The main aim of Meditations for Mortals is to acquaint readers with a broader perspective on what drives our mania for controlling our schedules and inboxes. We fear the present moment, the way that we are “confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there.” I’ve felt, more times than I care to admit, that despite my heartbeat and mortgage and two walking, talking children, I’m not yet inside my life. Someday it will start, I imagine, the part of life in which I’m really engaged, really moving forward, really jolted with the electricity of having a mind and body that can interact with this wild world. I’ll leave behind this practice life for the real one.
— Hillary Kelly, from her interview of Oliver Burkeman in her essay: “You Are Going to Die.” (The Guardian, October 4, 2024)
I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction… Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. […]
Meditations for Mortals could be read as a slacker’s charter, or as rehab for burned-out high achievers. For me, it fell somewhere in between. I have been grappling with my own middle-aged productivity wobbles. It can be deeply frustrating to know how much more you could earn or achieve if you could only find another gear, or rediscover the one you seemed to zoom along in as a care-free youngster.
Burkeman’s insight – always clear-eyed and jargon-free – backs up, in a reassuring and constructive way, the other sense I have on more forgiving days (going easy on yourself is the theme of day 16): that it’s better for you and everyone around you to work with, rather than fight against, who you are now. After all, Burkeman says, quoting the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson (who gets a free pass as a tech guy because he’s both Canadian and self-aware): most highly successful people are “just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity”.
The sweetest thing I read this week was a note from Cecilia Hogan, a reader in Tacoma, Wash. While waiting to pick up a book at her local library, she saw a 5-year-old boy applying for his first library card.
“The boy swam in excitement,” Ms. Hogan tells me, “bobbing from foot to foot, gurgling over each development the librarian devised. ‘Can you sign the back of the card?’ she asked. The boy nearly exploded. ‘You don’t have to write your whole name. How about just the first letter? A ‘Z,’ right?’ The boy took the pen from her and, after carefully executing a ‘Z,’ he added an ‘N’ and an ‘A.’ The more letters, the better, right?”
Then it was time to put the card on a lanyard — his own lanyard. “The boy was ecstatic!” Ms. Hogan adds. “It was magic as old as libraries and still possible in the world we occupy today.”
Amid all the shameless assaults on librarians– like this real-life horror story – that little boy’s delight reminds us what’s at stake and why it’s worth defending everyone’s freedom to read. […]
Sunday marks the start of Library Card Sign-up Month, a national effort to connect children with libraries and books. The annual drive started in 1987 after then Secretary of Education William Bennett said, “Let’s have a campaign. . . . Every child should obtain a library card and use it.”
If there are young people in your life, consider how you can help them get a library card and begin a transformative engagement with the world of books.
— Ron Charles, from “The Book Club” (Washington Post, August 30, 2024)
From the outside, it’s easy to roll our eyes at devotees of everything from Taylor Swift to “Star Trek.” We deem them nerdy or frivolous, judge their costumes, the time they waste on Reddit, the money they spend on concert tickets.
What if they’ve figured out something the rest of us haven’t?
After all, so many of us lack community. Data from Cigna finds 58% of Americans are lonely. Religion is fading. Work doesn’t love us back. Maybe letting ourselves be obsessed with that highly specific and possibly weird thing we love is the answer…
“If it brings you joy, why not do more of it?” the 33-year-old architect asked, clad in an “Aladdin”-print dress. A photo of her and her husband wearing mouse ears hung on the wall behind her on our Zoom call.
More than six in 10 Americans said hobbies or recreational activities were extremely or very important to them, according to a 2023 poll from Gallup. That’s up from 48% in 2001 and 2002. Meanwhile, the share of people who said the same about religion dropped 7 percentage points, to 58%.
Picture a crowd swaying in unison to a beloved song. Everyone assembled feels the same emotion simultaneously, says Paul Booth, a professor of media and pop culture at DePaul University. The euphoria catches and builds. The experience, known as “collective effervescence,” can feel transcendent, he says, almost telepathic. “I think it has to do with wanting something in our lives that we can lose ourselves in,” he says. At a time of increasing polarization and cynicism—not to mention that coming election—it’s an especially wondrous connection, he adds…
“That’s the heart of a fandom,” says Tara Block, who fell in love with the “Harry Potter” books after graduating college. “You care a lot.”
