Meditations for Mortals

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 his investigation of how to live unblinkingly in the face of our limited time on earth, some of them changed their lives—and made big decisions to rethink careers, relationships, priorities, and misguided assumptions about productivity.

Now, in Meditations for Mortals, Burkeman brings the themes and questions at the center 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 humor and provocation. The result is a winking challenge to the usual self-help platitudes—a surprising and entertaining crash course in living meaningfully.