Election Sanity for Mortals

Timely Advice From Oliver Burkeman

Hi folks! It’s Rufus, co-founder of The Next Big Idea Club and host of The Next Big Idea podcast.

This morning, we released an episode that is already on my short list of favorites — a conversation I had with journalist-turned-reluctant-self-help-guru Oliver Burkeman about his new book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

You may have heard of Oliver’s last book, Four Thousand Weeks, which, if we’re lucky, is about how long we have to putter about before the time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil. As Oliver laments in the book’s opening line: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” Isn’t it, though?

“But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair,” he concludes 231 pages later, “or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible — the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

Four Thousand Weeks became a surprise mega-bestseller, praised by The Atlantic as “self-help for people who generally find the genre mockable” and selected by our curators — Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink — as one of the eight best books of 2021.

Oliver’s new book invites us to embrace what he calls “imperfectionism.” Accept your limitations, your finitude, your lack of control — because “the more we try to render the world controllable,” he warns, “the more it eludes us; and the more daily life loses … its resonance, its capacity to touch, move and absorb us.”

It’s a beautiful book. It moved me. And I have found it to be a source of wise counsel in these frantic days before the election. Yes, we should all do what we can for our country — I am, and I hope you are too — but we also owe it to ourselves, our friends, and our families to remain focused and sane. This also increases the probability that our efforts, as flawed humans with finite energies, will make a difference.

How do we keep our feet on the ground going into election week? I posed this question to Oliver, and rather than include it in the podcast episode, we decided to share it exclusively with paid subscribers to this newsletter. I found his answer heartwarming.

When you join, you will also receive full access to our daily book summaries, which are written and read by the authors themselves, and the warm, fuzzy feeling that radiates down your spine when you support a small team of people doing work they care about deeply. Thank you in advance. I hope to see you in the comments.

So, without further ado, here’s my exchange Oliver: