Oliver Burkeman: The Fallacy of Time Management
Oliver Burkeman is a feature writer for The Guardian and the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book which delivers practical self-help through the lens of philosophical reflection as Burkeman questions the modern fixation on “getting everything done.”
We are finite, material creatures who only live so long—about four thousand weeks—Burkeman tells us, yet we are obsessed with cramming more and more “stuff” into our days, aided by time saving technologies that give us the illusion of transcending the ultimate limitation: Our own mortality. Our culture has led us to believe that if we just became more efficient, we could optimize our lives enough to bring about greater happiness. But in an era where busyness has become a virtue, our attempts to drive efficiency ultimately don’t yield more time for the meaningful stuff, but rather heighten our sense of anxious hurry as we face, and are expected to process, an incessant stream of inputs.
We can only begin to build toward a meaningful life when we embrace our finitude, he advises us. Rather than searching out shortcuts to arrive at our cosmically significant life purpose faster, Burkeman tells us to ride the metaphorical bus—allowing ourselves to learn and develop at all the stops along the way. The universe is not depending on us to maximize our time, he says, and when we fall victim to the siren’s call of efficiency culture to avoid the annoying parts of life, we miss out on a whole bunch of the meaningful stuff, too. I loved our conversation.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Why we shouldn’t maximize efficiency…5:18
Instrumentalizing time…15:42
Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality…31:41
Our universal insignificance…40:11
MORE FROM OLIVER BURKEMAN:
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Explore Oliver's Website
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited lightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well I am so pleased to talk to you. Thank you for saying yes. I actually read your book a while ago. I read it over Thanksgiving at the, my brother, who is a book editor, pressed it into my hands. So for him to also extol a book that's not his. He never gives me recommendations, but he was very insistent that I read your book and that your book was great. So high praise from someone who is hard to please.
OLIVER BURKEMAN:
Very glad to hear it.
ELISE:
And I feel like the people who talk to me about your book are all people I respect. So clearly you found your audience.
OLIVER:
I'm really happy to hear it. It's been amazing watching it land with people and resonate. It’s much more than I ever expected. So it's great to know that other people are screwed up in a similar way to one's self, you know, of when it comes to these issues of time and all the rest.
ELISE:
It's so simple, right? This overarching conceit of like, actually you can number your days. Like you can even use an actuarial table and probably figure out pretty accurately, how many in your case weeks, or how many weekends you have with your kids. And yet we're also loathe to do it in part because it's knowable. Why do you think we have that aversion?
OLIVER:
Well, I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because yes, you can make a good guess, but you also can't ever really really know. What we can know is that it's finite and you can know that in any given case, weekends with your kids or something, you can know that it's a lot fewer than you would ever choose if you had any say in the matter. So I mean, you know, ultimately it's just that we don't want to accept that we're finite and that we're gonna die. We can't get our minds around that idea. But I think that sort of on a more day to day basis, there is this kind of, it, it feels uncomfortable to confront these facts because all sorts of kind of responsibilities feel like they come with them.So if you've only got so much time, then it's on you to make the most of that time and you might not be making the most of it right now.
And it really matters what you choose to do as against other things. What I hope I'm getting at, at least by the end of this book is that this kind of stepping into the truth of the matter is, it's uncomfortable, but it's not a recipe for sort of panic, or doesn't need to be a recipe for panic, or for, you know, the message of this book is not, life is really short so like freak out every day, trying to fill your days with really memorable things. Like that is not the message that I want to deliver. It's something much more like, you know, why don't we just live at the human scale that we have been gifted to live rather than making ourselves miserable, and busier, and less present, and all the rest of it by trying to escape that this truth. So the title, I accept for partly for commercial reasons might, might be slightly startling or panic inducing of the book, Four Thousand Weeks. But I hope the thing I'm trying to say about time is, is a relief ultimately.
ELISE:
Well, I love what you just said, the human scale of it, and I loved how the book ventured from this idea of maximizing, which I wanna drill into and this like terrible cultural productivity that we really are enslaved to. And then the way at the end, you sort of make the point. And I think, you know, this is the week that the web telescope images emerged. It doesn't really matter. Like the universe is not depending on each of us to maximize our time. Like there is this human scale that we seem to miss. And so we'll take people on that range, but so let's start at the beginning. I loved the extended conversation around technology and John Maynard Keynes and this idea originally that all this technology was supposed to liberate us for leisure, right? Like that was the promise, not work more, but actually we could winnow down to 15 hours of work a week, and yet we have managed to expand expectations in a ballooning way. What do you think that that is? Is that just what it is to be human?
OLIVER:
I mean, I think ultimately this comes down to the human condition. I think capitalism, consumerism, all sorts of industrialization, all sorts of forces sort of piggyback on it and make it worse. But I guess that the way to think about it, I would say, is just that we start with this basic situation that we are finite material creatures who will only live so long, can only do so much, can only pay attention to so much at a time. All these limitations define us as animals. But probably uniquely among the animals we're capable of sort of conceiving of limitless things and infinite things; we're capable of wanting to do far more with our time than we ever could do, or feeling more social obligations than a person ever could reasonably fulfill, you know, everything like that.
So we use technology, at least in some ways in which we use technology, to try to sort of get our arms further and further around these things, the obligations we feel. The things we want to do, the comforts we want to have in our lives, whatever it is, to sort of extend our reach as these material beings. But the supply of those things is infinite. The supply of demands other people can make, ambitions, the number of emails you can receive. There's no limit to those. So technology that's designed to help you get your arms around more of them will never help people will never cause you to, to get to the end of them.And so one of the arguments I try to go into is that, you know, I think this rears its head in different disciplines under different names, but there seems to be this basic idea that if you make a system including a human life, more efficient, capable of processing more inputs, to put it in like abstract general terms.
Well, if that supply of input is infinite, all that's gonna happen is that you attract more of them into the system and you end up busier, right? This is Parkinson's Law. It's induced demand with the way when they widen freeways to ease the congestion, it makes the route more appealing to more drivers, so more cars come and fill the lane and thenthe congestion gets back to what it was before. There's all these different ways in which like trying to get on top of something that you can't actually get on top of is futile. And technology seems to offer that promise. And of course it does help us do lots and lots of really useful things, but it doesn't help us get to the state of peace of mind with respect to our limited natures. It's never going to break through that barrier.
ELISE:
It's a different scale, you know, at the beginning you write, “Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time, by any sane logic in a world with dishwashers, microwaves and jet engines, time out to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody's actual experience. Instead life accelerates and everyone grows more impatient. It's somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven, or 10 seconds for a slow loading webpage versus three days to receive the same information by mail.” It does, it feels like a mismatch. Like we are living in a way that is not how we're built. And as I read that I laughed cause I was like, that's me, like refreshing frantically.
OLIVER:
Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think there are different ways you can explain that bizarre phenomenon of how time-saving technologies make you feel like time is more scarce than it was before. But I think one simple way to think about it is just that yeah, they sort of fuel this fantasy we have of becoming God's and transcending our human situation, and becoming limitless and ungoverned by limits. Because once you can cook food in two minutes, it starts to seem reasonable that maybe you could cook it the moment you think you'd like some food. It feels like you're very close at that point to being unbound by the human situation. And I think the there's something very interesting. I don't really get into in the book, but about the sort of the phenomenology, the experience of being online, being in social media spaces, or other similar spaces, you know, the metaverse going to send all this into overdrive, that feels like limitation doesn't apply.
It feels like you can find out information about what's happening 4,000 miles away in the blink of an eye. It feels like you can present yourself to be any person you want and no one can ever know how it matches up to your sort of real life self. And so all these things kind of feed this feeling that we're sort of almost there in terms of escaping the human. But of course we're not, and you still have to sit in traffic, or wait for other people to do things at the speed in their own sweet time, or whatever it might be. And so all the ways in which you haven't yet transcended that thing become much more frustrating because there's still that like gap left to close, between this sort of fantasy of being sort of transhuman and the reality. So yeah, I think that that's not the only way to understand it, but like we keep being lured with these ways of making it look likewe're almost there. We're almost able to escape our limitations.
