Making Sense with Sam Harris - #269 — Deep Time

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Oliver Burkeman about our relationship to time. They discuss the perils of efficiency, being vs becoming, the illusion of time as a resource, parenting and childhood, work-life balance, the loss of leisure, the planning trap, social isolation, a modern Sabbath, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Today I'm speaking with Oliver Berkman. Oliver is a feature writer for The Guardian, where he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology. He's also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He's also written a few books. Most recently, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, which is a book that I really loved. It is certainly not your usual time management book, and touches upon some of the deepest questions in life, and in what sense should we even be thinking about time as a resource. life, and in what sense should we even be thinking about time as a resource? Anyway, we get into many aspects of this. We talk about our relationship to time, the perils of efficiency, being versus

becoming, parenting and childhood, the notion of work-life balance, the loss of leisure, the trap of planning, social isolation, the idea of a modern Sabbath, and other topics. Anyway, this conversation is all too timely as we careen into December here, the end of the year being the time where many of us think about reprioritizing things. time where many of us think about reprioritizing things. Just how did we spend this year that seemed like it was four months long? So I hope you find the conversation useful. And now I bring you Oliver Berkman. I am here with Oliver Berkman. Oliver, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for inviting me. So I'm not aware if we've ever met. I think you've interviewed me once or twice, but tell me our history together.

I think that's right. I think that we haven't ever met. I fairly recently consulted you for a piece that I was writing for The Guardian on free will. That was our most recent interaction, I think. Yeah, yeah. But was there a time before that as well? You know, there might have been a time before that when we exchanged less friendly words via Twitter, which tends to do that to people. Oh, all right. Well, apologies for anything untoward I might have done. No, I'm sure it was me being impertinent. Anyway, it's all in the past. Well, great to turn the tables on you and to be interviewing you about your book,

the title of which is 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. And it's really a fantastic book. We'll get into the way in which it breaks the mold for the topic of time management. But before we do, can you summarize your background as a writer and journalist and just how you came to this topic? Sure. I worked for a very long time on the staff and then as a freelance contracted person for The Guardian. One of the things I did for many years, just until a couple of years ago, was to write a weekly column on, I guess, self-help culture, the science of happiness, productivity, all that kind of whole sector. And, you know, on the one hand, this is an amazing

opportunity to explore all sorts of fascinating modalities and research and the rest of it. I think it probably also served as a slightly, as a sort of an enabler of various problematic tendencies in myself. You know, if you're sort of, if you're the kind of person who wants to spend your life exploring methods of productivity rather than actually getting on with things and being productive, then it's great to be able to have the excuse that you're doing it for work purposes. So in a way, this book came out the other end of that. It was like after spending many years trying to find the perfect productivity technique or the perfect time management technique and failing.

technique and failing. So before we jump into the iconoclastic and heretical take you have on this topic, maybe we should just, at the outset, say whatever can be said in support of the obvious virtues of time management. I mean, we're just acknowledging the problem and reclaiming whatever baby is in that bathwater. What do you think actually survives scrutiny here in terms of the standard advice? Well, clearly time management matters. I try to make the case, I think, that it matters even more than the people who have promoted that sort of standard version would claim. It's obviously, you know, it has this reputation as a slightly sort of narrow topic, but it's actually on some level, surely the whole of life is the whole challenge of constructing a meaningful life is a question of time management. And then I would say that there's definitely some room for becoming more efficient and more strategic.

And there are things that we all do in our days that we could do in less time and make savings around the edges in that way. I have plenty to say that's critical about that sort of efficiency and optimization-based approach to using one's time but i think that you know there's no doubt that there are ways of organizing your daily schedule that will see you spend less time switching between you know less time on email than you otherwise would or more time on the things that you truly care about so it it's certainly not all nonsense. Yeah, maybe we can start with one of the paradoxes or perverse dynamics here where the focus on efficiency leads strangely to a subversion of one's deeper priorities.

There's so many ways into this that you explore in your book, but maybe we can start with this all-too-common impulse of feeling the need to, quote, clear the decks before one can actually do the important stuff. And so much of time management amounts to recommendations around this kind of thing, doing things more efficiently, getting one's to-do list truly clear, getting to inbox zero. What's wrong with the level of focus when one approaches it that way? I mean, I think we're all familiar with this problem. It's just that we don't always put a name to it or sort of see it in objective terms but this general problem is i think is that if you if you focus on

efficiency as the governing value in your personal use of time and i think this probably applies to all sorts of other systems as well and it's recognized in those other contexts. All else being equal, a more efficient system will simply attract and process more inputs. If you get really good at getting through your email, you will receive more email because you will reply to people at a greater tempo, at a faster tempo, and those replies will generate replies and you'll develop a reputation in your organization as someone who's responsive to email so more people will be it'll be worth their while to send you email so that's just one example but you know the this is Parkinson's law the idea that the the work expands to fill the time available for its completion it's it's just this basic problem that efficiency pursued as the governing value leads

to more stuff coming in that you have to process. And for other reasons that I can talk about, I think it also leads to a lower quality of stuff, right? It focuses you on spending more and more time on the things that you don't particularly value. And so, you know, if you take that approach of trying to clear the decks before you get round to the important stuff, firstly, the decks will never be clear anyway, because of the world we live in is, you know, we are finite and the potential number of little things to do is effectively infinite. And secondly, the act of trying to clear the decks increases the number of the of things on the decks so it's a very sort of it's a very sort of counterintuitive stance that is required i think

to to sort of allow the decks to be too full and to sort of allow the feeling of of being overwhelmed to exist and nonetheless at the same time to spend you know an hour or the first part of the day or whatever on on the thing that you that you really want to prioritize it's not it's not how we're seems to be it's not how we're conditioned to uh to approach the feeling of being overwhelmed yeah there seems to be this psychological quirk at the bottom of all of this, which is we don't want to admit the fundamental limits of what we can do. I mean, just the basic fact that doing any one thing is synonymous with not doing an infinite number of things. So if you're going to spend an hour reading a book, you're spending that hour, if in fact you are merely reading that book and not doing 10 other hour, if in fact you are merely reading that book and

not doing 10 other things with your phone, there are an infinite number of things you're neglecting to do for that full hour. And in some sense, we don't want to admit this to ourselves, and we want to live with the illusion that if we could just control things better than we've been to date, we could do more or less everything that we want to do, should do, feel we must do. And what that allows for is a, or what that encourages is a failure to triage at the first opportunity to admit to yourself, okay, I've got 24 hours in the day. I will never have a longer day than that. And therefore, if I'm not doing these most important things first, they're vulnerable to my doing far less important, less rewarding things in the meantime. And this is something you explore at various points in the

book. The embrace of our limitation, the recognition that this finite resource of attention allows us to live with, as you say, the decks not being remotely clear and focus on the most important stuff, whereas actually not acknowledging the limitations causes us to just respond to the email we need never have responded to in preference for that most important thing that is yet once again not getting touched today. Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, for me, this is the core of it all, this deep discomfort that we have with confronting how limited we are, not

just in terms of quantity of time, I think, but also control over the unfolding of time, you know, the degree to which we are just rafts on the white waters of the river of time and have really relatively little control over how things go.

And the wonderfully alluring thing about chasing this promise of total productivity, total optimization, being completely in control and having everything sorted out at last, it never comes because, yeah, it would entail being non-limited when, in fact, we are limited. But there's always the sense that it might just be around the corner, might just be in the future. And that was my experience for years as a total sort of paid-up productivity geek. It was not that I had everything working brilliantly and could do everything that was thrown at me, but it was always like it was maybe only a few weeks away that I had everything working brilliantly and could do everything that was thrown at me, but it was always like it was maybe only a few weeks away that I would have this system set up

and everything would be perfect. So there's this kind of constant future allure that you're eventually going to get your time sorted out, which really just means break through the limitations of the human condition with respect to time. And because it's always feels like it's coming, right, that's a reason not to face the discomfort that would be entailed by saying, okay, it's never coming. I am going to end up neglecting in this life, huge numbers of things that matter, and that would have been a legitimate use of my time, along with lots of other less meaningful things. I'm going to end up neglecting lots of them. It's going to happen whatever I do. And so at some point, I've just got to apply myself to a few things that seem like the most important,

the most important. Yeah, there's this piece of corporate speak that has worked its way into my vocabulary, despite my best intentions. And I find myself using this phrase a lot because it does capture this ever-present problem, and it's the phrase opportunity cost. And it comes down to this, the need to decide. I mean, you actually break open the etymology of the word decide in your book from the Latin to cut off. I mean, to decide what to do is, by definition, to circumscribe something and separate it from everything that it's not. And I guess there's something on the other side of this. There is something to having a carefree attitude to and just allowing yourself to wander within certain limits and discover what happens of itself.

But even that kind of experience needs to be prioritized given the world in which we live. So inevitably, we have to confront this fact that to not decide is also to make some sort of decision. By default, you're going to be just left with whatever habit pattern is being played upon by circumstance. So it seems to me that the focus for making any kind of change in the quality of one's life has to be around this variable of deciding what it is that's really worth your time and attention, and noticing all the ways in which your life is buffeting you away from those priorities. And it takes this continuous act of recalibration, because as much as we may be intellectually aware of the finiteness of life

and the transitoriness of everything, in some sense, we're really not aware of it. We're not emotionally aware of it so much of the time. And to live a life that you really can't regret at the end of any given day or year or at the end of your life, I think has got to entail succeeding more and more at this choice point of granting your attention to all those things that most merit it. Absolutely. I mean, I think I'd push it even a bit further and say, it isn't only about making sure that you only focus on what matters the most to you, but it's almost about accepting that quite a few things that might be among the things that matter the most to you won't make the cut either, because there's just no reason in our situation to assume that the

quantity of things that matter fit comfortably inside the available time. Now, I mean, it's a big responsibility and it's a daunting thought. But I do also think there's something deeply liberating about it, right? It's the liberation of seeing that something you were trying to do was completely impossible. And given that it was completely impossible, given that there was no hope ever of sort of escaping the terms and conditions of the human situation, you don't need to fight that. And you can sort of relax into the situation a bit. I think there is something very sort of something that's, it sort of stops life. It gets rid of the idea that like life is a problem, that there's already a sort of, something that's, it sort of stops life. It gets rid of the idea that like

life is a problem, that there's already a sort of a problem that you've got to solve just through being here. You mentioned meditation briefly in the book, but I forget what your background is with it because it's obviously very informative of how I see this issue. What has been your experience with meditation? I have had a sort of patchy practice for many years, done a couple of five-day, week-long or so retreats at the Insight Meditation Society. Followed a lot of your writing on it and the Waking Up app. So I'm very, very interested, but I feel slightly sheepish when I get involved in claiming that I'm any kind of active, regular med just described, and that comes by acknowledging the endlessness of experience, right? You're never going to actually accomplish everything, not only everything that you might

do, but everything that even upon final analysis you would think is truly important and truly rewarding. You know, there's an infinite amount of that too, potentially, just like there's a functionally infinite number of good books to read. Once you give up the war here, I mean, you just give up hope, you recognize that there's just,

on some level, there's just, more can't be the point because more is always dwarfed by everything you can't do. point because more is always dwarfed by everything you can't do. And probably more important, everything you do do doesn't really accrue in quite the way that you expect. I mean, you look back at all of your past experience now, which is just a memory, and it is by very nature, evanescent. I mean, it's just you can't grab hold of it. You can just keep mulling it over by thinking about it. So it never quite lands. And it's not to say that you don't learn things and develop new skills and develop new opportunities for life in the present based

on past experience. But the satisfaction of satisfaction doesn't last in quite the way we sense it will by default, and yet we rarely turn the same understanding on the future and recognize that all of these things we are looking forward to or worrying about or are somewhere or other focused on, they too are going to have this mirage-like quality. When the future finally arrives, it will be this cascade of sights and sounds and sensations and impressions and assumptions, and it will blow through us yet again and very quickly become a memory. So in some sense, we need to recognize this different mode of being versus becoming. I mean, it's the becoming side of the equation,

