Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights and Notes

Introduction:The imperfect

• 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.

• Always over the horizon, meanwhile, hovered the fantasy of one day ‘getting on top of things’– where ‘things’ could mean anything from emptying my inbox to figuring out how romantic relationships were supposed to work– so that the truly meaningful part of life, the really real part, could finally begin.

• 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.

• Confronting your non- negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act, and to experience resonance. 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.

Week One: being finite

• Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, ‘a precious state of being can dawn… You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?’ With this comes the bracing understanding that you might as well get on with life: that it’s precisely because you’ll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can; and that it’s because intimate relationships are too complex ever to be negotiated entirely smoothly that you might as well commit to one, and see what happens.

• The challenge, then, is simple, though for many of us also excruciating: What’s one thing you could do today– or tomorrow at the latest, if you’re reading this at night– that would constitute a good- enough use of a chunk of your finite time, and that you’d actually be willing to do?

• 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. This can come as a revelation and a liberation to the anxious among us– partly because it cuts genuinely agonising choices down to a more manageable number, but also because it reminds us that most of the potential consequences we find ourselves agonising about don’t remotely justify such angst. If ignoring an email causes its sender a flicker of irritation, or if your in- laws frown at your approach to parenting, the correct response might very well be: So what?

• the feeling that we need to get things done not only to achieve certain ends, or to meet our basic responsibilities to others, but because it’s a cosmic debt we’ve somehow incurred in exchange for being alive. As the philosopher Byung- Chul Han has written, ‘we produce against the feeling of lack.’ Our frenetic activity is often an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable members of society.

• There is a religious route out of productivity debt, if you believe in a god who bestows grace– who loves you and delights in you, in other words, regardless of how hard you strive to justify your existence by means of your productivity, goodness, or anything else. But agnostics and atheists get to take a different path to a similar destination: if there isn’t a god, then there’s no authority with the power to demand that you earn your right to exist. You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient.

• Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it. Because you’re processing more of it, faster, and without ever achieving the satisfaction of reducing it, you’re just left feeling more scattered and stressed.

• Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to- read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.

• The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non- fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all.(This attitude prompts some people to develop complicated systems for taking notes on everything they read, which turns reading into a chore, which then perversely leads to their not reading books they’d otherwise enjoy or benefit from, because they can’t face taking the notes.)

• Most of the long- term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.’

• The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present- moment activity, like everything else. It’s not merely that a fixation on retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits of reading. It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now. So you needn’t always choose to read what’s most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe- inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future– though it might do that too– but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.

• the celebrated Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reassures readers of his Meditations: ‘Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.’ You could say the worrier gets things exactly backwards. He’s so terrified that he might not be able to rely on his inner resources, later on, when he reaches a bridge that needs crossing, that he makes superhuman efforts to bring the future under his control right now. In fact he should devote less energy to manipulating the future, and have more faith in his capacity to handle things once the challenge actually arrives. If it arrives, that is. Marcus’s phrase ‘if you have to’ is a useful reminder that most of the bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all.

Week Two: taking action

• The whole point of facing the truth about finitude is that it gets easier to spend more of your time on worthwhile and life- enriching activities once you’re no longer trying to do all of them, or do them perfectly, or do them with the secret agenda of achieving a feeling of security or control.

• And yet, in reality, repeatedly starting but rarely finishing things, or finishing them only under duress, is a recipe for misery. You get fewer worthwhile things done, not least because, whenever you hit a difficult patch in whatever you’re doing, there are several other projects to which you can scurry off instead. You never accumulate a track record of accomplishments in which to take pride; and you never benefit from the feedback you’d have received had you shared your work with others.

• People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it,’ Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see ‘that leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’(He suggests spending one day robotically completing as much unfinished business as you can: ‘Notice at the end of that day how much energy you’ve got. You’ll be amazed.’)

• The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it– and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long- established preference for comfort and security.

