100 Simple Secret of Great Relationships: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven

        In this relationship self-help book, David Niven offers a hundred simple secrets, which, when we really get into it, feels like an overpromise. Each of the chapters spans two pages (or three at most) and they all follow the same formula: a short paragraph to explain the ‘secret,’ an anecdote or case study of people demonstrating that secret in their relationships, and then a related factoid to close. The formula gives 100 Simple Secrets of Great Relationships an accessible, if repetitive, quality.

Ultimately, it feels like Niven’s work skirts along the surface and could easily be cut in half. A number of the chapters offer mirror images to each other. For instance, “No One Wins the Comparison Game” and “Beware Second Opinions” could just be one chapter that addresses both comparing your relationship to others’ and receiving their input. While some of the advice is good advice, it’s nothing revolutionary. Moreover, some of the advice offers principles but not really step-by-step instruction. For instance, the chapter “Be Willing to Evolve” essentially says that relationships are better if people are less rigid in their thinking. Well, yeah. Of course. But Niven doesn’t offer a practical strategy for becoming more willing to evolve.

Scaling back on the quantity of ‘secrets’ would give Niven the space to elaborate in more meaningful ways on ‘quality’ secrets. The anecdotes sometimes appear disconnected from the opening paragraph from each of the chapters or insufficiently exploratory. What I really wanted more of was analysis of the factoids at the end of each chapter. I wanted more information on the methodology for the studies or further elaboration on the factors and variables. I guess I was hoping for a more scientific approach than an anecdotal one. At the same time, the book felt weirdly dated. It was talking about gender stereotypes on television that seem long past prevalent and the fact that there was any controversy over men doing housework seems laughable. A lot can change in 20 years, I suppose.

In the end, the book just felt like it was doing too much and not enough simultaneously. It’s probably not going to hurt, but I don’t see this being any more valuable than other resources out on the market for people looking to deepen their relationships.

Happy reading!

Are You Mad At Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You by Meg Josephson

  It feels like most people I know would benefit from reading this book. Either that, or I overestimate how normal the feelings explored in this book are. How many times do we find ourselves asking the titular question of Meg Josephon’s Are You Mad At Me? The book is part self-help and part psychology book, outlining the unhealthy compulsions so many of us (am I projecting?) feel: perfectionism, self-doubt, overcommitment, and so on. The experience of reading the book was pretty wild because I started off taking a lot of notes and decided to stop suddenly when I realized there were too many relatable quotations to document them all.

We’ve all heard of fight, flight, and freeze—but the central focus of Josephson’s work is on the fawn response. For some of us, when we face a threat, our nervous system compels us towards appeasement and Josephson challenges us to consider the question: “when did I learn this was helpful or protective?”. Something I appreciate about Josephson’s approach is that she does not reject the feelings that arise or send us into shame spirals over how we should behave. Instead, she reinforces a narrative in which we thank the part of our brain that is trying to protect us before considering next steps. 

When we consider fawning behaviours in adult life, Josephson identifies the following: -Constantly worrying what people think of you, if they like you, if they’re mad at you -Overextending yourself, not setting boundaries, and then feeling resentful -Avoiding conflict at all costs -Constantly fearing getting in trouble or being seen as “bad” -Constantly fearing that you are bad and you’re just fooling everyone -Constantly seeking external approval or validation -Silencing your needs for the comfort and happiness of everyone else -Feeling hypervigilant of peoples’ emotions and moods -Overexplaining yourself as an attempt to feel heard or understood -Feeling like everything is your fault and then overapologizing -Being indecisive because you don’t want to disappoint anyone or because you genuinely don’t know what you like or prefer -Not trusting yourself to make decisions -Having trouble identifying your needs and speaking up about them -Never feeling good enough -Feeling unworthy of your accomplishments -Constantly feeling like you’re performing and trying to impress others and prove yourself to them -Feeling like you’re a chameleon in relationships

You can treat this like a quiz in Cosmopolitan and I’ll let you check off your own cues while I add up the 13 I count for myself. Again, I think it’s worth noting that Josephson thanks the brain for its protective habits. They may be maladaptive, but the intention is to keep ourselves regulated.

