Thorpe Scott —Oliver Burkeman

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Sarah Thorpe Scott: If you're an ambitious high performer with high hopes for your work and your life, you probably go through your days with this quiet tension between the drive to achieve and the desire to actually feel present and alive.

This might be one of the most persistent issues I see in my work as an executive coach for C-Suites and exceptional high performers. So I knew I had to bring Oliver Bergman onto the show because his book 4,000 Weeks, single handedly helped me reframe this a few years ago during one of the most stressful periods of my life.

Oliver and I get into the ways we've optimized the aliveness out of modern life and how exactly we can begin to reclaim it. How does see embracing our limits as a useful exercise rather than a setback and to find real meaning without having to abandon our ambition? This is a really grounding one y'all, and it'll help you to feel more present and alive without having to give up on the things that inspire you. [00:01:00] 

Sarah: I am so excited to have Oliver Berkman joining us for today's episode of We Don't Have To Live Like This. For over 10 years, Oliver authored a column at The Guardian entitled This Column Will Change Your Life, which focused on productivity and living well. You may know him as the author of The New York Times and Sunday Times Bestseller 4,000 Weeks.

Meditation for mortals, and he's also the author of the Imperf Perfectionist Newsletter. You may also be familiar with Oliver's principle of facing your Limits and spending your time on a few things that really matter. This sounds straightforward and simple, but in practice it can be quite difficult.

Today we'll be exploring how to discern what's. Actually important, how modern life and leadership have optimized the aliveness out of us and how we can restore our capacity to feel vividly alive and human again. Oliver, welcome to, we don't have to live like this. 

Oliver: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's good to be here.

Sarah: I am thrilled to have you [00:02:00] here. I also have to say that I have both. Copies of the books here, as you'll see, I think there's just endless, notes and a lot of stars that say, yes, this, and I have to say for anyone who hasn't read this, and for maybe even anyone who has that, this is the one book I've ever come across where I actually think I should be reading this every year as a reminder.

So this book was actually incredibly life changing for me and hit me at exactly the right moment where I picked it up in the Toronto airport. I'm just gonna be really open with everybody. I was six days after an embryo transfer. Not sure if it had worked. I was starting a business.

I was in Toronto, I live in London. There was a lot going on and I picked up your book thinking this might be for me. And it literally changed my life. So I couldn't be more excited to be talking with you here today.

Oliver: I feel like that's a very, sort of, it's an unfair context to read the book in. 'cause it's like, it's, it's more likely to have an amazing effect regardless of whether it's a good book or not. [00:03:00] You know, the way that, um. Movies you watch on planes always kind of bring you to tears and I think it's 'cause you're on a plane rather than, anyway, I'll take the compliment anyway.

Sarah: it could be said I was primed, but as we'll get into it today, I think a lot of people in the world are primed for your work and your thinking. I'm excited to dive into the concept of aliveness with you. But first I just wanna quickly track the journey that led you here.

So for almost 10 years, you were the productivity columnist at The Guardian. So it was literally your job to study and learn and test productivity hacks, um, and practices. And you would think that, so after long, you would've figured that out. was that the case? What did you actually learn from that experience?

Oliver: It wasn't only productivity. I, the, the sort of remit was. Large and expanded over the time I was doing it. But it definitely included, productivity, the sort of, science of happiness, philosophies of living, all that stuff.

but it was a really interesting and [00:04:00] transformative experience in hindsight for a lot of reasons. One of which was that I kind of went on a journey from cynicism to sincerity.

I feel like as a result of doing it, I thought I was maybe going to be pointing and laughing at self-help for a year or so. And it turned out that actually there were, there were real depths here. It was more interesting in the end to find the value, in this often, cringe-worthy and, You know, on Pseudoscientific world, but still to find what, what is there that matters instead of just being dismissive.

And then the other thing is like, yeah, I think on some semi-conscious level, I was looking for the method, the philosophy, the technique, the practice that would make me feel in control at last and less anxious and able to handle all the demands that were being thrown at me and all the rest of it. there's actually something very useful about trying so many, avenues towards that goal and finding that none of them work because eventually it's like it dawns on you that maybe there's [00:05:00] something interesting there.

Like maybe, maybe there's something wrong with the question that you're asking, rather than that you just haven't found a solution yet. So I think in a way all this stuff about the power of embracing limitation and all the rest of it emerges from that experience of really sort of.

Surveying the territory and wanting all of these magic bullet solutions to work and finding that they didn't.

Sarah: That's so interesting, and as you say that, it does make me wonder, and I guess this is a question for you. do you think so many of us do operate as if there is a way to somehow hack our way into not feeling anxious or to feel in control? Because I don't know that any of us could say, we know anyone who's done that.

Like, why, why, why are we trying to do that and why do we think it's possible?

Oliver: you know, it may be different for different people, but I think one, reason that's definitely I belong to this category is just that there's, there's something very intense about more fully being present about sort of, [00:06:00] Acknowledging that there are more things that you want to do than you, that you're able to do.

Acknowledging that, uh, you can't control whether somebody's mad at you for not doing something. all all those kind of things that come from showing up and facing our limitations and diving in any way are kind of stressful. And there's a kind of anxiety that they, that they give rise to.

And so it's very, very tempting, I think, completely understandable, that we would want instead to pursue techniques and methods that feel like they're enabling us to sort of hold all that at bay, get on top of it all. This phrase get on top of everything is very sort of interesting, I think. 'cause if you were to be able to get on top of all the things, you would be in control of them, but you also sort of wouldn't be fully enmeshed in them.

You would be slightly distanced. They'd be below you and, and you'd be in a different realm of, Of calm control. So I think it's totally understandable. And if you really, follow all the steps back, it goes back to the fact that we don't want to die. And that, uh, any sort of acknowledgement of our [00:07:00] limitation is kind of an acknowledgement of our mortality.

So I think it just makes perfect sense, but it doesn't work, because it's, you know, fundamentally at odds with, with reality. So that I think, you know, it feels like something we might achieve soon. And the great trick of the sort of worst kinds of productivity advice I'd say is that they hold out the promise that it's just another few weeks away, right?

To get to this place of no longer being bound by limitation. but you never know anyone who's there because we can't not be bound by limitation. it's the human condition.

Sarah: Yeah, a prize dangled in front of us. I, I also have to ask, you mentioned cynicism to sincerity, what exactly spurred that and like, how long did that take? Was that just in that first year that you were doing the column?

Oliver: No, I mean, I think it's sort of the story of my life a little bit. I think that one of my personal forms of the avoidance that we've been talking about, the holding life [00:08:00] at bay was a certain kind of ironic detachment. I think some people do that specific thing even more acutely than, than I did. I think it's, it's very easy for, I think this crops up in journalism quite a lot, right?

You get this, idea that Pursuing things for work acts as a sort of an alibi. You get to hold them at a distance. So I can sort of read a book about self-compassion or emotional vulnerability that I might maybe as a, 30-year-old then British man wouldn't be seen dead reading in public or something.

And you've got this kind of excuse for encountering something that actually you are very interested in, but don't want to, don't want to admit it. So I think there was an element to that and partly I just became, it's just sort of exposure therapy, right? If you, if you spend enough time reading books that are written in a kind of slightly new aged tone, slightly cheesy, rhetorical style, you stop being so bothered by that and you're like, okay, but maybe there's something useful and interesting here, even if I wouldn't use that [00:09:00] exact, phraseology to communicate it.

So I'm sure there's lots here that is gendered right. And to, and to do with maybe. I think Britishness probably plays a role. There's all sorts of cultural ways that add up to wanting to sort of keep things at, at one remove. I hope that my writing remains humorous even when it isn't, that kind of detached thing.

But there are benefits to that kind of stance. It's just that there, it also serves some ulterior motives, if you see what I mean.

Sarah: that's, it's so interesting you teed me up perfectly for a comment I was gonna make, which is that. You can tell when, when I read your books, I could tell, that there is a bit of a cynic in there in a good way. because you wanna be getting this advice from someone who has a degree of skepticism.

but also you're, you're just very funny. And I found myself laughing out loud while reading this book about mortality, which seemed kind of counterintuitive. Um, but there's a really nice sense of humor in it, which I love. but you're welcome. so as we've [00:10:00] mentioned, a lot of people know you for 4,000 weeks and your philosophy of leaning into mortality and our limitations as a portal to greater freedom, which again, can sound counterintuitive.

in essence you're sort of rejecting modern productivity culture I'm wondering how did you come to that realization? And in short, really what was your own personal, we don't have to live like this moment.

Oliver: yeah, so I mean, I can think of a few, uh, uh, but what, and I'll, I'll mention them, but what they, what they have in common I is that they are forms of realization of limitation. Right. They are that realization like, oh, I'm trying to do something here that is impossible or that will never reach the, the destination that is implicitly, within it.

And so I just don't, I don't have to keep the reason that I don't have to keep fighting like that, that people in my mindset don't have to keep doing it that way is because it's going to [00:11:00] fail on its own terms. So one example of what I mean, and this is in 4,000 weeks, I have spoken about it a few times, is this moment on a park bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where we lived at the time when I was on my way to my workspace, working mainly as a freelance journalist, loads and loads of deadlines, feeling very anxious about it, even more anxious than usual this specific week, and just sort of sitting down on a bench with my cardboard coffee cup on the way to work and. Engaged in this very normal thing for me of trying to figure out what combination of organizational systems and scheduling and canceling all my social, uh, engagements I was going to have to use to force my way through to to the finish line that Friday or whatever. And just being really hit by the thought that this was just never gonna work.

Like I, I was just going through this again. I've been doing it for so long, this kind of cogitating in hopes of finally finding a way to get on top of everything and it was just never going to [00:12:00] work. 'cause I was trying to do something that was impossible. Namely, to find time for all the things that felt to me like that I needed to do them.

that was really empowering because, you know, it was only the beginning of a longer process for me. It was the intellectual insight with me always comes really sort of easily and first, and then it takes. You know, forever to kind of live into that, uh, realization in a, in a real way. But, but that was definitely a moment of like, I don't have to live like this.

Not, not because I've persuaded myself that I can afford to spare the time, or I've given some great sort of affirmation to myself about how I'm worthy anyway, or anything like that. But just because it's just like, it's just pointless. It just doesn't belong to reality that I'm ever gonna get there. And I've found that pattern repeating a lot in my personal life.

That sense of like, oh, I've already failed. Like the moment I was born. This wasn't on the [00:13:00] cards for me. And I find that So sort of maybe counterintuitively relaxing that feeling that, uh, yeah, that ship has already sailed.

Sarah: Yeah. So in in that case, was it. you simply realize that the math and math, you couldn't possibly do all of these things by the deadline, or was it more of a there's no way, I'm not gonna feel somewhat anxious about this, there's no process that's gonna allow me to feel like this is clean and clear, or is it some other kind of distinct realization that occurred?

Oliver: I think it was bits of both of those. But it was basically the idea that, the relationship in which I stood to the reality of, to-dos was not one of with enough self-discipline and with enough clever methods, I would get through them all. It was the relationship of here I am sort of swimming in this infinite ocean of possibility and all I can ever do is take a few paths through it.

so The, the more general point is when you begin to let [00:14:00] in the fact of your limitation, and this applies in another context as well, we can talk about if you like, but when you begin to let in the fact of how limited you are, there's definitely a relief because it's like, oh, I don't have to struggle and make myself worth dependent on winning a struggle that actually can't be achieved.

