Book review: 4000 Weeks

So one of the books I read this week was 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

I think it's a book a lot of people in gemspace would find interesting given how many of us here are concerned with how our time, our attention, our lives are all spent.

So, basically, it's an anti-productivity book. The premise behind the title is that the average lifespan is about four thousand weeks. (Of course it's more complicated than that because of demographics, class, where you live, &c. but let's just accept that as rough simplified premise.) If you're like me you hear that and think "Oh %&@# that's not very long at all!!!" and that's sorta the point.

This is a book that's about accepting our finiteness, our limitations, the fact that we can't do everything we want to do. It's also about how capitalism makes us feel like we can't have leisure, like we can't just let ourselves exist quietly doing something that doesn't have a point. One of the things he talks about is that we don't get to have "atelic" activities, that is things that don't have an end goal: in short, hobbies.

At least in the West, though maybe globally at this point, we've been pushed to monetize everything towards productivity for our bosses. Even things like meditation, sleep, and healthy eating have been repackaged to us under the guise that it will make us better more attentive workers. This book strictly rejects those motivations.

It's an interesting book. At once having points that seemed rather obvious along with ones that were subtle and surprising, like the idea that the problem with the "digital nomad" lifestyle where one treks around the world working from their laptop is fundamentally limited because it doesn't allow for building community. He argues that individual leisure is nice but communities doing things for their collective happiness is something much more powerful, that being synchronized in time to ritual and place is incredibly important to us but that our lifestyles have been built to preclude having it.

I don't agree with everything in it. I think in the chapter The Watermelon Problem he downplays too much the importance of habits in how we spend our attention. It's true, as he says, that just cutting yourself off from social media or the like will only go so far if you can't train yourself to sit with the discomfort that comes from being undistracted and in-the-moment but I think our habits are still an important part of who we are and how we function. We tend to move along well-worn paths and fixing those paths to be inline with our values is, I think, a big part of the overall solution.

But, yeah, it's a book that I think was very much worth reading and was a pretty short, breezy, read.

Comments, thoughts, random urges to mail a stranger?

feel free to mail me at left_adjoint@rawtext.club