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Bullet-point philosophy: Attention and the Bright Sadness of Mortality

For Jen, who is always worth being present for, and for Lainey, for reasons that will become obvious

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Introduction: A method for finding meaning
At a high level, there are only two ways to pursue this: either by spending your time doing more fulfilling things, or by finding more fulfillment in whatever you’re already doing.
  • These two options are logically exhaustive; there are no others.
The former option — “increasing meaning in your life by spending your time differently” — is explicitly not the focus of this writing.
  • Even though it’s not the focus, I do want to briefly mention that this approach, while totally valid, has a tendency to backfire in practice. It backfires because “spending your time doing more fulfilling things” is so easily conflated with the mechanism for pursuing meaning that gets drilled into us by global capitalism: that you should find meaning in your life through achievement, which in turn demands a lifelong commitment to productivity and efficiency.
  • This capitalist approach to seeking meaning is utterly broken and fucked, for reasons that I go deeper into in the “bonus argument” section at the very end.
The purpose of this writing (”Bullet-point philosophy…”) is to describe a practical approach to the latter option. I’ve found a successful, durable method of getting more fulfillment from my day-to-day life. My hope is that it will work for you, too.
  • Just to get this out of the way up-front: this approach requires getting significantly more comfortable with your own mortality. It’s sort of the cost of doing business; I think it’s worth it.
  • The method has only two steps: buying into the argument you’re reading now, and then using it habitually to help yourself pay a certain kind of attention to your life.
The high-level argument for adopting that method looks like this:
  • Your daily routines have the potential to become deep reservoirs of satisfaction and fulfillment in your life.
  • Finding more meaning in your routines entails giving them more of your attention, which is uniquely difficult to do.
  • Feeling the bright sadness within a routine experience makes it much easier to pay attention to. This is a skill you can learn.
  • If you practice this skill on a regular basis, you’ll improve at finding this deeper meaning behind your experiences, which in turn should make you better at paying them higher-quality attention. The end goal is to become habitually more present in your own life.

1. Your daily routines have the potential to become deep reservoirs of satisfaction and fulfillment in your life.
Whether or not you currently regard them this way, your daily routines are some of the most important things in your life: they reflect your highest priorities, they help define who you are, and they’re how you’ll spend the vast majority of your remaining lifetime.
First, they’re important because you continually choose to do them over everything else you could be doing instead.
  • A routine is just a choice you continually make, day in and day out.
    • These sorts of choices are sometimes so old or automatic that it’s easy to forget they’re choices at all, but they always are. You don’t have to brush your teeth at night. You could instead choose from today onward to replace your entire bedtime routine with tuba practice. But you won’t do so, because your health is more important to you than learning the tuba.
  • To make a choice with your time is never just to choose between two options; to choose to do something is always to choose to do it over everything else you could have done. You can spend each day a million different ways, but you can only spend it once.
    • This means that anything you do comes with basically-infinite opportunity costs. Neat!
    • Thankfully, there’s absolutely no way to avoid incurring these opportunity costs, which means it doesn’t make any sense to treat this phenomenon as a problem to “solve” or to try to optimize your way out of. The only interesting thing about these opportunity costs is what they tell you about your priorities.
  • Choices are declarations of importance.
    • “Importance” is inherently relative; something is important because it’s more important than something else. And so the act of choice is necessarily an act of ranking; to choose to do thing A instead of thing B is fundamentally to deem A more important than B.
    • To choose to experience something, then, is to declare that thing more important than everything else you could have done instead (at least in whatever way was informing your decision-making at the time).
  • If your choices reveal what’s important to you, then your daily and weekly routines are reliable expressions of your highest priorities, because you choose to perform them more than you choose to do anything else in your life.
    Last thing: there’s a key distinction between routines “reflecting” or “revealing” or “expressing” your top priorities, and the routines themselves BEING those priorities. Your actual internal priorities are intangible; your routines are just the best available pointers to them. They’re the external evidence of your internal value structures. Examples:
    • My son’s bedtime routine takes about 45 minutes. He’s a little more than two years old, and I can probably count on two hands how many of his bedtime routines I’ve ever missed. So while by my own argument, doing the bedtime routine is more important to me than anything else I could spend those 45 minutes doing each night, the reason it’s important to me is that I love my son and love spending that time with him, not because of some deep abiding passion for board books and sleep sacks.
    • This is maybe easier to see with a routine like commuting; I hated commuting, but I prioritized commuting every day for years because what I actually wanted was financial security. I didn’t mourn my commute when covid took it away. The commute never mattered to me in its own right, but it always reflected something that did.
Second, they’re important because they play a key role in defining your identity.
Your identity is multifaceted. It’s an amalgamation of smaller, sharper, and more specific facets that you choose to hold, or sometimes that are thrust upon you. You consider some subset of these facets to be central to who you are as a person.
  • To take myself as an example: I hold most dear the elements of my identity that are defined through my relationships as a husband, father, son, brother, friend, etc. Several identities related to my learned skills also rank highly, like being a writer, product manager, and runner.
  • But there are tons of other things that are true about me and my behavior but that I don’t consider to be salient elements of who I am. You don’t have to stack-rank each element of your identity, but you do have to loosely sort them. For instance, the fact that I’m right-handed doesn’t enter into my conception of “who I am” at all.
For elements of identity that aren’t innate, you can’t consider any facet to be central to who you are until you believe it yourself.
Again, the only salient judge in the question of your own identity is yourself; you’re the only person you have to convince. But you’re not going to consider any identity to be core to who you are as a person until you’re able to convince yourself that you embody it, or at least are on the path to doing so.
  • This is easier to see in the extreme cases: if you’re not a plumber and have never been one, you will never feel that being a plumber is a core part of who you are.
  • But it also holds for anything. You can draw a lot of pictures, but until you believe you’re an artist, you’re not one. And if you don’t believe you’re an artist, you certainly can’t consider “being an artist” to be central to your identity.
  • For some elements of identity, particularly the innate ones that have been set from birth, like race or sexual orientation, it may be the case that no proof, convincing, or routine practice is required. You simply know that you are that thing, and know that that thing is important to you.
But for any voluntarily-adopted or aspirational facet of identity that you want to say is “core to who you really are,” you’ll need proof to convince yourself with.
  • For these identities, a corresponding commitment of time is usually necessary to believe you embody the identity at all, much less believe it to be central to your personhood. The more time is committed, more proof accumulates.
  • You’re not going to deeply identify as a gym rat after your first gym visit. You (probably) won’t know yourself to be a vegan the first time you eat a meal with no animal products in it. You’re not a runner because you’re someone who thinks the concept of running is cool; you’re a runner because you run, and the more you do it, the easier it is to believe.
  • Your relationships, for instance your identity as someone’s child, can feel more locked-in and permanent than the ones stemming from skills or hobbies. But even these usually need proof points: could you say that “being a good son/daughter” is core to who you are if you haven’t chosen to speak to your parents in a year?
  • On the other hand: if you go to church every Sunday for decades, it’s probably easier to convince yourself that you’re a religious person, or at least one who prioritizes community. If you write letters and attend protests month after month, you’ll more readily be able to convince yourself you’re an activist.
Recurring time investment is the mechanism through which you prove — to yourself — that you are who you think you are. And in the case of aspirational identities, this routine commitment is critical to actually becoming who you want to be.
My preferred mental model here is that each performance of a routine casts a “vote” in favor of whatever identity that routine corresponds with.
  • In a ledger known only to you, every repetition of an activity scratches another tally mark into your psyche. The longer and more consistently you do something, the more likely it is that you can successfully convince yourself that it’s part of who you are.
  • Every time you run, you vote for your identity as a runner. Every family dinner votes for your identity as a family-minded person. Every date night votes for your identity as a caring partner.
  • Of course, the elements of your identity which get the most votes aren’t necessarily the ones which are most deeply meaningful to you, but they’re certainly the ones that are easiest to believe. I put on my retainer every night because I don’t want my teeth to look crooked. I thus have decades worth of proof points to indicate that I care about my appearance, so I know at some real level that I am vain, but I absolutely don’t consider “vanity” to be a central element of my identity.
Over time, the accumulation of these “votes” is what permits aspirational identities to become deeply-known ones. Routine practice helps you believe that you’re becoming the person you want to be.
  • By turning something into a routine, and committing correspondingly large chunks of your life to performing it, you accumulate proof that a given interest or relationship really is important to you.
  • And to be clear, a “large chunk” of your life can be anything that you do for even just 5 minutes a day, because think of the vast universe of activities that don’t get anywhere near that total magnitude of lifetime commitment.
  • If you’ve never written a poem in your life, but then you commit to writing poetry for half an hour every Sunday night, consider to what extent you’d be likely to consider yourself a poet at the start of that year, vs at the end. Then imagine the same routine holding strong 5, 10, 40 years later, and how your relationship with that identity might continue to deepen and become more central over time.
And finally, for the practicable elements of identity that are already deeply known and deeply felt, your routines function as a primary avenue for the outward expression of your true self. Performing these routines feels fulfilling and satisfying and meaningful; they deserve your attention and appreciation.
  • If you know in your heart of hearts that you’re an activist, what can be more gratifying to you than recurrently participating in activism?
  • If you’re a bona fide Astros fan, far past of the point of needing to prove to yourself that you’re a real fan, you’re obviously going to watch as many games as you can, because that’s what Astros fans do.
Third, they’re superlatively important from an existential standpoint, because performing them will take up the lion’s share of your remaining lifespan.
Just for a moment, imagine you’ve been diagnosed with an incurable, terminal illness. You feel fine now, but doctors are certain that you have at most one month to live. Consider the way you might feel about having a dinner with your partner, playing with your child, or even taking a walk outside. Under this horrible shadow, you might find it easier to recognize how precious every single moment of your life actually is.
  • This is a known phenomenon with actual terminal patients. They do not report that their daily experiences are “happier” or “sadder” than they were before, but rather being confronted with their mortality makes it so that they absolutely have an easier time recognizing the meaning and gravity inherent to those experiences.
  • And just as a sneak peak of where this whole piece is going — a few weeks after the diagnosis, imagine you’re taking the same morning walk you’ve taken every day for decades. But now, you know you only have a handful of walks left. As you’re walking, what do you think about? For my part, I like to imagine that I’d want to spend that walk appreciating the walk itself, as much as I could. I’d do this by giving it as much of my attention as I was able to.
But of course, you don’t need to imagine it. You are a terminal patient. Your illness is called aging; if you’re lucky, it will kill you. If you’re unlucky, you won’t be alive in an hour. You shouldn’t need a diagnosis to deeply appreciate your life for what it is.
  • And here we might as well also remember that we die a million deaths before we’re actually put into the ground.
    • We are constantly saying goodbye to our past selves, our past realities.
    • “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
    • It’s always the last walk, always the last goodbye, always the last time you’ll have this experience, because no experience will ever be just like this one, because time only ever advances.
  • If you’re able to bear the pain of contemplating it, this transience reveals itself as a huge part of what makes life so beautiful in the first place. It is precisely because you can never get it back that each and every moment is a treasure.
As humans, however, we usually can’t do this. The primary reason we can’t do this is that we don’t like to think of ourselves as finite beings; mortality is sad and scary. Instead, we live most of our lives as if they’ll go on forever, or at least as if we’ll have enough time to fit in all the important stuff.
  • Consider: when you deprioritize something that you vaguely want to do, do you tend to think “I don’t have time for this right now,” or do you think “I don’t have time to do this, and will never have time for this, because between now and when I die I’ll probably always have higher priorities.” Usually, the latter is true. It’s why you haven’t picked up hang gliding or whatever, and almost definitely never will. But even though it’s true, this line of thinking is so tied up in your mortality that the default mode of thinking is to play along with with the delusion that in some future state, there will be enough time to get to your C-tier life goals.
  • This mindset is served in particular by modern productivity culture, which insists as its foundational myth that one can conquer death through spreadsheets — that if you just become more personally efficient, you can make time for everything that matters.
But you do not have enough time to fit everything in, and you will miss out on (almost) everything that will ever happen.
  • This is the natural result of combining an infinite mind with a finite body. You’ll have more goals, hopes, ambitions, priorities, and relationships than you can possibly service fully in the short duration of one human life.
    • In “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” Oliver Burkeman summons up an old grade-school demonstration, where a teacher would present the class with a jar, a pile of sand, and a bunch of big rocks. It’s a lesson in prioritization: if you put the sand in first, the rocks can’t fit — but if you start with the rocks, then the sand can fill in the gaps, and you can fit everything. But as Burkeman points out, the reality is that over the course of your life, you’ll accumulate far more rocks than could ever fit into a single jar, by orders of magnitude.
  • Personal efficiency seems like it might help with this. It does not.
    • When it comes to achieving your goals: of course a more productive person can accomplish more things in life. But the pursuit of productivity undercuts the pursuit of meaning in two key ways:
      • First, productivity and efficiency mindsets force you to continually dedicate a bunch of your attention to living in the future. Given the fact that attention is a limited resource, the more attention you spend in worrying-about-achieving-future-outcomes mode, the less you have for the present moment that you inhabit. The present is the only place you’re ever able to find meaning.
      • Second, there’s simply is no threshold of personal efficiency where an efficient person will feel like they’ve accomplished everything they intend to in life. Conversely, the more consistently efficient you are, the larger your expectations of future accomplishments you’ll have, because the continual achievement of goals will basically always result in the creation of more goals, set higher. You can make your personal conveyor belt of objectives run faster, but actually “clearing off” that conveyor belt is not a thing that the vast majority of humans are capable of doing, particularly those humans who concern themselves deeply with being highly efficient.
    • When it comes to missing out on everything: what percentage of the totality of Earthly goings-on do you think you’ll personally experience? And if you manage to ruthlessly optimize the rest of your entire lifespan to experience as many diverse experiences as you can possibly cram in, how much does that percentage change? By a distant, distant rounding error.
    • For more on productivity, read Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks.” Amazing book.
  • Happily, if something is truly impossible to accomplish, it makes no sense to treat it as a goal. You can stop pretending that you’ll get everything done that you want to get done, and can stop treating your remaining lifetime as a means to an infinite number of mutually-exclusive future ends.
  • Instead, try looking at your lifespan through a lens grounded in the actual reality of the current moment in which you exist — your “now” — which is itself defined in large part by its transience and your mortality. Seen this way, you can recognize each moment that you snatch from oblivion to be a nearly unimaginable privilege which is made sacred by your finitude. You GET to experience each of your small handful of moments. Each one matters as much as anything could ever matter.
    • The upshot here is huge: if every moment of your life is effectively a miracle because it occupies a precious slice of your remaining lifespan, then you never need to specifically “seek out meaning” through some sort of major spiritual quest; you can find it at any time by simply recognizing the moment for what it is.
  • And if every moment matters tremendously, then by extension, your daily and weekly routines are basically all outliers in terms of existential significance, because they represent larger swaths of your total remaining moments than anything else; most of your life is and will very likely remain routine-driven.
There’s one other principle at play here, which is that you’ll only ever live in the present, and fulfillment is something that’s only ever experienced right now; as a result, in the grand scheme of your life, recurring or habitual sources of life satisfaction will ultimately matter a lot more than almost any one-off experience will.
  • Say you decide to search for meaning at an ayahuasca retreat in Peru. You get to the jungle and your shaman or whatever gives you two options:
    • Option 1 is to trip balls so hard that you see the face of god, but with no lasting effects on your mindset; the next day is straight back to business as usual
    • Option 2 is to puke your guts out all night, but you emerge with a permanent perspective shift that causes you to find some sort of existential satisfaction every time you go for a walk outside, for the rest of your life
  • If you want to improve your overall life satisfaction, Option 2 is pretty clearly the better bet.
Putting this together: if the overwhelming majority of your life will be spent doing the things you do routinely, and if these routines’ fundamental importance gives them tremendous potential to be sources of lifelong fulfillment, then, because meaning can only ever be felt in the moment, you should figure out how to be able to actively regard your routines as meaningful, as you’re performing them.
  • Explaining my mechanism for doing that is the main purpose of this writing. It’s like the ayahuasca Option 2 from above, minus all the puking and crying.
  • The problem is that in order to “actively regard your routines as meaningful,” you first have to be able to pay attention to them, and paying attention to your routines is incredibly hard.

2. Finding more meaning in your routines entails giving them more of your attention, which is uniquely difficult to do.
Paying attention to something is a prerequisite to finding meaning in it.
  • Attention is the thing that bridges objective external reality with subjective internal reality. If you don’t notice something, you’re not going to have any feelings about it. Stuff can happen TO you that you don’t notice, but you can’t emotionally judge that stuff — or really internalize it at all — until it comes to your attention somehow.
Of course, this relationship between attention and meaning isn’t binary. Attention is complex and dynamic, and the more attention you pay to something, the more you stand to internalize from it. Attention sets your capacity for finding meaning in an experience.
  • To understand what it means for attention to “set your capacity” for finding meaning, it helps to think about some examples from different parts of the attention spectrum:
    • On one end of the spectrum is an event that you don’t pay attention to at all.
      • Here, if you don’t notice something, you don’t have the opportunity to have any feelings about it. You can’t find it meaningful, but you also can’t find it or sad or funny or interesting.
      • As an example, two coworkers spread a rumor about you, and you never find out. Nobody ever tells you that this has happened or mentions the rumor to you at all, so even though the rumor could impact you (maybe it causes you to be passed over for a promotion), you’re not upset about it, purely because you don’t know it happened.
    • On the other end of the spectrum are moments that you’re extremely present for.
      • Here, you’re internalizing as much as you can about the experience. You’ll be able to recall it well, and you’ll have clear feelings about it, though those feelings can go in any direction.
      • Say your mother is on her deathbed, and you’re by her side. She’s talking to you, and you have every reason to believe it’s the last lucid conversation you’ll ever have. This is an incredibly important moment to you, and you’re going to give it your full attention — and as a result of that combination, this conversation will remain with you for the rest of your life as an incredibly meaningful experience.
      • Now imagine you’re having a root canal without anesthetic. You’re extremely present in the moment, and you’ll remember it for the rest of your life, but your attention and presence isn’t making you feel the least bit more positive about the experience.
    • Now consider moments that you want to pay attention to, but don’t.
      • Imagine the wedding ceremony of your child is starting, but your small business is facing some existential threat. If you’re furiously texting while the vows are being read, you’re not really going to hear those vows, even if you’re in the front row. And even if you’re not texting, but your internal attention is focused on the work crisis, the emotional gravity of that ceremony will be different, worse, and less than if your attention had not been divided. Your memories will directly match whatever you attended to in the first place; you can’t go back and listen more carefully.
  • Put another way, attention doesn’t directly imbue an experience with meaning, but rather helps determine how much of that experience you stand to internalize. And it’s this internalization that provides the raw material for emotional response, whatever that response may be.
So if you agree that your routines are potentially very meaningful, then it’s worthwhile to try to pay more attention to them, because otherwise you won’t ever be able to actually discover or internalize that meaning.
  • More specifically, because routines stand to be extremely meaningful, it’s worth trying to be fully present for them, which entails paying them close attention. This is already how you approach other life events that stand to be extremely meaningful, like weddings, births, and major milestones.
  • The mental shift required here is to admit the possibility that some of your daily routines are just as important (or perhaps significantly more important) than these big tentpole moments.
But frustratingly, routines are the hardest experiences in your life to be fully present for. Their repetitive nature creates some of the safest and most reliable opportunities for your mind to wander.
For novel experiences, and particularly those novel experience which you deem important, attention comes automatically. The moment your kid comes into the world, you’re fully in that room. Performing in front of an audience, getting into a dangerous situation, whatever —these big moments are the ones where you’re most likely to be fully present.
  • To know this for yourself, take a moment to remember one of your life’s “biggest moments.” Your memory of that moment is as clear as it is because you were fully immersed while it happened; the ease of your recall is a testament to your presence.
Routines are the exact opposite of these novel experiences.
  • You’re not “present” when you brush your teeth. You don’t remember how you brushed them last weekend. You didn’t notice any specific details about how you brushed them them this morning.
  • Their consistent nature is exactly what allows you to perform your routines on a sort of autopilot. You do not need to pay any specific attention to your shampoo in order to wash your hair successfully. It just sort of happens, and while it happens, your mind is absolutely free to be elsewhere. At least for me, it basically always avails itself of this opportunity.
But in many cases, the thing that your mind wanders to during your routine is actually less important to you than the routine itself. In particular, for the routines that are deeply important to your life, priorities, or identity, they likely deserve your attention more than whatever your mind has wandered to.
Biologically speaking, your reserves of attention are finite. Modern neuroscience has repeatedly confirmed this.
  • See: “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity” by Dr. Gloria Mark, who has a PhD in informatics and who has been studying this for two decades.
    • “A long-standing, well-accepted theory in psychology, with over fifty years of research behind it, is that the mind has a general pool of attentional, or cognitive, resources that we use in our everyday functioning. These resources can be thought of as your attentional capacity, or rather, as the amount of attention you have available.”
    • “It turns out that there is a real physiological basis in the brain that underlies how cognitive resources are being used. Neuroscience studies show that when people focus their attention, a region of the brain becomes metabolically active, and carbon dioxide in the blood increases. In turn, the increase in carbon dioxide causes blood vessels to dilate to remove waste in that activated part of the brain. But as people spend more time in sustained focus, their vigilance declines, and blood velocity decreases.”
  • I’ve personally found it helpful to think about attention as a focusable flashlight — you can narrow it to a powerful laser or widen it to dimly illuminate a big area. You can even turn it back on yourself (attending more to your own inner thoughts and feelings). But you’re always working with whatever capacity is in the batteries, which steadily drain over time.
For something to be “important” means precisely that it is more deserving of this finite attention than other things.
  • In practice, the yardstick you use to actually evaluate “meaning” or “importance” is so profoundly internal and complex that you probably can’t even articulate it fully to anyone else. But that complexity doesn’t stop you from using the yardstick. You can tell the difference between things that matter to you and things that don’t.
    • Further, for almost any two things, you can use this yardstick and conclude that one of them is “more important” than the other one.
    • “Importance” in general is a fundamentally relative concept. Something can only be important if something else is not.
  • If you want your life to be more meaningful, “being present for the things that are important to you” seems like a pretty-obviously-correct strategy. Same goes for “giving more of your attention to the things that deserve it.” But because attention is finite, this will always come with tradeoffs; you can only do it if you’re willing to pay less attention to things that are less important.
  • Routines are important.
But even if you accept this and are willing to pay more attention to your routines, this is still incredibly hard to do in practice, in part because attention is terrible at policing itself.
  • In order to consciously change what you’re paying attention to, you first have to notice that you’re not paying attention to what you want.
  • Doing this sort of metacognition — asking yourself “what am I paying attention to right now, and is it what I want?” is cognitively expensive.
  • Attention is a finite resource. The more your attention is already dedicated to something, the lower the chances that you have a bunch of extra attentional resources to spare on metacognition.
  • During your routines, it's common to occupy your attention with other, more engaging things — being on your phone, listening to music or a podcast, or even just daydreaming or planning for whatever is ahead.
  • This creates a vulnerability, because the faculty responsible for fixing the problem of misallocated attention is often too engaged to do so (and in the case of most modern media platforms, this is the explicit intention of the software). A useful analogy here is the autoimmune disease, which compromises the exact systems you use to fight off infection.
    • This is precisely why you spend more time consuming algorithmically-sourced content than you’d prefer to.
    • Effectively this means that it's not frequently going to even occur to you to be present in your routines as they’re happening, even if you agree that doing so is valuable.
Trying to directly force yourself to pay attention to the mundane won’t work. Sheer willpower isn’t the answer here.
First, this approach is self-undermining.
  • We already talked about how “policing your own attention” is really cognitively expensive. So when you’re fully engaged by something, you typically don’t have room to do the metacognition work of really evaluating whether you’re paying attention to the “right” thing or not.
  • By that same token, the more of your cognitive resources are spent on self-policing, the less room you have in that moment for full engagement. So the more you’re trying to white-knuckle your way into being present, the more of your finite attentional resources get spent on the policing itself, as opposed to the presence.
    • The Grand Canyon inspires a lot less awe in you if you spend your whole visit asking yourself whether you’re doing a good enough job absorbing it properly.
  • This often manifests as a death-spiral of a thought pattern where you’re trying to gauge whether you’re doing well enough at “living in the moment.” If you’re asking this, the answer is “no,” and part of the reason it’s “no” is because you keep spending all these resources on monitoring yourself and asking it. There’s no winning, here. Generally, the thought loop looks like this:
    • You try to force yourself to really pay attention to, say, your morning commute. You genuinely try to take it all in, because you’ve read part 2 and you know that it’s worth being present in your life, even when that life is dull.
    • You probably just fail outright, because you know this exercise is dumb, and you know you’re about to fail. But let’s say you succeed and force yourself to really stare at the traffic for, say, 15 seconds.
    • You will not feel any deep sense of meaning emerge from the traffic.
    • You will notice this, ask yourself whether you’re doing a good enough job being present, and conclude that you’re not (yet).
    • The only thing you can do to correct for this is to try to pay more and better attention, so you go back to step one until you’re too annoyed and guilty to continue.
    • You begin the next cycle from an even more entrenched sense of failure and doubt, until you mercifully decide to never do this again.
  • Second, even if it wasn't self-undermining, it’s incredibly difficult to sustain. Unless you have monk-like focus, trying to force yourself to pay more attention to something that doesn’t actually interest you is likely to just leave you feeling bored and frustrated.
Rather, you need to find a consistent, durable way to move into a mindset where you genuinely want to pay that attention, more than you want to do anything else.
  • Attention that you pay because you truly feel that you want to is qualitatively different from attention that you force yourself to pay through sheer willpower.
    • This is again why presence is so automatic during these big, once-in-a-lifetime moments. You deeply understand and feel that they matter tremendously and you don’t want to miss them, which can only be accomplished by giving them more of your attention.
    • In these sorts of high-motivation moments there’s no need (or room) for self-policing; attention will come naturally.
  • So being able to use this former style of attention is the goal. But you can’t use it without first finding a reason to want to be present, and for that reason to be honestly compelling to you. So before you can use it on a routine moment, you first have to fully convince yourself that that moment truly matters.
  • This, too, is difficult, but the rest of this writing is about a mechanism for doing so.

