Ben C. Davis

Introduction

Time management has failed us. We only have 4 thousand weeks. Our time isn’t increasing, but our expectations are that it is.

We are forever trying to fill the same amount of time in life with more and more things.

We live in the future, where if we just do that one thing, then I can finally start living.

1. Limit-Embracing Life

Clock time vs task oriented time. One is defined by the numerical passing of it, based on a clock or a calendar, the other is on the natural tasks that occur: the milking of a cow, the feeding of a baby.

Modern conceptions of time are like a conveyor belt. Endless replacing anything you take from it.

Modern life uses time as a resource. As a part of a productive economic system. Our good use of it becomes a core part of our identity.

It’s a rigged game in which it’s impossible to feel like we’re ever doing good enough. That once we get that one thing out of the way, we can finally relax. But that’s not real. We will forever replace the tasks with others, so we’ll never arrive at that oasis of relaxation.

Deep time is the sense that time is timeless. An experience that forgets the abstract yard stick of the clock. It happens during appreciation of the vividness of reality, during meditation for example.

The thesis of the book is: you simply cannot master your time. It will end up mastering you. It is a fundamentally impossible game, an infinite treadmill.

The desire for control of time is a desperate alternative to facing the unknown realities of life. The feeling that through mastery of time, we’ll get to a place where decisions like starting a family are made clear and the decision made calm and confident, without anxiety or worry. It’s essentially an avoidance tactic. Avoiding the grim reality that life is finite and most your dreams won’t come true. A way of distracting ourselves from the pain of death, I suppose. To delude ourselves into feeling limitless. Procrastination is yet another tool to avoid seeing the truth, to avoid experiencing failure and dealing with what that means: we might forever fail and never achieve the “dream”.

The paradox of limitation: the more you try to manage your time, the more stressful life gets. The more you try to plan the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties. The more tasks you complete, the more take come to replace them, filling up your list once again.

Instead, the more you accept the finitude of life, the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

It’s essentially just embracing reality and life how it really is.

The solution essentially is accepting that you cannot do everything. So the best you can do is intentionally decide what not to do. In embracing the notion that tasks have inherent time, you cannot speed it up - it will take the time it takes. Instead of us using time, time uses us.

The ancient philosophers knew this: limitlessness was only for the gods, humans are fundamentally limited.

2. The Efficiency trap

Technically it’s irrational to feel troubled by an overwhelming todo list. You’ll do what you can and won’t what you can’t. We tend not to do this, because we’d rather not admit our limitations. To make tough decisions.

So we address our busyness by making ourselves more busy.

You will never make enough time for the things that matter. Goalposts always shift, even if you’re able to define what “matters”. The serenity of peace with time cannot be found.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” - Parkinson’s law.

Modern life, like email, is just an example of Sisyphus and his ball. Getting through your email just generates more email. Demands increase to offset benefits.

Peace of mind comes from letting go on the limit defying fantasy, reducing its dependence on the completion of some demands.

We cram our lives with experience because of the fear of not experiencing the future, a gift from the arrival of secular modernity. But again, the efficiency trap: the more we experience, the more we become aware of what we haven’t experienced.

The internet is great for this. You can use it to learn anything, but that just makes you aware of everything you don’t know.

Another aspect of the trap: the more we cram, the more we try to see, the more likely we aren’t doing the best of the options available to us. The reason: if we believe we can cram everything, experience everything, then order doesn’t matter.

Because of time is finite, doing anything, by definition, requires sacrifice. Not being aware of sacrifice will inevitably lead to our days being filled with trivial things. Commonly, things other people want us to do, because they want to make their lives easier. And the more efficient you get at that, the “more you become an unlimited reservoir for other peoples expectations” - Jim Benson.

You are guaranteed to miss out on almost all experiences the world has to offer.

Convenience isn’t always a good thing: it has no regard to whether you’re better off “more convenient”. The author makes an illogical argument that convenience is never a good thing as it makes you miss out on the genuine benefits of the thing being replaced. He mentions buying groceries is better than ordering because face to face contact is good and it keeps a community thriving. That may be true, but grocery stores were themselves conveniences over farmers markets, or growing your own food. But his broader point is good: convenient isn’t in and of itself a good thing. We do seem to desire convenience and that makes us do things other than things we’d prefer, like human contact.

I’d sum it up like this: humans are hardwired to minimise energy loss and so we prefer convenience at the cost of longer term benefits. Convenient activities can feel empty, and inconvenient seem frustrating.

