the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. (Location 42)
time seems to speed up as you age— steadily accelerating until, to judge from the reports of people in their seventies and eighties, months begin to flash by in what feels like minutes. It’s hard to imagine a crueler arrangement: not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. (Location 84)
the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up. Or else, eventually, to break down: (Location 105)
It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven— or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail. (Location 114)
In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. (Location 123)
Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. (Location 127)
the sense that despite all this activity, even the relatively privileged among us rarely get around to doing the right things. (Location 135)
Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters— and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. (Location 148)
“The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency,” writes the essayist Marilynne Robinson, (Location 151)
efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, (Location 158)
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 (Location 161)
we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse. (Location 172)
our modern way of thinking about time is so deeply entrenched that we forget it even is a way of thinking; we’re like the proverbial fish who have no idea what water is, because it surrounds them completely. (Location 193)
We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, “an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences,” (Location 195)
Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time. When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for “staying on top of things” and feel like we’re justifying our existence; if we let too many pass by unfilled, we feel we’ve wasted them. If we use containers labeled “work time” for the purposes of leisure, our employer may grow irritated. (He paid for those containers; they belong to him!) (Location 201)
Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. (Location 212)
we still occasionally encounter islands of deep time today— in those moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip “into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world.” (Location 224)
babies are the ultimate “task-oriented” beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the otherworldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.) (Location 229)
There’s one huge drawback in giving so little thought to the abstract idea of time, though, which is that it severely limits what you can accomplish. (Location 238)
As soon as you want to coordinate the actions of more than a handful of people, you need a reliable, agreed-upon method of measuring time. (Location 240)
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. (Location 246)
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. (Location 250)
Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used— and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. (Location 260)
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. (Location 263)
your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, (Location 270)
The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time— instead of just being time, you might say— it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.” (Location 273)
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 raised: to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.) (Location 277)
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. (Location 279)
my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances. (Location 310)
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. (Location 313)
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. (Location 333)
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.”) (Location 339)
the more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time— and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value. (Location 349)
The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty. (Location 351)
the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: 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. (Location 353)
limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do— and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. (Location 360)
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. (Location 362)
It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”— which is really just another way of trying to feel in control— in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. (Location 364)
the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something— indeed, on almost everything— is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. (Location 366)
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. (Location 368)
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. (Location 372)
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. (Location 375)
letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. (Location 378)
Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. (Location 381)
fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers (Location 389)
Charles Garfield Lott Du Cann wrote a short book, Teach Yourself to Live, in which he recommended the limit-embracing life, (Location 392)
you truly don’t have time for everything you want to do, or feel you ought to do, or that others are badgering you to do, then, well, you don’t have time— no matter how grave the consequences of failing to do it all might prove to be. (Location 418)
it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming to-do list. You’ll do what you can, you won’t do what you can’t, and the tyrannical inner voice insisting that you must do everything is simply mistaken. (Location 419)
would mean confronting the painful truth of our limitations. We would be forced to acknowledge that 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. (Location 422)
the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important— or just for enough of what feels important— is that you definitely never will. (Location 448)
there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel “on top of things,” or make time for everything that matters, simply by getting more done. (Location 451)
if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. (Location 454)
when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; (Location 460)
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. (Location 463)
In the contemporary version, Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back, and take a deep breath, before hearing a familiar ping: “You have new messages…” (Location 473)
every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe. (Location 475)
negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving them time: people find alternative solutions to the problems they were nagging you to solve, or the looming crisis they were emailing about never materializes.) (Location 478)
it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email. The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.” (Location 479)
stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes matters worse. 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, (Location 489)
You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count. (Location 492)
“existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. (Location 498)
secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. (Location 506)
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 missing out on almost all of that future. (Location 507)
