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.”’

This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: what would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

‘digital nomad’ is a misnomer – and an instructive one. Traditional nomads aren’t solitary wanderers who just happen to lack laptops; they’re intensely group-focused people who, if anything, have less personal freedom than members of settled tribes, since their survival depends on their working together successfully. And in their more candid moment

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

The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it – to lever ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.

tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centred judgements are part of what psychologists call the ‘egocentricity bias’, and they make good sense from