Oliver Burkeman: Embracing Limits, Finding Meaning

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. There's a sort of falling away of illusions when you see, like, seemingly no productivity technique exists out there that is going to enable me to get on top of everything. Isn't it weird that every single relationship I enter always seems to run into the same kind of problem? Like, who's the common variable in all these relationships? It feels awful.

It feels like I don't know what to do here, but it's great because you got there. And in a way, you get to a place where you've got nothing to lose, and then it's time to experiment with something different. On today's episode of the Puck, I'm joined by Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks and the Antidote. You may know him from his years writing the weekly column, This Column Will Change Your Life for The Guardian. Oliver is a gift for making us rethink how we use our time, why perfectionism weighs us down, and how embracing our limits can actually make life feel fuller.

This is a meaningful conversation, so let's get to it. Oliver Berkman, welcome to the puck. Thank you very much for having me. So before we jump in, can you just take a minute and tell our listeners a little bit about your background? And maybe also a little bit about your new book, Meditations for Mortals, and what prompted you to write the book?

Sure. So I'm a journalist and an author, British as you can tell, Lived in Brooklyn, New York for a good chunk of time, more than a decade until a few years ago, now back in the the North Of England. I've written about sort of productivity, social psychology, the science of happiness, philosophy for a long, long time in various forms. And a few years ago, I wrote a book called 4,000 weeks, which is really about kind of confronting the fact that we have finite time on the planet and finite control over that time and thinking about day to day time management from that big philosophical perspective. And then the new book Meditations for Mortals continuing in that in that sort of vein is it it's really primarily about, moving from kind of knowing how you wanna live your life to actually doing it.

And and the the sort of argument that I make there, which we can go into if you like, is that this too is very much to do with embracing our human limitations instead of constantly trying to outrun them or optimize our our way out of them or or something like that. That's the that's the overview. And I think that's a great way to start. It's a lot also to unpack because when you talk about unpacking our focus on imperfectionism and growth and all these other things, it it seems to be one of the hardest things for us to wrap our arms around is is mortality itself. Yeah.

Everyone has their own entry points into this journey, so to speak. And so how how do you wanna kinda break that down for us and explain kind of your methodology and and how it can become accessible for for those people who are struggling with perfectionism and and finding that peace of mind? Yeah. Great question. I mean, obviously, the books and the things that I write in some sense, they're about mortality because none of this would be an issue if we were immortal.

Then I think we would have other problems if we just live forever, but we can talk about that. That said, I don't really tend to write very much about death and dying. There are some amazing people who do write on that topic. I don't consider that to be something that I'm deeply experienced with or necessarily very reconciled to in my own case even. So I'm really looking at what I call finitude, which is all the different ways in which our mortality and our limitation has sort of day to day impact for us.

Right? So it's the fact that that there are twenty four hours in a day, that there are approximately four thousand weeks in an average lifespan. It's the fact that this finitude, the fact that our time is finite necessitates that we have to make tough choices about what to spend our time on and what to prioritize. We have to let things go. We have to accept that there are gonna be things that would be perfectly meaningful things to do with our time, but we are never gonna get to do because we wanna focus on other things instead.

And then I've sort of broadened that in the new book to say that all kinds of different ways in which we're trying to leap over our limitations, trying to sort of beating ourselves up because the work we produce isn't perfect or still worse, not actually even getting around to launching projects and initiatives or committing to relationships because we want to do it in a perfect way or to have perfect control over how those things unfold. And I'm sort of making the case. I think this is the important thing I wanna try to get across. Right? It's that it's not that, these limitations that we face are just a sort of sad fact that we have to resign ourselves to and say, well, okay.

It would have been nice to have a really ambitious and achieved and accomplished life, but we're gonna have to have a mediocre one instead. I'm saying specifically that getting more comfortable with our limitations in all their different varieties is the most reliable path to a a life of accomplishment and meaning. That's most obvious in the context of limited time. Right? If you can get really good at feeling and understanding what it means to have limited time, you're gonna make better choices about what you give your time and attention to.

But I think it's also true in lots of different in lots of different ways. And I guess, yeah, the the umbrella term I use for this in the new book as a as a as an outlook on life is imperfectionism. It's like, what happens if we take our limitations as a given and try to thrive and flourish in that true context that we're in? Instead of constantly finding ways to try to convince ourselves that we don't have to be the limited humans that we are. So is there a little bit of a paradox there because to the extent we don't have a lot of time, does that in a sense encourage us to try to really achieve as much as we can and rush to achieve stuff because we don't have a lot of time?

It's interesting. That is one way to take this argument. Right? You can and I've sort of, you know, I was asking for this a bit in calling a book four thousand weeks, the one before this because it has that kind of, like, urgency, stress kind of feeling to it. But I'm very much not somebody who's arguing, look, time is so precious that you have to make sure you're cramming every moment of it with, like, the most impressive things in the world or really unusual, leisure activities and traveling without stopping.

That, I think, is actually a a different way of kind of denying our limitations, that kind of very stressful attempt to, suck the most value out of the time we have. I'm really arguing instead that if you really feel your way in to what it means consciously, to what it means to be limited, to have so much less opportunity to actually do things than we can than than the things we can imagine doing, to have so much less ability to, to guarantee the con control over how things unfold when we set out or when we embark on projects and things like that. If you really let your feet yourself feel how how limited we are, the first thing you have to do is kind of go through a kind of defeat. Right? You have to sort of surrender to the fact that it's just there's just a complete mismatch between everything we might dream of doing and what we can actually do.

But actually, that defeat is the beginning of the path forward because it's once you really feel that, then the pressure is off to try to do everything or do everything perfectly. And you realize instead that what you can do is pour your finite time and attention into a into a handful of things that really count, get moving with them, start executing them instead of waiting for the perfect moment or waiting to feel completely ready. So it's that sort of transition. It's like a second order shift they might you might call it. Right?

It's not just, oh, time is precious so I'm gonna run even faster. It's time is so finite that I'm gonna give up this quest to feel infinite and I'm going to do something different instead that's actually both more productive in a meaningful sense and and more fulfilling. In order to make this transition that you're referring to, when you look at your own life and your own struggles and so forth Mhmm. It it seems to me that in order to, for sake of argument, die a thousand deaths or to actually withstand the pain of acknowledging that we are limited. Mhmm.

That there really is a emotional internal struggle that can take place. How have you experienced this in your own life? I mean, I feel like I keep on re experiencing it in different ways. So and a lot of the time and this is really what I write about a lot. A lot of the time, it's very small ways.

Right? So it's not necessarily about going through one great epiphany and then and then everything is different. One one way in which this has been very important to me is is in this the idea of patience. Right? The idea that when we are impatient, when we're trying to hurry the pace of of life, in all different kinds of ways and many reasons to believe it's getting worse and worse, We're trying to sort of exert more control over the speed of reality than we ultimately have any right to.

And a very mundane area where this comes up for a lot of people is reading. Right? It's get everywhere lots and lots of people say it's got harder and harder and harder to just sit down and and read a book. And sometimes people say they don't have a single second in the day to read a book, and maybe that's true. But a lot of the time, I think what they mean is they sit down to read and there's something really uncomfortable about the fact that reading, most kinds of reading, is just an activity that takes the time it takes.

Right? You you can't actually just decide that you're going to, race through certainly a novel and and many other kinds of of book as well. So you have to sort of surrender to an outside force, which is the the book, in order to make the most progress and get the most benefit from the reading. So you have to go through a kind of an a discomfort. Right?

You sit down, You've got half an hour spare in an otherwise very busy day. You crack open the book you've really wanted to get to. And for the first few minutes, like, it doesn't feel good at all because that very minor sense of discomfort and antsiness is on some level a confrontation with your finite control over the world. Right? It's kind of a big deal philosophically what's going on in that in that little moment of, like, this doesn't feel good.

And so learning to sort of ride out that discomfort, being willing to stay with an experience even when it feels like it's not going at the pace you feel it needs to go. That kind of small very small thing, and I'm deliberately choosing a mundane example. I could talk about bigger things if you like. But it's in those moments that finitude is sort of sinking into your skin and into your bones and you're really getting a feel for it. And it really repays it repays the effort and the willingness to sort of stay with those emotions.

In the book before last, I also did a a thing where I an exercise that was given to me by an artist story and where I went to look at a painting in a museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts for, three hours straight. So that's a more hardcore, approach to patients. But, you know, this this is one one example of that confrontation with with limit. And, yeah, as I say, a very a very mundane example. So how I mean, how does this all tie in with your interest in kind of people that are overly obsessed with being, you know, productive and and achieving and so forth?

How how does it all tie together? So I was, and to some extent, still am one of those people. Right? I I spent many, many years of my earlier adulthood, whether I knew it or not, desperately trying to find the the productivity system or the life philosophy that would, enable me to finally, like, get on top of everything, handle all the demands, never have to let anybody down, get to execute all my goals, you know. And I think it's pretty clear when you think about that and especially if you've had that experience yourself, that is a kind of a reaction against the unpleasant feeling of realizing that you're limited.

Right? You you if the person who is, like I was, constantly thinking that in another few months, they'll finally be at the place where they've they've solved it, and it's just plain sailing from now on, That's a very seductive place to be in because it's like, I'm almost free. I've almost achieved escape velocity from the human condition effectively. Of course, you never achieve it. It's always a few months in the future or one more, you know, airport bestseller that you find in the future, one more YouTube video because it can't exist in reality.

In there, in reality, you have to make tough choices. You have to sacrifice. You have to take make decisions without knowing that you won't come to regret that decision. All these kinds of horrible facts about being human. But the dream that you might get to something else is very is very powerful.

And I think, you see this all the time in the culture of sort of personal optimization and productivity. It's one of the, things that is coming up now in the conversation about artificial intelligence. There's lots of many different aspects to that, of course. But this notion that maybe we could get to a point where technology or clever productivity techniques or just massive amounts of self discipline could could get us out of this situation that we're all in as humans. And I think that when you spend your life, in that in that way, when you spend your life trying to fight reality in that way, you don't get around to the things that matter.

You get more and more stressed and busy and more and more busy with the wrong things is my my point in in brief. And how how have you come to the point where you realize that it is an illusion that you never the control is never coming and how did you experience that? Well, it's definitely an an unfolding process. I'm one of those people, I think there are many of us, who figure this out intellectually quite easily, and then it in a in a flash, and then it takes years to actually sort of live into that thing, to embody this way of being differently. But I've I've written in the past about this moment that I had sitting on a bench in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

I was on my way to my workspace early in the morning, sitting with a cup of coffee, and I was working then as a daily newspaper journalist primarily, lots and lots of deadlines. And I was even more stressed that week than usual about all the deadlines I had to meet. And I was going through that compulsive thing of, like, well, what combination of productivity techniques and canceling all my social engagements and getting up an hour early? Like, what what's the way that I could get through all the things that were on my plate in the time I felt I had to get through them by the end of that week or whatever it was? And I remember just being very vividly struck by the words like, oh, oh, it's impossible.

Right? You are none of this is ever going to work. You're never gonna get to the point where, you've got enough self discipline, clever productivity techniques, frictionless technology that's gonna get you over this hump. And the reason is because that's not what's going on there. Right?

It's not that you just haven't quite closed the gap. It's that the incoming supply of things that need doing is to all intents and purposes infinite. And so if you spend your life in this constant struggle to get on top of them all, you're not gonna succeed because that's not how infinite supplies work. And that was a big moment for me because that was the beginning, only the beginning, but it was the beginning of a process of coming up to a different understanding of what my relationship with time is. One in which my responsibility is to be present and make the wisest choices that I can and to do one thing at a time.

But where my responsibility is not to try to get my arms around infinity and can never be and only bad things arise from the from the attempt. So there are a lot of things that come to mind as you're talking about this, but whether or not you talk about not having cravings in in Buddhism and and being present, Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. In Judeo Christian, you know, practice, there's the Sabbath. There there are a lot of things. In fact, you know, the about counting your days.

Yep. There there are a lot of things out there that historically people have used as ways to kind of center themselves and try to be in the moment. What literature, what spiritual practices, what things have you adopted or modified in your own life that have helped you on this journey? Yeah. It's a good question.

I mean, I think of myself first and foremost as a journalist. So I take a very journalistic approach or you might say eclectic or magpie. Right? I just sort of take things from wherever they seem fruitful, and that can be sort of any level of highbrow or lowbrow culture, any kind of religion, whatever whatever works. But I've yeah.

I've certainly found that, sort of Eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, and Taoism are very eloquent on some aspects of this, especially the sense in which we approach life as a problem to be solved. We're always trying to get out of the reality that we're in and that the suffering that we feel arises not from being human, but from trying to kind of struggle out of that, trying to get away from the the reality that we're in. And then, also, definitely, the Judeo Christian traditions, I'm sort of from a Jewish background, but I was raised a Quaker, so I'm all a big big melange of spiritual things. But the the idea of the Sabbath there is an incredibly important one because that is the insight put quite aside from the specific theological context. You know, that is just the insight that you have to stop sometimes, not because all the work is done, but just because you have to stop.

And I think that's what's so interesting about the concept of the Sabbath. Right? It's Friday night or it's Saturday night. You stop. You do not stop because you have dominated your workload.

You just stop because rest has to be present in a human life. There has to be that at least a day of just sort of receiving the world instead of constantly trying to shape and to make it. And there's a writer called Judith Shulevitz who makes a really interesting argument about the the Sabbath in the Jewish tradition, which obviously in its orthodox forms comes with, like, hundreds of detailed rules about what you're not allowed to do, which looks kind of absurd from the outside until, as she points out, you realize that, like, this is a recognition that it's really hard to rest. Like, you're not gonna do it if someone just says chill out. You need them to say, no.

None of these things are allowed. So I think that's a really important part of it. Of course, you can also blame religion for some aspects of our predicament. I think the what gets called the Protestant work ethic or the Calvinist work ethic has sometimes been targeted as one of the reasons that we sort of feel we have to prove our worth by our productivity. But this mainly is just because until a few hundred years ago, all thought took place in the context of religious of religious traditions.

So there's good and bad in there. I I think that one of the challenges is that in a postmodern world where for a lot of reasons, people have been turned off by religion because of sometimes the way it's black and white nature, it's practice and Yeah. And the rule, so to speak, that you even refer to. And so I've always felt sometimes that, like, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We haven't, we've cut off people's access to these tools Mhmm.

That are so universally important. And and for you, like, in your own life, how how have you kind of balanced that? As you say, as a journalist, you've you've looked for these different areas and you've you've had to integrate them. For somebody that has been somewhat, you know, turned off by organized religion, how do you navigate that for somebody? It's a really good question.

I'm still sort of exploring it myself, to be honest. My sticking point I'm not a sort of atheist in the campaigning sense at all, but my sticking point with most of the religious traditions that I've been exposed to and certainly, you know, the ones I the Judeo Christian ones that I that I come from, is that they do seem to demand that I believe certain specific claims that I would be happy to believe, but I just find that I don't believe and I don't know what to do about that. I I don't think you can will yourself into that belief. So I've been much more attracted to the idea of religion as as practice, I suppose. I think there is lots and lot and one of the important things we talk about Sabbath.

Right? One of the important things there is it's not just that you got a rest, it's that everyone's doing it at the same time. And that you have the sort of peer pressure, very simply, of, the fact that, you know, you're not tempted to go shopping on a Sunday because the shops are all closed on a Sunday. Right? And there's definitely problems with that.

If we just sort of reverse time back to the days of very strong religious structures in life, that was very bad for plenty of people and there were lots of limitations on on freedom for for many groups. But the benefit there is that that synchronized nature of society makes it a lot easier, I think, to use time in a meaningful, wise, conscious way, at least within the value sets of that society. Because basically, everything worth doing with our time requires it to be synchronized with with other people's time in to some degree. And so, you know, in the obvious case, we talk a lot about loneliness and atomization, social atomization these days. There are lots of different reasons for this, but one of them is that, you know, even someone like me who has lots of autonomy over his time, it's really difficult to make a plan to meet up with someone else because they will also be on a completely different schedule.

Right? Everyone's just it's not that they don't have any time at all. It's that everyone's free time is different. It's that every you know, that our lives are sort of out of sync with each other. I think that's a one very big part.

I've drifted away from your your initial question about religion, but I think it's that practice, community, synchronized aspect of religious practice that has always really sort of moved me the most as opposed to kind of theological debates about belief. Without I mean, obviously, reading your book is is gonna really help people understand the practices. But are are there practical things that you recommend that people do that help them kind of change their internal feelings so that the ambition tends to moderate and you you you are able to find more peace and balance in leisure time? Well, this is gonna sound horribly like a sales pitch, but the fact is with the new book Meditations for Mortals, I am trying in its structure in the structure of it itself to sort of provide that that space for practice. So it's it's made up of 28 very short chapters divided into four weeks.

And the idea it's only an invitation. I can't really expect to control how people read the book, but the idea is that you might read one of those chapters each day for a month. And the point about that is that that practice itself, I think, will bring these kind of perspectives into your daily life right as it is. Right? Because I think what we need very much is ways to navigate towards a more meaningful and somewhat saner existence right in the middle of the packed schedule and the 10,000 emails in your inbox that you haven't got around to answering.

It's no good someone coming along saying, like, get all that out of the way first. And then when you have a spare month, put my wonderful productivity system into practice. That's that's a non starter. That that time is never is never coming. So there's a whole bunch of kind of techniques and practices that are, mentioned in the course of that month.

But I think the one of the really important points I'm often returning to is that we can get a bit waylaid and distracted by this idea of some new habit that we're going to inculcate, you know. Okay. What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna meditate for ten minutes every day for for forever. I'm gonna journal for twenty minutes every day. These are good things.

Right? If you're doing that, fantastic. But I think that that idea about I need new habits can often be, well, really, I think one of the psychological motives there is that we wanna feel we want to transform and we want to feel in control of the transformation. Whereas I think how real transformation often happens is that you have to sort of let go of control. And that means just being willing to do ten minutes of something that you know matters to you, like, today.

