The One You Feed - Oliver Burkeman on Time Management for Mortals

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Oliver Burkeman is a British journalist and writer based in New York. He is well known not only for his amazing books, but he also wrote a popular weekly column on psychology called “This Column will Change Your Life” which was printed weekly between 2006 and 2020.  Oliver joins Eric for a third time on the show, and in this episode, they discuss many things, including his new book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Oliver Burkeman and I Discuss Time Management for Mortals and …His book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”How we invest more energy and focus on trying to escape certain feelingsFinitude and understanding that life is finiteTime and how we relate to it as something we have and useThe idea that we are time rather than we have timeAccepting the truth of your finitude allows you to live more in the presentConfusing meaningful with extraordinaryCosmic insignificance therapy suggests that we reexamine the threshold of what makes a meaningful lifeOur tendency to want to define and measure what is meaningful in lifeHow the pursuit of using time well can lead us to live in the future rather than being presentAsking ourselves if something is expanding or contracting to usThe modern attention economy and being aware if we are choosing where our attention goesHow the things that matter most to us can provoke unpleasant emotions that lead to seeking distractionsThe problem isn’t how things are, but rather how we think they should beTrying too hard to be present in the moment Accepting the impossibility of complete control Oliver Burkeman Links:Oliver’s WebsiteTwitterOliver’s PostsCalm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Oliver Burkeman, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Oliver Burkeman on Modern Time Management (2019)Oliver Burkeman (2014)Living Between Worlds with James HollisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are certain things that we definitely cannot change about the human situation, and yet we're incredibly prone to sort of staking our self-worth on managing to change them. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious,

consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman, and I'm happy to say this is Oliver's third time on the One You Feed podcast. He's a British journalist and writer based in New York, and is well known not only for his amazing books, he also wrote a popular weekly column on psychology called This Column Will Change Your

Life, which was printed weekly between 2006 and 2020. Today, Oliver and Eric discuss many things, including his new book, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. Hello, Oliver. Welcome to the show, or welcome back to the show, I should say. Thank you very much for having me back. Time number three. You are in a rarefied guest country at this point. There's only a few three time guests. There's only a few. Wasn't my first appearance like near the birth of this thing? Yes. You were probably in our top 10 or 15 guests. And I was so excited when you said yes, because the title of your book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking, I was like, I have got to talk to this guy. And so yes, you were very

early and I have always appreciated your willingness to have us on. And then you and I, after that, met up to have coffee in New York City one time, like within about six months after that. Oh, yeah. It's all coming back to me now. Yeah. I'm very tired these days since I became a father. But I do vaguely remember all of these things in one way or another. I very much remember that first interview. Yeah, that was great. So we are going to be talking about your wonderful new book, which is called 4000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, which is a great idea. But before we go into it, you are going to get crack number three at the wolf parable. No one knows what you said the first two times. Well, there might be a couple of... Including me.

Might be a couple of photographic memory guests or listeners out there who are like, I know exactly what he said, but we can rest assured that the vast, vast majority of people have no idea. But we have a parable and it goes like this. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.

And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's such a strange parable in some ways. It strikes me because, or maybe I just mean, I don't know that I agree with it. I don't know. I feel that my journey over the last sort of, I don't know, decade or more in my personal life and in my work has been all to do with trying to sort of explore and let back in kind of shadow sides and darkness and not trying to push them away. That's not the same as the question of feeding, I suppose. So I guess what I'm really thinking

about right now, as I sort of let that idea permeate me is just this notion of trade-offs that has become so central to my thinking about time and meaning in life, right? That to do one thing is to not do a million other things with a given portion of time or something like that. There are choices to be made. And we cause a lot of trouble for ourselves and other people, and we try to find ways of feeling like we don't have to make choices. And I guess choice is pretty fundamental to that parable. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. I think I could probably go on and on for hours, but I'm not sure that would be a finite amount of time. And that if we truly do face that, if we look at it head on, then we have to make some difficult choices, or we are inclined towards certain difficult choices. So that might be a great place for us to jump off.

Yeah, I think that there's a way of talking about all this stuff that sometimes is very dramatic. It's about sort of staring death in the face and stepping into an authentic life in a way that takes a huge amount of courage and guts. And I think that's important stuff, but I'm not sure I am particularly expert at any of it. I think of this as much to do with being a very sort of ground level day-to-day idea that, as I say, you know, we invest far more energy, I think, than we realize and far more of our focus on trying to escape certain feelings, on trying not to feel certain things. I mean, in a way, this is the core insight of, you know, the whole tradition of psychoanalysis, right? The idea that the things we don't want to confront, our efforts to not confront them, structure our lives in many ways. And I think one key way is

we don't want to confront the ramifications of having finite time and what that means for how we need to live our days and make choices and prioritize. And so a lot, for example, as I write in the book, you know, a lot of kind of conventional productivity advice and time management advice. I think you can see it as kind of enabling this delusion, enabling this fantasy that we could be limitless. It's not really helping us make choices in our lives. It's sort of helping us deceive ourselves that we might not have to make those choices. So for me, it's all a question of just coming back and back and back in a very sort of, as I say, ground level, day-to-day way to what

it means to be a finite creature. You talk a lot in the book about this idea of relating to time as an instrument, to relating to time as something we have. But fairly early, you also talk about this idea that it's not that we have time or we get time, but that in some sense, we very much are time. Can you share a little bit more about that? Right. Yeah. These are the kind of very fundamental stances that one can adopt towards time. Time is an incredibly mysterious quantity when you start to really try to focus on what it is. And the natural way I think that many of us relate to it, especially in the modern world, is it's a bit like money or some physical possession. You know, it's something that you have and that is yours to spend and that it therefore makes sense to use it as well as you possibly can and not to waste it and all the things that follow from that idea of the use relationship. And we have to do that with our time. I am not suggesting that it is possible or desirable to just completely give up thinking about time in those terms. But it doesn't quite account for

what time really is in all its meanings. And so, actually, if all you do is relate to time that way, I argue anyway, you end up sort of constantly living only for the future, placing the whole value of life in the time that you're leading up to, you know, whatever your goals are, it's when you reach your goals. It's when you finally live in the kind of place you want to live or have the job you want to have or have the relationship you want to have. That's when life is suddenly going to acquire its real, real meaning. And that's a sort of terrible way to live, obviously, because you're never present for life itself. And so there are these other ways of thinking about time, which I think are at least as true. The idea that it's not ours to use, but that we sort of just

live in it, or even, as you say, you know, we live as it. It's a very odd thought to get your mind around. But this idea that sort of to exist is to exist as a little portion of time from your birth to your inevitable death. It's there in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. I've encountered it in some Zen writing. It makes a kind of intuitive sense, even if it's very, very hard to sort of get a very precise handle on it. And it sort of changes the game because if you are time rather than have a certain portion of time to use, this idea of trying to master your time, get on top of it all, it stops making so much sense. It starts to become much more appealing as a notion that you would just sort of sink back into the reality of your time and maybe sort of drop that sense of always being in a in a struggle with it but we are very much at the limits of language i feel when we're talking about this stuff it's incredibly

hard to be super precise about it those ideas are echoed in a fair amount of certain Zen ideas, particularly some of the work Dogen did and this idea. And you're right, it does kind of bump you up against the limits of language. More traditionally, you bring up the idea of 4,000 weeks, which is about the average amount of time that the average human will have to live. The average amount of time that the average human, well, I wonder if I could average using the word average one more time. I think that's right. I think that's right. Works for me. The gist of my question stands. Let's talk about 4,000 weeks. So partly I wanted to give the book a title that would grab people's attention. I think there's a risk that it grabs their attention and throws them into such a panic that they don't want to read my book, which would be a commercial

error. But I think the real import of that is simply that our lives are finite and that they are very short compared to how we might go about thinking of them. Obviously, many people get more than that number of weeks and many people get fewer and you can't know what side of it you'll be on. But whatever you get, it's not a high number, just sort of intuitively compared to what you might think. And if you sort of, as I did, ask your friends off the top of their heads, you know, don't do any mental math, just tell me how many weeks do you think the average human can live, they will come up with six-figure numbers, wildly off base, which I think is very natural because it does not seem like very much at all. So that's

really just the starting point for an exploration of what it means to be finite. And it's really interesting to hear you say, I think you're right, that that's a more conventional way of talking about time than this idea of being time. And yet they do come together somewhere because it is somehow to do with the fact that, you know, fully accepting or as fully as I've been able to, I, who knows what lies ahead of that, but like to somewhat fully accept that truth of your finitude is to step more deeply into that experience of like being time. It's to sort of give up this backdoor unconscious fantasy that there might be a way to sort of get out of this situation. There might be a way to sort of maneuver yourself into a position where you could do everything, where you weren't just existing from moment to moment with no control over what happens next, where you were sort of a kind of a god over time. And the more that you sort of are able to surrender that, the more it feels like you do drop back into the reality of the moment. I don't know. We've gone very swiftly into the deepest stuff, which I like, but it's, it's, it's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Fancy that. You make an interesting

