On the art of being limited
You stand in a hallway. Something comes through several doors at once.
From one, a call. From another, a ringing. From a third, only a sound that is harmless in itself – but it does not stop.
The doors have names.
The relationship. The children. Work.
Parents who are growing older.
Friendships that also need something in order to stay what they are.
Sometimes, in the middle of it all, something else that wants to be built or rebuilt.
You go to one door.
And while you are still answering, part of you is somewhere else.
With what is waiting behind the second door.
With what you should have been doing just now, and did not do.
The psychologist Sophie Leroy called this attention residue.
When someone moves from one task to the next before the first is finished,
a remainder of their attention stays with the first.
Not as a failure. As a physical property of attention itself –
it does not follow on command simply because you have changed rooms.
That explains something that is hard to put into words.
The feeling of being half present everywhere. Nowhere properly.
And it quickly turns into a verdict:
as if it could be fixed, with enough discipline, enough organisation.
As if the remainder that stays behind were a fault in the system – and not the system itself.
But a life has more doors than a person can hold open at the same time.
That is not a personal weakness. That is limitation –
and limitation is not a deficiency but a basic condition.
Time is finite.
Attention is finite.
So are the possibilities a life offers.
There is no way around choosing, and settling somewhere –
in a distribution that holds, not in one that satisfies everything at once.
Anyone who resists exactly that, this limitation itself,
carries a second burden on top of the first.
Not only the hallway with its many doors. Also the fight against the fact that it exists.
Herbert Simon, economist and cognitive scientist, showed
that people – and organisations – almost never optimise.
They do not look for the best possible option, but for the one that is good enough.
Satisficing, he called it, from satisfy and suffice.
Not a weakness, but the only possible answer to a world
in which time, attention and energy are always limited.
There is no version of the hallway in which all the doors are quiet at once.
There is only the one in which you go from one to the next –
with the remainder that stays behind a little each time, and comes along a little each time.