Stories of waste and loss

Rewriting our relationship with time

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.” - Oliver Burkeman

I didn’t plan to write about time on the same weekend that most of America just magically gained an hour, but here we are. This post is unexpectedly well-timed.

What is your personal relationship with time? Ever since the clock was invented, the ticking away of time has been cast in an increasingly insidious role in our inner narratives.

Stuck in traffic, we lamenting losing time.

We frequently berate ourselves for wasting time.

We race to beat the clock.

Books teach us how to manage time (and therefore how to measure our failure to do so).

And we certainly don’t have enough time to even scratch the surface on our denial of aging and the resulting violence to our own bodies.

Time is one of the most common empty adversaries. An opponent who is always besting us as we climb into bed way too late, egos bruised from the still outstanding to do list now waiting to torment us tomorrow.

If not an opponent, time is starring as an elusive lover. We savor the heady euphoria of a lazy afternoon or off-grid vacation and then return to the chase. Time feels scarce, and we crave more and more of it.

Plans are one way we attempt to deny our reality of finite time.

The fresh, tidy to-do list reassures us that we will do it all, despite a track record of almost never accomplishing this audacious feat. This denial leads to time worrying about our plans, procrastinating about our plans, and then lamenting our failure to manifest our plans, yet again. Words like those from Benjamin Franklin arise to chide us, “Lost time is never found again.”

While hours and minutes are simply a way to measure, compare, and coordinate time with others, time has taken on a greater myth within our culture. The lie is that we can and should do more, and that each new efficiency strategy or convenience will somehow lead to more time.

Responding to 25 emails to clear your inbox in a record-breaking pomodoro session is actually 25 requests for more email. In similar fashion, the advanced filtering that AI makes possible, to deliver only the content or ads you are actually interested in, only produces a more compelling distraction from your actual life.

“Rendering yourself more efficient…won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.” - Oliver Burkeman

Caught in an impossible story, we maintain a self-fulfilling prophecy of lack through procrastination, distraction, avoidance, rushing, taking on too many projects all at once, and compulsive worrying. In all instances, we are reacting to an illusion that we could and should somehow be in control.

The reality is, our lives are finite, unpredictable, and not a single additional day is guaranteed. Mortality is the great fear under all the anxiety about time. To embrace it is not to suddenly fly into action on all of what matters to you, as I once believed. To embrace it is to realize that you cannot possibly tend to everything that matters, and that any attempt predictably produces discontentment, stress, burnout, and mediocre experiences.

There is relief in surrendering to time. The task becomes to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and accept the losses required in order to live meaningfully.

“You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.” - Oliver Burkeman

In his reorienting book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals, Burkeman invites a mindset shift. In lieu of asserting ourselves onto time, as if we might bend the future to our present will, we could instead become responsive to life as it unfolds. Far from being passive or comfortable, a responsive relationship with our finite span of days is present-oriented and often challenging, inviting the unpopular and scary work of prioritizing based on your own values, rather than on others’ expectations, and then standing by those choices fully.

What if you no longer believed that you needed to keep up or catch up before you were allowed to do what matters most to you?

“...maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”

Oliver Burkeman

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