Four Thousand Weeks

We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race towards a resolution – any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re ‘dealing with’ the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control.

alcoholism is fundamentally a result of attempting to exert a level of control over your emotions that you can’t ever attain.

choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight.

“You see, I don’t mind what happens.”’

You might think of it as ‘cosmic insignificance therapy’: when things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life – relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries – shrink instantly down to i

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore

If you really thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something. ‘If I believed that my life would last forever,’ Hägglund writes, ‘I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be sei

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. 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 harde

Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfil. Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doe

To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure – by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation – was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its o