A National Bestseller

A map for a liberating journey toward a more meaningful life--a journey that begins where we actually find ourselves, not with a fantasy of where we'd like to be--from the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls imperfectionism. It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.

How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there's always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can get on top of everything? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice--and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.

To be read either as a four-week retreat of the mind or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

*Includes an interview with James Hollis*

Provocative and appealing . . . Well worth your extremely limited time. --Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal

There's a good reason why everyone has been talking about Oliver Burkeman's New York Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks. Nobody needs to be told there isn't enough time. Whether we're starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we're planning a vacation, we're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and yet the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks, the average length of a human life.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with getting everything done, Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made as individuals and as a society--and that we can do things differently.

From the author of the New York Times-bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, a totally original approach to self-help: success through failure, calm through embracing anxiety.

Self-help books don't seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth--even if you can get it--doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life, and work often bring as much stress as joy. We can't even agree on what happiness means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are we just going about it the wrong way?

Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it's our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty--the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid.

Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person's guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time. --Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on getting everything done, Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made as individuals and as a society--and that we could do things differently.

A National Bestseller

A map for a liberating journey toward a more meaningful life--a journey that begins where we actually find ourselves, not with a fantasy of where we'd like to be--from the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls imperfectionism. It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.

How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there's always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can get on top of everything? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice--and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.

To be read either as a four-week retreat of the mind or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.

La vida media del ser humano es ridículamente breve: si llegas a los 80 años, habrás vivido unas 4000 semanas. Si tienes 40, solo te quedan 2000. Sin embargo, estamos obsesionados con interminables listas de tareas pendientes, buzones saturados de correos sin leer y la sensación de que nunca llegamos a todo. La mayoría de los consejos sobre gestión de tiempo fomentan la idea de que un día podremos hacerlo todo y convertirnos en los dueños de nuestro tiempo, totalmente optimizados y emocionalmente invencibles. Nada hay más falso que eso. Basándose en las ideas de filósofos, psicólogos y maestros espirituales antiguos y contemporáneos, Oliver Burkeman ofrece una guía entretenida y práctica para construir una vida con sentido, unos objetivos alcanzables y una apuesta por todo aquello que realmente vale la pena.

Un libro admirablemente honesto. Cuatro mil semanas es una revisión de la realidad muy necesaria sobre las suposiciones absurdas de nuestra cultura en torno al trabajo, la productividad y la vida con sentido. MARK MANSON, autor de El sutil arte de que (casi todo) te importa una mierda

Todos sabemos que nuestro tiempo es limitado. Lo que no sabemos es que nuestro control sobre ese tiempo también es limitado. Este profundo (y a menudo hilarante) libro nos invita a replantear el culto hacia la eficiencia y reconfigurar nuestra vida en torno a lo que realmente importa. DANIEL H. PINK, autor de La sorprendente verdad sobre qué nos motiva

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The average life of the human being is ridiculously short: if you reach 80 years, you will have lived about 4000 weeks. If you're 40, you only have 2,000 left. Yet, we're obsessed with endless to-do lists, inboxes overflowing with unread emails, and the feeling that we never get everything done. Most time management advice promotes the idea that one day we can do it all and become masters of our time, fully optimized and emotionally invincible. There's nothing falser than that. Drawing on the insights of ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman offers an entertaining and practical guide to building a life of meaning, attainable goals, and a commitment to all that is truly worthwhile.

An admirably honest book. Four Thousand Weeks is a much-needed reality check on our culture's absurd assumptions about work, productivity, and meaningful living. MARK MANSON, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

We all know that our time is limited. What we don't know is that our control over that time is also limited. This insightful (and often hilarious) book invites us to rethink the cult of efficiency and reshape our lives around what really matters. DANIEL H. PINK, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us