TED Talks Daily Book Club: Meditations for Mortals | Oliver Burkeman | TED

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really glad to be here coming to you from North Yorkshire in the north of England. It's lovely to be here where I hear it's already dark and quite cold. Oh, yes. It's been dark for like an hour or something. It'll be dark until 9 in the morning tomorrow.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so yes, I spent a lot of time having to explain to people that calling a column This Column Will Change Your Life was meant to be sardonic. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek on some level, but it did sort of change mine at any rate. I don't know about anybody else's. The reason is that I think that I was very much, for the first part of that decade or more that I was writing that column, I was very much in the mindset of, at least unconsciously, you know, trying to find the system or the life philosophy or the practice that would solve all my problems, that would make me feel like I was finally kind of in control of life.

Yeah. And you know, if you have a different kind of job you might get the chance to read books and explore these things every so often. But if you're doing it as your work you get to go through so many candidate magic bullets for sorting your life out that you actually eventually begin to realize like, oh, maybe there's maybe the reason I haven't found this yet is not because I just need to find the next one. Maybe there's something deeper and more interesting going on here. Maybe there's something problematic about the idea that I should be looking for, you know, the very idea that I should be looking for a way to solve the problem of being human. So that got me started on the journey that led to 4,000 Weeks and then this new book.

Yeah, I mean it was definitely a gradual thing. It's amazing how many of these tricks and tips you can try and have them kind of not work and still feel like, oh, just one more month or 20% more self-discipline than I've ever managed to show at any other previous moment in my life and then I'll be over the hump. But I do write in 4,000 Weeks about how a moment that I was sitting on a park bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where we lived at the time, on my way to my workspace and sort of more overburdened with journalistic deadlines than usual, and desperately trying to fathom how I was going to use all these techniques and the rest of it to get myself through to where I needed to be by the end of the week, and just sort of suddenly realizing like, oh, none of this is ever going to work. Like, this is impossible. I'm trying to... The problem here is I'm trying to do something impossible. The problem is not that I haven't found the right way to do it. And there was a big shift in that moment. I don't know about you, I'm the kind of person who has these kind of intellectual shifts very easily and then it takes me like years to really kind of live into the implications of them. But that was a starting point.

I mean, there's two different ideas here, right? Because we've been talking about overwhelm and then we're talking about perfectionism. And for some people with us today, the first association of the word perfectionism might well be to do with wanting to create perfect work, right? So, it's not so much to do with how much you've got on your to-do list. It's about wanting it to be absolutely faultless in the execution. I'm sort of making the argument especially in the new book that perfectionism applies to a whole lot of things, right? So wanting to be perfectly optimized as you've been talking about, wanting to be perfectly on top of everything, wanting to produce perfect work, people-pleasing, I think that is also a kind of perfectionism, right? Wanting to know for sure that everybody likes you and isn't mad at you at this very moment, right? And so it's against that very broad definition of perfectionism, the attempt to feel in total control of what you're doing in the world, that I oppose this, bring this notion of imperfectionism, which is really just the viewpoint that says, well, what if we start from the idea that there will always be too much to do, that we will never be able to be certain that nobody's mad at us, that we will never bring work into the world that matches up to the absolutely perfect standards in our minds and all the rest of it. What if we just sort of began from that broken place, right? That imperfect place. Is it possible that actually that could be a much better recipe for really getting the important things done and actually enjoying the process as well?

Oh, no, totally. I think it is absolutely firstly just obviously this is what all I'm writing about in the new book or any of my books is a sort of synthesis of all sorts of existing wisdom traditions and religious traditions and then yes I think it is a sort of religious thought as well. The parallel with Buddhism may be echoing for lots of people here today but also there's parallels with Christianity and doubtless all sorts of other traditions. It's just that notion of like, well, seeing the human condition as a problem that we've got to solve seems to not be the way to make it to a life of presence and meaning and action. So it's like, can we start from the idea that we're not going to solve that problem and really live the experience instead.

Well firstly, like I don't think I'm anything other than a work in progress at this myself, right? So I'm certainly not coming to you from a state of perfect spiritual enlightenment and sharing my insights with you in that way. But well, so one way to respond to this is to point out that actually there's something about trying to be in control of life to a certain extent and trying to do everything exactly right and trying to be on top of everything that seems to squeeze out the vibrancy, the enjoyment, the juice from life. I rely in the new book to some extent on a German theorist called Hartmut Rosa who has written a huge amount of scholarly stuff on this idea that he calls resonance. The idea that what really gives life its meaning is this certain kind of, well, right, resonance, right, a vibration of some sort between us and the world. And it turns out that this is not what you get. Like even if you succeed in like hyper-optimizing your life, firstly, you won't actually get through all the work because it's infinite. And we can talk about that. That's a separate point. But yes, but even if you get that level of control, you sort of will wish that you didn't have it. There's a lovely quote from Alan Watts, you know, the famous old spiritual entertainer from the 60s and the 70s, that like if you carried technology to its perfect conclusion and you had machines that could do everything you wanted for you exactly as you wanted it, what you would want in the end, at the end of that process, is a button that said surprise me, because that's what's not there when we really get into the driving seat of life in that way.

I guess in essence because I think that we spend a lot of time, a lot of our lives, doing things which while we may not realize it are actually kind of ways of emotionally avoiding the truth of being finite. So we put a lot of effort whether we realize it or not into not feeling limited both in terms of the amount of time we have and the amount of control we have over that time. So yeah, a lot of the productivity techniques that you will find in the kind of productivity books that I disdain a little bit, I think are basically offering the promise that you, of not having to feel finite, right? It's like put this system into place and soon enough, probably later in the future, it's never right now, you won't have to make hard choices with your time, you won't have to feel the disappointment and the sacrifice of only ever being able to do a small proportion of the things you can imagine doing. And when you kind of, and it's the same with control, right? If you're trying to control perfect work, it makes everything very agonizing and tortured. When you can let in the truth of that limitation a little bit more, you undergo a shift where you're actually able to be more present in life because it's like, well, okay, I don't need to spend the day beating myself up for not having found the magic way to do all the things. I don't need to be shocked and surprised that there are still hundreds and hundreds of things I have yet to get around to because there always will be. And instead maybe it's my job today just to pick a few of the things that matter and really pour my time and attention into them. So it's really freeing in that respect to stop fighting against the unavoidable truth, I suppose.

Well, that specific thought experiment comes from a great writer blogger called David Cain. And he's sort of making the argument that, you know, you can't do very much with very diluted attention and you can do a lot, a small number of people can do a lot with more focus. I guess the broader point that I'm trying to get at there is just this notion that there is this old idea from another era really now that being a good citizen, being a good person means finding ways to make yourself pay more attention to the outside world and to the sufferings of the world. And we live now, as you well know, in a world where information and information about awful things happening in the world is completely abundant. The scarce resource is our own attention and the way all the social media platforms and the rest of it work is by monetizing our attention. I think it follows from this that actually there's a duty of a citizen in the modern world to be willing to withhold attention from things as well, which is very hard for anyone who cares about the world, right? It's like, what, you're telling me I should take this issue which is obviously really serious, right, and obviously involves an awful lot of people suffering, and not think about it? And my argument is, well, yes, firstly because there are many ways in which our paying attention is, we're misled into thinking we're making a difference, right? The idea that just attention isn't necessarily active, right? And just telling the rest of a social media platform that you care is not necessarily helping anybody on the ground as it were. But also like that willingness to say, okay, this particular world crisis, this particular humanitarian disaster, this particular aspect of the climate crisis, whatever it is, I'm not saying it's not real or that it doesn't really matter. I'm just saying that's not going to be my battle because this other thing is my battle and I'm going to put so many hours a week into volunteering or I'm going to give this proportion of my disposable income that I can afford to give to that cause. I think it's really easy to think that yeah more attention is always better and actually our attention is finite and that is not the case. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I always have to sort of feel my way into it because I don't think I'm in any personal danger. Like my problem, I have plenty of problems, but they're very much to do with like trying to do too many things and overreaching and then getting burned out. And I don't think I'm at a personal huge risk of sort of being like, oh, what's the point in doing anything then? But it is a real issue. And I think that, I mean firstly there's the point that many sort of teachers of mindfulness and Buddhism make many times, right, which is that acceptance is not the same as resignation. It's not about saying that the way your life is or the way the world is it just always has to be that way. It's about really acknowledging that it in fact is that way right now. And that's a very powerful move that doesn't need to be confused with the idea of like, guess I've guessed nothing's ever going to change then and I've just got to live with it. There's also this idea that I write about in the new book that we tend to get caught up in an idea of what counts as a meaningful action that can be very, that can have lots of sort of ironic unintended consequences, right? We tend to think that the only things that matter in the world are very like big actions or actions that will resonate down the centuries or affect hundreds of thousands of people or something like that. Whereas I think we all know from our lives that really very small things can be completely meaningful, right? There's nothing not meaningful about cooking a nutritious meal for your kids or caring for an elderly relative or going for a hike in a beautiful landscape. Like these things are not going to be remembered on some level a thousand years from now, but they matter. And so I think the other part of my response is that, you know, we can look at our lives as things that are already full of things that matter and from that position then choose additional ambitions to work into them. But we don't come from this place of like, well first of all my life's completely meaningless and so why should I try to, how can I make it more meaningful? It's like life can be meaningful already. I think that's an important point.

