How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580

29:41Has, you know, the theme in these last two books of yours, about living that more meaningful, calm, less anxious life, has that move helped you towards that goal? And what have you lost by not living in Brooklyn?

30:12Oliver Burkeman:It totally has helped me, I think, but it has helped me partly because it's helped me understand the truth of that phrase, right? You're free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. is we are not asked as human beings to make choices that have no downside. That is never a possibility for us. So whenever you face any kind of big decision, or little decisions actually, like whether to stay at your desk for another hour of emails at 5.30 or to go home to your family if you have that choice, even that kind of choice is relevant here as well, right? For sure. In every one of those moments, there's a downside to the choice that you end up making.

30:53Oliver Burkeman:And there would be a downside to the other choice. And what I find so amazing about that Sheldon Kopp quote, what helped me about it was it's like, oh, right. All I'm doing is choosing which set of downsides I want to take responsibility for. I don't have to worry about not having found a version of this life that doesn't have the downside. So, you know, in the context of the move, as you asked, I definitely miss a lot of people who I had become close to in New York. and a certain kind of ease with which it was possible to just make a plan to see them and fall into deep, long, stimulating conversation.

31:29Oliver Burkeman:That was wonderful. There's a vibrancy to living in Brooklyn, a sort of real sort of energy in that place that I will always love. And I don't know, maybe we'll be back there. I don't know. So these things really, like once I realized that I didn't have to persuade myself they didn't matter, that's what makes it possible to make a move right because you're saying yeah no that will be a that will be a downside and also there's the whole disadvantage of uncertainty right like maybe there'll be other downsides that one downside of a move from one country to another is that you don't know what all the downsides are going to be so like it goes on and on and on but that enables you to or enable me to let go of that tendency that i definitely had from a young age to constantly be second guessing myself and being like, I messed up here because I'm because I'm not because I've because there are downsides, right?

32:24Oliver Burkeman:Because I'm missing out on things or it would have been good for my career to be in this place or it would have been good for my son to have this benefit of living. It's like, no, yes, it would have been. And also, right? And also there are wonderful, amazing, utterly unplannable advantages of being where we are. I've talked about the landscape but the people as well right and you know it's like it's a different kind of amazing I think some of this frustration or this umming and ahhing comes from perfectionism a belief that it is possible to make the perfect decision with no downsides and it isn't there's a consequence to everything I think for me at least once you get good or better at recognizing that number one and then number two, trying to articulate them, trying to go, oh yeah, as you said, there are things you miss about Brooklyn.

33:20Yeah.

33:20Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, right. You can't have that in rural Yorkshire. Right. You have to accept that and go, yeah, and I've made my choice at this moment in my life. Right. This is what's happening. I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily agree with this, having read Meditations for Mortals. Well, I've got quite an interesting relationship with regret in the sense that I don't have any anymore. I think for many people, regret is a form of perfectionism. It's a belief that I could have made a perfect decision and I didn't. So I'm going to berate myself. It's like, no, no, wait a minute. If you go from the starting point that a perfect decision is not possible, it's like, well, what is there to really regret?

34:05I mean, you do things based on who you are and hopefully you can learn from them and go, yeah you know what that possibly with hindsight now wasn't the best choice but i didn't know that back then no those wouldn't have made it right but now i can go oh if i'm presented with that situation again i've learned something so for me i've realized that regret um keeps me trapped in my previous perfectionist tendencies and of course you know you are known as the imperfectionist aren't you you write about that a lot if that's the name of your newsletter right it is yeah the imperfectionist well perhaps you can elaborate what is your perspective on regrets but also what is an imperfectionist it's so interesting to hear you talk about regret in that way because

34:50Oliver Burkeman:i too am someone who this point in life does not feel like i i don't feel like i have significant regrets i'm not one of the people who's sort of very weighted down by that sense of the lives unlived. But what I have been anxious about all my life, it's a lot better now, but like is the fear of future regret. So the feeling that like I'm about to make a choice here that I will come to regret. Totally belied by the fact that I don't actually then feel the regrets, but always sort of having my life choices constrained by this sense of like, but you're going to regret this in future if this happens or this happens.

35:30And so release from that, I think,

35:33Oliver Burkeman:if you are someone who's prone either to act to regret or to fearing regret in the future, is to see that in a certain sense, like regret is inevitable. Another way of saying you never need to feel it is that you can't avoid feeling it. It will just depend on your personality, right? But if regret is the fact that you had to wave goodbye to, like every single moment of life, if you want to get really philosophical about it, right? You wave goodbye to an infinite number of other paths, like branching off like a river delta, just forever and ever and ever. And all you're doing at every single moment is just waving goodbye to possibilities that will always be closed to you forever.

36:14But again, it's so absolutely inescapable that it can be quite liberating to see that.

36:23Oliver Burkeman:It's like there's no way of not doing that. There's no way of making a choice that completely protects you from future regret. And of course, even if you look at a decision and say, well, with hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way. It's like, how did you gain the hindsight by making the choice and living through that bit of your life? So, you know, I don't see any reason that this is going to be true in the case of our move to Yorkshire. But if it had been that what we'd realized very swiftly after getting there was that we'd made a terrible mistake. like in a sense that wouldn't be a terrible mistake that would be like realizing you've made a terrible mistake is a good thing you know I've been just playing around in my journal about this the concept of wasting time recently and really questioning is it even possible to waste time because to say it's a waste is prejudging that you knew the consequences of that time so so if you are mindful of the time or you review it afterwards and you realize that it wasn't the best use of your time, is that a waste?

37:26Or actually, was it a very powerful learning opportunity?

37:29Oliver Burkeman:So again, I don't know how relevant it is, but it's just what I'm playing around with at the moment. This concept of wasting time. I'm like, I don't think I'm wasting any time. I'm just spending time and then trying to learn from it. Do I like it and I want to repeat it? Or have I learned something and I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure about that anymore. Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. I think it's totally in keeping with what we're talking about because to think that you could know in advance is to feel yourself more perfectible and more unlimited than we really are. But to realize that you can act on the basis of the accumulated information, that's being a really full, wholehearted, finite human being.

38:10Some people will call you a productivity guru. Are you one?

38:16Oliver Burkeman:Oh, I don't know what that... I mean, you know, I think on the one hand, I hate the idea because I think productivity has come to mean you know just getting ways to get as many things done as possible and a big part of what I'm as you can tell like a big part of what I'm trying to get at here is that just doing more things is a not inherently valuable depends what things are right there are plenty of people in the world at large who I might like to be doing fewer of the things they do I thought will be a better place if they didn't if they did fewer things and and all of us can only do so many things anyway but also because but but at the same time rather um i think there is some meaning of the word productivity that i that i think is important that that i do want i'm someone who wants to like do cool things with my life that make some kind of a difference there's a danger whenever we talk about this kind of paths to more peace of mind and out of anxiety and all these things there's a danger which you occasionally see reinforced by certain kinds of spiritual teacher and spiritual book that suggests that like there's either the life where you do all the stuff and it's kind of frenetic and overwhelmed and anxious or there's the life where you just sort of float through your days and you don't care anymore about doing things because you've transcended to this level where all of that is irrelevant and i feel like one way of expressing everything i'm trying to do is to say no i think we can have both of these i think we can have the peace of mind and the creativity and the generativity and the energy uh not in not in the spirit of trying to make ourselves feel like we're doing enough but in the spirit of saying okay i am enough but now what i want to do with this thing person i am in the world is like express uh express this through you know uh creativity through through work through through building things i i think you're a meaningful productivity guru as opposed to a toxic productivity i'll take that the guru thing is interesting too although this is where i like in terms of like our profile as advice bestowers it's even more of a interesting thing for for for you than for me perhaps but like i spent a long time being very sort of self-deprecating about well i don't have anything special to tell to say and i think it's important to be very honest and i try to be and in terms of like that i'm not like living some perfect life and now you lucky lucky people get to copy me right that's not the spirit of any of this at all we're all just muddling through but on the other hand more recently i have come to understand that this sort of knee-jerk british self-deprecation can be a little bit unhelpful and annoying for sure and you do have to hold some element of the authority that is vested in you.

41:06Oliver Burkeman:Like that's actually helpful to people. As I say, I suspect you know about this much more than me, but like you don't, it's no, it's not a useful contribution to the world to say, oh, I've got nothing to teach. Yeah, exactly. You know, this is such an interesting point for me. Let's take this podcast as an example.

41:25I've been very clear, I think, I hope, over the many years that this show has been running that I didn't tell anyone what to do. I have no interest in telling someone what to do with their life because that would also imply that I know what is best for their life and I can't know and I also don't believe that anyone does anything long term if someone else tells them to do it I've seen that times I went we all know that experience ourselves right so yeah my goal on each show each episode is to have a meaningful, authentic conversation that hopefully on occasion is going to connect with someone.

42:08And they go, oh, you know what? I recognize myself in that. God, you know, wrongest guess this week. Yeah, God, I've got that thing as well. I'm interested in trying that thing that the guest mentioned as opposed to you should be doing this. Right. You know, because, and also that, you know, you take that one step further. Let's say we look at your life from the outside and go, Oh, well, Oliver was a successful journalist in Brooklyn. And the pandemic hit and him and his wife decided that actually we don't want to be in the city now. We want to go out, be nearer your family in rural, you know, beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire.

42:44And then he went and wrote a global bestseller, 4 ,000 weeks. Oh, so from the outside, it can look as though that's the prescription. I need to move from where I live, go out into the country. Then I'm also going to write a bestseller like Oliver Bertman. Right. But there's so many other factors in. So just because it worked for you doesn't mean it's going to work for me. It's not going to work for anyone else. There's a subtlety there, which I think about this a lot through the lens of patience. I think, I spoke about this on my tour in March, I was saying that, in an era where there's so much knowledge out there, we have to acknowledge that, we've said for years, we need more knowledge.

43:22Knowledge is power. Knowledge is information. I'm like, well, would you accept that there's more health information out there than ever before? They go, yeah. So, okay. So if information was all, and knowledge is all we needed, we should also get associated better health outcomes, but we don't. Physical health is getting worse. Mental health is getting worse. So there's a disconnect. And I think for me, it comes down to the difference between external knowledge and internal knowledge. Like take the information in from the outside, but then put it through your own filter. Experiment. and go, you know, does this work for me?

43:55That's how I see it.

43:57Oliver Burkeman:I think it's so wise. And I think, you know, there's such a tendency, there's a sort of a collusion, isn't there, between certain kinds of guru advice bestowing people and the people who are in their audience. There's a collusion to take that advice, to give advice and then to take it and express it and like try and follow it to that. Everyone wants to do that. But actually, yeah, I think anyone who gets to the point where they have a sense that some of the things they do in their life work well and they might want to pass that information on has come to that in a whole journey that they had to go through to get to.

44:33Oliver Burkeman:And so actually one of the things I do early on in this book, it's divided up into lots of small chapters over the course of four weeks. The idea is that you could do like roughly a chapter a day for a month. And I say like, if you're the kind of person who I have been, right, who gets a book like this and wants to try to squirrel away every bit of information in it or take detailed notes or put it all into practice, like maybe instead of that, just sort of go through it and see what sticks. Because if something sticks, that's a really good sign that it's meeting you at the right time. And if something else is like, okay, well, that was mildly entertaining, but it doesn't really resonate, then like that's information.

45:12Oliver Burkeman:The idea that you should then take that and try and force yourself to do that thing in that chapter, even though it doesn't resonate is a mistake. Yeah, it was interesting to see how you followed up from 4 ,000 weeks. I think the structure in this book is brilliant. It is such a beautiful, I think you call it a retreat for the mind. Just trust that if it resonates, it will stick. And I really like that as opposed to, you know, jot it all down, make notes, going, oh, you know, all of a sudden I must do this. And now how do I apply this? It's much more freeing, I think, than that. I'm glad you think that and I think the other the other thing that I was hoping to get at with that is like I didn't want to create it would have been totally contradictory and hypocritical of me to create a book where the feeling of it was like you know get all this into your head and then when you get a free week in a couple of months time and you're through all this other stuff like then you can put it into practice high energy perfect like hit all the points I wanted it to be something that you can read right now before you've got through all the emails, before you've fixed your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction or whatever terrible problem you imagine yourself to have, right?

46:28Oliver Burkeman:Just right here before the world calms down and the news headlines stop being so terrifying because that might never be going to happen. And so just right here in the middle, that's this idea of retreat of the mind, right? Not you have to go on a retreat for a week when you can finally book the leave but like no just in the back of your mind now in the middle of it all and so that required the chapters to be very short because like it's going to be on a commute or with a morning coffee well that's that's the that's i think that's the gold in this book or what one of the pieces of gold and and actually you could you can make the case or i'll make it for you probably too modestly that you could just continue with your life the way it is and just read one of these short chapters each day for 28 days as you propose.

47:09And you're probably going to get some quite profound benefits because it's just these gentle realizations I think that people are going to get about the state of their daily life. And as you say, the important things are going to stick because, you know, with the best one in the world, not everything, and I don't mean this in your book, not in my books or anyone's books, not everything is going to resonate with everyone. It can't do Right. Because we all hear things differently. Yeah. No, totally. Okay. So can you just summarize then? It's week one, week two, week three, week four. Being finite, taking action, letting go and showing up.

47:46Can you just give us a little paragraph on what each one of those means and why you chose that order to take us through this mental retreat?

47:54Oliver Burkeman:Totally. Although even saying I chose it seems a little bit too much. It was one of those discoveries where it just sort of like after going through lots and lots of permutations and long conversations with my two excellent editors in the US and UK like this just sort of it was just obvious it had to be this way you know there's sometimes you'll feel like you're discovering things rather than willing them into into reality so yeah it seemed very natural by the end of that process to feel like you want to start with being finite facing the truth of our limitations sort of feeling what it's like to accept the fact that we are in this position of limitation not just limited amount of time but i think really important part of this is how limited is our control over how that time unfolds and our limited knowledge of the future and and all the rest of it and then the question that occurs naturally i think is well okay so how do i actually like do the stuff i got to do in that context or that i want to do and so that's the that's the week uh Week two on taking action.

48:59Oliver Burkeman:One of the things that has been so important to me and that I have struggled with myself is the theme of week three, that actually a lot of the time, the way to bring more meaning into your life and to more creativity, more meaningful productivity, involves sort of getting out of your own way and letting things happen rather than in that sort of dominating way, making them happen. So that idea of letting go is about letting go as a kind of an active, practice and it all seemed very naturally to to end up in this place a week for showing up the idea that like what all this is for the destination of this to the extent that there is a a destination because it's always in sort of endless unfolding process but that destination is just like being more here for your life like ultimately i feel like um what unifies all those things that you said in the exercise that you spoke about you that you would want to be able to look back at from your deathbed what unifies them all is that like you were really here and present it's a very strange idea to put into words but yeah that you that you were really alive for your life so that i guess that's where this this four-week journey um reaches its conclusion yeah i kind of feel so far although there are more we could cover i think we've we've spoken about this idea of being finite.

50:25Okay. So, I mean, I love the book. It's so good. I have written down lots of chapter things that I want us to talk about. We won't get through them all. Actually, you know, I'm going to just, before we get to week two, I just want to mention something there that I think really relates to one of your key messages about doing what counts, you know focusing on what really matters and it also maybe clashes with some of our ideas of productivity so okay so i host this podcast okay i i know many other podcast hosts these days podcasting is obviously blowing up and there's millions around the world now

51:11and most podcasts of the size of this one tend to have researchers so they have researchers who will go through the books and go through that person's work and then present the host with uh some research notes and the host may do a bit as well but a lot of the prep is done for them yeah because it's time efficient. Okay. Well, there may be other reasons as well, but one of the reasons is because you can be more productive. You can get more things done because you don't have to spend a day researching the guest. Someone could do that for you. So you could do other things, get more emails done or whatever it might be.

51:53And I had this realization a few years ago because I've never had a researcher. And I was starting to think, God, everyone seems to have a researcher. Not everyone. You know, my friend Rich Roll, who runs a podcast, he doesn't have a researcher either. And I thought, it's kind of interesting. Even if a researcher would save me time, what if I don't want the time saved? And I know that sounds maybe perhaps a bit of a throwaway comment, but it was a real profound realization for me where I thought, actually that's one of my favorite parts of my week is preparing for my guest I love it I literally love it a I happen to believe it makes the conversations better anyway because you're more invested but even if it didn't I just love it so the question I often ask myself is how would you like your experience of life to be yeah let's imagine you got some crack hot researcher who could present you everything.

52:56Well, I wouldn't have watched some of your videos yesterday. I wouldn't have read pretty much the entirety of Meditations for Mortals. My life would be less good had someone done that for me. So it's almost an anti-productivity hack to do it myself. But I'm like, no, damn it. I want to do it myself. No, totally.

53:20Oliver Burkeman:And I think this illustrates a really, really important point, which is that if you just follow the doctrine of optimization and you let yourself go along with the cultural currents towards optimization, then all else being equal, you will optimize out of your life precisely the things that make it worth living. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not some other things that, you know, you want to have other people do and that your position enables you to have other people do in that ecosystem of producing a podcast. But it's like it's such a gift to realize, oh, I was on track to optimize away something.

54:00Oliver Burkeman:And I think we do this to ourselves as a wider culture, right? I wrote in 4 ,000 weeks about how a lot of convenience culture has left us sort of feeling, I think a lot of people resonate with this notion, right? Like it's much easier to, often what's easiest to do is not what is most enjoyable for us as a matter of experience. So it's easiest to like get food delivered with an app and not have to talk to anyone and not have to go out and find the food yourself or not have to cook a meal from ingredients that you bought. It's easiest to stay home and watch stuff on TV when you could have met some people and watched it at a movie theater, right?

54:36Oliver Burkeman:There's always this kind of tension between what's the sort of smoothest life and what's the life that we want to live, that we value the most in hindsight. And this seems like a good example of it, right? It's effort. I'm sure that despite the fact that you love reading the books of the people that come on this podcast, there have been weeks when if you could just wish it away and save the time, you would have taken it. But actually, there's something really useful about saying to ourselves, like, no, I don't want to smooth my life out in this way. Because smoothness is not my ultimate goal here.

55:11Oliver Burkeman:Maybe smoothness in certain areas of life. It's about intentionality, isn't it? It's about really under, it's like, it goes about, you're free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences, right? You can, you know, obviously we're talking about through the lens of a podcast, but you can apply this to anything. you you've got infinite ways you can do these things right but all of them come with a cost and the and the ironic part which i'm sure you have experienced is that like the more success you are fortunate to enjoy in the world in a certain sense the worse it gets obviously in a certain sense um privilege of that comes with with success is fantastic and not to be sniffed now, like the opportunities that come your way are harder to choose between because more of them are good and enticing.

56:00Oliver Burkeman:So it's fascinating. It's like everybody who is human is faced by this, is faced with this situation and becoming very successful or becoming super wealthy or becoming famous or whatever doesn't solve the problem because the problem is called the human condition. Yeah, exactly. Be careful what you wish for, right? Because it may actually come true. And then, you know, it's a great point. And again, you know, some people may be thinking, yeah, okay, you guys have got nice problems, you get invited to nice things because you're successful authors. But the point you're making is not that. The point you're making is that that applies to everyone on some level.

56:34Oliver Burkeman:Right, and they definitely have a nicer feeling to them, the problems, when knowing where the next meal is coming from is not part of the calculation. And we have to acknowledge that. But there's still problems in the fundamental way that we've been tracking through this conversation, which is that they are tough choices about finite time. And in certain ways, they can be tougher because the things that you have to let go of are more obviously things that would have been great to do. A mate of mine's a filmmaker, right? And his dream is always to be in Hollywood and make feature films. But he's now got himself a regular gig, just filming locally to his house where he's got predictable-ish hours, no travel.

57:25And I remember having a chat with him a few years ago about, it really speaks to this, this acknowledgement of you can't do everything. You know, if he had gone to Hollywood and done the job of what he perceives Hollywood directors do and the busyness and all the things that come along with that, perhaps he wouldn't have the quality family life that he does have. Right. Right. I feel a lot of your work is about bringing the, is making the invisible visible, right? Yeah. It's the unmeasurables. You know, I think about this concept of unmeasurables a lot, that society is skewed now towards the things that we can easily measure, like your follower count or your income or your downloads, right?

58:14But, you know, the gold in life comes from the unmeasurables, the sort of thing you know the quality of your relationships you know do your kids like you and want to spend time with you right you know if you if you want to have a partner and you're lucky enough to have a partner do you have a good relationship with them you know is that something that's worthy you know there's no scorecard for those things right and i i honestly feel that's why that write your own happy ending exercise has helped me so much and also living five minutes from where I grew up, has really helped me as my public profile has grown.

58:48I'm still in the same town where I grew up. I'm five minutes away from mum. You know, I see her pretty much every day. And that's a choice. You know, it's interesting, you know, we're recording this just pre the summer and it was Father's Day a couple of weekends ago. And I was on the move and I thought, I'm going to share a post on Instagram. So I literally found a photo of me and my, the first photo I could see where you couldn't see my kids' faces because I never share faces on social media. And I thought, I just wrote a post in the moment about what does being a father mean to me? And what are the things I hope to not teach my kids, because I'm even skeptical that you can actually teach your kids anything now.

59:37Like, you know, sort of showcase. Or, you know, I don't know what the right word is, but one of the things I value as a father and the things I hope to do and showcase some that are important, I'd put a list of things that you might expect people to say, being kind, how you treat people, but things like, you know, how integrity is more important than money. But then what came to mind is I sort of shared that caring for my mother, their grandmother, there is not another thing to fit into a busy life, but an inherent part of a meaningful life. And it's interesting, that's what really people resonate with the most.

1:00:14And I never articulated that before or thought about it. Well, yeah, you know what, you're damn right it is. I could not do that. And in inverted commas, do more things with work and have more in inverted success. But if I, for me personally, how I value my life, how I was brought up, looking after my family is one of the most important things to me. So no amount of success is worth me not being able to do that.

1:00:41Oliver Burkeman:No, completely. I think that's so well put. And it's like you said before about making the invisible visible. I often think about that in terms of making unconscious things conscious, usually in terms of negative stuff. So it's like You can go through the day making choices. You're doing that anyway. You can either do it consciously or unconsciously. You can either be aware of the limitations of your time or you can be unaware of them. You can't not have them. You can just know whether you're relating to them in a conscious way. But as you point out, it's also to do with becoming conscious of the things that you have decided to have in your life because they matter to you.

1:01:22Oliver Burkeman:and then feeling much less bad about all the things that you could in principle be doing instead because you've found that those kind of end values, as it were, right? You're in less danger then of the means becoming the ends, which is what happens otherwise, right? People just like think that doing more and more and more stuff is important or getting more and more money is important regardless of what's happening to that money. freeing up time like even that is kind of not a very useful thing unless you're freeing it up for something that you want to free it up for so again and again it's like well why and I think once you've got that in place you're well on the way okay so week one being finite seven chapters seven I was going to say lessons but you probably would urge me to not use the word lessons but seven things to think about.

1:02:14Meditations meditations seven meditations okay week two there's seven meditations on taking action let's just cover one of them before we move on to week three uh rules that serve life doing things daily ish i think this is great what what is daily ish and why is it so useful

1:02:46Oliver Burkeman:So daily-ish is a word that I got from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher and podcaster, although I think he has told me that he got it from someone else as well. So we're not doing a good job of getting this to its final attribution. And he uses that as a guideline for, as an answer to the question, how often should you meditate? Meaning, you know, formal meditation, which this book isn't really about. the title may be a bit misleading in my book, I mean, but he teaches formal, following the breath. And he said, you know, people want to know, how often should I do it? Do I really have to do it daily?

1:03:17Oliver Burkeman:And it's like, we should do it daily-ish. And what I love about the idea of daily-ish is that it's very gentle and flexible, right? The idea of doing anything daily-ish, reading the chapters of this book daily-ish for a month, exercising, journaling, whatever it is you're trying to do as a habit, it doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it, right? It's not just like, ah, forget it. Like the moment you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. We all have a fairly strong sense of what counts as doing something daily-ish. Like five or six days a week is clearly daily-ish. And in busy times, maybe four days a week is going to count as daily-ish.

1:03:55Oliver Burkeman:But if you only do something two days a week, you're not going to fool yourself that that's daily-ish, right? So we get past all these detailed questions of exactly how often should you'd be doing something but you're still putting a sort of gentle kind of pressure on yourself to to make sure you you do it and i think this is one example that chapter is is about the idea of rules that serve life i think it's really easy especially in this space of health habits personal development all the rest of it it's really easy to think that there exists some set of rules that if you could only find them and then you promise to follow them completely obediently that will be it your struggles will be over the rules would effectively sort of live your life for you and you would be like the servant of the rules and people fall into this all the time right now from now on this three times a week this this morning routine this set of supplements whatever whatever whatever and it's not that it's bad to have rules it's that you've put yourself in a power relationship with those rules which sort of expects the rules to to sort you out and then you have to be completely sort of obedient to those rules.

1:05:02Oliver Burkeman:And I wanted to explore this notion, which I think goes a long way back, including to sort of Christian monastic traditions, among many others, of rules that really matter, but they're there for you. They're there for the things that you want to achieve, right? The important thing is not that you meditate every single day or even that you exercise every single day. The important thing is your peace of mind or your physical health and then what rules serve that and what level of attachment to those rules is helpful for them to actually be sustainable part of your of your life yeah it's beautiful and and i think this concept of daily ish really takes us away from this black and white thinking which massively leads comes from perfectionism and it's interesting you know i was um i was some of your interviews yesterday and the lead up to you coming to the studio today and in one of the interviews i saw you were asked about non-negotiables and it's a very common interview podcast question you know what are your non-negotiables and i i you know i have no issue with people asking that i understand why they ask that and it's the sort of thing that i would have thought about a few years ago that i'm wondering what i said now right yeah i can't I'm not sure of what you said now, actually.

1:06:23Oliver Burkeman:But the point was is that I don't think non-negotiables exist. I think it's a mirage. Everything's negotiable. Like everything is. You can't promise or guarantee you're going to meditate every day. Some days, I don't know, your mum might be ill and in hospital and frankly, you don't have time. You know, everything is changeable depending on the circumstance. I could say a non-negotiable is being kind and not using violence. Well, it kind of is, but if someone was threatening my two children, I might change my viewpoint on that, right? So I think even embedded in the question of a non-negotiable is perfectionist thinking.

1:07:04Oliver Burkeman:Right, because the only actual non-negotiable is our imperfectionism and our limitation. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, daily-ish I think is brilliant and hopefully helpful for people who are maybe struggling with health habits. Well, what if you did it daily-ish as opposed to every day? So let's get into week three, Letting Go, because there's just, well, all of them, frankly, I could, we could, I actually believe that you could do a whole podcast on just one of these 28 meditations, right? Because they're really deep, thought-provoking ideas that have resonance and relevance for all of us. But I really like in week three, Letting Go, the chapter entitled What If This Was Easy?

1:07:50the false allure of effort can you speak a little bit to this chapter and why it was so important

1:07:56Oliver Burkeman:for you to write yeah and we're definitely in the terrain here of the things that i've sort of struggled with myself the most or that more recently understood compared to some of the earlier weeks of the of the book um i think that there is a very natural tendency that many of us have. It's partly to do with the culture that we live in. It's definitely to do with the way we're raised. Maybe it's to do with religious traditions as well sometimes. To feel like if anything's worth doing, it's going to be pretty high effort, right? If you go through the day and you don't put in an awful lot of effort, then you're kind of not being a full, adequate human being who gets to feel good about themselves.

1:08:44Oliver Burkeman:and obviously there's some truth in that idea right life calls for effort in certain cases and you have to sort of put it in and it makes it worth living we were talking about you putting in the effort of reading the books of your podcast guest as an example of effort that you find rewarding but it's really easy to get to a point where you think you sort of approach life braced for everything that you're trying to do to be like some kind of fight and it's like oh no like this project really matters and therefore you assume it's going to be really hard. Or you just sort of go through the whole of your day with this kind of expectation that you're going to have to fight your way through it.

1:09:23Oliver Burkeman:And that you're not going to get to enjoy it. And that you're not going to get to choose to do things that you like because that's not what life is about. You're postponing enjoyment for later. Right, right, right. And just this incredible power of this idea, which has been articulated by many different people, as famous quotes from Tim Ferriss and Elizabeth Gilbert to this effect, but many other people as well. Like, just the radicalism of asking yourself, like, what if this were easy? What if this thing I'm about to, or what would this look like if this were easy, I think, is Tim's version of it.

1:09:57And it's such a sort of weirdly subversive question

1:10:03Oliver Burkeman:for a certain kind of person that I am, that kind of person, like, historically, right? That sort of, like, what would actually happen if you did some of the things today that you feel like doing? And is it really the case that you can't do that? There are limitations to it, of course, created by our situation in life. But would I, if I just did some things that I wanted to do, would I just definitely choose being a layabout and sitting on the sofa and eating crisps and, like, wasting my life? or maybe I can trust myself a little bit more than that. You know, maybe I can sort of take a subtly different attitude.

1:10:47Oliver Burkeman:And I write at one point in that chapter, I think, about an author called Julia Rogers Hamrick who has this idea of choosing easy world. And it's this idea that struck me as just so new agey when I first came across it. Like, oh, I don't want to go into this kind of terrain. But she has this idea that, you know, And she writes about the moment that she realized that you could just sort of choose to address a challenge in life in easy world instead of in difficult world. And she doesn't mean, I don't think, like persuading yourself that bad things aren't happening or trying to sort of force yourself to think that something painful is not painful.

1:11:28Oliver Burkeman:it's that actually you either have to choose to sort of take the attitude that everything's against you or you can choose to take the attitude that everything is at least potentially for for you and working in your favor and then the great thing about this is that even difficult experiences can be approached with a kind of ease with a kind of readiness to have them go more smoothly than you were naturally or you were previously assuming have i made that clear yeah Yeah, absolutely. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, as you were just finishing there, we know that when, I don't know, when people run at their fastest, they're not trying to go at their fastest.

