Learning This Sooner Could Have Saved Me Decades - Oliver Burkeman

The best in the world? I don't know. What I do think is that it is very possible to be really, really good at what you do and relaxed. And actually, my experience is that the more relaxed I can be, the better I am at things. I'm not going to claim to be the best in the world at anything, but I think that notion that you've either got to choose a relaxing life or an accomplished one — this is the thing I'm on a mission, a very personally motivated mission to prove is not how it works. I think there's a tension between having high standards, which is hypervigilance and obsession and focus and really paying attention to stuff, and that just tends to bleed into the personality and the ambient anxiety. And I can see, for instance, if you were to say, 'Is it possible to be the best in the world and never relax at the same time?' that question would seem pretty obvious to answer.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that there's something — I mean, this runs through a lot of what I try to write about — but there's something about wanting to feel in control of the process of getting better at things or being good at things, which is kind of completely different from the actual process of getting better at them or being good at them. So I think there's, you know, this is on some level just the banal observation that people who really excel in what they do are very often, or perhaps more often, in a flow state while they're doing it. They kind of, they sort of let go into the action. They're not sort of sitting back inside their minds controlling it all in a very sort of conscious, controlly way. So yeah, for me — and of course I'm talking about things like writing or speaking. I mean, I'm not talking about — it may work differently to different degrees for kind of sports performance and things — but you find that the more I'm trying to make sure that things go well, that that's just like a... and therefore I'm sort of rigid and clenched and muscles tensed and everything, the more you sort of pop into this awful self-conscious space where nothing works, and it's much better to lose yourself in the activity than to be trying to control it.

So I mean, there's a sort of ideal way of doing this, which I don't claim to have, you know, totally pulled off or anything, but I think the distinction is when you say 'care about', there's a way of caring about goals that basically defines yourself as inadequate and insufficient until you've met them. And there are other ways of caring about goals. So there's a concept in psychology, the concept of the insecure overachiever, which whenever I kind of mention it in a public audience context or whatever, like half the people in the room — just the look of recognition that passes over their face is amazing, right? So people who do really well in life and they're driven and they're probably applauded and celebrated by their friends or by society at large. They're doing loads of impressive stuff, but on some level — and I was like this for years — they're doing it to try to fix something about themselves or to try to feel okay and to try to sort of fill a void. So loads and loads of really successful people in the world, I think ultimately are sort of feeling like they've absolutely got to succeed, otherwise on some level they don't really deserve to exist or something.

And that sort of puts you in a perpetual place where everything you're doing in terms of goal pursuit is to try to make yourself feel sort of less bad about yourself. And it puts you in this really awful situation as well, which I definitely used to experience a lot, where anything you achieve in the world, which you might think you could then feel proud and happy about, just instantly becomes the minimum standard that you've got to meet next time. Which is a very depressing way to live, right? And so, you know, you do really well at an exam or you get a certain level of public success with something, and then it's like that instantly becomes — like if you don't meet that same level the next time, then like who are you? What are you? There is this whole other way of thinking about caring about goals, right, which is to say, like at least to entertain the possibility of like, what if everything was fine right now and you feel good about yourself and you don't have these self-worth psychodramas going on, and then on top of that you decided to create some cool things in the world because that's a more interesting way to live than sitting around doing nothing. So I think there is a way of being ambitious and accomplished that doesn't need to be in flight from something, but it can be challenging to get there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Right. Approximately probably 15 minutes or maybe less.

Yeah, absolutely. I was speaking to an author more successful than me talking about how — I shouldn't name names — he was talking about how, you know, when his first big successful book had hit right at the top of the charts, he was like following along with his friends on WhatsApp and they were just like completely amazed that this thing was happening and everyone was just overjoyed. And then realizing when that happened to his like, I don't know, fourth, fifth, sixth bestseller or whatever it was, and it did get to the top very soon after release, that he sort of felt only relief, and then realizing that there was something amiss about only feeling relief in a situation where you should be, you know, you should be just sort of amazed and celebrating that it's happening. But now it's become the bare minimum.

I asked a question at my live show. So the people who came to see me in North America last year would have heard me ask this. It's one of the final questions, which was to work out basically whether you're gripping life too tightly. And it is: when things go well, is your presiding sensation one of joy or one of relief?

