Meditations for Mortals

From the international bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks comes 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 international bestseller, touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers. Inspired and moved by Burkeman’s investigation into how to live unblinkingly in the face of our limited time on earth, some of them changed their lives: they made big decisions to rethink careers, relationships, priorities, and misguided assumptions about productivity.

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

Praise for Four Thousand Weeks:

'Wonderful' The Times
'Perfectly pitched somewhere between practical self-help and philosophical quest' Observer
'Wise' Mail on Sunday
'Full of such sage and sane advice, delivered with dry wit and a benevolent tone' Guardian