Michael Smoak

This is an Oliver Berkman thing where he says, there will never come a day where you have completed all of your tasks.

I think about the fact that one day I'll die.

And my email inbox will continue to accumulate messages.

People will get pissed that I'm not replying to their emails, not knowing that I'm dead.

And maybe that'll be lots of people because it'll happen suddenly and I'll be young and maybe it'll be a few people because I'll be old and they'll have known about it.

One day that will happen.

It will keep going.

So you have this, it's kind of like workload entropy.

You are going to be defeated by the entropy of this workload bearing down on you.

And it's just never going to stop.

So I think realizing that it's not morbid, but it should feel liberating, which is, I think, what you're getting at.

You should be liberated by this.

Look, you're never going to get on top of it all.

Yes, there's things that you need to do.

You want accolades.

You want status, acclaim, external achievements.

Cool, go get it.

Just know that if it feels a bit more hollow than you thought it would, that that's kind of by design.

It's always going to be that.

And a much quicker way to try and feel fulfilled is to go, huh, what if I just had fun?