Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to journalist and best–selling author Oliver Burkeman. 26/04/2023
This video is of a live recording of The Sacred podcast on 19 April 2023 at the UnHerd Cafe. Elizabeth Oldfield was joined by Oliver Burkeman.
Introduction
Elizabeth
While that is happening, I will introduce tonight’s guest, Oliver Burkeman, who is a journalist and an author known to many of you. He has written three major books – I want to say major in case I’ve missed any minor ones.
Oliver Burkeman
No, really only two major ones, if they’re major at all. Because the other one was a collection of columns, so I just had to like print them out.
Elizabeth
Great. The collection of columns was called “Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done”. “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking”, and most recently “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” – which I have to say is your best subtitle by a long way, which says a lot. Beautiful.
Oliver and the idea of ‘sacred’
And we have much to talk about tonight. We’re gonna characteristically go deep, but I’m gonna give Oliver a moment to warm up by asking not immediately what is sacred to him, but how he gets on with the word.
Oliver Burkeman
It sort of induces a panic attack, really. Sorry. Thank you. Hello. It’s really lovely to be here – before I talk about that. My dad put my name into Chat GPT the other day and it gave a biography, and it said that in 2021, I’d stepped away from writing to spend more time with my family. Very odd, anyway. Yeah, hmmm. Kind of, this word triggers an inferiority complex that I have about a certain kind of religious person who I feel like has figured something out about life that I haven’t figured out. One of the most straightforwardly ego–boosting responses that I get to books or to other things I’ve written is when somebody emails to say that I put something into words that they’d sort of dimly understood, but it becomes a lot clearer thanks to something that I’d written. And that’s great. It’s more than just ego–boosting, but it is ego boosting because it makes me think, like, “At least I’m somewhere on a level with other people about what they understand about life.” But I always have the suspicion that quite a few religious people… The things I’m spending all my life trying to work towards, and then finally coming up with in books, they might be just reading it and being like, “Well, yeah, that’s obvious to us.” So that’s the inferiority complex there. It’s kind of a… I don’t know what that word [sacred] means. I will try to answer the question, but I don’t know what it means is.
What is sacred to you? Oliver Burkeman’s answer
Elizabeth
We will come to that. There is no need for an inferiority complex. But having had a bit of time to sit with this slightly hefty concept, what bubbled up for you that might be sacred for you?
Oliver Burkeman
I just have to risk cliché and sounding like a book on mindfulness meditation, and say that I think it’s something like ‘reality’. It’s something like ‘the moment’, it’s being here in time, beyond the concepts that we use to try to grab hold of it or make sense of it. It’s the experience of mutually being consciousnesses, here. That sounds kind of inarticulate but I mean, I think it’s got to be that. It’s got to be. It can’t just be sort of values that you think about and aim to sort of steer your life by, it’s got to be the life underneath the concepts.
Elizabeth
I feel like there should be a ‘cliché permission–giving’. For so many people, it’s these indescribably… these concepts, the language around which is just worn out, like ‘Love’, that we can’t think of a more profound word for, but can’t get away from. And so I feel the tolerance of the discomfort around cliché is the only way that we get to talk about what’s real. The fear of not being original or not being ironic and distanced, stops us encountering reality. Where has that value kind of shown up in your life? Has it guided decisions? Or tell me a bit about how it’s played out.
Oliver Burkeman
I think it comes from a sort of long, slow process of realising that I had spent a lot of my life doing something else, right? Trying to, in some sense, get a handle on reality, rather than being it. Certainly get a handle on time. That strange neurosis was the motivation for “Four Thousand Weeks”. Just realising that you can spend your whole life trying to get to some future point at which everything is in working order, and it all feels like it’s like it’s functioning well, and you’re doing the right thing. And you’re sort of making… you’re acquitting yourself properly. And the sort of huge relaxation of the thought that, actually, it’s just this, right? It’s just this, and being here, and being here with other people. There’s like a Zen – my head is deeply in Zen at the moment. There’s a Zen teaching story. I don’t think it is a kōan, actually, though, the distinction is a little bit obscure to me. But there’s a teaching story about how a Zen master called Dongshan [Liangjie, 807 – 869], when he was a young monk leaving the monastery, asked the Master [Yunyan Tansheng, 781–841] of that monastery (I’m paraphrasing) something like, “If I should ever have to encapsulate the Master’s teaching, if I’m ever asked and I have to encapsulate the Master’s teaching in a single sentence, what should I say?” And the elderly Zen master says, “Just this is it”. And then the next line in the English translation of this is “Dongshan sighed”, and it almost moves me to tears, really. The idea of just ‘sighing back into reality’ and not needing to fight to make it something else is like, then I’m in the presence of something very, very important and bigger than my dumb thoughts.
Oliver’s childhood: Quakerism, political testimony, and intergenerational trauma
Elizabeth
Yeah. I’m going to make myself stay here before we dive into that, and ask about your childhood. I always find it helpful before we start unpacking someone’s ideas to just get a sense of their story and the things that have formed them, particularly any big ideas that you think were shaping you as you were growing up.
Oliver Burkeman
So, in sort of religious terms, in some way, I was raised as a Quaker. I don’t know how religious that really was, in my case. You can totally be an atheist and a Quaker. And it was very much you know… My experience of that was, sort of, The Guardian readership at prayer, basically. That’s my upbringing.
Elizabeth
Did you spend a lot of time in silence? You went to meetings and…?
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, you know, 15 minutes before the kids went out to do the ‘kids activities’, because that’s all you can ask of them. Alan Watts writes somewhere about going to Quaker meetings and being amazed to realise that, after a while, nobody’s meditating. They’re just like, sitting there, like, “What are you doing?” I think I probably spent quite a lot of that just worrying about things, and one things I thought I had to do, or something. But there’s something very beautiful about that whole… certainly about the kind of egalitarianism of Quakerism. Right, that always made a lot of sense to me. And I think the fact that anybody can, you know, minister as they feel moved to do. And then at the time, you know, when I was a kind of older child – adolescent or whatever – I think the sort of political and social testimony of Quakerism felt very important. The idea that you can’t have a meaningful religion without some kind of political engagement. That feels a lot more fraught now, because it feels like, you know, not enough politics in things is not our problem, right? The idea that things need to be more politicised doesn’t feel like the challenge of the moment. So now, I don’t feel particularly drawn to Quakerism these days, because I feel like I want the thing that isn’t immersion in political debate, and my brief forays into Brooklyn Friends and other Quaker meetings suggests to me that it’s mainly just talking about politics and social and cultural disputes. That’s probably very unfair, but it was my sort of experience of the handful of Sunday mornings that I that I did that. Other ideas? I’m trying to think. Explicitly or implicitly, I don’t know, I think that there’s a very important strand in my sort of psychology that comes through my father, who is Jewish, and his mother, my grandmother, who escaped Nazi Germany when she was 12, I think, and a sort of nebulous anxiety and need to feel like you are in control of planning a future that’s going to happen if that’s your, you know, adolescent trauma.
Elizabeth
Were you in anxious kid?
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I think so. I was a very anxious sort of young adult. And I think I was an anxious kid, although I don’t have clear memories of that. And I didn’t used to take any of this sort of intergenerational thing very seriously. I think partly because when something like… The Holocaust is such a huge history book–type topic, it doesn’t… it feels weird to sort of claim it as something that makes an impact on you if you’re not personally someone who went through that kind of hell. But I’ve become more open to that notion that that’s a real thing. One of the strangest emotional experiences of the last couple of years was sitting down to watch the Disney movie “Encanto” – the Lin Manuel Miranda musical about the family of gifted kids and a house that talks and acts – which has this steam about I think it’s Colombian histories about intergenerational trauma. Sitting down to watch it just like we’d watched ‘Moana’ and ‘Toy Story’ or whatever, and being completely emotionally blindsided by that film in a way that my son absolutely wasn’t and is kind of not interested at all. On a weekend, we’re like, “Let’s watch a movie”, and I’m like, “Encanto!”, and he’s like, “We’ve seen it, I don’t need to see it again.” But that there are multiple points in that movie that are just so… I was just completely shocked by the effect it had on me, and I think it is partly for that theme, so clearly brought up.
Going to Cambridge, and the terrible lesson that stress pays off
Elizabeth
And you went to comprehensive school in York, went to Cambridge to study political and social sciences. Why did you study those? If any teenager really knows…
Oliver Burkeman
It seemed like the closest fit to the things that I was interested in. Turned out it was widely considered by other people at university to be a an easy subject that you that you did because you couldn’t do harder ones. That was not how I approached it. I became incredibly stressed and I think, in hindsight, in an unnecessary way about the university work, but who knows?
Elizabeth
It wasn’t a fun time.
Oliver Burkeman
Oh, I mean, university, in some ways, was fantastic. Because I was doing student journalism, and that was just brilliant. And frequently extremely hilarious. And very sort of… a lot of camaraderie, we spent in a little office of the Varsity, the student newspaper. The work side of it, no, it was not fun. I became… I made myself ill with what I felt I needed to do and how… This is a tale as old as time, I think, especially for kids going from comprehensives to Oxbridge – not that I went to a gritty comprehensive, although I sometimes tried to pretend that that was the case. It really wasn’t. But there was enough of a ‘class thing’ there for it to sort of freak me out. And so I spent a lot of time being incredibly stressed about it, and then thinking I was going to fail miserably, and then doing, comparatively speaking, within the year really, really, really well, which is a terrible… You learn something really bad from that, which is that stress pays off. If you really, really make yourself ill with stress, you’ll get great results. Yeah. But, you know, it was a vivid experience as well, of spending multiple years scrambling for a goal, achieving the goal, more than achieving the goal, and being aware that the sort of elation of that goal achievement lasted for four days, a week. And also, I don’t want to… I think the sort of ‘social privilege’ side of going to that university has really helped me in my life. I don’t want to downplay that. But the degree result? Like absolutely never. That’s had nothing to do with my… Getting a First instead of a 2:1, that has had no effect on my life.
The self–evidence of doing philosophy and why 500 words is the ideal length
Elizabeth
I was reading your books. I went back to see if you had studied philosophy, because it feels to me that’s what you’re doing with a lot of your books. You are asking this question as old as time, which is “What is the good life? How shall we live? What is it to be a person? What do I do with this finite amount of time?” Well, you didn’t. You studied social & political science. Looking back, do you think those questions were already nagging at you, or not?
Oliver Burkeman
I think on some level, there must have been… I don’t know. Bryan Magee, you know, the philosopher–TV presenter guy who died only a year or two ago, I think, wrote a really interesting book called “Confessions of a Philosopher”. And he writes about this idea of having a memory of having, what he calls, ‘philosophical problems’. Like, lying on the grass at age five, and wondering if space goes on forever, which is nuts, or that space stops at some point, which is equally nuts, and like, not being able to fathom that. And I think maybe I did fall on that side of the divide in terms of, like, puzzling about those things from quite a young age. But it really just seems to me, like, if you have the good fortune to be able to write about – and think about – the meaning of life, why would you not? That’s the thing. It’s almost odd to see it as a question because I can’t really get myself into a position of thinking that it wouldn’t be interesting to do. And then I feel like something I figured out I could do quite early on in my sort of journalistic career was take deep, big things and write about them in a sort of, hopefully, very down–to–earth way and get some humour out of that gap, of crossing that gap. So, you know, it’s my one trick. I got to do it, you know.
Elizabeth
How did the Guardian column come about, which feels like it was the beginning of something that allowed that to become your vocation, really?
Oliver Burkeman
The sort of surface–level argument for that is that my editor at the time on in ‘Guardian features’ saw that I was reading all sorts of time–management and productivity books myself anyway, and decided to extract some content out of this. So I was just reading them anyway. And so, why not? Why not write about them? I think the thing that really hit me was that it was just a very, very good format in which to sort of explore these things without… You know, 550 words is such a great length for kind of going a couple of metres down some deep issue and then not having to sort of grapple with it in great detail. But you get to engage with it a bit, and you can get very formulaic, right? You can have a funny introduction, you can establish what the topic is, you can develop it and then you can take it in one interesting extra direction… Bam, bam, bam, bam, see? Under the word count. So, you know, I’m being silly in a way, but actually, there’s something really useful about having some kind of fixed vehicle in which to then do these kinds of things that would otherwise be endless. Like, if I tried to just sit down and write a book about those topics, I would have ended up on a park bench three decades later with like, a stack of manuscript paper, sort of talking to myself. So, it was really that combination of like the topics being potentially kind of huge, but if you don’t have a really good idea for a column by Monday lunchtime, you’re gonna have to go with a bad idea and just do it anyway. That’s such a good discipline.
Being vulnerable, imperfect, and writing about uncomfortable questions
Elizabeth
So, we’ve talked a little bit about your early life. What Oliver and I have just talked about is basically all that is publicly available about you (ask ChatGPT – a big scandal’s coming!). And as I’ve been reading a lot of your work, the thing that really stands out is how you are writing about very, very deep subjects, almost smuggled under subjects that seem easier to tolerate, like procrastination, or time–management. And you’re doing it with a very light touch, beautiful humour, but without giving a lot of yourself away. And a lot of other writers would have approached it differently. One of the lines that stood out in “Four Thousand Weeks” was… you mentioned something very light about, I think, anxiety and said, “Don’t worry, I won’t be dwelling here on my particular thing.” You can feel that… What is that, Oliver? What is in you that feels like backing away from how these things are really deeply at work in you is not appropriate, or you’re not comfortable with it? Question.
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I mean, I don’t have any consciousness of hiding stuff, of holding back from talking about things that are going on in me or with me, and then sort of keeping them from the audience. I do think that I’m writing for an audience who might be like me, in that respect. I’ll be like, a little bit wary of just diving into some very, very ‘California therapeutic’ kind of writing where it’s all sort of… You’re not accusing me of being dishonest, but it feels to me like being sort of more honest, in a way, about that discomfort and making that be there on the page. But I don’t know. It is just what comes naturally. I think there’s a good tension between that kind of attitude, and then going deep into these things. But I could also just be like, really repressed. And no, no, seriously, it’s very kind of you to shake your head, but I think these books and the writing that I do is a personal therapeutic thing. I am definitely sort of grappling with stuff and trying to come to terms with it in myself. And yeah, I’m always a little bit worried that people – not only religious people, that’s specifically one constituency – but just more have come to terms with these things much more in themselves. And it’s just like, “Ooh, well done. He’s almost got there. Well done.” You know, that sort of thing…
Elizabeth
That sounds deeply patronising and annoying.
Oliver Burkeman
Well, yeah, but this is an imaginary person in my head. You’ve got to understand.
Elizabeth
We all have the cast of them. Partly, my question is a kind of a gender question, in that many of your fans are men, and it feels like you’re doing this… Sometimes, reading, it felt like if you had been born 100 years earlier, you would have been a minister, or more straightforwardly a philosopher or… And the desperation of many of us, but I think particularly men, for spaces where they are allowed to think about meaning and belonging, they’re really missing and they find it in your books. And it’s very charming. You’re not becoming a Jordan Peterson – very clearly. Because that’s the other approach, right? To find that there’s an audience for accumulating wisdom, and synthesising it, and offering it, which you’re both doing. And you can go down the ‘guru’ route. But there’s a fear of that in you. Do you think it’s because of spending so much time with positivity people?
Oliver Burkeman
I mean, I don’t think any of it is conscious. I’m sort of stepping outside myself and trying to psychoanalyse myself here. Maybe this is just defensive, but I find myself wanting to stick up for this way of approaching those issues, right? I think that I am not sitting there, saying like, “I’m going to do this in a way that feels safe for other repressed British men to engage with these issues.” But that may be one of the effects. I think it acknowledges the vulnerability around these things. And I don’t think of myself as approaching them and then getting too close to it and running away. I think of myself as approaching it, acknowledging that it brings up a whole lot of this stuff, and that there’s something embarrassing or ‘un–British’, or kind of overly earnest about it, but going there anyway. Now, that’s not for me to say that I that I managed to go there, anyway. You may feel that I don’t.
Elizabeth
No, I find it very beautiful and interesting. And I think often the way people write about these things in public, and particularly women, there’s potentially pressure to be to confessional. And navigating that line that the most particular is the most universal, and how much we share of ourselves, and vulnerability, which comes up a lot in “Four Thousand Weeks”. Almost everything that you’re doing is leaving me very thought–provoked in a very beautiful way. So it was a question, not a critique.
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, no, but I’m really interested in it, because I know that it’s there. And I mean, maybe I would be interested in it, because it’s all about me. But the thing that I have found over and over again, is that the North Star, whatever that I should follow, is like writing about how things really do actually feel from my point of view today. And when I write sort of email newsletters, where I sort of talked about how I struggle with some aspects of something in daily life, there’s always like a whole bunch of people replying with, like, shock and surprise that I have bad days or whatever. And I’m like, “It’s wild. I feel like I talk about it all the time.” I’m actually like ‘the imperfectionist’ and build it all around the idea of not knowing exactly what I’m doing, or how to live life. So, I think there’s something really powerful in sort of not feeling like you have to pretend to be more evolved, or realised, or enlightened, or whatever the new “r” . And so, I take that to be just what’s actually going on inside my head, that coming towards and going away from topics.
Anti–positivity and how hitting the bottom is liberating
Elizabeth
Yeah, it’s remarkable how persistent the lie is in all of us, isn’t it, that everyone else has it together and we don’t? I’m constantly surprised that everyone is struggling. Tell me about “The Antidote” and particularly, this kind of “via negativa” sense. What was the thread of turning away from positivity towards something a bit more complex?
Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, so I don’t think I necessarily saw that so clearly at the time. But at the time, what I was trying to do in that book was to make the argument that, you know, there’s a certain kind of positive thinking that nobody needs telling – almost nobody needs telling. It’s kind of absurd, and obviously doesn’t work and is kind of something that we’ve all laughed at, especially British people laughing at a certain kind of American positivity for a long time. But what I was exploring was the idea that, actually, one level down, there’s something in that a positivity approach that actually we do all subscribe to, and that does lead us astray. That the idea that ultimately, you know, focusing on the positive, and seeking happiness as an endpoint, and setting inspiring goals and chasing after them: all of these things, they do really deeply sort of govern what a lot of us do, even if we would never be seen at a motivational seminar, like the one I went to in, in Texas for that book. And I think, you know, it wasn’t a question of me. As ever, it’s the book of advice that I need to hear. And I think that the idea there, is just that actually allowing in the negative side of things, and being with anxiety, and sadness, and failure, and all these things, is the way to live with them, and to some extent to sort of transcend them as opposed to trying to get rid of them from your life and sort of eradicate them. I think, as I move on in writing and thinking about stuff, I feel like the sort of governing idea here that was sort of trying to get out there, and that has become a bit clearer to me recently, is that there is this incredible liberation in seeing that the problems that we have in life are kind of worse than we think. So, like, in the very simple example of busyness that I talked about in the book, right? If you think that it’s really, really hard to make time for all the things on your to–do list, you will torment yourself forever trying to find ways to do it. If you see that it’s actually completely impossible to make time for everything in your to do list, then you have hit the ground. And at that point, you can sort of stand up and start building a meaningful life. There is the thing – I’m sorry, I’ve said it a lot of times, but I do want to throw it in because it seems like it really gets this. There’s a British–born Zen teacher Jiyu–Kennett, who said that her style of 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 think there’s something incredibly deep in that. In this notion that, if you can really see exactly how finite we are, exactly how reliant on each other we are, exactly what a mess we’re in in all sorts of ways – that’s freeing because then you stop. You finally give up trying to believe there might be an out. And then you can turn to where you actually are, and be, be here and do this. Yeah.
Overcoming the fear of death and the lethal force of pride
Elizabeth
We spoke last week, and I’d read “The Antidote”, and “Four Thousand Weeks” kind of back to back. And it was really interesting to do that, because they were written, you know, several years apart. But what I said was, it reads as this deepening spiral of meaning, and the themes are so interconnected. And the word that comes up again and again is “surrender”. Surrender to our limits, surrender to the fact we are not and never shall be in control of our lives. Surrender to discomfort, surrender to suffering, surrender to our interconnectedness, and our independence. Surrender to the complexity of our notion of the self and how unstable it is. As someone who is a Christian, it was a beautiful and life–giving journey that you took me on. Not in a, “Of course, Oliver. Here, let me give you a Bible.” But in the sense of, how much of this wisdom, how much of this story of interdependence, and our need for grace, and our limits, and our fragility is there in these great religious traditions, and a sadness about how inaccessible they are to people. And it left me with this, “Where has this other story come from?”, you know? I’d love you to just speak a little bit to that – the story that you’re trying to create an antidote to in both books, I think – of kind of the superhuman self. Where has that come from in us? Why do we start off at least wanting to believe it?
Oliver Burkeman
Wow, that’s such a good question.
Elizabeth
It was very meandering question.
Oliver Burkeman
No, no, it’s a great question. And, I mean, I don’t have an answer, but I’ll certainly say some words before handing back over to you and asking you some questions about Christianity. I mean, something I was consciously evasive about in “Four Thousand Weeks” was causal chains here, right? You could set out to say that everything that’s wrong with our feelings about time is capitalism’s fault. You can set out to say that capitalism is a symptom of deeper things, or technology is. There’s a big sort of industrialisation and technology piece. There’s evolutionary psychology, always waiting in the wings to step in and say “Ah, this is the explanation for everything.” I just sort of end at the point of like, we are afraid of the fact that we die, and that we are somewhat uniquely material beings with the deeply finite material beings with the conscious capacity to envision, to understand that we’re going to die, and to envision infinity and to envision the possibility of escape from our finitude. And so, this creates a sort of insurmountable thing that we’re always trying to surmount by, if not literally with sort of transhumanist experiments in Silicon Valley, then at another sort of conceptual level by attaining a kind of control over our lives that would be tantamount to stepping outside of the finite stream. And so, you can either do that by imagining that you’re going to live forever, or you can do it by imagining that you’re going to get everything done that you need to get done by the end of next week. Right? They’re both different routes to not being constrained by finitude. And I kind of think probably, fear of death is where that stops. And I think there’s a more and more… I think the argument that capitalism at its worst excesses is a symptom of the fear of death makes more sense to me than that all of this comes from the economic level first. What do you think?
Elizabeth
Yes, we did put “in conversation with”, which is… So, I am writing and thinking a lot about pride and what pride is, because the way we use it now has moved quite a long way. And we generally use it as a positive. And there’s good reasons for that, you know: black pride, the “I am proud of you” that we say to someone that we love… But throughout the history of my tradition, theologians have talked about pride as something deadly, as something that separates us from each other, and from God and our full humanity. And reading your book helped crystallise – I think that’s the language I would put to the problem that you’re so wisely and kindly going after – Hope that we are God in some way. Our desire not to need help, not to need others, not to be woundable, not to be vulnerable. And just how kind of tender and foolish and completely understandable and disruptive it is in us. So I want to try something new, which is related, but not directly. As I was reading your books, it really clarified for me where I think Christianity has a slightly different response. Because, particularly in “The Antidote”, although it comes up a lot in “Four Thousand Weeks” as well – forgive me, I’m going to narrate something, and you can push back on me – but it felt to me like you were starting from a place that we all start from (or maybe you were saying we all start from this place, also me) of deep, deep anxiety and fear that much of the world and I share, particularly now. But you went looking for medicines for it. And stoicism medicine is to say “if you just change your beliefs about what life should be about, you won’t suffer so much.” You know, if you can just almost lower your expectations or become very sanguine about the things that happen to you, you won’t suffer, so you won’t carry fear. And I’m going to botch this, but from my understanding, the kind of Buddhism approach is really this kind of non–attachment. We just need to detach from the things that we long for, detach from our fears. Just get enough distance to see that the world and our thoughts can kind of pass us by, but we can remain tranquil. We can remain steady. And there’s the Eckhart Tolle thing of the Self. And as I was reading this, I realised that I think I used to be technically a Christian, but temperamentally a Stoic. Because I had internalised one verse in the Bible where Paul says, “I have learned to be the same in any circumstances, in poverty or riches in oppression or…” (Phil.4:11–12) I mean, obviously he read and knew this work. The New Testament is in conversation with these ideas, right? They thread together, they’re not separable. But I had come to think that being a real Christian was someone who was very tranquil and unbothered and not anxious, because I had the peace that surpasses all understanding (Phil.4:7). And, you know, Jesus had taken away my sins and holiness was emotional steadiness. But I now don’t think that. I think the Christian response to the deep fear, and the deep anxiety of being a fallible human person in the world, and that temptation of pride is not to feel less but to feel more. And that, when the New Testament talks about sin, it talks about hard–heartedness. And it talks about “their hearts were hardened” (Mark.6:52). And we see anger and sadness in the person of God and Jesus and others. Forgive me, this is a much more theological digression than I intended to do. But that it takes a very different approach. It says the way to deal with the pain of being a person is to be continually processing, seeing it through the stories, to continually be following the drama of Scripture. To be in the rhythm of the liturgy, which shapes time and takes you through Good Friday, and back to Easter, and through Good Friday and back to Easter, and stops your heart getting hard. But I’m definitely less happy than I was. And the pull to deal with anxiety about human limits by having non–attachment is so appealing, because I want not to be angry about injustice, and I want not to be grieving about the climate. But I increasingly think that that is a form of escape for me.
Emotional bullet–proofing, Buddhism, and the personal aspect of Christianity
As you go deeper into Zen Buddhism, and you take this incredible concept of time, which seems to connect to every big idea, what’s your journey with that fear? And where have you landed for the things that feel both helpful, but not a form of escape?
Oliver Burkeman
I mean, first of all, it’s definitely true that there are people, and there are times in my life (maybe even some extent today) that people who… you can use a lot of these things. Stoicism is very obvious in certain manifestations of its modern resurgence as what someone – I can’t remember who – is called “emotional bullet–proofing”. That’s just kind of this this way of seeking to become invulnerable, which doesn’t work because it actually leaves you more vulnerable.
Elizabeth
There’s a couple of people that you interviewed, that was like, “Wow, yeah”. Every time something bad happens, they go, “Well, yeah, it could be worse. We could all be wacked out. So, fine!”
Oliver Burkeman
That’s why I think that some of that is in the original Stoicism. Some people might want to argue with this, but I don’t think it’s just in what’s been called “Broicism”. I don’t think it’s only that that has this invulnerability problem and, you know, might have been absolutely the best coping mechanism for some of the situations that that the original Stoics came out of and found themselves in. I guess I’m not sufficient of an expert in the Buddhist stuff to sort of counter what you’re saying, really. But here’s the difference between what you said and what I think of here. I think that all the ways that I’m drawn to and that I explore in, certainly, “The Antidote”, and later on, some of them can be misused in this way. I may be guilty of having misused them in that way. But what they all have in common – they’re sort of subtractive somehow, they’re sort of ‘demolitional’. They’re about sort of letting go of concepts and ways of thinking and being that get in the way of being fully present. And there’s definitely plenty of Buddhism as a whole and it’s and lots of this, which is all about very fully feeling everything, and embodiment. And the kind of the focus on posture in Zen meditation is fascinating (to me anyway) because it’s this kind of constant refusal to tell you what to do with your mind, because what you’re focusing on is your body in the world and everything that you’re feeling in it. And so, those resources are there in those traditions. Although, absolutely, I am a certain kind of cliché in terms of needing to become more embodied and less of a ‘brain on a stick’ and all the rest of it. It’s there in those traditions. But it says like, we reconcile ourselves to our finitude by just collapsing into it. And as a result, reality opens up in a way that is, in some sense, infinite. But it’s just this, right? And it seems to me that Christianity, the way you’re talking about it anyway, it’s absolutely dependent on this… There’s this other thing, there’s this broader context, which is infinite and is personal in some sense. And it’s not just about sort of taking away the barriers, it’s about opening to this thing that is there. And that’s my basic problem, right? Because it seems like at least sometimes I feel like I would love to be a Christian. But no matter how many times people say to me that it’s fundamentally an orientation to the world, or fundamentally about practice and community, it seems at the end of the day, you do have to believe in the historical reality of some events and in the construction puts upon those events by Christianity. And the contrast would be, if documents were discovered tomorrow showing that all the supposed history of Buddhism was a lie, it wouldn’t affect the psychotherapeutic spiritual claims being made by that tradition, as far as I can see. But Christianity is dependent on its story in a in a different way. And if I can’t will myself to believe that, then I’m sort of out of luck.
Pascal’s Wager and the benefits of ritual, religious practices and collective rhythms
Elizabeth
Have you ever read the actual Pascal’s Wager? I’ve been rereading it recently, and I think I want to kind of say, “Yes, and?” to what you’ve said, because believing is a complicated word. You know, ‘Perspectiva’ and the work of Iain McGilchrist a little bit, and I think what his work is showing is we have different modes of attention and attending to the world, which lead to different ways of knowing. And we have created a world which makes a very, left hemispheric way of attending and knowing easy because it’s constantly being reinforced, concrete, linear. And a right hemispheric way of knowing – I’m sorry, I can’t unpack this, I’m going to whisk right through it – the realm of the imagination, and art and music and religion is easily atrophied in our world, in a way that feels like. If you don’t speak your mother tongue, you lose it. And then someone else speaking it sounds gobbledygook. And so I think for me, I had a period as an atheist, I have a lot of friends who are atheists, and whether Christian or other religions, the invitation into the practices first is not to say the beliefs don’t matter. It’s not to say, “Oh, we don’t care whether you believe in God or not, as long as you come along and sing some hymns and do confession and, you know, celebrate Easter.” And Pascal unpacks this really well, because he does this… Like, Pascal’s Wager is not this mathematical “You know, you might as well believe, because it’s low cost. What you’re gonna lose?” It’s much more “I don’t know, I can’t know.” And this is years after he had his famous ‘Night of fire’, where he’s like, “Not the God of philosophers!” He feels like he’s met God. And then a few years later, he’s like, “I don’t know if I believe in God”. And I have that regularly, this complexity. But what the practices – and it is so clear in your book, you talk about rhythms, you talk about commitments, you talk about structure, you talk about grace, you talk about commitment to community. What those things do, is they form us. They form our ability to attend, they form our ability to know, and Pascal basically says, “Get yourself out of that tortured, ‘Do I believe? Do I not believe?’. Just go to church.” Like, do the things, sing the songs, and it changes you, and it changes your imaginative world. And so I think the question is too binary. I think it’s entirely possible to practice… Because your book does seem to be pointing towards the kind of life… Rowan Williams says it’s ‘the hidden geniuses of religion’. Everyone knows they’ve got stuff to say about ethics, but people forget that they are systems for organising time. That you can be invited into these rhythms and structures and rituals, because they’re a good way of organising time and not believe in a thing about it, in the sort of very left hemispheric way we talk about it, and still gain from it, still find steadiness and rootedness. But also it might create the preconditions for a different kind of attention, a different kind of knowing… would be my response to your… It’s not that I think ‘believing’ is irrelevant, but I think we need to complicate the meaning of that term. I want to open up to the floor very shortly, but I am going to stay with that sense that so much of what you are so wisely and beautifully and kindly inviting people into are the kinds of rhythms and structures that people used to be able to access through religion. For many people that’s just not accessible. Some people have very understandable reasons why that sounds like a terrible idea. What do you see in the world that might help people structure time, structure their lives, to move towards the kind of vision that you’re holding out? Have you found any ways of doing that yourself – kind of practical things you can point people to?
Oliver Burkeman
I mean, the first thing that springs to mind is that it seems to me that what matters is – there’s a temptation if you’re hungry for that kind of thing. And I’ve certainly been down this route, to try to build your own version of them that you’re going to do in your life and to have a sort of… I mean, just look at “morning routine” on YouTube for like five minutes. It’s wild. People are obsessed with this question of building rituals and rhythms in exactly the right way. I think it’s rather obvious, at least in the context of our conversation, what’s wrong about that, which is that is almost in every circumstance going to worsen the problem of trying to go it alone in life, just in a sort of packaging that looks a little bit like maybe they do in monasteries or something. It’s not going to actually address the issue. So I find again, and again, and again – often sort of slightly against my will – that the place to look is in rhythms that are truly collective and that really do exist, even if they seem very mundane or scant by comparison with these kinds of great, wonderful, liberating…
Elizabeth
If you’re gonna say “choirs”, I don’t think choirs are mundane at all.
Oliver Burkeman
No, I say choirs in one aspect, which is, choirs and other groups that meet at a specific time in the week, and you have to go there and be at them. All the best advice feels like it’s been given a million times, but it’s like, “Join things!” And a part of the joining of things is that you have to do them at that time. And just the rhythms of just life, right? School, whose turn is to make dinner tonight…. You can enter into those things that are there in our lives I think in a slightly more wholehearted way. First of all, if you’re me, you have to go through a long period of kind of resisting them and getting furious at the way that they get in the way of your brilliant schedule that you planned for your life. But then you do eventually realise – to some extent – that you wouldn’t have it any other way. Because the collectiveness is what counts. I don’t think whether we have fully structured… whether it’s always a Sabbath, whether it’s every moment of the day, that’s less important than just finding those bits of the world that are, in some sense, collective rhythm and ritual. Being here, right? I mean, it’s partly the stuff that we’re talking about and interested in talking about. But it’s partly just that every single person who wants to be involved in this had to come to one place at one time, even if they’d have rather done it at a slightly different time or a slightly different place. It would have been more convenient for me if this had been in Yorkshire, you know? So, I think that is the answer. There’s some lovely quote from Tobias Wolff that I used to have pinned above my desk – but then I moved my desk so it was in front of a window, so you can’t pin things above it – about (I’m not going to try and quote it) but it’s just about this notion that what works is to be held in these rhythms of all the things that you feel are going to get in the way of your work and what he calls “all the sovereign bullshit of being a writer”, right? This idea that because you’re doing something supposedly creative or artistic, these rhythms shouldn’t apply to you or should come second. And actually, they’re the things that make the whole thing meaningful.
Elizabeth
I was reading your book. You have these beautiful chapters about marching together in time and the kind of effect of marching together, or moving together, or dancing together actually has on our biochemistry and the ways it can make soldiers march much further because we are becoming in some ways, one orgasm [sic – meant “organism”]. But how we have, because of this myth, or the failure to surrender any of our autonomy and control means it gets harder and harder. And I was trying to schedule getting four friends together via WhatsApp, and it becoming this kind of Sartre–level hell. Three weeks later, “No, sorry, I can’t do that anymore. How about August?” You have this line: “We have constructed lives that cannot be made to mesh.” And it felt so sad and so true, that in our desire for more freedom with our time and more autonomy, we have actively isolated ourselves from one another. That is appalling for our well–being and it was just beautifully put.
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