This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I like to begin the show each year with an episode about something I’m thinking through personally. Call it resolutions-adjacent podcasting. And what was present for me as we neared the end of last year was a pretty real case of burnout. I took some of December off, and I’m feeling more grounded now. But that was my frame of mind when I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.”
The book connected for me. Burkeman’s big idea, which he described in “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” his 2021 best seller, is that no productivity system will ever deliver what it is promising: a sense of control, a feeling that you’ve mastered your task list in some enduring way, that you’ve built levees strong enough to withstand life’s chaos.
So Burkeman’s question is really the reverse: What if rather than starting from the presumption that it can all be brought under control, you began with the presumption that it can’t be? What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How then would you live?
Do I think Burkeman — or anyone, really — has the answer to that question? No. But I do think he asks good questions, and he curates good insights. And questions are often more useful than answers.
This episode contains strong language.
Ezra Klein: I understand your book largely as a book about burnout. How do you define burnout, and how do you think it’s different from anxiety or depression?
Oliver Burkeman: I think that burnout is best understood as having the component of a lack of meaning — that you’re not only working incredibly hard, but it doesn’t seem to get you any closer to the imagined moment when you’re actually going to feel on top of everything and in control — like you can relax at last. Anxiety is a big part of that, but anxiety can manifest in so many different life domains.
There’s an idea that I love from the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa about resonance — the vibrancy that makes life worth living. I think that’s what is gone in burnout.
My producer Kristin and I were kicking this back and forth as we prepared for this conversation, and one of the descriptions we came up with is that burnout is this persistent feeling that you don’t have the energy or the resources to meet the present. And when that feeling persists day after day after day, when the mismatch between you and the life you’re living seems like a constant of the life you’re living, it eventually throws you into some other state. I’m curious how that resonates for you.
That does resonate. We really feel an extreme pressure — from inside and from the culture and from all sorts of sources — to overcome our built-in limitations. To fit more into the time that we have than anyone ever could. To exert more control over how things unfold. Because we feel that we must just to keep our heads above water in the modern world.
But I say that we can’t, because there are built-in limitations. There’s always going to be more that you could meaningfully do with your time than the time you have to do it. You’re never going to be able to feel confident about what’s coming in the future — because it’s in the future.
And I think throwing yourself at that wall again and again and again — and never getting to that place of feeling in control — is a thoroughly dispiriting and fatiguing way to live.
One response that I think can arise in people in a conversation like this is, “Oh, get the [expletive] over it.”
For most of human history, a quarter or more of infants died. Half of everybody died before they were 15. Or, when you look at, say, my great-grandparents fleeing pogroms, it’s fair to think: Who cares if you have a lot of emails?
I’m sure you hear this a lot. How do you think about it?
[Laughs.] I don’t think I’m making the case that on every metric life is worse today — or even on almost any metric that life is worse today.
But the sense of fighting against time, the sense of being hounded by or oppressed by time — that is a very modern thing.
I think it’s a thing that people in the medieval period, for example, just wouldn’t have had to trouble with. This specific sense of racing against time — of trying to get on top of our lives and in control — and to make this the year when we finally master the situation of doing our jobs or being parents or spouses or anything else — is a really specific, acute modern phenomenon that has to do with how we relate to time.
Is it our relationship to time? Or is it our relationship to our expectations about life?
I trace the concept of burnout back to Anne Helen Petersen’s viral essay about millennial burnout in BuzzFeed many years ago. And I’m not saying that’s where the term “burnout” came from — it isn’t — but that’s where I began seeing it as an omnipresent diagnosis of modernity.
And I remember wondering whether the issue people were having was an issue of expectations — this belief that our lives were supposed to feel good. They were supposed to be, if not easy, then manageable, controllable. Work was supposed to be a source of meaning and even pleasure, and if it was actually soulless and overwhelming and always wanted more of you than you wanted to give, that was a problem to be solved. That all of these things were problems to be solved — which I’m sure is not how many of my ancestors thought about life. The sense of the tragic, the sense of the uncontrollable shot through everything. So perhaps there wasn’t this constant friction between the expectations people have for how the world is supposed to feel — and the way it does feel.
I think that is right, or at least partly right.
We do live in a time when there is an expectation that life should be manageable in that way. There is also the promise in technology that we’re sort of almost there — that with one last heave of self-discipline — combined with the right set of apps and the right outsourced services that handle our food delivery or our D.I.Y. around the house — we could finally cross that gap.
Go back to the medieval period, when people would have lived in this situation of completely endemic uncertainty. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that they didn’t find the opportunity to be happy. I think the crucial distinction is that they wouldn’t have postponed that until they felt in control. They wouldn’t have said, “Before we can have a festival, before we can sit back and look at the stars, we have to know what we’re doing here and feel in charge and in control of things” — just exactly because that possibility of being in control of things, for most people anyway, was so remote.
So I think the closer it feels like we’re getting to being in charge of life, the more tormenting and dispiriting it gets that we still aren’t.
Tell me about the idea of productivity debt.
I stumbled across this concept and found that it resonated a lot with my audience. I define this as the feeling that so many of us have when we wake up in the morning feeling like we have to output a certain amount of work in order to justify our existence on the planet.
As with paying off a financial debt, the very best thing that could happen if the day goes really well is that you end up at zero again — before the next day, when it all starts again and you wake up in a new productivity debt.
And just to head off an obvious objection, anyone who works for money is in a kind of productivity debt to whoever pays them. But I’m really trying to pinpoint this existential sense that if you don’t do a certain amount, you don’t quite deserve to be here.
And there are lots of causes we could look at here. The Protestant work ethic — the idea that there’s something inherently virtuous in hard work — is relevant here.
But that’s a really powerful thought — that we go through the day in deficit. And our best hope is to get to the end of the day exhausted and be like: OK, I just about earned the right to be here for one more day.
I found that chapter of your book very deep. There are many religious traditions, and many ways of practicing within religious traditions, but I do think there are, in general, two streams of thinking.
One stream is more of the mind that you are justified because you are a human being, and God loves you. Or your day here is justified because all there is is the present moment, and to sit quietly and absorb what is happening in the world is a beautiful and overwhelming thing.
And then there are other traditions that understand you more as an instrument — that you are trying to earn your place here. If you have the capacity and space in this world to try to be of service, and you’re not, then maybe you’re not justifying your time. Maybe you are being selfish. Maybe there is moral weight to our actions in that way.
So it was funny reading your chapter because on the one hand, everything you describe about the tendency to feel like you have to justify just being around does seem pathological. And then on the other hand, I think that sometimes it can be a real problem in cultures — and I’m part of a number of them — that are a little bit too new age, that they don’t ask you to understand yourself as a worm born into sin who needs to do good deeds to work your way out of it. It can be all about personal transformation and not your impact on the world. And maybe that’s neither good for the world nor that good for you. I find people get very obsessed with their own experience.
I’m curious how you weigh those competing interpretations of what we’re trying to do here.
I just wonder: Do we really need to say that the only viable way for making a difference in the world has to be from this place of deficit? Do we all have to be what psychologists call “insecure overachievers” who are doing lots of things in the world but doing them fundamentally to fill a void or plug a hole?
So where I’m headed with all of this is to try to salvage the notion of ambition and of making a difference — whether that’s in a business context or a political or activist context — from these notions of doing it anxiously and insecurely. Could we do it as an expression of the fact that we already feel good about ourselves?
There’s a strand of thinking in Zen Buddhism that suggests that if we could only get out of our own way, if we could only let go of some of the things that inhibit action, we would just naturally do a lot of things, many of which would be prosocial and for the good of the whole. It’s not that we need to constantly kick ourselves from behind with the threat of being a bad person if we don’t do it.
On some level that’s aspirational, including for me. But I think it’s useful as something to navigate by.
You quote the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who says that we “produce against the feeling of lack.” Where do you think the feeling of lack comes from?
I’ve been known to be evasive on these questions of causality because I think it’s overdetermined.
I definitely think that we live in an era when there’s a real kind of natural incentive to say: “There’s more to do. Here’s how to do it better.” Or: “You’re doing X all wrong.” Because that’s just the world in which we live and how attention is commodified.
And then, of course, there’s the psychoanalytic understanding that the lack is the lack of good-enough unconditional love received by almost everybody as kids, because so many parents are so normally and humanly imperfect.
So it’s just layered in all these ways.
