Four Thousand Weeks
Dear Frau V., Jung began, 'Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way.. If that's what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what's what.' By contrast, the individual path is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other) His sole advice for walking such a path was to 'quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don't yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and in tended by fate. A modified version of this insight, 'Do the next right thing', has since become a slogan favored among members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
"The next best thing" is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.
You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can't avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience least of all close relationships with other human beings, can never ever be guarantee
d in advance to turn out painlessly and well - and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it's all over, it won't have counted for very much anyway.
In return for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.
The human disease is often painful, but it's only unbearable for as long as you're under the impression that there might be a cure. Accept the inevitability of the affliction, and freedom ensues: you can get on with living at last.
We will never get the upper-hand with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments.
"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; It is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; It is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire". Jorge Luis Borges
Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to 'do something remarkable with them'. Back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely- and often enough, marvelously-really is.
Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
The universe doesn't give a flying fuck about you.
When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you're willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all.
Egocentricity Bias (developed for evolution)
Everything around you led to this point.
You have to have a sense about your sheer irrelevance.
History of humanity is just a blink.
This bias sets our expectations on life too high.
The power over your time isn't something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much on your own.
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.
Be in sync with the people you care about most.
Things take time they take and you can't quiet your anxieties by working faster.
Attention is the beginning of devotion
Renunciation of alternatives is what makes our choice a meaningful one in the first place.
The idea of future pregnant with infinity of possibilities is more fruitful than future itself and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Loss is a given.
Dispiriting as this might sound, if you're procrastinating on something because you're worried you won't do a good enough job, you can relax - because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won't do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.
The limitations we're trying to avoid when we engage this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don't in have anything to do with how much we'll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it's a matter of worrying that we won't have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won't respond to it as we'd like them to, or that in some other way things won't turn out as we want. The philosopher Costica Bradatan illustrates the point by means of a fable about an architect from Shiraz in Persia who designed the world's most beautiful mosque: a breathtaking structure, dazzlingly original yet classically well proportioned, awe-inspiring in its grandeur yet wholly unpretentious.
All those who saw the architectural plans wanted to buy them, or steal them; famous builders begged him to let them take on the job. But the architect locked himself in his study and stared at the plans for three days and nights - then burned them all. He might have been a genius, but he was also a perfectionist: the mosque of his imagination was perfect, and it agonised him to contemplate the compromises that would be involved in making it real. Even the greatest of builders would inevitably fail to reproduce his plans absolutely faithfully, nor would he be able to protect his creation from the ravages of time - from the physical decay or marauding armies that would eventu ally reduce it to dust. Stepping into the world of finitude, by actually building the mosque, would mean confronting all that he couldn't do. Better to cherish an ideal fantasy than to resign himself to reality, with all its limitations and unpredictability
We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliiantly we succeed in carrying things off - because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don't have limitless control and can't hope to meet our perfectionist standards.
Atelic Activities
To spend some of our time on activities in which the only thing we're trying to get from them is doing itself.
A good hobby should feel a little embarrassing.
Hiking, Walking, Building trains.
Freedom to suck without caring
10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
Adopt a "fixed volume" approach to productivity
Keep two to-do list
"Open" to-do list with all the activities you possibility want to do
"Closed" to-do list with top 10 items that you want to complete
Items should be moved from open to closed, only when closed to-do has less than 10 tasks. 10 should be the fixed volume.
The rule is: "you can't add a new task until one's completed".
Predetermined time boundaries for your daily work
You'll be aware of the constraints on your time and motivated to use it wisely.
Serialise, Serialise, Serialise
Focus on one big project at a time (one work and one non-work)
See the project to completion before moving on to the next one.
Train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating "that" anxiety by conciously postponing everything that you possibly can except for one thing.
Satisfaction of completing important porjects will make the anxiety seem worthwhile.
Not everything can be postponed (family, bills, relationships) - find balance
Decide on what to fail at.
Strategic Underachievement - nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won't expect excellence of yourself.
"Decide in advance what things you're going to bomb...you remove the sting of shame".
Fail on a cyclic basis
Suppose you aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, meanwhile you'll focus on your family or relationships.
After the time, switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting.
Focus on what you've already completed not just what's left to complete
Keep a 'done list'.
