Four Thousand Weeks

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🔼Topic:: Time Management (MOC) 🔼Topic:: Wellbeing (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. You will never have it all - Our desire to be more and more productive is a trap. It only creates more things to do, and the limit of our time in life is rigid. That means that we will never be able to be "on top of things", to have time as an infinite resource, to have full control on our lives.
2. Productivity is a hurtful illusion - Productivity causes us to live in a future that will never arrive, while we miss out on the "now", what matters to us right now, the things that brings us happiness. The more we focus on "using our time well", the more it escapes us and only brings stress of not living up to our impossible expectations. Also, the better we are at being productive, the less filter we have on incoming missions, causing us to spend (scarce) time on meaningless things.
3. Time has became a resource - With the rise of the industrial revolution, we have become slaves to the clock, since this is the measure of our productivity. Time has became a resource that have to be "well spent", even leisure time can be seen as a waste of a "billable hour". It is no longer an experience, but rather an instrument for matching up with our impossible expectations.
4. Be here, now - Life is a matter of experiencing the present, nothing more, nothing less. You will probably not live a legacy, you will not be remembered forever. Now that we have removed those impossible expectations, what should we do? We should focus on solving the important issues in the present, on what gives us happiness. We need to understand that in life, less is more. The more we shake ourselves from outside expectation we can focus on the essential, on what matters to us.
5. Scarcity is good - The fact that we have limited time, limited control over our lives is what gives it meaning. It gives every second value because it is finite. Similarly, having problems in our lives is not something that we wish to get rid of, because dealing with those problems gives us a room for growth, for giving our all, for being us.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? You will feel less stressed about "using your time well", about living an impossible standard of productivity, of chasing a future that will never arrive and having your happiness dependent on the future, while we completely miss out the present. You will work from a "less is more" attitude, focusing on the now, on what matters to you now, on what you are able to do now while embracing the challenges and uncertainties of live.

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... I think that it is only through the sheer power of optimism that he is able to persuade us that from our finitude we should become more, not less active in our lives. The argument for "why not to despair" is short, but perhaps he is rightfully assuming that this is a place no one wants to be in, and we prefer the optimist approach.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... Wow, wow, wow. This book really hits you hard in a good way, it causes you to see differently how you have perceived time and productivity, and it lets you feel okay, even good, with slowing down, focusing on what matters, on the now instead of being the most productive machine ever. I think it is a must reread once in a while, whenever we forget and get lost in the mountain of "todos" again.

The writing is good, captivating, relatable, human. It is fun to read as it is educating.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Introduction

We only have so much time in the world, and so much wanders to see. No matter how you slice it, around 4000 weeks is all we get. Yet, we are stuck in Hustle Culture, focusing on being more and more "productive" (aka busy), but nobody focused on what we really want to do with our time. And when we're not focused on productivity, it's not better. The Attention Economy that keeps creating Distractions is preventing us from having Agency on how to spend our time.

Productivity is just a trap. Being more efficient in getting things done will only bring you more things to do red queen syndrome. It will never clear out the free time you so hope to get. If life is a conveyor belt, than productivity is just speeding it up. The most efficient worker will always have even more to do.

We are bad at time management, and every tip or trick offered us has failed us. Instead of focusing on what's important, we try to shave seconds off our chores, or clear time for deep work, while we continue to lack time for connection, nature and leisure.

It's time to admit defeat, but it's a good thing.

Introduction: In the Long Run, We’re All Dead

• time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. (Location 50)
• The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. (Location 54)
• busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time. (Location 68)
• not only are our four thousand weeks constantly running out, but the fewer of them we have left, the faster we seem to lose them. (Location 87)
• time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up. (Location 108)
• We sense that there are important and fulfilling ways we could be spending our time, even if we can’t say exactly what they are—yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead. (Location 140)
• 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. (Location 162)

Choosing to Choose

Limit Embracing Life

Once "time" and "life" were two unseparated concepts. Time was just the medium by which life happens, things were measured (if at all) by length of tasks, not the time it takes to complete them. This is called task orientation. This allowed us to have moments of timelessness where we were fully immersed in what we were doing, aka "deep time" Flow. A feeling that feels ever lasting, or that time just slips away without noticing.

However, once we arrived to the Industrial Revolution, time has turned into a concept of it's own, because you can't coordinate between people without a measurement of time. We became slaves to the clock, and everything was measured by the time it takes. Instead of being paid by the produce we make, we got paid by the hour.

Time became a resource, which forced us to view it as something that have to be well spent. This prescription is exactly what causes us to make bad use of our time. We try to master it, instead of experiencing it mindfulness. Replacing deep time with "efficient time". With countless methods of productivity time management, we are promised that "if only we would take control of our time, we would achieve the calm existence we are after" Future disillusionment, and this kind of living through Expectations instead of the present is a sure way for Stress and Disappointment.

All productivity is is just a avoidance strategy, meant to help us avoid accepting the limited time we have and the acknowledgment that we will never have time to finish all that we wanted. It is like Reverse Thinking, the more we dedicate our thoughts towards time management, the more it escapes us and causes stress. Both work and leisure are tools, two sides of the same coin, that are used to help us forget the deadline of life, aka Death. Either we strive for the perfect Todo system that will help us accomplish everything (which will never happen), or we numb ourselves with distractions. We strive for endless control on what can't be controlled.

It is precisely this Scarcity of time that makes our choices meaningful Fleetingness, not the perspective that we can "do it all", which causes us to lose focus on what really matters. Limits

We need to embrace life with it's limitations. It won't solve all of our problems, but we will see the impossible struggle for control over time as what it is, and not feel ashamed for failing to uphold this impossible goal, or stress for living under the control of the clock. Rather life should be like flow Life as Flow. We need to respond to the necessities of our life, rather than implement an external goal.

The Limit-Embracing Life

• The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse. (Location 176)
• the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, (Location 218)
• 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 271)
• The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, (Location 282)
• The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you. (Location 293)
• most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. (Location 331)
• rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; (Location 346)
• 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. (Location 365)
• Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default (Location 373)
• meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, (Location 387)
• approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history. (Location 390)

The Efficiency Trap

The dream of being "on top on things" and "having it all" is highly tempting. We chase for "better" methods in hope we would be able to clear our Todo list and achieve calm and successful life, only to find that the list just gets longer and longer Parkinsons Law. The more free time we generate, the more we and society would want it filled. The supply creates demand. This is the efficiency trap.

Also, the more we become efficient, the less we believe that life is a trade off. We believe we can "do it all", so why bother filtering the list? Which ends up in us doing meaningless things instead of the truly essential ones. Prioritization

Convenience is a double edged sword. When we reduce Friction from a process, it also reduces it's meaning. In friction lies the value of things. For example, sending an automated birthday message in a click of a button is more efficient, but less valuable than crafting a gift yourself and hand deliver it with a note. It's not the thought that counts, but rather the effort. Struggle

Instead of admitting the obvious which is that we can't do more than we are capable of, we continue to pursue the dream of efficient "busyness". Because otherwise we would have to admit that we have to give up on something, and this loss is hurtful for us loss averse people. But this less is more approach, to resist our urge to do everything, is the only way out.

The Efficiency Trap

• even the winners in our achievement-obsessed culture—the ones who make it to the elite universities, then reap the highest salaries—find that their reward is the unending pressure to work with “crushing intensity” in order to maintain the income and status that have come to seem like prerequisites for the lives they want to lead. (Location 427)
• in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more (Location 439)
• the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will. (Location 463)
• 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. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do. (Location 498)
• the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count. (Location 510)
• 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)
• 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 559)
• Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. (Location 588)
• smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. (Location 605)

Facing Finitude

Time is our main limit. It's not just one aspect of our being, it's the only one that matters. We can never shake off our temporal limitation - death. Every decision is set in time, both it's inputs (my circumstances which are affected by my past and present), and the outcome (the consequences for future me). Similarly, every decision is a temporal one because I can only make x decisions per day, and some are mutually exclusive, which de facto means that any decision is both positive and negative. To choose x is to also give up on endless other possibilities. This is the Latin origin of the word "decide" - to cut off.

We can either see our finitude as being rubbed of something which is common in modernity for feeling entitled to life, but a better and more positive outlook would be to view what we have as a gift. Every moment is a gift since we could have not been born at all, or we could die tomorrow, so by dedicating time for something in this context, choosing "this" instead of an endless "that", knowing that we are finite, is what grants our actions value and meaning.

It often takes life threatening scenarios for this eureka moment, but hopefully we can embrace it without it.

Facing Finitude

• Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, (Location 688)
• As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (Location 697)
• It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. (Location 743)
• maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all. (Location 778)
• It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that—actually, instead of an infinite number of other “that's”—because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now. (Location 813)

Become a Better Procrastinator

Time management should therefore be all about how to detect what not to do, and be at peace about letting it go When to Quit

To do that, we should:

1. Pay yourself first - by using methods such as Time Blocking, you make sure that you have time for the most important things, and the rest? Let them be. The other tasks will have to manage with the little time left.
2. Limit your "in progress" - since Multitasking doesnt exist, having too much on our plate would cause us to progress at none. Therefore choose only a few (up to 3) to focus on until completion (or deletion)
3. Say no - it's more than just refusing what you didn't want to do anyway. A finite life would force us to say no to things that interest us, but simply aren't the most important ones. Saying no
4. Burn the bridge - once you make a decision, create a situation of Path Dependence. There's no going back, no exploration of other options or room for Regret. You either finish the project or discard it.

The bad kind of "procrastination" happens when we get stuck at perfectionism Perfect is the enemy of good. It is a type of avoidance strategy where we prefer to stay in the realm of perfect hypothetical dream rather than to face the truth of our finitude, settle and make it into a (non perfect) reality Image vs core.

Becoming a Better Procrastinator

• the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done—that’s never going to happen—but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it. (Location 831)
• The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. (Location 836)
• You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.” (Location 913)
• usually the result of trying to avoid that truth. The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. (Location 917)
• We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so. (Location 1030)
• When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice. (Location 1045)

The Watermelon Problem

Every action requires it attention Focus. And nowadays it is a scarce resource due to the attention economy. Not only that it takes away our time, which is exactly like paying with our lives, it only affects the way we view the world, and in a negative way. It strengthens social divides and hijacks our thoughts and preferences.

And the problem is that attention is not only a necessary condition for life same as food or water, it is life itself. To live is to experience and experience requires our attention. A mischlen star meal is as worthless as instant noodles if our mind daydreams.

The Watermelon Problem

• your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. (Location 1077)
• it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. (Location 1145)

The Intimate Interrupter

Distractions are not tempting because of their content. It's not that we escape to distractions, but rather we try to escape from something. That something is an unpleasant feeling when we try to focus on what matters. This means that even if we try to ignore distractions to the best of our ability, even if we hide our phones, we would still find ourselves trying to avoid what we're currently facing.

This feeling is the result of the gap between our expectations and reality. Therefore, the way to reduce the unpleasantness is to be more "mindful". To see things as they are, without judgment or expectations, and see that by being mindful we reduce the power of the unpleasantness

The Intimate Interrupter

• 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 1251)
• what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. (Location 1269)
• the truth is that I don’t think there is one. The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—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. (Location 1278)

Beyond Control

We Never Really Have time

We are not good at planning, because of the planning fallacy, we tend to underestimate how long things are going to take. But even if we do try to account for our bias, we might get an even larger error thanks to Goodhart’s Law. For example, planning for shopping to take one hour can lead to it eventually being an hour and a half, but giving it two hours will lead to two hours and a half.

The second reason planning is problematic is because we treat it as something more than it actually is. We think of it as creating certainty in the future, while in reality it is no more than just a promise. We don't "have" time to use as a resource the same way we have money in our bank. It is never really "ours" to have since life is uncertain. We never know what will happen in the future, no matter how well we planned. This is the source of all anxiety, to try and feel certain in an uncertain world. The only way out is to accept that things might fail, might not go our way. This doesn't mean that we don't have the freedom of response, this is perhaps the one certain thing we will surely have, but it does mean that we can't control the future, so there's no sense of feeling like we can by planning ahead.

We Never Really Have Time

• the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans. It’s as if our efforts to be good planners don’t merely fail but cause things to take longer still. Reality seems to fight back, (Location 1309)
• no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. Instead, the frontier of your uncertainty just gets pushed further and further toward the horizon. (Location 1336)
• 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. (Location 1341)
• You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past. (Location 1356)
• a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan (Location 1372)
• we can still respond, to the best of our abilities, should bad things nonetheless occur; we’re not obliged to accept suffering or injustice as part of the inevitable order of things. But 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 1421)
• 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. (Location 1430)

You Are here

When we treat time as a resource, it means that the present moment itself has become an instrumental thing, a tool to be used for a "better future". It turns our outlook onwards to a future that will never come, because we will never be there to witness it because by then we would focus on a more distant future. It is to think "once I achieve x, i will finally be able to y". Therefore any moment until x is passed by without noticing, and even we do achieve x, we feel empty, or miss the experience entirely.

The reason is that we don't live in the moment. However we can't force ourselves to "be in the present", it's like trying not to think about elephants, or forcing ourselves to sleep, it's doomed from the start. It's trying to view ourselves outside of ourselves. The only option is to recognize that there was never no other option, because the present is all we got. Life itself is our present experience.

You Are Here

• it turns out to be perilously easy to overinvest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are (Location 1442)
• we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of (Location 1536)
• 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. (Location 1546)
• life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now. (Location 1573)
• it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail. (Location 1618)
• The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” is the mental discomfort of attempting to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps—to modify your relationship to the present moment in time, when in fact that moment in time is all that you are to begin with. (Location 1630)

Rediscovering Rest

We have become unable to Rest. Even our leisure time is perceived as something that should be "useful", specifically with it ties to work. We rest in order to be better workers when we come back, to "recharge our batteries". We have turned everything upside down, as if it's not that we work for leisure, but the other way around.

Our leisure is perceived as something "productive", like writing books or studying a new skill. We also treat it as something instrumental Instrumental. However it has not always been the case. Before Capitalism that has enforced the concept of productive time, we had a society more focused on leisure. It was also easier when work was limited to the office and stores closed in the evening, and we had a social pressure to attend leisure activities such as church and holidays. The concept of shabbat shows us how difficult it is to truly rest, and why we need some (arbitrary) rules just to help us avoid doing work, and rest for rest sake. A key sign of true rest is hobbies. Not side hustles, not something we do for a future goal. Something that we do because it's fun, that we can suck at, and we won't care at all.

Rediscovering Rest

• we’re not merely the victims of an economic system that denies us any opportunity for it. Increasingly, we’re also the kind of people who don’t actually want to rest—who find it seriously unpleasant to pause in our efforts to get things done, (Location 1727)
• To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. (Location 1763)

The Impatience Spiral

Despite new inventions that let us move and operate faster and faster, it seems that our impatience is just growing more and more.

Our impatience operates as a negative spiral. It emanates from a will to avoid facing negative emotional states, i.e serve as a tool for emotional avoidance. We use our productivity, our work, as distractions from the problems in our lives. However it gets worse when this Escapism just aggravates the problem. Like an Addiction, the more we dedicate to it, the more problems we have, the more we need a fix, the more we get addicted, and on and on.

Instead of living life of flow, of letting things take their time. We have caught within the negative spiral of "speeding up life" Slowing down.

The Impatience Spiral

• We tend to feel as though it’s our right to have things move at the speed we desire, and the result is that we make ourselves miserable—not just because we spend so much time feeling frustrated, but because chivying the world to move faster is frequently counterproductive anyway. (Location 1913)
• since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still. (Location 1928)
• Reaching for the smartphone, diving back into the to-do list, pounding away on the elliptical machine at the gym—all these forms of high-speed living were serving as some kind of emotional avoidance. (Location 1967)
• As the world gets faster and faster, we come to believe that our happiness, or our financial survival, depends on our being able to work and move and make things happen at superhuman speed. We grow anxious about not keeping up—so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary. (Location 1990)
• When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed. (Location 2017)

Staying on the Bus

Patience seems as something negative, a form of passiveness, of laziness in a world that focuses on rushing ahead. However nowadays it is more essential than ever to be patient. Because rushing ahead stems from the misguided view that we can achieve life without problems, that everything is solvable and fast. However not only that it's not true, we want problems in our lives.

How to be more patient:

1. Develop a taste for problems - the struggle of facing problems and coming up with solutions is what gives our lives meaning. Adversarial Growth
2. Slow and steady - do small steps daily, something that is easy to maintain in the long run, and feel okay with stopping once you've reached the daily goal. Don't let the forces of impatience control you Start Small
3. Results take time - at first we all fail or don't create unique results First Batch Trash, this is not a sign of our inaptitude, just that we are on the track onwards. It is those who have patience to let their skills develop, instead of quickly switching to a different track, that get to extraordinary performance Trust the Process

Staying on the Bus

• patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future. (Location 2033)
• Your reward for surrendering the fantasy of controlling the pace of reality is to achieve, at last, a real sense of purchase on that reality. (Location 2083)
• Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, giving each one the time it requires (Location 2123)
• That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience. (Location 2157)

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

We pursue more and more control over our time, especially our personal time, but we fail to see that having more personal freedom makes it harder for us to sync with others. The desire to have uninterrupted "me time", together with the constraints of a full time job leaves almost no time to connect with others. The life of the free person are a life of Loneliness. And in the end, Human is a social being, we are built to sync with others, we copy other's emotional and physical state without even noticing. We have a sense of belonging the more we have shared experiences with others.

The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

• every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. (Location 2226)
• 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. (Location 2344)
• 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 2357)
• sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own. (Location 2374)

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

We feel obligated to have a life mission that will live a mark, to be remembered, to have meaning through doing something remarkable. To "go big or go home" Binary Thinking. The problem is that we set the bar too high. This will only lead to disappointment. We need to be humble and remember that most people don't leave a legacy, in the grand scheme of the cosmos, we are insignificant. But that shouldn't lead us to despair Nihilism. On the contrary, we should suffice with the daily activities that bring meaning to our live now, like spending time with your children, talking with friends. Simplicity

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. (Location 2464)
• what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. (Location 2479)

The Human Disease

Our problem is one of Perception, that we think that eventually we will be able to exert control over the entire reality, that we will have no more problems, we will have time to do everything we wanted, and we will be in control on everything that happens. We wish to believe it because the alternative is depressing, that problems are endless, that we don't have control and we don't matter.

However we have to acknowledge this truth in order to advance to a healthier mindset. That "now" is all we have, that problems are a source of meaning, that it's okay to not be able to finish everything, so we should focus on what matters to us, without being judged by impossible standards.

Ask yourself these questions to see whether you have adopted the healthier perception:

1. Are you prioritizing comfort as a type of escapism or are you facing challenges from a place of growth?
2. Are you judging yourself by impossible standards of productivity?
3. Have you accepted yourself as who you are instead of who you "ought to be"?
4. What are the things that you avoid doing because you are still waiting for "complete mastery"?
5. How would you act if you wouldn't see the fruition of your work?

The Human Disease

• This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because the alternative is so unsettling. But unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. (Location 2527)
• you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well (Location 2556)
• And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment. (Location 2559)
• The peace of mind on offer here is of a higher order: it lies in the recognition that being unable to escape from the problems of finitude is not, in itself, a problem. (Location 2567)
• Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can. (Location 2592)
• The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of incoming demands. (Location 2596)
• Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today. (Location 2608)
• it is from this position of not feeling as though you need to earn your weeks on the planet that you can do the most genuine good with them. Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead. (Location 2623)
• there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. (Location 2636)
• if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all—to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution. (Location 2646)
• What actions—what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results? We’re all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we’ll never see. The cathedral’s still worth building, all the same. (Location 2662)