I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks. This book is an anti time management book that, collecting the insight of philosophers and contemporary thinkers, provides an alternative to the axiom that we should constantly strive to be as productive as possible, while jam-packing our life with novel experiences.

Here are my notes:

• “Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
• “philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
• “all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live, lamented Seneca”
• “time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern.”
• “Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management (…) is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible”
• “The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
• “good luck finding a time management system that makes any room for engaging productively with your fellow citizens, with current events, or with the fate of the environment.”
• “you might have assumed there’d be a handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the shortness of life”
• “discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.”
• “Surveys reliably show that we feel more pressed for time than ever before.”
• “it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.”
• “Many other complaints (…) are essentially complaints about our limited time.”
• “You’d feel less self-loathing about wasting a morning on Facebook if the supply of mornings were inexhaustible.”
• “time seems to speed up as you age steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. (…) the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.”
• “the widely championed goal of squeezing the most from your time.”
• “The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. (…) paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.”
• “an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout (…) the paralysing exhaustion of a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines”
• “life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven”
• “when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email.”
• “But I failed to appreciate Allen’s deeper implication that there’ll always be too much to do and instead set about attempting to get an impossible amount done.”
• “None of this is how the future was supposed to feel.”
• “For the first time since his creation, Keynes told his audience, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares. But Keynes was wrong.”
• “for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.”
• “On Getting the Wrong Things Done”
• “despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things.”
• “It’s there, for instance, in the desire to devote yourself to some larger cause (…) But it’s also there in the feeling of frustration at having to work a day job in order to buy slivers of time for the work you love, and in the simple longing to spend more of your brief time on earth with your kids, in nature, or, at the very least, not commuting.”
• “We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.” — Charles Eisenstein
• “And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive”
• “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson”
• “Our struggle to stay on top of everything may serve someone’s interests (…) But it doesn’t result in peace of mind”
• “Four Thousand Weeks (…) is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.”
• “Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent.”
• “Productivity is a trap.”
• “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control”
• “Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”
• Part I: Choosing to Choose
• “The real problem (…) is that we’ve unwittingly inherited (…) a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.”
• “But there’s one set of problems you almost certainly wouldn’t have experienced [as a medieval peasant]: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored.”
• “You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to save [time]. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it.”
• “It was because (…) they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity, “as a thing” at all.”
• “We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us”
• “without being fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualising a calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some hazier kind of abstract timeline. You’ll then proceed to measure and judge your real life against this imaginary gauge”
• “Edward Hall was making the same point with is image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we msut fill as it passes”
• “The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea in the first place. Workers got up with the sun at slept at dusk, the lengths of their days varying with the seasons.”
• “anybody who tried to impose an external schedule (…) for example, by doing a month of 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.”
• “there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. 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 concept of life moving slowly would have struck most people as meaningless. Slowly as compared to what?”
• “In those days before clocks, when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity.”
• “Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him, (…) the feeling of timelessness that Richard Rohr (…) calls living in deep time.”
• “babies are the ultimate task-oriented beings”
• “The End of Eternity”
• “There’s one huge drawback in giving so little thought to the abstract idea of time, though, which is that it severely limits what you can accomplish. (…) As soon as you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time. This is widely held to be how the first mechanical clocks came to be invented, by medieval monks, who hard to begin their morning prayers while it was still dark”
• “time is what ticks away as the hands move around the clockface.”
• Mumford: the Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened without the clock.
• “gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour”
• “You don’t need to believe, as Mumford sometimes seems to imply, that the invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles (…) But a threshold had been crossed.”
• “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.”
• “When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time (…) instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.”
• “The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough.”
• “it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal”
• “it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (…) But ultimately it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present”
• “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.”
• “The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.”
• “I spent years trying, and failing, to achieve mastery over my time.”
• “I was like an alcoholic conveniently employed as a wine expert.”
• “I remember sitting on a park bench (…) feeling even more anxious than usual about the volume of undone tasks, and suddenly realizing that none of this was ever going to work.”
• “what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.”
