Upstream - Reclaiming Time with Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

At the beginning of the 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advances of technology, that no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. The challenge, in Keynes's view, would be how to fill all of our newfound leisure time without going crazy.’   That obviously never happened — so, what went wrong? Technology has advanced to the point where we could all be working much less, and with all sorts of time-management apps and tips from experts, why does it somehow feel like there’s never enough time in the day?   In this episode, we’ve brought on someone who might help us figure that out. Oliver Burkeman is the author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — a book about why life today often feels like a battle against endless to-do lists. In this conversation, we explore with Oliver how time has been instrumentalized under capitalism, why it’s important to “waste time” on activities that are not productive and cultivate the feeling of a “joy of missing out” as opposed to FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” and how to connect with what is truly most important to us right now and full-heartedly embrace our finite time, our mere 4000 precious weeks, on planet earth.   Thank you to The Weakerthans for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. The nature of capitalism and consumerism at first glance is a system that is fueled by people seeking the next horizon, seeking growth in a certain sense as the sole variable, seeking to sort of gain a kind of foothold. And other people have talked about capitalism as an economic system that sort of instrumentalizes everything it comes into contact with,

that this sort of instrumentalism is the core of it. It's like, how can this be used for goals of the system, natural resources, people's energy and ingenuity and skills, all the rest of it, and obviously also time, right? I mean, this idea that your time itself is a commodity is a big part of this, because then it becomes absolutely part of the same logic to try to squeeze as much value out of every minute, every hour.

You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. At the beginning of the 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century,

thanks to the growth of wealth and the advances of technology, that no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week. The challenge, in Keynes' view, was actually how we would fill all of our newfound leisure time without going crazy. That obviously never happened, so what went wrong? Technology has advanced to the point where we could all be working much less, and with all sorts of time management apps and tips from experts, why does it somehow feel like there's never enough time in the day? Why does it somehow feel like there's never enough time in the day?

Well, in this episode, we've brought on someone who might just be able to help us figure that out. Oliver Berkman is the author of 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, a book about why life today often feels like a battle against endless to-do lists. In this conversation, we explore with Oliver how time has been instrumentalized under capitalism, why it's important to, quote, waste time on activities that are not productive, and cultivate the feeling of a joy of missing out as opposed to the fear of missing out, and how to connect with what is truly most important to us right now and full-heartedly embrace our finite time, our mere 4,000 precious weeks on planet Earth.

Here's Della in conversation with Oliver Berkman. we would love to start with an introduction how might you introduce yourself for our listeners my name is oliver berkman i am an author and journalist, I suppose. I most recently wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, and I've written some other books. And I wrote a column for the Guardian newspaper for a long time about sort of psychology and philosophy and self-help and happiness and all that stuff. I wrapped that up a couple of years ago. I live in Yorkshire. I feel like I could now go on for an hour and a half, but that's not the point. So yeah, I'll stop there with the bio. Thank you. And so the theme of this show is about going upstream from the challenges of our time,

the ecological, the social, the political, the economic, and going to the root causes. the political, the economic, and going to the root causes. And your book, 4,000 Weeks, is absolutely a journey upstream. And let's start with what are the challenges or the heartbreaks or the things that you journeyed upstream from? Like, what were the seeds of inspiration that wanted you to embark on this book? And what were the challenges, political, economic, social, ecological, that your book is really an upstream journey from? Such a great question. And it's such a great sort of frame in general, metaphor, whatever it is, the idea of going upstream. I suppose one way to answer that is that I feel like in some way, I'm always in my writing, just trying to figure out ways to deal with is that I feel like in some way I'm always in my writing just trying to figure

out ways to deal with the struggles I have in a fairly self-absorbed and personal way and then hopefully working up to something more widely applicable and deeper and I had always had a sort of a fixation with this idea of managing my time feeling in control or rather not feeling in control of my time and wanting to feel in control feeling that there must be some way of you know organizing things and handling work and the rest of life in such a way that i could do everything that was demanded of me and pursue all my ambitions and fulfill my potential, whatever that means. And so that's sort of the ground level of this was, you know, being what I call in the book, you know, productivity geek and what that meant and what drives people who are really fixated on productivity in that way.

But what I came to see, I guess, is that it's that is one version of many ways in which people struggle with the sort of, to confront and acknowledge the facts, what it means to be a finite human with finite time. It's definitely one where there are all sorts of social and economic cultural pressures making it making it worse and um but i guess where that led me eventually is you know as upstream as perhaps you can go which is just death and the difficulties we have with the situation in which we find ourselves you know governed by limits and subject to forces beyond our control and and uh unable on principle to do even a fraction of the things that might feel like they matter just because that's what it means to be a finite human.

