Elise Hugh: Hello and welcome. I am Elise Hugh, the host of the TED Talks Daily podcast, and I'm so glad to be with you today for the latest edition of our TED Talks Daily Book Club along with this live event. This is a special series on our TED Talks Daily podcast, a show where we deliver ideas that inspire daily. I'm so excited today because we have for our book club guest, Oliver Burkeman. He's a writer, journalist, and TEDex speaker who worked for many years at The Guardian newspaper where he wrote a popular weekly psychology column. He also has written three books including Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and the New York Times bestseller 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which I just told Oliver before we started, is the book that I recommend the most. The book is based on the assumption that we have an average of 4,000 weeks to live if we're lucky. And Oliver has given two TEDex talks. He has published and publishes a newsletter called The Imperfectionist, an email on building a meaningful life in the age of bewilderment.

Elise Hugh: And today we are here to talk about his latest book, his newest book, Meditations for Mortals. four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts, which offers a different approach on taking action on what counts using a guiding philosophy of life that Oliver calls imperfectionism. Oliver Burkeman, welcome to the book club.

Oliver Burkeman: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really glad to be here coming to you from uh North Yorkshire in the north of England. It's lovely to be here

Elise Hugh: where I hear it it's already dark and quite cold.

Oliver Burkeman: Oh, yes. It's been dark for like an hour or something. It'll be dark until 9 in the morning tomorrow.

Elise Hugh: Well, thank you for staying awake with us. Um, before we get into your newest book, I want to ask you a bit about your journey to this point. I mentioned your weekly column for the Guardian before. It was called This Column Will Change Your Life, and it covered psychology, self-help, productivity, and culture. In a sense, just writing the column did kind of change your own trajectory. What did you learn there? um that kind of wound got got you to where you are today?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so yes, I I spent a lot of time having to explain to people that calling a column this column will change your life was meant to be sardonic. It was meant to be tongue and cheek on some level,

Oliver Burkeman: but um but it did sort of change mine at any rate. I don't know about anybody else's. Um the reason is that I think that I was very much for the first part of that decade or more that I was writing that column I was very much in the mindset of at least unconsciously you know trying to find the system or the life philosophy or the practice that would solve all my problems that would make me feel like I was finally kind of in control of life.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. And um you know if you have a a different kind of job you might get the chance to read books and explore these things every so often. But if you're doing it as your work you get to go through so many um candidate magic bullets for right sorting your life out that you actually eventually begin to realize like oh maybe there's maybe the reason I haven't found this yet is not because I just need to find the next one. Maybe there's something deeper and more interesting going on here. Maybe there's something problematic about the idea that I should be looking for uh you know the very idea that I should be looking for a a way to solve the problem of being human. So that got me started on the journey that led to 4,000 weeks and then this new book.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. There's a lot of time hacking and optimization culture and obviously the larger sort of workcoholism that we're in. When did you realize that this productivity mindset was actually making life smaller rather than larger?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean it was definitely a gradual thing. Uh it's amazing how how many of these tricks and tips you can try and have them kind of not work um and still feel like oh just one more month or 20% more self-discipline than I've ever managed to um show at any other previous moment in my life and then I'll be over the over the hump. Um, but I do write in 4,000 Weeks about how a moment that I was, um, uh, sitting on a park bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where we lived at the time, on my way to my workspace and sort of more overburdened with journalistic deadlines than usual, and desperately trying to fathom how I was going to use all these techniques and and and the rest of it to get myself through to the to where I needed to be by the end of the week. and and just sort of suddenly realizing like, oh, none of this is ever going to work. Like, this is impossible. I'm trying to The problem here is I'm trying to do something impossible. The problem is not that I haven't found uh the right way to do it. And there was a big shift in that moment. I don't know about you, I'm the kind of person who has these kind of intellectual shifts very easily and then it takes me like years to really kind of live into the implications of them. But that was a starting point.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. What are the implications? So, if you kind of give up on the idea of per perfectionism, what happens next? How does that practically apply?

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, there's two different ideas here, right? Because we've been talking about overwhelm and then we're talking about perfectionism. And for some people uh with us today, you might the first association of the word perfectionism might well be to do with wanting to create perfect work, right? So, it's not so much to do with how much you've got on your to-do list. It's about wanting it to be absolutely uh faultless in the execution. I'm sort of making the argument especially in the new book that perfectionism applies to a whole lot of things right so wanting to be perfectly optimized as you've been talking about wanting to be perfectly on top of everything wanting to produce perfect work people pleasing I think that is also a kind of perfectionism right wanting wanting to know for sure that everybody is um uh

Elise Hugh: likes you

Oliver Burkeman: likes you and isn't mad at you at this very moment right

Oliver Burkeman: and um and so it's against that very broad definition of perfectionism, the attempt to feel in total control of what you're doing in the world that I oppose this bring this notion of imperfectionism which is really the just the viewpoint that says well what if we start from the idea that there will always be too much to do that we will never be able to be certain that nobody's mad at us that we will never bring work into the world that matches up to the absolutely perfect uh standards in our minds and all the rest of it. What if we just sort of began from that um that broken place, right? That imperfect place. Would it is it possible that actually that could be a much better recipe for really getting the important things done and actually enjoying the process as well?

