Oliver Burkeman

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. Yeah. Today we have the writer Oliver Berkman, who is a columnist for The Guardian and author of the excellent book The Antidote Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, which was recently released as a paperback here in the US. Oliver,

Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's good to be here. I recently just finished your book and have to say I genuinely enjoyed it. I looked forward to, uh getting to read more of it. It's very refreshing in the I won't call it self help but for lack of a better word, self help space. It was very well done and very entertaining. Anybody who's gonna quote Marlow Stamfield from the wire, uh is is

okay in my book. I'm very grateful for that, and I don't I'm not too offended by the self help label. I think there's a lot of problems I have with books that are in that category, but I don't think the idea of that category is a bad thing at all. Really. So our podcast is called the One You Feed, and it's based on the old parable where there's a Cherokee grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, ah, in life, we have two wolves inside of us who

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents kindness and joy and love and happiness, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents greed and sorrow and pain and pick your poison. Uh. And the grandson thinks for a minute and says to the grandfather which one wins, And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So that's really what our podcast is about. How do people uh feed their good wolf in life, whatever that

means to them. Um, So I'd like to start off by just asking you, you know what, how does that parable apply to you and your life? And then also in the in the work and writing that you do well.

I was thinking about this and then and and I sort of got very confused at first, because I mean, I'll just let me just talk for just half a minute about the thesis of my book because it sort of reflect my own personal ideas about happiness, and then I'll try and connect it right away to to the to the story the book is is basically starts off being a critique of a very dominant idea we have about happiness these days, which is what I call loosely

positive thinking, the idea that by trying really hard to focus on happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, set very clear goals, put a lot of energy and effort into creating success and happiness, that that's the way we're going to get it, and actually brings a lot of evidence to suggest that this doesn't work, that we should open ourselves more if we can towards failure and sadness and these feelings of certainty, not be trying always to eradicate them and and stamp

them out. And so I sort of argue that it's much much more fruitful if we can learn to coexist with even embrace that that side of the coin. What it strikes me in the context of this of the story about the wolves is that maybe I'm partly saying that you shouldn't focus too much on feeding the good wolf because uh, maybe the maybe the analogy breaks down, because um, I do think that too much focus on

happiness it is counterproductive. I've been waiting. I've been waiting since I sort of came up with the idea for

the show. I've been waiting for h you know, I figured it would be somebody who was who who had studied Buddhism and was into Buddhism, who would say, hey, you know what, it's not all you know, you know it is, it is what it is, and you have to accept life and and you know a little bit more of the less positive thinking and and for me, it's really not about And that's why I was so excited to get you on the show, as I said in my email, because I don't want this to turn

into sort of there's a guy named triple Anear. I think he calls it, you know, uh fufu, no bullshit, you know, or bullshit, you know, hocus pocus, And that's really not what we're what we're after here. So and we've had people talk about how feeding their good wolf for them means feeding the part of them that works on their art, because that's what that's what drives them.

So but I do think it's it's interesting because we you know, the the the way you represent this is that, um, you know, if you just the constant positive thinking is not a not a recipe for for happiness. So I'd like to jump into the book a little bit in a couple of couple of different places. Um. The first thing that I would want to talk about would be, can you talk a little bit about Stoicism and the role that that kind of played in in in your

book and in your thinking. Sure, so this is the philosophy from ancient Greece and then and then roam is typified by the work of Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus, the realists. Now I keep saying, I mean, I don't think I could take responsibility for this. But but I see more and more, uh, sort of people recommending it as a as a as an interesting way to um

to to think about about happiness. I in my book quite openly and blatantly sort of plunder the bits that I think are most helpful for the for the for the direction I'm taking. It is a very broad philosophy with all sorts of interesting aspects and a sort of

quite theological aspect that I don't really get into. But I think one very simple way of thinking about it is, firstly, it starts with an idea that's very familiar from positive thinking, actually, which is the idea that your beliefs about the world are what caused your distress, not not the events themselves. So it's it's a question of you know, emotions arise

in a in a way that is dependent on thinking. Uh. Shakespeare has Hamlets say there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, which is a really great statement of stoicism. But then the positive think it says, well, and therefore you've got to make all your beliefs as as upbeat as possible all the time, and and convince yourself that you're going to succeed in any every venture,

or that nothing can go wrong. The stoics, it's more a question, I think the best way're putting it, it's just more a question of saying, once you know that that is how distress arises. Once you're aware that it is these beliefs about the world that cause your under stress. Well, firstly, that's just a much more calming place to be because you realize that it is to some extent self creative.

You don't necessarily to struggle to be positive. You're just finding this this new level of awareness about where things come from. Secondly, you can then in certain ways learn to think more rationally about events in the world and and to render your beliefs more more proportionate and rational. This is a very abstract way of talking about what I do in the book, which involves things like, you know,

embarrassing myself on public transports. Try to show that my fears about being embarrassed were were disproportionate to the reality. I can talk about it but if you want, But it's that's a rational rationalizing on some level your beliefs about bad things in the world, so that you still you don't have to pretend that they don't exist. You just have to see that they are in most cases not going to kill you. And the stocks will say

even a few cases that they will. Then there's still a limit to the appropriate level of distress that you need to feel about. Have you heard of I've came across something on the Internet a couple of months ago called rejection therapy, which sort of cracked me up because it's very similar to you, you know, riding on the on the bus or the train and sort of announcing the stops. The goal of rejection therapy is to go out and get someone to reject you once a day

for thirty days. You just gotta do something where someone rejects you. And and and the funny part of it is these guys will get out there, and you'd be amazed by how many things you get when you ask. They'll go ask something preposterous to get rejected. Then they'll get it, and so they're not done for the day.

They gotta And so but when I was reading that part that in your book, I thought, I thought a lot of that, and and I the the inherent wisdom in that makes a lot of sense, which is those things seem being rejected or or being loud on the train or standing out seem like they're such mortifying events that in you know, but once you do them, you realize they're really you know, there, there's not that much behind them, and it is your thoughts about them that

is far worse than the actual event themselves. Right. And it's a slightly subtle point because I think another thing that comes in here and uh, and it might be also part of the rejection therapy idea is just sort of exposure. You know, the idea that if you if you're scared of spiders and you spend time in the room with a spider, that you sort of numb out to the to the to the fear that you feel. And that is a sort of part of psychological approaches

to phobias and and all this stuff. But the really specific thing about stoicism, I think is that you can cut those thoughts down to size so that you you know, it's not that you don't it's not that you need to start thinking that it isn't embarrassing to speak out loud the names of the train stations on the subway train,

which is what I was doing. It's that you need to it that you learn to have an appropriate level of worry about them, and then you suddenly realize that you're going through life half the time worrying about things like embarrassing yourself as if they were things like, you know, a nuclear bomb dropping on your neighborhood or something you are sort of there's this sort of monochrome level of anxiety that we often go through life with that is

just completely inappropriate to most of life, daily daily hassles and anxiety. And you into your point earlier if you you know, realizing that it's not the events but your thought about the events is such a if you you know, I think in your book you say, even just having that awakening for a little bit really sort of put some distance between you and that anxiety, and you can

start to work from that. And you know, my senses and a lot of people never they don't see even that even that gap um where they're able to sort of realize that like it's you know, being stuck in traffic is not the bad thing, it's it's how I'm reacting to being stuck in traffic. And you've talked about how you've kept some of those stoic things going today even you know as you as you've gone on, how you've kept a little bit of things that you talk about sort of like being in the grocery line and

when it's long, and how how you work with that? Yeah, I mean I I just you know, little phrases come back to me and I use them over and over again, even though I don't go and sort of deliberately embarrass myself on subway trains as a as a regular practice, UM, I do use that question, you know, what is the worst thing that could happen here? All the time. The positive thinking approach is all about trying to persuade yourself that the best thing is going to happen, or that

the worst thing is not going to happen. And I think when you do that, that's the sort of dangerous flip side of reassurance. When you try and reassure yourself or somebody else that everything is going to be okay, you are implicitly affirming this idea that if things didn't turn out okay, that would be an absolute catastrophe. And it's much more empowering, I think, to remember that, actually,

if they didn't turn out okay, you'd be okay. So so that question what's the worst thing that could happen

is a really really helpful one. If you are getting um irritated by a long line in a in a store or something like that, that question just brings you right back down to earth because you realize that, Okay, you know, it's not that there's nothing going to happen as a consequence of this is that I'm going to be ten minutes later, or I'm going to not get to do ten minutes of whatever thing I plan to do,

you know, with my evening. But you sort of see it for what it is suddenly, and you realize that the emotions that when they are not mindfully attended to what we're running wild and you were completely disproportionate to the real loss of the of the delay in the line. A sort of related line that occurs to me a lot, which is less from stoicism more from actually from Tolly, the New Age writer who I write about as well,

is that question, do you have a problem right now? Uh. It's amazingly interesting to me how frequently the answer is no. I think you know, if you're in severe physical pain, it's possible to answer yes. But almost every problem that I think I have in my life is something that just happened or that I think is going to happen, and it's never actually afflicting me in the present moment.

That that is a really good one. You as we talked about the you riding on the trains, that was that was from I think it was Albert Ellis who pointed you towards that. And and he had a he coined a word that I had never heard of before the end in the book that just made me laugh. And and I want to hear more about which I know, you know what I'm going to say, which is called musturbation. Right, So what is musturbation? It was meant to make you laugh. I think that was part of his sort of vigorous

approach to psychotherapy. He died a few years ago. Unfortunately he was He was tremendous personality and swore an awful lot as a routine part of his public performances and and his writing. The The idea about musturbation is this idea that we that we plague ourselves with with musts, with demands that things must be a certain way, that we must perform to a certain level, that other people must treat us in a certain way, or that the

world in general must be a certain way. And he makes a very very very critical distinction between demanding that things must be a certain way versus having a strong preference, even a very strong preference, that they be a certain way. There's a sort of binary distinction there between really really wanting something to happen in a certain way, which is totally fine, and and and and demanding that it absolutely

must be that way. And he would say that if you can learn to relax those musts into preferences, you don't necessarily have to give up all desires, which is one interpretation of Buddhist psychology in this in this area, but you have to relate to them in a different way such that such of their preferences rather than demands, because it is those demands, ultimately that that cause a huge amount of suffering because plenty of times they will not be met because the world does not have an

inbuilt reason. Country to what that says in the Secret, you know that the world does not have an built reason to go the way you you demanded it goes. And I think that's another one of those things, and it's sort of you know, a thread that that weaves

through your book. But one of the challenges I have with the the over the top positive thinking and and and I'm a proponent of it to some degree, the over the top motivational speaking, is that it paints this idea of a life that should be so perfect, and when your life doesn't mean measure up to that, it's very easy to feel like you're getting the short end

of the stick, You're doing something wrong, you know. It's it paints this picture of perfection that's, to your point, simply doesn't exist, and and trying to achieve it is, as you talk about, frequently makes people feel worse. Right, There's two interesting issues that I think. One of them is what counts as the perfectly happy life, you know, and whether actually immense wealth and uh sort of material benefits and things like that are actually the real path

to happiness. And then whatever your definition of happiness, there is a question about the path you take towards it. And it's there I think that I try to focus and say that, you know, even if actually you think, yeah, millions and millions of dollars is what I want in my in my life, struggling vigorously and directly focusing on that alone is not the right way to to achieve it because of various things we can talk about about

how the human mind works. You know that that this kind of it's not a machine that can be programmed with an action that it will then fulfill and you

are constantly they're always kind of feedback effects. That mean that if you're thinking all the time about trying stamp out negative thoughts, for example, just to give the most obvious example, you'll be thinking about negative thoughts all the time, and therefore you won't be you won't be free of them, you'll have more You sort of led into it there a little bit, and I'm not quite sure how to

pronounce it, uh, goalidacy. Yeah, well it's sort of a made up word by bio scholar or Christopher k So, yeah, got goal odyssey. It's sort of derived from the odyssey, which is which is a religious theological term. Anyway, So and you describe in your book, you talk, you give a bunch of examples, you know, and basically ideas. You know, if you focus so insanely on goals, you often make really poor decisions and and things don't turn out as you like. And and you talk about the the Evert tragedy.

You talk about corporations, And I've done a fair amount of work in the software development space, and I have a phrase that says, anytime somebody tells you that failure is not an option, you ought to prepare for a disaster, because you know, nobody says that unless your back is so far up against the wall, um, that you're just never going to get there. And so I resonated a lot with with that. Is there anything else you you

want to add about the UH? You know about sort of goals and and you know, how do you strike the right balance between planning and having goals and um, you know, doing it to the point where it has a negative effect on your life. Well, it's it's fascinating part of the of the thing, I mean's part of the book. I really really enjoyed UH and benefited from change. There's lots of different reasons why too much focused on the end point is a problem. Partly to narrow a goal.

You know, the person who determines that at all costs, they're going to be a millionaire by age thirty five, say, you know, and some people will fail at that, but others will succeed. In exactly the wrong way. You know, you will succeed and alienate everyone you know, and and your relationship will have collapsed and everyone everyone will hate you, and but you will have achieved this goal. And and so that's an example I think of too much narrowness

in goal setting. There's sort of a deeper spiritual aspect here there as well, isn't there about the problem of always uh postponing happiness, fulfillment, whatever word you want to use to some point in the future, to the extent that every bit of present moment time that you have on the earth is actually only there instrumentally for some other point. And then, of course, you know, you fulfill your I year plan and then you just have to start another one because because you're not um present to

to to the to the moment. So I think that's sort of that's slightly corny. You know, it's the journey, not the destination thing. When you really take account of what it what it says is it's quite a powerful uh. Side of this goes beyond just setting bad goals or pursuing them in the wrong way, to this idea that actually some of your focus should just not be on

the goal at all. Right, It's that it's that sense that happiness is still always out there somewhere, and when you achieve whatever that thing is and you don't feel that happiness, the the you know, following the way that the mind has been trained to work, you just set it out, well, it must not be this thing. It must be that thing. You know it's not. And you know, I I that phrase the grass is always greener. Um. I heard a great quote the other day that said,

the grass is greener where you water it. Wow, that's really good. Yeah, it's kind of relating to the wolves as well. Right, Yeah, Yeah, there was another part in the book that I really resonated with and it's something that that I have, um, that I've really worked to deal with. And you talk about, you know, procrastination and habits and rituals and sort of the idea that a lot of people don't do something because they think they need to feel like doing it in order to do it.

Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, this was incredibly powerful for me. It was not It's not only in the book, but it also sort of why I ever got the book finished in the first place. This whole idea that is central to motivational the culture of sort of motivational speakers and motivational events and everything is that, um uh, doing great things in the world,

whatever they are, is a two stage process. First, you work up the right mindset and then you're just so excited to do the thing that that the the action follows automatically. And the problem with this, of course, is that it's actually a lot harder to work up the right mindset about certain important tasks that you know are going to be very meaningful to you than it is to just you know, move your limbs in the way

required to complete them. Um So, So this this particular line, which is a sort of way of putting into practice the Buddhist idea of non attachment, I suppose, is that this idea that you don't have to feel like doing something in order to do it. You can say to yourself, as I did many days in writing this book, and do another context today, you know, I don't really feel

like doing this thousand words today. I'd much rather in a in a short term hednistic sense, you know, not bother and serve the internet, or go and get another coffee, or go back to bed. But I also know that I want to achieve this thing, and so I'm not going to try and get rid of these negative things. I'm not going to try and stamp them out and

replace them with tremendous excitement for the task. I'm just going to say, Okay, I don't feel like doing it, and at the same time, I'm also going to open the laptop and load up the file and do five minutes on the outlining or whatever it might be. And and it's obviously what happens a lot of the time, then, is that a good feeling follows, you know, motivation follows

the action. But even when it sometimes doesn't, you know, you've you've them, You've you've done something that is meaningful to you without having to sort of get yourself into this psyched up into this into this state. And I think things like the motivational seminar that I went to and write about in the first chapter of the book, they are fundamentally about, you know, too often, they are not about providing people with interesting cognitive tools for their lives.

They are about whipping people up into a sort of physiological state of excitement for an you know, last a few days, and then it fades away and you have to go back to another motivational seminar, which is a great business model, I suppose, and so in something yeah, now it certainly is. And it it gets to the point that in order to accomplish anything, you have to have a certain mood. And moods are really a tricky thing. You know, people have different set points for their mood.

There's a lot of stuff there and and this was one of the things that you know, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways I've heard it phrased. You know, you can't act your you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. Um, you know, I've got uh I call it the now rule, which is that if there's something I need to do, I just I try and do it immediate. You know, I try and do it immediately, but I allow myself to do it for like five minutes. That's what I

tricked myself. I'm gonna do this for five minutes, and nine times out of ten, getting started, you know, gets me over the hump. But I'm going and it's amazing. I always I always think about how much momentum is involved in in sort of all these things and in being productive and doing different things is once the ball is rolling, it's much easier to keep it going. Yes,

I can, I I completely agree. Yeah. Yeah. We had a we interviewed a guy a couple of weeks ago who's uh got a website called the Value of Simple, and he had something that I thought was really great. He says, I plan out my week and then when it comes time at three o'clock on Tuesday to do the thing that's there. I believe that old old Joel, the one who made the schedule on Sunday, knows better

than new Joel, the one who's sitting here today. And uh, which I thought was really interesting because it points to and I think you talked a little bit about it, habits and rituals, right if you, if you, and that sort of takes the the emotion out of it and the other thing and you and you phrased it really well just there, And it was the first time I ever heard it was a rabbi and I cannot remember his last name. He wrote something, uh, the forty eight

Ways to Wisdom, which is really pretty interesting. But he talks about making the distinction between what you feel like and what you want and that's exactly what you just said. You want a book. What you feel like is doing nothing. But if you focus on and so many times I think we say to ourselves, I don't want to write today. Well not really, that's not really the reframing of I do want to in the grand scheme of things, I

just don't feel like And that really helps me. Transient moods are so you know, all you can do is be aware of them. I don't think you can. I don't think there are all that many ways to sort of deal with the mother than just being aware of

them and acting alongside them. But you know this is the this is the way in which you can be sort of You can get into some funk on some afternoon and feel like everything in your life is is really isn't working out and and and and you know everything's gone wrong and you need to have some huge overhaul of your life. And then you suddenly realize, I

didn't have a lunch. That's it. You know, they are affected by the tiniest things, um and you know, just being a bit too hungry or not having slept well the night before can put a completely different frame on on everything. Unless you stop and realize that I actually

that those are the things that caused those those things. So, yeah, I often wonder that, you know, how many wars have been started in world history by you know, someone not having had enough coffee that morning or something like that. So I wanted to get into another Another big chapter you had is around Buddhism and and I also have been to the Insight Meditation Center, UM, although I only

went for three days versus versus the whole week. But can you share a little bit about what that experience was like for you and and and how meditation had still impacts your life today and how you use it. Yeah, so this was actually just under a week, I think, but it was. But it was a silent retreat at this place, Insight Meditation Society in western Massachusetts, UM and in the middle of you know, very isolated countryside in the middle of a forest. UH, and forty of us

were doing a really quite entry level meditation retreat. You can do. You can go for you know, you can go there for three months if you're if you're really hardcore.

This involved. So we're sleeping in the dormitory, would be woken up at sort of five thirty I think I's in the book I can't quite record, but you know, very early in the morning by a by a bell and spend about nine hours of the day in alternating forty five minute periods of seated and walking meditation, with a few breaks and a few uh you know, chores you have to um complete around the around the meditation center.

You you'll you'll know all that um and you know, it's just a completely I had meditated a little bit before in sort of twenty minute portions, but but spending your whole day for multiple days in that context is is completely eye opening. It For the first couple of days, as I write in the book, I just had like bad pop lyrics going around in my head for ever, and it was can you sing those forms? No, that's what I immediately wandered as which bands? It was Barbie

Girl by Aqua, which is a terrible, terrible song. You might remember that I had never liked, never bought, never seen performed, but then came from somewhere exactly exactly terrible.

And gradually this sort of faded away. But what really changed for me in the middle of that process was seeing that I wasn't actually there to try to calm my mind down, because when you're putting that beautifully silent, serene environment, the first thing you notice is how non beautiful and non serene is your internal old It's a complete cacophonous racket of you know, Danish pop song lyrics,

but also, you know, just petty irritations. You get very, very irritated with the tiniest thing, like someone breathing wrongly a few feet from the order, you know. And and it's once you realize there not atually trying to get rid of all that stuff in a sort of eradicatory way, that that you learned then to let go of it,

and that's when really interesting things start start happening. I'd be interested in your experience because I don't think three days would have been enough for me in that context. There was actually only after about three days that something different change. By the end of the week, I was thinking to myself, I'd quite like to live here forever. I mean, I don't think I would have done, but it thought did occur. You talk a little bit about Pemma Children, who is among the top three guests I

ever want to get on this show. So Pemma, if you're listening. He's not listening. He's on retreating Nova Scotia, isn't I'm sure she is not listening. Um. Nonetheless, I would love to have her on there. But you talk about that the the idea of insecurity and and that you know, trying to cling to security in a safe life is a ultimately sort of pointless or fruitless. It

doesn't work. But you sort of end the book with an idea and maybe we can we can wrap up sort of talking about this because I thought it was really uh interesting and profound um where you talk about if you get that level of security, which again doesn't exist, but the cost of that is sort of the loss of the mystery of life, and you sort of describe that that mystery, that sense of awe, that sort of thing as a fairly passable definition for happiness for you,

which I thought was really interesting. It's that learning to be with the mystery, the uncertainty, the the fragile feeling, the tender feeling that that is somehow non mus with with being alive in the in the fullest sense that you can have in certain contexts. I don't think psychologically in life as a whole, you can have a great deal of security and certainty, but it is sort of

akin to not living at all. Um, that that that sort of openness, and this idea from from from John Keats, you know, negative capability, the idea that maybe the real happiness talent, the skill we need to try to learn is to remain in a situation of not having things finished off and sorted out and concluded. The question I asked in the book, which I borrow I think from Susan Jeffers, the self help writer, is you know if somebody could hand you a list. Actually maybe it'still in

the book. If somebody could hand you a list tomorrow that had every single event that was going to happen in the rest of your life to the day guy listed on it, and you're absolutely certain that it was correct, you wouldn't want, I don't think, to receive that list, even if every single item on the list was a good thing. I mean, that's the crucial point. Um, Yeah, I don't want to know about the bad things that

are probably going to happen to me. But even if there was nothing bad that was going to happen to me from now until the day I died, at a very very old age in perfect help in my sleep, there would be something about the knowing that would have sapped the point out of life. And I think there's something really profound in that. And it does basically entail being open to the to the negatives as well as the positive, because if you're only open to the positives,

you're not really open at all. Excellent, and I think you've got a lot in there. I think is it am I did I paraphrase? Or is it a is it a quote? Positive thinking of horrors and mystery? Right? I think it's a kind of it's a kind of refusal to accept that there are mysteries. It's it's an attempt to shut everything down and know that everything is going to be really happy and exciting and motivating all the time, that you're going to definitely hit your goals.

It is um. Yeah, it's really intolerant in a sense, in that sense of of half of what it is to be alive in the world. Is there anything that you would like to cover that we haven't haven't talked about anything you think that's relevant to our our theme? I have to say I think we've covered it all in some great questions and some great, great, great discussion. How much and how this applies to the to the wolves question is something that fascinates me. I will be

thinking about that for a while longer. Maybe it's to do with being okay with the bad wolf as well, I don't know, or not assuming that bad things are the bad wolf, right? And does one wolf have to win? Can't they just kind of get along? You know, there's

lots of fascinating we can really take this place. It's I know, I know, Like I said, I've been waiting for somebody with the Buddhist perspective to give me the you know or you know, give me the whole you can't have light without dark argument um, which was which was inevitable. However, I do think that the uh it's a it remains a semi useful metaphor if h one

that falls apart under too deep of thought. No, I think even if you, even if the process of engaging with it is such that you begin to think that it doesn't add up in certain ways, that then it's done its job as a story. Absolutely. Yeah, well, Oliver, thank you very much. This has been a great, great talk. Like I said, I genuinely enjoyed the book, and uh, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much, indeed for inviting me one thanks for listening to the

One You Feed. You can learn more about Oliver Bergman and his work in our show notes at one you Feed dot net slash Oliver