This Is Why You’ll Never Feel Truly Alive (Until You Let Go of Control) | Oliver Burkeman

26:49Oliver Burkeman:And I do think it's really good to have a plan for things like that, but I always have to relearn that the role of the plan is not to dictate my actions over the next months or years. The role of the plan is like, it's really good for some reason to do the plan, and then to have the plan as some sort of North Star that you're navigating by, and then maybe you change the plan. But what it is not is a kind of, or should not be, is a kind of inner taskmaster telling you what to do each day. Because apart from anything else I have always found, I don't know if it's true for you, true for other people, but like, whenever I get really, really rigid and strict about how I'm going to translate my goals into my daily actions and everything, the life, the aliveness just goes out of them, right?

27:39Oliver Burkeman:And suddenly I feel like I'm being bullied by, like, past me to go through all these steps whether I want to or not. And in writing the result will be less good writing, right? Because it'll be done in this sort of sense of chore and like, now I've got to handle this. So it might not be a comprehensive philosophy for life to just like do what you feel like doing at any given moment. That might lead to all sorts of pitfalls. But it's really important for me as a writer not to squeeze out the role for like, okay, I'm at my desk, it's nine o 'clock on a Wednesday morning, what part of this project, what set of ideas do I actually feel like going deeper into?

28:20Oliver Burkeman:Because why not harness that energy instead of using a goal setting method to squelch it and push it away? It's hard, isn't it? Because every time I open, I mean, there's a variety, LinkedIn, Substack, X, Instagram, there's always these productivity goals and I know that we spoke about that a lot last time but something that I found really interesting when thinking about today's conversation and I know that we spoke about the perception of time a lot last time but I actually experienced this recently which made me think about today was that I always think everyone says time flies when you're having fun, it's like a very like generic term which is really true but it's actually true that the novelty of having fun makes time feel longer yeah and so what you just said then about having these strict goals and having this kind of very specific schedule can take that novelty out can take those moments of creativity removed yeah because you just see it stretching out ahead of you for like months like this is what i've got to trudge through absolutely predictably yeah no totally and yeah I wrote down something that you had written the focus on on using time well each day makes you feel like something to survive when you realize what you were doing and when did you realize you were actually doing this to yourself so allowing you to use your time well and I think that I could productively write down my time well but then that made me think well is that the best way to do it without having these pockets of inspiration without having these moments of joy and novelty and this free time in your diary to actually explore that.

30:01Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, I mean, I think one useful thing that I find here, maybe what we're talking about is the distinction between like living in a planned way and living in a spontaneous way. And that sense that a lot of us have that neither one is quite enough on its own. Because planning squelches the life from things, but pure spontaneity, like you're worried that you might forget all the things that matter. And that's what I thought for a long time, like, okay, I've got to find time for both of these. And then you start doing weird things like time boxing space for serendipity into your schedule or something, right?

30:36Oliver Burkeman:It's completely insane when you think about it in detail. It is, but we've both done it. Yes, right, exactly. I'm laughing because I'm like, we've both been there. This is the time of day, the 90-minute period when I'm going to be completely spontaneous. this is something I find useful and you may not but it might just be how my mind works in a sense you're always acting spontaneously whether you like it or not right so even if what you decide to do with a spontaneous moment is implement your very strict time boxing schedule you are in that very moment making that decision whether you do it consciously or unconsciously unless you're literally like in jail or someone's physically manhandling you, put that aside, you're always in the moment deciding what to do.

31:26Oliver Burkeman:It's just that quite often if you're a certain kind of anal person, what you're deciding to do in that moment is carry out your strict plan that you made yesterday. So I found this a very sort of liberating realization. Again, it's one of these things not where you change how you live but where you see more clearly how you're already living um i'm always deciding moment to moment um what to focus on where to go whether to keep a commitment i've made whether to show up to a podcast recording or just i don't know just fail completely to do so right it's all technically within my power and all i need to do is sort of be aware of that and be aware that there are consequences of doing one and not the other and etc i think that makes it a lot easier to know when to stick with a plan and when to diverge from a plan if you see that what you're actually doing is the same thing in every moment you're you're choosing how to use that moment and then i think it's very much easier to sort of say well okay my plan for my day is to put a few hours into this project and try to get to this outcome with it and then to do that and then do that and then something else arises and oh okay now I'm just making a decision in this moment about whether that's something to change course for you see what I'm saying?

32:54Oliver Burkeman:I don't know if I'm expressing it properly but like actually every moment is a choice even you're not actually governed by the plan you made yesterday you're choosing to implement the plan you made yesterday and so the freedom that we fear losing when we stick to strict plans is actually always there the serendipity and spontaneity that we're a little bit scared of because it feels so out of control is just in fact the basic state of our whole lives so we're already in that kind of scary situation and all we all we ever need to do is try to make the wisest decision about what to do in the very next moment i don't know if you find that convincing or not you'll have to tell me well sometimes i feel like i can just go through and add more and more on and be more unconscious.

