I’m not a religious guy but I find a lot of wisdom in the words of the serenity prayer,
‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’
In just a few words, it encapsulates a vital message about constraints that so many of us (myself included) are not great at living in accordance with. There are those very real constraints, namely time and control, that we ought to be accepting and yet we try our best to ignore or override. And there are those more changeable constraints, mostly the host of mental distortions about who we are and what we’re capable of, that we more readily accept, despite knowing that our mind is a poor reflection of the truth.
So we’re not all living a life in accordance with those words, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth striving for. A life that balanced acceptance and change would be a life well lived in my view. So here we are, trying to find the wisdom to spot the difference.
Time is the scariest constraint of all to embrace. It means facing up to the truth that one day we’ll die. Sounds morbid I know, but in his book ‘Four Thousand Weeks. Time management for mortals,’ Oliver Burkeman makes a compelling case for a more constraint-embracing way of living which breaks the collective self-delusion that we can simply continue to make better and better use of our time.
Of course technological advancements can shift the goalposts of what is possible. If the Silicon Valley guys injecting their children’s blood magically discover the elixir of life, then perhaps some of us will live meaningfully longer. And with the advent of AI, what one person can meaningfully get done will increase. But whether we live to 80 or 150; and whether we can get two tasks done in a day or ten, we’re still faced with the same dilemmas. Life will never be truly long enough to do it all. And relentlessly pursuing productivity is a game that has no end - we’re like a dog chasing its tail.
So embracing the constraint of time, frames things differently. Rather than being a moment of despair, I think it plays an important role in being more purposeful with our lives. The Confucian quote, ‘We all have two lives and the second begins when we realize we only have one,’ rings true for me here. When we embrace the constraint of time, I think that’s when we start to live this second life, with a different emphasis to the first:
We meaningfully prioritise
We stop chasing our tail on productivity and face the facts of prioritisation. We make the tough choices about how we’re going to spend our time, and importantly, how we’re not going to spend it.
We’re reminded to try to live in the present
So much of our life is lived in a manner that projects into the future, and yet the only reality we ever have is the present. When the future arrives, it will do so in the form of the present. Embracing the constraints of time serves as an important reminder that if we’re not careful, we’ll spend an entire lifetime living for the future, which will never arrive.
‘People are like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own collars. They are never here. They never get there. They are never alive.’ — Alan Watts
If you live to 80 years old, this is what your life in weeks looks like on a chart.
As with time, I believe control is something that we have far less of than we think. But by contrast, the cutoff is less easily defined.