When I was doing my military service, we had a simple ritual for marking time. Each day completed, crossed off. Six months of obligation reduced to a grid of dots, each one representing twenty-four hours survived. The closer you got to the end, the more the remaining dots seemed to glow with significance. You could see the finish line. You could count what was left.
It was clarifying in a way that normal life rarely is. You knew exactly how much time remained and exactly what it was for.
Then I read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks and understood why that feeling never quite returned in civilian life. Four thousand weeks is roughly what an average human lifespan contains. When you write it out — not in years, not in decades, but in weeks — something shifts. The number is not abstract anymore. It is countable. And most of the counting, for most of us, is already done.
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"The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks |
Burkeman's argument is not that you should be more productive with the time you have. It is almost the opposite. The finitude of time is not a problem to be solved with a better calendar system. It is a fact to be faced, and once faced, it changes which decisions actually matter. You cannot do everything. The question is not how to fit more in. It is what actually deserves to be in the dots at all.
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During the early months of COVID, while the world was frozen, I was looking for a house to buy. I had been reading Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths' Algorithms to Live By — a book about what computer science can teach us about human decisions — and I came across the secretary problem.
The problem is this: you are hiring a secretary from a pool of candidates. You interview them one by one. After each interview you must decide immediately — hire or move on. You cannot go back. How do you know when you have found the best one?
The mathematically optimal strategy: interview the first 37% of candidates without hiring anyone. Use that phase purely to calibrate — to understand the range of what is available. Then hire the next candidate who is better than everyone you have seen so far. Applied correctly, this gives you the best chance of finding the optimal choice without either committing too early or waiting so long that you miss it entirely.
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"Knowing when to stop searching is one of the most important skills a person can develop." — Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By |
I used it to find a house. It worked — not perfectly, but well enough. More interestingly, I started thinking about how it applies to everything else. The career you stop searching for too early because the first acceptable option appeared. The partner you commit to before you have calibrated what you actually need. The life path you lock into at twenty-two before you have seen enough of the range to know what you are choosing.
Most of us get one life to run the secretary problem on. You cannot restart the search once you have used most of your dots.
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Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse who spent years with people in the final weeks of their lives. She recorded what they said they regretted. The most common regret, across years of conversations with dying people, was this:
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"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." — Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying |
Not the life others expected of me. That phrase lands differently when you hold it next to the four thousand weeks. The expected life is the script — the frame that most of Generation X, my generation, received and followed without much examination. Go to a good school. Graduate. Get a stable job. Marry. Have children. Retire. Die. Each step was the obvious next step. The script was so complete that questioning it felt less like wisdom and more like ingratitude or confusion.
We filled the dots. We just did not always choose what went in them.
Regret is not a failure of character. It is information about the gap between the life you lived and the life you actually wanted. Most people experience it as a weight — something to be avoided, suppressed, reframed away. But if you look at it differently, regret is one of the most honest signals available to you. It tells you what mattered. Not what you were told should matter. What actually did.
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Generation Z gets a lot of criticism for not following the script. Job hopping, prioritising experience over security, questioning whether the corporate ladder was ever worth climbing. From a Generation X perspective, trained to find stability in the frame, this can look like immaturity or entitlement.
I am less sure about that than I used to be. What I observe in the younger generation is something closer to a different relationship with the dots. They seem to understand — perhaps because they grew up watching their parents follow the script and arrive somewhere complicated — that the dots are limited and the frame is not mandatory. They are questioning which dots matter before filling them in. That is not immaturity. That might be the right order of operations.
The Generation X failure was not working hard or building things. It was accepting the frame as given and optimising inside it without first asking whether the frame was pointing in the right direction. We were excellent at filling the dots. Less good at choosing what went in them.
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I do not have a productivity recommendation to offer. No system for filling your remaining weeks more efficiently. Burkeman's whole point is that the efficiency framing is the wrong response to finitude.
What I have instead is the image of the military grid. The dots remaining, visible and countable. The question is not how to fill them faster or more completely. It is what actually deserves to be in them — not what the script says, not what is expected, not what you have always done because it was the next logical step.
Sit with that for a moment. Not to be morbid. To be honest.
The dots are limited. Move accordingly.
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This week's insight Four thousand weeks. Most of the counting is already done. The question is not how to fill what remains more efficiently. It is what actually deserves to be in the dots — not what the script says, not what was expected, not what you have always done because it was next. Regret is information about the gap between the life you lived and the one you actually wanted. Read it honestly. Then move accordingly. |
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