Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman was born in 1975 and is currently 50 years old. Oliver Burkeman was born in Liverpool, England. Burkeman attended the University of Cambridge where he received a social and political sciences degree.

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author, and formerly wrote the weekly column for The Guardian called This Column Will Change Your Life.

Oliver was educated at Huntington School, York, and at the University of Cambridge. He was an undergrad student at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and was the editor of the student paper Varsity. He graduated in 1994 with a degree in political and social sciences.

He was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize back in 2006. He won The Foreign Press Association London’s young journalist of the year award. He won FPA-London’s science story of the year for a piece on the mystery of consciousness.

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time For What Counts is a map for a liberating journey toward a more meaningful life, a journey which starts where we actually find ourselves, not with some fantasy of where we’d like to be.

Taking action for what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver calls imperfectionism. It helps us to tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: the lure of distraction, our finite time, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.

Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is this life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living life more fully.

The Antidote is a series of journeys among people that share a surprising and single way of thinking about their life. What they have in common is this hunch about human psychology: that it’s our constant effort to eliminate the negative which causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, and unhappy. And that there’s an alternative “negative path” to success and happiness which involves embracing all the things that we spend our lives attempting to avoid. It’s a galvanizing, subversive message, that winds up having a distinguished and long philosophical lineage ranging from ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to Buddhists.

Oliver talks with life coaches that make money making their clients’ lives a living hell, and maverick security experts like Bruce Schneier, who contends the changes we have made to aircraft and airport security ever since 9/11 attacks actually made us less safe. Then there are the backwards business gurus, who suggest having no goals at all and never planning a company’s future.

This is a fascinating, witty, and counter-intuitive listen which turns decades of self-help advice on its head and makes us rethink totally our own attitudes toward uncertainty, failure, and death.

Oliver Burkeman: Awards & Accolades

Burkeman's book, Meditations for Mortals was nominated for the Goodreads Awards, Best Nonfiction, in 2024.

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Oliver Burkeman: F.A.Q