Four Thousand Weeks

The reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things’ or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done. For a start, what ‘matters’ is subjective, so you’ve no grounds for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your employer, or your culture happens to deem important. But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, youll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. (Your boss isn’t stupid: why would she give the extra work to someone slower?) Figure out how to spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend more time exercising or to join the parent-teacher association — oh, and isn’t it finally tine you learned to meditate? p.41

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. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing ouť, by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out’. It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead — earn money to support your family, write your novel, bath the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk — is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect. p.69

Alongside the devastation that it wrought, the virus changed us for the better, at least temporarily, and at least in certain respects: it helped us perceive more clearly what our pre-lockdown days had been lacking and the trade-offs we’d been making, willingly or otherwise - for example, by pursuing work lives that left no time for neighbourliness. A New York writer and director named Julio Vincent Gambuto captured this sense of what I found myself starting to think of as ‘possibility shock’ - the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough. p.206

The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. 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. Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live, especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were brought up: to prioritise future benefits over current enjoyments.) But ultimately it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, peace of mind never quite arrives. And it makes it all that but impossible to experience ‘deep time’, that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead. p.25

What’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume. Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for — and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. p. 50

Worry, at its core is the repetitious experience of a a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner wonl leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favoured candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about the future. reach will always exceed your grasp. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp. p.116

To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from ‘the moment’, and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it. For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be ‘more in the moment’ is the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps to modify your relationship to the present moment in time, when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with. p.140