ELISE:
I was a magazine editor in New York for a decade before I moved to Los Angeles. And I remember the relief that I felt in Los Angeles because of the traffic and that there was suddenly a limiting factor on time. Which I know sounds insane. But in New York, there was nothing to stop you. There was no valid excuse from work to drinks, to dinner, to drinks, home. I mean, I had no children and I wasn't married, but there was this compulsion to maximize or fill. There was just no reason not to do it. And then when you get to LA and you're like, well, I'm not crossing the 405 at 6:00 PM. There are all these factors, where suddenly, I was like, I have so much more time by virtue of the fact that I can't actually physically do this. I found it very, very liberating. Just that false constraint of traffic, not a false constraint, a real constraint.
OLIVER:
Super fascinating and ironic, I guess that for you like the trek West, to the American frontier, this whole thing, which is that all about the, the pursuit of unlimited fortune and unlimited, you know, the unlimited beauty of Hollywood stars and all the rest, you know, all that stuff, it's all like off the charts, but actually for you, that was a, that was a move towards limitation. I think it's great.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, exactly. But really, you know, you talk in the book about sort of this idea of convenience culture and its seduction that by sort of outsourcing or making all of these annoying things so much faster and simpler, which technology obviously grants us. You don't have to sit and labor over a sink full of dishes, although I like doing dishes. But that you can do everything and you can do more, and then we end up with this overstuffed life where time is moving faster. I would presume, I don't know.
OLIVER:
Well it depends what you mean by time, but certainly yes, I mean the, I think the convenience thing, it has two related effects. One of them exactly, as you say, is, you know, makes everything so frictionless, but more and more stuff can sort of flood into your life system. And, and yet you don't, as a result of that, finish doing things you don't get to the bottom of any of this, the end of any of this, it's just that you are more rushed and more stressed than you were. This is really easy to see in the case of email, which I go on about a bit of length, you know, right. If you answer people's emails at a quicker tempo, then you're gonna get more applies from those people at a quicker tempo. You're gonna get a reputation for being responsive on email and receive more email.
So obviously, you know, utilizing this technology, that's supposed to make sending messages easier and more convenient is going to result in you spending much more of your time dealing with those messages. And then, yeah, I think the other thing is just that we perpetually end up sort of smoothing away annoying bits of our lives and then end up losing valuable bits of our lives at the same time. And so, you know, the obvious example there, if you're the kind of person like I was when I was writing this book who sort of works from home and stays at home and often doesn't see anybody for hours in a day, it's not actually all a good thing to be able to order delivery food without ever interacting with a human being, you know. You think it is because it's like, oh, I can't face having to actually have a conversation with somebody, but then you lose one of those little interactions that actually can to a sort of alarming extent can kind of keep you sane and connected for the day.
So, that's just one example, but I think there's lots of those where we smooth away things that actually, we value even if we don't realize that we value them.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, let's talk about this bigger idea, which gets twisted, but is still sort of the thesis of our lives. Really, the only thing we have is time. The thing that has value in our lives is time. And in that way it becomes as you call it instrumentalized. And I thought your description or your definition of capitalism was one that made so much sense, but it had never occurred to me where you write, “The mysterious truth is that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They're very good at instrumentalizing their time for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves. That's the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning even as their bank balances increase.” I thought that was so beautiful because I think we're so collectively trapped in that as a myth. And there's such a myth around wealth. And of course, like I get it being wealthy makes life fundamentally easier, safer in many ways, but that somehow it delivers you to something else is I think a terrible cultural myth.
OLIVER:
Yeah. I think one of the things that really struck me reading into that area when I was writing the book is, you know, it's a bit of a cliché to say that money doesn't bring happiness. And there's a lot of debate about exactly what annual income is the threshold for that. And there's all sorts of arguments about, you know, there's a certain amount of money that actually more money does make you happier.
ELISE:
But for an individual it's like $90,000, which is considerable, but after that happiness dwindles, it's like, and if you're below 55, you suffer?
bOLIVER:
Right. It's in those zones. So it's like, yes, every millionaire in America is like streets beyond that level. And plenty of, you know, people who today merely counter sort of upper middle class are long beyond that level, but it is really contested. Some people say that that, that research doesn't show that et cetera, et cetera, what I thought was so interesting was in some sense, it's not even the fact that you are doing everything for money that is the problem here. It's just the fact that you're doing everything for something other than itself. And there are particular issues attached to doing that for money. But it's this notion that even somebody who spurs the idea of being wealthy, because they think it's not virtuous or whatever, but is still spending their whole life heading towards some future time when they're going to be able to relax or they're going to have got everything their lives in working order or figured everything out.
They're still in that that mindset of everything is for something else. And of course we, like, we have to do that. Right. You can't, you, if you, don't the reason that you put your clothes in the washing machine and turn it on is, is because you are doing that in order to get an end result. It's not that you can live non-instrumentally completely. It's just that sort of total investment in the idea that that times value only comes from what it's leading up to. And obviously if that is everything you do, and then eventually your time just stops. Like there's never been a moment in your life when the payoff came, you know, when the thing you were doing it for arrived.
ELISE:
Well, it's so interesting, going back to that idea of like what you wanting, what you do to matter in some future distant state. You know, as a fellow book writer or content, so many people… there's a delusion in writing a book. If you think that you're writing it with a hope of having a successful book like yours, right? Like that's very hard to do. Chances are when you write a book, very few people will read it. And if there's no value in the process, if the act of writing it in of itself is not what matters to you. If you're writing it for some future hope of success, I mean, books and money is a joke. I mean, it's such a hard, anemic business, but like people still get lulled into that right. And you can apply it to almost any industry. So whether it's money or a claim or influence, we're all seduced by it. And yet that's a terrible, scary future state promise.
OLIVER:
Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I don't wanna make people feel bad for having that element in their motivation. It’s very human. And I think it could be motivating to a certain extent. I really wanted to target in the book the way that, that seems to just squeeze everything else out. So as you say exactly, if that is why you are doing it, then you are sort of, that is the only reason that you're doing it, or that takes over as the only reason why you're doing it, then you just miss out on, on your life. And I think about this quite a lot in the context of writing, because I feel very deeply, like it is a sort of a vocation type thing with me.
I've always done it since I was really young. I'm not as pleasant a person to know if I don't get to do it for a couple of weeks and things like that. It's very central to who I am, even though that can sound a bit pretentious, but on the other hand, do I enjoy it in the moment of doing it? I think for a lot of the time, I don't. A lot of the time it's just feels hard and unpleasant. So it's very easy in those circumstances to choose the more pleasant fantasy of like, well, the reason I'm doing this is because it's going to bring about everything I want to have brought about in my life. There's actually something very nourishing about the hardness. I think of writing. It's hard to get my I'm sure this applies to other things too, that it's, it's some, the move I'm talking about here is something to do with like, coming to terms with the fact that important things, things that matter to you feel difficult, and then sort of enjoying the difficulty rather than, as you say, constantly trying to account for them on the basis that they're going to lead to future paradise.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's difficult. The resistance that comes up,it's brutal. I don't know if you're ever driven under the blankets in tears. I mean, that's my process or part of my process, unfortunately, like it's not just a joyful experience and I've been laid low by feedback, et cetera. And it's brutal, but I can't imagine not doing it. This is what I feel like I'm called to do, and this is how I'm supposed to spend my time.
OLIVER:
Right. Right. And this feeds into another, it's a different part of the book where I'm talking about this, but it just makes me think, it's not a coincidence that this thing you really care about is also so difficult and uncomfortable. It's not just like your bad luck, that the thing that you want to do with your life is unpleasant to do. This is because I think, things that matter to us, doing things that matter to us, bring us into the encounter with our limitations. The stakes are high for you because it's something that matters to you, but you can't know that it'll be well received. You can't know that you have what it takes to do it, or that you have enough time to meet the deadline, all these things. So in that world of like the stakes are high and I can't control the future. and this really matters. Things that you don't care about are much more relaxing because like, it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter. So yeah, hat is why I think one of the main reasons why we sort of, we want to distract ourselves, we want to give in to you, sit down thinking you want to write a chapter and turns out what you actually want to do is scroll through social media, because then you're in this world where you don't have to think about the fact that you've only got a bit of time and you're trying to do something that might not work out.
ELISE:
I wanna talk about originality because I loved that, the story of the bus. But before we get to that, I just wanna just linger for a minute about the instrumentalization of time because I think it's so important and this idea as you write, “that we treat everything we're doing life itself. In other words, is valuable, only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.” And sort of detaching from that. Like you, you talk about Krishnamurti saying like, I don't mind what happens, but that detachment from future states so that we can live in the present. Do you feel having wrestled with this for, I don't know how many years, but it's any book you write is what five years of your life? Minimum.
Do you feel like having a new conscious awareness of like, of being in the moment with that struggle or with time? I mean, like you're doing it on a meta level, right? Like you're writing about this construct of time and, and creating something for the future while doing it in the present. Dd it change how you live?
OLIVER:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely been a slow ongoing process of change for me, and a work in progress. It's not a sort of lightning bolt and then everything changes. I do describe a sort of a lightning bolt moment in the book on an intellectual level when I was sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn and suddenly realized that all the things I was trying to get done by the end of the day were just completely impossible. And how, what a relief it was to realize that like, that was just, was just beyond possibility. And then I didn't need to beat myself up for not being able to do it and struggle to find a way to try to be able to do it because it wasn't possible. So that was a sort of confrontation with finitude that did change me in a sudden way.
But no, yeah. It's no, yeah, mainly it's just that sort of drops of water eroding a stone or whatever. One of the things I find is that I still do get into sort of anxious ruts of thinking that like the stakes are incredibly high and I've got to get something right. And I've got to fit something in, or it's all terrible. But I’m much quicker now that I like realize I'm doing that thing. And remember that in almost every case that it happens, the stakes are not high and it doesn't matter then there is more enjoyment to be had in the present. There's more meaning to be found in the present moment. I also think, you know, we, we can talk about parenthood or not. It's some people are, people are, parents are obsessed with it and people are not, parents are really annoyed to have to listen to long conversations about it, but I became a father just after getting started with this book and then had to put it on pause for a good couple of years, at least.
And I think there are certainly ways in which that experience sort of brings an awful lot of this, not so much that it's a completely different experience from what people have, who are not parents, but that makes a lot of universal truths much harder to ignore about the limitations of time. And the fact that everything is changing all the time and that, what relationships really benefit from is just, you are actually being present rather than you're figuring out the right way to do the relationship and things like that.
ELISE:
Right. That a child's life is simply to be a child. And not even though we think of it as like, again, something to instrumentalize or like child's job is to grow up and you write about it as like, no, actually a child's job is to be a child.
OLIVER:
Right. It's very easy to slip into that mindset that what you're doing as a parent is trying to create the right future adult. And, you know, you do have to give some thought to that.
ELISE:
But they kind of do it on their own.
OLIVER:
But they kind of do it on their own. And if you give too much thought to it, then you poorly serve that goal. And you miss out on the whole relationship.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, certainly. I mean, my kids are older than yours, but when my first child was a baby, and then you get that app that like indicates that they're going through a phase and you're like, oh wow, this is like coded into who they are naturally. They're just gonna do this. Like they're gonna walk and they're gonna talk. And like you're reminded that you're important obviously essential to their existence and yet not important at all. Like this is how nature is programmed.
OLIVER:
Yes. Your job is to be there and water the plants as it were rather than to figure out the strategy.
ELISE:
So I'm writing a book and one of the things I'm writing about is sloth and women. And so when you talked about, you talked about it as this being a heartbreaking, you were talking about the labor, the labor mills in Massachusetts, back in the 19th century.
OLIVER:
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a lovely quote.
ELISE:
That's such a lovely quote. Do you remember it? Or do you want me to read?
OLIVER:
No, you read it. I'll get, I'll get it wrong.
ELISE:
You were talking about how this work week was then engineered to support theoretically, rest for labor. And that's sort of how we think about it. And so you write that there's something heartbreaking about the 19th century Massachusetts textile workers who told one survey researcher, what they actually long to do with more free time to quote unquote, “look around to see what is going on.”
OLIVER:
I dunno why that moves me so much, but it still does. It's so beautiful.
ELISE:
But it's this like automation or this idea that we're machines really, and that we should be resting to workrather than resting that with no instrumental value. Just resting.
