The Benefits of Adding Novel Experiences to Your Life

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

There's something most people would find pretty ruthless and depressing about a whole life spent just seeking novel experience. I do wonder whether there's value in kind of strategically trying to break up your time if you can to add more novel experiences. The meditation teacher Shinzen Young makes this very persuasive to me anyway, argument that the sort of flip side of filling your life with new experience would be to train your concentration faculties to be able to take in more of the information in a mundane experience. So that's the alternative, right? It's to sort of up the resolution of what you're taking in from your regular life even if aspects of it are routinized.

Read the full transcript here.

How can we leverage our own limitations? Why does converting the average human lifespan from years to other units (like weeks) give us such a shock? What are the most useful kinds of reactions to contemplating our own mortality? What causes our feeling that time speeds up as we age? What is the "importance trap"? How should we handle the frustration or disappointment caused by our inability to do everything we want or need to do? Why is patience important in the world today? What information sets are available to us in various communication media? Is there — and should there be — a disconnect between the "meatspace" world and the internet world? Which kinds of self-help advice are actually useful?

Oliver Burkeman's new book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, published in the US on August 10, 2021. He is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology, productivity, and self-help culture for The Guardian newspaper called "This Column Will Change Your Life." His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can pre-order Four Thousand Weeks and sign up for Oliver's email newsletter "The Imperfectionist" at oliverburkeman.com or find him on Twitter at @oliverburkeman.

Staff