Philosophy of time

On a plane yesterday, I read most of the book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. This book that helped me realize that I don’t have a practical philosophy of how to spend my time. Sure, I abstractly knew that how we spend our time is of central importance to living a “good life.” Yet I didn’t have a practical way to apply this insight to the choices I make every day.

The metaphor from the book that I keep coming back to is that of rocks in a jar. The rest of this post will further develop this metaphor.

The rock jar metaphor

The rock jar metaphor goes like this:

1. The jar of our life is of a limited size.
2. We humans have unlimited imaginations and can think of thousands of possible rocks for our jar: different and varied careers, places to live, people to spend our time with.
3. Realizing this, we get to choose which rocks we put in our jar, and which rocks we leave out of our jar.

This metaphor is useful because I have a tendency to deny my jar’s limited size. Saying no to things I’m drawn to is inherently painful. So is admitting my mortality.

Yet keeping up the subconscious belief that my jar is limitless leads to psychological problems, for example:

• Burnout and dilettantism. If I believe I can fit infinite rocks in the jar, and I say yes to anything I’m drawn to, then before long I’ll be spread very thin.
• Living in fantasy. The band The National sings: “Spending all your time / somewhere inside your head / haunted by the important / life you could’ve lead.” The singer David Berman puts it more succinctly: “Nobody should have two lives.” One of the ways I “have two lives” is spending my attention on fantasies while doing nothing to make these fantasies real. I’ve done this in realms of location, career and romance. Living one life while dreaming about another. Fantasy is seductive because it allows for a pleasant diversion from reality, without having to go through the uncertainty, hard work and discomfort of actually making a change. Yet fantasy is itself a choice, a rock in the jar, which is ultimately unfulfilling.

Choosing my rocks

At the end of the day, the rocks in the jar are my life. So, how do I choose which rocks should go in the jar?

Given how diverse the possibilities for a “good life” are, there can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer here. Rather, I give a list of qualities that I think are important to keep in mind, when selecting rocks for the jar.

Rocks should be:

• Imperfect + real. There’s a story in the book of a famous architect who designs the most beautiful mosque. Everyone who sees the plans is awe-struck. The architect memorizes his blueprints and then tears them up because he prefers the perfect fantasy to the messy reality. He knows that if the mosque is actually built, it will never be as perfect as the plans. Perfection is something that only exists in the realm of fantasy. Once you bring something into reality, it becomes imperfect. And that’s OK. That’s why I’ve been saying this mantra to myself: I choose reality over fantasy. Staying in the realm of fantasy preserves the idea of perfection, but ultimately leads to an unsatisfying life. I recently got married, and our ceremony was imperfect. For example, a significant chunk of the guests cancelled because I got COVID right before the wedding. And yet, I’m still glad we did the thing. An imperfect real wedding ceremony was better than a perfect fantasy wedding ceremony.
• Expansive. The Jungian analyst James Hollis poses this question: “Does this choice diminish or enlarge me?” I experience this question in my body. Some choices, directions, feel constricting. Others, expansive. Interestingly, at one time in my life, one choice may feel constricting, but at another time, that same choice may feel expansive. One example I’m feeling that with these days is the prospect of having a kid. When I was back in residency training and super busy, the responsibility of child-rearing felt constricting, like it would pin me down and overwhelm me, keep me from exploring the world. Now, it’s starting to feel more like it would be an awe-filled adventure.
• Seen as cosmically insignificant. From far away, our jars, our lives, are very, very small. From the perspective of space, humanity is a collection of very tiny jars, filled with dust. I can get into thinking that my rocks are so big and important and put undue pressure on myself to “put a dent in the universe.” Yet if I keep in my awareness the vastness of space, and the age of the universe in comparison to the shortness of any individual human life, then I see that the people who I thought put “a dent in the universe” really didn’t. Nothing puts much of a dent in the universe, not even the birth of a new galaxy. And, that’s a beautiful thing, because it frees us from the delusion that we’re so big and important, it brings us back to our “right size.” The cosmic perspective frees me from the thought that my rocks have to be greatly impactful to have value or meaning.

