Four Thousand Weeks
Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman
Having read it
★★★★★
A very clear and decent read that really is helpful and in my reading of some parts of it, if not most of it – certainly given my post-TBI life now – it was comforting to know that I am not as mad as I often think I am and actually, the insights and thoughts I have had for many a year and adapted, dropped and followed and nurtured, seem to present me as reasonably with it, whatever it is!
Passages like this one . . .
Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.
. . . demonstrate some of that it, I think and, overall, the book is a good one to assist taking stock and continuing to learn on this brief journey we have.
Reading helps, despite this rather worrying trend:
There may be no more vivid demonstration of this ratcheting sense of discomfort, of wanting to hasten the speed of reality, than what’s happened to the experience of reading. Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labelled ‘restlessness’ or ‘distraction’ – but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like.
A good passage
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.
Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the solution.
A second good passage
We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
A third good passage
Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to ‘do something remarkable’ with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough, marvellously – really is.