In this episode, Oliver Burkeman, discusses how to accept limitations and make time for what counts. He offers a compelling exploration of the challenges inherent in daily living. With a focus on understanding imperfectionism and life’s constraints, his work provides practical strategies and thought-provoking insights for finding greater balance and meaning in life.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Embrace imperfectionism to unlock personal growth potential
- Discover techniques to infuse everyday life with meaning and purpose
- Overcome the challenge of finite time to live a fulfilling life
- Shift from perfectionism to take meaningful action in life
- Master strategies to manage information overload and find balance
Oliver Burkeman worked for many years at The Guardian, where he wrote a popular weekly column on psychology, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” His books include the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. and his newest book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
Connect with Oliver Burkeman: Website | X
If you enjoyed this conversation with Oliver Burkeman, check out these other episodes:
Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman on Modern Time Management (2019)
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Episode Transcript:
00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Oliver, welcome to the show.
00:01:45 – Oliver Burkeman
Thanks very much for having me back.
00:01:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I was saying to you before we started that you were one of the first few interviews we ever did, which was a decade ago, and I was so excited when you said yes, because the title of your book, the happiness for people who hate positive thinking, sounded like the book title I wish I had come up with. So I was so excited to talk to you then, and you’ve been on a couple times since, and I always enjoy speaking with you. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Meditation for mortals. Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. But before we get into that, we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d love to know how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do.
00:02:54 – Oliver Burkeman
While I hope in my book and in my work, I have some sort of counterintuitive interpretations of things, I feel like what that says to me, certainly right now feels very plain. It’s just straightforward and right and true, which is that where you focus your. Your energy and your finite time and your finite attention and all the rest of it is the life that you create. I know from listening to the podcast that people have a wide variety of interpretations of this story, but to me, that’s just like, what could it mean by that?
00:03:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, on one level, it is very straightforward and very simple.
00:03:27 – Oliver Burkeman
And I don’t say that as a criticism. Right. I feel like at a place I’m at, certainly in my career, certainly and probably life as a whole, it’s like I don’t want to shy away from the straightforward, obvious thing, if that happens to be the true thing.
00:03:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. In your latest book, you’re delving into something you’re calling imperfectionism, and I can’t remember whether that’s a term you used in the previous book or you’ve started to use it, but it’s a good encapsulation for what this book is about. What is imperfectionism?
00:03:56 – Oliver Burkeman
It really is, you know, an umbrella term for the things I want to talk about. You’ve got to have a proprietary label, right?
00:04:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.
00:04:03 – Oliver Burkeman
Malcolm Gladwell would have gotten nowhere if he just said, like, well, there’s a threshold sometimes, and on one side of the threshold, things behave different. No, it’s the tipping point. I’m kidding. But I think it does identify something real. I guess this book, in terms of what it means, for me, it’s a book about addressing the challenge, because I myself found myself constantly encountering this challenge of going from knowing very well how you want to be living a more meaningful life, showing up for a more meaningfully productive, attentive, energized, enjoyable life, and, like, actually doing it. And in some ways, even off the back of my last book, 4000 weeks, right, I felt like I had really understood something as a result of writing that about what it means to be finite and what it means to have such limited time and limited ability to control the time that we do get. But discovering that that doesn’t automatically add up to, like, okay, now you just live differently from now on, successfully, because you’ve developed this. So the book, and we can talk a bit about both the messages in the book and kind of the structure of the book, maybe because I think that’s an important part of this whole idea of going from thinking about to actually doing them. But essentially the answer to how do you go from knowing the right thing to do to actually doing it is the set of outlooks and techniques that I group under imperfectionism. It is an approach that prefers taking action right now, even if it feels like you don’t quite know what you’re doing or like you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to turn it into a long term habit or if you’re nothing sure that the quality of the work you produce is going to be any good over these kind of long term schemes of fixing all your problems, changing all your habits, setting up the ideal morning routine, and becoming a different kind of person. And I think that personal development and self help culture and all the rest of it, while it has a lot of useful stuff in it, can really end up making this problem worse. Right? Embarking on a path of always being in the process of getting to the place where you’re going to feel in control at last. You’re going to feel in the driver’s seat. You’re going to feel like you know what you’re doing or like you’re on top of all your demands and pleasing everybody, whatever version of it it is for you. And so what I wanted to do was really kind of zero in on this question of like, well, that’s not working. So what does work, right?
00:06:20 – Eric Zimmer
And it is true that we face a lot of limitations, and those limitations are different from person to person. But I feel like one of the things that this show has done over the years that gets reported back to me, maybe more than anything else that’s helpful is people realizing that it’s okay, that they’re struggling or that things aren’t easy or that there is difficulty in life, that that’s just to be human. You don’t get out of that.
00:06:48 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. I think, you know, two opposite things are true here. What you just said. Life is difficult, and then in a certain sense, life is easier than we make it, but they’re connected because the reason that we struggle in life more than we need to, or so I claim in this book and elsewhere, is that we’re trying to sort of transcend our limitations. We’re trying to get out of the condition of being human instead of entering more fully into and almost kind of harnessing, in a sense, the condition of being fully human. So, yeah, if you stake your self worth on being able to answer any number of emails and you’re in a job where you’re getting an impossible number, then you are going to feel very bad about yourself. If you can learn in certain ways to understand that that is an impossible situation, that meeting that sort of infinite demand is not on the cards for a finite human, then actually you’re much more free to now focus on the important emails, feel better about yourself, make some time for other things in your life. So that kind of pattern repeats itself again and again. I feel like in what I’m writing about, it’s the struggle to get out of our built in limitations that causes the extra layer of difficulty. And that’s kind of the same point as saying that it’s difficult and there are problems with being a human.
00:08:04 – Eric Zimmer
Oftentimes I just think of it as like, how do I not, this sounds pessimistic, but how do I not make things worse? Right. Like by thinking that I should be able to fix this or I should be able to do this and that there’s something wrong with me when I can’t.
00:08:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right, yeah, absolutely.
00:08:19 – Eric Zimmer
And that ability, like you’re saying, to just embrace that doesn’t make the difficult stuff go away, but it certainly stops us from, at least in my case, compounding the difficulty.
00:08:34 – Oliver Burkeman
It stops you from compounding the difficulty and sort of allows you to live in a way that honors all that stuff as a part of your life and that makes it meaningful. Now, it’s easy to say, and I’m always wary of somebody listening who’s recently experienced a tragedy far greater than any I’ve experienced yet. So I was saying, you know, well, that’s easy to say, but I think it is true. I think life can make it harder to accept or easier depending on your situation. But it is true that once you’re no longer treating life as a problem to be solved, that’s when the problems that it will throw you away all the time, unendingly, can become sources of meaning instead of things that you have to somehow get rid of. And you’re a failure because you haven’t yet reached the part of your life that has no problems in it.
00:09:25 – Eric Zimmer
You talk a lot about how if we try and control the world, that a, that’s not a strategy that often works. Right. Because it just slides right out of our hands.
00:09:37 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right.
00:09:38 – Eric Zimmer
But that, furthermore, the attempt to control deadens us to our lives. You use a phrase, I don’t know who it is, but life loses its resonance.
00:09:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. This is a german thinker called Hartmut Rose, whose work sort of blew my mind when I encountered it, especially because it’s in such a sort of academic setting, you don’t expect it to be so incredibly useful and illuminating in a personal sense. But this is just from my own experience, right? As a kind of somewhat insecure, quite driven, slightly fixated on productivity and efficiency type person, you’re engaged in this effort to make life feel okay by exerting more control over it, by feeling like you’re on top of things, by feeling like you’re keeping track of everything or that you’ve optimized yourself so well that you can handle everything that’s thrown at you. And sure, a lot of time it just doesn’t work. And I wrote a little bit in my previous book about how getting really good at answering email just means you get more email and doesn’t actually leave you more in charge of things at all. But also, yeah, and this is where Hartmut Rose’s work was so important. It squeezes the thing that makes life worth living out of life. It makes things feel less resonant. His term is resonance, and he’s referring to the way that, not that we should just sort of give up attempting to have any influence over life that’s taking things too far in the other direction, but that really organizing both our lives and our societies on some level as efforts to expand our control over things predictably has this unintended consequence of making them feel not enjoyable or meaningful anymore. So quick couple of examples. It might be helpful. I know that I’m not alone among sort of productivity geek people in having this experience of coming across some exciting new system for setting goals in life and coming up with what you’re going to do in the next 90 days or the next year and making it all really specific and breaking it all down into the. And feeling so excited about it on like Monday, drawing up the schedule, and by Tuesday or Wednesday. This is like the worst thing in the world, right? It just feels completely oppressive, this prison that you’ve built for yourself in an effort to get control over your life, because now it feels like you’ve just got to follow these steps and there’s no sort of real intuitive engagement with the moment anymore. It’s just like carrying out all these tasks that this jerk, namely me, two days ago, has instructed me to carry out. But right at the other end of the scale, just quickly, I don’t know anyone has either got experience of working in, or knows people who work in education, healthcare, sort of government, social services, things like that, and this is a Hartman Rose’s point. In all these sectors of work now, people complain all the time that they can’t do their jobs because there’s so much documentation and paperwork around doing their jobs. They have to spend so much time accounting for themselves and recording things that they don’t get to do those moments of human connection where the work really gets done. And he points out this is companies and governments wanting to make everything controllable and visible and predictable in a somewhat similar way to the productivity geek, really. And as a result, making it harder for a teacher and a pupil to connect or for a social worker and a client to actually have a moment of, you know, getting to the core of what the problem is or something like that because of this fixation on control. So I was really interested in the way that that seems to apply both to my sort of day to day routines and to whole swathes of society at the same time.
00:13:10 – Eric Zimmer
So this new book, Meditations for Mortals, is four weeks of reflections that we can do to help us, I would say, internalize some of these ideas and as you said earlier, help us maybe live some of them out. Why that structure?
