Mark Oppenheimer: Oliver Burkeman, thank you for joining me today.

Oliver Burkeman: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

MO: I am a longtime super fan. I’m hesitant to enthuse all over you because you mentioned several times in the book that the Brits aren’t comfortable with that. Your wry understatement and modesty won’t handle it.

OB: You can do it a little bit though. I don’t mind about that.

MO: I think it was my twelve-year-old who taught me the word stan, which is like a super fan, a stalker basically. I wouldn’t say I’m not your stan, but I think you do great work.

OB: That’s great. That’s perfectly calibrated. Thank you. Yes, that’s wonderful.

MO: Right. You don’t want me lurking outside your window, but you want me paying retail for your book.

OB: Yeah. With all due respect, don’t come around to my house. But anyways, it’s great to be here.

MO: Hello, friends. I’m Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Arc: The Podcast. So good to be with you again. Arc: The Podcast is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. And this podcast is the companion audio journey that goes along with our web magazine, which is Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. It’s online at arcmag.org. And if you go there, you can find all sorts of wonderful, provocative, interesting, funny, beautiful, witty, smart, shrewd literary content. But if you’re with me now, it’s for an audio journey. It’s so good to be in your ears once again. And this week on the podcast, my guest is Oliver Burkeman. I think it’s safe to say the only self-help writer whom I like and admire, certainly the only one whose stuff I read, definitely the only one whose books I have purchased for other people.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask my friend Sudmeyer. One day we were having a conversation and I thought, a book that I think he would love is “Meditations for Mortals” by Oliver Berkman. And I actually went and bought it for him online, had it sent to him. That is not something I would do with any other self-help author. Why? Because among the mostly irrational prejudices that I hold dear, my loathing for chiropractics as a practice, my loathing for the term “hold space,” that’s another one, My contempt for anyone who refers to herself or himself as a foodie. High up there on the list is my contempt for self-help as a genre of book. I’m sure there’s lots of good self-help out there. I can’t really defend my blanket contempt for the self-help genre, but nor am I willing to interrogate it away or get rid of it. I’m comfortable having it as what I think is a fairly benign prejudice.

And the big exception to it is the great British gent Oliver Burkeman, whose book “Four Thousand Weeks” and “Meditations for Mortals” are just really beautiful. And they’re beautiful because they are thoughtful. They don’t talk down to the reader. They’re interesting, they’re wide ranging, they bring in a lot of religion, a lot of philosophy. And ultimately, I think they’re fun to read even if you don’t take any of their advice. But as you’ll see, or as you’ll hear by listening to this interview, I am inclined to take Oliver Burkeman’s advice. When he tells us that we only have four thousand weeks on this planet, that time is not on our side, I think that’s very real and I think it really should have an effect on what we do with our time. I would say among other things, his great mission is to get us to give up the quest for endless productivity and efficiency. I think he really feels that it’s a false idol, that it’s idolatry. And as a Jew, I’m always willing to be conscripted into the fight against idolatry, against avodah zarah, as they say in Hebrew, the worship of false idols.

So Oliver Burkeman is one of the great warriors in that battle. He’s really trying to get us to live in the moment and not always try to be showing how productive we are and justifying our time on earth. And the interview with him I think is quintessential him. It was such a privilege to talk with him. Have a listen. And if you are somebody who has a kind of contempt for the self-help genre, see if he doesn’t change your mind. See if he isn’t the exception for you that he is for me. Here’s the first part of my conversation with Oliver Burkeman.

Your job as almost an anti-productivity guru, though caveat that in giving up trying to be productive, you make the point we often get more productive. But as your job as a productivity industry skeptic succeeds your job as a productivity columnist, which is a weird job. So I want to hear about that, but why don’t we go back a little bit further. Tell us where you’re from, where you grew up, something about the twelve or eighteen year old you, and then take us into the job you had that got you interested in efficiency, productivity, and so forth.

OB: Sure. Well, technically I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Yorkshire in the—

MO: That makes you a Scouse, right?

OB: Yes, it does. Although I left at the age of one, so I think many people who are thinking of themselves that way would not accept me in the fold.

MO: It’s just so fricking mysterious to Americans when we discover that the Scouse accent is from Liverpool. Why wouldn’t it be the Liverpudlian accent? I don’t know. It’s a weird country.

OB: There’s a lot going on. Yeah. And it’s lots of happening inside a very small geographical area. So I grew up in Yorkshire. I guess the quick version for now, I did sort of always want to be a journalist. I didn’t necessarily always want to be writing about these kinds of big philosophical themes or anything, but I definitely wanted to be a journalist from a very young age and was sort of foisting typewritten and photocopied single page newspapers that I’d made on my classmates, whether they wanted them or not.

MO: I did that too. I had a newspaper in second grade that my father photocopied at the Xerox machine at his office so I could hand it out to my fourteen classmates. Yeah. That’s what we do. We foist our product on people whether they want it or not.

OB: And I’ve basically been doing that ever since, right? Hopefully at a slightly rising level of quality, but that’s really it. Then I guess fast forward a lot, I went to university in Cambridge, the posh old famous university in—

MO: Heard of it.

OB: Yep. It’s big. Basically thereafter, I just sort of did what I could possibly do to get into journalism. A lot of kind of freelancing and casual shifts as a sub editor and sort of hanging around until the easiest thing to do was to give me a job. And I worked primarily on The Guardian then for quite a few years in a lot of different kind of capacities. But one of them after a few years, again, I’m jumping ahead, but was to start writing this column that had the title, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” This was meant to be a tongue in cheek joke. I had to end up explaining that to a lot of people. And looking back on it, I talk about how I was sort of writing about productivity techniques, and I was, and that is an interesting story, I think, but it was about a lot of other things as well.

I was writing about all sorts of, at that time, burgeoning kind of science of happiness, positive psychology, reviewing self-help books and self-help culture with a kind of a critical, hopefully not too cynical, eye. And this was just incredibly… I mean, I think it was quite popular with readers, but it was just very useful as a sort of personal therapeutic practice, right? Because if you have to put together six hundred words every single week for years, you learn a lot of… I was doing other work as well, it wasn’t just that I wrote six hundred words a week, but when it was time to write it, if I didn’t have a brilliant idea, then I needed to use one of my mediocre ideas and make do with that. And you have to be a quick study. You learn very quickly that the columns that you thought were your brilliant ideas just sort of vanish without trace and the ones that you thought were really quite poor turn out to be your biggest hits, all sorts of very important lessons. Meanwhile, I was sort of testing out lots of different practices and techniques and methods of getting things done, getting organized, being productive, dealing with the anxiety of sort of overwhelm and busyness. And that was really, really useful.

One of the ways in which it’s useful is because if you spend years trying to find the silver bullet of productivity techniques, for example, and you never do, you begin to wonder whether there’s actually something amiss with the question you’re asking, with the quest that you’re on, whether maybe it isn’t… The point here is not to try to get so efficient and optimized that you can handle everything. And the thought that that might actually be the case was the beginnings of the sort of period that led to my book, “Four Thousand Weeks.”

But just in closing of this sort of potted history, I want to be really honest, I was absolutely looking for…while I was doing this as a sort of professional thing and it was work, the sort of motive underneath the hood, as it were, was definitely that I really, really did want some kind of system for feeling like I could do all the things that were being asked of me and fulfill my potential, whatever the heck that means, and stay on top of all the demands, not let anybody down. That whole sort of feeling that I think a lot of us go through life with, that there must be some way of doing this and the time when everything is sorted out is going to come later, we’re just not quite there yet. And really sort of getting to pursue that quest in an absorbed way and also kind of fail at it were both really important parts of the evolution of my thinking of this stuff on this stuff, I think.

MO: You write pretty early in the book, in the introduction: “By this point in my life, I was already on intimate terms with the feeling of playing catch up. Indeed, few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind and need to claw my way back up to a minimum standard of output if I’m to stave off an ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head. Sometimes it felt like all I needed was a bit more discipline. At other times, I was sure the answer lay in a new system for managing my tasks and goals, which I’d tracked down just as soon as I got this article on smoothies out of the way.”

I went to college with a dude, great dude named David, who works at one of the major, major, major investment banks, with offices in your country as in mine. And he somehow became the in-house…I bumped into him like I think at our tenth reunion and he had become…so we graduated in ’96, so this was maybe ’06, and in the interim email had become ubiquitous, right? In the mid-nineties, it was present, but wasn’t required. And by the mid-aughts, it was completely compulsory. And he had become the in-house guy at, let’s say, UBS, although it wasn’t UBS or Credit Suisse, it wasn’t, but at a place like that on email management and he gave internal seminars on how to catch up on your email, which of course, as you point out later, is pointless because the faster you reply, the faster other people reply to you. But I’ve always thought about that. And I think I was saved from some of this because, God love him, he’s a great guy, but as he explained to me what he was doing at our tenth reunion, I remember thinking, “Well, you’ll never get there. That’s absurd.” And I think I had an epiphany.

I’m curious, here you were, I assume in your thirties at this point, feeling like the defining experience of adulthood was playing catch up. Did the realization that you weren’t going to get there dawn on you because of…you didn’t have a Dave in your life who kind of symbolized the impossibility of it. Was it just failing week in and week out to make any of these systems work? Did you go on a Zen Buddhist retreat? What deconverted you out of the cult of efficiency?

OB: I mean, a lot of different things. And I think for me, it does tend to be that sort of process of slow realization that something isn’t working, in the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, you have to start to become tired of, sick of your own bullshit. And I think that was a big part of it. I do write in “Four Thousand Weeks” about sort of an epiphany that I had very close to where I’m speaking to you now, actually. I’m temporarily in Park Slope, Brooklyn again.

MO: Brooklyn is the site of so many epiphanies from Walt Whitman to the Lubavitcher Rebbe to the present, but what was yours?

OB: Nice. I love how you spun those all together. I was sitting on a park bench in Prospect Park. I was working as a journalist. I was living here and I was using a coworking space down the road from here and I was feeling even more anxious than usual about the number of deadlines that I had to try to get through by the end of that week, all the things I promised people. A very much kind of ubiquitous feeling in my life, that sense of having more obligations than I can meet in the time available and not know what to do about it. And I was doing my usual stuff of kind of cycling in my head as I was just having a coffee, stopping on the way to work, cycling in my head through all the kind of schemes I could pull to get through all this stuff.

Could I work on these two projects simultaneously? Could I get up another hour earlier? Could I cancel some social events? What could I do to get through to the end of all this stuff by the end of Friday or whatever it was? And I recall being very memorably struck by the words just inside my mind, “This is impossible.” It’s never going to work. None of this is…you’ve been here before a million times and the problem is not that you haven’t found the system yet. The problem is…you can’t do this, right? You’re trying to do too many things and telling yourself that you have to do too many things. And I experienced that as a real sort of lifting of a burden from my shoulders that moment. And I think that specific sense of really feeling that something is impossible because of our sort of built-in limitations and feeling liberated as a consequence of that is a very sort of central motif, I guess, in the stuff that I write.

But on the other hand, that was really just an intellectual epiphany. It took years afterwards to kind of live into that in a different way.

MO: To live it.

OB: Yeah, absolutely.

MO: But when you think about that, I sometimes think about in my life… So I had a great experience, this will sound weird, but I had a great experience when someone very, very close to me, a sibling of mine, had a very curable cancer in their early twenties, and I was in my thirties, and I remember realizing, “Oh wait, actually I will die.” And there’s a way in which when you’re in your twenties and thirties, you don’t believe it yet, you think somehow you’ll find the escape hatch to mortality. And this person, the sibling, lived and is thriving and cured and all is well that ends well, as somebody wrote, but it was in some ways a gift because I really did wake up to think like, “This shit is finite.” And if I want to stay in touch with the friend, I should do it now. And if I want to learn Mandarin, I should do it now. I don’t want to learn Mandarin, so I didn’t do it then, nor shall I do it tomorrow.

But you do have these epiphanies that really do change you. And then there is this sense of gratitude for them, or getting out of a job that you have to get out of. The day after you quit, there’s this gratitude that you had the courage to do it. There’s this, if you get out of a relationship that has been toxic, there’s this gratitude. It took time to change your actions, but did you have a concentrated period of gratitude that, holy cow, if I hadn’t had that epiphany, I’d still be trying to get my list done by every Friday.

OB: It’s interesting to frame it as gratitude. Yeah, I guess it is gratitude. I definitely haven’t had that feeling of having been gifted something. So yeah, gratitude, right? I mean, it has been such a long, gradual process for me that I’m still perfectly capable of getting back into that kind of frenzy of this time, this time. What happens is I see through it quicker and I step away from it quicker, and I think I’m probably easier to get on with most of the time.

MO: But you could backslide. You backslide sometimes.

OB: Absolutely. But no, totally. But yeah, I think there is a sort of slightly hard to define richness or depth or aliveness to everyday experience when you are a little bit more in touch with reality as it is. So it’s like a sort of… I mean, I’m quite sure I’m still completely beset by avoidance in all sorts of ways that I have yet to discover in therapy, but this was definitely sort of big part of truth that I’d been flinching from internally. And any degree to which you relax that flinch and lean into the truth, I think is rewarded instantly with that sort of sense of richness of living and lightness. And yeah, I have not really thought of it as gratitude, but I guess it is. Yeah, I guess that is that.

MO: Well, and nor do you have to. I mean, I like the richness talk as well. So I’m almost fifty-one. How old are you?

OB: I’m almost fifty.

MO: Oh, well, so here we are, same generation. I remember in the nineties, and maybe this wasn’t a thing in England. So you’ll tell me if this is just cultural gobbledygook to you, but in the nineties, our generation, partly because of the movie “Slacker,” partly because of another movie, “Reality Bites,” but there was a lot of culture saying that we were slackers, that the cool thing was to graduate from college and kind of while away your twenties on somebody’s sofa watching movies and working at a coffee shop or a copy shop or not getting going yet. And it’s therefore been weird that our same generation ten years later was more productivity obsessed than any ever. And so I’m a little curious in the sort of cultural history of… I mean, this obviously goes back at least as far as the Protestant work ethic, this is…Weber was theorizing this stuff a century ago, but in the recent history, it seems to me, and I’m curious if it seems to you that we went from being a culture that valorized, if not slacker dumb, at least taking it easy, finding yourself, doing the grand tour, backpacking after college instead of getting right into the power hungry track, the rat race, to being a culture that was efficiency obsessed in our generation fairly quickly. And that always seemed mysterious to me.

Does any of that track for you?

OB: It does. It’s really interesting because then of course you get in people a bit younger than us, you get the sort of millennial confrontation with burnout at a much younger age and the rise of the work movement. And then like, goodness knows what Gen Z are doing, but certainly that sort of … It’s like as Generation X, we carried out the transition from slacking to obsessive optimization, which then ruined the lives of the people ten years, fifteen years younger than us. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t grow up in… I think that was present, that sort of slacker thing. I don’t know if it’s of interest, but the part of the milieu that really made a difference to me, and this is often the case in Britain, I guess, is like class plays a role in all of this as well.

MO: Oh, how so?

OB: Well, I mean, what I’m thinking of right now actually is like, I went to what you would call a public school, a state school—

MO: State school, sure.

OB: I was sort of definitely one of top achievers and came from a family background that was more interested in kind of giving me the sense that I could do what I wanted in the world than maybe a lot of people were there. But then having got those good grades and landing at Cambridge University, I found myself, it’s still to some extent true now, but it was very much true then in a world that is sort of still kind of dominated and defined by the very fancy private schools or the ones that we very confusingly call public schools in the UK. And that is not Gen X slackerdom work at a coffee shop, but that is an ethos of kind of effortless—

MO: Right. It sprezzatura. It’s like effortless grace. You don’t want to be seen working too hard.

OB: Exactly. And I was not of that, right? I was by comparison, I don’t want to claim too much sort of authentic working class roots that will be completely untrue, but by comparison, I kind of was. And so I was like a hard worker who’d got there by working very, very hard, surrounded by all these people who considered it a little bit insulting to think that they were going to work hard. So then my response to that was to be incredibly anxious and put a huge amount of effort into trying to do as much as I could, be completely convinced that I was going to fail out of my university degree and then do kind of basically top of the year, kind of do incredibly well on a results level. So that was kind of more of the same for me in a certain sense. But it was that sort of… I don’t know if this speaks to like what turned us into the optimization generation, but like that was a different, another kind of slackerdom, right? The slackerdom of deep, deep, deep entitlement that then manifests itself in kind of Boris Johnson as prime minister, like, “How hard can this be?” That kind of attitude.

MO: That’s a millennium of living in the country house, having servants.

OB: So I’ve always, yes, it’s weird to think of those people as being Generation X, really, isn’t it? Even though officially they are—

MO: Just to stay on the British thing for a moment, I remember Geoff Dyer has a great essay about getting out of, I think, Cambridge and being on the dole and as a writer, you could just live on the government dole for a while. Did that affect the culture of hard work in England? We never had as much of a dole here.

OB: I lose track, but I think Geoff Dye is a good decade older than us, isn’t he?

MO: He is, he is.

OB: And I think he’s really referring to something that was already well on its way out, if it still existed at all by the time I was… I know that’s been a lot of musical innovation has been attributed to as well in the UK. And I think it’s probably true. I think there’s a whole sort of musical generation of people that would attribute their ability to experiment with what they were doing with the fact that they didn’t really have to work. I was at university when Tony Blair was elected and—

MO: This was post-Thatcher. I think Thatcher probably got rid of the last of that, right?

