Oliver Burkeman Quotes

Healthy and happy people, research suggests, generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression.

Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.

The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals.

You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it's already turned into the past.

You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can't avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well — and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it's all over, it won't have counted for very much anyway.

[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

keep two to-do lists, one "open" and one "closed." The open list is for everything that's on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it's not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one — that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can't add a new task until one's completed. (You may also require a third list, for tasks that are "on hold" until someone else gets back to you.)

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn't it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to "do something remarkable" with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely — and often enough, marvelously — really is.

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 paralyzing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,

In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you've chosen to fight.

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

Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby.

the core challenge of managing our limited time isn't about how to get everything done — that's never going to happen — but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

Geoff Lye, a British environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: "What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?"