How to Use Your Time Well | Oliver Burkeman

I first discovered Oliver Burkeman’s work through his book, 4,000 Weeks, which was a real wake-up call for me. The idea that the average person has some 4,000 weeks to live helped me look at my time on the planet differently, and refocused me on how to use it well. So, I was excited when I saw he had a new book out called Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

It’s a series of short, provocative ideas, essays and thought-prompts, designed to give you new ways to looking at all the different aspects of your life. And, it’s a powerful reframing of how we approach the relentless demands and expectations of daily life.

Imagine you could wake up tomorrow with a completely new perspective – one that didn’t see your human limitations as obstacles to overcome, but as the very portals to a life of deeper presence, meaning and fulfillment. What if embracing your finite nature as a mortal human was actually the key to living an extraordinary existence, right here, right now?

In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore Oliver’s perspective on confronting fears through action rather than avoidance, developing an almost contrarian “taste for problems,” and reframing so-called “interruptions” as simply life happening around you. We explore the surprising liberation in realizing you’ll never have it all perfectly figured out, and the powerful invitation to fully show up for your delightfully imperfect yet extraordinary existence.

If you’re craving more authentic presence, fulfillment and even ease amidst the chaos of daily life, get ready to rethink some deeply held assumptions. Burkeman’s meditations offer a refreshing counterweight to our cultural obsession with grinding, optimizing and pursuing some future ideal of having finally “made it.” Instead, he makes a compelling case for accepting your inescapable human limitations as the catalyst for truly inhabiting the confines of the one precious reality you actually have – this present moment.

You can find Oliver at: Website | X | Episode Transcript

Oliver Burkeman: [00:00:00] You can be incredibly ambitious if that’s what you want for your life within the frame of acknowledging the reality of limitation, it’s when you spend all your energy and time and focus trying to fight your way out of those limitations. I think that you don’t get to focus on the things that matter the most.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:18] So I first discovered Oliver Burkeman’s work through his book 4000 weeks, which was his real wake-up call. For me, the idea that the average person has something like 4000 weeks to live, it helped me look at my time on the planet just differently, and refocused me on how to use it well. So I was so excited when I saw that he had a new book out called meditations for mortals. Four weeks to embrace your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. It’s a series of short, provocative ideas and essays and thought prompts designed to really give you new ways to look at all the different aspects of your life. And it’s a powerful reframing of how we approach the often relentless demands and expectations of daily life. So imagine you could wake up tomorrow with a completely new perspective, one that didn’t see your human limitations as obstacles to overcome, but as the very portals to a life of deeper presence and meaning and fulfillment. What if embracing your finite nature as a mortal human was actually the key to living an extraordinary existence right here, right now? In this thought-provoking conversation, we explore Oliver’s perspective on confronting fears through action rather than avoidance, developing an almost contrarian taste for problems, reframing so-called interruptions as simply life happening around you and so many other rich ideas. We explore the surprising liberation in realizing you’ll never have it all perfectly figured out, and the powerful invitation to fully show up for your delightfully imperfect yet extraordinary existence. So if you’re craving more authentic presence and fulfillment and even ease amidst the chaos of daily life, get ready to rethink some deeply held assumptions. Oliver’s meditations offer a really refreshing counterweight to our cultural obsession with grinding and optimizing and pursuing some future ideal of having finally made it. Instead, he makes a compelling case for accepting your inescapable human limitations as the catalyst for truly inhabiting the confines of the one precious reality. You actually have this present moment. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:32] It’s funny, as I was dropping into the new book Meditations for Mortals, I had this interesting flashback. In a very past life. I was a yoga teacher. I spent about seven years teaching, and I was always looking for things to share with my students, and I stumbled upon the work of Pema Chödrön and one particular book, Comfortable with Uncertainty, which was a series of 108 just short meditations, basically mini-lessons. And I found myself I’d wake up in the morning, I’d read one, and it would just kind of like make me think differently about the day. And I started sharing them with students on a regular basis, too. And as I dropped into your newest book, I had this feeling of sort of a similar experience of these are sort of these short things where there’s something to really think about and to rethink often about the way that we step into our lives. I was wondering if you were familiar with Pema’s work at all. And and I was curious, especially on coming on the heels of the last book, what motivated you to drop into this book and sort of structure it the way you did?

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:03:33] I’m very much familiar with Pema Chödrön’s work. Yeah, I for my interest in in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy more, more generally, one of the things that resonates for me in her work that I think you’re referring to there, and that I really am seeking to be in a tradition of in this new book, I guess it’s sort of phrases and insights or So idioms, analogies, whatever it is that somehow sort of are active in themselves, right? It’s not just like, here’s a good way to live. So remember it and put it into practice later. It’s like something has an effect on you that sort of shifts your perspective, maybe only in a small way in that moment, but in a way that actually enables you to sort of feel that you are in the world in a slightly different way. And ideas in a children’s work about fundamental groundlessness of our situation and things like this, the idea that you might be able to relax in that situation instead of only when you’ve gotten rid of that situation. That kind of idea is very powerful for me, and I think it probably feeds through a little bit what I wanted to really do in this book. I mean, one way of saying what I wanted to do in this book was address a problem that I think a lot of books about personal change and transformation have, including my own, you know, which is that they risk just being like an interesting way of thinking about the world.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:04:55] And then, hey, actually, there are too many emails and too many meetings to put that into practice right now. So maybe one day when I get a spare moment, I’ll really do it. And it never happens because they never are any spare moments. So I’ve structured it, you know, four weeks of very brief daily chapters. The invitation is that you might read one per day. We can talk a bit more about that sort of rhythmic patient quality if you want, but obviously I can’t really control how people read a book that I write, and I don’t think it matters if you don’t do it that way. But the idea is that that would help create some little space in the back of your mind where a new way of relating to the world was taking shape right in the middle of everything that you already have to do, right? So not only once you can put all that stuff on hold. Not only if you can take a sort of four week retreat from life, but right there in how you relate to the daily things that that happen.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:55] And that lands in a in a really effective way in my experience. And I love the idea of offering insights in a way that says you don’t have to blow up your current way of being. You don’t have to sort of like opt-out or retreat and then hope and pray that whatever you learned on retreat, somehow you’re able to bring back into the madness of daily life, which rarely ever happens. Um, and just say like, go ahead, live your life. This is, I mean, relating back to Buddhism. Like one of the things that always has resonated me with that path is the notion that there are actually two paths, you know. There’s the monastic path, but there’s also the householder path. There is this acknowledgement of the fact that for many of us, you know, we’re going to live in society, we’re going to have jobs, we’re going to have relationships, and we’re going to have all the the stress and the complexity. So how do we take these ideas into just our daily lives and be able to live, but maybe with a little bit more peace and ease and grace along the way.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:06:50] Right. And I think there’s a very it’s very tempting to think of that path as second best or something. But I’m always struck I don’t know who first made this point to me, but in the Buddhist tradition and the Christian tradition, in lots of traditions, monasteries and places where people go on retreat are kind of like on some level that’s easy mode, right? I mean, that’s the creation of an environment. That’s all you need to do. And it’s difficult. I’ve done a few really rather short meditation retreats. And, you know, it’s great that people make your food so for you or that you can spend the day doing battle with your inner demons. But there is something about that setup which is kind of this is what makes it easy to try to connect to these kind of this deep level of reality and see things as they really are. I think it’s an extraordinary crucible to try to do that in the context of email and children and relationships and politics. And so, yeah, I wanted to take that seriously here, I guess.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:50] Yeah. I love the blended approach. Pico Iyer, who sort of like, does this alternating back and forth between he spent, you know, over three decades, a lot of time in a monastery, but then he goes deeply out into the world, you know, and just goes and lives in a different place and lives not as a tourist, but among the people, the way that, like everybody else, is living and really is deeply present. And I always think it’s, you know, it would be interesting to be able to, to have both of those experiences and have one inform the other before we deepen into some of the ideas from the book. And I want to kind of cherry-pick some of these from the four different weeks. In the individual days, there is this sort of underlying fabric which I feel like to a certain extent you bring forward from the last book, which is this notion that and this is what you write, the time is never coming when you’re on top of things or finally feel like you know what you’re doing. That is one of these myths that we live by and seem to build our lives around. That is just fundamentally untrue, and yet we hold it so sacredly as being a truth.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:08:49] Yeah, absolutely. And as is always the case with books of this nature, I’m writing about what I’ve personally struggled with the most and possibly suffered from to a more acute degree than than the average, I don’t know, but that feeling that that the moment of truth is coming later and that your job right now is to fix what’s wrong with you, or find the right productivity techniques or get the promotion. You know, it can take so many different forms, but it has that fundamental kind of this is not it. I don’t quite have enough control or knowledge or understanding right now, but it’ll be later on. And what’s fascinating to me is that that’s obviously a very painful and agonizing way to live, because it puts the meaning of life into the future. But there’s also that payoff, right? There’s that sort of secret payoff of like, as long as there’s something that I need to figure out, and I haven’t yet figured out. And I don’t quite have to take full responsibility for the fact that that this is it right now and that, you know, if I’m going to do the things I want to do with my life, they’re going to have to be done in a present moment at some point, maybe not this one, but they’re going to have to be done in a present moment.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:10:00] They’re never going to be done in the future. And really, I guess my move that I find so personally appealing and liberating and that I’m sort of run through all of this book, is that it’s incredibly freeing to see just how hopeless that quest for the time of sorted Outness is. And one of the titles in the book is It’s Worse Than You Think on the Liberation of Defeat. If you think it’s going to be really difficult to get to that time, to be on top of everything, to know exactly what you’re doing, to fully understand relationships, whatever it is. If that’s an incredibly difficult challenge, then that’s a very hard way to live. But if it slips over from incredibly difficult to completely impossible, there’s like an extraordinary shift because then it’s like, oh, oh, I’m trying to do something that humans don’t get to do. And instead of doing that, I can show up fully for this and pour my energy and attention and finite time into the things that matter to me. So that shift from life is very difficult to life is, in a certain sense impossible and therefore in a certain sense, easy. It’s affected me very deeply. Whether I’m communicating what I mean here or not is a different matter. But yeah, I find that very powerful.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:11] Yeah, I do as well. And I keep relating back to Buddhism. But there’s a concept which translates roughly to abandon hope. And when I, when I first heard that, I just absolutely rejected it. I said, that’s terrible. How could you abandon hope? Like there’s a and when I finally understood, it’s really what you’re talking about. Like when in certain circumstances, in certain moments when you stop just waking up in the morning and living for the hope or the expectation that someday this will be better or different, And you basically say, like, what if it’s not? You know, like, what do I do with that? Yeah. And as you described, it’s weirdly freeing in the moment because then you can kind of come back to now and say, okay, so if this is it, how do I make it as good as I can, like now rather than just waiting? And there’s a certain freedom in that.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:11:58] Yeah, absolutely. And for me, it’s very specifically a kind of an active freedom. One of the things that I guess I’m probably trying to do in my writing is, you know, from a therapeutic point of view, is reconcile the part of me that would like peace of mind and stillness with the part of me that is ambitious and wants to do things and wants to accomplish things, and pushing back against the thought that these are that this is a choice you’ve got to make, right. That if you’re going to go for a peace of mind and sanity, then you’re going to have to settle for and not particularly accomplished or interesting or exciting life in the world. And I think that what you get or what I get from that idea of abandoning hope and sort of falling back to the present with a bump, is that you’re freed of this very sort of oppressive idea of the future, and there’s an immediate surge of like, well, then there is nothing to lose. Or in the great American phrase, like, here goes nothing. I think that’s such a great. The spirit of that is so is so important to me. To me, it actually is a productivity book as well. You know, even as it sort of rails against the the core tenets of productivity culture.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:12] Yeah. But I mean, it’s like a contrarian productivity book, you know?

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:13:16] I hope so. Yeah.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:17] And in a way, it’s and there are other elements I’m sure we’ll dip into with this notion of in different ways, you touch into the idea of letting go of the future and really focusing in the here and now. And in fact, that’s the day to in this first part of your book, the first part generally being the bucket of being finite, you talked about the, you know, it’s worse than you think, but right after that you talk about this interesting metaphor of kayaks and superyachts.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:13:40] Yeah. This is just a way of talking about the difference between sort of fully, consciously being somewhat fully, consciously being in the reality of life as a finite human versus all the ways in which I think we spend a lot of time trying to avoid it and shy away from it. So in this metaphor, you know, being human in a finite human is is like being in a little kayak on a on a rapidly moving river. You’re there on your own. You’re there are people, other people in other kayaks. But in some sense, you’re on your own and you are just sort of navigating as best you can, adapting to the things that happen. You don’t know what’s coming next. It’s very, very sort of alive and vivid experience, but it’s also completely vulnerable. Crash into the rocks at any moment and you can’t do anything about that. But I think what we really want a lot of the time, and what a lot of our personal development and self-help projects are motivated by is this idea that we could actually be on one of those, you know, enormous kind of what are they, 120 foot, 140 foot record breaking super yachts which have like multiple decks and you’re up on the bridge in an air conditioned room, programming your course into a computer and then just press and go, basically and sitting back in the swivel chair and waiting for to reach your fantastic destination, that sense of being on top of it all, not so much in life as looking down and making sure that everything in life is going smoothly.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:15:07] It’s tremendously seductive, but it just fundamentally isn’t where we are. And this is a part of the topic where I am sometimes tempted to start talking about Heidegger. It’s never a good it’s never a good thing, really. But, you know, this notion of just being sort of thrown, finding yourself thrown into life and how on some level, a lot of our efforts to change and to achieve security or to get to that point in the future where everything is sorted out. Are all efforts to kind of scramble out of this situation that we are actually in? And it crops up in all sorts of areas of life, right? That very subtle sense of, well, what I’m trying to do here is like, get on top of my life so as to direct and control it rather than to sort of fully, fully, fully be in it here as it is.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:58] Mhm. That makes sense. It also informs one of the other topics you dive into is actually day seven. In that first week let the future be the future, you know, and it’s really about focusing on what you can do today rather than being consumed by what might happen tomorrow. And that is really easy to say. And for most people they’re like, okay, so I get the concept, but I’m sitting here today and I have a thousand things spinning, and half of them are about what might happen tomorrow or next week or next month or next year, and the practicality of letting the future be the future versus the idea of it are two very different things. For the average person raising my hand there as well.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:16:42] Oh me too. Completely. It’s extraordinary, this, um, this sense that worry or rumination is somehow efficacious, that the what you’re doing by worrying about things that haven’t happened yet and aren’t going to happen yet, is somehow securing them, like roping them to the ground in some helpful way. And there’s a limited truth to that. If you’re sort of preparing for some high stress event or experience, but that’s preparation. What we’re really doing there, I think, is trying to sort of hypothetically make our way across every single bridge that we could come up against so as to not have that feeling, to quote the the writer Robert Saltzman, of being of total vulnerability to events. Right. That sense that we’re the situation we’re actually in, in which anything consistent with the laws of physics could happen at any moment to you or to anyone you love. And it you know, some things are much less likely than others, but that’s probability in terms of being able to know that these that what will happen next. None of us have any power. And I think that’s fascinating. I in the book I mention this great, vivid story that my wife tells about being a teenager growing up in Baltimore and having watched a huge amount of movies in her childhood, including like, lots of movies she probably shouldn’t have been watching when she was eight and nine and stuff.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:18:06] Really being fluent in the grammar of movies and walking across a bridge in Baltimore and suddenly realizing that if, like, something really terrible were to happen to her or to somebody that she loved, there wouldn’t be foreshadowing music for the period prior to it to let her know and to brace for what was going to happen. It would just happen. And like, that’s just a sort of universal truth for all of us. But see, there’s a flip side. Tell me if you want to go in a different direction, of course, but which is this line that I quote from Marcus Aurelius that actually I won’t try and get it verbatim, but he’s essentially saying one of the reasons you don’t need to worry about the future is that when you get there, you’ll have the resources that you have now, the psychological resources that that cause you to be able to handle life right now. You’ll have them, then you’ll be able to handle life right then. So in a way, we’re being very worried about the future and refusing to let the future be the future. We’re kind of overestimating how much power one has in the present to do anything about the future, but we’re underestimating how much power and capacity we’re going to have when the future arrives.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:19:16] It’s very odd. It’s like when I’m worried about whether I’m going to do well in giving a public speech, say, to use a cliched example, it’s like my worrying implies that I can do something now in order to make it go well. Which beyond basic. As I said, preparation and practice. I can’t know that it’ll go well, but it also implies that I have a very low opinion of myself when it comes to my ability to just like, be there when it comes in the moment and use these skills I’ve spent a long time developing. Right. It’s it’s a very odd combination of, um, grandiosity in our control of the future and like, total failure to give ourselves the credit we deserve when it comes to handling life as it comes to us. If it had ever happened once that something had happened to you, that was the end of the world, you wouldn’t be here, right? I mean, by definition, you have found some way to handle everything that has happened to you up to this point.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:12] Mhm. I mean, you add to that also this notion that we are, as Dan Gilbert wrote about in Stumbling on Happiness a million years ago now, you know, we as human beings are horrible at what psychologists call affective forecasting, at trying to predict how we think we’ll feel at some future point. And, you know, and the further away that point is, the worse we are at it. So much so that, you know, I remember the research showing that, you know, if you think about a particular situation in your life 20 years from now and, and try and imagine how you’ll feel and experience that situation, you’ll actually get a more accurate answer asking a stranger who’s already in that situation how they feel. Then if you try and think how you’ll feel like their lived experience of it is going to be more true to what you’ll eventually experience than anything you imagine. Because we are horrible at actually projecting out into the future and having any accurate sense of what’s really going to unfold, and yet we think we’re really good at it.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:21:12] Yeah, right. Absolutely. No, totally. And one of the ways that really makes itself felt is in and this is, you know, I’m drawing from the book, but it’s to do with the, the role of Control. It’s not that terrible tragedies with no silver linings don’t happen because they do happen. And it’s not that we should aspire to have no control over life, because that’s a very psychologically damaging situation to be in as well. But it’s really weird how often looking back on one’s own life, or talking to other people about the high points of their lives, the things that they really cherish, or the connections that made all the difference, or meeting their future spouse or whatever it might be, happened in contexts that were beyond their control. That if they had been able to completely control how their life unfolded that day, they might not. Those things might never have happened. That phrase that I quote in the book, that almost everything, not everything, but almost everything in life is either a good time or a good story, right? Things either go well or they kind of go badly. And then you, you get to sort of talk and enjoy thinking about the ridiculousness of them going badly for a long time afterwards. People remember picnics that were that were rained off. People remember ridiculous journeys that were screwed up in various ways, and they remember them in some way fondly. Which tells us something very interesting about the mismatch between what we think is going to lead us on the path to happiness and what and what ends up doing.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:34] Yeah, I love that last concept. Also for for five years we we ran a four day adult summer camp at the end of every summer, the final weekend. And the first year we did it, it was in upstate New York, and the only time we could get the facility was late September, and we kind of didn’t think through that in upstate New York. And late September, on any given day could be incredibly hot, or it could be the middle of a snowstorm. We got the latter closer to, and so we had 250 people living in kids bunks without, you know, like without any kind of air conditioning or heat or insulation and wind whipping through them. And, you know, it was torrential rain and freezing at night. And we literally like we kept backing up cars to the local Walmart and emptying them out of socks and umbrellas and, you know, like a blanket and like running them back and giving them out to everybody. And everyone’s shivering and running around and and yet most of those people came back. And then for later years, they would tell the story of the first year. Right? This was like the legend of the first year. Like, we survived this thing. And it’s this badge of honor. And it was like, you know, you all hunker down and and it did. It was it was a little bit evil, you know, like when it was actually happening. But the story it got it left behind was one of those things that people would probably share for a lot of years and did share. It is amazing how we sort of like we have those reframes, you know, in hindsight. And had you asked anyone before it, you know, like, would you rather have had this be a month earlier or have it unfold differently? They, you know, before this happened, they probably would have said yes. But in hindsight they probably were like, no. That was pretty epic experience. I’m kind of glad that it happened the way it happened.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:24:15] Yeah. No, absolutely. It really speaks to one of the issues that I’m sort of tracking through this book, I think, which is that control is a very curious thing that actually, in some ways, too much of it really squeezes what makes life feel worth living. Squeezes that out. So it’s kind of a good thing that we don’t have the option of achieving the level of it that we that we might wish. Yeah.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:38] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So in the Line of Control, you know, one of the other topics that you explore is this notion of what you call decision hunting, this idea that, you know, and your words in the forest of possibilities, it’s better to pick a path than to stand still. And the thing that I think stops a lot of people from this is, well, what if I pick wrong?

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:25:02] One of the things I’m trying to do in that that section is sort of reframe this and, and really, first of all, one part of a two-part answer to that question, maybe, or that that topic is really refocus on the fact that what matters very often on a day to day basis anyway, is is the taking of a decision much more than than which decision is taken. Obviously there are situations where it really matters which which decision you take, but I’m sort of trying to get at this notion that even just as a sort of simple way to get over a bout of procrastination, right. It’s a very sort of ground level technique. If you go looking for some decision that you could take on the project that you’re stalled on, the difficulty that you’re facing doesn’t need to be a big decision. It probably shouldn’t be a big decision. It just needs, in some sense, to close off other paths that were open in order to sort of bring you into proper attunement with the fact that that’s what’s happening all the time in life anyway, right? We’re always every moment that goes by, we’re using for something that we could when we could have used it for something else. So the example is one of the examples I’ve given is like deliberately incredibly mundane. If you’re going to if you want to launch a website of some sort. Right? Choosing the host for that site and moving on is like, that’s a decision. It’s a tiny decision. Might not really matter in the scheme of things, but that’s exactly the kind of thing which, you know, along with 20 similar decisions. Just people sort of hang back and stay in indecision because they’ve got some whole concept that they’re going to pick the right sequence of things and it’s going to be right. And if they pick any of the wrong sequences, it’s going to be wrong. The other example is like, you know, if you’re thinking of leaving a job, you don’t need to decide to leave the job. You just need to do something that constitutes a decision. And the example there would be like, you know, email a friend who you think might have some useful advice and invite them out to coffee. That’s a real decision because you’re taking like a private worry and making it public for the first time. It’s not a big decision because you’re not like marching into your boss’s office and shouting about how you’re quitting. But it is the kind of thing that puts you into back into the flow of finite life. So I think the first thing to say there is like, if you’re worried about making the wrong decision, maybe you’re looking at a too large a level of decision, right? Maybe there’s a very small decision that you could act on. And actually, I think life can largely usually be just a matter of those very small but consciously taken decisions with very few of the ones that really feel like total sort of forks in the road. The other part of the answer really is in that discussion of the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken, and unconventional interpretation of that poem that I really liked. You won’t ever know if you made the wrong choice. It’s like, it’s not that you’re making a choice now, and soon enough there’ll be a verdict and you’ll be like, I did. Well, or I really screwed up here. It’s like the nature of being a finite chooser that no matter how badly the results of a choice seem to be, you’ll never know that it wasn’t better than the alternatives, right? You’ll never know that it was preferable or not to a different choice. You’ll never know. There’ll never be a final state where you can say, like I have learned from this, or I wish I hadn’t had to learn from it. You know, it’s all just moving in the dark and following intuition, right? I don’t think it’s like, literally random. I think there are ways of, of, um, navigating that we can definitely talk about if you like, but that but it’s not about calculating the correct decision, which is not a meaningful concept, I don’t think. But it really is about making decisions anyway.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:41] Yeah. I mean, that last part is really interesting, right? Because we have this sense of, you know, if I make this call and then I can look at all these check marks that say things went well, you know, like I, I took this new job, I rose up, I ended up being CEO, I had a fabulous salary, a status. And and we were like, clearly that was the right move. But we we have nothing to contrast. That’s concrete. It’s all just the the alternative is a guess. Well, because if I didn’t take that, then I’m sure I would have been living in a van by the river and, you know, like.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:29:14] Right, right. No, exactly.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:15] And rather than saying, well. But you know, like, what if actually that other path would have been ten times more amazing and like, you have no data to contrast it with, to know like, all you know is what happened.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:29:27] Yeah, exactly. I always feel like the book business specifically is a really I mean, I’m sure other ones like Hollywood are as well, but the book business is a really great teacher of this because after the process where you finish writing a book, you’re sort of, you know, I don’t know, you know, this, right? But you’re sort of trying to do things to ensure that it has a successful journey out into the world. You press all these sorts of buttons, and you’ve got no idea which button leads to an effect on the on the outside. And if there is an effect and things go well, you’ve got no way of knowing that pressing some different buttons might not have led them to go better. And it’s just not the data isn’t there?

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:04] Yeah, but we love to tell ourselves it is. Yeah.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:30:07] Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. If things go well that was my you know, that was my expertise. And if things go badly, other people just like ganged up on me and made it impossible for me to succeed.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:16] Right. It’s like I made a great choice. I’m sure you did. Okay. Um, yeah, but it also speaks to something else that you write about under the same section in the second week, which is this notion of what you describe as going to the shed, you know, which is where we get into the fear side of this and confronting that through not just trying to guess, but like taking some kind of action.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:30:35] Yeah, this is a lovely idea, which I got from a writer called Paul Lumens, Dutch Zen monk, sort of asking what it would mean to take the things you’re avoiding. They can be big things, but they can also be very small things, like in the example I’m writing about there, you know, resisting going and cleaning out a shed that’s full of junk, what it would mean to sort of befriend that task, not to just cut it down into small chunks, which is a very commonplace piece of advice, but just to sort of turn towards the thing that you’re mentally turning away from. So lumens talks about how that might involve working on clearing out the junk for just 20 minutes, but it might just involve going to the shed. It might just involve going and putting yourself in that place and looking around, forming some kind of psychological relationship with it, accepting that it is a part of your reality. Just getting over that hump of saying, oh yes, this is how it is. And, you know, related to that and sort of borrowed from him. I found if you’re the kind of person who makes a list at the start of the day of some of the things you want to try to get done, by the end of the day, there’s an extraordinary value in going through a little mental exercise where you just sort of imagine, I suppose it’s visualization.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:31:53] You just sort of imagine what would be involved in that, like difficult phone call. I guess I’d go to a quiet place and pick up the phone, and I’d have gathered certain information that I needed in front of me and I dial it. It’s. It makes it so much likelier that you’re going to do that thing later on, because you’ve already begun the process of kind of making it part of your world. Or in another metaphor that Loomis uses, you know, turning it from a gnawing rat to a white sheep that just sort of follows you around in a in a docile fashion. I need to challenge him on this because I live surrounded by sheep now in Yorkshire, and they run away. They don’t they don’t follow you around. But the point is, they’re not threatening. They’re not things I need to try to avoid. And I think there’s something really powerful about that sort of mental turn that just says, okay, I’m going to really stop pretending that this isn’t part of my reality. I’m not going to do that thing where you, like, refuse to check your bank balance because you’re worried it might be too low, or refuse to go to the doctors because you’re worried that a pain might be something serious, right? I mean, it’s totally self-defeating, but very, very common and natural-seeming behavior.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:01] Which leads, I think, nicely to one of the other ideas in this same sort of umbrella of action-taking, which is your invitation to develop a taste for problems, which is not, you know, if anything, people try and run from them. I think for the most part, yes, there are a select group of people who look at something like, ooh, a new puzzle, a new problem, something to figure out here. But, you know, most people look at problems and they’re like, how do I give this to someone else? How do I step around it? How do I not have to deal with this? And yet your invitation is like, what if you actually worked on almost soliciting? Like, how do I actually step into this where I can invite these things in? Because on the other side of the problem is meaningful growth? Hopefully.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:33:47] Absolutely. And I think, you know that one of the things I’m trying to get at, there is just this idea that how natural it is to go through life not only being annoyed with a given problem or resenting a given problem, which like. Fair enough, might be an annoying problem, but resenting the fact that you still have to deal with problems at all that you haven’t yet reached this point you thought you were always going to get to. Or maybe you didn’t think it consciously, but you implicitly you did. Where you don’t have to deal with problems anymore and life is just smooth. And I sort of interrogate that idea because I think actually, while it would be lovely not to experience the worst problems that people suffer in the world, absolutely. A life with no problems would be meaningless, I think. I think, you know, on some level, a problem is just a word for something that we need to address ourselves to. And that’s what considered a very broad level. You know, that’s what makes for meaning in life. So I opened that chapter with the marvelously accepting or depressing Haitian proverb, beyond the mountains, more mountains.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:34:53] And I think, you know, there’s something really important and relaxing and liberating about that idea that, yeah, it’s just going to be a sequence. Life is just going to be a sequence of things to address myself to. And the fact that I haven’t got to the end of the supply yet is not a bad thing. There’s a quotation I don’t actually use in meditation for mortals I’ve used elsewhere, from a French poet whose name I’m temporarily blanking on, but I remember the quote vividly in translation. It’s I was peeling a red apple from the garden when it suddenly struck me that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. At this moment, an ocean of peace entered my heart. And it’s like, oh, right, okay, this is what we’re doing. We’re solving problems. It’s not a bad thing that you wake up in the morning and there’s a whole lot of stuff calling out for your attention, like it will be much worse if there was, if there was nothing calling out for your attention.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:48] It’s interesting. Right? It’s a little counterintuitive, but then, on the other hand, it’s very intuitive because the only way to entirely opt out of problems is if you largely disengage from life, you know, and then you’re not really living. It’s funny, like years ago, a friend of mine was running a company. We were talking about, you know, I had made this assumption early in my career as an entrepreneur, like, oh, I can’t wait until I get to that role where, like, I’m running everything and I’m higher up and I’ve got a team of this people and this layer and this layer and this layer, and like, I get to kind of opt out of the problems and everyone else can deal with them. And I just set the strategic vision and, you know, think about the future. And this person is like, okay, so you realize that when you’re at that level, the only problems that get to you are the ones that nobody else below you has been able to solve. Right? So sure, maybe you have fewer of them, but like, they’re going to be absolutely brutal and you’re going to be the one person who has to figure them out. Like you never get to opt-out. You know, it’s a matter of, you know, like, how can you put yourself into situations where maybe you can be more selective about the problems that come your way is almost like the best we can do, which I thought was just a really interesting frame.