The Lie That Keeps You Feeling Behind Every Single Day | Oliver Burkeman

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3:12Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

3:57Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I sound a little bit different because I am sick. Our whole family has basically been sick since Christmas off and on. I think we went through flu B, then strep. My oldest actually had strep twice and then now through flu A. So it's a little rough, but hopefully this is not symbolic of the year to come. but it is what it is and we will get through it. I want to read you something real fast. Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands this to be good news. It's not that facing finitude isn't painful. That's why the quest for control is so alluring.

4:47Ryan Holiday: Confronting your non-negotiable limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act and to experience resonance. That's a passage from Oliver Berkman's latest book, Meditation for Mortals, Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. You might know his other big bestseller, 4 ,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. I've actually known Oliver for a long time.

5:32Ryan Holiday: I was trying to remember. We had lunch or dinner. Was it in New York or L.A.? I don't remember. We met before, but he came out and did the podcast in person, and it was lovely. It's been awesome to watch his books blow up. He was a columnist for many years at The Guardian. in. He had a weekly column called This Column Will Change Your Life. And he wrote a book before 4 ,000 Weeks called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. And I think you're really going to like this episode. I'm keeping the intro short today because I am running out of voice. So I'll let my conversation, which I recorded with Oliver not too long ago, do most of the talking.

6:15Ryan Holiday: And if you haven't read 4 ,000 Weeks or Meditations for mortals you should we've got signed copies at the painted porch you can follow oliver on instagram and on twitter at oliver berkman

6:29Ryan Holiday: i remember with the antidote which i have here amazing when an old school edition yeah we were trying to find i was like what does it look like and so we went on amazon to like see the cover been reissued since then yeah and then i figured so when did this come out 2012 but i remember and And in your columns, too, you were somewhat cynical slash skeptical of self-help. Like, I think you rightfully sort of were criticizing the excesses or the nonsense of it and the manifestation side of it and the secret and whatever. And then it's been interesting with 4 ,000 Weeks, which became like a bonafide hit.

7:06Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

7:07Ryan Holiday: You're now one of those guys. True.

7:09Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

7:09Ryan Holiday: And I wondered what that feels like for you.

7:12Oliver Burkeman: I mean, I've definitely been on a journey from cynicism to sincerity. That is a real thing that happens as you get older, apparently. I'm learning. But it's curious, because I don't think I pretend at any point in any of these books that I've sort of found the perfect solution to life and all you have to do is follow me. And I think that's also antithetical to the philosophy that I'm exploring anyway. anyway. But yeah, there is a certain sense of that. And one thing you learn or one thing I've found is that like, I have a very strong British desire to be self-deprecating in response to anyone like investing any kind of authority in me.

7:51Oliver Burkeman: It's not actually that helpful for people to be like that. You don't want to become a cult leader, but you also like taking on a little bit of that is actually quite, it's helpful for people.

8:00Ryan Holiday: You meet the people who are sort of true believers and by true believers, I mean, true believers in themselves. Like they're able to get up and just pontificate about how someone should live their life and what they should. And you go like, first off, they're just, they just stole all this stuff from other people. They just like their real skill here is their, uh, confident shamelessness, their ability to, to sort of act like they invented any of this, even though the Greeks invented it and the Romans invented it and the religious thinkers invented it, but they're just able to get up there and be like this is me and of course you should follow me and yeah then there's the other part and i've met a bunch of these people and and i'm sure you have too where the sort of journalists who are writing skeptically right about like the and then they wonder why people don't buy those books like nobody cares enough about this space to read a book about the space and how the space isn't yes a value right right yeah like yeah i think about that when you read books or it's like the paradox of this or whatever.

9:00Ryan Holiday: And you're like, so you're just saying you haven't figured it out. Like, like people don't read enough to read a book that's like, it's complicated. So there's this kind of middle ground that's pretty rare of like, Hey, I'm writing this for myself. And I am as much a traveler on this road as you, but here's kind of what smarter people than me have said, and here's what's worked for me, and maybe it'll work for you.

9:28Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, totally. That's exactly it, right? I've seen people say different things. One is like the idea of being, maybe it was you, the idea of being like one and a half steps ahead of the reader. Oh, that's a good thing. That wasn't me, but I like it. Kind of writing for people who absolutely have just as much intellectual capacity and sensitivity to reach all these conclusions themselves, but I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time on it. Yes. And, you know. Well, you're good at explaining it. Right. And I think I do have a skill for synthesizing and explaining and things like that. So it's in that spirit that you're helping people.

10:01Oliver Burkeman: There's also a line that David Brooks quotes in one of his books, I should really say, who originated the quote. But that's where I found it about how writers are like beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread. Which is also another really good idea here. It's like there's a reason some of these things are eternal truths that crop up in eight different wisdom or spiritual traditions. And if you can sort of unpack them and find value in them and pass that on, you're just doing a bit more of that same thing, I guess.

10:32Ryan Holiday: And I think like in the ancient world, it's not that the ideas were obvious enough, but they were new enough that the person coming up with them and writing them was often the same person. And in our world, which is where we have an abundance of information, actually the rare skill is not the rare skill, but a necessary skill slash trade is the ability to effectively communicate and take things that do work and are of value and make it clear that they do work and are of value to people who wouldn't ordinarily think that. Right. And so the writing as a skill is maybe what you bring to the table.

11:14Ryan Holiday: I think it's what I bring to the table. It's like I didn't invent any of this stuff, but I'm pretty good at putting it in a context or a framework that is of use.

11:24Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I mean, you very evidently are. And I think that that's probably true of me too. I mean, the thing that I always come back to as a guiding light is that it is ultimately like therapy for myself as well. And if I'm ever sort of at a loss about what broad subject areas I should be focusing on, or even just things like what to write this newsletter about, the question to come back to always is like, what's the thing that's really been bugging me these last few weeks or that I feel like I had some kind of insight about? and I'm perpetually amazed at how many people then reply like saying like it's like it's like you're inside my head why did why did you come to this insight right now and and obviously that's there's a huge amount of like self-selection going on there in terms of who subscribes to things and who reads books who read specific books but it's kind of interesting right as well that like there is such thing as the zeitgeist and there is such thing as like particular forms of suffering that seem to be very widespread at any given moment and ways through them that seem to help.

12:26Ryan Holiday: That's the weird thing about the daily stoic because the daily stoic is attached to dates. Right. And then the email too, obviously it goes out every day, but people are like, how did you know? Or they're like, did you think about this? Because like what's happening in October is usually this. And it's like, I was literally thinking like, how many do I have left to get to 366? You know? And then I was like, this one's too similar to the one from three days ago. So let's just shuffle the deck a little bit more. And it's like horoscopes, but in a good way. People see what they need to see.

12:58Oliver Burkeman: Right. And in forging that connection, they've done something real for themselves. Right. Right. It reminds me of one of the arguments I've seen about dream analysis in psychotherapy, where there are, you know, there are people who believe that these are deep, important messages from the unconscious and people who believe that it's random synaptic firings that have no meaning. But actually, like taking a dream as if it might have something to tell you and journaling about it is a great thing to do, utterly regardless of which one of those is true. Right. Even if it is random, because your interpretations are certainly not going to be random.

13:34Ryan Holiday: Well, yeah. Even like analysis of literature. Yeah. Right. Like you could be right. You could be wrong. The important thing is that you sat down and thought about what this means. Yes, exactly. And just like there's no answer to most of these like Zen paradoxes either. Right. It's the thinking about them instead of letting your mind wander or think about 500 other things. That's actually the part of the enlightenment. Nobody actually knows what the sound of one hand clapping is.

14:00Oliver Burkeman: Right. Those questions are designed to stop you short and make you actually be in reality and feel things and think things. Right. Yeah. That relates to a much wider sort of thing that I'm always coming back to in my work, I think, which is, right, that this isn't all leading up to a specific end point where you get to sit back and relax and say, I've done all the inner work now. And now for the remaining, whatever, how many years are left in my life, I can just be like plain sailing and not really have to engage. And you wouldn't want that anyway.

14:30Ryan Holiday: Well, I was because I just did this book on wisdom and I was thinking I was sort of saying wisdom is kind of like the horizon, like you think you're getting closer to it and it's always a little bit further away. Yeah. And that struck me as true at first. And then I was thinking, but if I were to stand here and decide to walk towards the horizon and I walk for 30 minutes or an hour, yeah, I didn't get any closer to the horizon. But if I look back, I'm further than where I was when I started. I've definitely covered. Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea is not that, yeah, you arrive at any kind of enlightenment or wisdom or serenity, but you can certainly be better off than you were.

15:07Ryan Holiday: You can have covered some ground. That's the idea. Totally. Yeah, I completely agree. I think sometimes people do think that because a book was published, you arrived somewhere, as opposed to the book being just an encapsulation of part of that journey. And by the way, you can backtrack and get hopelessly lost. Absolutely.

15:26Oliver Burkeman: all of these other things yeah and that was also evident and i got i had sort of contact with a few people after 4 000 weeks really began to take off offering to help me put together specific kinds of courses and and i have done a bit of things like that and i am interested in the the general domain but but with one or two of these people there was an implication in what they were proposing that we worked on together that you could offer people the big ticket version of this that would somehow include like the secret that I left out of the book. And it's like, no, that is all that I had at the point that I finished writing that.

16:01Ryan Holiday: Also, like you wrote a book about mortality. So this isn't like a simple, small question. Like this is literally the, I mean, Cicero said to philosophize, it's to learn how to die. So this is the whole point of it. Like this is the whole point of life that psychedelics are aimed at and therapy is aimed at and religion is aimed at and every philosopher who's ever lived is thought about. There's not like a six module course to figure it out. And I think that is a little bit of a difference. I do notice like people who read a lot of self-help and then people who don't is that sometimes self-help people think that books are answers.

16:33Ryan Holiday: Right. Whereas like people who maybe read literature and history and biography understand that a book is just a book. Like I have read an embarrassing amount of books about the Civil War. and every time I think I don't need to read anymore, I read another one and I go, I didn't even think about it. Like you realize like, oh, this isn't a thing that you have read about. It's a thing you are reading about. And if you want to take a course to learn more or to maybe go in deeper depths in some of the things, sure, but again, to the different kinds of people, like the guru and the cult leader can get up there and go, I have the answers.

17:10Ryan Holiday: And a more intellectually honest person isn't able to go much further than like, Here's some stuff I've been thinking about.

17:17Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, absolutely. And this reminds me also of like this question of what is the role of techniques and methodologies and things? Because I think a lot about this because people really do want, and so do I, you know, like tricks and practices to help deepen their understanding or their productivity or whatever it might be. And yet there's a whole wing of self-help that implies that the right collection of practices like is the answer. And if you can just get those ones and do those ones every day for the rest of your life, then everything's fine. it's incredibly clear to me that the thing firstly that the thing that matters are the sort of the principles or the perspective the perspective shifts and then there are like 10 000 techniques you could come up with that would embody those those things so if you're making the argument as i do in the new book for um a sort of less structured approach to organizing your time so what does that mean in practice well i can give you about 10 different options and you can come up with another 10 yourself yeah the important thing is the the the point I'm making.

18:13Oliver Burkeman: And then also that even the set of principles is going to evolve through your life, right? I mean, it's not going to be or be appropriate for different people at different times in their lives. It's not going to be completely timeless truths. Although maybe you disagree because I feel like there is an element in the way that you write that perhaps you are getting down to the sort of handful of kind of claims about the meaningful life that really are universally and timelessly true as opposed to, you know, contingent.

18:42Ryan Holiday: I see like this with people who want to be writers all the time. They want to know like, what programs do you use? And, you know, like what pen do you use? And, you know, like a lot of it is just doing it. And the people who do it really well, do it very differently than the other people that do it very well. And there's, there really is not much more to it than doing it, you know? And so sometimes people can kind of get obsessed with the tactics and myths that it's largely the principles or the strategies. But yeah, when people ask me about stoicism, they're like, what are the five stoic exercises?

19:15Ryan Holiday: And it's like, there's a number of things that the stoics seem to talk about a lot that we could sort of pull out as strategies, but mostly they went to classes, talked to people about things, read books, and wrote books. It's just a process of thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. And like, even the other interesting thing is like knowing the principles and knowing the principles are very different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like I've more or less known everything that the Stoics have said since I was 20 years old. But my relationship to them and my ability to sort of understand what they mean and get any sort of real relief or insight or direction from them has obviously evolved quite a bit.

20:03Ryan Holiday: You know, it's the same thing. And it's like, if you look at where I start, if you look at where I am, it's not that impressive. If you look at where I am compared to where I started, I've made some progress.

20:13Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, absolutely. I say something similar because it's like, yeah, I was like an anxious wreck at like college. So the fact that I'm a little bit chilled out now ought to count for something.

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23:05Ryan Holiday: So how many days a week do you think you wake up feeling like you're behind?

23:10Oliver Burkeman: Because you talk about that a lot. Yeah. Again, that's one of these these days things. So I think I feel this a lot less intensely than I did. And I think when I do wake up that way, I'm more likely to have the presence of mind to sort of see through that thought. Because a big part of what I'm trying to argue is there's something kind of, there's something mistaken about that idea, right? Not because you're actually really great and you can do all the things but because precisely because you can't so precise that sort of feeling that there's a problem with you because you have not got your arms around infinity is a that's not a sensible way to think about the relationship between a finite human and infinity but to answer the question no i you know i think i don't think i wake up feeling that way most mornings but it definitely comes and what helps me in those kind of situations is well if this you know i have this morning pages that's the one thing that i've like religiously done for years now and i've done it not because i've had great self-discipline but because it so obviously improves the quality of my day that i i want to do it and that will be the place where i will sort of metabolize that feeling if it's if it's um if it's deep in me i'm often fascinated by the fact that sometimes it seems you wake up early in the morning and that feels like the the sort of wisest and calmest and most focused you'll ever be.

24:32Oliver Burkeman: And sometimes it's like whatever's happened in your sleep has like twisted you up in the wrong direction and you start from a sort of earlier stage of your psychological evolution.

24:41Ryan Holiday: Would you ever wake up like, and you had a dream about like your spouse and you're just like angry? Like, or they're angry with you. It's kind of like that. Like clearly you got in some sort of emotional place or vibe that like you have to do some real work to get out of. Because the thing that you're upset about is not real. You know, you're like, you just did this horrible thing to me in my mind. And I know it's not real, but I still, I woke up, while I was asleep, it was real. And now I'm having the, and there's probably a metaphor in there where it's just like, you're having the impression, the feeling that whatever, but it's not actually true.

25:17Ryan Holiday: yeah and so you made it up so you have to kind of work yourself out of that and i think you can do a like a life version of that too like you wake up and you're like everything's shit or i'm behind or like you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time

25:35Oliver Burkeman: to experience right right right yeah no absolutely but it's real for you in a sense and so it needs

25:40Ryan Holiday: your attention yeah and you can you can certainly make it real by how you treat people right so it's Like if you immediately pick a fight with your kids or you go straight to your inbox and you decide to take this, that or the other personally, like the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today.

25:59Oliver Burkeman: Right. Because it's all the overlay that you're putting on things, right? I mean, the back foot feeling is definitely something I write about a lot. But the other sort of side of that, it's the same point really, is just, I used to have this sense, and I occasionally will fall back into it these days, of time, sort of these kind of tranches of time that I'm sort of moving through in my life so that I'm, see if I can convey this properly. so like i would be working and it would be my turn to do school pickup at 3 30 and then from 3 30 till like after dinner that's i'm going to be focusing on parenting and as that's 3 30 approaches it's like this thing is moving towards you through the day it's like in some sort of like james bond movie or something right the walls of the room are getting smaller and smaller and I would get more and more sort of stressed about the time running out and resentful of this thing that I have to do but also like most days I really enjoy doing that thing yeah certainly it's very very high up in my values of what I want to give my life to and it's just the fact of relating to time in this particular sort of um finitude is a problem way that that sort of defines that upcoming thing as something to bemoan.

27:23Oliver Burkeman: Because yeah, somewhere in the back of my mind or in some like pre-unverbal part of my unconscious, there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that trade-offs are involved. Yes.

27:35Ryan Holiday: Yeah. You're just arguing with the reality that you can't do two things at the same time. Well, I think about that. And that's why I was saying like the key is just to say no to things Because it's like, OK, so if I get resentful when there's like things in the calendar, but I also understand that like life is things you have to do. Did I eat up the patience that I have with that because I agreed to this call and this meeting and this thing that could have been an email? And then so, you know, I'm like, OK, this is my publisher. I got to be nice. You know, I got to talk to the accountant about this thing or, you know, this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for three minutes, even though they've done this to me before.

28:12Ryan Holiday: and it's never three minutes and it never actually needed to happen. So I did all that. And then 3.30 comes along and I got to pick up my kid. And now I'm like, what the fuck? Will anyone let me work? And it's like, I should be polite and accommodating and patient with the one thing that I like doing and actually matters and is, by the way, totally my responsibility, which is picking them up from school and having fun together. But before that, I've used it up on a bunch of trivial shit. And so it's like when I pull up my calendar and there's not much in it, I'm like, today is a great day, you know?

28:48Ryan Holiday: And when it's, there's a bunch of things, I'm like, you know? And so part of it, I think, is just like the decisions you made beforehand. So you're not having to use like your Zen mastery of your emotions to deal with this situation that you voluntarily put yourself into.

29:07Oliver Burkeman: Right, and I think what, yes, I mean, what that brings up for me when I think about that is like first of all I think like isn't it crazy because we are both in a situation through great good fortune where we really can decide to say no to lots of things that come in and it's not going to be calamitous and people are going to understand and yet maybe it's different for you but the the weird stuff from childhood of like I've sort of got to be like obedient to these different like yeah and the way you can give like basically everybody in the world some sort of a strange quasi-parental authority over you.

29:42Ryan Holiday: Absolute disaster. There's this really fascinating exchange that Seneca talks about where he tells a story about Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great wants to conquer some territory. And he's been so successful that the leaders of that country come together and they call a meeting with him and they go like, look, if you don't attack us, we'll give you this part. And Seneca quotes Alexander going like, I didn't come all the way across the world to take what the leftovers you're willing to give me. He's like, I'm going to take what I want and give you the leftovers. Now, obviously, this is a brutal, horrendous idea, but Seneca is using it as a metaphor or analogy to go, this is how we have to think about philosophy and self-improvement, et cetera, that you don't like commit yourself to all these professional goals and all this, all these activities and all this stuff and then you give a little bit left over to meditation philosophy reflection quiet stillness whatever you want to call it it's it's the other way around yeah that's the main thing yeah and then you can if you have anything left over that you can spare you can give it to this random phone call or whatever yeah and so he's basically just saying that we have it precisely backwards that and most people myself included have some dynamic version of this dynamic at home, which is like, you promise the bulk of your time to professional things.

31:02Ryan Holiday: And then you give your kids a little bit of leftover. The office is closed today. I can hang out with you or whatever. And then we go, but I do this all for my family. My family's my number one priority. And it's like, the calendar doesn't lie. It's the exact opposite.

31:15Oliver Burkeman: Revealed preference. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, I agree. And I struggle with it all the time.

31:20Ryan Holiday: Of course. And that's what really struck me is that like, I don't want to say no to something. It's bad. Even when I really don't want to do it. Like I remember I was CC'd on some email once someone had asked someone I knew to do something and the guy just responded hard pass. And I was like, wow, I love it. You know, like if I could ever do that, I would be so proud of myself. But he was not just no, but just like not interested at all. But we find ourselves not wanting to be rude to these people. But you'll be really rude to a nine-year-old. They have no say. Like the consequences for the nine-year-old is what they're going to think when they're a 39-year-old.

32:05Ryan Holiday: That's a long way away. So you're not thinking about that. So you're like, yeah, sure, I'll do this thing.

32:11Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think I am better at saying no to things than I used to be, but it doesn't get easy. And again and again, I'm amazed by how OK people are with it in certain contexts, because in certain contexts, they were just having to go see if you were interested. I've even had a few contexts where because of the stuff that I write about, where where people sort of respond with relief, because it's like if you'd just done this, then like it might not have been living your philosophy.

32:38Ryan Holiday: They were testing you, but they're like, they're like, actually Kissinger has this thing about, he was like at early on in your career, you're, you're worried that you're boring people and then you get to a place of power influence and they worry about boring you. Yeah. And then like you get to a place if you're lucky or if you've talked about these things where then you say no to stuff and the people are like, I'm so proud of you. Well, I wish that if you had seen the ringer that you just put me through, you would not be so proud. And maybe you could have just not done this. Not done it in the first place.

33:13Ryan Holiday: I had to talk to like six people to get them to confirm that I shouldn't do, you know. Yeah.

33:19Oliver Burkeman: And then the other thing that never seems to get easier is the complete impossibility of properly judging how long anything will take anyway. Right. So there are plenty of occasions where I say yes to things. and I know all of this stuff about saying no. And I'm like, right, but I'm taking a sober decision. This is 20 minutes of my life. And of course it isn't, yeah.

33:37Ryan Holiday: Yeah, right, right. You agree, you think, oh, it's one hour talk, but you got to fly there the night before and then you got to fly home. And so it's like, wait, I just, that was a 36 hour commitment that I just did.

33:49Oliver Burkeman: There's a lot to be said. I mean, it's a well-known thing, but there's a lot to be said for that question, for asking yourself whether you would, whether you'd be looking forward to it or say yes to it if it was happening tomorrow or today when you're dealing with things that are a year or two out. I find that is very good for surfacing like, oh, no, I can exactly imagine the mindset I'm going to be in the night before this thing. So maybe listen to that.

34:13Ryan Holiday: Yeah, but you can get better at it and you can create more barriers and rules and sort of systems, but it's a difficult thing to do.

34:26Oliver Burkeman: Right. And like, just to get a little bit sort of maybe overwrought about it, I think it's difficult ultimately because it is a tiny little bit of facing mortality, right? It's a tiny little bit of experiencing the awful truth of our limits.

34:39Ryan Holiday: But it is hard because you're like, okay, it's only an hour. And then you're like, but it's an hour, you know? And then if you thought about everything in that light, you'd be paralyzed also.

34:50Oliver Burkeman: So sometimes people like I think people who haven't read 4000 weeks, but who know the title and know what it what it refers to. So I'm talking about like, you know, drive time radio interviews who can't be expected to read any of the things that they're talking to people about. To be clear, I have read. I am not not including. Not only have I read it, I read the galley. Certainly not including you in this. Like and this in a way is a fault of the titling, right? you might assume that what followed from that is like, oh my God, time is really short. We've got to think very, very self-consciously about the limitations of time all the time and pack our lives with the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring things we can.

35:31Oliver Burkeman: And I'm always at pains to be like, no, no, no. Like to the extent that I have gone through a perspective shift here and to the extent that I can take the reader on that shift, it's relaxing ultimately. It's like, it's a relief. Because as long as you're thinking about that sort of, you know, exactly what am I doing with this hour of my life? Exactly what am I doing with that hour of my life? Even though you're doing it out of an understanding of the limits of your life, you're still doing it with that desire to somehow, you know, triumph over the finitude rather than kind of falling completely into it and saying like, you're so finite, such a large proportion of the things you're capable of thinking you might want to do, you're never going to get to do.

36:09Oliver Burkeman: It's so not a fair fight from the very beginning that you get to kind of like not fight that fight.

36:14Ryan Holiday: Yeah, memento mori should both create a sense of urgency and make you slow down.

36:20Oliver Burkeman: Right.

36:21Ryan Holiday: Like the famous passage in Meditations where Mark Stabilis is saying, you know, as you tuck your child in at night, save yourself, like they may not make it to the morning. He's not like, so get bedtime done, you know, fast. He's saying the exact opposite. He's saying just slow down. This is the present is an eternity, right? And the idea might be that life is short, so you can't afford to rush. And what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards death. Yeah. So slow it down. Yeah. No, absolutely. It's not working if it's making you more anxious. Right. Because that's a waste of time and energy and not in your control.

36:58Ryan Holiday: Like, I think about that when, you know, you talk to people who are like, they have terminal cancer. And so the doctors tell them it's like six months to a year. Well, I just think about like, what are they thinking when the airplane lands and then the pilot goes, sorry, folks. There's another plane at the gate and we're going to have to wait till they back. And you're just like, 40 fucking minutes. Right. Right. Right. Like, is that what they're thinking? Or is it probably more of a 40 minutes?

37:26Oliver Burkeman: Right. And I mean, I feel like people have very different experiences of that being in that situation. Right. Some people sort of do go through the transformation and some people really don't. But if you do, I think, yeah, you can certainly I can certainly imagine, I believe, a sense in which that's like, you know, That reality is as alive in the plane that's waiting for the, as filled with aliveness and potential as any other bit of reality. It's a, you're there. It's not fake life compared to something else. It may be less pleasant in all sorts of ways than once you're out of the plane.

37:58Ryan Holiday: But so yeah, I think you can start when you get, I try to remind myself when I take my kids like on trips and stuff, I go like, this is part of the vacation too. It doesn't start when we arrive at the guided tour. Yeah. Like the car ride to the airport, time waiting at the airport, the time on the airplane. Like this is all part of the trip. So enjoy that. Yeah. You know, and don't make that miserable or else you're putting a lot of pressure on the dinner reservation.

38:26Oliver Burkeman: Totally. And I'd be interested to talk about that idea of urgency, actually, because I have a lot of trouble with the whole concept of urgency. and I've written newsletters in the past, like basically like provocatively entitled against urgency or whatever. And I think for me, it's because urgency has always connoted this kind of idea that like, there are other people's agendas that I've got to serve and that things aren't okay until I've served them. And I always got really annoyed with that Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgent and important because there's a category there which is urgent but not important.

39:00Oliver Burkeman: And I don't even know like - That's mostly shit from other people. right but i don't even know what that is how is it urgent then if it's not for if it's not important right it's like urgency should but you're totally right of course that memento mori is is there to bring well certainly a heightened awareness maybe that's not quite the same as as urgency but when i see like self-help books that are based around the idea of cultivating a feeling of urgency in your life i run a mile because i do not i want to live without what I think there's anything to be said for like hustle.

39:33Ryan Holiday: And I don't mean that like in the hustle porn sense, I just mean of like Seneca's thing about, you know, people sort of, he says the one thing all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start. Right. So the, just the like, Hey, when are you going to do this? Right. You know? So I think there's, or your warmup that you're going through is just a rationalized form of procrastination.

39:54Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, totally. And I think maybe this is all just semantics, right? Because I, i have experienced and written about that sense of like okay it's just time to plunge into this thing it's time to stop readying but for me that has worked most effectively and especially in the recent years as a kind of letting go of something right not as a kind of um like clenching my muscles and like but but but as a letting go of the things that were standing in the way of action yeah so there's that line from uh a zen teacher who i oh uh kosho uchiyama who says um life unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity this idea that like if you finally get rid of the blockages it's just the doing yeah and i think i spent a lot of my life trying to sort of force feelings of urgency push myself over the motivational hump and all this stuff And for me anyway, that wasn't the way.

40:49Oliver Burkeman: The way has been to sort of see the inhibitions that are stopping me from just from from doing the thing that I actually kind of on some level want to do already. Yeah.

41:00Ryan Holiday: Most of the time the urgency is leading you astray. Like people need to understand like speed reading is a scam. And even if it even if it wasn't a scam, it's a stupid thing. It's like, do you know how much faster I could eat? You know, like I could eat faster than I do. Yeah. That's not what eating is about. Right. You know, like it's not how many calories can you shovel down your throat in how little time, you know, like John Mulaney has this great joke about like the hot dog eating contest. And he's like, I never asked it to be fast. Like, what is, who introduced that? How quickly can you do it?

41:37Ryan Holiday: But like eating is a pleasurable activity. Right. So it should take however long it takes. It shouldn't take longer than, I don't know, needs to imply some sort of judgment too. But it doesn't need to take five hours to have lunch, but it also shouldn't take six minutes. Right. You know, and if you're enjoying the thing, why would you try to rush through it? Like, it's interesting that people who try to speed read, like, are they trying to rush through food? Are they trying to rush through time with their children? Do you rush through sex? And a pleasurable activity is intended to be enjoyed and savored.

42:11Ryan Holiday: And so oftentimes the urgency is not just, and this is where the memento mori thing comes in, you're not just rushing through the activity. What is ultimately on the other side of the rushing? Like, what is the destination? Right. The destination is you die and you don't do it anymore.

42:27Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. So. So it's more of a win. Right. So it's an right. So it's an awareness. I hadn't really thought about memento mori specifically in the ancient form of it in this context. But like, it's the awareness of death that that gives the possibility of a more a more fully present, more authentic experience. right and uh you know heidegger just to veer off into another area that we really don't need to go um talks about being towards death right the context the context that death creates for everything that we do if we're sufficiently aware yeah the fact yeah and i think also if you were to

43:04Ryan Holiday: know you had six months or a year or 10 years would you do a bunch of things faster is that the change you would make or would you probably just not do certain things and definitely do

43:17Oliver Burkeman: a bunch of things and do whatever you did with a kind of openness to kind of really being there

43:24Ryan Holiday: yes in the doing because because when the doctor tells you you have you know six months or 10 years even that is just a microcosm of the larger thing that everyone else is in like you you can still get hit by a bus. You can still get struck by lightning. You could still get murdered on a street corner. It could also turn out to be much worse than the diagnosis. There's this tendency to go, this is what they said. It's what I'm promised. So I get what I paid for. And it's never up to you.

43:54Oliver Burkeman: Right. And where is the point between being given six months to live and being given 50 years left to live, which if I'm incredibly lucky, I might have. Why is that fine yeah and this is a like extraordinary i mean it's always a terminal diagnosis right absolutely yeah yeah as a meditation teacher friend of mine once said everything is palliative

44:12Ryan Holiday: care when you think about it but yes yes everything's palliative care and also everything is gender affirming care in some form or another too as all these people spend their time getting

44:23Oliver Burkeman: angry at trans people so many discussions we could different directions that could happen yeah

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45:50Ryan Holiday: Look, I like home-cooked meals. I just don't like the process of getting all the stuff to then cook at home. I don't like having to think about dinner. and I'm like, when it's time for dinner, I want the dinner like pretty fast. But then I also want to eat well and I like stuff that tastes good. That's like a pretty complicated set of needs there. And it actually fits perfectly with today's sponsor. And it's why we love HelloFresh. They take the mental load of what's for dinner off your to-do list. HelloFresh makes it easy to do more home cooking with recipes that feel good and taste delicious night after night.

46:26Ryan Holiday: They have more than 100 recipes every week. It doesn't matter what your allergies or preferences are. You can make something work. They've got three times the seafood with no upcharge. And you can even have guests over, make them grass-fed steak ribeyes, or serve seasonal produce like pears and apples and asparagus. We love HelloFresh, and I think you'll love it too. Just go to HelloFresh.com slash stoic10FM to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife, which is$145 value on your third box. offer is valid while supplies last free meals applied as a discount on first box new subscribers only varies by plan so do you regularly meditate is that like a part of your practice or do you think about you have a more expansive definition of what meditation is i am definitely trying to

47:16Oliver Burkeman: tag onto the coattails of marcus aurelius here more than buddha with the word meditations right Right. And I am definitely, yeah, I do have sort of sketchy, not particularly regular disciplined sitting practice, but I think that I can make the case that the morning pages that I write and certain other things that I do in my life are, I think they're sort of bona fide meditation in the sense that I mean the term, there's a tendency to call anything that you do my meditation, right? But I think there are lots of things that involve sort of stepping away from objectifying narratives that are in your mind.

47:56Oliver Burkeman: And one of those is to sort of leave, be uninvolved with thoughts as they pass across your mental radar in meditation or to focus or to keep returning to the breath when they distract you. But so I think is certain kinds of journaling, certain kinds of sort of therapeutic exercises and things like that. They have that same shape of like, see these stories as not something that you're in and fully identified with, but as one of the things that you contain. Yeah, I don't meditate, but I take a lot of walks, you know, and that's it for me. And what are you doing on those walks?

48:34Ryan Holiday: I mean, I'm walking my dog and I'm looking around and I'm trying to be present and I'm trying to remind myself as I've been doing it lately, like, this is pretty fucking wonderful. You know, the sun is going down and I'm walking my dog and I'm just like, I don't think Marcus Rios ever experienced this. You know, like this is the best fucking thing of all time. And this is life. This is what it's all for. and I kind of try to do that. And one of the things, so like I live on this ranch, so we have a decent spread of property and then I'm usually walking on this dirt road that the house is on and, you know, most of my neighbors are like, there's a trailer here, there's a little old house here and I just go like, we're just like on the same street.

49:22Ryan Holiday: Like the best part of this is not that I own this part. The best part is the free part that I'm doing. And then I go like, my neighbor has more property, isn't doing the walk in the neighborhood, the less is, you know, like, this is just, I just try to kind of think about stuff like that. I just kind of run through my head, like, what are the things I need to be reminded of? And then I, you know, I get back home and I try to hold on to that feeling until I get, you know, hit the nuts by my son or something and it immediately goes away. But, you know, you try to get into some kind of spiritual place of stillness or acceptance or gratitude or perspective.

50:03Ryan Holiday: And then it's all very fleeting.

50:05Oliver Burkeman: And then you go back to it again. I think there's, yeah, it resonates a lot with my own experiences. We live now in the North York Moors in Northern England. And there's a sort of scale. It's not an American kind of scale to the landscape, but by UK standards, there's a scale to that landscape. But really, you know, I think it's very, very helpful to be, to feel relatively small within that landscape. There's something I I find very, it's not even that I'm thinking logically the thought like, oh, you know, the world is much bigger than my concerns. It's something much more physical and embodied.

50:40Oliver Burkeman: Just that sense of like, okay, I'm just going about my business here and I'm trying to do some good things in context of family, context of work. But there's this whole thing that's just like implacably carrying on no matter what happens in politics and no matter what happens in the world at large. This sort of landscape is just like there. And of course, actually, it's changing radically through the centuries and everything. But it has that sense of something more permanent, which is an old Stoic meditation as well, isn't it?

51:09Ryan Holiday: I think there is something about Europe, though, where you're like people have been walking on this exact road for 2000 years.

51:15Oliver Burkeman: And to your point about dirt roads and footpaths, like a lot of the walking I'm doing is on public footpaths where like I have an ancient historic right to walk through somebody else's farmyard because there's a public footpath there. And they can't do anything about it, even though occasionally you get the impression they wish they could. And so there are all these kind of ways over the land and then like churches dating back to the 5th, 6th century and all this stuff where, yeah, that sense of people having been there for a very long time is powerful. And lived and died and gone through all their shit.

51:51Oliver Burkeman: They're not famous people.

51:52Ryan Holiday: Not people whose name echoes down. Just random, nameless, faceless. There's a Taylor Swift song where she says, the who's who of who's that. And you go like, a bunch of them probably were famous. And then there's a line in Meditations where Mark Strelitz is listing just famous people that are, to him, not that famous anymore. Right. And then to us, it's like, there's 15 names, like two of them. Who are you talking about? And you go, oh, right. He's trying to remind himself that, I mean, if the movie Gladiator hadn't come out, how many people would even know his name? There is just the way in which all these people and names and things and full lives and not full lives just kind of fade into the rhythm of history and time and perspective.

