Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
Life is short, the universe doesn't give a damn, and you won't get around to doing most of the things you want to. In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that accepting these facts will lead to a more fulfilling life. No matter how many productivity books you read, life hacks you employ, or apps you download, you will never have enough time to accomplish everything, so you might as well embrace your finitude. If you live to 80, you only get 4000 weeks. Being more than halfway through those, I initially recoiled in horror from the title of this book. I refused to read it, but then Burkeman turned up on Sam Harris' Waking Up podcast and his calm, softly spoken reason had me hooked. It seems counterintuitive, but the man's message of mortality is inspiring and joyful. I've read the book twice since.
Burkeman lives in the UK, so I organised to zoom him at 3am our time. The alarm wakes me at 2.50am. I set up, excited to meet a newfound mentor. He didn't show. I wasn't angry. If there's one man I don't begrudge standing me up so he can allot meaningful time for his family, it's Oliver. When I get him on a few days later, he's apologetic, friendly and engaging. We only have a short time together, so we get straight into the meaningful stuff.
You point out that we humans have a terrifyingly short time on Earth. Why should we stop running from that fact and lean into it?
The tough love response to that question is, like it or not, that's the way it is. It's not being a finite human that's the problem. It's the conviction that there must be some way around this situation. There isn't. You could instead feel grateful that you have any time at all. I believe if we face our finitude, we can cultivate a fulfilling life.
Why is conventional thinking on productivity a frustrating way to master the time we have?
I think it holds out this promise that there is a way of getting on top of absolutely everything that we think of. That there's enough time for everything that matters. But I argue in the book that there's no effective limit to the number of things we could do. If you attempt to do it all, you're just not gonna get around to the things that really do matter to you. In a finite life, you will have to choose some and not all. There isn't a fit between what feels like it matters and what we have time for. You're going to fail to do all sorts of things that matter. If you can really get that into your skull, it's liberating. Right? I don't need to beat myself up for leaving some things on the table. That's just being human.
That leads to your point that FOMO (Fear of missing out) is mostly pointless because we're going to miss out on most things anyway.
Fear of missing out assumes there might be a way of avoiding missing out. But of course, we're inevitably gonna miss out on almost everything. You don't feel as anxious about the possibility of missing out if you understand that missing out infuses every hour of your day. Every choice you make rules something else out. This leads to the possibility of the joy of missing out. Having a real awareness of what you're sacrificing in order to do something lends more meaning to that thing you have chosen.
Tech advances appear to make it possible to do more of the things we want to, but probably lead to the opposite.
Yeah, it's always this ironic fight between the capacity of new technologies to enable us to do things faster and the fact that new technologies bring us a greater quantity of things that feel like they need to be done.
I've been trying to articulate an idea for the longest time about the dehumanising nature of tech efficiency. Tech looks to remove frictions on how we pay, communicate, travel etc. This usually involves removing the other humans. But human interaction is the point of life; it's what makes us happy. The most time-efficient and productive way to feed would be a device that puts a drip in your arm while you sleep. Sitting and eating around a table with people you love may not be the most efficient use of your time, but it is a human way to do things.
I think that's a great point. If you take anything to its ultimate level of efficiency, all sorts of things become meaningless. I write in the book about hiking in the country. Obviously, the most efficient way to get from the start point to the end point when you're walking in a loop is not to start in the first place. More and more, we are being sold less human contact to make things work better. It may seem easier at the time but may be wrong in terms of your deeper need to belong to a community. We are pretty bad at understanding what it is that makes us happy. As a result, we're too ready to get rid of things that feel like irritations when these things are the things that actually make us happy.
Why is it empowering that our lives don't matter to the universe?
People hold back from doing things they would find meaningful because the stakes seem too high. You don't put yourself out there professionally or romantically because it would be terrible if you misjudge it. Putting your life in perspective lowers the stakes very quickly. If you acknowledge that in 200 years, nobody will care about anything you ever did, then why not do it? You can even look at it in a shorter time frame. Some of the things you're wound up about today, no one will care about in a week, not even you. It seems wise to attempt to spend life for the present moment rather than for the future. There is the type of thinking that Steve Jobs endorsed: that we are "here to put a dent in the universe". But if you think you have to matter on a cosmic level, like that, it sets the bar for what counts as a meaningful life much too high. It leaves no time for things we know are meaningful, like raising kids, being a good spouse, or spending time in nature. I've nothing against people setting out to create the next iPhone or be the next Shakespeare. I just think we've got a problematic cultural sense that that's what really counts. I'd rather see it as an umbrella of things that matter, including lots of things that are not attempting to be significant in an impossible universal way.
If we accept that it's impossible to get everything done, that making a dent in the universe is pointless and that we will have to miss out on many things. How do we decide what to do with this small amount of time?
I don't think it's helpful or my job to list what people should do with their lives. I just hope my book can clear the fog a little bit. Help people see their time differently. Having said that, one of the things I love and mention in the book is from James Hollis, the psychotherapist; he suggests you ask yourself whether a given path or choice in life enlarges you or diminishes you. It doesn't work for everybody, but many people, including myself, find that a powerful way to connect to something intuitively. That sense of does this choice enlarge me? You usually know on some unspoken level if it does. That's a good way to distinguish between options, but I totally refuse to give the list of things that you should be doing with your limited time here. That's up to you.
With that, I let him get back to the important business of his family barbecue. Oliver Burkeman has never been to New Zealand but chose a beautiful shot looking out over Lake Wakatipu towards The Remarkables for the cover of his book. I've been holidaying in Queenstown since I was a kid. I know that view well. I've spent hours in that very spot relaxing and talking rubbish with family and friends. Huge coincidence. Time well spent.
• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
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