What is the Best Use Of Our Human Metabolism?

Perhaps the best use of our limited human metabolism (and life) is to make art!

Facts

Let us assume our maximum human lifespan is 120 years. Let us also assume that it is possible that we can die today in a car accident.

Let us also state that we all have a limited amount of human metabolism and energy every 24 hours. Let us also assume that every time we have to do anything, it saps some of our energy.

‘Energy management’

Better than ‘time management’ is ‘energy management’. The idea is that we all have a limited amount of energy during our days, and energy is more essential than time.

Why? Because let us say that you slept only 2 hours last night. Even if you have 8 hours of ‘free time’ today, you don’t have any energy or power to do anything. Thus, we need both free time and energy to do what we desire to do.

Why ‘metabolism’?

I like this idea of thinking of human metabolism, instead of “energy” or “time”, because it is more pragmatic and practical to think in terms of human metabolism.

Human metabolism includes:

  • Physical strength to do things
  • Mental strength to do things
  • Our limited human life-spans are predicated on our metabolism. Because the human body is a certain size, our heart beats at a certain rate, the extent of the human lifespan is around 120 years. If you look at the animal kingdom and compare different animals which are different sizes and have different heart rates, you see what their rough lifespan is. For example the small size of a hummingbird with an insanely fast heartbeat lives around 3-5 years. A larger tortoise (with slow heart rate) can live to be around 150 years.
  • Whenever we eat certain foods, it affects our human metabolism. For example, if you consume something high in sugar or simple carbohydrates (let us say a big bowl of spaghetti with lots of sugary tomato sauce), it creates a huge insulin spike in your metabolism, which causes you to have some energy for around 30 minutes, then you crash and want to fall into a “food coma”. Thus, being able to manage our food intake is important to our energy levels, from a metabolic standpoint

Thus, metabolism takes into account:

  1. Our lifespan (how many years will we live until we die?)
  2. Our daily energy (how much energy do I have to expend?)
  3. Our mental-physical strength to actually do things (we need both mental and physical strength to make art, do things, or create things)

Making art

This is a simple thought:

Perhaps the best use of our human metabolism is to make art.

This is why:

  1. When we die, we cannot take our toys, material possessions, and money with us. Thus, what we leave behind us is more important than what we have while we are alive.
  2. What is the best thing to leave behind to humanity? I think the artwork you created, the ideas you made, and also your biological DNA (your children).
  3. Your life story: When you die, like the Disney film ‘Coco’, your soul will live on via the stories transmitted by future generations of humans.

Let us not get distracted. Let us keep hustling hard, making art, and never forget– our limited lives (memento mori), our limited human metabolism, and to direct our personal creative power into making immortal artwork more lasting than bronze (Horace).

HUSTLE HARD!

ERIC