Afford Anything - Four Thousand Weeks, with Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

#331: Four thousand weeks. That’s how long we live if we’re lucky enough to celebrate our 80th birthday. We rarely think of our lifespan in terms of weeks. When we do, it seems painfully short. And that’s the point that Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, wants to drive home. Rather than fight a losing battle against time, Oliver recommends that we embrace our cosmic insignificance, redefine what a meaningful life looks like, choose what to fail at, burn bridges, and ruthlessly limit our works-in-progress. If the financial independence movement is a rebellion against trading the rest of our limited time for pay, Oliver’s unconventional view on time management is a rebellion against trading the rest of our limited time for an illusion of productivity. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode331  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most? And second, how do you align your daily, weekly, monthly, annual decision-making around

that which matters most? answering these two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore and facilitate. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Today, we are going to talk to guest Oliver Berkman about the stark reality of having only 4,000 weeks to live. Oliver Berkman wrote a bit of a contrarian productivity book. Rather than tackle your to-do list through a variety of systems and tactics,

We begin not with what we do, but with what we cut. What do we not do? That is the core message of today's conversation. Now, Oliver Berkman is a British journalist and the author of The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. He wrote a long-running column for The Guardian, and he has a devoted following for his writing on productivity, mortality, and the power of limits. He's been recommended by past podcast guests, including Cal Newport, Mark Manson, and Daniel Pink.

So for a conversation about how to allocate the most precious and limited resource, which is our time, here is journalist Oliver Berkman. Hi, Oliver. Hi, Paula. How are you? I'm doing well. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Oliver, you brought to light the rather depressing fact that we will live for a lot of a lot of

approximately 4,000 weeks. How did you come to that? Well, 4,000 weeks is approximately the length of an 80-year lifespan. It's not exact. And of course, 80-year lifespans are not universal. People live for less and more than that. But the basic idea when I was first beginning to write this book and to think about the sort of finitude of life was just how striking it was to express this amount of time that we all roughly expect on some level or hope that we have in terms of weeks. Because it is so few weeks. And after I first ran the calculation and had a nervous breakdown for a few minutes, I started sort of asking friends of mine, you know, not to do a mental arithmetic, but just as a guess, like how many weeks do you, would you say probably the average human gets to live? And a good

friend of mine, very smart person, but following my instructions about not doing the math, said something like, I don't know, 150,000 or something like that. And so I then had to tell her, I guess I didn't have to tell her, but I decided to tell her. 310,000 weeks is actually the duration of the whole of human civilization since the ancient Samirians of Mesopotamia, you know. So it's kind of, we are here just for the blink of an eye, and that's really the starting point of what I'm wanting to talk about. Although, I hope that the end result of this kind of this conversation is not that it's

actually very stressful or depressing, but that it's kind of inspiring in. an unexpected way. Right, right. Well, I think the recognition that our time is the ultimate limited resource creates the question, how do we then manage the most limited resource that we have? You have some criticisms of the way that time management, productivity management, life management is commonly talked about. Yeah, I really do. Sort of two parts to this. The first part is just that it seems so kind of narrow. It all ends up being to do with exactly how to schedule your day in your job or why you should cook all your meals in one big batch on Sunday so you don't have to think about them during the week. It's these kind of very ground-level things, which matter.

I'm not saying they don't matter, but it sort of lacks that big existential kind of angle, right? That sense that we're talking here about our lives and all we have. have to do everything and the sort of stuff of which life is made, we could get a little bit more dramatic about what we're talking about when we talk about time management and productivity. We could see it as kind of the challenge of being alive. The sort of deeper thing that I get into in more detail is just this idea that so much of that advice, it ends up, I think, encouraging us in a delusion that we have that we have an infinite amount of time that will be able to find a way to do everything because the sort of classic old school productivity

system is designed to sort of help you in principle, answer every email you might get, fulfill every ambition you might have, deal with every demand you might get from your boss. You know, it's this kind of you can get on top of everything, be in control of your time, be the master of your time and never have to face the really difficult decisions that come with being finite. So it actually does the opposite of helping you manage your time in many cases. It sort of encourages you to believe that you're just on the verge of getting to this position where you have the perfectly optimized system and you're able to do anything at all and everything.

That's really misleading because you can't. It's built in to the situation of being finite. It's nothing to be ultimately depressed about, I don't think. But you don't want to be embracing philosophies of managing your life that kind of enable your delusion, you want to be embracing philosophies that gently push you into confronting reality. So there are two directions that I hear in that answer. The first is that this focus on how to manage your day is a little too tactical and a little too granular in that we're talking so much about the how. Traditional productivity advice talks about the how rather than about the what.

that's one aspect of the answer. And then the other aspect of the answer is that traditional productivity advice implies that life can be an endless series of ands rather than oars. That's such a good way of putting it. I wish you'd written a book. Yeah, those two are both exactly right. So I'd like to talk about both of those in more detail. Let's start with the existential crisis. Let's start with the fact that so many of us, have received guidance on how to manage our days and our weeks at a granular level, at a tactical level, and yet pulling back and deciding, wait, what big picture, zooming out 30,000 foot view, what do we want to do with this blink of an eye that we have on the planet?

How do you even begin to grapple with such a major question in a meaningful way? Well, it is definitely a big question. I do think I just as a little sidebar, but it's very close to. linked to the tactical dimension, we can get back to that later, because obviously life is lived on the basis of what you do from minute to minute and hour to hour. I think what I was hoping to do in this book is to put it into this context where you see the real implications of our finitude, which is that, you know, here we are with brains that can imagine an infinity of things we might like to do, living in a world that presents us with an infinity of information, infinity of demands,

obligations, you know, any different setting, right? Sometimes it's to do with feeling that your boss is demanding an infinite amount of you, but other times it might be that you're a sort of comfortably off retiree with a bucket list of an infinite number of destinations to travel to. They can be very, we can be in sort of very nice or very hard-seeming situations, but they all share this kind of unlimited quality and really falling back into the truth of what it means that you're only going to get around to a few of those. Maybe I'm drifting onto the second of your questions here, but I think they are closely connected.

Really grasping what that means is to accept the complete inevitability of only getting around to a tiny handful of those ambitions, only being able to do a certain number of tasks in the course of a day. And as a result, choices are required. Now I'm really getting onto the second part of your question. But I think that what I tried not to do in this book was to sort of give a laundry list and say like, you know, these are the things that I think you should be filling your life with if you want it to be meaningful. Because I think that answer is so different for so many people. And more to the point, I think most people have a really good idea of it when they get a little bit quiet and they step back from this kind of infinity machine of trying to optimize themselves to do everything.

I think most people have a good sense of the areas of life that bring them the most nourishment or in some cases that they maybe decide they're willing to do because it supports other areas of their lives. It's more a question of all the ideas that get in the way of just sort of letting that rise up. And I think the key thing that gets in the way is this notion that you might be able to skirt around the tough choices. you might be able to find some way to game the system so that everything you could think of could get done. And do you think that's the appeal of current traditional productivity advice, the idea that you can avoid the hard choices by virtue of just doing more?

I think on some level that is the appeal of that advice and the appeal of huge numbers of different cultural messages that we get. There's this, I mean, to get really sort of abstract and sort of quasi-spiritual about it, There's a sort of a desire to somehow wrench yourself outside of the human condition, you know, to sort of get out of life and on top of it so that you're directing it. You and your listeners can't see this, but I'm contorting myself into a particular physical position while I say that, because I think that's the feel that it has for me, right? People are trying to sort of get out front of things so that we can direct how everything goes.

We never need to accept that things are going to happen that we don't have any control over. We don't never need to feel that we have to make the tough choices. And all of that ultimately, ultimately, is one or another way of avoiding the truth that we are mortal, the truth that this is it, that life isn't a dress rehearsal, and that it's not going to go on forever. So yeah, I think we engage in all sorts of kind of weird neurotic activity to try to avoid that. All of us, definitely me included, and we probably can't hope to completely get free of that. but a certain kind of attempt to control your workday and master your workday and make incredibly detailed plans for the next five years of your life is a manifestation, I think, of that neurosis, that kind of, I'm going to get the upper hand and win the war on time, all the while knowing that eventually one day, time is definitely going to win that particular battle. For a person who's listening to this, who wants to think more clearly about the next five years without getting neurotic about it, how do they begin that journey?

I think here it really can begin on a tactical level. It's a sort of a, for me anyway, it was a matter of sort of adopting techniques for organizing my day and my to-do list, but gently encouraged me to learn to tolerate a certain. kind of discomfort rather than to be constantly trying to eliminate that discomfort. So an example that I experienced a lot is this phenomenon whereby, I call it, in some places I've called it the importance trap. It's this idea that, you know, the things that you really care about the most, the more productive and efficient and organized you get, it's kind of like they're the ones you, you are least good at doing.

