I've been following the work of Oliver Burkeman for a few years now, having appreciated his Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, his newsletter The Imperfectionist, and now Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time For What Counts, featured on my Best of 2024 List. When I reached out recently to ask if he could spare a few moments for a conversation, he generously agreed to answer some questions, and I am grateful for his time and the thoughtful approach he seems always to take.
In Meditations for Mortals, you argue (as I would as well) for the long-term benefits of reading, which arise, "not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow." What books or essays have shaped your sensibility lately?
The work of Janet Malcolm is really important to my sensibility as a writer. I don’t want to claim any kind of parallel because she was an extraordinarily powerful genius, and that’s not for me to compare myself, but she deeply inspired me with a certain kind of approach to writing about ideas, writing about the personalities of the people who promote the ideas, putting herself into the narrative in a way that is not obtrusive but in another sense is absolutely central to the voice of the writing. I’m just always so happy to return to one of her books. I suspect my favorite, ultimately, is In the Freud Archives, but they’re pretty much uniformly fantastic. Hartmut Rosa’s book Resonance, which is an academic sociological text – you wouldn’t go to that for literary merit necessarily, though he’s actually a very fluid and engaging writer. In terms of ideas, this fundamental notion that what we really are seeking from a fulfilling life with one another is not control but something that he calls resonance is tremendously important. There’s so much depth in this idea that I’m still exploring — that what is valuable in our experience is something to do with the quality of our relationship with reality.
Your reading of Rosa’s resonance (“the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place”) says that it “depends on reciprocity: you do things and then see how the world responds.” Why is this concept so important? And what might we stand to lose if we abandon reciprocity as a foundational characteristic of humanity?
This book – and everything I write about – is about accepting the reality that we find ourselves in and embracing the limitations that we have as human beings, limitations of time and control and all the rest of it. That automatically implies, by definition, a reciprocal relationship with the whole of the rest of reality and with other people because it sets such incredibly narrow boundaries around our ability to do things all by ourselves. I’m automatically in a reciprocal relationship with everyone else in the world, with the whole of the rest of reality, the moment I acknowledge that I can’t control, or even exert the smallest amount of influence over, the future. What we’re doing when we accept our limitations is entering into a more consciously reciprocal relationship with everyone and everything else. Our attempts to achieve that total sovereignty, total control, total non-reciprocity – they don’t work, and at the same time, they also squeeze out the vibrancy that ultimately is what makes life worth living.
Can an information environment achieve true reciprocity? Can reciprocity occur asynchronously?
I think it can. I think there can be deep connection in email and in people writing to each other, and even between the author of a book written a hundred years ago and someone reading it today. Perhaps we need another word for that relationship because, of course, nothing a reader does can directly affect the author posthumously, but there’s certainly something very intimate and personal about those kinds of relationships. I don’t think they have to happen in physical co-presence, as it were, even though there’s a lot to be lamented about the ways in which we are losing physical co-presence from our lives.
Many of my readers are educators, facing significant changes that must be made in the face of shifts in tech, in culture, even in what we can reasonably expect students to read. How might educators approach these changes without succumbing to overwhelm or even despair?
On the overwhelm point specifically, when the problem feels like there are far too many things that need to be done, I find great liberation in understanding that there will always be too many things that need to be done. You’ll never get it all done. That’s off the table. Simply because there is a vastly larger, arguably infinite, set of things that would be useful and meaningful to do and obviously a finite amount of time in which to do them. So there the advice is to understand that if you can do even a small number of these things, a few of them that feel the most important, the fact that others are being left by the wayside is not grounds for feeling like a failure. It’s simply a reflection of the truth about being finite.
In terms of the idea that you can’t expect students to read as much as you might once have done, or expect things to unfold in the way you might once have expected them to unfold, I think this mismatch between our limited capacities and the number of things that need doing is just a subset of the broader questions of facing and working with reality. When people rail against something like students’ attention spans, they’re resisting reality in a way. They’re hoping in some unconscious way, that by clenching their fists and railing against it, they might do something to change it. I think it’s much more fruitful to just see that as the terrain that you’re on, to see that as the ingredients that you are working with to try to create a wonderful dish. And to start from that position and see where it takes you. I think that is also the only way you can have an effect in changing the things that you find objectionable.
I’m reminded here about Jennifer Roberts, the Harvard art historian who I wrote about in Four Thousand Weeks, and the exercise that she gives her students of looking at a single picture or sculpture for three hours straight. This idea emerged from taking stock of what the situation was with her students, accepting that they were living in an accelerated and accelerating culture and that they were naturally falling into the rhythms of it. Nobody’s fault, it’s just how things are. She came up with this almost absurdly or amusingly severe exercise, which has caught people’s imagination as a way of intervening in that situation. So first you have to accept that things are as they are and that the old ways aren’t appropriate to the new situation and that leaves you more open to have marvelously creative ideas like that one that she came up with.
I appreciate your thoughts (from Four Thousand Weeks) on attention scarcity and the idea that "whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been." It pairs well with the suggestion (from Meditations for Mortals) that "the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battle you've chosen to fight."
With those thoughts in mind, I wonder if, and I'm being a bit cheeky here, there might not be some value in having GenAI shoulder the lesser tasks that might otherwise claim our attention? If we've chosen not to fight the battle of reading emails from colleagues, is it better to outsource it to AI? What might Hartmut Rosa have to say about GenAI and resonance?
The critical thing to understand about Generative AI is that an important part of what gives written and other forms of asynchronous communication – painting, illustrations, music – their value is that it is produced by one or more conscious, emoting human sensibilities and then received by a conscious, emoting human sensibility. People sometimes say AI will very soon be able (or may already be able) to write a novel “just as good” as a novel by Jane Austen, and I don’t want to argue with that. One thing that is critically important about the novels of Jane Austen is not that they could only have been written by a human, but because they were in fact written by a human and that to read one is to enter into some kind of relationship with Jane Austen. And if we accept, as most people do I think, that LLMs are not conscious on the inside, then there can’t be any such relationship with AI generated information, and I suspect that means there can’t be any truly resonant relationship in Hartmut Rosa’s sense.
I don’t think that this means that there’s something terrible in having my AI and your AI deal with scheduling a meeting between us instead of us actually engaging with that question. I don’t think that everything that humans currently do or have done should be done by humans otherwise something terrible is lost. What I do think, based on the principles I’ve explored and written about in my books, is that if you think that you are going to free up lots of time and bandwidth by getting AIs to do things, you’re going to be falling into the Efficiency Trap. What’s going to happen is that the bandwidth taken up by those things will only fill with more demands that only you as a human can do, and the competitive edge will migrate from doing lots of the things that an AI can do to doing more and more of the things that only you can do. And I argue that you will still need the finitude-embracing outlook and techniques that I write about. I don’t think this kind of AI is going to be a magic bullet that optimizes us toward the leisure society, for example. I don’t think optimization of any kind can get us to the leisure society.
A recent Imperfectionist newsletter offered the somewhat contrary writing advice to "act fast" lest ideas find somewhere else to roost. How does this suggestion coexist with the idea that we must not just accept but embrace that we can't do all the things? How do we reconcile our desire to act fast with the reality of laundry or work shifts or carpool or even sleep?
At first, I thought you were going to object to acting fast as against everything I say about being patient, about being willing not to force the pace of reality. But I see that you’re referring here to an idea as resulting in some sort of creative work contrasted by the implicit drudgery of laundry or carpool or the necessity of sleep. And I’m talking about just plunging into everything, so it could be that if the laundry needs doing, there is great benefit in not sitting there resenting the fact or if you’re a different kind of person trying to figure out the most perfect system for doing it, but just doing it and getting on with it. I guess I would argue that to the extent that all these aspects of one's life are in someone’s life anyway, acting fast on creative ideas is in fact the best way to combine meaningful, deep work with all those chores. I’ve found that when I have a good idea, say for a newsletter, and I can talk it into a voice memo while I’m walking down the street, quite possibly to do an errand, then I’ve brought that idea into reality, and it makes the whole process easier than if I tell myself that I can only do this with five uninterrupted hours and therefore have to wait day after day until I can make that time.
