Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Author:Oliver Burkeman [Burkeman, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-Help, Self-Management, Time Management, Personal Growth, Happiness, philosophy, General
ISBN: 9780374715243
Google: WFP2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-08-10T00:21:41.235522+00:00

Pathological Productivity

And yet here we’ll need to confront a rarely acknowledged truth about rest, which is that 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, and who get antsy when we feel as though we’re not being sufficiently productive. An extreme example is the case of the novelist Danielle Steel, who in a 2019 interview with Glamour magazine revealed the secret of how she’d managed to write 179 books by the time she turned seventy-two, releasing them at the rate of almost seven per year: by working almost literally all the time, in twenty-hour days, with a handful of twenty-four-hour writing periods per month, a single week’s holiday each year, and practically no sleep. (“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor,” she was quoted as saying. “If I have four hours, it’s a really good night for me.”) Steel drew widespread praise for her “badass” work habits. But it’s surely not unreasonable to perceive, in this sort of daily routine, the evidence of a serious problem—of a deep-rooted inability to refrain from using time productively. In fact, Steel herself seems to concede that she uses productivity as a way to avoid confronting difficult emotions. Her personal ordeals have included the loss of an adult son to a drug overdose and no fewer than five divorces—and work, she told the magazine, is “where I take refuge. Even when bad things have happened in my personal life, it’s a constant. It’s something solid I can escape into.”

If it seems uncharitable to accuse Steel of being pathologically unable to relax, I ought to clarify that the malady is widespread. I’ve suffered from it as acutely as anyone; and unlike Steel, I can’t claim to have brought joy to millions of readers of romantic fiction as a happy side effect. Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be 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. Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter. Their commitment to frugal living supplied the other

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