Oliver Burkeman Quotes

our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we're doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son — a thought that appalls me, but one that's hard to deny, since I surely won't be doing it when he's thirty — there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there'll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you're doing it for the last time. Harris's point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we'd show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there's a sense in which every moment of life is a "last time." It arrives; you'll never get it again — and once it's passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact that we all do it, all the time.

So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they're truly happy in a way that the rest of us — pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment — are not. This also helps explain why it's far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a "side hustle," a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can't get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can't bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance — a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he's a finite human being.

The overarching point is that what we think of as 'distractions' aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

The argument goes as follows: that no matter where you draw the boundary – even if we could agree on a place at which to draw it – you would not really be drawing a boundary in the conventional sense at all. Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides.

Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life's tedious tasks. But it's a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

This world of polluted attention creates the opportunity to sell silence back to us, at a profit.

We've been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.

passion is the feeling you get from mastering a skill, not some magical quality unrelated to hard work:

I think the reason that we seek distraction is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold.

There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life.

We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said 'I think, therefore I am,' he had not discovered 'the most fundamental truth', Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to 'the most basic error'.

What is anxiety? It is the next day. With whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a powerless nothing if you yourself do not give it your strength.' – SØREN KIERKEGAARD