Sum from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.
I would like you to press “play” and watch the video at the top of the post. If you can’t see it on your browser or mobile device, you can click here to view Sum of your life.
Now I KNOW what you are thinking. I DO NOT HAVE TIME to watch this stupid little video. But what if I told you that by watching this, it might actually free up time, re-configure your personal priorities, and impact you deeply. As it did me.
What would it look like if you re-lived life’s main activities in continuous chunks?
- Thirty years of sleeping in one go.
- Five months sitting on the toilet.
- Six consecutive weeks clipping your nails.
Based on David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Like all great art, this film makes you feel. It made me compare my imagined “chunks of life” with the standards of in this film.
I wonder if I looked over my entire life …
What is the accumulated time I am on Facebook?
How many YEARS am I sitting in an airport?
Would the amount of time I spend on email be measured in decades?
These are timely questions indeed because less than a day before I saw this video I said to my wife, “I’m doing too much shit I don’t want to do. In some places in my life, the tail is wagging the dog.”
I think you would have to be an exceptional person to NOT feel that way at least some of the time. I’m guessing we are alike in our sentiments that we need to exert a little more control over our time?
So maybe at the end of your life, you can say, well, I spent four minutes watching this little video. And those were four very good minutes.
It’s Saturday morning as I write this. See you later. I’m going to go do something epic today.
