You Are Going to Die

Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.

- Hillary Kelly

"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.

What he does want you to do is remind yourself, regularly, that the human life span is finite that someday your heart will stop pumping, your neurons will stop firing, and this three-dimensional ride we call consciousness will just... end. He also wants you to know that he's aware of how elusive those reminders can feel-how hard their meaning is to internalize.

Burkeman's opening sentence, with its cascade of unexpected adjectives, is the prelude to his countercultural message that no one can hustle or bullet journal or inbox-zero their way to mastering time.

Such control, and the sense of completion and command it implies, is literally impossible, Burkeman argues. In fact, impossible is one of the words he uses most frequently, though it sounds oddly hopeful when he says it. He is perhaps best known for the idea that "productivity is a trap" that leaves strivers spinning in circles when they race to get ahead. In Burkeman's telling, once you abandon the "depressingly narrow-minded affair" that is the modern discipline of time management, you can "do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks." That is, you will find that an average 80-year life span is about far more than getting stuff done.