Finitude and Chance
Tuesday, November 19
From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks
This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead. And because you can’t dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get, you’ll never feel that you’re securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and ready for whatever comes down the pike.
A few days ago, I mentioned the calendar in my bedroom with dots representing every week of my life. This birds-eye view of the (small, countable, finite) number of weeks in our lives was the inspiration for the title of Burkeman’s book. Or, technically, I think it’s actually reversed: it was Burkeman’s book that inspired the creation of the poster.
In any case, the thrust of the book isn’t that, somehow, by tracking our limited time and making every effort to be intentional with it, we’ll manage to gain control of our lives. Burkeman’s conclusion is the opposite: despite our best efforts, we will never have enough time for all the things we find worthwhile.
We’ll always be in triage, and most of the valuable ways we could spend our time — the projects worth pursuing, the people worth meeting, the things worth learning — will simply never happen. While it’s tempting to try to optimize the few weeks we do have by always pursuing the most important opportunities and never feeling that we’ve wasted a moment, we simply don’t have that sort of control (of ourselves or the world around us).
We can’t change this, so we might as well embrace it, and cherish the positive experiences that we do get.