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- Four Thousand Weeks (Part I)
Four Thousand Weeks (Part I)
Matt Karamazov
June 07, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 31 minutes
*People who feel completely overpowered by the escalating expectations of the modern world, how much there is to do, and how little time there is to do it in.
*Working professionals seeking solutions to their persistent overwhelm, and those of us who want to find a better way to be productive, without sacrificing our sleep, sanity, or our personal standards of excellence.
*Anyone who feels as though there’s more to life than increasing its speed, and who find themselves seeking answers to the most difficult, yet most important questions of how we spend our limited time on this planet.
“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.
Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experience you actually do have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
Wharton professor and leading expert on motivation and meaning Adam Grant calls this the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree! In the opening pages of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman gets things started with a jolting, yet indisputable claim:
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short...But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
There's just something about putting a specific number on it that makes the idea of our finitude and our smallness so visceral, so affecting, and so real.
Here in these pages, we're no longer able to live under the delusion that we’ll ever be able to get everything done; the progress reports, the product launches, the career planning, the kids' events and extracurriculars - we will simply never be able to fit a full, meaningful human life into just four thousand weeks. Unless...
You see, Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” one, by which I mean operating by negation – focusing on eliminating rather than adding.
He suggests abandoning the idea that we could ever live up to the impossible expectations imposed on us by ourselves and others, rather than continuing to stack impossible commitments and doomed promises into a calendar that’s already bursting at the seams.
The fact is that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything. The very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly-short lives on trivia and nonsense. As Burkeman says:
“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes."
Efficiency is a trap, he says, and "productivity" is just a giant treadmill in disguise. When you're known as someone who responds to every single email within a half-hour, you're going to have more people emailing you.
When people start to learn that you'll never say no to a request, you'll start to get asked for more favors. And the more you think you can do in a single day, the more you'll expect from yourself in a single day, regardless of whether your expectations actually line up with reality.
So just give up!
Giving up, however, absolutely does not equate to admitting defeat.
Giving up the idea that you'll be able to do everything frees you to consider what you would do if you wanted your choices to have the maximum positive impact. Narrowing your options and committing to one choice confers meaning on the choice you do make.
In much the same way, sunlight warms the entire earth; but, focused through a single magnifying glass, the sun's rays are incendiary. Your attention is like the rays of the sun, and whatever you pay attention to becomes your life. What you pay attention to in your life grows, and it's our current poverty of attention - how we just give it away to anyone who asks for some of it - that’s diminishing us all.
Because those two options, ultimately, are the result of every choice we make in life. Every choice either enlarges us or diminishes us, and what we pay attention to, what we make time for, matters. It matters like you wouldn't believe, and that's one of the reasons why Four Thousand Weeks is such a special book. It's about making the most of the limited time we do have, and giving up the losing fight against a universe within which our time is finite and immeasurably valuable.
The book also goes into the idea of what's known elsewhere as "the adjacent possible." It's a term that refers to the next available action we're able to take, and it's incredibly relevant to our discussion here. Our choices at this moment determine which choices are available to us in the next, and this is a dizzying type of freedom that can be easier, psychologically, to ignore.
Our options for what to do with our four thousand weeks are near-limitless, and whenever we take any action whatsoever, we're forever closing off possibilities we once had and opening ourselves up to new possibilities that were closed to us before we took that first action - that's the adjacent possible.
It's taking this job, in this city, rather than another job in a different city. It's dating this person as opposed to this other person, which would lead to you having a completely different child with that person, who will grow up with completely different interests, all leading to you making - and being offered - completely different decisions for the rest of your life! That's a terrifying responsibility!
We can try to escape it by trying to fit everything into this one, four-thousand-week life, or we can take Burkeman's negative approach: we can embrace the limitations, and thereby confer absolute, perfect meaning on the choice we do end up making.
Even the people who try to fit every possible pleasure and experience into their lives are caught in the exact same trap as the workaholic who believes they can answer every email, and the same trap as the single parent who believes they can manage everyone's expectations and keep everyone happy forever.
All of the individuals above are equally doomed to failure.
In Four Thousand Weeks, however, we're reminded that the point of managing our time - to the extent that that can be done at all - isn't just to "do" more; it’s to show up, fully alive, in a world that's just bursting with wonder.
We are more than our to-do lists, and there's more to life than the walls of our self-imposed cubicles. We’ll explore all of these concepts and more in the Key Ideas that follow, but suffice it to say, Burkeman and Bradbury both get it:
“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
#1: What’s the Point of It All?
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
This right here is the core of the book. It's why Burkeman's approach is so much deeper - and more enlightening - than most of the other approaches to time management that we've all seen in recent years.
