The sense in tech especially that you cannot afford to be present in your life. You are racing to escape the quote unquote permanent underclass in 5, 10, 15 years' time or whatever. I think it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of meaning and fulfillment in life. I think that as soon as you're doing anything to keep up or to grind harder than others or to get to the place when finally everything is all right, I think all of those things ultimately embody the kind of error about the present and the future that we've been talking about.
Oliver, where does this podcast find you?
I'm in North York Moors in Northern England.
Ah, as one does. How did that happen?
We lived in Brooklyn for a long time. My wife's American and then in 2021 we moved here planning to come for a year and we just stayed. In hindsight I think we were just a pandemic data point. It felt like a very original life choice at the time but I think a lot of people did something similar.
So, you have two bestselling books and they essentially make what I would say is a similar argument that the way most people chase productivity is backwards and that our drive for control and perfection isn't making us better, it's making us miserable. And we've argued a similar point that optimization culture is less about improving life than it is about anxiety beginning to devour it. How would you diagnose our modern obsession with optimization and quote unquote maxing culture?
I don't think the underlying psychology is necessarily new. I think we have new opportunities to sort of indulge it and go completely crazy with it. But I think that just huge amounts of all sorts of things that we do in life can be understood as kind of an avoidance of our trying to avoid confronting our finite nature, right? Trying not to realize that we have finite time, finite control over that time, finite talents, finite ability to predict the future, etc., etc., etc. And as I've written, you know, I was obsessed in a very sort of straightforward way, I think, with productivity for years. I wrote about it in the Guardian. I was doing it in a kind of wry, sardonic British way, but I think I was hoping, maybe mainly unconsciously, to reach the moment at which everything was under control and I could handle all the demands that were thrown at me and be perfectly efficient in that way. And it took sort of a very long time to start to figure out that that was never going to happen and it was never going to happen for reasons that are like baked into the human condition. So anyway, yeah, I think it's a lot worse now because there's so many and like if we're even going to talk about the role of AI in expanding our sense of what it's possible for a human to do, but that sense that essentially to be productive in a way that matters and especially if you want to sort of enjoy the process you have to confront those limitations instead of constantly trying to outrun them.
How would you describe or how can someone identify and distinguish between healthy discipline and an optimization mindset that goes overboard?
It's a really good question. I think it's kind of one of the struggles of my life. I'd like your opinion. I mean, for me, I think it is, I mean, you identify it partly in the effects it has, right? So, if it results in that mindset of constantly living for the future, constantly feeling like you're almost at the point of dominance and vanquishing, but you're not there yet. If it makes you busier, which I think sort of control-oriented productivity actually does for reasons we can talk about if you want, then I think that's a pretty good sign that it's not working. But also the question of the place that it's coming from, like for me for years and still to some extent today, the motive was like if I can get to this point, if I can work hard enough, handle everything efficiently enough, be sufficiently productive, like then I'll reach the minimum level of being able to feel okay about myself, right? And I think that everyone who falls into this category of insecure overachievers is sort of doing that same thing, trying to get to the baseline, get up to the baseline. On my best days now, it's something totally different. It's like, right, I feel good about myself. Things are fine. I don't have to do anything just to feel like I've earned my right to exist on the planet. But then, of course, I want to do ambitious things and create stuff because it's just more fun than not doing. And I'd rather have some good methods and techniques for doing that, of course.
Yeah. That's really, I mean, productivity is, I feel like it's just, we've said, okay, it's the new, it's sort of the peptide or the creatine or the hormone therapy that's been around for a while in our economy. And that is, I fall into the fetishization and the addiction to money that infects all of the US. I didn't grow up with it so I was totally focused on it and then I saw productivity, I was told productivity was a tool for achieving financial security. What you realize, or I realized as I got older, is that all schooling and most TikToks and most discipline is trying to teach you to prioritize the future. That's it. What you do now, sacrifice now to prioritize and create more opportunity in the future. And productivity is one of the things where the sacrifice you make now has a lot of impact or power, right? If you're going to work 12 hours a day, work 12 hours a day smart, optimally, increase your productivity, and you might be this unstoppable force to get to that financial security. I think the hard part is, I don't know how old you are, but at some point, you've got to say, 'All right, what happens if I get to the end of my life and I prioritize the future and there is no more future? I never really took time to take a nap, you know. I never really took time to enjoy taking a nap in the afternoon sometime on a weekday.' I didn't, I'm supposed to be on Brian Williams on this Netflix like show tomorrow and I noticed it's in the England Argentina during the England Argentina game. So I called them and I said I'm sorry, I'm, you know, Brian Williams is important, Netflix is important, but I need to come in late because I wouldn't have done that 5 years ago, much less 25 years ago. And now you, I do think it's important to have a practice around and all this around, and I'll bring this back to you. I find that the ultimate, I want to put forward a thesis. The ultimate productivity hack, I'm very focused on happiness now. I'm very cognizant because of some things that have happened to me and the loss of some close friends about the finite nature of life. I think this is all going to be over really soon. And so I'm very focused on trying to squeeze as much happiness and purpose out of my remaining years. And one of the things that, you know, when I think about how do you do that, trying to be distinctly in the moment and have a series of practices and hacks to try and be in the moment and also around optimization. I find that the perfect fulcrum for me is if zero is sitting on the couch eating Twinkies and just basically waiting and being lonely and basically just waiting to have a heart attack in your couch at 50 years of age. And a hundred is what that Brian Johnson dude is doing just injecting his kid's blood into him or red light, you know, all that, right? I find that about 80 is I think the cheat code and that is I eat well, I exercise regularly, I have good nutrition such that on an infrequent but regular basis I can drink a little too much, I can stay up a little bit too, I can, you know, miss a meeting. I can go two or three days without working out. I can order dessert because I find that that 20% between 80 and 100 enhances my life. That there is a fulcrum and you need to decide where you're going to be on the fulcrum. But I find a lot of these people become, their optimization becomes obsession. Do you think about a continuum or a scale and then being thoughtful about where you land on that scale of productivity and optimization?
