4k weeks - dispatches from an alien planet
An adversarial look at Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks
Do you ever start a conversation or start reading something, and you quickly realize that your interlocutor is not just saying unexpected things, they’re saying things that you would literally have never thought of in ten thousand years of thinking?
They’re from some part of mind-space so remote and non-overlapping with your own that it’s literally like dispatches from an alien planet. An entirely novel mindset, approach, and way of life.
This is either really exciting or so difficult to extract meaning and shared understanding from that you give up. This is what reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, an otherwise rather anodyne time management book, was like for me.
I eventually decided it was more interesting and exciting than frustrating because his relentless morbidity and thanatophilia are indeed pointing to an important truth, in my opinion. And if he was pointing repeatedly to this truth, our single point of overlap, and one that I understood and knew to be important, maybe he has some other useful insights in there somewhere!
And honestly, don’t we get more lift out of engaging with minds who are antithetical to our own approaches and philosophies on most fronts?
With that context, let’s begin.
You will die someday.
Most people would rather not think about this rather unpleasant fact. Here we have this amazing world full of interesting stuff - beaches, haute cuisine, our sense of smell, Lamborghinis, dark matter, data science, the Olympics, shoes and clothes that are obviously way better than regular shoes and clothes, our own children and families, status, impossibly interesting thinkers, and that’s just the tiniest scintilla of it all!
But against this impossibly large and diverse panoply of great stuff, we are finite, and will only be able to dabble at the edges of this functionally-infinite sea of Quality.
Seems unfair! Monstrous, even. Definitely not how you’d arrange things…but you know, nobody said this was gonna be fair.
So Burkeman’s conceit is that people are pissed / distressed about this fact, and then try to cram as much as they can into their days, in a futile effort to distract themselves and cram more into their finite lives.
“Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all – that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing. Or, as we saw in the previous chapter, we embark on the futile attempt to ‘get everything done’, which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time – because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stultifying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.”
Again, this is an “alien planet” deal for me, so this really isn’t how “awareness and acceptance of your own mortality” ever shook out for ME, but I buy that this can be true for some people.
I think where we overlap is something like “awareness and acceptance of our own mortality is important because it lets you mindfully experience more and make better choices.”
I got to that standpoint via meditation and mindfulness, it sounds like he got there through some maximally neurotic road leading through adopting and dropping a bunch of time management systems over the years, but we can at least agree on the destination. Regarding mindfulness - in the book he says he’s spent years doing things like meditation retreats, and avers that mindfulness is fake, and “bewilderingly difficult to do.” That the more you try be be “here,” the more it seems like you aren’t here now. Which is definitely a take, I guess, but strong alien planet vibes there, too.
The book is called “Four Thousand Weeks,” incidentally, because this is about the amount of weeks you’d have in a 77 year lifespan. Of course, many of us reading this book or post are older than newborns, and so will have some lower number of weeks available to us.
And before we continue, let me just lay out where I’m coming from, time management wise.
There was an interesting Reddit thread about Harvard academics who write books and run ultramarathons, ie people who accomplish at a noticeable level across multiple domains. Dan Lieberman, whose Exercised I’ve reviewed, is an archetypical example, a Harvard academic who studies multiple fields, runs marathons against horses, and has written several popular books.
I’m one of these people too, in the sense I’ve accomplished a lot in my life across multiple domains. I published in two science disciplines, I got invited to do a Phd in a microbiology lab without ever having even a single college-level biology credit, I’ve worked in finance, I’ve done several startups, I was a regionally competitive strength athlete, I run triathlons, I routinely read 50+ books a year, and so on. This is barely the half of it.
The point is not to brag here, it’s to point out that I probably have as good a claim to being good at time management as anybody.
So now let’s go through Burkeman’s arguments, and you’ll get both sides - his from the “maximally neurotic” side of things, and mine from the “alien dispatch distance” side of things, and with luck we’ll get more from this adversarial semi-collaboration than we would from either source alone.
“On Getting the Wrong Things Done
But now here we get to the heart of things, to a feeling that goes deeper, and that’s harder to put into words: the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get round to doing the right things. We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are – yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead.”
