Life as an Integral Theory

I hate it when people tell me “life is too short”. In my teenage years the concept went completely over my head. I couldn’t even fathom the idea. Now that I’m in my twenties I’ve started to think about the idea a little more and I feel I’ve figured it out. Us ambitious people who want to make it big, be surrounded by successful people, and wrap it up in a shiny charismatic and happy package are busy people. Some of us come home everyday after work or school and feel faced with a million other things to do and progress seems slow. It’s a rat race and we feel we’re not doing everything we could be doing in life all while we have no free time to do more.

Then there’s the phrase “there are not enough hours in the day”. Welcome to my world. If you can’t relate to that then you’re boring. Shame on you for not living life to its fullest. There is ALWAYS something to DO, be LEARNED, to CREATE.



I’m about to geek out on you and show some calculust so hopefully you at least remember the general concept I’m about to go over. An integral in calculus is a method to determine the area under a curve. It does so mathematically by splitting the area under the curve into a bunch of rectangles which are simple to determine the area of and add up. Add all of these and you have a pretty damn close number of how much area is under that curve.

Our path in life is that curve. All we do/learn/create is our area. We live life one day (or slice) at a time. We can never get all that we want to get done in our day (see the white space under the curve?). Our (f)unfulfilled days stack and we’re left with a life that was “too short” (fat slices), where not all our desires could be achieved, or a fulfilled life (thin slices).

What’s the integral of your life?