Elise Hugh: I mean, it sounds a little bit like the foundations of Buddhist thought, right? Like humans have probably experienced some um flavor of this problem or this conundrum for as long as we've been around. Uh

Oliver Burkeman: oh, no, totally. I think it is absolutely firstly just obviously this is what all I'm writing about in the new book or any of my books is a sort of uh synthesis of all sorts of existing wisdom traditions and religious traditions and then yes I think it it is a sort of a is a sort of a religious uh thought as well. Um the the the parallel with Buddhism may be echoing for lots of people here today but also there's parallels with Christianity and doubtless all sorts of other traditions. It's just that notion of like well seeing the human condition as a problem that we've got to solve seems to not be the way that um to to to to make it to a life of presence and meaning and action. So it's like

Oliver Burkeman: can we start from the idea that we're not going to solve that problem and really live the experience instead.

Elise Hugh: Why is imperfectionism as you write where the magic begins sort sort of after you kind of come to the realization like okay I can be free of this general quest then what

Oliver Burkeman: well firstly like I don't think I'm anything other than a work in progress at this myself right so I'm certainly not coming to you from a state of perfect spiritual enlightenment and uh sharing my uh my insights with you in that way But well, so one way to respond to this is to point out that actually there's something about trying to be in control of life to a certain extent and trying to do everything exactly right and trying to be on top of everything that seems to

Elise Hugh: squeeze out the the vibrancy, the enjoyment, the the juice

Oliver Burkeman: from from life. I rely in the new book to some extent on a German theorist called Hart Rosa who has written this um a huge amount of scholarly stuff on this idea that he calls resonance. The idea that what really gives life its meaning is this certain kind of well right resonance right a vibration of some sort between us and the world. And it turns out that this is not what you get. Like even if you succeed in like hyperoptimizing your life.

Oliver Burkeman: Firstly, you won't actually get through all the work because it's infinite. And we can talk about that. That's a separate point. But

Elise Hugh: yes,

Oliver Burkeman: but even if you get that level of control, you sort of will wish that you didn't have it. Um there's a lovely quote from Alan Watts, you know, the famous old spiritual Yes. entertainer from the 60s and the 70s that like if if you carried technology to its perfect conclusion and you had a machines that could do everything you wanted for you exactly as you wanted it, what you would want in the end at the end of that process is a button that said surprise me because that's what's not there when we really get into the driving seat of of life in that way.

Elise Hugh: Let's move on to that other idea because this new book is kind of a companion or in conversation with your previous book 4,000 Weeks which is all about understanding that our time is finite. Why is understanding this the door to meaning as you write?

Oliver Burkeman: I guess in essence because I think that we spend a lot of time a lot of our lives doing things which while we may not realize it are actually kind of ways of emotionally avoiding the truth of being finite. So we put a lot of effort whether we realize it or not into not feeling limited both in terms of the amount of time we have and the amount of control we have over that time. So yeah, a lot of the productivity techniques that you will find in the kind of productivity books that I disdain a little bit um I think are basically offering the promise that you that of of of not having to feel finite, right? It's like put this system into place and soon enough probably later in the future, it's never right now. Um you you'll you won't have to make hard choices with your time. you won't have to um feel the disappointment and the sacrifice of only ever being able to do a small proportion of the things you can imagine doing. And when you kind of and it's the same with control, right? If you're trying to control perfect work, it makes everything very agonizing and tortured. When you can let in the truth of that limitation a little bit more, you undergo a shift where you're actually be able to be more present in life because it's like, well, okay, I don't need to spend the day beating myself up for not having found the magic way to do all the things. I don't need to be shocked and surprised that there are still hundreds and hundreds of things I have yet to get around to because there always will be. and instead maybe it's my job today just to pick a few of the things that matter and really pour my time and attention into them. So it's really

Oliver Burkeman: it's really freeing in that respect to stop fighting against the unavoidable truth I suppose.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. You mention attention and you write a lot about kind of focusing our attention especially as it pertains to this information overload age that we're in and the attention economy. um especially given the time that we're living in and the various horrors that we're witnessing or experiencing on a daily basis. I was really struck by a moment early on in the book um when you write about the danger of information overload, especially given social media, which leads us to feel this need to care about everything all at once all the time. And you wonder whether it would be better for just a few thousand people to focus on and care about one issue deeply over the course of a lifetime than for hundreds and thousands of us to care about something for a few minutes after we see it come through our feeds. Why?

