#four thousand weeks

[e26mi]

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.

[remembertheplunge]

Above is a photo of a page in my 2021 journal. It includes an original entry written on 11/3/2021 and two margin notes dated 12/8/2021:

11/3/2021

"The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly, short." From the book Four Thousand Weeks. Written at Preservation Coffee House Modesto, California on Wednesday 11/3/2021 at 4:46pm

My margin notes 12/8/2021

The young dread aging. They can't know that without it, life lacks richness and depth.

No one tells you when you are young about the rich evolution of aging. There is no language to convey it. And, we live in different universe's, young and old.

End of entries

[luxe-pauvre]

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 paralysed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance — a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being. The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d like them to, or that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want. The philosopher Costica Bradatan illustrates the point by means of a fable about an architect from Shiraz in Persia who designed the world’s most beautiful mosque: a breathtaking structure, dazzlingly original yet classically well proportioned, awe-inspiring in its grandeur yet wholly unpretentious. All those who saw the architectural plans wanted to buy them, or steal them; famous builders begged him to let them take on the job. But the architect locked himself in his study and stared at the plans for three days and nights — then burned them all. He might have been a genius, but he was also a perfectionist: the mosque of his imagination was perfect, and it agonised him to contemplate the compromises that would be involved in making it real. Even the greatest of builders would inevitably fail to reproduce his plans absolutely faithfully; nor would he be able to protect his creation from the ravages of time — from the physical decay or marauding armies that would eventually reduce it to dust. Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn’t do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability. Bradatan argues that when we find ourselves procrastinating on something important to us, we’re usually in some version of this same mindset. 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. Something — our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people — will always render our creation less than perfect. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax — because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

[winter-tospring]

Indeed, your present, however it may be, is precious:

but also, when you try too hard to BE IN THE NOW OR ELSE.... you're putting pressure on yourself and the moment too:

So...? Appreciate the moment, without overthinking it so much that you feel like you're failing at that. Just be in it, see it as unique, as The Moment of truth, the ever flowing moment of life itself, and be yourself in it, and that'll be enough. There's no extra magical thing you need to give it other than your attention.

Quotes are from Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman

[kjmckendry]

Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I've been reading a lot more this year than I have in a while and I thought I'd share some of my favorite books every now and then.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman is an eye opening look at how we really think about what we do each day and how we end up spending most of our time. The average person lives approximately 4,000 weeks and that of course is if you're lucky to live into your 80s. That doesn't really seem like very many weeks. For me, that means I'm more than half done. I only have about 1296 weeks left.

My task is to think about how I really want to spend those. Maybe some days I still want to sit back and watch some football with my husband or take a nice long nap, but for me the point is that I want to be consciously making those decisions. I want to be present and choose what is important to me each moment.

[remindmetoreed]

Just finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and I really enjoyed this. He discusses embracing your finitude and how you will essentially never be able to master time management...and that's okay, because its a myth. highly recommend and it was a great book to start the new semester with!

[whosebob]

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

Life Is Short. What Are You Going to Do About That? - The New York Times

[noodledesk]

When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks