Aliveness: Thriving in an Age of Bewilderment

From the widely beloved and bestselling author Oliver Burkeman, the book that we need: a guide to feeling fully alive in the face of paralyzing overwhelm.

Aliveness, the bold successor to Four Thousand Weeks, once again offers a radically fresh way of engaging with life. This is Oliver Burkeman’s bracing answer to a widely shared, if only half-articulated, discontent: the feeling that in these alarming and uncertain times, something vital has drained out of our everyday lives.

The term for that missing quality is "aliveness": a feeling of vibrancy, clarity, connection, and immediacy that’s essential for living an accomplished and creative life—and a life that makes a difference in this deeply unsettling era. Aliveness is what makes life worth living. It isn’t the same as happiness, because you can feel alive in the midst of challenge or sadness. It’s a quality that AI and robots will never have; it’s what they can’t fake. And our current sense of overwhelm, perma-crisis, and threat definitely erodes it, making us feel powerless and burned out.

In an age of doomerism and algorithmic predictability, Burkeman shows us that the problem isn’t our lack of control but rather our desperate clinging to it. His invitation is to "unclench," physically and psychologically, so as to step out of the defensive crouch in which we usually meet the world. He reveals that reality itself is the cure to our paralyzing malaise. By learning to relax into reality, embracing spontaneity and imperfect agency, and trusting our own idiosyncratic interests and desires, we can find our way back to feeling more fully and exhilaratingly alive. We can make the leap from thinking about all the things we want to do to actually doing them.