Four Thousand Weeks

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. (Location 563)

The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the American historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to ‘labour-saving’ devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. (Location 693)

because when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. (Location 1023)

There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we become obsessed with ‘using it well’, whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. (Location 1688)

Take education. What a hoax.3 As a child, you are sent to nursery school. In nursery school, they say you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up and second grade and third grade … In high school, they tell you you’re getting ready for college. And in college you’re getting ready to go out into the business world … [People are] like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive. (Location 1720)

But what struck me most forcefully was how entirely preoccupied with the future both sets of experts were – indeed, how virtually all the parenting advice I encountered, in books and online, seemed utterly focused on doing whatever was required to produce the happiest or most successful or economically productive older children and adults later (Location 1746)

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called ‘purposiveness’ – on using time well for future purposes, or on ‘personal productivity’, he might have said, had he been writing today – is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. ‘The “purposive” man,’ Keynes wrote, ‘is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time.10 He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.’ Because he never has to ‘cash out’ the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he’s truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life. (Location 1833)

De Graaf had put his finger on one of the sneakier problems with treating time solely as something to be used as well as possible, which is that we start to experience pressure to use our leisure time productively, too. Enjoying leisure for its own sake – which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure – comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (‘Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,’ reads the headline on one hugely popular New York Times piece).1 But a more surreptitious form of the same attitude has also infected your friend who always seems to be training for a 10K, yet who’s apparently incapable of just going for a run: (Location 1914)

If it seems uncharitable to accuse Steel of being pathologically unable to relax, I ought to clarify that the malady is widespread. I’ve suffered from it as acutely as anyone; and unlike Steel, I can’t claim to have brought joy to millions of readers of romantic fiction as a happy side effect. Social psychologists call this inability to rest ‘idleness aversion’, which makes it sound like just another minor behavioural foible; but in his famous theory of the ‘Protestant work ethic’, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. (Location 2006)

To rest for the sake of rest – to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake – entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing towards a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. ‘We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,’ (Location 2031)

Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work.15 The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ‘It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.’ This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation – at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. (Location 2050)

while capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more, (Location 2063)

Of course, it’s not my place to assert that Salcedo isn’t as happy as he claims. Perhaps he is. But I do know that I wouldn’t be, were I living his life. The problem, I think, is that his lifestyle is predicated on a misunderstanding about the value of time. To borrow from the language of economics, Salcedo sees time as a regular kind of ‘good’ – a resource that’s more valuable to you the more of it you command. (Money is the classic example: it’s better to control more of it than less.) Yet the truth is that time is also a ‘network good’, one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours. Telephone networks are the obvious example here: telephones are valuable to the extent that others also have them. (Location 2468)

The question is, What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty – the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks. On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the world: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavours that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when. Strategies for achieving the first kind of freedom are the sort of thing that fills books of productivity advice: ideal morning routines, strict personal schedules, and tactics for limiting how long you spend answering email each day, plus homilies on the importance of ‘learning to say no’ – all of them functioning as bulwarks against the risk that other people might exert too much influence over how your time gets used. And undoubtedly these have a role to play: we do need to set firm boundaries so that bullying bosses, exploitative employment arrangements, narcissistic spouses or a guilty tendency towards people-pleasing don’t end up dictating the course of every day. (Location 2619)

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life.2 For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is [a relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the unique human that one is. (Location 2843)

This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But ‘at a certain age’, writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, ‘it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. (Location 2911)