33:40I feel like the busier I get, the more unconscious I am. That's the way I feel. And actually, when I give myself that time, but the pressure to have that time is also quite hard. I mean, for instance, I'm someone who loves to be busy. So I fill myself with more busyness. Is that me moving away from feeling? Yes, probably. Is that why I'm connected to self-compassion? Yes, probably. Because I have to have it as an efficient tool to allow myself to have time off. But it's interesting, you talk about when we free up time in our diary or in our lives, we just fill it with more stuff. And so we live in this weird moment where actually we try...

34:20I think about this now with AI. People are implementing more into their daily lives because of AI's allowing them to free themselves up. They're becoming more efficient, so we're outputting more. I think about this at the show. Started off the show with just me, maybe one other guest five years ago and us just having this conversation back and forth and every week going okay maybe I should record another show now we're doing three shows a week we're putting out more content than ever we've you know gone to YouTube we're making it bigger and better than trying to do more than ever before but we've also utilized our systems better yeah so we've obviously bought in more AI tools less people become more efficient but my time is actually

35:02Oliver Burkeman:smaller yeah yeah and i think the real like i yes i am not here to question your content strategy right but but what i but what i think is really important to connect to and i recognize equivalent things from my own different yeah different domains and stuff but like i think the important question is always like why are you doing it right and and if tools and technologies ai or otherwise enable us to spend more time expressing our passions and enjoyment of the world in action, that's fantastic and really good. If you think, and because you're human on some level you probably do, there's no shame in it at all, that this expansion process is a trajectory that would eventually get to a point where you'll be like, okay, now this is the correct size of things, things, and this is the correct scale, and we're on all the platforms that count, and now we've arrived.

36:03Oliver Burkeman:I think that's the bit that one always has to be a little bit skeptical of, just because obviously that is never going to be the case. And it feels like every week I encounter news of a social media platform that I literally hadn't heard of its existence. So clearly I cannot be expected to already be all over that with my thoughts and content. So there's a point, again it's this idea that ultimately I think what we have to say we're doing when we try to get on top of everything and conquer these mountains of opportunities or of demands, whatever they are in each different person's life, is say you're not going to get your arms around it all.

36:47Oliver Burkeman:You're going to have to stop at a certain point. you're going to have to let certain people down in some contexts or turn down certain opportunities you know not be on certain platforms right this is just a given it's baked into the world um and then it's just a matter of of making those decisions as well as you're able it's the same with writing a book right you could do it you could keep tweaking it for for years until it was even better than you. That is an absolutely unfinishable project. It's finished when you develop the agency and authority to say, that's where I'm going to stop. And that's the only thing we can do.

37:31Oliver Burkeman:I think the problem is when we're chasing this notion that at some point the world is going to tell us that we've done enough and reached the correct place to be able to finally relax. I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor please subscribe to the show this helps it grow more than you know and I'm so bad at asking this from you I'm so bad at thinking about this but you know my goal is a hundred thousand to get to on YouTube and I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes and we can only do that with your help together so please do hit subscribe thank you well I find it interesting because you wrote this book kind of I don't want to say just before the rise of AI, because I guess it was coming up then, but now it feels even more relatable to try and intersect these ideas, to have more agency.

38:24And I think, I don't know if you struggle with this, but I'm sure you do because you're human. I think everyone struggles with this, which is comparison. Right.

38:30Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, no, totally. It makes me think about the upward social comparison theory, is when you compare your life to others who basically look online to have better, calmer, easier lives than yours. And I think now that's becoming more astringent than ever before, because we're just in a constant vortex of comparison. I mean, from the moment that one wakes up to the moment you fall asleep, you always feel that you're behind. And Anne Lambert, I love this quote. I think I might have heard this from you on a podcast, but I love her. Never compare your inside to anyone else's outsides. and you know i have had aliveness since you messaged me yesterday in my mind when i was thinking about all of this that kind of does kill our aliveness i think that's true i think it's really interesting because i sort of half wonder if there's a point at which this process of just constant like drowning in opportunities to make negative comparisons between yourself and everybody else, where it kind of loses its force or maybe becomes a little easier to let go of.

39:40Oliver Burkeman:Because losing hope can be a very useful thing sometimes. And actually, in that kind of context, when you really understand that there's always going to be someone who seems to be doing better than you, or making more than you, or looking better than you, or writing better than you, whatever it is, and probably lots of people. But when that's of borne in on you enough, I wonder whether we're going to get to a place where it stops being so tormenting, just through its sheer kind of ubiquity. Right? Because… But it's increasing faster than ever before. That's what I'm finding interesting in this narrative.

40:20If you think 10 years ago, comparison was obviously there, but it just wasn't as poignant as it is today. And it's rapid.

40:28Oliver Burkeman:Yeah. No, I'm not sure I have a really great, you know, deeply wise thing to say about this, except that, yeah, I think the insides and outsides point, that lovely Anne Lamott line that you quoted, is so powerful because it's really important to see not just that it doesn't matter that you're not at the top of whatever, like, x-axis, y-axis of greatness you've decided to focus on, not even just the fact that you select the one that you're doing badly on. That's the thing. At the moment you're just at the top of some pyramid, it doesn't matter anymore. You only care about that. You know, people who...

