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July 19 - August 20, 2025
For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second-guessing yourself until you get there.
Moreover, as you struggle to handle everything, your days begin to fill with less important tasks – because your belief that there must be a way to do it all means you flinch from making difficult decisions about what’s truly worth your limited time.
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.
The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation.
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 just means you’ll always be vulnerable to unforeseen disasters or distressing emotions, and that you’ll never have more than partial influence over how your time unfolds, no matter what YouTubers in their early twenties with no kids might have to say about the ideal morning routine.
offers a shift in perspective, a changed understanding from which different actions can follow. But shifts in perspective fade depressingly quickly: for a few days, everything seems different; but then the overwhelming momentum of the usual way of doing things reasserts itself once more.
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.
Maybe it’s true that you married the wrong person, or that you need years of therapy – yet it’s also just a fact that two flawed and finite humans, living and maturing together, will inevitably push each other’s buttons, triggering their buried issues. (It’s the ones who claim never to have experienced anything of the sort that you should wonder about.)
There are no guarantees – except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.
The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system
Something you do not solely to become a better sort of person – though it may have that effect, too – but because whatever you’re bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself.
The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
You need only be willing to pay the price of relaxing in such circumstances, which is a less-than-pristine home.
(It’s a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I’ve noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to make it yourself. But unless it’s you who’s underprivileged, that’s an alibi, not an argument.) It was a central insight of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in the ‘bad faith’ of believing yourself trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of your freedom.
Use your time in a worthwhile manner, I mean. Find ways to get around to what matters most. None of it’s compulsory. You have my permission not to bother.
Clearly, the mere existence of something readable creates no obligation to read it
it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all. (This attitude prompts some people to develop complicated systems for taking notes on
everything they read, which turns readinginto a chore, which then perversely leads to their not reading books they’d otherwise enjoy or benefit from, becauseterm benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility...
Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.
Their motives were generally good, so it seems a little churlish to point out that this behavior in no way makes the world a better place.
It used to be said about certain horrifying news events that ‘if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.’ But that’s a relic of a time when people had attention to spare, and when it wasn’t in the vested interests of media outlets to stoke as much outrage as possible. In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.
‘What is anxiety? It is the next day. With whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a powerless nothing if you yourself do not give it your strength.’
The trouble is that today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not.
After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future.
But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later.
for. In other words: to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in the confusing morass of your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.
At which point we make the error of assuming that a new endeavor might be free of such imperfections. Really, of course, what makes the new endeavor more appealing is just that we’re seeing it at a mental distance; we fail to realize, in the words of the psychology writer Jude King, that ‘every worthwhile goal is supposed to feel hard, unglamorous, unsexy,’ at least for some of the time you’re actually putting in the work.
And yet, in reality, repeatedly starting but rarely finishing things, or finishing them only under duress, is a recipe for misery.
People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it,’ Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’
As you get into the swing of this, completion ceases to be a matter of occasional, stress-filled crescendos of effort, and your days instead involve a low-key process of moving small, clearly defined packages of work across your desk and out the door. Each ending provides an energy-boost for the next.
‘Going was dying, and staying was dying. When we get to junctures like that, we had better choose the dying that enlarges rather than the one that keeps us stuck.’
Jung had recognized that resuming his studies was the ‘essential life task’ that faced him. His character was being tested – and he understood that if he was going to move forward into his life, instead of avoiding it, it was time to get down to work.
The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’
In the words of another Jungian, James Hollis, it may be the kind of endeavor that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy.
This helps distinguish the idea of a life task from certain popular notions of ‘destiny’ or ‘calling,’ which can leave people feeling as though there’s something they’re meant to be doing with their lives, but that their life circumstances make it impossible. That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are.
It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.
It’s ironic that this is known, in self-help circles, as ‘remaining in your comfort zone,’ because there’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, it entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort – an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn’t – as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety.
But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.
We want a rule to shoulder the burden of living on our behalf.
Benedict apparently understood that the point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.
The first is to try – to whatever degree your situation permits – to ringfence a three- or four-hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally important second part is not to worry about imposing much order on the rest of the day: to accept that your other hours will probably be characterized by the usual fragmentary chaos of life.
But regardless of context, you can choose not to psychologically collaborate with that culture.
Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.
I’m not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.’
There’s definitely some merit in this approach: it helps drain the drama from certain activities, especially those we intimidatingly label ‘creative,’ making it easier to get over yourself and take action.
Following pleasure’s lead, she had a more productive day, completing the tasks she usually yelled at herself to do, ‘only this time, it seemed effortless. I had such a light heart.’ Which makes sense, on reflection, because when you do what you feel like doing, you get to use your desires as fuel for action, rather than constantly diverting energy and attention to overcoming them.
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.
There’s no prize for failing to spend your time as you wish, to whatever extent you’re able, out of a misplaced sense of solidarity with those who cannot.
Self-indulgent? If anything, it’s constantly berating yourself that’s the self-indulgent path, reflecting the inner taskmaster’s hubristic belief that he or she could bully you into doing anything, merely by shouting loudly enough. Facing up to reality – as finite humans must – means facing up to the reality of your moods, desires, and interests, too. This is why it takes courage to ask yourself the question that I suspect all those gurus promoting the ‘warrior mindset’ and ‘mental toughness’ are too frightened to