OLIVER:
And so you end up with this very strange situation where we sort of condemn as wasted time or idleness, maybe slow. I dunno, that's a fascinating where think about it, you know, precisely anything that doesn't serve future purposes. In other words, precisely anything that brings us fully into the presence of the moment. So it's like everything that isn't wasting time counts as wasting time. And everything that counts as not wasting time is kind of wasteful of our present moment to experience. It's a strange seriously situation.
ELISE:
Paradox. I wanna go back and pick up that thread around originality and the process of any creative art, artistic adventure. Um, and it was Arno, it was a finish photographer, right? Arno Minikin?
OLIVER:
Minkin and yeah, I think he's, I think he's American Finnish origin.
ELISE:
Can you talk about sort of like his instruction for students and this idea that originality lies on the far side of, on originality?
OLIVER:
He uses the analogy of the bus network in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, is in his telling has this situation where all sorts of bus routes start from the same platform at the bus station. And for the first few stops, they go to the same stops as each other. And he says like, imagine that each bus stop is like a year in your career as a photographer. And you ride on the bus for year, you do a bunch of work, you do a bunch of photographs. Then you take 'em to a gallery and the gallery, the person at the gallery doesn't like them because they're just totally derivative of some famous other photographer.
So you go back to the bus station and you get on a different bus line and you do a different kind of photography. You go off in a different direction, different kind of approach. And the same thing happens after a year or one bus stop. It’s hard to keep track of this analogy. You get told that no, this was also derivative work. It's too much like somebody, some other famous established photographer. So you go back to the bus station, you do the same thing again. And, his point is that what we don't realize is that in those early stages of a career, you're going to be stopping at the same bus stops as other people have stopped at before, because they are the, they are the stages of going through creative sort of maturation.
The thing you need to know is that after the first few stops all these different lines in the Helsinki bus system branch off into new original places, and they go off to individual destinations that no other bus route goes to. So the moral of this story is that you have to stay on the fucking bus, right? You need the patience to, go through that phase in your creativity. I think it probably applies to other things that we don't think of as creativity as well, where you are producing things that are a bit like other peoples, or it feels like you're just doing the common thing. You're not sort of distinguishing yourself in some unique way in order to get to the originality that lies on the far side of unoriginality. It's a little bit related to that very famous quote that goes around from Ira Glass, the radio host and producer about how in the early days of people making radio, they think it's terrible because their taste is really well developed, but their abilities are running behind their taste. So they're actually judging themselves more harshly than they should. You just sort of go have the patience to go through that phase where you are figuring out what it is. And I don't think that's just on the level of a career and being young. I think it's also like it's in the early stages of any project as well. I think it sort of recapitulates the whole thing once again. So even if I'm writing an email newsletter or something, quite often, I'm like these notes don't seem like something I haven't written before, or something that hasn't been said before. And the answer is not start again. The answer is to keep developing them.
ELISE:
Yeah. And that it's not a waste of time. Right. Like I think we get one fixated on time as the finitem valuable thing that has to be maximized. And then we become extremely fearful of quote unquote wasting it. And we start searching out shortcuts or ideas that we could maximize it or get there faster. Should we be farther along. It all becomes very distorted. In the same way, I love that idea of like, you stay on the fucking bus because you think about any trade too, that requires mastery: science, medicine. Like you don't skip med school, you don't skip your residency. Like this is what it is to learn. This is what it is to develop. And, and then you can move the profession forward. You can create patents, you can re-engineer surgeries for better outcomes.
OLIVER:
I think he even applies to things like, as I say in the book, things like friendships and relationships that there's often a, it's maybe not quite the identical point, but there's often this kind of pressure to do the unconventional thing. To not stay in your hometown, to not get married fairly young. You know, at least these days there's a strong pressure to be remarkable. And there's an argument. I didn't follow it in terms of either staying in my hometown or getting married young, but I think there is an argument that's a similar process, right? It's like if you've, if you've got the willingness to actually do something that it seems a bit conventional, that can be the path to feeling deeply embedded in a place, or getting to the stage in a long term committed relationship where it is remarkable and unique in itself. There's a sort of broader point here about like, not feeling that you have to do something out of the ordinary necessarily, on the path to your deep, unique contribution and experience.