Do it today, like or unless you're listening to this really late at night, do it tomorrow. But like not to sort of turn it into a long term project of I'm gonna be a completely different person but just say like, what if I picked up the phone to that friend whose friendship I want to nurture? What if I sent that email to that person about a potential collaboration that I've been thinking about but not quite feeling ready for? What if I tried writing the first paragraph of my novel that I've been thinking about it, you know, in the shower for the last ten years? And that requires a willingness to do the thing badly.

Right? Because you're just getting started. Right? So that it's not going to work to be like, okay. From now on, I'm a completely changed person.

It's just that spirit of, like, can I do something in the direction of of more meaning? And the big irony is that although that involves a more peaceful and relaxed way of life, I'm completely convinced that in every case, you you're more productive that way. You're more productive in the way that matters because you are finding the ability to focus here and now on what matters instead of doing this thing that we do, even very successful people do. Right? Which is to think, I know what I really want to be doing with my time, but that's still a few months away and I gotta do all this stuff first.

And you can live out your whole life feeling like the real time is coming a bit later. So some people keep the Sabbath or go to church or temple or other things because, quote, God says that's what you're supposed to do. And then there are other people that come at it in a more organic way. Mhmm. You clearly are are a seeker.

You you you realize this is a path. It's it's it's not a destination. Mhmm. And you're clearly on that path. What do you think was the Mhmm.

Parting of the sea, so to speak, that put you on the path? For those people that are stuck, right, that are not seeking, that are not meditating, that absolutely believe they don't have the time to do what you're talking about. In your own life, what was it that called you, that broke through the perfectionism that allowed you to get on to this journey? I I think this happened at different times in different domains of my life. So I've I've mentioned one in the context of work sitting on that park bench, and there were other others in other context.

But it's always that sense of kind of hitting a wall or as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, you know, becoming sick of your own BS. Right? There's that moment when, like, well, what have I got to lose? This clearly isn't working. And so if somebody was feeling like, if you're feeling stuck, then by definition, you've already got sick of something.

Right? Because there are plenty of people who haven't made any changes to their lives and are just doing whatever they're doing, and they don't mind it at all. And, like, they're not in the market for this, and they haven't got a problem. But if you're already feeling that frustration that something just isn't working, and I think this is something that happens in the middle years of life to a lot of people. Right?

Ways of being, ways of approaching work and life and relationships that functioned perfectly okay and actually even very successfully in maybe your twenties or something, start to sort of run into the sand and you have the sense that, like, there's a real sort of and I mean this word in a positive sense. There's a real sort of disillusionment. Right? There's a sort of falling away of illusions when you see, like, seemingly, no productivity technique exists out there that is going to enable me to get on top of everything. Isn't it weird that every single relationship I enter always seems to run into the same kind of problem?

Like, what who's the common who's the common variable in all these these relationships? And lots of different you could you could spin that out to other to other areas of life too, I'm sure. And there's something really precious about that feeling if you can see it for what it is because, like, that is insight. It feels awful. It feels like I don't know what to do here.

But it's great because you got there. And in a way, you get to a place where you've got nothing to lose and then it's time to experiment with something different. And that makes total sense, but we live often in in kind of a rationalistic world where if you're late to a meeting, and you're driving down the street, your your tendencies to try to drive faster as opposed to reversing course and going in a different direction. Right. Right.

And some people have said, midlife crisis, some people have said, a born again experience hitting bottom. Yeah. When you're low and you're open, you're able to be vulnerable. Yeah. You know, there's there's a lot of different ways people describe it from an emotional perspective.

But I remember when I was young and I read Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now, and he's like, just, you know, click your heels like in The Wizard of Oz and be present. I mean, I I thought it was the craziest thing in the world and it was like, you know, I I had no way to access it. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, you've been able to access this other dimension where meditation creates time in a paradoxical way, and that you actually by doing less end up doing more because you focus more on effectiveness and happiness and so forth. Mhmm.

But again, for people that can't access that because they've never experienced what you're you've experienced, how do you develop the confidence to actually do the exact opposite of what everything in your body is telling you to do, which is to to just do more. Yeah. No. It's a great question. Three thoughts spring to well, two thoughts in addition to the one that, as I said, again, sound makes me sound like a terrible sales salesman, but this exact challenge informed the structure of the of the new book and it aims to sort of lead people into that.

