5200 Weeks

I was sitting with a coffee that had gone cold. Not because I’d forgotten it, but because I’d been staring at a number I’d scratched on a napkin.

5200. That’s all. Just a number.

Fifty-two weeks in a year. A hundred years if you’re lucky, if the genes line up and you don’t do anything stupid and the universe doesn’t flip its coin the wrong way. Multiply them together. 5200 weeks.

That’s the whole thing.

That’s the container your entire life fits inside.

Something happens when you move from years to weeks. Years are hazy. Abstract. “I have decades left” feels like a promise the universe made you. But weeks?

You know what a week feels like. You’ve lived through one just now. You know how quickly Monday becomes Sunday becomes Monday again. Weeks are concrete. Graspable. Countable.

And 5200 of them is not a lot.

Everyone knows they’re going to die. Ask anyone on the street and they’ll confirm it. Yes, yes, mortality, the human condition, we’ve all read the brochure. But there’s a difference between knowing something and knowing it. Between the intellectual acknowledgment and the felt sense of it settling into your chest. Most people live their entire lives in the first category.

The second one requires something to break through.

Maybe it’s a diagnosis. Maybe it’s a funeral.

Maybe it’s a number on a napkin.

The shift isn’t morbid. That’s the part that surprises people. You’d think staring directly at your own finitude would be depressing, would cast a shadow over everything. But it doesn’t work that way. What happens is more like... things get sharper. Clearer. The fog of “someday” and “eventually” burns off, and you see the landscape you’re actually standing in.

That argument you’ve been nursing for three years? Is it worth forty of your weeks? That job you keep meaning to leave? How many weeks have you already fed it? That person you’ve been too busy to call?

These aren’t productivity hacks. This isn’t about optimising your calendar or squeezing more into each hour. That’s a different disease entirely. This is about something quieter.

About standing in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and feeling, actually feeling, that this one won’t come again. Not as anxiety. As attention.

The strangest part is how easy it is to forget. You’d think once you see it, you couldn’t unsee it. But the mind has its defenses. Its ability to re-fog the window. To slip back into the comfortable assumption that there’s always more time, always another chance, always tomorrow. We’re built to forget death. It’s probably adaptive. You can’t function in a state of perpetual memento mori. You have to plan. You have to assume continuity.

You have to believe, at some level, in next week.

You have to live as if time is infinite while knowing it isn’t. Both things true. Both necessary. And somewhere in that impossible space, the actual living happens.

Most people won’t feel this until the end. When the weeks are down to single digits. When the future stops being abstract and becomes a door. That’s not a judgment. It’s just how consciousness works. How attention works. We notice what’s scarce. We feel what’s running out.

Here’s the question I keep turning over.

What if you could borrow that awareness? Not the fear, not the panic, not the desperate grasping. Just the clarity. The way the dying see. The focused calm of someone who finally understands what a week is worth.

What would you do with your next one?

Not your next year. Not your next decade. Your next seven days. The ones starting now.

I don’t have an answer.

I’m not sure there is one. Or rather, I’m not sure it’s the kind of question that gets answered.

It’s the kind of question that gets lived.

The coffee’s cold again. That’s three I’ve let go today. Somewhere in there is probably a metaphor about attention and presence and showing up for your own life. But I’ll let you find it.

You have the time.

For now.