Four Thousand Weeks — Alex Priest

Highlights

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short… Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.

…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.

On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute.” It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguable, time management is all life is.

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… …but 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.

How can you be sure that people feel so busy? It’s like the line about how to know whether someone’s a vegan: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media.

Even some of the very worst aspects of our era—like our viciously hyperpartisan politics and terrorists radicalized via YouTube videos—can be explained, in a roundabout way, by the same underlying facts concerning life’s brevity. It’s because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that social media companies are incentivized to grab as much of them as they can, by any means necessary—which is why they show users material guaranteed to drive them into a rage, instead of the more boring and accurate stuff.

It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them.

…it felt as though the future had been put on hold, leaving many of us stuck, in the words of one psychiatrist, “in a new kind of everlasting present”—an anxious limbo of social media scrolling and desultory Zoom calls and insomnia, in which it felt impossible to make meaningful plans, or even to clearly picture life beyond the end of next week.

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up.

Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time out to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, 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—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail.

Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige.

And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seems to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. “The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, who observes that many of us spend our lives “preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own.”

Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.”