I recently finished Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and I have not been as lit up by a non-fiction book since I read William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better in 2016. I am thus far responsible for at least 3 purchases of the book by co-workers (although it is not, mercifully, a business book) and pressing my own copy into the hands of my husband, a psychotherapist, convinced as I am of its pragmatic power to address existential concerns. This is not exactly a hot tip: the book is a bestseller that’s been out since 2021, but as every reader knows, you find books when you need them.
Doing Good Better set out a rigorous framework—which, being of good Scottish and Dutch stock, I’m a sucker for—on how we might do the most good, considering charitable giving, consumer choices, and career choices (turns out following your passion is questionable advice). Its author, MacAskill, is a founder of the effective altruism movement, a data-driven approach to philanthropy—which, in my humble estimation, has been undeservedly tarnished by its association with convicted crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, but that’s a whole other blog post.
In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman notably differs from MacAskill on the topic of charitable giving, urging that we act on generous impulses rather than complicating them by trying to optimize them. But more generally, while MacAskill is talking about how to save lives, Burkeman is addressing how to save your own by embracing its limitations or, to use a word I didn’t know existed until I read this book, finitude.
…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 in the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever…Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
If this sounds depressing to you—and worrying that it might, that ellipsis in the above quote purposely left out an explanation of how the Latin root for the word “decide” is closely related to “suicide”—fear not! The upside of all this is that you get, or, to be more blunt, need to choose how you spend your time. The constraints are precisely what make those choices, nay life, meaningful.
I liked the book so much I started reading it’s follow-up, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, before I even finished reading Four Thousand Weeks, which, now that I think about it may be where I got that nugget about embracing your charitable impulses in the moment. My point here is that one of the marks of a great read for me is that it puts itself in conversation with other books, admittedly not usually by the same author.
Besides Doing Good Better, Burkeman’s books also made me reminisce about another professor’s (this time MIT) book, Sherry Turkle’s 2021 The Empathy Diaries, and want to read Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame, a reflection on monastic life, which strikes me as being as literal a representation of closing possibility off in pursuit of freedom as it gets. From an interview with Iyer, it sounds like the new book touches a fair amount on community, a theme also in common with Four Thousand Weeks.
This morning I found the synapses firing in the realm of fiction, specifically the pages of Helen DeWitt’s novel, The Last Samurai. It includes this description of a marathon classical concert where the pianist, in the interest of enabling the audience to truly hear a piece of music, plays the same piece 59 times in a row over seven and a half hours before playing three different pieces in rapid succession.
It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.”
The humaneness of Burkeman’s book is so of a piece with the humanity of the notion of our singular lives, “played just once with a mistake.” Reading this chapter wasn’t enough to make me stream tears, but I did go listen to Brahms’ Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor (the piece played 59 times by the pianist in The Last Samurai) while I wrote this blog, two choices I made consciously and happily about how to spend my time today. Also, literary kismet: it’s real.
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