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

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. If you don’t prioritize the skill of just doing something, you risk falling into an exceedingly sneaky trap, which is that you end up embarking instead on the unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive project of becoming the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

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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.

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

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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. We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes, defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events.

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Many people these days report the feeling that they begin each morning in a kind of ‘productivity debt,’ which they must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, in hopes of returning to a zero balance by the time evening comes. If they fail – or worse, don’t even try – it’s as though they haven’t quite justified their existence on the planet. If this describes you, there’s a good chance that like me you belong to the gloomy bunch psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers,’ which is a diplomatic way of saying that our accomplishments, impressive as they may sometimes be, are driven ultimately by feelings of inadequacy. For example, maybe you believe that you’ll have earned your right to exist only when you attain a certain level of social standing, or income, or academic qualifications.

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one main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be ‘out of the way,’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.

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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. Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organize the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds. It’s hardly surprising that so many of us spend so much of our lives attempting to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over a reality that can otherwise seem so unmanageable and overwhelming.

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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. In short: it’s about what changes once you grasp that life as a limited human being – in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities – isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve.

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a freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you’ll finally get to feel fulfilled.

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I’d find myself angrily resenting the jerk who had the temerity to dictate how I spent my time in this manner – even though the jerk in question was me.

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