How to Stop Wasting Your Life (ft. Oliver Burkeman)

Do you worry that you might be wasting your life? That you’re doing things that don’t feel important? Are you constantly anxious about your to-do list? Is your mind blown that it’s 2024 already?!? This week, I’ve enlisted the help of my friend Oliver Burkeman, author of the bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to help us get a handle on using time wisely. In this episode, we’re going to look at how our perception of time shapes our self-image, how it’s often advantageous to choose to be bad at something, why people-pleasing doesn’t actually please people, and a whole lot more. Oliver Burkeman is a renowned journalist and author, known for his unique ability to seamlessly blend philosophy and psychology to bring a fresh and counterintuitive take to classic self-help subjects. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 | Introduction 00:03:22 | Our relationship with time 00:05:49 | A better way of looking at time 00:07:32 | “Strategic underachievement” 00:11:16 | How to stop people-pleasing 00:14:58 | Being a net positive at social events 00:18:45 | “Don’t try to change the world” 00:21:01 | Our toxic relationship with time and the art of “being present” 00:30:41 | “Effortless action” 00:32:53 | Buddhist influences on Oliver’s work 00:37:51 | Our primary misconception about time management 00:39:01 | Oliver’s final word of wisdom ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Do you worry that you might be wasting your life? Do you feel like you're constantly doing things that don't feel valuable? Do you get anxious that your to-do list only seems to get longer? And you only seem to get older? And the world is speeding up and holy balls, it's already 2024? Yeah, of course you do. We all do. And like the rest of us, you've probably tried to figure out a way to manage your time better. Like with to-do lists, or time blocking your calendar, or creating an Eisenhower matrix, or some fancy schmancy new app that promises to remove all stress and anxiety from your life by automatically ordering your toilet paper and installments. And yet, there's still that nagging voice in the back of your head, whispering to you that it isn't enough. It's never enough.

• 0:44Mark Manson?

  But of course, you've got to get more work done. You've got to spend more time with your partner, with your family. You've got to nurture your friendships. You've got to save more whales, and save more children, and save endangered salamanders, and change your profile picture to whatever sociocultural, political trend is happening on TikTok. It's a lot. It's a lot. But what if there's a way to escape the doom loop? What if you could actually get more of the important things done, not by defeating Father Time once and for all, but rather surrendering to Him? Are you wondering what the fuck I'm talking about? Well, that's because we're going to get into it in today's episode. We're going to look at how our perception of our time shapes our sense of self-worth. How it's often advantageous to choose to be bad at something,

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  or just to not do something at all. Yes, I hear the overachievers screaming in horror when I say that, but please, stick with me here. To help me out with all this, we will be joined by my friend Oliver Burkeman. He's the author of the hit bestseller 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Oliver is a renowned journalist and author, known for his unique ability to seamlessly blend philosophy and psychology, and bring fresh and counterintuitive takes to classical personal development subjects. Like this one. So strap in for this one, because it's going to get a little mind-bending. And we're about to embark on a journey that promises to enlighten, inform, and most importantly, inspire you to see your life, your choices, and your time.

• 2:10Mark Manson?

  In a completely new way. But before we get started, I do have one small, simple request. If you're listening to this, please take a minute, leave a rating or a review. It's a new podcast, and so I'm trying to grow so we can record more episodes and get bigger guests and do just a bunch of cool ass shit. And between now and the end of the year, I'm running a promotion where if you send me a screenshot of your review, I will send you my 2024 life audit PDF for free. This PDF takes you step by step to document how you're choosing to spend your time, how you could be choosing to spend it better, what you could invest more time in, and of course, what you should say fuck it to and cut back in the new year. So go to markmanson.net/audit, that's A-U-D-I-T, and get more info and send

• 2:55Mark Manson?

  in your screenshots. Trust me, it will be well worth your time. Come on, guys. You know you fucking love the dad jokes. That's why you're here. You love the dad jokes. Let's get started.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  20 million books sold, zero fucks given. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson.

• 3:19Mark Manson?

  Going back and looking at your book again, I kind of had this feeling that productivity or time management, it's almost, you're almost making a bargain with yourself without realizing it, which is when you choose to measure something, say a goal or an objective that you have, say a new year's resolution, when you choose to, to, to measure something, you objectify it. And when you objectify something, you kind of inherently remove yourself from the present. You basically say, okay, I'm going to increase my chances of accomplishing this thing, but the cost of doing that is that I'm going to enjoy it less and appreciate

• 4:02Mark Manson?

  it less as it's happening. I think the, if you were to distill kind of the revelation of your book for most people, I think it's that, is that we've been making this bargain our entire lives without realizing it. And, and I guess it's just that, that sense of meaning or Fulfillment was like never put on the balance sheet when we were like making our calculations or whatever.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I guess, you know, right at the bottom of this, there is this distinction that I tried to draw in the book between being sort of alienated from time versus seeing yourself as part of time. Maybe we should go straight into Heidegger.

• 4:41Mark Manson?

  It's a fan favorite here at the Subtle Art Podcast.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Just this idea that like all these, we talk so often about like having a relationship with time. Maybe it's a relationship where you're fighting time, or maybe you're succeeding in like winning the day or whatever it is, right? But it's always this kind of, it's this thing where there's you and then there's time and either this relationship is going well or it's going badly. And I sort of make the case that in pre-industrial times, certain other contexts in history, that whole notion that there's you and time and you've got to make the most of your time just falls apart if you just see yourself as being like in the flow of life. If you feel that you, you are a bit of time rather than that you have this time you've got to try to make the most of. So that's like at the bottom of all this. It's just this notion that like this idea that it's inherently a struggle

• 5:28Speaker 02

  or a fight and we've got to try to dominate or master time and that a good life would be one where we squeezed the most value out of it. Sounds like it would be right, but if the moment when that value gets enjoyed is always in the future, then, you know, one day you die and you never, and you never got to be present in your own life.

• 5:48Mark Manson?

  On a practical level, like what does that look like? How does one say work week differ between one approach and another?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  I think it's fundamentally to do with facing up to the realities of one's limitations, right? The degree to which you are limited by time, the fact that you only have so many hours in a day, the fact that you're going to have a finite number of years in a life. And instead of being in a constant struggle against this to try to somehow sort of achieve escape velocity from your own situation, you're working.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  With it, I think one of the things that means is getting more comfortable with working sequentially on things, being willing to neglect almost everything for large chunks of time. And while you work on a small number of them, it's about being willing to neglect some things perhaps entirely because you understand that your situation is finite person in a world of infinite possibilities. And that trying to get your arms around all of them, or get so efficient that you could do all of them, is kind of like a, it's a denial of the truth of what you are, which is a finite person in the world. And so even though that sounds at first like a kind

• 7:06Speaker 02

  of defeat, right? It's sort of like surrender. So I'm going to get less, I'm going to do fewer of the things that I dreamed I might do. It's actually a way of really concentrating your energies on a few things, not being perpetually distracted and made anxious by the fact that there are all sorts of other things you could in principle be doing and sort of entering more and more fully into the state of being a finite human.

• 7:31Mark Manson?

  I like the name that you came up for this in the book as well, which is strategic underachievement. I think for a lot of people, that just instinctually makes them bristle, makes them uncomfortable. What is the strategic under? Is that that consciously choosing things that you're willing to fail at to make energy and space for the things that are most important?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this phrase originates not with me and as a joke, right? Originally, I think this idea was, this is like, if you don't want to be the person who has to change the, ever has to change the toner in the printer at work or photocopier in the office, like, then just do it once really badly and you'll never get, you'll never get asked to do it again. So there's that kind of strategic underachievement. I sort of expanded the idea in the book to the idea that if it is the case, which it is, that there are always far more things you won't be doing and won't be excelling at than any that you are. That's just math. It's not, it's no criticism of you. Then it actually makes a lot of sense to get conscious about that and to be sort

• 8:37Speaker 02

  of willing to have the guts to face like, okay, this domain of life, or maybe these friendships that aren't as important to me as these other ones, right? I'm actually going to like, take the conscious decision to not focus my energies on nurturing those, on developing those. Just because you're going to be choosing anyway, right? This is a point I associate with with your writing as well, right? You're always, you're always choosing what to do with finite, in a finite situation anyway. The question is, are you going to face up to it or continue to kind of deceive yourself that somehow in a while, never right now, but sometime in the future, you're going to finally be sort of omnipotent and capable of doing it all. One aspect of this that I think is really important and immediately

• 9:20Speaker 02

  practical, maybe, is is just that being willing to work sequentially and seasonally even on things, right? So to say, for this period of my life or of the year, it could be all different kind of lengths of time, right? But say for this next few months, I'm going to put all these things on the back burner, not because they don't matter, not because I've managed to convince myself that they're irrelevant, that I don't need them, but just because something's got to be on the back burner if I'm going to really move the needle. I'm mixing metaphors terribly here, but you know, move the, move the needle with something on the front burner. So.

• 9:56Mark Manson?

  Moving, moving needles on burners. Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  The strange cookery is going on it. It takes a lot of trust, right? I feel like we often go through life thinking that with this sort of implicit notion, that if we don't address all these things now, we might completely forget that we cared about a certain friend or that we were really interested in a certain sport. So it's like, it's strange. It's like, if you don't do it now, you you're worried that you might just like wake up. Decades later and have never done it. So you have to sort of trust yourself that actually it's gonna, it's gonna get its time.

• 10:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I, I feel like, you know, you mentioned a writing project. Like I, I feel like I had to really learn to do this with, with books because just writing a book is so all consuming for six, minimum six months, often a year or more, that with my, my last book, I actually very explicitly kind of went to everybody in my life and was like, hey, I'm, I'm about to go into the hole, into the bunker with this book. I'm not going to be around a whole lot. Told my wife that, told my team that, told my, some of my friends that. I'm just gonna be in my, my little writing hole, trudging away at it for, and I'm gonna come out in six or eight months and, and I'll be like a happy, fun person again that will

• 11:12Mark Manson?

  be enjoyable to hang out with. But until that moment. So I, I feel like a lot of it is, is setting expectations with people. One thing I hear from people a lot, or that I've noticed from talking to readers, is that the people that I've seen who really, really struggle with this seems to be people pleasers. It seems to be the people pleasers who don't give themselves space to fail or underperform at anything. The driving motivation of that seems to be this fear of judgment or disappointment.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:46Mark Manson?

  What I've noticed with people is that they're, they tend to be more comfortable with the idea of failing themselves, but if it comes to failing a family member or a coworker or a friend, for a lot of people, it's just unmanageable.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:01Mark Manson?

  So I'm curious if you've run into that and, and what you would say to those people?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've totally run into it. I totally encountered the same experience talking to readers, but also it feels very, it feels closer to home than that, you know? I feel, it feels like in my, my character as well. I think one really useful thing, there's this kind of move that I often find myself making in the arguments that I'm making writing, which is that. Path to liberation in some given area is realising that the situation is worse than you think it is, right? So if you think, this is a kind of a Zen idea, I guess, in many ways. But if you, getting through your whole to-do list is going to be incredibly difficult, that is super stressful. If you see that it's logically, systematically, whatever, intrinsically impossible, that's much, there's much less suffering involved with that because you've seen that actually

• 12:49Speaker 02

  you were trying to do something that isn't within sort of human capacities. Where this applies in the people-pleasing case, I think, is it's been really useful for me anyway to realise that it doesn't really please people, right? To be a people-pleaser, right? It doesn't, it doesn't work on its own terms. I feel like I've spent a lot of my, sort of my earlier adult life, turning every kind of opportunity that came my way into a kind of onerous obligation that I didn't really want to do, just because I'd signed up to it. And then spending my whole life feeling like I just had to fulfil all my obligations to, you know, people I'd agreed to do stuff for, or that I was in a relationship such that I had to do stuff for them. And people pick up on that and they don't like it, right?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I mean, and it leads to all sorts of kind of weasely behaviour on one's own part that isn't really helpful. I wrote in a newsletter recently about like, where I was working on one assignment and I'd been asked by an editor if I could take on this other assignment and I didn't know if I had the bandwidth, so I had delayed giving her a reply. And eventually I sort of went over and had a kind of sheepish conversation about how I didn't think I would be able to do it. And of course, by then it was more annoying to have, to have, to be pulling out of it. And I recall her saying to me, if you can't do something, it's just, often just easier for everyone if you can just say no, when you, when, when you realise that. And it was just a sort of mundane comment, but actually kind of really eye-opening in hindsight.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Because the people-pleasing urge is an urge to be able to do everything, right? To be able to meet all demands, to never have to make that uncomfortable decision that you're going to let somebody down or risk disappointing somebody for all sorts of, you know, childhood reasons. It turns you into someone who doesn't do good work for the People you're trying to please, or who isn't a good relationship partner for the people you're trying to please. It's just like, it doesn't actually help anybody. And I find that, that, that realization that something is just no good on its own terms is always a lot more powerful, I think, in affecting change, at least in me personally, than just sort of telling yourself that you should be different.

• 14:51Mark Manson?

  I, I think that's a really good point, and I don't think I've ever heard it put explicitly like that. It's funny, my wife has this thing, and I always just thought it was kind of a pet peeve, but it, it's, I think it's actually very healthy, which she has this thing where she would rather I not go to something than go and not enjoy it. So you know how most marriages, you always have these situations where, you know, your partner is like, well, we gotta go do this thing with my friends or my mom or whatever. She's like, if you're not excited to go, just don't go. Because I'd rather go alone and just tell my family that you're busy than have you show up and spend the whole evening on your phone and miserable and wanting to go home.

• 15:35Mark Manson?

  And it's very jarring for a lot of people. It's even jarring, I mean, I've been married to her for, forever, and it's still jarring to me sometimes. But she's, she's like very, she's a stickler about it. And I think it actually ends up netting out much better because so many of us, and I'm guilty of this a million times, you get roped into things, you feel bad, you're like, well, my brother's friend's roommate's birthday, and I turned down the last two invitations, and I don't want to be the asshole who turns down three invitations. So you go, and what people don't realize is you like, you're bringing the mood of the party down itself. You're, you're actually potentially a net negative.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:14Mark Manson?

  And then, as you pointed out, in a professional situation, when you take on too much work, you're potentially a net negative on that work you're taking on that you don't really want to do anyway either.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. That, that sort of guilt feeling that, that where you go along with the thing because you feel like you, you should. It doesn't, it doesn't serve anybody involved. And also, usually, the consequence of, you know, in an upfront way, declining is, is, you know, it's, it's, it's pretty rare that people are going to be extremely offended. Obviously, that's situational, circumstantial, but there's, there is a kind of egotism in the notion.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  That I've got to say yes to a social invitation, otherwise that social event is going to be terribly bad in my absence or something, right? There's that notion that the that the world sort of orbits around myself in a way that it obviously just doesn't. And as soon as you put this into practice by not getting roped into certain things, or even pulling out of things that you've that you've originally let yourself get roped into, the consequences never really seem to be as calamitous as on some level I'm imagining.

• 17:25Mark Manson?

  Or if they are, like if the person makes a big drama and fuss about it, then that tells you something about your relationship with that person. It's so simple, but we get so caught up in kind of mind games and status games of like, oh, well, you know, Suzie won't like me if I say do this and she came to my thing. So I feel like I have to go to her thing and that's because I don't want to look bad and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think sometimes we just complicate things unnecessarily and like you said, make ourselves the center of the universe.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the difficulty with this kind of trade off and prioritization question comes when you just have competing values in yourself, right? I mean, not when you don't want to go to the social event at all, but you're going to pretend to because you just don't want to make people feel bad, but when you just legitimately do want to say, you know, be the kind of person who supports this kind of organization and be the kind of person who spends this amount of quality time with your kid and be the kind of person who spends this amount of time on meditation retreats. Like that's where you get into this situation where, yeah, something is going to have to give. And I think that the understanding that something is always going to have to give, as I said before, is actually really liberating because then you don't at least need to beat yourself up for not having found a way to fit it all in.