Oliver Burkeman: Well, that specific thought experiment comes from a a great writer blogger called David Kaine. and he's sort of making the the argument that that you know you can't do very much with very diluted attention and you can do a lot a small number of people can do a lot with more focus. The I guess the broader point that I'm trying to get at there is just this notion that that there is this old idea from from another era really now that being a good citizen, being a good person means finding ways to make yourself pay more attention to the outside world and to the sufferings of the world. And we live now as you well know um you know in a world where it's information and information about awful things happening in the world is completely abundant. The scarce resources our own attention and the way all the social media platforms and the rest of it work is by is by monetizing our attention. I think it follows from this that um actually there's a duty of a citizen in the modern world to be willing to withhold attention from things as well which is very hard for anyone who cares about the world right it's like what you're telling me I should take this issue which is obviously really serious right

Elise Hugh: and obviously involves an awful lot of people suffering

Oliver Burkeman: and not think about it and my argument is well yes firstly because there are many ways in which our paying attention is we're misled into thinking we're making a difference, right? The idea that just

Elise Hugh: attention isn't necessarily active,

Oliver Burkeman: right? And just right and just telling the rest of a social media platform that you care is not necessarily helping anybody on the ground as it were. But also like that willingness to say, okay, this particular world crisis, this particular humanitarian disaster, this particular aspect of the climate crisis, whatever it is, I'm not saying it's not real or that it doesn't really matter. I'm just saying that's not going to be my battle because this other thing is my battle and I'm going to put so many hours a week into volunteering or I'm going to give this proportion of my um you know disposable income that I can afford to give to that cause. I think it's really easy to think that yeah more attention is always better and actually our attention is finite and that is not is not the case. Yeah.

Elise Hugh: Zooming back out, when does acceptance of the idea that time is finite and acceptance of our limitations lead to a kind of helplessness or resignation? And I'm going to bring in one of our TED members, Kenny S. here, um, who asks, "How can we discern between a healthy acceptance of our limits versus complacency or giving up on something that we really want or care about?"

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, and I al always have to sort of feel my way into it because I I don't think I'm in any personal danger. Like my problem I have plenty of problems, but they're but they're very much to do with like trying to do too too many things and overreaching and then getting burned out. And I don't think I'm at a personal huge risk of sort of being like, oh, what's the point in doing anything then? But it is a real issue. And I think that um I mean firstly there's the point that many sort of teachers of mindfulness and Buddhism make many times right which is that acceptance is not the same as resignation. It's not about saying that the way your life is or the way the world is it just always has to be that way. It's about really acknowledging that it in fact is that way right now. And that's a very powerful move that doesn't need to be confused with the idea of like guess I've guessed nothing's ever going to change then and I've just got to to live with it.

Oliver Burkeman: There's also this um idea that I've uh that I write about in the new book that um we we tend to get caught up in in an idea of what counts as a as a meaningful action

Oliver Burkeman: that can be very um that can have lots of sort of ironic uh unintended consequences, right? We tend to think of we tend to think that the only things that matter in the world are are very like big actions or actions that will resonate down the centuries or affect hundreds of thousands of people or something like that. Whereas I think we all know from our lives that really very small things can be completely meaningful, right? There's nothing not meaningful about cooking a nutritious meal for your kids or caring for an elderly relative or going for a hike in a beautiful landscape. like these things are not going to be remembered on some level thousand years from now, but um but they but they matter. And and so I think um the other part of my response is that um you know we we can we can look at our lives as things that are already full of things that matter and from that position then choose additional ambitions to to work into them. But we don't come from this place of like well first of all my life's completely meaningless and so why should I try to how can I make it more meaningful? It's like life can be meaningful already. I think that's an important point.

Elise Hugh: You also ask us to drop this quest for control which is pretty prevalent in today's culture. Why do you think that impulse is so stubborn? Why do these productivity books sell?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean it's really stubborn and it's stubborn in me, right? So, I'm not I don't know that I'm even saying drop it. I think I'm saying can we all find ways to just like unclench just a little bit and any any degree to which I think you can do that even though it's scary and vulnerable to do it is is is going to be beneficial. The reason it's so appealing, I mean, there are so many different layers to this answer, right? that we we live in a culture and an economic culture that relentlessly causes us to feel that it's the only way to keep our heads above water is to get more control. I think we come from uh you know in the sort of in the in the western world in the global north we come from from uh cultures that very much prioritize um technological and other control of the world and then right back at the bottom because it always is I think it's just the fear of death right we we we are trying to scramble into a position over life where we would feel safe at past. But to be born into life is to sort of be unsafe, right? Because it's to be it's very well, it's slightly depressing material, but I think it's actually not depressing at all, right? It's like to be born as a human is just to find yourself in this vulnerable position on your way to death. I mean, that's what it is.

Oliver Burkeman: And and actually um the prospect of like, well, could I scramble up onto the riverbank instead of being born forward on it is very very very um seductive. We see all these kinds of, you know, there are famous examples of uh people trying to do everything they can to live for as long as they possibly can. And I think it probably ultimately is is all comes from the same motivation.

Oliver Burkeman: And I think some of those people would agree that it comes from that motivation. By the way, I'm not I'm not really criticizing them. Yeah,

Elise Hugh: there's a lot of immortality bros out there for sure.