The more we can accelerate our ability to go to different places, see new things, try new foods, embrace various forms of spirituality, learn new activities, share sensual pleasures with others whether it be in dancing or sex, experience different forms of art, and so on, the less incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future— that is, the closer we come to having a truly “fulfilled” life, in the literal sense of one that is as filled full of experiences as it can possibly be. (Location 511)
you find yourself pitched straight back into the (Location 523)
internet makes this all much more agonizing, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time— so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it. (Location 526)
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. (Location 532)
The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. (Location 537)
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. (Location 540)
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. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else. (Location 543)
Commonly, these will be things that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” (Location 547)
instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, (Location 563)
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. (Location 569)
the seductive lure of convenience. Entire industries now thrive on the promise of helping us cope with having an overwhelming amount to do by eliminating or accelerating tedious and time-consuming chores. But the result— in an irony that shouldn’t be too surprising by now— is that life gets subtly worse. (Location 574)
smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. (Location 584)
Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. (Location 591)
the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can stay home, order food on Seamless, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing so— (Location 599)
“When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone,” Wu points out, “waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating.” As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain. (Location 604)
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. (Location 628)
The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world, Heidegger asserts in his magnum opus, Being and Time, is how bafflingly astonishing it is that it’s there at all— the fact that there is anything rather than nothing. (Location 649)
Most philosophers and scientists spend their careers pondering the way things are: what sorts of things exist, where they come from, how they relate to each other, and so on. But we’ve forgotten to be amazed that things are in the first place— that “a world is worlding all around us,” as Heidegger puts it. This fact— the fact that there is being, to begin with— is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. (Location 651)
So bound up, in fact, that the two are synonymous: to be, for a human, is above all to exist temporally, in the stretch between birth and death, certain that the end will come, yet unable to know when. We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us. (Location 659)
every moment of a human existence is completely shot through with the fact of what Heidegger calls our “finitude.” 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. (Location 664)
situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited. For one thing, it’s limited in a retrospective sense, because I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life— but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (Location 670)
(The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) (Location 674)
Any finite life— even the best one you could possibly imagine— is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility. (Location 675)
for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life— becoming fully human— means facing up to that fact. (Location 677)
it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future. (Location 682)
Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all— (Location 688)
we embark on the futile attempt to “get everything done,” which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time— (Location 691)
If you really thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something. (Location 698)
This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it pitches them into a more authentic mode of being, in which everything suddenly feels more vividly meaningful. (Location 718)
if you can adopt the outlook we’re exploring here even just a little— if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get— you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Location 740)
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? (Location 748)
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. (Location 751)
when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed. (Location 767)
each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with. (Location 781)
making a choice— picking one item from the menu— far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that— actually, instead of an infinite number of other “thats”— because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. In other words, it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. (Location 783)
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. (Location 787)
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.” (Location 789)
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. (Location 790)
the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done— that’s never going to happen— but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it. (Location 801)
we need to learn to get better at procrastinating. Procrastination of some kind is inevitable: indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, (Location 802)
The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks. (Location 819)
The Art of Creative Neglect (Location 823)
pay yourself first when it comes to time. (Location 823)
If you take a portion of your paycheck the day you receive it and squirrel it away into savings or investments, or use it for paying off debts, you’ll probably never feel the absence of that cash; you’ll go about your business— buying your groceries, paying your bills— precisely as if you’d never had that portion of money to begin with. (Location 825)
like most people, you “pay yourself last” instead— buying what you need and hoping there’ll be some money remaining at the end to put into savings— you’ll usually find that there isn’t any. (Location 828)
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. (Location 834)
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.” (Location 841)
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. (Location 842)
limit your work in progress. (Location 846)
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. (Location 848)
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. 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. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.) (Location 851)
resist the allure of middling priorities. (Location 866)
Buffett’s advice is different: 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 organizes 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. (Location 870)
in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones— the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship— on which a finite life can come to grief. (Location 876)
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.” (Location 879)
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. (Location 884)
We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off— because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. (Location 900)
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.” (Location 942)
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” (Location 949)
Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling, in which he demonstrates, to start with, that we’re inconsistent when it comes to what we define as “settling.” 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. (Location 961)
we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. (Location 966)
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. (Location 979)
The point that Bergson made about the future— that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other— is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world. (Location 982)
That problem is distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus. (Location 1021)
Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character— a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and it’s the reason we ought to do so, too: what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is. (Location 1028)
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. (Location 1037)
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. (Location 1039)
the distracted person isn’t really choosing at all. Their attention has been commandeered by forces that don’t have their highest interests at heart. (Location 1048)
“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 savor 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. (Location 1070)
A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up. (Location 1091)
I love windswept Scottish beaches at dusk more passionately than anything I can ever remember encountering on social media. But only the latter is engineered to constantly adapt to my interests and push my psychological buttons, so as to keep my attention captive. No wonder the rest of reality sometimes seems unable to compete. (Location 1114)
The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like. (Location 1122)
In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” (Location 1125)
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. (Location 1171)
an important point about what’s going on when we succumb to distraction, which is that we’re motivated by the desire to try to flee something painful about our experience of the present. (Location 1174)
Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate interrupter”— that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away. (Location 1183)
It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter— the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives— that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? (Location 1189)
whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude— with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out. (Location 1195)
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. (Location 1213)
think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. (Location 1221)
The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise— to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold. (Location 1230)
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. (Location 1237)
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!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. (Location 1239)
the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining. (Location 1242)
“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.” 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. (Location 1250)
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. (Location 1253)
something a little unsettling about his law, because if it’s true— and it certainly seems to be, in my experience— it suggests something very strange: that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans. It’s as if our efforts to be good planners don’t merely fail but cause things to take longer still. Reality seems to fight back, an angry god determined to remind us that it retains the upper hand, no matter how much we try to supplicate to it by building extra slack into our schedules. (Location 1259)
Dad Suggests Arriving at Airport 14 Hours Early,” reads a headline in The Onion, (Location 1269)
The trouble with being so emotionally invested in planning for the future, though, is that while it may occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tends to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to allay. The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future— but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves, for the obvious reason that it’s still in the future. (Location 1279)
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again— as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. (Location 1291)
The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: (Location 1292)
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. And so your reach will always exceed your grasp. (Location 1296)
there’s something suspect about the idea of time as a thing we “have” in the first place. As the writer David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet. When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. “We assume we have three hours or three days to do something,” Cain writes, “but it never actually comes into our possession.” Any number of factors could confound your expectations, robbing you of the three hours you thought you “had” in which to complete an important work project: your boss could interrupt with an urgent request; the subway could break down; you could die. And even if you do end up getting the full three hours, precisely in line with your expectations, you won’t know this for sure until the point at which those hours have passed into history. (Location 1300)
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. (Location 1311)
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. (Location 1314)
Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem— the source of all the anxiety— is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful. (Location 1317)
Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours … We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.” (Location 1325)
Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. (Location 1330)
the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business— this one, here in the present. (Location 1348)
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— and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected. (Location 1365)
American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” 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. (Location 1377)
the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. The problem is one of instrumentalization. To use time, by definition, is to treat it instrumentally, as a means to an end, (Location 1385)
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.” (Location 1398)
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. (Location 1400)
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.” (Location 1458)
children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.” (Location 1468)
our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. (Location 1475)
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. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again— and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time. (Location 1479)
the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life— which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to (Location 1491)
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 toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. (Location 1510)
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. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now. (Location 1513)
By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life. (Location 1526)
more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not. (Location 1562)
the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” is the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps— to modify your relationship to the present moment in time, when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with. (Location 1568)
Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.” (Location 1571)