• 18:45Mark Manson?

  You have a bit of a spicy take. I don't know if I disagree with you, but I definitely want to discuss it. You have this point of don't try to change the world. Don't kind of build up these grandiose expectations. As I reread this, I thought Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave. My counterargument to this, and it's funny because this is something I've wrestled with myself. You know, the, first of all, the classic Steve Jobs quote, you know, it's, it's the people who are crazy enough to think they're going to change the world who actually do. So first of all, explain that. What is the motivation behind the, you know, don't try to change the world? What does that get us? And then we can kind of talk about the.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  It's not that it's bad to be Steve Jobs creating the iPhone, but that it is really bad to have a definition of a life well spent or a life meaningfully spent that only people like Steve Jobs get to qualify for because they do something absolutely huge that affects millions of people that is kind of astounding and impressive. I really, this is where I don't feel ambivalent, right? I really want to sort of speak up for definitions of a meaningful life that are A, much less conspicuous, but also more transient in a way, right? I mean, we all know that it is meaningful to care for an elderly relative

• 20:04Speaker 02

  or to, to be in nature in certain contexts, to go, to go hiking in wilderness landscapes. You know, these things are meaningful ways of spending our time. We feel intuitively. It's really hard to make a case that they are necessarily going to matter a few hundred years from now. I mean, you can always try to make that case about how your kid is going to be the one who solves this or that global crisis. But no, then they matter in themselves. I was really influenced, and I think about all this by a book, by a philosopher called Ido Landau, book called Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, where he just points out like, it's so weird basically to, to culturally adopt these definitions of the best lives that are just going to be

• 20:47Speaker 02

  in terms of statistics or the distribution of talent and luck, just going to be closed to like the vast majority of, of people, you know, beating ourselves up because we're not Shakespeare. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a strange way to go through life.

• 21:01Mark Manson?

  It's funny, on our previous podcast I had with Scott Barry Kaufman, we talked about having a toxic relationship with goals. How you can basically sacrifice your self-worth for a goal the same way, you know, people will often sacrifice their self-worth. To make their partner happy or to make a relationship work.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:20Mark Manson?

  How it's ultimately self-defeating. It just makes everything worse. A lot of what you're talking about, it sounds like you can kind of develop a toxic relationship with time, which is you start basing your self-worth on efficiency and optimization, which, as you point out in the book, there's no end to efficiency and optimization. No matter how optimized you get, there's always another level of optimization that you can achieve. But I also think it's interesting because this often happens to me. I think this happens to most people. It's like, I'll have a big goal in my life. I'll work my ass off to achieve it. And then I get the goal and I'm kind of disappointed. Like, I'm like, wow, I thought this was gonna be a lot better.

• 21:59Mark Manson?

  I worked so hard for so many months and now I'm here and I'm just kind of like, like, now what?

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. And I think that this toxic relationship frame is kind of interesting because it's sometimes you're the kind of domineering, control-obsessed partner in this toxic relationship. And then other times, you're sort of spending your life placating time with all your activity and exertions. Time doesn't keep to the deal, right? But the reward is not, is not, is not commensurate with, with the effort. As I say, I think that maybe the answer to this is to stop thinking about time as something you're in a relationship with, rather than to have a healthy relationship with time. I know that sounds kind of mind-bending, but I think this very strange, kind of slightly stoned notion

• 22:50Speaker 02

  of time as something that you are is really powerful because it gets you out of that whole mindset of trying to sort of control the course of your life, rather than to experience the course of your life.

• 23:04Mark Manson?

  So I'm with you on the stoned, conceptual grocking of this idea of inhabiting time, rather than being in a relationship, trying to control it. I lived in Latin America for four years, primarily Brazil, but also in Colombia and Argentina. Latinos have a very different understanding of time.

• 23:24Mark Manson?

  Then than us Anglo-Saxon people, you know, when I'm in Brazil, I go back to Brazil once or twice a year. The thing that's amazing about Brazil is people are present. People are, they're enjoying themselves. They're not worried about tomorrow. They're not worried about next week. If there's a dinner, they're in the dinner. If there's a party, they're in the party. If there is a concert, they're in the concert. But at the same time, nothing fucking gets done in Brazil.