41:06Oliver Burkeman:Once you're a billionaire flying everywhere in a private jet, you compare your private jet to everyone else's private jets and think your private jet sucks. It goes on and on and on. But also, it's just not a... You're not comparing apples with apples. How someone presents themselves has got essentially nothing to do with what's going on on the inside. There was a lovely line I came across the other day from the New Yorker writer Gia Tolentino, who's got, I'll get it wrong, but she says something along the lines of like, some of the most dysfunctional and out of control people you could ever imagine are like right now all over social media presenting their lives as completely calm and serene and sorted, right?

41:46Oliver Burkeman:I think we're beginning to learn from from certain kinds of social media meltdowns that it's not just that you might be as happy and have it all together as somebody you see on social media, but like some of those people might actually be having quite chaotic and disastrous lives. And you might be very happy, in fact, at the level of calm and serenity and achievement and self-compassion that you have in your own. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know that when we first spoke, you weren't on social media, and now you've gone on to social media. Yeah, I mean, I was on Twitter for a long time, and now Twitter's unusable.

42:24Oliver Burkeman:But I'm in constant struggle with how much I ought to be on any of these things. I'm never feeling fully resolved about it. But yes, with some excellent assistance, I am now doing some more on platforms that I'd previously just been completely baffled by and unfamiliar with. Well, I think with all of these models that show the good life, do you think that's now distracting us from it feels almost impossible to live a good one because we're having these constant streams? This is just sort of sensing the zeitgeist. It's not science on any level, but I feel that there is a real movement away from some of that.

43:09Oliver Burkeman:There is a real sense, both in the terms of the worst excesses of social media, sort of stepping away from them, a real understanding that a lot of the corporations behind those platforms do not have your best interests at heart on any level. They have maximizing your time on site as the only goal. And then also in the context of AI, which I found really interesting to witness a real sort of re-valuing of the human, right? And a sense that I'm fine if the podcasts I'm listening to or the YouTube videos I'm watching have had AI used in assistance as a tool in some part of the production cycle. But like, what I, it's now very clear to me that what I want in a podcast is one, two, three human beings telling me what it's like to be them in one way or another, right?

44:05Oliver Burkeman:And I read some news story just in the last few days about plans to sort of flood the zone of audio podcasting in the States with like, you know, limitless numbers of completely artificially generated conversation. And I don't know if what's going to happen, or if this is going to be terrible for humans making podcasts and other content, but I know it makes it much clearer to me that exactly what I want as a consumer of those things. And I've got to believe that there are enough people in that boat that actually you get back towards this kind of thing where what counts is the human. And I don't think this is just a sort of conversation about books and content creation, right?

44:56Oliver Burkeman:I think this goes far beyond that. It's not that there are necessarily specific skills that an AI will never be able to do. I think that sort of argument is a hostage to fortune because then there's a new news story the following week and it turns out an LLM can do that thing. But there is something deep in all of us that wants certain things that we do to be done with other thinking, feeling, sentient, conscious, emoting psyches. And it's not good enough for there to be all the output of that, but there to be no there there, no person inside. Which brings us back to the aliveness point. I don't know if you have strong feelings one way or the other about AI therapy, for example.

45:47Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, I do. I think, to me, I want to hear yours, but to me it seems obvious, like, absolutely, an LLM could be a source of interesting journal prompts or questions for self-reflection, or could tell you about breathing techniques and those kind of conveying of information, fine. But if you think that the ultimate benefit of a therapeutic relationship is precisely that there's somebody else holding you in their mind, then it's obviously just not therapy. It might be a useful adjunct, but it... And goodness knows we live in a world where really high quality therapy is out of reach for the vast, vast majority of people, I think.

46:29Oliver Burkeman:But if it's a relationship that is having the positive effect, I don't see how there can be a relationship unless I suppose you go really science fiction and say that the LLMs are are indeed conscious and thinking but I don't think we any of us would agree that's a whole that's a whole separate line of argument that we should not get into here no I think the AI is really the AI therapy is a really interesting call I've been having that a lot right now I actually had that at dinner last night when I was talking exactly that I think the problem that I see I think you said one really good point the therapy feels so out of reach for so many people One, because it's very confronting to speak to somebody else that you don't know about your deepest darkest problems.

47:11And a lot of the time people might lie in therapy because they also feel judged. With an AI you're less likely probably to lie because you know that there's going to be reduced judgment. And you also know that they're potentially going to agree with you, the AI, and make you feel seen. And there's going to be less of that friction. Whereas a person staring you back sat opposite you in person or even on Zoom. Yeah. It's more confronting to say something that you maybe don't want to hear. With AI, I think the problem that we're seeing in society right now, and this is just my theory and this is just my opinion, is that people feel less connected than ever before, which we know, and mental health is rising more worse than it ever has.

