Pod Insights How to Be a Better Human How to make the most of a finite life (w/ Oliver Burkeman) About this episode There’s only so much you can do in a week – or, according to Oliver Burkeman, in the roughly 4,000 weeks the average human lives. Oliver is a journalist and author of the books Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter “The Imperfectionist.” Chris and Oliver discuss the paradox of why change can only occur once we accept that we might not be able to change. Oliver also shares how life’s mishaps can become our most treasured memories and why sharing your imperfections is an act of generosity.
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0:03 Chris Duffy? You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about one of the big existential questions that humans have faced for thousands of years. What do you do with your time on this planet? Now, if you are expecting us to get to the bottom of that question, to give you a complete and definitive answer in the next 40-ish minutes, I have some terrible news for you. You have lost your mind. We are not going to be getting to the bottom of the meaning of life on this one podcast episode. If you thought we were, you are delusional. But we will be talking with the journalist Oliver Burkeman, and we will be trying to figure out some ways that we can think about this and tackle that question on our own
0:45 Chris Duffy? for ourselves. And Oliver has helped many, many people to think more deeply about their time on Earth. And one of the ways that he has done that is to simply point out the undeniable fact about our existence, which is that it is limited. Here's a clip from Oliver's TEDx talk where he's talking about exactly this.
1:02 Speaker 01 I think we need to think in a very different way about time. And to get towards an answer, I think it's really helpful if we turn to an idea that has a very long history in philosophy. It's there in Seneca and the Stoics. It's there in the Buddhists, and later on in Nietzsche and in Heidegger. And that's this idea that in some sense, most of us live our lives in a deep state of denial about how finite our lives are. Really, shockingly finite, actually. The average human lifespan is about 4,000 weeks long. It's not that we don't know we're going to die. I mean, we know we're going to die. If anybody here
1:43 Speaker 01 didn't realize that, I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But it's that we don't accept it deep down. We don't live as if we were finite humans. We instead do everything we can to try to maintain this comforting illusion that there'll always be more time for everything, that we can fit more in. Sometimes when I talk in this way, people think I'm saying something incredibly depressing. Frankly, I'd rather just go through my life deluded than face such a miserable truth. Or that it's really stressful, like that I'm suggesting we should go through our lives like freaking out all the time about the fact that we're going to die. But I think that the lesson from philosophers since Seneca onwards is that this way of thinking, it's not depressing or stressful at all.
2:27 Speaker 01 It's actually really, really liberating and relaxing. It's a huge weight off your shoulders.
2:39 Chris Duffy? We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with more from Oliver Berkman. Stick around because we're going to take even more weight off of your shoulders. I promise you're going to feel so relaxed. It's going to be like incredible how light you feel. Or maybe it'll just be more of a podcast. Either way, you'll have to stick around to find out.
3:03 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.
3:51 Chris Duffy? Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. You know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover things like the smartest way to book flights without planning your trip around the cheapest days to fly, or the quick math for knowing when to pay with points or just swipe your card. It's like having a travel savvy tour guide right in your pocket to let you in on all the little known tips and tricks to avoid all the hassle and extra costs that make travel so much harder than it has to be. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.
4:36 Chris Duffy? Today, we are talking about our brief but wonderful time on Earth with the journalist and author Oliver Burkeman.
4:42 Speaker 01 Hello, my name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a journalist. I wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and my new book is Meditations for Mortals.
4:53 Chris Duffy? I'm delighted to be talking to you because I've been a longtime reader of your newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and big fan of both of your books. I'm also interested because you've made a pretty big change in your personal life over the last few years, and you moved from New York to North York, which I just find somewhat delightful on a linguistic level. But I wonder how a big change like that has played into your thinking about the meaning and the value of your time.
5:20 Speaker 01 It's an interesting question. Yeah, we lived in Brooklyn for many years. My wife is American. And then we have spent the last few years in the North York Moors, which is a national park in the British sense. In the American sense, you can't, well, very few people live in national parks, but that's not the case here. So it's a beautiful, bleak part of the world, but it is also like a living community of towns and villages. I think we thought we were doing something very interesting and radical when we decided to leave, or maybe not radical, but at least self-determined. And when I look back now, it's just a pandemic data point, right? Like, everybody was doing this. Who could?
6:03 Speaker 01 I think in many ways, not everybody, but anyone who had that ability was considering it. It's also a return to the area in which I grew up. Not exactly, I didn't grow up in the countryside, but it's the part of England where I was raised. I do find that living in a rural area focuses one's mind in certain very helpful ways on how time is being used. In some ways, that's because I am surrounded by a landscape that I love, and I have the opportunity to spend Time in that almost every day, you know, out in the blustery winds and under the big skies and all the rest of it. And that is, you know, part of how I want to spend my finite time on the planet.
6:45 Speaker 01 In another sense, it's kind of inconvenient, living, you know, a long drive from big stores. You've either got to have a car with you or you need to arrange a ride from somebody. There's all these kind of little ways in which you're not just living in that sort of purely frictionless space. And that too, I think is actually really, really helpful in a way. It's sometimes it's annoying, right? Because I got to sort of think ahead about what I want to cook for dinner instead of just rushing out to the store while the, you know, pan is sizzling on the stove, which you could practically do where we, where we lived before. So there's a sort of a, there's a deliberateness that is required sometimes. And then socially, it's really interesting because yeah, you might feel like it was splendid isolation,
7:27 Speaker 01 but actually you're a lot more reliant on and interconnected with neighbors in many ways than you need to be anyway, in an urban environment.
7:35 Chris Duffy? I think it's interesting to hear you talk about this big life change, because one of the, the messages of meditations for mortals is that we often think we have to make some sort of huge, dramatic shift in our life in order for our life to start or to have meaning or to finally be the person we want to be. And your big argument is that shift will never happen, right? That we need to actually start right now and not worry about all of the big changes that could happen, but rather just what is happening today. It's interesting because in some ways you actually did make the big shift that people talk about, like if only I moved to another country into the countryside. So even having done that, do you still have that feeling of like, you do the giant shift and it's still, it doesn't fix all the things. You still have to do the work every day.
8:19 Speaker 01 There probably is a little bit of that fantasy whenever anybody moves long distance or between cities or anything like that. There's that slight sense of, um, now it's this that is going to answer all my problems. I think I had already begun to see through that fantasy a bit by the time we made this move. But yeah, regardless of what I thought. You move somewhere else and like you're still there. You brought yourself with you and all your kind of imperfections and limitations. And yeah, I think that one of the things that the new book is very much about is the idea that this moment of truth or this moment of problem-free living, this moment of getting over all the things about yourself that annoy you, that isn't coming. And this is great news. This is not depressing news at all.
9:02 Speaker 01 This is news that allows you to get on with living life to the full now, instead of postponing that until the point at which you've completely fixed your procrastination problems or worked out how to be the perfect parent or whatever thing it is for you. You don't need to wait for that.
9:20 Chris Duffy? Can we just define some of the terms that I think are, for me, really resonant and that come up a lot when people are reading you, which is the title of your newsletter, The Imperfectionist, and this idea of imperfectionism. And then relatedly, your book, Four Thousand Weeks. What is that number, four thousand weeks? And what is imperfectionism? And how are those related as we then move into Meditations for Mortals, your latest book?
9:42 Speaker 01 Sure. Well, four thousand weeks is very roughly the average lifespan in the developed world these days. I rounded it down a bit to get to the, to get to the round figure, you know, make for a better title. There's something kind of stress-inducing, I'm well aware, in expressing that figure in weeks, right? Because if you express it in years, then it's not as much smaller number, but years feel like large units. And if you express it in days, well, a day is very quick. It's very easy to waste a day, in my experience anyway, but you get a lot of them. There's something about the weeks denominator, I guess is the word, that really sort of puts pressure on those ideas because a week feels short enough to waste and to sort of not take account of.
10:24 Speaker 01 And also, you don't get very many of them when you, when you calculate the number in an average lifespan. Now, actually, I think in some ways, the book is almost an argument against the title. And I'll say what I mean by that in that. I think you could take that as an argument, that the idea of four thousand weeks, that could lead very swiftly to a different kind of book and a different kind of set of ideas, which would be, life is so short, you've got to cram every moment of it with the most extraordinary experiences you possibly can. And it's quite stressful, right? That's like, oh no, so more things I've got to do in the course of my day. So where I actually wanted to take that, I want to say we're actually so finite, we're so limited in what we can find time for and how much control we can exert over
11:09 Speaker 01 how our lives unfold. We're so limited that actually, in a sense, we need to give up hope of doing most of the things we can think of. We need to give up hope of exerting most of the control we might like to exert. And so there's a kind of a defeat that you have to go through here, when you realize that no matter how much you cram your life with exciting experiences, you'll never get to do more than a tiny fraction of what the world has to offer. But my argument is that that defeat is incredibly liberating and empowering and actually leads on to bigger and better accomplishments, because that's when you get to stop trying to do this crazy impossible thing of getting your arms around the whole of the world. And you see that
11:52 Speaker 01 actually your, your job, as it were, in the world is to show up and do some things and do them with as much presence as you can muster and to do them now instead of waiting decades until you feel completely ready to do them. So for me, imperfectionism is just the outlook on life that starts from the place that says, okay, there's always going to be too much to do. There's always going to be more meaningful things you could in principle do with your time than you're going to be able to do. So now what? You're always going to be sort of exposed to events. Anything could happen in any moment. You're never going to sort of cure all your, all the aspects of your personality you don't like. All of this is never going to happen. So now what? It really is not a recipe
12:33 Speaker 01 for despair or for sort of settling for a life of mediocrity. It's incredibly exciting because it's like, now you can bring all those meaningful things and those ways of being forward from the future, you know, into your life right now and really get stuck in to being wholeheartedly who you are right here and now.
12:53 Chris Duffy? It, it also makes me think that, you know, there's kind of this cliche of like, what would you do if you found out you were going to die in a week? You only had a week to live. And I think that The like cliche answer to that, at least that I've heard is like, I would travel the world. I would buy a fancy car. I would do all these drugs. I would like do this wild stuff. And I think that the reality is that if you actually genuinely knew you had a week to live, you would probably stay where you are and spend time with the people that you care about and maybe do a few things that really matter. You probably wouldn't be out pursuing like the highest possible highs and the most dramatic experiences. That's not actually what we want to do with our limited time, when we know it is limited.
13:35 Speaker 01 Right. First of all, the aspiration would be that you were, in the ideal case, you would, you would already be living the way that you wanted to spend those final days. You know, actually, many of us may be living something closer to that than we let ourselves believe, given the pressures in the culture and from all other, all sorts of other sources to sort of be super extraordinary. Like, that isn't actually what makes us feel most alive on a sort of regular basis. It's a reason to get started on things, not a reason to give up on them.
14:06 Chris Duffy? So I want to put a pretty big disclaimer on here, which I've said many times over the course of this podcast, but is that, you know, this show is called How to Be a Better Human, and I have a lot of qualms about that as a, as a title and an idea. And I love how you really push back in your book on the idea that we'd ever become a better person, some other person who's better and fuller and more generous. And yet, that also does not mean that you can't follow your best impulses. When you find yourself having an impulse to generosity, that you allow that impulse to go through rather than to squash it with some sort of logical explanation. You give the example of, you know, you walk by someone who's asking for money and you feel the, the urge to help them,
14:51 Chris Duffy? to give them some money, but instead you say to yourself, well, I actually heard that it's more effective to give to a charity that deals with homelessness. So I'm not going to help this person. I'm instead going to give to the charity. But then later on, you forget and you don't actually give to the charity. So you've done nothing, which I think is a very relatable experience. In my understanding of what being a better human would be, it's not being a different better human. It's being the best. Version of yourself. And I think that's really hard. It takes a lot of work, but it also is simpler than maybe it would look like from the outside, which I think your example captures is that you already have that impulse. So why not just allow it?
15:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's a really deep point. In fact, there's a sort of a paradox here that I'm not sure anyone has ever sort of solved, as it were, maybe it can't be solved. And so I'm not going to solve it now, but it's captured by that famous line from the humanist psychotherapist Carl Rogers, who says, "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." And it's also captured in that idea of becoming more of who you are, which, you know, doesn't really make any sense if we're going to be very sort of rational and technical about it. And yet I think most of us can connect with what that means in some sort of pre-verbal way.
16:09 Speaker 01 So again, for my own benefit, as much as for anybody else's, I'm experimenting with this notion of like, what would it mean to allow yourself to be more fully who you are? And that's a completely legitimate definition of the phrase better human, if that's the one you want to use. So not trying to sort of make yourself into a more generous person, but accepting the possibility that you may already be a perfectly generous person and just need to get a little bit better at the action of, well, not even an action, more like a non-action, more like not getting in the way of who you are at your best with kind of fear-based, anxiety-based, control-seeking, mental activity that just gets in the way. It's also related to an insight,
16:52 Speaker 01 which I've written about several times from the therapist Bruce Tiff, who has this kind of thought experiment. He invites people to take the thing that bothers you the most about yourself, like maybe you're incredibly distractible, or a procrastinator, or you have a short temper or something. And you just sort of think, well, what if I never change in this regard? Or what if some version of this is with me to the very end of my life? Because if, if I'm just always going to be a bit of a procrastinator, or I would say in my case, a bit of a catastrophizer, a bit anxiety prone? I can just sort of get on with life now instead of postponing the real part of life till I've fixed this thing. I can show up now. Now, as Tiff also says, there's something a little bit scary about showing up fully for life, which is,
17:34 Speaker 01 which is the secret payoff of telling yourself that you've got a big problem that needs fixing. You don't quite have to show up now because you can tell yourself, I'm going to do that when it's fixed. But overall, I think that notion of like, okay, then I can let go of that and just actually get on with the things I want to do. Instead of worrying away at trying to be someone that I'm not.
17:53 Chris Duffy? And it's interesting because when I think about my wife, she doesn't love transitions. Transitions are hard for her, even when we're going somewhere fun. If we're going on a fun vacation, the first day of getting into the new place is a little bit of a challenge for her. It's not her favorite day. Now, when I think about that with her, I don't think, oh, I hope one day she'll become totally comfortable with all transitions because that's when she'd finally be a good person. I'm just like, yeah, that's Molly. That's fine.
18:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:18 Chris Duffy? But when it's me, I'm like, oh, why can't I be good with transitions? I wish I was, I'm so bad at transitions and it's such a huge fatal flaw in my personality. Now, that's actually not my fatal flaw. Mine is probably something more like ego related. I can have a big head and that is, is sometimes helpful and sometimes very unhelpful.
18:36 Speaker 01 Right. And yet the moment you see it and the moment you accept that it's a part of you, you kind of let go of some notion that you're entirely within your own power to change yourself. And yeah, I think that's another thing that I write about elsewhere in the new book is this idea that like, there's this lovely quote I use from Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst, who says along the lines of, you know, if we met the person in reality who is inside our heads kind of yelling at us, you know, berating yourself, treating yourself in ways you'd never dream of treating a friend. We just think they were, as he puts it, like he would just be boring and cruel, right? It's just like, there's just, it's just, that would just be an obnoxious person. They would need help. This is not somebody to be listened to. Maybe it's somebody to be empathized with. That's an interesting point.
19:20 Speaker 01 And yet that person lives inside many of our minds. We hold ourselves to. Standards that yeah are essentially impossible to reach and are just unfairly applied as against other people. I found that a very useful insight when I first sort of started exploring work on self compassion and things like that because it's something in my nature or perhaps also my culture sort of predisposes me to think that all that stuff about self compassion is kind of cringe, you know, and I don't want, I don't want to, I don't want to go there and start treating myself as some incredibly special person worthy of vast amounts of cosmic love or something. And of course,
20:01 Speaker 01 all we're talking about here is like, could you maybe just extend the same amount of basic decency to yourself that you already extend to friends naturally as anyone who's an okay or even good friend to other people will just naturally do. And I found that very powerful. It's like, oh yeah, actually, yeah, I don't need to think I'm special. I just need to think I'm not specially inferior to all the other people in my life.
20:32 Chris Duffy? Okay, we're going to take a very special little break and then we will be right back with more from Oliver.
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23:18 Chris Duffy? And we are back. So Oliver, I just want to share an anecdote with you. And this is something I actually hadn't thought about in a long time. I was maybe 18 or 19 years old. I was in my first year of university. And I was visiting a friend, and this friend is very smart, one of my best friends. And she was going to Harvard. And I remember I was taking the train to visit her. And I was on the train. It happened to be with one of her college roommates who we were sitting together. We were both on the Train up to to visit her. And it was the first time that I'd ever seen a like a self help book, someone actually like our age, reading a self help book. And I remember she was reading this book that was called slowing down to the speed of life. And she's like, this is so helpful. This is really changed my life.
24:03 Chris Duffy? And she gave it to me and I read it and I felt like, oh, there's some big insights in here. But I also remember feeling in the moment like, this is ridiculous, right? Like, we're eighteen, we have to slow down to the speed of life. Like, we, life hasn't even caught up with us yet. And yet, it also was that idea of like, if I read this book, I'm going to figure out the secret to how to live a meaningful life. I could change myself in this way. It it felt really compelling. And that feeling that like, there is a secret out there that we just haven't uncovered yet is something that that you talk about a lot. And that I've never really heard other people talk about in the same way.
24:39 Speaker 01 That's interesting. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, well, I'm glad that you got it from my writing. I do think that the thing that underlies all of this is this notion that there is, yes, some way of mastering the art of being human that you haven't found yet. And maybe quite a lot of people around you have, and that's annoying. And you've got to find it somehow. What you learn, if you think about this and reflect on it after for a while, is that and live for a while, is that if there's any meaning to the idea of mastering the art of being human, it is in getting more and more comfortable with the sense in which life can't be mastered.
25:16 Speaker 01 As finite human beings, that is just not, that's not what it is to live fully as a human, to sort of get on top of life and then direct it from that vantage point. It's much more about being able to sort of be in it and take action despite the fact that you don't know if it's the right thing, or you don't know if you'll do it every day for the rest of your life, or you don't know if you're doing it well. So, yeah, I mean, this book is about action for sure, but it's imperfect action, which, which is not actually second rate as against perfect action, right? It's better because it's the kind that happens in the world.
25:51 Chris Duffy? I think also there's this piece of that, I mean, this culture of striving, of reaching the pinnacle of of being at the top. And I think that something that you've described.
26:01 Chris Duffy? And I feel like is really something I see in a lot of people around me, both my age and older and younger, is this feeling of like just deep exhaustion that like nothing is enough and I'll never be good enough and I can't ever compete with what is out there. And even before I've begun, it's already too late. And I think it ties into this metaphor that you use, the kayak and the super yacht.
26:30 Speaker 01 The kayak and the super yacht. And all I mean by this is just that I think to be human, to be a finite human is effectively to be in a little one-person kayak on a rapidly moving river, right? You just find yourself there on the river of time. There are lots of other people around in their kayaks. It's not totally solitary, but you know, you're just here and you're trying to stay afloat and you respond to what is happening as best as you can. And sometimes there are very choppy periods and sometimes there are very quiet periods and all you you never really sure what's coming and you just have to sort of navigate with into each new moment as best as you can. This is a very sort of vulnerable and risky and a little bit scary situation, but it's also very exhilarating,
27:15 Speaker 01 right? It really is being alive. And I think that what a lot of us sort of naturally instinctively, let's say, want instead is what I think of as life on the super yacht, right? Where you're on the kind of third floor story bridge of a huge fancy multimillion dollar boat in the kind of air-conditioned control room. I don't actually claim to know a huge amount about how super yachts are piloted and somebody's going to pull me up.
27:43 Chris Duffy? As you're saying it, I was like, I've never been on a super yacht, but.
27:46 Speaker 01 But you know, you program the route into the you program the route into the navigational computer system and you kind of you sit back and you're in control and you're confident about where you're going and it feels very sort of secure. At the same time, there's something kind of sterile and lifeless about it, which I think is an important point not to miss. So anyway, I just think that a lot of the things we do when it comes to sort of use, trying to manage our time, the ways we try to sort of set up our lives can be best understood as ways of trying to feel like. We're really on the super yacht when in fact we're in the kayak. Ways of trying not to feel what it is to be a limited human. So an obvious one of those is if you're perpetually on a quest to become,
28:30 Speaker 01 to discover the perfect productivity system, to perfect morning routine, the perfect set of protocols that is going to make you sort of invincible, then you're never going to get there because what you're trying to do is antithetical to being human. And I think that again and again, what I'm actually saying in my writing is basically, you know, if we can just a little bit let back in the reality that in fact we're in the kayak, that's not only just true, but it is actually A, more associated with getting things moving and accomplishing things and doing things. It's that's where you actually do things instead of postponing them until you're totally sure that you're on a super yacht, you know, you just dive into doing them now.
29:12 Speaker 01 And secondly, it has more of what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa calls resonance. The thing that we really want from life is not total control over it. It is this kind of vibrancy that really depends, to some extent, he argues, and I agree, on not being in total control of it.
29:29 Chris Duffy? It also makes me think that, you know, when we look back on our most treasured memories or the times when we felt like we had a really meaningful period in our life, it's almost never like, and it was comfortable and quiet and nothing happened, right? Like even though we think we want that and there was nothing going on, that's not what you look back on and go, you know, you look back on the periods of struggle or discomfort or at the very least it being, you know, less than ideal and you making the best of it with friends or family. Those are the periods that you look back and you laugh on. It's so rare that someone says like, remember when we stayed at that perfectly, totally clean rental house and it was exactly what the pictures looked like? Like, that's not a very big memory. Whereas remember when we got to the house and it turns out that there was a giant puddle
30:13 Chris Duffy? of water in the middle of the house and all of the beds were broken and we had to sleep in a tent outside, like that is the memory that people actually have and treasure later on, even though in the moment it's uncomfortable and unpleasant, maybe.
30:26 Speaker 01 Right, yeah, and I I refer in in one part of the new book to this saying, this quotation, that almost everything in life is either a good time or a good story. Not everything. I'm not claiming that there aren't just true tragedies that before people, but it's really striking how frequently the things we see, the memories we sort of treasure are in some sense, memories of things not working out. It may be that this is actually on some level, the same phenomenon though, as the one that people who are struck by real severe crises, you know, major, serious diagnoses of illnesses, do surprisingly frequently look back on those things as things that they're in some sense glad that they happened in terms of how they focused their minds on what mattered
31:08 Speaker 01 the most. So in all these different levels of intensity, you get this sort of basic principle that when things slip out of our control, it's at least possible and perhaps quite frequent that turns out to be for the best.
31:22 Chris Duffy? Coming at it from as a comedian too, like that idea of it's either a good time or a good story. That is definitionally what it means to be a comedian, to look at the world that way, I would say, right? Like it's either pleasant, fine, or this is fodder for my comedy later on. That is so how you look at the world as a comedian, I think.
31:41 Speaker 01 That's such a great point. How many sort of comedians bits drawn from life in any way are about everything going fine and nothing happening. It's like, that wouldn't be funny.
31:50 Chris Duffy? I can't think of a faster way to get people to throw things at you on stage than to tell them the things that are going well.
31:55 Speaker 01 It's funny. Now I'm laughing, but I'm laughing because the idea is ridiculous. And I think the deep truth there, I mean, humor is like, there is something very much not superficial and profound about the capacity to laugh at what is happening to you or has happened to you or has happened to somebody else when you're laughing in an empathetic sort of non-contemptuous way. There's something about the sort of position of laughing at the cosmic joke of all this, which is right, right in the heart, what I'm trying to get at. And whether I do it amusingly or not is not for me to say, but I think that one thing that can come from feeling your way into this viewpoint on the world is a real
32:35 Speaker 01 sort of deep belly laugh at what we are as humans and how things don't work out for us.
32:43 Chris Duffy? Okay, we're going to take a short break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about one of Oliver's favorite jokes of all time. You do not want to miss this.
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34:27 Chris Duffy? In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
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35:30 Chris Duffy? And we are back. So Oliver. Several of the quotes in your book are surprisingly from comedians, right? You have a Mitch Hedberg quote that I thought was fantastic. A Mitch Hedberg joke about how I'm going to butcher it. But basically, you know, if you're lost in the woods, what you should do is just build a log cabin and live there. You have dramatically improved your situation.
35:49 Speaker 01 I was lost, but now I live here. Yeah.
35:52 Chris Duffy? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was lost, but now I live here. Perfect. You got, I missed the punchline, of course. That's the most important part. That's very funny, but it also hits this kind of profound truth that you're writing about, which is that, like, that is where you are is where you are, period.
36:06 Speaker 01 I think that joke is incredibly profound. It's the idea that we're all sort of lost and that setting up home in the middle of that lostness and that lack of control is what we're here to do. I mean, I don't want to put ideas posthumously into Mitch Hedberg's mind about it, but that's what that means to me. And I think it's incredibly deep and also very, very funny.
36:25 Chris Duffy? I feel like this will resonate with you too, is that I have a friend who's Quaker and he gave me this Quaker phrase, which I'm not Quaker, but I have now written and is on my desk, which just says, proceed as the way opens. Because to me, that is just, that's all that you can ever do is just take the next step. Proceed as the way opens. You don't have to know where you're going.
36:42 Speaker 01 That's fascinating to me. I love that phrase. I was raised as a Quaker, actually, but it's, it's new to me and it feels like a very Zen Quaker insight.
36:50 Chris Duffy? So the question I have though, is when we have this relentless focus on the next step and on action. How do we ever get to rest? When is it ever okay to not be doing something? Like, how do you have a moment where you can draw a line and just be present and not have to be moving forward towards something yet again?
37:08 Speaker 01 I think doing can be at least partly a present moment thing, right? Maybe it is inherently and only a present moment thing. It's not about, are you getting through the list? I think that it's really important to not only focus, let's put it that way, be realistic about it, on all the things left to do, which is effectively an infinite list, right? So if you compare what you've done to all the things left to do, you're always going to feel bad because there's always somewhere further to go and more things to do, more actions to take. But the idea of focusing on what you have done, the simplest way of doing this is literally to keep a done list, right? Just to keep a list during the day where you write down the things that you have completed as you complete them. It just, you know, bends your focus back again a little bit to the comparison of what
37:53 Speaker 01 you've done as against zero, right? Not as against infinity, which is a very depressing place to be, but as against what if I hadn't done anything today? And there's a sort of a discipline that arises from that, which is like, okay, well, whatever I do next, I'm going to be adding it to my done list. So let me choose something. Let me choose something that I can complete and then let me do it so that I can add it in a very satisfying way to this list. I mean, maybe this is only something that list geeks like myself really find so satisfying, but I think the spirit of it is pretty satisfying. And that's what, you know, there's an even simpler way of so-called productivity technique that I've written about before, which I still return to sometimes, which is literally to get a notebook, write something down on a line that you're going to do, answer five
38:36 Speaker 01 emails, I don't know, make a call, do that one thing, cross it out, then write the next thing on the line underneath it and do that thing, then cross it out. And like, this shouldn't work, right? It's not a plan for the day. It's not a set of goals and visions and quarterly targets or anything like that. And yet, there's something very powerful about it because it is this act of sort of settling into your finite nature, picking something that feels like the right thing to do. Writing it down inherently requires you to sort of say what done would look like on some level. Getting to that point and then in a very sort of ritualistic ceremonial way, crossing it out and letting it go. There's something really powerful about that.
39:19 Speaker 01 It's very much in tune with who we really are as humans, I think.
39:22 Chris Duffy? Well, I love the idea of letting things go and crossing them out. And I also love the idea of just deciding that like there is an amount that is okay for now or for this time or for today, because I think that for me at least, I can really get into this idea of I have to do it all. I have to like, if I maximize all of the time, then I'll be able to write this book in two weeks rather than two months and that would be better. Both what works and also what makes me happy and to have meaning and purpose is when I think about it more as like I'm building a muscle rather than I'm trying to accomplish the task at once. And so it's like, if I just sit down, I mean, my technique for writing is I, I literally will put on a white noise machine and set a timer for 45 minutes and then I just, my role is I just
40:06 Chris Duffy? don't get out of the chair. But the trick for me is that 45 minutes, it took a lot of effort to work my way up to 45 minutes of just sitting in the chair, not even actively writing. Like at first I was like, I could do this for 10 and then eventually I got to 30 and then 45. And I found that honestly, the best days, once I'm really in my trained zone, I could maybe do two or three of those 45s. But yeah, that's over the course of a whole day. And I find that really what my goal is just to get myself into the endurance of being able to do that. That as a goal feels much more tolerable than like, I'm going to write four chapters today in my book. Even if I was to do it, it just burns me completely out.
40:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I think that's really well put. And that number, you know, I've written in this most recent book about this kind of strange three to four hour rule of creative productivity that seems to be the sort of optimal amount for pretty much almost anybody, if they have the freedom to do it, to put into their core. Work if their work involves thinking or creativity or writing. I don't hit it every day at all, but if you can do sort of three forty five minute periods, factoring in a few rests, that's that amount, you know, it's and coming back to do that over and over again is infinitely more meaningful and productive than sort of managing to do six or seven hours, two days running, being exhausted and then just sort of overwhelmed
41:25 Speaker 01 by the prospect of doing another hour on it that you can't be bothered and you throw it away for six months, right? I mean, that's not the way forward.
41:33 Chris Duffy? You know, we were talking and laughing about the idea of how how much an audience would hate you if you were standing on stage at a comedy show and talking about how great your life is. And that's certainly true. But I think that sometimes people mistake that idea as like, the audience would hate you because they're jealous of you or because their lives are not good. And I actually think the truth is that like, when, when you are connecting with another person, certainly on stage in comedy, but I think also just off stage when you're having a conversation, right? Like, if you really make someone laugh, a lot of times they say, oh, that's so true. Oh, that's so true. Right? Like, because it connects to them. There's this feeling that you and they have seen something or experienced something in the same way. And it makes me think about how we often want
42:18 Chris Duffy? to present ourselves as perfect, as we've got it all together, thinking that will impress other people or bring us closer to them. When in reality, that's the least relatable position you could be at. If someone comes over to your house and there's not a speck of dirt, it's actually the least relatable thing you could do. And you talk about this idea, which I loved, of scruffy hospitality.
42:39 Speaker 01 So this term scruffy hospitality comes from this Anglican pastor from Tennessee, Jack King, who uses it and tells a story of it in his own life of, you know, him and his wife enjoying having friends around for dinner, but having such a complicated checklist of things they went through to make the house perfect for visitors that it was putting them off having visitors. And His resolution, their resolution to to start just inviting people to eat on to eat what was in the cupboards and to sit in the kitchen as the kitchen was and to walk over the unmoed lawn, you know, because that actually allowed the thing to take place. And the sort of idea here, the underlying idea, it's not just that, you know, it's okay to not be perfect about these things. It's that there is more connection usually when
43:22 Speaker 01 you kind of let your guard down or when you relate to people from a position of openness about flaws. There's fascinating research in imposter syndrome that says that actually the best thing that leaders and mentors can do for younger people in an organization, say, is to be honest about their own struggles rather than to sort of provide a perfect role model to inspire you to be like, and one day you could be that perfect, but instead to just be open about the ways in which they don't feel perfect themselves. I'm always struck in my newsletter, for example, if I write something about what I do when I'm overwhelmed by email or something, I will get some messages from people kind of surprised that I ever still do get overwhelmed by email, even though I, you know, call the newsletter
44:05 Speaker 01 The Imperfectionist and feel like I write quite often about about my own sort of struggles with these things. And then secondly, they will be liberated by, on some level, by that. Not just in the sense of like, well, if he's overwhelmed by email, that gives me permission to just be useless at email. Actually liberated to kind of address some more of their email, right? It's like they, there's something in the freeingness of realizing that we are on some level, all in the same boat, all struggling with these same conditions of modernity. It doesn't make you want to give up. It makes you want to say, well, okay, I can roll up my sleeves and do my bit because I'm as qualified to do this as anybody else. So there's something incredibly, there's actually something generous in sharing your
44:47 Speaker 01 imperfections and faults, I think, that it's not just that you should be allowed to do it. It's that it's almost a positive good.
44:54 Chris Duffy? And and also separately, there is something so sweet and also absolutely hilarious about responding via email to a person to tell them, I'm so glad you shared that you get overwhelmed by email. I'm sending you this email to say, I really relate to you being overwhelmed by email. Is a perfect summary of the human condition to me.
45:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely.
45:16 Chris Duffy? Oliver Burkeman, thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed it.
45:20 Speaker 01 I've really enjoyed it too. Thanks very much, Chris.
45:25 Chris Duffy? That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Oliver Burkeman. He spent a portion of his 4,000 weeks talking with us here today, and I really, really, really appreciate it. His new book is called Meditations for Mortals, and his fantastic newsletter is called Be Imperfectionist. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my imperfect newsletter and other projects that are similarly imperfect, at ChrisDuffyComedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who I am so truly deeply grateful to spend my weeks with. On the TED side, we've got mortals with the skills of gods, Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Laney Lott, Antonia Lei, and Joseph Dubrine. This episode was fact-checked by
46:07 Chris Duffy? Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who love to see an untrue fact die. And on the PRX side, there's a crew whose every move is worthy of deep meditation. I'm talking about Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening. You have so many choices for what to do with your time, so many podcasts out there in the world to listen to. Thank you for listening to this one. Please share this episode with a friend or a family member who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Now, I cannot promise you 4,000 more episodes, but I can promise that we have got you covered for at least a few more of your weeks. Thank you for listening, and please take care.
46:53 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.
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