Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. Today's guest is the brilliant Oliver Berkman, author of the New York Times bestselling 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. I'm an author, podcast host, and parent who built a long career in media. I grew up in a state of perpetual curiosity.
investigating the world and asking a lot of questions. In this show, I chat with culture-defining leaders, thinkers, and experts about this rare moment that we find ourselves in and how to think about our own lives and experiences. within a larger social and spiritual construct. There seems to be this basic idea that if you make a system, including a human life, more efficient, capable of processing more inputs, to put it in light.
abstract general terms well if that supply of inputs is infinite all that's going to happen is that you attract more of them into the system and you end up busier right this is parkinson's law it's induced demand where the way when they widen freeways to ease the congestion it makes the route more appealing to more drivers so more cars come and fill the lane and then it
the congestion gets back to what it was before. There's all these different ways in which trying to get on top of something that you can't actually get on top of is futile. And technology seems to offer that promise. And of course, it does help us do lots and lots of really useful things, but it doesn't help us get to the state of peace of mind with respect to our limited natures, right? It's never going to break through that.
That barrier. So says Oliver Berkman, feature writer for The Guardian and the New York Times bestselling author of 4,000 Weeks. Time Management for Mortals, a book which delivers practical self-help through the lens of philosophical reflection as Berkman questions the modern fixation on getting everything done. We are finite material creatures who only live so long.
About 4,000 weeks, Berkeman tells us, yet we are obsessed with cramming more and more stuff into our days, aided by time-saving technologies that give us the illusion of transcending the ultimate limitation, our own mortality. Our culture has led us to believe that if we just became more efficient, we could optimize our lives enough to bring about greater happiness.
But in an era where busyness has become a virtue, our attempts to drive efficiency ultimately don't yield more time for the meaningful stuff, but rather heighten our sense of anxious hurry as we face and are expected to process.
an incessant stream of inputs. We can only begin to build toward a meaningful life when we embrace our finitude, he advises us. Rather than searching out shortcuts to arrive at our cosmically significant life purpose faster, Berkman tells us to ride the metaphorical bus, allowing ourselves to learn and develop at all the stops along the way.
The universe is not depending on us to maximize our time, he says. And when we fall victim to the siren's call of efficiency culture to avoid the annoying parts of life, we miss out on a whole bunch of the meaningful stuff, too. Okay, let's get to our conversation. Well, I am so pleased to talk to you. Thank you for saying yes. And I read your book, actually read your book.
A while ago, I read it over Thanksgiving at the – my brother, who's a book editor, pressed it into my hands. So for him to also extol a book that's not his – he never gives me recommendations, but he was – Oh, brilliant. very insistent that I read your book and that your book was great. So high praise from someone who is.
Hard to please. Excellent. Very glad to hear it. Yeah. And I feel like the people who talk to me about your book are all people I respect. So clearly you found your audience. I'm really happy to hear it. Yeah, it's been amazing watching it. sort of land with people and resonate much more than I ever expected. So it's great to know that other people are screwed up in a similar way to oneself, you know, when it comes to these issues of time and all the rest of it.
It's so simple, right? This overarching conceit of like, actually, you can number your days like you can even use an actuarial table and probably figure out pretty accurately how many. in your case, weeks, or how many weekends you have with your kids. And yet we're all so loathe to do it, in part because it's knowable. Why do you think we have that aversion? Well, I mean...
It's funny, isn't it? Because yes, you can make a good guess, but you also can't ever really, really know. What we can know is that it's finite. And you can know that it's, in any given case, you know, weekends with your kids or something, you can know that it's a lot fewer.
than you would ever choose if you had any say in the matter. So, I mean, you know, ultimately it's just that we... don't want to accept that we're finite and that we're going to die we can't get our minds around around that idea but i think that sort of on a on a more day-to-day basis there is this kind of it feels uncomfortable to confront these facts because all sorts of kind of...
responsibilities feel like they come with them right so if you if you've only got so much time then it's on you to make the the most of that time and you might not be making the most of it right now and it really matters what you choose to do as against other things what i hope i'm getting at at least by the end of this book is that this kind of stepping into the truth of the matter is it's uncomfortable but it's not a recipe for sort of panic or doesn't need to be a recipe for panic or for
You know, the message of this book is not life is really short. So like freak out every day, trying to fill your days with really memorable things. That is not the message that I want to deliver. It's something much more like, you know.
why don't we just live at the human scale that we that we have been gifted to live rather than making ourselves miserable and busier and less present and all the rest of it by trying to escape that this this truth so i yeah the the title except for partly for commercial reasons might might be slightly
startling or panic-inducing of the book, 4,000 weeks. But I hope the thing I'm trying to say about time is a relief, ultimately. Yeah. Well, I love what you just said, the human scale of it, because... And I loved how the book sort of ventured from this idea of maximizing, which I want to drill into, and this like terrible cultural productivity that we really are enslaved to. And then the way at the end.
you sort of make the point. And I think, you know, this is the week that the web telescope images emerged. It doesn't really matter. Like the universe is not depending on each of us to... maximize our time. There is this human scale that we seem to miss. And so we'll take people on that range. But so let's start at the beginning. I loved... the sort of your conversation, the extended conversation around technology and John Maynard Keynes being like,
this idea originally that all this technology was supposed to liberate us for leisure, right? Like that was the promise, not work more, but actually we could winnow it down to 15 hours a week. of work a week and yet we have managed to expand expectations in a ballooning way. What do you think that that is? Is that just what it is to be human?
I mean, I think ultimately this comes down to a sort of a, the human condition. I think capitalism, consumerism, all sorts of industrialization, all sorts of forces sort of.
piggyback on it and make it worse but i guess that the way to think about it i would say is just this yeah we start with this basic situation that we are finite material creatures who will only live so long can only do so much can only pay attention to so much at a time all these limitations define us as as animals but probably uniquely among the animals we're capable of sort of conceiving of limitless things and infinite things we're capable of wanting to do
far more with our time than we ever could do or feeling more social obligations than a person ever could reasonably fulfill or you know everything like that so we use technology at least in some ways in which you use technology to try to sort of get our arms further and further around these things, the obligations we feel, the things we want to do, the comforts we want to have in our lives, whatever it is, to sort of
extend our reach as these material beings, but the supply of those things is infinite. The supply of demands other people can make, ambitions you can have, emails you can receive, there's no limit to those. technology that's designed to help you get your arms around more of them will never cause you to get to the end of them. And so one of the arguments I try to go into is that I think
this rears its head in different disciplines under different names. But there seems to be this basic idea that if you make a system, including a human life, more efficient, capable of processing more inputs, to put it in like abstract general terms. Well, if that supply of inputs is infinite, all that's going to happen is that you attract more of them into the system and you end up busier, right? This is Parkinson's law. It's induced demand where the way when they widen freeways to...
ease the congestion it makes the route more appealing to more drivers so more cars come and fill the lane and then it the congestion gets back to what it was before there's all these different ways in which like trying to get on top of something that you can't actually get on top of is is futile and technology seems to offer those that promise and of course it does help us do lots and lots of really useful things but it doesn't help us get to the state of peace of mind
with respect to our limited natures, right? It's never going to break through that barrier. Yeah. It's a different scale. You know, at the beginning... You write, consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time. By any sane logic in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time out to feel more expansive and abundant thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is...
nobody's actual experience. Instead, life accelerates and everyone grows more impatient. It's somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven or 10 seconds for a slow-lidding web page. versus three days to receive the same information by mail. It does, it feels like a mismatch, like we are living in a way that is...
not how we're built. And as I read that, I laughed because I was like, that's me, like, refreshing frantically. Yeah, I think that I mean, I think there are different ways you can explain that bizarre phenomenon of how... Time-saving technologies make you feel like time is more scarce than it was before. But I think one simple way to think about it is just that, yeah, they sort of fuel.
this fantasy we have of becoming gods and transcending our human situation and becoming limitless and ungoverned by limits because once you can cook food in two minutes, it starts to seem reasonable that maybe you could cook it the moment you think you'd like some food. It feels like you're very close at that point to being unbound by the human.
situation and i think the there's something very interesting i don't really get into in the book but about the sort of the phenomenology the experience of being online being in social media spaces or other similar spaces and you know the metaverse is going to send all this into overdrive that feels like limitation doesn't apply. It feels like you can find out.
information that about what's happening 4 000 miles away in the blink of an eye it feels like you can present yourself to be any person you want and no one can ever know how it matches up to your to your sort of real life self and so all these things kind of feed this feeling that we're sort of almost there in terms of escaping the human but of course we're not and you still have to
sit in traffic or wait for other people to do things at the speed in their own sweet time or whatever it might be. And so all the ways in which you... haven't yet transcended that thing become much more frustrating because there's still that like gap left to close between this sort of fantasy of of of being sort of
transhuman and the reality. So yeah, I think that's not the only way to understand it, but like we keep being lured with these ways of making it look like we're almost there, almost able to escape our limitations. Hi there, it's Laleh Arakoglu, the host of Condé Nast Traveler's podcast, Women Who Travel. I'm here with our executive producer, Stephanie Karayuki. Hi Laleh, so good to be here. Stephanie and I, we've been talking a lot about the new twists and turns the show has taken.