• 23:52Mark Manson?

  There are half-built highways that have been sitting there for 20 years.

• 23:59Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because, you know, growing up in the States and particularly being interested in Buddhism, which I still want to get to Buddhism, I definitely had this very romanticized idea of being present. I remember when I was in my early twenties, I read The Power of Now. And like a lot of people who read Power of Now, it's for about a month, presence was the hammer and everything in my life was the nail. It's like, oh, I just gotta be present. And living in Latin America for that amount of time, it changed my mind a little bit about present. I think that's when it switched to viewing this orientation

• 24:38Mark Manson?

  towards time as is maybe a trade-off. And I almost feel like maybe the healthiest way to go about it is, is having a flexibility in terms of when you need to be present, be present. And when you need to set goals and systematize time, you can set goals and systematize time. Both of those things are skills that are not easy or natural to most people, I think.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  I wonder if you can go even further than just saying you need a balance or to be able to move flexibly between them and to say, there's something important here about understanding that the tools of efficiency and productivity and optimization are just tools. And, you know, I think even Eckhart Tolle says something on along these lines, right? It's not that thinking's bad. It's that it's that can you develop a relationship to thinking where you pick it up when you need it and put it down when you don't, as opposed to becoming fully identified with it, or in the case of our tools, sort of governed by them instead of using them. So, you know, something that I

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Keep getting asked when I do media about the book and stuff is always like, "Well, you've said all these things about how productivity is nonsense, but are there any productivity tips, techniques you do still use?" And it's always like, you know, I'm going to reveal that actually I'm completely obsessed with squeezing every minute out of my time. And I'm like, actually, I kind of am obsessed with that. And that's why I wrote the book, right? It's kind of, there is nothing wrong with productivity techniques if what you're doing is just picking the one that seems useful for you right now and using it because it's useful and then stopping using it when it isn't useful. It's the kind of idea that there's some great meta principle or technique in the sky that you're going to

• 26:22Speaker 02

  use. And once you find it, you're going to run your whole life on it forever. Like, that stuff will lead you down all sorts of odd pathways. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the use of tools as tools. And I think this goes to what you're saying because I think it is possible, at least, you know, on my good days, I'm not claiming any unbroken perfection in this, to center yourself in that kind of presence in the moment and in life, and then use these kinds of methods of planning and of fitting more in and working faster when you need to and setting goals and defining outcomes without becoming totally

• 27:03Speaker 02

  identified with them. There's a whole idea that I've also been really impressed by in a lot of the Zen writing, and I came across it in a really interesting little book called The Art of Taking Action. Actually, it's possible to see those kind of eastern spiritualities as very, very much about action, not as about sort of passivity and just sort of sitting cross-legged on a mountainside, meditating. And that in a way, there's almost this framing that says like, if you really, truly were in the moment, in the fullest sense, not because you're just sort of hedonistically relaxed or something, you've got all your thinking out of the way, you're not, you're not, you're not impeding yourself, what would

• 27:44Speaker 02

  happen would be lots of action, right? You would like do a lot of stuff. And maybe this is too sort of obscure and not even fully formed in my own mind. But I think there is a potential way of seeing the switch here from not, not from, you know, we, we spend our lives endlessly chasing these goals and being miserable in the process. So what we have to do instead is stop chasing goals and just chill out. But from

• 28:11Speaker 02

  That first idea of actions leading up to some future fulfillment and switching it to the idea that that action is the expression of fulfillment, right? That like the way that you celebrate being alive, the way that you express joy is just by doing stuff. And if you're doing stuff that you enjoy, and if you love your work in some sense of that fraught phrase, that that's a possibility for you, right? The idea that you could be really active and get huge amounts accomplished, but not because meaning lies at the end of a of a long slog, but because that is, that is what's meaningful for you to do. Certainly, at least in theory, that's how I feel about my work, right?