one of the sneakier problems with treating time solely as something to be used as well as possible, which is that we start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too. (Location 1593)
Enjoying leisure for its own sake— which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure— comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. 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. (Location 1594)
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. (Location 1604)
Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t. (Location 1612)
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. (Location 1615)
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 behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else. (Location 1617)
leisure was life’s center of gravity, the default state to which work was a sometimes inevitable interruption. (Location 1623)
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. The problem was that for the average mill or factory worker, industrial work wasn’t sufficiently meaningful to be the point of existence: you did it for the money, not for its intrinsic satisfactions. 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. (Location 1641)
spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it— to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. (Location 1656)
Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” (Location 1676)
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. 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. (Location 1714)
“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?” (Location 1743)
Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite 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. They have “no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end.” (Location 1764)
As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes. (Location 1769)
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. (Location 1775)
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. Hence it swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom.” (Location 1783)
We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone— to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself. (Location 1788)
In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. (Location 1795)
There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them. (Location 1809)
Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t— and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it. (Location 1839)
We tend to feel as though it’s our right to have things move at the speed we desire, and the result is that we make ourselves miserable— not just because we spend so much time feeling frustrated, but because chivying the world to move faster is frequently counterproductive anyway. (Location 1842)
Virtually every new technology, from the steam engine to mobile broadband, has permitted us to get things done more quickly than before. Shouldn’t this therefore have reduced our impatience, by allowing us to live at something closer to the speed we’d prefer? Yet since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still. (Location 1854)
The reason that technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding time. And so every reminder that in fact we can’t achieve such a level of control starts to feel more unpleasant as a result. (Location 1858)
Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”— but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like. (Location 1870)
the twelve-step philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, which asserts that alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain. (Location 1899)
drinking does temporarily numb unpleasant emotions. In the longer run, though, it backfires disastrously. Despite all your efforts to escape your experience, the truth is that you’re still where you are— stuck in your dysfunctional family or your abusive relationship, suffering from depression, or not confronting the aftermath of childhood trauma— and so the feelings soon return, requiring stronger drinks in order to numb them. Only now, the alcoholic has additional problems: as well as struggling to control her emotions through drink, she must also try to control her drinking, lest it cost her her relationship, her job, or even her life. She’ll probably start experiencing more friction at work and at home, and feel shame about her situation— all of which are triggers for further difficult emotions that are most easily numbed by more drink. This is the vicious spiral that constitutes the psychological core of an addiction. You know you must stop, but you also can’t stop, because the very thing that’s hurting you— alcohol— has come to feel like the only means of controlling the negative emotions that, in fact, your drinking is helping to cause. (Location 1904)
Perhaps it seems melodramatic to compare “addiction to speed,” as Brown calls our modern disease of accelerated living, to a condition as serious as alcoholism. Some people definitely get offended when she does so. But her point isn’t that compulsive hurry is as physically destructive as an excess of alcohol. It’s that the basic mechanism is the same. As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up— so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Location 1913)
just as alcohol gives the alcoholic a buzz, there’s an intoxicating thrill to living at warp speed. (Location 1922)
And whereas if you find yourself sliding into alcoholism, compassionate friends may try to intervene, to help steer you in the direction of a healthier life, speed addiction tends to be socially celebrated. Your friends are more likely to praise you for being “driven.” (Location 1924)
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. (Location 1927)
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. If you can let those fantasies crumble, Brown’s clients discovered, something unexpected happens, analogous to the alcoholic giving up his unrealistic craving for control in exchange for the gritty, down-to-earth, reality-confronting experience of recovery. Psychotherapists call it a “second-order change,” meaning that it’s not an incremental improvement but a change in perspective that reframes everything. 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. (Location 1936)
“You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,” Brown explains. 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. (Location 1943)
It’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience simply seems unappetizing. More specifically, though, it’s disturbingly passive. (Location 1950)
patience is a way of psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power, an attitude intended to help you to resign yourself to your lowly position, in theoretical hopes of better days to come. 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 fulfillment to the future. (Location 1954)
In his book The Road Less Traveled, the psychotherapist M. Scott Peck recounts a transformative experience of surrendering to the speed of reality— one that emphasizes that patience isn’t merely a more peaceful and present-oriented way to live but a concretely useful skill. (Location 2008)
if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself— (Location 2024)
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 toward 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. (Location 2026)
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. (Location 2036)
Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires— that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one. (Location 2043)
The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. (Location 2046)
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. (Location 2049)
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. (Location 2057)
The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. (Location 2063)