Obviously for many, many people, all these challenges of time really do feel very political, economic. You know, they are to do with feeling like the world is making impossible demands on them just to stay afloat. I think a lot of my impossible demands probably came from inside me in my case, but it's all part of the same. It's all part of the same challenge, I guess. Yeah, I really heard you say that, you know, one approach to your writing is to explore the questions or challenges that you're facing. And then it sounds like it led to more systemic or more collective challenges around time and productivity. And yeah, I would say for me reading the book, there were a few

heartbreaks or challenges that your book went upstream from that I didn't even know I had, meaning the ways that I instrumentalized time, that I tried to make everything productive, even my leisure time. Also, my sense of deferral of happiness or contentedness until a future state. I didn't realize that I have that as well, as well as a sense of urgency or a pressure to really have meaning that might be a little out of proportion in the grand scheme of things. So just to add a few more that I like, those are challenges that I didn't even know I was experiencing that were having a toll on me that your book really went upstream from. Yeah, no, I think that's great to hear. And I mean,

it's not great to hear that you that you suffer like the rest of us. But you know what I mean? It's great to hear that it resonated. I think that, yeah, that sense that the real meaning of life is going to come at some point in the future, which is so easy to sort of credit if you're maybe 18 or 19 and progressively gets harder and harder to believe in as you get further and further through the life journey is a really big part of this. And I think that, you know, we can talk more about it if you like but what's that's really bound up with this awful but in some ways poignant and beautiful truth that loss and turning and waving goodbye to opportunities and and endings and all of this are absolutely baked in to our situation and to you know the very best life

imaginable is nonetheless you know it's completely shot through with all the things we can't do all the lives unlived all the decisions we have to make to not spend our time on most things in order to spend them on a few things that that matter to us i think one of the functions that that sort of deferral serves that sort of one day i'm gonna get it together i'm gonna be fully qualified or i'm gonna have get myself fully organized or you're just you know one day the time of meaning and joy and pleasure is going to come it's really sort of useful in an avoidant way because it helps us to keep on thinking that we're going to win this struggle against our limits and against loss, you know, but just not yet. As long as it's going to happen soon, you can sort of keep on believing in it. Yeah.

I'm reminded of the one way that you described what you're saying in your book is the joy of missing out. People may have heard of FOMO, the fear of missing out, is the joy of missing out. People may have heard of FOMO, the fear of missing out, but the joy of missing out, you describe as coming when we decide on something, when we commit to something, when we land on something. And a friend of mine just sent me this article of a 35-year-old who just had flitted between jobs and all sorts of locations and was really searching for meaning and really not finding it and and all sorts of locations and was really searching for meaning and really not finding it and having a sense of anxiety and overwhelm and depression. And I recalled what you shared and this idea of like, you know, if we choose, let's just say a place to

live, it may be that there are many other places out there that could be warmer, more walkable, you know, an even better Thai restaurant. And yet that commitment, that landing, that setting our bags down, that putting roots in can be the starting place for really deepening of our connections with place, with the planet, with communities, with our work in the world. So yeah, I loved your reframe of the joy of missing out that comes with a commitment to people and places and relationships. Yeah, I think it's a lovely way of putting it. I mean, it reminds me as well that so much of what I think I'm saying, and also much of what I find useful in other people's writing and speaking is it's never really a matter of thinking of a new way to live or a new method to use in your day-to-day life. It's rather a kind of new degree of seeing what is already true and a new way of relating more authentically to things that were already the case.

So, you know, the shift from the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out is not necessarily about doing less in your life. In some contexts, I think it could be about doing more. It's just about moving from this unreal fantasy notion that it might be possible to avoid missing out and moving, shifting to the mindset and the state of understanding that you're always missing out anyway, when you decide to commit some time to something, the state of understanding that you're always missing out anyway when you decide to commit some time to something the nature of that commitment and the value of that commitment comes at least in part from all the things that you're declining to do in favor of it and the only choice we have as humans is to dive into that realization or do everything we can to avoid confronting it and that shift even if you only go some of the way i'm sure i've only gone

some of the way from living in denial to living in sort of an authentic understanding of how things are does bring with it a kind of poignancy there's a kind of bittersweet really sort of deep and lovely richness that comes from acknowledging that what really gives the value to the fact that you decide to spend a couple of hours with a certain friend, say, is in part the fact that you could have done all these other things. They would have been valuable and you're not doing them. The joy of facing our finitude, as you write. And, you know, let's go back to what are the barriers? Why is it that we're not all living with death on our shoulder, which is a phrase I've heard, or facing our finitude or accepting or, you know, resting into the joy of missing out. One of the economic things

that you bring up that I really appreciated was you, you said that John Maynard Keynes said, and this was like at the early part of the 1900s. He said, within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one will have to work more than 15 hours per week. And the challenge will be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. So I wonder how many folks listening are like, oh, yeah, we're there. I only have 15 hours of work a week and my challenge is what to do with all my leisure time. And instead you write, work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos. So talk to us about how do we approach work both in terms of the systemic and the individual? How do we approach work in a way that makes this a barrier