And sometimes stories that just make you laugh really hard. A big part of Women Who Travel has always been to claim space that has traditionally been taken up by male voices. And that's still true today. And our mission moving forward with this show is to bring to life the travel experiences that you might not have heard while helping you figure out where to go next.
So when you listen to Women Who Travel, you not only support our show, you support the vision behind it to make travel accessible and exciting for all. New episodes come out every Thursday. So make sure you follow Women Who Travel wherever you get your podcasts. You know, it's funny. I lived in New York. I was a magazine editor in New York for a decade before I moved to Los Angeles. And I remember the relief that I felt in Los Angeles because of the traffic.
And that there was suddenly a limiting factor on time, which I know sounds insane. But in New York, there was nothing to stop you. There was no valid excuse from work to drinks to dinner to drinks.
home. I mean, I had no children and I wasn't married, but there was this compulsion to... maximize or fill there was just no reason not to do it and then when you get to LA and you're like well I'm not crossing the 405 at 6 p.m. like there are all these factors where suddenly I was like I have so much more time by virtue of the fact that I can't actually physically do this. I found it very, very liberating. Just that false constraint of traffic, not a false constraint, a real constraint.
Super fascinating and ironic, I guess, that for you, like, the trek westwards. to the American frontier, this whole thing, which is all about the pursuit of unlimited fortune and unlimited, you know. beauty of Hollywood stars and all the rest, you know, all that stuff. It's all like off the charts. But actually for you, that was a move towards limitation. I think that's great. Yeah, no, exactly. But really, you know, you talk in the book about sort of this idea of convenience.
culture and its seduction that by sort of outsourcing or making all of these annoying things so much faster and simpler, which technology obviously grants us. You don't have to sit and labor over a sink full of dishes, although I like doing dishes, but that...
You can do everything and you can do more. And then we end up with this overstuffed life where... time is moving faster i would presume i don't know i don't know well it depends what depends what you mean by time but certainly yes i mean i think the convenience thing it has two related effects one of them exactly as you say is you know makes everything so frictionless that more and more stuff can sort of flood into your life system and and yet you don't as a result of that finish
doing things you don't get to the bottom of any of this the end of any of this it's just that you're more rushed and more stressed than you were this is really easy to see in the case of email which i go on about a bit at length you know right if you if you answer people's emails at a quicker tempo
And you're going to get more replies from those people at a quicker tempo. You're going to get a reputation for being responsive on email and receive more emails. So obviously, you know, utilizing this technology that's supposed to make sending messages.
easier and more convenient is going to result in you spending much more of your time dealing with those messages. And then, yeah, I think the other thing is just that we perpetually end up sort of smoothing away annoying bits of our... lives and then end up losing valuable bits of our lives at the same time and so you know the obvious example there if you're the kind of person like I was when I was writing this book you sort of
works from home and stays at home and often doesn't see anybody for hours in a day. It's not actually all a good thing to be able to order. delivery food without ever interacting with a human being. You know, you think it is because it's like, oh, I don't want to face having to actually have a conversation with somebody. But then you lose one of those little interactions that actually can, to a sort of...
alarming extent can kind of keep you sane and connected for the day. So that's just one example. But I think there's lots of those where we smooth away things that actually we value even if we don't realize that we value them. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this bigger idea, which is that which gets twisted, but is. still sort of the thesis of our lives like the really the only thing we have is time right the thing that has value in our lives is time
And in that way, it becomes, as you call it, instrumentalized. And I thought your description or your definition of capitalism... was one that made so much sense, but it had never occurred to me, where you write, the mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They're very good at instrumentalizing their time for the purpose of generating wealth.
