Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks deals with a very old question: how to best spend our limited time, roughly four thousand weeks in a lifetime (hence the book’s title)? In case you are wondering, this is not “yet another” book about time management. Burkeman will tell you that he hates time management coaches, and in fact his thesis is exactly the opposite: that you should literally stop trying to make best of your time – which reminds me the infamous Chinese internet meme: lying flat (躺平). While he thus approaches the question from a deeply philosophical perspective, Burkeman wrote the book in a highly accessible – one may even say a little casual – way. The book contains many fascinating ideas and ingenious insights about our relationship with time; some of which I have pondered about myself; some of which I have vaguely felt but never set my mind on; some of which are completely new to me.
The first insight of the book concerns our endless quest for greater efficiency. Productivity, according to Burkeman, is a trap, because eventually you will become the victim of your own efficiency. The faster you respond to emails, the more emails are drawn into your mailbox; the sooner you submit your journal reviews, the earlier the editor is ready to send you the next invitation; the better you become at work, the busier you might feel. As Burkeman quipped, “your boss isn’t stupid, why would she give the extra work to someone slower”? Seen from this light, the attempt to get everything under control – or keep your desk clean, to use a familiar metaphor – by using our limited time more productively is doomed to fail.
Burkeman argues our self-defeating obsession with efficient time management comes from the anxiety about our own finitude. It is almost certain that, before you die, you could only see a small part of the world, acquire a tiny portion of the knowledge our species had accumulated, and get much less done than you or your parents once dreamed you might. Because our time is so limited, tough choices are inevitable. Yet, most people refuse to face this inevitability, and instead invent strategies that help them look the other way. They convince themselves that the real culprit is suboptimal time management, that they can always accomplish more – even all that they had ever wanted – if only they push themselves harder and find the perfect work-life balance. This, of course, is an illusion, because no optimization can possibly enable you to make time for everything you legitimately like or want. Thus, the modern lifestyle of super-busyness is often an excuse, or a delay tactic, that numbs oneself emotionally so that they don’t have to feel the powerlessness in controlling their time, or saying no to things they hate to give up. As Nietzsche once said,
“haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself!”
How do we confront our finitude then? Burkeman offered three suggestions.
First, be patient. To be patient first means to accept our life will always be full of problems, many of which are unpredictable and might visit in what appear to be the “worst time”. The truth is, the day on which your life finally becomes problem-free will never come, because life is nothing but a series of problem-solving episodes. A life without problems is not worth living, the same way as a novel without plots not worth reading. To be patient also means, in Burkeman’s words, “to embrace radical incrementalism”. The idea is that you should divide your problems into pieces and conquer them piece by piece, with the understanding that each piece may only bring you a relatively small step closer to the point of completion. More often than not, seeking to finish your enemy off in a “decisive battle” – a concept cherished by Imperial Japanese Navy – is not a winning strategy, but rather an indicator of impatience, anxiety and weakness.
Second, be humble. To be humble means to have a realistic expectation of the likelihood you can – to quote Steve Jobs – “put a dent in the universe”. The common wisdom usually suggests you have nothing to lose by setting overly ambitious goals, provided you are committed to following through. The spirit is best summarized in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.” However, Burkeman thinks this mentality of aiming-high-to-miss-is-better-than-aiming-low-to-hit tends to make you overvalue your existence, giving rise to an undue sense of urgency to spend your finite time well. If the goal is to change the world, your life should not only “transcend the common and the mundane” but also have a lasting impact on humanity. However, how many of us could ever make an impact of that proportion? Even Jobs, Burkman argued (and I agree), would fail to pass that mark in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, if one is to take a cosmologic perspective, even humanity as a whole may fail to put a dent in the universe. As Katie Mack explained in her book “The End of Everything”, any marks left by humanity will be irreversibly erased by the final Death of the universe, and “at some point, in a cosmic sense, it will not have mattered that we ever lived”. Younger people may dismiss Burkeman’s thesis as pessimism and defeatism, perhaps an indication that the prime of the man’s life is behind him. However, as a middle-aged man in my forties, I think Burkeman was merely suggesting a change of perspective, from your own vintage point – to which harmful self-importance seems natural and understandable, to the perspective of others, to whom what you are doing with your life matter little, if at all.
Third, be time, not use it. That we don’t “have”, but “are”, a limited amount of time is a concept that I’ve never conceived, perhaps never will on my own. This was the idea of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher whose reputation was tarnished by his close association with the Third Reich. “To be, for a human”, Burkeman writes of Heidegger’s insight of “being-toward-death”, “is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when.” This understanding of our relationship with time is radically different from the conventional wisdom, which insists the present is something that we must instrumentalize for a great future gain, whose promise is as boundless as it is ambiguous – in fact so ambiguous one often has difficulty to articulate it when asked. The laser focus on the future means, Burkeman observes, you end up living in it mentally, “locating the ‘real’ value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.” However, life is a succession of present moments and, since you may never know which one is your last, the moment of truth is always now. Therefore, we must not view the present as a dress rehearsal for something greater to come, because the present moment is part of you – not merely a resource to be exploited by you.
Curiously, it seems the trace of Heidegger’s idea of “being-toward-death” can be found in the Japanese culture. In Rising Sun, John Tolane writes (the emphasis is mine),
“This strong recognition of death gave the Japanese not only the strength to face disaster stoically but an intense appreciation of each moment, which could be the last. This was not pessimism but a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint or elate, to accept the inevitable.”
The phrase “sayonara”, commonly translated as goodbye, literally means “so be it” in Japanese. To the Japanese, “life was sayonara”, and they say sayonara to appreciate the present moment, as well as to accentuate its mortality. Where did the Japanese get this idea? I would guess Buddhism. But the answer to this question is obviously beyond me, for now.