People really do want, and so do I, 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 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.
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. 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.
Commit yourself to all these professional goals and all these activities and all this stuff and then you give the little bit left over to meditation, philosophy, reflection, quiet, stillness, whatever you want to call it. It's the other way around.
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 want to do it.
The reward for success or self-awareness or whatever, like knowing your best, should not again be some form of anxiety or this prison that you have designed for yourself. Although maybe you disagree because I feel like there is an element in the way that you write that...
I remember with The Antidote, which I have here.
Which I have you signed, but when did...
That was the 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.
It's been reissued since then.
Yeah. And I figured so, when did this come out?
So, but I remember, and in your columns too, you were somewhat cynical slash skeptical of self-help. I think you rightfully sort of were criticizing the excesses or the nonsense of it and the, you know, 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.
You're now one of those guys.
Yeah. And I wondered what that feels like for you.
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.
But yeah, no, 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. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, there is a certain sense of that. 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. Yeah, it's not actually that helpful for people to be like that. You don't want to become a cult leader, right? But you also like taking on a little bit of that. It's helpful for people.
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 just stole all this stuff from other people. Their real skill here is their confident shamelessness. Their ability 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.'
Then there's the other part, and I've met a bunch of these people, and I'm sure you have too, where there's sort of journalists who are writing skeptically 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 of value, right? Books of this read 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.
Yeah. No, totally. That's exactly it. Right. There's, 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.
It 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.
And you know, you're good at explaining.
Right, and I think I do have a skill for synthesizing and explaining and things like that. So, you know, you get to it's in that spirit that you're helping people.
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, you know, this stuff, 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.
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.
Yeah. And in our world where we have an abundance of information, actually the rare skill is not the rare skill, but a necessary skill or trait 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. 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.
Yeah. I mean, you very evidently are, and I think 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 saying like it's like you're inside my head. Why did you come to this insight right now? And obviously there's a huge amount of self-selection going on there in terms of who subscribes to things and who reads books, who reads specific books, but it's kind of interesting as well that there is such a thing as a zeitgeist and there is such a thing as particular forms of suffering that seem to be very widespread at any given moment and ways through them that seem to help. That's the weird thing about the Daily Stoke because the Daily Stoke is attached to dates, right?
Or and then the email too obviously 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 put Z 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 3 days ago. So let's just shuffle the deck a little bit more.' Like horoscopes but in a good way. People see what they need to see.
Right. And in forging that connection, they've done something real for themselves. Right. It reminds me of one of the arguments I've seen about dream analysis in psychotherapy where there are people who believe that these are deep important messages from the unconscious and people who believe that it's random firings that have no meaning. But actually 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.
Well, yeah. Even like analysis of literature, 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, not...
Nobody actually knows what the sound of one hand clapping is, right? Those questions are designed to stop you short and make you actually be in reality and feel things and think things.
Right. Yeah. I think that relates to a much wider sort of thing that I'm always coming back to in my work, I think, which is 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 however 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. So...
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. 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 ground, right? 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. You can have covered some ground. That's the idea.
Totally. Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah.
And 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 and all these other things.
Yeah. And that was also evident and 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 I have done a bit of things like that and I am interested in the general domain. 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 the solution, 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 manuscript.
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 is to learn how to die. 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 has ever lived has 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, 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 is a thing, 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. And a more intellectually honest person isn't able to go much further than like, here's some stuff I've been thinking about.
Yeah. No, absolutely. And this reminds me also of like this question of what is the role of techniques and methodologies and things. 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 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 firstly the thing that matters are the principles or the perspective shifts and then there are like 10,000 techniques you could come up with that would embody those things. So if you're making the argument as I do in the new book for 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 point I'm making 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 a meaningful life that really are universally and timelessly true as opposed to, you know, contingent.
Well, I see 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 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 miss that it's largely the principles or the strategies. But yeah, like when people ask me about Stoicism they're like what are the five Stoic exercises 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 like that. 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, 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.
You know, it's the same thing. It's like 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.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I say something similar because it's like, yeah, I was like an anxious wreck at college. So, the fact that I'm a little bit chilled out now ought to count for something.
So, how many days a week do you think you wake up feeling like you're behind? Because you talk about that a lot.
Yeah. Again, that's one of 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 that sort of feeling that there's a problem with you because you have not got your arms around infinity is obviously like, that's not a sensible way to think about the relationship between a finite human and infinity. But to answer the question, no, 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, 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 want to do it. And that will be the place where I will sort of metabolize that feeling 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 wisest and calmest and most focused you'll ever be. 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. Did 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 while I was asleep it was real and now I'm having the... and there's probably a metaphor in there. It's like you're having the impression, the feeling that whatever, but it's not actually true.
And so you made it up. So you have to kind of work yourself out of that. And I think you can do a life version of that, too. Like you wake up and you're like everything's [ __ ] or I'm behind or like you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time to experience.
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. But it's real for you in a sense and so it needs your attention.
Yeah. And 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 you can... the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today, right? Because it's all the overlay that you're putting on things, right?
I mean maybe 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 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. 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 finitude is a problem way that sort of defines that upcoming thing as something to bemoan because yeah, somewhere in the back of my mind or in some like preverbal part of my unconscious, there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that trade-offs are involved.
Yes. 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 okay, 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, okay, this is my publisher. I got to be nice, you know, or I got to talk to the accountant about this thing or, you know, this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for 3 minutes even though they've done this to me before and it's never 3 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 [ __ ]? Will anyone let me work?' you know, and it's like, right, 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, you know, picking them up from school and having fun together.
But before that, I've used it up on a bunch of trivial [ __ ]. 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, and when 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.
Right. Right. Right. And I think 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 the sort of, maybe it's different for you, but the weird stuff from childhood of like I've sort of got to be like obedient to these, and the way you can give like basically everybody in the world some sort of a strange quasi parental authority over you. 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, you know, 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, you know. 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, etc., that you don't commit yourself to all these professional goals and all these activities and all this stuff and then you give the little bit left over to meditation, philosophy, reflection, quiet, stillness, whatever you want to call it, it's the other way around.