• “I didn’t want to accept (…) that fear was part of the deal, and that experiencing it wouldn’t destroy me.”
• “The universal truth behind my specific issues is that 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.”
• “We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents (…) and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die.”
• “We recoil from the notion (…) that this life, with all its flaws (…), its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only we’ll get a shot at.”
• “we mentally fight against the way things are so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel (…) constrained by reality.”
• “This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call neurosis“
• “Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. (…) most of our strategies for becoming more productive [are] just ways of furthering the avoidance.”
• “tough choices are inevitable and (…) 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”
• “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself” (Nietzsche)
• “it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing (…) depends on cooperating with others”
• “Denying reality never works (…) It may provide some immediate relief”
• “the paradox of limitation (…) the more you try to manage your time (…) the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead (…) the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”
• “I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”
• “a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do”
• Make hard choices consciously, “deciding what to focus on and what to neglect”
• “[resist] the seductive temptation to keep your options open (…) in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best”
• “missing out (…) on almost everything is basically guaranteed. (…) missing out is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.”
• Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.”
• “freedom, sometimes, is to be found (…) in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community”
• meaningful productivity often comes (…) from letting [things] take the time they take, surrendering to (…) Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.”
• “accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use (…) There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”
• “Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves”
• “however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help.”
• “So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time (…) you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them”
• “[The philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome] understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.”
• “None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed.”
• Chapter 2: The Efficiency Trap
• “[Busyness is] a uniquely vivid illustration of the effort we invest in fighting against our built-in limitations”
• “What they aren’t, though, is overwhelmed.”
• “we live with the constant anxiety of fearing, or knowing for certain, that [our tasks will not fit into our hours]. Research shows that this feeling arises on every rung of the economic ladder.”
• “It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense”
• “it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list.”
• “we rarely stop to consider things so rationally, though, because that would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations.”
• “His blunt diagnosis was that most people wasted several hours each day, especially in the evenings”
• “Like virtually every time management expert who was to come after him, Bennett implies that if you follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done to feel at peace with time.”
• “there is no reason to believe you’ll ever feel on top of things, or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done.”
• Note: but if we are content with how we use our time, wouldn’t we at least not feel guilty about how we use it?
• “if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift”
• “Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it.”
• Parkinson’s Law: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
• “In fact, it’s the definition of what needs doing that expands to fill the time available.”
• email: “that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves”
• “the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to, or just make a considered decision to delete is strictly finite. So getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder”
• “every time you reply to an email, there’s agood chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply”
• “the process of getting through your email actually generates more email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the efficiency trap. (…) the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”
• Note: an asymptotic process as one that doesn’t grow when its done better; quite the contrary.
• “But the choice you can make is to stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in”
• “the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”
• “In an unchanging or cyclical view of history, there never are any exciting new possibilities.”
• “But secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress (…) they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan”
• “The more we can accelerate our ability to [do new things], the les incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future” — Johanthan Trejo-Mathys
• “their fulfilment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do.”
• “The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have (…) the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.”
• “the internet makes this all much more agonizing, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential users for your time”
• “The technologies we use to try to get on top of everything always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the everything of which we’re trying to get on top.”
• “The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.”
• “The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe [in finding] time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.”
• “doing anything requires sacrifice: the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.”
• “your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else. Commonly, these will be things that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier”
• “it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed either forever or until an imminent deadline forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush.”
• “One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
• “What’s needed instead in such situations (…), is a kind of anti-skill: (…) a willingness to resist such urges, to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything”
• “instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort”
• “you’ll no longer be operating under the illusion of one day making time for everything.”
• “The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences”
• “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.”
• “one further, especially insidious way in which the quest for increased efficiency warps our relationship with time these days: the seductive lure of convenience. Entire industries now thrive on (…) eliminating or accelerating tedious and time-consuming chores.”
• “life gets subtly worse. (…) freeing up time in this fashion backfires in terms of quantities, because the freed-up time just fills with more things (…) also in terms of quality, because (…) we accidentally end up eliminating things we didn’t realize we valued until they were gone.”