which is always taken in yet again by the illusion that if we could only check all these boxes in the future, we will be satisfied, whereas the being side recognizes that in some basic sense, there is no real place to land beyond recognizing that this moment, with all that has been done and left undone, has to be, in some sense, the ground of our well-being. You know, whatever, you have to be in the very middle of writing the email you really don't feel like writing. The good life requires that you be able to locate some tranquility and acceptance and even happiness, even in the midst of that. It can't be predicated on getting it done or just getting through. Because then you're just getting through your life. You're getting through your day. And it's just treadmill time.

Right, right. You're so right that we forget this for sort of years and decades at a time, but it's also kind of immediately obvious that if it's all leading up to something, it's all leading up to what? A single moment on your deathbed? That makes no sense. It's obvious that it makes no sense. You know, I think it, I don't know if I can articulate this properly, but it has something to do with a kind of fundamental misunderstanding or illusion or something about what time is, I suppose. Right, it's this idea that time is a resource, it's a thing that we use, that you have to sort of get the most out of the portion of time that you've been given. All of these things imply a separation between time and you. And yet,

you know, as I try to go into in the book a little bit there's a real sense in which it might make more sense to think of to think of the idea that we are time right that um that you are a portion of time and that to me speaks to the this idea that it's not a dress rehearsal it has to matter now if it's ever going to matter. The whole idea that you're sort of using this resource to get to some place of paradise in the future stops making any sense if you think instead that we just are this portion of time. Well, then obviously it's got to be in the present that meaning is to be found. I attribute some of these ideas in the book to Heidegger, who I grappled with to try to understand this. But since the book was published, I've found, I think, strikingly similar things in

some work commentaries on Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen, who seems to have said some very similar things and wrote an essay, the title of which is translated as Being Time. This idea that we just are time, for me anyway, it almost at least sometimes triggers this kind of bodily shift into the feeling that it has to matter now. I don't know if that makes sense when I put it into words. Yeah, well, and Dogen has the virtue of not having joined the Nazi party. Right, exactly, exactly. It would have been a nice attempt. Yes, you said you made one point about it can't all be purposed toward getting safely to one's deathbed with one's priorities intact.

And it's this instrumental relationship to everything in life. It is pernicious. Actually, you have some reflections on parenting and childhood that make this pretty poignant. Perhaps you can talk about it in light of how we tend to think about

our kids as parents and how strange that conception of living life as a means to some nebulous end becomes in that context. Yeah, I mean, I'm not the only person to have made the observation, but it's just the degree to which we think about parenting or naturally fall into thinking about parenting as solely a matter of creating the most successful adults later on for any value of successful right this isn't necessarily a point about um money and professional success it's a point about treating your job as a parent as being the act of creating something in the future to the exclusion of the experience of childhood and the experience of parenthood in the very moment itself

and i quote in the book i think um adam gopnik the new yorker writer calling this the causal catastrophe the idea that the only reason question to ask about the quality of a childhood or of a parent-child relationship being what it's creating for the future. And as I recall, one of the examples, I think it was him who gave, you know, there is a question when it comes to violent video games, very controversial question, obviously, about whether this leads to sort of bad psychological traits later on in life. But it's kind of only one part of the question. The other question is whether a childhood spent playing violent video games is or is not a good childhood. And it might be. I'm steering well

clear of having an opinion on that matter right now. But the point is just that you can ask the question about how the quality of time is spent now, not only about whether it is adding up to certain outcomes. And if you don't, if you don't at least a little bit focus on what it's like to be on the experience right now, you sort of sap all the meaning and value from it. I write in the book about, being in this very productivity oriented mindset when our son was first born and finding myself not sufficiently absorbed in the experience of interacting with him because one part of me was trying to figure out whether he was meeting the developmental milestones that I'd read about in some book. And you know, these things matter. You can't disregard them. But there's a real possibility

