Speaker 1: There are certain things that we definitely cannot change about
Speaker 1: the human situation, and yet we're incredibly prone to sort
Speaker 1: of staking our self worth on managing to change them.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 1: think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
Speaker 1: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Oliver Berkman,
Speaker 1: and I'm happy to say this is Oliver's third time
Speaker 1: on the One You Feed podcast. He's a British journalist
Speaker 1: and writer based in New York and is well known
Speaker 1: not only for his amazing books, he also wrote a
Speaker 1: popular weekly column on psychology called this column Will Change
Speaker 1: Your Life, which was printed weekly between two thousand six
Speaker 1: and two thousand twenty. Today, Oliver and Eric discussed many things,
Speaker 1: including his new book four thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.
Speaker 1: Hello Oliver, welcome to the show, or welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show. I should say thank you very much for
Speaker 1: having me back time number three. You are in a
Speaker 1: rarefied guest country at this point, there's only a few
Speaker 1: three time guests. There's only a few. Wasn't my first appearance,
Speaker 1: like near the birth of this thing. Yes, you were
Speaker 1: probably in our top ten or fifteen guests. And I
Speaker 1: was so excited when you said yes, because the title
Speaker 1: of your book the anecdote Happiness for people who hate
Speaker 1: positive thinking. I was like, I have got to talk
Speaker 1: to this guy. And so, yes, you were very early
Speaker 1: and I have always appreciated your willingness to have us on.
Speaker 1: And then you and I after that met up to
Speaker 1: have coffee in New York City one time, like within
Speaker 1: about six months after that. Oh yeah, it's all come
Speaker 1: back to me now. Yeah, I'm very tired these days
Speaker 1: since I became a father, But I do vaguely remember
Speaker 1: all of these things in one way or another. I
Speaker 1: very much remember that first introducer. Yeah. That. So we
Speaker 1: are going to be talking about your wonderful new book
Speaker 1: which is called four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals,
Speaker 1: which is a a great idea, But before we go
Speaker 1: into it, you are going to get crack number three
Speaker 1: at the wolf pair. No one knows what you said
Speaker 1: the first two times, Well something there might be a
Speaker 1: couple of might be a couple of photographic memory guests
Speaker 1: up or listeners out there are like, I know exactly
Speaker 1: what he said, but we can rest assured that the vast,
Speaker 1: vast majority of people have no idea, but we have
Speaker 1: a parable and it goes like this. There's a grandfather
Speaker 1: who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you
Speaker 1: feed so I'd like to start off by asking you
Speaker 1: what that parable means to you in your life and
Speaker 1: in the work that you do. It's such a strange parable.
Speaker 1: In some ways it strikes me because well, maybe I
Speaker 1: just mean I didn't know that I agree with it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I I feel that my journey over
Speaker 1: the last sort of I don't know, decade or more
Speaker 1: in my personal life and in my work has been
Speaker 1: all to do with trying to sort of explore and
Speaker 1: let back in kind of shadow sides and darkness and
Speaker 1: not trying to push them away. That's not the same
Speaker 1: as the question of feeding, I suppose. So I guess
Speaker 1: what I'm really thinking about right now as I sort
Speaker 1: of let that idea permeate me, is just this notion
Speaker 1: of trade offs that has become so central to my
Speaker 1: thinking about time and meaning in life, right that to
Speaker 1: do one thing is to not do a million other
Speaker 1: things with a given portion of time, or something like that.
Speaker 1: There are choices to be made, and we cause a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble for ourselves and other people, and we
Speaker 1: try to find ways of feeling like we don't have
Speaker 1: to make choices. And I guess choice is pretty fundamental
Speaker 1: to that parable. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. I
Speaker 1: think I could probably go on and on for hours,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure that would be any benefit to anybody. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that that's a great way of taking us
Speaker 1: right into one of the parts of this book, which
Speaker 1: is you call it facing finitude, right facing the fact
Speaker 1: that we have a finite amount of time. And then
Speaker 1: if we truly do face that, if we look at
Speaker 1: it head on, then we have to make some difficult choices,
Speaker 1: or we are inclined towards certain difficult choices. So that
Speaker 1: might be a great place for us to jump off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that there's a way of talking about all
Speaker 1: this stuff that sometimes it's very dramatic. It's about sort
Speaker 1: of staring death in the face and stepping into an
Speaker 1: authentic life in a way that takes a huge amount
Speaker 1: of courage and guts, and I you know, I think
Speaker 1: that's important stuff, but I'm not sure I am particularly
Speaker 1: expert at any of it. I think of this as
Speaker 1: much to do with being a very sort of ground level,
Speaker 1: day to day idea that, as I say, you know,
Speaker 1: we invest far more energy I think than we realize,
Speaker 1: and far more of our focus on trying to escape
Speaker 1: certain feelings on trying not to feel certain things. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, this is the core insight of you know,
Speaker 1: the whole tradition of psychoanalysis, right, the idea that the
Speaker 1: things we don't want to confront, our efforts to not
Speaker 1: confront them structure our lives in many ways. And I
Speaker 1: think one key way is we don't want to confront
Speaker 1: the ramifications of having finite time and what that means
Speaker 1: for how we need to live our days and make
Speaker 1: choices and prioritize, and so a lot for example, as
Speaker 1: I write in the book, you know a lot of
Speaker 1: kind of conventional productivity advice and time management advice. I
Speaker 1: think you can see it as kind of enabling this delusion,
Speaker 1: enabling this fantasy that we could be limitless. It's not
Speaker 1: really helping us make choices in our lives. It's it's
Speaker 1: sort of helping us deceive ourselves that we might not
Speaker 1: have to make those choices. So for me, it's all
Speaker 1: the question of just coming back and back and back
Speaker 1: in a very sort of as I say, ground level,
Speaker 1: day to day way to what it means to be
Speaker 1: a finite creature. You talk a lot in the book
Speaker 1: about this idea of relating to time as an instrument,
Speaker 1: to relating to time as something we have. But fairly
Speaker 1: early you also talk about this idea that it's not
Speaker 1: that we have time or we get time, but that
Speaker 1: in some sense we very much are time. Can you
Speaker 1: share a little bit more about that, right, Yeah, these
Speaker 1: are the kind of very fundamental stances that one can
Speaker 1: adopt towards time. Time is an incredibly mysterious quantity when
Speaker 1: you start to really try to focus on what it
Speaker 1: is and the natural way I think that many of
Speaker 1: us relate to it, especially in the modern world, is
Speaker 1: it's a bit like money or some physical possession. You know,
Speaker 1: it's something that you that you have and that is
Speaker 1: yours to spend, and that it therefore makes sense to
Speaker 1: use it as well as you possibly can and not
Speaker 1: to waste it and all the things that follow from
Speaker 1: that idea of the use relationship, and we have to
Speaker 1: do that with our time. I am not suggesting that
Speaker 1: it is possible or desirable to just completely give up
Speaker 1: thinking about time in those terms, but it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: account for what time really is in all its meanings,
Speaker 1: and so actually, if all you do is relate to
Speaker 1: time that way, I argue, anyway, you end up sort
Speaker 1: of constantly living only for the future, placing the whole
Speaker 1: value of life in the time that you're leading up to.
