The Daily Stoic - The Lie That Keeps You Feeling Behind Every Single Day | Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Most productivity advice promises that if you just find the right system, you’ll finally catch up. In today’s episode, Ryan sits down with Oliver Burkeman who explains why that feeling never arrives and why that is not a personal failure. They discuss the productivity lie that keeps so many people feeling behind every single day, how hustle culture quietly creates anxiety, and why the goal of getting “on top of everything” is impossible. Oliver explains why urgency often makes life worse, not better, how saying no is harder than it should be, and what actually changes when you stop trying to win time and start accepting your limits.Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, and Meditations for Mortals. Follow Oliver on Instagram and X @OliverBurkemanGrab signed copies of Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped. helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Thoak podcast.

I sound a little bit different because I am sick. Our whole family has basically been sick since Christmas off and on. I think we went through Flu B, then Strep. My oldest actually had strep twice. And then now through Flu A. so it's a little rough, but maybe, hopefully this is not symbolic of the of the year to come, but it is what it is, and we will get through it. I want to read you something real fast. Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands this to be good news. It's not that facing finitude isn't

painful. That's why the quest for control is so alluring. Confronting your non-negotiating your non-negotiated. limitations means accepting that life entails tough choices and sacrifices, that regret is always a possibility, as is disappointing others, and that nothing you create in the world will ever measure up to the perfect standards in your head. But these truths are also the very things that liberate you to act and to experience resonance. That's a passage from Oliver Berkman's latest book, Meditation for Mortals, four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. You might know his other big bestseller, 4,000 weeks, time management for mortals. I've actually known Oliver for a long time.

I was trying to remember. We had lunch or dinner. Was it in New York, L.A.? I don't remember. We met before, but he came out and did the podcast in person. And it was lovely. It's been awesome to watch his books blow up. He was a columnist for many years at The Guardian.

He had a weekly column called This Column Will Change Your Life. And he wrote a book before 4,000 Weeks called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. And I think you're really going to like this episode. I'm keeping the intro short today because I am running out of voice. So I'll let my conversation, which I recorded with Oliver not too long ago, do most of the talking. And if you haven't read 4,000 weeks or meditations for mortals, you should. We've got signed copies at the painted porch.

You can follow Oliver on Instagram and on Twitter at Oliver Berkman. I remember with the antidote, which I have here. Amazing. Oh, an old school edition. Yeah, we were trying to find. I was like, what does it look like? And so we went on Amazon to like see the cover. It's been reissued since then.

Yeah. And I figured. So when did this come out? 2012? But I remember in your columns, too, you were somewhat. cynical slash skeptical of self-help. Like, I think you rightfully sort of were criticizing the excesses or the nonsense of it and the, you know, the manifestation side of it and the secret and whatever. And then it's been interesting with 4,000 weeks, which became like a bonafide hit.

Yeah. You're now one of those guys. True. Yeah. And I wondered what that feels like for you. I mean, I've definitely been on a journey from cynicism to sincerity. That is a real thing that happens. as you get older apparently. I'm learning.

But it's curious because I don't think I pretend at any point in any of these books that I've sort of found the perfect solution to life and all you have to do is follow me. And I think that's also antithetical to the philosophy that I'm exploring anyway. But yeah, there is a certain sense of that. And one thing you learn or one thing I've found is that like I have a very strong British desire to be self-deprecating in response to anyone like investing. any kind of authority in me. Who me? Yeah.

It's not actually that helpful for people to be like that. You don't want to become a cult leader. Right. But you're also like taking on a little bit of that is actually quite, it's helpful for people. You meet the people who are sort of true believers. And by true believers, I mean true believers in themselves. Like they're able to get up and just pontificate about how someone should live their life and what they should.

And you go like, first off, they're just, they just stole all this stuff from other people. They just, like, their real skill here is their confident shamelessness, their ability to sort of act like they invented any of this, even though the Greeks invented it and the Romans invented it and the religious thinkers invented it. But they're just able to get up there and be like, this is me and of course you should follow me. Then there's the other part, and I've met a bunch of these people, and I'm sure you have two, where the sort of journalists who are writing skeptically about like the, and then they wonder why. people don't buy those books. Like nobody cares enough about this space to read a book about the space and how the space isn't a value. Right, right. Yeah.

Like I think about that when you read books or it's like, the paradox of this or whatever. And you're like, so you're just saying you haven't figured it out. Like people don't read enough to read a book that's like it's complicated. So there's this kind of middle ground that's pretty rare of like, hey, I'm writing this for myself. and I am as much a traveler on this road as you. But here's kind of what smarter people than me have said, and here's what's worked for me, and maybe I'll work for you.

Yeah, no, totally. That's exactly it, right? I've seen people say different things. One is like the idea of being, maybe it was you, the idea of being like one and a half steps ahead of the reader. Oh, that's a good. That wasn't me, but I like it. Kind of writing for people who absolutely have just as much,

intellectual capacity and sensitivity to reach all these conclusions themselves, but I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time on it. Yes. And, you know. Well, you're good at explaining it. Right. And I think I do have a skill for synthesizing

and explaining and things like that. So it's in that spirit that you're helping people. There's also a line that David Brooks quotes in one of his books, I should really say, who originated the quote, but that's where I found it about how writers are like beggars telling other beggars where we have found bread. which is also another really good idea here.

It's like there's a reason some of these things are eternal truths that crop up in eight different wisdom or spiritual traditions. And if you can sort of unpack them and find value in them and pass that on, you're just doing a bit more of that same thing, I guess. And I think like in the engine world, it's not that the ideas were obvious enough, but they were new enough that the person coming up with them and writing them was often the same person. Yeah. And in our world, which is where we have an abundance of information, actually the rare skill is, not the rare skill, but a necessary skill slash trade is the ability to effectively communicate. Yeah. And take things that do work and are of value and make it clear that they do work and are of value to people who wouldn't ordinarily think that, right? And so that writing as a skill is maybe what you bring. to the table. I think it's what I bring to the table. It's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff, but I'm pretty good at putting it in a context or a framework that is of use. Yeah. I mean, you very evidently are. And I think that that's, I think that that's probably

true of me too. I mean, the thing that I always, you come back to as a guiding light is that it is ultimately like therapy for myself as well. And if I'm ever sort of at a loss about what broad subject areas I should be focusing on or even just things like what to write this newsletter about. The question to come back to always is like what's the thing that's really been bugging me these last few weeks or that I feel like I had some kind of insight about and I'm perpetually amazed at how many people then reply

saying like it's like you're inside my head. Why did you come to this insight right now? And obviously there's a huge amount of self-selection going on in terms of who subscribes to things and who reads books, who reads specific books. But it's kind of interesting, right, as well, that, like, there is such thing as the zeitgeist and there is such thing as, like, particular forms of suffering that seem to be very widespread at any given moment and ways through them that seem to help. That's the weird thing about the Daily Stoke, because the Daily Stoke is attached to dates.

Right. And then the email, too, obviously, goes out every day. But people are like, how did you know? Or they're like, did you think about this? because like what's happening in October is usually this. I was literally thinking like, how many do I have left to get to 366? You know, and then I was like, this one's too similar to the one from three days ago. So let's just shuffle the deck a little bit more.

And it's like horoscopes, but in a good way. People see what they need to see. Right. And in forging that connection, they've done something real for themselves, right? Right. It reminds me of one of the arguments I've seen about dream analysis in psychotherapy, where there are people who believe that these are deep important messages from the unconscious and people who believe that it's random synaptic firings that have no meaning.

But actually, like, taking a dream as if it might have something to tell you and journaling about it, is a great thing to do utterly regardless of which one of those is true, right? Even if it is random, because your interpretations are certainly not going to be random. Well, yeah, even like analysis of literature, right? You could be right, you could be wrong. The important thing is that you sat down and thought about what this means. Yes, exactly. And just like there's no answer to most of these like Zen paradoxes either, right?

It's the thinking about them instead of letting your mind wander or think about 500 other things. That's actually the part of the Enlightenment. Nobody actually knows what the sound of one hand clapping is. Right. Those questions are designed to stop you short. make you actually be in reality and feel things and think things. Right, yeah. That relates to a much wider sort of thing that I'm always coming back to in my work, I think,

which is, right, that this isn't all leading up to a specific end point where you get to sit back and relax and say, I've done all the inner work now. And now for the remaining, whatever, how many years are left in my life, I can just be like, plain sailing and not really have to engage. And you wouldn't want that anyway. Well, I was, because I just did this book on Wisdom and I was thinking, I was sort of saying wisdom is kind of like the horizon, like you think you're getting closer to it and it's always a little bit further away. And that struck me as true at first. And then I was thinking,

but if I were to stand here and decide to walk towards the horizon and I walk for 30 minutes or an hour, yeah, I didn't get any closer to the horizon. But if I look back, I'm further than where I was when I started. I've definitely covered around. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea is not that, yeah, you arrive at any kind of enlightenment or wisdom or, serenity, but you can certainly be better off than you were. You can have covered some ground. That's the idea. Totally.

Yeah, I completely agree. I think sometimes people do think that because a book was published, you arrived somewhere as opposed to the book being just an encapsulation of part of that journey. And by the way, you can backtrack and get hopelessly lost and all these other things. Yeah, and that was also evident. And I had sort of contact with a few people after 4,000 weeks. really began to take off offering to help me put together specific kinds of courses. And I have done a bit of things like that.

And I am interested in the general domain. But with one or two of these people, there was an implication in what they were proposing that we worked on together that you could offer people the big ticket version of this that would somehow include like the secret that I left out of the book. And it's like, no, that is all that I had at the point that I finished writing that. Also, like, you wrote a book about mortality. So this isn't like a simple, small question. Right.

Like this is literally the, I mean, Cicero said to philosophize this is to learn how to die. So this is the whole point of it. Like this is the whole point of life that psychedelics are aimed at and therapy is aimed at and religion is aimed at. And every philosopher has ever lived is thought about. There's not like a six module course to figure it out. And I think that is a little bit of a difference. I do notice like people who read a lot of self-help and then people who don't. Is it sometimes self-help people think that books are answers?

Whereas like people who maybe read literature and history and biography understand that a book is just a book. Like I have read an embarrassing amount of books about the Civil War. And every time I think I don't need to read anymore, I read another one and I go, I didn't even think about it. Like you realize like, oh, this isn't a thing that you have read about. It's a thing you are reading about. Yeah. And if you want to take a course to learn more or to maybe go in deeper depths in some of the of the things, sure, but again, to the different kinds of people, like the guru and the cult leader

can get up there and go, I have the answers. And a more intellectually honest person isn't able to go much further than like, here's some stuff I've been thinking about. Yeah, no, absolutely. And this reminds me also of like this question of what is the role of techniques and methodologies and things? Because I think a lot about this, because people really do want, and so do I, you know, like tricks and practices to help deepen their understanding or their productivity. or whatever it might be. And yet there's a whole wing of self-help that implies that the right collection of practices is the answer. And if you can just get those ones and do those ones every day for the rest of your life, then everything's fine. It's incredibly clear to me that the thing,

firstly, that the thing that matters are the sort of the principles or the perspective shifts. And then there are like 10,000 techniques you could come up with that would embody those things. So if you're making the argument, as I do in the new book for a sort of, less structured approach to organizing your time. So what does that mean in practice? Well, I can give you about 10 different options and you can come up with another 10 yourself. But the important thing is the point I'm making. And then also that even the set of principles is going to evolve through your life, right? I mean, it's not going to be or be appropriate for different people at different times in their lives. It's not going to be completely timeless truths. Although maybe you disagree because

I feel like there is an element in the way that you write that perhaps you are getting down to the of handful of kind of claims about a meaningful life that really are universally and timelessly true as opposed to, you know, contingent. I see like this with people who want to be writers all the time. They want to know, like, what programs do you use? And, you know, like, what pen do you use? And, you know, like, a lot of it is just doing it. And the people who do it really well do it very differently than the other people that do it very well. And there's, there really is not much more to it than doing it, you know. And so, Sometimes people can kind of get obsessed with the tactics and miss that it's largely the principles or the strategies.

But yeah, when people ask me about Stoicism, they're like, what are the five Stoic exercises? And it's like there's a number of things that the Stoic seem to talk about a lot that we could sort of pull out as strategies. But mostly they went to classes, talked to people about things, read books, and wrote books. Right. Like it's just a process of thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking. And like even the other interesting thing is like knowing the principles and knowing the principles are very different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like I've more or less known everything that the Stoics have said since I was 20 years old.

But my relationship to them and my ability to sort of understand what they mean and get any sort of real relief or insight or direction from them has obviously evolved quite a bit. You know, it's the same thing. It's like if you look at where I start, if you look at where I am, it's not that impressive. If you look at where I am compared to where I started, I've made some progress. Yeah, no, absolutely. I say something similar because it's like, yeah, I was like an anxious wreck at like college.

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looks like, and right now Momentus is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first order with promo code Daily Stoic. Head over to LiveMomenus.com and use promo code Daily Stoic for up to 35% off your first order. That's livemometus.com promo code Daily Stoic. So how many days a week do you think you wake up feeling like you're behind? Because you talk about that a lot. Yeah. Again, that's one of these these days things. So I think I feel this a lot less intensely than I did. And I think when I do wake up that way, I'm more likely to have the presence of mind to sort of see through that thought. Because a big part of what I'm trying to argue is there's something kind of, there's something mistaken about that idea, right? Not because

you're actually really great and you can do all the things, but precisely because you can't. So that sort of feeling that there's a problem with you because you have not got your arms around infinity is a that's not a sensible way to think about the relationship between a finite human and infinity but to answer the question no i you know i think i don't think i wake up feeling that way most mornings but it definitely comes and what helps me in those kind of situations is well this you know i have this morning pages that's the one thing that i've like religiously done for years now and i've done it not because i've had great self-discipline but because it so obviously improves the quality in my day that I want to do it. And that will be the place where I will

sort of metabolize that feeling if it's deep in me. I'm often fascinated by the fact that sometimes it seems you wake up early in the morning and that feels like the sort of wisest and calmest and most focused you'll ever be. And sometimes it's like whatever's happened in your sleep. It's like twisted you up in the wrong direction and you start from a sort of earlier stage of your psychological evening. Would you ever wake up like and you had a dream about like your spouse and you're just like angry like or they're angry with you it's kind of like that like clearly you you got in some sort of emotional place or vibe that like you have to do some real work to get out of because the thing that you're upset about is not real right you know you're

like you just did this horrible thing to me in my mind and I know it's not real but I still I woke up feel while I was asleep it was real and now I'm having the and that there's probably a metaphor in there. It's just like you're having the impression, the feeling that whatever, but it's not actually true. Yeah. And so you made it up. So you have to kind of work yourself out of that. And I think you can do like a life version of that too. Like you wake up and you're like everything's shit or I'm behind or like you can wake up in an emotional place that is not based on anything you've had time to experience. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. But it's real for you in a sense. And so it needs your attention. And you can you can certainly make it real by how you treat people, right? So it's like

if you immediately pick a fight with your kids or you go straight to your inbox and you decide to take this, that or the other personally, like the world will oblige you if that's how you want to feel today. Right. Because it's it's all the overlay that you're putting on things, right? I mean, the back foot feeling is definitely something I write about a lot. But the other sort of side of that, it's the same point really, is just, I. used to have this sense, and I occasionally will fall back into it these days, of time, sort of these kind of tranches of time that I'm sort of moving through in my life so that I'm, see if I can convey this properly. So, like, I would be working, and it would be my

turn to do school pickup at 3.30, and then from 3.30 till, like, after dinner, that's, I'm going to be focusing on parenting. And as 3.30 approaches, it's like this thing is moving towards you through the day. It's like in some sort of like James Bond movie or something, right? The walls of the room are getting smaller and smaller. And I would get more and more sort of stressed about the time running out and resentful of this thing that I have to do. But also, like most days, I really enjoy doing that thing. Certainly it's very, very high up in my values of what I want to give my life to.

And it's just the fact of relating to time in this particular sort of finitude is a problem way that sort of defines that upcoming thing as as something to bemoan. Because yeah, somewhere in the back of my mind or in some like pre unverbal part of my unconscious, there is this assumption that it shouldn't be the case that tradeoffs are involved. Yes, yeah, you're just arguing with the reality that you can't do two things. at the same time. Well, I think about that, and that's why I was saying, like, the key is just to say no to things, because it's like, okay, so if I get resentful when there's, like, things in the calendar, but I also understand that, like, life is things you have to do. Did I eat up the patience that I have with that because I agreed to this call and this meeting and this thing that could have been an email? And then so, you know, I'm like, okay, this is my publisher, I got to be nice, you know,

where I got to talk to the accountant about this thing or this person really wanted to just hop on the phone for three minutes, even though they've done this to me before and it's never three minutes and it never actually needed to happen. So I did all that. And then 3.30 comes along and I got to pick up my kid. And now I'm like, what the fuck?

Will anyone let me work? You know? And it's like, I should be polite and accommodating and patient with the one thing that I like doing and actually matters and is, by the way, totally my responsibility, is, you know, picking them up from school and having fun together. Yeah.

But before that, I've used it up on a bunch of trivial shit. And so it's like when I pull up my calendar and there's not much in it, I'm like, today is a great day, you know? And when it's, when it's there's a bunch of things, I'm like, you know. And so part of it, I think, is just like the decisions you made beforehand. Yeah. So you're not having to use like your Zen mastery of your emotions to deal with this situation that was you voluntarily put yourself into. Right. And I think what, yes, I mean,

what that brings up for me when I think about that is like, first of all, I think like, isn't it crazy? Because we are both in a situation through great good fortune where we really can decide to say no to lots of things that come in and it's not going to be calamitous and people are going to understand. And yet, maybe it's different for you, but the weird stuff from childhood of like, I've sort of got to be like obedient to these different, like, and the way you can give like basically everybody in the world some sort of a strange quasi-parental authority over you, absolutely disaster. There's this really fascinating exchange that Seneca talks about where he tells a story about Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great wants to, to conquer some

territory and, you know, he's been so successful that the leaders of that country come together and they go, they call a meeting with him and they go, look, if you don't attack us, we'll like, we'll, like, we'll give you this part, you know? And Seneca quotes Alexander going like, I didn't come all the way across the world to take what the leftovers you're willing to give me. He's like, I'm going to take what I want and give you the leftovers. Now, obviously, this is a brutal, horrendous idea. But Seneca's using it as a metaphor or analogy to go, this is how we have to think about

philosophy and self-improvement, etc. That you don't, like, commit yourself to all these professional goals. and all these activities and all this stuff. And then you give a little bit left over to meditation, philosophy, reflection, quiet, stillness, whatever you want to call it. It's the other way around. Yeah. That's the main thing. Yeah.

And then you can, if you have anything left over that you can spare, you can give it to this random phone call or whatever. Yeah. And so he's basically just saying that we have it precisely backwards. That, and most people, myself included, have some dynamic version of this dynamic at home, which is like, You promise the bulk of your time to professional things, and then you give your kids the little bit of leftover. The office is closed today. I can hang out with you or whatever. And then we go, but I do this all for my family. My family is my number one priority. And it's like, the calendar doesn't lie. It's the exact opposite. Revealed preference. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah, no, I agree and I struggle with it all the time. Of course. And that's what really struck me is that like I don't want to say no to something. It's bad even where I really don't want to do it. Like, I remember I was CCed on some email once. Someone had asked someone I knew to do something. And the guy just responded, hard pass. And I was like, wow. I love it. You know, like, if I could ever do that, I would be so proud of myself. But he was not just no, but just like, not interested at all. But we find ourselves not wanting to be rude to these people. Yeah. But you'll be really rude to a nine-year-old. They have no say.

Like the consequences for the nine-year-old is what they're going to think when they're a 39-year-old. Yeah. That's a long way away. So you're not thinking about that. You know, so you're like, yeah, sure, I'll do this thing. Yeah. And I mean, I think I am better at saying no to things than I used to be. But it doesn't get easy.

And again and again, I'm amazed by how okay people are with it in certain contexts. Because in certain contexts, they were just having to go, see if you were interested. Yes. I've even had a few contexts where, because of the stuff that I write about, where where people sort of respond with relief because it's like if you just done this, then like, it might not have been living your philosophy. It's not that they were testing you, but they're like, they're like, actually Kissinger had this thing about.

He was like early on in your career, you're worried that you're boring people and then you get to a place of power influence and they worry about boring you. Yeah, yeah. And then like you get to a place if you're lucky or if you've talked about these things, where then you say no to stuff, and the people are like, I'm so proud of you. It's right. Well, I wish that if you had seen the ringer that you just put me through, you would not be so proud and maybe you could have just not done this.

I had to talk to like six people to get them to confirm that I shouldn't do. Yeah. And then the other thing that never seems to get easier is the complete impossibility of properly judging how long anything will take anyway, right? So there are plenty of occasions where I say yes to things. And I know all of this stuff about saying no. And I'm like, right, but I'm taking a sober decision. This is 20 minutes of my life.

And of course it isn't. Yeah. Yeah, right, right. You agree. You think, oh, it's one hour talk, but you got to fly there the night before. And then you got to fly home. And so it's like, wait, I just, I just, that was a 36 hour commitment that I just did. There's a lot to be said.

I mean, it's a well-known thing, but there's a lot to be said for that question, for asking yourself whether you would, whether you would, whether you, be looking forward to it or say yes to it if it was happening tomorrow or today when you're dealing with things that are a year or two out. I find that is very good for surfacing like, oh, no, I can exactly imagine the mindset I'm going to be in the night before this thing. So maybe listen to that. Yeah, but it never, you can get better at it and you can, you can create more barriers and rules and sort of systems, but it's always, it's a difficult thing. to do. Right. And like just to get a little bit sort of maybe overwrought about it, I think it's

difficult ultimately because it is a tiny little bit of facing mortality, right? It's a tiny little bit of experiencing the awful truth of our limit. But it is hard because you're like, okay, it's only an hour. And then you're like, but it's an hour, you know? And then if you thought about everything in that light, you'd be paralyzed also. Sometimes people, like, I think people who haven't read 4,000 weeks but who know the title and know what it refers to. So I'm talking about like, you know, drive time radio interviews who can't be expected to read any of the things that they're talking to people about. To be clear, I have read. I have not including you. Not only have I read it. I read the galley. I'm certainly not including you in this.