3. Facing Finitude

Heidegger thought a lot about this. Was a nazi though.

He thought the defining aspect of being human was our finitude. We are, literally, our limited time on this earth.

He thought humans should be in constant acknowledgment of the reality of anything. That there is anything to begin with.

Deciding anything is also cutting off other possibilities. “Decide” in Latin means to cut off.

No element of the future can be relied on. It can end at any moment. We have to live in acceptance of this. To Heidegger, it’s the only way to live. The morbid thing is not acknowledging that his, but avoiding it.

He quotes a Swedish philosopher called hegland or something, who says that immortality would render every experience irrelevant, unimportant. I entirely disagree. Enjoyment is an emotion that lives outside of time limitations

Terminal diagnosis often give people a profound new relationship with time. The goal is to achieve some amount of this without the terminal diagnosis. The sense of recognising real reality.

Feeling like life is short comes from an entitled sense that we are immortal and so anything less than that is “short”. But if we recognising the miraculousness of reality, then any life is a gain.

4 Becoming a Better Procrastinator

Procrastination is inevitable. You’ll always be procrastinating on something. So the only choice we have is what not to do.

There’s a cliche in time management that if we do the most important things first, the big rocks, then we’ll have time for everything else, the sand in the jar. The lie is that we never have just the right amount of big rocks for the jar. Nowadays there are too many rocks. Then what do we do?

There are 3 principles:

1. Pay yourself first. Similar to how if we allocate money to savings immediately, we’ll probably never feel its absence. But if we do the opposite, buy what we need, and then allocate savings from what we have left, we’ll rarely save anything. It’s because we’re inherently short sighted. Everything, every purchase, feels important right now. So it is with tasks. The only way to do what’s important is to do it now. The only option is to claim time now for what’s important, regardless of its effect or other things that may also be important. Claim time now, other in the sense of choosing to do it in life, but also today, right now, this morning. It’s like how if I don’t work out in the morning I won’t do it.
2. Limit your work in progress. If we have multiple things ongoing, it’s too easy to jump to something else when one isn’t working, and never getting anything done. Instead set a hard upper limit on what we can work on at any given time. Another book suggests only 3 things. This also forces us to break things down into smaller achievable chunks so that we can do other things. It forces progress.
3. Resist the temptation of middling priorities. In a world of too many rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones, the somewhat interesting job offer, the somewhat enjoyable friend, that end up being what we do. We need to learn to say no to things that we may feel we want to do. We only have one life.

Perfectionism can be a huge source of procrastination. It’s a finitude avoiding action. Our fantasies are perfect. Within our fantasies nothing is sacrificed and our desires are wholly met. By acting, stepping into reality, we’re admitting finitude and it’s necessary truth that it is inferior to our fantasy.

Same thing can happen with relationships. Indecision is easier than commitment. Future is attractive. It’s full of possibilities and without any requirement for specificity. Everything is equally possible. I can be a successful novelist, an entrepreneur, a great parent, etc. All in my head. The moment we have to actually live it, then trade offs are required. Dreams are more enjoyable than reality.

But the silver lining is that knowing that trade-off is inevitable, disappointment is inevitable, the inability to make every ounce of a dream reality, we’ll then there’s no reason not to try. You’re already destined to live a lesser version. It’s similar to the thought I’ve had that suicide is pointless. We’re all going to die, all suicide does is speed something up that would literally happen by itself without you doing anything at all. So, you may as well just see what happens with a certain type of indifferent acceptance and equanimity. Same with dreams and reality. Break the illusion of dreams by just seeing what happens.

Loss is a given, what a relief.

Settling is often seen as a moral crime. That we should always strive for better. But again the truth is that you cannot escape settling. A partner will always be a lesser version of some vaguely defined fantasy. It’s impossible any other way.

Settling is often badly defined. With a finite life, spending a decade looking for the perfect one is just as much settling as staying with someone you think isn’t perfect. Again, settling is inevitable. Dreams will never be reality. Ever. In every facet of life.

Settling is the first step in striving for something. To become the best lawyer, you first have to settle on that career at the expense of all others. To have a fulfilling relationship, you first have to settle on that relationship; and then get to work.

Our partners are finite and so cannot match a infinite fantasy that exists in your mind. For example, desiring stable and excitement. They’re mutually exclusive. They cannot exist in one person.

Burning bridges, choosing reality over fantasy, often leads us to be much happier. Making the choice and living with it may feel restrictive, but there’s a freedom in having made the choice. They’ll be no need to stress over alternative choices. The “joy at missing out”. The renunciation of choices is what makes the one you made meaningful. With the choice made there’s only one choice: forward, with all the consequences of the choice you made.

5. The Watermelon Problem

Life is simply the totality of whatever we pay attention to. Distraction then is spending your life, not just your attention, on things you do not want to do.

The problem with distraction is not that relaxing or playing games is less important, it’s that the distracted person hasn’t made a choice.

Complete control over our attention is probably impossible. At the very least, they’ll always be events like a car coming at you in the road, that commandeer your attention.

Having a meaningful experience requires our attention deliberately placed upon the experience.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”.

The modern web is essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong decisions on what to do with your attention. To make you care about things you actually don’t care about.

We’re not really the product, but the fuel, fuelling the machine.

Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize what’s most compelling, rather than what’s most important. It distorted our reality. It influences not just our online lives, but our physical ones too.

“They sabotage our ability to want what we want to want”

Unfortunately, attention is the only way to notice how your attention is being misdirected. As TS Elliot said “we are distracted from distraction by distraction”.

Although the products have thousands of people working to make them addictive, we can’t blame them entirely. We can’t deny that part of us wants to be distracted. It’s coming from within us.

6. Intimate Interrupter

When we experience pain, our immediate reaction is to avoid the pain. To think about something else. To avoid the experience. But during a discussion of an American who went to a Japanese monastery and had to experience daily deluges of ice cold water, he discusses how the American learned to focus on the pain, presently and entirely with awareness, and how that reduced the resultant suffering.

This can be applied to life in general. The more our awareness focuses on the present, the less discomforting or frustrating they are.

We’re told there’s a war for our attention in the age of social media. But if that’s true, then we are willing collaborators. We are desperate in the constant everyday moments of boredom, or the discomfort of doing something we don’t want to do, to welcome the distraction of endless scrolling and autoplayed videos.

“The Intimate Interrupter”.

Why this happens: when we are forced to focus on something that matters, whose stakes have some importance, then in an indirect way we are forced to confront our finitude. The task is important, and getting it wrong has consequences, and these consequences reverberate through time and so reveals its finitude. Distractions do no such thing. They exist in a sort of timeless world, where the stakes are zero, and the illusion is ever-present that this can continue forever. So to work on consequential real world things like writing that book or working on a relationship reveals the possibility of failure and finitude through it. Boredom is an intense reaction to our fundamental limited control over life. They demand us to face finitude. That this is it. This moment is life. Without control.

The online world doesn’t need to be fun to alleviate us of this. It just needs to be “endlessly present”.

There is no cure for this. Nothing that really alleviates us of the discomfort of facing finitude. Of the lack of control over life. But there is a certain freedom that comes from accepting that. That being uncomfortable is inevitable, and so in some way, acceptable and predictable.

7. We Never Really Have Time

Excessive planning of the future can accerbate the very anxieties we’re trying to alleviate. Hoffstats law: things will always take longer than we expect, even if we’re aware of that fact and allocate time accordingly. Things will always grow to fill the available space.

Taking action to alleviate our worrying in the future just pushes the frontier of our uncertainty. Worry is our desire to make the the fundamentally uncertain future, dependable, which is of course impossible. One worry is simply replaced with another as there’s always more things to be uncertain about.

Our belief that we control time; or that we have time, is the source of all our worrying about the fire. Our goal setting.

It’s not that having desires for the future is bad, it’s that our desire to have certainty about those things now here in the present caused our anxiety.

The remedy: know that this desire from the future for certainty will never ever be met.

We are here as we are due to a countless sequence of events that were entirely outside our control.

So the past is uncontrollable and the future unknowable.

Plans aren’t bad though, they’re required to be a good citizen. But we take them as something they’re not: a rigid expectation of the future, rather than what they are: a present moment intention for the future.

8. You Are Here

We’re obsessed with using time well. This leads to a feeling of waking up each day with time feeling like something you have to get through. To some perfect future that will happen once you’ve completed everything.

He mentions how people record things like art in a museum. Something to be looked at later, rather than right now in the present. We’re working on behalf of a future observer that probably doesn’t exist. We treat the present moment as only as valuable in as much as it lays the groundwork for something else.

The “when I finally…” mind. Then I can relax. This comes from a belief that our happiness eludes us because of something lacking now. But of course when we achieve that thing, we just replace it with something else.

We are never really here. We are chasing carrots dangling in front of us.

It occurs in parenting. We parent our kids as if everything now is only valuable in producing the ideal adult. Their future. But it entirely removes the joy and pleasure of the current moment. Of hugging our baby. Of feeding. Laughing. But it mirrors how we all spend our lives: days spent striving for future outcomes. When a notional time when life would run smoothly, at last. Optimal future.

Babies are the opposite though: they’re pure presence.

Causal catastrophe: the notion that we value in parenting only that which causes the perfect future outcomes for our children. But this entirely robs childhood of any joy. As nothing but a training ground for the future. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.

Sam Harris points out that life is full of last moments. There will be a last time you swim in the ocean, eat an apple, hug your friend. But we’ll never know when that is. And in a sense every moment is the last moment. It causes us to have one less “moment” left in our lifetime of moments.

This is clearly a result of capitalism. The instrumentalizing of everything. Every moment. Every earth resource. All time for all humans. All in service of future profit. It’s why rich people don’t escape unhappiness. They treat their lives as nothing but a vehicle on which to travel into the future where some happiness must exist. So their days are sapped of meaning.

The worst example of this: the billable lawyer. Every moment is tarnished by the knowledge of what it’s worth monetarily. Their time, their existence, is commodified. So every moment that isn’t billed feels worthless. And there’s a sense in which we all do this.

But capitalism isn’t the only cause. We collaborate with this. By indulging in the idea that in the future lies perfect happiness, we get to ignore the reality that our lives aren’t leading towards something perfect. That the moment of truth is right now. That life is only the amalgamation of these moments and that no perfect moment in the future will ever come to pass. That life and meaning cannot be postponed.

John Maynard Keynes: all of this is motivated by the desire not to die. By ascribing value to things only in the future, we achieve a certain type of immortality. By not acknowledging that jam is made for today, not for the future, we can continue believing that the joys from our actions will come in the future, so we don’t have to worry about experiencing it right now. So we never actually enjoy actual jam. By making the most of time for the future, we end up missing out on our lives.

But the paradox: the more we try to value and experience the present moment, the more we’re actually not experiencing it. We’re obscuring it. It’s like how you can’t fall asleep if you try to. Trying to have an intense present moment is a surefire way to fail at that.

The better way: to realize that regardless of what we do, we are in the present moment all the time. There is no other option. There is no other place we go to when not present. To try to actively be present is essentially the same future-oriented goal of trying to control time. We’re trying to use the present moment to bring some future state of happiness. But life has no outside. Living in the present then may be as simple as realizing that’s all we’ve ever done. Just drop the goal of trying to use it for anything in the future.

9. Rediscovering Rest

The modern age has redefined leisure as something only valuable in as much as it makes us more productive in our work. That its justified in an economic sense. That was part of the origin of the weekend.

This pressures us to expect much of our leisure. That simply enjoying it isn’t enough. It needs to serve something else, something more productive.

Even mediation can fall into this trap.

All of this makes leisure feel like a chore. Read for profit. Socialize for networking. Stay home to improve the house.

Research suggests this gets worse as we get richer, as the things we’re denying ourselves are more valuable: the ski trip in Aspen, the worldwide trip, etc.

It wasn’t always this way. To the ancient philosophers, leisure was often the end point. Its own sake. The latin for business literally means “not leisure”. Leisure was seen as the ultimate human attainment. Work an inevitable interruption to leisure, rather than the other way around.

Union leaders ironically ended up creating this sense of leisure as a productivity tool when campaigning for the 8 hour work day and 2 day weekend. They justified them by their benefit to work during the week.

This is all perverse though. Rest on its own is now seen wasteful. Idle. But to be truly inhabit the only life we ever get, we have to refrain from using every moment for something else. Idleness is not only forgivable, but crucial.

But we have to acknowledge: we’re complicit. We don’t want to sit still. We want to use every moment for something else. We idolize workaholics. In spite of those people sometimes acknowledging the inability to rest as an escape from uncomfortable emotions.

There’s a thought that this mentality, the hard work hustle of capitalism, arose from Calvinists - they believed that some humans were predestined, to be preselected to spend an entirety in heaven. So hard work now was considered a way to prove you’re in that select group, not the damned. To be idle then was a deeply existential discomfort.

As long as you spend every day striving, you get to believe that you are still on track to some perfect future. A heavenly realm. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that we often fill these moments with actual pain, like a soul cycle class. A cleanse of sin of idleness.

To rest for the sake of rest requires acknowledging that this is it. That we aren’t on the train to something perfect. That this is all there is.

But we actually need to look to religion to understand how to truly find rest: it needs rules and habits. Like the Sabbath. Something enforced, lest the trappings of life take ahold.

We also need to stop expecting it to be so enjoyable. Initially it can feel uncomfortable. And that’s okay.

Think of a country walk: there’s no goal beyond walking. And there’s no real sense that you’re “good” at it. It just is. The value is not derived from a result, it’s telos, but just from itself. An atelic activity.

The opposite of an atelic life: the project-driven life. Where your relationship with time is entirely instrumental and your present time entirely stripped of any meaning.

The absurdity of this often strikes at midlife: the time where we become aware of our mortality and the absurdity of constantly postponing life for some future state of happiness.

Schopenhauer spoke of how desire is a the core of being human. But that inevitability leads to unhappiness, fundamentally. We’re either in a state of striving, and so unhappy at not having attained the thing, or we have achieved it and so are left without something to strike towards. It’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have objects of willing. Because striving for these objects is hard, but getting them is even worse.

But the author believes Schopenhauer missed the atelic activities. The ones that have no purpose other than themselves.

Another word for atelic activities: hobbies. But there’s a stigma with this word as it suggests doing something that has no higher purpose. Instead we value “side hustles” - hobbies with the express purpose of seeking profit.

Working on hobbies that we’re actually not very good at might be a great thing. It removes the burden of expectation of being good, or getting better. To be able to suck without caring is freedom. Results aren’t everything. Results come later, and later is always too late.

10. The Impatience Spiral

Impatience is an expression of our desire to will the universe to speed up to our expectations. But of course, it’s pointless to try. We believe we have the right to control the world, rather than being flexible ourselves to adapt to what is. The Daoists, and many like them, use the analogy of the tree bending, rather than breaking, in the wind. Just like how honking a horn has no effect on reality, our desires for things to happen more quickly often result in the opposite. We speed up and brake fast, which actually ends up slowly everything down.

Research suggests we’re becoming more impatient as time goes on. How is it that with technology that makes everything more efficient and more fast, we are becoming more impatient? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? But actually with each new advance our expectations shift. Now with a microwave that heats your food in 1 minute, we can imagine, and therefore expect, it could take 10 seconds, or instant.

Reading is causality of this too. Reading is more often a task we can only do for a moment before that scratch at the back of our mind pushes us to pick up our phone. It’s not that we’re becoming more distractible, it’s that we desire distraction, especially from tasks like reading that cannot be hurried - it takes the time it takes to read a book. That lack of control is becoming increasingly hard to deal with rather than being a moment of joy. So we reach for distraction.

A psychologist that worked during the dot com boom realized that her patients, who struggled to sit still with the build up of anxiety, exhibited all the symptoms of addiction. Just like alcoholics use alcohol to numb discomfort, workaholics use work and achievement to numb a deep discomfort. And just like with alcohol, the more we work, the more negatively it affects our lives and our relationships, and the more we use work as a way to numb ourselves from that pain. A vicious cycle that constitutes the psychological core of addiction.

But the way we get through alcoholism can be useful here: “the way to give up alcohol is to give up expecting you can beat alcohol”. You have to hit rock bottom - where you give up hoping that somehow you’ll be able to gain control over the drink, that there’s the right amount that if you can just reach you’ll be fine. The reality: it just takes the time it takes. If you let that fantasy crumble, that if you just go faster then all will work out, then something unexpected happens: a second order change. A change in perspective that changes everything. Once you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things can go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety. You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, of putting one foot in front of the other, without delusion. You achieve the uncool: patience.

11. Staying On The Bus

Patience has a terrible reputation. It’s disturbingly passive. It implies powerlessness. But in a world increasingly in a hurry, the capacity to resists its urge is a form of power. To allow things to take the time they take. It’s a way to gain purchase on the world. To do the work that counts, and to derive pleasure from doing the work, rather than deriving all fulfilment from the future.

He tells the story of a Harvard art professor. She requires students sit in an art museum and look at a single painting for 3 hours. She does so because it’s so uncomfortable. To not have control. But when you do break through that discomfort, you find a level of appreciation you can’t otherwise find. A second order change. Once you abandon efforts to dictate the speed at which things move, the real experience begins, and you start to experience patience as something tangible (the philosopher Robert Gruden calls it “chewable”), a real sense of purchase.

