book full title:
Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
Bookshop link

I've been on the mailing list of Oliver Burkeman's newsletter ("The Imperfectionist") for quite a while now and think it's pretty good. But also I have ADHD and a lot of stuff drops out of my head pretty much immediately.

These notes are really just paraphrasing in the end, but the hope is that making myself engage a bit more with it means I'll internalize some more of it. I get to read more and it's hashtag-Content for the website. Win-win, clearly.

Intro

The overall premise of the book is that, as mere mortals, we will never truly be able to get our lives as under control as we wish them to be (or as self-help books insist we can). There will never be a mythical time where everything else is out of the way and we can finally focus on the stuff we want, and only by accepting as such can effort be truly put towards the things we are otherwise constantly waiting/preparing to do. We are finite beings.

In the intro he notes "the efficiency trap", where (using email as an example) by getting faster at replying to emails, you simply receive more emails and become known for prompt replies, causing yet more emails, and the flawed belief that you can always stay on top of all your emails with a bit more effort ends up taking up even more time and energy.

Viewing existence as something to be conquered, optimized, or brought under control means you're cursing yourself to always feel overwhelmed, and the things you want to do once you're "stable" will simply never happen. Life becomes "an infuriating chore, something to be endured". Only by accepting you will have regrets, disappoint people, and never live up to the ideal, can you start to actually enjoy life.

The format is meant to be "one chapter a day" over the eponymous four weeks, with broad weekly categories.

Week One: Being Finite

Day 1, "It's worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat"

Burkeman asserts that the best way to start doing what matters to you is to understand that you will never live up to your dreams in the scant limited time you have on Earth. People think that they can overcome their to-do lists by summoning willpower and being efficient, but the to-do list is infinite and, as finite beings, it is literally impossible for us to check every box.

(He does note that depending on your position there might be serious consequences to not fulfilling specific tasks.)

He repeats the chapter title: everything is worse than you think. You will always be busy. You will always have impostor syndrome. Your relationships will always be somewhat troubled. The sooner you accept this then the sooner you can stop spending all your energy trying to make things perfect and start spending it on how things actually are.

He puts it another way: you cannot have "control over life, or safety from life", because you are always in life. You cannot stop the plane from crashing because it has already crashed. All you can do is the best you can with what you have.

Day 2, "Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things"

Burkeman does not have a "system" that you can just follow and then things will work out. He says: to do things you must do them, it is that simple, but it is also one of the hardest things in the world.

He notes the "sneaky trap" of "becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing". Rather than simply writing, you spend all your time and energy "becoming a writer"; buying books, listening to podcasts, making it into a Project that becomes far too huge and daunting to reasonably do at the moment... so you put it off until you have more time and energy. What better way to procrastinate than to research and prepare?

chapter's eponymous metaphor:
To be human is to be in a kayak; you can steer and react in the present moment, but are otherwise largely at the mercy of the current and the rapids. You cannot choose your present circumstances. The false image of control in our minds is the superyacht, where we can daydream about being the captain and letting The System perfectly carry out our orders as we relax until we hit the destination.

The actionable advice is to figure out what is one thing to be done today that is good enough to simply do. He notes spending time wondering about what's best to do is to again be imagining the superyacht, while spending even two or three minutes proverbially kayaking forward is a more tangible and real action. It is reality and not fantasy.

Day 3, "You need only face the consequences: On paying the price"

Burkeman argues that while we feel like we simply cannot make certain choices, the fact of the matter is that we can but must then face the consequences. As finite human beings, all our choices have consequences in at minimum the form of that time not being used for something else. The idea you "must" do something means you have chosen to not pay the price of refusing, while deciding you "can't" do something means you chose not to pay the cost of doing it.

He notes the "elephant in the room" with this assertion: some consequences for some people are far more serious than others; you probably shouldn't do something that causes you physical harm or leaves you destitute. However, if we were to be truly honest with ourselves, we usually exaggerate potential consequences to avoid having to frame our actions as a deliberate choice. It's easier to swallow having "no options".

Quote:

"It's a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I've noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to make it yourself. But unless it's you who's underprivileged, that's an alibi, not an argument."

The idea essentially seems to be that by framing your actions in this way, you are claiming more agency over yourself, even if your actual actions don't change. You move from "having no choice" to "making a choice", and the latter fundamentally has more room for alternatives you may not have recognized before.

Day 4, "Against productivity debt: On the power of a 'done list'"

This chapter describes how many of us live as though we are in "productivity debt", which must be proverbially paid off across the day to justify our existence. We feel inherently inadequate if we do not hit certain arbitrary standards, the worst of which is "realizing your potential" because there is no way to measure such an abstract concept. Burkeman says to not combine material day-to-day obligations (paying rent, taking care of children, etc.) with this abstracted sense of obligation of paying off an existential debt.

Puritanical capitalist society has an obvious interest in keeping everyone feeling inadequate since then they buy things to make the feelings go away. So we constantly live in a state of anxiety and exhaustion, feeling guilty about doing "unproductive" things like hanging out with friends or, say, sleeping. And each new milestone causes the proverbial debt to gain more interest because you can't just settle, you must improve.

His method to combat the feeling of productivity debt is the "done list", which starts empty and includes the tasks you have completed each day, no matter how mundane. The idea is that instead of comparing our actions to what we could potentially do (thus dooming ourselves to feeling inadequate), the done list compares our output to having done literally nothing at all. Instead of "paying off debt", it's accumulating accomplishments. Plus it feels better to do something for its and your sake than because you feel like it must be done to pay your debt.

Day 5, "Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading"

As we all know, the internet bombards us with far more information than we can possibly process. There will always be more genuinely interesting stuff than we have time to absorb, no matter how efficient the algorithm is, or how fast we learn to speed-read, or how much we turn up the speed on podcasts.

Burkeman offers three pieces of advice on handling Unlimited Information:

• Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket
  • It's not a container that fills and must be emptied. It flows along, and you can choose when to pick something up or put it back in. There is no guilt in simply allowing the river to flow on its own.
• Resist the urge to stockpile knowledge
  • If you treat everything as something you must hoard and remember and take notes on, then reading becomes a chore. Let things affect you in the present and in your subconscious.
• Consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else
  • Focusing on "reaping later benefits" narrows your perception and opportunities. It's okay - even preferable - to do things that are simply enjoyable or interesting in the moment, because the moment is the only real life.

Day 6, "You can't care about everything: On staying sane when the world's a mess"

Technology has created a world where we are asked to care about everything at maximum intensity. No literal saint in human history, over their entire lives, ever viewed as much human suffering as social media exposes us to daily. Outlets and social media have direct and obvious financial interest in making us as horrified and outraged as possible. It's the attention economy exploiting the inherent impulse to be a good person.

It ends up paralyzing us to care so much about so many things we cannot affect. By picking your battles, you can do more with the battles you do pick, rather than performatively show you care about everything.

Day 7, "Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them"

We live in the present, and often parts of the future are simply out of our control. The act of worrying is the mind trying to regain control by trying to figure out how to cross every possible bridge that we might come across. And we can never be truly sure we're safe until after we crossed the bridge anyway, so worrying locks us into constant fear and anxiety.

Worry made more sense when the world was more immediate and humans had to be wary of predators. But the world (despite being faster than ever in some ways) now has delayed consequences and you often can't tell if something is a problem for weeks or months. Anxiety about those things is a lingering weight upon you. You will still be you when the future happens and you can mentally deal with it then.

Sometimes "the next and most necessary thing" is to plan for the future, but most of the time it isn't. You can only truly control what you are doing in the current moment. Most of the future bridges we worry about are ones that we don't even need to cross once we get there.

Week Two: Taking Action

Day 8, "Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods"

Burkeman opens by saying, "Embracing your limitations isn't a matter of settling for less in life." The point of facing our finitude is that removing the burden of doing everything and doing it all perfectly makes it easier to actually do things that enrich our lives. It's about making imperfect decisions and committing to carrying them out imperfectly.

Decisions are not things that just "come along" and then we pick an option, but things we must actively hunt for. There's a distinction between "choosing" and "trying to decide"; the latter is spinning our wheels while the former is taking a step, however small. Indecision feels comfortable, because it's avoidance of the pain of sacrificing all the other things we could be doing. Decision focuses that energy into a single point.

He notes two rules of "decision-hunting":

• Decisions don't count until you've actually done something in reality that discards alternatives. Telling yourself you decided isn't good enough.
• Decisions can be as tiny as you want. You do not have to instantly upend everything. But they do still have to be real actions.

Quote from E.L. Doctorow, that I've seen multiple places other than this book:

"[Writing] ...is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

You can never truly know ahead of time what consequences your decisions will have. But you also can't truly know in hindsight either, because you chose this path, not the other one. And the only way to move forward is to keep choosing; otherwise you are simply stuck at the crossroads forever.

Day 9, "Finish things: On the magic of completion"

Finishing things replenishes energy rather than depleting it. Finishing things helps you finish more things.

Perfectionists love to start new things because that way they can bask in the ideal potential vision and don't have to smash headlong into the inevitable limitations. Finishing things is inherently messy and imperfect.

Metaphor: we think of upcoming objects and events from different "mental altitudes". At first, you see things from super high up, in broad terms. As things get closer, the details appear, the flaws in the plan or the grunt work involved coming into focus. It often feels easier to switch to a new goal which is not yet in focus... but all worthwhile goals inevitably have a certain amount of "unsexy" work involved.

If you never finish things, you never build a track record and you never get true feedback to use next time. Instead you become depressed and overwhelmed at the ever-increasing number of unfinished things on your mind. Each one is a drain on your energy.

Burkeman notes a trick to finishing things: redefine "finished" as smaller pieces. Break down a larger goal into smaller "deliverables." He notes here that the term "deliverables" is, "monstrous business-speak, evoking the soulless milieu in which people talk of cloudifying business-critical learnings and future-proofing core competencies," but also that it can be helpful to view tasks with a certain level of mechanicalness because it lessens the drama of trying to finish something. It becomes routine and surmountable.

He recommends defining deliverables as something achievable in a single sitting, ranging from a few minutes to at most an hour. That way you can do it in one go, and then it is Done (on the Done List, even). If you keep plugging away at goals in this way, finishing things becomes simpler and less fraught; it becomes part of the flow of life, rather than fighting against the current.

Day 10, "Look for the life task: On what reality wants"

When caught at a crossroads of options or stuck between pressure points or unable to figure out what's next, ask yourself, "What is the next essential life task?" Not what do you want to do, but what does your life want to do? It need not (though it might) line up with society's expectations.

Burkeman says identifying your next life task is a matter of intuition, but offers two guidelines:

• It's something only to be done "by effort and with difficulty", that pushes against the inertia of comfort and security. That said, you also have to watch out for the "internalized voice of societal morality" that thinks it's smarter and wants you to do unreasonable things.
• A true life task may be difficult, but it is always immediately achievable. This helps separate a life task from some dramatic concept of "destiny" or "true calling" that trends towards materially impossible. A life task is what you can do right now with your current skills and resources.

Considering your current life task means shifting your perspective and digging deeper than the usual assumptions, including what society and others expect of you. A life task shouldn't feel oppressive, but instead like you're getting a handle on things because it's defined by your current situation. There is always some step to take.

Day 11, "Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear"

Our lives are disproportionately shaped by what we're actively trying to avoid. Anxiety causes us to not confront things, when confronting them is the only way to actually do something about it; purposefully avoiding things makes it more likely they'll turn into serious problems down the line. And the longer your avoid things, the more time you spend scared and unhappy.

Burkeman refers to a book titled Time Surfing by Paul Loomans. Loomans refers to the tasks we're avoiding as "gnawing rats", and says that conventional advice is to confront and overcome the rats with brute force. But that creates more avoidance, because you end up spending your entire life in an adversarial relationship with yourself. His advice is to befriend the rats. To do this you want to proverbially "go to the shed", accepting that the situation you're avoiding is already part of your reality whether or not you want it to be.

This is different from reducing anxiety by breaking something down into manageable chunks (removing a rat from the pack so you can kill it). Befriending the rat means defusing the anxiety by making it present; Loomans says the "gnawing rats" transform into "white sheep", harmless creatures that follow you until you do something about it. They start waiting their turn rather than hanging around your neck.

He outlines a practical way of befriending your rats: ask what you'd be willing to do to address it, and be truly honest. He relates a story about psychologist Virginia Valian, who wanted to work on her PhD thesis but found the anxiety insurmountable. She figured out how much time she was willing to spend on it each day:

"I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours. Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought…One hour? More reasonable, but still not possible. Half an hour? Getting closer but still too much. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. Now there was a figure I could imagine. A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day."

To push through in a way you think you should is still an act of anxiety and fear. There is genuine courage in recognizing your own limits in dealing with your problems.

Day 12, "Rules that serve life: On doing things dailyish"

Burkeman relates an anecdote about the "Seinfeld Strategy", where allegedly Jerry Seinfeld stated to mark a big red X on your calendar every day you spend dedicating some time to your creative goal. If you do it every day, you have a bunch of Xs on your calendar and you must not break the chain. This has since become a popular standard of productivity advice, but in an interview, Jerry Seinfeld said he originally said that as a forgotten one-off comment.

"Keeping the chain" is not the same thing as "doing the work", and you don't have to do the work every single day. Burkeman (borrowing the term from Dan Harris of Ten Percent Happier) suggests instead to do things "daily-ish." Doing something every single day is unsustainable because life is not that predictable. "Dailyish" removes the fetters of perfection and gives room for imperfect but concrete progress.

Plus the definition of "dailyish" is conveniently mutable. He says that two days a week clearly isn't dailyish while five is, and you know in your heart that three days might count if you're going through a rough patch. You still push yourself to work, but not unreasonably, and without "expecting the rule to force the action."

Much productivity advice relies on the hidden allure that there is a secret set of rules that, if followed, simply force some kind of accomplishment into being in an automatic fashion. Humans yearn for simplicity like this not out of laziness but out of anxiety and not trusting ourselves. The rule becomes a substitute for knowledge or a whip to self-flagellate, something that carries the burden of living for us. Rules are meant to serve life, not the other way around.

Day 13, "Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos"

While there is no true one-size-fits-all rule, one particular thing crops up with uncanny consistency among memoirs and historical accounts of creatives, intellectuals, and others who do "knowledge work". Admittedly, many notable figures had servants or families who handled much of the mundane work of life for them, allowing them to spend their downtime in various pursuits. But the stories of the focused work are strangely consistent.

You make more progress if you limit yourself to about three to four hours of concentrated work a day. This is supposedly because:

• Intense focus uses up your energy, so it's more effective to do so during your peak hours rather than half-heartedly across the entire day.
• Creative work relies on your brain quietly making connections while it's not focusing.
• Limiting the allowed work time prevents it from becoming an intimidating, oppressive mass consuming all waking hours.

Accordingly, Burkeman suggests cordoning off a three-to-four-hour period each day away from other appointments and interruptions in which to do the serious work, and not to worry too much about the rest of the day which will inevitably be shredded by everyday chaos. Most people do not have the capacity for much more serious concentration per day, and it frees us from the futile struggle to force time itself under our control. The rule respects that work requires focus, but saves us from bracing ourselves all day against inevitable interruptions.

