causti · co

atom feed

text

01.04.24 #001

Logarithmic age

;; 329w; 2'

KEYWORDS: life, death, mathematics

Have I ever told you about logarithmic age? I don't remember exactly when I first came up with this idea, but the realization was that not all consecutive 365-day period in your life are comparably significant. Of course, we speak from the bias of being our current age, but I think we can all agree that the amount of shit you get done during days 7305 and 7670 of your life is significantly more than what you get done between days 2922 and 3287.

Logarithmic age fixes this. Logarithm to the base 2, to be precise. Here's how it works: You take your boring old linear age, you calculate its binary logarithm, and you take the ceiling of that number. That's your new age. Me? I recently turned 6. This year will last twice as long as the previous one. Which was twice as long as the previous one. Which was twice as long...

What do these new numbers mean? We can take a look.

log2 Age Age
0 0 - 1
1 1 - 2
2 2 - 4
3 4 - 8
4 8 - 16
5 16 - 32
6 32 - 64
7 64 - 128

The first two years are the same, but then it starts to get interesting. Year two, you star to socialize. Year three is your early childhood. Year four is the core of your youth. Year five you're a young adult. Year six is the major part of your life. And finally year seven is when you retire and die. Every year you have twice as much time to accomplish things as the previous one. Every year puts you twice as close to the end of your life as the previous one.

Me? I recently turned 6. Fuck.