CBR18Bingo: Summer, because it was the first book I finished this summer.
Meditations for Mortals opens with the line, “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out.” Rather than offering a system guaranteed to optimize your life and change you into the ideal version of yourself, the book’s stated goal is to teach you how to live a meaningful life in the messy imperfection of reality. I picked it up after seeing the author, Oliver Burkeman, talk about his philosophy of “Imperfectionism” on Adam Conover’s podcast. As a recovering perfectionist, I was interested to hear what Burkeman had to say. I found this book to be an easy read with some surprising insights that I am still thinking about a month later.
Meditations for Mortals is designed to be read over a 4 week period, one chapter per day. Each week has a theme, with daily short essays centering on different aspects of that theme. A few of the essays didn’t feel super applicable to me(Burkeman sometimes seems to assume that everybody either works in a creative field or has multiple spare hours per day to spend on creative projects). However, most of them were lovely and contained some really powerful insights. The thesis of the book seemed to be that you don’t need to wait for things to be perfect before you start to live your life, and that’s an insight I needed reminding of. I don’t usually enjoy self-help, but I liked this one.