Most importantly, it pushes against the urge of Hurry, the voice that says to hustle and get as much done as fast as possible, to burn yourself out because if you just grind out the next week you'll definitely be on top of all your work forever. Rest and good mood are essential for sustainable, quality work.

Depending on your own circumstances, it might not be possible to fully remove yourself from "the culture of overwork." But you can at least psychologically decouple yourself from it, kill the delusion that you can squeeze in juuuust another couple hours today. The three-to-four-hour rule builds the skill to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of feeling unfinished.

Day 14, "Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase"

There's always something. Are you expecting that you will reach a point in your life where you have no more problems?

Living our lives under the assumption that eventually we won't have to deal with ordinary problems causes us to feel the weight of those problems more keenly. We end up living in a world that feels fundamentally flawed because it's got too many problems, and considering ourselves as fundamentally flawed because we haven't eliminated the problems. This is a delusion keeping us trapped in the future.

A "problem" is any situation that confronts the limits of our capacity to control the outcome. If you accept that you cannot win against the concept of problems then you can shift your focus towards the specific problems you actually have. You can live in the present rather than trying to constantly kill the present to reach an impossible future.

Week Three: Letting Go

Day 15, "What if this were easy?: On the false allure of effort"

This chapter starts by noting a danger in all of the previous advice offered: it risks implying that meaningful action is always tough or complex. Burkeman says that if you define all meaningful tasks as requiring a certain amount of exertion and yourself as someone who needs to build up motivation to do them, you end up framing every day as a battle of will.

Under this mindset, you end up not doing satisfying things that would have been fairly simple because you convince yourself they're not easy and require more work. When you do take action, you overexert yourself because it becomes about "putting in the effort" rather than the action itself. This is the "bogus reverse logic" of tying effort to satisfaction: the assumption that the effort itself is what matters. If you use up all your energy, you subconsciously assume you spent the time well because it took a lot of effort... even if the action itself was unnecessary.

Quote, from an anonymous comment on a Washington Post article:

"My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing. I'm 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very very little that's worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I'm not interested in burning myself out by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill.

Rather than attempting to summon up a well of motivation, ask yourself if the thing you're trying to do is simply easier than you were assuming. This isn't about denying the reality that some things are hard, but about preventing yourself from unconsciously making things more complicated than they are. Caring about something isn't the same as that thing being necessarily complex or difficult.

Day 16, "The reverse golden rule: On not being your own worst enemy"

Chapter opens by noting how cringe it is to talk about being kinder to yourself.

When we try to force ourselves to things that are important to us, especially when we are trying to do them regularly every day, it's easy to start blaming ourselves and our shortcomings when life inevitably gets in the way. Instead, try to do things when you feel like doing them, so that you are not viewing life as a constant battle against yourself.

Quote:

"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 or don't deserve to - and you grow so resentful and annoyed by whatever you try to force yourself to do instead that you reach for your phone as a distraction."

Some might say it's a sign of privilege to even consider being able to use your time on what you feel like doing, and of course it's true that everyone has limitations on their freedom and some have notably worse limitations. But there's no prize for not using your own means in solidarity with those who can't; at some point you're just beating yourself up for making use of what you do have.

Doing what you want to do isn't self-indulgent, it's facing the reality of the moment. What's truly self-indulgent is assuming you can bully and shout at yourself until you do things.

Day 17, "Don't stand in generosity's way: On the futility of 'becoming a better person'"

Rather than trying to make yourself into the kind of person who does good things, it's better to simply do the good things. If you already worry that you're not a good person and aren't generous or kind enough, that probably means you have that positive impulse and feel bad about not acting on it more often. Often we don't do these things because we create our own barriers; we want to feel in control and be optimally kind.

