My NYT essay on the future of (less) work
Also: Two wise and delightful new books on how to live during the time you have left.
Last week the New York Times published an essay I wrote, “The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less.” If you haven’t read it yet, I hope you will. The digital designer, Shoshana Schultz, did a remarkable job incorporating Times readers’ post-pandemic work resolutions (which I did not collect, by the way) into the webpage, which I think adds a lot to the experience of reading the essay.
Then on Sunday I got to see the essay as the lead article in the Times’s Sunday Review, with my byline on the cover and the essay itself running across two pages inside, above a cartoon titled, “It’s Time to Wear Pants Again.” This is not really something I imagined happening when I left academia and focused on writing five years ago, so it’s pretty thrilling to see it happen!
I want to welcome new subscribers to this newsletter. I’m grateful for your interest in my writing. I’m currently planning to write these posts twice a month in the lead-up to the early-January publication of my book, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. Many of the ideas in the NYT essay are much expanded in the book, but the book is framed in terms of occupational burnout, a great moral and spiritual crisis emerging from the wide gap between our cultural ideals for work and the reality of our jobs. If you read the book, you’ll also hear more of Patricia Nordeen’s story, and the stories of other people who are trying to build good lives without paid employment at the center. The book is available for preorder through the publisher’s website (click “Buying Options”) and elsewhere.
If you want to read more from me on this topic, here’s a quick primer:
A Burnt-Out Case, in Commonweal, tells my own burnout story in light of the final days of St. Thomas Aquinas, my candidate for patron saint of burnout.
When Work and Meaning Part Ways, in The Hedgehog Review, is about what we expect from work, what we get, and why we should stop expecting work to be “meaningful.” (Usually behind the paywall, currently not.)
The Exaggeration of “Burnout” in America, in The New Republic, is about how, by seeing burnout everywhere, we lose sight of those who suffer most from it.
Taming the Demon, in Commonweal, is about how Benedictine monks in a remote New Mexico monastery limit work so they can pray as much as possible. Most of this essay appears in the book.
Letter of Recommendation: Cheap Sushi, in The New York Times Magazine, is not really about burnout but is a short, fun piece about my experience working as a sushi chef.
I also have an essay about finding meaning in work (or not finding it) next month in Notre Dame Magazine, an excellent general-interest magazine published by the university. There’s no paywall — even if you didn’t go to Notre Dame! (I didn’t.)
By the way, everything I’ve written in the past five years, on all topics, is archived on my website.
Bad news / good news
First, the bad news: You’re going to die. Not anytime soon, I hope, but perhaps sooner than you’d like. The number of weeks you have left is in the low thousands. Seventy-seven years, a typical lifetime, amount to 4,000 weeks. You can do the math to estimate how many of those weeks are gone, and how many might remain. There is probably a lot you want to do in that time: raise your children, learn and accomplish things, climb one mountain or other. My home is full of books I’d like to read. I have 20 open browser tabs. I have 17,895 unread email messages. There might not be enough time to get to everything. In fact, I’m sure of it. You, I, we — can’t do it all.
Now, the good news: We don’t have to. We don’t have to do the impossible. We can identify the handful of things we really want or need to do, and do them with full attention, in order. That’s the central recommendation of Oliver Burkeman’s charming yet morally challenging new book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. If you try to do everything, Burkeman convincingly argues with his characteristic English wit, you will do nothing but fail. But if you focus on the next most important thing in front of you, and see it to completion, you will be surprised by how often you succeed.
This is a hard lesson for ambitious people in rich countries. “We treat everything we’re doing — life itself, in other words — as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else,” Burkeman writes. We learn so that later we can earn money. We earn money so we can buy things, or so we can save. We save so we can spend on experiences later. And then, finally, we’re standing at Victoria Falls, taking a video that we can watch later (but actually won’t).
As soon as I finished 4,000 Weeks, I got a bit anxious about its central lessons. I was afraid I hadn’t fully allowed them to sink in. I thought I might need to read the book over from the beginning, just to make sure I understood. But I think that impulse, too, is a denial of finitude. It’s the mistake of thinking that reading the book is a time out from my life, that if I take that time to really learn what it has to teach, then I’ll really be able to put it in practice once my real life starts up again.
But even the time spent reading the book is my real life. My problem isn’t that I don’t know what to do. It’s that I’m afraid to commit myself fully to the few things I’m capable of doing. I still want to take half-measures, to hedge my bets, under the illusion that I’m not facing a hard limit.
Given the shortness of life, we’re unlikely to attain perfection. Even the austere, moralistic philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wanted us to do right every single time, didn’t think we were up to the task in the limited time allotted to us. So he argued we have reason to believe in life after death, to allow us to continue on our moral trajectory. We also have reason to believe in a God who could recognize the progress we’ve made.
What we can do in our 4,000 weeks is improve. And as the literary scholar Anna Katharina Schaffner shows in her new book, The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths, the bulk of human wisdom — from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu to Frozen — is about how we might improve our lives.
Schaffner focuses on ten themes in the history of thought and culture that serve as pathways for self-betterment, including Socrates’s “know thyself” and Elsa the Snow Queen’s “let it go.” Each of these pathways has a long, cross-cultural history, with ancient ideas often reappearing in contemporary self-help literature, adapted to contexts their original authors could not have imagined. In the face of all the forces that seem to freeze us in place — mortality included — “Our belief in the improvability of the self can … be seen as a powerful proclamation of defiance, an assertion of agency in a world where it is all too easy to feel powerless and adrift,” Schaffner writes.
Schaffner’s previous book, Exhaustion: A History, was not only informative about burnout’s historical precursors like melancholia and neurasthenia but also a good model for how to write intelligently yet accessibly about exhaustion. I gained so much from it. And in everything she does, Schaffner’s writing is just delightful.
Burkeman and Schaffner were kind enough to write endorsements for the back cover of my book, and I was glad to write one for Schaffner’s. Here, again, is where you can learn more about and order Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks and Schaffner’s Art of Self-Improvement.
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Jon