Four Thousand Weeks

‘This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,’ lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life.3

The environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein recalls first sensing this basic ‘wrongness’ in our use of time as a child, growing up amid material comfort in 1970s America: Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.14 We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.

(Until we get them onto schedules, babies are the ultimate ‘task-orientated’ beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the other-worldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.)

The Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock.

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.

Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live, especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were brought up: to prioritise future benefits over current enjoyments.) But ultimately it backfires. 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.

I would never succeed in marshalling enough efficiency, self-discipline and effort to force my way through to the feeling that I was on top of everything, that I was fulfilling all my obligations and had no need to worry about the future. Ironically, the realisation that this had been a useless strategy for attaining peace of mind brought me some immediate peace of mind.

If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.

It had been more comforting to imagine that I might eventually ‘optimise’ myself into the kind of person who could confront such decisions without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process. I didn’t want to accept that this was never going to happen – that fear was part of the deal, and that experiencing it wouldn’t destroy me.

We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves – and we certainly don’t want to get ill and die.

constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call ‘neurosis’, and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to co-dependency and chronic shyness.

After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get: maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles you feel you should.

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t – and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.

there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at. Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your children; maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on.

So getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder: you’ll feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly you go, you’ll never reach the top.

And once you stop investing in the idea that you might one day achieve peace of mind that way, it becomes easier to find peace of mind in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands. Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones.

As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains, pre-modern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to ‘get the most out of’ their limited time, because as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t limited, and in any case, earthly life was but a relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part.

When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress – in the idea that history is headed towards an ever more perfect future – they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.

This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived – but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities. Instead, you find yourself pitched straight back into the efficiency trap.

the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favour of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it. Yet 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.

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.

But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. Take those services – on which I’ve relied too much in recent years – that let you design and then remotely mail a birthday card, so you never see or touch the physical item yourself. Better than nothing, perhaps. But sender and recipient both know that it’s a poor substitute for purchasing a card in a shop, writing on it by hand, and then walking to a postbox to post it, because contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort – which is to say, the inconvenience.

Because you can stay home, order food online, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing so – though you might be perfectly well aware that you’d have had a better time had you kept your appointment to meet friends in town or tried to make an interesting new recipe.

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all.

Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that … Hägglund quotes a headline from the magazine U.S. Catholic that has the air of being written by a devout religious believer on whom an awful possibility has suddenly dawned: ‘Heaven: Will It Be Boring?’7

If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer holidays, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing.

why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given – as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

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.

The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed. So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or 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.

This is the same insight embodied in two venerable pieces of time management advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling ‘meetings’ with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude. Thinking in terms of ‘paying yourself first’ transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies this simple insight: if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it.

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.4 Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot.

Another happy consequence was that I found myself effortlessly breaking down my projects into manageable chunks, a strategy I’d long agreed with in theory but never properly implemented. Now it became the intuitive thing to do: it was clear that if I nominated ‘write book’ or ‘move house’ as one of my three tasks in progress, it would clog up the system for months, so I was naturally motivated to figure out the next achievable step in each case instead. Rather than trying to do everything, I found it easier to accept the truth that I’d be doing only a few things on any given day. The difference, this time, was that I actually did them.

he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organises his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

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.’

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. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: 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.

French philosopher Henri Bergson tunnelled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because ‘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’.10 In other words, it’s easy for me to fantasise about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditation retreats or volunteering in my community – because so long as I’m only fantasising, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly.

Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed – and what a relief.

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. Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle – and this fact ought to please you.

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.

you can’t become an ultra-successful 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.12 If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections – which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

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 of reality don’t apply.

It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement – and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory.

And not only should you settle; 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.

Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and a colleague gave hundreds of people the opportunity to pick a free poster from a selection of art prints.13 Then he divided the participants into two groups. The first group was told that they had a month in which they could exchange their poster for any other one; the second group was told that the decision they’d already made had been final. In follow-up surveys, it was the latter group – those who were stuck with their decision, and who thus weren’t distracted by the thought that it might still be possible to make a better choice – who showed by far the greater appreciation for the work of art they’d selected.

When two spouses agree to stay together ‘for better or worse’, rather than bolting as soon as the going gets tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling, too – because having committed themselves to one finite course of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives.

the ‘joy of missing out’: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying – to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue or exchange on a house. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

‘Attention is the beginning of devotion,’ writes the poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are incompatible with each other: you can’t truly love a partner or a child, dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause – or just savour the pleasure of a stroll in the park – except to the extent that you can hold your attention on the object of your devotion to begin with.

