How to make the most of a finite life (w/ Oliver Burkeman)

How to Be a Better Human

TED

Self-improvement, Education

4.2 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s only so much you can do in a week – or, according to Oliver Burkeman, in the roughly 4,000 weeks the average human lives. Oliver is a journalist and author of the books Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter “The Imperfectionist.” Chris and Oliver discuss the paradox of why change can only occur once we accept that we might not be able to change. Oliver also shares how life’s mishaps can become our most treasured memories and why sharing your imperfections is an act of generosity.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.
0:05.0	I am your host, Chris Duffy.
0:08.0	Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about one of the big existential questions that humans have faced for thousands of years.
0:15.0	What do you do with your time on this planet?
0:19.0	Now, if you are expecting us to get to the bottom of that question,
0:22.3	to give you a complete and definitive answer in the next 40-ish minutes,
0:25.8	I have some terrible news for you.
0:27.7	You have lost your mind.
0:29.2	We are not going to be getting to the bottom of the meaning of life on this one podcast episode.
0:33.7	If you thought we were, you are delusional.
0:36.3	But we will be talking with the journalist
0:38.8	Oliver Bergman and we will be trying to figure out some ways that we can think about this and
0:44.1	tackle that question on our own for ourselves. And Oliver has helped many, many people to
0:48.9	think more deeply about their time on Earth. And one of the ways that he has done that is to
0:53.6	simply point out the undeniable fact
0:56.0	about our existence, which is that it is limited.
0:58.9	Here's a clip from Oliver's TEDx talk where he's talking about exactly this.
1:03.1	I think we need to think in a very different way about time.
1:07.7	And to get towards an answer, I think it's really helpful if we turn to an idea that has a very
1:12.6	long history in philosophy. It's there in Seneca and the Stoics, it's there in the Buddhists,
1:18.5	and later on in Nietzsche and in Heidegger. And that's this idea that in some sense,
1:23.9	most of us live our lives in a deep state of denial about how finite our lives
	...

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