Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243) Read online

  Hiking as an End in Itself

  It’s just after half past seven on a rainy morning in midsummer when I park my car beside the road, zip up my waterproof jacket, and set off by foot into the high moors of the northern Yorkshire Dales. There’s a splendor to this terrain that’s most powerful when you’re alone, and in no danger of being distracted from the barren drama of it all by pleasant conversation. So I’m happy to be solo as I head uphill, past a waterfall with a satisfyingly Satanic name—Hell Gill Force—and into open country, where the crunch of my walking boots sends startled grouse airborne from their hiding places in the heather. A mile or so farther on, far from any road, I stumble on a tiny disused stone church with an unlocked door. The silence inside feels settled, as if it hasn’t been disturbed in years, though in fact there were probably hikers here as recently as yesterday evening. Twenty minutes later, and I’m on the moor top, facing into the wind, savoring the bleakness I’ve always loved. I know there are people who’d prefer to be relaxing on a Caribbean beach, instead of getting drenched while trudging through gorse bushes under a glowering sky; but I’m not going to pretend I understand them.

  Of course, this is just a country walk, perhaps the most mundane of leisure activities—and yet, as a way of spending one’s time, it does have one or two features worth noting. For one thing, unlike almost everything else I do with my life, it’s not relevant to ask whether I’m any good at it: all I’m doing is walking, a skill at which I haven’t appreciably improved since around the age of four. Moreover, a country walk doesn’t have a purpose, in the sense of an outcome you’re trying to achieve or somewhere you’re trying to get. (Even a walk to the supermarket has a goal—getting to the supermarket—whereas on a hike, you either follow a loop or reach a given point before turning back, so the most efficient way to reach the endpoint would be never to leave in the first place.) There are positive side effects, like becoming more physically fit, but that’s not generally why people go on hikes. Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. “You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,” Setiya explains. They have “no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end.” And so the only reason to do them is for themselves alone: “There is no more to going for a walk than what you are doing right now.”

  As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes. He published papers in philosophy journals in order to speed his path to academic tenure; he sought tenure in order to achieve a solid professional reputation and financial security; he taught students in order to achieve those goals, and also in order to help them attain degrees and launch their own careers. In other words, he was suffering from the very problem we’ve been exploring: when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?

  The most unsparingly pessimistic of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, seems to have seen the emptiness of this sort of life as an unavoidable result of how human desire functions. We spend our days pursuing various accomplishments that we desire to achieve; and yet for any given accomplishment—attaining tenure at your university, say—it’s always the case either that you haven’t achieved it yet (so you’re dissatisfied, because you don’t yet have what you desire) or that you’ve already attained it (so you’re dissatisfied, because you no longer have it as something to strive toward). As Schopenhauer puts it in his masterwork, The World as Will and Idea, it’s therefore inherently painful for humans to have “objects of willing”—things you want to do, or to have, in life—because not yet having them is bad, but getting them is arguably even worse: “If, on the other hand, [the human animal] lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence become an intolerable burden for it. Hence it swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom.” But the notion of the atelic activity suggests there’s an alternative that Schopenhauer might have overlooked, one that hints at a partial solution to the problem of an overly instrumentalized life. We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone—to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.

  Rod Stewart, Radical

  There’s a less fancy term that covers many of the activities Setiya refers to as atelic: they are hobbies. His reluctance to use that word is understandable, since it’s come to signify something slightly pathetic; many of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of, say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they otherwise might. Yet it’s surely no coincidence that hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally. In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

  And so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, 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. My respect for the rock star Rod Stewart increased a few years back when I learned—from newspaper coverage of an interview he’d given to Railway Modeler magazine—that he’d spent the last two decades at work on a vast and intricate model railway layout of a 1940s American city, a fantasy amalgam of New York and Chicago complete with skyscrapers, vintage automobiles, and grimy sidewalks, with the grime hand-painted by Sir Rod himself. (He brought the layout on tour with him, requesting an additional hotel room to accommodate it.) Compare Stewart’s hobby with, say, the kitesurfing antics of the entrepreneur Richard Branson. No doubt Branson sincerely finds kitesurfing enjoyable. But it’s difficult not to interpret his choice of recreational activity as a calculated effort to enhance his brand as a daredevil—whereas Stewart’s model train hobby is so at odds with his image as the leather-trousered, gravel-voiced singer of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” that it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion he must genuinely do it out of love.

