Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World

"This is a book about the meaning of life, and what it’s meaningful to spend your life doing. I don’t see why that isn’t the same question as time management, in the end, because I think that’s the underlying question behind all these more specific tips and tricks and techniques. Landau has this wonderfully down-to-earth, imperfectionist approach, which is based on criticising certain unspoken assumptions that we make about what it means to spend life meaningfully. One of the recurring themes through this book is that having a definition of meaning that most humans can’t achieve is a sort of weird, unnecessary cruelty to yourself. We are tiny little individuals on a globe of billions, tiny pinpricks of consciousness in aeons of cosmic time—so if you think you’ve got to affect that picture, to change the cosmos in some way in order for yours to count as a meaningful life, then basically none of us ever could. But it doesn’t actually need to follow that if, in 100 years’ time, nobody has any notion that I ever did anything, or even existed, then my life has been meaningless as a result. “If you think you’ve got to change the cosmos in some way, in order for yours to count as a meaningful life, then basically none of us ever could” Landau says, no, it’s true that in 100 or 200 years time, most of what any of us do will be forgotten, but it’s arbitrary that we’ve decided that this means it’s not meaningful. You can value things in a different way. Literature doesn’t need to reach the level of Tolstoy or Shakespeare in order to be of value, for example. If there’s only a handful of people of Shakespeare’s genius in every thousand-year span of human history, then it’s a strangely over-exacting definition of meaning to impose on yourself. What I like about lowering the bar in this way is that it makes you see all the things you’re doing already that might be more meaningful than you’d thought. Steve Jobs urged people to ‘put a dent in the universe’. If you take that literally, even the iPhone hasn’t done than. 10,000 years from now, no-one’s going to know what an iPhone was. When I’ve written and talked about this, some people say, well, hang on. It does matter what we do now, especially in the context of climate. I don’t think any of this means we don’t have to think about the level of planetary survival. I think what it means is, we have to have a better definition of a meaningful life—one that permits you to volunteer at your local community garden, and thereby make some tiny, miniscule contribution towards that project of planetary survival, without telling yourself it’s too small to be meaningful. Yes. Arrogantly enough, I suppose I think that in some ways, all these different streams of insight are synthesised in my book! What these books share, on some level, and what I tried to focus on, is the importance of confronting the implications of being finite, not being able to do everything, not being able to control time or be confident about what the future holds. And that this is ultimately not a cause for stress and despair. There’s a potential misinterpretation of this viewpoint: life is short, so I have to fill every weekend with the most extraordinary, Instagram-worthy activities—bungee-jumping and so forth. You know, ‘seizing the day’ in a self-conscious fashion. I hope what emerges from my book is that when you let the implications of finitude permeate you a bit, it’s a relief, and liberation, because it enables you to better align your expectations for a day or a year with the reality of the situation. Not so you give up hope of doing cool things, but so you can carry out a few really important, brilliant accomplishments, instead of fruitlessly chasing an unlimited level of productivity. That’s what all these books have in common in some way, and also with mine. Come back down to earth when it comes to time management, because that’s the only place where you can put one foot in front of the other."