00:13:25 – Oliver Burkeman
I really wanted, if I was going to write a book that was about this challenge of actually living differently instead of just thinking about it and planning to do it, I wanted to make sure that the book, as far as any book could, and there are limitations there, but embodied that right, that it didn’t turn into some new system that you could read and store away in your head and then put into practice one day when you get a spare moment, because there aren’t any spare moments. When did you last get a spare moment? Ridiculous. So I wanted the book to be something that people could read. Again, you don’t have to follow my instructions, but the invitation is that you read one of these short chapters each day, take a few minutes, and if some of those sort of shifts in perspective or those suggested tools and techniques work for you, that’s going to change in a small way how you live that day. Not some big character reinvention that you’re going to get involved in six months from now, but just on the day to day texture of life. And on the level of what I’m explicitly saying in those chapters as well, I’m sort of constantly pulling the rug, I hope, under, away from any attempt to say, okay, this is great, I’m going to note it down and have a whole new system of habits. It’s like, no, just do this one thing today, because it’s actually quite hard to do that for a certain kind of person, of whom I am, to just try it once, to just behave a little bit differently in a positive sense towards one person without having any confidence that you’re going to make this stick or keep it up as a regular habit or anything like that. And so that’s what I’m really trying to drive home every day. And then the four weeks sort of build on each other, right? So they’re intended to be a bit of a journey from starting more philosophically, getting quite concrete, and then ending a bit more philosophically again.
00:15:11 – Eric Zimmer
I guess the thing about habits is we know repetition can be a very positive thing, right. If we’re pointed in the right direction, a habit can be beneficial to us because it just sort of allows a good behavior to happen a little bit easier. And at the same time, they can be deadening, right. Just go through the motions. It sort of interviewed a guy, I don’t know, Michael Norton, who wrote a book about rituals. But the core idea, which is just that habits almost have the meaning sucked out of them. You don’t think about the meaning because you just do the thing. And again, it’s good and bad, but a ritual is an action that you take that you’re trying to imbue with emotion specifically. And so I love this idea that you’re pointing at, which is you don’t have to do something again and again and again and every day for it to have value.
00:16:01 – Oliver Burkeman
Right? That is absolutely right. And, you know, the other thing I would add is that very often, I think certainly if I examine in my own life the habits that have stuck, what happened was that they emerged through that process of just doing it sometimes. Right? They were not always these sort of top down willed efforts at exerting control over how I lived my life. And so I’m not even in some level making a point against habits. I’m just making a point about how habits can emerge. Everything has to start with a willingness to just, right now, do something that feels meaningful for ten minutes. You know, one thing, and I guess part of this point of this book is it’s a reaction to seeing in me as much as in anybody else the incredible sort of seductiveness of not doing that. It makes you feel much more secure on some level to believe that you’re involved in a process of reaching towards perfection, but you’re not there yet, than to say, actually, I’m just going to live a little bit differently today.
00:16:57 – Eric Zimmer
Which is ultimately all you can do, because you can’t live next Thursday. You can only live today.
00:17:03 – Oliver Burkeman
Right.
00:17:04 – Eric Zimmer
And you can only take action today. And it’s overly obvious, but when I was coaching people, I would. The same thing would happen. They’d be doing great with whatever it is that they wanted to do. But there was this constant. But I just know next week I’m not going to be able to stick with it.
00:17:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right, right. That’s interesting because that’s not so much putting it off until later. That’s saying, it’s going fine now, but I’m racked with anxiety about whether I can keep it up and amounts to the same thing. Right. Which is that the real value, the real sort of payoff moment in life where you get to say that you did well or not is always in the future. And if you live too completely in that way, you just reinforce the idea that the meaning of life is in the future.
00:17:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Day seven kind of talks about this directly. Let the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them.
00:17:52 – Oliver Burkeman
I write in that chapter about the moment not many years ago when I, like, finally felt like I understood what cross bridges when you come to them means. People say it all the time. It’s like, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Of course, you will only cross that bridge when you come to it. There’s no other time that you can cross a bridge. But I think that for the sort of habitually anxious and worrier people like me, a lot of what is going on with worry is this attempt to sort of achieve in the present the security that would have come from crossing all the bridges, from dealing with everything that could go wrong in the future. And, you know, it’s useful to prepare yourself for things that could go wrong. That’s a sort of old stoic technique, isn’t it right to sort of think about what could go wrong so that you’re sort of mentally girded for it. But you can’t ever in the present, have the security of knowing that you survived something that happened in the future. That’s just not the kind of thing that humans get to experience. Because one of the ways we’re limited is we’re sort of temporally limited, right? We’re limited to this spot in time. You can’t sort of like, just look over the fence and see how it’s going to be a week or a month or a year from now. And like all the things I’m discussing in this book, or many of them, that is both incredibly sort of stressful and depressing and requires you to admit defeat in a way. And then as soon as you begin to do so, you realize that it’s. It’s amazing, it’s liberating, and it’s energizing and it’s empowering, because now you only have to care about the very next moment ever. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t sometimes use the very next moment to do some planning. Sure. Like, you know, definitely write a will, you know, make certain kind of judicious plans in your life, but all you’re ever doing is using the next moment in whatever seems like the most important, meaningful way. You’re not sort of pinning down the future so that you know it’s all going to be fine. And that’s why worry is so repetitive, right. Because we’re constantly trying to get to this place of security about the future and then realizing, like, no, we’re not going to get there. That’s not how it works. So we worry some more.
