Picked up a philosophical musings-type book in a bookstore the other day. I believe the colorful, mountainy cover is what got me!

Very similar to the last unique book review I wrote for SN (#1073289)

Also the title... So I spent a flight + a few readings-before-bedtime engaging in Mr. Burkeman's musings.

I think about the extremely limited time we have, especially after having just squandered some time in a manner the overarching average of "me"s across time wouldn't be happy with.

Burkeman elaborates that exact idea, and then sort of loses the plot a bit. Wanders around the theme, interviews some random wackies, accounts anecdotes from his own life.

Parkinson's Law: a concept everyone knows, coined in 1955: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" = "what needs doing" is just murky enough that it can expand to fill all the time there is. Feeling stressed and short on time isn't a constant ("if I only had more time...") but a consequence of being.

There was a nice ~econ concept there that Burkeman failed to elaborate on: to decide stems from a Latin word meaning "to cut off." That's a beautiful linguistic rendition of the economic concept of opportunity cost. When you decide to do one thing, you cut off the opportunity to do all the others

There are some dating notions in there that hit hard, the illusion of expanded choice undermined by the fact that everyone else's opportunities and choice expand as well:

No, it's not just technology's fault that you're so often distracted... it's that paying attention is hard... "They're just places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation" (e.g, #1025290)

I liked this idea of plans for the future, too, and the political-economy notion of impossibility of binding your future self:

I don't have anything major to say about this typical airport-bookstore type of product. Some interesting tidbits, worth looking through, nothing world-shattering.