The Ezra Klein Show - Burned Out? Start Here.

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

I like to begin each year with an episode about something I’m working through more personally. And at the end of last year, the thing I needed to work through was a pretty bad case of burnout.So I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s latest book, “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.” Burkeman’s big idea, which he also explores in his best seller “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” is that the desire to be more productive, to squeeze out the most from each day, to try to feel on top of our lives, is ultimately insatiable. He argues that addressing burnout requires a shift in outlook — accepting that our time and energy are finite, and that there will always be something more to do. In other words: What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How, then, would you live?Burkeman’s book is structured as 28 short essays on this question. In this conversation, I ask him to walk me through some of them. We discuss what burnout is; what it means to accept your limitations and let go of control; the messages children absorb about productivity and work; navigating the overwhelm of information and news; and more.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen PetersenRest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang“Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.” with Cal Newport on “The Ezra Klein Show”“The Man Who Knew Too Little” by Sam DolnickBook Recommendations:The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut RosaFully Alive by Elizabeth OldfieldDeath by Joan TollifsonThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. And we're back. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. I like to begin the show each year with an episode about something I'm thinking through personally. It's resolutions adjacent podcasting. And what was present for me as we near the end of last year was a pretty real case of burnout. I took some of December off, took a vacation.

I'm feeling more grounded now. You don't need to send me concerned emails, but that was the frame of mind I was in when I picked up Oliver Berkman's Meditations for Mortals. And the book connected for me. Berkman's Big Idea, which he described in his bestseller a couple years back, 4,000 Weeks, is that no productivity system anywhere will ever deliver what it is promising. A sense of control. A feeling that you have mastered your task list in some enduring way. That you've built levees strong enough to withstand life's chaos.

And so his question is really the reverse. What if rather than starting from the presumption that it can all be brought under control, you began instead from the presumption that it can't be. What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How then would you live? Do I think Berkman or anyone really has the answer to

that question? No. But I do think he asks good questions and he curates good questions and insights. And questions are often more useful than answers. As always, my email, azraklanshow at ny times.com. Oliver Berkman, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for inviting me. So I understand your book largely is a book about burnout. How do you define burnout and how do you think it's different than anxiety or depression? Wow, I mean, I think that burnout really is probably best understood as having this sort of component of a lack of meaning. This component that you're not only working incredibly hard,

but the harder you work, it doesn't seem to get you any closer to the imagined moment when you're actually going to feel on top of everything and in control and like you can relax at last. I think anxiety is a big part of that, but anxiety can obviously manifest in so many different life domains. I think this idea that I love from the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa about resonance, the vibrancy that makes life worth living, I think that is what is gone in burnout, right? It's that sense of working harder and harder and harder just to stay in one place and it's not even working and what's the point of it all anyway? My producer, Kristin and I were kicking this back and forth as we prepared for this conversation.

And one of the definitions we came up with or one of the descriptions maybe we came up with is that burnout is this persistent feeling that you don't have the energy or the resources to meet the present. And when that feeling persists day after day after day, when the mismatch between you and the life you're living seems like a constant of the life you're living, it eventually throws you into some other state. I'm curious how that resonates for you. Yeah, that does resonate. I think that we really feel an extreme pressure from inside

and from the culture and from all sorts of sources to overcome our built-in limitations, to fit more into the time that we have than anyone ever could to exert more control over how things unfold because we feel that we must just to keep our heads above water in the modern world. But I say that we can't because they're built in limitations. There's always going to be more that you could meaningfully do with your time than the time you have to do it. You're never going to be able to feel confident about what's coming in the future because it's in the future, all the rest of it.

And I think sort of throwing yourself at that wall again and again and again and never getting to that place of feeling in control is a thoroughly dispiriting and fatiguing way to live. One response that I think can arise in people in a conversation like this, it arises in me. It arises in me sometimes It arises in me, sometimes when I'm reading a book and sometimes when I am talking to myself about myself, is, oh, get the fuck over it. For most of human history, a quarter or more of infants died. Half of everybody died before they were 15. We were subsistence farmers after things

got better. That was most of what we did after we had made the major advances of agriculture. When you look at, you know, my grandparents or great grandparents rather fleeing pogroms, I am sorry you have a lot of emails. Who cares? I'm sure you hear this a lot. How do you think about it? I mean, I don't think I'm making the case that on every metric life is worse today or even on almost any metric that life is worse today.

There is a specific thing which is the sense of fighting against time, the sense of being hounded by or oppressed by time that is, I think, a very modern thing. I think it is a thing that people in the medieval period, for example, just would not have had to trouble with. This specific sense of racing against time, of trying to get sort of on top of our lives and in control and to make this the year when we finally master the situation of doing our jobs or being parents or spouses or anything else. I think that is a really specific acute modern phenomenon that has to do with how we relate to time.

Is it our relationship to time or is it our relationship to life, to our expectations about life? When I began hearing a lot about burnout, I trace it back to Anne Helen Peterson's very viral essay about millennial burnout in BuzzFeed many years ago. And I'm not saying that's where the term burnout came from, it isn't, but that's where I began seeing it as this omnipresent diagnosis of modernity. And one of the things I remember thinking about that is whether the issue people were having

was an issue of expectations, an issue, this belief that our lives were supposed to feel good. They were supposed to be, if not easy, manageable. That they were supposed to be controllable. That work was supposed to be a source of meaning and even pleasure. And if it was actually soulless and overwhelming and always wanted more of you than you wanted to give, that was a problem to be solved.

That all of these things were problems to be solved, which I don't know, I can't go back and ask them, but I'm not sure it's how many of my ancestors thought about life, right? The sense of the tragic, the sense of the uncontrollable was more shot through. And so perhaps there wasn't this constant friction between the expectations people have for how the world is supposed to feel and the way it does feel. I think that is right, or at least partly right. I think that we do live in a time when there is that expectation that life should be manageable in that way.

And there is also the promise in technology and, you know, that we're sort of almost there, right? That like one last heave of self-discipline combined with the right set of apps and the right outsourced services that handle our food delivery or our DIY around the house, we could finally cross that gap. And I do think, yes, I do think that if you live in an era when there isn't that expectation and go back before the last few generations to, again, back to the medieval period when people would have just lived in this situation of completely endemic uncertainty.

I don't think it's necessarily true that they didn't find the opportunity to be happy. I think the crucial distinction is that they wouldn't have postponed that until they felt in control. So they wouldn't have said, before we can have a festival, before we can sit back and look at the stars, we have to sort of know what we're doing here and feel in charge and control of things, just exactly because that possibility of being in control of things for most people anyway was just so remote. So yeah, I think the closer we get, or the closer it feels like we're getting to being

in charge of life in a way, the more tormenting and dispiriting it gets that we still aren't. Tell me about the idea of productivity debt. I just sort of stumbled across this concept and found that it resonated really a lot with my audience. I just define this as the feeling that so many of us have, I think, that we sort of wake up in the morning feeling like we have to output a certain amount of work in order to have justified our existence on the planet.

As with paying off a financial debt, the very best thing that could happen if the day goes really well is that you end up at zero again before the next day it all starts again and you wake up in a new productivity debt. I mean, just to head off an obvious objection, anyone who works for money is in a kind of a productivity debt to whoever pays them, right? But I'm really trying to pinpoint this existential sense that if you don't do a certain amount, you kind of don't quite deserve to be here. And you know, there are lots of sort of causes we could look at here, the sort of Protestant work ethic, the idea that there's something sort

of inherently virtuous in hard work is relevant here. But I think that that is just a really powerful thought that we sort of go through the day in deficit. And our best hope is to get to the end of the day exhausted and be like, okay, I just about earned the right to be here for one more day. I found that chapter of your book very deep and it made me think about the way there are many religious traditions and many ways of practicing within religious traditions. is in general, these two streams. And one stream is more of the mind that you are justified because you are a human being and God loves you. Or you are justified, your day here is justified because all there is is a present moment and you are experiencing it and to sit quietly

and absorb what is happening in the world is a beautiful and in its own way an overwhelming thing. And then there are other traditions, including within these same traditions, that understand you more as an instrument that you are trying to earn your place here. Sometimes that is phrased as trying to earn your place in what will come after here, right? Heaven and hell. But in even more secular versions of it, and I probably lean in this way myself,

if you have the capacity and space in this world to try to be of service and you're not, then maybe you're not justifying your time. Maybe you are being selfish. Maybe there is moral weight to our actions in that way. And so it was funny reading your chapter, because on the one hand, everything you describe about the tendency to feel like you have to justify just being around.

Yeah, that does seem pathological. And then on the other hand, I think that it can be sometimes a real problem in cultures, and I'm part of a number of them that are a little bit too new age, that they don't ask you to understand yourself as a worm born into sin, who needs to do good deeds to work your way out of it, who needs to heal the world, who needs to take the bodhisattva path. It can be all about the personal experience, the personal transformation, and not your effect on the world.

And maybe that's neither good for the world, but also not that good for you. I find people get very obsessed with their own experience. I'm curious how you weight those competing interpretations of what we're trying to do here. I just wonder, do we really need to say that the only viable way for making a difference in the world has to be from this place of deficit? Do we all have to be what the psychologists call insecure overachievers who are doing lots of things in the world, but doing them fundamentally to kind of fill a void or plug

a hole? So I think where I'm headed with all of this is in some ways to try to sort of salvage the notion of ambition and of making a difference, whether that's in a business kind of context or a political or activist kind of context, but to salvage it from these notions of sort of doing it anxiously and insecurely to try to plug a hole. Could we do it as an expression of the fact that we already feel good about ourselves? There's a strand of thinking in Zen Buddhism specifically, I think, that suggests that if we could only get out of our own ways, if we could only

let go of some of the things that inhibit action, we would just sort of naturally do a lot of things, many of which would be pro-social and for the good of the whole. It's not that we need to kind of be constantly kicking ourselves from behind with the threat of being a bad person if we don't do it. On some level, that's aspirational, including for me, but I think it's useful as something to navigate by. And I'll admit that the way I phrase that question really loads the deck and makes it a binary, right, between doing the things that will improve the world, feed the hungry, bring justice to the oppressed, and hanging out in your room, watching Amazon Prime.

And of course, it's not typically the experience, and much of what's on the to-do list is responding to emails that probably don't actually need a response and doing tasks that are optional at best. How clean will the house be before we go to sleep tonight? And so there is something that opens in a lot of people that I do think resonates to this question of what is driving this forward? You quote the philosopher Young Chul Han who says that we quote, produce against the feeling of lack. Where do you think the feeling of lack comes from?

I have been known to be evasive on these questions of causality because I just think it's overdetermined really. I do definitely think that we live in an era when there's a real kind of just natural incentive to wanting to say like there's more to do, here's how to do it better, you're doing X or wrong, you know, because that's just the world in which we live and how attention is modified and all the rest of it. And then of course the sort of psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic understanding that the lack is the lack of kind of good enough unconditional love received by almost everybody as kids because so many parents are so normally and humanly imperfect.

And so I think it's sort of it's just layered in all these ways. And we're trained in it from a young age. School is a beautiful thing and amazing advance of human civilization. But I have a five-year-old, and he's already bringing home homework. And getting praise or not praise based on whether it gets done is maybe a strong word for what we're talking about here. But I can see the structure of self-worth that he is being pulled into.

And it is different than where he was six months ago, where that wasn't asked of him at all. He was just going through his days, going to the playground, playing with blocks. And I mean, this is kindergarten. So there's a large architecture, and human beings are nothing if not cultural animals, that teaches us to judge ourselves based on what we are accomplishing and to judge ourselves very harshly. If we're not accomplishing, look at all these people around you, they're getting it done. Why aren't you?

Yeah, totally. I'm fascinated. I feel like there's so much wisdom in the idea that's been so prevalent in recent years that one should praise children for their effort, at least as much as for their attainment, so that they don't get the idea that they've got to maintain a specific certain standard as a minimum for being acceptable, but that doing what they can and bringing themselves to the task is the thing that really matters. And yet I think, I wonder if that doesn't sort of reinforce the notion that if something's worth doing, it's going to feel kind of difficult or grueling or hard in some sense. It's interesting you bring up that wrinkle of modern parenting, but to expand on what you were just saying, there is a very influential, I would say,

among wealthy parents school of thought right now that you don't want to ever praise children for innate qualities. You don't want to say, you're smart. You're so nice. You're such a wonderful human being. You're such a bright light in this world. You want to praise them for trying for their growth mindset. I saw that you really worked to do something nice.

You're doing such a good job trying hard at this. You're working so much. You're really applying yourself, right? What you're trying to promote or encourage or reinforce in them is the effort. And I get it and like you, some part of me is completely repulsed. Yeah, I mean, if we knew how, I think what we would want to do as parents, I think it would be to guarantee that we were always just praising our children for being them, as opposed to either putting in the effort or as opposed to demonstrating certain innate qualities.

We're taught from an early age that if it's worth doing it should feel hard and unpleasant. One of the ideas I explore in this new book is how scary in a way it is for some of us, again, talking about me as much as anyone else, to ask that question, what if this thing that I'm approaching in my life might be easier than I was expecting? What if I don't need to sort of furrow my brow and tense every muscle in my body and sort of barrel into it as if I'm headed for a fight. It's quite subversive in a way for some of us, I the three to four hour rule. What is the three to four hour rule. What is the three to four hour rule? This is an idea that I've adapted from a few sources.

One of them is the work of a writer, Alex Pang. There is a huge amount of evidence that Alex and others gather to suggest, and it's mainly anecdotal but it's not entirely anecdotal, that over and over gather to suggest, and it's mainly anecdotal, but it's not entirely anecdotal that over and over again, all the way through history, you look at the daily routines of artists and authors, scholars, scientists, composers, the list goes on. They each, when they have the freedom to do it, put about three or four hours in each 24 hour period into the kind of core, core focused creative work that they do, the kind of work involving thinking and reflection that I think is increasingly widespread in

the knowledge work era, right? And I'm sort of exploring the notion that there's something really wise for any of us who have something like this degree of autonomy over our time and absolutely not everybody does, to kind of really work hard to ring fence that sort of three or four hour period in the day for the things that are at the core of your work. I'm not suggesting we can do all our job in three or four hours a day, but that we could sort of profitably separate out the kind of focus reflective part of it from the rest. Not to try very hard to ring fence or schedule or defend the rest of it, right?

Because we have to find some way of approaching the kind of work we do these days that treats this kind of focus time as sacred in some sense, but also doesn't turn us into the kind of jerk that you become, I think, if you're trying to sort of dictate how every hour of your time is used. What I thought was interesting about that chapter was something you say towards the end of it. Because, look, on one level, we should admit and highlight that many people do not have jobs where you get to ring fence three to four hours a day for deep creative work. You're paid by the hour. You stand at the cash register. Absolutely. All of this is speaking about a very particular kind of person.

And so, in some ways, it's not that widely applicable. But what I thought was interesting and was a little bit more universal was something you say on the final page, which is, the truly valuable skill is one the three to four-hour rule helps to instill, not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished. There is a real difference between the people who seem to have the skill to stop and who don't. And we talk a lot more and think a lot more and are taught a lot more about how to keep going

or keep pushing ourselves past the point of comfort, then we are about how to stop pushing ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this is endemic these days. And as you say, it kind of arises in all sorts of different professional contexts. I mean, my basic outlook on this is just that it's never going to be done, right? The nature of the world that we live in today especially, but on some level I think it's a timeless universal, is that there is more that could profitably be done with our time than we will ever be able to do. There is always something more that you

could do. Cal Newport, who I know you've had on the show, has this lovely line about how you could fill any arbitrary number of hours in a day with work that feels like it needs doing in that day, right? There's no limit to that unless you place one. And I think in that inability to stop, or at least to stop cogitating about it once you've left the workplace or whatever it might be, there is that sort of yearning to get to the point where it is all done and you can finally relax. And I think the skill is being able to relax in the midst of it not being done. This is what Benedictine monks understand, right? This idea that you

have a work period, the bell rings. When the bell rings, you put down your work and you go on to the next thing. And there's a real kind of spiritual practice in being able to psychologically as well as physically put down the thing that you're working on just because the bell rang, not because you finished everything and it's all done. This perhaps gets to some of the philosophical shifts you're encouraging readers to make. You share an anecdote from the late British Zen master, and I hope I don't butcher this name, Hun Jiu Kennet, about making the burden heavier.

Can you share it here? Yeah, I love this. Hunjio Kennett was a British-born Zen master, as you say, and she used to say that her preferred approach to teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. And I'm certainly not a Zen master, but I think there is something really wonderful

in this that sort of gives me goosebumps and that does characterize something I am hoping to try to do, which is to show that very often anyway the path to peace of mind and peace of mind combined with being productive and functional and efficacious in the world comes not from kind of trying to make things feel a bit better, finding new ways to take on more work or to get more done, to get closer and closer to that never reached point of control, but really to take a good look at how unattainable that is. Really to feel what it means to be a finite human swimming in a sea of infinite possibilities and infinite demands and infinite pressures.

And just to be like, okay, well, maybe I can stop fighting that particular fight and have some new energy for doing the things that I actually can do. That's what I understand by making the burden so heavy that you put it down. Finiteness feels like it is a very central concept for you. When I think about your previous book, 4,000 Weeks, Meditation for Mortals, mortals being right there in the title, I feel like you're writing long memento moris with pastel colored cover jackets. They seem friendly, but the message on virtually every page is you are going to die. Yeah, I think that's fair. I suppose a nuance that I add to that just because of how this

has mattered to me in my life to date and in coming to terms with these ideas is that it feels a bit less like a focus on death and dying. It feels a bit less like that, something that I have no particular reason to believe I am more reconciled to than anybody else. So much as it is a focus on a very specific set of things that follow from the fact that we're going to die, the fact that our time is not unlimited. We can't be in more than one place at a time. We can't reach outside of the present moment and just check that everything in the future is going to be okay. All these different ways that we're limited that feel really uncomfortable, perhaps because on some ultimate level they are daily, hourly reminders of our forthcoming death.

And how much effort we, by which I certainly mean me for many years, sort of put in to trying not to feel that. And so many of the things that we call self-improvement or we call making a life change or developing good habits, I think can be best understood as a big sort of structure of emotional avoidance so that we don't have to like really start to feel how uncomfortable and sort of claustrophobic it is to actually be who we are as finite individuals. There's a meditation sequence I love that I learned from the writer Stephen Batchelor. And it's just repeating this phrase, I'm of the nature to grow old.

I'm of the nature to get sick. I'm of the nature to lose the people I love. I'm of the nature to die. So how then shall I live? And I don't do that meditation that often for, it's sort of a, it's a lot to hype yourself up for in the morning. But when I do it, I feel very peaceful. I don't feel saddened.

I don't feel depressed. But I often have a bit of perspective that maybe the answer to that question does not match my to-do list for that day in a deep way, and I should reflect on that. Yeah, I love that. I think there's a certain kind of cliched version of memento mori in the culture that sort of says, you know, life is very short, so you've therefore got to cram every minute of every day with being as impressive or unusual or unconventional or just generally kind of high octane as you possibly can.

And I don't think that is the point. I think the point of what we're circling around here is that when you really begin to let it permeate you, that we are of the nature, as Stephen Batchelor says, you know, to be so finite, you get, to be so finite. You get to exhale, right? You get to let your shoulders drop, not in order to then just kind of veg out, but precisely then to move forward, doing a few of the things that would, you know, be the most meaningful things to do with your day.

So it is a refocusing. There's also this divergence between what I might call the aesthetic of productivity or creativity and the reality of it. Something I noticed in my own work is I almost never have a truly good idea sitting in front of the computer. But the more work I have, the more I feel I should be sitting in front of the computer. I was having a day when there's a lot on the to-do list, and also because I was reading your book about stopping more, I feel I should be sitting in front of the computer. I was having a day when there's a lot on the to-do list.

