The Mathematics of Existence and the True Cost of Your Time
Time is the ultimate, unforgiving equalizer. It has absolutely no respect for persons. It does not care what is going on in your life, how important you believe you are, or the magnitude of the tasks you are attempting to accomplish. Whether you are a billionaire CEO, a struggling middle-class worker, or someone simply trying to survive the day, time just keeps moving forward. It yields to no one’s anxiety and pauses for no one’s grief.
As a business consultant and personal financial coach, I have spent decades watching people wrestle with their resources. They track their money, they insure their houses, they guard their physical assets with alarm systems and lawyers. Yet, the most vital, non-renewable resource they possess—their time—is often treated as if it were an infinite commodity. It is given away to ungrateful acquaintances, wasted on unsolvable drama, and sold at a discount to demanding clients.
Recently, as I approach my 65th birthday in April 2027, I sat down to do something few people have the courage to do: I audited my remaining lifespan. I calculated exactly how much time I have left before my existence transitions from active, engaged living to simply occupying a human shell. The realization was profound, jarring, and entirely transformative. It changed the way I view my business, my clients, my family, and the very nature of existence. This article serves as a blueprint for fellow thought leaders, consultants, and professionals to take back ownership of the time they have left.
The Mathematics of Mortality: Fighting to be the Outlier
Let us look at the cold, unyielding mathematics of life. I was born in 1962. The average life expectancy for an African American man at birth is around 72 years. Unlike some, I do not have the luxury of leaning on good genetics. My father died in his late 60s from cancer and heart disease. My mother passed away from complications of diabetes and heart disease. I do not have longevity in my DNA. (The uncle I often mention who lived to be 103 is on my wife’s side of the family, not mine.)
Because of my family history, I am fighting every single day to be the outlier. I exercise rigorously, I eat intentionally, and I prioritize rest. Stress is the number one killer—more dangerous than almost any other factor. Because of this, managing my environment is literally a matter of life and death. If a person, a place, a situation, or a client brings stress into my life, they are out. It is that simple. I must make time to get the sleep I need, to eat right, and to rest appropriately.
With this intense stewardship of my health, and keeping in mind the biblical promise of “threescore and ten, or fourscore by reason of strength,” I am targeting 85 as the boundary of my highly active, intellectually sharp, fully engaged life. I refuse to merely exist; my healthcare directives clearly state that I do not want extraordinary measures taken just to keep a shell alive. I want to live.
Between my 65th birthday in 2027 and my 85th birthday, I have exactly 20 years. That represents 20 summers. It translates to roughly 7,305 days. Multiplied by 24 hours, you get 175,320 total hours remaining in that active window.
You Have Less Than Four Hours a Day
But raw hours are a lie. Let us break down the actual reality of human time. Out of your 24 hours, you must subtract the time required to sleep, eat, poop, maintain basic hygiene, and handle the functional necessities of mere survival. That instantly consumes at least 12 hours a day.
Now, let us look at the working professional. If you work a job, or even if you are self-employed, you spend another 8 to 10 hours working, commuting, and performing tasks for someone else in exchange for compensation. You have to make time to work to survive.
Do the math: 24 hours minus 12 hours for baseline survival, minus another 8 to 10 hours for work and commuting. That leaves the average person with less than four hours of actual personal, discretionary time a day.
When you look at life through this lens of extreme scarcity, your entire perspective on who gets access to those four hours must change. Those precious few hours are completely consumed and absolutely non-redeemable. If a resource is this scarce, giving it away to the wrong person is a tragic squandering of a depreciating asset.
The Independent and the Overwhelmed
In my years of consulting and observing human behavior, I have realized that the world is broadly divided into two categories of people when it comes to time and crisis management.
The Independent: These are the people who have their own agenda and execute it. They do not need anything from anybody. They are living their lives, doing their thing, answering to no one. They have figured out how to navigate the human experience on their own terms. They do what they want, when they want, how they want, and why they want. Their time is their own.
The Overwhelmed: Then there is the rest of humanity. The human existence is filled to the brim with challenges. These people desperately need help navigating life. They have housing needs, medical needs, financial needs, insurance needs, budgeting needs, crisis needs, and conflict needs. Whether they are young and just getting started, middle-aged and still struggling to figure it out, or dealing with the fallout of massive life mistakes, their existence is a chaotic web of unresolved issues.
The tragedy of the Overwhelmed is their default coping mechanism: they automatically want to make their problems someone else’s problem.