Four Thousand Weeks is about life, and about deepening the quality of our experience, rather than just stuffing more and more into it, trying to get it all done. Because we’ll never get it all done, and that’s the point. There’s just too much “stuff” to do, not enough time to do it in, and it’s that disconnect that Burkeman identifies so persuasively.
When we're so extremely focused on the doing, and not focused enough on the why, our quality of life suffers immensely, and we turn ourselves into walking, talking to-do lists - rather than fully alive, engaged human beings.
The world is more beautiful than most of us can even imagine - and there's certainly more depth and resonance available to experience than we ever will in our whole lives. So why do we sell ourselves so cheaply? What’s the point of all this frenetic doing?!
#2: The Point of Being Rich
“It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.
As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.”
As they say, even if you do somehow manage to keep up with the Joneses, they’ll just refinance! But seriously, freedom is the new status symbol, and the barrier to its attainment is this idea we have that more "stuff" is the answer.
Acquiring "stuff" is the opposite of gaining freedom, but one of the most difficult financial and time management skills to develop is to be able to get the goalposts to stop moving - to realize when we've made it and don't need to strive so hard anymore.
The technical term for what Burkeman is describing is "lifestyle inflation," which means that as our income expands, our desires expand with it, and so we never really catch up. There's always that next thing on the horizon that we convince ourselves we need before we can allow ourselves to feel truly fulfilled.
This is a mirage, and even if we do ever reach that next peak, we'll just discover that there's now this new thing that we want even more, that's - no surprise - just a little bit further away, and that we need to work a little harder to get. It's a mirage and a trap. Don’t fall for it. Plant those goalposts in the ground and enjoy your newfound freedom.
#3: The Productivity Trap
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7:00 am.’
The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control – when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”
This point doesn’t require a whole lot of explanation. It’s simply the case that unreasonable demands for “total productivity” or “ultimate perfection” (whatever those mean) will never go away, and will never be fully achieved in this or any other lifetime.
That’s excellent news because now we can all stop beating ourselves up when it - predictably - never happens. We can just sidestep this whole productivity trap and, while continuing to strive for personal excellence in the areas that matter to us, remove the burdens of impossible expectations placed upon us by others (and ourselves).
#4: Reality Refuses to Go Away
“Most of us spend a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.”
The science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick wrote that reality is that which, even if we stop believing in it, refuses to go away. And yet, we always seem to be running away from ourselves, trying to escape feelings of lack, unworthiness, uselessness, isolation, and fear.
Fear is probably the greatest threat to the existence of humanity at this moment in history, and the great effort that's expended in trying to get away from this fear - to suppress it, to drive it away - is taking a lot out of us. This energy could be put to much greater use.
When we're fearful, we're not thinking straight; we actually come to believe that getting this promotion, buying this house, or pleasing this person will banish our fear forever and make all of our internal problems disappear.
This has basically never happened in the entire history of humanity. You know that, right?
Internal problems are never resolved with external measures, and when we stop running, we gain the energy and the stamina to look inward, to fight for our sanity and fulfillment.
#5: The Paradox of Limitation
“The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead – and work with them, rather than against them – the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”
The more strongly you embrace your limitations, the more free you become. That’s the paradox of limitation, encapsulated by Aristotle’s saying that discipline equals freedom. The natural existence of limits allows us to experience freedom within and because of those limits.
That’s why “disciplining” yourself to follow a healthy diet will grant you the freedom to live well into old age. It’s why “disciplining” yourself to save and invest diligently when you’re young will grant you the freedom to experience total financial security later in life.
When it comes to time management, “disciplining” yourself to confront your own limitations grants you freedom from worry, stress, and anxiety. Maybe not complete freedom - these feelings are likely to creep back in at least occasionally.
But Burkeman’s one hundred percent right in this, that confronting the facts of your own finitude will lead directly to a more peacefully productive, meaningful, and joyful life. And it’s certainly better than the alternative!
#6: The Efficiency Trap
“This whole painful irony is especially striking in the case of email, that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends, too.”
Doing more each day will eventually lead to having more to do. For example, if you become known as someone who always replies to emails blazingly fast, then more people will start to realize that if they want a quick answer they should email you, which of course just leads to you having more emails to deal with!
If the boss realizes that you can finish a staggering amount of work on deadline, then they will likely load you up with more work, and you will never be free.
The whole trap stems from the fact that we think that being more productive will clear our plates and help us get to a point where we can finally relax. But it doesn't work that way!
We even do this to ourselves, when we load ourselves up with commitments, thinking that we can handle it all. Because we already do so much, we think that we can do even more. That’s the efficiency trap. That’s what we must learn to avoid.
