Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman

Gems

• "The world is bursting with wonder," and we should spend more of our lives trying to experience that wonder.
• On the wrongness of how we spend time as children:
  • "Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day."
• "Freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community — participating in forms of social life where you don't get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it."
• Parkinson's law applies to the whole sum of what we deem important.
  • "The other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you'll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory."
• "As I make hundreds of smaller choices throughout the day, I'm building a life — but at one and the same time, I'm closing off the possibility of countless others, forever."
  • "Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility."
• We should not regret having to make the choice to pick only one of many valued activities; we should be thankful we get to pick one of them at all.
• "When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result. We'll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we're generally pleased that we did so."
• "The 'joy of missing out': the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place."
• "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 be wary of getting distracted, or giving attention to junk content.
• "In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth."
  • An old man drinking a glass of wine is truly at leisure, producing nothing for the future, and experiencing satisfaction from that moment.
• Patience is often felt to be disturbingly passive. But as society accelerates, patience often becomes a form of power, because few are able to wield this virtue and achieve the long-run outcomes it enables.
• "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, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself."

In the long run, we're all dead (intro)

• Philosophers "have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action."
• No "productivity book" addresses the fundamental shortness of life.
• "The world is bursting with wonder," and we should spend more of our lives trying to experience that wonder.
• Time hacks do work, in a sense — you will probably produce a greater quantity of shallow work — and yet they leave you feeling more empty, because you're spending your life on busyness.
• On the wrongness of how we spend time as children:
  • "Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day."
• Burkeman asserts that we will never increase our productivity to the point where we feel ahead, unpressured, with enough time to enjoy the important things in life, so we've already "lost" and should change the game that we're playing with our lives.

The limit-embracing life (chap 1)

• Experiencing "deep time" vs. "clock time": being fully present and fully alive to the experiences of the world, without conscious organization of time. Like children.
  • (Maybe I should put less pressure on my kids to count and understand time. Make it more about executive function and the sequence of activities, and less about time allocation and budgeting).
• He mentions the shift of labor during the industrial age from being compensated per task to per hour.
• "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 hope to reach once your tasks are finally 'out of the way.'"
• "Eternity ceases gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions." - Mumford
• "The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you."
• "We recoil from the notion that this is it — that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we'll get a shot at."
• We mentally fight so that we don't have to feel constrained by reality. It's a form of neurosis and escapism.
• He argues that for most, increasing one's productivity is just a form of avoidance, to maintain hope that we can do all that we desire and won't face painful constraints of reality.
  • (I wonder if maintaining hope of achieving all the things, while unrealistic, is actually a useful mindset for being ambitious and for "striving well." I.e. aim for perfection so that you can achieve and be happy with "pretty good.")
• "Most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time — our culture's ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want — because 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."
• "Freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community — participating in forms of social life where you don't get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it."
  • Letting go of control, to participate in a community.
• "So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you're implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you'll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you're in."

The efficiency trap (chap 2)

• "You'll do what you can, you won't do what you can't, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken."
• "There are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at."
• "The other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you'll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory."
• He argues that acknowledging that you will never have the time needed for your important desires is the only helpful strategy. It's freeing. All else is denial, avoidance. All time management advice is predicated on the false notion that you can fit everything in, with the right strategy.
• Parkinson's law applies to the whole sum of what we deem important.
• "This whole painful irony is especially striking in the case of email, that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends, too."
• A belief in the afterlife lessens the pressure to "see it all" before you die.
• Digital tools like Facebook, email, and dating sites help us more efficiently sort through choices but also expose us to unrealistic amounts of new choices.
• Ticking things off of a bucket list suffers the same dynamic of any TODO list: it's infinite, and so making one's happiness tied to completion or progress will be unsatisfying.
• "The more efficient you get, the more you become 'a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations.'"
  • The better you are at doing things, ironically, the more things you end up having to do.

Facing finitude (chap 3)

• (Beautiful chapter)
• "As I make hundreds of smaller choices throughout the day, I'm building a life — but at one and the same time, I'm closing off the possibility of countless others, forever."
• "Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility."
• "For Heidegger, this is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact."
  • Instead, we earnestly try to spend most of our days busy and distract ourselves from this fact.
• "We try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don't get to choose at all — that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job."
• When bouts with cancer teach us the scarcity of life and to live it more fully: "it pitches them into a more authentic mode of being, in which everything suddenly feels more vividly meaningful."
  • "Such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonizing loss."
• "When you're trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that's foisted upon you against your will."
  • Knowing that today's life is a gift rather than a day we're entitled to changed his experience of every day annoyances.
  • "It can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience."
• "Each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with."
• We should not regret having to make the choice to pick only one of many valued activities; we should be thankful we get to pick one of them at all.
• "It's precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else — someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say? — that makes marriage meaningful."

Becoming a better procrastinator (chap 4)

• It's agonizing to confront that one's creative calling will be compromised by a romantic relationship; it's enough to cause bitterness, once the constraints become clear.
  • "Confining his relationship with Bauer to the realm of letters meant that he could cling to the possibility of a life of intimacy with her without allowing it to compete with his mania for work, as a real-life relationship necessarily would."
• "When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result. We'll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we're generally pleased that we did so."
  • Whether it be selecting a spouse, a career path, a job, a startup idea... it's simplifying to prune the space of possibility. It's exhausting to keep open so many possible branches.
• "The 'joy of missing out': the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place."

The watermelon problem (chap 5)

• The Ancient Greeks serious take on distraction: they "saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character — a systematic inner failure to use one's time on what one claimed to value the most."
• "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 be wary of getting distracted, or giving attention to junk content.
• "The crucial point isn't that it's wrong to choose to spend your time relaxing, whether at the beach or on BuzzFeed. It's that the distracted person isn't really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don't have their highest interests at heart."
  • So we must develop the ability to exert some top-down control over our attention in the face of preempting forces.
• The digital attention economy appropriates our attention with things that make us angry or horrified, because these things are hardest to ignore, and then it monetizes that attention via advertising. It's a leech.
  • (I think all subjects that are attention-grabbing, but return little value, are the same in this way: gossip, politics, news, fighting about our opinions / dogmatism).
• "Unscrupulous politicians can overwhelm their opposition, not to mention the fact-checking capabilities of journalists, simply by flooding a nation's attentional bandwidth with outrage after outrage, so that each new scandal overwrites the last one in public awareness — and anyone who responds or retweets, even if their intention is to condemn the hatemongering, finds themselves rewarding it with attention, thereby helping it spread." A pit of futility.
• Despite the increasing effectiveness of social media and the attention economy, ultimately we are choosing to be distracted and allowing it to happen. If we were really enamored with our most prioritized activities, and weren't fatigued, then we couldn't be pulled away from them.

The intimate interrupter (chap 6)

• "You're obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it."
  • Taking care of a two year old for an afternoon makes you confront the limited control you have over your time.
• The appeal of online distractions: "it doesn't need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained."
• "Listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender", which is hard, and so we seek distraction to avoid listening to people around us.
• "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."
  • E.g. enduring painful experiences like unavoidably being outside in the blistering cold.

We never really have time (chap 7)

• "Despite our total lack of control over any of these occurrences, each of us made it through to this point in our lives — so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we'll have what it takes to weather that as well."
  • Comforting. Let go of anxiety about the future; have confidence in our self-efficacy.
  • "A life spent 'not minding what happens' is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it."

You are here (chap 8)

• Future chasing mindset — "When I finally XYZ, then I can relax/become satisfied" — is a limiting mindset which converts the present moment into mere stepping stones to the future, sapping the present of enjoyment.
• "[People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive." - Alan Watts
• Concerning his child's developmental milestones, "I came to realize that I didn't want to squander these days of his actual existence by focusing solely on how best to use them for the sake of his future one."
  • Young kids are "sheer presence" existing only in the current moment.
• Causal catastrophe: "the belief that 'the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is the kind of adults it produces.'". "Its effect is to sap childhood of any intrinsic value, by treating it as nothing but a training ground for adulthood."
• "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment... Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late." - Alexander Herzen
• "As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future — that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems — you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn't leading toward some moment of truth that hasn't yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now."
  • Don't forsake enjoyment of the present in pursuit of the future.
• "By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life."

Rediscovering rest (chap 9)

• "Aristotle argued that true leisure — by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation — was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else."
• "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."
  • That we should use our leisure time for self-improvement has become an entrenched idea.
• "In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth."
  • An old man drinking a glass of wine is truly at leisure, producing nothing for the future, and experiencing satisfaction from that moment.
• Your kids will grow up, or might not survive, or you may not survive. So harvest the present!
• Enjoy the sabbath, the day of rest. Use it to develop gratitude.
• Hiking in solitude: "there's a splendor to this terrain that's most powerful when you're alone, and in no danger of being distracted from the barren drama of it all by pleasant conversation."
• The word hobby has come to have a connotation of embarrassment.
  • "In order to be a source of true fulfillment, 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."

Staying on the bus (chap 11)

• Patience is often felt to be disturbingly passive. But as society accelerates, patience often becomes a form of power, because few are able to wield this virtue and achieve the long-run outcomes it enables.
• "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, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself."
• (Nice section on slowing down to the pace of the problem so you can observe and study the situation and be present enough to see when a solution presents itself).
• "Life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires — that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn't an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one."

The loneliness of the digital nomad (chap 12)

• "The digital nomad's lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root. For the rest of us, likewise, more freedom to choose when and where you work makes it harder to forge connections through your job, as well as less likely you'll be free to socialize when your friends are."
• The flip side to to temporal freedom is fewer opportunities to socialize and collaborate with others.
• Working in the same office; choir; praying in a monastery.
  • "There is an even more visceral sense, as well, in which time just feels realer — more intense, more vivid, more filled with meaning — when you're synchronized well with others."
• What kind of freedom do we want to prioritize as we aspire to achieve sovereignty over our time? The freedom to never see your friends?

Cosmic insignificance therapy (chap 13)

• A VP of a medical instruments company asks "is this what I want to be doing with my four thousand weeks?"
  • "A malaise that had been growing in her for years had crystallized in the understanding that she was spending her days in a way that no longer felt as if it had any meaning."
• "A chair just isn't the kind of thing that ought to have the capacity to boil water, so it isn't a problem that it doesn't. And it is likewise 'implausible, for almost all people to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein... there have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.'"
  • So release yourself from the standard of using your life to "put a dent in the universe."

The human disease (chap 14)

• "We chase the ultimate fantasy of time mastery — the desire, by the time we die, to have truly mattered in the cosmic scheme of things, as opposed to being instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing eons."
• Life's unending queue of problems is only an issue if one believes there's a cure.
  • "I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart." - Christian Bobin.
• "Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can", where enlargement means growth as a person, and diminishment means "having your soul shrivel with every passing week."
• Do the next most necessary thing. ("Do the next right thing" - Frozen)