3. Feeling the bright sadness within a routine experience makes it much easier to pay attention to. This is a skill you can learn.
Emotion is an overwhelmingly more compelling motivator than knowledge alone.
Behavior change is hard. Just knowing that you “should” pay high-quality attention to your daily life simply won’t be enough to make that happen.
  • This one seems sort of obvious. You know about all sorts of stuff that could make your life better that you don’t routinely act on. That’s very normal.
  • Coming into this, you already knew life is short, precious, and worth paying attention to. You’ve probably connected all these dots before, which is why reading this argument and nodding along, even if you believe every word, is simply not enough.
  • Rather, what’s needed is a practical mechanism to actually feel motivated to pay this attention, day by day, moment by moment. Personally I’ve never encountered someone else describing this sort of mechanism; I suspect they’re rare.
    • Philosophy stops before it gets here because as a discipline, philosophy considers this type of “hand holding” unnecessary. It doesn’t tend to spend a lot of time on how the truths it articulates may be practically applied, because that’s the domain of self help, which it views with derision. “If you just internalize what we’re telling you, you’ll be enlightened and behavior change will flow from that enlightenment” seems to be the prevailing attitude. Maybe this actually works for some people. I’m not one of them.
    • I’m admittedly not too familiar with self-help as a genre. But I’d be surprised to learn (and interested to read) a self help book which takes the position that “you should try to basically meditate about death in real-time to make yourself feel something, and then leverage that raw material of feeling to experience existential gratitude for whatever you’re doing.” But (spoiler) that’s the direction we’re heading in.
Instead, you want to be able to recurrently feel motivated to pay this attention. This is difficult.
  • First, your daily routines are unlikely to emotionally engage you on their own. So if you want to feel something while you do them, you’ll need to first think your way into doing so. This is weird and hard. It’s not the way you normally feel stuff.
    • Normally, you feel stuff in response to some external stimulus; something reaches out and catches you by the heart. It almost always starts with something you see or hear.
    • These sorts of stimuli are largely absent from your routine activity. They don’t happen in the shower.
    • Instead, you’ll need to trigger an emotional response through your inward thoughts, and your outward attention to something that — by definition — isn’t that special. Possible! But atypical. It’s a skill that takes some practice.
  • Second, it’s often difficult to be emotionally moved with regularity, because you’re very good at “getting used to stuff.”
    • The human urge to normalize and seek homeostasis is incredibly strong. As a species, we’re remarkably adaptable, and we accept new things as “normal” very quickly, even if those things initially provoke big feelings within us.
    • As an example, if you’ve ever lived in a city where homelessness is rampant, compare how you felt about seeing a homeless person in rough shape on your first day in the city, compared to how you’d feel about the same thing years later.
    • Desensitization is, in most cases, the norm; regular exposure to a stimulus will rapidly decrease its ability to provoke an emotional reaction in you. You move from feeling something to simply knowing or recalling it; I find myself understanding that homelessness and poverty is horrible, but I don’t feel as gut-wrenchingly moved every time I see it as I used to be. I am not proud of this.
    • That said: even though it’s difficult, it’s absolutely still possible to be recurringly moved if you find the right trigger. Emotional edges need not dull with each use.
      • Consider chronic road-ragers; they manage to be emotionally moved every day on their morning commutes.
      • Parenthood brings endless examples of durable emotional engagement. Try to not feel something when your kid gives you a hug, falls off something, says “I love you,” etc. If anything, repeated exposure here tends to continually strengthen the emotional response.
      • Other examples: being in nature, or feeling nostalgia for something.
You can (probably) become emotionally moved whenever you want, if you’re willing to deal with a little discomfort. You then can use that emotional movement to motivate yourself to pay attention to the moment you’re in.
  • Right now, with the right prompting, you could think of something that makes you feel joy, grief, wistful nostalgia, whatever. The trick, of course, is finding the right prompts.
  • What you’re looking for is the thought that makes you deeply feel the full weight and meaning of whatever you’re doing, because those feelings can powerfully move you to want to feel present in that moment.
Often, the thought patterns that achieve this are going to be bittersweet. The bitterness tends to emotionally register first, which is why this gets uncomfortable. But that’s worth pushing through.
  • And here we arrive at what’s easily the biggest leap of faith in this whole piece. The big gamble is whether your brain works anything like mine does. If it does, then you’re about to get a shortcut for feeling meaning and paying attention whenever you want to. If it doesn’t, I’m about to make you feel sad for a little bit. For the rest of the piece, I’m just going to assume compatibility here.
    • Certainly these assumptions — first that thought patterns can be usefully encoded into writing at all, second that those written patterns, when executed in good faith by a reader, will create the desired emotional response in that reader — are the least-justified thing in this writing. No denying that. I suspect this is why no other author that I’ve seen has taken this approach.
    • But even in this leap of faith, I feel like there’s solid enough grounding to continue. If I’m going to take a shot into your psychological dark, starting with “you’re probably uncomfortable about death” seems like one of the safest bets I can make.
    • Plus, if it’s any reassurance, you’re not the first guinea pig here. I’ve been bothering my friends and relatives about this for months, and those discussions have made me confident that I’m not a total outlier on all this stuff.
The basic formula that I’ve landed on looks like this:
  • For any experience where you want to be present, first acknowledge that you will imminently lose it, both in the immediate sense (because time marches on and all moments are transient and irreproducible) and in the macro sense (because your life is finite, short, and constrained). Allow yourself to confront and feel this loss, contextualized to this moment in particular. Sounds fun, I know. Bear with me.
  • Second, re-contextualize that emotional response: the only reason that these feelings are painful is that you deeply value whatever it is you stand to lose. So shift your focus away from the fact that you’ll lose what you value, and towards the value itself, along with a sort of existential gratitude for your ability to experience this important thing in the first place.
  • Third, dwell on that value, and on that gratitude, and use them to remind yourself why this moment is worth paying attention to.
  • Fourth, pay the experience the attention that you now actually feel that it deserves.
  • Fifth, recognize how good it feels to be present, and to be in your body as it gets to have this experience. Allow that feeling to help maintain your attention until you inevitably get distracted, which will always eventually happen.
Here it is with much more detail, but somehow fewer steps:
  • This is difficult to describe, so I’m going to frame it up within an analogy, with the hope that the metaphorical leeway it creates might allow you to more readily map this onto your own brain.
  • Think about manually starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together.
The first step is to create an ember.
  • This part takes by far the most work. In fire-starting; this is a repetitive, high-effort, sustained process. If you stop at any time, the sticks rapidly cool down and you have to start again. This is analogous to the difficult, meditation-like work of holding a thought process until you find an emotional spark.
Without the analogy: begin by contemplating finitude, and reaching for its melancholy.
  • Finitude means death, of course, but so much more. Finitude is about limits and boundaries of all kinds, and these boundaries continually shape our lives. Allow yourself to acknowledge these boundaries and feel what they mean.
    • Don’t just think about any old depressing shit. There are plenty of extremely depressing things out there that have no redeeming qualities. Finding this feeling of melancholy in finitude specifically is critical, because being sad about finitude is guaranteed to come with a silver lining, and the silver lining is what you’re actually after. Do not contemplate the news.
  • Most prominently, you just simply don’t have as much time as you want.
    • Not enough time with the people you love.
    • Not enough time to do everything that you love.
    • Not enough time to reach all the goals you can dream up.
    • You will die, and you will miss out on (almost) everything that will ever happen.
  • More subtly, but no less urgent or real, is that because time moves unstoppably forward, everything you do, you do for the last time. Every day brings a thousand little deaths.
    • I don’t mean this in the literal sense of “living each day like it’s your last,” though of course you might actually die tomorrow. I mean that you and everything around you are always changing. You will never be the same you again, and even if tomorrow you try to reproduce this moment as faithfully as you possibly can, THIS moment will still be lost, is being lost even as you reflect on it, sand between your fingers.
      • If you have a newborn, you only get 24 hours with a 0-day-old kid; you only get 52 weekends with your 2-year old. And neither the hours nor the weekends are fungible; the clock may go back to 12am each night, but at the close of each moment we permanently say goodbye to the old versions of ourselves and everything around us.
You may know all these things, but you need to actually confront them, so as to let yourself really feel one. You’ll know when that happens, because these types of thoughts are the emotional equivalents of live wires. Wade through the sludge until one of them shocks you.
  • If you actually lean in, this shouldn’t take long. Maybe an (admittedly unpleasant) minute or two. If nothing’s resonating, try a different angle.
    • Note! Like fire-starting, this gets easier and faster the more you do it, the edges less sharp, the existential shocks less severe.
  • The first few times are likely to be the most intense; it won’t always be like this, and at least in my experience you can quickly get to a point where you can mostly skip this step. But especially as you’re first learning to will yourself into an existential, emotional state, these thought patterns serve as incredibly powerful catalysts.
    • We’re used to letting our minds very quickly slide off of “morbid” topics, or ignoring them entirely, which means we’re not very acclimated to the emotions behind them.
    • This is convenient, because if you’re not acclimated to an emotion, that emotion is going to be big and sharp. If you fear death in an abstract sense but never allow yourself to really consider your own mortality and what that means, doing so is likely to be a little intense — you won’t really have to worry about adopting an emotional posture.
      • As a handy side effect: the more often you consider something, the less scary it becomes. For example, my mortality can still stir something in me, but the fear and discomfort I have for it now, compared to before I started this process, is vastly diminished. A lot of thoughts become easier to accept once you allow yourself to deeply engage with them.
The second step is radically different from the first: use the ember to light the tinder.
  • The moment you’ve got an ember, the fire-starting process immediately and radically changes. You fully discard the sticks you were using. You drop the ember into your tinder and blow on it; your new goal is to get it to catch. The ember itself disappears both from your sight and as an object of focus; your priority shifts onto the ball of fuel you’re holding. The emotional spark is often a melancholy one, but the tinder only catches fire once you’re able to find gratitude within that melancholy. You need to recognize what a privilege it is to get to be here, now.
Without the analogy: once you feel the melancholy, resist the urge to recoil. Sit with your emotional response, and explore it; recognize that loss only exists in the presence of value. Find and begin to focus on the value; allow the sadness to yield to reverence.
  • Finitude guarantees that each moment will end, but in the same breath, it makes each moment indescribably precious. Looking through the lens of finitude and asking “what am I afraid to lose?” brings what’s valuable into sharp relief; pivot your focus from the loss to the value, and understand that they’re two sides of the same coin.
  • You don’t have as much time as you want, but the reason that’s sad is that life is something you appreciate. It’s because your life is so short that you can know with deep certainty that each moment of it ought to be savored.
  • You don’t have enough time with the people you love, but that’s exactly why you should treasure each moment you get with them, and why you should strive to be as present as possible in those moments.
  • You only have time to reach a few of your goals. In pursuing the small handful of things that matter most, you necessarily close the door of a whole universe of alternate choices, goals, and lives, most of which are genuinely appealing to you. We value things by how much they cost. If cost of each of your priorities is an enormous set of other happy futures, then its value must be correspondingly tremendous.
  • You’ll miss out on nearly everything that will ever happen, but what’s actually miraculous is that you won’t miss it all. You get to have your handful of experiences. You are, somehow, part of the tiny chunk of the universe that may know itself and fathom its own wonders, existing during the profoundly short cosmic window where such a thing is even possible. Heat death is coming, and will last for eternity, but it’s not here yet.
The third step is simply to feed the flames.
  • Once the tinder is burning, the hard part is done; you just need firewood. Attention is the only fuel, here — the more you can throw on the fire, the longer and more deeply you’ll remain present.
Without the analogy: understand that existence is a gift, and the only way to accept that gift is by being present, now. Consecrate the moment with your attention.
  • Once you’re in the posture of feeling existential gratitude, giving your attention to that moment will be precisely what you want to do most.
  • Pay attention to your body, to your vision, to your hearing, to what you smell, to the feelings your companion stirs in you. You’ll find that there’s no wrong way to drink in the cosmos.
To emotionally ground yourself in a moment, seek out the bright sadness of that moment in particular. The more specific you can get, the better.
  • You don’t need to bear-hug your own mortality every time you want to feel something. Finitude is everywhere; use it as a lens to examine the moment you want to be present for.
  • Allow yourself to really internalize that this moment will end, as eventually will all future moments like these. Try to figure out why exactly that line of thinking aches, because the emotional pang of that loss will perfectly highlight whatever you appreciate most about the moment, and you can shift your emotional focus to that. Once you’re reminded of what you treasure in a moment and why finitude means you should treasure it right now, it’s time to pay attention. Do so for as long as you can.
  • There’s a positive feedback loop here. Once you really feel that you need to be in a moment, paying attention feels extremely good, which will in turn reinforce your conviction in the decision to be present.
Two personal examples of finding bright sadness and meaning in routine things:
Example 1: Running with Lainey, my dog
  • I run with Lainey every weekday morning. I do so instead of doing an infinite number of other things, but most notably I do so instead of spending those minutes waking up and making breakfast with my wife and son.
  • I spend about two hours a week running with Lainey, which is about 1.7% of the 120 waking hours I have each week. That’s a ton.
  • I realize that these two things alone — the major tradeoff, and the large recurring time investment — necessarily mean that running with her is, reflexively, one of the top priorities in my life.
  • As a result of that realization, on my next run, I decide to try to pay attention to it and be more present for it.
  • As I run, I think about Lainey, and about time. I think about how she’s started acting weirdly at nights, recently. She paces restlessly, and often gets extremely startled for no obvious reason. I think about how, even if her unusual behavior isn’t a sign of anything more ominous, my time running with her is going to end far sooner than I would prefer.
  • I think about how ridiculously lucky and grateful I am to be running with her now, and to feel the joy of knowing that during this run, I’m actively living in what I’ll later recognize as “the good old days.”
  • As we run, I tell her she’s a good girl, give her some pats, and then stay present with her. I feel the chilly morning air on my knuckles, watch the way she holds her head so still and straight as her barrel chest swings back and forth with each stride. It’s all going to be over soon, but it’s not over not yet. I get to run with her, today.
    • I also decide, a few minutes later, to dedicate this writing to her. Some of my absolute best thinking about this piece you’re reading was done while running with Lainey. Including, for instance, the connection between the mental posture toward finality and the role of habits in our lives, which had previously been an either/or thing. “Either find meaning in your life by fixing your mentality towards death, or adopt a new habit that makes you happy.” Instead, finding meaning IN the habits you already have, BY embracing finitude, strikes me as deeply more useful and powerful than that either/or framework. And of course, my daily attempts to be present with her have been the most reliable way to make all this philosophizing real, to practice what I’m preaching, and to convince myself that this method both a) genuinely works and b) is worth telling people about.
    • After doing this successfully the first time, I’ve actually been able to give my full attention to the run for at least a few minutes each morning. Which means that for some fraction of that 1.7% of my waking time, I can say with confidence that I’m routinely fully present in my own life. I’m very happy about that; that’s an extremely hard number to move.
    • She’s happily snoozing next to me as I’m writing this now. It’s 12:20am. Best dog.
Example 2: Hanging out with my parents
  • Since moving home to Austin, I see my parents about once a week. Assuming I keep up this cadence for a (very fortunate) 20 more years straight, it means I only get to see them about a thousand more times. A thousand days isn’t nothing, but it’s also, unequivocally, not enough.
    • It also means that the day I graduated high school, I’d already used up a little more than 80% of the total in-person days that I’ll ever have with them.
  • Say we do get 20 more years together. It’s very easy for me to imagine myself in year 21, and to think about, from that perspective, just how much I’d give to be able to hang out with my parents even just one more time.
  • So: this makes the remaining time obviously, in-my-face precious. Acknowledging the reason for why it’s so precious is not fun, but neither is it depressing — it’s just how reality is, and accepting that makes it extremely easy to want to be present for our remaining time together.

4. If you practice this skill on a regular basis, you’ll improve at finding this deeper meaning behind your experiences, which in turn should make you better at paying them higher-quality attention. The end goal is to become habitually more present in your own life.
If you buy all that, the next step is to figure out how you’re actually going to habitually trigger this feeling in your day-to-day life. This will ultimately be a function of what works for your own brain and routines. My pointers for making it as easy as possible:
Pick a routine that meets two key criteria: you actually want to be present for it, and you do it often (at least weekly, preferably daily).
  • Picking the routine that you most urgently want to be present for helps because “how easy it is to pay attention to something” maps directly onto that desire. For me, the stack-ranking looks like this:
    • 1 (very easy to pay attention): any routine involving people I love
    • 2 (easy enough): any routine involving other people or animals, or any routine that occurs outside
    • 3 (hard): any short indoor task. Also work in general, with the exception of flow-state work, which feels like a different flavor of attention/presence.
    • 4 (basically impossible to pay attention): most screen-based activity, but particularly any short-form content consumption/scrolling/browsing. And the less intentional this is, the harder it gets.
  • Picking something you do a lot is critical because you’re effectively grafting a new habit — a habitually-triggered thought pattern — onto the routine you pick, and the more often you do the main habit, the easier it is to establish the new one.
If you’re the kind of person who frequently asks yourself questions like “am I being ‘in the moment’ enough right now?” you should make that thought pattern itself a trigger for this new bright-sadness-seeking habit.
  • Every time you find yourself questioning whether you’re doing a good enough job being present, you need to:
    • Recognize that train of thought as counterproductive
    • Remember that a much better question to ask is “why, really, do I want to be present for this thing?”
    • Ask yourself that question, then look for an answer grounded in the context of that moment’s finitude
    • Use that answer, and its beauty and loss, to emotionally move yourself.
  • This is a perfect way to not only break out of those doomed “am I experiencing this moment correctly” thought loops, but to actually get the desired outcome out of them. A quick meditation on death or whatever is a small price to pay to get out of that spiral and into a genuine experience, in my book.
Even though you’re trying to habitually trigger a thought pattern, best-practices for general habit-building work just fine. Personally I like the “Tiny Habits” method from BJ Fogg, which I’ll summarize here:
  • First, find a consistent trigger for the habit, so that you consistently remember to do the thing.
    • This is absolutely critical. Pick a specific action that you always do during whatever routine you’ve chosen, and make that action your trigger point. Commit to yourself: as soon as you do that specific trigger action, you’ll kick off the thought process that searches for the moment’s bright sadness.
    • Examples:
      • If you’re running, you need to decide that you’ll always try to kick off this search-for-meaning thought process when you stop at the first stop sign of your run.
      • If you’re going to see your parents, kick it off every time you put the car in park as you get to their garage.
  • Second, do the easiest possible version of the habit. For the habit we’re building, there are two ways to make it easy:
    • Pick the routine where you want to be present for the most (discussed above)
    • Define success as paying full attention to your surroundings AT ALL, for ANY duration of time. 5 seconds of emotionally-moved attention? That’s a victory.
  • Third, celebrate your success.
    • Being present in your own life feels great; and doing it during routine moments is genuinely hard. Remember to pat yourself on the back; this is crucial for re-enforcing the habit.
But no matter how easy you make it, this practice will still be difficult. You’ll typically fail because you’ll get distracted by something else before you feel emotionally moved.
  • Whenever you try to focus on the bright sadness in a moment, your mind is going to interject with several other things it’d rather be thinking about. Admitting one of these thoughts will carry you away, derailing the train of thought you’re trying to follow.
  • This sort of failure is more than normal — you should absolutely expect it to happen.
    • Mindfulness meditators work for years to quiet their minds, and to notice and dismiss intrusive thoughts. And experienced mindfulness meditators still fail all the time. Constantly! Minds like to wander. It’s fine. Just try again.
Helpfully, because this is hard for exactly the same reason that meditation is hard, it has exactly the same set of (pretty well-established) solutions that meditation does.
Now that you’ve basically made it to the end of this writing, I can tell you outright that the “becoming emotionally moved” step in this process isn’t LIKE a meditation, it IS a meditation. The thing you’re doing is meditating on finitude until you provoke an emotional reaction in yourself.
  • The reason I didn’t frame it this way before is that the term meditation spooks people, and a lot of people have already tried meditation and failed. I also think what I’m advocating here is so qualitatively different in feeling from other kinds of meditation that it’s worth trying, even if you’ve tried normal meditation and didn’t like it.
Specifically, you’re doing a variant of mindfulness meditation. Here’s how to do it:
  • Focus on the moment at hand and what it means for you — for both better and worse — for that moment to be in the process of ending. You’ll want your mind to really delve around in this space until you encounter something emotionally compelling.
  • All sorts of thoughts will come up that have nothing to do with what you’re trying to focus on.
  • Your goal is to “good naturedly let [those thoughts] play out in the background” and return your focus to the bright sadness of the moment at hand.
    • The quote is from Jeff Warren, specifically his “Concentration 101” video on Youtube. At time of writing, this is the only meditation aid I’ve ever used.
  • When you get swept up in a rogue thought, try to notice what happened, and reset. Be gentle on yourself. “The art of meditation is beginning again, feeling the sensation again, as if for the first time.”
    • -Also Jeff Warren. Same video. Have the whole thing memorized.
  • If you don’t notice it happening, or you’re tired, it’s fine. Just try again tomorrow.
Even better, this practice is actually much easier than normal mindfulness meditation, for four reasons.
  • First, it’s easier because with this practice, you have a very specific goal: become emotionally engaged. As soon as that happens, you can stop meditating.
  • Second, it’s easier because you’re actively having all sorts of thoughts about the value within and behind whatever moment you’re in, what makes it sad, and what makes it wonderful. This is dramatically more engaging for your mind than trying to maintain a blank slate, so it’s way easier to stay focused.
  • Third, once you get good at this, you can do it in seconds, so you don’t actually have to hold your focus for nearly as long as you would in a standard meditation session.
    • Thinking back to the fire-starting analogy in the previous section: making an ember from rubbing sticks together gets significantly faster and easier with practice. You’ll get better at moving yourself into an emotionally-receptive posture, and better at holding your attention.
  • Fourth, a big category of what constitutes “distraction” in mindfulness comes from the environment around you — the sights and sounds that break your focus. In the bright sadness practice, however, this is just “paying attention,” which is the thing you’re actively trying to do.
    • Sure, I’ve been talking about how you feel emotional movement and then use that to pay attention, but this sequence isn’t strict; this stuff all layers together.
    • If you’re going for a run after a night of rainfall and you notice how it smells, that’s not a “distracting thought,” but rather that’s the perfect sort of observation that lends itself to both grief (you probably only get X many more after-rain runs in your life, and only Y of those with your dog) and gratitude (because it smells amazing, and you’re lucky you get to be smelling it). Use it!
There’s one final hurdle: over time, you’ll become increasingly desensitized to whatever thought process you’re using to emotionally move yourself. This is actually desirable, but it requires you to tweak your approach.
  • As an example, one reason that “thinking deeply about your own mortality” provokes such a strong emotional response is that you probably don’t do it very often. Once you start doing it every day, the strength of that response is guaranteed to diminish. Humans get used to stuff.
    • As far as side effects go, “decreasing your fear of death” seems like a pretty strong entry.
Fortunately, while fear of loss fades over time, existential gratitude tends to grow brighter, and the act of paying attention itself begins to serve as a positive feedback loop.
  • The more quality time and attention you spend on something, the greater your appreciation will be for it, and the less you’ll need to consider the shock of its loss to be able to feel its deep value.
    • At least in my case, this has been a consistent, general result. For the routines and moments where I habitually seek out bright sadness, I find it increasingly easy to directly access the “bright” parts, which in turn means that I rely less and less on the “sad” parts to move me into an emotional posture. For instance, in routines that involve people you love, being fully present in the time you spend together will tend to deepen that love, which in turn makes it easier to want to pay attention.
  • Over time, the act of paying that attention will begin to directly remind you of the deep value in doing so.
    • Once you’ve gotten into the habit of paying repeated attention to something, and you’ve connected that attention to what’s beautiful and valuable and ephemeral within it, the attention itself starts carrying an emotional valence.
    • As an example: if you just tried to force yourself to pay deep attention during your commute tomorrow, it would probably feel frustrating and boring. But if you’ve successfully been using the method in this writing to make yourself want to be present, and that feels good for you, then you begin to actually increase your capacity for using the act of attention to kick off the process of emotional engagement. Noticing things on your commute will begin to remind you of why you want to be present, and will help you make that happen.
This is all worth trying. You, reading this, should try it.
Of course, there’s a good chance that this won’t work for you.
  • It might not work at all. For instance, if you can’t think your way into feeling an emotional response. Or perhaps you can feel something, but you can’t easily pivot out of the negative framing, so it doesn’t help you pay attention.
  • It might work, but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. For some, I’m sure the discomfort of this technique will outweigh the benefits.
    • For what it’s worth, if this describes you, know that the discomfort may fall away faster than you’d expect, with regular practice. But if you don’t feel like it will, bail!
  • It might both work and feel good, but you can’t sustain it as a habit for any number of reasons. Behavior change is always difficult.
But if it does work for you, the upside to being habitually more present for the entire rest of your life is enormous. In the best case:
  • You’ll be permanently more attentive to some of your highest-priority experiences
  • You’ll be more deeply appreciative of that time as it’s being spent.
  • You’ll develop the ability to pay attention to whatever you want to pay attention to, as it’s happening, and having that attention be both emotionally engaging and self-sustaining.
  • You’ll gain a perspective on your own time, choices, and priorities that’s grounded in reality, and clear-eyed about the human condition of finitude. Bonus: you may not fear death as much.
  • But ultimately I think it’s worth trying because presence today is the best recourse against grief tomorrow, and grief tomorrow is inevitable.

    The longer I live, the more deep and permanent loss I’ll face. I’ll lose the people I love and the things I cherish, from traditions to entire life stages, from my relationships to my own autonomy.

    It is desperately important to me that the version of myself who must face these losses can find solace in my behavior today.

    I want his head to be crowded with memories. I want him to remember appreciating the things that mattered most to him as they were still happening. To remember recognizing the good old days while he was still in them. To remember showing up for each of those days as best he could, as often as he could.

    Most of all, I need him to believe that he gave the people and things he loved as much of his attention as he was able, because he’s known how much they really meant to him all along.

More arrows, please: bibliography and extras
Bibliography
Burkeman, Oliver. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-15912-2.
  • The single most influential source here
  • This is where I encountered the term “bright sadness,” itself quoted from Richard Rohr. (Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, Revised and Updated, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Jossey-Bass. ISBN 978-1-394-18569-6.) I wasn’t that impressed by Rorh’s take.
  • Highly relevant to part 2 in particular.
  • Clear, James. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery. ISBN 978-0-735-21129-2.
    • Mostly useful for the identity piece in part 1.
  • Fisher, Max. (2022). The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-70332-1.
    • Not specifically used, but made me guard my attention more preciously. Also salient to the chronophage conversation in the caveats. Scrolling addiction is still addiction.
  • Fogg, B.J. (2021). Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything. Harvest. ISBN 978-0-358-36277-7.
    • Second most influential piece, specifically for part 4.
  • Hwang, Tim. (2020). Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet. FSG Originals x Logic. ISBN 978-0-374-53865-1.
    • More background thinking on attention
  • Liming, Sheila. (2023). Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. Melville House. ISBN 978-1-68589-005-6.
    • Salient to parts 1 and 2; helped inform thinking but not directly leveraged.
  • Mark, Gloria. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press. ISBN 978-1-335-44941-2.
    • Informed and is specifically quoted in part 1
  • Wallace, David Foster. (2009). This is water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-06822-2.
  • Yong, Ed. (2022). An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Random House. ISBN 978-0-593-13323-1.
    • Helped me think about perception. Used specifically in the sunflower bit in the bonus argument about your internal reality’s relationship to attention
  • Clean bibliography:

    Bibliography

Bonus arguments!
Why trying to find more meaning by “spending your time better” is incredibly hard.
  • There is precisely one valid conceptual link between fulfillment and efficiency, which is that being efficient with your time can “free you up” to do the things you actually find meaningful. But in practice, this relationship is too tenuous and unreliable to bet your life on.
The contingency here is as obvious as it is fraught: this arrangement only works if “saved” time actually gets spent the way you hope it will. But time isn’t fungible and doesn’t lend itself to being easily horse-traded; there’s absolutely no guarantee that the time you free up by optimizing thing A gets spent on meaningful life experience B.
  • Say you really love writing poetry, but getting into that mindset takes half an hour. If you can efficiently cut two minutes out of your morning routine, what probably happens is that you get two bonus minutes to sleep, work, or be online. Optimizations like these don’t translate into more poetry getting written.
  • The general lesson is that time that productivity “saves” can readily and unconsciously be spent on other meaningless things, and usually will be.
You can of course succeed at making this tradeoff in specific instances, and when you can, you should probably do so. But as a guiding life strategy, it’s doomed to fail because the amount of time discipline it demands at scale is enormous.
  • The things in our lives which are most readily optimized are often its smallest tasks. Our ambition by optimizing them is to “clear the deck” for large things, but no human being in history has ever successfully “cleared out” all of life’s small tasks and annoyances. For every little thing you optimize, another new small task will tend to take its place. And often, the act of more quickly processing one small tasks actually speeds up the creation of more tasks. The creator of Inbox 0 admits that getting really good at replying to email means that you just get more email.
  • Trying to fight this and control it with ever-more-rigid time management techniques is Sisyphean and exhausting. And even if somehow, some way, you translated every scrap of daily optimization into something you found meaningful — which you absolutely cannot and will not do — there are way easier ways to go about feeling fulfillment in life. This isn’t worth it.
  • The book “Four Thousand Weeks” is wonderful and goes deep into this, if you want to learn more. I couldn’t recommend it more highly; it’s probably my favorite book of the last decade and has directly inspired several segments of the piece you’re reading.
Why the capitalist approach to finding meaning in life (that fulfillment in life flows directly from achievement, which in turn is a function of living as productively and efficiently as possible) doesn’t work.
The heart of the problem is that the relationship between productivity and fulfillment is inherently oppositional. The more you life your life through a lens of efficiency and optimization, the more you undercut your ability to actually find fulfillment in it.
Looking for life satisfaction in a checklist of achievements is self-defeating.
It turns failure into something existentially horrifying. And then it makes you fail more often.
  • If meaning only follows from accomplishment, then if you work for a long time at something but fail at it (or even give up), all the time you invested will feel not only meaningless, but completely wasted. You’re going to fail at a bunch of things in your life; none of this life will “count.”
  • Worse: if this is your mindset, you’re actually going to be failing continuously. If you think you can only find meaning from achievement, and you want your life to be as meaningful as possible, you’re basically forced into holding unrealistically high expectations of what you think you need to achieve in your life. So now your checklist is full of incredibly hard-to-meet goals that all feel uniquely terrible when you fail to meet them.
  • This is basically adopting New Years Resolutions as a life strategy. Please do not do this.
Many things on your checklist won’t “count,” and each one of these accomplishments will remind you that you’ve prioritized it over something that might have “counted.” This will hurt.
  • Because meaning is internally constructed, you won’t find it in anything on your list of goals that you didn’t personally put there.
  • Life will add big, difficult, meaningless-to-you things to your list all the time. For instance: our society has no meaningful safety net, and you need to keep yourself fed. Hope you find meaning in wage labor!
  • If you DON’T find meaning in wage labor, and instead find it in art or family time or whatever, then even some of life’s biggest objective achievements (like climbing up the corporate ladder) will not only feel meaningless, but will chiefly serve as badges of departure from your true self, a celebration of time spent chasing someone else’s dream instead of your own.
Finally: even success is fleeting. You will have dazzling moments of accomplishment in areas of your life that you personally consider very important. But you probably won’t have that many, and worse, human nature is to cut these moments short by immediately establishing new, more ambitious goals. To understand these distantly-spread moments as your primary source of fulfillment in life is to consign the vast majority of that life to meaninglessness.
  • I want to underscore that feelings of success usually aren’t emotionally durable. Very rarely can you genuinely feel in-the-moment satisfaction just by reflecting on a previous accomplishment. For me, thinking about the miracle of my son’s existence is pretty much the only exception to this rule.
More generally, viewing productivity as an end onto itself incurs incredibly nasty side-effects which make your life feel less meaningful.
  • First, you may begin to think that your worth as a human has any correlation with your economic worth. Once you internalize that it does, then any time you are not being economically productive, you’ll perceive your own human worth as decreasing. “I’ll matter once I get the discipline to make myself work harder” is a sentence that hurts my heart to even type.
Second, the more you’re trying to optimize your life for the future, the less you’re able to actually show up for it as it’s happening. This is a problem because being present in a moment is a prerequisite to being able to internalize it at all, let alone to distill meaning or life satisfaction from it.
  • To keep oneself productive, an efficient person must continually ask and answer questions like:
    • How can I do this faster?
    • What should I be doing next?
    • How long will this take?
    • How can I be useful right now?
    • Am I doing the most important thing?
    • What goal does this serve? And what larger goal does THAT goal serve?
  • Your attentional resources are finite. See Gloria Mark’s book “Attention span.”
  • If you continually spend a big chunk of these finite resources on planning for the future, or executing the task at hand as quickly as possible so that the next one can be undertaken, there will simply be less of those resources available for being fully present in your life experiences.
  • You can’t get meaning from moments that you’re not paying attention to, per the very first argument in this writing.
Why scrolling is uniquely bad.
  • Scrolling (and rote activity in general) isn’t bad because you could be using that time more “productively”; this mode of thinking is a trap (see the capitalism argument right above this one).
Scrolling is bad because it’s both unconscious and very good at taking more of your attention than you intend to give it. Deliberately allocating more of that time to something that reinforces an identity that you want to hold is going to feel better, even if that new thing is also rote or carries no possibility of payoff (think: cultivating a model-train-building hobby). You should basically always be doing anything else that isn’t scrolling.
  • Algorithmic time takes so much of our attention because it’s been engineered to do that, but it doesn’t actually further our own goals very well
    • People spend more time on algorithmically-served content than they want to
    • Most engagement-algorithm-powered websites, as a core feature of their designs, make you into an angrier person, which typically isn’t an identity that people want to get closer to.
    • Negative emotions like guilt and shame over doing something aren’t effective at creating behavior change — beating yourself up over your screen time is counterproductive
      • “New year’s eve resolution”-style sweeping pass-fail goals also, generally speaking, do not work
      • It’s worth noting that rote tasks, including social media, both make us happy and are like neurochemically necessities to recharge the resources that let us focus. The trick is entirely in stopping when you actually want to stop, which is usually hard.
    • “Self-actualization” is a heavy and loaded phrase, but generally “becoming closer to the person you want to be” is likely to make feel people better than additional algorithm time over the medium and long term
The stuff you choose to do instead of scrolling should not be held to any particular standard of “efficiency” or “optimality.”
  • Feeling shitty about things doesn’t actually help with behavior change. Feeling guilty over screen time is as common as it is unhelpful. The trick is not to internalize that algorithm time is bad — though that helps — but rather to get in the habits of doing stuff that makes us happier.
  • Wrong framing: Scrolling is an ‘inefficient use of time’
    • Though technically, scrolling IS bad because it’s “inefficient,” if the thing you’re optimizing for is “directly trying to increasing your satisfaction with your life,” but when people talk about “efficiency” they never mean it in that way. Generally “efficiency” is an effort to optimize your time in the service some sort of concrete achievement, where life satisfaction is assumed to be the byproduct. After you hit a certain level of income/safety/stability, that assumption is basically always bad.
  • Better framing #1: Scrolling time is generally spent without clear intention, and deliberately allocating that time to something else that you actually intend to do — even if that other thing is also rote or ‘pointless’ — will feel very good, in cases where that ‘something else’ votes more strongly for an identity that you want to hold
  • Better framing #2: Most engagement-based social networks, as a core feature of their designs, make you into an angrier person, which typically isn’t an identity that people want to get closer to.
Why your entire internal reality is a function of how you spend your attention.
  • You live exclusively in the present; your life is only ever experienced as a series of “now” moments.
  • In those “now” moments, you can only ever experience things that you personally perceive.
    • “Perceive” here means “physically sense” — using biological sensors to get information about the world into our brain.
      • Sunflowers have bullseyes painted on them in infrared, but humans can’t detect infrared light. This means we can’t have the experience of seeing those bullseyes, even though infrared light is constantly hitting our retinas.
    • Objective reality exists (probably! hopefully!), and you can of course be impacted by things you don’t directly perceive, and their downstream effects. But the bridge between objective external reality and subjective internal reality is always the senses. If a meteor hits the other side of the planet, you can’t know that until its effects come to you: you feel the shockwave, see it on the news, or get washed away by the tsunami.
  • Further, for an experience to enter into your internal reality, sensory perception alone isn’t enough. You also need to be paying attention.
    • You don’t specifically notice the vast majority of things your senses perceive.
    • Any act of “thinking about something” necessarily starts with noticing that thing. To “register” something is not to physically sense it, but rather to attend to it.
  • So to the extent that you can define your life as the sum of the experiences you have and the way you internalize those experiences, it follows that your life is a function of how you choose to allocate your attention, moment to moment.
    • You can’t simplify all the way down to just saying “your life IS your attention,” because your thinking is significantly influenced by subconscious and environmental factors (like how much sleep you’ve gotten) all the time.
    • But it’s still true that your life is a function of your attention, because attention is unavoidably upstream of the rest of your internal reality. Attended perception is the only avenue available for the “raw material” of external reality to make its way into your head — so while attention isn’t responsible for the whole ball game of your consciousness, it’s absolutely a factor in every thought you’ll ever have.
A bonus attempt at demonstrating why each moment is precious — astronomical/cosmic angle
  • The fact that you exist at all is unfathomably unlikely.
  • The universe exists, for some reason. At a certain, brief point in its lifecycle, a very small percentage of that universe happened to be fit for life.
    • Tim Urban put it this way:
      • “The last stars will die out 120 trillion years from now (at most) followed by 10^106 years of just black holes. Condensed, that’s like the universe starting with 1 second of starts and then a billion billion billion bilion billion billion billion billion years of just black holes. Stars are basically the immediate after-effects of the Big Bang. A one-second sizzle of brightness before settling into an essentially endless era of darkness. We live in that one bright second.”
  • Life came into existence at all, (and then again, here on Earth). It supports life, which it absolutely does not have to.
    • But https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?t=792 — as measured from the beginning of the universe to the evaporation of the last black hole, life can exist for about this much of it:
    [IMAGE]
  • Consciousness is, as far as we know, the rarest stuff in existence. Think of the percentage of total atoms, or of square footage of total universe, that can truly be said to experience sensation of any kind.
  • Putting it all together: the overwhelming majority of the universe’s timeline will be spent in barren heat death. You not only get to exist during the infinitesimally small window where existence is possible, but in that window you get to be a piece of the universe that gets to know itself, and behave freely. And for this to happen, for you to actually come about, the entire history of the universe, of our galaxy, the solar system, earth, evolution, civilization, and the specific social conditions under which your parents met had to happen exactly the way it did.
  • So again: anything you experience, you get to experience, because experience itself is an astronomically special privilege. And because the total list of your life’s experiences is a quite short in the grand scheme of things, every entry ends up mattering a whole hell of a lot.
Caveats by section: stuff that qualifies the corresponding arguments. Generally these ideas were excluded from the main text for length and noise reasons.
Introduction: A method for finding meaning
This sort of efficiency-for-the-sake-of-meaning arrangement is possible, and is beneficial when you can pull it off. It’s just not the focus here.
  • For example, there will be times where you have no practical choice but to work. If you get your work done faster, you can spend more time with your family, for example.
And of course if there are things in your life that you habitually do, but reliably find meaningless — for instance, scrolling online — your life will be better if you spend that time doing other things.
  • Note: those other things do not need to be productive things. Rather, you win whenever you replace something habitually meaningless with something habitually more meaningful.
  • But yeah, this is still what an efficiency victory looks like. If you replace all your scrolling time with guitar, and you feel alive every time you play guitar, then making this optimization will make your life better. Hooray.
  • I think a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of what you care about most is absolutely something to aspire to. I don’t think you get to that end-state by trying to continually be more productive.
  • I’m absolutely not saying that it’s bad to be ambitious or to work on important things. But it’s definitely bad to frame this work as only meaningful when it bears fruit. Cathedrals used to take hundreds of years to build. Builders who started them would know that they’d never see the finished product, but they laid down the first stones anyway. If those builders had internalized that the end goal was all that mattered, we wouldn’t have cathedrals. I think climate change works a similar way; we need to work on it, but we can’t allow ourselves to feel demoralized and quit when key bills fail, etc. Your fulfillment needs to be intrinsic to the activity itself; tying it to an outcome will make you sad.
  • Survival is more important than actualization. The society I live in — the US in the early 21st century — has little in the way of safety nets, and will absolutely punish poverty with suffering and death. The most effective survival strategies all require treating time as a means to an end and trying to spend it as efficiently as possible to improve one’s future outcomes. It is not my intention to criticize any action or mindset taken to securing one’s safety or future; staying traditionally “productive” and achieving these goals will necessarily entail optimization. Conversely, focusing exclusively on “living in the moment” will basically never result in upward class mobility, which is extremely important.
1. Your daily routines have the potential to become deep reservoirs of satisfaction and fulfillment in your life.
On addiction:
  • In the intro, I said that “There are only two ways to pursue [living a more meaningful life]: either by spending your time doing more fulfilling things, or by finding more fulfillment in whatever you’re already doing.”
  • This writing is about the second direction, and ignores the first one because it’s assumed to be held steady. But addiction consistently results in the severe erosion of the first category — spending your time on fulfilling things. Addiction is a chronophage: it eats your time, eats your life.
  • If you’re voluntarily sinking a ton of time into something that’s explicitly destructive to the rest of your life, any benefits of finding more meaning within the moments of your addiction (if you could even realize them, which, depending on the addiction in question, might be impossible) are massively outweighed by the harms of continuing to be addicted.
Via Matt: Does this sort of “Accept your life as it is” mentality encourage people to stay in bad situations, instead of wanting to change?
  • None of this is an argument against ambition or change or taking on big projects. Nor is it an enjoinder to declare things that hurt you as sacred. It’s rather an alternative approach to measuring things only in terms of the value they deliver, or specifically seeking to convert ourselves into optimization machines to deliver these ends. It is amenable to being situationally applied. Don’t try to find meaning in situations that diminish you; escape those situations.
I’m just going to quote from “Four Thousand Weeks” directly and at length, here, because I think Burkeman spells this out better than I can:
What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counter-productive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. You’ll sometimes still decide to drive yourself hard in an effort to squeeze more in, when circumstances absolutely require it. But that won’t be your default mode, because you’ll no longer be operating under the illusion of one day making time for everything.
The same goes for existential overwhelm: what’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more experiences, since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having even more experiences left to consume. Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

