Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Rachael Xerri: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Rachael Xerri, and today I'm joined by the one and only journalist and bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman, to talk about his most recent audiobook, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Welcome, Oliver.
Oliver Burkeman: Thanks very much for inviting me.
RX: Oh, it's a pleasure. So, I often recommend your work to listeners who are skeptical of self-development audiobooks because I genuinely find that all of your advice meets people where they are instead of presenting some sort of intimidating or unattainable standard of living. I mean, the very first meditation in Meditations for Mortals is called “It's Worse Than You Think—On the Liberation of Defeat,” which definitely got a good chuckle from me. So, my first question is, what motivates you to write about productivity, and more specifically, why did you set out to write Meditations for Mortals?
OB: I think I am very much writing the advice that I have needed to hear, or indeed still need to hear on some level. Now, I think that's true about almost all works of advice or self-help, personal development, but I guess maybe other authors would maybe question that. But to me, I think if you're reading some advice from somebody, it's because they have struggled or are struggling with that stuff. What I wanted to really focus in on in Meditations for Mortals is that gap between knowing what it is you should be doing or want to be doing, or the way you want to be showing up for life, and actually doing it. You know, actually making it happen.
I think a big danger there, actually, can be that people read a book or they come up with a plan or discover a personal philosophy somewhere, and then they turn it into this huge project that it's like, “Okay, this is great. In a few months’ time, when I've got some spare moments and some more energy than right now, I'm going to actually make it all happen in fantastic style.” But obviously there are no spare moments in life, that's not a thing, these days especially. So, really, what I'm trying to do in the book, I think, is in the moment of listening to it or in the moment of thinking about these ideas, can we get across that gap from knowing to actually doing meaningful things?
RX: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic philosophy. So, you're a journalist, perhaps best known for your long-running column in The Guardian called “This Column Will Change Your Life.” I'm curious, how did your research skills come into play while you were writing Meditations for Mortals, and what type of research did you perform?
OB: I mean, one place that journalism has really helped me is just in having a very eclectic approach, so I am extremely happy to go and read ancient Greek philosophy or to try to make sense of the works of Martin Heidegger, but if the most pithy statement of an important point comes from a comedian on social media, I don't want to ignore that. I want to be able to bring it all in. And so the skills that I developed when I was primarily working in newspapers, which happens at a slightly faster pace, I suppose, but you do really just have to go and vacuum up everything that there is to know and that's been said on a particular topic, instead of what might be a more academic approach of going first and foremost to only the canonical sources. So, there's that. I think also it's helpful as an author to be able to meet deadlines. My editors might question how good I am at that skill, but I'm certainly better at it than I would've been without that journalistic training.
RX: Definitely want to touch on deadlines and hitting specific goals in a bit, but I find your response really interesting as far as where you draw sources of inspiration, and you said you might be as willing to draw from a comedian as you would, say, a stoic philosopher. So, how much would you say philosophy does come into play in your work?
OB: Well, I think on some level it is philosophy itself. That's not to be grand and say that I think I'm dealing with insights that other people couldn't necessarily reach or anything. I think it's just that we are all doing philosophy in a way when we reflect on our lives and try to figure out how to close that gap between what we feel they could be or should be, and what they are. If you go all the way back to the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, like the stoics you mentioned, there wasn't this division between intellectualizing and therapy, between the self-help side of things and the more academic side of things. This was all one thing. It was intended to help you live better.
"We are all doing philosophy in a way when we reflect on our lives and try to figure out how to close that gap between what we feel they could be or should be, and what they are."
So, one of the things I really enjoy doing is taking philosophy that might be a little bit more obscure or difficult to access and finding the ways in which it really has a direct application to how you deal with your to-do list feeling like it's got 10,000 more things on it than you're going to be able to do in a day. Or how you handle really difficult life decisions, where you can't seem to see the way forward. Or procrastination, or distraction, all these things. These have been deeply explored by people for centuries, not always in an accessible form, but I think it's just another version of what we're all doing when we try to thoughtfully figure out how to live, really.
RX: That really resonates with me, and as someone who has personally and professionally devoted years of my life to self-improvement and well-being and recommending wonderful self-improvement content such as your works to audiences, I really find your philosophy around acceptance and letting go of perfection to be just utterly freeing. I wonder, was that your intention, and what types of audiences do you have in mind while you're writing?
OB: Yeah, no, I'm really glad to hear that, and as I said, I sort of start with the audience of myself. I don't think it stops there, but I am pursuing, I guess, a really strong desire to live in a way that is calm and peaceful and not stressed, but at the same time, welcomes being meaningfully productive, doing things, being ambitious. There's often a sense I get of a choice that has to be made between “Well, are you going to take the route of just sort of being chilled-out, or are you going to take the route of being very stressed and accomplished?” And I really hope that one can choose chilled-out and accomplished.