Why Some Problems Aren’t Worth Any Price
Because the Overwhelmed do not have the time or the emotional bandwidth to deal with their own problems, they attempt to transfer that burden to you. Often, they believe that because they are willing to pay your hourly rate, they are entitled to your emotional energy and your finite hours.
Here is the hard truth that every professional, consultant, and empathetic human being must learn: There are some people, circumstances, and situations where there is not enough money in the world to make getting involved worth it.
If you are a consultant, you have seen clients desperate for help who refuse to take advice. Why would someone hire an expert if they have no intention of following the blueprint? Engaging with these individuals brings nothing but stress—and remember, stress is a killer. Every hour spent managing manufactured drama or listening to a client complain about a situation they refuse to change is an hour stolen from your family, your health, and those precious four hours of free time you have left each day. Therefore, your engagement must be heavily guarded.
Setting the Rules of Engagement
I am not outlining a theoretical framework of how I plan to operate “moving forward”—this is exactly how I already operate. My current clients already understand this. They know they cannot just call me; they have to schedule time. Prospective clients who visit my website see exactly what the rules of engagement are clearly spelled out before we even speak.
I am sharing this blueprint as a thought leader for you—the consultants, the coaches, and the professionals who are in the business of helping people. Regardless of your profession, if your work requires giving your time to help someone, you must respect your own time first to ensure they respect it.
| Engagement Category |
The Standard for a “Yes” |
The Trigger for a “No” |
| New Consulting Clients |
Follows the clearly spelled-out rules of engagement on my website. Willing to execute the advice given without introducing friction or stress. |
Haggles, brings unnecessary drama, ignores expert counsel, or causes undue stress that threatens my health and peace. |
| Current Clients |
Understands that access is scheduled and structured. Values the time and implements the strategies discussed. |
Attempts to circumvent the schedule with unscheduled calls, or fails to take accountability for their own actions. |
| Personal Relationships |
Brings mutual joy, intellectual stimulation, peace, and deepens a valued connection. |
Chronic complainers, one-sided relationships, or engagements attended purely out of guilt or societal obligation. |
We Are the Stewards of our Time.
This strict protection of time is not just for entrepreneurs or consultants. If you are an employee working for someone else, this applies directly to you.
You give your employer the time that they are paying you for. That is it. Your employer is not your friend. The company is not your family. You are there to fulfill a task, you are compensated for that task, and when the work is over, you go home. The remaining time does not belong to them; it belongs to you.
Do not bleed your precious four hours of discretionary time into unpaid corporate loyalty. You have to be a good steward of your time, managing your own life, health, and family with the same rigor a CEO manages a Fortune 500 company.
Time as the Great Dissolver
There is a profound, almost comforting stoicism in understanding the nature of time. One of the greatest secrets of the universe is that Time is the Great Dissolver.
I literally mean everything. Every problem that seems insurmountable right now, every crisis that is keeping you awake at night, every interpersonal conflict that feels like the end of the world—eventually, it passes. With enough time, a problem either resolves itself, loses its impact on your life, or simply fades into irrelevance.
Even the people in your life are subject to this dissolution. People move. They relocate. They change jobs. Friendships drift apart. Eventually, people die. Over time, the landscape of your life will be completely wiped clean and rewritten. Time has no respect for the person who is stressed out, nor the person causing the stress. It just keeps on moving.
If you fail to recognize this—if you do not move with time and respect its power—you will spend your finite, precious hours obsessing over things that time is going to dissolve anyway. You cannot control time. The only thing you have absolute control over is what you do with it while you have it.
Take Back Your Time
If you are reading this, you are on the clock. Whether you are young and just getting started, or standing on the threshold of your final major chapters, your account is draining.
Do not let the “Overwhelmed” transfer their chaos into your peaceful hours. Protect your health by ruthlessly eliminating stress. If you are a consultant, demand that your clients respect your rules of engagement. If you are an employee, give your job the hours they pay for and fiercely protect the rest.
Make every remaining hour count, because whatever you are doing, it had better be worth it. The clock is ticking, the Great Dissolver is at work, and you cannot get this moment back.
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and life, grounded in decades of lived experience and informed by research.
If you are navigating a financial decision, building a business, considering homeownership, or simply trying to make better use of your time and resources, I invite you to engage further.
Subscribe to The Power Is Now TV to connect with me live every weekday, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PST, as we record television shows across the Power Is Now TV Network. As a subscriber, you can participate in live tapings, engage in real-time discussions, and connect directly with industry leaders.
Visit ThePowerIsNow.com to access real estate magazines, books, podcasts, television shows, and exclusive media content focused on homeownership, business, and wealth-building.
