My rating: 9/10
My rating: 9/10
You should read this if:
You are a productivity zealot with a growing suspicion that implementing ever more efficient methodologies to optimise your life and work might not cure your existential angst after all.
My thoughts:
Those unchallenged assumptions about what makes a meaningful and fulfilling life (busyness, achievements, doing more things) are systematically stripped away in this ruthless assault on our increasingly pervasive productivity culture. After learning that the average human lifespan is an insultingly short four thousand weeks, I was expecting a litany of the many ways we should all be maximising the little time we have on this earth, squeezing every last drop of juice from the meagre offering of conscious experience bestowed on each of us before death comes knocking.
Refreshing, then, to receive the opposite message: that it is impossible to do everything we want to do, so there is really no point in trying. In fact, accepting our limitations is an ironically liberating exercise. When we free ourselves from the unrealistic expectation that we can squeeze more and more into our packed schedules (suffering the fatigue and burnout that inevitably follow), we open the door to mindfully enjoying doing the few things we initially set out to do.
In truth, I often felt defensive reading this book. I suffer from perennial unrealistic expectations about how much I can achieve (the negative side of the double-edged sword of optimism). When reality refuses to comply with those expectations, I’m often left feeling dejected. This book invited me to let go of those expectations and embrace my human limits. To accept them with curiosity and compassion, rather than frustration. It’s ok that your to do list isn’t shrinking. In a few lifetimes, nobody will remember anyway.
A few of my favourite extracts:
The paradox of limitation: ... the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being a human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets, but the more you confront the fact of finitude instead, the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.
Fulfilment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations.
The 'efficiency trap': rendering yourself more efficient - either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder - won't generally result the feeling of having more time, because all else being equal - the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done - you'll be creating new things to do.
It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.
The paradoxical reward for accepting reality's constraints, is that they no longer feel so constraining.
Our expectations are forever rubbing up against the stubborn reality that time isn't in our possession, and can't be brought under our control.
All a plan is, all it could ever possibly be, is a present moment statement of intent. It's an expression of your current thoughts about how you'd ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
[On parenting with a future-optimising mindset] Maybe it really is a bad habit, as the baby trainers insist, for your one-year-old to grow accustomed to falling asleep on your chest. But it's also a delightful experience in the present moment and that has to be weighed in the balance. It can't be the case that concerns for the future must always automatically take precedence.
To "try" to live in the moment implies that you are somehow separate from the moment, and thus in a position to either succeeded or fail at living in it.
Living more fully in the present may simply be a matter of finally realising that you have no other option, but to be here, now.
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time 'wastefully', focused solely on the pleasure of experience, is the only way not to waste it, to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self improvement.
A country walk, like listening to a favourite 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.
We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone – to spend some of our time, in other words, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.
As you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable, but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience.
Time is also a "network good", one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it too, and how their portion is coordinated with yours.
You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn't something best hoarded entirely for yourself; that your time can be too much your own.
A blunt, but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn't matter that much, and when it comes to how you're using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
The Ancient Egyptians lived 35 centenarian lifetimes ago, the Romans 20.
No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance. It's the feeling of realising that you've been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn't reasonably be expected to meet and this realisation isn't merely calming, but liberating because once you're no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a life well spent, you're free to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.
Procrastination, distraction, commitment phobia, clearing the decks, and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of maintaining the illusion that you are in charge of things.
Carl Jung : "Quietly do the next and most necessary thing"
My rating: 9/10
You should read this if:
Lke me, you are an economics muggle who wants a basic understanding of the economic themes and jargon you read in the news. If you studied economics previously, this book will be less valuable, but you may still enjoy the facts and anecdotes peppered throughout (e.g. that falling sales of men’s underwear is a good indicator of recession).
My thoughts:
A succinct overview of economics, covering supply and demand, markets, growth, inflation, money, banks, crises, and more. Each chapter addresses an economic concept by answering a common question (like “can’t we just print more money?”) in simple language, supported by endearing anecdotes and curious facts that bring the subject to life. The authors are economists at the Bank of England, meaning references tend to be Anglocentric. That may be a turn-off for those who didn’t grow up eating Freddo chocolate frogs purchased from Woolworths, but had me smiling and nodding along.
Having never studied economics, this book drew together many nebulous concepts that previously floated around my head on disparate islands (inflation, interest rates, growth, etc.), weaving a comprehensive and cohesive foundation of economic understanding. Armed with that understanding, I’m now more confident to read about and discuss contemporary economic issues with friends and family. You might justifiably deride me for not already knowing this stuff at the ripe old age of 33. Better late than never, I suppose.
Perhaps it was all the jargon I read in the news, or my complexity bias, but I never appreciated how much economics effects, and is affected by, everything you and I do, no matter how seemingly mundane. Feeling a part of it has kindled my interest. As the authors suggest, economics "is everything: the cumulative effect of all of the billions of decisions that humans make every day, and the way they interact with everything else in the world".
A few of my favourite extracts:
All models are wrong, but some are useful (George Box).
Markets, like all of us, are far from perfect. They fail to adequately internalise the costs of people's actions, leading to the over-consumption of finite resources ... they also lead to the underproduction of useful things, like education, and the overproduction of harmful things, like carbon dioxide.
The US-China trade war that began in 2018 harmed not just the two countries directly involved, but the whole world. At the time, it was expected to lower US and China's GDP by early 2 per cent, and global GDP by around 16 per cent.
The first national lottery in England came in 1567 ... the first prize was £5,000 - with some bonus prizes including plates, tapestries and, naturally, immunity from prosecution.
The theory goes that what we think will happen to inflation is one of the big determinants of what actually does happen. Inflation can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At its core, money is trust. Money works because we all agree, as a society, that it has value.
Even as recently as 2009, huge wheels of Parmesan cheese could be used as a deposit for a loan in parts of Italy.
The bulk of the money we use every day, in the form of bank deposits, is nothing more than a promise by our bank to pay us back, created out of thin air when they lend.
Scottish banknotes are not a direct claim on the Bank of England - they are privately issued … however, they do have to be backed one-for-one by money held at the Bank of England. To make this possible, the Bank's vaults contain notes called Giants, each worth £1 million, and Titans, each worth £100 million.
Today there are around 400,000 bars of gold worth over £200 billion stored in the Bank of England’s vaults. This amounts to a fifth of all the gold in the world.
In the UK there are over £8 million worth of money transactions made per second - £700 billion worth of exchanges between bank accounts every single day.
We all believe that banks keep our money safe, and for the most part they do. But if for a moment we all stopped believing that banks are safe - and tried to take that money out - the whole system would collapse.
One of the most accurate short-term predictors of a downturn is the number of articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post in which the word 'recession' appears.
I started this book hoping (perhaps naïvely) to finish with an understanding of the general meaning of my life. Using the analogy of a film (where each frame represents each moment in life), Frankl argues that the general meaning of a life only becomes clear when the whole thing has been lived, so rather than searching for a general meaning now, we might be better served by searching for the meaning in each moment (or 'frame' of the film) that we live.
How? Frankl argues that we are free to choose our attitude in response to any circumstances, however dire* (he might well be regarded authoritative on this point, having been imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps), and that - armed with this credo - we can find meaning through: (1) creating a work or doing a (virtuous) deed; (2) experiencing or encountering someone (doing something or being with someone you love); or (3) enduring unavoidable suffering. We are warned against relying solely on the first option (which risks conflation of external validation with meaning), reminded of the virtues of finding meaning via the second, and advised that enduring avoidable suffering is masochistic - not heroic.
In seeking meaning, Frankl invites us to act responsibly and in accordance with our (presumably virtuous) values. Not to think: "what do I want / what can I get from this situation?", but rather 'what does life expect of me in this situation?' - and then taking that action.
These are the teachings of Frankl's 'logotherapy' (from the Greek 'logos', meaning 'meaning'). Logotherapy invites its subjects to look to the future (i.e. choosing actions and finding meaning) rather than to the past (i.e. analysing trauma) to soothe 'existential vacuum' and help overcome psychic pain. It reminds me of Alfred Adler's concept of 'contribution to Community' and focus on our 'life tasks' to mitigate existential angst and attain tranquility.
My take: we can find meaning in each moment of our life if we strive for the most responsible action that aligns with our (virtuous) values. That might be something as momentous as applying brushstrokes to a magnificent canvas, or as banal as doing the dishes (even when it's not your turn). In practice, it probably means dedicating meaningful time toward a creative pursuit, spending quality time with loved ones, and bravely and mindfully weathering the storm of unavoidable suffering (when it inevitably arises). I find this idea compelling and will experiment with implementing these tenets of logotherapy in my own life over the coming months.
*In defence of this assertion, Frankl points to his experience in concentration camps, where some prisoners acted ruthlessly toward their fellow inmates, while others acted with grace and selflessness, despite experiencing the same horrendous conditions. I couldn't help but question whether the life experiences and mental constitution of the prisoners before they entered the camps might have had some impact on whether they turned out to be a 'swine' or a 'saint'. Is this really proof that to act in a good or evil way is always a choice? That anyone demonstrated selflessness in spite of the cold, hunger, cruelty, and illness rife in Nazi concentration camps perhaps shows that at least some humans are able to choose between good and evil regardless of their conditions.
A few of my favourite extracts:
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself."
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
"Logotherapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation."
"People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity."
p.36 Everlasting misfortune does have one blessing, that it ends up by toughening those whom it constantly afflicts.
p. 38 It was nature's intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life; every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself.
p. 39 Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessings which she kindly bestowed on me - money, public office, influence - I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken them away, not torn them away. No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortune unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. Everything (even the sun and stars) is changing all the time, we should delight in novelty rather than rail against it.
p. 44 So fate has decreed that nothing maintains the same condition forever
p. 45 only the most worthless of our possessions should come into the power of another. Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away. The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain.
p. 48-49 The body's needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs. We do not need to scour every ocean, or to load our bellies with the slaughter of animals, or to pluck shellfish from the unknown shores of the furthest sea.
p 52-53 It is the mind that creates our wealth, and this goes with us into exile, and in the harshest desert places it finds sufficient to nourish the body and revels in the enjoyment of its own goods. Money in no way concerns the mind any more than it concerns the gods. All those things which are revered by minds untaught and enslaved to their bodies - marble, gold, silver, great round polished tables - are earthly burdens which a soul pure and conscious of its nature cannot love: for it is light and unencumbered, and destined to soar aloft whenever it is released from the body.
p. 59 For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it.
p.61 I know that this is not something which is in our power and that no strong feeling is under our control, least of all that which arises from sorrow: for it is violent and violently resists every remedy. Sometimes we want to crush it and swallow down our groans, but through the pretended composure of our features the tears pour down. Sometimes we divert our mind with public shows or gladiatorial contests, but in the very midst of the distractions of the spectacles it is undermined by some little reminder of its loss. Therefore it is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage is But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed forever.