Meditations for Mortals

✒️ Note-Making

🔗Connect

⬆️Topic:: Wellbeing (MOC) ⬆️Topic:: Mindsight

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. We can't have it all, but we can have something - We try to do it all, to control it all, to finish all of our goals within our time. This is not possible, and will only add stress to our lives. While we must accept that we can't do everything, we still have time to do something.
2. Let go of control, we never had it to begin with - We don't control the cards we are given, only what we do with them. A "perfect" stable life was never an achievable dream. Our finite lives and the nature of change prevents that. By letting go of expectations of control we become free, we don't have to spend energy fighting a hopeless cause. Instead we can dedicate it to what matters
3. Strive for imperfectness - You don't have to do anything, and whatever you do it doesn't have to be perfect. Lower the bar, start small, try it for just a while instead lifelong commitment. It doesn't matter if you miss a streak once in a while, just as long as you do it regularly-ish. As long as you enjoy spending time doing something that is meaningful to you, that's enough.
4. Don't fight the current - Some things like inboxes, social media, to-read lists are literally infinite. To try and reach "inbox zero" is hard borderline impossible. Treat these as rivers that flow by and you pick whatever interests you, instead of a bucket you have to drain.

🗒️Relate

⛓ by following this method, what will happen? What is the goal of this book? We would feel more at peace, accepting our limited nature and reduce suffering and anxiety

✅Act

📋What should I do to achieve the goals set out by this book?

1. Accept your finitude - acknowledge you cannot do everything and stop trying to control every outcome so you can free attention for what matters.
2. Start small (five minutes) - lower goals and begin one task today for five minutes instead of demanding perfect or total change.
3. Prioritize a handful of projects - choose a few things to pour your finite time and attention into rather than spreading yourself across endless opportunities.
4. Ask the price before choosing - for every decision, identify the alternative cost and decide whether you’re willing to pay it.
5. Celebrate accomplishments - shift from a debt mindset to positive recognition by noting and celebrating what you complete instead of fixating on backlog.
6. Treat your reading list as a river - pick what you want to read now and let other items flow by without guilt.
7. Use soft rules / be “dailyish” - create flexible rules that serve your life (most days, not every day) to avoid rigid chains that punish small failures.
8. Block time for deep work (3–4 hours) - limit focused, high-quality work to about 3–4 hours per day and protect that time where possible.
9. Take the smallest non‑anxiety step - when avoiding an important task, identify and do the tiniest action that doesn’t trigger anxiety to start progress.
10. Produce quantity over perfect quality - create freely and frequently to increase the chance of valuable outcomes instead of waiting for perfect results.

🔍Critique

✅ relevant research, metaphors or examples that helps to convey the argument

1. Being dry in the rain - To resist our limits is like trying to stay dry in the blizzard without an umbrella, it is doomed from the start
2. Drivers at night - Living is like driving at night, even without knowing every step of the way, just seeing a few steps ahead is enough to get us to our destination

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... As a meditations book, it serves more as a remainder than as an awakening. Nothing here will astonish you, but these are ideas that needs to be reinforced from time to time.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... I love the author and his arguments, but this book is a meh for me. Probably because of the format, it's not their fault for not having enough depth in a short meditations. For me, some of the meditations were interesting and some were not. I don't know if I will ever go back to reading this, as it's notes are less useful than reading the other book by this author.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

The Imperfect Life

In our modern times, many of us are walking Busy Stress disorders, searching for meaning in the world. We believe there is an answer "out there," and until we find it, we won't feel satisfied Future disillusionment.

We are Lost in the infinite, trying every trick we hear about in hopes of finding meaning. We jump from one shiny new promise to another, only to be quickly disappointed when we still feel empty inside after trying them.

Productivity is the greatest trap of all because it promises to help us fulfill our goals, regardless of what they may be. We fixate on the tools instead of the purpose Form vs essence.

We perceive life as a matter of control, believing that Uncertainty is our enemy and the source of our Existential dread. By bringing order to life and taming it, we think we can find peace. We strive to be the best at everything, create systems that bring structure to our lives, and plan every step. However, life is anything but stable, so our attempts are destined for failure fatalism.

Instead, we should find a way to connect with life rather than tame it. Happiness and creativity both arise from the unexpected.

Once we realize we can't do everything and that time is limited, we can choose to do something Prioritization. We can dedicate our time and attention to a specific project, pouring meaning into it and receiving meaning in return.

