Oliver Burkeman On Meditations For Mortals
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5 by 15. Good evening and welcome here to 5 by 15 online tonight with a great guest of ours who's been on 5 by 15 before, Oliver Berkman.

who is the author of the fantastically successful 4,000 Weeks and has now come out with a wonderful new book called Meditations for Mortals. Now, anyone who reads The Guardian, which I suspect is quite a lot of our audience, will have followed Oliver's extraordinary journalism over the years, which

He applied a really keen journalistic sensibility towards the questions of self-help, what we could do to make life just generally better. And out of that, of course, came the first remarkable book, which led to the second. Now, first of all,

We're going to talk for about 40 minutes and then we'll have questions. So please post them. And I'm sure that a lot of you feel like me about Oliver's writing, which is that you find the bit that applies to you. And then you think, ah, he's writing this book or this piece just for me. And I'd like to ask him this. So please don't hesitate. All the books, the details will be in the chat. And of course, they're always available from Newham Books. So Oliver, please switch your...

switch your machine on and please join us. Thank you so much for being here. First of all,

Let's start with talking about how this book has emerged off the back of 4,000 Weeks. It's a curious book in that it's, well, I'm not really quite sure how I would describe it because it's got a very individual and interesting structure. Maybe you could just talk us through how you came to think of it and why and how it built on 4,000 Weeks.

Yeah. Hello, everyone. I'm really glad to be to be back tonight. Yeah, I mean, I could definitely give and maybe I will soon like the sort of cerebral philosophical story about how I experienced this book coming along after the last one. But there's another way of talking about it, which is just that I...

was incredibly aware and have been for a while, but you know, it's possible to have a really clear grasp of like how you want to live and how you want, how you want to approach your work and your relationships and all of these things. And just like not actually do it repeatedly day after day in life. And so I,

you know, the sort of self-critical account of this was, was sort of coming off the back of 4,000 weeks realizing, and I think this was true for some readers as well, right? That there was a sort of a, uh, interesting vision on how, of how to approach life coming out of that. And we get other philosophies from other sources. Of course, it's not, not just that. And then like, yeah, but, but how do you actually do the things? So I think this book for me is about

that crossing that gap from knowing to doing. And yeah, if you want to talk about the structure of the book, that was my attempt to sort of not just write a book about

actually doing things but write a book that could somehow in its very sort of structure and how people might use it um help cross that that gap but it also has time involved doesn't it because it's about doing something or really can read it as a book that you do something every day that just takes a little quirky sideways look at how you're doing things and reassures you

Yeah. So yeah, just quickly for anyone who's interested, right. It's, it's four, it's divided into four weeks. Each week has a short seven short chapters, um,

they sort of build on each other. It's like meant to be a journey. And yeah, the invitation, I think that's the word that I use is that you could read a chapter a day for 28 days. It's a book about in many ways about loosening our attempts to control reality. So it would be unseemly for me to sort of

really insist that people followed a certain way of reading it. But I think it's useful to have that kind of rhythm in mind, even if you don't happen not to follow it, right? And really the idea there was that each of these days could provide a tiny little perspective shift

that might actually change in some little way, how the reader lived through that next 24 hours. So that the change might be small, especially at first, but it would be real in the real world. Instead of this thing that I have known with so many books, self-help books, personal development books, and experienced as a reader again and again, which is like, you read it and you think that sounds good. And you try to take some notes. And then you think like, someday soon when I get a spare week, I'm really going to put this into practice.

And then like, there's no such thing as a spare week. So that never happens. I wanted it to be something that could sort of maybe have a little bit of an effect right here. And now in the midst of all the, you know, too many emails and scary news headlines and all one's personal problems that one hasn't yet resolved. Yeah. And I think this is a very, very good time of year to be having this conversation because all around me in London are all the endless, horrible preparations for Christmas and

you know, the perfection of Christmas. There's lights everywhere and there's perfect presents in the shop and there's money changing hands. And there's just the sort of horrific sense that you're leading up to one of those times of the year when you're meant to be perfect. So I find that your book, from the get-go, it says imperfection. And I think that that is just the most interesting sort of way of looking at

us and how we live. So can you talk about, I know you use the word imperfectionism as a verb, as such, as a sort of way of being? Yeah, it's sort of just my umbrella term for the outlook that I'm trying to get across in this book. And I suppose imperfectionism plays off against perfectionism, obviously, but I'm sort of working with a very broad definition of perfectionism. So I'm

I'm pinpointing definitely that, that thing in many of us that wants to produce perfect work or yes, host perfect Christmas gatherings, but also all sorts of other things that I think can be well understood as, as perfectionism, but the desire to sort of, um, I think people pleasing is a form of perfectionism because it's the desire to exert sort of perfect control over the emotions of, of everyone around you. Um, even sort of, uh,

Imposter syndrome can be a kind of perfectionism because it's that inner demand that you feel more qualified and ready for whatever it is you're addressing yourself to than you actually do. I think in all these different ways, we're trying to sort of get on top of life, master life, find a way that kind of a sort of set of rules to follow or just some way of being that makes us feel better.

