A Review of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks
Burkeman seems to have rehashed his earlier work - The Antidote - and a bunch of his articles on The Guardian along with some new material to produce this book. Though the title suggests it is about our limited time on this planet, it is really about limits on human beings: trying to escape limits makes us miserable, and acknowledging them makes us happier. In other words, greed is the culprit.
The book feels disjointed, possibly because it was put together partly from the author's various different articles. Even apart from that, what is new in the book is not that good, and what is good is not really new. The author seems to think the book is a radical departure from other self-help books, but there are any number of books telling us to embrace limits. Books on minimalism have been there forever. The slow revolution is rather old too. Even in the self-help genre, Stephen Covey told us to be less greedy about personal efficiency, and to focus on doing the right things rather than on doing things right. Many recent books talk about the futility of to-do lists. Virtually every recent book about time management tells us to shun multi-tasking - in other words, being less greedy and less frantic is the path to accomplishment. Greg Mckeon's Essentialism is entirely about limits.
The author presents a few reasons why we tend to fight limits, and there are some practical time management tips: limit work in progress, don't start too many projects, do the important work first, learn to say no. This is all fine, but it is not really new advice. Then there are leftist-sounding rants about why it is futile to do more work. "If you do more, more will be given to you to do." (If you are wondering why I'm referring to Burkeman as a leftist, recall that he writes for The Guardian!) Liberals seem to view personal productivity and efficiency as tools of capitalism. "You are working hard and doing more work to make your boss rich." As if you are not getting paid for your troubles! There is an obligatory chapter on social media filled with the same platitudes as found in most other books. (The author adds in a few anti-Trump rants of his own, though he doesn't name Trump.)
There are some philosophical arguments about time and about being a person, but I have trouble viewing Burkeman as a wise guru, given his childish rants in other places. (At one place, he argues we aleady had an 'unqualified' person as the president, so what can be a bigger catastrophe than that?) Things get thoroughly weird once Burkeman touches upon "Climate Change", apparently his pet subject. While brushing away the damage caused by the pandemic, Burkeman marvels at the quiet, the clear blue skies, and the empty roads that animals can again wander. He says we are shown what the world might be like if we "could find a way to have a less deadly effect on the planet."
Then he goes on to quote at length from Derrick Jensen, who is the co-founder of an environmental group called Deep Green Resistance. This group is against all energy use, not just fossil fuels. They want to shut the whole "industrial civilization" down. How they think the billions of people will survive after that is not very clear, but how extreme does Burkeman himself have to be for him to think Jensen's opinions are worth quoting and disseminating? Jensen thinks we should all lose hope, because that is the only way we will be spurred into action (against "Climate Change", I suppose).
Finally, how seriously can you take life advice from someone if you think they are a climate alarmist? "Climate Change" fanatics are not exactly known for a balanced persepctive.