Periodically, some variant of a meme pops up in my feeds that goes “Adulting is saying ‘maybe next week will be easier’ until you die.”
Yeah, I know. Great thought to start your Monday, right?
Well, author Oliver Burkeman has a different approach in what he’s termed this “age of bewilderment.” It’s not going to get easier, but once you let go of “being on top of everything,” you have some options.
Your mileage may vary, but I suspect you may need some reinforcement to accept that you can’t do everything beyond what he touches on at the top of the video. We are bombarded by productivity gurus who explicitly or implicitly preach that we can do it all. And I’m certain many of us have searched for “the system” and then later “the system that will work for us” when we realized we were not cookies to be cut. Yet the voice of Boxer (“I must work harder”) may be in the background of your head, so at the very least, check out the video above and make sure that, in your efforts to be productive, you give space for the human moments.