Like we're finally getting our arms around it all, or we finally know really what we're doing, or we finally don't need to worry about what the future might hold. And I guess then imperfectionism is just the approach that says like, what if we started from the place of knowing that there will always be too much to do, that you'll never fully understand what makes other people tick.

that you can't have any confidence about what the future holds. It's just this sort of radically vulnerable, but very real and true situation. And basically, I suppose my thing I've got to try to persuade people of is that this is not depressing. And it's also very much a kind of energizing and active way to be in the world, not a resigned and passive one. So that's what I...

It's quite a tricky line to draw because you think of going into the shelves of, say, self-help books or stuff or business books, and they're always how to win, how to conquer. I mean, there's always this sense that your life is permanently a fight. Right. And you approach it from a really different way, I think.

Well, yeah, I mean, only from long experience of approaching it that way, which certainly haven't completely, you know, transcended in any way at all. But yeah, I think that because we tell ourselves that there's something that's got to be in position before we can really relax into life, right? We've got to solve your problem with procrastination or distraction, or you've got to figure out how to do your job or how to really be a

an effective parent or, or, or whatever, or, or how to, or that, you know, some people say they've got to get when they get married, when they retire, blah, blah, blah, because you're never there. It's always in the future. Um, yeah, life is basically a slog towards that, that point, um, which never arrives because it would entail being kind of superhuman really to, to have that level of, um,

security over life. But it's got a big payoff, right? There's a reason we do it, I think, which is that for as long as the big moment of truth is coming later, you don't quite have to reckon fully with life as it is right now, right? You don't quite have to be here. Language gets a bit difficult at this point, but you don't quite have to fully be here and feel what it's like to be who we are, limited and sort of

trapped in the reality that we're in because you get to tell yourself that later on the real stuff is coming. Yeah, that's kind of depressing though, isn't it? That sort of idea that you can't appreciate today or right now because something has to happen to you or you have to do something or someone, I think in most people's cases, has to do something. So you can be crossed with your boss or you can be crossed with whatever to...

to postpone being just yourself. Oh, yeah, no, it's totally sad. I just think it does, yeah, it does, it's depressing. It serves that function of not giving us the degree of control that I think we wish we had over reality, but leading us on to the notion that we might be about to get it, basically. So in a way, it's a process of letting go of that control. Yeah, and of seeing that...

that control or that quest for that kind of control doesn't bring us the things that we thought it was going to bring. So there's a, I refer throughout the book on several occasions to this German social theorist called Hartmut Rosa, who wrote a very big book called Resonance that had a big effect on me. Its subtitle is a sociology of our relationship to the world. And it's,

to cut a 600 page book down to a very unfairly down to one sentence. He basically argues that, you know, the ways in which as individuals and as societies, we're always trying to extend the reach of our felt control, uh, which an awful lot of self-help and time management and productivity advice and all of this really is right. Um, but this actually has the effect of squeezing out the vibrancy or the resonance as he calls it, um,

That is the thing that we really value the most in life, that actually you need life to be somewhat outside your control for it to feel meaningful. And that when you get to the point where it's, if you ever do, where it's sort of very, very much under your control, all the life is gone from it somehow. Yeah.

How does it work out in your life? Because presumably you also write these books yourself, don't you? I mean, you went on this original quest to understand or to look at proposals that other people made and bring that brilliant sceptical eye to them and say, is this worth anything or not? And you also, of course, had a very sceptical readership in The Guardian, which you had to keep going week after week. But

So how does something like just the idea of accepting imperfection and accepting the fallibility of life, how does that work out in your life? I mean, it's just sort of endless process of having to learn the lessons and have my wife sardonically suggest that I read my own books. I think that...

I can talk about other life domains, but one that I think is always so vivid because I was writing about it and it meant such a lot to me was this question of how you organize your time. So quite relatively early on in my career, I had a lot of

autonomy over how I organized a day, not, not, not autonomy over what I did. It didn't feel that way. I had lots and lots of deadlines, but, um, you know, once I was not working on a daily basis, it was, there was a lot of freedom to sort of, uh,

do things at the specific times. And, you know, like there was, and so, and this was all at the time as well, when an awful lot of this stuff was come, was really coming to prominence in books and later YouTube and elsewhere, right. That there's, that there might be some,

Some silver bullet, a magic bullet way of kind of organizing your day or the perfect morning routine or the perfect way of organizing your tasks. And this is still like I mean, I may have grown disillusioned with it, but this is still a huge industry of promising control over time in this particular way.

And yeah, I would discover again and again when I tried to implement these things in my life that either they just didn't work because I was making all these perfectionistic demands over how the day would unfold. And then people got in the way and I was a jerk to them because I had a plan for the day and it wasn't what was actually happening. Or more interestingly, perhaps they sometimes did work as in, you know, I got to sort of

go through my life in the ways that I had decided I was going to. And it would just be within about 48 hours, just no fun at all. Right. Just sort of completely, um, sapped of any, um, uh, you know, life or goodness. I mean, I will definitely also say that then, uh, parenthood has, it has a very powerful way of, um, uh, you know, countering perfectionistic, uh,

I mean, there's a lot of perfectionistic advice given to parents and new parents especially, but in reality, you're sort of in that situation where the situation of a child is sort of...

is is of growing up or getting older and developing is happening whether you want it to or not right you can't stop it pause figure out the right system and then implement it so uh you know i don't think this is an experience unique to parents at all but there is something that makes it very vivid uh in that context yeah that's that's really interesting the um

uh, when we were talking the other day, I was saying that I'm an alcoholic and I'm part of fellowship and, you know, that's very much about acceptance of, well, this massive, I suppose you'd say imperfection, which you just learn to live with. And that the big things, I guess you learn as well, that you, you can't,

you can't control people, places or things. You can only have a short, a small chance of controlling how you react to them. And I think very much through your book that that's, that's a very fundamental message that, you know, as you, if you, it's like putting your future happiness on someone else, it tends not to work. Yeah. I think it's really interesting. And yeah, we discussed one or two of the overlaps, didn't we? Between, um,

I guess, 12 step approaches in general and some of these ideas. And I think one of the, I mean, tell me if this resonates or not, but like there's a psychotherapist called Bruce Tift, who I've quoted lots of different places who offers this kind of thought experiment that you take whatever it is in your life that bothers you the most about yourself, you know, like your proneness to anxiety or your, how easily distracted you are, your short temper, something like that. And you just sort of entertain the thought of what it would be like to, you

to know that you were going to be afflicted by some version of this for the rest of your life. You're never going to get over it completely. And for many, many people, that is a very empowering thought because, and the parallel here is obvious, right? With the sort of notion that one remains an alcoholic, even when one is no longer drinking. And

It's actually like once you accept this trait, then you can do something about it. Then you can behave in the ways that you would rather behave. But it's so paradoxical because it first of all begins by this acceptance that you're probably not going to achieve the level of total change that you might have wanted to. And it's through that that the change is achieved.

The acceptance is powerlessness. And that's what's incredibly interesting. And I'm not going to say that it manages to wash over all the other parts of your life, but it certainly helps sometimes in that feeling of not, you know, not really being able to control things as much as you might like or think you might like. And that's, I mean, I think if you try to control everything, like you were saying, the spontaneity goes out a bit. And in fact,

Everything about a day is made by its surprising bits, quite honestly. It's not made by what you totally expect to happen. Right. Yeah, no. And that's the point that I, but really also Hartmut Rosa presses home, right? You know, if you actually think about, excuse me, if you actually think about all sorts of contexts, if you find it interesting to...

if you enjoy studying some field of scholarship, say like, obviously that's because you don't understand it all right now. People may claim that they wish they knew in advance that their, their football team was going to win every single match that they played, but they really wouldn't. It would be, it would be, it would remove the sort of engaging excitement of that situation. So all sorts of different obvious places where we don't actually want that level of

Yeah, I lived in Kuwait for a couple of years and you get unbelievably bored with having no weather.

When you know exactly what it's going to be the next day. Oh, no, where's the rain? There's some really nice things that I really like. I mean, I'm someone who goes to bed at night and makes a to-do list for the following day because then I can sleep because I feel like I've extracted it from here on a piece of paper. But you have this really nice idea of having a done list through the day, which is something I'm now...

doing as a result of reading your book. And it's, it's very cool actually. Do you do it? Do you explain what you do? Yeah, I do. Um, I mean, to be really transparent, I've sort of, I use a, the way I have my stuff organized, it sort of creates it automatically because I move something from one place to another and then that is the list. But anyway, put this aside, done list is just any form of, of list, right. That you, that you keep, um,

by recording the things that you do during the, during the day. So that it gets longer as you, as you accomplish them. If you're a real dedicated to-do list user and you stick very religiously to your to-do list, then obviously it's going to look quite a lot like your to-do list because you're just going to be writing those same tasks, but that's fine. I think what's so powerful about this extremely simple practice is

is just that it reorients the sort of comparison that you're making. We go through life just instinctively comparing what we've done so far today with all the things left to do. And really that's an infinite supply. Like you might only have a few things left to do on your physical to-do list or your digital to-do list, but the number of things you could do today that would be useful to do today if you had all the time in the world is endless.

So when you compare what you've done to that, you always end up feeling depressed and down on yourself because it's, you know, a finite amount compared to an infinite amount. The great thing about the done list is you're sort of implicitly comparing what you've done to if you'd done nothing at all. And therefore you get a much better result. One context in which people find this really useful is if you're in a really sort of low period, if you're in a real sort of

rut with your both emotionally and in terms of managing to do anything, you can just write the most basic low level achievements on this list. Took a shower, made a cup of coffee. No one else ever needs to see this list, right? So you can tear it up at the end of the day, whatever.