OB: Yeah. And then very loosely, the Clinton-Blair parallels are overdone, but that was also a big moment in sort of left-wing politicians embracing the idea of welfare to work and all this stuff. So there wasn’t an awful lot of that. But both I and the very posh people I went to university with were in the position that after college, we could do things that didn’t pay enough for a year or two. Some of them, they might have had a million pound trust funds that enabled them never have to work a day in their lives. A few of them, I’m exaggerating. I certainly didn’t, but I had enough parental support that I could, and friends with a spare room that I could go to London and kind of work in writing without having to pay for every expense in my life immediately. We’ve gone off topic a bit, but I don’t know. I feel like I was always someone who was destined to be an obsessive optimizer.

MO: Yeah, I think one of the questions at hand here is, is this innate or how much is this culturally conditioned? One of the stories that you tell in the book, which is so funny, and I’d read about this guy, is the story of this fellow, Erik Hagerman, who really opts out in a pretty profound way. I think it was after Donald Trump was elected president, right? Where he… Would you tell that story, which I have at my fingertips, but you have it in the book?

OB: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s all derived, as I say in the book from a big profile in the New York Times. He’s a guy, I think he’s a former executive at Nike, I might be getting that wrong, who after Donald Trump was elected the first time in 2016, just decided he was going to pretend that it hadn’t happened. The title of this profile was “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” which is good headline writing. And—

MO: It is.

OB: He stayed in his lovely home in Ohio in the woods, I think. And when he went to the local coffee shop, he wore, this was the detail everyone loved or hated the most, he wore noise canceling headphones playing white noise so that he didn’t have to hear his fellow liberal members of the professional managerial class or whatever bemoaning the state of politics. And I bring that up in the book because I want to sort of speak in favor of this attitude a little bit, because as you can imagine, and that is sort of the sort of burgeoning kind of days of 2016, 2017, he was condemned very widely in all kind of liberal or left wing online spaces as just a monster of privilege, right? Somebody who could just check out the terrible things that were happening and just sort of relax only because he was a wealthy person or white male, et cetera, et cetera. And of course there’s a certain amount of truth to that.

But if you read down this profile and you actually make it all the way to the end, even though the writer is clearly a little bit condemning of Erik Hagerman as well, you find out that what he was doing with his time when he wasn’t doomscrolling and driving himself to a frenzy, talking to other people about how bad things were, was regenerating an area of wetlands that he had bought with basically his life savings and that he planned to return to public ownership once he’d sort of resuscitated them and made them fit natural habitats again. And I was just struck by like, this is just someone with a finite amount of attention and time like all of us choosing to use it in certain helpful ways. And I think the important point that I want to try to make in that chapter is it’s very easy to think that in grim, dark, bad, political, cultural times, you have to care about everything and sort of spend a lot of time emoting and feeling bad about it all, otherwise you’re not really a decent member of society.

And yet actually in a world of super abundant information and the attention economy that is everything is manufactured to try to compel us as much as possible, there’s something really important to be said when it comes to being a good citizen for the ability to withdraw your attention from things, to not feel automatically guilty because you’re failing to feel the pain of some people who are legitimately suffering, as long as you then use that time to do something that makes the world a better place. So I think there’s some interesting questions about finitude and compassion in there as well.

MO: No, I think I love that section of your book and it reminded me that I had read the profile. Although it’s funny, I didn’t remember it as being condemnatory of Hagerman. Maybe it was, and I was so in love with this guy, this Erik Hagerman, that I didn’t notice that the writer wasn’t. I should go back and read it.

OB: I remember it being an arch rather than a sort of…

MO: Right, I got you.

OB: Really other people who were sort of furious with him. It wasn’t that…yes.

MO: Right. No, it was written as a news story in a pretty restrained and subdued manner, but normally I have a pretty good antennae for archness in other people’s writing and I don’t remember it setting off those bells, but it may have, I would’ve missed it just because I thought, well, this guy’s great. He’s got it entirely right. Maybe it’s because I’m a moral cretin, but I have no guilt about not paying attention to suffering thousands of miles away. I pay attention sometimes and not other times. I don’t think I do anything to ameliorate it. I’m not on social media, so I’m not on social media condemning people or exhorting people or whatever. I mean, I try to make my charitable giving reflect not just my neighborhood, but also the rest of the world, but I don’t think any of us is obligated to doomscroll or fetch or hand ring at all and certainly, you know, no more than is necessary.

So I am perplexed by this, and you name it in a different passage in this book as a progressive impulse, as a left liberal impulse to feel that we all must be maximally working or working to our limits or trying to exceed the bounds of our own finitude in improving the world, which of course we can’t do, but to admit that we can’t do it and humble our own expectations of ourselves sets off some liberals. It drives them crazy. Do you have a theory of why? Why did they care so much about what I do with my time, or you with yours, or Erik Hagerman with his?

OB: Well, yeah, I think I probably do have a theory, partly because there’s a bit of that in me. We have this finite capacity for care and attention, that’s true. But I think that a lot of the reasons that we give that to the things we give it to don’t stand up to a huge amount of scrutiny, at least from some philosophical standpoints on ethics. So I’m quite dissuaded by Peter Singer’s famous example of the child drowning in the pool. You’re walking home one day when you see a child drowning in a pond, you can easily rescue them, but it’ll mean spoiling the new shoes you’ve bought. Do you do that or not? Of course you do. You don’t think twice. Nobody would think twice. Well, then says Peter Singer, there are thousands upon thousands of children in exactly that situation relative to you, except they happen not to be in your neighborhood, they’re just elsewhere in the world. So actually you should give a significant portion of your income to help them.

And there are some arguments against that from a sort of communitarian perspective that say it really does matter that we care more about people around us than people we can’t see and don’t know. That’s not a completely wrong impulse. But basically, this basic idea, this basic utilitarian idea that says that if there are people in extreme agony and we have enough money to buy meals out then all else people a big chunk of that money for meals out should go to the people who are in extreme agony. So that’s a question of how you divide up and distribute your finite resources. And I don’t think I have a strong counter argument other than… I mean, I think it’s good that I care more about my family than that I don’t regard my family as humanity in general.

But putting that aside, where I think we can really sort of reject that is when it sort of intersects with the attention economy and where it intersects with this idea that like just sheerly emoting, I even want to say virtue signaling, a problematic phrase on many levels, but that’s where I think we can all be on the same side and Peter Singer would agree, right? It’s very difficult to make the claim that posting relentlessly on social media about the children drowning on the other side of the world is doing anything much in the world. And it does seem that what it’s largely doing is plicating something inside oneself that wants to feel like you did something.

And actually, now that I’m saying this, that’s actually, it strikes me that’s actually very similar to a certain kind of productivity or deceptive kind of thing in productivity culture where just the sheer doing of things makes you feel like you’ve made a difference regardless of whether they were the right things to do, right? It’s just activity. And in the same way, scrolling, sharing, emitting your rage about the state of the world, it feels like, well, I had a busy day today doing all these things without actually any clear focus on what you changed or not.

MO: Yeah. I think you’re being overly generous to the scolds, only because in my own life, and I don’t want to belabor this too much, but I want to belabor it enough to make the point that I want to make, which is that there seems to be an antipathy towards someone else’s happiness, which is to say, if I’m happier because I’m not doomscrolling, then my happiness is somehow loathsome or depraved because if I were more ethical, I’d be doomscrolling, I’d be miserable and I wouldn’t have that levity or contentment that I think is my kind of human right. I mean, it comes up a lot.

And I don’t know if sort of greetings are the same in England, but in progressive culture in America for the past few years, couple years, whenever Trump’s president, let’s say, or whenever there’s war in the Middle East, which is to say always, you greet someone and say, “How are you doing?” And you get a lot of people saying, “Well, you know, I mean, what with the state of the world and all.” And I always think that’s not really what I was asking, first of all. And second, if you ask me how I’m doing and I just had a wonderful time reading to my daughter, I’m going to say, “I’m doing great.” And I think there’s a kind of sense that that’s shallow or morally obtuse. But anyway, I’m—

OB: No, I think it’s really interesting. And I think I would want to distinguish between the, I think, small number of people who really do exist in the world who, and I give an example in the book of an anecdote involving the philosopher Simone Weil in this respect. And I think maybe she was one of these people who, in the context you mentioned, really are just completely, deeply, personally, emotionally impacted by events and occurrences that do not—

MO: What’s the story she read about a child dying somewhere?

OB: The story is about the… He’s like a sociologist, wasn’t he? Raymond Aron sort of strolling through France in the one day in the twenties at Paris on a sunny morning and everyone’s happy and enjoying themselves except he sees this figure hunched in tears and goes over and realizes with alarm that it’s his friend Simone Weil, who was a philosopher and sort of mystic and saint. And in his telling, he asked her what’s wrong. And she says, “Haven’t you heard in Shanghai there is a general strike and the police have opened fire on the workers.” I think it’s affectionately meant, but the idea is that some people just don’t develop the kind of skin that it’s kind of essential to have in a world of, especially the world, not like that in the twenties, but now of total digital connectivity and being able to learn about everything that’s happening.

I think there are people who are just deeply, deeply, for whom these things affect them in exactly the same way as personal tragedies do. But I also think you’re absolutely right. There are probably bigger number of people for whom it is all a sort of competition of moral superiority located in the place where that conversation is happening, not really reaching out to the distant suffering. And the point I make elsewhere, but also in the book, right? I mean, if you spend twenty minutes of a week, or $20 of disposable income making a concrete difference to something, one of the big awful crises in developing the world, and then you spend the whole of the rest of the week just in pure hedonistic self-gratification, by any sensible measure, you’re a better person than if you’d spent twelve hours a day just feeling bad and doomscrolling about those topics.

MO: I like that as a life plan. I like that as a sort of… That should be your next book.

Hey, listeners, we will be going back to my interview with Oliver Burkeman in just a moment, but first I wanted to talk to you about the stuff that you can read over at arcmag.org. Among my favorite recent pieces are Brad East’s profile of the Catholic feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant. Of course, you heard my interview with her on the last episode, but if you haven’t read the profile of her yet, please go read it. It really goes deep on her thought and is a wonderful companion to the podcast interview with her.

I would also suggest that you check out a new piece that we ran about Zohran Mamdani, in which the author, Stephen Adubato, argues that Zohran Mamdami actually could make inroads among conservative New York voters if he leaned into his Muslim heritage. The thinking, of course, is that his being Muslim scares voters more than it draws them to him, but Adubato argues, somewhat counterintuitively, that actually there are conservative Catholic and Jewish and Protestant voters, not to mention Muslim voters, who might be more drawn to Mamdani if he actually incorporated some traditional Islamic teachings into his campaign messaging. It’s a really interesting piece, and I would encourage you to go over to arcmag.org and check it out.

Finally, we’ve run recently a beautiful review essay by our contributor, Blake Smith, about the largely forgotten gay Anglo-Catholic poet, Tim Dlugos. And rather than tell you about that piece myself, I invited Blake to record a little audio essay in which he talks about Tim Dlugos and also reads a couple of his poems so that you can hear a little bit about this poet and what he was up to. So kick back, pour yourself a gin and tonic because we are in the world of Episcopalians for the next few minutes and listen to Blake Smith talk about the subject of his recent Arc essay, Tim Dlugos.

Blake Smith: Hello, I’m Blake Smith. I’m the author of a recent essay at Arc on the poet and seminary in Tim Dlugos. The L in his name, by the way, is silent. I wanted to share with you a couple of poems that weren’t included in the essay, but relate to its themes of Dlugos as a Christian and gay poet who was concerned with how to live those identities authentically, but also with a certain subversive playful humor. So the first of these is from 1973, very early in his career, called “Famous Writers”:
“With famous writers, you rarely know what to expect, but sometimes there are clues. The maya in Mayakovsky, for example, as in all is. The secret hem of Hemingway. Closet writers give us many clues. Those two blew their skulls apart with gunshots. Most famous writers have died one way or another. Frank O’Hara, the magnificent O in his name is what you say when you’re on the street pretending to be Frank O’Hara. He may have said it himself on the beach that night. And the man at the end of Berryman, which appears to in Whitman, but means something different.”

So here we see Dlugos playing around with ideas about sexuality, closetedness, openness, naming some poets, known to be gay, O’Hara, Whitman, some poets who were torture in one way or another, Berryman Hemingway, Mayakovsky, and having some fun playing around with their names. The puns may work better on the page than allowed. Compare for yourself.

Okay. This one is more somber, more seasonally appropriate. It’s from the end of Dlugos’s life in the late 80s and it’s called “All Souls Day”:

“Faithful depart in swarms like holiday or weekend mobs that throng the underground republic of commuters, on their way against the odds to someplace nicer. Around my hospital bed, rosebuds, and beyond yellow hibiscus on the windowsill, gauze crisscrosses blue sky. Is it a fond evasion to imagine that we will relax and to a gently lit eclipse so porous and expansive, it derails time like a train, absorbing dark details, life’s action painter imitation drips each second on each soul that aches to be revived, restored on all souls, probably.”

So okay, here we have, I think, a really beautiful and yearning invocation from Dlugos’s deathbed about a wish for, if not quite a resurrection, something like a hope of heaven, which is comically, semi-comically undercut at the end. It’s not obvious maybe listening to it that the poem is a sonnet, which I think is part of the fun, and it has a neat O’Haraesque nod to action painting or abstract expressionism, thinking about life or God as a kind of mad painter throwing paint on the canvas of our lives.
Well, that’s Tim Dlugos.

MO: Arc contributing writer Blake Smith on Tim Dlugos. You can read his profile, review, critical essay about Tim Dlugos’s life and poetry at arcmag.org. And now, back to the rest of my interview with Oliver Burkeman, author of “Meditations for Mortals.”

Could you please read the first paragraph of Day 15? It’s on page 81. It starts with “Years ago.”

OB: “Years ago, while researching a book on the pitfalls of positive thinking, I attended a motivational seminar in a basketball stadium in Texas entitled appropriately enough, ‘Get Motivated.’ Needless to say, it was utterly excruciating. In all honesty, I had strongly suspected it would be, that was why I went. As pyrotechnics exploded on stage, disco lights flashed and energetic rock music lasted from the speaker stacks. We were urged to leap from our seats and shout about how motivated we felt. Asking a British person to do such thing is of course a form of torture and that they didn’t improve when the pastor of a megachurch took to the podium to instruct us to eliminate the word impossible from our vocabularies, but it was only later that it dawned on me that the problem wasn’t solely the simplistic cheesiness of get motivated. It lay with the whole underlying notion of motivation itself.”

MO: All right. And I think you have lived through an explosion in motivational speaking. Obviously this goes back to Dale Carnegie and others. It’s not new, but there’s been a lot of motivational speaking in our time. And I’m curious, first of all, how does it connect to efficiency? Because it seems like they are two versions of the same thought mistake, which is that we can exceed our own bounds, that we don’t have finitude. And what is the problem with the idea of motivation as you describe it?

OB: Well, yeah, I think that’s a very correct parallel there, right? I mean, optimization and efficiency is the attempt to do more than you can do or to do even more and ultimately maybe to be able to do everything through rendering yourself capable of doing more things in a given amount of time. And then motivation is the idea that there are sort of untapped wells of sheer will power that you could use to achieve the same goal, right? That you could sort of act your way to greatness or to be doing everything or to doing the most important and impressive things sheerly through kind of summoning that level of motivation.

Part of this is this idea that if something matters, if something is worth doing, then you’re really going to have to kind of… The implication of the whole idea of motivation is you’re going to have to really have to sort of gin yourself up to do it. You’re going to have to find extra reserves of effort. It’s going to feel like a big effort. Lots of problems with this. Number one is the idea that it sort of implies that you think of yourself as naturally a kind of a worm, naturally a very lazy person, right? If you just were allowed to just do the things you wanted to do, you’d just lie around on the sofa doing nothing. The flip side of that is it leads you to think that if you spend a day doing lots of really effortful stuff, then they must have been worthwhile things, which is not at all the case. It could have been sort of pointless busy work. And above all, it denies the possibility that something important could just be really quite easy. I’m not saying that any given activity necessarily will be easy, but there is something very powerful about going into challenging moments in life, challenging projects, challenging relationship experiences with at least the thought in your mind that this could just be pleasurable and it could just be easy.

It might not be those things, but nothing is made worse by allowing that possibility. And in fact, you can experience even kind of obviously negative and terrible things in life with a certain kind of spirit of ease or not. So yeah, I’m really just going deep in that section into the fact that, as much as I was always very disdainful of that kind of motivational seminar, that deeper sense of like, okay, life is a fight and you need to gear yourself up for the fight and you need to go into it with your fists clenched. That’s deep in lots of us and was deep in me even at the same time that I was writing sarcastically about motivational stuff.

MO: That’s a really good way to analyze it. It’s sort of the assumption that life is a fight, that we’re sort of struggling up this hill. And by the way, I think that’s the flip side of some people’s scorn for those who appear to be having a really easy time of it, right? They’re also, if I or you appear to be just kind of relaxing our way through life, we are implicit rebukes to those who not only think there’s lots of good that has to be done in the world and have a commendable urge towards social justice, but also those who temperamentally think life is a fight and they’re agonizing all the time about why they can’t get more done and why they’re losing the fight. They therefore have contempt for people who seem to not perceive it as a fight.

OB: Yeah.

MO: I was very intrigued a lot of, and this might kind of get us into the next question I wanted to ask, which is a lot of the book is implicitly or in some cases explicitly pointing us toward Buddhism or certain Buddhist texts. And I’m curious about the role of Buddhism in your own journey and also just in this book where, again, it’s not a Buddhist book, but some of the teachers you rely on and some of the underlying message seems to me as a non-expert to be Buddhist.

OB: I think that’s right. You say non-expert, but this is deep in your… We’re in your wheelhouse, I think, right? Talking about various aspects of this email.

MO: If we were saying Judaism or Christianity, yes, but Buddhism’s actually pretty far at the edge of my wheelhouse. Whatever a wheelhouse is, Buddhism’s at the outer edge of it. So you can teach me. You’d be the teacher here.

OB: Well, now of course the whole point about Buddhism is, especially Zen Buddhism, is that we have to be sort of beginners and non-experts our whole lives.

MO: Well, I was going to say, I mean, what is the perspective? For those who don’t know Zen, it seems to me that you quite clearly feel that if you’re looking to escape the sense of efficiency as a trap, productivity as a trap, that some of the teachings that will help you escape it, not the only ones, but some of them come out of Buddhism, in particular Zen Buddhism. But for those who haven’t read your book, I was hoping you might just kind of explain how that is.

OB: Yes. And I certainly am not in a position to offer a sort of overview of the teachings of Zen, but I think where it touches on this material, it starts for me with some kind of sense that our problem solving cogitation and intellectual activity when it comes to trying to get life figured out, get life sorted out, get our productivity systems perfect, all the rest of it, but something about that takes us away from a full experience of reality rather than getting us to it, which is what we implicitly hope for when we’re pursuing it. So at the broadest level, this idea that we treat life as a problem to be solved, but in fact, life is not a problem to be solved, that to me feels like a very Zen idea. And when I’m talking about getting on top of everything or sorting your life out or all this stuff, that is just one flavor of a sort of persistent thing that I think we do and that Zen calls us out for doing, which is to try to sort of get outside of and on top of life, the human condition, instead of allowing ourselves to sort of fall back more fully into it.

So at the beginning of “Four Thousand Weeks,” I used this quote from Charlotte Joko Beck, an American Zen teacher who says, “What makes it unbearable is our mistaken belief that it can be cured.” And a similar idea from Mel Weitsman, another American Zen person, “Our suffering is believing there’s a way out.” And so this idea is clearly very connected to the whole idea of embracing limitation because it sort of calls you back to the fact that freedom is in fully entering the reality that we’re in rather than finding ways to escape it.

Just one other thing that I’ve found very relevant about Zen specifically, I think, is that I’m a kind of a left brain, whatever, that default intellectual person who wants to try to figure things out cognitively and finds that part very easy and various other things, ways of engaging with the world more difficult. And some spiritual traditions, including some Buddhist spiritual traditions, take the approach of saying, “Well, I don’t do that.” Focus on love, focus on beauty, meditate on loving kindness or in other religious traditions, it would be sort of seek to experience the love of God, which seems to me to be very desirable if I could do it, but fundamentally sort of not where I’m coming from. And the lovely thing about Zen, and I suppose Zen koans are the most obvious example of this, the kind of puzzling phrases that Zen people sometimes study, it’s like it takes the left brain stuff, it sort of doubles down on it and it sort of invites you to take it all the way to the end and like, okay, right, this is how you’re trying to get a handle on life using your intellect. Let’s sort of pursue that as far as it will go. And it’s sort of down there. If you sort of pursue that far enough, my experience is that the whole sort of structure of intellect that you’ve constructed kind of shudders and collapses and some sort of new insight comes that way.

Now to me, that is way more powerful than just trying to tell myself that my natural way of engaging with the world is not fit for purpose, so I should visualize beautiful flowers instead. I’m being overly disdainful, but you know what I mean?

MO: I know what you mean.

OB: There’s something about that kind of, no, we’re going to use your intellect and we’re going to use it precisely to demarcate the limits of what it can really do. I find that to be very powerful.

MO: Well, that cogitation on the limits of God talk actually leads us into my traditional closing questions. Are you ready for a quick lightning round of questions that you should answer with a few sentences, but not at great length?

OB: I’ll do my best. Yes.

MO: All right. So the first one, and again, take what you need, but obviously it’s a question that could have us here all day, is do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

OB: I have no idea if what I mean by God is what anybody else on the planet means. So I don’t know how to answer that first part of the question. It seems very, very indisputable to me that there is an essential part of reality that is outside my conceptual grasp, is outside scientific knowledge, is outside any form of objective understanding and is characterized by kind of aliveness or life force. And sometimes when I write about this, people respond to my email newsletter and say, “You’re just talking about God. Why won’t you just say God?” So I guess maybe the answer has to be yes. Wow.

MO: If you could have had any other career looking back, something that was within the realm of possibility, so not King of England or Navy SEAL, not James Bond or King of England, but something you might have been able to do had you made different choices, what would it have been?

OB: I think I could probably have worked in… I think I could possibly have been a halfway decent psychotherapist or worked in kind of mental health kind of professions. I think I maybe don’t have the patience to… I want to go on and on about what I’m thinking, not listen to what other people are thinking of feeling, but I think that’s probably trainable. And I have so much respect for a certain kind of worldview and of writing that I associate with depth psychotherapy and Jungian therapy and psychodynamic therapy that I would… That feels quite adjacent to me.

MO: So you’ve read all of Adam Phillips then?

OB: Not quite, but yes.

MO: Or I guess he’s not Jungian, right? Isn’t he really a kind of neo-Freudian?

OB: Yeah, I think so. And yeah, no, absolutely. I’m a big fan of the writing of James Hollis, who is a sort of dyed in the wool Jungian. And one of my favorite works of narrative nonfiction is a book called “Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession” by Janet Malcolm.

MO: Oh, Janet Malcolm. Well, that’s one of the greatest books ever.

OB: Indeed, exactly.

MO: Does she have the following among English, British, nonfiction specialists like you that she has here where she really is kind of the touchstone?

OB: No, not really. I’m one of her evangelists, I think.

MO: I mean, right, her ten or so books are all classics. And I just think one would wish for that to be a lingua franca, but we don’t read Robert McFarland here and we read less Geoff. I mean, you have so many wonderful people, Francis Spufford and Geoff Dyers or so in the nonfiction world whom we don’t read, whom we should.

