57 pages • 1 hour read
Oliver BurkemanFour Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Beyond Control
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “We Never Really Have Time”
This chapter addresses the planning fallacy and the idea that we can plan the timescale of our daily activities. The law, named after cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, states that every task takes longer than we anticipate. Burkeman finds that this is the case no matter how much time we allocate, showing that time cannot be controlled.
Burkeman comes from a family of obsessive planners, who like to feel some sense of control over how the future will unfold. This may stem from his Jewish paternal grandmother’s trauma-response to the sense that she was lucky to leave Germany on time before the worst of Hitler’s antisemitic atrocities took place. Quite understandably, this matriarch passed onto her descendants the anxiety that if you did not plan things perfectly, catastrophe might occur. In a safer era, Burkeman models his grandmother’s attitude in actions such as leaving an exaggerated amount of time for airport departures.
However, being so emotionally invested in the belief that we can control the future often creates anxiety, as “the obsessive planner […] is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves” (115), given the uncertainty inherent in it. Worriers of all stripes fall prey to this anxiety, as our minds repetitively engage in the futile process of trying to predict and plan under the mistaken belief that this will prevent disaster. This is a further example of our rejection of our limitations when it comes to controlling time.
Although Burkeman’s initial premise was that we get on average about four-thousand weeks to live, the truth is that we get a lot less, even if we do end up living eighty years. This is because there is no guarantee that we will be able to use the time as we planned. Burkeman concludes that “the struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one – which means you have permission to stop engaging in it" (119).
We can get a sense for how futile it is to try to control the future if we examine our lives retrospectively. In doing so, we will see that the most defining circumstances of our lives arose not out of controlling events, but out of a hodge-podge of circumstances that we never could have predicted. We might even find some relief in the fact that the most valuable things happened because of circumstances that we could not control.
When we stop demanding that the future play up to our expectations, we experience less anxiety in the present, which is the actual moment of our lives. While we do not have to dispense with planning altogether, we must remember that a plan is only a thought about the future, and the actual future has no obligation to comply with it.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “You Are Here”
Burkeman maintains that treating time as something that we can control makes our lives worse, especially when we become preoccupied with using it well. This is because the more we focus on not squandering time, the more each day becomes something to get through in the pursuit of some greater reward. This use of time is known as instrumentalization, as you “focus on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are” (125), to the extent that you live mentally in the future rather than the present. This perpetuates the damaging illusion that we will be satisfied when certain events come to pass and only feel in control of our lives at that future time. However, demoting the present in favor of the future is to practice the habit of never allowing the present to feel satisfying, as fulfilment is continually put off.
Burkeman realized that he himself was living according to a future-orientated mindset when he became a father. He found that all types of how-to books aimed at the parents of newborns were more concerned with using the infant’s present as a steppingstone to their future. They thus prioritized training the child up to be a successful adult as opposed to having it enjoy its present. Even as Burkeman was practiced in an instrumental approach to time, he began to view the notion of using a baby’s every moment to optimize its future as absurd, especially as his son was “sheer presence” (130). It therefore seemed more natural to join his son in the present and enjoy the succession of transient experiences than to push him on a conveyer belt towards the future.
Future-orientation at the expense of the present does not only occur on an individual level, but on a societal one as well. Capitalism instrumentalizes everything it touches in favor of future profit. We cooperate with its philosophy towards time because it allows us to maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives and that sacrifices in the present are leading to some ultimate moment of happiness. However, all that happens is that we are absent in the present and defer happiness indefinitely.
While some cite mindfulness as a crucial means of savoring the present, Burkeman is more skeptical. It is excruciatingly difficult to focus on the present without our anxiety that the moment may slip away from us being a constant companion. The effort overshadows the experience itself, as we create a gulf between what we are experiencing in the present and what we want to experience in the present. This paradoxically creates distance between us and the moment. Instead, we might remedy the situation by accepting that we are always living in the present, whether we like it or not. We have no other option.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Rediscovering Rest”
The pressure to use time as well as possible seeps into our leisure-time too, as in modern society “it begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some distinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future” (142). The consequence of this is that leisure too starts to feel like a chore.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, leisure was akin to godliness. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle believed that unstructured time for contemplation was a high virtue because it could be chosen for its own sake, rather than being adopted as a means to an end. In medieval times, there was social pressure from close-knit societies and the church to observe the sabbath and take time off. There were also prescribed Saints’ days and festivals that demanded absence from work and participation in group activities.
