Main idea:
To feel free we have to embrace our limitations
“And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.”
PART1: CHOOSING TO CHOSE / CONFRONT OUR FINITUDE
Chap 1: The limit of embracing life
Lesson 1:
Before modernity, time was considered an abstract concept and not something outside of us that we can control and manage. This had a huge impact on our relationship with time.
“From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. Previously, labourers had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. ”
Lesson 2:
There are two modern beliefs that put pressure on us to optimize our time and plan ahead. The first one is the belief that we have one life. Previously, the prevalent common belief was shaped by the traditional religions that believed in the existence of an afterlife and hence there wasn’t much pressure to make most of this life. If you believe you only live once, you’d want to make sure you optimise every part of it. The second one if the idea of progress and that we should always strive to be better. With this idea, we internalize the belief that the future will always be better than the present.
These ideas are subconsciously embedded in us and they come as a second nature when in fact this wasn’t the norm decades ago.
“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 toward an ever more perfect future—they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to miss out on almost all of that ”
Lesson 3: Our urge to optimize time stems from the avoidance of admiting our limitations
Most of us driven people have a long ass list of the things we want to do in life and we try to find a way to do them all. But we fail at doing them all because we simply can’t. Instead of embracing the thruth , we seek out the avoidance strategy of numbing ouselves by putting more efforts to do it all.
“We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally. (“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”)”
“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. And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it.”
Lesson 4: the compulsive desire to plan comes from our the anxiety of how little control control we have over the future.
“the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”
Lesson 5: Sometimes achieving control over your schedule isn’t as freeging as allowing yourself folow the rythm of the community.
“This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads to the insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.”
CHAP 2: The efficiency trap
Lesson 6: The more you optimize to fit everything into the schedule, the more new things pile up for you to find time for them as well.
“ The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.” Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do .”
And the technologies which were designed to help us sometimes make it worse.
“The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.”
Lesson 7: The dark side of convinience.
As humans, we’re biologically wired to look for convinience. But, as Olivier puts it, when you render a process convient, you deprive it of its meaning. In food for example, food delivery service is a god sent when you cannot be bothered to cook. But most of the time the food doesn’t taste as good as if you spend the time making it pleasurably yourself. That labour that we try to get rid of to make room for other things, is sometimes necessary for its fruits to taste sweeter.
CHAP 3: Facing our finitude
Lesson 8: Three priciples to be able to fit “everything in”
Principle1: “Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time.” Most of us have these little things (side project, hobbies, passions …) that are important to us that but we keep postponing them because their are more important things that need to be done. One possible solution, as oliver suggest, is to allocate a bit of time everyday for it and make it a non negociable instead of waiting for this magical moment where you’ll be freed up.
“If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” as she puts it, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”
“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.”
Principle2: Limit your work in progress
Instead of thinking if how to manage the pool of to dos that keep piling up, don’t bring them up in the first place. The best thing to do is to set a limit to the number of projects you’re currently working on.
“Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. ”
Principle3: is to resist the allure of middling priorities
This principle in my opinion goes hand in hand with the first one. When you make a list of the things you want to do in life and list them by order of priority, you pick the first ones from the list and abort the rest all together.
CHAP 4: Becoming a better procrastinator
CHAP 4: Becoming a better procrastinator
Chap 4: Becoming a better procrastinator
Lesson 9: Good and bad procrastination:
CHAP 4: Becoming a better procrastinator
When we prioritise something over another, we are procrastinating. But there’s good and bad procrastination. The good one is done from the perspective that we have a finite life and we should focus on what’s actually meaningful for us and make progress in it and the bad one is caused by trying to avoid facing the truth of our limitations.
“The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.”
“ it’s easy for me to fantasize 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 fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs—to put less time than I’d like into one of those domains, so as to make space for another—and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway, with the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy.”
CHAP 5/6: The watermelon problem / the intimate interruptor
Lesson 10: The intimate interruptor
The idea of “intimate interruptor” goes in line with our fear of facing our finitude. To escape facing it we unconsciously opt for distractions online.
“No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply—where you can update yourself instantaneously on events taking place a continent away, present yourself however you like, and keep scrolling forever through infinite newsfeeds, drifting through “a realm in which space doesn’t matter and time spreads out into an endless present,” to quote the critic James Duesterberg. It’s true that killing time on the internet often doesn’t feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn’t need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained.”
“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.”
Part III
Chap 7: “We Never Really Have Time
Lesson 11: Why do we manage time as if it is something we own ?
“Likewise, and despite everything I’ve been saying, 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 entail, 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.”
Chap11:
Lesson 12: Three principles of patience
1- “develop a taste for having problems
2- embrace radical incrementalism
3- “originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.”
Lesson 13: Cosmic insignificance therapy:
This is the second most important idea of the book in my opinion.
I’ve lived my life with this idea graved in my mind. I have to do something good for the world by leaving a positive impact. And logically this would allow for a more meaningful life full of purpose and service. The downside, however, is that this puts huge constraints on how you spend your finite time. You cannot sit chill and watch that TV show or have a blast with your friends because you haven’t achieved meaningful accomplishments.
Most of us nowadays are looking for a life of purpose. That calling we’re meant to answer to be of good to the universe. However, for 99% of us, what we do doesn’t matter at all from a cosmic perspective. There are very few people who throughout the history of the world were able to leave something. Even Steve Jobs who invented the iPhone might be remembered for a few generations but forgotten in a thousand years.
This truth, albeit blunt and painful, can be very liberating. It lifts the burden of you having to have lived a meaningfu. But when you zoom out and admire how big the world is, all the angst and pain of your career, relationships and life in general shrink.
This is what Oliver refers to as “cosmic insignificance therapy”.
“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.”
“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. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.”