For personalized support, consulting, and advisory services in real estate, mortgages, business, and personal finance, visit EricFrazier.com to schedule a consultation and learn more about my work as your trusted advisor in business and wealth.
Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
Your Trusted Advisor in Business and Wealth
Real Estate Broker CA DRE 01143484 | Mortgage Originator NMLS 461807
ThePowerIsNow.com|EricFrazier.com
The Great Equalizer
The Mathematics of Existence and the True Cost of Your Time
Time is the ultimate, unforgiving equalizer. It has absolutely no respect for persons. It does not care what is going on in your life, how important you believe you are, or the magnitude of the tasks you are attempting to accomplish. Whether you are a billionaire CEO, a struggling middle-class worker, or someone simply trying to survive the day, time just keeps moving forward. It yields to no one’s anxiety and pauses for no one’s grief.
As a business consultant and personal financial coach, I have spent decades watching people wrestle with their resources. They track their money, they insure their houses, they guard their physical assets with alarm systems and lawyers. Yet, the most vital, non-renewable resource they possess—their time—is often treated as if it were an infinite commodity. It is given away to ungrateful acquaintances, wasted on unsolvable drama, and sold at a discount to demanding clients.
Recently, as I approach my 65th birthday in April 2027, I sat down to do something few people have the courage to do: I audited my remaining lifespan. I calculated exactly how much time I have left before my existence transitions from active, engaged living to simply occupying a human shell. The realization was profound, jarring, and entirely transformative. It changed the way I view my business, my clients, my family, and the very nature of existence. This article serves as a blueprint for fellow thought leaders, consultants, and professionals to take back ownership of the time they have left.
The Mathematics of Mortality: Fighting to be the Outlier
Let us look at the cold, unyielding mathematics of life. I was born in 1962. The average life expectancy for an African American man at birth is around 72 years. Unlike some, I do not have the luxury of leaning on good genetics. My father died in his late 60s from cancer and heart disease. My mother passed away from complications of diabetes and heart disease. I do not have longevity in my DNA. (The uncle I often mention who lived to be 103 is on my wife’s side of the family, not mine.)
Because of my family history, I am fighting every single day to be the outlier. I exercise rigorously, I eat intentionally, and I prioritize rest. Stress is the number one killer—more dangerous than almost any other factor. Because of this, managing my environment is literally a matter of life and death. If a person, a place, a situation, or a client brings stress into my life, they are out. It is that simple. I must make time to get the sleep I need, to eat right, and to rest appropriately.
With this intense stewardship of my health, and keeping in mind the biblical promise of “threescore and ten, or fourscore by reason of strength,” I am targeting 85 as the boundary of my highly active, intellectually sharp, fully engaged life. I refuse to merely exist; my healthcare directives clearly state that I do not want extraordinary measures taken just to keep a shell alive. I want to live.
Between my 65th birthday in 2027 and my 85th birthday, I have exactly 20 years. That represents 20 summers. It translates to roughly 7,305 days. Multiplied by 24 hours, you get 175,320 total hours remaining in that active window.
You Have Less Than Four Hours a Day
But raw hours are a lie. Let us break down the actual reality of human time. Out of your 24 hours, you must subtract the time required to sleep, eat, poop, maintain basic hygiene, and handle the functional necessities of mere survival. That instantly consumes at least 12 hours a day.
Now, let us look at the working professional. If you work a job, or even if you are self-employed, you spend another 8 to 10 hours working, commuting, and performing tasks for someone else in exchange for compensation. You have to make time to work to survive.
Do the math: 24 hours minus 12 hours for baseline survival, minus another 8 to 10 hours for work and commuting. That leaves the average person with less than four hours of actual personal, discretionary time a day.
When you look at life through this lens of extreme scarcity, your entire perspective on who gets access to those four hours must change. Those precious few hours are completely consumed and absolutely non-redeemable. If a resource is this scarce, giving it away to the wrong person is a tragic squandering of a depreciating asset.
The Independent and the Overwhelmed
In my years of consulting and observing human behavior, I have realized that the world is broadly divided into two categories of people when it comes to time and crisis management.
The Independent: These are the people who have their own agenda and execute it. They do not need anything from anybody. They are living their lives, doing their thing, answering to no one. They have figured out how to navigate the human experience on their own terms. They do what they want, when they want, how they want, and why they want. Their time is their own.
The Overwhelmed: Then there is the rest of humanity. The human existence is filled to the brim with challenges. These people desperately need help navigating life. They have housing needs, medical needs, financial needs, insurance needs, budgeting needs, crisis needs, and conflict needs. Whether they are young and just getting started, middle-aged and still struggling to figure it out, or dealing with the fallout of massive life mistakes, their existence is a chaotic web of unresolved issues.
