Iddo Landau Quotes

We are lucky, then, to have death; death is what allows life to be meaningful.

We can appreciate those we do not idolize; we can respect those we criticize.

It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged – that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them – for them to think it appropriate to act that way.

The world is terrible, and the world is wonderful. Both statements are true. It includes evil, injustice, pain, cruelty, and frustration, but also beauty, kindness, friendship, dedication, courage, inspiration, human closeness and warmth, justice, generosity, fairness, knowledge, responsibility, and depth.

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people).

But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the philosopher Iddo Landau, “transcend the common and the mundane.” Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it?

three more modern and somewhat less poetical books: Effortless Living: Wu-Wei and the Spontaneous State of Natural Harmony by Jason Gregory, Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity, and Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts. Iddo Landau’s discussion of the ‘reverse golden rule,’ and the added cruelty we reserve for when we’re talking to ourselves, comes from his book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World,

For example, maybe you’re afraid you’ll be fired and lose your income if you don’t stay on top of your impossible workload. But this is a misunderstanding. If the level of performance you’re demanding of yourself is genuinely impossible, then it’s impossible, even if catastrophe looms—and facing this reality can only help. There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.