Happiness math · Michael Stroe

Your reactivity is expensive.

The shoes you keep meaning to replace. The email you keep not answering. Thirty minutes would fix each one, but you pay a few seconds of irritation every time you notice it, for months.

Step 1 · Price your hours

What is an hour of your life worth?

Answer quickly, with your gut. There are no right numbers.

Think of a genuinely good hour. Calm, enjoyable, things moving. In what you feel you get out of life, what is that hour worth to you?

Now a bad hour. Tense, irritated, dragging, and the thing still isn't done. What did you get out of that hour?

Step 2 · List your paper cuts

What have you been meaning to do?

Small undone things that bug you when you see them. Count the moments you notice them, and any time spent talking about them.

or quick-add

Step 3 · See a decade

One decade is about 56,000 waking hours

Here it is as 1,000 cubes. Each cube is about 56 hours, roughly a week of waking life.

Why this works

Small, daily, and invisible

You stop seeing it

Like banner ads, a paper cut you see every day fades into the background. The irritation doesn't. You just stop counting it.

Open loops hum

An undecided thing keeps using a little working memory and baseline energy, even when you're not thinking about it.

Heavy means feeling

If a ten-minute fix feels heavy, it's not a time problem. The task is resonating with older stuff. Feel that first, then the task gets easy.