Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)

by Burkeman, Oliver

  Frequently, the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can stay home, order food on Seamless, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing so—though you might be perfectly well aware that you’d have had a better time had you kept your appointment to meet friends in the city or tried to make an interesting new recipe. “I prefer to brew my coffee,” the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer.’” Meanwhile, those aspects of life that resist being made to run more smoothly start to seem repellent. “When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone,” Wu points out, “waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating.” As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.

  Resisting all this as an individual, or as a family, takes fortitude, because the smoother life gets, the more perverse you’ll seem if you insist on maintaining the rough edges by choosing the inconvenient way of doing things. Get rid of your smartphone, quit using Google, or choose snail mail over WhatsApp, and people are increasingly likely to question your sanity. Still, it can be done. The Bible scholar and agriculturalist Sylvia Keesmaat abandoned a full-time university position in Toronto because she was following a hunch that her overwhelmed life—and the efficiencies and conveniences it seemed to necessitate—were somehow undermining its meaning. She moved with her husband and children to a farm in the vast swath of the Canadian interior known as the Land Between, where each winter day begins by lighting the fire that will warm the farmhouse and provide heat for cooking:

  Every morning I carefully scrape out the ash of yesterday … As I lay the kindling and listen for the crackling of wood devouring flame, I wait. The house is cool, and all I have to do now for the next few minutes is be attentive and patient. The fire needs time to build, needs to be fed and nurtured into the strength of heat for cooking. If I walk away and leave it, it will die. If I forget to pay attention, it will die. Of course, being fire, if I build it too big and forget to pay attention, I could die. Why take the chance?

  Someone once asked me how long it takes before I have my first, hot cup of tea in the morning. Well, let’s see: in the winter I light the fire, sweep the floor, and wake the kids for chores … I run water for the cows, get them some hay, give the chickens some grain and their water, feed the ducks. Sometimes I help the kids with the horses and barn cats and then come back in. Then I put the kettle on. Maybe I get something to drink within an hour of waking. If things go well. An hour?

  We needn’t dwell here on whether Keesmaat’s new, self-consciously inconvenient way of life is intrinsically superior to the kind with central heating, takeout food, and twice-daily commutes. (Although I think perhaps it might be: her days do seem busy in exactly that agreeable, non-overwhelmed, Richard Scarry sense of the word.) And obviously not everyone has the option of pursuing precisely her sort of path. But the real point is that her decision to make such a radical change arose from the recognition that she’d never manage to build a more meaningful life—which for her meant cultivating a more mindful relationship with her family’s physical surroundings—by saving time and thereby squeezing more into her existing one. To make time for what mattered, she needed to give things up.

  Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results. Keesmaat chose building fires and growing food with her children. “How else are we to get to know this place where we have been set, apart from tending to it?” she writes. “Outside of planting the food we eat, how are we to learn the living character of soil, the various needs of peppers, lettuce, and kale?” You might make a very different choice, of course. But the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.

  3.

  Facing Finitude

  You can’t delve far into the question of what it means to be a finite human being, with finite time on the planet, before encountering the philosopher who was more obsessed with the subject than any other thinker: Martin Heidegger. This is unfortunate for two reasons, the most glaring one being that for more than a decade, starting in 1933, he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. (The question of what this means for his philosophy is a fraught and fascinating one, but it would get us off track here. So you’re going to have to decide for yourself whether this exceptionally poor life choice invalidates his thoughts about how we make life choices in general.) The second reason is that he’s almost impossible to read. His work abounds with broken-backed phrases such as “Being-towards-death” and “de-severance” and—you might like to be sitting down for this next one—“anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost.” This is why nobody’s interpretation of Heidegger’s work, very much including mine, ought to be taken as definitive. Yet on this second charge, of incomprehensibility, he does have a kind of defense. Everyday language reflects our everyday ways of seeing. But Heidegger wants to slide his fingernails under the most basic elements of existence—the things we barely notice because they’re so familiar—so as to prize them away for our inspection. That means making things unfamiliar, using unfamiliar terms. So you stumble and trip over his writing, but sometimes, as a consequence, you bang your head against reality.

  Thrown into Time

  The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all—the fact that there is anything rather than nothing. Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place—that “a world is worlding all around us,” as Heidegger puts it. This fact—the fact that there is being, to begin with—is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But instead, it almost always passes us by.

  Having focused our attention on this ground-level issue of “being” itself, Heidegger next turns to humans specifically, and to our own particular kind of being. What does it mean for a human being to be? (I realize this is starting to sound like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers lost in wild abstractions. I’m afraid that’s going to get worse for another couple of paragraphs before it gets better.) His answer is that our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.

