Making Sense with Sam Harris - #289 — Time Management for Mortals

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Sam Harris presents an unconventional perspective on time management from Oliver Burkeman. Rather than focusing on rote efficiency or productivity, Burkeman calls on us to embrace our finitude and sur...render to the rhythms of life, so that we may “end our struggle with time”—and live with “more accomplishment, more success, and more time spent on what matters most.” 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Well, last time around I mentioned that we had added a new category of content to the Waking Up app called Life, where we're going to be covering a wider range of topics. Things like decision-making and leadership, wealth, parenting, and really anything else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life. And here I wanted to preview the new course we just launched with Oliver Berkman on time management, titled Time Management for Mortals. I really think what Oliver is doing here is fantastic,
Starting point is 00:01:16 and people are already loving this course over at Waking Up. So here, if you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you'll get the first eight lessons presented without break on this episode, and there are more lessons coming over at Waking Up. And now I give you Oliver Berkman. Enjoy. Welcome. My name is Oliver Berkman, and I'm really happy to be working with Sam to bring you this course entitled Time Management for Mortals. It's something a little different, maybe, in that we won't be focusing here on meditation or even spirituality per se. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking that time management was the polar opposite of meditation or of spirituality.
Starting point is 00:02:10 That it was a field concerned not with the deepest questions about human experience, but just the shallow stuff. How to crank through as many work tasks as possible when you might not even particularly want to do them in the first place, or how to save a few hours each week by cooking all your dinners in one big batch on Sundays. So my very first job is to convince you otherwise. To persuade you that time management isn't just about labelling your tasks with A, B and C priorities, or batch cooking pasta sauce or such like. It's vastly more than that. Arguably, time management is all that life is. Here we are with this terrifyingly short lifespan of little more than 4,000 weeks on average. And the question of how to use this time wisely and well is the central challenge if we want to live lives of accomplishment and meaning, to connect deeply to the wonder the world has to offer,
Starting point is 00:03:11 and to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet as conscious creatures. So the lessons that follow are an attempt to combine certain essential philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete, usable, tactical tools for daily living. Because of course, it's on that daily level of work, family, travel, housework, finances, morning routines, all the rest of it, it's on that level that the rubber meets the road. I trust you'll agree with me that virtually everyone struggles with time in one way or another. The most obvious manifestation of this these days is busyness, the sense of being overwhelmed by more things that you have to do than you actually can do. Distraction is another obvious one, this seemingly paradoxical situation that we don't want to spend our time
Starting point is 00:04:05 on the things we want to spend our time on, but would rather focus on something else, anything else, so that we never quite get around to what we claim to care about the most. And then arising from all this, there's also this ubiquitous, subtler sense that somehow this portion of our lives right here isn't quite it. That everything we're doing is for the purpose of some future time, or that we're going to get our lives figured out soon, that we'll get on top of things and we'll live as we want to live, but that for now, many of our tasks are just things we have to get through to get them out of the way so that real life can begin sometime later. A lot of people
Starting point is 00:04:47 have this feeling, as the English novelist Arnold Bennett put it, writing at the dawn of the modern busyness epidemic, that the years slip by and slip by and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order. Now, the guiding principle of this course, and I certainly didn't make it up, it's a theme in the work of everyone from Seneca the Roman Stoic to the Zen master Dogen and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, it's that all of these versions of the feeling of being in a struggle against time arise from a core kind of mistake in how we think about time and how we relate to it. Now I don't want to imply that this is all just a matter of switching your mindset. Certainly the situation is made worse by all kinds of cultural and economic pressures, so it's
Starting point is 00:05:38 definitely not all your personal fault that you're so overwhelmed at work, for example, or that you can't resist glimpsing at social media. But changing our relationship to time into something more fulfilling and energizing, I think it does have to start with clearing up this fundamental issue. And what is this issue? Well, you could characterize it as an unwillingness to face the reality of our finitude. as an unwillingness to face the reality of our finitude. Let's talk briefly about finitude. I mentioned that we each only get about 4,000 weeks of life on average, indeed the whole of human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia has unfolded over the span of only about 300,000 weeks. To think of this tiny portion of time, set against the duration of, say, the existence of the Earth itself, on almost any meaningful timescale,
Starting point is 00:06:31 as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, we will all be dead any minute. And perhaps the key consequence of this finitude is that it makes our choices matter. When it comes to how we use our time, because we don't have an endless amount of it, something is always at stake. Every decision to spend a portion of time on one thing is a decision not to spend it on a million other things instead. And in a world of effectively infinite inputs, limitless emails and articles to read, limitless demands from the boss, limitless ambitions you might have for your career, or people to date, or places to visit, it's inevitable for a finite human that there will always be vastly more to do, and indeed vastly more that's really worth doing than you will ever have time for. And that mismatch between what we can conceive of doing and what we can actually do is really painful. To make things worse, our finitude also means we have very little control over how our brief stretch of time unfolds.
Starting point is 00:07:46 So, yes, you have to make choices, and your choices matter, but you can't ever know what the future holds, whether your choices were the right ones or what's coming next down the pike. Instead, in each moment, we're just totally vulnerable to events. Anything could happen at any time, and we can never achieve the authentic sense of security in our travels through time that we crave. Now, all of these are just the indisputable facts about being a finite human. But they're uncomfortable, and they're anxiety-inducing facts. And so what we do by default is to pursue strategies of emotional avoidance, to try to find ways not to have to feel that discomfort. For example, we might tell ourselves, maybe subconsciously, that real life is going to begin when we finally graduate college, or when we get married, or when we have kids, or when we retire. And that's so
Starting point is 00:08:38 that we don't have to face the anxiety of knowing that, in fact, right now, this is our only shot at life, that we need to do the things we care most about right now. Or if you're a so-called productivity geek, like I certainly was for many years, obsessed with every cool new time management hack, well, on some level, you're probably telling yourself that you're doing all this because you're en route to becoming so efficient, so optimized and self-disciplined that you will eventually be able to make time for everything that matters, that you'll achieve a kind of mastery of your time that means you won't have to face tough choices or risk the emotional vulnerability of never knowing if things are going to work out.
Starting point is 00:09:22 As the psychotherapist Bruce Tift puts it, we will do a lot to avoid consciously participating in what it's like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality. We seek ways of managing time that are not really focused on making the best of our little portion of it, but rather on making ourselves feel as if we don't only have a little portion of it. Like actually we are limitless and omnipotent, or at least that we're going to become limitless and omnipotent just as soon as we can find the right time management techniques and the necessary reserves of self-discipline.
Starting point is 00:10:02 As we'll see, none of this works because it fails to acknowledge our real situation. And if you've ever suspected that pursuing these sorts of productivity methods is actually making you busier, more scattered, and less fulfilled, I'm going to explain why you're completely right. And so a big part of the purpose of these lessons is just to get you to give up that impossible quest, and that there is no moment of truth coming sometime later when things will finally make sense and real life can begin at last. And that while recognizing this truth does involve a kind of a defeat, it's a liberating and empowering defeat. It's the kind of defeat that leads very quickly to much better things,
Starting point is 00:11:07 to ending the struggle with time, and to a life of more accomplishment, more success, more time spent on what matters most, and more joy, wonder, and focus. So, let's dive in. As the saying goes, and I think it's a deeper saying than we usually give it credit for, there's no time like the present. To start going deep into this question of how to manage your time as a finite human being, it makes sense to start with a modern problem that has reached epidemic proportions. I'm talking about busyness. Now, busyness isn't our only time problem. And for some people, it isn't really the essence of their struggle with time at all. It's entirely possible to feel that you don't have enough to do, that you're using up
Starting point is 00:11:57 your limited time on insufficiently challenging or meaningful tasks. But busyness is a great place to begin this task of undoing the mistake we make in our relationship with time, to start dispelling the illusion that the path to peace of mind and to meaningful productivity lies in somehow mastering or dominating time, when in fact the answer is to step more fully and wholeheartedly into our non-negotiable human limitations. Because what do we really mean when we complain about feeling busy these days? About the kind of busyness that leaves us feeling out of control, or resentful about the demands that the world makes on us, or anxious that we're neglecting the truly meaningful stuff. It isn't just that we've got lots to do. You might be familiar with the Busy Town series of children's picture books
Starting point is 00:12:51 by the American illustrator Richard Scarry, which depict a world full of cats, pigs, raccoons, and other animals who all work at different jobs in a thriving small town. They are busy. You know, they have plenty to do. Their hours are filled up. But it's very clear that they're happy as well, perhaps because there's just no sense of any lack of fit between the tasks they have to do and the time that they have to do them. This kind of busyness, where you have plenty to do and plenty of time to do it, that can be delightful. Our real problem isn't so much that we're busy as that we're overwhelmed. We have the feeling that there are more things we need to
Starting point is 00:13:33 do than we can do in the available time. These are things we might tell ourselves we need to do in order to stay afloat financially, to meet our family obligations or to realize our potential. financially, to meet our family obligations, or to realize our potential. Whatever is fueling it in each particular case, there's this fundamental mismatch between the amount of stuff that feels as though it matters on one hand, and the amount of time and stamina that we have available to address it. In other words, this is a classic case of the human encounter with limitation. For a whole variety of reasons, we've come to feel that we must do more than we can, and we experience psychological pain in confronting that gap. And actually, a huge amount of mainstream productivity and time management advice,
Starting point is 00:14:18 I would argue, along with all sorts of other ways that we instinctively try to get a grip on our time, is dedicated really to holding out the promise, to maintaining the promise that there is a way of bridging this gap. That if you could only become efficient enough, optimized and self-disciplined enough, if you could only find exactly the right set of productivity techniques, then you'd fit so much more into your time that this sense of mismatch would evaporate. You'd finally have time for everything that matters. This is a way of thinking about time that we've borrowed essentially from the industrial
Starting point is 00:14:54 revolution where it was a pretty good way to squeeze more output from machinery. And we've tended to just assume that it must work as well when it's applied to human fulfillment in the 21st century. assume that it must work as well when it's applied to human fulfillment in the 21st century. Certainly through all my years when I was a hardcore productivity geek, that's the feeling I was chasing. This idea that soon, through becoming more and more efficient and in control, I would reach a place where I was on top of everything, where I could feel like I was doing enough. And actually, because I had a lot of my sense of self-worth tied up in all of this, that I was justifying my existence on the planet. Well, if you've already listened
Starting point is 00:15:32 to lesson one in this series, it won't come as a surprise to learn that this approach doesn't work. Efficiency is never going to be what gets you to peace of mind when it comes to time, simply because the supply of incoming things to do, tasks, obligations, goals, ambitions, is functionally speaking infinite. So fitting more of it in isn't going to get you any closer to the end of it. But that's not even the whole story here, because what you find, what I certainly found, is that all else being equal, the pursuit of efficiency as a way to win the struggle with time will actually make you busier than before, more stressed than before,
Starting point is 00:16:12 less focused on the things that matter to you the most. Partly this is just a matter of quantity. If you get really efficient at, say, processing your email, the main thing you'll find is that you spend more of your time dealing with a greater volume of email. Because what happens is you reply more swiftly to other people's emails, and then they reply to those replies, and half the time you probably have to reply to their replies to your replies, and on and on and on. And meanwhile, you'll develop a reputation for being responsive on email,
Starting point is 00:16:43 so more people will email you in the first place. It's like the old saying, has it? The reward for good time management is more work. Or if you're the person in your office who is far and away the fastest at handling a certain kind of project, well, don't be surprised when you're the one who gets all of those projects dumped on your desk. There's a close parallel here with the idea of induced demand, which refers to the way that cities add extra lanes to congested freeways in an effort to make the traffic flow more freely. And what often happens instead is that those extra lanes just incentivize more drivers to use that route. So more cars flood the system and the congestion
Starting point is 00:17:22 stays just as bad as it was. But there's another dimension to this pitfall that I'm calling the efficiency trap too, which is one not just of the quantity of tasks, but the quality. If you focus obsessively on trying to fit more and more in as a way to feel in control of your time, you're actually likely to end up spending more and more of your time on the least important things. That's partly because we tell ourselves that the really important things need our full focus. They need plenty of energy. And so we postpone them. We concentrate instead on clearing the decks. That is, you know, dealing with all the other little tasks that are tugging at our attention, so that we can later get the time and the focus that we need for the important ones. Trouble, of course, is that the
Starting point is 00:18:11 decks are never cleared, because the incoming supply of things to fill them is basically infinite, so we never get round to the important stuff at all. Meanwhile, if you're convinced that you're en route to a time when you're going to be able to handle everything, then when any potential new use for your time arises, a new request from a co-worker, some new potential business opportunity or social event or something, you're going to be much more likely to accept it unquestioningly and less motivated to ask whether it's truly a worthwhile use of your time. Because, after all, aren't you someone who's on the way to finding a way to get everything done?
Starting point is 00:18:50 So what does it matter to add one more thing to the list? So systematically, efficiency leads to us feeling busier and busier with less important things. To be clear, I'm not saying that efficiency has no role to play in using time well. If it currently takes you half an hour just to find the file you're supposed to be working on, or to find a clean pair of socks in the morning, then yes, there probably are some efficiency improvements you ought to be making in your life, and please don't let me dissuade you from making them. The point, point instead is that more efficiency and optimization can never be the main answer to feeling overwhelmed for the simple reason that we
Starting point is 00:19:33 are finite creatures swimming in oceans of infinite possibility. So there'll always be too much to do. And that's why I think the really important skill to be developed here, and we'll be looking at some concrete techniques for this in some of the lessons that follow, it's actually a kind of anti-skill. It's the ability to not do something. It's the willingness to not clear the decks, to be okay with the fact that there will always be a whole bunch of stuff on your to-do list that you're not doing at the moment, to know that there is all this other stuff you could meaningfully be doing, and yet to be willing to turn your attention for a few hours right now to something that genuinely matters to you. This anti-skill is similar to the cast of mind that the poet John Keats famously called negative capability.
Starting point is 00:20:26 It's the capacity to stay with one activity despite so many other things feeling unresolved, to be present with a project that matters to you or a person who matters to you, even though you know there are so many other things calling for your attention. Of course, few of us are in a position to just ignore our email or all those other little tasks that fill up the decks. You're still going to have to spend time on that stuff. But what you can do is to give up hope of ever getting to the end of all that stuff, of ever getting totally on top of it all, or of thinking that peace of mind lies at the time and the place when you will finally have got on top of it all, or of thinking that peace of mind lies at the time and the place when you will
Starting point is 00:21:05 finally have got on top of it all. You can treat all that stuff instead as something that you dip into for a while on a regular basis with no particular expectation of completion. So sure, maybe you need to give an hour or two hours to email each day. But if you can, put that time towards the end of your working day and don't necessarily aim to reach inbox zero, just aim to spend the prescribed amount of time on that activity before stepping away. And if your energy is greatest at the start of the day, like mine is, well use some of that time for the projects you care about the most, even though you'll be doing so in the full knowledge
Starting point is 00:21:45 that the decks are not clear. See what happens if you can approach life in this way to allow the anxiety that's going to arise from all those undone tasks being on the to-do list. And at the same time, to just spend a few hours anyway on something that feels truly important. There's a sort of surrender involved here, a giving up on something. But ultimately, what you're giving up is the attempt to escape the way that reality actually is. And when you drop down into reality instead, when you truly
Starting point is 00:22:21 grasp that there is no chance ever of getting everything done, that's when you can finally get some purchase on reality and get stuck into making the best use of the time that you have. In the last session, we looked at the ubiquitous modern problem of overwhelm and why the standard response to it, which is trying to become ever more efficient, isn't going to lead you to peace of mind. That in fact, left unchecked, the pursuit of efficiency will end up draining
Starting point is 00:22:50 your life of meaning. But to really grasp the shift of perspective that we're exploring here, I think it's important to see that this underlying mismatch between the infinite world of possibility and our all too finite time and capacities, it isn't confined to the world of possibility and our all-too-finite time and capacities, it isn't confined to the world of emails and work demands and chores and family duties and so on. It's really more a basic condition of being alive in the modern world. Because the modern world provides us with, and just as importantly, informs us about, a truly inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing. Things that seem like they'd enable you to live a truly meaningful life, to really suck the marrow out of your limited time. So there's an inexhaustible supply of
Starting point is 00:23:38 experiences worth having, books worth reading, people worth getting to know. And it often seems like if we could only squeeze in a few more of them, then we would finally feel fulfilled at last. This morning when I was out on a walk, I had the thought, seemingly from nowhere, that what I really needed, what would really enable me to feel like I was living fully, was a mountain bike. Well, maybe a mountain bike really would improve my life. I don't know. But I do know that once I obtain one, if I do that, there'll be a million other potential versions of that thought. What I really need in order to feel fulfilled is waiting in the wings to remind me of all the other things I'm not doing, the experiences I'm not having,
Starting point is 00:24:22 the possessions I don't possess. We're in the territory here, obviously, of the fear of missing out. That very contemporary suspicion that other people are living more exciting and fulfilled lives than we are, that there's something different we ought to be doing with our time in order to maximize our potential or our happiness. The German social theorist Hartmut Rosa has made the interesting point that this feeling probably didn't afflict people in pre-modern times. Go back a few centuries and most people either believed in an afterlife, so there was less riding on making the most of this life, or they believed in some kind of cyclical picture of history, so they saw themselves
Starting point is 00:25:05 as just playing their role in an endlessly repeating cosmic drama. Or alternatively, maybe it just never would have occurred to them that they had any right to expect anything other than to occupy the social or economic role in which they found themselves. By contrast, today we are ceaselessly attempting to get the most out of life, to seize the day, to somehow close the gap between our actual set of experiences and the available world of experiences. And then we're ceaselessly discovering that we can't do it. I think if you can get a small taste of an alternative way of seeing this, the shift from the fear of missing out to what I like to call the joy of missing out,
Starting point is 00:25:52 that can be a kind of master key for using your time meaningfully and well. And to get there, I'm afraid I think we're going to have to begin with the incredibly unreadable and incredibly politically unpalatable German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Don't worry, I'm just going to pluck a couple of the most useful ideas from his work here. One of those is just to see the total extent to which we are defined by our finitude, by our capacity as we proceed through life only ever to choose one path at a time from a multiplicity of possible paths. This is the realization that every decision to use a portion of our time in a certain way, an hour, a week, or a whole lifetime, it's by definition a decision not to use it in an infinity of other possible ways. And what this means is that any human life, even the most successful life you could possibly
Starting point is 00:26:54 imagine, is inevitably a matter of constantly waving goodbye to possibilities. As I go through the day making hundreds of small choices, I'm building a life, yes, but at one and the same time, I'm closing off the possibility of countless other lives forever. And what Heidegger saw was that facing up to that fact, even just a little, taking responsibility for the situation, for the fact that we're always making these choices, whether we like it or not, is incredibly daunting. It's anxiety-inducing. So we're always trying to find ways to evade taking responsibility instead, to avoid having to confront the fact of all these cuttings away of possibility. One way we do that is just to numb ourselves with distraction
Starting point is 00:27:46 and busyness. Another is to convince ourselves that actually we don't have choices that in fact we do have. So we tell ourselves that we have no option but to pursue a given career, or stay married to the person we married, or no option to leave the city for the country or the other way around. That it's just the done thing and we have to go along. I also think the modern obsession with personal productivity can often be another way of avoiding responsibility for our choices, right? You get to dodge the responsibilities of finitude by convincing yourself that in some sense you're not finite, that you're going to be able to do everything so that you won't have to make tough choices with your time. And you can probably see how the internet makes all this a lot worse because
Starting point is 00:28:37 it promises to help us make better use of our time while simultaneously exposing us to vastly more potential uses for our time. And then, by the way, also offering the perfect source of distraction when it all gets too much and we want to shift our focus from the stress of making choices. So the very tool you're using to try to get the most out of life actually makes you feel as though you're missing out on even more of it. So, for example, Facebook is a great way to stay informed about events you might like to attend, but it's also a guaranteed way to find out about more events you'd like to attend than anyone possibly could ever attend.
Starting point is 00:29:18 Online dating, likewise, is a fantastic way to find people to date, but it's also pretty much a guaranteed way of being constantly reminded about all the other, potentially more alluring people you could be dating instead. So if you're somebody who is plagued by this fear of missing out, it can be surprisingly powerful just to understand that in fact missing out is inevitable. It's baked into the human condition that we will miss out on almost everything. So that fearing missing out makes no real sense. It's like worrying that you might be unable to make two and two add up to five, when the truth is you don't
Starting point is 00:30:00 need to worry about that because you're definitely not going to manage it. But we can go a step even further here, I think, and see that missing out isn't just unavoidable. It's arguably what makes things worth doing, what makes life worth living, what gives meaning to our experiences in the first place. Our finitude, the fact that we have to miss out on so much, is what gives weight to our choices. It's what means that something is at stake in how we choose to live our lives. Think about it. If you knew that your life would never end, then the answer to the question, should I do X or Y with my time today, would always be, who cares?
Starting point is 00:30:40 It doesn't matter, because there's always the next day, and the next day, and the one after that. In fact, why bother doing anything at all today in a situation like that? So the fact that you have to miss out isn't necessarily even something to regret. It's perhaps the thing that makes life juicy in the first place. I think one final way to help bring all this into focus is to see that there is something rather arrogant and entitled in the way we usually think about our finite time. We act as if it's a huge problem that we only get a short amount of time, and that it's a kind of insult that it gets taken away from us by death. But when we say
Starting point is 00:31:22 that our lives are short, short compared to what? Certainly short compared to the life of a hypothetical immortal being. But it might make as much sense or even more sense to compare our lives not to a hypothetical immortal being, but to all the countless hypothetical people who never got to be born in the first place. And to see that from that perspective, it's not really cruel that our lives aren't longer. Rather, it's a staggering, stupendous bonus that we get any time on the planet as conscious creatures at all. And when you see things in this way, it starts to make more sense to think of all those inexhaustible experiences that the world has to
Starting point is 00:32:06 offer, not as existing on some kind of endless to-do list, where if you don't make it through the list, you'll have missed out on life, but more like a different kind of list, a menu, a list of options you get to choose from. And that in that situation, having to choose, the necessity of choosing, it's not a terrible fate you've been sentenced to but rather a wonderful opportunity and a positive affirmation of whatever choices you do end up making in this state of mind you can certainly relish the peak experiences of your life more completely than before but you can also find deep meaning in the peak experiences of your life more completely than before. But you can also find deep meaning in the other experiences too, in the chores and the duties and the myriad ways we just
Starting point is 00:32:51 need to maintain our daily lives. You can embrace the fact that you're foregoing certain pleasures or certain theoretically rewarding experiences because whatever you've decided to do with your time instead today, to earn money to support your family, to write your novel to bathe your toddler, to pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk, that's how you've chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect. to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect. There's one specific skill that has to lie at the heart of any approach to time management that acknowledges the reality of our finitude. One tactic, arguably more crucial than any other, for unlocking accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment, for stepping off this anxiety-fueled treadmill where we're always trying
Starting point is 00:33:46 to get on top of an infinite supply of things we could do with our time. That skill is deciding. In other words, developing the habit of making decisions, making more decisions throughout the day, throughout our lives. Now deciding has acquired something of a bad reputation in recent years thanks to the publicity surrounding the phenomenon of decision fatigue. That's the claim that making decisions depletes the ego in a way that makes it harder to make further decisions later on. This was supposedly why President Barack Obama wore only grey and blue suits, so that he didn't need to use up his decision-making capacities on such trivial matters and could store it up for the truly consequential decisions that his role required of him. But for now, I just want to encourage you to put this idea of
Starting point is 00:34:39 decision fatigue to one side, to suggest that unless you actually are the leader of a major nation or the CEO of a giant corporation or something like that, that it's well worth experimenting with this idea that what you might need in your life isn't to make fewer decisions, but to make more of them. Or maybe I should say more conscious decisions. Because one ramification of the view we've been exploring in this series is that, well, there's a sense in which you're making decisions all the time, all through the day, whether you realize it or not. For a finite human being, whenever we spend a portion of time on anything, we are making a decision not to spend it on a million other things. Even more than that, in each of those
Starting point is 00:35:25 moments, we're closing off countless whole alternative lives. Every step you take through your life, you're cutting away alternative life paths. That's actually the etymology of the word decide. It means cutting away, slicing off options. It's actually related to words like homicide and suicide. We are all in the position of the narrator of Robert Frost's legendary poem, The Road Not Taken, about choosing between two paths in a wood. Only, we can't know which path will be better. We won't even know at the end of the journey if the path we took was the better one. We won't even know at the end of the journey if the path we took was the better one. And if we just hang around at the fork in the path instead, unable or unwilling to make a decision,
Starting point is 00:36:12 well, that's a decision too. It's a decision to use up part of our finite life doing that instead of selecting one of the paths. If you've listened to some of the other sessions in this series, it won't surprise you by now that generally as humans, we really don't like this situation. That we tend to do all we possibly can not to consciously participate in what it feels like to be in this situation of being compelled to choose at every moment of our lives. Why? Well, because we don't want to acknowledge that we're missing out on all those unlived lives. We don't want to have to sacrifice some options for other options. I would love to spend this current season of my life being both a truly engaged parent of a small child and also spend six months every year on
Starting point is 00:36:57 solitary meditation retreats in exotic locations. But my finitude, my inability to be in two places at once means that i do just have to choose and additionally we don't want to experience the inevitable negative aspects of any path we do choose you know that the difficulties that come with any relationship the imperfections that must inevitably afflict any creative project that we bring into the world, and so on. So we hang back from making choices, partly to hang on to perfect fantasies that could only ever be damaged by making a choice and bringing them into reality. So what we do instead, in an effort not to feel this discomfort of being limited, is we try to cling on to the feeling of control by keeping our options open, by not consciously making decisions, by staying mired in indecision
Starting point is 00:37:54 or procrastination or commitment phobia. It's no fun to be mired in indecision or procrastination or commitment phobia, but in a very important way, it does feel sort of... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of The Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs
Starting point is 00:38:20 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.

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