4000 Weeks

I picked up this book in the December of 2023 after watching Sisyphus55's "The Myth of Productivity". It made me question my values and goals like nothing else has ever managed to.

"4000 Weeks" flies in the face of quite literally everything valued by modern day society - productivity, overachievement, and the seemingly all-pervasive drive to "do more things". I've read quite a few books on how to do more shit with your life - Atomic Habits, Timeboxing, and Flow just to name a few. This was the book that made me question why I was so hellbent on becoming more "productive". It talks about the shocking brevity of human life - a mere 4000 weeks, and made me question whether everything I was working towards was worth it.

A common response to present day sacrifice is the response, or rather the assumption that it will result in payoffs in the distant future. "I'm hustling now so I can live a better life later on", we say. But is that really the case? By partaking in self-sacrificial behaviour in the present day and risking constant burnout, do we not run the risk of losing the ability to relax, ever? By becoming the ever "purposive man", as put forth by John Maynard Keynes and quoted by Oliver Burkeman, we try to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for our acts by pushing our interests in them forward into time, thereby not loving our cat, nor our cat's kittens, nor our kitten's kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. By pushing our interests in our cats forward into the future, we strive to secure our actions in taking care of them in immortality. (You can read the full essay here).

Burkeman compares life to an unending conveyor belt of never-ending work, and sure enough, that's the most common complaint nowadays, isn't it? We all feel "so busy" and are distressed about "wasting time" and turn to "life hacks" to be more productive and do more. And, well, it works. We do perform more tasks, but yet it feels like we're moving slower than ever. And of course, the solution to that is becoming "more productive" so you can do even more work. And that goes on until you burn out. And then you decide, "Hey, maybe I should take a break!", and you usually do. For about three days. Then you start feeling bad again because everyone else is doing so much, and you're just lagging behind, and you have to be successful too, don't you? So you just pick yourself up and hop on the goddamn fucking hamster wheel all over again until the end of eternity. Or till the end of your life. Before you know it you're hooked onto a ventilator wondering where all the time went, like all the times you've woken up, hopped on youtube and drugged yourself on 13 hours of meaningless content.

Burkeman made me stop and think the preposterous, horrible thought that maybe the solution isn't doing more things. Absurd, I know. How could we ever succeed in society without being good little slaves that carry progressively more load for arbitrary tasks given to us by people higher up in the social hierarchy and then burn out and feel bad about it? But I do admit that just not doing work was not a satisfying conclusion for me. I wanted to do things, be successful, change the world, yknow? But hey, I'm not done yet - Burkeman's not telling us to simply drop everything and live a life of inaction. The first step is embracing your own limits. Don't think that you're a limitless being - sure, you could do more, but there is a hard cap on how much work you can do. Be cognisant of the fact that you have limits, and work accordingly.

Secondly, work on the right things. A lot of our time is spent on tasks that really serve us no purpose - content addiction is an obvious one. But the problem is a lot more pervasive then it may seem - a lot of us suffer from analysis paralysis, or "productive procrastination". We sharpen our pencils, make that website, come up with schedules and timetables, but we don't really do anything about our goals. Snap out of it. Such actions are only useful if they actually serve as a precursor to true action. There are a lot more incisive tidbits like this scattered throughout the book, along with a few shifts in mental perspective. One of my favourites is our typical view of time itself - more specifically, our perspective of time as a resource. We treat time much like we do money - we spend it, waste it, and quite literallly say "time is money". No it's not.

We don't have a limited amount of time. It might be more appropriate to say that we are a limited amount of time, in the words of Martin Heidegger. There no space out of this quant life that we are afforded that we can take our achievements to - we cannot "get something" out of life, and the very attempt is futile. It is perhaps due to the futility of this action that so much of lives feel hopeless, with seemingly impossible mountains of work to get through. That is just simply not the point of life. Learn to experience, to live, to think for yourself, and to come to terms with your relationship with time. A lot of the book spends time pointing out the obvious flaws in our societal fabric, but the solutions it proposes are weak at best. I didn't really understand what exactly he wanted us to do, which is hypocritical, given my vague statements to "experience" and "enjoy". But most of the value I got from the book wasn't from the proposed solutions - it was in the violent wake-up call that it gave me and the realisation that I was living my life in a manner that was not very satisfying, and that I wanted to change. I'm still learning how to balance lofty goals with quality of life. I have a sometimes counterintuitive, dogged belief that the two are not exclusive of each other, despite all the talk of sacrifice and discipline to the point of self-harm in order to achieve success in mainstream media. Your life can indeed have value without achieving obscene measures of material wealth. It is alright to be tired. It is alright to not always be working.

It is okay to be human.