Or my newborn son would do something adorable, and I’d catch myself speculating about how I might describe it in a tweet, as if what mattered wasn’t the experience but my (unpaid!) role as a provider of content for Twitter.

In fact, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – whereas once his ‘attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable’.

After his retreat, Young – who is now a meditation teacher better known as Shinzen Young, his new first name having been bestowed on him by the abbot at Mount Koya – found that his powers of concentration had been transformed. Whereas staying focused on the present had made the agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings – daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance – positively engrossing. 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. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.

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. Unlike the architect from Shiraz, who refused to bring his ideal mosque into the world of time and imperfection, you’re obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about.

This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction – digital detoxes, personal rules about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth – rarely work, or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the things you use to assuage your urge towards distraction, and in the case of the most addictive forms of technology, that’s surely a sensible idea. But they don’t address the urge itself. Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or – the preferred option of the productivity geek – redesigning your to-do list and reorganising your desk.

On the contrary, ‘surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table’ is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation – because listening takes effort and patience and a spirit of surrender, and because what you hear might upset you, so checking your phone is naturally more pleasant. 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.

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.

Some 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!’7), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. 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. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’.1 In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. 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.

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. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win. You can never be truly certain about the future.

nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live – not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time – that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time – begins to make more sense. And it has real psychological consequences, because the assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control.

So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realise that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied – no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right.

‘Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place,’ cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, in a warning echoed several centuries later by the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, ‘Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.’6, 7 Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). ‘Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,’ he advises.8 Then he adds the celebrated phrase ‘sufficient to the day is the evil thereof’, a line I’ve only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?

‘Partway through this particular talk,’ recalls the writer Jim Dreaver, who was in attendance, ‘Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?”9 Almost as though we were one body, we sat up … I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining, their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.’ Then Krishnamurti ‘said in a soft, almost shy voice, “You see, I don’t mind what happens.”’

Rather, a life spent ‘not minding what happens’ is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it

But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities towards other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, ‘a plan is just a thought’.10 We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is – all it could ever possibly be – is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

In his book Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artefact on display in front of them, so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos of it on their phones.1 So intently were they focused on using their time for a future benefit – for the ability to revisit or share the experience later on – that they were barely experiencing the exhibition itself at all. (And who ever watches most of those videos anyway?)

This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the ‘“when-I-finally” mind’, as in: ‘When I finally get my workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was always meant to be living can begin.’2

The person mired in this mentality believes that the reason she doesn’t feel fulfilled and happy is that she hasn’t yet managed to accomplish certain specific things; when she does so, she imagines, she’ll feel in charge of her life and be the master of her time. Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state – and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself.

But 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 towards retirement. To live like this is arguably insane – but it’s an insanity that gets inculcated in us early in life, as the self-styled ‘spiritual entertainer’ and New Age philosopher Alan Watts explained with characteristic vigour: Take education. What a hoax.3 As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.

Obviously, it mattered to keep half an eye on the future – there would be vaccinations to be administered, preschools to apply to, and so forth. But my son was here now, and he would be zero years old for only one year, and I came to realise that I didn’t want to squander these days of his actual existence by focusing solely on how best to use them for the sake of his future one. He was sheer presence, participating unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself, and I wanted to join him in it.

The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the ‘causal catastrophe’, which he defines as the belief ‘that the proof of the rightness or wrongness of some way of bringing up children is the kind of adults it produces’.5 That idea sounds reasonable enough – how else would you judge rightness or wrongness? – until you realise that its effect is to sap childhood of any intrinsic value, by treating it as nothing but a training ground for adulthood.

But the author and podcast host 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. 7 Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son – a thought that appals me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty – there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the sea, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it.

Powerful external pressures push us in this direction, too, because we exist inside an economic system that is instrumentalist to its core. 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. They’re very good at instrumentalising their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalising their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel towards a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.

As Kaveny writes, ‘Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.’9 When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us – even the non-lawyers – than we’d care to admit.

The truth is that we collaborate with this state of affairs. We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future – that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems – you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading towards some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.

The problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist, future-focused mindset I’ve been criticising in this chapter, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. 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. It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing.

My favourite example of this effect is the 2015 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in which couples were instructed to have sex twice as frequently as usual for a two-month period.13 At the end of this time, the study concluded, they weren’t any happier than they had been at the start. This finding was widely reported as demonstrating that a more active sex life isn’t as enjoyable as you might have imagined. But what it really shows, I’d say, is that trying too hard to have a more active sex life is no fun at all.

Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now.

Why, its members wanted to know, should holidays by the sea, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? ‘You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,’ fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient seventy-ish film-maker 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!’

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (‘Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,’ reads the headline on one hugely popular New York Times piece).

The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore – in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word.

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades – an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women.3 But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you

To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure – by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation – was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behaviour in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else. The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as ‘not-leisure’, reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling.

Some historians claim that the average country-dweller in the sixteenth century would have worked for only about 150 days each year, and while those figures are disputed, nobody doubts that leisure lay near the heart of almost every life.5 Apart from anything else, while all that recreation might have been fun, it wasn’t exactly optional. People faced strong social pressure not to work all the time: you observed religious holidays because the church required it; and in a close-knit village, it wouldn’t have been easy to shirk the other festivities, either.

Implicitly, 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.

In one narrow sense, this new situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work.

So now the whole of life – work and leisure time alike – was to be valued for the sake of something else, in the future, rather than for itself.

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. ‘If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ‘then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.’9

we’re not merely the victims of an economic system that denies us any opportunity for it. 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.

As the writer Judith Shulevitz explains: Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work.15 The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ‘It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.’ This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation – at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction.

we’re in danger of forgetting what a radical notion the Sabbath always was – radical not least because, as the former slaves who inaugurated it were at pains to point out, it applied to everyone without exception. (Shulevitz notes that in the Torah verses setting out the rules for the Jewish Sabbath, the fact that even slaves must be allowed to rest gets mentioned twice, as if it were an alien idea, which the text’s author knew would need to be forcefully driven home.)

And since the dawn of capitalism, it’s been radical in a second way: while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, the Sabbath embodies the thought that whatever work you’ve completed by the time that Friday (or Saturday) night rolls around might be enough – that there might be no sense, for now, in trying to get any more done.

One need not be a religious believer to feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being ‘on the receiving end’ – in the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.

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.

The other important thing we can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance. ‘Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,’ writes the philosopher John Gray. 17 He adds: ‘How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?’ 18 In such an era, it’s virtually guaranteed that truly stopping to rest – as opposed to training for a 10K, or heading off on a meditation retreat with the goal of attaining spiritual enlightenment – is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort, rather than of delight. That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favourite 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. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk ‘done’; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. ‘You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,’ Setiya explains.19

when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching – and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfilment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any ‘later’ left?

As Schopenhauer puts it in his masterwork, The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have ‘objects of willing’ – things you want to do, or to have, in life – because not yet having them is bad, but getting them is arguably even worse: ‘If, on the other hand, [the human animal] lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence become an intolerable burden for it.20 Hence it swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom.’

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. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defence mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us – pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfilment – are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a ‘side hustle’, a hobby-like activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

And so in order to be a source of true fulfilment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. My respect for the rock star Rod Stewart increased a few years back when I learned – from newspaper coverage of an interview he’d given to Railway Modeller magazine – that he’d spent the last two decades at work on a vast and intricate model railway layout of a 1940s American city,

Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct; hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.

It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds.

The futility of this situation – in which the addict’s efforts to regain control send him spiralling further out of control – is the basis of the paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become famous: that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol. This necessary shift in outlook generally happens as a result of ‘hitting rock bottom’, which is AA-speak for when things get so bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself. At that point, it becomes impossible for the alcoholic to avoid surrendering to the unpalatable truth of his limitations – to see that he simply doesn’t have the ability to use alcohol as a strategic tool to suppress his most difficult emotions.

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.

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. Digging in to a challenging work project that can’t be hurried becomes not a trigger for stressful emotions but a bracing act of choice; giving a difficult novel the time it demands becomes a source of relish. ‘You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,’

You give up ‘demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes’. You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfilment to the future.

I first learned this lesson from Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University.1 When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks.

There is nothing passive or resigned about the kind of patience that arises from this effort to resist the urge to hurry. On the contrary, it’s an active, almost muscular state of alert presence – and its benefits, as we’ll see, extend far beyond art appreciation.

here is what happens when you spend three unbroken hours on a small fold-out seat at the Harvard Art Museum looking at Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, a painting by Edgar Degas, with your phone, laptop and other distractions stowed out of reach in the cloakroom: you spend the first forty minutes wondering what on earth you’d been thinking.

Time slows and sags. You wonder if an hour has passed, but when you check your watch, you find it’s been seventeen minutes. 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. And the Degas begins to reveal its secret details: subtle expressions of watchfulness and sadness on the faces of the three men – one of whom, you notice properly for the first time, is a black merchant in an otherwise white milieu – plus an unexplained shadow you hadn’t previously seen, as if a fourth person were lurking out of view; and a curious optical illusion that renders one of the figures either conventionally solid or transparent, like a ghost, depending on how your eyes interpret the painting’s other lines. Before long, you’re experiencing the scene in all its sensory fullness: the humidity and claustrophobia of that room in New Orleans, the creak of the floorboards, the taste of dust in the air. The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin. And you start to understand what the philosopher Robert Grudin means when he describes the experience of patience as ‘tangible, almost edible’,

Peck’s insight here – that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself – would be helpful enough if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawnmowers and cars. But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and parenting. 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 towards a resolution – any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re ‘dealing with’ the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. 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. Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than in waiting to see how they might develop.

Three Principles of Patience In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems. Behind our urge to race through every obstacle or challenge, in an effort to get it ‘dealt with’, there’s usually the unspoken fantasy that you might one day finally reach the state of having no problems whatsoever. As a result, most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive. And more to the point, you wouldn’t want it to, because a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless.

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the 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.

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. If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point ‘includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time’ for work.4 Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatises this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station.5 There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one – and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction – perhaps you start working on platinum prints of nudes – and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knock-offs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialise. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognised as being truly your own.

What’s the solution? ‘It’s simple,’ Minkkinen says. ‘Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.’ A little further out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But 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.

Yet the truth is that time is also a ‘network good’, one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.

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. To do countless important things with time – to socialise, go on dates, bring up children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances – it has to be synchronised with other people’s. In fact, having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant – which is why, for premodern people, the worst of all punishments was to be physically ostracised, abandoned in some remote location where you couldn’t fall in with the rhythms of the tribe.

The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root. For the rest of us, likewise, more freedom to choose when and where you work makes it harder to forge connections through your job, as well as less likely you’ll be free to socialise when your friends are.

In 2013, a researcher from Uppsala in Sweden named Terry Hartig, along with several colleagues, elegantly proved the connection between synchronisation and life satisfaction when he had the ingenious notion of comparing Swedes’ holiday patterns against statistics on the rate at which pharmacists dispensed antidepressants.4 One of his two central findings was unremarkable: when Swedes take time off work, they’re happier (as measured by their being less likely, on average, to need antidepressants). But the other was revelatory: antidepressant use fell by a greater degree, Hartig demonstrated, in proportion to how much of the population of Sweden was on holiday at any given time. Or to put things slightly differently, the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got. They derived psychological benefits not merely from holiday time, but from having the same holiday time as other people. When many were on holiday at once, it was as if an intangible, supernatural cloud of relaxation had settled over the nation as a whole.

Hartig did not flinch from the controversial implication of his results. They suggest, he observed, that what people need isn’t greater individual control over their schedules but rather what he calls ‘the social regulation of time’: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways. That means more willingness to fall in with the rhythms of community; more traditions like the Sabbath of decades past, or the French phenomenon of the grandes vacances, where almost everything grinds to a halt for several weeks each summer. Perhaps it even means more laws to regulate when people can and can’t work, like limits on Sunday opening hours or recent European legislation banning certain employers from sending work emails out of hours.

Because something intangible but important happens at the fika. The usual divisions get set aside; people mingle without regard for age, or class, or status within the office, discussing both work-related and nonwork matters: for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy. One senior manager told me it was by far the most effective way to learn what was really going on in his company. Yet it works only because those involved are willing to surrender some of their individual sovereignty over their time.

Josef Stalin’s chief economist, Yuri Larin, concocted what seems in hindsight like a ludicrously ambitious plan to keep Soviet factories running every day of the year, with no breaks. Henceforth, he announced in August 1929, a week would be not seven but five days long: four days of work, followed by one day’s rest. Crucially, though, the idea was that not all workers would follow the same calendar. Instead, they’d be divided into five groups, identified by a colour – yellow, green, orange, purple, red – each of which would then be assigned a different four-day workweek and one-day weekend, so that operations would never have to cease, even for a day. Meanwhile, Soviet authorities argued, there would be numerous benefits for the proletariat, too: more frequent days off, plus less overcrowding of cultural institutions and supermarkets, thanks to the steadier flow of customers. But the main effect for ordinary citizens of the USSR, as the writer Judith Shulevitz has explained, was to destroy the possibility of social life. It was a simple question of scheduling. Two friends assigned to two different calendar groups would never be free to socialise on the same day. Husbands and wives were supposed to be assigned to the same group, but they often weren’t, placing intense stress on families; and for obvious reasons, Sunday religious gatherings were disrupted, too – neither of which posed a problem from Moscow’s point of view, since it was part of communism’s mission to undermine the rival power centres of family and church.

