You Are Going to Die
13 min read
“The average human lifespan,” Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 mega–best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline. What he does want you to do is remind yourself, regularly, that the human life span is finite—that someday your heart will stop pumping, your neurons will stop firing, and this three-dimensional ride we call consciousness will just … end. He also wants you to know that he’s aware of how elusive those reminders can feel—how hard their meaning is to internalize.
Burkeman’s opening sentence, with its cascade of unexpected adjectives, is the prelude to his countercultural message that no one can hustle or bullet-journal or inbox-zero their way to mastering time. Such control, and the sense of completion and command it implies, is literally impossible, Burkeman argues. In fact, impossible is one of the words he uses most frequently, though it sounds oddly hopeful when he says it. He is perhaps best known for the idea that “productivity is a trap” that leaves strivers spinning in circles when they race to get ahead. In Burkeman’s telling, once you abandon the “depressingly narrow-minded affair” that is the modern discipline of time management, you can “do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.” That is, you will find that an average 80-year life span is about far more than getting stuff done.
His book is self-help for people who generally find the genre mockable, or at least unhelpful. I figured this approach was made for me—an anxious perfectionist, snobby about how-to-ism, and impatient with positive thinking. I turned out to be right. Four Thousand Weeks has had the same effect for me as snapping a rubber band on my wrist to break a bad habit: I’ve surprised myself by how often, stuck in some self-sabotaging rut, I recite parts of it in my mind.
But Burkeman’s enterprise—to free people from traditional, silver-bullet self-help while selling them his own carefully packaged counsel—is a tricky one. Burkeman himself doesn’t seem like an obvious advertisement for anti-productivity: Only three years after the success of Four Thousand Weeks, he has arrived with what he bills as a higher-efficiency follow-up, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, a 28-day “retreat of the mind.” So I couldn’t help wondering how he would align his stop-and-smell-the-roses ethos with a more streamlined, regimented how-to book. I was eager to talk with the man who has seemingly mastered the art of not mastering time.
Burkeman, atall, nearly bald 49-year-old Englishman, met me near Prospect Park in Brooklyn on a muggy summer morning, wearing navy hiking pants and bright-blue sneakers. This wasn’t quite one of his “unplanned walks,” an exercise he has promoted: Our conversational stroll had been arranged by his publicist. Still, he came across as the sort of low-key guy you’d happily chat with over a pint. Dotted with perspiration even before we set out together, he didn’t launch into credential-touting as we walked (he considers himself a mere dabbler in Zen Buddhism and the like). He earnestly copped to his own experiences as a life-hack-focused striver and where they had led him.
From 2006 until 2020, Burkeman was a serial sampler of efficiency zealots’ strategies, the kind that promise deeper focus and superior habits. He wrote about the experience once a week in a series for The Guardian titled “This Column Will Change Your Life.” An editor, aware of his interest in personal-psychology books, had suggested it, and after years of covering news for the paper, Burkeman had felt ready for, if not a life change, the chance to add a new gig.
As the wry billing of his column suggests, the degree of urgency he brought to the role of paid guinea pig wasn’t always apparent. In fact, blurring just how personally invested he was in the enterprise was part of his appeal. In 600 or so words, he briskly laid out a problem to solve; introduced a tip or mindset shift (the Pomodoro Technique, say: 25-minute bursts of work, preferably tracked by a little tomato-shaped kitchen timer); described, with more than a hint of self-deprecating humor, trying it out himself; and closed with a lesson in how this particular idea aligned, or didn’t, with what science reveals about human inclinations. As expected, the kitchen-timer trick kept him on task, blocking the tendency to “default to whatever inertia would have you do.” But it didn’t answer the larger question that so often distracted him: Is striving for focus really what we should be doing with our time?
In 2014, several years after moving to Brooklyn from England, Burkeman experienced an epiphany of sorts on a Prospect Park bench. We tried and failed to find the bench while we walked, then agreed that it didn’t matter exactly where it had happened; epiphanies, his work argues, are ephemeral anyway. Stressed and run-down, he realized that he would never “clear the decks” of adult life’s niggling responsibilities and create a smooth path forward. But instead of despairing, he felt liberated. The idea of “getting it all done” is a fantasy. No one can! Now he could begin to wean himself off that towering delusion.