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Like, if I if I eliminated all anxiety I have about my work, if I had no need to do it for financial reasons or for, you know, egotistical reasons, I kind of hope that I would still want to do it because it I enjoy doing it.

• 29:11Mark Manson?

  I think there was a really, really profound idea between presence and procrastination or anxiety about outcome, because I think fundamentally what procrastination is, is it's a low level anxiety about outcome. It's I'm working on this article or working on this email because I'm worried it won't go well or it won't turn out as well as I think it will. And the only thing I've ever found in my life that defeats procrastination is adopting that kind of that presence of stop thinking about the outcome, open a fucking word document, like be present, click the button, click the button again. Okay, write the title.

• 29:53Mark Manson?

  Okay, that's done. Now write the first sentence, you know, and just kind of taking it

• 29:59Mark Manson?

  little piece by piece, which when you do look at the Zen tradition or a lot of the eastern traditions, it is very much like that. It's fetch wood, carry water practices. It's like when you read about monks and temples and stuff like they're just fucking, they're fucking doing chores all day.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:17Mark Manson?

  And it's, and part of the practice of that is to only be focused on the next block of wood. Don't look at the tree, don't look at all the logs, like just focus on this one block of wood, split it, okay, now focus on the next block. Again, as a, as a tool, being able to access that state of mind, I think, is supremely valuable and ironically productive.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  I'm a little prone to ranging freely over various spiritual traditions in which I have no right to be, to be doing so, but it does make me want to make the point here that a lot of these ideas arise in a really interesting form in Taoism, which is sort of, sometimes seems, again, from my shockingly amateur perspective, as the kind of happier cousin of Buddhism, right? It's like, it's like, maybe, maybe the essence of life isn't that it all completely sucks. Maybe the essence of life is that it's, is that it's really great. But, but there's a tradition there in this, the idea of Wu Wei, effortless action, the idea that, that action is what happens when you get out of the way of impeding action,

• 31:24Speaker 02

  that the sort of perfect mastery of an activity is, is very close in some sense to inactivity, because you're sort of, you're acting with your, without, you're taking yourself out of the picture and as a result, acting more fully in the moment. So, again, just as it's come to the West and how I've encountered it, there's always this sort of slight edge in Buddhism of like, the ultimate idea here would be to be so completely free of self, that you would just sit in the meditation center. And there's this emphasis that occurs more in my experience in Taoism, that if you really could get yourself out of the picture, just like, activity would flow through you, you

• 32:04Mark Manson?

  know? It's, so we've got some commonalities. We're identifying a theme here that's popping up regularly, which is people identifying too much with goals, people identifying too much with politics news, people identifying too much with how much they're able to get done. It's, there's nothing wrong with goals, there's nothing wrong with politics, there's nothing wrong with productivity, it's when you start basing your identity on these things.

• 32:31Mark Manson?

  Seeing them as a fundamental aspect of yourself, rather than like a tool to be used. Ultimately, this all is dovetails perfectly with the core tenets of Buddhism, which is just disidentification with everything. There is no you, you don't exist. So stop pretending you are this, or that, or the other thing. You and I met by going to a Buddhist event, by Zen meditation group in New York. What is your background with Buddhism? How did you get into it? And how has it influenced you in your work throughout your life?

• 33:06Speaker 02

  I think I tried meditating in some sense when I was about maybe 19 or 18 or something, but not in a serious way at all, and not in a way that lasted. But that was certainly when I was becoming, in some sense, aware of my own anxiety levels and my need for something to deal with them. I think the real impact for me, especially recently, I don't know, there are all sorts of these issues that I was sort of feeling my way towards in my own reading and writing, and the column I wrote for The Guardian, that really feel brought into focus by Buddhism and sort of Eastern philosophies more generally.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Certainly in my case, I think they do appeal to we left-brained people, to the analytical mind, to the person who thinks they're going to solve all their life's problems by thinking. That's not what they are. It's not what they promise. But in a way, it's the entry point, right? I mean, I'm not super literate in other religions either, but I do think with Christianity, for example, there are certain things that's really helpful if you can believe in a felt way, and then you can sort of take it from there. Whereas... A lot of the sort of Buddhism that has come into the West is very much like you don't believe anything, just look at the way things are, follow these arguments.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  And what I really love specifically about Zen, I think, is that it does this in a way that it sort of takes the left brain and it really kind of doubles down on it until you get to the end of what the left brain can possibly do. So that is one way, I would say, of thinking about a Zen koan, right? A sort of a teaching story that is in some sense a puzzle. And if you just apply your thinking mind to it as hard as you can, it will just break your brain in a useful and illuminating and liberating way. There's something very appealing to me as a sort of, you know, brain on a stalk type person, as a sort of too analytical left brain person.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  There's something really appealing about getting, sort of pursuing that, that way of, that approach to life as far as it'll go and to the point where it kind of judders and collapses, right? That's how I get to feelings of presence and feelings of being more than just my thinking mind. It's like by trying really hard to solve the world, the problem of reality through my thinking mind and failing. Whereas other religions and other approaches appeal, I'm sure, more to people who, who are naturally sort of feeling and emotional types first. You know, there are so many great quotations that come from the, from the Zen tradition

• 35:57Speaker 02

  that just revolve around this idea. Problem here is that you think you're going to solve the problem. The suffering of your not having found a escape hatch from your situation is, is in the belief that there was ever an escape hatch. All these kind of wonderful, kind of intellectually playful things that ultimately have the effect of showing overly intellectual types the limitations of the intellect. I find that really helpful.

• 36:22Mark Manson?

  It's a really interesting point because I grew up in a very religious Christian upbringing and I was always frustrated growing up at how Christianity really just doesn't even engage with the analytical mind. You're actually supposed to kind of put your analytical mind away. Just suspend disbelief when engaging with a lot of the Christian mythology. And, and yeah, Buddhism just takes it, or Zen in particular, seems to be very much geared towards taking that analytical tendency and just breaking it in paradox and in self-reference.

• 37:02Mark Manson?

  And there's something very pleasing about it, like it's very intellectually satisfying in a weird way, even though you're being presented problems that clearly have no logical solution to them, you strangely feel happy about that. Whereas in Christianity, I was just always frustrated. I'm like, well, wait, no, explain why. Was there actually a whale? Did he actually swallow him? And everybody's like, stop asking questions.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Right. And I think, you know, I think a lot of this has to do with, this is an old point, but a lot of this has to do with whether one is encountering what is ultimately the kind of scholastic, monastic form of religion or the, or the folk form of religion. And broadly speaking, I think you're much more likely to encounter folk Christianity and, and monastic Buddhism if you're in America in the 21st century.

• 37:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, for sure. What do you think is the primary misconception people have about productivity and time management?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a very good and big question. I suppose one of the misconceptions that I think is, is really sort of powerful, if you can even call it a misconception, is this notion that the time when we are going to have everything sorted out is forthcoming, you know, that like in a few weeks' time, or maybe it's a few years' time, or when you find the right system, or you finally find reserves of self-discipline that you've never shown before at any point in your life. At that point, like the moment of truth will, will, will happen and things will be kind of smooth sailing from, from then on. And I think that totally screwed me up for a long time, right? That notion that I wasn't

• 38:41Speaker 02

  there yet, but I was gonna get there. And it's not that you don't change or reach milestones or, you know, transform certain aspects of your life, because you do, but you don't get them by, by imagining that meaning is, is in the future. You get them by finding ways to bring meaning to the present, I suppose.

• 39:00Mark Manson?

  Mr. Burkeman, it's been a pleasure. So what's our final word of wisdom, Oliver? What should we tell people? What should we leave them with?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  There's a quotation I really like, I actually use it at the beginning of the book, but from Charlotte Jocko Beck, the American Zen teacher, which I feel like is the summary statement of all our problems in life. And she says, "What makes it unbearable," I think she means life, "What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured."

• 39:33Mark Manson?

  Awesome. Well, enjoy. Try not to cry yourself to sleep, folks. All right, we'll be back next week. Thank you. This is Subtle Art, Not Giving a Fuck Podcast. See you guys later.