Oliver Burkeman on the Power of Embracing Imperfectionism

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Oliver. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

OLIVER BURKEMAN: Thank you for inviting me.

SB: So, I just want to jump right into a paragraph from your latest book, Meditations for Mortals. In it, you bring up a plane-crash analogy as a view of life.

OB: All right.

SB: You write, “When you grasp the sense in which your situation is worse than you thought, you no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, desperately hoping someone will find a way to prevent the plane from crashing. You understand that the plane has already crashed. (It crashed, for you, the moment you were born.)… [You have] no option but to make the best of life with your fellow survivors.”

Reading this, for me—and I think many Time Sensitive listeners will know this—is beyond eerie, because I survived a plane crash when I was 3.

OB: Wow.

SB: And this has been my perspective ever since then. I’d never put words to it quite the way you had, and I’d never seen anyone else do so, either. So I was reading this passage, nodding yes, yes, yes. I guess, because it’s been my experience in these very literal terms, and I guess maybe in a roundabout way, I wanted to ask, how did you come to that metaphor, or what led you toward writing that particular passage?

OB: Yeah, I feel suddenly kind of insecure talking about how freely I throw around metaphorical plane crashes and metaphorical calamities in the context of real ones. But I guess I’m looking—when I used that metaphor, I was looking for a way to express this sense that I think a lot of us have, and I’ve certainly spent large proportions of my adulthood with, of feeling like the calamity is going to happen any moment unless I can stave it off. “Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is the other phrase that springs to mind, this sense that I’ve got to be constantly vigilant or constantly try to become more and more efficient to hold things together, to stay on top of everything so that this thing doesn’t happen.

There is this really important sense in which what you’re trying to do there, I think, is kind of get outside of life as it actually is, renegotiate the terms and conditions of being human. Actually, the realization not that things might go wrong, but that by those standards of perfection and omnipotence, they already have gone wrong—that’s just so liberating to me. Some people might find that depressing. I find it like, “Oh, great. Now I can get stuck into life.”

There are other phrases that kind of get at this. There’s a famous paraphrase, I think, of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who said that “the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.” And there’s various Zen articulations of it that we could talk about, too, but they all have in common this notion of, like, Ah, the reason I don’t have to try to stave off the worst is because, in some sense, it already occurred and we’re living in the ruins. I love that. Maybe not everyone does.

SB: I mean, it’s exactly what I’ve been saying my entire life and, in a certain sense I have lived through the worst, so it’s almost like I’m a walking embodiment of the phrase.

OB: Yeah.

SB: Well, here I should say that you’re a time expert. Can I call you that?

OB: I’ll accept it, yeah…

SB: And reading your books is this crash course in time literature, I feel like, from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, a great book, for all the time nerds listening, that you should all read; to [Martin] Heidegger’s Being and Time; to Time Warrior by Steve Chandler; to Time Surfing by the Dutch Zen monk Paul Loomans—wasn’t familiar with him; to Anti-Time Management by Richie Norton. What are some of the most mind-expanding things you’ve learned about time through your journey as a journalist, a researcher, and writer?

OB: I think the journalism part of this has always been really important to me. I really do think of myself as a journalist, as I am by training, and what that means to me is, I guess on some level, just a very eclectic, magpie-based approach to source material. I’m not working—consciously, anyway—in one tradition versus another or trying to promote one particular academic tradition over another. It just literally is, like, where can I find morsels in the world that seem to point in an interesting direction?

I think one of the most interesting, most fundamental ideas that arises from a lot of the books that you mentioned is just to perceive how much of our experience of time—the part that we just relate to like it’s the air that we breathe—is on some level contingent, chosen, not consciously chosen, but it could be otherwise. I mean, this was the thing that really blew my mind, I think—the very idea that there is you and there is time and you’re in a relationship with this thing called time, and it’s usually a pretty dysfunctional relationship; either it’s hounding you and it’s nipping at your heels or you are trying to dominate it or relate to it in some particular way… All of that depends on this notion that there’s me, and then there’s this thing that runs parallel to my life all the time and I’ve got to get a handle on somehow. 

I was really struck reading things from a variety of different places about how it doesn’t have to be that way, and actually, for example, in a lot of preindustrial civilizations, it probably wasn’t that way for most people. The cliché I rely on a lot is the medieval peasant in northern England in the middle of medieval times. I think it’s reasonable to assume that, despite having completely terrible lives in almost every way you can imagine—and much shorter ones—those people would not have experienced time problems. They wouldn’t have experienced the sense that, okay, time’s ticking away, I’ve got to use the next hour really, really well, there’s too many things to fit into the time available, because you live in a life that is just given by the natural rhythms that you are dependent on. You harvest the crops when it’s harvest time; you milk the cows when it’s time to milk the cows. You don’t try and sort of force all that into an ever-more-efficient schedule. And there’s huge downsides to that. You probably can’t get society beyond a certain level of growth or development living in that way, but there’s something magical about—

SB: Yeah. The medieval peasants did not have the four-hour work week.

[Laughter]

OB: Right. But there’s something magical about it, too. They didn’t have the four-hour work week. They also didn’t have dental anesthesia and all sorts of things that I’m very glad that we have. But there’s some wisdom there, I think, that is worth holding on to.

SB: I loved learning what you’ve written in connection to Heidegger and time, and I wasn’t super familiar with his notion, which is that he, to some extent, views us, ourselves, as a limited amount of time, rather than time being separate from, it’s of. We are time.

OB: Yeah. I mean, listen, I’m very clear in the book and whenever I say or write anything about Heidegger, that I’m not sure anybody should say they definitely understand what he was writing. It’s extraordinarily complicated and almost destabilizing writing. I think the best argument for that is that he was really trying to draw attention to things so basic and fundamental in our assumptions that they don’t usually get named.

