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An editor once said nothing scared him more than seeing a reporter holding a calculator. But he can’t see me from where he’s sitting today, so let’s do a little ciphering.

It was mentioned in an e-mail the other day that we spend 33.3 percent of our lives at work, and of course that’s not really true. The writer was simply referring to the eight-hour work day as compared with the 24-hour solar day.

But it started me wondering how much of our lives we really do spend at the old sweatshop.

The average American male lives 75 years – females are granted an extra eight years, which almost, but not quite, compensates for the time they spend on their hair and makeup. If you live to be exactly 75, you get 27,393 days (that’s including 18 leap-year days; pretty thorough, huh?) to spend as you see fit. It comes out to 657,432 hours. Don’t get all panicky; to put things in perspective, everything the Beatles ever recorded as a group amounts to about 10 hours. You’ve got lots of time.

Of course, that’s what John Lennon thought, too. But back to work.

Let’s say you work for 40 years with no long periods of unemployment or sabbaticals; no extended periods of debauchery due to midlife crisis; no prison time; no summers off as a schoolteacher. If you average four weeks off per year through vacation days and holidays, you spend 76,800 hours on the job.

Divide work hours by total hours to see how much of your living time is working time. The answer is 11.7 percent. That’s how much of your time you actually put into your career, that beast that you think of as consuming your being and defining your identity.

All of the complaining, all of the talk about retirement, and you only spend the equivalent of one out of every eight days actually participating in your life’s work.

That leaves seven days for you to study biochemistry or watch “Phineas and Ferb,” your choice.

In ancient times, people spent roughly 100 percent of their hours eking out a living. Hunting, gathering, building fires, finding water, etc. They didn’t have retirement plans, but that was OK, because they died at an early age, often while trying to coax a large animal into a roasting pan.

Then we invented specialization, so that people could develop one skill – selling insurance or hanging drywall or mailing ransom notes – and take care of their basic needs with it. This freed up gobs of time.

And yet, just about every employed American feels overworked, and people from other nations agree. They think we’re way too driven, far too obsessed. As they lounge at outdoor cafes, sipping wine, they frequently say, “Those Americans are such workaholics – and their foreign aid checks are often late, too.”

They might be somewhat misinformed. They haven’t seen us slipping out the freight delivery door at 2 p.m. on a nice day. They don’t know that we fastidiously divide our time between YouTube and Amazon.com.

And now, thanks to the sinister magic of arithmetic, we discover that we have even more time to think about ways to plug oil well blowouts or scrutinize mortgage applications.

Although, as I randomly punch calculator keys because I like to watch the liquid crystal numbers change, I’m thinking it might not be reasonable to base this on hours instead of days.

Figuring by hours doesn’t take into account that we have to sleep every night. And every workday morning you have to put on your shoes and find your keys, which isn’t really free time away from the employment routine, either.

Actually, if you just compare workdays to total days, it appears that you spend an unfortunate 35 percent of your life working.

Wow, this really is tricky stuff. No wonder actuaries make so much money.