52:44Oliver Burkeman: And you're part of that. Right. And it's really strange that that is so therapeutic and relaxing and good, at least for many people. I think there may be people who consider that to be a sort of world historic insult to their specialness. I don't know, but to me, that's what I need.

53:03Ryan Holiday: Take some of the pressure off.

53:04Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

53:06Ryan Holiday: No, absolutely. It doesn't mean that everything you're doing is meaningless. It just means whatever it is, is enough, I think.

53:14Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, yeah, no, I like that. It's helpful in the context of anxiety about world events as well, right? There's this sense of, it's very, very easy to feel like the whole of history was leading up till now, and now everything is on a knife edge. And if it all goes in the wrong direction, then that's it for humanity. And, you know, there is a sector of the AI, Duma crowd that wants to persuade us of that very claim. But putting that aside, there's something very important about the fact that like far worse has arisen and been gone through. It doesn't mean that it's not real suffering and real pain and real injustice in the moment that it's happening, but it's useful to have that in the back of your mind.

53:53Ryan Holiday: Yeah. There's a story you tell in the book where this guy's out for a walk and he bumps into one of his friends who's like weeping in the park and he goes, you know, what's wrong? And he was like, they fired on a mob in Crimea or something. Right. And you go, the timelessness of that, of just being made miserable by a thing that happened thousands of miles away and the timelessness of this of the tension between it happened to human beings and therefore it's significant and my problem and it matters and i should care about it and it would say something bad about me if i didn't care and at the same time if it's causing me to weep in a park i'm probably flattering myself about its relationality to me and the contributive value of those tears.

54:36Ryan Holiday: Like what I'm not doing is doing anything about it. I'm just feeling miserable.

54:40Oliver Burkeman: Yes, I think that's right. I think the actual person in that anecdote who is the philosopher Simone Weil was a very extraordinary person. And I think she was sort of almost like a kind of tuning fork for all human suffering. It was almost like her role in history to be one of those people who doesn't put up that boundary. The reason it's so educational for me, that anecdote is because it's like, I know I couldn't do that at all. I know I'm not functioning well if that's how I get about the world at large. And it's obviously vastly more to the point now that we're so easily informed about the whole of the world's suffering if we want to be or if the algorithms want us to be.

55:17Oliver Burkeman: Something is happening shitty somewhere at every moment. Right. In the same way that there's, you know, the worst opinions are being expressed by people on any side of anything and you will find them and then it will enrage you that that's what people are like. Yeah.

55:31Ryan Holiday: If you want to be miserable, the Internet can help you with that. It certainly can. Yeah, right. Right. And it's not to say that you should be, you know, ignoring it at the same time. You don't need to seek it out and you don't need to mainline it from the second you wake up in the morning.

55:50Oliver Burkeman: Right. And you don't need to feel bad about apportioning your attention. This is one of the points I'm really trying to drive home in that section is like this whole idea that we had for a long span of modern history. right? That to be a good citizen means sort of pushing yourself to give more attention to the wider world outside your home than you might otherwise naturally do. And now in a sort of an attention economy, this is the opposite of the situation that we face. What you need to be able to do now is to actually be willing to say, this particular problem over there is totally real and it's totally awful.

56:23Oliver Burkeman: And I totally wish that things were made better, but it's not going to be my fight because this one is and i've got to choose got to pick my i've got a man it's just not me i've got a man yeah right i gotta pick my battles yeah yeah i mean a lot of this circles around the sort of most classic in my understanding stoic notion of just the the question of the sphere of the sphere that you can control and the sphere that you can't control although i've always had a bit of trouble with the stoic version of that because it seems like there's a lot of claims made, at least in some iterations of it, about how much control you can exert over your own emotions.

57:00Ryan Holiday: Well, and I mean, there's also some stuff that's kind of in the middle. Right. And then there's also, what if you have clinical depression or what if you have a brain injury? It does change things. But what's interesting to me is stoicism is mostly famous for those circles. But the most interesting sort of illustration of circles in stoic philosophy comes from this guy named Heracles, who said that, you know, you have this central circle, which is you. This is how we're born. We're born selfish, self-interest, et cetera. And then you have these concentric circles around you. And those are your family, your friends, your neighbors, your fellow citizens, you know, fellow human beings, people who haven't been born.

57:41Ryan Holiday: And it gets bigger and bigger. And that although people think of Stoic philosophy as this selfish philosophy, it's actually, he says, the work of it is about drawing those outer rings inward. So it's this kind of tension between only focusing on things that are under control, but then also making sure that you're not utterly indifferent to everyone else. And I think the problem is with your point about this attention economy, we have told ourselves a lie that knowing about stuff and feeling bad about it is helpful to them and us. And so we have confused emoting about problems with being involved in the solution to said problem.

58:22Ryan Holiday: Yeah. So like, it'd be better if you said, I'm not going to think about it, but I am setting up this recurring donation. Right, right. Or something, right? Like, I'm not going to give it my day-to-day unhappiness, but I am going to apportion a percentage of my earnings towards addressing, or I'm going to run for office, or I'm going to, here's my contribution to society, or here's my contribution to things greater than myself. That's what I do. That's how I know I'm not making the world a worse place. But I'm not going to go to bed weeping every night and wake up weeping every night and tell myself I'm a good person because I'm so emotionally wrong.

59:03Oliver Burkeman: Right, right. And that sense of like pseudo action, that emotion is action or that it's hugely encouraged by the basic form of like social media interaction, right? The idea that like - Because they're monetizing your attention. Right, right. putting something out there sharing something liking it resharing it whatever is feels like an action and it is an action within the space of the the platform but uh yeah there's no reason to believe that is an action that affects necessarily affects the issue that you're so

59:29Ryan Holiday: upset about and it is negatively affecting you or your other responsibilities yeah while in subtle

59:34Oliver Burkeman: ways just polarizing everybody all to hell so yeah yeah i do think talking about strategies

59:39Ryan Holiday: I think this idea of waking up on the back foot is a very common, very real problem. I'm curious if you have any changes you've made to address that.

