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You’ll never escape life's problems. Why that’s actually liberating | Oliver Burkeman for BT+ | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: You’ll never escape life's problems. Why that’s actually liberating | Oliver Burkeman for BT+
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Core Theme
The core theme is that embracing life's inevitable problems and discomforts, rather than avoiding them, is essential for meaningful living and personal growth.
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My name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a recovering
productivity geek, and I wrote the book "Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to
Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts."
I think when it comes to problems — just, you know, the ordinary,
annoying problems that fill so much of life —
we make things a lot worse for ourselves, because we have a sort of dual objection to
them, right? So on the one hand, when you're dealing with a problem,
there's whatever the problem is, and it's it's something you've got to grapple with.
But there's also this background sense a lot of the time
that we somehow shouldn't be facing problems at all. We thought we would have got to
the stage in our lives by now
where we didn't have to deal with problems. That we could do our jobs really
well if only there weren't all these problems, or that family life would be so great
if only we didn't have to deal with these problems. So we actually make it
worse for ourselves because we're dealing both with the problem and with this
sort of indignation that there should even be problems in our lives.
I think it really helps if you can develop a taste for having
problems in life. And what I mean by that is to start, really, just with the recognition
that this inner demand to get to the place
with no problems is
sort of absurd on its face. There are definitely specific problems
that one would hope to avoid, that one would never wish on anybody.
But if you think about what a problem is at the most general level, it's just like,
some area where your limited capacities
are running up against reality in some way. And as a result, there's something you
have to address yourself to.
Like, another word for that or another phrase for that is
"meaningful activity in life." A life without any problems, I think, would be a
life that had lost
what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa calls "its resonance."
There would be something very, very empty and meaningless about this sort of life
with no problems.
A friend of mine describes the epiphany she had when
she realized that, you know, she spent a lot of time thinking how well she could do
her job if she didn't have to deal with all these problems.
And then realizing that actually in a very profound sense, the problems were the
job. The reason she was in that position was her creative
and energetic ability to deal with unforeseen
things and find resolutions
to them. And apart from anything else, you know, if your job
didn't feature any of those creative challenges,
if it could be completely reduced to an absolutely predictable set of steps,
it wouldn't be any fun. It would also be extremely
prey to being automated away
entirely.
So one of the things that absolutely gets in the way of our just doing the things we
think we want to do with our lives and living and working meaningfully is avoidance.
It's the sense that there are certain
tasks or areas of life that trigger so much kind of fear or intimidation that
we just sort of don't go there. You're worried you might not have enough money in
your checking account, so you don't even check the balance, or you're worried
that some physical pain could be the sign of something serious, so you don't get it
looked into.
Very common
and sort of very understandable human behavior to just not do things. You just
ignore the garage because there's just too much junk in there, and you can't
bear the thought of trying
to clear it out.
There's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Loomans who's written very eloquently
on this phenomenon and he talks about these things that we avoid all the time as
"gnawing rats" that kind of, you know, in the middle of the night, you'll remember
them and you'll feel bad about them. They'll be gnawing at you, but basically,
you spend your life just sort of trying to get out of their way.
And he suggests that what we need to do is actually to sort of befriend our
gnawing rats, the path towards doing something about them. And in
his imagery, transforming them from gnawing rats into fluffy white sheep that just
sort of very docile and
don't cause the same problems.
The key step is to just sort of turn towards
our gnawing rats. We need to befriend them. In other words, you just need to do something to
consciously build a psychological
relationship with that task.
So it might not actually be that you do anything about it.
If you've got a whole, like, shed full of junk that needs to be sorted out and you
can't bear to go in to to deal with it, it might just be a question of going into
that space
and sort of psychologically letting it into your world, no longer sort
of actively trying to keep it
an arm's length. It might be a question of just visualizing how you would undertake
the first two or three steps of a big project that you've been avoiding
out of fear. Could be anything like that. It could be writing down what would
be involved in the initial steps. Anything like that will have the effect of
bringing that
project or task or domain of life back into your sort of acknowledged
reality. And then as Loomans
argues — and it's been my experience —
fairly soon after that, probably, the time will arise when it just does seem like
the right moment to take the first step on that activity. But there's got to be this
conscious process of kind of
bringing it back, having a relationship with it, not pretending —
not putting all this energy into pretending —
that it doesn't exist and isn't a part of your life when it when it already is.
I think there are two things to remember when it comes to moving forwards with
things that feel awkward because they are new and because they represent
some kind of growth, something that's being challenged inside you.
The first, absolutely, is just to remember this, right? Just to remember that
the feelings of discomfort and awkwardness are not
signs that something is wrong. Best, they could very well be signs that
something is right. If something, some change you're making feels uncomfortable,
that's a sign that it is challenging fairly
deeply conditioned things inside you,
and you should expect it to feel awkward. The second thing is to
be willing to work in incredibly tiny increments.
One question that I think could be very useful to ask yourself is just how much
of something or what version of something you're willing to do in
this moment.
So maybe it makes you feel
awkward to put yourself into a sort of social context where you're performing or
where you're on show or something like that. And in every case it's a question of
saying, "Well, okay,
maybe it's not speaking in front of an audience of a thousand people that I'm
working to here,"
but sort of gradually lowering that boundary, what is it? And maybe it is some very
very small version of that activity
where you will actually find once you lower, lower, lower, "Oh, okay. Yes. I could do
that fifteen minutes.
I could go into that setting and talk to that number of people." And it's
fascinating. There almost always is some level at which you're willing
to make the next step. You just have to be okay with it being a very,
very, very low and introductory level, I think.
Just speaking personally,
there's a sort of related
phenomenon
where certain kinds of advice and certain kinds of personal development philosophies
make you — or I should say, make me — want to kind of cringe. They're sort of so
corny or cheesy
whatever the the word you want to use. And they're sort of embarrassing. It's
like, "Oh, I don't want to do that." Like, "I don't want to read about self-compassion
because that seems kind of like, ugh, yucky."
That is a sign that you're onto something. This is something I've learned after too
long in this
sort of personal development space, is that that feeling of, "Oh, I don't want to go
there, and that's not my kind of thing," is very often a defense mechanism against the
fact that
this material has touched something vulnerable in you. And you think that by being
sort of sardonic, and funny, and dismissing it as cringe,
you're going to protect yourself from it. So
I've reluctantly come to this conclusion, but I'm pretty confident it's the
right one.
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