Like, and this in a way is the fault of the titling, right? You might assume that what followed from that is like, oh my God, time is really short. We've got to think very, very self-consciously about the limitations of time all the time and pack our lives with the most extraordinary and or inspiring things we can. And I'm always at pains to be like, no, no, no. To the extent that I have gone through a perspective shift here and to the extent that I can take the reader on that shift, it's relaxing, ultimately. It's like, it's a relief. Because as long as you're thinking about that sort of, you know, exactly what am I doing with this hour of my life, exactly what am I doing with that hour of my life. Even though you're doing it out of an understanding of the limits of your life,

you're still doing it with that desire to somehow, you know, triumph over the finitude rather than kind of falling completely into it and saying like, you're so finite, such a large proportion of the things you're capable of thinking you might want to do, you're never going to get to do. It's so not a fair fight from the very beginning that you get to kind of like not fight that fight. Yeah, Memento Mori should both create a sense of urgency and make you slow down. Right. Like the famous passage in meditation's remarks Surrealist is saying, you know, as you touch your child in at night, save yourself, like they may not make it to the morning. He's not like, so get bedtime done, you know, fast. He's saying the exact opposite. He's saying just slow it down.

This is the present is an eternity. Right. And the idea might be that life is short so you can't afford to rush. And what are you rushing towards? You're rushing towards death. So slow, slow it down. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's not working if it's making you more anxious. Right. Because that's a waste of time and energy and not in your control. Like, I think about that when you, you know, you talk to people who are like, they have terminal cancer and so the doctors tell them it's like six months to a year. Well, I just think about like, what are they thinking when the airplane lands and then the pilot goes, sorry, folks, there's another plane at the gate and we're going to have to wait till they back and you're just like, 40 fucking minutes.

What the fuck? Right. Like, is that what they're thinking? Or is it probably more of a, is there 40 minutes? Right. And I mean, I feel like people have very different experiences of that being in that situation, right? Some people sort of do go through the transformation and some people really don't.

But if you do, I think, yeah, you can certainly, I can certainly imagine, I believe, sense in which that's like, you know, that reality is as alive in the plane that's waiting for the, that is filled with aliveness and potential. as any other bit of reality. It's a, you're there. It's not fake life compared to something else. It may be less pleasant in all sorts of ways than once you're out of the plane. But so, yeah, I think you can.

Like, I try to remind myself when I take my kids, like on trips and stuff. I go, like, this is part of the vacation too. It doesn't start when we arrive at the guided tour. Yeah. Like the car ride to the airport, the time waiting at the airport, the time on the airplane. Like, this is all part of the trip. So enjoy that, you know, and don't make that. that miserable or else you're putting a lot of pressure on the dinner reservation.

Totally. And I'd be interested to talk about that idea of urgency, actually, because I have a lot of trouble with the whole concept of urgency. And I've written newsletters in the past, like basically, like, provocatively entitled against urgency or whatever. And I think for me, it's because urgency has always connoted this kind of idea that, like, there are other people's agendas that I've got to serve and that things aren't okay until I've served them.

And I always got really annoyed with that Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgent and important, because there's a category there, which is urgent but not important. And I don't even know, like... That's mostly shit from other people. Right, but I don't even know what that is. How is it urgent, then, if it's not important, right?

It's like urgency should... But you're totally right, of course, that Memento Mori is there to bring, well, certainly a heightened awareness. Maybe that's not quite the same as, as urgency. But when I see like self-help books that are based around the idea of cultivating a feeling of urgency in your life, I run a mile because I do not, I want to live without what I think there's anything to be said for like hustle. And I don't mean that like in the

hustle porn sense. I just mean of like Seneca's thing about, you know, people sort of, he says, the one thing all fools have in common is they're always getting ready to start. Right. So just the like, hey, when are you going to do this? Right. You know, so I think there's, or your warm up that you're going through is just a rationalized form of procrastination. Yeah, no, totally. And I think maybe this is all just semantics, right? Because I have experienced and written about that sense of like, okay, it's just time to plunge into this thing.

It's time to stop readying. But for me, that has worked most effectively, and especially in the recent years, as a kind of letting go of something, right? Not as a kind of like clenching my muscles and like going. But as a letting go of the things that were standing in the way of action. Yeah. So there's that line from a Zen teacher who I owe Kosho Uciamu, who says, life unimpeded by anything manifests as pure activity, this idea that like if you finally

get rid of the blockages, it's just the doing. Yeah. And I think I spent a lot of my life trying to sort of force feelings of urgency, push myself over the motivational hump and all this stuff. And for me anyway, that wasn't the way. The way has been to sort of see the inhibitions that are stopping me from just from doing the thing that I actually kind of on some level want to do already. Yeah, most of the time the urgency is leading you straight.

Like people need to understand like speed reading is a scam. And even if it wasn't a scam, it's a stupid thing. It's like, do you know how much faster I could eat? You know, like I could eat faster than I do. Yeah. That's not what eating is about. Right. You know, like, it's not how many calories can you shovel down your throat in how little time, you know? Like, John Mullaney has this great joke about, like, the hot dog eating contest. And he's like, I never asked it to be fast. Like, what is, who introduced that? How quickly can you do it? But, like, eating is a pleasurable activity. Right.

So it should take however long it takes. It shouldn't take longer than, I don't know, needs to imply some sort of judgment too. But it doesn't need to take five hours to have lunch, but it also shouldn't take six minutes. Right. You know, and if you're enjoying the thing, why would you try to rush through it? Like, it's interesting that people who try to speed read, like, are they trying to, yeah, they're trying to rush through food? Are they trying to rush through time with their children? Do you rush through sex? Like, and a pleasurable activity is, is intended to be enjoyed and savored. Yeah. And so oftentimes the urgency is not just, and this is where the momental, Tomori thing comes in, you're not just rushing through the activity.

What is ultimately on the other side of the rushing? What is the destination? The destination is you die and you don't do it anymore. So you win. Right. So it's an awareness. I hadn't really thought about Memento Mori specifically in the ancient form of it in this context. But it's the awareness of death that gives the possibility of a more fully present, more authentic experience.

Right. And, you know, Heidegger, just to veer off into another area that we really don't need to go, talks about being towards death, right? The context, the context that death creates for everything that we do if we're sufficiently aware of the fact. Yeah. And I think also, if you were to know you had six months or a year or 10 years, would you do a bunch of things faster? Is that the change you would make? Or would you probably just not do certain. things and definitely do a bunch of things. And do whatever you did with a kind of openness to kind of really being there in the doing. Because when the doctor tells you you have, you know, six months or 10 years, even that is just a microcosm of the larger thing that everyone else is in. Like you can still get hit by a bus. You can still get struck by lightning. Right.

You could still get murdered on a street corner. Right. It could also turn out to be much worse than the diagnosis. Like there's this tendency to go, this is what they said. It's what I'm promised. So I get what I paid for. And it's never up to you. Right.

And like where is the point between being given six months to live and being given like 50 years left to live? Which if I'm incredibly lucky, I might have. Like, why is that fine? Yeah. And this is like extraordinary. It's always a terminal diagnosis. Right. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. As a meditation teacher friend of mine once said, everything is palliative. care when you think about it. Yes, yes. Everything's palliative care and also everything is gender affirming care in some form or another too as all these people spend their time getting angry at trans people. So many discussions we could, different directions like often, yeah. Look, your body has this performance superhighway. That's the 60,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell. This is your cardiovascular system. Maybe you learned about this

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Is that like a part of your practice? Or do you think about you have a more expansive definition of what meditation is? I am definitely trying to tag onto the coattails of Marcus Aurelius here more than Buddha. Yes, to himself. With the word meditations. Right. And I am definitely, yeah, I do have sort of sketchy, not particularly regular, disciplined sitting practice, but I think that I can make the case that the morning pages that I

write and certain other things that I do in my life are, I think they're sort of bona fide meditation in the sense that I mean the term, there's a tendency to call anything that you do my meditation, right? But I think there are lots of things that involve sort of stepping away from objectifying narratives that are in your mind. And one of those is to sort of leave, be uninvolved with thoughts as they pass across your mental radar in meditation or to focus or to keep returning to the breath when they distract you. But so I think is certain kinds of journaling,

certain kinds of sort of therapeutic exercises and things. They have that same shape of like, see these stories as not something that you're in fully identified with, but as one of the things that you contain. Yeah, I don't meditate, but I take a lot of walks. You know, and that's it for me. And what are you doing on this walk?

Are you... I mean, I'm walking my dog and I'm looking around and I'm trying to be present and I'm trying to remind myself as I've been doing it lately, like, this is pretty fucking wonderful, you know? The sun is going down and I'm walking my dog and I'm just like, I don't think Marcus Real has ever experienced this, you know, like, this is the best fucking thing of all time. And this is life. This is what it's all for. And I kind of try to do that.

And one of the things, so I live on this ranch. So we have a decent spread of property. And then I'm usually walking on this dirt road that the house is on. And, you know, most of my neighbors are like, there's a trailer here. There's a little old house here. And I just go, like, we're just like on the same street. Like, the best part of this is not that I own this part. The best part is the free part that I'm doing.

And then I go like, my neighbor has more property, isn't doing the walk and the neighbor what the less is it. You know, like this is just, I just try to kind of think about stuff like that. I just kind of run through my head, like, what are the things I need to be reminded of? And then I, you know, I get back home and I try to hold on to that feeling until I get, you know, hit the nuts by my son or something. And it immediately goes away. But, you know, you try to get into some kind of spiritual place of stillness. or acceptance or gratitude or, you know, perspective. Yeah.

And then it's all very fleeting. Yeah. And then you go back to it again. I think there's a, yeah, it resonates a lot with my own experience. We live now in the North York Moors in Northern England. And there's a sort of scale. It's not an American kind of scale to the landscape, but by UK standards, there's a scale to that landscape.

But really, you know, I think it's very, very helpful to be, to feel, relatively small within that landscape. There's something I find very, it's not even that I'm thinking logically the thought, like, oh, you know, the world is much bigger than my concerns. It's something much more physical and embodied, just that sense of like, okay, I'm just going about my business here and I'm trying to do some good things in context of family, context of work.

But there's this whole thing that's just like implacably carrying on, no matter what happens in politics, and no matter what happens in the world at large, this sort of landscape is just like there. And of course, actually, it's changing radically through the centuries and everything. But it has that sense of something more permanent, which is an old stoic meditation as well, isn't it? There is something about Europe, though, where you're like people when walking on this exact road for 2,000 years. And to your point about dirt roads and footpath, like a lot of the walking I'm doing is on public footpaths where, like, I have an ancient historic right to walk through somebody else's farmyard.

because there's a public footpath there. Yeah. And they can't do anything about it. Yeah. Even though occasionally you get the impression they wish they could. Sure. And so there are all these kind of ways over the land. And then like churches dating back to the fifth, sixth century and all this stuff where, yeah.

And that sense of people having been there for a very long time is powerful. Sometimes we've lived and died and gone through all their shit. They're not famous people. Right. Not people whose name echoes down. Right. Right. Right.

Random, nameless, faceless. There's a Taylor Swift song where she says, the who's who of who's that. And you go like, even like a bunch of them probably were famous. Yeah. And then there's a line in Meditations where Mark Struis is like listing just like famous people that are to him not that famous anymore. Right. And then to us, it's like there's 15 names like two of them. Yeah.

And you go, oh, right. That he's trying to remind himself. that like, I mean, if the movie Gladiator hadn't come out, how many people would even know his name? Right. Like, there is just the way in which all these people and names and things and full lives and not full lives just kind of fade into the rhythm of history and time and perspective. And you're part of that.

Right. And that it's really strange that that is so therapeutic and relaxing and good, at least for many people. I think there may be people who consider that to be a sort of world historic insult to their specialness. I don't know, but to me, that's what I need. Take some of the pressure off. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

It doesn't mean that everything you're doing is meaningless. It just means, like, whatever it is is enough, I think. Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. It's helpful in the context of anxiety about world events as well, right? There's this sense of it's very, very easy. to feel like the whole of history was leading up till now and now everything is on a knife edge and if it all goes in the wrong direction, then that's it for humanity. And, you know, there is a sector

of the AI, Duma crowd that wants to persuade us of that very claim, but putting that aside, there's something very important about the fact that like far worse has arisen and been gone through. It doesn't mean that it's not real suffering and real pain and real injustice in the moment that it's happening, but it's useful to have that in the back of your mind. There's a story you tell in the book where this guy's out for walk and he bumps into one of his friends who's like weeping in the park. And he goes, you know, what's wrong? And he was like, they fired on a mob in Crimea or something. Right.

And you go the timelessness of that, of just being made miserable by a thing that happened thousands of miles away. And the timelessness of the tension between it happened as human beings and therefore it's significant and my problem and it matters and I should care about it. And it would say something bad about me if I didn't care. And at the same time, if it's causing me to weep in a park, I'm probably flattering myself about its relationality to me and the contributive value of those tears. Like what I'm not doing is doing anything about it. I'm just feeling miserable. Yes, I think that's right.

I think the actual person in that anecdote, who is the philosopher, Simone Veigh, was a very extraordinary person. And I think she was sort of almost like a kind of tuning fork for all human suffering. it was almost like her role in history to be one of those people who doesn't put up that boundary. The reason it's so educational for me that anecdote is because it's like, I know I couldn't do that. I know I'm not functioning well if that's how I get about the world at large. And it's obviously, you know, vastly more to the point now that we're so easily informed about the whole of the world's suffering if we want to be or if the algorithms want us to be. Something is happening shitty somewhere at every moment.

Right. In the same way that there's, you know, the worst opinions are being expressed by people on any side of anything and you will find them and then it will enrage you that that's what people are like. Yeah. If you want to be miserable, the internet can help you with that. It certainly can. Yeah, right. And it's not to say that you should be, you know, ignoring it at the same time. You don't need to seek it out and you don't need to mainline it from the second you wake up. up in the morning. Right. And you don't need to feel bad about apportioning your attention. Yeah. This is one of the the points I'm really trying to drive home in that section is like this whole idea that we had for a long span of modern history, right, that be a good citizen means sort of pushing yourself to give more attention to the wider world outside your home than you might otherwise naturally do. And now in a sort of an

attention economy, this is the opposite of the situation that we face. What you need to be able to do now is to actually be willing to say this particular problem over there is totally real and it's totally awful and I totally wish that things were made better, but it's not going to be my fight because this one is and I've got to choose, got to pick my battles. I've got a man on it, it's just not me. I've got a man on it, yeah, right? I got to pick my battles. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of this circles around the sort of most classic, in my understanding, Stoic notion of just the question of the sphere that you can control and the sphere that you can't control. Although I've always had a bit of trouble with the stoic version of that because it seems like there's a lot of claims made, at least in some iterations of it, about how much control you can exert over your own emotions. Well, and I mean, there's also some stuff that's kind of in the middle. Right. And then there's also, what if you have clinical depression or what if you have a brain injury? You know, it does change things. But what's interesting to me is stoicism is mostly famous for those circles.

But the most interesting sort of illustration of circles in Stoic philosophy comes from this guy named Heracles, who said that, you know, you have this central circle, which is you. This is how we're born. We're born selfish, self-interest, et cetera. And then you have these concentric circles around you. And those are your family, your friends, your neighbors, your fellow citizens, you know, fellow human beings, people who haven't been born. And it gets bigger and bigger. And that although people think of Stoic philosophy is this selfish philosophy, it's actually, he says the work of it is about drawing those outer rings inward.

So it's this kind of tension between only focusing on things that are under control, but then also making sure that you're not utterly indifferent to everyone else. Right. And I think the problem is with your point about this attention economy, we have told ourselves a lie that knowing about stuff and feeling bad, about it is helpful to them and us. And so we have confused emoting about problems with being involved in the solution to said problem. Yeah.

So like it'd be better if you said, I'm not going to think about it, but I am setting up this recurring donation. Right, right. Or something, right? Like, I'm not going to give it my day-to-day unhappiness, but I am going to apportion a percentage of my earnings towards addressing. Right. Or I'm going to run for office or I'm going to, here's my contribution to society or here's my

contribution to things greater than myself. That's what I do. That's how I know I'm not making the world the worst place. But I'm not going to go to bed weeping every night and wake up weeping every night and tell myself I'm a good person because I'm so emotionally wrong. Right, right. And that sense of like pseudo action, that emotion is action or that it's hugely encouraged by the basic form of like social media interaction, right?

The idea that like, because they're monetizing your attention. Right, right. Putting something out there, sharing something, liking it, re-sharing it, whatever, feels like an action. And it is an action within the space of the platform. But, yeah, there's no reason to believe that is an action that necessarily affects the issue that you're so upset about. And it is negatively affecting you or your other responsibilities.

Yeah, yeah, while in subtle ways just polarizing everybody all to hell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I do think talking about strategies, though, like I think this idea of waking up on the back foot is a very common, like, very real problem. I'm curious if you have any changes you've made to address that. I don't want to get too sales pitchy here,

but part of something that was really important for me in the new book was to sort of create a book that, to whatever extent a book can do this, could like be an active ingredient in this way, right? So that if you do decide to read one short chapter a day for a month, which is my strong suggestion in the introduction. If someone decides to do that, I think I'm sharing like versions of this perspective shift

that might sort of take a route in you somewhere and affect how you live through the next 24 hours in some small way. And I'm not going to claim that I read my own book over and ever again. That would be weird. But I do do a similar thing with the reading that I choose to do first thing in the morning. I think the morning pages that I mentioned really, helped me out a lot with that. And then, you know, in general, not so much to do with waking up

on the back foot, but just that feeling of being on the back foot. All my sort of productivity and writing process as well has been on a long-term evolution or shift, I don't know, from being very sort of programmed and scheduled to being more and more sort of intuition-based. And this is where the Zen stuff has been so important to me. The more that you can feel that, And I'm not perfect at this. But the more that you can feel in any moment that you're just choosing to do one thing, it's the only thing in the world, and you're focusing on that until you finished it. And then you'll do another thing. And that's all you ever possibly could do and all life is. That's what causes that backfoot feeling to sort of to lift, right? Because literally all you can ever do is pick a thing and address yourself to it for a while and then pick another thing and address yourself to that. And even people who are following incredibly rigid time boxing system for their are still actually doing that because they're still choosing in every moment to stick with the system that they set up. So once you can sort of feel your way into that sense that that's all you ever have to do, the next thing or the next most necessary thing, as Carl Jung calls it,

then it's almost on some level that's just incompatible with feeling like you're on the back foot because then it's like, yes, there are three different deadlines I was supposed to meet today and here I'm addressing myself to one of them. What more do you want? Yeah, I try to say to myself like either like this is all I have to be doing or like this is enough not and I try to push back against that feeling of like but I have these 15 things or that I have I have this looming thing coming up. It's like this is the thing that I'm doing. So that's the thing that I'm doing. And I think something to beware of here I've found I totally resonate with that is this how many productivity approaches and people's natural attempts to organize their lists and all the rest of

lead to this systematic practice of constantly reminding yourself of all the other things that you've got to do, right? So the idea of visible lists and plans that just like endlessly reinforced to you all the things that you're failing to do in the moment that you may well be doing something really important and meaningful. You don't like to do lists. I've gone back and forth, but yeah, no, I don't like trying to, I don't like to do lists as things to try to sort of control time via, right?

I think I'm not going to claim that I don't keep any reminder list of the things that I've committed to and things that I need to not forget. But I try more and more to make the decisions about what I will do in any given moment in a more intuitive way and then check back with that list to make sure that I'm not letting too many things fall off the radar. And then there are certain patterns that emerge right. So it's definitely the case that writing works much better for me in early hours of the day, then that you try to suddenly begin at 2.45 in the afternoon. Yeah, that doesn't work. Right. But once upon a time, because I knew that, I would then create these very strict plans for when I was going to start and all the stuff. And it would ultimately,

for me, it would backfire. It ultimately became that my life was spent, well, I was going to say serving this rule, but actually it would be failing to serve this rule and then feeling bad about it. The routine becomes this ritual and then not doing the ritual becomes sacrilegious. Right. Instead of just being like, hey, more often than not. I try to get my writing done in the morning. Right, exactly. And when people, when you sort of shift into this somewhat more intuitive thing, the fear that comes up is that like if you just go with what you feel like,

you'll just waste all your time. And there's maybe is a sort of stage on the journey where that has to happen. But when you get sort of deeper into that and you're really feeling what it is that feels like it needs doing in a given moment, then it just becomes quite natural to want, the thing you will want to do at 8 o'clock in the moment. morning or nine o'clock in the morning is is the stuff that works best then you do need to control your calendar so that you haven't got five meetings planned between 8 a.m. and midday, right? But once that space is cleared, I find it more and more effective to navigate by that sense of what feels like

it needs doing right now. Yeah, because the reward for success or self-awareness or whatever, like knowing when your best should not, again, be some form of anxiety. or this prison that you have designed for yourself. And, like, I think especially if you're someone who is driven or a little bit compulsive, then you're like, all of a sudden, I got to flip this light switch 15 times before I go on the, like, you just do the work equivalent of that. Yes. And you feel bad if you don't do it.

And the reward I've noticed, it's like the reward is not feeling great. Right. The reward is just relief from the tension I ratchet it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's not a good way to thing to build your life around. And the crazy part of it, I'm not going to say this happens often, but the crazy part of it is that actually sometimes you do have it in you to do some writing starting at 245 in the afternoon, right?

Sure. If you haven't made it in your head that it's impossible to do it. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You're stealing from yourself the ability to be spontaneous or flexible. Yeah. Right.

So I have principles or sort of rules of thumb. Yes. Writing works best in the mornings. It's really good if I can touch. into the real writing and ideas every day or, you know, five or six days a week. But they're not, yeah, once they become rules that I am sort of the indentured servant of, that's when it all goes wrong. Yeah, yeah, are the rules serving you or are you serving this system you've made?

Right, right. It's all in the Bible. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, says Jesus Christ. There we go. You want to check out some books? Yeah, I'd love to. Let's do it. Thanks so much for listening.

And if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.