{"id":202137,"date":"2022-03-21T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=202137"},"modified":"2022-02-25T06:39:17","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T06:39:17","slug":"escaping-the-trap-of-efficiency-the-counterintuitive-antidote-to-the-time-anxiety-that-haunts-and-hampers-our-search-for-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/escaping-the-trap-of-efficiency-the-counterintuitive-antidote-to-the-time-anxiety-that-haunts-and-hampers-our-search-for-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cProductivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster\u2026 Since finitude defines our lives\u2026 living a truly authentic life \u2014 becoming fully human \u2014 means facing up to that fact.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A decade ago, when I first began practicing with my mindfulness teacher<\/a> while struggling to make rent and make meaning out of my borrowed stardust, one meditation she led transformed my quality of life above all others \u2014 both life\u2019s existential calibration and its moment-to-moment experience:<\/p>\n

You are asked to imagine having only a year left to live, at your present mental and bodily capacity \u2014 what would you do with it? Then imagine you only had a day left \u2014 what would you do with it? Then only an hour \u2014 what would you do with it?<\/p>\n

As you scale down these nested finitudes, the question becomes a powerful sieve for priorities \u2014 because undergirding it is really the question of what, from among the myriad doable things, you would choose not<\/em> to do in order to fill the scant allotment of time, be it the 8,760 hours of a year or a single hour, with the experiences that confer upon it maximum aliveness, that radiant vitality filling the basic biological struggle for survival with something more numinous.<\/p>\n

The exercise instantly clarifies \u2014 and horrifies, with the force of its clarity \u2014 the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin\u2019s Thinker<\/em>, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Wall clock<\/a> featuring Discus chronologicus<\/em> \u2014 an early eighteenth-century German depiction of time. (Also available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Oliver Burkeman<\/strong> reckons with these ideas in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 an inquiry equal parts soulful and sobering, offering not arsenal for but sanctuary from our self-brutalizing war on the constraints of reality, titled after the (disconcertingly low) number of weeks comprising the average modern sapiens lifespan of eighty (seemingly long) years.<\/p>\n

After taking a delightful English jab at the American-bred term \u201clife-hack\u201d and its unfortunate intimation that \u201cyour life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally,\u201d Burkeman frames our present predicament:<\/p>\n

This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older<\/a> thinkers<\/a> have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom<\/a> is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved \u201cwork-life balance,\u201d whatever that might be, and you certainly won\u2019t get there by copying the \u201csix things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.\u201d The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control \u2014 when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you\u2019re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody\u2019s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you\u2019ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In consequence, we lose sight of the fundamental tradeoff that the price of higher productivity is always lower creativity<\/a>. All of it, Burkeman observes, is the product of an anxiety about time that springs from our stubborn avoidance of the elemental parameters of reality. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson lamented that \u201cenough is so vast a sweetness\u2026 it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,\u201d<\/a> he writes:<\/p>\n

Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can\u2019t ever bring the sense that you\u2019re doing enough \u2014 that you are enough \u2014 because it defines \u201cenough\u201d as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This pursuit of efficiency hollows out the fullness of life, flattening the sphere of being that makes us complete human beings into a hamster wheel. Burkeman terms this \u201cthe paradox of limitation\u201d and writes:<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and work with them, rather than against them \u2014 the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Echoing physicist Brian Greene\u2019s poetic meditation on how our mortality gives meaning to our lives<\/a>, he adds:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we\u2019re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I\u2019m aware of no other time management technique that\u2019s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Time-Catcher<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the crux of facing the limits of reality is the fact that we must make choices \u2014 a necessity that can petrify us with \u201cFOMO,\u201d the paralyzing fear of missing out. And yet, as Adam Phillips observed in his elegant antidote to this fear<\/a>, \u201cour lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have different coping strategies for managing the melancholy onus of having to choose. I am aware that my reliance on daily routines, unvaried meals, interchangeable clothing items, recursive playlists, and other life-loops is a coping mechanism aimed at automating certain choices in order to allay the anxiety and time-cost of having to make them afresh each day. Others orient orthogonally to the problem, avoiding making concrete choices and commitments, in life and in love, in order to keep their options \u201copen\u201d \u2014 an equally illusory escape from the grand foreclosure that is life itself.<\/p>\n

But however we cope with the fearsome fact of having to choose, choose we must in order to live \u2014 and in order to have lives worthy of having been lived. It is, of course, all about facing our mortality \u2014 like every anxiety in life, if its layers of distraction and disguise are peeled back far enough.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
One of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s etchings for a rare edition of Montaigne\u2019s essays<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to the etymology of \u201cdecide\u201d \u2014 which stems from the Latin decidere<\/em>, \u201cto cut off,\u201d a root it shares with \u201chomicide\u201d and \u201csuicide\u201d \u2014 Burkeman considers the necessity of excision:<\/p>\n

Any finite life \u2014 even the best one you could possibly imagine \u2014 is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility\u2026 Since finitude defines our lives\u2026 living a truly authentic life \u2014 becoming fully human \u2014 means facing up to that fact.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Facing our finitude is, of course, the most challenging frontier of our ongoing resistance to facing the various territories of reality. The outrage we intuitively feel at the fact of our mortality \u2014 outrage for which the commonest prescription in the history of our species have been sugar-coated pellets of illusion<\/a> promising ideologies of immortality \u2014 is a futile fist shaken at the fundamental organizing principle<\/a> of the universe, of which we are part and product. Only the rare few<\/a> are able to orient to mortality by meeting reality on its own terms and finding in that reorientation not only relief but rapturous gladness.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Liminal Days<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A generation after Richard Dawkins made his exquisite counterintuitive argument for how death betokens the luckiness of life<\/a>, Burkeman offers a fulcrum for pivoting our intuitive never-enough-time perspective to take a different view of the time we do have:<\/p>\n

From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult\u2026 There you were, planning to live on forever\u2026 but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.<\/p>\n

Yet, on reflection, there\u2019s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it\u2019s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it\u2019s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who\u2019d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given \u2014 as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it\u2019s not that you\u2019ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it\u2019s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our anxiety about the finitude of time is at bottom a function of the limits of attention \u2014 that great strainer for stimuli, woven of time. Our brains have evolved to miss the vast majority of what is unfolding around us<\/a>, which renders our slender store of conscious attention our most precious resource \u2014 \u201cthe rarest and purest form of generosity,\u201d<\/a> in Simone Weil\u2019s lovely words. And yet, Burkeman argues, treating attention as a resource is already a diminishment of its reality-shaping centrality to our lives. In consonance with William James \u2014 the original patron saint of attention as the empress of experience<\/a> \u2014 Burkeman writes:<\/p>\n

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals \u2014 such as food, money, and electricity \u2014 are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it\u2019s possible to live without them, at least for a while. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Annie Dillard captured this sentiment best in her haunting observation that \u201chow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives\u201d<\/a> \u2014 a poetic sentiment that, on a hectic day, becomes an indictment. What makes our attention so vulnerable to distraction is the difficulty of attending to what is consequential in the grandest scheme \u2014 a difficulty temporarily allayed by the ease of attending to the immediate and seemingly urgent but, ultimately, inconsequential. (Who among us would, on their deathbed, radiate soul-gladness over the number of emails they responded to in their lifetime?) \u201cPeople are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy,\u201d Rilke admonished<\/a> a century before social media\u2019s stream of easy escape into distraction, before productivity apps and life-hacks and instaeverything. \u201cBut it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burkeman writes:<\/p>\n

Whenever we succumb to distraction, we\u2019re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude \u2014 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\u2026 The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise \u2014 to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so we get to the crux of our human predicament \u2014 the underbelly of our anxiety about every unanswered email, every unfinished project, and every unbegun dream: Our capacities are limited, our time is finite, and we have no control over how it will unfold or when it will run out. Beyond the lucky fact of being born, life is one great sweep of uncertainty, bookended by the only other lucky certainty we have. It is hardly any wonder that the sweep is dusted with so much worry and we respond with so much obsessive planning, compulsive productivity, and other touching illusions of control.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Vanish<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Burkeman \u2014 whose previous book made a similarly counterintuitive and insightful case for uncertainty as the wellspring of happiness<\/a> \u2014 writes:<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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: that your partner won\u2019t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won\u2019t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it\u2019s a fight the worrier obviously won\u2019t win.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state \u2014 because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional \u2014 as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you\u2019ve gotten it, in Arnold Bennett\u2019s phrase, \u201cinto proper working order.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The primary manifestation of this \u2014 and the root of our uneasy relationship with time \u2014 is that, in the course of our ordinary days, we instinctively make choices not through the lens of significance but through the lens of anxiety-avoidance, which increasingly renders life something to be managed rather than savored, a problem to be solved rather than a question to be asked, which we must each answer with the singular song of our lives, melodic with meaning.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Arthur Rackham from a rare 1926 edition of The Tempest<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Leaning on Carl Jung\u2019s perceptive advice on how to live<\/a>, Burkeman makes poetically explicit the book\u2019s implicitly obvious and necessary disclaimer:<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it\u2019s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they\u2019ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

If you can face the truth about time in this way \u2014 if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human \u2014 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 rearview 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 around to doing \u2014 and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing \u2014 whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying and clarifying Four Thousand Weeks<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, drawing on a wealth of contemporary research and timeless wisdom from thinkers long vanished into what Emily Dickinson termed \u201cthe drift called \u2018the Infinite,’\u201d<\/a> Burkeman goes on to devise a set of principles for liberating ourselves from the trap of efficiency and its illusory dreams of control, so that our transience can be a little more bearable and our finite time in the kingdom of life a little less provisional, a lot more purposeful, and infinitely more alive.<\/p>\n

Complement it with Seneca on the Stoic key to living with presence<\/a>, Hermann Hesse on breaking the trance of busyness<\/a>, artist Etel Adnan on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence<\/a>, and physicist Alan Lightman\u2019s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to life\u2019s central anxiety<\/a>, then revisit Borges\u2019s timeless refutation of time<\/a>, which Burkeman necessarily quotes, and Mary Oliver \u2014 another of Burkeman\u2019s bygone beacons \u2014 on the measure of a life well lived<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cProductivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster\u2026 Since finitude defines our lives\u2026 living a truly authentic life \u2014 becoming fully human \u2014 means facing up to that fact.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":202138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[801,1496,1177],"class_list":["post-202137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-consciousness","tag-humanism","tag-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}