• To make a fortune: “identify a pain point, one of the small annoyances resulting from (more jargon) the friction of daily life, and then to offer to circumvent it.”
• “Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that (…) bind a neighbourhood together”
• “where tech-induced loneliness doesn’t yet reign supreme.”
• “Convenience (…) makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.”
• “it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort, which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
• “Frequently, the effect of convenience (…) [is] that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones.”
• “As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that rae now far more convenient, but that feel empty (…) and the kind that now seem intensely annoying”
• “resisiting all this as an individual (…) takes fortitude”
• “To make time for what mattered, she needed to give things up.”
• “You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
• “the undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.”
• Chapter 3: Facing Finitude
• “the philosopher who was more obsessed with [what it means to be a finite human being] than any other thinker: Martin Heidegger. This is unfortunate for two reasons: (…) for more than a decade (…) he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. (…) The second reason is that he’s almost impossible to read. (…) you stumble and trip over his writing, but sometimes, as a consequence, you bang your head against reality.”
• Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time.
• “how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all, the fact that there is anything rather than nothing.”
• “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.”
• To Heidegger, “our being is totally, utterly bound up with our finite time. (…) to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally (…) we are a limited amount of time.”
• “Our limited time (…) [is] the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all.”
• “a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.”
• “The original Latin word for “decide”, decidere, means to cut off, as in slicing away alternatives”
• “Any finite life (…) is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.”
• Note: but what if we’re completely determined? Then, there would be no choice, just the one path that happens (and the only one that can happen). All of this implies that there’s an element of choice in our decisions.
• “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”
• “from any ordinary perspective, this all sounds intolerably morbid and stressful.”
• “On the contrary, it’s the only way for a finite human being to live fully”
• “What’s really morbid, from this perspective (…) is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls falling.”
• “It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.”
• “It’s intrinsic to the value of this experience, he notes, that he won’t be around to experience it forever”
• “anyone who spends their days failing to confront the truth of their finitude (…) or alternatively that they’ll be able to cram an infinite amount into the time they do have is essentially in the same boat.”
• “happier is clearly the wrong word (…) But things certainly do get realer.”
• “You will lose everything that catches your eye.” — Marion Coutts
• “But such experiences, however wholly unwelcome, often appear to leave those who undergo them in a new and more honest relationship with time.”
• “bright sadness” (Richard Rohr), “stubborn gladness” (Jack Gilbert), “sober joy” (Bruce Ballard).
• “alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.)”
• “So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
• “when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook.”
• “wouldn’t it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them?”
• “how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.”
• Chapter 4: Becoming a Better Procrastinator
• “the core challenge of managing our limited time (…) [is] how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.”
• Gregg Krech: “we need to learn to get better at procrastinating.”
• “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.“
• “Most productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles”
• “there are too many rocks and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.”
• “Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.”
• “The trouble is that we’re terrible at long-range planning”
• “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time (…), you’ll be disappointed.”
• “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week, as [Abel] puts it, there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”
• “if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.”
• “The second principle is to limit your work in progress.”
• “You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important. The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time.”
• “The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects”
• “I found it easier to accept the truth that I’d be doing only a few things on any given day. The difference, this time, was that I actually did them.”
• “The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.”
• “the second-tier priorities (…) [are] the ones he should actively avoid at all costs because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract”
• “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”
• “The good procrastinator (…) decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance”
• “usually it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent (..) or that others won’t respond to [our work] as we’d like them to, or that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want.”
• “By way of cautionary tale, consider the case of the worst boyfriend ever, Franz Kafka”
• “his neuroses are no different from ours (…) only more intense, more pure and driven by genius to an integrity of unhappiness that most of us never approach.” From Morris Dickstein
• “or any other clash of possible lives. And Kafka responded like the rest of us, too, by trying not to confront the problem.”
• Henri Bergson, in Time and Free Will: “We invariably prefer indecision (…) because the future (…) appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. (…) we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
• “Loss is a given.”
• “You will settle, and this fact ought to please you.”
• “living life to the fullest requires settling.”
