Meditations for Mortals - week one, day six

Meditations for Mortals (by Oliver Burkeman): A 4 week/28 day series with dailyish posts about the book
Week one - facing the facts of finitude

DAY SIX
You can’t care about everything
On staying sane when the world’s a mess

On day six, Burkeman talks about all the information we are asked to process on a daily basis. Connected more than ever, we are asked to care about everything. He suggests we decide what to overlook, or what to care about. It’s better, he offers, to “pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so.” In this way we can be more effective by “embracing your limitations (so you can) fight the battles you do pick, and also…feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.”

He shares a different way of looking at doing things, from Canadian writer David Cain:

Imagine if all the available ‘public concern’ for a given issue could be collected in a huge rain barrel…and redistributed among fewer people. Instead of having 50 million people care seriously about an issue for all of six hours, you could distill that 300 million hours of public concern into, say, 3,000 people who made it a primary moral concern for a decade…Imagine if it was normal for each person to focus ten times as deeply on one or two issues at a time, rather than taking on the emotional burden of dozens…[and] feeling helpless about the ‘state of the world.’

It’s a fantastic call to action, and one we can have some control or power over, rather than feeling helpless about the ongoing barrage of discouraging and frightening news, especially these days.

I love the story in this chapter about a man named Erik Hagerman who was profiled in the New York Times in 2018. A former sneaker-firm executive and dedicated Trump opponent, he was described as someone who “consumed no news whatsoever.” He used headphones to drown out any political talk where he picked up his morning coffee and scone, and was labeled as someone who was selfish, or ignorant, or one who didn’t care.

However, in his free time he was busy restoring an area of wetlands he’d purchased; when he was finished, he planned to preserve it for public access. He used up most of his savings. “There are more selfish ways to spend a life,” adds Burkeman.

How do I choose to spend my life? I hope that my work as an artist, teacher, performer, etc. impacts others positively. It’s a quiet way of making some kind of difference. Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s reminder to create joy and community in difficult times really resonates with me. I hope that what I do can be a small flicker of joy and / or building community with others.

To wrap up, Burkeman shares this with us:

In an age of attention scaractiy, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.

Thoughts:

What are the battles you’ve chosen to fight?