Oliver Burkeman Quotes

Just as a factory pumping out pollutants degrades that air for everyone, so a TV blasting cable news into an airport lounge degrades the attentional capacities of everyone nearby.

give a moment's thought is a friendship in name only. "Attention is the beginning of devotion," writes the poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are incompatible with each other: you can't truly love a partner or a child, dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause — or just savor the pleasure of a stroll in the park — except to the extent that you can hold your attention on the object of your devotion to begin with.

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.

Geoff Lye, a British environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: "What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?"

how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.

I came to understand that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.

Most successful people,' as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, 'are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.

The unconscious is the repository of everything that we're avoiding.

Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible.

The more efficient you get, the more you become "a limitless reservoir for other people's expectations," in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.

Because our problem, it turns out, was never that we hadn't yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails. ('Our suffering,' as Mel Weitsman, another Zen teacher, puts it, 'is believing there's a way out.')

Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.

The argument goes as follows: that no matter where you draw the boundary – even if we could agree on a place at which to draw it – you would not really be drawing a boundary in the conventional sense at all. Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides.

if you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you're just going to have to start doing it.

The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.