Speaker 1: You know, whatever your goals are, it's when you reach
Speaker 1: your goals. It's when you finally live in the kind
Speaker 1: of place you want to live, or have the job
Speaker 1: you want to have, or have the relationship you want
Speaker 1: to have. That's when life is suddenly going to acquire
Speaker 1: It's it's real, real meaning. And that's a sort of
Speaker 1: terrible way to live, obviously, because you're never present for
Speaker 1: life itself. And so there are these other ways of
Speaker 1: thinking about time which I think are at least as true.
Speaker 1: The idea that it's not ours to use, but that
Speaker 1: we sort of just live in it, or even as
Speaker 1: you say, you know, we live as it. It's a
Speaker 1: very odd thought to get your mind around. But this
Speaker 1: idea that sort of to exist is to exist as
Speaker 1: a little portion of time from your birth to your
Speaker 1: inevitable death. It's there in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Speaker 1: I've encountered it in some Zen writing. It makes a
Speaker 1: kind of intuitive sense, even if it's very very hard
Speaker 1: to sort of get a very precise handle on it,
Speaker 1: and it sort of changes the game because if you
Speaker 1: are time rather than have a certain portion of time
Speaker 1: to use this idea of trying to master your time,
Speaker 1: get on top of it all, it doesn't. It stops
Speaker 1: making so much sense. It starts to become much more
Speaker 1: appealing as a notion that you would just sort of
Speaker 1: think back into the reality of your time and maybe
Speaker 1: sort of drop that sense of always being in a
Speaker 1: in a struggle with it. But we are very much
Speaker 1: at the limits of language, I feel when we're when
Speaker 1: we're talking about this stuff, it's it's incredibly hard to
Speaker 1: be super precise about it. Those ideas are echoed in
Speaker 1: a fair amount of certain zen ideas, particularly some of
Speaker 1: the work Dogan did, and this idea, and you're right,
Speaker 1: it does kind of bump you up against the limits
Speaker 1: of language. More traditionally, you bring up the idea of
Speaker 1: four thousand weeks, which is about the average amount of
Speaker 1: time that the average human will have to live, the
Speaker 1: average amount of time that the average human, Well, I
Speaker 1: wonder if I could average using the word average one
Speaker 1: more time. I think that's right, that's right books for me.
Speaker 1: The gist of my question stands, let's talk about four
Speaker 1: thousand weeks. So partly I wanted to give the book
Speaker 1: a title that would grab people's attention. I think there's
Speaker 1: a risk that it grabs their attention and throws them
Speaker 1: into such a panic that they don't want to read
Speaker 1: my book, which would be a commercial, commercial error. But
Speaker 1: I think the real import of that is simply that
Speaker 1: our lives are finite, and that they are very short
Speaker 1: compared to how we might go about thinking of them. Obviously,
Speaker 1: many people get more than that number of weeks, and
Speaker 1: many people get fewer, and you can't know what side
Speaker 1: of it you'll be on, but whatever you get, it's
Speaker 1: not a high number, just sort of intuitively compared to
Speaker 1: what you might think. And if you sort of as
Speaker 1: I did, ask your friends off the top of their heads,
Speaker 1: you know, don't do any mental math. Just tell me
Speaker 1: how many weeks do you think the average human can live?
Speaker 1: They will come up with like six figure numbers, wildly
Speaker 1: off base, which I think is very natural because it
Speaker 1: does not seem like very much at all. So that's
Speaker 1: really just the starting point for an exploration of what
Speaker 1: it means to be finite. And it's really interesting to
Speaker 1: hear you say, I think you're right. That's a more
Speaker 1: conventional way of talking about time than this idea of
Speaker 1: being time. And yet they do come together somewhere, because
Speaker 1: it is somehow to do with the fact that you
Speaker 1: know fully accepting or as fully as I've been able
Speaker 1: to who knows what lies ahead of but like to
Speaker 1: somewhat fully accept that truth of your finitude is to
Speaker 1: step more deeply into that experience of like being time.
Speaker 1: It's to sort of give up this back door, unconscious
Speaker 1: fantasy that there might be a way to sort of
Speaker 1: get out of this situation, there might be a way
Speaker 1: to sort of maneuver yourself into a position where you
Speaker 1: could do everything where you weren't just existing from moment
Speaker 1: to moment with no control of what happens next, where
Speaker 1: you were sort of kind of a god over time.
Speaker 1: And the more that you sort of are able to
Speaker 1: surrender that, the more it feels like you do drop
Speaker 1: back into the reality of the moment. I don't know,
Speaker 1: We've gone very swiftly into the deepest stuff, which I like,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's fun. Yeah, yeah, fancy that. You
Speaker 1: make an interesting point, though, because in the book you
Speaker 1: talk about we're recognizing the limit of our time is
Speaker 1: important facing up to that reality, and yet you're not
Speaker 1: really advocating that what we do then is try and
Speaker 1: grab life and time by the throat and you know,
Speaker 1: suck the marrow out of every day and make every
Speaker 1: moment the most precious it can be. You're not really
Speaker 1: advocating that that is the response. No, absolutely, And I'm
Speaker 1: really glad you make that point, because I think it
Speaker 1: is so easy to go from these reflections on finitude
Speaker 1: straight into like, Okay, well, if I'm not like base
Speaker 1: jumping every weekend and you know, leaving my conventional job
Speaker 1: to do something radically strange and unconventional and all the
Speaker 1: rest of it, and I'm not really building a meaningful life,
Speaker 1: there's that confusion of meaningful with extraordinary that seems to
Speaker 1: come very quickly when you go down that route. I
Speaker 1: think in some subtle way, I didn't really quite get
Speaker 1: there in the book, but it's coming to me now.
