Why It’s Actually Good to “Settle” in Love | Feat. Oliver Burkeman

[Foreign] welcome, everybody, to the love life podcast with me, Matthew Hussey. For those of you that are new here, I've been working for 17 years helping people find love through increased confidence and relational intelligence. And today I bring you a very special guest. His name is Oliver Berkman. I have been wanting to get Oliver on the podcast since I read his book, 4, 000 weeks. It is one of my favourite books in recent years. And it's not a love life book. It's a book about time and how we use our time and how we approach our lives. And I absolutely loved it. Oliver just wrote a brand new book called Meditation for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace youe Limitations and Make Time for what Counts. I have read this cover to cover already. It is a fantastic I'm a giant fan of Oliver. So this, you know, I am having so much fun in this conversation. I think you will too. He has such a insightful and often counterintuitive way of looking at things. For those of you that don't know Oliver, he worked for many years at the Guardian where he wrote a popular weekly column on psychology, this Column Will Change youe Life was the name of the column. His books include the New York Times bestseller 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, and the Antidote happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. His new book is this one, Meditation for Mortals. And I'm really excited to introduce both the book and him to you today. For those of you, by the way, who haven't tried it yet, make sure you go and give Matthew AI a go. If you've got a question you want to ask me about your life or your love life, Matthew AI can answer that question for you. It also answers it in my voice, like a real phone call that you're having with me, and you can try it for free by going to askmh.com, so check that out if you haven't already. Well, without further delay, I would like to present to you the wonderful, the insightful, Oliver Berkman. Oliver Bergman. Hello.

Hi.

I I have to start by, I I suppose, letting you know what a fan I am. I read your first. Well, not your first book, of course. I know you've been a writer for many years, but the first book of yours that I was aware of, 4, 000 weeks, that. Instantly, I went around telling everybody, this is one of the most important books I have read in years. I would describe my experience of 4,000 Weeks as being this sort of incredibly emotional encounter with something that gave me a giant sigh of relief. And I also had that wonderful feeling you have when you read a writer and you feel that you share a decent amount of DNA. And so I want to thank you because I really, I really, that was a tremendous piece of work. And your new book, Meditation for Mortals, which for anyone who has not heard about this yet or hasn't got a copy, the subtitle is four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. What's funny, Oliver, is I, I had wanted to talk to you about this book before I knew whether you would have the time or say yes. And I had long since pre-ordered the book for myself, for my own purposes. And it was lovely when your team reached out and said, we'll send you a book. I said, don't worry, I've already got that covered. So I've read it cover to cover. And it's just another beautiful, beautiful piece of work. So I'm sorry for the long-winded intro, but I really am grateful for the work that you do.

Please do not feel that you need to apologize for saying a large number of nice things about me. I'm happy with that.

No, it's great to be here. I think you're truly one of the really fresh voices out there that's doing... I don't even know whether to call it what you do because I know that there's a productivity tilt to your background, but It's so far transcended that to be something that I would recommend to anyone I love for getting more out of life and for truly living life. I'm gonna really work to get through all of my questions. I know we have an hour, so to what extent you're aware of me or my work, Oliver, I don't know, but I will say A huge amount of our audience are people who would really like to find a meaningful relationship. I almost want to start there and then come on to a wider lens for some of the things you talk about in dealing with our overwhelm in life in general and the kinds of lives that lead us feeling anxious and stressed and unhappy. But to begin with, one of the things that struck me even in 4,000 weeks and you kind of actually continue in this book with a chapter that relates specifically to commitment, you said in 4,000 weeks that your advice to people in their love lives is that they absolutely should settle and that they should stop seeing that as some kind of derogatory idea. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah, I will. And let me just say by way of beginning that I've only just started reading your book, which you sent me. I'm very glad I've started reading it. I'm certainly going to keep going. And I think, yeah, I mean, one thing that really is clear to me from that and from other conversations is that to some extent, we're all sort of targeting the same big stuff here, whether we're doing it through the lens of romantic relationships, relationships in broader sense or Apparently I'm doing it through how you organize your to-do list and your Netflix, right? But somehow it is all about how we sort of show up in the world. And it all comes back down to the same stuff. So I think it's, I think we'll have a good conversation. I mean, the point I was making when I ventured to give the only romantic advice I feel qualified to give there was just that, In a sense, all that settling could ever possibly really mean when you think about it deeply is accepting a trade-off, right? It means deciding to do one thing, to enter a relationship with one person instead of the other people you could enter a relationship with. It's the same in your job, it's the same in where you choose to live. You have to turn down possibilities. at least hypothetical possibilities, in order to do anything that's just built in to being a human. It's not the same as saying that you should sort of, you know, commit to a relationship with somebody that you don't think is right for you, because some guy on an interview told said that you should settle. But it's that idea that there isn't like a There's no option at any point open to us as humans that doesn't involve putting up with some kind of downside. And I think that when somebody is sort of stuck in commitment phobia.

