## Metadata - Author: [[Oliver Burkeman]] - Full Title: Four Thousand Weeks - Category: #books ## Highlights - Edward Hall was making the same point with his image of time as a conveyor belt that’s constantly passing us by. Each hour or week or year is like a container being carried on the belt, which we must fill as it passes, if we’re to feel that we’re making good use of our time. When there are too many activities to fit comfortably into the containers, we feel unpleasantly busy; when there are too few, we feel bored. If we keep pace with the passing containers, we congratulate ourselves for “staying on top of things” and feel like we’re justifying our existence; if we let too many pass by unfilled, we feel we’ve wasted them. If we use containers labeled “work time” for the purposes of leisure, our employer may grow irritated. (He paid for those containers; they belong to him!) ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=206)) - You don’t need to believe, as Mumford sometimes seems to imply, that the invention of the clock is solely to blame for all our time-related troubles today. (And I certainly won’t be arguing for a return to the lifestyle of medieval peasants.) But a threshold had been crossed. Before, time was just the medium in which life unfolded, the stuff that life was made of. Afterward, once “time” and “life” had been separated in most people’s minds, time became a thing that you used—and it’s this shift that serves as the precondition for all the uniquely modern ways in which we struggle with time today. Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=267)) - (“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”) ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=351)) - most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time—our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want—because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=354)) - All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=365)) - teach best what you most need to learn.” ([Location 384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=384)) - This confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community—participating in forms of social life where you don’t get to decide exactly what you do or when you do it. And it leads to the insight that meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself. ([Location 385](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=385)) - “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available. ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=479)) - This whole painful irony is especially striking in the case of email, that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends, too. ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=483)) - every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe. At the same time, you’ll become known as someone who responds promptly to email, so more people will consider it worth their while to message you to begin with. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=492)) - The general principle in operation is one you might call the “efficiency trap.” Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=498)) - Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=516)) - The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top. ([Location 551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=551)) - the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=560)) - (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.”) ([Location 699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=699)) - Most productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done. ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=838)) - The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks. ([Location 851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=851)) - Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. ([Location 1077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1077)) - The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1110)) - “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are incompatible with each other: ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1112)) - ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as “variable rewards”: when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine. When this whole system reaches a certain level of pitiless efficiency, the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee has argued, the old cliché about users as “the product being sold” stops seeming so apt. After all, companies are generally motivated to treat even their products with a modicum of respect, which is more than can be said about how some of them treat their users. A better analogy, McNamee suggests, is that we’re the fuel: logs thrown on Silicon Valley’s fire, impersonal repositories of attention to be exploited without mercy, until we’re all used up. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1129)) - Even at the height of my dependency (I’m now in recovery), I rarely spent more than two hours a day glued to the screen. Yet Twitter’s dominion over my attention extended a great deal further than that. Long after I’d closed the app, I’d be panting on the treadmill at the gym, or chopping carrots for dinner, only to find myself mentally prosecuting a devastating argument against some idiotic holder of Wrong Opinions I’d had the misfortune to encounter online earlier that day. ([Location 1149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1149)) - The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like. In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1166)) - Mary Oliver calls this inner urge toward distraction “the intimate interrupter”—that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away. “One of the puzzling lessons I have learned,” observes the author Gregg Krech, describing his own experience of the same urge, “is that, more often than not, I do not feel like doing most of the things that need doing. I’m not just speaking about cleaning the toilet bowl or doing my tax returns. I’m referring to those things I genuinely desire to accomplish.” ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1229)) - whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out. ([Location 1242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1242)) - This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1252)) - Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: ([Location 1341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1341)) - As the writer David Cain points out, we never have time in the same sense that we have the cash in our wallets or the shoes on our feet. When we claim that we have time, what we really mean is that we expect it. “We assume we have three hours or three days to do something,” Cain writes, “but it never actually comes into our possession.” Any number of factors could confound your expectations, robbing you of the three hours you thought you “had” in which to complete an important work project: your boss could interrupt with an urgent request; the subway could break down; you could die. And even if you do end up getting the full three hours, precisely in line with your expectations, you won’t know this for sure until the point at which those hours have passed into history. You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past. ([Location 1352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1352)) - despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live—not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. Reflect on this a little, and Heidegger’s idea that we are time—that there’s no meaningful way to think of a person’s existence except as a sequence of moments of time—begins to make more sense. And it has real psychological consequences, because the assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be brought under our control. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1359)) - My point, to be clear, isn’t that it’s a bad idea to make plans, or save money for retirement, or remember to vote, so as to increase the chances that the future will turn out the way you’d like. Our efforts to influence the future aren’t the problem. The problem—the source of all the anxiety—is the need that we feel, from our vantage point here in the present moment, to be able to know that those efforts will prove successful. ([Location 1367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1367)) - Our anxiety about the uncontrollability of the future begins to seem rather more absurd, and perhaps therefore a little easier to let go of, when considered in the context of the past. We go through our days fretting because we can’t control what the future holds; and yet most of us would probably concede that we got to wherever we are in our lives without exerting much control over it at all. Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. ([Location 1379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1379)) - to the extent that we can stop demanding certainty that things will go our way later on, we’ll be liberated from anxiety in the only moment it ever actually is, which is this one. ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1423)) - planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply. ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1429)) - the “proof” that it’s wrong to let your baby cry itself to sleep comes largely from research among infants abandoned in Romanian orphanages, which is hardly the same as leaving your child alone in their cozy Scandinavian bassinet for twenty minutes a day; meanwhile, there’s one West African ethnic group, the Hausa-Fulani, who violate every Western parenting philosophy by deeming it taboo in some cases for mothers to make eye contact with their babies—and it seems those kids mostly turn out fine, too.) ([Location 1489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1489)) - our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time. ([Location 1532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1532)) - it’s not entirely our own fault that we approach our finite time in such a perversely instrumental and future-focused way. Powerful external pressures push us in this direction, too, because we exist inside an economic system that is instrumentalist to its core. One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase. ([Location 1541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1541)) - One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1557)) - Because he never has to “cash out” the meaningfulness of his actions in the here and now, the purposive man gets to imagine himself an omnipotent god, whose influence over reality extends infinitely off into the future; he gets to feel as though he’s truly the master of his time. But the price he pays is a steep one. He never gets to love an actual cat, in the present moment. Nor does he ever get to enjoy any actual jam. By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life. ([Location 1583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1583)) - The problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist, future-focused mindset I’ve been criticizing in this chapter, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself. It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing. You resolve to stay completely present while, say, washing the dishes—perhaps because you saw that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh about finding absorption in the most mundane of activities—only to discover that you can’t, because you’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re being present enough or not. ([Location 1610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1610)) - To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it. For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. ([Location 1628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1628)) - As the author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.” ([Location 1633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1633)) - leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1674)) - The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling. ([Location 1682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1682)) - Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work. The problem was that for the average mill or factory worker, industrial work wasn’t sufficiently meaningful to be the point of existence: you did it for the money, not for its intrinsic satisfactions. So now the whole of life—work and leisure time alike—was to be valued for the sake of something else, in the future, rather than for itself. ([Location 1705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1705)) - We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. ([Location 1716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1716)) - “Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?” ([Location 1811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1811)) - 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? ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1846)) - 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. ([Location 1866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1866)) - 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. ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1872)) - 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. ([Location 1881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1881)) - 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,” ([Location 1884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1884)) - “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…” ([Location 1946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1946)) - “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. ([Location 1954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1954)) - When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same, and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. No checking email or social media; no quick runs to Starbucks. ([Location 2037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2037)) - She insists on the exercise lasting three hours precisely because she knows it’s a painfully long time, especially for anyone accustomed to a life of speed. She wants people to experience firsthand how strangely excruciating it is to be stuck in position, unable to force the pace, and why it’s so worthwhile to push past those feelings to what lies beyond. The idea first arose, Roberts told me, because her students faced so many external pressures to move fast—from digital technology, but also from Harvard’s ultracompetitive atmosphere—that she began to feel it was insufficient for a teacher like her merely to hand out assignments and wait for the results. She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. “They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,” she said. “Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the ones that were dominating their lives.” ([Location 2045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2045)) - The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin. And you start to understand what the philosopher Robert Grudin means when he describes the experience of patience as “tangible, almost edible,” as if it gives things a kind of chewiness—the word is inadequate, but it’s the closest one there is—into which you can sink your teeth. ([Location 2081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2081)) - We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution—any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control. So we snap at our partners, rather than hearing them out, because waiting and listening would make us feel—correctly—as though we weren’t in control of the situation. Or we abandon difficult creative projects, or nascent romantic relationships, because there’s less uncertainty in just calling things off than in waiting to see how they might develop. ([Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2106)) - We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. It’s harder than ever to find time for a leisurely family dinner, a spontaneous visit to friends, or any collective project—nurturing a community garden, playing in an amateur rock band—that takes place in a setting other than the workplace. ([Location 2344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2344)) - The reason it’s so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn’t usually that we “don’t have the time,” in the strict sense of that phrase, though that’s what we may tell ourselves. It’s that we do have the time—but that there’s almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. Free to pursue our own entirely personal schedules, yet still yoked to our jobs, we’ve constructed lives that can’t be made to mesh. ([Location 2355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2355)) - All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroots politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. ([Location 2359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2359)) - You can push your life a little further in the direction of the second, communal sort of freedom. For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, ([Location 2370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2370)) - the logic of the attention economy obliges campaigners to present whatever crisis they’re addressing as uniquely urgent. No modern fundraising organization would dream of describing its cause as the fourth- or fifth-most important of the day.) ([Location 2811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2811))