If you're like me, you know, the more supposedly optimized and productive you become, the more you focus on all the little stuff that doesn't really matter so much. You sort of tell yourself that the things that really matter, they need time and attention and focus. And first you need to get all this other stuff out of the way. So you end up with a life that's constantly spent sort of clearing the decks, focusing on stuff that feels like it needs to be done now, but it's not really the main event. And yet the input to that system is infinite. So you're never going to clear the decks.

So very simple things, like leaving the deck clearing, activity in your work day to the end of the day and giving yourself half an hour, an hour, two hours, whatever you think is needed to do it, a fixed amount of time rather than telling yourself that you're first going to get all the little fires put out before you turn to it. And just this general sense that doing what matters is going to trigger this discomfort, this feeling that is like you're neglecting something else. This idea that like, you know, the fear of missing out, this kind of you've been. ubiquitous phenomenon that afflicts us all these days. It's kind of really weird to me,

because when you really think about it, it's like missing out is a 100% inevitable. And anything you do with an evening is automatically to not do a million other things. And so there's a sort of a psychological move which involves sinking into the reality of that and letting yourself feel the discomfort of that. But when it comes to tactics, you know, there are lots of different organizational methods. I guess I just mentioned one there, but which serve this kind of getting friendly with the discomfort of our situation rather than serving the denial of it. What are some of the tactics that you use in terms of, you mentioned tolerating discomfort or perhaps even taking it a step further, embracing that discomfort. What are some of the

specific tactics that you use in order to increase that tolerance? Something that I do is called limiting my work in progress. This is an idea that comes from this workplace management system called Canban that you may be aware of and has been adapted in a personal way by a writer called Jim Benson who wrote a book called Personal Canban. There are lots of ways of implementing it, but the basic idea is just that you're going to select a very small number of key projects that you're focused on at any one time, and you're going to say it's three, and you're not going to let a fourth one in until one of them has been completed thereby freeing up a slot in your limited three projects.

You can do this with just to-do lists as well, right? You can say you can have one to-do list which you put anything onto, so it quickly has like 300 items on it, and another one which only has five slots, and you move tasks from the long one to the short one, but you only move a new one when a slot has been freed up, almost like the deliberate creation of a bottleneck in your work, although it's not really the creation of a bottleneck, right,

because you already were only capable of focusing on a small number of things. And this is really just making it conscious. And what I find when I do this is every time I select a task, I'm obliged to confront the tough decision of all the things that I'm leaving undone, but I'm also obliged to see that, like, that's just how it is. I don't know if that's clear, but, you know, you're sort of confronted with the way reality is,

which is that you can only pick a few things at any one time. And that becomes less uncomfortable and you become more and more content to sort of put on ice that idea you're really excited about and focus on this other idea that you're really excited about. Because you have a better understanding of that, that if you try to do them all, you won't really make progress on any of them. Right. So focusing on the big three. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's all however many. It can be tasks. It can be at the level of tasks. It can be at the level of big projects. If it's big projects, you maybe only want to have one that you're focusing on at any one time, or maybe one in your work and one outside of work. It's just that idea that you're not going to sneak in another three onto the list because that would make you feel like you were on top of everything. It's a recognition that, in fact, if you did that, you wouldn't be on top of everything.

You'd just be adding items to your list. And there's something very sort of bracing about this. I still, to this day, struggle to convey the emotional quality. of living in this way. But it's something like, it's not scary, it's not depressing, ultimately. It's uncomfortable, but it's the kind of discomfort that you get from like taking a cold shower. You walk out with a greater sense of clarity and some energy. And you know what I mean? It's like, it brings a certain kind of creative tension into your life that is, I find actually very motivating and makes it easier to focus on what I care about.

One of the concepts that you talk about in your book quite a bit is the superficiality of the endless pursuit of efficiency and how our fixation on getting everything done often is counterproductive. You described the Canban approach as one of the approaches, a specific tactical practice that reminds us of our limitations. what other specific tactical practices would you recommend that remind us of our limitations? There are a whole host of these, but one that springs to mind right now is this idea of deciding in advance what you're going to fail at in life, which I think is not an idea that completely originates with me, but it's a very sort of forgiving and ultimately uplifting approach, I think, where you look at the domains of your life and you decide that there's some area, keeping a tidy home or, I don't know, it could be any kind of area where at least for

now, you're actually not even going to try to optimize your activities because you're going to focus on something else. And getting into that rhythm of seasonality, a kind of deliberate imbalance in life, right, rather than always trying to seek this perfect work-life balance, you might say, well, actually, for the next few months, it is just going to be work, work, work for me and I'm going to try to do as little as I can get away within every other domain. You need a trust in yourself that the time is going to come when you're going to shift the focus again. But this is just another way of avoiding this constant sense of struggle oscillating with dismay when it turns out that you are in fact a finite human and can't do 35 hours of

something in a 24 hour day, just these sort of strategic decisions about what you're going to try to maximize and what you're very explicitly not going to try to maximize, I think is another really helpful tactic. So be comfortable with failing at certain things. Yes, exactly. Comfortable with failing at certain things, comfortable with never reaching what might theoretically be your peak performance in some given area, right? Precisely so that you can focus on a different one. I think it's a really powerful way to meet the truth and then as a result of that, you know, actually how the time to excel in something instead of spreading yourself ever more thin. And you also mentioned the importance of thinking in terms of seasons.

So there might be a certain season of your life where work is the primary focus and you let other things slide. And that's an intentional decision because the pressure to constantly be balanced at all times can sometimes just make things worse. Right. Absolutely. Because it sounds, work life balance sounds like you're going to find a sort of magical way of dividing up the 100% of your life into chunks. What it actually means in practice is the pressure to be 100% dedicated to your work and 100% involved in family life, dating, leisure activities,

and that just doesn't work on mathematical grounds in doing more than 100%. So it's a way of channeling and as a result kind of intensifying your efforts. Obviously there are limits. If you have kids, you can't decide to spend six months not feeding them. But within the limits, I think most people do have more room for making those decisions than they realize that they have. You also in the book talk about the importance of burning your bridges. Can you describe that? Yeah, right. This is another way in which we, well, the opposite of burning your bridges, which is keeping your options open is another way in which I think we try to maintain this feeling of omnipotent control over our lives, how we seek to feel like we're not actually sacrificing

anything in order to do anything else, all of which doesn't make sense in the context of a finite life, right? You are making sacrifices. Everything you do is a choice not to do everything else, but this practice of keeping your options open allows you to believe that that's going to happen. Because it's out of tune with how things actually are, it doesn't lead to more satisfying results and you can see this anecdotally, but also there are psychology studies that have been done that show that when people make a choice of something and they don't have the option of changing that choice, they are much happier than otherwise. I think all of us have this intuition that there's something in the world of sort of dating and online dating that is where

this comes into play. This idea that in a context where there is a sort of theoretically anyway, infinite number of choices, it becomes a lot more difficult. for people to settle on each other and to forge satisfying long-term relationships. Never mind that the business models of many of these platforms depend on people staying dissatisfied because then if you were satisfied, you'd stop using the platform. But, you know, it's been said before, it seems that for everyone these days who has so much of agony about when and with whom or if ever to settle down, that if you'd sort of grown up on an island with a choice of 20 members of your preferred sex as a partner,

you would have chosen one of them and been perfectly happy, right? Because there are limits to that, and I don't think that traditional, older historical times were all good at all. But, you know, there is this sense that, like, the existence of hypothetically infinite alternatives torments people about the choices that they do make. And so there's something very much to be said if you can, Although, you know, these days it has to be a sort of conscious effort because we live in these sort of situations.

So I think this is an argument in favor of trying to make big commitments in your life, even when you can't know how they're going to turn out, which actually you never can. You can never know how the next hour is going to turn out, but we kid ourselves that we can. And we hold off from making big commitments because we want to hang on to that feeling. And anyone who's had the experience of crossing a boundary like that that you can't go back from, buying a house, having a kid, there are various other ones. You know, like in Lifeway, it's really going to be difficult for you to go back and redo your decision. Almost always people find that they are much more relaxed as a result of having crossed that threshold because there's nothing to worry about now. It's like there's only one way to go, which is forwards into the consequences. of the choice that they have made.

And all the anxiety and stress turned out to be dependent on continuing to feel that there were other options open to them at that time. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared. Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens. Maybe you need serveware and cookware. And of course, holiday decor, all the stuff to make your home a great place to host

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your commercial payments a fifth-third better. One of the other concepts that you discuss in the book is the concept of too much convenience. How can there be too much convenience? Well, this is another example of the ways in which we full prey, I think, to this pressure to believe that we might be able to become sort of little gods with respect to time rather than wholehearted, full-hearted humans with respect to time. And that is this idea that like the main offering of countless goods and services now and pretty much the whole of Silicon Valley these days,

it's all targeted on this idea that there are tedious things that we have to do in our lives and that there are ways to either eliminate these things or speed them up greatly and that we will live much happier lives on the other side of that as a consequence. And as a number of people have pointed out, The problem here is that the decision about what is unnecessary and should be removed is, generally speaking, not being made by each of us on a conscious basis. It's being made for us. And then, secondly, it's very hard to know in advance when you sort of eliminate some

aspect of life, what aspect you would have actually valued. The idea is that there might be something we lose when you can order delivery food without out ever having to speak to a human being, when you can conduct so much of your life swiftly in a technologically-aided way, for a number of reasons. So one example is I live in the US, but have a lot of family in the UK.

And so when I fail to send people birthday cards or other things on time, I end up using these services that you now can get online where you go and design the card online and it's generated and printed locally in the UK and mail to them. And it's probably better than nothing. But I think, you know, this is an example where both I and the person receiving it kind of

know that what happened here was because I had this very low effort alternative open to me. I failed to, in a small way, become the kind of person who remembers my family members' birthdays on time. And something is kind of lost there, right? That if I had actually had to write a card by hand and put it in the mail, there would be a little bit more of a relationship going on there. Tim Wu, who's a writer and law professor who's written a lot about this stuff, also points out that we just end up doing the more convenient thing even if it's not what we want to do. He says he, as he puts it, you know, he prefers, in quotes, to brew his own coffee.

But there are various instant alternatives to this that are so easy that he never actually does the thing he prefers. Then you also get this problem where various other aspects of life can't be made more convenient. And so we start to hate them more and more and more. I think it was Tim Wu as well, who says that, you know, once you can pick your, once you can buy tickets for a concert on your phone without standing in line, it's even more aggravating to have to stand in line to vote in an election. So people are going to be more reluctant to go do that. There's this kind of problem where you sort of smooth out all the edges for all the rough edges from life. And then you kind of realize that actually rough edges are the bit where relationships get made and the, the part where we engage with the world and to be a perfectly optimized person benefiting

from all the convenience is ultimately to sort of remain in your apartment all day long, receiving your groceries at the door and watching Netflix on your own. You know, it's like there's something's not. That's right. I mean, we've had to do a lot of this in pandemic times. But I think that, you know, maybe that has been an opportunity for some people to discover that there are things that you've. felt like you might want to eliminate in your life that you maybe didn't. For some people,

it's even like commuting, you know, I mean, not for me, but some people, that inefficiency, that fact that you can't just tumble from your bed to your desk, but you have to sit on a subway train for half an hour. It turns out to be an opportunity to, you know, learn a new language or gather your thoughts, write in a journal. So it sounds as though convenience removes a forcing function that in some cases could force you to become a better version of yourself if you were to harness it correctly. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. I'm always a bit wary of this phrase forcing function that I now hear everywhere. But I also think like, you know, I don't want people to come away from this thinking that like the idea is that you have a strict doctrine of the kind of person you ought to be. And so you eliminate all the things in your life that are stopping you from becoming this highly virtuous person.

I think it is just literally that it is more enjoyable and fulfilling to do a lot of things that convenience wants to. The convenience tends towards wiping out and smoothing out. And so it's just sort of more fun to end up having to go meet someone in person just because it would have been possible to talk online or it's more fun to go to cook a meal for yourself, go buy the ingredients and try a new recipe than to get the delivery food. It may also make you a better person by for some definition of better person but I really think it can be more enjoyable as well. Given, and I guess this goes to the other theme of the book, given that life isn't that endless series of ands, what strikes me is with the example of getting the ingredients yourself

and cooking a meal for yourself, that comes at the cost of something else. Again, it goes back to the question, how do you think clearly about those tradeoffs? Thinking clearly about tradeoffs is really above all a matter of this perspective shift that helps you understand that they are already happening, that you are already choosing. This is why I think this message is ultimately liberating, right? This is absolutely not advice to turn away from a point. path of transcending all your limitations and to just be despondent about it instead. It's this kind of exhilarating, turning towards the way things really are, which is that every single

choice you make closes off a million other possibilities, and it always does anyway. And once you can sort of live with some awareness of that, I mean, in the book I grapple with and try my best to translate for readers the shockingly complicated philosophy of Martin Heidegger who's had problems besides being shockingly complicated like being an actual Nazi

but I do briefly talk about his idea of being towards death. This is this concept that like there is a state of a way of existing that sort of carries within it the awareness that you are finite that every choice you make is like

taking another path on a choice of endlessly proliferating path, but you only take one. And then after that, you are limited and the ones you can take based on the ones that you've already taken. And there's definitely something scary about that. I think that a lot of our fondness for distraction, especially digital distraction, is based on trying to sort of avoid that feeling, based on trying to sort of feel limitless, like we're not really, that we're not really charged with the responsibility of deciding what to do with the next hour that we will never get again. But when you get there a little bit more frequently, it lends a really sort of precious feeling to life. I quote Sam Harris,

the writer and podcaster, you know, talking about how our lives are completely full of things that we're doing for the last time and that we will never know in the moment that we are doing them for the last time. And he talks somewhere about picking up his daughter, who is still a child. It's like, well, there is going to be a last time that he does that. because parents don't tend to pick up their 40-year-old daughters. And that's just shocking to a parent, right? But on the other hand, it's inevitable. And in a sense, you can think of every single moment of our lives like this, right?

It's the last time we get that moment. But I really think that when you sort of allow yourself to see that there is no choice in this matter, there's a great sort of sweetness to it. There's definitely a sort of element of sadness, which is, I think, just the sadness of being human. But if you can let yourself feel that and have it percolate through you, it gives depth to life, right? It does not mean that you go through your life with a sort of white knuckle. Oh my goodness, I've got to seize every day. Am I getting enough out of today?

Do I need to go base jumping at the weekend to make sure that I've really carpaid the DM? It's not that. It's this much softer ability to just put one foot in front of the other, take risks on projects that you might have been nervous about whether they'd work out. because, you know, now is the time and perfection is guaranteed not to happen, so you might as well start, and to reach out to other people and to live more presently, not in this kind of, oh my goodness, I've got to be present in the moment kind of thing, but just because, like, what else is that? You close the book by discussing our cosmic insignificance, which is quite a heavy topic for a Monday or whenever people are going to be listening to this. I mean, yeah, and I indicate, I call it Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, because I want to make the argument that it's actually really energizing and relaxing and empowering rather than the cause for a huge existential breakdown. There's this kind of persistent notion in a lot of self-help culture, a lot of productivity, advice, that what you have to be doing is kind of mattering in your life in some very extraordinary way. that is significant to the world as a whole that's going to change the world.

It's going to live on long after you've died. You're going to put a dent in the universe. That's the famous Steve Jobs quote. And I explore the work of a philosopher called Ida Landau, who makes the point that what ends up happening here is not that this suddenly causes us to summon a genius equivalent to Shakespeare's or Mozart's into our work. I mean, what actually happens is because this standard of meaning, is so out of sync with the fact that we're here for 4,000 weeks in the middle of the infinite

eons of the cosmos, because it's so out of tune with where we really are, it's just a recipe for endless dissatisfaction and despair, right? If you have told yourself that your novel is no good unless it's received as well as Tolstoy's, or if you believe that on some subliminal level, and yet there's only like one Tolstoy every hundred years in the whole history of humanity, of someone or maybe, you know, a few more genius level authors, but not very many out of the billions of people, you're not encouraging yourself to actually be that person, which, of course, you might theoretically be, but you're setting the bar so high that, like, demoralization and a sense of meaninglessness is going to be the result. And so Landau argues that actually

what we could start by doing is really expanding our definition of what is a meaningful thing to do. And one of the things that we can decouple from the sense of meaning is the sense of extraordinaryness. I think this is very hard to do in modern society where we sort of worship fame as much as we do. And we're standing out from everyone else has become the key distinguisher. But it doesn't really follow, right? I mean, it does not follow that something that is deeply meaningful has to be unusual. And in fact, every person who's ever found it meaningful to be in a relationship, to be a relationship, to be a parent to be a member of a religion, to sing and a choir, there is nothing unique or extraordinary

about these things. These are sort of universal things that humans have always done since the beginning of time, and yet they are deeply fulfilling. So one of the lessons here, I think, in tailoring your definition of a meaningful life to the reality of the human situation is that maybe some very mundane and ordinary things are where you could find deep meaning. Maybe it is things that you're already doing in your life, but that you kind of had been assuming weren't a meaningful way to spend your life. And now you look at them and you think, well, that counts as much as anything else. And I don't think that the result of this, as I suspect, some sort of self-help gurus might say is to reduce the chance that you might then, you know,

also be a completely unique and extraordinary and world-famous, world-changing person. I think that it means that you can drop this unrealistic struggle, sort of accept that none of us, including Steve Jobs, is going to have put a dent in the universe if you look at it on the scale of, you know, the millions and millions of years that the planet is going to outlast us. And you can just drop that whole weird, weirdly overdemanding definition of what it, what counts as a meaningful life and actually get started on doing. meaningful things that are possible here, now, and today. And so that is, that is pure motivation and an energizing message, not an existential crisis message at all. The joy in the ordinary. Right, right. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your work?

My website is Oliverbergman.com. And if you go to 4,000 Weeks Book, 4,000weeksbook.com, You can go straight to the page about the book, and I'm on Twitter at Oliver Boehner. Thank you, Oliver. What are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are six. Number one, stop trying to optimize your time. This is counterintuitive, but by optimizing your time, you're focusing on the minute details of the day rather than the big picture. Insignificant tasks, such as emails, may receive a disproportionate degree of time.

And we run the risk of falling into what Oliver refers to as the importance trap. The more supposedly optimized and productive you become, the more you focus on all the little stuff that doesn't really matter so much. You sort of tell yourself that the things that really matter, they need time and attention and focus, and first you need to get all this other stuff out of the way. So you end up with a life that's constantly spent sort of clearing the decks, focusing on stuff that feels like it needs to be done now,

but it's not really the main event. And yet, the input to that system is infinite, so you're never going to clear the decks. Avoiding the importance trap, the illusion of importance, requires becoming comfortable with discomfort, leaving things undone or unfinished. There are always trade-offs, even in the small moments. So getting clear on your priorities can help you overcome this discomfort.

If you know that you have more important work to do, you can focus on that, which matters most, and get comfortable letting small things slide. This reminds me actually of a tip that I read at the very end of the four-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss, where he talks about how as a mental practice, it's important to incur small losses. So the example that he gives is if you've got an overdue library book and you're going to incur a $5 fee, incur it. Just let it happen because you need to train yourself.

not to rearrange your day in order to avoid something that is so trivial. And by training your mind to do that, by training yourself to do that, by not optimizing everything, you free yourself up to focus on the bigger picture. And so that's the first key takeaway. Stop trying to optimize everything. Key takeaway number two, limit your works in progress. And here is how Oliver describes this tactic. The basic idea is just that you're going to select a very small number of key projects that you're focused on at any one time, and you're going to say it's three, and you're not going to let a fourth one in until one of them has been completed thereby freeing up a slot in your limited three projects.

Oliver mentions that you can apply this in numerous ways, not only to the amount of projects that you'll work on, but to the amount of... of to-do lists that you have, or the number of slots on a given to-do list. This is the practice of making our limitations conscious. It forces us to prioritize, to say no, and to pace ourselves, and it keeps us from agreeing, even mentally, to an endless series of ands. It's a tactic fundamentally grounded in reality. We can only focus on so many things at one time, so why not? Make a rule impose limitations that you'll only work on three projects at a time,

or get three big tasks done per workday. This can alleviate guilt or pressure that you feel to get everything done all of the time. And so that is the second key takeaway. Limit the number of things that you're working on. Key takeaway number three. Decide in advance what you'll fail at. This tactic has echoes of the approach described by the one thing. So if you listen to our January 1st, 2021 episode, it was an interview with

