Author of Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman on How To Live Well (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part two of our live conversation with Oliver Bergman, recorded recently at Union Chapel in London. If you haven't listened to part one yet, do just jump back an episode to catch up on the conversation.

In this second half, Oliver continues his conversation with Tim Harford, diving deeper into the key ideas of his new book, Meditation for Mortals. Together, they explore how to find clarity amid chaos, how to stop measuring life by to-do lists, and how to make time for what really matters. Let's return to their conversation now. Just to read a

quote from the book. This is you quoting somebody else, by the way. My mum used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing. I'm 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving and influential career, and I still think there is very little that's worthy of applying my whole entire ass.

I'm not interested in burning myself out by whole assing stuff that will be fine if I half or quarter ass it. Being able to achieve maximum economy of ass is an important adult skill. Discuss. It's great. As you say, it's not me. It's a commenter on a column that ran in the Washington Post. But I sent approval. Oh, I do approve, yeah.

And I mean, I think what that... First of all, I just love the phrase maximum economy of ass. I think that's great. It should be used a lot. Where I sort of draft that in is in this whole section of this book, which is sort of organized in four weeks of short daily chapters we can maybe talk about if you want. But like that third week is really focused on

the sort of how often we need to sort of let things happen in life rather than make them happen, a lesson I have certainly needed to learn a difficult way, and how it's very tempting to assume that if something is worth doing and meaningful, it's going to be very grueling and unpleasant. And I think a lot of us are raised this way, right? It's like effort is what counts.

And so you run into this problem of thinking that if something matters to you, it's going to be really hard and therefore that's intimidating. Or even worse is the flip side of like, if I spent the day doing something that felt very effortful, it must therefore have been meaningful, which doesn't follow at all, right? You can exhaust yourself with busy work that you just maybe shouldn't have done at all. And so what that woman in that quote is saying that appeals to me so much is just like,

You really should not assume that something needs you to sort of, you know, furrow all the muscles in your brow and clench your fists and sort of brace against life and square up to it like it's going to be a fight. And it can actually be a really subversive and quite scary question to ask yourself, like...

what if this is easy? What if this is going to be easier than I'm expecting? Or a related question that I asked you to mention in that section, like, what do I feel like doing right now? Like, obviously there are limits to how much freedom we have to do that in a specific professional situation or whatever, but like,

actually to go with that sort of sense of ease instead of just assuming that life has got to be gruelling. Yeah, there was... Case study is not the right word. You give the example of someone who...

who was just constantly pushing herself to get up at 5.30 in the morning, do my journaling, do my meditation, make my coffee and then do my, do this, do that. And, and, and, and then she'd be constantly beating herself up because she hadn't done it. Or alternatively, if she had done it, she'd give herself a pat on the back and then she'd beat herself up to make sure she did it tomorrow. And then, and then one day she's like, why don't I just get up and do whatever I want? And, and this terror, this,

oh, but then I'll just, I'll be, it'll be beer on cornflakes. This idea of, because deep down I'm this terrible person who with no self-discipline, and if I do whatever I want, it will be a disaster. And then she spent the day doing whatever she wanted, and she had a lovely day and also got loads done, and it was absolutely fine because she's not the person she feared that she was. Right, right. This is Susan Piver, the meditation teacher. And, you know, all the usual caveats apply here.

Everyone's situation is different. The degree of freedom you have to do exactly what you want from moment to moment will vary widely. But the point she's making, I take it to be making, is that there's a real, like, deep... This is a big part of why we're constantly trying to get more control and feel in more control, right? It's a deep distrust of our own selves. And so you sort of berate yourself and shout at yourself to...

do stuff or to do stuff more or to do it following a program or a plan. At least in part because, yeah, you think that if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk, all hell would break loose. And of course it's not true. And of course the kind of people who think that in the first place are exactly the kind of people for whom it's not true. And for whom if they just sort of unclenched a little bit...

they would find that, yeah, actually, you know, they want to be the kind of person who keeps promises and commitments that they've made and who, you know, files their taxes, to use the cliched example. So you do actually want to do that. Question of sort of trust, self-trust is really, it comes up in some other areas. The one that's coming to mind is about

There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius that I lean on to make this point that like a lot of the way we worry about the future has this quality that we want to make sure everything, all our ducks are in a row now and that we can be really confident that things later on are going to work out. Basically because we don't trust ourselves to respond quickly.

at the time something happens later with the resources that we've got. And it's really weird because like you got to today through your whole life and there were probably some pretty hairy moments in it. Like it's probably not all been completely easy and you had the psychological resources to respond to every single one of them because here you are, right? And yet something in us or the compulsive warriors among us anyway is like, I've got to make sure this whole thing is in place now because like,

I just wouldn't have what it takes if I have to face an emergency or a crisis, you know, a month away or a year away or 10 years away. Well, there's that, but then a point that you make very powerfully in the book is also there's a lot of the crises that will come inevitably. There's nothing you can do now to prevent them. I mean, you and I are getting old. I mean, I'm already older than my mother was when she died, right?

there's some stuff you can't do anything about. And so you really are wasting your time trying to get all the ducks in a row today to fend off the randomness of life, which can strike at any time. Yeah, absolutely. And I think all of it is ultimately some form of redirected version of the fear of the one thing that you can't control at all, which is the fact that your time will end.

I think it's a really interesting reflection to think in your own life about the things you worry about and the things you don't worry about, even though they absolutely could happen and would be awful. And I think basically the things that I spend most of my time fretting about when I catch myself fretting about things are things where it seems like I ought to be able to have some kind of control or I feel like I would have messed up if things didn't work out a certain way.

And, you know, always there's the possibility of a grand piano falling from an upper story when you walk out of a tall building, right? Or whatever, you know, that kind of anything could happen-ness is just absolutely endemic. And so we try to rule it out by clinging onto the things where it seems like we ought to have some leverage, but that's a mistake, like...

It's absolutely built in. Yeah. We were talking about maximum economy of ass. There is a counter argument that says you're basically just giving everyone an excuse to be lazy. Yeah. Somebody, some Silicon Valley type person said this basically. He put some book notes on his website where he said he thought this book is basically an alibi for people who don't really want to, you know.

push themselves and excel and make a dent in the universe and all these things. It feels like an intervention for people who do want to make a dent in the universe. Right. So this is my main response to that. I mean, I've got two responses to this, but my main one is like, yeah, this is like, this is, this kind of stuff is for, and in my experience is of interest to the kind of people where like, yeah,

you don't need to worry right now about being too relaxed and not stressed enough and like going too easy on yourself all these things like these are unlikely to be your problem if like me you're interested in this kind of material it's like my friend Robert Wright who wrote a book called Why Buddhism is True and people

come back to him, push back against his prescription of meditation saying like, well, what if you just meditated so much that you just didn't want to participate in the world anymore? And it's like, I can't make myself do it for five minutes. So this is not a, this is not a, this is not a hazard yet. Um,

So I think that's a really important thing to realize. It's a corrective to a certain kind of person. For example, the people that psychologists call insecure overachievers, which is a phrase that always gets a lot of people like, oh yeah, that's me, that's me. And then secondly, it's not, even then, like even putting that aside and like just at the fundamental root of all this stuff, it's about facing...

getting a little bit readier to face the way reality really is, right? So it's like, I don't think that even if you were somebody who was prone to like going too easy on yourself, whatever that even means, that it hurts to understand the nature of our limitations. I mean, those are the people who might actually need to be sort of

like slightly startled and scared into making better use of their time by appreciating how finite yeah it is so that's the sort of um yeah so anyway yeah that is my response fair uh that you you quote a meditation teacher who says something along the lines of i don't

I'm not trying to lighten my students' burden. I'm trying to make it so heavy that they'll put it down. So what's behind that idea? I just love this line so much. It still gives me goosebumps when I think about it and talk about it. And as a result, I talk about it a very great deal. I asked the question, you got an excuse. This was...

A British-born Zen master called Hoon-Joo Kennett, Peggy Kennett, who'd only died a few years ago and was surely the only or one of the only Zen masters in history to sound exactly like Margaret Thatcher. Were they ever photographed together? There's old YouTube archive of her talks and it's really extraordinary.

