# Oliver Burkeman - Meditations for Mortals (Highlights)  ## Metadata **Review**:: [readwise.io](https://readwise.io/bookreview/58659995) **Source**:: #from/readwise #from/kindle **Zettel**:: #zettel/fleeting **Status**:: #x **Authors**:: [[Oliver Burkeman]] **Full Title**:: Meditations for Mortals **Category**:: #books #readwise/books **Category Icon**:: 📚 **Highlighted**:: [[2026-03-01]] **Created**:: [[2026-03-02]] ## Highlights ### Introduction:The imperfect - The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. (Loc 185) ^992688617 - 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. (Loc 187) ^992688618 #i Empathy of things - Rather than fuelling the fantasy of one day bringing everything under control, this book takes it as a given that you’ll never get on top of everything. (Loc 198) ^992688619 - 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. (Loc 208) ^992688620 - facing the facts of finitude in Week One; taking bold, imperfect action in Week Two; getting out of your own way and letting action happen in Week Three; and finally, in Week Four, showing up more fully for life in the present, rather than later. (Loc 223) ^992688621 - Relatedly, I recommend making no over-industrious efforts to retain what you read, or to put it into practice; instead, trust that if something strikes a chord, it’ll linger through the day by itself. (Loc 231) ^992688622 ### Week One: being finite #### Day One: It’s worse than you think: On the liberation of defeat - It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. (Loc 259) ^992688625 - When you grasp the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought, you no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, desperately hoping someone will find a way to prevent the plane from crashing. You understand that the plane has already crashed. (Loc 297) ^992688626 #### Day Two: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things - So you just do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever manage to do it again. (Loc 355) ^992688628 #### Day Three: You need only face the consequences: On paying the price - Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice–that’s never an option–but of realising, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. (Loc 386) ^992688630 #### Day Four: Against productivity debt: On the power of a ‘done list’ - a tunnel-vision focus on paying off your debt makes it much less appealing to prioritise apparently unproductive activities like hanging out with your friends. (Loc 453) ^992688632 - Worse still, the productivity-debt mindset turns success into a kind of punishment: each new accomplishment merely sets a higher standard that you now feel you’ve got to reach next time around, so it becomes even harder to pay off your debt than it was before. (Loc 454) ^992688633 - By contrast, what makes a done list so motivating and encouraging is that it implicitly invites you to compare your output to the hypothetical situation in which you stayed in bed and did nothing at all. (Loc 478) ^992688634 #### Day Five: Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading - The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. (Loc 526) ^992688636 - Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. (Loc 545) ^992688637 #### Day Six: You can’t care about everything: On staying sane when the world’s a mess - Living inside the news feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralysing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference. (Loc 584) ^992688639 - We can’t reallocate public concern like rainbarrel water [but] maybe each of us, within ourselves, can become a little more focused. Imagine if it was normal for each person to focus ten times as deeply on one or two issues at a time, rather than taking on the emotional burden of dozens…[ and] feeling helpless about ‘the state of the world.’ (Loc 589) ^992688640 #### Day Seven: Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them - The trouble is that today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not. (Loc 641) ^992688642 - most of the bridges we worry about never end up needing to be crossed at all. (Loc 652) ^992688643 - your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. (Loc 655) ^992688644 ### Week Two: taking action #### Day Eight: Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods - The first is that a decision doesn’t get to count as a decision until you’ve done something about it in reality, so as to put some of your discarded alternatives beyond reach. Merely telling yourself you’ve decided, inside your mind, isn’t enough. (Loc 703) ^992688647 - There’s no need to leap directly from thinking about a career change to marching into your manager’s office to quit. Baby steps are fine; they just have to be real ones. (Loc 708) ^992688648 - ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’) (Loc 710) ^992688649 - Keep making tiny-but-real decisions, and when it’s time to quit, your visit to the boss will be just one more incremental next step. (Loc 711) ^992688650 #### Day Nine: Finish things: On the magic of completion - The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is simply to redefine what counts as finished. Instead of viewing the completion of a project as something that happens only occasionally, after days or weeks of work, think of your days as consisting in the sequential completion of a series of small ‘deliverables.’ (Loc 760) ^992688652 #### Day Ten: Look for the life task: On what reality wants - 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. In the words of another Jungian, James Hollis, it may be the kind of endeavour that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy. (Loc 806) ^992688654 - The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. (Loc 815) ^992688655 #### Day Eleven: Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear - I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing. (Loc 852) ^992688657 - Loomans’s surprising advice is to befriend them instead. Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them. (Loc 857) ^992688658 - All you’re seeking is some way to ‘go there,’ psychologically speaking: to begin to accept, on an emotional level, that the situation in question is already a part of your reality, no matter how fervently you might wish that it weren’t. (Loc 860) ^992688659 #### Day Twelve: Rules that serve life: On doing things dailyish - every day that you manage to dedicate at least some time to your central creative goal (Loc 895) ^992688661 - doing something dailyish requires sacrificing your fantasies of perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now. (Loc 914) ^992688662 - what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action. (Loc 918) ^992688663 - Think about it: even the most hidebound rule-follower, dutifully implementing an intricate schedule or set of behavioural guidelines, is still choosing to keep on following them in every moment. They could always opt not to. Like it or not, you’re always in charge of the kayak. (Loc 928) ^992688664 - The point is for the rules to serve life. (Loc 939) ^992688665 - 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, (Loc 940) ^992688666 - Obviously, the goal was never a chain of red Xs. It was making people laugh. (Loc 944) ^992688667 #### Day Thirteen: Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos - accept that your other hours will probably be characterised by the usual fragmentary chaos of life. (Loc 975) ^992688669 - It pushes back against the ubiquitous modern urge to get as much done as possible as fast as possible, in obedience to the inner voice whispering that just maybe, if you really went hell-for-leather for the next few days, you might get on top of the work once and for all. (Loc 982) ^992688670 - A central point of the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Sabbath is that you have to stop anyway–not because you’ve finished, but just because it’s time to stop. (Loc 990) ^992688671 #### Day Fourteen: Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase - 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. (Loc 1027) ^992688673 ### Week Three: letting go #### Day Fifteen: What if this were easy?: On the false allure of effort - Not making things happen, through willpower or effort, but cultivating the willingness to stand out of the way and let them happen instead–which is our focus this week. (Loc 1063) ^992688676 - 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? (Loc 1089) ^992688677 - ‘What would this look like if this were easy?’ (Loc 1096) ^992688678 #### Day Eighteen: Allow other people their problems: On minding your own business - Instead, the point is simply that it’s a fool’s errand–and a flagrant denial of your finite power over reality–to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too. (Loc 1245) ^992688680 #### Day Nineteen: A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability - 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. (Loc 1316) ^992688682 #### Day Twenty: Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller - A more pragmatic and imperfectionist way to ease up on a fixation with outcomes is to set a quantity goal. (Loc 1370) ^992688684 - ‘Here’s the magic trick: if you can’t come up with ten ideas, come up with twenty ideas.’ (Loc 1377) ^992688685 - A quantity goal puts you back in the driver’s seat: instead of hoping you produce something good, you get to know you’ll produce something. (Loc 1380) ^992688686 #### Day Twenty-one: What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible - Even interruptions and distractions can be among those things it’s wisest to let happen. (Loc 1401) ^992688688 #supprise - But at the very least, it’s a reminder not to cling so confidently to those preferences that you turn life into a constant struggle against events you’ve decided, futilely, shouldn’t be happening. Or that you close off the possibility that what looks like an interruption might in fact prove a welcome development. (Loc 1423) ^992688689 - 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. (Loc 1440) ^992688690 #thought-proking - Paul Loomans (who we met on Day Eleven, about ‘just going to the shed’) calls them ‘drop-ins.’ His advice is to give them your full attention. That is: once your focus has already been diverted–once the child has burst into the room, or the anxious thought about the timing of your doctor’s appointment has pulled you away from the novel you were reading–don’t fight the fact. Deal with your new reality instead. Make a note to check the time of the appointment; or look the child in the eyes, listen to their request–then either close your laptop to be with them, or explain you’ll need to finish what you’re doing first. (Loc 1445) ^992688691 #favorite #novel-viewpoint #takeaway ### Week Four: showing up #### Day Twenty-two: Stop being so kind to Future You: On entering time and space completely - the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. (Loc 1481) ^992688694 - It means you get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they’re achieved. (Loc 1486) ^992688695 #### Day Twenty-three: How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first - In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’ (Loc 1559) ^992688697 - spending a little time on what matters to you most immediately, instead of waiting, because you understand that even thirty minutes spent Actually Doing the Thing today are more valuable than hundreds of purely hypothetical hours in the future. (Loc 1566) ^992688698 - starting with the acknowledgement that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. (Loc 1589) ^992688699 #### Day Twenty-five: You can’t hoard life: On letting the moments pass - Congratulations: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress. (Loc 1683) ^992688701 - 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. (Loc 1686) ^992688702 - 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. (Loc 1701) ^992688703 - 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. (Loc 1708) ^992688704 #### Day Twenty-six: Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt - 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. (Loc 1771) ^992688706 #### Day Twenty-eight: What matters: On finding your way - Marcus Aurelius recommends a mental exercise we might today call ‘zooming out’: whenever you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed–or, alternatively, too full of yourself–try expanding your awareness of reality from your small patch of ground to the world as a whole. (Loc 1831) ^992688708 - ‘The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done.’ (Loc 1888) ^992688709 - You might easily never have 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. (Loc 1889) ^992688710