• “But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person.”
• “when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.”
• “When two spouses agree to stay together (…) that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling too, because having committed themselves (…) they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives.”
• “When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.”
• Chapter 5: The Watermelon Problem
• “It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst”
• “these days distraction has become all but synonymous with digital distraction”
• “Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it (…) as a question of character”
• “what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”
• “Attention (…) just is life.”
• “So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, (…) you’re paying with your life.”
• “This was shy Seneca, in On the Shortness of Life, came down so hard on his fellow Romans”
• “the distracted person isn’t choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.”
• “When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, [you’re] denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible.”
• “the capacity to exert some influence over (…) the top-down or voluntary kind [of attention] can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.”
• “to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it”
• Mary Oliver: “Attention is the beginning of devotion”
• “the contemporary attention economy (…) [is] essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention”
• “as the saying goes, you’re not the customer but the product being sold: in other words, the technology companies’ profits come from seizing our attention, then selling it to advertisers.”
• “used to show us precisely that content most likely to keep us hooked, which usually means whatever makes us angriest or most horrified.”
• “variable rewards: when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying”
• Roger McNamee: “we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up.”
• “the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful”
• “our devices (…) change how we’re defining important matters”
• It’s very difficult for attention to monitor itself.
• T.S. Eliot: “we are distracted from distraction by distraction”.
• “By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fueling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible.”
• “Political crises demand political solutions.”
• “much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly (…) The calls are coming from inside the house.”
• Chapter 6: The Intimate Interrupter
• “Faced with physical distress (…) most people’s instinctive reaction is to try not to pay attention to it, to attempt to focus on anything else at all.”
• “Young began to understand that this was precisely the wrong strategy (…) the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them (…), the less agonizing he found them”
• “staying focused on the present (…) made less unpleasant undertakings – daily chores (…) positively engrossing.”
• “the real problem had been not the activity iteslf but his internal resistance to experiencing it.”
• “what’s going on when we succumb to distraction (…) we’re motivated by the desire to try to feel something painful about our experience of the present.”
• “Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate interrupter””
• “Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter (…) that we’d rather flee into distractions”
• “When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits”
• “boredom (…) [as] an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.”
• Contexts for boredom “have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude. (…) resign yourself to the reality that this is it.”
• “In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.”
• Distractions “aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”
• “accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.”
• Note: but is it truly that?
• “the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”
• Chapter 7: We Never Really Have Time
• Hofstadter’s law: “any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
• “the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans. (…) Reality seems to fight back, an angry god determined to remind us that it retains the upper hand”
• “My wife and I are lucky to make it to the end of June (…) before receiving the first inquiry from my parents about our plans for Christmas”
• “that special irritation reserved for traits one recognizes all too clearly in oneself as well.”
• “planning for the future (…) tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay.”
• “Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate the a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again”
• “You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.”
• “When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it.”
• “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. (…) Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time (…) begins to make more sense.”-
• “Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem (…) is the need that we feel (…) to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful.”
• “The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.”
• “Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences”
• “deep in this life and not in any other.” — Simone de Beauvoir
• “when the uncontrollable future arrives, we’ll have what it takes to weather that as well.”
• “Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.” — Geshe Shawopa
• “Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives (…), that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?”
• “The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t.”
• “The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.”
• Chapter 8: You Are Here
• “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. (…) it turns 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”
• “We treat everything we’re doing – life itself, (…) as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.”
• “To live like this is arguably insane”
• “They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.” — Alan Watts
• “But what struck me most forcefully was how entirely preoccupied with the future both sets of experts were indeed (…) it was no less true of the Natural Parents.”
• “He was sheer presence, participating unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself, and I wanted to join him in it.”
• Adam Gopnik: “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.”
• “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.”
• “life is a succession of transient experiences, valuable in themselves”
• “Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.”
• “To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”
• “we exist inside an economic system that is instrumentalist to its core.”
• “capitalism (…) as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters (…) in the service of future profit.”
• “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.”
• “you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.”
• Keynes: “purposiveness” as “motivated by the desire not to die.”
• “By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.”
• “Absent in the Present”
• “the effort to be present in the moment (…) [is] like trying too hard to fall asleep”
• “But what it really show’s I’d say, is that trying too hard to have a more active sex life is no fun at all.”
• “A more fruitful approach (…) starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway”
• “To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment””
• “Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.”
• Chapter 9: Rediscovering Rest
• “Why (…) should vacations (…) need defending in terms of improved performance at work?”
• “why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy?”
• “It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life (…) if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.”
• “she has convinced herself that running is a meaningful thing to do only insofar as it might lead toward a future accomplishment.”
• “The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness (…) is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore (…), like work in the worst sense of that word.”
• “Leisure no longer feels very leisurely.”
• “We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means.”
• Aristotle: true leisure as “self-reflection and philosophical contemplation, was a mong the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues (…) were virtuous only because they led to something else.”
• negotium: not-leisure.
• “certainly not the main point of being alive.”
• “Even the onerous live of medieval English peasants were suffused with leisure (…) Some historians claim that the average country-dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days each year”
• “But industrialization, catalyzed by the spread of the clock-time mentality, swept all that away.”
• “workers were offered a deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it didn’t damage – and preferably enhanced – your usefulness on the job.”
• “this situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.”
• “The problem was that (…) industrial work wasn’t sufficiently meaningful to be the point of existence”
• “Ironically, the union leaders and labor reformers (…) helped entrench this instrumental attitude toward leisure”
• Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy.
• “In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness.”
• “spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully” (…) is the only way not to waste it – to be truly at leisure rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement.”
• “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, wrote Simone de Beauvoir, then production and wealth are only hollow myths”
• “Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people who don’t actually want to rest”
• “Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion””
• “Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul.”
• “Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove to others, but also to themselves, that they belonged to the former category”
• “Their commitment to frugal living supplied the other half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth (…) but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.”
• “It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live.”
• “idleness (…) might be evidence of the horrifying truth that you already were damned.”
• “Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when the activities with which we fill our leisure hours increasingly come to resemble not merely work but sometimes, as in the case of (…) a CrossFit workout, actual physical punishment”
• “If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet ,we had better show up for it now.”
• “You need ways to make it likely that rest will actually happen.”
• “we need this sort of pressure in order to get ourselves to rest.”
• Judith Shulevitz: “The inventors of the Shabbath understood that (…) [y]ou cannot downshift casually and easily (…) interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.”
• “The idea of a communal weekly day off seems thoroughly old-fashioned today”
• The Shabbath was also radical in that it applied to absolutely everyone.
• “the fact that even slaves must be allowed to rest gets mentioned twice”
• “whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough“
• “Societal pressures used to make it relatively easy to take time off”
• “And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at home.”
• “in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance.”
• John Gray: “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness”
• “unlike almost everything else I do with my life, it’s not relevant to ask whether I’m any good at it (…) Moreover, a country walk doesn’t have a purpose, in the sense of an outcome you’r trying to achieve”
• “They have no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end.”
• “when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning.”
• “mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future.”
• To Schopenhauer, it’s “inherently painful for humans to have “objects of willing””
• “a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom.”
• “Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive”
• “it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle”, a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.”
• “a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake”
• “There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture (…) it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.”
• “I can’t eradicate the hope that I might accomplish it brilliantly, meeting with high praise or great commercial success”
• Karen Rinaldi: “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile.”
• “Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later, and later is always too late.”
• Chapter 10: The Impatience Spiral
• “in that stretch of time, there can’t be more than a handful of honks in the entire borough that serve a practical purpose (…) no sane honker can seriously believe that his honk will make the critical difference and get things moving at last.”
• “a howl of rage at the fact that the honker can’t prod the world around him into moving as fast as he’d like it to.”
• The Tao Te Ching is full of images of suppleness and yielding”
• “Thins just are the way they are (…) and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.”
• “Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors (…) hurrying a toddler to get dressed in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.”
• “we’re almost certainly much more impatient than we used to be.”
• “Virtually every technology (…) has permitted us to get things done more quickly (…) Shouldn’t this therefore have reduced our impatience, by allowing us to live at something closer to the speed we’d prefer?”
• “each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding time.”
• societal impatience: “Once most people believe that one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so, regardless of your feelings on the matter.”
• “a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like.”
• “People (…) can’t locate an empty half hour in the course of the day. (…) when they do find a morsel of time, and use it to try to read, they find they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task.”
• Tim Parks: “one is actually inclined to interruption.”
• “we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.”
• “reading something properly just takes the time it takes.”
• “in response to the suggestion that she might consider taking things a little more gently, the feeling of anxiety wells up inside, and I look for something to take it away.”
• “The high achievers of Silicon Valley reminded Brown of herself in her days as an alcoholic.”
• “the twelve-step philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which asserts that alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain.”
• “the alcoholic has additional problems: as well as struggling to control her emotions through drink, she must also try to control her drinking, lest it cost her her relationship, her job, or even her life.”
• “You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting (…) has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause.”
• “Perhaps it seems melodramatic to compare “addiction to speed” (…) to (…) alcoholism. (…) But her point is that the basic mechanism is the same.”
• “to quell the anxiety (…) we move faster.”
• “Meanwhile, we suffer the other effects of moving too fast: poor work output, a worse diet, damaged relationships.”
• “you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol.”
• “Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We ahve to give up. You surrender to th reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster”
• “Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change”, meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything.”
• “Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice (…) you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.”
• Chapter 11: Staying on the Bus
• “[Patience] is the virtue that has traditionally been urged upon housewives, while their husbands led more exciting lives outside the home; or on racial minorities, told to wait just a few more decades for their full civil rights.”
• “In all such cases, patience is a way of psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power”
• “But as society accelerates (…) patience becomes a form of power.”
• “the capacity to resist the urge for hurry (…) is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfilment to the future.”
• Jennifer Roberts’ initial assignment: “choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight.”
• “[The students] needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything“
• “There is nothing passive or resigned about the kind of patience that arises from this effort to resist the urge to hurry.”
• “now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin.”
• Robert Grudin: the experience of patience as “tangible, almost edible”
• “if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself”
• “three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force”
• “The first is to develop a taste for having problems. (…) the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. (…) life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem”
• “The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. (…) the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others (…) Thy wrote in brief daily sessions, sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours, and they religiously took weekends off.”
• They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process – and so they sought to escape it”
• “One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach (…) is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.”
• “the urge to push onward beyond that point includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough (…) Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.”
• “originality lies on the far side of unoriginality“
• Minniken: “Stay on the fucking bus“
• “bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage (…) copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.”
• “if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first.”
• “to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted (…) you have to stop moving around.”
• Chapter 12: The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
• “having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.”-
• “having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant”
• “the same basic mistake: of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share, even if that means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when.”
• “But “digital nomad” is a misnomer – and an instructive one. Traditional nomads (…) [are] intensely group-focused people who, if anything, have less personal freedom than members of settled tribes”
• “the chief problem with their lifestyle is the acute loneliness.”
• “every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s.”
• “less likely you’ll be be free to socialize when your friends are.”
• “the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got. They derived psychological benefits (…) from having the same vacation time as other people.”
• “Hartig did not flinch from the controversial implication of his results. They suggest, he observed, that what people need isn’t greater individual control (…) but rather what he calls “the social regulation of time””
• “the French phenomenon of the grandes vacances, where almost everything grinds to a halt for several weeks each summer.”
• “Swedes are liable to become mildly offended – which is the equivalent of a non-Swede becoming severely offended”
• “for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy. (…) Yet it works only because those involved are willing to surrender some of their individual sovereignty over their time.”
• Josef Stalin’s chief economist, Yuri Larin, concocted (…) [a] plan to keep Soviet factories running every day of the year (…) a week (…) [would be] four days of work, followed by one day’s rest. Crucially, though, the idea was that not all workers would follow the same calendar.”
• “[The effect] was to destroy the possibility of social life.”