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:36:59] Yeah. No, absolutely. That’s that’s lovely. And in some ways it’s a reminder that that’s what they’re paying you for at that level. Maybe it’s maybe you’re you’re talking about entrepreneur. It’s not literally someone else paying them in in a sort of employer sense, but a high-status roles exist when the system is working because the people in them are good at solving the hardest problems. And so, yeah, I mean, either develop a relish for that kind of life or don’t seek that kind of position, I suppose, because the idea that it’s going to be problem free is, um, is yeah, I think is a misunderstanding.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:35] The idea that you offer immediately after this in the book is an interesting contrast as well, which is you then pose the question, you know, you go from saying develop a taste for problems, and then you say, well, what if it were easy actually.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:37:49] Right.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:49] So take me there.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:37:51] Yeah. I mean, this is the point in the book and in my own, but also in my own growth. I think where you’re like, okay, I have made some progress in facing the truth of the reality that I’m in as a finite human who can only do a small amount of all the things I might want to do, only do them to a certain level of attainment that I might want to do them. I’m never going to get rid of problems, but we need to make sure that doesn’t flip over into the very equally sort of natural place, which is that that means that, like, if something is worth doing, it’s going to be really hard. And also the even more perhaps poisonous inverse of that, which is if something’s really hard and takes a lot of effort, then it must have been worth doing. And so that frame that question, what if this were easy? So I quit. Tim Ferriss, whose phrasing of that is, um, what would this look like if it were easy? And Elizabeth Gilbert, who talks about how you have to be willing to let it be easy, and I also talk about this author called Julia Rogers Hamrick, who wrote a book, which is the kind of book that, like, I don’t know, even ten years ago, certainly 15, 20 years ago, I would never have wanted to have anything to do with called Choosing Easy World.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:39:01] It’s quite an old book, and she’s quite a sort of, you know, I think new agey would be a fair way to describe the style of the book. And she writes about what changed for her when she realized that in most situations in life that she was sort of dreading, she could just resolve to live in easy world where everything is easy, and she could just say, you know what? I’m going to go through this experience in easy world. And if what that means is I’m going to visualize success and and visualize becoming a multi-millionaire, and then it’s just going to happen to me and it’s all that kind of stuff. Then to this day, I’m a huge skeptic of that way of thinking about things, but it isn’t in that book and it isn’t in what I’m trying to write about here. If what it is is is relaxing the assumption that it just must be going to be a fight to get to the end of whatever you’re engaged in. It’s extraordinary. Right? And it’s sort of on one level, it works. I find it works on a sort of mysterious level. Things do seem to just go more fluidly when you decide to approach things as if they might be easy.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:40:08] And then on another level, it’s just sort of extremely obvious and rational in a down to earth sense that if you are in the mindset that is enjoying yourself when you write the email or pick up the phone to the person to make the ask or whatever, then it’s just, you know, you’re going to meet with more success that way than if you are bracing yourself for a fight with everything you do. If you’re sitting down to write something and you’ve decided that it’s going to be combat with resistance until you’ve succeeded, that’s just going to be a harder job than if you sit down and sort of invite inspiration into your life. So I find that just to be a very powerful notion and a very important corrective to something that is deep in me. I think going back, which is the way you prove your adequacy and your worth by getting to the end of the day or the university degree or whatever it is, and saying like, well, look, I really gave it my all. Like, and on some level we should give life our all. But that’s not the same really, as giving it as much pain and agony and suffering as we can possibly muster.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:11] Yeah, no. So agree with that. And it’s funny, years ago I was in a conversation with someone, and to this day I remember the language I used because it was disconcerting to me. I said, you know, I pretty much always get what I want in life, but not without a lot of blood in the water. And they looked at me and they’re like, but does it have to be that way? Right? You know, they challenge the assumption because I was always just like, well, this is just like, it’s my lot. It’s my karma. This is the way things are for me. You know? It’s the way it’s always been. It’s the way it’s always going to be. And I found myself sort of like moving through later seasons of life. And when I’m in a moment where I’m kind of like, this is really hard, I’ll ask some version of the question, you’re like, what would the easier version of this be? Don’t just assume that this is what it needs to be. Or if somebody else came into this situation who wasn’t me that was looking for, you know, like the most easeful way through this, what would they do? Like when I almost disconnected from me. Um, all of a sudden, like. Oh, right. You know, somebody else would do this, so why am I not doing it that way? And it’s that dissociation that sometimes for me, allows me to see options, allows me to see, you know, the potential for ease that I was struggling to see when I was sort of like looking through my own eyes. I found, like a really interesting experience for me that I’ll, I’ll try and dip into when I remember, which isn’t all that often, frankly. But but I try. The assumptions that we make around this are really it’s it’s interesting how it affects the circumstance.