British author Oliver Burkeman is behind the self-help book, Meditations for Mortals.
For decades, self-help gurus and advice books have been pushing people to live their best lives and offering tips on how to sort your life out.
But what if you instead focused on your limitations and mortality, rather than seeking perfection?
That philosophy is central to the work of Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals.
The British journalist and author focuses his advice on “imperfectionism”, looking at finding ways to live a “saner, freer” life, rather than a perfect existence.
Speaking to Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey on their NZ Herald podcast, The Little Things, Burkeman said mortality is central to his philosophy.
“Ultimately, at the core of almost everything that causes us stress, causes us anxiety, causes us to not be as fully present for a vibrant life than we might be, is this desire to not feel too intensely what it is to be a finite human.
“It’s not so much about thinking every day about the end and about death
“It’s much more, for me, the idea of the discomfort that is involved in having only so many hours in the day with an infinite number of things that feel like they ought to be done in the day... having only so much control over how time unfolds or understanding of what’s going on in the world and still having to function in this intrinsically limited state.”
He said we do a lot of things to try to manage our time, but ultimately end up ignoring this fundamental truth.
His book Meditations for Mortals is split into 28 chapters, designed to be read once a day rather than all at once.
Burkeman said this was motivated by how many self-help or advice books are written one of two ways.
“Either it’s kind of a big perspective shift that then fades away, or it’s a list of tips to follow, that you never get around to really making yourself follow because you don’t understand the emotional logic behind them.
“So I wanted to sort of see if I could make a book that got the best of both worlds here and kind of led people through a series of very small perspective shifts of the kind that would maybe hang around in the back of their mind during the day that followed.”
He didn’t want to write a book that proposed a radical new way of living your life, and instead targets something more practical – with a focus on living a less anxious, more peaceful life, but still active and ambitious.
“I think in many ways what I’m trying to suggest is that it is only when we get a bit better at embracing limitation, acknowledging the way that the ways in which we are limited, that you are then freed up to really take the ambitious actions, do the things that count.”
When it comes to striving, Burkeman said he falls in the category of what psychologists call insecure overachievers.
“We do lots of stuff... and we sort of put ourselves out there. But on some level we’re doing that because we feel like if we don’t do it, we don’t get to count as. adequate human beings.
“So you’re constantly trying to earn your place on the planet. And the wonderful thing, at least to aspire to, is the state of affairs where you don’t need to do anything in order to feel like you have the right to exist.
“But then you do lots of stuff anyway because that’s a fun way to engage with being human on the earth, right?”
Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for more advice from Oliver Burkeman on how to succeed while living unburdened.
Meditations for Mortals re-releases in July.
The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series is hosted by broadcaster Francesca Rudkin and health researcher Louise Ayrey. New episodes are available every Saturday.
Kickstart the day with rich slices of brioche with cheesy bèchamel sauce and fried egg.