Just that sort of bringing the attention to the way in which you did have some effect on reality, however tiny, took out the bins. It snowballs in a really extraordinary way. And you find very quickly that you're sort of motivated to do slightly larger things as well. I think that it's subtle, isn't it? Because too much control over reality, we've been saying is undesirable, but having some kind of

effect on the world around you is is also one of those kind of absolute psychological essentials that people go crazy without so you write a lot quite quite a lot about making decisions and that i mean one of our um in again going back to one of the things that's actually in al-anon um in the just for today cards is please please relieve me from two pests hurry and indecision

And indecision is also, I think, what you described as procrastination. So you're going in your kind of you put something off because, well, lots of reasons which you go into, which I find very interesting. Obviously, I'm sure that I'm picking things up because they appeal to me and other people would ask you different questions. But you talk about procrastination and how it both protects you and hobbles you.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's sort of procrastination seems to sort of mean two things. And in 4,000 weeks, I wrote a bit about like good procrastination by which I really mean inevitable procrastination. If there are too many meaningful ways you could spend today for you to do them all, which always will be, then you're sort of procrastinating on almost everything all the time. Right. I mean, if not making progress on something important is what procrastination is, then it's just a

of our lives. But I think that sort of indecision procrastination is really fascinating because I've certainly spent plenty of time mired in this. There is some feeling that going back to how we started talking, you know, the discomfort that comes along with sort of consciously feeling what it is to be a finite human and having limited time, not being able to be sure that anything you produce will be well-received or meet your standards or any of that.

Like the best way to hold on to that perfect fantasy that it's all going to be perfect is never to begin it in the first place, is to never bring it into reality. You also don't have to take... In fantasy land, you also don't have to take tough decisions about how to spend your time, right? You can sort of harbour plans to...

Spend six months a year on meditation retreats while also being a very present friend and parent while also working 10 hour days. As long as you're just harboring fantasies, no problem. Obviously, when you put them into reality, those don't add up because they're only 24 hours in a day and you have to get some sleep. So so there's a there's a there's something really alluring about just sort of hanging out in that not yet committed reality.

because the thing remains pristine. Yeah, and it remains still a perfect possibility. So you come up with, I mean, like many people do about the Robert Frost, you know, the road less travelled. But I think you make a really wonderful observation after that is that actually we choose roads all the time. I mean, every day we're making kind of decisions that could be

alter what happens and that if you went to this one room, you might bump into someone who might not. And that we put too much emphasis on that. It's slightly how I read it, a feeling, a feeling. It's a kind of what if feeling. I think that's right. Yeah. That's an interesting way of putting it. I feel like because every moment is a decision or a choice, whether we consciously decide or not, there is this sense in which, um,

The idea that the things that we can see as decisions and then get stressed about because we're taking them, like actually you can cut them down to size and see that that's all just being more conscious about how you were living anyway. The bit where I write about the Robert Frost poem based on the interpretation of that by the American poet David Orr,

I had filed that famous poem away. It's possible that not everyone in the five by 15 audience knows about it. If you were American or if you are American, you will, because it's sort of like drummed into Americans in high school, whether they like it or not. But it's the one about two paths diverging in a, in a wood. And it, the, the, the speaker of the poem says, you know, I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. And I had filed this away like everybody or like most people and,

as a kind of rather cliched argument for going your own way and following a beat of a different drum and, you know, always doing the unconventional thing and not going with the crowd. But David Orr shows that if you really read this, and I won't like,

do it line by line here because it's not the point. But if you really see what he's doing, it's very quickly apparent that what Frost may at least really be saying instead is that, you know, sure, we may justify our decisions in hindsight by saying I did the unconventional thing, but really in every moment of our lives, we're making decisions

decisions, not only where we can't know which, which one is going to be the right one in, in, in advance, but we can't even know in hindsight because who knows, right? Even if you consider your life to be wonderfully happy, like maybe there's some way it could have been happier. Even if you consider your life to be a tragedy, maybe there's some way it could have been more tragic. So there's, we're just sort of flying blind to a degree that we,

don't like to admit. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, as an expression, slightly been hijacked by the what-if brigade, you know, if only, the if-onlys, you know, if only I had done this or I hadn't done that or I had done this, I had done that. That is a very...

not great way to assess what's going on around you. I mean, I'm someone who used to do that a lot. Then I married a lawyer and he would say, just stop that. I deal with that every day in court. Someone going, oh, if only I hadn't murdered my wife or, you know, whatever it is. And you suddenly think, okay, this is just get on and deal with whatever the reality is in front of you. Right. And also just like butting in, I don't necessarily think this applies to murderers, but there is a,

it sort of cuts regret down to size as well, doesn't it? Because it sort of makes it clear that you're going to regret things. Absolutely. And that's not avoidable. And in its non-avoidability, there's a kind of freedom. Yes, that's a really good point. That's a really good point. So there's lots of really nice things. I love the stuff about your list of books by the bed. I'm guilty of that one. Of course, I'd pick this out again. That it isn't,

It isn't meant to oppress. You're meant to see it like a river. I just suggest in this, it's a very sort of vivid form of a much wider phenomenon, right? That we have all these sort of infinite or effectively infinite inputs in our lives that we drive ourselves a bit crazy trying to fully deal with the whole of. And yeah, the to read pile or the list of articles in your read it later app or whatever the equivalent is. It feels like, yeah, the metaphor I use is it feels like

