I’ve made my feelings on the self-help genre pretty clear: I ascribe to the One Book Theory1 and have beef with anyone who tries to tell me how to live my life when they A) refuse to acknowledge how much help they have and B) also act like your life exists in a vacuum where you have no responsibilities other than Your New Optimized Self.
These omissions are linked.
This is all to say that I’m currently listening to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and it is actually good. It is attacking Me Personally, as someone who knows intellectually that it’s impossible To Do All Of The Things, BUT I still think that I am somehow the exception in terms of my physical limitations2 and ability to bend the space-time continuum to fit in just ONE MORE TASK!!!
It’s a simple premise, really. You might not have exactly 4,000 weeks in your life but whether you have more or fewer, you still have a finite number. You still have to decide what you are going to do with your one wild and precious life and who you are going to do it with.
It’s not a bad thing to be busy, unless you’re using it to avoid ever processing a single thought or feeling.
If you never stop moving, you never settle on any one thing. You are always striving toward something better.
To the ideal.
Settle down, babe
We have a societal idea that settling is bad. Striving is good! We should always strive for more — more money, more things, a more important job title, a more better partner who is sexier, funnier, fitter, etc. This is an extension of the idea that if we just work hard enough, we can be Perfect and find that perfect match to fit into that Idealized Life we will surely, finally curate next week.
The morning routine that will Fix Us, the skincare routine that will make us worth loving (again?), or the salad that will undo the bowl of parmesan fries we housed, only to find some cheese in our hair the next day3.
Spoiler alert: it’s never gonna happen, babe. (This is me, talking to me. Oh no.)
Worse? Constantly striving and deciding that nothing is ever good enough for you is also settling, just in another form — the same way that not making a choice is making a choice. Burkeman quotes the American political theorist Robert Goodin about it.
“The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world.”
- In Praise of Settling: A Selection from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021)
This applies to everything else from friends and material goods to your job. To have an incredible career in anything, you first have to decide what it is that you want to do. If you constantly pivot into something new, you never develop deep expertise.
I don’t mean the kind of career pivot where you take the expertise you have developed in one field and find a way to channel it into something else intentionally and meaningfully. I mean a real Buster Bluth mixed with the visionary minds behind Entertainment 720.
In real life, if you’re charismatic enough and lucky enough, you can probably coast on your reputation for a while — but not forever.
Please put these fucking babies in the corner
This is the problem with our current crop of broligarchs: They want to be everything. They’re not content to be CEOs of one thing; they need to be CEOs of three things, go on 17-month silent meditation retreats, and somehow also be Extremely Online. Unfortunately, they have enough money and sycophantic hangers-on that nobody has pointed out to them that this is impossible. Also, they are huge dorks (derogatory).
Or maybe someone did, but they got fired and replaced with an iPad on a Roomba wearing a stylish scarf and googly eyes. It has a custom GPT on it that only pays its master in compliments and drains the water supply of an impoverished town of undesirables every three-to-six days.
It is the perfect assistant.
There is no finitude with this assistant, except computing power and the earth’s resources, I guess. It’s the ultimate enabler, allowing them to continue to ignore their own finitude.
At least we can rest assured that they will, in fact, die one day just like all the rest of us horrible peasants.
put it brilliantly a few weeks ago in the aptly titled "Your Billions Will Not Grant You An Exemption From The Indignity of Death.”
And there’s another bit about finitude in there that Cox probably didn’t intend, about going out into the weather, and how it’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be from your “position of superficial safety” (in love with this line). Burkeman talks about the same thing; the relief that comes from finally making a decision and closing off the infinite, fantasy options you think it’s always better to hold open.
Remember that when you’re standing in that yellow wood, babe, deciding which road to take. Do not wither away at that crossroads.
Don’t take the road exploring the banality of evil either, please.
Get Rec’d
What I’m reading, watching, being haunted by.
What I’m reading: I’m about to start Martyr! for one of my book clubs; will report back.
What I’m watching: My increasingly rapid descent into insanity I guess !!!
Reality: Cannot recommend reading this piece from
on the economic boycott/no-buy Friday situation enough. (Please do not give a random man with no organizing credentials or clear plan your money!!)Escapism: Estelle’s new meditation just dropped.
Wildcard: What are the ethics of an undead Instagram animal account? “The question becomes: When a pet dies but its account is still profitable, should creators keep it going with a new animal?” Chronically Online investigates.
Until next time.
As espoused by my best friends Michael and Peter of If Books Could Kill
I am a monster with oatmeal for brains if I do not sleep, and I cannot sleep if I do not get enough physical activity, and yet I work an incredibly sedentary desk job and refuse to give up my social life and hobbies that make life worth living…h e l p
Not that I speak from personal experience