I am rapidly approaching hour 500,000.
34.25 days from now, as of this writing.
Am I celebrating? I don’t know. Let’s see if I make it that long, first.
The idea of approaching 500,000 hours old lands differently than birthdays ever did. Years are abstract. Hours are intimate. Hours are what you actually live inside.
Five hundred thousand hours means there have been half a million chances to notice something or miss it entirely. Half a million opportunities to be kind, distracted, generous, petty, awake, asleep, or somewhere in between. It is a number large enough to feel mythic, but specific enough to feel accusatory.
Most of those hours were not dramatic. They were ordinary. Folding laundry. Waiting for software to update. Sitting in traffic, convinced you were late for something that now barely exists in memory. That is the uncomfortable truth of time: it is mostly made of beige moments. And yet those are the hours that add up. Those are the ones doing the real work.
Approaching 500,000 hours does not feel like running out of time so much as finally understanding the exchange rate. Hours turn into habits. Habits turn into days that feel familiar. Familiar days turn into a life that seems to have happened very quickly when you look back at it all at once.
There is a quiet relief in realizing how many hours survived you. The bad ones passed. The unbearable ones did not last forever. Even the best ones were temporary, which somehow makes them better instead of worse. Time takes everything, but it also carries you through things you could not have crossed on your own.
Five hundred thousand hours is not a trophy. It is not an achievement. It is evidence. Evidence that you stayed. That you endured boredom and heartbreak and repetition and still kept showing up for the next hour, and the next.
If there is anything to do with the hours ahead, it is probably this: notice them a little more often. Spend fewer of them pretending there will always be more. And forgive yourself for the ones you wasted, because wasting time is one of the most human ways to prove you were alive at all.
https://svonberg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/time3.html