47:53Yeah. People don't feel seen. And I think that's one of the biggest things. When we lose connection and we lose the vulnerability that we have with proper human connection, we don't feel seen and we don't feel understood. in comes this amazing tool yeah and it allows you to feel quite seen it agrees with you it's very agreeable and now there's this conversation that can be quite manipulative because whatever you say it's going to say i totally agree with you oliver that makes complete sense and in some

48:18Oliver Burkeman:cases it tells people that they're like that they're like gods who've discovered the something some amazing new discovery about the nature of humanity right and then they go completely yeah It's true. And so that agreeability, but also that person feeling seen, which I think is a really, really important part of being human. Because if you don't feel seen, you feel very lonely. And that's where the concept of loneliness comes in. You can be in a room full of people. If you're not seen. But you can feel completely alone. Right. And that's not having that conversation of feeling seen. Right. And yes, and I sort of have felt in certain contexts like I'm being a party pooper, but if you feel seen by an AI, you are fooling yourself, right?

49:01Oliver Burkeman:Because there's no seer. Exactly. And the question of whether that's better than nothing, given how out of reach so much therapy is, or whether it's actually worse than nothing seems to me to be part of where this conversation is at, right? I mean, maybe with enough controls and enough self-awareness on the part of the user and enough, you know, health warnings, the fact that that's kind of not real is not a problem, right? So a parallel that somebody brought up the other day, which I thought was very interesting, is like, I know people do have absolutely real relationships with their dogs, for example, but they probably put a large amount of fantasy on top of in terms of like how much a dog can really sort of understand and connect, right?

49:51Oliver Burkeman:I'm not disputing that that's a real relationship and that dogs feel and think, but I think that it's probably a relationship that humans put quite a lot of stuff into that is not technically true about what's going on in a canine mind. So maybe that's okay too if it's a simulated mind on a computer. But yeah, I guess I don't think so. I think there's got to be something there, and there is something there in most animals as far as we understand. But also you can touch them. At least you have a physical connection to them. And dogs can sense feelings. So they're not going to give you direct advice, but they'll comfort you in a certain time.

50:38They'll help release the oxytocin. That's all really important. But an AI is just telling you what you want to hear.

50:45Oliver Burkeman:Right, yes. And so maybe it's almost opposite to what I said, right? It's like people treat the AI as if they're like the wisest person they ever met. And they understand that, you know, their dog is not going to be able to give them life advice, but can do something that's really important in life that actually some other animals can be a part of. Yeah, I think it's such a kind of fascinating and interesting development. I keep seeing that it's like the number one use case of LLMs now, is this sort of therapeutic conversation. I wish I remember who it was, but I was having a conversation online with somebody who made this really good point that when you talked about it being less confronting to talk to talk to an LLM.

51:34Oliver Burkeman:When you tell your deepest darkest secrets to a therapist, obviously a good therapist will create a very trusting, secure environment where you can really trust that they're not going to go and post about it immediately afterwards. But you can't totally know, right? So there's something very important about trust is that it shouldn't be 100 % certain, right? If you're my therapist and I tell you a deep dark secret, I want to basically be sure that you're going to keep my confidences, but I could never know. And that's actually a very powerful and important moment, I think, for someone in any relationship, therapy or otherwise, to be able to risk that thing.

52:11Oliver Burkeman:And as you say, assuming the sort of basic data security and privacy of the LLMs, there's no risk at all. You could tell them the most utterly monstrous, shocking things in the world and they'll just affirm your, if you prompt them to affirm your views on the matter, they will. So I think that's really important, the fact that real relationship has that little element of genuine risk in it. Like you might be shamed, you might be rejected, you might be laughed at for the thing you said, and then that makes it really valuable when a good therapist doesn't do those things, right? Because they could.

52:48Oh 100%, but also a good

52:50Oliver Burkeman:therapist will challenge you right right that too right challenge you friendly and on your side way but like tough love when required absolutely yeah and that's the problem with ai yeah yeah which it is interesting how it connects to to aliveness because i mean you'll feel great about yourself after you speak to an ai that's for sure um but is it useful is it useful in human context probably not no because you're going to go around with a disbelief of maybe what is true yeah and i mean I mean, you see all these stories now being widely reported of really serious delusions, and people spiralling into terrible places by what they're told and what they come to believe.

53:27Oliver Burkeman:And I guess I believe that we're all a little bit prone to that, and that these are just the most lurid examples of something that we all need to be aware of. Other people seem to argue that this is something that's a specific risk for people who have only a particular kind of psychosis or particular proneness to mental insecurity. And obviously, it's worse for some people than others, but like, I don't think I'm so special that if I spent like several hours a day in a room conversing with a LLM that was sort of designed basically to convince me that it was a human, that I would have the great mental resilience to resist falling into that vortex.

54:13Oliver Burkeman:No. Not at all. No, they're very convincing. That's the thing that we are not aware of. Because empathy is such an important value. But how empathetic we are all the time to people is also a really interesting subject. I find very interesting. And so an AI will give you the fake empathy. And meanwhile, I mean, we don't need to talk about this forever, I find it so interesting, But like, meanwhile, you are relating to a box on your computer screen, partly as if it were a real human, but also as if it's there just to do your every bidding, right? I mean, this is how much of a Luddite I am. I've sort of had this problem with Siri and Alexa as well, right?

54:55Oliver Burkeman:I think if there is a technology that you're encouraged to think of as a human in some way, but you're also encouraged to think of as only being there to do your every bidding and to be at your beck and call, that's kind of icky. There's something corrupting about that. It's not good to... It seems to be quite a risk that you're then going to treat... It's going to make it more likely that you treat other real humans in your life like nothing but instruments for your goals, right? And not as whole, real, full people. No, it's true. It's true. I think it's something that we always have to be very aware of.

55:36I mean, sometimes I do shout out Alexa and somebody just say to the other day, you've got to be really careful how you speak to Alexa. That's true!

55:42Oliver Burkeman:Early in the days of Alexa, it was well noticed that it was like turning young kids into like jerks, right? Because they would not be told off for barking commands at Alexa and then they would just turn and bark commands at mum or dad and genuinely not understand why one was okay and one was wrong. Yeah. I've got enough work trying to gently explain to my son that he shouldn't just order his parents around without also having a technology in the corner that he is supposed to order around. So moving on from AI, because this is also something that maybe is to bring in the self-compassion with our relationship with AI.

56:21I know we've touched on this briefly throughout the show, but how has your relationship with self-compassion changed from the last time I spoke to you till now? Because it's something that you fundamentally know that I'm very interested in. But you also said to me really interestingly after we came off that original talk that we had which I didn't think was going to go into self-compassion. It was about productivity, it was about time management, it was about looking at perfectionism and being an imperfectionist and being okay with that but it's really interesting when we left you said to me I'm really diving into I'm really trying to understand this a lot more and it's really piquing my interest which is really interesting to me because I just didn't think it was going to come up right and I thought if only I knew that I would have had the whole conversation there.

57:04So I could not bring it up today because, I mean, it's kind of instrumental now to all the work that I do. And obviously, I said to you earlier, the cringe part was really interesting to me when you said that. How cringe-aversed is it to you now? Like, when you think about the term self-compassion or the things that you do in your life, like, what's your journey been with it in the last year?

57:26Oliver Burkeman:Well, I might end up recapping a bit from last conversation because I think it is a deepening of that same idea. But the cringe originally was this notion that there's something sort of self-indulgent or self-absorbed about, or that you're a sort of… As if the invitation in the idea of self-compassion is to think of myself as very specially in need of being treated well, which just goes against everything that I I've sort of been raised to think and to feel. And a big breakthrough, and this is a recap from last time, but a big breakthrough for me was encountering ways of expressing this idea that made it out as being that all I was being asked to do was not be more unkind to myself than I would ever dream of being to a friend, right?

58:24Oliver Burkeman:So I think that realization of how easy it is to sort of go through the day shouting at yourself. Not just in ways that are mean, but in ways that you yourself would never do to the people you live and work with because of course you wouldn't, right? That was a useful moment for me. Do you remember when that moment happened? Because I remember when that moment happened. Right. And there was a moment when something just flipped. All of a sudden I was like wow that that is what I've been doing but I think I had to be in the right moment of my life to see it yeah because I think if someone would have said that 10 years ago I'd be like that's really nice totally unrelatable right right yeah I don't remember the specific moment I think that I I very often don't remember moments it's like I look back and it turns out that I'm in a different place than I was a few weeks ago and writing morning pages is a crucial part of this for me so that's my one sort of that's just anything that comes to your mind three sides of an a6 narrow ruled notebook that that's not part of the rules by the way that's just what i do right yeah just wherever my head is at almost every morning um really helps these sort of ideas and feelings take shape i guess where i'm at with it now and it's interesting because i feel like it's interesting to me i feel like i've been on i'm quite a psychological journey but have maybe not recently been thinking of it in terms of of self-compassion but it is about self-compassion because it is understanding and i think we all go through this right that in one way or another coming to understand the ways in which the difficulties that you encounter in life or the difficulty you seem to cause yourself in life sort of are because of ways of being that that made sense right that that um that that were reasonable ways of of dealing with aspects of your childhood situation or experiences that you had and again not only in the context of people who experienced like sort of severe trauma or neglect which i certainly did not but that like you know there's some aspect of however all of us are raised that's going to give us certain kind of schemas, you know, certain kinds of rules of thumb that we follow.

1:00:49Oliver Burkeman:And I think one of the ones that I developed for sure was this sense that I had to hold the rest of the world at bay, often by doing all my work and being really productive and staying on top of everything, so that I could get breathing space to be myself. So there was a sort of zero-sum arrangement between all the stuff I had to do and actually living. thing. So I'm constantly like, can I just deal with it all so that I can finally… As opposed to somebody more psychologically integrated who might say, no, I can be myself through the things that I do and choose to do. And so that's just one pattern, and people have a million different patterns and a million different random screw-ups and neuroses, right?

