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  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529925395
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99

Meditations for Mortals

Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts





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.

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

  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529925395
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $36.99

About the author

Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning feature writer for the Guardian. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, and has reported from London, Washington and New York.

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Praise for Meditations for Mortals

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

A very special book. We should all read this - for the sake of our aching world as well as the state of our souls

Krista Tippett, author of Becoming Wise

A practical path towards personal transformation. A must-read

Cal Newport, author of Slow Productivity

Bracing and refreshing ... This book is both a comfort and a challenge — exactly what our trying times demand

Daniel H. Pink, author of The Power of Regret

Full of wisdom and comfort. I enjoyed every page and read it in a single sitting. This is a really important book about embracing truth and reality

Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People

A delightful, engaging, rigorous and reassuring book – so intelligent and questing and intimate. I read it in one go. The world would be a better and less frightening place if more people would stop what they are doing and read this book

Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Write It All Down

A deeply helpful reflection on how to permit our lives a sigh of relief. Moments stopped me in my tracks. Oliver is a steersman through sanity and must be read alongside any attempts at self-improvement

Derren Brown

I'm sceptical about self-help - but a four-week 'mind retreat' changed me ... [Meditations for Mortals] teems with good sense, sensibly dispensed

i

Thoughtful, level-headed and useful ... a book to meditate upon

The Times

Life-changing

Stylist

Illuminating ... Burkeman's insight [is] always clear-eyed and jargon-free ... reassuring and constructive

Guardian

Full of wise advice on not getting overburdened by work

The Times

A bracing read ... I'd bet that his audience will finish it in one sitting ... uplifting

FT

A must-read for anyone struggling with perfectionism, imposter syndrome, or feeling in need or direction

Psychologies

If there are two people who have changed my life - or encouraged me to configure it differently - then one of them is Oliver Burkeman ... Insightful and wise

Pandora Sykes
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