The point (…) isn’t to imagine a parallel universe in which things were easy, but to raise the possibility that they might in fact be easy, here and now.
(…) the irony of what’s going on here is that this prospect – that something meaningful might prove easier than you imagined – can itself be a source of discomfort. Many of us were apparently raised to believe not just that important things can feel difficult (they can!) but that they must feel difficult; that the measure of accomplishment is how much effort it took. And, moreover, that effort is a measure of self-worth — that if an achievement comes easily to you, you must somehow be cheating, or that you just got lucky.
It feels somehow illicit to consider the alternative: that you might already have all it takes (…)
Tag: oliver burkeman
-
-
Many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”
-
Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you’re using “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong.