“Four Thousand Weeks” stares into my soul

The average human lifespan is absurdly terrifyingly insultingly short. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.

I have been plagued by constant existential anguish since I was a very little child. I have a distinct memory of being five, sitting in the bathtub for one of those rare moments I was able to take a bath instead of just a shower, and just feeling dread and panic wash over me in the cooling bath water.

As a result, I was both eager to and hesitant to dive into Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Even though I have (too) much practice in confronting my own mortality, I have not reached any better answers or mastery over that feeling, and so I was afraid that this book was going to trigger a lot of scary feelings that I would rather just choke down, ignore and be distracted from.

It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management — like it’s hipper cousin, productivity — is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter to some extent, no doubt. But they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

I want more wonder. I definitely want more wonder.

So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance — to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.

This book is ultimately valuable for how it reminds you to reflect and truly think about what you have not questioned and just unconsciously taken for granted: concepts that govern your inner voice dictating what you have to do and how you have to approach things. The paradigm shift Burkeman offers can free you from unthinkingly pursuing things. If you're not a fan of living an unexamined life — if you’d like to live life truly on your own terms — this is for you. This is for those who take the red pill from The Matrix.

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem — or so I hope to convince you— is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.

Go ahead and do a vibe check as you read the following excerpts; see if you’re the kind of productivity-obsessed over-achiever with whom these things will resonate:

It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.

The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time set up a rigged game in which it’s impossible to ever feel as if you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time — instead of just being time, you might say — it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hoped to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work more and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up — so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it will become that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.) Yet the only thing that feels feasible, as a way of managing all this additional anxiety, is to move faster still. You know you must stop accelerating, yet it also feels as though you can't.

…many of us know what it is to suspect that there might be richer, fuller, juicier things we could be doing with our four thousand weeks — even when what we're currently doing with them looks, from the outside, like the definition of success. Or maybe you're familiar with the experience of returning to your daily routine routines, following an unusually satisfying weekend in nature or with old friends, and being struck by the thought that more of life should feel that way — that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions. The modern world is especially lacking in good responses to such feelings: religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can't be found.

What did you think? Now check out how the following jolts your thinking differently:

…the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done — that’s never going to happen — but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it. As the American author and teacher Gregg Kerch puts it, we need to learn to get better at procrastinating.

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won't have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do — and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default — or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open” — which is really just another way of trying to feel in control — in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can't know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something — indeed, on almost everything — is basically guaranteed. Which isn't actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.

As with money, it's good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn't much use if you're forced to experience it all on your own. To do countless important things with time — to socialize, go on dates, raise children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances. — it has to be synchronized with other people’s. In fact, having large amounts of time, but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn't just useless but actively unpleasant — which is why, for pre-modern people, the worst of all punishments was to be physically ostracized, abandoned in some remote location where you couldn't fall in with the rhythms of the tribe.

When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress — in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future — they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience.

Do you still doubt that you need a paradigm overhaul? Perhaps you think that if you had more discipline, that you could eliminate distractions and just FOCUS you would be able to propel yourself towards your life goals. You do know what your life goal are, right? Because you’ve had lots of time to mull on them and ponder the possibilities in the universe?

Then I’ll leave you with these two last thoughts:

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the pain of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction — that is, an investment of the portion of your attention, and therefore your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.

As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I am building a life — but at one and the same time, I'm closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.