How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580 | Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed.

Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential we have to do them will leave us feeling wiped out.

That is not a war that any of us is ever going to win.

And it's in that realization that you can then, I hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy which is like OK, that's the way it is.

Hey guys, how you doing?

Hope you're having a good week so far.

My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Many of us feel under constant pressure to optimize every moment, to become more efficient, more productive and somehow more worthy.

But what if embracing our limits could be the key to living a calmer, More Meaningful Life.

This week's returning guest is Oliver Berkman, someone who for many years wrote a popular psychology column for The Guardian newspaper and, more recently, someone who wrote the wonderful book 4000 Weeks.

His latest book, Meditations for Mortals, a four-week guide to doing what counts, takes us on a liberating journey towards a more meaningful life.

One that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence, but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves.

Designed as a four-week retreat of the mind, it offers daily wisdom, solace and inspiration to help us find a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled way of living.

In our conversation, we discuss why the belief that life will finally feel easier once we clear our to-do list is an illusion, how shifting our focus from endless achievement to small present moments can transform the way we experience each day.

Why the fantasy of perfect decisions keeps us stuck in indecision, and how accepting the downsides of any choice can set us free.

How our fear of wasting time is often rooted in perfectionism and why many of us feel we have to earn our worth through effort.

The liberating idea of daily-ish habits a flexible, compassionate way to keep showing up without turning routines into self-criticism.

Why we don't need to wait for life to feel calm or under control before we start living with more intention, and how embracing our limits and accepting that time is finite can help us feel more alive and connected.

I was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Oliver once again, as he brings such clarity and compassion to questions that so many of us grapple with.

Instead of offering yet another system for getting more done, this conversation is about stepping back, loosening our grip and recognizing that a good life is not measured by productivity, but by presence, meaning and connection.

In your new book, you talk about the kind of life that you would like to be living.

And you describe it as calm and focused, energetic and meaningfully productive, and connected to others who as opposed to anxious, isolated, and overwhelmed.

I think that's the kind of life, Oliver, that many people would also like to lead.

So I guess my first question is twofold.

Why do so many people struggle to lead that kind of life?

And secondly, how are you getting on in your quest to do so?

Great questions.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many reasons why it's hard to live that kind of life, right?

Reasons to do with the society that we live in, reasons to do with the ways we were parented and the messages we give ourselves.

I think the reason I really want to focus in on, and that relates to your second question, is I

There's a problem with seeing that as something that you're striving towards, something that's off in the future, and that you're going to work really, really hard.

And then eventually that's going to be your life.

There's a big sort of mistake involved in that, in that approach, as opposed to seeing it as something that you can actually claim for yourself right here in the moment.

And of course, that doesn't get away from the fact that there's like too much to do and too many emails, and the economic system that we live in exerts all sorts of pressures.

But there's something really important, I think, about the idea that we can actually enter into that way of being right here, at least to some degree, instead of seeing it as this thing that we're constantly chasing on the horizon.

So yeah, to the extent that I have succeeded in living a life like this, which is definitely only partial is because I've found ways to sort of step into it now, instead of sort of reinforcing this notion that it's always in the future, that I've always got to do more until I can get to it.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Through the lens of health, I think about... what you just said in the context of weight loss.

And something I've realized over my career is for people who are looking for sustainable weight loss, for whatever reason, that might be, too often it's put off into the future.

When I lose weight and get to this weight, I'm going to be happy and go on holiday here and do this or do that hobby, whatever it might be, and i found it much more um helpful for people to say no no, why don't you do those things now right, and then i think you'll find that the weight loss obviously you have to do some things, yeah are going to come quite nicely as a almost like a second order effect of that, rather than the other way around.

Totally, i can totally see how that will work in weight loss.

I think of it in the context of like um overwhelm.

I have a huge tendency.

I'm letting go of it to a large extent, but I have this huge tendency to say okay, I want my life to be calm and peaceful.

It feels incredibly overwhelming, overwhelmed with demands and obligations and emails and everything.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to really, really buckle down and power through and spend much more time on all the overwhelming stuff and actually have a less peaceful life and a busier life and a more stressed life, because I'm going to get through it to this alleged vista of peace and calm on the other side.

And I think where that connects to what you were saying is if instead, you can see how you show up in the day today as some form of expression of the life that you want to live not a perfect one, it's never going to be a perfect one.

But if you can, sort of, if you say like okay, I want to get to this point where I've lost enough weight that I can enjoy myself.

So what if I took that focus on what I want to enjoy now.

And I think time and again yeah, people find that what happens then is like then you're living.

You're living the life you want to live.

And so it's exciting and fun to get better at living that life and to lose more weight and to be more calm and to handle more of the demands without sort of spinning off into overwhelm.

Yeah, there's also a compassion to yourself in living this way.

I know you do talk about one of the chapters and You also acknowledge how self-compassion can be a difficult term for British people.

To get our heads around right through the lens of weight loss, you know, often people want to beat themselves up, deprive themselves, restrict themselves until they've reached the goal of a set weight so that then they're going to start, you know, treating themselves in the right way.

And it doesn't work like that.

All you're doing then, right, is, yeah, you're reinforcing this notion that you're bad.

Exactly.

You need fixing.

You can't really fully participate in life until you have uh, achieved that that, that fixing and the.

I mean i had such struggle with this idea of self-compassion because, as you say, there's something about it that invites me to think i'm being told that i have to see myself as super, super special and much more deserving of love and cuddles than anyone.

None of that.

The thing that really made the change for me was when i came across this idea from philosopher called ido landau, who talks about the, the reverse golden rule So not treat other people as you would like to be treated yourself the famous golden rule but don't treat yourself worse than you would treat other people.

And I think that was such a moment for me when I realised that I sort of went through my days often sort of berating myself internally in ways I would just never like, I would just never dream of doing that to anyone a friend, a person I met in a day-to-day business context.

It would be utterly outrageous to be that horrible.

So all I was asking of myself even if it gets labeled self-compassion and triggers all sorts of cringe responses from Brits like all I was asking of myself was equal treatment that I was already perfectly good at giving to other people.

In your answer to my first question you said it doesn't mean that there's not going to be too many things to do or too many emails.

And it's kind of interesting that really landed and kind of has been whirring in my brain since then.

So my question is, is that really true?

Are there always going to be too many things to do and too many emails?

Or perhaps could it be the way that we're framing those things to do and those emails?

The answer is yes.

Right.

It's totally a question of perspective.

And I think this is something that I've tried to find ways to articulate lots of times in my writing.

It's like you have an incredibly finite capacity for doing things because you are a human and you have so much time on the planet and so many hours in the day and so much attention and energy.

And so the amount of things that feel like they need doing is basically infinite.

Right, there's no reason why your brain can't feel that your obligations to your family, the ambitions you have for your job, whatever it might be, that just keeps on expanding, whereas your finite capacity really, really doesn't, and so yeah, from that perspective, there's always too much to do.

But because there's always too much to do and there's no way around it.

That is kind of another way of saying that there isn't too much to do, because this is not a war that you can win as a finite human being.

So there's a quote that I really like that says I'm going to mangle it, but says something like the problem is not that we don't have enough time to do the things we need to do.

It's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.

Yeah.

And of course, this is a lot harder for some people than others, right?

You can absolutely feel like you have to do an impossible amount just to keep a roof over your head.

And that's a very real and acute feeling.

But actually, nobody can do an impossible amount.

And so, in the end, all you can ever really do with the time in your life is a handful of the things that you might feel you wanted to do with them.

And when you see how totally inescapable that is, I think it's really liberating.

I think it's like oh, it's not because I'm a loser that I haven't figured out how to do all these things.

It's not because I haven't found the right productivity system.

It's because you don't get to do all the things.

Your last book, just before this, 4000 Weeks, and this new one, Meditations for Mortals.

I think one of the reasons they're striking such a deep chord with so many people around the world is precisely because of what you just said.

This acceptance of that actually can't do everything.

Well, let me put it to you.

Your last book, 4,000 Weeks, became a global smash bestseller, right?

First of all, congratulations.

Thank you.

But related to that is the question, why?

Why do you think that book at that time made waves in the way that it did?

What was it in that book?

I mean, who knows?

And I think a lot of it is just luck and good fortune.

But I suppose I was going to try to answer.

I would say English modesty.

Well, you know, but it's also true, right?

But I also think, if you're going to try that, if I was going to try to answer that I would say for various reasons, partly having to do with coming out of the pandemic, partly having to do with the stage.

That kind of books and thinking about productivity and stuff were at that point.

It was time for something that sort of gently introduced people to this, to this like fact instead of this notion.

So there'd been a lot of a lot of the history of sort of um, time management advice is like, if you follow my system and you really try hard, then you're going to get to the point where you can do everything that needs doing.

And then there was a bit of a rebellion that came in the in the form of saying like well, this is all rubbish anyway, stop working for the man rebel like, just chill out, which i don't even necessarily object to.

But it's not what a lot of people want to do or can do, and so i think it was time for someone to say look, you can be productive and ambitious and you can do, you can make a difference in the world.

What you can't do is get your arms around an infinite number of potential demands obligations ambitions, and there's a sort of a there's a moment there where you can I went through it myself and I hope that the book has led people through it as well where you can sort of Oh, just sort of relax into reality.

I've compared it in a couple of places to that feeling like you're, you're out in uh, you're out in the street and you haven't brought the right um, like waterproofs, and it starts raining.

And for a while you, sort of like, keep trying to find ways, almost unconsciously, to keep the water off you.

And the rain gets heavier and heavier.

And eventually you're just like, okay, I'm going to get wet.

It's like, okay, I'm going to be finite in this ocean of infinite possibilities.

And it's fine.

And it's fine, right?

Yes.

The problem is when you resist it.

Exactly.

There is nothing wrong.

Oh my God, I don't want it, I don't want it.

I didn't get the right clothes.

That's where the stress comes.

And then you're just soaking wet.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's life.

I would agree.

I think the idea that you can't do everything, I think it particularly resonates now because of the world in which we live.

The amount of information we get exposed to on social media.

We see all these incredible things that we could be doing and that some of your friends will be doing right.

But you've only got 24 hours in a day.

It's funny.

As I've been reading meditations for mortals over the last couple of days, I thought, maybe one of the reasons why There's an exercise that I call Write Your Own Happy Ending.

That I wrote about in my book on happiness and it really had a profound impact on me.

I wonder if I could put it to you, actually, because I think it...

I think it really embraces the limitation and what matters at its heart.

So there's two parts of the exercise.

Part one is fast forward to the future.

Imagine you're on your deathbed and look back on your life and imagine you know what are three things you will want to have done or spent your time on.

And the truth is we probably know what a lot of these things are because people have written books about the regrets of the dying and what people actually do say on their deathbed.

But for us individually, we can imagine.

So for me, for example, last time I did this exercise was I want to have spent quality time with my friends and family.

I want to have had time to pursue my own passions.

And I will thirdly want to have done something that improves the lives of other people.

So that's part one.

Then you go to part two, which is you come back to the present moment.

And you come up with three what I call happiness habits.

So these are three things that I can try and commit to each week that will pretty much guarantee I get the happy ending.

I've just defined that I want.

So how that worked for me was...

The three things that I put down are I would specify how many undistracted meals with my wife and kids I want a week.

And I think the current one is five.

It might be different for someone else, but for me, it's a nice thing.

If I can have five undistracted meals with them and the kids when I'm not thinking about work.

If I keep doing that week after week, come my deathbeds I will have ticks off.

If I get a chance to go for a long run each week or play my guitar and write a song and have a sing, I will know that at the end of my life I will have found time for my passions.

And the third one was if I release an episode a week of this podcast which I've been doing for seven and a half years and I keep doing that I know I'm gonna be doing something to improve the lives of others.

And why it's been so helpful for me is because It embraces this concept that your to-do list is never done.

There's always more you could be doing.

But if I just do those three things each week, I'm winning at life.

And I have to just let go of the other stuff.

And it's not there as a stick to beat me with.

If I have a busy week where I'm traveling and I don't get to do them, it's just a nice gentle reminder.

Hey, you only had one meal within the kids last week.

Yeah. don't let that become a pattern where you're doing that for a second week or a third week.

So what do you think of that?

Do you think that speaks to some of the ideas in your book?

No, I think it really does.

I think one of the other things I love about that is that it sort of takes these goals that you have and brings them forward from the future into like well, the goal is in doing these things in the present.

Now I'm not saying that I and some people whose minds work like mine wouldn't then be able to turn that into a stick to beat themselves with.

It's like, have I done the five?

Have I done the five?

Whatever.

And I think you know it's not a the the amount of the proportion of the week that that might take.

I mean, a podcast probably takes a lot of your week, but like, that's actually a relatively small number of the hours that you're awake and that's very good too, because there's a strong tendency, i think, in a lot of sort of goal setting, life visioning approaches, to try to account for every minute of the day.

And then you get very depressed and frustrated because you realize that an extraordinary amount of the day just seems to go in like, you know, just living, just like getting dressed and like you know whatever, just stuff that doesn't fulfill you.

And so I think if you can take that alternative approach that says you know, here are a few sort of pinpoints in the course of a week that would express that long-term goal, I think that's fantastic.

Yeah, that's very inspiring.

I mean, you write about it beautifully in your introduction to Meditations for Mortals.

When you give up the unwinnable struggle to do everything.

That's when you can start pouring your finite time and attention into a handful of things that truly counts.

That's life, isn't it?

A handful of things that truly matter.

I think it has to be.

Yeah.

And I think it's I think that the problem is not that that's the way it is.

The problem is just always that we are tormented by the thought that It should be more and it should be more.

One of the ways you can think about that that I've found very helpful is sort of seasonally.

Right.

The fact that you're giving things up for now to focus on these few things doesn't mean you're giving them up for forever.

Right.

So maybe in your focus on these three things, there's something that you don't get to do.

Maybe you don't get to indulge your passion for some other activity, or you know something like that.

But you can always, like, this is for now.

This is for now, exactly.

You know, it's not like when I'm 60, I'm going to beat myself.

You said you were going to do that.

You put it down in 2023 on your list.

You're not doing it now in 2043, whatever.

All you can ever do is make a decision.

And it means that you're approaching the reality of you know you're, you're.

It's awful for any of us with kids at home to think about one day your kids will be out in the world.

And, you know, maybe you'll persuade them all to live within like half a mile of your house.

But maybe you won't and you won't get so many meals in the course of a week.

And that's fine, too, because that'll be that season.

So, instead of trying to optimise everything, you focus on what you have now and how that can give you meaning to what you're doing right now.

This idea of embracing our limitations.

Yes, I think it helps us be calmer, less anxious, enjoy our lives more, which I think is one of these core messages that you talk about.

But it kind of also applies, I think, to other genres as well.

I think it helps with creativity.

As I've become a creator over the last years, I'm like Those limitations that we impose on ourselves and frankly, life imposes on us.

That's what leads to creativity.

That's what leads to a meaningful life.

Acknowledging that you can't do everything, gives you the license to go yeah, so what do I want to do?

Yeah.

No, I think it's true.

I think it's worth doing just as a thought experiment that philosophers have debated this, right?

But if you were actually going to live forever um, not in any kind of religious sense that you may believe, but but just in the sense of like your actual life here on earth, going on and on and on forever, i think very possibly it would be terrible.

Right, it would be the quest, because the question, like what should i do with my day?

Would always be like doesn't matter.

Right, there's always, there's always more days, and there's something about the fact that we are in these limited situations that that gives value to the, the choices that we make.

I've written before about, like the joy of missing out.

Right, it's this sense that, like It matters more if you're staying home for bedtime with your kids.

It matters more to know that you, in principle, could have been somewhere else, and you chose not to be somewhere else.

That gives it value.

And then the other thing that just on my mind, when you talked about creativity, there is...

I'm always at pains to try to emphasise.

I think this way of embracing the truth about your finitude is completely consistent with being very ambitious for your life.

I think I am.

And I think occasionally I've run into people who've sort of misunderstood and thought what I'm saying is like you can't do very much, just settle for mediocrity.

There's no point trying to reach the heights because we're all just too limited.

And it's like, no, no, no, it's the exact opposite.

It is by acknowledging the reality of our limitations that that's how you can then focus your life for the most meaningful ambitions that you're capable of.

I'm going to choose very intentionally and carefully what it is that's truly important to me.

So is it that you're doing less better?

It is, but again, there's also danger there, right?

There's a danger which is like this becomes incredibly high stress.

It's like, oh my goodness, time is precious.

I've got to make the right choices.

And it'd be terrible if I made the wrong choices.

And I've got to watch myself like a hawk every minute of the day to make sure I'm doing really cool and important things.

I went through a phase of thinking that, but where I have sort of ended up is actually no, it's a bigger relief than that, right?

If you really sort of feel your way in to this limited situation, you get to cut yourself an immense amount of slack because you get to say okay, like the fact that something is important or that somebody wants me to do it, or that it will please my parents, or that it will be morally good, that can't be enough to mean I've got to find time to do it because I'm just too limited for that.

And something sort of falls away and into that space, you can say well okay, almost any choices that I make, as long as they're you know, if I make them honestly and being in touch with myself, they're going to be meaningful things to do.

I don't need to sort of go through life double checking and being incredibly sort of putting a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I'm doing exactly the right things, or extraordinary things or anything like that.

It's like no once I really feel where I am.

You know, helping a handful of people in your life matters.

Cooking a nutritious meal for your kids matters, right?

We don't need to it's great.

Some people change the world in huge ways and invent extraordinary inventions and have sweeping effects on humanity for the better.

But that can't be the standard that you have to reach to live a meaningful life.

So I find I don't know if I'm expressing this properly, but it sort of imbues more things with mattering.

I think to live in this way that's truer to our real situation.

A few years ago, you made a very big life move, didn't you?

You were working, I believe, as a journalist in Brooklyn.

And you have moved to North Yorkshire.

Can you contrast for us, you know, what has the difference been?

You know, what, I guess, what led you to go to Brooklyn?

What was your life like in Brooklyn?

And how does that compare to what your life is like in Yorkshire?

I mean, as always, these things have more moving parts and they're more complex than it looks from the outside.

I do come from North Yorkshire, but to a significant extent this was led as much by my wife as me in terms of wanting to have a spell of time outside the city.

Um, to some extent we're like a date, another data point, because it happened at the end of the pandemic when it turned out that almost anyone who could ended up making this, this sort of move.

We thought we were being terribly unique and individual at the time, but it's just like just statistics.

Um, i think that when it comes to those kinds of big decisions, i've got more and more able to see that these are things you have to reach intuitively, right?

It's not going to work to make a list of pros and cons and try and add number scores to each thing and figure it out.

I've I've been in a situation several times in my life where and I've become more able to see that this is going on as I've gotten older where clearly the direction of just sort of growth and generativity and enlargement is a phrase somebody James Hollis, the Jungian therapist uses, like it lies in a specific direction, right.

So it's like actually to continue in this particular place right now doing this stuff.

It wouldn't be challenging in the right way.

It wouldn't be leading me into the next chapter of things.

And it's really hard to put into words because it is actually like all your unconsciousness as well that has this kind of amazing amount of information in it.

That's very hard to express uh, in explicitly.

But you know, if you want to put it another way, i was interested in being near my extended family.

I have friends in, um the area that i wanted to reconnect with properly i'm.

I love the landscape of the north york moors where we, where we live.

I've always, since i was a child, felt a really deep connection to that sort of rather bleak and windswept uh place, um.

So there were all these things that sort of pointing in in that direction.

I think we thought it would be a good place for our son uh, at least for sort of early years, for his schooling, um.

So you know all these specific things, but actually what it was on a deep level was this sense that like it might be fun in some ways and difficult in other ways, but all of those would be in the direction of something kind of juicy and something that was like alive, whereas not doing it and coming up with all the good rational reasons why it wasn't sensible to do it right now or whatever, would be against that spirit of aliveness.

More and more I come back to this thing called aliveness, which I don't even know what it is, but it seems like it is what we can navigate by.

You have this inner sense that this is... what you needed to do, that's what you wanted to do.

You know, maybe you couldn't rationally argue it.

So, you know, a pro, V-con list and go on balance, it's got six pros, that's got four.

It's like, well, I just really will.

I mean, I really do feel more and more, even when it comes to health.

I think the most important things are led by our intuition and that inner guts feeling that we just know.

You write in the book about Sheldon Copp's phrase you are free to do whatever you like, you need only to face the consequences.

Right?

Let's use that phrase to examine your move from Brooklyn to North Yorkshire.

You know, you were free to do it.

What have the consequences mean?

Has you know the theme in these last few books of yours about living that more meaningful calm, less anxious life?

Has that move helped you towards that goal?

And what have you lost by not living in Brooklyn?

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It totally has helped me, I think, but it has helped me partly because it's helped me understand the truth of that phrase, right?

You're free to do whatever you like.

You need only face the consequences.

We are not asked as human beings to make choices that have no downside.

That is never a possibility for us.

So whenever you face any kind of big decision or little decisions actually like whether to stay at your desk for another hour of emails at 530 or to go home to your family, if you have that choice, even that kind of choice is relevant here as well.

Right?

For sure.

In every one of those moments, there's a downside to the choice that you end up making.

And there would be a downside to the other choice.

And what I find so amazing about that Sheldon Copp quote.

What helped me about it was it's like oh right.

All I'm doing is choosing which set of downsides I want to take responsibility for.

I don't have to worry about not having found a version of this life that doesn't have the downside.

So you know, in the context of the move, as you asked, I definitely miss a lot of people who I had become close to in New York and a certain kind of ease with which it was possible to just make a plan to see them and fall into deep long, stimulating conversation.

That was wonderful.

There's a vibrancy to living in Brooklyn, a sort of real sort of energy in that place that I will always love.

And I don't know, maybe we'll be back there.

I don't know.

So these things really...

Like once I realized that I didn't have to persuade myself, they didn't matter.

That's what makes it possible to make a move right.

Because you're saying, yeah, no, that will be a disadvantage.

And also there's the whole disadvantage of uncertainty, right?

Like maybe there'll be other downsides.

One downside of a move from one country to another is that you don't know what all the downsides are going to be.

So like it goes on and on and on.

But that enables you, To enable me to let go of that tendency that I definitely had from a young age to constantly be second guessing myself and be like I messed up here because I'm, because I'm, not because I've, because there are downsides right.

Because I'm missing out on things, or it would have been good for my career to be in this place, or it would have been good for my son to have this benefit of living.

It's like, no, yes, it would have been.

And also and also there are wonderful, amazing authors utterly unplannable advantages of being where we are.

I've talked about the landscape, but the people as well, right?

And it's a different kind of amazing benefit.

I think some of this frustration or this umming and ahhing comes from Perfectionism, a belief that it is possible to make the perfect decision with no downsides.

And it isn't.

There's a consequence to everything.

I think, for me at least, once you get good or better at recognising that number one and then number two, trying to articulate them, try to go.

Oh yeah, as you said, there are things you miss about Brooklyn.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

You can't have that in rural Yorkshire.

Right.

You have to accept that and go.

Yeah, and I've made my choice that at this moment in my life, this is what's happening.

I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily agree with this, having read Meditations for Mortals.

Well, I've got quite an interesting relationship with regret, in the sense that I don't have any anymore.

I think... for many people, regret is a form of perfectionism.

It's a belief that I could have made a perfect decision and I didn't, so I'm going to berate myself.

It's like, no, no, wait a minute.

If you go from the starting point that a perfect decision is not possible, it's like well, what is there to really regret?

I mean, you do things based on who you are and hopefully you can learn from them and go yeah, you know what.

That possibly with hindsight now wasn't the best choice, but I didn't know that back then.

No.

But now I can go, oh, if I'm presented with that situation again, I've learned something.

So for me, I've realized that regrets keeps me trapped in my previous perfectionist tendencies.

And of course, you know, You are known as the imperfectionist, aren't you?

You write about that a lot.

That's the name of your newsletter, right?

It is, yeah.

The Imperfectionist.

Well, perhaps you can elaborate what is your perspective on regret, but also what is an imperfectionist?

It's so interesting to hear you talk about regret in that way, because I too am someone who, this point in life, does not feel like.

I don't feel like I have significant regrets.

I'm not one of the people who's sort of very weighted down by that sense of the lives unlived.

But what I have been anxious about all my life.

It's a lot better now, but like is the fear of future regret.

So the fear, the feeling that, like I'm, I'm about to make a choice here, that I will come to regret, totally belied by the fact that I don't actually then feel the regrets but but, but always um, sort of having my life choices constrained by this sense of like ah, but you're release from that.

I think, if you are someone who's prone either to actual regret or to fearing regret in the future, is to see that, in a certain sense, like regret is inevitable.

Another way of saying you never need to feel it is that you can't avoid feeling it.

It will just depend on your personality right but yeah, but the but, the but, if regret is the fact that you had to wave goodbye to, like every single moment of life.

If you want to get really philosophical about it right, you wave goodbye to an infinite number of other paths, like you know, branching off like a river delta.

You know just forever and ever and ever, and all you're doing at every single moment is just waving goodbye to possibilities that will always be closed to you forever um, but again, it's so absolutely inescapable that it can become that it can be quite liberating to see that it's like there's no way of not doing that, there's no way of making a choice that completely protects you from future regret.

And, of course, even if you look at a decision and say well, with hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way.

It's like how did you gain the hindsight by making the choice and living through that bit of your life?

So you know, I don't see any reason that this is going to be true in the case of the move to Yorkshire.

But if it had been that, what we realized very swiftly after getting there was that we've made a terrible mistake like, in a sense, that wouldn't be a terrible mistake.

That would be like Realising you've made a terrible mistake is a good thing.

You know I've been just playing around in my journal about the concept of wasting time recently and really questioning is it even possible to waste time?

Because to say it's a waste is prejudging that you knew the consequences of that time.

So if you are mindful of the time or you review it afterwards and you realize that it wasn't the best use of your time, is that a waste or actually was it a very powerful learning opportunity?

Right, right.

Again, I don't know how relevant it is, but it's just what I'm playing around with at the moment.

This concept of wasting time, I'm like, I don't think I'm wasting any time.

I'm just spending time and then trying to learn from it.

Do I like it and I want to repeat it?

Or have I learned something and I'm like yeah, I'm not sure about that anymore.

Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant.

I think it's totally in keeping with what we're talking about.

Because to think that you could know in advance is to feel yourself more perfectible and more unlimited than we really are.

But to realise that you can act on the basis of the accumulated information.

That's being a really full wholehearted, finite human being.

Some people will call you a productivity guru.

Are you one?

Oh, I don't know what that I mean, you know, I think.

On the one hand, I hate the idea because I think productivity has come to mean, you know, just getting ways to get as many things done as possible.

And a big part of what I'm, as you can tell, like a big part of what I'm trying to get at here, is that just doing more things is a not inherently valuable.

It depends what the things are, right?

There are plenty of uh people in the world at large who I might like to be doing fewer of the things they do.

I thought we'll be a better place if they didn't, if they did fewer things and all of us can only do so many things anyway but also because but, but at the same time rather um, I think there is some meaning of the word productivity that I think is important.

I'm someone who wants to do cool things with my life that make some kind of a difference.

There's a danger whenever we talk about this kind of paths to more peace of mind and out of anxiety and all these things.

Or there's the life where you just sort of float through your days and you don't care anymore about doing things because you've transcended to this level where all of that is irrelevant.

And I feel like one way of expressing everything I'm trying to do is to say no, I think we can have both of these.

I think we can have the peace of mind and the creativity and the generativity and the energy.

Not in the spirit of trying to make ourselves feel like we're doing enough, but in the spirit of saying OK, I am enough.

But now what I want to do with this thing person I am in the world is like express myself, express this through.

You know, creativity through work, through building things.

I think you're a meaningful productivity guru as opposed to a toxic productivity guru.

I'll take that.

The guru thing is interesting too, although this is where, like in terms of like our profile as advice bestowers, it's even more of a interesting thing for you than for me perhaps.

But like I spent a long time being very sort of self-deprecating about well, I don't have anything special to tell, to say.

And I think it's important to be very honest.

And I try to be in terms of like, that I'm not like living some perfect life.

And now you lucky, lucky people get to copy me, right?

That's not the spirit of any of this at all.

We're all just muddling through.

But on the other hand, more recently I have come to understand that this sort of knee-jerk British self-deprecation can be a little bit unhelpful and annoying.

And you do have to hold some element of the authority that is vested in you.

That's actually helpful to people.

As I say, I suspect you know about this much more than me but it's not a useful contribution to the world to say oh, I've got nothing to teach.

Yeah, exactly.

This is such an interesting point for me.

Let's take this podcast as an example.

I've been very clear.

I think I hope, over the many years that this show has been running, that I didn't tell anyone what to do.

I have no interest in telling someone what to do with their life, because that would also imply that I know what is best for their life.

And I can't know.

And I also don't believe that anyone does anything long-term if someone else tells them to do it.

I've seen that times.

We all know that experience ourselves, right?

So my goal on each show, each episode, is to have a meaningful, authentic conversation that hopefully, on occasion, is going to connect with someone.

Oh, you know what?

I recognize myself in that.

God, you know, wrongest guess this week.

Yeah, God, I've got that thing as well.

I'm interested in trying that thing that the guest mentioned.

As opposed to, you should be doing this.

And also, you take that one step further.

Let's say we look at your life from the outside and go.

Oh well, Oliver was a successful journalist in Brooklyn and the pandemic hit and him and his wife decided that actually we don't want to be in the city now.

We want to go out be near your family in rural, beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire.

And then he went and wrote a global bestseller 4000 weeks.

Oh, so from the outside, it can look as though that's the prescription.

I need to move from where I live, go out into the country.

Then I'm also going to write a bestseller like Oliver Burtman.

But there's so many other factors in.

So just because it worked for you, doesn't mean it's going to work for me.

It's not going to work for anyone else.

There's a subtlety there, which I think about this a lot through the lens of patience.

I think I spoke about this on my tour in March, saying that, you know, in an era where there's so much knowledge out there, we have to acknowledge that.

You know, we've said for years we need more knowledge.

Knowledge is power.

Knowledge is information.

I'm like, well, would you accept that there's more health information out there than ever before?

But go, yeah.

So, okay.

So if information was all and knowledge is all we needed, we should also get associated better health outcomes.

But we don't.

Fiscal health is getting worse.

Mental health is getting worse.

So there's a disconnect.

And I think For me it comes down to the difference between external knowledge and internal knowledge.

Like take the information in from the outside but then put it through your own filter, experiment and go.

You know, does this work for me?

That's how I see it.

I think it's so wise.

And I think you know there's such a tendency.

There's a sort of a collusion, isn't there, between certain kinds of guru advice bestowing people and the people who are in their audience.

There's a collusion to take that advice personally, to give advice and then to take it and express it and like try and follow it to that.

Everyone wants to do that.

But actually yeah, I think anyone who gets to the point where they have a sense that some of the things they do in their life work well and they might want to pass that information on, has come to that in a whole journey that they had to go through to get to, to get to.

And so actually one of the things I do early on in this book.

Um, It's divided up into lots of small chapters over the course of four weeks.

The idea is that you could do like roughly a chapter a day for a month.

And I say like if you're the kind of person who I have been right who gets a book like this and wants to try to squirrel away every bit of information in it or take detailed notes or put it all into practice, like maybe instead of that, just sort of go through it and see what sticks.

Because if something sticks, that's a really good sign that it's meeting you at the right time.

And if something else is like okay well, that was mildly entertaining, but it doesn't really resonate, then that's information.

The idea that you should then take that and try and force yourself to do that thing in that chapter, even though it doesn't resonate, is a mistake.

Yeah, it was interesting to see how you followed up from 4,000 Weeks.

I think the structure in this book is brilliant.

It is such a beautiful, I think you call it a retreat for the mind.

Just trust that if it resonates, it will stick.

And I really like that, as opposed to you know, jot it all down, make notes going.

Oh, you know, all of a sudden I must do this.

And now how do I apply this?

It's much more freeing, I think, than that.

I'm glad you think that.

And I think the other thing that I was hoping to get at with that is like I didn't want to create.

It would have been totally contradictory and hypocritical of me to create a book where the feeling of it was like you know, get all this into your head.

And then when you get a free week in a couple of months time and you're through all this other stuff, like then you can put it into practice.

High energy perfect, like hit all the points.

I wanted it to be something that you can read right now before you've got through all the emails before you've fixed your terrible problem with procrastination or distraction or whatever terrible problem you imagine yourself to have right just right here before the world calms down and the news headlines stop being so terrifying because that might never be going to happen and so just right here in the middle that's this idea of retreat of the mind right not you have to go on a retreat for a week when you can finally book the leave but like no just in the back of your mind now in the middle of it all and so that required the chapters to be very short because like it's going to be on a commute or with a morning coffee well that's that's the that's i think that's the gold in this book or what one of the pieces of gold and and actually you could you can make the case or i'll make it for you probably too modestly that you could just continue with your life the way it is and just read one of these short chapters each day for 28 days as you propose and you're probably going to get some quite profound benefits because It's just these gentle realizations, I think, that people are going to get about the state of their daily life.

And as you say, the important things are going to stick.

Because, you know, we're the best people in the world.

Not everything, and I don't mean this in your book, not in my books or anyone's books.

Not everything is going to resonate with everyone.

It can't do.

Because we all hear things differently.

Yeah.

No, totally.

Okay.

So can you just summarize then?

It's week one, week two, week three, week four.

Being finite, taking action, letting go and showing up.

Can you just give us a little paragraph on what each one of those means and why you chose that order to take us through this mental retreat?

Totally.

Although even saying I chose it seems a little bit too much.

It was one of those discoveries where it just sort of like, after going through lots and lots of permutations and long conversations with my two excellent editors in the US and UK, like this just sort of emerged.

It was just obvious it had to be this way.

You know, sometimes you feel like you're discovering things rather than willing them into reality.

So yeah, it seemed very natural by the end of that process to feel like you want to start with being finite, facing reality, the truth of our limitations, sort of feeling what it's like to accept the fact that we are in this position of limitation, not just limited amount of time.

But I think really important part of this is how limited is our control over how that time unfolds and our limited knowledge of the future and all the rest of it.

And then the question that occurs naturally, I think is well okay, So how do I actually like do the stuff I got to do in that context or that I want to do?

And so that's the week two on taking action.

One of the things that has been so important to me and that I have struggled with myself is the theme of week three, that actually, a lot of the time, the way to bring more meaning into your life and to more creativity, more meaningful productivity, is involves sort of getting out of your own way and letting things happen rather than um, in that sort of dominating way, making them happen.

So that idea of letting go is about letting go as a kind of an active practice, and it all seemed very naturally to to end up in this place a week for showing up the idea that like, what all this is for, the destination of this to the extent that there is a a destination, because it's always a sort of endless unfolding process, but that destination is just like being more here for your life like ultimately, i feel like um, what unifies all those things that you said in the exercise, that you spoke about you, that you would want to be able to look back at from your deathbed.

What unifies them all is that, like you were really here and present.

Uh, It's a very strange idea to put into words.

But yeah, that you were really alive for your life.

So I guess that's where this four-week journey reaches its conclusion.

Yeah, I kind of feel so far, although there are more we could cover.

I think we've spoken about this idea of being finite.

Okay.

So, I mean, I love the book.

It's so good.

I have written down lots of chapter things that I want us to talk about.

We won't get through them all.

Actually, you know I'm going to just before we get to week two.

I just want to mention something there that I think really relates to one of your key messages about doing what counts, you know, focusing on what really matters.

And it also maybe clashes with some of our ideas of productivity.

So, okay.

So I host this podcast.

Okay.

I know many people. other podcast hosts these days.

Podcasting is obviously blowing up and there's millions around the world now.

And most podcasts of the size of this one tend to have researchers.

So they have researchers who will go through the books and go through that person's work and then present the host with some research notes.

And the host may do a bit as well, but a lot of the prep is done for them because it's time efficient.

Well, there may be other reasons as well, but one of the reasons is because you can be more productive.

You can get more things done because you don't have to spend a day researching the guest.

Someone could do that for you.

So you could do other things, get more emails done or whatever it might be.

And I had this realization a few years ago, because I've never had a researcher.

And, you know, I was starting to think, you know, God, everyone seems to have a researcher.

Not everyone.

You know my friend Rick Troll, who runs a podcast.

He doesn't have a researcher either.

And I thought, it's kind of interesting.

Even if a researcher would save me time, what if I don't want the time saved?

Yeah.

And I know that sounds maybe perhaps a bit of a throwaway comment, but it was a real profound realisation for me where I thought, actually that's one of my favourite parts of my week is preparing for my guests.

I love it.

I literally love it.

A, I happen to believe it makes the conversations better anyway because you're more invested.

But even if it didn't, I just love it.

So the question I often ask myself is, how would you like your experience of life to be?

Yeah, let's imagine you got some crack-hot researcher who could present you everything.

Well, I wouldn't have watched some of your videos yesterday.

I wouldn't have read pretty much the entirety of Meditations for Mortals.

My life would be less good had someone done that for me.

So it's almost an anti-productivity hack to do it myself.

But I'm like, no, damn it, I want to do it myself.

No, totally.

And I think this illustrates a really, really important point, which is that if you just follow the doctrine of optimisation and you let yourself go along with the cultural currents towards optimisation then, all else being equal, you will optimise out of your life precisely the things that make it worth living.

Now that doesn't mean that there's not some other things that you want to optimise, have other people do, and that your position enables you to have other people do in that, in that ecosystem of producing a, producing a podcast.

But it's like it's such a gift to realize, oh i was, i was on track to optimize away something that and i think we do this to ourselves as a, as a wider culture.

Right, i wrote in 4 000 weeks about how a lot of convenience culture has left us sort of feeling.

I think a lot of people resonate with this notion right, like it's much easier to often what's easiest to do is not what is most enjoyable for us as a matter of experience.

So it's easiest to like get food delivered with an app and not have to talk to anyone and not have to go out and find the food yourself or not have to cook a meal from ingredients that you bought.

It's easiest to stay home and watch stuff on TV when you could have met some people and watched it at a movie theater, right?

There's always this kind of tension between what's what's the sort of smoothest life and what's the life that we want to live, that we value the most in hindsight.

And this seems like a good example of it, right?

Effort.

I'm sure that, despite the fact that you love reading the books of the people that come on this podcast, there have been weeks when, if you could just wish it away and save the time, you would have taken it.

But actually there's something really useful about saying to ourselves no, I don't want to smooth my life out in this way, because smoothness is not my ultimate goal here.

Maybe smoothness in certain areas of life.

Exactly.

It's about intentionality, isn't it?

It's about really under, it's like, you're free to do whatever you like.

You need only to face the consequences, right?

You can.

You know, obviously we're talking about through the lens of a podcast, but you can apply this to anything.

You've got infinite ways you can do these things right, but all of them come with a cost, and the and the ironic part, which i'm sure you have experienced, is that like, the more success you are fortunate to enjoy in the world, in a certain sense, the worse it gets.

Obviously, in a certain sense, um privilege of that comes with with success is fantastic and not to be sniffed out but, like I'm guessing that where you are now like, the opportunities that come your way are harder to choose between because more of them are good and enticing.

So it's fascinating.

It's like everybody who is human is faced by this, is faced with this situation, and becoming very successful or becoming super wealthy, or becoming famous or whatever doesn't solve the problem, because the problem is called the human condition.

Yeah, exactly.

Be careful what you wish for, right?

Because it may actually come true.

And then, you know, it's a great point.

And Again, you know, some people may be thinking, yeah, okay, nice.

You guys have got nice problems.

You get invited to nice things because you're successful authors.

But the point you're making is not that.

The point you're making is that that applies to everyone on some level.

Right.

And they definitely have a nicer feeling to them.

The problems when you know.

Knowing where the next meal is coming from is not part of the calculation.

And we have to acknowledge that.

Right.

But there's still problems in this fundamental way that we've been tracking through this conversation, which is that they are tough choices about finite time.

And in certain ways, they can be tougher, because the things that you have to let go of are, more obviously, things that would have been great to do.

A mate of mine is a filmmaker, right?

And his dream is always to be in Hollywood and make feature films.

But he's now got himself a regular gig just filming, you know, locally to his house, where he's got predictable-ish hours, no travel.

And I remember having a chat with him a few years ago about it really speaks to this, this acknowledgement of you can't do everything you know.

If he had gone to Hollywood and done the job of what he perceives Hollywood directors do, and the business and all the things that come along with that, perhaps he wouldn't have the quality family life that he does have right.

I feel a lot of your work is about bringing the, is making the invisible visible, right?

Yeah.

It's the unmeasurables.

You know.

I think about this concept of unmeasurables a lot that You know.

Society is skewed now towards the things that we can easily measure, like your follower count or your income or your downloads, right.

But, you know, The gold in life comes from the unmeasurables, the quality of your relationships.

Do your kids like you and wanna spend time with you?

If you want to have a partner and you're lucky enough to have a partner, do you have a good relationship with them?

Is that something that's worthy?

There's no scorecard for those things.

And I honestly feel that's why that Write Your Own Happy Ending exercise has helped me so much, and also living five minutes from where I grew up has really helped me as my public profile has grown.

I'm still in the same town where I grew up.

I'm five minutes away from mum.

I see her pretty much every day.

And that's a choice.

It's interesting we're recording this just pre the summer and it was Father's Day a couple of weekends ago.

And I was on the move and I thought I'm gonna share a post on Instagram.

So I'd literally found a photo of uh, me and my the first photo i could see where you couldn't see my kids faces, because i never share yeah, faces on on social media and i thought and i wrote i just wrote a post in the moment about um, what does being a father mean to me and what are the?

What are the things i hope to not teach my kids, because i'm even skeptical that you can actually teach your kids anything.

Now, like you know, sort of showcase right, or you know, I don't know what the right word is, but one of the things I value as a father and the things I hope to do and showcase them that are important.

I'd put a list of things that you might expect people to say, being kind, how you treat people, but things like you know how integrity is more important than money.

But then what came to mind is I sort of shared that caring for my mother, their grandmother, is not another thing to fit into a busy life, but an inherent part of a meaningful life.

And it's interesting, that's what really people resonate with the most.

And I never articulated that before or thought about it.

Well, yeah, you know what?

You're damn right it is.

You know I could not do that.

And in adverse commas, do more things with work and have more in adverse commas success.

If I for me personally, how I value my life, how I was brought up, looking after my family is one of the most important things to me.

So no amount of success is worth me not being able to do that.

No, completely.

I think that's so well put.

And it's like you said before about making the invisible visible.

I often think about that in terms of making unconscious things conscious, usually in terms of negative stuff.

So it's like you can go through the day making choices, you're doing that anyway.

You can either do it consciously or unconsciously.

You can either be aware of the limitations of your time or you can be unaware of them.

You can't not have them.

You can just know whether you're relating to them in a conscious way.

But, as you point out, it's also to do with becoming conscious of the things that you have decided to have in your life because they they, matter to you, and then feeling much less bad about all the things that you could, in principle, be doing instead, because you've found that those kind of end values, as it were, right.

You're not and you're in less danger then of the means becoming the ends, which is what happens otherwise right.

People just like think that doing more and more and more stuff is important, or getting more and more money is important, regardless of what happening to that money.

Freeing up time like even that is kind of not a very useful thing, unless you're freeing it up for something that you want to free it up for.

So again and again, it's like, well, why?

And I think once you've got that in place, you're well on the way.

Okay, so week one, being finite, seven chapters, seven episodes.

I was going to say lessons, but you probably would urge me to not use the word lessons, but seven things to think about.

Meditations.

Meditations, seven meditations.

Okay, week two, there's seven meditations on taking action.

Let's just cover one of them before we move on to week three.

Rules that serve life, doing things daily-ish.

I think this is great.

What is daily-ish and why is it so useful?

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So dailyish is a word that I got from Dan Harris, the meditation teacher and podcaster, although I think he has told me that he got it from someone else as well.

So we're not doing a good job of getting this to its final attribution.

And he uses that as a guideline for as an answer to the question, how often should you meditate?

Meaning, you know, formal meditation, which this book isn't really about.

The title may be a bit misleading in my book, I mean.

But he is he teaches formal following the breath.

And he said, you know, people want to know how often should I do it?

Do I really have to do it daily?

And it's like we should do daily ish.

And what I love about the idea of daily ish is. that it's very gentle and flexible, right?

The idea of doing anything daily-ish reading the chapters of this book daily-ish for a month, exercising journaling, whatever it is you're trying to do as a habit.

It doesn't mean just do it when you feel like it, right?

It's not just like, ah, forget it.

Like the moment you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it.

We all have a fairly strong sense of what counts as doing something daily-ish.

Like five or six days a week is clearly daily-ish.

And in busy times, maybe four days a week is going to count as daily-ish.

But if you only do something two days a week, you're not going to fool yourself that that's daily-ish right.

So we get past all these detailed questions of exactly how often should you be doing something, but you're still putting a sort of gentle kind of pressure on yourself to make sure you do it.

And I think this is one example, that chapter is about the idea of rules that serve life.

I think it's really easy, especially in this space of health habits, personal development, all the rest of it.

It's really easy to think that there exists some set of rules that if you could only find them and then you promise to follow them completely obediently, that will be it.

Your struggles will be over.

The rules would effectively sort of live your life for you.

And you would be like the servant of the rules.

And people fall into this all the time, right?

Now, from now on, this three times a week, this morning routine, this set of supplements whatever whatever, whatever.

And it's not that it's bad to have rules.

It's that you've put yourself in a power relationship with those rules, which sort of expects the rules to sort you out.

And then you have to be completely sort of obedient to those rules.

And I wanted to explore this notion, which I think goes a long way back, including to sort of Christian monastic traditions, among many others, of rules that really matter, but they're there for.

They're there for the things that you want to achieve, right?

The important thing is not that you meditate every single day, or even that you exercise every single day.

The important thing is your peace of mind or your physical health.

And then what rules serve that and what level of attachment to those rules is helpful for them to actually be sustainable part of your life?

Yeah, it's beautiful.

And I think this concept of daily-ish really takes us away from this black and white thinking which massively comes from perfectionism.

And it's interesting.

You know I was watching some of your interviews yesterday in London.

The lead up to you comes to the studio today.

And in one of the interviews I saw, you were asked about non-negotiables.

And it's a very common interview podcast question.

What are your non-negotiables?

And I have no issue with people asking that.

I understand why they ask that.

And it's the sort of thing that I would have thought about a few years ago.

I'm wondering what I said now, right?

Yeah, I can't remember what you said now, actually.

No, please carry on.

But the point was is that I don't think non-negotiables exist.

I think it's a mirage.

Everything's negotiable.

Like, everything is.

You can't promise or guarantee you're going to mend set every day.

Some days, I don't know, your mum might be ill and in hospital, and frankly, you don't have time.

You know, everything is changeable depending on the circumstance.

I could say a non-negotiable is being kind and not using violence.

Well, it kind of is, but if someone was threatening my two children I might changed my viewpoint on that right.

So I think even embedded in the question of a non-negotiable is perfectionist thinking.

Right, because the only actual non-negotiable is our imperfectionism and our limitation.

Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, daily issue I think is brilliant and hopefully helpful for people who are maybe struggling with health habits and go well, what if you did it daily issue as opposed to every day?

Let's get into week three, let's go, because there's just...

Well, all of them, frankly.

I actually believe that you could do a whole podcast on just one of these 28 meditations, right?

Because they're really deep, thought-provoking ideas that have resonance and relevance for all of us.

But I really like in week three, Letting Go, the chapter entitled, What if this was easy?

The false allure of effort.

Can you speak a little bit to this chapter and why it was so important for you to write?

Yeah, and we're definitely in the terrain here of the things that i've sort of struggled with myself the most, or that more recently understood compared to some of the earlier weeks of the of the book.

Um, i think that there is a very natural tendency that many of us have.

It's partly to do with the culture that we live in.

It's definitely to do with the way we're raised.

Maybe it's to do with religious traditions as well sometimes.

To feel like if anything's worth doing, it's going to be pretty high effort, right?

If you go through the day and you don't put in an awful lot of effort, then you're kind of not being a full, adequate human being who gets to feel good about themselves.

And obviously there's some truth in that idea, right?

Life calls for effort in certain cases and you have to sort of put it in and it makes it worth living.

We were talking about you putting in the effort of reading the books of.

Your podcast guest is an example of effort that you find rewarding.

But it's really easy to get to a point where you think you sort of approach life braced for everything that you're trying to do to be like some kind of fight.

And it's like, oh, no, like this project really matters.

And therefore you know, you assume it's going to be really hard, or you just sort of go through the whole of your day, sort of.

Yeah.

With this kind of expectation that you're going to have to fight your way through it.

And that you're not going to get to enjoy it.

And that you're not going to get to choose to do things that you like, because that's not what life is about.

You're postponing enjoyment for life.

Right, right, right.

And just this incredible power of this idea, which has been articulated by many different people, as famous quotes from Tim Ferriss and Elizabeth Gilbert to this effect, but many other people as well.

Just the radicalism of asking yourself, what if this were easy?

What if this thing I'm about to, or what would this look like if this were easy?

I think it's Tim's version of it.

And it's such a sort of weirdly subversive question for a certain kind of person that I am that kind of person like historically right.

That sort of like What would actually happen if you did some of the things today that you feel like doing.

And is it really the case that you can't do that?

There are limitations to it, of course, created by our situation in life.

But if I just did some things that I wanted to do, would I just definitely choose being a layabout and sitting on the sofa and eating crisps and wasting my life?

Or maybe I can trust myself a little bit more than that.

You know, maybe I can sort of take a subtly different attitude.

And I write at one point in that chapter I think about an author called Julia Rogers Hamrick who has this idea of choosing easy world.

And it's this idea that struck me as just so new agey when I first came across it.

Like, oh, I don't want to go into this kind of terrain.

But she has this idea that you know.

She writes about the moment that she realized that you could just sort of choose to address a challenge in life in easy world instead of in difficult world.

And she doesn't mean, I don't think, like persuading yourself that bad things aren't happening or trying to sort of force yourself to think that something painful is not painful.

It's that actually you either have to choose to sort of take the attitude that everything's against you, or you can choose to take the attitude that everything is at least potentially for you and working in your favour.

And then the great thing about this is that even difficult experiences can be approached with a kind of ease, with a kind of readiness to have them go more smoothly than you were naturally, or you were previously assuming.

Have I made that clear?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And it's kind of interesting that, as you were just finishing there, we know that when I don't know, when people run at their fastest, they're not trying to go at their fastest.

Of course, it's not completely effortless, right?

They're clearly expending energy and effort, but there is an effortless quality to it, where they're not trying all out.

They're just, they're flowing.

I think it's an important idea because my kids, I think, are a little older than your son, right?

He's eight.

My kids are 15 and 12.

And this idea that things have to be hard, I think gets subconsciously instilled by many parts of society.

But schools, right.

Because I'm watching it going...

Yeah, but it doesn't need to be.

It doesn't need to be difficult.

Not everything in life needs to be hard.

And I realized a few years ago that I had to artificially create internal stress by way of, let's say, a deadline or other things to make myself do stuff.

So I had to create this sense that it was hard.

I'm up against it.

And now I'm going to do it.

And I've bit by bit started to change my relationship with difficulty.

And actually, you can do some things that do feel effortless to a certain degree.

Yeah.

And you certainly don't need to make them harder than they inherently are.

I think it's in that chapter that I write about a friend of mine, the meditation teacher Susan Piver, who wrote this blog.

She's written lots of things.

And I imagine she gets sick of the fact that I only always talk about this one blog post, but it it made such a difference to me.

Its title was getting things done by not being mean to yourself, and she writes about how she used to try to govern herself very strictly by schedules for what she was going to do with her day and with her work, and how fruitful and liberating it was to ask like, what do i feel like doing today?

And to realize, you know, obviously people are in different situations.

We have differing degrees of autonomy over how our work days unfold.

But very many of us have at least some capacity to ask that question like well, of the things on my plate, what do I?

What I feel like doing right now?

And discovering again and again that basically she ended up that proceeding through life that way.

She did end up doing pretty much all of the things that she'd been beating herself up to do right.

You don't actually want to be the kind of person who never pays your bills or who never keeps promises, commitments to friends or to who never cares for your physical health.

It's just so much more motivating and freeing to do it in a context where you're not like presenting it to yourself as a sort of a terrible trial that you've got to get through before happiness is allowed to be yours.

Yeah, i think when you wrote about her i can't find the bit now it was she had this really um, elaborate morning routine, didn't you?

This much meditation, this much journaling, this much that, this much.

And i think it's a great example to use, because i suspect there will be people listening who have perhaps tried that approach before.

Maybe for some people it works, because of course it can do for some people.

But for some people what i found often happens is that they They kind of think that there's some sort of flaw within them.

God, I'm trying.

I'm doing the meditation journaling thing.

I'm doing the breath eats, but I can't stick to it.

I'm not getting what I thought I would get out of it.

And you write this in that chapter, which I think really speaks to this.

When I fail to take action on the things I care about.

The reason is sometimes that I lack the time or couldn't summon the willpower, but it's at least as likely to be because I spooked myself with visions of the perfect result I thought I needed to achieve or assumptions about the difficulties involved, thereby blocking action that would otherwise have flowed naturally.

I think you have just summed up there Oliver, why so many people struggle to make their health habits stick.

I don't think it's about the right information or the right knowledge or the need to learn about a new technique.

I really don't.

I think there's something in that.

We have in some ways, a disordered relationship with that behaviour, with that habit, what we think it should feel like or what it should give us.

I really think you're on to something with that.

I'm really glad to hear it.

And I think there's, I mean, the thing that that makes me want to say is...

Like even the very idea of a habit can get in the way sometimes.

And I do mention this at different points in the book.

Right.

Like, if you're someone who's got into that psychological tangle with habits, it can be really interesting to ask like well, you know, would you be willing to just go for a brisk, go for one brisk walk today?

Would you be willing to go to the gym, go for a swim, whatever it is that you do and enjoy doing and are capable physically of doing?

Like, could you just do that today, not could you do it for 10 minutes every day for the rest of your life not um, even daily-ish, but like could, could you just do it once?

Like and just let yourself go and do it, Because I think that it's so easy to think well, this is a difficult thing.

It's going to have huge rewards for me.

I'm going to feel like a million dollars once I've really got into the swing of it.

So it's a long-term project.

Better dig in, better buckle down.

And it's especially harmful for those of us who've had so much success with this approach in life.

I got great exam results because I was really good at the patient work of endlessly working on schoolwork.

And I'm not saying that was a bad thing at the time.

It served me well in lots of ways.

But there's a bad message in there which is like if something's going to be worth doing, it's going to take a long time and be hard and pretty unpleasant as you go.

And actually...

The moment that you just go for the swim or do whatever.

The thing is that you are willing to do, the moment you do it, once you're doing it.

You're there.

The bridge has been crossed.

There's two things I'm thinking a lot about at the moment which I think speak to this, which is first of all about goals.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion, or the current viewpoints at least, because it's an endless journey and it may change again.

But I really do think that for many people, dare I say most of us, goals are a problem.

And the reason I say that is because a goal, by definition, is somewhere in the future.

That, And I think the way that we've been spoken to about goals, in this Western culture at least, is that it's this thing that I work up to and then I achieve.

But the problem is and I've faced this on innumerous occasion, which is why I'm coming to this belief is that it goes back to these habits.

You're meditating because you've heard it's going to help me with anxiety and depression and it's going to help me with focus.

Okay.

But we really want to get to the point where we're doing it just because we like doing it, right?

Not for what it's going to give us.

And the problem with goals is or a potential problem, I should say with goals, because I don't think it's a problem for everyone is that there's so much focus on the goal.

That okay, so what?

Let's say you achieve that goal.

Yeah.

What next?

What should you do the following morning, when the last two years you've been working up to that goal?

You see this with Olympic athletes all the time, where the morning after the Olympic race they don't know what to do themselves.

The last four years was about that one 10-second race.

What the hell did you do the following morning?

How is there a reason to get up?

But I see this at my local park run, where we're so focused on the goal of the time that Well, let's say you work hard and you get that time.

So what?

What happens the next day?

So where I'm sort of landing at the moment on goals, is they're useful as a sort of compass or like a directing point to go?

Yeah, to help you then put into practice some behaviours.

But just sort of loosely hold the goal.

Don't hold too tight because, you know, be careful what you wish for.

What happens if you do reach that goal?

What's next?

Yeah, I think that that way of.

I mean, I was thinking before you said compass, I was thinking like the point is here that they can be things to navigate by.

And, and so a good goal, or I would say even more, maybe like a sort of good vision for your ideal expression of life.

Um, that doesn't necessarily have to have like metrics in it.

Um is very useful because it helps you make decisions in the presence and it helps you decide what to do this afternoon.

Um, i think that is a much.

Yeah, the problems that you outline with the traditional approach, i think are really true, and i've certainly experienced them uh, in my own life as well.

I think it's a subtle thing because there's a chapter i mean it's later in the book, so i guess i'm speaking out.

You can go to week four.

It's fine, we don't have to go sequentially.

This idea, we sort of started with it, the whole conversation with it, in a way, this idea of uh, starting from sanity right, which is this phrase that i used to as one way of expressing this notion of like, you decide who you want to be in the world And then you sort of go through life from that place, starting right now, as opposed to something that you're trying to get to in the future.

And I think goals and visions can be incredibly useful.

That is what it is to use a goal as a navigational aid.

Right.

You can certainly have a particular target that you hope in a few years time you're at.

But in the meantime, the reason that that's useful is to ask like how could I show up in the spirit of that today, as opposed to I have to put aside all my happiness and enjoyment because later is when I'm going to do that.

And especially when it comes to sort of money and prestige and status goals.

We all know from all the research doesn't work that way.

You just get.

You just get accustomed to the quality of life that you're building, or the status, or whatever it is.

And then you just need the next one and the next one.

So you don't actually come to rest in happiness in 10 years time anyway.

You might as well start trying to express that.

So what, if you do achieve your dreams?

Then what you know basically, when you you're kicking it down the road into somewhere in the future, that that that is a great chat to have to start from sanity.

And you know, you say striving towards sanity versus operating from sanity.

It's a subtle difference, isn't there?

Yeah, i think it's that.

That's exactly what we're speaking about, right?

It's not taking the question of what you want your life to feel like as something that you have to strive towards, very often by doing the exact opposite, right?

So you maybe you want a very restful life.

So first of all, you've got to work incredibly hard to get to the rest.

But taking it as the sort of place from which you come.

There's an author I quote in the book, Richie Norton.

Yeah, I've got it.

It's brilliant.

Right.

It says it's a two step process.

Yeah.

Number one, decide who you want to be.

Number two, act from that identity immediately.

And I love that.

It doesn't mean like, if who you want to be is like a sort of super high energy sports person but you're right now completely sedentary and and in a lot of pain or something.

It doesn't mean force yourself to pretend to be someone you're not.

It means like, what would the person who you are now do today if you're acting from the identity that you want to manifest in the world?

So for that person it might be some very gentle movement.

I mean, i'm i'm on your territory talking about physical advice here.

But, like you know, If you want to be a novelist, it's not about sort of telling yourself that in the next week you've got to have the novel written or going around talking about it.

It's just like, what would that person who I am now living from that identity do today?

And, you know, it might be a few words of the novel.

Yeah, I love that, you know, that two-part process.

Decide who you want to be and then to act from that identity immediately.

I happen to enjoy journaling and I've seen journaling be very helpful for many people.

And I ask myself three questions every morning.

Let me rephrase that.

Most mornings.

And the third one is, which quality do I want to showcase to the world today?

And I also have three questions in the evening, but they sort of piggyback off each other.

So that question is about I would say about Richie Norton's question one decide who it is you want to be right.

So often it will be.

I want to be kind, i want to show the world the quality of compassion.

I want to show the world the quality of patience.

Right for me, it will be one of those things.

I want to show the world the quality of integrity today.

You know, whatever's top of mind for me, that or or i feel i could do with a nice reminder off at that particular moment in time.

And why i find it so powerful is because just by writing it in my journal while i'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to showcase that quality.

But I would say it makes it more likely because I've been a bit intentional that morning.

So if later on in the day I'm tempted to be a bit short with someone or react, I'm just that little bit more likely to go ah, you would get hey okay, showcase the quality of compassion.

And then two of the evening questions are well, what went well today and what can I do differently tomorrow?

What can I do differently tomorrow is Getting away from this perfectionist tendency.

The acknowledgement there is that even though I put that intention in the morning, it doesn't mean I'm a 100 perfect human who can do that all the time.

So what I can do differently tomorrow might be.

Oh, I wanted to be really patient today, but at 5pm that last email really bothered me and I reacted.

Tomorrow I'm going to try again and see if I can showcase quality of patience, which I love, simple things like that which in a very gentle way, in a non beating up way, helps guide us, because then you start to show up more and more.

That's what I found myself and with patients who I recommended this to in the past is that they you actually, little by little, start to change who you are in the present.

And so those goals that you were looking forward to.

You know you become a a nicer, a calmer, more like the person you want to be, and your behaviours, actually that you're trying so hard to do and you're struggling to, they follow suit as a natural consequence of you showing up as that person.

Yeah, I think that.

Yeah, there's something very, very deep about this idea of what an intention is right.

Because you've spoken about it rightly, I think, as if it's something quite gentle.

And yet I think it might be more potent than a lot of kind of other more sort of willpower based approaches to change and transformation, because you're planting it there.

And yes, sure, it may not flower the way you wanted it to today, depending on circumstances.

But it's really there in a way that...

Just sort of having it as a far off vision, as the kind of person you want to be, or turning it into tasks that you're going to sort of grind through is not going to be.

It's a very opposite to something that I've definitely fallen into, still do sometimes, which is, you know, if you think about the times when you have been a jerk to other people, or impatient or, you know, or truculent and not done things that you should have done, or whatever it is.

For me, anyway, it's it's not I mean, I don't think it's because I'm an unpleasant person.

It's because I've got these goals that feel to me very pro social, very generous and very good for the world.

They're not just all about my own indulgence and gratification.

And like everyone else is getting in the way of my attempts to achieve them.

And so I'm snap at them or I failed to respond to their email or something.

And so I'm in this ironic situation where, precisely because I want to do good things, I'm showing up as the opposite of that person.

And the intentional approach, the way that you're talking about it here, that sort of gets around that.

That says, like my actual tasks for today.

The part of me that wants a list of things I need to do or ways I need to be is to manifest this thing.

You're much less likely, taking the approach you talk about, to end up like snapping at people because you're too busy trying to build a world where you're compassionate and patient, which is so ironic and ridiculous when you do it all the time.

I think about this through the lens of behaviours.

I really don't like the word healthy behaviours and unhealthy behaviours anymore.

It's a bit like time.

You spend time and it has a consequence. you engage in certain behaviors, there are consequences.

If you like the consequences, you might wanna repeat them.

If you don't like the consequences, you might wanna think about changing them.

But that internal conflict I think that many of us have when we're not really acting or showing up in the world as the people we really wanna be and we know ourselves to be.

That internal conflict is often what leads to the sugar and the boos, and for me, a lot of the time they're downstream consequences from that inner conflict.

And once you can sort of bring that into more alignment.

I do find I found this myself.

I've seen it with patients.

You know you're actually starting to change your behaviours without actually trying so hard, you know, because you're not trying to do a behaviour in conflict with a person you know you are being, which I think is destined for failure.

And then you have to do things to take yourself out of your head, because it's an uncomfortable dissonance.

So I'm very much fascinated by root causes of everything.

What is the root cause of your behaviours.

And I think your books very much speak to well.

One big root cause of many of our struggles health happiness productivity, meaningful life, whatever it is you want come from this kind of these perfectionist beliefs that we have.

And so that's upstream.

We have this perfection.

We have a belief that time is infinite and that actually we can get everything done because what social media tells us and that you know, I can do that and that and that and have a good marriage and see my kids and be crushing at work.

Well, wait a minute.

Well, what if you re-examine that root cause belief, which your books are helping us re-examine, then You change that, you'll naturally have a ripple effect when things below that are going to start to change.

Did that fully make sense?

Yeah, no, I think it does.

And I think it did.

And I think that that sort of and for me it's, and I think for a lot of people that perfectionism is, it's sort of a perfectionism that you've got to achieve in order to feel like you earned your right to exist basically, like it's got that very sort of moral, self-worth uh element to it.

And so then yes, the failure to do that, the failure to have life match up in that way is is a painful thing that you need to find ways to to to, to not feel so.

I yeah, i think it's true.

It reminds me also of the, just very briefly, the chapter called uh, don't stand in generosity's way, which is um, draws on the work of uh, the buddhist teacher, joseph goldstein, and it it speaks to this idea that, like it's really hard to make yourself into a better person.

Lots of people think they need to be a kinder person or a better person than they are.

And that sets up all sorts of internal conflicts and issues.

But Joseph Goldstein says he has this personal practice that when he feels a generous impulse arise, his practice is to try to act on it immediately.

So he's saying not, I'm going to make myself a better person.

I'm going to get better at recognizing when I'm already naturally being compassionate or nice or kind.

And just make sure that I follow through with sending the email or making the donation or whatever it is.

And I think so often I've definitely had this experience, right?

I feel like, oh yeah, I'd love to sort of reach out to that person and tell them how much they appreciated their work.

Or I'd love to make a donation to that good cause because it really reaches me in my heart.

It's not that I'm a mean guy who doesn't want to do those things.

It's that I'm really busy.

I want to do those things really well when I have lots of time and energy and focus.

Or I want to make sure that I'm giving the right donation to the right organization.

That's got a really good effectiveness rating.

And then it just never happens because this life gets in the way.

And so I really, it's another example of this, right?

This lovely idea of Joseph Goldstein's practice, which is just like.

You don't need to summon up more kind thoughts.

You just need to spot when they're happening and get a little bit better at just doing the thing that's behind them.

That's beautiful.

And that's kind of, in some ways, real mindfulness, isn't it?

That's like the art of being present and noticing what's going on in you and around you.

That's kind of, I guess, one way that we can think about mindfulness.

Definitely.

Just be aware of that and then act on it.

Not, oh, I'll research the latest charity later.

Right.

Running.

If you want to run, just start running.

Don't wait until you've found the perfect running shoe or the perfect running outfit.

It's like, no, no, you've got the urge now. do it now.

Yeah.

When you got the urge, and by the same mindfulness.

With the same mindfulness, you can not act on a sort of angry thought that you think you're going to regret later.

Right.

So you can send the lovely emails and not send the mean emails.

You can go running and not necessarily engage in the sort of unhealthy habits so easily just because, like you, already have the motivation to be that person.

Yeah, exactly.

I, uh, wanted to go to the interruption chat set.

It's one of my favorite chats in the book, actually.

For some reason, I just love it.

And it was when you we were talking about that journaling exercise and you were sort of saying, when you can not, you one could be short with someone because we're trying to do something else that we deem more important.

And in that- Although me as well, many times.

But anyway, yeah, carry on.

But in that you sort of very openly share, you know sometimes what goes through your mind.

If your son comes in to see you after school when you're trying to I don't know work between four and five or whatever it might be.

Can you just explain-

I think there's such a deep, simple, but a very deep concept behind interruptions.

Yes, I think there is a tendency that we have.

I mean part of the tendency I'm tracking all the way through the book is we want to have lots more control over our lives.

And we think that having more control over ourselves and our lives is the path to freedom and peace of mind and all the good things.

And I'm partly questioning that.

And one of the ways we do that when it comes to our time is we sort of set ourselves these schedules, these very strong decisions about what we're going to use a portion of time for.

And as a result, we actually end up creating a lot of the interruption problem.

Like, of course, there are all sorts of things that happen unexpectedly all the time.

Whether that is defined as an interruption or not is at least partly up to ourselves.

So the example that I give is you know, if it's one of the days of the week when I'm working from home, I'm not doing school pickup.

So my son and my wife are somewhere else in the house.

And if he bursts into the room to tell me excitedly about something that happened to him at school that day.

Now there are contexts, if I'm right, in the middle of recording a podcast or doing a live radio interview or something where that's higher up on the problem scale.

But if I'm just sitting there and the only problem is that I had defined that part of the day as being for deep focus, and then it becomes a problem that this otherwise totally wonderful thing that life is supposed to be about, which is moments of connection with your nearest and dearest, if that's only a problem... because of the sort of overlay that I put on my day in an attempt to get control over it, then I think, you know, again, in a gentle way, without beating myself up, I can suggest that maybe I've taken a wrong turn there in how I'm in how I'm thinking about my, my time.

There's also a lovely there's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Luhmann.

So I quoted a few points in this book.

That's okay.

It's not saying you should just let anyone interrupt you, even for lovely reasons.

But even when you do need to get back to that work, the way that works most smoothly in the flow of reality is to stop put down what you're doing.

Look the other person in the eyes, see them for real and say this sounds really wonderful.

Actually, I'm going to need to talk to you about it in a little while.

That person feels seen.

They go off, you know, and that can work not only in a lovely interaction with your son but with like, some really irritating co-worker in the office or something right.

It's not actually going to help to try not to be interrupted and keep control.

It's actually like, okay, this is what the unfolding of time has brought for me.

I don't have to be a doormat and just go with it for the next hour and a half, but I do have to like respond to what's really happening.

And then as Lumen's points out, that is much, everyone leaves happier in that situation.

It's much smoother way.

Most stress I've realised is And some people may push back at this, but I really do believe this that most stress not all stress, but most stress is internally generated within our minds by the way we're viewing situations.

And I think that was a prime example.

On one level.

What could be more lovely than your child wanting to see their father telling them about something that's happened?

What a lovely thing.

It's only a problem because... we thought I had to do this.

And again, as you say, you acknowledge, you know yes, there will be times, but you know creating, getting the frustrated um by that interruption that frankly, your son i'm using that as an example he's not a mind reader like right and he's a child right yeah, absolutely yeah um, they're not to know that.

Um, you could apply this to a partner who's interrupting or coming in when you're, when one is trying to work right, and you know somebody yeah yeah, i'm trying to work at the moment.

You know i'm working.

You know it doesn't help you yeah because, a the instructions happens, b that that friction to it that creates more internal stress.

It's going to make it much harder for you to get back to the work when it does need to happen, when you want to get back to it.

No, absolutely, absolutely.

And also yes, you don't even know that the interruption like to call something.

Interruption is to say that what should have happened is what was going to happen in your mind.

And what did happen shouldn't have happened.

And there are times that that's true, but there are also times when it's like a wonderful, serendipitous thing that is much better for everyone in the long run.

And I do mention in that chapter, you know, that very famous moment, that sort of viral moment, when Robert Kelly, the career expert, was very famously interrupted during Zoom by his kids.

And then you see his wife in the background, managing to sort of get them out of the room while this interview carries on.

And he wrote a lovely little sort of reflective essay on the experience, because he's become famous as that guy right.

I mean, so many people saw this.

Obviously, on some level, that was something going wrong.

But like it, everyone loved it like and it and when um, it happened before the pandemic but when the pandemic came, like it was a sort of a.

It got circulated again as a sort of a touchstone of like what it's like trying to work as a family with other kids in the in the house at the same time, and like he also writes about how he um Did pretty much think as he wrapped up that interview that he was never going to be booked on a major media thing again.

He's like, no, way more often now.

He gets way more bookings.

Right.

Because he's like he's famous and everyone thinks it was kind of adorable.

So he should give his kids a cut.

Right.

Exactly.

So it's like nothing bad came from that thing that you would always have if he'd had the choice in advance.

Should I stop?

Like, do I want to make sure this doesn't happen or not?

He would have chosen that it wouldn't happen.

And all the things that came from it were good.

And I think that is very, very common in our lives.

Be careful what you wish for, you know, in that scenario. you know, be careful.

You do that enough times, they're not going to come and interrupt you and tell you.

You see this.

It's like it's all these cliches.

As you're a kid or a teenager, you hear all these.

Time is short.

It passes so quickly the kids grow up.

You think, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Oh man, you become a parent, you're like, oh my God, these are so true.

I'm really feeling it at the moment as my kids are getting older, my son's 15.

I'm like, oh, it's not long till he's 18.

Right.

You know, how many summer holidays might we have left together as a family?

I don't know, hopefully lots.

Yeah.

But it really brings into that present day realisation.

Just for me at least, be careful what you wish for.

Do you really want lots of unbroken time when no one's disrupting you?

Yeah.

Well, you know, you could be fully isolated and have that life.

Yeah.

Or you could go, well, maybe, you know, going back to your thing of trade-offs.

Mm-hmm.

Well, maybe a part of having a family and having children means that that is going to happen.

So maybe you have to accept that.

And I understand that sometimes you're in a job where you can't do that.

But having the humanity to explain it in the right way is more helpful for that other person and yourself.

And the truth is that that interaction thing is a really big.

I think this is why I like it so much is that A close friend of mine a few years ago found out that one of his children had a brain tumour.

Non-malignant, thankfully, but nonetheless a concern.

I remember him saying to me, since that moment, he never says no to that child.

Now, anything can be taken to an extreme, right?

So take that to an extreme and someone could be someone who's completely spoiled, right?

But I didn't take it.

Can I have a 20th ice cream, right?

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

He doesn't mean that.

No, what he really meant is if and I'm being careful not to use names if he or she wants to do something, or wants to throw a ball in the garden, or wants to go swimming, or whatever it might be, his default has become yes.

And since he told me that, my default has become yes.

Now, am I perfect?

No.

And of course, sometimes it's not appropriate.

But for me it's been a really you know, it's the, I guess, in some ways the realization of mortality, even in a child, that reminds us of what is truly important in the present.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And yes, I think that's so powerful.

And it's interesting, isn't it, to see that when we do say no a lot of the time, sometimes there's the kind of no which is that's not good for you, and it's my role as your parent to try to steer you in healthy ways.

Exactly, which can go wrong as well, because it's important to make your own decisions and all the rest of it.

But there's also the no that says like, well, that is a good thing, but I just can't do it now.

Like we can't do it now because it's got to be later.

And there's a beautiful line in a Tom Stoppard play which I quote in 4000 Weeks, which is in the context of child mortality as well.

But like, you know, it's like later is always too late.

Like and it's, and he's talking about how like.

There's this other line in that same quote, which is that, you know, we treat children as if their purpose is to grow up into successful adults.

And so we say yes or no to them on that basis, but actually a child's purpose is to be a child.

And later is always too late.

Just this idea that, like you know, if you're going to do these things that matter in your life at some point, you're going to have to do them in a, in a now.

Right.

And I think it's, it's, it's so easy to forget it's then so easy to beat yourself up when you remember it as like oh no from now on i'm going to be perfect about this that's also not where this is headed right yeah but just like just to let that back in is is very powerful i think i cannot finish this conversation without talking about scruffy hospitality i think it's uh i think i I'd like to think I demonstrated a bit of that today when you came to the house with the painters there and you happened to come in through the back.

But what is scruffy hospitality?

Scruffy hospitality.

This is a phrase that was coined by an Anglican priest in Tennessee called Jack King.

And he had this experience where he and his wife loved having people around to have dinner.

He's written about this and gave a sermon about it, which sort of is where I first found out about this.

They loved having people around for dinner, but they had sort of developed this checklist of all the ways in which the house had to be perfect before they could have people around for dinner and how perfect the dinner had to be and well chosen and cooked, and everything that it became a barrier to actually wanting to have people around for dinner because it's just so much work.

And so he recounts how they became dedicated instead to this idea of scruffy hospitality which is saying like okay, we're going to invite people around and the deal is going to be that you come and the house is the way the house is and we eat the stuff that we can cook from the cupboards, more or less.

And we're sort of Understanding in this moment that the connections that come from the hospitality are more important than the putting on of the facade.

And the sort of deeper point here, and I've definitely experienced this in my own life.

Life is that it's not just a question of saying look.

It's okay.

Don't worry, It's forgivable like people are going to overlook the mess.

It's that actually when we show up in this more and not just in dinner parties, obviously right.

But when we show up in life in this more unvarnished way, we're more willing to talk about or display flaws.

It it's better right a lot of the time.

It causes people to connect much more with each other.

So I write in that chapter about how you know, I often had noticed long before I came across this term scruffy hospitality, how like if we were having people around for dinner and I noticed that there were like crumbs under the fridge or like an open mail on the toaster for some reason, I'd be like, oh my goodness, got to sort this out before people come around.

But if I ever saw things like that, or worse frankly, at places that I had been invited to, I would never be offended.

Like, I would never think like, this is outrageous.

This person hasn't got it together.

I would actually be kind of flattered that I was being given the sort of VIP pass to their real lives.

I was like, oh, I must be this person's real friend.

So it's a bit like people pleasing, isn't it?

In some ways, where people pleasing is kind of trying to change who we are so that people think of us in a certain way.

Exactly.

It's that notion specifically, that you have to be perfect in how other people The people-pleasing example is good, because the point about people-pleasing is it doesn't please other people, right.

They find it really annoying.

And there's a level of trying to make everything perfect in your presentation of yourself or your home or anything that actually causes a distance.

Now, as I am aware and have also been had emphasized to me by one or two readers since first writing about this.

Firstly, there are plenty of people who really enjoy putting on a show when people come around for dinner.

And I'm not trying to say that's bad.

And secondly, this plays out, this is gendered, right?

This plays out different ways.

I think overall women feel more pressure for the domestic spaces to be really sort of spotless.

And there's a sort of like well, it's easy for you to say as a man aspect to this, which I also take on board.

But the underlying point is just that, like thinking that things need to be presented a certain way that is different from who you really are before you can show up in the world.

That's where the unnecessary self-harshness comes from.

If people like you as a person, they like you as a person and they don't need you to always be pretending to be a different person.

To just move it into a different domain quickly.

There's research to show that when people are There's been these kind of mentoring schemes to try to get people over imposter syndrome in academia right.

There was a whole set of schemes where young women academics were paired with older female academics.

And the idea was that they'd get inspiration from the great success of these people.

They wouldn't feel imposter syndrome anymore. and what the researchers found was that actually that just makes it a bit worse to be to when you're put in a position it can make it a bit worse when you're put in a position where you're sort of looking at someone else's amazingness and you're comparing yourself negatively and that actually when those people or people in that position started sharing about their own insecurities and failures and flaws that was when the people um who had imposter syndrome started to feel more empowered because there was a connection that came through behind those facades it was about how we are all human we are all flawed and finite and we are all in the same boat and that's when you really get to feel a common bond yeah i love it i honestly uh four thousand weeks and this new book meditation mortals absolutely fantastic honestly so so helpful so many insights and we've Honestly, barely scratched the surface in this conversation of what is in Meditations for Mortals.

I think the format is also really, really clever and very inviting for people.

So I really appreciate that.

Right at the end of this conversation Oliver, I guess mirroring how we started off for that person who is listening to us right now and feels that actually their life is out of control.

They're knackered, they feel close to burnt out, they feel anxious.

Given everything you've written about over the past years in your books, but also in your newsletter.

What are your final words of wisdom to that individual?

I mean.

First of all, it is just to say that this is the most sort of fundamental universal human experience, especially these days.

Right.

So there is.

I hope that I can persuade the person in that situation at least not to make things worse by by telling themselves that they shouldn't be feeling worse that way, that it's a sort of personal failure of discipline or character, or not having found the right methods yet that have left them feeling that way.

No, this is a very very, very understandable and forgivable response to just the sheer fact of being human, especially today.

But then I suppose it would be to suggest that this kind of set of awful feelings does have.

In a sense it's a portal to something right.

In a sense, it's an invitation to something very powerful.

I've quoted in the book, and I keep quoting everywhere, the Zen master, G.U.

Kennett, who used to say that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.

And I just love this, which is why I repeat it endlessly.

But you can sort of see, can't you?

I think, in that yes, the attempt to do it all is going to make you feel incredibly anxious and overwhelmed.

Yes, the demands that are made on us and the things that feel like they're essential, we have to do them, will leave us feeling wiped out, like it's not just true, it's like so true, but that is not a war that any of us is ever going to win.

And it's in that realization, that sort of um, that sort of relaxing into that situation, that you can then, i hope, begin to feel the first glimmers of a different kind of energy, which is like okay, that's the way it is.

So what would be something I could do with the next 20 minutes?

That would be one good way to spend 20 minutes of my life on the planet.

Yeah, absolutely love it.

Oliver, the new book is Meditations for Mortals, a four week guide to doing what counts.

Thank you very much for coming back on the show.

Oh, thank you.

This has been such a pleasure.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation.

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And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else.

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[Embracing Limits: A Path to a More Meaningful Life]-[How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580]

📋 Summary

Embracing Limits: The Key to a Meaningful Life

The Illusion of Infinite Capacity

Living from Sanity, Not Striving Toward It

Reframing Productivity and Effort

Regret and the "Imperfectionist" Mindset

Conclusion: Being Truly Here

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Embracing Limits: A Path to a More Meaningful Life]-[How to Stop Overthinking & Start Living a More Meaningful Life with Oliver Burkeman #580]

📋 Summary

Embracing Limits: The Key to a Meaningful Life

The Illusion of Infinite Capacity

Living from Sanity, Not Striving Toward It

Reframing Productivity and Effort

Regret and the "Imperfectionist" Mindset

Conclusion: Being Truly Here

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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