Burkeman’s atelic self-help

Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is well worth your time. It is a splendid meditation on what it means to be a finite creature and what follows for making decisions, down to the most mundane, about how to spend one’s vanishingly small allotment of hours in this, our only world, with this, our only life. Like all Burkeman’s writing, the book is crisp, clear, well-researched, offered to the reader with a sincere smile of solidarity as well as a light touch. Like his other exercises in anti-self-help, Four Thousand Weeks is a gold mine for people obsessed with productivity, self-improvement, and endless to-do lists. That gold mine has a simple goal: for such people to cut it out. That is, to accept their limitations and to do what they are able, with pleasure, in the time they have with the people they love and the values they affirm. For the efficiency-obsessed, this message is doubtless a necessary tonic.

As I approached the end of the book, however, a single glaring weakness stuck out to me. It is a weakness shared by other entries in the genre today, including the very best. That weakness is simply put.

Neither Burkeman nor his other self-help authors can tell us the purpose or meaning of life.

Now, that may sound like rather unfair criticism. Who among us can articulate the purpose or meaning of life? Must it fit in a tweet? Be reducible to clickbait? How about the long title of a memoir?

But no, I’m not being unfair. Here’s why.

Burkeman wants his readers to see two things. First, that our lives are far shorter, far more limited, far less consequential, in a sense far less significant than we usually want to admit. We will almost certainly make no lasting difference in the world. The world will keep on spinning; the human race and/or the earth and/or the universe will endure perfectly well in our absence.

And that is true. But Burkeman goes on, second, to insist that this dose of reality is not (or should not be) depressing or frightening. Rather, it is a revelation, and a liberating one at that. It frees me from my narcissistic and false sense of my own self-importance. It bursts the bonds of my illusion of infinitude. Emancipated to see and accept my limits, I am enabled thereafter (and thereby) to live within them. And surely to live within the hard limits that bracket my life, whether or not I believe in them, is a recipe for happiness by comparison to the alternative.

But that “surely” is doing a lot of work in the previous sentence. Burkeman provides not one reason to suppose that human beings are built for happiness, living in accordance with our finitude or otherwise. Perhaps, instead, we have been programmed by natural selection to live a lie, the lie being our unbound immortality, and only so long as we believe in that are we (a) satisfied and/or (b) maximally productive. Perhaps we achieve great things only when we believe falsehoods about ourselves, our desires, or the world as a whole. Burkeman appears to be agnostic or atheist himself, which means that he must believe this to some extent. For most of civilization’s highest accomplishments—in music, art, architecture, and so on—have been conceived and produced by communities driven by zeal for God, for transcendence, for eternal life. Are we in a position to know, even and especially if we are secular believers in no intrinsic purpose apart from what remains after natural selection has done its work, that such ostensible illusions are not the requisite (false) premises for human and cultural greatness, not to mention happiness?

The answer is No, we are not. But there is more to say.

*

Burkeman rightly remarks on the pleasures of “atelic” practices. Walking in the woods, for example. There is no “point” to such a walk except the walk itself. It doesn’t lead to a product; there is no “winning” at such an endeavor. It is nothing but itself, and experiencing it is the only point of the practice: the telos is the doing of it, not something beyond or following it.

The problem is that Burkeman supposes, or assumes, that life is atelic: that the meaning of life lies not beyond itself, for it is its own point. The purpose of being human, on this view, is just the doing of it: to be human. But this doesn’t work, even on Burkeman’s own terms. There are at least three reasons why.

First, if an ordinary human being asks, What is the point or meaning of life?, it is inadequate to answer, The living of life. For the premise of the seeker’s question is that something beyond one’s life gives that life meaning, or purpose, or a point. So unless one is satisfied to reject the terms on which the question is asked, something more is required.

Second, then, Burkeman might have recourse to a constructivist answer: namely, that the purpose of one’s life is what one decides that purpose is. So the question remains meaningful but is turned back on the asker: Well, what do you value? But this answer fails in multiple respects. For one, it makes life’s meaning arbitrary, even relative. By the same token it suggests a fearsome causal sequence, as if the meaning of my life were what I value, and what I value is what makes it meaningful. In other words, my apparently random act of valuing (whether received from my genetic and social inheritance or chosen autonomously as a mature adult) carries an impossible burden: to create life-level significance where there is none in itself.

