The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Oliver Burkeman - How can I more fully embrace my finitude?
This is a distilled version of last year's conversation with the writer Oliver Burkeman. In it, you'll hear Oliver talk about our troubled relationship with time and how to more fully inhabit it.
Oliver believes our obsession with productivity and efficiency is no route to happiness, quite the opposite. In order to inhabit time more fully, we need to embrace our limitations. This will mean admitting that however many worthwhile ways there are to spend our time, we can't do them all. This is a liberating fact, and can help us enjoy those things we have committed to all the more.
Oliver's new book Meditations for Mortals is now available to buy, and focuses on helpful ways to resist the culture of efficiency, and embrace our finitude more fully.
We'll never solve this sort of emotional, psychological, existential problem of feeling out of control with respect to time, feeling on the back foot with respect to time. We'll never solve that through efficiency. You can only solve that, if you can solve it at all, by reconciling yourself to the situation, deciding to focus on a few things, letting a whole lot of other stuff fall by the wayside. There isn't a technique or technology for getting on top of time and mastering time in that way, because, yeah, time always wins that battle in the end, I guess.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to a distilled version of the Examined Life podcast. In these short episodes I'll be pulling together some of the insights from previous conversations. Today I'm reaching back into the archive from last year and bringing back the voice of Oliver Berkman. Oliver has just released a new book called Meditations for Mortals, which I think is excellent and resonates very much with some of the things we talked about in our conversation last year. Oliver's writing sits loosely within the genre of self-help, but I don't think that label adequately captures what he's trying to do. In this episode you'll hear Oliver talk about how we relate to time and how to inhabit it in a more life-giving way. I hope you enjoy listening.
Speaker 2:If you're anything like me, you are in a hurry a lot of the time. Just generally speaking, there's too much to do in every sphere of life Work, family, leisure, the house, friends. The demands are infinite and you need to hurry if you have any hope of getting ahead of the infinite demands that are in front of you. This way of operating is highly stressful and it's liable to lead to error. In fact, for me it frequently does, and there's an extent to which this sense of hurry up is about my stage in life. I'm middle-aged, I've got kids, a career, lots of things to juggle and it makes time feel very pressurized. But there's also this kind of cultural delusion at work, which is partly the gift of technology luring us into thinking that we can somehow get some purchase on time, get ahead of time. Oliver explains this here.
Speaker 1:We get more and more ways in which I think we are encouraged to believe that the moment at which we could transcend our limitations is just around the corner. So that sort of the acceleration in technology is just like you know, the internet, email, whatever social media, mobile, uh, mobile, internet, it it has this effect of. I mean it feels like we're really close to being sort of gods in all sorts of contexts. And so you know when you can, when you can be updated on what's happening 4 000 miles away in less than a second. Um, it becomes all the more frustrating that you know you have to. You can't sort of make a traffic jam go at the speed you you wish it was was going.
Speaker 1:I give this example in the book about why it's more frustrating to wait two minutes for a microwave than it is for something you've put in the oven for two hours, and it's very much something to do compromise with, with our desires, and therefore it makes the remaining ways in which we do have to compromise all the more, all the more infuriating. I think that's a. I guess they're the same point in some ways, but as we test the limits of individuals in the workplace and the limits of the environment and the limits of um, all these, all the ways in which we live in a culture and economy that tests the limits. We're also being given all these technologies, that sort of whisper that maybe, maybe we can pass the test and sort of achieve escape velocity. Uh, somehow it's a weird situation to be in. That's my conclusion.
Speaker 2:Perhaps you can relate to what Oliver was saying just there. I certainly can. We are inured into this kind of sense of impatience at the world because we have such power through technology that it makes us frustrated when we have to wait for anything. Though, as Oliver points out, it's not only that technology makes us kind of frustrated and impatient. It actually doesn't solve the problems that it promises to solve.
Speaker 1:There's this much observed phenomenon in all sorts of different fields where if all you do is you make a system more efficient, then it actually just sort of clogs up with more junk, right? So the classic example of induced demand in traffic management if you widen a motorway to add an extra lane to ease congestion, it becomes a more appealing route for more drivers, so more people use that route and the congestion, at least in some cases, you know, tends back towards what it originally was. You mentioned washing machines. There's really good historical work to suggest that, um, that um, housewives in in early 20th century america and britain who started to get these machines, uh, didn't save any time at all because the standards of cleanliness to which they were held by the culture just rose to offset the benefits. This is there in Parkinson's law, the idea that the work expands to fill the time available. And I think the general point here, the sort of abstract point, is something like we are these finite creatures facing hypothetically infinite numbers of emails. We could send infinite levels of household cleanliness to which we could in principle aspire, infinite levels of speed of a motorway that you could imagine In all these cases if you just use efficiency to try to get through that infinite supply. You're never going to get through it because it's an infinite supply, so more and more inputs kind of rush in to fill the gap, and so using efficiency and optimization as a way to try to get on top of the situation, to try to master time, is sort of doomed to fail because it's an attempt to sort of escape the reality of the situation.
Speaker 1:So I guess, on a sort of concrete level, what I'm saying in the most recent book, I think, is you know, nothing wrong with getting a bit more efficient in certain areas of life.
Speaker 1:If it takes you, uh, you know, an hour to find the things you need for breakfast in the morning, then there's probably some efficiency that you can be working on in that, in that system. But we'll never solve this sort of emotional, psychological, existential problem of feeling out of control with respect to time, feeling on the back foot with respect to time. We'll never solve that through efficiency. You can only solve that if you can solve it at all by reconciling yourself to the situation, deciding to focus on a few things, letting a whole lot of other stuff fall by the wayside. You can only solve that if you can solve it at all by reconciling yourself to the situation, deciding to focus on a few things, letting a whole lot of other stuff fall by the wayside. There isn't a technique or technology for getting on top of time and mastering time in that way, because time always wins that battle in the end, I guess.
Speaker 2:There's a significant industry of public speakers and coaches and writers who are providing solutions to these problems, hacks for life that will help you fit more in and live the most extraordinary life and defy your limits, and I'm a sucker for these books and these people. I want that advice, that advice. But, as Oliver points out in this next clip, it is this approach of thinking that we can live outside of our limits that creates the problem in the first place.
Speaker 1:So at the beginning of the book I quote Jocko Beck, the late American Zen Buddhist, who said what makes it unbearable I think she's talking about life as a whole what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. And I, I really like this kind of um bucket of ice water over the head kind of um kind of observation, because it's like, oh yeah, it just rings immediately true to me. It's like, oh yeah, the problem here was thinking that I was going to find some way to, uh, you know, escape the terms and conditions of the human condition. It wasn't the fact that I can't do that, it was the fact that I thought I might be able to do it.
Speaker 2:Like Oliver, I find this realization sobering and liberating, you know, in a really profound way. It's like something in me unclenches at that realisation that actually I'm limited, I can't solve these problems and life isn't going to resolve itself in some neat way. Oliver goes on and explains helpfully, I think, what this looks like.
Speaker 1:Once you really see that there will always be too much to do and too many things that genuinely matter, you know, not just sort of nonsense, busy work, but really really important ways to spend a life, life, once you see that there are far more of those than you're ever going to actually have the the chance to um, get around to in a finite life, what, how does that change everything really? I mean both partly, of course, one's choices about what you spend time on, but also just how it how it feels to to be, uh, human in this situation. I, I don't know, I think. I think what I'm always coming back to is this sort of it.
Speaker 1:It's a theme or it's a sort of perspective or way of approaching things. It's always like there's some kind of freedom for me anyway and liberation in realising that our situation is sort of even worse than we thought it was. If you think that it's really hard to make time for everything that matters in life, that's a very stressful and anxiety-inducing situation. If you see that it's completely impossible to make time for everything that feels like it matters in life, that's not so stressful because you have surrendered to reality in some important way. You've accepted that things are the way they are and from then on you're freer to. You're sort of freer to choose a few things to spend your time on, because you're sort of no longer haunted by this impossible goal.
Speaker 2:There's a sense in which Oliver disabusing us of this idea that we can manage more than we possibly can, that we will win the race against time, leaves me thinking well, what do I want to do with the time that I have? How can I maximise it and do more of the things that I really want to do? Though that way of thinking doesn't really get to the heart of what Oliver is trying to say.
Speaker 1:I've noticed sometimes a sort of a response to the title of my book 4 000 weeks, which is extremely approximately the lifespan of a human being in the west these days. Um, there's a sort of reaction you can have to that which is like, yeah, that's terrifying, um, and as a result I've got to try to cram every remaining week that I've got with the most extraordinary stuff and go, like you know um base jumping every weekend and do extreme sports and like live a completely remarkable life. That's really different to, to how other people and there's that whole ethos in the culture of like seize the day, meaning meaning be extraordinary, do more than anyone else, do more extraordinary things than anyone else, and there's nothing wrong with doing things that are extraordinary if they are actually the things you want to do. But that reaction always strikes me as a sort of a halfway like. You've got halfway to what I'm trying to say right, which is like it in the, in the desire to um cram life with more and more stuff, which is a, which is what efficiency is right, whether it can be efficiency of workload or efficiency of uh you know, getting through thrilling experiences or something. But in that desire to cram all this stuff in.
Speaker 1:There is still a desire to somehow, like, gain the upper hand over time, to somehow win this battle and, if not achieve immortality, then at least sort of achieving immortality by other means, which is, if you can't live forever, you can try to do an infinite amount with the time that you do have, and I think both of those are just different versions of the same mistake. Right, and actually I hope that there is something and I've found that there's something very relaxing about really getting inside the idea of limitation. It isn't like, oh, now I've got to find even better techniques to counter this limitation. It's like, oh, this is, this is how it is and this is the ground from which I can do some interesting and meaningful and hopefully helpful things with my, with my time and it's this question of what is the meaningful, significant thing I can do with my time.
Speaker 2:that often has us tied up in knots. How can I make the most impact, be the best version of myself or whatever? That can be, you know, fairly stressful. It puts quite a lot of pressure on what we do choose to do and, within that mode of thinking, oliver offers a kind of thought on cosmic insignificance that releases you from that burden. I'll let him explain it here.
Speaker 1:I think there's all sorts of ways to use this idea of one's own insignificance, but certainly one of them is the sense that the decisions that tend to haunt us and leave us mired in indecision are, you know, it's very useful to realize how little difference they'll make to the run of things. The other is just that, you know, um, there is this cultural message that we've spoken about, about, you know, the idea that a meaningful life is an extraordinary one or a very noteworthy one, and, um, if you sort of zoom out to cosmic time, you see that the there's a sort of flattening of the difference between, uh, living a very quiet and so-called ordinary life and living a very big deal, and extraordinary life because, you know, on the scale of the cosmos, all these extraordinary people are basically the same tiny little pinpricks of consciousness as the ordinary ones. And actually I find in that the possibility of seeing that there is more meaning in the ordinary things I do than I had realized. And so I don't want to live a life where cooking dinner on an ordinary weeknight is a distraction from living a meaningful life. I would like to live a life where that was part of a meaningful life.
Speaker 1:With that idea is. You take a sort of y-axis on the graph of, of, uh, of um, how important your activities are and you could plot, you know, being having a boring, mundane life at the bottom and then doing some extraordinary world changing things a bit further up. But if you then extend the x-axis for another sort of 10 000 miles sorry the-axis If you extend the y-axis 10,000 miles further up, everything's down at the unimportant end of the scale. And that is liberating too, I find.
Speaker 2:One of the insights that I really valued in the conversation with Oliver was his distinction between time that we used instrumentally for some future gain and that time that we used to do something for its own sake, doing what he calls etylic activities. These, he says, kind of enrich the time that we have.
Speaker 1:If you just end up focusing on achieving those goals, if you're never sort of letting life cash itself out in the moment as meaningful, now then, like it's never going to happen because it's only ever now, and and and. So it's a different way of inhabiting time, as you, as you say, and sort of a more. It's a way of more fully inhabiting time, because there is something about that purely instrumental mindset, that sort of skirts over the surface of life towards the moment of truth, when it's all sorted out, or the project is launched, or you can retire, or you know. Whatever it is in each person's case.
Speaker 2:So you might be wondering, like me, whether these thoughts have any real practical application to life. Can we change the way that we approach life and approach our finitude the time that we have? I put this question to Oliver and asked him has working through this idea of how we embrace our limitation had any practical impact on the way he approaches time?
Speaker 1:we embrace our limitation had any practical impact on the way he approaches time. The thing I am always trying to do, I think and and I think I do more successfully than I used to is is to let go of a certain kind of need for control or for comprehensive productivity, for the idea that I'm going to be able to fit everything in, for the idea that it's absolutely terrible if anybody out there is disappointed in me or impatient with me or wishes that I was doing something that I'm, that I'm uh, not doing, and to just sort of stay more aware, more of the time, of the real situation, which is that every single moment that I'm doing anything, I'm saying no to a million other things in that, in that, in that choice. So you know, if I'm, if I leave behind an un, some unanswered emails, to go and spend, you know, the evening with my son, because I would rather do that. I mean, most people would endorse my decision, but the feeling that if I just gave it another hour I would have those emails all done takes away value. It leeches into the experience of being with my son and it gets very difficult If I understand instead that to finish those emails would be literally, not literally, but it would be a drop in the ocean. It would be nothing compared to the incoming supply is infinite, it's never ending.
Speaker 1:It's just a question of doing what you can, and then I'm sort of freed from the tyranny of that thought about what else I ought to be doing and more able to be present in that moment. So you know, in fact, when we stop speaking in a little while, I'm going to go down and start making dinner and there are various urgent emails or emails that the people who sent them consider to be urgent in my inbox. And I don't mean to be callous towards those people and I do try, ultimately, to work with their agendas too, whenever I can. But it's just this understanding that there's no way of winning here, right, it's like the only way to win is not to play the game or whatever. It's like there's no hope of keeping everybody, or all parts of me perhaps, happy here, and that's wonderful. That's like a huge release from the burden, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I hope you've enjoyed listening to this distilled version of my conversation with Oliver Berkman. I found it really helpful to return to Oliver's points. There are, for me, always relevant, and maybe increasingly so. We live at a time where there's massive emphasis on efficiency and productivity and measurability, and this can rob us of the ability to inhabit the time that we do have to let life cash itself out in the moment, as oliver puts it. I'm very grateful for his wisdom and observations and I recommend to you his new book, meditations for mortals. I, for one, I found it really helpful. Thank you for listening and, as ever, please do rate and review the podcast wherever you find it.