Oliver Burkeman Quotes

Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren't attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way – and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others – why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world?

As the American author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, 'We cannot get anything out of life.14 There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life's provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.' Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now. 9.

Mainly, it's not that there are things you can't say. It's that there are things you can't say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

The truth, then is that spending at least some of your leisure time "wastefully", focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it - to be truly at leisure rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement.

It's quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the 'reverse golden rule' – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you'd never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they'd immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged – that in Phillips's words 'something terrible' must have happened to them – for them to think it appropriate to act that way.

It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life 'better' or 'happier', in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.

...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. –

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

Uncertainty is where things happen.

I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.

You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it's already turned into the past.

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we're willing to confront it or not.

For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task.

It's a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it's all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, 'it's much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.