Author of the global bestseller
FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS
OLIVER BURKEMAN Meditations for Mortals
Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
Meditations for Mortals
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
Meditations for Mortals
Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
Oliver Burkeman
LO NDON BH
THE BODLEY HEAD
The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published by The Bodley Head in 2024
Copyright © Oliver Burkeman 2024
Oliver Burkeman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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? That is the question!’
– Anthony de Mello
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 fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties 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 infinite 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. The twenty-eight chapters in this book are intended as a guide to a different 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 finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment- filled 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 filing 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 stuff 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 finite humans, the time for that has to be now.
So I sincerely hope you find 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 office in the morning, was to be assigned some topic currently in the news – the fate of refugees fleeing 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 floor near my desk, clicking his fingers to expel nervous energy, and wondering aloud why I wasn’t closer to finishing. The answer (as I doubtless told him on several occasions) is that writing an intelligentseeming 2,000-word article in seven hours flat, 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, fighting 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 off an illdefined 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 figuring out how romantic relationships were supposed to work – so that the truly meaningful part of life, the really real part, could finally 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. The 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 fifty 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.’
The 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 difference. The 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-first 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 efforts to address the problem seem only to exacerbate it. In my book Four Thousand Weeks I labelled one version of this ‘the efficiency 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 first place. Moreover, as you struggle to handle everything, your days begin to fill with less important tasks – because your belief that there must be a way to do it all means you flinch from making difficult 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 efforts 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 first place. The days lose what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa evocatively calls their ‘resonance’. The world feels dead; and for all our efforts to get more done, we find 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! Then, within a day or two, my new schedule would seem dismal and lifeless, another list of
chores I had to slog through, and I’d find myself angrily resenting the jerk who had the temerity to dictate how I spent my time in this manner – even though the jerk in question was me.
These are admittedly minor examples. But this loss of aliveness also helps explain the epidemic of burnout, which isn’t merely a matter of exhaustion, but of the emptiness that comes from years of pushing oneself, machine-like, to do more and more, without it ever feeling like enough. The increasingly rage-filled and conspiratorial character of modern political life might even be seen as a desperate attempt, by people starved of resonance, to try to feel anything at all.
The essential trouble, as Rosa tells it, is that the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable – and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control. And so we experience the world as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer. We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes, defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimise our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events. (Even if we congratulate ourselves on, say, prioritising friendship over making money, we may still approach it in the spirit of optimisation, pushing ourselves to make more friends, or to do better at keeping in touch with them – that is, to try to exert more control over our social lives.) The culture reinforces
this doctrine of control in multiple ways. Advances in technology always seem on the cusp of permitting you to tame your workload at last – at the time of writing, virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence are what’s about to do it – while the hyper-competitive economy makes it feel ever more essential to do so, just to keep your head above water.
Yet everyday experience, along with centuries of philosophical reflection, attests to the fact that a fulfilling and accomplished life isn’t a matter of exerting ever more control. It’s not about making things more predictable and secure, until you can finally relax. A football match is exciting because you don’t know who’ll win; a field of intellectual study is absorbing because you don’t yet have a handle on it all. The greatest achievements often involve remaining open to serendipity, seizing unplanned opportunities, or riding unexpected bursts of motivation. To be delighted by another person, or moved by a landscape or a work of art, requires not being in full control. At the same time, a good life clearly isn’t about giving up all hope of influencing reality. It’s about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact – just without the background agenda of achieving full control. Resonance depends on reciprocity: you do things – you have to launch the business, organise the campaign, set off on the wilderness trek, send the email about the social event – and then see how the world responds.
It’s hardly surprising that so many of us spend so much of our lives attempting to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over a reality that can otherwise seem so unmanageable and overwhelming. How else are you