This was one of my first “alien dispatch” moments. If you’re unhappy with what you’re spending your time on, that’s up to you, you have a lot of discretion and leeway to alter that!
I think the main culprit here is probably screens. Tv, phones, streaming. I buy that there’s probably some inadequate equilibrium where people are wasting more time on screens than they’re happy with, but feel compelled to do it anyways, because behind every screen, there’s a team of thousands of well paid Phd’s pooling their collective brainpower to keep you looking at those screens longer. But, just like you can choose not to step into the casino if you’ve got a gambling problem, you can choose to grayscale your screen, turn off visual and audible notifications for 99% of apps, and not install a bunch of fully adversarial apps.
“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 a.m’. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimised person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.”
I mean, yes in one trivial sense, but no in every other sense. Especially missing deadlines or dropping the ball - that’s on you. Don’t commit to deadlines you can’t meet, you’re definitely the asshole in that situation.
Also, lots of people achieve work life balance, almost certainly the overwhelming majority of people in the West. People have hobbies and kids and lives, and typically devote 6-7 hours a day to recreational screen time on top of all that stuff,1 and I’d say spending your time that way is WAY more common than somebody putting in 80-100 hour weeks. I’m fully opposed to this “nobody has work life balance” point, it’s patently ridiculous.
“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 reason isn’t that you haven’t yet discovered the right time management tricks or applied sufficient effort, or that you need to start getting up earlier, or that you’re generally useless. It’s that the underlying assumption is unwarranted: there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things’, or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done. For a start, what ‘matters’ is subjective, so you’ve no grounds for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your employer, or your culture happens to deem important.”
Once again, alien dispatches. What “matters” is 100% up to you, as is the prioritization you give those things.
Sure, you may decide that the things that “matter” vastly outweigh your time available to get things done, but isn’t this like deciding that you really want a free pony and for somebody to invent unicorns that dispense fine chocolate and hundred dollar bills? It’s a total self own, and it’s totally optional. And back to the “work life balance” point, I see way more people wasting their limited time than using it to accomplish things.
And then he takes an interesting tack - he claims that it’s entirely pointless to try to optimize your time *at all,* on the theory that having more time only inspires you to fill it with more stuff:
“So it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of ‘getting through your email’ actually generates more email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the ‘efficiency trap’. Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time’, because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.
“Figure out how to spend enough time with your kids and at the office, so you don’t feel guilty about either, and you’ll suddenly feel some new social pressure: to spend more time exercising or to join the parent–teacher association – oh, and isn’t it finally time you learned to meditate? Get around to launching the side business you’ve dreamed of for years, and if it succeeds, it won’t be long before you’re no longer satisfied with keeping it small. The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the American historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to ‘labour-saving’ devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,’ the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law.”
So…we shouldn’t even try to manage our time, because we’ll just end up filling it with more stuff? This really seems like a problem of prioritization again, because definitionally, having more time is a good thing. How you choose to fill that time is up to you, but you can’t say it’s a DOWNSIDE to have more time that you choose to fill with dumb stuff, it’s a strict upside to have more time. You “filling it with dumb stuff” is the problem!
I mean, broadly, we’re approaching this from two opposite ends, but I think we’d both agree that people usually prioritize their time badly, and that people waste a lot of their time on stuff that isn’t really fulfilling or meaningful.
“The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume. Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. 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.”
I completely disagree here. “No” on time optimization being pointless - being able to have more free time that you can spend on more experiences is a strict good. I don’t buy the “experiencing more just leaves you emptier than before” thing at all, either. People get satiated. People travel, and then look forward to going back home at some point. People get tired of Activity A and want to do Activity B. People drink their fill of whatever it is. The trick is having a wide array of things that you enjoy that you can quaff to the dregs.
But I do agree with his mindfulness point. Back to his “we’re all gonna die!” point, it’s true! We have a tiny and very finite slice of time in which we can experience stuff, and compared to the infinite varieties of experience out there, it’s basically nothing, so we might as well enjoy the tiny bits we get to the utmost.
“There’s 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 the promise of helping us cope with having an overwhelming amount to do by eliminating or accelerating tedious and time-consuming chores. But the result – in an irony that shouldn’t be too surprising by now – is that life gets subtly worse. As with other manifestations of the efficiency trap, freeing up time in this fashion backfires in terms of quantity, because the freed-up time just fills with more things you feel you have to do, and also in terms of quality, because in attempting to eliminate only the tedious experiences, we accidentally end up eliminating things we didn’t realise we valued until they were gone.”
OMG, this guy is like my nemesis or something. Who thinks this way?? “Convenience is bad, actually.” Really?? I mean, it’s a take.
I’m sure you’re jumping right back to taking months carding and spinning fiber for your hand-sewn clothes and washing them in a river with rocks then, huh champ?
Hard disagree, convenience and saving time is awesome, things like grocery delivery and Uber and nannies and cooks and laundry services and whatever else are all 100% unmitigated goods, and we need way more of them, YES with robots and AI, and we need them yesterday, please and thank you.
There is SO much “basic maintenance” stuff in life that’s a low-value time sink. Sure, if you have to do it, make it fun. Be mindful, or listen to music, and do it to the best of your abilities, 100%. But if you’re able to opt out of it, I think you should definitely go for that, because spending an incremental hour with your kid or your hobby or your side project is about ten thousand times more valuable than spending an incremental hour doing laundry or dishes.
He then goes into various examples, like ordering food online and watching Netflix and going to Starbucks versus French Pressing your own coffee. Once again though, if you’re doing stuff you don’t actually want to do, don’t do it? I agree, Starbucks sucks. That’s why I make French Press coffee at home with nice beans, which is apparently impossible to do? Netflix sucks too, for most marginal hours you could be spending. So spend that time reading or writing or having sex or whatever man, c’mon! I don’t know your preferences, but YOU sure do, so do them!
Then, god help us all, he starts talking about Heidigger. “What does it mean for a human being to “be?” He at least has the self awareness to point out that this sounds like a bad comedy sketch about philosophers. But Heidigger points out that we ARE time, the time that we have to choose and experience things is the substrate on which we define ourselves.
“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
“In this situation, making a choice – picking one item from the menu – far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that – actually, instead of an infinite number of other ‘thats’ – because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. In other words, it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make.”
Sure, alright. We can agree here at least! I’m still definitely on team “you can optimize both the menu items you pick and the time which you have available to fill with menu items,” which he apparently doesn’t agree with for some reason, but definitely. Choose the things you want to do wholeheartedly and with no reservations. We are on the same team here.
“And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime. For instance, it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else – someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say? – that makes marriage meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out’, by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out’. It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. ”
And here he points to a deeper truth about our Garden of Forking Paths - many choices preclude whole sections, whole geographies, of other choices. Many choices are zero sum, in the sense they actively preclude big swathes of other choices and possibilities.
It’s the dynamic behind the Fertility Crisis
It's the general problem of "people who are really good at optimization are leery of throwing away the peak they've attained to focus on some other, totally different peak (kids and family), with much less control or ability to influence outcomes and much harder success criteria (getting your kids into Harvard)"
And this is why high human capital people with good metrics and careers either don't have or don't have enough children, which I’ve discussed here. The level of effort-exerted-per-reward in your own life is impossibly large vs the level of effort vs reward in your kids’ lives. So you’re asking these people who are really good at winning to give that up and play a game where it’s fundamentally impossible to win by your own efforts as much.2
Then on top of that, having kids is a one-way gate - your life is forever changed, and you’ve precluded a LOT of other choices and experiences by going for it. Versus most career choices and paths? Full optionality is generally preserved!
But now we start getting to some stuff I can agree with a lot more from Burkeman.
For instance, “settling” in relationships:
“The Inevitability of Settling
Which brings me to one of the few pieces of dating advice I feel entirely confident in delivering, though in fact it’s relevant in every other sphere of life, too. It concerns ‘settling’ – the ubiquitous modern fear that you might find yourself committing to a romantic partner who falls short of your ideal, or who’s unworthy of your excellent personality.”
