Oliver Burkeman's Reading List

"This is a psychotherapist’s memoir, essentially. Gottlieb is also a journalist and a writer, but she’s a working psychotherapist, and this is the story of a crisis in her own life, intertwined with a whole cast of characters based on her patients. I really want to talk to her about how you do this, actually; I fully believe that she has protected everybody’s confidentiality, and yet these composite characters must be drawn very heavily from life, because they just ring so incredibly true. It really reminds you – or me, anyway – that in many ways there’s no more exciting plot than the course of an ordinary life. That said, she’s a therapist in Los Angeles, so there’s a certain amount of Hollywood show business stuff which adds extra glitter. Some of the lives in question are unfolding on the sets of network television shows, and things like that. I don’t want to spoil any of the specific plots, but there’s this idea that in therapy, and life in general, the ‘presenting problem’ is not necessarily the real problem. People seek Gottlieb out in a way that’s related to how we seek out self-help books – thinking we know what’s missing in our lives, and that you can hire someone to fix it, like you might hire a plumber or an accountant. But very often those assumptions are precisely what needs to be questioned. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That has shown itself to be the case in my own life over and over again: you can be really, really efficient and brilliant at fixing certain problems, but actually, you’ve not understood the problem that you have. Often you’ve just gone and made it worse. To put it in the terms that Gottlieb might use, a lot of that kind of fixing is often really a form of avoidance. An example that springs to mind is: you think you need to get tons more work done, so you go and buy self-help books about productivity techniques and becoming more efficient. Or you even seek out a therapist, and say: ‘Give me advice on cramming more into my day.’ But maybe your problem is actually workaholism. Maybe work is an attempt to avoid something else – to become so much the master of your work, say, that you don’t need to think about what’s happening to your life in terms of relationships. In that case, trying to become more efficient is a defence mechanism to help you avoid acknowledging the true situation. What Gottlieb is so good at is that she’s not telling them that they’re full of shit, she takes their perspective on things very seriously – and yet creates this space in which they can also then let things come to the surface that they had been denying, or trying to keep down. Does that make sense? This is related to the book I’m trying to write at the moment, but it’s also related to my own life. I definitely know how easy it is to confuse frenetically doing with doing things that matter, and deriving a lot of self-worth from your ability to do things that aren’t necessarily worth doing, or are serving some kind of unhelpful hidden agenda. The other thing I’d like to say about Gottlieb is that she really drills down into this idea that everybody’s behaviour has some kind of emotional rationale. It’s very dicey to talk in this way, because it can sound like justifying terrible behaviour, but it’s not; it’s about explaining it. She writes a brilliant advice column for The Atlantic , where people write in to report the ways in which their partners or family are behaving appallingly towards them. I think a lot of writers in that context would just ally themselves with the letter-writer in condemning the people they’re complaining about. And obviously there are contexts in which you should do that. But she also leads them toward seeing things from the other people’s perspective – not to excuse the bad behaviour, but because you can’t make any progress in life until you start to learn the emotional rationales according to which other people’s behaviour makes sense to them."

"It surprised me how much I got from this book, because it is – in a very low-key, not in your face way – a Christian work, and I’m not a Christian. David Zahl’s basic argument is that this idea that we’re not religious these days is mistaken; we’ve just transferred our religious urges onto things other than conventional organized religion. What he means by that is that we’re seeking salvation of some sort in work, in shopping, in the cultivation and creation of identities online, in parenting, in foodie culture and a whole bunch of other domains. We seek transcendent meaning from secular sources. ‘Seculosity’ is religiosity applied to the secular world. I think he makes a really good argument from a Christian perspective: that religion has many, many flaws, but it has built into it a capacity for forgiveness that our other modern secular ‘religions’ don’t. This is the quality that he would call ‘grace’ – the idea that you are worthy, and acceptable, despite, perhaps almost because of, your flaws. That you don’t need to deserve God’s love, by meeting some kind of level of accomplishment or virtue, in order to have it. That’s very much not true when it comes to seeking salvation through, say, your work; there, you really do have to meet specific criteria to count as worthy, and you’ll probably find that the bar you’re supposed to meet keeps rising the closer you get to it. “You might be seeking salvation from things that can’t really provide what you need” I became a parent, what, three years ago now, and I’ve found that it’s very easy to think that you’re going to somehow one day find the perfect way of parenting, and, as a result, create the perfect adult, and as a result, finally get to consider yourself a worthy and successful parent. But it’s totally, totally counter-productive, a massively anxiety-inducing way of thinking. This book helps you see that that’s what you’re doing – that you’re trying to get something out of it, that it can’t provide. Though Zahl does, toward the end, make the case for his flavour of Christianity, I think it’s a really useful argument no matter your feelings about religion: that you might be trying to seek a kind of salvation from things that can’t really provide what you need. I don’t mean to imply that by giving up the idea of achieving salvation through being a perfect parent, you are relegating parenting to something that isn’t really very important or satisfying. I think it’s abandoning that quest for salvation that enables you to really engage with it, and to connect to the meaning that it actually has to offer. It’s not that there isn’t something transcendent about the relationship between a parent and child. It’s that there is something in that relationship that is spoiled when what you’re really trying to do is implement a philosophy. By the way, I haven’t totally won the battle with implementing philosophies. I still fall for it all the time. But… baby steps. Yeah, and I think there’s also a sense of always wanting to be in control, of wanting to feel in a position of mastery. Of course, actual religion is very much about you not being in control. The good versions of religion don’t make your worth, as a human, dependent on having achieved mastery. You have to accept your relative place in the universe, but in return, you get the underserved gift of grace. I shouldn’t talk as if I understand the theology fully, because I don’t. But the core of the idea resonates deeply with me. The other thing that’s worth saying is that there’s a chapter in this book on how religion can become a form of seculosity as well. There are plenty of versions of religion, especially here in the US, where it becomes its own form of secular salvation through believing that religion is the path to material riches, or to constant happiness in daily life, or something like that. It’s absolutely possible that you can engage in this mistaken quest for an unattainable form of salvation in a megachurch, as much as at the office or a shopping mall."

"Brooks gets a lot of grief from the Twitterati for his politics; he seems to drive some people completely up the wall. But what I’ve always liked about his writing, especially in book form, is that he doesn’t pretend to have everything together in his life. I’m always drawn to writers where you get a sense that they’re putting their insides out there, regardless of their politics. He sometimes gets teased online because you can detect, from the subjects that seize his interest, what particular issues he’s grappling with in his own life at that moment – divorce, ageing, et cetera – and for some reason his critics see this as terribly embarrassing. But I’m always like: great, finally, a pundit who’s not just pretending to have everything solved! The basic idea of the ‘second mountain’ metaphor is that there are two phases in most people’s lives, or that ideally there ought to be. First, there’s a young adulthood phase that very properly is about making your place in the world and developing your talents, starting a family, buying a house, making a career and a name for yourself. It’s largely self-focused, but not in a bad way; that’s the appropriate focus of that phase. But there often does come a point when the strategy seems to stop working, seems to stop bringing the fulfilment it once did. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The so-called ‘second mountain’ is a shift toward asking what life is demanding of you, rather than what you can get out of it. Brooks thinks we’re in a culture that’s so hyper-individualistic that we often miss moving to this second mountain. But if you get to a point in your life or your career where everything seems a bit empty and meaningless, even though you might outwardly be very successful, it might be time to switch mountains. A lot of the book consists of the inspiring stories of people in history, and in the present day, who’ve found and enacted this second purpose of their lives in an astonishingly impressive way that most of us never will. But, as inspiration, they’re really powerful stories. At the same time, he’s writing about his own crises, which, as I say, I always find very disarming. Even when part of his crisis is that he left his wife who he’d been married to for more than two decades, and later married a woman 23 years younger than him, who’d previously worked as his researcher. It’s not a story that you’re likely to come out well from telling! Most of us, I think, would approach the basic facts of that story thinking judgmental thoughts about the person telling it, and not necessarily unwarrantedly. All I’m saying is that I think it is a very honest and authentic book. I don’t think he’d ask you to endorse his life choices, necessarily. I admire him being willing to go ahead and write the book the way he did, because he must know what people are going to say when you tell that particular story. That’s a really interesting point. The mountain metaphor too is probably a little macho to begin with. Ultimately I think this may be best thought of in Jungian terms, though Brooks doesn’t do it that way – and from this perspective, the second phase of life can absolutely be seen as a matter of coming home to yourself, claiming your own authority, even listening to your own soul, if you like that sort of language. So it’s not that the first mountain is selfish and the second mountain selfless, but that the first mountain is about following what modern society tells you you ought to do, to have a happy life, while the second mountain is about going beyond that to something that doesn’t see ‘a happy life’ as the priority anyway."

"This is actually the second book that she has written after losing her husband to suicide, so this is a kind of a sequel to Chase the Rainbow . It’s essentially a travelogue, intertwining an outer journey with an inner one. People have made comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love – a book I really liked, actually. Bell leaves her job and travelled to various places that have significance for her, including India, where her family heritage is, and New Zealand, where her husband’s family was from. I don’t mean to sound dismissive about individual locations, but what made an impression for me from this book was the role and importance of the perspective she gained. It isn’t about her going to find the answer in some physical location, at the top of the mountain, or by meeting a specific person, or anything like that; instead the book is at least partly about the power of travel to bring you back to yourself, and to let you see your life in a radically different way. There’s a weird power in this: even if you acquire no new information about what’s gone wrong, or the direction you should take in life, simply changing the place from which you’re seeing it all can make a big difference. Bell addresses the way we chronically hope that other people, or certain lifestyle choices, are going to ‘fix’ us, and how unhelpful that is; the end result of her all her physical travel is to come back to herself."

"This is a massive book by a Yale University philosopher, but it’s surprisingly readable. In contrast to the David Zahl book, it makes the case for what Hägglund calls ‘secular faith.’ He argues that it is the finitude of life – the fact that we’re only here briefly and all our relationships are therefore only here briefly – is precisely what gives them their value. One main way of interpreting the religious idea of eternal life is that what really matters in life is what’s eternal, what can’t ever perish. Hägglund wants to say, not only is that not the case, but if it was, life would become meaningless because you could never really meaningfully face the question of how to use your precious, finite time. Because it wouldn’t be precious. He pitches this mainly as a response to religion, but I don’t think religious people are the only ones to find themselves in this mindset of valuing the eternal over the transient. One other way in which it manifests itself is in all this stuff coming out of Silicon Valley about living forever – people who think they’re about to crack the secret of living for thousands of years, and apparently believing that this will be highly desirable. And yet I think most of us who aren’t religious, unless you’ve really been through a lot of up-close confrontation with death , which I have not, do still think of ourselves, in the back of our minds, in some unarticulated way, as being immortal. You would never admit to it, if asked – but even so I’m not sure that most of us really live our lives as if our time were brief and finite. So the case Hägglund makes is powerful even if you don’t explicitly believe in the afterlife. It’s a wake-up call: not only have you only got so much time, but you should fully face up to that fact, rather than avoiding it, because ultimately you wouldn’t want it to be otherwise. Then, the second half of this book goes off into politics. Hägglund seeks to show why it follows from all this that democratic socialism is the best way to organize society. Which is very interesting, but probably more outside the scope of what we’re talking about here. I think it would be a very good one. The simplest way of thinking about it is, I suppose, is just that it’s helpful to think about living a meaningful life rather than a happy one; and I do think there has been a cultural shift from a focus on happiness to a focus on meaning. It can be difficult to define what a ‘meaningful life’ is, except to say that you know it when you encounter it, and that it does seem more worth seeking than any specific emotion, even the very positive ones. There’s a writer called James Hollis , whose work I really like, who says that sometimes the right question to ask yourself – about a major life-choice for example – is not: ‘Will this choice make me happy or sad?’ but: ‘Will it enlarge me or diminish me?’ I’ve often found that when you phrase the question this way, you do know the answer. You can’t actually know whether choices relating to relationships or careers are ultimately going to ‘cash out’ in success or happiness. But I think we do have a good instinct as to whether a given option is the growth-oriented choice or not. “The right question to ask yourself is not: ‘Will this choice make me happy or sad?’ but: ‘Will it enlarge me or diminish me?’” To go back to Lori Gottlieb, that’s another thing she seems very good at: helping her clients and the reader navigate that question. You realize that at certain junctions in life, the thing that would actually make you happiest is the opposite of the thing that would lead to some kind of growth. Sorry, I’ve drifted away from the question. But I think it’s a theme that does come out in all the books I’ve mentioned. Is that because there’s been a change in the world, or is it just that I’m changing as I move through my forties? You can never tell. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I started off being someone who was getting comedy value out of mocking self-help, and I’m still happy to do that from time to time. But I think that for people of a certain demographic – that I suspect you and I and many of the readers of Five Books fit into, broadly speaking – sometimes the real challenge is not to remember to be sceptical, to remember to reject all the bullshit, but on the contrary, to allow the possibility that a book with a slightly embarrassing title, or that seems too earnest, or that you wouldn’t necessarily want people to see you reading on the Tube, might nonetheless contain some real value. To push the point further: maybe your embarrassment about it itself is an indication that a given book or way of seeing things has value – that a sensitive spot is being touched, because it needs to be."

"Yes! I mean, I’m a secular audience. I’m more interested with every passing year in Christian writing, but I’m still a secular audience. This is an adapted reissue of a book that first came out right after 9/11 , though references to Covid have been added in the appropriate places. But essentially it’s an exploration of the idea that in all sorts of mythologies and religious teachings, and in our individual lives, there’s a recurring pattern of leaving a state of orderliness for disorder and confusion, then pushing through until you get to a new order, a new understanding and way of living. I don’t remember whether he talks about Jung, but I’m into Jung, and Jung talks about how the biggest problems in our lives are never really solved, but outgrown. He compares them to being in a storm on a mountainside; you keep climbing up the mountain until you pass through the storm clouds, and then the storm is below you—but it hasn’t gone, it’s that you’ve integrated it into your life. That seems like a useful way of thinking about the uncertainties of the world. Trying to go back to what we remember life was like before is probably not going to be the most resilient approach. He also argues against what we can think of broadly as postmodernism, though I think he has a more nuanced view about this than some commentators. He says that, when everything falls apart, or when our common understandings fall apart, or when science doesn’t seem able to guarantee us meaningful lives, there’s an impulse to conclude that there are no patterns, no grand narratives. It’s a cynical way of thinking—it suggests there’s nothing you can do—but it also puts you in the godlike position of claiming to know that there’s no order to the way human lives or civilisations unfold. Instead we need to be open to the idea that there are patterns and that we might not know exactly what they are. “He compares problems to storm clouds; keep climbing the mountain until you pass through the clouds, and then the storm is below you” This is where something that might seem recognisably Christian speaks to me, I think, without necessarily signing up to a whole bunch of beliefs: just this state of receptivity to the idea that you might not know all there is to know, and opening oneself to the idea of being governed by some kind of higher wisdom—not even the Christian one, necessarily. It’s an attitude of mind that has to do with understanding or accepting your own limitations and imperfections, not trying to escape the situation of being human. And having no narratives is clearly associated with a general sense of loneliness and isolation, and of life being absurd. Someone, somewhere, defined depression as the absence of meaning, which is an interesting thing to consider, whether it’s true or not."

"Yes. For me, a big challenge from this year has been trying to figure out my own relationship with the news. This is partly a matter of doomscrolling and finding Twitter very addictive. But it’s also the question: what are my responsibilities? Given that it doesn’t seem to make me a happier person or make the world a better place when I spend most of my day immersed in American politics , or in the British government’s response to Covid-19 , that seems to call into question the old-fashioned idea that being an informed citizen—constantly discussing this stuff around the dinner table, staying up to date with what’s happening in the world at large—is the pinnacle of being a good human. And, as my son grows up out of toddlerhood, I find I’m not too sure that I agree with the prevailing wisdom that constantly talking at home about climate change and racial justice—things that really matter!—is the right approach. I find myself wondering if, actually, a certain amount of protection from the outside world has a role here. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Anyway, that’s all by way of a preface to discussing what Phil Goldberg calls ‘spiritual practice’, by which he mainly means various approaches to meditation , and various ways of shifting your perspective. It’s not a question of: ‘Are you going to be a hermit and spend your life meditating?’ or ‘Are you going to engage?’ but that having a kind of inner sanctuary is a precondition for engagement in the world in which we live. He doesn’t put it quite this way, but a lot of this is about stewarding your attention, training your attentional faculties. We have good reason to believe that if you do that, and persist at it, it can lead to some more dramatic ‘spiritual experiences’, and grasping certain deep truths about reality. But I also think they’re very useful just as tools for living in the world that we live in, with an economy that profits directly from taking control of your attention. This is a very practical book. He talks about how to fit meditation into your day, that sort of thing. It has this feel of—this is language that Western Buddhists, meditation people, use—creating a refuge from the world inside yourself, rather than needing to retreat to a cabin on top of a mountain, or quitting online news altogether. I think that’s true. What you just said reminded me of an interesting point—I’m speaking from other sources, rather than this book specifically. There’s evidence for certain kinds of mystical experiences going back right to the beginning of the human species. But formal meditation, of the sort where you sit down and train your mind, is new, relatively speaking. It’s a few thousand years old, as far as people can tell. And I’ve seen it argued that this is because meditation is a response to what people felt happening to their attention when cities started to develop, when some early form of information overload began—when people were no longer just living in bands of twelve in rural isolation. This is fascinating to me, because it suggests that, actually, they were struggling with the equivalent of what we’re struggling with today when we’re trying to figure out if it’s possible to use Twitter in a sane way. Yes. Although people always use that example to imply we should just stop worrying. But maybe some aspects of our inner experience were better before we were reading books? I don’t know. Or before TV? Or before radio? Maybe it has just been a long slow decline. Because we have no access to the pre-printing press mind, how would we ever be able to know? But we are where we are. And I’m not suggesting we go back."

"What I admire about this book is that it takes on a topic that’s had a lot of exposure in popular writing in recent years… …and, indeed, this is something I touched on in my own book, the way we hear so much about needing to be willing to fail, and what people really mean by that and how helpful it really is, or isn’t. But what really impressed me in this book is that Clack connects the idea of failure to the idea of loss, noting how we confuse the two: maybe failure is avoidable in some sense, maybe it’s your fault in some sense, but loss is just completely intrinsic to being a human. Living and dying, getting old, finitude—these are just the fate we all face as a result of just being who we are in the situation that we are in. There’s a connection to Rohr here, because it’s about human limitation. “Maybe some aspects of our inner experience were better before we were reading books” She writes about her own experience of miscarriage as one particularly vivid way of understanding this kind of encounter with loss. But then the way we talk about ‘failure’ has this effect of—I don’t know if she would put it this way—implying that if you got things right, you could have avoided loss. And in certain specific situations that could theoretically be true. But obviously you can’t avoid the sense in which human life is about loss. Being a finite human is inevitably a matter of deciding which of your ambitions you’re going to focus on, because you don’t have the time or resources to do everything, so in this and many other ways, it’s all about facing the reality of death. She quotes Anthony Giddens, the sociologist, who writes that death is “nothing more or less than the moment at which human control over human existence finds an outer limit.” Clack also talks very eloquently about the fact that because human meaning is found above all in relationships of all sorts, there’s a sort of loss or failure that’s essential to a meaningful life, because relying on relations with others is another kind of expression of limit. It’s an expression of the idea that you can’t go it alone, you need to some extent to surrender to being in relationship with others. That in itself is an example of how not being completely in charge of yourself and your life outcomes is unavoidable, but also that you wouldn’t want it any other way, because that would be so empty. Does that make sense? Yes. It’s a philosophy book , but it’s very accessibly written. The effect it has for me is that—this is a theme that crops up in lots of places—if you come to see certain things that you are trying to do in your life as just kind of structurally, intrinsically, logically impossible, then it’s a lot easier to stop beating yourself up for not doing them, isn’t it? And this includes the attempt to avoid all loss, to not have to make hard choices and sacrifices with how you deploy your limited time and resources. It’s impossible. This is a theme of the book I’m finishing up at the moment as well. If you can get clear on what in life is actually completely inevitable versus what isn’t, you can bring a lot more time and energy to focus on doing a few cool, meaningful things with your life, rather than spending it railing against these built-in limitations of being human. Exactly. I think that connects directly. Because once you see that regret is inevitable, why stress about it? Kierkegaard had that funny line, “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it.” You can be bound a lot less by trying to avoid future regret—which is a very limiting way of going through life, and keeps you from committing to people and projects—if you see that that ship has sailed. You’re going to have regrets, if you’re predisposed toward regret! (Unless you’re not the regretting type, in which case you won’t.) Because there’s no option where you get to live out a life of the married and a life of being single, a life of having four children, and a life of being child-free. Once you internalise that, you can throw yourself into whatever you do choose with a lot more vigour. Yes. That’s always the question with self-help books: what’s to stop you reaching intellectual insight but then carrying on with your existing, neurotic ways? But I think a book like this begins to wear away at certain ways of seeing the world that might have become entrenched, or calcified. It can open you up. It’s a very slow process. All I can say is, I read these books, and think through this stuff—then I look back on recent decades of my life, and I think I’m becoming a little bit saner, and doing a few more things that I’ll be happy and proud to have done with my time! But who knows what I’ll think later on? Yes. I think it’s also useful to cultivate the attitude that the advice you need might not be the advice you want to hear. But that’s a very difficult thing to tell someone else. And, yes, it’s a very clichéd, gendered thing in relationships, isn’t it—the person seemingly seeking advice actually mainly wants to be heard, but the other person responds by immediately coming up with solutions, which misses the point. And I am that really annoying bloke who goes straight to solutions—although I think less so than I was. Maybe some of the writing I do is an alternative outlet for that! But you’re absolutely right: people move too fast to the stage of, ‘here are the three fixes you need.’ In those Twitter exchanges, I don’t know what the original posters’ agendas are in the first place—being so public about anxieties or sufferings—but it isn’t usually that they want to be directed to a web page, or a three-step solution. That feels like it’s cheapening, as if it undermines your right to have those feelings. Yes. Another thing: I think advice-giving in general is almost always a kind of effort to work through your own issues, perhaps even to justify your own choices. I think it can be done transparently and with integrity—I hope that when I’m giving advice that I try to do that! But very often people are doing it to make themselves feel better, and they don’t always see that that’s what they’re doing."

"Yes, I think so. Although reality has shifted under it, because it was largely written prior to what’s happened to the economy this year. But I don’t think that undermines its message. I agree with you: I’ve written, and totally believe, that the idea that we have one passion that we have to discover in life, or that if you follow your passion you don’t need to worry about anything else, is not useful. But he’s not making that argument. He’s saying, through a sequence of interesting case studies, that it used to be the case that you had to choose between doing what enthused you and felt deeply meaningful, or making a stable living. But now you don’t have to choose—in fact, you kind of have to choose the opposite, at least for a certain demographic. That doing the things you’re passionate about, that really fire you up, are often the best way to flourish in this new economy. Granted, there’s a whole other book to be written about how there should probably be universal basic income, and more progressive taxation; we shouldn’t be having to lecture people on how to stay afloat. But putting that aside, I think it’s a very powerful argument, based on the well-known truth that more and more of industry is being automated. That’s been true for a long time in the manufacturing of simple, cheap consumer goods; but it’s also happening now with all sorts of ‘knowledge work’ careers as well. “If my career is going to go in the direction I want it to, it’s going to involve reaching out directly to the people who are into the kind of stuff I do” The example people always give is routine accountancy and legal work—things that once needed a highly skilled professional with a flair for that work. But, increasingly, doing your tax preparation just requires a piece of software. Journalists are constantly freaking out about how routine news stories can also now be written by robots, by artificial intelligence . And it follows that as this process escalates, what will retain its value is the human spark that can’t be replicated in that way: people who tell stories really well, people who can create beautiful objects that can’t be replicated 1000 times, people who can tailor their services to extremely specific segments of the audience. A lot of his examples have to do with people taking a business model that once could have been a service with hundreds of thousands of clients, and instead offering services to a far smaller number of clients, but who are willing to pay more money. Specialized accountancy services, niche clothes designers, people serving the Amish farming community, there’s even a high-end pencil manufacturer in the book. I’ve been thinking about it in terms of my own work as well, increasingly. I feel it’s probably the case that, if my career is going to go in the direction I want it to, it’s probably going to involve more directly reaching out to the specific people who are into the kind of stuff I do, as opposed to holding out for the blockbuster, the one-in-a-million chance that will make you a name in every household in the land. He sets up the book with a story about his father and his grandfather, both called Stanley. Stanley his grandfather worked in a ball bearings factory, and it never occurred to him to find it fulfilling. But he provided for his family. Stanley the father rejected it to become an actor. Davidson writes that he always saw life as a choice between these paths, but that now, for the first time ever perhaps, you don’t need to make that choice. In fact, you shouldn’t make it. You’re totally right. Because any one of your income streams can be threatened without it threatening the whole. I mean, if you had a few thousand pounds to invest in stocks and shares, no one would tell you to invest it all in one company, but that’s exactly what we do with our jobs—or at least, what we have traditionally tended to do."

"This is a brilliant political polemic and a critique of the problematic effects of positive thinking. Ehrenreich argues, among other things, that the idea that nothing can go wrong is a terrible philosophy to adopt in the world of business. To some degree she directly attributes the current financial crisis to how positive thinking affected the culture of American business. If you’re a banker, constructing complex financial instruments, the idea that nothing could go wrong is obviously highly problematic. On the consumer level the same goes for homebuyers, thinking that if they want the house of their dreams all they need to do is convince themselves that they can go out and get it, whatever their financial circumstances. Ehrenreich shows that positive thinking came to be a useful ideology for corporate America to instill in its employees and in the population at large. The classic example here is the book Who Moved My Cheese? , a very badly written story about some mice and how they adapt to changes in their environment. The moral is that change happens, you just have to soldier on and look on the bright side. Various companies distributed huge numbers of copies to their employees as a motivational tool. You can see how useful that might be for a company planning huge and often detrimental upheavals for its staff – how helpful it would be if the staff took a compliant stance towards change. The other powerful part of Smile or Die concerns Ehrenreich’s involuntary immersion in the positive-thinking culture of breast cancer sufferers. In that situation, the pressure to maintain a positive outlook can be felt as an oppressive, aggressive force. When she goes on online discussion forums for people having treatment for breast cancer, and admits to feeling bad about what is happening to her – as you might expect she would – she is jumped on by people who don’t want to let her feel like that. She thinks the message of positive thinking is often there to enable other people to not have to face up to a situation. If someone suffering from cancer is told to be positive at all times, then other people don’t have to confront what is really happening – they don’t have to feel awkward and embarrassed in their company."

"This is an amazing book that sketches out some alternatives to the very shallow and impractical positive-thinking approach to happiness. Paul Pearsall was a maverick psychologist who lived in Hawaii. He died a few years ago. His book takes as its organising idea the notion that true happiness requires plenty of the emotion that he calls awe. He writes: “The best description I’ve been able to give it so far is that – no matter how good or bad our brain considers whatever is happening to be – it is feeling more totally and completely alive than we thought possible before we were in awe.” It’s an emotion that combines negativity and positivity, and that even has an element of fear in it, of not being completely in control of a situation. Yes – he has an extraordinary and awful personal story. He begins the book by talking about the difficulties he experienced around the birth of his son, and how those terrifying moments were filled with awe. Then there is a terrible postscript where he describes discovering the body of his adult son, who committed suicide. It is extremely painful, of course, and he makes you feel some of that pain. But he also adds, in a jarring phrase, that he feels more completely alive than he has done at any point he can remember before. So even at that point there is the emotion of awe. His capacity to feel what happened so intensely is still somehow preferable to the alternative. A lot of positive thinking is about shutting off those possibilities, controlling how things are going to go, and trying to know how you’re going to feel about them. Yes. He uses the word “openture”, as in the opposite to closure. It’s an awkward word, but maybe the awkwardness is part of the point. It’s the idea that we need to let go of approaches to happiness that involve trying to get the last word on life, to seal everything off neatly. Pearsall argues that openture is preferable on every level. Because in reality, we just wouldn’t want the life that is promised by purely positive thinking. It would shut off much of what it means to be alive."

"This is an historical account of changing attitudes towards failure. Sandage takes American culture as his focus, although I think his insights apply far beyond that. The idea of being “willing to fail” gets bandied about a lot these days, mostly by annoying celebrity entrepreneurs who say that “the only way to succeed is to be willing to fail”. I think that’s true, but it goes a lot deeper than how they mean it. And of course we only ever hear from the ones who end up succeeding – and they would say that. Sandage goes back through history to look at changing ideas of what failure means. He argues that, prior to the emergence of consumer capitalism, people themselves were rarely referred to as failures. Their individual projects might fail, but you didn’t write someone off as a failure just because their expedition or their business venture failed. There are lots of different reasons, but Sandage’s economic reading is that the system of consumer credit and loans needed to categorise people in a more all-round way as good or bad risks. He suggests that the growth of credit ratings agencies was central in starting to define people as successes or failures. There’s a strong argument that part of the difficulty we have with confronting and experiencing failure is the idea that it’s global and final – that it defines a person entirely. The psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that if you treat failure as feedback – evidence that you’re pushing against your present limits – you’ll be much better off."