Like is it the sort of congratulation of self-love or simply the abatement of fear? And I just think like this — you see, it's strange doing talks, I'm sure you do live stuff too, and it's strange giving talks like this because a musician wants hands in the air and shouting, and a comedian wants laughter and clapping, and if you're us, what you want is this kind of sullen, fearful look on someone's face. It's the... what does an existential...

What does an existential crisis look like from the outside? And that's what we're — that's the [__] bullseye for me. That's exactly what I'm going for.

And I think it's really one of those things where first of all, just seeing the dynamic is far more powerful than like any technique or method for goal setting or anything that I've ever come across. Just like realizing that you're doing that and that it kind of makes no sense that you're turning your successes into reasons to beat yourself up. And I guess also, I guess this is sort of part of this overarching idea that I end up writing about, you know, because we are finite creatures, because we're all going to die, because there is — because there are limits of all sorts of other kinds of the control you have over your life or the number of avenues that you can pursue with finite time. There's this really powerful and incredibly liberating, and I insist not depressing, sense in which you've kind of already failed. And so this desperate kind of white-knuckle clinging to the cliff face attempt to not fail, you can sort of let it go, because like a metaphor that I've used in my writing before, right? It's like we go through life braced like we're in a plane that might crash and you're adopting the brace position or whatever, and it's like everyone's terrified, but in a way the plane has already crashed, and here you are, right? You're on the desert island in the smoking wreckage of the plane, and that's what life is, right? It's just sort of doing what you can with what's in front of you. And I definitely — there are definitely people who think that this is a very sort of unambitious, depressing, sort of resigned attitude to life, but I think it's absolutely — like it's so invigorating to realize that like I don't have to go through life trying to stave off the great failure, because that's just being alive, and now I just get to...

And yeah, not just a fail to do everything, but even to fail to reach kind of perfect standards in the things that you do do, or fail to have uniform positive responses to the things that you do. It's like once you see that the way that all these things are kind of outside our control, it becomes a lot easier to waste less time trying to control them and thereby sort of, you know, free up time and energy and focus for doing a few of the things that you want to do with your life.

So just for anyone who's not familiar with it, right, the legend or the anecdote here is that he's leading some group in California in the '70s or something. And this is Krishnamurti, the spiritual teacher, and he asks everyone who's present, 'Do you want to know my secret?' And of course all these kind of spiritual junkies, absolutely obsessed, lean forward, desperate for the secret. And his secret, as you say, is 'I don't mind what happens.' And for me, that is a sort of ultimate statement of a kind of approach to life that recognizes the limitations of the control that we have, recognizes how much of our lives are spent sort of anxiously leaning into the next hour or the next day or the next week, just waiting to make sure that things are okay, and then of course they are okay usually, and all you do is lean forward into the next week through your own life.

And I don't think Krishnamurti in that line, I don't think he means that some things that happen aren't better than others, that you shouldn't try to have things in your life or the world or the people you love go well instead of badly. It's just that when whatever happens does happen, there isn't this sort of automatic stressful collision between what you are demanding that reality do and what reality does do. And you can still put huge amounts of effort and time and focus into trying to, you know, have things go the best way, but then when they don't go the way that you were hoping, you're not sort of completely bent out of shape by it. Who knows how perfectly even he manifested this attitude, right? I think a lot of what we're talking about here is kind of a shift of perspective that one hopes to embody on one's best days, but it's a largely unreachable gold standard, I think, but it's definitely a direction that you can be — or an orienting principle would be a good way to put it.

And this — you're so right that people sort of lean toward the thing that's happening in an attempt to control it, in an attempt to deal with the uncertainty.