#7: You Will Never, Ever Feel “Full”
“So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and the hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer.
It’s true that the things by which they’re being overwhelmed are nominally more enjoyable; it’s certainly nicer to have a long list of Greek islands to visit than a long list of homeless families left to find housing for, or a huge stack of contracts left to proofread. But it remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do.
This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived – but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities.
Instead, you find yourself pitched straight back into the efficiency trap. The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.”
#8: Limitation Equals Freedom
“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.”
This is a big one, and it deserves a few extra words of explanation. A big portion of the "art of living" is the ability to separate the signal from the noise, to discover for yourself what is truly valuable to you, and to ruthlessly eliminate everything that isn't - or at least to do so to the best of your ability.
It's actually a gift that there are only 24 hours in a day, or four thousand weeks in a lifespan, because those are hard numbers you can work with to find out what really matters to you.
If you believe - even implicitly - that your time will never run out, you won't feel the necessity of making choices about the absolute best use of your time. If you believe that you'll be able to read everything eventually, you won't choose the best books first. If you believe that your family will never get old, separate, or drift apart, you're not going to close your laptop and sit down with them to watch a movie.
But the idea of having limits is actually liberating because it frees you to make these kinds of (literally) life or death choices about where you are going to spend your limited time and attention.
#9: Collapsing the Adjacent Possible
“I’m already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me. But it’s also radically limited in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life – but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.”
This is such a terrifying concept for most people (including myself sometimes) that many of us refuse to even look at it. It harkens back to the idea of the "adjacent possible," which basically means the very next step we can take based on every step we've taken previously to get to where we are now.
We are, all of us, all the time, opening and closing our own sets of possibilities, creating opportunities for ourselves at the same time as we close off other opportunities forever and ever. I know, scary shit, right?
But we're doing this at every moment of every day: When I'm reading one book, I'm not reading every other book that has ever been published, ever, essentially choosing the specific thoughts and ideas that are going to enter my head and which will lead to my next thoughts. If I had chosen to read a different book, I would have had different thoughts, and perhaps been led down an entirely different path.
If I were to move to another city, I would be shutting down every possibility - every meeting, every accident, every experience - that I could actualize in the city from which I just moved. The possibilities that New York made available to me are lost forever, and the new possibilities available to me in Los Angeles are opened up to me. Last time I checked, there were something like 4,000+ cities on earth, and they all come with their own sets of possibilities.
No wonder that people don't want to face these actualities! It's scary to have that much freedom, and to think that perhaps your dream job or the love of your life exists in the country you just left - or the one you're too scared to move to. I don't have any final answers either, by the way. These are fundamental human freedoms and terrors that we all must live with, be aware of, and struggle against. But sometimes the recognition of one's own freedom can liberate us from the chains we fashion ourselves.
#10: The Astonishingness of Being
“If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get – you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.”
There are plenty of amazing things about being alive, but perhaps the most amazing thing is that we’re even alive at all.
The odds against you being here is vanishingly small - statistically insignificant, basically. You shouldn’t be here…except you are. And when you take a moment, stop, and truly notice that? Well, Burkeman’s right: it can lead to a pretty massive shift in how it feels to be present in the here and now.
Moreover, at the end of your life, you’re likely going to want to go back and re-experience even the most ordinary, uneventful Tuesday afternoon. Even just sitting here reading this is a moment that’s frankly astonishing when you stop and think about it. Because it’s so unlikely, so special in its own way…upon further consideration, it’s the furthest thing from “ordinary.”
#11: What Makes Our Choices Meaningful
“It’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. And the same applies, of course, to an entire lifetime.”
Some paragraphs are worth the price of the entire book and the entire time you spent reading it, and that's the way I feel about this one. Four Thousand Weeks is about meaning and choices, and, as Annie Dillard says, "how we spend our days is how we spend our lives."
What we do today is our life, and the mere fact of choosing - consciously and deliberately - what we're going to do with this span of time that's been given to us is often the difference between a meaningful life and one that's tinged with regrets.
#12: You Don’t Actually Want to Do Everything
“You wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.”
In her incredibly thoughtful, brilliant book, The Therapy of Desire, professor Martha Nussbaum discusses the fact that death is a kind of “ultimate limit” that confers meaning on life. Without death, she says, our lives would be much less meaningful, because none of our choices would exclude anything else. There’d be no urgency, and life would feel somewhat shallow and vapid.
The inevitability of death may force meaning on us and our choices, but we can also create and establish this meaning for ourselves with through our own decisions. We can use our power of choice consciously, and by understanding and appreciating what exactly we’re giving up, we can learn to value the choices we do make so much more.
#13: Your Life is What Your Attention Makes It
“Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”
Your memories are formed by what you pay attention to throughout your life. What you pay attention to becomes your life, and it’s impossible for it to be otherwise. What’s more, your future self is watching you through memories. In this moment, through what you’re choosing to do and not do, you’re deciding what your future self sees as they look back at this moment. That’s a tremendous power that we rarely even recognize that we possess.
#14: The Lack of Any Solution IS the Solution
“I wish I could reveal, at this point, the secret for uprooting the urge toward distraction – the way to have it not feel unpleasant to decide to hold your attention, for a sustained time, on something you value, or that you can’t easily choose not to do. But the truth is that I don’t think there is one.
The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold. Yet there’s a sense in which accepting this lack of any solution is the solution.”
#15: The Most Fundamental Question of Time Management
“To realize midway through a business trip that you hate your life is already to have taken the first step into one you don’t hate – because it means you’ve grasped the fact that these are the weeks that are going to have to be spent doing something worthwhile if your finite life is to mean anything at all.
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?”
Pain is a great motivator. In another book summary I've published here on the Stairway to Wisdom, the author M.J. DeMarco talks about an FTE, or a "Fuck This" Event, which refers to a painful event or realization that is strong enough to motivate positive action and get us to change.
Sometimes, the pain just doesn't hurt enough to inspire action, but if you can tap into that pain and really feel the fact that you hate the direction your life is heading, then you're going to have sufficient motivation to take action to change it.
An FTE can enable you to ask the question, "What would I have to do to not feel like this anymore?" When we're just "comfortable," we're often blind to the fact that our life isn't all that it could be and that we're not really happy or fulfilled. Once again, Burkeman is correct: the "negative" approach is often the best.
#16: Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
“Why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?”
The liberating realization that even the most significant human accomplishments are drops in the ocean of universal time.
Those accomplishments are important today, absolutely, but this realization lowers the bar for activities that might be considered meaningful, since we’re no longer under any obscene pressure to “build something that lasts,” or “make a dent in the universe.”
None of us will ever make a dent in the universe, no matter what we do, and that’s okay. The actions we take can matter now; they can make other people’s lives better now, and we can enjoy them now. There is no later.
#17: A (Potentially) Unsettling Discovery
“At a certain age, it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. 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.”
What a fantastic realization! No one actually cares! The technical term here is the "spotlight effect," according to which we believe that everyone is paying attention to us and what we're doing, when in fact they're so concerned about what we think of them that they're really not paying attention to or judging any of our mistakes at all!
There's nothing inherently wrong with self-interest (you should take an interest in yourself, at least a little bit, and treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping), and the fact is that most people are so caught up in their own lives that they're really not spending a whole lot of their day following you and critiquing your every move and life choice.
Sure, some people might have an inappropriately large interest in what you're doing, but these people are basically losers; let's be honest here. If they were really doing anything with their lives, they wouldn't spend so much time judging you. So you can safely ignore the opinions of these people.
Other than that, maybe you might get a raised eyebrow or something when you tell someone you're quitting your high-paying corporate job to pursue your interest in watercolors, but they don't actually care! Five minutes later they're going to be off evaluating someone else's life choices and they won't be thinking of you at all. Then you're free to do whatever you were going to do anyway! What freedom and power you now possess to do what you've always wanted to do, and live a life that's true to your deepest desires!
#18: Double the Intensity, Double the Life
“Experience life with twice the usual intensity and your experience of life will be twice as full as it currently is.”
It’s said of Plato that he was alive every minute of his life. And in books like Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot, you find words of encouragement to live every moment as if you had just experienced a tremendous stroke of luck. Because that’s exactly what it is!
Being alive is tremendous, and one of the purest pleasures available to human beings is the pleasure of merely existing. But to get the absolute most out of life, it requires some effort. You have to meet life halfway.
It’s this effort of will that philosophers like Colin Wilson talks about in his books, and Nikos Kazantzakis wrote about in his amazing book, Zorba the Greek. The default state of most humans - unless acted upon by an outside stimulus - is passivity and inaction. We coast. We remain at rest. We let life happen, instead of rising to meet it.
This is virtually always a mistake.
Life could feel so much more vital and real - so much more electrified - if we only made the effort to overcome our habitual apathy and doubled the intensity with which we live. The default can feel so much more comfortable on a day to day basis, but it’s a trap, the same as the efficiency trap or the productivity trap. But we don’t have to fall into it. We can escape the trap of passivity, even if it requires us to live twice as hard. Double the intensity, double your life.
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