I think two other things. One is just to find any opportunity in your day to explore what it feels like to be in the place that you're in without taking action on those thoughts. So journaling is a great example. I've known people who, like, walked through the park with a voice recognition app on their phone talking to themselves and turning it into a a journal entry. That way, Anything that enables you to just take even five, ten minutes in your day to feel that without immediately responding to those feelings and rushing off.

Now maybe when you're on late for the meeting, you're just gonna do your old thing and raise raise the meeting because that's that's like the urgency is overwhelming. But later in that day, you can sort of explore in a bodily way what it what it feels like. And then that can be very empowering because you're developing the ability to stay with these emotions instead of just immediately reacting to them. And the other thing is that any kind of action you take in this direction, any kind of action that you take in the direction of building a saner, calmer life, it can be really incremental. Right?

You know, it can be that you spend the first ten minutes of the day reading some kind of spiritual or psychological literature that that means something to you. It can mean that you spend twenty minutes a few times a week trying to write down your thoughts in a context that you might one day want to share as a piece of writing or something like that. I think there's it's really important to see that if you're feeling like the things that we're talking about here, if you're feeling that draw to, that pull to want to live sort of more, what I would say more sanely than many of us do and more presently, this doesn't need to be, in fact, it shouldn't be some grand project of self transformation that you now need to embark upon. Like, one more item on the to do list, become a completely different person. It it really is done on that very sort of moment to moment level.

The new book has a word meditations in the title. It's more meditations in the Marcus Aurelius sense than the sitting on a cushion and following your breath sense. But that kind of meditation, the formal kind, absolutely is another example of this. If you can sit down in a sort of alert position, close your eyes, and stay present with what's arising in your experience for five minutes. That's huge.

Like, most of us don't do that for one second in the course of the day. Well, when you say most of us, I mean, is that something that you struggle with? Is that something in in your typical day, for instance? I mean, what do you do? Like, presumably, when you get monkey mind or you're distracted, what do you what are your techniques that you do to kind of try to get back into that place of of, you know, being present, so to speak?

So in the yeah. This is a great question. I mean, I do. I think I've got a lot better at moving on from it. So I think it's a lot less long lasting, but I'm certainly not gonna say that I never I never get it.

And maybe Eckhart Tolle never gets, distracted and, sort of overwhelmed, but, but I certainly do. Two things spring to mind. I found I find it really useful in the context of work, and obviously what I'm mainly doing in work is sitting, writing at a computer. Is like to to make sure that, I move the position, like, to make it it's a physical and embodied experience. Right?

So if I'm feeling confused or overwhelmed by some bit of work or something like that, it's no good to sort of take a break and stay sitting in exactly the same position. I have to get out, I have to walk. Those those sort of state changes can be very important in sort of bringing recalling yourself to yourself. And I think that's frankly partly a religious insight as well. Right?

You go back sort of the history of monastic organization. Right? Getting up, changing your state, going doing something else because the bell in the monastery has rung and now it's time to go and do a a different kind of activity. The other thing I found very very helpful, I've already mentioned journaling in some ways, but is free writing practice. So what I mean by this, this has that word gets used to mean many different things.

But what I will frequently do if I'm feeling overwhelmed by things or I'm just facing a big naughty work challenge or I can't bring myself to do anything else is I will open up a text file, set a timer for either ten or twenty minutes and just write without stopping. Not very fast. This is an important confusion that comes up. Right? It's not like write as fast as I possibly can.

It's just keep moving my fingers over the keyboard whether or not I can think of anything to say about the situation that I'm in. And that is very powerful. That's a way of bringing what's going on in your unconscious and your sort of higher intentions for yourself, into conscious, awareness. So I'd recommend that as well. And what about a sense of community or or people that you practice with?

I mean, you know, one of the things that I I struggle with is that, you know, I'll have the intention of being very present, and then you're with a friend or your with your spouse, your significant other, whatever the situation or your kid. And, you know, they they're not interested in the same, you know, creating this space that you may be in. And it it seems to me at least that, again, when you're in a monastery, everybody's doing exactly the same thing. Mhmm. Yes.

How do you integrate this into the real world? Yeah. This is a great question because, yes, as you say, we think of the life of monks, for example, as very disciplined. But in certain ways, it's easier. Right?

Because you just go with the you go with the structure and you don't have to to do it yourself. I mean, I think I'll give the example of parenting specifically. I have found that this is and it's a bit of a cliche to say this, but, like, this is the absolute crucible for where these things can be practiced. And the practice is not that I need the people I spend time with to follow my rhythms and, you know, be silent when I'd like to be silent and be active when I'd like to be active. The practice is precisely that if I can sort of learn to go with the flow of the changing social context.

