#289 — Time Management for Mortals
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Summary
In this episode, I preview the new course we just launched with Oliver Berkman on time management, titled Time Management for Mechers: How to Live a More Satisfying and Happy Life by Mastering Time Management: The Art of Time Management by Oliver Berkman. In this course, we'll cover a range of topics related to time management and how to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet as conscious creatures. We'll combine some essential philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete tactical tools for daily living because of course it's on that daily level of work, family travel, family, travel, housework, finances, and the rest that the rubber meets the road that the real problem is. And it's that we don't have enough time to do all the things we'd like to do in the world, and that's why we need to learn how to manage our time so that we can have enough of it to do what we really want to do. If you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you'll get the first eight lessons presented without break, and there are more lessons coming over at Waking Up, where we'll be covering a whole new category of content called Life where we're going to be covering topics like decision making, leadership, wealth, wealth parenting, parenting, and parenting and really anything else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast you'll need to subscribe to the making sense podcast, you ll need to become a subscriber. You'll get access to the first-party, where you'll be able to access the first 8 lessons presented by Making Sense's founder, Sam Harris. To access the full archive of all the lessons presented over at waking up, go to makingsense.org.org/Making Sense. It's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, and all the great resources that help make sense of the world around you. This episode is made possible through the efforts of our sponsors, including: . We don't run ads, we don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's possible to support the podcast by becoming a supporter of the podcast and become a member of the community. The Making Sense Club. Want to sponsor Making Sense? Become a Member? Learn more about your ad choices? Get a discount code: Mentioned in this episode?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part
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of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll
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need to subscribe at sam harris.org there you'll find our private rss feed to add to your favorite
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podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and
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therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy what
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we're doing here please consider becoming one well last time around i mentioned that we had added a
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new category of content to the waking up app called life where we're going to be covering a wider range
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of topics things like decision making and leadership wealth parenting and really anything
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else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life and here i wanted to preview the
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new course we just launched with oliver berkman on time management titled time management for mortals
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i really think what oliver is doing here is fantastic and people are already loving this
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course over at waking up so here if you're a subscriber to making sense you'll get the first
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eight lessons presented without break on this episode and there are more lessons coming over at waking up
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welcome my name is oliver berkman and i'm really happy to be working with sam to bring you this course
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entitled time management for mortals it's something a little different maybe in that we won't be
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focusing here on meditation or even spirituality per se in fact you'd be forgiven for thinking that time
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management was the polar opposite of meditation or of spirituality that it was a field concerned not with the
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deepest questions about human experience but just the shallow stuff how to crank through as many work
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tasks as possible when you might not even particularly want to do them in the first place or how to save a few
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hours each week by cooking all your dinners in one big batch on sundays so my very first job is to
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convince you otherwise to persuade you that time management isn't just about labeling your tasks
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with a b and c priorities or batch cooking pasta sauce or such like it's vastly more than that arguably time
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management is all that life is here we are with this terrifyingly short lifespan of little more than
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four thousand weeks on average and the question of how to use this time wisely and well is the central
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challenge if we want to live lives of accomplishment and meaning to connect deeply to the wonder the
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world has to offer and to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet
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as conscious creatures so the lessons that follow are an attempt to combine certain essential
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philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete usable tactical tools for
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daily living because of course it's on that daily level of work family travel housework finances
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morning routines all the rest of it it's on that level that the rubber meets the road
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i trust you'll agree with me that virtually everyone struggles with time in one way or another
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the most obvious manifestation of this these days is busyness the sense of being overwhelmed by more
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things that you have to do than you actually can do distraction is another obvious one this seemingly
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paradoxical situation that we don't want to spend our time on the things we want to spend our time on
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but would rather focus on something else anything else so that we never quite get around to what
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we claim to care about the most and then arising from all this there's also this ubiquitous subtler
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sense that somehow this portion of our lives right here isn't quite it that everything we're doing is for
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the purpose of some future time or that we're going to get our lives figured out soon that we'll get on top
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of things and we'll live as we want to live but that for now many of our tasks are just things we have
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to get through to get them out of the way so that real life can begin sometime later a lot of people
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have this feeling as the english novelist arnold bennett put it writing at the dawn of the modern
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busyness epidemic that the years slip by and slip by and slip by and that they have not yet been able
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to get their lives into proper working order now the guiding principle of this course and i certainly
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didn't make it up it's a theme in the work of everyone from seneca the roman stoic to the zen master
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dogon and the philosopher martin heidegger it's that all of these versions of the feeling of being in a
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struggle against time arise from a core kind of mistake in how we think about time and how we relate
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to it now i don't want to imply that this is all just a matter of switching your mindset certainly
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the situation is made worse by all kinds of cultural and economic pressures so it's definitely
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not all your personal faults that you're so overwhelmed at work for example or that you can't
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resist glimpsing at social media but changing our relationship to time into something more fulfilling
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and energizing i think it does have to start with clearing up this fundamental issue and what is
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this issue well you could characterize it as an unwillingness to face the reality of our finitude
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let's talk briefly about finitude i mentioned that we each only get about 4 000 weeks of life on average
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indeed the whole of human civilization since the ancient sumerians of mesopotamia has unfolded over
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the span of only about 300 000 weeks to think of this tiny portion of time set against the duration
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of say the existence of the earth itself on almost any meaningful time scale as the philosopher
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thomas nagel has written we will all be dead any minute
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and perhaps the key consequence of this finitude is that it makes our choices matter when it comes to
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how we use our time because we don't have an endless amount of it something is always at stake
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every decision to spend a portion of time on one thing is a decision not to spend it on a million other
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things instead and in a world of effectively infinite inputs limitless emails and articles to read limitless
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demands from the boss limitless ambitions you might have for your career or people to date or places to
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visit it's inevitable for a finite human but there will always be vastly more to do and indeed vastly
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more that's really worth doing than you will ever have time for and that mismatch between what we can
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conceive of doing and what we can actually do is really painful to make things worse our finitude also
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means we have very little control over how our brief stretch of time unfolds so yes you have to make
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choices and your choices matter but you can't ever know what the future holds whether your choices were
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the right ones or what's coming next down the pike instead in each moment we're just totally vulnerable
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to events anything could happen at any time and we can never achieve the authentic sense of security in
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our travels through time that we crave now all of these are just the indisputable facts about being a finite human
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but they're uncomfortable and they're anxiety inducing facts and so what we do by default is to pursue
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strategies of emotional avoidance to try to find ways not to have to feel that discomfort for example we might
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tell ourselves maybe subconsciously that real life is going to begin when we finally graduate college or
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when we get married or when we have kids or when we retire and that's so that we don't have to face the
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anxiety of knowing that in fact right now this is our only shot at life that we need to do the things we
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care most about right now or if you're a so-called productivity geek like i certainly was for many years
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obsessed with every cool new time management hack well on some level you're probably telling yourself
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that you're doing all this because you're en route to becoming so efficient so optimized and self-disciplined
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that you will eventually be able to make time for everything that matters that you'll achieve a kind of
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mastery of your time that means you won't have to face tough choices or risk the emotional
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vulnerability of never knowing if things are going to work out as the psychotherapist bruce tift puts
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it we will do a lot to avoid consciously participating in what it's like to feel claustrophobic
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imprisoned powerless and constrained by reality we seek ways of managing time that are not really focused
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on making the best of our little portion of it but rather on making ourselves feel as if we don't
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only have a little portion of it like actually we are limitless and omnipotent or at least that we're
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going to become limitless and omnipotent just as soon as we can find the right time management techniques
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and the necessary reserves of self-discipline as we'll see none of this works because it fails to
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acknowledge our real situation and if you've ever suspected that pursuing these sorts of productivity
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methods is actually making you busier more scattered and less fulfilled i'm going to explain why you're
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completely right and so a big part of the purpose of these lessons is just to get you to give up that
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impossible quest to put down the heavy burden of attempting to escape your non-negotiable limitations
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or to put it a little differently it's to point you towards the truth that there will always be too much
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to do that none of us will ever enjoy certainty about the future and that there is no moment of
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truth coming sometime later when things will finally make sense and real life can begin at last
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and that while recognizing this truth does involve a kind of a defeat it's a liberating and empowering
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defeat it's the kind of defeat that leads very quickly to much better things to ending the struggle
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with time and to a life of more accomplishment more success more time spent on what matters most
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and more joy wonder and focus so let's dive in as the saying goes and i think it's a deeper saying
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than we usually give it credit for there's no time like the present to start going deep into this
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question of how to manage your time as a finite human being it makes sense to start with a modern
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problem that has reached epidemic proportions i'm talking about busyness now busyness isn't our only
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time problem and for some people it isn't really the essence of their struggle with time at all
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it's entirely possible to feel that you don't have enough to do that you're using up your limited time
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on insufficiently challenging or meaningful tasks but busyness is a great place to begin this task of
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undoing the mistake we make in our relationship with time to start dispelling the illusion that the path
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to peace of mind and to meaningful productivity lies in somehow mastering or dominating time when in fact
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the answer is to step more fully and wholeheartedly into our non-negotiable human limitations
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because what do we really mean when we complain about feeling busy these days about the kind of
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busyness that leaves us feeling out of control or resentful about the demands that the world makes
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on us or anxious that we're neglecting the truly meaningful stuff it isn't just that we've got lots to do
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you might be familiar with the busy town series of children's picture books by the american illustrator
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richard scarry which depict a world full of cats pigs raccoons and other animals who all work at
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different jobs in a thriving small town they are busy you know they have plenty to do their hours are
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filled up but it's very clear that they're happy as well perhaps because there's just no sense of any
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lack of fit between the tasks they have to do and the time that they have to do them this kind of
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busyness where you have plenty to do and plenty of time to do it that can be delightful our real problem
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isn't so much that we're busy as that we're overwhelmed we have the feeling that there are
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more things we need to do than we can do in the available time these are things we might tell ourselves
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we need to do in order to stay afloat financially to meet our family obligations or to realize our
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potential whatever is fueling it in each particular case there's this fundamental mismatch between the
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amount of stuff that feels as though it matters on one hand and the amount of time and stamina that we
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have available to address it in other words this is a classic case of the human encounter with
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limitation for a whole variety of reasons we've come to feel that we must do more than we can
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and we experience psychological pain in confronting that gap and actually a huge amount of mainstream
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productivity and time management advice i would argue along with all sorts of other ways that we
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instinctively try to get a grip on our time is dedicated really to holding out the promise to maintaining
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the promise that there is a way of bridging this gap that if you could only become efficient enough
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optimized and self-disciplined enough if you could only find exactly the right set of productivity
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techniques then you'd fit so much more into your time that this sense of mismatch would evaporate
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you'd finally have time for everything that matters this is a way of thinking about time that we've
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borrowed essentially from the industrial revolution where it was a pretty good way to squeeze more
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output from machinery and we've tended to just assume that it must work as well when it's applied
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to human fulfillment in the 21st century certainly through all my years when i was a hardcore productivity
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geek that's the feeling i was chasing this idea that soon through becoming more and more efficient
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and in control i would reach a place where i was on top of everything where i could feel like i was doing
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enough and actually because i had a lot of my sense of self-worth tied up in all of this that i was
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justifying my existence on the planet well if you've already listened to lesson one in this series it
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won't come as a surprise to learn that this approach doesn't work efficiency is never going to be what
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gets you to peace of mind when it comes to time simply because the supply of incoming things to do
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tasks obligations goals ambitions is functionally speaking infinite so fitting more of it in isn't going
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to get you any closer to the end of it but that's not even the whole story here because what you find
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what i certainly found is that all else being equal the pursuit of efficiency as a way to win the struggle
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with time will actually make you busier than before more stressed than before less focused on the things
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that matter to you the most partly this is just a matter of quantity if you get really efficient at say
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processing your email the main thing you'll find is that you spend more of your time dealing with a
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greater volume of email because what happens is you reply more swiftly to other people's emails and then
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they reply to those replies and half the time you probably have to reply to their replies to your
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replies and on and on and on and meanwhile you'll develop a reputation for being responsive on email so
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more people will email you in the first place it's like the old saying has it the reward for good time
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management is more work or if you're the person in your office who is far and away the fastest at handling a
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certain kind of project well don't be surprised when you're the one who gets all of those projects dumped on
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your desk there's a close parallel here with the idea of induced demand which refers to the way that you know
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cities add extra lanes to congested freeways in an effort to make the traffic flow more freely and what often
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happens instead is that those extra lanes just incentivize more drivers to use that route so more
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cars flood the system and the congestion stays just as bad as it was but there's another dimension to this
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pitfall that i'm calling the efficiency trap too which is one not just of the quantity of tasks but the
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quality if you focus obsessively on trying to fit more and more in as a way to feel in control of your
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time you're actually likely to end up spending more and more of your time on the least important
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things that's partly because we tell ourselves that the really important things need our full focus
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they need plenty of energy and so we postpone them we concentrate instead on clearing the decks that is
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you know dealing with all the other little tasks that are tugging at our attention so that we can later
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get the time and the focus that we need for the important ones trouble of course is that the decks
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are never cleared because the incoming supply of things to fill them is basically infinite so we never
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get round to the important stuff at all meanwhile if you're convinced that you're en route to a time when
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you're going to be able to handle everything then when any potential new use for your time arises a new
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request from a co-worker some new potential business opportunity or social event or something
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you're going to be much more likely to accept it unquestioningly and less motivated to ask whether
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it's truly a worthwhile use of your time because after all aren't you someone who's on the way to
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finding a way to get everything done so what does it matter to add one more thing to the list
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so systematically efficiency leads to us feeling busier and busier with less important things
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to be clear i'm not saying that efficiency has no role to play in using time well if it currently
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takes you half an hour just to find the file you're supposed to be working on or to find a clean
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pair of socks in the morning then yes there probably are some efficiency improvements you ought to be
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making in your life and please don't let me dissuade you from making them
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the point instead is that more efficiency and optimization can never be the main answer to
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feeling overwhelmed for the simple reason that we are finite creatures swimming in oceans of
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infinite possibility so there'll always be too much to do and that's why i think the really important
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skill to be developed here and we'll be looking at some concrete techniques for this in some of the
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lessons that follow it's actually a kind of anti skill it's the ability to not do something it's
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the willingness to not clear the decks to be okay with the fact that there will always be a whole bunch
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of stuff on your to-do list that you're not doing at the moment to know that there is all this other
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stuff you could meaningfully be doing and yet to be willing to turn your attention for a few hours
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right now to something that genuinely matters to you this anti skill is similar to the cast of mind
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that the poet john keats famously called negative capability it's the capacity to stay with one
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activity despite so many other things feeling unresolved to be present with a project that matters
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to you or a person who matters to you even though you know there are so many other things calling for
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your attention of course few of us are in a position to just ignore our email or all those other
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little tasks that fill up the decks you're still going to have to spend time on that stuff but what
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you can do is to give up hope of ever getting to the end of all that stuff of ever getting totally
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on top of it all or thinking that peace of mind lies at the time and the place when you will finally
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have got on top of it all you can treat all that stuff instead as something that you dip into for
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a while on a regular basis with no particular expectation of completion so sure maybe you need
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to give an hour or two hours to email each day but if you can put that time towards the end of your
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working day and don't necessarily aim to reach inbox zero just aim to spend the prescribed amount of
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time on that activity before stepping away and if your energy is greatest at the start of the day
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like mine is well use some of that time for the projects you care about the most even though you'll
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be doing so in the full knowledge that the decks are not clear see what happens if you can approach
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life in this way to allow the anxiety that's going to arise from all those undone tasks being on the to-do
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list and at the same time to just spend a few hours anyway on something that feels truly important
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there's a sort of surrender involved here a giving up on something but ultimately what you're giving up
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is the attempt to escape the way that reality actually is and when you drop down into reality
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instead when you truly grasp that there is no chance ever of getting everything done that's when you can
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finally get some purchase on reality and get stuck into making the best use of the time that you have
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in the last session we looked at the ubiquitous modern problem of overwhelm and why the standard
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response to it which is trying to become ever more efficient isn't going to lead you to peace of mind
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that in fact left unchecked the pursuit of efficiency will end up draining your life of meaning
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but to really grasp the shift of perspective that we're exploring here i think it's important to see
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that this underlying mismatch between the infinite world of possibility and our all too finite time
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and capacities it isn't confined to the world of emails and work demands and chores and family duties
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and so on it's really more a basic condition of being alive in the modern world because the modern
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world provides us with and just as importantly informs us about a truly inexhaustible supply of
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things that seem worth doing things that seem like they'd enable you to live a truly meaningful life
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to really suck the marrow out of your limited time so there's an inexhaustible supply of experiences
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worth having books worth reading people worth getting to know and it often seems like if we
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could only squeeze in a few more of them then we would finally feel fulfilled at last
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this morning when i was out on a walk i had the thought seemingly from nowhere but what i really
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needed what would really enable me to feel like i was living fully was a mountain bike well maybe a
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mountain bike really would improve my life i don't know but i do know that once i obtain one if i do
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that there'll be a million other potential versions of that thought what i really need in order to feel
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fulfilled is waiting in the wings to remind me of all the other things i'm not doing the experiences
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i'm not having the possessions i don't possess we're in the territory here obviously of the fear of
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missing out that very contemporary suspicion that other people are living more exciting and fulfilled
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lives than we are that there's something different we ought to be doing with our time in order to
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maximize our potential or our happiness the german social theorist hartmut rosa has made the
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interesting point that this feeling probably didn't afflict people in pre-modern times go back a few
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centuries and most people either believed in an afterlife so there was less riding on making the
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most of this life or they believed in some kind of cyclical picture of history so they saw themselves
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as just playing their role in an endlessly repeating cosmic drama or alternatively maybe it just never would
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have occurred to them that they had any right to expect anything other than to occupy the social or
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economic role in which they found themselves by contrast today we are ceaselessly attempting to
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get the most out of life to seize the day to somehow close the gap between our actual set of experiences and
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the available world of experiences and then we're ceaselessly discovering that we can't do it
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i think if you can get a small taste of an alternative way of seeing this the shift from
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the fear of missing out to what i like to call the joy of missing out that can be a kind of master
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key for using your time meaningfully and well and to get there i'm afraid i think we're going to have
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to begin with the incredibly unreadable and incredibly politically unpalatable german philosopher
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martin heidegger don't worry i'm just going to pluck a couple of the most useful ideas from his work
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here one of those is just to see the total extent to which we are defined by our finitude by our
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capacity as we proceed through life only ever to choose one path at a time from a multiplicity of
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possible paths this is the realization that every decision to use a portion of our time in a certain
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way an hour a week or a whole lifetime it's by definition a decision not to use it in an infinity
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of other possible ways and what this means is that any human life even the most successful life you
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could possibly imagine is inevitably a matter of constantly waving goodbye to possibilities
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as i go through the day making hundreds of small choices i'm building a life yes but at one and the
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same time i'm closing off the possibility of countless other lives forever and what heidegger saw
00:27:16.700
was that facing up to that fact even just a little taking responsibility for the situation for the fact that
00:27:24.640
we're always making these choices whether we like it or not is incredibly daunting it's anxiety inducing
00:27:31.380
so we're always trying to find ways to evade taking responsibility instead to avoid having to confront
00:27:38.280
the fact of all these cuttings away of possibility one way we do that is just to numb ourselves with
00:27:46.160
distraction and busyness another is to convince ourselves that actually we don't have choices that in fact we do
00:27:53.280
have so we tell ourselves that we have no option but to pursue a given career or stay married to the
00:28:00.160
person we married or no option to leave the city for the country or the other way around that it's just
00:28:06.640
the dumb thing and we have to go along i also think the modern obsession with personal productivity
00:28:13.240
can often be another way of avoiding responsibility for our choices right you get to dodge the
00:28:20.020
responsibilities of finitude by convincing yourself that in some sense you're not finite that you're
00:28:25.580
going to be able to do everything so that you won't have to make tough choices with your time
00:28:30.880
and you can probably see how the internet makes all this a lot worse because it promises to help us
00:28:38.660
make better use of our time while simultaneously exposing us to vastly more potential uses for our time
00:28:45.220
and then by the way also offering the perfect source of distraction when it all gets too much
00:28:50.360
and we want to shift our focus from the stress of making choices so the very tool you're using to try
00:28:58.560
to get the most out of life actually makes you feel as though you're missing out on even more of it
00:29:04.080
so for example facebook is a great way to stay informed about events you might like to attend
00:29:10.200
but it's also a guaranteed way to find out about more events you'd like to attend than anyone
00:29:16.000
possibly could ever attend online dating likewise is a fantastic way to find people to date but it's
00:29:23.120
also pretty much a guaranteed way of being constantly reminded about all the other potentially more
00:29:29.120
alluring people you could be dating instead so if you're somebody who is plagued by this fear of
00:29:35.940
missing out it can be surprisingly powerful just to understand that in fact missing out is inevitable
00:29:43.560
it's baked into the human condition that we will miss out on almost everything so that fearing missing
00:29:51.640
out makes no real sense it's like worrying that you might be unable to make two and two add up to five
00:29:58.860
when the truth is you don't need to worry about that because you're definitely not going to manage it
00:30:04.280
but we can go a step even further here i think and see that missing out isn't just unavoidable
00:30:10.380
it's arguably what makes things worth doing what makes life worth living what gives meaning to our
00:30:16.380
experiences in the first place our finitude the fact that we have to miss out on so much
00:30:23.360
is what gives weight to our choices it's what means that something is at stake in how we choose to live
00:30:29.800
our lives think about it if you knew that your life would never end then the answer to the question
00:30:35.460
should i do x or y with my time today would always be who cares doesn't matter because there's always
00:30:41.920
the next day and the next day and the one after that in fact why bother doing anything at all today
00:30:48.140
in a situation like that so the fact that you have to miss out isn't necessarily even something to
00:30:54.760
regret it's perhaps the thing that makes life juicy in the first place i think one final way to help
00:31:03.080
bring all this into focus is to see that there is something rather arrogant and entitled in the way we
00:31:08.700
usually think about our finite time we act as if it's a huge problem that we only get a short amount of
00:31:15.320
time and that it's a kind of insult that it gets taken away from us by death but when we say that our
00:31:22.960
lives are short short compared to what certainly short compared to the life of a hypothetical
00:31:28.960
immortal being but it might make as much sense or even more sense to compare our lives not to a
00:31:35.620
hypothetical immortal being but to all the countless hypothetical people who never got to be born in the
00:31:41.740
first place and to see that from that perspective it's not really cruel that our lives aren't longer
00:31:49.340
rather it's a staggering stupendous bonus that we get any time on the planet as conscious creatures
00:31:56.200
at all and when you see things in this way it starts to make more sense to think of all those
00:32:02.760
inexhaustible experiences that the world has to offer not as existing on some kind of endless to-do list
00:32:10.640
where if you don't make it through the list you'll have missed out on life but more like a different
00:32:16.100
kind of list a menu a list of options you get to choose from and that in that situation having to
00:32:23.420
choose the necessity of choosing it's not a terrible fate you've been sentenced to but rather a wonderful
00:32:29.280
opportunity and a positive affirmation of whatever choices you do end up making in this state of mind
00:32:38.360
you can certainly relish the peak experiences of your life more completely than before but you can
00:32:45.000
also find deep meaning in the other experiences too in the chores and the duties and the myriad ways we
00:32:51.540
just need to maintain our daily lives you can embrace the fact that you're foregoing certain pleasures or
00:32:59.820
certain theoretically rewarding experiences because whatever you've decided to do with your time instead
00:33:06.540
today to earn money to support your family to write your novel to bathe your toddler to pause on a
00:33:13.520
hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk that's how you've chosen to spend a
00:33:21.020
portion of time that you never had any right to expect there's one specific skill that has to lie at the heart
00:33:29.440
of any approach to time management that acknowledges the reality of our finitude one tactic arguably more
00:33:36.820
crucial than any other for unlocking accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment for stepping off this
00:33:43.000
anxiety fueled treadmill where we're always trying to get on top of an infinite supply of things we could
00:33:49.380
do with our time that skill is deciding in other words developing the habit of making decisions making
00:33:57.240
more decisions throughout the day throughout our lives now deciding has acquired something of a bad
00:34:04.800
reputation in recent years thanks to the publicity surrounding the phenomenon of decision fatigue that's
00:34:11.280
the claim that making decisions depletes the ego in a way that makes it harder to make further
00:34:16.400
decisions later on this was supposedly why president barack obama wore only gray and blue suits so that he
00:34:24.560
didn't need to use up his decision making capacities on such trivial matters and could store it up for the
00:34:31.640
truly consequential decisions that his role required of him but for now i just want to encourage you
00:34:38.440
to put this idea of decision fatigue to one side to suggest that unless you actually are the leader of a
00:34:45.340
major nation or the ceo of a giant corporation or something like that that it's well worth experimenting
00:34:51.900
with this idea that what you might need in your life isn't to make fewer decisions but to make more of
00:34:58.520
them or maybe i should say more conscious decisions because one ramification of the view we've been
00:35:06.940
exploring in this series is that well there's a sense in which you're making decisions all the time
00:35:11.300
all through the day whether you realize it or not for a finite human being whenever we spend a portion
00:35:18.020
of time on anything we are making a decision not to spend it on a million other things even more than
00:35:24.360
that in each of those moments we're closing off countless whole alternative lives every step you
00:35:31.300
take through your life you're cutting away alternative life paths that's actually the etymology of the
00:35:38.200
word decide it means cutting away slicing off options it's actually related to words like homicide and
00:35:46.300
suicide we are all in the position of the narrator of robert frost's legendary poem the road not taken
00:35:53.780
about choosing between two paths in a wood only we can't know which path will be better we won't
00:36:00.920
even know at the end of the journey if the path we took was the better one and if we just hang
00:36:06.220
around at the fork in the path instead unable or unwilling to make a decision well that's a decision
00:36:12.120
too it's a decision to use up part of our finite life doing that instead of selecting one of the paths
00:36:18.200
if you've listened to some of the other sessions in this series it won't surprise you by now that
00:36:23.300
generally as humans we really don't like this situation that we tend to do all we possibly can
00:36:29.280
not to consciously participate in what it feels like to be in this situation of being compelled to
00:36:36.320
choose at every moment of our lives why well because we don't want to acknowledge that we're missing out
00:36:42.420
on all those unlived lives we don't want to have to sacrifice some options for other options i would
00:36:48.620
love to spend this current season of my life being both a truly engaged parent of a small child and also
00:36:55.460
spend six months every year on solitary meditation retreats in exotic locations but my finitude my inability
00:37:02.580
to be in two places at once means that i do just have to choose and additionally we don't want to
00:37:09.880
experience the inevitable negative aspects of any path we do choose you know that the difficulties that
00:37:16.300
come with any relationship the imperfections that must inevitably afflict any creative project that we
00:37:22.620
bring into the world and so on so we we hang back from making choices partly to hang on to perfect
00:37:30.320
fantasies that could only ever be damaged by making a choice and bringing them into reality
00:37:36.580
so what we do instead in an effort not to feel this discomfort of being limited is we try to cling
00:37:44.680
on to the feeling of control by keeping our options open by not consciously making decisions by staying
00:37:52.740
mired in indecision or procrastination or commitment phobia it's no fun to be mired in indecision or
00:38:01.140
procrastination or commitment phobia but in a very poor way it does feel
00:38:05.020
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00:38:16.580
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