for that to completely crush the experience itself. And I think it's certainly not just parenthood, but parenthood is a sort of a terrain where it seems very, very easy to fall into it. Yeah, it's a very strange question to pose. What is the purpose of a good childhood? If the whole point of having a good childhood is to have a good adolescence, and the whole point of having a good adolescence is to have a good young adulthood, and the whole point of a good young adulthood is to have a good young adulthood and the whole point of a good young adult is to have a good middle age i mean you see where this is going right yeah it

might make some sense if we lived forever but yeah we don't exactly what do you what are your thoughts about um the occasionally vaunted ideal of uh having a anything like a work-life balance the more i thought about and read about this topic the the less i understood what it meant so i don't know that i have anything particularly coherent to say i think the most obvious thing that i do think about it is that this is a sort of classic example in traditional approaches to productivity and time management that looks like what it's offering is calm and peace and a sort of appropriate level of of involvement in different domains of life but really in practice and in the way it gets internalized by people, it just ups the pressure.

It's basically the demand that you have a 100% level of appropriate engagement and accomplishment in your work and 100% in your life outside work. and you know that that that it ought to be possible to find a way to feel that you're giving all you would like to give to your work and all you would like to give to your family and your social life and your hobbies and that if you're not managing it you know maybe sometimes the argument gets said it's not managed you're not managing it then it is a sort of issue with the societal arrangements and work policies and the rest of it but usually it's that it's your fault that you haven't found the uh you haven't found the right reserves of energy and self-discipline to um to make it work again the sufficiency problem kicks in right this this this problem that um if you get really good at at um handling any given domain in

your life you it will lead to the sense that there is more that you ought to be handling if you get to the point where you do feel that you have a good work-life balance i think it's virtually inevitable that you'll feel some some new pressure to do something else, to add another domain in which to excel. So it just seems like a very typical example of that treadmill phenomenon. Yeah, I think we should probably acknowledge that people are in very different places here with respect to a few of these variables. So there are people for whom their work really is just a job because they need to make money to survive, but it's not something that is truly aligned with how

they would want to spend their time if they didn't have to work. And then there are those of us who have managed, through just sheer good luck, to figure out a line of work that is to some significant degree similar or if not identical to what we would want to do even if we didn't have to do anything. And those strike me as fundamentally different circumstances in which to think about how one defends one's work from the rest of one's life and one's life from one's work. I mean, so for me, you know, just, you know, I'm definitely among the luckiest here where, you know, what I do for work is what, in fact, I want to do anyway most of the time. And then it has this strange quality of bleeding into the rest of life because, you know, selfishly

I'm doing what I want to do a lot and a lot of that is work and so there's no real boundary between my work and the rest of life. So the challenge for me is not to be a total workaholic where, you know, my working just competes with, you know, family time and everything else that I also want to give attention to, because it really, you know, I'm confronted by, you know, the zero-sum contest between things I genuinely want to do rather than the burden of work, which, you know, I know I have to do it, but I wish I didn't have to do it, where I have to think many people are caught. It's interesting, isn't it because it's like there is a similarity between the two situations much as you're absolutely right i

think that they're very very different they are both kind of um confrontations with finitude and the discomfort of finitude it's obviously a much better problem to have if you're at risk of letting your deeply absorbing job squeeze out time with the family you love than if it's a terrible job that you wish you didn't have to do that's doing that. But I don't know, there is a certain kind of through line between the different situations that I think is, I don't know, it's interesting to me. There's obviously a sort of a kind of, it feels like existentialist philosophy or something, but there is a kind of internal shift that I think people do sometimes make when they are doing work that they don't find intrinsically fulfilling, that if they can sort of see the reason why they're doing it in the

context of goals that are intrinsically fulfilling if they can truly believe that it's their best option right now to support the family that they want to support then there is a there is a level of sort of meaning that gets inculcated just through the the choosing but um yeah i don't know it's fascinating the other thing it makes me want to ask you is whether there's this other phenomenon that one encounters even if you are lucky enough to spend your work time doing things that you might choose to do otherwise is the phenomenon whereby the fact that it is work the fact that it is a job threatens to sometimes to erode the satisfaction of it. And the fact that you sort of have committed yourself to producing a book manuscript or putting out a regular podcast or whatever it might be

starts to threaten to undermine the joy that you would otherwise take in the activity. I don't know if you resonate with that at all. Well, you know, inevitably there is a kind of treadmill effect even in doing what one loves to do the moment it becomes something that has to adhere to any kind of calendar or, you know, deadlines or deadlines, even if you like what you're having to do. Now I find myself in the spot of my work and my guilty pleasures are more and more indistinguishable. You know, it's just, it's really, I mean, if you just look at, I mean, just, you know, take this conversation, you know, the reason why we're having it is because I wanted to read your book and I read it and I loved it and now we're talking, right? So it's like, you know, had this

book been forced on me, which, you know, occasionally happens, then it's a slightly different experience. But this really was, you know, it was a book I felt like reading anyway, and now it has become the substance of my, quote, work, but it's really, you know, a uniquely privileged spot to be in to have found a way to do this. But as you point out, it does have this other effect of throwing me up against the limits of all that I want to do and all that I feel I should do and just the limited bandwidth for all of that. It does make a mockery of this other concept, which used to be pretty well enshrined in our culture, certainly among the most fortunate

people. That's the concept of leisure, right? And this is something you analyze in the book. We have kind of lost sight of leisure and the whole point of it, even the most fortunate people have especially. When you look at how the rich, certainly among the rich knowledge workers, if you look at how they spend their time, these are not people who are especially good at downtime. You have people working, as measured by the clock, more hours than anyone else in society. On some level, they're choosing to work this hard, and not all of them are in precisely my spot of doing almost entirely things they want to do anyway. But in most cases, presumably, they're free to do less work and they're not accomplishing it. And leisure has become this, it's something that we feel that we either need to justify or we just fail to even try to justify it. Whereas in previous generations, that kind of inversion of priorities would be unthinkable.

I mean, the point of being rich and lucky in generations past was so that you could enjoy leisure. this inbuilt tendency that we have to want to be unlimited, to want to get to the very end of workload that we're brought, and all the technological reasons that that workload has become ever more functionally infinite, so that there's no possibility of getting to the end of it. And then the way that that becomes like a status symbol it's kind of embarrassing on some level to to seem to have leisure and to be very busy is i'm not saying anything uh original here but to be to be busy is a sign that you must be in demand and that you must be uh living your life in a useful fashion. And then as well, you get this very strange phenomenon where leisure itself becomes subject to the instrumental imperative

where it doesn't really count as a good use of your time off if you're not at least building some skill or resting and engaging in, quote, self-care so that you can be a better worker or more productive in your in your job or uh you know at least meeting your fitness goals or something right there's something very there's something very counter to the spirit of the times in just um in just sort of tinkering around with some hobby because you sort of enjoy doing it and not particularly caring whether you even get better at it or manage to turn it into an income stream or something.

There's one version of multitasking around which I'm, I think, unabashedly positive now, which is, and this is going to sound self-serving because it's speaking directly to what is increasingly my career here. But listening to audio, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks while doing something else that would otherwise be merely instrumental has changed, I think, many people's relationship to whatever it is, the long commute, the doing of the dishes, just doing something which is inevitable but not the point of one's day, when you're listening to a podcast or to a book or something that really is adding value to what you're doing with your mind, that strikes me

more and more as an unalloyed good. I mean, it's made me, by default, patient with a, let's say, a drive that takes a half hour longer than planned for. The sense of rushing, provided there's no real urgency out there in the world, has just completely evaporated for me because I'm now virtually always listening to something that I really do want to listen to. that I really do want to listen to. And I don't know if you've experienced the same thing in your life or if you see any unhappy little caveat to add to that rosy picture I just painted. No, I totally know what you mean.

I mean, this is a, I defer to you on this, but there's a neuroscientific point about different channels of attention here, I think. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, Thank you. and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.