Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)

by Burkeman, Oliver

  Our anxiety about the uncontrollability of the future begins to seem rather more absurd, and perhaps therefore a little easier to let go of, when considered in the context of the past. We go through our days fretting because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without exerting much control over it at all. Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. You might never have been invited to the party where you met your future spouse. Your parents might never have moved to the neighborhood near the school with the inspiring teacher who perceived your undeveloped talents and helped you shine. And so on—and if you peer back even further in time, to before your own birth, it’s an even more dizzying matter of coincidence piled upon coincidence. In her autobiography All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir marvels at the mind-boggling number of things, all utterly beyond her control, that had to happen in order to make her her:

  If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement—why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?… The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

  There’s a soothing implication in de Beauvoir’s words: that despite our total lack of control over any of these occurrences, each of us made it through to this point in our lives—so it might at least be worth entertaining the possibility that when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well. And that you shouldn’t necessarily even want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.

  Minding Your Own Business

  These truths about the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business—this one, here in the present. “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place,” cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, in a warning echoed several centuries later by the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, “Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.” Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). “Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,” he advises. Then he adds the celebrated phrase “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” a line I’ve only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?

  But the version of this thought that has always resonated the most for me comes from the modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who expressed it, in a characteristically direct manner, in a lecture delivered in California in the late 1970s. “Partway through this particular talk,” recalls the writer Jim Dreaver, who was in attendance, “Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, ‘Do you want to know what my secret is?’ Almost as though we were one body, we sat up … I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining, their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.” Then Krishnamurti “said in a soft, almost shy voice, ‘You see, I don’t mind what happens.’”

  I don’t mind what happens. Perhaps these words need a little unpacking; I don’t think Krishnamurti means to say that we shouldn’t feel sorrow, compassion, or anger when bad things happen to ourselves or others, nor that we should give up on our efforts to prevent bad things from happening in the future. Rather, a life spent “not minding what happens” is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it—and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected. None of that means we can’t act wisely in the present to reduce the chances of bad developments later on. And we can still respond, to the best of our abilities, should bad things nonetheless occur; we’re not obliged to accept suffering or injustice as part of the inevitable order of things. But to the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one.

  Incidentally, I also don’t take Krishnamurti to be recommending that we emulate those irritating individuals (we all know one or two of them) who are a little too proud of their commitment to being spontaneous—who insist on their right to never make plans and to skip impulsively through life, and of whom you can never be sure that an agreement to meet at six o’clock for a drink means they have the slightest intention of showing up. These ostentatiously free-and-easy types seem to feel confined by the very act of making plans, or trying to stick to them. But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

  8.

  You Are Here

  There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end, and of course we do this every day: you don’t boil the kettle out of a love of boiling kettles, or put your socks in the washing machine out of a love for operating washing machines, but because you want a cup of coffee or clean socks. Yet it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the “real” value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.

  In his book Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching 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. So intently were they focused on using their
time for a future benefit—for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on—that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all. (And who ever watches most of those videos anyway?) Of course, grumbling about younger people’s smartphone habits is a favorite pastime of middle-aged curmudgeons like Taylor and me. But his deeper point is that we’re all frequently guilty of something similar. We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

  This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind,” as in: “When I finally get my workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was always meant to be living can begin.” The person mired in this mentality believes that the reason she doesn’t feel fulfilled and happy is that she hasn’t yet managed to accomplish certain specific things; when she does so, she imagines, she’ll feel in charge of her life and be the master of her time. Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state—and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself. Even if she does get her workload under control, or meet her soulmate, she’ll just find some other reason to postpone her fulfillment until later on.

  Certainly, context matters; there are plenty of situations in which it’s understandable that people focus intently on the possibility of a better future. Nobody faults the low-paid cleaner of public restrooms for looking forward to the end of the day, or to a time in the future when he has a better job; in the meantime, he naturally treats his working hours mainly as a means to the end of receiving a paycheck. But there’s something odder about the ambitious and well-paid architect, employed in the profession she always longed to join, who nonetheless finds herself treating every moment of her experience as worthwhile only in terms of bringing her closer to the completion of a project, so that she can move on to the next one, or move up the ranks, or move toward retirement. To live like this is arguably insane—but it’s an insanity that gets inculcated in us early in life, as the self-styled “spiritual entertainer” and New Age philosopher Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigor:

  Take education. What a hoax. As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

  The Causal Catastrophe

  It took becoming a father for me to grasp how completely I’d spent my whole adult life, up to that point, mired in this future-chasing mindset. Not that the epiphany was instantaneous. Indeed, what happened first, as my son’s birth approached, was that I became more obsessed than usual with using time well. Presumably every new parent, arriving home from the hospital to face the reality of their incompetence in the matter of child-rearing, feels some desire to spend their time as wisely as possible—first to keep the squirming bundle alive, and then to do whatever they can to lay the foundations for a happy future. But at the time, I was still enough of a productivity geek that I compounded my problems by purchasing several how-to books aimed at the parents of newborns; I was determined to make the very best use of those first crucial months.

