How to make the most of a finite life (w/ Oliver Burkeman) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about one of the big existential questions that humans have faced for thousands of years. What do you do with your time on this planet now, if you are expecting us to get to the bottom of that question, to give you a complete and definitive answer in the next 40ish minutes, I have some terrible news for you.

You have lost your mind. We are not going to be getting to the bottom of the meaning of life on this one podcast episode if you thought we were, you are delusional, but we will be talking with the journalist Oliver Burkeman, and we will be trying to figure out some ways that we can think about this and tackle that question on our own for ourselves.

And Oliver has helped many, many people to think more deeply about their time on Earth. And one of the ways that he has done that is to simply point out the undeniable fact about our existence, which is that it is limited. Here's a clip from Oliver's TEDxTalk where he's talking about exactly this.

[00:01:03] Oliver Burkeman: I think we need, uh, to think in a very different way about time and to get towards an answer I think it's really helpful if we turn to an idea that has a very long history in philosophy. It's there in Seneca and the Stoics. It's there in the Buddhist, and later on in Nietzsche and in Heidegger. And that's this idea that in some sense, most of us live our lives in a deep state of denial about how finite, uh, our lives are really shockingly finite.

Actually, the average human lifespan is about 4,000 weeks long. It's not that we don't know we're going to die. I mean, we know we're going to die. If anybody here didn't realize that, I'm sorry to be, be the one to break it to, but. But it's that we don't accept it deep down. We don't live as if we were finite humans.

We instead do everything we can to try to maintain this comforting illusion that there'll always be more time for everything, that we can fit more in. Sometimes when I talk in this way, people think I'm saying something incredibly depressing, like, frankly, I'd rather just go through my life deluded than face such a miserable truth or that it's really stressful like that.

I'm suggesting we should go through our lives like freaking out all the time about the fact that we're going to die, but I think that the lesson from philosophers since Seneca onwards is that this way of thinking… it's not depressing or stressful at all. It's actually really, really liberating and relaxing.

It's a huge weight off your shoulders.

[00:02:39] Chris Duffy: We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with more from Oliver Burkeman. Stick around because we are gonna take even more weight off of your shoulders. I promise. You're gonna feel so relaxed. It's gonna be like incredible how light you feel. Or maybe it'll just be more of our podcast. Either way, you'll have to stick around to find out.

[00:03:03] Chris Duffy: Today we are talking about our brief but wonderful time on Earth with the journalist and author Oliver Burkeman.

[00:03:10] Oliver Burkeman: Hello, my name's Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a journalist. I wrote a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and my new book is Meditations for Mortals.

[00:03:19] Chris Duffy: I'm delighted to to be talking to you because I've, I've been a long time reader of, uh, your newsletter, “The Imperfectionist,” and big fan of both of your books.

I'm also interested because you've made a, you made a pretty big change in your, in your personal life over the last few years, and you moved from New York to North York, which I, I just find somewhat delightful on a linguistic level. But, uh, I wonder how a big change like that has played into your thinking about the meaning and the value of your time.

[00:03:48] Oliver Burkeman: It’s an interesting question. Yeah. We lived in Brooklyn for many years. My wife is American, and then we have spent the last few years in the North York Moors, which is a, it's a national park in the British sense, in American sense, you can't, well, very few people live in national parks, but that's not the case here.

So it's sort of, it's a beautiful, bleak part of the world, but it is also like a living community of towns and villages. I think we thought we were doing something very kind of interesting and radical when we decided to leave. Or maybe not radical, but at least self-determined. And when I look back now, it's just a kind of, I'm just a sort of a pandemic data point, right?

Like everybody was doing this, who could, I think in many ways, not everybody, but you know, anyone who had that ability was considering it. It's also a return to the area in which I grew up not exactly, I didn't grow up in the countryside, but it's the, the part of, uh, England where I was raised. I do find that living in a rural area focuses one's mind in certain very helpful ways on how time is being used.

In some ways, that's because I am surrounded by landscape that I love and I have the opportunity to spend time in that almost every day, you know, out in the blustery winds and under the big skies and all the rest of it. And that is, you know, part of how I want to spend my finite time on the planet. In another sense, it's kind of inconvenient living, you know, a long drive from big stores, you've either gotta have a car with you or you need to arrange a ride from somebody. There's all these kinda little ways in which you're not just living in that sort of purely frictionless space. And that too, I think is actually really, really helpful. In a way, it's sometimes it's annoying, right?

Because I've gotta sort of think ahead about what I want to cook for dinner instead of just rushing out to the store while the pan is, is sizzling on the stove, which you could practically do where we, uh, where we lived before. So there's a sort of a, there's a deliberateness that is required sometimes, and then socially it's really interesting because yeah, you might feel like it was splendid isolation, but actually are a lot more reliant on and interconnected with neighbors in many ways than you need to be anyway in an urban environment.

[00:06:02] Chris Duffy: I think it's interesting to hear you talk about this big life change because one of the messages of Meditations for Mortals is that we often think we have to make some sort of huge dramatic shift in our life. In order for our life to start or to have meaning or to finally be the person we want to be.

And your big argument is that shift will never happen. Right? That we need to actually start right now and not worry about all of the big changes that could happen, but rather just what is happening today. It's interesting because in some ways you actually did make the big shift that people talk about, like, if only I move to another country and to the countryside.

So even having done that, do you still have that feeling of like, you do the giant shift and it still, it doesn't fix all the things. You still have to do the work every day.

[00:06:47] Oliver Burkeman: There probably is a little bit of that fantasy whenever anybody moves long distance or between cities or anything like that, there's that slight sense of, um, now it's this that is gonna answer all my problems.

I think I had already begun to see through that fantasy a bit by the time we made this move. But yeah, regardless of what I thought. You move somewhere else and like you're still there. You brought yourself with you and all your, um, kind of imperfections and limitations. And yeah, I think that one of the things that the new book is very much about is the idea that this moment of truth or this moment of problem free living, this moment of getting over all the things about yourself that annoy you, that isn't coming.

And this is great news. This is not depressing news at all. This is news that allows you to get on with living life to the full now, instead of postponing that until the point at which you've completely fixed your procrastination problems or worked out how to be the perfect parent or whatever thing it is for you, you don't need to wait for that.

[00:07:47] Chris Duffy: Can, can we just define some of the terms that I think are, for me, really resonant and that come up a lot? Um, when people are reading you, which is the title of your newsletter, the Imperfectionist, and this idea of imperfectionism. Then relatedly, your book Four Thousand Weeks, what is that number? 4,000 weeks, and what is imperfectionism and how are those related as we then move into Mediations for Mortals, your latest book?

[00:08:11] Oliver Burkeman: Sure. Well, 4,000 weeks is very roughly the average lifespan in the developed world these days. I rounded it down a bit to get to the, to get to the round figure, you know, make for a better title. There's something kind of stress inducing. I'm well aware in expressing that figure in weeks, right? Because if you express it in years, then it's not, uh, it's a much smaller number, but years feel like large units.

And if you express it in days, well a day is very quick. It's very easy to waste a day, in my experience anyway. But you get a lot of them. There's something about the week's denominator, I guess is the word that really sort of puts pressure on those ideas because a week feels short enough to waste and to sort of not take account of, and also you don't get very many of them when you, uh, when you calculate the number in an average lifespan.

Now, actually, I think in some ways the book is almost. It's an argument against the title. And I'll say what I mean by that, in that I think you could take that as an argument that the, the idea of 4,000 weeks that could lead very swiftly to a different kind of book and a different kind of set of ideas, which would be, life is so short, you've got a cram every moment of it with the most extraordinary experiences you possibly can.

And it's quite stressful, right? That's like, oh no, more things I've got to do in the course of my day. So where I actually wanted to take that. I wanna say we're actually so finite. We're so limited in what we can find time for and how much control we can exert over how our lives unfold. We're so limited that actually, in a sense, we need to give up hope of doing.

Most of the things we can think of, we need to give up hope of exerting most of the control we might like to exert. And so there's a kind of a defeat that you have to go through here when you realize that no matter how much you cram your life with exciting experiences, you'll never get to do more than a tiny fraction of what the world has to offer.

But my argument is that that defeat is incredibly liberating and empowering and actually leads on to bigger and better accomplishments because that's when you get to stop trying to do this crazy impossible thing of getting your arms around the whole of the world. And you see that actually your, your job as it were in the world is to show up and do some things and do them with as much presence as you can muster and to do them now instead of waiting the decades until you feel, uh, completely ready to do them.

So for me, imperfectionism is just the outlook on life that starts from the place that says, okay. There's always gonna be too much to do. There's always gonna be more meaningful things you could in principle do with your time than you're gonna be able to do. So now what? You're always gonna be sort of exposed to events.

Anything could happen in any moment. You're never going to sort of cure all your, all the aspects of your personality you don't like. All of this is never gonna happen. So now what? It really is not a recipe for despair or for sort of settling for a life of mediocrity. It's incredibly exciting 'cause it's like… now you can bring all those meaningful things and those ways of being forward from the future, you know, into your life right now, and really get stuck into being wholeheartedly who you are right here and now.

[00:11:20] Chris Duffy: It, it also makes me think that, you know, there's kind of this cliché of like, what would you do if you found out you were gonna die in a week?

You only had a week to live and I think that, the like cliché answer to that, at least that I've heard is like, I would travel the world. I would buy a fancy car, I would do all these drugs. I would like do this wild stuff. And I think that the reality is that if you actually genuinely knew you had a week to live, you would probably stay where you are and spend time with the people that you care about and maybe do a few things that really matter. You probably wouldn't be out pursuing like the highest possible highs and the most dramatic experiences. That's not actually what we want to do with our limited time when we know it is limited.

[00:12:02] Oliver Burkeman: Right. First of all, the aspiration would be that you were, in the ideal case, you would, you would already be living the way that, um, you wanted to spend those final days. You know, actually many of us may be living something closer to that than we let ourselves believe. Given the pressures in the culture and from all other, all sorts of other sources, to sort of be super extraordinary, like that isn't actually what makes us feel most alive on a sort of regular basis.

It's a reason to get started on things, not a reason to, um, give up on them.

[00:12:33] Chris Duffy: So, I wanna put a, a pretty big disclaimer on here, which I, I've said many times over the course of this podcast, but is that. This show is called How to Be a Better Human, and I, I have a lot of qualms about that as a, as a title and an idea.

And I love how you really push back in your book on the idea that we'd ever become a, a better person, some other person who's better and fuller and more generous. And yet that also does not mean that you can't follow your best impulses. When you find yourself having an impulse to generosity, that you allow that impulse to go through rather than to squash it with some sort of logical explanation.

You give the example of, you know, you walk by, uh, someone who's asking for money and you feel the urge to help them to give them some money. But instead you say to yourself, well, I actually heard that it's more effective to give to a charity that deals with homelessness, so I'm not gonna help this person, I'm instead gonna give to the charity.

But then later on you forget and you don't actually give to the charity. So you've done nothing. Um, which I think is a very relatable experience. In my understanding of what being a better human would be, it's not being a different, better human, it's being the best version of yourself.

And I think that's really hard. It takes a lot of work, but it also is simpler. Then maybe it would look like from the outside, which I think your example captures is that you already have that impulse, so why not just allow it?

[00:13:54] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I think that's a really deep point. In fact, there's a sort of a paradox here that I'm not sure anyone has ever sort of solved, as it were.

Maybe it can't be solved and, and so I'm not gonna solve it now, but it's captured by that, um, famous line from the humanist psychotherapist, Carl Rogers, who says, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am. Then I can change. And it's also captured in that idea of becoming more of who you are, which you know, doesn't really make any sense if we're going to be very sort of rational and technical about it.

And yet I think most of us can connect with what that means in some sort of preverbal way. So, again, for my own benefit as much as for anybody else's, I'm experimenting with this notion of like, what would it mean to allow yourself to be more fully who you are? And that's a completely legitimate definition of the phrase, better human, if that's the one you want to use.

So not trying to sort of make yourself into a more generous person, but accepting the possibility that you may already be, uh, a perfectly generous person and just need to get a little bit better at the action of, of, well, not even an action, more like a, a non-action, more like not getting in the way of who you are at your best with kind of fear-based, anxiety-based control-seeking mental activity, but just gets in the way.

It's also related to an insight, which I've written about several times from the therapist Bruce Tift, who has this kind of thought experiment. He, he invites people to take the thing that bothers you the most about yourself. Like maybe you are incredibly distractible or a procrastinator or you have a short temper or something, and you just sort of think, well, what if I never change in this regard?

Or what if some version of this is with me to the very end of my life? 'Cause if, if I'm just always gonna be a bit of a procrastinator, or I would say in my case, a bit of a catastrophizer, a bit anxiety prone. I can just sort of get on with life now instead of postponing the real part of life to life, fix this thing, I can show up now.

Now, as Tift also says, there's something a little bit scary about showing up fully for life, which is, which is the secret payoff of telling yourself that you've got a big problem that needs fixing. You don't quite have to show up now 'cause you can tell yourself I'm gonna do that when it's fixed. But overall, I think that notion of like, okay, then I can let go of that and just actually get on with the things I want to do instead of worrying away at trying to be someone that I'm not.

[00:16:19] Chris Duffy: And it's interesting because when I think about my wife, she doesn't love transitions. Transitions are hard for her. Even when we're going somewhere fun, if we're going on a fun vacation, the first day of getting into the new place is a little bit of a challenge for her.

It's not her favorite day. Yeah. Now when I think about that with her, I don't think, oh, I hope one day she'll become totally comfortable with all transitions, because that's when she'd finally be a good person. I'm just like, yeah, that's Molly. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. But when it's me, I'm like, oh, why can't I be good with transitions?

I wish I was. I'm so bad at transitions, and it's such a huge fatal flaw in my personality. Now, that's actually not my fatal flaw. Mine is probably something more like ego related. I can have a big head, and that is is sometimes helpful and sometimes very unhelpful.

[00:17:04] Oliver Burkeman: Right? And yet the moment you see it and the moment you accept that it's a part of you, you kind of let go of some notion that you are entirely within your own power to change yourself.

And yeah, I think you, that's another thing that I write about elsewhere in the new book, is this idea that like, there's this lovely quote I use from Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, who says along the lines of, you know, if we met the person in reality who is inside our heads kind of yelling at us, you know.

Berating yourself, treating yourself in ways you'd never dream of treating a friend. We just think they were, as he puts it, like he would just be boring and cruel. Right? It's just like, there's just, it's just that would just be an obnoxious person. They would need help. This is not somebody to be listened to.

Maybe it's somebody to be empathized with. Uh, that's an interesting point. And yet that person lives inside many of our minds. We hold ourselves to standards that. Uh, essentially impossible to reach and are just unfairly applied as against other people. I found that a very useful insight when I first sort of started exploring work on self-compassion and things like that because something in my nature, or perhaps also my culture, sort of predisposes me to think that all that stuff about self-compassion is kind of…

Cringe, you know, and I don't want, I don't want to, I don't want to go there and start treating myself as some incredibly special person, worthy of vast amounts of cosmic love or something. And of course all we're talking about here is like, could you maybe just extend the same amount of, uh, basic decency to yourself that you already extend to friends naturally as anyone who's an okay or even good friend to other people will just naturally do.

And I found that very powerful. It's like, oh yeah, actually, yeah, I don't need to think I'm special, I just need to think I'm not. Especially inferior to, um, all the other people in my life.

[00:18:59] Chris Duffy: Okay. We're gonna take a very special little break and then we will be right back with more from Oliver.

[00:19:15] Chris Duffy: And we are back. So, Oliver, I just wanna share an anecdote with you, and this is something I actually hadn't thought about in a long time. I was maybe 18 or 19 years old. I was in my first year of university and I was visiting a friend, and this friend is very smart, one of my best friends, and she's, she was going to Harvard and we were, I remember I was, I was taking the train to visit her and I was on the train.

It happened to be with one of her college roommates who we were sitting together, we were both on this train up to, to visit her. And it was the first time that I'd ever seen a, like a self-help book. Someone actually like our age reading a self-help book. And I remember she was reading this book that was called Slowing Down to the Speed of Life.

And she's like, this is so helpful. This is really changed my life. And she gave it to me and I read it and I felt like, oh, there's some big insights in here. But I also remember feeling in the moment like. This is ridiculous, right? Like, we're 18, we have to slow down to the speed of life? Like we, life hasn't even caught up with us yet.

And yet it also was that idea of like, if I read this book, I'm gonna figure out the secret to how to live a meaningful life. I could change myself in this way. It, it felt really compelling and. That feeling that like there is a secret out there that we just haven't uncovered yet is something that, that you talk about a lot and that I've never really heard other people talk about in the same way.

[00:20:36] Oliver Burkeman: That's interesting. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm, well, I'm glad that you got it from my writing. I do think that the thing that underlies all of this is this notion that there is Yes, some way of. Mastering the art of being human that you haven't found yet, and maybe quite a lot of people around you have, and that's annoying and you've gotta find it somehow.

What you learn, if you think about this and, and reflect on it after for a while, is that and live for a while, is that, um, if there's any meaning to the, of mastering the art of being human. It is in getting more and more comfortable with the sense in which life can't be mastered as finite human beings.

That is just not. That's not what it is to live fully as a human to sort of get on top of life and then direct it from that vantage point. It's much more about being able to sort of be in it and take action despite the fact that you don’t know if it's the right thing, or you don't know if you'll do it every day for the rest of your life, or you don't know if you're doing it well.

So yeah, I mean this book is about action for sure, but it's imperfect action, which is not actually. Second rate as against perfect action, right? It's better because it's the kind that happens in the world.

[00:21:46] Chris Duffy: I think also there's this piece of that, I mean this culture of striving, of reaching the pinnacle of, of being at the top, and I think that something that you've described and I feel like is, is really something I see in a lot of people around me, both my age and older and younger, is this feeling of like just deep exhaustion that like nothing is enough and I'll never be good enough and I can't ever compete with what is out there. And even before I've begun, it's already too late.

And I think it ties into this. Metaphor that you use, the kayak and the super yacht.

[00:22:27] Oliver Burkeman: The kayak, and the super yacht. And all I mean by this is just that I think to be human, to be a finite human is effectively to be in a little, one-person kayak on a rapidly moving river, right? You just find yourself there on the river of time.

There are lots of other people around in their kayaks. It's not totally solitary, but you know, you are just here and you're trying to stay afloat and you respond to what is happening as best as you can. And sometimes there are very, um, choppy periods and sometimes there are very quiet periods and all you, you're never really sure what's coming and you just have to sort of navigate with into each new moment as best as you can.

This is a very sort of vulnerable and risky and a little bit scary situation, but it's also very exhilarating, right? It really is being alive and I think that what a lot of us, sort of naturally, instinctively, let's say, want instead is what I think of as life on the super yacht, right where you are on the kind of third floor story bridge of a, of a huge fancy multimillion dollar boat in the kind of air conditioned control room.

Yeah. I don't actually claim to know a huge amount about how super yachts are piloted and somebody's gonna pull me up on as you're saying it. I was like, I've never been on a super yacht, but, but you know, you program the route into the you program the route into the navigational computer system and you kind of, you sit back and you're, you're in control and you're confident about where you're going, and it feels very sort of secure.

At the same time, there's something kind of sterile and lifeless about it, which I think is an important point not to miss. So anyway, I just think that a lot of the things we do when it comes to sort of use, trying to manage our time, the ways we try to sort of set up our lives, can be best understood as ways of trying to feel like we're really on the super yacht when in fact we're in the kayak.

Ways of trying not to feel what it is to be a limited human. So an obvious one of those is if you are perpetually on a quest to become, to discover the perfect productivity system, to perfect morning routine, the perfect set of protocols that is gonna make you, um, sort of invincible, then you're never gonna get there.

Because what you're trying to do is antithetical to being human. And I think that again and again, what I'm actually saying in my writing is basically, you know, if we can just a little bit let back in the reality that in fact we're in the, the kayak, that's not only just true, but it is actually a more associated with getting things moving and accomplishing things and doing things.

It's, that's where you actually do things instead of postponing them until you are totally sure that you're on a super yacht. You know, you just dive into doing them now. And secondly, it has more of what the German social theorist Harmut Rosa called “resonance.” The thing that we really want from life is not total control over it.

It is this kind of vibrancy that really depends to some extent he argues and I agree on not being in total control of it.

[00:25:25] Chris Duffy: It also makes me think that, you know, when we look back on our most treasured memories or the times when we felt like, uh, we had a really meaningful period in our life. It's almost never like, and it was comfortable and quiet and nothing happened, right?

Like even though we think we want that and there was nothing going on, that's not what you look back on and go, you know, you look back on the periods of struggle or discomfort or at the very least, it being, you know, less than ideal and you making the best of it with friends or family. Those are the periods that you look back and you laugh on.

It's so rare that someone says, like, remember when we stayed at that perfectly, totally clean rental house and it was exactly what the pictures looked like. Like that's not a very big memory. Whereas when, remember when we got to the house and it turns out that there was a giant puddle of water in the middle of the house and all of the beds were broken and we had to sleep in a tent outside like that is the memory that people actually have and treasure later on, even though in the moment it's uncomfortable and unpleasant maybe.

[00:26:23] Oliver Burkeman: Right? Yeah. And I, I refer in, in one part of the new book to this saying, this quotation that almost everything in life is either a good time or a good story. Not everything. I'm not claiming that there aren't just true tragedies that befall people, but it's really striking how frequently the things we, the memories we sort of treasure are in some sense memories of things not working out.

It may be that this is actually on some level, the same phenomenon though as, as the one that people who, who are struck by real severe crises, you know, major serious diagnoses of illnesses do surprisingly frequently look back on those things as things that they're, in some sense, glad that they happened in terms of how they focused their minds on what mattered the most.

So in all these different levels of intensity, you get this sort of. Basic principle that when things slip out of our control, it's at least possible and perhaps quite frequent. That turns out to be for the best.

[00:27:19] Chris Duffy: Coming at it from a, as a comedian too, like that idea of it's either a good time or a good story that is definitionally what it means to be a comedian, to look at the world that way, I would say, right? Like it's either pleasant, fine, or this is fodder for my comedy later on. That is so how you look at the world as a comedian, I think.

[00:27:39] Oliver Burkeman: That’s such a great point. How many sort of comedians, uh, bits drawn from life in any way are, are about everything going fine and nothing happening.

It's like, that wouldn't be funny.

[00:27:47] Chris Duffy: I can't think of a faster way to get people to throw things at you on stage than to tell them the things that are going well.

[00:27:52] Oliver Burkeman: It's funny now I'm laughing, but I'm laughing because the idea is ridiculous and I think the deep truth there, I mean, humor is. There is something very much not superficial and profound about the capacity to laugh at what is happening to you or has happened to you or has happened to somebody else.

When you're laughing in an empathetic sort of non-contemptuous way. There's something about the sort of position of laughing at the cosmic joke of all this, which is right, right in the heart. What I'm trying to get at, and whether I do it amusingly or not, is not for me to say, but I think that one thing that can come from feeling your way into this viewpoint on the world is a real sort of deep belly laugh at what we are as humans and and how things don't work out for us.

[00:28:40] Chris Duffy: Okay, we're gonna take a short break, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about one of Oliver's favorite jokes of all time. You do not want to miss this.

[00:29:00] Chris Duffy: And we are back. So, Oliver, several of the quotes in your book are surprisingly from comedians, right? You have a Mitch Hedberg quote that, uh, I, I thought was fantastic. A Mitch Hedberg joke about how I, I'm gonna butcher it. But basically, you know, if you're lost in the woods, what you should do is just build a log cabin and live there, you have dramatically improved your situation.

[00:29:19] Oliver Burkeman: “I was lost, but now I live here.”

[00:29:20] Chris Duffy: Yeah, right, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. “I was lost, but now I live here.” Perfect. You got, I missed the punchline. Of course. That's the most important part. Um, that's very funny. But it also hits this kind of profound truth that you're writing about, which is that like where you are is where you are, period.

[00:29:37] Oliver Burkeman: I think that joke is incredibly profound. It's the idea that we're all sort of lost and that setting up home in the middle of that lostness and that lack of control is what we're here to do. I mean, I don't want to put ideas posthumously into Mitch Hedberg’s mind about, but that's what that means to me, and I think it's, it's incredibly deep and also very, very funny.

[00:29:55] Chris Duffy: I feel like this will resonate with you too, is that. I have a friend who's Quaker and he gave me this Quaker phrase, which I, I'm not Quaker, but I have now written and is on my desk, which just says, “Proceed as the way opens.” Because to me that is just, that's all that you can ever do is just take the next step, “Proceed as the way opens.” You don't have to know where you're going.

[00:30:14] Oliver Burkeman: That's fascinating to me. I love that phrase. I was raised as a Quaker, actually, but it's, it's new to me and it feels like a very zen Quaker insight.

