Author of Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman on How To Live Well (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our live event with Oliver Berkman, recorded in April 2025, live at Union Chapel in London. Oliver is a best-selling author of 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, a book that encourages us to rethink our obsession with productivity and to embrace the limitations of life.

In his latest work, Meditation for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, he takes that exploration even further.

He joined us on stage with Financial Times columnist Tim Hartford to discuss how we can stop striving for impossible efficiency, accept our imperfections and cultivate a more meaningful life, one that works with rather than against the reality of our finite time on Earth. This is part one of the conversation. If you'd like to listen to the full event ad-free, you can become an Intelligence Squared member.

Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or tap the IQ2 extra button on Apple. Now let's join our host, Tim Harford, with more.

Thank you very much, Oliver, instantly wrestling with the problem of how to applaud while holding a microphone. It's great. Everything we struggle with on stage tonight, every moment of awkwardness will be turned into some zen. Makes you look like you're trying to do a human beatbox. Yeah, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Anyway. Oh, very nice. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming.

Thank you for braving the crowds going to the second most important event of the evening just down the road.

Thank you so much Oliver for coming. It's a very special place. I'm delighted to be here. I'm particularly delighted to be able to talk to Oliver about his wonderful book and all of his ideas. We're going to cover as many different ideas as we can. Oliver, of course, is the author of numerous books, most recently 4,000 Weeks and 4,000

Meditations for Mortals. He was a long-running columnist at The Guardian. This column will change your life. Yeah? That's what it was called. All about self-help. And

I just wanted to say a word about Oliver personally. When I heard that Meditations for Mortals was coming out, I happened to be in the, unusually for me, in the Financial Times building, and I mentioned to a couple of colleagues in journalism,

Oliver Bergman's got a new book coming out. And everybody's, oh, Oliver. I used to work with Oliver. He's so lovely. We did this job together. He's such a nice man. So this front he puts on about being a nice person, it turns out it's nice person all the way down. And this is actually, although I feel I know Oliver very well through his writing, this is actually only the second time we've been in a room together. And the first time was 24 years ago.

I was working in a job I hated and I wanted to become a journalist. And Oliver had volunteered to have lunch with me and to tell me how to become a journalist. Which shows you, first of all, he's a very nice man because there was really no reason at all for him to bother to do that. And secondly, that he is absolutely qualified to give advice because I am now a journalist. So it worked.

The student has outshone the master. Well, we'll see who outshines who, shall we? Let's jump to conclusions. So, Oliver, I remember where I was when I first read 4,000 Weeks. I remember reading this book thinking, this is incredible. Berkman's nailed it at last. This is brilliant.

And then you wrote the sequel, or an extension, a response. So what was it that you felt you wanted to add to the ideas in 4,000 Weeks in Meditations for Mortals? Thank you for that lovely introduction. There's different ways to answer this, but I think the main one is really that I became aware, partly as a result of writing 4,000 Weeks and looking at my own life, how easy it is to kind of have quite a strong sense of

what you think is true about life and the right way to live it and the things you want to focus on, the way you want to show up, and just like totally not do that for months and years. So this idea of the sort of gap between knowing and doing is a big part of, to me, what this book is about. I don't know if that's...

That's how it comes across. And then the other thing was just talking to so many different people in the wake of 4,000 weeks and it sort of doing better than I'd expected, certainly. Getting a sense of how universal or ubiquitous anyway was this feeling that I think until quite recently I had maybe thought was not, was just me, which is this idea that like

of being on the back foot in life all the time, of feeling like there's some way of mastering the situation of being a human in the 21st century. And other people have kind of figured it out, but you haven't quite nailed it yet. You haven't quite got your life into proper working order. Yeah, everyone else has got it. Right, probably. I mean, I was never hugely beset by imposter syndrome, but it was more just this sense that, like, I just need another six months or the right philosophy of...

how to live or I need to find slightly more self-discipline than I've ever shown in any part of my life to date. And then I'll be like on top of things. And realizing how widespread that was, I think that's another part of why I'm addressing here. 'Cause my argument obviously is that like that's never coming. That time when you've got it all sorted out. - Yeah, we'll explore that. Before we dive into the ideas in the book,

Early on, you talk about the experience of being a feature writer at the Guardian and just the impossibility of this task that you've got. You're supposed to write a 2,000-word piece by 5 o'clock. You don't know anything about it.

TikTok, come on, get on with it. And that sort of that sense of panic and inadequacy and so on. But it struck me that maybe being a journalist is quite good training for the outlook on life that you're advocating in these books in the following sense. You've got to do it now. You can't do it tomorrow. You can't do it next week. You can't dream about the amazing piece you're going to write tomorrow.

You have to just write it. And you have a limited amount of time, so there will be problems with the piece. There'll be questions you can't answer, there'll be facts you can't check, and therefore you'll probably have to just remove the claim from the piece. So it's a daily lesson in imperfection and finitude. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's just a very sort of, like, broad...

bucket of water cold water over the head way to do it right because you're sort of thrown into that situation and on the one hand yes gradually i think i it's sort of i did get it into my into my thick head as it were you know if you have to write a column every week and um

it's Monday afternoon and you don't have a really good idea for the column, then you have to use one of the really rubbish ideas instead. And then you also learn that actually you don't know what are good ideas and rubbish ideas anyway because things you spend a lot of time working on and are very proud of will get no take-up and things you dashed off without thinking will be popular and all the rest of that. But for a long time, even so, it was also the place where I really experienced and got deeply into that kind of

awful anxious feeling of not having life sorted out yet. So one of the problems with sort of short deadlines, like I was doing, was that it's quite easy to always tell yourself like, okay, when this, just as soon as this next piece is out of the way, I'll stop like,

surviving on pizza and Coke and I'll stop and I'll really get organised and I'll make time in my life for my friends as well as my work but first of all I'll just get this out of the way and then of course you get to that point and there's another one to get out of the way and on and on and on but yeah it certainly dramatises all this stuff pretty heavily So we should try and pin down I think one of the key ideas in the book so that those who have not yet had a chance to read it

can get a handle on what we're talking about. So one of the first things that you say is, it's worse than you think, which is a book that is maybe a piece of self-help. We can discuss whether it's a self-help book at some stage. It's worse than you think is quite an interesting way to start. Yeah, sorry. So why do you, no, you don't need to apologize, but why do you say it?

Oh, I mean, to me, this kind of really took a while to get to that phrasing and everything, but it really expresses what I'm trying to get at here, which is an initially incredibly depressing and annoying truth that I think very quickly, I think, reveals itself to be the opposite, reveals itself to be sort of liberating and empowering and all the rest of it. So I think, in essence, the idea is that

in all sorts of ways we struggle with the limitations of being human and time and again you find that actually the way to sort of get past them or at least sort of integrate them into your life and not suffer so much with them and do the stuff you wanted to do is not to solve these problems but to gain a deeper appreciation of how completely insoluble they are. So obvious simple example is

If you think that getting through all the things you feel you need to do is really difficult, right? All the things that feel like they need doing, it's just such a long list. It's really hard. It's a very grueling experience. You're going to be constantly fighting to try to get to that place when you can finally say that it's all done. But if you realize, for reasons I try to convince you of in this book and elsewhere, if you realize that it's actually not really difficult, it's completely impossible. Yeah.

And that the space of things that feel like they need doing is effectively always infinite for all of us. Well, maybe it's just me, but I think that's really, firstly, it's a big relief because you don't need to beat yourself up for failing to do everything because it's an infinite list. But it's not just a relief. It's also kind of like, oh, right. That means that my job here is not to do all the things. My job is to, you know, roll my sleeves up and

Do the ones that seem most pressing or important or meaningful. Do some of the things. Right. And just, I don't want to go on, but just one other example of this worse than you think thing that I think brings it into focus maybe is imposter syndrome, right? If you think that you're a very long way from having the same abilities as your peers, if you think you need lots and lots more experience or to take extra training or courses or something, that is a really hard place to be in.

But if you realize that it's worse than that because actually you're never going to feel ready to do new, to embark on new life chapters or launch new projects because nobody ever does and all the people who look like they are just good at hiding the fact that they also feel this way. Well then it's, that's worse in the sense that you just realized that the time you were holding out for is never coming.

But it's really a lot better because it means like, well, you might as well do those things now and not postpone life to the time when this level of control and security finally descends. So that's the basic idea there. Yeah. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to die. You're going to die. I'm going to die. You're all going to die. And there's only 24 hours in a day. There's only... Spoiler alert.

