Four Thousand Weeks
by Oliver BurkemanHow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Confronting our limitations
Acceptance, not avoidance, of our limitations.
We look towards procrastination and distraction when we want to avoid confronting our limitations. Distractions are unconstrained, while making a choice and committing to something important locks us on a path and imposes constraints on our future. We forget that being distracted is also a choice and imposes its own constraints.
Reject the premise of being able to meet and fulfil all the demands on our time, because they are impossible. There are literally too many things to do, so why expect to be able to do all of them? The futility of not being able to get everything done can instead be freeing.
There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated.
learning to procrastinate well, by facing the truth about your finitude and making your choices accordingly,
Think of it as ‘existential overwhelm’: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.
The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.
Using our finite time
Opportunity cost of time spending is real and needs to be acknowledged, but you can’t avoid paying the cost by never making the choice to commit to something. Because the cost is inevitable, and making a choice of what to do isn’t the cause, you should feel free to choose.
Procrastination comes from being unable to face our limitations and imperfections. Embracing them and working through them is key, one incremental improvement at a time.
So: how to use the finite time we have?
Pay yourself first. Where you can, use your time to do the things that bring you joy or move you towards long term goals first. Then use the rest for your obligations.
Time is a network good. Time is something to be shared rather than hoarded. You can’t use it on your own. Desynchronised populations can’t coordinate, even to take leisure time together.
Plan for the future, but accept that it is inherently unpredictable and it will not turn out like you expect.
the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important – or just for enough of what feels important – is that you definitely never will.
In this situation, making a choice – picking one item from the menu – far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that – actually, instead of an infinite number of other ‘thats’ – because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. In other words, it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime.
So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.
And so in order to be a source of true fulfilment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
But the main effect for ordinary citizens of the USSR, as the writer Judith Shulevitz has explained, was to destroy the possibility of social life. It was a simple question of scheduling. Two friends assigned to two different calendar groups would never be free to socialise on the same day. Husbands and wives were supposed to be assigned to the same group, but they often weren’t, placing intense stress on families;
in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish.
Persistence over perfection
Procrastination comes from being unable to face our limitations and imperfections. Our taste works well ahead of our ability which can be disappointing at the start, when it’s easiest to quit. Embracing them and working through them is key, one incremental improvement at a time.
Three principles of patience
- Develop a taste for having problems
- Embrace radical incrementalism
- Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
And so in order to be a source of true fulfilment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.
Something – our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events and over the actions of other people – will always render our creation less than perfect.
Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something constructive to try to stay in control.
That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills and accumulating experience.
Existence is attention
Existence, life, is literally just the things you pay attention to - directing and engaging our attention is key to finding meaning.
The present moment is not just a path to some satisfying future. A future like that will never arrive if you aren’t also taking advantage of the present. Having problems means that you are engaging with the world in front of you.
You should be paying attention to the rainbow, not thinking about finding the pot of gold at the end.
The “attention economy” distorts our experience of reality by hijacking our 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.
if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.
The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be ‘more in the moment’ is the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps – to modify your relationship to the present moment in time, when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with.
Yet it turns out to be perilously easy to over-invest in this instrumental relationship to time – to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are – with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the ‘real’ value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.
Because the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things – and all these distorted judgements then influence how we allocate our offline time as well.
Re-learning leisure
Industrialisation has moved us away from historical views on leisure, which was that it was the end for all our means.
It has become harder to take leisure time as societal pressures towards it have been stripped away.
Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favourite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an ‘atelic activity’, meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.
People faced strong social pressure not to work all the time: you observed religious holidays because the church required it; and in a close-knit village, it wouldn’t have been easy to shirk the other festivities, either.
As convenience colonises everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.
In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world
Other ideas
Questions to ask to make better use of your 4000 weeks
- Where are you pursuing comfort where you should be pursuing discomfort?
- Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me?
- Are you holding yourself to impossible productivity standards?
- Have you accepted that you are who you are and not who you ought to be?
- Where are you holding back until you feel like you’ve figured things out?
it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.
Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and ‘your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is’ – and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long. Meditation helps here. But so does going on unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to work, taking up photography or birdwatching or nature drawing or keeping a journal, playing I Spy with a child: anything that draws your attention more fully into what you’re doing in the present.