Each week’s theme (“Being Finite”; “Taking Action”; “Letting Go”; and “Showing Up”) explores what he calls “imperfectionism,” a realization 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.”
Instead, accepting our limitations “is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.”
Burkeman draws on insights from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual writers of various traditions to open a door to what theorist Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance,” the world’s “capacity to touch, move and absorb us” when we recognize we are not, and can’t ever be, in total control of it.
He suggests some practical considerations, always recognizing they are not absolutes; we do indeed need to exert some control over our environment and sometimes must to do that pressing to-do. But if you can, he writes, “treat your to-do list as a menu”: “It’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plough through, but as options you get to pick.”
And this for people-pleasers: “It’s a fool’s errand … to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.” Be careful about worrying that others are thinking bad things about you; likely they’re not thinking of you at all. Novelist Leila Sales writes that “when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”
“This, here and now, is real life. This is it.” Choose from the day’s menu, and go for it, even if imperfectly.