And also because I was reading your book about stopping more, I was doing less of it and spending more time in meditation and taking walks. And I happened to be sitting outside in the morning at a coffee shop reading a book. And I decided not to come in to work immediately and instead to drink my coffee outside. It was a nice morning in Brooklyn and think or let my mind wander. And I had a great idea for a column, just an absolutely excellent idea for a column that will get written at some point. And in some way, that time was so much more productive than what I would have done if I had kept my

original plan of not stopping at the lovely coffee shop wine bar that happens to open two blocks away from me at 8 a.m. and just continuing over to the AC subway line and coming into Times Square and coming up to my office. And the latter was the structure of the day that felt responsible to me. And the latter was the structure of the day that felt responsible to me. And the former was an effort and a decision to prioritize self-care. And the former is what gave me the idea that my work really values. And the latter, I'm quite sure, wouldn't have. And it's a mindfuck.

wouldn't have and it's a mindfuck. Yeah, it is. I think one way of understanding it, see what you make of this, but is that it is the same idea of wanting to feel like we're in control of the processes of our lives and actually valuing or being tempted to value that feeling of control more than the things that we really want, which in your case is good ideas as opposed to really the knowledge that you sat at your desk like a good worker for the right amount of time. Now as you said in other parts of this conversation, there are plenty of people who can't choose to go at a more leisurely pace into work.

But I think the sort of unifying principle here is just that actually there's a lot of positive things that come from being able to unclench a little bit that desire to kind of steer the day in the way that feels right and being able instead to listen to the whisperings of chance and serendipity. And that there's actually something about really trying to control the day to within an inch of its life that militates against those moments of inspiration. And this I think is a challenge at an organizational level too, right? I think there's plenty of reason to believe that the more kind of total control an organization seeks to impose upon people, the easier it is for the real work to not get done.

Is this a way that our schooling system reflects at least some origins in wanting to prepare people for factory work? I don't want to be binary about this or simplistic. So the idea that, as it was for me in school, as I see it already being for my children in school, that learning how to sit still and pay attention, that is not meaningless. It is miserable, but it is not meaningless. But there's this very sharp cut then made, recess, lunch, after school, that the things that are related to learning are this relentless application of self-discipline, keeping yourself from getting up, keeping yourself from following your own impulses. And then there's play.

And I just find it interesting on some level that there is no structured effort to teach people how to take a walk, to teach people to know when their mind has stopped working that way, when their mental resources are exhausted, when they need time to think about or integrate an idea. And I understand that that is partially because institutions need to work. They need to impose control. Having everybody in a school constantly walking out the door on walks isn't going to work because schools are partially custodial places where children are watched so parents can

go to work. But there are also places where formed and something just seems quite wrong with it. Yeah, I think you're right. It's one side of a coin when we need both of them. I think something that's sort of related, not quite exactly the same point, but something else that it leads to is that it encourages us to distrust our own intuitions about how would be the right way to spend the next hour, the next day, and sort of put our faith instead in rules. Now, it might often be in situations at school and even in the workplace where there's some coercion there where we have

to follow the rules. But then we sort of do it to ourselves even if we don't have to. And people who start working for themselves or go freelance or whatever it is, very often find themselves first of all recreating the prison of rigid schedules that they thought they were escaping. And one of the things that I think is really a problem there, and it's made a big difference to my working life to sort of let go of this a little bit, is that it teaches you that what you feel like doing is almost certainly the wrong thing.

And that even when you are privileged as I am to have the luxury to ask in a given moment of the workday, what do I feel like doing now? You kind of shouldn't ask it because probably the answer would just be like getting distracted on social media or like just being passive and useless and lazy. And I don't think that's true at all for most of us. In the book I quote a post that the meditation teacher Susan Piver wrote once that made a really big impact on me about sort of her own experiments in letting go of a rigid schedule and just asking what she wanted to do in each moment as an experiment. And finding that pretty much all of the sort of dutiful tasks that she was worried she

couldn't be trusted to complete without a rigid internal set of commands. Got done anyway because most of us want to keep our commitments and meet our deadlines and pay our bills if we're able to do so. So I think there's a real sort of lack of faith in oneself that is inculcated by the idea that you've always got to be pushing on the side of self-discipline and never listening to what you're actually, what it feels like you might want to do on the inside. Inside these books is a journey that you say that you've gone on, from being a columnist exploring self-help and optimization techniques at The Guardian

to writing 4,000 Weeks, which is a book about recognizing there is no optimization that will work. You will never get on top of it. The world is too big. One day you will die. You need to accept limits. To this book, which is more individuated essays revolving around the theme of accepting limits and working with limits.

And I guess something I wonder when, as I've read these books and read your trajectory here, is has this actually worked for you? You're an amazing curator of great lines, of great advice, but I'm deeply skeptical of advice. So I'm curious, to what degree, if I was tracking the anxiety levels and productivity or whatever you want, whatever you think the measure of success would be here, from when you were that guardian writer on Deadline to an international avatar of accepting finitude. How different are you? Well, I do think I'm significantly different. Perhaps you would expect me to say that, but I think it's true. I think the claim that I'm more relaxed and easier to live with and all the rest of it

is probably better addressed by my family than by me, but I believe it's true. I think that it's not that I sort of changed completely and then shared my beautiful wisdom with the lucky public, right? It's that these books, like any book, I think, especially any book of advice, these books are me working through these issues. But something I find- Definitely not true about this podcast. Podcast is a completely abstract exploration of ideas. Something that I find consistently to be true in writing books is that I will come up with kind of a neat intellectual account of what I want to do for the book proposal. But then

to actually write the book, I kind of have to change more in the direction of the ideas that I'm outlining, right? I mean, the book won't write itself without me changing. So to some extent it happens during the process of writing the book. Also, you know, it's slow. I think it would be completely ridiculous to claim that any of this is a kind of module you can install in your brain and after that you're golden, you know, it's all fine. I think it's in the nature of it that it's sort of falling off the wagon and getting back on again. One thing I have a very clear and vivid experience of all the time though is that I've sort of, it's not that I won't fall into these old ways of being, it's that I, well, firstly

that I sort of notice what I'm doing more quickly and can let go of it more quickly, which I think is something that also sort of formal meditation is something that people say brings them, right? That ability to catch yourself. But also I just kind of don't believe my own bullshit as much as I used to. So it's not even that I'm not going to try and do more than I can reasonably do in a day. It's not even that I'm not going to download the new productivity app and mess around with it. But I don't think it's going to save my soul. And I don't end

up sort of postponing real life now until I get to the point where it has. And as a result, I think I am able to be more present and attentive and like actually show up for the life that I actually have. I find that answer completely convincing and so dispiriting. Which is to say that if you told me that the way to really absorb ideas like this is to force yourself to write an entire book about them. Because it is such an immersion and such a long period of working with them that that's what it takes for the penetration. That actually feels really true to me. I'm not saying the ideas can't work in reading it, but there is something about,

it does sound to me like something you just said, is that to live differently takes some structure of commitment that keeps you coming back to it. That keeps the immediate decay when you close the pages from happening. You mentioned meditation. What's powerful about meditation isn't a sit, it's the practice, right? The regularity of it. If I stop tomorrow, a lot of its effect on me decays. I think that's true and I also think that there are dangers in sort of setting it up

as something that is only worth doing if it is done completely consistently. I think that one of the things I try to do in this latest book is in the structure of it, in this idea of four weeks, short daily chapters that you might read at the pace of one a day or so, was specifically an intention to try to get at this issue, to try to let these ideas seep under your skin, into your bones, through coming back to them and back to them. there is a greater benefit, I think, for people in marinating in this kind of stuff than in necessarily being taught a sort of five-point set of steps to execute.

And I think that finding a commitment mechanism is absolutely one version of it, but finding some way to just sort of be in these ideas for an extended period, there's nothing that rivals that. You told me that in the last few years you moved from Brooklyn to the town you grew up in in the UK. And I assume the town you grew up in in the UK. And I assume the town you grew up in, I don't know that much about where you grew up, is smaller. It sounds like it's more filled with nature from some of the things you write in the book. How has changing the context, the environment, to the culture in which your day-to-day life takes place changed you?

That's a great question. I mean, I grew up in a more sort of suburban setting and I now live in a much more rural one, but it's, you know, it's roughly the same part of England for sure. And I find lots of very predictable benefits to my nervous system of living in natural landscapes. That's a common experience. There's actually one of the sort of slightly surprising things, although I shouldn't have been surprised because I had sort of explored this a little bit in 4,000 weeks, is the sort of benefits of something

that I think I would call inconvenience, ultimately, a sort of a friction in life that I didn't experience in Brooklyn, just tiny little things like one has to think about when you're going to go and run various errands instead of hopping out to the store to buy an extra ingredient while the dinner is still boiling on the stove. A degree to which you have to kind of, this is a famous thing about rural life I suppose, but a degree to which you have to sort of, this is a famous thing about rural life, I suppose, but a degree to which you have to sort of be attentive and aware of the interests of other people because you're going to see them tomorrow and the day after and the day after and you might need them in a pinch. There's something about the environment that while it is relaxing compared to very sort

of hyper stimulated urban one, actually calls me to attend to it in a way that feels a little bit effortful, but ultimately feels like completely right. You did a quick, I'm going to skip over the banal effects of living in a more natural environment on my nervous system. Expand on that. I think that the area that we live specifically, the North York Moors, is characterized by big, open, rather bleak, especially in winter, moorland. It's close enough to the setting of Wuthering Heights, people need a reference

point. And there's something about walking in that environment that is a kind of in the bones, deeper than conscious really most of the time, reminder that I'm really a very small deal in the scheme of things, which I personally find to be incredibly liberating and not dispiriting at all. There is this way that the world can now follow you anywhere. It used to be that you went to a rural spot on the Moors and it was pretty hard to know what was not happening at that rural spot on the Moors. And now you know what is happening in

the Donald Trump transition as quickly as I do. Oh, yes. Sitting here at New York Times headquarters in New York. And you and I actually share a fascination. It was in my book on polarization, and it was also something you wrote about in your book. With this article The Times published years ago about a man who, at the beginning of the first Trump administration, decided he was done with the news.

And he went to very extreme lengths to shut himself off from it, but not necessarily to shut himself off from the world. Do you want to tell that story? Yeah, this is Eric Hagerman. This is a profile that the Times ran, headlined, The Man Who Knew Too Little, which is a great piece of headline writing. And what interested me about this story, so you know, you've summarized it, but yeah, the anecdote that really stuck in many people's minds was that when he left his lovely home to go to his local liberal-filled coffee shop, he would wear noise-cancelling headphones playing white noise, I think, as

I remember it, so that he wouldn't have to hear anyone else discussing what was happening in national politics. And there were various other examples like this in the piece. And you can imagine and you specifically, I'm sure, recall the kind of response to that in many quarters, right? There was a sort of standard response among kind of left-leaning media who were writing about this profile or just sort of mocking him on social media, that this was kind of just monstrous privilege, right? It was just outrageous and repugnant to imagine that, you know, because so many people couldn't choose to opt out of the real ramifications of what was happening and

what is now happening again. But it was clear from the profile that one of the main things he was spending his time on while not filling up his attentional bandwidth with political angst was restoring an area of wetlands that he'd purchased and planned to release back to public ownership. It just strikes me as possible that this is somebody not being a monster of selfishness, but rather being quite realistic about the finite nature of his attention and his time and his sort of emotional energy and deciding in a quite defensible way to withdraw it from things that are sort of structured in our attention economy to try to claim it in every single moment and put it somewhere that has an absolutely

important role to play in making the world a better place in future. So I kind of, you know, I wanted to make a defense of him on those grounds. I end up making a similar defense of him in my book and there is an extremism to the precautions he takes. Makes him look a bit like a weirdo. Probably is a bit of a weirdo. When you're going into town early in the morning wearing noise canceling headphones so you can't hear anything.

I do think there's a... He's a sort of an avatar for something rather than... Exactly, yes. And that's between him and his therapist. At the same time, the thing that I was found moving about that profile is he was doing something hyper-local. And too much of our political and civic attention is now national and international. There's a concept from the political scientist, Etan Hirsch, political hobbyism.

And he makes this distinction between following and being informed about politics almost as a hobby. You're following who's up and who's down. You're having emotional relationships to it. But it's the way you engage with a sports team, you're not trying to change anything. You're just knowing a lot because it's a thing that you like to know about. And we give the bulk of our focus to the levels of politics and calamity that we have the least capacity to affect. And that has coincided with a reduction in focus on the levels that we have the most capacity to affect local government, civic institutions.

And for most people, this trade has been bad. Bad in the sense that it's good for them to be involved locally, but it also feels good to be involved locally. It's a bad trade for mental health. So I don't think people should go all the way to where this guy went. But in terms of this acting as a metaphor for what an inversion of the balance many people have come to looks like. Because the truth is in a weird way, most of us, probably listening to the show

at least, are on the opposite end of it. Instead of the noise canceling headphones that keep you from knowing what is going on in the world. I recognize how against interest this whole riff for me is, by the way. You have the noise producing headphones where you are listening to someone like me or maybe me tell you about the worst things happening in the world that you can't change. And there's something in this that is not serving us and also I think not making politics better.

Right? I don't think that politics has become healthier in America at the time that these engagement dynamics have become most pervasive. It's a difficult problem. Right, right. No, absolutely. And you're putting me in mind also of the work of the political philosopher Robert Telis about how he argues, as I understand it, that one of the things that the health of democracy could do with it is more time spent with people who are

on some level on the other side of the aisle, but not arguing about politics, not trying to understand other people's political opinions, not having our heads in politics at all, but just building civic life at sports games and at gigs and in bowling leagues and all the rest of it in places where politics doesn't arise and where you don't know what the politics of the other people are. That's obviously harder and harder with the sort of total geographical sorting of people into their partisan groups, as I know you've explored in a lot of detail. And also, perhaps we've reached a point in American politics, especially where the thought that somebody might be on the other side from you means that you just can't bear the thought of having them in your social world. But there is a room also here for us sort

of getting our heads out of politics, even for the sake of politics. You had almost throw away remark in the book, and noting this book was before this, written I guess before this election, that quote, the increasingly rage-filled and conspiratorial character of modern political life might even be seen as a desperate attempt by people starved of resonance to try to feel anything at all. I read that and I was trying to decide if it connected for me, but I'd like to hear you expand on what you were thinking there. I'm using the term in that context, resonance having discussed the work of Hartmut Rosa on that topic, this idea that there is something that the modern world lacks and he argues

that it lacks it because of our attempts as societies and individuals to extend more and more control over the world. Something about that that squeezes out a sense of aliveness. I think that might just be another word we could use here, right? A sense of really sort of being alive, which on some level makes no sense because we're all alive, but I think people know intuitively what that means. They know experiences in their own lives when they really felt alive and when they didn't. And I do think that there are sort of dysfunctional forms of feeling alive. There is a kind of an intoxication that I'm sure comes when people are picking fights in social media spaces, for example, or I'm sure when they are sort of burrowing themselves deep into sort of intricate stories of what's really going on in the world despite what appears to be going on, the conspiracies unfolding

behind the scenes and all the rest of it. There is just something that I find that even as somebody who repudiates most of that stuff, that's the point at which I can think like, oh yeah, I can see why that might feel fleetingly good. It's a little bit related in a way to the way that anger can feel strangely pleasurable in a certain way. There is an aliveness that can be all too readily lacking from our days that it does reintroduce. It's interesting that that last point you made on that feeling of anger being a feeling of aliveness, because it loops us back to something I was going to ask you about early in our conversation that one of my producers had sent me a note saying, look, isn't there a

perverse pleasure in pushing yourself too hard? That even, and I do, I read this and I was like, shit, I do feel this, that even if you feel miserable and under slept and wildly out of balance, it's absorbing, it's a little manic, and it can be this way to block out the noise of the rest of your life. And I definitely know that when the more my life feels out of control, the more work and throwing myself at work, which is this one place where I actually do have some control. Not total, but more than I do in a lot of other things. It can be in a way the place where I feel most quiet. And so isn't there some paradoxical pleasure in this experience that we're describing

as the thief of pleasure? I think there is. I think it is a sort of rather suspect kind of pleasure when you examine it. It's as you hinted out there, there's a kind of an avoidance very often motivating it. And I think that's what is at the heart of a lot of workaholism. I'm not accusing you of being a workaholic necessarily, but I think that's adjacent to what you're talking about, right? The idea that when it's uncomfortable to confront certain ways in which your life feels out of control, there is a sort of sense of calm control in work that then makes it very appealing. There is

firstly a sense that you're a little bit more in charge now, but also the sense that it's all leading onwards and onwards to this future moment when you're really going to have mastered life. I think that probably is a feeling that is reinforced by professional success and therefore it gets worse in a way the more that it seems to pay off because it becomes more and more useful as a form of avoidance. There is a kind of a high or an intoxication which I guess has some parallels to kind of other forms of intoxication and what they are emotionally giving people. I don't want to push those parallels too far, maybe. Well, and it offers the dopamine hit of completable tasks.

Years and years and years ago, I was an intern on a presidential campaign when I was in college. And I had wanted to do field, which I thought was going to be being out in the field knocking on doors, but I got placed in the field headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, where I was sending out bumper stickers and yard signs, right, sending out the accoutrement of field. And I didn't like it. And some days, though, I would be placed at the desk, the reception desk. And I remember I found it so pleasurable because people would call and I would route their call and then it would be jumbled on.

You finished that and it would just keep happening. I would just keep having these little calls and you put it somewhere and it's done and you hang up and you finished. And there's so much in life that doesn't have that character at all. Parenting and caring for others and caring for yourself actually, and the allure. Things you can finish, they do allow a sense of control and things you cannot do not.

And so I do think there can be this seductiveness to retreating back into the artificial productivity architecture that you have been given or you have created that lets you keep knocking things off of a to-do list as opposed to sometimes least, sitting in the actual unending mess of life. Yeah, I agree completely. I think all sorts of meaningful and ultimately very joyous experiences of life are kind of uncomfortable to let ourselves fall into because they involve accepting our limited nature, our vulnerability to distressing emotions, all the rest of it. We have to just sort of be present and ready for whatever might happen. I suppose a sort of perfectly realized Zen master, in other words very much not me, would say that it is on some level possible to sort of complete each moment of existence in that way, to sort of

fully experience and then completely let go of each passing portion of time. But it's a heck of a lot easier when it's reinforced by the structures where we're working and living inside. Yeah. I think it's a good place to end. So in the interest of giving people a nice little completable to-do list, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Well, I've mentioned the work of Hartmut Rosa, who is really writing on a societal level in some ways, I feel like, about the things that I'm writing about on a more individual

level. He has a small book called The Uncontrolability of the World. He's also written a very big one, but if we're going for easily finishable things, let's go with that. That's a really lovely overview of this idea that there is something important in the idea that the world escapes our complete control however much we might think we wish it otherwise. I'd also recommend a book by a friend of mine, Elizabeth Oldfield called Fully Alive. I think the subtitle is Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, which I, written from a sort of a Christian perspective, but I actually

think really gets at this idea of aliveness that we've been circling around and what that might mean in the mon world. So I think that was quite an important book for me in bringing some of those ideas into focus. And then there's a book by a spiritual teacher called Joan Tollefson, which has the remarkable title Death the End of Self Improvement. That's strong, I got to admit. That title does not screw around. She's a sort of a non-dual teacher, I guess, in a sort of eclectic, modern spiritual teacher. And the book is essentially a memoir of handling the circumstances

around the death of her mother and then her own serious illnesses in older age. But what I really appreciated about this book was how unlike a lot of books in this space, which claim to be about showing up for the present moment, but then when you look at the present moments in question, they all seem to be rather lovely ones. They all seem to be looking at the beauty of nature or appreciating the beautiful taste of a glass of water or whatever it might be. She's really applying this idea to some grueling experiences. And I think suggesting that there is something about full immersion in the life that is actually happening to us that is meaningful and elevating and deep

and perhaps even enjoyable when the content is not happy at all. Oliver Berkman, thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. This episode of The Ezra Klanjo is produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, mixing by Isaac Jones with the female Shapiro and Amin Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Who, Elias Isquith, and Jack McCordick. We've original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.