Category: Meditation

I have a secret: I’m not perfect. I’ve stopped trying to be. Why am I telling you this? Isn’t a blog post supposed to help you become a little more perfect? Not this one. This is about giving up the constant struggle for perfection, and in doing so, leading a better life.

The Imperfectionist is the title of Oliver Burkeman’s blog. These essays are compiled into his book Meditations for Mortals, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The title sounds simple, but it has a very British double meaning. I originally thought the word “mortals” was referring to ordinary people, but it also refers to the finitude of life.

I’d been searching for a book of daily meditations—something that could set my day off on the right note. This one has truths I’d always sensed but couldn’t name. I’ve read the whole thing back to front 3 or 4 times this year, for 10 minutes each day while my tea steeps and the house is still silent.

Before this, he wrote columns for The Guardian about productivity, convinced that if he just found the right system, he’d finally get everything done. But each trick only bred more tasks—the emptier his inbox, the faster it refilled. Doing more didn’t bring calm; it just changed the game of whack-a-mole. Eventually he saw that the goal wasn’t to finish his infinite list but to change the way he thought about it. His solution: treat your to-do list like a river, not a bucket—something that flows endlessly past you, from which you can dip a few meaningful things, and let the rest drift on by.

The book draws on wisdom from across centuries—Stoics, Buddhists, existentialists, and even comedians—and packages it all in clear, modern language. It answers many of the key questions of life like:

• What should I do with my life? Carl Jung says: discover your life task—the thing your deeper self is already moving toward. You don’t choose it; you uncover it. The work isn’t to decide what to become, but to listen closely enough to become what you already are.
• How do I keep from feeling overwhelmed? Create a done list. Instead of staring at what’s unfinished, notice what you’ve already done. It’s as simple as not deleting the items on your to-do list once they’re completed.
• What if my life could’ve turned out better? Maybe it could have—but then it wouldn’t have been yours. Simone de Beauvoir marveled that out of hundreds of millions of chances, one sperm met one egg and became her. Change even a tiny detail, and you disappear.¹
• What should I do when I feel completely lost? As comedian Mitch Hedberg put it: “If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house.”

Burkeman even has BBC radio shows exploring these ideas further. I particularly enjoyed An Inconvenient Truth,² where he argues that convenience culture is a bit of a fraud. Companies try to convince us we need their products to remove life’s inconveniences. He uses the example of a hypothetical baby care app that raises your child without any hassle. Would anyone actually want that? Of course not—because inconvenience is where life is lived.

Each morning, as my tea steeps, I still listen to one meditation and let it settle. I still make mistakes—I get frustrated, I leave tasks undone, I make mistakes. But now I see those things differently. They’re not failures. They’re just life as a mortal.

Note: Much of Burkeman’s work is available for free on Spotify and/or the BBC.

Footnotes

1. This one is from Burkeman’s book 4000 weeks. ↩︎
2. Note that you have to listen to these from the bottom up because the most recent episodes are on top. ↩︎

Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters.

On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, “Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It’s not about other people judging me—it’s about me judging myself. Am I doing enough? Am I worthy of having gone here?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I have that too. It’s called Yale-ing.”

That was it exactly—the quiet, constant self-surveillance that comes from trying to measure up to an imaginary, idealized version of yourself. Yale searches for the most driven, unconventional, obsessive people it can find and gives them space to run. What looks like drive from the outside is often anxiety on the inside—a constant need to prove themselves again and again. They’re insecure overachievers.

For most of history, people worked so they could have leisure. We’ve somehow flipped it: now we have leisure so we can work better.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that being busy was the same thing as being valuable. If your calendar is full, you must be important. If your inbox is overflowing, you must be needed. If you never stop moving, you must be living a good life.

It’s a strange inversion of history. The ancient Greeks even had a word for this: scholē. It meant “leisure,” and it’s the root of our word school. Leisure wasn’t a reward for hard work; it was the highest state of being. Work was a means to secure leisure, and leisure was where life actually happened — in thinking, creating, learning, conversing.

The early idea of the “liberal arts” came from the same place. They weren’t job training. They were the “arts befitting a free person” — skills in language, reasoning, mathematics, and music. They were for people who had the time and freedom to explore ideas without having to justify every minute in terms of productivity.

Nearly a century ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell made a sharp case for idleness in his essay In Praise of Idleness. He argued that civilization would gain far more from shorter work hours and longer stretches of leisure than from endless production. For Russell, leisure wasn’t a pause from life — it was where life happened. It was the true incubator of culture, thought, and creativity.

I’ve been noticing a pattern: no matter how much I do, it never feels like enough. This make sense at work. The more I accomplish, the more money I can make, the faster I might get promoted, and the sooner I can wrap things up and spend time with my family. But I also feel compelled to do this at home too.

I catch myself listening to books and podcasts at 1.5x or 2x speed, just to get through them faster. Sometimes I even feel annoyed at a book—not because it’s bad, but because I have to finish it before moving on to the next one.

But I’ve noticed that I don’t do this with music.

Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the most unique self-help books ever written. It’s not your typical “Ten Steps to Success” guide, and it’s not filled with quick fixes or easy answers. Instead, it’s a guide to living a meaningful life, born out of Frankl’s harrowing experiences as a Holocaust survivor. The book weaves together his personal story and the psychological principles he developed—offering not just inspiration, but a framework for finding purpose in life.

Paul Bloom’s book, Against Empathy, challenged a core belief of mine: that empathy is inherently good. He writes about how empathy, which feels so natural and kind, sometimes sends us down the wrong path.

Recently, meditation has brought me closer to the world around me. In moments of stillness, I feel in tune with the natural flow, sensing life unfolding nearby. I’ll notice a squirrel darting up a tree or feel a butterfly gently landing on my shoulder. These encounters reveal a hidden beauty in the world that I hadn’t noticed before.

One day, during a particularly quiet moment in the garden, I found myself watching an insect slowly chewing through a leaf, leaving behind a pattern almost like lace. It reminded me of the dying autumn leaves, those vibrant bursts of orange and red signaling the close of summer. I began empathizing with the insect, appreciating not just its role in nature but also the beautiful art it created. I even started to feel guilty about all of the murderous humans destroying them with pesticides.