In This Episode: The title of this episode — The Eight Secrets to a (Fairly) Fulfilled Life — isn’t mine, as I’ll explain, but it’s the distillation of one man’s writing, and this is going to summarize his summary.

080: The Eight Secrets to a (Fairly) Fulfilled Life
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Show Notes

* Help support Uncommon Sense: kofiwidget2.init('Support TRUE on Ko-fi', '#29abe0', 'L4L31K3PE');kofiwidget2.draw(); — yes, $5 helps!
* Burkeman’s book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, and his last column in The Guardian.
* Two of the ideas Burkeman discusses that have been covered in earlier episodes are gratitude, which is covered briefly in Episode 77: 7 Things to Stop Doing, as well as in my own guided meditation, and (yes!) meditation, discussed in Episode 78: Tapping a Deeper Mind Power.
* Wikipedia has a nice summary of Impostor Syndrome.

Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
Oliver Burkeman is a British writer with a Master’s degree in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. He grew up in York, so naturally he lives in …New York. He’s mostly known for his books (my favorite title of his is “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking”, which I’ll link to on the Show Page), and his column in the London Guardian.
His column was about psychology, with the unassuming series title, “This Column Will Change Your Life”. I say “was” because earlier this month he concluded his column after about 14 years, and in the last installment he distilled eight of his life lessons under the title, “The Eight Secrets to a (Fairly) Fulfilled Life”. I will of course link to that from the Show Page too, because it’s a worthy read.
In his first column way back when, he said he’d continue writing it “until I had discovered the secret of human happiness.” A secret, he admits, he never expected to find. But then, he gave up the gig, and left the world with those eight “secrets.”
While these eight aren’t an “exhaustive summary” of what he learned in those 14 years, he says, “these are the principles that surfaced again and again, and that now seem to me most useful for navigating times as baffling and stress-inducing as ours.” So let’s get right to it!
Number 1: “There will always be too much to do — and this realisation is liberating.”
Burkeman says that “Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition,” the demands on your time just keep going up, while the amount of time to do things every day still have to fit in the 24 hours you’re given. Trying to catch up is futile since “the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.