3 Practical Ways To Harness Patience:

1. Develop a taste for having problems. To go through life constantly solving problems carries the implicit assumption that there will one day be a time without problems. So as a result we treat every problem twice as bad: due to the problem itself and as an impediment to that perfect end state. But we don’t want that - a life without problems is a meaningless one. A problem is simply a thing that demands our attention, and if nothing requires attention, then what is life at all?
2. Embrace radical incrementalism. Generally writers seem to do better when they write a small amount each day, rather than in longer chunks less frequently. It seems this is because by limiting how long we write for, we remove the need for an impatient urge to push through resistance. To work for longer than we want to, it becomes another reason to think we’re not productive enough, that we won’t ever be as productive, and so on. Stopping helps cultivate patience that will allow us to continue for an entire career.
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. There’s a parable at Helsinkis bus station. All routes use the same first few stops before taking unique routes. If one were to get off before they branched, then your route remains unoriginal. If you stayed on, through the unoriginal stops, eventually you’ll find an original route. The worst is to stop, get off, and start at the beginning. Just stay on the bus. This isn’t just about creativity. To experience what’s it’s like to be in a loving marriage for decades, you have to stay in it. They take the time they take.

12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

Time is an often seen a regular kind of good: where more of it is a desirable thing, a more valuable thing, like money.

But there are other types of goods where their value comes from others sharing in them too. Like phones or social media. They serve no value alone.

Time is this too. If you have as much as possible, but cannot share it with others, then it’s far less valuable than lesser time spent collaboratively. Pre-modern people considered time alone the worst of punishments. You would be forced out. Outside of the synchronicity of the tribe.

We perhaps all do this. We treat time as something to hoard, rather than something to share.

Traditional nomads are very different to modern digital nomads as they often were intensely group-based, where their success as a tribe requires group effort.

But the benefits of group time requires sacrifices our complete autonomy over how we spend it.

Research has shown that time off leads to much more happiness if others have time off too. Synchronized movement has been shown to increase collaboration and group happiness. We have a natural urge to collaborate.

So what kind of freedom do we want when it comes to our time? Individual freedom to choose how we spend our time? Well we do want some of that, and it’s mainly what fills productivity books, but it’s this kind of freedom that leads to a kind of fracturing of society, where we all live individual lives on individual timelines, with no room, or time, for collaboration or shared enjoyment. It’s worse: the nature of work now, and of life, constructed on the notion that individual agency of time is the noble goal, leads to all our time being eaten up by a never-ending list of tasks to be done. Work seeps into life through a stream of Slack messages. Where in all that do we find time to just be with each other?

What do we do? We can make the chose to avoid decisions that lead to an increase in individual time sovereignty and instead aim for communal time freedom. We can join groups. Prioritize activity in the physical world, rather than the digital. We can deliberately let the actions of those around us, friends and family, dictate how some of time is spent, giving up that perfect morning routine. Power over time isn’t best hoarded and that it can sometimes be too much your own.

13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

We probably have all had that feeling of returning to the routine of life after a particularly satisfying trip into nature and wondered why more of life doesn’t feel that way. The modern world doesn’t really provide us with answers, with its lack of religion or joint spiritual purpose.

But that feeling isn’t a bad thing: it means a shift has happened internally and you know that satisfaction of any kind doesn’t lie in the deferred future, instead it has to change now. The fundamental question: what would it mean to spend the only life we only have on something that feels like it meaningfully counts.

The Great Pause - that time during the pandemic where we all realized what really should be demanding our attention. What we really could do with our time. What really mattered. But the pandemic ended and corporations rushes in with shiny new products and services and we forgot all about the pause and the revelations it contained. The true joy one gets from the present moment experience of baking bread or playing with your children.

The issue though with this is it puts off pressure on achieving a certain type of grandiosity with our lives. That every moment should contain these meaningful glimpses of the true nature of existence. To make everything consequential.

The cure for this: realize the absolute insignificance of everything. That no matter the problem, if you zoom out enough, they are essentially nothing at all. Non-existent.

There is a tendency that leads us to this desire for grandiosity: we live through our own perspectives. This gives to our lives a sense that they are an apex, with the past leading inexorably up to this point, where the goings on of today are of era-defining importance. Of course this isn’t true, it’s just a bias. What psychologists call the ego-centricity bias. It has evolutionary benefit; it makes us strive to survive as it feels crucial important to do so.