“The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle.”
“Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle – to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person – is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation. ”
Now we’re talking! Yes, a thousand times, yes!
I have a good friend who’s an extraordinary person. Brilliant, charismatic, personable, a great dancer, fun. She’s the kind of person that racks up extra masters degrees just for fun, last I was keeping track, she has a Phd and 3 different Masters’. A bon vivant with a high level career, she’s great socially, she often brings really diverse social worlds together, throws great parties, always has fun ideas for a night out, she’s just topping the charts on so many metrics.
She’s been single for most of her life, because she’s waiting for somebody who operates at her level, she refuses to settle. I once elicited what she was looking for in a mate over several conversations, and then showed her that the confluence of traits she was looking for was literally a one-in-a-billion man. There was simply no way that she could find this guy, and that’s before you get to the (extremely high) likelihood that he’s already partnered, because he WILL settle, because guys wanna have sex regularly!
I’m “good” at dating, in the sense that family and friends sometimes ask my advice. My advice here is no matter HOW great you are - how ripped, how rich, how attractive, how smart, how fun, how high status, you get 3 attributes at most that you can optimize on. It seems unfair - only 3 things?? But I bring more than 3 good things to the table! Yeah, reality is a harsh mistress. In general, it’s impossible to find somebody who matches you, and the cooler you are on multiple fronts, the less you’re gonna be able to match - you only get 3 things, period. So decide which 3 you want to optimize, and get out there and settle!
I’m on team “always settle,” just like Burkeman. Anyone you date is going to be settling, and if you ever don’t feel that way, definitely lock it down!
I do disagree with Burkeman in one place though - he recommends “locking it down” even when settling.
“ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude – to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options – is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.”
I think the data is just plainly and obviously the other direction here. Marriages have a 2/3 failure rate, in the sense that 42% end in divorce at the vintage level, and then another half of the remaining marriages are net-miserable for both parties and were definitely a mistake. Increasing friction and duration under those dynamics and base rates seems like an obvious mistake.
He also cites an absolute dogshit-level study to back up his “happier as a result” point, one of those “we gave college undergrads a choice of posters, and some we told that was it, and some we told they could switch it.” That has literally nothing to do with relationships, has zero stakes or downside, and is probably p-hacked garbage to begin with!
There’s a general problem here that he points to, which was new to me. It’s that our fantasies and imaginary maunderings are always flawless - they have no compromises, they execute perfectly, you’re never giving something else up, they’re all upside. Compared to the real world, where we need to make tradeoffs, and high quality execution isn’t a given:
“Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same mindset. We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off – because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. Something – our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events and over the actions of other people – will always render our creation less than perfect.”
So for many people, it’s easier to live in the fantasy world and not actually do things in the real world, which will largely not live up to your imaginary standards. And he ties this back to dating in the sense that when you have your dating app open with the ten thousand hotties you can swipe, you feel like there’s an infinite panoply of choices, and surely one of those choices is going to blow your socks off!
This was like ~90% “alien planet” for me, so I found it interesting. It seems obvious to me that your mental models should be calibrated to your execution ability, and I think that’s true for myself - but apparently this isn’t true for everyone. And back to the dating thing, your mental models should be calibrated with your entire history of human interaction too - like you’ve probably dated and interacted with a lot of people, you know the basic deal when it comes to other people, quality-wise and what-you-can-shoot-for wise.
It also seems obvious to me that the metric you optimize should be “getting stuff done in the world,” not “imagining the best possible case.” Getting stuff done is a skill - by all means, imagine the best case as a reference class which you try to execute towards, but ultimately it only ever matters if you’re getting something done. A “settled” dating partner is way better than an imaginary one with no flaws. A 66% “well executed” thing-in-the-world that works is incontrovertibly better than an imaginary 100% thing every single time. Even if what you’ve accomplished is empirically an ugly kluge, if it did the thing that’s what matters, right?
He finally gets to apps and the “attention economy”
“All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.”