It's a really interesting way of thinking about it because I think I haven't usually sort of mentally represented it to myself in that way. I'm 50 so, you know, it's like you're a kid. This idea that all of this optimization should be at 100 because it's going to pay off in the age of peace and plenty later obviously gets like systematically less possible to believe in. It's obviously easy to believe when you're 18 if you're in a fortunate situation and maybe you should believe it when you're 18 to some extent. Maybe it should be at 90 or 95 the way you represent the continuum. And obviously gets harder and harder to tell yourself that like all the good stuff is coming in the future the further that you move through life. I guess the only pushback there is I wonder if there is obviously a trade-off between thinking about the future and thinking about the present. But I think, or at least maybe I just hope, that there is a way of caring about the future that keeps its focus on the present. Right? You can choose how you work out. You can choose the sort of broader attitude you take to your work, kind of work you do, all the rest of it in such a way that at least to some extent you're trying to find present moment fulfillment in those things that will help later. I totally agree that like, you know, the way I've put it in one of the books is like, you know, the marshmallow tests, we know all about this about how deferred gratification is a vital skill for a successful life. This doesn't extrapolate forever, right? There's no benefit to just accumulating marshmallows and never eating them. If you just live a provisional life the whole of your life until it's over then you've really missed something crucial. I kind of hope that there's a way for the same experience to be both instead of only thinking about it as like I live for the future and then I stop and live for the present which is maybe not what you meant but yeah.
I want to talk a little bit about data. So I have consciously decided to move a lot of my investments from the public markets to the private markets. One, because I think the public markets are overvalued. A lot of people would argue that's true of the private markets. But something that's been accretive to my mental health is when I have a disproportionate amount of my worth in stocks, I check my stocks 10 to 20 times a day. In other words, there's too much data. And I have absolutely no desire to have a wearable telling me how I don't want a sleep score. As long as my sleep seems to be okay, I don't want to know when I'm getting good REM and bad REM because I think it'll create more stress than it relieves. What are your thoughts around the abundance of data?
It's an invitation to too much attempted control to be able to see the effects of what you're doing. The example that springs to my mind is about how easy it is for anyone who's like a content creator understood broadly to use a term I don't love to see what people are responding to positively in the audience and to sort of follow that with some public figures into a sort of terrible kind of audience capture situation where you get spun off into weird radicalisms because of how you're being rewarded. But even just for me, like coming up with ideas for my email newsletter or something, it's actually not helpful for getting it written to be tracking too closely what I think people want. And it's not helpful for getting a good response from people because I think that there's something essential to the process, which is that it's coming from my intrinsic desire to choose something that I'm interested in that resonates with people. And I guess the parallel there for kind of personal health metrics and stuff is that yeah, like you're sleeping to relax or to dream or to enjoy the process of sleeping or to feel rested in the day. It's just a complete distortion of that to turn it into chasing the numbers. I mean that's just a banal point about targets becoming distorting the process, right? But it's so omnipresent now we can just sort of completely swim in that kind of feedback. I don't know what the, I'm no investment expert so I don't know how it works in that context. I know that the basic advice to people who are not super interested, you know, retail investors is always very much to set it and forget it, low-cost funds, diversified.
Let's talk about your book. So 4,000 Weeks, for anyone who hasn't read it, what does 4,000 Weeks actually mean and why would you build a book around that number specifically?
I mean, look, I don't know that the book is specifically built around that number, but that is the very approximate average human lifespan in the developed world expressed in weeks. You've got a good chance of getting a few more than 4,000. So, I'm rounding it to a headline figure. What the book is really about, I think, I mean it was fun to give it that sort of arresting title but it's not really about the shortness of life so much as the finite nature of life. Right? So sometimes I get into debates with people about like, are you really saying that when you say embrace your limits, are you really saying you wouldn't like to have another thousand years of healthy life? And it's like, no, not necessarily. I don't think that's true. I think I would like that, but the fact that things come, the fact that life comes to an end, the fact that time is finite impacts our day-to-day experience in like so many subtle ways that we don't realize. It's what makes there even be a choice, an important choice about how to spend an hour of the day or a week of the year or a lifetime, right? Is the fact that everything else must be, something else must be sacrificed and that in that moment everything else must be sacrificed. And I don't know, I think the basic act, the book goes through all these different, you know, distraction, procrastination, overwhelm, all these things, but the basic move in all those contexts is like, it's almost like a feeling, like an embodied feeling, I'm not sure I can express it perfectly in words just quickly here, but there's like a sort of letting go or a falling back into that finitude, an avowal of it, that gives you a kind of real traction on life, like a purchase on things. It makes it much more feasible to let go of all the things you could be doing today in order to allow yourself to focus on one or two that will really move the needle, if that makes sense.
I love that, finitude resulting in purchase. What you just described is a discipline or an approach that's been rewarded or forced on me because of my atheism and that injected a question or inspired me to ask this question. And it's a personal question. I'm going to ask it anyways. Do you believe in an afterlife? You're sounding like an atheist. What you just described has been washed over me because of my atheism.
It's such an interesting question. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I do believe in an afterlife in any recognizable sense at all. My spiritual touchpoints are like, I was raised Quaker, I'm half Jewish and I'm really drawn to Buddhism. So, I'm a very tedious kind of spiritual but not religious mixture of nonsense. But none of that as it's come down to me really has any sort of sense that we're not mortal, right? That it's just going to go on forever in a different realm. I did get one very touching review of 4,000 Weeks from a Christian publication that said like, this book would be absolutely the organizing book of my life if I were a mortal but I don't think I am and therefore it's not relevant in the same way. I think, yeah, I don't think that in any sort of linear sense it makes sense to think about life continuing on. Right? And so I think this question remains relevant to anybody who either is an atheist or a religious person who has a sort of more sophisticated or metaphorical or, you know, something else view of eternal life. Yeah. If we sort of in some sense live forever and ever and ever and ever, I think that would be terrible and sort of catastrophically meaningless in certain ways. But yeah, I think then I can say maybe most of these lessons and perspectives wouldn't apply.
In your book, Meditations for Mortals, your latest book, you argue against implementing systems that promise to optimize people's routines and habits for maximum productivity. Why don't they work? And why do so many people believe they do?
I mean, I'm not sure they can't work, but you know, you'll be very well aware of this kind of broad notion that systems are better than goals as a way of organizing your time. And I think that's probably true. But what I noticed in myself and in some other people as well is that you can really turn system building into the focus of your life in a way that gets in the way of the only real answer to meaningful productivity in my opinion, which is to like just do the thing. You sort of identify a problem in your life or a place you'd like to get to or a goal that you have and then you sort of set about becoming the kind of person who would be really good at doing those things. So, you know, taking the courses, reading the books, developing the skills, you turn it into a long-term project, which is often like a really neat way, I think, of postponing the difficult bit or the scary bit. And in all those cases, you could have just taken one action that was going to, that would be the act that would be being that kind of person. Right? So just one of the examples in the book, you hear that meditation is really great. You want to get into it. It's so tempting to do all sorts of things that kind of have being a meditator six months from now as their goal. And none of them are just spending five minutes doing it today. Not today and then every day for the rest of your life, which is this kind of projection into a future again, but just literally today running the risk that you might never do it again. I think that that actually takes more guts often than launching in on these life-changing systems or long-term projects.
The book opens with a chapter and I love this, it's 'Worse Than You Think.' Basically it's an argument for radical acceptance. Why start there? Can you talk more about that?
I mean, I think you have to start there. I wanted to start there because it is that kind of, first of all, let's come crashing down to the ground and then pick ourselves up and see what we can do. Let's step into reality first. And all I mean by that is that in our quest for more control, in our quest to be on top of everything, to be completely the kind of people we think we should be, fix all our personal problems, we tend to think of this as a very, very difficult slog that it's going to take all our self-discipline and the very best systems we can find and lots of time. And I sort of want to argue it's worse than that. It's completely impossible. But actually there's huge liberation in understanding that it's completely impossible because then you can let go of that and actually start doing some things that matter in the moment. So, you know, the most basic example is just having too much to do. The most basic kind of busyness. You got an incredibly long to-do list. You feel like it'll be very, very difficult to get through it all. It'll take a huge amount of your time and lots and lots of discipline. But actually it's worse than you think. It's that the space of things that feel like they need doing is always systematically larger than the space of things you're able to do. And there's just an amazing, first of all, kind of relief in that thought for me, like, oh, okay, it can't be my job to do this because it's not possible. But then crucially there's also like an extra agency. There's a kind of, well, now I give myself permission to like get stuck in, as we say in Britain anyway, to the things that I'm deciding to do. So, I think it's really important. It's been really important for me anyway, that kind of, like, no, certain challenges in life are not really hard. They're impossible.
