Four Minutes To Live?!

Ants can live for 3 years. A bee maybe only 1 year and a dragonfly only lasts 4 months. Some species of mayfly only live for 30 minutes.

According to statistics, the average life span for a human is about 80 years, which seems a really long time when compared to insects but some animals live longer than we do, tortoises for example are often said to live for around 200 years.

It got me thinking about how we spend our time and how long a period of our lifespan could be allocated to actual free-living. I found several interesting articles and, for a bit of fun and in a very unscientific way, I have calculated our time using a one hour clock. 

If you condensed your life into one hour, you would spend 20 minutes (33%) of it sleeping and another 20 minutes working (and/or in education). So two-thirds of your life is taken up straight away. It is not an exact science, these things never are, those out of work for example would have perhaps more spare time if they are not actively working by seeking employment.

In general then, we would only have one third of our capacity left for free-living, at least so it would seem.

Apparently we spend 8% of our lives in the great pastime of eating (5 minutes on the clock) By the way we use up 13 months of our lifetime visiting the toilet as a consequence!



Another 4 minutes would be taken up by ‘waiting’. Yes, 7% of your life is used up waiting in queues and at traffic lights and such.

And how about this, you spend 3% of your time (2 minutes) just getting dressed (okay, it’s probably longer for women). We also do housework for an accumulative time-period of 4 years, (3 minutes on our clock) and an entire year is wasted in our efforts to locate lost possessions!



That lot adds up to 93% of our lives, maybe just a little more as a lot of us work quite long hours these days.

So by and large we have about five or six years of truly free-time.



Converted to our one hour clock, that works out at 4 minutes.