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I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly.

Today, I'm speaking with Oliver Berkman.

What if the thing that you consider to be your sort of biggest personal flaw

or biggest thing you struggle with, like, what if you thought about the prospect of that

never going away, of that just being

something that you have to sort of find a way to live with? I think it's incredibly powerful

because it really highlights the degree to which so many of us are making our sense of meaning

in life dependent on becoming a different person than we actually are in some moment

that's going to happen in the future when you're sort of transformed so utterly that you leave

behind everything that you've come from.

Oliver Berkman is my favorite modern philosopher on the topic of why humans are so obsessed

with doing.

For many years, he wrote a wonderful column for the Guardian called,

This Column Will Change Your Life. And I can confirm that some of those essays really did

change my thinking in far-reaching ways. Oliver has written a handful of marvelous books,

including The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and Help,

...