4,000 Weeks: The Unending Fear of Running Out of Time and How Leisure Helps Me Fight It
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Did you know that people on average only live for approximately 4,000 weeks? That’s somewhere between 76 and 79 years. I read Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals three or so years ago and honestly the only thing I remember is the title. That 4,000 is etched into my mind. To think that we on average only get 4,000 weeks to experience and live our entire lives seems utterly insane. Okay maybe some of us can go as far as 5,735.71 weeks (110 years) but that’s about it, at least for now.
My fear of running out of time started when I was in my early teens. Maybe my sophomore year in high school. I became painfully aware of how little time we get on this planet. Reading tome after tome of Eastern European literature probably didn’t help my case or my unexplainable obsession with Kafka’s letters.
Additionally, growing up in an Eastern European/Balkan household meant being constantly reminded of how fast time moves. My parents constantly repeated phrases such as “Time will only start moving faster the older you get,” “40 is around the corner,” “You won’t have enough time,” “Don’t waste your time doing that.” Well you get the point.
We also had to make sure to spend our time, the very little and precious time we all get, wisely (or let’s be honest productively). This meant we had to maximize every minute of every day. This is when my fear of wasting time kicked in as well, and I started harboring feelings of guilt anytime I perceived what I did with my time as wasteful or not good enough. I felt so much guilt about wasting my precious and very limited commodity. This caused me to be incredibly hard on myself and nearly took away my ability to give myself permission to enjoy my free time or make room in my life for leisurely activities. Spending time on anything that could be thought of as a waste of time instantly gave me anxiety. This of course included doing things that are considered unproductive or choosing to spend my time NOT working towards something deemed “important”. By the way, doing things for yourself is not deemed important in Eastern Europe.
My first wave of depressive episodes coincided with this realization, everything got brushed off as teenage angst or growing pains. My parents didn’t care to understand or listen to the existential dread that was pouring out of me. So I decided to shut the fuck up and have those conversations or thoughts with myself.
This looming fear of not having enough time stayed with me till this day. Its power has gotten weaker as a result of lots, and I mean lots, of weekly trauma informed therapy. I got better at challenging the thoughts that motivated this fear, but it’s not dead, it still has a pulse and it does have a tendency to flare up from time to time especially around big milestones such as Birthdays and New Year.
With 2025 just around the corner, I can’t help but think how many of us are struggling with similar thoughts and fears of running out of time. Lately when I see 2025 in print all I think about is that’s 25 years away from 2000. 25 fucking years, that’s roughly 1,304.46 weeks. How! How did so much time pass already?
It really bugs me that these feelings of fear still have such a hold on me. I did learn this year that my fear of running out of time is made worse when my time is spent prioritizing other people’s needs or doing things that I don’t perceive as important or meaningful. Unfortunately, the majority of my teens, twenties, and thirties were spent prioritizing other people’s needs and expectations of me. I am working very hard to make sure that I keep my needs and desires front and center.
Earlier this year I wrote about how little time I’ve had these past 10 to 15 years for leisure or leisurely activities; flipping through books, wondering through libraries and archives, researching or going down random rabbit holes, daydreaming, organizing PDFs, creating, making lists, curating, playing (yes even RPGs), and of course reading.
I made it a point this year to make more time for leisure in my life. It didn’t happen until October of this year, but I did start to slow down and prioritize my needs. I noticed a shift in the way I perceived and experienced time. Things slowed down. Most of my life has felt like it’s on x2 speed. But during those moments of rest and calmness everything feels slower. The days feel longer, the hours feel longer, the minutes feel longer, down to the seconds.
I noticed during one of my recent flash EMDR sessions that as I progressively felt calmer throughout the session, time and the world around me slowed way down. It was such a noticeable difference. It is as if I could feel the planet itself slowing down.
Looking back on my teenage years, my twenties, and the majority of my thirties, 99% of the time I did not feel calm. Not one little bit. My anxiety and stress as well as living in survival mode were my opus operandi. It is not until this year that I have started to feel and notice a real sense of calm—while still having a fair share of panic attacks, as I said, it is a work in progress.
With everyone talking about resolutions and setting goals for 2025, I want to say just one thing. Slow the fuck down. Seriously. Calmate. What’s the point of meeting your productivity goals if they are feeding feelings of anxiety, not being enough, and frustration. Until we learn how to experience calmness, it is very difficult to not let life just pass us by. This is further exacerbated by focusing on achieving one thing after the next without moments of real rest.
For me, knowing that I only have about 4,000 weeks, only 76 summers, winters, falls, and springs, about 920 months to live “use to” make me want to throw up like physically run to the toilet and puke my guts out. Followed by a wave of panic hitting me almost like a strike of lighting. My heart starting to race as did my thoughts and inability to breathe.
But then it all passes. These days faster than ever before. I regain my equilibrium. I remind myself that my fear of not having enough time stems from unhealed generational trauma, developmental trauma, and my identities as a child and adult immigrant. My fears of maximizing time are not my own, they are my parents. My fear of running out of time is also theirs. As long as I get to spend the majority of my time in pursuit of leisure, I can die happy.
As long as I continue to focus on prioritizing my needs and values such as leisure and calmness, by calmness I mean time away from doing, especially doing that is connected to output, I will be fulfilled. Even typing the word output made my heart rate increase. I had an abusive boss while working at UT Austin who only cared about KPIs, ROIs, and output!
My entire life I was made to feel guilty about the things that I truly and solely cared about. I am finally able to embrace and erase those feelings of guilt and enjoy the moments of stillness that to me make my life worth living. How truly cruel it is to convince a person to feel guilt about things that bring them joy.
There are still plenty of things in my life that I have not been able to achieve such as becoming a full time writer, recipe developer, and researcher, but the things that I have not achieved are no longer the sources of how I feel about myself and the world. They are no longer the source or purpose of my existence. This approach caused me nothing but copious amounts of anxiety and stress. Instead, my focus is on what brings me the most joy out of life, and that my friends are leisurely acts.
I still have to remind myself every single day that everything comes second to my desire of maintaining a state of calm. As well as encouraging myself to prioritize leisurely activities that invite calmness into my life. Like eating a sandwich at my favorite deli with the love of my life or reorganizing folders and files on my computer with my 3 cats flanking me on the bed.
Wishing everyone a more leisurely New Year.
I understand this completely. I've been struck every since I saw something called the "Death Clock," an early internet countdown-to-death timer, as a child in the 1990s. I have nightmares about the apocalypse and "running out of time."
I know some think quotes are trite, but here are some that I repeat as mantra when I have these feelings. Maybe you'll find something in them, too, especially when trying to frame leisure as "productive:"
"There is more to life than increasing its speed." ~Ghandi;
"The price of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it." ~Thoreau;
and on enriching life by relaxing--
"There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction." ~Kafka.
Good luck with your leisure "goal!" Happy New Year. :)
Beautiful essay. There is a season for it all and slowing down to enjoy, observe and create is a sign of faith. It is also a learned experience. I learned it and realized that the QUIET of the moments is when we hear the most valuable sounds, that of the heart and soul. Youth is taught to hurry but age has taught many of us how to respect time as teacher and gift. You will be one of those that will know this.