For some reason, this made me think of a calculation I did a few years ago. A friend of mine, who lives in DC, in a rowhouse that was converted to condos, had a small backyard. The mowable part was probably around 10x15 feet, at the most. He just hit it with a weed whacker. Yet, he griped about having to "cut the grass", and mentioned that he couldn't even fathom the idea of being out in the suburbs or more rural areas (like where I live), because of all the grass cutting. I simply told him that "you get used to it" and "it's not that bad" and so forth, but he didn't want to hear any of it.
Anyway, I think I was around 42 at the time. I probably started cutting the grass when I was around 10, when Granddad taught me how to drive the lawn tractor. Being out in the boonies, we don't have an HOA breathing down our necks, so we can sometimes let the grass go a bit before cutting it. On average, I'd say 10 cuts per year, at 2 hours per cut, is an over-estimation. But, let's use that. That's 20 hours per year. Over the course of 32 years, that would have been 640 hours of my life. Or roughly 26 days and 16 hours.
So, at the age of 42, not even a month of my life had been devoted to cutting the grass. Even now, at the age of 50, that would only be 800 hours, or roughly 33 days and 8 hours. As I've gotten older, I've learned I like cutting the grass less and less. When I was a kid, it was exciting, like being one step closer to driving a car. But now it just seems repetitive and dull. Plus, now that I've moved, I have a much larger yard. I let the grass go about 4 weeks without cutting, and as a result it took almost 7 hours to cut it all.
Still, to put it in perspective, even if it took me 70 hours total to cut the grass this year, that's about the equivalent of 11 weeks worth of commuting back and forth to work for me. And, I know I'm not going to cut it 10 times over the course of the year. Last year I think it only got cut 5-6x, and later in the season when it was drier, it didn't take as long.
So, whenever I'm having trouble finding the ambition to cut the grass, I remember this little math exercise, to put it in perspective. Even though it drones on and seems to take forever, in the overall scheme of things it's such a tiny portion of my life.
Another statistic I just figured out. With my current commute (75 minutes round trip on a good day, 5x per week), in about 2 1/2 years, I will have spent the same amount of time driving to and from work as I did cutting grass for 40 years!
Now that, more than anything else, makes me want to retire!