He was also, in many ways, an absolutely terrible person, and that’s maybe a separate conversation. But that sense that, if we’re not in a relationship with time, perhaps it makes more sense to say that we are time; we are a little space of… We are a little duration in which experience unfolds and happens. I find that actually is a really powerful starting point for a lot of this, because one of the things that it draws your attention to is how much effort we put into not quite facing up to that fact.

So in a sense, even the idea of trying to manage time well keeps it at arm’s length. It puts a little barrier between you and the fact that you are this little duration and then you die. It’s like, well, no, no, no. My time is something that I manage. I have all my little notebooks and my productivity apps. I don’t quite have to authentically be in the stream of “being toward death,” as he insists on calling it.

SB: Yeah. The artist Alicja Kwade was on the podcast recently, and she described time as a straw, and this idea that you are born and you enter the straw, and then you die and you leave the straw.

OB: That’s great. I’ve used lots of imagery of rivers and things, but the straw really points up how small and insignificant it is. [Laughter] My life is not the huge, flowing Mississippi. It really is just a little bit of soda through a straw.

SB: In Meditations for Mortals, you write, “The fact that your time is limited—plus the reality that you can only ever be in one place at any instant—means that in every moment, you’re opting not to take a thousand alternative paths through life.” I think it’s really interesting to think about a podcast and this conversation, this time you and I have together today, right now, in this context, even more so—and sort of cheekily or funnily, because the podcast is called Time Sensitive. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

OB: Well, we’re spending this time together, and that means that every single other thing that’s incompatible with that that we could be doing we’ve sacrificed, right? Not necessarily permanently sacrificed—we’ll do other things with the rest of the day. Similarly, a conversation is a great example of this, because it goes off in one direction and at every moment, decisions that we don’t know we’re making are closing off a thousand other places that it could go to, and that’s just called being finite. That’s just what it is to have limited time, limited control over that time, uni-presence instead of omnipresence: the fact that you can only be in one place.

I guess, yes, we could go in lots of different directions with this and have to leave aside all the others. But one place that I think is really relevant to everyday experience is that we don’t like that fact. It’s uncomfortable, and a lot of the time what we’re doing, especially when we engage in productivity systems and hacks and things like that, is trying to feel like we’re kind of above that situation, like our options remain open, like nothing is shut down. I think it gets us into lots of trouble, because it’s basically an effort to not look at reality in the face. I could talk about this endlessly. What are you interested in? [Laughter] 

SB: Well, you mentioned productivity, and it’s always been sort of coy, I guess, or tongue in cheek of us calling the show Time Sensitive, which is a long-form interview show. But you actually write about this idea of time-sensitive tasks in your book in a way that I’d never thought about before, and that really resonates. You write, “The unpleasant anxiety that attaches itself to tasks we’ve deemed ‘urgent’ is often a sign that someone else’s priorities are in control. The sense of urgency is really the fear that someone else will get angry or anxious if you don’t hurry up.” So it’s actually not about you, it’s about them.

OB: I think one of the things I love about this phrase “time sensitive,” which both as a title for a podcast, but even just in its increasing use in the culture that you’re obviously referring to when you use it, is as an alternative to this idea of urgency. The more I have… Well, certainly the older I get, the more I know that I just don’t want my life to be governed by urgency. And what I mean by urgency, I kind of detest, and you pointed to a lot of it there—it’s other people’s agendas or other people’s agendas that I’ve internalized. They might not actually be mad or care, but that’s my whole psychodrama.

Of course, a lot of things are time sensitive, in the sense that it matters when you do them and there’s an optimal time to do them, and if you do them sooner rather than later, things are going to go better. But then if you take that thought much further, I mean for a finite human being, everything is time sensitive, because the vast stretches of cosmic time that I’m not alive are going to be infinitely greater than the little bit that I get.

I always think it’s really interesting to compare that unpleasant tug of urgency with the idea of being wrapped up in an emergency, where it’s not like there’s this kind of pulling of somebody’s agenda to do what we’ve decided must be important with that time, but it’s just completely obvious what has to be done in an emergency. You can have all the time-management systems in the world, but then someone in your house who you love needs to go to hospital, to the E.R., and you just go. It’s not pleasant because it’s scary, and it might be agonizing and it might even end with horrible, horrible experiences, but there’s a simplicity to it. There’s something kind of like… I’ve always felt a little bit relaxed in crises, because I don’t have to fret endlessly about which of three things I ought to be doing with the next hour.

SB: Well, people actually talk about how time slows in a crisis, which I think is interesting. I don’t think that time is literally slowing. It’s that your focus is narrowing.

OB: Yeah, I can see all sorts of evolutionary arguments for why it would help to have that level of absolute focus. But part of what enables that or what goes along with that is this sense that, right, there’s no second-guessing. It’s just easy. It might be difficult in lots of other ways, but it’s easy to know what to do. I think that a lot of what screws us up about urgency is it’s actually a conflict about what ought to happen. There’s the thing I feel like doing—the thing I’ve told myself I must do, the thing someone else is haranguing me to do—and it quickly gets quite sort of agonized and time-wasting as well, to be honest. 

SB: Well, I think we’re talking also about what it means to be fully present in your body in this sort of endless now, and you write beautifully about the Japanese tea ceremony. I think we could all channel the Japanese tea ceremony a little bit more into our lives, and there’s this idea of ichi-go, ichi-e, by Ii Naosuke, which means “one time, one meeting,” and it’s really about the tea ceremony as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion—each tea ceremony. And I love this idea that each meal should be treated as: This is a once-in-a-lifetime meal. This is a once-in-a-lifetime podcast recording.

OB: Right, right. And it quickly extrapolates to every moment as a once-in-a-lifetime moment. And I think that’s the thing I love about… I’m not an expert on Japanese culture, but it does seem to be something that Japanese culture is especially eloquent on, that notion of what’s cherishable about things being their transience, about experience being its transience rather than we’ve got to constantly keep fighting its transience.

When I became a parent, something that, a cliché, that—I was already relatively advanced in years to be a parent—I had lots of friends who’d already been through those early stages of parenting. Something everyone says is, “Oh, you really should savor those early months with a newborn. Those are to be savored.” And this is a terrible thing to say to someone like me, because then I just become very self-conscious about whether I’m savoring time enough. I think this feeling of trying to take an experience that has some magic or uniqueness to it and really kind of…

SB: Squeeze it. [Laughs]

OB: Right, or hold on to it, or file it away, it’s not only relevant to parenting and newborns; it’s just that’s a place where it really crops up I’ve experienced in other contexts too. It’s not helpful to the experience of actually becoming fully immersed in the moment. It’s to the degree that you can let go of trying to hold on to time passing that you can really be there in that. And so that lovely idea in the tea ceremony, yes, you could go through exactly the same actions with exactly the same people in exactly the same place at exactly the same time of day. It’ll never be the same one, and there’s no point trying to fight to make it feel like it’s going to last forever.

The funny result here—and I remember realizing this with a newborn—is you have to be sort of willing to waste the time. You have to be willing to not treat it as precious in order to become more immersed in it. Otherwise, you’re just in this constant tangle of, like, am I optimizing my experience of being a parent? What a disaster. [Laughter]

SB: Well, there’s this great quote that you quote in another one of your books, The Antidote. It’s from Eckhart Tolle, and it’s “Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.” 

OB: Right, yes. [Laughs] That’s good. He says it like it is. I mean, whether it’s an illusion, whether it’s what we are, but yeah, it’s only if we think of it as something separate from us that it’s our job to do something with that we are then going to get into this mode of how do we hold on to it? How do we extract the maximum value out of it? And that takes us out of life somehow.

SB: There’s this other great quote from Agnes Martin that’s relevant here that you use in Meditation for Mortals, as one of your chapter epigraphs, and it’s “That which seems like a false step is just the next step.”

OB: Yeah. I mean, I think you could get a lot out of that line, but what that evokes for me anyway—tell me if you agree—is just that sense that it’s in the nature of… Well, in that case, any creative pursuit, but maybe in the nature of living, that you can’t know in advance what is going to have been the right step to take. Any kind of movement into growth or novelty or creativity is almost by definition going to feel like a false step, because you are on ground that you haven’t trodden before.

It reminds me also where I write elsewhere in the book about the idea of the very, very famous poem “The Road Not Taken” [by the poet Robert Frost], which every American high school student has studied, and how when you sort of get deeper into the meanings of that poem, there is this real sense of, not that you should always choose the unconventional path or follow the beat of your own drum or anything, but just that we’re always choosing paths, and we’ll never know. We don’t know when we make the step whether it’s going to prove to have been the right step. We don’t even know later, because all the other steps we could have taken and sacrificed, those paths are closed to us. You can love your life and have no idea that it could have held some extraordinary things that you’ll never experience, or you could hate your life and have no idea that it could have been a thousand times worse, so…

SB: Well, you’re sort of describing what you call “imperfectionism,” this term that I love. Basically this idea that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, and that, in being imperfect, it means accepting the decisions you make and going on your path.

OB: Yeah, and seeing that perfection doesn’t belong in reality. Perfectionism, at least as it screwed me up for many years, is an attempt to hang back from, or get on top of, out from under reality. Acting imperfectly, accepting the limitations of control, the limitations of time, the necessity of tough choices with time, all of this—it’s just a sort of letting go into the real. It isn’t some kind of settling for mediocrity. It’s how things actually become part of life. It’s how you actually make things in the world and forge relationships with people. It’s the only way.

SB: I like that you mentioned settling, too, because you make this great point that we are always settling, but it doesn’t mean settling for mediocrity.

OB: Right.

SB: It just means settling in the decisions that you make.

OB: Exactly. Trade-offs is the other way of talking about it, or “opportunity costs,” if you prefer those terms. Everything we do is a form of settling. Every relationship we enter is a form of settling, because we are settling this transaction that has trade-offs, right? We’re turning down other opportunities. That’s what makes marriage valuable in many ways, is this notion that what you’re really doing is—at least with a fair wind, and if all things go well—excluding the possibility of other relationships. Yet a lot of us, both in dating and in life in general, take the commitment-phobic approach, which is to say, “Well, maybe if I hang back from commitment, it’ll be like, I don’t have to make those painful decisions.” But that’s a decision, too. If you decide to spend a year being indecisive about something or someone, that’s how you chose to spend that year. And maybe it was the right way to spend that year, I don’t know, but it wasn’t not choosing, if you see what I mean.

SB: Meditations for Mortals is structured as a four-week exercise. You call it a “retreat of the mind.” Why did you choose this sort of structure, and what do you hope readers take away from it when they get to the end of these four weeks?

OB: This is really important to me. I mean, maybe it would be, but I really wanted to try to build the book in a way that was consistent with the message I was trying to communicate, and that meant it definitely couldn’t be a really detailed, tricked-out system with a thousand implementation steps where you then think to yourself, “Oh, this is cool, but I’m too busy right now, so I’ll put it off for another six months until I’ve got all this other stuff out of the way.” I mean, it went through many iterations, and in the early stages I was thinking it was going to be like one of those page-a-day-for-a-year type books. But the structure that seemed to sort of naturally emerge in the end was twenty-eight days divided into four weeks, a short chapter for each day, and then the kind of invitation is what I say, to read them roughly one a day. I feel like it’s important that I don’t become a huge control freak trying to tell people how to read a book they own. 

The idea there is just to sort of allow these perspective shifts to just be part of your existing day. It’s right here, before you’ve dealt with the fact that you’ve got ten thousand unread emails in your inbox; right now, before you’ve solved your terrible problem with procrastination or achieved financial security or whatever the project is that you’re using to put off life. Before doing that, you could just also read this little chapter about decision-making, and it subtly affects how you make a decision that day. And then a chapter on some other aspect of this material, just to sort of… Because that’s the only way change has ever worked for me. You almost have to put aside your plans for grand transformation and just be like, Okay, not going to get to that for a while, but for now I’ll just see if this—

SB: Right, increments.

OB: … moves things, moves the needle a bit …

SB: Ultimately, at least this is how I read your work, I feel like your writing at large is about—if not living well—“the good life.” It’s seeking a way toward the good life. I was wondering if you could speak about what the good life looks like to you.

OB: Oh, wow. Yeah, I’m very happy with that sort of umbrella description. It always seems to me like, why would you write about anything else, really, right? Or maybe nobody does write about anything else. They just do it in subtler ways than I do. [Laughs] 

This question of “what is the nature of a good life?” is, for me, just in constant flux. So I’m sort of, in all these books, I suppose I’m giving updates of the most recent things I’ve added to the picture for myself. But I think that it has something important to do with generativity or growth or a certain…

There’s the whole sort of productivity, life-optimization culture that I spend lots of time railing against, but then there’s a risk of going somewhere else, which popular spiritual literature sometimes does, in suggesting that if you got over all that rather coarse nonsense about trying to achieve your goals, you would just sort of float around and do nothing in life. I think I’m really trying to figure out the answer to the question: Beyond the anxiety, beyond trying to get things done to make us feel better about ourselves, because we feel we have to, or being hamsters in treadmills or anything else, what is it, when you’ll get through that, to use time well, to create things, to grow, to have that sense of forward motion, not in a kind of, “I’ve got to meet these six specific goals in the next year, otherwise I can’t be happy,” but to what extent is meaning and happiness in that growth? I don’t know if that’s clear at all. I have not given you a simple answer to the question.

SB: [Laughs] Well, I don’t think there is a—

OB: What’s the meaning of life?

SB: There is no simple answer.

OB: It’s movement. It’s something that is not stagnant, and it is moving toward something. Greater integration? I don’t know, it depends on the tradition you would refer to. More wholeness? More aliveness? I think that’s a really important word for me at the moment, and it’s a very strange one because obviously on some level we’re all alive all the time until we’re dead, but there is something that we know we experience, sometimes and not other times in life.

SB: That’s true. Well, and I often feel like the word aliveness is paired with the word worth. I hear aliveness and worth—

OB: Oh, right, right.

SB: … a lot, and I feel like there’s definitely some sort of …

OB: Well, I think there’s probably, yeah, I think there’s probably an antithesis—that’s a really good point—between aliveness and acting from a place of deficit and trying to patch up your self-worth and feeling like you’re not good enough until you… It’s probably true that to really relax into a good life, you have to be doing the things you’re doing to express your existing self-worth or your joy of being alive or something, as opposed to trying to plug a gap and fill a void. So that’s an interesting thought, yeah. I think that’s good, yeah. I hadn’t thought about those terms before today, but that’s great. 

SB: Let’s go back to your upbringing here. I was curious if you could share a bit about your parents, what they did, where you grew up, what your childhood was like.

OB: Sure. I was born in Liverpool, in England, which officially makes me a Scouser, but I left when I was 1, so I don’t think that label would be agreed upon by people who live there now. Then I grew up in York, on the other side of England, but also in the north. My parents are both very much still with us. A sort of, how would you describe this background? I think in Britain we call it middle class, but I think that in America it’s probably upper-middle class, because these have different connotations, and it sounds a little bit too much like I’m trying to claim a gritty authenticity for my life if I use the phrase in the U.S. So it’s more like a sort of very kind of ideas-y, academic-y, intellectual-y background.

I’m Jewish on my father’s side, and was raised as a Quaker, so sort of liberal, progressive, reading The Guardian newspaper, which is what I ended up working for a big chunk of my life, so you get the feel of it that way. 

There’s a whole other story to that always, right, isn’t it, which is like, okay, but you clearly were someone who got really anxious and worried about time and had to struggle with this question of control, I feel like, so where did that come from?

SB: You know where I’m going with this, yeah. [Laughs]

OB: I think you can answer this on a million different levels, but I do think I probably grew up with a sense that it’s kind of important not to achieve a certain level of fame or money or even professional success, but that it’s really important to do your best. You should really work hard. There’s something very grounding and lovely about that ethos in Quakerism, and there’s something about it that is a little puritanical and tyrannical and doesn’t quite make enough of a place for goofing off and pleasure, basically. I don’t know.

SB: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely tied to the Protestant work ethic.

OB: Absolutely, yeah.

SB: I mean, it’s there. And what did your parents do? Were they…?

OB: My father worked in sort of grant-making foundation type stuff for the majority of his career, and my mother sort of switched back and forth between staying at home with me and my sister and working in social housing, I guess, primarily. 

SB: When did you decide you wanted to become a writer or journalist? 

OB: Oh, annoyingly young. I wanted to do something with journalism from a really young age. I think I was handing out little typewritten quasi-newspapers, photocopied things, single pages, to my school friends in probably the top of elementary school, as opposed to high school. And then yeah, whenever there was a school newspaper or university newspaper or anything like that, I was sort of heavily, heavily involved. So that thing, and I also was, like, I came up at the time when what was briefly called desktop publishing, a phrase no would ever use these days, was really becoming a thing. So the early ways of laying out text and headlines and printing them out on a computer just absolutely entranced me. That whole thing about writing and publishing was there early on. I’ve never been someone who has much interest in writing things not for publication, I think that would be fair to say. And then pretty swiftly when I was in the working world, I was doing what I’d been hoping to do for a very, very long time.

SB: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned The Guardian was in the house, this paper that you went on to work for more than twenty years. Do you remember your early interactions with that newspaper? Do you recall the role The Guardian had in your upbringing?

OB: Well, looking back, I definitely think there’s something about where the authority comes from and who knows what they’re doing. And I’ve written [in] several different places since about how I think this process that we all go through, I think, of gradually discovering that everyone in the world is just winging it all the time. And you discover it about your parents at some point, and then you think, “Well, okay, maybe my parents are winging it, but people who put that newspaper together, look at it. It’s like every single day, the statement of what matters in the world is there on the breakfast table.” And then if you end up working in a newspaper, you see that it’s not like that at all.

I’ll get the details wrong, and I’d better not use any names because I would end up libeling somebody, but I remember some mini-scandal early when I was working at The Guardian where some very embittered freelance journalist or somebody connected with the media somehow was accusing The Guardian of some form of malpractice because they had sent them a letter that had some crucial facts for something in it, and The Guardian, the editor of The Guardian, said that if the letter had been received, it had been lost. They’d never seen the letter. And this slightly conspiratorially minded person was like, “Yeah, yeah, right. That’s a likely story that a letter would be lost.” And I’m like, “Have you seen a newspaper office? Of course they’re going to lose it.” It’s just the degree to which newspapers are this kind of constant daily unfolding of trying not to make too many errors in this kind of crisis mode, where everyone’s just trying to pull everything together, and they’re doing their best, and in the case of The Guardian do a really good job. But it isn’t because they’re these quietly authoritative people who know what’s what. 

And then you think, well, maybe it’s the government that knows that. And I think in the last decade or so, we’ve come to understand that that certainly isn’t true of government either, and everyone is, whether with good or bad motivations, just trying to hold it together. I think Covid was important for that, the whole of society trying to… Called upon to improvise. And obviously there are experts in there and there’s expertise and there’s protocols, but I think I really value the learning experience of understanding that nobody else is more calmly in absolute authoritative control over anything than I am… It’s scary, and that’s why people become conspiracy theorists, because it’s like, well, at least there’s an evil cabal who knows what’s going on and is in charge. It might be awful, but at least they’re the grown-ups. And it’s like, no, not them either.

SB: [Laughs] Talking about The Guardian, you were there from the late nineties, like 1999, right, was when you started?

OB: Yeah.

SB: Until around 2020. And you wrote this column called “This Column Will Change Your Life,” starting in 2006 until the end of your tenure there.

OB: Yeah.

SB: I was curious how you now, in hindsight, having a few years post-Guardian, think about your time there.

OB: Yeah, right. It’s interesting. I mean, actually, the second half of my time there I was… I’d left the staff and gone freelance and was doing book-related stuff as well, so it didn’t feel like I was there in the same way, but for a large chunk of that time, it was my major, major work. I mean, I have all sorts of thoughts about how it trained me and the things I learned from the experience, the things I got to do, and also the ways in which it probably was work that I sought out for my own weird psychological reasons. But I don’t know. Ask a narrower question, and I’ll see what I can do, yeah.

SB: Well, I’ll dig into some specific stories, maybe because I—

OB: Sure.

SB: The first story I could find that you wrote in The Guardian was from October 12th—

OB: Oh, wow. You’ve done your research.

SB: … 1999, and it’s headlined “A Tale of Mice and Mucus.” The first sentence was, “’To banish a cold, kiss a mouse,’ said Pliny the Elder.” That’s quite a way to—

OB: Oh, that must’ve been one of the health features I was writing. Right, okay. What I was doing from very early on was…

SB: This is what I could find on the internet, by the way, so…

OB: Yeah, yeah. It’s feature writing, which in some contexts, I think, sounds like it’s the big, big featured thing. But it isn’t, really. It’s just writing that is not breaking-news writing. It’s sort of the Style section, it’s the Culture section, it’s pieces about things that are in the news, but not the breaking news itself. And I worked for the feature section on The Guardian, where I wrote things like investigating the truth behind folk cold remedies evidently, although I’ve certainly forgotten that piece.

I think the really interesting thing there for me—and it has a time facet to it, actually—is that we weren’t in quite so stressful an environment as the news desk. We weren’t responding within an hour or two to breaking stories, but there was this requirement to, over the course of a day or maybe two or three days, if you were lucky, go from knowing nothing at all about a topic to being able to write one, two thousand words about it in an authoritative tone that was correct, but hopefully, and that sort of exuded the sense that you might’ve been thinking about it for a good six months without of course lying that you had. You only had the sources that you had.

And we would always chuckle in a British journalist way at the moments in New Yorker profiles when the writer would reveal that they first met the profile subject eighteen months previously or something, and had probably just been working on that and one other thing for the last year and a half. [Laughter]

SB: You’d started on the subject eighteen hours previously.

OB: Right. Exactly. And it definitely has its downsides, and people cut corners, and a lot of it is sort of secondhand, so you’d be quoting other publications or you’d be calling two people and getting two hundred words of stuff to put straight into the paper. But it has real advantages as well. There’s something very unfussy about just sort of imperfectionistic, I would say, about just going for it, trying to understand as fast as you can, throwing yourself on the mercy of some people who have expertise, and then just writing it and not spending weeks and weeks getting all talked up about the perfect introduction. 

So there’s a British journalism ethos, that definitely does in other corners of British journalism, tend toward outright dishonesty and making things up, which is awful. But there is a sort of a to-the-pointness of the process, which I think is… I’m really glad that I got.

SB: Yeah. I mean, the breadth of subjects that you wrote about is astounding. You wrote about everything from baldness to a Manchester nightclub that installed a two-person toilet cubicle in one of its bathrooms.

OB: Wow. All news to me at this point. I wrote so many pieces.

SB: From the late Oliver Sacks to the late Ted Turner, both of whom you got to profile and spend time with. From a piece about a potential Jerry Seinfeld–Hunter S. Thompson spat.

OB: Wow.

SB: That was a deep cut. I was very entertained reading that. To coverage of the iPod Nano. I mean, how do you make sense of this? By my count, it was more than two thousand stories deep across your tenure, so…

OB: Right, wow. Well, you’ve done the greatest research of any interview I’ve ever done. I think that’s the nature of the job. [Laughter] I think I was pretty productive and hopefully I was good at it, but it wasn’t unusual what I was doing in the range. That was the job of a feature writer. And to some extent, it’s the job of journalists on a British paper where the newsrooms definitely tend to be smaller overall. So there’s fewer people and it’s a case of all hands on deck.

The interesting thing about that—that was maybe not totally beneficial—is it really encourages this sense that your job is to go from a standing start each time, because I won’t know anything about a topic, and it’s great to learn to be a quick study on those things. But there was a very clear moment, quite a way into that period that I was working at The Guardian when I realized that, actually, I’d kind of accumulated quite a good internal database of ideas and references, and I didn’t necessarily need to treat every new assignment as just I’m an empty vessel. I’ve got to fill myself up with new facts. And that was the beginning of something which has been a completely new experience for me writing the books, which is this sense that, not to put it too pretentiously, but I do sort of have an evolving philosophy or worldview. There’s something that is growing, and it’s not a question of new book, totally new topic, start from scratch. There’s something that is developing through these books that has a consistency or a coherence.

SB: Yeah, for sure. I read the books as a form of distillation, taking all of the self-help blah-blah out there and finding the… It’s sort of like you’re making diamonds out of coal, right? You are trudging through the mud to reach this end that’s not quite an end, obviously—I think part of the argument you make is that there is no end. But you’re creating wisdom out of all the muck that you have to sort through as a journalist, in a way.

OB: Yeah, no, I think that’s a good way of putting it. And I’m struck a few times people have responded with surprise or—it’s usually positive, but surprise anyway—that I’ll quote, like, Heidegger and Rod Stewart within a few pages of each other or something. And I do find that funny. I enjoy the high-low stuff that I get to do in these books, but also it just seems like why wouldn’t you, right? Why would you not quote the useful philosopher and the interesting insight from the life of the rock star if they were relevant? So yeah, I think that is the thing that I bring to the party probably. Yeah.

SB: So I want to mention here—because we haven’t really talked technology yet, and technology and time is a big subject—I came across this June 2001 piece you wrote about technology titled “Post modern.” It begins, “We used to be able to dismiss the spectre of information overload as a fantasy of panicky Luddites.” Then you describe how this 1998 study showed that office workers were beginning to hyperventilate at receiving just twenty or thirty emails a day. “But that was three years ago,” you write, “when the idea of connecting to the internet on a train through a laptop connected to a cell phone or through BlackBerries, the nifty pocket-sized email checker that combines keyboard screen and wireless dialer, now de rigueur in what remains of Silicon Valley was barely credible to many.” So I said—

OB: This is post—

SB: Yes.

OB: … post dot-com bust, right?

SB: Exactly, yes.

OB: 2001, yeah.

SB: And I wanted to quote this because I’m reading this, I’m like, “Man, here we are, twenty-four years later.”

OB: God.

SB: We’re coming up on twenty years of having the iPhone in our pockets. Contrasting this piece you wrote back in 2001 and where we are today, what do you think about this relationship between technology and reality—which is to say, time? What do you think the smartphone has done to us and our sense of time?

OB: I mean, obviously it’s done so many things to us, and the information overload pieces, that’s fascinating to me, because that was like… I’ve joked with a friend of mine who came up through The Guardian at the same time. That was the kind of piece we were all … information overload. We must have written—We must have overloaded people with a hundred features about information overload. It’s like the classic newspaper feature speaking to that audience. They’re the people who feel overwhelmed in that way.

I mean, for me, the way that technology in general, digital personal technology especially, connects to these themes, is that it constantly does this double thing of seeming to promise—and to some extent actually delivering—ways of doing more with the time available, getting through more stuff, finding things out much more frictionlessly, replying to things, and messaging people much more easily, and radically increasing the sense of the things that we have to deal with or think about or that need concern us.

The phrase in Four Thousand Weeks that I talk about, how we can never use that technology to get on top of everything because it consistently increases the size of everything that we’re trying to get on top of. So there’s this relationship between… We’re constantly, I think, coaxed into feeling like we are almost at the point where we’re finally over our limitations. We can finally do everything because we’ve got the technological capacity, but we never get there because it seems to be equally a phenomenon of this technology that it just sort of brings us more and more stuff.

There’s a bit in the most recent book where I write about this argument at an earlier stage of information overload between the tech critic Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky, and this idea that Shirky, among others, promoted that we were going to get over the problem of information overload because we were going to get better and better filters so that there would be much less dross that we had to deal with. We would just get the needles in the haystacks. And the problem that we had was not really one of too much information. The problem was that we had inadequate ways of filtering the stuff we really wanted.

Years ago, Carr made this brilliant point, which I think really is defining of a lot of our experience of information through digital means these days, which is that, if the supply of incoming information is to all intents and purposes infinite, then better filters don’t lead to less information overload. They lead to more information overload, because you are being reliably connected all day long to a fire hose of things that actually really are relevant and that are hard for you to dismiss, or things you think you should be reading or people you ought to be getting back to and on and on and on. So the way he puts it’s not a question of finding a needle in a haystack, but being confronted with haystack-size piles of needles, day after day.

I think that he’s largely been vindicated. I mean, the ways that algorithms work is not always to bring us the things that we want to encounter, at least that we in our higher intentions want to encounter. It’s often things that make us angry or mesmerized in some other way. My experience these days is that it’s become clearer and clearer and clearer that there is no possibility of making sure that I’ve seen all the things on Substack that are kind of relevant and interesting to my work. That would take many, many, many more years than I am going to have on the planet. And there’s something salutary about that. There’s something about like, “Oh, okay, yes, the plane has already crashed.” All I need to do is follow my nose and pursue a few things that are interesting. 

I even think it’s happening with email. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe this is just testament to my terrible email habits, or the fact that at this point in my career I can kind of get away with being worse at email in certain ways. But I do think that expectations are shifting, and people are less condemnatory of a multiday delay to an email that doesn’t need an instant response, because we’re all seeing that, yeah, we know that it’s like that for everyone.

SB: Yeah. Well, you’ve written how in this age of acceleration, patience is a form of power. Could you elaborate on that?

OB: This is an insight from Jennifer Roberts, who’s an art historian at Harvard and has written—and more than just written—really fascinating… She teaches in a way that brings onboard this felt need for patience. She makes the point that, historically, the stereotype of patience is something you tell people who are in a sort of subservient position in society. So children, or, at various points in society, women confined to the domestic sphere, or lots of other different examples, that you say like, “Just be patient,” right? It’s just, like, deal with the fact that you don’t have the power in this situation and learn as a virtue to sort of not be bothered by the fact that you lack it. But in an endlessly accelerating culture, that shifts, because now we’re all just moving incredibly fast and trying to do more and more and more things. Actually, it becomes a way of resisting that flow to have the patience to stop and to give something the time that it needs to… Jennifer Roberts has all her students look at a painting for three hours solid.

SB: Right. You went and did this—

OB: Which I went and did. Yeah, right. That’s an example of can you build that inner strength to stop and say, “Even though this feels weird and wrong, even though I feel like there’s thousand other things I’d like to be doing, even though I’ve been conditioned to having the kind of control over my time where I do not have to sit on a stool and look at a painting for three hours—can I allow myself to do that?” 

I’m sure you’ve seen the coverage recently of the idea that it’s becoming some sort of macho endurance test to be able to sit on a long-haul flight and just sit there and not listen to podcasts or watch entertainment. It’s a thing people boast about now. It’s like, “I did that.” It’s really fascinating that that should now be valorized in that way. It’s not the sort of docile, meek virtue at all. It’s like a kind of strong thing, because you can push back against the acceleration that will otherwise carry us all along.

SB: I mean, it’s funny because, in a totally different way, Pico Iyer, who also was on this show, he described how when he’s on planes, he likes to do that intentionally. The way he described it didn’t sound macho at all. It just sounded like his sort of monkish, meditative self, right?

OB: Right. But I’m sure that… Well, I don’t know this because I haven’t heard him talk about that specifically, but I’m sure that it takes a form of discipline.

SB: Yes.

OB: That’s interesting: The idea that not doing the thing needs discipline is a very modern realization, I think.

SB: One of the things I wanted to bring up was that so much rides on this relationship to time, and we’ve been sort of hitting at this question, so I’ll just come out and ask it: What do you think a successful or healthy relationship to time actually looks like?

OB: Yeah, that’s the question. I think that the way it feels is indicated by a lot of stuff we’ve already discussed, right? It’s this sense of being sort of at rest in the processes of growth and creation and action. It’s that idea of being at rest in action [that] I think is really central to certainly my best experiences of time and how I can imagine wanting all of my life to be. So it’s not a sort of desperate attempt to catch up, to get to the point where I’m on top of everything, but it’s also not a sort of checking out into passivity, because I’ve become so “good” at not being tormented by time that I could just watch the world go by. There’s a role for that, but it’s not the essence of it.

On a more sort of practical level, something I’ve found, which I think is really telling in a way, is that lots of the time-management techniques that I used to chase because I thought like, “Oh my God, this is going to be the one now. This is the system that gets me there,” and then three days later you’re full of despair. A lot of those techniques are totally great ways to approach the day if you’re not doing them with that motivation, that kind of, this is going to save my soul somehow, this is going to get me out of the real situation of human finitude.

I often use a timer to work in things that look like Pomodoro-type lengths of time. I’ve had quite a lot of success with task-management systems that very artificially sort of consciously limit the number of tasks you have on your plate at any one time. Anyone who’s familiar with Kanban methods of task management, as one example, will know what I’m talking about. That idea where you sort of say, “Okay, these are the three hundred things that on some level need my attention. These are the four that are getting it, and no more come onto this plate until one of them has been moved off.”

All these things are great. I’m not against any of these ways of giving structure to the day, but there’s something critical changes, because you’re no longer saying, like, “If I just put a lot of discipline into following this set of rules, everything is going to be fine.” You’re saying, like, “I’m seeking ways of engaging more and more fully with my experience,” and I don’t think you have to throw out all hacks to do that. I don’t think you have to just be a kind of perfectly present person. 

You mentioned, earlier on, the book Time Surfing by Paul Loomans, who’s a Dutch Zen monk, and that’s a really interesting sort of meeting point between the idea of being fully present and the idea of needing to get things done, and how do you think that through.

He’s very much in favor of a very intuitive approach to deciding what to do with each moment, and I’m probably a little bit less intuitive in the way that I go about it. But that spirit of one thing at a time, that spirit of doing the thing in the hopefully quite full acceptance that there are a thousand other things you could be doing but you’re not doing. There’s something very powerful about that, and it has a real sense of getting a purchase on life, which I think is very enriching. I don’t know if that conveys any of what I’m trying to convey, but…

SB: No, it does. I mean, there’s so much wisdom that you’ve accrued through your work, and I feel like getting at that wisdom is part of your practice. It’s like back to what I was saying, creating a diamond out of coal. Of all the things you’ve learned though, I wanted to ask, what are the bits of wisdom that stick out for you? What are the things that maybe a younger Oliver didn’t know that you now know that you wish you had known?

OB: It was a very big moment for me when I discovered the work of the Jungian psychotherapist James Hollis, and from there, the world of Jung and the Jungians in general. He has this line that I’ve repeated all over the place—always with attribution, though I’ve seen on social media that there are people who think I originated it—which is this question of asking yourself whether the path you’re on is one that enlarges you or diminishes you, as opposed to whether it makes you happy or not. And I think that, as a navigator, am I in the place of growth enlargement? Am I in a generative…? That can be a very useful way to navigate things, whereas chasing happiness is probably not a very good way to approach how you use your time.

I also really liked that insight from the psychology of Alfred Adler, which has most recently been popularized in the book The Courage to Be Disliked, which has sold many millions of copies around the world. The idea that, in some sense, all or basically all problems that we encounter in life are interpersonal relationship problems somehow, that even sitting at a desk with nobody else around, perfect silence, being unable to write a paragraph, is something to do with how you’ve internalized how you think people will perceive it, or how you’ve internalized the idea that you have to earn your right to be on the Earth, or whether you’re feeling guilty because you should be doing something else with your time, because somebody else needs you to be doing it. Seeing it in that frame, I think, is a really helpful thing. And then of course, many problems are very obviously personal, interpersonal relationship problems, as well.

I think the thing I would’ve liked to have told the younger version of me with all of this is to sort of chill out a little bit and to not feel like you have to sort of… That how you use time—let’s bring it back to time specifically—I think a lot of us feel that how we use our time in a given day is a sort of moral verdict on our basic right to exist or our legitimacy as an adequate human being. And I think what I’m seeking for myself in what I write about is that place where you can say, “No, I don’t need to do anything to earn my right to exist.” The reason to do things, the reason to try to put good things into the world or make the world a better place or help other people is because that’s just a great way of spending your time on the planet, not because you need to in order to reach a minimum standard of acceptability.

SB: You write this beautiful line that I wanted to quote here, too, actually. I would say these are the bits of wisdom that I pulled from spending some time with your books that really sat with me, and one is, “Real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out. It lies in grasping that sense in which you never will get it completely figured out.” Again, the unknowability, the imperfection, the embracing of those things. Then the other one, which maybe probably sounds obvious to all the listeners now, but I’ll say it anyway, because I think it’s great and it’s terse in the best way, which is: “Now is all you ever get.”

OB: Yeah. I stand by both of those observations.

SB: Well, we have to finish, and I feel like the best place we could finish is talking about cosmic insignificance therapy. This was something that I didn’t know about until I read about it in your writing, in Four Thousand Weeks. Although I’ve certainly thought about this subject when looking at art or the stars, it’s still… It’s something I think we all kind of forget. And you describe cosmic insignificance therapy as “an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things,” and note elsewhere that it is “almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.” This idea in the end is that life doesn’t really matter. Your life doesn’t really matter. The universe certainly doesn’t care about you, so you might as well make the most of your time here while you have it. That’s basically it, right?

OB: Yeah. I mean, for a start, the reason you haven’t heard this phrase, cosmic insignificance therapy, is because I just invented it, right? This is not an actual—

SB: Oh, I thought… Because you write about it in a way that’s like, “Oh, this should be a thing. Oh, it is a thing.” Okay. Yeah. [Laughter]

OB: Yeah. I mean, I’m talking there primarily about the great consolation that can come, just to start with, from seeing how small our concerns are, right? I certainly find it very … like a weight off my shoulders to remember when I’m facing some huge dilemma or feel like I screwed up and embarrassed myself or whatever it might be, to see that from that perspective, from the cosmic perspective. That is something that, I mean, this is recommended by the original Stoics, this kind of exercise, so it definitely has a big… there’s a long tradition of it. I think where I want to go from there is to say, not to the sort of nihilistic place of saying, “Well, nothing matters so you might as well enjoy yourself,” although there’s a sense in which that might be true, but more that we can use this as an opportunity to redefine mattering.

We can use this as an opportunity to stop insisting that the only life that matters is the one that somehow matters for all time, or affects everyone in the world, or echoes through the cosmos somehow, which intellectually is kind of absurd, but I think is very deep in the culture and is very deep in what we’re doing when we try to assess whether we’re doing something that matters. It’s like it’s a bar that we’re constantly struggling to reach and probably never actually could. And to think instead, yeah, firstly, why does that have to be the standard of mattering? Why can’t the full sense of aliveness that comes from helping one person, or going on a hike, or helping keep your neighborhood beautiful—why can’t that matter? It’s only because of this kind of oppressive notion that mattering has to happen on the level of the cosmos that we even devalue that in the first place.

And then, yes, as you refer to the end of the bit you were reading—and this is to some extent Heidegger again—we’re constantly locked into this notion of, like, well, what we have a right to is kind of an infinite life, and then we have this offensive fact that we only get this number of years, and so we’re constantly fighting to pack more into it. But you could just as easily, and I think probably more persuasively, see it as astounding that we are here, that we get experience, that—certainly by most measures, it’s a slightly meaningless thought—but by most measures, the chances of your never having been born were vastly higher than the chance that you would be. And then it’s like, Oh, then I get to… It’s not a question of how awful it is that it’s so short, but how astounding it is that you get to have it at all. I think that’s a useful perspective to go through the day with.

SB: A beautiful way to end. Thanks, Oliver.

OB: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on July 25, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Olivia Aylmer, Mimi Hannon, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Oliver Holms.