Yep - the solution is to not immerse yourself in fully adversarial systems from the start. Don’t go into that casino! Don’t install a bunch of dumb apps, particularly ones with thousands of Phd’s on the other side optimizing against you. For that matter, don’t eat processed food, it’s the same “thousand Phd’s” dynamic.
I mean, this has always been obvious to me, but I’m a luddite-adjacent grump who thinks most apps are dumb and obvious time wasters.
Back to his “nobody ever achieves work life balance” point, it’s hilarious because it’s not like people aren’t wasting 7+ hours a day on recreational screens. You want more time? That’s obviously your biggest reservoir you can cut into right there! Next is eating - do meal prep and save 5-8 hours a week while eating healthier. Next pay for the “convenient” services he’s against - grocery shopping, laundry, nannies, maids, etc.
Back to time management
He points to three things to do that are pretty easy “agrees:”
Pay yourself first - ie make time for the stuff you care about in your time budget, don’t have some policy of “I can only do hobby X when everything else is done.”
Limit your work in progress. You get 3 things you can focus on - all other things have to wait til one of the 3 things is completed. If you want to add something else, you’ve got to take one of the 3 out.
Resist the allure of middling priorities. He cites the old Buffet meme of “put the top 25 things you want to do in your life in a list. The top 5 are the ones you want to spend time on. You explicitly want to spend ZERO time on the bottom 20, avoid them at all costs, because they’ll take away from the top 5, and are an attractive nuisance, in the sense you’ll want to spend time on them.”
“Making this rather modest change to my working practices produced a startlingly large effect. It was no longer possible for me to ignore the fact that my capacity for work was strictly finite – because each time I selected a new task from my to-do list, as one of my three work-in-progress items, I was obliged to contemplate all those I’d inevitably be neglecting in order to focus on it. And yet precisely because I was being forced to confront reality in this way – to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply wasn’t an option – the result was a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and a lot more productivity than in my days as a productivity obsessive. ”
I really wonder what he was even doing back when he was a “productivity obsessive,” because he seems to think limiting and prioritizing the things you put time into is some bold new hyperborean frontier, when it’s literally a fundamental part of any productivity system.
“To be fair, this sort of thing probably bothers me more than most, because I come from a family of people you might reasonably call obsessive planners. We’re the type who like to get our ducks in a row by confirming, as far in advance as possible, how the future is going to unfold, and who get antsy and anxious when obliged to coordinate with those who prefer to take life as it comes. My wife and I are lucky to make it to the end of June, in any “in any given year, before receiving the first enquiry from my parents about our plans for Christmas; and I was raised to regard anyone who booked a flight or hotel room less than about four months before the proposed date of departure or occupancy as living life on the edge to an inexcusable degree.”
Lol, definitely “alien planet” here. I mean, a big part of the disconnect between my approach and Burkeman’s is just base neuroticism. I’m roughly bottom decile neurotic, and he seems to be top decile. But yeah, wanting to guarantee the future is an obvious folly, which apparently he took a while to realize.
“The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future. After all, you can never be absolutely certain that something won’t make you late for the airport, no matter how many spare hours you build in. Or rather you can be certain – but only once you’ve arrived and you’re cooling your heels in the terminal, at which point there’s no solace to be gained from the fact that everything turned out fine, because that’s all in the past now, and there’s the next chunk of the future to feel anxious about instead. (Will the plane land at its destination in time for you to catch your onward train? And so on and so on.) Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like.”
“I’m using my neurotic family by way of example here, but it’s important to see that this underlying longing to turn the future into something dependable isn’t confined to compulsive planners. It’s present in anyone who worries about anything, whether or not they respond by devising elaborate timetables or hyper-cautious travel plans. Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again – as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favoured candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. ”
Yep, definitely base neuroticism at play here. Worrying is pointless, but it’s not always optional. I feel the same way about regret - basically pointless, but sadly non-optional for most people.
I’m not sure how effective the whole maximally pessismistic “embrace death, it’s the only certainty, and god laughs at all your plans!” sort of gestalt he’s highlighting is for most neurotic worriers (seems like a tough sell), but it worked for him!
But yeah, most plans are dumb. Take care of the important stuff - make sure you’re investing in an index fund, spend time and bandwidth optimizing your career, spend time on relationships and friendships. Beyond that? Everything is up for grabs. Zero certainty. I’d even argue that you should err more on the side of less commitment and planning. When I travel I like to buy one-way tickets. I book the first 2-3 nights and that’s it, just figure it out from there. Preserving optionality is usually the better move vs locking down or planning months in advance, in my own experience, because largely, most businesses and people suck. If you’re in a place that sucks for only 2 nights, so what? And if it’s great, you can almost always extend and stay there longer! But if you’ve locked down weeks in a place that sucks, it’s an obvious self-own.
We’re past my usual 10-20 min reading time target and running up against my recently adopted ~35 min hard cutoff pretty soon, so I’ll just hit some top highlights from here.
Last highlights
“There’s a less fancy term that covers many of the activities Setiya refers to as atelic: they are hobbies. His reluctance to use that word is understandable, since it’s come to signify something slightly pathetic; many of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of, say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they otherwise might. 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 instrumentalisation, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no pay-offs in terms of productivity or profit.”
Another “alien planet” take. Hobbies are embarassing? He explicitly calls out an example of Rod Stewart having a model train hobby. Yes, super nerdy, maybe slightly embarassing in a “this will never impact his life” way? But for most productive people who care about their time, hobbies are embarassing? First I’ve heard.
Pretty much everyone I’ve known who is productive also has hobbies that they pursue at a pretty high level. I work on my own cars, and my “fun” car is a street legal fire-breathing 8-second-quarter monster. Me and my friends used to do Iron Chef Cookoffs, where half of us would cookoff against each other and the other half would judge, and it definitely inspired everyone to bring their A-game. If anything, I think most hobbies are the exact opposite - a veiled status flex - rather than embarassing.
Capitalism and Cosmic Insignificance
Inevitably for a Cambridge educated journalist and social and political science major, he’s got to get some anti-capitalist digs in:
“One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalising everything it encounters – the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or ‘human resources’) – in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable.”
Lol, ok. I mean, it’s not true for myself, and pretty much every person I’ve known in startups, finance, or the Professional Managerial Class (who most journalists would consider “rich”) has generally been happier and more engaged with life AND had hobbies they excelled at.
Also, for somebody who’s obsessed with “equity” and “oppression” and other woke talking points, he’s really missing the important insight that capitalism is what actually brings people out of poverty and improves standards of living for everyone. Literally a billion people rose out of <$5 a day poverty during the last 40 years, and it wasn’t through “equity” it was through capitalism expanding throughout China and letting a bunch of Chinese businessmen become USD millionaires and billionaires. True progress is driven by inequity, because in any meritocratic system, people who are genuinely better at “doing the thing” will rise to the top and amass more benefits and rewards. If you want a society of well-run businesses that provide a lot of value, if you want economic growth, if you want any sorting or quality filtering in any profession (doctors come to mind), you NEED inequity.
He then propounds his “cosmic insignificance theory,” in which he points out that on the cosmic scale, nobody’s life matters, and even Einstein’s or Steve Job’s lives were pointless.
“Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to ‘do something remarkable’ with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which “they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough, marvellously – really is.”
I’ve gotta hard disagree here too. It is very plainly and obviously better for more people to aspire to be Einsteins and Jobs’, both at the individual and societal level. Wanting to make a real impact and a drive for excellence are some of the greatest and best attributes of humanity, and to eschew them is to deny what is best about us. And for what? To relax into mediocrity, free of the burden of trying?
I mean sure, if Jobs is an unattainable standard, choose somebody closer to home that’s at the outside envelope of your own capabilities - but deciding that “you shouldn’t strive for anything, actually, because we’re all insignificant nothings on a cosmic scale” is pure laziness and copium, and is trying to abnegate one of the highest human virtues - arete.
