I like to begin each year with an episode about something I’m working through more personally. And at the end of last year, the thing I needed to work through was a pretty bad case of burnout.So I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s latest book, “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.” Burkeman’s big idea, which he also explores in his best seller “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” is that the desire to be more productive, to squeeze out the most from each day, to try to feel on top of our lives, is ultimately insatiable. He argues that addressing burnout requires a shift in outlook — accepting that our time and energy are finite, and that there will always be something more to do. In other words: What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How, then, would you live?Burkeman’s book is structured as 28 short essays on this question. In this conversation, I ask him to walk me through some of them. We discuss what burnout is; what it means to accept your limitations and let go of control; the messages children absorb about productivity and work; navigating the overwhelm of information and news; and more.This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen PetersenRest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang“Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.” with Cal Newport on “The Ezra Klein Show”“The Man Who Knew Too Little” by Sam DolnickBook Recommendations:The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut RosaFully Alive by Elizabeth OldfieldDeath by Joan TollifsonThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What personal struggle does Ezra Klein discuss at the start?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. And we're back. I hope y'all had a wonderful holiday. I like to begin the show each year with an episode about something I'm thinking through personally. It's resolutions adjacent podcasting. And what was present for me as we near the end of last year was a pretty real case of burnout. I took some of December off, took a vacation.
I'm feeling more grounded now. You don't need to send me concerned emails. But that was the frame of mind I was in when I picked up Oliver Berkman's Meditations for Mortals. And the book connected for me. Berkman's big idea, which he described in his bestseller a couple years back, 4,000 Weeks, is that no productivity system anywhere will ever deliver what it is promising, a sense of control.
a feeling that you have mastered your task list in some enduring way, that you've built levees strong enough to withstand life's chaos. And so his question is really the reverse. What if rather than starting from the presumption that it can all be brought under control, you began instead from the presumption that it can't be? What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits?
How then would you live? Do I think Berkman or anyone really has the answer to that question? No. But I do think he asks good questions and he curates good questions and insights. And questions are often more useful than answers. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com. Oliver Berkman, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for inviting me.
So I Understand Your Book largely is a book about burnout. How do you define burnout and how do you think it's different than anxiety or depression?
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Chapter 2: How does Oliver Burkeman define burnout?
Wow. I mean, I think that burnout really is probably best understood as having this sort of component of a lack of meaning. This component that you're not only working incredibly hard, but the harder you work, it doesn't seem to get you any closer to the imagined moment when you're actually going to feel on top of everything and in control and like you can relax at last.
I think anxiety is a big part of that, but anxiety can obviously manifest in
so many different life domains i think this idea that i love from the german social theorist hartmut rosa about resonance the vibrancy that makes life worth living i think that is what is gone in burnout right it's that sense of working harder and harder and harder just to stay in one place and it's not even working and what's the point of it all anyway
My producer, Kristen, and I were kicking this back and forth as we prepared for this conversation. And one of the definitions we came up with, or one of the descriptions maybe we came up with, is that burnout is this persistent feeling that you don't have the energy or the resources to meet the present.
And when that feeling persists day after day after day, when the mismatch between you and the life you're living seems like a constant of the life you're living,
eventually throws you into some other state i'm curious how that resonates for you yeah that does resonate i think that um we really feel an extreme pressure from inside and from the culture and from all sorts of sources to overcome our built-in limitations you know to fit more in to the time that we have than anyone ever could to exert more control over how things unfold
because we feel that we must just to keep our heads above water in the modern world. But I say that we can't because they're built-in limitations. You know, there's always going to be more that you could meaningfully do with your time than the time you have to do it. You're never going to be able to feel confident about what's coming in the future because it's in the future, all the rest of it.
And I think sort of Throwing yourself at that wall again and again and again and never getting to that place of feeling in control is a thoroughly dispiriting and fatiguing way to live.
One response that I think can arise in people in a conversation like this, it arises in me. It arises in me sometimes when I'm reading your book and sometimes when I am talking to myself about myself is, is, oh, get the fuck over it. For most of human history, a quarter or more of infants died. Half of everybody died before they were 15. We were subsistence farmers after things got better.
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Chapter 3: What is productivity debt and how does it affect us?
Yeah, totally. I'm fascinated.
I feel like there's so much wisdom in the idea that's been so prevalent in recent years that one should praise children for their effort, at least as much as for their attainment, so that they don't get the idea that they've got to maintain a specific certain standard as a minimum for being acceptable, but that doing what they can and bringing themselves to the task is the thing that really matters.
And yet I think, I wonder if that doesn't sort of reinforce the notion that if something's worth doing, it's going to feel kind of difficult or grueling or hard in some sense.