Does Burkeman, or anyone else in the self-help crowd, believe that ordinary human beings are capable not only of this purpose-conferring power but of self-consciously wielding it, that is, of engaging knowingly in making their lives teleological from within? As a matter of fact, while plenty of that crowd does believe this, I don’t think Burkeman does. But then, whence his confidence in essentially atelic normies self-bestowing meaning on their otherwise meaningless lives, underwritten by the active self-awareness that they are doing so while they are doing so?

This is not even to mention that, absent some antecedently given and shared human telos—some basic but substantive account of the goods and ends common to human life—“what I value” or “what I make the point of my existence” or “what I find meaningful in human life” or “what I want to spend my 4,000 weeks doing” may with perfect consistency be evil. Perhaps my self-constructed telos is serial murder, or ferocious avarice, or treating women like objects to be used and disposed of, or belittling children, or making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. When “the good” is a function solely of my own will, it is transmogrified into something called “value,” which is just another name for whatever I happen to want, prefer, or take pleasure in. The realm of “values” is paradise lost, which is to say, it is hell; as Milton has Satan declare:

All hope excluded thus, behold, instead
Of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind, created, and for him this World!
So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold,
By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;
As Man ere long, and this new World, shall know.

Third and finally, therefore, Burkeman has no answer or antidote to despair. It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that I’ve written about Burkeman once before, in a post responding to his review of a book by Jordan Peterson. I note the very same problem there. Burkeman seems genuinely not to countenance the seriousness of the problem of despair, precisely as a philosophical or theological problem. Imagine a young man who reads Burkeman’s book and finds himself persuaded that life is short, each of us is unimportant, and the whole shebang is without any meaning except what we bootstrap for ourselves. Far from embracing limits and finding, to his pleasant surprise, that he is even more economically productive than before, he kills himself instead. After all, he came to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and his self-assessment was just: he was neither impressive nor sufficiently special to manufacture enough meaning to get on with life without unmitigated pain, self-loathing, and anguish. Best to avoid that, all things considered. Whom will it affect, anyway? The universe goes on, without so much as a flinch.

There is not a doubt in my mind that such a scenario would fill Burkeman, who seems enormously decent and thoughtful, with sadness, compassion, and lament. Obviously he does not want anyone to commit suicide, not least someone who reads his book. He intends his message, as I said above, to be one of freedom, not bondage.

But I see no reason, given the parameters of his project, to forestall the judgment that atelic finitude is a cause for despair rather than joy. Why view limits as anything other than chains? Many people have seen them as just that, including some of the wisest of our writers and thinkers. Indeed more than a few of them, consistent with their principles, chose suicide as young or middle-aged men and women for this very reason: to escape the bonds of life, which held them in sway the way a despot might. Only by forcing death’s hand could they exert real agency in the sole respect that mattered: how and when one goes out, and on whose terms.

I don’t mean to pick on Burkeman (who in any case is safe and secure from being picked on by anyone, let alone me). Every other self-help and productivity guru is far, far more liable to the charges I’ve laid out than he is. But in another way he is the most guilty of this lacuna, because his book takes on board many of the ideas that despairing, existentialist, relativistic, constructivist, and nihilistic philosophers have proffered throughout the last two centuries. So he ought to know better. Yet he seems honest-to-God incurious about the fork in the road he constantly faces. The reader knows that he sees it as a fork, because whenever he comes to it, he reassures the reader, in assertive and consoling tones, that the annunciation of their atelic finitude is good news rather than bad. That implies the possibility of interpreting it as bad. Yet apart from his own confidence and kindness, we are provided no reasons to share his cheerful demeanor, at least no reasons that are not question-begging or that do not fall prey to the criticisms outlined above.

*

Two dissonances mark the book from beginning to end, and it is these dissonances that illuminate, not to say justify, the book’s failure to reckon with the terrifying possibility (a) that life is in fact meaningless or (b) that some, perhaps many, people, faced with a life made meaningful only by their own self-generated efforts, would judge it to be meaningless (whether or not they would be right to do so). Those dissonances are politics and religion.

