Review of Four Thousand Weeks
Four thousand weeks attempts to change the thinking about time that do justice to all humans’ real situation: the brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks. It explores a saner way of relating to time and provides a toolbox of practical ideas for doing so.
Four Thousand Weeks
This is the number of weeks that a human has, assuming he/she lives to be eighty. Each of us might have less or more time, depending on how old we live to.
The Time Conundrum
Previously, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used. This shift serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time becomes a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you have wasted it.
Thus, we have inherited and feel pressured to live by a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse. The fundamental problem is that this attitude with time sets up a rigged game in which it is impossible ever to feel as though you are doing well enough. Obtaining a feeling of control over life would always remain out of reach.
Parkinson’s law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. It is the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available. That is why doing more might not help. Besides that, we also struggle with goalpost-shifting effect where the endpoint keeps on changing as we progress.
Our Finitude
Attention just is life – your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. When you try to focus on something you deem important, you are forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.
To dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained – that is why people are attracted to the internet. However, this might just cause more problems.
Making Choices
Any finite life – even the best one you could possibly imagine – is a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility. Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there is no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid all those losses. Loss is a given.
We should turn from FOMO (fear of missing out) to JOMO (joy of missing out). Instead of missing out, it is “I choose to do this and forgo others”. Missing out is what makes our choices meaningful. Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time. To willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.
A limit-embracing attitude to time means organising your days with the understanding that you definitely would not have enough time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do. The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important or just for enough of what feels important is that you definitely never will.
The Solution to Busyness
Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. Convenience makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what is most valuable in any given context.
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. Do not make your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands. 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. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you to neglect the right things.
Consider the opportunity cost. The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you will feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. To make time for what matters, we need to give things up. Procrastination can be good or bad, depending on its purpose. A good procrastinator accepts that not everything can be done and decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect.
Future-focused Attitude and Anxiety
No matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything is going to go the way you would like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just gets pushed further and further toward the horizon. All a plan is a present-moment statement of intent – an expression of your current thoughts about how you would ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future, which is under no obligation to comply.
The fuel behind worry is the internal demand to know in advance that things will turn out fine. You only get to feel certain about the future once it has already turned into the past. This future-focused attitude – we treat everything we are doing as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else – is not good. Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now.
You cannot quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it is not within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to. When you finally face the truth that you cannot dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. This is second-order change which is not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything.
Meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take. If you are willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself.
3 rules for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life:
1. Develop a taste for having problems – life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires;
2. Embrace radical incrementalism;
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
Leisure
To rest for the sake of rest entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days are not progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.
The consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore. A hobby should probably feel a little embarrassing as it is a sign you are doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
True value of time
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. Time is not something to hoard, but something to share, even if it means surrendering some of your power to decide exactly what you do with it and when.
Though most humans strive to justify our own existence, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence. Despite our total lack of control over life 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 will have what it takes to weather that as well. And you should not necessarily want such control, given how much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.
Conclusion
Most of us invest a lot of energy in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. Nonetheless, this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we will get a shot at. Thus, we should approach life not as an opportunity to implement our predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of our place and our moment in history.
This book is about human relationships with time and how to live. The author advises us to slow down and enjoy our time in this world. Nonetheless, it does not mean that we should not have any plan. Just focus on the important stuffs and do not be disheartened even if the plan does not go your way. After all, life is full of surprises and it is impossible to control every single thing.
One-sentence summary for Four Thousand Weeks
No one can do everything; just focus on things that matter to you the most.
Quotes
- To be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when.
- You can never be truly certain about the future. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp.
- 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.
- Because now is all you ever get.
- To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment – the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just “the future” – to make things all right in the end.
Rating
Interested in Four Thousand Weeks?
You may get the book from through the links below*.
Get the print book from Shopee here
Get the ebook from Shopee here
*These are affiliate links and I might earn a small amount if you purchase the book through the links.
No Comments