So, what I'm really driving at as a sort of guiding philosophy there is that we're really prone—people like me anyway, and I think anyone who sort of considers themselves a little bit anxious, little bit maybe falls into the category of what psychologists call insecure overachievers, which I think is a lot of people who are drawn to this kind of work—we're very prone to telling ourselves that we're on the way to really getting on top of things, getting sorted out, really knowing what we're doing in our careers or as parents or as spouses, whatever it might be, but we're not there yet. There's something we've got to fix in ourselves first. I think that one of the things I'm focusing on in the new book is how easily that holds us back from just diving in and taking action. And how the kind of surrender that you need in order to take action now and be willing for it to be imperfect and done without knowing what's going to happen, and done in a state of confusion and all the rest of it, yeah, it is a defeat in a way. It's the defeat of that perfectionistic fantasy, but it's the kind of defeat that leads to real and real-world action and a much more meaningful life, so it's not really a defeat in the long run.
RX: I will definitely take that label of insecure overachiever. I think we've all been there at least at some point in our lives and professional careers. I guess this leads me into another burning question that I have, which is, in what ways do you apply the principles from your audiobooks to your own life? I know you talk about arriving at the place where you're writing about self-improvement and time management because of your own experiences, but how do you then take what you've written and incorporate it into your own routine?
OB: Well, I think one obvious place to start is just that writing a book is kind of a big creative goal, and it brings all the risks of distraction and procrastination and feeling like your self-worth is all tangled up in it in complicated ways. So, the act of writing is actually one of the places where I feel like my own personal development gets forced into happening, in a way, because it's the only way that I find that one can write. So, a real willingness, especially in the early stages of a writing project, a real willingness to relax one's own standards. I hasten to add that I think the end result is really good [laughs]. I'm not trying to tell you this book is just nothing but flaws, but all creative work is on some level nothing but flaws, and I think that starting from that willingness to be like, “Okay, you just have to make a mess on the page initially before structuring it and working on it and polishing it up.”
That is a place where I challenge my own tense and stressful perfectionistic fantasies all the time, and it has another strange effect, which is I really do find myself thinking during the course of the rest of my life about the ideas that I've been writing about. If I'm going to write a chapter, as there is one in Meditations for Mortals, about rethinking the nature of interruption and not always going through life kind of braced against people interrupting you, being willing to be open to the idea that at least some interruptions are to be welcomed, if I've been thinking about that in my morning writing, it's going to make me more of that kind of person when my young son bursts into the room when I had been planning to be doing something else with that moment. It keeps you honest. You have to on some level live these imperfectionist ways of being in order to be able to write about them, I think.
RX: I love that your work always embraces the imperfection of being, as you so eloquently said it. It seems that all of the conventional advice hammers in the importance of consistency and discipline, and that said, your latest audiobook also provided me with my new favorite word, which is “daily-ish.” I would love to talk about how radical this idea is.
OB: Yeah, I love this idea and obviously credit, as I say in the book, for the word itself goes to Dan Harris, the podcaster and meditation teacher. He's using it in the context of meditation, following your breath, and I'm widening it out to the whole of life. Consistency is good, and in a general sense I think it's been a really positive change in the way we read and talk about this stuff in the personal development space, from taking massive, revolutionary action for a couple of days or something, to the sort of quieter and more persistent and patient approach to developing habits.
"We're all in the same boat as humans, doing our best within our built-in limitations in a world of infinite inputs and demands and unpredictability."
But consistency can become, as you imply in your question, really sort of brittle and really a very stressful and overdisciplined way to approach things. If you tell yourself you've absolutely got to do your new habit every single day, obviously that's going to make it much worse when life gets in the way or your moods get in the way, and one or two days you can't do it. So, we need to find ways to discipline ourselves, but in a way that is kind to ourselves, and in a way that accepts the reality of the unpredictable world that we all live in.
Daily-ish is a really good way of doing that, because you might be tempted, if you're the kind of person who values discipline, to say that's letting yourself off the hook. It's too self-indulgent. But it doesn't. Everyone can tell that daily-ish does not mean “just do it whenever you feel like it.” If you do something two times in a week, you haven't done it daily-ish. But in a really busy time in your life, four days might get to count. Surely, five and six count. It's a much more resilient way of changing because it doesn't devalue those weeks when you did it four times. If your new goal is to sit down and meditate or go for a brisk walk and you did it four times out of seven, that's very far from nothing, and it's really ridiculous to embrace systems of personal change that systematically devalue progress that you're making in that way, I think.
RX: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that statement. I think rather counterintuitively when really perfectionistic people fail at doing something really consistently, they're somewhat less likely to go back to try to achieve that goal. It's definitely something that has impacted me in my own work throughout the years. It sounds like it's something that you might be able to relate to as well. What advice do you have for someone who is maybe stuck in that cycle of starting and stopping?
OB: Well, I think it's all part of the challenge of perfectionism in all its different forms. On some level, the central idea in this book is that perfectionism takes many forms, so it might be the standard kind, which is demanding a level of output from yourself that is perfect. But I think people-pleasing is a form of perfectionism. People feel the need to have perfect confidence that everybody around them is feeling positive towards them. Certain kinds of worrying or an attempt to have perfect confidence about the future. So, they all can be seen as attempts to get a kind of control, a sense of security about life that just isn't open to human beings, right? It's just not part of what a finite, limited human being gets to experience.
I actually think when you see that, when you really do realize, “Oh, I'm never going to be completely confident about a future. I'm never going to produce work that is absolutely as perfect as what I'm capable of imagining. I'm always going to have too much to do. I'm never going to completely understand what I'm doing as a parent or a partner or anything else.” It's not only relaxing, it's actually liberating to allow action to happen, to get off that stop-start cycle and just do some of the things that you know matter in your life, not because you're leading up to some paradise where you're going to be doing them absolutely perfectly and with ease, but just because life is short and you're here, and you're using some of your hours to do something meaningful, and that is wonderful. That is the goal. To spend your whole life waiting for the perfect time is kind of, by comparison, a little bit tragic.
RX: Let's talk about another source of stress in all of our lives. You mentioned the personal—family, work constraints we're putting on ourselves or our own self-limitations. But if we focus on the external for a second, there is so much going on in the world, and one of your meditations is about staying sane while the world is a mess. So, there's a lot for humans to be concerned about these days. We have politics, the environment, war, advancements in technology. What tips do you have for staying focused without losing your mind?
OB: It's a good question. I think it's really important to understand that the nature of the attention economy that we live in today, the nature of the connected world we live in today, is such that, if you're the kind of person who in any way cares about the world at large, if you care at all about the world beyond your own four walls, you're going to be implicitly asked to care about everything, maximally, all the time. We're exposed to information about human suffering around the world on a scale that the greatest saints in history never had to contend with, in the pre-digital era. That's got a lot of positives. We get to know about things and we can do something about them, but it can be completely paralyzing and overwhelming. So, one of the arguments I make in the book is that we really do have to learn, I think, cultivate, to not feel guilty about actually withdrawing our attention from a large number of those.
I'm not one of these people who says, "Don't read the news, just ignore it all, get on with your own life." I am someone who says, "Pick your battles." If there is a cause that is really dear to your heart and that brings you alive and that you can do some volunteering for or give some charitable donations for, that's wonderful, but the risk is of spending all day doomscrolling, imagining that by doing so, you're somehow helping, and all you're doing is adding an extra miserable person to the planet when you didn't need to, and it doesn't help the other miserable people for you to be miserable in that way. So, I actually think a willingness to withdraw a bit from big events in the news and focus on maybe one cause or one charitable cause, people should feel permission to do that. You are helping that way.
RX: Pick your battles is also wonderful advice heading into the holiday season where we'll be gathering with loved ones. What do you think people are going to need help with next?
OB: [Laughs] That's a big question that could go in many different directions. I really think that just looking at the culture at large and politics and just everything, it's in many ways the same things that it has been for centuries, millennia, but just turned up to 11 in a sort of wild way. I think we're going to have to get better and better at stewarding our attention and sort of taking responsibility for where we apply it, which is a big ask because it's not a fair playing field, the attention economy. So, asking people to do it themselves is a difficult thing, but I think we have to.
"There is something important about the fact that we retain the capacity to be surprised by reality. I think it's pretty essential to a meaningful and enjoyable life."
An idea I've always had difficulty with—if I'm honest, when I have difficulty with some self-help idea is usually when it makes me cringe, it's usually a sign that it's really that I need it. There's a little bit of this in Meditations for Mortals. I think there is a degree of, you could call it self-compassion, you could call it kindness towards yourself, or just kind of friendliness towards oneself, which is actually getting lost. People very readily point out all the ways in which we live in a narcissistic culture, and I think that's true in certain ways, but it coexists with an awful lot of people not really liking themselves very much. It doesn't help anybody. It makes life more miserable. It holds people back from connecting with each other and making the connections that make life worth living. I hope that one of the things I'm doing in this book is, as well as offering tools and techniques for acting and accomplishing things sanely, just showing the degree to which, on some level, we're all in the same boat as humans, doing our best within our built-in limitations in a world of infinite inputs and demands and unpredictability.
RX: Yeah, in such a demanding world, what I love the most about Meditations for Mortals is that you're inviting listeners to partake in a daily, or daily-ish, practice that doesn't really take long at all. It's just one meditation on most days. It's honestly a little bit of an ego boost being able to cross off “meditate” or “work on myself” from my to-do list in such a short amount of time. What other simple tips do you have for achievable progress?
