Most of us live our lives in a deep state of denial about how finite our lives are. It's not that we don't know we're going to die — I mean, we know we're going to die. If anybody here didn't realize that, I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But it's that we don't accept it. Deep down, we don't live as if we were finite humans. We instead do everything we can to try to maintain this comforting illusion that there'll always be more time for everything, that we don't face these limitations of time.
This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duy. Most of us have about 4,000 weeks alive. That's not a threat — that's how long we have in the average human lifespan, give or take a couple weeks. And the author of the book 4,000 Weeks, Oliver Burkeman, is here with us today to talk about how you can make your limited time on Earth meaningful. That's a kind of big, weighty philosophical topic to try and tackle in a short internet video, and I wouldn't say we're going to get to a decisive, definitive answer, but you never know. We are going to try and figure out what you can do with those 4,000 weeks that you're given, and you've already used a few, so you better listen to this.
Hello, my name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a journalist. I wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and my new book is Meditations for Mortals.
I'm delighted to be talking to you because I've been a longtime reader of your newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and I'm a big fan of both of your books. I'm also interested because you've made a pretty big change in your personal life over the last few years, and you moved from New York to North York, which I just find somewhat delightful on a linguistic level. But I wonder how a big change like that has played into your thinking about the meaning and the value of your time.
Yeah, we lived in Brooklyn for many years. My wife is American, and then we have spent the last few years in the North York Moors. It's a beautiful, bleak part of the world, but it is also like a living community of towns and villages. You know, I think we thought we were doing something very kind of interesting and radical when we decided to leave — or maybe not radical, but at least self-determined. And when I look back now, it's just a kind of... I'm just a sort of a pandemic data point, right? Like everybody was doing this who could. I think in many ways — not everybody, but you know, anyone who had that ability was considering it. It's also a return to the area in which I grew up. I do find that living in a rural area focuses one's mind in certain very helpful ways on how time is being used. In some ways, that's because I am surrounded by a landscape that I love, and I have the opportunity to spend time in that almost every day, you know, out in the blustery winds and under the big skies and all the rest of it. And that is, you know, part of how I want to spend my finite time on the planet. In another sense, it's kind of inconvenient. There's all these kind of little ways in which you're not just living in that sort of purely frictionless space, and that too I think is actually really, really helpful. In a way, sometimes it's annoying, right? Because I got to sort of think ahead about what I want to cook for dinner instead of just rushing out to the store while the pan is sizzling on the stove, which we could practically do where we lived before. So there's a sort of a deliberateness that is required sometimes. And then socially, it's really interesting because yeah, you might feel like it was splendid isolation, but actually you're a lot more reliant on and interconnected with neighbors in many ways than you need to be anyway in an urban environment.
I think it's interesting to hear you talk about this big life change because one of the messages of Meditations for Mortals is that we often think we have to make some sort of huge dramatic shift in our life in order for our life to start or to have meaning or to finally be the person we want to be. And your big argument is that that shift will never happen, right? That we need to actually start right now and not worry about all of the big changes that could happen, but rather just what is happening today. It's interesting because in some ways you actually did make the big shift that people talk about, like if only I moved to another country, into the countryside.
There probably is a little bit of that fantasy whenever anybody moves long distance or between cities or anything like that. There's that slight sense of, now it's this that is going to answer all my problems. I think I had already begun to see through that fantasy a bit by the time we made this move. But yeah, regardless of what I thought, you move somewhere else and like, you're still there. You brought yourself with you and all your kind of imperfections and limitations. And yeah, I think that one of the things that the new book is very much about is the idea that this moment of truth, or this moment of problem-free living, this moment of getting over all the things about yourself that annoy you — that isn't coming. And this is great news. This is not depressing news at all. This is news that allows you to get on with living life to the full now instead of postponing that until the point at which you've completely fixed your procrastination problems or worked out how to be the perfect parent or whatever thing it is for you.
Can we just define some of the terms that I think are for me really resonant and that come up a lot when people are reading you, which is the title of your newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and this idea of imperfectionism. And then relatedly, your book 4,000 Weeks. I'd love if we could just get — I'm certainly not trying to get you to summarize the whole book — but what is that number, 4,000 weeks, and what is imperfectionism, and how are those related as we then move into Meditations for Mortals, your latest book?