The experience stuck with McNeill, and after the war, when he became a professional historian, he returned to the idea in a monograph called Keeping Together in Time. In it, he argues that synchronised movement, along with synchronised singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue. And some evolutionary biologists speculate that music itself – a phenomenon that has proved difficult to account for in terms of Darwinian natural selection, except as a pleasurable by-product of more important mechanisms – might have emerged as a way of coordinating large groups of tribal warriors, who could move in unison by following rhythms and melodies, where other forms of communication would have proved too cumbersome for the job.

We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. 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.

But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify during the coronavirus lockdown. It starts to feel as though you, your spouse and your closest friends have all been assigned to different colour-coded Soviet work groups.

You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own.

Or maybe you’re familiar with the experience of returning to your daily routines, following an unusually satisfying weekend in nature or with old friends, and being struck by the thought that more of life should feel that way – that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions.

It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life. But it isn’t actually a bad thing, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. You couldn’t entertain such doubts in the first place if you weren’t already occupying a new vantage point on your life – one from which you’d already begun to face the reality that you can’t depend on fulfilment arriving at some distant point in the future, once you’ve got your life in order, or met the world’s criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now. To realise midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate – because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile, if your finite life is to mean anything at all.

Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfil. 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.

Now for the arresting part: by this measure, the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs – an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote from our own – took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago. Jesus was born about twenty lifetimes ago, and the Renaissance happened seven lifetimes back. A paltry five centenarian lifetimes ago, Henry VIII sat on the English throne. Five! As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilisation, sixty, was ‘the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party’.5 From this perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded glacially but in the blink of an eye. And it follows, of course, that your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side.

But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly consoling. You might think of it as ‘cosmic insignificance therapy’: 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? The anxieties that clutter the average life – relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries – shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed: The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You.7 To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realise we were carrying in the first place.

most of us do go around thinking of ourselves as fairly central to the unfolding of the universe; if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be any relief to be reminded that in reality this isn’t the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to megalomaniacs or pathological narcissists, but something much more fundamental to being human: 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-centred judgements are part of what psychologists call the ‘egocentricity bias’, and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.

And it is likewise ‘implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves that they be a Michelangelo, a Mozart, or an Einstein …10 There have only been a few dozen such people in the entire history of humanity.’ 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.

No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realising that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realisation isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a ‘life well spent’, you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed – and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t ‘significant’ enough.

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.

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.

This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead.

It’s tempting to imagine that ending or at least easing the struggle with time might also make you happy, most or all of the time. But I’ve no reason to believe that’s true. Our 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 – or not exactly, anyway. The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem. The human disease is often painful, but as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.3 Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.

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

Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. It means embarking on ventures that might fail, perhaps because you’ll find you lacked sufficient talent; it means risking embarrassment, holding difficult conversations, disappointing others, and getting so deep into relationships that additional suffering – when bad things happen to those you care about – is all but guaranteed. And so we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritise anxiety-avoidance instead.

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’6 The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time. If you’re trying to decide whether to leave a given job or relationship, say, or to redouble your commitment to it, asking what would make you happiest is likely to lure you towards the most comfortable option, or else leave you paralysed by indecision. 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.

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

It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like ‘enough time’ on your work and with your children, and on socialising, travelling or engaging in political activism. But there’s a deceptive feeling of comfort in believing that you’re in the process of constructing such a life, which is due to come into being any day now.

3. 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?

I’m convinced, in any case, that it is from this position of not feeling as though you need to earn your weeks on the planet that you can do the most genuine good with them. Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.

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

But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. Growing up, I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job at a newspaper. Unconsciously, I transferred my assumptions of competence elsewhere, including to people who worked in government.

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: 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. It is even more liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

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

But in his documentary A Life’s Work, the director David Licata profiles people who took another path, dedicating their lives to projects that almost certainly won’t be completed within their lifetimes – like the father-and-son team attempting to catalogue every tree in the world’s remaining ancient forests, and the astronomer scouring radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life from her desk at the SETI Institute in California.

