I don’t normally like to post big chunks of other people’s text without some commentary, but I really don’t know what to add to this. Sometimes, serendipity means that we come across exactly the right paragraph at exactly the moment we need to read it.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US Presidential Election, Oliver Burkeman wrote in his email newsletter:

You really, really, really don’t know when a given event is, or isn’t, for the best. You can’t know what effect present-day events will have in the long run, and it’s to ignore your status as a limited human being to imagine you ever could. As the old Taoist story has it: “We’ll see.” Remember, it’s one of the normal responses to a diagnosis of critical illness—not the only one, but a commonplace one—to conclude that in the end, it was a wonderful gift, thanks to how it led to a focus on what truly mattered. Seismic political defeats can stoke the fires of renewal or transformation, while victories can breed complacency, leading to worse catastrophe. Of course, the point isn’t that good things always emerge from seemingly bad things—you can’t be sure of that, either! It’s that this radical uncertainty is where you’ve always lived, whether you realized it or not, and the only place from which you’ve ever accomplished anything. You don’t need hope. You can move forward in the dark. You just need to do “with conviction the next and most necessary thing” – which is all you’ve ever been able to do anyway. And there’s room for enjoyment in the middle of it all, too. I come back to John Tarrant’s observation that the average medieval person lived with no understanding of when the next plague, famine or war might come along to utterly upend their lives. If they’d waited until the future looked dependably bright before gathering for festivals, or creating art, or strolling under the stars with friends, they’d have been waiting forever. So they didn’t wait. You don’t need to wait, either.

I enjoyed this extract from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals, and this imagery in particular:

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. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.

The point Burkeman is making is about knuckling down and actually doing the things one wants to do in life, but I liked this imagery more for its root in stoicism. Life is unpredictable, and the best laid scheme gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns had it.

But I think there is something in Burkeman’s recognition that there can be ‘wisdom’ and ‘grace’ in the response. I usually associate those qualities with well-laid plans which come off, but Burkeman helped me to remember that it’s demonstrating them in the face of unexpected challenge which is both the most difficult and the most worthy outcome.

And it’s also a reminder that when we look at others and perceive them to be in their own superyachts gliding towards some goal, we are mistaken: in the end, we’re all in kayaks, and we’re all at the mercy of fortune and the unknown.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

On The Imperfectionist last week, Oliver Burkeman wrote:

If there’s one error of thought that most reliably holds me back from living an absorbing and meaningfully productive life, it’s the idea that certain things really matter, when the truth is that they don’t matter at all. Or at least nowhere near as much as I seem to believe.

This feels a bit thematically connected to my post yesterday about buying a ‘good enough’ fridge-freezer, but Burkeman’s post made me reflect more on understanding what matters in a professional context.

In my professional role, as is the case for most professionals, I’m asked to make hundreds of decisions per day. Most of them, however they may seem to the person who is asking, are pretty insignificant: whatever decision is made will have little impact on the public’s health.

A few years ago, I got into the habit of occasionally saying that ‘I didn’t care’ which option was chosen, often explaining that I didn’t think it would particularly influence the ultimate outcome. A typical example that comes to mind was whether a letter, whose content had been agreed upon by a group, should have my signature or someone else’s appended to the bottom.

One day, a kind colleague gently corrected me, saying that I did care, I just didn’t mind.

It was one of those useful small correctives that revealed to me the potential impact of the casual language I had habitually employed. It forced me to reflect and change my language.

The situation also made me reflect on the skill, wisdom, and kindness of the colleague who gave me that nudge. I hope that I one day have enough of the same qualities to help others.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Oliver Burkeman shared the following riddle—which was new to me—in the latest edition of his newsletter, The Imperfectionist:

Imagine you’ve come into possession of a live goose, trapped in a large glass bottle. (Don’t ask how or why.) The animal has plenty of room in the bottle, and air to breathe, but the neck of the bottle is much too narrow for the goose to pass through. Your job is to remove the goose from the bottle without harming it, and without breaking any glass.

Perhaps you’ll laugh this off as obviously impossible. Or narrow your eyes and furrow your brow, as you try to figure out what you’re missing. In fact, the problem is neither impossible nor difficult. It’s easy. First, imagine the goose is outside the bottle.

Actually, there are no further steps. That’s it. You did it!

I know, I know: incredibly annoying. But I think the goose-in-the-bottle scenario encapsulates a crucial and liberating lesson about the way that a certain kind of person – me, and maybe you too – tends to overcomplicate things, when it comes to meaningful productivity or psychological growth.

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into a friend who reminded me of a management and leadership course we took together twelve years ago. It was memorable because our impressions of the course were polar opposites: she had loved it, and I… hadn’t.

We spent a painful half-hour on that course working through an exercise sorting playing cards into a specific order in the fastest possible time. The ‘trick’ we were supposed to realise at some point during the exercise is that no-one instructed us to shuffle the cards between rounds, and so once we had sorted them, we could complete the next round of the ‘task’ instantly.¹

This was a long-winded, activity-based attempt to make the same point as the goose-in-the-bottle: We sometimes impose our own unstated, unquestioned rules, which can make life more difficult than it needs to be. We ought to be open-minded and actively question our assumptions.

The ‘goose-in-the-bottle’ allegory made me see this point entirely: it felt like a bit of an epiphany. The exercise with the playing cards left me mostly annoyed, and only with a background awareness of the point it was trying to make. Yet, I suspect for many people, including my friend, the opposite would be true: they’d find the goose-in-the-bottle annoying and the playing cards illuminating.

I’m occasionally guilty of inwardly rolling my eyes when people say things like ‘I’m a visual learner’—after all, we all learn in lots of different ways all the time. And yet, this example showed me the power of how different techniques can connect more directly with different people, and how getting the message across powerfully can depend on picking the right one.

