Meditations for Mortals
Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Burkeman
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Written by:
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Oliver Burkeman
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Rehab for burned-out high achievers.”—The Guardian
How would life open up if we stopped treating it as a problem to be solved?
Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.
How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice―and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.
A map for a liberating journey toward a more meaningful life―a journey that begins where we actually find ourselves, not with a fantasy of where we’d like to be―from the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks
©2024 Oliver Burkeman (P)2024 Allen LaneYou may also enjoy...
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What the critics say
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
One of TIME’s “32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024”
A Lit Hub Pick for “The Ultimate Fall 2024 Reading List”
“Oliver Burkeman has a way of giving you the most unexpected productivity advice exactly when you need it.”—Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“More than a book of ideas, Meditations for Mortals offers a practical path toward personal transformation—one that helps you sidestep the shallow allure of frenetic busyness and find a liberation joy in the limits and imperfections of life. A must-read.”—Cal Newport, author of Slow Productivity
“I follow Oliver Burkeman’s personal, literary, and journalistic adventures into wisdom with admiration and exhilaration. Now he bring us a ‘retreat of the mind’ in a very special book. We should all read this, preferable in the company of others—for the sake of our aching world as well as the state of our souls.”—Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise
What listeners say about Meditations for Mortals
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Paul
- 2025-01-19
On point, masterfully honest, generous and kind
Oliver is one of my favourite thinkers in the world. I think his uniqueness comes from addressing head on subtle and implicit facts and feels of life, instead of giving guides, recipes, models. After reading a Burkeman book, I always feel more capable, more understood, less serious about it all - like his prose reads like light and empathetic spiritual winks of the human experience. Many thanks Oliver for this work, and all your work. Very eager to read and listen to all your future books.
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- Nika
- 2025-01-30
Eminently sane & very needed for our times
I listened to this in the early days of the new year, at the suggested pace of a chapter a day, as an experiment. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised time and time again at the author's wonderfully warm capacity for both acknowledging our human foibles and for pointing out true things--like the futility of trying to do *everything* and the self-defeating patterns that excessive perfectionism instills. Much of the lessons are things we already know, in theory, yet constantly ignore. Burkeman's writing articulates them in a way that seeps into the mind and has a tendency to percolate over days and weeks. He reminds us over and over that making a "fresh start" isn't the point, but rather it is doing something that matters today, in the present moment, however small. As a person who generally cringes at the very idea of self-help books, I found this both helpful and witty. A pleasure!
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- Ah yes....
- 2024-10-22
Simply brilliant
I thought Oliver Burkemans 4000 weeks was a wonderful booj and one that I was talking to friends and family about for weeks, if not months, after reading it. I was excited when I knew this one was coming out... I just finished listening to it today and I'm even more blown away than the first book! Maybe it's just that I'm listening to it at the perfect time in my life, combined perhaps with the fact that he is a very good writer and a lot of the messages throughout the book are life-changing. Please read it or even better listen to it.
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