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”.
— Simon Usborne, from his review of “Meditations for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. (The Guardian, September 12, 2024)