It’s Worse than You Think

The most liberating and empowering and productive step you can take, if you want to spend more of your time on the planet doing what matters to you, is to grasp the sense in which life as a finite human being—with limited time, and limited control over that time—is really much worse than you think. Completely beyond hope, in fact. You know that cloud of melancholy that sometimes descends—when you’re awake in the dark at three in the morning, perhaps, or toward the end of a frazzled Thursday at work—when it seems as though the life you’d envisaged for yourself might never come to fruition after all? The magic begins when you understand that it definitely won’t come to fruition.

It is true that I have been accused of being a killjoy. So I should probably try to explain why this isn’t depressing at all.

Consider—just to begin with—the familiar modern predicament of feeling overwhelmed by an extremely long to-do list. You think the problem is that you have far too many things to do, and insufficient time in which to do them, so that your only hope is to manage your time with amazing efficiency, summon extraordinary reserves of energy, block out all distractions, and somehow power through to the end.

In fact, your situation is worse than you think—because the truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.

But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. 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. Very well, then: This is how things are. Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck into what you actually can do. It’s not that life becomes instantly effortless: Depending on your situation, there might be serious repercussions to letting certain tasks fall by the wayside. But if doing everything that’s demanded of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, is genuinely impossible, then, well, it’s impossible, and facing the truth can only help. After that—once you’re staring reality in the face—you can take action not in the tense hope that your actions might be leading you toward some future utopia of perfect productivity but simply because they’re worth doing.

There are no guarantees—except the guarantee that holding back from life is a recipe for anguish.

Busyness might not be a major problem for you, of course. Your problem might be that you’re a perfectionist, who suffers anguish in your efforts to produce work that meets your exacting standards. But that situation’s worse than you think, too, because the truth is that no work you bring into concrete existence could ever meet the perfect standards in your mind. Imposter syndrome? You might believe you need more experience or qualifications in order to feel confident among your peers; but the truth is that even the most experienced and qualified people feel as though they’re winging it, much of the time—and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’ll probably have to do it in a state of feeling unprepared. Relationship troubles? They’re worse than you think, as well. Maybe it’s true that you married the wrong person, or that you need years of therapy—yet it’s also just a fact that two flawed and finite humans, living and maturing together, will inevitably push each other’s buttons, triggering their buried issues. (It’s the ones who claim never to have experienced anything of the sort that you should wonder about.)

The late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett, born Peggy Kennett, had a vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that can come from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. Metaphorically speaking, lightening someone’s burden means encouraging them to believe that, with sufficient effort, their struggles might be overcome: that they might indeed find a way to feel like they’re doing enough, or that they’re competent enough, or that relationships are a piece of cake, and so on. Kennett’s insight was that it can often be kinder and more effective to make their burden heavier—to help them see how totally irredeemable their situation is, thereby giving them permission to stop struggling.

And then? Then you get to relax. But you also get to accomplish more, and to enjoy yourself more in the process, because you’re no longer so busy denying the reality of your predicament, consciously or otherwise. This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. 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, OK, 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. There are no guarantees—except the guarantee that holding back from life instead is a recipe for anguish.

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. (“Our suffering,” as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, “is believing there’s a way out.”) 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. (It crashed, for you, the moment you were born.) You’re already stranded on the desert island, with nothing but old airplane food to subsist on, and no option but to make the best of life with your fellow survivors.

Very well, then: Here you are. Here we all are. Now . . . what might be some good things to do with your time?

♦

From Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 8, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Oliver Burkeman. All rights reserved.