Throughout the book, Josephson goes through some case studies from her clinical experience. She writes about “Sophie.” Sophie “spent so much of her time and energy meeting her family’s physical and emotional needs that she forgot she had needs of her own.” She discusses being an adult that “overextends herself and then feels secretly resentful.” She “struggles to set boundaries and gets all of her feeling of value from being nurturing and helpful.” I couldn’t help but think back to reading The Cider House Rules by John Irving, Homer’s desperate need to feel “useful,” and reflect on how I should probably not have identified so closely with his sentiment. Josephson then elaborates on Sophie being a parentified child—not everything is relatable directly to my experience. She talks about how Sophie “grew up to be a hyperindependent adult [who] feels like she has to do everything on her own and struggles to ask for help. She’s the therapist friend, the person everyone goes to with their problems, but she feels like her problems and emotions are burdens.” Josephson elaborates on how “Sophie got the message that she could receive love and attention by alleviating other people’s stress but now when she’s stressed or overwhelmed she feels like she needs to hide those feelings.” The passage continues, “No one ever thinks to check in on her because they assume she always is fine and has it together. She unconsciously seeks out romantic relationships in which she needs to mother her partner because that’s the dynamic that feels familiar to her but it leaves her resentful and exhausted.” She has a harsh inner critic that has been a stand-in for parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was caring for everyone else. Moreover, “she also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly.” Josephson’s list of descriptors is compelling as a kind of character study, but simultaneously hits a bit close to home in some of the mindsets of her clients. 

Carter is another compelling case study. Josephson talks about how Carter’s challenging emotions were discouraged or ridiculed by her parents and “she learned to believe that something was wrong with her for having such emotions.” In response, she “adapted by taking on the perfectionist role—she was the high achiever, the golden girl.” One detail in her story could have been lifted directly from my life: “She cried in middle school when she got an A on a history paper, instead of an A.” Just replace middle school with elementary school and history paper with presentation about classical composers. I haven’t engaged in enough self-reflection to really conceptualize this, but it felt true when I read that “she’s a charmer who morphs her personality to match that of whomever she’s with and wants to be liked by everyone, even if that means not always liking herself.” More apt for me is the sentence that follows it: “She’s terrified of making a mistake and of having people find out that she did.” For her, it was about heavy criticism while she was growing up, like when she accidentally broke a glass or missed a goal at soccer practice. Josephson continues: “She feels crippled by any sort of negative feedback because being seen as anything but perfect has felt entirely unsafe” and—here’s the really problematic stuff for me—”she needs people to think she’s always productive and if she hears someone walk through the door, she’ll quickly swap the TV remote for a book so they don’t think she was gasp relaxing. She’s very hard on herself and never feels like she’s doing enough. She walks around with a deep sense of shame for not being the perfect person she expects herself to be.” I think I’m revealing way too much of myself here, but I also bring it up because these characterizations felt like finding connection with these strangers. Josephson also considers the nuances of the catch-22 that Carter “often feels like she’s putting up a front so that people won’t see the messiness underneath” but that “as a result, she feels like people don’t know the real her.” Being flawless is an isolating place to be, but “she learned, ‘I need to be perfect to be loved.’” 

One of the fawning responses that I felt was most engrossing was the sense of chasing accomplishment and overextending. I hadn’t considered that drowning yourself in responsibilities is a protective experience, but one that doesn’t serve its victims long term. The fawn response, she says, “is about finding safety by doing more.” Josephson talks about the sense of accomplishment and the sense of relief and considers its implications. She starts off by talking about how “the inner critic, which is trying to protect you, tells you that no accomplishment is enough, because it’s stuck in a time when you had to constantly impress in order to achieve a sense of safety.” It’s a paradox. If you reached a point where you felt “good enough” the protective part would feel scared “because it would mean you could stop trying so hard.” Fawners often struggle with low self-esteem and so “no accomplishment is impressive.” If you are able to achieve it, then it couldn’t have been that hard, and this mindset leads you to “constantly undervalue your milestones.” There is no satisfying the inner critic, “who’s trying so hard to find safety through perfection.”

The reason I was initially drawn to this book is because I saw someone on TikTok post about the relationship between achievement and relief. It was this passage: “Achievements may bring a sense of relief instead of joy, because those achievements were merely an obligation, another milestone you had to complete to continue to prove yourself.” Ouch. Right in the heart. It seems so unfair that achievements can be so stripped of joy. It also creates contradictions for us in that when you receive compliments, it challenges our sense of unworthiness, and to maintain our sense of self, we push away such compliments. Another of Josephson’s figures, Ari, “wants to reject herself before others can reject her. She doesn’t think she’s enough, so it feels absolutely unbelievable to her when someone else thinks she is.” Yet, Ari also “desperately wants to be taken seriously” and “feels frustrated by her inability to accept praise.” The question remains: how can we learn to appreciate and celebrate our own achievements without that sense of guilt or unworthiness?

There’s another passage that feels true about ‘filling our cups.’ Josephson says, “Maybe it was impossible to receive nourishment without also receiving something that didn’t feel good, like being guilt-tripped or controlled.” The notion of receiving care and criticism in equal measure feels awful. Nourishment came with a price, and so we can’t resist nor fully absorb it, and no amount of reassurance or validation will feel like enough. External validation can never satisfy us, though: “True long term safety arises internally through validating our emotions, soothing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to receive validation from someone else.”

I can’t help but feel my review of Are You Mad at Me? has done little more than provide quotations and summarize some of the things I found relatable. I don’t think I’ve done very well considering the book as an aesthetic object. It was an informative one, for sure, and one that I connected with a lot.

Happy reading; happy healing!

Struggles of a Dreamer by Yahaya Baruwa

Yahaya Baruwa’s Struggles of a Dreamer is a special book to me for reasons entirely independent of the novel itself. I recently taught a student who was enthusiastic, driven, and a dedicated reader. Several times, he discussed with me how this book set him on a better path and inspired his love of reading. He discussed meeting the author and getting his copy signed. Then, on the day of our exam, he brought me his personal copy as a gift. It seemed too meaningful—too special to him—to keep it. I didn’t feel worthy to be given something so special to him and I tried to return it, but he insisted I keep it. It may very well be the most meaningful gift I’ve received in all my years of teaching.

In a fun coincidence, Struggles of a Dreamer is about people giving books to one another. The book starts with Tunde, a beggar in New York who is assaulted and robbed of the few possessions he has. Tunde tells the nurse his life story, moving from Nigeria to Toronto. In his previous life, he worked for a rich man who was similarly robbed and had his life threatened. Instead, he paid for his life and dismissed Tunde with a bonus. Things did not go well when Tunde moved to North America, and he makes a promise to his nurse to turn his life around and help his wife and child get to North America. Living in the street, a wealthy woman in a limo passes by and gives him an envelope. Hoping for cash, he instead finds a book. The woman, a CEO of a beauty company, leaves a note about receiving the book and changing her life and we get her own story of hardship. Then, he reads the book, which is the story of Toku’te, another poor man who wants to leave his family’s farm to become wealthy.

The book then takes on layer after layer of people telling stories, similar in structure to the spiral of of Scheherazade’s stories in The Arabian Nights. There are a bunch of anecdotes about poor folk turning their luck around through sheer dedication and the book reads like a series of parables or folk tales. Stylistically, the book is a bit messy. There are some loose ends that just get dropped, some inconsistent quotation marks that make it unclear who is speaking when, some increasingly infrequent interruptions of Tunde commenting on the Toku’te narrative—so infrequent that you keep wondering if the main character of the frame narrative is ever coming back.

On occasion, Baruwa offers some insightful comments. I would venture that the highlight in that respect is the proverb that “Something that happens once will not happen again, but something that happens twice will surely happen a third time” (135). The other insights peppered throughout the book offer surface-level platitudes, which culminate in the six rules of success in the final section of the book. At their core, the rules break down to being: 1) have a vision, 2) thoughts become reality, 3) be disciplined, 4) manage your fear, 5) be willing to learn, and 6) handle money profitably. The rules for success are literally spelled out for the audience with the same (lack of) subtlety as The Alchemist.  

I can’t say the book really did much for me by way of inspiration. It seems to play into a naive notion of individual effort with one eye permanently on the concept of wealth. As a result, its appeals to the spirit are a bit at odds with the drive towards profit. I’m just lucky that my engagement with the book was driven by a sense of connection and a spirit of intellectual generosity. I’ll forever be grateful for the gift of the book—and I’ll forever be grateful for the impact it had on my student—even if the book does very little for me overall. 

Thanks to my student and happy reading!

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention---and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Har

    It’s no secret that every beep, boop, and buzz draws us away from our inner calm into a whirlwind of distraction. In that respect, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again is nothing revolutionary. Anecdotally, you already know what Hari confirms with research: modern life is comprised of interruptions that prevent us from thinking deeply. Hari sites studies about the average number of interruptions we face, the length of time it takes to enter a flow state of thinking, and the ultimate inefficacy of so-called multitasking. In addition to the research, Hari provides relatable personal anecdotes to help characterize the phenomenon.

    Whenever I read nonfiction, I think about titles and subtitles. I think about the promises they offer. Stolen Focus offers a promise to think deeply again and, technically, Hari delivers on that promise. The final chapter offers a primer on how to change habits in order to maintain focus—things like digital detoxing and setting times for when you’ll allow yourself to check your e-mail. That said, though, even Hari recognizes that personal changes are not enough. Like recycling in response to climate change, the onus (and the shame) is displaced onto individuals rather than those who are truly responsible for stealing our focus. 

    To Hari’s credit, he places the phenomenon in the broader technological and political contexts from which it has arisen. What’s at the heart of this problem? The same thing as for all problems: capitalism. Take, for instance, Google, whose business model is based on maintaining the engagement of its audience. They design ways of keeping you focused on their own products and services (one need look only so far as its new “AI Summary” feature—it’s there so that you don’t actually have to click away from Google itself). Hari recounts how one employee at the company suggested scaling back on push notifications—rather than sending an alert to your phone every time you receive an e-mail, you’d instead receive an update once a day—and he was essentially laughed out of the room. Apply that, and other tactics, to an already vulnerable populace that is burnt out from overwork, stress, poor diets…it’s a recipe for manipulation.

    To that end, Hari notes that personal commitments to improve our focus are insufficient and to suggest that we can simply restore our own focus offers us a “cruel optimism” in light of more systemic issues. The problem with systemic issues, though, is that they have far-reaching implications for mass-society and politics in particular. When people are not able to focus, they are not able to organize. Yet, all of the major issues in our society require collective, deep thinking. If we are to solve the environmental crisis, we will need to coordinate our efforts and communicate with one another and take action over long periods of time. That cannot be done if the threshold of our focus is a thirty second TikTok.

    This all plays into the hands of corporate interests and exploitative politicians. When nobody has the capacity to think through the implications of policy, do the research, fact-check politicians’ claims, it leaves the most vulnerable unprotected from policies that are actively harmful. Again, this is nothing surprising or even controversial.

    Stolen Focus delves into the medicalization of inattentiveness (i.e. through our collective response to ADHD). Essentially, the issue is that we don’t look enough at root causes and instead try to medicate the problem away. While medication can be effective, Hari’s approach is more of socio-psychological one that critiques the factors that contribute to a rise in inattention, including factors such as poor diet, constant distractions via media, and so forth. We’re at a cultural moment where ADHD is increasingly “normal” and yet there are a number of mitigating factors we might consider to help to manage it. This part of the book was of less interest to me, but still offered some valuable insight into both science and culture.

    All things considered, Stolen Focus likely won’t revolutionize your thinking. It will affirm your experiences, give you the language with which to discuss them, and inspire you to change some habits to restore the attention you deserve—and hopefully inspire you to change the world in turn.

    Happy reading!

The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play by Alexander Kriss

  In 2023, I read Getting Gamers by Jamie Madigan, which uses psychological principles and experiments to explain why people who play video games play the way they do and how they engage with one another. I found it a really illuminating text and I’ve been looking for other texts that delve into analysis of video games, their impacts on player behaviour, and so on. To that end, I decided to read The Gaming Mind by Alexander Kriss. Kriss is a clinical psychology with an interest in video games, but his approach is largely the inverse of how Madigan approaches interpretations of gamer behaviour.

Rather than taking a look at how games influence our behaviour, Alexander Kriss holds up the mirror: how do our gaming behaviours reflect our other habits of mind? For instance, how does a woman’s obsession with Candy Crush speak to the lack of control she feels over her life? How does our relationship with violence impact how we engage with games?

The best part of the book—or at least the part I found most engaging—was the opening chapter: “Me, You, and Silent Hill 2.” The opening chapter establishes Kriss’ experience as a psychoanalyst and how he is made responsible for the “gamer kid” who needed help, and whose therapist-group-assigned moniker required deconstruction. Running parallel, Kriss establishes his own coming to terms with the “gamer” label for himself, beginning with his experience of playing Mist with his father, his coming into the Tomb Raider series and Ape Escape. While playing games, Kriss developed a friendship with another boy—one less interested in gaming—who later took his own life.

