Good evening and welcome here to 5 by 15 online tonight with a great guest of ours who's been on 5 by 15 before, Oliver Burkeman, who is the author of the fantastically successful 4,000 Weeks and has now come out with a wonderful new book called Meditations for Mortals. Now, anyone who reads the Guardian, which I suspect is quite a lot of our audience, will have followed Oliver's extraordinary journalism over the years, which he applied a really keen journalistic sensibility towards the questions of self-help, what we could do to make life just generally better, and out of that, of course, came the first remarkable book, which led to the second.
Now, first of all, we're going to talk for about 40 minutes and then we'll have questions, so please post them. And I'm sure that a lot of you feel like me about Oliver's writing, which is that you find the bit that applies to you and then you think, ah, he's writing this book or this piece just for me, and I'd like to ask him this, so please don't hesitate. All the books, the details will be in the chat, and of course they're always available from New York Books. So, Oliver, please switch your machine on and please join us. Thank you so much for being here.
First of all, let's start with talking about how this book has kind of emerged off the back of 4,000 Weeks. And it's a curious book in that it's, well, I'm not really quite sure how I would describe it because it's got a very individual and interesting structure. So maybe you could just talk us through how you came to think of it and why, and how it built on 4,000 Weeks.
Yeah, hello everyone. I'm really glad to be back tonight. Yeah, I mean, I could definitely give, and maybe I will soon, like the sort of cerebral philosophical story about how I experienced this book coming along after the last one. But there's another way of talking about it, which is just that I was incredibly aware, and have been for a while, but you know, it's possible to have a really clear grasp of like how you want to live and how you want to approach your work and your relationships and all of these things, and just like not actually do it, repeatedly, day after day in life.
And so, you know, the sort of self-critical account of this was sort of coming off the back of 4,000 Weeks, realizing, and I think this was true for some readers as well, right? That there was a sort of interesting vision of how to approach life coming out of that, and we get other philosophies from other sources, of course, it's not just that. And then like, yeah, but how do you actually do the things? So I think this book for me is about crossing that gap from knowing to doing.
And yeah, as if you want to talk about the structure of the book, that was my attempt to sort of not just write a book about actually doing things, but write a book that could somehow, in its very sort of structure and how people might use it, help cross that gap.
But it also has time involved, doesn't it? Because it's about doing something, or we can read it as a book that you do something every day that just takes a little quirky sideways look at how you're doing things and reassures you.
Yeah, so yeah, just quickly for anyone who's interested, right? It's divided into four weeks. Each week has seven short chapters. They sort of build on each other. It's like meant to be a journey, and yeah, the invitation, I think that's the word that I use, is that you could read a chapter a day for 28 days.
It's a book about, in many ways, loosening our attempts to control reality. So it would be unseemly for me to sort of really insist that people follow a certain way of reading it, but I think it's useful to have that kind of rhythm in mind, even if you don't happen to follow it, right? And really the idea there was that each of these days could provide a tiny little perspective shift.
That might actually change in some little way how the reader lived through that next 24 hours, so that the change might be small, especially at first, but it would be real in the real world, instead of this thing that I have known with so many books, self-help books, personal development books, and experienced as a reader again and again, which is like you read it and you think that sounds good, and you try to take some notes, and then you think like, someday soon when I get a spare week, I'm really going to put this into practice. And then like, there's no such thing as a spare week, so that never happens.
I wanted it to be something that could sort of maybe have a little bit of an effect right here and now in the midst of all the, you know, too many emails and scary news headlines and all one's personal problems that one hasn't yet resolved.
Yeah, and I think it's a very, very good time of year to be having this conversation because all around me in London, all the endless horrible preparations for Christmas. You know, the perfection of Christmas. Right. There's lights everywhere, and there's perfect presents in the shop, and there's money changing hands, and there's just the sort of horrific sense that you're leading up to one of those times of the year when you're meant to be perfect. So I find that your book, from the get-go, it says imperfection, and I think that that is just the most interesting sort of way of looking at us and how we live. So can you talk, I know you use the word imperfectionism as a verb as such, as a sort of way of being?