And so it’s worth asking: what actions – what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future – might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results? We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see.

On 15 December 1933, Carl Jung wrote a reply to a correspondent, Frau V., responding to several questions on the proper conduct of life, and his answer is a good one with which to end this book. ‘Dear Frau V.,’ Jung began, ‘Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live.11 One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way … If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.’ By contrast, the individual path ‘is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other’. His sole advice for walking such a path was to ‘quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.’

‘Do the next right thing’, has since become a slogan favoured among members of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a way to proceed sanely through moments of acute crisis. But really, the ‘next and most necessary thing’ is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment.

Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way – if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human – you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfilment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with.

People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmentalist who co-founded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim.1 But he tells them he doesn’t – and that he thinks that’s a good thing. 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 – the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just ‘the future’ – to make things all right in the end. 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’.2 And sometimes that attitude can be justified: if I go into hospital for surgery, for instance, I do simply have to hope that the surgeon knows what he’s doing, because no contribution I can make is likely to make much difference. But the rest of the time, it means disavowing your own capacity to change things – which in the context of Jensen’s field, environmental activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were supposed to be fighting.

To give up hope, by contrast, is to reinhabit the power that you actually have. At that point, Jensen goes on, ‘we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive … When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to resolve it.’

You realise that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you’d previously felt so desperate to attain. This is a liberation. Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn’t filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you’re free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count.

Any strategy for limiting your work in progress will help here (page 75), but perhaps the simplest is to keep two to-do lists, one ‘open’ and one ‘closed’. The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one – that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed. (You may also require a third list, for tasks that are ‘on hold’ until someone else gets back to you.)

A complementary strategy is to establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work. To whatever extent your job situation permits, decide in advance how much time you’ll dedicate to work – you might resolve to start by 8.30 a.m., and finish no later than 5.30 p.m., say – then make all other time-related decisions in light of those predetermined limits.

‘When you can’t do it all, you feel ashamed and give up,’ notes the author Jon Acuff, but when you ‘decide in advance what things you’re going to bomb … you remove the sting of shame’.2 A poorly kept lawn or a cluttered kitchen are less troubling when you’ve preselected ‘lawn care’ or ‘kitchen tidiness’ as goals to which you’ll devote zero energy. As with serialising your projects, there’ll be plenty you can’t choose to ‘bomb’ if you’re to earn a living, stay healthy, be a decent partner and parent, and so forth.

As a counterstrategy, keep a ‘done list’, which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day. Each entry is another cheering reminder that you could, after all, have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive – and look what you did instead!

An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and ‘your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is’ – and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long.6 Meditation helps here. But so does going on unplanned walks to see where they lead you, using a different route to get to work, taking up photography or birdwatching or nature drawing or keeping a journal, playing I Spy with a child: anything that draws your attention more fully into what you’re doing in the present.

when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, in which your goal isn’t to achieve any particular outcome, or successfully explain your position, but, as Hobson puts it, ‘to figure out who this human being is that we’re with’.7

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. I’m definitely still working on the habit proposed (and practised) by the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later. When we fail to act on such urges, it’s rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the prospective recipient deserves it.

And while your colleague might appreciate a nicely worded message of praise more than a hastily worded one, the latter is vastly preferable to what’s truly most likely to happen if you put it off, which is that you’ll never get round to sending that message. All this takes some initial effort, but as Goldstein observes, the more selfish rewards are immediate, because generous action reliably makes you feel much happier.

‘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 wrote.9 When it comes to the challenge of using your four thousand weeks well, the capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, simply to feel as if you’re acting – choices such as stressfully trying to hurry activities that won’t be rushed (chapter 10) or feeling you ought to spend every moment being productive in the service of future goals, thereby postponing fulfilment to a time that never arrives

Maybe it really is a ‘bad habit’, as the Baby Trainers insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your chest. But it’s also a delightful experience in the present moment, and that has to be weighed in the balance; it can’t be the case that concerns for the future must always automatically take precedence. Likewise, the question of whether or not it’s okay to let your nine-year-old spend hours each day playing violent video games doesn’t turn solely on whether or not it’ll turn him into a violent adult, but also on whether that’s a good way for him to be using his life right now; perhaps a childhood immersed in digital blood and gore is just a lower-quality childhood, even if there aren’t any future effects. In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck – and whose life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult…