From the international bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals comes a new way to engage with life: aliveness.

The bold successor to Four Thousand Weeks, Aliveness offers its reader, once again, a radically fresh way of engaging with life. It 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.

Aliveness is the name of that missing quality: 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 AI and the robots will never have; it’s what they can’t fake. And our current sense of overwhelm, perma-crisis and threat definitely erodes it.

And so, in an age of doomerism and algorithmic predictability, Oliver 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.

Ultimately, with this book Burkeman shows us how – 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.

‘If there are two people who have changed my life … then one of them is Oliver Burkeman’ PANDORA SYKES

‘Burkeman has a way of giving you the most unexpected productivity advice exactly when you need it’ MARK MANSON

‘Oliver is a steersman through sanity and must be read’ DERREN BROWN

© Oliver Burkeman 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026