Oliver Burkeman
Stop trying to sort your life out. Start living. Author of the global bestseller Four Thousand Weeks A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts
Meditations for Mortals
Praise for Meditations for Mortals :
‘Delightful, engaging, rigorous and reassuring’
Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘If there are two people who have changed my life . . . then one of them is Oliver Burkeman’
Pandora Sykes
‘Full of wisdom and comfort. I enjoyed every page and read it in a single sitting’
Chris van Tulleken
‘Oliver Burkeman has a way of giving you the most unexpected productivity advice exactly when you need it’
Mark Manson
‘Thoughtful, level-headed, and useful . . . a book to meditate upon’
The Times
‘A deeply helpful reflection on how to permit our lives a sigh of relief’
Derren Brown
‘This book is both a comfort and a challenge – exactly what our trying times demand’
Daniel H. Pink
‘A very special book. We should all read this’
Krista Tippett
Praise for Four Thousand Weeks :
‘Read this book and wake up to a new way of thinking and living’
Emma Gannon
‘Every sentence is riven with gold’
Chris Evans
‘Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and useful’
Marian Keyes
‘The most important book ever written about time management’
Adam Grant
‘Perfectly pitched somewhere between practical self-help book and philosophical quest’ Observer
‘[This] book will challenge and amuse you. And it may even spur you on to change your life’ Evening Standard
‘Witty, modest and refreshingly sane’
Robert Webb
‘A fantastic, warm, clever book’
Kate Mosse
OLIVER BURKEMAN
Oliver Burkeman is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks and The Antidote, and for many years wrote a popular weekly column on psychology for the Guardian, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher.
He has a devoted following for his writing on productivity, mortality, the power of limits and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.
oliverburkeman.com @oliverburkeman
ALSO BY OLIVER BURKEMAN
Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
OLIVER BURKEMAN
Meditations for Mortals
A Four Week Guide to Doing What Counts
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First published in Vintage in 2025 First published in hardback by The Bodley Head in 2024
Copyright © Oliver Burkeman 2024
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Parts of this book have previously appeared in the author’s email newsletter The Imperfectionist.
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‘It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.’
– Marion Woodman
‘Is there life before death? at is the question!’
– Anthony de Mello
Rules that serve life On doing things dailyish
On nding focus in the chaos
Fourteen 75
Develop a taste for problems On never reaching the trouble-free phase
Three
go
What if this were easy?
On the false allure of e ort Day Sixteen 87 e reverse golden rule
On not being your own worst enemy Day Seventeen 93
Don’t stand in generosity’s way
On the futility of ‘becoming a better person’
Day Eighteen 97
Allow other people their problems
On minding your own business
The imperfect life
This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvellously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how eeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your aws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest di culties in life might never be fully resolved.
In short: it’s about what changes once you grasp that life
as a limited human being – in an era of in nite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities – isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve. e twenty-eight chapters in this book are intended as a guide to a di erent way of taking action in the world, which I call ‘imperfectionism’ – a freeing and energising outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you’ll nally get to feel ful lled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment- lled life – and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety- inducing moment in history.
If you decide to read this book at the suggested pace of one chapter per day or thereabouts, my hope is that it will function as a four-week ‘retreat of the mind’ in the midst of daily life – a way of actually living this philosophy here and now, and doing more of what matters to you as a result, instead of mentally ling it away as yet another system you might try to implement one day, should you ever get a moment to spare. After all, as we’ll see, one main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stu will be ‘out of the way’, so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For nite humans, the time for that has to be now.
So I sincerely hope you nd this book useful. To be completely honest with you, though, I wrote it for myself.
In my late twenties, I started working as a general feature writer at the Guardian newspaper in London, where my job, upon arriving at the o ce in the morning, was to be assigned some topic currently in the news – the fate of refugees eeing an unfolding geopolitical crisis, say, or why green smoothies were suddenly so popular – and then to turn in a big-picture, intelligent-seeming 2,000-word article on it by 5 p.m. the same day. An hour or two before deadline, my editor would begin pacing the oor near my desk, clicking his ngers to expel nervous energy, and wondering aloud why I wasn’t closer to nishing. e answer (as I doubtless told him on several occasions) is that writing an intelligentseeming 2,000-word article in seven hours at, on a topic about which you previously knew nothing, is a fundamentally preposterous undertaking. Still, it had to be done – and so my days at the Guardian were shot through with the feeling of being on the back foot, ghting against time, and needing to buckle down immediately, if I were to stand any chance of closing the gap.
Not that I can really blame my editor for any of this. By that point in my life, I was already on intimate terms with the feeling of playing catch-up; indeed, few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to a minimum standard of output, if I’m to stave o an illde ned catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing
down upon my head. Sometimes, it felt like all I needed was a bit more discipline; at other times, I was sure the answer lay in a new system for managing my tasks and goals, which I’d track down just as soon as I got this article on smoothies out of the way. I devoured self-help books, tried meditation, and explored Stoicism, growing slightly more anxious each time another new technique proved not to be the silver bullet. Always over the horizon, meanwhile, hovered the fantasy of one day ‘getting on top of things’ – where ‘things’ could mean anything from emptying my inbox to guring out how romantic relationships were supposed to work – so that the truly meaningful part of life, the really real part, could nally begin.
I know now, though I didn’t back then, that I’m not alone in feeling this way. Frankly, I could hardly be less alone. Hundreds of conversations and email exchanges I’ve had since 2021, when I published a book about the challenge of using time well, have convinced me that this sense of not having life nailed down just yet – and needing to exert oneself harder and harder, if only to avoid slipping further back – is close to universal these days. e younger people I encountered seemed utterly daunted by the task of getting life into working order, while many older ones were dismayed that by forty or fty they apparently still hadn’t managed it, and were starting to wonder if they ever would. Certainly, it was clear that achieving wealth or status didn’t cause the problem to go away – which makes sense, since in the modern world, external success is often the result of being even more enmeshed in the desperate game of catch-up than everyone else. ‘Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and
investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.’
e most common form of the anxious feeling I’m trying to pinpoint here is sheer, overwhelming busyness, the sense of having far too much to do in the time available for doing it. But it takes other forms as well. For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop secondguessing yourself until you get there. It also arises, for many of us, in the feeling of not yet having cracked the code of intimate relationships, so that for all our outward accomplishments we feel thwarted on a daily basis by the bewildering complexities of dating, marriage, or parenting. For still others, the falling-behind feeling is mainly a matter of believing they ought to be doing more to address the national and global crises unfolding around them, but having no idea what they could do, as individuals, that could possibly make any di erence. e thread that runs through all these, though, is the idea that there exists some way of being in the world, some way of mastering the situation of being a human in the twenty- rst century, that you have yet to discover. And that you won’t be able to relax into your life until you do.
Yet the worst of it is that our e orts to address the problem seem only to exacerbate it. In my book Four ousand Weeks I labelled one version of this ‘the e ciency trap’, to describe the way that when you get better and faster at dealing with an incoming supply of anything, you often end up busier and more stressed. Email is the classic example:
vowing to address the deluge, you start replying more promptly, triggering more replies, many of which you’ll need to reply to; plus, you acquire a reputation for being unusually responsive on email, so more people consider it worthwhile to email you in the rst place. Moreover, as you struggle to handle everything, your days begin to ll with less important tasks – because your belief that there must be a way to do it all means you inch from making di cult decisions about what’s truly worth your limited time.
But my conversations helped me recognise a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless e orts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the rst place. e days lose what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa evocatively calls their ‘resonance’. e world feels dead; and for all our e orts to get more done, we nd ourselves somehow less able to bring about the results we were seeking. It happens even when our attempts to get in control of things do work. You manage to make yourself meditate daily, and suddenly it feels soul-crushingly boring to do so; or you get around to organising a date night with your spouse – because everyone says that’s how to keep the spark alive – but the whole thing makes the two of you so self-conscious that it’s fated to descend into bickering, and you end the evening feeling like failures. In my days as a ‘productivity geek’, I was always embracing some new system for designing my life, and as I downloaded the relevant app, or purchased the required stationery, I’d feel excited, even intoxicated: I was on the verge of great things! en, within a day or two, my new schedule would seem dismal and lifeless, another list of