“Dad Suggests Arriving at Airport 14 Hours Early”: The Onion, September 22, 2012, available at www.theonion.com/dad-suggests-arriving-at-airport-14-hours-early-1819573933.
“We assume we have three hours or three days to do something”: David Cain, “You Never Have Time, Only Intentions,” Raptitude, May 23, 2017, available at www.raptitude.com/2017/05/you-never-have-time-only-intentions.
“So imprudent are we”: Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2018), 49.
“If I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work”: Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Putnam, 1974), 1.
“Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place”: Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 92.
“Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities”: Quoted in Shaila Catherine, “Planning and the Busy Mind,” talk transcript available at www.imsb.org/teachings/written-teachings-articles-and-interviews/planning-and-the-busy-mind-2.
“Take no thought for the morrow”: Matthew 6:34, The Bible: King James Version (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 1555.
“Partway through this particular talk … Krishnamurti suddenly paused”: Quoted in Bhava Ram, Deep Yoga: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (Coronado, CA: Deep Yoga, 2013), 76.
in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: Quoted in Catherine, “Planning and the Busy Mind.”
8. You Are Here
In his book Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor: Steve Taylor, Back to Sanity (London: Hay House, 2012), 61.
what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind”: Tara Brach, personal communication.
“Take education. What a hoax”: Alan Watts, “From Time to Eternity,” in Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960–1969 (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006), 109–10.
there’s one West African ethnic group, the Hausa-Fulani: Robert A. LeVine and Sarah LeVine, Do Parents Matter? Why Japanese Babies Sleep Soundly, Mexican Siblings Don’t Fight, and American Families Should Just Relax (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), x.
The writer Adam Gopnik calls the trap into which I had fallen the “causal catastrophe”: Adam Gopnik, “The Parenting Paradox,” New Yorker, January 29, 2018.
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up”: Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 223.
But the author and podcast host Sam Harris makes the disturbing observation: Sam Harris, “The Last Time,” a talk in the Waking Up app, available at www.wakingup.com.
Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices: See, for example, the Happy Planet Index, at happyplanetindex.org; and John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, eds., World Happiness Report 2013 (New York: UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2013).
“Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour”: M. Cathleen Kaveny, “Billable Hours and Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life,” Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 33 (2001): 173–220.
“The ‘purposive’ man … is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), downloaded from www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf.
“[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of, ‘Well, there it is,’”: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 341.
that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, trans. Mobi Ho (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 3.
the 2015 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh: George Loewenstein et al., “Does Increased Sexual Frequency Enhance Happiness?,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2015): 206–18.
“We cannot get anything out of life”: Jay Jennifer Matthews, Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2011), 27, emphasis added.
9. Rediscovering Rest
“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive”: Tony Schwartz, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” New York Times, February 10, 2013.
“We are all of us compelled … to read for profit”: Walter Kerr, quoted in Staffan Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 4.
we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades: See, for example, J. H. Ausuble and A. Gruebler, “Working Less and Living Longer: Long-Term Trends in Working Time and Time Budgets,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 50 (1995): 113–31.
research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get: Daniel Hamermesh’s research is discussed in Allana Akhtar, “Wealthy Americans Don’t Have Enough Time in the Day to Spend Their Money, and It’s Stressing Them Out,” Business Insider, June 26, 2019, available at markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/how-the-desire-for-status-symbols-leads-to-stress-2019-6-1028309783.
Some historians claim that the average country-dweller: Juliet Shor, The Overworked American (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 47.
“The laboring man … will take his rest long in the morning”: Quoted in Shor, The Overworked American, 43.
To “look around to see what is going on”: Livia Gershon, “Clocking Out,” Longreads, July 2018, available at longreads.com/2018/07/11/clocking-out/.
The Right To Be Lazy: Paul Lafargue, The Right To Be Lazy (1883), available at www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/.
“If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Open Road, 2015), 146.
“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor”: All quotes from Danielle Steel come from Samantha Leach, “How the Hell Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books?,” Glamour, May 9, 2019, available at www.glamour.com/story/danielle-steel-books-interview.
Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion”: C. K. Hsee et al., “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 926–30.
his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic”: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 2002).
guilty sinners anxious to expunge the stain of laziness: I owe this thought to David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 106–107.
“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives”: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), xv.
“Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work”: Judith Shulevitz, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” New York Times, March 2, 2003.
In his book Sabbath as Resistance: Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), xiv.
“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness”: John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 195.
“How can there be play”: Gray, Straw Dogs, 196.
“You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will”: Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 134.
“If, on the other hand, [the human animal] lacks objects of willing”: Quoted in Setiya, Midlife, 131.
My respect for the rock star Rod Stewart: Steve Flint and Craig Tiley, “In My Heart, and in My Soul: Sir Rod Stewart on His Lifelong Love of Model Railways,” Railway Modeler, December 2019.
The publisher and editor Karen Rinaldi: Karen Rinaldi, “(It’s Great to) Suck at Something,” New
York Times, April 28, 2017.
10. The Impatience Spiral
The practice of inching toward the car in front: S. Farzad Ahmadi et al., “Latent Heat of Traffic Moving from Rest,” New Journal of Physics 19 (2017), available at iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367–2630/aa95f0.
It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly: See Kit Eaton, “How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion in Sales,” Fast Company, March 15, 2012, available at www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales.
“I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words”: Hugh McGuire, “Why Can’t We Read Anymore?,” Medium, April 22, 2015, available at medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-503c38c131fe.
“It is not simply that one is interrupted”: Tim Parks, “Reading: The Struggle,” New York Review of Books, NYR Daily blog, June 10, 2014, available at www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/06/10/reading-struggle/.
a psychotherapist in California named Stephanie Brown: All quotations from Stephanie Brown come from my interview with Brown and from Stephanie Brown, Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster—and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down (New York: Berkley, 2014).
As the science writer James Gleick points out: James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 12.
“We admitted,” reads the first of the Twelve Steps: The twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are available at www.alcohol.org/alcoholics-anonymous.
11. Staying on the Bus
I first learned this lesson from Jennifer Roberts: All quotations from Jennifer Roberts come from my interview with Roberts and from Jennifer Roberts, “The Power of Patience,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 2013, available at https://harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-power-of-patience.
“tangible, almost edible”: Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living (Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1982), 125.
“Boy, I sure admire you”: All quotations from M. Scott Peck come from “Problem-Solving and Time,” in The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (London: Arrow Books, 2006), 15–20.
“includes a big component of impatience about not being finished”: Robert Boice, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 33.
The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatizes this deep truth: A transcript of Minkkinen’s 2004 commencement address, “Finding Your Own Vision,” at the New England School of Photography, where he outlines this theory, is available at jamesclear.com/great-speeches/finding-your-own-vision-by-arno-rafael-minkkinen.
12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
“I don’t have to take out the garbage”: All quotations from Mario Salcedo come from Lance Oppenheim, “The Happiest Guy in the World,” New York Times, May 1, 2018, available at www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/opinion/cruise-caribbean-retirement.html.
“A person with a flexible schedule and average resources”: Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (New York: Portfolio, 2013), 173.
“Last year, I visited 17 countries”: Mark Manson, “The Dark Side of the Digital Nomad,” available at markmanson.net/digital-nomad.
In 2013, a researcher from Uppsala in Sweden named: Terry Hartig et al., “Vacation, Collective Restoration, and Mental Health in a Population,” Society and Mental Health 3 (2013): 221–36.
research, which has demonstrated that people in long-term unemployment get a happiness boost: Cristobal Young and Chaeyoon Lim, “Time as a Network Good: Evidence from Unemployment and the Standard Workweek,” Sociological Science 1 (2014): 10–27.
The historian Clive Foss has described the nightmare that transpired: Clive Foss, “Stalin’s Topsy-Turvy Work Week,” History Today, September 2004. I have also drawn here on Judith Shulevitz, “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore,” The Atlantic, November 2019.
“Lenin’s widow, in good Marxist fashion”: E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 278.
“What are we to do at home if the wife is in the factory”: Quoted in Shulevitz, “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore.”
“Marching aimlessly about on the drill field”: William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2.
And some evolutionary biologists speculate: See Jay Schulkin and Greta Raglan, “The Evolution of Music and Human Social Capability,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 8 (2014): 292.
a study based on a frame-by-frame analysis of the race: Manuel Varlet and Michael J. Richardson, “What Would Be Usain Bolt’s 100-Meter Sprint World Record Without Tyson Gay? Unintentional Interpersonal Synchronization Between the Two Sprinters,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41 (2015): 36–41.
The extraordinary psychological benefits of choral singing: Betty Bailey and Jane Davidson, “Effects of Group Singing and Performance for Marginalized and Middle-Class Singers,” Psychology of Music 33 (2005): 269–303.
The world “doesn’t open up into a million shimmering dimensions”: Stacy Horn, “Ode to Joy,” Slate, July 25, 2013, available at slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/singing-in-a-choir-research-shows-it-increases-happiness.html.
“Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1973), 323.
13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
The Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis recalls: In James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (New York: Gotham, 2005), 2.
“Then I considered all that my hands had done”: Ecclesiastes 2:11, The Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 471.
“What the trauma has shown us”: All quotations from Julio Vincent Gambuto are from “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” Medium, April 10, 2020, available at forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0.
The late British philosopher Bryan Magee liked to make the following arresting point: Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–2.
“the number of friends I squeeze into my living room”: Magee, Ultimate Questions, 2.
“the massive indifference of the universe”: Richard Holloway, Looking in the Distance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), 13.
The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You: Johnny Truant, The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You. Self-published, Amazon Digital Services, 2014. Kindle.
“transcend the common and the mundane”: Iddo Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31.
“We do not disapprove of a chair because it cannot be used to boil water”: Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 39.
“implausible, for almost all people, to demand of themselves”: Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 39.
14. The Human Disease
“Time is the substance I am made of”: Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 2007), 234.
“There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life”: Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (Toronto: Inner City), 8.
as the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck puts it: Quoted in Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement (Salisbury, UK: New Sarum Press, 2019), 60.
“I was peeling a red apple from the garden”: Christian Bobin quoted in Christophe André, Looking at Mindfulness: Twenty-Five Paintings to Change the Way You Live (New York: Blue Rider, 2011), 256.
“live the questions”: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 27.
James Hollis recommends asking: James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More
Considered Life (New York: Gotham, 2009), 13.
There is a sort of cruelty: Landau, Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, 40–41.
“at a certain age … it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares”: Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (New York: Bantam, 2015), 37.
The Buddhist teacher Susan Piver points out: Susan Piver, “Getting Stuff Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself,” August 20, 2010, available at openheartproject.com/getting-stuff-done-by-not-being-mean-to-yourself.
in his documentary A Life’s Work: David Licata, A Life’s Work (2019), at alifesworkmovie.com.
“Dear Frau V.… Your questions are unanswerable”: Carl Jung, Letters, vol. 1, 1906–1950 (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 132.
Afterword: Beyond Hope
People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen: All quotations from Derrick Jensen come from “Beyond Hope,” Orion, https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/.
“there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one”: Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart (Boulder: Shambhala, 2016), 38.
“People say, ‘Oh, when the apocalypse comes…’”: Nellie Bowles, “Fleeing Babylon for a Wild Life,” New York Times, March 5, 2020.
“Abandoning hope is an affirmation”: Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, 40.
“Spring is here, even in London N1”: George Orwell, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” first published in Tribune, April 12, 1946, available at www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/.
Appendix: Ten Tools for Embracing Your Finitude
“You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work”: Cal Newport, “Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours,” available at www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/02/15/fixed-schedule-productivity-how-i-accomplish-a-large-amount-of-work-in-a-small-number-of-work-hours/, with further discussion in Cal Newport, Deep Work (New York: Grand Central, 2016).
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