#26 Life is short: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
The average human lifespan is 4,000 weeks.
We often think of time stretching before us like a vast ocean – perhaps wrapped up in the minutes and hours which may seem incalculable in number.
But when we boil it down to weeks, life’s scale is far shorter than we imagine.
I first encountered this slightly scary and existential number when I downloaded an audiobook on a whim.
In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman challenges the conventional wisdom of time management by arguing that we should focus on living a meaningful life instead of trying to get everything done.
Burkeman offers a framework for thinking about our time in a more realistic way, and he encourages us to embrace our mortality and make the most of the time we have.
Four Thousand Weeks sits somewhere between a philosophical musing, history of timeand your bread and butter self-help time management book.
One of the key takeaways is we should be mindful of our limitations and rather than frantically fight against them, to some extent we can embrace life better when we let things go that do no matter to us.
I also read the book as permission to be more playful with life and cast aside the ‘shoulds’ of life – I should be doing this or I should have experienced this, etc.
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Benjamin Craske
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