But there's also empowerment, right? It's also like you get a kind of, I really struggle to express this, but you get a kind of purchase on reality somehow. You actually have more agency in a situation where you're saying, you know what? I'm gonna get, probably get five or six things done today out of the five or 600 that really feel like they ought to be done, and I know it and I accept it.

Now I can really roll up my sleeves and, immerse myself in those few because I'm not engaged in this constant act. Of judgment and just to throw it in. the other one that occurred to me was actually related. It seems different, was to do with the, the overwhelming nature of the news and of all the things that happen in the world, and the idea that it's somehow my [00:15:00] responsibility or our responsibility to stay on top of it all and, you know, stay informed and, and active as citizens. I was sitting outside a, I was coming out of a gym in Brooklyn and, um, I checked my phone and there was some news headline, which at the time, which is like years ago now, felt really, really ominous and full of foreboding, which is completely hilarious in terms of what's happened in the, decade or more since.

But it was, I think it was, um. It was one of the liberal, I was, I was living in America, living in New York, and it was one of the liberal Supreme Court justices resigning where it must have been Kennedy, I think. Anyway, these days no one even remembers this new story. Right. But it was a, it was a development that was like, seemed likely to change the politics of the country where I then lived in a way that was, significantly in the opposite direction of what I would like it to go in.

Little did I know. Um, and, and I remember sort of feeling stressed about this and then having the [00:16:00] thought, which at first I'm well aware, sounds very privileged and indulgent, so bear with me, but just having the thought, if I just switch my phone off and put it back in my gym bag, it's like, this doesn't have to be happening for me in the way that I, that I'd thought it was.

It's kind of. It's kind of a choice. I can sort of live my life here where actually nothing's wrong. I can in detail, immediately fill in the objection, right? Which is like, how dare you? Just because you don't personally, uh, needs like Roe versus Wade to be in place or whatever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I, I want to distinguish this from like, well, I don't care. I'm just going to ignore the news headlines. It's, it was more the realization that again, I was a limited human. My attention is a limited resource. The idea that because something bad has occurred in the world or bad even, you know, even that's a subjective judgment.

But let's keep it there for now. The idea that something has happened in the world, the idea that that means I have to take account of it and incorporate it into [00:17:00] my reality. That can't be the rule here because like. What about the 90 other huge things that happened that day just in countries that I happen to be much less informed about or for various biased reasons, less interested in.

and that was an important, similar moment for me in realizing that actually this kind of stance of what I've, I've called it living inside the news that I think a lot of us fall into these days. It doesn't have to be what we do. We don't have to live like this, and it doesn't actually help the causes we care about to live like this anyway, because it's not actually making a difference.

And I think it's, you know, only become more pressing and central in the years since then.

Sarah: Yeah, I, that tracks so, so much to me. Also as someone, I I worked at the New York Times for a long time in New York and then moved here. In 2018 as the MD of EMEA for the New York Times was not a journalist, but loved journalism, have always loved news culture. And I love your term about living inside the [00:18:00] news because I think even people who come from that culture and people who are in it are having to make separation.

So it feels like the tide is kind of turning. And there's a bit of a question now of if I actually even say I do care about that topic, am I actually helping impact the world and having change if I engage with it in this exact moment and like, let the tide take me. I also, you may laugh at this reference, but Taylor Swift recently made waves by talking about how her energy is expensive and how people should think of their energy as uh, an expensive item, a luxury item, and then not everybody can afford it.

And that seems to really resonate and also what you're saying, around just the logic, We can't possibly give every cause and issue a news story that probably does merit our attention or could have an argument of meriting our attention, our time. We don't have enough hours in our life to do that.

So we do have to choose. And I also think too, and we can talk about this more, but I love your concept of living [00:19:00] inside the news. I also think I personally, sometimes it's a bit personal, but I feel like I'm sometimes living inside the news. Um, and I've had to work on separating myself from that. But living inside my to-do list and also my tech enabled tools for doing my to-do list, which again, are probably, distracting me, disconnecting me from my sense of aliveness.

but before we, go into that, I'm actually just curious. You often refer to this need to control everything and to be mega productive, which I deeply relate with. And many of my clients as an executive coach relate with this. These are people who wanna have impact. They care, which is a good thing.

They wanna get things done, they wanna lead meaningful lives. They also usually have some component of wanting to live a joyful, meaningful, connected life personally. but when we're trying to be mega productive, the term I think you've used is that like we can get into a clenching state and um, a controlling state.

And I'm wondering how do you think we came to this norm of clenching and kind [00:20:00] of denying what, when we talk about it here is so obvious that we can't possibly do all the things that we are supposed to. And I'm using air quotes supposed to do.

Oliver: It's a really good question. I don't know that I have a sort of packaged answer about the causation. and I don't think it's necessarily everybody, but I think it is huge numbers of people and that it doesn't always manifest as, you know, hyper productivity, wanting to make a big difference in your work and, and things like that.

I think, people pleasing is a form of it and, imposter syndrome is a form of it. And there are all sorts of different subtler ways in which the same idea manifests. And yeah, I've just been really interested observing in myself, but also exploring the topic elsewhere in recent years to, to notice how, how much of this is kind of a literal clenching.

It's a sort of a, a muscular bracing against the world. And I, I suppose, one explanation that is invited by that is the kind of evolutionary one that, we're, designed in [00:21:00] quotes, for an environment in which threats and, and things that made us afraid and anxious were, much more likely to be, physical and to have a physical manifestation.

And so that sense of kind of, clenching your fists or throwing your brow, and you can sort of dimly, see I'm very much improvising my evolutionary theory here, but you can, you can sort of see how we would be designed as humans to try to sort of deal with these problems in that kind of physical, muscular way.

And then find repeatedly that like, that's not how it works when you're dealing with symbols, information and writing and, and uh, communication. And it's also just completely unfeasible when you are facing out towards like the internet, which has. So many more people, that we're in connection with than we would ever evolve to be in connection with.

So I think that's one part of it. Do you have some theories?

Sarah: well, I actually, I, I have some curiosity on some things I've heard you talk about. And things I think about, but I'll just say we had a guest [00:22:00] on recently, um, a man named Matthew Cook and he was talking about applied neuroscience and our nervous systems. And one of the things he was talking about was computer consciousness and this idea that, you know, computers are able to do everything 24 7 at a high degree.

And how, you know, we as humans are now sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, maybe trying to mimic that and how we show up. And to me this really connects with, I think some of what I've heard you talk about around the industrial revolution. And I'd actually be really curious to hear your thoughts on through the arc of history, like, how we even relate with time, and how that might be affecting our clenching.

if you could just share a little bit more about that here, that would be helpful.

Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, in 4,000 weeks especially, I've, I write about this idea that, even the very concept of time as something that [00:23:00] we have a relationship with, it's like a thing and you are in a relationship with it, and you are trying to, you know, maybe it's hounding you or you're trying to outrun it or whatever.

It's usually a pretty, um, fraught relationship. And then on top of that, the idea that it's a resource that it's your duty to use, well, all of this. is a broadly speaking, modern idea. it's not intrinsic to the experience of time, which actually as many philosophers have noted through the ages, is an incredibly weird and mysterious thing as soon as you try to really look at it directly.

So I think it's probable that, you know, your average medieval peasant before the invention of clocks, before industrialization, would not even have had this sort of conceptual, repertoire, right? This idea that there's like, am I using my time well? How much more time is there this idea that your life is sort of unfolding alongside a little, um, yardstick and you've got to make sure that you are keeping up or you might be wasting time.

I don't think that would've [00:24:00] arisen, always with the caveat that medieval peasants had a vast number of other problems that, we, we shouldn't want to go back to on any level. But, so it's a, it's a modern idea to sort of be alienated, to sort of pop out of time as just the thing that you swim in the, the, that you just are time and, and then have it as this thing that you think about and that oppresses you or that you are trying to conquer or dominate, or something like that.

I mean, I think that perhaps for all sorts of reasons to do with, you know, how we have evolved to try to conquer or dominate a saber tooth tiger or something. I don't know. We're, we're trying to do that same thing physically, muscularly and in other ways as well with our time. And it never quite works because, you know, you can treat time as a resource and that can lead to lots of very useful outcomes.

But, but at the end of the day, you don't like have it really, You can't set it aside or store it for later. as I write in the 4,000 weeks, you know, you never, when you say you have a month to do some complete, some [00:25:00] project, you just mean you expect to have enough spare time in that month to do it.

You don't really know anything about what's gonna happen. So we're constantly trying to treat time as something that it isn't 

Sarah: Yeah, it's interesting and I'm hearing is like treating time as if it's in a unit like that we get to control and almost store away as opposed to being. Something that we live in. And I'm really struck by what you just said about the medieval peasants. again, not that that's what we wanna go back to, but this idea of them perhaps being more attuned to the seasons and rhythms and a day's work might be you get up with the sunlight and stop working with the sunlight, whatever it

Oliver: I mean the, obviously the, the example that I think makes, uh, sense to a lot of people is like, you know, we all know about how important it's to task batch. Because if you do all your tasks of a certain kind at one time and you're more efficient, and of course you know, you can't do all the milking of the cows for the year in one, three week period because it's a cyclical thing.

it doesn't work like that. And also there's no, I think on [00:26:00] other sort of small scale agriculture, level modern agriculture is obviously as much of a big, goal oriented business as any other. But, There's, there's no sense of the work finishing, right? There's no, there's no sense of, that if you work really hard, then you might get to the point where you don't have to, maintain the farm at all because it just stretches off forever.

it's not your job to do it all. It's your job to participate fully in the stretch of time that you get.

Sarah: Hmm. okay, so, we've alluded to this concept of aliveness and basically, again, to reorient us that this clinching that we do this kind of, impossible. task that we somehow, like still, most of us, many of us try to control our days and squeeze the most productivity out of the day and get on top of things or clear the decks.

but really our obsession with productivity can come at a cost of aliveness. I wanted to ask you if you could first just explain what you mean by

Oliver: Hmm. Oh, I wish it was that simple. I'm still, I feel like that's, in some ways, that's the whole, that's the [00:27:00] whole challenge and I'm, I'm really immersed in this at the moment. I think it is, a way of being or a broad set of ways of being that you sort of know when you're in it and you know, when it's, you know, things are not going well.

Sometimes you can tell that that's what's absent. other people and writers talk about, resonance in life or, or a vibrancy presence sometimes gets used as a, synonym. it's the general sense of some sort of life force or, uh, energy in a, in a colloquial or maybe slightly woowoo sense, being present in what you're doing.

And obviously we're alive all the time until we're dead. So it's not that it's just a state of being alive. you know, sometimes when your experience feels well, it makes sense to call it dead, or, burnout So, yeah, I don't know that I do have an exact definition.

I also think it's a get out that you encounter in a lot of sort of spiritual writing. So maybe I'm just falling into that. But I also [00:28:00] do think that maybe it's intrinsic to it, but it can't be fully captured in words. And maybe if you could pin it down like a dead butterfly in a museum, you would actually, by that have failed to capture it.