  Ever since Heidegger made this claim, philosophers have been disagreeing about what exactly it might mean to say that we are time—some have even argued it doesn’t mean anything—so we shouldn’t get stuck on trying to clarify it with precision. It’s sufficient to take from it the insight that every moment of a human existence is completely shot through with the fact of what Heidegger calls our “finitude.” Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all. Before I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time, I find myself already
thrown into time, into this particular moment, with my particular life story, which has made me who I am and which I can never get out from under. Looking ahead to the future, I find myself equally constrained by my finitude: I’m being borne forward on the river of time, with no possibility of stepping out of the flow, onward toward my inevitable death—which, to make matters even more ticklish, could arrive at any moment.

  In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited. For one thing, it’s limited in a retrospective sense, because I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

  The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

  Obviously, from any ordinary perspective, this all sounds intolerably morbid and stressful. But then, to the extent that you manage to achieve this outlook on life, you’re not seeing it from an ordinary perspective—and “morbid and stressful,” at least according to Heidegger, are exactly what it is not. On the contrary, it’s the only way for a finite human being to live fully, to relate to other people as full-fledged humans, and to experience the world as it truly is. What’s really morbid, from this perspective, is what most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing. Or, as we saw in the previous chapter, we embark on the futile attempt to “get everything done,” which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time—because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stultifying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.

  Getting Real

  In his 2019 book, This Life, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund makes this all a bit clearer and less mystical by juxtaposing the idea of facing our finitude with the religious belief in an eternal life. If you really thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something. “If I believed that my life would last forever,” Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that … Hägglund quotes a headline from the magazine U.S. Catholic that has the air of being written by a devout religious believer on whom an awful possibility has suddenly dawned: “Heaven: Will It Be Boring?”

  By way of contrast, Hägglund describes the annual summer vacation he spends with his extended family in a house on Sweden’s wind-battered Baltic coast. It’s intrinsic to the value of this experience, he notes, that he won’t be around to experience it forever, that his relatives won’t either, that his relationships with his relatives are therefore temporary, too—and that even the coastline, in its current form, is a transient phenomenon, as dry land continues to emerge from the twelve-thousand-year retreat of the region’s glaciers. If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer vacations, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing. Indeed, it’s also only from this position of valuing what is finite because it’s finite, Hägglund argues, that one can truly care about the impact of a collective peril such as climate change, which is wreaking changes to his native country’s landscape. If our earthly existence were merely the prelude to an eternity in heaven, threats to that existence couldn’t matter in any ultimate sense.

  Of course, if you’re not religious, and maybe even if you are, you might not literally believe in eternal life. But anyone who spends their days failing to confront the truth of their finitude—convincing themselves, on a subconscious level, that they have all the time in the world, or alternatively that they’ll be able to cram an infinite amount into the time they do have—is essentially in the same boat. They’re living in denial of the fact that their time is limited; so when it comes to deciding how to use any given portion of that time, nothing can genuinely be at stake for them. It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.

  This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it pitches them into a more authentic mode of being, in which everything suddenly feels more vividly meaningful. Such accounts sometimes give the impression that people reliably become happier as a result of facing the truth about death, which isn’t the case; “happier” is clearly the wrong word for the new depth that is added to life when you grasp, deep in your bones, the fact that you’re going to die and that your time is therefore severely limited. But things certainly do get realer. As she recalls in her memoir The Iceberg, the British sculptor Marion Coutts was taking her two-year-old son to his first day with a new caregiver when her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, came to find her to tell her about the malignant brain tumor from which he was to die within three years:

  Something has happened. A piece of news. We have had a diagnosis that has the status of an event. The news makes a rupture with what went before: clean, complete and total, save in one respect. It seems that after the event, the decision we make is to remain. Our [family] unit stands …

  We learn something. We are mortal. You might say you know this but you don’t. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for such a thing … It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.

  In case this needs saying, it isn’t that a diagnosis of terminal illness, or a bereavement, or any other en
counter with death is somehow good, or desirable, or “worth it.” But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time. The question is whether we might attain at least a little of that same outlook in the absence of the experience of agonizing loss. Writers have struggled to convey the particular quality that this mode of being infuses into life, because while “happier” is wrong, “sadder” doesn’t convey it, either. You might call it “bright sadness” (as does the priest and author Richard Rohr), “stubborn gladness” (the poet Jack Gilbert), or “sober joy” (the Heidegger scholar Bruce Ballard). Or you could just call it finally encountering real life, and the brute fact of our finite weeks.

  Everything Is Borrowed Time

  This is the point at which I should come clean and admit that, unfortunately, I don’t live my own daily life in a permanent state of unflinching acceptance of my mortality. Perhaps nobody does. What I can confirm, though, is that if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little—if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.) From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, “a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one’s time,” in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.