Meditations for Mortals

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From Oliver Burkeman, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, a four-week journey to embracing your limitations, thriving in an age of bewilderment, and finally making time for what counts.

Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman’s breakout New York Times bestseller, touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers. Inspired and moved by Burkeman’s investigation of how to live unblinkingly in the face our limited time on earth, they changed their lives: made big decisions to rethink careers, relationships, priorities, and misguided assumptions about productivity. They made to-don’t lists; embraced hobbies they aren’t any good at and that will never earn a profit; and made peace with letting certain aspirations go. Many readers found new forms of happiness and meaning at home and at work.

In Meditations for Mortals, Burkeman brings the themes and questions at the heart of Four Thousand Weeks—time, mortality, imperfection, productivity, and how to live fully and deeply even when things are most challenging—into the heart of our daily lives. How do we embrace the reality of our finiteness? How do we make decisions and act with conviction when there is always too much to do and failure is inevitable? How do we find a deeper sense of purpose when we realize that life is not a problem to be solved? How does care for others make us more free?

Comprised of four weeks of extended reflections on inspiring quotations—drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help—Burkeman’s latest is the perfect companion during a time of turbulence and pervasive anxiety: a source of solace and enlightenment, inspiration and insight, and humour and provocation. The result is a winking challenge to the usual self-help platitudes—a surprising and entertaining crash course in living meaningfully.Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals as well as The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking and HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column for The Guardian, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, on psychology, productivity, self-help culture, and the science of happiness. His writing has also appeared in The Observer, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Psychologies magazine and New Philosopher. A resident of Brooklyn, New York for more than a decade, he currently lives with his wife and son in the North York Moors in England.CA

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