Favorite Quotes from Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

"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." (p. xxii)

"So you do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you'll ever manage to do it again. But then perhaps you find that you do do it again, the next day, or a few days later and maybe again, and again - until before you know it, you've developed that most remarkable thing, not a willpower driven system or routine but an emergent practice of writing or meditating, or listening to your kids, or building a business. Something you do not solely to become a better person - though it may have that effect, too - but because whatever you're bringing into reality, right here on the rapids, is worth bringing into reality for itself." (p. 13)

"The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it's worth paying." (p. 16)

"It was a central insight of the philosopher Jeal-Paul Sartre that there's a secret comfort in telling yourself you've got options, because it's easier to wallow in the 'bad faith' of believing yourself trapped than to face the dissing responsibilities of your freedom" (p. 18)

"Freedom to examine the trade-offs - because there will always be trade-offs - and then to opt for whichever tradeoff you like." (p. 19)

"And while I'm not going to pretend it happens all the time, you might even experience a few of those transcendent moments in which taking action on a project you care about - now that it's no longer serving the hidden agenda of making you feel better about yourself by helping you repay an imaginary debt - becomes utterly effortless and joyful." (p. 25)

"The real trouble, according to the prominent techno-optimist Clay Shirky, wasn't information overload but ''filter failure'. All we really needed - and would presumably imminently get - were more sophisticated ways to filter the digital wheat from the chaff." (p 27)

"The challenge isn't to locate a few needles of relevance in a haystack of dross. The challenge, in the words of the technology critic Nicholas Carr, is figuring out how to deal, day in day out, with 'haystack-sized piles of needles'." (p. 29)

"It wasn't simply that people were addicted to doomscrooling (although they certainly were.) It was that they'd started 'living inside the news'. The news had become the psychological centre of gravity in their lives - and more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event." (p. 34)

"After all, if you're hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment - that your job is always simply what Carl Jung calls 'the next best thing' as best you can. Now and then, to be sure the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn't try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what's coming later. You get to stop fretting about literally everything other than how to spend the next instant in a wise, enjoyable or otherwise meaningful fashion. Finite human beings need never worry about anything else." (p. 41)

"The executive coach Steve Chandler, in his book, Time Warrior, refers to this sort of decision-making as 'choosing', which he contrasts with the similar-sounding but actually very different activities of 'trying to decide', or figuring out what to do." (p. 46)

"Maybe you lack confidence that you know how to do your work, so you hope that rigidly following a rule might serve as a substitute for that missing knowledge. Maybe you're a self punishing perfectionist, who demands from yourself a flawless track record, so you want a rule to help ensure you never put a foot wrong. Or maybe you don't really want to do your work at all, but you just think that you ought to want to do it, so you're seeking a system to try to force the missing desire into existence." (p. 68)

"But it also respects limitation in another important way: it frees you from the futile perfectionistic struggle to try to make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires. It respects the fact that your work demands focus; but at the same time, it spares you from having to spend most of your hours in a defensive posture, braced against each new email, phone call or serendipitous encounter in the hallway." (p. 73)

"The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished." (p. 74)

"And I am free to aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life of ever more interesting and absorbing ones." (p. 78)

"By defending meaningful tasks as those that always require exertion, and you as the kind of person who needs pushing and prodding to do them, it turns daily life into an ongoing internal battle between the kind of person you'd like to be - energetic, productive - the kind of person you privately fear yourself to be at the core: prone to backsliding at the first opportunity." (p. 83)

"When I fail to take action on things I care about, the reason is sometimes that I lacked the time, or couldn't summon the willpower, But it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve, or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally." (p. 85)

"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 endeavor. And so I began to grapple with a truth that people-pleasures 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." (. 101)

"Whereas a relationship in which you unquestionably have the upper hand at all times is no relationship at all." (p. 108)

"And yet, objectively, all that's occurring in the world is that certain things happen, then other things happen, then still more things happen. When we define some of these things as interruptions of, or distractions from, other ones, we're adding a mental overlay to the situation, sorting events into hard categories of those which ought and ought not to happen." (p. 115)

"We try to hard to cling to the rock face of fixed focus; we fall off, again and again - yet when we do, as Tarrant beautifully puts it, 'the world catches us every time'. we lose our grip on our plans for the day, and find ourselves rumbling into life." (p. 118)

"One: decide who you want to be. Two: act from that identity immediately." (p. 128)

"The trouble with clearing the decks, as we've seen, is that the supply of things to fill the decks is to all intents and purposes limitless. So a commitment to clearing the decks leads inexorably to a life spent unendingly clearing the decks." (p. 129)

"But your problems start to feel more tractable and interesting, and often enough you find you can approach them with relish. This way of being feels less like lying on a beach in the sun and more like striding over hills, with the wind and rain in your face: not effortless, maybe not even always that pleasant, in a conventional sense; but bracing, invigorating, and vital." (p. 131)

"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, the day's gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion." (p. 141)