The Joy of Opting Out

In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spe

... See more

“Everything is opportunity/cost. If I go out to a movie instead of going hiking as my leisure activity, what is the cost of that? If I go to the movies instead of a hike, does that help or hurt my paddling? I’ve got to judge that.” “Quit” doesn’t have to be the opposite of “grit.” This is where “strategic quitting” comes in. Once you’ve found somet

... See more

You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that

... See more

And now consider what all this means for the crucial and basic question of choosing what to do with your limited time. As we’ve seen, it’s a fact of life that, as a finite human, you’re always making hard choices—so that, for example, in spending this afternoon on one thing that mattered to me (writing), I necessarily had to forgo many other things

... See more

The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out’, by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the ‘fear of missing out’. It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on,

... See more