A.

State of which I have plenty of experience earlier in my adulthood.

Me too.

Part of what's keeping that going is the sense that you're not settling, you're not burning a bridge, you're not closing a door. But actually, of course you are, right? Because we're always doing it. And what you're doing if you decide to spend several years not entering a committed relationship when you could have had that option is you're deciding to spend those years not in a committed relationship. And that might be right for some people at certain life stages, but it's not It's still like, you know, life is finite, time is ticking away, you're using that part of your life for that purpose, and then it's going to be gone forever and you'll be on to the next part of your life. So it's really just another way of getting at this whole thing that is, you know, I'm always banging on about basically, which is that we are finite in our time and our amount of control over our time and many other ways. And we spend a lot to invest a lot of energy trying to feel like we're not, but we are. And in a sense, what gives a commitment, and especially in a relationship context, what gives a commitment its value is precisely that you're shutting down other possibilities, right? I mean, it's the act of saying no to all those other life paths that gives meaning to the one you choose. Because if we lived for eternity, or we could be in a thousand places at once, it would not be of any great value that you were in a committed long-term relationship in one of those realities, right? It would be like, well, sure, but what about all the other ones? But we only have one to choose from, and that's what gives it its meaning.

William How do you think about you know, I get asked the question a lot. I would paraphrase the question as, what do I do with the 70 to 80% right partner? You know, they sure they have a lot of great things. I do feel like I'm missing some important things or some things that I would like, but, you know, they're pretty great or they're great in other ways. How do you think about making choices in those moments when it does feel like there's this impossible question of, well, time is ticking, but do I give it another five years to try to find my right person, or do I make this the best I can by leaning into it? Do you have any models or frames that could help people in that situation?

It's such a good question. And I apologize in advance if there's a pattern in our conversation where you're asking the big questions about deep human relationships, and I'm somehow managing to pull it back to productivity advice where I feel more, more comfortable.

Not at all.

And maybe we can find an interface between these things.

The truth is, I think the excitement of having you here is that you're bringing a kind of a different way of thinking to this that I think directly applies. I read 4,000 weeks and went, this could just, to your point earlier, this could just as easily be a book about finding love or dating if you apply it through that lens. So actually, I'm very happy to hear you talk from that angle.

Cool. I mean, the question about sort of 70%, 80% good enough situations, it's such a good question because obviously, on the one hand, that feels like far too imperfect a situation to settle for. 100% is on the horizon. And yet, on the other hand, we know in all sorts of other areas of life that, you know, if you write a novel and it's 70% as good as the best novel ever written, that is like an insanely good novel. So in lots of other areas, we're sort of more comfortable with that level of sort of good enoughness. I guess in terms of what I really think is that there is a really severe limit to how far we can reason our way into any conclusion in this area. And a big part of my own journey into sort of confronting and getting comfortable with my limitations has been, you know, being a kind of a brain on a stick type person who thinks that who's got a good sharp intellect and therefore thinks I ought to be able to use it to figure out the whole of my life. and gradually coming to see that intuition as an alternative way of navigating is a real thing and you can trust it to a certain extent and it's not just totally woo-woo. And so, you know, two perspectives that I think are really helpful here. One is to ask the right question that will connect you to your intuitions. And one of those that I've written about before comes from James Hollis, the Jungian psychotherapist, the extremely wise man, but also very sort of humane and funny writer and person who recommends asking this question: Does the path I'm on enlarge me or diminish me? really is an alternative to asking, will this make me happy or not? Which is a very, very troublesome question that we're terrible at answering and all sorts of pitfalls involved. And I think that a lot of people find that connecting to that intuitive sense of like, is this like a path of growth? Can I feel that this is enlarging me? This is something that has really been of great help to me. I mean, the first time I was navigating this way, I think early in my, in what was to become, you know, my, my marriage, I wasn't doing it having encountered this question. It was more a gut feeling. But, but later the question really put it into, put it into perspective for me. Just trying to connect to that felt sense of whether this is kind of a growing path. or a shrinking path. And that's what's so helpful about that, of course, is that, you know, when you're making those kinds of decisions, especially in the relationship context, there are certain kinds of difficult time that you might have in a relationship that are a huge red flag that you should get out immediately. And there are certain kinds of difficult time you can have in a relationship which are the very substance of growing in a relationship, right? And, and you know, learning more deeply how to be with another, another person. And I find that kind of James Hollis question is great for distinguishing between those, those two kinds of difficulty, the good difficulty and the bad difficulty. Then I think the other thing that is really helpful, and it's another sort of perspective from Carl Jung and the jungians, is that although it is also the subject of a song sung by Anna in Frozen 2. So you can choose the source you wish. You only actually ever have to figure out the very next moment. You only ever actually have to try to make the wisest choice about what you're going to do with the next day. and the next day and the next day. And of course there are going to be days in a life when that involves, you know, breaking up with someone or proposing marriage to someone. But very, very often I find, and I'm thinking, I guess, more in other contexts and relationships, but I think it applies here, too, when you narrow your field of focus to what you as a limited human actually have the right to kind of ask about, which is where do I, what's my next step? As opposed to where do I see myself in five years time or something. Very often clarity arises from that and it becomes clear that, you know, the only reason you're continuing with the course of action is fear or no, that you haven't got to the point yet where you really know what you're talking about.

Those things really resonate with me. Firstly on the level of the James Hollis question, because I really viscerally connect to that in my memory of my early days dating my wife, where I felt resistant to commitment on some level, but I had become quite dissatisfied with being single and dating around. And that dissatisfaction met with a person of such incredible character and personality that I felt like I was growing with every interaction, even in the early days where, you know, we would have an argument, which usually was my fault, not hers. I would come away from that argument in some way enlarged because I would feel like the way that it was handled from her side was so so competent and so kind and so compassionate while also being very strong that I couldn't. I remember coming away from argument, even arguments I would come away from going, oh, God, I think I'm the problem here. Like, I. Because. Because I couldn't blame it on how her bad handling of the situation or that I was just. I came away going, I had this really deep sense of. I'm gonna learn a lot here.

Right, right. So it's not only that you were the problem, but that actually you were sort of excited to dig into addressing that problem.

I truly saw this as the path that made me the best me. And that was really, there was something very exhilarating about that to me. And so again, I didn't have that question, you know, specifically in my mind of will this, I think, was it will this enlarge or diminish Me?

Yeah.

I didn't literally have the question, but I definitely viscerally felt that sense of, I can't walk away here because this is going to continue to enlarge me. And I felt like I was somehow now on a steep learning curve. That was really wonderful. So I completely relate to that idea. And that idea, I knew exactly where you were going when you mentioned Frozen 2, because that that idea of the next, when I heard that song about, you know, taking the next best step you can, I remember having a visceral reaction to that idea because there's something very manageable about that. And whether someone is, you know, I think so many of us miss out on relationships because we spend so much time obsessing over whether they're right or wrong instead of saying, well, look, let me actually go on another date with this person in a different context, maybe show a little more of myself, maybe get a little more curious about them. and see if more data helps me, or if I've been in a relationship for five years and I constantly just find myself doubting it. Can I give myself three months of permission not to doubt it and instead just to do all the things I would do if I was earnestly, sincerely trying to make this relationship work? And if at the end of those three months, I feel no better off, well, okay, maybe I've gotten closer to a decision. Or if my response to being told to do that is that I really don't want to do all of that, then maybe I already have a kind of answer. So I relate to all of that. What do you say, Oliver, to people who, you know, you talk in the book Meditation for Mortals, your new book, about this idea of waiting for life to start and how, in fact, this right here now is life. Life isn't going to start at some point in the future. And in the context in which I often speak, the classic example is of someone thinking that their life is going to start once they find the relationship they're looking for, and that in a sense their life is on hold until that point. What would your perspective, your advice be to someone who is really struggling to enjoy their life now before they've had this, what for some people is the number one goal in life is to find love and it hasn't happened. How could people really connect to that idea that life is happening right now and that there's more enjoyment to be found there?

I mean, yeah, it's so interesting to hear you talk about this kind of idea of the provisionality of life in the context of relationships because I'm very often coming at it from other angles, but it's of course the same phenomenon, this notion that there's something that needs to happen before life can really begin. And maybe for other people it's, you know, when they've solved their procrastination problems or when they've got the right promotion in their career or something. But it's the same idea. You can start sort of pushing back against this idea just from an intellectual level, right? You can say for finite humans, meaning has to be now because all we have is this succession of nows. You know, I think if you're, you know, if you're in your sort of early 20s and you're thinking that it might be that you're going to feel more secure in your relationships by the end of your 20s, right, this is not something to beat yourself up about, this notion that you're sort of, you've got a goal and the goal is very important to your to your well-being. I think the problem comes when you're sort of, yeah, when you're postponing engagement in the present, pending that thing. And of course, what you find is that it gets harder and harder to sort of, it gets more and more troublesome as you get older because the idea that the moment of truth is coming later is obviously a lot easier to believe in when you're 22 than when you're in your mid-40s.

