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

by Oliver Burkeman

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.