Yeah, I mean it's really stubborn and it's stubborn in me, right? So I don't know that I'm even saying drop it. I think I'm saying can we all find ways to just like unclench just a little bit and any degree to which I think you can do that even though it's scary and vulnerable to do it is going to be beneficial. The reason it's so appealing, I mean, there are so many different layers to this answer, right? That we live in a culture and an economic culture that relentlessly causes us to feel that it's the only way to keep our heads above water is to get more control. I think we come from, you know, in the western world, in the global north, we come from cultures that very much prioritize technological and other control of the world. And then right back at the bottom because it always is, I think it's just the fear of death, right? We are trying to scramble into a position over life where we would feel safe at last. But to be born into life is to sort of be unsafe, right? Because it's to be, it's very well, it's slightly depressing material, but I think it's actually not depressing at all, right? It's like to be born as a human is just to find yourself in this vulnerable position on your way to death. I mean, that's what it is. And actually the prospect of like, well, could I scramble up onto the riverbank instead of being borne forward on it is very, very, very seductive. We see all these kinds of, you know, there are famous examples of people trying to do everything they can to live for as long as they possibly can. And I think it probably ultimately all comes from the same motivation. And I think some of those people would agree that it comes from that motivation. By the way, I'm not really criticizing them.

I mean this is something if I can talk a little bit about the structure of the book, it was very important to me to try to sort of write the kind of book that is similar to things that have helped me and that might also continue to help me because I definitely approach my writing in that way. So, it's divided into 28 short chapters which are then divided into four weeks. And the idea, the invitation, right, is to do one a day for 28 days. Given that it's all about not being such a control freak, I can't really try to force anybody that specific way. That would be unfair, but hypocritical. But what that tries to do or what I'm trying to do there is to get over this problem with a lot of personal development writing I think where it either gives you a great perspective shift but then you don't know what to do with it or it gives you like a whole complicated set of tips and tricks to put into practice and you're like, okay, when I get a free month I'll finally get around to doing that. And instead say like what if I could lead you through a small perspective shift but repeatedly over the course of a month such that you might live the next 24 hours a little more, a little differently than if you hadn't had that perspective shift. So, you know, we could talk about any of these if you want, but so there's a chapter on taking a slightly different approach to decision-making. There's a chapter on a slightly different approach to how you set goals for the day or how you think about interruptions that might arise in the course of the day. And the idea is just to sort of layer these different perspective shifts right in the middle of life, right? You don't have to wait until you've cleared the 20,000 emails from your inbox before you put this into practice. It's like right in the middle of things.