Obsidian Sync 2024-12-08 15:38:57

content/daily-notes/2024-12-08.md

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+### 2024-12-08
+Missed reading a chapter for _Meditations for Mortals_ yesterday. I ended up reading two chapters today to make up.
+#### Meditations for Mortals Day Twelve
+> A much better rule – indeed, one I think more accurately reflects Seinfeld’s approach to his work – is to do things _dailyish_. I’m borrowing the word from Dan Harris, host of the meditation podcast Ten Percent Happier, who suggests it whenever people ask him how often they ought to be meditating. If you’re the ambitious type, ‘dailyish’ might strike you as a little self-indulgent. It isn’t. If anything, it’s the Seinfeld Strategy that’s self-indulgent, because at the moment you set it in motion, you flatter yourself that you’re going to be able to follow it impeccably, day after day – even though, were you to reflect on it, you’d probably agree that your life is too unpredictable for that, and your moods too much of a rollercoaster. ‘Dailyish’ is a much more resilient rule: it’s less of a high-wire act, where one mistake could end everything. But emotionally speaking, it’s an unsettling rule to follow – because doing something dailyish requires sacrificing your fantasies of perfection in favor of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now. In any case, ‘dailyish’ isn’t synonymous with ‘just do it whenever you feel like it.’ Deep down, you know that doing something twice per week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times per week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count. So you’re still putting some pressure on yourself. But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.
+
+#### Meditations for Mortals Day Thirteen
+> The three-to-four-hour rule functions, too, as a reminder of the profound truth that for finite humans the work is never done. A central point of the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Sabbath is that you have to stop anyway – not because you’ve finished, but just because it’s time to stop. How far you can check out of the culture of overwork will be context-dependent, of course. But regardless of context, you can choose not to psychologically collaborate with that culture. You can abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a couple more hours of focused work, you’d finally reach the commanding position of mastering it all. The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.