That's more or less how many days of conscious life you have on this planet as a fully capable adult.

If that number doesn't sound right to you, let's do the math together. First, we'll assume you'll live to be 80 years old. Second, we'll subtract 18 years of youth away from 80, because as a kid, you have little control over your own destiny. You can't really design the life that you want; not only are you legally a minor, but you lack experience, knowledge, and earning power. Third, we'll subtract the last 10 years from 80, because most people slow down considerably in that period -- the majority are even retired.

So we're left with 52 years of adult life. That's 18,980 days. Now, let's assume you sleep about eight hours a day, so you're out of commission 33% of the time. That leaves us with 12,526 days. In order to make this number easy to remember, we'll round it down to 12,500.

12,500 days, and every day, one less. That's all the time you have to do something meaningful or meaningless with your life -- to experience happiness and misery, love and hate, adventure and boredom.

It's not much time, is it?