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:42:36] It is really interesting. It occurs to me that it’s worth saying about this, that I think it is true also in an interesting way of genuinely sad, painful, agonizing experiences, right? It’s not that one should expect to go through very heavy experiences in life in a spirit of cheeriness. There’s a potential for a kind of ease, even there, while you are feeling the full feelings of of what’s involved and a potential for not adding to that with a sort of or changing that by sort of fighting the situation. And it reminds me, you’re the yoga expert, and I am most certainly am not. But there is a sort of tradition of talking about sort of finding the rest in the middle of effortful poses. Right? This idea that like, while your muscles are straining and you’re sweating and your blood is your heart is racing, there’s there can be located a sort of spirit in which you’re doing that, which doesn’t really feel like vegging out on the couch, but it’s not fighting the situation either.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:41] Yeah, I’ve heard about that too. Always was always reaching towards it, but didn’t spend a whole lot of time in that state, although I do hear it exists. So. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. One of the other ideas that you bring up is this notion of, um, exploring interruption in a different way. I think so often, you know, we’re doing something and we view anything that interrupts what we’re doing as a bad thing. And you have a you what I found to be a really powerful reframe around this.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:44:19] Yeah. There’s a quote that begins that chapter from C.S. Lewis, who is obviously writing from a Christian perspective, and he and he says, you know, there’s a great tendency to see what happens to you in life as something like a sort of distraction or an interruption from your real or own life. But of course, he says, the interruptions are precisely real life, the life that God is sending one day by day. I think there’s something very, very powerful there about exactly how much we can or would want to sort of rigidly control the unfolding of life. And I give examples. You know, I think many people can resonate with this. If you’re the kind of person like me who has a long history of sort of putting into practice all sorts of geeky scheduling tricks and routines and productivity plans, it’s very easy to get to this point where you actually make interruptions feel worse and end up defining more things in life as interruptions because they collide with you or your very firm for the day. So in the example in the book, you know, if I’m working at home and it’s not my day for school pickup, so my son is in the house somewhere else with my wife or with his friends. He sort of bursts in to tell me excitedly about something that happened at school today, that day. There may be 1 or 2 circumstances where I really need to say, can you tell me later because I’m doing something specific now, but if my whole productivity Activity system is making that into a problem. If it’s saying like, well, at 4:00 every day I have a focus hour and therefore if anything interrupts that, something’s gone wrong.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:45:50] I’m literally defining one of the sort of lovely experiences that life is about as an unnecessary or an unwanted interruption, just because it clashes with my sort of mental overlay of how the day should go. And I’ve been really struck by the writing of John Tarrant, the Zen writer, as well. How who applies this similar frame to distraction as a sort of an internal kind of interruption? I guess what I’m saying about the external interruptions is, you know, there are all sorts of contexts where you want to be open to what we call interruptions, because that is real life. It’s creative opportunities, it’s business opportunities, it’s opportunities to make new friends. It’s opportunities to engage in parenting. As an example, I gave but also Tarrant talks about this idea that actually it’s not the natural state of the attention to be absolutely rigidly fixed on one thing, it’s sort of the natural state is free to move about in a gentle fashion, and that doesn’t mean you don’t want to have some time in your day or your life where you’re seeking to be more focused than that. But it does mean you don’t want to start off by defining the sort of natural movement of attention as some sort of problem you’ve got to conquer. So I think there’s something really important there. It’s really sort of delusions of godlike status to go through your day thinking, you know in advance that if something unexpected happens at 330, that’s a bad thing. Like, it might be, but all manner of things could happen. And the idea that they’re definitely going to be inferior to the thing you had planned is, like, wildly grandiose in a way.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:30] Yeah, I’ve experienced that same thing and often not. You know, I’ve worked at home for years also, and we had a, you know, for a window of time in younger daughter wandering around the house also. And and I had the same realization. I would, you know, she’d poke her head in when I’m doing something and I’d be like, but this is my writing time, right? And I’m like, five minutes from now. It could be my writing time, too. And, you know, the joy of, you know, like having a giggle and a hug and like, hearing a quick story so far outweighs whatever, quote, ramping costs there is to me. Taking this time and having to get back into my writing mode, you know, in the bigger scheme of life that who cares? Like, like basically, you know, productivity was making me into a bit of an ass and opting out of like these moments that are, as you described earlier, like so often, like it’s the interruptions, the things we didn’t see coming that if we’re present to them, they end up being the best stories and the best moments. And when we just were so rigid, you know, life becomes brittle.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:48:25] Yeah. And Paul Lumens, who I mentioned before, also says about this and something that’s really stayed with me, it’s much better for everyone if you’re interrupted, if you give the interruption, the person interrupting you, although I’m sure the same thing works for distractions. But like if you give the person interrupting you your full attention, even if it is to tell them that you can’t focus right now and they’re going to need to come back or call you again, right? It’s like if you try to keep half your attention on the thing you’ve just been interrupted from, it leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. The person or especially kids. But I think other people as well, in office contexts will come back and bother you more in ten minutes time if you actually really give the thing that has arrived your full attention for a moment. It’s much better for everybody. Yeah. Even if what you’re using that attention for in that moment, then, is to say that actually you really need to focus on something else. Then people feel seen and it all sort of works a lot better. Yeah.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:20] You know, really speaks to just how we show up, which is in fact, sort of like the umbrella for the fourth week in your invitations. The one of the last of which is a French phrase, fais pas du monde. And this notion, you know, you’re not creating for perfection, but really for the experience that it brings you. And I just found that so resonant.

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:49:42] Yeah, I love this phrase. It’s, uh, I think it may fall on French ears a little questionably. I’ve spoken to a couple of French friends about this because I think it’s Quebecois, and it’s in the origin of the person I mentioned in the in the book using it. So it’s kind of like a I guess it’s different. But that idea that, you know, one way of translating that, that phrase, safe bet pas du monde is just like people did that, that anything you see in the world that is impressive. Any accomplishment, anyone living a life that you envy or making a breakthrough or a contribution to creativity that you would like to make like those are all just finite, flawed human beings too. They’re not, in that respect, different from you. And in a way, I wanted to put that part in the book to answer something that I think comes up a lot. I found when you go around talking about the necessity of embracing limitation and reconciling yourself to finitude, which is like, well, aren’t we just settling for mediocre lives? If we look at all the sort of great breakthroughs in science and technology, weren’t they made by people who refused to embrace their limitations? I want to say no. I think they were people who sort of stepped most fully into their limitations and didn’t believe that their limitations needed to prevent them from doing truly extraordinary things. They still didn’t, you know, think that they could somehow answer 100 emails in an hour, or in fact, probably in many cases in the email era, far more selective about the emails they answer precisely so they can focus on their on their breakthrough achievements. So I really think that idea that, like, you can be incredibly ambitious if that’s what you want for your life within the frame of acknowledging the reality of limitation, it’s when you spend all your energy and time and focus trying to fight your way out of those limitations. I think that you don’t get to focus on the things that matter the most.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:35] Mm. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in this conversation as well, in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

 

Oliver Burkeman: [00:51:45] I think it has to be that that idea of showing up that we were just discussing. It’s that idea of aliveness, which is, you know, in some ways is a placeholder word for something that can’t be easily defined. One thing I’m very confident about, increasingly confident about, is that a good life is not making sure you give time to the following six activities which constitute a good life, right? That it can show up in many, many more varied contexts than that. But it does share this sense of like, you weren’t waiting for it to begin later. You weren’t making it conditional on status or level of ability or confidence that you haven’t yet achieved. You were just sort of like, I think to say that you have lived a good life is to say that you showed up for it as fully as you could, again, in the context of another human limitation, which is the difficulty of embodying any of this that we’re talking about in a perfect way.

 

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:42] Mhm. Thank you. Okay. Before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Tara Brock about being present to life’s moments. You’ll find a link to Tara’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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