Just wanted to say I’ve found Oliver Burkeman‘s lectures on the Waking Up app incredibly good and it was the first time I listened to all the sessions in one go. I’m reading his book now.
Listened to this whilst on a walk. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it and how much it helped me in such a short space of time. Recognising I have fallen into the trap of wanting to get things done to then free up my time, was invaluable. Thank you.
@@tonefilter9480 true but a lot of times books are about the supporting content that helps cement in your mind the main points. You can read a book summary but will you really take on the new concepts like you would with the whole book. It depends on the book but I would usually say no you don’t.
I think a critical point of this, that the speaker didn't really touch on, is learning to let go of success and learning to accept failure. Of course we should try to succeed. But we shouldn't be a slave to it, and we shouldn't be afraid of failure. I think this is really helpful to decision making, and having a free-er and less-stress-ier life. Just my opionion
Beautiful words. One thing to note is, in thinking about our lives Oliver mentions about not making negative comparisons and instead making positive ones. The thing is we need not make any comparisons, instead we should seek to experience and assess each thing we encounter on its own merit and in comparison only to itself. In doing this we can experience the thing in itself beyond a definition in relation to other things and in doing so, see the beauty in it. This removes the attachment to an expectation of what something should be, which can in turn can be disappointed by it not turning out that way. By liberating ourselves from this cycle we can just appreciate the thing we are experiencing for what it is and try to find the good in it. It is in this true transcendence from comparisons that we can achieve real peace within ourselves.
Woah 🤯 this really revealed to me some illogical thinking patterns that I didn't before question. And I didn't know that most other people (everyone?) also perpetually are thinking "just gotta get thru this grind rn. Then later everything will be fantastic"
Time is an illusion but we need the sense of it for practical purposes here on earth. This talk is great, but essentially it all boils down to the importance of any given moment you're presently in. It's really all that matters and yet we treat it so disrespectfully. The future is not promised us, health is not promised us, and living with regret or worse, dying with regret, is no way to have lived life.
If time really were an illusion it would be hard to make sense of why clocks move slower on satellites that orbit the Earth than they do on the ground. There are well known examples in special relativity where someone boarding a rocket ship and traveling close to the speed of light for about a year could come back and see that Earth has advanced by 100 years or so, while they have barely aged. If time were an illusion, then how do you make sense of the fact that two different "nows" exist and seen to move at different rates. You really have to have a notion such as time to make sense of the two, no matter what it is you've read from spiritual authors that say otherwise :P.
@@radscorpion8 I think you misunderstood my point. Of course the way we humans perceive time is real and as I stated, necessary and practical. The illusion is that movement through time is real, when the only real moment we get is the present one. I don't really have a theory for the physics of it, and if you look up all the great minds who have posited this notion, you'll find a variety of such explanations. Interestingly, those who have had cardiac arrests, and died on the operating table yet continued to have a stream of consciousness, even after the heart stopped and blood flow to the brain ceased, reported seeing and hearing events happening around or far from their incapacitated bodies and went on to have lengthy experiences that did not match up to the material world's understanding of space/time flow.
The call here is for more discipline and discernment. The focus being one's life purpose. Which automatically cuts through the noise of life's many attractions. The key is a highly tuned intuition. And the courage to make these truths the highest priority. The quality of your life depends on it.
Sam: you really need to have a conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck about time, and how the modern calendar affects our interpersonal (and extrapersonal, group theoretical) conception of reality.
Excellent insight. FOMO drains you of energy that could've been invested more usefully in your passions hobbies daily activities relationships etc. Healthy outlook attitude and philosophy is important in life.
A very welcome reminder. I agree with just about everything said here but there is one very common take that I highly disagree with. It's the notion that we wouldn't have the same motivation to get things done if we had longer lifespans. Living forever does not mean you can do everything there is to do. It certainly doesn't mean the world will wait for you. Oliver said it himself: For every one thing you do in a moment, there's an infinite amount of other things you can't. That growing list of things we miss out on will _never_ cap off. Maybe it's the naïveté of youth speaking but I get the impression that this FOMO you get as your biological clock ticks away is far from the only significant motivator; it's just the most obnoxious one so it can be difficult to see past
wierd how the comments are sorted now. not chronologically or by most likes or what ever transparent metric. no. the sort is done blackbox-automagically
So many others do this better. I beg everyone thinking that this Is helpful to read “7 habits of highly effective people”. And if you want to be philosophical, 1984. And then Meditations by Aurelius. Atomic habits is also decent. This is a sales pitch. See it for what it is.
I read all the above and while 1984 is great and so is Mediations, the other books did nothing for me whatsoever. But I absolutely loved Oliver's book and read it thrice already and will do again.
I have read 7 habits, 1984, Atomic habits, and 4,000 weeks. The books you mentioned do not "do it better", they don't even do the same thing. It would be like saying don't read a math textbook, because Harry Potter exists.
I love the message here, but had to double check several times that this podcast isn't actually twice-looped upload. I swear I'd heard the same message in the exact same way about 10 times by the end.
Oliver Burkeman's views here are a glittering example of analysis paralysis, which is why Sam likes it I suspect. Let me summarize: Burkeman: To understand why people don't do things is because they don't realize how short life is (finitude) and they haven't read Heidegger. Reality: People do things which excites them and they enjoy doing.
I am waking up Sam however, as an ec RAF veteran my income doesn't allow me to subscribe. The people of the world need to hear your words. Why not run ads for the 'poor"? Thanks for your work Sam. You make sense.
Sam, could you sometime address the points raised by Lee Strobel in The Case for Christ? That is one book people constantly point to, to make an argument for the validity of Jesus being who he says he is. Anyways, love the podcast and your argument on freewill was one of the biggest things that opened my eyes to many things in life and about religion. Thank you!
I enjoyed the podcast, but Oliver may have missed a nuance. Even if we were immortal, we cannot be everywhere at once, so we cannot do everything that we might want to do. If the world was like Groundhog Day, then we could eventually do everything, but in the real world, if you fail to go to a particular restaurant on one night, that restaurant might not be there the next. And even if it was, the waiter from the first night might not be there the subsequent night. Having an infinite life would not change the fact that such an immortal could not do everything, either.
I’m sorry - I don’t mean any personal harm and I And I wish Berkman All the happiness and success that the world can offer him - and I think him for this attempt and helping people, but what shines through his lectures is that he is talking about time management in the most time wasting verbose way I’ve ever heard. This guy needs an editing course. Listening to him more than 10 minutes and I want to scream. It’s almost like he’s trying to waste our time and that’s how he’s making his money. I can think of 10 people off the top of my head who could’ve said what he said here in a third the time.
@@frankgradus9474 for me it just left me kind of empty. I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I honk I’m more the marrying type. But acted like I was mr Don Juan or some shit
I honestly believe one should just off oneself or get offed at 35. This is kind of the reality of life anyway, but in a much more painful, slow, pathetic way... That one doesn't fully realize until then. (I also have some cool ideas about punishment where anything above a few years of prison is objectively worse than death, whereas not every "crime" needs to be as badly punished as things which count as trivial but are very deliberate malice nonetheless.)
My time saving tip: Avoid narcissists. You can't live with them, you can't work with them and in whatever you do, you step forward 3 steps they pull you back 2. It is mentally and emotionally depleting. Waste of your time and a depressing experience that sucks your spirit away. (You gain some time at the very end. You don't even want to read or do ANYTHING anymore. Now you can just sit around and do nothing. Watch the world go down in the drain, while you numbed)
@@bradbecker8982 I think immortals could still have day jobs in order to buy shelter and other items for themselves, or else other social obligations. Maybe why this episode is devoted to mortals is because its within the broader context of managing your life. But I'm sure you're joking and if not, they're joking. Bah
Just wanted to say I’ve found Oliver Burkeman‘s lectures on the Waking Up app incredibly good and it was the first time I listened to all the sessions in one go. I’m reading his book now.
Listened to this whilst on a walk. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it and how much it helped me in such a short space of time. Recognising I have fallen into the trap of wanting to get things done to then free up my time, was invaluable. Thank you.
I was afraid to listen to this but now I feel so free for having listened to this. Thanks for posting!
I don't have time to listen to this today. I will make a mental note to circle back to this episode as soon as I can.
The valuable insights/unit of time of this talk is off the charts.
Loved this! Oliver's book is amazing and his newsletter (The Imperfectionist) is the only one I never skip.
Loved the book; didn't know about the newsletter. Thank you for the post I will check it out.
Podcast time saving hack: listen to only the public feed of Sam's podcast instead of the whole thing :)
Must say, I get enough from this approach - people can babble for hours - books of 300 pages usually contain 4 pages of information
@@tonefilter9480 true but a lot of times books are about the supporting content that helps cement in your mind the main points. You can read a book summary but will you really take on the new concepts like you would with the whole book. It depends on the book but I would usually say no you don’t.
@@spol Nah, man. That's rarely the case, not often
@@af8808 it is quite often the case. Just like conditioning and brain washing, the brain responds to repetition.
@@domzbu nope
Love the frequent uploads Sam!
Nothing better than listening to this while wasting my time. I am mortal after all. ;)
I think a critical point of this, that the speaker didn't really touch on, is learning to let go of success and learning to accept failure. Of course we should try to succeed. But we shouldn't be a slave to it, and we shouldn't be afraid of failure. I think this is really helpful to decision making, and having a free-er and less-stress-ier life. Just my opionion
Beautiful words. One thing to note is, in thinking about our lives Oliver mentions about not making negative comparisons and instead making positive ones. The thing is we need not make any comparisons, instead we should seek to experience and assess each thing we encounter on its own merit and in comparison only to itself. In doing this we can experience the thing in itself beyond a definition in relation to other things and in doing so, see the beauty in it. This removes the attachment to an expectation of what something should be, which can in turn can be disappointed by it not turning out that way. By liberating ourselves from this cycle we can just appreciate the thing we are experiencing for what it is and try to find the good in it. It is in this true transcendence from comparisons that we can achieve real peace within ourselves.
"What is time for except to be wasted?" -Alan Watts
Omg.
Woah 🤯 this really revealed to me some illogical thinking patterns that I didn't before question. And I didn't know that most other people (everyone?) also perpetually are thinking "just gotta get thru this grind rn. Then later everything will be fantastic"
Time is an illusion but we need the sense of it for practical purposes here on earth. This talk is great, but essentially it all boils down to the importance of any given moment you're presently in. It's really all that matters and yet we treat it so disrespectfully. The future is not promised us, health is not promised us, and living with regret or worse, dying with regret, is no way to have lived life.
If time really were an illusion it would be hard to make sense of why clocks move slower on satellites that orbit the Earth than they do on the ground. There are well known examples in special relativity where someone boarding a rocket ship and traveling close to the speed of light for about a year could come back and see that Earth has advanced by 100 years or so, while they have barely aged.
If time were an illusion, then how do you make sense of the fact that two different "nows" exist and seen to move at different rates. You really have to have a notion such as time to make sense of the two, no matter what it is you've read from spiritual authors that say otherwise :P.
@@radscorpion8 I think you misunderstood my point. Of course the way we humans perceive time is real and as I stated, necessary and practical. The illusion is that movement through time is real, when the only real moment we get is the present one. I don't really have a theory for the physics of it, and if you look up all the great minds who have posited this notion, you'll find a variety of such explanations. Interestingly, those who have had cardiac arrests, and died on the operating table yet continued to have a stream of consciousness, even after the heart stopped and blood flow to the brain ceased, reported seeing and hearing events happening around or far from their incapacitated bodies and went on to have lengthy experiences that did not match up to the material world's understanding of space/time flow.
The call here is for more discipline and discernment. The focus being one's life purpose. Which automatically cuts through the noise of life's many attractions. The key is a highly tuned intuition. And the courage to make these truths the highest priority.
The quality of your life depends on it.
This is the 3rd time I have tried to listen to this episode but I'm just too busy to focus on it, I wish I had more time.
I would be more inclined to pay for full episodes if there was a private discord to go with it :)
Sam: you really need to have a conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck about time, and how the modern calendar affects our interpersonal (and extrapersonal, group theoretical) conception of reality.
Excellent insight. FOMO drains you of energy that could've been invested more usefully in your passions hobbies daily activities relationships etc. Healthy outlook attitude and philosophy is important in life.
A very welcome reminder. I agree with just about everything said here but there is one very common take that I highly disagree with. It's the notion that we wouldn't have the same motivation to get things done if we had longer lifespans. Living forever does not mean you can do everything there is to do. It certainly doesn't mean the world will wait for you. Oliver said it himself: For every one thing you do in a moment, there's an infinite amount of other things you can't. That growing list of things we miss out on will _never_ cap off. Maybe it's the naïveté of youth speaking but I get the impression that this FOMO you get as your biological clock ticks away is far from the only significant motivator; it's just the most obnoxious one so it can be difficult to see past
I 100% agree. It never makes sense to me when people bring up how mortality gives life meaning and whatever.
this time TH-cam AI hit me EXACTLY where it hurts the most currently, with this recommendation. Thank you Sam, Oliver, TH-cam AI...
wierd how the comments are sorted now. not chronologically or by most likes or what ever transparent metric. no. the sort is done blackbox-automagically
What a great presentation
So many others do this better. I beg everyone thinking that this Is helpful to read “7 habits of highly effective people”. And if you want to be philosophical, 1984. And then Meditations by Aurelius. Atomic habits is also decent. This is a sales pitch. See it for what it is.
I read all the above and while 1984 is great and so is Mediations, the other books did nothing for me whatsoever. But I absolutely loved Oliver's book and read it thrice already and will do again.
I have read 7 habits, 1984, Atomic habits, and 4,000 weeks. The books you mentioned do not "do it better", they don't even do the same thing. It would be like saying don't read a math textbook, because Harry Potter exists.
I love the message here, but had to double check several times that this podcast isn't actually twice-looped upload. I swear I'd heard the same message in the exact same way about 10 times by the end.
Oliver Burkeman's views here are a glittering example of analysis paralysis, which is why Sam likes it I suspect. Let me summarize:
Burkeman: To understand why people don't do things is because they don't realize how short life is (finitude) and they haven't read Heidegger.
Reality: People do things which excites them and they enjoy doing.
In reality I find myself doing things I don’t enjoy all the time.
@@rgonzalez100 Book a session with a shrink. Might be able to help.
I am waking up Sam however, as an ec RAF veteran my income doesn't allow me to subscribe.
The people of the world need to hear your words. Why not run ads for the 'poor"? Thanks for your work Sam. You make sense.
Definitely reach out, pretty sure they offer free subs for people who can't afford one.
you can send an email to get a free subscription
Sam gives free subs to anyone who requests it. no questions asked
This is tremendously liberating.
"And now on BBC radio four we bring you the English Sam Harris."
Sam, could you sometime address the points raised by Lee Strobel in The Case for Christ? That is one book people constantly point to, to make an argument for the validity of Jesus being who he says he is. Anyways, love the podcast and your argument on freewill was one of the biggest things that opened my eyes to many things in life and about religion. Thank you!
Hello Mr. Harris.
I really do love your works!
Can I be one of your Podcast/Video editors?
I enjoyed the podcast, but Oliver may have missed a nuance. Even if we were immortal, we cannot be everywhere at once, so we cannot do everything that we might want to do. If the world was like Groundhog Day, then we could eventually do everything, but in the real world, if you fail to go to a particular restaurant on one night, that restaurant might not be there the next. And even if it was, the waiter from the first night might not be there the subsequent night. Having an infinite life would not change the fact that such an immortal could not do everything, either.
I’m sorry - I don’t mean any personal harm and I And I wish Berkman All the happiness and success that the world can offer him - and I think him for this attempt and helping people, but what shines through his lectures is that he is talking about time management in the most time wasting verbose way I’ve ever heard. This guy needs an editing course. Listening to him more than 10 minutes and I want to scream. It’s almost like he’s trying to waste our time and that’s how he’s making his money. I can think of 10 people off the top of my head who could’ve said what he said here in a third the time.
Alright. Just gave up. Done. The peace, man.
Excelente Sam Harris
I feel like my whole life been waisted sleeping with women not good for me. Any one feel like I do. I don’t recommend.
But I hope you got at least a bang out of it ... ?
@@frankgradus9474 for me it just left me kind of empty. I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I honk I’m more the marrying type. But acted like I was mr Don Juan or some shit
So, Jevon's paradox applies to personal efficiency too!
I really like Sam but I’m also Not interested in half podcast episodes. Plenty of free content and times are tough.
At 20:24 I felt I need to stop the video and just meditate on "now"
I’d love Oliver to repeat this topic but within the context of having adhd.
I honestly believe one should just off oneself or get offed at 35. This is kind of the reality of life anyway, but in a much more painful, slow, pathetic way... That one doesn't fully realize until then.
(I also have some cool ideas about punishment where anything above a few years of prison is objectively worse than death, whereas not every "crime" needs to be as badly punished as things which count as trivial but are very deliberate malice nonetheless.)
Real life DOES begin when you have kids.
to become an expert it takes 10000 hours (or approximately 10 years)
My time saving tip:
Avoid narcissists. You can't live with them, you can't work with them and in whatever you do, you step forward 3 steps they pull you back 2.
It is mentally and emotionally depleting.
Waste of your time and a depressing experience that sucks your spirit away.
(You gain some time at the very end. You don't even want to read or do ANYTHING anymore. Now you can just sit around and do nothing. Watch the world go down in the drain, while you numbed)
Don't waste your time on this. There are no answers here.
How ironic
The fact that I´m procastinating by listening to this is funny nonetheless
wow
As if anything other than a mortal needs to manage time well? 🤔
Well, if you're immortal you can still have FOMO (unless you're also able to time travel)
@@SuperLotus I assume whatever you’re afraid of missing out on will come back around eventually.
@@bradbecker8982 I think immortals could still have day jobs in order to buy shelter and other items for themselves, or else other social obligations. Maybe why this episode is devoted to mortals is because its within the broader context of managing your life. But I'm sure you're joking and if not, they're joking. Bah
@@radscorpion8 I think at a certain point an immortal being would not care about shelter or possessions
i dont have time to listen to this 🤨
You can listen while doing other things.
Lazy and terrible.
just like sellotape
Boring