At a rally in Tel Aviv this past summer held by Israel’s beleaguered left, Yuval Noah Harari appeared as the keynote speaker. He began his speech not with the latest developments from Gaza or a grand pronouncement about how the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians might be solved. Instead, he did what Harari does best: place all of it, everything people tend to take for granted, within a very, very long historical framework. “Once upon a time, there was neither a Jewish people, nor a Palestinian people,” Harari said. “A hundred million years ago, this land was home to dinosaurs.”

Harari, as anyone who has bought a gift for a dad must know, is a historian whose books, starting with his account of human and civilizational evolution, Sapiens, have sold in the millions. Since the beginning of his stardom, Harari’s identity as an Israeli was no secret. His accent would give that away. But his feelings about his country were not something he openly shared. Consciously or not, he kept his distance from Israel as his stature rose in the pop-intellectual firmament and he jetted off to meetings with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

But starting two years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected prime minister and formed an extreme-right government intent on dismantling some of the basic guardrails of Israeli democracy, Harari felt he couldn’t stay quiet. He is now among the most internationally famous Israelis speaking publicly about the possibility and necessity of peace.

As the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel approached, I wanted to hear from Harari, who happened to be in the United States touring with his new book, Nexus. We met on the Upper East Side of Manhattan one morning in mid-September.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: I’ve probably never felt more despairing in my life about Israel than I have in the past year. You bring historical perspective to everything that you work on, so I’m curious if that makes you see things more hopefully, or whether the country seems even more stuck from where you stand.

Yuval Noah Harari: Israel is at a crossroads. I don’t think its existence is at stake. I do think its identity is at stake. The soul of the country is now the battleground, and the outcome will decide not just the shape of Israel for many, many years to come, but also the shape of Judaism. I think that Judaism is at an intersection. Maybe we haven’t been in such a place for 2,000 years, since the end of the Second Temple era.

Beckerman: What is the parallel with that moment?

Harari: The Second Temple era ended after the Zealots took over with messianic visions and almost destroyed the Jewish people, almost destroyed the Jewish religion, which had to then reinvent itself. And we’ve come full circle. Judaism as we know it was born from the ashes of the Temple of Jerusalem in the failed rebellion against the Romans that the Zealots instigated. For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.

Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?

Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn. They go to Egypt; they learn. They go to Brooklyn; they learn. And eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years? Why did ben Zakkai have to go ask Vespasian for Yavne? He could have just asked Vespasian, Tell me, how do you build an army? How do you fight wars? You Romans, you are so good with power, with violence. We Jews, we want to learn violence. We want to learn power. And Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

[Read: Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision]

Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?

Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades. When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.

Beckerman: This is Zionism as I understand it. But the term has taken on different dimensions for so many people.

Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas. Some ideas were definitely racist and very violent. Some Zionists have denied the existence of a Palestinian people and the right to self-determination of Palestinians. But this is not a logical conclusion from the premises of Zionism. You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that. But basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described. And I’ll go a step further, which is to ask about empathy. I can contain the pain and the sorrow that I feel for what happened on October 7 and the people I know, what happened to Jews. And I can still open the newspaper and see what’s happening in Gaza and feel extraordinary pain too, but there are settings in which I can’t talk about the pain that I feel for one side or the other, because it immediately becomes a zero-sum game.

Harari: It’s like in an emergency room in a hospital, where there is triage. You have a couple of people shouting in pain. I’m shouting in pain and somebody near me is also shouting in pain. If the doctor pays attention to them, then maybe they take care of them and not of me. So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.

Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?

Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people. This is how violence breeds more violence, because you get used to it, and it becomes easier. And this is what is now happening with the hostages. When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage 18 years ago, the whole country was focused on that, and Gilad Shalit’s family was sacred. Whatever you thought about the deal to release Shalit, to say a word against him or his family was really blasphemy. And now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.

Beckerman: Does this worry you?

Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted. In the Second World War, you would not see in British newspapers a lot of images of German families burned in their homes during the bombardment of Hamburg or Dresden.

Beckerman: I’ve heard you talk about the distinction between peace and justice, as a more reasonable way of trying to think about the conflict.

Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective. You can see, are people being killed or not? But people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life; you cannot undo the injuries, the rapes, the humiliation. The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?

[Read: The war that would not end]

Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people.

Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model. I mean, it denies the fact that there was continuous Jewish presence on the land, going back 3,000 years. For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European. They are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, from Yemen, from Iraq, who were brutally expelled from their ancestral homes after 1948 by Arab governments in revenge for the 1948 war. So my husband, for example, his family is from Egypt, expelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Beckerman: I know that you made a decision to publicly weigh in when Netanyahu’s coalition tried to pass a law curbing the power of the supreme court; you saw a threat to democracy. Does it still feel like that threat exists?

Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7. And the other thing, which goes back to the beginning of our discussion: The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify. And he’s the last person on Earth who can unify Israel. If you go down the street in New York, you pick at random some person, that person has a better chance of uniting Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beckerman: This interview will be published around October 7, on the first anniversary. I’m curious where you think we will be next year, on the second anniversary.

Harari: I think it has a lot to do also with events in the United States, with the election in November. You see this wave of strongmen who believe only in power, only in force, who spread hate. People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?

Beckerman: Do you think the United States should exercise more pressure over Israel? A lot of activists really want Harris to pledge to stop selling arms to Israel. Do you think that’s a good thing?

Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.

“The average human lifespan,” Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 mega–best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline. What he does want you to do is remind yourself, regularly, that the human life span is finite—that someday your heart will stop pumping, your neurons will stop firing, and this three-dimensional ride we call consciousness will just … end. He also wants you to know that he’s aware of how elusive those reminders can feel—how hard their meaning is to internalize.

Burkeman’s opening sentence, with its cascade of unexpected adjectives, is the prelude to his countercultural message that no one can hustle or bullet-journal or inbox-zero their way to mastering time. Such control, and the sense of completion and command it implies, is literally impossible, Burkeman argues. In fact, impossible is one of the words he uses most frequently, though it sounds oddly hopeful when he says it. He is perhaps best known for the idea that “productivity is a trap” that leaves strivers spinning in circles when they race to get ahead. In Burkeman’s telling, once you abandon the “depressingly narrow-minded affair” that is the modern discipline of time management, you can “do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.” That is, you will find that an average 80-year life span is about far more than getting stuff done.

His book is self-help for people who generally find the genre mockable, or at least unhelpful. I figured this approach was made for me—an anxious perfectionist, snobby about how-to-ism, and impatient with positive thinking. I turned out to be right. Four Thousand Weeks has had the same effect for me as snapping a rubber band on my wrist to break a bad habit: I’ve surprised myself by how often, stuck in some self-sabotaging rut, I recite parts of it in my mind.

[Read: An interview with Oliver Burkeman]

But Burkeman’s enterprise—to free people from traditional, silver-bullet self-help while selling them his own carefully packaged counsel—is a tricky one. Burkeman himself doesn’t seem like an obvious advertisement for anti-productivity: Only three years after the success of Four Thousand Weeks, he has arrived with what he bills as a higher-efficiency follow-up, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, a 28-day “retreat of the mind.” So I couldn’t help wondering how he would align his stop-and-smell-the-roses ethos with a more streamlined, regimented how-to book. I was eager to talk with the man who has seemingly mastered the art of not mastering time.

Burkeman, a tall, nearly bald 49-year-old Englishman, met me near Prospect Park in Brooklyn on a muggy summer morning, wearing navy hiking pants and bright-blue sneakers. This wasn’t quite one of his “unplanned walks,” an exercise he has promoted: Our conversational stroll had been arranged by his publicist. Still, he came across as the sort of low-key guy you’d happily chat with over a pint. Dotted with perspiration even before we set out together, he didn’t launch into credential-touting as we walked (he considers himself a mere dabbler in Zen Buddhism and the like). He earnestly copped to his own experiences as a life-hack-focused striver and where they had led him.

From 2006 until 2020, Burkeman was a serial sampler of efficiency zealots’ strategies, the kind that promise deeper focus and superior habits. He wrote about the experience once a week in a series for The Guardian titled “This Column Will Change Your Life.” An editor, aware of his interest in personal-psychology books, had suggested it, and after years of covering news for the paper, Burkeman had felt ready for, if not a life change, the chance to add a new gig.

As the wry billing of his column suggests, the degree of urgency he brought to the role of paid guinea pig wasn’t always apparent. In fact, blurring just how personally invested he was in the enterprise was part of his appeal. In 600 or so words, he briskly laid out a problem to solve; introduced a tip or mindset shift (the Pomodoro Technique, say: 25-minute bursts of work, preferably tracked by a little tomato-shaped kitchen timer); described, with more than a hint of self-deprecating humor, trying it out himself; and closed with a lesson in how this particular idea aligned, or didn’t, with what science reveals about human inclinations. As expected, the kitchen-timer trick kept him on task, blocking the tendency to “default to whatever inertia would have you do.” But it didn’t answer the larger question that so often distracted him: Is striving for focus really what we should be doing with our time?

