Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmentalist who cofounded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn’t—and that he thinks that’s a good thing. Hope is supposed to be “our beacon in the dark,” Jensen notes. But in reality, it’s a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment—the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just “the future”—to make things all right in the end. As the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, it means relating to life as if “there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one.” And sometimes that attitude can be justified: if I go to the hospital for surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what he’s doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity to change things—which in the context of Jensen’s field, environmental activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were supposed to be fighting. “Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world,” as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, “they’ve assumed the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.” To give up hope, by contrast, is ...