This Week’s Quotation for
Meditation With Movement
October 2nd, 2026
It's Worse Than You Think
Consider—just to begin with—the familiar modern predicament of feeling overwhelmed by an extremely long to-do list. You think the problem is that you have far too many things to do, and insufficient time in which to do them, so that your only hope is to manage your time with amazing efficiency, summon extraordinary reserves of energy, block out all distractions, and somehow power through to the end.
In fact, your situation is worse than you think—because the truth is that the incoming supply of things that feel as though they genuinely need doing isn’t merely large, but to all intents and purposes infinite. So getting through them all isn’t just very difficult. It’s impossible.
But this is where things get interesting, because an important psychological shift occurs whenever you realize that a struggle you’d been approaching as if it were very difficult is actually completely impossible. Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: This is how things are. Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck into what you actually can do. It’s not that life becomes instantly effortless: Depending on your situation, there might be serious repercussions to letting certain tasks fall by the wayside. But if doing everything that’s demanded of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, is genuinely impossible, then, well, it’s impossible, and facing the truth can only help. After that—once you’re staring reality in the face—you can take action not in the tense hope that your actions might be leading you toward some future utopia of perfect productivity but simply because they’re worth doing.
Oliver Burkeman, Tricycle Magazine Dec. 16 2024, From Meditations for Mortals