A strategy for this is to quickly act on generous impulses when they arise, not overthink it. If you keep doing this, you are being more generous without having to "become a more generous person." It's better to find the positive traits already within you than tie them up in guilt and obligation.

Day 18, "Allow other people their problems: On minding your own business"

People-pleasing arguably involves a self-important, outsized view of oneself, assuming everyone else is thinking negatively of you, or that your specific presence is bringing down the room. Other people's negative emotions are problems that belong to them, not something you can control or fix. Even if people are genuinely upset with you, that's still their problem. It also doesn't even really work. On some level, people eventually can tell you're coming from a selfish place and perhaps even adding to their problems.

This is not the same as ignoring others' emotions or being a dick to everyone all the time. The point is that you give up personal agency by tying your personal sense of being okay to everyone else also being okay, making them responsible for you. It's healthier to choose to act (Day 3, above) on others' emotions because you have considered the situation.

Quote:

"'You know,' a Guardian editor once told me, very early in my career, after she'd been waiting all day for me to tell her whether or not I could take on a certain assignment, because I feared I didn't have the bandwidth, yet also couldn't bear to disappoint her, 'if you can't do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.'"

Day 19, "A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability"

Many of our most cherished memories are about moments when things were out of our control, or things happening that we could not have possibly predicted, and yet we constantly strive for greater control of the world.

Working towards greater control of the world has obviously brought many benefits to humanity (medical knowledge, food production, etc.) but also downsides (climate change, surveillance state, social media anxiety). If we have 100% control over life, then life loses its "resonance." Focusing on metrics over the work itself makes most jobs worse.

Of course we still need the world to be somewhat controllable; we need enough control to actually engage with reality. It's the outcome of doing so that gains value from being unknown.

Day 20, "Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller"

Worrying about the quality of our ideas means we ignore the majority of them, which curtails the potential for organic growth. Focusing on quantity instead creates more room for unexpected gains.

Burkeman describes the "falling in love with the process" adage as a defense mechanism against anxiety over things not working out, which doesn't work because pretending you don't care about the outcome doesn't really help anything. And it's only for artsy folk anyway.

Quantity overpowers perfectionism: instead of hoping you'll make something good, you get to know that you'll make something. The idea is to replace the activity of "thinking of what to write" with "writing". And you are forced to reckon with the fact that when the quality ends up being substandard, the world does not immediately end.

Day 21, "What's an interruption, anyway? On the importance of staying distractible"

If you obsessively try to shut out distractions and interruptions, you are paradoxically both increasing the number of things you consider distractions and making them more powerful when they inevitably appear anyway. Do this too much and you view your entire life as a series of distractions from some nebulous concept of "what you're meant to be doing instead," causing you to shut out ever increasing portions of reality.

Labeling things as interruptions or distractions in the first place is trying to assert control by assuming you know in advance what the most optimal and ideal way for time to pass. But no matter what we think, Things Happen and Keep Happening; we can sort them into "should happen" or "shouldn't happen" boxes, but we can't actually stop them from happening.

By labelling "interruptions" in such a way, we pretend that stable, intense focus is the default, which is blatantly false. The human brain is built to observe and be aware of multiple things. Rigidly trying to eliminate distraction undermines your ability to respond to reality in real time and follow unexpected opportunities.

Quote:

"Looking at this from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn't the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineer to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction."

This doesn't mean not having boundaries, it means trying to perceive everyday reality as less negative. If your focus is diverted by something, try giving the new thing your full attention, even if it's to say that you don't have time right now. Trying to split your focus just makes it worse for everyone involved.

Week Four: Showing Up

Day 22, "Stop being so kind to Future You: On entering time and space completely"

We are in real life, right now, even though we haven't done any of the things we intended to do or any of the things society wants us to do. The past is over and the future hasn't happened yet, there is only the Right Now. If you see everything as leading up to some point in the future where you can start enjoying yourself and live a Real Life, you treat your actual life as something to "get through", something provisional.

One can reach this state of mind by avoiding all commitments and the sacrifices involved, but also by taking life too seriously and obsessing over efficiency with the intent of "preparing" for the future where it'll all definitely run smoothly. Electing to be miserable now to make yourself happy later only works to a certain extent. Either way the motive is the fear of finitude.

Quote:

"Looking back, I see that I was always telling myself that once I figured out how to be a national newspaper journalist, or a good partner, or the best possible parent, I'd let myself relax into those roles; now at least on my better days, I realise that the activity of figuring such things out is the substance of an absorbing life, not something I need to do in order to prepare for one."

Burkeman notes the infamous marshmallow test, pointing out there's no virtue in "accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows that would be delicious were you ever to let yourself consume one." There's no guarantee you'll even be around in the future to do the things you are putting off. Might as well do some today.

Day 23, "How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first"

"Sanity" here refers to "the kind of life you want to be living". We are not perfect, so it's natural to treat "sanity" as something we are constantly working towards. But by treating it as a state we can only reach by preparing ourselves or getting other things out of the way first, then we are just constantly reinforcing that "sanity" is forever distant and unavailable. "Striving towards sanity" deepens the stress. "Operating from sanity" means treating the present moment as somewhere sanity is achievable, as opposed to an obstacle on the path towards sanity.

There will always be more things to "get out of the way first", and eventually life just becomes about getting those things out of the way rather than doing the thing we want to reach. One thing to do is "pay yourself first with time" and do the thing that matters to you first. 30 minutes doing the thing are more valuable than a hundred hypothetical hours.

Burkeman notes three techniques for this:

• Deal with a backlog by isolating it. Rather than devoting time to burning through the backlog of emails or small tasks, separate it into another folder or list and focus on new tasks that arrive. You can work on the backlog a bit at a time or if possible abandon it entirely.
• Free up time by renegotiating existing commitments, not just planning to make fewer. Rather than scrambling to meet all your commitments, bite the bullet and redo the ones you already have. This might mean backing out of something, cancelling plans, or requesting extensions, but it also means reducing your current load rather than your hypothetical future load.
• Treat your to-do list as a menu. It's not something you have to completely eliminate before you can relax, but a list of things to choose from based on your current needs and wants. There's probably not enough time and energy for all of them anyway. Seeing tasks as choices rather than chores can help.

Quote:

"Life certainly doesn't become problem-free and, what's more, you're no longer so confident it ever will. But your problems start to feel more tractable and interesting, and often enough you find you can approach them with relish."

Day 24, "Scruffy hospitality: On finding connection in the flaws"

If you have a whole checklist of things you must make right in the house before you have visitors over, at some point you'll stop inviting people over because it's too much of a hassle. And if they're your friends, what are you gaining from hiding the daily reality of your life from them? Is your relationship something that can be ruined by a cluttered table?

It's fine to put on a show for guests, but thinking of it as mandatory is tacitly admitting you think of your life as inadequate the rest of the time, and arguably that your guests' lives are inadequate if they do not put in the same level of work for company. It's better for everyone involved to be more open about their own perceived shortcomings, which takes pressure off social interactions.

Extrapolated out beyond the frame of houseguests, viewing the world through people's greatest achievements and best days causes anxiety and burnout over not reaching that standard. It's liberating to view the world as flawed and human, where we don't have to constantly project strength and can recognize how we can support each other.

Day 25, "You can't hoard life: On letting the moments pass"

Quote:

"Were I to put the stressful feeling into words, it might go roughly as follows: 'This is amazing! This is the kind of place in which I've always wanted to live, and the kind of thing I've always wanted to do in the early mornings - so I'd better make sure I'm getting the most out of it, and also, do whatever I can to make sure I can keep having this sort of experience forever, because it's slipping away already!'"

