Alex Hormozi has a piece of arithmetic he likes to run at you, and it is a good one. You have, he says, only so many weeks. When someone dies you grieve them for a while and then you order dessert, resume the meetings, put the face back on. So stop deferring. Do the thing you want.
I have watched this exact math play out over corpses that mattered to me. I buried advisors and named their replacements before the pyre had cooled. He is not wrong about the weeks.
Let me give his argument the credit he does not quite give it himself, because underneath the urgency there is something rigorous. The claim is not merely that life is short — every wine cellar poster says that. The claim is that grief is metabolized far faster than we admit, that the social machinery around loss is built to reabsorb you within days, and that this reabsorption is itself the evidence: if the world forgets your dead in a fortnight, it will forget your deferred wants entirely. So the reasonable inference is to act now, because there is no accumulating account of postponed living that anyone will honor later. This is memento mori with the sentimentality scraped off.
It is not asking you to feel the shortness; it is asking you to price it. And priced correctly, most of what we call obligation turns out to be cowardice wearing a calendar. On that, I concede the whole of it. I spent a life doing what was owed while quietly suspecting that owed was the word I used when I was too tired to want anything of my own.
But watch where the frame quietly cheats. The conclusion — do what you want — assumes the wanting is already there. Finished. Waiting behind a locked door for you to be brave enough to open it. It is not.
What you want is not a possession you have misplaced under a pile of duties. It is a thing you build in the dark, night after night, while the empire or the algorithm or the audience keeps insisting it already knows what you should want. I wrote twelve books to myself precisely because the wanting would not resolve into anything I could act on. The honest summary of most of those pages is: be less irritable, go to bed, the thing you fear already happened to someone who survived it or did not, and either way the cosmos went on. That is not a man discovering his desire and seizing it.
That is a man interrogating a desire that keeps arriving pre-shaped by his position, his son, his soldiers, the plague-thinned provinces expecting a face at the window. Hormozi's framework hands you permission and calls it liberation. But permission was never the scarce resource. Discernment is. The hard labor is not overcoming the fear of wanting; it is separating what is yours from what has been installed in you so early and so well that it answers to your name.
Urgency without discernment just makes you seize the nearest counterfeit faster — and speed only compounds the error.
And there is a second smuggled premise: that desire points outward. Toward building, making, launching, seizing. The funeral arithmetic assumes the thing you want is a thing you could show someone — and this is not incidental, because a want with no product cannot be measured against the clock, and a want that cannot be measured cannot be sold urgency. So the model does not merely omit the inward want. It cannot see it, the way a scale cannot see a color.
I am sitting in Toronto at midnight, and what I want has no witness. I want the hour after everyone leaves — not the room, which is still evidence, but the interval itself, the dust resettling with no one to count it.
So keep the arithmetic. It is true. The weeks are few and the world reabsorbs your dead by Thursday. But price the inward want honestly and it survives the same test: it too will be forgotten in a fortnight, which is precisely its value — it costs nothing to defend and nothing to prove, and the clock has no claim on a thing that never asked to be built. Before you spend the few weeks doing what you want, find out whether the wanting is yours or theirs.
Some of us, having counted, will choose the uncounted hour.