The tragedy of the Overwhelmed is their default coping mechanism: they automatically want to make their problems someone else’s problem.
Why Some Problems Aren’t Worth Any Price
Because the Overwhelmed do not have the time or the emotional bandwidth to deal with their own problems, they attempt to transfer that burden to you. Often, they believe that because they are willing to pay your hourly rate, they are entitled to your emotional energy and your finite hours.
Here is the hard truth that every professional, consultant, and empathetic human being must learn: There are some people, circumstances, and situations where there is not enough money in the world to make getting involved worth it.
If you are a consultant, you have seen clients desperate for help who refuse to take advice. Why would someone hire an expert if they have no intention of following the blueprint? Engaging with these individuals brings nothing but stress—and remember, stress is a killer. Every hour spent managing manufactured drama or listening to a client complain about a situation they refuse to change is an hour stolen from your family, your health, and those precious four hours of free time you have left each day. Therefore, your engagement must be heavily guarded.
Setting the Rules of Engagement
I am not outlining a theoretical framework of how I plan to operate “moving forward”—this is exactly how I already operate. My current clients already understand this. They know they cannot just call me; they have to schedule time. Prospective clients who visit my website see exactly what the rules of engagement are clearly spelled out before we even speak.
I am sharing this blueprint as a thought leader for you—the consultants, the coaches, and the professionals who are in the business of helping people. Regardless of your profession, if your work requires giving your time to help someone, you must respect your own time first to ensure they respect it.
We Are the Stewards of our Time.
This strict protection of time is not just for entrepreneurs or consultants. If you are an employee working for someone else, this applies directly to you.
You give your employer the time that they are paying you for. That is it. Your employer is not your friend. The company is not your family. You are there to fulfill a task, you are compensated for that task, and when the work is over, you go home. The remaining time does not belong to them; it belongs to you.
Do not bleed your precious four hours of discretionary time into unpaid corporate loyalty. You have to be a good steward of your time, managing your own life, health, and family with the same rigor a CEO manages a Fortune 500 company.
Time as the Great Dissolver
There is a profound, almost comforting stoicism in understanding the nature of time. One of the greatest secrets of the universe is that Time is the Great Dissolver.
I literally mean everything. Every problem that seems insurmountable right now, every crisis that is keeping you awake at night, every interpersonal conflict that feels like the end of the world—eventually, it passes. With enough time, a problem either resolves itself, loses its impact on your life, or simply fades into irrelevance.
Even the people in your life are subject to this dissolution. People move. They relocate. They change jobs. Friendships drift apart. Eventually, people die. Over time, the landscape of your life will be completely wiped clean and rewritten. Time has no respect for the person who is stressed out, nor the person causing the stress. It just keeps on moving.
If you fail to recognize this—if you do not move with time and respect its power—you will spend your finite, precious hours obsessing over things that time is going to dissolve anyway. You cannot control time. The only thing you have absolute control over is what you do with it while you have it.
Take Back Your Time
If you are reading this, you are on the clock. Whether you are young and just getting started, or standing on the threshold of your final major chapters, your account is draining.
Do not let the “Overwhelmed” transfer their chaos into your peaceful hours. Protect your health by ruthlessly eliminating stress. If you are a consultant, demand that your clients respect your rules of engagement. If you are an employee, give your job the hours they pay for and fiercely protect the rest.
Make every remaining hour count, because whatever you are doing, it had better be worth it. The clock is ticking, the Great Dissolver is at work, and you cannot get this moment back.
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and life, grounded in decades of lived experience and informed by research.
If you are navigating a financial decision, building a business, considering homeownership, or simply trying to make better use of your time and resources, I invite you to engage further.
Subscribe to The Power Is Now TV to connect with me live every weekday, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PST, as we record television shows across the Power Is Now TV Network. As a subscriber, you can participate in live tapings, engage in real-time discussions, and connect directly with industry leaders.
Visit ThePowerIsNow.com to access real estate magazines, books, podcasts, television shows, and exclusive media content focused on homeownership, business, and wealth-building.
For personalized support, consulting, and advisory services in real estate, mortgages, business, and personal finance, visit EricFrazier.com to schedule a consultation and learn more about my work as your trusted advisor in business and wealth.
Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
Your Trusted Advisor in Business and Wealth
Real Estate Broker CA DRE 01143484 | Mortgage Originator NMLS 461807
ThePowerIsNow.com|EricFrazier.com