Buddhism teaches that part of our own suffering is because we try too hard to hold onto the good things. You might not enjoy a moment because you're focused too hard on making it last, or taking pictures of it, or beating yourself up for not having more good days. If your focus is on accumulating a catalogue of good experiences, you can never truly be present for said experiences.

Much anxiety is rooted in the feeling that good times are going to slip away and that we must hold onto them as tightly as possible. But as finite beings, all things we do or experience must come to an end, so the value in any given thing comes at least partly from its finitude. The transience of any given moment is core to the experience of that moment.

Day 26, "Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt"

We generally operate by first figuring out what's going on and then acting on that once we're confident that we have enough information. But it's easy to fall into the trap of "analysis paralysis", where we indefinitely continue to collate and consider, research and review. Which is understandable, because life is big and scary. We can never truly have all the pertinent information.

As a potential salve to this anxiety, Burkeman notes the occasionally bandied about "medieval peasant" joke (as in, "consider what a medieval peasant would think"). For most of human history, everyday life was far more uncertain than it is for us today, and so the idea of having to fulfill a list of intellectual prerequisites before taking action would have been somewhere between alien and ridiculous. The act of living life is inherently to be in uncertainty.

We don't need to (perhaps can't) have all the context or answers before taking action, and we also don't need to let uncertainty cause us undue anxiety. Not knowing what's going on is perhaps closer to the gestalt human experience; the value is in gaining that experience, not simply having it.

Day 27, "C'est fait par du monde: On giving it a shot"

The French in the chapter title is from an internet post Burkeman saw, attributed to the poster's grandmother, roughly translated as: "People did that." Everything built by human civilization - rockets, pyramids, films, nations - was made by normal people who are just as flawed and finite as any of us. Though economic and material circumstances impose many limits on people, none of these achievements are superhuman.

A noted example Burkeman brings up, with the caveat that it obviously isn't morally good or anything, is the way L. Ron Hubbard decided he was going to make up a new religion (Scientology) and proceeded to go for it. Guy improvised a whole obviously bullshit religion and it somehow worked out for him. If he could do that, then you can probably accomplish whatever project you mean to.

We are all just human beings.

Day 28, "What matters: On finding your way"

On a large enough timescale, the actions and worries of a single person are pretty much completely ineffectual. Which brings up the question: why bother doing anything at all?

Just because we do not affect things on a massive scale doesn't mean our actions have no value. But accepting that they matter only in a transient sense means reckoning with our mortal limits; to avoid facing that truth, we convince ourselves that we are working towards some grand importance only to inevitably become discouraged when we don't manage that. Doing something small that affects only a few people is no less meaningful of an act.

Quote:

"You might easily have never been born, but fate granted you the opportunity to get stuck into the mess you see around you, whatever it is. You are here. This is it. You don't much matter - yet you matter as much as anyone ever did. The river of time flows inexorably on; amazingly, confoundingly, marvellously, we get the brief chance to go kayaking in it."

Epilogue, "Imperfectly onward"

Obviously one cannot completely change their perception and embrace their finitude within a four week (or one book) period, and suggesting that it's possible would be pushing the fantasy of Getting It All Sorted Out. You may simply never get over things that bother you until the day you die. Which seems depressing at first, but ultimately means you don't need to in the first place to justify your existence and do things that you find meaningful.

Similarly, there will never be a fresh start from which you can begin anew and start living in a perfectly imperfect way. There is only today, with all of the inevitable grief and despair of the human condition, and there's no reason to let that prevent us from living.

It took me like twice as long as the book's purported length of time to actually get these notes done, oops.

A lot of the stuff in here resonates with me but also must compete with decades of internalized western capitalist mindset. I find it extremely difficult to figure out "what I actually care about" because society has taught me to value things based on how big I can get the proverbial number.

Frankly, that number pretty much always rounds down to zero. Never enough.

Which is kind of the point of the book, I guess. Always more lessons to be relearned.

Hopefully I read more books and take more notes in the future (and not just self-help stuff either). See you again!