Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

2024 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Nonfiction

A National Bestseller, the book invites us to ask deep questions about how we live and what counts.

In the face of our finite time, the pull of distraction, and the illusion that life will begin once we’re “on top” of everything, the author proposes a guiding philosophy he calls “imperfectionism”.

Drawing on quotations from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, the book offers a combination of practical tools and shifts in perspective. Whether read as a four-week “retreat of the mind” or in one go, it aims to be a source of solace, inspiration, and a pathway to a saner, freer life.

“That’s the dilemma that will almost surely keep Oliver Burkeman busy: His counsel that life’s problems can’t really be solved only primes his audience to want more advice . . . As Burkeman’s ideas seep into my bones, so—slowly—does the reality that I’m going to be bumping up against the rough edges of life every day, even every hour, until I die. The nubbiness, the initial recoil followed by a kick of recognition—yes, I’m off-balance: This is the point.” — The Atlantic

“The kind of pep talk I can get on board with . . . Burkeman’s insight—always clear-eyed and jargon-free—backs up, in a reassuring and constructive way, the other sense I have on more forgiving days . . . that it’s better for you and everyone around you to work with, rather than fight against, who you are now.” — The Guardian

“Meditations for Mortals provides useful answers to the questions of when and why you should give up: you should do it when your optimized, productivity-hacked life starts to feel constricting, deadening, or unrealistic, so that you can get more value out of your all-too-brief existence.” — The New Yorker