• The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie- making equipment

• The most remarkable part is that while you might have assumed that complying with a life task would feel oppressive– you’re ‘complying’ with a ‘task,’ after all– it never does. It gives you the feeling of getting a handle on life, because the life to which you’re addressing the question is the one you actually have. It is never the case that there’s no next step to take. On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about it.

• ‘Dailyish’ is one that does. In not insisting on your doing something absolutely every day, it shifts the focus away from the ultimately meaningless question of whether or not you have an unbroken chain of red Xs, and back to the life it’s supposed to be serving– to the thing you’re seeking to bring into existence, whether that’s a piece of writing, a work of art, a happy family, a healthier body, or anything else. In any case, does anyone really believe that Jerry Seinfeld owes his success to his assiduous observance of a productivity technique he happened to stumble across? Of course not. He owes it to talent, and maybe a modicum of luck, and then to the willingness to keep showing up and developing that talent, more days than not, in the unpredictable context of his real life. Obviously, the goal was never a chain of red Xs. It was making people laugh.

• If you’re a ‘knowledge worker’– that is, if you spend your days doing things with computers and words and ideas, as opposed to, say, building houses out of bricks– then you’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, how frequently this specific range of hours crops up in historical accounts of the daily routines of artists, authors, scientists, composers, and others.

• But the near- uniformity of their hours of deep focus suggests what I’ve come to think of as the ‘three- to- four- hour rule’ for getting creative work done. It has two parts. The first is to try– to whatever degree your situation permits– to ringfence a three- or four- hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally important second part is not to worry about imposing much order on the rest of the day: to accept that your other hours will probably be characterised by the usual fragmentary chaos of life.

• The truly valuable skill is the one the three- to- four- hour rule helps to instil: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.

• Harris goes on, is that ‘… life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one.’

• It takes only a little further reflection to see that we wouldn’t really want life to be otherwise. It would be nice to be able to skip the scariest or most overwhelming problems. But to face no problems at all would leave you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.

Week Three: letting go

• And in one sense, for finite humans, life certainly is a tough challenge: you’ve got severely limited time, and limited control, necessitating hard choices and a tolerance for imperfection and uncertainty. But it’s equally true that often the real challenge, in building an accomplished and absorbing life, is learning to let go. Not making things happen, through willpower or effort, but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead

• And so instead of asking how to summon the energy or motivation or self- discipline to do something that matters to you, it’s often more helpful to ask: What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming?

• None of these cases indicates any profound deficiency in your character. Nothing was wrong with your essential impulses. It’s just that for the usual perfectionistic, limit- denying reasons– wanting to be optimally kind instead of just kind, or wanting to feel in full control of your time and obligations– you never managed to translate your impulses into action. This is why I can wholeheartedly recommend a personal policy I learned from the(vastly less problematic) meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, and that I seek to follow myself, which is to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises.

• What I eventually figured out– not that it ever seems to get particularly easy– is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.

• ‘It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy,’ observes the novelist Leila Sales, poking fun at this tendency in herself, ‘but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.’

• Taken at face value, the news that somebody is upset because you’re not behaving as they wanted you to behave is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. You might or might not choose to act on such a report, but that’s an entirely separate matter. Every decision is a question of trade- offs, as we saw on Day Three, and other people’s emotions are one more thing to be weighed in the balance.

• One of the main reasons we fail to treat other people’s emotions in this clear- headed way is that they sail under the flag of ‘urgency.’ Some tasks are legitimately time- sensitive, of course; but the unpleasant anxiety that attaches itself to tasks we’ve deemed ‘urgent’ is often a sign that someone else’s priorities are in control. The sense of urgency is really the fear that someone else will get angry or anxious if you don’t hurry up. Again, maybe it’s in your interests to forestall that outcome. But then again, maybe it isn’t: their feelings have no magic power to reach out and force you to act. It might help to consider the billions of people on earth who are, at this moment, feeling angry, depressed, disappointed, impatient, or anxious. The thought of them might evoke your sympathy; yet you surely don’t see it as your job to cheer them all up.

