Make Your Damn Bed

We've been taught to view "productivity" and "worth" and "value" through a capitalistic lens. What if we change our interpretations of these things? What if we start to include "presence" and "experience" as worthwhile ways to be productive and add value to our lives?Get Jenny Odell's Books Here.Buy Jenny Odell's book here.Listen to a different podcast episode about Jenny Odell's book.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

The world is so make it about interaction, instead. The attention economy has spent billions making their product irresistible while convincing us it's our idea to be there. Resist your fear of being perceived. Jump timelines and do something different. Get Jenny Odell's Books Here. Buy Jenny Odell's book here. Listen to a different podcast episode about Jenny Odell's book. Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

When I act in alignment with my core values I feel more confident but what if the decisions I’m stuck with leave me with no choice but to make choices that don’t align and dont fit my desired values for the future? The beauty of judging the choices I had rather than the decision I made, is that it opens me up to the nuanced reality. It’s not about perfect alignment because that’s not possible or available but it’s about attunement. Alignment with context. You’re not discovering your values, you’re practicing them. Doing what you can, learning from the mistakes, and not being so analytical and precise.  This whole universe is chaos. We can, realistically, make sense of very little. So instead of trying to solve a puzzle that doesn’t exist, just practice existing. Practice staying present as often as possible. Practice moving with the inherent knowledge that things only get better when we start doing better, where we are, with the context we’re given. Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

CORE INSIGHTS FROM THE BOOK, "FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS": Embrace finitude: Your life is absurdly short (around 4,000 weeks). Stop trying to “master” time; instead, accept your fundamental limitations.Productivity is a trap: Becoming more efficient only creates more demands, leading to perpetual busyness, not freedom.Choice means sacrifice: Every decision to do one thing means sacrificing countless others. True meaning comes from consciously choosing what to neglect.Control is an illusion: You can’t control the future or prevent pain. Releasing the demand for certainty is the path to peace.Attention is life: What you pay attention to is what your life will have been. Digital distractions, often a flight from discomfort, steal your life by commandeering your attention.Rest is not a means to an end: Leisure has intrinsic value and should not be justified by its productivity benefits. Embrace “wasteful” idleness.Patience is power: The ability to let things take the time they take is a crucial skill in a hurry-driven world, leading to deeper engagement and creativity.Communal time is valuable: Excessive individual temporal freedom leads to loneliness. Meaning often arises from synchronizing your time with others.Cosmic insignificance is liberating: You don’t need to make a “dent in the universe.” Accepting your irrelevance frees you from impossible standards and allows you to find meaning in ordinary life.Life is a series of insoluble problems: The “human disease” is the belief that there’s a cure for life’s inherent difficulties. Freedom comes from accepting them.Access the book, Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeksThe synopsis of the book, here.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

We can control our vessel, not the ocean. Life’s default state is a little scary. A little insecure. A little worried. A little vulnerable to the elements. The good news is, those scary vulnerable unavoidable feelings don’t have to be all encompassing and can be made less powerful through direct recognition and balance. The future is still in progress, so I can and should be doing what I can to make it better and more approachable and more enjoyable and more comfortable and more sustainable but I also should not be wasting my one beautiful and temporary life freaking out about everything that could go wrong. Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

I'm slowly realizing that the key wasn't to get "more free time for myself", the key is to get "more free time together". The highlight should be: Communal rhythm. Coordinated leisure. Planned connection. Shared ritual. Access the book, Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeksThe synopsis of the book, here.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

Build your tolerance for "chill" and "ease" by scheduling it. Prioritize doing nothing productive. Seek out ways to create that don't have a "payoff" and make it anyway. My addiction to "motion" to "movement" to constant "stimulation" is normal, daily tasks feel like a physically painful burden. Consider discipline as a form of devotion, not a form of punishment. Access the book, Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeksThe synopsis of the book, here.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

When work became “the real point of existence,” leisure's purpose became for “recovery and replenishment.” This meant the whole of life was valued for something else, in the future, not for itself. Accept that everything is random and impossible to predict. The only part of time that is "our business" is the present moment. Access the book, Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeksThe synopsis of the book, here.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. 

The human experience is finite, but that is terrifying. So we distract ourselves. We convince ourselves that if we just "do everything perfectly all the time" we can avoid the painful reality of life's limitations. But refusing to make a choice is a choice. Not committing is a commitment.Not settling is settling. There's some shit you'll never get to. There's some shit you'll never do perfectly. But for some things, done is better than perfect. The only way to ensure it gets done is to commit to it. Limit your works in progress and focus on prioritizing things that actually matter. Don't resist all distraction, see if you can choose better ones. Access the book, Four Thousand Weeks: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeksThe synopsis of the book, here.Read Julie's Medium Blog.Support JULIE (and the show!)Support + get some bonus stuff over on PATREON.Get an occasional personal email from me: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTune in on INSTAGRAM AND YOUTUBE or TIKTOK.Info on War Tax Resistance.Donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund and the Sudan Relief FundThe opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.