On the spurious need to justify leisure for leisure’s sake, via Four Thousand Weeks:

John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.

This is, in part, an invocation to stop making everything count for something and just, you know, be. But, that’s hard:

It’s like trying too hard to fall asleep, and therefore failing. You resolve to stay completely present while, say, washing the dishes—perhaps because you saw that quotation from the bestselling Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh about finding absorption in the most mundane of activities—only to discover that you can’t, because you’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re being present enough or not.

Soon, leisure isn’t very leisurely. It’s just a different kind of job:

The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. This was a pitfall the critic Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: “We are all of us compelled,” Kerr wrote, “to read for profit, party for contacts … gamble for charity, go out in the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.”

When was the last time you really did something without an eye toward some other goal?

In his book Sabbath as Resistance, the Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week “in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.” One need not be a religious believer to feel some of the deep relief in that idea of being “on the receiving end”—in the possibility that today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.

and

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness,” writes the philosopher John Gray. He adds: “How can there be play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads to something else?”

and

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim.

You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them.

You cannot complete them.

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. (Isn’t it hilarious, in hindsight, that you ever imagined things might be otherwise?) Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.

Read some more thoughts and quotes from Burkeman’s excellent book in Productivity is a Trap, Inescapable Finitude, and Choosing Rocks.

From How Not to Invest by Barry Ritholtz:

There is a forecasting-industrial complex, and it is a blight on all that is good and true. The symbiotic relationship between the media and Wall Street drives a relentless parade of money-losing tomfoolery: Television and radio have 24 hours a day they must fill, and they do so mostly with empty nonsense. Print has column inches to put out. Online media may be the worst of all, with an infinite maw that needs to be constantly filled with new and often meaningless content.

The broader internet—with its incredible volume of content, endless noise, spam, grift, and now AI slop, ruthless competition for attention, and the need to placate the algorithm gods—has gotten really bad. This is one of the reasons why I never transitioned my writing to a niche like student loans or other financial pseudoadvice, even when that was potentially a lucrative option. The need to continue writing the same things over and over in my free time was unfathomable. Once I said what I wanted to say (for example), I had no interest in saying it again. To wit:

Award-winning Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig brilliantly defined what he actually did: “My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.”

I’m not sure that’s possible for most people? Not to most readers, and probably for only a select few writers. The problem with all this thirst for raw material is that most of it isn’t very good, and much of it is derived from our worst storytelling tendencies:

The idea of narrative fallacy—the term was actually coined by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan—applies to pretty much everything. Danny Kahneman explains it in Thinking, Fast and Slow: Flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.

The ability to tell a convincing story is very different from the ability to be right.

All of us, by our very nature, are telling “wrong” stories most of the time (even when we’re right).

From Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us by Russ Roberts:

Instead of spending more time trying to make the right decision, I show you that often there is no right decision in the way we usually think of the term.

Sometimes there are no right or wrong choices, just choices. And, of course, the status quo bias of not making a choice is itself also a choice.

The ability to boil complexity down to a single number so you can make comparisons is very powerful. The mathematical name for a number that describes physical concepts like area is scalar.

A matrix is messy. Its lessons are opaque. A scalar is clean and precise. The precision makes scalars seductive. But the usefulness and accuracy of a scalar depends on how many corners have to be cut to turn a complex set of information into a single number.

It’s easy to want to summarize nebulous concepts like quality with metrics, but the more we try to reduce important multimodal things (good care, a good career, a happy marriage) into measurements, the more often our models of the world become a poor proxy for the things we really care about.

Summarizing the “Vampire Problem” as crafted and popularized by LA Paul:

In her book Transformative Experience, L. A. Paul uses the choice to become a vampire as a metaphor for the big decisions that are the focus of this book. Before you become a vampire, you can’t really imagine what it will be like. Your current experience doesn’t include what it’s like to subsist on blood and sleep in a coffin when the sun is shining. Sound dreary? But most, maybe all, of the vampires you meet speak quite highly of the experience. Surveys of vampires reveal a high degree of happiness.

