Happy 2024, and a book summary- Four Thousand Weeks

Happy 2024! I started the last year by sharing my personal word of the year and listing a few things I hoped to do. It was a very helpful exercise and I do believe it guided me through the year. 

So here I am doing it again. My word for 2024 is STRETCH. It is an overarching theme that I hope will guide me all year and coax me to be slightly braver and a little more comfortable with discomfort. The graphic below shows a few tangible areas in which I would like to stretch a little- a homebody with a slightly adventurous travel plan, a couch potato running a slightly long race, a distracted human stretching to understand her mind a little better. 

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One of the last books I read in 2023 was Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (published in 2021). It seems like a good book to discuss on this day, when we're marking the passage of time. The four thousand weeks in the title refers to the number of weeks in an average human lifespan of about 80 years. The premise of the book is that standard productivity advice is a trap and that becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, trying to clear the decks just makes them fill up again. 

There's quite a bit I did not agree with, but this book has some gems. Some of my favorite passages discuss the relationship between human life and time. 

• German philosopher Heidegger: The most fundamental thing we fail to appreciate about the world is how astonishing it is that it is there at all- the fact that there is anything rather than nothing.
• It is amazing that “a world is worlding all around us”.
• We tend to speak about having a limited amount of time. It makes more sense to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us. We don’t get or have time; instead, we are time.
• Argentinian writer Borges: "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river."
• A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time can only end up feeling provisional.
• Each day can feel like something we have to get through, en route to a calmer and more fulfilling time in the future, which never actually arrives.
• Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz: "There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life." (This one really hit home for me- the feeling that this is a dress rehearsal and real life will start at some point in the future.)
• Life is not a dress rehearsal. You may never feel like you know what you’re doing, in work, parenting or anything else. It is liberating to reflect that everyone else is in the same boat, whether they’re aware of it or not.

A lot of this book also reiterated the philosophy that I have been encountering in several places lately, about paying attention to the present moment.

• Understand that you are guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer. Focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you do actually have time for. 
• What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.
• Attention IS life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing more than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.
• We are eager for the slightest excuse to turn away from what we’re doing in order to escape how disagreeable it feels.
• The inner urge toward distraction is the ultimate interrupter.
• We do not feel like doing most of the things that we genuinely desire to accomplish. (Painfully relatable, y'all)
• The past is uncontrollable and the future is unknowable. Confine your attention to the only portion of time that really is our business- the one in the present.
• Start by noticing that you are in fact living in the moment whether you like it or not.
• Living more fully in the present may simply be a matter of finally realizing that you never had any option but to be here now.
• Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti: “I don’t mind what happens”- live without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it. (What a powerful mantra, and one I will be repeating to myself to fight against my impulse to control, orchestrate and "will" all the big and small things in life: I don't mind what happens.)

This book also had these reminders:

• Develop a taste for having problems: problems are simply demands that need addressing and the substance of life, not an impediment. You will never reach the state of not having problems. 
• A blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: 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 couldn't care less.
• Human history has unfolded in the blink of an eye, our own lives are a minuscule flicker.
• The realization of your insignificance frees you to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.
• You are also free to consider that many of the things you’re already doing are more meaningful than you supposed.
• Get the hang of hopelessness. The world is already broken. Our 4 thousand weeks are already running out. The world is already filled with uncertainty and tragedy. You cannot do everything that needs doing but you can focus on a few things that count.
• Are you holding yourself to impossible standards of productivity or performance? Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Pick up a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.

Finally, one of my favorite quotes in this book is by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: "One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way. Quietly do the next and most necessary thing."

If you want to read the review for this book in the NYTimes- I'm linking the full gift article here. 

I hope we all have a good year ahead of us. Do you have a word for the year, or any new year's resolutions?