1:01:34Oliver Burkeman:But the self-compassion part, I think, for me anyway, was seeing like, oh yeah, you don't just do this because you're an idiot, or because you haven't figured out the truth, or because you haven't come across the right therapy modality or productivity technique. You do it because you can see the ways that it made sense as a way of managing anxiety and living in the specific context that you're living. And that's really powerful, because then it's like, okay, it's not a mystery, but somehow it also then gives me the agency to be like, I also maybe don't have to do that all the time for the rest of my life.

1:02:15Oliver Burkeman:Yeah. And it enables you to be more compassionate to the equivalent patterns in others, the people you live with or work with or are the parent of even. You know, I mean, our son is still young enough that I can hold on to the hope that we're somehow not going to completely screw him up. And I'm sure, you know, all parents do on some level. but just a general empathy for the idea that the way people do things for emotional logics. And if you really want to push that point, people who I think of as causing all the problems in the world today are also doing for following emotional logics, which doesn't make their actions acceptable or moral, but it's really helpful in understanding what the hell's going on and not just being shriveled up in hate.

1:03:04Oliver Burkeman:against the situation. Yeah, well, I guess the embodiment of self-compassion is love and acceptance. And I think the thing that I figured out, for me, it feels like the antidote to stress of when you feel overwhelmed or when you feel, as you said, that like push and pull, which I think we all feel in today's demanding world, that push and pull, that self-compassion allows you just to have a bit of a breather. And for me, it's propelled the word let go. That's what self-compassion allows me to do. It is that propeller to say, actually, I can let go. Like, I am allowed to give myself this in the moment because I find that I seem to be the friend in the friendship group that everyone comes to for advice and sits there.

1:03:50But at points in my life, my friends have gone, why can't you ever take your own? You're so great at being the person we come to, but you seem to struggle with implementing it on yourself. And it's interesting because I think we all have this innate wisdom in us. We all have it, but we have intellectualized ourselves so much that we push it away. And I think we live in our minds. And so that self-compassion is bringing in that ancient wisdom that we actually know because we offer it to everyone else. We can very clearly see what we should really do. But when it comes to ourselves, we can't inflict it to ourselves, but we can find it so much easier to give it to someone else.

1:04:31Oliver Burkeman:Yeah, right. No, I, yes, I think this is a, I think this is a common pattern. Yeah. And I'm sure I have a good dose of it as well. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is all wrapped up into the optimization, longevity, productivity, cultures that we all are so eager to get to and find out the right answer to. But we missed that crucial step, which is us. Yes, exactly. On this journey. Yeah. And that's the irony of the whole situation, which I think it's amazing that we all want to be better. I think that's an amazing thing. And that's fundamentally the essence of the quality. I think the essence of all the work that you write about is that ultimately we want to be better.

1:05:14We want to be better with our time. We want to be better friends. We want to be better parents. We want to be better at our work. So we want to be healthier. We want all of these things, but we kind of lose ourselves in that.

1:05:24Oliver Burkeman:Yeah. And it's so interesting. I haven't really thought about those terms, but like the wanting to be better, that is not antithetical to aliveness. That is the expression of aliveness. Exactly. But wanting to be better in order to get to a standard where you can then finally relax, that's the thing that, or where you can finally not have to feel bad about yourself and like you're a huge loser. That is antithetical to aliveness. So it's really interesting, the distinction there, because, yeah, no, I totally agree that that urge to grow is that is life. Then that is that is that's not to be let go of.

1:05:59Well, I think it feels very right now to read this quote, which I think is kind of connected to people always want to think about the future and how we can implement these things. But you wrote, you can't, and I know this because I got from these from your favorite quotes that you pulled out that Alice sent me from your book. You can't know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is astringically hopeless. So you have the permission to stop. Something about saying that to yourself. And I call them permission slips. I have them for myself, where it's like writing a little permission slip to myself as you would at school.

1:06:37to say, Sarah's excused from this class. She's allowed. There's something about I didn't want to break rules when I was a kid, but if I was given a permission slip, I was like, okay, I'm allowed to step outside the classroom. I'm allowed to do this. I think about that in my own life. Do you have any ways that people can lessen their grip, loosen their grip, allow themselves permission to stop? How are you doing that actively now? Thinking about terms of living more alive and being more alive in the future and now, I guess.

1:07:10Oliver Burkeman:I mean, for me, and I am a certain kind of left-brainy, intellectual-first kind of person, there's a lot of power in understanding the futility of a quest that I'm beating myself up for not having completed, right? So getting everything done, it's very helpful to understand that the supplies are infinite and that they will never be done. Feeling certain about the future, as in that quote, it's very helpful for me to see that it's just not in the gift of humans to be able to feel authentically certain about the future. So for me that kind of perspective shift is important, and not to do a sales pitch, but that is what I was trying to do in the structure of Meditations for Mortals, right?

1:07:52Oliver Burkeman:To try to sort of have the book not just be some information about some things that you might think about differently, but for it to be like an active ingredient that But in reading it, you might, you know, a short chapter every day for a month, as I suggest, you might actually sort of go through some of that process of unclenching, of letting go. And then I think really it's just anything in the course of the day that enables you to get a little bit of distance, of sort of perspective on the situation. So it's almost like it's just like deliberately stopping. If you want to remember one thing to do it is to like take breaks and get up from the desk and stare out of the window.

