Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It
by Oliver Burkeman
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2022-11-04
Wow. Definitely worth reading. It’s short, and I pretty much constantly wanted to write down what I was hearing. I’ll probably read this again.
Some major ideas I liked:
- You don’t use time, you are time. Life is a series of moments. At the end, your life will have been the sum of what you did. Life is the sum of what you paid attention to. When social media captures your attention, you are literally paying with your life. We cannot possibly get anything out of life; there is nothing outside we could take it to.
- Induced demand applies to so much. Build wider highways to alleviate traffic and more people will drive. Get to inbox zero, and you’ll get more replies. Help more people, and people will learn to come to you for help. Keynes’ prediction that we’d have a 15 hour work week: by becoming more productive, we were expected to produce more, not work less. Lifestyle inflation: by getting more luxuries, you expect more luxuries. By getting instant gratification on social media, you lose patience for other slower activities.
- There’s freedom in accepting that doing everything you want is impossible. There are way more books than you’ll ever read, so you’re free to just read the one you really want to right now. You’ll never visit every tourist spot on earth, so you can stop worrying about it and enjoy the things you do see.
- The seductive temptation to keep your options open often means you don’t get anything at all. If you don’t commit to a romantic partner, you never experience a committed relationship. The joy of missing out: by sacrificing other possibilities, you give more meaning to the choice you made. After cutting off other possibilities, you stop worrying if you made the best choice, and you start enjoying your choice more.
- The convenience trap: by eliminating tedious experiences, you often miss out on something good. Order delivery and you never enjoy cooking. Pay for someone to send a card, and it loses all its meaning.
- Say no to things. Expect imperfection. You will definitely settle. No option will have everything you want.
- Do as few things as possible at a time. Keep a “done” list, not just a “to do” list. The goal isn’t to get as much done as possible. It’s to do things you find valuable, and to find value in the things you do.
———————– Second read This time, I mostly picked out quotes I like.
“When people start believing in progress, in the idea that history is headed toward an ever-more-perfect future. They feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.” I’ve definitely felt this. I follow news about technological progress closely - self-driving cars, nuclear fusion, robots, AI, space travel, colonizing other planets, blah blah blah. The end result is I get frustrated that things aren’t moving fast enough, and that I probably won’t get to see a lot of these things.
The section about treating travel as another TODO list made me think of a particular friend I have who once showed me his google maps list of places he wants to go. It literally has thousands of places. There’s no way he’ll see them all before he dies, but he’s still delaying settling down in order to increase the number. From like 1000 to 1500.
“Procrastination of some kind is inevitable. Indeed at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything and by the end of your life you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So the point isn’t too eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters.”
There’s an anecdote in the book about Franz Kafka being really indecisive about whether or not to marry this woman. He kept waffling for years because he didn’t want to give up on devoting his life to writing. I find it comical. This person who we read in school and try to learn from was so noncommittal and immature.
“You can’t become an ultra successful lawyer or artist or politician without first settling on law or art or politics and therefore deciding to forego the potential rewards of other careers. If you flip between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling. Unless you’re willing at least for a while to settle for that specific relationship with all its imperfections.” I love this argument in favor of settling. I think I was scared to pick a place or live or to commit to a romantic partner for a long time because it would preclude living in all other places, and would preclude dating all other people. But that kind of thinking precludes you from the experience of building long-lasting relationships in one place, or building a deep and lasting relationship with one person.
“Social media prevents us from wanting what we want to want.” I think this hits the nail on the head with social media, news, advertising, etc. Before we go into it, we don’t want to spend our time scrolling through pictures of other peoples’ lives… we want to live our own life. But once we’re in it, a thousand engineers are working extremely hard to change what you want, so that you want to keep scrolling. And it changes you so if you’re not getting the dopamine hit of your feed, you get “itchy”. The secret to happiness is finding ways to want things that are good for you and not want things that are bad for you.
“Nobody ever really gets 4000 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.” There’s no time like the present. Make hay while the sun shines. Live each day like it’s your last. There are no guarantees in life. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
“Tourists at the British museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta stone, the ancient Egyptian artifact on display in front of them, so much as preparing to look at it later by recording images and videos of it on their phones… And who ever watches most of those videos anyway?” I find this really funny. It’s a common trap to fall into, especially on vacations. You’re see the whole thing through a camera, and 99% of those photos are never looked at again.
I found the section about the “billable hour” really interesting. The more money you make, the more your time is worth, and the more you’re missing out on if you’re not working. It becomes harder and harder to justify taking time off to relax or watch your kid’s soccer game. This is why I find it so frustrating to hear people talk about their time in terms of money.
“In his hippie classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Piercing describes arriving with his young son beside the blazing blue expanse of Crater Lake in Oregon… He’s determined to get the most out of the experience, yet somehow he fails. We see the crater lake with a feeling of, well, there it is. Just as the pictures show.” I find this hilarious because I had the exact same experience when I saw Crater Lake. I was blown away for a little bit, but very quickly, I was like “yep, there it is”.
“Last year, I visited 17 countries. This year, I will visit 10, the author Mark Manson wrote back when he was still a nomad himself. Last year, I saw the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu in the span of three months. But I did all this alone. A fellow wanderer, Manson learned, burst into tears in a small suburb in Japan watching families ride their bikes together in a park because it dawned on him that his supposed freedom, his theoretical ability to do whatever he wanted whenever he chose, had put such ordinary pleasures beyond reach.” This hit really close to home. I took 5 months off work and travelled all over the U.S., and the parts that were alone were terrible. After just a couple days of traveling alone, I become miserable. There are a lot of people who fantasize about traveling the world and getting all these experiences, but do it too long and you end up missing out on the experiences of being partnered, with deep roots, with strong relationships. I find solo travel very lonely.
“Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then take a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.” This is a good takeaway from the book. Stop trying to do everything. That’s impossible. Feel good about the few good things you do get to do.