It can be so easy to feel like we don’t have enough time to get everything done. Yet according to journalist Oliver Burkeman, freedom comes not from figuring out how to become so productive that we can tackle our full to-do lists but rather from letting go of the conceit that such control is possible in the first place. In his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, Burkeman lays out a practical guide for living meaningful and fulfilling lives as finite, imperfect humans.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Burkeman to discuss what we gain by letting go of the delusion that life is something we have to solve, how our attempts at avoiding our anxieties often backfire, and why everything is much worse than we think—and why that’s OK.

James Shaheen (JS): To start, can you tell us a bit about your new book and what inspired you to write it?

Oliver Burkeman (OB): A while ago, I wrote a book called Four Thousand Weeks about coming to terms with what it means to be finite in the context of how busy, overwhelmed, stressed, and distracted many of us feel most of the time. In the conversations that I had after that book was published, I came to realize that I was not the only person who was capable of having quite powerful insights about how to show up for life but then just not actually [putting them into practice] at all—in other words, for there to be this big gap between knowing and doing. This book came from wanting to look at how resistant we are to acknowledging our limitations and our finitude in various ways. Both the content and the structure of the book are intended to help readers to take away the blockages that always seem to throw themselves up between fine notions of how to be in the world and actually doing it.

JS: In some ways, the book is an anti-self-help book—you write that the book is about how the world opens up once you realize that you’re never going to sort your life out. Can you say more about this? What do we gain by letting go of the delusion that life is something that we have to try to solve or control?

OB: I think that the conventional approach to self-help fuels this problem because it suggests that by following certain protocols, you can become the kind of person who never procrastinates or always follows healthy habits during the course of every day or focuses relentlessly on their goals. You can embark on this big project of transforming your life. But this can actually be an obstacle to just allowing yourself to do the thing—to spend ten minutes today working on the creative project that brings you alive, or to spend ten minutes today nurturing the relationship that you’ve been neglecting. There’s a sense in which these big projects of life transformation can be a distraction or a form of avoidance from showing up more completely in the moment. And so I think that that feeling of waiting to feel ready to do something lends the present moment a provisionality and causes you to want to get it out of the way, which is an absurd thing for finite mortal humans to want to do—to see time as so precious and then to be constantly trying to get the current bit of it out of the way.

Sharon Salzberg (SS): You describe your approach as imperfectionism, a “freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence.” So can you tell us more about imperfectionism as an outlook and vision? How can it be liberating?

OB: I’m characterizing all these different ways of trying to get into control over reality as varieties of perfectionism, not just the classic kind of wanting to produce perfect work. I think people-pleasing is a form of perfectionism—you’re wanting to exert perfect control over how people are responding to you. Wanting to feel ready and not like an imposter is a kind of a perfectionism.

Imperfectionism is an approach that opposes all that perfectionism. It asks, what if we started from the acceptance that there will always be too much to do? What if we started from the perspective that the future was always going to be in some sense radically unknowable? What if we started from the assumption that you’re never going to feel ready for any new venture or life stage, almost by definition, because you’re just right here in the present and it’s a new thing?

I think that that is not only consoling but also quite energizing and productivity-focused. When you let go of trying to fit everything in or trying to know with absolute confidence what the future holds, you are actually freer to take action. The writer Sasha Chapin calls this playing in the ruins, which I think is a brilliant phrase. You’re playing in the ruins of your fantasies for how life should be. Once they’re just ruins and there’s no chance of maintaining them anymore, it’s very freeing.

JS: You begin the book by saying that the most empowering step you can take in living more meaningfully is to realize that life is much worse than you think. This may seem counterintuitive or even counterproductive. So can you say more about what you call the liberation of defeat?

OB: Very often, the path forward emerges not from trying to convince yourself that things are more OK than you thought but really from going all the way through into how bad they might be. It’s easy to think that getting on top of everything that you need to do will be very, very difficult. There are quite a few people out there offering advice saying, “Well, actually, it’s not quite so difficult. Use these systems and then you can do it by an easier route.” I think it’s more useful and truer to say, “Well, no, it’s not really difficult; it’s impossible.” In that transition from really difficult to impossible, there can be a real lifting of a weight, because then it’s like, “Oh, right. This is the situation. This is where we are.” I think it’s the same with imposter syndrome. If you think that it’s going to be really hard to get the experience and the confidence that you need to not feel like you’re winging it, that’s an agonizing way to live. If you understand that basically everybody’s winging it and that you’re never going to get to that point, it’s freeing and energizing because now you can do the things that you’ve been postponing.

When you let go of trying to fit everything in or trying to know with absolute confidence what the future holds, you are actually freer to take action.

There’s a line about the Zen teacher Houn Jiyu-Kennett that her preferred method of teaching was not to lighten the burden of the student but to make it so heavy that they will put it down. I don’t know if she meant what I think she meant by that, but to this day, I just get shivers repeating that, because for me, there’s something so deep and true in that idea that it’s when I stop trying to make this situation OK in all the ways that I wrongly think it needs to be made OK that I can actually come to grips with it and do so in a much lighter spirit.

SS: You also quote the Buddhist author and activist Joanna Macy, who defines action as something that we are. As she writes, the work we have to do can be seen as a kind of coming alive. So what does it mean to view action as something that we are, and how does it change our approach to action when we think of it as a form of coming alive?

OB: I think that there’s a prevalent notion that our default state, if we didn’t push ourselves to act, would be passivity. It would be not participating in the world. It would be laziness. But my experience has always been that that’s not how it works at all and that actually these attempts to motivate yourself backfire pretty easily. Usually, when I fail to do something that I really want to do and have the time to do, it’s because I’m getting in my own way with some version of perfectionism. The third section of the book is called “Letting Go,” and it explores this idea that actually a lot of action is about letting things happen. There’s that wonderful quote that I use from Kosho Uchiyama: “Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity.” In other words, our default state is just to let action flow through us and, in Joanna Macy’s sense, perhaps as us, and the problem is that we stand in its way or inhibit ourselves. In this sense, action is how we show up for the world.

SS: One aspect of getting out of our own way is not thwarting our impulses toward generosity, and to illustrate this, you talk about Joseph Goldstein‘s advice to act on a generous impulse the moment it arises rather than turning generosity into an arduous project. Can you say more about this?

OB: I’ve really been changed by this thought. For myself, I think the reason I am not as generous a person as I might be is not because I don’t have generous impulses; it’s because I throw up all sorts of obstacles to the impulses, and sometimes they’re very ironic impulses. You can have a thought that you really want to reach out and send a note to a friend, and then you can think, “Well, but I only want to do that when I’m fresh and have lots of energy and time to do it well, because it would be insulting to that friend to do it in a half-assed way.” There is this sense in which our perfectionism about making ourselves into good and generous people stops us from doing good and generous things, and there’s something so wonderfully unpressurizing about Joseph’s insight there: I don’t need to make myself into a better person; I just need to get a little bit better at turning my naturally kind impulses into actually doing it.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.