Four Thousand Week – Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, is a book about what Burkeman calls “the paradox of limitation.”

All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

Burkeman shares a wealth of wisdom on how we can achieve more focus in our lives without getting overwhelmed by our social media addiction and how the media manipulates us for the sake of gaining more eyeballs on the media itself (the media is the message, as Marshall McLuhan concluded years ago).

The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you—that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself—that might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated, without your realizing anything’s amiss.
…

It’s been obvious for some time now, of course, that all this constitutes a political emergency. By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fueling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible.

The book is a gem. I conclude with his advice for a more creative life.

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems.
…
Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem…
…
The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism.

When you accept that you probably won’t produce very much on any individual day, you will find that you produce much more over the long term.

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.
…
Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again…

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

This is the principle known as “Stay On The Bus”. You don’t find originality around the corner. It is in the depth of the work.

… it begins at all only for those who who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

Burkeman uses the metaphor of the long-married couple.

To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.

I somehow thought Looking for Alaska was set somewhere in the state of Alaska. So it isn’t.

Miles is a shy, slouchy boy who seems to know what he can and what he wants. Of his own accord, he goes to a boarding school. He befriends Chip, Takumi, and the peculiar girl Alaska, who are other cost-schoolers from the poorer strata of society. They form a club to take on the arrogant kids from more affluent families.

Miles and his friends are somewhat outcasts at the school. They smoke and drink and share a love of literature. Miles falls in love with Alaska. She had a rather complicated childhood after her mother died at a young age.
At the end of school, Alaska crashes in the middle of the night in her car on her way to her mother’s grave. The question that occupies the teenagers left behind is whether she committed suicide and, more importantly, why she would have done so. The second half of the book finds Miles and his friends searching for the answers to these questions, in addition to bullying the Eagle, the dean of the school. In the second part, I miss the quirks of the Alaska character. But she is dead.

John Green says in the book’s epilogue that this story did not succeed as well as his other books have succeeded, mainly because his regular editor could not help him with this one. I think Green lacks a little self-confidence because Looking for Alaska is just a very good book. In Anthropocene Reviewed style, I give Looking for Alaska … 5 stars.

I am reading Sayaka Murata’s collection of stories, Life Ceremony. The stories describe futuristic societies you can’t imagine could ever become reality. Furniture and clothing are made from the remains of deceased people. Artificial insemination is the norm. Raising children is paid out to specialized organizations. A girl keeps a man as a pet. After a death, the deceased is ceremoniously prepared and served to the bereaved, who proceed to insemination after the meal to fulfill life’s circle.

All this seems ridiculous. Like a democratic society as seemingly impossible as one in which a president has the power to acquit convicted criminals. In which billionaires conspire to ensure they get richer and can draw even more power to themselves. In which a self-proclaimed genius running a car company has no qualms about making a Hitler salute. A Brett Easton Ellis novel turned into reality.

Staying informed is important, but the constant barrage of horrific news from a government populated by narcissists can be overwhelming. Sometimes, it’s necessary to take a step back for the sake of our mental well-being.

Let’s instead focus on the beautiful things people make. Like books by Sayaka Murata’s.