  This genre of publishing, I soon realized, was sharply divided into two camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the mere existence of the other. On the one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our infant onto a strict schedule as soon as possible—because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure and also because making his days more predictable would mean he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household. This would allow everyone to get some sleep, and my wife and me to swiftly return to work. On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all such schedules—and frankly, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to—were further evidence that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, to this camp of parenting experts, for all practical purposes, the same.

  Later, I would learn that there’s virtually no credible scientific evidence favoring either of these camps. (For example: the “proof” that it’s wrong to let your baby cry itself to sleep comes largely from research among infants abandoned in Romanian orphanages, which is hardly the same as leaving your child alone in their cozy Scandinavian bassinet for twenty minutes a day; meanwhile, there’s one West African ethnic group, the Hausa-Fulani, who violate every Western parenting philosophy by deeming it taboo in some cases for mothers to make eye contact with their babies—and it seems those kids mostly turn out fine, too.) But what struck me most forcefully was how entirely preoccupied with the future both sets of experts were—indeed, how virtually all the parenting advice I encountered, in books and online, seemed utterly focused on doing whatever was required to produce the happiest or most successful or economically productive older children and adults later on.

  This was obvious enough in the case of the Baby Trainers, with their passion for inculcating good habits that might serve a baby well for life. But it was no less true of the Natural Parents. It would have been one thing if the Natural Parents’ justifications for insisting on “baby-wearing,” or co-sleeping, or breastfeeding until age three had simply been that these were more satisfying ways for parents and babies to live. But their real motive, sometimes explicitly expressed, was that these were the best things to do to ensure a child’s future psychological health. (Again: no real evidence.) And it struck me, rather more uncomfortably, that the reason I’d been seeking all this advice in the first place was because this was my stance on life, too: that for as long as I could remember, my days had been spent striving for future outcomes—exam results, jobs, better exercise habits: the list went on and on—in the service of some notional time when life would run smoothly at last. Now that my daily duties involved a baby, I’d simply expanded my instrumental approach to accommodate the new reality: I wanted to know that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in the domain of child-rearing as well.

  Except that this now began to seem to me like an astoundingly perverse way to approach spending time with a newborn, not to mention an unnecessarily exhausting thing to have to think about when life was already exhausting enough. Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future—there would be vaccinations to be administered, preschools to apply to, and so forth. But my son was here now, and he would be zero years old for only one year, and I came to realize that I didn’t want to squander these days of his actual existence by focusing solely on how best to use them for the sake of his future one. He was sheer presence, participating unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself, and I wanted to join him in it. I wanted to watch his minuscule fist close around my finger, and his wobbly head turn in response to a noise, without obsessing over whether this showed he was meeting his “developmental milestones” or not, or what I ought to be doing to ensure that he did. Worse still, it dawned on me that my fixation on using time well meant using my son himself, a whole other human being, as a tool for assuaging my own anxiety—treating him as nothing but a means to my hypothetical future sense of security and peace of mind.

  The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the “causal catastrophe,” which he defines as the belief “that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children
is the kind of adults it produces.” That idea sounds reasonable enough—how else would you judge rightness or wrongness?—until you realize that its effect is to sap childhood of any intrinsic value, by treating it as nothing but a training ground for adulthood. Maybe it really is a “bad habit,” as the Baby Trainers insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your chest. But it’s also a delightful experience in the present moment, and that has to be weighed in the balance; it can’t be the case that concerns for the future must always automatically take precedence. Likewise, the question of whether or not it’s okay to let your nine-year-old spend hours each day playing violent video games doesn’t turn solely on whether or not it’ll turn him into a violent adult, but also on whether that’s a good way for him to be using his life right now; perhaps a childhood immersed in digital blood and gore is just a lower-quality childhood, even if there aren’t any future effects. In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck—and whose life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”