But will it be good for you—the actual you and not some average experienced by others—a flesh-and-blood human being who will live the experience in real time? Ah, different question. You have no data on that one. And the only way to get that data is to take the leap of faith (or in this case, anti-faith, maybe) into Vampire World. Once you’ve made the leap and find you don’t care for an all-liquid, heavy-on-the-hemoglobin diet, you can’t go back. One of the weirdest parts of the decision, as Paul points out, is that once you become a vampire, what you like and what you dislike change. As a human, you might find narcissism repugnant. But vampires find narcissism refreshing and look back on their humbler non-vampire selves with disdain for their humility. Which “you” should you consider when deciding what’s best for you? The current you or the you you will become?

Paul uses this example as a metaphor for becoming a parent. It’s a powerful thought experiment for approaching what Roberts calls “Wild Problems,” the big decisions without prospectively correct answers that are hard to change, the ones that define us.

To summarize:

Many decisions involve burning bridges, crossing into a new experience that will change you in ways you can’t imagine, including what you care about and what brings you joy or sorrow, sweetness or sadness, sunshine or shade.

Becoming a parent is perhaps the biggest one-way street. But broad choices about marriage, where to live, and what kind of career to pursue also have massive impacts, especially over time.

One of the unavoidable tradeoffs is the pursuit/balance of Hedonia vs Eudaimonia:

Human beings care about more than the day-to-day pleasures and pains of daily existence. We want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. We aspire. We want to matter. These overarching sensations—the texture of our lives above and beyond what we call happiness or everyday pleasure—define who we are and how we see ourselves. These longings are at the heart of a life well lived.

To flourish as a human being is to live life fully. That means more than simply accumulating pleasures and avoiding pain. Flourishing includes living and acting with integrity, virtue, purpose, meaning, dignity, and autonomy—aspects of life that are not just difficult to quantify but that you might put front and center, regardless of the cost. You don’t get married or have children because it’s fun or worth it. Having a child is about more than just the accumulated pleasure and pain that comes your way because there is a child in your life. You have a child because it makes your entire life richer even if it makes your bank account poorer.

Of course we do want both. One caution about the pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, more or less) is that perhaps we shouldn’t become too self-serious and dry. As Oliver Burkeman argues, most of what we do doesn’t really matter—we are cosmically insignificant.

Even so, we can all acknowledge the long-term satisfaction of Type 2 Fun:

A Type 1 experience is nice the whole time—nothing too stressful, mostly positive. You enjoy it while you’re in the middle of it and you enjoy it after. A day at the beach. A walk in the park. A Type 2 experience is hard. There are moments of pain that have to be endured—difficult days with a lot of altitude gained over a fairly short distance, streams to be crossed without your shoes where the water runs so cold your feet go numb while you’re crossing, heavy gear to be carried on the trek that hurts your back or feet. But a Type 2 experience is one that you never forget, one that makes you stronger, and when you overcome the obstacles in the way, you feel like you’ve accomplished something. A Type 2 experience can teach you something about yourself. A Type 2 experience has a chance to be more than pleasant. It can be exhilarating. You might not enjoy it (much) while you’re in the middle of it. But you enjoy it after it’s over and in a different way than a Type 1 experience.

And sometimes we choose a Type 2 experience that isn’t just a test, but a chance to experience something profound and meaningful, a chance to share something with another person that brings out the best in us and allows us to grow. Marriage and parenting are much more Type 2 than Type 1.

It can be impossible to know prospectively when type 2 fun is worth it. The problem with “wild problems” is that they are problems of inherent, unavoidable uncertainty. When they turn out poorly, we often think of them as mistakes:

Often in such situations, we’ll say, I took the job, but it was a mistake. I got engaged, but it was a mistake. I went to law school, but it was a mistake. But none of those things are mistakes. A mistake is when you know you don’t like anchovies but you keep ordering them on your pizza. A mistake is trusting someone you know is a person without honor.

A lot of what makes wild problems so painful is the specter of regret. You decide not to marry someone and you end up regretting it. Or the opposite—you marry someone and it doesn’t turn out well. You go to law school and you hate it. The potential for these decisions to turn out badly tends to cause fear of making any decision at all. We say to ourselves that we need more time to gather information, ignoring that more information isn’t going to help—it’s just a form of procrastination.

Outcomes matter, but at least the process is controllable. At the end of the day, sometimes we just have to decide and live.

Michael Crichton (famous novelist and never-practicing MD), describing the cognitive bias of “Gell-Mann Amnesia” in a 2002 speech (as included in How Not to Invest by Barry Ritholtz):

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets cause rain stories. Papers are full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

One of the points Crichton is making, particularly with regard to the media, is that we are more forgiving of certain institutions than we are with people in real life. When someone opines confidently but incorrectly about your area of expertise, you know they’re a blowhard. But we are generally forgiving of institutions (until we become so blinded by bullshit that we discount everything, adrift on a sea of conspiracy theories).

We do discount what are considered credible and trustworthy sources when we know they’re wrong but otherwise assume they’re generally right. It’s almost an institutional halo effect; we give more credit than due unless we are forced by our own knowledge to confront it.

In reality, the lesson is: truth is hard. People are wrong all the time, and institutions are full of people. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter—they do!—or that everyone is consistently wrong or that you should never trust anyone, but it does mean that our beloved institutions require maintenance and care.

Ritholtz:

There are tremendous advantages in recognizing what you do not know. Acknowledging shortcomings in your informational intelligence is a form of situational awareness that prevents you from being blindsided. There are other benefits as well. It shifts your focus to process over outcome; you can better understand what results come from skill versus dumb luck. It prevents you from being fooled by randomness.

We should be a little more thoughtful and a little less credulous. A little less precious with our own knowledge, acknowledging the shortcomings in what we know, where we seek information, and how we incorporate it into our latticework of mental models.

In other words: Less Certainty, More Inquiry.

Regarding the nature of a “good job” vs/and/or a good career, the two different types of ancient Greek “happiness” as relayed by Arthur C. Brooks in From Strength to Strength:

Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry.

A few more of my favorite passages from that book that work well together:

Hold your success lightly—be ready to change as your abilities change. Even if your worldly prestige falls, lean into the changes.

If you base your sense of self-worth on success, you tend to go from victory to victory to avoid feeling awful…You need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

This past year was the fifteenth of this site and this is my eleventh reading list. This year, among other things, I also took over as the neuroradiology division chief for our large private practice (in addition to serving as associate program director for our radiology residency) and then started a new hand-crafted high-touch job board exclusively featuring true radiology private practices called Independent Radiology. It’s been busy.

1. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
2. Show Your Work by Austin Kleon (referenced in this April post)
3. Keep Going by Austin Kleon
4. Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (I remember being somewhat disappointed by this book when I read it as a boy. Returning to it as a grown man with children, it feels like a completely different book. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers of all time.)
5. The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (This book and its personalities had a hard time carrying its length, I remember why I dropped the series in high school.)
6. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris (skimmed large sections due to format and the fact that I’m not going to do meaningful dietary content restriction, convoluted workouts, or psychedelics. I have a full-time job and a family I want to eat with.)
7. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (I read this to my son when it was new and selling oodles of copies, I opened it up again because my daughter is almost to that age again.)
8. Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words (a free and sometimes even a little raw collection of Steve Jobs’ emails, quotes, and speeches)
9. Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott (this may be the most delightful book about writing I’ve come across)
10. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem #2)
11. The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (I remember when this came out when I was in high school, and I remember being happy the series ultimately hadn’t ended with Tehanu. But I’d literally forgotten everything about this story [it’s great].)
12. Anything You Want by Derek Sivers (very short. Perhaps it’s hard to justify the cover price and sell books when they seem too short, but more nonfiction should be this short and to the point).
13. The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers (this book is middle grade—and I bought it for my son—but I read it first, and I’ll freely admit to being surprised by how it came together).
14. Death’s End by Cixin Liu (lots of info dumping and not always the most elegant prose given the translation but incredibly unique and inventive universe-scale science fiction)
15. Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
16. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
17. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch Book 2—good!)
18. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (1: Do fewer things, 2: Work at a natural pace, and 3: Obsess over quality.)
19. The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby
20. A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (TLDR: All the popular ideas of settling space probably won’t work for a variety of reasons)
21. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch Book 3)
22. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Murberbot #2, really great series, concise and enjoyable with strong efficient plotting)
23. Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (Murberbot #3)
24. Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (Murberbot #4)
25. Network Effect by Martha Wells (Murberbot #5)
26. Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (Murberbot #6)
27. System Collapse by Martha Wells (Murberbot #7)
28. The Coward by Stephen Aryan
29. The Warrior by Stephen Aryan
30. Loaded by Sarah Newcomb (meh)
31. Hyperion by Dan Simmons (this is one of those classic sci-fi Hugo winners from the 1980s. It was pretty out there.)
32. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
33. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson
34. The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
35. Translation State by Ann Leckie (I normally don’t care very much for spin-off stories set off the main story arc, especially prequels. This takes place after the Radch trilogy, covers new ground, and has some fun cameos. I enjoyed it, and the series in general continues to be an illustration—in a good way—of the fact that Science Fiction says more about the period in which it is written than about the future it envisions).
36. Spelunky (Boss Fight Books) by Derek Yu (written by the creator of a popular/niche roguelike indy videogame; it’s always neat to open the hood and see how something is made, how someone approaches a novel set of problems.)
37. Emperor’s End by Kyle Kirrin (Ripple System #5)
38. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (I think this is a very important book)
39. Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time #3)
40. The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (I would say overall the most enjoyable of the Year of Sanderson)
41. The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell (answer: it would honestly be very hard.)
42. The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
43. The Employees by Olga Ravn (Disorienting epistolary sci-fi. I saw this on a list of 100 best sci-fi books of all time. I definitely wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the form. I wrote a very small portion of an abandoned epistolary novel myself when I was a medical student.)
44. The 4 hour Body by Tim Ferriss
45. The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson (Interesting narrative history tying together several bits of history I knew very little about: anarchism, the role of dynamite in the creation of modern terrorism, and the rise of the modern detective).
46. He Who Fights with Monsters 11 by Travis Deverell
47. The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building by Matt Mochary
48. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
49. Outlive by Peter Attia
50. The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
51. Chrono Trigger (Boss Fight Books) by Michael P. Williams (One of my favorite games of all time, but this didn’t hit anywhere the same notes as Spelunky in terms of diving into the mechanics of the game from the perspective of its designers.)
52. The Fragile Threads of Power by VE Schwab (a new series continuing the world of the Shades of Magic)
53. A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorpe (fascinating memoir, my brief summary and some choice quotes here)
54. How to Decide by Annie Duke
55. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (I’ve read a lot LitRPG, but this series somehow brought the subgenre into the mainstream [relatively speaking]. It looked like—and is—an absolutely ludicrous entry, so I’d been ignoring Amazon’s recommendations about it for a while. But it came up in conversation with a normal human so it seemed like it was time. Seth MacFarlane is even going to make it into a TV show).
56. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #2)
57. The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3)
58. The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #4)
59. The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #5)
60. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #6) (I thought when I started the series that it was complete at 6 books, but book 7 is coming out next year, argh)
61. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (his books are well established in the thought-leader zeitgeist and yet often misconstrued for personal gain. He may be a bit of a boor in his internet and intellectual fights, but I think his arguments themselves hold water.)
62. Insight by Tasha Eurich (I bought this book in 2019 apparently. Ultimately, I’m not sure what got me to pick it up at the end of the year, but it’s a great example of the glorified single article premise padded into a book through the overuse of tedious stories format of business publishing)

Here are the prior years:

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2014

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorpe is a fascinating memoir from the mathematician/gambler/investor who solved card counting and essentially invented modern quantitative investing strategies.

While reading, I was struck by two things: One, unsurprisingly, Thorpe is/was curious, industrious, and clearly a genius. Two, that his life as a latchkey kid in the early 20th century, which included buying dangerous chemicals and making amateur explosives at home could not seem more distant than the modern American screen-based and scheduled childhood.

A few standout passages:

Regarding the need to have both a desired outcome and an expected outcome in mind when making a new decision:

If you do this, what do you want to happen?

If you do this, what do you think will happen?

The problem of moral hazard in the modern US economy:

Our corporate executives speculate with their shareholders’ assets because they get big personal rewards when they win — and even if they lose, they are often bailed out with public funds by obedient politicians. We privatize profit and socialize risk.

On negotiating to “win”:

It doesn’t pay to push the other party to their absolute limit. A small extra gain is generally not worth the substantial risk the deal will break up.

The information food chain:

Be aware that information flows down a ‘food chain’, with those who get it first ‘eating’ and those who get it late being eaten.

Regulation matters, but only when simple and effective and not crafted by the schmucks making all the bad choices:

Nassim Taleb asked why, after a driver crashes his school bus, killing and injuring his passengers, he should be put in charge of another bus and asked to set up new safety rules.

How much leverage is enough?

The lesson of leverage is this: Assume that the worst imaginable outcome will occur and ask whether you can tolerate it. If the answer is no, then reduce your borrowing.

The gambler’s approach to life:

In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them.

And finally, what old people always say but young people can’t seem to internalize:

That acknowledgment, applause, and honor are welcome and add zest to life but they are not ends to be pursued. I felt then as I do now that what matters is what you do and how you do it, the quality of the time you spend, and the people you share it with.

A little over a year ago, I found Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals to be one of the most excerpt-able books I’d read in a while.

In it, Burkeman describes cosmic insignificance theory, the perhaps counterintuitive argument that I would summarize as, “You really don’t matter very much in the grand scheme of things, so stop getting so worked up.”

You could consider the aspirational approach to be a form of happy nihilism. 

Here are some of my favorite passages:

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

Except the people who want to amass experiences like a collector hoarding trinkets.

I also always love references to Keynes and his prediction for the 15-hour workweek:

None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”

But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.

That summarizes a lot of depressing things about the modern human condition.

Not to mention the downsides of being effective. In many industries, that means the more you are able to do, the more you get to do.

Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.”

Heh. No matter how much you do, you can’t do it all—so stop being so dramatic.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.

The lists don’t magically become empty unless you don’t mind them being empty.

The fundamental problem is that this attitude toward time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

On the opposite side of binging content in its many forms is the feeling that activities need to be “worth it” by some metric, that you are accountable for your time to any judge but yourself. (Also, I’m a hypocrite.)

I was a “productivity geek.” You know how some people are passionate about bodybuilding, or fashion, or rock climbing, or poetry? Productivity geeks are passionate about crossing items off their to-do lists. So it’s sort of the same, except infinitely sadder.

That’s a good line.

I tried to align my daily actions with my goals, and my goals with my core values. Using these techniques often made me feel as if I were on the verge of ushering in a golden era of calm, undistracted productivity and meaningful activity. But it never arrived. Instead, I just got more stressed and unhappy.

I would never succeed in marshaling enough efficiency, self-discipline, and effort to force my way through to the feeling that I was on top of everything, that I was fulfilling all my obligations and had no need to worry about the future. Ironically, the realization that this had been a useless strategy for attaining peace of mind brought me some immediate peace of mind. (After all, once you become convinced that something you’ve been attempting is impossible, it’s a lot harder to keep on berating yourself for failing.) What I had yet to understand, at that point, was why all these methods were doomed to fail, which was that I was using them to try to obtain a feeling of control over my life that would always remain out of reach.

Inevitably, to Nietzsche:

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” wrote Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

…which is a lot like the classic quote by Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.

…which then reminds me of the Covid-era essay by happiness professor/guru Arthur C. Brooks: How to Want Less.

Even embracing limitations, it’s easy to want to turn finitude into some sort of productivity paradox like the one thing: the best way to get things done is to do fewer things.

What Burkeman suggests is instead: just be okay with doing fewer things.

2023 is the tenth year of sharing my reading list. (The blog is also turning 15(!). I am…aging.

Here are the prior years: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

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