This overvaluing of our particular existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use our finite time well. It raises the bar to unrealistic levels. It forces us to believe that our lives must rise above the mundane. That they must leave a legacy. It must not be ordinary. To “leave a dent in the universe”. But in reality you almost certainly won’t. There are only a few such figures like Einstein in history. Even Steve Jobs - who coined the phrase - arguable didn’t leave a dent. How long will we really remember Apple and the iPhone?

Relinquishing ourselves from this feeling is a liberating thought: it allows us to consider many other ways of life that will feel like a meaningful use of time. Perhaps many things we’re already doing might be more meaningful that what we otherwise might be pursuing. Like feeding our children or going through the nighttime routine.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy invites us to embrace the reality of our complete insignificance. Realizing the truth of four thousand weeks doesn’t require us to spend those weeks of grandiose things. It actually does the opposite. Encourage us to refuse to hold them to some insane standard, and instead drop down from the the god-like cosmic significance , and experience life as it concretely and marvellously is.

14. The Human Disease

Time feels like a struggle because we’re constantly trying to control it so that we might finally feel safe and secure, invulnerable to events. We desire to become so efficient and productive that we can forever avoid disappointing others or ourselves. Or that we may avoid facing the prospect of dying without fulfilling our greatest ambitions. Others entirely avoid embarking on relationships or new ideas because they can’t bear the idea of something we’ve dedicated our lives to not working out in the end. We get angry at traffic jams because we cannot face the truth of how little control we have over time. We chase the the ultimate fantasy of time mastery: that in the grand cosmic scheme, we may have actually mattered.

This delusion of one day getting the upper hand over time is forgivable and the alternative is so unsettling. But it’s the alternative that’s true. We will always have to make choices of what to prioritize and what to fail at. We can never control what happens and so can never achieve a state of comfort with knowing exactly wants coming.

But we are time. We are that substance. It will never be something that we can master because we can never be outside of ourselves in that way. Insecurity is the default state and the only state. We can never control what comes down the river - we are the river. This is my comment: consciousness literally is the flow of time, we are exactly time, and so we are impossibly connected with it.

We feel that once we’ve done some thing, have kids, see them off to college, start the company, sell the company, that the true purpose of our lives will reveal itself just beyond that hill. That’s when we will feel in control of our lives and finally find true meaningfulness. Until then, life is a struggle, in service of that future moment. It makes us feel like we are not quite yet in “real life”.

But living in that real life now, when we’re actually only ever living, requires accepting the truth of that reality, admitting defeat, our illusions die. There will always be too much to do, tough choices to make, no control over time, no experience can ever be guaranteed to work out well, and that cosmically its all insignificant anyway. By accepting all this, we get to actually be here. To actually experience life. To do a few things that actually matter to you, right now, in this moment. The only moments we ever have.

There are a few questions we can ask to make this all concrete. Answers aren’t the point, its living with the knowledge of the questions that matters.

1. Where in your life are you seeking comfort, where really you should seek discomfort? Things that matter always involve risk, and therefore discomfort and suffering. So instead we often avoid those things and seek comfort. Anxiety avoidance. This makes us feel like we’re in control. Instead ask if a decision will shrink or enlarge you. It helps get in touch with deeper intentions. Asking of any particular important decision whether it’d make you more happy will cause you to seek the easiest short-term option. But you usually know when considering something like leaving a job or relationship if staying will lead to growth or stagnation. Always choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.

2. Are you holding to an impossible standard? A sign of living under the delusion of expecting salvation in the future is setting impossible standards. Ones we wouldn’t put on others knowing they can never be achieved. Instead let those standards crash to the ground, and then pick a few meaningful things from the rubble and start on them today.

3. In what ways have you yet to accept that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be? Another way to live in the delusion is to expect that some idealized version of yourself lives over the horizon. But eventually we realize that no-one really cares except us. So why live waiting for the acceptance of some particular version of ourselves. The validation of that future person isn’t important, it’s the realization that it wouldn’t bring security even if you got it. The most good you can do is when you realize that you don’t need to earn your weeks on this planet. You can just focus on what actually matters to you. Baking. Art. Whatever it is we truly enjoy.