Speaker 1: I mean, in some subtle way, that kind of overly
Speaker 1: self conscious carp a d M kind of stance towards time,
Speaker 1: I think probably is another attempt to kind of find
Speaker 1: an escape from the reality of our limitations. Right, it
Speaker 1: is an attempt to say, well, you know, at the
Speaker 1: very least I will have lived like one of the
Speaker 1: most extraordinary lives of anyone in my generation, or at
Speaker 1: the very least I will have left the kind of
Speaker 1: legacy that echoes down the centuries after I'm I'm gone,
Speaker 1: I will in some way have kind of broken the
Speaker 1: rules of the sort of non negotiable part of just
Speaker 1: being a limited human. So it's still kind of a resistance,
Speaker 1: it's still a little bit of a resistance to to
Speaker 1: where we really are. And so it is my guests,
Speaker 1: this is not research based or survey based, but it
Speaker 1: is my guests that people who spend large chunks of
Speaker 1: their lives really sort of ostentatiously trying to suck the
Speaker 1: marri out of life. In that way, it's not maybe
Speaker 1: the real central meaning of life. And by the same token,
Speaker 1: you know, we can all point to things in our
Speaker 1: own lives that we consider incredibly meaningful, things to do
Speaker 1: with family relationships, parenthood, friendship that are literally like the
Speaker 1: most universal and in a sense mundane experiences that a
Speaker 1: human being can have, and yet are totally in one
Speaker 1: way or another, very often the highlights of people's lives. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this takes us again to go kind of into the
Speaker 1: deep water, but into this idea of you call it
Speaker 1: cosmic insignificance therapy, which is such a great name. I
Speaker 1: don't know whether you are licensing therapists in this particular
Speaker 1: mode of whether it's research space, but tell us about
Speaker 1: cosmic insignificance therapy. You're giving me ideas. I need a
Speaker 1: certification program. That's what I'm going to do, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: So I just used this term to refer to these
Speaker 1: sort of surprising benefits that I think there are when
Speaker 1: it comes to building a meaningful life and experiencing life
Speaker 1: is meaningful, to really paying attention to how, yeah, how
Speaker 1: insignificant we are by by many measures. Four thousand weeks
Speaker 1: seems short, but it seems short partly and especially when
Speaker 1: placed against the timeline of the world, or the history
Speaker 1: of the world, or cosmic time. Billions of eons are
Speaker 1: stretching off in every direction, and here you are for
Speaker 1: like no time at all. It's very hard to feel
Speaker 1: like that really matters. But I think there two ways
Speaker 1: to just sort of sum up what I think is
Speaker 1: so liberating about that and not liberating in a nihilistic way.
Speaker 1: So not liberating in the sense of like nothing matters,
Speaker 1: so might as well party, but liberating in the sense that, firstly,
Speaker 1: the kinds of decisions that tend to paralyze us in
Speaker 1: life about you know, what we ought to do and
Speaker 1: whether we can risk certain choices in career and relationships
Speaker 1: and elsewhere, they've become a lot easier to do when
Speaker 1: you sort of lower the stakes in this way, when
Speaker 1: you really understand that nobody in two hundred years time
Speaker 1: one time is going to care which decision you made
Speaker 1: about a certain question, then it's actually easier to be
Speaker 1: bold and to take risks and to and to sort
Speaker 1: of find the courage that you need to make those changes.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, might as well, because the downside is
Speaker 1: not what you had imagined it was that somehow the
Speaker 1: whole future of the universe depended on whether you got
Speaker 1: this right or not. And then also, I'm borrowing here
Speaker 1: from the work of a philosopher called Hido Landau, whose
Speaker 1: work I really admire. There's also this question that it
Speaker 1: calls into question the definition of a meaningful life criteria
Speaker 1: of meaning that we're using. It shows that there's something
Speaker 1: a little bit strange about saying that the only meaningful
Speaker 1: way to spend your life is the kind of life
Speaker 1: that you know, Steve Jobs put, it leaves a dent
Speaker 1: in the universe. I think a lot of people have,
Speaker 1: for example, in creative work, they have this kind of
Speaker 1: background thought that if their work is not ultimately celebrated
Speaker 1: as some of the greatest ever produced by humanity, then
Speaker 1: they've kind of failed. And they probably also think it
Speaker 1: isn't going to be so they sort of already have failed.
Speaker 1: And none of this, All of these are very strange.
Speaker 1: Like this is to put the bar for a meaningful
Speaker 1: life at an incredibly high place. It comes up also
Speaker 1: in the environmental activism. Right if the only thing that
Speaker 1: counts is saving the planet from climate change in a
Speaker 1: sort of overall way, if then sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: helping restore some woodland or some wetlands down the street
Speaker 1: from you becomes completely meaningless. But of course it isn't
Speaker 1: completely meaningless. And of course cooking nutritious meals for your
Speaker 1: children night after night isn't a meaningless way to spend
Speaker 1: your life. These are all meaningful ways, and so this
Speaker 1: idea of cosmic and significance therapy, it suggests that maybe
Speaker 1: we need to re examine the threshold that we're applying
Speaker 1: for what counts is using life meaningfully, and that that
Speaker 1: might actually make us see that all sorts of things
Speaker 1: we are already doing a very meaningful ways to spend
Speaker 1: I think this question is a really important one, which
Speaker 1: is how do we and as I'm using the word,
Speaker 1: I'm recognizing it as an instrumentalist approach. How do we
Speaker 1: measure meaning? Because exactly what you said, if we're like, well,
Speaker 1: I want my life to have impact, that's a big
Speaker 1: word people use. I want to have impact. And I
Speaker 1: hear people all the time saying like I want to
Speaker 1: help a million people. I'm like, well why million? Why
Speaker 1: not eight? Eight four thousand or eight thousand or two?
Speaker 1: Or where is the line? Where is the line where
Speaker 1: you go, oh, this has been successful? And you talk
Speaker 1: about it in time management that even if we buy
Speaker 1: some miracle wrangle the confines of our current life under
Speaker 1: some sort of time management, we just move the goalpost
Speaker 1: by adding more in. It never ends. And I think
Speaker 1: this idea. When we start to think about meaning as
Speaker 1: something that has to hold up to some grand scale,
Speaker 1: then it gets really hard hard to figure out so
Speaker 1: I think how we are defining and thinking about meaning
Speaker 1: is so important and yet really really difficult to wrap
Speaker 1: our heads around, particularly in the light of cosmic insignificance therapy.