Elise Hugh: Um what does for folks who haven't read the book yet and meditated on the various ideas inside it um what does unclenching as you say what does that get us how does it actually open up more life how did it work for you

Oliver Burkeman: I mean this is something if I'm if I can talk a little bit about the structure of the book it was very important to me to to try to sort of write the kind of book that is similar to things that have helped me and that might also continue to help me because I definitely approach my writing in that way. So, it's divided into 28 short chapters which are then divided into four weeks. And the idea, the invitation, right, is to is to do one a day for 28 days. Given that it's all about not being such a control freak, I can't really try to force anybody that specific way. That would be unfair, but hypocritical. But um

Oliver Burkeman: what that tries to do or what I'm trying to do there is to get over this problem with a lot of personal development writing I think where it either gives you a great perspective shift but then you don't know what to do with it or it gives you like a whole complicated set of tips and tricks to put into practice and you're like okay when I get a free month I'll I'll finally get around to doing that.

Elise Hugh: Mhm.

Oliver Burkeman: and instead say like what if I could lead you through a small perspective shift but repeatedly over the course of a month such that you might live the next 24 hours a little more um a little differently than if you hadn't had that perspective shift. So, you know, we could talk about any of these if you want, but so there's a chapter on uh taking a slightly different approach to decision- making. There's a chapter on um slightly different approach to how you set goals for the day or how you think about interruptions that might arise in the course of the day. Um and the idea is just to sort of layer these different perspective shifts right in the middle of life, right? You don't have to wait until you've cleared the 20,000 emails from your inbox before you before you put this into practice. It's it's like right in the middle of things.

Elise Hugh: One of our TED members asks an important question that I wanted to bring to you. Katherine N writes, "How should minorities navigate the advice to embrace per imperfection instead of fighting it given that the price we pay maybe in terms of rights or access, safety, finances can be considerably higher?"

Oliver Burkeman: This is a great question. I think it's really important to understand that there are just simply two at least two but let's say two kinds of um sort of suffering and difficulty that are encountered by humans in the world. And there's the kind that is universal and is related to being a human. And then there's the kind that is that is relative and societal and is uh arises from injustice between groups of humans and power dynamics and all the rest of it.

Elise Hugh: Sure.

Oliver Burkeman: So I'm sort of unashamedly focusing on the first kind, right? Which is not in any way to sort of deny or undermine the the second kind. You know, it is impossible for all of us, for any of us, no matter what background we come from, what heritage or anything else m

Oliver Burkeman: to produce work that matches up to the perfect standards we may have of it in our heads if we're perfectionists, right? That's a universal.

Elise Hugh: But the but the the cost of acknowledging that fact,

Elise Hugh: right,

Elise Hugh: and might be greater for some people than for others. Right.

Oliver Burkeman: I still maintain that it is that that that to whatever degree you feel able in your own life to edge towards acknowledging that fact. It will lead to a freer life, to better work, to more productivity of the kind that counts. So it's not that it isn't harder for some people than others and that the stakes aren't higher for some people than others. But underneath that or alongside that there is the fact that you know trying to do something that is not possible for humans to do is not a recipe for a stress-free uh and expansive uh existence.

Elise Hugh: A stress-free and more expansive existence. You've mentioned a freer life. Um we've talked about resonance which comes up a lot in meditations for mortals. What is resonance? How do we get to it um without a a very complicated system? In fact, this this is the opposite, right? It's like let go of the the complicated systems.

Oliver Burkeman: I mean it is it is it's not that I've I'm not actually quite as against systems as I may sometimes suggest. The point is for me is why are you using those things right? So uh a good example of this in my own life the famous pomodoro technique. Oh right

Elise Hugh: which many people

Oliver Burkeman: as a way of the pomodoro technique is a way of dividing up your um working day into 25 minute chunks with little breaks. But it's a good it's a good system right nothing wrong with it. The the problem is if you think that that technique or any other technique is going to kind of save you, right? If you think it's going to cause you to get all the things done and not have to have any difficult conversations and not have to have any difficult decisions about what to focus on and how much of your finite time you want to give to this person or this um cause or another.

Oliver Burkeman: Once I so when I first used it, it was a sort of a it just got me even more anxious and stressed like all the other ones. But these days, having gone through this kind of at least something of an evolution in how I feel about these things and being much more I think uh grounded and sane about um you know the the the what I can do as a finite human in the course of a given day. Well, sure. Then the Pomodoro technique is a totally great way of organizing my day sometimes. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it's no longer this like ticket out of the human condition. I think that's really the the thing that's so important for me and anything that I do or that I anything that I that I do in my life to bring myself back to that absolute reality of like here I am. These are the talents I've got, the energy levels I've got, the attention I've got, the hours in the day I've got, the relationships I'm in. Anything that brings me back to that, it's like the resonance was waiting all along.

Elise Hugh: Um, uh, so it's almost like a return to yourself, return to your

Oliver Burkeman: emotional engine. And you know, we're definitely I know that I'm sort of dicing with cliche here, but it really is true that the world is full of a a million small interactions every day or or experiences that are potentially um enchanting and absorbing ones. And that at least some of us the thing that gets in the way the most of that is being relentlessly in pursuit of some schedule or the end of a to-do list or or something similar. So it's like yeah it's like the life is there. I don't you don't need to you don't so much need to bring it into being as to clear away the the the things that get in the way.

Elise Hugh: This is related to a question from a TED community member Alana W who writes many rising leaders I work with are afraid that if they focus on quote unquote softer things they will lose their edge. I think there's an underlying belief or fear or underlying belief that fear or anxiety in its many forms is their fuel. How has your personal definition of and relationship to ambition changed over the time you've been doing this work?

Oliver Burkeman: Oh, I love that question because I think I've been in that place for sure of thinking that like it's not fun to be as anxious as I am at the point this was this described me, you know, to have the knot in my stomach and all the rest of it, but it

Elise Hugh: but it seems to work, right, in some

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. It's motivating on some level,

Oliver Burkeman: some definition of the word work. Yeah. Right. Um, and I think it's always been really important to me in this writing work to to to to sort of salvage a version of ambition that goes along with it, right? Because there is a that that is compatible with this outlook. There's a there's a certain kind of approach to uh popular psychology, self-help, which I don't necessarily even think of myself as hostile to, but it isn't mine. Where if you really came to confront the truth of the world and to really sort of understand the reality of of life and you became totally calm and peaceful, then you just sort of become very passive and you wouldn't really do very much.

Oliver Burkeman: drift through the world and maybe you'd go to a yoga retreat now and again, but that would be basically it, right? You just sort of and I've just on personality grounds, that's not anything that anyone that I've ever wanted to to to to be. I ambitious for my work. And so I I hope that there's a way of being ambitious that is um not just fueled by and perpetuating of anxiety. And um and I really think that there is and I think that that's what something that I have discovered through through some of this. You know, the there's a it's the difference between ambition as a kind of the sort of deficit model of ambition that says like I've got to keep working and working harder and harder and harder just to become and accomplishing more and more and more just to become like an adequate human being. Right? This is the idea that psychologists the concept that psychologists refer to as the insecure overachiever

Oliver Burkeman: it's the difference between ambition as a kind of the sort of deficit model of ambition that says like I've got to keep working and working harder and harder and harder just to become and accomplishing more and more and more just to become like an adequate human being. Right? This is the idea that psychologists the concept that psychologists refer to as the insecure overachiever

Elise Hugh: which refers to

Elise Hugh: the idea that we're not enough or something.

Oliver Burkeman: Right. Right. No. Exactly. And whenever I use this term in public event or something like half the people in the in the room seem to recognize exactly what I'm what I'm talking about. this notion that um you get a lot done and you achieve a lot and people think and and you maybe you get a lot of accolades but you sort of get it from the reason you're doing it is to sort of plug a hole and you never feel good because every time you achieve something that just becomes the new minimum baseline for your subsequent achievements. Right? If you you you do really well at some project then you've got to do all the future projects just as well or better. And it's it's it's very stressful.

Oliver Burkeman: But it is possible and I hope that the new book has some of the sort of tools for this shift to see um ambition in a different way as as an expression not as a way to try to feel all right but as an expression of the fact that you already that you know that you already are uh all right that you are enough and that once you're not tangled up so much in these kinds of self-worth related struggles Actually, it's just really fun to build things and create things and do things, right? Most people's personalities are not suited to doing very little. I mean, if you are and you can afford to, then absolutely fine. I don't want to to say otherwise, but but I think ambition is if you're an ambitious person, it's still there uh as you as you learn to let go of anxiety and control. I also think that if you observe babies or children, you know, we're all born with some innate creativity, too. I think that humans want to create. Um, and so just returning to that, I love this framework of the scarcity model of ambition or a deficit model of ambition versus a more abundance model

Oliver Burkeman: or surplus model of ambition and coming at it um with this idea that we we already have it and we already have enough and we're not trying to plug any gaps. Um, great. You also write about um kind of how you're showing up for yourself now and showing up is a whole section of meditations for mortals. Why is showing up kind of the last pillar in your day-to-day action plan for embracing our mortality and our limitations?

