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Burkeman terms this “the paradox of limitation” and writes: This pursuit of efficiency hollows out the fullness of life, flattening the sphere of being that makes us complete human beings into a hamster wheel.
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Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough - that you are enough - because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson lamented that “enough is so vast a sweetness… it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” he writes:ĭenying reality never works, though. All of it, Burkeman observes, is the product of an anxiety about time that springs from our stubborn avoidance of the elemental parameters of reality. In consequence, we lose sight of the fundamental tradeoff that the price of higher productivity is always lower creativity. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control - when the flood of emails has been contained when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Oliver Burkeman reckons with these ideas in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals ( public library) - an inquiry equal parts soulful and sobering, offering not arsenal for but sanctuary from our self-brutalizing war on the constraints of reality, titled after the (disconcertingly low) number of weeks comprising the average modern sapiens lifespan of eighty (seemingly long) years.Īfter taking a delightful English jab at the American-bred term “life-hack” and its unfortunate intimation that “your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally,” Burkeman frames our present predicament: Wall clock featuring Discus chronologicus - an early eighteenth-century German depiction of time. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin’s Thinker, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. The exercise instantly clarifies - and horrifies, with the force of its clarity - the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. You are asked to imagine having only a year left to live, at your present mental and bodily capacity - what would you do with it? Then imagine you only had a day left - what would you do with it? Then only an hour - what would you do with it?Īs you scale down these nested finitudes, the question becomes a powerful sieve for priorities - because undergirding it is really the question of what, from among the myriad doable things, you would choose not to do in order to fill the scant allotment of time, be it the 8,760 hours of a year or a single hour, with the experiences that confer upon it maximum aliveness, that radiant vitality filling the basic biological struggle for survival with something more numinous.
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A decade ago, when I first began practicing with my mindfulness teacher while struggling to make rent and make meaning out of my borrowed stardust, one meditation she led transformed my quality of life above all others - both life’s existential calibration and its moment-to-moment experience: