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Then there’s the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert’s first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever. As for focusing on your long-term goals: the more you do that, the more of your daily life you spend feeling vaguely despondent that you have not yet achieved them. Should you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is strikingly brief – then it’s time to set a new long-term goal. The supposed cure just makes the problem worse.

Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives

Oliver Burkeman

At that age I had a certain vision of the world, this very tidy, control-freak, Khalil Gibran–reading idea of nobility, like the way to be a good person was to hover righteously above all those weak, dopey sinners down there. Sort of a purity obsession. To go out in the Chicken Van every night was to constantly have that view undercut. Because the whole world was crazy and erratic and sinful. But the people I met were also sweet and weird and endearing. You’d get all of that in one night.

George Saunders, the Art of Fiction No. 245

theparisreview.org

Inner listening, recognition, acknowledgment, and compassion are the roots of recovery and, in this case, recovery from our addiction to thinking. These fundamental processes lay the ground for transformation. Once we’ve recognized the truth of what’s happening in our mind, acknowledged what we’re doing to ourselves, and offered ourselves compassion for our own experience, we can then play with a variety of different contemplations and practices.

Can't Stop Thinking

Colier, Nancy

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