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Oliver Burkeman’s Inconvenient Truth
A BBC Radio 4 Series
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Burkeman
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By:
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Oliver Burkeman
About this listen
Oliver Burkeman examines the insidious way in which convenience has warped our existence.
Bestselling author Oliver Burkeman is well known for his books and radio programmes exploring how we can lead meaningful and productive lives in an age of overwhelm. This time, he brings his keen sense of the ridiculous to bear on our obsession with convenience, looking at the hidden pitfalls of a life of ease.
Over the past 20 years, the on-demand industry has flourished, promising to solve our problems, save us time and spare us from tedious, time-consuming tasks. But, in attempting to excise mundane experiences, we've inadvertently ended up getting rid of many things that are actually necessary for our well-being. Having everything delivered denies us the chance to interact with other people, leaving us lonelier. Services such as Apple Pay encourage us to make pointless purchases, meaning we're less likely to have spare cash to give to someone begging on the street. And our demands for immediacy and instant gratification have made us lazier and more impatient.
In these five episodes, Oliver attempts to assess the consequences of our reliance on convenience. Helping him are a wealth of authors and thinkers, including Kat Rosenfield, Julian Baggini, Jonathan Rowson, Mark Manson and Coco Krumme. He asks how our sense of belonging is undermined by frictionless travel and effortless digital communication; spends time with the gig economy workers who pick up the tab to smooth our path; delves into the spiritual and psychological implications of convenience; and explains how, since moving from Brooklyn to rural Yorkshire, he has come to love his less convenient life.
Throughout, Oliver shows how convenience culture has made our lives subtly worse - and how, by resisting its temptations at least some of the time, we could become happier, healthier and more fulfilled individuals.
Production credits
Presented by Oliver Burkeman
Produced by Peter McManus
Executive Producer: Heather Kane-Darling
With Kat Rosenfield, Julian Baggini, Jonathan Rowson, Mark Manson, Craig Lambert, Coco Krumme
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 29 May-2 June 2023
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Performance
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Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.
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Outstanding everyone needs to learn
- By Lily K. on 02-03-25
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
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Oliver Burkeman: Epidemics of Modern Life
- A BBC Radio 4 Collection
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman, Various
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Original Recording
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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.
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An interesting and nuanced look at four modern problems
- By Nick on 01-22-25
By: Oliver Burkeman
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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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The Antidote
- Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The Antidote is a series of journeys among people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. What they have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that it’s our constant effort to eliminate the negative that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure, and unhappy. And that there is an alternative "negative path" to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid.
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The Antidote explores the negative path.
- By Bonny on 05-15-14
By: Oliver Burkeman
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Addicted to Busy
- Why Life Has Got So Hectic
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 1 hr and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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There's a ritual of the modern workplace - one you've heard and most likely indulged in yourself. It's the call and response we go through when you ask a workmate how they're doing: 'Busy!' 'So busy.' It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint. And our simultaneously grim and half chuckled reply comes as a kind of congratulation: 'Ha, better than the opposite.' When did we start doing that? As if he didn't have enough to do, Oliver Burkeman explores this epidemic of busyness to reveal that it may not be what it at first seems.
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Superb
- By Vio on 07-14-23
By: Oliver Burkeman
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Meditations for Mortals
- Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
- By: Oliver Burkeman
- Narrated by: Oliver Burkeman
- Length: 4 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.
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Outstanding everyone needs to learn
- By Lily K. on 02-03-25
By: Oliver Burkeman