I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction. Thankfully, as readers of Oliver Burkeman’s old Guardian column already know, he’s a self-help sceptic, too. He doesn’t trade in magic bullets or revelatory hacks. Indeed, he rejects the premise that life can be somehow mastered and the implication that, until we manage get to that point, we’re still half-formed.
Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with.
Meditation for Mortals follows the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman sought to realign our relationship with time and what we might do with it. The new book is thematically similar but more snackable, which is perfect for those of us whose imperfections include attention issues. Its 28 short chapters are meant to be read daily as a month-long “retreat of the mind”, but are just as illuminating if you use a dip-in, dip-out approach.
On day five, for example, Burkeman takes on the relatively low-stakes problem of reading itself, and the pressure of a teetering bedside pile of unread books. Stop treating your to-read list as a slowly filling bucket that must be emptied as often as possible, he advises. Think of it more as “a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by”.
On day 13, we learn how many hugely successful and prodigious authors, from Dickens to Trollope, worked for no more than four hours a day. Burkeman writes: “The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instil: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.”
On day 24, Burkeman writes of the freedom and meaningful connection that can come with “scruffy hospitality”, or the confidence required not to put on a front by, for example, frantically tidying your house before guests arrive. He quotes Mary Randolph Carter, a kind of anti-Kondo clutter aesthete and the author of the Joy of Junk: “A perfectly kept house is the sign of a misspent life.” Burkeman is a keen collector and deft deployer of quotes, from sages as diverse as Saint Benedict and Somerset Maugham. Rather than meaningless maxims from some Silicon Valley mogul, we get the wisdom, for example, of Marie-Louise von Franz, a 20th-century psychologist and scholar of fairytales, who had interesting things to say about male commitment-phobes (see day 22).
Meditations for Mortals could be read as a slacker’s charter, or as rehab for burned-out high achievers. For me, it fell somewhere in between. I have been grappling with my own middle-aged productivity wobbles. It can be deeply frustrating to know how much more you could earn or achieve if you could only find another gear, or rediscover the one you seemed to zoom along in as a care-free youngster.
Burkeman’s insight – always clear-eyed and jargon-free – backs up, in a reassuring and constructive way, the other sense I have on more forgiving days (going easy on yourself is the theme of day 16): that it’s better for you and everyone around you to work with, rather than fight against, who you are now. After all, Burkeman says, quoting the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson (who gets a free pass as a tech guy because he’s both Canadian and self-aware): most highly successful people are “just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity”.
• Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman is published by Bodley Head (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
