Four Thousand Weeks

we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

Workers got up with the sun and slept at dusk, the lengths of their days varying with the seasons. There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time, and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that – for e

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

it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.

as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of d

Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character – a systematic inner failure to use one’s time on what one claimed to value the most. Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward, and i

The American political theorist Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling, in which he demonstrates, to start with, that we’re inconsistent when it comes to what we define as ‘settling’. Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settli

to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit.

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.8 This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.’