In contrast, with industrialization and the proliferation of clock-time, leisure became less abundant and less prescribed. Away from the institutions of the village and church, workers could do what they liked with their time off work, as long as they turned up when the boss required it. Ironically, the trade unions who campaigned for the two-day weekend paved the way for leisure’s association with productivity, as they argued that workers would use the time off for self-improvement through engagement with cultural pursuits. Burkeman maintains that if we do not allow ourselves to waste time and be idle, then we are not allowing ourselves leisure at all—just a stressful form of personal growth.
Our reluctance to use leisure-time in non-productive pursuits stems from what the German sociologist Max Weber identified as “Protestant work ethic” (149). This emerged from Calvinist Christians in Northern Europe, many of whom went to America and worked relentlessly to prove to others that they were among the morally righteous elect, who would be saved on judgment day and go to heaven. While modern secular society may have outgrown such beliefs, the vestiges of Calvinism are evident in the belief that our drive towards constant productivity is proving our worth and leading us towards a future heaven-like reward. If we are constantly optimizing, we do not feel the need to justify our existence. However, as there are no guarantees for the future, we would do better to enjoy our time in the present and that includes rest for its own sake, and non-productive hobbies at which we do not feel the pressure to excel, but where we enjoy the doing itself.
In a society that is continuously facilitating the possibility of 24-hour work and productivity, getting proper rest time can seem like a struggle of extraordinary willpower. Burkeman advises that when we do take proper rest, we should stop expecting it to feel good. It is bound to feel awkward and wrong, given our surroundings and upbringing, but it is good for us because it forces us to focus on living and process rather than results, which are always deferred to some future time.
Part 2, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
A key theme of Chapters 7-9 is deferring pleasure and fulfillment in the present for a future reward. In many respects, this mirrors the functioning of capitalism, which encourages us to work hard now so that there will be a product later, or work Monday to Friday, so that we can earn our two-day weekend. We see this ideology take shape in several forms across the chapters. For example, in Chapter 7, there is the mistaken notion that planning in the present stops disasters from happening in the future. By sharing his own family’s experience of escaping Nazi persecution in Germany owing to a well-executed plan, Burkeman shows that investment in the future over the present can be both a survival strategy and a trauma response. While he has compassion for such predicaments, he shows that one cannot over-invest in plans, as the future is unpredictable. It is therefore our task to strike a balance between preparing for the future (and the potential harms in it) and focusing on the present.
Then, in Chapter 8, he shows a more sinister aspect of using time instrumentally, in the sphere of childrearing. While children are in themselves vividly present, much of the childrearing literature is more preoccupied with how they will turn out in the future. Thus, every experience a parent has with their child in their present is treated as a model for future interactions. Burkeman demonstrates the inhumaneness of this model when he contemplates that “maybe it really is a ‘bad habit’, as the Baby Trainers insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your chest. But it’s also a delightful experience in the present moment” (131). He argues that “it can’t be the case that concerns for the future must always automatically take precedence” and that training a baby to be a successful adult means missing out on the far briefer state of their childhood (131).
Moreover, Burkeman’s Acceptance of Limitations goes even further in this part of the book, as he shows how even the best planners will not get to use their 4,000 weeks as anticipated. We must accept that much of our time will be used in a manner that is not controlled by us, and that plans are no more than thoughts about the future. This leaves us with the appreciation that we should be trying to get more out of the present. While many people’s thoughts might go to mindfulness, Burkeman makes the interesting argument that the effort to become present means that we have already separated from presence; we are still trying to control our experience of time. We are actually more present when we relinquish this kind of control and allow ourselves the luxury of being off the clock for periods. Still, referencing the theme of Individual and Social Uses of Time, Burkeman admits that it is difficult to be present and let go of time in a society where working at all hours and time-managing for the future is the norm. This is in contrast to preindustrial societies, where leisure time was protected by being supported by a system which designated days and hours for celebration and idleness. In contrast, today it is almost countercultural to let go of the instrumental use of time.
