A philosophical book about the finitude of life. It is dense, and by far the most eye opening I've read in a long while. I give it my strongest recommendation. Warning: I'm not gonna make justice to the book, if this topic interests you I recommend you read it or have a glance at the detailed notes.

Summary

In one line: Life is finite, and we can't have it all. We, modern humans, are future oriented and tend to forget our current misery because tomorrow will be better. But this is all there is. We need to make real life-decisions, and be present.

Life is finite, and we need to accept that fact. Doing more (as most time-management advice is advocating) is not the answer, and only calls for more to do.

Instead we need to embrace finitude. It requires to make actual decisions about what's important to you, be aware of distractions and the mildly important, and limit your WIP. This is not calling for extreme productivity, but for realizing that you can't have a crazy career, a very fulfilling family life, involvement in activism, become a virtuose musician and an accomplished athlete. We need to pick. Keeping options open is counterproductive, settling and comitting is what allows to start moving.

We need to slow down, to embrace that this is all there is. To be really present in activities we engage with and embrace the boredom. To realize that we're not in control, and accept that things are happening. To expect less of others and be more patient. To persist a little more and see where the bus we're in is leading us. Leave behind the expectations of others, and find what matters to you.

In the end nothing matters, we're insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and the universe is indifferent to us. Making a dent in the universe is pointless, you're dead all the same. Aspiring to grandiosity is a recipe for disappointment. Target a modestly meaningful life, have a positive impact on the people you can reach, and around you. Do the things because they matter, and let go of the result because you can't control it.

Finitude can sound very pessimistic, but it's in fact liberating, because it reminds us that this is all there is, so we ought to live it.

Notes

Choosing to choose

Limit-embracing life: Life is finite and time is finite. We're doing much to avoid being confronted to that finitude.

The fact that we're alive is, by itself, defying all odds. We tend to think about what is due to us, whereas we should already be amazed that we're already alive. And there's always someone who would be happy to be in our place.

In the end life ends, humanity is incredibly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Running after some grandiose plan, trying to "make a dent in the universe" is pointless, since it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you life a fulfilling life and be a net positive to your surrounding.

Efficiency trap: Controlling time is a very new concept when it comes to humanity, only dates from the industrial era. Since time became the organizational center of our lives, we became obsessed with "managing it".

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.

Most of the time management frameworks are made to cram-in more, and work around that finitude. The problem is that a) that doesn't solve finitude b) doing more is always calling to have more to do - responding to all emails brings more emails, doing all tasks is bringing more tasks, being efficient at work makes you the go-to person, etc. c) it doesn't bring happiness either.

because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist.

Facing finitude: Finitude imposes to make hard decisions, and time management frameworks are usually just ways around having to make too many of them. The fading of religion and notably of belief in afterlife induced people to face finitude. Instead the tendency is to want to "make the most out of life". The simple reality of finitude imposes that we make hard decisions since we can't do everything. Not only trivial ones when two events superpose (going to Amy's party or Bob's), but much more radical ones: you can't have a stellar career, spending a lot of time with your spouse and multiple kids, be an athlete, have a very tidy house, be relaxing drinking mai-thais on the beach on a bi-yearly basis and cross all items from your bottomless bucket list. You have to face finitude and make decisions about your life. You will disappoint people. But you have to chose and be comfortable with having parts of your life be less than efficient.

We recoil from the notion that this is it—that 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’ll get a shot at.

Having your priorities straight means that you'll discard everything that's not important. Be wary of the "mildly interesting". The top 3 things are those you should put your effort in. The bottom 3 are for sure things you're not gonna do. The middle 4 things are those you think you want to do, but should avoid by any means because they're distraction. There's no time for them.

In practical terms, 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—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.

in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief.

Three principles:

When it comes to time, pay yourself first.
Limit your work in progress
Resist the allure of middling priorities.

Becoming a better procrastinator: Procrastination is the symptom of having to face finitude. We're so afraid of not willing to put in the effort, and having something else better to do, that we don't even start. If it's important, do it. If it's not, just discard. You don't need to be perfect, if it's not important, you should do your best to do the minimum on them.

if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

Watermelon problem: You can't do it all.

something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them.

