honest) math calculations that are based on barroom conversations and fraternal admissions I've heard from a sampling of perhaps 200 men the past 25 years. Take it on good authority: Growing up, most guys whack it 5 times a week minimum. Even if they are having sex frequently, they're whacking it in memory of the good sex they just had.

I know several men who have confessed to masturbating 7 times in one day. Seven times! If you figure they spent at least half an hour on the act, thinking about this or that woman, or something else, who knows, you get 3.5 hours of mercilessly pleasurable entertainment.

But back it off a bit for the sake of "normalcy" and figure that if most guys simply spend an hour a day whacking it and take a couple days off a week, it still averages out to 5 times a week. But I remind you, in the confessions I've heard from quite a few friends and drunken associates over the years, that estimate is on the low side.

That means for many men the average amount of life spent masturbating adds up to something like 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month, or 240 hours a year. If a guy keeps up this pace from age 12 to age 42, that's a total of 7200 hours or 300 total days of masturbation. That's nearly a full year of your life spent yanking the crank.

Perhaps the pace slackens a bit (to coin a phrase) between ages 42 and 52, then lets up a bit more between ages 52 and 62. By then your hot fantasies may look more like worn out magazines (there were probably a few of those along the way anyway) so most men probably top out at one full year of masturbation in a lifetime.

I do not mean to imply here that masturbation is necessarily a bad thing. This is not some lame attempt to proselytize, moralize or guilt anyone into whacking it less often. The only goal of this essay is to raise the simple question: Given a choice on your deathbed, will you someday want that year of your life back?

Think about it: The things you could with a full year! Write a novel! Sail around the world! Run for President! Instead you've got a handful of memories and little to show for it.

Some men do recall their masturbatory histories with a note of pride. I have heard guy friends relate fondly (over many beers usually) their peak masturbatory moments. These recollections tend to be tinged with a certain wistful lament for their former virility and a longing for some unreconciled actual conquest.

There's something about the stupid urgency of it all that appeals to the masculine imagination. That puts masturbation right in line with the practice of betting on sports teams when it comes to productive drives and instincts. In the end (or so it seems) it's all about managing urges and drives in the 80-100 years we get on this earth, if we're lucky. That brings us to the next category of time invested in things we might not realize take up a lot of time in our lives: Going to church.

Church

Don't get me wrong: I love church. Been attending since I was a little kid. That's 40 years of weekly church attendance if I honestly subtract the 10 years I didn't go to church during my 20s. That's the decade where no one but the truely fearful really goes to church.

Generally church requires about 3 hours of your time each week by the time you drive there, socialize, sit through service, socialize some more and then drive home. That's 12 hours a month and 144 hours a year. Over 40 years that adds up to 5760 hours, or 240 full days spent listening to pastors lecture about matters on which you typically disagree.

Now you might notice something interesting in the statistics we've gathered so far. If you do the math you might notice that most men spend 125 more days in life masturbating than they do going to church. Quite a few men spend probably spend time masturbating over thoughts of women they've just seen in church. That's how the male mind tends to work, you see. There is fodder for fantasy everywhere. So I guess the Bible and God have a long way to go in convincing supposed believers to behave. It appears there is a very strange cycle at work here.

I can't speak for women in these circumstances. I do think most women thrill more to organ music than to the notion of male organs. That simply proves they have more class and are content to occupy their minds with something other than physical gratification. God Bless them. Church would appear to be the clear winner in the female category when it comes to worthwhile pursuits in life.

Perhaps we should let women run all the churches? But we all know men will never let women take over running the church because men want to continue building church steeples that resemble giant penises in order to remind women who's really in charge, and what they'll really be thinking about when they get home. I told you there were some strange cycles going on here.

Working on your computer

I cannot accurately calculate the number of keystrokes I've entered into computers in my lifetime, and I'm not sure I'd regret any one of them on my deathbed. For better or worse (and you can be the judge of that since you've made it this far in this article) writing is something I really love to do. But let's take a crack at some numbers relating to time spent on the computer to get us a ballpark figure on how much time and effort we're spending typing inane thoughts like those you are now reading.

At this point in this article there are about 6018 characters entered. Multiply that number by a factor of 10 and you get a typical output for each day in our work lives. Then like many people I go home and type four or five more articles or spend time entered stupid comments on Facebook like "That's a really cute picture. I did not know you had three nipples."

At any rate, we're all logging in about 100,000 characters a day, 700,000 characters a week and 2,800,000 characters a month. That all adds up to a figure that's off the charts by the time a year rolls by. The numeric widget calculator on my Mac Dashboard won't even go that high. (And that was that a fun sentence to type.) Maybe that's why I do this, for the thrill of putting weird words next to each other. So let's say I'm really dying and I stop to think, "I wish I could have typed that word more, "widget," because it's a really cute word..."

Well, that's a writer's lament. I won't bother you any more with it. With it. That's sounds like "widget," doesn't it? But I digress...

Instead, let's take a serious look at the time we spend on computers. A typical day might involve 6 hours per day typing on the computer. That's around 36 hours a week with one day off for other activities. It adds up to 144 hours a month and 1,728 hours a year. If your career lasts 50 years in the workforce you'll spend 86,400 hours or 3600 days of your life typing on the computer. That's more than 9 years, or 11% of your entire life if you live to be 80 years old.

I will tell you that I love computers. Word processing on a computer makes writing much easier than the jury-rigged IBM Selectric I used to write my first--and as yet unpublished-- novel back in 1981. But the book I wrote on my computer is published. So I am not complaining. Without my computer I frankly might go insane. Life these days requires a release. Writing does it for me.

What I am proposing is that we should all really be trying to do something productive when sitting in front of a computer. Perhaps you really are trying to write a novel or further the cause of social justice.

But who's to say that the new time-waster--social media-- is not a constructive use of time? As for Twitter, well, the jury is still out on people who are so attention starved they feel compelled to log their every move and have people follow them. Who do they think they are, the New Disciples?

But if you're actually spending all your time typing out angry messages about your stupid boss to other co-workers, and hoping no one ever reads your email, then you might want to put yourself into a "deathbed perspective" mode and try to fix your life a little.

Because you also wouldn't want that boss to come visit you on your deathbed clutching a printout of those emails and seeking revenge by trying to make you feel guilty about those nasty words you wrote way back when.

No, that would not be a pretty final scene. But now's the time to work on the habits that lead to memories so you won't have those deathbed regrets about how you spent your time on this earth.