Because the whole point is that it's something bigger or beneath or behind our conceptual categories. It's certainly nothing new. And in fact, when I write about this in newsletter, there's a couple of people always, um, write in and say, you talk about God, can you just say God instead of constantly refusing to say God?

So for a lot of people, that's what it is.

Sarah: So interesting what I, I mean there's a few things that struck me there. I mean, it feels like it's something around, and I think it's fine for us to just, just accept that it's not a thing you can necessarily pin down, although maybe, maybe you will and you'll write a book about it so that we can, we can have that, but it feels like it's something like the opposite of what we often hear people sort of jokingly say, like, oh, I'm like dead inside.

You know, we hear a lot of professionals jokingly say, but I mean that is actually [00:29:00] linguistically the opposite of aliveness, right? So we know what the opposite feels or like just going through the motion. I think what it might also feel like is, That we are getting through, and you talk about this, but I really, this really resonates for me the sense that we are getting through our days or getting through our weeks, or getting through our lives, which is just, it's wild.

Like how many times? Reasonable, thoughtful people. And I, you know, myself included, I like to think I'm those things. Say I just gotta get through this week, right? And we do it all the time, or I just gotta get through this day. But it turns out these days and these weeks, like they become our lives. And if we're not careful, we're just getting through our life.

Like what? That's not, we're supposed to be alive. And I think that's what you're talking about. And it can sound vague to people, but I also think there's something like a consciousness that we are indeed in a body. I struggle with that sometimes. 'cause some of the, and as a coach, like some of the coaching language around this can sound a little woowoo, like embodied.

What does that mean? But, that we're here on [00:30:00] earth, that we can see things that are living, just simply seeing like, Observing what's happening in the world seasonally and trying to incorporate a sense of wonder.

Like I genuinely am thrilled when I see things blossoming in my garden that I planted, but sometimes it's like these little micro moments throughout the day. And I don't think the idea should be that we persist within this state of like, looking at the flower for 24 hours a day. That's not how it works.

But this rhythm of making sure we have those moments that remind us we are indeed alive. there's something there. And maybe even a sense of being connected to joy because it feels like the opposite of dead inside does this landing? Does this feel like

Oliver: No. Totally. Absolutely. No, completely. I think it absolutely is. I think the sort of yes and to that is to say that it does not have to be, is present in moments that are not at all happy as well. We have experience of, of that. I think you can definitely be in sort of grief or sadness or anger, and be alive in the sense that we're [00:31:00] talking about, but no completely.

and I think that that problem of the language sounding woo woo is kind of it's sort of what you'd expect you're trying to talk about something that is in some real sense beyond language. And one of the problems, and I think this comes up in spiritual writing all the time, is that like something that makes a huge impression on some one set of reasons will just totally not resonate with another set.

Because all these things are, um, fingers pointing at the moon as the saying goes. They're not, they're not the, they're not the thing itself. But we're talking about the same thing 

Sarah: Yeah. Another thing, I mean, since this entire pilot season is around conflict and connection, the word connected really comes up for me around this. And I, I also have to say, I think what you said was really important there around how it's not always joyful. It could be profound grief. It feels like it's being, some part of it has to do with being conscious of deep [00:32:00] feeling and being able to, it's rhymes with, or maybe it's the same as something you said earlier around being able to actually sit with the things that are maybe uncomfortable, or with the complexity of things.

But as it relates to connection, I think it's as simple as like Do I feel connected with myself? Do I feel connected with others? And do I feel connected with the world? Because there's something I'm seeing, in my own personal life as someone who tries to be quite intentional about these things and things I see from coaching lots of people and just being curious about the stuff and talking with switched on people in the world.

people are really struggling to feel those things. And again, they're getting through their days and they're buried in their to-do list and like, and all these tech enabled tools that are supposed to make everything easier. And now we've got ai and that's supposed to be helpful and it can be helpful.

But, you know, I think I, I vaguely woke up this morning to BBCI literally woke up to it, so I wasn't quite conscious, but it was to a report that I think teenagers, Maybe it [00:33:00] wasn't a majority, but a meaningful portion of them trust AI more than they do humans. There's just something going on that's a little bit scary where people feel disconnected.

That's, I think, seems to do with the digital world as well.

Oliver: Yeah, I do think that it's not going to be aliveness to be in a relationship with an AI interlocutor. I think, um, you know, I'm trying not to just be a complete curmudgeon on the AI topic at the moment, but I do think, again and again, I, the, the use cases that I see people, um, celebrating, championing the most are also the use cases that seem most associated with people going off the deep end into sort of delusional, dangerous places.

And I think they all have in common this factor of relationship and this reaching out from a human to another human, or actually to an entity where there isn't anything there. and all the kind of trust and commitment that comes from the side of the human.

Goes into some very dark places when it's just being processed by an [00:34:00] unthinking machine. Back to something else you said. I think it's just, I'll just throw it in there. It's like, and connected to the idea that this aliveness can be present in, moments of suffering as well. I think there's something important here about not second guessing ourselves.

And I think there's a, there's a sort of chronic basic condition in the modern world where there's so many things that we could be doing with a individual moment of time, and there's so many promises of technology that could enable us to do more of them with that moment in time or faster so we could get through more of them.

Something about that, um, that status of second guessing holds us back. Sort of, it's like a screen between us and reality and the. Experience that I have had several times in my life being up close to, I should say, like, not, tragedies that have befall me personally, but being close to them when they have befallen other people and trying to sort of be present for those people.

it's also something that comes up in just sort of day-to-day parenting because you don't have any [00:35:00] choice when your kid needs you and things like that. Another sort of minor emergencies in life and things like that. What these all have in common is that feeling that like, there's nowhere else I should be, I'm obviously doing the one thing with my time that I should be doing with it.

And, it doesn't need to be pleasant if it's like, you know, changing a diaper at two 30 in the morning, like, so be it the, the thing that I'm freed from. Is the second guessing, which otherwise I would torment myself with all the time. So I think there's something, there's something interesting there about Singletasking and the way in which emergency or

extreme experiences, but also I would say ordinary experiences of, care for newborns or for elderly relatives or anyone else. they take away that sense of, hang on, should I be doing another thing? And what about all those other things that are bearing down on me? It was just like, I mean this happened even to me, last week. It was not a terrible acute crisis, but it was the kind of emergency with my.

[00:36:00] Sun had all sorts of mysterious arm pains that were very intense and required visits to doctors and required going to the hospital at one point. Seems to be over now, thank goodness. and I don't want to exaggerate right. It was never, it was never sort of absolute hell. but it was just so obvious to me that that's what I had to be doing.

That all my usual amount of fretting about all the other things I'm not doing just are just not, it's not present in that moment. ' 

Sarah: Yeah. There's nowhere else I should be, which, like, I have a, a year and a half year old too, so it feels fresh, the whole like, you know, middle of the night feeding, et cetera. and single tasking is the phrase you just used, which I think is

interesting. It feels like in moments, there's certain moments that maybe involve care, maybe that's the thread, but where there could be tragedy or just something that's caretaking, that's so obvious that you have a, like a, that is your most important responsibility. That there's sometimes where these moments provide such clarity.

in certain ways, while we don't wish for some of these moments that come up,

there [00:37:00] is a bit of a weight off of your shoulders. 'cause you just feel the relief of knowing that you were doing what you were meant to be doing. You don't have the, you know, 30% or whatever percentage in your brain that's wondering, oh, should I be doing the right thing as I'm doing it in that voice, I'm curious. How do you think that we should be chipping away at this question of what is actually most important when it's not obvious? Because I think most of the time in our relatively luxurious lives where it's not about pure survival anymore and modernity, I think that's one of the fundamental challenges.

We don't know what's most important, and I know you've written about the hacks and the like a little bit of eye rolling around like writing down your values to correlate with your calendar items, et cetera. But like how do we begin to approach that better to know?

Oliver: It is a really good question. one thing that's important to bear in mind, I don't think this sort of gets you all the way there, but I think it's an important preliminary, is just to say that, if I'm right, and if we're talking about things that make sense [00:38:00] to people in the audience about, how limited each of us is relative to all the possibilities for what we could be using our time for, then really by rights, this should reduce the agonizing nature of that.

What's the right thing to do? question, right? Because it should enable you to see that you don't need to worry about leaving lots and lots and lots of really important things undone in your life because you can be absolutely certain. That you'll be leaving lots and lots of important things undone in your life, right?

The, the tininess of a person relative to the infinity of possibility is just so great if you're deciding to do something with a day or a week or an hour, the answer to the question, is there something else that would be a really good use of this hour is always gonna be yes.

And so actually, ironically, because it's always going to be yes. it's not your job to try to make it not be. Yes. 

Sarah: is the job then to make sure it's good enough or is it some other filter? Because then I also ask this, 'cause I, I have a [00:39:00] client who will obviously for confidentiality reasons, like not be described or named here, but, I had given them a copy of your book and, they. At first bristled with the idea, of the finite nature of our lives being a constraint for them because they actually had a parent who died when they were young.

And so it's actually because of this constraint that they feel this pressure to do something incredible with their lives. And it's not to do everything, but I could say that the same thinking, if you accept that and you know that you, you know, and you maybe even have the ticking time clock. I've heard of this with people who have parents who pass away, they're aware of where they are relative to how long their parent had to live, and some of them feel like they may not make it to that moment.

How do people who maybe even do know that we have this finite period, but they may be pressurized themselves to find the thing, the best thing to live it. 

Oliver: I wanna give a sort of more intellectual brief answer to that. And then I want to talk about what I think is more, [00:40:00] probably more practical and useful in terms of navigating life. So the thing that is maybe easy for me to say, but I still think it's true about people in that context, is that that speaks to me of kind of maybe having gone halfway into this realization, right?

So the, the sense that the limitation of time creates a huge pressure. I mean, you don't need necessarily to have lost a parent young for that to be present, right? One response people sometimes want to have to the idea of, oh, 4,000 weeks, the average human lifespan, it's so little is they're like, so I've got to stuff it with lots and lots of extraordinary activity.

'cause it's like, it's so small that can arise. Even without those very difficult life experiences, I think that if you are in that place, there's maybe further to go yet in terms of letting in the real truth about how limited we are, both in terms of the time we have and the control that we have over that time.

I think that the desire to sort of live an extraordinary life because of what you've seen happen to other people is a, [00:41:00] is still a kind of sublimated or slightly changed, desire to kind of dominate life to kind of win and vanquish life and that ultimately, that whole stance is the thing that leads us astray.

But that's only an intellectual observation and it's also one that I don't have the personal experience of childhood tragedy to know that I could handle, I think the thing that I want to say, unless you want to dive in on that first, 

Sarah: Well, there's one thing I wanna say on that is just, I love the imagery that you have about us, kind of like trying to vanquish time and we're in this battle of it or being on top of things is like you're, you are conquering them. They're on top of you or clearing the decks.

In each of these instances, it is you alone and like kind of pushing away life. And if time, and this is kind of doubtful, but you get into your book about it. Like, if we are time, if our lives are time, there's this feeling a bit that we are at war with ourselves, right? There's this conflict between our [00:42:00] life and ourselves.

And I also wonder how that maybe connects to aliveness. But, I'm really just fascinated by this. Battle the imagery that it evokes in me when you're speaking again, is that we are alone and it's not a happy existence.

It's,

Oliver: Right,

Sarah: it's never relaxed, and it's a sense of controlling instead of being in our lot, controlling our lives versus being in our lives. That's what I would say.

Oliver: yeah. No, definitely. And the aloneness makes the point as well that it's, it's related to individual versus collective and communal ways of being. I undoubtedly don't stress that as much as I want to or should in my writing. I think, 'cause it's kind of my edge, I think I'm, you know, I'm the degree to which, aliveness kind of depends on and is aliveness with others.

And the degree to which this kind of do something extraordinary with your life idea is a is a solitary one, I think is really important Now, I just wanna say, um, really just to get sort of super practical about it. I think that where all this points in terms of how you navigate the [00:43:00] day is. Towards, and this has certainly been my journey in the last few years towards a significantly more intuitive and significantly less kind of top down planned approach to scheduling and choosing what to focus on when not necessarily a completely kind of floaty, spontaneous thing. People are different, but, it may be ultimately that full or fuller aliveness can't emerge from a very sort of rigid, top-down plan that is designed to get you to the place you want to get.

And that you can only really touch into aliveness if you're at least partly asking yourself the question. what do I feel like doing right now? What feels alive to me to do, right now? How, if I were navigating by aliveness, what would I. Choose to do right now. And instantly you run into complexities like, you know, most people and most jobs have loads of things they have to do, by a certain time, whether or not they're, they're feeling like it.

So that is a complicated question of how those two things interact. But I really, [00:44:00] I have personally found myself moving, much more in the direction of, like, you finish a task, you pause, you sort of to return to your reality and your body and your environment a little bit, and you just sort of see what, what feels like it has energy and you know, sometimes you have to not listen to it because the tax return deadline is coming up.

But I think it's just really important to give it a roll.

Sarah: Okay, so practically, I find this really interesting to get into the nitty gritty of it, because it might seem reckless in certain ways to just do what we intuitively wanna do. It could mean that I end up eating bon bons on the couch all day. which if I did that all day every day, that probably wouldn't be, well, it wouldn't be great for me.

And if everybody did similar things, it wouldn't be great for society. 

And I know that's also not what you're saying,

Oliver: Right. I mean, I just think it, I think it's really interesting and I've been in this place as well, right? and to some extent still I'm about thinking, well, I can, I can't allow myself to just do that. And like I say, I think [00:45:00] our professional situations do create constraints.

if you are a school teacher, you have to be there when the lesson begins, right? It's like that is a given in your temporal environment. But I think it's really worth noting how little trust in yourself that sort of BombBomb on the couch imagery, Crisps, it would be in my case, how much that sort of, implies that your deep down belief that ultimately you're kind of a terrible person and it's only because you kind of watch yourself like a hawk all day long that you don't sink back down to your natural default level of being absolutely abominable.

And I can't speak for you, but like I recognize that part of my belief structure in my myself. I think I'm less admired in it than I once was, but like that's it is a bit scary to risk trusting that you might actually be the kind of person who wants to do important and useful things and, keep your commitments to people and, and all the rest of it.

and it probably does mean that you are [00:46:00] going to disappoint some people in certain contexts and let some people down in certain contexts because you are finite. But I almost wanna say that if you're the kind of person who's worried that you might just end up doing nothing useful, that's almost proof that you're not the kind of person who's

Sarah: I think that's That's helpful. That's a helpful reframe. And I'm curious, what if you are someone who may be the thing you would wanna do? You know, you'd love to just. Say it's something that's not as terrible. Like I'd love to be outside enjoying beauty and the fellows of the Lake District where my husband's family is from, like connected with nature, right?

That sounds aspirational, but I also need to take care of my kid and I've got like to pay my bills and do my taxes and all that sort of stuff. And I'm I know there's probably not, an easy solution fix, like a tool that you can necessarily give here, but I'm curious as you're navigating this, when you think about your own diary and you mentioned like being in touch with and maybe this has to do with the concept of [00:47:00] aliveness, being in touch with your own tuition of what might I like to do? How are you creating space in your diary to get this stuff done? And by the way, for the Americans, diary means calendar for the Brits. Um, how are you creating space in your calendar diary to make sure the most important things get done, but where there's enough openness to do the things on an intuitive basis.

 how can we think about that differently than we might naturally be doing?

Oliver: so I mean, just to reel off a few thoughts. One, I mean, again. Each specific here is informed by my job and my situation, and invites the response like, well, that's all right for you, but not for me from somebody. And to which the answer is like, yeah, very possibly. and therefore, the question is to find what captures the spirit of it.

That does apply in a different context. But so, you know, I try pretty hard to keep large chunks of the morning and up to the beginning of the early afternoon free of, meetings and appointments so that I have that sort of, area for my sort of creative stuff to at least, at [00:48:00] least I give myself a fighting chance of wanting to do some writing.

You know, whether I then also have to push myself to do some writing, sometimes under deadline pressure and things as a separate matter. I think another really important thing to the example you gave is to sort of. Find incredibly imperfect, short, small ways to touch into the thing.

So you might be desperate to be on the sort of hills side of the lake district. And actually you are in an office in the city with two deadlines by the end of the day. Does that mean that there's no possibility of a moment in a green environment over the course of the afternoon? Perhaps it doesn't mean that, so, you know, maybe the spirit of what is captured there can be found right away.

and then, you know, the only other thing to say is I think we are all very constrained by our professional social, economic, cultural situations. But I think it is a bit of a general rule that people are almost uniformly a bit less constrained by them than they tend to [00:49:00] believe. which is another way of saying, right, you don't necessarily have endless cash and endless freedom in your schedule to go on a long holiday in a up market, European skiing resort next week or something. But the idea that you might go on a trip somewhere that you've ruled out because, oh, you can't possibly afford the time at the moment, like, maybe that's not quite as true as you think it is. Maybe the people you'd need to ask in your life to, take care of the shop while you were doing this.

Maybe you just haven't asked and you'd be surprised at their responses and things like that. So I think those two things in combination, finding ways to respond to that aliveness, even if they're not the perfect way right now. and then to follow that lead of aliveness. And then also, working on the assumption that you have a bit more freedom agency and choice than you probably tend to assume can 

Sarah: Yeah. those are all practical and helpful things. And A lot of the work you originally did as a columnist was about how to do things in order to be more productive you've gone more [00:50:00] into a world of how we need to be in order to do the things to be productive.

And it's actually a concept I talk a lot about with clients of mine, where we always think about the thing we wanna do. In this case again, we wanna be more productive. and so it's easy to go to and most people, particular leaders go into, I need to do X, y, Z in order to be productive. I need to clear these things off of my list.

But you do those things and it maybe doesn't even feel better. And also when you do those things, something else could pop up and it may not, give you the intended effect. The thing is really that most people also try to do a thing, but they don't think about how they need to be in order to do the thing as well.

And what you're talking about again, is like aliveness, connectivity, like being attached to intuition as well. And I'm, I'm really curious to see how this work, evolves. 'cause I think you're very much onto something. 'cause there's like a state of being piece that I know that can sound like. wishy-washy woowoo, but I, think you're exploring something that's super interesting.

I am curious though, as we think [00:51:00] about the future, and a lot of this has been about , at the individual level, like, you know, how do I need to be and do differently? I'm curious about on a societal, wider level, if we were to move towards a society full of less clenching and more aliveness, what might need to ?

Are there systemic things? And I know this could be a whole hour conversation, right? I don't think you're necessarily talking about, oh, let's dismantle capitalism. What about any of these things, and you could add something else there, the way we're educated about our, social structures and systems, the way we work, are there things that you would like to see us change that would help an individual, because this is, this is a lot of lifting for someone to do against the cultural systems around them.

Oliver: I do have thoughts. I think the thing that I always come back to is that like what I'm trying to do in my work, I think is neither say it's all on you, it's all individual. Nor write the kind of books which definitely have a role, which are kind of, you know, for informing policy makers and saying like, [00:52:00] this is the revolution we need to see.

But as rather sort of addressing the individual as someone who lives here in this system and here and now. And one thing that you can do with your time as an individual is, is work to change the system, but also you've got all the stuff you need to do by the end of the week or whatever. So, the reason that I tend not to go into the policy prescriptions is, cause I think that is the thing that I can contribute to sort of like how to orient yourself to this situation when it comes to the policy prescriptions.

I think I have a kind of a politics that probably wouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with my work. I, I definitely think, a sort of less rote and more. Flexible and creativity focused approach to education. I think lots of aspects of state support that enable people to pursue not necessarily hugely profitable forms of work that are deeply fulfilling and for childcare and healthcare [00:53:00] policies to rise, to meet them, to enable that.

Like none of this is going to, astonish anybody. It's fairly sort of middle of the road, liberal progressive politics. And I think it's all really important. And I think probably a sort of hyper individualistic, ultra libertarian politics isn't compatible in the same way with a lot of what we're talking about.

But again, I just sort of, I get frustrated, I certainly get frustrated with the kind of book that says, like it's all on you ignore society. You've, you can do it if you believe hard enough, but I kind of also get annoyed with the kind of books that say. there's no point trying to tackle any of this until we have ushered in the new dispensation, the new regime, because A, like got to do my things this week.

Like, I can't wait for the, for the revolution. And BI think that can also be a, a sort of a form of avoidance or distraction or something. I think you can, you can spend your life, you can certainly spend your life being a very effective [00:54:00] activist, but you can definitely spend your life sort of slightly fantasizing about how perfect things are gonna be later to the detriment of showing up, here and now.

Sarah: Yeah. I also find it to be, really depressing for the soul to think that we don't have any agency, as individuals. It's just. A sad way of existing, if you believe that, in my opinion. so my last question for you, is what do you think we, as individuals can do today that future generations will thank us for?

Oliver: I mean, the immediate sense of future generations. I just realize again and again to my slight irritation, that the best way to kind of raise a child who, embodies some of the values we've been talking about, unfortunately, is to actually model them yourself. So you do have to just sort of be a bit more the kind of, person that we've been discussing in the.

the sort of broader sense of future generations. I do think it's important for any of us who are able through however much privilege, you know, to, to hold a space for this kind of, [00:55:00] way of thinking about things to, to live lives where spending time in nature or not having everything super optimized is feasible.

Where, I think that sort of sanity, even if it's something that you need a certain amount of, privilege to be able to embody, like we sort of need to do that, just to sort of keep it alive, it would be so easy to just, let everything go the way of, fully automated, fully efficiency, eyes optimized, and, you know, less and less alive.

Sarah: Hmm. Thank you for that. Thank you for your time. You've given us so much to think about. I really appreciate you coming onto the podcast and I hope to speak to you soon.

Oliver: It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. 

Sarah: Thanks for being here. If this resonated, follow the show and please leave a rating.

It helps more people like you find it. And if you wanna stay in touch with me or keep exploring, I share more in Field Notes, a monthly ish newsletter that offers observations, questions, and tools for [00:56:00] navigating leadership, work, and life with more clarity and intention. You can sign up through the link in the show notes.