[00:30:20] Chris Duffy: So the question I have, though, is when we have this relentless focus on the next step and on action, how do we ever get to rest?

When is it ever okay to not be doing something? Like how do you have a moment where you can draw a line and just be present and, and not have to be moving forward towards something yet again?

[00:30:37] Oliver Burkeman: I think doing can be at least partly a present moment thing, right? Maybe it's inherently and only a present moment thing.

It's not about. Are you getting through the list? I think that it's really important to not only focus, let's put it that way, be realistic about it on all the things left to do, which is effectively an infinite list, right? So if you compare what you are, what you've done to all the things left to do, you're always gonna feel bad because there's always somewhere further to go and more things to do and more actions to take.

But the idea of focusing on what you have done, the simplest way of doing this is literally to keep a done list, right? Just to keep a list during the day where you write down the things that you have completed as you complete them. It just bends your focus back again a little bit to the comparison of what you've done as against zero, right?

Not as against infinity, which is a very depressing place to be. But as against what if I hadn't done anything today? And there's a sort of a discipline that arises from that, which is like, okay, well whatever I do next, I'm gonna be adding it to my done list. So let me choose something. Let me choose something that I can complete and then let me do it so that I can add it in a very satisfying way to this list.

I mean, maybe this is only something that list geeks like myself really find so satisfying. But I think the spirit of it is pretty satisfying. And that's why, you know, there's an even simpler way of so-called productivity technique that I've written about before, which I still return to sometimes, which is literally to get a notebook, write something down on a line that you're gonna do, answer five emails, I dunno.

Make a call, do that one thing, cross it out. Then write the next thing on the line underneath it and do that thing, then cross it out and like this shouldn't work. Right? It's not a plan for the day. It's not a set of goals and visions and quarterly targets or anything like that. And yet there's something very powerful about it because it is this act of sort of settling into your finite nature.

Picking something that feels like the right thing to do. Writing it down inherently requires you to sort of say what what done would look like on some level, getting to that point, and then in a very sort of ritualistic, ceremonial way, crossing it out and letting it go, there's something really powerful about that.

It's very much in tune with who we really are as humans, I think.

[00:32:51] Chris Duffy: Well, I, I love the idea of letting things go and crossing them out, and I also love the idea of just deciding that like, there is a, an amount that is okay for now or for this time, or for today, because I think that for me at least, I can really get into this idea.

Of, I have to do it all. I have to, like, if I maximize all of the time, then I'll be able to write this book in two weeks rather than two months, and that would be better. Both what works and also what makes me happy and have meaning and purpose is when I think about it more as like I'm building a muscle rather than I'm trying to accomplish the task at once.

And so it's like if I just sit down, I mean, my technique for writing is I, I literally will put on a white noise machine and set a timer for 45 minutes and then I just, my role is I just don't get out of the chair. But the trick for me is that 45 minutes, it took a lot of effort to work my way up to 45 minutes of just sitting in the chair, not even actively writing.

Like at first I was like, I could do this for 10, and then eventually I got to 30 and then 45. And I found that honestly, the best days. Once I'm really in my trained zone, I could maybe do two or three of those 45s. But…

[00:33:58] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

[00:33:58] Chris Duffy: …that's the for the course of a whole day, and I find that really what my goal is, just to get myself into the endurance of being able to do that.

That as a goal feels much more tolerable than like, I'm gonna write four chapters today in my book. Even if I was to do it, it, it just burns me completely out.

[00:34:12] Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, no, I think that's really well put. And that number, you know, I've written in this most recent book about this kind of strange three-to-four-hour rule of creative productivity.

That seems to be the sort of optimal amount for pretty much almost anybody, if they have the freedom to do it, to put into their core work. If their work involves thinking or creativity or writing, I don't hit it every day at all. But if you can do sort of three 45-minute periods factoring in a few rests, that's that amount.

You know, it's, and coming back to do that over and over again is infinitely more meaningful and productive than sort of managing to do six or seven hours, two days running, being exhausted, and then just sort of overwhelmed by the prospect of doing another hour on it that you can't be bothered and you'd throw it away for six months.

Right? I mean, that's not the way forward.

[00:35:01] Chris Duffy: You know, we were talking and laughing about the idea of how, how much an audience would hate you if you were standing on stage at a comedy show and talking about how great your life is. And that's certainly true, but I think that sometimes people mistake that idea as like, the audience would hate you because they're jealous of you or because their lives are not, um, good.

And I actually think the truth is that like when, when you are connecting with another person, certainly on stage in comedy, but I think also just off stage when you're having a conversation, right? Like if you really make someone laugh, a lot of times they say, oh, that's so true. That's so true, right? Like, because it, it connects to them.

There there's this feeling that you, and they have seen something or experienced something in, in the same way. And it makes me think about how we often want to present ourselves as perfect as we've got it all together, thinking that will impress other people or bring us closer to them, when in reality, that's the least relatable position you could be at.

If someone comes over to your house and there's not a speck of dirt, it's actually the least relatable thing you could do. And you talk about this idea, which I loved of scruffy hospitality.

[00:36:09] Oliver Burkeman: So this term, scruffy hospitality comes from this Anglican pastor from Tennessee, Jack King, who uses it and tells a story of it in his own life of, you know, him and his wife, enjoying having friends around for dinner, but having such a complicated checklist of things they went through to make the house perfect for visitors.

That it was putting them off, having visitors and his resolution, their resolution to, to start just inviting people to eat, to eat what was in the cupboards and to sit in the kitchen as the kitchen was and to walk over the unmowed lawn, you know, because that actually allowed the thing to take place.

And the sort of idea here, the underlying idea, it's not just that, you know, it's okay to not be perfect about these things, it's that there is more connection usually, when you kind of let your guard down, when you relate to people from a position of openness about flaws. There's fascinating research in imposter syndrome that says that actually the best thing that leaders and mentors can do for younger people in an organization say, is to be honest about their own struggles rather than to sort of provide a perfect role model to inspire you to be like, and one day you could be that perfect, but instead to just be open about the ways in which they don't feel perfect themselves.

I'm always struck in my newsletter, for example, if I write something about what I do when I'm overwhelmed by email or something, I'll get some messages from people kind of surprised that I ever still do get overwhelmed by email, even though, you know, call a newsletter “The Imperfectionist,” and feel like I write quite often about, uh, about my own sort of struggles with these things.

And then secondly, they will be liberated by, on some level by that. Not just in the sense of like, well, if he's overwhelmed by email, I, that gives me permission to just be useless at email, actually liberated to kind of address some more of their email.

Right. It's like there’s something in the freeing this of realizing that we are on some level, all in the same boat, all struggling with these same conditions of modernity. It doesn't make you want to give up. It makes you wanna say, well, okay, I can roll up my sleeves and do my bit because I'm as qualified to do this as anybody else.

So there's something incredibly, there's actually something generous in sharing your imperfections and faults. I think that it's not just that you should be allowed to do it, it's almost a positive good.

[00:38:22] Chris Duffy: And, and also separately, there is something so, um, sweet and also absolutely hilarious about, uh, responding via email to a person to tell them, I'm so glad you shared that you get overwhelmed by email.

I'm sending you this email to say, I really relate to you being overwhelmed by email is a perfect summary of the human condition to me.

[00:38:44] Oliver Burkeman: Yep. Absolutely.

[00:38:45] Chris Duffy: Oliver Burkeman, thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed it.

[00:38:50] Oliver Burkeman: I've really enjoyed it too. Thanks very much, Chris.

[00:38:55] Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Oliver Burkeman. He spent a portion of his 4,000 weeks talking with us here today, and I really, really, really appreciate it. His new book is called Meditations for Mortals and his fantastic newsletter is called “The Imperfectionist.”

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my imperfect newsletter and other projects that are similarly imperfect at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who I am so truly, deeply grateful to spend my weeks with. On the TED side, we've got mortals with the skills of God's Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng. Cloe Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who loved to see an untrue fact die. And on the PRX side, there's a crew whose every move is worthy of deep meditation: I'm talking about Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez.

And of course, thanks to you for listening. You have so many choices for what to do with your time, so many podcasts out there in the world to listen to. Thank you for listening to this one. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more how to be a better human.

Now I cannot promise you 4,000 more episodes, but I can promise that we have got you covered for at least a few more of your weeks. Thank you for listening and please take care.