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- Author: Oliver Burkeman
- Full Title: Meditations for Mortals
- Category: #books
- Yet everyday experience, along with centuries of philosophical reflection, attests to the fact that a fulfilling and accomplished life isn’t a matter of exerting ever more control. It’s not about making things more predictable and secure, until you can finally relax. A football match is exciting because you don’t know who’ll win; a field of intellectual study is absorbing because you don’t yet have a handle on it all. 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.
- 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.
- The conservative American economist Thomas Sowell summed things up with a bleakness I 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.
- 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, a few of which constitute you. What could it even mean to say you don’t belong?
- This is the lesson we insecure overachievers could do with getting into our skulls: actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.
- We want a rule to shoulder the burden of living on our behalf. It’s a quid pro quo: we’ll follow it religiously and, in return, won’t have to take so much moment-to-moment responsibility for making the most of our lives.
- Sometime in the aftermath of those poisonings, Benedict apparently understood that the point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life.
- ‘The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.’ – C. S. LEWIS
- ‘Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,’ Tarrant writes. Looking at things 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 engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.
- 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 realize 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.)
- it’s detrimental to approach good experiences like this: they’re for living, not holding on to. Spending your days trying to get experiences ‘under your belt,’ so as to maximize your collection of them, or to feel more confident about their future supply, means you never get to enjoy them properly because another agenda is at play.
- It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.