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

by Oliver Burkeman

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 truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible. But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are.