"It’s important to stress that I take a completely mercenary attitude towards Stoicism , picking and choosing the bits that seem to me to be useful techniques for the present day. There are aspects of Stoicism that are very hard to stomach today. For example, the underlying principle that the universe as a whole is in some sense God, with a will or agency of its own, and that rational behaviour consists of aligning yourself with the will of the universe. I personally take from Seneca and the other Stoics a very interesting attitude towards negative emotions and situations. They had the insight, which later recurs in cognitive behavioural psychology, that it is your beliefs about your circumstances that determine the distress you feel about them, not the circumstances themselves. As Hamlet says: “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Positive thinkers take that and say: You must have very positive beliefs about everything. But the Stoics argue that if you rationally analyse those negative beliefs, rather than fight to replace them with positive ones, you will find that there is a lot of solace and consolation to be had. Dr Keith Seddon is a great Stoic scholar and translator who is very much not part of the academic mainstream. As he puts it, the question that a Stoic would ask in any given situation is: How is this bad for me, and why? There’s a wonderful Stoic technique called “the premeditation of evils”, which involves deliberately visualising the worst-case scenario, instead of the best one. One benefit of that is that you replace limitless panic and fear – which is how we often respond to problems – with a sober analysis of exactly how badly things could go wrong. The answer might still be “really bad” – but not infinitely bad, as the Stoic-influenced psychotherapist Albert Ellis would say. That’s something I put into practice every day, and find helpful. I found very useful the basic insight that underlines Buddhist psychology: That your emotions and your thoughts are in some way not “you”. That the whole concept of what you are is in fact quite problematic, and needs to be called into question. A slightly corny but nonetheless useful way of explaining this is to see your thoughts and emotions as like the weather – they arise and they pass. I did a silent meditation for a week as part of the research for my book. One of the things that you swiftly learn is that it’s really hard to force your inner world to be calm and tranquil. But then, the point isn’t to try and force it. Not bad situations, necessarily. It’s important not to interpret this as an exhortation to put up with your lot in life. Rather, you don’t have to be completely attached to and led by your emotions. Take procrastination as a mundane example. When you’re writing a book, if you tell yourself that you have to get into the right frame of mind in order to write, you’re making life even harder for yourself. Not only do you have to write the book, but you also need to be in the right frame of mind to do it! It just adds an obstacle. This originates with John Keats. He suggested that Shakespeare was the genius he was because of his willingness to rest in uncertainties and doubts and mysteries, without “an irritable reaching after facts and reason”. I blatantly steal that thought, not to assess literary genius but as an attitude of mind towards happiness. We should try to rest in uncertainties and doubts, accepting that they’re a part of us, rather than trying to stamp them out so as not to have to think about them."

"This is a very thin book but a mind-blowing one. In many ways it was part of my motivation to write my book. Alan Watts was a philosophical populariser. He called himself a “spiritual entertainer”, and went around the world giving lectures and writing popular books about Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. This book is about non-dualism – the theory that in some sense, everything is one. It’s the principle encapsulated in the symbols of yin and yang. These days it is often seen as cheesy and New Age. But there’s vastly more to it than that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In this book Watts argues that the reason why we feel so insecure is because of all our struggles to feel secure. He was writing in the 1950s, but we surely feel just as insecure, indeed more so, today. He calls this “the law of reversed effort”. Our security-seeking efforts, like many other techniques of positivity, are all about trying to shore up our own egos – to make ourselves into well-defended, separate units. Watts argues that this is based on a fundamental failure to understand how life works. What he is pointing to is that the concepts of positive and negative are entwined, and must ultimately be transcended. Focusing on only one side of the human emotional repertoire doesn’t work. It denies life, and it denies reality. Trying to live a life that is only positive, Watts would argue, is like trying to imagine a wave that only has a crest and not a trough. Well, that’s not a wave."

"This was one of the books that started my own interest in this area. It was revolutionary in its time, more than 20 years ago. This book was hugely popular with Silicon Valley people—software developers, computer geeks in general. But it was aimed, in the first instance, at a more conventional realm of managers: there’s a picture of Allen on the cover of the first edition, wearing a suit, the epitome of respectability, nothing remarkable… And yet it’s a book that crystallised a handful of really deep and true and powerful insights about how to organise your work within time—the kind of insights that are so fundamental now that Allen probably doesn’t get all the credit he should get, because they just seem like givens. Probably the most penetrating one is that a lot of the stress that we associate with feeling overwhelmed with work is actually the stress of using our brains to keep track of and remember everything that’s on our plate. It’s not necessarily that there’s too much to do, but that our brains are badly designed for storing lists of what to do, although they’re very well designed for actually doing things. So one of Allen’s core guiding ideas is that if you get all the things that are on your plate out of your head and into what he calls ‘a trusted system’—in one place, on a computer or in a notebook—then your mind can relax, and let go of the attempt to keep track of it all. He would say the thought will come to you at three in the morning that you need new batteries for the smoke alarm—but it will not come to you in the supermarket when you’re walking past the batteries. The mind is ill-adapted to this job. It reminds you of things in a haphazard, stress-inducing way. This builds on the well-known observation that writing things down in a list is stress-reducing, even when you haven’t yet done any of the things on the list. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s stress-reducing merely to get it out of your brain in that way. The other big thing that he maybe doesn’t get enough credit for is the distinction he makes between ‘projects’ and ‘actions’. A project, on his definition, is anything that takes anything more than one action step to complete. So it’s not just big projects like ‘launch new company website’ or ‘write a book’, but ‘clean the house’ or ‘get the car fixed’. A task is doable. You ask: what’s the next action? For getting the car fixed it might be getting the number of the mechanic. Think of your day as a series of actual, doable, physical next steps. “A lot of the stress that we associate with with work is actually the stress of using our brains to keep track of everything on our plate” This explains the phenomenon that I think we’re all familiar with, where someone keeps a to-do list, but there are various items that sit there for ages undone. Like ‘Get car fixed.’ One of the reasons it’s there for ages is because ‘get car fixed’ is not a specific, doable thing. It’s the name of a project, for which the next action hasn’t yet been clarified. I’ve certainly benefited from this system myself. He then builds a whole time management system on top of it, which personally I find can sometimes be a little too involved for my specific work–but any difference of opinion about that pales by comparison to the core insights of this book. What all these books have in common, and what I hope my own book is doing, is that they encourage a certain kind of confrontation with the reality of the situation. What David Allen brings is this idea that there’s too much to do, and that your brain is not a good place to keep it. So it’s all about bringing the focus back to what’s doable, now, in the moment, for real. Deep Work has some of this going on too. I think Cal Newport was deeply influenced by David Allen’s thinking."

"One of the arguments that he wants to make, I think, is that there’s a certain kind of work that isn’t well suited to the canonical approach of Getting Things Done , which is to divide everything into little units and then do them, in the manner of ‘cranking widgets’, as David Allen puts it. I think reflecting on things, just being able to think about things in an open-ended way, is increasingly essential for many of us in the jobs that we do. Deep Work is partly about how to safeguard that kind of time in your schedule, because the risk of a certain application of the Getting Things Done method is that you just do 8,000 tiny things in a row, but never get to fall into a state of deep reflection. One of the things that I think Newport is very strong on is what he calls ‘fixed schedule productivity’, which is this idea of approaching your work by first figuring out how much time you’re going to devote to it, then making your choices about what to work on based on that pre-decided container of time. So, you might decide you’re going to work from 9am to 5:30pm, with an hour for lunch, and do what you can—instead of having a list of things you’re going to get through, which for all sorts of reasons is probably just going to grow longer and keep you working until 11pm. Blocking off time first is a mechanism that then obliges you to make choices about how to use your finite time instead of killing yourself to get everything done. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He has a whole methodology that involves drawing little blocks on a calendar: I’m going to assign the first three hours to this important project; then I’ll spend two hours on email. It’s very simple, in a way—but so much bad time management is premised, instead, on the idea that however much you want to get done, there’ll be some method that’s so efficient you’ll be able to do absolutely all of it. Another good thing about this book is that he’s quite realistic about people’s different lifestyles and situations. Deep work could involve anything from shutting down your communication with the outside world for six months to work on an incredibly hard scientific proof, to safeguarding a handful of individual hours within a high-stress schedule. He’s not implying that everyone is able to go and live in a hut on top of a mountain. But I do think it’s an important piece of the puzzle, working out how to ring-fence some time for deep work. One important point is to understand how little time it actually has to be. If you can get three hours in a day where you’ve got the energy and lack of interruptions to focus on whatever’s your number one priority, and do that consistently, you’re going to make much more progress than spending your days dreaming of a time when you can give it eight hours. One thing he definitely does deal with, and where I’ve taken inspiration from him, is pushing back against this idea that a plan for the day needs to be a straitjacket, and if you don’t keep to it you’ve failed. This system of ‘time blocking’—drawing boxes on your calendar and so on—is explicitly one that’s intended to adapt during the day. Your plans change, someone interrupts you in some unavoidable way… OK, next time you get a free moment, you just draw a new set of boxes for what remains of the day. I think you could apply that to failures of motivation, too. You could say, well, look, OK, it’s Monday at 9am but deep work is just not happening. Fine, go and do something else and put that deep work in another part of the schedule instead. That said, you’ve reminded me of another thing he talks about, which I think is very true, which is that a lot of the motivational issues that we encounter—especially as writers—are the result of distorted expectations about what hard creative work should feel like. He has this lovely idea that writer’s block is just the feeling of writing: if the writing feels hard, maybe that’s because writing is hard, and draws from parts of you that are uncomfortable to access. Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth, but perhaps there shouldn’t be an expectation that something like this will feel delightful. Wasn’t it Muriel Spark who compared writing to taking dictation from God? Well, okay, great. But I don’t know anyone in my own life for whom that’s true. Instead it’s a matter of trying to remember to say to myself, ‘oh, yes, this feels uncomfortable, because it is hard, and that’s ok.’ You can feel like you don’t want to do something, and keep doing it. Don’t turn it into a war with yourself—‘I’m going to power through even though I feel like shit!’ It’s a matter of not being dictated to by your emotions and also not going to war with your emotions."

"Yes. This can be hard to get hold of. I got mine from a second-hand warehouse. But it did have a big impact on me. It’s a few decades old now. It very deliberately takes a radically different approach to time management, and seeks to apply insights from Taoism to time management. I don’t know how canonical its take on Taoism is, but essentially it speaks to this idea that time is not something you can expect to master and dominate and dictate to, but something you have to work with as an ally rather than as a predator, as another time management guru puts it. The Tao Te Ching , which I’m sure you’re familiar with, is full of all these images—the strong reed is the one that bends in the breeze; the wise man is like water, flowing around the pebbles in his path. That sort of thing–resilience through gracefully yielding to reality. That’s a really important insight to bring to time, I think. Because if you decide to fight time—meaning that you try to cram ever more stuff into the same amount of it, or just speed things up to do them faster than they naturally take—you’re always ultimately going to lose. There’s only one winner in a battle with time, and that’s time. “Time is not something you can expect to master and dominate, but something you have to work with as an ally” This basic approach of bending with time can manifest in lots of different ways. It might mean having plans for how you want the day to go, but holding them loosely and expecting them to change, or seeing them as a navigational aid for decisions in the moment, rather than a strict instruction for the future. I think it could also speak to some of the motivational things we were discussing—moving through reality and accepting things for as they are at different times, including unavoidable interruptions and maybe also your levels of motivation, that you can’t fight in the moment. And I think probably the best way, in the long term, to have the most generative and creative relationship with time is to work with this strange phenomenon, rather than try to control it. You can take this to another level, into Heidegger territory—that it’s not merely that we can’t get on top of time and control it, or even that we have to work with it, but that in fact there isn’t a separation between us and time. Right. We start by acknowledging reality, instead of starting from some fantasy of how you think reality ought to go, and then spending your days trying to force reality into that box. When you put it like that, it’s kind of absurd, but I think we all do it all the time."

"Dufu is a writer and a leadership expert, and what I like about this book is that on the one hand, there’s something very American about it—something very ‘you can do anything that you set your mind to!’, but that on the other hand, it’s channelled through this thing that is very close to my heart—this point about accepting the truth about finitude and limitation. It also brings in the gender aspect of all this that needs mentioning—that impossible demands tend to be made in a very particular way of women . There’s a sense in some of the classic books of time management—generally by men—that they rest on the assumption that you don’t need to worry about keeping the house that you live in clean, or that you have power to determine the length of your work day, but only because others are taking care of the kids, and so on. And even putting aside the war of the sexes aspect, there are lots of time management books that seem to assume you have secretaries or even servants to keep everything going. “Getting more efficient at tasks just causes the standard you’re trying to reach to drift higher and higher” This book is partly about getting men in heterosexual relationships to do their fair share, but also about the idea that, if you make an exhaustive list of all the things that you feel that are on your plate as a family, there might be a whole bunch that nobody should do at all. Hence the title. The assumption that just because you can think of something that seems to need doing, you therefore need to find somebody with the capacity to do it—that’s what this book throws into question. There’s no reason to believe that a list of ‘things that seem to need doing’ is going to be well-fitted to human capacities to actually get things done. There are also all kinds of weird effects built into work and efficiency—including the housework context—where getting better at them just causes the standard you’re trying to reach to drift higher and higher. There’s really fascinating work by a historian called Ruth Schwartz Cowan , about how vacuum cleaners and washing machines basically didn’t save any time at all, because the standards of cleanliness rose to offset the benefits. It soon became a moral obligation to keep the carpet spotless, because you could. So I really like this book’s focus on finitude, and the idea that a well-lived life doesn’t involve making an arbitrarily long list of everything that could possibly need doing, then finding a way to get through it all. Clearly the message of the book, in this context, is tailored towards an audience of women. But I do think there’s a levelling between the sexes going on, in the sense that nobody is immune from these patterns of work creating more work. I mean, it speaks to me too, because I do think of myself as a recovering extreme perfectionist. I’m averse to the idea that perfectionism is something to be sneakily proud of, because it totally screwed me up for a long time. It didn’t have an upside. So it might be something that more women than men feel, but I felt it! Right. I think this book is also aimed at people who can pay people to do certain things—that’s a mark of some kind of privilege. But on the other hand, there are times when the cost/benefit is the right one, and if you can afford a cleaner to come to your house, there are many contexts where that might be the most sensible way to handle your limited resources. Or, say, giving up any hope of your garden and patio ever looking like something from Homes & Gardens is really empowering, because you decided in the beginning not to succeed at that, rather than struggling to fit it in and being dismayed when you fail."

"This is a book about the meaning of life, and what it’s meaningful to spend your life doing. I don’t see why that isn’t the same question as time management, in the end, because I think that’s the underlying question behind all these more specific tips and tricks and techniques. Landau has this wonderfully down-to-earth, imperfectionist approach, which is based on criticising certain unspoken assumptions that we make about what it means to spend life meaningfully. One of the recurring themes through this book is that having a definition of meaning that most humans can’t achieve is a sort of weird, unnecessary cruelty to yourself. We are tiny little individuals on a globe of billions, tiny pinpricks of consciousness in aeons of cosmic time—so if you think you’ve got to affect that picture, to change the cosmos in some way in order for yours to count as a meaningful life, then basically none of us ever could. But it doesn’t actually need to follow that if, in 100 years’ time, nobody has any notion that I ever did anything, or even existed, then my life has been meaningless as a result. “If you think you’ve got to change the cosmos in some way, in order for yours to count as a meaningful life, then basically none of us ever could” Landau says, no, it’s true that in 100 or 200 years time, most of what any of us do will be forgotten, but it’s arbitrary that we’ve decided that this means it’s not meaningful. You can value things in a different way. Literature doesn’t need to reach the level of Tolstoy or Shakespeare in order to be of value, for example. If there’s only a handful of people of Shakespeare’s genius in every thousand-year span of human history, then it’s a strangely over-exacting definition of meaning to impose on yourself. What I like about lowering the bar in this way is that it makes you see all the things you’re doing already that might be more meaningful than you’d thought. Steve Jobs urged people to ‘put a dent in the universe’. If you take that literally, even the iPhone hasn’t done than. 10,000 years from now, no-one’s going to know what an iPhone was. When I’ve written and talked about this, some people say, well, hang on. It does matter what we do now, especially in the context of climate. I don’t think any of this means we don’t have to think about the level of planetary survival. I think what it means is, we have to have a better definition of a meaningful life—one that permits you to volunteer at your local community garden, and thereby make some tiny, miniscule contribution towards that project of planetary survival, without telling yourself it’s too small to be meaningful. Yes. Arrogantly enough, I suppose I think that in some ways, all these different streams of insight are synthesised in my book! What these books share, on some level, and what I tried to focus on, is the importance of confronting the implications of being finite, not being able to do everything, not being able to control time or be confident about what the future holds. And that this is ultimately not a cause for stress and despair. There’s a potential misinterpretation of this viewpoint: life is short, so I have to fill every weekend with the most extraordinary, Instagram-worthy activities—bungee-jumping and so forth. You know, ‘seizing the day’ in a self-conscious fashion. I hope what emerges from my book is that when you let the implications of finitude permeate you a bit, it’s a relief, and liberation, because it enables you to better align your expectations for a day or a year with the reality of the situation. Not so you give up hope of doing cool things, but so you can carry out a few really important, brilliant accomplishments, instead of fruitlessly chasing an unlimited level of productivity. That’s what all these books have in common in some way, and also with mine. Come back down to earth when it comes to time management, because that’s the only place where you can put one foot in front of the other."