It feels like something where something accumulates and it's your job to sort of empty it out. But this makes no sense when you think about the supply being as unlimited as it is. And so the alternative is, yeah, to think of it as a river, to think of all this information flowing by you and you're standing by the banks or perhaps in the middle of the river, picking out things as they flow by.

that catch your attention or that seem particularly worth your time, but not with some background agenda that you're going to consume the whole river, I suppose, to put this metaphor too far. And it's funny because I do feel sort of oppressed by the, or I can do, by the list of bookmarks in my browser, right? And yet nobody feels oppressed by all the books in the British Library. You don't sit at home at night feeling bad that you haven't got through all of those.

It's just a question of where we draw the mental boundary and then beat ourselves up on one side of it. But there's so many... I mean, I'm a victim of this. There's so many interesting things to read. You're just... There is just always this feeling of there's yet another paper about food or climate change that I should be reading. I think...

Another metaphor here that really made a big difference to me, but that you just reminded me of in the way you expressed that is that it's possible to look to approach lists as and lists of things to read and mental lists of books to catch up on and all the rest of it as, as menus. In fact, it probably makes a lot more sense to approach them as menus. That's good. You go to a restaurant, especially if you go to one of those like New York diners where they hand you like a

lever arch file of all the dishes that they claim they can prepare. Nobody in their right minds would feel bad. I think maybe I'm wrong. Um, that, that you have to make a choice from that list, right? That would, that the whole point is there's this abundant world of things to pick from. And so in a sort of slightly cliched, uh,

self-help thing. You don't, it's not like a to-do list that you have to get through. It's a, it's a menu that you get to choose from. And, and I think you can approach information overload and a lot of other things in lifelines. Honestly, if we're finite and there's an infinite amount of stuff to do, then all lists are menus anyway. And, um, we sort of might as well take that attitude, I guess. Yeah. Well, on that sort of question of finiteness, I find that, um,

you have somewhere in that thing about figuring out what you say no to. And I think that people's problems about saying no are huge. I mean, I have a small rule, which is I try to do it, don't do anything wrong.

in six months' time, because you know you agree to do something in six months because it's so far away. Don't agree to anything that you wouldn't want to do tomorrow morning. That's a very wise... I mean, when you can do it, it really helps sort of filter something out. But of course, you don't do it for reasons to do with... because it makes you feel better or, you know, whatever it is. So do you think that there is a good strategy? Well, in fact, your book is not really so much about strategy. It's about learning how to...

Learning how to do things that give you back your life force, I suppose, is what? Because some things you feel in the bow and some things you feel you're just scratching along.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's that wonderful line that I've quoted a few times from James Hollis, the Jungian therapist about asking whether a choice enlarges or diminishes you as a way of just, just intuitively connecting to like, you know, is this the way of the, is this, is there life in this choice or is it kind of not? I think when it comes to saying no, I mean, you make a great point about how our,

the sort of telescoping the time in terms of saying no to things you don't want to do. Understanding that, yeah, that trick is golden, I think. There's a lovely line that I've quoted from Elizabeth Gilbert who makes the point that actually the real problem is saying no to things you do want to do. But almost all of us

in, you know, most walks of life, there are going to be more things that you do want to do or would like to pursue than there is time available to pursue them. And that's harder because then you're in the realm of thinking, well, this is six months away. Would I want to do it tomorrow? Yes, I would. But maybe still I have to find a way to say no, because just for, you know, just the maths of the situation, but there are other things that I want to do more that I can't

have in my life if I'm always doing this other kind of thing. I think there's something quite, I mean, this is a thing, a point that occurs in lots of different forms in this book, right? But there's something quite freeing about seeing that it's worse than you think, as it were, right? There's something quite freeing about seeing that you're going to have to say no to a lot of things you would like to do as well as a lot of things that you don't want to do. There's no way to win here and do all the things that you want to do.

And if there's no way to win, then you don't need to fight that fight, right? That's true, but it is different from, I mean, it's different from, say, having slightly lower expectations because then the chances are you'd always be kind of pleased and surprised. There's something different about that kind of acceptance, I think. Well, there's something, yeah, there's something, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but yeah, there's a form of, I mean, I come at this from so many different angles to try to get it across, and one of them is a,

One of them is a line from a writer whose work I admire a lot called Sasha Chapin. And he uses this phrase, playing in the ruins. And he talks about how, it's a different context, but he talks about how he really wanted to be a sort of famous novelist. And when he realized it wasn't going to work out, he was able no longer to sort of, to actually be, he was able to be the writer that he was,

that he could be and to enjoy the process because he was no longer trying to make reality match up to something that was actually not in his, in the stars for him. And I think it's a bit of the same when it comes to FOMO and trying to make, do all the things that feel like they need doing or meet all our obligations because it's not always fun, right? Once you see how impossible it is, the thing that we've been trying to do, like there's new energy to actually more playfully in the ruins,

do the things that we can do. I don't know if that is it, but it's another way, another way into the same stuff, maybe. Slightly diverting, but I guess all these things come around to the same thing. They do, I think. The question of the gnawing rat, the can-gnawing rat, however you say that. Yeah. I mean, we all have that. I mean, one of the great things about reading this book is I suppose you realise that everyone,

has fundamentally got all the same insecurities and worries and annoying rats hanging around their shoulders that you have. But you have some rather good advice about that. Yeah, this needs to be attributed to a Dutch Zen writer called Paul Lumens, who's made a big impression on me. Well, I'm adapting it and synthesizing it and putting it in a wider context. But anyway...