Speaker 1: Or you know, I spent the weekend visiting my father
Speaker 1: who's in a memory care unit, and you go and
Speaker 1: you see the number of people there and the amount
Speaker 1: of suffering that's there, and it's essentially infinite, and so, yeah,
Speaker 1: how do we think about making a meaningful life? And
Speaker 1: so how for you does cosmic insignificance therapy? How do
Speaker 1: you find turning towards it as a relief and a
Speaker 1: gift versus it feeling like a vacuum of doom? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you haven't used that term yet, that's an Oliver
Speaker 1: Berkman term right there, if I've ever heard one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two ways, both sort of each relating to the different
Speaker 1: parts of it that I was speaking about before you
Speaker 1: picked up. I think on the most important one. But firstly,
Speaker 1: maybe this is not everyone. Maybe I have sort of grandiose,
Speaker 1: narcissistic tendencies that that go beyond the norm. But for me,
Speaker 1: I can get incredibly caught up in in decision about
Speaker 1: things or anxiety about certain outcomes where my anxiety, when
Speaker 1: I examine it, really does seem to imply that I
Speaker 1: am the center of the universe and that and that
Speaker 1: terrible things are going to happen for the whole of
Speaker 1: reality if I get this decision wrong. I mean just absurd,
Speaker 1: just completely ridiculous. And so this is a very good
Speaker 1: corrective to that, because you are reminded that, like you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter on that long term scale. Honestly, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter on a on a short term scale. As
Speaker 1: a journalist, when I'm sort of late with a deadline,
Speaker 1: or even when I was writing this book and I
Speaker 1: knew that various editors and my agent was sort of
Speaker 1: quite keen that I should finish it, it's very hard
Speaker 1: not to sort of mentally picture all these people pacing
Speaker 1: their houses totally consumed with the question of what I'm
Speaker 1: doing at that moment, and it's obviously cless right. Even
Speaker 1: even within our own little social worlds are grandiosity or well,
Speaker 1: my grandiosity runs runs rampant, and so it's incredibly useful
Speaker 1: to just be reminded that, you know, you're not such
Speaker 1: a big deal. In my experience, it doesn't lead to
Speaker 1: sort of low self esteem and misery. It leads to
Speaker 1: being freer to just get on with doing the things
Speaker 1: that count that matter. And then I guess the other is, yet,
Speaker 1: as you say, right or imply, you know, you don't
Speaker 1: want a standard of meaning that says that those moments
Speaker 1: that you shared with your father were not worth doing
Speaker 1: because you didn't managed to sort of assuage the suffering
Speaker 1: of everyone in the place completely or you know, thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of other people across the world who have
Speaker 1: the same experiencing similar suffering. So in that respect, I
Speaker 1: guess it just sort of it's a reminder that not
Speaker 1: to kind of dismiss small things from my day to day,
Speaker 1: my daily routines, just just because they don't have that
Speaker 1: kind of level of grandeur to them. Measuring it is
Speaker 1: a very interesting question. I think it is ultimately has
Speaker 1: to be a sort of an intuitive thing, but I
Speaker 1: think there are ways to sort of hone that intuition
Speaker 1: and sort of questions you can ask that helped clarify
Speaker 1: I guess, whether whether something is meaningful even if it's
Speaker 1: not sort of outwardly impressive or revolutionary world changing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are such tricky questions when you get into trying
Speaker 1: to figure out, Yeah, what's meaning I'm going to jump
Speaker 1: to a completely different place here, but that somehow feels
Speaker 1: connected to me. Whether it actually is in reality, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but that place is One approach to thinking
Speaker 1: about the limited amount of time we have is to say, well,
Speaker 1: I've got to make every minute matter, right, But you
Speaker 1: also talk about the incredible importance and beauty in doing
Speaker 1: things that in essence don't matter for any other reason
Speaker 1: except doing them absolutely. I think this is another place
Speaker 1: where the pursuit of using time well, using it on
Speaker 1: the things that matter, can really trip us up, because
Speaker 1: it becomes very easy to live entirely in the mode
Speaker 1: of doing things for future benefit, for future accomplishment. It's
Speaker 1: very obvious in work projects, but it happens in leisure
Speaker 1: time too, right. It's it's very easy to sort of
Speaker 1: turn your entire leisure time into sort of meeting certain
Speaker 1: fitness goals or running in a marathon, or even just
Speaker 1: like reading your way through a certain set of certain
Speaker 1: area of literature. And then in parenting, I think it's
Speaker 1: incredibly hard to resist that belief that what you're really
Speaker 1: doing and the measure of what you're doing is only
Speaker 1: whether sort of successful adults emerged from the process of
Speaker 1: raising a child. Again in all cases, not that these
Speaker 1: things are wrong, but that they neglect the idea of
Speaker 1: value in the moment and side really influenced by the
Speaker 1: work of a philosophical cure and satire who wrote a
Speaker 1: great book called Midlife, and he has this notion of
Speaker 1: what he calls the at activity right, that the pursuit
Speaker 1: that you do for itself alone, that you never sort
Speaker 1: of get to the point where you have completed it.
Speaker 1: He gives the example, and I expand on the example
Speaker 1: in my book because it's very relevant and close to
Speaker 1: my heart. Of hiking. You don't go hiking in order
Speaker 1: to get anywhere. You don't expect to reach a point
Speaker 1: in your life. When you've done all the hiking you
Speaker 1: planned to do, you will stop at some point age
Speaker 1: or frailty or the end of your life will mean
Speaker 1: that you can't hike anymore. But it won't be because
Speaker 1: you have got through the hiking that you intended to
Speaker 1: get through. None of these things makes sense applied to
Speaker 1: going on a hike. Efficiency really doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to do a hike most efficiently, you
Speaker 1: should just stay home and never go in the first place.
Speaker 1: So it really shows that if you're somebody who finds
Speaker 1: that experience fulfilling, it must be for itself alone. It
Speaker 1: must be because it matters to you. Now, people since
Speaker 1: I published the book of pointed out that there are
Speaker 1: exceptions here, like going hiking in order to generate huge
Speaker 1: numbers of wonderful photographs to burnish your image on social media,
Speaker 1: and there's a social hiking app. I think that's just
Speaker 1: to looked specifically for people to sort of compete about
Speaker 1: the number of miles that they've walked. So you know,
Speaker 1: you can ruin anything you can you really want to.
Speaker 1: But just to get into this spirit, I think is
Speaker 1: the thing. It's not about people should go hiking. It's
Speaker 1: about is there something in your life that you do
Speaker 1: just because there's a real sense of meaning in the
Speaker 1: moments that you're doing it. I don't think our whole lives,
Speaker 1: whole days can be like that realistically, but I completely
Speaker 1: agree with you that I think it's really important to
Speaker 1: have things we do in life for no other reason
Speaker 1: except to do them. I have thankfully managed to make
Speaker 1: guitar kind of this way for me. I've managed to
Speaker 1: mostly strip the striving out of it, the desire to
Speaker 1: make something out of it. I've noticed that there's a
Speaker 1: process of getting better, of increasing mastery that feels good.
Speaker 1: But it's just that it feels good. I'm not doing
Speaker 1: it because of the end result. I'm actually doing it
Speaker 1: because the satisfaction of like, oh jeez, like I couldn't
Speaker 1: play that five minutes ago, now I can. It feels
Speaker 1: really nice. So I recognize that, and and I am
Speaker 1: one of those people who will turn any hobby into
Speaker 1: a job if you give me the chance. I have
Speaker 1: to work against it. The flip side of this, though,
Speaker 1: that I think about, though, is that there are definitely
Speaker 1: and maybe this is again me having a measuring instrumentalist
Speaker 1: type mindset to it, but there seems to be a
Speaker 1: difference to me in lowest common denominator hobbies like playing
Speaker 1: Best Fiends. They're a sponsor of the show playing Best
Speaker 1: Fiends for four hours a day versus you know, playing
Speaker 1: guitar for four hours a day. And so how do
Speaker 1: you navigate or think about navigating that, Like, Well, I
Speaker 1: want to do things just because I like doing them,
Speaker 1: but I also don't want to do things that are
Speaker 1: the equivalent of I think a guest once said, cotton
Speaker 1: candy entertainment, like, you know, it tastes sweet in the moment,
Speaker 1: but afterwards you're like, oh, that isn't so good. But
Speaker 1: that's where the attention economy drives most of us. Ye know,
Speaker 1: that's a really good distinction. I mean, I think what
Speaker 1: I want to say in response to it is that
Speaker 1: I don't think there's many activities, even of the cotton
Speaker 1: candy kind, that are never the sort of appropriate thing
Speaker 1: to be doing with your time, and that there are
Speaker 1: obviously times when you're sort of really tired and it's
Speaker 1: just a question of finding a mellow place psychologically to recharge.
Speaker 1: When those things can be totally legitimate, there are forms
Speaker 1: of them that don't actually relax you at all, and
Speaker 1: that you probably can do with sort of eliminating from
Speaker 1: life completely. But I don't think that they necessarily need
Speaker 1: to have mastery or the potential for mastery built in.
Speaker 1: I don't think they need to be necessarily socially valorized,
Speaker 1: you know, celebrated as as as good things to do.
Speaker 1: I really like, and I may have mentioned this in
Speaker 1: our previous conversation, come to think of it, because it's
Speaker 1: been so important to me. But I really like this
Speaker 1: question that James Hollis, the Union psychotherapist, talks about primarily
Speaker 1: in the context of making big life choices, but I
Speaker 1: think you can apply it in a much broader context,
Speaker 1: which is whether a given choice or direction or activity
Speaker 1: enlarges me or diminishes me. Very sort of poetic language
Speaker 1: that can feel hard to grab hold of at first,
Speaker 1: but I think that if you get a feel for that,
Speaker 1: you can almost always answer that in some way. So
Speaker 1: you can, even just on a very low level, you
Speaker 1: can see that a certain kind of idle activity on
Speaker 1: some level. It's not that you're growing towards some achievement level.
Speaker 1: It's just that it just feels like juicy and generative
Speaker 1: and growth is involved somehow. But I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: that's quite the right word, because I don't want to
Speaker 1: slip back into thinking that it's about, you know, achieving
Speaker 1: certain levels of accomplishment. It just feels like it's got
Speaker 1: some sort of forward motion in it. It doesn't feel stagnant,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel stale. It doesn't feel like it's making
Speaker 1: you slightly worse as a person or slightly eroding your soul.
Speaker 1: And there are definitely forms of, as you say, cotton
Speaker 1: candy entertainment that do have that diminishing feel to them.
Speaker 1: As I say, Hollis sort of thinks about this in
Speaker 1: a much bigger sense, I think to do with like
Speaker 1: is this job, is this relationship? Whatever? Is it enlarging
Speaker 1: me or diminishing me? But I think even on a
Speaker 1: much more fine grained level, it's a useful thing to
Speaker 1: apply to those questions. And honestly, at the end of
Speaker 1: an extremely tiring day, there are certain kind of things that,
Speaker 1: like I'm just thinking right now, like if I'm like
Speaker 1: just totally chilled out and I'm trying to relax and
Speaker 1: or want to, you know, just sort of drift off
Speaker 1: into sleep. Don't know why I'm sharing the specific example,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to anyway. There is a huge subculture
Speaker 1: on YouTube of people listening to the old radio comedy
Speaker 1: shows that Ricky Gervais and a couple of other people
Speaker 1: produced about ten fifteen years ago. Now they stopped doing
Speaker 1: them years ago. There's hours and hours of this footage
Speaker 1: and there are whole communities of people just listening to
Speaker 1: them as they fall asleep. That is cotton candy entertainment
Speaker 1: in a sense. But I love that stuff because it
Speaker 1: has the right vibe for the time when I'm doing it. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were to spend your whole day listening to
Speaker 1: fifteen year old radio comedy when you could be doing
Speaker 1: other things that were more sort of creative and generative,
Speaker 1: that would be a bad way to spend your life.
Speaker 1: But it's a pretty good way to spend a little
Speaker 1: bit of evening time. Sometimes there are times where a
Speaker 1: silly game is the best thing for me. It's just
Speaker 1: I'm done. I've got nothing left in the tank to
Speaker 1: really give much of anywhere else. And I'd like that
Speaker 1: idea of expanding or contracting me so much. When you
Speaker 1: asked that question before we went and got James Hollis
Speaker 1: to be a guest, because I was like, I gotta
Speaker 1: talk to this guy. I think the other one is
Speaker 1: there's a built in point at which I notice an
Speaker 1: activity cross a chasm, and all of a sudden it
Speaker 1: goes from being something I'm enjoying doing to something that
Speaker 1: I'm feeling slightly about. And most cotton candy entertainment has
Speaker 1: that for me, if I'm sensitive to it now. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I don't know it till afterwards. Sometimes I don't know
Speaker 1: it until I'm like, oh, I crossed that line a
Speaker 1: while ago. But if I'm sensitive to it, I can
Speaker 1: actually sort of feel it a little bit where I'm like,
Speaker 1: it just all of a sudden crosses into feeling like
Speaker 1: it would be if you were eating cotton candy, where
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you would go, oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know this has got to end now. If I'm not careful,
Speaker 1: we can you know, you can just shoot way past that.
Speaker 1: And the nature of a lot of these experiences, particularly
Speaker 1: if they are digitally delivered, they are designed to make
Speaker 1: you completely miss that point at which you know you
Speaker 1: would notice that, which I think takes us into the
Speaker 1: next area I wanted to hit in your book that
Speaker 1: I thought was really well done in as one of
Speaker 1: my absolute favorite topics, which is attention. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: there's really part of what is in the background of
Speaker 1: what we've been talking about about these cotton candy activities
Speaker 1: is that there are some clashing agendas here, right. It's
Speaker 1: it's not just that sometimes it's appropriate to play a
Speaker 1: silly game, listen to a silly bit of radio, whatever
Speaker 1: it is. It's that when you engage in the modern
Speaker 1: attention economy, with the platforms and the devices that deliver
Speaker 1: those platforms to you, You are in a certain kind
Speaker 1: of a struggle with corporate interests that want you to
Speaker 1: stay on those platforms and are willing to basically do
Speaker 1: anything to get you to stay, which means learning from
Speaker 1: your activities there, what your interests are, what makes you angry,
Speaker 1: what makes you compelled for any reason, and then sort
Speaker 1: of giving you more and more of that stuff and
Speaker 1: making it a little bit more extreme each time to
Speaker 1: keep you there and keep you hooked. So we're not
Speaker 1: even talking about what is the right decision for me
Speaker 1: about the use of my attention? Is it something intellectual
Speaker 1: and edifying or is it something sort of superficial and
Speaker 1: low value In a way we're talking about am I
Speaker 1: even making a choice? Is it really me who's making
Speaker 1: the whole choice here? Because, as you know, Tristan Harris,
Speaker 1: the tech critic, famously says, every time you go onto
Speaker 1: one of these platforms, there are a thousand people on
Speaker 1: the other side of the screen who are paid high
Speaker 1: salaries to try to keep you there. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not a fair fight. I think that is a tremendously
Speaker 1: important aspect of this whole question and really seeing what's
Speaker 1: going on there about how deeply these platforms can sort
Speaker 1: of colonize your attention even at the times when you're
Speaker 1: not actually using them, right. I mean, I know I'm
Speaker 1: not the only person who find some elves hours after
Speaker 1: seeing some Twitter exchange about something kind of mentally arguing
Speaker 1: one side or other of that argument, like while I'm
Speaker 1: in the shower or while I'm making dinner or something,
Speaker 1: and at that point I'm not staring at Twitter, but
Speaker 1: they're still They're still got me on some on some level,
Speaker 1: I guess in a way, I think my most important
Speaker 1: contribution on this topic is almost points in the opposite direction, though,
Speaker 1: which is to say that, yes, it's true that there
Speaker 1: are all these people out to sort of mine or
Speaker 1: steal our attention, but that we also need to be
Speaker 1: honest about the fact that we sort of collaborate with them.
Speaker 1: We sort of have an urge inside us to distract
Speaker 1: ourselves from the things that we think we care about
Speaker 1: the most. And that, to me is the really interesting part,
Speaker 1: because I feel like we know basically now that we
Speaker 1: have to be on our guard for the attention economy.
Speaker 1: We have to support I think significantly greater regulation of
Speaker 1: some of the biggest companies in that space, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: in my opinion. But we also have to think about
Speaker 1: what's going on in ourselves when you know, and I'm
Speaker 1: writing a chapter and it's something that really matters to me,
Speaker 1: and the topic fascinates me, and getting the book completed
Speaker 1: is a huge priority for me. And then it's somehow
Speaker 1: is more pleasurable to go and do something that I
Speaker 1: absolutely don't really want to do on a website or
Speaker 1: on a social media platform. That is the strange and
Speaker 1: important part of this equation as well. And what do
Speaker 1: you think is happening there? I mean, obviously you make
Speaker 1: the point that in order for distraction to work, we
Speaker 1: kind of have to want to be distracted to some degree.
Speaker 1: What is it you think that we're wanting to be
Speaker 1: distracted from. Let's take you and your book in that moment,
Speaker 1: you're working on a chapter, You're working on something that's
Speaker 1: important to you, everything is aligned, and yet the afternoon
Speaker 1: is spent on Twitter. What's happening there? Do you think?
Speaker 1: I think the sort of general case, and then I'll
Speaker 1: talk specifically about writing, but and my work but I
Speaker 1: think that the general case is that it's not a
Speaker 1: coincidence that the things that matter to us the most
Speaker 1: are the ones that provoke kinds of unpleasant emotions that
Speaker 1: we want to escape by and that we try to
Speaker 1: escape through distraction. They are all, in one way or another,
Speaker 1: Just to sort of return to my central theme, unpleasant
Speaker 1: emotions that come from the confrontation with one's limitations that
Speaker 1: is involved in doing things that matter. So in the
Speaker 1: case of me writing a chapter, you know, the stakes
Speaker 1: are high because this is the center of my creative
Speaker 1: life and it's my livelihood. I can't be sure that
Speaker 1: the chapter will turn out well because you know, writing
Speaker 1: is a kind of mysterious process where I'm in communication
Speaker 1: with my unconscious and I don't know what's going to
Speaker 1: happen next. I can't be sure that I've got the
Speaker 1: talent to turn the ideas that I have into something
Speaker 1: clear and understandable. I can't be sure that anyone is
Speaker 1: going to like what I do. My editor might hate
Speaker 1: it and want me to revise it. The reading public
Speaker 1: might show no interest. There's all these uncertainties in this
Speaker 1: thing that really matters to me, and all these uncertainties
Speaker 1: are to do with my lack of total control over
Speaker 1: how events in the world unfold. Some kinds of writing,
Speaker 1: it might be sort of leaving me feeling emotionally vulnerable
Speaker 1: by connecting to some issues in my past that I
Speaker 1: don't want to think about, or you know, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of another possibility. All of this is way less
Speaker 1: pleasant than just sort of numbing out online or in
Speaker 1: some other distraction. And I think the online cases especially
Speaker 1: interesting because it does have this feeling of limitlessness. Right
Speaker 1: There is a sense that you sort of leave behind
Speaker 1: your mortal limits and go like marching off through the ether.