OB: One of the things that I write about in one of the chapters is the idea of the grace and pleasure of keeping a “done list.” Balancing your to-do list of things yet to be completed—which, when you think about it is sort of, by definition, infinite, right? There will always be more things that you could do and haven't done, and balancing that with a list on which you put the things that you've already accomplished through the day, it gets longer as the day goes on, but it's supposed to get longer, so you get a kind of satisfying record of what you've done.
That's a small example. I talk in another part of the book about what I call the three- to four-hour rule for creative work and for any work, really, that involves thinking, which is a lot of us these days, knowledge work. If you have the autonomy over your time to do this, I highly recommend trying to ring-fence three or four hours for that core work in the course of a day. It turns out, looking back over history, so many authors and artists and scholars and scientists have zeroed in on this particular length of time. But then at the same time, not worrying if the rest of the day is shredded into ribbons by interruptions and by unpredictable happenings, and finding that balance between living intentionally and not trying to live so intentionally that the reality in which we are all embedded feels like a terrible problem when it happens, when you don't get to be this total dictator of how your day unfolds.
RX: So, would you say balance is really key?
OB: Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a constant navigation. I use this metaphor at one point—our situation as humans is like being on a little kayak on a river, as opposed to some big superyacht where you can be very calmly confident of your route and program it into the computer. We're just constantly in this vulnerable position of being right here, not knowing what the future holds, just being able to steer as well as we can. And it's a question of balancing the fact that we have ambitions for our lives and we have decisions of the ways we like to be, and we do want to put those into practice. Balancing that with the fact that this all takes place in a world that is in so many ways so completely beyond our individual control, and always will be, and we actually—this is another part of the book—but we actually wouldn't want it any other way. There is something important about the fact that we retain the capacity to be surprised by reality. I think it's pretty essential to a meaningful and enjoyable life.
RX: Speaking of vulnerability and being surprised by reality, what's it like to narrate your audiobooks after you've spent so much time crafting them? Are there ever any moments that surprise you while you're reading your work?
OB: I really enjoy the audiobook recording process. I don't know if that's universally true for authors, but for me it's very pleasurable because the kind of agony and anguish of putting those sentences together is all in the past. Usually, I'm not as religious about it as I should be, but usually I have read out what I have written to myself in private, so I'm not surprised by something not reading well in audio form. The thing that does happen sometimes is that I can feel deeply involved in the work of some author or philosopher and realize that I have never said their name out loud or never been absolutely sure how to pronounce it. So, there are all these moments in audiobook recording where you're stopping and chatting with the producer and checking to be absolutely certain that a complicated name is being pronounced properly, which is really strange because these people live inside my head and yet it's not until the recording that I've actually had to vocalize it. And just generally, I think it's such a useful process for me personally to kind of feel my way back into that writing and into the ideas. I do find it quite, you know, as I do as a listener to audiobooks, there's something sort of intimate about that whole audio experience.
RX: It's actually quite refreshing to hear you say that you love the audio recording experience, and I do think it translates really well into your work because we love listening to what you have to say. It is an intimate experience, and it's also a very relatable and enjoyable experience for us as the listeners as well. I know earlier you were grappling with saying that your work is good or that Meditations for Mortals is good, and I'll just take the pressure off and say it, that I do personally recommend Meditations for Mortals. I know it's gotten at least two people on my team to listen as well. So, I would love to know what you're working on next.
OB: Thank you [laughs]. Well, to be completely honest, I'm in that phase around a book where it's sort of just beginning to get out into the world, and a lot of what I'm doing is around the book. I do have just the faintest glimmerings of what might be coming next, book-wise, and I'm not being coy in not sharing them, it's just that I'm not sure the sentences would even make sense if I tried to express them.
The other thing I do, and it's been a really important part of working on this book and it will be an important part of any further books, I think and hope, is this email newsletter that I write every couple of weeks. I've been completely fascinated by that form of interacting with an audience. You press send on some pretty raw thoughts that have not been properly worked out yet and thousands of people receive it and quite a few of them tell you what they think about it. I mean, it's overwhelmingly positive, but often it's kind of, “Oh, well, have you thought of this? Have you read this book? This happened to me…” and offers a different take on it. So that's sort of, much more, actually, than when I was working for newspapers, so I don't know what explains that, but it much more feels like one is in a group of people and working things out in real time with other people. So, I'm working on that as well.
RX: That's wonderful. How can we sign up for your newsletter?
OB: You go to my website, oliverburkeman.com.
RX: Okay, I will be doing that. Thank you so much for joining us today, Oliver. And for those of you who are listening in, you can find Meditations for Mortals and Oliver Burkeman's other audiobooks on Audible.
OB: Thanks so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
RX: Thank you, as did I. This was really lovely.
