An antidote to hustle culture: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
What does a book about time have to do with our calling?
I was completely unprepared by how much this book about time would be relevant to our topic. I expected it to be good, but it was so much more helpful than I expected. It seems obvious to me now (now that I’ve finished the book, of course) that our relationship to time profoundly shapes how we go about seeking a meaningful life and fulfilling our purpose.
In recent years I have noticed a gradually increasing uneasiness in my relationship to time. And I have spoken to a few of our readers who share this experience. It’s almost inevitable that this will happen when we acknowledge that our lives are finite and we want to make the most of it. Y’know, no regrets and all that.
I’ve spoken to friends about this phenomena and noticed the role that climate anxiety and hustle culture plays in exacerbating this feeling of generalised rushiness.
I enjoyed this book so much, because it managed to address these seemingly insoluble issues in a generous and accessible way. So here are some of it’s major points, captured in a list of excerpts, that I hope can point you in the direction of peace while on the journey of making a meaningful life.
PURSUING EFFICIENCY IS A TRAP
Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, its easier to make better ones. You begin to grasp that when there is 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.
There is nothing wrong with pursuing efficiency. But the way that we pursue efficiency matters. Productivity hacks—think #lifehacks—implicitly suggest that if we follow their advice, then we will get enough of the important things done to be at peace with time. It’s a fantasy because the definition of ‘what needs doing’ always expands to fill whatever time is available. Pursuing efficiency backfires in several ways:
It creates more work for us: respond to more email, receive more email.
Pits us against reality: life is inherently chaotic and impossible to fully control and anticipate/predict.
There is no end-point to the worship of efficiency. We have to decouple our peace of mind from the fantasy of ‘getting it all done’. He says:
You have to accept that there will always be too much to do. That you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world turn at your preferred speed… in exchange for accepting all that, you get to actually be here.
PURSUING EFFICIENCY WILL BACKFIRE
I love and enjoy being efficient, but Oliver helped me see that the pursuit of efficiency alone runs against some other crucial things that matter in life.
The points that really struck home for me were about community and patience. Firstly, on community:
As with money, it’s good to have plenty of time, all else being equal. But having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own. To do countless important things with time—to socialise, go on dates, bring up children, launch businesses, build political movements, make technological advances—it has to be synchronised with other people’s. In fact, having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant – which is why, for premodern people, the worst of all punishments was to be physically ostracised, abandoned in some remote location where you couldn’t fall in with the rhythms of the tribe.
Time is valuable to the degree is syncs up with others too. It’s not individually siloed. You know that common experience of not being able to find time in schedules to meet up with friends? We could ask, is it that we don’t have the time, or that we’ve constructed lives which can’t be made to mesh?
Time is not best seen as a resource to hoard for yourself out of a sense of missing out, because missing out includes communal activities and joys - “your time can be too much your own”.
And finally, some of the things that we want to achieve or pursue will require patience. And, although patience is a power to not to do—the refusal to quit, the ability to not respond—it will be necessary for us to recognise and respond to our calling:
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 fulfilment to the future.
Sooo good. Can’t believe I hadn’t noticed these things before.
TIME IS NOT AN OBJECT THAT YOU HAVE BUT AN EXPERIENCE THAT YOU ARE
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…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 for that work project…
You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past.
The way we think about time can completely change our experience of it. Oliver makes the case that we are all becoming such experts at instrumentalising our time—that is, seeing it as a sort of object that we can own, grasp and use for a specific future outcome—that it’s distracting us from the actual experience of time itself. He puts it this way:
ON CAPITALISTS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO TIME:
…seeing things in this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist countries are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time… but in focussing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning even as their bank balances increase.
The point is that time is not something that we have, but something that we are. If we only think of how we use our time to create a future outcome, then our present experience is postponed. We come to wish that we were somewhere else, doing something more productive or purposeful or fun, when in reality the most wasteful thing we can do with our lives is to fail to inhabit the present moment.
We musn’t get caught getting ready to live.
FIND SOLACE IN ATELIC ACTIVITIES
Telos in latin means the ultimate object or aim. So the telos of a knife would be ‘to cut’. It follows then, that a ‘telic’ activity is something which you do in order to complete it: like an exam. No one is out here dedicating their life to taking exams, purely for the thrill of it — to hell with the results!
So, you see where we’re going here. Atelic activities are activities which you don’t do for the sole purpose of getting them done. When you say, ‘I’m going to take a walk’, it would be quite counter-productive to try to complete the walk as fast as possible because the purpose of the walk is to be on the walk, not to have done the walk.
A country walk, like listening to a favourite 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.” And so the only reason to do them is for themselves alone…
I found this concept of Atelic activities very interesting, and I wondered if it could be a good guide for creating better goals. James Clear in Atomic Habits says we should choose identity-based goals instead of accomplishment based one’s so that they are rewarding in the process and don’t have a fixed end point. This means that instead of saying “I want to run a marathon”, we would say “I want to become a runner”, which is much more immediately rewarding and therefore motivating.
We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone – to spend some of our time, in other words, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.
It occurs to me, that once we notice this unhealthy pattern of motivation in our own life, then it can empower us to take charge of situations where we cannot choose a different activity. If we recognise our rushing to the end, then we can release ourselves from rushing to the finish and shift our attention to be more mindful, contemplative and present to the task.
IN SUMMARY
This book is difficult to summarise because it makes a kind of cumulative case. It takes apart bad ways of thinking about time, piece by piece to leave you with an overall feeling of calm.
My takeaway though, is that no matter how efficient you become, it will never make you at peace with time. A proper relationship with time begins by embracing our limitations as finite beings: if we can accept that we won’t be able to get everything we want done, then we won’t get sucked into the productivity spiral of doom.
There’s more practical advice from this book that I couldn’t include here. I look forward to sharing that in a future post.
MORE FROM OTHERS
This video from NewelOfKnowledge picks out some equally interesting, but different points from my own.
A powerful critique of the book here. Brad makes the point that much of Oliver’s advice is only helpful from within a framework of an ultimate divine purpose, and it offers little to those struggling with existential despair.