Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Oliver
Technology promises to help us get on top of everything, but it never works in the end because it always is expanding the size of the everything.
Lee
That's Oliver Burkeman, author of The New York Times Bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals.
Oliver
People sort of read the title and realize the four thousand weeks is a reference to the average human lifespan and then sort of freak out.
Lee
Today - a delightful discussion about the makings of a good life in the age of distraction.
Oliver
There is something incredibly powerful about anything that we can do to sort of lead ourselves more fully into our experience. You have to attend to things in order to care about them at all.
Lee
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life. I am a long recovering perfectionist, and as a therapist told me years ago, I can be obsessed with productivity. So I've always loved trying new productivity systems, methods, hacks, and habits. And as Thomas Merton says somewhere, I have often found myself trying to wring every last morsel of pleasure out of some wondrous moment to the detriment of the moment's wonder.
I do remain grateful for many of the habits of productivity and focus I've learned, but a particularly pernicious temptation accompanies those methods and habits - namely, seeking to quantify everything, give every minute some special meaning, or make every hour especially productive. [00:02:00] This turns out, quite counterintuitively perhaps, to be a self-defeating trap.
It's this trap that our guest Oliver Burkeman diagnoses so well in his New York Times bestselling book, Four Thousand Weeks, his title pointing to the length of a somewhat generous average lifespan. So, he opens his book this way: "The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." So, we learn ways to try to ignore, overcome, or defeat that finitude. For example, our productivity methods may be a primary effort to overcome that finitude.
To this, Burkeman says, "The world is bursting with wonder, and yet, it's the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our [00:03:00] frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder".
So, today, take your time and relish with me this conversation with Oliver Burkeman, and make a bit of space for a world overflowing with the possibility of wonder.
Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks, which we'll be discussing today. He's also the author of other books, including The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. For years, he wrote a popular column for The Guardian entitled, This Column Will Change Your Life. In his email newsletter, The Imperfectionist, he writes about productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. And he lives now in the North York Moors.
Welcome, Oliver.
Oliver
Thank you very much for inviting me. Hi.
Lee
It's a, it's a delight to have you. [00:04:00] I, I love your book. And I think one of the reasons I love your book is that you, you confess being a sort of productivity geek and I too-- [laughs] I too, confess to that.
And, uh, you and me both, for example, getting rather obsessed with people like David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. How do you get to this current book from being obsessed with productivity?
Oliver
Well, I think it's a pretty straightforward journey, really. It's-- but it's the kind of journey where you, you come to the end of a trail and then you need something else, right? I think what happened was that I had explored kind of every productivity technique, read every book. I was writing a column, as you mentioned, for the Guardian newspaper. One of the things I got to do was to try out all sorts of different systems for trying to get in control of my time. And I think there's actually that phenomenon, isn't there, where it's, it's precisely because you do get to try everything out, and none of it [00:05:00] brings the kind of salvation that you, that you were looking for, [both laugh] just to get immediate-- immediately theological here. It's precisely because you do get to do that–
Lee
Oliver
--That you sort of, can have, maybe, some new fresh thoughts or a different perspective that I'm trying to communicate in this book.
If I hadn't gone all the way down that rabbit hole, I might still be here thinking that, you know, next week I was gonna find the perfect system. And there is a little part of me that still hopes that next week I'll find the perfect system. But, yeah. [laughs]
Lee
Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
You, you open up saying, uh, early on in your book you say, "The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it's the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder." So, is it simply, for you, that sort of, getting to this sort of frustration, you got a lot done, but in getting a lot done, you weren't getting [00:06:00] more important things done?
Oliver
Yeah, I mean that's definitely one of the symptoms, right? One of the things that happens if you really put a lot of effort and discipline into becoming more efficient at processing your tasks, or so I discovered anyway, was that you get really, really good at doing the least important things. And you, you also discover that, because the supply of those tasks is effectively, you know, infinite for us, in this era anyway, you don't get to the end of them. So, so all those plans for kind of, getting on top of one's email, for example, just lead to the sense that you are answering far more email, getting far more email, uh, because that's what happens if you reply to a lot more email, [laughs] and, um, absolutely not getting anywhere closer to what it was that you thought you were chasing.
And I think another part of this, we can come to it later maybe, but I think another part of this is that I think a lot of us, certainly me in those days, feel a very strong desire to kind of, [00:07:00] yeah, get on top of, be in control of our time. It's that sort of desire to somehow dominate, not necessarily dominate anybody else, but to, you know, be in the driver's seat of our lives, I suppose, in a way that, firstly, doesn't work for all sorts of reasons, but secondly, does have the effect of kind of, squeezing out, squelching out the wonder and the awe and the joy. Yeah.
Lee
Yeah, it certainly does seem to be, in my experience as well, that the better I got at doing more stuff faster, that indeed there was this endless supply, and you even begin to get a reputation, right? That the more stuff you can get done, then the more people feel free to ask you to do X, Y, or Z.
And it's a sort of endless, uh, productivity trap, I suppose,
Oliver
Right, yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't end because, uh, yeah, as I say, like, firstly, the, the supply is infinite and you don't get to the end of an infinite supply. And, and then, [00:08:00] actually the act of getting through the supply can generate more of it. So it's-- and it, it sort of ups the tempo at which you do things.
But if you just up the tempo, which you do things without getting to the end or focusing on what matters the most, that's just called being busier, and, and more stress.
Lee
It reminds me, we recently did a interview with Rebecca DeYoung, who's a theologian, on the Seven Deadly Sins, and I was reminded of her description of the so-called sin of sloth, where typically we've thought of sloth as being lazy, with regard to productivity, but she notes that, historically sloth was thought of as inattention to more important matters or inattention to relationship or inattention to the meaning of life, and this-- it's this, or ironic sort of thing, in which it may be actually our obsessions on productivity might lead us toward, unexpectedly, sloth.
Oliver
I think that's a fascinating [00:09:00] angle. It immediately reminds me of the idea, that I think comes from more of a Buddhist tradition, that one of the forms of laziness is busyness - that not exerting a certain kind of agency or discipline over one's actions in that way, or kind of mastery, is to have not done something rather than doing all the things.
Lee
Oliver
It's actually sort of a failure, in some sense, or a falling away from the the ideal past.
Lee
So early in the book, you make the argument that we, in the contemporary world, think of time in ways quite different than, say, a medieval peasant might have thought about time. So can you describe that difference for us?
Oliver
Yeah, I mean, I think there's all sorts of things that have changed over the decades and the centuries, but I [00:10:00] think the most fundamental thing that I wanted to try to articulate was the sort of very idea of seeing time as a thing at all. That's the, the kind of very non-technical phrasing that I use in the book. This, um, this sense we have today that there is me, and then there is my time, and it's some sort of resource that I have to use, or it is a little mental timeline that's always ticking along beside me and I'm trying to keep up with it, or it's something that I need to maximize the value of.
All these ideas about having a relationship with time, which, you know, and for most of us these days is some form of adversarial relationship most of the time. But the, the very premise of a relationship, obviously, is that there are two things here - me and time. And I think that the direct daily experience of a medieval peasant, and many other people at different points in history, would've been what anthropologists call 'task orientation' instead of time orientation.
[00:11:00] It would've just been that time was just the medium in which you lived. It would've been that, you know, there was no sense that you had the power to sort of step outside of this flow and, you know, manage it, control it, change the level of efficiency with which you were approaching it.
One of the sort of needles I try to thread in the book is, I think that today, the times that we feel this way are those kind of moments when the clock falls away, when we feel like we've stepped out of time. These often happen in sort of prayer or meditation or in wonderful natural landscapes or at the birth of a baby, or, you know, they tend to happen at these very peak moments.
The point I'm trying to suggest is that, I think there was a time - I think there's a good reason to believe that there was a time - in pre-industrial cultures, when most, if not all of life, would've been lived in that vein, which is not to say that it wasn't absolutely terrible in all sorts of ways, right. It's not that everyone just went around–
Lee
Oliver
--uh, as if they were at some wonderful [00:12:00] moment in their lives, but the, the one problem they didn't have, while they had all sorts of problems to do with illness and disease and, and injustice and a million other things, one kind of problem they didn't have was time problems, right? That sense of being overwhelmed, of trying to fit more things into your time than you have the time available for, feeling guilty about wasting time....
All these different things are all premised on this idea that, there's you and that there's time, and this is somehow something else, and you've gotta deal with it instead of just, be it.
Lee
And then you indicate that the industrial revolution becomes a key turning point towards, uh, the change.
Oliver
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, the-- it's very hard to sort of unpick causality directions here, and I, I don't really even try. But, there's very obviously lots about the industrial revolution that requires a kind of third person, objective, agreed upon idea of time. You can't coordinate shifts in factories or transportation [00:13:00] networks without that. You get the spread of-- actually starting before the industrial revolution, you get the spread of public clocks and, you know, the idea that you might see 'The Time' when you were out in the market square or something. It wouldn't be the same time as, as at the next village over - that wasn't until sort of the railroads did the biggest job of synchronizing those - but there was, nonetheless, this idea of, you know, time other than just the flow of life. And yeah, I think that all gets much, much more pronounced as a result of industrialization. I think there are other reasons why it's become even more, sort of, acute just in the last few decades - because of certain kinds of agreed upon boundaries between work and non-work, and leisure and the Sabbath versus working days. And all these things were obviously-- persisted far, far beyond the 19th century.
But yeah, I think industrialization was a big part of that.
Lee
Talk to us [00:14:00] more about what you see as other contributing factors to the exacerbation of this. You, you even use the language, I think, of seeing it as a social contagion. Uh, so what are some of those other factors that contribute to this sort of frenetic instrumentalization of time?
Oliver
Well, these days, I mean, it's always, um, hard to unpick the role of, kind of, economic forces and political forces versus technological ones. It does-- and as I say, I don't, I don't actually, you know, in, in this book, at the stages of the book that you're talking about, I'm more trying to paint a picture of how it is, rather than claim that I know who or what's to blame.
But I think, you know, digital technology, is a really fascinating case here, because digital technology really just supercharges all of these things. It, it provides us with these absolutely unprecedented capacities to do things in an unlimited way - or, or less limited way, I should say, both in terms of the number of messages we can send, the distance we can send them in no time at all, [00:15:00] the information we can access about events happening thousands of miles away. But of course, while that seems to hold out the promise that, okay, at last we could get on top of, of our stuff and to answer all the emails and know about all the things we wanted to know about happening in the news-- pretty obviously, it does two things at once, right? It allows us to take in a lot more of the world and to exert more control over the world, at the same time as it massively, massively extends the amount of the world that we even know about, that we even hear about. So email is, you know, it's a great way to answer lots of messages fast, but you wouldn't get so many messages if it wasn't for email, right?
So there's this constant back and forth between, well, as I put it in the book, I think, you know, technology promises to help us get on top of everything. But it never works in the end because it always is expanding the size of the everything that we're trying to get on top of.
Lee
Yeah, that reminds me of, of a, a book written by a Quaker, uh, I think it was the [00:16:00] 1930s, entitled, A Testament of Devotion.
The author is Thomas Kelly. The book is entitled, A Testament of Devotion, and it was actually first published in 1941, so I suppose he was writing in the late 1930s. See the show notes for more info. But I remember he has this passage where he's talking about mass media, and he makes the claim that the human was not designed, created, didn't have the capacity to deal with the onslaught of information foisted upon the human by mass media. And of course that's, that's the 1930s, right?
[both laugh]
Oliver
Lee
So when you think about that, how much that's changed in the last 90 years - which of, of course I think is precisely, segues into, at least, what I see as one of your fundamental arguments that you're making in the book, and namely, that we refuse to accept finitude. Or that our struggle [00:17:00] with our finitude is causing us deep anxiety, and that's one of the reasons that we're so drawn toward this sort of frenetic pace, or this frenetic desire for productivity.
So talk to us then, about that major move in your book about this call to an acceptance of our finitude, or acceptance of our limitation.
Oliver
Sure. Yeah, it happened for me through sort of a personal experience of this, right? I mean, and it was, for me, through all this productivity nonsense. It's-- it happens. I think, you know, the, the struggle with finitude is pretty universal.
The articulation of it through being a productivity geek is just one, one flavor of it. But, you know, I think something that's going in the back of the mind of many people obsessed with productivity is the idea that one day they will get to a place where they're sort of emotionally invincible, and they can handle every w-- any bit of work that's thrown at them, and it's all completely smooth sailing.
And yet, of course, being vulnerable in relationships, and not being able to do everything that is asked of you, and having to make tough choices about what you're gonna do - these are [00:18:00] just built in, they're, they're just structured into our situation.
And so, as I began to look through this lens, I found more and more context where it seems clear to me - but also, you know, echoed in the work of many philosophers and psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and all sorts of people - that so much of what we do that adds to our suffering and gets in the way of our living the most meaningful lives we could, is-- it seems to have its roots in this idea of, like, not wanting to feel fully what it's like to be finite in all the ways that we are.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our conversation with Oliver Burkeman. I, along with all the team at No Small Endeavor, do love hearing from you. Love for you to tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at [00:19:00] lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
Would you like to go deeper with my conversation with Oliver Burkeman? You can find show notes in the description for this episode wherever you listen. Those notes include links to resources mentioned in this interview, and a PDF of my complete and extensive interview notes, including material not found here.
Coming up, more from Oliver Burkeman about what might make for a good life in the age of distraction.
At one point you say, "All this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows. The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, [00:20:00] empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead, and work with them, rather than against them, the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes."
I wonder, what sort of criticism I, I guess, or... naysaying have you received in response to that kind of claim?
Oliver
[Laughs] That's a great question. Obviously, it's in the nature of this business that you've-- you mainly get commentary from people who resonate and respond positively, 'cause the other ones don't, don't contact you.
[Both laugh]
And you know, some people who do - I will get to the actual criticism - but some people who have appreciated the book use words like, they find it confronting. You know, I think there's an element of what I'm doing here, which is in a, in a hopefully witty and approachable way, dumping a bucket of cold water over the reader's head in certain ways.
[Lee laughs]
And, and hoping - I think this is important - to show that actually the end result of that [00:21:00] is peace of mind and relaxation. It's not a kind of like, life is so short, so you better stress out massively trying to force meaningful activity into every second.
I guess the couple of, sort of, pushback arguments there are.... You know, uh, o-- one that is something that people in sort of, business world and startup world especially, have, which is, isn't it only by trying to break limits and do the impossible that we ever achieve anything really splendid and meaningful as, as humans? Isn't there-- isn't there a benefit in, sort of, aiming to do the impossible?
And I have a response to that, which has to do with what we really mean by 'the impossible'. And pointing out that the, the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs and life and world changing reformers, you know, did not spend all their days trying to answer every single message that came into their, into their inbox.
And then I guess the other part of this, which might be of more interest to you, I [00:22:00] don't know, from the theological perspective, is like, well, where's the role for the infinite in what I'm saying? I don't think what I'm saying about human finitude is, is at all incompatible with the idea that there is something infinite. I'm just sort of focusing on the fact that we are finite.
I think that certainly, from a, from a religious perspective, I think some people definitely wanna say like, okay, but do we not partake in something infinite as well? So that's-- that a whole, that's a whole other dimension.
Lee
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it, it definitely is another dimension, but it, perhaps counterintuitively, it's not one I'm particularly interested in discussing, at the moment at least, because I think it's so helpful to have you confront us with this sort of, this life that we have, it is in fact finite and the--
You know, I was thinking, for example, as you were describing that, Thomas Merton, the famous 20th century monk Catholic writer, um, has one passage in one of his meditation [00:23:00] books where he talks about the immensely frustrated person who is trying to wring every last bit of perfection out of every moment that he lives. And you know, it's like I, I, I thought, well, that's, that's what Oliver's saying, right? It's that we, we get to this point of exasperation being unable to live life well, when we have this sort of perfectionistic, instrumentalization, or focus-- obsessive focus on productivity with every moment.
Oliver
Yes, but I'm fa-- I don't know that particular Merton, uh, line. And I'm, I'm fascinated by that, because... you're right, I'm making the same critique. But one interesting response to the book, or maybe more to the title - because peop-- some people sort of read the title and realize the four thousand weeks is a reference to the average human lifespan and then sort of freak out - one of the, um, ways you can go with this is that, you know, life is short and therefore, you have to wring something [00:24:00] really, really, really stupendous out of every moment.
And there is a kind of a, a modern version of that kind of carpe diem philosophy that I think is-- I find personally, just incredibly stressful. [Laughs] It's like, oh no, I've gotta do this as well? Come on, I'm just trying to stay on top of things here. I always think of that as, sort of, the conclusion you'd get if you sort of went halfway with what I'm saying here, because hidden inside that desire to, kind of, live the most stupendous life is a kind of backdoor quest to overcome the human situation, right? There's a kind of a backdoor way of saying, well, maybe I can't live forever, but I can do things in the limited time I have that are so stupendous that it's almost a proxy for living forever, somehow. [Laughs]
Lee
Yeah, you know, I'm currently on sabbatical from my university appointment, [00:25:00] and... I'm finding myself having to be very conscious, and your book turned out to be immensely helpful in reading at the start of a sabbatical, because my natural tendency would be to try to cram my sabbatical, every moment full of something stupendous, right?
And, I do plan to travel and I do plan to get to visit with a lot of folks, but it's, it's helping me reframe the notion in terms of things like, sabbatical, namely Sabbath, rhythms of rest, rhythms of social connection, rhythms of friendship, and to maybe have just a little bit more breathing space to pay attention to the things that really do make life meaningful, as opposed to cramming them full of more consumerist experiences that the productivity side might foist upon me.
Oliver
Yeah - it's fascinating, isn't it, especially, yeah, as you point out with the word 'sabbatical'-- I don't know if you're finding this, but one of the things I'm always struck by is, like, it's the overproductive sort of cramming-in mindset that [00:26:00] comes most naturally to us as - or at least to many of us - as modern people.
It feels more comfortable, in a way, to take that route, and in a strange way, more comfortable to be stressed out. That's a very curious thought, but I think it is probably true. And so, if you're anything like me and you're in your situation and you decide to, to like, deliberately not do that, and to, and to open up margin and space and time for friends and time for walking in the park, whatever, it's kind of gonna feel a bit uncomfortable at first, right? It's, it's strange, and it's hard to, sort of, stick with it when you, sort of, allow yourself to rest and the first thought you have is, oh, I'd rather be doing something more constructive. [Laughs]
Lee
I know that you've written a previous book on [00:27:00] perfectionism, which I've not had the opportunity to read, but it seems like that, that sort of notion certainly fits into, kind of, some of what we're describing at this moment, sort of in-- for in my mind, again, a perfectionism about wringing the most out of every moment.
But, how do you see your work on perfectionism relating to this conversation?
Oliver
I guess, yeah, that is one of the themes in the, the Positive Thinking book, and then I had a collection of my Guardian columns that came before that. I guess I... I do think that that's a, sort of one way of describing all the things that I'm interested in, is this drive in us, certainly in me, to achieve something sort of final and perfect in that way - whether it is, you know, the perfect merit of a piece of creative work or the perfect efficiency of a organized life, or anything like that - and, sort of, the constant need to re-confront the fact that perfection does not exist in this [laughs] earthly reality. It's not there. [00:28:00] It's a, it's a sort of mental framework that we try to impose on the world, and that, relative to which, the world will always be found wanting.
And I have, I think I've always felt this in myself. You know, it's like, I remember, uh, you know, as early as my, um-- It's a cliche that it's sort of university entrance interviews, in the UK anyway, when people ask you like, what's your greatest fault, it's great to say, oh, I'm a perfectionist, because it's kind of, like, not a, it's not a fault. It's like you're saying, well, my, my greatest, my greatest fault is that I'm totally brilliant at everything, you know? It's like a, it's a totally-- Humble bragging, we would call it these days.
[Lee laughs]
But I was aware, it doesn't lead to me doing my best work. And there is that sort of perpetual straining to make the world line up to how it feels like the world ought to be.
And so, yeah, I think it's all-- you can see it all as some version of perfectionism. And then, yeah, I call my [00:29:00] email newsletter The Imperfectionist, 'cause I feel like that's what I'm trying to preach, but also--
Lee
Oliver
--uh, you know, internalize. As, as always, it's, uh, it's in both directions.
Lee
Right, right. Yeah.
Yeah, it's rather-- it can certainly contribute to a rather neurotic sort of life, right? And I think for me, some - at least one of the roots of my perfectionism, of which I'm still recovering - is my own, kind of, religious tradition, which can be, you know, that really ramps up the perfectionism, when you feel like you're having to constantly attend to the demands of a perfectionistic God, and if you don't, there's sort of, eternal, eternal damnation sorts of consequences, which obviously is quite unhealthy.
But one of the things that has helped me a lot, kind of, philosophically, is in my appreciation of the virtue traditions, where they substitute typically, the notion of excellence as opposed to perfection. And so, excellence that's striving to grow in the capacities to envision a sort of [00:30:00] flourishing life.
But it's tricky, because in, in my experience it's been tricky because, for example, the virtue of magnanimity - which at its best is saying, I'm striving for all parts of my life to continue to grow towards what it looks like to be a flourishing human being - under a perfectionistic sort of standard, that can become its own sort of neuroses, right?
But, if on the other hand, magnanimity keeps hearing the kinds of things you're telling us, such that a flourishing human life really means learning also to have space for rest, to have space for reflection, to ask questions about, what are the most important things about life to be focusing on, as opposed to this sort of incessant, mindless productivity, then in that regard, it becomes very helpful because it's not a breathless, I've gotta grow, I've gotta grow, I've gotta grow, as much as it's a sort of invitation to, as you say in your book, leisure, which is, right, in the Greek philosophers, is this question about, what is the meaning [00:31:00] of life?
Thoughts on any of that?
Oliver
Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating, and one thing it's reminding me of is this thing that I've noticed a lot - is that, perfectionism, or just your, you know, whatever are your old conditioned ways of doing things, are always trying to, sort of, come and co-opt the new way of being, right? So yes, the moment you, you can embrace a tradition that you find helpful, and then find that this, the same old forces are trying to get you to embrace it perfectly.
Lee
Oliver
I saw an email newsletter, a great woman called Catherine Andrews who writes a great newsletter called The Sunday Soother, who we, who gave it this very ironic headline - something like, you're going about recovering from perfectionism all wrong, or something. You know, that sort of--
[Lee laughs]
--that, that, that idea that, from now on, I'm going to be completely different in a much more, sort of, self-forgiving and restful way, and I'm going to do it completely perfectly. And that's just the same thing.
The other thing, I mean - and I'm not a super expert on the virtue traditions at all - but I think this idea of letting go of [00:32:00] perfectionism is not just about, like, turning down the dial and no longer aiming for ten out of ten, but aiming for six out of ten instead. It's something more to do with aiming to be wholeheartedly and fully human, rather than trying to somehow get out of being fully human.
Lee
So I want to kind of turn towards the latter part of your book, with sort of constructive possibilities in dealing with the, the problem that you've described there. And, I first wanna begin with your appropriation of Martin Heidegger's notion of, of being, which I found--
Oliver
Lee
--very helpful, because I, I, I found myself reminding myself of that after I, I read you describe that repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. And that is this, this notion that, [00:33:00] as I hear you saying, from Heidegger, rather than this sort of constant questioning that we so typically do - of asking why are things the way they are, and our, and our grappling and our frustration, perhaps out of our perfectionisms, about things not being the way we want them to be - instead, to look with wonder at the fact, simply, that they are, or that we are, or that we exist. And that this gives us a different sort of frame towards wonder as a posture, as opposed to a perfectionistic stance about the way things are.
But, is that, is that fair enough description of what you're getting at there?
Oliver
Yes, it is. I mean, I think the fact that any of this is... if you train your attention on that for a moment, is the sort of direct path to some kind of wonder, right? Because when I step out of the house where we're living now, in the very, very beautiful part of the countryside, which has no light pollution, and see the stars - like, then it's very easy [00:34:00] to feel awe and wonder, because it is this sort of extraordinary sight and an extraordinary environment to be a part of.
But actually, there's nothing non-extraordinary about sitting on the subway or going to the grocery store. Like, like what-- from the perspective of the idea that any of this is, at all, it's possible to be, um, really filled with astonishment by that. And I mentioned very briefly in the book an, an anecdote told to me by somebody else who, who lost a close friend, sort of unexpectedly young, and found himself, after that experience of bereavement, asking, like, what his friend would've given to experience the things he was experiencing, even if those things were waiting in a long traffic jam, or, or being on hold to an annoying customer service line or something. You know, it is-- all these things that life is full of are, sort of, not [00:35:00] pleasant in terms of their substance, but the fact that you are doing them and that death could take them away, puts a different spin on it all.
Lee
Yes. Yeah, I, I think I was sitting in a favorite taproom when I read that passage in your book, and I found myself then just sitting for a while, looking around at the people in the room and considering how amazing it is, right, that I exist, that they exist, that we get to enjoy the craft of beer together in this room, um, and the wonder of life.
It's a beautiful, a very practical gift, I think, that you give us with that, of, of learning to look with wonder, and the reminder to do that.
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our episode with Oliver Burkeman.
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, [00:36:00] the art of procrastination and how paying attention to pain might actually reduce suffering.
Another, sort of, practice that you suggest is the, the art of creative neglect and, or getting better at procrastinating. So talk to us about either one of those .
Oliver
[Laughs] Yeah, I mean they pretty much amount to the, different angles on the same thing. I mean, I think all the way through this book, and other stuff I do, I'm, I'm, I'm much less, kind of, trying to say, why don't you do things this way, and much more trying to say, like, this is how things are. [Laughs]
And so, there's something really empowering and freeing and meaningful about stepping into a full awareness of that, uh, or a little bit closer to a full awareness of it, anyway, which is also a, a Heidegger related [00:37:00] thing. But, so, this idea of creative neglect or getting better at procrastinating, is just to say, it is a fact about our situation that there will just always be vastly many, perhaps, arguably infinitely many, more meaningful uses for any period of time - an hour, a week, your whole life - than you'll be able to do in, in the time that you have. So, so it will always be the case that, you know, huge amounts of potentially legitimate and fulfilling and wondrous uses for your time are, are being sort of, abandoned.
Every decision we make, every moment of life, is a, is a waving goodbye to countless other alternatives. And... I'm just pointing to ways, I think, of sort of, approaching that situation a bit more consciously, instead of what we generally do, which is to try to sort of build structures of belief, or indeed productivity systems, that allow us to go on thinking that we don't have to make [00:38:00] these tough choices, and to sort of let yourself fall into the reality of those tough choices, and that fact that everything is a trade off and everything carries an opportunity cost.
At that point, you can start to make slightly wiser choices about what matters the most to you. Because, you know, in the extreme case, if you are a proponent of some productivity system that makes you believe there's gonna be time to do everything, then you're going to choose to do all sorts of things that don't really matter to you enough to spend your precious time on them, because, after all, you're gonna get everything done. So, so what's the loss?
And so, yeah, I think that's just the idea I'm trying to get at there. And this idea of becoming a better procrastinator, which, that phrasing originates with a writer called Gregg Krech. And he sort of makes the point that, you know, we're always procrastinating on almost everything at any moment, if, if procrastination means [00:39:00] not making progress on something meaningful. So, so really seeing that as an art form, and saying, well, you know, every moment is gonna be saying a no to almost everything, so how can I do that in the most graceful and wisest way, is, it makes it little bit more approachable than, than eliminating procrastination entirely, which is, uh, you know, a rather tougher call.
Lee
Yeah, and I, and I read it as a-- not an invitation to carelessness, as much as quite the opposite, right, an invitation to paying attention to what we are paying attention to. And I, I, I did find the repeated surfacing of the notion of attention that comes throughout your book very important, which has been a topic that's been discussed in interesting ways in theology here in the last couple decades.
You know, for example, the language one well known American theologian Jamie Smith has, has popularized, of, you know, you, you are what you love. That is, you, you are what [00:40:00] you give your attention to. And you have this beautiful line from the poet, Catholic poet Mary Oliver, who says, attention is the beginning of devotion.
Uh, so talk to us a little bit more about the-- this notion of attention.
Oliver
Well, it's-- I, I, I guess it's the central way of, of talking about our finite time, how it is just a question of what we pay attention to. And people talk about attention being a, a finite resource, especially in the modern sort of attention economy where it's a, a resource that various companies want to monetize.
But that always seems to me to slightly, um, underplay how central it is. It's not really something we, we use to live our lives, so much as just-- it just is our lives. And, if you never pay attention to a given relationship in your life at all, could you really be said to, to have that relationship in your life at all?
Uh, likewise, you know, if you have a certain problem that you literally [00:41:00] never think about, it would be, it would be difficult to say that it was really a problem for you. So, that idea from Mary Oliver, that you have to attend to things in order to care about them at all. And the fact that our attention is finite, not only because our lives are finite, but in any one moment we can only really pay attention to, depending on how you read the neuroscience, but basically to one thing at a time.
It just goes to the core of all this, and it becomes in-- it becomes very clear, at least to me, how, how sort of casually I had treated my own attention, and how there's a serious sort of responsibility to sort of think about what is happening to my attention and do what I can to steward it well.
Lee
Yeah. You tell a story in this vein, about Steve Young, a young man who wanted to be a Buddhist monk?
Oliver
Sure. He's better known these days as Shinzen Young. He's a, sort of, celebrated teacher of meditation from a very, sort of, really quite a sort of, secular [00:42:00] scientific perspective, these days. Long and the short of it is, he was obliged in the, in the mountains of Japan to undergo this purification ritual, where three times a day through the winter, he had to dump icy water from a system onto his naked body.
And first, this just seems like some sort of terrible form of torture, why are they making me do this just to become a, just to become a monk? But, um, he writes about gradually learning that the more attention he paid to the sensations, the less suffering there was.
You might think it's the opposite, right? You might think that if there is some fact of your life that is distressing to you, that trying to sort of run away from it mentally would be the, would be the way forward, and that, he found, was, was associated with more suffering.[00:43:00]
A friend of mine who's a meditation teacher puts it in another way and just says like, you know, in order to suffer in life, in order to find your life, your situation unpleasant and annoying and stressful, or whatever it might be, you have to have some mental bandwidth left over for that, for that complaining, and actually, you know, if you can train the attention to, to be more and more, evermore fully in and on the experience that you're having, then there's less bandwidth to, to sort of find it, the cause of, of suffering. And, uh, Shinzen Young writes about, you know, how-- seeing that this was, this was actually a form of meditation training. They were, it was a training in concentration to, to, to sort of, with a reward of not being so distressed by the icy water if you did it well, and the punishment, to sort of Pavlovian - you know, it's like getting electric shock or something if [00:44:00] you, uh, if your, if your attention wanders. And so this sort of, this prompts a kind of hypothetical thought that, in principle, any experience could be, sort of, fully suffused with wonder and meaning and absorption if we could hold our attention on it absolutely, completely. I'm not there yet. [Laughs]
Lee
Yeah, it's very difficult, isn't it? Yeah. I'm thinking, for example, as you were describing that, you know, Viktor Frankl's famous book about, uh, his experience in the Holocaust. I don't know what the sort of approach you were describing would say about what I'm about to say, but in, in my mind, it, it's helpful for me conceptually to draw a distinction between a given social condition that I would want to describe as horrific or evil, while, on the other hand, drawing the category of an individual or a group of people [00:45:00] choosing how they're going to respond or the particular attention that they're gonna give to it. This fascinating notion that, by paying attention to - in this case, the Buddhist monk in training - to the pain of the cold water exposure, it's fascinating to think about giving more attention to that suffering or to that pain, uh, reduces the suffering.
I just, I just find that remarkable. I-- and of course, I also, I also find it fascinating because years ago I started doing cold water exposure myself, with, with cold showers. And it's been fascinating the ways I've learned about my own mind and my own thinking through that sort of process.
Oliver
Lee
Any other co-- closing thoughts about that particular conversation though?
Oliver
Well, I mean, no, I think that sort of nails it. It's, um... for me it all ties together with this thought that there is something incredibly powerful about anything that we can do to sort of lead ourselves more fully into our experience.[00:46:00]
You know, it's like, this notion that stepping fully into the experience of being human is something we sort of can't afford to do because it will be too awful, is repeatedly belied by, by experience, yeah.
Lee
I liked, a moment ago, where you, you said that in thinking about sort of constructive practices, you're trying to avoid this sort of notion of, you know, coming up with a sort of to-do list or five successful steps [laughs] to overcome what you're talking about, which I think is quite helpful to point us toward posture or point us toward practice or point us toward a different sort of attention.
Uh, but you do close the book with five potential questions that we might ask ourselves, as well as ten potential practices, uh, that might help us step into [00:47:00] living the sort of way you're pointing us towards. So, could you talk about what are, what might be some of your favorites among those five questions or those ten practices as we kind of move toward the close?
Oliver
Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the questions are the part I-- I was sort of happy to realize that that was the way to end this book, that it could get quite specific and practical for readers without me engaging in this sort of laundry list of, you know, 'here are the six things you should spend your time on to have a meaningful life', which would sort of violate the whole thing.
Then the, the techniques at the end, I mean, that's-- I'm a little bit more ambivalent about, because, uh, you know, if they work for you, that's great, but I also think people are easily smart enough, having sort of imbibed some of this perspective, to come up with their own ways of, of instantiating it in their lives.
I guess one of the questions I - I'm not going to remember the exact phrasing, cause don't have the book in, in front of my eyes right this second - but is the, the question about, you know, where in life you are waiting to get started on, [00:48:00] to dive into the things that matter the most to you until you're, until it's the right time, until you are fully qualified, until you can, you know, until you know what you're doing basically.
And I've found it, you know, repeatedly, astonishingly revealing in life - I think many people go through some version of this to realize that, you know, that everyone is, is in a sense, making it up as they go along. That, um, that we're all sort of, we're all together in being just on the leading edge of this moment and next moment and like, actually nobody knows what's coming a moment from now, and we are all sort of improvising.
Certainly, you know, a good surgeon is improvising on the basis of some serious training, and a good airline pilot has, uh, you know, is not, is not just sort of making it up in a certain sense. But in another sense, you know, I think we, we all, we all are, and there's something very liberating about that realization that the moment of truth isn't...coming. That this is the moment of [00:49:00] truth. That, you know, that this is it. And that if you're going to do things in your life that you care about, at some point it's gonna be now that you do them. I think it's incredibly easy to get into that perspective that says, real life will get started soon. And then, I think it gets progressively harder to cling onto that notion the older you get, right? Because it's, um, you can believe it at twenty in a way that you can't believe it at forty.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the, the wording you have here in the book - "In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?"
Another one, going back to what we had earlier - "Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?"
And that, that's one that really deeply spoke to me. I, I, I started learning to get over some of that, I don't know, three, four, five years ago, but it's an immensely helpful question, right? We hold over ourselves some sort of set of criteria that are just, from the start, impossible. [00:50:00] And yet, again, your book is this invitation to let go of this impossible set of criteria over ourselves.
Oliver
Yeah. And I think it's worth just noting something that people want, very reasonably, to push back there and say, well, you know, it's all very well for you to say, but, but I do need to do an impossible number of things in order to keep my life going. Or more often they're talking about notional people who are not them, but who are people less, much less privileged than them.
You know, what, what if you have to do an impossible amount of work just to keep the roof over your head and keep food in your children's stomachs and you know, and it's a subtle point that I always want to try to make in the right way, but like, the tr-- the answer to that is that nobody can successfully complete impossible demands.
And if it's really true that you're gonna get fired unless you do the impossible, then you're gonna get fired, right? Because-- and that's a, that's a, might well be [00:51:00] a, an indictment of the society that we live in, but it's not a reason to keep on trying to find a way to do the impossible. And so I think it's important to say, because I think that everyone's situation varies massively.
But even if you can't take on board these ideas and sort of revolutionize your circum-- life circumstances, or even if you don't want to take them on board and use them to revolutionize your life circumstances, there's a very important internal shift, which I think is at the core of all this, which is about saying, I'm not gonna make my self-- sense of, like, self-worth conditional on being able to do something that is systematically impossible for a human being to do.
Maybe I'm gonna still have to keep answering a huge number of emails from my boss or dean or whatever, that I'd far rather, you know, just ignore and, and that are not in themselves a meaningful-- maybe I'm gonna make the calculation that continuing to do a bunch of this stuff is the right thing [00:52:00] to do, given my circumstances, but I'm not going to sort of collaborate with these forces of these impossible demands and say like, yeah, I'm only gonna feel good about myself when I can answer fifty emails an hour, because you can't do it, so might as well start feeling good about yourself now, and then, [laughs] and then do what you can [Lee laughs] to deal with that situation.
Lee
So, um, one last question that's a, that's two part as we close. One is, after completing this sort of very helpful book and uh, invitation to life - after having written these things, at what point do you still look at your life and think, I'm, I'm, I'm not yet living into what I've described here yet, in the way I want to?
And then, give us an example of a way in which you, you find yourself in a moment of wonder or gratitude and you think, yeah, this is [00:53:00] what I'm trying to describe, and I'm grateful to be in this space at this moment.
Oliver
Yeah, I think it's, you know-- one thing, uh, writing a book like this will really do, is make you absolutely acutely aware of the sense in which you are a work in progress and have not got there. And I do sometimes, what-- I think I'll actually seriously do this one day, like I'll do some event or podcast or something, and I'll, and I'll, like, interview my wife, and get her to be, like, unsparing about how relaxed with respect to time and how open to life's vaguery she really thinks I am.
[Both laugh]
'Cause I think that's a-- I think it's, you know, that is the ultimate kind of, uh, uh, accountability, isn't it? And I'm-- and, uh, she does find it amusing to, to advise me to read my own book on not-- and not too infrequently. [Lee laughs] Um, but I mean, I think I have a pretty good-- to me, this is not actually, when you get to the bottom of it, this is not actually a sign that, uh, you know, I'm a terrible hypocrite and my, uh, ideas are all [00:54:00] superficial.
It's precisely those things that you struggle with, that you're interested in as a writer, right? I mean, it's like, you're not gonna be interested in exploring things that just come really easily and naturally to you. So, it's all relative. I am a much less anxious person than I used to be, and still a pretty anxious person.
I am still, I am much more able to sort of spend absorbing time with my son and my wife without, sort of, cycling through work stuff. But on the other hand, this book did quite a lot better than I expected it to, and the challenges and the opportunities and the, the sort of pace of all that has increased. So, you know, it's its own challenge. And so there's, it's a constant kind of back and forth between those things.
In terms of some time when I've-- when I feel like I'm, doing it right, I suppose, I'm not sure that was exactly your phrasing, but... Well, you know, we moved from Brooklyn to the North York Moors. I've got-- I deeply love Brooklyn and I'm not so [00:55:00] saying people should all move to the countryside, even if they're in a position to, but for me, being surrounded by this landscape, this rather bleak moor landscape acts-- you know, the f-- I'm really proud of us for having made this move because it's the kind of thing that one talks about and doesn't actually do, and it's the kind of landscape where, yeah, I just feel a-- it's funny 'cause it goes along with feeling very small in the landscape, but there is a real sense of like, showing up for life somehow.
And some aspects of the community life are also very, sort of, make you feel very much more, sort of-- I think there's some plus points to being slightly more dependent on your neighbors and, and, and on, uh, the people in the surroundings. So all of that is something that I cherish and value quite a lot. But it's, yeah, I mean, in no way am I, uh, some, uh, [00:56:00] absolutely perfect handler of all time related stresses.
Then again, if I was, that would be perfection, wouldn't it? And that would undermine my, my arguments.
Lee
Yes, indeed.
[Both laugh]
We've been talking to Oliver Burkeman from his home there in England. Oliver is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks. Oliver, thanks so much. It's been a delight to talk to you and, and thank you for the moving and immensely helpful book.
Oliver
Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Oliver Burkeman on his New York Times Bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals. Oliver is also the author of the popular newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and The Guardian's This Column Will Change Your Life.
You can find show notes for this episode wherever you listen. Those notes include links to resources mentioned in this interview and a [00:57:00] PDF of my complete and extensive interview notes, including material not found here. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing. Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hayes, Cariad Harmon, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together. No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media LLC, and Great Feeling Studio.