1:12:12there isn't as of course it's not completely effortless right they're clearly expending energy and effort but there is an effortless quality to it where they're they're not trying all out they're just they're flowing um i think it's an important idea because my kids i think a little older than your son right he's eight he's eight my kids are 15 and 12 and this idea that things have to be hard i think gets subconsciously instilled by by many parts of society but schools right because i'm watching it going yeah but it doesn't need to be right it doesn't need to be difficult it doesn't not everything in life needs to be hard and i realized a few years ago that I had to artificially create internal stress by way of, let's say, a deadline or other things to make myself do stuff.

1:13:15So I had to create this sense that it was hard, I'm up against it, and now I'm going to do it. And I've bit by bit started to change my relationship with difficulty. And actually, you can do some things that do feel effortless to a certain degree.

1:13:28Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, yeah. And you certainly don't need to make them harder than they inherently are. I think it's in that chapter that I write about a friend of mine, the meditation teacher, Susan Piver, who wrote this blog post. She's written lots of things and I imagine she gets sick of the fact that I only always talk about this one blog post, but it made such a difference to me. Its title was Getting Things Done by Not Being Mean to Yourself. And she writes about how she used to try to govern herself very strictly by schedules for what she was going to do with her day and with her work and how fruitful and liberating it was to ask, like, what do I feel like doing today?

1:14:04Oliver Burkeman:And to realize, you know, obviously people are in different situations. We have differing degrees of autonomy over how our work days unfold, but very many of us have at least some capacity to ask that question like, well, of the things on my plate, what do I feel like doing right now? And discovering again and again that basically she ended up proceeding through life that way. she did end up doing pretty much all of the things that she'd been beating herself up to do, right? You don't actually want to be the kind of person who never pays your bills or who never keeps promises, commitments to friends or to who never cares for your physical health.

1:14:39Oliver Burkeman:It's just so much more motivating and freeing to do it in a context where you're not like presenting it to yourself as a sort of a terrible trial that you've got to get through before happiness is allowed to be yours. Yeah, I think when you wrote about her, I can't find a bit now, she had this really elaborate morning routine, didn't she? This much meditation, this much journaling, this much that, this much. And I think it's a great example to use because I suspect there will be people listening who have perhaps tried that approach before. and maybe for some people it works because of course it can do for some people but for some people what I found often happens is that they they kind of think that there's some sort of flaw within them that I'm trying I'm doing the meditation journaling thing I'm doing the breath eats but I can't stick to it I'm not getting what I thought I would get out of it and you write this in that chapter which I think really speaks to this okay when I fail to take action on the things I care about the reason is sometimes that I lacked the time or couldn't summon the willpower but it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve or assumptions about the difficulties involved thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally I think you have just summed up there Oliver why so many people struggle to make their health habits stick.

1:16:12I don't think it's because they don't have the right information or the right knowledge or they need to learn about a new technique. I really don't. I think there's something in that. We have, in some ways, a disordered relationship with that behavior, with that habit, what we think it should feel like or what it should give us. I really think you're on to something with that. I'm really glad to hear it. And I think there's,

1:16:34Oliver Burkeman:I mean, the thing that that makes me want to say is, like, even the very idea of a habit can get in the way sometimes. And I do mention this at different points in the book, right? Like, if you're someone who's got into that psychological tangle with habits, it can be really interesting to ask like, well, you know, would you be willing to just go for a brisk, go for one brisk walk today? Would you be willing to go to the gym, go for a swim, whatever it is that you do and enjoy doing and are capable physically of doing? Like, could you just do that today? Not could you do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life?

1:17:12Oliver Burkeman:Not even daily-ish, but like, could you just do it once? Like, and just let yourself go and do it. Because I think that it's so easy to think, well, this is a difficult thing. It's going to have huge rewards for me. I'm going to feel like a million dollars once I've really got into the swing of it. So it's a long-term project. Better dig in, better buckle down. and like it's especially harmful for those of us who've had like so much success with this approach in life like I got I got great exam results because I was really good it's like the patient work of endlessly working on schoolwork and it's like I'm not saying that was a bad thing at the time it served me well in lots of ways but like there's a bad message in there which is like if something's going to be worth doing it's going to take a long time and be hard and pretty unpleasant as you go and actually the moment that you just go for the swim or do whatever the thing is that that that you are willing to do the moment you do it once you're doing it like you're there yeah the bridge has been crossed there's two things i'm thinking a lot about at the moment which i think speak to this which is first of all about goals i'm starting to come to the conclusion or the current viewpoints, at least, because it's an endless journey and it may change again.

1:18:27But I really do think that for many people, dare I say most of us, goals are a problem. And the reason I say that is because a goal by definition is somewhere in the future. and I think the way that we've been spoken to about goals in in this western culture at least is that it's this thing that I work up to and then I achieve yeah but the problem is and I've I've faced this on innumerous occasion which is why I'm coming to this belief is that it goes back to these habits you're you're meditating because then you've heard it's going to help me with anxiety and depression and it's going to help me with focus okay but we really want to get to the point where we're doing it just because we like doing it right yeah not for what it's going to give us and the problem with goals is or a potential problem i should say with goals because i don't think it's a problem for everyone is that there's so much focus on the goal that, okay, so what?

1:19:40Let's say you achieve that goal. What next? What did you do the following morning when the last two years you've been working up to that goal? You see this with Olympic athletes all the time where the morning after the Olympic race, they don't know what to do themselves. The last four years was about that one 10 second race. What the hell did you do the following morning? How is there a reason to get up? But I see this at my local park run, you know where we're so focused on the goal of the time well let's say you you work hard and you get that time so what what happens the next day right so so i i where i'm sort of landing at the moment on goals is they're useful as a sort of uh compass or uh yeah yeah like a directing point so go yeah to help you then put into practice some behaviors but just sort of loosely hold the goal don't hold too tight because you know be careful what you wish for what happens if you do

1:20:33Oliver Burkeman:reach that goal what's next yeah i think that that way of i mean i was thinking before you said compass i was thinking like the point is here that they can be things to navigate by and and so a good goal or i would say even more maybe like a sort of good vision for your ideal expression of life um that doesn't necessarily have to have like metrics in it um is very useful because it helps you make decisions in the present and it helps you decide what to do this afternoon um i think that is a much yeah the problems that you outline with the traditional approach i think are really true and i've certainly experienced them uh in my own life as well i think it's a subtle thing because there's a chapter i mean it's later in the book so i guess i'm speaking out you can go to week four it's fine we don't have to go sequentially this idea we sort of started with the whole conversation with it in a way, this idea of starting from sanity, right?

1:21:26Oliver Burkeman:Which is this phrase that I use to, it's one way of expressing this notion of like, you decide who you want to be in the world and then you sort of go through life from that place, starting right now, as opposed to something that you're trying to get to in the future. And I think goals and visions can be incredibly useful. That is what it is to use a goal as a navigational aid, right? You can certainly have a particular target that you hope in a few years time you're at. But in the meantime, the reason that that's useful is to ask like, how could I show up in the spirit of that today? As opposed to, I have to put aside all my happiness and enjoyment because later is when I'm going to do that.

1:22:08Oliver Burkeman:And especially when it comes to sort of money and prestige and status goals, we all know from all the research, it doesn't work that way. You just get accustomed to the quality of life that you're building or the status or whatever it is. And then you just need the next one and the next one and the next one. So you don't actually come to rest in happiness in 10 years time anyway. You might as well start trying to express that. So what if you do achieve your dreams, then what? You know, basically when you're kicking it down the road into somewhere in the future. That is a great chapter, how to start from sanity.

1:22:38And you say striving towards sanity versus operating from sanity. It's a subtle difference, isn't there?

1:22:45Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're speaking about, right? It's not taking the question of what you want your life to feel like as something that you have to strive towards, very often by doing the exact opposite. So maybe you want a very restful life, so first of all you've got to work incredibly hard to get to the rest. But taking it as the sort of place from which you come. There's an author I quote in the book, Richie Norton. Yeah, I've got it. It's brilliant. Right. It's a two-step process. Yeah. Number one, decide who you want to be. Number two, act from that identity immediately. And I love that.

1:23:25Oliver Burkeman:It doesn't mean like if who you want to be is like a sort of super high energy sports person, but you're right now completely sedentary and in a lot of pain or something. It doesn't mean force yourself to pretend to be someone you're not. It means like, what would the person who you are now do today if you're acting from the identity that you want to manifest in the world? So for that person, it might be some very gentle movement. I mean, I'm on your territory talking about physical advice here. But like, you know, if you want to be a novelist, it's not about sort of telling yourself that in the next week you've got to have the novel written or going around talking about it.

1:24:06Oliver Burkeman:It's just like, what would that person who I am now living from that identity do today? and you know it might be a few words of the novel yeah i love that you know that two-part process decide who you want to be and then and to act from that identity immediately um i i happen to enjoy journaling and i've seen journaling be very helpful for many people and i ask myself three questions every morning let me rephrase that most mornings um and the third one is which quality do I want to showcase to the world today? And I also have three questions in the evening, but they sort of piggyback off each other.

1:24:45So that question is about, I would say, about Richie Norton's question one, decide who it is you want to be, right? So often it will be, I want to be kind. I want to show the world the quality of compassion. I want to show the world the quality of patience, right? For me, it will be one of those things. I want to show the world the quality of integrity today. You know, whatever's top of mind for me or I feel I could do with a nice reminder off at that particular moment in time. And why I find it so powerful is because just by writing it in my journal while I'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to showcase that quality.

1:25:29But I would say it makes it more likely because I've been a bit intentional that morning. so if later on in the day I'm tempted to be a bit short with someone or react I'm just that little bit more likely to go hey okay showcase the quality of compassion and then two of the evening questions are well what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow what can I do differently tomorrow is getting away from this perfectionist tendency the acknowledgement there is that even though I put that intention in the morning It doesn't mean I'm a 100 % perfect human who can do that all the time. So what I can do differently tomorrow might be, oh, I wanted to be really patient today, but at 5pm, that last email really bothered me and I reacted.

1:26:19Tomorrow, I'm going to try again and see if I can showcase quality of patience. I love simple things like that, which in a very gentle way, in a non-beating up way, helps guide us because then you start to show up more and more. That's what I found myself and with patients who I recommended this to in the past is that they, you actually little by little start to change who you are in the present. And so those goals that you were looking forward to, you know, you become a nicer, a calmer, more like the person you want to be and your behaviors actually that you're trying so hard to do and you're struggling to, they follow suit as a natural consequence of you showing up as that person yeah i think that yeah

1:27:07Oliver Burkeman:there's something very very deep about this idea of what an intention is right because you've spoken about it rightly i think as if it's something quite gentle um and yet i think it might be more potent yeah um than a lot of kind of other more sort of willpower based um approaches to change and transformation because you're planting it there. And yes, sure, it may not flower the way you wanted it to today, depending on circumstances. But it's really there in a way that just sort of having it as a far off vision as the kind of person you want to be or turning it into tasks that you're going to sort of grind through is not going to be.

1:27:48Oliver Burkeman:Well, it's a very opposite to something that I've definitely fallen into, still do sometimes, which is, you know, if you think about the times when you've have been a jerk to other people or impatient or you know or truculent and not done things that you should have done or whatever it is for me anyway it's it's not i mean i don't think it's because i'm an unpleasant person it's because i've got these um goals that feel to me very pro-social very generous and very um good for the world they're not just all about my own indulgence and gratification. And like everyone else is getting in the way of my attempts to achieve them.

1:28:28Oliver Burkeman:And so I'm snap at them or I fail to respond to their email or something. And so I'm in this ironic situation where precisely because I want to do good things, I'm showing up as the opposite of that person. And the intentional approach, the way that you're talking about it here, that sort of gets around that. That says like my actual tasks for today, the part of me that wants a list of things I need to do or ways I need to be, like is to manifest this thing. You're much less likely taking the approach you talk about to end up like snapping at people because you're too busy trying to build a world where you're compassionate and patient, which is so ironic and ridiculous, but we do it all the time.

1:29:08And I think about this too, the lens of behaviors, right? So all the, you know, I really don't like the word good behavior, you know, healthy behaviors and unhealthy behaviors anymore. or it's a bit like time. You spend time and it has a consequence. You engage in certain behaviors. There are consequences. If you like the consequences, you might want to repeat them. If you don't like the consequences, you might want to think about changing them. But that internal conflict, I think that many of us have when we're not really acting or showing up in the world as the people we really want to be and we know ourselves to be.

1:29:39That internal conflict is often what leads to the sugar. and the booze and the down, for me, a lot of the time, they're downstream consequences from their inner conflict. And once you can sort of bring that into more alignment, I do find, I found this myself, I've seen it with patients, you know, you're actually starting to change your behaviors without actually trying so hard. You know, look, because you're not, you're not trying to do a behavior in conflict with a person you know you are being. Yeah. Which I think is destined for failure. and then you have to do things to take yourself out of your head because it's an uncomfortable dissonance so I'm very much fascinated by root causes of everything what is the root cause of your behaviours and I think your books very much speak to well one big root cause of many of our struggles health, happiness, productivity, meaningful life whatever it is you want come from these perfectionist beliefs that we have.

1:30:46And so that's upstream. We have this perfection. We have a belief that time is infinite and that actually we can get everything done because what social media tells us and I can do that and that and that and have a good marriage and see my kids and be crushing it at work. Well, wait a minute. Well, what if you re-examined that root cause belief, which your books are helping us re-examine, then you change that. You'll naturally have a ripple effect when things below that are going to start to change. Did that fully make sense?

1:31:15Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, no, I think it does. And I think it did. And I think that sort of, and for me, and I think for a lot of people, that perfectionism is it's sort of a perfectionism that you've got to achieve in order to feel like you earned your right to exist, basically. Like it's got that very sort of moral self-worth element to it. And so then, yes, the failure to do that, the failure to have life match up in that way is a painful thing that you need to find ways to not feel. So yeah, I think it's true. It reminds me also of, just very briefly, the chapter called Don't Stand in Generosity's Way, which draws on the work of the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein.

1:31:54Oliver Burkeman:And it speaks to this idea that it's really hard to make yourself into a better person. Lots of people think they need to be a kinder person or a better person than they are. And that sets up all sorts of internal conflicts and issues. but Joseph Goldstein says he has this personal practice that when he feels a generous impulse arise it's his practice is to try to act on it immediately so he's saying not I'm going to make myself a better person I'm going to get better at recognizing when I'm already naturally being compassionate or nice or kind and just make sure that I follow through with sending the email or making the donation or whatever it is and I think so often I've definitely had this experience Right.

1:32:36Oliver Burkeman:I feel like, oh, yeah, I'd love to sort of I'd I'd love to sort of reach out to that person and tell them how much they appreciated their work. Or I'd I'd love to make a donation to that good cause because it really, you know, reaches me in my heart. It's not that I'm a mean guy who doesn't want to do those things. It's that I'm really busy. I want to do those things really well when I have lots of time and energy and focus. I want to make sure that I'm giving the right donation to the right organization that's got a really good effectiveness rating. and then just it just never happens because this life gets in the way and so i really it's another example of this right this this lovely idea of joseph goldstein's practice which is just like you don't need to summon up more kind thoughts you just need to spot when they're happening and get a little bit better at just doing the thing that's behind them that's that's beautiful and that's kind of in some ways real mindfulness isn't it that's like the art of being present and noticing what's going on in you and around you.

1:33:35That's kind of, I guess, one way that we can think about mindfulness. Just be aware of that and then act on it. Not, oh, I'll research the latest charity later. Running. If you want to run, just start running. Don't wait until you've found the perfect running shoe or the perfect running outfit. It's like, no, no, you've got the urge now.

1:33:55Oliver Burkeman:Do it now when you've got the urge. And with the same mindfulness, you can not act on a sort of angry thought that you think you're going to regret later, right? So you can send the lovely emails and not send the mean emails. You can go running and not necessarily engage in the sort of unhealthy habits so easily just because like you already have the motivation to be that person. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to go to the interruption chat set. It's one of my, it's one of my favorite chats in the book, actually. For some reason, I I just love it. And it was when we were talking about that journaling exercise and you were sort of saying when you can, not you, one could be short with someone because we're trying to do something else that we deem more important.

1:34:43Oliver Burkeman:And in that... Although me as well, many times. But anyway, yeah, carry on. But in that, you sort of very openly share, you know, sometimes what goes to your mind if your son comes in to see you after school when you're trying to, I don't know, work between four and five or whatever it might be. Can you just explain that? I think there's such a deep, simple, but a very deep concept behind interruptions. Yes, I think there is a tendency that we have. I mean, part of the tendency I'm tracking all the way through the book is we want to have lots more control over our lives. And we think that having more control over ourselves and our lives is the path to freedom and peace of mind and all the good things.

1:35:19Oliver Burkeman:And I'm partly questioning that. And one of the ways we do that when it comes to our time is we sort of set ourselves these schedules these very strong um decisions about what we're going to use a portion of time for and as a result we actually end up creating a lot of the interruption problem like of course there are all sorts of things that happen unexpectedly all the time whether that is defined as an interruption or not is at least partly up to ourselves so the example that i give is you know if it's one of the days of the week when i'm working from home I'm not doing school pickup so my son and my wife are somewhere else in the house and if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that happened to him at school all day now there are contexts if I'm right in the middle of recording a podcast or doing a live radio interview or something where like that's higher up on the problem scale but if I'm just sitting there and the only problem is that I had defined that part of the day as being for deep focus, and then it becomes a problem that this otherwise totally wonderful thing that life is supposed to be about, which is moments of connection with your nearest and dearest, if that's only a problem because of the sort of overlay that I put on my day in an attempt to get control over it, then I think, you know, again, in a gentle way without beating myself up, I can suggest that maybe I've taken a wrong turn there in how I'm thinking about my time.

1:36:46Oliver Burkeman:There's also a lovely, there's a dutch zen monk called paul lumens who i quoted a few points in this book and he has this lovely observation about this as well which is like even if you do need to get back to focused work at that time because maybe you do need to like um make that interaction as short as you can to meet a deadline like that's okay that it's not saying you should just let anyone interrupt you even even for lovely reasons but even when you do need to get back to that work the way that works most smoothly in the flow of reality is to stop, put down what you're doing, look the other person in the eyes, see them for real and say, this sounds really wonderful.

1:37:26Oliver Burkeman:Actually, I'm going to need to talk to you about it in a little while. That person feels seen. They go off, you know, and that can work not only in a lovely interaction with your son, but with like some really irritating co-worker in the office or something, right? It's not actually going to help to try not to be interrupted and keep control it's actually like okay yeah this is what the unfolding of time has brought for me i don't have to be a doormat and just go with it for the next hour and a half but i do have to like respond to what's really happening and then as lumens points out that is much everyone leaves happier in that situation it's much smoother most stress i've realized and some people may push back at this but i i really do believe this that most stress not all stress but most stress is internally generated within our minds by the way we're viewing situations and I think that was a prime example you know um on one level what could be more lovely than your child wanting to see their father telling them about something that's happened right right what a lovely thing it's only a problem because we thought I had to do this and again as you say you acknowledge you know yes there will be times but you know creating getting frustrated

1:38:39by that interruption that, frankly, your son, I'm using that as an example, he's not a mind reader. And he's a child. Absolutely. They're not to know that. You could apply this to a partner who's interrupting or coming in when one is trying to work. And somebody will say, I'm trying to work at the moment. Do you know how I'm working? It doesn't help you. Because A, the interruptions happens. be that friction to it, that creates more internal stress. It's going to make it much harder for you to get back to the work when it does need to happen,

1:39:13Oliver Burkeman:when you want to get back to it. No, absolutely, absolutely. And also, yes, you don't even know that the interruption, like to call something interruption is to say that what should have happened is what was going to happen in your mind and what did happen shouldn't have happened. And there are times that that's true, but there are also times when it's like a wonderful serendipitous thing that is much better for everyone in the long run. And I do mention in that chapter, you know, that very famous moment, that sort of viral moment when Robert Kelly, the career expert, was very famously interrupted during Zoom by his kids.

1:39:45Oliver Burkeman:And then you see his wife in the background managing to sort of get them out of the room while this interview carries on. And he wrote a lovely little sort of reflective essay on the experience because he's become famous as that guy, right? I mean, so many people saw this. obviously on some level that was something going wrong but like it everyone loved it like and it and when um it happened before the pandemic but when the pandemic came like it was a sort of a it got circulated again as a sort of a touchstone of like what it's like trying to work as a family with all the kids in the in the house at the same time and like he also writes about how he um did pretty much think as he wrapped up that interview that he was never going to be booked on a major media thing again.

1:40:32Oliver Burkeman:And he's like, no, way more often now. He gets way more bookings, right? Because he's like, he's famous and everyone thinks it was kind of adorable. So he should give his kids a cut. Right, exactly. So it's like, nothing bad came from that thing that you would always have, if he'd had the choice in advance, should I stop? I mean, like, do I want to make sure this doesn't happen or not? He would have chosen that it wouldn't happen. And all the things that came from it we're good and i think that is very very common in our lives be careful what you wish for you know in that scenario you know be careful you you do that enough times they're not going to come and interrupt you and tell you right it's you know you see this it's like it's all these cliches as you're a kid or a teenager you hear all these time is short it passes so quickly the kids go up you think yeah yeah whatever oh man you come a parent you're like oh my god these are these are so true.

1:41:23I'm really feeling it at the moment as my kids are getting older. My son's 15. I'm like, oh, it's not long till he's 18. How many summer holidays might we have left together as a family? I don't know. Hopefully lots. But it really brings into that present day realisation, just for me at least, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want lots of unbroken time when no one's disrupting you. Well, you know, you could be fully isolated and have that life. Or you could go, well, maybe, you know, going back to your thing of trade-offs, well, maybe a part of having a family and having children means that that is going to happen.

1:42:05So maybe you have to accept that. And I understand that sometimes you're in a job where you can't do that. But having the humanity to explain it in the right way is more helpful for that other person and yourself And the truth is that interruption thing is a really big, I think this is why I like it so much is that a close friend of mine a few years ago found out that one of his children had a brain tumor. Non-malignant, thankfully, but nonetheless a concern. I remember him saying to me, since that moment, he never says no to that child. Now, anything can be taken to an extreme, right? So take that to an extreme and someone could be someone who's completely spoiled.

1:42:57Right. But I didn't take it...

1:42:58Oliver Burkeman:Can I have a 20th ice cream? Right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. But what he really meant is if, and I'm being careful not to use names,

1:43:11if he or she wants to do something or wants to throw a ball in the garden or wants to go swimming, or whatever it might be, his default has become yes. And since he told me that, my default has become yes. Now, am I perfect? No. And of course, sometimes it's not appropriate. But for me, it's been a really, it's, you know, it's the, I guess in some ways, the the realization of mortality, even in a child, that reminds us of what is truly important in

1:43:47Oliver Burkeman:the presence yeah absolutely and and yes i think that's so that's so powerful and it's it's interesting isn't it to see that when we do say no a lot of the time sometimes there's the kind of no which is that's not good for you and it's my role as your parent to try to steer you in healthy ways which can go wrong as well because it's important to make your own decisions and all the rest of it but but but there's also the no that says like well that is a good thing but i just can't do it now. We can't do it now because it's got to be later. And there's a beautiful line in a Tom Stoppard play, which I quote in 4 ,000 weeks, which is in the context of child mortality as well.

1:44:24Oliver Burkeman:But like, you know, it's like later is always too late. Like, and it's, and he's talking about how, like, there's this other line in that same quote, which is that, you know, we treat children as if their purpose is to grow up into successful adults. And so we say yes or no to them on that basis. But actually a child's purpose is to be a child and later is always too late just this idea that like you know if you're going to do these things that matter in your life at some point you're going to have to do them in a in a now right and i think it's it's it's so easy to forget it's then so easy to beat yourself up when you remember it as like oh no from now on i'm going to be perfect about this that's also not where this is headed right yeah but just like just to let that back in is is very powerful i think I cannot finish this conversation without talking about scruffy hospitality.

1:45:15I think I'd like to think I'd demonstrate a bit of that today when you came to the house with the painters there and you having to come in through the back. But what is scruffy hospitality?

1:45:28Oliver Burkeman:Scruffy hospitality, this is a phrase that was coined by an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King. And he had this experience where he and his wife like loved having people around to have dinner. He's written about this and gave a sermon about it, which sort of is where I first found out about this. They loved having people around for dinner, but they had sort of developed this checklist of all the ways in which the house had to be perfect before they could have people around for dinner and how perfect the dinner had to be and well chosen and cooked and everything, but it became a barrier to actually wanting to have people around for dinner because it's just so much work.

1:46:07Oliver Burkeman:And so he recounts how they became dedicated instead to this idea of scruffy hospitality, which is saying like, OK, we're going to invite people around and the deal is going to be that you come and the house is the way the house is. And we eat the stuff that we can cook from the cupboards, more or less. and we're sort of understanding in this moment that the connections that come from the hospitality are more important than the putting on of the facade um and the sort of deeper point here and i've definitely experienced this in my own uh life is that it's not just a question of saying look it's okay don't worry it's forgivable like people are going to overlook the mess it's that Actually, when we show up in this more, and not just in dinner parties, obviously, right?

1:46:56Oliver Burkeman:But when we show up in life in this more unvarnished way, we're more willing to talk about or display flaws. It's better, right? A lot of the time it causes people to connect much more with each other. So I write in that chapter about how, you know, I often had noticed long before I came across this term scruffy hospitality, how like if we were having people around for dinner and I noticed that there were like crumbs under the fridge or like an open mail on the toaster for some reason, I'd be like, oh my goodness, got to sort this out before people come around. But if I ever saw things like that, or worse, frankly, at places that I had been invited, I would never be offended.

1:47:36Oliver Burkeman:Like I would never think like, this is outrageous. This person hasn't got it together. I would actually be kind of flattered that I was being given the sort of VIP path to their real lives. I was like, oh, I must be this person's real friend. So it's a bit like people pleasing, isn't it, in some ways, where people pleasing is kind of trying to change who we are so that people think of us in a certain way. Exactly. It's that notion specifically that you have to be perfect in how other people... People pleasing example is good because the point about people pleasing is it doesn't please other people, right?

1:48:10Oliver Burkeman:They find it really annoying. and there's a level of trying to make everything perfect in your presentation of yourself or your home or anything that actually causes a distance. Now, as I am aware and have also been, had emphasized to me by one or two readers since first writing about this, firstly, there are plenty of people who really enjoy putting on a show when people come around for dinner and I'm not trying to say that's bad. And secondly, this plays out, this is gendered, right? This plays out different ways. I think overall women feel more pressure for the domestic spaces to be really sort of spotless and there's a sort of like what's easy for you to say as a man aspect of this, which I also take on board.

1:48:45Oliver Burkeman:But the underlying point is just that like thinking that things need to be presented a certain way that is different from who you really are before you can show up in the world. That's where the unnecessary self-harshness comes from. If people like you as a person, they like you as a person and they don't need you to always be pretending to be a different person. To just move it into a different domain quickly, there's research to show that when people are, there's been these kind of mentoring schemes to try to get people over imposter syndrome in academia, right? There was a whole set of schemes where young women academics were paired with older female academics.

1:49:27Oliver Burkeman:And the idea was that they'd get inspiration from the great success of these people. They wouldn't feel imposter syndrome anymore. And what the researchers found was that actually, it just makes it a bit worse to be, when you're put in a position, it can make it a bit worse. when you're put in a position where you're sort of looking at someone else's amazingness and you're comparing yourself negatively. And that actually when those people or people in that position started sharing about their own insecurities and failures and flaws, that was when the people who had imposter syndrome started to feel more empowered because there was a connection that came through behind those facades that was about how we are all human, we are all flawed and finite, and we are all in the same boat.

1:50:04Oliver Burkeman:And that's when you really get to feel a common bond. Yeah, I love it. Honestly, 4 ,000 weeks and this new book, Meditations for Mortals, absolutely fantastic. Honestly, so, so helpful. So many insights. And we've honestly barely scratched the surface in this conversation of what is in Meditations for Mortals. I think the format is also really, really clever and very inviting for people. So I really appreciate that. right at the end of this conversation oliver i guess mirroring how we started off for that person who is listening to us right now and feels that actually their life is out of control they're knackered they feel close to burnt out they feel anxious given everything you've written about over the past years in your books but also in your newsletter what are your final words of wisdom to that individual i mean first of all it is just to say that this is the most sort of fundamental universal universal human experience especially these days right so there is i i hope that i can persuade the person in that situation at least not to make things worse by by telling themselves that they shouldn't be feeling that way that it's a sort of personal failure of discipline or character or not having found the right methods yet that have left them feeling that way no this is a very very very understandable and forgivable response to just the sheer fact of being human especially today but then i suppose to it would be to suggest that this kind of set of awful feelings does have in a sense it's a portal to something right in a sense it's a it's an invitation to something very powerful i've quoted in the book and i keep quoting everywhere the zen master Giu Kennett who used to say that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down and I just love this which is why I repeat it endlessly but you can sort of see can't you I think in like yes the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed yes the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out like it's not just true it's like so true but that is not a war that any of us is ever going to win and it's in that realization that sort of um that sort of relaxing into that situation that you can then i hope begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy which is like, okay, that's the way it is.

1:53:12Oliver Burkeman:So what would be something I could do with the next 20 minutes that would be one good way to spend 20 minutes of my life on the planet? Yeah, absolutely love it. Oliver, the new book is Meditations for Mortals, a four-week guide to doing what counts. Thank you very much for coming back on the show. Oh, thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

1:53:37really hope you enjoyed that conversation do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else remember when you teach someone it not only helps them it also helps you learn and retain the information now before you go just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.

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