Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

In her autobiography All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir marvels at the mind-boggling number of things, all utterly beyond her control, that had to happen in order to make her her: If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with

a feeling of childish amazement – why am I myself?5 What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about? … The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

present. ‘Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place,’ cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism,

it). ‘Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,’ he

American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’.10 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.

Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artefact

So intently were they focused on using their time for a future benefit – for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on – that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all.

in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state – and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself.

New Age philosopher Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigour: Take education. What a hoax.3 As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [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.

Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: ‘We are all of us compelled,’ Kerr wrote, ‘to read for profit, party for contacts …2 gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.’

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 behaviour in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.

The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as ‘not-leisure’, reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling. In

‘If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ‘then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.’9

Social psychologists call this inability to rest ‘idleness aversion’,

‘We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,’ writes Thomas Wolfe, ‘all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.’

Cat in the Hat says, ‘It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.’

‘Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,’ writes the philosopher John Gray.

philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an ‘atelic activity’, meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.

The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have ‘objects of willing’ – things you want to do, or to have, in life – because not yet having them is bad, but getting them is arguably even worse:

subversive:

There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.

The Tao Te Ching is full of images of suppleness and yielding: the wise man (the reader is constantly being informed) is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its path.

In his book The Road Less Travelled, the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck recounts a transformative experience of surrendering to the speed of reality – one that emphasises that patience isn’t merely a more peaceful and present-orientated way to live but a concretely useful skill.

‘A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule,’ advises the cartoonist turned self-help guru Scott Adams, summarising the ethos of individual time sovereignty.

on, ‘step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule’.

conviviality

concocted

gait

drily

‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week.

forsworn

what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much – and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

The anxieties that clutter the average life – relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries – shrink instantly down to irrelevance.

Heidegger’s mysterious suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all – that instead we are time.

‘Time is the substance I am made of,’ writes Jorge Luis Borges.

‘Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’

Our finite lives are filled with all the painful problems of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t stop them from feeling like problems – or not exactly, anyway. The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem.

Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.

Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.

Christian Bobin, he recalls, at a similarly mundane moment: ‘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.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.’

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’6

The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time.

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people).7 The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.

Stephen Cope, ‘it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.8

‘Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live.11 One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way … If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church,

they tell you what’s what.’ By contrast, the individual path ‘is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other’.

‘Do the next right thing’,