What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther 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. (Location 2074)
every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. (Location 2141)
the fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake. (Location 2167)
the Soviet government had inadvertently demonstrated how much of the value of time comes not from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in sync with the people you care about most. (Location 2195)
in a monograph called Keeping Together in Time. In it, he argues that synchronized movement, along with synchronized 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. (Location 2213)
as dancers know, when they lose themselves in the dance, synchrony is also a portal to another dimension— to that sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy, and time seems not to exist. (Location 2228)
the trouble with this kind of individualist freedom, as Judith Shulevitz points out, is that a society in thrall to it, as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself— (Location 2254)
For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and “on-demand scheduling,” (Location 2260)
grassroots politics— the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations— are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected— alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. (Location 2271)
“Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. (Location 2274)
you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. (Location 2286)
“Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had spent in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” (Location 2304)
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 fulfillment arriving at some distant point in the future, once you’ve gotten your life in order, or met the world’s criteria for success, and that instead the matter needs addressing now. (Location 2306)
“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. (Location 2373)
No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. (Location 2403)
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 (Location 2404)
is the substance I am made of,” writes Jorge Luis Borges. “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” (Location 2443)
A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional— as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve gotten it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, “into proper working order.” (Location 2447)
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? (Location 2483)
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. (Location 2484)
we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritize anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which offers its own gloomy but comforting sense that you’re doing something constructive to try to stay in control. (Location 2488)
James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” (Location 2491)
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. (Location 2495)
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? (Location 2498)
There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. (Location 2510)
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? (Location 2513)
A closely related way to postpone the confrontation with finitude— with the anxiety-inducing truth that this is it— is to treat your present-day life as part of a journey toward becoming the kind of person you believe you ought to become, (Location 2514)
But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.” (Location 2521)
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. (Location 2527)
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? (Location 2536)
It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on. 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. (Location 2537)
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— (Location 2547)
How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? (Location 2552)
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? (Location 2564)
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. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same. (Location 2566)
“Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. 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.” (Location 2570)
the “next and most necessary thing” is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. (Location 2577)
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— (Location 2603)
Embracing your limits means giving up hope that with the right techniques, and a bit more effort, you’d be able to meet other people’s limitless demands, realize your every ambition, excel in every role, or give every good cause or humanitarian crisis the attention it seems like it deserves. It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren’t coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn’t really it— that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you’ll feel truly confident that you have what it takes. (Location 2617)
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible— the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead. (Location 2645)
Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. (Location 2655)
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.) You’ll never get through all the tasks on the open list— but you were never going to in any case, and at least this way you’ll complete plenty of things you genuinely care about. (Location 2659)
Serialize, serialize, serialize. Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. (Location 2670)
Decide in advance what to fail at. (Location 2678)
You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But the great benefit of strategic underachievement— that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself— is that you focus that time and energy more effectively. (Location 2679)
there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting. (Location 2686)
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. (Location 2690)
Part of the problem here is an unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning in a sort of “productivity debt,” which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope that you might reach a zero balance by the evening. (Location 2694)
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. (Location 2695)
Consolidate your caring. (Location 2701)
Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things (here), but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile. (Location 2702)
consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry— not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care. (Location 2708)
Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. (Location 2711)
Seek out novelty in the mundane. (Location 2721)
“As each passing year converts … experience into automatic routine,” wrote William James, soon “the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” (Location 2726)
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. (Location 2731)
when presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity, (Location 2741)
Curiosity is a stance well suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike— whereas the stance of demanding a certain result is frustrated each time things fail to go your way. (Location 2743)
Not knowing what’s coming next— which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future— presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can. (Location 2746)
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. (Location 2750)
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” (Location 2760)
training yourself to “do nothing” really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you— to let things be as they are. Young teaches “Do Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. (Location 2766)