[Read: Oliver Burkeman on the spiritual emptiness of achievement]

In 2014, several years after moving to Brooklyn from England, Burkeman experienced an epiphany of sorts on a Prospect Park bench. We tried and failed to find the bench while we walked, then agreed that it didn’t matter exactly where it had happened; epiphanies, his work argues, are ephemeral anyway. Stressed and run-down, he realized that he would never “clear the decks” of adult life’s niggling responsibilities and create a smooth path forward. But instead of despairing, he felt liberated. The idea of “getting it all done” is a fantasy. No one can! Now he could begin to wean himself off that towering delusion.

Burkeman continued writing the column for six more years, though its emphasis slowly evolved. He started asking questions such as “Are you living too much in the future at the expense of now?” and positing theories like “Too many problems? Maybe coping isn’t the answer.” He hastened to tell me that he had not found “total unbroken serenity.” But he had acquired new insight, and it wasn’t what he (or I) would have predicted. “I was pretty down on those hacks to begin with, right? Because I thought the fun thing would be to take this kind of absurd world and be quite sarcastic about it. And, you know, even at the beginning, I think I understood that there was something defensive in my sarcasm.” Disdain hadn’t motivated him; discomfort had. “And it turned out that, actually, it was more of a journey from more cynicism to less cynicism, a journey towards more sincerity,” he went on. His post-epiphany disbelief in superhuman productivity remained unchanged, but vulnerability in the face of impossibly large life questions? Well, he could work with that. “With a bit of humor,” he said, “you can actually get at the serious, tender thing.”

Burkeman told me all of this on a visit from his native Yorkshire, where he returned in 2021. He and his wife, now with a young son, had moved back to the U.K. the month after Four Thousand Weeks came out—and no, he didn’t have a “my new life” testimony to recount about the transatlantic shift. He enjoys long walks on the sublime moors but doesn’t live like a monk; he lives like a guy lucky enough to be able to set his own pace (partly thanks to sales of more than half a million copies of Four Thousand Weeks, according to his publisher). He relishes his return to where he grew up “lower-upper-middle” class in a “Quaker Jewish civil-rights-movement kind of nexus,” as he put it. He is busy, but not too busy. He writes his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, twice a month, which is his way of responding to the legions of followers who fill his inbox with, yes, an impossible number of queries.

Four Thousand Weeks proved an opportune project. It was completed in the midst of the pandemic, when time was playing tricks on the at-home populace and death was distressingly ubiquitous. The book approaches time and death as phenomena we misunderstand without realizing it. Time, Burkeman observes,“became a thing that you used ”(he’s a fan of italics) back in the Industrial Revolution, but it’s not; it’s something we inhabit. And death worries us not just because it marks our end but because it epitomizes our utter lack of control. The message is philosophical but directly targeted at the daily stressors of what Burkeman terms the “laptop-toting” class: “Your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time,” he notes. “It stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.” Standard self-help drums precisely that perspective ever deeper into us with an alluring lie. “Virtually every time management expert,” he writes, “implies that if you follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done to feel at peace with time.”

[Read: What to read to come to terms with death]

His suggestion: “fully facing the reality” that you will not, in fact, get it all done—even, or especially, all the genuinely important things, whatever those are. When I repeat that idea to myself, it does seem to help—to shrink the broad horizon of possibility down to a more manageable path for me to stumble along. But that kind of profound realization, Burkeman admitted as we wandered the park, is something he cannot guarantee. That admission is part of what makes his methods so appealing—you don’t feel suckered. It is also what makes the premise feel as tenuous as your own self-discipline.

Burkeman’s chapter in Four Thousand Weeks on “the efficiency trap”—the idea that getting better at dealing with tasks only leads to more tasks—showcases his three-act approach to dispelling conventional wisdom. Here he begins by laying out the ideal level of busyness, the fantasy that beckons: Richard Scarry’s aptly named classic childhood locale of Busytown, in which nobody is idle or, notably, overwhelmed. The little postman pig and brown-bear schoolteacher “have plenty to do, but also every confidence that their tasks will fit snugly into the hours available.” Burkeman is not tsk-tsking the childishness of the vision. He’s taking note of how deep it runs in adulthood—and how often it’s dredged up: This is the same blissful balance we see presented in “day in the life” videos and snapshots on Instagram, where time unfolds in a succession of pleasant accomplishments and undistracted rest.

Act II delivers the letdown that “there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things.’ ” That’s tough talk, but his third act is the radical part: Actively avoid quick fixes and the clear-the-decks perspective, he advises. Instead, tolerate the discomfort of knowing that nearly all the vacations you hope to take won’t come to pass, and that the house chores will go on and on (until they don’t). What he sells is not the promise of overcoming difficulties, but the unexpected comfort of relaxing into them.