Burkeman continued writing the column for six more years, though its emphasis slowly evolved. He started asking questions such as “Are you living too much in the future at the expense of now?” and positing theories like “Too many problems? Maybe coping isn’t the answer.” He hastened to tell me that he had not found “total unbroken serenity.” But he had acquired new insight, and it wasn’t what he (or I) would have predicted. “I was pretty down on those hacks to begin with, right? Because I thought the fun thing would be to take this kind of absurd world and be quite sarcastic about it. And, you know, even at the beginning, I think I understood that there was something defensive in my sarcasm.” Disdain hadn’t motivated him; discomfort had. “And it turned out that, actually, it was more of a journey from more cynicism to less cynicism, a journey towards more sincerity,” he went on. His post-epiphany disbelief in superhuman productivity remained unchanged, but vulnerability in the face of impossibly large life questions? Well, he could work with that. “With a bit of humor,” he said, “you can actually get at the serious, tender thing.”
Burkeman told me all of this on a visit from his native Yorkshire, where he returned in 2021. He and his wife, now with a young son, had moved back to the U.K. the month after Four Thousand Weeks came out—and no, he didn’t have a “my new life” testimony to recount about the transatlantic shift. He enjoys long walks on the sublime moors but doesn’t live like a monk; he lives like a guy lucky enough to be able to set his own pace (partly thanks to sales of more than half a million copies of Four Thousand Weeks, according to his publisher). He relishes his return to where he grew up “lower-upper-middle” class in a “Quaker Jewish civil-rights-movement kind of nexus,” as he put it. He is busy, but not too busy. He writes his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, twice a month, which is his way of responding to the legions of followers who fill his inbox with, yes, an impossible number of queries.
Four Thousand Weeks proved an opportune project. It was completed in the midst of the pandemic, when time was playing tricks on the at-home populace and death was distressingly ubiquitous. The book approaches time and death as phenomena we misunderstand without realizing it. Time, Burkeman observes,“became a thing that you used ”(he’s a fan of italics) back in the Industrial Revolution, but it’s not; it’s something we inhabit. And death worries us not just because it marks our end but because it epitomizes our utter lack of control. The message is philosophical but directly targeted at the daily stressors of what Burkeman terms the “laptop-toting” class: “Your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time,” he notes. “It stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed.” Standard self-help drums precisely that perspective ever deeper into us with an alluring lie. “Virtually every time management expert,” he writes, “implies that if you follow his advice, you’ll get enough of the genuinely important things done to feel at peace with time.”
His suggestion: “fully facing the reality” that you will not, in fact, get it all done—even, or especially, all the genuinely important things, whatever those are. When I repeat that idea to myself, it does seem to help—to shrink the broad horizon of possibility down to a more manageable path for me to stumble along. But that kind of profound realization, Burkeman admitted as we wandered the park, is something he cannot guarantee. That admission is part of what makes his methods so appealing—you don’t feel suckered. It is also what makes the premise feel as tenuous as your own self-discipline.
Burkeman’s chapter in Four Thousand Weeks on “the efficiency trap”—the idea that getting better at dealing with tasks only leads to more tasks—showcases his three-act approach to dispelling conventional wisdom. Here he begins by laying out the ideal level of busyness, the fantasy that beckons: Richard Scarry’s aptly named classic childhood locale of Busytown, in which nobody is idle or, notably, overwhelmed. The little postman pig and brown-bear schoolteacher “have plenty to do, but also every confidence that their tasks will fit snugly into the hours available.” Burkeman is not tsk-tsking the childishness of the vision. He’s taking note of how deep it runs in adulthood—and how often it’s dredged up: This is the same blissful balance we see presented in “day in the life” videos and snapshots on Instagram, where time unfolds in a succession of pleasant accomplishments and undistracted rest.
Act II delivers the letdown that “there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever feel ‘on top of things.’ ” That’s tough talk, but his third act is the radical part: Actively avoid quick fixes and the clear-the-decks perspective, he advises. Instead, tolerate the discomfort of knowing that nearly all the vacations you hope to take won’t come to pass, and that the house chores will go on and on (until they don’t). What he sells is not the promise of overcoming difficulties, but the unexpected comfort of relaxing into them.
Burkeman cheerfully acknowledges that repetition is vital to his message—and to the way we self-reinforce it. A favorite tweet, he told me with a hearty laugh, goes something like this: “Four Thousand Weeks is basically just Oliver Burkeman shouting You are finite; you’re going to die over and over again for 200-whatever pages. And I love it.” His belief in the power of repetition is partly what inspired him to undertake Meditations for Mortals : “Even if the advice is excellent and exactly right, that doesn’t mean it sticks,” he told me; it “doesn’t mean that you can just hear it and then go implement it.” You need what he calls a “felt realization”—something that sinks into your bones.
“I have to be beaten over the head with certain insights about life,” Burkeman said after we’d circled a portion of the park twice and found a perch that overlooked a meadow (he was desperate to make sure we were both sitting comfortably in the breeze). In Meditations for Mortals, his practical advice reveals a new take on his old message. Maybe we aren’t just afraid to die—maybe what equally intimidates are the real, unvarnished sensations of living: the fear of being unprepared, of letting a pleasant moment slip by, of facing even minor consequences for our actions. By the end of Four Thousand Weeks, he’d arrived at the realization about life that animates this new book—summed up in a favorite quote of his by the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck: “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” His solution? Develop “a taste for problems,” a readiness to say to yourself, over and over, that problems are “what life is fundamentally about.”
Before I had a copy in my hands, I feared that Meditations for Mortals would be a collection of Stoic-inspired aphorisms (Burkeman is a walking anthology of quotations, from sources as incongruous as Mitch Hedberg and Marilynne Robinson) or the sort of follow-up “workbook” that publishers introduce to squeeze more money out of a best-selling idea. It isn’t. Explaining his goal to me, Burkeman sounded slightly more mystical than his straightforward prose. “A lot of what looks like our attempts to manage our lives successfully are really attempts to hold the full intensity of that aliveness at bay.”
Designed to be a guide through this existential and temporal mire (his topics include how much news to read and why messy houses needn’t bother us), Meditations for Mortals is divided into four sections: “Being Finite,” “Taking Action,” “Letting Go,” and “Showing Up,” each of which contains seven chapters, one per day. Written with a tough-love zing, the chapters are short, five or six pages at most, and contain some of Burkeman’s best tips (such as his recommendation to work on important things “dailyish,” an idea that sounds obvious but eliminates the albatross of an overly rigorous schedule).
Burkeman’s signature combination of philosophy and practicality is what makes Meditations for Mortals at once jarring and reassuring to read. Peppered throughout the techniques he prescribes are reminders that there is no way “of mastering the situation of being a human in the twenty-first century,” and that trying to do so is an escape hatch from reality—the opposite of purposeful buckling down. In the last section, “Showing Up,” he exposes the root of contemporary malaise: Productivity culture turns life into something to “get through,” until some unspecified better moment. That moment, he writes, won’t come unless we admit that this often unpleasant, completely uncontrollable, forever-changing water is all we have to swim in.
The main aim of Meditations for Mortals is to acquaint readers with a broader perspective on what drives our mania for controlling our schedules and inboxes. We fear the present moment, the way that we are “confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything’s all right there.” I’ve felt, more times than I care to admit, that despite my heartbeat and mortgage and two walking, talking children, I’m not yet inside my life. Someday it will start, I imagine, the part of life in which I’m really engaged, really moving forward, really jolted with the electricity of having a mind and body that can interact with this wild world. I’ll leave behind this practice life for the real one.
That’s where death and life come together. If real life is always waiting in the distance, then so is death. Or at least that’s the misapplied logic of the do-it-all class, which condemns us to constantly flee not just the ache of aliveness, but also its pleasures, and the longing that holds far more meaning than any color-coded to-do list ever can.
Before we separated at the park gates and Burkeman headed off to tackle a formidable to-do list (he’s finally clearing out the family’s old Park Slope apartment, three years later), he told me that ideally, you will read a chapter of this new book with your morning coffee, and find that it “in some tiny way changes how you go about thinking about your to-read pile or the decisions you’ve got to take today.” Then again, he can’t control how you read it, or what you do with his wisdom. That’s the dilemma that will almost surely keep Oliver Burkeman busy: His counsel that life’s problems can’t really be solved only primes his audience to want more advice.
For me, the wisdom is taking hold. Right now, I’m well aware that I need to go back and start at the beginning of Meditations for Mortals again. I’m ready to feel the bracing discomfort that will come with another guided 28-day retreat of the mind. As Burkeman’s ideas seep into my bones, so—slowly—does the reality that I’m going to be bumping up against the rough edges of life every day, even every hour, until I die. The nubbiness, the initial recoil followed by a kick of recognition—yes, I’m off-balance: This is the point.
This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “You Are Going to Die.”
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supportingThe Atlantic.
