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October 12 - November 7, 2025
‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’
The world feels dead; and for all our efforts to get more done, we find ourselves somehow less able to bring about the results we were seeking.
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.
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.
When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. And when you stop making your sanity or self-worth dependent on first reaching a state of control that humans don’t get to experience, you’re able to start feeling sane and enjoying life now, which is the only time it ever is.
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 or habit or routine.
you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
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.
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.
The real trouble, according to the prominent techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn’t information overload but ‘filter failure.’
Most of the long-term 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, from which good work and good ideas will later flow.
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.
Firstly, we can’t possibly think of every challenge we might end up facing. Secondly, even if we could, the solace we crave could only come from knowing we’d made it safely over the bridges in question – which we can’t ever know until we’ve actually crossed them.
Thus, as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.’
The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about it.
Benedict apparently understood that the point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.
‘problem’ is just the word we apply to any situation in which we confront the limits of our capacity to control how things unfold.
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.
It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else.
What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.
‘if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.’
On the other hand, there’s no virtue in accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows that would be delicious were you ever to let yourself consume one. At some point, in order to experience the benefits of having received any in the first place, you’re going to have to eat a damn marshmallow.
Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in the impression your home or lawn makes.
Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.
So there need be no shame in the feeling that you don’t yet fully understand the field you work in, or how to date, or be in a relationship, or be a parent.
The idea that things only count if they count on the vastest scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude: accepting that they might count only transiently, or locally, requires us to face our limitations and our mortality.
And so to avoid that unpleasantness, as the philosopher Iddo Landau has explained, we gravitate towards an unnecessarily grandiose standard of what matters – then get demoralized when our achievements don’t make the grade.
‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’