  There’s a second sense in which hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance: it’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them. Stewart confessed to Railway Modeler that he isn’t actually all that good at building model train layouts. (He paid someone else to do the fiddly electrical wiring.) But tha
t might be part of why he enjoys it so much: to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to “use time well,” which in Stewart’s case presumably involves the need to keep on pleasing audiences, selling out stadiums, showing the world he’s still got it. My other favorite pastime besides hiking—banging out the songs of Elton John on my electric piano—is so uplifting and absorbing, at least in part precisely because there’s zero danger of my chimpanzee-level musicianship ever being rewarded with money or critical acclaim. By contrast, writing is a far more stressful undertaking, one in which it’s harder to remain completely absorbed, because I can’t eradicate the hope that I might accomplish it brilliantly, meeting with high praise or great commercial success, or at least do it well enough to shore up my sense of self-worth.

  The publisher and editor Karen Rinaldi feels about surfing the same way that I do about cheesy piano rock, only more so: she dedicates every spare moment she can to it, and even wiped out her savings on a plot of land in Costa Rica for better access to the ocean. Yet she readily admits that she remains an appalling surfer to this day. (It took her five years of attempting to catch a wave before she first managed to do so.) But “in the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss,” Rinaldi explains, “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.” Results aren’t everything. Indeed, they’d better not be, because results always come later—and later is always too late.

  10.

  The Impatience Spiral

  If you’ve spent much time in a city where the honking of car horns is out of control—New York, say, or Mumbai—you’ll know the special irritation of that sound, which derives from the fact that it isn’t merely a disruption of the peace and quiet, but overwhelmingly a pointless disruption, too: it reduces everyone else’s quality of life without improving the honker’s. In my corner of Brooklyn, the evening rush hour honking begins around 4:00 p.m. and continues until around eight; and in that stretch of time, there can’t be more than a handful of honks in the entire borough that serve a practical purpose, like alerting someone to danger or rousing a driver who’s failed to notice the light has changed. The message of all the other honks is simply “Hurry up!” And yet every driver is stuck in the same traffic, with the same desire to make progress, and the same inability to do so; no sane honker can seriously believe that his honk will make the critical difference and get things moving at last. The pointless honk is thus symptomatic of another important way in which we’re unwilling to acknowledge our limitations when it comes to our time: it’s a howl of rage at the fact that the honker can’t prod the world around him into moving as fast as he’d like it to.

  That we suffer when we adopt this sort of dictatorial attitude toward the rest of reality is one of the central insights of the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching is full of images of suppleness and yielding: the wise man (the reader is constantly being informed) is like a tree that bends instead of breaking in the wind, or water that flows around obstacles in its path. Things just are the way they are, such metaphors suggest, no matter how vigorously you might wish they weren’t—and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it. Yet the phenomenon of pointless honking, and of impatience more generally, suggests that most of us are pretty bad Taoists. 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 chivying the world to move faster is frequently counterproductive anyway. For example, traffic research long ago established that impatient driving behavior tends to slow you down. (The practice of inching toward the car in front while waiting at a red light, a classic habit of the restless motorist, is wholly self-defeating—because once things start moving again, you have to accelerate more slowly than you otherwise would, so as to avoid rear-ending the vehicle ahead.) And the same goes for many of our other efforts to force reality’s pace. Working too hastily means you’ll make more errors, which you’ll then be obliged to go back to correct; hurrying a toddler to get dressed, in order to leave the house, is all but guaranteed to make the process last much longer.

  Escape Velocity

  Though it’s a hard thing to establish scientifically, we’re almost certainly much more impatient than we used to be. Our decreasing tolerance for delay is reflected in statistics on everything from road rage and the length of politicians’ sound bites to the number of seconds the average web user is prepared to wait for a slow-loading page. (It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.) And yet at first glance, as I mentioned in the introduction, this seems exceedingly strange. Virtually every new technology, from the steam engine to mobile broadband, has permitted us to get things done more quickly than before. Shouldn’t this therefore have reduced our impatience, by allowing us to live at something closer to the speed we’d prefer? Yet since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still.

  This is another mystery, though, that’s illuminated when you understand it as a form of resistance to our built-in human limitations. The reason that technological progress exacerbates our feelings of impatience is that each new advance seems to bring us closer to the point of transcending our limits; it seems to promise that this time, finally, we might be able to make things go fast enough for us to feel completely in control of our unfolding time. And so every reminder that in fact we can’t achieve such a level of control starts to feel more unpleasant as a result. Once you can heat your dinner in the microwave in sixty seconds, it begins to seem genuinely realistic that you might be able to do so instantaneously, in zero seconds—and thus all the more maddeningly frustrating that you still have to wait an entire minute instead. (You’ll have noticed how frequently the office microwave still has seven or eight seconds left on the clock from the last person who used it, a precise record of the moment at which the impatience became too much for them to bear.) Nor will it make much difference, unfortunately, if you personally manage to muster the inner serenity to avoid this kind of reaction, because you’ll still end up suffering from societal impatience—that is, from the wider culture’s rising expectations about how quickly things ought to happen. Once most people believe that one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

  There may be no more vivid demonstration of this ratcheting sense of discomfort, of wanting to hasten the speed of reality, than what’s happened to the experience of reading. Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”—but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like. “I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs,” laments Hugh McGuire, the founder of the public domain audiobook service LibriVox and (at least until recently) a lifelong reader of literary fiction. “Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs.” He describes what’s shifted in the formerly delicious experience of sliding into bed with a book: “A sentence. Two sentences. Maybe three. And then … I needed just a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch the itch at the back of my mind—just a quick look at email on my iPhone; to write, and erase, a response to a funny tweet from William Gibson; to find, and follow, a link to a good, really good, article in the New Yorker…”

  People complain that they no longer
have “time to read,” but the reality, as the novelist Tim Parks has pointed out, is rarely that they literally can’t locate an empty half hour in the course of the day. What they mean is that when they do find a morsel of time, and use it to try to read, they find they’re too impatient to give themselves over to the task. “It is not simply that one is interrupted,” writes Parks. “It is that one is actually inclined to interruption.” It’s not so much that we’re too busy, or too distractible, but that we’re unwilling to accept the truth that reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can’t hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning; it refuses to consent, you might say, to our desire to exert control over how our time unfolds. In other words, and in common with far more aspects of reality than we’re comfortable acknowledging, reading something properly just takes the time it takes.

  Must Stop, Can’t Stop

  In the late 1990s, a psychotherapist in California named Stephanie Brown began to notice certain striking new patterns among the clients who came to seek her help. Brown’s consulting rooms are in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and as the first dot-com boom gathered steam, she found herself meeting its early casualties: well-paid, high-status overachievers who were so accustomed to a life of constant motion and stimulation that remaining seated for a fifty-minute therapy session seemed to cause them almost physical pain. It didn’t take Brown long to figure out that their pulsing sense of urgency was a form of self-medication—something they were doing as a way not to feel something else. “As soon as I slow down,” she remembers one woman telling her, in response to the suggestion that she might consider taking things a little more gently, “the feeling of anxiety wells up inside, and I look for something to take it away.” Reaching for the smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as some kind of emotional avoidance. As the months passed, it dawned on Brown that she recognized this sort of avoidance intimately herself. Her own experiences of it belonged to a life she’d long since left behind. But even so, the connection was clear: “These people were talking about exactly the same thing!” she told me, the thrill of that initial realization still audible in her voice. The high achievers of Silicon Valley reminded Brown of herself in her days as an alcoholic.