Sure. Well, 4,000 weeks is very roughly the average lifespan in the developed world these days. I rounded it down a bit to get to the round figure, you know, to make for a better title. There's something kind of stress-inducing, I'm well aware, in expressing that figure in weeks, right? Because if you express it in years, then it's not as much a smaller number, but years feel like large units. And if you express it in days, well, a day is very quick. It's very easy to waste a day, in my experience anyway, but you get a lot of them. There's something about the weeks that really sort of puts pressure on those ideas, because a week feels short enough to waste and to sort of not take account of, and also you don't get very many of them when you calculate the number in an average lifespan. Now, actually, I think in some ways the book is almost an argument against the title, and I'll say what I mean by that. In that I think you could take that as an argument — the idea of 4,000 weeks — that could lead very swiftly to a different kind of book and a different kind of set of ideas, which would be: life is so short, you've got to cram every moment of it with the most extraordinary experiences you possibly can. And it's quite stressful, right? That's like, oh no, some more things I've got to do in the course of my day. So where I actually wanted to take that, I want to say we're actually so finite, we're so limited in what we can find time for and how much control we can exert over how our lives unfold. We're so limited that actually, in a sense, we need to give up hope of doing most of the things we can think of. We need to give up hope of exerting most of the control we might like to exert. And so there's a kind of a defeat that you have to go through here when you realize that no matter how much you cram your life with exciting experiences, you'll never get to do more than a tiny fraction of what the world has to offer. But my argument is that that defeat is incredibly liberating and empowering, and actually leads on to bigger and better accomplishments, because that's when you get to stop trying to do this crazy, impossible thing of getting your arms around the whole of the world. And you see that actually your job, as it were, in the world is to show up and do some things, and do them with as much presence as you can muster, and to do them now instead of waiting decades until you feel completely ready to do them. So for me, imperfectionism is just the outlook on life that starts from the place that says, okay, there's always going to be too much to do. There's always going to be more meaningful things you could in principle do with your time than you're going to be able to do. So now what? You're never going to sort of cure all the aspects of your personality you don't like. All of this is never going to happen. So now what? It really is not a recipe for despair or for sort of settling for a life of mediocrity. It's incredibly exciting because it's like, now you can bring all those meaningful things and those ways of being forward from the future, you know, into your life right now, and really get stuck in to being wholeheartedly who you are right here and now.
It also makes me think that, you know, there's kind of this cliche of like, what would you do if you found out you were going to die in a week? And I think that the cliche answer to that, at least that I've heard, is like, I would travel the world, I would buy a fancy car, I would do all these drugs, I would like do this wild stuff. And I think that the reality is that if you actually genuinely knew you had a week to live, you would probably stay where you are and spend time with the people that you care about, and maybe do a few things that really matter. You probably wouldn't be out pursuing like the highest possible highs and the most dramatic experiences. That's not actually what we want to do with our limited time when we know it is limited.
Right. First of all, the aspiration would be that you were, in the ideal case, you would already be living the way you wanted to spend those final days. Actually, many of us may be living something closer to that than we let ourselves believe, given the pressures in the culture and from all sorts of other sources to sort of be super extraordinary. Like, that isn't actually what makes us feel most alive on a sort of regular basis. It's a reason to get started on things, not a reason to give up on them.
I do want to put a pretty big disclaimer on here, which I've said many times over the course of this podcast, but is that, you know, this show is called How to Be a Better Human, and I have a lot of qualms about that as a title and an idea. And I love how you really push back in your book on the idea that we'd ever become a better person, some other person who's better and fuller and more generous. And yet that also does not mean that you can't follow your best impulses. You give the example of, you know, you walk by someone who's asking for money and you feel the urge to help them, to give them some money, but instead you say to yourself, well, I actually heard that it's more effective to give to a charity that deals with homelessness, so I'm not going to help this person, I'm instead going to give to the charity. But then later on you forget and you don't actually give to the charity, so you've done nothing, which I think is a very relatable experience. In my understanding of what being a better human would be, it's not being a different human, it's being the best version of yourself. And I think that's really hard. It takes a lot of work, but it also is simpler than maybe it would look like from the outside, which I think your example captures, is that you already have that impulse, so why not just allow it?
Yeah, I think that's a really deep point. In fact, there's a sort of a paradox here that I'm not sure anyone has ever sort of solved, as it were. Maybe it can't be solved, and so I'm not going to solve it now, but it's captured by that famous line from the humanist psychotherapist Carl Rogers, who says, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. It's also captured in that idea of becoming more of who you are, which, you know, doesn't really make any sense if we're going to be very sort of rational and technical about it. And yet I think most of us can connect with what that means in some sort of pre-verbal way. So I'm experimenting with this notion of like, what would it mean to allow yourself to be more fully who you are? And that's a completely legitimate definition of the phrase better human — not trying to sort of make yourself into a more generous person, but accepting the possibility that you may already be a perfectly generous person and just need to get a little bit better at the action of not getting in the way of who you are at your best. It's also related to an insight which I've written about several times from the therapist Bruce Tiff, who has this kind of thought experiment he invites people to do, where you sort of take the thing that bothers you the most about yourself — like maybe you're incredibly distractible, or a procrastinator, or you have a short temper, or something — and you just sort of think, well, what if I never change in this regard? Or what if some version of this is with me to the very end of my life? If I'm just always going to be a bit of a procrastinator, or I would say in my case a bit of a catastrophizer, a bit anxiety-prone, I can just sort of get on with life now instead of postponing the real part of life till I've fixed this thing. I can show up now. Now, as Tiff also says, there's something a little bit scary about showing up fully for life, which is the secret payoff of telling yourself that you've got a big problem that needs fixing. You don't quite have to show up now because you can tell yourself, I'm going to do that when it's fixed. But overall, I think that notion of like, okay, then I can let go of that and just actually get on with the things I want to do instead of worrying away at trying to be someone that I'm not.
And it's interesting because, right, that exact same thing. Right, when I think about my wife, she doesn't love transitions. Transitions are hard for her. Even when we're going somewhere fun, if we're going on a fun vacation, the first day of getting into the new place is a little bit of a challenge for her. It's not her favorite day. Now, when I think about that with her, I don't think, oh, I hope one day she'll become totally comfortable with all transitions because that's when she'd finally be a good person. I'm just like, yeah, that's Molly, that's fine, right? But when it's me, I'm like, oh, why can't I be good with transitions? I wish I was. I'm so bad at transitions, and it's such a huge fatal flaw in my personality. Now, that's actually not my fatal flaw. Mine is probably something more like ego-related. I can have a big head, and that is sometimes helpful and sometimes very unhelpful, right? And yet the moment you see it, and the moment you accept that it's a part of you, you kind of let go of some notion that you're entirely within your own power to change yourself.
There's this lovely quote I use from Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, who says along the lines of, if we met the person in reality who is inside our heads, kind of yelling at us, berating yourself, treating yourself in ways you'd never dream of treating a friend, we'd just think they were, as he puts it, like he would just be boring and cruel, right? It's just like, there's just, it's just that would just be an obnoxious person. They would need help. And yet that person lives inside many of our minds. We hold ourselves to standards that are essentially impossible to reach and are just unfairly applied as against other people. I found that a very useful insight when I first sort of started exploring work on self-compassion and things like that, because something in my nature or perhaps also my culture sort of predisposes me to think that all that stuff about self-compassion is kind of cringe, you know? And I don't want, I don't want to, I don't want to go there and start treating myself as some incredibly special person and worthy of, you know, vast amounts of cosmic love or something. And of course, all we're talking about here is like, could you maybe just extend the same amount of basic decency to yourself that you already extend to friends naturally? And I found that very, very powerful. It's like, oh yeah, actually, yeah, I don't need to think I'm special. I just need to think I'm not specially inferior to all the other people in my life.
I want to just share an anecdote with you, which I hadn't thought of in a long time, and I thought of when I was reading your book, and I wonder if it'll resonate with you, which is I was maybe 18 or 19 years old. I was in my first year of university, and I was visiting a friend, and we were, I remember I was taking the train to visit her, and I was on the train, and I was with, it happened to be with one of her college roommates, who we were sitting together. We were both on this train up to visit her. It was the first time that I'd ever seen a, like a self-help book, someone actually like reading a self-help book. And I remember she was reading this book that was called Slowing Down to the Speed of Life, and she's like, this is so helpful, this has really changed my life. And she gave it to me, and I read it, and I felt like, oh, there's some big insights in here. But I also remember feeling in the moment like, this is ridiculous, right? Like we're 18, we have to slow down to the speed of life? Like life hasn't even caught up with us yet. And yet it also was that idea of like, if I read this book, I'm going to figure out the secret to how to live a meaningful life. I can change myself in this way. That feeling that like we could change ourselves, that we could get to that, that there is a secret out there that we just haven't uncovered yet, is something that you talk about a lot, and that I've never really heard other people talk about in the same way.
That's interesting. Yeah, no, I'm glad that you got it from my writing. I do think that the thing that underlies all of this is this notion that there is, yes, some way of mastering the art of being human that you haven't found yet, and maybe quite a lot of people around you have, and that's annoying, and you've got to find it somehow. What you learn if you think about this and reflect on it for a while is that, and live for a while, is that if there's any meaning to the idea of mastering the art of being human, it is in getting more and more comfortable with the sense in which life can't be mastered, you know, as finite human beings. That is just not, that's not what it is to live fully as a human. It's much more about being able to sort of be in it and take action despite the fact that you don't know if it's the right thing, or you don't know if you'll do it every day for the rest of your life, or you don't know if you're doing it well.
This culture of striving, of reaching the pinnacle of being at the top, and I think that something that you've described and I feel like is really, really something I see in a lot of people around me, both my age and older and younger, is this feeling of like just deep exhaustion, that like nothing is enough, and I'll never be good enough, and I can't ever compete with what is out there, and just it's just nothing will ever be enough, and I even before I've begun, it's already, it's already too late. And I think it ties into this metaphor that you use, the kayak and the super yacht.
