
Oliver Burkeman: Epidemics of Modern Life
A BBC Radio 4 Collection
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Burkeman
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Various
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By:
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Oliver Burkeman
About this listen
Oliver Burkeman's guides to leading a better life in an age of confusion.
Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman is well-known for his long-running Guardian column, 'How to Change Your Life', and has written three best-selling books on happiness, productivity and time management. In this radio collection, he looks at four central ills of modernity—busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance. Talking to a range of experts, he discovers how these problems became so widespread, and how we can go about tackling them.
In Addicted to Busy (first broadcast as Oliver Burkeman Is Busy), Oliver explores why we all feel so busy nowadays, asking whether we've talked ourselves into feeling overwhelmed, and if our problem might not be lack of time, but lack of bandwidth. Could the solution lie not in working harder, but in indulging in a little idleness?
The Power of Negative Thinking sees Oliver examining the virtues of negativity. Asking why 'thinking yourself happy' can so often have the opposite effect, he probes the ways in which negative visualisation can achieve positive results, considers the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation; ponders whether workplace fun is ever a good idea and wonders whether confronting our own mortality could make us happier. And in a special one-off episode, The Impostor's Survival Guide, he inquires why so many of us spend our working lives feeling like a fraud. Where do these feelings come from, and what can be done about them?
In Why Are We So Angry?, Oliver attempts to understand why we are frequently so full of fury. Explaining how anger gave humans an evolutionary edge, he divulges how companies today profit from our outrage, investigates how anger can be essential for social change, learns how to manage rage in a healthy way and asks if the future will become ever more angry, or if there's a point where our anger will finally break.
Finally, in The Death of Nuance, he looks at how nuance is vanishing from public discourse. He discovers that our brains are wired for snap decisions, and that language can limit our capacity for nuanced thought—depending on how we choose to use it. He also considers how to open minds through moderation, explores how society has become polarised across political divides and reveals how to restore nuance and evolve our thinking in a changing world.
Production credits:
Presented by Oliver Burkeman.
Produced by Peter McManus.
Addicted to Busy: Why Life Has Got So Hectic first broadcast as Oliver Burkeman Is Busy, BBC Radio 4, 12th - 16th September 2016.
With Maria Popova, Tony Crabbe, Jonathan Gershuny, Brigid Schulte, Stephanie Brown, Dan Ariely, David Drever and his team, Eldar Shafir, Mark Cropley, Andrew Smart, Tom Hodgkinson.
The Power of Negative Thinking first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 21st - 25th November 2016.
With Gabriele Oettingen, Russ Harris, Jim Trodden, Derrick Jensen, Peter Congdon, Carol Barraclough, Kelsang Zamling, Kiera Lawlor, Ian Bogost, Marcus Coates, Josefine Speyer, Rebecca Green.
Why Are We So Angry? first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 17th October - 14th November 2018.
With Ryan Martin, Aaron Sell, Maya Tamir, Mark Vernon, Charlie Beckett, Molly Crockett, Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Martin Boyce, Brett Ford, Martha C. Nussbaum.
The Death of Nuance first broadcast BBC Radio 4, 28th December 2020 - 1st January 2021.
With Kevin Dutton, Susan Neiman, Tim Lomas, Naomi Baron, Damon Linker, Daniel Ravner, Robert B. Talisse, Poppy Noor, Richard Holloway.
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The Power of Negative Thinking
- And How It Can Be a Powerful Route to Joy, Success and Satisfaction
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 1 hr and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Burkeman explores why people are often more successful - as are organisations, armies and governments - when they focus on reasons they are likely to fail; asks where happiness comes from, and whether we look for it in the wrong places; explores a phenomenon that has come to be called 'fungineering' – attempts to boost happiness in the workplace; and confronts what many of us see as the most negative of all experiences: death.
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Perfect Follow-up to "Addicted to Busy"
- By Andrew Lenards on 07-23-19
By: Oliver Burkeman
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Oliver Burkeman: Living with the News
- A BBC Radio 4 Series
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Original Recording
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Award-winning journalist and author Oliver Burkeman has written three bestselling books on happiness, productivity and time management. Now, in this thought-provoking radio series, he looks at the way we consume and obsess over the news, and why it's so bad for us. Tracing the origins of the modern news cycle, from the first mass production of newspapers in the 19th century to 24-hour rolling news and the alluring interactivity of social media, he shows how we have gone from a scarcity to a superabundance of information.
By: Oliver Burkeman
What listeners say about Oliver Burkeman: Epidemics of Modern Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nick
- 01-22-25
An interesting and nuanced look at four modern problems
More of a radio program than an audio book, but the interview format makes it interesting and fun to listen to.
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