Burkeman cheerfully acknowledges that repetition is vital to his message—and to the way we self-reinforce it. A favorite tweet, he told me with a hearty laugh, goes something like this: “Four Thousand Weeks is basically just Oliver Burkeman shouting You are finite; you’re going to die over and over again for 200-whatever pages. And I love it.” His belief in the power of repetition is partly what inspired him to undertake Meditations for Mortals : “Even if the advice is excellent and exactly right, that doesn’t mean it sticks,” he told me; it “doesn’t mean that you can just hear it and then go implement it.” You need what he calls a “felt realization”—something that sinks into your bones.

“I have to be beaten over the head with certain insights about life,” Burkeman said after we’d circled a portion of the park twice and found a perch that overlooked a meadow (he was desperate to make sure we were both sitting comfortably in the breeze). In Meditations for Mortals, his practical advice reveals a new take on his old message. Maybe we aren’t just afraid to die—maybe what equally intimidates are the real, unvarnished sensations of living: the fear of being unprepared, of letting a pleasant moment slip by, of facing even minor consequences for our actions. By the end of Four Thousand Weeks, he’d arrived at the realization about life that animates this new book—summed up in a favorite quote of his by the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” His solution? Develop “a taste for problems,” a readiness to say to yourself, over and over, that problems are “what life is fundamentally about.”

Before I had a copy in my hands, I feared that Meditations for Mortals would be a collection of Stoic-inspired aphorisms (Burkeman is a walking anthology of quotations, from sources as incongruous as Mitch Hedberg and Marilynne Robinson) or the sort of follow-up “workbook” that publishers introduce to squeeze more money out of a best-selling idea. It isn’t. Explaining his goal to me, Burkeman sounded slightly more mystical than his straightforward prose. “A lot of what looks like our attempts to manage our lives successfully are really attempts to hold the full intensity of that aliveness at bay.”

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Making a New Year’s resolution? Don’t go to war with yourself.]

Designed to be a guide through this existential and temporal mire (his topics include how much news to read and why messy houses needn’t bother us), Meditations for Mortals is divided into four sections: “Being Finite,” “Taking Action,” “Letting Go,” and “Showing Up,” each of which contains seven chapters, one per day. Written with a tough-love zing, the chapters are short, five or six pages at most, and contain some of Burkeman’s best tips (such as his recommendation to work on important things “dailyish,” an idea that sounds obvious but eliminates the albatross of an overly rigorous schedule).

Burkeman’s signature combination of philosophy and practicality is what makes Meditations for Mortals at once jarring and reassuring to read. Peppered throughout the techniques he prescribes are reminders that there is no way “of mastering the situation of being a human in the twenty-first century,” and that trying to do so is an escape hatch from reality—the opposite of purposeful buckling down. In the last section, “Showing Up,” he exposes the root of contemporary malaise: Productivity culture turns life into something to “get through,” until some unspecified better moment. That moment, he writes, won’t come unless we admit that this often unpleasant, completely uncontrollable, forever-changing water is all we have to swim in.

The main aim of Meditations for Mortals is to acquaint readers with a broader perspective on what drives our mania for controlling our schedules and inboxes. We fear the present moment, the way that we are “confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there.” I’ve felt, more times than I care to admit, that despite my heartbeat and mortgage and two walking, talking children, I’m not yet inside my life. Someday it will start, I imagine, the part of life in which I’m really engaged, really moving forward, really jolted with the electricity of having a mind and body that can interact with this wild world. I’ll leave behind this practice life for the real one.

That’s where death and life come together. If real life is always waiting in the distance, then so is death. Or at least that’s the misapplied logic of the do-it-all class, which condemns us to constantly flee not just the ache of aliveness, but also its pleasures, and the longing that holds far more meaning than any color-coded to-do list ever can.

Before we separated at the park gates and Burkeman headed off to tackle a formidable to-do list (he’s finally clearing out the family’s old Park Slope apartment, three years later), he told me that ideally, you will read a chapter of this new book with your morning coffee, and find that it “in some tiny way changes how you go about thinking about your to-read pile or the decisions you’ve got to take today.” Then again, he can’t control how you read it, or what you do with his wisdom. That’s the dilemma that will almost surely keep Oliver Burkeman busy: His counsel that life’s problems can’t really be solved only primes his audience to want more advice.

For me, the wisdom is taking hold. Right now, I’m well aware that I need to go back and start at the beginning of Meditations for Mortals again. I’m ready to feel the bracing discomfort that will come with another guided 28-day retreat of the mind. As Burkeman’s ideas seep into my bones, so—slowly—does the reality that I’m going to be bumping up against the rough edges of life every day, even every hour, until I die. The nubbiness, the initial recoil followed by a kick of recognition—yes, I’m off-balance: This is the point.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “You Are Going to Die.”