From there, the chapter discusses Silent Hill 2, which I already find deeply engrossing and rife with possibility for analysis. Kriss provides a beautiful account of the game’s haunting premise and analysis of the characters. What is really most compelling is Kriss’ discussion of the eight multiple endings of the game. To unlock different endings, there are different conditions, including inconsequential actions like how many times you inspect the photo of your deceased wife in your inventory. One of the endings is James, the main character, killing himself. To unlock that ending, you have to play the majority of the game at low health. Kriss explains how he could never play the game that way and never cope with the prospect of the central character killing himself at the end. It’s a stunning and sincere discussion of our relationship to depression and mental illness and the way our game behaviours can give a window into the player.

That first chapter wowed me. From there, the rest of the book was good but didn’t quite hit the same highs for me. Perhaps because the case studies are more focused on the patient rather than critique of games, or perhaps because the games referenced haven’t been part of my gaming repertoire. The chapters deal with violence, addiction, health, treatment of others in multiplayer games, and so on. There’s a lot to work with, but your enjoyment of the book will probably depend on what resonates with you at the personal level.

Either way: happy reading. Happy gaming!

The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin

  I’m convinced that every person is creative and wants to do creative work. Unfortunately, that’s often harder said than done. Enter: books like The Practice by Seth Godin, which was recommended to me from an artist friend of mine and is comprised of a list of about two hundred pieces of advice on how to create and publish artwork.

Throughout the book, Godin challenges people to actually do the creative work they want to do and to toss excuses to the wind. He has a knack for identifying, with great precision, specific flaws in our logic that prevent us from moving forward in the work—and often I found myself “called out” in my fear of actually doing the creative things I want to do. One piece that stood out to me in particular is how we’re not really “doing the work” if we stay safe and fail to push ourselves, but we also stop doing the work if we feel like we don’t have the skills to actually achieve the vision. If we stay lazy, our work sucks. If we stop ourselves because we feel we’re incapable of living up to the idea of what we want, our work doesn’t happen at all.That has me written all over it.

One of the other parts I really like about The Practice is when Godin talks about decisions and outcomes—especially as it relates to the the idea of process versus product. Godin writes that “There is a huge gap between a good decision and a good outcome.” He continues that “a good decision is based on what we know of the options and the odds. A good outcome happens or doesn’t. It is a consequence of the odds, not the hidden answer.” I appreciate his commitment to actually doing something, even if it’s not perfect. In a pretty extreme example, Godin talks about how “a good process doesn’t guarantee the outcome you were hoping for, [and] a good outcome is separate for what happens next.” He continues with the idea of someone choosing whether to fly or drive. Flying is statistically safer. You might know someone who dies in a plane crash, but “they didn’t make a bad decision when they chose to fly. There was certainly a bad outcome, though.” We can make the right decision and it still might not pan out, or, in Godin’s words: “Decisions are good, even if outcomes aren’t.” He makes the explicit connection to valuing the process, “even if the particular work doesn’t resonate, even if the art doesn’t sell, even if you aren’t happy with the reaction from the critics.”

All of this also relates to the idea of getting reassurance from others. The process is itself the thing, the work is secondary. If you’re hoping for a particular result (i.e. in terms of response), “reassurance is futile and focusing on outcomes at the expense of process is a shortcut that will destroy your work.”

I also appreciate the way Godin characterizes art. It feels like so often there’s a clear difference between “art” and “content” akin to the difference between “music” and “muzak.” In part, art serves as a gift. It is an act of generosity, similar to how Anne Lamont characterizes writing as a gift in Bird by Bird. However, the gift is not a comfortable gift. When characterizing what artists do, Godin suggests that “artists actively work to create a sense of discomfort in their audience,” which certainly rings true for the artists that have spoken most to me. Godin continues, “Discomfort engages people, keeps them on their toes, makes them curious. Discomfort is the feeling we all get just before change happens.” When combining the idea of discomfort and generosity, Godin suggests that “this new form of hospitality, of helping people change by taking them somewhere new, can make us personally uncomfortable as well.” As an artist, Godin suggests in a really beautiful passage:

It might feel easier to simply ask people what they want and do that instead. Choosing to offer only comfort undermines the work of the artist and the leader. Ultimately, it creates less impact and less hospitality as well. Your discomfort is no excuse for being inhospitable. Our practice is to bring a practical empathy to the work, to realize that in our journey to create change, we’re also creating discomfort for our audience and for ourselves. And that’s okay.

This is one of those things where it is hard to address in yourself (err….myself). I have a particular “style” that has developed in my poetry, for example, that I adhere to. I’m nervous about branching out, but who am I challenging in doing the same thing over and over? The sense of risk needs to be there in order to make it exciting again.

Another excuse that Godin points out that resonates with me is the idea of building domain knowledge and getting credentials as a way of avoiding doing the work. Here I am reading nearly a book or two a week while I’m not writing even one or two pages of my own work. There’s this compulsion to know everything before starting anything. It’s an outgrowth of that need for approval of your product. Godin writes, “Desire for external approval undermines your desire to trust yourself; you hand it over to an institution instead. Institutions have no magical powers.” But, Godin continues, “You don’t need a permit to speak up, to solve an interesting problem; or to lead. [...] The system established credentials to maintain the consistency of our industrial output, but over time they’ve been expanded to create a roadblock, a way to slow down those who would seek to make change happen.” I appreciate the way that creative work is linked to the idea of capitalism and the systems that force us into productivity and consumption rather than exploration. The idea that we all need credentials is “a form of signalling, a stalling device, an also a way to keep diversity down.” He notes how “famous colleges need to enforce the regime of compliance and scarcity, so they seek our cooperation and belief to build their reputation. [...] That desire is about credentialing, the magic power a famous institution has to bless us with status and authority.” Systems are established to deselect, fail to mould, and refuse to amplify the people that want to make change happen, and I recognize in myself the desire to be credentialed despite its obvious shortcomings.

There’s a comfort in Godin’s work. Despite my need to feel mastery over the artistic process before beginning, I also resonate with Godin’s idea that “domain knowledge opened the door to understanding what might work.” When creating work, “the point is not to copy, but to avoid copying” and even “our best commercial work reminds people of what they’ve seen before.” Take that, Harold Bloom and your “anxiety of influence.” There’s a beautiful phrase that I think encapsulates so many things about the kind of art work we do: “Creativity doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

So, it’s time to rhyme. It’s time to create. Happy reading!

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

  Our time on Earth is finite. On average, about four thousand weeks long.

And that thought terrifies me.

Enter Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, a self-help-ish book about how to rework our relationship with time. If you’ve ever taken a peek at my to-do lists, you’re likely to see why such a book is necessary for me. I want to do it all, I feel like there’s never enough time, and I’m perpetually afraid of having wasted time that is irrecoverable.

But Oliver Burkeman is here to say, “Settle down, Proust, everything you want is impossible anyway!” (Hooray?). Burkeman’s central claim in the text is that we hold on to unhealthy—and even cruel—beliefs about time that are working against our actual lives. No matter what we aim to accomplish, it will never be finished. One task done, another pops up, and the idea of somehow gaining mastery over time is actually a disabling belief that prevents us from doing what is actually important.

In contrast to many books in the self-help genre, Burkeman is not giving you a list of rules to follow in order to make better use of your time (“how to stop procrastinating”, and all that type jazz). In fact, the sense of productivity culture that underlies those types of books is something Burkeman is challenging. In one passage he writes the following:

The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work, in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after school activities, generate more profit for your employer, and yet paradoxically you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result.

Thus, in a sense, even if we could be more productive: would it even be sensible to follow-through? For whom are we expending our time? The passage continues with a reference to Edward T. Hall’s suggestion that “Time moves like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones, and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up, or eventually to break down.” A lot of people, I would suggest, are in “break down” mode precisely because there is no keeping up with the endless tasks we are required to accomplish. In Burkeman’s words, “It’s now common to encounter reports, especially from younger adults of an all-encompassing, bone-deep burnout, characterized by an inability to complete basic daily chores, the paralyzing exhaustion of a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean, production machines.” I feel that.

In fact, a lot of what Burkeman discusses is deeply relatable and he continues to focus on the psychological, physical, and existential impacts of measured time. I almost felt a faint hint of Mark Fisher’s comments with respect to capitalism and time. This is particularly true in the following quotation that Burkeman presents:

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to get through tasks in order to get them out of the way, with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying in the meantime that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move. The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.

Just impeccable. I feel like our relationship to time, productivity, and capitalism are all linked in this passage. The idea of contrasting what life is supposed to be with what it has become as a result of constant productivity and capital is, in my view, very well articulated—especially because so much of it is ubiquitous in our systems. The line about having to raise our hands to pee is something that is so common in schools and reinforces the idea that we must live according to others’ expectations and timelines. From a personal standpoint, I see myself in the characterization that “this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seemed to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever-further over the horizon.” The idea of trying to deal with all of the meaningless things in order to work towards the actual things is too real; it’s a deeply engrained mentality that the important things require full attention, and how can they have my full attention if I have to worry about all of the little things that don’t matter at all? I am trying to cope with my “joyless urgency.”

Burkeman notes that our relationship to time has changed because we are in a situation of “task-oriented living” versus whatever we have now. In task-oriented living, Burkeman argues, “the rhythms of life are governed by tasks rather than abstract timelines”. He makes reference to a medieval farmer who would wake with the sun, sleep with the dusk, and allow the length of day to vary based on the season. Just as an aside, I think that the example could have been about Indigenous people in Canada as much as about medieval farmers, but I digress. The key part here is that “there was no need to think of time as abstract and separate from life.” An example that really resonated with me is that, Burkeman says, “You milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that, for example doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner, would rightly have been considered a lunatic.” Here I am: a lunatic. Despite reading this book and gaining a lot from it, I still am trying to work weeks ahead in my daily planner to somehow clear my schedule of all responsibilities. Yet, responsibilities can’t be handled like this. In the separation of task-oriented living towards more abstract-time based living, we have gained a great deal of anxiety. For the medieval farmer, “There was no anxious pressure to get everything done, either, because a farmer’s work is infinite. There will always be another milking and another harvest forever. There is no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.” I’m struck by this characterization in its truth and also in the despair that it causes me. There will always be more to mark, there will always be more classes to plan, there will always be more book reviews to write, more video games to finish and clear off my mental load. Even entertainment-based activities are reframed as tasks.

Just to expand a little further, Burkeman refers to “those days before clocks.” In those times, he says, “when you when you did need to explain how long something might take, your only option was to compare it with some other concrete activity. Medieval people might talk of a task lasting a miserere while, the time it took to recite psalm 50, known as the miserere from the Bible, or alternatively, a pissing while, which should require no explanation.” I feel like there is some resonance here. We have the trace of those comparative measurements lingering in our language, but overall we try to quantify in abstract terms. It’s ten minutes up the street, it’s going to be a fifteen hour project, and so on. Even as I am about to begin an additional qualifications course, I’m told how many hours I’m expected to spend, not what tasks I’m expected to complete. In a comparative-task measurement, Burkeman says,

one can imagine that experience would have felt expansive and fluid, suffused with something it might not be an exaggeration to call a kind of magic. Notwithstanding the many real privations of his existence, our peasant farmer might have sensed a luminous, awe-inspiring dimension to the world around him, untroubled by the notion of time ticking away, he might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things, the feeling of timelessness [...] living in deep-time.

It is a kind of magic in those moments when we are free of time, liberated from it. Instead, he suggests, we do everything we can to “avoid the painful constraints of reality” and focus instead on being productive, of ignoring those bright moments of tranquility.

There’s an addictive quality into task-completion. The people that used to refer to themselves as “workaholics” in job interviews as a cheeky ‘worst quality’ may have been more truthful than they thought. Especially if alcoholism is a means of escaping reality and trying to regain a sense of control of your life, productivity addiction runs parallel. Burkeman notes how common it is for “well-paid, high status, overachievers” to be “accustomed to a life of constant motion.” He sees their “pulsing sense of urgency [as] a form of self-medication, something they were doing as a way to not feel something else.” He then gives the example a woman who feels anxiety whenever she slows to rest and immediately looks for active distraction as a form of “emotional avoidance.” He then continues on to note that these traits are similar to alcoholics.

