Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

Likewise, and despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live – not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because 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. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time – that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time – begins to make more sense.