Speaker 1: There is that phenomenological sense that like, right now, I'm
Speaker 1: not constrained by life, by reality. So I think then
Speaker 1: it begins to make a lot more sense, Like, of
Speaker 1: course we would want to not do the things that
Speaker 1: matter to us because they matter, and that makes them
Speaker 1: scary or unpleasant in a host of different ways. Right,
Speaker 1: you talk about the idea that, well, it's your core idea.
Speaker 1: There is a very down to earth kind of liberation
Speaker 1: in grasping that there are certain truths about being a
Speaker 1: limited human from which you'll never be liberated. And I
Speaker 1: would say that theme runs through this book, and it
Speaker 1: runs through the anecdote. I think you may have summed
Speaker 1: up a big part of you know, your work there
Speaker 1: in one line, right, which is you know that, yeah,
Speaker 1: there is a there is a liberation in grasping their
Speaker 1: certain truths about being a limited human that you're just
Speaker 1: not going to get away from, right right, I mean,
Speaker 1: for me, this has been a very powerful kind of
Speaker 1: angle into all sorts of different issues. Right. It's this
Speaker 1: idea that, Okay, it's definitely possible to sort of strive
Speaker 1: and to accomplish things you didn't realize what possible. There
Speaker 1: are all sorts of virtues in pushing yourself to do
Speaker 1: more and to be more. But there are certain things
Speaker 1: that we definitely cannot change about the human situation, and
Speaker 1: yet we're incredibly prone to sort of staking our self
Speaker 1: worth on managing to change them, on managing to sort of,
Speaker 1: in this case, you know, achieve a kind of mastery
Speaker 1: over time that you're never going to achieve. That time
Speaker 1: is always going to win that battle in the end.
Speaker 1: And so it's really just a sort of suggestion that
Speaker 1: we and I include myself, could like, you know, stop
Speaker 1: beating ourselves up for not being able to do things
Speaker 1: that are equivalent to making two plus two add up
Speaker 1: to five. It's not that you haven't found the right
Speaker 1: time management technique yet. It's not that you are a
Speaker 1: sort of undisciplined person and you need to find more
Speaker 1: self discipline. It's like you're trying to do something that
Speaker 1: you will definitely never do. And then there's this way
Speaker 1: of talking about it that as you will no more
Speaker 1: familiarly than me, I think runs through all sorts of
Speaker 1: but it's writing especially then this idea that the problem
Speaker 1: is trying to escape the situation. The problem is not
Speaker 1: the situation, but trying to escape the situation. And I
Speaker 1: quote Charlotte Jocko Beck at the beginning of this book
Speaker 1: saying about life in general, I think what makes it
Speaker 1: unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.
Speaker 1: This idea that there's all sorts of aspects of human experience.
Speaker 1: Whether it's not a problem that that's how things are.
Speaker 1: The problem is that we think they ought not to
Speaker 1: be that like that, and we spend our lives sort
Speaker 1: of indignantly railing against them or trying to find the
Speaker 1: escape route or the clause that lets us um not
Speaker 1: have to be subject to them, and there is no
Speaker 1: such thing, and that is the cause of a huge
Speaker 1: amount of frustration and sort of misdirected energy and attention.
Speaker 1: That's so well said and so true. You know. After
Speaker 1: leaving this memory care facility with my dad this weekend,
Speaker 1: I was I was reflecting on one of my favorite
Speaker 1: Buddhist sayings, which is the ten thousand Joys and the
Speaker 1: ten thousand sorrows. And I love that idea because it
Speaker 1: really just speaks to like, they're both they're kind of
Speaker 1: in at ten Thousand's just the Buddhist way of saying infinite, right,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just it's, you know, the biggest number
Speaker 1: they can come up with. But but you know, it's
Speaker 1: they're both there, and so it's a question of orienting
Speaker 1: towards that a sick fact, and for me, I keep
Speaker 1: sort of going, well, I just have to sort of
Speaker 1: not get stuck on one side of that, you know,
Speaker 1: not get stuck on oh it's it should all be
Speaker 1: ten thousand joys or oh it's all ten thousand sorrows, right,
Speaker 1: and just go, oh yeah, just you're going to get both.
Speaker 1: They're both going to be there. And the more that
Speaker 1: we can sort of accept that and deal with them
Speaker 1: is as gracefully as possible seems to me to be,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of your point that those are the
Speaker 1: certain truths about being a limited human. Right, Absolutely, it's dicey.
Speaker 1: It's difficult territory in a way, especially with things like
Speaker 1: example you give. Right, the implication is not I think
Speaker 1: that it's not painful to be with one's apparent in
Speaker 1: their sort of declining years. It's not that this is
Speaker 1: no big deal once you see the truth of the situation.