There are two distinct groups I have in mind. One is the group that, especially women who really want to have a biological family of their own, and there's a kind of, there's a very real time pressure there, and they see that window closing for some of them. And at the very least, there's a fear of that window closing. And then there's people who are on the other side of that equation who maybe they did have kids, maybe they didn't. But either way, maybe there's a long-term relationship that ended, maybe there's a marriage that ended in their 50s or 60s. They never thought that would happen. Or maybe they've never had a long-term relationship and they find themselves in that season of their life.

Yeah.

Still thinking, God, I, I'm, you know, life hasn't turned out the way I want, and it's terrifying. And this feels like it's at the heart of a good life.

Again, it's fascinating to sort of have the shift of terrain for these same ideas, but I think it's. there is something really powerful and beautiful about certainly in that if your particular struggle is the sense that something didn't, that things didn't go the way that you wanted them to go and that it is in some sense too late. I think there is something really beautiful and powerful and sort of really feeling that and turning towards it. Let's see if I can sort of port this idea of playing in the ruins into relationships. This comes, I've got to give full credit, from a writer called Sasha Chapin, who among other great pieces of writing, wrote a newsletter, an addition of his Substack newsletter, where he talks about when he was in his early 20s, he really wanted to be a novelist on a par with David Foster Wallace, and the worst thing that could happen in that domain would be that he failed to become a novelist on a par with David Foster Wallace. And then, you know, some years later, he realized that that was not going to happen. He had failed. And how liberating this was, because now you no longer had to, you no longer had to tell himself all these stories about what his life was going to become. He could just say, okay, well, what is my life? What is this, this scrap heap that I'm actually in? And what could I what could I make of it? And I think there are all sorts of contexts where you can understand that same idea that there's a kind of a, there's a moment you can exhale and a weight being lifted off your shoulders when you really appreciate in depth that this is where you are, either, you know, in the situation of not having got something yet that you think you still can soon, or especially in the position of thinking that something has passed you by, or that you've, or that a relationship has failed to work out in the way that you had planned. And in fact, it's coming back to me now that Chapin also writes about this happening to him after a, I think, a fairly youthful divorce. It's like, well, at least you're no longer putting all, have to put all this effort into trying to never become a person who gets divorced, right? That ship has kind of definitively sailed. And, you know, the same can come in sort of creative work, I find. It's like, at least I no longer have to put any effort into trying to be the person who never puts a foot wrong in my creative work, because I've done it plenty of times at this point. and there is a kind of a liberation in that that is like, okay, so here we are. And there's a Zen writer called, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he's a Zen writer and a sort of a chef and a bread maker. I'm sorry, I can't. Edward Espy Brown, maybe? Something like that. He writes very articulately about how the sort of one of the ultimate kind of spiritual questions is to just look at your situation or your ingredients before you're preparing to cook a meal or life, you know, and say, and ask the question, well, like, what have we here? And no longer, you know, what do I wish this was? Or what do I think I can make it into if I really try hard and get lucky in the next couple of years? But, like, what do we have here? and just to finish that thought off, I've got to also believe, I'm pretty sure it's true that, you know, that there isn't a, there isn't a trade-off that you have to make here, but a choice you have to make here between enjoying yourself now and working on bringing about the life situation that you want. I mean, it's an old cliche, I know, but I, I'm sure it's as true in romantic relationships as anywhere else that actually if you are enjoying yourself, if you are making something of your life right now, that just turns you into the kind of person who is going to find it easier to, you know, find the relationship that would complement that. It's, you know, apart from anything else, it's just a more attractive trait, I think, to be enjoying life. than not to be enjoying it.

Absolutely. It's funny, I wrote that idea of what have we got here as far as ingredients go. I wrote a part of my book on having seen just the introduction to the TV show Chopped. I don't know if you've ever watched it, but there was something fascinating to me about the idea that the chefs were given baskets of ingredients. They didn't know what was in there and their job for the next 20 minutes was to do something with those ingredients. And it always struck me that there there was something very true to life about that concept. They may not have intended it to be, but the idea that, you know, the show isn't about the chefs asking the opening the basket of ingredients and then judging themselves based on what ingredients they happen to get in the basket. It's a show about chefs. It's a show about what this person is able to do with these very obscure and sometimes, you know, really difficult ingredients. And at the end, they're judged on how creative they can be with that. So I really love that the idea of what have we here, what have we got here, really fits with that. I wonder if this is an interesting segue to the concept you write about in your book of, I think you call it the life task. But this idea that you're your life may be calling you to do something right now. I'll leave you to explain it. But the thing I really enjoyed about this concept and found very liberating was this idea that your life task will never be something that's not possible for you where you stand right now. Could you just speak to that idea of a life task? 'Cause I think it's actually really reassuring wherever someone is starting from now, whether it's, you know, 65 and single again in a way they never thought they would be, or 32, and wondering if they'll ever find love. There is something applicable universally about that idea.

Yeah, I mean, this is just a notion. Again, it's from Jungian psychology, really. It's the question of sort of asking, it's a sort of a reframing, I suppose. It's a question of saying, instead of asking yourself, what do you want to get out of life? Where do you want to go in your life? Asking instead the question, of what life is asking of you in this moment. And I tell a story in the book about how this happened to Carl Jung himself as an adolescent when life was asking him to buckle down to his studies after he'd spent six months playing truant from school. But there are so many contexts in which this is a really useful way of kind of surfacing something. And of course it's still you who's providing the answer, right? But it's a deeper or less, more unconscious part of you. So it's really just that question, you know, what is reality asking of me right now? And yeah, there are these two criteria that I think help you identify what that life, if you're sort of dealing with a legitimate, genuine life task. The first, as Jung says, is that it's something that may well only be doable by effort and with difficulty or with effort and by effort and with difficulty, I think he says, meaning it's not going to be the thing that comes most easily. It's not going to be the sort of lazy option. It's not going to be the thing that is just going with your instincts and not finding any kind of self-discipline. But at the same time, as you say, it's going to be something that is doable fought by you in the life situation in which you find yourself. So examples I give are, you know, if you've only got $50 in the bank, it's not going to be something that requires you to have $10,000 worth of movie making equipment. That is where your sort of destiny lies. If you're not able to have biological children, another example I give, then it's not going to require that you do because that's not something that's open to you. And that is a very useful way, and I think you're right, reassuring way of distinguishing it from all these kinds of ideas of destiny and purpose that clutter the self-help space. And very often give rise to the sense people have that there's something they're meant to be doing on the planet that they can't do because of their situation. Right. So it's like you're meant to have a big family, but you can't find the person to do that with, or you can't have children, or you're meant to be launching a certain kind of business, but you don't have the financial resources that it would require. And the idea of the life task really pushes back against that and says, well, no, it can't be the case that you're meant to do something that you can't do. It may be that there's something very unexpected and difficult that you weren't thinking of. that is what you're meant to do. But it can't be the case that you're meant to do something that you cannot do because that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about how you respond to the reality you're actually in, not the one that you think you should be in or that you wish you were in again.

You talk about sanity being something that can always feel like it's out of reach and defining sanity as this, I suppose, more of a feeling of equanimity.

And.

Not overwhelm a sense that we can actually connect to things, enjoy things, approach them with a lightness as opposed to that heaviness of, oh my God, I've got so much to do and I'm so overwhelmed. And now we can't enjoy anything because everything in our days just becomes one giant never-ending to-do list that bleeds into the next day and the next day and the next day and waking up in deficit every morning. feeling like we have to earn our worth by the end of the day only to start the process all over again the next day. I find these ideas so liberating and the practical advice you give in the book for overcoming that trap, very liberating. In fact, I actually wrote these down today because I was like, God, these are really gonna help me. You talked about freeing up time. by, you know, one way to operate from sanity and deal with the overwhelm is to free up time simply by renegotiating existing commitments, not by planning to make fewer ones in the future, which we can certainly do, but you can literally reduce your overwhelm right now by reducing your number of commitments, saying you can't go to the party when you originally said you could or, you know, dropping a project that maybe isn't as important as you've been making it or is certainly not more important than your sanity. And so there's all these ideas in the book that I find so liberating. I am curious, Oliver, from your perspective, when we're writing a book, it's almost like when we're actually in the chapters ourselves, we're never more close to the material than then. And that's, when it all feels very real to us, and I'm sure you must have it regularly when you're writing something and you breathe a sigh of relief at the truth in what you're writing, and you feel very connected to it. And I think the great irony is that when an audience is reading our book for the first time, and we've been working on it for the last couple of years, they're more connected, or we're in danger of our audience being far more connected to the concepts than we are, because We're now talking about them kind of almost in the abstract from the outside, and they're suddenly the ones on the inside. Where I'm going with this is it's sometimes with a sadness that I read a book that I feel was changing me or a fear that I read it because I go, what if I don't connect to this a month from now? This is so helpful. What if a month from now I forget? What is your, do you have a system for connecting and reconnecting and reconnecting to the truths that you are writing about? And if so, what is that system? Or is it something that you rely on sort of happening to you regularly enough that it saves you?

Yeah, great question. I've thought about it a lot, and I've sort of changed my my answer. But where I'm at now is that, you know, there's a lot of hunger for that kind of system. And ultimately, I think it is another of these kinds of systems that we long for because it would just make everything so much simpler if we could put in place that system. And, you know, if you spend any time on YouTube looking at sort of personal knowledge management, there's all these kind of people with all these amazing systems for memorizing everything that you read and retaining every fact that you learn. And that's a part of the same urge, I think, this idea that there must be a way to really, like, install these insights or, you know, epiphanies or whatever, once and for all. And I've sort of reached the point now of seeing that I think that's just another example of sort of trying to be kind of perfectionistic and to sort of do something that is not in our human gift to do. So really now I just think about the importance of sort of marinating in this stuff, the importance of kind of circling back and back and discovering new ways of articulating it and discovering writers who articulated in different ways. And in my own book, in this new book, it's really a conscious effort to create a book that leads people through this material in a way that kind of resists any kind of system or any kind of attempt to store all this knowledge away and then put it into practice perfectly at some subsequent point. Or it's really about this very topic, I think, of how do you keep this stuff alive because it's got this kind of four-week structure, short chapter for each day of the month. And the idea being, you know, obviously I can't control how people read my book, but the idea might be that you would go at it roughly a chapter a day and that in so doing you'd sort of increase the degree to which you're sort of marinating in these ideas and letting them seep under your skin. rather than trying to find the way to kind of install them in a kind of plug and play kind of fashion. And when it comes to my own creative work, yeah, I just find that I have to be writing, journaling, reading sort of pretty much all the time in some way. I really feel it if too many days go by without that. and I think there's something very, there's a sort of ironic but very important moment in personal growth when you realize and in creative work, when you realize that you're not heading towards one specific point when you will finally be there, which at first is very depressing because it's like, what am I growing towards if I'm not getting to this this point. But actually, I think that's actually the deeper thing, right? To sort of, it's like a spiral, deepening spiral of re-engaging with all this stuff, which is a long-winded way of saying, you know, maybe there are people who have sort of a sudden and immediate spiritual transformation, and they're different from that moment on, and it never fades. But I don't think that's common.

But for those of us mortals who aren't that kind of person, I wonder if there is any kind of.

A.

Trigger for you that you've been able to ingrain, because I would describe my life in a way that I'm still ashamed isn't nearly far enough along in this department as these moments of just truth where I feel really connected to everything that you've written about here in this book. And I think you write about better than anyone I've read. And feeling like, oh my God, this is my mind is the problem. My mind is the whole problem here. My standards for myself are the cause of all of my suffering, my relentless urge to do more, to take on more, to fill any space in the diary, to keep. And I get that realization. But it's depressing how quickly I can go back to that either fight or flight mode where it feels like something disastrous will happen if I don't get this next webinar right, or if I don't do a great job on the Oliver Berkman interview, which I've been looking forward to. There will be some kind of catastrophic consequences, but also this general feeling of, you know, the days get filled with to-dos where you feel on the outside of your life, where even the things that should, in theory, be pleasurable just become another thing to be scratched off of the, the to-do list.

Yeah.

When you find yourself slipping back into that way of being, or maybe you find that you've worked the muscle sufficiently that you slip back less. But when you do, do you have any kind of a trigger for that kind of doesn't allow you to get too far gone or doesn't allow you to realize that you've been operating from that place of obligation and drudgery for a month before that truth revisits you again?

Such a great question. and I'm certainly not so I have certainly haven't strengthened that muscle to the degree that it doesn't happen frequently. I have two thoughts might be helpful. One of them in terms of a sort of a concrete practice is that I think that any kind of journaling or free writing or morning pages, whatever, but this is a habit that through all my years of trying out habits and routines and getting sick of them within 24 hours, this is the thing that has stuck. You know, I do this pretty much every day of my life. Spend 40 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes writing on three sides of a narrow lined A5 journal. What I think is really good about this and there are other practices that could fill the same gap is this is something that those of us who want to kind of follow rules and have a routine and stick to a certain protocol, you know, can do because it's a thing. You have to sit down, do it for a certain amount of time. There's an action associated with it. It's very clear. But then what you do inside that space is completely outside your control. It's completely sort of free form. I think it's very, very useful to follow the rule if you're doing that of that you don't ever stop writing. You can in the time for the time period, or the length of space that you're trying to fill. Doesn't mean you have to write fast. Certainly doesn't mean you have to write eloquently. I think you can do it long hand or on a keyboard, but just that notion that you're going to keep going and not allow the internal editor to sort of pull down the, pull up the drawbridge or whatever, you know, on what you want to say. And I think anything like that is really amazing because it puts this very sort of formal boundary around something. But then what you're doing inside that space is just letting and allowing and permitting and things bubble up. And I find that that does bring me back to these things very often in the last paragraph of three sides of free journalism, right? After a whole lot of rubbish, something surfaces and I'm reminded of the path that I want to be on. So that's one thought. And then just quickly, the other one, I'm sort of paraphrasing here from the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, just listening to you talk about how, you know, thinking of her own, seeing that your own mind is the problem and all of this stuff. I think there's something to be aware of here, which is that, you know, you can go a little adrift in this direction if you think that that there is a big problem to fix here, right? That because you're not spending your whole life in a sense of total communion with the deepest truths of existence, that that's a big issue that you need to fix. You can recapitulate that whole problem of like postponing life until you've fixed it. Bruce Tift has this great thought experiment that I find very liberating where he says, you know, take the thing that bothers you the most about yourself, your procrastination or your anxiety about commitment, or maybe it's your inability to stay conscious of the things that you think are the truest outlook ways of looking at the world. And just kind of imagine what it would be like to know that you were going to be afflicted by some degree of that problem for the whole of the rest of your life. you know, maybe that'll just always be the case. Maybe I'll always be prone to catastrophism and too much anxiety about travel plans when it just doesn't matter at all if I miss the train or not, really, you know, and all this stuff. And along with a lot of other people, I find that really freeing, like that thought was like, oh, maybe. Maybe that's just part of me, right? I mean, maybe that's not something that. that needs to be got rid of. Now, of course, you can sort of, it can circle around on itself, right? Because you can think, well, how do I keep remembering that? But I think it's very powerful that sort of, what if part of my personality is just that I have this kind of, you know, adorable eccentricity that maybe the perfect person wouldn't have, but who's perfect? And I think it's also Bruce Tift who has just in that same vein. I think I've heard him say on a podcast that he no longer experiences any problems at all in his marriage, but only because he no longer defines experiencing emotional disturbance as a problem. Because, getting wound up or getting triggered is just like, it's just part of the deal. So that's one way to get rid of all relationship problems, is just not to see them as, as, as, as problems.

But there is, there is something so profound to that because I, I'll always remember when I first started Jiu Jitsu, the Jiu Jitsu, you, you roll, that's the Jiu Jitsu version of sparring in in boxing. And I remember being so unfit, stamina-wise, for the task that after three minutes, I couldn't breathe. And the person coaching me at the time said, you know, sometimes we'll set a timer between the professors to just roll for an hour. And it was inconceivable to me that what I had just done for three minutes that anyone could do for an hour. And I said, how do you do that for an hour? And he said, well, when you know that you're going to be doing it for an hour, you just, you strap in and you start breathing differently because you know that, you know that the way that you scrambled around for three minutes just now, you couldn't scramble like that for an hour. So you actually start to approach the whole thing differently because you know that you're going to be doing it for the next hour. And and that was a really big realization for me. I think we do the same even in dating. You know, you can kind of be anxious because someone's not texting you back or something's, you know, oh, my God, do they like me? Do they not like me? And if I always say to people, if you think about the fact that if this works, you're going to be with this person for decades. Can you continue to breathe like this for decades? Or if you knew you were going to do this for decades, would you actually breathe differently and embrace it differently?

Yeah, that's great.

I think it's such a great point. I am wondering what to ask you as my last question, because I have at least 100 more. But I will try and settle on one. I had made lots and lots of notes for this, and it was actually my own practice in finitude and accepting finitude to have to narrow the questions I wanted to ask down.

It's all part of the point.

But I suppose I'll ask a selfish question. How do you, Oliver, if you do, resist the urge to do more. You strike me as a person who has settled on some really core things that you value and have found a degree of peace and happiness and fulfillment in both the work you do and the family life that you have. And I say that from a distance. But it does seem that way for your world and my world. There's always more. If you want to start making videos every week and you want to start doing, you start your own podcast and do this and do that. And there's always a, you know, someone with your brain could do all of that and more and more would come and it would lead to more. And I'm just wondering if it's easy for you. to not do those things or to not constantly be saying yes to the more that sounds exciting and sounds like it could get your work out there more. It could do this. Whether you find that easy or whether it's a constant struggle and how you do say no when you say no.

Yeah, I've got better at it. It's definitely still a thing for me. And as per earlier parts of our conversation, I'm not sure it ever won't be. A thing. I think on the level of sort of perspective shifts, what has helped has been everything we've been talking about, that real understanding on a deep level that there will always be more. That by grabbing a bit more of the more, I will not actually reach the position of thinking that I have enough of it. never going to happen. But there will always be trade-offs. There's always going to be somebody disappointed by the choice I make or something I miss out on that would have been good to have. This is just completely non-negotiable and given, and that makes it a lot easier to pick some things and not other things. I think thinking about it seasonally has helped. Right now I'm in a period of a lot of intense work and, you know, spreading the word about this new book and all sorts of things. And it does take away from the time I have with my family. And the challenge for me is to make sure that that doesn't just become my life from here on out, but that it's a thing for a while and then something else is a thing for a while. And then just to be much more sort of practical about it, sort of, you know, technique based. It's really a matter of one thing I do a lot is sort of in the productivity side of things, for example, keeping a very long list of all the things that I want to do or that on my plate and understanding just how long it is, and that I can only pick a few things from it onto my list of things I'm actually going to do. Any practice like that that's sort of really Brings me into contact with the fact that there will always be more. Maybe this is harder to sort of make real in the context of relationships. Maybe that's where journaling would come in, but it's really sort of really sinking into that awareness that being a finite limited human just means you could always do more and more and more. And that really breaks the spell that whatever you don't have must be going to be better than where you are right now.

Oliver's book, Meditation for Mortals is out right now. I think I was one of the first people in the world to get a copy. The subtitle is Four Weeks to Embrace youe Limitations and Make Time for what Counts. One of the really interesting things about this book, as Oliver said, is that it's designed to be a short chapter a day to really let this seep in and have it help you make real changes in the way that you approach things, the way that you approach your life, your work, and your thoughts over the space of an entire month. And I think that's really, really powerful. It's a great read. I would recommend every single person go out and grab a copy of this book. And I say this without exaggeration, there will be many people in your lives who, you know, are like me, can struggle with their own mind and the way they approach things. And this book will help them. I literally said to my mum this morning, who has sat across from me, who wanted to sit here and listen to this because she knew it would help her too. I said to her, you have to get a copy of this book. I've just ordered one for my wife, Audrey, as well, because mine is littered with notes now. And my book, if she reads it, is just going to tell her what to think about everything in the book. So she needs her own copy. But it really is a tremendous book, and I recommend everyone grab a copy from wherever books are sold. Oliver, is there anywhere else before you go that you would like People to visit of yours or anywhere that they could benefit from hearing your work or is the book the place?

The book's the place. My website, oliverbergman.com is also where you can sign up for my newsletter, which I call the Imperfectionist. So that's the other, that's the other place.

Which I'm an avid reader of, so that's a great shout. The Imperfectionist. Is there a specific domain for the Imperfectionist or is that just on your website if people go there?

The place to sign up is oliverbergman.com okay.

Yeah. So oliverbergman.com, Oliver writes regular articles that I find really, really helpful. So go check those out as well. Oliver, it truly has been a privilege for me to speak with you. I hope we get to do it again.

Me too, what a lovely conversation and.

Thank you, really appreciate it. Thanks Oliver, be well and good luck.

With the rest of the book tour.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed that interview. Leave me a comment.

Let me know what you thought. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you're listening to it on the Love Life podcast, email us podcast@matthewhussEy.com, pick up a copy of Oliver's book. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I believe that it will make a measurable impact on the life of anyone who reads this book. It certainly has on mine. And thank you, Oliver, for joining us. It really means a lot for anyone who hasn't yet, if you're finishing with any kind of a question you would like to ask me about your love life, about your dating life, about a relationship, or just about your confidence in your life in general, go try out Matthew AI. It is an incredible way for you to access my answers, even if you haven't been able to reach me or you haven't ever been able to ask me a question. Matthew AI has all of my content uploaded to it so that the answer that Matthew AI gives isn't just some generic answer. It's my answer. Go check it out for free at askmh.com. think of what you want to ask and go ask it now. And thank you as always for listening to the love life podcast. It means so much that you're here and I can't wait to see you next time.

Foreign.