You don't need a perfect morning routine

As he argues in his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitation and Make Time for What Counts, “finite humans" (that is all mortals) are hardwired to make mistakes, which “means never achieving the sort of control of security on which many of us feel our sanity depends."

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When he finally appears on my screen, Burkeman is apologetic for the mix-up over time zones (he lives in the UK but has dual citizenship in the US). He is soft-spoken, mulls over his sentences, and is quick with self-deprecating quips. In a nutshell, the 40-something Burkeman is the antithesis of your assembly line motivational guru or productivity maven.

He is nothing like those YouTubers preaching their secret mantra to fitting a two-hour morning routine—comprising meditation, yoga, workout, skin care, journaling and coffee run—into a gruelling workday, while ensuring eight hours of sleep and conquering meal prep, one week at a time.

In contrast, Burkeman is an advocate of imperfectionism. His blog, The Imperfectionist, which is sent out as a bi-monthly newsletter to thousands of subscribers, is devoted to celebrating “a good life" that is free of the obsessive “doctrine of control" that humans are primed for. The effect of this philosophy, if you will, is twofold.

On the one hand, Burkeman has his band of loyal admirers, readers of all ages, who find comfort in the friendly voice he addresses them with. Reading his newsletters often feels like having a deep chat with a genial, but knowledgeable, older cousin over a pint at the pub at the end of a rough day.

“I’ve never been the sort of person who says I’ve figured out how to live my life and you can all learn from my example," Burkeman says. “But, yes, I’m also aware that you can go too far in that direction, especially as a British person inclined to self-deprecation. So I’d say, all I am trying to do is stay just one step ahead of my readers." It doesn’t protect him from detractors, though.

There are enough people who misread Burkeman’s books as pessimistic. They accuse him of advising readers to give up. “Someone on the internet said Four Thousand Weeks (his best-selling book, which was published in 2022) became popular because it was comforting for unambitious people to feel okay about being unambitious," he says. His intention, Burkeman explains, was far from it. “I’m an ambitious person myself," he says. “I’ve always wanted to write books and be successful. Such statements really surprise me."

Meditations for Mortals is quite clear that the pursuit of the good life is indeed a perfectly worthy goal. If anything, Burkeman isn’t at all asking his readers to give up “all hopes of influencing reality." Rather, he wants them to reframe their idea of what living a purposeful life means. It should indeed be “about taking bold action, creating things, and making an impact—just without the background agenda of achieving full control," as he puts it.

Burkeman’s own journey to reach this clarity hasn’t just been the result of an intellectual quest. Rather, it has come from living through some of the universal problems that 21st-century humans suffer from. “Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind," as he writes in Meditations, “and need to claw my way back up to a minimum standard of output."

It was helpful that he began his career as a journalist. Burkeman’s job at The Guardian involved reading up vast amounts of literature on topics related to current affairs and synthesising his research, bolstered by reporting, into long-form pieces every day. His work as an author draws on his early training in mining information for stories and telling them in a style that is relatable to the masses.

“I’d always wanted to work through ideas at a greater length. I was interested in topics that had a timeless appeal," Burkeman says. “But a lot of what I was writing as a journalist wouldn’t be relevant in a few days." As he finally moved on to book-writing, he decided to work at the intersection of multiple disciplines—the three most significant areas of his interest remain stoicism, Zen, and psychology.

Like a true-blue reporter, Burkeman takes a magpie approach to gathering and assimilating knowledge from a vast range of sources, be it Hindu philosophy or a podcast on time management. He marinates these ideas, layers them with his personal experience, and presents an antidote to toxic mindsets that plague humanity in the 21st century.

Even when you are not obsessing over your material output and achievement, you are not immune to a competitive streak that lies in you. “Even if we congratulate ourselves on, say, prioritising friendships over money, we may still approach it in the spirit of optimisation," Burkeman reminds us, “pushing ourselves to make more friends, or to do better at keeping in touch with them—that is try to exert more control over our social lives."

It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to break out of fully, and Burkeman isn’t one to hector you to follow 10 steps to achieving nirvana. On the contrary, his style is too non-prescriptive to be labelled as self-help. And yet, it is too freewheeling to be classed with the work of Alain de Botton, the mainstay of whose ideas remains Western psychology.

Burkeman’s rigour comes not only from research and reading, but also from grappling with real, personal, existential problems. “If you are a so-called left-brained person like me, who is historically trying to figure things out, in good and bad ways, Zen can be an appealing philosophy," he says. “It takes a certain view of the world and pushes it as far as it will go until it collapses."

If this approach sounds self-defeating, it is also counterintuitively fortifying. “If you are talking about being overwhelmed by life, people in psychology or self-help may say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, love yourself more, live more in the present, and so on,’" Burkeman adds. “Zen, on the other hand, says let’s pursue this thought all the way it can go. This feeling that you have to get on top of things loses all sense in a world of infinite inputs."

In Four Thousand Weeks, for instance, this point is driven home in Burkeman’s trademark style of charm spiked with a heady dose of realism. The title is a reference to the number of weeks a human being would live assuming they reach the age of 80. It’s a sobering reminder of the measure of a life—how scarily little it feels when you count it in terms of weeks, days and hours.

And what do we do with this finite span of time?

We blame ourselves. For buying more books than we'll ever be able to read (“Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket," is Burkeman’s sage advice).

We agonise. Over long-term goals and projects. (Once again, “The trick to finishing things when the prospect seems overwhelming is to simply redefine what counts as finished.")

We “strive against sanity" instead of “operating from sanity." (Instead, we need to embody “a certain kind of orientation towards life…" Burkeman says, “one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it.")

We can blame the industrial revolution or invention of clocks for this human tendency to overwhelm and exhaust themselves. Or even lambast social media and digital technology. “But maybe, the big thing in all of this is the fear of death," Burkeman says, as we wrap up our conversation. “Maybe capitalism is, at the end of the day, a response to the fear of death."

Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.

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