Make Time for What Counts with Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman's latest book, "Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts," is a guide to embracing what he calls the imperfect life. It's the realization that you're never going to sort your life out. So instead of attempting that futile task day after day and viewing your limitations as a human as obstacles to a meaningful life, you embrace them. In our conversation, Oliver and I dig into some common misconceptions about the human condition, why existing in the modern world asks so much of us, and how and why we must take action admist uncertainty.

You can learn more about Oliver and his work here: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/

Transcript:

Sarah Cavanaugh: [00:00:00] I am Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about life and death.

Today I am talking with Oliver Burkeman about his latest book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. This is not your typical time management book. We all have plenty of those on our bookshelves, half empty. What Oliver has written is why it's so important to make time for what really counts.

It's about accepting we each have limited time on earth, not waiting to do the things in life that matter. It isn't some maximize your time. YOLO stay young forever. Finally, get organized book. It's actually just about acceptance. Each chapter is a different way to help you think about life and accept reality.

In my conversation with Oliver, we cover some really fascinating aspects of [00:01:00] living in the modern world ways we deny our mortality at the societal level and as individuals. I can't stop thinking about how Oliver talks about meaning making amidst uncertainty and overwhelm.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hi Oliver.

Oliver Burkeman: Hello Sarah.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

Oliver Burkeman: Thank you very much.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I wonder if listeners are thinking, why are we talking about time management? Because what does that have to do with death? Uh, but that connection is central to your work. Yeah. I mean, I,

Oliver Burkeman: I do feel slightly, um, odd having a conversation for this podcast 'cause I, the, the books that I've written and the subjects that I write about are not overtly about death.

And dying. But, but they are about finitude. They are very much about the limitations that ultimately all come from the fact that we do die. So [00:02:00] yeah, I'm, I'm sort of expanding the notion of time management up to the question of how do we deal with the fact that our time is finite? And as soon as you talk about our time being finite, you are talking about, you're talking about death in some sense.

Sarah Cavanaugh: And accepting your mortality makes life worth living. I, I love, I love the premise of the limited time, the limited amount of projects you can finish, the, you know, really acknowledging that is really what we talk about a lot.

Oliver Burkeman: I've definitely come at it from the end of like, I've got too many emails in my inbox and too many items on my to-do list, as opposed to.

Really huge encounters with, with the sort of absolute nature of mortality, but they are completely the same thing. Yeah.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I found a lot of peace reading about showing up and accepting your limits and letting go. I was actually at a writing retreat when I read your book, and there was a lot of spaciousness there to really think about everything I'm involved with.

Mm-hmm. And what's coming down the pike and this cultural [00:03:00] shift in the United States and. What to focus on because I think a lot of us are a little bit like overwhelmed.

Oliver Burkeman: One of the ways in which we're finite is, is not only how many chores you can expect to get through on a to-do list on a Saturday afternoon, but also how many things and how many aspects of a sort of a sort of big unfolding thing.

Like American politics at the moment. You can really usefully. Pay attention to and keep track of. So I'm really interested in that question of whether it's sometimes actually the right thing to do in certain ways to kind of withdraw your attention from aspects of that. Any of us who sort of care about being good citizens have got it drummed into us by the culture and by, uh.

Childhood conditioning and all the rest of it. That, that, that that's irresponsible. That the way to be a good citizen is to pay as much attention as you possibly can to everything that is unfolding. And I think that is sort of in [00:04:00] defiance of our. Of our limits in a way, and ultimately not very useful to anybody.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I also think it was in a time prior to all of this sort of tsunami of information, you know? Yeah. Managing the, the amount and the sources, because I think, you know, we've got this sort of crisis of trust and truth and who's telling the story. Mm-hmm. And I, we talk a lot about who's telling your story and who's telling the story of what's happening in the world and what do you pay attention to.

I think that that's really complicated right now.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, absolutely. Especially as you know, overwhelming the collective attentional bandwidth is, is clearly a tactic. I. It's a really difficult question. It is not obvious at all that paying ever more attention is, is the most helpful thing to do. I'm not someone who counsels, you know, just withdraw completely and pretend that the news isn't happening if you can, but there's something we've got to do and a way we've got to find to [00:05:00] relate to that bigger picture, the national, international picture, that that is not just give it all the attention that it seems to ask.