• Limited in number. The jar of my life is limited in size, and can hold only a limited number of rocks. A life may end up lasting 4,000 weeks, or 3,000, or 6,000. Or it may be cut short at 40. The point is that no matter the size of the jar, it won’t be able to hold all of the rocks that I want to put into it. This realization is painful and there’s the tendency to try to get hyper-efficient in an effort to put more rocks in the jar. I once listened to a book called The Four Hour Chef where the author talks about “rapid learning.” This book filled me with a sense of stress and I had to quit in the middle. I think that the stress came from my system intuitively rejecting the idea that one can rapidly learn things well. Eigenzeit is a German word that means “the time inherent to the task or process itself.” This is in contrast to the idea that you can “cram” learning, or speed up tasks faster than the pace at which they ought to go. Being efficient is all well and good, but over-focusing on it can be a trap, a way to deny the fact that we have to choose only a few rocks for our jar, and exclude the vast majority of possibilities.
• Savored for their very existence. One basic fact of existence, that is so basic it’s very easy to overlook, is that it’s fundamentally miraculous. We need not wait to be grateful only for amazing life events. We can be grateful for the basics of life: for having eyes, or fingers, for breathing air, for having the experience of consciousness. There doesn’t have to be matter, life, consciousness, or a human alive in 2024 named Dan, but there is. Burkeman writes that remembering this fact helps him in moments when he’s feeling negative emotions. The other day, my family was driving to go hiking. My brother made a mistake with the GPS, and took us to the wrong spot, which was an hour from where we should have been. I seethed with anger, for a little while. In that moment, I could have acknowledged my anger was real, and also, that: 1) I was getting to breathe, 2) I was getting to experience anger and consciousness. Right now, I’m getting to experience being slightly hungry, and typing on my laptop while listening to roosters, in the wee hours of the morning. It’s all miraculous. Existence is not inevitable. If other things had happened in the past, I would not be existing. At a some point in the future, I won’t be. Any rock in the jar, even the rock of sitting in a car and driving an extra two hours because of GPS miscalculations, can, on some level, appreciated simply for its existence. A mantra (for any moment in life): I get to experience this.
• Autotelic. “Telos” is a greek word that means “end.” An autotelic experience is done for its own sake. One of my favorite jokes goes like this: two old Jewish men are talking in the shtetl. “Tell me about your business,” one man says to the other. “I buy eggs for a dollar, boil them, and sell them for a dollar.” “What’s the point?” asks the first man. The second replies: “I get to be with the eggs.” Yes, there are some things we inevitably do for external ends, yet, as much as possible, I think it’s good when the rocks in our jar fill us with inherent satisfaction and meaning.
• Realistic. Burkeman writes: “Are you judging yourself by standards…that are impossible to meet? …It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like ‘enough time’ on your work, with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or engaging in political activism…There is a sort of cruelty…in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people).” I just got back to Hawaii after spending several weeks in Buffalo, during which time both my mom and grandma were ill. I have experienced guilt for ‘not doing enough’ for my family. Yet, while living in Buffalo for several weeks with very little occupying my time outside being with family, I realized that my capacity to help them was limited, even when I’m in Buffalo and not busy. And if I’m pursuing a life, vocation and marriage in Hawaii, then my time for helping family in Buffalo is even more limited. Not only do I have to exclude rocks from my jar, but even when I do judiciously choose just a few rocks for the jar, I still have to make trade-offs of time and energy between them. On a trip to Thailand, my wife and we visited a Buddhist nun and meditated a few days before leaving the country. Tears streamed down my wife’s face because she would miss her parents. The nun hugged her and said: “You’re doing your best.” There is a trade-off between my wife’s dream of living and working abroad, and her desire to be connected with family. Both are rocks she’s choosing for her jar, but the two are in tension. Ditto for me and my desire to move to Hawaii, and my desire to be there for family. We need to stay realistic about the standards we judge ourselves by.
• Chosen. During a tough relationship patch, when we were on a break, I enlisted the help of a counselor. “You aren’t choosing her,” the relationship counselor said to me after hearing me talk. At concerts here on Hawaii, the musician Paul Izak often says, “Thank you for choosing to be here.” I like this language of choice, because it underscores our agency, the fact that we are always making a choice about what to include, and what to exclude, from our jar. Another example: there are myriad ways we can make the world a better place. Consciously choosing certain causes (e.g. the environment) means I don’t choose other ones (e.g. prison reform). This doesn’t mean that environmental work is more worthy than prison reform work. It’s just that time is limited and we have to choose what goes in and what goes out. Choosing to choose what’s in our jar means that we give up the various unhealthy ways of filling the jar: with too many rocks (due perhaps to FOMO), or with no big rocks at all (due to commitment phobia or perfectionism).
• Not perfectly controlled, consciously responded to. Some of the rocks in our jar, we won’t get to control. For example: the rock of illness, which we will all face in one form or other. In the end of the book, there is an interview with a man going through cancer treatment. He approaches the cancer with an attitude of “militant submission.” He says: “First of all, why would I think I’m immortal here? I’m finite. So I can’t deny that I’m speeding toward my dissolution. Why would I think I should be exempt from illness? And to submit to that is actually a certain freedom. But the militant part is that I’m going to live as fully as I could in the face of that.”
• Settled on and committed to. Given the vast array of possible rocks in the universe, and the fact that getting information about all of them is impossible, it’s inevitable that in making choices and commitments, we are foregoing options that might be better for us. Settling has a bad reputation, but it’s inevitable and necessary. We can’t choose all the options, so at some point we should say: this is a good enough career, partner, location, hobby, etc. and fully commit. The alternative is constantly searching for something better out of a fear of missing out (which leads to dilettantism), or ostensibly committing but keeping an active “second life” alive in fantasy (which leads to not being fully “in” reality). Burkeman tells the story of buses in Helsinki that all start in the city, and then go to interesting places in the countryside. There’s a tendency to want to get off the bus, and try another bus, because the first half-hour of the ride isn’t anything special. This is a mistake. We need to stay on the bus to get somewhere beautiful. Yes, the bus we’re on may not be “the best” bus route out of all possible routes. It is this very act of settling and commitment that allows us to have depth, that allows us to leave Helsinki and move forward.

I spoke to my friend Ethan yesterday about “settling,” and he offered an amazing reframe of the word. “When I settle into meditation, I’m at peace,” he said.

When I think about the whole project of living a good life, its this feeling of peace that I’m ultimately after. That’s the whole point of thinking about rocks and jars and all of the other stuff in this blog post. At the end of my life, I don’t want the feeling of “Damn, I’ve messed up my life. I’ve filled my jar with unfulfilling rocks because I didn’t want to accept some painful facts of reality.”

My theme for 2024 is “inner peace.” But really, inner peace is something I want to cultivate for the rest of my life. By writing this post, I wanted to clarify principles I can use for as many weeks as I have left, to bring more peace in.

As I go forward in time, it’s inevitable that my jar gets filled with rocks. At the end of my life, I want to look back on this jar and feel peaceful, proud of myself for having lived the way that I did.