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Do What You Love Interview – Oliver Burkeman

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Author and journalist Oliver Burkeman wants us all to be happier. Or at least less unhappy. Or perhaps just happy-ish if that’s more realistic. Each week in the column he writes for The GuardianThis Column Will Change Your Life, Oliver explores ideas around social psychology, self-help culture, productivity and the science of happiness. 

For his latest book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, he spoke with psychologists, Buddhists, New Age Dreamers, hard-headed business consultants and other experts to figure out what does work when it comes to being happy. He discovered that what they all have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that in our personal lives and the world at large, it’s our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – that cause us to feel anxious, insecure and unhappy. And that there is an alternative “negative path” to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid.

So, with a fresh new year ahead of us, and our minds open to new ways of thinking, we caught up with Oliver to see what advice he could offer to help us be happier in 2015.

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1. How are you ‘doing what you love’?

I do love writing, so I’m deeply fortunate to have been able to spend my working life so far as a journalist and author. But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that writing and me have a trouble-free relationship; I think it’s probably a mistake to imagine that “do what you love” means finding something that makes you constantly thrilled to be doing it. Indeed, I’m quite suspicious of writers who claim to enjoy the act of writing: it’s frequently a nightmare! The crucial thing about writing, for me, isn’t that it triggers nonstop joy (it doesn’t) but that it usually feels meaningful. It feels like a worthwhile thing to be doing, for me personally and – though this isn’t for me to judge, ultimately – for people who read what I’ve written.

2. What led you to start examining the self-help culture and writing about alternative approaches to living your life?

I’d always had a fascination with the self-help industry – partly a horrified fascination, because there’s so much rubbish out there, but also sincere fascination, because who doesn’t want to be happier? It was my very savvy editor at The Guardian who figured out that if I was going to be reading all this stuff, she might as well see if she could get a column out of it…

3. In your book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, you share your philosophy about the “negative path”. What is it and how can it actually help us to achieve happiness?

The “negative path” refers to a whole family of approaches to happiness, with deep roots in philosophy and religion, that involve turning towards negative experiences – fear, insecurity, failure, uncertainty – instead of trying to banish them, which is the usual advice from positive thinking gurus. The problem with a positivity-only approach is that it backfires: when you try really hard never to feel sad or stressed, you end up feeling worse. The negative path acknowledges that there is a deeper happiness to be attained by learning to accommodate those negative emotions, which are an essential part of being human.

The-Anitdote book cover

4. In your video, The Negative Path to Happiness and Success, you explain that we could all benefit from loosening our grip as goal driven people. Does this mean we should forget fresh starts and New Year’s resolutions this year?

I’m pretty goal-driven myself, so I’m delivering advice to myself as much as to anyone when I write this! I don’t mind a few loosely-held New Year resolutions; I think the problem is when people imagine they’re going to leave behind all their old flaws and become a perfect new self. This is a very strange idea when you look closely at it – who is this “you” that is leaving your “self” behind, anyway? – and a recipe for disappointment. Making productive changes is wonderful! But the all-or-nothing approach of “fresh startism” almost always goes wrong.

Oliver Burkeman: The Negative Path to Happiness and Success from 99U on Vimeo.

5. You believe that Buddhist thinking is a good alternative to positive thinking. How can mindfulness and meditation help people to meet goals, manage expectations and handle challenges?

The Buddhist teacher Charlotte Joko Beck said that meditation is all about “becoming a bigger container” for all the thoughts and emotions, negative and positive, that will inevitably come your way. You don’t stamp out the bad ones, or try to inflate the good ones; you learn instead to be present with whatever arises. This is just a very resilient way of being – it means you don’t get totally knocked off course whenever you’re confronted by change – and it allows you to take action in the world alongside whatever you’re feeling, instead of needing to feel ‘motivated’ to take action. People do use meditation to ‘numb out’, too, I think, but I think that is based on a misunderstanding.

6. How could we all benefit from learning to be more adaptable and willing to embrace uncertainty?

When you think about it, uncertainty is simply intrinsic to life; to know exactly what was going to happen to you, every day from now until your death, would be a kind of death in itself. We won’t get rid of uncertainty, and we won’t get rid of the feeling that we’re ‘winging it’ at work, in relationships, and the rest of it – though we easily convince ourselves that other people really do know what they’re doing – so it’s liberating to learn not to be paralysed by that uncertainty.

7. When life gets busy we can all feel like slaves to the urgent-but-unimportant – how can we make time and space in life for the things that really matter?

This sounds too simple, but by far the best trick I know is: do the things that matter as early in the day as possible. If I spend an hour on important work before I fire up Twitter, it seems to provide momentum, and I probably won’t get too distracted for the rest of the day; if I go for Twitter first, it’s all over. If you possibly can, get up 15 minutes earlier and spend that time collecting your thoughts and making a loose, flexible plan for the day.

8. You believe that you don’t necessarily need to feel inspired in order to be productive… what’s your advice for getting things done? How can we subdue the perfectionist impulse that sabotages our creative work?

The phrase I always repeat to myself is: you don’t need to feel like doing something in order to do it. Often, procrastination arises from the sense that you’re not in the right state of mind to be productive, so you naturally start focusing on getting yourself into the right state of mind – leading to all the usual pitfalls of positive thinking. If you can, remind yourself that you don’t need to be in “the right state of mind”; you can feel your reluctant, hostile thoughts, you can be friendly towards them, and meanwhile you can add a few hundred words to the piece you’re writing, or a few more brushstrokes to the painting…

9. What’s your take on today’s ever-changing digital world… is email, text and social media having a negative impact on our psychological wellbeing? Is it all just another big distraction?

The problem for many of us is that email and the web are too essential to our work to spurn them entirely. The crucial thing, I believe, is to try to make sure that our default state is to not be on social media, to not be looking at screens. There’s nothing wrong with texting or Facebook or Instagram; there’s something wrong when it’s always the first thing you automatically do to forestall feelings of boredom or irritation. Try experiencing those feelings instead!

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[Image courtesy of Ryan McFarland]

10. What does 2015 have in store for you?

I wish I knew, but then again – see my answer on uncertainty – maybe I’m glad I don’t. I am going to be plunging into book-writing properly again, so I’m sure I’ll be tearing out what remains of my hair.

Oliver’s snapshot…

When do you feel happiest? Hiking in bleak places with good friends.

Best ‘thinking’ place where you live in Brooklyn, New York: The riverfront at Dumbo.

Most inspiring book you’ve read recently: Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung.

Top three tips for overcoming writer’s block: Set process goals, not outcome goals (500 words per day, not “write a brilliant novel”); pick a time and stick to it (If you always write for an hour at 8am, it saves you having to decide whether or not you’re going to do so); don’t write – or try to write – for more than 90 minutes without a break.

Article you most enjoyed writing last year in This Column Will Change Your Life: This one on ‘near enemies’.

Quote you live by: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking”  – Richard Rohr

Wish for the world: For everyone to cut everyone else a bit more slack.

For more information about Oliver you can visit his website, read his column in The guardian, follow him on Twitter, or connect on Facebook. You can also find out more about his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, below.

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