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​I Made 8 Pieces Of Fan Art For 'Meditations for Mortals'​
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I can’t remember when or where I first read the Gandhi quote “there is more to life than increasing its speed,” but it feels like I’ve been reminding myself that for something like 15 years now. Every year, it seems like the societal pressure to do the exact opposite—to make more stuff faster, streamline your workflow, get this app/hack/course on how to maximize productivity in your work/career/life, pay a robot or someone halfway around the world almost nothing to do the work you don’t like, optimize optimize optimize—keeps increasing.

I have tried to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism for all of that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just being a curmudgeon, or maybe I’m getting old, or surely this skepticism is going to result in me getting left behind or becoming irrelevant. I have a bit of a crisis of confidence in my judgment from time to time.

And then I read something Oliver Burkeman has written, and I usually breathe a sigh of relief. I was a late adopter of his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, waiting almost an entire calendar year after it was published before I listened to it while remodeling a garden shed into an office for Hilary. There is nothing more validating than when somebody who is way smarter than you says some shit you’ve been feeling, and says it in a far more intelligent way that you could ever say it.

And Oliver Burkeman was doing exactly that, calling bullshit on the idea of our obsession with productivity and “optimization”—or maybe not quite calling bullshit, but more questioning it in a way that his readers could call bullshit on it in their own lives. Like sure, you can try to get it all done, but you're never going to, so maybe relax a little bit and just concentrate on the stuff you really think is important. I became an instant fan.

When his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, came out in 2024, I bought it the same way you buy your favorite band’s newest album: You hope it sounds pretty much the same as their previous stuff, but just different enough from the last one. As I read it and underlined passages, I thought, “I should try to illustrate some of these bits sometime.”

I finally got around to it last week and did exactly that. Since the book is broken up into 28 chapters, one intended to be read each day for four weeks, I picked two chapters from each week and tried to draw something that I thought captured something in those chapters. I’ve included the passages I underlined from those chapters too. [In the way of a disclaimer, this is purely fan art and was not any sort of paid promotion—fingers crossed I don’t receive a cease-and-desist from the book’s publisher.]

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Day 2: Kayaks and superyachts: On actually doing things

Rather than paddling a 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.” (page 12)

Day 7: Let the future be the future: On crossing bridges when you come to them

“What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in the future, then trying to figure out how to cross it?”?(page 39)

Day 9: Finish things: On the magic of completion

“People think finishing things ‘would drain even more of their energy and they get tired just thinking about it,’ Steve Chandler writes. They don’t see that ‘leaving things unfinished is what’s causing the low levels of energy.’”(page 53)

Day 14: Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase

“The author and podcast host Sam Harris recalls being at lunch with a friend, moaning on about the various problems he was confronting in his work, when she interrupted him mid-flow. ‘Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?’ she asked.” (page 76)

Day 16: The reverse golden rule: On not being your own worst enemy

“Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged—that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them—for them to think it appropriate to act that way.” (Page 91)

Day 19: A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability

“In short, the more we try to render the world controllable, the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses what [social theorist Hartmut] Rosa calls its resonance, its capacity to touch,move and absorb us. As soon as any experience can be completely controlled, it feels cold and dead; a work of art you fully understand or a person whose behavior you can predict with total accuracy is no fun at all. What brings fulfillment is being in a certain form of reciprocal relationship with the rest of the world, including other people; you might liken it to a dance in which you alternatingly lead and follow.” (page 105)

Day 22: Stop being so kind to future you: On entering time and space completely

“The commitment-phobe can’t bear to enter ‘time and space completely’ because letting himself be pinned down to one relationship or career path means renouncing the other ones. He imagines that what he’s doing instead is keeping his options open, though he has of course chosen a path—because choosing to use up some of your finite time in a state of non-commitment is still a choice. On the other hand, the too-responsible type holds off from entering time and space completely by always locating the real value of her present-day actions somewhere off in the future. (page 124)

Day 27: C'est fair par du monde: On giving it a shot

“You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Every thing they ever did was done by people.” (page 152)

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