The imagery is his, the idea of the gnawing rat. It's really good. And what this refers to is those kind of tasks that, or indeed whole areas of life that one avoids taking action on because they trigger some kind of anxiety. So this is the classic situation where you feel a pain that you probably ought to get the doctor to look at, but precisely because it could be something serious, you don't go to the doctor or you're,

worried that you don't have as much money in your current account than you feel you ought to have or thought you had. So you don't check the balance because then you don't need to confront this fact. And of course, this is a disastrous way of operating because if you haven't got enough money, seeing the truth of that is the first step to doing something about it. If the pain is something serious, getting it checked out is the first step to resolving it, right? Obviously you should be turning towards these things, but, but it's,

absolutely not you know normal for us not to and there's a certain kind of cliched self-help advice that said piece of advice that says like you've just got to sort of man up or woman up and like push through and force yourself to do these things and and it's all going to be a big fight lumens has this idea that actually all you need to do is as he puts it befriend your annoying rats you need to take any kind of action even a purely internal mental action and

but just sort of acknowledges that they are already a part of your reality. It could be as easy as visualizing the first step you would take to make the doctor's appointment or to check the balance. He gives this example of a woman who had become completely sort of pathologically stressed out about a shed full of junk that she hadn't been into and desperately needed to sort of clear out. And his advice there is like, just go to the shed, just stand in the space.

And it's extraordinary when you sort of let these, we actually put so much effort into sort of trying to deny the fact that some particular problem, some annoying problem is a part of our reality. We'd rather imagine that it wasn't. But as soon as you do anything to just like accept that it's there, lots of the other steps follow quite intuitively and naturally and don't need that kind of daily effort to sort of force yourself, which is absolutely no fun and

And sort of a disincentive to action. So it is the Adam Phillips quote that you have about, you know, treating oneself with compassion very much is, I think, kind of comes out of that as well. And it is that thing that if it was a friend of yours who was saying, I'm so sorry,

fearful of my bank account i don't look you would say actually it's probably a really good idea to have a look that's right and you know yeah it's almost like yeah yeah it's like taking it sounds all all levels of of cliched i know but it's like you know it's like taking yourself by the hand and just sort of gently leading yourself to the first step it's how you would work with a toddler you know um but phillips is totally right like if you yeah

the way we berate ourselves instead if you if you met the person doing that berating in a social context you just think like where does that where does that come from that that human impulse to kind of gauge yourself i could do better i could do better i could try harder you know i really screwed that one up and you what you remember is the things you've got kind of quotes wrong rather than again the things you'd put on your done list the camera's done it again which um

which are quite good. Why do we have a human instinct to find the not good? I mean, the why of it is so, I think we could sort of discuss endlessly, and I'm sure that the sort of psychoanalytic answer would be at least in part to do with the ways in which we're, you know,

imperfectly and insufficiently parented. And the fact that we feel like we're trying to sort of, we've got to try to sort of earn a level of acceptance or love or belonging that we don't feel that we have by birthright. But then you've got all the sort of social and economic pressures that really make it feel like you have to drive yourself harder if you're going to keep your head above water. And I think if I would say, if you go right back to fundamentals on some level,

all of this is just an unease with being finite, with being mortal, right? It's this sort of feeling that if we really push ourselves to be better and different, we could somehow, uh, forestall the, the fate that, um, awaits us. I think there's, there's, there's something really powerful in that notion that, um,

you know, we'll fight and berate ourselves and make life completely miserable to do anything for a sort of, to sustain this fantasy that if we finally get to the place it's all aimed at, suddenly, you know, at that point, we might not have to

uh you know experience what what we actually do all have to experience as finite human beings would die basically yeah and all the things that follow from that like having a limited amount of time and you know yes i mean it's all it's all capped by uh by death yeah so getting come to the questions in a minute but we we haven't yet talked about the great big new elephant in the room which is social media and of course the hideous comparisons that it

makes all the time and the fact that, and I know we talked about this a bit before, but the way that the economy, the capitalist economy, I was saying to you, you can no longer buy a shampoo for normal hair. You're berated all the time that you could do better for yourself by buying this, investing in this, by losing weight, by whatever it is or taking this course and that

we're completely sealed in a world where you're not all right. I mean, you're somehow morally responsible to yourself. I mean, in South America, for instance, you can get bank loans to have those jobs and they're seen in exactly the same way as

say you could get a bank loan for university. So this is seen as a step on the career ladder. So it's telling you, I'm not okay and I should be better. And it's madly exacerbated now. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, and yeah, the economic system that we live in has an obvious sort of vested interest in kindling dissatisfaction and then promising the

but not delivering the solution to it. And obviously, you know, self-help is one very vivid version of that because it's so sort of overt. It's like, you know, this book will solve your problems. And then if it did, then that would be a bad business model for the people putting those books out.

