I’m reading Oliver Burkeman’s much-recommended Four Thousand Weeks and I’m not really sure about it. It’s highly relevant to me as I’m exactly the kind of person he often uses as an example of how not to live – always trying and failing to get more done, never realising how futile it all is.
But I think he might be wrong. I’m not very far in, so I need to give it some time, but if his main point is that life is finite and that’s why you should stop trying so hard to ‘fit it all in’, then I think that a) that’s a bit predictable and b) isn’t trying better than not even trying? However, as above, I’ve read about three chapters so I’m not sure what revelations may await.
I’m once again on a big ‘fix my life’ drive which is why I’m reading this book. I’m planning to finally figure it all out. Or at least have a good idea of what the sources of my bad moods and stress are. I’d like to live constantly in a good mood and stress-free – surely not so very much to ask – but I’ll settle for an extra measure of self-knowledge.
There’s a Large Language Model living in my house. He’s only been ingesting data for three years and the calibration needs some more work. That’s why it keeps spitting out things like ‘my teeth think they’re fishes too’, ‘I’m going to start wearing pants when it’s in general’ (a follow-up question reveals that ‘in general is what you can see over the tops of houses’) and ‘when the trains stop, that’s low tide’. Let me know if you’d like to invest in the development of ChatGPToddler.
[…] The house project has progressed to a point where we have had an offer accepted on a house in Woolwich (one of the areas with the cheapest square footage according to my research), and are working on all the millions of pieces of paperwork, checks etc that have to get done before we can even start seriously thinking about moving. I’ve been making copious use of a couple of phrases that stuck with me from reading Four Thousand Weeks: […]