That's the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing.
but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase. I thought that was so beautiful because I think we're so... collectively trapped in that is a myth right and there's such a myth around wealth and of course like i get it being wealthy makes life fundamentally easier safer in many ways but that
Somehow it delivers you to something else is, I think, a terrible cultural myth. Yeah, I think one of the things that really struck me reading into that area when I was writing the book is, you know. It's a bit of a cliche to say that money doesn't bring happiness. And there's a lot of debate about exactly what annual income is the threshold for that. Right. And there's all sorts of arguments about, you know, there's a certain amount of money that.
actually more money does make you happier and then it seems to stop. But isn't it like for an individual it's like $90,000 which is... considerable but after that happiness dwindles it's like and if you're below 55 you right it's actually now it's around it's in those zones so it's like yes every every millionaire in america is like is like streets beyond that
that that level and and plenty of you know people who today merely count as sort of upper middle class are long long beyond that level but it is really contested some people say that that that research doesn't show that etc etc What I thought was so interesting was in some sense, it's not even the fact that you're doing everything for money that is the problem here. It's just the fact that you're doing everything for something other than itself.
And there are particular issues attached to doing that for money. But it's this notion that, you know, even somebody who spurns. The idea of being wealthy because they think it's not virtuous or whatever, but it's still spending their whole life heading towards some future time when... They're going to be able to relax or they're going to have got their lives in working order or figured everything out. They're still in that mindset of everything is for something else.
And of course, we have to do that, right? The reason that you put your clothes in the washing machine and turn it on is because you are doing that in order to get an end result. It's not that you can't. You can live non-instrumentally completely. It's just that sort of total investment in the idea that time's value only comes from what it's leading up to. And obviously, if that is everything you do.
And then eventually your time just stops. Like there's never been a moment in your life when it was, when the payoff came, you know, when the thing you were doing it for arrived. Well, it's so interesting. I mean, going back to that idea of like what you. wanting what you do to matter in some future distant state you know as a fellow book writer or content you know it's like it's this so many people there's a delusion in writing a book if you think that you're writing it
with the hope of having a successful book like yours, right? Like that's very hard to do. Chances are when you write a book, very few people will read it. And if there's no value in the process, if like the act of writing it in of itself is not what matters to you. If you're writing it for some future hope of success, I mean, books and money is a joke. I mean, it's such a hard, anemic business. But people still get lulled into that, right? And you can apply it to almost any industry.
So whether it's money or acclaim or influence, we're all seduced by it. And yet that's a terrible, scary future state promise. Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I don't want to make...
People feel bad for having that element in their motivational setup. It's very human. And I think it can be motivating to a certain extent. I really wanted to target in the book the way that... that seems to just squeeze everything else out so as you say exactly it's it's if if that is why you're doing it then then you're sort of that is the only reason that you're doing it and or that sort of takes over as the only reason why you're doing it then then
you just miss out on on your life and I think about this quite a lot in the context of writing because I feel very deeply like it is a sort of a vocation type thing with me. I've always done it since I was really young. I'm sort of I'm not as pleasant a person to know if I. don't get to do it for a couple of weeks and things like that right it's very central to to to who i am even though that can sound a bit pretentious but on the other hand
Do I enjoy it in the moment of doing it? I think for a lot of the time I don't. A lot of the time it just feels hard and unpleasant. So it's very easy in those circumstances to sort of choose the... the more pleasant fantasy of like well the reason i'm doing this is because it's going to bring about everything i want to have brought about in my life
there's actually something very nourishing about the hardness i think of writing it's hard to get my i'm sure this applies to other things too that it's some the move i'm talking about here is something to do with like coming to terms with the fact that important things things that matter to you feel difficult
And then sort of enjoying the difficulty rather than, as you say, constantly trying to account for them on the basis that they're going to lead to future paradise, which, yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean... It's difficult. The resistance that comes up, it's brutal, I think. I don't know if you're... ever driven under the blankets and tears. I mean, that's my process or part of my process. Unfortunately, like it's not just a joyful experience. And yet, I can't, I have been laid low.
by feedback, et cetera. And it's brutal, but I can't imagine not doing it. Like, this is what I feel like I'm called to do. And this is how I'm supposed to spend my time. Right, right. And this feeds into another, it's a different part of the book where I'm talking about this, but it just makes me think, you know, it's not a coincidence that this thing you really care about is.
also so difficult and uncomfortable it's not just like your bad luck that the thing that the thing that you want to do with your life is unpleasant to do like these this is because i think things that matter to us doing things that matter to us bring us into encounter with our limitations the stakes are high for you because it's something that matters to you but you
can't know that it'll be well received. You can't know that you have what it takes to do it or that you have enough time to meet the deadline, all these things. So in that world of like the stakes are high and I can't control the future and this really matters, things you don't care about.
much more relaxing because like it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter so that that is why i think one of the main reasons why we sort of we want to distract ourselves we want to give in to you sit down thinking you want to write a chapter turns out what you actually want to do is scroll through social media because then you're in this world where you don't have to think about the fact that you've only got a bit of time and you're trying to do something that might work out.
I want to talk about originality because I loved the story of the bus. But before we get to that, I just want to just... linger for a minute about the instrumentalization of time because I think it's so important and this idea as you write that We treat everything we're doing, life itself, in other words, is valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else. And sort of detaching from that, like you talk about...
Krishnamurti saying like I don't mind what happens but that detachment from future states so that we can live in the present do you feel having wrestled with this for I don't know how many years, but it's any book you write is what five years of your life minimum. Do you feel like having a new conscious awareness of like, of being in the moment with that struggle or with time. I mean, like.
you're doing it on a metal level, right? Like you're writing about this construct of time and creating something for the future while doing it in the present. Did that change? Did it change how you live? Yeah. I mean, I think it's definitely been a... slow, ongoing process of change for me and a work in progress. It's not a sort of lightning bolt and then everything changes. I do describe a sort of a lightning bolt moment in the book on an intellectual level when I was sitting on a park bench.
Brooklyn and suddenly realized that all the things I was trying to get done by the end of the day were just completely impossible and what a relief it was to realize that that was just beyond possibility. And I didn't need to beat myself up for not being able to do it and struggle to find a way to try to be able to do it because it wasn't possible. So that was a sort of confrontation with finitude that did change me in a sudden way.
But no, yeah, mainly it's just that sort of drops of water eroding a stone or whatever. One of the things I find... is that I still do get into sort of anxious ruts of thinking that like the stakes are incredibly high and I've got to get something right and I've got to fit something in or it's all terrible, but I'm much quicker now.
that I like realize I'm doing that, that thing. And remember that, you know, in almost every case that it happens, the stakes are not high and it doesn't matter. And then there is, there is more enjoyment to be had in there. in the present there's more meaning to be found in the present moment i also think you know we can talk about parenthood or not it's some people are
People who are parents are obsessed with it and people who are not parents are really annoyed to have to listen to long conversations about it. But I became a father just after getting started with this book and then had to put it on pause for a good couple of years at least. And I think...
There are certainly ways in which that experience sort of brings an awful lot of this. Not so much that it's a completely different experience from what people have who are not parents, but that it makes a lot of universal truths much harder to ignore about.
the limitations of time and the fact that everything is changing all the time and that what relationships really benefit from is just you're actually being present rather than you're figuring out the right way to do the relationship and things like that right that that a child's life is simply to be a child and not even though we think of it as like again
something to instrumentalize like child's job is to grow up and you write about it as like no actually right it's very easy it's very easy yes it's very easy to slip into that mindset that what you're doing as a parent is trying to create the right future adult. And, you know, you do have to give some thought to that. But they kind of do it on their own. But they kind of do it on their own. And if you give too much thought to it, then you poorly serve that.
that goal and you miss out on the whole relationship. So, yeah. Yeah. No, certainly. I mean, my kids are older than yours, but when they were, when my first child was a baby and then you get that app that like.
indicates that they're going through a phase and you're like oh wow this is like coded into who they are naturally right like yeah they're just gonna do this like they're gonna walk and they're gonna talk and like i don't there's no you're reminded that you're important obviously essential to their existence and yet not important at all like this is how nature is programmed yes and that your job is yeah your job is to be there and
water the plants, as it were, rather than to figure out the strategy. To make them grow. Yeah, exactly. Do you feel, so I'm writing a book and one of the things I'm writing about is sloth and women. And you talked about it as this being a heartbreaking, you were talking about the labor.
the labor mills in Massachusetts back in the 19th century. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lovely quote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go on. That's such a lovely quote. Do you remember it or do you want me to read? No, you read it. I'll get it wrong. So you were talking about how this work week was then engineered to support.
theoretically, rest for labor, right? And that's sort of how we think about it. And so you write, but there's something heartbreaking about the 19th century Massachusetts textile workers who told one survey researcher what they actually longed to do with more. time to quote unquote, look around to see what is going on. I don't know why that moves me so much, but it still does. Yeah, absolutely. It's so beautiful. Yeah.
But it's this like automation or this idea that we're machines, really, and that we should be resting to work rather than resting. With no instrumental value, just resting. Yeah. And so you end up with this very strange situation where we sort of condemn as wasted time or idleness.
Maybe sloth, I don't know. That's a fascinating way of thinking about it. You know, precisely anything that doesn't serve future purposes. In other words, precisely anything that brings us fully into... the presence of the moment so it's like everything that isn't wasting time counts as wasting time and everything that counts as not wasting time is kind of wasteful of
our present moment experience. It's a strange situation. It's a paradox. Yeah. All right. I want to go back and pick up that thread around originality and the process of any creative or artistic. adventure and it was arno it was a finnish photographer right arno minikin minikin and yeah i think he's i think he's american finnish origin okay yeah yeah yeah
Yeah. Can you talk about sort of like his instruction for students and this idea that originality lies on the far side of unoriginality? Sure. Yeah, he tells this story, which I guess I'll just try to summarize. He, he compares, he uses the analogy of the, the bus network in Helsinki capital Finland, which is in his telling has the situation where all sorts of bus routes start from the same.
platform at the bus station and for the first few stops they they go to the same stops as each other and he says like imagine that each bus stop is like a year in your career as a photographer and you ride on the bus for a year you collect a bunch of you do a bunch of work you do a bunch of photographs and you take them to a gallery and the gallery the person at the gallery doesn't like them because they're just totally derivative
of some famous other photographer. So you go back to the bus station and you get on a different bus line and you do a different kind of photography. You go off in a different direction, different kind of approach. And the same thing happens after a year.
or one bus stop. It's hard to keep track of this analogy. You get told that no, this was also derivative work. It's too much like somebody, some other famous established photographer. So you go back to the bus station, you do the same thing again. And his point is that we're, you know, what we don't realize is that in those early stages of a career, you're going to be stopping at the same bus stops as other people have stopped at before, because they are the stages of going through.
creative sort of maturation the the thing you need to know is that after the first few stops all these different lines in the helsinki bus system branch off into
new original places and they go off to individual destinations that no other bus route goes to. So the moral of this story is that you have to stay on the fucking bus, right? You need the patience through that phase in your... creativity i think it probably applies to other to sort of things that we don't think of as creativity as well where you are sort of
producing things that are a bit like other people's or it feels like you're just doing the common thing. You're not sort of distinguishing yourself in some unique way in order to get to the originality that lies on the far side. of yeah of unoriginality it's a little bit related to that very famous quote that goes around from ira glass the radio host and producer about how in the early days of people making
They think it's terrible because their taste is really well developed, but their abilities are running behind their taste. So they're actually judging themselves more harshly than they... than they should. You just have to go, you have the patience to go through that phase where you're figuring out what it is. And I don't think that's just on the level of a career and being young. I think it's also like, it's in the early stages of any project as well. I think it's sort of...
yeah recapitulates the whole the whole thing once again so like even if i'm writing an email newsletter or something quite often i'm like these notes don't seem like something i haven't written before or something that hasn't been said before the answer is not to start again. The answer is to keep developing them. Yeah. And that it's not a waste of time, right? Like I think we're also, we get...
one, fixated on time as the finite, valuable thing that has to be maximized. And then we become extremely fearful of, quote unquote, wasting it. And we start searching out shortcuts. Or ideas that we can maximize it or get there faster. We should be farther along. It all becomes very distorted. In the same way, like, and this, I love the. I love that idea of like you stay on the fucking bus because you think about any trade too that requires mastery, science, medicine.
You don't skip med school. You don't skip your residency. This is what it is to learn. This is what it is to develop.
And then you can move the profession forward. You can create patents. You can re-engineer surgeries for better outcomes. I think it even applies to things like, you know, as I say in the book, things like friendships and... relationships that there's often a it's maybe not quite the identical point but there's often this kind of pressure to do the unconventional thing to not stay in your hometown to not get
married fairly young you know at least these days there's a strong pressure to be like to be remarkable and there's an argument i i didn't follow it in terms of either staying in my hometown or getting married young but i think there is an argument that that's a similar process right it's like if you've if you've got the willingness to actually do something that it seems a bit conventional that can be the path to feeling deeply embedded in a place
or getting to the stage in a long-term committed relationship where it is remarkable and unique in itself. So there's a broader point here about not feeling that you have to do something out of the ordinary.
necessarily to as on the path to your sort of deep unique contribution and experience yeah i think about my own career and i'm more i'm certain Oliver, I'm more woo-woo than you are, but that you can look back at sort of your trajectory and where you've gone and walked and in moments where you're like, this feels backwards or like not exciting or not glamorous.
And recognize like, well, I learned critical skills there. I met like invaluable people. I would never have that perspective in a way that only, again, hindsight is 20-20. But like if you have a little bit more faith. And patience, difference between patience and waiting, patience being having no expectations of where you're going. Sometimes you end up exactly where you need to be.
And I loved, I thought this was, and I believe everyone has their own specific purpose to do it into the world. I really do. And I think that everyone's, everyone. matters in a significant way. But I loved the end, where you talk about sort of the grandiosity of people's grandiosity and this belief that each of us has some cosmically significant. life purpose i'm quoting you which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill
which is why it's useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth that what you do with your life doesn't matter all that much. And when it comes to how you're using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not. care less. So I'm like, I might push on you, but I think that's a grounding principle that I think is also important. Like, everyone calm down, right? It's the egocentricity bias. Is that what it's called?
yeah and you know i'm i'm i definitely think that this idea of how insignificant each of us is and the universe not caring i think it's it's true and it's an important sort of corrective to that sort of notion that the whole of history was leading up to your life my birth definitely yeah i'm not sure that that means the inverse is untrue right i'm not sure that i think there's something very interesting in the idea that like there's something very true isn't there about the idea that like
none of us are special and all of us are special and that is not i believe right that is not just a like facetious paradoxical statement there's there's a there's a there's something very true in that we're not we're all special but we're not special we're not special in virtue of being special because everyone is special and i think that's part of
What I'm sort of hoping to do in that section is, I think, is to say that actually, if you can let go of this burdensome notion that you're supposed to like stand out. from everybody else and live a life that is exceptional in the sense of most people don't try to live that kind of life, but you did great. You know, if you can let go of that a bit, it actually enables you
To embrace the real sense in which you're special, right? Because it may be for some people that fame or doing things that affect millions of people or launching companies that change everything. in an industry or something that might be their thing, but you can absolutely be, be doing your special unique thing in, in some way that is much more.
I mean, I'm sure you agree with this from what you said, but like, you know, it's much more obscure or much more looks like looks like something normal and unremarkable to the to the to the world of, you know. fame and social media and social comparison and all the rest of it and if you're going through life thinking like meaning meaningfulness in life requires that I do like unusual things then
You actually rule out from being meaningful all sorts of things that you might be doing or might want to do. And as a society, right, we come to sort of hugely devalue things that are... Absolutely critical and meaningful and important and just don't happen to be noteworthy because people have been doing them for centuries and millennia and stuff, yeah. Well, I think it's why we're having a meaning crisis, because people assume that...
the only life worth living or the life that has the most value is the one where you're going out to change the world, which is such a, in some ways, insane idea. And I think that we're collectively... need a right sizing or human scaling back to really the only thing that you can do is change yourself change your relationships you can be a more
compassionate loving present parent and that's really like that's where the ripple that's where the ripple that changes the world comes from it doesn't come from changing systems of law. I mean, certainly for some people, sure. But like, I think we all know anyone who's had sort of that brush of scaled success, right? Where you're like, wow, I did something that affected people.
that's momentary, right? It's not, it doesn't feed your soul in perpetuity. Yeah, no. And I've certainly, you know, I mean, this book has done well, but books doing well is not, it's not like a... multi-million person phenomenon as you know but but but it has sort of I do get a little bit of a sense of that sort of scale of things and
It's just like, there's just no question that it is individual contacts with individual people who've found something resonant in there that it is what makes my day, right? I mean, a sales number doesn't really... do that but uh but uh but an email from somebody who for whom what something i've written sort of plays into where they're at in their lives in a helpful or useful way that's like i'll think about that for ages and
Yeah, absolutely. I think it does ultimately come down to those individual contacts. It's not that there's anything wrong with being the person who becomes a prominent activist and changes leads.
