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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

I like to begin the show each year with an episode about something I’m thinking through personally. Call it resolutions-adjacent podcasting. And what was present for me as we neared the end of last year was a pretty real case of burnout. I took some of December off, and I’m feeling more grounded now. But that was my frame of mind when I picked up Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.”

The book connected for me. Burkeman’s big idea, which he described in “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” his 2021 best seller, is that no productivity system will ever deliver what it is promising: a sense of control, a feeling that you’ve mastered your task list in some enduring way, that you’ve built levees strong enough to withstand life’s chaos.

So Burkeman’s question is really the reverse: What if rather than starting from the presumption that it can all be brought under control, you began with the presumption that it can’t be? What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How then would you live?

Do I think Burkeman — or anyone, really — has the answer to that question? No. But I do think he asks good questions, and he curates good insights. And questions are often more useful than answers.

This episode contains strong language.

Ezra Klein: I understand your book largely as a book about burnout. How do you define burnout, and how do you think it’s different from anxiety or depression?

Oliver Burkeman: I think that burnout is best understood as having the component of a lack of meaning — that you’re not only working incredibly hard, but it doesn’t seem to get you any closer to the imagined moment when you’re actually going to feel on top of everything and in control — like you can relax at last. Anxiety is a big part of that, but anxiety can manifest in so many different life domains.

There’s an idea that I love from the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa about resonance — the vibrancy that makes life worth living. I think that’s what is gone in burnout.

My producer Kristin and I were kicking this back and forth as we prepared for this conversation, and one of the descriptions we came up with is that burnout is this persistent feeling that you don’t have the energy or the resources to meet the present. And when that feeling persists day after day after day, when the mismatch between you and the life you’re living seems like a constant of the life you’re living, it eventually throws you into some other state. I’m curious how that resonates for you.

That does resonate. We really feel an extreme pressure — from inside and from the culture and from all sorts of sources — to overcome our built-in limitations. To fit more into the time that we have than anyone ever could. To exert more control over how things unfold. Because we feel that we must just to keep our heads above water in the modern world.

But I say that we can’t, because there are built-in limitations. There’s always going to be more that you could meaningfully do with your time than the time you have to do it. You’re never going to be able to feel confident about what’s coming in the future — because it’s in the future.

And I think throwing yourself at that wall again and again and again — and never getting to that place of feeling in control — is a thoroughly dispiriting and fatiguing way to live.

One response that I think can arise in people in a conversation like this is, “Oh, get the [expletive] over it.”

For most of human history, a quarter or more of infants died. Half of everybody died before they were 15. Or, when you look at, say, my great-grandparents fleeing pogroms, it’s fair to think: Who cares if you have a lot of emails?

I’m sure you hear this a lot. How do you think about it?

[Laughs.] I don’t think I’m making the case that on every metric life is worse today — or even on almost any metric that life is worse today.

But the sense of fighting against time, the sense of being hounded by or oppressed by time — that is a very modern thing.

I think it’s a thing that people in the medieval period, for example, just wouldn’t have had to trouble with. This specific sense of racing against time — of trying to get on top of our lives and in control — and to make this the year when we finally master the situation of doing our jobs or being parents or spouses or anything else — is a really specific, acute modern phenomenon that has to do with how we relate to time.

Is it our relationship to time? Or is it our relationship to our expectations about life?

I trace the concept of burnout back to Anne Helen Petersen’s viral essay about millennial burnout in BuzzFeed many years ago. And I’m not saying that’s where the term “burnout” came from — it isn’t — but that’s where I began seeing it as an omnipresent diagnosis of modernity.

And I remember wondering whether the issue people were having was an issue of expectations — this belief that our lives were supposed to feel good. They were supposed to be, if not easy, then manageable, controllable. Work was supposed to be a source of meaning and even pleasure, and if it was actually soulless and overwhelming and always wanted more of you than you wanted to give, that was a problem to be solved. That all of these things were problems to be solved — which I’m sure is not how many of my ancestors thought about life. The sense of the tragic, the sense of the uncontrollable shot through everything. So perhaps there wasn’t this constant friction between the expectations people have for how the world is supposed to feel — and the way it does feel.

I think that is right, or at least partly right.

We do live in a time when there is an expectation that life should be manageable in that way. There is also the promise in technology that we’re sort of almost there — that with one last heave of self-discipline — combined with the right set of apps and the right outsourced services that handle our food delivery or our D.I.Y. around the house — we could finally cross that gap.

Go back to the medieval period, when people would have lived in this situation of completely endemic uncertainty. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that they didn’t find the opportunity to be happy. I think the crucial distinction is that they wouldn’t have postponed that until they felt in control. They wouldn’t have said, “Before we can have a festival, before we can sit back and look at the stars, we have to know what we’re doing here and feel in charge and in control of things” — just exactly because that possibility of being in control of things, for most people anyway, was so remote.

So I think the closer it feels like we’re getting to being in charge of life, the more tormenting and dispiriting it gets that we still aren’t.

Tell me about the idea of productivity debt.

I stumbled across this concept and found that it resonated a lot with my audience. I define this as the feeling that so many of us have when we wake up in the morning feeling like we have to output a certain amount of work in order to justify our existence on the planet.

As with paying off a financial debt, the very best thing that could happen if the day goes really well is that you end up at zero again — before the next day, when it all starts again and you wake up in a new productivity debt.

And just to head off an obvious objection, anyone who works for money is in a kind of productivity debt to whoever pays them. But I’m really trying to pinpoint this existential sense that if you don’t do a certain amount, you don’t quite deserve to be here.

And there are lots of causes we could look at here. The Protestant work ethic — the idea that there’s something inherently virtuous in hard work — is relevant here.

But that’s a really powerful thought — that we go through the day in deficit. And our best hope is to get to the end of the day exhausted and be like: OK, I just about earned the right to be here for one more day.

I found that chapter of your book very deep. There are many religious traditions, and many ways of practicing within religious traditions, but I do think there are, in general, two streams of thinking.

One stream is more of the mind that you are justified because you are a human being, and God loves you. Or your day here is justified because all there is is the present moment, and to sit quietly and absorb what is happening in the world is a beautiful and overwhelming thing.

And then there are other traditions that understand you more as an instrument — that you are trying to earn your place here. If you have the capacity and space in this world to try to be of service, and you’re not, then maybe you’re not justifying your time. Maybe you are being selfish. Maybe there is moral weight to our actions in that way.

So it was funny reading your chapter because on the one hand, everything you describe about the tendency to feel like you have to justify just being around does seem pathological. And then on the other hand, I think that sometimes it can be a real problem in cultures — and I’m part of a number of them — that are a little bit too new age, that they don’t ask you to understand yourself as a worm born into sin who needs to do good deeds to work your way out of it. It can be all about personal transformation and not your impact on the world. And maybe that’s neither good for the world nor that good for you. I find people get very obsessed with their own experience.

I’m curious how you weigh those competing interpretations of what we’re trying to do here.

I just wonder: Do we really need to say that the only viable way for making a difference in the world has to be from this place of deficit? Do we all have to be what psychologists call “insecure overachievers” who are doing lots of things in the world but doing them fundamentally to fill a void or plug a hole?

So where I’m headed with all of this is to try to salvage the notion of ambition and of making a difference — whether that’s in a........

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