[From Pixabay]
Good morning,
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is premised on the fact that our lifespan is around 4,000 weeks, and on a few things all of us have experienced. A Burkeman writes in the introduction: “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.’”
Given this, the book has some practical tips to offer, and one of them is to serialise our work—just do one thing at a time.
He writes: “Focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all at once, but you’ll make little progress that way; instead, train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing. Soon, the satisfaction of completing important projects will make the anxiety seem worthwhile—and since you’ll be finishing more and more of them, you’ll have less to feel anxious about anyway. Naturally, it won’t be possible to postpone absolutely everything—you can’t stop paying the bills, or answering email, or taking the kids to school—but this approach will ensure that the only tasks you don’t postpone, while addressing your current handful of big projects, are the truly essential ones, rather than those you’re dipping into solely to quell your anxiety.”
Have a great day and week ahead.
Fighting ableism
In the latest edition of Ground Realities, Ipsita Bandyopadhyay, Himal Belwal and Piyul Mukherjee from Quipper Research trace the diverse and inspiring trajectories of three women as they navigate the corporate world while living with a disability, as well as key members of the Youth4Jobs (YFJ) team who have been facilitating many such journeys.
Here’s a short extract from the piece. It’s the story of 30-year-old Y. Sasikala, a customer service executive who is originally from Lepakshi, Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh and now lives with her husband and in-laws in Chittoor. She was born with dwarfism, a genetic condition that doesn’t let her grow beyond 3.5 feet. Ipsita, Himal and Piyul write:
“Though she was already training in shot put and discus throw, her heart was in badminton. She’d been a good sportswoman in school but lack of opportunities for para sports in her home state Andhra Pradesh left her in the lurch. While professional sportspersons train hard their entire teenage years, she was battling her family’s lack of confidence in her abilities and then, mind-numbing bureaucracy.
“‘I kept trying to crack government exams through the para sports quota but in our area, there is no stipend or incentive for para sports persons,’ she recalls. ‘Through this time I had earned a national bronze medal in badminton and a state gold medal in discus throw and shot put but still, there was no provision for me because of a policy loophole. Any national champion receives a stipend from the government but para sports do not.’ She recalls her despair during this time when she was trying to make an income and shift to her favourite sport.
“An abject irony in the year that India celebrated 19 gold medals at the Paralympics in Tokyo.
“The pandemic changed everything. She was hitting 30 and knew she was running out of time if she were to fulfil her goal of becoming a para sports champion.”
Dig deeper
The limits of life
Once upon a time, researchers believed, as the medical sciences make progress, they would be able to work out ways to increase human lifespans. But Michael Eisenstein writes in Nature that the scientific community is now split down the middle and a school of thought, after looking at the data, is arguing, this may not be possible.
“One of the first efforts to map the boundaries of human lifespan came from the British mathematician and actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825. His analysis of demographic records demonstrated that after a person’s late twenties, their risk of dying increased at an exponential rate year after year—suggesting that there is a horizon where that risk finally reaches 100%.
“‘Gompertz speculated that this could be something like Newton’s law of gravity,’ says Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist and gerontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. Almost 200 years later, Gompertz’s work remains influential. His model still seems to accurately map the pattern of age-related mortality for a sizeable portion of the human lifespan, even though medical advances have shifted the timing somewhat.
“In 1996, for example, a mathematical analysis by Caleb Finch and Malcolm Pike at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles used the Gompertz model to estimate a maximum human lifespan of around 120 years—a reasonable ceiling, given that only one person had reached that age.
“However, the authors also speculated that medical advances in controlling senescence and treating chronic disease could theoretically bend the curve and make that limit a routine life expectancy in the future.”
Dig deeper
Facing truth
(Via WhatsApp)
Found anything interesting and noteworthy? Send it to us and we will share it through this newsletter.
And if you missed previous editions of this newsletter, they’re all archived here.
Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
(Note: Founding Fuel may earn commissions for purchases made through the Amazon affiliate links in this article.)
