Four Thousand Weeks

capitalism gets its energy from the permanent anxiety of striving for more,

important thing we can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance.

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

when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning.

a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.

We tend to feel as though it’s our right to have things move at the speed we desire, and the result is that we make ourselves miserable – not just because we spend so much time feeling frustrated, but because chivvying the world to move faster is frequently counterproductive anyway.

As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.

When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.

‘You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward,’ Brown explains. You give up ‘demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes’. You breathe a sigh of relief, and as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.

The talented but self-effacing employee who ‘waits patiently’ for a promotion, we tend to feel, will be waiting a long time: she ought to be trumpeting her achievements instead.

When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks.

if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself

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. So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel – correctly – as though we weren’t in control of the situation.

we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all. Yet the state of having no problems is obviously never going to arrive.

Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires – that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of one.

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.

having large amounts of time but no opportunity to use it collaboratively isn’t just useless but actively unpleasant

every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s.

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realise we were carrying in the first place.

If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.