00:20:16 – Eric Zimmer
I think one of the things that you do well in the book is avoid the binaries, right. And it’s really easy to be in, I think, one of two binaries when people paint them, right. One is just live for the moment, now is all you have. And the other is this idea of, like, make sure your future self is totally set up for success, and you’ve actually got one of the meditations that talks about your future self, but it sounds like you’re trying to sort of split that difference between these. Maybe that’s a wrong way to say it, but to find some place between these binaries that we often tend to.
00:20:51 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I mean, I think, as always, when there’s a binary, really, it’s like a, there’s some sort of synthesis or transcendence of those ideas that can usefully take place. And in that context, yeah, I mean, I think live in the moment very often means, you know, put all this effort and self consciousness into trying to feel like all you’re doing is just sensing the world around you and not caring about the future and not behaving in ways that society deems responsible, but just really soaking it all up. And in that sense, sure, that’s an extreme, just as a sort of fixation with your future self is an extreme. On the other hand, the fact that we always are only in the moment is just a brute fact of being temporal, finite human beings. So the question then is how much of those present moments you’re going to use for things that really only get their meaning in the future, or whether you can make sure that there are things you’re doing in your life that have meaning in themselves, perhaps meaning in themselves, meaning for the future. And the point in the section that you mentioned there that I’m sort of addressing this directly is, I think that a lot of people who are sort of attracted to ideas like this read books on personal development, spirituality, even though many of them may pay a lot of lip service to the idea of being present in the moment. They’re really focused on, almost to the exclusion of anything else, on sort of becoming a different kind of person in the future, on making sure that their future self thanks them for the decisions they’re making now. So it’s quite easy, I think, from my experience and people I’ve met to sort of adopt a path of meditation or non duality or, you know, something that really does try to sort of, in its content is all about being here now and just embark upon it as a completely future oriented, goal focused process towards becoming a. A kind of person that you like more than the person that you are right now. There’s a quote at the very beginning of the book that I use from Marian Woodman. It’s easier to try to be better than you are, than to be who you are, which I think is quite a powerful one. A lot of us, I don’t want to group anyone else in, but certainly me, are very prone to really deferring gratification too much to saying if I’m going to have a time in my life when I can relax or just enjoy things, enjoy people, enjoy being alive. That’s got to come at the end of this very long, arduous process of doing all the things I’m obliged to do first.
00:23:21 – Eric Zimmer
At the same time, you also, in another chapter, talk about you can’t hoard life, like on letting the moment pass. And this really resonated with me. Say more about what you mean by that.
00:23:32 – Oliver Burkeman
I think this is really in keeping with that, but it is a different angle. I’m writing there while I begin in that section with this awareness that I’ve had myself, that even when good things are happening, to give the example in the book, even when I’m sort of living in a landscape I always wanted to live in, walking at a beautiful day through beautiful countryside that I’ve always loved, there can be this thing that stops you fully enjoying it, which is a desire to sort of take ownership of it or to convince yourself that you’re going to be able to have lots more of this experience going on into the future or really encode it in your mind so that you can always remember it, or just something that takes you away from the experience itself. Buddhism is especially good on this. Right. One of the specific ways we make ourselves miserable is not just that we don’t yet have what we think we want or that we have things that we wish we didn’t have, it’s that we do have what we did want.
00:24:24 – Eric Zimmer
Right.
00:24:25 – Oliver Burkeman
And cling so hard to it that it actually undermines the sort of the resonance of that moment. So that’s what I’m referring to as hoarding life. Whether it’s busily taking photos of the place you are to try to keep it permanent or if even just the thought that I was having there, you know, okay, I’ve got to make sure that my life works such that I can carry on having this kind of experience, like, every day for the rest of my life or something. It’s like, no, that’s not quite fully being in the experience.
00:24:53 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, yeah. That’s an experience I’ve had so many times where it’s like, all right, let’s say I’m getting ready to go on a beach vacation. It’s like, I just got to get to the beach. I just got to get to, you know, like, when I get there. So the whole day just kind of waiting to get there. Waiting to get there, get there, walk out, have about 30 seconds of like. Like, oh, wow, that’s really beautiful and amazing. And then my brain immediately will say something like, I wonder what houses around here cost.
00:25:17 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right.
00:25:18 – Eric Zimmer
Because I’m suddenly like, I need to be here all the time. But there’s another flavor of this that I get. You sort of talk about it by saying that you fail to savor a moment in nature because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, which is that I often have this moment of, like, what’s the way to say this? It’s the beautiful countryside there, and I feel like a more evolved version of me would be content with just what’s right in front of me, and I don’t feel quite content with what’s right in front of me. So now I’m even further away from being able to enjoy what’s right in front of me.
