Week 2 - The Limit-Embracing Life

Welcome to Week 2 of my Self-Help Slow Read of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. We will read through the book one chapter at a time, using excerpts, reflections, resources, and questions that stimulate conversation and actions, with an occasional dash of healthy skepticism.

This week – Chapter 1: The Limit-Embracing Life

If this is your first time here, visit the Four Thousand Weeks reading schedule for more details.

“The real problem - or so I hope to convince you - is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse” (p. 17).

What are these troublesome ideas? To start, Burkeman leads us by exploring how different periods of history have seen time differently, primarily by comparing a preindustrial medieval peasant versus our current clock-dominated age. Here are some things that caught my attention:

…it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you [as a medieval peasant] that you had ‘too much to do,’ that you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong...…none of the this was simply because things moved more slowly back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity - as a thing - at all” (p. 18).

How did they experience it?

“There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvesttime, and anyboy who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that – for example, by doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner – would rightly have been considered a lunatic” (p. 20).

He brings forward the idea, that I understand comes from historian E.P. Thompson’s essay Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism, that:

“Historians call this way of living ‘task orientation,’ because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today...[the] concept of life ‘moving slowly’ would have struck most people as meaningless” (p. 20).

Burkeman then draws upon this to say “Living this way, one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid… “ 21 I’m not sure exactly what “expansive and fluid” mean exactly, but I surmise that, as a medieval peasant, you would be more attuned to living in and bound by the rhythms of nature and your daily tasks. Or maybe expansive and fluid means that time was experienced mostly in the feeling of being present, since most days and weeks were cyclical and not linear in the modern sense of how we think of our lives.

So how did we get to today? Apparently the invention of the clock, which allowed a shift in understanding of time as a measurable thing, a resource that one’s life could be measured against.

“Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once ‘time’ and ‘life’ had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used - and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today” (p. 24).

He doesn’t suggest that all we need is to go back to living like medieval peasants or farmers. Instead, I think he’s getting at that by being more aware of how one understands time and how that understanding affects or doesn’t affect your life, can go a long way to help deal with the moment we live in today.

Next, he brings up an idea that I have never thought of before: that time gets bound up with our self-worth.

“Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it” (p. 24).

How often have I said to myself, stop wasting your time! Am I using my time wisely? Am I wasting my time with this project? Shouldn’t I be spending more time on more important things! When are you going to get this done? Hey, you’re late, what’s wrong with you? Sometimes we act as if the Time Police are about to bust into our lives and grill us according to our amount of wasted hours.

Share

Burkeman confesses he was obsessed with productivity, always measuring his own life against all the things that he wanted to accomplish, and became so much an obsession that he parlayed it into a regular column at The Guardian where he could test out different methods and write about it. He was searching for the perfect system that would get him to his ultimate goals and ambitions, but after a while the disillusionment set in, and he could no longer avoid the thing under the surface of his pursuit.

“…my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda” (p. 28)

“…as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead” (p. 29).

“…most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves” (p. 29).

And that is what he proposes that a lot of us are at today. Under the facade that we can get done all that we want, working towards that some future state of bliss and relaxation, where everything works towards our ends, while also in constant fear of missing out.

And this is where he gets to the crux of the situation – that we are in a state of denial of our limited lives by trying to fill it up so with much stuff as a bulwark against that uncomfortable sense festering beneath the surface.

So what does Burkeman suggest? Stop living in the illusion that you are going to do and be everything that you imagine.

”After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get: maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the ways you feel you should. And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless” (p. 30).

He also points out that he doesn’t think that changing how we think about time will solve all our problems with what time demands of us. But facing the reality of our own individual lives could help.

“So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in” (p. 34).

As someone who has bounced around on multiple systems, seminars, and books, trying to get my life in order, reach the endless list of goals I want to achieve, do all the things I hope to do one day, this chapter felt like a good punch in the gut.

What has my own search been about really? Am I using it to avoid certain uncomfortable truths about my life? What deeper need is asking to be heard that I try to cover up with these pursuits? A sense of fear of letting life happen to me instead of trying to control how my life would turn out?

Or maybe this is just what people in their 40s and 50s do? Worry about all the less time they have to live. But I suppose that worry mostly comes from the grief of feeling left out, left behind, or never gonna get ahead where you once hoped you would be. And with grief, many get stuck on the first steps, anger and denial. I don’t know if I’m angry, but the sense of denial hit a little close to home.

I am at an age where I have accomplished some good things: a university degree, a decent, worthwhile job, and some published writing here and there. But as I’ve recently passed certain milestones in my life, I have felt the pressure of those personal “goals” of mine bearing down on me, berating myself for time wasted, or time spent on frivolous things, and on and on. I too have come to realize things are not going to work out that way I have wanted it to, and I’ve spent too much time trying to find something that gets me there. (Oh, there is it: I’ve spent too much time!)

Which, funny enough, I picked up Four Thousand Weeks in the bookstore because I thought it just might be the next system that would work. But now, it’s telling me I’ve been playing the wrong game to begin with.

“None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction” (p. 35).

So how does one get out of the game? I guess I’ll see if the book offers any satisfaction over the next few weeks.