massive change in the laws it's it's there's something wrong with the definition of meaning that places that as the the canonical form of a meaningful yeah life and of course you know this is a cliche, but the people who we think of as the greatest paragons of doing those things at scale, you know, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, like in their writings and their...
speeches and their model thing their lives they absolutely didn't promote any notion that like everyone has to be really unusual or extraordinary or like that that's not that's not what the the essence of those people's messages is it's just happened to be that you know history placed them at the vanguard of those of those things and they they rose to the to the moment but it's not you know
The people who are doing that out of the best intentions don't believe that everybody's cosmic purpose is to change the world for millions of people. That's not the point at all. No. Not at all. But it's interesting. It's like that paradox of no one is special and everyone is special, which is exactly this need, this very human need.
to rank ourselves or compare ourselves, particularly at moments in time. And it's like, you kind of need a longer snapshot. It's also that Jewish teaching story about the two pieces of paper in two pockets. You know that? You know what I'm talking about? Please. I mean, I'll get it wrong, but there's some famous historical account of a rabbi, I think, who carried a piece of paper in each of his two pockets, one of which said, I'm nothing but a speck of dust. And the other one says,
for me the universe was created and it's a question of like holding these two truths together and consulting consulting each piece of paper as a corrective when you're when you're too far off the other way i'm sure anyone with a deep familiar deep familiarity with judaism will
We'll say I've got that wrong somehow, but I think I'm getting the gist. Yeah. Well, as my friend and I say about some people, it's like, I'm the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around. It's common. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What was the impetus for this book? Like, what was the question? I mean, I think both this book and the one I wrote some years ago about... positive thinking and negative the benefits of negative thinking i think you if you didn't care about any selling any copies of them you could have i could have called them like you know my my philosophy of life as it as it currently stands you know just sort of it's like i i don't really know how i could write a book other than just trying to figure out
what what it's all about right i mean i think it's there are sort of acts of self-therapy and they are the things that are consuming you at that moment and that period in your life and so it's a bit of a cheat because yeah
if you have to say what this book is about, it's about time, but like everything is, everything happens in time. Time is time is the medium through which in which everything unfolds. So, you know, Once again, I think it's just a cunning strategy that I've been following all through my career as a journalist as well to get to remain a generalist about things and just talk about the meaning of life.
sort of you have to focus it a little bit otherwise otherwise your books and articles are just called like the meaning of life That doesn't work, but that's pretty much the agenda, I think, really. I mean, in this case, it was just like, yeah, this feeling of needing to wait until I was sufficiently in control, I felt in control of my life.
and and of time that i could do everything that was asked of me and not feel emotionally vulnerable and like just all this this seeing the illusory nature of that and that actually like entering into life meant confronting these limitations and these sort of inevitable vulnerabilities and all the rest of it. You know, that was what I was going through when this book germinated. Yeah. Well, writing books is painful.
And wonderful. And it's an amazing privilege to accept in advance also to go and probe the questions. Yeah. You know, the curiosities and the questions that are, to do the therapy. I think it is. Any book that's not a therapeutic process, I don't quite understand. It's so probing. Yeah, no, it's true. And I think people occasionally say, I think you're just writing about the things you struggle with yourself. And I'm like...
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Right. The question is what's going on in the minds of people who write like biographies of Hitler, right? The question is not what's going on in the minds of people who write about how can we be a bit happier and saner in the world. Like, of course, we're all struggling with that. Yeah. No, but it is an interesting question to give your life, four or five years of your life, to probing the mind of someone who's very disordered. Right. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.
So at the end of his book, Oliver writes, You might imagine, moreover, that living with such an unrealistic sense of your own historical importance would make life feel more meaningful by investing your every action with a feeling of cosmic significance, however unwarranted. But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high.
It suggests that in order to count as having been well spent, your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations or at the very least. that it must, in the words of the philosopher Ido Lando, transcend the common and the mundane. Clearly, it can't just be ordinary. After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe,
How could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it? And I love that sentiment, just again, going back and forth from... Creating the right context, the right human scale for our lives. I think the pressure that we each feel to make such a significant difference isn't always... realistic or founded or necessary. I think being good to ourselves, to our loved ones, our children, our communities, that seems to me to be the more
admirable place to start. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next week. You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at theelisepodcast.com. Please sign up for my newsletter. I promise I won't spam you. Or follow me on Instagram at Elise Lunen to get updates on new episodes. This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio. If you enjoyed this episode, Please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread. Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey.
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