Oliver Burkeman addresses the monkey that rides on our shoulder whispering “You didn’t get enough done today – certainly not as much as we should have, could have.”

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Nothing to Prove

By Oliver Burkeman, from The Imperfectionist

I think a bit too often, if I’m being honest, about the closing scene of episode two of Aaron Sorkin’s TV-show-about-a-TV-show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which got ignominiously cancelled after a single season. (You can watch the scene in question here.)

Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford play executive producers called in to rescue and relaunch a weekly live sketch show, a thinly disguised version of Saturday Night Live, and the episode follows their high-stress efforts to pull it together in a week. The anxiety builds as a huge digital clock on the control room wall counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the moment they’re due on air. The world – well, the media world – is watching. The stakes are high. Last-minute crises and conflicts threaten to derail the whole thing.

But they manage it: the show goes live, the opening number ends, the studio audience goes wild, and the camera cuts to Perry, watching from the back. For the first time, his expression isn’t tense, but relaxed. He’s satisfied, proud, absorbed in the spectacle. Against the odds, things are OK.

…For about one second. Then a troubling thought strikes him, the tension returns to his face, and the camera follows his gaze to the countdown clock on the wall. It now shows six days, 23 hours, 57 minutes and 53 seconds: the time they’ve got left in which to do it all over again next week.

I doubt I’m alone in feeling as if I know exactly what Perry’s character is going through here. I’ve written before about the sense many of us have that we begin each morning in a state of “productivity debt”, which we must struggle to pay off over the course of the day, if we’re to feel by the evening like we’ve earned our spot on the planet. (“Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood,” I wrote, “than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output.”)

By Nedra Tawwab

Why it’s important to reevaluate the stories we tell ourselves

There is a series on Showtime called The Affair. The aspect of the show I liked best was that it was told from multiple perspectives. In every episode, each character shared their account of a conversation. Within an episode we would get all of these different versions of the same event, and it was so interesting. There are so many different ways to experience something. More than one truth can exist.

We may have a different perception of ourselves and the way we come across than the people around us. Someone may find themselves in disbelief that someone thought they were rude when in reality that is a perception that is commonly held by the people around them.

There is a series on Showtime called The Affair. The aspect of the show I liked best was that it was told from multiple perspectives. In every episode, each character shared their account of a conversation. Within an episode we would get all of these different versions of the same event, and it was so interesting. There are so many different ways to experience something. More than one truth can exist.

We may have a different perception of ourselves and the way we come across than the people around us. Someone may find themselves in disbelief that someone thought they were rude when in reality that is a perception that is commonly held by the people around them.

This is a very well-written, no-fluff essay on living and dying in the Ukraine.

It is easy for me to wake up, get on with my day and forget about those waking up to a world of pure insanity.

What is going on IS insane…

Drop the Load

by Rick Hanson

Why?

You may have seen the old Mickey Mouse movie in which he is working at a conveyor belt in a factory. More and more widgets come at him that he has to handle, and he gets increasingly frazzled as he struggles to keep up.

Do you ever feel the same way? Think about all the dishes, emails, meetings, reports, drives, calls returned, laundry folded, children tucked into bed, friends comforted, errands run, etc. etc. Most of a person’s tasks, even all of them, could be individually rewarding and done for a good purpose, but taken as a whole they’re often too much. It’s certainly gotten this way for me.

Doing crowds out being, the urgent crowds out the important, and you go to bed after working hard all day feeling frustrated and maybe self-critical that you didn’t get more done. (…) At the heart of it all there’s an unfreedom: you can feel chained to obligatory tasks.

What to do?

Take on Fewer Tasks
Of course, it’s good to make an effort, to hold up your end of the log. You honor your previous commitments. And sometimes new things come your way – some wonderful, some not – that do require a lot of work. (,,,)

Your Life is Not Yours

by Nicklas Goke

Your entire life, death is with you. You know it’s coming. It knows it’s coming. It’s just a matter of when.

Death is your neighbor, and one day, he’ll come over. The funny thing is when he does, you’ll be the least affected.

“Interesting expression, ‘taking your own life,’” Sherlock Holmes once remarked. “Taking it from who? Once it’s over, it’s not you who’ll miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everybody else.”

We tend to think death is the worst thing that can happen to us, but actually, it is the worst thing that can happen to the people we love. Our death, that is.

When we live in fear of death, we often try to take ridiculous precautions, like working hard to build “a legacy,” whatever that means, or amassing a fortune we’ll never get to spend. Ironically, we might neglect the very people who’ll bear the brunt of our departure in the process.

You Are Who I Love

By Aracelis Girmay

 

You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

Nick Cave, lead of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and author of The Ass Saw the Angel (to name only a few of his accomplishments) writes the Red Hand Files, a newsletter for his fans to ask questions.  

His writing is informed by the loss of his young son, who died from a fall while climbing in England a few years ago.

Below Nick responds to Valerio, a mother who is concerned about passing her current cynicism on to her son.

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The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave

ISSUE #190 / APRIL 2022

Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?