Oliver Burkeman is an expert in contrarian consolation. He’s also a former columnist at The Guardian and the author of several books that offer antidotes to the excesses of self-help culture. “Excesses” here meaning the promise offered by many books and podcasts that we can learn to be wildly productive, perfectly calm, and totally on top of things at some future date, if only we follow their formulas.
Many of us are suckers for these. Yet somehow, those ideas rarely seem to cross over from fantasy to reality.
Burkeman takes the opposite approach. Rather than teasing us with techniques that promise to turn us into productivity wizards, his titles — Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and his newest, Meditations for Mortals — put the reality of our limited time front and center. (Because we’re all going to die, this focus also gives his work broad demographic appeal.)
Burkeman’s gentle reminders of our finitude add up to a bracing call to action: We may as well do that thing we’ve been waiting to do, imperfectly and now-ish, rather than continue to waste precious time pursuing a mirage of perfection.
Meditations for Mortals is structured as a four-week retreat for readers, with 28 daily reflections on this reality-based approach to life. Burkeman recently shared with us some of the central ideas of his latest book.
Q&A With Oliver Burkeman
Experience Life | What is imperfectionism?
Oliver Burkeman | Imperfectionism is my umbrella term for the approach to life that I’m trying to describe in the book — one I hope to embody myself someday. It begins with accepting our limitations.
Our time is finite. There will always be too much to do. We will never be able to know the future. We can only understand a limited amount about what’s going on in the world. I wanted a name for the idea that says, OK, these limits are our reality. Now, how do we act in it? How do we do constructive, meaningful, difference-making things in it? Can we start from our lack of control and act anyway?
EL | You suggest the idea of “getting on top of things” is mainly fantasy.
OB | There’s a pretty universal desire to get to some future point at which life is all smooth sailing. And there’s plenty of productivity advice that suggests you can someday become efficient enough to handle everything that comes your way.
Yet the universe of meaningful things is much vaster than my individual bandwidth. It’s impossible for me to ever get to everything that matters to me. Realizing this can be quite relaxing. I describe this as the liberation of realizing that it’s worse than you thought.
EL | What happens when we realize that we’ll never get everything done?
OB | If you believe that getting on top of everything is difficult but somehow possible, that’s an agonizing way to live. But if you understand that getting completely on top of things is not just difficult but impossible, that may offer a relief; it’s hard to beat yourself up for not doing something that you understand you can never do.
This frees up your energy to do a few things that really count. You become absorbed in the things that you’re doing rather than seeing them only as steppingstones to a place of ultimate control. You get to stop postponing life.
EL | What do you say to someone who’s afraid that slowing down will destroy their productivity?
OB | This notion that we’ve got to go hard at ourselves or we’ll completely slack off is not usually true. I do understand the panic in that question — the worry that you have to keep going at a breakneck pace because good results have come from it before.
If you can allow yourself to unclench a little bit, slacking off is not what happens — at least not in my experience. Not only do you continue doing things but you do them with more energy and focus. You do things better because you’re no longer trying to spread your attention over absolutely everything.
EL | How does imperfectionism address the fear of failure?
OB | What imperfectionism says to worry is this: You will certainly get life wrong. If your goal was to do something completely perfectly, or to never waste a moment or disappoint a single person, it’s too late. That ship has sailed.
When you’re trying not to be a flawed human, you hold back. But you already are a flawed human. I find that thought motivating! If I’m already imperfect, then why not do the thing? This is definitely a contrarian form of consolation, but that’s what works for me.
EL | How might imperfectionism help us make better choices?
OB | We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make decisions that don’t cause any distress. But if we can accept that such consequences are unavoidable, every difficult decision becomes a question of weighing them.
Changing the time of a meeting may annoy your colleagues, but you choose to tolerate that so you can pick up your child from school. Or you accept the near-term agony of leaving an unhappy marriage to avoid the long-term suffering of staying. It’s about asking yourself which problem you want to have. There’s no way to have zero problems.
EL | What is scruffy hospitality?
OB | The phrase comes from the Anglican priest Jack King. He and his wife loved entertaining guests, but they also had this onerous checklist of tasks to complete before they’d have anyone over. So they decided to just invite people around and say, “This is how the house is, this is what we have in our cupboards, and this is what we’ve cooked for you.”
In my experience, this might mean you slightly apologetically invite people into a house that’s messy and serve them a bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce, then find you’re more relaxed and connected than if you’d overprepared.
We put a lot of effort into maintaining our façades; sometimes that’s unavoidable. But whenever you lower them a little bit, you let people into your real life.
This is not just about dinner parties. It’s also about sharing our feelings and our failures. You’re saying that if you invite me around to your house, you don’t need to make it pristine first. And that if you’re ever feeling in a despondent mood when we hang out, you’re allowed to tell me about it.
EL | What is resonance?
OB | This comes from German social theorist Hartmut Rosa. He uses the example of a first snowfall of winter. It feels magical because it’s a gift; it isn’t something you could go out and get. It wouldn’t feel meaningful if it was a snow machine generating fake snow.
A relationship to the world that allows for resonance is, on some level, antithetical to control. We invite resonance when we aren’t trying to force life to unfold on our terms.
It’s not that all control is bad — to be completely at the mercy of your circumstances is horrifying. But you can be in a relationship with the world that’s more of a dance. You have agency and you do things, then you wait and see how the world responds.
The post The Joys of Imperfection appeared first on Experience Life.
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