I turned 32 yesterday.

Which means, if you run the numbers on an average Australian life expectancy, I have roughly 18,315 days left.

I did this calculation on my birthday. Not as an act of self-torture — just because I've spent enough time reading philosophy to have developed a mild habit of uncomfortable arithmetic. You do the maths, the number comes back, and it sits there on the screen looking smaller than you expected.

It always does.

Here's what I did with the day.

Took the day off work. Drove to school and watched my daughters, London and Isla-Rose, run the cross country — both of them taking it far more seriously than I would have at their age, which made me unreasonably proud. Got burgers for dinner. Played Exploding Kittens with the family until the evening ran out.

That's it. Nothing on any bucket list. No milestone celebration. No grand gesture at the significance of another year.

Just a completely ordinary day that felt, somehow, like exactly enough.

I want to be clear about something. The reckoning with mortality didn't come from a health scare. No dramatic catalyst. No moment of crisis that forced the question.

It came through reading. Through sitting with people who thought carefully about time — what it costs, what it means to spend it badly, what happens when you treat it like it renews every morning.

The Stoics had a practice they called memento mori. Remember, you will die. Not as a threat. Not as something to flinch from. As a tool. A way of staying awake to the life you're actually living rather than the one you keep meaning to get around to.

Seneca put it plainly: we don't have a short time to live, we just waste a great deal of it.

I've been turning that over for a while now. Long enough that it's quietly working its way into another book I'm writing — something about what death has to say about living, and why that's a more hopeful conversation than it sounds.

But the newsletter version is simpler.

18,315 days. Give or take. And a clock is only useful if you're paying attention to it.

Here's what knowing the number doesn't do.

It doesn't make me anxious. Doesn't make me want to quit everything and go find myself on a mountain. Doesn't produce any particular urge toward grand gestures or dramatic reinvention.

Here's what it does.

It makes the cross country matter. It makes standing on the side of a school oval on a Thursday morning, watching two small people run their hearts out, feel like something worth being fully present for rather than something to half-watch while checking emails.

It makes the burgers matter. It makes Exploding Kittens — a card game involving cartoon cats and fictional detonations — matter in a way that is completely disproportionate to what it actually is.

When you know time is finite, the ordinary stuff stops being background noise.

It becomes the thing.

Most people don't do this calculation. Most people don't want to. There's a version of that which makes complete sense — who wants to know? Better, maybe, to just get on with it without the number hanging around.

But the alternative is living like the number is unlimited. Treating the cross country as an inconvenience. Getting to the end of things and doing the maths for the first time then, when there's nothing left to do about it.

Memento mori isn't about death. It's about not sleepwalking through the part before it.

The number isn't there to frighten you. It's there so the ordinary Tuesday feels like what it actually is.

18,315 days.

Yours will be different. Might be more. Might be less. The number doesn't come with a guarantee — just an average, and averages are cold comfort when it's your hourglass.

But yesterday — the cross country, the burgers, the exploding kittens, the whole unremarkable, irreplaceable mess of it — that one came off the top.

And it was worth every second.

If this gave you something to think about, feel free to forward it to someone who might appreciate it.

Until next time,
Broden Johnson