Two weeks ago, I made the case for specifying the global problems you wish to spend years on. Today I want to place these choices at the right altitude, because from arm’s length everything blurs and from 10 years out it usually becomes embarrassingly clear. Set aside the buzz lines, and your career adds up to about 40-50 years, roughly 80,000 working hours. That is the single largest block of time you will ever control. Life is smaller than it feels, and if you do not decide what those hours are for, inertia will determine it for you.
You start with about 13 years of school, which translates to roughly 2,340 days of fluorescent-lit desk-sitting and forgetting everything except how to fold a paper fortune teller.
By college, you’ve consumed a nontrivial fraction of the 1.5 million pounds of food you’ll manage in a lifetime, enough to noticeably fill a gym. You’ll stream nearly a decade of TV, and turn nearly half a million gallons of clean water into lukewarm shower runoff. A magnificent return on investment, you are, if you squint.
In your twenties and thirties, the pace accelerates. You will likely cycle through roughly a dozen jobs before you hobble into retirement. If you’re particularly average, you will have five romantic partners before marriage, or before abandoning the institution altogether. If you do marry, you will likely have 1.6 children, which is rather awkward. You will celebrate about 80 birthdays, attend a scattering of weddings, some funerals for people your age, and many more funerals for people older than you.
Zoom out some more. About 150,000 people die every single day. That’s two football stadiums cleared out before the next sunrise. Meanwhile, 385,000 babies arrive daily: Half a million timelines kick off every morning, each destined to compete with you in traffic. By the time you reach the end of this article, a small city’s worth of humans will have both popped into existence and checked out of it.
Let's go bigger still. Since the first biped decided walking upright was a good idea, roughly 117 billion people have lived and died. Line them shoulder to shoulder, and the chain would loop around Earth almost 3,000 times. Each one correctly assumes their life is an indispensable data point in the grand ledger of existence.
Widen the scale again. Our Milky Way galaxy contains about 200 billion stars. Count one per second, and you will still be ticking them off 6,000 years from now. The Milky Way is one in an estimated two trillion.
Had enough yet? Somewhere out there lurks J0529-4351, a quasar so excessive it outshines 500 trillion suns. At its center sits a black hole weighing 17 billion solar masses, swallowing the equivalent of a star the size of our sun every single day. J0529-4351 will blaze for eons while our languages, nations, and any marks of civilization vanish.
Suppose we are alone in the cosmos. Then the burden and the privilege are ours. Ours is the only species capable of rewriting genomes even as we rehearse pre-Copernican errors. Without us, the universe might just be rocks smashing together and gas setting itself on fire. With us, it might briefly mean something. The probability that matter and energy ever conspired to produce consciousness is vanishingly small. We may not get another shot at this strange experiment of awareness, which places upon us the obligation to see it through.
The future is not a handful of generations; it is a timescale on which trillions of lives may yet unfold if civilization holds. Imagine artificial intelligence deployed not to deskill us but to tackle what we once mistook for fixtures of reality: the arrest of aging, cures for every major disease, food and energy so abundant that scarcity recedes into a footnote. That future is contingent. It depends on choices made in the narrow present, including, unfortunately, yours.
What looms ahead is not a seminar puzzle but an existential crucible that demands immediacy. A “limited” nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia could trigger a global famine that starves billions as agriculture collapses. Severe pandemics are not rare events in waiting; plausible estimates put a COVID-scale outbreak at a few percent per year. In 2023, more than half of surveyed AI researchers judged there to be at least a one-in-10 chance that advanced AI leads to human extinction or comparably catastrophic outcomes. Who’s feeling lucky?
You have about 80,000 working hours in your life. Those hours can either dissolve into routine or be aimed directly at the problems that matter most. 80,000 hours, a nonprofit based at Oxford, exists to help you do just that. Their career guide walks you through big career decisions step by step, from clarifying your values to weighing your options. Their global problem profiles explain, in plain English, the risks that could shape the entire future, from AI safety to biosecurity to climate stability. They run a job board that lists hundreds of vetted, high-impact roles you can apply to right now, ranging from research fellowships on AI governance to biosecurity labs looking for sharp scientists. They even offer one-on-one advising calls with trained coaches who can help you think through your decisions.
The question is not whether you will be remembered. You almost certainly will not. The question is whether, in the finite span allotted to you, you directed your hours toward ends greater than yourself.
Visit go/betterthings for more, or get on the email list for more opportunities at go/impactjobs.
