# What if you never sort your life out? | Oliver Burkeman
source: https://ift.tt/kbCPrDU tags: #literature #living-well uid: 202302202233 —
In recent years, for example, there’s been an explosion of books on habit change, most of which take a splendidly down-to-earth approach, focusing on the importance of taking tiny, incremental steps. Yet they rarely escape the trap of implying that once a habit’s been implemented, it’ll become totally automatic — and life’s suffering, at least in that domain, will have ended for good. Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3wszqtwarfs6qejb1ebcz
I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet — that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.” Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3str51pekeaz0grmam1q2
One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you’d never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life’s troubles. What if I’ll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days? Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gsm3xbf1f9fwpdxp4546j0kk
Things would probably be fine. I might have a nagging feeling that I’m not living my life to my full potential, but I don’t care as much about that as some people (including Mulan) might.