to facing our finitude or to really accepting the mortality of our lives? Yeah, interesting. Just in case there are, you know, economic historians in the audience, I have to say that the lines you read, Trudy Duquesne's there, I'm me paraphrasing him, but he does say that. He does make that claim about the 15 hour work week he says some other very wise things in that speech that essay that i quote elsewhere as well but but that really didn't

pan out and the barriers it's interesting to think about whether work presents barriers to our doing this or whether the way we approach work is a kind of symptom of our abhorrence of doing it and i just mean that the sort of the causal directions here i think you can talk about forever on the one hand we are certainly encouraged by the culture extremely competitive and individualizing especially the sort of gig economy the collapse of the job for life and paternalistic corporations things that, all of those forces make us feel like we have to do an impossible amount just to stay afloat. And it may be in some sense true in that, you know, I don't mean it's all in our heads. I don't mean there aren't people who absolutely have to work

crushing numbers of hours just to put food on the table, keep a roof above their heads. That is true. numbers of hours just to put food on the table, keep a roof above their heads, that is true. But it all contributes to a sort of force that keeps us from facing the fact that actually an impossible demand is an impossible one to fulfill by definition, and that we're all going to fail to do the impossible, even if it has terrible consequences for us. On the other hand, I think a lot of us those of us with some modicum of autonomy and freedom in this system and privilege whatever we embrace this right we we sort of enthusiastically jump on the on the bandwagon and feel that by becoming ever more efficient and increasing our capacities and optimizing

and being able to take on more and more and more and process it more and more effectively we will get to this point where we can finally feel at peace with time we can finally feel like we've won the battle we've got the upper hand and uh you know it's all smooth sailing from from now on so it's an interesting combination of sort of forces that pressure us and ways in which we totally collaborate with those forces. And it's an interesting combination too, I think, of the darker sides of capitalism as against like, well, what causes capitalism? That's always a fascinating question to me. And I think on some level you can trace all of this back to, you know, people not wanting to die. Me too, by the to, you know, people not wanting to die. Me too,

by the way, when it comes to not wanting to die. So I think that there's just so much going on here in every direction. Yeah, one thing that I've come to realize is I've like gone on this upstream journey is there is kind of a little bit of a challenge with causality, like the upstream metaphor really is like, there's this and then then we go upstream from that, and that causes that. And, and actually, I've heard, you know, causality is more like a ball of yarn, you know, that there, these things are very related and connected and affect one another. So I hear you on the tangledness of the the answer to the question. I was just gonna say, as a, as a writer, it's become clear to me that, certainly in the kind of writing I'm doing, you don't need to answer that question.

It's not the most useful thing you can do necessarily to line up the causal order. It's more a matter of sort of trying to vividly reflect back to people like this is how it is. And if you think about it, you'll see that these are some of the consequences of how it is. if you think about it, you'll see that these are some of the consequences of how it is. So I have to say, I've sort of given myself a bit of a free pass on trying to conclude whether capitalism causes us to fear death or the fear of death causes capitalism and all the many other questions of that form. For someone listening who that might not be very clear, that connection for, can you explain what you mean? How is capitalism and our fear of death how are they connected well i think that this is all very impressionistic i don't have you know data and studies but but it seems that there is this fundamental desire to i'm sort of semi-quoting

the therapist bruce tift here to not fully consciously participate in what it feels like, to be constrained by reality in all the ways that we are, to only have a certain amount of time to know that it's coming to an end, to not know when it's going to come to an end, to only be able to control it to an incredibly modest degree. All of these things are sort of a situation in which we don't want to be. situation in which we don't want to be and just sort of the nature of capitalism and consumerism at first glance is a system that is fueled by people seeking the next horizon seeking growth in a certain sense as the sole variable seeking to sort of gain a kind of foothold sometimes in the worst forms you know at the expense of other people depending on how marxist you want your analysis of it to be i suppose and it seems obvious to me that all of that all of our participation in this to any degree

really fulfills this function of encouraging the feeling that we're sort of getting on top of life or that we're getting a foothold on things if you're in any of the sort of winning positions in a capitalist system. And if you're in one of the sort of losing positions, then I suppose it's more a matter of feeling that you've got to do all these things in order not to slide off the bottom completely. But it's not just survival, it's this existential level of like, well, if I can do this, I can get to this point where I can feel secure, I can feel peace of mind in a way that doesn't involve turning to stare reality in the face. And other people have talked about capitalism as an economic system that sort of instrumentalizes everything it comes into

contact with, that this sort of instrumentalism is the core of it it's like how can this be used for goals of the system natural resources people's energy and ingenuity and skills all the rest of it and obviously also time right i mean in the post-industrial era certainly and the industrial from the industrial era onwards, I should say, this idea that your time itself is a commodity is a big part of this, because then it becomes absolutely part of the same logic to try to squeeze as much value out of every minute, every hour, I think. I don't know. What do you think? You may have more cogent thoughts about this than I do. No i i really hear you about the