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, I think because really it's it's the only point of of any of this, right? I think that um and all the ideas up to that point in the book are sort of leading up to this idea that that that um you know, it's hard to put into words, but I think most people know what we're speaking about that it is possible to sort of really be here and really be present in your life. And it is possible to to to to not be. One of the main ways I think that we end up not being is that we are sort of perpetually living for the future, living for,

Oliver Burkeman: you know, sometimes it's very obvious, right? People feel like their life they're sort of like living until they I don't know uh settle down with a partner or have kids or till they've retired or some some those kind of milestones. But very often it's I've noticed even in myself, you know, it can it can be this idea of just sort of living for three hours in the future from now. This sort of perpetual state of like we just got to get this out of the way. Just got to get this out of the way. But of course

Oliver Burkeman: then you're in a new moment and you know the future is still in the future. So I think the practice and the thing I'm trying to bring people back to in the book and and myself if you if I haven't made that clear by now is is is back towards seeing that like this right here is is real life. Like it's it's as real as it's ever going to get for finite humans. If you're going to do some things that you care about uh and that matter to you and that make you feel alive, at some point you're going to have to do them now. It's it's um they can't always be later when you've got the other things out of the way or when you finally know what you're doing and don't feel imposter syndrome or or whatever it might be. It's it's going to have to be in a in a moment of the of the present. Um, and I find this like a really important reminder. Hopefully not a stress inducing reminder, right? The idea is not so that now you've got to be incredibly self-conscious about whether you're showing up,

Elise Hugh: living life, right?

Oliver Burkeman: Turns out that that is a terrible way to be in the moment, right? To be constantly asking yourself if you're if you're uh in the moment. But um but just to realize that like you've got no option um if if you're going to have spent some of your life doing certain things that matter to you or that you find enjoyable or that or that you feel make a difference like at certain point it's just got to be right now whether you feel completely ready for that or not.

Elise Hugh: Meditation is in the title of the book. And so as a result, a lot of people submitted questions asking you for your advice.

Oliver Burkeman: This is a problem. We'll talk about that in a moment. Sorry. Okay.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. On how to start a meditation practice. So I just want to bring this up, you know, or how to keep going. I think a lot of us have now been culturally taught to have a specific view of what meditation should or shouldn't be. and you share a bit about this throughout your book, but for those listening, what advice do you have?

Oliver Burkeman: So, this is to some extent, this is an artifact of the title we chose to give the book, and that's on me and my editor. Um, the sort of the great figure that I'm arrogantly taking the mantle of here is less Buddha and more Marcus Aurelius, right, whose meditations are a collection of um short thoughts to reflect upon. Yeah. Um uh and I am myself a pretty sort of patchy uh meditator when it comes to um a sort of a formal seated meditation practice. I think it's wonderful uh and it really helps me but uh it's not it's a place that I've always um struggled with to some extent. That said, as you as you rightly know, I don't think these two things are as different as um as these two senses of the word meditation are as different as one might assume at first.

Oliver Burkeman: I think that any activity that causes you to sort of um disidentify from the conceptual screen that through which you view the world and to either look at those concepts directly or to follow your breath and to allow the concepts to be let go of as they arise. I think they can make a claim to something uh meditative. So if all that some of the sections in this book do is sort of um unseat some kind of completely settled way of viewing things. uh if it's the act of a sort of a fish understanding what water is as it were but I think that I think that gets to count also there's a lot of material in the book about habits and daily habits and all the rest of it of which meditation is is one for a lot of people and there I am really banging the drum for how much more important it is to just do five 10 minutes of whatever the thing is today in reality instead of becoming having invested in sort of very big deal projected out in months into the future schedules about how you're going to do it every single day forever. It's it's such an important skill to be able to let all of that go and with no guarantee that it's part of some long-term practice to still be able to do the thing whether that's meditation or exercise or journaling or whatever to still be able to do it today without without the guarantee that you're becoming a different kind of person in the long term.

Elise Hugh: Last question from me before we go to audience questions. Oliver, you write towards the top of your book that you're fine with um listeners or readers forgetting a lot of what they read and that it's the little things that really stick with us that count. So, if one of our listeners remembers only one thing from Meditations for Mortals, what is that one thing that you hope it will be?

Oliver Burkeman: Huh. Um, it's a challenging question because in some sense I feel like the answer has to just be something like, okay, here's what I'll say. There's a there's a there's a there's a phrase towards the end of the the book where I talk about um the idea of starting from sanity. Um, and what I mean by this phrase, you can argue with the wording, but what I'm trying to say is if if there is a way that you want your life to be, which in my case might be, you know, attentive and focused, uh, calm, socially connected, making time for rest, uh, doing my part to address the crisis of the world, whatever it is, It's not going to work to see that as something that you're striving towards, right? As something that you're going to get to one day once you've got your life in place. It has to be something that you live from. Uh so in practical terms you know the example I've given before is if you if you know that your life needs more rest in it. It's less about resolving to take a three month sbatical in two years time and then working really hard so that you can get them resources together to do that and much more about asking where in your dayto-day there could be five minutes for 10 minutes for for genuine rest.

Oliver Burkeman: It's that sense of like what is the identity you want to be in the world and can you live from it a little bit today. I think that's one way of saying the one thing that I'd want people to to to to take away. It's about doing the thing today, not about building up to doing the thing perfectly all the time in the future.

Elise Hugh: Yeah, I really like that. Bird by bird.

Oliver Burkeman: Yes.

Elise Hugh: All right, let's jump to member questions. James G asks, "I spend a lot of my time concentrating on helping others have a better life, often at the expense of feeling like I myself have a good life. How can I look inward and accept the same advice that I'm often offering to others?"

