Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. - Oliver Burkeman

So imprudent are we," he wrote, "that we wander in the times which are not ours

The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically lured. Wegner labelled this effect ‘the precisely

We feel pressured to do something extraordinary with our lives, or to an extraordinary standard of merit, or in a way that's applauded by an extraordinary number of people – even though it's true by definition that only a few people can ever be extraordinary in any given domain. (If we could all stand out from the crowd, there'd be no crowd from which to stand out.) Why shouldn't an anonymous career spent quietly helping a few people get to qualify as a meaningful way to spend one's time? Why shouldn't an absorbing conversation, an act of kindness, or an exhilarating hike get to count? Why adopt a definition that rules such things out?