Yeah, it's sort of just my umbrella term for the outlook that I'm trying to get across in this book, and I suppose imperfectionism plays off against perfectionism, obviously, but I'm sort of working with a very broad definition of perfectionism. So I'm pinpointing definitely that thing in many of us that wants to produce perfect work or, yes, host perfect Christmas gatherings, but also all sorts of other things that I think can be well understood as perfectionism.
The desire to sort of, I think people-pleasing is a form of perfectionism because it's the desire to exert sort of perfect control over the emotions of everyone around you. Even sort of imposter syndrome can be a kind of perfectionism because it's that inner demand that you feel more qualified and ready for whatever it is you're addressing yourself to than you actually do.
I think in all these different ways we're trying to sort of get on top of life, master life, find a way that kind of a sort of set of rules to follow or just some way of being that makes us feel like we're finally getting our arms around it all, or we finally know really what we're doing, or we finally don't need to worry about what the future might hold.
And I guess then imperfectionism is just the approach that says, like, what if we started from the place of knowing that there will always be too much to do, that you'll never fully understand what makes other people tick, that you can't have any confidence about what the future holds. It's just this sort of radically vulnerable but very real and true situation.
And basically, I suppose the thing I've got to try to persuade people of is that this is not depressing, and it's also very much a kind of energizing and active way to be in the world, not a resigned and passive one. So that's what I...
It's quite a tricky line to draw, because you think of going into the shelves of, say, self-help books or stuff or business books, and they're always how to win, how to conquer. I mean, there's always this sense that your life is permanently a fight, right? And you approach it from a really different way, I think.
Well, yeah, I mean, only from long experience of approaching it that way, which I certainly haven't completely, you know, transcended in any way at all. But yeah, I think that because we tell ourselves that there's something that's got to be in position before we can really relax into life, right? Got to solve your problem with procrastination or distraction, or you've got to figure out how to do your job, or how to really be an effective parent, or whatever, or that, you know, some people say they got to get when they get married, when they retire, blah blah blah.
Because you're never there, it's always in the future. Yeah, life is basically a slog towards that point, which never arrives because it would entail being kind of superhuman, really, to have that level of security over life.
But it's got a big payoff, right? There's a reason we do it, I think, which is that for as long as the big moment of truth is coming later, you don't quite have to reckon fully with life as it is right now, right? You don't quite have to be here. That language gets a bit difficult at this point, but you don't quite have to fully be here and feel what it's like to be who we are, limited and sort of trapped in the reality that we're in, because you get to tell yourself that later on the real stuff is coming.
Yeah, that's kind of depressing though, isn't it? That sort of idea that you can't appreciate today or right now because something has to happen to you, or you have to do something, or someone, I think in most people's cases, has to do something. So you can be crossed with your boss or you can be crossed with whatever to postpone being just yourself.
Oh, yeah. No, it's totally sad. I just think it does, yeah, it's depressing. It serves that function of not giving us the degree of control that I think we wish we had over reality, but leading us on to the notion that we might be about to get it, basically. Yeah.
So in a way it's a process of letting go of that control.
Yeah, and of seeing that that quest for that kind of control doesn't bring us the things that we thought it was going to bring. So there's a, I refer throughout the book on several occasions to this German social theorist called Hartmut Rosa who wrote a very big book called Resonance that had a big effect on me. Its subtitle is A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World.
And to cut a 600-page book down, very unfairly, to one sentence, he basically argues that, you know, the ways in which as individuals and as societies we're always trying to extend the reach of our felt control, which an awful lot of self-help and time management and productivity advice and all of this really is, right? That this actually has the effect of squeezing out the vibrancy or the resonance, as he calls it, that is the thing that we really value the most in life.
That actually you need life to be somewhat outside your control for it to feel meaningful. And that when you get to the point where it's, if you ever do, where it's sort of very, very much under your control, all the life is gone from it, somehow.
How does it work out in your life? Because presumably you also, you write these books yourself, don't you? I mean, you went on this original quest to understand what to look at, proposals that other people made, and bring your brilliant skeptical eye to them and say, is this worth anything or not? And you also, of course, had a very skeptical readership in the Guardian which you had to keep going week after week. But so, how does something like just the idea of accepting imperfection and accepting the fallibility of life, how does that work out in your life?
I mean, it's just sort of endless process of having to learn the lessons and have my wife sardonically suggest that I read my own books. I think that, you know, one, I can talk about other life domains, but one that I think is always so vivid because I was writing about it and it meant such a lot to me was this kind of, this question of how you organize your time, right? So quite relatively early on in my career I had a lot of autonomy over how I organized a day.
Not autonomy over what I did. I didn't feel that way. I had lots and lots of deadlines, but, you know, once I was not working on a daily basis, there was a lot of freedom to sort of do things at the specific times. And, you know, like there was, and so, and this was all at the time as well when an awful lot of this stuff was really coming to prominence in books and later YouTube and elsewhere, right? That there might be some silver bullet, some magic bullet way of kind of organizing your day or the perfect morning routine or the perfect way of organizing your tasks.
And this is still like, I mean, I may have grown disillusioned with it, but this is still like a huge industry of promising control over time in this particular way. And yeah, I would discover again and again when I tried to implement these things in my life that either they just didn't work because I was making all these perfectionistic demands over how the day would unfold, and then people got in the way and I was a jerk to them because I had a plan for the day and it wasn't what was actually happening.
Or, more interestingly perhaps, they sometimes did work, as in, you know, I got to sort of go through my life in the ways that I had decided I was going to. And it would just be within about 48 hours just no fun at all, right? Just sort of completely sapped of any, you know, life or livingness.
I mean, I will definitely also say that then parenthood has a very powerful way of, you know, countering perfectionistic tendencies. Not, I mean, there's a lot of perfectionistic advice given to parents and new parents especially, but in reality you're sort of in that situation where the situation of a child is sort of, is of growing up or getting older and developing is happening whether you want it to or not, right? You can't stop it, pause, figure out the right system, and then implement it.
So, you know, I don't think this is an experience unique to parents at all, but there is something that makes it very vivid in that context.
Yeah, that's really interesting. When we were talking the other day, I was saying that I'm an alcoholic and I'm part of a fellowship, and, you know, that's very much about acceptance of, well, this massive, I suppose you'd say, imperfection which you just learn to live with. And that the big things, I guess, you learn as well that you can't control people, places, or things. You can only have a small chance of controlling how you react to them. And I think very much through your book that that's a very fundamental message that, you know, if you, it's like putting your future happiness on someone else, it tends not to work.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting, and yeah, we discussed one or two of the overlaps, didn't we, between, I guess, 12-step approaches in general and some of these ideas. And I think one of the, I mean, tell me if this resonates or not, but like there's a psychotherapist called Bruce Tiff who I've quoted lots of different places who offers this kind of thought experiment that you take whatever it is in your life that bothers you the most about yourself, you know, like your proneness to anxiety or how easily distracted you are or short temper, something like that.
And you just sort of entertain the thought of what it would be like to know that you were going to be afflicted by some version of this the rest of your life. You're never going to get over it completely. And for many, many people that is a very empowering thought because, and the parallel here is obvious, right, with the sort of steps notion that one remains an alcoholic even when one is no longer drinking.
And it's actually like once you accept this trait, then you can do something about it, then you can behave in the ways that you would rather behave.
But it's so paradoxical because it first of all begins by this acceptance that you're probably not going to achieve the level of total change that you might have wanted to. And it's through that that the change is achieved. The acceptance is paralysis. And that's what's incredibly interesting. And I'm not going to say that it manages to wash over all the other parts of your life, but it certainly helps sometimes in that feeling of not, you know, not really being able to control things as much as you might like or think you might like.
And that's, I mean, I think if you try to control everything, like you were saying, the spontaneity goes out of it. And in fact, everything about a day is made by its surprising bits, quite honestly. It's not made by what you totally expect to happen.
Right. Yeah, no. And that's the point that I, but really also Hartmut Rosa presses home, right? You know, if you actually think about all sorts of contexts, if you find it interesting to, if you enjoy studying some field of scholarship, say, like obviously that's because you don't understand it all right now.
People may claim that they wish they knew in advance that their football team was going to win every single match that they played, but they really wouldn't. It would remove the sort of engaging excitement of that situation. So all sorts of different obvious places where we don't actually want that level of control.
Yeah, I lived in Kuwait for a couple of years and you get unbelievably bored with having no weather. Anyway, when you know exactly what it's going to be the next day. Oh, yeah, another bored day. Oh, no, where's the rain? You know. There's some really nice things that I really like. I mean, I'm someone who goes to bed at night and makes a to-do list for the following day because then I can sleep because I feel like I've extracted it from here onto this paper. But you have this really nice idea of having a done list through the day, which is something I'm now doing as a result of reading your book, and it's very cool, actually. Do you do it? So can you explain what you do?
Yeah, I do. I mean, to be really transparent, I sort of, I use a, where I have my stuff organized, it sort of creates it automatically because I move something from one place to another, and then that is the list. But anyway, put this aside. Done list is just any form of list, right, that you keep by recording the things that you do during the day so that it gets longer as you accomplish them.
If you're a real dedicated to-do list user and you stick very religiously to your to-do list, then obviously it's going to look quite a lot like your to-do list because you're just going to be writing those same tasks, but that's fine. I think what's so powerful about this extremely simple practice is just that it reorients the sort of comparison that you're making.
We go through life just instinctively comparing what we've done so far today with all the things left to do. And really that's an infinite supply. Like you might only have a few things left to do on your physical to-do list or your digital to-do list, but the number of things you could do today that would be useful to do today if you had all the time in the world is endless.
So when you compare what you've done to that, you always end up feeling depressed and down on yourself because it's, you know, a finite amount compared to an infinite amount. The great thing about the done list is you're sort of implicitly comparing what you've done to if you'd done nothing at all. And therefore you get a much better result.
One context in which people find this really useful is if you're in a really sort of low period, if you're in a real sort of rut with your, both emotionally and in terms of managing to do anything. You can just write the most basic low-level achievements on this list, you know, took a shower, made a cup of coffee. No one else ever needs to see this list, right? So, you know, you can tear it up at the end of the day, whatever.
Just that sort of bringing the attention to the way in which you did have some effect on reality, however tiny. Took out the bins, you know. It snowballs in a really extraordinary way, and you find very quickly that you're sort of motivated to do slightly larger things as well.
I think that it's subtle, isn't it? Because too much control over reality, we've been saying, is undesirable, but having some kind of effect on the world around you is also one of those kind of absolute psychological essentials that people go crazy without.
So you write a lot, quite a lot, about making decisions, and that, I mean, one of our, in again, going back to one of the things that's actually in Al-Anon, in the Just for Today cards, is please relieve me from two pests: hurry and indecision. And indecision is also, I think, what you describe as procrastination. So you're going and you're kind of, you put something off because for lots of reasons, which you go into, which I find very interesting. Obviously, I'm sure that I'm picking things up because they appeal to me, and other people would ask you different questions. But you talk about procrastination and how it both protects you and hobbles you.
Yeah, I mean, I think procrastination seems to sort of mean two things. And in 4,000 Weeks, I wrote a bit about like good procrastination, by which I really mean inevitable procrastination. If there are too many meaningful ways you could spend today for you to do them all, which always will be, then you're sort of procrastinating on almost everything all the time, right? I mean, if not making progress on something important is what procrastination is, then it's just a condition of our lives.
But I think that sort of indecision procrastination is really fascinating because I've certainly spent plenty of time mired in this. There is some feeling that, going back to how we started talking, you know, the discomfort that comes along with sort of consciously feeling what it is to be a finite human, and having limited time, not being able to be sure that anything you produce will be well received or meet your standards or any of that.
Like the best way to hold onto that perfect fantasy that it's all going to be perfect is never to begin it in the first place. It's to never bring it into reality. You also don't have to take, in fantasy land, you also don't have to take tough decisions about how to spend your time, right? You can sort of harbor plans to spend six months a year on meditation retreats while also being a very present friend and parent while also working 10-hour days. As long as you're just harboring fantasies, no problem.
Obviously, when you put them into reality, those don't add up because there are only 24 hours in a day, and you have to get some sleep. So there's something really alluring about just sort of hanging out in that not-yet-committed state because the thing remains pristine, you know.
Yeah, and it remains still a perfect possibility. So you come up with, I mean, like many people do about the Robert Frost, you know, the road less traveled. But I think you make a really wonderful observation after that, is that actually we choose roads all the time. I mean, every day we're making kind of decisions that could alter what happens, and that if you went to this one room, you might bump into somebody, you might not, and that we put too much emphasis on that. It's slightly how I read it. A feeling, it's a kind of what-if feeling.
I think that's right. Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. I feel like because every moment is a decision or a choice, whether we consciously decide or not, there is this sense in which the idea that the things that we can see as decisions and then get stressed about because we're taking them, like actually you can cut them down to size and see that that's all just being more conscious about how you were living anyway.
The bit where I write about the Robert Frost poem based on the interpretation of that by the American poet David Orr, I had filed that famous poem away. It's possible that not everyone in the 5 by 15 audience knows about it. If you were American, or if you are American, you will, because it's sort of like drummed into Americans in high school, whether they like it or not. But it's the one about two paths diverging in a, you know, wood, and the speaker of the poem says, you know, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
And I had filed this away, like everybody or most people, as a kind of rather clichéd argument for going your own way and following a beat of a different drum, and, you know, always doing the unconventional thing and not going with the crowd. But David Orr shows that if you really read this, and I won't like do it line by line here because it's not the point, but if you really see what he's doing, it's very quickly apparent that what Frost may at least really be saying instead is that, you know, sure, we may justify our decisions in hindsight by saying, I did the unconventional thing.
But really, at every moment of our lives, we're making decisions not only where we can't know which one is going to be the right one in advance, but we can't even know in hindsight. Because who knows, right? Even if you consider your life to be wonderfully happy, like maybe there's some way it could have been happier. Even if you consider your life to be a tragedy, maybe there's some way it could have been more tragic. So there's, we're just sort of flying blind to a degree that we don't like to admit, you know.
Yeah, I think it's as an expression slightly been hijacked by the what-if brigade, you know, if only, the if-onlys, you know, if only I had done this or I hadn't done that or I had done this, I had done that. That is a very not great way to assess what's going on around you. I mean, I'm someone who used to do that a lot, and then I married a lawyer, and he would say, just stop that. I deal with that every day in court, someone going, oh, if only I hadn't murdered my wife, or, you know, whatever. And you suddenly think, okay, this, just get on and deal with whatever the reality is in front of you.
Right, and also just like, butting in, I don't necessarily think this applies for murderers, but it sort of cuts regret down to size as well, doesn't it? Because it sort of makes it clear that you're going to regret things.
Absolutely. And that's not avoidable. And in its non-avoidability, there's a kind of freedom.
Yes, that's a really good point. That's a really good point.
So there's lots of really nice things. I love the stuff about your list of books by the bed. I'm guilty of that one. Of course, I'd pick this out again. That it isn't meant to oppress. You're meant to see it like a river.
I just suggest in this, it's a very sort of vivid form of a much wider phenomenon, right? That we have all these sort of infinite or effectively infinite inputs in our lives that we drive ourselves a bit crazy trying to fully deal with the whole of, and that, yeah, the to-read pile or the list of articles in your read-it-later app or whatever the equivalent is.
It feels like, yeah, the metaphor is that it feels like a bucket, you know, it feels like something where something accumulates and it's your job to sort of empty it out. But this makes no sense when you think...
About the supply being as unlimited as it is, and so the alternative is, yeah, to think of it as a river, to think of all this information flowing by you and you're standing by the banks, or perhaps in the middle of the river, picking out things as they flow by that catch your attention or that seem particularly worth your time, but not with some background agenda that you're going to consume the whole river, I suppose, to push this metaphor too far.
And it's funny because I do feel sort of oppressed by the list of bookmarks in my browser, right? And yet nobody feels oppressed by all the books in the British Library. You don't sit at home at night feeling bad that you haven't got through all of those. It's just a question of where we draw the mental boundary and then beat ourselves up on one side of it. But there's so many... I mean, I'm a victim of this. There's so many interesting things to read.
I mean, there is just always this feeling of, you know, there's yet another paper about food or climate change that I should be reading.
I think another metaphor here that really made a big difference to me, but that you just reminded me of in the way you expressed that, is that it's possible to approach lists of things to read and mental lists of books to catch up on and all the rest of it as menus. In fact, it probably makes a lot more sense to approach them as menus.
You go to a restaurant, especially if you go to one of those like New York diners where they hand you like a lever arch file of all the dishes that they claim they can prepare. Nobody in their right minds would feel bad, I think, maybe I'm wrong, that you have to make a choice from that list, right? That the whole point is there's this abundant world of things to pick from. And so, in a sort of slightly clichéd, self-helpy thing, it's not like a to-do list that you have to get through. It's a menu that you get to choose from. And I think you can approach information overload and a lot of other things in life like this. Honestly, if we're finite and there's an infinite amount of stuff to do, then all lists are menus anyway. And we sort of might as well take that attitude, I guess.
Yeah. Well, on that sort of question of finiteness, I find that you have somewhere in that thing about figuring out what you say no to. And I think that people's problems about saying no are huge. And I mean, I have a rule which is I try to do it: don't do anything in 6 months' time, because you know, you agree to do something in 6 months because it's so far away. Don't agree to anything that you wouldn't want to do tomorrow morning.
Well, I mean, when you can do it, it really helps sort of filter something out, but of course, you don't do it for reasons to do with, because it makes you feel better or, you know, whatever it is. So, do you think that there is a good strategy? Well, in fact, your book is not so much about strategy, it's about learning how to do things that give you back your life force, I suppose, is what, because some things you feel and know and some things you feel you're just scratching along.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's that wonderful line that I've quoted a few times from James Hollis, the Jungian therapist, about asking whether a choice enlarges or diminishes you, as a way of just intuitively connecting to, like, you know, is this the way of... is there life in this choice or is it not. I think when it comes to saying no, I mean, you make a great point about how our... the sort of telescoping the time in terms of saying no to things you don't want to do. Understanding that, yeah, that trick is golden, I think.
There's a lovely line that I've quoted from Elizabeth Gilbert who makes the point that actually the real problem is saying no to things you do want to do. But almost all of us in, you know, most walks of life, there are going to be more things that you do want to do or would like to pursue than there is time available to pursue them. And that's harder because then you're in the realm of thinking, well, this is 6 months away, would I want to do it tomorrow? Yes, I would. But maybe still I have to find a way to say no, because just for, you know, just the maths of the situation, that there are other things that I want to do more that I can't have in my life if I'm always doing this other kind of thing. But I think there's something quite... I mean, this is a point that occurs in lots of different forms in this book, right? But there's something quite freeing about seeing that it's worse than you think, as it were, right? There's something quite freeing about seeing that you're going to have to say no to a lot of things you would like to do as well as a lot of things that you don't want to do. There's no way to win here and do all the things that you want to do.
That's something... And if there's no way to win, then you don't need to fight that fight, right? I mean...
It's true, but it is different from... I mean, it's different from, say, having slightly lower expectations, because then the chances are you'd always be kind of pleased and surprised. There's something different about that kind of acceptance, I think.
Well, there's something... yeah, there's something... I mean, there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but yeah...