00:25:56 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. Yeah. And, I mean, you know, you can very easily get into loops where you’re then beating yourself up for being like that. Right. And it’s like, well, before you know it, you’re just a huge mess. It’s sort of a twin process, isn’t it? Of sort of allowing yourself to enjoy that experience just for itself, but also allowing yourself to have all these kind of other parts of you that want to do this. This is not a unique argument at all, but I’m very big, really, on the idea that it doesn’t help to try to sort of beat up or extinguish the parts of your personality that are causing these sort of ridiculous situations. I think what I’m sort of constantly hoping to indicate in the book is like, they are a little absurd. Right. It’s not that you should feel bad that you have something in you that wonders about house prices. There’s a great power in being able to notice that. That’s quite funny, because the place from which you’re laughing at that is a very big and all encompassing space. Right. And it’s like, yeah, on some level, you’ll probably always have that kind of thought anywhere that you’re not living, that you go, that you enjoyed being in. I mean, that comes up in another section. But that strategy that I’m borrowing from Bruce Tift, the psychotherapist, is like, you know, what if the trait that you most deplore in yourself, what does it feel like to imagine that you would have some version of that for the rest of your life? Never getting rid of it? You’re always going to have a little bit of a tendency towards worry or being dissatisfied in beautiful places or easily distracted by nonsense, you know? And I really find that a very relieving thought. To imagine that I might not eradicate that kind of issue because it feels like, okay, then I can give up that fight and just spend my time and energy on things that I care about instead of constantly struggling with something that on some level, is just who I am.
00:27:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, this is one that I talk about on the show a lot because I was diagnosed with clinical depression sometime in my late twenties after getting sober from heroin addiction. And have thought about myself in those terms a lot. But what I wrestle with all the time is sort of a version of what you’re saying, which is like, what if this is just how I am? I’ve referred to it before as treating it a little bit like the emotional flu. Like, oh, it comes here and get it for a few days, then it goes away, and then it comes back and just, like, just letting it be instead of thinking that there should be some way to change it or fix it. And I don’t know if you know Andrew Solomon. He wrote a book called the Noonday Demon in Atlas of Depression, but he also wrote a book called Far from the tree. And the thing that stuck out from that book to me the most was it’s about children who often have some sort of difference from their parents blindness or autism. Or if the parent knows that there’s nothing that can be done to change that condition they get on with the business of building the best possible life they can with a child.
00:28:48 – Oliver Burkeman
Oh, wow.
00:28:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And if, on the other hand, they absolutely know it can be fixed, then they just focus on that. But everybody else is caught in this.
00:28:57 – Oliver Burkeman
Middle ground of not knowing if it can be fixed.
00:28:59 – Eric Zimmer
Not knowing if it can be fixed and getting your hopes up again and again because someone else comes down the street saying, I know how to fix that. I can fix that. Maybe if you just ate this way, maybe if you just. And so they end up in this limbo where they’re neither fully committed to changing it and they’re also not fully committed to accepting it. And I think a lot of things in life fall into that middle ground which makes them hard.
00:29:22 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And that is fascinating because obviously there’s a kind of a glib acceptance response to that that just says, well, you know, acceptance is always the way, but that makes no sense. If there’s a really serious chance that you can relieve your kid of a serious issue, that’s crazy to not try. So it comes down to that very sort of subtle position of saying that you accept how things are right now in this moment, including your desire to make changes, including the possibility that the changes might or might not work. There’s a sort of level of acceptance that I only occasionally glimpse myself that includes non acceptance.
00:30:00 – Eric Zimmer
Right. In the book. Several times you talk about this and you just used a similar reference to it a couple minutes ago. Although I don’t remember the exact words. I think you were talking about making more and more space. But you talk a lot about contraction and expansion as ways of thinking about these ideas.
00:30:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I mean, one of these came up in 4000 weeks and I return to it in this book, which is the lovely line from James Hollis about asking whether a certain life path or choice enlarges you or diminishes you instead of will it make me happy? Will this be enlarging? And that’s just very powerful because it seems to connect intuitively to something a lot of people really do get. There’s a certain kind of attitude of growth that you can take in life that will sometimes take you through very happy and enjoyable things but sometimes through quite difficult terrain. And equally, there is a path of pure hedonism you could take that sometimes might be meaningful, but a lot of the time would be not meaningful, even though it was sort of fun on the surface. And so that question, does this enlarge me or diminish me? Is quite important. I mean, I’ve seen so many different references to this all over the place from different sources, but just that idea that what I’m doing wrong or what I’m doing unwisely, when I worry, when I feel like I need to get into more control over the world than I am or anything like that, is best understood as some kind of clenching. And for me, and I think for a lot of people, actually, is accompanied by sort of muscular tensions, that part of worrying about something is like tightening the muscles in my face, and that this is somehow girding me against the world in a way that will keep me safe. And part of worry for me certainly is always, like, in the bottom of my stomach. That’s where anxiety lives when it comes. And it’s all this kind of way of being braced against reality, which is both unpleasant and kind of makes no sense. Right. Because you’re just part of reality and you’re not going to be able to prevent events happening through sort of that sort of bracing. So I think the advice I’m giving in this book, which as ever, is advice to myself as much as to anybody, is like, maybe just relax in that very specific muscular sense a little bit and see what it is to go through life in that way instead.
