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Email is the classic example: vowing to address the deluge, you start replying more promptly, triggering more replies, many of which you’ll need to reply to; plus, you acquire a reputation for being unusually responsive on email, so more people consider it worthwhile to email you in the first place.
(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.)
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.
It’s because being a finite human just means never achieving the sort of control or security on which many of us feel our sanity depends. It just means that the list of worthwhile things you could in principle do with your time will always be vastly longer than the list of things for which you’ll have time. 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.
That’s what makes change last, in my experience: real feedback, from doing things differently in real life.