ELISE:
I think about my own career and I'm more, I'm certain, Oliver, I'm more woo woo than you are, but that you can look back at your trajectory and where you've gone and walked, and in moments where you're like this feels backwards or like not exciting, or not glamorous, and recognize well, I learned critical skills there. I met invaluable people. I would never have that perspective in a way that only again, hindsight is 2020, but like, if you have a little bit more faith, patience, difference between patience and waiting, patience being having no expectations that you're of where you're going, sometimes you end up exactly where you need to be. And, and I loved, I thought this was, and, and I believe everyone has their own specific purpose to doula into the world.
I really do. And I think that everyone matters in a significant way, but I loved the end where you talk about sort of the grandiosity of people's grandiosity and, and this belief that each of us has some cosmically, significant life purpose. I'm quoting you, “which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill, which is why it's useful to begin this last stage of our journey with the blunt, but unexpectedly liberating truth that what you do with your life doesn't matter all that much. And when it comes to how you're using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.” So I might push on you, but I think that's a grounding principle that I think is also important. Like everyone calm down, right. You call it's the egocentricity bias. Is that what it's called?
OLIVER:
Yeah. And, you know, I definitely think that this idea of how insignificant each of us is, and the universe not caring, I think it's, it's true. And it's an important sort of corrective to that sort of notion that the whole of history was leading up to your life. I'm not sure that that means the inverse is untrue. Right. I'm not sure that, um, I think there's something very interesting in the idea that like there's, well, there's something very true is in there about the idea that like, none of us are special, and all of us are special. That is not just a like facetious paradoxical statement. There's something very true in that. We're all special, but we're not special. We're not special in virtue of being special, because everyone is special. And I think that's part of what I'm sort of hoping to do in that section is I think, is to say that actually, if you can let go of this burdensome notion that you're supposed to like stand out from everybody else and live a life that is exceptional in the sense of most people don't try to live that kind of life, but you did, great.
You know, if you can let go of that a bit, it actually enables you to embrace the, the real sense in which you are special, right? Because it, that maybe for some people that, that fame or, or doing things that affect millions of people or launching companies that change everything in an industry or something. That might be their thing, but you can absolutely be, be doing your special, unique thing in, in some way that is much more, I mean, I sure you agree with this from what you said, but like, you know, it's much more obscure, or much more looks like, looks like something normal and unremarkable to the world of fame and social media and social comparison and all the rest of it. And if you're going through life thinking like meaningfulness in life requires that I do like unusual things, then you actually rule out from being meaningful, all sorts of things that you might be doing, or might want to do. And as a society, right, we come to sort of hugely devalue things that are absolutely critical and meaningful and important. And just don't happen to be noteworthy because yeah, people have been doing them for centuries and millennia and stuff.
ELISE:
Well, I think that's why we we're having a meaning crisis because people assume that the only life worth living or the life that has the most value is the one where you are going out to change the world, which is such an in some ways insane idea. And I think that we're collectively need a right-sizing or human-scaling back to really, the only thing that you can do is change yourself, change your relationships. You can be a more compassionate, loving, present parent. And that's where the ripple that changes the world comes from. It doesn't come from changing systems of law. I mean, certainly for some people sure. But like, I think we all know anyone who's had sort of that brush of scaled success, right. Where you're like, wow, I did something that affected people. That's momentary, right? It's not, it doesn't feed your soul in perpetuity.
OLIVER:
Yeah. No. And this book has done well, but books doing well is not, is not like a multimillion person phenomenon as you know. Butit has sort of, I do get a little bit of a sense of that sort of scale of things. And it's just like, there's just no question that it is individual contacts with individual people. Who've found something resonant in there that it is what makes it, that makes my day. Right. I mean, uh, a sales number doesn't really do that, but an email from somebody who, for whom what something I've written sort of plays into where they're at in their lives in a helpful or useful way. I'll think about it for ages. And absolutely. It does ultimately come down to those, those individual contact. It's not that it's not that there's anything wrong with being the person who becomes a prominent activist and changes, leads a massive change in the laws. There's something wrong with the definition of meaning that places that as the, the canonical form of a meaningful life. And of course, you know, I, this, this is a cliché but the people who that we think of as the greatest paragons of doing those things at scale, you know, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, like in their writings and their speeches and their modeling their lives, they absolutely didn't promote any notion that like everyone has to be really unusual or extraordinary or like that that's not, that's not what the, the essence of those people's messages is. It's just happened to be that, you know, history placed them at the vanguard of those of those things. And they, they rose to the, to the moment, but it's not, you know, the people who are doing that out of the best intentions don't don't believe that like everybody's universal, cosmic purpose is to change the world for millions of people. That's not the point at all.
ELISE:
No, not at all. But it's interesting. It's like that paradox of no one is special and everyone is special, which is exactly…this very human need to rank ourselves or compare ourselves, particularly at moments in time. And it's like, you kinda need a longer snapshot.
OLIVER:
It’s also that Jewish teaching story about the two pieces of paper in two pockets, you know, that, you know what I'm talking about?
ELISE:
No, please.
OLIVER:
I mean, I'll get it wrong, but there's some famous historical account of a Rabbi, I think who carried a piece of paper in each of his two pockets. One of which said, I'm nothing but a speck of dust. And the other one says for me, the universe was created. And it's a question of like holding these two pieces together and consulting each piece of paper as a corrective when you are too far off the other way. I'm sure anyone with a deep familiarity with Judaism will say, I've got that wrong somehow. But I think, I think I'm getting the gist.
ELISE:
Well, as my friend and I say about some people, it's like, I'm the biggest piece of shit that the whole world revolves around is common. What was the impetus for this book? Like what was the question?
OLIVER:
I mean, I think both this book and the one I wrote some years ago about positive thinking and negative benefits of negative thinking. I think if you didn't care about selling any copies of them, you could have, I could have called them like, my philosophy of life as it currently stands. I don't really know how I could write a book other than just trying to figure out what it's all about. These are sort of acts of self therapy and there are the things that are consuming you at that moment and that period in your life. And so it's a bit of a cheat because, if you have to say what this book is about, it's about time, but like everything is, everything happens in time.
Time is time is the medium through which everything unfolds. So, you know, once again, I think it's just a sort of a cunning strategy that I've been following all through my career as a journalist as well, to remain a generalist about things and just sort of talk about the meaning of life. You have to focus it a little bit, otherwise your books and articles are just called like the meaning of life and that doesn't work, but that's pretty much the agenda. I think really. In this case it was just this feeling of needing to wait until I was sufficiently in control of my life and of time that I could do everything that was asked of me, and not feel emotionally vulnerable, and seeing the illusory nature of that, and that actually like entering into life meant confronting these limitations and these sort of inevitable vulnerabilities and all the rest of it. That was what I was going through when this book germinated.
ELISE:
Well, writing books is painful and wonderful, and it's an amazing privilege to accept in advance also to go and probe the questions. You know, the curiosities and the questions that are that to do the therapy. I think any book that is not a therapeutic process. Like I don't quite understand it's so probing.
OLIVER:
People occasionally say, like, I think you're just writing about the things you struggle with yourself and I'm like, yeah, absolutely. The question is what's going on in the minds of people who write like biographies of Hitler, right? The question is not what's going on in the minds of people who write about how can we be a bit happier and saner in, in the world? Like, of course we're all struggling with that.
ELISE:
No, but that, it is an interesting question to like, give your life four or five years of your life to probing the mind of someone who's very disordered.
So at the end of his book, Oliver writes: “You might imagine, moreover, that living with such an unrealistic sense of your own historical importance would make life feel more meaningful, by investing your every action with a feeling of cosmic significance, however unwarranted. But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been ‘well spent,’ your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the philosopher Iddo Landau, ‘transcend the common and the mundane.’ Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it?” And I love that sentiment. Just again going back and forth, creating the right context, the right human-scale for our lives. I think the pressure that we each feel to make such a significant difference isn’t always realistic, or founded, or necessary. I think being good to ourselves, our loved ones, our children, our communities. That seems to me to be the more admirable place to start.