Learning This Sooner Could Have Saved Me Decades - Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist, a writer for The Guardian, and an author. How does the insecure overachiever evolve? You think success will quiet the doubt, then you hit 30, and it’s still there. More achievement, more stress. So how can you feel proud of what you’ve built without always fearing it’s not enough? Expect to learn if it possible to be the best in the world and relaxed at the same time, how to deal with uncertainty more effectively, the biggest changes insecure overachievers will face as they age, the cost of constantly asking, “Am I living my best possible life?“, how to know when it’s a good time to settle and much more… - 0:00 The Hidden Trap of Tying Your Worth to Success 6:31 How to Accept You Can't Control Everything 15:25 Why Nothing Going Your Way Might Be a Gift 19:04 The Real Cost of Trying to Control Everything 24:27 Why You Should Do It Anyway 30:41 Can You Actually Design Fun? 41:03 Is AI Just Another Control Fantasy? 46:26 The Insecure Overachiever Paradox Explained 55:14 Is Optimising Your Life Making You Miserable? 58:41 Do High Performers Create Their Own Problems? 01:05:19 How to Handle Criticism and Let Go of Control 01:21:22 Does Settling Lead to a Better Life? 01:26:12 What Is Oliver Working On Now? 01:31:25 Where to Find Oliver - Get up to 20% off the leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Is it possible to be the best in the world and relaxed at the same time?

• 0:08Oliver Burkeman?

  The best in the world? I don't know. What I do think is that it is very possible to be really, really good at what you do and relaxed. And actually, my experience is that the more relaxed I can be, the better I am at things. I'm not going to claim to be the best in the world at anything. But I think that notion that you've either got to choose a relaxing life or an accomplished one, this is the thing I'm on a mission, very personally motivated mission to prove is not how it works.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  I think there's a tension between having high standards, which is hypervigilance and obsession and focus and really paying attention to stuff. And that just tends to bleed into the personality and the ambient anxiety. And I can see, for instance, if you were to say,

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  is it possible to be the best in the world and never relax at the same time? That question would seem pretty obvious to answer. Yes, of course, because the exact same level of resolution that you're obsessing over your pursuit with is the thing that kind of destroys the rest of your life. The interesting question is to work out whether you can kind of be on and off, or if you can hold things a little bit more loosely whilst still getting the right level of output you want.

• 1:36Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that there's something, I mean, this runs through a lot of what I tried to write about, but there's something about wanting to feel in control of the process of getting better at things or being good at things, which is kind of completely different from the actual process of getting better at them or being good at them. So I think there's, you know, this is on some level, just the banal observation that people who really excel in what they do are very often, or perhaps more often, in a flow state while they're doing it. They're kind of, they sort of let go into the action. They're not sort of sitting back inside their minds, controlling it all in a very sort of

• 2:22Oliver Burkeman?

  conscious, controll-y way. So.

• 2:27Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, for me, and of course, I'm talking about things like writing or speaking. I mean, I'm not talking about, I may work differently in to different degrees for kind of sports performance and things, but you find that the more I'm trying to make sure that things go well, that's just like a, and therefore I'm sort of unrelaxed and clenched and muscles tensed and everything, but the more you sort of pop into this awful self-conscious space where nothing, nothing works and it's much better to lose yourself in the activity than to be trying to control it.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of people are struggling to find a healthy way to pursue goals without tying their self-worth to the outcome.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  That is one of the, one of the fundamental problem. Like if I, the only way that I can get myself to pursue a goal is if I care about it. And in the act of caring about it, I'm going to be disappointed if I don't reach it. And in the act of the disappointment is some sort of value judgment about me and my worth and whether or not I, yeah. And so how do you healthily pursue goals without tying your self-worth to the outcome, given that the only sort of goals you do pursue are ones you care about and in the caring, the disappointment and in the disappointment, the self-worth?

• 3:46Oliver Burkeman?

  So, I mean, I, the, there's a sort of ideal way of doing this, which I don't claim to have, you know, totally pulled off or anything, but I think the distinction is when you say care about, there's a way of caring about goals that basically defines yourself as inadequate and insufficient until you've met them.

• 4:07Oliver Burkeman?

  And there are other ways of caring about goals. So there's a concept in psychology, the concept of the insecure overachiever, which whenever I kind of mention it in public audience context or whatever, like, like half the people in the room, just the, the look of recognition that passes over their faces is amazing, right? So people who do really well in life and they're driven and they're probably applauded and celebrated by their friends or by society at large for doing loads of impressive stuff. But on some level.

• 4:40Oliver Burkeman?

  And I was like this for years, they're doing it to try to fix something about themselves or to try to feel okay and to try to sort of fill a void. So loads and loads of really successful people in the world, they ultimately are sort of feeling like they've absolutely got to succeed, otherwise on some level they don't really deserve to exist or something. And that sort of, that puts you in a perpetual place where everything you're doing for, in terms of goal pursuit is, is, is to try to make yourself feel sort of less bad about yourself. And it puts you in this really awful situation as well, which I definitely used to experience a lot, where anything you achieve in the world, which you might think

• 5:24Oliver Burkeman?

  you could then feel like proud and happy about, just instantly becomes the minimum standard that you've got to meet next time.

• 5:32Oliver Burkeman?

  Which is a very depressing way to, to, to live, right? And, because, and, and so, you know, you, you, you do really well at an exam, or you get a certain level of public success with something. And then it's like, that instantly becomes like, if you don't meet that same level the next time, then, then like, who are you? What are you? There is this whole other way of thinking about caring about goals, right? Which is to say, like, at least to entertain the possibility of like, what if everything was fine right now and you feel good about yourself and you don't have these self-worth psychodramas going on? And then on top of that, you decided to create some cool things in the world because that's a more interesting way to live than, than

• 6:17Oliver Burkeman?

  sitting around doing nothing. So I think there is a way of being ambitious and accomplished that doesn't need to be, like, in, in flight from, from something, but it's a, it can be challenging to get there.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  I love this. I, I've, it's been one of the central questions. I think it's why I'm such a huge fan of your work and, and your newsletter as well, that everyone should go and sign up to the, the Imperfectionist.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  It, it's one of the central questions that.

• 6:48Chris Williamson?

  I want to achieve things, but I don't want to miss my life. Might be a pithy way to to sort of describe it. And I called it the curse of competence. This situation where if if things go well for you sometimes, or even worse than that, most of the time, then success is no longer a reason for celebration. It's the minimum level of acceptable output. And there's a line from a John Bellion and Luke Coombes song that says, if the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all? And he's talking about it with regards to falling in love with somebody. But the same thing is true. The insecure overachiever in me pattern matched it to personal development.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  I was.

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  I just thought it's so funny. I found out in the middle of December last year that the podcast charted really high globally on this Spotify thing. And the

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  the Goldilocks zone period, after not knowing that I was, I charted at this thing. And before realizing that that meant next year I have to be better than that. Was. Yeah, right, right. Approximately probably 15 minutes or maybe less.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  And a beautiful 15 minutes. It was so good. I got to actually enjoy the thing before I thought, well, 2026 is chart is only, whatever, 11 months and 30 days away. So I must, I must get my nose back to the grindstone. I remember I saw this Ryan Holiday video. I brought this up to him. And I think Ryan's a super balanced guy and I really, really like him. But I had seen this, it's almost like performative grind set. I don't think, I think it's more him, which is why it's less. It feels less contrived. He got a call from his publisher and he was sat in his office and it was to say, you've hit the New York Times list, you're number whatever one or something like that. Congratulations. And Ryan took like three minutes or less, like 90 seconds on this call and it's videoed and he put it on his Instagram.

• 9:00Chris Williamson?

  And then was like, all right, I gotta get back to writing the next book. And I was like, Ryan, come on, dude. Like, you're supposed to be the fucking guy. Anyway, curse of competence. If the higher I climb is the further I fall and me, my Spotify debacle last year of, yeah, realizing this is the minimum level of acceptable output for 12 months' time. It's a real pervasive challenge.

• 9:27Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, absolutely. I was speaking to an author more successful than me, talking about how, I shouldn't name names. He was talking about how, you know, when his first big successful book had hit right at the top of the charts, he was like following along with his friends on WhatsApp and they were just like completely amazed that this thing was happening and everyone was just overjoyed. And then realizing when that happened to his, like, I don't know, fourth, fifth, sixth bestseller or whatever it was. And it did get to the top very soon after release that he sort of felt only relief. And then realizing that there was something amiss about only feeling relief in a situation where you should be, you know,

• 10:10Oliver Burkeman?

  you should be just sort of amazed and celebrating that it's happening. But now it's become the bare minimum.

