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

by Oliver Burkeman

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

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.

‘If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house. “Well, I was lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!”’ – MITCH HEDBERG

with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. (‘Our suffering,’ as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, ‘is believing there’s a way out.’)

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.

appreciate, insisting that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. 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.

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.