Although I personally love this book, I would not recommend it for people who do not like their reality served without sweetener. This is an author who takes a position that truth is going to save you some time in the long run. Additionally, the long run isn't all that long.
A healthy, lucky human residing in a safe locale can expect to live about 80 years or approximately 4000 weeks. A few folks get more, and a few get less. The shocking business is in following Burkeman's logic and doing the simple calculation that tells you how many of your 4000 weeks you have already spent.
We have many linguistic and a few emotional tricks that prevent us from facing how fleeting our time really is. One of these tricks is referring to people in their fifties and sixties as "middle aged." It may seem like the charitable thing to say, but it skews our calculators pretty substantially. Burkeman thinks that if you don't turn away from the facts, you will end up making more sensible choices, and consequently will enjoy and appreciate your life a little more.
He points out some things that most of us conveniently ignore, such as: We are not going to be able to read all the books we would like to read; we are not going to be able to travel to all the places we would like to see, and we are not going to accomplish everything that we have dreamed of doing. These hard facts should inform the choices we make about how we spend our energy and our days and weeks.
This is a brilliant book. I think bluntness sometimes saves time and energy and brings peace of mind a little more reliably than myths like: If we plan and organize well, we can do absolutely everything we want to do. Burkeman points out that there is such a thing as being too efficient, and didn't we really suspect that?
And one more thing: it's a short book. You won't spend several of your precious weeks getting through it!
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