NewPhilosopher“How can you not even know if your cat
is alive or dead, Mr Schrödinger?”philosophical thought, expressed above
all in the work of Martin Heidegger,
living in denial of your limited time
is a recipe for a meaningless and in-
authentic life. This is for essentially
the same reason that eternal life itself
would be so undesirable: when you
make decisions as if you had all the
time in the world, you fail to grasp
what’s at stake. So you naturally grav-
itate toward trivial entertainments
over daunting but meaningful tasks,
and never really leap wholeheartedly
into any experience at all.
There’s a risk that this talk of
meaning, death, and authenticity
might sound utterly removed from
everyday life. But the subtle urge to
deny our finitude plays out in nu-
merous mundane ways, with serious
consequences. Take busyness: when
we’re feeling overwhelmed, most of
us respond by seeking ways to get
more done. (That’s also the promise of
most productivity advice, and all those
smartphone apps designed to optimise
your workday, your workout, even your
sleep: that you might, with enough ef-
ficiency and self-discipline, succeed at
fitting in everything.) The problem of
busyness only arises in the first place,
of course, because our time is limited.
But by responding in this fashion,
we’re investing our hopes in the idea
that we might be able to eliminate the
need for hard choices – to avoid the
opportunity costs that our finitude
makes inevitable.
In the short term, this is comfort-
ing; avoiding hard choices is pleasant.
But in the long term, it’s a disaster:
the more you can convince yourself
there’ll be enough time for every-
thing, the less you’ll feel obliged to
ask if you’re spending your time in the
best way possible, right now. When-
ever you encounter some new poten-
tial item for your to-do list, you’ll be
strongly biased in favour of accept-
ing it, because you’ll assume you need
sacrifice nothing important to make
space for it. And since you rarely stop
to ask whether the new task is really
worth giving something else up for,
your days automatically begin to fill
not just with more tasks, but with less
and less meaningful ones.
I won’t pretend that I succeed, with
any great consistency, in living my
daily life with a conscious awareness
of my own finitude. But to the extent
that I manage it at all, the surprisingrevelation is that it isn’t anxiety-in-
ducing. On the contrary, it’s liberating.
To realise that you’ll never completely
‘get on top of ’ all your tasks, that your
ambitions will never be fulfilled in
their entirety, and that you can’t avoid
disappointing at least some people in
your life, all comes as a profound relief.
It means you can stop struggling to
achieve the impossible, and focus in-
stead on choosing the most important
tasks, realising the most important
ambitions, and investing in the rela-
tionships that mean the most.
“We each have two lives, and the
second begins when we realise we have
only one,” runs a wise observation, the
source of which I’ve never been able to
confirm. (It’s attributed on the inter-
net, in roughly equal measure, to Con-
fucius or the actor Tom Hiddleston.)
It’s not finitude that’s the problem,
it turns out, but resisting finitude – a
stance that inevitably turns life into a
race against time, a panicky struggle
to do everything, even though doing
everything was always unfeasible to
begin with. The solution is to drop the
resistance, to whatever extent you’re
able. Life’s too short to spend it wor-
rying that life’s too short.Life’s too short