Settling is extremely important. Data shows it makes people happier. It's also a problem linked to finitude: if we always think there's a better option, we refuse to settle. Always a better partner, always a better job. But settling is inevitable because life is finite, and choices need to be made. Instead, accepting an option that looks good, and making it work is harder, but more fulfilling. Settling is making it harder to back out, and puts pressure onto working out problems.

We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so. [...] When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away

Intimate interrupter: Attention is finite. Today's world is constantly seeking our attentions, partly because it's finite and valuable. This is not only causing issue when our attention is called to something that doesn't matter, but more importantly when it's called to something that looks like it matters. Certainly famine, disasters, injustice and violence are things that need attention and fixing, but our own life is finite and we can't fix the entire world. Personally carring about too many problems is preventing entirely to do anything about any of them. This is where the news and social media are a nuisance.

Being bored is discomfortable, and we've been taught to hate and given tools to fight boredom to the extreme. Boredom is an unpleasant encounter with finitude. We seek distraction online where no limits seem to apply.

what we think of as “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

To face finitude we need to accept boredom, and be present to experience life better. Be present in conversations with our spouse and kids, in a walk to the bus in the morning. To tame the power of distractions we need to stop expecting things to be otherwise.

This is all there is.

Beyond control

We Never Really Have Time: We tend to be future-oriented, and tell ourselves that we will be happier when we have X, or that life will get easier when Y. And that's why we sacrifice today on the altar of a better tomorrow. When in reality, now is all there is. Life is fragile and finite, and we have no proof for when it will stop. Ego pushes us to think that nothing bad will happen, but we don't know that. That is not to say we shouldn't save for retirement or burn everything because screw the planet ; but we shouldn't accept our current misery on the premise that it is the grounding work for a promotion next year, when we might very well be dead by then.

We also tend to just put all our money on the fact that something else will make us happy. "When I finally" is a trap. The promotion won't make us happy, and there will always be more.

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.

We need to accept that things are happening, and not expect that our favored option will unravel: I don't mind what happens is a philosophy of accepting we're not in control of the world, and we can't be disappointed that it turns the way it turns.

You Are Here Our lives are full of activities we are doing for the last time. There's a last time you will visit your childhood home, a last time you'll kiss you kid, a last time you'll have dinner with your spouse. And you don't know when it will be.

We need to appreciate the things that happen. Stop to see the beauty and perfection, to feel how we feel, be grateful for now and forget about the future. Enjoy the scenery, a hike, a hug, a laugh.

there’s something odder about the ambitious and well-paid architect, employed in the profession she always longed to join, who nonetheless finds herself treating every moment of her experience as worthwhile only in terms of bringing her closer to the completion of a project, so that she can move on to the next one, or move up the ranks, or move toward retirement.

Rediscovering rest Enjoy leisure and hobbies, doing something for the sake of doing it, without the goal of being perfect at it or the judgement of others regarding how well we're doing it, or the usefulness of it. Rest by itself, without the premise of personal growth. With no pressure other than enjoying what we do. Resting is important, not for its usefulness, but from the joy we derive out of it.

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.

Impatience spiral: The other side of patience is to stop having expectations for others, and accepting that the world cannot be pressed. Expecting for someone on the road to move faster, for a toddler to stop being a toddler, are unreasonable expectations that are bound to make one stressed, angry and miserable. Ironically, the more efficient things become, the less patience we have for them. It makes us addicted to speed. An internet page that loads in more than 3s makes us jittery - while it's still orders of magnitude faster than having to go to the library.

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed

Staying on the bus: You need patience to trully experience things. Problems are bound to happen, things are bound to not be by expectations. Sometimes that triggers a flight reaction that is counter productive. If you don't insist a little, you'll never fix things. We need to develop a taste for having problem, embrace incrementalism (small steps, and hard limits on how much time we give to something), and understand that originality is beyond unoriginality, that life is a repetition of something else, but at some point it becomes unique.

And then, around the eighty-minute mark, but without your noticing precisely when or how it happens, there’s a shift. You finally give up attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the discomfort abates.

Loneliness of digital nomad: The simplest things are the best. Having friends, having a family, having rituals. These require sacrifices, notably on how we spend time, on being in phase with others. We need to lose some personal freedom to enjoy synchronous activies with others. We can be envious of people who have more, but they usually didn't do the same sacrifices, and don't have what we have.

every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s

Cosmic insignificance therapy: Nothing matters. Humans are just a blip in time and in the universe. The universe is massively indifferent to us. Society has been existing for only 6000 years. There are only but a handful people whose legacy survives generations in the collective mind, but they're dead all the same. This is comforting, because none of what you are doing matters in the grand scheme of things. Everything we can aspire to is a "modestly meaningful life": be a positive force to the people around us.

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, marvelously—really is.

The human disease: We don't get to have time, we are not just on borrowed time, we are time, in that it's passing and we can't control or even predict it. We'll never feel in control. We'll never be spared from suffering.

You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway. And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually _be_here.

Make some real purchase on your life:

Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? What conversations with your spouse are you postponing? Does your decision diminishes or enlarges you?
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? You can't do it all.
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? People set expectations in us, maternal and patternal figures, teachers, mentors, etc. We carry these in adult life and try to satisfy these expectations because that's who we're supposed to be, and we don't want to disappoint. This is how we get miserable.
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? No-one knows anything. Everyone is pretending. Stop waiting until you feel like you know what you're doing and do - because no-one knows.
How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? We want to carve the future too much on things that we don't have control on. We can't make our kids who they are, we can't make people want what we want. In the end we can only do, we can't generate the impact itself. Cathedrals are made over generations. Even if we don't see the cathedral achieved, it is still worth doing.

Afterword: beyond hope: Hoping is waiting for the future, and praying for some entity to side with us.

As the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, it means relating to life as if “there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one.”

Sometimes this attitude can be justified when the future is entirely in somebody else's hands: we can only hope a surgeon knows what they're doing. For what truly matters, hope is disawoving our capacity to change things. We need to do and not expect.

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.

Ten tools for embracing your finitude: (ndlr: fun how some of these are: use Lean)

Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity: limit your backlog and timebox.
Serialize, serialize, serialize: limit WIP, only work on one project at a time. Limit batch size.
Decide in advance what to fail at: (aka strategic underachievement): nominate areas where you don't expect excellence on yourself, where you won't feel shame for failing. Lawn-maintenance and home-tidiness can be things you devote zero-energy and instead spend your time elsewhere. Importantly: you can put temporality on it. You can't bomb in work, with your partner, etc. But you can definitely do the bare minimum at work while you work things our with a sick parent.

But even in these essential domains, there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting. To live this way is to replace the high-pressure quest for “work-life balance” with a conscious form of _im_balance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete: You're achieving stuff, realize that as well. Maintain a "done" list.
Consolidate your caring: Social media gives too many things to care about. Focus on only a few.
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology: to limit distractions.
Seek out novelty in the mundane: life accelerates because it's lacking novelty. To counter-act you can either cram your life with new experiences or pay more attention to the moment, however mundane. Experience things with twice as much the intensity.
Be a “researcher” in relationships: Be active in discovering others and be curious about them.
Cultivate instantaneous generosity: Act immediately or you wont.
Practice doing nothing: sit down for a few minutes and do nothing, think of nothing, not even of your breathing.

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber

~~ Blaise Pascal

Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead

Part I: Choosing to Choose

The Limit-Embracing Life
The Efficiency Trap
Facing Finitude
Becoming a Better Procrastinator
The Watermelon Problem
The Intimate Interrupter

Part II: Beyond Control

We Never Really Have Time
You Are Here
Rediscovering Rest
The Impatience Spiral
Staying on the Bus
The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
The Human Disease

Afterword: Beyond Hope

Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

Highlights

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Note: Bla

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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. 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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.”

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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none of this was simply because things moved more slowly back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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It also reflects the manner in which most of us were raised: to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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We recoil from the notion that this is it—that 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’ll get a shot at.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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In practical terms, 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—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

—

It’s not just that this situation feels impossible; in strictly logical terms, it really is impossible. It can’t be the case that you must do more than you can do. That notion doesn’t make any sense: if you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time—

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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 uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say, the inconvenience.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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The smug teacher is being dishonest. He has rigged his demonstration by bringing only a few big rocks into the classroom, knowing they’ll all fit into the jar. The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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if a certain activity really matters to you—a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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activism in the service of some cause—the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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The second principle is to limit your work in progress.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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breaking down my projects into manageable chunks,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief.

Note: Semi-enjoyable work

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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it’s much harder than

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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that. 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.”

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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it illustrates an elephant-in-the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and time management. That problem is distraction.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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the flip side of this inspiring truth is that a life spent in circumstances immeasurably better than a concentration camp can still end up feeling fairly meaningless if you’re incapable of directing some of your attention as you’d like.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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’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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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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, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

—

Roger McNamee has argued, the old cliché about users as “the product being sold” stops seeming so apt.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

—

A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel:

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Percentage read: 100%

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 33.33%

The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 33.33%

when we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 38.89%

Consider the archetypal case of being lured from your work by social media: It’s not usually that you’re sitting there, concentrating rapturously, when your attention is dragged away against your will. In truth, you’re eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what you’re doing, in order to escape how disagreeable it feels to be doing it; you slide away to the Twitter pile-on or the celebrity gossip site with a feeling not of reluctance but of relief

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 50.0%

But the more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 55.56%

When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 66.67%

Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts—when you’re working on a major project; when you can’t think of anything to do on a Sunday afternoon; when it’s your job to care for a two-year-old for five hours straight—but they all have one characteristic in common: they demand that you face your finitude

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 77.78%

The overarching point is that what we think of as “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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 83.33%

Even if you place your phone out of reach, therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself seeking some other way to avoid paying attention. In the case of conversation, this generally takes the form of mentally rehearsing what you’re going to say next, as soon as the other person has finished making sounds with their mouth

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 94.44%

The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 94.44%

The less attention he devoted to objecting to what was happening to him, the more attention he could give to what was actually happening

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 94.44%

Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 14: 6. The Intimate Interrupter

Chapter progress: 100.0%

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 16: 7. We Never Really Have Time

Chapter progress: 0.0%

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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 16: 7. We Never Really Have Time

Chapter progress: 8.7%

It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 16: 7. We Never Really Have Time

Chapter progress: 26.09%

The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 16: 7. We Never Really Have Time

Chapter progress: 56.52%

Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 0.0%

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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 11.76%

We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Annotation

Chapter progress: 17.65%

there’s something odder about the ambitious and well-paid architect, employed in the profession she always longed to join, who nonetheless finds herself treating every moment of her experience as worthwhile only in terms of bringing her closer to the completion of a project, so that she can move on to the next one, or move up the ranks, or move toward retirement.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: Gold

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 50.0%

Sam Harris makes the disturbing observation that the same applies to everything: our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 50.0%

there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 55.88%

in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 64.71%

So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Chapter progress: 70.59%

purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Annotation

Chapter progress: 70.59%

—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: Future oriented so much that they even focus on what theyll leav ebehind when theare deady

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Annotation

Chapter progress: 88.24%

You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: Fun cause i do experience the present moment when out in wildeness or a good dinner wth solid friends

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Chapter 17: 8. You Are Here

Unknown annotation type

Chapter progress: 91.18%

None

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: None

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 4.65%

Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 6.98%

You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventyish filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 13.95%

a year spent backpacking around the globe could fall victim to the same problem, if your purpose isn’t to explore the world but—a subtle distinction, this—to add to your mental storehouse of experiences, in the hope that you’ll feel, later on, that you’d used your life well.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 25.58%

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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 32.56%

Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 34.88%

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 37.21%

Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people who don’t actually want to rest—who find it seriously unpleasant to pause in our efforts to get things done, and who get antsy when we feel as though we’re not being sufficiently productive

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 65.12%

Societal pressures used to make it relatively easy to take time off: you couldn’t go shopping when the shops weren’t open, even if you wanted to, or work when the office was locked. Besides, you’d be much less likely to skip church, or Sunday lunch with the extended family, if you knew your absence would raise eyebrows. Now, though, the pressures all push us in the other direction: the shops are open all day, every day (and all night, online). And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at home

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 76.74%

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 86.05%

We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 18: 9. Rediscovering Rest

Chapter progress: 95.35%

that might be part of why he enjoys it so much: to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 23.81%

we’re almost certainly much more impatient than we used to be

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 23.81%

hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 71.43%

This is the vicious spiral that constitutes the psychological core of an addiction. You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you—alcohol—has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 76.19%

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up—so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 95.24%

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 95.24%

possible: facing reality—above all, the reality that, in his case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a functioning life—then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more productive and fulfilling existence.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Likewise, Brown argues, we speed addicts must crash to earth. We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go

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Chapter 19: 10. The Impatience Spiral

Chapter progress: 100.0%

you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Annotation

Chapter progress: 37.5%

And then, around the eighty-minute mark, but without your noticing precisely when or how it happens, there’s a shift. You finally give up attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the discomfort abates.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: the discomfort of ptience evntually fades

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 50.0%

I’ve never been able to fix those kinds of things!”

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

“That’s because you don’t take the time

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 58.33%

We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 58.33%

So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel—correctly—as though we weren’t in control of the situation

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 62.5%

Peck recalls one patient, an accomplished financial analyst in her professional life, who took this same rushed approach to the challenge of disciplining her children: “Either she made the very first change that came to her mind within a matter of seconds—making them eat more breakfast or sending them to bed earlier—regardless of whether such a change had anything to do with the problem

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Annotation

Chapter progress: 62.5%

The first is to develop a taste for having problems.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: Life is only a succession of prpblems. Might as well just get onboard

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 75.0%

patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 79.17%

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, 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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 20: 11. Staying on the Bus

Chapter progress: 95.83%

it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 21: 12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

Chapter progress: 16.67%

As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 21: 12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

Chapter progress: 27.78%

every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 21: 12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

Chapter progress: 33.33%

if you can be sure the whole office is deserted while you’re trying to relax, you’re spared the anxiety of thinking about all the undone tasks that might be accumulating, the emails filling up your inbox, or the scheming colleagues attempting to steal your job

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 8.7%

Not everyone has this kind of sudden epiphany, but 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—even when what we’re currently doing with them looks, from the outside, like the definition of success.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 17.39%

To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate—

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 52.17%

Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that 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.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 65.22%

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

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 73.91%

it’s the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the “egocentricity bias,

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 22: 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter progress: 86.96%

In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe. Indeed, depending on the stringency of your criteria, even Steve Jobs, who coined that phrase, failed to leave such a dent. Perhaps the iPhone will be remembered for more generations than anything you or I will ever accomplish; but from a truly cosmic view, it will soon be forgotten, like everything else.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 7.14%

For some of us, the struggle manifests as the attempt 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. Other people hold off entirely from starting on important projects or embarking on intimate relationships in the first place because they can’t bear the anxiety of having committed themselves to something that might or might not work out happily in practice

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 21.43%

or once the kids have left home, or once the revolution comes and social justice is established—that’s when you’ll feel in control at last, you’ll be able to relax a bit

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Annotation

Chapter progress: 28.57%

“Entering space and time completely”—or even partially, which may be as far as any of us ever get—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 or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Notes: Wow

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 32.14%

finite lives are filled with all the painful problems of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t stop them from feeling like problems

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 39.29%

Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 46.43%

But you usually know, intuitively, whether remaining in a relationship or job would present the kind of challenges that will help you grow as a person (enlargement) or the kind that will cause your soul to shrivel with every passing week (diminishment). Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 50.0%

Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 57.14%

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?

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 57.14%

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 64.29%

This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 71.43%

In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 71.43%

it can be surprisingly radical and discomfiting, for many of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending our time

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 78.57%

if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 82.14%

How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 23: 14. The Human Disease

Chapter progress: 82.14%

everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 18.18%

To put things as mildly as possible, it’s hard to remain entirely confident that everything will turn out fine.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 36.36%

Hope is supposed to be “our beacon in the dark,” Jensen notes. But in reality, it’s a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 36.36%

it means relating to life as if “there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 54.55%

think of this book as an extended argument for the empowering potential of giving up hope

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 54.55%

giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t coming your way

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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Chapter 24: Afterword: Beyond Hope

Chapter progress: 90.91%

Although another way of making the point that giving up hope doesn’t kill you, as Jensen points out, is that in a certain sense it does kill you. It kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later. You find, Jensen writes, that “the civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died.

~~ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

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