Rachel Y’s Reviews > Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals > Status Update

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you DO want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life. Elizabeth Gilbert

There you were, planning to live on forever- as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment

"bright sadness" Richard Rohr

We learned something. We are mortal. You might say you know this, but you don't. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for such a thing... It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, you will lose everything that catches your eye.

The original Latin word for decide, decidere, means "to cut off" as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like "homicide" and "suicide."

We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger's strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time.

So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and a hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer..... It remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do.

Re: premodern people's unchanging or cyclical view of history: When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of *this* life. And when people start believing in progress- and the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future- they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future.

They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn't to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.
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None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction.