The Daily Stoic - Journalist Oliver Burkeman on Making the Most of the Time That We Have

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to journalist and author Oliver Burkeman about his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals which releases August 10th, practicing the Stoic concept of memento mori, facing the harsh state of the reality that surrounds us, and more. Oliver Burkeman is a British journalist (principally for the British newspaper The Guardian) and writer. Between 2006 and 2020 Burkeman wrote a popular weekly column on psychology, This Column Will Change Your Life, and has reported from London, Washington and New York. He has his own blog and has published several books including The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and HELP!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More DoneGet the Memento Mori Coin to remind yourself of the shortness of life: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/memento-moriThe Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.Beekeeper’s Naturals is the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B.LXR. Visit beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or enter code “STOIC” to get 20% off your first order.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Oliver Burkeman: Homepage, Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily's To a Podcast. I have something on a little shelf in my

bathroom here that I stare at every single day. What it is, it's basically, it's a, I got this from an anti-ut dealer. It's a chunk of a Victorian tombstone. I don't know how the chunk came to be for sale or what circumstances led to this. I don't want to think about it too much. I hope it was for ethical reasons, but you can only see one word on the tombstone. And it just says, dad. To me, it's like this immediate reminder, when I see it in the morning, when I see it before bed, that life is short, that we don't have forever,

that everybody dies, including parents, doesn't matter how much you love your kids, doesn't matter how successful you are, doesn't matter how rich you are, we all go. And this is why we can't take time for granted. This is why we can't waste time. I don't know if you can hear this, but that is my Memento Mori coin,

which I have in my pocket, that's my other sort of Memento Mori exercise. I think it's crazy to think about. I think we made them three years ago. It might even have been four years ago. But this idea of momentum worry is something that I don't want to ever lose sight of. Because to lose sight of it is to risk wasting

the time that you do have for certain, which is right now. And so momentum worry is obviously this really core, still, exercise. And it was transformative for me in my life. I feel like I've gotten to a place where I'm actually acting as if I live on borrowed time. I'm actually seizing the moments as if they're

as they're in front of me. I'm not rushed, but I'm also not entitled. I'm not in denial, but I'm also not in fear. And that's when the Stokes talk about momentum, or worry, you could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think, that's where they're trying to get. And so when we first made these coins, I didn't know if it would help a couple of people. I knew I wanted one for myself. You know, here we are all these years later and thousands of people

carry them all over the world. I see people post photos on them. People come into the bookstore or I used to see them at events and they pull out of their pocket and show me. It's just, it's been an amazing experience and I've gotten as much out of it out of anyone and I think you will too. You can check them out in the day or still, if you want, click the link in today's episode. All of this leads into today's guest, who I've actually known for a long time. I've been a long time reader of his column in The Guardian.

He's a great writer. We interviewed him on Daily Stoke a long time ago about his book, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, which is great, has a whole chapter on Seneca. He's a great writer. He lives in New York City, he's a Brit, and his new book is very well suited to stoic thinking.

It's called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, and it's sort of a philosophical exploration of time and time management, but time management, as the subtitle says, in light of the indisputable, undeniable, unavoidable fact of death. That life is short. We don't know how long we're going to get. We do have some sense. We have some sense of averages.

And so what should one do with this life? How do they manage that time? How do they think about it? Obviously, for obvious reasons, you can imagine why I wanted to talk to Oliver and I feel like he delivered. It was a great conversation. You can check out his new book,

4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, Anywhere Books or Sold. Enjoy. What does that mean? Give me why that's such an important number. Four thousand weeks is the approximate length of an 80 year lifespan expressed in weeks. It's the expressing it in weeks that, well, I think when I first did that calculation, I kind of had a brief, miniature panic attack, but I think it's kind of edifying and salientry to think in those terms.

So, 4,000 weeks is how old? It's just under 80 years. Just, yeah. Well, what I thought was fascinating too, so people go, oh, maybe I'll live to be longer, you were talking about like the oldest woman who ever lived. And it's not really that many four weeks. You can get to like 6,000 or something

if you really break all records. Yeah. Yeah, I met a guy here in Austin, and I've talked about him before. His name was Richard Overton. He died, I think, two years ago or three years ago. And he was, at that time time the oldest man in the world. He died at 112, but I just did the map.

That's 5,800 weeks. Right. When I first, yeah, I started asking friends when I first did this calculation, just sort of guess off the top of their heads without doing any mental math. How many weeks they thought the average person could have. And you were getting like six digit numbers, but it turns out that 310,000 weeks is

the approximate duration of the whole of human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. So it's kind of, it's wild when you think about it in these terms. You would also think that this would be, you'd think we'd intuit, like, like, there's, there's some things we're good at guessing because it matters to us and some things were bad at guessing because they sort of were invented recently or whatever, right? Like, if you saw a crowd of a million people, how good would you be at guessing that? Evolutionarily, you'd have no reason to ever be able to comprehend how many people that was, but we're pretty good at, let's say, measuring distances because there's a reason to do that. You'd think that understanding

how much time we have on Earth, that having some awareness of our own mortality, you'd think that would be something we'd be good at. I guess, I think that makes sense, but then I think the problem is just that it requires it's so uncomfortable, right? It is more the stakes feel higher, and the desire to sort of psychologically scuttle away into a more comforting, but less accurate view of things is sort of overwhelming because it's mortality, right?

I mean, that was an easy thing to confront. Yeah, I mean, I guess 4,000 weeks, the weird thing about that number is that it's a lot and also not a lot. Like, you can look at it and it's a lot and also not a lot. Like you can, I could, you can look at it and it's like those pictures, like depending on how you look at it, you can see two different things.

