I'm missing out on literally everything.

on having too much passion and not enough time

Each time I step foot in a bookstore or library, my brain warps under the crushing weight of all the books I’ll never read.

Inevitably, my heart starts pounding and a touch of vertigo sets in. I scan the thousands of sideways spines at rapid speed, attempting to intuit from the particular font the title and author’s name is typed in whether the book will change my life. I leave, more often than not, with at least one book I’ve already read before. I tell myself I’m not missing out on anything.

But deep in my bones I know, because it occurs to me at least once a day: there is so much I will never get to experience in this life because there is simply not enough time.

I consider myself to be a bit of a hedonist at this point in my life. Over the years, I’ve suffered a great deal simply because I decided to stay stuck: in certain patterns of thinking, in relationships with particular people, in cycles of behavior that were harming more than helping me. Right now though, I feel anything but stuck. I feel passionate, alive, excited to soak up whatever is out there for me. But I don’t know if you’ve heard, there’s a LOT out there.

There are billions of books, millions of podcasts, an untold number of consumer items to buy and add to our lives. There are recipes to be tried and mountains to hike and sunrises to see in every corner of the world. And the internet makes these infinite possibilities so much more visible to us; we can see people making those recipes and producing those podcasts and hiking those mountains in real time, right from the screen of the tiny computers in our pockets. It is both amazing and absolutely fucking exhausting.

For many years, I used the app Goodreads to set reading challenges for the year and keep up on what books other people—both my friends and family as well as total strangers—were reading. Harmless enough, I figured. What could be more wholesome than an app devoted to reading? But after a while, I found that I was rushing through books just so I could track them on Goodreads, that every time I opened the app, I experienced that same dizzy, heart-pounding feeling I got in bookstores. Because suddenly I could see how many books I wanted to read but would never have the time to finish in my limited time here on earth. (Oh, and did I mention that there’s something like an additional million books published each year? The math just doesn’t work in our favor.) I ended up ditching the app and keeping a paper list of my yearly reads that no one sees but me.

In his clever and insightful book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, distills this problem down to its very essence: “The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.”

Uhhh, yeah. That.

So how, I started to wonder, could I push back on the feeling that I’m missing out on literally everything and shelve my existential overwhelm once and for all? For me, as it generally tends to be, it’s about what I choose to devote my attention to. It’s also, just as importantly, about how I allow the awareness of new experiences to come to me. Social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and apps like Goodreads are no longer it. There is simply too much overwhelm associated with them, and while they might expose me to targeted and interesting content (I mean, the algorithm is basically inside of my actual brain), it’s not worth the tradeoff of feeling like my head might explode from information overload.

Lately, I find myself paying more attention to what inserts itself into my field of awareness without me having to chase it down. There’s a lot to be said for a book recommendation from a friend, for a recipe I try at a potluck that I want to repeat at home, for a consumer product that seems to keep tugging at my sleeve as I consider whether it fits into my life.

A couple weeks ago, I was chatting with the woman behind the counter at my local apothecary store. We were talking about the colder months coming and I said that I was in the market for some new slippers. I’d been eyeing a particular pair from L.L. Bean but was still in the information gathering phase. “Oh! I have the BEST slippers,” she enthused. “They’re crazy warm and beyond comfortable.” I thought to myself, If she tells me they’re from L.L. Bean, that’s all the confirmation I need to make my decision. Naturally, they were. (I got my pair a few days ago, and they are just as fantastic as she described.)

There is a lot I inevitably miss out on by letting ideas and experiences come to me naturally. And that’s the rub of accepting the call to a slower, more intentional life: I have to let go of the infinite ways I might like to spend my time and attention, and also set aside the idea that I’m somehow missing out in their absence. What comes to me is meant for me, and what never winds up on my radar is probably for the best.

At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

What I’m Paying Attention to This Week:

This reckoning from Isabel Cowles Murphy about our own internalized prejudice surrounding the work of mothering

Alex Elle’s brief but impactful essay on letting go of people who don’t want us to be there for them

This exploration from Erin Nystrom of the intersection of the wellness industry and our current inclination to pathologize the human experience

In our neck of the woods:

homemade caramel sauce (YUM), chocolate chip banana cookie skillet, more fresh tomatoes from the garden, my new slippers!, treasure hunting, campfire tending