When I was in Europe, I was lucky enough to spend a day at Disneyland. As I explained to my American roommate at the hostel, I’m not Disneyland fanatic, but I do enjoy an opportunity to go when I can, considering there aren’t any in Australia or close by to us. I’ve been really lucky to go to Disneyland a few times with my family when I was younger, and they instilled in me a particular Disneyland philosophy which I also followed on my solo trip to Disneyland Paris. That philosophy is to run around and try to do as much as physically possible, with basically no stops. Needless to say, this makes for a very whirlwind day, but one that is stacked with experiences. Since I only had the one day there, it was important to me that I made the most of my time there.

I also think, though, that Disneyland can be viewed as a bit of a scale model for life. Don’t stop reading, I promise it makes sense. You see, in a sense every trip to Disneyland has a birth and a death. You are born when you walk through the gates for the first time, and you die when the park closes. In between those times, you have a finite number of minutes to achieve whatever you want to do. In my case, at Disneyland Paris, it was open 9am-9pm, which gave me a maximum of 12 hours or 720 minutes there, which doesn’t sound like much when you write it out like that. But real life is like that too. On my phone I have a widget which tells me approximately how many days I have remaining in my life until I die, as estimated by an online calculator (apparently I should live until 93 years old, which makes me a bit sad to likely not be a centenarian actually). Currently, there are around 24000 days until I (approximately) die. When I first realised this, it seemed like a terrifyingly low number. I have this widget on my lock screen, so every time I look at my phone I can remind myself of the inevitability of my passing. Most people are (understandably) a bit freaked out when they see a widget on my phone counting down until “My Death” (that’s literally the event name I’ve called it). Admittedly, it is very morbid. To me, that is the point. It is only the knowledge that our death will come one day that makes life have meaning. Disneyland is special because you have a limited amount of time there. In the Disneyland scale model of life: you are born; you have 720 minutes to do something; then you die, wham bam goodbye. Those 720 minutes are exactly like the days of our real life: we can either spend each minute or day doing something, otherwise it’s lost forever, and you can never get it back.

Of course, something else interesting about this scale model is that, unlike the real world, the primary currency at Disneyland is time. All of the attractions are free, the only thing you need to spend money on is food and/or souvenirs, though if you plan your day properly you can avoid doing that within the park. You can also think of the 720 minutes as being a currency, and you spend it on queuing. Unlike the last time I went to Disneyland, they had an app there now which tells you the wait times of every attraction. To me, this turned Disneyland into a kind of time stock market. I wanted to buy queuing time when it was low, so I was on my phone a lot checking to see when and where the best deals were and running across the park to get there in time before the market fluctuated and more people arrived driving up the price. In the real world, I think we so often get caught up by money being our primary currency. Of course, there’s times where that’s very important, and more important than the currency of time. But once you have essentials sorted (like housing and food), then we should prioritise time as at least an equal currency with money. In his book Die With Zero, Bill Perkins argues that, like money, time has costs too. He argues that too often people wait until retirement to achieve life goals, but by that point their bodies have deteriorated and it is much harder to do those things. As we move through life, doors close to us. Deciding whether or not to have kids is a decision that you need to make young, not one that you can think about once you’re at retirement age. Disneyland is a good reminder and a chance to see what life is like when time is the dominant currency over money.

In my one day at Disneyland, I achieved a lot. I saw almost every attraction and ride I wanted to see, I saw one of the parades and the closing drone show, and I did this across the two parks there, to boot. By the end of the day, my throat was killing me, and I got sick the day after, on 3 hours of sleep to catch an early morning flight. I don’t blame Disneyland for that, but my entire Europe trip consisted of me running around like crazy trying to do and see as much as possible, and this eventually caught up with my body. I couldn’t live every day like my Disneyland day: Going flat out for 12 hours is crazy and I can do that for a short period, but not every day. But it did hit home for me the importance of living life to its fullest and using our limited time on this planet wisely.

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