4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? Don’t treat your life as a dress rehearsal. But we all learn: there’s no walk of life where people know what they’re doing. Not the newspapers, not the government. Everyone is winging it. Again it’s liberating. No sense of authority will ever arrive, so why not just give it your all?

5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care about seeing your actions reach fruition? The causal catastrophe: that the value of something is only in its results. This causes us to believe we should only spend time on things we’ll see the results of. But there’s a sense that all work, including parenting and community building, and everything else, has this quality of not being completable in our lifetimes. So if you could come to terms with never seeing the results, what would feel meaningful to you today? The stonemason adding bricks to a cathedral they’ll never see to completion.

Carl Jueng: he answered a question from someone seeking to understand the best way to live. Only religion can give you that. Instead the individual life is the one you make for yourself, the one that’s never proscribed, that you cannot know in advance, and instead comes into being by just putting one foot in front of the other. Quietly do the next and most necessary thing. If you don’t know that then you have too much time and money. But once you do, that next thing is guaranteed to be meaningful.

Doing the next best thing is really all we can ever be expected to do. And because that’s all we can ever do, it’s all we ever have to do. And at the end of our lives, we’ll look back knowing that by taking each step as it came, we end up reaching our greatest heights anyway. We’ll have a life that meets the measure of what it means to have spent our weeks well: not how many people we helped or how much we got done, but working within our limits of our moment in history and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to whatever magnificent task or weird little thing you came here for.

15. Beyond Hope

To give up hope is liberating. It requires us to not seek comfort in the babysitting notion of a self-perfecting future, but instead focus on what we can do here, right now, within the limits of our time and abilities. Give up the notion of being in complete control, of maximizing every conceivable possibility for life, that this is just a dress rehearsal and a perfect future where we will be our perfect selves still exists, just there beyond the horizon. To do so is acknowledge reality as it is now and what we can do about it here and now. The world is already broken, and your life is too. It was always finite and will always continue to be less finite. That’s just the way it is. But internalizing this doesn’t lead to despair, it’s liberating. It means accepting that the thing we’re fearing to begin with - dying without a trace - has essentially already happened. So you reach a beginning of a beginning. A new acceptance, without a need to expect yourself to do the impossible. Without that you can instead do what’s possible, helping in the ways you can.

Giving up hope does kill you, in a way. The control-chasing, ego-dominated you. The one that cares intensely what others think of you. About not disappointing you. You find the civilized, manufactured you died, the victim. But the you that survives is more alive. Ready for action. Joyful. When you’re open to let in things as they really are, you’re willing to let the good things in too. Instead of using them as resources to convince you that everything will turn out fine. They can be enjoyable in and of themselves. Life is terrifyingly short and insignificant. But accepting that allows you to get stuck into to what’s possible instead.

Appendix

10 further tactics for embracing the ideas of this book:

1. Embrace a fixed volume approach to productivity. Have two todo lists: one open and one closed. The open is endless, but the closed is fixed. You cannot add to the closed without finishing one first.
2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. Just one project at a time. Complete it, and then move on. Embrace the anxiety of not working on other things. Use it to complete a thing so you can move onto others.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at. Inevitably you’ll underachieve at something. Doing that intentionally removes the sting of shame. Imbalance is okay.
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not what’s left to complete. We know now that it’s fundamentally impossible to complete everything, so to avoid despondency, focus on what you’ve already completed. Avoid the feeling that by waking up, you’ve already incurred debt.
5. Consolidate your caring. Social media forces us to care about things that don’t matter, but also on things that do matter, but too many things that matter. Pick your battles. Again, you can’t do everything.
6. Embrace boring, single-purpose technology. Embrace things that don’t have inherent distraction. An ereader over an iPhone.
7. Seek novelty in the mundane. We can make time feel like it lasts longer as we grow older, not but cramming our lives with novel experiences (which does work but has the same issue of an endless treadmill), but instead making what we experience more intense. To pay more attention. To experience more intensely the life we already have. Mediation helps. Taking a different route to work.
8. Be a researcher in relationships. Deliberately adopt a curious mindset to counteract the desire to see all things go our way. Embrace uncertainty. The nature of reality.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. Any time we have a desire to be generosity, do it now, rather than wait. The only donations that count are the ones we do now. We delay due to a desire to control time. But most likely we won’t donate at all.
10. Practice doing nothing. If you can’t bear the discomfort of doing nothing, you’re far more likely to make bad decisions with the finite time we have simply to feel as if we’re acting. Let things be as they are, allowing action to be actually intentional and meaningful.