The last point of his that I’ll hit, that I can actually agree with - time is more valuable when shared, but we have a tendency to hoard our time and to put it into more individual pursuits due to the difficulty of coordinating multiple schedules. Inevitably, he tries to blame it on capitalism again:
“The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fuelled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organising time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work and socialise are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project – nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band – that takes place in a setting other than the workplace.”
It’s not capitalism. Look in any other less capitalist country - Europe or China, for example - and you’ll see the same dynamics. This is “Bowling Alone” writ large. Individual entertainments are better and better, and the value people get from constraining their time and optionality for random weirdos in their “community” is less and less valuable, so these things happen less.
The answer isn’t less capitalism, nor is the answer letting random weirdos impose on your time more, the answer is curating a friend group where you all value time spent together and regularly make the effort. And if you want more community stuff, self sort into a relevant community - plenty of baugruppes and group houses and the like in NYC or SF.
Wrap Up
Overall, I think the book is probably a good choice if you’re a similar “neurotic worrier” to Burkeman. It’s obviously one of those things where he really achieved a life-changing insight that positively impacted his own life, and now is trying to capture it in words to communicate to others, with mixed results.
But I’m a big fan of these kinds of books! When I think of similar (fiction) books like Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, and Hesse’s Siddhartha, I think it’s a great thing that they were written, and they remain some of my favorites, and are worth rereading every couple of years. C. Terry Warner’s Bonds That Make Us Free is probably the best non-fiction book like this that I can think of. It’s just hard to capture leviathanic, multiply-networked core realizations like this, that are partly thoughts, partly habits, partly ethical and aesthetic judgments, that plug into multiple layers of our thoughts, value systems, and approaches to the world, in words.
“Globally, people average 6 hours and 40 minutes of screen time per day”
“The average American spends 7 hours and 3 minutes looking at a screen each day”
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats?
My own personal suggestion on this front - guarantee spots in R1 universities for any kid above a given SAT or ACT threshold, who are from parents meeting certain criteria.
The state of California, for example, has the well-regarded UC system, and could guarantee spots to selected parents based on pretty simple criteria. Say both of you have a degree and/or have paid >$XXX,XXX amount in taxes to California over the years. Issue those parents a guaranteed non-transferrable slot in the UC system (inclusive of the good ones like UC Berkeley) to any of their kids as long as their kid scores above Y SAT / ACT score. Keep issuing slots for every $XXX,XXX in taxes they continue to pay.
You can extend this to ANY R1 university in any state, or more broadly to any state-controlled well-regarded university in any country, with whatever threshold makes sense. Poof! The educational arms race has had some of the pressure taken off of it, and elites (however you define them) are directly incentivized to have more kids.
The schools only have so many spots? Well legislate that you have to use some of those $XXX,XXX tax dollars to expand the universities then, this is a self-perpetuating system!
This would relax a lot of the Red Queen’s Race dynamics around paying for private schools and furiously gaming your kids’ extracurriculars to maintain your relative position amongst all the *other* a-hole parents doing all this stuff, which has to have a major impact on fertility from high human capital people.
These time management books usually have the implicit premise "it's good to get your discount rate arbitrarily low". I've always had doubts that an arbitrarily low discount rate really is utility optimising, so it's refreshing to see go against that even in a way that's kinda weird or not logical.
I sometimes point in Burkeman's general direction, and could even follow him for a step or two along his journey, but not much further. We sacrifice too much on the alter of convenience, telling ourselves we will invest the time saved into writing the great American novel, only to sit a little longer on the couch watching Netflix. Beyond a certain point needed to recharge our batteries, too much slack dulls our desire to actually do anything fulfilling, as opposed to merely filling empty hours. Better to scrub dishes and toilets until it sparks a desire to LIVE, rather than simply fluffing the seat cushion on the glide into the boneyard.
One of my New Year's resolutions was to cut out all video during the weekdays, a bad habit picked up during Covid. I'm not only spending more time on what truly interests me, I'm finding time to knock off small things I could never rouse myself to starting. And during the weekend... I'm less interested in video.
So, yeah, two cheers for Burkeman putting his finger on what ails plenty of us these days.