1. In fact, in an illustration of why I did not enjoy this course, the tutor did, in fact, tell me that I had to shuffle the cards between rounds when I attempted this ‘trick’ too early in the exercise, completely undermining the point of the activity. ↩

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Readwise reminded me today that Oliver Burkeman makes an insightful observation in Four Thousand Weeks:

Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a large volume of messages – but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

These days, it strikes me that tools like Microsoft Teams chats have added even more to the ‘everything’. Lowering the barrier to communication isn’t always helpful.

I sometimes daydream about insisting on replying to emails by letter. This is partly to slow down exchanges which need not be at the speed of light. It also increases the barrier to communication to a height which more accurately reflects the time-cost of receiving it.

Even if just internally, corporate email systems ought to have a built-in tool to estimate the time cost of any email (i.e. reading time multiplied by the approximate salary of the recipients). There ought to be a budgetary approval process for any exceptionally high-cost emails. The same ought also to apply to Microsoft Teams messages and meetings.

The observation is hardly novel, but it strikes me that we’ve become bad at accounting for people’s time.

I’ve finished six books this December, some of which were considerably better than others.

Problems by Jade Sharma

This 2016 debut novel is appropriately titled: the protagonist, Maya, is a married New York bookseller writing an MA thesis, while also having an affair with her former college professor, living with an addiction to heroin, and making questionable life choices in pursuit of money to fund her habit.

This book is gritty and explicit, with some bits which are stomach-churningly disgusting. It is also full of dark humour, which occasionally made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is especially sharp.

Sharma’s writing made this book feel true. Her close observation and vivid description feel real. I was particularly taken with the description of the protagonist’s shifting perceptions of.a psychiatric hospital.

The overall effect—despite the dark subject matter—was strangely uplifting, though it was certainly not a ‘light’ read.

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novella in which the titular character falls in love with a giant man/frog/monster called Larry has recently been reissued with a lovely Faber Editions cover. It is a book with an engaging surface plot, which very funny in places, but whose subtext deals with a whole range of sociocultural issues.

There is a load of gender politics in here, which I expected from a sort of background cultural awareness of the book. Ingalls also has interesting observations to make about psychiatric illness, both for Mrs Caliban and for Larry. The latter aspect resonates with a lot of the themes explored in Frankenstein.

The writing is also sublime. At a little over a hundred pages, this could be comfortably read in a single sitting, and it is well worth that short time investment.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I confess that I went into this much-recommended recently published book with some trepidation and quite a lot of cynicism. Everything about it screamed “self-help” including the cringeworthy subtitle (“Embrace your limits. Change your life.”)

Nevertheless, Burkeman won me over. This isn’t really self-help, this is engaging philosophy which happens to be relevant to the moment. Burkeman argues that life is short and our time ought to be lived, not seen as a resource to be ‘used’. We should recognise and make peace with the fact that there will never be time to do everything that we want to do, nor everything that is demanded of us. Being more productive will not substantially alter that fundamental fact, but the effort might distract us from living.

I really enjoyed this, and will search out Burkeman’s other books.

JFK: Volume One by Fredrik Logevall

This 2020 biography was a Christmas present last year, and I’ve been reading it in chunks through the year. It is an exceptionally detailed account of JFK’s life, up to the point where he decided to run for President.

Unfortunately, this is one of those astoundingly well-researched biographies that contains so much detail that it feels like it loses its thread. It is only 654 pages long, but feels much longer, and it felt a little like the sense of the subject’s character got lost among the weeds.

At one point, Kennedy is invited to a house to watch some film footage he is to narrate. Logevall insists on telling us that this was a “twenty-room beachfront home” which was “built in 1936 for film industry titan Louis B. Mayer”—details that add precisely nothing to a visit that lasts one sentence, beyond exhibiting the research.

I’m uncertain whether I’ll read the second volume.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

Earlier this year, I thoroughly enjoyed Rovelli’s collection of essays, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. This led me to pick up Seven Brief Lessons, Rovelli’s best-selling and most famous work.

First published in Italian in 2014, I read Allen Lane’s 2015 translation. The book consists of six numbered brief lessons on aspects of physics, followed by a somewhat philosophical closing section called ‘Ourselves’, which serves as the seventh lesson.

Somewhere into the third lesson, I came to the shuddering realisation that I simply wasn’t all that interested in physics. Rovelli writes with lyrical clarity about complex subjects. I used to very much enjoy reading popular science, yet I found myself struggling to be astounded that general relativity and quantum mechanics sometimes disagree. Nor was I moved to really care whether black holes are hot or cold. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

The final section was a little more absorbing, partly because it involved Rovelli introducing his physicist’s perspective to wider questions such as the future of our species, which, I think, is what I enjoyed about There Are Places…

Essentially, overall, this was beautiful writing about a complex subject that doesn’t really interest me. There is enjoyment and value in that, but perhaps less than I was expecting to find.

The Comfort Book by Matt Haig

This 2021 bestseller was a bad purchasing decision on my part, and one driven by online shopping during lockdown. I enjoyed Haig’s previous books, Notes on a Nervous Planet and Reasons to Stay Alive, though as I noted at the time, I preferred his personal reflections on his experiences rather than the aphorisms and superficial psychology.

I think others may have had exactly the opposite opinion, as The Comfort Book is essentially a compendium of short ‘inspiring’ texts, some extending to only a few words, others to a couple of pages. None of this is up my street, and had I flicked through the book in a physical shop before I bought it, then I would have known that.

I’m confident this will book will bring a lot of comfort to many people, but it wasn’t my sort of thing.