“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

My mom used to watch Days of Our Lives when I was a kid. That line is how it opened. She’d follow the dramas. Who was sleeping with whom. Who was a cheating scoundrel. Who was possessed by the devil, and all the other dramas that kept people glued to the midday television.

I still remember that opening line.

The first episode aired on NBC in 1965. In 2022 it moved to streaming. They’re still making them.

Sixty-one years.

Sixty-one years of almost daily episodes. That is roughly 15,000 episodes, 14,000 hours of content, and 9 million years of consumption.

We don’t comprehend the scale. It’s grains-of-sand-on-the-beach levels of time.

The grains of time emptying from my mom’s hourglass, while she watched fictional people living theirs. I do it too, just with better fiction.

We all have an hourglass full of sand. And it starts slipping the moment we’re born. We act like we can just flip it and start again when the sand runs out. But nobody flips this hourglass.

And worse, the top of the hourglass is painted. We never know how much sand remains.

Living is something we’ll do tomorrow. When the kids are grown. When the business sells. When I retire. In the meantime, we’re planning for it. Always planning.

Planning often disguises postponing. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

In the meantime, we consume.

Mishima wrote of the artist who confuses what’s real: art or action. Of this person’s death, he writes:

“This death is a fearful death, the death that descends on the human being who has never lived; yet he can at least dream, ultimately, of the existence in the world of action—the falsehood—of a death that is other than his own.”

Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

I’ve watched Gladiator over 10 times. Maximus finally killing Commodus in the arena pumps steel through my veins. And then I open my laptop to see how many views and comments my last video got.