Would You Pay to Buy Back a Year of Your Life?
Updated: Sep 5
Imagine you're 80 years old. Someone walks up and offers to sell you back one healthy year — not just any year, but a year of who you were at 63. Strong knees. Full days. The stamina to actually do the things on your list instead of just thinking about them.
How much would you pay for it?
I want to be honest with you before you try to answer that: there isn't a real number. There shouldn't be. You can't put a dollar figure on a year of your own life, and I'm not asking you to solve it like a math problem. This isn't the money chapter of my book. It's the mirror chapter.
That's the exact question The Usable Years is built around — click here to see how I actually answered it for myself.
The Question That Started the Whole Book
This is actually the question I opened with, before I'd explained any of the retirement math or the health numbers or any of it. Because we've all had some version of this feeling already — God, I wish I could go back twenty years, knowing what I know now, feeling the way I feel now. Almost everyone has said some version of that sentence at some point. This question just gives you a chance to get ahead of it. To feel that regret now, in advance, while you can still actually do something about it — instead of waiting until you're 80 and it's just a feeling with nothing left to do about it.
The Version That Actually Stings
Here's a sharper way to ask it, and it's worth sitting with: would you give up five years in your 80s to get back one year in your 60s?
Say that out loud to yourself. Actually listen to what you just said. If the answer is yes — and for a lot of us, if we're honest, it is — that's not a throwaway thought. That's an admission. You just told yourself that something has changed enough, dimmed enough, narrowed enough, that you'd trade five years of one kind for a single year of another. That's how much those earlier years are actually worth to you. Not in dollars. In trade value against your own future self.
This Isn't a Question I Can Answer For You
I'm not telling you what your answer should be. That's the whole point of asking it. I'm not in the business of telling anyone how they should think or feel about their own life. All I'm doing is opening the door and asking you to walk through it. I want you to sit with a question you probably haven't actually asked yourself yet, and see what comes up when you do.
So don't answer it for me. Answer it for yourself. Sit with it tonight, or on your next long drive, or the next time you catch yourself saying you'll get to something "someday."
Because maybe the real question was never "can I afford to retire."
Maybe it's "can I afford to wait."
That question — and what I did once I actually answered it — is what The Usable Years is about. Get the book here and start figuring out your own number before 80 makes the decision for you.
The mirror doesn't lie.
Keep Reading
📖 If this resonated, you’ll want to read The Usable Years — the full framework for figuring out your next chapter.
Comments