How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity

As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer. If you want to sample something from every aisle in the grocery store of life, you turn yourself into a chooser, the sort of self-obsessed person who is always thi

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard makes the case that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. I would extend this to how we measure our days, too: how we measure our days is how we measure our lives. When we measure our days by how much we’re able to accomplish in them, and we’re not careful, we measure the sum of our days this w

Annie Dillard is: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Do any of the activities that fill your days (which remember, make up your whole life) get you to where you want to go or at least bring you joy in the here and now?