There’s a realism to Oliver Burkeman’s life advice that both unnerves and relieves.
Like: as a human here for a finite time, you’ll never get “on top of it all,” so you might as well start living right now, however imperfectly.
Mr. Burkeman breaks this to readers in his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, a slim volume illuminating “how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out.”
An ex-Guardian columnist, Mr. Burkeman brought a sober lens to modern dilemmas such as productivity, attention and stress. His books, including the 2021 bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, hold up a mirror to the misguided ways we try to wrangle our hours and days.
“We experience the world as an endless series of things we must master, learn or conquer,” Mr. Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals. “We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes, defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance or understanding of world events.”
Penguin Canada/Supplied
But this neurotic drive toward mastery and control can end up deadening our days, leaving us caught off guard by life’s surprises, Mr. Burkeman argues.
His book is organized into 28 short chapters, each meant to be read in a day; Mr. Burkeman hopes the effect is a four-week “retreat of the mind.” His counsel feels like a good friend – kind, forgiving and highly rational.
Counsel like: treat your endless to-do list like a menu of options, not a death march. See your to-read list – a stack of books on the nightstand, or 25 tabs open on your browser – as a flowing river, not a bucket that needs emptying. Accept that you might have just three hours of deep work focus in you each day. Allow that the other hours will probably be riddled with distractions. Stop treating these interruptions like a nuisance; they are the stuff of life. Finally, it’s okay if you don’t do something edifying every single day: “Your life is too unpredictable for that, and your moods too much of a roller-coaster.”
The Globe and Mail spoke with Mr. Burkeman from his home in England’s North York Moors about “unclenching” in life.
You write about modern adult life being marked by this feeling of forever falling behind. Have adults always felt this way?
This a universal and timeless thing. It’s the human resistance to wanting to acknowledge our own mortality.
What’s new is the idea that use of time is one way we might manage to hold mortality at bay. This idea that time is a resource we can use well or waste, this notion is relatively modern.
It’s the beginning of the whole trouble. As soon as you think of time as something you ought to be able to control as a resource, you’re presented with the agony of the fact that you can’t.
What are the costs of wanting to be in the driver’s seat of life all the time? “The world feels dead,” you write.
I came across this idea in German social theorist Hartmut Rosa’s enormous book Resonance, about how the project of modern civilization is this quest for greater control. Yet in all sorts of ways, this has counterproductive effects, making life feel less vibrant and absorbing.
I was always doing this with goal-setting systems. It’s very exciting to put some new plan into action to change your life. It’s very exciting for a day or two, and then suddenly it’s, “Follow these rules that someone set up.” It’s no way to live. There’s something in us that needs spontaneity or unexpectedness.
Oliver Burkeman's books hold up a mirror to the misguided ways we try to wrangle our hours and days.Oliver Holms/Supplied
If you operate under a Protestant work ethic, this might all sound like throwing up your hands – a bit unambitious.
None of this is about lowering your sights. There’s an unfortunate implication in which mindfulness has been presented in the Western context, that the goal for peace is passive and not aimed to do very much. There are a bunch of people like me who want to do a lot of stuff. They just don’t want to do it with great anxiety and deep inner inadequacy.
It’s only once you release your grip on the impossible goal of doing everything in a world of infinite things – of knowing everything, of feeling confident about the future – that you’re free to focus your energy and attention on here and now, for real. If you don’t do that, you’re always postponing the moment at which you really give your all, because that will only happen when you’re “on top of everything.”
What if your identity is wrapped up in non-stop busyness?
There are people who get a significant part of their meaning in life out of the work they do. I would be the last person to condemn this.
But there is an important distinction between feeling this is enjoyable, versus feeling you absolutely have to do this, otherwise you’re going to sink. The modern economic system in which we exist makes it feel like you have to exert new levels of control if you’re going to keep your head above water. That’s a condemnation of our societies and governments, rather than of individuals.
The other difference is the kind of person with an inner self-worth struggle. You can’t rest because you have to drive yourself forward, just to feel okay about yourself. That’s something we should want to ease up on and move on from. Consider that maybe we have a right to exist on the planet regardless of how much productivity we manage in the course of a day.
Have you encountered people who are just more chill about their time, who might be baffled by this compulsion to spend every minute productively? Big Lebowski types?
This gives me the opportunity to say that in an interview, Jeff Bridges once said that he thought my book Four Thousand Weeks was, quote, “Kind of cool.” I cherish this, and you’ll forgive me for sharing.
I do hear from people where the tone of their very nice e-mails is, “This is how I live already; I’m glad to see you’re coming around to the perspective.” Especially from very wise-seeming elderly people. I find that reassuring.
What do you still struggle with, time-wise?
I’m prone to being seduced by that feeling of, “I’m gonna be on top of it all, soon.” I do catch myself more easily than I might have previously.
Allowing things to be easy – acknowledging the possibility that something meaningful that you need or want to do might not be gruelling – this is something I struggle with.
I was raised with the sense that putting in your best effort really matters. It implies that you’ve got to effort your way through life, always. When I can get into the mindset of, “Maybe this is going to be easier than I expected,” again and again, it kind of is.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