00:32:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You mentioned non duality earlier, and I studied with a non dual teacher for a while by the name of Adyashanti. And he said two things that were relevant to this. One is he said that ego is nothing but contraction, which I think is just sort of an out there sort of phrase to contemplate. Right. But the other one was, he said his teacher told him at one point, less of this and I’m making a fist right now, and more of this, I’m opening my hand. And I like that because, like you said, when I do that, I feel some sense of what I’m trying to do psychically.
00:32:55 – Oliver Burkeman
Totally. I really feel. I mean, I’m only at the beginning of a journey of the sort of embodied and somatic part of these ideas, but it really is where the rubber hits the road. And I’ve even found, you know, just to give a completely sort of self absorbed example from writing and wanting to promote a book. Right. It’s just like, just what I’m doing in my life. It really is true that the more I can just enjoy myself, the better it goes for everybody, including the readers that I’m addressing in my newsletter, including the, I hope, the host of the podcast who’s who I’m talking to right now. You know, just including book sales, just like all of it, is not helped by this sort of excess of furrowing one’s brow and clenching one’s fist and trying to make it work out. And it’s a real leap of faith. The glib way of talking about it is it goes better when you don’t really care about it, and that makes it sound like you’re being sort of irresponsible. But actually, yeah, it goes better when you stand up on a stage and mostly you’re dedicated to just having a good time. It goes better for other people.
00:34:23 – Eric Zimmer
Let’s turn in the next, oh, 20 minutes or so to a couple more practical things that are in the book. We’ve kind of been philosophical to a large degree up till now, and I want to get some of the great practical things that are in the book out. And the first that I wanted to talk about was this idea of too much information on the art of reading and not reading. We are like obsessed with getting more, knowing more, learning more, remembering more. What are some ways to navigate this that are sane?
00:34:57 – Oliver Burkeman
I love this topic partly because, you know, it’s just a big deal in my own life, the feeling that there’s too much that I need to read or should consume or that would be useful for me to digest, but also because I think it really is a good example of a much wider phenomenon when it comes to being. Being a finite human. We are convinced that there must be some way of getting to all the most important stuff, and we feel bad because we haven’t done so. So it might not be that we get to read every book that we think of, but it certainly is that we should be able to, like, at least make the right choices and then make sure that the books we do read or the articles we do consume, or whatever it is, are the ones that we really needed to consume, and the rest didn’t really matter. And of course, the real problem that we have in the modern world is that there’s far too much interesting, compelling, important stuff that does matter. It’s not that with a really good filter, you know, with really good discernment, you can get rid of all the stuff that you don’t need to consume. It’s that actually, you know, if you had 48 hours in each day and nothing to do but consume books and articles and podcasts and videos, there would be enough good stuff, important stuff, to fill that time. And in that context, the only sane way to approach the glut of information is the metaphor I use is to treat it like a river rather than a bucket, right? So it’s not something you’re trying to drain, it’s not something you’re trying to go through every single item and at least consume the stuff that really matters until the bucket is empty. It’s just this endless river of infinite stuff. And you’re just picking a few things that seize your interest and attention as they go by. And you’re not feeling bad about all the things that flow by without you ever seeing them. Because to feel bad in that context, to feel overwhelmed, although it’s very understandable, and I don’t want people to beat themselves up for it, it is ultimately to believe that you ought to have the capacities of a kind of infinite being, of a God. It really is a sort of denial of what it actually means to be a finite human, especially in the modern world, which is to be just surrounded by so much more interesting stuff to read. And that’s just one example, right. Could be places to go, people to get to know, obligations to fulfill, ambitions to realize there’s so much more than we could ever get to do that actually. There’s a little bit of liberation to be. There’s a separate section of the book where I talk about how like, it’s so liberating to realize that these things are worse than you think. Because if you think it’s really bad, how many emails you’ve got and it’s going to be really hard to answer them all, or you think it’s really bad, how many books you feel you need to read, and it’s going to be really hard to get through them all, that’s very stressful. But when you realise that it’s worse than that, and that it’s completely impossible that you’re never going to make it through all the things that feel like they need your time and attention, not even close, then you can just give up that fight and you can use your time and your energy and your attention in ways that really matter, which is going to be to make some good enough choices about what to focus on and move forward.
00:37:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. I love that river analogy. I think that’s a great one. And I think the other thing that comes in here is also losing a belief that if we just get the right book or the right article or the right whatever as you say, we’re going to be on top of it, right? We’re going to be fixed. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to arrive at some place. We just need to find the right one, which is not really true because it doesn’t matter. What we do. Is the point of the book being you never fully feel on top of it or complete, or that, you know, everything’s under control because it doesn’t exist.
00:38:35 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. What we’re trying to do in all those moments, however, forgivably and understandably, is sort of get up and out of the situation in which we all are in as finite humans. Limited time, limited control, limited ability to know what’s coming next or to even to understand other people, right? We’re looking for some secret to sort of master the situation of being a human, and we don’t find it. We spend a lot of our lives struggling to find it. We beat ourselves up for not having found it. We get sort of angry or jealous or envious of people who we think have found it, and it’s just not there, because what it really is is a desire to renegotiate the terms and conditions of the human condition. And that’s what all those lovely Zen phrases mean. When Charlotte Jacobec says, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. And when Mel Weitzman says, our suffering is believing there’s a way out, the problem is not the problems. The problem is thinking that there ought to be a complete solution to the problems. Yeah.
00:39:40 – Eric Zimmer
There’s some version of a story where I don’t think it’s an actual buddhist tale, but it’s this guy who comes to the Buddha with all these problems. Right. It’s just this list of problems. And the Buddha’s found, like, 99 problems, which he’s basically saying infinite problems. He’s like, I can’t help you with any of those. And the guy gets very frustrated and thinks, why am I talking to someone so wise? And again, this is not an actual buddhist story, but it’s attributed that way. I don’t think it is. And the Buddha says, well, I can help you with one problem, which is that you think you shouldn’t have problems.
00:40:12 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, exactly. And there’s a section in the book on this idea of giving up hope, of getting to the problem free phase in life, which I contend you would not actually want to be in if you did reach it, that it would be kind of a death to have a life with no problems. There are obviously very bad problems that one hopes never to have to experience and there’s nothing good about. But that idea that a problem is doubly problematic because there’s the problem itself. And then there’s the fact that by this stage in my life, I ought to have figured things out so that I don’t have problems. You know, it’s like an extraordinary recipe for unnecessary self hate.
00:40:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I had a conversation with. I don’t know how it happened. My partner Ginny will just start conversations with people wherever we go, and they go very deep, very quickly. I’m like, how does she connect with these people like this? But one of them was with this 25 year old american woman we were in Paris at the time, who was living in Paris and feels like she just doesn’t know what she’s doing or that all of her friends are ahead of her or all these different things. And a big part of the conversation was just like, I’ve got bad news, which is that feeling is not necessarily going to go away. You’re not like two years away, where you’ll figure it out. I mean, I’ve got some disconcerting news to give you, which is, and I love you, just sort of used a phrase about renegotiate. I feel like we’re always renegotiating. We have to be the terms of reality. Right? We think we’re going to get to a place where we strike a deal, and that’s it. But it’s not. Life is an ongoing negotiation with reality.
00:41:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And the example that you give there, it’s a classic case of the liberation of seeing that it’s worse than you think because it’s a tormenting thing to feel. That imposter syndrome or, you know, not that youthful idea that other people understand life if they’re a little older than oneself. It’s tormenting because you think it’s somewhere that you can get and you haven’t got there yet, but when you really let it sink into your bones that no one ever gets there, or maybe that the few people who really do think they know what they’re doing in life are the most dangerous and deluded on the planet, that’s kind of worse than you think because it turns out it’s not possible. But that’s wonderful, because then you’re just. You’re free. You’re free to just, like, try things now because you don’t need to postpone them to this point at which you know what you’re doing.
00:42:35 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Yeah, I’m not sure that. But those statements to her were initially consoling. I think she’s got a little bit more of wrestling with that. Oh, no. You gotta be kidding me. I’m gonna. It was not instantly liberating, I don’t think.
00:42:50 – Oliver Burkeman
No, no. None of this is instant, in my experience, whatever certain Zen masters say.
00:42:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes. I’m just gonna jump around at a couple here. Set a quantity goal on firing your inner quality controller, which is day 20.
00:43:05 – Oliver Burkeman
This is part of a week of reflections on the ways in which sometimes what we really need to do is not make things happen in our lives to build more meaningful ones, but just to let them happen, to stand out of the way and, you know, born of seeing this tendency in myself over and over again to make things harder than they need to be. I’m coming at it, in this case, through the lens of creativity and talking about how difficult it is to, in my case, write good stuff when you’re ahead trying to write good stuff. And this was an experience totally borne out by this book, because my last book had done a lot better than I expected. And so naturally, I had this predictable reaction of being, like, paralyzed and thinking like, oh, no, I’ve got to meet the same standard. And if I mess it up, more people will see my humiliation or whatever. And the first step through that was to let myself. And it’s not easy, right? It’s sort of unpleasant at first, but sort of let myself put quality to one side, at least at first. Just write. Just do free writing exercises where you set a timer for 20 minutes and fill the page with words. All these things that, to be quite honest, I had always deeply disdained, because I’m like, oh, yeah, free writing exercises are for, like, amateurs. It’s like such b’s, right? I just sit down and I write the damn. Not perfect, but it makes sense, you know? And actually, behind that kind of attitude, there is something a bit perfectionistic. It’s not perfectionistic in terms of the quality of the sentences, but it is perfectionistic in terms of what mood I ought to be able to bring up whenever I want to. And, you know, this is in the book, right? That seemingly great quote from Chuck close that’s so famous. Like, inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. And there’s something really great about that, but there’s also something really bad about it, which is that implication that it doesn’t matter how you feel, you just get there and you write good stuff or you paint good paintings or whatever, because you’re a professional and actually I think that what we need to do very often in those situations is to relax the quest for quality and standards that we hold ourselves to. And a very simple down to earth way to do that is, as I say, to set a quantity goal right, to make your creative practice about the number of hundred words you’re going to put onto a page or the number of minutes that you’re going to work on something for. And really to be careful that that doesn’t turn into I’m going to spend this many minutes and do something really amazing. But that actually completion for the day, the state of being done, the state of having done what you showed up to do is measured totally, at least at first, in those quantities because it really has a wonderful way of taking the drama out of it. And it sort of obliges you to trust processes that are bigger than you or beneath your consciousness. You have to say, look, I really am going to write 500 words a day. And if I think the 500 words I’ve written are terrible, I’m going to write another 500 words. I’m not going to spend the next six months finessing that 1st 500 words. Now I feel honour bound to add that by the time I was actually writing this book and editing it, I wasn’t just free writing nonsense onto the page. I don’t think it’s full of nonsense now, but it’s absolutely critical at the beginning to not really mind and to see that that sort of little taskmaster inside you that is barking that this isn’t good enough and that you need to do better. I’m sufficiently familiar with internal family systems therapy and stuff to know that he does want the best for you. He’s not evil, but he really needs to be sort of indulgently chuckled at rather than obeyed.
