Making Sense - Sam Harris - #269

Oliver Berkman 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, and has also written a few books, most recently, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for mortals. which is a book that touches upon some of the deepest questions in life, including whether we should even be thinking about time as a resource anyway, and why we should reclaim it as a useful resource. In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with Oliver Berkman about his take on time management, and how we can reclaim the concept of time as something that matters, and reclaim it in a way that matters more than the standard, standard version of time management advice that has long promoted a reputation as a standard approach to time management. In this conversation, we talk about what matters most, and what matters least, and the case for reclaiming the term time as a valuable resource. This conversation is all too timely as we careen into december, with the end of the year being the time where many of us think about reprioritizing things, and re-designing our lives in order to make the most of the things we could do in less than four months. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who are making possible by becoming a supporter of the podcast. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming one of our sponsors, and consider becoming a patron of the making sense Podcast. You ll get access to all sorts of useful resources, including the best resources that make it possible to make it all the best possible for you, making sense of the world. Thanks for listening to the podcast! - making sense by Sam Harris and much more! To find a list of our sponsor, go to anchor.fm/makingsense Subscribe to Making Sense to become a member of the mailing list Learn more about us here: bit.ly/support the podcast? Get a copy of our newest issue of Making Sense: The Making Sense Podcast? Want to support the Making sense? Subscribe for a chance to win a discount on a future issue of our latest issue of The Making sense podcast issue? You'll get 20% off the next episode?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

00:00:12.520 this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part

00:00:16.900 of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll

00:00:21.800 need to subscribe at sam harris.org there you'll find our private rss feed to add to your favorite

00:00:27.020 podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and

00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.540 what we're doing here please consider becoming one

00:00:38.940 today i'm speaking with oliver berkman oliver is a feature writer for the guardian where he wrote a

00:00:53.800 long-running weekly column on psychology he's also written for the new york times the wall street

00:00:59.220 journal and other publications he's also written a few books most recently four thousand weeks time

00:01:07.720 management for mortals which is a book that i really loved it is certainly not your usual time management

00:01:14.700 book and touches upon some of the deepest questions in life and in what sense should we even be thinking

00:01:22.800 about time as a resource anyway we get into many aspects of this we talk about our relationship to time

00:01:31.120 the perils of efficiency being versus becoming parenting and childhood the notion of work-life balance

00:01:40.100 the loss of leisure the trap of planning social isolation the idea of a modern sabbath

00:01:48.800 and other topics anyway this conversation is all too timely as we careen into december here

00:01:57.040 the end of the year being the time where many of us think about reprioritizing things just how did we

00:02:05.980 spend this year that seemed like it was four months long so i hope you find the conversation useful

00:02:12.240 and now i bring you oliver berkman

00:02:15.780 i am here with oliver berkman oliver thanks for joining me thanks so much for inviting me so i'm not

00:02:28.140 aware if we've ever met i think you've interviewed me once or twice but uh tell me our history together

00:02:35.720 i think that's right i think that we uh haven't ever met i fairly recently consulted you for a piece

00:02:43.940 that i was writing for the guardian on uh on free will that was our most recent uh interaction i think

00:02:49.280 yeah yeah but was there a time before that as well you know there might have been a time before that

00:02:54.520 when we exchanged less friendly words via twitter which tends to do that to people all right well

00:03:00.700 um apologies for anything untoward i might have done no i'm sure it was me being uh me being uh

00:03:06.260 impertinent anyway it's all in the past well great to turn the tables on you and to be interviewing

00:03:12.300 you about your book the title of which is four thousand weeks time management for mortals and it's

00:03:18.820 really a it's a fantastic book it's the we'll get into the way in which it breaks the mold for the

00:03:24.580 topic of time management but before we do can you summarize your background as a writer

00:03:30.680 and journalist and just how you came to this topic sure i worked for a very long time on the staff

00:03:38.020 and then as a freelance contracted person for the guardian uh one of the things i did for many years

00:03:44.520 just until a couple years ago was to write a weekly column on i guess self-help culture the science of

00:03:51.380 happiness productivity all that kind of that whole sector and um you know on the one hand this is an

00:03:57.460 amazing opportunity to explore all sorts of fascinating modalities and research and the rest

00:04:04.640 of it i think it probably also served as a slightly as a sort of an enabler of various problematic

00:04:13.600 tendencies in myself you know if you're sort of if you're the kind of person who wants to spend your

00:04:18.140 your life exploring methods of productivity rather than actually getting on with things and being

00:04:24.120 productive then it's great to be able to have the excuse that you're doing doing it for work

00:04:29.020 purposes so in a way this book was sort of came out the other end of that it was like after spending

00:04:33.820 many years trying to find the the perfect productivity technique or the perfect time management technique

00:04:40.580 and uh and and failing so before we jump into the iconoclastic and heretical take you have on this

00:04:49.740 topic maybe we should just at the outset say whatever can be said in support of kind of the the obvious

00:04:58.020 virtues of time management i mean we're just acknowledging the problem and you know reclaiming

00:05:05.160 whatever baby is in that bath water what do you think actually survives scrutiny here in terms of the

00:05:11.000 standard advice well clearly time management matters i try to make the case i think that it matters

00:05:18.700 even more than the people who have promoted that sort of standard version would would claim it's

00:05:24.240 obviously you know it has this reputation as a slightly sort of narrow topic but it's actually

00:05:31.600 on some level surely the whole of life is the whole challenge of constructing a meaningful life is a

00:05:36.500 question of is a question of time management and then i would say that there's definitely some room for

00:05:43.900 becoming more efficient and more strategic and and there are things that we all do in our days that

00:05:49.960 we could do in in less time uh and uh and and make savings around the edges in in that way i have

00:05:57.060 plenty to say that's critical about that sort of efficiency and optimization based approach to

00:06:03.800 to using one's time but i think that you know there's no doubt that there are ways of organizing your

00:06:10.440 daily schedule that will see you spend less time switching between you know less time on email than

00:06:17.300 you otherwise would or more time on the things that you truly care about so it's certainly not all

00:06:22.160 all nonsense yeah there's maybe we can start with one of the paradoxes or perverse dynamics here where

00:06:32.240 the focus on efficiency leads strangely to a subversion of one's deeper priorities there's so

00:06:43.740 many ways into this that you you explore in your book but um maybe maybe this we can start with this

00:06:50.220 all too common impulse of feeling the need to quote clear the decks before one can actually do the

00:06:57.740 important stuff and so much of time management it amounts to recommendations around this kind of

00:07:05.060 thing the the doing things more efficiently getting one's to-do list truly clear getting to inbox zero

00:07:13.660 what's wrong with the level of focus when one approaches it that way i mean i think we're all familiar

00:07:20.920 with this problem it's just that don't always put a name to it or sort of see it in objective terms but

00:07:27.740 this general problem is i think is that if you if you focus on efficiency as the governing value

00:07:35.620 in your personal use of time and i think this probably applies to all sorts of other systems as

00:07:41.160 well it's recognized in those other contexts all else being equal a more efficient system will simply

00:07:47.340 attract and process more inputs if you get really good at getting through your email you will receive

00:07:55.140 more email because you will reply to people at a greater tempo at a faster tempo and you'll those

00:08:01.100 replies will generate replies and you'll develop a reputation in your organization as someone who's

00:08:06.760 responsive to email so more people will be it'll be worth their while to send you email so that's just

00:08:12.760 one example but you know you the the this is parkinson's law the idea that the the work expands to fill

00:08:18.420 the time available for its completion it's it's just this basic problem that efficiency pursued as the

00:08:26.040 governing value leads to more stuff coming in that you have to process and for other reasons that i can

00:08:33.280 talk about i think it also leads to a lower lower quality of stuff right it it focuses you on spending more

00:08:40.100 and more time on the things that you don't particularly value and so you know if you take that approach

00:08:45.120 of trying to clear the decks before you get around to the important stuff firstly the decks will never

00:08:51.780 be clear anyway because of the world we live in is you know we are finite and the potential number of

00:08:57.300 little things to do is effectively infinite and secondly the act of trying to clear the decks

00:09:03.740 increases the number of the of things on the decks so it's a very sort of it's a very sort of

00:09:10.800 counterintuitive stance that is required i think to to sort of allow the decks to be too full and to

00:09:19.360 sort of allow the feeling of of being overwhelmed to exist and nonetheless at the same time to spend

00:09:27.580 you know an hour or the first part of the day or whatever on on the thing that you that you really

00:09:33.160 want to prioritize it's not it's not how we're seems to be it's not how we're conditioned to uh

00:09:38.320 to approach the feeling of being overwhelmed yeah there seems to be this psychological quirk at the

00:09:45.260 bottom of all of this which is we we don't want to admit the fundamental limits of what we can do i

00:09:51.940 mean just the basic fact that doing any one thing is synonymous with not doing an infinite number of

00:09:58.920 things so if you're going to spend an hour reading a book you're spending that hour if in fact you are

00:10:04.400 merely reading that book and not doing 10 other things with your phone there are an infinite number

00:10:09.660 of things you're neglecting to do for that full hour and in some sense we don't want to admit this

00:10:15.680 to ourselves and we want to live with the illusion that if we could just control things better than

00:10:23.980 we've been to date we could do more or less everything that we we want to do should do feel we must do

00:10:33.060 and what that allows for is a or what that encourages is a failure to triage at the first opportunity to

00:10:45.060 admit to yourself okay there's i've got 24 hours in the day i will never have a longer day than that

00:10:50.160 and therefore if i'm not doing these most important things first they're vulnerable to my doing far less

00:10:58.840 important less rewarding things in the meantime and this is something you explore at various points

00:11:06.900 in the book the embrace of of our limitation the recognition that this finite resource of attention

00:11:14.800 allows us to live with you know as you say the decks not being remotely clear and focus on the most

00:11:23.280 important stuff whereas actually not acknowledging the limitations causes us to just respond to the

00:11:32.040 the email we need never have responded to in preference for that most important thing that is

00:11:38.260 yet once again not getting touched today yeah right exactly i mean for me this is the the the core of it all

00:11:46.300 this this this deep discomfort that we have with with confronting how limited we are not just in

00:11:52.540 terms of quantity of time i think but also control over the unfolding of time you know the degree to which

00:11:59.860 we are just rafts on the on the white waters of of the river of time and have really relatively little

00:12:07.620 control over how things go and the the wonderfully alluring thing about chasing this this promise of total

00:12:16.000 productivity total optimization being completely in control and having everything sorted out at last

00:12:21.180 it never comes because yeah it would entail it would entail being non-limited when when in fact we are

00:12:28.140 limited but there's always the sense that it might just be around the corner might just be in the future

00:12:34.200 and that was my experience for years as a total sort of you know paid up productivity geek it was not that i

00:12:40.660 had everything working brilliantly and could do everything that was thrown at me but it was always like

00:12:45.940 it was maybe only a few weeks away that i would have this this system set up and everything would be perfect

00:12:52.840 so there's this kind of constant future allure that you're eventually going to get your time sorted out

00:12:58.880 which really just means break through the limitations of the human condition with respect to time

00:13:04.580 and because it's always feels like it's coming right that's a that's a reason not to face the

00:13:10.620 discomfort that would be entailed by saying okay it's never coming i am going to end up neglecting

00:13:17.240 in this life huge numbers of things that matter and that would have been a legitimate use of my time

00:13:22.600 along with lots of other less meaningful things i'm going to end up neglecting lots of them it's going

00:13:27.880 to happen whatever i do and so i've at some point i've just got to apply myself to a few things that

00:13:33.700 seem like the most important the most important yeah there's there's this piece of corporate speak

00:13:39.780 that has worked its way into my vocabulary despite my best intentions and i find that myself using this

00:13:46.460 phrase a lot because it does capture this ever-present problem and it's the phrase opportunity cost

00:13:53.660 and it comes down to this the need to decide i mean you actually break open the etymology of the word

00:14:01.500 decide in your book from the latin to cut off i mean to decide what to do is by definition to

00:14:08.340 circumscribe something and separate it from everything that it's not and i guess there's

00:14:14.680 something on the other side of this there is something to having a carefree attitude too and

00:14:19.680 just just allowing yourself to wander within certain limits and discover what happens of itself but

00:14:27.400 even that kind of experience needs to be prioritized given the world in which we live so there inevitably

00:14:34.360 we have to confront this fact that we to not decide is also a to make some sort of decision you know by

00:14:41.120 default you're going to be just left with whatever habit pattern is being played upon by circumstance

00:14:49.200 so it seems to me that the the focus for making any kind of change in the quality of one's life has to

00:14:56.760 be around this variable of deciding what it is that's really worth your time and attention and noticing all

00:15:06.520 the ways in which your life is buffeting you away from those priorities and it takes this continuous act of

00:15:15.540 recalibration because as much as we may be intellectually aware of the finiteness of life

00:15:22.940 and the transitoriness of everything in some sense we're really not aware of it you know we're not

00:15:30.000 emotionally aware of it so much of the time and to live a life that you really can't regret at the you know

00:15:37.520 the end of any given day or year or at the end of your life i think has got to entail

00:15:43.480 succeeding more and more at this choice point of granting your attention to all those things that

00:15:52.080 most merit it absolutely i mean i think i'd push it even a bit further and say

00:15:58.620 it isn't only about making sure that you only focus on what matters the most to you but but it's

00:16:06.620 almost about accepting that quite a few things that might be among the things that matter the most to

00:16:11.440 won't make either because there's just no reason in our situation to assume that the quantity of

00:16:20.320 things that matter fit comfortably inside the available time now i mean it is a very sort of

00:16:26.480 it's a big responsibility and it's a very sort of um it's a daunting thought but i do also think

00:16:33.060 there's something deeply liberating about it right it's the it's the liberation of of seeing that

00:16:39.900 something you were trying to do was completely impossible and given that it was completely

00:16:47.240 impossible given that there was no hope ever of sort of escaping the terms and conditions of

00:16:52.340 the human situation you don't need to fight that and you can sort of relax into the situation a bit

00:16:59.460 i think there is something very sort of something that's it sort of stops life it gets rid of the

00:17:05.500 idea that like life is a problem that there's already a sort of a problem that you've got to

00:17:09.480 solve just through just through being here you mentioned meditation briefly in the book but i forget

00:17:14.640 what your background is with it because it's it's obviously very informative of how i see this issue

00:17:20.680 what what has been your experience with meditation i have had a sort of patchy practice for many years

00:17:27.680 done a couple of five day week long or so retreats at the insight meditation society uh followed a lot

00:17:35.980 of your writing on it and uh and the waking up app so i'm very very interested but i feel um slightly

00:17:44.680 sheepish when i get involved in claiming that i'm any kind of active regular meditator because that would

00:17:50.180 be dishonest but i think that i mean i do think that a lot of these ideas have touch points with

00:17:56.660 with a lot of buddhist ideas for sure in the possibility of of relief that you just uh described

00:18:03.980 and that comes by acknowledging the the endlessness of experience right you're never going to actually

00:18:10.480 accomplish everything not only everything that you might do but everything that even upon final

00:18:17.900 analysis you would you would think is truly important and truly rewarding you know there's there's an

00:18:23.520 infinite amount of that too potentially right just like there's you know a functionally infinite

00:18:27.700 number of good books to read once you sort of give up the the war here i mean you just give up hope

00:18:34.620 you recognize that there's just um on some level there's just more can't be the point because more is

00:18:41.940 is always dwarfed by everything you can't do and you know probably more important everything

00:18:50.520 you do do doesn't it doesn't really accrue in quite the way that you expect i mean we you know you look

00:18:58.080 back at all of your past experience now which is just a memory and it is by its very nature evanescent i

00:19:06.100 mean it's just you can't you can't grab hold of it you can just keep mulling it over in by thinking

00:19:11.900 about it so it it never quite lands and uh it's not to say that you know you you don't learn things

00:19:21.060 and develop new skills and and develop uh new opportunities for life in the present based on

00:19:27.820 past experience but the satisfaction of satisfaction doesn't last in quite the way we sense it will by

00:19:36.600 default and yet we we rarely turn the same understanding on the future and recognize that

00:19:43.720 all of these things we are looking forward to or worrying about or are you know some somewhere

00:19:50.400 or other focused on they too are going to have this mirage-like quality when when the future finally

00:19:57.080 arrives it will be this cascade of sights and sounds and sensations and impressions and assumptions and and it

00:20:06.100 will blow through us yet again and very quickly become a memory so there's a there in some sense

00:20:12.000 we need to recognize this different mode of being versus becoming i mean it's the becoming side of the

00:20:19.280 equation which is always taken in yet again by the illusion that if we could only you know check all

00:20:25.120 these boxes uh in the future we will be satisfied whereas the being side recognizes that in some basic sense

00:20:35.040 there is no real place to land beyond recognizing that this moment with all that has been done and left

00:20:44.980 undone has to be in some sense the ground of our well-being you know whatever you could be you have to

00:20:53.120 be being in the in the very middle of writing the email you would you really don't feel like writing

00:20:58.840 the good life requires that that you'd be able to locate some tranquility and acceptance and even

00:21:06.220 happiness even in the midst of that it can't be predicated on getting it done or just getting

00:21:12.120 through because then you're just getting through your life you're getting through your day and uh

00:21:16.560 it's just your it's just treadmill time right right it's you're so right that we don't we forget this

00:21:23.500 for sort of years and decades at a time but it's also kind of immediately obvious that if it's all

00:21:28.960 leading up to something what it's all leading up to what a single moment on your deathbed that makes

00:21:34.000 no sense it's obvious that it makes no sense you know i think it i don't know if i can articulate this

00:21:39.000 properly but it has something to do with a kind of fundamental misunderstanding or illusion or something

00:21:46.400 about what what time is i suppose right it's this idea that time is a resource it's a thing that we use

00:21:53.140 that you have to sort of get the most out of the portion of time that you've been given all of

00:21:58.240 these things imply a separation between time and you and yet you know as i try to go into and book a

00:22:06.080 little bit there's a real sense in which it might make more sense to think of to think of the idea that

00:22:12.060 we are time right but um that you are a portion of time and that to me speaks to the this idea that

00:22:19.220 it's not a dress rehearsal it has to matter now if it's ever going to matter the whole idea that

00:22:24.700 you're sort of using this resource to get to some place of paradise in the future stops making any

00:22:30.660 sense if you if you think instead that that we just are this portion of time well then obviously

00:22:36.400 it's got to be in the present that meaning is to be found i attribute some of these ideas in the book

00:22:42.800 to heidegger who i sort of grappled with to try to understand this but since the book was published

00:22:49.960 i've i've found i think strikingly similar things in in some work commentaries on um on dogan the

00:22:57.480 the founder of soto zen who seems to have said some very similar things and wrote a essay that the title

00:23:04.520 of which is translated as being time this idea that we just are time for me anyway it's almost at least

00:23:12.160 sometimes triggers this this kind of bodily shift into a into the feeling that like it has to matter

00:23:17.780 now i don't know if that makes sense when i put it yeah yeah well and dogan has the virtue of not

00:23:23.920 having joined the nazi party right exactly exactly it would have been all things being equal with him

00:23:30.920 yes you said you made one point about it can't all be purpose toward getting safely to one's deathbed

00:23:40.020 you know with one's priorities intact and it's it's this instrumental relationship to everything in

00:23:48.520 life it is pernicious i actually you have some reflections on parenting and childhood that make

00:23:55.100 this um pretty poignant perhaps you you can you can talk about in in light of um how we tend to think

00:24:02.600 about our kids as parents and how strange that conception of living life as a means to some

00:24:11.980 nebulous end becomes in that context yeah i mean i'm not the only person to have made the observation

00:24:17.860 but but it's just this the degree to which we think about parenting or naturally fall into thinking

00:24:25.400 about parenting as solely a matter of creating the most successful adults later on for any value of

00:24:34.660 successful right this isn't necessarily a point about um money and professional success it's a point

00:24:39.800 about treating your job as a parent as being the act of creating something in the future to the exclusion

00:24:46.740 of the experience of childhood and the experience of parenthood in the very moment itself

00:24:53.980 and i quote in the book i think um adam gopnick the new yorker writer calling this the causal

00:25:00.900 catastrophe the idea that the only reason question to ask about the quality of a childhood or of a

00:25:06.680 parent-child relationship being what it's creating for the future and as i recall one of the examples

00:25:12.040 uh i think it was him who gave you know there is a question when it comes to violent video games

00:25:18.740 very controversial question obviously about whether this leads to sort of bad psychological traits

00:25:23.680 uh later on in life but it's kind of only one part of the question the other question is whether

00:25:29.120 a childhood spent playing violent video games is or is not a good childhood and it might be i'm

00:25:36.120 steering well clear of having an opinion on that matter right now but but the point is just that you

00:25:40.420 can ask the question about how the quality of time is spent now not only about whether it is adding up

00:25:47.140 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

00:25:55.140 on the experience right now you sort of sap all the meaning and value from it i write in a book about

00:26:02.640 you know still being in this very sort of productivity oriented mindset when our son was first born and

00:26:08.820 finding myself you know not sufficiently absorbed in the experience of interacting with him because

00:26:17.680 one part of me was trying to figure out whether he'd was meeting the developmental milestones that i'd

00:26:23.880 read about in some book and you know these things matter it's like you can't disregard them but but there's

00:26:30.480 a real possibility for that to completely crush the experience itself and i think it you know it's

00:26:36.740 certainly not just parenthood but it but it becomes very parenthood is a sort of a terrain where it

00:26:42.760 seems very very easy to to fall into it yeah no it's a very strange question to pose what is the

00:26:49.900 purpose of a good childhood right like if the whole point of having a good childhood is to have a good

00:26:58.100 adolescence and the whole point of having a good adolescence is to have a good young adulthood and the

00:27:04.440 whole point of a good young adult is to have a good middle age i mean you see where this is going

00:27:08.960 yeah it might make some sense if we lived forever but yeah we don't exactly what do you what are your

00:27:17.420 thoughts about um the occasionally vaunted ideal of uh having a anything like a work-life balance

00:27:25.760 the more i thought about and read about this topic the the less i understood what it meant so i don't know

00:27:34.440 that i have anything particularly coherent to say i think the most obvious thing that i do think

00:27:40.720 about it is that this is a sort of classic example in traditional approaches to productivity and time

00:27:48.380 management that looks like what it's offering is calm and peace and a sort of appropriate level of

00:27:56.320 of um involvement in different domains of life but really in practice and in the way it gets

00:28:02.160 internalized by people just ups the pressure it's the demand that you you know it's basically the

00:28:08.640 demand that you have a sort of 100 percent uh level of um engage appropriate engagement and

00:28:15.320 accomplishment in your work and 100 in your life outside work and you know that that that it ought to

00:28:24.580 be possible to find a way to feel that you're giving all you would like to give to your work and all you

00:28:30.820 would like to give to your family and your social life and your hobbies and that if you're not managing

00:28:35.660 it you know maybe sometimes the argument gets said there's not managed you're not managing it then it

00:28:40.620 is a sort of issue with the societal arrangements and work policies and the rest of it but usually it's

00:28:48.100 that it's your fault that you haven't found the uh you haven't found the right reserves of energy and

00:28:53.960 self-discipline to um to make it work again the sufficiency problem kicks in right this this this

00:29:01.120 problem that um if you get really good at at um handling any given domain in your life you it will

00:29:08.460 lead to the sense that there is more that you ought to be handling if you get to the point where you do

00:29:14.660 feel that you have a good work-life balance i think it's virtually inevitable that you'll feel some

00:29:20.180 some new pressure to do something else to add another domain in which to excel so it all it just

00:29:28.320 seems like a very typical example of that uh that treadmill phenomenon yeah i think we should probably

00:29:34.400 acknowledge that people are in very different places here with respect to a few of these variables

00:29:41.240 so there are people for whom their work really is just a job because they they need to make money to

00:29:49.340 survive but it's not something that is uh truly aligned with how they they would want to spend their

00:29:56.740 time if they if they didn't have to work and then there are those of us who have managed through just

00:30:02.260 sheer good luck to figure out a line of work that is to some significant degree similar or you know if

00:30:11.480 not identical to what we would want to do even if we didn't have to do anything and um those strike me as

00:30:19.220 fundamentally different circumstances in which to think about how one defends one's work from the

00:30:26.820 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

00:30:32.440 among the luckiest here where you know what i do for work is what in fact i i want to do anyway

00:30:38.560 most of the time and then it has this strange quality of bleeding into the rest of life because

00:30:46.820 you know you know selfishly i'm doing what i want to do a lot and a lot of that is work and so there's

00:30:53.100 no real boundary between my work and the rest of life so the challenge for me is not to be a total

00:30:58.540 workaholic where you know my working just competes with you know family time and you know everything

00:31:04.660 else that i also want to give attention to because it really you know i'm confronted by you know the

00:31:11.180 zero-sum contest between things i genuinely want to do rather than the burden of work which um you

00:31:17.820 know i know i have to do it but i wish i didn't have to do it where where i i have to think many

00:31:22.420 people are are caught it's interesting isn't it because it's like there is a similarity between the

00:31:28.400 two situations much as you're absolutely right i think that they're very very different they are both

00:31:34.020 kind of um confrontations with finitude and the discomfort of finitude it's obviously a much

00:31:40.400 better problem to have if you're at risk of letting your deeply absorbing job squeeze out time with the

00:31:47.620 family you love than if it's a terrible job that you're that you wish you didn't have to do that's

00:31:53.560 that's doing that but i don't know there is a there is a certain kind of through line between the

00:31:59.860 different situations um that i think is i don't know it's it's interesting to me there's obviously

00:32:05.960 a sort of a kind of it feels like existentialist philosophy or something but there is a kind of

00:32:10.960 internal shift that i think people do sometimes make when they are doing work that they don't find

00:32:16.560 intrinsically fulfilling that if they can sort of see the reason why they're doing it in the context

00:32:22.240 of goals that are intrinsically fulfilling if they can truly believe that it's their best option

00:32:27.580 right now to support the family that they want to support then there is a there is a level of

00:32:32.440 sort of meaning that gets inculcated just through the the choosing but um yeah i don't know it's

00:32:40.040 fascinating the other thing it makes me want to ask you is whether there's this other phenomenon that

00:32:44.100 one encounters even if you are lucky enough to spend your work time doing things that you might

00:32:50.480 choose to do otherwise is the phenomenon whereby the fact that it is work the fact that it is a

00:32:57.580 a job threatens to sometimes to erode the satisfaction of it and the fact that you sort of

00:33:04.700 have committed yourself to producing a book manuscript or putting out a regular podcast or whatever it

00:33:10.840 might be starts to threaten to um undermine the joy that you would otherwise take in the in the

00:33:17.500 activity i don't know if you resonate with that at all well you know there inevitably there is a kind

00:33:23.020 of treadmill effect even in doing what one loves to do the moment it becomes something that has to

00:33:30.240 adhere to any kind of calendar or you know so you know deadlines or deadlines even if you like what

00:33:35.620 you're having to do so there's that but no to to an unusual degree now i'm i find myself in the spot of

00:33:42.300 my work my work my work and my my guilty pleasures are more and more indistinguishable you know it's

00:33:50.820 just it's really i mean if you just look at i mean just you know take this conversation you know

00:33:55.600 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

00:34:02.960 we're talking right so it's like you know had i had this book been forced on me which you know

00:34:09.400 occasionally happens then it's a slightly different experience but this really was you know it was a

00:34:14.680 book i felt like reading anyway and now it has become this the substance of my quote work but it's

00:34:22.380 really a you know a uniquely privileged spot to be in to have found a way to do this but it's still

00:34:28.500 you know but as you point out it really it does have this this other effect of throwing me up

00:34:34.180 against the limits of all that i i want to do and and all that i feel i should do and just that you

00:34:39.640 know the limited bandwidth for all of that it does make a mockery of this other concept which used to be

00:34:47.160 pretty well enshrined in our culture among certainly among the most fortunate people and that's the

00:34:53.900 concept of leisure right and you this is something you you analyze in the book we have kind of lost

00:35:00.120 sight of leisure and and the whole point of it even the most fortunate people have especially when you

00:35:08.240 look at how the the rich certainly among the rich knowledge workers uh if you look at how they spend

00:35:15.500 their time these are not people who are especially good at downtime this is you have people working

00:35:22.600 by as measured by the clock more hours than than anyone else in society on some level they're

00:35:28.780 choosing to work this hard and not all of them are in precisely my spot of doing almost entirely things

00:35:36.160 they want to do anyway but they're you know in most cases presumably they're they're free to do less

00:35:42.500 work and they're not accomplishing it and leisure has become this it's something that we feel that we

00:35:49.620 either either need to justify or we just fail to even try to justify it whereas in previous generations

00:35:56.140 that kind of inversion of priorities would be unthinkable i mean the point of being rich and

00:36:02.540 lucky in generations past was so that you could enjoy leisure right right yeah and it does it's such

00:36:09.720 a strange mix i'm thinking about like what the causes of that are it's such a strange mixture of

00:36:14.180 i think economic forces sort of glomming on to this inbuilt tendency that we have to want to

00:36:24.080 be unlimited to want to get to the very end of workload that that we're brought and all the

00:36:34.640 technological reasons that that workload has become ever more functionally infinite so that there's no

00:36:40.520 possibility of getting to the end of it and then the way that that becomes like a status symbol it's

00:36:45.240 kind of embarrassing on some level to to seem to have leisure and to be very busy is i'm not saying

00:36:53.680 anything uh original here but to be to be busy is a is a sign that you must be in demand and that you

00:37:00.900 must be uh living your life in a in a useful fashion and then as well you get this very strange

00:37:07.660 phenomenon where leisure itself becomes subject to the to the instrumental imperative where it

00:37:14.000 doesn't really count as a good use of your time off if you're not at least building some skill

00:37:18.840 or resting and engaging in quote self-care so that you can be a better worker or more productive in your

00:37:27.480 in your job or uh you know at least meeting your fitness goals or something right there's something very

00:37:33.520 there's something very counter to the spirit of the times in just um in just sort of tinkering around

00:37:39.620 with some hobby because you sort of enjoy doing it and not particularly caring whether you whether you

00:37:45.080 even get better at it or manage to turn it into a income stream or or something there's one version of

00:37:52.040 multitasking around which i'm uh i think unabashedly uh positive now which is and it's i mean this is going to

00:38:00.220 sound self-serving because it's speaking directly to what is increasingly my career here but you know

00:38:06.300 listening to audio listening to podcasts listening to audiobooks while doing something else that would

00:38:11.900 otherwise be merely instrumental has changed i think you know many people's relationship to

00:38:19.540 you know whatever it is the long commute the doing of the dishes the you know just doing something

00:38:25.140 which is inevitable but not the point of one's day when you're listening to a podcast or to a book or

00:38:31.760 something that really is adding value to what you're doing with your mind that strikes me more and more

00:38:37.680 as an unalloyed good i mean it's it's it's made me by default patient with a let's say a drive that

00:38:46.020 takes a half hour longer than planned for right so there's there's no the sense of rushing

00:38:51.080 providing provided there's no real urgency out there in the world it's just completely evaporated

00:38:56.380 for me because i'm now virtually always listening to something that i really do want to listen to

00:39:01.800 and i don't know if you've experienced the same thing in your life and or if you see any um unhappy

00:39:08.440 little uh caveat to add to that that rosy picture i just painted no i totally know what you mean i mean

00:39:14.580 this is a i defer to you on this but there's a neuroscientific point about different channels of attention

00:39:19.460 if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at sam

00:39:30.900 harris.org once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast

00:39:35.900 along with other subscriber-only content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations i've

00:39:42.340 been having on the waking up app the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener

00:39:47.880 support and you can subscribe now at sam harris.org

Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 03, 2021

#269 — Deep Time

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript