Four Thousand Weeks

We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work–life balance; or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything, so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life – because you needn’t risk the upsetting exper

The rest of this book is an exploration of a saner way of relating to time and a toolbox of practical ideas for doing so, drawn from the work of philosophers, psychologists and spiritual teachers who all rejected the struggle to dominate or master it.

seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place. There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of respondin

secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life. And when people start believing in progress – in the idea that history is headed towards an ever more perfect future – they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing ou

more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by

She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. ‘They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can.

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

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

That discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it, though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.