I think good books should change what you know while great books should change how you think. Four Thousand Weeks is a great book.
In the book I read right before this one, Do Hard Things, the author explains that we give up when we no longer see the point in continuing. When you set a goal, you hold the belief that it is achievable. But as you begin working towards said goal, you start to collect evidence of the goal's “achievability”. Are your grades getting better? Are you winning more games? Can you lift heavier weights now? This evidence can reinforce your belief that your goal is achievable, or it can convince you that you are in fact unable to achieve the goal. It is in the latter situation, when you no longer believe you are able to achieve something, that the act of pursuing the goal loses meaning*. A myriad of emotions are triggered: shame and despair in yourself, regret for the time you’ve “wasted”, and hopelessness for the future, until eventually, you give up. Thoughts drive emotions which drive actions.
While books like Do Hard Things and Atomic Habits revolve around combatting this unhelpful phenomenon, Four Thousand Weeks convinces you to embrace it. We all have life goals. And if you’re like me, to accomplish all of them is probably not possible in one lifetime. That’s because the average human is only alive for around four thousand weeks. We deal with our finite time on Earth by striving to experience and accomplish the most amount of things possible. To that end, I wake up each morning with the idea that I will cross off as many items from my to-do list as possible, so that I can do more tomorrow, and the next day, and when the to-do list is EVENTUALLY cleared, I’d have earned myself some free time. So existential is this goal that despite collecting copious amounts of discouraging feedback, I have yet to give up on it. I might fall into a rut for days or weeks, but eventually I climb out of it.
I would characterize this book as 'discouraging feedback on steroids': “How have you not realized yet that you will NEVER reach the end of your to-do list? That you will NEVER reach a point when all your problems are solved? Don’t you know that it’s the things we choose NOT to do that give meaning to what we actually do? So why are you still trying to do everything?”** The reason Burkeman says all this is because only after you accept this fact can you give up on trying to do everything. Only after you accept this fact can you genuinely focus on the things you value most. On being present. On discovering yourself. On calling your parents and checking in on old friends and staying fit and all the things that have no deadlines and aren’t on your to-do lists.
Overall, Four Thousand Weeks was not what I was expecting from a book whose subtitle is “Time Management for Mortals”. There were no tips for hyper optimizing your schedule. No morning routines of successful people. No brain hacks to boost productivity. Instead, this book taught me the importance of zooming out. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck focuses on our belief systems and why introspection is so important in rooting out the irrational beliefs we subconsciously hold. But looking inside ourselves is just the first step. When you zoom in, you find a lot of uncomfortable truths about yourself. To see their absurdity, you have to zoom back out.
IRL Update (04/21/2024): I read this book on the flight to Shanghai, which was almost a month ago. As you can see, I am quite behind on book reviews and hope to bang out a few more in the coming weeks.
*I think philosophers like Frankl and Camus would argue that one can and must derive meaning from these situations, but in the interest of sticking to the topics of this book, we’ll leave it at that.
**Not an actual quote. I put the quotation marks to show where my (rather brash) paraphrasing begins and ends.