1:08:38Oliver Burkeman:And if you remember that one thing I think it it's actually surprisingly easy then to sort of get back into to become conscious again of like what you're doing and the choices that you're making. There's a Dutch zen monk I quote quite a lot in this book who wrote his own book Time Surfing which which is very highly recommended by me. He's called Paul Lumens. And he really goes in deep on the weird importance of what he calls, or his English translator calls, taking breathers through the day. It seems like some little extra luxury and the first thing that's going to go when you've got a busy day.

1:09:18Oliver Burkeman:But in fact, in those moments of stepping away, maybe doing something physical instead of mental, It does not count to stop working on a piece of writing and then just surf the web or social media, right? You've got to physically move your context. But it's much more than a little luxury. It's actually the moment in which you're sort of called back to yourself and you sort of can see that you were maybe starting to scuttle off down one of those avenues of like desperate for control and beating yourself up. And you can sort of like return again and then ask the only question you ever need to ask, as Carl Jung says, which is like, what is the next most necessary thing?

1:10:01Oliver Burkeman:What's the thing I'm going to do with the next moment? Which might well be going back to the task you were on, fine. But it's that sort of presence of mind coming back and back, which is actually one of the original meanings of the word that gets translated as mindfulness in the meditation literature, right? We think of mindfulness as sitting down and closing your eyes, following your breath. But actually that sort of ability to have the presence of mind. And I can't really give you, and no one can, like a sort of scheme or technique or app or something to always have that presence of mind, so that you can forget about it.

1:10:36Oliver Burkeman:Because you can't forget about it. It is just literally that job of calling things to mind again throughout the day, falling off the wagon, getting distracted, coming back, and not expecting it to be anything else. Yeah, I think it's really, it was a big deal for me when I realized I wasn't, it was okay for that to just be an ongoing, ever unfolding thing of seeking to become and to stay more and more conscious, rather than beating myself up for not having become perfectly conscious yet. Now I never, never expected to do so. You've given yourself agency, which is the best thing ever. Permission slipped to continue being on some level unconscious and compulsive and messed up for the rest of my life.

1:11:25Well, the messiness is what makes us human. I think that's the beauty. No one, and I believe, maybe I shouldn't say no one because somebody might connect to this, but I really do believe that most people do not connect to perfectionism. To seeing someone who is perfect the whole time, who never messes up, who has no messiness of life. I know that when I relate to people, it's because I've seen the struggle. I'm like, wow, they're not this perfect human being, that they have everything together. And I think that's the interestingness with the digital world of today. Like actually, this is what I love about these conversations, that when people walk through the door, they tell me the messiness of their lives before they come onto the mic.

1:12:01I see the messiness of their lives afterwards. I live in a messiness of chaos that somehow looks fine-tuned when I can sit down, but I'm not like that way at all. And it's the acceptance of that. And I actually think that's what brings the beauty to so much of work is that chaos and allowing yourself to accept it and live in it. And, you know, we did a really, really, really recommend our listeners and watch us on YouTube to go and watch our first episode that we did together, because we really spoke about all these different tools as well with, and it isn't the optimization of time management, but it's the things that you can do to connect to all of these theories that we spoke a little bit more about in the kind of philosophical side today than we did more in the practical side last time, that we really got into the practicality of it.

1:12:45But the one thing that really stayed with me, which was amazing because I was literally about to write my book, was that you said work in 90 minute time blocks. And I would always have this thing in my mind where it would be you coming into my brain and being like, nothing's more productive now, you need to stop. And I would find it hard and I would find that if I finished mid-sentence or I do a task and I finish kind of two thirds in and I leave, I can easily come back to it because I've already got a structure. It's when you sit down and you have nothing that your mind is easily wondering. But working in this 90 minute time blocks and then like physically removing myself was a massive godsend.

1:13:22godson because it's interesting you think that you have to work continuously and the whole time and having that isn't hard it's hard to have self-agency in that moment no having that changed

1:13:34Oliver Burkeman:me oh i'm really glad to hear it and by the way i'm sorry i don't want to undermine this brilliant advice that you're uh finding so useful but like it's not even that there's something deeply magic about 90 minutes there is research to suggest that there's something quite common about that level length of the time you've got the stamina for focused work. And I also have written about how a total of about four hours a day spent on that kind of real deep thought is most people's limit as well. But it's really just having any kind of limit that enables you to say, that's okay, I'm not going to keep going on and on and on and on, which is always implicitly, like, until I've finished it and can finally feel good about myself.

1:14:19Oliver Burkeman:It's like, no, I'm going to do this and then stop. And I have to discover this again and again in my own book writing. Like, if I can actually get into the place where I can happily and not anxiously spend, you know, two or three hours, most days, moving a book project forward, the progress you make is like weird. Like, it's amazing how much accumulates after a week or two or three. and it's so much more effective than like deciding to do 10 hours one day and then basically spending the next three days like first of all feeling like oh i don't need to do anything because i just did 10 hours and then the other two days realizing how exhausted you are from doing the 10 and eventually it's like it's worse than the alternative so um yeah if you can bring yourself to do just that modest bit but keep it going um most days you will amaze yourself well it's like small layered blocks of consistency.