OB: Yes, right. Here’s to more cross-pollination. Yeah, absolutely.

MO: What’s a big regret that you have?

OB: I don’t have many regrets. I’m very, very afflicted by the fear of future regrets. So I always think I’m going to regret things, but I don’t have much experience of then actually regretting them. On some level, it would be nice to have become a parent at a younger age than I did, but I think I could equally make the argument that it’s a very good job that I didn’t. So even that doesn’t keep me up at night.

MO: Do you have a general piece of advice that you give younger people on how to live?

OB: No, not really. I mean, when I’m asked what advice I would give to my younger self, I feel like I’m on, maybe that’s a very close question and then I’m not saying it to everybody. The advice I would give to people like me, who are younger than me, it is essentially to consider chilling out a bit. I mean, it is essentially to—

MO: Read your books at a younger age.

OB: Right, exactly. No. Well, it’s the idea that I would want to look somebody who was me or who was like me at that age, younger age in the eye and say, “You do realize that you don’t have to do any of these things that you’re trying to do. These big achievements.” No, it’s important. I mean it. It’s important. You’re doing a lot of good, you’re going to have a lot of fun, but I want you to know that you do sort of deserve to live or deserve to be a human being, even if you don’t have a sort of astoundingly well accomplished, successful life. That sounds a little bit meldramatic, the sort of right to exist thing, but I do think a lot of us are this kind of… the phrase is insecure overachiever. This is the thing that psychologists talk about. I think a lot of us are kind of thinking, “Well, I’ve actually really got to do this well and be successful at this, otherwise I’m a bad person.” And I think if you can consider the possibility that you’re completely adequate and fine as you are, and then decide to accomplish some amazing difference making world changing things because that’s a fun way to live, then that’s brilliant. But not because you absolutely have to, otherwise you would be condemned as inadequate.

MO: Is there a song that invokes for you an intense feeling of nostalgia?

OB: There’s not a quick fire round if I take half an hour to come up with a title.

MO: As I said, we’re in no rush.

OB: There are certainly songs that make me feel nostalgic because I associate them with specific times in life. It feels a bit like the regret question. I don’t think I spend a lot of time mentally inhabiting the past. I spend a heck of a lot of anxious time mentally inhabiting the future, but that’s a different math.

MO: So that’s interesting and I’m the opposite. I spend a lot of time mentally inhabiting the past and so much less mentally inhabiting the present or the future. And I don’t know if that’s healthy. I once read, there was some study that came out that said that nostalgia is very psychologically healthy because it suggests that you see yourself as part of a narrative across time, that it’s a kind of suggests an integrated personality. But of course I would remember that study because it confirmed all my biases about myself.

OB: Yeah, no, I think we can conclude that you’re extremely psychologically healthy. So yes.

MO: We can just include, or just incredibly narcissistic and self-serving.

Okay, finally. So finally, can you recommend for our listeners something to watch, like a TV show or a movie that you love and/or a book to read?

OB: The movie, I’ve been saying this around the place in the last year or two, but I believe it so much. If you resonate with any of these themes of kind of high achievement from a place of insecurity or inadequacy, then you need to watch the 2021 Disney animated movie “Encanto,” which is just breathtaking to me and it’s sort of psychological, close to the boneness. I won’t say anymore. Just if you haven’t seen “Encanto,” watch “Encanto.”

MO: Well, I saw it with my kids who then memorized the whole soundtrack and tortured me with it.

OB: I saw it with my kid and he thought it was okay and I was completely emotionally blindsided by it and like absolutely unprepared for the way it sort of unraveled me. And I think this is not… If I thought I was the only person on the planet who had this response, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’m aware from conversations since that there’s at least a certain category of person for whom it has this power.

MO: Oliver Burkeman, thank you for spending a fraction of your four thousand weeks on earth with me. I really appreciate it.

OB: It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you, Mark.

MO: Such a treat to talk with Oliver Burkeman. If you want to buy his books, I would encourage you to go to bookshop.org where instead of your money going to the big bookselling behemoth of the internet, you can choose local indie bookstores for your money to go to and they will send you the book. It won’t get there overnight, but it’ll get there and your money will go to better places. So go support Oliver Burkeman. The book is “Meditations for Mortals.”

More importantly, I think celebrity birthdays in the coming couple weeks. October 24, Drake has a birthday, but so does the actor Kevin Klein, beloved of me for “A Fish Called Wanda,” and for marrying the terrific Phoebe Cates, who of course was in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” the greatest movie ever made. October 25, Katie Perry has a birthday. Hillary Rodham Clinton, October 26, same day as Keith Urban. John Cleese and Kelly Osborne on October 27. Julia Roberts on October 28 and Winona Rider on October 29. Free Winona, baby. I’m just going to stop on October 30 with Henry Winkler because he was my commencement speaker. He actually gave the commencement address to the class of 1996 at Yale College, and it was as good as speeches can get. November 3, Dolph Lundgren from Rocky IV has a birthday. November 5, Tilda Swinton. November 6, Emma Stone and November 8, Parker Posey. Oh wait, I skipped over someone very important. November 4, Matthew McConaughey. All right, all right, all right.

Upcoming world religion holidays. October 24 is the birthday of the founder of the Baha’i Faith. We talked about that on the last episode. That’s today for many of you listening on the day this drops. November 1 is All Saints Day for Roman Catholics and some other Christians. And November 8, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and many Buddhists celebrate Diwali.

Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer. I would love feedback write to me at mark.o@wustl.edu. The show is edited and produced by David “Dave” Sugarman. Audio consulting by Robert “Bob” Scaramuccia, intern help from Caroline Coffey and from Ben Esther and from Avi Holtzman. Over at the Danforth Center, we are supported by Debra Kennard, Abram Van Engen, and Sheri Pena and many other fine people. Our music is by Love Cannon and web design is by Cause + Effect online at causexeffect.com. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer.