Five Questions from 4000 Weeks

Here are the five questions found at the end of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021):

1. Where in your life and work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity and performance that are impossible to meet?
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, nto the person you think you ought to be?
4. In which areas of your life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you are doing?
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so muhc abou tseeing your actions reach fruition?

(SIDE NOTE: My notes on Four Thousand Weeks can be found here)

And here are the difficult realizations I came to realize in doing this exercise and answering these questions. (I didn’t end up answering them all, but it sparked the following meditation):

Comfort > Discomfort

With client work, I’m pursuing as much comfort as possible by doing as little as possible. I’m not quiet quitting, but I am “lying flat”. I am drained by meetings and the environment that veers on toxicity. At my agency and in the last two years of attempt to launch a press, I have had persistent and chronic guilt at not delivering. There is “comfort” in that pushing off and procrastination I suppose, but it’s also recognizing that I am – not so much as “doing too much” – as I have promised and added too much on to my plate. It’s the trap Burkeman talks about where you say yes to everything, but you don’t actually deliver on anything, and then feel horrible for doing that.

With hobbies, a lot of it are these weird excuses of “in order to” activities. I’m playing (or shopping for) wargames because I want to “learn more” about a battle or war which could potentially be an “in order to” create more realism as a setting in my ficiton… which I am not doing any of. Improv/Sketch/Standup was my first pure hobby in a long time. I actually did stuff. It wasn’t just shopping, gathering, and collecting.

And I hate writing this – but at this moment, I am on automatic with my family. I am doing the bare minimum. I am not putting in energy and intent into making their lives better. I have failed them. There is a guilt/exhaustion cycle here. “I feel bad but I’m also so tired”.

There’s a bubbling resentment I’ve felt this year for all these sacrifices I’ve made. At the work/projects/clients I committed to in the hopes of a “payoff” that never paid off.

Life Projects That Matter (Notes)

Burkeman says that in order to make room for “Life Projects that Matter” (LPM), you need to accept the following conditions:

• You are NOT in control of your time
• You are NOT immune to the painful attacks of reality
• You are NOT confident about the future of these projects

In other words, you need to GIVE UP control and planning. Recognize you might fail, you risk embarrassment, you’ll have difficult conversations, disappoint some people, and add suffering to your life.

The alternative to this is you maintain the illusion you’re in charge. When you do this, when you avoid anxiety, you do the following:

• Procrastinate
• Distract Yourself
• Commitment-Phobia
• Clearing the Decks (organize/clean/index)
• Taking on too many projects (Say yes to everything)

Learning how to say no comes down to asking this question: Does this decision diminish or enlarge me?. You don’t alleviate anxiety. You don’t ask “what would make me happiest?” (that question lures you into the comfortable option or paralyzses you with indecision).

• Enlargement = Grow as a person
• Diminishment = Shrink with every passing week

In Order To

When I think on this topic, so many of what I’ve done in the past 15 years were “in-order-to” activities. BH was a five year “in order to” project that didn’t pay off and made me resentful. I was chasing a Freshmanistan model (AS) that was unrealistic. I was never going to replicate AS’s 2018 jackpot. But I kept thinking that way.

And that’s the chase and hunt of business, isn’t it? You use up the energy of your 20s/30s to pursue, going down every rabbit hole, seizing every opportunity. I don’t think it helped that I was blessed with above-average energy levels. I just pursued things harder even when they didn’t pay off. I just took on more but in the false sense of more as Burkeman talks about. You think you’re doing more, when all you did was added a lot to your plate and did everything half-assed.

How many “in-order-to” activities have I done to avoid my actual dream of writing ficiton? How many hobbies did you take on, how many things did you buy (claiming resource collection - for ideas/worlds), how many educational things did you add to the list?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of “in order to” hobbies that I believed “fed” into writing/telling stories when I just needed to “DO THE WORK”…

All of these “in-order-to” hobbies were really distractions, commitment-phobia, and some mind-bending logic of “clearing the decks”. I need to do this X first, before Y can happen, wherein X is this “in-order-to” preparation before I could actually sit down and write ficiton. It is truly mind-bending.

It is consumption, clearing the decks, adjacent, critique, putting off, and comfort. They are Avoidant Activities.

Standup was the only “hobby” that actively forced me to create and deliver content. I had to embarrass myself, push myself out of my comfort zone, add more anxiety by facing my creative demons, iterate on content that was initially shitty, and then set up on stage and perform.

What Do I Really Want?

Is it really fiction? That’s just the vehicle I’m choosing. When I look back at the values exercise I did in a group therapy session, it’s feeling special, that I did something “great”, and I’m recognized for it. Yes, it is vain. But after my first ever standup set, pumping with adrenaline, when I got off the stage, I realized… this has been missing from my life since my music days. From piano recitals, to standing up in front of a class because Mr. Stokes felt my writing was worth reading to the class, to performing in choir, the few times with EG/BC/TK/GT during Christmas and EOY performances, the few times I played bass in front of the church, to being the lead trainer in my eBay department… I knew that PERFORMANCE and getting accolades for it was actually built into my DNA. I had forgotten about it in my 15 years of freelancing. I had gone under the radar and forgot that I liked (needed?) audience attention.

The three values discovered at that group therapy session: Close Relationships, Meaningful Work, Recognition.

Novel writing, I believe, would hit those last two.

Conclusions

Stop thinking you have thirty years to make up for the last 42. Recognize you have 8 years to repair the last 42. You may not have the time or energy to build if you don’t build now. Accept that your life is limited and you don’t have much left.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight of themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.

Oliver Burkeman, pg. 31 of Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

Don’t do things “in order to”. Do the actual thing. Develop a taste for problems. Accept radical incrementalism. Stay on the fucking bus.

You do not have a cosmically significant life purpose. And that’s OK.

To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment – the government, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just “the future” to make things all right in the end

Oliver Burkeman, pg. 230 of Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.

Pema Chödrön

Train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing.