How Many More Movies Will You Be Able to Watch in Your Lifetime?
As a new year begins, how will you spend your remaining time?
In the 1999 classic, The Matrix, Agent Smith presumably has the upper-hand on Neo as a subway car is racing towards the two of them. Smith, pinning Neo to the ground, says:
“You hear that, Mr. Anderson?…That is the sound of inevitability…It is the sound of your death…”
The inevitability of death is something we rarely like to think about. While uncomfortable, it provides perspective. A potential outcome of this perspective fosters discernment over what we put before our eyes.
Just as we have a limited amount of time on this earth, we have a limited amount of movies to watch. Knowing this may shape which movies we choose to view. I mean, how many of us really want Sharknado 12 to be our last movie?
With this in mind, let’s consider how many movies you have left in your lifetime.
Depending on where you look, the average life expectancy is around 77.5 years for both sexes (74.8 years for men and 80.2 for women).1 There are numerous sources you can check on this, so don’t be offended if this statistic is conflicting with your own calculations.
If you really dig into this, you will see that other factors come into play - geographical location, race, family history, etc. And, stating the obvious, none of us know how much longer we have on this earth. That being said, let’s just use 75 years as our life expectancy for the purposes of this article (if you’re older than 75, no offense…and also, congrats!).
If we have a life expectancy of 75 years, that comes to approximately 655,200 hours on this earth. To keep things easier, I’m going to say that each movie has a runtime of 2 hours. In our lifetime, we will watch some movies that are shorter and some that are longer. In recent years, there has been quite an increase of movies with a runtime well over 2 hours (I’m looking at you Marvel).
Let’s add a few more factors to think this through.
Sleep
Even though most people don’t get the recommended 8 hours of sleep a night, let’s pretend this is the case. This means that the number of waking hours comes to 16, which is 112 waking hours a week and 5,824 a year.
If you live to be 75 years old, your waking hours come to 436,800, which also means that you slept 218,400 hours!
Work
Let’s go ahead and factor a 40-hour work week. Even when we were children and teenagers, we went to school and had extracurriculars, so I’m going to subtract that 40hr/wk over our entire span of life. If you think that will lead to inaccuracies, just keep in mind that we slept about 12+ hours when we were infants and young children, which also cut back on our ability to watch movies (also keep in mind that this is a movie newsletter and not a scientific journal).
Our number now comes to 280,800 waking hours that we must devote to something other than movies. Subtracting this from the 436,800 waking hours of a 75-year-old lifespan, we come to 156,000 hours we can devote to family, church, friendships, hobbies, movies, you name it.
Average Movies Per Year
If you Google this, answers are all over the place. I think we would all agree that Covid upped everyone’s screen time in a pretty significant way. All of that being said, a fairly modest estimate comes to around 50 movies per year.
Some of you might be thinking, John, why didn’t you just start with 50 movies a year and do the average lifespan of 75 years instead of all this waking hour stuff? My answer: This same realization is just now hitting me as I write this. Seriously though, where’s the fun in that.
With all these calculation, we watch approximately 3,750 movies in our lifetime.
Based on the above, here’s the average number of movies you have remaining in your lifetime. If you’re in your…
70s = approximately 53.5 movies
60s = approximately 62.5 movies
50s = approximately 75 movies
40s = approximately 93.75 movies
30s = approximately 125 movies
20s = approximately 187.5 movies
Logging Your Remaining Movies
I would assume that many of you don’t have a clue about how many movies you’ve watched in your lifetime. However, you now have some idea of how many movies you have left to watch (Let that sink in a little).
With that in mind, why not start keeping track of the movies you’re watching with this end number in mind? Here are some ways to start logging your movies:
Letterboxd: “Letterboxd is a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past. Showcase your favorites on your profile page. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying.”
An Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc.
A good ol’ fashioned legal pad.
For those of you wanting a more tactile and fun option; use the super-handy Family Movie Night Journal (you’d also be supporting this newsletter by doing this).
If you don’t want to make the effort on any of this, I get it. Simply know we all have a set number of days and a set number of movies to watch…books to read…songs to hear…meals to share. Be grateful for another year and be intentional about the movies you put before your eyes.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm