Oliver Burkeman: How to Thrive in an Age of Bewilderment

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and its sequel Meditations for Mortals changed lives. Now he returns with a radically fresh way to engage with our age of bewilderment. Oliver Burkeman has inspired thousands of us to rethink careers, relationships, and big decisions. Now he joins us to share a bracing answer to a widely shared discontent: the feeling that in these uncertain times, something vital has drained out of our everyday lives. Aliveness is what makes life worth living. It isn’t the same as happiness, because you can feel alive in the midst of challenge or sadness. It’s a quality AI will never have; it’s what they can’t fake. And our current sense of overwhelm, perma-crisis and threat definitely erodes it. And so, in an age of doomerism, Oliver will show us that the problem isn’t our lack of control but, rather, our desperate clinging to it. His invitation is to ‘unclench’, physically and psychologically, so as to step out of the defensive crouch in which we usually meet the world. He will explain how – by learning to relax into reality, embracing spontaneity, and trusting our own idiosyncratic interests and desires – we can find our way back to feeling more fully and exhilaratingly alive. Don’t miss this rare chance to hear from one of the wisest and most respected thinkers at work in the psychology and wellbeing field today, and to ask him your own questions. Praise for the Work of Oliver Burkeman: ‘If there are two people who have changed my life … then one of them is Oliver Burkeman’ Pandora Sykes ‘Oliver is a steersman through sanity and must be read’ Derren Brown ‘Full of wisdom and comfort’ Chris van Tulleken ‘Every sentence is riven with gold’ Chris Evans ‘Comforting, fascinating, engaging, inspiring and useful’ Marian Keyes