• 10:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that I asked a question at my live shows. The people who came to see me in North America last year would have heard me ask this. It's one of the final questions, which was to work out basically whether you're gripping life too tightly.

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  And it is when things go well, is your presiding sensation one of joy or one of relief?

• 10:37Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  Is it, is it the sort of congratulation of self-love or simply the abatement of fear? And. I just think like this, you see, it's strange doing talk. I'm sure you do live, live stuff too. And it's strange giving talks like this because a musician wants hands in the air and shouting. And a comedian wants laughter and clapping. And if you're us, what you want is this kind of sullen fearful look on someone's face. What does an existential crisis?

• 11:14Oliver Burkeman?

  Existential crisis is triggered, right?

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Correct. What does an existential crisis look like from the outside? And that's what we're, that's the fucking bullseye for me. That's exactly what I'm going for.

• 11:24Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, brilliant. No, I think, and I think that's a great, it's a great question. It's a great way of putting it. It obviously raises the question of what the, um,

• 11:32Oliver Burkeman?

  what the answer is to this. And I think, um, uh, it, it's, it's really one of those things where

• 11:41Oliver Burkeman?

  first of all, just seeing the dynamic is far more powerful than like any technique or method for goal setting or anything that I've ever, I've ever come across, just like realizing that you're, that you're doing that and that it kind of makes no sense that you're, um, that you're turning your successes into reasons to, to, to beat yourself up. And I guess also,

• 12:05Oliver Burkeman?

  I guess this is sort of part of this overarching ideas that I end up writing about, you know?

• 12:13Oliver Burkeman?

  Because we are finite creatures, because we're all going to die, because there is, because there are limits of all sorts of other kinds of the control you have over your life or the number of avenues that you can pursue with finite time. There's this really powerful and incredibly liberating, and I insist not depressing sense in which you've kind of already failed. And so this, this, um, this desperate kind of white knuckle clinging to the cliff face attempt to not fail.

• 12:48Oliver Burkeman?

  You can sort of let it go, cause like a metaphor that I've used in my writing before, right? It's like we go through life braced like we're in a like we're in a plane that might crash and you're adopting the brace position or whatever. And it's like everyone's terrified. But in a way, the plane has already crashed and it and you're, you know, and here you are, right? You're on the desert island in the smoking wreckage of the plane. And that's what life is, right? It's just sort of doing what you can with what's in front of you. And I definitely, there are definitely people who think that this is a very sort of unambitious, depressing,

• 13:29Oliver Burkeman?

  sort of resigned attitude to life. But I think it's absolutely like it's so invigorating to to realize that like, I don't have to go through life trying to stave off the the great failure, because that's just being alive. And now I just get to.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  It's an interesting inversion of what the actual situation is, right? That I've said this before, I I often think about the fact that one day I'll die, but my inbox will continue to accumulate emails that will forever go unanswered and unopened. So, given, given the fact that you're not going to be able to do everything that you want, you you cannot do all of the things. There will come a day where there are still things that you want to do and and time will be up. So in that, in that perspective, 100%, there is, there is already failure as the set point. If that is your criteria, if your criteria is to do

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  everything that you want to do, complete all of the tasks, answer all of the emails or whatever, one day you will fail at that. And yeah, it is an interesting inversion of.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  What might be more accurate?

• 14:49Oliver Burkeman?

  And yeah, not just to fail, not just to fail to do everything, but even to fail to reach kind of perfect standards in the things that you do do, or fail to have uniform

• 15:03Oliver Burkeman?

  positive responses to the things that you do. It's like, once you see that the way that all these things are kind of outside our control, it becomes a lot easier to waste less time trying to control them and thereby sort of, you know, free up time and energy and focus for, for doing doing a few of the things that you, that you want to do with your life.

• 15:25Chris Williamson?

  You're a fan of Krishnamurti's secret of existence, I don't mind what happens. What's that mean to you?

• 15:35Oliver Burkeman?

  So just for anyone who's not familiar with it, right? He's, he, this is the, the, the legend or the anecdote here is that he's leading some group in California in the seventies or something. And this is Krishnamurti, the spiritual teacher. And he, he sort of, he asks everyone who's present, do you want to know my secret? And of course, all these kind of spiritual junkies, absolutely obsessed, lean forward, desperate for the secret. And his secret, as you say, is I don't mind what happens.

• 16:05Oliver Burkeman?

  And for me, that is a sort of ultimate statement of a kind of approach to life that

• 16:19Oliver Burkeman?

  that, that recognizes the limitations of the control that we have, recognizes how much of our lives are spent sort of anxiously leaning into the next hour or the next day or the next week, just waiting to make sure that things are okay. And then of course, they are okay usually. And all you do is lean forward into the next, into the next week.

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  You potentially lead through your own life.

• 16:41Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, exactly, exactly. And I don't think Krishnamurti in that, in that line, I don't think he means

• 16:50Oliver Burkeman?

  that some things that happen aren't better than others, or that you shouldn't try to have things in your life or the world or the people you love, like go well instead of badly. It's just that when whatever happens does happen,

• 17:03Oliver Burkeman?

  there isn't this sort of automatic.

• 17:07Oliver Burkeman?

  Stressful collision between like what you are demanding that reality do and and what reality does do. And you can still put huge amounts of effort and time and focus into trying to, you know, have things go the best way. But then when they don't go the way that you were hoping, you're not sort of completely bent out of shape by it. Who knows how perfectly even he manifested this attitude, right? I think a lot of what we're talking about here is kind of a shift of perspective that, that, you know, one, one hopes to embody on one's best days, but.

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  It's a largely unreachable gold standard, I think, but it's definitely a direct, it's a direction that you can be or an orient, orienting principle would be a good way to put it. A quick aside, if you've noticed, your energy isn't quite what it used to be, even though you eat well and stay active, there might be a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, which is the parts of our cells that produce energy, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I am such a huge fan of Timeline. They developed this pill right here that helps clear out damaged mitochondria. So your cells can actually renew themselves. And this isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increase by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  overall energy. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research, has more than 50 patents, and is the number one doctor recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. I started taking it nearly two years ago because it was recommended to me by my doctor. And that is why I've used it for so long, since way before I knew who made the product. And that is why I partnered with them. Best of all, there's a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. So right now you can get up to 20% off and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom. The place that I get this, this looking over the shoulder of the present moment

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

  thing the most is when I go to comedy shows, especially if you go to the mothership here in Austin, because lots of comedians, this is probably the same way it is at many other comedy clubs, but I haven't gone to them. When you see a lineup and there's eight comedians in a night, and it's 10 minute spots, or you know, five minutes maybe for the first few guys, and then some tens, and then maybe one or two fifteens, and then a 30 or a 60 at the end. And what it means is that there's kind of a regular carousel of these new comics stepping out on stage. And me at my most juvenile and worst, and most dopaminergic, is me going, oh, I can't wait for the next guy as the current guy starts. And then I

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  next guy my way through every comedian.

• 19:58Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  Until the show's out over, and then I can't wait to get into bed, and then it's the morning. And this, you're so right, that people sort of lean toward the thing that's happening in an attempt to control it, in an attempt to deal with the uncertainty. I think our first ever conversation that we had, I'd identified that most of your work is around control. It's around people's need for control, their desire to control. Do you see, just to dig into that a little bit, is control the reduction of uncertainty? Like, what is control trying to achieve? What are the, what are the component parts? What's the problem it's looking to solve?

• 20:44Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, it's a really deep and interesting question. It gets to the point where I don't know if I have the, the answers. I guess what I think ultimately, the idea that I'm tracking, which is of course, you know, me doing personal therapy and coming to terms with my own issues, is that there's something really, really sort of overpoweringly intense and, and vulnerable feeling about being human and consciously showing up for the human life that we have to sort of really take account of. The fact that we're here, that we didn't make, didn't choose to be born, that we have

• 21:26Oliver Burkeman?

  limited time, limited ability to steer how things go, that we're gonna die, all of this is just like super intense. And I think that very, very often what we're doing without necessarily realizing it is pursuing strategies for feeling like, not that we've got out of this situation, because you can't get out of it until death, but feeling like we're, we're feeling like we're engaged in a project of like getting a little bit out of it, or sort of up on top of it sometimes is the, is the way I think about it. It's like, we're trying to sort of lever ourselves into a position where we're kind of controlling life instead of being in life, which all of us inevitably are. And so,

• 22:11Oliver Burkeman?

  you know, you can do that in ways that involve, I think, you know, a lot of mainstream productivity culture is all about developing that feeling that like, you know, I'm really in the driver's seat of the, of the, of the thing now. But also, sometimes it's a more kind of numbing out and distracting ourselves response, right? A lot of, a lot of kind of time wasting is probably best understood as the fact that if you were really to focus on what you wanted to be doing, you'd feel vulnerable again, because like, who knows if this difficult plan would work out? Who knows if this awkward conversation is gonna go the way I, I want it to go? And that manifests in all sorts of ways. I mean, the thing you're saying about the comedy clubs is interesting

• 22:52Oliver Burkeman?

  to me because there's a cliche about how people put off life until they get married, until they get a promotion, until they retire, these big milestones, and that's true.

• 23:06Oliver Burkeman?

  But even after I felt like I kind of got over that, which to some extent, you know, getting older will cause you to get over it because you pass some of these milestones and, and realize that there's just more milestones. But you're referring to this thing that I've really noticed in myself too, which is the capacity to sort of live, not a decade in the future for when you get that big promotion or retire or something, but like about an hour in the future or 20 minutes, right? Like, like even Such an amount of time that's so fucking unimpressive. It doesn't even achieve anything.

• 23:40Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, and it's just that sort of waiting for the next thing to happen, checking it went okay. And not even checking it went okay. In the case of comedy club, a night at a comedy club, what's going to go wrong, right? Like, I mean,

• 23:54Oliver Burkeman?

  actually, and I would be, I'm terrible in those situations because I have sort of too much weird vicarious empathy for the performers and like I'm.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Me too.

• 24:03Oliver Burkeman?

  When people, when people die on their feet in comedy clubs, I can't bear it, but um. That maybe doesn't happen at the high class Austin ones that you go to.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Typically, the guys are not bombing all that much, although I'm sure if it did happen, I would feel the exact same. I'd, I'd want to do, throw some sort of a lifeline. I'd feel obliged to make this performance night okay. Like, how is it my responsibility to do that? You, you hit on something that I think is real interesting. So I'm thirty eight next month. And what I'm interested in, speaking to a slightly older gentleman on a similar set of rails to me. What changes for the insecure overachiever as they age?

• 24:46Oliver Burkeman?

  It's interesting. I turned fifty, well, actually technically last year, but I am, I am fifty.

• 24:56Oliver Burkeman?

  Which is completely alarming and I'm still constantly going through the weird experience of realising that people in their twenties or even their thirties are relating to me as a, as someone from an older generation. When, I'm not talking about now in this conversation, but like, you know, when I was just kind of assuming we were having a comment, oh, I see, right, I'm an old person.

• 25:22Oliver Burkeman?

  What changes is, you know, I think that gradually there's this accretion of experience that gets big enough that you realise that firstly, you know, the world does not collapse when you don't meet, when you don't, when you break a streak of some kind of achievement that. That you know, you can sort of relax in that sense and you sort of develop, I have developed, I think, a greater level of sort of basic confidence that I sort of know what I'm doing when it comes to to writing things, which I until quite recently, don't think, don't

• 26:06Oliver Burkeman?

  think I had. But then also, there's just the kind of, if you, if you healthily manage your midlife crises and your dawning sense of mortality and being in the sort of much more decisively being in the likely second half of of life and and all the rest of it. There is just that kind of awareness, whether panicky or quite sort of up down to earth, that it's sort of got to be now, right? It's like, like, when, you know, when are you going to, when are you going to do that thing or travel to that place or learn that skill? Like, I mean, at some point, it's going to have to be, it's going to have to be in a

• 26:48Oliver Burkeman?

  in a now. You'll be familiar, I'm sure, with the the book Die With Zero about.

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  Bill Perkins, good friend, lives here in Austin, Texas.

• 27:00Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, right. About how dangerously possible it is to defer gratification for too long. And, you know, so I've had, to the extent that, you know, to the extent that I'm a calmer person and a happier person than I was, which is, you know, it's a mixed picture. But I think one of the big reasons for that is sort of this combination of like, I kind of know what I'm doing. And also, even if I didn't, I would have to do it now.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  Hurry the fuck up.

• 27:27Oliver Burkeman?

  That's a kind of, that's, that's a good combination of motivations.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  That's nice. I don't make a habit of showing my phone on the on the episodes all that much. But you might be able to read my new background. Come on, there we go. Can you read what that says?

• 27:44Oliver Burkeman?

  Do it anyway.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  Do it anyway. It's a gentleman walking up what appears to be a completely exploding ravine. And this is just like cosmic hellfire coming down. It's quite artistically done, I think. My prompting was lovely, but that's rotating, that's rotating on my phone background with different versions of do it anyway. And do it anyway, for me, is kind of do it scared, do it uncertain, do it tired. It's not push through and grind, like the sort of the just do it thing feels a little bit more forceful and grippy. And maybe this is just like total bias because like I did this one.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  But I really love, I really love do it anyway. And do it anyway, I think speaks to what you're talking about here, which is.

• 28:31Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  You don't know how, maybe it won't, maybe you don't have a hundred percent certainty that it's going to work, even though it probably will. Maybe it, like just fuck, just do it anyway, dude. And I think that that, the doing it anyway becomes increasingly important the older you get.

• 28:51Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like the maybe it's not, maybe it's not quite the same point as do it anyway, or maybe it's identical, but the slightly more, um, the slightly more.

• 29:03Oliver Burkeman?

  The one that evokes a more British atmosphere for me is, um, is like, you might as well.

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  So much more British. Yeah, it is.

• 29:16Oliver Burkeman?

  Might as well.

• 29:19Oliver Burkeman?

  Like, it's like, yeah, the, the stakes shift in such a way that like you have less to lose. Or maybe you never had what you thought you had to lose in the first place. Elizabeth Gilbert has that wonderful line about how you, um, you're, you're scared to let go or to surrender because you're afraid of losing control. But you never had control. All you had was anxiety, um, which I think is a brilliant insight.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Oliver Burkeman?

  That is Elizabeth Gilbert writing somewhere. I don't know which which book it comes from.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. How great. Isn't it? I think there's a lot of pity lines about, you know, true hell is when the person that you are meets the person you could have been or whatever, whatever, whatever. A really painful version of hell is you getting to the end of your life and finally realizing that you had nothing to lose, but you feared it all along. Like, oh, God, like now, now it's gone. And I spent my entire life fearing that I would get here, the place that I was going anyway. Like, I was always gonna be here and now the time to do anything else is sort of passed me by.

• 30:34Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, yeah. Genuine tragic

• 30:39Oliver Burkeman?

  situation, yeah.

• 30:41Chris Williamson?

  What sort of person do you think is having the most fun? Do you ever, do you ever think about engineering enjoyment as a productivity strategy?

• 30:55Oliver Burkeman?

  I mean, I started off very skeptical about any kind of engineered fun, right? Especially in kind of corporate settings, but frankly, even in one's own life, because as moment you're, the moment you're engineering it, isn't it? Doesn't it stop being fun? The moment you're doing it for some outcome other than itself. Aren't you just sort of monitoring it all the time vigilantly to make sure that it's a, that it's having its, having its effects? So I'm not sure this is the, quite an answer to your question, but what it makes me think of is

• 31:27Oliver Burkeman?

  sort of trying to engineer fun experiences is not something that I feel I've had much success with, but asking myself in the moment, in the context of the day, what I feel like doing, or what I would enjoy to do. Letting my productivity be at least somewhat guided by the question of like, what I feel like doing has been a huge revelation for me. I think a lot of us, probably the insecure overachievers, right? We go through life with a sort of deep lack of trust in ourselves. We think that if we were to just do what we wanted, we'd just like unspool and spend all day on the sofa eating.

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  I love that image. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:15Oliver Burkeman?

  And of course, it's not true. Like, you know, if you're interested in being productive or ambitious in the first place, you can pretty much assume that you're not the kind of person who's just going to become a wreck if you were to ease up on yourself a bit. And the big revelation for me was finding that when I can pursue some kind of approach to productivity that allows me to take note of what I want to do, firstly, you get to harness that energy instead of trying to squash it all the time, right? It's like crazy to come up with these incredibly rigid, straitjacket productivity systems that say like, even if you feel like working on X, you've got to work on Y because that was what you, that was what you assigned. You're just wasting your own energy.

• 33:00Oliver Burkeman?

  And then secondly, the big discovery is that actually, you know, I, among the things I enjoy sometimes is things that involve, you know, work or administrative things that I would, would never have wanted to try to force myself to do, but feel like I need to do, those sort of the things that belong to the world of obligation. Actually, that there does come, there do come moments in the day or the week when that's the thing that you want to do because you want to be the kind of person who keeps your commitments and is organized and all sorts of things like that. So it's kind of a no lose situation

• 33:38Oliver Burkeman?

  if your professional situation permits it at all, I think, to, to, to navigate by fun and enjoyment at least a little bit more than you probably are doing.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you wrote about the idea that interest is everything. When you're procrastinating on a project, wondering why your outwardly successful career doesn't feel as vibrant as it could, or feeling stuck on a difficult life choice, it's worth asking if you've forgotten the importance of building your days as far as you're able around what actually interests you. And I think this sort of explains the bind that many people are in where they struggle to do what they want because they think it won't be as effective in the marketplace or something, or it's, it's not right. For some reason, what they want to do is not right. What interests them is not right. So they nerf that.

• 34:27Oliver Burkeman?

  And, you know, I've, I've, I'd be fascinated about, to hear about your experiences with this because I think one of the One of the places this is really evident is in any kind of, any kind of digitally mediated stuff, including, you know, most of what I do, but especially a lot of what you do and at the scale that you do it, right? You have the capacity to really know what other people respond well to when you do it. This phenomenon is famous in podcasting and elsewhere for leading some people sort of astray, the kind of audience capture phenomenon and the rest

• 35:08Oliver Burkeman?

  of it. But even if you're not being audience captured, you're still liable or susceptible at any moment to really decide that what you're going to try to do is, is give people what they want. And I think as opposed to what you want to give them, because it's more interesting for you. And the big irony, of course, I think, at least my limited experience has been, actually what people want is to read, watch, listen to things from people who are really alive with interest in what they're, in what they're talking about and dealing with.

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

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• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  near you, or, best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped right to your door. Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below, or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom. So true. Yeah. And in my experience, the further I've gotten away from what is it that I'm interested in, who is it that I want to speak to, the worse the show's got. Now, the numbers may have gone up, but if it's something that I don't care about, like... Maybe if you run a charity or something, you're a pediatric neurosurgeon or something.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Like it's on you, your job is in service of this thing. And, and it's the

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  parameters of outcome are a bit more tightly defined. Like it's, if, if you do the surgery and it goes well, it doesn't matter if you enjoyed it or not. Right. Like what matters is the outcome. But with this, the, all the, these sorts of conversations and largely even blogging as well. It's just vibes, just what was your vibe that day? What was the kind of language that you used when you put this thing across? What was the sort of energy that you brought into the conversation? And, uh, yeah, for, for me, there's been times where, oh, it would be tactically great to bring this person on. It would be, um, useful from an optics perspective or whatever. And, uh, I've done pretty well.

• 37:53Chris Williamson?

  I've said no to some guests on the podcast that would fucking shock the world that I've said no to. Because I just, it just didn't feel, it just straight up didn't feel something. It just, I was like, no, the answer, the answer was no.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  And, um, the more that I've done that and the more that I've been like, yeah, Morgan Housel for the seventh time. Yes, Rory Sutherland for the 11th time. I don't give a fuck. I'm just gonna do it. Like Rory, Rory Sutherland accounts for like nearly 1% of this podcast.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  That's amazing. Not insignificant amount of hours on this podcast have been Rory Sutherland. And, uh, and you and I, you know, I just, I will continue to do it. And yeah, this tension between

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  what is marketable, what is effective, especially because

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  people, unfortunately momentum is so much more important than ability or, uh, quality for a lot of things. And that means that If you play the game enough, you can then sort of burn and coast with I've applied some momentum and then I sort of get to come into land and then I do the same. So that's why playing the game, but knowing it's not about it. That's why I do think that there's an argument to be made. Well, yeah, you know, like this movie star or musician or whatever, that maybe they're interesting. Maybe, you know, we'll see, see how you get on with them. And sometimes it's really great. Often there's times it's really great, like rolling the dice in that way to be like, okay, we're going to pick up a bit more steam and then I'm going to bring more people in to learn about some more niche ideas.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  That's not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but fucking hell, there is an upper bound. And I, if I start to stray beyond that, whatever Overton window thing, it gets, it gets so, it's so dull. And, you know, that's why you've got this line in that, um, in that blog post where you say connecting to the aliveness is the ultimate point. Like just connecting to the aliveness of what the thing is that you're doing.

• 39:59Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, cause the other thing, I mean, the other point is like, yeah, when you said that you can take certain decisions that, that are not like that, but the numbers might go up.

• 40:08Oliver Burkeman?

  You know, firstly, you might want to argue that the numbers wouldn't, wouldn't indefinitely go up if you kept doing it. There might be a short term boost, but also like, you know, at the end of the day, why do you care, right? That's what it always comes back to is like, if the thing you're not doing is an overall and an aggregate, a sort of a meaningful experience, then once you've got like, you know, basic food and shelter taken care of, why, why would you, um, why would you do it? And it's, I mean, I say it as if it's an easy thing to remember. It's obviously, we're all forgetting it, uh, all the time and kind of pursuing these instrumental goals that lead to other instrumental outcomes and kind of losing sight of whether they're all, yeah.

• 40:54Oliver Burkeman?

  It's the thing about, uh, climbing a ladder and realizing it was the wrong.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  I think it was wrong one.

• 40:59Oliver Burkeman?

  Leaning against the wrong wall, whatever. Yeah, yeah.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good point. I, I've been thinking about this with the advent of AI because everybody has now, anyone that writes or, or speaks or fucking anybody, uh, has the potential to augment their process by using AI. And one of the things that it's given us the opportunity to do is basically.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  Put out, take credit for work that we didn't do at a scale that no one's ever been able to in the past.

• 41:33Oliver Burkeman?

  Right, right. People have done it in organizations and stuff at a lower scale, right? Taking credit for their, what their underlings produce.

• 41:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you know, but it.

• 41:41Oliver Burkeman?

  This is nuclear, yeah.

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  It really, it is, it is, and it's available to everybody and it's available in sort of micro ways. For instance, let's say that you and your partner had an argument and it would be really good for you guys to make up. And you go to ChatGPT and you load the last few messages in and you say, can you write me a reply? That is meaningful and loving, that compromises without completely destroying my boundaries. And will make my partner feel great. Please refer to as many psychological principles as you can, but keep it light and lighthearted. We've been together for about five years. Send. They send you that back. You send the message over to your partner, let's say. Your partner goes, baby, I'm so glad you sent me that message. It made me feel so good.

• 42:25Chris Williamson?

  I, I just, you know what I love about you? And then all that you hear coming into your ears is, I'm a fraud, I'm a fraud, I'm a fraud, I'm a fraud. Liar, liar, contrived, conceitful, like.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  Because you do not get to capture. What is truly happening here. It wasn't you, it wasn't your genesis. What's someone saying is, thank you for showing me you. And thank you for how wonderful for me to be the progenitor, the muse, the inspiration for your thoughts. And because you didn't do it, you don't get to capture any of that goodwill.

• 43:04Oliver Burkeman?

  Yes, no, that's a great, it's a great and kind of chilling example, although I know that lots of people are, are doing it. And I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that, um. I wish I could attribute this argument because it's not my own. I'm borrowing it from something I read and I can't remember where I read it. But I think that, um.

• 43:23Oliver Burkeman?

  A lot of what happens when you use L L M's in that kind of context to sort of it's again, it's like wanting to stay in control, right? It's wanting to sort of control and direct the process, make sure you say the right thing. It's totally not about the fact that a lot of relationship happens in the repair that follows saying the wrong thing, right? And so you have to sort of go wrong first. But somebody was making the argument that, you know, it's a very, very old observation that everyone seems to speak in therapy speak these days. And sometimes this leads people to go on tirades against therapy itself. And I always want to, I always want to kind of say, these are two totally different things,

• 44:07Oliver Burkeman?

  right? And I couldn't really put words to it. But I saw this argument made that actually a lot of the therapy speak, especially in the, obviously in the last couple of years or whatever, is, is really the kind of generic outputs of both of large language models and of the kind of brains that use them too much and come to think and, and speak like them. It's the exact opposite of really good therapy, which is about, you know, at least in the tradition that I'm familiar with, is about like long-term real relationship with another conscious emoting human being and absolutely doesn't need to be full of,

• 44:49Oliver Burkeman?

  you know, so-called therapy speak and jargon terms and, you know, turning every human experience into a, into a sort of technical path pathology or something. It's completely different. But that feeling that everyone is kind of thinking too hard about what they're saying, figuring out what to say first, even just the nature of text-based communication and email and messaging has allowed some of that, right?

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  The ability to delete and.

• 45:16Oliver Burkeman?

  Right. You think about it first, you work it out, you know, even that is a bit secondary.

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that interesting? Isn't that, that's such a good point. Cause what, what is it? Written language has been around for basically no time at all for human history and spoken language has been around for way longer. And like editable written language has been around for a microsecond, essentially. And the, yeah, that's, I'd never even thought about that. But that's a really, really great idea that. It does, but how could that not create a, an environment of self-assessment and, and cajoling energy and this sort of semi-manipulative coercion of, was that really what I meant to say? Yeah.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Was that, well, it's what you said. It's what you said the first time and the second, or the third time when you got to go back. No, that's, that's more like what I meant to say. I'm not, I'm not, by any, if, if all books had to be published on the first pass, the world of literature would be a fucking mess. But I, I, I think that's a really interesting insight. Going back to the, uh, Dady about engineering enjoyment. I think the really impressive magic isn't in just grinding out difficult tasks. It's the very elite strata of people who are able to turn something enjoyable into a drag. Like that is, it's, it's kind of like inverse stoicism. You're, you're, you're insulated from the good things

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  happening to you and you manage to turn everything into something negative. So I had a little essay that I quoted you in that I wanted to, I wanted to read to you and it's called Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. That's Viktor Frankl. Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to ignore moment to moment happiness entirely

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  and just always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TLDR is you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.

• 47:53Oliver Burkeman?

  Oh, I love that. And feel confronted.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got, I've got your line. It's significantly longer than that and I didn't want to subject you to the whole thing. But one of my favorite lines, paragraphs from you is, "You need to do at least a bit of what you care about now as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future. Once the decks are clear and life's duties are out of the way, life's duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it, when you say you'd like to write a novel, or spend more time with your aging parents, or fighting climate change, or having fun, at some point, you're just going to have to start doing it." And I think that the category of people for whom ease, grace, joy, moment-to-moment

• 48:39Chris Williamson?

  happiness are more difficult to access, they have learned that a lower efficiency but higher reliability fuel is to just do hard things, because the sense of satisfaction can kind of always be achieved, even if the sense of joy can't.

• 49:00Oliver Burkeman?

  That's really interesting. And I love your use of the word grace in the bit that you wrote is kind of, is kind of really interesting to me as well, because I think there is, I'm slightly changing the subject maybe, or developing the subject, but there's a, but there's a, there's an aspect to this which is also, which also maps on to the distinction between like, living entirely in your head and in your intellect versus being kind of embodied in the world, right? Because a big part of enjoying life and showing up for things is, is embodied. You know, even just in the most basic sense of like,

• 49:41Oliver Burkeman?

  like feeling the air on your skin when you're present in a, in a place or something.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  Enjoying the coffee as opposed to using it at the maximum possible survivable temperature in order to get the caffeine into your system.

• 49:53Oliver Burkeman?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, yes, I think another thing that, you know, that characterizes these insecure overachievers of which we speak, and that has definitely been like part of my biography, and I see it all over the place as well, is, is being really sort of in your head. And really sort of not only driving towards the future, but assuming that the only way to, but that doing the driving through sort of Cognition and living in your frontal cortex or whatever, this very specific feeling. And I think you sort of see it, I feel like as I've got the older and more experienced with what I've been doing, you sort of. I um.

• 50:38Oliver Burkeman?

  I sort of pick up on it in people and kind of public figures sometimes, right? Not people I know personally, but it is this kind of. It's not just like we're charging into the future, but we're sort of dragging ourselves into the future by our. By our thinking in some way and it is, there is something crucial about remembering that you're a. That you're a body as well.

• 51:04Oliver Burkeman?

  When it comes to, of course, you can then be sort of obsessed with the body for reasons of like, you know, looks maxing or or kind of. Really obsessive kinds of physical fitness or whatever that are just as much about. The future progress.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  I think the crossover, the crossover between those people is way bigger than you might think, which is why. The, in the modern world, the kind of dumb gym rat versus the. A hyper obsessive autist with glasses that doesn't lift, those Venn diagrams have gotten closer and closer together. Because the desire for control in the cerebral world has moved into the physical world as well and the reverse has happened too. Yeah, I think you're right to say.

• 51:56Chris Williamson?

  People hope for, they want this. I make life happen and that's beautiful. Agency, my friend George Mack is writing what will be the seminal book on agency right now. And it's going to be fantastic. And I think I massively value agency and high agency in my own life. But there is a limit to.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  The art of agency, I guess you could say, like, learning when to just be able to be on a set of guardrails.

• 52:27Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, I want to say even I'm gonna read that book very energetically because I want to say that it's not so much that um agency is great and all, but there comes a point where you have to, I think it's that agency and control are in some sense fundamentally different things and that

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 52:45Oliver Burkeman?

  My experience anyway has been that to whatever extent I can relax the need for control, that's the extent to which I kind of acquire what I think of as agency or power or something, right? It's like when I'm going through my life, trying to make sure that it goes the way I think I need it to go. Trying to bend reality in the direction that I've decided that for a fundamentally deep buried emotional reasons, right? I need it to go. I'm actually sort of disempowered. I'm I'm kind of chained to

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  But you're fragile. You're very fragile.

• 53:24Oliver Burkeman?

  Absolutely. Yeah. And and

• 53:28Oliver Burkeman?

  again, maybe it's not everybody, but I when I when I don't need

• 53:34Oliver Burkeman?

  when I don't absolutely feel like my basic worth needs something to happen, like, that's when I can get to it. That's when I can start doing it.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Fully lean into it. Yeah, that's that's

• 53:45Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  That's wonderful.

• 53:47Oliver Burkeman?

  So I, yeah, I think I think I don't think there necessarily needs to be any limit to agency. We just need to see and appreciate the sense in which it isn't to do with sort of this kind of

• 54:00Oliver Burkeman?

  this kind of control domination based urge, which has another agenda always than just creating and building for the joy of doing so.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

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• 54:55Chris Williamson?

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• 55:15Chris Williamson?

  What is the cost of constantly asking whether or not you're living your best life?

• 55:26Oliver Burkeman?

  That's a good question. I mean, most obviously, I suppose it's just that that is,

• 55:34Oliver Burkeman?

  that's a, that's an invitation to find your life as it is right now wanting, as opposed as compared to some fantasy that you have of what your best life would be. I'm quite suspicious of the notion of a best life. It reminds me of the notion of sort of fully realising your potential, right? These are, these are concepts, they're not, they're not, they're not reality. And they're also concepts that have this kind of absolute no, no stopping rule, right? No, no limit, like you can, you could be doing absolutely the most amazing things in the history of the world, and you'd have no objective way to know that you had maximised

• 56:18Oliver Burkeman?

  your potential, or that it was your best life, and there couldn't be one better. So maybe I'm taking your question too literally.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 56:26Oliver Burkeman?

  If you really are asking that, that's where you're going to end up.

• 56:28Chris Williamson?

  There's a really interesting tweet that I saw a couple of weeks ago by this lady, who's a communications professor, and it was a clip of her. And she was talking about how

• 56:40Chris Williamson?

  Being underrated is a compliment, but being overrated is an insult. And how if you actually think about that, what you're saying is, why would not being as popular as you're supposed to be be a compliment? And why would be, why would being basically an overachiever with regards to your capacity? And it's, it's all just social signaling. It's all just you being able to say, as the observer, I am the sort of person that is able to detect in another that which hasn't been recognized by other people on both sides. Like, I know that they're full of shit when actually people think they're good, or I know that they're actually brilliant when no one else has realized it yet. Yes. That is kind of happening with our own judgments of our potential.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  That what we're saying is, I have an estimation of where I should be based on what I think I can do.

• 57:35Chris Williamson?

  But the what I think I can do is plucked out of complete fucking obscurity. And it is, like you say, a fantasy, because what? This is a good question that I sometimes ask myself if I get too self critical, which is, what else could you have done?

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  What else could you have done that you didn't do in order to assuage whatever deep feelings of insufficiency are currently swimming through you? Like, what else, what else would you have done? And when you actually go through it, you're like, fuck me, like, I mean, I could have gone to bed half an hour earlier on Tuesday and then that would have meant I could have got it, but I'm really, you know, I'm playing in the margins here. I really, I really, I really gave it a good shot. And just when you ask, what else could I have done?

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  You, in my experience, you find out, probably not that much. I, I, I probably did pretty close to what I'm capable of. And again, what was, have I ever done my type A people, type B problems thing to you? Have I given you this one?

• 58:47Oliver Burkeman?

  It's not ringing a bell.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 58:49Oliver Burkeman?

  So maybe not.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  God, let me give you.

• 58:53Oliver Burkeman?

  Oh.

• 58:54Chris Williamson?

  Let me give you this. I mean, this is.

• 58:56Oliver Burkeman?

  I'm excited.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  I am just so shameless with how much I get inspired by people like you and Alain de Botton. But this is one of my best ones, and this came out of a conversation between me and George. I think type A people have a type B problem and type B people have a type A problem. Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined. Given that you subscribe to me, I'm going to guess you're probably type A. Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says. Here's the thing you may have already realized. Type A people with a type B problem get very little sympathy. Because a miserable but outwardly successful person always appears to be in a much more preferential position

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  than a content being lazy but on the verge of bankruptcy. One, problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity. One feels like a choice, the other like a limitation. One is a bourgeois luxury, the other is a systemic imposition. I need someone to teach me how to be disciplined and work harder feels noble, upward aiming and charitable. I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax feels dopaminergic, addicted and opulent. Every underdog movie ever has a training montage of someone sorting their life out by working harder. None included a guy learning how to log out of Slack at 6pm or finally enjoy a beach holiday.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  So yes, type A people may objectively have better lives, but subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough. They wake up every morning feeling as if they've already fallen behind. And only if they dominate their entire day flawlessly will they have dragged themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output, which means they can go to sleep that night without feeling like a loser. Congratulations, you might be very successful, but you also might be very miserable. Just work harder, bro, advice reliably makes everyone more successful in the only way they can be judged outwardly. There are very few issues in life which can't be solved by just working harder. So everyone treats it as a panacea, not a purpose-built tool. And on average, maybe more people do need to hear David Goggins screaming in their

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  face to go harder than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they are enough already. But for a certain, perhaps, minority cohort of people, they actually need to hear the opposite message. We need a parasympathetic Goggins who's going to carry the TV remote and the Cheetos. #RestHarderThanMe. Type B problems are just as tough as type A ones, but they require a much less sexy solution. Peace. One that you can't actually achieve by simply working harder.

• 1:01:35Oliver Burkeman?

  Nice. I agree. I have those problems. I have had those problems. You know what? It also makes me, something that came up in the middle of listening to you read that, which is lovely, is there's like a weird selection bias problem here as well, isn't there? Which is that the, see if I can express this, the, the people who are drawn to the hard-charging, self-punishing, you know, work harder stuff are gonna be pretty much by definition the people who don't, for whom that message is something they don't need,

• 1:02:17Oliver Burkeman?

  right? That, that the temptation is going to be for people to pursue those messages and consume that kind of stuff, read those books, watch those videos, because they're already like in too deep with the idea that that's what they need to do and they need more sort of fuel to, to help their, their sort of driving of themselves. And so, and probably the reverse is true, right? Which is that people who are kind of already pretty relaxed and into relaxation are going to be consuming a lot of relaxing content. So it's almost like, you know, it's like democracy, the, the people who get into power are exactly the ones who shouldn't be in power or whatever. It's like the people who, people who really

• 1:03:00Oliver Burkeman?

  need to relax are going to be the most prone to. Consuming the message that.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you just, you, you keep fucking activating my trap cards, all of them. I can't read you another, I can't read you another essay, but it does go to show how astrally fucking connected we are. I did, I, I, I'll just send you it. I'll send you it and you can read it afterwards.

• 1:03:21Oliver Burkeman?

  Please do.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  If, if anyone wants to read it, it's called Advice Hyper Responders and, and they can just search it on my, on my blog.

• 1:03:28Oliver Burkeman?

  Oh, there you go. Yeah. That, the, the title, the, the title shows me that that is.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  Basically, basically the, the people who most need the medicine don't take it and the people who are likely to overdose have taken too much already.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, you know, the, the, the most spicy example of this that I think still holds true was around me too, which was telling men, don't be pushy caused men who really could have actually done with a bit more confidence around women to take it to heart. While the guys that were just blowing through boundaries all along disregarded it entirely. So advice is not taken evenly by people. It amplifies their existing fears and predispositions and worldview.

• 1:04:11Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, and it's also the idea that the, the, the, I'm not going to try and successfully quote poets. Live, but it's the idea that the worst people are full of intensity and the, and the, and the, the best lack all conviction, right? It's the same.

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:30Oliver Burkeman?

  That comes from. Um, well, this is why, you know, I'm not going to pretend that it was some sort of strategy in any of the books that I've written. But I do sometimes think in hindsight, and one or two people have said it to me, that I am, uh, that I might be performing some kind of useful and edifying bait and switch in some of the stuff I do. In the sense that like, sometimes I think it appeals to people, uh, who, um, think what they need is more.

• 1:04:59Oliver Burkeman?

  Time management device or something like that. And then I sort of, you know, if it works, completely destroy their worldview from the inside.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Lulled them in under a false, a false sense of dopamine and then pulled the rug out from it. Yeah, I mean, so it's a good point to make. And there's two things that I've been thinking about recently, especially over the last maybe 18 months or so, which is since the last time that me and you spoke.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  I have really fucking tried to go on a journey, partly inspired by you, partly inspired by Alan, partly inspired by Joe Hudson and my therapy. And to be like, okay, can I be really good at what I do and enjoy it? Can I try and produce at a high standard and not grip life too tightly? And one of the problems of that, this journey of relinquishing of certainty and control and all the rest of it. It's two things that have happened. First off, I've had to publicly say things that sound like they're in disagreement with something that I previously said. Me saying that, just work harder, bro advice, a sentence that I've almost certainly said at some point,

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  like fuck your feelings, just keep going, blah, blah, blah. That feels like a non insignificant number of comments. It's something to the effect of, bro sold us the problem and now he's selling us the solution. I'm like, well, if, if I did, if I did do that, I fucking sold it to myself as well because I believed it. So I apologize, I apologize for that. That also being said, at the time, I've never said, this is the way to live your life. Like this is what I'm playing with at the moment. And I think I've caveated a lot around like, don't just fucking end yourself trying to get this done. So that's the first thing. The first thing is that you've, you end up with a lot of criticism, I think. You end up with more criticism being, giving the sort of.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  Rhetoric, philosophy that you do, because it sounds, it doesn't sound like going from low agency to high agency. It sounds like going from high agency to low agency. And like the obviousness of just work, the sort of just work harder, grip it more tightly advice is so much more pithy. And much of my channel has been built on, you know, analogies, analogies of that in the orbit around that sort of thing. The second thing, and this is way fucking harder. And this is something that I'm really interested to find out whether you had to deal with. And I think a lot of the audience are dealing with too, is a complete loss of congruence as a person, as you try and go through this, especially

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  if you've made, you've wrapped a lot of your identity in being the hard charger. I get things done. I know me. The outcomes I get in the real world are because I do things. I go to bed on nighttime and I think about doing things. I wake up in the morning and my plan is to do things like, you know, thoughts, intentions, actions, goals, outcomes, they're all aligned. And say what you want about Trump, or Andrew Tate, or fucking Mamdani, or whatever it is, but they are highly congruent people. Like they are just a single line up and down. And this is why Andrew Tate recently lost a boxing fight. That was why it was so

• 1:08:24Chris Williamson?

  damaging, I think, to some of his perception publicly, because he had this sort of very congruent line. And there was now this thing that had got slotted on the side. It would be like if you found out that Trump had started doing meditation or something, you'd go, well, this doesn't fit the congruence that we expect. Or if you found out that Mamdani secretly owned a bunch of like bakeries or something. It's like, it just doesn't, I can't slot it in to, to my sort of worldview. And the going through this. I truly believe that there is something on the other side of letting go. And that is a journey that I'm going to try and go on. But as you do that, your real world results, briefly, and maybe even for actually a medium,

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  a pretty significant chunk of time, get a little bit worse because you've got to relinquish some of the strategies that you were using previously before you've got mastery in the new ones.

• 1:09:17Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Chris Williamson?

  You're saying all of this stuff and you're talking about embodying emotions and just going with the flow and learning to, and from the outside, what it looks like is not that you've evolved into this newly enlightened, but it looks like you've devolved back to the thing that you tried to only just get escape velocity from a fucking decade ago. So this, this loss of congruence between criticism and congruence, those are the two things that I've felt in the last 18 months since sort of trying to embody this a little bit more, uh, honestly.

• 1:09:47Oliver Burkeman?

  That's really interesting. I mean, the criticism one feels somewhat kind of professionally specific, right? Because you're, oh.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:58Oliver Burkeman?

  It's a strange, okay, the criticism one feels.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  You're having a stroke, you're having, you're having a stroke. It's nothing to do with the camera fading in and out, the beginning of the end for you. This is how you go.

• 1:10:09Oliver Burkeman?

  Lovely.

• 1:10:13Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, you know, having an interesting conversation, there's worse, there's worse ways.

• 1:10:19Oliver Burkeman?

  That's obviously a professionally specific thing. And I had a slightly different journey in that I was being sort of sarcastic about,

• 1:10:27Oliver Burkeman?

  sarcastic in public for about sort of self-help related things from an early point in my career and then became, went on a sort of journey towards more sincerity, which does, is, does leave you open to some of the same criticisms to some extent, right? It's like you said, this is all rubbish and that. Like the question I've been asked a lot is like, you spent lots of your earlier career criticizing self-help gurus, but now you've become a self-help guru. How did that happen? And it's like, I don't think either of the arms of that criticism are quite accurate. But anyway, that's a separate, a separate matter. I think the incongruence thing is really, is really an interesting, uh, uh, point. And I do think that, yes, the, the process that.

• 1:11:09Oliver Burkeman?

  Sounds like we're sort of both on is one where you have to kind of be willing to move away from strategies that have served their time. And in one definition, right, that is the original highly respectable definition of a midlife crisis, right? Not some kind of terrible problem where you start acting out and being weird, but just where you shift from the first part of adulthood to the second part of adulthood and things that you use to get yourself established in the world or to ultimately, therapists would say probably to sort of separate off from your family of origin and your parents, right, and become sort of fully, fully existing

• 1:11:52Oliver Burkeman?

  individual adult human. They stop, they stop working. They, they, they, they're no longer the, they're not going to get you all the way through the process of sort of coming to, or further along through the process of coming to sort of understand life and yourself and the endless fascinations and difficulties of relationships with other human beings and all the rest of it. And I think, you know, I, I think an argument could probably be made that kind of, that remaining completely congruent, as you put it, all the way through your life and from early adulthood through to, through to late adulthood is like a disaster.

• 1:12:36Oliver Burkeman?

  Like, I think that's kind of a, I, I don't think that's anything to be, to be celebrated at all, because I think, you know, we all do know people who seem, maybe we don't, I mean, I know people, we, we know people who's stuck in, they're, they're sort of the wrong age for the, for the, for the psychological outlook that they have. What do you, what do you, what do you mean there?

• 1:13:01Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, people who are sort of, you know, there's something amiss about people who are acting at, in their late 50s, in, who seem to have the attitude of, some aspects of the attitude of being in your late 20s, right? Not necessarily any particular lifestyle choice. I'm not saying everyone's got to be like married and settled down and with adult children by the age of 60. There's nothing like that. It's just that sort of, there's something almost hard to put into words. That is a bit too sort of, right, they're sort of too intent on establishing themselves in the world or something. They're too intent on, too intent on sort of, um.

• 1:13:44Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, I think that, I think that is a kind of a, I think that is a, some, there's something, there's something kind of wrong about that. On the other hand, you know, it's never too late and people go whatever route they need to go to get to their midlife crisis. Um, James Hollis, who I know we both are admirers of the, of the work of, I think, the Jungian psychotherapist, has this whole very excellent kind of riff about, um,

• 1:14:18Oliver Burkeman?

  how the goal of, the goal of really good therapy is to like make your life more interesting to you and how, and how the, the wide, the wide world just sees this as like nothing. Like what a pathetic goal in life to, to, to, to have a, to, to become more and more interested in, in being alive. But he says like, you know, he makes the point that really that's like, that's the whole game. Uh, it's the most that psychotherapy can do, but it's also, it's also all you, all you need for absorbing a meaningful and fulfilling life. It's that, and I think it's, that requires this kind of change and development. And I'm sort of going on and on now. You can cut this out. But the bit that, the bit that,

• 1:15:02Oliver Burkeman?

  the bit of what you said as well that resonated with me, like, no, I have quite recently gone through phases of feeling like I'm completely unable to work for like weeks at a time, being completely like unclear about the direction I'm taking and like really sort of out of sorts in ways that when I describe them in very simple language, sounds like I was going through like a depression or something. Um, but it wasn't that. It was, it wasn't pleasant at all. But I think it's better understood as these phases of like, yeah, the, the, the last way of doing things falling away and you just haven't figured out the, the new way of doing them yet.

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  One of the particular pains that you feel as you go through this, uh, whatever we want to call it, this chasm of incongruence.

• 1:15:55Chris Williamson?

  One of the challenges is if you're around people who are highly congruent at the time, you feel so inferior by comparison because these people know what they're doing, they're waking up and thinking about it. And you you used to be peers or are comparable or maybe even ahead of them in whatever version of a hierarchy you've conceived in your mind. And you're like, I'm falling behind. I'm falling behind. This look at this person, this is how I should be. This is how I should be behaving. I should be a singular spear of of reason and intention and action, and it should all be moving in the same

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  direction. And what I feel like is one of those red ropes that kids eat, sweets, and I'm floppy and flaccid and I'm all over the place. How their congruence is throwing my incongruence into harsh contrast. And that's a really dangerous situation to be in, because what it causes you to do is it causes you to it's kind of like being a crab that's outgrown its shell, come out of it, and he's now trying to force itself back into the old one. Like, that that simply is not going to work, but it will delay your growth in moving forward. It'll make you feel like fucking shit the whole time that you're doing it, because you're just going to it's going you're not going to have

• 1:17:22Chris Williamson?

  the nobility of your evolution, or the congruence of your past version of yourself. Like, both of those things don't exist, if that makes sense. And yeah, it's it's it's a it's a challenge. Being being in a period of transition around people who aren't is it's a challenge.

• 1:17:44Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, no, totally. And the sort of, you know, you can get you can get some way through it by reminding yourself smugly that the reason they're so congruent is because they haven't, you know, grappled with the truths. But you're right, exactly. But no, I think it's a real I don't think that's not enough. And it's and it's it's a real issue. It's one of those times where and I think these we're not we're not easily susceptible to the advice that like. What's required of you in that moment is like, just to kind of stay, you know, just to um, just to not restlessly uh leave the situation uh whatever they call that middle stage of the alchemical process, right, where the, where all the things that are happening.

• 1:18:29Oliver Burkeman?

  It's like, the, the only, the, the skill you need or the, the, the um quality you need there is to is to just sort of remain there and to, to stand firm or whatever the, the phrase is, right, to be um to, to not let yourself be lured by the temptation to just like fix it all and sort of nervously irritably start um start tampering and like, it's true, but it never gets, I don't, in my experience, it never gets like um uh easy, but it is um or pleasant, but um but you can have, I, you know, I said before that these, these periods of

• 1:19:13Oliver Burkeman?

  non-productivity in my recent past have not felt like depressions. I think you can you, you can feel on some intuitive level when this bad situation of being incongruent compared to other people or not being super productive when you want to be being super productive, you still can connect, I find, to some some kind of intuition that like that this is growthy or generative.

• 1:19:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, generative is a wonderful way to put it, yeah.

• 1:19:45Oliver Burkeman?

  Like, you're not, when you really get quiet or write in your journal or whatever it is that you do, you don't it's not like life is completely meaningless. It's like, I'm out of control, I don't know what's going on and I wish I did know what was going on, but something is going on.

• 1:20:07Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:46Chris Williamson?

  This orange flavour in a cold glass of water is a sweet, salty, orangey nectar and you will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavours with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. One other contrarian opinion of yours, which I think is real interesting, is unsettling.

• 1:21:28Chris Williamson?

  Basically, the people can sort of get more out of life from settling. That when you commit to a person or a path, more opportunities will arise because of the newfound depth. Is this intention with the creature inside of us all that desires maximisation and novelty and creativity?

• 1:21:53Oliver Burkeman?

  It's been interesting, that thing I wrote in 4000 weeks about settling. Because obviously, apart from anything else, this is a phrase that... And immediately connotes kind of romantic relationships and dating. And I don't think that's my role on your podcast, actually, Chris, I think, to come in and give dating advice. I think that I think that is best left to other guests, probably. But the but the but the thing that the thing that I was trying to say, and that I think is just true, is that it's not so much that you should settle in that context or any other. It's it's that finitude just means you are settling, right?

• 1:22:32Oliver Burkeman?

  Like, what we mean by settling is accepting some downside in return for the security or whatever else it might be that you get through taking that option, choosing that relationship, staying in that job, whatever it is. And and one way of expressing like half of what I write about is just like, there are always downsides, right? You can do what you like, you only need to face the consequences, as Sheldon Cop puts it. So it's not really, I think, we get into the situation where you think, well, I'm the kind of person who would never settle, so I'm going to max, I'm going to go for the absolute best thing. But what that gets confused with is I'm going to go for this thing that doesn't

• 1:23:15Oliver Burkeman?

  exist, that has no downside, that has no consequence, no negative consequence, when for finite humans, every choice, every decision on how to use your time or what commitments to make or not make has has a downside.

• 1:23:33Oliver Burkeman?

  So it isn't that you should do any one specific thing, or that settling down, to extend that phrase, right into a long term relationship is necessarily the right thing for any person at any given point in life. It's just the recognition that if you don't do that and you do the other thing, you're also settling, right? You're also deciding to accept a different set of negative consequences. A lot of indecision, a lot of

• 1:24:03Oliver Burkeman?

  commitment phobia, I think, in relationships and in other domains, has this feeling of like, I'm just going to keep my options open. But you don't keep your options open, you choose to spend that portion of time without the benefits of. A long term relationship, which might be right for somebody, but don't go fooling yourself that you're somehow like hanging back from like you're in the human condition, like you're not getting out of it. And this means that this means that um this means that you're making that kind of trade off in every moment of time. I hope this is clear. I don't know.

• 1:24:38Chris Williamson?

  But It is. How do people know when it's a good time to settle? Is there such a thing?

• 1:24:48Oliver Burkeman?

  I think that

• 1:24:52Oliver Burkeman?

  I mean, rephrasing that question back into what I was saying, it's like, how do you decide which how do you decide which trade off to make? How do you know in a given moment which trade off is the right trade off? And I think an awful lot of it is is annoyingly enough kind of intuitive and beyond words and all the rest of it. But I do think that

• 1:25:21Oliver Burkeman?

  you can become aware that the only main reason that you're not committing to something is some sort of restless fantasy of not having to make any trade off. So holding out for a kind of perfection that that doesn't actually exist in the world. And I think when you become aware of that fact, that when you see what game you're up to,

• 1:25:52Oliver Burkeman?

  then it's often very easy to see, oh, right. Actually, yes, this is the this is the path I should follow. This is the commitment I should make because the only reason that's really stopping me from making it is this kind of notion that I might not have to accept any loss or disappointment for making it.

• 1:26:13Chris Williamson?

  What are you working on now? Have you got a new book? I want you to have a new book.

• 1:26:16Oliver Burkeman?

  Can you? I'm trying to write a new book. I'm trying to write a new book. I'm, I am endeavoring to write a book. I should be more, I should be open about what it is, shouldn't I? I shouldn't be all coy and it's probably helpful to the creative process to like, put my cards on the table. I'm trying to write a book going into, going in on this topic of aliveness. And this idea of this mysterious concept that describes so much of what seems to be missing from so many people's experience. And also to be present when things are going really well, this sort of intangible sense of, of, of aliveness. I need some other words perhaps.

• 1:27:00Oliver Burkeman?

  And also I'm trying to get at this idea that a lot of what stops us from feeling that kind of deep sense of being immersed in life and doing the right things and meaningful things and all the rest of it is a kind of, well, the word I keep wanting to use is clenching. And then the correct antidote for clenching is unclenching. But my, my editors are concerned at the imagery.

• 1:27:29Chris Williamson?

  If I consider.

• 1:27:30Oliver Burkeman?

  Talking about clenching and unclenching.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  I, it's a fraught word. Have you considered grasping? Grasping is, grasping is quite nice because it suggests that you don't yet have it. I quite like that.

• 1:27:42Oliver Burkeman?

  Well, yes, yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's a huge part of it, but it's, yeah. And I, and also it's the kind of,

• 1:27:54Oliver Burkeman?

  it's the degree to which kind of relaxing into the situation that you're in is the pathway to.

• 1:28:03Oliver Burkeman?

  Agency and the pathway to enjoyment and all the rest of it. And part of this, where this comes from in some ways is partly to do with the very widespread sense that people have that we're living in like really unnerving historical times and that the sort of wider world is one that causes a lot of people to want to sort of like, like, um, uh, um, clam up or tighten or something. Um, and I think that this, this move of relaxing into the chaos and the craziness and the uncertainty is one that, like, I think it's really useful just in day to day individual life, but I think it might also be a way of, of relating

• 1:28:48Oliver Burkeman?

  to the feeling that whether it's politics or AI or a million other crises unfolding everywhere, that, that trying to sort of shelter from all of that completely is, see, I don't want to write, I'm not an activist. I don't want to write a book about being an activist and making the world's crises better, but I also don't, I've got no time for the kind of argument that is like, just ignore all that stuff and focus on, you know, just focus on your own personal life and your, and, you know, building your business or whatever, like these two, some, as ever, I'm sort of annoyed with two camps of writing on, on, on these topics and I'm trying to find what I think people should do instead.

• 1:29:27Chris Williamson?

  Walk some balance beam in between them. I think if you were to say a book about aliveness, it would, if it wasn't you or someone like you that's going to do it in a sufficiently sanguine and self-deprecating way, it would, it would, my, my first sense would be a sort of cloyingly prescriptive framework.

• 1:29:49Oliver Burkeman?

  Spiritual.

• 1:29:50Chris Williamson?

  No, it would be, it would be a framework. It would be too practical. It would be, well, the components of aliveness as determined by Seligman et al. in nineteen eighty-eight.

• 1:30:01Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Chris Williamson?

  Um, that would, no, thank you.

• 1:30:04Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:30:05Chris Williamson?

  We've been through that world. So I think to, to call that.

• 1:30:07Oliver Burkeman?

  I have no plan to tell you, yeah, I have no plan to tell you about the surprising neuroscience of this, of this, of this topic, or, um, or, you know, um.

• 1:30:20Oliver Burkeman?

  Yeah, the kind of what studies have shown. There's a place for that writing and I apologize to anyone I've.

• 1:30:25Chris Williamson?

  No, it's supposed to, it's supposed to, it's supposed to be there, but is the place for that writing supposed to be around aliveness? Like the neuroscience of, you're right.

• 1:30:37Oliver Burkeman?

  I know, but this is really, this is very useful information for me because I do struggle with the labels and the words. I'm trying to do something that is not a kind of, I'm not a spiritual teacher writing a book about how to transcend the self, but I'm also absolutely not trying to get into that, that science-based wellbeing stuff. It really is this sense that like, there's a, there's a quality to the experiences and the activities that we, that we know are the right ones for us to be doing. And there's various aspects of modern culture that seem to sort of systematically squeeze that out. And yes, I think it is all ultimately about control.

• 1:31:23Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah.

• 1:31:24Oliver Burkeman?

  Because I always think that.

• 1:31:26Chris Williamson?

  Oliver Burkeman, ladies and gentlemen. Oliver, you're great. Everyone should go and subscribe to your newsletter, which is The Imperfectionist. Where else? Are you doing, is there anything else to subscribe to or is it just that?

• 1:31:35Oliver Burkeman?

  That's the thing to subscribe to. My most recent book is Meditations for Mortals. So that's the other thing to imagine here.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  Until the next time, Oliver. I appreciate you very much.

• 1:31:45Oliver Burkeman?

  It's a huge pleasure. Thank you so much.