Oliver Burkeman on mortality, acceptance and imperfectionism
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Oliver Burkeman on mortality, acceptance and imperfectionism
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September - when we’re almost as likely to be trying to reform ourselves as in January - is the perfect moment for Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals.
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Please note, this is an automated transcript and as a result
there may be errorsKatherine May: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, good evening, good morning if you're not in the UK where it is grey and threatening to rain a little bit. Um, I hope you're okay. Um, I am a very, very tired human being today, so we have the right guest on tonight. Um, I had a little party this weekend to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary.
Katherine May: And as you all know, like, I'm not really sure about parties as an entity, and I had a really nice time, and everyone I loved was in the room, and some people unfortunately missing. But my god, it was really tiring, and I have the world's biggest social hangover right now. However, I'm excited to see you all here, it's really lovely.
Katherine May: Um, and I am just going to invite Oliver Burkeman on stage, semi competently. Look at that, I didn't make a big fuss about it this time. [00:01:00] Things are looking up, guys. Hi Oliver, it's nice to see you here. Now, look, before we start, can I clear up how to pronounce your surname? Because someone told me a while ago it's Burkeman and not Burkeman.
Katherine May: Please tell me I'm not being an idiot.
Katherine May: It's just got two syllables. Um, I thought so. My God, I shouldn't listen to other
Oliver Burkeman: people. I think I did one high profile ish podcast a while ago where it may have got pronounced right or wrong because I've come across this before. That E is just a human problem and shouldn't be there because it's Well,
Katherine May: I'm going to do it right from now on anyway, sorry.
Katherine May: It is so lovely to have you here. And, um, I just, it always strikes me that we have loads in common, actually. Perhaps we'll dig into that later. Um, but we are talking about the very beautiful looking Meditations for Mortals, um, which, um, is it out now or is it about to come out?
Katherine May: No, it's out. It's been out for, well, [00:02:00] 12 days.
Oof, 12 days. Wow. So you're feeling exhausted by now. Um, would you like to start us off by reading a bit from it and then we will, we will get into it.
Oliver Burkeman: Sure. Okay. I'll just read. I might as well, if we're starting with the reading, read from the beginning. I've got the American edition here, which is very bright orange.
Oliver Burkeman: Oh yeah. I have that one too. They just came in yesterday. So I'm, uh, that's why I've got them here. Okay. Lovely. So this is from the introduction, which is called The Imperfect Life. This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you're never going to sort your life out. It's about how marvellously productive you become when you give up the grim faced quest to make yourself more and more productive, and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you'll never get around to more than a handful of them, and that, strictly speaking, you don't absolutely need to do anything.
Oliver Burkeman: It's about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is. How much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from [00:03:00] others, and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.
Oliver Burkeman: In short, it's about what changes once you grasp that life as a limited human being, in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities, isn't a problem you've got to try to solve. The 28 chapters in this book are intended as a guide to a different way of taking action in the world, which I call imperfectionism.
Oliver Burkeman: A freeing and energising outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren't obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you'll finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment filled life.
Oliver Burkeman: And never more so than at this volatile and anxiety inducing moment in history. [00:04:00] If you decide, this is a little bit technical for reading the book, but I'll read it. If you decide to read this book at the suggested pace of one chapter per day or abouts, my hope is that it will function as a four week retreat of the mind in the midst of daily life, a way of actually living this philosophy here and now and doing more of what matters to you as a result, instead of mentally filing it away as yet another system you might try to implement one day should you ever get a moment to spare.
Oliver Burkeman: After all, as we'll see, one main tentative in perfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be out of the way, so that you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now. So I sincerely hope you find this book useful.
Oliver Burkeman: To be completely honest with you though, I wrote it for myself.
Katherine May: Do we ever write books for anyone other than ourselves? I'm not sure. Um, Oliver, a couple of people have said they're finding you a little quiet. Is there anything you can possibly turn up? I'm not, [00:05:00] um, I don't know, but, um, Possibly not, but, um, Oh, that is, that's way louder.
Katherine May: I have, yeah, that's, that's much better. Thank you. I can hear that. Volume
Katherine May: is already high. Oh, okay. All right. Sorry about that.
You're perfect. Don't worry. Um, I could hear you.
Katherine May: I could have, I could have, I could have
Oliver Burkeman: stopped you, but anyway, whatever. I'm not going to read it again. So it's really fine.
Katherine May: I think it'll, I think it'll record fine.
Katherine May: Cause I could hear it, but obviously it's, it's going funny, but yes. So I, I love the way that you have, um, well, I mean, I love the way that you've structured this as a sort of process. But I wondered, I wondered what your narrative arc was really at coming to this angle on, on the self help kind of genre.
Katherine May: Um, because it's been a bit of a journey for you, hasn't it? I think you began by, you began by sort of being really interested in it, but you've, you've gone on a real journey to get to this perspective on how we look after ourselves well. [00:06:00]
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, the short version is that my first sort of, engagement with writing about it was this column for, uh, The Guardian that I stopped doing a couple of years ago, a few years ago now, but started almost, wow, extraordinary number of years ago.
Oliver Burkeman: Um, it did for more than a, more than a decade. Um, which definitely was, it, it definitely was like a journey from cynicism to, towards sincerity for me. I sort of started off thinking that I would just spend a few months mocking bad self help on a weekly basis. Um, and then And of course, I mean, firstly, I think some of that mockery reaction is a defense mechanism about when it comes to talking about things that one is uneasy talking about.
Oliver Burkeman: On the other hand, you know, there's a lot of rubbish in the world of self help, so there was certainly [00:07:00] grist for the mill. But the other thing is that I, in a sort of low key way, I think I'm quite sort of, I like to be provocative in what I'm writing. And it soon dawned on me that actually, if you're writing a column about self help for the readers of The Guardian, Saturday magazine, it's, it's much more, much more radical and prerogative than, than being rude about it is suggesting that there might be some value in it.
Oliver Burkeman: Uh, and, you know, I think, I think even at the early days of that, I would not have denied that I was, you know, sort of backing through sardonic humor into Into sincerity. And also to issues that I needed to, you know, think about and confront, right? So I don't think, um, just occasionally, um, as an event or something, someone would say to me like, Oh, I think you're just using all this as kind of therapy.
Oliver Burkeman: Like they'd got my [00:08:00] number and I think all along I would have been like, yes, obviously. Like that's, that's, I think I knew that at the beginning, but it became much more, uh, the case. And then, you know, You know, I don't know I can, I don't know what direction to go with this in really, but, but, um, I sort of became, and now I'm at the point anyway, where it seems like there's a way of writing about this material, like directly, um, not, not sort of couching it in something else and not being necessarily needing to always be sarcastic about it.
Oliver Burkeman: That is, at the same time, like avoids what I want to avoid, which is the idea that these are sort of, you can sort of, that I've got any sort of plug and play answers to life or that there could even be them. So I was trying to sort of, yeah, I don't know, I'm tailing off there, but in the new book I'm trying to sort of make it, like you say, make it sort of, [00:09:00] Something that could be like an active ingredient.
Katherine May: It's like you've come, you've almost come full circle, but without losing the sort of air of cynicism about the original material. But I mean, like for me, I, I've always found self help books really magnetic and not because I believe in them, but because I sort of, you know, like some people are attracted to really trashy fiction or, you know, kind of film like pulp films or something.
Katherine May: Yeah. I, I've never been able to not read a self help book if I've got access to one, because I'm sort of, I think, because I think the urge towards them is really valid, like we, we lack, we lack any kind of guiding, clear guiding structure in this world that would tell us what to do, and it's really understandable to want to be told what to do.
Katherine May: But then, I kind of get really entranced by how people will step into these positions of [00:10:00] authority that if you think about what they're saying for more than a couple of minutes, they can't possibly believe what they're saying. They cannot possibly. And then the third thing that makes me cross is that there's this sort of brutality to them.
Katherine May: I know sometimes you just got to hate read things, but there's this brutality that. That often comes into them sort of structurally knitted into the book that's, that pre predicts that people won't be able to stick to it and starts to say if, if this doesn't work for you, it's on you for these reasons, you'll have done this, this, this or this.
Katherine May: And I, for some reason, I find that really engrossing.
Katherine May: Yeah, yeah. Like these people are making a lot more money than you and I, let's be clear on that.
Katherine May: Yeah, no, it's a bit of a, it is a bit of a horror show. But,
Oliver Burkeman: um, I guess, you know, I've, maybe this is a, one way I've sort of found myself thinking about it is, there is a kind of, uh, self help book that is just like [00:11:00] a list of, you know, steps that you should follow and then you can enjoy the same great success that the author thoughts to have experienced.
Oliver Burkeman: And like, sometimes that's just fraud, but I think other times, even if it's well meaning, you know, if someone's gone on a huge lifelong emotional journey and they've come up and they've come to several conclusions, like just telling you the conclusions isn't helpful. helpful thing to do. You have to go on that journey.
Oliver Burkeman: Then there are the books that kind of shift your perspective, which I think is ultimately a much deeper and more practical. Sorry, people can't hear my dog howling. Sorry, everybody. And I sort of wanted to try to I don't know, I'm, I'm not sure I've even fully articulated what I'm trying to do in this recent book, but it's this new book, but it's more like, could you somehow find a way to structure a book such that it might let people marinate [00:12:00] in a few perspective shifts in the midst of daily life, in a way that they might actually sort of take root and affect action on a sort of granular level, instead of become like, even the best self help books that, that have that sort of quality of setting out a whole system for living better, even if it's a good system and science backed and all the rest of it, it's just completely prone, with me anyway, to this problem of like, okay, I'm going to really, really like, take notes on this and figure out the essence of it and then store it up.
Oliver Burkeman: And then, you know, someday in the future, put it all perfectly into practice. And I wanted to try to, I'm always trying to pull the rug out from under that temptation in my own life. And I wanted to kind of make a book that pulled the rug out of that too, in a way.
Katherine May: Yeah, and it does. And what I love about it, you know, there's this kind of 28 day structure.
Katherine May: So it's a little bit like a course, but, but in a very gentle way, you know, and there's something about that, that's saying, look, this is [00:13:00] really slow, incremental change. And it's, it's actually about you minutely shifting your perspective in a few different ways. That will help you to see your existing life as probably okay and maybe tweakable.
Katherine May: Um, I'm so behind that. That's, that feels really true to me, as opposed to 28 days to be wealthy, devastatingly attractive to women, and be able to summon dogs. I don't know, I think.
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, and you know, it's sort of, there is a sense in which it's self undermining, right? So at the end I say like, I hope by now you don't think that four weeks was going to be enough to sort of deal with everything that you needed to deal with in your life that's never going to happen and accepting the sense in which that's never going to happen is the part of the really, the really sort of empowering part of it, I think.
Oliver Burkeman: But I don't know, a lot of it's informed by writing this email newsletter that I've been writing for a [00:14:00] few years now. Partly the specific ideas sort of slightly road tested in that context. And, you know, people have got back to me and I have a sense of what resonates and what doesn't, et cetera. But also just time and again, it seems to me that what people find helpful, like it is, is much more, um, sort of having someone articulate how it is for us as humans.
Oliver Burkeman: than it is, than any particular techniques for sort of solving it. I mean, I have those as well, but like, you know, for making things a little bit better, but I, but I think that sort of, there's something about bringing into consciousness what it really is to feel overwhelmed by to dos, for example, not just because you get to know that everyone else is in the same boat, that that's a part of it, but also just being able to like, see it, as a third, almost, you know, um, [00:15:00] at one remove or something.
Oliver Burkeman: I don't know why that should be, but it does seem like that's the bit that is actually helpful in a way, as opposed to, like, now then do this.
Katherine May: Yeah, well I, and I think one of the insights is that we can, that comes up in your book is that like we can, we can rarely stick with things, even if we make a really good start to them so a lot of systems that you know that I might devour in a, in a self help book will say, Well, from now on, you're going to do this every day.
Katherine May: And it only takes five minutes and it will be completely fine. Um, and you do it enthusiastically for like eight days. And then the ninth and 10th start to feel really heavy. And then the 11th, you just kind of forget. And then we all just quietly walk away from it and never, never see it again. Um, whereas like, tell me, like, talk to me about your approach to meditation, which is much more [00:16:00] gentle on the nervous system, I think.
Oliver Burkeman: Well, I. I write in one of the chapters of this book, Borrowing with Attribution, an idea from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher and podcaster, who, when asked how often, how regularly one should meditate, tells people, uh, daily ish.
Oliver Burkeman: I think there's something really, you know, there's, there's something very important about, the idea of sort of discipline that doesn't turn into this kind of brittle, attempting to sort of, uh, shout at yourself to be absolutely, uh, absolutely consistent. And, you know, people find little workarounds for this.
Oliver Burkeman: I don't know if anyone has read, millions of people have, uh, James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, where he has this, I think, pretty sensible notion that, like, the way to handle [00:17:00] A consistent habit is to say, well, don't ever miss it for two days. Right. And that's kind of, uh, a good reality. Um, uh, you know, reality embracing approach because it suggests that, you know, not every single day is going to work.
Oliver Burkeman: Even that though, I think is probably a little bit ambitious. And I was just thinking, like, I don't think I could do something. And so then you think, well, should it be don't miss three days? And I think the answer is that all these kinds of rules that we try to. impose upon ourselves just need to be kind of held in a different way, right?
Oliver Burkeman: They need to serve us rather than we end up serving the rule. And you can end up serving a rule, even the one that's a little bit more gentle, like don't miss two days. So the great thing about daily ish for me is, for meditation, but also for lots of other things as well, is like, you know what it means in your, intuitively, you know that if you do it once a week, you're not really doing it daily ish, right?
Oliver Burkeman: And you know that in a very [00:18:00] busy week, maybe four times does get to count as daily. as daily ish. And, you know, the, the thing that counts here is not adherence to a rule, right? The thing that counts is that muscle that, that stays supple and strong when you keep on going back to it, right? I mean, if you could, if you fall off the wagon for four days, five days, and then start again, that's almost better than if you hadn't fallen off the wagon, right?
Oliver Burkeman: Because you're developing an extraordinary kind of resilience to just flawed onwards with something that matters, um, instead of like trying to maintain a streak, like a sort of high wire action, then it's all Oh, the phrase maintain
Katherine May: a streak just gave me really sort of triggered weird duolingo anxiety in me.
Katherine May: I do do duolingo every day, but it's often with great resentment and fury at this little Yeah. Hmm. I dunno, I don't, [00:19:00] I don't think it helps, but like, I, I often think that that actually the, the hallmark of a good habit is the eternal restart. Actually. I mean, you know, I, we probably both get asked about writing a lot and I don't think I've ever developed a consistent writing habit, honestly.
Katherine May: Like I, I, that's never happened for me. Oh, that's interesting. But the, yeah, but the positive, I think the positive thing I do. is constantly re start, like constantly go, that's not happening for me now. I'm going to start doing it again somehow. And I'm going to try and do it a bit of a different way.
Oliver Burkeman: So what I want to know about that is, just because I'm fascinated, you can move us off this topic if it's too sort of navel gazing, but like, do you, do you mean that you keep trying to institute different practices, like from now on this many hours a day, or from now on this many words or [00:20:00] something.
Oliver Burkeman: And then you stop. It's like, Oh, you just mean that you don't even have that. You're just like, I'm going to, you know,
Katherine May: I would, I would love to move. I'd actually, I'd love to segue into your three hour, three to four hour rule, which I think is the only thing that is true for me actually, and has been consistently true is that I, I, that is, that is the right timeframe for me to plan to do, but no, I, I mean, I'm much more diffused than that in the.
Katherine May: I will, it's almost like my intention kind of decomposes over time. So I'll start, you know, I don't know, writing a thousand words a day and gradually that will drift. And so then I'll have to have a little think about it and think, well, what's, what's going wrong with this? And then I'll realize that I really like doing it at the kitchen table instead of at my desk, and so that will happen for a few weeks, and then that will drift off.
Katherine May: And then I have to make another change, and that seems to be, like, really consistent in my writing practice over God knows how, like, 20 years now. And, and [00:21:00] when people ask me to talk about writing, I think they find that frightfully disappointing, because they want me to say, Right, here's how you do it. You get up at 4.
Katherine May: 30am, you put in three good hours, you sit here, you drink this much coffee, you write 1500, you know, you do a workout for, you know, you spend an hour journaling first, and like, whatever it is. And actually the truth is, I think the real, the thing that I'm proudest of about my practice is my ability to keep saying, okay, that's not working anymore, it did work and now it doesn't, and let's try something else.
Oliver Burkeman: That's fascinating. You see, I think I'm, I'm similar. I really recognize myself in that, except that I think at least until pretty recently, maybe like writing this book, I probably did think at the beginning of each of those new write at the kitchen table, write a thousand words moments, I probably did on some level believe that that was going to be it forever now.
Oliver Burkeman: And I was going to do that. That's quite touching.
Oliver Burkeman: But the only, [00:22:00] the only measure. Right? Of the only relevant measure of whether what you're doing is a good thing or not is, well, it's two measures. So it's like, do books fall out the other end of the pipe of this system? It's like, yes, they do. It takes a while. And do you consider yourself, and do you spend your, a big chunk of your life doing an activity that is meaningful to you?
Oliver Burkeman: Yes, you do. So, you know, everything else is that's using rules to serve life, as I put it in this book, I think, as opposed to life serving the rule. And it's sort of, Yeah, that, that muscle is a, I'm mixing metaphors, but it's a more sustainable, durable thing than like being incredibly good at writing for two and a half hours, starting exactly at 7am every day.
Oliver Burkeman: Cause that quickly becomes something that you then can't write unless you get to do. And then the moment something changes in your life, [00:23:00] you're, you're, you're. your throne. Yeah.
Katherine May: Yeah. I mean, it is that it does come from an attitude of sort of kindness to myself, really, that I know. And also, I think acknowledging genuinely that sometimes life gets too busy and that and that actually that busyness isn't dissolved by certain habits that actually sometimes you're doing stuff that takes up every hour of the day.
Katherine May: Right. And that's just what it is. That's and that's got to be fine.
Oliver Burkeman: Right. And that really is like my sort of big meta level. point in this book is like, there isn't a, there isn't a secret of mastering being human in the 21st century that you haven't found, that lots of other people have found. And that if you really work hard, you might find, and until you do find, you're kind of being, you're performing inadequately as a member of the species, right?
Oliver Burkeman: That's not, that's not coming. And seeing why that actually isn't depressing is the point. But [00:24:00]
Katherine May: yeah, let's talk about the three to four hour rule because that is so interesting, isn't it, that there's this consistency across loads of different, I mean, great thinkers and like middling thinkers like myself, but, but not, not aiming for the whole day seems to be the secret to great productivity.
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, I think this really applies to any, And if any sort of loosely considered knowledge work, you know, I don't know how you really define that, but any, any work that involves a lot of any, any work that involves, you know, the benefits from focused thinking. Um, yeah, there's this extraordinary pattern.
Oliver Burkeman: Uh, and I give a few of the examples. There are many, many more examples in a book by Alex Pang called Rest. Um, just a, Authors and artists, scientists, mathematicians, composers, all the way across history, when they have the freedom to do it, choosing to spend between three and four hours in every [00:25:00] 24 hour period on the sort of core, the core work that they're doing.
Oliver Burkeman: So actually writing or actually composing, actually doing high level maths in their head, like Henri Poincaré. And not necessarily all in one big chunk, right? And not necessarily at one specific time of day, but, but that amount. Um, and there's some, there's a little bit of sort of quantitative research as well to suggest this isn't just like cherry picking.
Oliver Burkeman: Um, there's something about that, that number that seems to be the right sustainable amount. Um, now, of course, uh, the vast majority of these people had like 10 servants to handle all the other things that life was throwing at them, uh, um, and wives, to put it bluntly. Um, uh, in many of these specific cases, right?
Oliver Burkeman: So Charles Darwin gets to spend the rest of the day wandering through the woods at down house [00:26:00] because someone else is, you know, paying the bills and cooking the meals. So my point is not if you've got, whether anyone's going to have the freedom to work for 48 hours and then do nothing else. It's more to say that for anyone who has autonomy over their time in the sense that they get to organize their day when meetings are and when they're focusing on different kinds of work, which is a lot of people that are certainly not everybody.
Oliver Burkeman: It really makes sense to kind of try to ring fence three or four hours for focus and try to defend it quite aggressively. And at the same time, not to worry very hard about doing that with the rest of the time and to sort of be more okay with the fact that interruptions and serendipity and extra stupid life admin that you weren't planning is all going to fill the rest of the time.
Oliver Burkeman: What I really like about this is that, you know, it seems to me to speak to a sort of realistic amount of. control that [00:27:00] many of us anyway, uh, get to have over the daily schedule instead of, you know, you will see things if you look at, you know, if you, if you go onto YouTube and look up, uh, sort of self help videos, do you, is it just books that you're fixated because YouTube is the place now?
Oliver Burkeman: No, I
Katherine May: don't, don't tell me about that. I need to not know about that. Don't, don't,
Oliver Burkeman: don't go on YouTube. Anyway, you might, if you look up sort of, uh, monk mode, Oh yes, I have, I have, I have. Many, many, many, uh, 22 year old men without, uh, families, yeah.
Katherine May: Ooh, your sound has just cut out. Uh, that's peculiar. I wonder what happened there. I'm going to keep talking to see if Oliver can recover his sound. I
Oliver Burkeman: can hear you, but people Oh, there you are. You're back. You're back. All right.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Oliver Burkeman: All right. Okay.
Who knows what that was? Yeah. Monk mode. [00:28:00] Over enthusiastic young men who've got the secret to the universe.
Oliver Burkeman: Right. And well, and we'll tell you that, you know, you should schedule every single moment of the day, all the way through the day, you know, uh, uh, uh, focus for six months, unbrokenly from eight in the morning to 6 PM and all this stuff. And like, I'm like, uh, you know, it's not going to happen, is it? But also it's just not, it's not consistent with that, that idea of, um, uh, sort of understanding the real limits of the control that you have.
Oliver Burkeman: You wouldn't actually want, I mean, I think that's the other point I'm trying to make here in the book is that actually you wouldn't want the kind of control that would come from having that degree of sovereignty over, solo sovereignty over your time. So anyway, Long way of saying, um, it's sort of staking out those hours.
Oliver Burkeman: If it's something you think you might be able to do in your day. Uh, and, and really not worrying about the fact that it's only, [00:29:00] only three hours doing that in an, in a cumulative way. And of course, if you're trying to write and you've got a day job, maybe it's half an hour every day, maybe it's one hour, but like, it's just extraordinary, obviously, you know, the compounding effects of that.
Oliver Burkeman: We all know are extraordinary.
Katherine May: Yeah, well, that's right. And I, I think that this idea that time can now be packed like a suitcase is a really modern idea, like a really contemporary idea. And it's what we forget when we think about that is about the quality of our interactions and the quality of our thinking and the quality of our work, which is, improved if you make more space around it, rather than just merely thinking about quantity and thinking about all the things you can pack in.
Katherine May: And I, I do, I used to really believe in it too, honestly, like I used to think that I could just, if I could only find the right system, I'd be able to do a million more things. And actually, I [00:30:00] think the human condition is accepting That you, you won't ever be able to do all the things. Like that, that seems to me that the fundamental truth we're all groping our way towards.
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, absolutely. And sort of at the same time as that's completely true, I think that there is also something in the idea that whatever extent to whatever, whatever capacity you do have, one does have to do much more than you're managing to do at a given point. It's often through easing up on systems and optimization.
Oliver Burkeman: and trying to sort of use the will to schedule and process things in that way that one gets there. So, you know, if you can find a space and I really am sensitive to the fact that, you know, there are professional, there are jobs where just people don't have the opportunity to do this, but if you can on any level, and this is in the book as well, right?
Oliver Burkeman: If you can on any level make some space for [00:31:00] like navigating your day through by what you feel like doing at that given moment. That's really powerful because it's so strange when you think about it, that there are so many books full of sort of personal productivity systems that basically say, like, you should completely ignore or squelch your moods and your, the energy levels people have accepted now, right?
Oliver Burkeman: It's okay to talk about having different energy levels at different times of the day. What's not okay to, to talk about is like, I just don't feel like doing that. And yet, if you're a bit gentler towards that, again, not everyone can be, but if you're a bit gentler towards saying, okay, I'm not going to do that now, because I just don't feel like doing it.
Oliver Burkeman: The, the, the attitude that you cultivate, I've found, I've found is actually a more productive one in the long run anyway, because then later on you actually will be feeling like dealing with those, that boring paperwork and you'll do it and you'll harness that energy for that. And you know, [00:32:00] it's weird how it works because you'd assume you would never
Oliver Burkeman: the genuine desire and like that. But, but I think that's partly because we spend so much of our lives not trusting our genuine desires for what we want to do. There will always
Katherine May: be a moment when you want to pay your credit card bill. Apparently it will happen.
Oliver Burkeman: I think that's true, right? On some level. I mean, maybe it's not comprehensively true, but like there's this strange notion that we have, and that certainly has been what drew me to a lot of very controlly top down time management techniques in the past.
Oliver Burkeman: If you just let your true self be, you'd just be a terrible person and an irresponsible member of society. That's not true and you wouldn't be interested in these issues if it was true anyway.
Katherine May: Yeah, that's right. So let's talk about death
Katherine May: Because [00:33:00] actually and I I do I do speculate that we are our role in life is to be like the English people that makes American people think about their own mortality in a really uncomfortable way And I am deeply at home with that role. Like, I'm really, I'm really, really happy to be a memento mori for the world.
Katherine May: But so much of your work is founded on this idea that you're going to die at some point. Can you, can you talk a little bit about the importance of mortality to, to your thinking?
Oliver Burkeman: I can, although I always feel a little bit of imposter syndrome on this question because, um, You know, I have not written any books that are sort of explicitly really about death and dying, right?
Oliver Burkeman: They, I talk about them being about just
Katherine May: how many weeks left until you die. Yeah.
Oliver Burkeman: Because, um, I think, um, you know, [00:34:00] finitude and our limitations of control of amount of time of knowledge about the future, all the rest of these are all sort of imposed by the fact that we are finite creatures, limited in the present, and then you die.
Oliver Burkeman: But Except for like one chapter in my book The Antidote years ago, I have not really, you know, again, I don't sort of, I'm not sort of focused on the sort of actual sort of end of life, as it were. And I think on some level, maybe even writing about all this stuff is almost a way to not focus on that or something.
Oliver Burkeman: I don't know. I mean, it's, there's a,
Oliver Burkeman: I do feel like I've developed a sort of, um, uh, bracingly tragic outlook on the human condition that I find very sort of genuinely energizing and rather fun, but I'm not sure that it takes you to the [00:35:00] point of, like, reconciling. to death, one's own or other people's. Certainly in the case of oneself, it just seems too completely incredible to me to really start sort of, um, I don't know how you would put it into words.
Oliver Burkeman: I don't even know what it would mean to be frightened of it because it just seems, this is an outrage that like, uh, life, is going to continue after I'm no longer here. You know, on some level that's just like, it's just like brain explodingly unreasonable. Um, and so, you know, just don't sort of, I, I don't know what to do with that, with that thought.
Oliver Burkeman: What I, what I do think I know a bit more than I did about what to do with is the, is the fundamental ramifications of that, right? The things that would not apply if we lived forever, which would be terrible in a different way. Um, but everything that I'm writing about is sort of suffused with. The fact [00:36:00] of the end.
Oliver Burkeman: Yes. That is that sort of, it's, it's there being towards death, you know, like just to, just to drop high digger into the conversation before. It's, uh, not too much of the hour is advanced, but, uh, but, but it's,
Katherine May: you know, you find it important to hold that fact in your mind, right? That, that our lives are finite.
Katherine May: Finite. That we are mortal.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Katherine May: Um, and that therefore we need to adjust our behavior to acknowledge that. This is not, this is not an eternal situation. We don't have infinite time.
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. And then, absolutely, yes. And then trying to not go to a place that that sometimes goes to, which is a very sort of, looks like taking mortality seriously, but I think is not ultimately, which is saying like, okay, and some people do just look at the title of my book, Four Thousand Weeks and think that's, just assume that's which is like, okay, time is short.
Oliver Burkeman: You've got to really wring value from every minute and spend every [00:37:00] weekend doing, um, incredibly exciting, like adventure sports and travel a lot and do sort of big, amazing, uh, extraordinary things with your, with your life, all of which can be good things to do, but obviously this, well, not obviously to me, there's something about that attitude that hasn't quite pursued this thought.
Oliver Burkeman: as far as you need to, right? It's sort of saying, I'm still somehow going to conquer death just by having lived such a sort of unusual high energy life. And the real liberation, which I would never claim I've more than glimpsed, you know, is, is in seeing like, no, it's worse than that, actually. And even if you were to live that incredibly high octane life, you still would only do a fraction of the infinity of things you could do.
Oliver Burkeman: And actually I find that really freeing [00:38:00] because it means you get to let go of the fight to try to cram and just actually actively be in the things that you're doing now instead.
Katherine May: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's really, really true. And again, it's about that kind of quality over quantity that comes up for me over and over again when I think about these things that it's not about the number of things you pack in, but.
Katherine May: what that awareness of mortality should do for you is to think about the, your, the enjoyment you're taking in your life and the time that you can waste by being miserable at your own ambition. Like the misery that it causes to be an overachiever is, is just not quite worth it really in the long term.
Oliver Burkeman: And even the sense in which the transience gives value to life, right? It always seems that Japanese culture is much better at this than, than them, maybe. [00:39:00] Anglo American culture, but that sort of sense that there's a sort of, and you know about all this from your writing anyway, but there's a sort of a wistful, poignant quality to life when you are aware of the fact that, you know, every moment is for the, only happens once and then it's gone forever.
Oliver Burkeman: That is, that is not just something to reconcile yourself to, but almost something to, to, heighten the experience of life.
Oliver Burkeman: Do you get people that are quite surprised by the content, that expect one thing and have clearly got another?
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, it's a bit early with this book, but 4000 Weeks, definitely, because the subtitle is Time Management for Mortals.
Oliver Burkeman: So it's sort of, you know, that's funny to me, because time management is such a sort of shallow salesy kind of concept. And then, Mortality is such a [00:40:00] sort of deep one, um, because I like the idea of, like, limiting the, I like the implication that it's limited in its audience target only to people who die.
Oliver Burkeman: Um, yeah. Uh, not, not to immortal people. So it's like niching. Very neat.
Katherine May: Very, very niche. Yeah.
Oliver Burkeman: So that's just like amused me. And that was where that subtitle came from. And actually the British hardback, the title was. The subtitle was Time and How to Use It. It wasn't anything to do with mortality. Um, so yeah, you get some people, perhaps more Americans than Brits, I don't know, expecting that it is going to be a more sort of straightforward or on the nose book about time management.
Oliver Burkeman: Um, and then I think you do get people who expect, and this is fair from the title really, that it might be one of those sort of, um, uh, you know, ring every minute of value that you can from your, from your [00:41:00] from your life? Um, I don't know. I never know how to, I have not known how to present. I haven't written many books.
Oliver Burkeman: I'm making it sound like I've written scores, but I, I have never known how to present these things because to me, and I'm sure on some level you're going to agree with me on this, but I'll wait, I'll wait and see what you actually think. Like on some level, the book you're writing at any one time is just like the only book you could write at that time.
Oliver Burkeman: And on some level it's title could be, um, You know, it'd be a very commercially poor choice, but it could be, you know, the present state of my understanding of life by Oliver Burkeman, right? Yeah,
Katherine May: but I love that, but we are almost not allowed to say that, you know, like there's, it's really hard to, I mean, I always, I always say, Everything I write is like my temporary thinking and that's why I love writing a substack and I loved writing a blog before this because I love writing a [00:42:00] work in progress.
Katherine May: I love being wrong. I love changing my mind. Like I love that. that I'm creating temporary work, because how on earth could you declare in any other way on these, like, nobody thinks the same thing over 10 years, surely, um, but I, it's really rare for someone to, to say that, and it's even rarer for publishers to be comfortable with
Oliver Burkeman: it.
Oliver Burkeman: And I think you do have to, you know, not just for publishers, but just for, just as a common courtesy to the reader, you do, as you have done, um, and I have tried to do, come up with a framing that is. you know, that stands alone. And that is a topic that the book is about. And that in 25 years, whatever your views are, will still be the topic that the, that book, uh, was, was about.
Oliver Burkeman: And I think that's, that's just a courtesy really. But I, yeah, I suppose I just mean, you know, I wouldn't even know what it meant to write a time management book or write [00:43:00] a philosophy book or write a self help book, even though what comes out gets categorized as, as one of these. Um, because I'm just like trying to put into words.
Oliver Burkeman: What seems to me to be the deal.
Katherine May: Yeah, no, and like for me, I only ever write books as a learning process as well. I'm really disinterested in talking about stuff I already know because like what's the point of that? That's happened. So I'm always, I'm always on these like journeys when I'm writing a book.
Katherine May: And that, and that means it's always super emotional for me. Like I'm, I'm probably 85 percent through my current book and I'm having about three nervous breakdowns a day right now. You know, like it all just gets too much for you. And I just, I just don't know how I'm supposed to, and I, it's a really brutal way to write a book, but then I will, You know, and I'm sure you've done these too, where you do these like radio tours of 40 people interviewing you in a day, when the book comes out.
Katherine May: And, [00:44:00] They, those people are doing loads of interviews a day as well, so they don't have time to read the book. And so they will say, so what are your three top tips for getting through winter? You're like, and you're kind of like, oh, well, um, actually in truth, I don't think there's anything much you can do, to be honest.
Katherine May: And I, like, I really think the best thing to do is to accept that You might be accepting negative change here and that's your process and you just hear this like landing at the other end of the line really badly. And, um, yeah, it's like it's really necessary to say the things that we both say, but it's also very, very hard to say them in the kind of climate that's set up to receive books about life and how to live it, which is, you you know, almost universally about trying to receive positive and active messages on, on doing, and doing in order to improve [00:45:00] things.
Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. It's really, it's really true. And I'm sure that your work attracts the kind of response that I'm about to mention. And I'm just thinking about in the context of 4, 000 weeks is like, there is something oversell this, but like you do hear from one does hear from people for whom it's like, This little network of people who subscribe to my newsletter, subscribe to your sub stack.
Oliver Burkeman: It's like a sort of, you know, global little minority of people who actually like sort of benefit from it. And there's a great of some thinking about the world in this way and there's a, there's a real kind of, um, you know, I've often thought that this sometimes people say like when I'm doing things in America, they say, well, Isn't the sort of outlook of this book really?
Oliver Burkeman: antithetical to American culture. And secretly I'm thinking to myself, well, to some extent it is, but if that's true, that's the only [00:46:00] reason it like lands in America, right? Because there is this, this hunger among some subsection of people for something that is not the, that sort of majority view. And then in Britain, it's a bit different.
Oliver Burkeman: Like, I feel like In Britain, I'm often trying to point out that my book is not about just being like sardonically depressed about how rubbish everything is. A place that a certain kind of comic British humour writing and book publishing goes, right? And so I'm just straddling that kind of, you know, I don't know.
Oliver Burkeman: I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere saying American people not to maybe take life too seriously, but to British people not to take life insufficiently seriously or something.
Katherine May: I know, I think we're both stuck on the Azores maybe, like, I know, and I, like I, if you ask a British person, an American person, what my books are about, you'll get completely different answers.
Katherine May: [00:47:00] And in America, I'm seen as like a spiritual writer, which, you know, as you know, being a British person, we would die rather than read a spiritual book, mostly. And in England, I've seen as a nature writer, which I, You know, I, and I'm not really sure I'm either, to be honest. Um, and I pitched wintering as a self-help book, so go figure.
Katherine May: Great.
Oliver Burkeman: Openly, so, yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Katherine May: because I, I, I, you know, I actually said like, I, I love self-help books, and I think they're completely wrong, but I wanna have a go at it ,
Oliver Burkeman: um, fascinating. Yeah. I, I've, I, I think mine, I don't know, they get categorized in different places. Um, this whole category in British bookshops, uh, as.
Oliver Burkeman: British participants who all know exists called, um, Smarter Thinking. Oh, that's only for men, I think. Yeah, quite possibly. I don't know. And it's sort of, well, it's sort of, yeah, it's self help that [00:48:00] doesn't want to admit to being self help or something. But anyway.
Katherine May: Yeah. I've got a couple of questions from the audience and if anyone else has got one there might be time for it too, so pop it in the questions box.
Katherine May: But I'm going to group these two together because, um, I think they go quite well. So Richard asked, um, How has writing the book improved your own life? What adaptations and changes have you made and what are you resisting? And Kay asked, was the process of writing the book meditative? Um, and what was your main takeaway?
Katherine May: So yeah, what, how does your thinking actually impact your lived experience?
Oliver Burkeman: So this has happened now at least with 4, 000 Weeks and this book. I can't really remember whether it happened with The Antidote years and years ago, but um, like I will come up with, this is very me, maybe very male in some sort of stereotypical way.
Oliver Burkeman: I'll leave. People judge that, but like, I will come up with a perfectly good, like, intellectual grasp of [00:49:00] the thing. Like, I'll come up with like, a concept that I think this is really good, and I'll feel quite happy about it. And I'll write a book proposal, and quite, I've, my book proposals and the end result have often, I mean, again, I haven't written hundreds of books, you know what I mean?
Oliver Burkeman: They tend to, be quite similar at the end, more than I think may be the norm from where I started off, because I have this sort of very clear understanding of what I want to do,
Oliver Burkeman: but it's just an intellectual understanding. And then I like, have to like, you know, actually sort of, to write the book properly, you sort of have to actually live into this thing and embody it at least a bit.
Oliver Burkeman: So I always feel like I have to change my personality a bit, you know, at least a bit in order to be able to write book. And actually give some sort of soul, hopefully, to that initial intellectual notion. And the [00:50:00] left brainy thing is what it is, really, isn't it? So that's what it is. Um, so in this case, uh, absolutely.
Oliver Burkeman: And, you know, this is partly a very sort of cliched thing to the fact that 4, 000 Weeks did better than I expected. So I kind of got slightly paralyzed by, yeah, does it have to, does this one have to be successful? Um, If I mess it up, more people watching. I hear you. Yeah, I thought you might resonate. Um, so actually this thing about going, this thing about sort of unclenching and being willing to like do free writing practices that I had formerly massively scorned and been very snotty about, but actually, you know, just let yourself do whatever.
Oliver Burkeman: is there to be done and to work on whatever schedule seems to go with my rhythms and not try to force myself to, like, all that stuff, [00:51:00] a lot of what we've been talking about here, like, I had to actually do it to get this book to, uh, to write, as it were. And, um, and so all of those sort of emphases that are in this book about being willing to be decisive under conditions of almost complete uncertainty, being willing to let things happen, and to let them be easy, and to sort of dare to trust that if you do this bit now, you'll know what to do about that bit later, instead of having to know in advance that you'll feel certain about the whole thing.
Oliver Burkeman: All these things that I'm sort of applying to life definitely all had to be kind of, uh, done in the course of the book, and Actually it was a very tight time timescale. This one between finishing the book and being out promoting the book. Right. It's [00:52:00] really helped in a weird way, 'cause I've still got the aftertaste of that like sense that there's no point in any of this kind of stuff if there isn't enjoyment in it.
Oliver Burkeman: And so I've been going off doing these book events and just actually succeeding in reminding myself, oh, close friends have also reminded me of it, but like, like. There's no point in this unless you're having fun, and also it will be better if you're having fun. So can you just have fun? And the answer is like, things like that.
Oliver Burkeman: Things that I'm still a little bit nervous about, like certain kinds of public speaking are just so much easier when you think I'm just, I am going to be open to enjoying this . Yeah.
Katherine May: Yeah. Oh, I, I just, I think I am profoundly changed by the books I write and I, like, I, that's, that's their intention for me.
Katherine May: But I do, I do deviate very far from my proposals most of the time, like to the extent that I often write a completely different book to the book I [00:53:00] proposed. I write that book first. And then I trash it and then I write, you know, another one that's maybe got some sort of lineage in it, but yeah, I'm, I'm very lucky to have editors who tolerate that and who are fine with it.
Katherine May: But I think I would be a living nightmare for some people. Anyone with any control issues could not work with me because I'm like, yeah, no, I just got bored of that while writing it. So I think, I think I'm just going to do something else. Like, honestly, I'm just going to move on now. Um, there's another question, uh, from Fiv, who says, um, you've obviously been writing about this subject for a long time, but is your focus shifting as you age?
Katherine May: Like, to what extent does age change this kind of project of the self? Does it, is there a mellowing? Do we mellow?
Oliver Burkeman: You know, I'm always, I never know how to think about this because I think, and I know not in suggesting it's implied in the question, but there's definitely my sort of inner critic Are
Oliver Burkeman: [00:54:00] these all just changes that naturally you come across as you get older? That doesn't mean that there's no role for someone to articulate them in print, of course. But, like, you know, have I had some interesting idea about our finitude or have I just entered my 40s in the case of 4, 000 Weeks? Very much more than entered my forties now.
Oliver Burkeman: Um, uh, we'll be leaving them soon. Um, so, you know, and is it just almost like a stage of life thing? And I think it is a stage of life thing. I think like, um, you know, it's a lot when I'm railing in a hopefully not too unpleasant way against the tendency to think of life as all coming later. And the real meaning of life is coming later, for example.
Oliver Burkeman: And that's a much more forgivable perspective if you're 20, but to think that like the real moment of life is coming later, it's still not technically true, right? All life is in the present, but it's much more forgivable. And then of older you get, [00:55:00] the more it's just like, when is this time going to come when I've got everything sorted out and it's all working problem free?
Oliver Burkeman: And eventually sort of the disillusionment of a very productive kind and positive kind starts to, starts to set in. Um, so I think in that sense, it's definitely a life cycle thing. So it's hard to tell from inside an individual life, isn't it? Whether, whether one is sort of mellowing through age or actually understanding things better or whether they're somehow the same, the same thing.
Oliver Burkeman: And I think there's a bit of use in articulating that and responding, arguing with my inner critic now. So there's a bit of, there's a bit of use in, in responding to that. in offering it to people who are just like half a step behind in their lives or in their understanding, not sort of preaching as a cult leader, but just saying, like, if you're ready for this, this is what comes next.
Oliver Burkeman: Sometimes people have said to me that this has [00:56:00] happened surprisingly often is that somebody who I assume is my age and usually older than me has really appreciated 4, 000 Weeks or the new book, but this is mainly 4, 000 Weeks, and then bought a copy for their adult children who are going off to university.
Oliver Burkeman: And I always think like, well, good luck with that. Thank you for the purchase. But I'm not sure if my dad had bought me a book and said like, here, this is how to live better. Um, at that age that I would have responded well at all. And that might be because you don't want advice from your parents, but also might be because it is a life stage thing.
Katherine May: It is. I think, yeah, I think you're right. There is a, there is a life stage thing. And I think that. I mean, I, you know, I wouldn't ever go back to my twenties. Like, in retrospect, they were awful. And I'm, I really, I really like the more settled perspective that I'm allowed to have in my forties. It's just so much nicer and I'm allowed to, on a fundamental level, [00:57:00] admit that I can't do everything.
Katherine May: Life is just so much less about work than I thought it was and hard work and willpower. I hate willpower. Anyway,
Oliver Burkeman: I hate willpower. I
Katherine May: hate willpower. That's the conclusion of this whole conversation. Oliver, this has been a joy. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you could make time to do this. And, um, it's just a fantastic book.
Katherine May: I'm going to wave it at the camera again for everybody to see. Um, Meditations for Mortals, which is just the book that everybody needs. I think, particularly in September when we're all a bit like itchy and back to school and this will, this will calm your nervous system, uh, while you're, you know, just learning loads of stuff.
Katherine May: So thank you. Thank you so much. And, um, hope to see you again another time.
Oliver Burkeman: Brilliant. Yes. And I hope we meet. in real life. Yes, we will [00:58:00]
Katherine May: definitely try to meet in real life. We'll have a cup of tea one day.
Katherine May: Exactly. All right. Well, thank you everybody as well. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I have been looking at your comments on the way past.
Katherine May: It's been lovely to see you all and um, Next month we're about to announce we're doing a retro classic, um, which is Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost. Um, we like to like maybe once a year do an old book that isn't in the current discourse, um, and I thought that was the perfect one for Halloween, um, but also because everyone should read Hilary Mantel's memoir, like it's, it's, I prefer it to her fiction, but don't say that.
Katherine May: Um, so yeah, so I'm looking forward to that, and we will get your reading guide out about that soon, but for now, thank you very much, and uh, good night.
Oliver Burkeman: Bye everyone.
Bye everyone.
Show Notes
September - when we’re almost as likely to be trying to reform ourselves as in January - is the perfect moment for Oliver Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals.
Katherine sat down to talk to Oliver for her Book Club, and there was one question she was burning to ask: do you confuse lots of readers too?
Oliver, you see, has mastered the art of subverting the self-help genre. It’s not that he doesn’t want to offer succour to people who are struggling, nor that he denies we can change. It’s just that he wants us to understand how unrealistic we’ve learned to be about our capacity to do things. He urges us to accept our imperfections, our limitations, our fundamental humanness.
Katherine's book, Enchantment, is available now: US/CAN and UK
Links from the episode:
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