• “The restructured workweek persisted in some form until 1940, when it was abandoned because of problems it caused with the maintenance of machinery.”
• William McNeill: “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall”
• McNeill’s monograph: Keeping Together in Time. “In it, he argues that synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history”
• “Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue.”
• “In daily life, as well, we afll into synchrony all the time”
• “other research has indicated that conforming to an external rhythm renders one’s gait imperceptibly more efficient.”
• “The extraordinary psychological benefits of choral singing, one 2005 study drily concluded, are not reduced “when the vocal instrument is of mediocre quality”.”
• “What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time?”
• “Strategies for achieving the first kind of freedom are the sort of thing that fills books of productivity advice: ideal morning routines, strict personal schedules”
• “The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated.”
• “For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy gobs and “on-demand scheduling” (…) making it all but impossible to plan childcare or essential visits to the doctor, let alone a night out with friends.”
• “Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs”
• “All this comes tiwh political implications, too, because grassroots politics (…) are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing.”
• “”Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals”, wrote Hannah Arendt in *The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
• “You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. (…) joining amateur choirs or sports teams (…) You can prioritize activities in the physical world”
• “that your time can be too much your own.”
• Chapter 13: Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
• “many of us know what it is to suspect that there might be richer, fuller, juicier things we could be doing with our four thousand weeks”
• “religion no longer provides the universal ready-made sense of purpose it once did, while consumerism misleads us into seeking meaning where it can’t be found. But the sentiment itself is an ancient one.”
• “the matter needs addressing now.”
• “This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?”
• “The enforced pause in work, school and socializing put on hold numerous assumptions about how we had to spend our time.”
• “many people could perform their jobs adequately without an hour-long commute to a dreary office”
• “the virus changed us for the better, at least temporarily”
• Julio Vincent: “possibility shock”: “the startling understanding that things could be different, on a grand scale, if only we collectively wanted that enough.”
• “When lockdown ended, Gambuto warned, corporations and governments would conspire to make us forget the possibilities we’d glimpsed, by means of shiny new products and services and distracting culture wars, and we’d be so desperate to return to normality that we’d be tempted to comply.”
• Vincent: “think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal”
• “what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much – and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.”
• “In every generation (…) there were always at least a few people who lived to the age of one hundred (or 5,200 weeks). (…) So it’s possible to visualize a chain of centenarian lifespans, stretching all the way back through history”
• “the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs (…) took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago.”
• “the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilization, sixty”
• “When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all?”
• “the rest of the time, most of us do go around thinking of ourselves as fairly central to the unfolding of the universe”
• “this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests (…) your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations.”
• “What they really mean is that they’ve adopted a standard of meaningfulness to which virtually nobody could ever measure up.”
• “it is likewise implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein.”
• “In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.”
• “this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating”
• “a far wider variety of things might quality as meaningful ways to use your finite time. (…) many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful that you’d supposed – and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them”
• “virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life, if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.”
• “from the experience of the coronavirus pandemic (…) become just a little more attuned to the needs of our neighbors”
• “Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things.”
• “Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. (…) refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness”
• “dropping them back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely, and often enough, marvelously, really is.”
• Chapter 14: The Human Disease
• “The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it (…) so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.”
• “to become so productive and efficient that we never again have to experience the guilt of disappointing others, or worry about being fired for underperforming; or so that we might avoid facing the prospect of dying without having fulfilled our greatest ambitions.”
• “railing against traffic jams and toddlers for having the temerity to take the time they take, because they’re blunt reminders of how little control we truly have”
• “This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling.”
• From Heidegger: “We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments.”
• “To “master” them would first entail getting outside of them.”
• “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” — Jorge Luis Borges.
• “A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional”
• “Until then, life necessarily feels like a struggle (…) always in the service of some moment of truth that’s still in the future.”
• Marie Louise von Franz: “There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life.”
• “Entering space and time completely (…) means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do, that you can’t avoid tough choices (…) that no experience (…) can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly (…) and that from a cosmic viewpoint (…) it won’t have counted for very much anyway.”
