The Antidote: A Book Review • Nathan Laundry

Hey friends,

Here’s a little book review and story about my time with Oliver Burkeman’s books—and his newest: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

My first Oliver Burkeman book was Four Thousand Weeks, and it arrived at the exact right moment. I had just come off a productivity rampage—six months deep, scheduling everything, even “rest days” (every other Sunday, thanks), and wondering why I felt like my brain was on fire. I was deep into the world of Ali Abdaal videos, time-blocking techniques, and endless debates about the best to-do list app. All of it served as a clever excuse to mask my anxiety with “efficiency” and justify my existence through output.

Unsurprisingly, it was not a healthy time.

Enter two books that quietly shifted everything: Deep Work by Cal Newport and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Together, they’ve become staples for a particular kind of person—those of us who’ve rejected hustle culture but still feel the aching desire to do something useful, maybe even meaningful. The folks who misattribute “beware the barrenness of a busy life” to Socrates. (To be fair, it does sound like something he’d say.)

Four Thousand Weeks and Deep Work work beautifully in tandem. One gives you a philosophy of essentialism—focus on what matters. The other gives you a framework for actually doing it in today’s corporate, always-on, digital world. That pairing inspired my own piece, Care is an Act, Not a Desire, and it’s shaped how I work ever since. These days, I live with a much healthier balance—still productive, but no longer compulsively trying to earn my place in the universe by jamming my calendar with meetings or collecting credentials like Pokémon badges.

Then comes The Antidote.

Classic Oliver Burkeman—which is a good thing. Where Four Thousand Weeks took down hustle culture and its false promise that you can #DoItAll if you just time-block yourself into peak efficiency, The Antidote takes on a different modern affliction: the cult of positivity.

Largely, I agree with Burkeman’s take: the West is obsessed with drowning out negative thoughts and emotions—as if happiness were simply the absence of bad vibes. But repression breeds obsession. The more we try not to feel bad, the worse we tend to feel.

The book can be summed up like this:

If you’ve ever spiraled into “I feel bad… Oh no, I shouldn’t feel bad… That must mean I’m failing… I, as a whole person, am a failure! Now I feel even worse for being a failure! WHAT DO I DO?”—Burkeman offers an offramp in the middle of that spiral:

“I feel bad.” “So what?”

Some days just suck. That doesn’t mean you’re broken. You can go about your day a little grumpy instead of declaring your entire existence a doomed affair.

This seemingly mundane, small-time wisdom turns out to be surprisingly far-reaching—and deeply grounded in both ancient Western and Eastern traditions (Stoicism and Buddhism, both of which underpin much of modern therapy, from CBT to ACT). Burkeman does a brilliant job making these ideas accessible without watering them down, and showing just how practical the so-called “negative path to happiness” can be.

Now, I personally choose to declare my entire existence a doomed affair. But that’s just a matter of taste. Grumpy is boring. Existential angst is sexy.

Mental Health < Smouldering over Existentialism in a French Café

Anyway. I’m writing this on a sleepless night—not because I jammed a 4 a.m. wake-up into my Google Calendar (I’m over that, remember), but just because my brain occasionally decides to do its thing. Nothing I write is going to make sense.

But The Antidote does.

It’s a genuinely helpful book. It mobilizes real philosophy and psychology to address a very real, very modern problem: the weaponization of “good vibes.” And it reminds us that some parts of life can’t be fixed—only carried.

Good book. Solid message. Good job, Burkeman.