59:51Oliver Burkeman: I don't want to get too sales pitchy here, but part of something that was really important for me in the new book was to sort of create a book that, to whatever extent a book can do this, could be an active ingredient in this way, right? So that if you do decide to read one short chapter a day for a month, which is my strong suggestion in the introduction. If someone decides to do that, I think I'm sharing like versions of this perspective shift that might sort of take a route in you somewhere and affect how you live through the next 24 hours in some small way. And I'm not going to claim that I read my own book over and over again.

1:00:27Oliver Burkeman: That would be weird. But I do do a similar thing with the reading that I choose to do first thing in the morning. I think the morning pages that I mentioned really help me out a lot with that and then you know in general not so much to do with waking up uh on the back foot but just that feeling of of being on the back foot all my sort of productivity and writing process as well has been on a long-term evolution or shift i don't know from from being very sort of programmed and scheduled to being more and more sort of intuition based and this is where the zen stuff has been so important to me the more that you can feel that and i'm not perfect at this, but the more that you can feel in any moment that you're just choosing to do one thing, it's the only thing in the world and you're focusing on that until you've finished it.

1:01:13Oliver Burkeman: And then you'll do another thing. And that's all you ever possibly could do and all life is. That's what causes that back foot feeling to sort of to lift, right? Because literally all you can ever do is pick a thing and address yourself to it for a while and then address, pick another thing and address yourself to that. And even people who are following incredibly rigid time boxing system for their day are still actually doing that because they're still choosing in every moment to stick with the system that they set up so once you can sort of feel your way into that sense that that's all you ever have to do the next thing or the next most necessary thing as Carl Jung calls it then it's almost on some level that's just incompatible with feeling like you're on the back foot because then it's like yes there are three different deadlines I was supposed to meet today and here I'm addressing myself to one of them what more do you want?

1:02:04Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I try to say to myself, like, either like, this is all I have to be doing, or like, this is enough. And I try to push back against that feeling of like, but I have these 15 things, or that I have this looming thing coming up. It's like, this is the thing that I'm doing. So that's the thing that I'm doing.

1:02:24Oliver Burkeman: And I think something to be aware of here, I've found, I totally resonate with that, is this how many productivity approaches and people's natural attempts to organize their lists and all the rest of it lead to this systematic practice of constantly reminding yourself of all the other things that you've got to do, right? So the idea of visible lists and plans that just like endlessly reinforce to you all the things that you're failing to do in the moment that you may well be doing something really important and meaningful. you don't like to do lists i've gone back and forth but yeah no i don't not i don't like uh trying to i don't like to do lists as things to to try to sort of control time via yeah right i think um i'm not going to claim that i don't keep any reminder list of the things that things that i've committed to and things that i need to not forget but i try more and more to make the decisions about what I will do in any given moment in a more intuitive way, and then check back with that list to make sure that I'm not letting too many things fall off the radar.

1:03:28Oliver Burkeman: And then there are certain patterns that emerge, right? So it's definitely the case that writing works much better for me in the early hours of the day than that you try to suddenly begin at 2.45 in the afternoon. But once upon a time, because I knew that, I would then create these very strict plans for when I was going to start and all this stuff. And it would ultimately for me be, it would backfire. It ultimately became that like my life was spent, well, I was going to say serving this rule, but actually it'd be failing to serve this rule and then feeling bad about it.

1:03:58Ryan Holiday: The routine becomes this ritual and then not doing the ritual becomes sacrilegious instead of just being like, Hey, more often than not, I try to get my writing down in the morning.

1:04:07Oliver Burkeman: Right. Exactly. And when people, when you sort of shift into this somewhat more intuitive thing, the fear that comes up is that like if you just go with what you feel like you'll just waste all your all your time and there's maybe is a sort of stage on the journey where that has to happen but when you get sort of deeper into that and you're really feeling what it is that feels like it needs doing in a given moment then it just becomes quite natural to want the thing you will want to do at eight o 'clock in the morning or nine o 'clock in the morning is is the stuff that works best then you do need to control your calendar so that you haven't got five meetings planned between 8 a.m and midday right but once that space is cleared i find it more and more effective to to um navigate by that sense of what feels like it needs doing right now yeah because the reward

1:04:56Ryan Holiday: for success or self-awareness or whatever like knowing when you're best should not again be some form of anxiety or this prison that you have designed for yourself. And like, I think, especially if you're someone who is driven or a little bit compulsive, then you're like, all of a sudden, I got to flip this light switch 15 times before I go on the, like, you're just doing the work equivalent of that. And you feel bad if you don't do it. And the reward I've noticed, it's like, the reward is not feeling great. The reward is just relief from the tension I ratcheted it up. And that's not a good thing to build your life around.

1:05:38Oliver Burkeman: And the crazy part, I'm not going to say this happens often, but the crazy part of it is that actually sometimes you do have it in you to do some writing starting at 2.45 in the afternoon, right? If you haven't made it in your head that it's impossible to do it. Exactly.

1:05:49Ryan Holiday: Exactly. Yeah. You're stealing from yourself the ability to be spontaneous or flexible.

1:05:56Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

1:05:56Ryan Holiday: Right.

1:05:57Oliver Burkeman: So I have principles or sort of rules of thumb. Yes. Writing works best in the mornings. It's really good if I can touch into the real writing and ideas every day or, you know, five or six days a week. But they're not. Yeah. Once they become rules that I'm that I am sort of the indentured servant of, that's when it all goes wrong.

1:06:17Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

1:06:17Oliver Burkeman: Are the rules serving you or are you serving this system? Right. Right. It's all in the Bible. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, says Jesus Christ. There we go. You want to check out some books? Yeah, I'd love to. Let's do it.

1:06:32Ryan Holiday: Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

1:07:23Oliver Burkeman: Thank you.

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