My Lifes Work

 

The number appeared on the screen without much ceremony: 168,421 minutes. I asked for the conversion. About 2,807 hours. Then I asked for days. Approximately 116.96 days. Nearly 117 days. , 117 uninterrupted days of existence spent doing one thing: typing. Just typing. The simple act of taking ideas that existed only in my mind and giving them physical form through a keyboard. What struck me immediately was that those 117 days represented only a tiny fraction of the work behind Soulverses. They didn't include the handwritten notes, the sketches, the diagrams, the scribbles in margins, the voice recordings captured on a dictaphone, the digital notes scattered across devices, or the countless revisions and redesigns accumulated over decades.

Then I began thinking about the time that couldn't be measured so easily. Soulverses began in 1996, and ever since then it has occupied a permanent place somewhere in the background of my mind. I wasn't constantly actively working on it, but it was always there. During school, jobs, relationships, road trips, conversations, sleepless nights, and quiet moments, some part of my attention was still exploring its worlds, refining its cultures, solving narrative problems, building histories, inventing technologies, and imagining futures that stretched tens of thousands of years beyond the present. When I calculated what that might amount to if every waking hour since July 27, 1996 carried some measure of Soulverses within it, the estimate approached 168,000 hours, nearly nineteen years of waking consciousness.

The number seemed ridiculous at first, but the more I considered it, the more accurate it felt. Every book I read, every documentary I watched, every scientific concept, mythological story, philosophical idea, historical event, piece of music, artwork, or personal experience eventually found its way into the machinery of the setting. The world wasn't simply being imagined; it was being continuously analyzed, expanded, and interconnected. Everything became material. Everything became part of a larger tapestry that was always growing somewhere behind the scenes.

When I added together the measurable work, the typing, the planning, the sketches, the recordings, the research and reading, and the revisions, the estimate exceeded thirteen thousand hours. For many people that would represent a career's worth of effort. Yet even that figure felt incomplete because it only accounted for the visible labor. The greater investment was the time spent thinking, dreaming, questioning, and imagining. No spreadsheet can measure the years spent carrying multiverses in your head.

Looking at all those numbers, I realized they weren't telling me anything new. They were simply putting scale to something I had always known. Some projects are hobbies. Some are ambitions. Some are businesses. Soulverses became something else entirely. It became a constant companion, a lens through which I examined reality, and an ongoing conversation with myself that has lasted most of my life. It contains my questions, my curiosities, my obsessions, and my attempts to understand existence translated into story form. It is my shadow work and what I feel I was created to create and imagined to imagine. After nearly three decades of mental immersion, I can say with certainty that Soulverses is my life's work. Whatever happens when it finally reaches the world, no one will ever spend as much time inside Soulverses as I have, because before it became a universe, it was a lifetime, my lifetime.