Meditations for Mortals

Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realizing, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs

It was in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum result, that I first began to notice a bizarre effect of all this in myself, and more acutely in certain friends and acquaintances. It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling (although they certainly were). It was that they’d started ‘living inside the news.’ The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives – more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event.

Much of life gets shaped by what we’re actively trying to avoid.

But to face no problems at all would leave you with nothing worth doing; so you might even say that coming up against your limitations, and figuring out how to respond, is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.

The final hazard in the idea that if something matters it must take effort is that it leads, by a seemingly reasonable but entirely bogus reverse logic, to the assumption whatever takes effort must matter.

Be willing to let it be easy

Ask people to relate the milestones of their biography, and they’ll almost always dwell on moments whose consequences they could never have anticipated.

One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately.’

You might even define ‘friendship’ as the sort of connection between people that can’t be imperiled by an unmown lawn or an unvacuumed carpet.

‘Perhaps all anxiety,’ writes Sarah Manguso, ‘might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.’