Speaker 1: It's that there's a very specific kind of additional suffering
Speaker 1: that comes from imagining that it could be ruled out,
Speaker 1: that the situation could be escaped from. And I don't
Speaker 1: even quite have the words to express it, but I
Speaker 1: think it's letting go of that kind of attitude that
Speaker 1: allows you to find the meaning in the other kind
Speaker 1: of pain and suffering and negativity of the situation, that
Speaker 1: it becomes more meaningful to the extent that you can
Speaker 1: sort of accept that you don't sort of have the
Speaker 1: right to be excused from it. Right That viewpoint of
Speaker 1: the ten thousand Joys and the ten thousand sorrows doesn't
Speaker 1: take away me, you know, essentially sobbing as I leave
Speaker 1: right like, it's heartbreaking. You know, that is the reality.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't take that away, But to your point,
Speaker 1: it doesn't layer on some additional level of suffering where
Speaker 1: I'm railing against It shouldn't be this way. It shouldn't
Speaker 1: be this way. I'm like, well, but it kind of is,
Speaker 1: you know. So, Yeah, I think that idea of getting
Speaker 1: to you say it slightly differently, you say, in an
Speaker 1: effective antidote to anxiety is to realize that this demand
Speaker 1: for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely
Speaker 1: never be satisfied. It's another way of sort of getting
Speaker 1: to this point of accepting that there are certain things
Speaker 1: about being human. Yeah, absolutely, that that one puts sort
Speaker 1: of puts it slightly more in the present versus future
Speaker 1: framing of sort of wanting to know that the future
Speaker 1: is going to go a certain way. You can't be
Speaker 1: given that guarantee, and you can't be given the guarantee
Speaker 1: that the present ought to be unfolding in a certain
Speaker 1: way either. And it's yeah, it's all about sort of
Speaker 1: seeing that and letting it permeate you. I suppose I'll
Speaker 1: wrap us up here with one last idea, you refer
Speaker 1: to it as being absent in the present. You write,
Speaker 1: the problem is that the effort to be present in
Speaker 1: the moment, though it seems like the exact opposite of
Speaker 1: the instrumentalist future focused mindset, is in fact just a
Speaker 1: slightly different version of it. You're so fixated on trying
Speaker 1: to make the best use of your time, in this case,
Speaker 1: not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience
Speaker 1: of life right now, then it obscures the experience itself.
Speaker 1: It was important to meet to go into this aspect
Speaker 1: of things, because if you talk and write about the
Speaker 1: perils of instrumentalizing time to the degree that you're never
Speaker 1: present in the moment itself, it's very easy to think
Speaker 1: that the solution to that is to sort of really
Speaker 1: try hard to be present in the moment. And I
Speaker 1: have never found this to work, and I don't think
Speaker 1: I'm alone. I write in the book about trying to
Speaker 1: be incredibly present while seeing the northern lights in the
Speaker 1: Arctic Circle and how this was a total disaster. You know,
Speaker 1: I wasn't present at all. I was just sitting there, thinking,
Speaker 1: standing there shivering and thinking, you know, am I am
Speaker 1: I being present enough? Like am I really am I
Speaker 1: really like getting this experience in all its fullness And
Speaker 1: the answer is no, because you're trying to do that.
Speaker 1: So I think it's worth noting that I don't think
Speaker 1: that like trying to be present in the moment is
Speaker 1: a particularly effective counter strategy to the way that we
Speaker 1: missed the moment all the time, and that instead, for
Speaker 1: me anyway, it's just been this matter of gradually coming
Speaker 1: to understand what it means to point out that it always,
Speaker 1: only ever is the moment anyway, we are sort of
Speaker 1: not separate from it. That brings us back to the
Speaker 1: idea of being time, I suppose. So it's not something
Speaker 1: that you could be present in, or could be failing
Speaker 1: to be present in, and or to try harder to
Speaker 1: be present in that just somehow that just completely this
Speaker 1: is the point, and when you glimpse the point that
Speaker 1: you've missed there, it is a little bit easier, I think,
Speaker 1: to find that you are more comfortably present in the moment.
Speaker 1: It's a paradox because yes, you already were, and even
Speaker 1: a distracted person anxiously worrying about the future is doing
Speaker 1: all of that in the present. But you can be
Speaker 1: a little bit more at peace with it all when
Speaker 1: you see that there's not really any choice to begin
Speaker 1: with anyway. Right, Well, and I think you make the
Speaker 1: point that, you know, even when we start to think
Speaker 1: about working with our attention, you know, you say, and
Speaker 1: I agree, probably the most precious thing. And even as
Speaker 1: you say, are attention is essentially what we are. It
Speaker 1: is always there. It's it's kind of this fundamental thing.
Speaker 1: And there is a point I think in trying to
Speaker 1: work with our attention skillfully, to put it on things
Speaker 1: that matter more often. But you say that when we
Speaker 1: go too far with that, we start thinking that we
Speaker 1: should be able to completely control our attention, which of
Speaker 1: course is impossible. You say, it's slightly different in the book.
Speaker 1: But the the example I often give about it is
Speaker 1: like if somebody let a firecracker off behind my head,
Speaker 1: no amount of mindfulness is going to stop me. Like
Speaker 1: paying attention to my breath is going to stop me from,
Speaker 1: you know, jerking my attention that way. It's wired into
Speaker 1: my survival circuit. It's sort of like breathing. It's both
Speaker 1: automatically controlled and it also has an element that you
Speaker 1: can actually direct to some degree. I just love the
Speaker 1: way you sort of point out like this idea of
Speaker 1: trying to colonize our attention is doomed to fail. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess all of this really is about accepting the
Speaker 1: impossibility of that kind of control, but showing up anyway
Speaker 1: to sort of be an active participant in in everything,
Speaker 1: not thinking that the alternatives are this kind of total
Speaker 1: passivity or total control, but just sort of keeping on,
Speaker 1: keeping on and doing things that are creative and important
Speaker 1: and make a difference to people and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it without them only really being valuable if they
Speaker 1: reach that level of the kind of masterial control over
Speaker 1: reality that we're never going to get. Yep. I think
Speaker 1: so much of what you talk about, and I think
Speaker 1: it's why I've always resonated with your work at points
Speaker 1: towards the middle way. It points towards a path of
Speaker 1: if you get too far to either of these extremes.
Speaker 1: If you go to the extreme of thinking you should
Speaker 1: control your attention every moment, that's not it's not going
Speaker 1: to work out well for you. And if you go
Speaker 1: to the other extreme of like screw it, I just
Speaker 1: give my attention to whatever pops up, that's not really
Speaker 1: it either. There is a middle way between those two
Speaker 1: extremes that seems to serve us best. Yeah. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: it feels that something often feels kind of inadequate about
Speaker 1: settling from middle way. Right. It feels like a lot
Speaker 1: of us, I think, have personalities that want to go
Speaker 1: all out in one direction. But but what if that's
Speaker 1: not how it is? All right, Oliver, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for taking the time to come on. It's been
Speaker 1: a lovely and pleasurable conversation. As always, the book is
Speaker 1: called four thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals and we'll
Speaker 1: have links in the show notes to the book and
Speaker 1: all your other stuff. Thank you so much, Thank you,
Speaker 1: it's been a pleasure. If what you just heard was
Speaker 1: helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to
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