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

by Oliver Burkeman

‘imperfectionism’

‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’

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

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.

nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act, and to experience resonance.

‘What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

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

see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.

‘playing in the ruins.’

Very well, then: here you are. Here we all

‘thrownness,’

(Don’t get distracted wondering what might be the best thing to do: that’s superyacht thinking, borne of the desire to feel certain you’re on the right path.)

all. So you just do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever manage to do it again. But

you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice.

Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore

up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society.

‘insecure overachievers’ start off as children raised to feel noticed and valued only when they’re excelling at things.

You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient. As

the Taoist writer Jason Gregory explains, expressing the same idea in a different and powerful way, we fall into the error of believing that we somehow don’t belong

to the world, and must therefore spend our lives trying to earn back the right to belong. But who could ever decide we don’t belong? The obvious truth is that we already do. This isn’t sentimentalism, just a hard-nosed statement of the facts. Look around: this is reality. It consists of a whole lot of atoms...

‘People today are in danger of drowning

‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.’

The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives – more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which

Erik Hagerman, profiled

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.

the way we’re hopelessly trapped in the present, confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and

peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there. This is deeply disturbing, because it means that we suffer from what the psychologist Robert Saltzman calls ‘total vulnerability to events.’

What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross

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.’

Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’

that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can.

our focus, this week, is on the art of taking imperfect action. And I know of no better way to start doing that – especially when you’re mired in procrastination, or unable to figure out your next move – than to go looking for some kind of decision you could make. And then make it.

‘Deliverables’

‘Work is done, then forgotten,’

‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security.

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.

just go to the shed.

Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them.

Asking yourself what it would actually entail to befriend the gnawing rats in your life is an act requiring real courage – more courage, perhaps, than the standard confrontational approach, which feels

‘dailyish’

The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.

‘Beyond the mountains, more mountains.’

grappling with all the somethings is what life is fundamentally about. It truly is always something, even if most of the time, thankfully, it’s something less frightening than a cancer diagnosis.

The trick is learning to appreciate this situation for the cosmic joke, and the daily reality, that it is.

The unfortunate consequence is that we experience our ordinary problems – the bills to pay, the minor conflicts to resolve, each little impediment that stands between us and realizing our goals – as doubly problematic. First, there’s the problem itself. But then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearning to feel perfectly secure and in control. So we spend our lives leaning into the

But to face no problems at all would leave you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.

But it’s equally true that often the real challenge, in building an accomplished and absorbing life, is learning to let go. Not making things happen, through willpower or effort, but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead – which is our focus this week.

Being able to achieve maximum

economy of ass is an important adult skill.’