Deep thoughts with Oliver Burkeman

You can’t hoard life On letting the moments pass

‘the efficiency trap,’ to describe the way that when you get better and faster at dealing with an incoming supply of anything, you often end up busier and more stressed.

Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organize the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds.

‘You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – SHELDON B. KOPP

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death.

just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water,

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger described this state of affairs using the word Geworfenheit, or ‘thrownness,’ a suitably awkward word for an awkward predicament: merely to come into existence is to find oneself thrown into a time and place you didn’t choose, with a personality you didn’t pick, and with your time flowing away beneath you,

It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now.

agnostics and atheists get to take a different path to a similar destination: if there isn’t a god, then there’s no authority with the power to demand that you earn your right to exist. You just do exist, and that has to be sufficient.