And we’re trained in it from a young age. I have a 5-year-old, and he’s already bringing home homework and getting praised, or not praised, based on whether it gets done. I can see the structure of self-worth that he’s being pulled into. And it’s different than where he was six months ago, when that wasn’t asked of him at all — he was just going to the playground, playing with blocks.
There’s a large architecture that teaches us to judge ourselves very harshly if we’re not accomplishing.
There’s so much wisdom in this idea that’s been so prevalent in recent years — that one should praise children for their effort as much as for their attainment, so that they don’t get the idea that they’ve got to maintain a certain standard as a minimum for being acceptable. That doing what they can and bringing themselves to the task is the thing that really matters. And yet I wonder if that doesn’t reinforce the notion that, if something is worth doing, it’s going to feel difficult or grueling or hard in some sense.
It’s interesting you bring up that wrinkle of modern parenting. To expand on what you’re saying: There’s a very influential school of thought right now among wealthy parents that you don’t want to ever praise children for innate qualities — “You’re smart,” or “You’re such a wonderful human being.”
You want to praise them for trying — for their growth mind-set: “I saw that you really worked to do something nice” or “You’re doing such a good job trying hard at this.” What you’re trying to encourage in them is the effort.
I get it. And, like you, some part of me is completely repulsed. [Laughs.]
If we knew how, I think what we would want to do as parents would be to guarantee that we were always just praising our children for being them — as opposed to either putting in the effort or demonstrating certain innate qualities.
We’re taught from an early age that if it’s worth doing, it should feel hard and unpleasant. And one of the ideas I explore in this new book is how scary it is for some of us — again, talking about me as much as anyone else — to ask that question: What if this thing that I’m approaching in my life might be easier than I was expecting? What if I don’t need to furrow my brow and tense every muscle in my body and barrel into it as if I’m headed for a fight?
It’s quite subversive for some of us to allow that possibility.
You talk about something you call the three-to-four-hour rule. What is it?
This is an idea that I’ve adapted from a few sources. One of them is the work of the writer Alex Pang.
There’s a huge amount of evidence that Alex and others gather to suggest — and it’s mainly anecdotal, but not entirely anecdotal — that over and over again, if you look at the daily routines of artists and authors, scholars, scientists, composers, the list goes on, they each, when they have the freedom to do it, spend about three or four hours on the core, focused creative work that they do. The kind of work involving thinking and reflection that I think is increasingly widespread in the knowledge work era.
There’s something really wise — for any of us who have something like this degree of autonomy over our time, and absolutely not everybody does — to really work hard to ring-fence that three-to-four hour period in the day for the things that are at the core of your work.
I’m not suggesting we can do all our job in three to four hours a day but that we could profitably separate out the focused, reflective part of it from the rest. Not to try very hard to ring-fence or schedule or defend the rest of it — because we have to find some way of approaching work that treats this focus time as sacred but also doesn’t turn you into the kind of jerk you become if you’re trying to dictate how every hour of your time is used.
I thought what was interesting about that chapter was something you say toward the end of it. On one level we should highlight the many people who do not have jobs where you get to ring-fence three to four hours a day for deep creative work. You’re paid by the hour. You’re standing at the cash register.
So all of this is speaking about a very particular kind of person. And in some ways, it’s not that widely applicable.
But what I thought was interesting, and was a little bit more universal, was something you say on the final page:
The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.
There is a real difference between the people who have the skill to stop and those who don’t. And we talk a lot more about how to keep going or keep pushing ourselves past the point of comfort than we do about how to stop pushing ourselves.
Absolutely. I think this is endemic these days and, as you say, it arises in all sorts of different professional contexts.
My basic outlook on this is that it’s never going to be done. The nature of the world that we live in — today, especially, but on some level it’s timeless, universal — is that there is more that could profitably be done with our time than we will ever be able to do. There is always something more that you could do.
Cal Newport, whom I know you’ve had on the show, has this lovely line about how you could fill any arbitrary number of hours in a day with work that feels like it needs doing in that day. There’s no limit to that — unless you place one.
In that inability to stop, there is a yearning to get to the point where it is all done and you can finally relax. And I think the skill is being able to relax in the midst of the work not being done.
This is what Benedictine monks understand: You have a work period, but when the bell rings, you put down your work and you go on to the next thing. There’s a real kind of spiritual practice to being able to psychologically, as well as physically, put down the thing that you’re working on just because the bell rang. Not because you finished everything and it’s all done.
This perhaps gets to some of the philosophical shifts you’re encouraging readers to make. You share an anecdote from the late British Zen master Hōun Jiyu-Kennett about making the burden heavier. Can you share it here?
I love this. Hōun Jiyu-Kennett was a British-born Zen master, and she used to say that her preferred approach to teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down.
I’m certainly not a Zen master, but I think there is something really wonderful in this. Very often the path to peace of mind, combined with being productive, comes not from finding new ways to take on more work or to get more done — to get closer and closer to that never-reached point of control — but to take a good look at how unattainable that is. To feel what it means to be a finite human swimming in a sea of infinite possibilities and infinite demands and infinite pressures, and to say: OK, well, maybe I can stop fighting that particular fight and have some new energy for doing the things that I actually can do.
That’s what I understand by making the burden so heavy that you put it down.
Finiteness feels like it is a very central concept for you. When I think about your previous books “Four Thousand Weeks” as well as “Meditation for Mortals,” I feel like you’re writing long memento mori with pastel-colored cover jackets. They seem friendly, but the message on virtually every page is: You are going to die.
[Laughs.] Yeah, I think that’s fair. I suppose a nuance that I’d add to that is that it feels a bit less like a focus on death and dying — something that I have no particular reason to believe I am more reconciled to than anybody else — so much as it is a focus on a specific set of things that follow from the fact that we’re going to die. The fact that our time is not unlimited, we can’t be in more than one place at a time, we can’t reach outside of the present moment and just check that everything in the future is going to be OK.
All these different ways that we’re limited, that feel really uncomfortable. Perhaps because on some ultimate level they are daily, hourly reminders of our forthcoming death — and the effort we put into trying not to feel that.
So many of the things that we call “self-improvement” can be best understood as a structure of emotional avoidance so that we don’t have to feel how uncomfortable and claustrophobic it is to actually be who we are as finite individuals.
There’s a Buddhist meditation sequence I love that I learned from the writer Stephen Batchelor, where you repeat this phrase:
I’m of the nature to grow old.
I’m of the nature to get sick.
I’m of the nature to lose people I love.
I’m of the nature to die.
So how, then, shall I live?
I don’t do that meditation that often — it’s a lot to hype yourself up for in the morning. But when I do it, I feel very peaceful. I don’t feel saddened or depressed. But I often have a bit of perspective that maybe the answer to that question does not match my to-do list for that day in a deep way, and I should reflect on that.
I love that. I think there’s a certain kind of clichéd version of memento mori in the culture that says that life is very short, so you’ve therefore got to cram every minute of every day with being as impressive or unusual or generally high-octane as you possibly can.
And I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that when you really begin to let it permeate you that we are of the nature to be finite, you get to exhale. You get to let your shoulders drop. Not in order to veg out but precisely to move forward to do the most meaningful things with your day. It’s a refocusing.
There’s also this divergence between what I might call the aesthetic of productivity and the reality of it.
Something I’ve noticed in my own work is I almost never have a truly good idea sitting in front of the computer. But the more work I have, the more I feel I should be sitting in front of the computer.
I was having a day where there was a lot on the to-do list. But because I was reading your book, I was doing less of it and spending more time in meditation and taking walks. There was one day when I decided not to come into work immediately and instead to drink my coffee outside and let my mind wander. And I had a great idea for a column that will one day get written.
In some way, that time was so much more productive than what I would have done if I had kept my original plan of not stopping at a lovely coffee shop and just going to my office.
There’s a lot of positive things that come from being able to unclench that desire to steer the day in the way that feels right and, instead, listening to the whisperings of chance and serendipity. And there’s something about really trying to control the day within an inch of its life that militates against those moments of inspiration.
This is a challenge at an organizational level, too. I think there’s plenty of reason to believe that the more control an organization seeks to impose upon people, the easier it is for the real work to not get done.
Is this a way that our schooling system reflects at least some origins in wanting to prepare people for factory work?
I don’t want to be binary about this or simplistic — learning how to sit still and pay attention is not meaningless. But there is this very sharp distinction made between play — recess, lunch, after school — and learning, which requires this relentless application of self-discipline: keeping yourself from getting up, keeping yourself from following your own impulses.
And I find it interesting that there’s no structured effort to teach people how to take a walk, to teach people to know when their mental resources are exhausted, when they need time to integrate an idea.
I understand that this is partially because institutions need to impose control, because schools are partially custodial places where children are watched so parents can go to work. But they’re also places where we’re formed, and something just seems quite wrong with it.
This is not quite exactly the same point, but something else that it leads to is that it encourages us to distrust our own intuitions about the right ways to spend the next hour, the next day. This kind of coercion might begin at school or in the workplace, where we have to follow rules. But then we do it to ourselves, even if we don’t have to. People who start working for themselves or go freelance often find themselves recreating the prison of rigid schedules that they thought they were escaping.
In the book, I quote the meditation teacher Susan Piver, who wrote about her own experiments in letting go of a rigid schedule and just asking what she wanted to do in each moment. And she found that pretty much all of the dutiful tasks that she was worried she couldn’t be trusted to complete got done anyway. Because most of us want to keep our commitments and meet our deadlines and pay our bills if we’re able to do so.
So I think there’s a real lack of faith in oneself that is inculcated by the idea that you’ve always got to be pushing on the side of self-discipline and never listening to what you might want to do on the inside.
Inside these books is a journey that you say that you’ve gone on, from being a columnist exploring self-help and optimization techniques at The Guardian to writing “Four Thousand Weeks” — a book about recognizing there is no optimization that will work, that one day you will die, and you need to accept limits — to this book, “Meditations for Mortals,” which is more individuated essays revolving around the theme of working with limits.
And I guess something I wonder when, as I’ve read these books and read your trajectory here, is: Has this actually worked for you? If I was tracking the anxiety levels and productivity from when you were that Guardian writer on deadline to your being an international avatar of accepting finitude, how different are you?
[Laughs.] Well, I do think I am significantly different. Perhaps you would expect me to say that, but I think it’s true.
It’s not that I changed completely and then shared my beautiful wisdom with the lucky public. It’s that these books are me working through these issues.
Definitely not true about this podcast. This podcast is a completely abstracted exploration of ideas. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Something that I find consistently to be true in writing books is that I will come up with a kind of neat, intellectual account of what I want to do for the book proposal. But then to actually write the book, I have to change more in the direction of the ideas that I’m outlining.
I mean, the book won’t write itself without me changing. It’s not that I won’t fall into these old ways of being. It’s that I notice what I’m doing more quickly and can let go of it more quickly — which I think meditation brings people to, that ability to catch yourself. But also I just don’t believe my own [expletive] as much as I used to.
So it’s not even that I’m not going to try to do more than I can reasonably do in a day. And I’ll still download the new productivity app and mess around with it. But I don’t think it’s going to save my soul. And I don’t end up postponing real life until I get to the point where it has.
And as a result, I think I am able to be more present and attentive and actually show up for the life that I actually have.
I find that answer completely convincing and so dispiriting.
[Laughs.]
If you told me that the way to really absorb ideas like this is to force yourself to write an entire book about them, that actually feels really true to me.
Something you just said is that to live differently takes some structure of commitment that keeps you coming back to it. You mentioned meditation. What is powerful about meditation isn’t any single sit. It’s the practice, the regularity of it. If I stop tomorrow, a lot of its effect on me decays.
I think that’s true, and I also think that there are dangers in setting it up as something that is only worth doing if it’s done completely consistently.
This latest book is structured as short daily chapters that you might read at the pace of one a day — specifically as an intention to try to let these ideas seep under your skin, through coming back to them and back to them.
Finding some way to just be in these ideas for an extended period — there’s nothing that rivals that.
You told me that in the last few years you moved from Brooklyn to the town where you grew up in the U.K. How has changing the context, the environment, the culture in which your day-to-day life takes place changed you?
That’s a great question. I grew up in a more suburban setting, and I now live in a much more rural one. But it’s roughly the same part of England.
I find lots of very predictable benefits to my nervous system of living in natural landscapes. That’s a common experience.
One of the surprising things is the benefits of inconvenience — a sort of a friction in life that I didn’t experience in Brooklyn. Just tiny little things, like thinking about when you’re going to go and run various errands instead of hopping out to the store to buy an extra ingredient while dinner is still boiling on the stove.