If I can both allow myself to be interrupted when that's the right thing, but also maintain a certain sense of agency and sometimes ask someone to come back later and interrupt me later. Finding that place between, like, well, I'm not just going to surrender to other people's agendas. But on the other hand, we're in a shared space here and I and I'm going to and I care about other people's agendas. It's a huge challenge. I mean, it's still a big challenge, but it that's exactly where, the rubber meet meets the road.

So I think it's very there's a temptation to sort of withdraw, isn't there, from from social and relational context because at least then you can pursue the things that you you really care about. Only you can't because, ultimately, all the things that we care about are involve some form of interpersonal relationship. Even if you live alone and have no kids and have never married or anything like that, your work in the world will be some kind of relationship. So I think it's that if you can if you can stay with a certain amount of presence of mind in those situations, like, that's the best practice ever. So you shouldn't feel bad that you don't get to impose your schedules and rhythms on these people you share your life with.

You should be like, oh, this is the training ground for a life of, sort of sanity and wise decision making. When we look at people that are obsessed with trying to get everything done and being productive and so forth, I mean, where where do you think that ties into culture and the fact that we live in a quote, you know, capitalistic society and we have the Protestant work ethic that's been passed down? How much of it do you think is imposed upon us by culture versus what is part of just the human condition of being ambition and wanting more and that natural tendency of the ego to want more? I mean, I'm always a bit evasive when I get asked about the sort of causal questions because I think this is just overdetermined. Right?

I think this is this is partly just humans dealing with the fact they're gonna die and wanting to escape that. It definitely is also the the logic of capitalism that, you know, needs to accelerate and to grow in order to not collapse completely. There's no possibility within the economic system that we live and work in at the moment of of a sort of healthy stasis. That stasis is, by definition, unhealthy, in the logic of capitalism. I think the sort of digital media, social media landscape in which we live creates a lot more sort of social comparison dynamics that that make the whole thing, even worse and more painful.

But then again, I think you can probably argue I've seen it argued, in fact, that maybe, you know, fear of death is at the heart of capitalism. Like, why why did we embrace this this economic system in instead of others? What then again, I'm sure that, I'm sure that fear of death is at the heart of communism in a different way as well. So there's probably no way out of it. I think the real reason that this is important is that, you know, it's important to be clear that you can't just mindset shift your way out of this completely.

If you are someone who is in a situation where you've really got to keep working incredibly hard in order to not lose your job, in order to make enough money to live the life that you feel you need to live. It's not very useful for someone to say, hey. Why don't you just give up the attempt to optimize yourself and and, and relax? What I think you can do in any situation, no matter how sort of economically fortunate or unfortunate you are, is you can you can sort of internally make a shift. So you can stop believing the falsehood that just a bit more discipline, just a bit more productivity, just a bit better selection of apps on your phone is gonna finally get you to the point where you can do everything.

You might still, given depending on your situation, have to spend some of your life at the moment doing certain things that you wish you didn't have to do with it, but you'll no longer be in this quest to sort of get through to the the perfect time in future. And And when you're no longer doing that, it enables you to look at your present day life in a in a more sober way to make some better decisions. And in some cases, right, yes, maybe to leave the work setting that you're in, maybe to leave the relationship, that you're in. All sorts of things could be necessitated by that. But the really important part is that you'll be sort of fully feeling the reality that you're actually in instead of sort of just trying to race through it to get to this alleged future moment of of perfection.

And do you think it's and again, you talk about different stages of life, you know, you refer to people in their twenties and so forth. Yeah. Is it also the kind of getting to a mindset where we, from an experiential perspective, believe that we needed some level of material success to actually achieve happiness? And that what really you're talking about is this recognition that instead of happiness being something out there Mhmm. That it actually is something that's more internal.

And that by slowing down, you're able to become less result oriented and more experientially and and able to slow things down and realize that that space between the notes, so to speak, is where the happiness is found. Yeah. I think it's a lovely way of putting it. And it's I mean, it's not necessarily slowing down. Right?

It's to do with becoming more present and finding more of the meaning in the present. And for a lot of people, that's gonna involve slowing down. But I think it's certainly in principle possible to imagine a very, very fast paced life where you are nonetheless present. It's not fast because you're racing through to some future moment. It's fast because you're enjoying the the thrill of moving moving fast.

And so, I think the the the the idea there is a powerful one. It's it's important to be able to sort of step more fully into what it is that you're doing, understanding that for a finite human, meaning has to be has to be now. You know, it has to be now at some point. Otherwise, when is it going to, occur? And maybe we should be talking about meaningfulness rather than happiness because I think there's, you know, there's good evidence that at least a certain level of income is really beneficial for leading a a life that isn't miserable.