Burkeman’s politics are clearly left-liberal, if of a moderate bent. Numerous times he admirably allows the convictions to which he has honestly come, about finitude and the unknown future and the relative unimportance of my or your life in the grand scheme of things, to override or modify political convictions he might once have believed or might, in the present, feel social pressure to maintain. Nevertheless, there are odd occasional interruptions of his otherwise steady emphasis on that one tiny sliver of a time-bound life you and I have to live. These interruptions almost always concern what he calls (always with nodding approval) “activism,” but especially climate change. It seems to me that he needs it to be true not only that the earth today is in dire straits (a premise I have no reason to doubt or dismiss) but also that urgent cooperative political action on its behalf, namely, making every effort to keep it from becoming worse, makes intuitive and even self-evident sense. But the truth is that it does not. Not, at least, on his own terms, terms he believes you and I may and ought to share. There are quite a few additional premises, premises that might call into question some of his own, required to cross that particular logical finish line. Yet he seems not to notice. Why?

I think it has something to do with his calmly but firmly non-religious beliefs. I call them “non-” rather than “anti-” religious because he doesn’t have an axe to grind against religion, and he is laudably open-minded about learning from religious and spiritual authors. (The self-help crowd may be alone among our public-facing and popular writers to read religious and theological texts seriously.) For example, I was delighted to see Burkeman quote Walter Brueggemann’s book on the Sabbath. He is also an avid reader of Buddhists and other adherents of Eastern, non-Abrahamic, and spiritual-not-religious thinkers. Again, I say, this is all to the good.

Burkeman himself, though, is non-religious, or at least presents himself as such. There is no God, at least one we may know or name. There is no afterlife. There is no soul, no eternity, no transcending the confines of this life, this world, these 4,000 weeks. Now Burkeman makes no arguments for this perspective, nor even alludes to them. He takes it for granted. So far as I can tell, he takes it for granted not only for himself or his readers but for all “modern” people living in the secular West.

That’s fine. He’s certainly not obliged to be a believer, or even to take seriously the counterclaims of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. But I do think the shortcomings of his book would be alleviated were he to do so. He would see that it is not obvious that a finitude absent God and ruled by death is a live worth living, much less a life capable of being made meaningful by one’s own labors. In this St. Paul and Nietzsche are of one mind. If Christ is not raised, Christians of all people are most to be pitied. Why? Because, as Paul says only a few verses later, death is the enemy of God—the “last” enemy, as he puts it—which means that death is the enemy of life, for God is the source and sustainer of life. Life without God is life without life. Or as St. Augustine puts it (anticipating Heidegger, but drawing a different conclusion), life defined by the inevitability and overawing power of death is not so much a life lived toward death as itself a living death. Which is no life at all.

That is why Burkeman is wrong to agree with the climate activist Derrick Jensen that life without hope is the only life we have, such that hopelessness is a spur to living life to the full rather than a sap to life’s vitality. To write such a thing is to betray a profound ignorance of actual human beings. Even if it were true—that is, even were it an undeniable and objective fact that there is no God, no hope, no meaning in life except what we construct of it and for it—it would be a recipe for despair for most of us, for all but the most heroic, most stoic, most self-possessed. Whether or not that tells us anything about the proposition’s likely truth or falsehood, to suppose that it is actually, really, believe-me-I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight a relief from unhappiness is pure folly. I share with Burkeman the premise that the truth sets one free. But I have grounds for believing it. He does not. His philosophy desperately wants, even needs, objective truth and personal happiness to be positively correlated. They may not be, however. The relationship between them might be inverted: the more of one the less of the other. Maybe there is no relationship at all. Best to face that uncomfortable fact, to admit it at the outset as an ineliminable question mark set next to all of one’s most cherished hopes.

But then, that would be to admit that hope is irreducible to the act of making sense of human life. And not only hope, but the irreducibly given. If we creatures who by nature not only pursue happiness but seek the truth, then we discover a telos within ourselves driving us beyond ourselves toward that which lies before, behind, and above us. The truth satisfies because and only because (a) it is other than us and (b) we were made to know it. That is, we were made for it. And it turns out that “it” is not an object but a person. St. Augustine was right all along; humans are teleological—rational, desiring, social, liturgical—creatures who, furthermore, cannot help themselves. We are not past saving, though. We just need to know where to look. Augustine knew. And so he prayed:

To praise You is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.