• Four thousand years can give you such a crick in the neck…
• This is self-help in a trenchcoat; it’s also a serious commentary on our increasing instrumentation of time

This book is self-help in a trench coat. But unlike many self-help books of the day, it invites us to critically inquire our society’s messed up relationship with time, and what one can do about that.

Our current perception of time management is kind of bullshit, actually. Isn’t it strange how the more ‘productive’ we feel, and the more things we do, we just end up with even more things to do? Work is never truly finished, and in our time on earth, we will never have the time to do everything. Burkeman uses a motorway as an analogy – yes, you could open a new lane, and that would reduce congestion, but that just means more cars can flood in.

Pre-industrial work didn’t run on clock time. There was no urgency to meet quotas. Most tasks were conducted in task oriented time, dictated by seasonal changes. Then monks introduced clocks to synchronise prayer time, and we began to treat time as an abstraction.

Merchant capitalism, followed by industrial capitalism, slowly began to warp time into yet another commodity to be bought, spent, wasted, and bargained for. ‘Time’ and ‘life’ became separate, and we became preoccupied with ‘using’ our time in the best way – in other words, using time instrumentally, as a means to some future goal that we might profit from.

Procrastination, the author argues, is a by-product of this preoccupation. The more we try to be in control of time, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life becomes. If pushing productivity is counterproductive, we can learn to ‘stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed… Without automatically responding by trying to fit more in.’ Why worry? Focus on the biggest priority – there will always be something to do, no matter how much you try to get done. And of the things we want to do, it’s imperative we squirrel away a little time every day, and accept we will neglect other valued activities.

We then run into yet another problem – our instrumental treatment of time causes us to pressure ourselves into using our downtime productively as well. That is, if we’re not spending it investing in some positive future outcome, we are fuckups. So, despite the fact that we have more time off than ever in the past few hundred year, it doesn’t feel like time off. Rest simply doesn’t start when you’re not working, nor is it defined as being an absence of work.

From a historical perspective, this is utter delirium. Religion talks a big game about rest. Christians have the sabbath, Jews have the Shabbat, and they didn’t just take a day of rest because the man upstairs said they deserved it – communities pressured each other to rest.

When our relationship to time is instrumental like this, the present moment loses its meaning. It’s never really here so much as it is over there. When we don’t have what we want, it’s painful because we lack it; when we do finally get it, it’s still painful, because it’s no longer something to pursue. Unless the only thing we’re getting out of an activity is the joy of pursuit, for the sake of pursuiting itself, there will always be this suffering.

Burkeman uses the example of hiking. If we go out walking for the sake of walking itself, then we’re not walking so it can be ‘done.’ We’re not doing it because it might make us physically fitter, nor are we doing it to improve our walking skills, which are unlikely to change since we learned how. We can stop walking, and die, having never done all the walking we wanted to do, but we can never say that we’ve truly completed walking, as there is no achievable goal that could bring about its end.

No-one really knows how to live. The best we can do is to do the next right thing. If we want to be told how to live, we might as well join a Church. This havering obsession we’re expected to have with productivity might as well be its own Church. Beyond that, doing the next and most necessary thing with conviction is meaningful in and of itself. It’s all we can do, and all we have to do.

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Links to buy Four Thousand Weeks can be found at Burkeman’s website:

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books

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