Facing Our Finitude

For Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.
 
What most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing.
 
Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that …
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Idleness Aversion: Inability to Rest

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 half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.
 
It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live. There was no chance that all that hard work could improve the probability that one would be saved: after all, the whole point of the doctrine of predestination was that nothing could influence one’s fate. On the other hand, wouldn’t someone who already was saved naturally demonstrate a tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness? On this fraught understanding, idleness became an especially anxiety-inducing experience, to be avoided at all costs—not merely a vice that might lead to damnation if you overindulged in it, as many Christians had long maintained, but one that might be evidence of the horrifying truth that you already were damned.
 
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

 

The Decline of Pleasure

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.
 
We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.
 
The Purpose of Rest
 
We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
 
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Time as a Resource

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.
 
Previously, laborers had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who didn’t.
 
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

 
 

The Delusion of ‘Billable Hour’

One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d care to admit.
 
We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future—that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems—you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Life on the Conveyor Belt

In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”
 
But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.
 
We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done, or both.
 
Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

日本农村比城市还富裕

在20世纪70年代日本经济高速发展时期，日本政府实施了对农村的特殊优惠政策，对于农副产品生产给予了高额补贴，鼓励农民留在家里种田，而不是到城市里当农民工。日本政府认为，日本大部分地区是农村，如果农村富裕不起来，全国也就富裕不起来。如果农村乱了，那么全国也会乱。

因此，日本在20世纪70～90年代的经济高速发展期中，解决了一个很大的问题，那就是基本消除了城市与农村的贫富差距，消除了农民与城市居民的收入差距。

日本在经济高速发展时期，也遇到过农村城镇化建设的问题。但是，日本的农村城镇化，并不是把一些小村落进行人为拆并，把农家集中起来建高楼，而是在不改变他们原有的居住地、不实行村落拆并的前提下，由政府出资进行现代化的农村基础设施改造，做到家家通电、通煤气、通自来水、通无线网络、通道路。为什么需要政府来投资农村的基础设施呢？因为农村的每个人都纳税，政府收了老百姓的钱，就要承担起为老百姓生活提供服务的义务和责任。

因此，日本的农村在过去几十年中，家没有搬，村还是那个村，地还是那块地，但是生活的环境改变了，农村的基础设施实现了现代化。农民的居住与生活条件，不仅与东京大阪的城市居民相差无几，而且许多家庭都超过了城市居民的居住条件。

因为土地价格便宜，日本农村家家户户都是一户建的别墅。而且许多家庭新建的房子充分利用政府对太阳能利用的补助政策，将自己的房子建成太阳能智能化住宅。照明、做饭、空调、洗浴等，都使用太阳能，而且富余的电力还可以卖给电力公司，每个月都能有2000元人民币左右的卖电收入。

与中国的农村相比，日本农民的受教育程度更高。由于日本所有的公立中小学校的建设费用和教育费用都是由政府专项拨款，按照全国统一的规格标准建设，即使是一所只有10名学生的小学，室内体育馆、游泳池、图书馆、科学实验室等也是一应俱全，与城市里的小学没有什么差别。而且日本农村七八十岁的老太太也大多是中学甚至大学毕业，因此，即使是在十分偏僻的农村，我们也都能看到她们把家里收拾得干干净净，庭院里种上各种花花草草。

日本的农村之所以能够做到比城市还富裕，还有两个基本的因素。一是日本农村有一个全国性的农业合作组织——农业协同组合，一般用英文字母“JA”来表示。这个农业合作组织不仅拥有自己的银行、自己的物流中心，还拥有自己的农副产品交易中心，可以给农民贷款，同时也把农民种的蔬菜水果汇集到各地的交易中心，提供给全国的农产品交易市场，或者直接提供给各地超市。也就是说，农民种的蔬菜水果，根本不用担心因为卖不出去而烂在地里，只要开车送到各地的JA交易中心，JA交易中心就会负责收购，然后分销到全国各地去，这样就能够保证农民有足够的种田收入。

二是农村劳动力除了种植和加工农副产品之外，更多的时候还是充当一名产业工人。也就是说，农忙的时候，他是农民；农闲的时候，他在家附近的工厂里工作，是工人。

日语中有一个专门的词语，叫“兼业”。“兼业”与背井离乡去外地打工做农民工不同，他们的农田就在家门口，而他们上班的工厂也在家附近。所以日本农民除了种田种地的收入之外，每个月还正儿八经地可以从工厂企业里领到固定的工资，所以这些农民的收入自然要比一般的城里人多。

正因为日本农民有“兼业”的传统，因此，日本许多制造企业都把工厂搬到农村去，利用当地富余的劳动力，将一批不会跳槽的农民训练成为技术工人，可以让他们长久地在工厂里工作。