• “And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. (…) Because now is all you ever get.”
• “It’s tempting to imagine that ending or at least easing the struggle with time might also make you happy (…) But I’ve no reason to believe that’s true.”
• “The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order. It lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem.”
• “Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.”
• Rainer Maria Rilke: “live the questions.”
• 1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
• “And so we naturally tend to make decisions (…) that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once”
• James Hollis: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”
• “Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.”
• 2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
• “It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like “enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or engaging in political activism.”
• “What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming”
• “If the level of performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms, and facing this reality can only help.”
• Iddo Landau: “There is a sort of cruelty in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach”
• “Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.”
• “3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?“
• “Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.”
• “The attempt to attain security by justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all along.”
• “I’m convinced (…) that it is from this position of not feeling as though you need to earn your weeks on the lpanet that you can do the most genuine good with them.”
• “4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?“
• “there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.”
• “It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing”
• 5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?“
• “in his documentary A Life’s Work, the director David Licata profiles people who took another path, dedicating their lives to projects that almost certainly won’t be completed within their lifetimes”
• “And so it’s worth asking: What actions – what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results? We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons”
• Jung: “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. (…) quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”
• “If you can face the truth about time in this way – if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human – you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfilment that were ever in the cards for you to being with.”
• “you actually got around to doing and – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.”
• Afterword: Beyond Hope
• “To put things as mildly as possible, it’s hard to remain entirely confident that everything will turn out fine.”
• “our success or failure in responding to the challenges we face will turn entirely on how we use the hours available in the day.”
• “To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment”
• “You could think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope.”
• “The key to what Chodron calls “getting the hang of hopelessness” lies in seeing that things aren’t going to be okay.”
• “the result is not despair, but an energizing surge of motivation.”
• “Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.” — Chodron Pema
• “Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.”
• “you’re open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms, instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything will turn out fine.”
• “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic (…) It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible (…). Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”
• Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
• 1. Adopt a fixed volume approach to productivity.
• “It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.”
• “perhaps the simplest is to *keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed”. The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one – that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed.”
• “A complementary strategy is to establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.“
• 2. Serialize, serialize, serialize.
• “focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.”
• “train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety (…) Soon, the satisfaction of completing important projects will make the anxiety seem worthwhile”
• 3. Decide in advance what to fail at.
• “But the great benefit of strategic underachievement – that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself – is that you focus that time and energy more effectively.”
• “As with serializing your projects, there’ll be plenty you can’t choose to bomb”
• 4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
• “Part of the problem here is an unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning in a sort of “productivity debt”, which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope that you might reach a zero balance by the evening.”
• “As a counterstrategy, keep a “done list”, which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.”
• 5. Consolidate your caring.
• “Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things”
• “No modern fundraising organization would dream of describing its cause as the fourth-or fifth-most important of the day.”
• “to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.”
• 6. Embrace boring and single purpose technology.
• “Digital distractions are so seductive because they seem to offer the chance of escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t apply”
• “You can combat this problem by (…) removing social media apps (…) and then by switching the screen from color to grayscale.”
• “choose devices with only one purpose“
• 7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.
• “It turns out that there may be a way to lessen, or even reverse, the dispiriting manner in which time seems to speed up as we age”
• “Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences (…) as we get older, life gets routinized”
• William James: “the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
• “An alternative [to cram your life with novel experiences] is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane“
• “Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”
• “Meditation helps (…) But so does going on unplanned walks”
• 8. Be a researcher in relationships
• “The desire to feel securely in control of how our time unfolds causes (…) controlling behavior”
• “when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity“
• “Curiosity is a stance well suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others”
• “Not knowing what’s coming next (…) presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (…) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not)”
• 9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity
• “whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away (…) When we fail to act on such urges (…) it’s because of some attitude stemming from our efforts to feel in control of our time.”
• “the only donations that count are the ones you actually get around to making.”
• 10. Practice doing nothing.
• Blaise Pascal: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
• “if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting”
• “So training yourself to “do nothing” really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the wold around you”
• Jenny Odell: “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”