On Disappointment

May 8, 2025

Oliver Burkeman's 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is possibly the most enlightening book I've read countering the usual methods of productivity and perceptions of success and cultural value; it starts with accepting the truth that one can never attain the level of perfect organization or productivity or intelligence that one might unintentionally expect to attain in an imaginary future point in time. There is always more to do; the goalposts keep shifting. That being said, I subscribed to Burkeman's bimonthly email newsletter and the last one I received was about disappointment.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that it’s a critical life-skill – at least if you’re roughly the sort of person I am – to get better at disappointing other people.

I don’t just mean you should go easier on yourself when you catch yourself feeling bad for falling short of others’ expectations (although you should do that, too). I mean that it’s worth deliberately and consciously practicing disappointing others, letting the associated feelings sink into your bones, and generally spending time hanging out in the space of ‘being a disappointment’.

From one angle, all this is just a useful mindset for protecting your time and getting better at saying no. But there’s something more profound to it as well. Disappointment feels close to the core of what it means to confront the truth about human limitation. After all, it’s because our time and attention are limited that we can’t please everyone. And the ceaseless sacrifice of alternative possibilities demanded by our finitude is nothing if not disappointing.

And so the more I’m willing to experience disappointment, and to risk disappointing others, the more I’m really here, feeling the full poignancy of my situation. Accepting the place of disappointment in life means falling back down to earth; and falling back down to earth is never going to be entirely pleasant. But it also puts you back in the only place where you can stand on solid ground, put one foot in front of the other, and actually get on with the things you care about the most.

I disappointed myself so deeply today because I forgot to fill out a form two weeks ago. If only if only. For some reason, it reminded me of the crippling disappointment from a whopping five years ago from junior year of high school, which concluded during the pandemic, when homework became a lot more optional and weekly check-ins became the new bare minimum for keeping a good grade. I turned in many assignments late, which did not incur penalties because of the flexibility that was granted to us, but forgot to tell my teacher that I'd turned in the work; she'd calculated my grades with the assumption that I'd never turned it in, and my grade on the website was a B. (Of course, it wouldn't have mattered because there was a rule that noted that our grades couldn't drop lower than the grade we had on March 13, 2020.) My mom was livid when she found out. I'd refrained from telling her and of course she'd blown up. I was watching Tangled with my friends on Discord and my mom stormed through the door and I instantly knew exactly what she was mad about.

Just like that night, I felt the same sinking feeling of being such a disappointment that I couldn't even fill out a form in time. And then I curse at myself because I know, I know, I'm being the mean version of my mom berating me and I'm not treating myself like a friend.

And of course, because I will be unemployed, I disappointed myself with failing all the interviews I've done over the course of this semester because I'd been cramming my schedule in an attempt to make the most of my limited undergraduate experience, and as a result, I don't have the time or energy to practice interview responses to the confidence I prefer. I know I shouldn't compare, but I have friends who received internationally acclaimed fellowships for PhDs and will spend their time studying advanced, unfathomably difficult concepts in top grad schools, and I'm still here, planning to languish in my hometown for the time being.

It's as if being tired isn't really an excuse I'd accept. But I almost want to learn to accept it; I'm too tired to learn even the most basic forms of self-kindness I need right now. The good news is, at least, that I just turned in all the work I need for all my classes. (I spent hours and hours cramming a 13-page Chicago style paper on Heinrich Biber's Rosary Sonatas and his use of scordatura as an embodied physical rhetoric in Jesuit devotion.) Whew.