00:46:42 – Eric Zimmer
I. I think the headline out of this is Burkeman thinks latest book not much better than free writing exercises.
00:46:51 – Oliver Burkeman
That would be great positioning.
00:46:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you call them quantity goals. I refer to them as effort goals. For me, I’ve been in the midst of this with trying to write a book for myself. Now I’ve had the problem of having read a decade’s worth of books like this by many people who are extraordinarily good authors who I would consider you in that camp and that I know that what’s coming out of me isn’t that good. And the phrase that I’ll use is yet and I have no idea. Can I write 500 words a day? Should I be writing a thousand? I have no sense of any of it. So for me, it’s number of 30 minutes sessions. Yeah, it’s just that. And if I get that done, at the end of the day, I do everything I can to just shut off all the voices of doubt. And it’s not good. Nothing good came out and just be like, I did it. Like, I showed up and did my best for this window of time. And that’s just gonna have to be good enough for now.
00:47:46 – Oliver Burkeman
And the crazy part is, I totally agree, what is represented by that attitude, which is really engaging with reality, which is putting aside perfectionistic fantasies in favor of action that really matters, that will be in the book just as a result of having approached it in that way. Right. Separate from which words you end up writing in the final draft. Like, the book will live and exude that in a way that I don’t even understand. Right. I don’t know how it works. It seems a bit supernatural, but that sort of down to earth approach, I firmly believe will be reflected in the sort of usefulness and ability to connect to people that will be in the end product.
00:48:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I imagine my editor is probably going to be like, okay, we’ve got the idea that writing this book has made you nervous. Like, we don’t need it in, like, every fifth sentence.
00:48:32 – Oliver Burkeman
Right? The other reason not to submit a perfect book is you. You’ve got to give your editor something to do. Otherwise, where’s the meaning in your editor’s life? Right? You’ve got to give them something to get their teeth into and send back and say, do this differently.
00:48:43 – Eric Zimmer
All right, let’s end with a phrase that I really liked. I’m just going to read a couple sentences and let you talk more about it. Striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead. What does that mean?
00:49:00 – Oliver Burkeman
It means that whatever counts for you is the spirit of the kind of life you want to live. And when I think about for myself, it’s calm and energized, focused, attentive and available for other people and sort of getting important things actually done, all of that. Call that sanity by my standards here. In some sense, you have to live from that identity right now and sort of manifest that in the world rather than viewing it as something that you’re working towards, but that you can’t have yet. Because if you define it in that way, that will become a self fulfilling prophecy, and you will never get it because you’re defining it as something that has to be in the future. So that sounds very, very vague and abstract. I think to make it a bit more concrete, if you feel that at this point in your life, as I do, a certain amount of more like rest is probably appropriate than you’ve been granting yourself up to this stage. Striving towards sanity would be saying, okay, I need to rest. I’m gonna take a sabbatical in a year’s time, and until then, I’m gonna. You wouldn’t necessarily say it consciously to yourself, but right until then, I’m gonna work really, really hard so that I’ve got everything running and, you know, the business is self sustaining and everything’s working. Out of your intuition that you need rest, you start doing the exact opposite of resting and reinforcing all those parts of your psyche that think that what you have to do in life is strive harder and harder and harder. Starting from sanity would be allowing yourself today maybe only for 20 minutes, maybe it doesn’t feel very great at first, but allowing yourself to take that, a little bit of rest, a little bit of enjoyment and savoring of the world right here and now. And there’s lots of other examples that don’t necessarily apply to rest per se, but it’s that idea of finding some way to embody the life you want to have now, instead of working towards some kind of amazing, full spectrum, perfect manifestation of it that only comes later.
00:51:10 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation. We’re going to talk about distraction and interruption, what it means to be a good person in this world, and answering the question of do you really have to do that thing that you’re convinced you have to do? Listeners, if you’d like access to the post show conversation ad free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a poem, and you want to be part of supporting something that’s important to you, go to oneyoufeed.net join and we’d love to have you as part of our community. Oliver, such a pleasure. Thank you again.
00:51:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
00:52:08 – Chris Forbes
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