Many of us experience the anxiety that we are wasting our lives on our current path and that we could be having fuller experiences with our 4,000 weeks. Burkeman attests that this is positive, because we are owning up to the fact that fulfilment cannot be deferred until the future. We can ask ourselves the difficult but important question of what it means to spend our time in a manner that makes it feel as though it truly counts.

We faced this question on a collective level during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many people discovered the value of neighborliness, using their time and resources to go out of their way to help those who lived around them. The reason why they neglected to do this before the pandemic was not because they did not care about other people but because they felt they did not have the time. Now, in the context of a global health crisis, they were making time and there was a sense that the world could change if enough people wanted it to.

We often overestimate the significance of our lifetime in the universe, partly as an evolutionary mechanism that spurs us on to survive and reproduce.