Life’s Short. So Stop Trying to Perfect It.
In 2021, the Brooklyn-based Brit published a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which starts with a bleak but indisputable fact: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (If you live to be 80, you’ll have about 4,000 weeks on Earth.) So, it might surprise you to learn that Four Thousand Weeks—which became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic—is not a depressing treatise about the meaninglessness of life; it’s actually a profoundly empowering guide to making the most of the time that you’ve got.
This claim sounds radical in an age in which self-help books tell us the key to happiness is to wake up at 5 a.m. for a dance workout, and social media bombards us with ideas about how to #OptimizeYourLife. (Why does it always involve juice?) Oliver himself is a recovering “productivity geek,” a man who has tried every trendy new method to cram more and more tasks into his limited days—from apps with names like Braintoss to hacks like the Pomodoro Technique. “Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to do more,” he admits in today’s essay.
It’s a philosophy he’s named “Imperfectionism,” and we were so excited when we heard he was writing a whole new book on it. Meditations for Mortals—which came out Tuesday—is “about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out, when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive.” And it’s exactly what Americans—44 percent of whom feel burned out by the demands of modern life—need to hear.