This is a famous thing about rural life, I suppose, but you have to be attentive and aware of the interests of other people, because you’re going to see them tomorrow and the day after, and you might need them in a pinch.
There’s something about the environment that, while it is relaxing compared to a hyperstimulated urban one, actually calls me to attend to it in a way that feels a little bit effortful — but ultimately feels completely right.
You did a quick “I’m going to skip over the banal effects of living in a more natural environment on my nervous system.” Expand on that.
The area that we live in — specifically, the North York Moors — is characterized by big, open, rather bleak moorland. It’s close enough to the setting of “Wuthering Heights” — if people need a reference point.
And there’s something about walking in that environment that is a kind of in-the-bones, deeper-than-conscious reminder that I’m really a very small deal in the scheme of things. Which I personally find to be incredibly liberating and not dispiriting at all.
There is this way that the world can now follow you anywhere. It used to be that you went to a rural spot on the moors, and it was pretty hard to know what was not happening at that rural spot on the moors. And now you know what is happening in the Donald Trump transition as quickly as I do sitting here at The New York Times headquarters, in New York.
You and I share a fascination with this article The Times published years ago, about a man who, at the beginning of the first Trump administration, decided he was done with the news. And he went to very extreme lengths to shut himself off from it — but not necessarily to shut himself off from the world. Do you want to tell that story?
Yeah, this is Erik Hagerman. This is a profile that The Times ran, headlined “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” which is a great piece of headline writing. And what interested me about this story was that when he left his lovely home to go to his local, liberal-filled coffee shop, he would wear noise-canceling headphones playing white noise — as I remember it — so that he wouldn’t have to hear anyone else discussing what was happening in national politics.
And there was a sort of standard response among left-leaning members of the media who were writing about this profile, or just sort of mocking him on social media, that this was a kind of monstrous privilege. It was just outrageous and repugnant to imagine, because so many people couldn’t choose to opt out of the real ramifications of what was happening — and what is now happening again.
But it was clear from the profile that one of the main things he was spending his time on, while not filling up his attentional bandwidth with political angst, was restoring an area of wetlands that he had purchased and planned to release back to public ownership.
It struck me as possible that this is somebody not being the monster of selfishness but rather being quite realistic about the finite nature of his attention and his time and his emotional energy. And he’s deciding, in a quite defensible way, to withdraw his attention from things that are structured, in our attention economy, to try to claim it in every single moment, and put it somewhere that has an absolutely important role to play in making the world a better place in the future. So I wanted to make a defense of him on those grounds.
I end up making a similar defense of him in my book. The thing that I always found moving about that profile is that he was doing something hyperlocal. And too much of our political and civic attention is now national and international.
There’s the concept from the political scientist Eitan Hersh of political hobbyism. You’re following who’s up and who’s down. You’re having emotional relationships to it. But it’s the way you engage with a sports team. You’re not trying to change anything.
We give the bulk of our focus to the levels of politics and calamity that we have the least capacity to affect, and that has coincided with a reduction in focus on the levels that we have the most capacity to affect: local government, civic institutions. And for most people, this trade has been bad.
You’re putting me in mind of the work of the political philosopher Robert Talisse. He argues the health of democracy depends on everyone spending more time with people who are, on some level, on the other side of the aisle.
But rather than spending that time arguing about politics, or trying to understand other people’s political opinions, just building civic life. Sports games and gigs and bowling leagues and all the rest of it where politics doesn’t arise and where you don’t know what the politics of the other people are.
That’s harder and harder, with the total geographical sorting of people into their partisan groups, as I know you’ve explored in detail. And perhaps we’ve reached a point in American politics where the thought that somebody might be on the other side from you means that you just can’t bear the thought of having them in your social world. But there’s room for getting our heads out of politics — even for the sake of politics.
You had an almost throwaway remark in the book — and note that this book was written before this election:
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.
I read that and I was trying to decide if it connected for me. But I’d like to hear you expand on what you were thinking there.
I’m using the term “resonance” having discussed the work of Hartmut Rosa. It’s this idea that there is something that the modern world lacks because of our attempts, as societies and individuals, to extend more and more control over the world. Something about that squeezes out a sense of aliveness.
I think that might just be another word we could use here: a sense of really being alive. On some level, that makes no sense, because we’re all alive. But I think people know intuitively what that means. They know experiences in their own lives when they really felt alive and when they didn’t.
And I do think that there are dysfunctional forms of feeling alive. There’s an intoxication that I’m sure comes when people are picking fights in social media spaces, for example. Or when they are burrowing themselves deep into intricate stories of what’s really going on in the world, despite what appears to be going on — the conspiracies unfolding behind the scenes and all the rest of it.
Even as somebody who repudiates most of that stuff, that’s the point at which I can think: Oh, yeah, I can see why that might feel fleetingly good. It’s related to the way that anger can feel strangely pleasurable in a certain way. There’s an aliveness that can be all too readily lacking from our days that it does reintroduce.
One of my producers sent me a note saying, “Look, isn’t there a perverse pleasure in pushing yourself too hard?”
I read this, and I was like, “[Expletive], I do feel this.” Even if you feel miserable and underslept and wildly out of balance, it’s absorbing, it’s a little manic, and it can be this way to block out the noise of the rest of your life.
So isn’t there some paradoxical pleasure in this experience that we’re describing as the thief of pleasure?
I think it is a sort of rather suspect kind of pleasure when you examine it. There’s a kind of avoidance, very often, motivating it. And I think that’s what is at the heart of a lot of workaholism.
I’m not accusing you of being a workaholic, necessarily. But I think it’s adjacent to what you’re talking about: the idea that when it’s uncomfortable to confront certain ways in which your life feels out of control, there is a sense of calm and control in work that makes it very appealing.
And it offers the dopamine hit of completable tasks.
I was an intern on a presidential campaign when I was in college. I had wanted to do field, knocking on doors. But I got placed in the field headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, where I was sending out bumper stickers and yard signs. And I didn’t like it.
Some days, though, I would be placed at the reception desk, and I found it so pleasurable, because people would call, I would route their call, and then it would be a job well done.
There’s so much in life that doesn’t have that character at all — parenting and caring for others and caring for yourself. So I do think there can be this seductiveness to retreating back into the artificial productivity architecture that lets you keep knocking things off a to-do list. As opposed to — sometimes, at least — sitting in the actual unending mess of life.
All sorts of meaningful and ultimately very joyous experiences of life are kind of uncomfortable to let ourselves fall into, because they involve accepting our limited nature, our vulnerability to distressing emotions. We have to just be present and ready for whatever might happen.
A sort of perfectly realized Zen master — in other words, very much not me — would say that it is on some level possible to complete each moment of existence in that way. To fully experience and then completely let go of each passing portion of time.
But it’s a heck of a lot easier when it’s reinforced by the structures we’re working and living inside.
I think it’s a good place to end. In the interest of giving people a nice little completable to-do list, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
I’ve mentioned the work of Hartmut Rosa, who is writing on a societal level about the things that I’m writing about on a more individual level. He has a small book called “The Uncontrollability of the World.” He’s also written a very big one, but if we’re going for easily finishable things, let’s go with that. It’s a really lovely overview of this idea that the world escapes our complete control, however much we might wish it otherwise.
I’d also like to recommend a book by a friend of mine, Elizabeth Oldfield, called “Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.” It’s written from a Christian perspective, but I actually think it really gets at this idea of aliveness we’ve been circling around and what that might mean in the modern world. That was quite an important book for me in bringing some of those ideas into focus.
And then there’s a book by the spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson that has the remarkable title “Death: The End of Self-Improvement.”
That’s strong, I’ve got to admit. That title does not screw around.
[Laughs.] She’s a nondual teacher, an eclectic modern spiritual teacher, and the book is essentially a memoir about handling the circumstances around the death of her mother and then her own serious illnesses in older age.
What I really appreciated about this book was how it’s unlike a lot of books in this space, which claim to be about showing up for the present moment, but then, when you look at the present moments in question, they all seem to be rather lovely ones — looking at the beauty of nature or appreciating the beautiful taste of a glass of water or whatever it might be.
But she’s really applying this idea to some grueling experiences and suggesting that there is something about full immersion in the life that is actually happening to us, that is meaningful and elevating and deep and perhaps even enjoyable when the content is not happy at all.
Oliver Burkeman, thank you very much.
Thank you very much, indeed.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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