Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

by Oliver Burkeman

My favorite example here concerns a former sneaker-firm executive and dedicated Trump opponent named Erik Hagerman, profiled in the New York Times in 2018, where he was presented as a kind of anti-Simone Weil: instead of trying to absorb the whole world’s pain, he’d opted to live as if the upheavals in American public life weren’t happening at all. He consumed no news whatsoever, and when he left his home in rural Ohio to get coffee and a scone from his local café, he wore headphones playing white noise, so he couldn’t hear fellow customers talking politics. Unsurprisingly, conservative news outlets condemned him as a whining liberal, while progressive ones labelled him a monster of privilege. One journalist disparaged Hagerman as ‘the most selfish person in America,’ and further fumed: ‘Not everyone gets to be ignorant. People whose families are being torn apart by [US immigration policy] don’t get to be ignorant. People who are affected by gun violence don’t get to be ignorant.’

Hagerman