Of us.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Yeah. And we don't have enough time in the day, and there's no way to pay attention to all of those sources. Well, let's talk about your book for a sec. This passage for meditations for Mortals explains exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with you. If you see all of this as leading up to some future point, when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself or feeling good about yourself, then you'll end up treating your actual life as if it's something to get through until one day it'll be over without the meaningful part ever having arrived.

Oliver Burkeman: So that's, that's finitude, right? I mean the, the idea that the experience will end. Means that we should be very, very cautious about this kind of na, very well natural, I don't know, [00:06:00] but very forgivable tendency to treat the present moment as, as leading up to some time where we'll have our lives in better working order or be on top of things or finally know what, what, what we're doing.

Obviously, you know. People do go to school and university and learn things to prepare themselves for later in life to some extent. But, uh, it's directly to do with mortality because it's about wanting to feel more in control of experience than we do. Right? Right now in the present moment, you feel vulnerable and you feel like you can't be sure what's gonna happen next, and you can't protect yourself from distressing emotions, but like soon.

With, with the right techniques and some more self-discipline that you're going to apparently locate from somewhere and all the rest of it, then you'll get to this place where you can have that kind of of security. And my argument, I don't claim to have invented this argument at all, but my argument in the book is that desire to feel more in control is really a desire to not be a limited human in the way that [00:07:00] we all are.

Right? It's a way to sort of, to desire to sort of get out on top of your life. Instead of accepting the reality that you're just sort of in it and the river of time is bearing you forwards towards death, whether you, whether you like it or not.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you feel it's the same in England that it is here in the United States where I.

Productivity and achievement and all of that, you know, you'll, you'll sort of give back when you retire, you'll, you'll give yourself time back. You'll give your, you know, you'll give money to good causes. You'll do all of this at 65.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. I mean, I think on some level this is, this is a sort of timeless and universal human tendency, right?

It's definitely this, this sort of living for the future is exacerbated by all sorts of cultural and. Economic forces, but right at the bottom of it, I think it's a. Sort of baked in human discomfort with being, [00:08:00] as far as we know, the only creatures who are both finite and able to be aware of what that, of, what that means

Sarah Cavanaugh: or will stay young forever.

Oliver Burkeman: Right. That's the other way of doing it. Right. So you can, you can say three ways, basically. You say, I'm never gonna die. You can say I'm gonna die, but in the future now, but before I die I'm gonna have like. The time that made it all worth it. Or you can just go fully into sort of optimization culture and say like, I can do a limitless amount of things right now, which is this kind of immortality as well, right?

If I really could make it so that I could answer every email, pursue every ambition, meet every obligation, and go to 50 different places around the world every year. Then it would be sort of functionally equivalent to living forever. 'cause I could do everything in the present, but, but neither is possible, unfortunately.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Yeah. Well your second book called 4,000 Weeks, if we live to 80, then we, how many weeks we [00:09:00] have in a a lifetime. And putting in another number like that really also illustrates the point of a finite life. Do you think of life being short or long?

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, at first blush, I think of it as being. Short and the, the use of weeks in that title was obviously, uh, you know, having, having figured it out myself and had the panic attack I wanted to make everybody else suffer too.

A week is a, kind of, feels like a very easy unit of time to waste, you know, like what happened to the last week, but also 4,000, it's a few more than 4,000 if you don't round it down. But 4,000 is not, is not very many of them. Whereas, you know, a year is. Hard to waste. So the fact that we get fewer years isn't so bad.

Days are very easy to waste, but you get thousands and thousands and thousands of days. So maybe it's not so bad that a week really sort of gives you the, the worst of both worlds in that, in that topic. But I think when you think about that question, is life short or long? Compared to what? Compared to the history of humanity or the [00:10:00] life of the cosmos, it's obviously incredibly short and compared to the life of a may, whatever human life is, is incredibly long.

It is interesting that. Our minds naturally tend towards the first comparison rather than the the second. I think on some level we sort of feel like we should be entitled to be present for the whole history of humanity, and it's kind of an insult that we're not, which is completely fascinating when you stop to think about it.

And not many people have come across this, but not many people regret not having been alive in the past in the same way that they hate the fact that they won't be alive in the. Future. So we've got some, we've got some curious intuitions going on there for sure.

Sarah Cavanaugh: There's three things that really stuck with me personally when I read your book.