Jeff Woods, he's the host of the One Thing podcast, and he recommended choosing one thing to focus on and making peace with the fact that that's where you're going to spend your time, your energy, your attention, your effort. Oliver says that this tactic helps us embrace seasonality. You're not choosing to fail at something for the rest of your life. You're deliberately choosing to fail at something right now while you're ramping up your efforts elsewhere. You can think of this like budgeting your money and choosing to put all of your savings towards retirement or towards a travel fund or towards college for your kids. You've decided that there is one overarching goal that is the most important to you

and you want to hit it within a particular time frame. Maybe you want to max out your entire Roth IRA contribution, the full $6,000 limit. You want to max that out in the first three months of the year. So that's what you do in Q. one at the beginning of the year, you put every ounce of energy there, and then boom, once you're done, you check off the box, you're done, and then you can move on to the next thing, right? So, you decide what's most important to you, and by extension, you decide what you're not going to do, and you hyper-focus on one thing at a time. This is just another way of avoiding this constant

sense of struggle oscillating with dismay when it turns out that you are, in fact, a finite human, and can't do 35 hours of something in a 24-hour day, just these sort of strategic decisions about what you're going to try to maximize and what you're very explicitly not going to try to maximize. So ask yourself, what are you okay with failing at for a little bit? What is worth giving up so that you can achieve something else? That is key takeaway number three. Key takeaway number four, burn more bridges.

Oliver says that leaving all of your options open is a way of maintaining the illusion of control over your life, but it's only illusory, because these limitless options often control us or get us stuck. So Oliver recommends Burning Bridges, make it so that you have no choice but to move forward. There are psychology studies that have been done that show that when people make a choice of something and they don't have the option of changing that choice. They are much happier than otherwise. Oliver says this is an argument for making big commitments in your life. We will never know for sure how something will turn out.

And instead of worrying about it, or deliberating on the choice that we need to make, or getting mired in endless analysis paralysis, make a decision and move forward. That's what this tactic is fundamentally. And when we do that, we find that our worry and anxiety, EASES a bit because we're just focused on the next step. Plus, taking action means gaining knowledge.

As long as a decision doesn't have extremely severe consequences or implications, you're better off moving forward as that's the only way to clearly assess the decision. At the end of the day, you're going to learn by doing. And so that is key takeaway number four. Make the decision, burn the bridges, move on. Key takeaway number five. Consider scrapping conveniences once in a while, particularly if those conveniences lead you into becoming the type of person that you don't want to be. Oliver makes the point that when we have convenience options, we tend to take them, but sometimes something gets lost in the process.

He gives the example of ordering a birthday card online that can be delivered electronically versus handwriting a card and putting it in the mailbox. Now, everyone has their own personal preferences, but if you identify as and what we want to see yourself as, the type of person who remembers birthdays and does something special, maybe does something handwritten or handmade, who does something that's more than just a Facebook post that says, happy birthday, if that's the type of person that you want to be, then being able to take the more convenient option can sometimes lead you away from yourself. lead you away from developing and practicing the tiny attributes about you that makes you special. This kind of problem where you sort of smooth out all rough edges from life, and then you kind of realize that actually rough edges are sort of the bit where relationships get made and the part where we sort of engage with the world. And to be a kind of perfectly optimized person benefiting from all the convenience is ultimately to sort of remain in your apartment.

all day long, receiving your groceries at the door and watching Netflix on your own. As Oliver and I discussed, during the pandemic, a lot of us spent all day sitting at home, getting groceries delivered and watching Netflix, and really, we kind of missed the small inconveniences. We missed the inconvenience of needing a reason to shower and wear pants. So if I can summarize Key Takeaway Number Five, and this is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but given that we are hopefully maybe coming out of a pandemic right now, the key takeaway here really is take a shower and put on some pants. And that leads us perfectly to the sixth and final key takeaway,

which is to redefine what a meaningful life looks like. Many of us have these pie-in-the-sky definitions of what a meaningful life looks like that's often a copy-paste goal fed by some fantasy spurred by Instagram. But it's completely out of sync with our 4,000, week's reality and it's a recipe for disaster. Of course we feel dissatisfied when our expectations are unmoored from reality. We don't necessarily need to do something that is unusual or insta worthy in order for it to be meaningful and joyful. It doesn't really follow, right? I mean, it does not follow that something that is deeply meaningful has to be unusual. And in fact, every person

who's ever found it meaningful to be in a relationship, to be a parent, to be member of a religion, to sing and a choir. There's nothing unique or extraordinary about these things. These are sort of universal things that humans have always done since the beginning of time, and yet they are deeply fulfilling. And if we zoom out at the 30,000 foot level, what we're really talking about here are values. Do your current actions and lifestyle align with your values? At the broadest level, That's what the 4,000 weeks conversation, and frankly, the entire Afford Anything, Not Everything, conversation is all about. Those are six key takeaways from this conversation with Oliver Berkman.

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