Oliver Burkeman: This is a great question and uh deliberately or not it gives me a great way in to to one to one of the short chapters in the book. So I know exactly what I want to say about this. It's always a a lovely kind of question. Um I have found I've written about this how how beneficial I found um the notion of uh treating yourself. The philosopher Ed Lando calls this the reverse golden rule.

Oliver Burkeman: Not treating yourself in ways you would never dream of treating other people. So there's a lot of talk about self-compassion and self-kindness and all the rest of it and it's very very important. But I have always had a bit of a difficulty with it. Maybe it's being British, maybe it's being male, I don't know, whatever. Like, I feel like I'm being asked to treat myself as very special and then I get all sort of icky about that. The moment that changed that for me was coming across this notion of like what if I what if I explored just not treating myself significantly worse than I than I treat other people. We a lot of us I think have this tendency to berate ourselves in the inner monologue, you know, in ways that you just would never ever ever dream of. Like somebody who said that to somebody else would just be ostracized from that friendship group, right? You'd be kicked out of the party um for being so obnoxious, but we do it to ourselves. And what I really liked about that idea of self-friendliness was then that it's just a it's just very equalizing. It's I'm not asking I'm not it's not treat yourself as a wonderfully special human. It's just like

Oliver Burkeman: why don't you deserve the the standards that you already are willing to apply to everyone else? And just as a journal prompt or a way a place to start from I think it's very powerful. I also think that in the end we do help other people much much more effectively from a place of self friendliness than from a place of beating ourselves up because very often we're beating ourselves up in order to make ourselves be better people or something and then all the people we're helping they kind of pick up on the fact that there's this weird psycho drama going on uh and it's not as effective. So I think it's it's kind of a win-win

Elise Hugh: to take. Miriam SK asks, "What changed for you during the writing of this book?" Um, and this is a reference to a fellow TED speaker, Simon Synynic. What was your why behind this particular book?

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, I think my why is always basically to try to work out my own issues and problems and struggles. So 4,000 weeks it was very much to do with feeling overwhelmed and anxious and out of control. And with meditations for mortals it was about the gap between sort of knowing how I wanted to show up in my life and actually doing it. M

Oliver Burkeman: um so so it's always very personally motivated and you know some people some people's advice about non-fiction writing is you should always be focused on the problems of the audience that you're solving and I'm always a bit worried because I am sort of focusing on solving my own but hopefully and consciously in a way that

Oliver Burkeman: you know is based on the notion that I'm there's a lot of similarities between the ways in which people uh have struggled Right.

Elise Hugh: I I think the popularity and success of the book does show that, right? That that what you

Oliver Burkeman: I mean I'm always amazed by people saying yeah sometimes people have emailed me and said it's like it's like you're inside my head and it's like yeah I think mainly that's just because it's quite similar to being inside my head.

Elise Hugh: This is part of the modern human condition I think.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and the other part of the answer to that great question is just that um, I have had the really odd experience to me anyway of writing both these most recent two books where the idea for it comes quite early and I write it in the book proposal and the publisher approves the book proposal and I get a book deal whatever

Oliver Burkeman: but the writing of it although it doesn't although the basic idea doesn't change very much in order to write it properly. I do sort of have to undergo a I do have to become a somewhat different person, right? I have to become a sort of uh slightly different person in tune with what I'm writing otherwise it just won't it won't write. So in the case of meditations for mortals and I mentioned this towards the end like I did have a bit of a freeze response to the success of 4,000 weeks. was a little bit like um paralyzed and like you know uh I know how can I make sure it's just as good as whatever and so I did have to experiment with some very unclenchy uh freewriting techniques and ways to sort of um allow myself to write before I knew what it was I was wanting to write.

Oliver Burkeman: That's not what ended up in the book. I would like to I would like to stress this the beginning of the process. But so I did actually have to like be that less controlly person in order to write honestly about um controlling things less.

Elise Hugh: Yeah, that's really nice to hear. All right, Gina G asks, "Age is helpful when it comes to seeing the big picture. Would Oliver have been able to write this book in his 20s? I'm curious what his thoughts are on how age factors into unclenching."

Oliver Burkeman: I think it's a really, really good point. And I think about it a lot because, you know, um would I have been able to write this in my 20ies? No, I don't think so. Um the question as a writer that that brings up for me then is like who is this useful for? And is it if it's something that you have to go through, what is the role of the writer who's sort of hoping to add something useful, right? Like maybe the answer is just you just have to live and then you'll come to these conclusions or you won't.

Elise Hugh: Right. Right.

Oliver Burkeman: And I think that well a couple of thoughts. I mean, one is I'm always really surprised at events and in correspondents and stuff by the degree to which among the people who this resonates with are represented people from in their 20s and uh and early 30s as well as those of us more, you know, midlifey. Um, and I think in some ways that's just because of the sort of accelerating competitive pressures and and problems of the world, right? It's like a lot of things that

Oliver Burkeman: uh a lot of the aspects of a lot of the pressures that lead to a midlife crisis, you you might say maybe um are being felt uh at a at a younger age.

