FOUR THOUSAND WEEKS

THE ANTIDOTE

Is our search for happiness futile? Or are we just going about it the wrong way? Oliver Burkeman argues that there is, in fact, an alternative path to contentment and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid - uncertainty, insecurity, pessimism and failure.

OLIVER BURKEMAN'S INCONVENIENT TRUTH

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.

OLIVER BURKEMAN: EPIDEMICS OF MODERN LIFE: A BBC RADIO 4 COLLECTION

Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman is well-known for his long-running Guardian column, 'How to Change Your Life', and has written three bestselling 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.

OLIVER BURKEMAN: LIVING WITH THE NEWS: A BBC RADIO 4 SERIES

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. Hooked by attention-grabbing headlines, we've dived into the dramas of presidential politics, pandemics and wars, feeling actively involved in - and infuriated by - things we can't control. And this illusory sense of participation in events inevitably causes stress, anxiety and a loss of perspective. So how do we rethink our dysfunctional relationship with the news? Talking to authors, academics and media experts including Emily Bell, Robert Talisse, Pandora Sykes, Rolf Dobelli and 'Doomscrolling Reminder Lady' Karen K Ho, Oliver considers how we can free ourselves from the relentless grip of the news. Do we have to be up to speed with the latest stories to be responsible citizens, or is our increasing engagement with current affairs actually bad for democracy? Is going cold turkey the solution, or could simply stepping back, pausing and reflecting be the key to greater understanding? And is it possible, by focussing only on issues over which we can personally exert an influence, to let the rest of the world take its course? Over five fascinating episodes, Oliver shows how we can switch our default state, put real life centre stage - and make the news somewhere we visit, rather than where we live.