Let's talk about time

How Much Time Do You Actually Have Left?

In this episode, I look at why our internal sense of time is so unreliable — why the years speed up as we get older, why the future always feels blurrier and more distant than it actually is, and why the things that matter most (a parent, a child, a friendship) so easily lose out to things with a deadline attached, purely because they don't have one.

Then the numbers: real UK life expectancy at different ages, the often-overlooked gap between lifespan and healthspan, and a set of simple exercises — how many visits are actually left with an ageing parent, how much of your time with your kids has already happened before they're even a teenager — that turn a vague future into a countable one. The episode closes with what this should actually change about how you spend money and time, drawing on George Kinder's Three Questions and the life-planning work this podcast keeps

Mentioned in this episode:

• ONS National Life Tables — look up life expectancy by your own age and sex: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/datasets/nationallifetablesunitedkingdomreferencetables
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — on the average human lifespan, laid out in weeks, and what it means to take that limit seriously
• The Kinder Institute's Three Questions (George Kinder) — the life-planning exercise referenced in the episode's close https://www.lifeplanningforyou.com/main/homepage/?i=0