One of those was list what you have completed. The done list. I actually did the done list for three days while I was on the writing retreat because. [00:11:00] There's this pressure. Then there's other, you know, writers with you and there's this pressure to get things done. And so I was writing anything that sort of made a cup of coffee, you know?

Right. Completed that. I wrote sort of every small thing. Mm-hmm. That happened in the day. Wrote a sentence. Yeah. Which is. Sometimes really hard to do. Right. A good, A good sentence. Yeah. Yeah. But it was really profound over the three days as I was writing this done list, to kind of track time in a different way.

I really appreciated that. It really stuck with me. Oh, I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. Is that something you do?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah, I, I, I, I wouldn't say that right now in my sort of process, I explicitly keep a done list I have done, and now I've sort of got a slightly more complicated system that basically includes it. I don't need to go into details right now, but the, the basic idea of having some way in which you.

You take note of the thing [00:12:00] that you have done and have now completed, and as you say, you gotta be careful with what you mean by completed. Completing writing a paragraph is a very good kind of completion. Completing writing a book is such a vast undertaking that you know you're only going to be able to get to.

Write that down once every several years probably. It's not, it's not really the right, the right cadence. But, you know, I think there's something about this attitude, however you exactly manifest it, that really sort of brings you into life and really causes you to kind of savor, I guess, in some ways the, the moments 'cause on some level.

Each moment, like that's what life is, right? Whether you'd keep a done list or not, whether you're doing anything productive with your time or not. That the, the moment is passing and then the moment is gone. And I think that keeping a done list really helps you kind of fall in with that. Reality.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yes. And all those small things add up and it feels like when you read the list, it's almost a poem [00:13:00] because it is the way you pay attention.

Oliver Burkeman: Hmm.

Sarah Cavanaugh: And I walked down to the estuary, um, and the birds were so out and excited because it had been a atmospheric. Rainstorm for like three days. There was just so much water and floods and everything. And so the sun finally came out. So I walked down and they were just going nuts. And so one of our kids had showed me the Merlin app and I was just looking up what birds I was hearing, and it was probably 10 different varieties of birds, you know?

And who's to say that isn't the right way to spend my time?

Oliver Burkeman: Absolutely no com completely. It

Sarah Cavanaugh: was so

Oliver Burkeman: beautiful. Yeah. It, it's something to do with the consciousness of what you're doing that is, that matters almost more than the content, although that sounds like a very lovely kind of, kind of content. Yeah.

It's sort of respecting the fact that it is transient, paying respect to the fact that [00:14:00] this is one of a ultimately finite number of, of moments. You'll get.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Um, it's been one of the gifts of my life to be on the founding board of William Merwin's Conservancy. So if you ever make it to Hawaii, he took a piece of land on Maui mm-hmm.

That was condemned due to the pineapple plantations, and he brought it back to life and it's now one of the most diverse palm forests in the world. It's just magical. Wow. It's an incredible place. It does sound

Oliver Burkeman: amazing.

Sarah Cavanaugh: One of the things that stuck with me in your book is something that William taught me, and that is the focus for three hours a day.

It was so interesting to me that that's what you came to because he would wake in the morning, he would have his tea read and write poetry, and then in the afternoon he would garden and he would. Plant his palm trees. And so the way he spent his time in this finite life really taught me about the amount of focus he took.

And he is one of the most prolific poets. Yeah. Uh, he's won the Pulitzer [00:15:00] twice. He's an incredible, incredible human being, and we miss him a lot.

Oliver Burkeman: I mean, you're referring partly in my book to the, this idea of. Trying to defend three, maybe four hours in the course of the day for kind of deep work and not expecting that much more of yourself.

And of course, you know, there'll be people listening who sort of respond that. They don't have that time because everything they've got to do, and that's completely true. And even I, as a parent of a small child, listen to your account of, of, well

Sarah Cavanaugh: he had no chil, he had no small

Oliver Burkeman: children. Right,

Sarah Cavanaugh: right, right,

Oliver Burkeman: right.

Of, of his day. And think like, oh, I'd love to be able to just sit, you know? Of course the point is not. Copy this one other person's lifestyle? No, the point is that there's something maximally fulfilling about the sort of balance of these things, and there's something that is not helpful about the sort of either the cultural narrative or just the economic [00:16:00] pressure to kind of do the one thing as much as you possibly can, uh, in the course of the day, and this crops up all over the place.

TOL stories, diaries, have all this kind of stuff in them about the ideal day being some combination of writing, conversation, manual labor, and I can't remember what the other one was, but you know, he's got this kinda like this idea that maybe we went wrong on some level when in the specialization of of labor and the idea that, you know what I do for my job, I do for nine hours a day, eight hours a day, and it's someone else's job to come and.

I don't know, fix things in my house as opposed to I do a few hours and then I fix the things in my house. I haven't never really written about this, but one thing we did when we lived in Brooklyn, like the enormously walking cliches that we, that we were, was to, um, belong to the, the famous slash notorious park Slope food co-op where he's put in.

Four hours a month to stacking shelves or [00:17:00] hauling in groceries or working on a on a checkout, and in return, you're a member of this co-op that has really high quality food at amazing prices. I loved those shifts, right? I like doing a job that is thought of as completely menial. And something that is, you know, that we very much look down on.

If you only have to do it a bit, it's actually just a net great positive in your life. I'm not suggesting that it is a net positive for people who, who are obliged to do it for many, many hours every single day, but it's like all sorts of things are worth doing with your life and interesting. And add a dimension to it as long as you're not in a system that forces them to kind of.

Totally drown out everything else. Kind of feel like there's something to that kind of, everyone does a bit of everything approach to organizing society.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk a little bit about choice and consequences. 'cause the third thing that really stuck with me after my first reading of the book is what you write.

[00:18:00] It's in the nature of being finite, that every choice comes with some sort of consequences. Because at any instant you can pick one path and. What stuck with me is making those hard choices. All you have to do is make them. Mm-hmm. And then just live with the consequences. Mm-hmm. And I hadn't thought about it with exactly that frame.

Is there an example from your life that illustrates this?

Oliver Burkeman: I've several different points in life as a sort of British born person who then lived in America and now lives in Britain, had that sort of, that question of like. Is it, should I stay here or should I go back there? Kind of idea, which is relatively serious kind of question.

It's not ultimately as serious as as some, and then I also think this same logic applies on a much more day-to-day level for me in terms of where I have the discretion to spend an hour either. With my son or writing, like how do I navigate that choice because I want to [00:19:00] do both of those things intensely and the freeing thing in both those kinds of contexts.

But I think that it applies even to write incredibly grave choices is there is something really freeing about understanding that all I have to do is weigh negative consequences.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's address privilege for a second because. Some of us have more choices than others

Oliver Burkeman: in one sense. Absolutely. Yes. I think this is a tricky sort of needle to, to thread.

So the most obvious point, as you say, is about choice, right? For a very privileged person, the choice to spend some time. Working outside their job on a creative project might be a choice between doing that and going on a wonderful vacation. And for somebody else, the choice might be the, in quote Marks choice might be to sort of not be able to keep a roof over their heads if they gave up the, the jobs that they don't find fulfilling, but that are completely filling every hour of, of, of time that they have.

So those are sort of [00:20:00] two extremes.

Sarah Cavanaugh: The consequences are dire, you know? Yeah. If they make a certain choice, you know, if they leave a job that they, that's soul crushing, for example.

Oliver Burkeman: And then the really difficult part here is the sort of, I, I think of this as a kind of argument from existentialist philosophy, which says, if your choice.

Between working in a terrible job or letting your kids starve so that you can pursue your dream of writing screenplays all day with no, with no guarantee of any income from it. Obviously, in a practical sense, that's no choice at all, but in some kind of ultimate sense, there's still a choice there, right?

You could be the sort of. Who would sacrifice the basic wellbeing of your children. You could make yourself vulnerable to going to jail for child neglect. Right? And the, and I think the sort of existentialist position there says, well, the fact that there is in some ultimate sense of choice there.

Actually imbues more meaning to what you decide to do instead. Right? Because it, it [00:21:00] connects what you are doing in your meaningless or or unsatisfying job to your ultimate goals. It, it's in remaining in the job. Once you understand that, you are saying, I care deeply about something here, which is I.

Supporting my family and I care about it enough to make it the organizing principle of my life for now. And on some level, you have chosen, right? You're choosing more consciously to do something that on some level you have no option but to do. Now, this does not mean that it's therefore not a problem that we live in a society that.

Forces people to make these choices. Does

Sarah Cavanaugh: that make sense? It does, and I really appreciate, I'm so curious about your comment about privilege being sort of a block almost to people who can make choices, but they don't make them because other people can't make them.

Oliver Burkeman: All these sort of issues of social justice are not feeling very humorous at the moment.

I'm aware, especially in the us. Sense, but there was that whole sort of thing a while ago of specifically boyfriends in heterosexual [00:22:00] relationships claiming that they wouldn't get married until people of every sexual orientation could get married. And how that was kind of like a very convenient thing to say if you're just a commitment phobe, you know what I mean?

So it's the correct morality to have that marriage should be open to people regardless of sexual orientation. If that's the reason that you are claiming you are not willing to like tithe the knot, there might be something else going on there and you might be using that legitimate point for some kind of avoidance.

You know what I mean? And as a sort of commitment phobe in the past, I resonate with that a lot. Yeah. It'd be nice to have decent, righteous reasons for not doing the scary thing in your life.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. And what you're really talking about is living consciously if you're being, you know, honest with yourself about Yeah.

Commitment. Yeah. Or not?

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah. I mean, this is really inviting pushback and irritation from people maybe. But I think there are people who really don't want to have children because of the climate crisis. [00:23:00] And I think there are probably some people who may be not even consciously themselves are using that sort of argument to not.

Tread into the unknown scary place that becoming apparent entails. We're all avoiding something in some way. Nobody's worse at this than others necessarily, but it's possible to engage in avoidance in ways that look very socially conscious and committed and just, and maybe not, aren't necessarily.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, I think one of the beautiful lessons that you're modeling for your son is that life is full of problems and that's what makes it interesting, right?

You're not trying to wrap life and bubble wrap and. Make it impossible to acknowledge

Oliver Burkeman: right

Sarah Cavanaugh: that things go wrong.

Oliver Burkeman: I think that's right. I think, you know, my inner critic pipes up and wants to say, I write about a lot of this stuff. This is sort of hard won wisdom in the sense that like I'm kind of the worst at all these things.

Otherwise, they wouldn't be compelling to me to write about. I think through writing about 'em, I have sort of metabolized them a [00:24:00] bit and probably. Totally misusing that metaphor, but they have become more of a part of who I am as a result of exploring them in, in prose. So I'm not totally denying your mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Compliment

Sarah Cavanaugh: You ask in your book too. What if we never sort our life out and how do you find meaning in life?

Oliver Burkeman: It is to whatever extent I can give up on the idea that I'm going to fix the things about my life or about me that. I've historically wanted to fix or don't bother me, it is to that extent that I can sort of drop into whatever it's is I'm actually doing and find that absorbing and interesting.

And there's no automatic reason why that has to be writing a chapter as opposed to clearing out the garage or cooking dinner or going shopping, what you know, it can absolutely be mundane. To whatever extent I am [00:25:00] not viewing it as just a stepping stone to the real thing. Later on, there's a quote, I think, well, I'm not sure if there's a quote from Joseph Campbell, but it's related to something he said about how possibly what we're really looking for in life is not the meaning of life, but a feeling of aliveness or an experience of life.

And I do think that ultimately you can get that out of any substance. It might be a lot harder to do when you are, you know, unclogging the toilet. As opposed to staring out over a gorgeous mountain range. But in principle, what makes experience feel meaningful, I think is absorption in it rather than the content of it.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Being mindful. Yeah.

Oliver Burkeman: Yeah.

Sarah Cavanaugh: All this talk about mortality. Do you think about your own death? Hmm.

Oliver Burkeman: I definitely think about getting older. This will, uh, dawn on one during. The stage of life that I'm in late forties, you're a spring chicken, I, I, I'll take it, but I'm still at the po I'm still at the [00:26:00] point where I can be like, oh yeah, I gotta take real, take care of that.

Otherwise, it's gonna, it's gonna be a bad scene in a little bit. So I think about my decline. I don't think about sort of the moment of death and I don't think a lot about no longer being here. When I do it strikes me still on some level as. Absolute outrage. The idea that just like human history is gonna unfold.

For goodness knows how long without me it's just like, no, without me.

Um, no, I mean, I'm kidding, but yeah. Right. I mean that's the, that is outrageous and I think that all my sort of writing and exploring of Finitude have, they've sort of taken the charge outta that, right? It's not that it stops being out an outrage, it's just that it just becomes a less horrifying one somehow.

But I think that that's where humor is. Completely central to one's attitude, right? [00:27:00] To sort of see that it is a joke. The situation that we have been thrown into and quite a sort of a deep joke. I think there's something really powerful in that, in that insight.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I talk to a lot of people who are overwhelmed and, and we know our.

Our little part in the work won't save the rainforests or stop climate change, but people are asking. You know, why bother? Mm-hmm. And I don't, I don't want to trivialize that feeling because it, it kind of hearkens back too to what you were saying about 20 somethings maybe not wanting to have children in this mm-hmm.

Fraught time. Mm-hmm. And I get it. And I, I thought you offered such a great perspective that the idea that things only count if they count on the vast scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude.

Oliver Burkeman: As a culture, we have this strange notion that that, that for something to matter, to be meaningful, to be worth doing, it has to have an enormous effect.

So in the context of the climate, for example, it's [00:28:00] to do with stopping the temperatures rising much more, or the context of some other sort of fight for justice. It's about achieving that justice in the context of entrepreneurialism. It's about making some products that millions of people use and it makes you vast amounts of money.

And it's a little bit arbitrary, right, that we choose that. That level at which to judge whether something was, was meaningful or not, right? If you zoom out far enough, well the world's going to end in billions of years if you zoom in close enough. We all have the feeling of doing something right and meaningful when we, you know, make dinner for our kids or.

Pick up a piece of trash and street or visit a elderly relative, a million different things. All of which it's quite easy to argue, have no significance century from now. So I'm drawn to this idea, which I sort of credit to the philosopher Ido Landau, that just seeing the arbitrariness of that criterion of meaning is quite helpful.

'cause then you can say to yourself, well, do I really want to go through my [00:29:00] life with a definition of meaning that. Either very few people or perhaps nobody, uh, is ever going to be able to, to meet. And that rules out all these things that I already have experience of being deeply meaningful. Potentially, this is not going to, uh, address the fact that it's not going to have any effect on terrible things happening to humanity in very short order.

But also it might in ways that it's. Beyond my limitations to know how that, how that works, how those ripples work, how, how any of that manifests itself. And anyway, even if it isn't gonna have that effect, like why, why conclude that it's therefore meaningless. We are here for a bit and there are sort of absorbing and meaningful and pro-social ways to spend that bit.

I mean, it's the same idea ultimately, isn't it, of like the time is coming when all my problems are outta the way. It's like. Everything I do now must [00:30:00] cash out in successful meaning in a thousand years or something. But, but why?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Accepting uncertainty we don't know

Oliver Burkeman: Right. And doing right and doing things in the midst of that uncertainty.

Right. I mean, I think it's quite a modern idea that we could even expect there to not be uncertainty before we get on with all the things that feel like worthwhile to do as. As human beings, this would've been so strange to like, like a medieval person, to be like, first of all, I've got to be sure that terrible things aren't gonna be happening in the future before I take actions and do things.

And I mean, that would've made no sense at that level of understanding and technology, and something about the age in which we live makes us think that we ought to be able to get that locked down, and then it's mm-hmm. Much more distressing that we can't.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Mm-hmm. It might be a product of all those products out there that guarantee us certainty.

Yes.

Oliver Burkeman: Right, right.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, speaking of uncertainty and not knowing about the future, what does a peaceful exit mean to you? [00:31:00] Hmm.

Oliver Burkeman: I would say it means a specific kind of completion, which is very, very much not having done all the things, got through all the ambitions, fulfilled all the obligations, but is that sense of having, at least some of the time shown up completely, the, the feeling of having, you know, within my own, built in limitations of genes and chart, uh, upbringing and everything like, have, have, have sort of shown up for it as much as I, I mean, I would also obviously.

Like to, uh, dime my sleep and all the rest of it. But I think that's the sort of looking back at life kind of, uh, a piece of it. Having sort of entered it fully, at least for some of the time.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, it certainly seems to me that you have, and it's an absolute pleasure to talk to you today.

Oliver Burkeman: I've really enjoyed it.

I mean, I've really found it meaningful.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find me on Instagram at @APeacefulExit. And you can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net. Our senior producer and editor is Katy Klein. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin.

Original music provided by Ricardo Russell, with additional music and sounds from Blue Dot Sessions. If you'd like to support our show, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does make a difference. And as always, thank you so much for listening.