The imperfect life

• life as a limited human being – in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities – isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve. (Location 41)
• the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable – and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control. (Location 111)
• The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. (Location 124)
• When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything, that’s when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly count. When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them. (Location 149)

Being Finite

The first step is to accept that you will never be able to do everything or achieve a "perfect life," neither now nor in the future. It's like trying to stay dry in the rain without an umbrella; it's hopeless from the start. We can't stop the plane (of life) from crashing; we are born on a desert island, and now we must choose what to do with it.

When we truly accept this, something is released within us - the burden of trying to control everything. Without it, we can simply be. We can choose to do something, not because we are perfect at it or because it will ever be perfect, but because we want to do it. We let go of impossible Expectations.

Instead of striving for perfection, an unattainable standard that's hard to maintain, you should Start Small. Lower your goal; just do it once today for five minutes. Not a complete life change, not a new system of habits, just something good enough to be worth doing.

Remember that you are never helpless; you are never forced to do anything. You can make any choice you want, as long as you are ready to face the consequences. For every decision you encounter, ask yourself what the Alternative cost of each choice is and determine whether it is a price you are willing to pay.

There's freedom in limitations, in being free to choose, regardless of the situation.

We face a productivity debt, feeling we must justify our existence by completing a certain number of tasks or achieving a specific social status. This creates a bar that generates debt for tomorrow. We are insecure overachievers who accomplish much yet always feel it's not enough. The only way to escape this cycle is to shift from a debt mindset to positive thinking by celebrating our accomplishments instead of fixating on our endless to-do list.

We also experience information overload, with far more content than we can handle. That's why we should lower the bar. Treat your "to-read" list as a river, not a bucket. Allow things to come and go without feeling guilty for not reading them. Choose only what you want to read right now, without the added pressure of consuming only "what's useful" or forcing yourself to take notes for your future self. The benefits of reading lie not in the knowledge gained but in the process and the way it transforms you.

Similarly, be selective about where you place your attention. You can't care about every single problem in the world or bear the responsibility for all of humanity's suffering. Choose your battles and focus solely on them.

We worry too much, considering that many of the things we fret over are beyond our control and cannot be resolved before they occur. We choose to suffer from chronic stress. You will cross the bridge when you get there, so focus on the challenges you face now and let go of unnecessary concerns.

Being Finite

• once you’re staring reality in the face – you can take action not in the tense hope that your actions might be leading you towards some future utopia of perfect productivity, but simply because they’re worth doing. (Location 210)
• it’s precisely because you’ll never produce perfect work that you might as well get on with doing the best work you can; (Location 237)
• our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place (Location 240)
• you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. (Location 336)
• The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying. (Location 346)
• Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. (Location 374)
• each new accomplishment merely sets a higher standard that you now feel you’ve got to reach next time around, so it becomes even harder to pay off your debt than it was before. (Location 413)
• That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by. (Location 490)
• 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. (Location 576)

Taking Action

Accepting our limited human existence is not settling for less; it's about the freedom to choose what matters most and promote it.

Inaction, Analysis paralysis, or procrastination are forms of Avoidance strategies because they delay the moment we must confront the results of our decisions and life itself. If I don't choose which job to take, I technically haven't made the wrong decision yet.

However, we will never know what the right choice was because we can't access the Counterfactual to understand what it would have been like if we had chosen differently, not even in hindsight.

We are like drivers at night, seeing only a sliver ahead, yet we can still reach our destination. Taking baby steps is perfectly fine, as long as we actually take them.

When in doubt, we must ask ourselves what our life's task is. The answer will come from within, not from external sources. Forget what others expect you to do. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, what will enlarge your life, and what requires your specific set of skills.

There are tasks we avoid on purpose, much like a person who fears checking their bank account. The information we need most often causes us the most anxiety because it shatters the bubble of our comfort zone. It's a truth that transforms us. To make it less intimidating, think about the smallest step you could take that doesn't trigger anxiety, and do that.

We should avoid having Rigid rules. The purpose of rules is to support the way we want to live, not to make us their slaves. Since life is hard and unpredictable, having a rigid rule like "do this every day" is unforgiving. It focuses too much on not breaking the chain rather than improving in the areas we want to enhance.

Using soft rules, such as doing things dailish - on most days but not necessarily every day - preserves the main intention behind the activity without making it impossible to follow.

Limit yourself to 3-4 hours of work a day. This is the optimal amount of time to produce quality Deep Work while allowing yourself enough time to Rest. Since most of us can't freely choose how long we work, at least try to block off time for deep work.

We will never be free of problems, as they indicate our lack of total control over life; otherwise, we wouldn't have problems in the first place. Dealing with problems is part of life, part of living, and even part of finding meaning.

Taking Action

• embracing your limitations isn’t a matter of settling for less in life. It’s not about passively sitting back and letting things happen to you. (Location 647)
• The whole point of facing the truth about finitude is that it gets easier to spend more of your time on worthwhile and life-enriching activities once you’re no longer trying to do all of them, or do them perfectly, or do them with the secret agenda of achieving a feeling of security or control. (Location 649)
• the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. (Location 702)
• The more you organize your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems (Location 837)
• the point isn’t to spend your life serving rules. The point is for the rules to serve life. ‘Dailyish’ is one that does. In not insisting on your doing something absolutely every day, it shifts the focus away from the ultimately meaningless question of whether or not you have an unbroken chain of red Xs, and back to the life it’s supposed to be serving (Location 935)
• to face no problems at all would leave you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying. (Location 1033)

Letting Go

We praise effort and Grit as signs of progress and meaningful work. It feels like cheating to do something simple and enjoyable. To progress without constantly needing to motivate ourselves or tempt ourselves into working more, we should ask, "What if that were easy?" This helps us see if we are making some tasks unnecessarily difficult as a badge of honor No pain no gain instead of recognizing their redundancy.

We should treat ourselves according to the reverse Golden rule, treating ourselves as we typically treat others, avoiding being our worst critic.

However, we shouldn't take our Kindness too far. We don't have to think about giving optimally at every opportunity; simply being nice is enough. Similarly, we are not responsible for others' mental states. Others may be angry, frustrated, or sad, but it's not our job to fix it.

Every experience is either a good time or a good story. Looking back, the memorable moments are often those where everything went wrong, yet we still laughed about it. Uncertainty makes life enjoyable and meaningful, as long as it doesn't consume us entirely. A life with full control is boring, while a life without any control is frightening. However, a life with some control is surprising and exciting.

We sometimes obsess over quality, which blocks us from producing anything at all. Instead, we should focus on quantity; when we create without filtering, there's a higher chance we will produce something of value amid all the noise First Batch Trash.

Distractions and interruptions are labels we often assign too easily, typically with a negative connotation. A world without distractions is a soplipstic world, where only you exist and nothing else - not even life itself. Life is not bound by your "time boxing" or your schedule; it exists constantly. A child interrupting your deep work session - is that really a bad thing? Isn't time with your children the main point of it all?

Letting Go

• what you generally find, instead, is that you do want to honor your commitments, pay your bills, keep yourself physically healthy, and so on – because the person you are, behind all the screeching and yelling, isn’t a worthless layabout after all. (Location 1188)
• Being a better or more loving person is another thing you can’t make happen. You have to let it happen – which you can do by first recognizing that some part of you already feels the emotions you believe you ought to be feeling. (Location 1210)
• the more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses what Rosa calls its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us. (Location 1343)
• going through the world with the default belief that it’s full of people or things that need holding at bay is a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Location 1451)

Showing up

We also shouldn't let future plans overshadow our present. It's okay to have ambition and to live by it, but not in a way that prevents us from living in the moment. For example, delaying gratification is only useful if we eventually decide to enjoy ourselves; otherwise, we risk delaying it to oblivion and suffering unnecessarily. Don't base your happiness on a future state or wait for it to arrive. Balance ambition with living in the now.

Trying to achieve Inbox Zero or tidy your house to perfection is a never-ending task because supply creates demand. A clean house creates more opportunities for messiness. Focusing on emptying our inbox is more about maintaining the facade of order and "being on top of things" than actually achieving it. For instance, if you tidy your house before friends come over, they won't see the real you, and you'll spend your effort cleaning instead of connecting with them Vulnerability.

Everything "amazing" you see around you has been accomplished by ordinary people, just like you. They didn't break the laws of physics; they are not superhumans. More than raw talent, their "gift" was likely understanding their finitude and deciding to take action, even without all the answers Practice beats talent.

We should aim to be imperfect perfectionists. For example, we should lower the bar for what it means to have a meaningful life. Life cannot be meaningful only if we change the world. It is enough to be a good friend, to find flow in what we do, and to engage in activities that make us feel alive Meaning is Crafted.

Showing Up

• showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them. It means letting go of the notion that you can’t quite allow yourself to feel fully immersed in life before those plans are realized, (Location 1562)
• Spending your days trying to get experiences ‘under your belt,’ so as to maximize your collection of them, or to feel more confident about their future supply, means you never get to enjoy them properly (Location 1744)
• real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out. It lies in grasping the sense in which you never will get it completely figured out. (Location 1789)
• Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you’re rewarded with the time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable. (Location 1858)
• Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not. If so, then maybe our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it, nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are. (Location 1952)