Doors Are Always Closing

Back in 2022, I read a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

I really enjoyed it. It’s basically a study of the philosophy of “time management”, and a harsh critique of the sigma grindset productivity self-help trend. Burkeman essentially argues that it will bring more anxiety and misery to try to perfectly optimize your life and turn yourself into a finely-tuned machine. Instead, you should come to terms with your own limits and with the natural flowing of time.

There’s one particular part that really stuck with me. In it, Burkeman notes how people struggle with decision-making because of a feeling of “doors closing.” Every opportunity you don’t take, whether it’s for career or enjoyment, feels like a door closing in front of you. You’ll never get to go through it again. Therefore, people agonize over the decision. Some people rush into a decision without thinking it through. Other people hesitate forever, worried they’ll make the wrong choice or do something suboptimally.

Essentially, people agonize over how they spend their time when they feel like they’re presented with a choice. The perfectly-optimized productivity nut may feel that, by pushing themselves to the limit, they’ll never miss one of those closing doors.

But Burkeman argues that this is the wrong way to visualize your life.

Instead of viewing life as a series of binary choices, where it feels like one door is closing, or one door is opening, he asserts that we should remember that hundreds, if not thousands, of doors are opening and closing at all times. Every day, every hour that goes by is a chunk of time that you’ll never get back. It’s also a chunk of time that you could have used for doing something else, a chunk you could have spent in a more “optimized” or “fun” or “advantageous” way.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed and hopeless at this idea, it’s something that we should let wash over us. It’s okay. Because a thousand doors close at the same time as another thousand doors open. Yes, some decisions are more major than others, and require careful planning. But it’s over-dramatic and un-helpful to think of each door closing like it’s a personal failure that could somehow be prevented. It’s un-helpful to think of each of these doors as some sort of “branching timeline” where our life could’ve been totally different, and we have to jump through a door when it’s presented to us.

We don’t have the ability to shove our foot into any of these doors, or to stop the flow of time. It’s worth keeping that mind, but also not worth letting it paralyze us with indecisiveness.

An example that he illustrates is the idea of someone who avoids engaging in deep personal relationships (like a romantic relationship) out of fear that they haven’t found the perfect person, or that it will be a waste of years of their life if they eventually break up. But the person who waits for years on dating apps to make a choice isn’t necessarily “saving years of time”, they’re just spending those years in a different way.

It’s not right or wrong, it’s just different. Either way, time is being spent. You’ve just made a choice to spend it differently. Or, if you refuse to make a choice, the choice is made for you by default.

Obviously, your mileage may vary, but this way of thinking really works for me. Instead of picking a side of either extreme (either “I must perfectly optimize my time for productivity and seize every opportunity that crosses my path” or “I should sit back and let life pass me by instead of worrying”), it helps me stay grounded. It reminds me that dozens and dozens of doors open and close as soon as I wake up each day. It’s something to be aware of, but not necessarily daunted by.

I just need to pick which ones to walk through.