Your Life Is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays

But in Maslow's research he deliberately selected subjects he considered "self-actualizing" and then studied what made them tick. The peak experiences he documented were symptoms of people who'd already figured out something more fundamental.

What Maslow's self-actualizers actually had in common was what he would later come to call "plateau living," a sustained capacity to appreciate ordinary existence, to find the sacred in the quotidian. The peaks were outgrowths of the plateaus, not replacements for them.

The barely tolerated Monday is a down payment on a life that never arrives, a perpetual advance payment for goods that don't ship.

Neuroplasticity works both ways. Every Monday you survive without presence, you're training your nervous system that survival is the appropriate response to ordinary life. The brain gets efficient at what it practices, and if it practices endurance, endurance becomes its resting state. You build tolerance in the drug addiction sense: you need more and more peak moments to feel alive because your baseline has been chemically optimized for numbness.