I guess sort of depending on how you feel that day or what your frame of reference is, that's a lot or it goes by like that. Right, and I think that actually, what you're saying there gets to something really deep about the whole concept of like time and being finite with respect to time, which is like, there's something very strange in the way that we think about it as something we're entitled to in the first place, right? I mean, you could think of 4,000 weeks as

an extraordinary amount compared to never having been born. But we tend to go around thinking that it's a radically shockingly tiny amount compared to some eternal life that we apparently thought we were entitled to. Or that just a couple generations ago, that number was half. And then before that, it was like half again. Right. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Senka says, you know, it's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it.

I think that's really what you're saying when you say 4,000 weeks, it's to sort of, you talk a lot about the, in the book, you talk a lot about the benefits of being aware that there, there is an upper limit on this, that even if you took 5,800 weeks as your reference point, it doesn't fundamentally change the conclusion you're supposed to take from that, which is that every week is relatively precious. Right, exactly. But I think the other thing that I'm always, I'm really at pains to try to get across, is I don't think any of this is a recipe for kind of living your life in this kind of white knuckle,

incredibly self-conscious. Am I making the most of it? I've got to seize every day. I've got to, you know, do, you know, I've got to go base jumping every weekend otherwise. I'm not really sucking the marrow out of life. I think that it's a question of kind of fitting your ambitions to the reality of your situation. If you can really do that, it's incredibly liberating and sort of a

relief because you're no longer setting your standards by the standards of eternal life or having limitless time or you know, being able to do everything. And when you accept tough choices, I'm going to be part of the equation. Well, though, I want to get into all that. But what I love about your rating, and you must feel it when you're sitting down and doing these books, is that because I noticed, and you did this in the antidote too, you quote all the bestselling books like in that category. And you're usually sort of quoting them, I would say somewhat critically, right? As you just said, this sort of white, knuckle-ing approach to time management, or you look at some

of the happiness books out there in the antidote, you must see what those people are selling, that there's probably more sales in tell it's not what people want to hear, but telling them the sort of very unnew on like here is the opposite way to think about it. What I love about your books is that you really are exploring it kind of from both sides and the the conclusion you come to it you don't say it's's 4,000 weeks, yeah, live as if you're dying right this minute, you're saying, it's complicated, you have to get the most out of every second, but you will also not get the most out of every second

if you're consciously trying to get the most out of every second. Right, exactly. In fact, I would say that kind of approach of doing it really consciously, it still is oddly a kind of denial of reality, right? It still is setting the standard of a meaningful life at doing something more, doing something kind of superhuman, instead of full heartedly human. So, yeah, I think the only thing that isn't nuanced and complicated here is that is the facing reality part.

I think life is better to the extent that you can face the reality of the situation, the predicament that we're all in. Well, no, that's a nuance that definitely appears in the Stoax 2, Marx's realist, most of all, where he's sort of like, let's say you are the most productive person and you do live a really long life. You still die and you still don't get to take any of it with you and you'll still be

forgotten shortly after said death. So you know, like, I agree that the idea of like, I'm gonna get, I'm not gonna waste a second of this time. It doesn't get you to a different conclusion. The story still ends with a fade to black, and that's it. Right, and you actually wouldn't ultimately want it to be otherwise. That's the thing, I take a little bit of that from Seneca and I think it it it recurs in a modern philosophical sense in this work of this philosopher Martin Hagglen who I quote in the book who he quotes a headline from an American Catholic

magazine which is a question which is heaven, colon. Will it be boring? Just this idea that actually if you really had a kind of literal kind of eternal life, that's not certainly what all Christians mean by that idea, but if you did, it will be terrible because nothing would be at stake. And the answer to the question, should I do this or that with today or this hour would always be like, who cares? Because there's always be another day and another day and another day. So there's actually something about the limit that when you get to the end of it, and when you get to the bottom of it, like, we should be grateful that it's that it's our way.

Yeah, and weren't there a bunch of like Greek gods that were like sort of cursed with immortality? Like isn't that isn't that go back pretty far to the idea that like, I don't think you actually want what you think you want here. Right. Right. I think so. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, so, so, we'll talk about sort of productivity and efficiency in a bit, but this idea of time and time's passage and the invention of time, to me, you can sort of study it philosophically all you want. And then you go through what we've gone through the last year, and it really does radically reorient your sense of time. I'm just curious how I imagine most of the book was done before the pandemic, but how has this sort of intermitable lockdown and then sort of semi-pause and then moments of pausing and unpause and how has that changed your conception of time?

Well, just as an aside, I could totally talk about how the lockdown and the pandemic caused this book to be completed finally after a while, not being completed. And it wasn't because I had more time on my hands, that is not what happens when they close the preschools and your childmind account. Oh yeah, of course. But it was motivation there for sure. I think that people have been reporting these incredibly strange phenomenologies of time under lockdown, the sense that the days are racing by but also dragging in a way that doesn't seem to make sense in any straightforward way. I think a lot of it has to do with the

the loss of conventional anchors in time, right, the ways in which we measure duration all seem to be gone. There's also this thing that I've been really fascinated by about this sort of combination, I guess it goes to the heart of what I'm saying in the book. This combination of seeing that time is really precious. I mean, you know, a pandemic with a very high death toll will do that if nothing else. And at the same time, the strange kind of glimpse that we could do things differently compared to how we had been doing them, right? So, you know, you're forced to work from home instead of the office say, you may love certain aspects of that and hate certain aspects of it. There are things that people missed that they didn't realize they would miss, but there are also things that they really didn't miss, like, you know, commuting or

having to stay at the office to a specific time of day just to show that you are at your desk or something like that. And ways in which those constraints, the fact that like if you wanted to do something as a leisure activity, it was going to have to be like tending the plants in your backyard and because everyone else was closed. Certain kinds of constraints that people found themselves valuing. It's difficult to talk about, obviously, because plenty of people have had such a terrible experience, but I think that has been that sort of, I sort of think of it as possibility shock, you know, it's just this sort of like hang on. All these things that we took for granted as things that have to be part of the daily schedule

apparently don't, because they weren't for months and life went on. Did you watch that movie? I think it came out right at the beginning of the pandemic called Palm Springs. I didn't know about it. No. Oh, it's really good. It's an Andy Samberg movie and he goes to this wedding and he gets somehow sucked in. It's a comedy, but it gets sucked into this time continuum. And it's sort of like Groundhog's day, but the same day begins over and over and over again. Or if he dies, it starts over. And I thought about that movie a lot during the pandemic, because there is an element of it's, and we would joke about this with my kids, it'd be like, what are we going to do today?

And we'd say, you know, the same thing we do every day, pinky, like from pinky and the brain. It's nothing, which is going to be here. And it's totally screwed with my conception of time, whereas like something could have happened two months ago or 18 months ago, and it all feels equally close together and far apart. Right, right. I mean, that speaks to this thing that we, you know, we don't, we don't mentally record time per se, right? We have to have proxies of how much

new stuff is happening as a sort of proxy for duration. And so it was all so new, but it was all incredibly new in a, in a very monotonous way. There was an interesting difference if you're interested between how I saw the UK handling this and the US, I'm British, but live in the United States. And we very quickly here in New York got into basically a rhythm. It was, you know, it had its many downsides and its constraints, but things were after the first couple of months, we're kind of basically the same. And into sameness, we could build a life with rhythms and routines and things we did regularly and people we met in the park for play dates, once that was feasible, and etc., in the UK, they have sort of changed these very complicated sets of rules have come in and changed

every month, as far as I can tell, As soon as they relax, there was certain restriction. Everyone goes completely insane, like, you know, crowding into as many people into a small space as possible because now they're allowed to. And there was a sort of, there's been something crazy making there, I think, about this kind of imposition of these rules about how you can spend your time that just keep constantly shifting. And so I guess

this is maybe a point against what I was saying before, but there was something about the rhythmicness of the life that we got into here that was kind of the large stretches of it. Pretty peaceful, really. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle,

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wonder App. And maybe it's actually a much more natural way to live too. I think I was thinking about this a couple times from the pandemic, James Stockdale, who is a prisoner of war and Vietnam, I think it was ever seven years. You would talk about the people that got crushed were the optimists, like the people who thought, like they'd be like, and actually I had Dr. Edith Eger who was a Holocaust survivor.

She was talking about the choice. Yeah. She was talking about, she had this friend who thought, you know, like, March 1st, we're going to be out. And she was like, and that person died on March 1st, when like, they got to a point where they were hoping at this sort of conditional future, which never came. And I think there was an element of sort of, if you could accept the reality of your

circumstances, again, to go to your point about accepting the reality of death, then you can build a life around that. If you are keeping yourself in this sort of suspended state or this temporary state or this waiting for x, y or z to happen state, not only are you very vulnerable if that does or doesn't happen, but you're also that's also coming at the expense of the present moment in front of you. Right, absolutely. I totally believe that about hope in many manifestations. I have a whole riff on this at the end of the book. Yeah, it's the hope that kills you as the English football fans say and probably Ferris American sports fans as well.

Yeah, yeah. No, and the other thing I thought of during the pandemic, James Salter, the novelist, I think he was a fighter pilot in Korea, and then he ended up writing these great novels. But his memoir was titled Burning the Days. And I thought that was a beautiful expression. And I thought about it during the pandemic for two reasons. So one, that is what a lot of people are doing. Even though you only have 4,000 weeks, and however many days that is, we're just burning them,

never to return. But I also thought of this idea as, like, you know, you can also burn things for fuel or heat or light. And so it's like, how do you, how do you use the days, right? That doesn't mean you're using them some fit of productivity, but I think Sennaka talks about what's the return that you got? What did you get for what you gave up? That's really the question. Right, I think a lot of it has to do with the kind of,

I mean, I'm gonna start sounding psychoanalytic here, which is something I do, but a lot of it has to do with a kind of inner holding back from being where you are, if that makes sense, right? It's like, it's like the, and this speaks to the productivity stuff as well. I think, you know, if you're sort of a holding out for something that is actually not within the gift of humans to achieve, it is actually more comfortable because, because, moment to moment, you don't have to feel the discomfort

of being right here and constrained by reality. But, since you are, you know, inescapably and non-negotiably constrained by reality, it's a fundamentally kind of alienated way to live. And, yeah, sort of dropping back down into where you are. I think is ultimately always going to be the way to create meaning in the present. Do you, you mentioned your kids how old are your kids? I have one son he's four.

Oh four. I have a four year old also. I thought that was the other weird thing. I mean, I have a four year old and then I have a two-year-old. At some point during the pandemic, it got to the point where he'd spent more time in it than out of it, which was a very surreal experience. Then also just this idea of not only is the pandemic changed my conception of time, but also having kids change my conception of time, whereas four years, if you told me I had to go do some job, I didn't like for four years,

I would feel like an eternity, or four years of a prison sentence, I would feel like an eternity. But then also like, it feels like my son was born like two months ago. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

So, through with your perception of time as well. Yeah, totally. And I mean, part of what you're doing there, I think sometimes, it's a lot going on there, but I think part of it is you're sort of slightly entering into what you imagine their experience of time to be, which for the first couple of years is probably something very kind of similar to the experience of an enlightened Zen master, but then gradually, yeah, I mean, the proportion of our son's life that is represented by one week or one month is just, it's just so extraordinary compared to someone like me.

Yeah, I said that to a basketball coach in the middle of the pandemic, where it had been like four or five months of it, and we were talking about, he was talking about some of his athletes. We're getting really anxious and having trouble with the sort of pause that they were in. And I was like, you got to understand, even just four or five months here is like a significant percentage of their entire life. You know, this is like one percent. You're at for you, you're like, hey, can you guys just wait three months and then we'll resume? But you're asking them to wait one percent of their life, you know,

or whatever the percentage was. I forget what it was exactly, but they don't, like, as you get, that's a weird thing I've felt as I've gotten older, although not really older, anything. But I've now done, there's now things I can be like, oh, I remember when I started that 15 years ago, or I remember that 10 years ago. So now I have the conception of 10 years as a block of time, being an indurable or even relatively quick period of time. But before you've done that, you have no conception.

So, like, yeah, you have a kid and you're like, you know, you're measuring it in months and then, then you're like, oh, when they turn three, they'll be doing X, Y, and Z and you're like, three years from now, like, what? Like, I haven't done anything for three consecutive years in my entire life. So, I, you know, I think as you experience things,

it does change your conception of time, which is probably something to do with why older people seem to have a kind of a wisdom and a stillness to them that we don't quite comprehend. Yeah, I'm sure that's right. You're, I mean, the other, you're reminding me of the way that I feel like I often, I mean, I'm a bit older than you, but you know, still sort of fundamentally the notion of the units of time that my life is comprised

of so far are they're incredibly hard to get a handle on sort of from the inside and yet then all the time things are happening in the outer world that sort of throw it into this kind of perspective. I finished writing a column that I'd been doing for the Guardian every week for more than a decade last year. And one of the very complimentary emails I got from somebody said that they had grown up reading it.

It was just absolutely extraordinary. They're mentioned as a compliment, but I had a momentary existential crisis. The idea that I could be doing anything for long enough for someone else to have grown up to it is, it's just utterly discombobulating and totally out of sync with what I think going through my life about my relationship to time. Yeah, like 15 to 25. That's a good chunk of a life. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I had a conversation with someone a while ago, we were talking about like, what's an amount of money you can spend without having to run it by your spouse? That constitutes a large amount

of money. But I was also thinking that we have that relationship with time. Like what is a large amount of time to you? And that that amount changes as you get older. Right. You, you know, you first start dating someone and like, oh, we've been together a month, we've been together, you know, six months. And then you get married to someone, you can have a bad year. Or you know, marriage could have a bad decade, right? Like the amount of time that you're comfortable with changes as you get older because you've had more of it and then I don't know what the other factors are, but you do seem to get comfortable with larger amounts of time as you get older, which is kind of ironic because you actually have less of it. And it seems to be going by faster to most people. Yeah, yeah, no, it is. It's amazing.

So let's talk about work-life balance because that's something you talked about in the book. I had an interesting experience with someone young who was working for me and it just started and then they ended up not working out and they were saying, you know, it's just my work life balance is not what I wanted to be. And I was like, you know, you're 20 years old. What work life balance are you not even that you think you're entitled to. What work, what things do you balance? You know, right, right. What's your life?

Yeah. But it is an interesting topic because I feel like some people their work life balance is totally out of whack. And then other people, it's out of whack in the other direction where they're just sort of, as we said, burning the days as if they have unlimited time to figure out what they want to do in life, to figure out what they want to apply themselves to and all of that. Right, I think these are sort of two equal and opposite bad ways to respond to a finitude, right? And they're both sort of troubling when you're in it because you are aware on some level if you're sort of using up your finite time in a way

that that feels too empty. And then of course, you know, if you feel like you have so much to do that you don't get to pay proper attention to any of course, you know, if you feel like you have so much to do that you don't get to pay proper attention to any of it, that's equally bad. I think the point that I'm really sort of keen to try to drive home about all this is how often we get lured into trying to do things, trying to arrange time and use time in ways that are kind of inherently and systematically impossible. And the obvious way this manifests in the case of work-life balance is that it sounds like what you're talking about is a kind of judicious mixture of all the different

kinds of domains that bring meaning to a life. But what it seems for various different reasons to end up meaning is the attempt to sort of dedicate yourself with 100% enthusiasm and energy to your work and also 100% enthusiasm and energy to your life outside work in a way that like literally doesn't add up because it neglects the fact that in each different season of your life there's probably going to be, or maybe inevitably going to be, tough choices to be faced and sacrifices to be made. And maybe there are parts of your 20s that are the right time for not doing much outside of work.

And then, you know, there are times after, say, just having a child when it might make sense to really be failing to achieve everything you could imagine achieving on the work front for some time because something else is more important. So it's just that understanding of finitude and that understanding that this isn't the council of despair, right? This is what you need to see in order to consciously build the meaningful life that you want to build. It's not about how you can't build that meaningful life. It's actually the precondition for it

is to see the trade-offs that you're making and make sure that they're the ones you want to be making instead of the other ones. Well, I think the other thing is like, nobody owes you worth life balance, right? So it's like, you know, life is nasty, brutish and short. That's like the sort of status quo.

If you want work life balance, I usually find you have to get yourself to some place of power or in demand or leverage that allows you to then design your life the way you want it. So that's one part of it. But then the irony is a lot of people get themselves into that position and then don't actually do it. People talk about like fuck you money, but then they get the money and then they're still grinding away as ever. So it's like this interesting tension where nobody is going to ever give you a perfectly

balanced life where you only have to work just enough to support yourself, have everything you want, and get to spend just as much time doing all the things you want. At the same time, the people who ostensibly could and have the leverage to design their life exactly the way they want it, you know, still seem to spend a lot of time in meetings that they can't possibly enjoy. Right, right, because yeah, it starts to feel that you've got to do that to maintain the quality of life that you think is a precondition for your happiness. Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's a third option, and this might be where, you know, me and you

as the person from Northern Europe versus the Texas resident can't have different perspectives on the world, is like, I mean, there are countries that try to some extent to sort of impose this from the top and to make, you know, to limit work, not actually the UK as I have been, but, you know, European countries that try to limit working hours, try to provide so much of a social safety net that it really is a lot more possible to do, to sort of have the balance that you speak of. But again, there's still a trade-off because that is enforced and

that you speak of, but again, there's still a trade-off because that is enforced. And I definitely recognize parts of my personality that wouldn't want to be in that situation, that wouldn't want to feel that there was an enormous cultural pressure to not spend, the next year of my life working morning, noon and night in order to launch something incredibly cool. So I don't think you can't win.

You can just arrange the sacrifices and trade-offs in different ways that prioritize different values, I guess. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Well, and that's, I guess that's another part of this idea of the 4,000 weeks, which is that you may get 4,000 weeks. You might also get 2,000. So how do you use the time while you have it to do the things that you want to do. So I think it's not that some people are taking it slow, but I do tend to hear from people

who are like, oh, like things that I've done. So I live on this farm and people go, oh, I've always wanted to do that. And it's like, okay, when, you know, when are you gonna do it? It's not as if I won the lottery, and that's how I was able to do it. Like quite the country, it was much cheaper than I thought. Also a lot more work than I thought.

So, have you actually always wanted to do it or you're not being honest with yourself? Or do you really want to do it and you're just not taking the step to do it? So, I think, you know, I think a lot of, like Seneca talks about this where he says, you know, it's wrong to think of death as something in the future. He's like, death is also happening right now, that you're dying as time passes. So, like, I don't know, let me do the math. How many weeks have I already died? that you're dying as time passes. So like, I don't know, let me do the math. How many weeks have I already died?

34 times, 52. So I've already died 1700 weeks. That's another way to think about it, right? Is that every week that passes you died, it's not that you won't, that that gets subtracted from the total, it's just like, no, you already died. Like, And I think, yeah, and I think that explains, actually, the desire to not face that explains some of the behavior you're talking about. There may be people who are very

legitimately sort of biting their time just because they enjoy the way that they're spending their young adulthood. But I think a lot of people, maybe the ones you're referring to, there's something very pleasant about putting off these kinds of ambitions because you don't have to decide between them. In the book, I quote a little bit of a line from the philosopher, French philosopher, Henri Bergson from his book Time and Free Will,

where he points out what seems obvious once it's pointed out that the reason fantasies of the future and what you're going to do one day are so much more pleasant for so many people than actually doing things in the present moment is because you get to hang on to them all even if they conflict with each other. So you can sort of believe in some doom and unarticulated way that you're going to, you know, get married and have kids and be a super engaged parent. And also you're gonna spend your whole life

on silent meditation retreats. And also you're gonna, you know, take Silicon Valley by storm. Because in fantasy, like there's no math applies, you can have them all and and it's the choosing between one and letting go of others that is that is the painful thing that people are avoiding. I think that goes to a lot of much more sort of day to day procrastination as well. Yes, actually. Yeah, we act as if we have forever and so that means no

no hard decisions. And that's Seneca too, right? So you have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. The desires of immortals, yeah, exactly, right, right. I remember I read a piece, you know what fire is? Like the fire community, I think it's a financial independence retire early. The idea is like you live very frugally while you're in your high earning years as a young person.

You know, this is mostly well suited to like computer programmers and stuff that are making $200,000 a year at Google. But you're earning a lot of money, you're spending no money, and then you retire at 30 or 40 instead of, you know, 60 or 70. But I remember the New York Times profiled one of the people and they were like, well, you know, he'd retired at 30 or something. And they were like, well, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing with all your new bound time?

And the guy was like, well, this morning I stared at the ceiling fan and I'm making my way through the criterion collection. And they're like, I'm not sure that's, one, I'm not sure that's better for humanity, but two, I'm not sure that's better for you than to two, I'm not sure that's better for you than to be showing up at a job you're good at. So it's funny what we think we'll do

if we had more time. A lot of times people don't have a great answer. Right, no, I think what I am the about those people is a certain kind of, you know, getting the basic financial security thing squared away early, it feels very appealing. But I also know that some combination of human, the way human psychology works, plus, you know, late capitalism leads to this situation where it's never going to, most of us, I think, are probably never going to feel like we're there. And that if I would have five times the savings and investments that I have now, it would

not lead to the people that are loosing peace that I believe it would, yes, exactly. Right, no, because whatever the number is, it's like, it doesn't matter how much gas is in the tank. You're always like, how long can this take me? Right. Right. And I think you talk a little bit about these people in the book, the sort of the digital nomads, or the people that make a living as a travel influencer or a YouTuber,

whatever they look like, they have these amazing lives. And I think the pandemic, it was also sort of pulled the curtain back a little bit and you go, these people have nothing. You know, not just like they physically own nothing, but like, you know, shit got real and they had to stop and they have no home, like not a physical house. They don't have a place, you know. They don't have a life. They don't have a routine. They're not tethered to the world or to society in any way.

And it's always struck me that that's probably kind of on purpose, right? That it's, I think it was Epicurus that said that every man flees himself. There is this, it seems like a wonderful fantasy, but in fact, is rooted more in a nightmare, an inability to just actually sit down and pass time in your own company, instead you always have to be chasing the next flight, the next deal, the next Instagram photo. Absolutely. I think it also has, I think in addition, and it's kind of the same point extended, it's something to do with holding yourself back from relationship as well, something to do with kind of commitment phobia. And like, I've been there. Like, I'm not, I'm not wanting to talk about,

you know, I spent my 20s in some version of all of this, even though I wasn't like working as a digital nomad from overly glamorous locations. But, you know, that idea of like, again, it's to do with control and finitude. It's a different kind of finitude, not the amount of time, but the control that you either have or want over the time. And I think the ideal of the digital nomad, and it may be something that a ton of people have to go through at one stage in adulthood, right? I'm not saying if you, if that's you, a given person listening, like you're bad, but there's something about that which absolutely champions the idea

of totally soul individual control of your time as being the thing to aspire to. And then you find, right, that, you know, you've closed off all sorts of things that happen just because you live in a neighborhood and you have certain roots to it and things happen at certain times that you enjoy participating in even though you didn't take sole control over deciding that that thing was going to happen at that point. And sometimes I always think I was really fortunate. I came to New York City more than a decade

ago now and I was still I think in that kind of phase of, I was one of the many brits who come to New York, sort of treated a little bit like a playground and sort of not be fully committed to. And on the assumption that I would eventually have to sort of face the music and go back to my real life. And then a few years in, I realized that I apparently had a real life in terms of a relationship and friends and a connection to a place. And so I was sort of tricked into getting over my commitment phobia, which was by the passage of time, which was brilliant, because I'm very glad it happened. But it wouldn't have happened solely by me deciding to, in fact, if I'd let my sort of ego dictate everything, I would have decided to

go dictate everything I would have decided to go home, go back to the UK just at the point when a sort of commitment that was not based on full soul control was beginning to be a part of my life. So I'm sort of grateful for events and circumstances in that respect. Well, I know a travel blogger who is sort of like, what I really want to do is meet someone and get married and start a family. And it's like, that's what you say you want. But show me any of your choices that would make that not just reasonably possible. Show me one that could physically happen. Because you're in one place for more than,

two consecutive weeks. And so again, there's this idea. We say we want certain things, but perhaps because we think we can always get around to it. We never do that. We've quoted Senegal, but I love his quote. He says, the one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to live. Always getting ready to live, meaning they're about to get started.

They're gonna do it tomorrow. But of course they never do it. And I think the thing that I would wanna say to like my former self or anyone who's the younger than me and in that kind of situation is like, you'll be amazed in almost all circumstances at how mild and tolerable the discomfort that you're avoiding is. Big terrible crises and tragedies happen to people, but that's got nothing to do with this, that's nothing to do with your choices that they just happen.

But putting that aside, you know, the thing you're avoiding when you keep moving or don't settle down somewhere or don't allow yourself to go on a whole bunch of dates that might be really like a waste of your time or, you know, live in a neighborhood that you don't, might end up not loving, et cetera, et cetera. Like, it's nothing. You can totally cope with that discomfort.

It is not worth running your life on the avoidance of that kind of discomfort. Speaking of avoidance, you talk a lot about inbox zero in the book, and I've been at inbox zero for a person for a long time. And also, at some point, it's not that I gave up on it. I just, you know, I just, it was like I had this breakthrough. It's like I don't have to respond to everything. I can also just let it sit and delete it. And if it's important, it'll come back. But like, whatever the anxiety that was keeping me in this sort of rigid system, fear of the chaos that would happen if I was not disciplined about it all the time, I was incredibly surprised at how nobody noticed and nobody cared, and that it was

entirely a construct in my head. Right, I mean, yes, if we, if we, uh, we would care less what other people thought about us, if we realized how little, how seldom they do or whatever that, whatever the saying is, yeah. Um, I think that's totally right. And I mean, you know, some people might be listening and think, well, okay, you're in a slightly different position. You've got a public profile. You're going to get more email and you can handle and you've got a position of power when it comes to what's not going to happen to you if you fail to respond to them. But I do think there's a sort of basic logic here that applies to

absolutely everybody, no matter their kind of profile status, things like that. We live in this world of effectively infinite inputs, whether that's emails, demands, live in this world of effectively infinite inputs, whether that's emails, demands, business opportunities and ambitions or just, you know, obligations, if you're in a job that just piles you up with obligations. Like, if the demands being made on you by yourself or by the world are impossible, then you're not gonna do them all.

Like, I mean, that's what the word impossible means. And so, some kind of trade off, some kind of sacrifice is choice is already being made, right, by you in that situation, because there's no option, but for a finite human to make choices faced with infinite possibilities. And all this is about becoming more conscious of it and sort of thinking about the fact that you're going to kind of piss somebody off, but deciding that actually that's the least worst option in the situation that you're in. So it all is just about becoming conscious of the way things actually already are so as

to move more wisely through it rather than kind of giving up on something that might have actually been. What I think is because you're happiness book two, it's like you gotta get comfortable letting stuff happen. You can't be in control all the time and touch everything and have it be your way all the time and touch everything and Have it be your way all the time. There as you said there's trade-offs You can't do everything and you have to make choices and

If you can't do that not only are you gonna be overwhelmed but you'll probably be unhappy as well because you'll be beating yourself up for being too late, too weak slate respond and it's something or not RSVPing know, just ignoring it or going, even though you don't wanna go and you don't have to go and no one will care if you don't go, but you've imposed this on yourself. Right, absolutely. And yeah, your life is gonna fill, it's just a sort of logical entailment of that attitude

that your life is gonna fill with other people's priorities instead of your own. And of course, you know, plenty of people are in jobs where they have to give a lot of attention to other people's priorities. Sure. But you don't have to collaborate internally with the idea that that is going to somehow lead you to the golden era when you're spending

all your time on the things that you care about the most. Once you've decided to secede from that idea, You are in a stronger position, even if you happen to be, you know, right now in circumstances that are very structured by other people's demands. I love the thing that Jessica Abel, she's a graphic novelist and a creativity coach. She sort of says, you have to do this thing that comes from personal finance

and apply it to time with this idea of paying yourself first. Yes. You just have to decide to do some of the things that count to you the most and let the other chips fall where they may, to some extent. Otherwise, you know, there won't be time left over at the end of the day, end of the month, to do it, because that's just, because that's just not how it works. Yeah, there's a meme I like where someone is texting with their boss, they've gone, they've taken a week vacation, or they've taken a paid time off day,

and the boss was like, hey, can you come in and they're like, no, I'm off today, and the boss says, oh, we really need you, we're slammed, and the person just replies like, whoa, that sucks. And you're like, yes, like you don't, you don't have to do that.

I don't like it too because it's not like a billionaire saying, you know, like I'm not gonna opt into society's constructs anymore. It's like you don't know anything to your, to the restaurant that you work at, right? Hopefully you guys have a mutually beneficial relationship, but yeah, you have to put yourself first.

And I think having kids was super helpful for me in that regard because if you are a driven person, if you're trying to accomplish things, you probably have what I have, which is seemingly an endless capacity to deprive yourself of things, right, to put yourself last, you know, in favor of the job or the work or the the piece you're writing or the place you want to go or whatever it is. But when you realize saying yes to this, I like, I'll get them now, it'll be like, hey, do you want to do this local radio interview at 4 a.m. you know, blah, blah, blah. And at a certain point in my career, I'd be like'm gonna drag myself out of bed and do and and it's I don't think it's now coming from a place of privilege

That I'm saying no because I don't think it made a difference then No, right in a difference now. It was pretty early ego or something But now I go if I agree to this thing that's at 5.30 p.m That means I won't have dinner with my kids and that is costly and I don't want to do that. And so when you have kids it does, it's like you're apparently be willing to waste the vast majority of your 4,000 weeks but you realize you have even fewer weeks with these kids, especially when they are kids, and then that does provide some important context, I feel.

I think that's absolutely right. Sorry, I don't know if you can hear these pings. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's also where you see the affinity with the kind of fixed schedule approaches that like Cal Newport is most famous for advocating this idea that you first of all fix the time you're going

to give to work and the time you're going to make available to your family and then you make the work fit or not fit inside that time. And it's the same thing with sort of quota system. So you might, you know, if you were getting us to do a million of those kind of radio interviews that you talk about, you might say, well, I'm going to do X number of them per however long. And then, and then when the quota is full, the quota is full. All of these things are just approaches that take start with your limits and start with an acknowledgement of your finitude and sort of oblige your activities to fit into that instead of this kind of constant chasing of the trying to fit everything in, which just postpones the, you know, that it makes you feel like there's

going to be a moment one day soon when it all feels like it fits, but you never get that. Yeah, it's taking yourself discipline out of it and making it like a rule that you just have to point to the rule and you say, sorry, I don't do that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it also gives you a good alibi for your sort of conflict of verse. It's also helpful because you're sort of like bleaming the quota, which is weird because like you made it up, but all the same. It does hate. You can't have that effect. Yeah. No, people are oddly respectful of rules.

Sorry, I just don't, I don't blur books or, you know, sorry, I'm on book deadline and I can't, you know, do this or sorry, you know, sorry, blah blah blah. They respect the rule even if thinking about it for two seconds would reveal that the rule is arbitrary and made out. So, obviously the subtitle is time management for mortals, mortality being the thing, not unlike death that hovers over the whole book and our conversation today. I've kind of been amazed going back to the pandemic, people will think about, like, what would

I do if I found out I had cancer and then survived? What would I do if I was on a plane, crash, but then I survived? We think about what changes we'd make, like from a near death experience. I've kind of been amazed at how many people have just decided to ignore the enormous near death experience that all of humanity not just went through, but is currently going through on a day- day. I mean, they're hopefully not, but they're very easily could be someone listening to this who could be dead from the pandemic in two weeks or three weeks, right? Like you could be not yet infected, but living on borrowed time, just as we're all living on borrowed time,

just as we're all living on borrowed time in a larger sense. But it has been interesting to me how people have just decided not to see this as a near death experience. Some people have, but a lot of people haven't. Right, and I guess that really goes to the fact that there's some kind of choice involved and whether you do see things as near-death experiences, there's something that this is the

power of the forces inside us that want to not think about these things. You may have no option in the case of certain kinds of you know Diagnosis happening to you personally, but but if you'll take any option you can to not have that thought about about things that are happening in the news and I think you can see that in a lot of the sort of political polarization around vaccination and lockdowns and all the rest of it in different ways people are prioritizing I think on both sides of the political spectrum, actually, people are prioritizing their desire to feel that everything's going

to be totally okay over what might make the most sense from a public health perspective or something like that. A big question, can you hold on to those epiphanies reliably, even if you do have them, you reliably, even if you do have them? Even if you do have them. I don't know. I think one of the things I try to, the practical side of this book, is that I think there are practices and techniques and disciplines that you can sort of unfold into your life that will keep you going

in this kind of limitation-facing, finitude-facing way, even on the many days when your deeply felt psychological state is probably not going to be one of, you know, rapturous acceptance of your own mortality. Well, the political thing is funny because there's another group, there's like, you know, what Doomsday preppers are like, these people have spent, like decades or countless amounts of money or courses, like preparing for like, when things get really bad.

There's some irony to me that those are precisely the people who have decided that this pandemic is not real and that they don't have to take it seriously. Like they spent their whole life preparing for like, the event to go into the bunker. And now they're, because they're in the cult of Trump, they wanted to deny that the event is happening. But yeah, we think about what would happen

if I came face to face with death. And you, everyone here, it's listening, did. I mean, just because you didn't end up in the hospital on a ventilator, didn't, doesn't mean it wasn't a near-miss where you have no idea how, what's lurking inside your body, how if you'd bumped into this person on the street

and said, that person on the street or if you hadn't been able to get the vaccine or but about about like and you could run it back in any number of ways and and we all did and I guess to your point about can you hold on to these experiences perhaps the impact of the near death experience is fleeting maybe depending on how powerful it is you get a year or five years or five minutes but this is where that stoic idea of momentum where it comes in, you should just be meditating on that idea all the time to hopefully keep it. You should be thinking about how fragile life is all the time and thinking about going because it does have at least an ephemeral impact

of taking you out of your little fantasy world. Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, the important point here is that we, as you say, we are always all living on borrowed time and a grand piano could fall out of an apartment building as you walk by. What has happened in the pandemic, at least for those of us fortunate enough so far to be sort of part of it, but healthy, is that we've been shown the way things actually always are in a more vivid and unignorable way rather than things have changed to become more uncertain. There's a sermon

that CS Lewis gave that I've quoted several times in that's a writing over the last few months where he talks at the beginning of the Second World War about how the war, the quote is something like, the war creates no absolutely new situation. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. And I'm sorry, do you find a lot of why messages still come through to my phone? It's all right, we can edit that out. Life and a precipice. Right, life has always been lived on a precipice and it just makes the ongoing human situation more clearly perceivable. And the point he was making in that sermon was

that therefore there is no argument for sort of waiting until the war is over to get back to things like the pursuit of knowledge in universities or great works of art and culture, because if humanity waited to feel secure with respect to the future or even to the present before doing kind of important meaningful things, then we'd just be waiting forever. So I think, you know think these two things go together, understanding that we are always on this precipice, and understanding that being on that precipice is no reason not to sort of take risks and pursue your dreams to put it in a cliché way, because there's never going to be a different kind

of jumping off point for those activities. Right, just as a certain number of people have died in the pandemic, a certain number of people die each year in car accidents and plane crashes and people who get lung cancer but have never smoked a cigarette in their life. The number comes up for certain percentage of people every year and a huge percentage of those are not people at the end of their 4,000 weeks. And a lot of them are good people, and a lot of them are people who were doing everything right.

And so I think if you're waiting for the actual near death experience, the indisputable undeniable one, it may be too late. You know, it may be that you just found out you have cancer and it's terminal as opposed to you know, my brush with testicular cancer at age 22, gave me a new frame of reference, you know, blah, blah, blah. You got to go seek out that understanding and not let it, you know, sort of escape from your fingertips, you've got to hold on to it.

And I love that conception in the book. Thank you, yes. No, I think that's, I think it's right. You can sort of let it permeate you, I think, in a way that doesn't lead to sort of spending every day in a kind of existential panicky space. But just sort of adds a level of vividness to more of the time than it otherwise would. Yeah. Well, if you're living life as if an asteroid is coming tomorrow, and we're all for certain going to die, you know, you might say goodbye to some people, but this is where you get in the situation where like, I wonder what heroin feels like, or, you know, you might say goodbye to some people, but this is where you get in the situation. We're like, I wonder what heroin feels like.

Or, you know, I think the stoic conception of more like, just wrap up each day. Yeah. Like just leave things and like don't leave anything undone, but also don't assume that you will not get tomorrow, right? It's sort of to be to a place, like, I think you want to get to a place where you're living as if you're on your playing with house money. Like Senaqa says, if you go to bed going like, I live my whole life, then when you wake

up tomorrow, it puts that day in perspective, which is I'm lucky to be here. I don't have to do anything, but I did get this gift. I shouldn't waste it. To me, that's the healthier way to do it. And that's right in the middle of what we're talking about, the people who are terrified of death, and the people who are assuming they're going to live forever and aren't in much of a hurry.

Right. And it comes down to just you know, just seeing, it's that idea of saying that dying every moment, right? It comes down to doing something that counts with this moment, not because it's leading up to something necessarily, not because you're going to be guaranteed a certain future supply of moments, but because moments are valuable in themselves, self-valuable, you know, that meaning ultimately in life can only ever be found in the time that it is. I love it.

Well, I thought the book was great. It was good to chat again, and I wish you many more weeks. Thank you so much, Ryan. Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars

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