For those who hadn't realized. You're like, "Why did I come out tonight?" But I think, Noeth, you're absolutely right. And it is actually... Well, I've certainly found it liberating. And looking at the to-do list, I mean, the classic thing... You know, I've got a to-do list just to swipe away on this magic pad in front of me. You look at the things on the to-do list and, oh, there's a lot of things. But if I was able to tick them all off, which never happens,

if I was able to tick them all off, I'd just put some more things on. I wouldn't be like, "Oh, okay, I guess that's it." Of course you put more things on. And so they will never will be done. And so, which is kind of obvious except, I guess one of the points that you have to make over and over again, because we're so easy at forgetting this, is that our capacity to deny the fact that we'll never do the whole to-do list.

our capacity to deny the fact that we are going to die. This denial is kind of shot through the way we think all the time. Oh yeah, no, completely. And I think that's all, on some level, that's all I'm doing. And I'm doing it for myself as much as for anyone else. It's taking these truths that are sort of, are empowering, if you can sort of, you know, slightly relax into them a little bit.

but that we're completely conditioned for a million different reasons. You could go everything from sort of evolutionary arguments all the way through to kind of late-stage capitalism arguments, that we're completely conditioned to sort of clench ourselves away from or sort of psychologically push away. So something I was really surprised about with the previous book was people kept...

telling me as a form of praise, I think, that they found it confronting, which that particular usage of that word I'd never really encountered before. But they meant it in a good way, as I say, I think. And it's because we do have to keep sort of gently and hopefully humorously and forgivingly sort of confronting ourselves with this

with this stuff because just absolutely, yeah, all you want to do unconsciously is close off against it. So you mentioned late-stage capitalism and because this is Intelligence Squared, they suggested some questions that I should ask and I'm like, no, no, no, I want to ask questions about dinner parties and kayaks and various things but they said, we've got to...

I've got to ask some politics questions because it's intelligence quest. The first politics question is, or maybe it's a social question. What does it tell you about us collectively, about

modern Western society that all of us seem to be in this state of denial. That we're all frantically trying to fill all the buckets as they go past with productive stuff. We've got these morning routines, we've got these to-do lists that we never finish and that somehow we're never able to

I mean, to adopt the cliche to stop and smell the roses. So what does it tell us about how our society is set up? Or is this a human universal or is it something particular about... Well, I always completely sort of act evasively on these why questions, partly because I think that the whole thing is so overdetermined, right? There's like...

You can make an argument that various developments of the last sort of four decades have really exacerbated a lot of this stuff. You can definitely make an argument about what happened to our concepts of time in the Industrial Revolution and the invention of clocks and the sort of the development of the sense of time as a resource to be exploited, sold, bought and how we sort of internalized that message.

And then you can totally say, yeah, it's a human universal, right? On some level, we are born as creatures who can envisage and think about, in some sense, the infinite or doing an infinite number of things or doing an unending number of things, but within material bodies that have only so much time, energy, and attention. So I think you can sort of, you can argue the cause is almost infinite.

however you like. I think a really obvious thing, I'm not, this is not a brand new point or anything, but it's just that you can chart over decades and centuries the erosion of various buffers against that way of thinking about your time and your responsibilities to be as productive as possible. I mean, certainly religion has some blame to carry here, the sort of Protestant work ethic and all of that, but those kind of things like, you know,

putting that aside, right? Religion, other ways in which we sort of... Even just like, you know, the era of the paternalistic company, which sort of softened the edges of pressure to compete for individuals and all these different things that sort of fall away to the point where it is just like you're...

We're still religious in the sense that we're looking to save our souls, but we're doing it now entirely through the idea that if we produce enough and hold on to our hold on things and keep our head above water through productivity, through getting more efficient and optimized and knowing what we're doing and being in control, that's all that's left. That was kind of an incoherent answer.

and I apologise for it. That's okay. I mean, you can have another go if you like, or we can move on. It's fine. I told you it wasn't my favourite question anyway. That'll teach him to ask... Actually, well, another question which is, I guess, not quite about politics, but it's about one of the side effects of politics. And one of the side effects of politics as currently practised is there's an awful lot of news...

Not in a good way. And I think there's a lot of pressure to read the news, to have opinions about the news, to tweet about the news. How do you advocate that we engage with what is a, you know, there's a lot of noise out there and it feels to some extent that we kind of owe it to ourselves and owe it to each other to take the noise seriously and to pay attention.

