How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time

We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else. This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind,”

The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.

All my life, I’ve been very aware that time is finite. I admit I’m overly logical about a lot of things, but I firmly believe that one of my most appropriate fixations has been to manage time well. I’ve railed about time management to my students. I’ve given lectures on it. And because I’ve gotten so good at it, I really do feel I was able to pack

“Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question [of] whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on £85 a year,” Bennett wrote. “I have [also] seen an essay, ‘How to live on eight shillings a week.’ But I have never seen an essay, ‘How to live on twenty-four hours a day.’” The joke—to spell it out—is how absurd it is that anyone