Oliver Burkeman on Time Management for Mortals

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman, and I'm happy to say this is Oliver's third time on the One You Feed podcast. He's a British journalist and writer based in New York and is well known not only for his amazing books, he also wrote a popular weekly column on psychology called this column Will Change Your Life, which was printed weekly between two thousand six

and two thousand twenty. Today, Oliver and Eric discussed many things, including his new book four thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. Hello Oliver, welcome to the show, or welcome back to the show. I should say thank you very much for having me back time number three. You are in a rarefied guest country at this point, there's only a few three time guests. There's only a few. Wasn't my first appearance, like near the birth of this thing. Yes, you were

probably in our top ten or fifteen guests. And I was so excited when you said yes, because the title of your book the anecdote Happiness for people who hate positive thinking. I was like, I have got to talk to this guy. And so, yes, you were very early and I have always appreciated your willingness to have us on. And then you and I after that met up to have coffee in New York City one time, like within about six months after that. Oh yeah, it's all come

back to me now. Yeah, I'm very tired these days since I became a father, But I do vaguely remember all of these things in one way or another. I very much remember that first introducer. Yeah. That. So we are going to be talking about your wonderful new book which is called four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals, which is a a great idea, But before we go into it, you are going to get crack number three

at the wolf pair. No one knows what you said the first two times, Well something there might be a couple of might be a couple of photographic memory guests up or listeners out there are like, I know exactly what he said, but we can rest assured that the vast, vast majority of people have no idea, but we have a parable and it goes like this. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed so I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's such a strange parable.

In some ways it strikes me because well, maybe I just mean I didn't know that I agree with it. I don't know. I I feel that my journey over the last sort of I don't know, decade or more in my personal life and in my work has been all to do with trying to sort of explore and let back in kind of shadow sides and darkness and not trying to push them away. That's not the same

as the question of feeding, I suppose. So I guess what I'm really thinking about right now as I sort of let that idea permeate me, is just this notion of trade offs that has become so central to my thinking about time and meaning in life, right that to do one thing is to not do a million other things with a given portion of time, or something like that.

There are choices to be made, and we cause a lot of trouble for ourselves and other people, and we try to find ways of feeling like we don't have to make choices. And I guess choice is pretty fundamental to that parable. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. I think I could probably go on and on for hours,

but I'm not sure that would be any benefit to anybody. Well, I think that that's a great way of taking us right into one of the parts of this book, which is you call it facing finitude, right facing the fact that we have a finite amount of time. And then if we truly do face that, if we look at it head on, then we have to make some difficult choices, or we are inclined towards certain difficult choices. So that

might be a great place for us to jump off. Yeah, I think that there's a way of talking about all this stuff that sometimes it's very dramatic. It's about sort of staring death in the face and stepping into an authentic life in a way that takes a huge amount of courage and guts, and I you know, I think that's important stuff, but I'm not sure I am particularly

expert at any of it. I think of this as much to do with being a very sort of ground level, day to day idea that, as I say, you know, we invest far more energy I think than we realize, and far more of our focus on trying to escape certain feelings on trying not to feel certain things. I mean, in a way, this is the core insight of you know, the whole tradition of psychoanalysis, right, the idea that the things we don't want to confront, our efforts to not

confront them structure our lives in many ways. And I think one key way is we don't want to confront the ramifications of having finite time and what that means for how we need to live our days and make choices and prioritize, and so a lot for example, as I write in the book, you know a lot of kind of conventional productivity advice and time management advice. I think you can see it as kind of enabling this delusion, enabling this fantasy that we could be limitless. It's not

really helping us make choices in our lives. It's it's sort of helping us deceive ourselves that we might not have to make those choices. So for me, it's all the question of just coming back and back and back in a very sort of as I say, ground level, day to day way to what it means to be a finite creature. You talk a lot in the book about this idea of relating to time as an instrument,

to relating to time as something we have. But fairly early you also talk about this idea that it's not that we have time or we get time, but that in some sense we very much are time. Can you share a little bit more about that, right, Yeah, these are the kind of very fundamental stances that one can

adopt towards time. Time is an incredibly mysterious quantity when you start to really try to focus on what it is and the natural way I think that many of us relate to it, especially in the modern world, is

it's a bit like money or some physical possession. You know, it's something that you that you have and that is yours to spend, and that it therefore makes sense to use it as well as you possibly can and not to waste it and all the things that follow from that idea of the use relationship, and we have to

do that with our time. I am not suggesting that it is possible or desirable to just completely give up thinking about time in those terms, but it doesn't quite account for what time really is in all its meanings, and so actually, if all you do is relate to time that way, I argue, anyway, you end up sort of constantly living only for the future, placing the whole value of life in the time that you're leading up to. You know, whatever your goals are, it's when you reach

your goals. It's when you finally live in the kind of place you want to live, or have the job you want to have, or have the relationship you want to have. That's when life is suddenly going to acquire It's it's real, real meaning. And that's a sort of terrible way to live, obviously, because you're never present for life itself. And so there are these other ways of thinking about time which I think are at least as true.

The idea that it's not ours to use, but that we sort of just live in it, or even as you say, you know, we live as it. It's a very odd thought to get your mind around. But this idea that sort of to exist is to exist as a little portion of time from your birth to your inevitable death. It's there in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

I've encountered it in some Zen writing. It makes a kind of intuitive sense, even if it's very very hard to sort of get a very precise handle on it, and it sort of changes the game because if you are time rather than have a certain portion of time to use this idea of trying to master your time, get on top of it all, it doesn't. It stops

making so much sense. It starts to become much more appealing as a notion that you would just sort of think back into the reality of your time and maybe sort of drop that sense of always being in a in a struggle with it. But we are very much at the limits of language, I feel when we're when we're talking about this stuff, it's it's incredibly hard to

be super precise about it. Those ideas are echoed in a fair amount of certain zen ideas, particularly some of the work Dogan did, and this idea, and you're right, it does kind of bump you up against the limits of language. More traditionally, you bring up the idea of four thousand weeks, which is about the average amount of time that the average human will have to live, the average amount of time that the average human, Well, I wonder if I could average using the word average one

more time. I think that's right, that's right books for me. The gist of my question stands, let's talk about four thousand weeks. So partly I wanted to give the book a title that would grab people's attention. I think there's a risk that it grabs their attention and throws them into such a panic that they don't want to read my book, which would be a commercial, commercial error. But I think the real import of that is simply that our lives are finite, and that they are very short

compared to how we might go about thinking of them. Obviously, many people get more than that number of weeks, and many people get fewer, and you can't know what side of it you'll be on, but whatever you get, it's not a high number, just sort of intuitively compared to what you might think. And if you sort of as I did, ask your friends off the top of their heads, you know, don't do any mental math. Just tell me how many weeks do you think the average human can live?

They will come up with like six figure numbers, wildly off base, which I think is very natural because it does not seem like very much at all. So that's really just the starting point for an exploration of what it means to be finite. And it's really interesting to hear you say, I think you're right. That's a more conventional way of talking about time than this idea of

being time. And yet they do come together somewhere, because it is somehow to do with the fact that you know fully accepting or as fully as I've been able to who knows what lies ahead of but like to somewhat fully accept that truth of your finitude is to step more deeply into that experience of like being time.

It's to sort of give up this back door, unconscious fantasy that there might be a way to sort of get out of this situation, there might be a way to sort of maneuver yourself into a position where you could do everything where you weren't just existing from moment to moment with no control of what happens next, where you were sort of kind of a god over time. And the more that you sort of are able to surrender that, the more it feels like you do drop

back into the reality of the moment. I don't know, We've gone very swiftly into the deepest stuff, which I like, but it's it's it's fun. Yeah, yeah, fancy that. You make an interesting point, though, because in the book you talk about we're recognizing the limit of our time is important facing up to that reality, and yet you're not really advocating that what we do then is try and grab life and time by the throat and you know, suck the marrow out of every day and make every

moment the most precious it can be. You're not really

advocating that that is the response. No, absolutely, And I'm really glad you make that point, because I think it is so easy to go from these reflections on finitude straight into like, Okay, well, if I'm not like base jumping every weekend and you know, leaving my conventional job to do something radically strange and unconventional and all the rest of it, and I'm not really building a meaningful life, there's that confusion of meaningful with extraordinary that seems to

come very quickly when you go down that route. I think in some subtle way, I didn't really quite get there in the book, but it's coming to me now. I mean, in some subtle way, that kind of overly self conscious carp a d M kind of stance towards time, I think probably is another attempt to kind of find

an escape from the reality of our limitations. Right, it is an attempt to say, well, you know, at the very least I will have lived like one of the most extraordinary lives of anyone in my generation, or at the very least I will have left the kind of legacy that echoes down the centuries after I'm I'm gone, I will in some way have kind of broken the rules of the sort of non negotiable part of just

being a limited human. So it's still kind of a resistance, it's still a little bit of a resistance to to where we really are. And so it is my guests, this is not research based or survey based, but it is my guests that people who spend large chunks of their lives really sort of ostentatiously trying to suck the marri out of life. In that way, it's not maybe

the real central meaning of life. And by the same token, you know, we can all point to things in our own lives that we consider incredibly meaningful, things to do with family relationships, parenthood, friendship that are literally like the most universal and in a sense mundane experiences that a human being can have, and yet are totally in one

way or another, very often the highlights of people's lives. Yeah, this takes us again to go kind of into the deep water, but into this idea of you call it cosmic insignificance therapy, which is such a great name. I don't know whether you are licensing therapists in this particular mode of whether it's research space, but tell us about cosmic insignificance therapy. You're giving me ideas. I need a certification program. That's what I'm going to do, exactly exactly.

So I just used this term to refer to these sort of surprising benefits that I think there are when it comes to building a meaningful life and experiencing life is meaningful, to really paying attention to how, yeah, how insignificant we are by by many measures. Four thousand weeks seems short, but it seems short partly and especially when placed against the timeline of the world, or the history

of the world, or cosmic time. Billions of eons are stretching off in every direction, and here you are for like no time at all. It's very hard to feel like that really matters. But I think there two ways to just sort of sum up what I think is so liberating about that and not liberating in a nihilistic way.

So not liberating in the sense of like nothing matters, so might as well party, but liberating in the sense that, firstly, the kinds of decisions that tend to paralyze us in life about you know, what we ought to do and whether we can risk certain choices in career and relationships and elsewhere, they've become a lot easier to do when you sort of lower the stakes in this way, when you really understand that nobody in two hundred years time one time is going to care which decision you made

about a certain question, then it's actually easier to be bold and to take risks and to and to sort of find the courage that you need to make those changes. It's like, well, might as well, because the downside is not what you had imagined it was that somehow the whole future of the universe depended on whether you got this right or not. And then also, I'm borrowing here from the work of a philosopher called Hido Landau, whose

work I really admire. There's also this question that it calls into question the definition of a meaningful life criteria of meaning that we're using. It shows that there's something a little bit strange about saying that the only meaningful way to spend your life is the kind of life that you know, Steve Jobs put, it leaves a dent

in the universe. I think a lot of people have, for example, in creative work, they have this kind of background thought that if their work is not ultimately celebrated as some of the greatest ever produced by humanity, then they've kind of failed. And they probably also think it isn't going to be so they sort of already have failed. And none of this, All of these are very strange. Like this is to put the bar for a meaningful life at an incredibly high place. It comes up also

in the environmental activism. Right if the only thing that counts is saving the planet from climate change in a sort of overall way, if then sort of, you know, helping restore some woodland or some wetlands down the street from you becomes completely meaningless. But of course it isn't completely meaningless. And of course cooking nutritious meals for your children night after night isn't a meaningless way to spend

your life. These are all meaningful ways, and so this idea of cosmic and significance therapy, it suggests that maybe we need to re examine the threshold that we're applying for what counts is using life meaningfully, and that that might actually make us see that all sorts of things we are already doing a very meaningful ways to spend I think this question is a really important one, which is how do we and as I'm using the word, I'm recognizing it as an instrumentalist approach. How do we

measure meaning? Because exactly what you said, if we're like, well, I want my life to have impact, that's a big word people use. I want to have impact. And I hear people all the time saying like I want to help a million people. I'm like, well why million? Why not eight? Eight four thousand or eight thousand or two? Or where is the line? Where is the line where

you go, oh, this has been successful? And you talk about it in time management that even if we buy some miracle wrangle the confines of our current life under some sort of time management, we just move the goalpost by adding more in. It never ends. And I think

this idea. When we start to think about meaning as something that has to hold up to some grand scale, then it gets really hard hard to figure out so I think how we are defining and thinking about meaning is so important and yet really really difficult to wrap our heads around, particularly in the light of cosmic insignificance therapy.

Or you know, I spent the weekend visiting my father who's in a memory care unit, and you go and you see the number of people there and the amount of suffering that's there, and it's essentially infinite, and so, yeah, how do we think about making a meaningful life? And so how for you does cosmic insignificance therapy? How do you find turning towards it as a relief and a gift versus it feeling like a vacuum of doom? Yeah, if you haven't used that term yet, that's an Oliver

Berkman term right there, if I've ever heard one. Yeah, two ways, both sort of each relating to the different parts of it that I was speaking about before you picked up. I think on the most important one. But firstly, maybe this is not everyone. Maybe I have sort of grandiose,

narcissistic tendencies that that go beyond the norm. But for me, I can get incredibly caught up in in decision about things or anxiety about certain outcomes where my anxiety, when I examine it, really does seem to imply that I am the center of the universe and that and that terrible things are going to happen for the whole of reality if I get this decision wrong. I mean just absurd,

just completely ridiculous. And so this is a very good corrective to that, because you are reminded that, like you know, it doesn't matter on that long term scale. Honestly, it

doesn't matter on a on a short term scale. As a journalist, when I'm sort of late with a deadline, or even when I was writing this book and I knew that various editors and my agent was sort of quite keen that I should finish it, it's very hard not to sort of mentally picture all these people pacing their houses totally consumed with the question of what I'm

doing at that moment, and it's obviously cless right. Even even within our own little social worlds are grandiosity or well, my grandiosity runs runs rampant, and so it's incredibly useful to just be reminded that, you know, you're not such a big deal. In my experience, it doesn't lead to sort of low self esteem and misery. It leads to being freer to just get on with doing the things

that count that matter. And then I guess the other is, yet, as you say, right or imply, you know, you don't want a standard of meaning that says that those moments that you shared with your father were not worth doing because you didn't managed to sort of assuage the suffering of everyone in the place completely or you know, thousands and thousands of other people across the world who have

the same experiencing similar suffering. So in that respect, I guess it just sort of it's a reminder that not to kind of dismiss small things from my day to day, my daily routines, just just because they don't have that kind of level of grandeur to them. Measuring it is

a very interesting question. I think it is ultimately has to be a sort of an intuitive thing, but I think there are ways to sort of hone that intuition and sort of questions you can ask that helped clarify I guess, whether whether something is meaningful even if it's

not sort of outwardly impressive or revolutionary world changing. Yeah, these are such tricky questions when you get into trying to figure out, Yeah, what's meaning I'm going to jump to a completely different place here, but that somehow feels

connected to me. Whether it actually is in reality, I don't know, but that place is One approach to thinking about the limited amount of time we have is to say, well, I've got to make every minute matter, right, But you also talk about the incredible importance and beauty in doing things that in essence don't matter for any other reason

except doing them absolutely. I think this is another place where the pursuit of using time well, using it on the things that matter, can really trip us up, because it becomes very easy to live entirely in the mode of doing things for future benefit, for future accomplishment. It's very obvious in work projects, but it happens in leisure

time too, right. It's it's very easy to sort of turn your entire leisure time into sort of meeting certain fitness goals or running in a marathon, or even just like reading your way through a certain set of certain area of literature. And then in parenting, I think it's incredibly hard to resist that belief that what you're really doing and the measure of what you're doing is only whether sort of successful adults emerged from the process of

raising a child. Again in all cases, not that these things are wrong, but that they neglect the idea of value in the moment and side really influenced by the work of a philosophical cure and satire who wrote a great book called Midlife, and he has this notion of what he calls the at activity right, that the pursuit that you do for itself alone, that you never sort of get to the point where you have completed it.

He gives the example, and I expand on the example in my book because it's very relevant and close to my heart. Of hiking. You don't go hiking in order to get anywhere. You don't expect to reach a point in your life. When you've done all the hiking you planned to do, you will stop at some point age or frailty or the end of your life will mean that you can't hike anymore. But it won't be because you have got through the hiking that you intended to

get through. None of these things makes sense applied to going on a hike. Efficiency really doesn't make any sense. If you wanted to do a hike most efficiently, you should just stay home and never go in the first place. So it really shows that if you're somebody who finds that experience fulfilling, it must be for itself alone. It

must be because it matters to you. Now, people since I published the book of pointed out that there are exceptions here, like going hiking in order to generate huge numbers of wonderful photographs to burnish your image on social media, and there's a social hiking app. I think that's just to looked specifically for people to sort of compete about the number of miles that they've walked. So you know, you can ruin anything you can you really want to. But just to get into this spirit, I think is

the thing. It's not about people should go hiking. It's about is there something in your life that you do just because there's a real sense of meaning in the moments that you're doing it. I don't think our whole lives, whole days can be like that realistically, but I completely agree with you that I think it's really important to have things we do in life for no other reason except to do them. I have thankfully managed to make

guitar kind of this way for me. I've managed to mostly strip the striving out of it, the desire to make something out of it. I've noticed that there's a process of getting better, of increasing mastery that feels good. But it's just that it feels good. I'm not doing it because of the end result. I'm actually doing it because the satisfaction of like, oh jeez, like I couldn't play that five minutes ago, now I can. It feels

really nice. So I recognize that, and and I am one of those people who will turn any hobby into a job if you give me the chance. I have to work against it. The flip side of this, though, that I think about, though, is that there are definitely and maybe this is again me having a measuring instrumentalist type mindset to it, but there seems to be a difference to me in lowest common denominator hobbies like playing

Best Fiends. They're a sponsor of the show playing Best Fiends for four hours a day versus you know, playing guitar for four hours a day. And so how do you navigate or think about navigating that, Like, Well, I want to do things just because I like doing them, but I also don't want to do things that are the equivalent of I think a guest once said, cotton candy entertainment, like, you know, it tastes sweet in the moment, but afterwards you're like, oh, that isn't so good. But

that's where the attention economy drives most of us. Ye know, that's a really good distinction. I mean, I think what I want to say in response to it is that I don't think there's many activities, even of the cotton candy kind, that are never the sort of appropriate thing to be doing with your time, and that there are obviously times when you're sort of really tired and it's just a question of finding a mellow place psychologically to recharge.

When those things can be totally legitimate, there are forms of them that don't actually relax you at all, and that you probably can do with sort of eliminating from life completely. But I don't think that they necessarily need to have mastery or the potential for mastery built in. I don't think they need to be necessarily socially valorized, you know, celebrated as as as good things to do.

I really like, and I may have mentioned this in our previous conversation, come to think of it, because it's been so important to me. But I really like this question that James Hollis, the Union psychotherapist, talks about primarily in the context of making big life choices, but I think you can apply it in a much broader context, which is whether a given choice or direction or activity

enlarges me or diminishes me. Very sort of poetic language that can feel hard to grab hold of at first, but I think that if you get a feel for that, you can almost always answer that in some way. So you can, even just on a very low level, you can see that a certain kind of idle activity on some level. It's not that you're growing towards some achievement level. It's just that it just feels like juicy and generative

and growth is involved somehow. But I'm not sure if that's quite the right word, because I don't want to slip back into thinking that it's about, you know, achieving certain levels of accomplishment. It just feels like it's got some sort of forward motion in it. It doesn't feel stagnant, it doesn't feel stale. It doesn't feel like it's making you slightly worse as a person or slightly eroding your soul.

And there are definitely forms of, as you say, cotton candy entertainment that do have that diminishing feel to them. As I say, Hollis sort of thinks about this in a much bigger sense, I think to do with like is this job, is this relationship? Whatever? Is it enlarging me or diminishing me? But I think even on a much more fine grained level, it's a useful thing to

apply to those questions. And honestly, at the end of an extremely tiring day, there are certain kind of things that, like I'm just thinking right now, like if I'm like just totally chilled out and I'm trying to relax and or want to, you know, just sort of drift off into sleep. Don't know why I'm sharing the specific example, but I'm going to anyway. There is a huge subculture on YouTube of people listening to the old radio comedy shows that Ricky Gervais and a couple of other people

produced about ten fifteen years ago. Now they stopped doing them years ago. There's hours and hours of this footage and there are whole communities of people just listening to them as they fall asleep. That is cotton candy entertainment in a sense. But I love that stuff because it

has the right vibe for the time when I'm doing it. Now, if you were to spend your whole day listening to fifteen year old radio comedy when you could be doing other things that were more sort of creative and generative, that would be a bad way to spend your life. But it's a pretty good way to spend a little bit of evening time. Sometimes there are times where a silly game is the best thing for me. It's just I'm done. I've got nothing left in the tank to

really give much of anywhere else. And I'd like that idea of expanding or contracting me so much. When you asked that question before we went and got James Hollis to be a guest, because I was like, I gotta talk to this guy. I think the other one is there's a built in point at which I notice an activity cross a chasm, and all of a sudden it goes from being something I'm enjoying doing to something that I'm feeling slightly about. And most cotton candy entertainment has

that for me, if I'm sensitive to it now. Sometimes I don't know it till afterwards. Sometimes I don't know it until I'm like, oh, I crossed that line a while ago. But if I'm sensitive to it, I can actually sort of feel it a little bit where I'm like, it just all of a sudden crosses into feeling like it would be if you were eating cotton candy, where all of a sudden you would go, oh, yeah, you know this has got to end now. If I'm not careful, we can you know, you can just shoot way past that.

And the nature of a lot of these experiences, particularly if they are digitally delivered, they are designed to make you completely miss that point at which you know you would notice that, which I think takes us into the next area I wanted to hit in your book that I thought was really well done in as one of my absolute favorite topics, which is attention. Yeah. I think there's really part of what is in the background of what we've been talking about about these cotton candy activities

is that there are some clashing agendas here, right. It's it's not just that sometimes it's appropriate to play a silly game, listen to a silly bit of radio, whatever

it is. It's that when you engage in the modern attention economy, with the platforms and the devices that deliver those platforms to you, You are in a certain kind of a struggle with corporate interests that want you to stay on those platforms and are willing to basically do anything to get you to stay, which means learning from your activities there, what your interests are, what makes you angry, what makes you compelled for any reason, and then sort

of giving you more and more of that stuff and making it a little bit more extreme each time to keep you there and keep you hooked. So we're not even talking about what is the right decision for me about the use of my attention? Is it something intellectual and edifying or is it something sort of superficial and low value In a way we're talking about am I even making a choice? Is it really me who's making

the whole choice here? Because, as you know, Tristan Harris, the tech critic, famously says, every time you go onto one of these platforms, there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen who are paid high salaries to try to keep you there. It's not it's not a fair fight. I think that is a tremendously important aspect of this whole question and really seeing what's going on there about how deeply these platforms can sort of colonize your attention even at the times when you're

not actually using them, right. I mean, I know I'm not the only person who find some elves hours after seeing some Twitter exchange about something kind of mentally arguing one side or other of that argument, like while I'm in the shower or while I'm making dinner or something, and at that point I'm not staring at Twitter, but they're still They're still got me on some on some level, I guess in a way, I think my most important

contribution on this topic is almost points in the opposite direction, though, which is to say that, yes, it's true that there are all these people out to sort of mine or steal our attention, but that we also need to be honest about the fact that we sort of collaborate with them. We sort of have an urge inside us to distract ourselves from the things that we think we care about

the most. And that, to me is the really interesting part, because I feel like we know basically now that we have to be on our guard for the attention economy. We have to support I think significantly greater regulation of some of the biggest companies in that space, etcetera, etcetera,

in my opinion. But we also have to think about what's going on in ourselves when you know, and I'm writing a chapter and it's something that really matters to me, and the topic fascinates me, and getting the book completed is a huge priority for me. And then it's somehow is more pleasurable to go and do something that I absolutely don't really want to do on a website or on a social media platform. That is the strange and important part of this equation as well. And what do

you think is happening there? I mean, obviously you make the point that in order for distraction to work, we kind of have to want to be distracted to some degree. What is it you think that we're wanting to be distracted from. Let's take you and your book in that moment, you're working on a chapter, You're working on something that's important to you, everything is aligned, and yet the afternoon is spent on Twitter. What's happening there? Do you think?

I think the sort of general case, and then I'll talk specifically about writing, but and my work but I think that the general case is that it's not a coincidence that the things that matter to us the most are the ones that provoke kinds of unpleasant emotions that we want to escape by and that we try to escape through distraction. They are all, in one way or another, Just to sort of return to my central theme, unpleasant emotions that come from the confrontation with one's limitations that

is involved in doing things that matter. So in the case of me writing a chapter, you know, the stakes are high because this is the center of my creative life and it's my livelihood. I can't be sure that the chapter will turn out well because you know, writing is a kind of mysterious process where I'm in communication with my unconscious and I don't know what's going to happen next. I can't be sure that I've got the talent to turn the ideas that I have into something

clear and understandable. I can't be sure that anyone is going to like what I do. My editor might hate it and want me to revise it. The reading public might show no interest. There's all these uncertainties in this thing that really matters to me, and all these uncertainties are to do with my lack of total control over

how events in the world unfold. Some kinds of writing, it might be sort of leaving me feeling emotionally vulnerable by connecting to some issues in my past that I don't want to think about, or you know, that's the kind of another possibility. All of this is way less pleasant than just sort of numbing out online or in some other distraction. And I think the online cases especially

interesting because it does have this feeling of limitlessness. Right There is a sense that you sort of leave behind your mortal limits and go like marching off through the ether. There is that phenomenological sense that like, right now, I'm not constrained by life, by reality. So I think then it begins to make a lot more sense, Like, of course we would want to not do the things that matter to us because they matter, and that makes them

scary or unpleasant in a host of different ways. Right, you talk about the idea that, well, it's your core idea. There is a very down to earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you'll never be liberated. And I would say that theme runs through this book, and it

runs through the anecdote. I think you may have summed up a big part of you know, your work there in one line, right, which is you know that, yeah, there is a there is a liberation in grasping their certain truths about being a limited human that you're just not going to get away from, right right, I mean, for me, this has been a very powerful kind of angle into all sorts of different issues. Right. It's this idea that, Okay, it's definitely possible to sort of strive

and to accomplish things you didn't realize what possible. There are all sorts of virtues in pushing yourself to do more and to be more. But there are certain things that we definitely cannot change about the human situation, and yet we're incredibly prone to sort of staking our self worth on managing to change them, on managing to sort of, in this case, you know, achieve a kind of mastery over time that you're never going to achieve. That time is always going to win that battle in the end.

And so it's really just a sort of suggestion that we and I include myself, could like, you know, stop beating ourselves up for not being able to do things that are equivalent to making two plus two add up to five. It's not that you haven't found the right time management technique yet. It's not that you are a sort of undisciplined person and you need to find more self discipline. It's like you're trying to do something that

you will definitely never do. And then there's this way of talking about it that as you will no more familiarly than me, I think runs through all sorts of but it's writing especially then this idea that the problem is trying to escape the situation. The problem is not the situation, but trying to escape the situation. And I quote Charlotte Jocko Beck at the beginning of this book saying about life in general, I think what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.

This idea that there's all sorts of aspects of human experience. Whether it's not a problem that that's how things are. The problem is that we think they ought not to be that like that, and we spend our lives sort of indignantly railing against them or trying to find the escape route or the clause that lets us um not have to be subject to them, and there is no such thing, and that is the cause of a huge amount of frustration and sort of misdirected energy and attention.

That's so well said and so true. You know. After leaving this memory care facility with my dad this weekend, I was I was reflecting on one of my favorite Buddhist sayings, which is the ten thousand Joys and the ten thousand sorrows. And I love that idea because it really just speaks to like, they're both they're kind of in at ten Thousand's just the Buddhist way of saying infinite, right, you know, it's just it's, you know, the biggest number

they can come up with. But but you know, it's they're both there, and so it's a question of orienting towards that a sick fact, and for me, I keep sort of going, well, I just have to sort of not get stuck on one side of that, you know, not get stuck on oh it's it should all be ten thousand joys or oh it's all ten thousand sorrows, right, and just go, oh yeah, just you're going to get both.

They're both going to be there. And the more that we can sort of accept that and deal with them is as gracefully as possible seems to me to be, you know, sort of your point that those are the certain truths about being a limited human. Right, Absolutely, it's dicey. It's difficult territory in a way, especially with things like example you give. Right, the implication is not I think that it's not painful to be with one's apparent in

their sort of declining years. It's not that this is no big deal once you see the truth of the situation. It's that there's a very specific kind of additional suffering that comes from imagining that it could be ruled out,

that the situation could be escaped from. And I don't even quite have the words to express it, but I think it's letting go of that kind of attitude that allows you to find the meaning in the other kind of pain and suffering and negativity of the situation, that it becomes more meaningful to the extent that you can sort of accept that you don't sort of have the

right to be excused from it. Right That viewpoint of the ten thousand Joys and the ten thousand sorrows doesn't take away me, you know, essentially sobbing as I leave right like, it's heartbreaking. You know, that is the reality. So it doesn't take that away, But to your point, it doesn't layer on some additional level of suffering where I'm railing against It shouldn't be this way. It shouldn't be this way. I'm like, well, but it kind of is,

you know. So, Yeah, I think that idea of getting to you say it slightly differently, you say, in an effective antidote to anxiety is to realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied. It's another way of sort of getting to this point of accepting that there are certain things about being human. Yeah, absolutely, that that one puts sort of puts it slightly more in the present versus future framing of sort of wanting to know that the future

is going to go a certain way. You can't be given that guarantee, and you can't be given the guarantee that the present ought to be unfolding in a certain way either. And it's yeah, it's all about sort of seeing that and letting it permeate you. I suppose I'll wrap us up here with one last idea, you refer

to it as being absent in the present. You write, the problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist future focused mindset, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. You're so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time, in this case, not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now, then it obscures the experience itself.

It was important to meet to go into this aspect of things, because if you talk and write about the perils of instrumentalizing time to the degree that you're never present in the moment itself, it's very easy to think that the solution to that is to sort of really try hard to be present in the moment. And I have never found this to work, and I don't think I'm alone. I write in the book about trying to be incredibly present while seeing the northern lights in the

Arctic Circle and how this was a total disaster. You know, I wasn't present at all. I was just sitting there, thinking, standing there shivering and thinking, you know, am I am I being present enough? Like am I really am I really like getting this experience in all its fullness And the answer is no, because you're trying to do that.

So I think it's worth noting that I don't think that like trying to be present in the moment is a particularly effective counter strategy to the way that we missed the moment all the time, and that instead, for me anyway, it's just been this matter of gradually coming to understand what it means to point out that it always, only ever is the moment anyway, we are sort of not separate from it. That brings us back to the

idea of being time, I suppose. So it's not something that you could be present in, or could be failing to be present in, and or to try harder to be present in that just somehow that just completely this is the point, and when you glimpse the point that you've missed there, it is a little bit easier, I think, to find that you are more comfortably present in the moment. It's a paradox because yes, you already were, and even a distracted person anxiously worrying about the future is doing

all of that in the present. But you can be a little bit more at peace with it all when you see that there's not really any choice to begin with anyway. Right, Well, and I think you make the point that, you know, even when we start to think about working with our attention, you know, you say, and I agree, probably the most precious thing. And even as you say, are attention is essentially what we are. It is always there. It's it's kind of this fundamental thing.

And there is a point I think in trying to work with our attention skillfully, to put it on things that matter more often. But you say that when we go too far with that, we start thinking that we should be able to completely control our attention, which of course is impossible. You say, it's slightly different in the book. But the the example I often give about it is like if somebody let a firecracker off behind my head,

no amount of mindfulness is going to stop me. Like paying attention to my breath is going to stop me from, you know, jerking my attention that way. It's wired into my survival circuit. It's sort of like breathing. It's both automatically controlled and it also has an element that you can actually direct to some degree. I just love the way you sort of point out like this idea of

trying to colonize our attention is doomed to fail. Yeah, yeah, I guess all of this really is about accepting the impossibility of that kind of control, but showing up anyway to sort of be an active participant in in everything, not thinking that the alternatives are this kind of total passivity or total control, but just sort of keeping on, keeping on and doing things that are creative and important and make a difference to people and all the rest

of it without them only really being valuable if they reach that level of the kind of masterial control over reality that we're never going to get. Yep. I think so much of what you talk about, and I think it's why I've always resonated with your work at points towards the middle way. It points towards a path of if you get too far to either of these extremes. If you go to the extreme of thinking you should control your attention every moment, that's not it's not going

to work out well for you. And if you go to the other extreme of like screw it, I just give my attention to whatever pops up, that's not really it either. There is a middle way between those two extremes that seems to serve us best. Yeah. Absolutely, And it feels that something often feels kind of inadequate about settling from middle way. Right. It feels like a lot of us, I think, have personalities that want to go all out in one direction. But but what if that's

not how it is? All right, Oliver, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's been a lovely and pleasurable conversation. As always, the book is called four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals and we'll have links in the show notes to the book and all your other stuff. Thank you so much, Thank you, it's been a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to

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