Four Thousand Weeks

In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, 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.

The venture capitalist and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has observed that we often ‘don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way’.

as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, 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 d

Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context.

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.

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.

Hofstadter was half joking, of course. But I’ve always found something a little unsettling about his law, because if it’s true – and it certainly seems to be, in my experience – it suggests something very strange: that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans.

Denying reality never works, though.

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. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn