Oliver Burkeman has been styled “the self-help guru for people who hate self-help.” In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, he spurned productivity tips and an obsessive focus on “getting things done” and instead explored how readers might direct their lives in the light of life’s limits, especially its ultimate limit — death. His new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, picks up the theme. A recent author profile in the Atlantic is bluntly titled, “You Are Going to Die.”
Although he draws on a variety of sources, Burkeman does not mention in his latest book that his core insight (that a truly human life must be lived in full awareness and appreciation of its finitude) is an old one: Burkeman has rediscovered, or reinvented, the ancient spiritual practice of attending regularly to one’s mortality, or Memento mori: “Remember, you shall die!”
Comments