Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman #
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. A few years ago, I read and was genuinely moved by Burkeman’s earlier “anti-self-help” book Four Thousand Weeks.This was at a time when I logged what books I read, but didn’t write reviews. You can find it listed in “The Books I Read in 2022”. So when I heard about this new book from Brendan Leonard’s illustrations of some chapters, I quickly ordered it from bookshop.org. The core thesis of that earlier book was a liberating one: instead of fighting to get all the things done, one has to embrace one’s unescapable limitations—primarily, timeThe title comes from the amount of time in an 80 year life.—and accept that you can’t do it all. Things fall by the way-side, but all you can do is prioritize and make incremental progress. The message was timely for me, as I was in the process of shedding a PhD-internalized form of perfectionism while on a tenure track, realizing that I could no longer optimize things but had to satisfice given the many demands of the job.I describe an academic job as “three jobs in a trenchcoat” to my students.. The apt label for this belief that Burkeman has since adopted for an email newsletter: imperfectionism.
This book continues on very similar lines as that book, in a somewhat unusual format belied by its subtitle: “Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts”. It’s a bit eye-rolly; had I not already trusted Burkeman, it might have turned me off of the book for good. The book’s divided into four seven-chapter “weeks”: Being Finite, Taking Action, Letting Go, and Showing Up. Each chapter is a short and easily-digestible chunk of advice about implementing and embracing imperfectionism. Burkeman recommends reading one per dayThe cynic in me wonders if this is genuine or a publisher’s scheme to encourage longer engagement with a relatively short book. but, given his general disposition and commitments, also encourages the reader to not let perfect be the enemy of the good and consume it however you can. In other words, a four-week sequence of meditations.This book is decidedly not a how-to guide on meditating. For me, this wound up being a hodge-podge: I started the first few days on that pace, but would then skip several days, did a few two-a-days (and a four-chapter-day to finish), and switched between my print version and a version on my phone borrowed from the library as travel and circumstance dictated. Imperfect, but good enough.
For more of a taste of the content, I’ll refer you to the afore-linked illustrations. I will simply note that the overall message that Burkeman sells continues to resonate with me and it was nice to have many of the ideas put into relatively concrete form.
One idiosyncratic observation of an at-the-time-unknown intrusion of this book into my daily life. For over 15 years now, my morning ritual has been to read updates from RSS feeds that I curate. You should do this, too. It’s a way of bringing high-quality, relevant writing to me instead of jumping into an endless stream of rage-bait thrown at me by an algorithm designed to keep me hooked. I’ve recently been trying a new RSS readerA big deal given the centrality of this ritual in my life. called Current. It’s centered on a design philosophy that treats your reading as a river to step into, as opposed to an inbox with an unread count that you feel pressure to get down to zero. The developer of Current, Terry Godier, foreshadowed this app with a very-relatable post called phantom obligation, a great coinage for a real phenomenon.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read on Day 5, “Too much information: On the art of reading and not reading”, this advice from Burkeman (emphasis in original):
Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.
I’d take a gander that Godier was specifically influenced by Burkeman here. Possibly through a blog post of his explicating this idea.Which I just found while writing this book review.
That anecdote can serve as a testament to the power of Burkeman’s ideas. Learning to let go and embrace inescapable imperfection has felt liberating, so this is one of the rare self-help books that I’m more than happy—nay, enthusiastic—to recommend. Grade: A-.