I generally stay away from self-help books these days, but I recently read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It has come up in enough dispirate contexts I thought it was worth a shot, and it certainly was. The book is generally an argument against the modern busyness epidemic, that feeling that we always need to be doing something and can never get caught up on everything. Its certainly a feeling that I experience and I bet you have too. Anyway, Burkeman doesn’t promise a system to get everything done or fix all your problems like other books in the genre, but instead encourages readers to accept that we will simple never get it all done and trying to do so will only lead to more pain. Put another way, the more you try to master time the more it masters you.

Two arguments from the book stood out to me and are concepts I’m trying to keep in mind every time I feel like I just need to do more. The first is that our relationship with time has changed drastically since the beginning of the industrial revolution and onset of modern capitalism. Widespread factory work promoted the idea that time has an hourly value, it is something that can be spent, saved, or wasted. That idea propagated to people’s personal lives. It became expected that everything we do should have some value. We are encouraged to invest our time for the future but never actually enjoy ourselves in the present.

The second point is rather more philosophical. As mentioned above, we tend to think of ourselves a having time, its something we own, spend, waste, etc. But perhaps its more accurate to consider ourselves as part of time, as made of the stuff. We only exist because of time, and time is not something given to us like a dollar bill, its simply the medium we exist within.