Oliver Burkeman: I also think that there's something beneficial in sort of I read somewhere the idea of being sort of being sort of one and a half steps ahead of the reader, right? It's like it's not that I have um understood everything about the world and now I'm passing it on to people who know nothing about the world. It's just that because I have the luxury of the time to explore these things as a job. Um you can maybe you know um it's like sort of uh um holding the flashlight in a on a in among a group of people all making their way down the same uh uh dark mysterious path. Right. I don't know the end. I don't know the destination either, but but maybe I've maybe I've built a flashlight that could be useful for us. Yeah. In the in the process. What it isn't I in my YouTube all the time at the moment I keep getting things coming up in YouTube that use the same title seat thing. Um it took me 40 years to learn what I'll tell you in five minutes, right? I don't know people have seen this kind of cliche and I don't think it's like that. I don't think it's I don't think experience or insight accumulated over time can be passed on to somebody who's just at the beginning of that age life cycle and then they get to skip all the difficulties. I don't think that's how it works, but I think it can be good to have a companion in the difficulties.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Maya asks, "How do you set priorities when the whole list feels like a priority?"

Oliver Burkeman: Practical.

Elise Hugh: Isn't that the question?

Oliver Burkeman: Yes.

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, first thing to say about this, I don't claim this is the whole solution because it's a bit of a rational thought instead of a real emotional response. But it is worth remembering that strictly logically speaking, if everything feels like a priority, then it kind of matters a lot less which one you choose because you're going to be doing something really important um no matter what choice you make. And I I think this actually has a name. I've forgotten the name of this paradox, but it like it exists. It's a thing. Um so to some extent, the very fact that everything feels important should just reassure you like, okay, well, I'm going to spend the next hour on important thing C instead of A, B, D, or E. Doesn't matter. I'll still be doing something important. Um

Oliver Burkeman: beyond that, I have found very useful and I talk about them a bit in the book. any kind of method, any approach to um thinking about organizing your work that limits what they call work in progress. Right? So, you take the 20 incredibly important things that you have on your plate and you say, "I'm focusing on these three for now and I'm not going to focus on anymore until one of them is done."

Oliver Burkeman: And it's not because the other 17 are not important. It's just because I am facing the truth about being a finite human. I'm making these decisions. Obviously, then all sorts of questions arise about like what counts as a completed project because you can't put your family on hold while you do your work projects and you can't put uh you know the leaking pipe in the bathroom on hold while you like go to your job because then the bathroom's going to flood. You have to think about it in creative ways. But that basic insight of like I actually can't do more than a handful of things at a time. So, so I can just see that fact and acknowledge it. And the truth is that moving things through in this way, you get more done and you get things done faster because you're not spending all your days kind of bouncing between 50 of them and making no progress on any of them.

Elise Hugh: Yeah. Yeah. I really like that. Okay. Um, last question from the audience before we have to wrap. Diana GC says, "I particularly like the idea of learning to face the consequences of the decisions we make, but struggle a lot to come to terms with the sacrifices that one needs to make, which leads me to decide that I can't afford to make those sacrifices."

Elise Hugh: My question for Oliver, how does one practice this? How do we trust that we can face whatever comes?

Oliver Burkeman: So, there's a quotation in the book. Each of the days in the book sort of plays off a quotation from someone else. And one of those is from Sheldon Cop, the therapist and writer who famously said, "You're free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences." Mhm.

Oliver Burkeman: Which is a really empowering frame for decision-m I think because it reminds us I'll the short version here because I know time is pressing but that reminds us that like all we're ever really doing in when we face difficult decisions is is choosing which set of downsides we'd like to have. We're not actually a lot of the time we sort of wythe around in indecision because we're waiting for um to come up with a solution that doesn't have downsides. And when you understand that for finite humans there aren't such decisions um that anything you choose is not choosing the other things

Elise Hugh: for sure

Oliver Burkeman: uh and all sorts of other ways in which everything has a downside.

Elise Hugh: Sure.

Oliver Burkeman: That's the perspective shift that makes the difference to me. Right. It's seeing that actually even if you don't make a decision you are making a decision. you are moving into the next phase, hour or week or day of your life. Uh not having you're using it up on indecision instead of going down one of these two paths. You're going down this this other path. And again and again, I don't know if I'm conveying this well enough in the time available, but again and again, I find this kind of negative message to be incredibly liberating. It's like that ship has already sailed, right? producing perfect work, making a decision that doesn't come with downsides, uh finding a relationship that doesn't on some level trigger stuff from your childhood, like all off the table. And it's so great because then you can be like, "All right, now let's get down to the business of of actually living."

Elise Hugh: Yeah, that's a lovely note to end on. Oliver, thank you so much. I have long wanted to speak with you and I'm so delighted that we got to spend

Oliver Burkeman: Oh, thank you. really enjoyed the conversation and thanks everybody. It's been great to be here. Thank you very much.

Elise Hugh: Absolutely.