Review: “Four Thousand Weeks”

I liked Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. The main argument as I understand it: People need to accept that the time that forms our life, and the time in every day we are alive, is finite, and we need to stop trying to cram more tasks and projects into each day. Those will never stop coming, we will never achieve a “clean slate,” and we will never relax and live out our best path unless we stop hoping for life to settle down. We have to accept that we are creatures with limited time, and that sometimes we are subject to disappointment and there’s no way around it. Which means we have to be patient. On the positive side, we get to set the priorities that make us feel like our real self, and being patient feels good. The implications Burkeman lays out grow bigger with each chapter. 

My favorite comes near the end. We need to stop believing we aren’t who we were supposed to be because we have not achieved enough according to external, moving-target standards. If we truly accept that our time on earth is not even a blip in the cosmic scope, and quit hoping for more, we can be free to do our real work and find our unique path to making a difference — no matter how close to home — in the present. 

I believed for decades that I was doomed to lack achievement thanks to the profound insecurity of growing up after my mother’s death. I believed I had gone from having a strong personality to being permanently weakened. Instances when I let myself be pushed around or bullied seemed to bear that out. (Funny how we absorb things that verify our beliefs even if there is evidence that could contradict them.)

Recently I realized that in fact I did maintain the integrity of my personality despite my loss. I remained true to who I was when my mom was alive to see and love me, even as I grew up and changed. I can feel that my inner eleven-year-old approves, in her tween way, of who I became. And I know my mother would recognize and love the adult me.

That state of integrity came partly from the way in which I coped with my heart’s doubts starting at age eleven and twelve, when I didn’t know how to do anything: address an adult by name, speak and read slowly enough to be understood, shop for clothes or even for art supplies, manage my horrifying and painful monthly periods, buy a bra, or choose a high school. I felt, to the depths of my soul, that I could not make it in the real world because of these deficits. But at some point I noticed that I would always make a choice when I saw that one was possible. My world of choice seemed limited to about one square foot of ground, but from limited options, I always chose what would please me, or failing that, what would be less stressful than the other option.

Now I’m getting back to Four Thousand Weeks, I promise.

In his final chapter and Afterword, Burkeman lays out something I’ve struggled to put into words: the fact that we create our own, truly unique, and most rewarding path not by doing what we “should” do, not by somehow finding out what our path “should” be, but by making one choice at a time with very limited information.

Quoting Carl Jung, Burkeman writes,

“…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.’ [Jung’s] sole advice for walking such a path was to ‘quietly do the next and most necessary thing.’” Burkeman says, “the ‘next and most necessary 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.” And that’s how we form a unique life. Quit hoping, and make your best choice.

I have said that my teen and young-adult years were characterized by limited hope and also by a grim freedom. I wrote in 2019, “The light at the end of the tunnel was the spark of a free future. You grow up and if nobody’s guiding you, nobody’s pushing you into a groove — you are fed and housed but nobody’s nudging you to, say, play with makeup, appreciate fashion, get dressed up, go to prom, go to college, believe in a knight/Mr. Right on his way to you, be religious, babysit, love children, nobody expects you to dream of your wedding day, nobody’s pushing you to learn to cook, learn to drive, plan a career, long for a family of your own — you saw freedom. Nobody’s paying attention. Do what you like; please yourself.” And that’s what saved me. I made one choice at a time, put one foot in front of the other, despite always feeling I didn’t know what I was doing. 

I appreciate Oliver Burkeman’s description of this principle as universal and as positive.

Going further with the notion of finding the positives and pleasing yourself, he writes,

“You get to appreciate life in the droll spirit of George Orwell, on a stroll through a war-dazed London in early 1946, watching kestrels darting above the grim shadows of the gasworks, and tadpoles dancing in roadside streams, and later writing of the experience: ‘Spring is here, even in London N1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it.’”

I felt that even as a kid: I enjoy what I enjoy, no matter how trivial it might seem to someone else, and I am entitled to do so. 

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.