Yeah, it's a really deep and interesting question. It gets to the point where I don't know if I have the answers. I guess what I think ultimately — the idea that I'm tracking, which is of course, you know, me doing personal therapy and coming to terms with my own issues — is that there's something really, really sort of overpoweringly intense and vulnerable-feeling about being human and consciously showing up for the human life that we have, to sort of really take account of the fact that we're here, that we didn't choose to be born, that we have limited time, limited ability to steer how things go, that we're going to die. All of this is just like super intense. And I think that very, very often what we're doing without necessarily realizing it is pursuing strategies for feeling like — not that we've got out of this situation, because you can't get out of it until death, but feeling like we're engaged in a project of getting a little bit out of it, or sort of up on top of it, sometimes is the way I think about it. It's like we're trying to sort of lever ourselves into a position where we're kind of controlling life instead of being in life, which all of us inevitably are. And so, you know, you can do that in ways that involve — I think, you know, a lot of mainstream productivity culture is all about developing that feeling that like, you know, 'I'm really in the driver's seat of the thing now.' But also sometimes it's a more kind of numbing out and distracting ourselves response, right? A lot of kind of time wasting is probably best understood as the fact that if you were really to focus on what you wanted to be doing, you'd feel vulnerable again, because like, who knows if this difficult plan would work out? Who knows if this awkward conversation is going to go the way I want it to go? And that manifests in all sorts of ways. I mean, the thing you'll say about the comedy clubs is interesting to me because there's a cliché about how people put off life until they get married, until they get a promotion, until they retire, these big milestones, and that's true. But even after I felt like I kind of got over that, which to some extent, you know, getting older will cause you to get over it because you pass some of these milestones and realize that there's just more milestones. But you're referring to this thing that I've really noticed in myself too, which is the capacity to sort of live not a decade in the future for when you get that big promotion or retire or something, but like about an hour in the future or 20 minutes, right? Like even such an amount of time that's so [__] unimpressive. It doesn't even achieve anything, right? And it's just that sort of waiting for the next thing to happen, checking it went okay, and not even checking it went okay. In the case of a night at a comedy club, what's going to go wrong, right? Like I mean, actually, and I would be — I'm terrible in those situations because I have sort of too much weird vicarious empathy for the performers and like I'm...

When people die on their feet in comedy clubs, I can't bear it. But that maybe doesn't happen at the high-class Austin ones that you go to either.

It's interesting. I turned 50 — well, actually technically last year, but I am 50, which is completely alarming, and I'm still constantly going through the weird experience of realizing that people in their 20s or even their 30s are relating to me as someone from an older generation when I'm not talking about now in this conversation, but like, you know, when I was just kind of assuming we were having a — 'Oh, I see, right, I'm an old person.' What changes is, you know, I think that gradually there's this accretion of experience that gets big enough that you realize that firstly, you know, the world does not collapse when you don't meet — when you break a streak of some kind of achievement, that you know you can sort of relax in that sense, and you sort of develop — I have developed, I think, a greater level of sort of basic confidence that I sort of know what I'm doing when it comes to writing things, which I don't — until quite recently don't think I had. But then also there's just the kind of — if you healthfully manage your midlife crisis and your dawning sense of mortality and being in the sort of much more decisively being in the likely second half of life and all the rest of it, there is just that kind of awareness, whether panicky or quite sort of down to earth, that it's sort of got to be now, right? It's like when are you going to do that thing or travel to that place or learn that skill? Like I mean at some point it's going to have to be in a now. You'll be familiar, I'm sure, with the book Die with Zero about...

Right, right. About how dangerously possible it is to defer gratification for too long. And you know, so I've — to the extent that I'm a calmer person and a happier person than I was, which is, you know, it's a mixed picture, but I think one of the big reasons for that is sort of this combination of like I kind of know what I'm doing, and also even if I didn't, I would have to do it now.

That's a kind of — that's a good combination of motivations.

Do it anyway.

Yeah, yeah. And I feel like the — maybe it's not quite the same point as 'Do it anyway,' or maybe it's identical, but the slightly more — the one that evokes a more British atmosphere for me is like 'You might as well.'

'You might as well.' But like it's like...

The stakes shift in such a way that like you have less to lose, or maybe you never had what you thought you had to lose in the first place. Elizabeth Gilbert has that wonderful line about how you're scared to let go or to surrender because you're afraid of losing control, but you never had control. All you had was anxiety. Which I think is a brilliant...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How great.

Yeah, yeah. Genuine tragic situation. Yeah.

I mean, I started off very skeptical about any kind of engineered fun, right, especially in kind of corporate settings, but frankly even in one's own life, because the moment you're engineering it, doesn't it stop being fun? The moment you're doing it for some outcome other than itself, aren't you just sort of monitoring it all the time vigilantly to make sure that it's having its effects? So I'm not sure this is quite an answer to your question, but what it makes me think of is sort of trying to engineer fun experiences is not something that I feel I've had much success with. But asking myself in the moment, in the context of the day, what I feel like doing or what I would enjoy to do, letting my productivity be at least somewhat guided by the question of like what I feel like doing, has been a huge revelation for me. I think a lot of us, probably the insecure overachievers, right, we go through life with a sort of deep lack of trust in ourselves. We think that if we were to just do what we wanted, we'd just like unspool and spend all day on the sofa eating potato, right?