It's interesting you bring up that wrinkle of modern parenting. But to expand on what you were just saying, there is a very influential, I would say, among wealthy parents school of thought right now. that you don't want to ever praise children for innate qualities. You don't want to say, you're smart. You're so nice. You're such a wonderful human being. You're such a bright light in this world.
You want to praise them for trying, for their growth mindset. I saw that you really worked to do something nice. You're doing such a good job trying hard at this. You're working so much. You're really applying yourself, right? What you're trying to promote or encourage or reinforce in them is the effort. And I get it, and like you, some part of me is completely repulsed.
Yeah, I mean, if we knew how, I think what we would want to do as parents, I think, it would be to guarantee that we were always just praising our children for being them, right? as opposed to either putting in the effort or as opposed to demonstrating certain innate qualities. We're taught from an early age that if it's worth doing, it should feel hard and unpleasant.
And one of the ideas I explore in this new book is how scary, in a way, it is for some of us – again, talking about me as much as anyone else –
to ask that question you know what if this thing that i'm approaching in my life might be easier than i was expecting what if what if i don't need to sort of furrow my brow and tense every muscle in my body and sort of barrel into it as if i'm headed for a fight it's it's quite subversive in a way for some of us i think to allow that possibility
You talk about something you call the three to four hour rule. What is the three to four hour rule?
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Chapter 4: How can we embrace our limitations?
This idea that you have a work period, the bell rings. When the bell rings, you put down your work and you go on to the next thing. And there's a real kind of spiritual practice in being able to psychologically as well as physically put down the thing that you're working on just because the bell rang, not because you finished everything and it's all done.
This perhaps gets to some of the philosophical shifts you're encouraging readers to make. You share an anecdote from the late British Zen master, and I hope I don't butcher this name, Hunji Ukenet, about making the burden heavier. Can you share it here?
Yeah, I love this. Hunji Ukenne was a British-born Zen master, as you say, and she used to say that her preferred approach to teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. And I'm certainly not a Zen master, but I think there is something...
really wonderful in this that sort of gives me goosebumps and that does characterize something I am hoping to try to do, which is to show that very often anyway, the path to peace of mind and peace of mind combined with being productive and functional and efficacious in the world comes not from kind of trying to
make things feel a bit better finding new ways to take on more work or to get more done to get closer and closer to that never reached point of control but really to take a good look at how unattainable that is really to feel what it means to be a finite human swimming in a
sea of infinite possibilities and infinite demands and infinite pressures and just to be like okay well maybe i can stop fighting that particular fight and have some new energy for doing the things that i actually can do that's what i understand by making the burden so heavy that you put it down
Finiteness feels like it is a very central concept for you. When I think about your previous book, 4,000 Weeks, Meditation for Mortals, mortals being right there in the title, I feel like you're writing long memento moris with pastel-colored cover jackets. They seem friendly, but the message on virtually every page is you are going to die. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I suppose a nuance that I add to that just because of how this has mattered to me in my life to date and in coming to terms with these ideas is that it feels a bit less like a focus on death and dying.
It feels a bit less like that, something that I have no particular reason to believe I am more reconciled to than anybody else, so much as it is a focus on a very specific set of things that follow. from the fact that we're going to die. The fact that our time is not unlimited. We can't be in more than one place at a time.
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Chapter 5: What is the three to four hour rule?
I think that's true. And I also think that there are dangers in sort of setting it up as something that is only worth doing if it is done completely consistently. I think that one of the things I try to do in this latest book is in the structure of it, in this idea of four weeks, short daily chapters that you might read at the pace of...
of one a day or so was specifically an intention to try to get at this issue, to try to let these ideas seep under your skin, into your bones, through coming back to them and back to them. There is a greater benefit, I think, for people in marinating in this kind of stuff. than in necessarily being taught a sort of five-point set of steps to execute.
And I think that finding a commitment mechanism is absolutely one version of it, but finding some way to just sort of be in these ideas for an extended period, there's nothing that rivals that.
You told me that in the last few years, you moved from Brooklyn to the town you grew up in in the UK. And I assume the town you grew up in, I don't know that much about where you grew up, is smaller. It sounds like it's more filled with nature from some of the things you write in the book.
How has changing the context, the environment, the culture in which your day-to-day life takes place changed you?
That's a great question. I mean, I grew up in a more sort of suburban setting and I now live in a much more rural one, but it's roughly the same part of England for sure. And I find lots of very predictable benefits to my nervous system of living in natural landscapes. That's a common experience.
There's actually one of the sort of slightly surprising things, although I shouldn't have been surprised because I had sort of explored this a little bit in 4,000 Weeks, is the sort of benefits of something that I think I would call inconvenience, ultimately. A sort of friction in life that I didn't experience in Brooklyn.
Just tiny little things like one has to think about when you're going to go and run various errands instead of hopping out to the store to buy an extra ingredient while the dinner is still boiling on the stove.
A degree to which you have to kind of, this is a famous thing about rural life, I suppose, but a degree to which you have to sort of be attentive and aware of the interests of other people because you're going to see them tomorrow and the day after and the day after and you might need them in a pinch. There's something about the environment that while it is relaxing,
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Chapter 6: How does the expectation of productivity shape our lives?
And deciding in a quite defensible way to withdraw it from things that are sort of structured in our attention economy to try to claim it in every single moment and put it somewhere that has an absolutely important role to play in making the world a better place in the future. So I kind of, you know, I wanted to make a defense of him on those grounds.
I end up making a similar defense of him in my book. And there is an extremism to the precautions he takes. Makes him look a bit like a weirdo. Probably is a bit of a weirdo. When you're going into town early in the morning wearing noise-canceling headphones so you can't hear anything.
I do think there's a... He's a sort of an avatar for something.
Exactly, yes. But that's between him and his therapist. At the same time... The thing that I always found moving about that profile is he was doing something hyper-local. And too much of our political and civic attention is now national and international. There's a concept from the political scientist Eitan Hirsch, political hobbyism.
And he makes this distinction between following and being informed about politics almost as a hobby. You're following who's up and who's down. You're having emotional relationships to it. But it's the way you engage with a sports team. You're not trying to change anything. You're just knowing a lot. Because it's a thing that you like to know about. And we give...
the bulk of our focus to the levels of politics and calamity that we have the least capacity to affect. And that has coincided with a reduction in focus on the levels that we have the most capacity to affect, local government, civic institutions. And for most people, this trade has been bad.
Bad in the sense that it's good for them to be involved locally, but it also feels good to be involved locally, right? It's a bad trade for mental health. So I don't think people should go all the way to where this guy went.
But in terms of this acting as a metaphor for what an inversion of the balance many people have come to looks like, because the truth is, in a weird way, most of us, probably listening to the show at least, are on the opposite end of it. Instead of the noise-canceling headphones...
that keep you from knowing what is going on in the world i recognize how against interest this whole riff for me is by the way you have the noise producing headphones where you are listening to someone like me or maybe me tell you about the worst things happening in the world that you can't change and and there's something in this that is um not serving us and also i think not making politics better
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Chapter 8: How can we find peace in our finite existence?
It's interesting that that last point you made on that feeling of anger being a feeling of aliveness, because it loops us back to something I was going to ask you about early in our conversation. One of my producers had sent me a note saying, look, isn't there a perverse pleasure in pushing yourself too hard? Yeah. And I read this and I was like, shit, I do feel this.
That even if you feel miserable and underslept and wildly out of balance, it's absorbing. It's a little manic. And it can be this way to block out the noise of the rest of your life. And I definitely know that when the more my life feels out of control...
the more work and throwing myself at work, which is this one place where I actually do have some control, not total, but more than I do in a lot of other things, it can be in a way the place where I feel most quiet. And so isn't there some paradoxical pleasure in this experience that we're describing as the thief of pleasure?
I think there is. I think it is a sort of rather suspect kind of pleasure when you examine it. As you hinted out there, there's a kind of an avoidance very often motivating it. And I think that's what is at the heart of a lot of workaholism. I'm not accusing you of being a workaholic necessarily, but I think it's adjacent to what you're talking about, right? The idea that when it's
uncomfortable to confront certain ways in which your life feels out of control there is a sort of sense of calm control in work that then makes it very appealing there is firstly a sense that like you're a little bit more in charge now but also the sense that it's all leading onwards and onwards to this this future moment when you're really going to have sort of mastered life and um
I think that probably is a feeling that is reinforced by professional success and therefore it gets worse in a way the more that it seems to pay off because it becomes more and more useful as a form of avoidance. There is a kind of a high or an intoxication which I guess has some parallels to kind of other forms of intoxication and what they are emotionally giving people.
I don't want to push those parallels too far maybe.
Well, and it offers the dopamine hit of completable tasks. Right. Years and years and years ago, I was an intern on a presidential campaign when I was in college. And I'd wanted to do field, which I thought was going to be being out in the field knocking on doors, but I got placed in the field headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, where I was sending out bumper stickers and yard signs, right?
Sending out the... accoutrement of field. And I didn't like it. And some days, though, I would be placed at the desk, the reception desk. And I remember I found it so pleasurable because people would call and I would route their call And then it would be job well done. You finished that. And it would just keep happening.
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