1:15:12I think that's what it is. I'd rather somebody do 10 to 15 minutes of movement a day or add one new food to their trolley every week. Because over time, as they add that new food and that new product into their trolley, they're naturally reducing the bad ones and having more diversity rather than going out and trying to eat 10 vegetables in one day and thinking, well, I've done it now for my week. Adding that in consistently over time actually has a much better outcome. Yeah.

1:15:38Oliver Burkeman:And then absolutely. And then also the other risk to just be aware of there is not rigid consistency, right? It's like most days, it's most times you go shopping. And that's important. It's not just do whatever the hell you feel like, but it also isn't that if you miss a day or mess up once, like it's all over. Because that is a very self-defeating way to think as well. Self-compassion comes in at that moment. Absolutely. That's where it's really strong. It's the hardest times to do it, but that's when it's the most effective. And that's when you know that you have that thought process more, that you know that you're connecting more more to it because at the beginning it'll feel very hard to do it.

1:16:13So we started with what's changed. I want to end with what do you want to write about next?

1:16:18Oliver Burkeman:I mean I am obviously like chasing these ideas of aliveness and humanness and like being in reality versus being kind of one removed from reality which has a lot to do with being online and being in the world offline but it's not quite the same thing and I'm trying to sort of shape all this at the moment into something yeah i guess that just sort of answers the questions i feel i need answering now which are not quite so much about dealing with overwhelm and the finitude of time which was my focus before i'm really glad i i figured some of those things out but more about kind of how do you show up for life and live sanely and hopefully happily in a world that feels so completely volatile and inexplicable and yes, overwhelming, but overwhelming in kind of new ways over and above long to-do lists.

1:17:14Oliver Burkeman:And that, yes, that lots of what we do to try to handle this seems to end us and leave us feeling less alive even when it's effective. So, you know, all I want to write is a manual for surviving and thriving in the future forever that's absolutely brilliant and read by everybody. Yes, those are my modest ambitions. Well, the word that came out to there was depletion. I feel quite depleted. That's probably a word that resonates a lot with me, although I do feel very intellectually stimulated and I feel excited and I feel like I'm a curious person. I'm always, you know, there's so many things that now I can access.

1:17:52But weirdly, the curiosity can lead to depletion because there's so much. And so that sense of aliveness, I think people will really connect with, or I will anyway.

1:18:03Oliver Burkeman:I'm really glad to hear it. Like I connect to imperfectionists I felt so soon. It's something to do with, I mean, yeah, it's something to do with like allowing, it's something to do with like allowing life to nourish you as well as just trying to get as much as you can out of life. It's a, it's a, I think that depletion idea is really, it's really interesting. Yeah. I'm going to think about that. How to not feel depleted in a new modern world. Brilliant. There you go. Thank you. Just a bit of a brainstorm to end the session on your book. Why not? Thank you. So I can't remember, and I should have looked at this, but obviously my last question you answered, which I leave the show.

1:18:39I can't remember what you answered. I will go back and I will have a look. I think it was something to do with self-compassion. But now I would like to know, what does live well, be well mean to you, Oliver?

1:18:49Oliver Burkeman:It means like really fully being here. It means showing up. It means feeling things more and sort of, you know, it's the rain on your skin or whatever, right? It's the real sense of kind of being there for what is happening, being there for other people, not necessarily having fun all the time, but no longer kind of holding the world at one remove in order to sort of stay calm, right? but actually finding the ways to be calm fully in the world. Incredibly vague recipe for a life of living well and being well, but that's what comes to my mind right now. Well no, I love that because I just thought about the emergence of these two worlds, which is actually showing the real you and the value that you bring every day.

1:19:39So showing the messiness integrated with the external that you bring. Because I think that's maybe where, this is me speaking from myself, where that restriction comes in was if I show my best self on all of these case scenarios, then I can kind of collapse into a bit of a mess when I get home. And it's kind of letting that infiltrate into the messiness of like what you do every day. So there isn't perfection there. And that can feel less exhausting.

1:20:03Oliver Burkeman:Yes, yes, absolutely. And like the world maybe doesn't need to be held at bay in the way that we assume that it does. And people don't get a nice feeling from it when they sense that you're dealing with them just so that they'll go away and leave you in peace, you know, and all the rest of it. So I think it's a win-win situation. Yeah, we always want the win-win-win situation in every scenario. Oliver, thank you for coming on. I'm very excited to see this depletion of the modern world in maybe 2026, 2027. Thanks for coming on. Everyone who's listening, please go and check our first episode as well.

1:20:37We will link it in the show notes. We will also link your recent book again, Meditation for Mere Mortals, and 4 ,000 weeks into the show notes. But thank you for coming on.

1:20:46Oliver Burkeman:Thank you so much for asking me back. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.