And of course, it's not true. Like, you know, if you're interested in being productive or ambitious in the first place, you can pretty much assume that you're not the kind of person who's just going to become a wreck if you were to ease up on yourself a bit. And the big revelation for me was finding that when I can pursue some kind of approach to productivity that allows me to take note of what I want to do, firstly, you get to harness that energy instead of trying to squash it all the time, right? It's like crazy to come up with these incredibly rigid, straightjacket productivity systems that say like even if you feel like working on X, you've got to work on Y because that was what you assigned. You're just wasting your own energy. And then secondly, the big discovery is that actually, you know, among the things I enjoy sometimes is things that involve, you know, work or administrative things that I would never have wanted to try to force myself to do but feel like I need to do, those sort of the things that belong to the world of obligation. Actually, there do come moments in the day or the week when that's the thing that you want to do, because you want to be the kind of person who keeps your commitments and is organized and all sorts of things like that. So it's kind of a no-lose situation if your professional situation permits it at all, I think, to navigate by fun and enjoyment at least a little bit more than you probably are doing.

Well, because the other — I mean, the other point is like, yeah, when you said that you can take certain decisions that are not like that but the numbers might go up. Firstly, you might want to argue that the numbers wouldn't indefinitely go up if you kept doing it. There might be a short-term boost, but also like, you know, at the end of the day, why do you care? Right? That's what it always comes back to is like if the thing you're not doing isn't overall and in aggregate a sort of meaningful experience, then once you've got like, you know, basic food and shelter taken care of, why would you do it? And it's — I mean, I say it as if it's an easy thing to remember. It's obviously we're all forgetting it all the time and kind of pursuing these instrumental goals that lead to other instrumental outcomes and kind of losing sight of whether they're all... Yeah. It's the thing about climbing a ladder and realizing it was the wrong...

Leaning against the wrong wall or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Right. People have done it in organizations and stuff at a lower scale, right? Taking credit for what their underlings produce. But this is like...

It really is. It is. And it's available to everybody and it's available in sort of micro ways. For instance, let's say that you and your partner had an argument and it would be really good for you guys to make up, and you go to ChatGPT and you load the last few messages in and you say, 'Can you write me a reply that is meaningful and loving, that compromises without completely destroying my boundaries and will make my partner feel great? Please refer to as many psychological principles as you can, but keep it light and light-hearted. We've been together for about five years. Send.' They send you that back. You send the message over to your partner. Let's say your partner goes, 'Baby, I'm so glad you sent me that message. It made me feel so good. I just — you know what I love about you?' And then all that you hear coming into your ears is, 'I'm a fraud. I'm a fraud. I'm a fraud. I'm a fraud. Liar. Liar. Contrived. Conceitful.' Like because you do not get to capture what is truly happening here. It wasn't you. It wasn't your genesis. What someone's saying is thank you for showing me you, and thank you for how wonderful for me to be the progenitor, the muse, the inspiration for your thoughts. And because you didn't do it, you don't get to capture any of that goodwill.

Yes. No, that's a great — it's a great and kind of chilling example, although I know that lots of people are doing it. And I think that yeah, I mean, I wish I could attribute this argument because it's not my own. I'm borrowing it from something I read and I can't remember where I read it. But I think that a lot of what happens when you use LLMs in that kind of context to sort of — it's again, it's like wanting to stay in control, right? It's wanting to sort of control and direct the process, make sure you say the right thing. It's totally not about the fact that a lot of relationship happens in the repair that follows saying the wrong thing, right? So you have to sort of go wrong first. But somebody was making the argument that, you know, it's a very, very old observation that everyone seems to speak in therapy speak these days, and sometimes this leads people to go on tirades against therapy itself. And I always want to kind of say these are two totally different things, right? And I couldn't really put words to it, but I saw this argument made that actually a lot of the therapy speak, especially obviously in the last couple of years or whatever, is really the kind of generic output of both language models and of the kind of brains that use them too much and come to think and speak like them. It's the exact opposite of really good therapy, which is about, you know, at least in the tradition that I'm familiar with, is about like long-term real relationship with another conscious, emoting human being, and absolutely doesn't need to be full of, you know, so-called therapy speak and jargon terms and, you know, turning every human experience into a sort of technical pathology or something. It's completely different. But that feeling that everyone is kind of thinking too hard about what they're saying...