…

“Entering space and time completely”—or even partially, which may be as far as any of us ever get—means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.
And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.
Maybe it’s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.
Why it’s uncomfortable to consider that your choices reveal your interior values.
  • The value structures expressed by your actions are typically different from the value structures that you’d articulate if someone ever asked you to.
    • Maybe you care deeply about climate change and social justice and world hunger and Big Important Problems. But maybe in practice you like to scroll on your phone for two hours a day, and you only go to one or two protests a year (or whatever).
    • Looking at your actions, an observer would have to conclude that appeasing whatever underlying need that is causing you to scroll is more important to you than solving these Big Problems. And that’s uncomfortable!
But the former value structure — the one expressed by your actions — is your “real” one. It’s the one you ascribe to. It’s the one you literally live your life by. It’s the value system you evidently hold, to any objective analysis and to anyone who isn’t living in your head.
  • And even internally to your own head, time investment is undeniably the best yardstick of what actually matters to you. Stuff that you never invest any time into is not actually important to you. It just can’t be considered that way. This is more obvious in some matters of identity: if I literally never run, nobody else is going to think of me as a runner, and I’m probably going to struggle to consider myself to be one.
  • This is less obvious in other matters like social justice: if I’m sympathetic to a given cause, but don’t actually spend time trying to advance that cause, I can’t really say that I’m a good antiracist or communist or whatever, even if I am profoundly and fully convinced in the validity and importance of a given cause.
    • Personally: I spend 5 days a week doing capitalism as hard as I can for 8 hours, and probably an hour a week being bummed about the consequences of capitalism. It’d be very hard to make the case that I’m any sort of communist at all! Rather I’m a capitalist waiting for someone else to fix things.
  • This is sort of a bummer, because people think of themselves as good people, and they also have pretty high standards, value-wise, for what constitutes a good person. So taking this sort of outward approach to discerning your values — judging folks purely by their actions — creates cognitive dissonance.
  • But! All of this is only a problem if you’re trying to spend your time more efficiently, including being more efficient at aligning the time you spend with some value that that you nominally hold but that you’re not currently investing enough time in. And this whole writing is sick of that way of thinking because it’s all we ever hear about. So instead, look at how you’re spending your time, recognize that you can only ever spend a moment/hour/day in one way, and then see if there’s a way that you can feel content in your choices, which are given a profound weight just by virtue of you making them. You’re not obligated to solve every problem.
    • Walking your dog isn’t “inefficient” and walking your dog way more often than you secretly plot to destroy oil infrastructure doesn’t mean you’re a bad citizen of the world. It does also mean that you’re prioritizing your dog over other people, because that is ultimately what you’re doing. If that bothers you a whole bunch, then change it. If it doesn’t bother you, live your life. But either way, you sort of have to start by acknowledging reality, and close examination of your routines (and in general how you spend your time) is the best possible starting place for viewing that reality.
2. Finding meaning in your routines first requires being able to pay them your full attention, but this is difficult to do.
There’s actually a double-edged sword here. Specifically this bit: “Routines are the hardest experiences in your life to be fully present for. Their repetitive nature creates some of the safest and most reliable opportunities for your mind to wander.”
  • It’s true that because you have done your routines so many times, it’s easy for your mind to go elsewhere when performing them. This immediately means it’s harder to be present in those routines.
  • …But it also also means that for these routines, you typically have some free mental capacity to play with. You’ll need that capacity and space for doing the hard work of adopting an emotionally-receptive posture — which you can then use to go be present. If you’re fully distracted or engaged to start with, you’re not going to be able to pull off a quick meditation on death to move yourself with; you’ll be too busy
  • In this way, routines go from the hardest things to pay attention to some of the easiest, once you get consistent at trying to be present in them.
3. Feeling the bright sadness within a routine experience makes it much easier to pay attention to. This is a skill you can learn.
  • Via Ben: I do have a question though... you were talking about being mindful and present with your runs with Lainey but then using that time to think on writing this piece? Does that count as being present with Lainey?
    • Time spent thinking about writing this piece while running absolutely does not count as presence with Lainey! There was terrific irony in it, which was never lost on me. For several months of my life, the single most common intrusive thought to pull me out of presence with Lainey was some realization about this writing that I felt I needed to think about more, or hold in my mind to document upon getting home.
      It was a trade I was happy to make -- documenting this has made me better at practicing presence across the whole rest of my life, and it wouldn't have happened without this sort of thinking-while-running -- but especially as I was getting toward the end of the writing, I'd sort of roll my eyes at myself each time I left the moment in order to think about how to tell my future self (the primary audience for this writing, and one of the main reasons I wrote it to “you” — this whole thing could be fairly classified as “a lengthy letter to my future self”) how to be in the moment better.
      Happily, since stopping work on the piece, I don't have to make this trade any more, and find myself able to stay with her for longer :)
4. If you practice this skill on a regular basis, you’ll improve at finding this deeper meaning behind your experiences, which in turn should make you better at paying them higher-quality attention. The end goal is to become habitually more present in your own life.
  • (Empty for now)
About the writing
  • Thinking this up and writing it down took me about a year, including the time it took to read everything in the bibliography. It contains, as far as I can tell, exactly one original thought. I think it’s a good thought.
  • I use the terms “meaning,” “fulfillment,” “satisfaction,” and “importance” mostly interchangeably, in order to avoid the semantic satiation you’d feel if I just used the same word every time. Unfortunately, the word “attention” doesn’t have nearly as many handy synonyms.
  • I didn’t use AI to generate any of the writing. I did use it to see if it could find holes in the argument. It couldn’t, beyond basically saying “this is pretty intense; a bunch of people may be unwilling to try it or unable to successfully practice it.”
  • The mostly-complete first draft of this writing was completed on 3/16/24. The last set of major changes was done on 6/29/24, which is the draft you’re reading now. I suspect that it’ll only be small tweaks to the core argument from here on out, though I expect more stuff to show up in the “Bonus arguments” and “Caveats” sections. (As of 2/25/25, I haven’t added any new bonus arguments or caveats, but I did just fix some typos and clean up a couple phrases).
    • Just for fun, here’s the high-level sequence from the original 3/16 draft (these were all fleshed out, except the 7th one). It was nearly 9,000 words long (now 17k+) and I wrote it all in one night, while on a trip with my son, after he had fallen asleep.
    1. Your internal reality is defined by how you spend your attention.
    2. You should spend more of your attention on things that you care more about.
    3. Your daily routines directly reflect what you care about.
    4. Your imminent death makes these routines uniquely meaningful.
    5. Giving your full attention to these routines is incredibly difficult.
    6. It gets much easier to pay attention to them once you learn how to emotionally move yourself to do so.
    7. Embedding the pursuit of this emotional movement into your day-to-day routines allows you to become habitually present for your own life.
Extras — quotes and inspiration
  • Kurt Vonnegut: “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
  • Jenny Odell: “To live in the gap between past and future is quite simply the human condition, even if culturally dominant and politically convenient views of time, history, and the future obscure it from us.” We live exclusively in the present; we can exist nowhere else and experience nothing else.
David Foster Wallace: All meaning is internally constructed. Read https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ for more on this, because it’s beautiful.
  • Better yet go listen to it here; it’s a speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw
  • This work, and the corresponding realization about meaning, kicked off my interest in this subject. But what it lacks is a practical approach to actually force your brain out of its default setting, a gap my writing attempts to close.
  • Thanks for reading, and good luck. Be gentle with yourself.