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

by Oliver Burkeman

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved. In short: it’s about what changes once you grasp that life as a limited human being – in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities – isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve.

a different way of taking action in the world, which I call ‘imperfectionism’ – a freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you’ll finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.

The thread that runs through all these, though, is the idea that there exists some way of being in the world, some way of mastering the situation of being a human in the twenty-first century, that you have yet to discover. And that you won’t be able to relax into your life until you do.

The essential trouble, as Rosa tells it, is that the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable – and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control. And so we experience the world as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer. We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes, defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events. (Even if we congratulate ourselves on, say, prioritizing friendship over making money, we may still approach it in the spirit of optimization, pushing ourselves to make more friends, or to do better at keeping in touch with them – that is, to try to exert more control over our social lives.) The culture reinforces this doctrine of control in multiple ways. Advances in technology always seem on the cusp of permitting you to tame your workload at last – at the time of writing, virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence are what’s about to do it – while the hyper-competitive economy makes it feel ever more essential to do so, just to keep your head above water.

Yet everyday experience, along with centuries of philosophical reflection, attests to the fact that a fulfilling and accomplished life isn’t a matter of exerting ever more control. It’s not about making things more predictable and secure, until you can finally relax. A football match is exciting because you don’t know who’ll win; a field of intellectual study is absorbing because you don’t yet have a handle on it all. The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. To be delighted by another person, or moved by a landscape or a work of art, requires not being in full control. At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact – just without the background agenda of achieving full control. Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organize the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds.

It’s hardly surprising that so many of us spend so much of our lives attempting to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over a reality that can otherwise seem so unmanageable and overwhelming. How else are you supposed to handle all those to-dos, pursue a few cherished ambitions, take a stab at being a decent parent or partner, and do your bit as a citizen of a world in crisis? But it doesn’t work. Life edges ever closer to being a dull, solitary, and often infu...

‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’ – EUGENE GENDLIN

The most liberating and empowering and productive step you can take, if you want to spend more of your time on the planet doing what matters to you, is to grasp the sense in which life as a finite human being – with limited time, and limited control over that time – is really much worse than you think. Completely beyond hope, in fact. You know that cloud of melancholy that sometimes descends – when you’re awake in the dark at three in the morning, perhaps, or towards the end of a frazzled Thursday at work – when it seems as though the life you’d envisaged for yourself might never come to fruition after all? The magic begins when you understand that it definitely won’t come to fruition.

Consider – just to begin with – the familiar modern predicament of feeling overwhelmed by an extremely long to-do list. You think the problem is that you have far too many things to do, and insufficient time in which to do them, so that your only hope is to manage your time with amazing efficiency, summon extraordinary reserves of energy, block out all distractions, and somehow power through to the end. In fact, your situation is worse than you think – because the truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.

But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are. Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck in to what you actually can do. It’s not that life becomes instantly effortless: depending on your situation, there might be serious repercussions to letting certain tasks fall by the wayside. But if doing everything that’s demanded of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, is genuinely impossible, then, well, it’s impossible, and facing the truth can only help. 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.

The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. Metaphorically speaking, lightening someone’s burden means encouraging them to believe that, with sufficient effort, their struggles might be overcome: that they might indeed find a way to feel like they’re doing enough, or that they’re competent enough, or that relationships are a piece of cake, and so on. Kennett’s insight was that it can often be kinder and more effective to make their burden heavier – to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling. And then? Then you get to relax. But you also get to accomplish more, and to enjoy yourself more in the process, because you’re no longer so busy denying the reality of your predicament, consciously or otherwise. This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as ‘playing in the ruins.’