I think all the same that, yeah, these are things that are really, that technology and the attention economy and the rest of it is able to exacerbate greatly. But that dissatisfaction, that sense that something isn't right and needs to be fixed before we can really relax into our lives is much older than any of that. And it's part of the core of what, you know, Buddhism to name one world religion is about that notion of like,

there's some problem that has to be solved here before you can really consider yourself to fully, to fully be here. And what changes when we start to ask the wonder if, if maybe life isn't a problem to be solved and that quoting Charlotte Jocko Beck, the American Zen teacher, as I quote the beginning of 4,000 weeks, it's possibly true that as she puts it, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. Yeah.

And when you relax the idea that there must be a cure to all of this, then the need for a cure to it all seems to evaporate. Well, that's really interesting. I think that that is, I mean, you can sort of take the 1960s expression, you know, get laid back, chill out. But it was a kind of,

ground of truth in there and in fact I've got a question here what role does Zen practice play in your thinking because a lot of that kind of thinking did derive from religions like Zen if you call it way of thinking rather. Yeah no absolutely and I mean I think I feel very sort of journalistic in the way that I approach the book so I sort of plunder from anywhere if it's useful for the thing I'm doing but Zen is one tradition that over and over again

seems to have found ways of expressing what I'm, what I'm exploring and sort of pushing it to the next, to the next level. I, I have a sort of patchy undisciplined history with actual sort of seated meditation, but, but then specifically in, in Buddhism, to me, it seems does this very,

ingenious thing where it takes people like like me and perhaps many people here tonight who are sort of intellect first people who sort of think they can go through life using their brain their minds to figure things out and sort of you know liable to be brains on sticks or stalks as some people sometimes say and um not so good at the embodied aspects of life

But then instead of just telling them that that's a bad way to live, Zen and things like koans in Zen, they almost like, they say, well, okay, let's take this as far as it can go. Let's like, let's like really bring thinking to bear on reality. And if you take it far enough, it's sort of, I don't know if this is going to sound clear to anyone who doesn't already know what I'm talking about, but if you take that far enough, it kind of, something,

crumbles something sort of collapses in the attempt to get your mind around reality and there's something very very um liberating and deep about that collapse and you're sort of delivered on the other side of it to um to a more to a fuller participation in in reality but um

Oh, I love that. As that came out of my mouth, it sounded very cryptic. No, no, no, no, it didn't. I mean, I don't know if you could. I mean, the Zen koan that I love is about the tiger.

The tiger's racing. Someone's being chased by a tiger. They get to a cliff and they start climbing down the cliff and they hang on to a tree. And then slowly the tree starts to fall away and the drop is huge and up above the tiger's roaring and the person doesn't know what to do. And then he looks over to his left and he sees a strawberry and he reaches out and picks the strawberry.

You think, oh, okay, I don't get that, but I can kind of get that. It does crumble the walls. Yeah. Or pulls a rug from under something. Thank you. So

There's another question here about practical strategies to tackle the anxiety that perfectionism brings, i.e. how to remind oneself that flaws are okay. But I don't know if that's the right word, flaws, because actually it's humanity, isn't it? It's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, we use lots of negative expressions, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's fascinating that, yeah, I mean, even imperfectionism could be accused of being a sort of smuggling in a pejorative judgment. I think this depends in terms of practical strategies. I think this depends very much on what you're doing, you know, the specific activity where you are sort of haunted by perfectionism. So forgive me if I just give an example from writing because it's what I know. But as I write in the book, one of the things I

I sort of encountered a new level of, I got down to a new level of perfectionistic, uh, weirdness in myself, writing this, writing this book and had to sort of figure out how to grapple with it. And, um,

started really for the first time in my career, um, doing these kinds of free writing exercises where, you know, you set a timer and just write anything for a certain period of time, which I had always deeply disdained as like the, the, well, the thing that amateur writers did. And I was a professional and I wasn't going to do any of this nonsense, like, you know, uh, exercises. I just get down to work and do the thing. Um, and,

But actually I was astonished by how difficult I found it to sort of allow myself to just make a total mess onto the page. And how that sort of exposed what I'd been doing before as quite perfectionistic where you sort of sit and wait until you can think of something good to write, a very agonizing way to do things. So really that was about

Just again, taking oneself by the hand and leading oneself through these very elementary exercises in doing things badly or doing things far from perfectly or however you want to phrase it. Just doing that for 10 minutes into a file that you then delete. Nobody else ever needs to see it. And yet the sort of emotional journey that you go on if you're a real perfectionist through just actually allowing that to take place.

is quite, something gets sort of metabolized or something in that process that is very useful. Now, whether that will transfer to areas other than writing, I don't know, but that was what came to my mind. There's a question here about taking time for yourself, given that that's seen as a bit self-indulgent and without it having an impact on your interpersonal relationships.

there's expectations today that we're always available that we can't and i mean i on the back of that question i'd also like to ask you a bit about wasting time i mean again that's another horrible way of looking at time and that we sort of despise he's a time she's a time waster and it's derogatory but how do you how do you take time for yourself is it a valid thing to do

I mean, I find the concept, it's really interesting because I have found and I found for a long time that if I sort of tried to build in time for myself in that sense and think of it in those terms, it didn't work either because it was too easy to

give way and give that time to other people instead. Or because on the occasions that it did work and you had like two hours that you'd sort of ring fenced just for yourself. Like I was just at a loss about what to do with it. The flywheel of wanting to sort of get everything done and keep everyone happy is so powerful that it feels just like not fun.

I think our reflection is something that needs to be questioned in that notion of time for oneself that implicitly defines all the rest of time as not being for yourself, right? As being for serving other people. And I don't mean that people aren't in situations where that is how it goes, right? I mean, where your job or your family, all sorts of things could just feel like they take every single moment. But I think it's important at least to aspire to,

to an outlook on life that would not see that as a zero sum game, right? Where if what you are doing at this point in your reality and your life is raising a family, you don't want to get to the point where you think of all the time spent on that as not being for yourself. Some of it might involve a lot of sacrifices, but you don't want to define it from the start as not being yourself because that almost suggests some sort of

failure to fully internalize the fact that this is a choice you have made at this season of your of your life so i'm sort of thinking that through i think it's very important to you know build in time when what you're doing is taking a walk or what you're doing is reading a novel and there's endless evidence to show that will make you better at doing all the other things uh

but I think it would be quite helpful to question the notion that we're dividing time into four selves and four others as if that's a dichotomy we have to only be on one side of. Yeah and it is that you deserve time for yourself as though you didn't quite deserve the rest of it, you're quite right, it makes life seem like the other part of life is not so great.

Right. And I've caught myself in this, right? It's like there are definitely times when the specific things one has to do as a parent of a young child are not particularly pleasant. Sure. But it's really self-defeating to approach that time intrinsically as being somehow a distraction or an interruption to time for oneself. Yeah.

You want your life to feel congruent. I'm not sure if that was a word that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to use, who you quote, who was an absolutely crazy Tibetan guru who I crossed paths with many years ago. But he was very interesting about imperfection. And he would always say, you don't want to give things up. You want to use them as the manure in which to grow new things.

It was very, it's quite a helpful thing that you can turn the energies around inside you to make them less destructive or more destructive. And that, yeah, that they work. Anyway, we are up to the time, I'm afraid. It's gone by so fast. I've got reams of other things to ask you. But there's a really nice, on page 146, because I'm not quite sure which chapter we're in, there's a really wonderful quote from a woman who, you've got the book with you.

I was wondering whether you could read it. It's a woman who lost a child and about how life came back to her, what brought her peace. It's very beautiful. Sure. This is, I mean, there's a quote in the middle of this from a Zen teacher called John Tarrant. I'll start by reading something I wrote, but then I'll, well, I think it's clear because it says Tarrant writes, but yeah. Yeah.

So this is somebody, right, of his acquaintance going through the most harrowing thing it's possible to conceive of, if one can even conceive of it, if it hasn't happened to you.

and found a woman who found herself unable to wrap her mind around what had happened. Well-intentioned friends sought to help her recover a sense of meaning in life, but meaning was nowhere to be found. Indeed, trying to find purpose after such a calamity only seemed to make things worse. What eventually brought a modicum of peace and the first stirrings of forward motion was the woman's realization that a stable sense of meaning, a clear grasp of what was happening to her, might be things that didn't need finding after all. Tarrant writes...

She accepted that her life was now outside anything she had ever imagined. There was no reason for living. And at the same time, there was no reason why she couldn't survive or feel joy. She had to live merely for the sake of life without justifications or achievements. She found that she was willing to do this. It also came to her that taking this path was generous to her daughter. And I mean, not to unpack it too much, and I know we've got to stop, but I think there's something very deep there that applies to

in far less calamitous situations, right? That this need to try to get things figured out and to get on top of things in that way can be a real impediment to actually entering fully and wholeheartedly into them.

Yeah, I didn't find it catastrophic. I found it very joyous, actually, that you just live life because it's in front of you. It's extraordinarily magical if you allow it to be, which means you have to slightly let it go. Yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you. As I say, there's so much more in this book. We haven't even begun to cover all the different extraordinary ideas and really, really good ideas. And sorry, you've probably got very much my one side of it because, of course, as I said before, you all feel that Oliver's writing entirely for you. But thank you so much for your time. And I just say Christmas is coming. And this is a really good book to read as we run up to this weekend.

tough time of year um and also join the christmas present i would say so oliver thank you very very much indeed for joining us and i hope we thank you rosie i've really enjoyed it and thank you everyone who's been here tonight thank you very much okay