Contemplating Four Thousand Weeks, the book, and hopeful, but not guaranteed, reality

One of my plans for last weekend, the weekend of my birthday, was to read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. While I didn’t finish it then, I did finish it Tuesday. And it probably will be the best book I read this year, because it’s hitting at just the right time, not only with my birthday, but also with changes at work. It was, and is, the perfect time for me to contemplate mortality and how I’m living, will live (including work), the years (months, weeks, days, and hours) remaining that I have (hopefully).

Since I have been a little scatterbrained this week, and I don’t think I can muster a cohesive post about exactly why this book struck me like it did, I’m just going to share a few of my favorite passages, starting with this one:

We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally. (“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.”) Or we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.

If you’ve followed this blog and my meandering thoughts here, you know that I like to plan ahead, especially for the time I (or both Kim and I) have off from work. I think Burkeman captures almost exactly why I do 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.

As within the last couple of months I’ve been given new responsibilities at work, I’m finding this (letting things take the time they take) to be so relevant. In my job as the cataloger at our library, I can’t rush the process of labeling books, audiobooks, and DVDs and finding, copying, and sometimes creating, records. It just takes the time it takes.


Ironically, the union leaders and labor reformers who campaigned for more time off, eventually securing the eight-hour workday and the two-day weekend, helped entrench this instrumental attitude toward leisure, according to which it could be justified only on the grounds of something other than pure enjoyment. They argued that workers would use any additional free time they might be given to improve themselves, through education and cultural pursuits—that they’d use it, in other words, for more than just relaxing. But there is something heartbreaking about the nineteenth-century Massachusetts textile workers who told one survey researcher what they actually longed to do with more free time: To “look around to see what is going on.” They yearned for true leisure, not a different kind of productivity. They wanted what the maverick Marxist Paul Lafargue would later call, in the title of his best-known pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy. We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea ofit 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. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefit because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.

Ironically as I was reading this book , I felt I was doing just that, resting for a form of self-improvement, not “wasting” my time. However, it also is why I had planned fun time for last weekend, just being idle, which I think I accomplished, but as if it were a thing to check off like in a to-do list, which Burkeman also discusses:

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item n the to-do list.


Burkeman connects what social psychologists call “idleness aversion” to what German sociologist Max Weber coined as the “Protestant work ethic” which he believe stemmed from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The doctrine is “that every human since before they were born, had been preselected to a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell.” Idleness then became/becomes anxiety-inducing, to be avoided at all costs – not just because, as Burkeman writes – it might be a vice that leads to damnation if overindulged, but might be evidence of a worse truth: that you already were damned.

We flatter ourselves that we’ve outgrown such superstitions today. And yet there remains, in our discomfort with anything that feels too much like wasting time, a yearning for something not all that dissimilar from eternal salvation. As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense that there’s more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence.

I think I’ve felt that even with what I call ‘My Own Personal Sabbath’, where “almost every Sunday since mid-May 2020 with a few exceptions, I have been taking my own personal Sabbath, where I tune out of the news and social media and turn off my ringer and all notifications on my phone.” And maybe I feel, or have felt, like I have to justify it to you by sharing exactly it is what I am doing with my time off.


So as Eve on the Headspace meditation app signs off: “I’ll leave it there and I look forward to seeing you back here soon.”

My binge-reading disorder

You have a binge-reading disorder.

That quote was from my wife earlier this week about the way I read. I can’t (or haven’t learned to) read in short bursts which she does in her job as a rural 911 dispatcher. She can read 20 minutes at a time, be interrupted, and then read for 10 or whatever between calls.

Which leads me to…

My Own Personal Sabbath #14

Almost every Sunday since mid-May 2020 with a few exceptions, I have been taking my own personal Sabbath, where I tune out of the news and social media and turn off my ringer and all notifications on my phone. Throughout the day and/or sometimes the next day, I share what I am reading, listening to or watching during my Sabbath.

Since I am off work today and tomorrow, I plan on some binge-reading. Like last weekend, I plan on on starting with Get Shorty, and then maybe over this weekend, I’ll also get to Be Cool, and Out of Sight, all three which were made into movies. I’ve seen all but Be Cool, but plan to watch all three when I’m finished with them. Maybe Kim and I can have a mini-Elmore Leonard filmfest on Memorial Day Weekend.

If I don’t finish all three this weekend, maybe I’ll try some reading in short bursts, as recommended by my wife. I also have two other books checked out from the library that I want to get to, but I’m in no rush to read: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer and Riverman: An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath. My wife and I started watching the Hulu/FX adaptation of Under The Banner of Heaven. She had read the book and recommended it to me. I’ve read a couple of other Krakauer and liked them, both Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. Riverman, according to the book jacket, is “the riveting story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero, who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers — and then in 2014 disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina.” I thought it might be interesting.

Other than reading this weekend, we have no big plans this weekend. Today, since it’s supposed to be in the high 80s and low 90s (not normal for us, usually in 60s and 70s in mid-May) we’re getting Chinese for lunch and dinner. The portions are quite large so we’ll have enough for both.

Update, 7:30 p.m. Saturday night: I finished Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard and then Kim and I watched the movie. It was interesting to see the differences between the two, but I liked both, maybe the movie a little more.

So what are you all up to this weekend? Reading, watching, listening to anything good? Please share in the comments.

My Own Personal Sabbath #13: The Pruning

Subtitle: The Slow Burn

Almost every Sunday since mid-May 2020 with a few exceptions, I have been taking my own personal Sabbath, where I tune out of the news and social media and turn off my ringer and all notifications on my phone. Throughout the day and/or sometimes the next day, I share what I am reading, listening to or watching during my Sabbath.

If you could look at my history on Libby of books I’ve checked out and not read just from this year, it probably would be at least 50 books. Likewise, I’ve probably checked out at least a dozen physical books from the library where I work (and have worked for the last decade) that have gone unread. Others, I have checked out and returned a few times but not read yet. However, in total, I’ve only read just under a dozen at 11.

So I’d guess you could say that I have an omnivorous appetite but only a small “stomach” for reading. In a way, it’s similar to pruning in that I let lists build up, then I borrow too many books, and finally I cut back to what I really want to read.

And sometimes I digest books slowly. For example, the last book I finished was Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld, a collection of his favorite material through the years. I’ve been making my way slowly through it since the start of the year. Then the two books previous to that I finished were two short devotionals read over the 40 days of Lent.

Out of the other eight books, only three were read in less than a week, with two, both nonfiction, taking about a month. The other three, all but one nonfiction, were read at about a week. So I guess you also could say that I like the slow burn when it comes to my reading, especially with nonfiction.

All of the fiction I’ve read this year (all FOUR of them) were all crime fiction, and the next fiction books that I plan to read are all crime fiction, all by Elmore Leonard. They are Get Shorty, Be Cool, and Out of Sight, all three which were made into movies. I’ve seen all but Be Cool, but plan to watch all three when I’m finished with them.

So, this afternoon, I plan on starting with Get Shorty and then reading Be Cool next Sunday afternoon and Out of Sight on the last Sunday of the month. Maybe Kim and I can have a mini-Elmore Leonard filmfest on Memorial Day as we are both off work that day.

This morning, I’d like to start Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren. I bought a copy but I also have it in audiobook on loan from our library consortium’s electronic resource collection. I liked Warren’s book, Liturgy of the Ordinary, which I read earlier this year, so I thought I’d give this one a try.

As for what we’re watching tonight, I’ll refer to yesterday’s post, where I mentioned that.

My Own Personal Sabbath #11: Last Day of Vacation

This past week, I was off work along with my wife. I had planned to do a little bit of reading, but it didn’t happen. So, instead I will try to do a little bit of reading today before I go back to work tomorrow. Initially, I had planned to participate in today’s readathon. But just this morning, I decided I just want to read free of social media since tomorrow will be my first day back to work. I need the social media sabbath today and am doing My Own Personal Sabbath one day early.

I’m sticking with a few of the Elmore Leonard books I selected to read last week and maybe finally finishing Is This Anything? By Jerry Seinfeld, a collection of his favorite material through the years that I’ve been making my way slowly through since the start of the year.

Other than reading, we are having our “burger night” tonight. We have Impossible burgers and Alexia onion rings. Most likely, we’ll also have wine from our trip up to Seneca Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, in New York.

We’ll probably watch something, yet to be determined.

So, that’s about it for me for today? What are you up to this weekend? Reading, watching, listening to, doing anything good? Share in the comments.

Photo above is where I’m posting this from, as I am starting my reading today. It’s almost noon and while it’s a late start, at least it’s a clear day.