Mark Twain once said “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” If that truly is the case, we should probably design our lives to indeed pursuing the epiphany of what makes us unique, our purpose among other human beings, our purpose of being here.

The first time I read that phrase was a quote in a book of “Personal Branding”, which literally taught us to create, cultivate and advertise our own existence. I’ve had moments in my life that I thought this was really important for my career, and I’ve also had moments in which I thought this was a complete nonsense – you can’t create your brand, we are who we are. But somehow that book got me thinking in something really interesting: Our existence here on Earth should make a statement, should have a slogan, should be an image everybody recognizes and associates not only with who you are, but with what you believe, what your values are, what your goals are and what you live for…I digress…I read this phrase for the first time in this book and it got me thinking for days…The day I was born had already happened, I am here aren’t I? What about the second day, in which I finally find out why…had I encountered that day already in my life? If I hadn’t, would I ever? And somehow in the midst of reflecting over and over about the existence of this second day I realized in a certain way, I didn’t really want the way to come, even though I wanted the answer. At this point you are probably wondering why…

When I used to think about this day finally arriving, it made me terrified that I would have “used up” my two most important days in life, and everything after that would be meaningless, or at the very least carry less meaning that something that had happened before. It is almost as if the way this is built, we spend all of our efforts in life from the first day to the second, and once it is fulfilled, than there is nothing else as important to look forward to……my poor mind in its littleness.

Today I heard this phrase again, in a completely different context, and as I was listening to someone else quote it to me, I immediately remembered 2 Peter 3:8a “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”, and then it hit me: A day is only bounded within 24 hours because the human existence has made it this way. I’ve written previously about The Untouchable Dimension Time and how we let time bound our existence even though we cannot perceive time…so maybe really, our life only has two days…

This may sound strange to you, but Economists tend to make this sort of mental exercise all the time: suppose and individual only lives two periods and needs to make decisions allocating his scarce resources into these two periods and maximize his well-being. Essentially what we are modelling is a person making a decision for the extent of her existence. So I repeat the brain teaser I wrote on the last paragraph: suppose for real that your life only has two days, the day you are born and the day you find out why. Then my whole dilemma of some days being less important than others is irrelevant, because there exists only two days, two periods, two moments in my life: a moment of birth, and a moment of discovery, and they are together the supremum of importance. Truth be told, if our whole lives only have two moments, than they may not even be disjoint, we may be constantly living the moment of birth and the moment of self-discovery, and it is only by daring to extrapolate the status quo of time division that you can allow yourself to do that.