If you're in a rut, lower the bar for what gets to count as an accomplishment
Consolidate your caring
No modern funraising org/cause/issue would dream of describing its cause as the fourth or fifth most important of the day.
Conciously pick your battles in charity, activism and politics
It's not because you don't value other causes out there its because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care.
Embrace boring and single purpose technology
Switching the screen from color to grayscale.
Choose devices with only one purpose like the Kindle
Seek out novelty in the mundane
As you age time flies by this is because childhood involes plentiful novel experiences; as you age life get routinised and the novelty tapers off.
This leads to automatic routine
This shouldn't lead to existential overwhelm - too many experience too little time
Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane.
To find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
Meditation helps here.
Taking up atelic hobbies; anything that draws your attention more fully into what you're doing in the present.
Be a researcher in relationships
Deliberately adopt an attitude of curiosity.
Curiosity is a stance well suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others.
Choose curiosity (what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not)
Cultivate instantaneous generosity
Whenever a generous impulse arise in your mind - to give money, check in on a friend, send an email thanking/praising someone - act on the impulse right away.
When we faill to act on such urges, it's rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts whether the person deserves it.
If you put it off, you'll never get round to sending the message.
Practice doing nothing
"I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chambers" ~Blaise Pascal
"Do Nothing Meditation"
Prevent any type of thought or attention till the timer goes off.
Training yourself to do nothing really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you - to let things as they are.
Stop being motivated by the attempt to evade how reality feels here and now. Calm down and make better choices with your brief allotment of life.
5 Questions
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what's called for is a little discomfort?
We naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritise anxiety-avoidance.
Before making a significant decision, ask this question:
"Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?"
Diminish - will cause your soul to shrivel every passing week
Enlarge - decision will help you grow as a person
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performane that are impossible to meet?
There is a deceptive feeling of comfort in believing that you're in the process of constructing such a life, which is due to come into being any day now. It doesn't
If the level of performance, you're demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it's impossible, even if catastrophe looms and facing this reality can only help.
Let he impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
In what ways are you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
There is a quest yo justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority. There is no need for that. You're not on a journey to becoming the kind of person you ought to be.
No one cares.
Life will always feel uncertain and out of your control.
There is no point in waiting to live until you've achieved validation from someone or something else.
Peace of minf and an exhilarating sense of freedom comes not from achieveing the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn'r bring security if you got it.
Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality the strengths and weakness, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.
In which area of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?
There is no institution, no walk to life, everyone is just winging it - all the time.
If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all - to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.
Everyone else is in the same boat, what they're aware of it or not.
How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions into fruition?
We're all in the position of medivial stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we'll never see. The cathedral is still worth building, all the same.
Do the next and most necessary thing
Fortunately, precisely because that's all you can do, it's also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way- if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human - you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with.
And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rear-view mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got round to doing - and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing-whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
3 Principles of Patience
Develop a taste of having problems
Presence of problems in your life is not an impediment to a meaningful existence but the very substance of it.
Embrace radical incrementalism
Big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never finding such an ideal time for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career.
Be consistent. Do it everyday.
"This is because you don't take time"
Watch the painting for 3hrs assignment - Jennifer Roberts
Trying to dictate the speed at which your experience moves is futile.
Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
Have patience to travel the well-trodden path first.
Engage with the uncertain part of the journey too instead of always badgering reality to hurry up.
Art of Creative Neglect
Pay yourself First
There is no moment of time the future when you'll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.
Limit your work in progress
Resist the allure of middling priorities
To watch
"A life's work" by David Licata
To Read
Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are - J. Jennifer Matthews
The origins of Totalitarianism ~Hannah Arendt
Road less traveled ~Scott M Peck
Interesting stuff
Soviets reconstructed calender/time to keep the factories running all year around. Introuced five day work weeks with difference types of calendars for the workers.
Brain Magee's chain of centenarian
The number of friends needed to span the whole civilization till now is sixty. That woul be the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have drinks party.
Asynchronous time and flexible schedule contributes more in isolation. I am free when he's not kind of thing.
The more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got.
Hofstadter's law.
Kafka and Felice Bauer - A Kafkaesque Relationship.
Joy of Missing Out (JOMO)
Quotes
“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. (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.”
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