the both and that there is the systemic there's the capitalism and you write capitalism is a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters right the earth's resources your time your abilities so there is this systemic pressure of the instrumentalization and then there's also the ways in which we are complicit, and that we embody capitalism and that we instrumentalize our time, and we may be avoiding facing our finitude. So I think it's a both and and it's understandable that if we live within the system and we're socialized within it, that we may embody or be complicit in its operating principles. So I hear that both and. And yeah, maybe can you just talk a little bit about that history of time? Because I think that's helpful to place it in the

history of capitalism. You have this beautiful section around looking at clocks and our perception of time and how we've come to the relationship with time that we're in now, this more instrumentalization of time. So what did you learn about the history of clocks and time and how we use time as a means to an end? So this is broad brush, certainly, but I think that in general terms, pre-industrial people did not have this basic sort of duality between you know you and time so that you have a relationship to time time is some sort of thing that you have to maximize a resource you have to use i make the case in the book drawing on a number of sources that i think it can only ever be a speculative case but it is it is the case that um you know an early medieval

peasant in england say to pick one example who contrary to some memes that go around on the internet today i do not think had a better life in general than many of us today but who almost certainly did not suffer from time problems many other problems but not time problems because they all seem to stem from this notion of time as a resource that has to be maximized. And I think that before the development of that idea, which went sort of hand in glove with the development of clocks and mechanical ways of representing the time, would have felt much more like time would just have been the medium in which your life unfolded. like time would just have been the medium in which your life unfolded. It just was your life rather than something that you had and that your life was spent relating to in a certain way. It just

would have been your life. And I think part of the reason it's difficult for us to see this today is that we do have these moments of timelessness and sort of stepping off the clock, but they tend to be sort of heightened moments that we generally think of as very beautiful moments, or perhaps occasionally really, really awful moments. It happens, I think, in crises as well. So, you know, I've got experiences on a meditation retreat or in a beautiful natural setting of feeling that timelessness. I'm sort of trying to argue in the book that that quality would have been present for sort of pre-clock people and pre-objective ideas of time people all the time. Doesn't mean that it would have been beautiful and wonderful to suffer all the many diseases

of medieval peasant or do the back-breaking labor or have the early mortality or all these things. But that sense that you're living your life with a yardstick or a ticking clock in the background you're trying to keep up with something you're trying not to waste time or get the most out of time i think that would not have been there i think though it's always very dubious i acknowledge to to make comparisons between earlier phases of people in what are now industrialized countries and indigenous peoples today i think there are cultures where this idea of what anthropologists call task orientation instead of time orientation is still really prevalent where there is a sort of rhythm that comes from the activities that are done in the day rather than first of all coming from a schedule you know you're sort of fitting

your activities into a temporal plan and yeah yeah, clocks, I mean, I think clocks, which, at least according to some accounts, developed first in sort of monasteries that needed to keep all the monks on the same schedule through the day. And then obviously, much later, with industrialization, factory shifts, and all the rest of it, there's this need for a collective, coordinated, synchronized kind of time. And that obviously fuels this objectified or i don't know this kind of notion of time that is something separate from you that we can all see by looking at the clock thank you for that yes and especially that task orientation versus time orientation and i'm recalling a visit that i had to a bakery in my neighborhood. And the woman

was behind the counter and she was, you know, making coffee and getting the pastries for folks. And she asked me if I wanted something heated. And of course, you know, you want a chocolate croissant heated. And she was going very slowly or very naturally, let's say. And there was a little bit of a line behind me, and I felt rushed. I felt stressed. And I remember she saw that in me, and she said, I don't rush anymore. It's not worth it. So just this sense I'm feeling and remembering from your book of if we let things take the time they take, and if we were more focused on the task at hand rather than the time, you know, would we feel less of a sense of rush? It's a question. I'm wondering what you learned about rush or how your relationship with rush has changed in the

writing of this book. Yeah, I'll happily speak to that. Your anecdote reminds me of one of mine that suggests that I haven't changed enough yet. But I've noticed that, you know, here in the UK in supermarkets, it's different in most of America, I think. But here in the UK, when you go through the checkout with a large, you know, weekly grocery shop, you pack it away yourself rather than the person operating the checkout packing it away for you. And so the situation is set up where like the shopping comes at you and it's going pretty fast because the checkout person is pretty efficient at their job. And there's this kind of crazy notion that you've got to get it all into the bags as it comes and not allow it to pile up. Or at least I'm aware of feeling that stress even when the person in the

checkout is under no hurry because they're on a shift they just they're doing their job until it's time to go home and there's no queue behind you that's the crazy thing i noticed the other day there is still from somewhere from somewhere supernatural or rather cultural and maybe economic you know there is this strange pressure to just get it done fast and it doesn't come from any rush that i'm And it doesn't come from any rush that I'm in. It doesn't come from any rush that the checkout person is in. And it doesn't come from any rush that other shoppers are in. It just is in the air. It's really strange.

But I think that, yeah, if you sort of trace that back or upstream, if I can use that, that part of the reason for this hurry is that making things go faster trying to get things to go as fast as we feel we need them to go is clearly one obvious way to try to not feel limited by time it's not pleasant because rushing in this sense is not pleasant but it feels like whether you sort of are consciously aware of this thought or not, it feels like if you could only go fast enough, then you could get it all done. And it would feel like you were in some sort of position of control over the unfolding time of your life if you could decide how quickly everything happened. And we can't, but I think a number factors in the the modern world make it harder partly by sort of getting us closer to that goal right so i think that again i'm not sure i can prove this

but i think that impatience and that sort of stressful suffering kind of hurry where it's like it's really awful that things can't be made to go faster. That comes to us in traffic jams or, as I say in the book, waiting for food in the microwave. It's weirdly worse to wait three minutes for some food that's in the microwave than a couple of hours for some food that you've put in the oven. And I think that's because our technology sort of gets us really close. us really close. It holds out this promise that we can get faster and faster and faster doing things and maybe reach this kind of escape velocity where we are not constrained by the natural world or by the rhythms of the social world, right? Where we just call the shots. But of course, we still don't get there. So that remaining two minutes that it does take to heat something up in the microwave, you can't do it in zero seconds,

is all the more tormenting. Or to pick a different kind of example that the writer, law professor Tim Wu wrote about a while back, we're much less tolerant of waiting in traffic, or he said in his example, waiting in line to vote, which is not something we end up having to do in the UK, but I know it does happen a lot in the US. It's much worse to do that if you never have to do it anymore to buy concert tickets because you just do it on your phone. The parts of life that remain the kind that need to be given the time they take,

queuing for things, reading a novel, got to be harder to do in a world that is totally full of all these things that don't take any time at all. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Oliver Berkman, author of 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. We'll be right back. Hell like water in your shaking hands

Are all the small defeats that day demands Ten to six or nine to 6 to 9 to 5 Trying dying to survive Never knowing what survival means Leave the apartment to buy alcohol Hung our diplomas on the bathroom wall Look at the plaster chipped away Space is stunning to decay

List Academy and pending class war Play our bad day down here, dear Let's make believe we're strong Now come some protests Some, like maybe we shall Overcome someday Overcome the stupid Things we say

Say I needed more Miss, say I needed One more kiss Left that light on way too Long now Let's plan to bomb More kiss left out, I don't wait too long now Let's plan to bomb at City Hall Let's kill an MLA We'll talk the night away

You're coming sick, I'll quit the word games that I play Swear I weigh more than half, believe it when I say That somewhere love and justice shine Sin of sin's a false slave Tyranny talks to the devil Sad these slogans all come true We forget to feed our ears. That was Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist by The Weaker Thans. Now, back to our conversation with Oliver Berkman.

You know, this feeling of speeding through things, this also reminds me and brings me back to the instrumentalization of time that, you know, if I were to cook a meal to eat, like the instrumentalization of that time, I might try to do it as quickly as possible, kind of get it done. Yeah. And yet if I were to do it for the intrinsic value of the activity itself, I might savor and enjoy the experience. So let's go back to this instrumentalizing time, because I really do think that was one of the most powerful pieces. So to instrumentalize time, to treat time instrumentally as a means to an end. Why do we do this, Oliver? And even our leisure

time, talk to us about this. Why do we do this? And what does it look like? What are the ways that you find that we do this? So yeah, in general, what I mean by this phrase is just literally valuing the time that you are experiencing now solely or pretty much solely in terms of where it is taking you or failing to take you, what you're doing with it that will be valuable later on. And, you know, as I write in the book, it's not like you can avoid this

or would want to avoid this. We all do things for those later goals you do not record a podcast to just stop and never do anything with the recording you do it to put out a podcast and there are thousands of examples of this in everybody's life every day but this sort of total investment that all the real meaning is coming later keeps you in this kind of it's like being you know donkey being led along by a carrot or something right you never get to the moment where it cashes out to use a sort of slightly capitalist metaphor but where it really you know where it cashes out into enjoyment now pleasure now and the tragedy of that for anybody is that if you do that all your life and never

quite get there then when your life stops you sort of missed the potential for the deepest value of life and it isn't just an argument for you know smelling the roses and meditating and reading novels it's an argument for how we go about building businesses and making podcasts and you know working on community projects and parenting it's not that these are not things that have a sort of end point goal of some kind it's that their value can't entirely come from that end point if you ever want to sort of experience the fullness of of life why do we do it i mean putting aside really important stuff about you know being raised to do it and cultural and economic pressures i think the reason we do it and i sort of tried to get a little bit towards this in an earlier answer

but is because in instrumentalizing time there is the sense that the goal to which you're headed belongs to a realm of limitlessness a realm where you're immortal a realm where you're not constrained by your limited time or talents it's really hard to put this into words but actually Keynes who got that 15 hour week wrong puts this beautifully in the same thing where he says I think I can quote this from memory something like the purposive man by which he means the person who is locked into this instrumental mindset is always securing for his actions a spurious immortality by pushing the value of them further and further into the future he doesn't really love his cat but only

his cat's kittens nor even in truth the kittens but the kittens kittens and so on forever to the end of catdom which is a really nice quote but but also you know i think it gets to this it's hard to convey but i think a lot of people can feel it when they get inside a quote like that that like projecting forwards all the time is to kind of project your life forever to think that the meaning of life is something you're getting to is in part a defense mechanism against the sort of unnerving and scary and anxiety-inducing, but ultimately, I think, really beautiful truth that this is it. Actually, it's now. And it will be now tomorrow as well, hopefully, for you and for me. But this is it. It's here

that meaning has to be made, if it's ever going to be made. Yeah. And you also share another quote, Thomas Wolfe, you share, we are the sum of all the moments of our lives. All that is ours is in them. We cannot escape it or conceal it. And then you follow, if we're going to show up for and thus find some enjoyment in our brief time on this planet, we had better show up for it now. And yeah, really speaks to that. And one thing I love too is then you say, yeah, but you also can't try. You can't try to enjoy the present moment. And I certainly have that experience of like, okay, I've been really looking forward to, let's say this dinner or this vacation, I'm going to try to enjoy it. And you really can't because that pressure is the separation of yourself from the experience. So it is really

hard to articulate the savoring and enjoying and being with the moment and not trying to. I don't know if there's anything else you'd add to that. Yeah, I'm sort of throwing up obstacles in every direction there, just because I think that's true. And that if you respond to any of this message by thinking any of these thoughts, like, oh, I'm going to be really present in the moment today, or I'm going to eke every inch of value out of life today by just doing remarkable things all day, you know, you are, as you say, or as you imply, maybe, you know, you're still reinforcing this distance between meaning and you, or, you know know a rich experience of life and you

here now i think the answer such as there is one to the extent there is one has to just come from seeing that this is just true that you always are in the moment that if you postpone meaning entirely to a later point you're going to miss out on life and it's just from sort of entirely to a later point you're going to miss out on life and it's just from sort of understanding that a little bit preferably on a kind of a bodily level and letting your shoulders drop a little bit and not you know unless you're much better at it than me it's not a question of figuring this out and then sticking with it every minute for the rest of your life but just enough to see that like you know to pick an example from my life that like to be more fully in the rest of your life but just enough to see that like you know to pick an example from my life that like to be more fully in the experience of like reading a bedtime story

with a kid or having a meal with a older parent or some you know with one of your parents something like this just to sort of be in it in that spirit of like well there's nowhere else to be so i might as well i think that phrase might as well has always been really powerful for me it's like it's got a kind of a resignation to it but it's the right it's the right attitude in a sense it's like this is it so you might as well be here as fully as it seems possible to be yeah I really felt a sense of you know holding things a little lighter not trying to control or force obviously you're you're certainly cautioning us against that, and that we can't even control or force even if we wanted to. So to hold it lighter and

to be with what is, is the only thing we can do. And then you also kind of expand this to really caution us against like human hubris, right, to kind of get smaller. And you call this cosmic insignificance therapy. And this was so interesting to me because I, in part, work as a livelihood coach, really helping folks find their mythopoetic identity or their calling or their contribution to the just transition or the great turning, really with this kind of sense of rising to the occasion of the challenges of our time. And of course, you don't say, let's not address climate change or social injustices

or things that we're facing. You just say, let's hold our importance and our ability to kind of change the world we're in more lightly and really embrace the kind of insignificance of ourselves in the cosmos. And then in that same vein, turn towards things that we can more easily turn towards, as well as the bigger things, right? You talked about, you know, supporting an aging parent with Alzheimer's or, you know, picking up trash, perhaps, you know, so this like, it's like both the grand and the big, but also holding that lightly and doing what is directly around us and what we can make a difference in. I don't know if I'm if I'm saying that well,

but that's kind of how I interpret it. What would you say to that point? Yeah, I think it's a great way of putting it. I think that. So yeah, when I talk about cosmic insignificant therapy, I'm just sort of encouraging readers to consider how tiny even frankly the whole of human civilization or sort of you know human existence is let alone one's own life in the grandest of grand schemes of things and the time scale and the spatial scale of the of the cosmos and i'm always struggling a bit i think i just about managed in the book but i'm always struggling a bit to explain why i think this is not a recipe for sort of mediocrity or for not figuring out your role in the great turnings of the eras or anything but actually an understanding of what it really means

to enter into them fully because it's to do with sort of really wholeheartedly finding and occupying your place in this thing with a full full understanding of how minuscule that place is but firstly that's the way it is and you single-handedly on your own changing the whole of course of history is not is not on the cards but also because there's something very kind of i think a lot of us when we sort of worry about whether our lives are meaningful or we're doing meaningful things or making a difference we use this rather arbitrary really standard of meaning which which says implicitly i mean it's it gets a bit ridiculous if you spell it out in words but like implicitly, it's like if the things I do now aren't detectable as having made a difference to the world in a millennium's time or something, then they're not meaningful.

Or maybe it's 100 years or maybe it's the end of history. It's ridiculous in a way. It's so out of reach. And yet there's no reason, I i argue to use this standard of meaning it's where we naturally go somehow but actually it feels meaningful to do some of the things you mentioned and you know make dinner for your kid or have a meaningful communication i get all these kind of not to brag but like i've got a bunch of really kind of moving and interesting and poignant emails from people in response to the book and then some of them at least uh i managed

to sort of write back to and engage with people about that's a meaningful experience that feels like we both showed up for a little bit of our time on the planet i don't think i can make a strong case that anyone's gonna care that that exchange took place 200 years from now but i just want to say maybe let go of that being the thing you think you need to have for it to be for it to be meaningful and then this is where it sort of gets a bit paradoxical and i hope not contradictory if you can live a little bit more in that way as i say i think you do more more fully take your place in grand truly universe changing events and you know a handful of people in every generation it's going to be their role to make the scientific breakthrough that really does make a you know

vast difference for many millions of people and for some other people it's going to be playing the guitar in the coffee shop where those ideas get thrashed out. You know, it's like, whatever. It's like, it's like, it's all, it can all be meaningful. It can all be showing up. Yeah. I'm recalling Joanna Macy, eco-justice, Buddhist philosopher and activist. She says, any act with good intention sends out ripple effects into the web of life in ways we cannot measure or even see so it really does go back to that the effort or the action for the sake of it intrinsically and kind of letting go of what may be the results or the impact of that action that first we may not be able to ever measure or even see the impact of our action and that it's the intrinsic value of doing it, even when things look bleak or it doesn't look hopeless or it may not make any difference,

that that's kind of a wise approach to our actions in the world. And I'm also thinking of Martin Shaw who says, you know, don't let a Hercules complex land on your shoulders. land on your shoulders. So it is that showing up and playing our part, and yet not taking kind of a self-important grandiosity to our efforts. It's holding our egos, perhaps, a little bit lightly, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lovely way of putting it. Well, one of the main gifts for me from your book was really inviting me to consider what is most important to me and what is most important right now and i know that there is a buddhist saying i don't know who said it but this buddhist saying of the most important thing is to know what is the most important thing and it's something i've been working with of like what

is most important right now? What is most important? And I really love that your book could be perceived as a time efficiency book, time management, and then you just totally Akito move it and really say, what is most important right now? So I'm wondering, can you share the story of the Warren Buffett, the 525 rule, and just what you learned about prioritizing what's most important to us? Like, why is that an offering and how might we do that? Yeah, sure. So the story is attributed to Warren Buffett, but as I say in the book, probably apocryphally. apocryphally. And it's just this idea that he was asked, you know, again, purportedly by his personal pilot, how to think about and focus on what matters in life and figure out your priorities.

And he argued that you should, in the story, he says you should list your 25 most important goals in life in descending order from one to 25. And then the top five of those are the ones that you should pour your time and attention into. But then this is the crucial twist. The remaining 20 are not things that you should like do a bit on if you get some time here or there, but they are the ones that you should avoid like the plague because they are the ones that are meaningful to you, but not quite sufficiently meaningful to you to warrant using your incredibly precious time on them it's really easy to not waste time on things that you consider meaningless by and large maybe some people have to do some work that they consider

meaningless but but you know i'm at no risk of spending too much of my time watching paint dry because it's a meaningless task and it's not alluring but i'm at great risk of not spending enough time with friends or family members who i love the most because i'm sort of maintaining maybe some of those sort of friendships that have slightly become zombie friendships and you know they're perfectly okay they're they're they're nice enough but they're not quite don't quite reach that that level of um being worth it even this story doesn't quite put the thumbscrews on as much as I feel like we probably should here and say, because it still has this sense that, you know, you can make this ranking and that you can reasonably say that there are activities or people in your life that are only at position 17 or something. I think the

really sort of agonizing, anguishing truth about all this is that in the end there are going to be things we don't get time to do and have to sort of accept not getting time to do that would have been perfectly good contenders for the top five that this is the thing i'm always sort of banging on about that the mistake that i think people make i've certainly made is is that if you get really good at managing your time and saying no and all the rest of it you can just make time for everything that matters and waste no time on anything that doesn't matter but in fact that that set of things that matter there's just no reason to believe that it's something we can get our arms around that was something we can find time for all of or even very much of and so it's that sort of leveling that i think is so important as

a certainly for prioritization in life it's that leveling that says look if i'm not going to pursue this potential hobby right now or i'm not going to go on this trip right now it's not because i don't need to persuade myself that that would have been a useless use of my time i don't need to do that i don't need to try and trick myself into thinking that I wouldn't have enjoyed it. No, I can say I really would have enjoyed it. It really would have been good, but it's just that I have to make some choice. And if you can get into this way of thinking, it actually can get easier to make choices because this is relates to something called fredkin's paradox but this funny idea that actually if two things are kind of roughly equal have roughly equally good claims on your time for the next hour day month whatever it is however you're thinking then it

kind of doesn't matter which one you choose right you might as well toss a coin it feels much more agonizing but if they're both really meaningful and you're both and you're drawn to them both and you and you have to choose one and not the other not always the case that you have to choose one not the other but then it the answer to how do you choose what matters what to focus on is like if you really understand our situation when it comes to time and finitude you're going to have enough things that matter to be able to put a few of them in and not do the others. It's not going to be difficult in that sense, I think. What do you think? Yeah, no, I really appreciated that. And that's something that's been working on me since I read the book. And one way that I relate to this, I did this

activity with some students in creating their own metrics, because I'm interested in alternative metrics in economics, like donut economics or gross national happiness. And one person said one of their metrics of happiness or well-being or contentedness was not did they complete everything on their to-do list, but did their to-do list end up matching their time and energy available that day? Like that that was a new metric of success for them. And I think that's kind of really what you're speaking to. Are we not chasing an endless task or to-do list, but are we balancing how much time and energy we have and how much attention we have and what we fill it with or what we do with it. So I'd love to end with some invitations for listeners, such as thinking through our metrics and really looking at our to-do list differently and asking ourselves what

is most important. And I also love in the instrumentalization of time, you talk about leisure time. And this is a quote from your book, you say, spend at least some of your leisure time wastefully, focus solely on the pleasure of the experience. This is the only way not to waste it, to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future focused self improvement. So that was a delicious thing to read, again, as someone who does instrumentalize time and working on that now from reading your book. But I'm just new appreciation for my bowling hobby and for playing Magic the Gathering, things that I'm particularly not good at, and I don't really see how they self-improve

or they encourage my self-improvement. Another invitation, and then I'm going to ask you for yours. Another invitation, you bring up this Carl Jung quote, quietly do the next and most necessary thing. Quietly do the next and most necessary thing. That's another word that's been working on me from reading your book. This idea of I don't need to make a big deal out of it. And also it's more task oriented, like what is necessary and what is next and to do it quietly. And there's a humility aspect to that phrase. So I really thank you for weaving that in. And then lastly, to not rush, right? To allow things to take the time they need to take, to watch your relationship with rush and to cultivate patience. Maybe go wait in a line just for the sake of

waiting in a line. So Oliver, I want to ask you, and I know that the book, especially the ending, the last chapter and the afterward really invites some things for listeners and beautiful questions and some invitations. So what invitations would you have for us going forward beyond those that I mentioned? Well, one that forward beyond those that I mentioned? Well, one that springs to mind that I always find really powerful is this idea of considering what if you never change in the way that you think you need to change? What if you never, in the context of time, get into this position of total control of your time, or you never beat your procrastination or your anxiety or something like that borrowing here partly again from bruce tift who i mentioned earlier and his book already free what if these

things that we spend our lives struggling to fix about ourselves and our situations it's a really interesting experiment thought experiment to us like if that was just never going to change if i was going to be anxious about having too much on my plate to the end of my days, like what could that free up? Like if you weren't focused on that endless struggle, what could you just get on with now that really, that really mattered? And it's closely related to that idea of, you know, what if you knew that there was never going to be enough time? You were going to die with an incredibly long to-do list. Like what if that, what if that was just all totally a given? What could you do? You know, what would that unleash once you weren't focused on that? And yeah, I guess these are all different versions of the same thing.

Now I think about it, but the other way of thinking about that is like, I love this notion that it's really therapeutic to consider that your situation might be worse than you think because especially when it comes to time we tend to feel that we've got far too much to do and staying on top of it all is really hard or we're really anxious about the future and feeling confident about what's happening in the future is a matter of really having to do a lot of planning and contingency planning and forecasting and all the rest of it. But what if in all those kinds of cases, it wasn't that these things were really hard, but completely impossible? What if it was just off the table to stay on top of everything? What if there was just no hope of knowing what was coming down the pike? I think that often we suffer because we keep open this thought that there might be a solution,

there might be a way to fix the terms and conditions of being human. And it's that little bit of hope that kills you in a sense, right? I mean, it's keeping the thought that there might be some solution to this fundamental situation that is so tormenting and if you sort of think about like wow how liberating could it be to just see that there wasn't going to be a solution to that that we had to be free in our lives and in time instead of sort of free from our current situation or overwhelm or whatever it might be so some thoughts there maybe. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Oliver Berkman, author of 4,000 Weeks,

Time Management for Mortals. Thank you to The Weaker Dance for the intermission music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. To find the links to any of the resources we've mentioned in this interview, please check the show notes. Support for this episode was provided by The Resist Foundation and listeners like you.

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