The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair. — Oliver Burkeman

On the mind-bending book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

I have been confronted with a face-slapping truth about humans:

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

I know inherently that my time on earth is short, but the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by

Oliver Burkeman

really hit the message home for me.

Burkeman opens his book by quoting the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who says, ‘We will all be dead any minute.”

This is a terrifying reminder. But once Burkeman gets the truth out of the way, he spends the rest of the book telling readers why we can stop worrying about our minuscule time allotments.

As someone who is obsessed with capitalizing on the short time I have to pursue my passions, I needed to read this book. It’s a remedy for the paralysis that we time-conscious people can be so troubled by.

In Times of Harmony | Paul Signac

The premise of Four Thousand Weeks (which is the average lifespan of humans today) is simple: the more we try to manage our time so as to feel in control, the more stressful life gets. BUT, the more we confront the facts of our finitude — a concept Burkeman touches on throughout the book — the more “productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

Everything we do is a sacrifice

Whenever we make the decision to spend our time on something like, say, watching television or reading a book, we are sacrificing all the other ways in which we could use our time.

“To willingly make that sacrifice,” Burkeman says, “is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.”

We will never be able to do all the things we want to do, and as much as I wish this weren’t true, in a way this knowledge feels freeing. Once we understand that all the various demands on our time are impossible, we’ll be better equipped to resist them and instead focus on what matters to us. (Sidenote: it’s important to know what’s important to us.)

You can’t say yes to something without saying no to a billion other things. As such, we must “choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.” Understanding that it’s a guarantee that we’ll miss out on nearly everything in the world, we can kind of bask in our inability to do it all and really enjoy the “tiny slice of experiences” we actually do have time for in our allotted weeks on earth.

Procrastination for the win

“At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done,” Burkeman says.

Bleak right?

But there are good and bad ways to procrastinate. He goes on to say that the good procrastinator “accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect.”

This conscious neglect enables us to focus on what matters to us and accept that, due to our short time on earth and our inability to attend to everything that “needs” our attention, maybe our houses won’t be as clean as they could be. Or our laundry won’t be done as frequently as it should be. Or, in my case, my hair will probably never look as good as it could. Now that I have been reminded that I can’t get to every single thing and that that’s okay, I’ll settle for the way the house is, the way my hair never looks quite like I want it to.

It’s strange, but it is such a relief.

Distraction = our demise*

A truism of the time we live in is that our phones yank our attention away from virtually everything. What’s interesting, and what I’d never really thought about until reading Four Thousand Weeks, was that when we give in to distractions like social media, we’re, “attempting to flee a painful encounter.”

To make this point embarrassingly clear: while struggling with how to write about this, I just pulled up a new window in my browser and searched “golden retriever rescue.” I was trying to avoid the discomfort of writing, even though I am writing about how short life is and how everything is a sacrifice. (Okay, I did it twice. This is hard!)

*But it doesn’t have to be

The way Burkeman suggests relieving distraction of its power is for us to stop expecting things to be otherwise. We must accept that the unpleasantness — sticking to my example of writing this post — is simply what it feels like for “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.”

Although I have so much more I’d like to share with you, I will end with one final quote. After all, you and I both have other things to spend our time on.

“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 about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

— Oliver Burkeman

What gloriously possible work are you spending your time on?

What I’m reading: Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, my fourth book of hers this year — my Year of Jhumpa!

What are you reading? Does the idea of 4,000 weeks make you feel differently about the book you’re currently spending time with?

Love,

Words on Words is a free newsletter about books that hits inboxes on Thursdays. Subscription upgrades exist so readers can support my work if they feel compelled, but these weekly essays are free.

Note: When you purchase books through my links, you support Words on Words (I get credits for more books!) and an indie bookstore of your choice at no additional cost to you.