There's pretty good evidence that are above the as you go much further up that it doesn't go on forever. Right? That, the richest people on in the world are not necessarily the the happiest at all. But you can make meaning out of wherever you are in life. Very famously, Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning shows that it can be done as a prisoner in a concentration camp if that is where you have the the profound misfortune to to end up.

And his point is not that that horrible as I take it, it's not that that horrible experience somehow helped him find meaning. It was that meaning is something we bring for the situation that we're in. And so at least in principle, you can do it anywhere. Not that I'm not very happy for the advantages I have in life, but if I didn't have some of them, that might make me less happy. It wouldn't necessarily mean that I had lost the power to make meaning out of my life.

In referring to Victor Franklin, you you came me back to I I I have read his book and I I do remember maybe mixing this up, but the story about, for instance, sharing a piece of bread with someone. You know, I think in a society where going back to wanting more, and and being productive, the sometimes just realizing that doing for others, you know, whether or not it's an act of kindness, or an act of charity, or or just witnessing somebody, and actually getting out of our own way, so to speak, and making room for another person. Mhmm. It is a way to find meaning and and find that happiness and and break that cycle. I don't I don't know what your experience is in that regard, but I I think there is something to that.

I think that's absolutely true. Definitely. One of the ways that I I there's a chapter in the new book about the idea of life tasks, which comes from Carl Jung primarily. But one of the ways that I tend to find that very resonant is thinking maybe not so much in terms of helping other people, though that's really important. But in sort of asking what asking what needs doing, asking what reality needs from you.

So it's not just a shift from serving me to serving some other individuals. It's a shift from serving me to serving reality. So it's a shift to sort of an inherently collective or universal kind of vantage point where I don't just, you know, try to make life better for me and I don't just try to make it better for a few other people that I like or something. I try to ask what does the reality that I'm in call forth from me in this moment? I'm not saying I always do this or even or even often do it.

But when I do, that is a wonderful way of sort of stepping more fully into life because you are setting aside the question of who does this benefit and and just sort of responding to that sense that it's a thing that needs doing. You you end up sort of it's less a question of time using time and more a question of allowing time to use you. I love that when I think about Shakespeare saying that, you know, all the world is a stage. I I think about how each of us are here to sing a song. We're all here to play our part And if we realize that we're not here to play somebody else's part, we're just here to play our part and do whatever is needs to get done, that we have enough time for that.

You know, if we if we're trying to do other people's part, that's a different story. But if we really focus on what we're here to do Right. And we realize it's it's not all about us. We just have Right. A part in the play.

And like you, I don't I don't do it all the time when I remind myself that everybody has has their own party, and whether or not you're the airline pilot or either the guy putting the bolt on the engine, we all have to do our part or or it doesn't end well. Right. And the wonderful thing about that is it's by definition true that you have what it takes to do your part. Right. Well, I I agree with you completely, but you know, some people that don't like religion will say that's magical thinking.

Mhmm. But you know, in Judaism, they'll say, you know, you're not given a test that you can't pass. Right. And that, you know, whatever universe we're in, we can accomplish what it is we're supposed to do. And and I I think it's an actual tourism because the reality is we can only do what we can do.

Right. So we Right. So the answer is if it's our part, then we obviously can do our part. Yeah. And this doesn't mean that life will treat you well.

This doesn't mean that you can cope with anything that happens. This doesn't mean there aren't traumas that destroy people. What it means is you at least don't need to beat yourself up for not being able to do more than you can do. Yeah. Because by definition, nobody can reasonably expect you to do more than you can do.

I love that. I'm definitely not talking about settling for less here, but I am talking about going through a kind of a defeat on the other side of which is a life of extraordinary, you know, accomplishment and meaning and hopefully a service to other people. There's an old, I quote this in the in the new book. There's a a Zen master called Jio Kenneth. She's a a rare modern western female Zen master.

She used to say that her, her method for teaching students was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. That's something that I feel, like, very close to. It's that notion, like, if we really see how futile are some of the things we spend our days trying to do in terms of transcending our liberate our limitations and doing everything, we would not beat ourselves up for this anymore. We would put that burden down and we would, as a result, be freer. When you're no longer carrying that impossible burden, you can do more stuff.

You can help more people. You can achieve more things because you're no longer fighting this this futile battle to do all the things. That's a beautiful place to end, and I appreciate the time today. I thoroughly enjoyed it, Oliver, and it was a pleasure. The POC Venture Capital and Beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors.

Rating. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.