point though, because in the book you talk about, well, recognizing the limit of our time is important facing up to that reality. And yet you're not really advocating that what we do then is try and grab life and time by the throat and, you know, suck the marrow out of every day and make every moment the most precious it can be. You're not really advocating that that is the response. No, absolutely. And I'm really glad you made that point because I think it is so easy to go from these reflections on finitude straight into like, okay, well, if I'm not like base jumping every weekend and, uh, you know, leaving my conventional job to do something radically strange and unconventional and all the rest of it,

that I'm not really building a meaningful life. There's that confusion of meaningful with extraordinary that seems to come very quickly when you go down that route. I think in some subtle way, I don't really quite get there in the book, but it's coming to me now. I mean, in some subtle way, that kind of overly self-conscious carpe diem kind of stance toward time, I think probably is another attempt to kind of find an escape from the reality of our limitations, right? It is an attempt to say, well, you know, at the very least, I will have lived like one of the most extraordinary lives of anyone in my generation, or at the very least, I will have left the kind of legacy that echoes down the centuries after I'm gone. I will in some way have kind of broken the rules of the kind of legacy that echoes down the centuries after I'm gone. I will in some way

have kind of broken the rules of the sort of non-negotiable part of just being a limited human. So it's still kind of a resistance. It's still a little bit of a resistance to where we really are. And so it is my guess, this is not research-based or survey-based, but it is my guess that people who spend large chunks of their lives really sort of ostentatiously trying to suck the marrow out of life in that way, it's not maybe the real central meaning of life. in our own lives that we consider incredibly meaningful things to do with family relationships, parenthood, friendship, that are literally like the most universal and in a sense, mundane experiences that a human being can have and yet are totally in one way or another, very often the highlights of people's lives. Yeah, this takes us again to go kind of into the deep water, but into this idea of, you call it cosmic insignificance therapy, which is such a great name. I don't know whether you are licensing therapists in this particular

mode of whether it's research-based, but tell us about cosmic insignificance therapy. You're giving me ideas. I need a certification program. That's what I'm going to do. Exactly. Exactly. So I just use this term to refer to the sort of surprising benefits that I think there are when it comes to building a meaningful life and experiencing life as meaningful to really paying attention to how, yeah, how insignificant we are by many measures. 4,000 weeks seems short, but it seems short partly and especially when placed against the timeline of the world or the history of the world or cosmic time. You know, billions of eons are stretching off in every direction and here you are for like no time at all. It's very hard to feel like that really matters. But I think there are two ways to just sort of sum up what I think is so liberating about that, and not liberating in a nihilistic way. So not liberating in the sense of like, nothing matters, so might as well party.

But liberating in the sense that firstly, the kinds of decisions that tend to paralyze us in life about what we ought to do and whether we can risk certain choices in career and relationships and elsewhere, they become a lot easier to do when you sort of risk certain choices in career and relationships and elsewhere, they become a lot easier to do when you sort of lower the stakes in this way. When you really understand that nobody in 200 years time, 100 years time is going to care which decision you made about a certain question, then it's actually easier to be bold and to take risks and to sort of find the courage that you need to make those changes. It's like, well, might as well, because the downside is not what you had imagined it was, that somehow the whole future of the universe depended on whether you got this right or not.

And then also I'm borrowing here from the work of a philosopher called Ido Landau, whose work I really admire. There's also this question that it calls into question the definition of a meaningful life, the criteria of meaning that we're using. It shows that there's something a little bit strange about saying that the only meaningful way to spend your life is the kind of life that, you know, as Steve Jobs put it, leaves a dent in the universe. I think a lot of people have, for example, in creative work, they have this kind of background thought that if their work is not ultimately celebrated as some of the greatest ever produced by humanity, then they've kind of failed. And they probably also think it isn't going to be so they sort of already have failed. And none of this, all of these are very strange, like this is to put the

bar for a meaningful life at an incredibly high place. It comes up also in environmental activism, life at an incredibly high place. It comes up also in environmental activism, right? If the only thing that counts is saving the planet from climate change in a sort of overall way, then sort of, you know, helping restore some woodland or some wetlands down the street from you becomes completely meaningless. But of course it isn't completely meaningless. And of course, cooking nutritious meals for your children night after night isn't a meaningless way to spend your life. These are all meaningful ways. And so this idea of cosmic insignificance therapy, it suggests that maybe we need to re-examine the threshold that we're applying for what counts as using life meaningfully. And that might actually make us see that all sorts of things we are already doing

are very meaningful ways to spend life. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to

reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I think this question is a really important one, which is how do we, and as I'm using the word, I'm recognizing it as an instrumentalist approach. How do we measure meaning? Because exactly what you said, if we're like, well, I want my life to have impact.

That's a big word people use. I want to have impact. And I hear people all the time saying, like, I want to help a million people. I'm like, well, why a million? Why not 884,000 or 8,000 or two? Or where is the line? Where is the line where you go? Oh, this has been successful. And you talk about it in time management that even if we buy some miracle wrangle, the confines of our current life under some sort of time management, we just move the goalposts by adding more in. It never ends. And I think this idea when we start to think about meaning as something that has to hold up to some grand scale, then it gets really hard to figure out.

So I think how we are defining and thinking about meaning is so important and yet really, really difficult to wrap our heads around, particularly in the light of cosmic insignificance therapy. Or, you know, I spent the weekend visiting my father, who's in a memory care unit, and you go and you see the number of people there and the amount of suffering that's there, and it's essentially infinite. And so, yeah, how do we think about making a meaningful life? And so how, for you, does cosmic insignificance therapy, how do you find turning towards it as a relief and a gift versus it feeling like a vacuum of doom? Yeah, absolutely. I haven't used that term yet. That's an Oliver Berkman term right there, if I've ever heard one.

I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Two ways, both sort of each relating to the different parts of it that I was speaking about before you picked up, I think on the most important one, but firstly, maybe this is not everyone. Maybe I have sort of grandiose narcissistic tendencies that go beyond the norm, but for me, I can get incredibly caught up in indecision about things or anxiety about certain outcomes, where my anxiety, when I examine it, really does seem to imply that I am the center of the universe and that terrible things are going to happen for the whole of reality if I get this decision wrong. I mean, just absurd, just completely ridiculous. And so this is a very good corrective

to that because you are reminded that like, you know, it doesn't matter on that long-term scale. Honestly, it doesn't matter on a short-term scale. As a journalist, when I'm sort of late with a deadline or even when I was writing this book and I knew that various editors and my agent were sort of quite keen that I should finish it. It's very hard not to sort of mentally picture all these people pacing their houses, totally consumed with the question of what I'm doing at that moment. And it's obviously ridiculous, right? Even within our own little social worlds, our grandiosity or, well, my grandiosity runs rampant. And so it's incredibly useful to just be reminded that, you know, you're not such a big deal.

In my experience, it doesn't lead to sort of low self-esteem and misery. It leads to being freer to just, you know, get on with doing the things that count and that matter. And then I guess the other is, yeah, as you say, right, or imply, you know, you don't want a standard of meaning that says that those moments that you shared with your father were not worth doing because you didn't manage to sort of assuage the suffering of everyone in the place completely, or, you know, thousands and thousands of other people across the world who have the same experiencing similar suffering. So in that respect, I guess it just sort of, it's a reminder that not to kind of dismiss small things from my day to day, my daily routines, just because they

don't have that kind of level of grandeur to them. Measuring it is a very interesting question. I think it is ultimately has to be a sort of an intuitive thing, but I think there are ways to sort of hone that intuition and sort of questions you can ask that help clarify, I guess, trying to figure out, yeah, what's meaning. I'm going to jump to a completely different place here, but that somehow feels connected to me, whether it actually is in reality, I don't know. But that place is one approach to thinking about the limited amount of time we have is to say, well, I've got to make every minute matter, right? But you also talk about the incredible importance and beauty in doing things that in essence don't matter for any other reason except doing them.

Absolutely. I think this is another place where the pursuit of using time well, using it on the things that matter can really trip us up because it becomes very easy to live entirely in the mode of doing things for future benefit, for future accomplishment. It's very obvious in work projects, but it happens in leisure time too, right? It's very easy to sort of turn your entire leisure time into sort of meeting certain fitness goals or running in a marathon or even just like reading your way through a certain set of certain area of literature and then in parenting i think it's incredibly hard to resist that belief that what you're really doing and the measure of what you're doing is only whether sort of successful adults

emerge from the process of raising a child. Again, in all cases, not that these things are wrong, but that they neglect the idea of value in the moment. And so I've been really influenced by the work of a philosopher called Kieran Satir, who wrote a great book called Midlife. And he has this notion of what he calls the atelic activity, right? That the pursuit that you do for itself alone, that you never sort of get to the point where you have completed it. He gives the example and I expand on the example in my book because it's very relevant and close to my heart of hiking. hiking in order to get anywhere. You don't expect to reach a point in your life when you've like done all the hiking you planned to do. You will stop at some point, age or frailty or the end of your life will mean that you can't hike anymore, but it won't be because you have got through the hiking that you intended to get through. None of these things make sense applied to going on a hike.