• It helped me see that if trying so hard to manage other people’s emotions wasn’t even helping them, I had less to lose by abandoning the endeavour. And so I began to grapple with a truth that people- pleasers are prone to resist until it halfway kills them: that very often, the best way to benefit others is to focus on doing your thing.

• Not being able to guarantee that your plans will come off; not knowing what the future holds; never quite feeling like you’ve got things figured out, or that you’re on top of things– all of these are mysteriously central to what makes life worth living.

• But he shows that, simultaneously, our desire for controllability backfires, undermining our efforts to build happy and fulfilling lives. The human domination of nature has caused nature to escape human control, threatening our flourishing through runaway climate disruption. The more people with whom we’re able to connect digitally, the worse the loneliness epidemic gets; and the more vigilance parents exert over their children’s comfort, the more anxious and uncomfortable they are. In short, the more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses what Rosa calls its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us. As soon as any experience can be completely controlled, it feels cold and dead; a work of art you fully understand or a person whose behaviour you can predict with total accuracy is no fun at all. What brings fulfilment is being in a certain form of reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, including other people; you might liken it to a dance in which you alternatingly lead and follow. Whereas a relationship in which you unquestionably have the upper hand at all times is no relationship at all.

• Still, it’s central to an enjoyable and meaningful life that whenever we reach out to the world in this way, we don’t get to control how it responds. The value and depth of the experience relies on that unknowability. Maybe you’ll get what you wanted, or maybe you won’t– and sometimes, not getting what you wanted will leave life immeasurably better.

• Allowing one’s ideas on to the screen with no quality control violates everything the uptight perfectionist stands for, even though you can always edit or delete it later. Still, the method surprises me, over and over. Sometimes because it leads to good writing or creative solutions, and at other times because it reminds me that when my output falls wildly short of my standards– when the writing’s no good, or no creative solution presents itself– the world never actually seems to collapse.

Week Four: showing up

• but it seems clear that the self- discipline not to grab the first marshmallow is an invaluable trait for what’s commonly thought of as a successful life. On the other hand, there’s no virtue in accumulating the greatest number of uneaten marshmallows that would be delicious were you ever to let yourself consume one. At some point, in order to experience the benefits of having received any in the first place, you’re going to have to eat a damn marshmallow.

• You might get all sorts of useful things done– but they’ll never bring peace of mind, because you’ll effectively be telling yourself on a daily basis that peace of mind is something distant and not available right here. That’s what I mean by ‘striving towards sanity.’ ‘Operating from sanity,’ on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable– and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it.

• Treat your to- do list as a menu. In the striving- towards- sanity mindset, a to- do list is always something you’ve got to get to the end of before you’re allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there’s time available in which to do them– which is the normal state of affairs, after all– a to- do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgement that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu.

• To put on an impressive show for visitors is to erect a facade, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that: some of us love the challenge of creating the most enchanting one we can. But the idea that such a facade is mandatory, if visitors are to be admitted to your life, must arise from the assumption that there’s something incomplete or inadequate about your life the rest of the time. Since your visitors’ home is presumably likewise usually a mess, it might even imply there’s something wrong with their lives, too. No wonder calling off the whole performance forges a deeper bond. The moment I first see a friend’s chaotic kitchen is like the moment in a blooper reel when two actors can’t help breaking character and collapsing in laughter. Nominally, it shouldn’t be happening, but it always feels delightfully real when it does.

• Spending your days trying to get experiences ‘under your belt,’ so as to maximise 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.

• as the nineteenth- century Japanese statesman Ii Naosuke explains: Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’(ichi- go, ichi- e). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once- in- a- lifetime occasion.

• The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience, the more I find I can get into it, and the more I can be present for other people involved in it. This is not to say that life becomes a matter of unbroken good cheer; after all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment arises then vanishes. But it’s the flavour of sadness conveyed by the Japanese phrase mono no aware, a wistful pathos at the transience of things, the kind of poignant sadness that deepens an experience instead of detracting from it. The kind you feel once you’re no longer grasping at the moment, thereby undermining your experience of it, but stepping more fully into it. Feeling yourself a part of it. Being it.

• This is one more context in which it can be useful to try to imagine how things might have felt for a medieval peasant– or, really, for anyone at any time in history when people experienced life as radically more uncertain than today, yet were perhaps more clear- headed on the topic of human limitation. In those days, you couldn’t ever have known with confidence what caused a famine or an outbreak of disease, nor felt reassured that a total eclipse didn’t presage the end of the world. There’d be no way of telling if a family member’s fever meant death or nothing much. Tradition and religion offered some broad explanations, and prescribed various rituals. But with certainty so hard to come by, it would never have occurred to you to make it a precondition for taking action that you should first attain a sound intellectual grasp of your specific situation. You’d have been accustomed to moving through life enveloped in uncertainty about almost everything that was going on, or what might happen next.

• Those of us accustomed to relying on our intellects to power us through our days can get jumpy at the idea of relying on them less– of not always stopping to do research or think things through before acting on our intuitions. Yet over the course of humanity’s history, it must have been far more common than not to feel adrift in a world of mysteries, obliged to proceed on the basis of blind hunches alone. So there need be no shame in the feeling that you don’t yet fully understand the field you work in, or how to date, or be in a relationship, or be a parent. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take constructive action– or, alternatively, relax– until all the answers are in. It just means that we’re limited in our capacity to get a grip on our infinitely complex reality. It makes little sense to let that hold you back from living in it.

• In other words, the more willing you are wholeheartedly to acknowledge the hard limitations of human finitude, the easier it gets to do what others might dismiss as impossible. Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you’re rewarded with the time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable.

• Likewise, if you’ve been thinking of making a radical change in your life– travelling the world in midlife, say, or educating your kids outside the school system– there’s a solid chance you can scrabble together the resources and figure out a way. You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Everything they ever did was done by people.

• There’s no reason to see ‘getting on top of things’ as the target of your endeavours in the first place– and still less to imagine that you might manage to obtain a sense of security regarding the crises engulfing the planet, which will doubtless continue to engulf it long after you’re gone. Instead, you get to pour yourself into tasks that matter for no other reason than that nothing could be more enlivening, or more true to the situation in which you find yourself. You get to proceed in the splendidly imperfectionist spirit of the eco- philosopher Derrick Jensen, who says: ‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’

Epilogue: Imperfectly onward

• The psychotherapist Bruce Tift suggests the following reflection: pick the trait that bothers you the most about yourself or your life– your tendency to procrastinate or get distracted, perhaps, or your short fuse, or your proneness to gloomy moods– and then ask yourself what it feels like to imagine that some version of it might dog you to the end of your days. What if I’ll always have anxious reactions– the clench in the stomach, the sharp intake of breath– to minor events that don’t warrant them? My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief. I get to give up on that futile struggle, which means I needn’t wait for it to be won before diving into reality. Maybe I never needed to change in order to justify my existence.

• Our limitations make fresh starts impossible: you are already here, in time, shaped by everything that came before this moment, and with whatever personality, resources and challenges you find yourself to have. Screwing up your willpower and insisting you’re leaving that all behind is unlikely to change much. On the other hand, more fully accepting that you are who you are, and where you are, might change a lot, by permitting you to abandon the dream of a fresh start and actually do one thing today that truly matters, and that makes life resonate once more.

• But the price we must pay is facing hard truths: that we’ll die; that life unfolds one moment after another; that each moment represents a choice among competing ways of spending our time, so that agonising choices, and the sacrifice of alternative worthy paths, are inevitable; and that we’ll never achieve emotional invulnerability, or a sense of full control.