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Self-Help No More

Thoughts on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

After what must have been a particularly-neurotic diatribe of mine, a good friend pressed Four Thousand Weeks into my hands. She didn’t have to explain her logic: I’ve been struggling to balance work and life as the distinction blurs, and author Oliver Burkeman reflects on spending our limited time on Earth more intentionally. Although an overdeveloped sense of individualism generally dampens my interest in self-help books1, my friend’s recommendation trumped my ego.

And I’m glad it did! I definitely got something from this quick read–just not quite the thing that Burkeman had in mind.

To be sure, I was nodding along through most of the book2. In sourcing perspectives about time-management, the author casts a wide net. He includes his own personal experience among philosophers, journalists, and others. (Burkeman fails with great confidence and spectacle by drawing from Martin Heidegger’s work, though3.) I found a certain truthiness to each take, and the presence of lessons I’ve already learned gave credence to the ones I hadn’t.

Most of the examples feature people undergoing transformative change due to their lived experience. That sure feels familiar to me: the lessons that I’ve found most useful were ones that took me years to learn. The things is, such stories of growth undermine Burkeman’s attempt to convey insight through persuasive writing.

It’s certainly entertaining to read well-reasoned and hopeful advice (especially when it challenges conventional wisdom), but I just don’t think amusement is a course toward implementation. To draw the problem out to absurdity: I could write the book’s points on flashcards, but no amount of repetition would change how I respond to challenges in my life.

At the end of the day, self-help books are illusory shortcuts to learning from hardship and self-work. Becoming a better person (whatever that might mean) necessarily involves making mistakes and reflecting on them (possibly assisted by a professional therapist). This clearly isn’t the point Burkeman wanted to make, but given his aversion to conventional wisdom, a contrarian take feels fitting.

  1. Probably oversensitive to the hubris in authors’ advice and under-sensitive to the hubris in my refusal to hear it. ↩︎

  2. On a couple occasions, though, the ideas didn’t resonate as strongly as they did when presented by others. Timothy Snyder compares the concept of “freedom from” and “freedom to” way more adeptly in On Freedom, and in Ask Iwata, Satoru Iwata offers a far more compelling definition of humanity than Burkeman’s. ↩︎

  3. Burkeman repeatedly cites the Nazi, and he’s at least cognisant of the problem with that:

    The question of what this means for [Heidegger’s] philosophy is a fraught and fascinating one, but it would get us off track here. So you’re going to have to decide for yourself whether this exceptionally poor life choice invalidates his thoughts about how we make life choices in general.

    By describing the issue as “off track,” Burkeman dismisses it as irrelevant (making his apparent concern seem entirely performative). Dude: there’s an entire world of philosophers out there.

    The most charitable explanation I can see for citing Heidegger (and suggesting that the conflicted reader skip some undefined portion of the book) is that Burkeman was alerted of the tension only after writing his text. There are darker possibilities, but I’m trying to be nice. Even so, it’s a drag to read lazy research. ↩︎