As the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa explains, it applies just as much to “bucket lists”, at least for those of us with the good fortune to be able to spend some of our time improving our minds, visiting exotic locales or pursuing hedonistic pleasures.
LIFE NO PROFESSIONAL
Nor is this culturally reinforced effort to outrun our limitations confined to the worlds of professional and domestic obligations. Likewise, should you acquire a reputation at the office for powering more speedily through your work than any of your colleagues, what on earth do you think is going to happen? Obviously, you’ll just find yourself being given more to do. Most approaches to time management make things worse, pitching us into a futile struggle to deny the truth of our limitations © Lucas Varela (Not least because each reply you send is likely to trigger a reply to that reply and so on forever until the heat death of the universe.) But it turns out that when you get really good at processing your emails, all that happens is that you just get more emails. A few years ago, drowning in emails, I resolved to up my game and implemented the system known as Inbox Zero - constantly working toward having an empty inbox. In fact, it’s worse than that: becoming more efficient and productive leads to more busyness.
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No matter how fast you go, you’ll never reach the top. It’s like getting better at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder. The implied promise is that one day, finally, you’ll feel “on top of things” and “in control” of your life. Yet because the incoming supply of demands on your time is effectively infinite, that day never quite arrives, no matter how close it might sometimes seem. Productivity gurus offer an array of techniques for becoming more efficient (or “optimised”) so as to process more emails and dispatch more tasks. Take the familiar predicament of the overlong to-do list. Rather than helping us make the best of our little allotment of time, they pitch us into a futile struggle to deny the truth of our limitations and to avoid the discomfort involved in staring our finitude in the face. (Although it’s not exactly long either: if you live to be 80, you’ll have had roughly 4,000 weeks.) And yet time feels as tormenting as it ever did.Īnd most approaches to time management, not to mention most of our allegedly time-saving technologies, make things worse. The average life may not be as short today as it was in Seneca’s time.
LIFE NO FULL
Seneca chided his contemporaries for living “as if you drew from a full and abundant supply of time, though all the while that day . . . is perhaps your last”. We complain about how little time we have, he observed - we feel hounded by its onward march and terrified to contemplate the day when our portion of it will end - and yet we fritter it away, day after day, on things we don’t truly value. Seneca, the ancient Roman philosopher, got to the core of our troubles with time in a famous letter known by the title On the Shortness of Life.
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