Let’s focus for a moment on the idea of avoidance. Burkeman argues that “Most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.” It is indeed a bleak thought. I once did the calculation of how many books I read in a year and how many years I expect to live and when I calculate the number of books I’ll likely finish by my death is barely a drop in the bucket of all the incredible writing in the world. So we replace finitude with measurable progress towards some ambiguous dream. Not only do we not have enough time, “It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get. Maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles that you feel you should. So rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies in an effort to carry on feeling limitless.” Those lines strike me to the core. I can never simply be. I get depressed for a few weeks following the constant pressures of teaching because if I rest I do not feel I have “accomplished” anything. Trying to gain control this way, though, is outright unhealthy: “We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance. Or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything so that tough choices won’t be required. Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotence control over life, because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project.” It’s hard not to see myself reflected in this: unable to make decisions, so drowning in tasks that require low stakes. I also think back, though, to my literary theory professor who made the comment that if something said “no experience necessary” it really meant “no experience gained.” Same thing here with choices. We avoid important choices so we never really have to live.

Burkeman links to other sociologists, theorists, and philosophers to help make the case. In this section, he refers to Nietzsche to explain how we “fill our minds with business and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.” In Nietzsche’s words, “We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life [...] because to us it is even more necessary to not have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” This can take many forms, whether it be distraction of meaningless nonsense (cf. any meme on Facebook), or, Burkeman states, “we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have.”

There are some political implications here, which I think takes Burkeman’s work a step beyond the general self-help tone. Burkeman notes how “most of us seek a specifically individualistic mastery over time” and that “our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whatever you want.” It becomes clear why capitalism and individualism and time have all bound together in this unhealthy spiral. What is clear to Burkeman, though, is that we do this “because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing from marriage and parenting to business or politics depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.” I would go one step further to suggest that this is precisely why the system gets maintained as it is. If, for instance, a company does not want its workers to unionize, what better way than to promote an individualistic sense of time—I am what matters to me, and who has the time to organize and work together? Again—we are distracted from the important work.

In another section, Burkeman addresses the blight of social media. I think it’s commonplace to recognize that our devices distract us from things that are more important. But Burkeman takes that one step further. He says that it’s not simply that devices distract us from things that are more important, but that “they change how we’re defining important matters in the first place. [...] They sabotage our capacity to want what we want to want.” He elaborates on the idea of social media and discusses our instances of heightened judgment of others that occur as a result of seeing a narrow window into them, rather than the full picture. But also, time eats away at us after such moments. For instance, when I see something politically egregious online and I’m out in the world later I think about how I might respond. Burkeman makes that case and says we even retrain our brains to think about how we will share moments afterward—while we’re still in them. Again, connecting politically, Burkeman notes his “unpaid role as a creator of content for Twitter” and how the entire format has been crafted by teams of psychologists. One of the reasons I find Burkeman’s text so rich is that it connects to so many discourses. I feel like these observations serve as a launch pad for so many rich epistemological, political, and existential questions.

 Returning to the personal level for now, Burkeman offers the true, if depressing, observation that we will never do all of what we actually want to do. Since there is so much to do in the world, “At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around doing virtually nothing of the things you theoretically could have done.” This sounds pretty bleak. Thank goodness Burkeman follows it up by reframing the discussion around choices: “the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” As a phrase, “neglecting the right things” would have served as a good subtitle for the book and as a good piece of advice in general.

At the end of the day, Burkeman focuses on the ways that these relationships to time are unhealthy and harmful for us. As we chase more and more accomplishment and productivity, he writes, “There is a sort of cruelty [...] in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach and many of us would never dream of demanding of other people. The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then, pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble, and get started on them today.” It’s about as practical as advice in the book gets. As I mentioned, it’s more of a theoretical explanation than a simple enhance-your-productivity checklist. He asks a critical question that I think hits at the heart of our relationships with time and productivity: “In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you’re who you are and not the person you think you ought to be?” I think so much of our pain surrounding time is related to that disconnect of what we expert of ourselves and what is actually realistic. I struggle with that myself. Burkeman says, though, that we cannot treat the present day as part of a journey towards some version of ourselves we think we ought to be. There’s a sadness in that mentality that is implicit in the trouble of all overachievers, I think: “Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control.” But we already have and it never does, anyway. We do not have to prove ourselves, and even if we did, the measure would be, quite frankly, impossible anyway.

Before the review ends, I want to thank you for taking the time to read it (and all of my reviews for 2024). The fact that you have finite time and that you have chosen to spend some of it with me reading, thinking about, and responding to books means the world. I hope you have a year of restfulness, a year of accomplishment, and a year of neglecting the right things.

Happy reading; happy new year.