You’re Wasting Your Life

Every day you're in this place, you're two days nearer death.

Photo by Pedro Mulondo

I sit here beneath fluorescent lights, ghostly and humming, in an office cooled to sterile perfection. I am the silent witness to my own small, daily erasures — bits of time filed away in folders, emails, memos, lost in the labyrinth of deadlines and documents that will all turn to dust in some drawer one day.

There’s something raw and unpolished about it, like witnessing a storm roiling beneath a placid lake. The mind races forward, propelled by caffeine and deadlines, while something deeper, something much older, calls out from beneath. A part of me that remembers it was once free, that it once saw the stars as kin rather than distant, unremarkable points behind the city lights.

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”

— Albert Camus

In the words of Camus, I find a twisted sort of peace. He knew the void, he knew the absurdity of our relentless attempts to give shape to the shapeless. And yet he advocated for a smile — a smile into the emptiness, a nod of camaraderie with the silence.

Photo by Philippe Donn

But my smile feels thin, stretched across hours spent in front of an indifferent screen, answering questions I don’t care about, in a voice that isn’t quite mine. The office is filled with the ghostly traces of lives that could have been — lives that danced with some larger calling but somehow ended here, under the cool wash of cubicle lights.

The average human life spans about 4,160 weeks or 80 years. Of those, I have spent 1,690 — a bit more than 32 years — in a whirlwind of conformity, shackled to the machinery of modern work, eyes glazed over at pie charts, at Excel cells stretching out like tiny iron bars. That leaves me with 2,470 weeks, perhaps less, a little more if I’m lucky, each a flickering matchstick in the dark.

There’s a strange, poignant beauty in visualizing it. Imagine a grid, each cell a week. Rows upon rows, columns upon columns. The first quarter, third, hell, half already shaded, filled in with the deeds of a life lived on autopilot, ticking through days in the service of things I barely understand and scarcely believe in. The remaining boxes? Blank. So pristine, so full of promise. And so fragile.

Feel free to fill in the boxes yourself at https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/weeks.html

Each of these 2,470 weeks is an ember, small but bright, waiting to catch fire. And yet, here I sit, in an office chair with a slow hydraulic leak, sinking ever so slightly each day.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus

But is there happiness in this relentless push? Is there fulfillment in building bridges to nowhere, in scaling the cliffs of corporate absurdity, only to find the view as empty and distant as before? I imagine Sisyphus staring up at that boulder, nodding grimly, understanding the futility and yet pressing on. He had no choice. But we — don’t we?

In an era of breathtaking advancements, the universe itself seems to be calling out to us, whispering of mysteries and horizons waiting to be reached. Artificial intelligence is on a trajectory that defies the limits of imagination. We’re glimpsing the edges of understanding, approaching the kind of intelligence that once lived only in our wildest dreams. OpenAI reports that AI capabilities are now doubling every three to four months — a speed so blistering, it outpaces even our wildest sci-fi predictions. If you’ve tried their advanced voice mode you have glimpsed the intelligence beyond, the new masters of the world.

But I’m not there. I’m not at the frontier of discovery, helping humanity unlock new doors or rewriting the future. I’m here, adjusting the font size on a report no one will read. A report AI could write better than me, read and act on it better than my colleagues.

Photo by ThisIsEngineering

Imagine if this energy, this blink of existence, were spent unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. Imagine standing at the helm of an expedition to Mars, or unlocking the language of the brain, decoding the final secrets of consciousness. Imagine creating something that would be remembered — a legacy carved into the walls of history rather than trapped in the temporary memory of a computer.

In the Apple TV show For All Mankind, there’s a vision of what could have been if we’d never stopped reaching outward, if humanity’s relentless curiosity had continued its climb beyond the stars. The show presents an alternate reality, where space isn’t just a past triumph but an ongoing journey, a shared mission that transcends borders and ideologies. It’s a reality in which exploration is celebrated, not abandoned, and where human potential reaches past its limits into the great unknown. Watching it, you can’t help but feel the pull of that purpose — the sense that, as a species, we’re meant for more than the daily grind, that we are, at our core, explorers, and always have been.

Screenshot from the TV show “For All Mankind”

But there’s a cost, and For All Mankind doesn’t shy away from it. It raises the thorny, uncomfortable questions: can we justify the price of venturing into the void when there is so much need here on Earth? People go hungry, suffer in poverty, face struggles that could be solved with the resources we pour into these cosmic dreams. Yet, perhaps the show’s true brilliance lies in its refusal to offer a clear answer. It leaves us to wonder if the pursuit of knowledge, the hunger for discovery, might itself be a path to unity — a purpose that binds us, a reminder that even in our divided world, there exists a place for shared dreams, for striving toward something greater than ourselves.

The question is futile. I am here, managing files, working in marketing.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

— Albert Camus

But what does rebellion look like in a place like this, where the walls close in with a polite, professional efficiency? Camus dared to confront the absurd head-on, to stare into the void and extract from it a raw, pulsating form of freedom. Can we do the same here, surrounded by the trappings of order and stability?

Perhaps there is rebellion in small acts. In refusing to let the days slip by unnoticed, unmarked. In daring to imagine a life that defies the expectations placed upon it, a life that refuses to be boxed into a cubicle and categorized by task lists. Each of these remaining 2,470 weeks is a grain of sand slipping through my fingers, and I have the power to choose how I spend it, even if the world insists otherwise.

The absurdity, I think, is that we could be doing all these things. We could be explorers, thinkers, creators, each of us capable of pushing the human race forward. We have the technology, the resources, the raw potential to transcend the mundane and reach toward something extraordinary.

Yet we remain, like Sisyphus, rolling our own boulders up mountains that never end. But unlike him, we’re the architects of our own suffering. Each spreadsheet, each meeting, each hour spent chasing a carrot on a stick — is it not our own creation? We’re slaves to systems that, in some twisted irony, were designed to serve us.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

— Oscar Wilde

It’s a bitter truth, but a hopeful one too. If most people merely exist, then we have the opportunity — the rare privilege — to truly live. To make choices that cut through the veneer of societal expectation and touch upon the raw, visceral experience of being.

I think of those 2,470 weeks, shimmering on a calendar that hangs heavy in my mind. Each week, a chance to deviate from the script, to make the absurdity my own, to find beauty in the chaos. Maybe I won’t change the world, or lead a mission to Mars, or discover the cure for mortality. But I can, at least, rebel against the pull of the ordinary, in whatever small ways I can muster.

Today, maybe it’s a walk under the stars. Tomorrow, perhaps a dive into a new skill, a new thought, a new way of being. This is how we resist, how we reclaim the time that slips so easily through our grasp.

So here’s to the remaining weeks. To living not as a cog, but as a creator, an explorer of inner landscapes and quiet revolutions. Every day in this place may bring me closer to death, but it also, paradoxically, brings me closer to life.

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