Reconnect with the physical world

Convenience has removed many of the small physical interactions that once filled everyday life. Buttons became touchscreens, keys became sensors, tickets became apps, and countless tasks became automated. You don’t need to reject technology, but pay attention to the physical interactions that remain: buttoning a shirt, opening a window, washing a dish, sharpening a pencil, or petting a cat. Let yourself actually feel these interactions instead of rushing past them.

Look for gratification, not just happiness

Keep pursuing the big things that make life meaningful, like relationships, health, purpose, and accomplishment, but don’t make them your only source of a good life. Happiness often depends on goals that take months or years; gratification is available immediately through ordinary sensory experiences. Notice the warmth of a cup in your hands, the sound of a zipper closing, or leaves crunching beneath your feet. We’ve been taught to think these experiences are background noise, while the “real” parts of life happen somewhere else. But those tiny moments aren’t distractions from a meaningful life; they’re part of what makes life meaningful in the first place.

Use Your Two Superpowers

As a young person, you face a ton of uncertainty. But you face little risk. The superpower you have when you’re young is time and options. You can quit your job, travel for a couple of years, and then get a new job when you come back. You can leave your company to start your own business, and if it fails, get a new job. You can break up with your partner to date new people. You can move to a completely new city. You have time to make new friends, explore different careers, and live in different places. You have your whole life ahead of you. You have time to figure things out. If something doesn’t work out, you just try something else. You can easily reset your life, over and over again. You can’t do that (or it’s much harder) when you’re in your 30s or 40s, married, and have multiple kids. Time and options have an expiration date. Use it before you lose it.

Solvable problems are a wonderful distraction.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction.

Hold to this illusion

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. This could apply to a lot of vocations and missions, not just writing.

Live with lightness

Without laughter, the rough and rocky places on the path might be too painful to bear. Humor not only lightens your load, but it also broadens your perspective. To be deadly serious is to suffer tunnel vision. To be able to laugh at yourself clears the vision.

The work is the reward

Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next. The work is the reward.