She said that her approach to teaching Zen students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. And you can interpret that, you know, a million different ways, as always with Zen. But to me, that is this whole idea of it's worse than you think, right? That is this whole idea of...

no longer pursuing or offering the kind of advice that says, you know, just one more act of burden lightening and you'll finally be free of this burden or it'll be light enough for you to live the way you want to live. Or, you know, come on my multi-thousand pound retreat and I'll show you how to make burdens permanently lighter. It's like, no, just like, just like feel it, feel what this really is like.

to the point where trying to get rid of the truth or turn life into a problem that you then have to solve is like you just put it down. And then you don't have a burden. Then you can keep walking up the mountain or wherever this metaphor goes with a spring in your step. And I just, I really, really, that idea speaks to me a lot. Yeah. Do you still meditate? Yeah, definitely.

in a sort of undisciplined way. I have to keep clarifying that the word meditations in the title of this book is... Like Marcus Aurelius. Like Marcus Aurelius is who I...

arrogantly think I'm a bit like, not the Buddha. So you choose which of those will be the more arrogant comparison. I don't know. Because you, I'm trying to remember which book it was, but three or four books ago, was it The Antidote? Yeah. You had a book that basically said meditation is, that's it. Meditation is the solution. Well, yeah, I think in

but I think in my defense I didn't say and and now I meditate every day and I'm really good at it but clearly you know an awful lot of these ideas lead back and back and back to lots of religious wisdom traditions but especially to eastern ones Buddhism and and Taoism especially and

A lot of that is just to do with this spirit of feeling and seeing and acknowledging more of what is present without identifying with it in a way that sends you spinning off into suffering. So anyway, I'm avoiding the question. I do meditate in the sense of a seated formal practice, but it is not. I mean, there's a section in this book about doing things daily-ish and how powerful that idea can be.

I think it's stretching a point to suggest that I meditate even daily. That's okay. I mean, there's no judgment here. Well, there may be judgment out there. We'll see. Prepare your questions for Oliver. We'll come to you shortly. But what I wanted to ask about this, I mean, who cares what I think, but...

I do, Tim. Well, thank you. It's kind of you. This is the one part of your writing where I just... I personally have not seen it. So every time I read a page of your prose, I think, "He's nailed it again. That's so true. That's perfect." Except the meditation.

I've never, I've never seen the point. I've tried it a bit. It always makes me laugh. I don't have a problem with it, but it always like, I, I haven't been able to figure out like if this is the solution, what's the problem. So, so help me understand what am I missing? Well, no, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and be a huge sort of evangelist for formal meditation because that would just be totally hypocritical. But I'll say two things. I mean, firstly, you could just be

really, really enlightened. You just barely need this. It's a theory. That's a possibility. You could just be so at ease with the sort of arising phenomena that you experience in the course of being alive. And I'm mainly joking, but also it is possible. We both have the appropriate haircut for this. Yeah, that's true. But the other thing, and I'm sure that many sort of really committed people

meditation people would object to this on some level, although in a very chilled out way, obviously. But for me, I think the thing that that does is something that it gives is something that is gettable in many, many different ways. And that actually, if you look at it through a certain lens, it's rare to find someone who doesn't have some form of meditation in their lives. They just call it

Rock climbing or... I do Tai Chi and running. Is that... Tai Chi is kind of literally meditation, I think, really, isn't it? We can discuss if you wish. I see it slightly differently. Photography, creative art practices. And so for me, I think the thing I do do on a really regular basis is...

is free writing, journaling, morning pages, right? And that's something that is really central to my day. And I think that the important part about that is this kind of letting go of identification with mental contents and putting it out there. But I've got a friend who's a climber and generally scoffs at the ideas in my books. But like,

It's incredibly obvious to me, as I tell him in a doubtless annoying fashion, that putting yourself into that situation where absolute focus on what's happening right then is completely required by the situation is something that he finds sort of deeply meaningful and relaxing. And sort of relaxing in an active sense, not sort of just chilling out, but like...

letting go of identification with thought, basically. Yeah, I would imagine the difference... When you're doing something incredibly physically challenging, such as rock climbing or calisthenics or whatever, you are distracting yourself from yourself.

and forcing yourself to focus on, I've got to find the next hold, I've got to make this move, whatever it is. Whereas meditation, you're kind of, it feels like a different challenge because actually there's nothing to focus on and that's why it's so hard, I think. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think the only reason for that sort of parallel I'm drawing with something like climbing is that, like, that's the...

That's the issue that we all on some level struggle with and deal with in certain ways. I think whether you happen to have the sort of particular personality for wanting to deal with it by training this mental muscle day after day after day to non-attach, I mean, I don't think I have a very great degree of commitment to that. So, fair enough.

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One idea that is towards the end of the book that I really enjoyed was that of messy hospitality. And it was just one of these points. We've talked sometimes in quite highfalutin terms. Scruffy hospitality. Scruffy hospitality. Sorry. I wrote a book called Messy a while ago, so maybe that's why the thing's stuck in my mind, but thank you for the correction. We've talked about these finitude and limits and...

meditations and all of these things but a lot of the ideas in the book are actually very straightforward everyday practical and this idea of scruffy hospitality I thought was terrific so tell us a bit about that. Yeah I certainly can't claim credit for the phrase this comes from an Anglican minister in Tennessee called Jack King. I mean this is, sorry to interrupt before you've even answered the question but one of the delightful things about the book is you have just

pulled in ideas from so many different sources and you're always very clear about whose idea this was originally was but it's just this wonderful kind of scrapbook that somehow acquires this coherence it's a it's a you know it's a very it's a very well-organized coherent statement of

the problems we're facing and how to deal with them. But you've just, you've magpie-like plucked all these ideas from everywhere. This is another part of feature, newspaper feature writer training. It's like, you take what you can find, right? Not always giving the credit, but you always do. Okay, fair enough. But sorry, anyway, Scruffy Hospice. So Jack King and his wife, he's written about this and spoken about it, had this kind of

they loved having people around for their to their house but they sort of developed this kind of implicit checklist of things they had to do before the house was ready you know mow the lawn tidy the playroom pick a good recipe go and buy the ingredients put the whole thing you know and realize that the the weightiness of this um checklist was effectively dissuading them from uh actually inviting people around in the first place because it just took a lot of time and effort and thought and so um

They made a commitment instead to what he calls scruffy hospitality, which is this ethos of inviting people around to dine in your house as it is, to eat what happens to be in the cupboards, and finding not just that it was kind of fine and okay and people didn't judge you in the way that you might expect to be judged, but there was actually something...

about it right there's a there's a kind of a there's an intimacy and a connection that comes from dropping the facades that we put up to try to look like we've got everything in control obviously this is not only a point about dinner parties right it applies to all sorts of areas of life but I just find this really true and there's this very strange I'd noticed this sort of

dissonance in myself before I even encountered this idea, which is that like, if people were coming around to our house and I noticed like crumbs under the fridge or like letters stacked on the toaster or something, I would be like, oh my goodness, better tidy that up before people come around. But if I was at someone else's house and saw those things, I would never think like,

Bad thoughts about them and not just that I would actually feel like admitted to the like I've been admitted to their real lives Okay, I'm actually in your house. Like this is a real friendship and there's lots of other examples of this like there's evidence research to suggest that when you pair young things young female academics with older Female mentors in academia to deal with imposter syndrome if if if you pair people in that way

with very accomplished people who talk about their accomplishments. It makes the imposter syndrome worse. But when the people in the mentor situation can be encouraged to talk about their imposter syndrome, that's when the problem is released by the other person because we're putting aside...

facades for a moment and connecting as full imperfect humans. Yes, a friend of mine who has a very grand professorship at Oxford, although she's not a particularly grand person, was talking about when she was a younger academic

her laptop melted down and she hadn't made a backup and it was the first week of term and she was trying to recover all her lecture notes and she said she went round to various colleagues and they all went...

I should have had a backup, shouldn't you? And then she went to the head of department and the head of department said, that's nothing. I was cycling along the canal and I just lost my sense of where I was going and I cycled into the canal with my bike and my rucksack with my laptop in it. And she just thought, I love you. This is what I needed to hear. But

But the broader point about scruffy hospitality as well, it ties back into many of the themes of the book,

Because we're afraid of not doing it perfectly, we end up just not having our friends over for dinner at all. Or once every year, or once every three months. In any case, far more rarely than we could have. We could have them over and we could see our friends and we could have a good time much more often. And we don't because we're afraid that it needs to be perfect and it doesn't. And I mean, that is something that in the whole of this book I tried to sort of... I mean, even the concept of the book, right? Like this idea of...

having these sort of short chapters that you might read one per day for 28 days. Obviously, you can't dictate this to you because it's all about not being too much of a control freak. So I can't try to control how you read the book. But there's a perfectionistic urge with self-help and with advice and personal development stuff as well, right? Which is like, okay...

Assuming that you resonate with the book and you like what's in it, you think to yourself, like, okay, this is great. I'm going to put it into practice in a few weeks because I've got a lot on right now. So I'm going to wait until I've got, like, real proper bandwidth in a little while. And then you sort of take notes and it's all very sort of controlly and perfectionistic and then you just never do it. So I really wanted in the structure to...

for it to be a book that people could sort of... that could sort of cause these perspective shifts to kind of seep in under the surface right in the middle of your life as it is now, not something you need to sort of go on a retreat at the top of a mountain for a week or a month to internalize. So I'm trying to be imperfectionistic about what it is as well as

convey a philosophy called imperfectionism. Yeah. I mean, I can tell everyone what it is. It's 28 short, digestible chapters, each of which contains nuggets of wisdom that Oliver pretends you're going to take a month to read, but in fact you're going to read in an hour or an afternoon. I mean, it's a beautiful little book. It really is very readable and absolutely delightful. And I should say very giftable. If you've already bought a copy...

Yeah. You might want to buy another copy. Very giftable. Everyone you know, I think, would really like a copy. I think everyone should buy a copy for the person next to them. I would like to come to you and ask you to ask Oliver questions. But before we do, I had one more question for you, Oliver. You gave, very kindly gave of your time and your wisdom to 27-year-old me. But what advice would you give to 27-year-old you based on...

decades of thinking about self-help, writing all these books, distilling all this wisdom, what would you say to yourself? - Haven't been that many decades since I was 27. Can I sort of revise it to like, I don't know, 18 year old me or something? Can I add an extra decade? - Yeah, that's fine, I'll allow it. - 27 is a funny age 'cause I was probably-- - You'd already nailed it by then. - No, not nailed it, but I was probably stumbling on a little bit of this, you know, I was already seeing the problems with how I was trying to do life, put it that way.

Fine. 18 year old. I think mainly just like chill out a little bit, basically. I think, yeah, I think it's the stuff that I mentioned being in the third week of this four week thing, especially. It's the idea that it would be like to try to give him something.

to experiment with not clenching so tightly around to relax your grip just a little bit on life and to see what happened as a result of doing that and more and also maybe even more importantly to just sort of entertain the thought I don't think I could have sort of inculcated this into the brain of

that person but to entertain the thought that maybe you don't need to do any of this in order to sort of you know justify your existence yeah nothing wrong with doing lots of stuff and trying to do well in your work and all the rest of it but when you're doing it just because you kind of feel like it's the bare minimum you ought to do I think that sort of I could have used that message

Thank you, Oliver. So, let's have some questions. How much do you think education systems play a part in this kind of need to be clenched and very stressed? We live in a society where our kids are tested from four, our schools are assessed and published,

teachers are inspected and it comes to me as an educator that one of the bains of your entire, what you're talking about, being able to release is actually based on what's going on in our formative years. I'm really interested if you've seen it or you've seen the opposite in education systems which aren't so test heavy.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably a really great point. It's definitely not a sort of error of great expertise of mine in terms of what causes what. I think it's really clear from my exposure to the current UK system that, you know, there is this sort of deep

instrumentalism built into it, which is a lot of what I've been writing about in both the last two books, the degree to which the value of everything done is for the future and for the person you become. And so this wonderful idea

I think it's a Tom Stoppard quote, isn't it? That the purpose of a child is to be a child is completely sort of lost because everything is training for successful adulthood by a very narrow definition of success. I mean, I think that's, I'm sure that that's true. The other thing it reminds me of, and I do mention this in the book, is this work of the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who's written really, done really interesting work on how

the thing we're trying to do as a society as well as well as individuals is to sort of exert more and more control over the functions of society so that you know anyone who works in education, healthcare,

all sorts of other sort of professions like that is always complaining that they spend so much time kind of reporting the status of where they are in their work or helping sort of create these monitorable processes of what's going on that they don't get to do the actual work which sort of unfolds in spontaneous

interactions, so that you've always got to be doing the paperwork to be able to show the organization where things are at. And that is sort of the organization and the society wanting control instead of

what Rosa calls resonance, right? The real experience of being alive. I better stop there because I don't have the, you know, studies to hand or anything, but everything you said in your question really resonated with my thinking, I think, yeah. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Leila Ismail and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

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