Efficiency really doesn't make any sense. If you wanted to do a hike most efficiently, you should just stay home and never go in the first place. So it really shows that if you're somebody who finds that experience fulfilling, it must be for itself alone. It must be because it matters to you. Now, people since I've published the book have pointed out that there are exceptions here, like going hiking in order to generate huge numbers of wonderful photographs to burnish your image on social media. And there's a social hiking app, I think, that's just specifically for people to sort of compete about the number of miles that they've walked. So, you know, you can ruin anything if you really want to, but it just to get into this

spirit, I think is the thing. It's not about people should go hiking. It's about, is there something in your life that you do just because there's a real sense of meaning in the moments that you're doing it? I don't think our whole lives, our whole days can be like that realistically, but I completely agree with you that I think it's really important to have things we do in life for no other reason except to do them. I have thankfully managed to make guitar kind of this way for me. I've managed to mostly strip the striving out of it, the desire to make something out of it. I've noticed that there's a process of getting better, of increasing mastery that feels good, but it's just that it feels good. I'm not doing it because of the end

result. I'm actually doing it because the satisfaction of like, oh, geez, I couldn't play that five minutes ago. Now I can. That feels really nice. So I recognize that. And I am one of those people who will turn any hobby into a job if you give me the chance. I have to work against it. The flip side of this, though, that I think about, though, is that there are definitely, and maybe this is, again, me having a measuring instrumentalist type mindset to it, but there seems to be a difference to me in lowest common denominator hobbies, like playing Best Fiends. They're a sponsor of the show, playing Best Fiends for four hours a day

versus, you know, playing guitar for four hours a day. And so how do you navigate or think about navigating that? Like, well, I want to do things just because I like doing them, but I also don't want to do things that are the equivalent of, I think a guest once said, cotton candy entertainment. Like, you know, it tastes sweet in the moment, but afterwards you're like, oh, that isn't so good. But that's where the attention economy drives most of us. Yeah, no, that's a really good distinction. I mean, I think what I want to say in response to it is that I don't think there's many activities, even of the cotton candy kind, that are never the sort of appropriate thing to be doing with your time. And there are obviously times when you're sort of

really tired and it's just a question of finding a mellow place psychologically to recharge when those things can be totally legitimate. There are forms of them that don't actually relax you at all and that you probably can do with sort of eliminating from are forms of them that don't actually relax you at all and that you probably can do with sort of eliminating from life completely. But I don't think that they necessarily need to have mastery or the potential for mastery built in. I don't think they need to be necessarily socially valorized, you know, celebrated as good things to do. I really like, and I may have mentioned this in our previous conversation, come to think of it because it's been so important to me, but I really like this question that James

Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist, talks about primarily in the context of making big life choices, but I think you can apply it in a much broader context, which is whether a given choice or direction or activity enlarges me or diminishes me? Very sort of poetic language that can feel hard to grab hold of at first. But I think that if you get a feel for that, you can almost always answer that in some way. So you can even just on a very low level, you can see that a certain kind of idle activity on some level, it's not that you're growing towards some achievement level. It's just that it just feels like juicy and generative and growth is involved somehow. But I'm not sure if that's quite the right word because't feel stale. It doesn't feel like it's making you slightly worse as a person or slightly eroding your soul. And there are definitely forms of, as you say, cotton candy entertainment that do have that diminishing feel to them.

As I say, Hollis sort of thinks about this in a much bigger sense, I think, to do with like, is this job, is this relationship, whatever, is it enlarging me or diminishing me? But I think even on a much more fine grained level, it's a useful thing to apply to those questions. And honestly, at the end of an extremely tiring day, there are certain kind of things that like, I'm just thinking right now, like, if I'm like, just totally chilled out, and I'm trying to relax and want to, you know, just sort of drift off into sleep. I don't know why I'm trying to relax and, or want to, you know, just sort of drift off into sleep. I don't know why I'm sharing the specific example, but I'm going to anyway. There is a huge subculture on YouTube of people listening to the old radio comedy shows that Ricky Gervais and a couple of

other people produced about 10, 15 years ago now. They stopped doing them years ago. There's hours and hours of this footage and there are whole communities of people just listening to them as they fall asleep. That is cotton candy entertainment in a sense, but I love that stuff because it has the right vibe for the time when I'm doing it. Now, if you were to spend your whole day listening to 15-year-old radio comedy when you could be doing other things that were more sort of creative and generative, that would be a bad way to spend your life. But it's a pretty good way to spend a little bit of evening time sometimes. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There are times where a silly game is the best thing for me. It's just, I'm done. I've got nothing left in the tank to really give much of anywhere else. And I like that idea of expanding or contracting me so much when you asked that question before we went and got James Hollis to be a guest because I was like, I got to talk to this guy. Right. I think the other one is there's a built in point at which I notice an activity cross a chasm and all of a sudden it goes from being something I'm enjoying doing to something that I'm feeling slightly about.

And most cotton candy entertainment has that for me. If I'm sensitive to it. Now, sometimes I don't know it till afterwards. Sometimes I don't know it until I'm like, oh, I crossed that line a while ago. But if I'm sensitive to it, I can actually sort of feel it a little bit where I'm like, it just all of a sudden crosses into feeling like it would be if you were eating cotton candy, where all of a sudden you would go, oh, yeah, yeah. You know, this are designed to make you completely miss that point at which, you know, you would notice that, which I think takes us into the next area I wanted to hit in your book that I thought was really well done and is one of my absolute favorite topics, which is attention. Yeah, I think

this really part of what is in the background of what we've been talking about, about these cotton candy activities is that there are some clashing agendas here, right? It's not just that sometimes it's appropriate to play a silly game, listen to a silly bit of radio, whatever it is. It's that when you engage in the modern attention economy with the platforms and the devices that deliver those platforms to you, attention economy with the platforms and the devices that deliver those platforms to you, you are in a certain kind of a struggle with corporate interests that want you to stay on those platforms and are willing to basically do anything to get you to stay, which means learning from your activities there, what your interests are, what makes you angry, what makes you compelled

for any reason, and then sort of giving you more and more of that stuff and making it a little bit more extreme each time to keep you there and keep you hooked. So we're not even talking about what is the right decision for me about the use of my attention. Is it something intellectual and edifying or is it something sort of superficial and low value in a way? We're talking about, am I even making a choice? Is it really me who's making the whole choice here? Because as Tristan Harris, the tech critic, famously says, every time you go onto one of these platforms, there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen who are paid high salaries to try to keep you there. It's not a fair

fight. I think that is a tremendously important aspect of this whole question and really seeing what's going on there about how deeply these platforms can sort of colonize your attention even at the times when you're not actually using them right i mean i know i'm not the only person who finds themselves hours after seeing some twitter exchange about something kind of mentally arguing one side or other of that argument, like while I'm in the shower or while I'm making dinner or something. And at that point, I'm not staring at Twitter, but they're still, they still got me on some, on some level. I guess in a way, I think my most important contribution on this topic is almost points in the opposite direction though, which is to say that, yes, it's true that there

are all these people out to sort of mine or steal our attention, but that we also need to be honest about the fact that we sort of collaborate with them. We sort of have an urge inside us to distract ourselves from the things that we think we care about the most. And that to me is the really interesting part because I feel like we know basically now that we have to be on our guard for the attention economy. We have to support, I think, significantly greater regulation of some of the biggest companies in that space, et cetera, et cetera, in my opinion. But we also have to think about what's going on in ourselves when I'm writing a chapter and it's something that really matters to me and the topic fascinates me and getting the book completed is a huge priority for me.

And then it somehow is more pleasurable to go and do something that I absolutely don't really want to do on a website or on a social media platform. That is the strange and important part of this equation as well. And what do you think is happening there? I mean, obviously, you make the point that in order for distraction to work, we kind of have to want to be distracted to some degree. What is it you think that we're wanting to be distracted from? Let's take you and your book in that moment. You're working on a chapter, you're working on something that's important to you. Everything's aligned. And yet, the afternoon is spent on Twitter. What's happening there, do you think? I think the sort of general case, and then I'll talk specifically about writing and my work, but I think the general case is that it's not a coincidence that the things that matter to us the most are the ones that provoke kinds of unpleasant emotions that we want to escape by and that we try to escape through distraction. They are all in one way or another, just to sort of return to my central theme,

unpleasant emotions that come from the confrontation with one's limitations that is involved in doing things that matter. So in the case of me writing a chapter, you know, the stakes are high because this is the center of my creative life and it's my livelihood. I can't be sure that the chapter will turn out well because, you know, writing is a kind of mysterious process where I'm in communication with my unconscious and don't know what's going to happen next. I can't be sure that I've got the talent to turn the ideas that I have into something clear and understandable. I can't be sure that I've got the talent to turn the ideas that I have into something clear and understandable. I can't be sure that anyone is going to like what I do. My editor might hate it

and want me to revise it. The reading public might show no interest. There's all these uncertainties in this thing that really matters to me. And all these uncertainties are to do with my lack of total control over how events in the world unfold. Some kinds of writing, it might be sort of leaving me feeling emotionally vulnerable by connecting to some issues in my past that I don't want to think about, or, you know, that's a kind of another possibility. All of this is way less pleasant than just sort of numbing out online or with some other distraction. And I think the online case is especially interesting because it does have this feeling of limitlessness, right? There is a sense that you sort of leave behind your mortal limits and go like marching off through the ether.

There is that phenomenological sense that like right now i'm not constrained by life by reality so i think um then it begins to make a lot more sense like of course we would want to not do the things that matter to us because they matter and that makes them scary or unpleasant in a host of different ways right you talk about the idea that well it's your core idea there is a very down to earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you'll never be liberated. And I would say that theme runs through this book, and it runs through the antidote. I think you may have summed up a big part of, you know, your work there in one line, right? Which is, you know, that, yeah, there is a liberation in grasping there's certain truths about being a limited human that you're just not going to get away from. Right, right. I mean, for me, this has been a very powerful kind of angle into all sorts of different issues, right? It's this idea that, okay, it's definitely possible to sort of strive and to accomplish things you didn't realize were possible. There are all sorts of virtues in pushing yourself to do more and to be more.

there are all sorts of virtues in pushing yourself to do more and to be more but there are certain things that we definitely cannot change about the human situation and yet we're incredibly prone to sort of staking our self-worth on managing to change them on managing to sort of in this case you know achieve a kind of mastery over time that you're never going to achieve. Time is always going to win that battle in the end. And so it's really just a sort of suggestion that we, and I include myself, could like, you know, stop beating ourselves up for not being able to do things that are equivalent to making two plus two add up to five. It's not that you haven't found the right time management technique yet. It's not that you are a sort of undisciplined person and you need to find more self-discipline. It's like you're trying to do something that you will definitely never do. And then there's this way of talking about it that, as you will know more familiarly than me, I think runs through

all sorts of Buddhist writing, especially Zen. This idea that the problem is trying to escape the situation. The problem is not the the problem is trying to escape the situation. The problem is not the situation, but trying to escape the situation. And I quote Charlotte Jocko Beck at the beginning of this book saying about life in general, I think, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. This idea that there is all sorts of aspects of human experience where it's not a problem that that's how things are. The problem is that we think they ought not to be like that. And we spend our lives sort of indignantly railing against them or trying to find the escape route or the clause that lets

us not have to be subject to them. And there is no such thing. And that is the cause of a huge amount of frustration and sort of misdirected energy and attention. That's so well said and so true. You know, after leaving this memory care facility with my dad this weekend, I was reflecting on one of my favorite Buddhist sayings, which is the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. And I love that idea because it really just speaks to like, they're both there kind of in a 10,000 is just the Buddhist way of saying infinite, right? You know, it's just, you know, it's the biggest number they can come up with, but, but, you know, it's, they're both there. And so it's a question of orienting towards that basic fact. And for me, I keep sort of going, well, I just have to sort of not get stuck on one side of that, you know, not get stuck on, oh, it should all be 10,000 joys or, oh, it's all 10,000 sorrows, right? And just go, oh, you just, you're going as gracefully as possible seems to me to be,

you know, sort of your point that those are the certain truths about being a limited human. Right. Absolutely. It's dicey. It's difficult territory in a way, especially with things like the example you give, right? The implication is not, I think, that it's not painful to be with one's parent in their sort of declining years. It's not that this is no big deal once you see the truth of the situation. It's that there's a very specific kind of additional suffering that comes from imagining that it could be ruled out, that the situation could be escaped from. And I don't even quite have the words to express it, but I think it's letting go of that kind of attitude that allows you to find the meaning in the other kind of pain and suffering and

negativity of the situation. It becomes more meaningful to the extent that you can sort of accept that you don't sort of have the right to be excused from it. Right. That viewpoint of the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows doesn't take away me, you know, essentially sobbing as I leave, right? Like it's heartbreaking, right? You know, that is the reality. So it doesn't take that away. But to your point, it doesn't layer on some additional level of suffering where I'm railing against, it shouldn't be this way. It shouldn't be this way. I'm like, well, but it kind of is, you know? So yeah, I think that idea of getting to, you say it slightly differently, you say an effective antidote to anxiety is to realize that this demand for reassurance from

the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied. It's another way of sort of getting to this point of accepting that there are certain things about being human. Yeah, absolutely. That one sort of puts it slightly more in the present versus future framing of sort of wanting to know that the future is going to go a certain way. You can't be given that guarantee and you can't be given the guarantee that the present ought to be unfolding in a certain way either.

And it's, yeah, it's all about sort of seeing that and letting it permeate you, I suppose. I'll wrap us up here with one last idea. You refer to it as being absent in the present. You write, the problem is that the effort to be present in the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of the instrumentalist future-focused mindset, is in fact just a slightly different version of it. You're so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time, in this case not for some later outcome but for an enriching experience of life right now, that it obscures the experience itself. It was important to me to go into this aspect of

things because if you talk and write about the perils of instrumentalizing time to the degree that you're never present in the moment itself, it's very easy to think that the solution to that is to sort of really try hard to be present in the moment. And I have never found this to work and I don't think I'm alone. I write in the book about trying to be incredibly present while seeing the northern lights in the Arctic Circle and how this was a total disaster. You know, I wasn't present at all. I was just sitting there, standing there shivering and thinking, you know, am I being present enough? Like, am I really getting this experience in all its fullness? And the answer is no, because you're trying to do that. So I think it's worth noting that I don't think that like trying to be present in the moment

is a particularly effective counter strategy to the way that we miss the moment all the time. And that instead, for me anyway, it's just been this matter of gradually coming to understand what it means to point out that it always only ever is the moment anyway. We are sort of not separate from it. That brings us back to the idea of being time, I suppose. So it's not something that you could be present in or could be failing to be present in and ought to try harder to be present in. Somehow that just completely misses the point. And when you glimpse the point that you've missed there, it is a little bit easier, I think, to find that you are more

comfortably present in the moment. It's a paradox because yes, you already were. And even a distracted person anxiously worrying about the future is doing all of that in the present. But you can be a little bit more at peace with it all when you see that there's not really any choice to begin with anyway. Right. Well, and I think you make the point that, you know, even when we start to think about working with our attention, you know, you say, and I agree a hundred percent, probably the most precious thing. And even as you say, our attention is essentially what we are. It is always there. It's kind of this fundamental thing. And there is a point, I think, in trying to work with our attention skillfully, to put it on things that matter more often. But you say that when we go too far with that, we start thinking that we should

be able to completely control our attention, which of course is impossible. You say it's slightly different in the book, but the example I often give about it is like if somebody lit a firecracker off behind my head, no amount of mindfulness is going to stop me, like paying attention to my breath is going to stop me from, you know, jerking my attention that way. It's wired into my survival circuit. It's sort of like breathing. It's both automatically controlled, and it also has an element that you can actually direct to some degree. I just love the way you sort of point out like this idea of trying to colonize our attention is doomed to fail. Yeah, yeah. I guess all of this really is about

accepting the impossibility of that kind of control, but showing up anyway to sort of be an active participant in everything, not thinking that the alternatives are this kind of total passivity or total control, but just sort of keeping on, keeping on and doing things that are creative and important and make a difference to people and all the rest of it without them only really being valuable if they reach that level of the kind of mastery or control over really being valuable if they reach that level of the kind of mastery or control over reality that we're never going to get yep i think so much of what you talk about and i think it's why i've always resonated with your work it points towards a

middle way it points towards a path of if you get too far to either of these extremes if you go to the extreme of thinking you should control your attention every moment, that's not, it's not going to work out well for you. And if you go to the other extreme of like, screw it, I just give my attention to whatever pops up. That's not really it either. There is a middle way between those two extremes that seems to serve us best. Yeah, absolutely. And it feels there's something often feels kind of inadequate about settling for middle way, right? It feels like a lot of us, I think, have personalities that want to go all out in one direction. But what if that's not how it is? Yeah. All right, Oliver, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's been a lovely and pleasurable conversation as always. The book is called 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals,

and we'll have links in the show notes to the book and all your other stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.