Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you’re rewarded with time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable. –Meditations for Mortals Pg 149
When I look at much of what concerns me in a day I’m faced with the stark reality that it doesn’t matter. How long or green my lawn is doesn’t change who I am, or mean I have a better relationship with my family. Having a home that’s showroom spotless doesn’t enhance the fun I’ll have with the friends that come over, it merely robs you of presence in the quest for perfection. Showroom homes only increase the requirements for your friends before they’re willing to invite you over. When we up the ante we longer just have to think about who we’d like to spend time with, we have to decide if we have the time in our day to clean our house to showroom quality.
Week four of Meditations for Mortals is all about how you show up in your life and how the overwhelming clutter of tasks in our lives stops us from showing up. There will never be a time in the future when we have everything under control so you can live the best life you want1. Your life is lived in the here and now with all the mess you have going on. The future will never live up to your dream of ease, it will have its own mess to deal with that you can’t see from here.
You will never have it all figured out2. I know that everyone around you seems to have life figured out, but that’s merely a thin facade they show to the world in response to the facade everyone else is showing. No matter how fast you deal with tasks, there will always be more tasks that come your way which Burkeman calls the efficiency trap3. The more efficient you are at getting your tasks done, the more tasks are given to you. You don’t earn the right to leisure, you just get more stuff to do.
One of the hard parts of realizing this in our world is that productivity addiction is celebrated as a virtuous drive. It doesn’t matter that many people use it as a coping mechanism by jumping into some task instead of dealing with the uncomfortable situation in front of them. We don’t offer interventions for this toxic method of accomplishment, instead, we reward it and have built a society that worships this broken coping mechanism.
Where Burkeman suggests that we do what we can and let go of all the things we’ll never do, Alex Pang suggests that we should take it a step further and stop focusing on how to get more done. Instead, we should focus on how we can rest better.
Many of us are interested in how to work better, but we don’t think very much about how to rest better. Productivity books offer life hacks, advice about how to get more done, or stories about what CEOs or famous writers do. But they say almost nothing about the role of rest in the lives or careers of creative, productive people. When they do mention rest, they tend to treat it as nothing more than a physical necessity or inconvenience. – Rest Location 65
What if you spent more time thinking about how to rest better instead of how to get more done? What if you spent more time thinking about how to enjoy the moments that are in front of you, instead of putting off enjoyment so you can answer one more email or check off one more task?
- Meditations for Mortals Pg 122 ↩︎
- Meditations for Mortals Pg 145 ↩︎
- Four Thousand Weeks Pg 43 ↩︎