At the end of my time off clinical work I had finished all the Malcolm Gladwell podcasts that it was possible to listen to and was seeking out something else to occupy my ears when I was dog walking or otherwise had free head space and so, I went back to audible to the credits that I had stacked up and realised I was being recommended a book by Oliver Burkeman.
The book itself was actually published in 2012 and then published on audible in 2019 and so, before his extraordinary time management description in Four Thousand Weeks, which took the world by storm which almost everybody I've ever met has heard about.
But, prior to that, he'd written The Antidote - Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking and I was sucked into thinking that because it wasn't new then it wasn't good.
This of course, is part of the symptom of the disease of the human condition as it currently stands where we gravitate towards new things when in fact, most of the stories we seek out have been told many times before.
Also, in my audible library, which I haven't listened to yet, is the George Orwell collection read by Stephen Fry with Animal Farm and 1984.
It seems to me that there are probably no more books that are of greater significance in the world now than those.
Anyway, back to Burkeman.
It is, at least in my opinion, safe to say, that this man is a genius.
He used to write a column for The Guardian, examples of which were brought together in his first book, but he's now given it up due to his fame as an author.
He lives in New York and observes and reports about the way the world is and in particular how much overwhelm almost everybody in the world is suffering from.
He gives massive and insightful advice on how to deal with that and overcome it for all of us because I think, honestly, that this might be one of the biggest problems that we're encountering in the western world middle classes.
It's no longer possible in any way to stream your information so that you don't feel like you're drinking from a fire hose.
And so, even if you tailor the input through clever software or barriers, it floods and floods in until you highlight all the things that you'd like to read, all the articles you think relate to you, all the books you have to get hold of or the YouTube videos or the movies or the songs or whatever it is.
You then stack them in a pile either beside your bed or digitally in some sort of collected area and then you look and then you realize that you will never, ever get them done and then you become overwhelmed.
He tells the story of a monk who is part of an order who stop doing anything that they're doing at 12:40 PM each day and the rest of the day is down to contemplation and meditation and generally relaxation.
He asked one of the monks how he deals with the fact that at 12:40 in the day, he might not have finished the things he had to do and the monk replies “we get over that”
As I reached the end of my Sab 5.0, I looked forwards to what is coming next and wondered how I would cope with the overwhelm which inevitably will wash over me like a tsunami.
But the fact is, as I've always done since I was a child, I'll just wake up, face the day, do my best and start again.
When I was a young boy, running around the park, going to school, trying to be a basketball player, I never thought about the bigger picture, the longer term, where I might get to in the end, it was always just about what I could do next and what I could do today, jump the next hurdle in front of you and move along.
That's what Burkman teaches us in all his writing.
And so, if any of this seems to resonate or make sense, I suggest you go to his website here and just subscribe to his blog.
It's once a fortnight, so not like the nonsense that I do and is totally manageable and beautiful and it might just give you something which will make you feel at ease with the fact that you will never enter your inbox and you will never finish your to do list.
Same as me.
Blog Post Number - 3349
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