But you can't pay attention to everything, so what should we do? Right, and I feel like it's also... I mean, some of this may be relative to me and getting older or something, but I also feel like there is a difference in the sense that, like...

many of the crises that are unfolding now, like we're in them, we're implicated in them, they affect us, right? So it's not even a question of, I guess I'm pushing back against one interpretation of what you said, which would be like, how much attention should we pay to this show over there? And it's like, it's not over there. It's directly, everyone sort of feels now like they're sort of living through history with a capital H. Yeah, but I think that's an interesting point there. Like, where is it?

So where is the show? Because I think one of the points that you made in a recent newsletter, and I think it's in the book as well, about living inside the news. So it can feel as though Donald Trump is under your pillow if you sleep with your phone under your pillow, which I do not advocate. It can feel like Keir Starmer is right there. It's all right there. And in a sense, it is right there. And in another sense, it's actually, it's all happening a long way off.

Yeah, so this is just this phrase that I... I mean, I first wrote a Guardian long read about it ages ago now, but this feeling that... or this experience that I had, really after all the very disruptive things that happened in 2016 on both sides of the Atlantic, that...

that lots and lots of people who I knew, and not just journalists, because it might be a professional hazard of being a journalist, but had started to sort of do what I called living inside the news, right? You have this sense that for more and more people, the news was like the real world. That was where they lived. That was their sort of center of gravity, was what they saw on Twitter, what they saw online.

online on news sites. And then, you know, like the life of their family in their house and their street and even their job, you know, this was sort of somewhere they maybe occasionally visited, but it wasn't like where the center of gravity was. And I think that a lot of reasons for that are fairly obvious reasons to do with how algorithmic social media makes us feel, you know, sucks us in, makes us feel like we're doing something active just by participating in the social media and all the rest of it.

So this is really interesting and complicated challenge about how do you not only pay attention to things that matter because you're a good person and you want to not, even if you have the privilege to be able to do it, you don't want to just like shut the doors of your house against all the suffering of the world. But how do you also bring yourself to withdraw attention from most of that in order to make a

any kind of impact on any of it because obviously there's just you're connected to more tales and more reason to panic or despair than anyone in history until very recently. So I think that challenge of like allowing yourself to not focus

on things to sort of return yourself to the physical immediacy of your life and not feel like you're escapist in doing that. It's so weird, like the idea that it would be escapist to come more into the sort of non-conceptual, non-cyber world.

reality of your life. You're escaping to the place where you live with the people that you live with and the people that you see every day and in some way that's escapist. Yes, that's a helpful confrontation.

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I mentioned in the book, I wrote in that Guardian piece as well, about this guy, the story of Eric Hageman. Can I briefly recount this? This is a guy who kind of fairly comfortably off, upper middle class Americans would say, executive who, after Donald Trump was elected the first time, decided he was going to just live as if it hadn't happened because he hated it so much.

So he sort of retreated largely into his nice house in Ohio where I think he lived alone, I think. And when he went to his local coffee shop, he wore noise-cancelling headphones playing white noise so that he didn't have to hear all the other liberals bemoaning the state of politics.

And of course, once this New York Times profile came out about him, it was called The Man Who Knew Too Little. It was a good headline. He was like denounced across kind of progressive left-leaning online media as this sort of monster of privilege who could, only because he didn't need to think about what was happening to immigrants or in police brutality, only because he was, could he sort of afford to escape in this way.

But if you read down this profile, it turned out that what he was doing with his time when he wasn't having conversations at the coffee shop with his fellow people who bemoaned what had happened, was restoring an area of wetlands that he'd bought and planned to restore to public ownership as soon as he'd restored it. Invested his entire life savings in this kind of local environmental project.

And they didn't even make much of this in the Times piece, but you did begin to think, like, is this someone who is a monster of privilege who's escaping reality? Or is he actually, like, deciding that his attention is limited, that his emotional energies for things are limited, and the contribution he can make is this great thing that he was doing with a little bit of, like, the landscape of Ohio instead of...

like complaining at the coffee shop, which by the way is also not effective activism. It doesn't do anything. No, I mean, I have to say I have a lot of sympathy with Hageman and, and I mean, that,

the noise-cancelling headphones are possibly a bit much and the idea of trying to avoid all information about Donald Trump, but I do often find, like, you know, if I get together with my Dungeons & Dragons group to play Dungeons & Dragons, every now and... You seem very pleased at that revelation. No, it's just, it's so adorable. We can... Sorry, I don't mean to condescend. That's brilliant. That's fantastic. I don't need your pity. LAUGHTER

Every now and then, instead of playing Dungeons and Dragons, everyone will sit around and go, oh, isn't it terrible, the thing Donald Trump just did? I'm like, I actually, I don't really need to discuss this with any of you. For a start, none of us really know anything about it. Nobody's actually learning anything about it. No one's persuading anyone.

anybody to do anything they wouldn't already do. So really we're just all making ourselves a bit miserable when we could be having fun pretending to be wizards. And there's a time and a place, basically. There's a time and a place. But naturally, human conversation, we tend to gravitate to whatever is common knowledge and that will be whatever's on the front pages. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also...

if you really want to push this point and people might want to push back and say, you know, this is sort of irresponsible. In half an hour you will get your chance to push back.

There's a strong argument to be made that there is something very important and even sort of subversive and sort of politically an act of resistance in maintaining those spaces, psychological spaces that don't get completely colonized by sort of panic and thinking about the people in the White House and the rest of it, right? There's a sense in which, you know, if you...

if you agree with the argument that there are sort of totalitarian tendencies at play, a big part of totalitarianism is like this idea of colonizing the whole mind of all the people in the country so that you just have them just living in a state of anxiety and panic. And like you can say it's not only forgivable to play Dungeons & Dragons, but you're actually doing something that is an important part of like...

fabric of society continuing to be woven. I think so. I wanted to get to some particular bits in the book. It's quite difficult because I've got the microphone and the book. We'll be alright. We'll figure it out. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was there's a metaphor that I found very useful which is the kayak and the super yacht. So just tell us about

you know the the super yacht fantasy and the the kayaking reality yeah sure i think this is just a really useful pair of images for thinking about all of this especially as it sort of concretely applies to what you do in your life today to try to live with more meaning or meaningful productivity or connection and the rest of it so i think one thing you could say about being human is that it's like

being a little kayak on a river and you're sort of exposed to the situation you can't really predict what's coming you don't know when the choppy parts are coming or when the stiller waters will come all you can really do in that moment is you know navigate as best you can with whatever skills you have and sort of respond to each moment as it arises and this is a kind of

to continue the metaphor, right? It's an intensely sort of vulnerable situation. You could be exposed to scary things happening and deeply unpleasant emotions. But it's also really exhilarating and exciting and you're sort of, you know, you're really there in the moment. I think that a lot of what we end up sort of subconsciously trying to pursue instead, and I think a lot of the worst kind of self-help and productivity, personal development advice just enables this a lot.

is this totally different fantasy that we're sort of the captains of a, we're the captain of a super yacht, right? I don't actually claim to know a great amount about super yachts, but go with me, right? You're sort of on the, you know, the third, like a bridge three stories up, it's all completely air conditioned, you're sitting on a sort of plush leather swivel stool or something, and you're sort of programming your destination into the

navigational system and then you just sort of sit back and the whole thing sort of in a very controlled way reaches its planned destination and like life isn't like that in a million different ways but when you look at the approaches we take to managing our time or developing habits or structuring the day or whatever it is the ones that work are the ones that sort of are honest about the super yacht the kayak truth of the situation and the ones that don't are the ones that really

cause us to cling harder to this fantasy that it could actually all be sort of fully controlled. And just to finish that off, it's also the case that actually there's something kind of missing about the experience on the super yacht, even if you did have that level of control. This is where the metaphor falls down because maybe there are people like, I'd love to be on a really expensive super yacht. But

It's on autopilot, right? You're not doing anything. Right. Even when you achieve, even in those moments when you achieve the degree of control over your life that you thought you wanted, that is when the sort of life drains from it. And that is when you sort of wish it wasn't that way. So if you decide to sort of very rigidly time block your whole week or something, obviously the main thing that happens is like life gets in the way. But even if it doesn't,

then you're just carrying out this set of lifeless instructions and something has gone from your experience of life. Yes, your past self programmed everything and you're just executing the program. I've never quite understood why that idea is so appealing. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Leila Ismail and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

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