The Imperfectionist

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. ↩︎