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

by Oliver Burkeman

After that – once you’re staring reality in the face – you can take action not in the tense hope that your actions might be leading you towards some future utopia of perfect productivity, but simply because they’re worth doing.

It’s easy to believe that if you let yourself do what you want, you might spend the day scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram. But often the truth is that ‘scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram’ is what happens after you’ve told yourself you can’t do what you want, because you can’t afford to or don’t deserve to – and you grow so resentful or annoyed by whatever you try to force yourself to do instead that you reach for your phone as a distraction.

Looking at things from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn’t the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.

From this perspective, it makes no sense to judge your activities by the unreachable standards of a god, nor to fault yourself for having only a minuscule impact on the whole. There’s no reason to see ‘getting on top of things’ as the target of your endeavors in the first place – and still less to imagine that you might manage to obtain a sense of security regarding the crises engulfing the planet, which will doubtless continue to engulf it long after you’re gone. Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself.