Kenneth Primrose:

I’m delighted to be connecting with you today, bill. You are a psychologist who studied morality, personal development, how we become the adults we are, and the search for purpose, so I hope we’re going to explore some of the themes that have been part of your life and work. But I wonder if we could begin by diving into the question that you think we should be asking ourselves.

William Damon: 2:11

Sure. The question goes is this is the way that you are spending your time these days, reflective of your ultimate goals in life? You could say in what ways does how you’re spending your time match or relate to where you want to be headed in life? Or do the kinds of day-to-day activities that are absorbing your time and attention and thoughts connect with where you want to go with your life and what kind of person you want to become, what kind of things you want to go with your life and what kind of person you want to become, what kind of things you want to accomplish in life? These are all different ways of asking the same question, which invites people to examine what they’re doing with their time, from the moment they wake up till they go to bed at night.

William Damon: 2:57

Is that a good use of your time? In other words, is it the right use of your time or are there adjustments you might want to make to advance the things you believe in, the goals you have in life?

Kenneth Primrose: 3:11

I wonder if we could begin by thinking slightly upstream of it. Perhaps you could begin by unpacking what you mean by goals. What are the kinds of goals we’re talking about here that should seize our attention and we should be working towards?

William Damon: 3:31

Yes, because your question implies there are many kinds of goals that we have, and some of them are very short-term goals that may be important from day to day, but they’re short-term and they don’t endure. For example, when I go to campus today to teach my course later this afternoon I’m going to need to find a parking place on campus, and that’s a goal that I have. It’s a real goal. It’s important. If I don’t find one, I’m not going to be able to make it to my office, but it’s not what I would call an ultimate concern. It’s not a long-term goal that drives me over a long, enduring period of my life and, of course, it’s only important if I want to go to campus. It’s not important in other things I want to do. So there are special types of goals that you would call ultimate concerns the deep driving goals that reflect your beliefs, where you want your life to be heading and what you want to accomplish over the course of your lifetime. There is a relationship between these short-term goals, like finding a parking place, and the longer-term goals, because the short-term goals help you get to the longer-term goals, like finding a parking place, and the longer-term goals, because the short-term goals help you get to the longer-term goals, and they’re necessary.

William Damon: 4:50

Finding a parking place would be one trivial example. But even taking a job to earn enough money to keep a roof over your head or keep food on the table, the job itself may or may not be reflective of your ultimate concerns. You may need a job simply to earn income by maintaining you, by keeping you alive, and hopefully someday it may turn into an activity, a vocation that is reflective of something deeper and more driving. But in the meantime, you need a job and, whether or not it’s connected to something you deeply believe in, you need to stay alive. You need to earn money to live on. A lot of short-term goals may or may not be something you want to hang on to, but they may be necessary to promote, eventually, your search for the ultimate concerns in your life.

Kenneth Primrose: 5:46

Would it be fair to hear, within what you’ve said there’s a distinction between extrinsic goals and intrinsic goals with what you’re saying is Maslow’s hierarchy, that there are certain needs we need to fulfill, but ultimately, apex of that hierarchy are a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Is that what you’re getting at when you talk about these ultimate concern goals?

William Damon: 6:14

In a lot of ways. Yes, I don’t particularly like the extrinsic-intrinsic distinction, because I think that the ultimate concerns are informed by other people and by wise people that we learn from. It’s not that I develop my own vision of life on my own and don’t listen to other people and unfold my own personal satisfaction and meaning, because my own sense of meaning in life is informed by people who are a lot wiser than I am throughout history. So I can be reading Aristotle or reading Shakespeare or listening to some friend of mine or some mentor and I can learn a lot and my ultimate concerns are very much influenced by the external world beyond the self. That’s why I’m not really in favor of thinking of it being external versus internal. I think I want to keep learning and to learn I have to open my mind, listen and be influenced.

Kenneth Primrose: 7:24

I was thinking of the words extrinsic and intrinsic, as in. There is a goal to which I’m aiming and once I’ve got there, I’ve got there. James Kars makes this distinction between finite and infinite games. We’re infinite games. We play in order to keep playing. If my goal is to become a teacher or a doctor, once I’m there I need something to keep me going, some kind of goal or purpose. I think of that as intrinsically motivating, as opposed to a carrot on a stick motivating for donkey.

William Damon: 7:56

Sure, let’s talk a little bit about purpose, because I think that’s a key concept that I’ve spent a lot of my life studying, writing about. I do think that the idea of purpose explains a lot of what we’re talking about, which is how people can organize their lives around something that they believe in and something that continues to inspire them and give them meaning and satisfaction in life. And let me just give you a quick definition of purpose. I think that’ll clarify my view of all the things we’re talking about, including intrinsic, extrinsic, maslow to the, something that is meaningful to the self and, of consequence, to the world beyond the self. The high points of the definition are that, first of all, it’s a commitment. It’s something you stick with. It’s not a one-shot deal. It’s broader than stick with. It’s not a one-shot deal. It’s broader than any particular action. So you can do a lot of activity and actions that are valuable, but they’re not purposes. For example, if you’re riding your bike and you notice that you’re passing a river and you notice a child fall on the river and you jump in the river to save the child, that’s a wonderful, heroic thing to do, but it’s not a purpose in life because you don’t organize your life around it, unless you sit by the river all day watching for children falling in. That would be an example of a very good action. That’s not a purpose. Purpose is a commitment and it has to be active. You have to be doing something for it.

William Damon: 9:43

And then the two important things and this gets to your question about what keeps you going, even after you have a job as a teacher or a doctor or whatever it is the two high points are that, first of all, it’s meaningful to you. You own it. Somebody isn’t ordering you to do it. It’s not a command. Sometimes there’s a lot of things you have to do it it’s not a command. Sometimes there’s a lot of things you have to do in life that you do by command and I’m not dismissing those things, but they’re not purposeful. A student who does homework in a subject that the student hates, in order to graduate, has to do that. The student needs a degree, and they hate studying chemistry or Greek or whatever it is, but the student is only being purposeful if that subject matter becomes meaningful to the self. What has to be meaningful? It can’t be a response to a command.

William Damon: 10:36

And secondly and this is the important thing, or one of the important things, needs to be of consequence to the world beyond the self. It’s not simply doing something to promote your own interests, whether they be interests in happiness or self-promotion and again, I’m not putting down any of those things. There’s nothing wrong with promoting yourself, with trying to survive. You need to have self-goals too, but purposeful goals go beyond the self, and so that’s why if you in your example, if you are aiming to, let’s say, become a teacher, that’s always a nice example, and teachers is certainly a great. It’s a great vocation that the world needs. You can become a teacher and you can do it in a purposeful way, which means you really care about the students, you want to promote learning, you invest yourself in the vocation wholly in terms of what the vocation can add to the world.

William Damon: 11:39

But not all teachers are like that. I’m sure all of us in growing up have encountered teachers that were not purposeful. I think some people go into it just because they need a job or they do it for a while. They don’t like it very much and stick with it. I’m sure all of us have run into teachers like that from early years to college or university. That teacher is not being purposeful it’s not simply getting the job as a teacher and, by the way, I can use any job that way. Doctors are like that too Physicians same thing. So just getting the job is not really a manifestation of purpose. What is a manifestation is dedicating yourself to the public mission of that profession, to the public mission of that profession. If you’re in medicine, I really want to promote the health of people. If you’re in education, I really want to promote learning and investing yourself in that. That’s being purposeful. Being purposeful is a pursuit of the ultimate concerns that I mentioned before, because these are long-term goals that go beyond the self.

Kenneth Primrose: 12:47

Just to recap and clarify it’s got to be meaningful to you and consequence beyond the self, as in, you’ve got to be serving something larger than the self. If my purpose is to get rich, that’s not something of ultimate concern. That doesn’t work as a purpose.

William Damon: 13:02

It’s a long-term goal and again, I’m not really making judgments about it’s fine if people are ambitious and want to become rich, as long as they do it ethically. I would never make a judgment about that. But I will say it’s not. We would call it purpose. If you want to become rich in order to promote charitable reasons or to create a company that serves the needs of people or provides goods and services that people can benefit from, that’s being purposeful. But if you’re simply trying to accumulate money in order to buy yourself fancy automobiles, that is not a purpose. Those are self-goals.

William Damon: 13:43

One of the great books about purpose before I started doing psychological research on it was a book called Purpose-Driven Life, which was a theology book by an American pastor named Rick Warren. It’s quite a good book. It’s all about theology. Our work is about secular things as well and it’s psychological work, not theological work. Rick Warren’s book had one of the great first lines of any book, which is the first line of the book is it’s not about you. And that is truly one of the fundamental aspects of purpose and it’s also why and I want to underline this for our discussion it’s this dimension of purpose and it’s also why and I want to underline this for our discussion it’s this dimension of purpose, the beyond the self dimension, that provides the value that purpose has in people’s lives.

William Damon: 14:37

Because purpose not only promotes a lot of activity and commitment in the world a lot of benefits for the world, because purposeful people accomplish a lot, naturally but it also can provide a lot of benefits for the self. A lot of those benefits derive from the non-self-oriented nature of purpose. It prevents self-absorption. It prevents people from just thinking all the time how am I doing? Am I happy? Am I worried about something? Self-absorption, as any psychiatrist would know, is one of the risks of mental health. When you’re always thinking about yourself, you’re always worried about yourself. Purpose offers you a pathway beyond that. It offers you an opportunity to get engaged in causes and commitments that get you outside of your own day-to-day anxieties and worries. I think one of the great benefits of purpose is the opportunity to not be thinking about yourself all the time, be thinking about something you believe in, something you’re trying to accomplish and something that contributes to the world beyond the self.

Kenneth Primrose: 15:58

That’s really helpful, bill, thank you. The way you talk about purpose is like a nutrient for the mind, but there are certain things that we pursue that can do the opposite, especially if they focus us inward. I think maybe we can talk about this shortly. It’s what smartphones and social media and a lot of technology is doing to us. It’s perhaps part of the reason that there’s a kind of mental health crisis. There’s such an inward focus.

William Damon: 16:24

I want to support what you just said with some interesting data that I heard very recently and it confirms what you said, which is somebody in our country in one of the universities did a bunch of observations about how young people are using their smartphones. In other words, what are they actually doing? We know they spend a lot of time on them and, according to this professor’s, one of the major activities that young people are using their phones for is to take videos of themselves. They turn the phones around and look at themselves and see how am I dressed, how do I look. It’s a perfect example of how social media, in the current uses, are encouraging self-absorption. It confirms what you said, as social media can be aggravating this tendency. People have to think about themselves all the time.

Kenneth Primrose: 17:15

It’s definitely a strand of the argument from Jonathan Haidt on why we’re also the anxious generation his new book, why we’re also wound up and unhappy, is partly because it makes us look inward. As you point out, you’ve got a camera that faces you now, so it’s not about taking photos, about the path to purpose. That is Viktor Frankl who, I think, said that when we pursue money, sex and power, we’ll never have enough of them. There’s always a sense that we need more to satisfy us. But I think he said giving yourself over to moral good, spiritual good, creative good, relational good, those are all ends in themselves. It sounds like there’s something in what you say about a purpose of ultimate concern that it’s an end in itself. Does that sound?

William Damon: 18:07

That’s it. I couldn’t say it any better than you just said it, so I don’t have a lot to add to that. I think that’s exactly right.

Kenneth Primrose: 18:33

I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head. Moral child and a sense of drift among young people, a sense of purposelessness that you were noticing, brought the path to purpose into being for you. There’s a book on finding purpose, I guess. Two questions One is that zeitgeist still with us? Do you think you wrote it slightly more than 10 years ago, right? Do you think this is still as relevant as it was, perhaps even more? And secondly, I would love you to unpack a little bit about what happens to people when they have a lack of purpose or meaning in life. Why is this such a big concern?

William Damon: 19:15

You mentioned the word drift. Drifting is one of the problems that, especially among younger people, but even as people go on in life, about 20, 25 percent are only drifting. So it’s not talking about 100 percent of people. There are obviously very purposeful people around. There are obviously very purposeful people around. We tend to find something like, as people get into their adulthood, a third or more of adults being fully purposeful and another 40 or 50 percent being at least partially purposeful. So a lot of the population is either purposeful or at least looking for purpose or partially purpose. But the 20 to 25 percent who are quote, drifting that’s an important part of the population. Some of them are drifting because they’re very hedonistic.

William Damon: 20:31

In our country, the college student that drinks his or her way through college and spends all the time just on hedonistic pursuits. Some of them are just anxious, depressed, have given up. But whether it’s a happy drift or a miserable drift, it’s not leading them anywhere that they’re going to want to go. And if you remember, that was my question at the outset when you asked me what question? What I was asking was is the way you’re spending your time reflective of an ultimate concern, something you are trying to develop and advance in life, and if it’s not, maybe you’re at danger of drifting.

William Damon: 21:12

And drifting, I think, is a developmental problem. You may get away with it for a while, but eventually you’re very likely to look on your life and say am I really wasting my life or am I actually accomplishing something? The problem is that a significant part of our population is drifting without finding something to aim for, without finding an ultimate concern to marshal their energies towards. To some extent, a lot of other people are drifting too much of the time. They may not be drifting all the time, like the quote drifters, but even the rest of us can very often use some structured reflection around where we’re heading and maybe think about how we’re spending our time and maybe making better uses of our time, guided by our best visions about what’s important in life.

Kenneth Primrose: 22:11

A couple of different questions come to me in this, bill. One is whether there is a connection between you mentioned Rick Warren, and Pur, a purpose-driven life, which is a theology book, and you use the word vocation, which is quite theological. It means to be called. Whether you think a sense of meaninglessness or purposelessness is attendant with secularism, believing that the universe is ultimately a meaningless place. Are those two correlated? In people who are drifting, do you think?

William Damon: 22:44

I agree with you that the roots of the idea of vocation, even the Latin root, is to be called. But I think there isn’t a necessity to say there has to be, and I think faith is a very powerful source of purpose. Let me be clear about that. I think Rick Warren was onto something there, but I don’t think any particular religious faith is the only source of purpose. A lot of people feel called not by a religious tradition but by their observation about what the world needs.

William Damon: 23:20

We have a lot of cases that we’ve studied of young people a young woman who went into medicine because her grandmother died of cancer and she wanted to respond to her, or to people like her grandmother, I should say.

William Damon: 23:37

She said cancer is a terrible thing, maybe I can do something about that. We have examples of that from a wide range of professions people that go into teaching, people that go into business because they feel, oh, I can develop a product that will help people communicate better or help provide food for people. So I think the sense of being called is a result of having some perception of something that the world needs or can benefit other people or can somehow improve life in some way. We haven’t even mentioned the arts life in some way. We haven’t even mentioned the arts. One of our subjects became a passionate music composer because he felt that the scales being used in contemporary music, including jazz, were boring and they could be enlivened. That was an example that he felt called to improve jazz music. I think there are lots of ways that you can feel this sense of vocation, but it mostly comes from an observation of something you can do to improve the world, add to the world in some way.

Kenneth Primrose: 24:50

May I ask you, bill, the study of purpose for you is academic, it’s based in psychology. Is it also personal? Have you got a sense of purpose in your studies on purpose? Do you feel called towards doing this, and how would you articulate that as a vocation?

William Damon: 25:11

let me expand it because I want to make sure that we all understand that purpose is not only connected to your job, of course, when you feel, like vocation, you are purposeful.

William Damon: 25:24

I have a family, children and now grandchildren, and those folks were a large part of my purpose in life to do the best I could to support them, to raise them, to educate them. My wife and I are deeply engaged in that. Even when your children move out, they still are a bit of a purpose to you in the sense that you still want to support them. So there are lots of realms of purpose beyond work. Faith, the sense of serving a higher power is another robust source of purpose. There are lots of ways we engage in the world that we can be purposeful for. Life is long for those of us fortunate to live beyond childhood and purposes come and go very often. Raising children is one example when my children moved out of the home and have their own life. There’s some purposes, but in much less direct everyday sense. I don’t believe in parenting beyond, in micromanaging my children’s life. Once they’re adults, that recedes. That source of purpose recedes in my life and maybe my source of purpose then becomes more community oriented.

William Damon: 26:37

I have more time to invest in neighborhood cleanups, let’s say, or any other ways that you can get involved in the community. Purposes come and go and there are times in our lives and we talked about drifting. There are times in our lives we’ve studied people when they retire from their job. A lot of people go through a period of drifting. At that point Hopefully they find what we call encore purpose, next purposes to be involved in that are no longer connected with their careers, but there could be a time in their lives when they start drifting again, with all of the disadvantages of drifting the sense of meaninglessness and emptiness.

William Damon: 27:16

Life is a moving target. It’s a movie, not a snapshot, and we develop and go through different phases. This is just a way of saying that there are lots of ways to be purposeful with their appearance in our lives, when we may be dedicated to a certain purpose and then that may no longer be appropriate, when it’s time to retire or when your children move out or whatever it is. And there are other times in life when you search for new engagements. But I always get back to that question I started with, which is the way that you’re spending your time these days, reflective of some ultimate concern, and there will be periods of time in your life when it’s not, but that might be a good time for you to reflect on gee maybe I should examine this and not just drift, but actually employ my daily activities or re-employ them towards a ultimate concern that I believe in.

Kenneth Primrose: 28:15

Do you think we always know what is of ultimate concern to us?

William Damon: 28:19

Thank you. That’s a great question, and that gets back to something we talked about earlier, which is we are not alone in this world. Sometimes we are at a loss, but that’s where we can open our eyes and ears and be inspired by other people who we admire. We may be inspired by somebody who writes about things in a way that moves us. We may be inspired by people we know or people in the public sphere. You can follow your instincts in that and learn from other people and help yourself form an ultimate concern. You don’t have to invent this yourself. You can look around the world and say are there things that people are doing that I admire, that I could invest my time in, so you don’t have to do it all by yourself.

Kenneth Primrose: 29:05

He talks about purposes coming and going through the course of your life and this is something I’ve found written about by David Brooks in his book the Second Mountain. I think he builds on Jung’s idea of life having essentially two acts a second half where you commit to things bigger than yourself, and the first half where you’re building a container, building a sense of who you are. It’s a little bit more self-focused and ego-driven. Is this a pattern that you’ve noticed in your own life and in those around you and people you’ve studied? Does the gravitational pull of purpose shift through the course of a lifetime just because of the age we’re at?

William Damon: 29:48

It does for some people. I think that’s a little simplistic. I think the distinguishing between these two strands is correct. In our research we find that people who are very strong in their capacity to develop self-goals that are sensible are also strong in their capacity to develop purposeful goals. These are more yin and yang, working together rather than in opposition. And as for the sequential part of it, I think David Brooks may be a little bit off base there, because we find that early in life among adolescents is really when young people start thinking about their futures we find that the young people that do best are synchronizing their focus on their own self, which has to do with identity. Who I am that’s an Ericksonian notion, one of the main goals of adolescence, and that’s very self-focused. Who am I? What kind of a person do I want to become? But they’re synchronizing that with what they want to do for the world. The question of what they want to do for the world, which is a purposeful question, helps bolster the search for identity.

William Damon: 31:04

Erickson wrote about this too. Right from the start. Both things can and should be happening at the same time, not sequentially, one after another. That said, we do find, over the lifespan, people generally becoming more and more purposeful and we do find over the lifespan people generally becoming more and more purposeful. So in adolescence or early adulthood maybe one in five or 20% are fully purposeful. By midlife or later in life it goes up into the 30s and 40%, with a lot of the rest being at least mostly or partially purposeful. There is some development towards purpose and in that sense you could say David Brooks has a point. But it’s not quite as simplistic as one comes first and the other comes second. In the best of cases, and even in most cases, they both are happening at the same time and bolstering one another. As development goes hand in hand, self-goals and other goals can and should develop at the same time.

Kenneth Primrose: 32:04

It sounds like as we become more purposeful, life takes on some coherence. It brings to mind Frederick Buechner, often quoted as saying where your great gladness meets the world’s great need. I’ve probably paraphrased that poorly, but it seems that is accessible to you as a young person as much as it is as someone who’s middle-aged or older.

William Damon: 32:25

Young people. Aristotle wrote that youth is a time of idealism. So young people very much can be in tuned with this and in fact they are. That is one of the things that inspires their search for meaning and self, who they are in life. That quote you offered I quoted in. I wrote a little book. Before I wrote the Path to Purpose, I wrote a little book called Noble Purpose which was filled with quotes from people about purpose, going all the way back to Aristotle and beyond.

Kenneth Primrose: 32:56

I wonder, as you talk about purpose changing over the lifespan and in your most recent book with my father, you’ve written about James Butler’s life review method Is that something worth talking about in relation to this question we’re exploring today Is the way I’m spending my time in the service of my ultimate goals. Does the life review method help you do that?

William Damon: 33:22

Oh, absolutely. Butler himself promoted it that way. I’ll just give three or four sentences to explain the background. This was a discovery that was personally very important to me fairly late in my life, and the initial discovery had to do with my discovery of what actually happened to my father. I grew up without a father After World War II. He never returned. I always assumed that he was killed in action, but it turned out he wasn’t. I discovered more and more about what happened to his life and what difference it made in my life. So as I explored records about what happened to him, I found out about what my early life was like and what it was really like growing up without a father, and lots of other things. All of that’s in the book and I will go into it here.

William Damon: 34:12

But the point here is that in my discoveries of where my life really began and what some of the important choice points that helped form me as a child and adolescent in the absence of my father, I began to understand more about choices that I made in adapting to what was a very difficult set of conditions, both economically. My father left my mother and I without financial support, and also I didn’t have the benefit of having a father to teach me all kinds of things. So I discovered things about myself that were strengths that I didn’t know that I really had. I had a way of working out some of the regrets that I had in terms of understanding what some of those silver linings were, and all of this gave me material to look forward and say in my future choices, how can I build on the strengths that I clearly demonstrated and on the interests that I had, and how can I also liberate myself from the remaining regrets I had of things that never happened, because of things that were missing in my early life? This is exactly what Butler’s Life Review is intended to do. It’s intended to give you a positive, affirmative rear view on your past in order to prepare you for good choices about your future that build on those strengths, the things that you have found satisfying, the things that you have found redemptive. There’s a lot of ideas about redemption and redeeming and it’s very liberating, the reason I call the book, just to give you an example, a Round of Golf with my Father.

William Damon: 36:03

I never met my father. I never had a round of golf with him. One of the regrets that I’d had when I discovered about him was. It turns out he was a great golfer and I love golf, but I am very far from a great golfer. So I started to resent. I said, why couldn’t this guy have come around and taught me how to play golf? I had to liberate myself from that resentment. So what I did and this was a psychological exercise and it was purposeful in its own way, as I discovered my father’s family late in life this was a revelation.

William Damon: 36:38

One of my new cousins found an old set of my father’s golf clubs. In that golf bag was a scorecard from his youth playing at a country club in Massachusetts. I went to the country club. They let me on the course to play around. I pretended in my mind that he was playing with me as I played against his scorecard and I can tell you that it was a very liberating experience. It was redemptive.

William Damon: 37:07

I found things about him that I admired. It was a beautiful day and I felt the joy of being out there and reconciling myself to his absence and even forgiving him in some ways for abandoning my mother and me and trying to understand why, as a young man, he felt that he could do that. That was an example of going back in the past, finding out ways that I had not resolved certain things and moving through it, moving on with my life. In my book Round of Golf with my Father, I quote William Faulkner, an American writer who had a wonderful line in one of his plays, which is that the path is not dead, it is not even past. And that really was the point that I got to, which is that I learned from my professional writing don’t dismiss the past, even if you’re forward-looking and you believe that purpose is leading you forward in ways that you choose, and you have a lot of agency. Part of that agency is figuring out what to do with your history and how to make the most of it.

Kenneth Primrose: 38:16

Thank you for sharing that, bill. It sounds very redemptive and it’s a beautiful story. It sounds very therapeutic as a way of coming to terms with the way the past is sedimented into the present. It isn’t, as Faulkner says, even past interested in the meaning crisis. So this is spoken about broadly whether it really is a kind of crisis of purpose and, related to that, whether purpose has a lot to do with belonging. What I’m thinking of is kind of Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone his point that communities are atomized and falling apart in some ways, and in those cohesive communities there is, it seems to me, far less sense of drift psychologically. So I wonder, could you speak into that? Has belonging got anything to do with purpose?

William Damon: 39:16

Actually, you anticipated one of the things that we discovered as we followed young people, who became purposeful because they discovered causes or activities that they believed in. They very often started joining groups or galvanizing people around them. Some of them became leaders. Young people became socially quite popular and have very much a sense that they now were part of some group or even leaders of some group that shared interests. Empirically, in our studies of young people, we found exactly the relationship that you’ve just suggested, which is a relationship between purpose and a sense of belonging and, of course, in terms of society as a whole.

William Damon: 40:04

I think there are periods in every society where there are national purposes that bring people together. Of course, war is one. If your country is attacked, people tend to pull together and even though it’s an awful situation to be in and nobody would choose to be at war that is one of the silver linings is that there is a sense. I know from people that have written about the greatest generation. In the United States during World War II there was definitely the sense of national purpose and even during economic hardships social scientists that have looked at the Great Depression back in the 1930s in our country and all over the world. A lot of families shared purpose. Just by struggling to survive economically, natural purposes arise and then there are periods where nothing big is happening that is drawing people together for any national reason, and during those periods people have to create systems of meaning that create those bonds and that sense of belonging. The world isn’t doing it for you through some catastrophe, so you need to find other ways of pulling together and sharing our lot as humans in this world.

Kenneth Primrose: 41:25

Thank you. That’s really helpful and I think, in terms of my own personal experience, it really resonates with those times I felt most purposeful or when I felt like I belong and like I have a place within a community. It feels like you’re not asking what am I doing with the day? I suppose communities form around purposes bigger than themselves a lot of the time. How would you articulate your own purpose, Bill? Is there something that comes to mind for you there? Is it the kind of thing that you can speak about?

William Damon: 41:54

Fairly early in my life I had some experiences that surprised me in how they made me feel. They made me feel that I was dedicated to something and I wasn’t even looking for it. Naturally, and my own personal experience was I started writing for my school newspaper as a ninth grader, which means I was about 14 years old at the time. I was interested in sports and I was a terrible writer at that time. So I got assigned the most unimportant sports games in our school, which tended to be junior varsity soccer, actually, because nobody in America in those days played soccer. I would go to these and cover them for the newspaper and I wrote about some interesting events that went a little beyond the game, about some of the teams we played against and some of the children who came from Europe and were better soccer players and that kind of thing. I noticed that my friends would read these articles and say well, that’s a really interesting story. You did so.

William Damon: 42:58

I did research as a third-rate sports writer.

William Damon: 43:02

I went to the games and wrote about it.

William Damon: 43:03

It would add to people’s lives, it would give information that people found interesting and that sent me off at an early age on a long course of doing what I have done for my entire life, which is becoming a scientific researcher in psychological science, is becoming a scientific researcher in psychological science, doing studies, making observations and writing about it in a way that I hope is helpful to people’s lives, to educators who are using my writings to help educate young people, or even not just young people.

William Damon: 43:37

Some of my work is used in lifelong learning and professional education, and all of that really started with my own very incompetent efforts as a sports writer when I was 14 years old. But that is how it happens. It happens gradually, sometimes by accident. Somebody discovering gee. I’m actually adding something to the world by doing this activity and I want to become better at it, and I started at that point paying attention to my classes and trying to learn how to write well and doing all the things you need to do to get the skills that would then advance my career in this direction of becoming a scientific researcher.

Kenneth Primrose: 44:18

The two things I’d like to pick up there that I find really helpful is one that it happens gradually, that it’s a craft that over time develops, but also that it was through hearing that you added value to other people. It was getting feedback that kind of woke you up to this idea that you had something to contribute. Feedback is a really important part of the process when we’re trying to discern what might be a purposeful way to spend our time, like what’s working. Where am I adding value?

William Damon: 44:51

Yeah, that’s right and it can be. I gave an example in a kind of an intellectual professional area, but we’ve seen this happen all over the place. Just to tell you one of the cases we observed during our studies of youth development a boy went to work at a fast food restaurant to earn some summer spending money. That’s the only reason he got the job to get a little money so he could have fun on weekends. But it turned out that he had a very wise manager, a mentor, who at some point said to him you’re not doing this job only to flip burgers and go home with some spending cash.

William Damon: 45:31

Look around this restaurant, you’ll see people come in with their families and these are people who have hard lives. In a lot of cases, this meal that they’re having may be the high point of their day. They’re coming in and they have their children with them. Maybe there are little toys in the restaurant boxes that we’re serving them. Your job is not just to give them a burger, but to put a smile on their face, to bring something to their day that they haven’t had a chance to have with their families. And the boy said after that summer of working, his whole attitude towards work changed. He understood how even working at the most basic level job can be a noble calling. It’s true that any job you have that sense of service with that you’re actually serving and you’re accomplishing something and you’re doing a good job and putting a smile on people’s faces, to say it figuratively, that is joyful, it’s a purpose, it gives you fulfillment. So this applies across the range of human occupations.

Kenneth Primrose: 46:42

I love that, and I love particularly that you picked up on what changed this young lad’s perspective was having a mentor. It makes me think we need to be looking for people we can help mentor and also people who might be mentors to us. That’s how a sense of purpose is passed down to some degree.

William Damon: 47:03

I completely agree with that Wonderful.

Kenneth Primrose: 47:06

I want to be respectful of your time, bill. Do you mind if I just try and summarize a little bit of what we’ve been speaking about? Your question was how am I spending my time in a way that is reflective of my ultimate goals, my purpose? And we’ve gone into purpose as this morally motivated ultimate concern something that takes you out of yourself and it leads to flourishing of yourself as well as those you’re benefiting through serving this purpose well as those you’re benefiting through serving this purpose. And some of the ways we find this is by tuning in, listening keenly to where we’re adding value to what people are saying about us and presumably also what we’re passionate about. Where we find, perhaps, a flow state, where we find ourselves absorbed by what we’re doing. These are all signals that we’re serving a purpose that feels rewarding for its own sake.

William Damon: 48:08

All of that is exactly right, and the only thing I’d add to that is that and you did mention this briefly, that this happens the development of this capacity to invest yourself and to find out what you want to really dedicate your time and commit to. You mentioned that it happens gradually, and that’s something I’d underline Of all the things I’ve studied in the field of child and adolescent development. Purpose is probably the slowest growing capacity. Most of the skills kids or teenagers pick up by the end of adolescence pretty rapidly, but purpose takes a while. Not only does the development of purpose take a considerable amount of time, but there are a lot of false starts. Very often for a lot of people They’ll try something out. Perhaps they find out they’re not really good enough at it to make a contribution. They may want to be a singer, but they can’t quite hit all the right notes or the timing isn’t ideal, and so they’re going to try something else.

William Damon: 49:13

There are a lot of trial and error. There’s a lot of discovery of what you’re really capable of, what you enjoy doing. There are people that want to be computer scientists because it looks great, but they find it pretty boring so they’re not going to stick with it, so they’ll switch. Or people that want to be lawyers and they find out oh my God, learning all these laws and cones more than I really want to invest my time in so they’ll switch. There’s a lot of false starts, a lot of experimentation, but the important thing is forward movement, that you’re learning from those experiments, that you’ve learned something about yourself, what the world needs, what you’re good at what you’re interested in and as long as there is that sense that I’m going to stick with it.

William Damon: 49:59

I’m going to keep my search going. I’m going to learn something more. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I always tell this to parents and teachers who say my 22-year-old seems to be drifting, he doesn’t have a sense of purpose. I say there’s no time limit on any of this, as long as the person isn’t discouraged, hasn’t given up, hasn’t thrown their hands up and said I’ll never find anything meaningful in my life. That’s the only danger sign, not how long it takes or how many attempts you’ve made. It’s an ongoing surge. Sometimes you have to switch directions, but as long as there’s a sense of forward movement.

Kenneth Primrose: 50:37

I’m aware we’re almost out of time, but I would love to have asked you about whether, now that we don’t have so many cultural rites of passage that move you into adulthood, those moments seem to me helpful at taking on responsibility and then finding purpose.

William Damon: 50:53

I’m glad you said that because I’ll make one quick comment about that, which is, as you’re suggesting, the world is a much more complicated place than it’s been in the past. In the past there have been relatively fewer choices. There have been built-in initiation rides, transition points. All of that helps structure a young person’s search and a lot of that has been disbanded as the world’s developed lots of different kinds of occupations, lots of different pathways. So it’s hard for young people and complicated, and that’s partly why it takes so long. That’s why people shouldn’t be so nervous about is my child or my student getting there quickly enough? It’s not the speed, it’s. Is this young person still trying, still looking and learning something from the search?

Kenneth Primrose: 51:45

That’s a really helpful framing Bill. Thank you so much for your time today. I found it really interesting and I loved hearing your own story of finding your purpose and your life review. It’s inspired me. I’m still looking for a sense of purpose. I think I’ve found bits of it. I think I’ve got a kind of a compass, rather than a map.

William Damon: 52:03

That’s a great place to be. Keep at it.

Kenneth Primrose: 52:06

Cool. Thank you very much, bill, and I hope your class today goes really well.

William Damon: 52:10

Thank you. This is a joy and a pleasure. Thank you, Kenny. I enjoyed talking to you.

Listen to the podcast of this conversation here

KP Hello Anna, thank you so much for joining me today. As you know, this podcast starts by asking for a question that we should be asking ourselves, so I wonder whether we can start there. From your insights and experience, what do you think it’s particularly important for us to be asking ourselves at this moment in time?

AL  Well thank you for inviting me, I’m delighted to be here and I’m a little nervous in the face of having to pose this type of question. But I’m going to try, and I guess I would say I think one of the most pressing questions for modern humans, because I think we all ask the same questions again and again through the generations but we have to reformulate them for our times, and different questions become more urgent at different times…As you can see I’m prevaricating, trying not to get to the point where I actually have to pose the question. But I think one of the most important questions, or a question that we could and should ask ourselves, is how is it that we as modern humans should be orienting on pain and pleasure. So what role do pain and pleasure have in our lives today, and how can understanding how we process pain and pleasure inform better choices.

KP That’s an excellent question. So how is it that pain and pleasure kind of affect and shape the way that we live today? You mentioned that this is relevant to the way we live in modern life, which is presumably slightly different or maybe drastically different from the way it has been in the past. So um, how do you think, if you can speak in general terms, we are orientating towards pain and pleasure in contemporary life?

AL Well as you point out, implicit in my question is the idea that somehow the world is fundamentally different today than it has been for most of human history. So let’s talk about that first, because I think that’s an important way to set the stage and, importantly, you know, for most of human existence we have lived in a world of scarcity and ever present danger, and our reflexive, innate evolutionary wiring to approach pleasure and avoid pain is what has allowed us to survive over the millennia. But scientific and technological innovation in all aspects of life have really transformed the world from a place of scarcity, to a place of overwhelming abundance. We need to now orient differently on how we approach pleasure and pain, and namely, I believe that we need to embrace a new kind of asceticism, and we need to actively invite the friction of pain and suffering into our lives as a way to just generally be physiologically healthier. But also to strive for the kind of contentment and serenity that I think all humans are wired to want and to strive for. So I think that this is a unique time where we have to think differently about our orientation to pleasure and pain, and specifically we have to go against our biology; we have to kind of actively and intentionally oppose millions of years of evolution if we want to survive frankly.

KP So maybe we could begin by unpacking what happens with pain and pleasure in the brain – your work is based on the neurotransmitters of pain and pleasure, and what that is doing to us – because it’s counterintuitive isn’t it to avoid pleasure.

AL Yes, exactly. So I use a simple metaphor to try to explain how our brains process pleasure and pain and I’ll share it here. First of all, one of the exciting findings in neuroscience is that pain and pleasure are co-located in the brain. So the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance. So if you imagine that in your brain in your reward circuitry there’s like a teeter totter in a kid’s playground, and that represents how we process pleasure and pain. When we experience something pleasurable it tips one way, and pain tips it the other. But like all living organisms, one of the driving realities is the desire or the need for all physiologic systems to return to homeostasis, or a level balance that means without any deviation from neutrality, either in the direction of pain or pleasure. Our brains are going to work very hard to restore a level balance, and the way that our brains do that when it comes to pleasure and pain is first by tilting an equal and opposite amount to whatever the initial stimulus was. So to give an example, I really like chocolate, and when I eat chocolate I get the release of dopamine, our reward neurotransmitter and a specific circuit of our brain called the reward pathway. My balance tilts to the side of pleasure. But no sooner has that happened than my brain adapts to that increased dopamine by down-regulating dopamine receptors and dopamine transmission, not just to baseline levels but actually below baseline. I like to imagine that as these neuro-adaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again, but they like it on the balance so they stay on until it’s tilted an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That’s the come down, the hangover, the after effect, that moment of wanting one more piece of chocolate now. If I wait just a few seconds or minutes or hour minutes or hours, those gremlins hop off and homeostasis is restored, and that feeling passes. 

But if I live in a world of overwhelming overabundance, where at the touch of a finger I can have more of my drug, which again is not the world that humans evolved in, then all of a sudden I’m overwhelming my neurological system with these high dopamine rewards in order to compensate for that. My brain essentially has to continue to down regulate dopamine transmission as a way to restore homeostasis. You might imagine that as the gremlin’s multiply, getting bigger and stronger, eventually I’ve got enough gremlins on the pain side of my balance to fill this whole room. They’ve got their tents and barbecues in tow now they’re camped out there. And essentially what that means is that I’ve changed my hedonic set point, now I’m walking around with a pleasure pain balance semi-permanently tilted to the side of pain – that means now I need more of my drug in larger quantities, in more potent forms. Not even to get high, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And when I’m not using my drug of choice, I’m experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, which are anxiety, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, dysphoria and craving or intrusive thoughts of wanting to use. 

How this resonates, or is relevant on the meta level is that in the last 30 to 50 years, what we’ve seen is rising rates of anxiety depression and suicide all over the world, but especially in rich nations which is really this paradox of plenty. Why is it that living in the richest countries in the world with the access to everything we could ever desire and then some, we are more miserable than ever? I would argue it has to do with the mismatch between our ancient wiring and this modern ecosystem; we were not evolved for this world of plenty. We are evolved to be eternal strivers, never satisfied with what we have, always craving more. And this mismatch is leading to a kind of overwhelming population despair, essentially because from our first potent cup of Joe in the morning, and checking our smartphones, to our Netflix binge in the evening and everything in between – we’re overwhelming our reward pathways and our brains are reeling in an effort to compensate.

KP You got onto the more banal ways that we are addicted like Netflix, and I guess that was my next question because when people think about addiction, they think about people who have real problems with alcoholism or drugs or whatever. But you think this is significantly more widespread in the West, and in ways that we wouldn’t ordinarily call addiction, but you would like to use the word addiction for?

AL Yeah, thank you for emphasising the need for clarification there. When I say drugs, I’m not just talking about alcohol, and cannabis, and cocaine, and heroin, I’m talking about really anything that releases a lot of dopamine in our brain’s reward pathway quickly and and in large amounts. Dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter involved in pleasure reward and motivation, but it is the final common pathway for all reinforcing drugs and behaviours. And the more dopamine that’s released, and the quicker it’s released, the more likely that substance or behaviour is to be addictive. And what I’m arguing is that every aspect of human life has become druggified in some way, made more more reinforcing as it releases more dopamine, and is more accessible. 

One of the biggest risk factors for addiction is simply access to our drug. If you live in a neighbourhood where drugs are sold on the street corner, you’re more likely to use them and more likely to get addicted to them. Can you imagine somebody who had access to cocaine at the level that we have access to Tiktok? That would be a very serious cocaine problem, right? And then we talk about a potency – you know we have engineered ancient drugs like opioids to be a hundred times more potent than opium from the poppy plant, that is to say fentanyl, and we’ve also created drugs that didn’t exist before – video games, social media is in essence the drugification of human connection. We’ve got online pornography, you know pornography and and sex addiction probably always existed in some form, but it’s the access, quantity and potency made possible by the internet that completely changes the risk vulnerability diathesis. 

So that now you’ve got people who were innately vulnerable to addiction who are absolutely reeling. And then you’ve got a whole bunch of people who maybe aren’t innately that vulnerable to that problem two hundred years ago, but become vulnerable in the modern ecosystem, because the drugs are more potent, and again because we now have access to more drugs including, again, drugs that didn’t exist before. 

I’ll use myself as a case example. So I thought that I was immune to the problem of addiction –  when I drink alcohol I feel nothing but a headache, when I drink caffeine it unfortunately does not wake me up – I’ve tried many different times and versions. So I thought well, whatever this addiction gene is, I guess I don’t have it. But then you know in my early 40’s I discovered romance novels, for whatever reason I’d never read them before. I’d always been a reader but never happened on romance novels, and I was absolutely transported. And then I got a Kindle, which is part of the technology making that drug more accessible, and I was off and running. I became a chain reader. Twilight was my gateway drug, then I found other vampire romance novels, and then I went to the next level of like werewolf romance novels, and then you know not long thereafter that wasn’t enough, and I was reading frank erotica. And I know I wasn’t alone, because there were a lot of other middle aged women who were clearly hooked on Twilight and ended up at 50 Shades of Gray, which is essentially a socially sanctioned pornography for women. But it was very interesting for me not be able to observe the phenomenon as it was happening, which is exactly what my patients with addiction describe. It’s an insidious process that we don’t see happening as it’s happening – that is to say the process of becoming addicted. And it wasn’t until I had a kind of ah-ha moment where I had to relate my reading habits to another human being that it became real for me, which is of course the therapeutic function of going to see a mental health professional and having to tell your story all of a sudden. It’s like oh wow yeah – I really did that thing which is not necessarily observable until we put it into words. Anyway, I went a little far afield of your question.

KP No, I think you answered it really well, particularly this point about those things that we think of as innocuous that are socially acceptable and sanctioned, that there’s also, like very little friction between you and your drug of choice – be it a book, a kindle or whatever. Have you noticed in your clinical practice a rise in these kinds of problems that wouldn’t classically fit into your drug addiction and categories, but have misshapen lives because of the habits they have developed?

AL Yes, and I think this is really an important point. It’s not just my own experience, but it’s what I’ve observed in the past twenty years as a psychiatrist. And just to clarify, addiction is the continued compulsive use of a substance or behaviour, despite harm to self and/or others. So what we’re talking about here is a kind of engagement that leads to real harm, and what I have seen in just really ever growing volume in the past twenty years, but especially in the past ten years is, alarming numbers of ah people coming in with severe pornography and sex addiction a mostly occurring on the internet. And we’re talking devastating, life-threatening behaviours, people who are suicidal, who can’t do anything else, who have lost their families, lost their incomes for engaging in legal activity. Young people addicted to video games, people addicted to social media, or just the internet in general getting caught up in the spiral of being on their screens and then letting everything else go – their self-care, their obligations to others, reaching a kind of lethargy and nihilism and thoughts of suicide. So these are really devastating patterns of behaviour which are similar enough across different demographics and ethnic groups that they really can’t be Ignored. You know psychiatry is phenomenology. We based it on observed patterns of behaviour, and this is clearly an emerging problem. The other thing that I would add is that we have many patients who come to see us who are coming in for depression and anxiety,  and insomnia who don’t self identify as addicts, but have these behaviours – especially on the internet and screens causing or playing into their depression anxiety. 

But when we engage them in asking them to abstain from their tech behaviour for a period of time, usually on average about four weeks, what we find is that they initially feel more depressed and anxious. But by you know, the fourth week they’re feeling less depressed and anxious than they have in many years, and I say that because there’s a big question of causality versus correlation or causation. Because there’s lots of data now showing that people who spend more time on the internet are more likely to be depressed and anxious, is it because they’re depressed and anxious and they’re going on the internet, or is it because they’re on the internet and depressed and anxious? I would really argue that it’s the causal direction, where we’re priming our reward pathways with these highly reinforcing drugs and behaviours, and our brains are trying to compensate by down regulating – we go into the dopamine deficit state which is akin to depression. I argue that that’s the causal direction because when we ask our patients to abstain for four weeks, the vast majority feel much much better after having not been on their devices. So I think that’s really important to think about.

KP It’s huge in thinking about it as a parent, but also as someone who works in schools – it’s like this is a significant job, and it doesn’t feel like we figured out how to do it at all, and not not in the slightest. What you say reminds me slightly of Pinocchio, the Disney classic. You know when he goes to this hedonistic Island where he seeks pleasure and it’s turns out to be like some kind of a hell. It feels like a really clever way of kind of playing out the fruits of seeking pleasure for its own sake

AL Yeah, right.

KP And so we have this kind of reward and motivation chemical called dopamine. But when that becomes the goal in itself, that feeling it seems like that’s a very quick route to mischief, and so I suppose the one of the questions I’m failing to ask here is, if we shouldn’t be seeking pleasure which the world is screaming at us to pursue, what is the thing we should be pursuing beyond it, what’s the self talk there?

AL Yeah, so to me, it’s ah it’s a three part approach. The first is abstain, and you know that again is very difficult to do in the world that we live in now these drugs literally chase us down with push notifications and and other such technological advances. So. It’s very hard to do that. When we first do that, by definition we will experience pain because there’s the pain of withdrawal, but there’s also the pain of having to tolerate our own negative emotions without distracting ourselves, or escaping from them through these titillating behaviours and substances that are really everywhere we look. So because the world is kind of chasing us down with these pleasures, we really need to engage in what I call self-binding strategies. This is where we create both literal and meta cognitive barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, so that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption. I talk about three general categories of self-binding: categorical, geographic and chronological.

So categorical is like we might tell ourselves and this may be true. Okay I can’t play League of Legends video game because it’s just too addictive, but maybe it’s okay for me to play some other video game. Or I can’t play with strangers, but maybe I can play with friends. Food is often – I can’t eat processed food and sugar, but I can eat other foods. So we kind of create these categories. 

Chronological self-binding is where we use time as a way to create these boundaries between ourselves and these drugs, which is absolutely necessary in the world today. I might say, okay I’m only going to use my drug on special occasions, or I’m only going to use two days a week for two hours a day, or I’m only going to use after I finish my exam, or I’m going to use at the end of this 30 day dopamine fast which is the initial intervention. 

Geographic is just exactly what you would imagine – not having the drug in the house, or not having the app on our phones, or maybe not even having a phone. So like, I personally own a smartphone, but 99% of the time it’s turned off in my backpack. So I don’t use it for texting and I don’t give out the number, so that’s a great barrier for me because I’m essentially not on the phone, I’m not giving and I’m not receiving through the phone. Obviously I’m on the internet and you know, I’m interacting in that space. But I do it from this relatively less portable laptop. 

So these people have to find out what works for them. So it’s first abstain, and then its use self binding to maintain, and then the third thing is seek out pain. And from a neuroscience point of view, this makes a lot of sense, that is to say if you go back to this pleasure pain balance those gremlins are essentially agnostic to whatever the initial stimulus is. So if we press on the pleasure side, they will try to rebalance by going on the pain side. But if we first intentionally press on the pain side, they will hop on the pleasure side as a way to restore homeostasis, and we will get our dopamine indirectly. Getting dopamine indirectly, for example through exercise, ice cold water immersion, focused concentration, cleaning out our closet, prayer meditation things that are effortful that are difficult to initiate, that are even physically painful – as long as they’re not too physically painful, these are all things that will ultimately change our hedonic set point to the side of pleasure, and that’s what we’re looking for right? We’re looking for a healthy resilient pleasure pain balance that responds to pleasure and pain. It’s not a matter of eliminating all pain and pleasure in our lives, we wouldn’t be human. But it’s a matter of not overdoing it in one direction or another, and because we live in this dopamine overloaded world, we have to with intention actually seek out pain, or kind of ah you know ascetic practices so that we stay in balance. So these are ideas that have been woven throughout theological and philosophical texts since the beginning of time, but with a slight twist. So for example, you know Buddha preached the middle way, right? Not asceticism, not indulgence – but somehow in the middle. But the problem is that you know in the modern world, the middle way is already tilted to the side of pleasure. So I think what we have to with intention is to tilt ourselves to the side of pain in order to stay balanced and in the middle.

KP So actually your page is on cold water immersion in Dopamine Nation was fascinating. I’ve been into that for a while, but since reading there the 200% increase in dopamine I’ve been much more religious about going in the sea and turning the shower cold and the payoff is good.

KP Good, I’m Glad.

AL It’s interesting that going towards pain, the things you mentioned they’re quite embodied-  exercise, cold water immersion, prayer, meditation etc, as opposed to and classic addiction were like you know porn, gaming, those kinds of things – they’re not embodied in the same way/ In fact, they’re kind of living a vicariously embodied life in some ways, I think you make a point to that and that effect in your book. So I guess my question is part of the problem that we have we’re very sedentary, and we have departed from the ways of our ancestors in feeling like embodied human beings, and we’re living vicariously for pleasure rather than having it as a payoff from the way that we naturally?

AL Yes I agree with you, and I would even take it a little bit further, and I would say that we first of all, we absolutely need and crave physical experiences, and in some ways drugs actually do that for us. So they give us a physical experience that otherwise we are not getting in our lives and that’s part of their appeal. I would argue that sex addiction, because it’s almost always associated with orgasm, is also a physical experience in a vacuum of physical experiences – and so again, very attractive, very appealing. And then the video games – you’re right there there we have our avatars – they run, they jump, they fly. They do all these physical things while we’re just sitting there, but the physicality of the video games is in large part their appeal, because we are so disembodied. So there’s a funny way in which these drugs sort of simulate an embodied experience, but actually are this real disconnection between our lives, and our minds, and our goals, and our values – and then this physical experience that that we’re having. I agree with you 100%, we are our bodies – I mean you know this idea that we had there’s some capacity to be a person not in your body, really don’t buy that – like we are our bodies, and our bodies are a huge part of our subjective experience in the world, and the way that we both ignore and mistreat our bodies because we have machines that do the work for us because we have a supply chain that delivers everything we need. You know we’re really suffering because of the disembodied nature of our lives.

KP I think I’ve heard your book described as science catching up with Grandma, you know this  lovely phrase to describe stuff that we know intuitively or from traditional wisdom, and and now you’re uncovering the kind of science behind it.

AL Ah, yeah, that’s right.

KP One question I have really is about something that you mentioned passingly, and now and again in the book, about the role of the spiritual, higher powers etc. At one point you say ‘I believe in believing’ when you’ve urged somebody to get on their knees and pray when they’re struggling with an addiction.And I guess my question is maybe slightly upstream of that. So over the last few decades as screens have proliferated and friction has been removed from all these ways we can find dopamine, and at the same time we’ve lost a kind of meaning-making narrative that religion offered. Would you would it be too much to suggest that perhaps as we’ve lost this sense of meaning and purpose, pleasure has has become the kind of the purpose of things? I mean would you make that association at all, if that makes sense as a question?

AL Well those those two things definitely go hand in hand. So you know I mean I think it’s fair to say that again for most of human existence people derived their meaning through the notion of being part of something larger than themselves, and some deistic you know, um, some kind of god right? And of course what’s happened with the enlightenment and science and scientism, because science is at the end of the day a religion in itself, is that we are really these disembodied, purposeless things that are just sort of floating around on this rock in space, and none of it means anything, and so I think you know with that comes a kind of nihilism on the order of ‘well if if if none of it means anything and and there’s no reason for my suffering, then who cares like you know and like, ‘just live for today and feel pleasure’ and I think also a big part of that. 

Many people don’t really necessarily even reflect in spiritual terms especially in our increasingly secular world. There’s just plain old capitalism, which is really the driving economic system even in so-called communist countries today.  And capitalism is sort of this incredible invention which optimizes human striving and innovation, but the ultimate end of which is to turn us all into addicts. You know the ultimate capitalist member of society, not necessarily the dominant members, but you know the vast hordes, is the ultimate consumer – somebody who just feeds the machine by continuing to look for an optimal product, and then ultimately becomes the product themselves. We talk the way that these digital products are really engineered to keep us hooked in, so I think it’s I think all of those things, all of those threads are related like the secular nature of our lives, the sort of underpinnings of capitalism, a kind of a nihilism. You know that that Nietzsche certainly predicted it, and that has really come to pass – and I say that because I see that in a lot of young people who come from loving families of privilege who have access to the best education, and who have friends and you name it, they could really do almost anything, and yet there’s this incredible lassitude. They can barely get out of bed in the morning, they see no reason for doing anything, and so they they lose themselves in in video games or pornography or what have you.

KP So you’ve got these fantastic, really practical tips on self-binding and so on. But you can’t impose a spiritual narrative on people, but do they at the same time have to re-enchant  the world so that it doesn’t seem as nihilistic, and you know that hedonism isn’t there and isn’t the guiding principle of life, like to move away from the Utilitarian and towards something a bit more transcendent?

AL Oh yes I mean I agree with that 100%, and that’s been also very true in my own life. But it’s really interesting in modern western medicine you know the probably the the four- letter word is is the three letter word of God. So we’re not supposed to talk about God and Spirituality. It’s crazy even in Psychiatry. It’s kind of a taboo subject, but I do – I mean I really encourage patients to talk about spirituality. I ask them whether they have a spiritual practice, whether they are a person of faith. So I tried to meet them where they are explore those aspects of their lives with them, and really encourage that The nice thing about being in the field of addiction medicine is that there’s a long tradition of getting into recovery from addiction through spiritual transformation. So it is let’s say ah a sort of area of of medicine where maybe spirituality talk is is still okay, but even then I would say most most physicians are really afraid to go there. I had a colleague recently who said to me ‘I had a patient who come came in, he was a lot of distress and you know he asked me if maybe he should start going back to synagogue or seek out his rabbi’ and she said you know and I’m Jewish and I wanted to tell him ‘yes, you definitely should’. But then I thought no, I shouldn’t do that because I’m a doctor, so a lot of these. Yeah.

KP It’s I mean it’s so interesting isn’t it. Lisa Miller who I interviewed for the series, her research suggests that you are with the spiritual practice 80% resilient against despair and suicide and presumably addiction comes into that too. And yet despite the evidence base, it’s kind of taboo – like in the UK you could be struck off because it it seems proselytizing or whatever. So it’s interesting, when we want to be scientific and you know there’s is data here, there is there’s something to be said.

AL Yeah yeah, yeah, that’s right, that’s right and when you know you look at, for example, we have data showing that participation in 12 step groups like alcoholics anonymous, which is really founded on this idea of a spiritual transformation or higher power. When people participate in that, they have good outcomes that are on par with seeing a psychologist, and maybe even better than seeing a psychologist for long-term recovery. And when you look at the mechanisms specifically that are at play in those organizations, the spiritual transformation or the higher power is a very important part of that. And yet I would argue that this is the age of scientism. Science is our new religion, and if you can’t quantify it, and you can’t do a controlled trial or whatever, or even if there are controlled trials, people are very resistant to these ideas.

KP I feel like I hope that the conversation is beginning to change. I mean maybe it’s just what I read, but there’s a certain kind of disenchantment with hard scientism and reductionism and utilitarianism and instrumentalism – and all these things these isms that seem to be governing the way we live in a dissatisfying way. So if our pursuit of pleasure is part of the problem, how should we think about pleasure, like what role should it have in our lives?

AL Yeah, I mean you know so my message is not ‘never imbibe intoxicants’. But my message is to use them infrequently, and in moderation, and try to avoid very potent forms. You know once we reset our reward pathways, even very simple, modest rewards can be highly rewarding. In other words, pain and pleasure are incredibly relative, and that’s what we have to recognize in that. If we’re always upping the ante, and using more and more of these reinforcing drugs and behaviors, they all exhaust themselves – nothing then is pleasurable and then things that are more modestly rewarding that used to be pleasurable, aren’t pleasurable either. So it’s really a matter of keeping a healthy and resilient pleasure pain balance, and we need to do that by generally avoiding intoxicants and using them in moderation when we do use them, and allowing enough time in between for those neuro-adaptation gremlins to hop off of the pain side of the balance and for homeostasis to be restored because what we don’t want to do is get into that situation where we’re getting into the addicted brain, which is those gremlins camped out on the pain side of the balance. 

There’s an interesting experiment done by George Koob, a neuroscientist and his colleagues, showing that if you expose rats to an unlimited amount of cocaine they will essentially accelerate their consumption by pressing a lever faster and faster over the course of subsequent days. But if you allow them to have access to cocaine only one hour a day, then the rate at which they press that lever stays steady over the course of many days, so there is something important about having enough time in between our usage to kind of restore this homeostatic step set point, so that we don’t start chasing more and more dopamine. So I think that’s really important. I do think it’s really important to recognize the ways in which so many things have become drugified, you know, even watching a Netflix show. We might not think of that as a drug, but I challenge people to think about how they feel when they’re watching a show and then how they feel right when the show ends and then what it means that when you come to the end of an episode, for example, that there’s a little button in the right hand corner that starts to go through and say next episode so you’ll automatically be given that next episode unless you do the work to stop that button which is I think a great metaphor for the world that we live in now. 

We have to actually prepare in advance for it, and do the work to avoid pleasure, because otherwise the world is set up to just keep that fire hose going. So I think that’s really important and then you know, inviting pain into our lives doing things that are physically hard. We have a whole narrative that pain is bad for you, that pain is not just painful in the moment, but kind of creates a kind of psychic scar for pain in the future. That is completely different from how people used to think of pain the role of pain in our lives. The people used to believe that not only were there spiritual gifts through suffering, but even surgeons you know in the mid eighteen hundreds when general anaesthesia was first invented did not did not want to use it, because they believed that their patients needed to experience pain during surgery in order to heal faster and have a better recovery. That sounds like barbaric to modern people, and yet fascinating studies are now showing that when when surgeons spare opioids during surgery, that is to say use fewer opioids or use no opioids, that patients heal faster from surgery. So there’s real scientific evidence to support that sort of instinctual reaction that surgeons had to general anaesthesia with opioids in the mid 1800’s.

KP That’s a super interesting finding, it reminds me of something I learned recently about trees that grow up in kind of greenhouses or biodomes, and they get to a certain height and they can’t support their own weight, so they collapse. The reason is that they’re never exposed to wind to resistance, which is what makes them grow strong, if they have resistance – the same with grass and football stadiums. They have fake wind so that it has some resistance to grow against, which seems like a lovely metaphor for character development, right?

AL Oh that’s fascinating. Yeah, yeah, right, right

KP I mean, you’re talking about something much bigger than chemicals here really, it’s how we live, how we oriente our lives. Something you say towards the end of your book is that you urge. your reader to embrace yourself fully in the life you’ve been given. I take it from this that the suggestion is that we run away from the life that we’ve been given, and into these kind of cul-de-sacs of pleasure. But perhaps you could explain a bit more what the intention behind that kind of challenge was to us?

AL Yeah, so I mean it the way that it comes to me visually that most of us spend most of our lives literally, like not literally but figuratively, mentally running away from the pain in our lives, whatever it may be. And that is a race we will never ever win, at some point we will be too exhausted to keep going and the terror of that moment, we can’t even fathom it. And yet you know there’s this incredible paradox that when we stop running away trying to escape with drugs and alcohol and Netflix and romance novels and you name it,  to sort of not feel our pain; when we actually then stop and turn and face that pain of our lives, whatever it may be – we imagine that we will be annihilated, but something really incredible happens in that moment, and we experience relief from our suffering. And I just find that absolutely fascinating. Especially I as a psychiatrist in the work that I do it’s really It’s really changed the way that I talk with patients. Because you know early in my career, because of where I was in my own life and and still running from pain and also the way that I was taught to prescribe pills for people to make them not feel pain. Then if I was going to be a good doctor then I would get them out of their pain. And now I don’t orient that way at all toward patients, instead I see their suffering as part of our communal suffering, I try to some extent to to normalize, to validate it, to just kind of bear witness and to also trust in their own ability to tolerate it, and to endure and to keep going, which is a very different thing than saying oh no, you’re you’re depressed here, let’s give you some pills and take that away, and are you less depressed now? No. Okay so here are some more pills. 

The other way that idea ,this different way of orienting on pain has really affected my practice which is at serious odds with the way that mental health care is delivered today, is this the way that people now orient on trauma. So. There’s this very, I would say like, overwhelming movement now in mental health treatment that if we’re unhappy or have dysfunction in our lives that what we need to do is go back into our past and find that moment or 2 or 10 of how we were traumatized typically by other people who then ah then get identified as the perpetrators of our suffering. And then once we’ve done that we will be completely illuminated as to why we’re so unhappy and then that will solve our unhappiness and first of all I don’t know that that is true. That’s the ancient Freudian idea that adult psychopathology is caused by these early childhood experiences, that then often enter some unconscious realm and maybe we don’t even remember them and once we. Bring them to the surface then we will solve our psychological problems and like I mean the longer I practice psychiatry the less true I think that is I think that we’re much more likely to be influenced by things like temperament. Ah the people that we surround ourselves with the the ecosystem and the culture that we live in the dominant narratives. But we we nonetheless tell ourselves and mental health care providers encourage this telling of a story, where you identify that moment of trauma and what happens to those people often is it doesn’t help them, it doesn’t move them into wellness or um, serenity or a better way of living it instead. It makes them feel like the perpetual victims. So this idea that the difficult things in our lives make us weaker is really problematic.

KP That’s really interesting. I’ve not heard much pushback against that before, so dominant this find the pain in your childhood and you bring it to the fore and then you, you’re going to yeah deal with it that way. 

One last thing I’d like to ask you about is truth and deception, which have some place in this whole story of addiction. Like what we do on screens is essentially secret, we can get away with things when we live in atomized communities. We’re far less relational than we were I think made to be. You have this observation that truth produces a sense of plenty or abundance, this kind of spaciousness; whereas deception or lies create scarcity –  I think it paraphrased you badly there, would you with your mind explaining the gist of it?

AL I think a good way to enter into this is to talk about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. So this was an experiment that was done many years ago where they put a child between the age of 4 and 6 in a room with nothing else in the room except for a table a chair a plate and one marshmallow on the plate. They said to the child ‘if you can wait 15 minutes here in this room by yourself without eating the marshmallow we will give you a second marshmallow and then you can have both of them’, and it was a way to kind of measure the ability to to delay gratification what they found was that it highly correlated with age. The older the child, the more able they were to not eat the marshmallow in order to get a second one 15 minutes later. The sort part of the marshmallow experiment that became very famous is that they then followed these children prospectively to show that you know the kids who could wait longer at a given age compared to the kids at the same age who couldn’t wait as long. The kids who could wait longer went on to college, had better jobs better test scores and more successful lives. But a little known variant to that experiment was where they divided the kids into two groups. They said the same thing ‘you wait 15 minutes you’ll get a second marshmallow, but you see this bell here. if you ring this bell anywhere in those 15 minutes the researcher will come back, so if for any reason you want to ring the bell and have the researcher come back,t hey’ll do that’ and what they did is that in half of that cohort. When the child rang the bell the researcher indeed came back. In the other half when the child rang the bell the researcher did not come back in. In other words, the researcher had lied to the child and said I’ll be there for you but then they weren’t and what they found was that in the cohort of children who were lied to they were much more likely. To eat that marshmallow and not be able to wait the full fifteen minutes and I as as as I interpret that um, what? what? I think that means is that when we live in a world where people tell the truth to each other then we have. Trust in ah, an unseen future and we feel we can rely on the world being an orderly and predictable place where people will do what they said they would do and when that happens then we can delay gratification because we can trust in other people. Ah, and trust in the world and that is a plenty mindset. Um as opposed to a scarcity mindset where ah people lie to us. We can’t rely on them. So I better take all I can get and eat that marshmallow right now because. Who knows if they didn’t come back at the bell they’re probably not going to give me a second marshmallow even if I wait the full fifteen minutes and I think this has to me really interesting implications for um, for the world that we live in now and for a conceptualisation of of addiction.

Addiction really is the ultimate scarcity mindset. It’s you’ve got a lot of your drug you wouldn’t be able to get addicted without having access to quite a bit of it and yet you have this continual feeling that there’s never enough, and you can’t wait and you can’t delay gratification. There’s lots of data and lots of studies showing that people who are addicted discount future rewards and opt for immediate rewards, and it’s like it’s ah it’s like a very nice. It makes a very nice indifference curve when you examine that. But the sort of corollary to that that is fascinating is that. Let’s not start with the addiction piece that often also and leads to lying. Let’s just start with the lying and we we aren’t we now live in a world like a post- truth world right? Where people can make up their entire identities and run for office on fake identities and then other people find out that it’s fake and then still vote for them. I mean it just like.. it’s like truth is sort of optional and I think that that very much contributes to this kind of addictive tendency that we then all gather this sense of well that the world is a. An unreliable place I can’t trust my politicians I can’t trust other people So I’m just going to eat myself silly so that that’s that’s how I understand that.

KP It’s a super helpful explanation, and particularly your interpretation of the marshmallow experiments a very telling. I think of it the way I bring up my kids, because I can be late for things I’ll say ‘I’ll be down in a minute’ and I think it’s innocuous is not actually.

AL Yes, that that’s right. And so and I’m always very interested in how these ideas can practically influence our choices and so I hope that that.

AL That you know anecdote and the explanation of it and encourage parents to be really truthful with their kids to admit their mistakes to to show up when they said they were going to show up. It’s all those little things. The accumulation of those little things that absolutely hugely impact. How people you know, perceive the world and the framework that they then apply to their choices. So I’m glad that you think about that a vis-a-vis your children I think that’s really important and I try not to lie to my children too. I’m often unsuccessful but then I try to make amends.

KP So if I can if I can kind of just a brief review of what I think and we’ve been talking about what particularly you’ve been saying and well yeah, well weve we’ve ramble that as for my curiosity but you’ve.

AL Great. Thank you! That’ll be good to write it down.

KP You’ve been fascinating to to hear in these questions and the that society needs a reset is absolutely clear but we cannot rely on society to to reset itself for our benefit, because it’s not happening. It’s too much in thrall to big tech and everything else. So what needs to happen on an individual level when you ask yourself this question of how do I orientate towards pain and pleasure is to step back and to think about how we need to reset in terms of what are we enthralled, to and how is this kind of misshaping the way we orientate to the world and those around us. And so one of my big takeaways from your book and from this conversation is, what would it mean to have a healthy relationship with pain and pleasure?

AL Yes, that’s wonderful. Yes, and that that’s a wonderful way to phrase it, I wish I had phrased that it that way in the beginning. What would it mean to have a healthy relationship with pain and pleasure – and again because I’m ultimately a very practical person and I feel that life is one grand experiment that we’re always tinkering with the variables to the recipe for a healthy relationship with pain and pleasure is really this 3 step recipe. First abstain, then use self binding to maintain, then seek out pain. And because it rhymes it will hopefully be easy to remember.

KP Well rhyming is a wonderful way to to work in the memory. Dr Lembke, it’s been such a pleasure to speak to you, I think your book is massively important and I frequently recommend it. 

AL Well thank you, It’s been really a pleasure and thank you for your thoughtful questions and your curious mind and also thank you for teaching young people I think that’s a really important job.

KP Oh thank you I appreciate that, and thank you so much for your time today – it’s been a privilege and a pleasure.

AL Oh you’re welcome. Thank you so much bye-bye.

Listen to the podcast of this conversation here.

KP Hello Oliver, I’m delighted to be speaking to you, and so grateful for you giving up your time. The theme of this podcast is to elicit and explore a question that we should be asking ourselves, so if we could start with the question you think we should be asking…

OB So I guess what this calls to mind, in my mind anyway, is sort of big abstract questions that seem to be like at the core of all the things that I feel drawn to write about and look into. One of those big abstract questions is something like, how can we more fully embrace the condition of being finite? What does it mean to sort of embrace your limitations as a human, and live wholeheartedly in that state, instead of trying to run away from it or escape it. Now that’s about 80 words so it’s not a very elegant question, but it’s definitely the subject matter.

KP So let me just and rehearse what I heard there. How can we more fully embrace, was it our mortality or our finitude? What was the wording you used?

OB Well I would say our nature as finite human beings, yeah I would say I’ll find finitude rather than our mortality. It’s arguably a distinction without a difference – it’s an interesting question. But yeah…it’s the fact that we are limited in so many ways, not not simply the fact that we we die, although in some sense the fact that we die is what is what creates all the other limitations.

KP So that seems to be the question behind your book Four Thousand Weeks, which was born of the realization that you can’t fit everything into a life, and so how do you reckon with the fact that we are finite, and how then to spend that well. Would it be fair to say that question has kind of driven that exploration?

OB Yeah, I think that that book I now see sort of in the rearview mirror, because you only ever see these things that way. But that book is is an attempt to ask that question specifically through the lens of time, and our daily time.  I don’t think that’s the only lens through which confronting limit is important and interesting, but yeah, absolutely. It’s like, once you really see that there will always be too much to do, and too many things that genuinely matter, you know, not just sort of nonsense busy work, but really really important ways to spend a life. Once you see that there are far more of those than you’re ever going to actually have the the chance to get around to in a finite life, how does that change everything, really? Partly of course one’s choices about what you spend time on, but also just how it feels to be human in this situation.

I don’t know, I think what I’m always coming back to is this sort of theme, or it’s a sort of perspective. or way of approaching things. It’s almost like there’s there’s some kind of freedom for me and liberation in realising that our situation is sort of even worse than we thought it was. If you think that it’s really hard to make time for everything that matters in life – that’s a very stressful and anxiety inducing situation. If you see that it’s completely impossible to make time for everything that feels like it matters in life, that’s not so stressful because you have surrendered to reality in some important way. You’ve accepted that things are the way they are and from then on you’re sort of freer to choose a few things to spend your time on, because you’re sort of no longer haunted by this impossible goal. I mean obviously it continues to haunt me on a sporadic basis multiple times a week, but [we’re talking] in terms of the sort of the the ideal mindset here. The thing to sort of aspire to, is that we might see just how bad things were in terms of our limitation, and actually be freer as a result.

KP So we kind labour under an impossible burden, and calling that out as an impossible burden removes it from you. It says actually okay, what am we gonna choose what’s worth my time?

OB Totally. There are all these there are all these quotations that come from Zen Buddhist teachers especially, about how the problem that we have, is not the problems that we encounter in life, but that we think life is a problem that can be solved. So at the beginning of the book I quote um Joko Beck, the late American and Buddhist teacher, who said what makes it unbearable (I think she’s talking about life as a whole), is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. I really like this kind of bucket of ice water over the head kind of observation; because it’s like oh yeah, it just rings immediately true to me. It’s like, the problem here was thinking that I was going to find some way to, you know, escape the terms and conditions of the human condition. It wasn’t the fact that I can’t do that, it was the fact that I thought I might be able to do it.

KP I actually read that just before speaking to you, and every time I’ve read it, as you said it’s like a bucket bucket of ice water over the head. It’s been so refreshing, like actually yeah, this is something which I’m not going to solve, an equation which will never write quite resolve.

OB Right.

KP And that’s okay, it’s better that I know that it won’t resolve than, you know, that I struggle on with it thinking I’m going to get to the end of it.

OB Yeah, and not just in a sort of spirit of resignation either – not that that’s what you meant. But you know, it’s tempting to say that this kind of advice is to sort of like give up doing something futile so that you can just sort of be becalmed and kind of accept that life sucks, and eek some minor enjoyment out of it along the way. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s that it’s sort of precisely the precondition to being the most that we can be, and doing the most that we can do; and all these kinds of things that sound a bit cheesy American self-help. It’s not that they’re bad goals necessarily. It’s just that actually, they have to come through this encounter with limitation, not by sort of visualizing impossible outcomes so effortfully that eventually they come true, or whatever you would be told by those kind of cliched books. It’s so that you can live full-throatedly that you need to be able to come to terms on some level with with these sort of built-in limitations.

KP I think you write about it in the book, having kind of a memento mori – things that remind you that you’re going to die, which we we we seem to be very good at denying and the death is ever going to envelop us in our culture. You know that’s it’s a truism say the Victorians talked about death and not sex, and we talk about sex and not death. And is I suppose my question is whether this question of our finitude is more relevant now than it was in the past, because of where our culture is, and the things we’re influenced by. And this book has come out of a particular moment, and maybe that’s no coincidence – it’s the question we need to hear, because we’re not very good at paying attention to it. Do you get where I’m going with this kind of question?

OB Yeah I do. I think there are multiple ways to sort of talk about the timeliness of this idea, and one of them which I’ll put to one side, is that you know, I definitely think my interest in these ideas is something to do with my stage of life – there’s a mid-lifey thing to this kind of idea. I hope it can be useful to people who aren’t at midlife – and I think it has been – but I think it there’s something about the encounter with limitation that naturally comes out of turning 40 or whatever. It’s a cliche, but it’s but it’s a cliche for a reason in terms of where we are in history and in the culture.

I think that there’s all sorts of factors that sort of make this encounter with limit so important. It’s like on the one hand, there’s a whole lot of ways in which it feels like we are coming up against our limits. So in the discourse about work and burnout there’s this idea that burnout is now something that you seem to experience in your in your twenties instead of something towards the end of a professional career. The sense that evermore is being demanded from individuals in the in the workplace, that eventually that you know that optimization and efficiency tricks on and a person on a personal level are not going to get you to the point. It’s more obvious than it has been in the past I suppose, that you’re not going to be able to solve all these problems with that kind of technique – and partly that’s to do with late capitalism, to coin a phrase, but I think that there’s also this sort of technological piece to it where we get more and more ways in which I think we are encouraged to believe that the moment at which we could transcend our limitations is just around the corner. So that sort of the acceleration in technologies just like, you know, the internet, email, social media, mobile internet, it feels like we’re really close to being sort of gods in all sorts of contexts.  And so you know when you can be updated on what’s happening four thousand miles away in less than a second, it becomes all the more frustrating that you know you can’t sort of, make a traffic jam go at the speed you wish. I give this example in the book about why it’s more frustrating to wait two minutes for microwaves than it is for something we’ve put in the oven for 2 hours, and it’s very much something to do with this kind of feeling that if it can be that quick, it ought to be even quicker. You know that we now have the technology that means we shouldn’t have to compromise with our desires, and therefore it makes the remaining ways in which we do have to compromise all the more all the more infuriating. I think that’s they’re the same point in some ways, but as we test the limits of individuals in the workplace, and the limits of the environment, and the limits of all these ways in which we live in a culture and an economy that tests the limits, we’re also being given all these technologies that sort of whisper that maybe maybe we can pass the test, and sort of achieve escape velocity. Somehow it’s a weird situation to be in, that’s my conclusion.

KP It is, it’s such a paradox. It seemed that you know the invention of dishwasher and washing machines, and things that make us more efficient, haven’t seemingly given us any more time back.

OB Right.

KP And clearly it shouldn’t work like that. Things that stop you doing laborious time intensive chores should give you more time, but as you say, it’s maybe changed the way we think about what we need to do with the kind of time we’re given.

OB Right, yes, and I think that where this fits into this idea about limitation I think, is that you know, there’s this much observed phenomenon in all sorts of different fields, where if all you do is you make a system more efficient then, it actually just sort of clogs up with with more junk. So the the classic example of induced demand in traffic management – if you widen a motorway to add an extra lane to ease congestion, it becomes a more appealing route for more drivers so more people use that route and the congestion, at least in some cases, tends back towards what it originally was.

You mentioned washing machines. There’s really good historical work to suggest that that housewives in in early twentieth century American Britain who started to get these machines didn’t save any time at all, because the standards of cleanliness to which they were held by the culture just rose to offset the benefits. It’s there in Parkinson’s law, the idea that the work expands to fill the time available, and I think the sort of the general point here is something like, we are these finite creatures facing hypothetically infinite numbers of emails we could send, infinite levels of ah household cleanliness to which we could in principle aspire, infinite levels of speed of a motorway that you could imagine, and in all these cases we think that if you just use efficiency to try to get through that infinite supply. Well, you’re never going to get through it, because it’s an infinite supply, so more and more inputs kind of rush in to to fill the gap. And so using efficiency and optimization as a way to try to get on top of the situation, to try to master time, is sort of doomed to fail because it’s an attempt to sort of escape the reality of the situation. So I guess on a sort of concrete level, what I’m saying in my most recent book is that there is nothing wrong with getting a bit more efficient in certain areas of life. If it takes you an hour to find the things you need for breakfast in the morning, then there’s probably some efficiency that you can be working on in that system. But we’ll never solve this sort of emotional, psychological, existential problem of feeling out of control with respect to time, feeling on the back foot with respect to time. We never solve that through efficiency. You can only solve that, if you can solve it at all, by reconciling yourself to the situation, deciding to focus on a few things, and letting a whole lot of other stuff fall by the wayside. There isn’t a technique or a technology for getting on top of time and mastering time in that way because time always wins that battle in the end, I guess.

KP It’s reminds me of the French Sociologist Jack Ellul, who talked about the governing principle of our society since the industrial revolution – though he would actually go back to Genesis in the fall – being efficiency and productivity. Or I think of Michael Sandel who said we’ve moved from ah having a market economy to being a market society, and that we only do things that are kind of productive or efficient, which leaves very little room for what Kiran Sentiya’s term atelic, which you mention – doing activities things that are not productive for their own sake.

So your question of how do I embrace my finitude is very much not a question of how do I become more efficient and productive and fit more in is it. Is it more about a different way of inhabiting the time that we have?

OB No, exactly, I just got sent a book actually written from a Christian perspective called how to inhabit time, and I love that title because I don’t know yet.

KP Oh is that by Jamie K Smith?

OB It is, yes’s correct.

KP I hear that’s a good book.

OB I have not read it yet, so I should not comment on its on its innards. But that title was like ‘oh yes, right’ – it totally chimes with some stuff I’ve been reading about Dogan the Zen teacher, and this is the sort of Christian approach to the same idea. But yeah, it’s like um so backing up because I shouldn’t talk about a book. Right, efficiency…I’ve slightly lost the thread of the question, but I thought it was a very good question and now I can’t recall…

KP The the question was and your your question about embracing our finitude isn’t about efficiency and productivity. It’s about inhabiting time in a different way, and that’s in a sense quite subversive to a culture which only seems to value um productivity and efficiency, and time gains and getting more done and that kind of thing. So I think you were speaking into that.

OB Yeah, absolutely. So yeah I think for example, I’ve noticed sometimes a sort of a response to the title of my book Four Thousand Weeks, which is extremely approximately the lifespan of a human being in the west these days, there’s a sort of reaction you can have to that which is like, yeah that’s terrifying and as a result, I’ve got to try to cram every remaining week that I’ve got with the most extraordinary stuff, and go like base jumping every weekend, and do extreme sports and live a completely remarkable life that’s really different to other people. There’s that whole ethos in the culture of like seize the day, meaning, you know, be extraordinary do more than anyone else, do more extraordinary things than anyone else.

There’s nothing wrong with doing things that are extraordinary, if they are actually the things you want to do, but that reaction always strikes me as a sort of a halfway to what I’m trying to say. Which is like, in the desire to cram life with more and more stuff, which is what efficiency is right – whether it can be efficiency of workload, or efficiency of, you know, getting through thrilling experiences or something, but in that desire to cram all this stuff in, there is still a desire to somehow gain the upper hand over time, to somehow win this battle – and if not achieve immortality, then at least sort of achieve an immortality by other means. Which is if you can’t live forever, you can try to do an infinite amount with the time that you that you do have, and I think both of those are just different versions of the same mistake right? And actually, I’ve found that there’s something very relaxing about really getting inside the idea of limitation. It isn’t like, now I’ve got to find even better techniques to counter this limitation. It’s like ‘oh this is how it is and this is the ground from which I can do some interesting and meaningful and hopefully helpful things with my with my time’.

KP And that seems key a to your book – it’s about inhabiting a moment for meaning rather than for instrumental purpose?

OB Right, and you mentioned Kiran Setiya’s idea of atelic activities – the idea of doing things that that are beneficial and meaningful for themselves not because they lead somewhere. I think that’s really the crucial thing here right, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with using time instrumentally – we all do it every day all the time, where we’re using an hour to achieve some goal. But if you just end up focusing on achieving those goals, if you’re never sort of letting life cache itself out in the moment as meaningful now, then like, it’s never going to happen – because it’s only ever now. And so, it’s a different way of inhabiting time, as you say, and it’s a way of sort of more fully inhabiting time.  Because there is something about that purely instrumental mindset that sort of skirts over the surface of life towards the moment of truth when it’s all sorted out, or the project is launched, or you can retire, or you know, whatever it is in each person’s case.

KP So Oliver, we’ve been discussing the pressure our culture puts on us to instrumentalise our time, to sort of live beyond our very finite human limits. And so I’m wondering how helpful it has been for you to become aware of this problem, like, how much are you managing to live more in the present because you’re aware that we need to?

OB  I mean this question of how to embrace my finitude, I mean I think I’ve made leaps and bounds compared to how I used to be. But it is absolutely like such an ongoing struggle of life. I think it’s a cliche but it’s true that people don’t write books or create podcast or anything else about topics that they don’t struggle with. I mean that’s what makes these things interesting.

So I did an email newsletter the other day where I sort of wrote about how to what I do on those days when I just have a complete motivational meltdown and can’t bring myself to do any of the things that I feel I ought to be doing and a significant number of people in reply to me sort of astonished that I ever have such days, because I’ve spent so much time writing about this kind of topic. Um, and it’s….

KP I found out a very refreshing email Oliver, thank you – please share more of your foibles and flaws, I think it makes everybody else feel a bit better about themselves.

OB Well also, it’s such a testament to how destined we are to try to assume that other people have got it together right? because I literally call my email newsletter The Imperfectionist, and the way I see it I’m endlessly writing about my foibles and flaws, but still because you wrote a book, or because you’re the writer of the email newsletter instead of the recipient on this particular day, there is this assumption that you know more than than other people.

I mean the thing I am always. trying to do I think, and I think I do more successfully than I used, to is to let go of a certain kind of need for control, or for comprehensive productivity for the idea that I’m going to be able to fit everything in. The idea that it’s absolutely terrible if anybody out there is disappointed in me, or impatient with me, or wishes that I was doing something that I’m that I’m not doing. And to just sort of stay more aware more of the time of the real situation, which is that every single moment I’m doing anything, I’m saying no to a million other things in that choice. So you know, if I leave behind some unanswered emails to go and spend the evening with my son because I would rather do that, I mean most people would endorse my decision, but the feeling that if I just gave it another hour I would have those emails all done takes away value from it. It leaches into the experience of being with my son, and it gets very difficult. If I understand instead, that to finish those emails would be literally (you know, not literally), be a drop in the ocean – it would be nothing compared the incoming supply which is infinite -it’s just a question of doing what you can. Then I’m sort of freed from the tyranny of that thought about what else I ought to be doing, and more able to be present in that moment.

So you know in fact, when we stop speaking in a little while I’m going to go down and start making start making dinner and there are various urgent emails or emails that the people who sent them consider to be urgent in my inbox, and I don’t mean to be callous towards those people, and I do try ultimately to work with their agendas too whenever I can, but it’s just this understanding that there’s no way of winning here, right? It’s like ah the only way of winning is not not to play the game, or whatever. It’s like it’s like there’s no hope of keeping everybody, or all parts of me happy here, and that is wonderful. That’s that’s like a huge release from the burden.

KP The gift of your book is awareness, right? It feels like you like that quote at the beginning the the and you know that ‘what makes it unbearable is the mistaken belief that it can be cured’ –  when when you say those things out loud and you realise, ah I’ve got I’ve got to actually figure out what I value here and prioritise.

OB Yeah, yeah, it’s just about becoming it’s about becoming conscious of what was already the case. Yeah I think that’s really true.

KP There’s a sense in which I think why what you say is so important and relevant, is that the air we breathe has very much  reversed the values which are probably good for us. So spending relationships spending time with people is better than inbox zero, but that nagging sense of inbox zero and efficiency, and you know, getting things done – means that we often do the reverse. And so that’s why I love the question of finitude, because we then have to reckon with what trumps what, given that I’ve only got four thousand weeks, and actually 2000 left if I’m lucky.

OB Yeah, and you you raise a really good point there, which is that it’s not always the case, what I’m about to say, but it is very often the case that the lure of getting the emails answered exerts a pull, and sort of the idea of spending time with my family, even though I love doing it, doesn’t while I’m answering email. If I’m with my family it’s easier to be haunted by emails; when I’m answering emails, I’m less likely to be haunted by the wish to be spending time with my family. It’s not always true, and certainly when my son was a newborn I found it really hard to be doing things other than just being with with him. And you know when you’re in the first flush of love in a relationship, nothing else seems like it has any meaning. But once you get into sort of the routines of life, it’s exactly the wrong things that exert the that exert the pull. Yeah, and it’s fascinating. So you really have to sort of stay aware of that, or at least have structures in your life that cause you to do the things that are good for you, whether they feel like the urgent things or not.

KP Yeah, your family doesn’t always have a persuasive design like Twitter or whatever does.

OB Right, exactly. Yeah, there’s no gamification in the in that, whereas the satisfaction of knocking out the emails is real. Yeah.

KP Yeah, and I suppose the other point I think you raise here is to do with cosmic insignificance. One lovely part of your book you use Brian Mcgee;s thought experiment about hundred year old people living end to end to give perspective, and actually ah the the significance of what we contribute ah is vanishingly small, and therefore getting and anxious and stressed about it kind of goes away when you see when you zoom out.

OB Yes, right. I think there’s all sorts of ways to use this idea of one’s own insignificance, but certainly one of them is the sense that the decisions that tend to haunt us and leave us mired in an indecision, it’s very useful to realise how little difference they’ll make to the run of things. The other is just that you know there is this cultural message that we’ve spoken about about, you know the idea that a meaningful life is an extraordinary one or a very noteworthy one, and if you sort of zoom out to cosmic time you see that there’s a sort of flattening of the difference between living a very quiet and so-called ordinary life, and living a very big deal and extraordinary life. Because you know on the scale of the cosmos, all these extraordinary people are basically the same tiny little pinpricks of consciousness as the ordinary ones, and actually I find in that the possibility of seeing that there is more meaning in the ordinary things I do than I had realised. And so I don’t want to live a life where cooking a cooking dinner on an ordinary weeknight is a distraction from living a meaningful life, I would like to live a life where that was part of a meaningful life.

I think what I’m doing in with that idea is you take a sort of Y axis on the graph of how important your activities are, and you could plot having a boring mundane life at the bottom, and then doing some extraordinary world-changing things a bit further up. But if you then extend the X-axis for another sort of ten thousand miles, sorry the Y axis, if you extend the Y axis 10,000 miles further up, everything’s down at the unimportant end of the scale, and that is liberating too I find.

KP Yeah, absolutely, me too. I find the way you’ve thought through these problems has ah has the potential to re-enchant the mundane and the ordinary and the things, that that in a different way of thinking become you know, annoying details like cooking, when they are actually the stuff of life and that we need to be present to. So your question, ‘how do I embrace my finitude’ is a recipe for living in the moment in a richer kind of more meaningful way, and I get the sense that that’s that’s how you intend it for yourself as well as a question.

OB Yes, absolutely,There’s lovely of you to say and that phrase about re-enchanting ordinary life, I couldn’t hope for for a for a better sense of what I’m trying to say and trying to experience than that.

KP Well on that on that note I think you you said you need to go and re-enchant dinner for your your family,

OB Ah, yeah, got to re-enchant some broccoli. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

KP As do I. I’m going to re-enchant some broccoli and Lidl’s pie…which I’m not sure was ever that enchanting in the first place…

I’ve so appreciated you making the time in you know, but particularly with this question of, you know, you’re only going to live about four thousand weeks and you’ve you’ve spent a hour talking to me. So Oliver I’m very very grateful for that.

OB It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me to to do so.

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Kenny Primrose:

My guest Katharine Birbalsingh is widely known as the strictest headteacher in Britain. Over the past decade, she has become a prominent and, at times, polarising voice in education, regularly featured in the media for her forthright views on ideology, discipline and schooling. In 2014, she founded the Michaela Free School in London, a school that’s as famous for its strict ethos as it is for its remarkable academic results. Whether or not you agree with Katharine, there’s no denying her influence and the clarity with which she articulates her vision for education. In our conversation, we discuss the deeper purpose of schooling, why she believes certain ideological movements, disempower young people and what she thinks we often misunderstand about children and schools. I was fascinated to explore the question that drives her work and grateful too that, despite her no-nonsense reputation, she was gracious when my internet failed and we had to reschedule.

I hope you find this conversation as thought-provoking as I did. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issues it raises. I will hand over now to Catherine Purglesingh. Catherine, it’s a real privilege to be speaking to you. You’ve been on my radar for a long time as an educator, but also you’re in the national press quite a lot, and I’m fascinated to explore in a bit more depth like the things that have driven you. And so, as I think I explained, the theme of the podcast is to explore a question that an influential thinker such as yourself believes we should be asking ourselves. So I wonder if we can begin with that.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Yeah. So the big thing that I think we are missing is the fact that children are the future and families and schools are what influence our children to become who they will become, and so we should care about both, and we seem to care about neither. I spend my life constantly going on about children and schools and the impact schools have and no one cares, and I find it amazing. They’re talking about net zero and they’re talking about immigration and they’re talking about tariffs and I don’t know whatever else, and I just think to myself that’s all well and good, but do you understand that what children are being taught now by both their parents and their teachers will tell us what the debates will be in five years’ time, because they will be adults, and I just I don’t understand why no one seems to care about children. They really don’t.

This conversation around technology, for instance, the total disregard to the damage that technology is doing to children, both in the classroom and at home, to children both in the classroom and at home, I just I despair, quite frankly. But you say, about what keeps me going? It’s all the thousands, tens of thousands of children, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children that I have known in my lifetime, I just there’s nothing better than children. They’re innocent and fun and cheeky and they’re just great. And I believe in our duty that we have as adults, both as teachers and as parents, to do what’s right by children. And that’s how I live my life by trying to do right by kids.

Kenny Primrose:

So you mentioned a lot in there that I’d love to dig into. But where did this passion, this sense of duty come from? How did it grow in you?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Yeah, I don’t know. I became a teacher and I was always saddened by I’ve always been in the inner city and I was always saddened by the lack of success and progress that children were making in the inner city and these were typically black kids in the inner city just not achieving anywhere near as much as they could. And I was always bothered by the fact that it wasn’t as straightforward as just being able to find the bad guy, say this is the bad guy, let’s slay the bad guy and then we’ll make it okay. It’s just so much more complex than that, and so I’ve spent my life trying to make it better for these kids, and I think I have.

Actually, I think in many ways, michaela has had huge impact across education in the country and has normalized certain things that before were quite exceptional Things like lineups and silent corridors and knowledge organizers and standing at the front leading the classroom and desks in rows. Now, when I say normalized, there’s lots of schools that don’t necessarily do those things, but it’s become part of the normal conversation. People don’t think it as being weird, whereas when we first started these sorts of things, there were maybe there was a handful of schools in the country doing it and we have. We’ve popularized it and made it in a way, acceptable for it to just be normal now. So I’m very proud of being part of the revolution that has taken place in the country, I think, around education, a revolution that, sadly, is going to now come to an end with the current government, but it will live on, I think, despite changes that will be made with policy, because there are lots of people who have changed their minds thanks to not just the work that we do, but the work that other schools have done and that other individuals have done in their schools, in their classrooms, and so we’ve just got to fight on, because, I don’t know, you pick something in life to dedicate your life to a struggle, as it were, influence on the education of children across the country and, indeed, frankly, the world.

We get visitors 800 to 1,000 visitors here every year at Michaela and they come and take ideas and take them back to their countries and to their classrooms and so on. I feel I have a responsibility to pass on the good ideas and to help people. Every day I speak to the guests who come and give advice to people on how to improve their schools, because I want to be able, at 95, to look back and say I contributed somehow to making the world a better place. And I chose, for good or for bad. When I was young, I chose to go into teaching and that’s where I ended up. I could have ended up somewhere else, to be honest, but I love kids and then I ended up teaching and this is my world, and so that’s what I know and that’s how I contribute.

Kenny Primrose:

Wonderful, this passion for the way that kids are formed at home and at school, and they’re as you say, they’re going to inherit and then shape the future. Now, the type of formation that you’re interested in doing isn’t the same as lots of other people. You’ve got a particular set of ideas and ideals around that. So what kind of human beings are you trying to shape at Michaela?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Yeah, it’s a really good question and people don’t often ask it. They just assume that the school is all about social mobility, getting the kids great GCSE grades and then sending them off to the best universities. And yes, we do want them to get good grades at GCSE and to go off to the best places they can go. I have to say we don’t want them all to go to the best universities. I’d like the kids who can get to the best universities to go there, but I also want our kids to be great hairdressers and great plumbers, and kids who shouldn’t be going to university shouldn’t go to university. They should do a variety of other things and they should do it well. And that really then just taps into the idea of what kinds of people are we trying to create here. We want our children to be honest and decent and polite and grateful and kind, have a sense of duty towards others, being the kind of adult that I would respect. And that doesn’t mean that they’re going to go off and getting a good job ever. Not in 10 years have we ever done an assembly on getting a good job. Our assemblies are about who you are as a person and when we talk about developing the whole child here. That’s because that’s what we’re doing, and I think too often we as a population in the country view schools as a place to go so you can get some GCSEs, so you can get a good job.

Then what’s the point of learning Shakespeare? Is Shakespeare going to make you into a great construction worker? I don’t think so. Why do we read Shakespeare? To connect with what it is to be human and to see the depth and meaning in life. That’s why you read Shakespeare, not so you can get a job as a doctor or as a lawyer or as a shop assistant. It doesn’t really matter what you go into. The reason why you choose a particular job is so that you find something you enjoy, that will give you purpose, that it gives you something to then develop as a person and contribute to society, and that, frankly, could be in any direction. Really, I don’t know. Some of our kids will become dentists, Some of them will become real revolutionaries. I don’t care.

Katharine Birbalsingh: 10:55

My job is to enable them to develop the skills and the knowledge and the values, the virtues that are needed to lead a meaningful life, and I think that’s what we should be doing in schools and what we should be doing at home. They’re parents, and I don’t think anybody is doing this anymore, or at least very few people are doing it. So when I talk about it it’s hard to make people understand because it’s so foreign to them, Because what we tend to talk about nowadays is a me culture. How do I get what I want? How do I find a job that fulfills me? How do I get the flat and the car and the girlfriend or the boyfriend or whatever that is going to make me feel like I’ve fulfilled my ambitions?

As opposed to what are you doing for other people? In what way are you serving others so that you can contribute to the world being a better place? And that’s very much. I’ve tried to live my life in such a way that I’m contributing, and sometimes that comes at a very heavy price. That’s what makes life worth living, I’d say.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, fascinating. You’ve got a massive emphasis on belonging at Michaela, haven’t you Belonging nationally? You’ve got a very diverse group of students and belonging to the school. Is this something you think is particularly important at this moment, and where did the belief that belonging was going to be central to a good education come from in you?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Yeah, that’s less about a good education, although I would say it ends up being part of a good education. I would say the reason why I want our children to be grateful and not entitled, the reason why I want our children to be kind and not mean, the reason why I want them to feel a sense of belonging and not either living in a solipsistic world where they’re just looking inwards all the time or feeling like they’re ostracized for some reason from the group. I want all those things to them because really I want them to be happy. I want them to be able to go through life feeling content and as if they belong in a way, belong to the world. You know the thing about virtue, the thing about knowledge is that it allows you not to be at odds with yourself, it allows you to flourish. And so you just said you belong to your country, you belong to your community, you belong to your family, you belong to the school, you belong to your year group, you belong to your form group, and there are all these kind of gradations down to a much smaller entity.

Now we are group animals as people. So, like when you remove a child from a class, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? You’re pulling him out because he’s been naughty. Now, ultimately, you think what’s the punishment? You pull him out of class and then he goes back to another class. What do we care? The reason he cares is because he doesn’t like being away from the group, because we like to belong to something. That’s how we feel happy.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Okay, we feel unhappy when we are removed from the group. So that’s what we use to say to punish children sometimes, and that’s why, when we reject our country, we are making the entire country of people feel unhappy. We don’t belong to it anymore and we want to belong to something. It not only does belonging to the country make us happy. It gives us a set of values and beliefs that we can all share, and it’s through belonging to our country that you can then have a multicultural society where you have people of different religions and people of different races and different classes, where we can all live together in harmony, because we live underneath this umbrella of Britishness, which we all buy into and makes us similar to one another, because if we’re all completely different, then we’ll just have chaos, just like in a school. So we need the values of Michaela, the umbrella of Michaelaela, to have everybody fit under. And therefore you have Muslim kids, hindu kids, sikh kids, jewish kids, you’ve got black, brown, white, chinese, everything is here right. So we’ve got everything, but we’re all part of the. We’re under the same umbrella of Michaela values and if you don’t have that umbrella, then you will have chaos and you will have disharmony. The way you get harmony is by having that umbrella. It’s the same thing with the entire country. We all need to be British together. Now, if we reject Britishness, then we reject what is required for multiculturalism to succeed, in my opinion. And if we reject, if you don’t have a school blazer, if you don’t have a school uniform which brings you all together so you all know you’re part of the same team, then you’re not a team.

We always say to the kids when you get a detention, you’re not just letting yourself down, you’re letting the whole form group down, you’re letting your form tutor down, you’re letting your head of year down. And if you have relationships with those people, then there is motivation not to let them down. They’re not just not children, don’t just do the right thing because they fear a detention. Okay, so you do have some of those kids and they really are right at the bottom and you’re trying to instill in them some relationships with their teachers and a sense of right and wrong, so that they don’t just do it because they don’t just do the right thing, because they think they’re going to get into trouble, because they have trust with their teachers, they want to impress their teachers. They understand that their future itself depends on what they do.

Now. You want them to have all of that understanding, to develop a sense of right and wrong which is just inside them. That can only be done if you’re doing it under an umbrella of the school, the family, where we all believe the same things, and 50 years ago the values of the family matched what the values were in the school. Nowadays, there is total chaos when it comes to values. Nobody knows what they should be thinking about anything. And not only that. Actually, we really celebrate the diversity of values. We say, oh no, everybody should just do whatever they want. No, they shouldn’t do whatever they want. We need to agree on a set of values that we can all share, otherwise we’re all going to hate each other.

Kenny Primrose:

Is there a way that you try and balance some sense of individuality where people don’t feel like they’re having to give up themselves, along with conformity to ensure that people are belonging, or does individuality just not get a look in at? An institutional level.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

So I think of course you couldn’t be an individual. So I’m very much an individual. I don’t think anybody would say that I wasn’t right. I’m very much an individual. I think if you had to describe me to somebody and say, oh, there’s this head teacher in Wembley, let me tell you about her, you’d be able to describe me in a way that was pretty unique. But I do buy into the values of the country. It is not the case that in the 1950s, where everybody did buy into the values of the country, then that we didn’t have individuals in Britain. Of course we did. We had individuals. They just agreed on the differences between right and wrong, and I don’t see that as a problem. Why wouldn’t we want everybody to agree? Do we really have a better society if some people think murder is okay? I don’t think so. I think it’s good that we all think murder is wrong, but you also would like to create questioning citizens.

Kenny Primrose:

presumably. So you’ve said, I think, to Jordan Peterson kids need to be told what to think, not how to think. How do they go from that transition of imbibing the values of the institution, the culture, and then becoming potentially critical about them when necessary, like Hannah Arendt, obviously, writing after World War IIi talks about? The disaster is when you have unthinking citizens who just follow the cultural values of the time when they’re destructive okay.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

So you see, I’d say you’ve got it the wrong way around with that question. In your thinking, the thing that makes you questioning is not having any kind of structured fundamental beliefs. It’s just being open to anything and that means you can question. I would say that’s precisely when you cannot question because you have nothing to question with. You have fundamental beliefs that tell you no, that’s wrong. So I’m going to speak out now because I think that’s wrong.

If you have never been taught the difference between right and wrong, then you have no idea what’s out there and actually it makes you a bit of a fool. You’re just, you’ll be easily led, and which is exactly what I’d say is happening right now. Because people haven’t been taught the difference between right and wrong, because they haven’t been taught their history, because they don’t really know much about the world, they just end up being led by TikTok. Whatever influencer is talking to them at that time, they get led by that person. It’s only by teaching children a common set of values that then allows them to go out there and say you know what, mr Influencer, I don’t think you’re right. You know what, andrew Tate, I don’t like all of this, the way in which you’re talking about women, because I’ve been taught, I’ve given a sense of the way in which I should treat women as a boy, and actually it doesn’t fit with what you’re doing. So I’m going to use my sense of right and wrong of how to treat women now to criticize Andrew Tate.

But if I have nothing as a young man, because I haven’t been taught anything at school, because there’s chaos in the classrooms, because we don’t know what our values are as a society, I end up just following Andrew Tate because he looks like a strong man and that’s quite appealing and so I just end up following that. That’s what happens, what we always think. People say to me what do you say about Andrew Tate? And I say we need to teach children what to think. I’m not saying to them here’s Andrew Tate, think whatever you like. Of course I’m not thinking, saying that I’m teaching them a bedrock of values which would mean if they do come across Andrew Tate, they would instinctively know that what Andrew T? Does that make sense? It?

Kenny Primrose:

makes good sense. Yeah, yeah, I’m totally in agreement, actually, but I wonder what others would say who come from so. You’ll have fairly woke ideology in some schools and they will think these are our values. This is right and wrong. This is your yardstick for judging and rotate with. You happen to disagree with those values. How do you keep everyone in the same room?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

That’s a really good question. It’s a really good question. That’s a really good question. It’s a really good question and it’s what we’ve lost as a country.

Really, we haven’t got the harmony and the consistency of those values and unfortunately it means, I think, that children are being taught the wrong values, and I would say a woke understanding of the world is to teach children the wrong values. So what would I take that to mean? Teaching children like mine, for instance, that they’re victims, that the problem is on the outside, that it’s racism, it’s sexism, it’s you being denied your rights by X, y, z, as opposed to looking inward and thinking well, what can I do to better myself so that I can contribute to the world? That’s what you should be interested in as a human being, and I’m not saying that means that racism doesn’t exist and that there aren’t various obstacles that you’re going to have to jump over. Sometimes they’re unfair obstacles. I get that Life is unfair, but what you should be interested in is in what way am I promoting unfairness? In what way am I making the world a worse place? What can I do to make sure that I achieve and to make sure that I am worthy of the life that I have got so that I can contribute to society. That is what I want our children to understand, as opposed to looking for ways to make excuses for our own poor behavior. I’m not saying as I say. I stress again that there’s no such thing as oppression in various different guises, whether it’s racism or sexuality, or the accent that you have or any number of things. I recognize all of that accent that you have or any number of things. I recognize all of that. But to live a life that’s worthwhile, you need to know that there are obstacles, true, but you need to know that your biggest obstacles will be the way in which you prevent yourself from succeeding.

My assembly this morning, this is my assembly this morning, and I have this little video here of this street performer who is. He’s got this little green monster here and the green monster is he’s. He’s got this coat on, he’s actually just his hand, but he looks like an additional little guy sitting on him. And every time the main, the performer, tries to put on a hat, tries to move, that his green monster friend keeps hitting him and stopping him from doing all the things that he wants to do. And then I said look, the thing is, we all have that monster inside us. We want to do our homework when we get home, but the monster says go and play some video games. And the monster’s constantly trying to undermine you and stop you from doing what’s right. And what we’ve got to do is find a way to overcome that monster.

Now, yes, there are big things in the world like earthquakes and racism and so on. Before I get to fixing the earthquakes, I’d like to be able to get over that monster and get home and do my homework right away. So I turn up tomorrow morning with an excellent piece of homework where I did not procrastinate. They’re these small wins that we want for our children, that we want for ourselves. I procrastinate, of course I do. In fact, that assembly that I prepared, I did it at 10 pm last night because I procrastinated throughout the week, weekend, right, and then eventually I got to it and I thought, oh, my goodness, it’s 10 o’clock, I’ve got to get this done.

We all do. We all have a monster inside us and we need to teach the children how to master that monster and how to master our, to own our development and to become the kinds of people who can then drive the car who can move forward and have impact on the world. Then drive the car who can move forward and have impact on the world. And I don’t think we do that when we are constantly concentrating on the stuff that’s out there. That’s going to stop us from succeeding. We need to look inwards and think what stuff’s in here that’s going to stop us from succeeding.

Kenny Primrose:

So super significant aspect of the formation in Michaela is on personal responsibility, on not being a victim, and so what makes some values good, as far as I’m understanding you, is that they allow you to fulfill your potential, contribute to making the world a better place and not complain or submit to the external circumstances. I have a question on the back of that and this kind of shades into the broader discussion on the mental health crisis right now, which I’m sure you’ve got some opinions on. So previously in this series I’ve spoken to the psychologist Peter Gray. He’s been fairly influential on Jonathan Haidt, especially the stuff on play.

He’d say that school days got longer, they got more intense, recess lunch got shorter and there was far too much supervision and children didn’t learn an internal locus of control because they were always just complying with what adults were telling them to do. And then you have these very fragile vessels. They don’t feel like they’ve got any agency in the world because they’re just being told what to do, what to follow. I wonder what your response would be to to that point. Like if you’re telling kids what to think and this is good and so on, and they’re not getting ownership of it because of the recipients, then do you see that as a hazard, as a danger?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

yeah. So it’s interesting. I love jonathan hyatt and always have right from his book the Righteous Mind, which sort of explains the conservative mindset to a liberal, right through to Coddling of the American Mind and now is the anxious generation. I’m a big fan. I think he’s probing at something there which he’s got something. There’s something good there. He’s got something. There’s something good there, but I think he’s got it a little bit wrong.

I think that those children he’s talking about have not been told what to do by their parents at all. In fact they’ve been abandoned to screens, which of course he talks about. How kids are just on screens all the time, and that kids come home and are then just left to wander on TikTok and that this, the screen world which just brings everything to you, is the thing that takes away their agency. They don’t understand what it is to own something and to have agency over it and take personal responsibility, because they’re just on those screens and the screens do it for you. You will remember a moment ago when I was talking all about children having agency and personal responsibility and owning their own development right. So I would agree with Gray and Haidt in that sense that children need the opportunities given to them to do exactly that take personal responsibility. But that doesn’t mean that you just leave them in chaos. So again, I would come back to when you were saying, yes, but to learn anything doesn’t mean that you just leave them in chaos. So again, I would come back to when you were saying, yes, but to learn anything, doesn’t that just mean that you need to just leave them to it. You need to give them structure. But within that structure they then make decisions. So I do my assembly, control the monster, go home tonight, do your homework. I guarantee you there will be some kids who will go home tonight after the assembly and they won’t do their homework. There’ll be other kids who start it right away, and there’ll be other kids who procrastinate and do it at the end. There’ll be other kids who listen to me and will go home and do it when they get home at four o’clock, and then I’ll do another assembly in six weeks time, and then there’ll do another assembly in six weeks time, and then there’ll be more kids perhaps who decide to take my advice, et cetera. They are deciding what to do with the advice that they are getting. So within a controlled environment, which children have always grown up in you and this is where Height and I see I’ve never spoken to him directly about this and I would really like to he talks about.

He and I grew up at the same time. We grew up in the time when you could cycle to the corner shop. You leave your bike, you don’t tie it up, you go in, you come out. I remember I grew up in Toronto. We used to leave the house door open when I was really little. We never even locked the door. It was fine.

Now, the thing is, in those days you could depend on other people around not to lock the door. Now at some point we then got burgled and then we decided we better start locking the door Now. It would be absurd for any of us to leave the house now and not lock the door. I don’t think Haidt would say don’t lock the door every day, everybody, because then that allows the children to be more free. Now he does look back nostalgically at this time when we rode our bikes and we could just do what we wanted. I also don’t think he would say children should ride their bikes to the shop and leave them untied, unlocked, outside the shop.

I don’t think he would suggest that he is tapping into some of that helicopter parenting, which I think is more of a middle class thing. I have to say so. I don’t come across it so much because my kids are from the inner city, where they’re watching everything that their children are doing all the time. I often think to myself if only the parents would watch their children more, because you see them out at 11 o’clock at night just wandering the streets and you’re thinking what the hell? Where are their parents? Obviously, I stress, that’s not all of our parents. You see some of the kids. It is true that there is a middle class worry and anxiety around kids where they won’t let them do anything and go anywhere and so on. But when you do let them go somewhere and I agree with Haif, we need to get those middle class parents not to do that and we need to get them out and about. But when you do get them out and about, you might give them a brick phone and say here’s the brick phone so you can call me if you have any issues, because in the day if you had issues you could have found a call box to call. There’s no more call boxes, so you have to bring the fence in to allow them to succeed, but at the same time you need to allow them some freedom. So that’s what I would say.

We are very much doing at Michaela, for instance, when guests come to visit. So teachers come to visit from other schools and they see our children playing basketball outside. Because at lunchtime our kids are playing basketball and football. Because at lunchtime our kids are playing basketball and football table football and they play various things ping pong and so on and then they chat to their friends and they do whatever it is they want to do. And the teachers come and they say it’s just amazing the way your children play basketball. It’s so ordered and so nice and they’re so friendly to each other. And at our school we have to confiscate the basketball all the time because they get really rough and mean with each other, whereas the kids here don’t do that. Now, of course, that has required a certain amount of teaching. We’ve had to teach them how to play basketball. Professionally is what we say, and what that means is they can then just do it and they can have a nice time and they can make their decisions.

One of the joys of my life is, at lunchtime to look outside my window here and we have one of our boys who’s very autistic and he jumps in one spot his whole lunch hour. He just jumps and he loves. That’s what he loves doing. And the thing I love watching is all the other children around him. They’re playing basketball all around him and they just walk around him and they just they play basketball somehow around him. He’s not bullied, he’s perfectly happy and that’s because we’ve taught the children how to behave here.

So this idea that somehow it’s wrong or oppressive to teach children how to behave, or somehow we’re taking away their agency by teaching them the difference between right and wrong, pushing over the autistic kid is wrong.

Being kind and actually to move in such a way that your basketball game isn’t exactly as you would have wanted it, but you sacrifice in that moment to allow that autistic boy the thrill of jumping up and down in that one spot that he loves, it’s a good thing. I don’t see how this is a good. It’s good to teach children kindness and decency and it’s good that they can then apply that kindness and decency to making the world into a better place. And so when they see harm happening to another vulnerable person outside of school. When they’re older, they will then step in because they’ve had practice of doing the right thing while they were in school. If they don’t ever have that practice, we say take away everything. No structures, just do whatever you want. If I’d done that in the yard, we’d have to keep that autistic boy inside because he would not be able to jump up and down on that spot.

Kenny Primrose:

I don’t know yeah, it’s a very it’s a very compelling case, and when I hear you say these things and like, what is that people have such a problem with, this sounds like a very good thing. But I’m interested because you’re an immigrant right Jamaica via Canada. You went to a state school where the behavior wasn’t good. You ended up going to Oxford. You’ve got masses of agency You’re a paragon of this and you’ve started a school and so on. Where did that come from if you weren’t schooled in it, and what difference might it have made if you’d gone to Michaela?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Oh, my goodness, I’m going to go to Michaela one day I’m only saying that when I’m 65, I’m going to retire and I’m going to sit in the lessons and I’m going to learn my years of history. I don’t know enough. I can’t even talk to our kids about science and history and so on, because they know, yes, if I’d gone to Michaela, my goodness, I would just know so much. Now I am who I am because of my parents. Okay, my parents taught me right from wrong and I had a real sense of meaning and purpose when I was younger, thanks to my parents. And I remember I grew up in Canada till the age of 15. And we did in the day I doubt they do it now, but in the day we did dissections of frogs and I stood up in the class and said I am not dissecting this frog, this is outrage against its rights as a frog. I had a point, because I’m telling you, all those kids used to take the insides of the frogs and throw the insides at each other. You can just imagine the chaos. It was completely ridiculous Total waste of money on the and these poor frogs had given their lives. I was worried these frogs had died for nothing and we should not have been killing those frogs and then throwing their insides around the classroom. And I refused to have anything to do with it and I just sat there and just they didn’t put the frog in front of me and I said I’m not doing it now. That was me. Why was I like that? I don’t know it was.

All of us are born with different personalities. My father will tell you that when I was four, I took all the baby powder and poured it all over myself and made a big mess in the room. So I was always a kid. My sister was not like this. My sister was much more quiet and obedient and I was much more kind of I’m going to go and do whatever. That was my personality, but my parents did teach me values that taught me the difference between right and wrong. And actually, when I look back to who I was when I was a kid and the things I used to think and say, it’s true that I used to be very much on the left politically, but I’m still the same person. I’m still trying to make the world into a better place. When I didn’t dissect those frogs that day, I was trying to make the world into a better place by what I did, right, I used to go to the RSPCA on the weekends and I would walk the dogs, volunteering because I thought it was. I liked animals and so that was what I wanted to do for those animals. It’s still the case that I don’t eat red meat. Like it’s, you find your thing and you do what you can.

And this idea it’s not just about removing the constraints Like I think, with Jonathan Haidt, he has this idea. It’s not just about removing the constraints. Like I think with jonathan height, he has this idea of having all kinds of what does he say like? Having like metals and various things that you could have in the yard, in a school yard, which kids could use to build things and so on. And I’m always thinking have you ever been in a new city school? Missed the height? Are you classy? Just whack each other with those iron bars. This is insane. So partly, I do think Jonathan Haidt is looking at this from a very middle class point of view. He’s dealing with middle class kids. He’s dealing with his kids, his friends’ kids. It’s a different world from the world that I know, and I do wish that I could talk to him because I think there is lots of good in what he’s saying on this point. I just think that it needs some altering or some nuance in there really.

Kenny Primrose:

Yeah, I’m interested in whether part of the problem comes from kids picking up bars and hitting each other with it, comes from the fact that we don’t trust them, comes from the fact that we don’t trust them. So we’ve got a Lord of the Flies type image of what will happen to children if they’re allowed to have free reign. But actually there are certain examples of children who’ve been marooned on islands, who learn to cooperate, who come up with the rules themselves, and so on. And do you think we ever have too low a view of human nature in children? No, no.

Katharine Birbalsingh: 38:57

You’re saying have you ever worked in an inner city school? That’s crazy. They’re beating each other up all of the time. They put their lives in danger. They’re awful.

Look, we were all flawed. Children are very flawed because they’ve never been taught to be good. We need to teach them to be good. It is not the case that they are good. They are not naturally good. If you put two toddlers together and give them one toy, it is not the case that one toddler is going to say now I’ll have it for five minutes and then I’ll lend it to you for five minutes and we’ll share. They’re not going to do that. They’re going to beat each other over the head with that toy. Now you can teach them to share, but you have to, and it takes years, that’s. The other thing is that it takes a long time.

I’ve got this great quote here from Roger Scruton on my wall that says Aristotle’s view was that there are virtues and there are vices, and that virtues are indicative of a successful life or living in harmony with oneself. And we need to cultivate those virtues so as not to be at odds with ourselves I spoke about being at odds with ourselves earlier so as to be able to flourish. But children do not understand this, and you can only acquire virtues if you acquire the habits that are involved in them. That’s what we’re all about here at Michaela. We’re instilling habit in them so that it just becomes part of who they are. And he says you must do this first by imitation, even if you don’t initially know the reason you are doing it. You build up initiative, you build up purity of heart, you build up a sense of justice by encouraging children to imitate before they know why. Then, gradually, as it becomes second nature to them, then they understand that indeed there is a reason for it. That is what we should be doing with children. It’s a great quote.

Kenny Primrose:

I interviewed Roger Scruton before he passed and his question was what is more important to me than my present desire, which I think is a wonderful question. It’s the kind of how do I delay gratification and think about the kind of person I’m going to become in the future.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

You must send me your link. Yeah, I can send you the interview you did Fascinating.

Kenny Primrose:

You’ve done extraordinarily well on Progress 8, on all those measures, but it sounds, at least in this conversation, like some of the other stuff that isn’t examined is more important to you.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Absolutely Every time our results come out, I say really proud of the kids, but what’s most important to me is who they are as people. I say it every single year and everybody always ignores me. I say it all the time what’s most important to me is who they are as people. And then people say that, michaela, yeah, but what’s important is not just in exam results and I say, yes, that’s right, it’s not just exam results. Come and see our kids, come and visit and you will see that what is more important to us is not exam results, but who they are as people.

Kenny Primrose:

Is there a danger, do you think in follow it’s what we’re measured on right, education is measured on exam results and so on that schools will focus on that and relegate neglect. Everything else it just becomes about kind of exam results. Is that a danger that you feel your intention with a McKenna Like how do we keep the bigger picture as a bigger picture?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

That’s right, and what we prove, you see, is that when you do concentrate on the kinds of people they are, the results come with that right. Obviously, you have to get excellent teaching in there. You need good homework, so obviously there’s lots of other stuff involved, but actually, if you can speak to their hearts and get them to be the kinds of people who don’t procrastinate at home, who do their homework, who become the kinds of people who you will admire and respect, guess what they’re going to do well at their GCSEs. That’s what will happen. So what I’d like very much is for people to understand that who they are as people will contribute to your exam results.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Unfortunately, the system is such and this has nothing to do with any particular political party the system is such that you can only be judged by the exam results that you get. There’s no way of judging how kind children are. There’s no way of putting a number on it, and it’s something that I find annoying, because actually, I think the thing that we are most proud of here is who they are, but there’s no way of demonstrating that to anyone, to say, hey look, we’ve got the best kindness score in all of the country. There’s nothing.

Kenny Primrose:

There’s this law, Goodhart’s law, that when a measurement becomes a target, it stops being a good measurement. So I think if there was some metric for kindness, it would stop being kindness. It would become gaming the system in some other way. So I think, keep them unmeasurable and you’ll retain their integrity. Good point. I was going to ask you, what do you wish people would talk about more, but presumably it’s this stuff, the kind of character stuff. So people talk a lot about Michaela and its success and Progress 8 and so on. I read a story recently about AI bots teaching students and doing so incredibly successfully. Now there’s a bunch of questions. I’d like to ask about that and interrogate the data a bit. But let’s imagine it’s true. What is the human bit of teaching? That means you don’t think, and I’m assuming you don’t. Teachers can be replaced by AI.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Yeah, that’s really good that question, because I often say to people not to staff here or elsewhere I say to staff elsewhere if it is the case that you could just be replaced by a robot, then you’re doing something wrong. Obviously you mustn’t just think of yourself as somebody who gives them some knowledge and then they copy it down and that’s it Right. What a teacher does is build relationships with the children, and those relationships are founded essentially on love, and you love the child and the child loves you, and love is why they work for you. They work for you because they don’t want to let you down, because they love you and they care about the respect and the admiration that you’re going to give to them or have for them, and so that is so important. Children need motivating and they’re not going to get motivated by a robot, they just are. But then there’s simply the sophistication that’s needed for excellent teaching, which robots certainly at the moment cannot do.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Maybe one day they will, I don’t know, but they can’t do it now which is to know what you’ve taught, sense the class, know what they’ve understood and what they haven’t understood. Come back to something to be able to re-explain it, to let them retrieve it from their heads in order to write it. But then you think, oh, let me get them to say it. Now I’m going to bring it back in a class discussion and that retrieval practice is happening on all kinds of different levels, and then I’m going to leave it for 10 minutes and then come back to it, and then in two days I’m going to come back to it and then in five days I’m going to come back to it again and I’m going to put it in a different way and bring it together with that piece of knowledge and get them to fuse that together, to do their own thing with that. And I’m constantly pushing the boat out while at the same time scaffolding for those kids who don’t get it.

There’s just so much going on. There’s no way a robot could do any of that Now. I don’t know, robot of the year 3000, maybe he’ll be able to do it. Certainly he can’t do it now. So the simple quality of the teaching he can’t get, and then also just the motivating, the relationships, the sense of team, the sense of belonging, all of that stuff that I was saying is so important to a child feeling happy and secure in school and loved. Ultimately, you want your children to be able to go to school and feel loved. How can a robot love you? It’s bad, it’s mad.

A robot cannot love you how do your students know that you love them? How do they know I love them? I don’t think that they would necessarily know that I personally love them. I don’t have one-on-one relationship with the kids. There’s a few, but most of them I don’t. I go and give assembly every day and they see me every day, but I don’t have a relationship with them.

I don’t think that’s my role. To be honest, I think my role is to support my teachers, because somebody has to love the teachers and if all I’m doing is loving the kids and being there for the kids, then nobody’s there for the teachers. And I have to support the teachers and make sure that I’ve got their back and that I’m helping to train them and support them and scaffold them so that they get what I need to give them, what they give to the kids. So it’s my role to support my teachers so that the teachers can love the children.

I represent the school and I’m sure if you were to ask the kids what I do, they would have no idea. They would say I give assemblies. That’s what they would say we like and they do. They give me little postcards and they say thank you so much for your assemblies and I always think, gosh, it’s so funny. That’s all I do is give assemblies, which is fine. They’re kids, so obviously they’re going to think that. But my role is with the staff and I spend all of my time with my staff and that’s so that they could do the best possible job that they can, building the relationships that are needed with the children.

Kenny Primrose:

That’s incredibly valuable. I want to be respectful of your time, Catherine, but I wonder if I could close by asking you if there’s anything, if there’s anything you’d like to say to the following stakeholders. So we’re discussing the absolutely integral role of schools and parents to the well-being of not just children now but our future. So what would you like to say? Let’s start with students.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

To young people today, to young well reject the woke way of things, where you blame everybody else apart from yourself or what they’re telling you about the world and how everyone’s against you. Look inside and think what can I do to make a contribution to the world? Who can I be and be in control of your own life? Stay away from the screens, 100%. Stay away from the screens. Build stuff, do stuff, be interested in the world. And if you don’t have the best teaching, that’s going on at school or there’s chaos well, get yourself some books and read them. Teach yourself. That’s what I would say to kids. Fantastic.

What about to parents? Parents? Oh my goodness. Definitely do not give your children screens. Do not give your children a smartphone, not until after 16. In fact, I would take it all the way to 18. Whatever you do when they’re toddlers, oh my goodness, read to them, read to them over and over and count the peas on the plate. Zero to five are the most important ages that exist and if you get them to five and they can do all of that, you should have already taught them how to read before they go to school. You should have already taught them how to count. Do not say but that’s the teacher’s job, because that’s insane. It’s your job, you are their first teacher, you are their parent. So I would say what about to teachers?

To teachers I would say that I know it is very difficult, I know that the society at the moment makes it very hard to teach, but that it can be done and that you need to just look outside the box. Edutwitter can help you, researched can help you Reading Tom Bennett’s books and E Hirsch’s books and Dan Willingham’s books and all of the stuff that tells you the right way to think about this sort of stuff. Read Michaela’s books, come and visit us at Michaela, see what’s possible and then just try and aim for that and always think what am I doing wrong? Just don’t be brought down by what SLT are doing. Yes, maybe they’re making the right, wrong decisions, maybe it’s not what you want it to be, but you can do it just in your own classroom. You can. It is you just got to make it your goal and do it and not look outside all the time. For all three of them I would say parents, teachers, kids stop looking outside for who to blame. Look at what you’re doing and build something for yourself.

Kenny Primrose:

And then finally policymakers.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

Oh my goodness. I mean, obviously, what they’re doing now is a total disaster. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Very simple Maybe go and see the schools that are really successful and learn from them. That would be an idea. And be open-minded, because you yourself have never been a teacher or a school leader, so maybe you should ask the school leaders, who actually know what they’re doing, and listen to their, their advice really clear.

Kenny Primrose:

Thank you, Katharine. What gives you hope in a cynical age?

Katharine Birbalsingh:

One thing children, children, because they’re lovely and they’re always so innocent and so wide-eyed and there’s always hope with them because they’re young enough to believe. I think often adults can become too cynical because they’ve had a hard time, whereas the kids, they’re always ready to go. So that’s why I’ll always want to work with kids. Being a teacher is the best job in the world.

Kenny Primrose:

Katharine, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, your insights and your clarity. I’ve really appreciated it.

Katharine Birbalsingh:

All right, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Listen to the podcast here.

EO When I ask the question, who is it that I want to be becoming, the way I am answering or the way I am using? The answer is right, what do I need to set up in my life to make it easier for myself? What structures, what do I need to commit to publicly in advance to give my future self, who is as weak and feeble as I am, the best chance of making the choice I hope she makes the best chance of making the choice I hope she makes?

Intro:

KP What do you hope that people might say about you at your funeral? How would you like to be remembered by those who knew you? It’s a powerful question and a sobering one too, and it’s one that today’s conversation takes seriously. You’re listening to the Examined Life. This is a podcast where I speak to a range of influential thinkers about the question they think we should be asking ourselves. I’m delighted to be joined today by the writer, podcaster and all-round interesting human being, elizabeth Oldfield. I came across Elizabeth many years ago when she was director of the think tank Theos. She currently hosts a podcast called the Sacred, where she interviews a range of fascinating and often high-profile individuals about the values that they hold sacred. She writes for a range of publications and has a newsletter that I really look forward to reading, called Fully Alive. She’s also just in the process of releasing a book by the same name, which is currently available for pre-order and to be highly recommended.

KP I really valued this conversation. We dive into Liz’s key question who am I becoming? And while the conversation dances around and sometimes draws from the Christian tradition, I think there’s material here for anyone, regardless of perspective or worldview. It’s a conversation that’s really about character and formation and why we may well be setting ourselves up for disaster if we don’t pay close attention to our own character. I think it ties into this season’s theme of being positively maladjusted, because being deliberate about your character formation will generally mean being subversive towards the cultural forces around us, whether it’s consumerism or whatever’s piped through our social media channels. My hope is that you might find something in this conversation helpful in your own thinking, in your own journey. If you do, and if you do enjoy this episode in general, then please do like, share, subscribe, as ever.

As a podcast which exists without sponsors, it’s mainly through word of mouth that this finds an audience. So if you find encouraging words in your mouth about this podcast, or this conversation in particular, then do please share them with others. And so, without further ado, I hope you find this conversation as helpful, provocative and hopeful as I did.

KP Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today. It’s a joy to have you on the podcast. In your own podcast, the Sacred, you often skip the small talk and jump straight in with the question what are your sacred values? And I wonder if I could start by taking the same liberty and jumping in with the kind of the peg that this series is hung on. And that’s what question is it that you think we should be asking ourselves, and kind of the peg that this series is hung on, and that’s what question is it that you think we should be asking ourselves, and kind of exploring together and maybe we can begin to unpack that. So what is the question that animates you?

EO Yes, um, I mean it’s going to sound very meta, but what a great question about questions. I am, um, I I’m married to someone for whom good, honest questions is their sacred value, and I think, um, I do kind of coaching and reflective listening to people which is almost entirely question-based and can be extremely transformative for people, and I am very moved and inspired by the life of Jesus, who asked way, way more questions than he did, kind of give straight answers to things, I think. So I would align with you in wanting to pay attention to the power of a good question as a way of living intentionally and fruitfully. And when you said what is the question you think we should be asking ourselves, the thing that kind of bubbled up in me was who am I becoming Because? Or maybe who are we becoming Because?

I think a lot about what it sounds like quite a technical, theological term, and I think it is originally a Jesuit term this idea of formation, this idea of how we change and grow over the course of our lives and how we can do that more carefully and with more purpose, rather than just allowing the kind of events and the influences and the situations that we find ourselves in to shape us, you know, towards cynicism or hope or despair, or courage or cowardice or these kind of big virtue words. What does it mean to and sometimes I wonder if it’s just hubris but what does it mean to think about the kind of person we want to be at the end of our lives? You know the kind of things we would love people to say about us at our funeral. What do we want our lives to be defined by? And then work back from there and think, okay, if actually I’m less concerned about being famous or, you know, earning a lot of money or finally getting a kitchen island or a flat stomach, or finally getting a kitchen island or a flat stomach than I am, about someone standing up and saying, you know she cared for other people or she was brave, or you know she lived a life defined by generosity, Knowing what I know about myself, that I am neither of those things yet and if I’m not careful, we’ll just become less those things.

How do I set out my life and focus my intention and journey alongside people that give me the best possible chance of becoming those things that I wanted to find my life? So there’s lots of ways we could go with that and directions we could go in, but I think that heart check of is this who I want to be becoming? Is this not? I want to find and somehow, you know, um, archeologically dig out my true self, which is perfect and eternal. And if I can only find my true self, I will be, you know, fully actualized in the world. But I’m always changing and growing and and I want to point myself in in the direction towards the good. Um, that’s the question that that leads me.

KP Well, thank, you, that’s an incredibly rich question. You brought to mind David Brooks’s distinction between kind of resume virtues and eulogy virtues, and so, for you, this question of formation comes out of that kind of reflecting on what do I want people to say about me at my funeral and what’s my idea of the good or the flourishing life? Um, have there been kind of moments when this question has has really become a particularly sharp one, ways that you feel like, oh, I’m being formed in this way, to the good or not, that you realize that this, this really is the question I need to keep coming back to. Who am I becoming?

EO I don’t know that I would have um, framed it quite like that. But there was a real fork in the road in my life, um, at university, because I had been very involved in drama and performance and had been um kind of Saturday morning stage school kid. I did tap, I did ballet, I did jazz, um, I did drama. Gcse I did theatre studies a level and the sort of trajectory of my. Honestly, if someone had said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I would have said Judi Dench, that is what I want to be when I grow up.

KP I want that’s a pretty good role model to have.

EO Yeah I want to be a national treasure. I want to be someone who, uh, is an extraordinary performer, who uses that talent to bless people’s lives. And, um, in my first year at university I got a bunch of different parts with the drama society and, um, it’s so embarrassing looking back, but definitely like, felt myself to be the sort of up, one of the upcoming young actors on campus, you know. And this university is so funny, isn’t it? This like weird microcosm of society, these like hugely over-inflated egos and, uh, it’s a tiny arena that feels huge, you know. But there was sort of like third years who were aspiring playwrights and directors and they wanted me to be in their plays and I’m brilliant, um, and uh, I was acting some parts which I found really fascinating and interesting but weren’t particularly lovely people to inhabit. I had this really funny thing where I was, I had to have like special lessons on how to say the C word because I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it with conviction, um, which is not to say you know that people who use that word, I’d love it anyway, but it was just, it was the the. I’re spending a lot of time deliberately, imaginatively, imaginatively immersing myself in um, different characters, different people. I played lady macbeth and loved playing lady um and and some you know nicer parts as well. But that actually the nature of being a tall woman is you you play character parts. It’s very, it’s very like that industry is very clear. Like if you are short and hot, you play bland leads and if you are tall and brunette, you pay, you play character. I was like you play villains, you play prostitutes, you play um, the interesting, the interesting ones, but that those were the kind of parts that I was always getting um and then I had become a Christian when I was about 15 and this was kind of running alongside that.

And on one of my summer holidays I went with a group to um with a development charity to Kenya to work alongside a charity out there that was working with people living in, was working with children living in the slums, and we were basically there to relieve the Kenyans so they could go and deliver the aid and education and medicine to children in the slums. So you know there’s always questions around those kind of projects and some of them are definitely kind of problematically white saviory. But I think this one was kind of um, as thought out as it could be about. How do you use basically the free labor of students to do something good, um, for people who actually need it and don’t make it about the students, um. So we were there like built, building accommodation and helping cook and various other things.

But it was my first exposure to the reality of grinding poverty for most of the world and my first up close encounter with just the shattering injustice that defines so many people’s lives. And I came back and had this real sense of discomfort and disconnect between the thing I had thought I wanted to do and how it was forming me and the kind of lives that I had got to know and made friends alongside and seen the sort of the struggle and the value of people working in that sector. And I went back and did another play and found myself in the bar afterwards like drinking in the compliments and feeling my ego kind of stretch and purr and just had this real. I don’t think this is good for me. I don’t think I currently have the kind of character that can cope with other people’s praise about who I am in my body and myself and my presentation on a stage, and presumably who would also not have been able to cope with other people’s criticism or their dismissal or their ignoring right.

The the life of a performer felt likely to feed the worst parts of myself, and I don’t think that’s true of everyone. I think some that’s a really noble calling and some people are cool to it and have a really steady sense of self and can do that kind of work without becoming a monster, and we need those people. But I was like I think this is going to make me a monster and I want instead to work out. Are there ways about the way our world is set up and the way that we live together and the deep injustices and the deep divisions between us that I can have a go at tackling? That’s not the path I ended up on exactly, but that was the turn.

KP Thank you so much for sharing that, Elizabeth. I didn’t know that that you had this history of stage work. It’s fascinating and that kind of Damascene moment is really interesting. I’d love to, I’d love to come back to the ways you have sought to deliberately be shaped and formed. There’s all sorts of practices and things that you do. I mean you’ve you’ve deliberately chosen to live in an intentional community, something that I’m sure we’ll come back to discussing.

Um, picking up on this theme of having, you know, one’s ego massaged, being like center stage of I think that’s just a very natural place to go. When, when you’re receiving praise, when you literally have a follow spot on you and it seems like that’s just social media culture generally now, like Instagram or whatever, this idea of you know being the star part in the movie of your life To what extent do you see that being a very formative influence in people who are not, you know, am-dram or you know aspiring professional dramatic, but just it’s in the air and water of the culture we’re in now. So I guess sorry, this is a clumsy question my question is do you see that kind of formative influence being pretty toxic generally?

EO Hmm, yes, I think it defaults to that extremely easily and I feel it in myself. You know it defaults to that extremely easily and I feel it in myself. You know I, interestingly, I’ve kind of come full circle and I feel not full circle but like, two decades later I’m writing and doing more public things. I’m not acting, but I am sort of not behind an organization. Now I’m more, you know, I’m writing under my own name. I’ve got a book coming out. All of these things which are closer to the life I walked away from.

And I hope, and I kind of you know I’m a Christian, so in my tradition, you know, I pray about like is this okay? Like, have I put my roots down deep enough now? Like, have I got a steady enough sense of self to do this without turning into a monster? I really hope not. But do this without turning into a monster? I really hope I am. But it means that some of those temptations are more alive.

For me, when I was using social media in my previous job, it was much more like we have this report out and if people liked it and shared it, I felt a glow of collective achievement.

But it wasn’t as compulsively addictive as it is when I write a piece and I put it online and then I have to do everything I can to stop myself going to open my dopamine mining. It’s like, oh, check again, check again, check again, affirm me, affirm me, affirm me. You know I have to have all these blockers. I have to have very strong, um, disciplinary approaches and like 24 hours off, all technology a week and, um, you know, uh, a week a year where I have nothing and like regularly removing myself from that arena and going is your, is your sense of self stable enough without this? Like this can be a tool to communicate some things. I need communicating, but if it’s where I’m finding my worth and my identity, it is definitely not forming me into the kind of person I want to be. It’s forming me into a performing monkey for that algorithm. That is not what I want someone to say at my funeral.

KP So I think this is helpful personally for me, but I think perhaps for others listening to this. You are a public figure, you have a significant following and it’s still you know with all your awareness a danger that you feed the beast. And so when you talk about kind of ways of staying grounded, you mention practices. I hear in what you’re saying, perhaps a Shabbat practice, digital detoxing and things like that. So what are the practices that keep you grounded? Practices that keep you grounded because you know, although most of us don’t have significant followings, we’re not public figures, we are still subject to the kind of limbic capitalism and individualism of our day and require some kind of deliberate practice to to not be trapped by it.

EO So I wonder if you could say something a bit about that you’re going to preach to my own soul here, kenny um, and I think public figure is definitely an overstatement, but we are in a time when there we have lots of micro public figures because of all of these overlapping filter bubbles that we all sit in. Um, so I find and it’s something I’ve been writing about a lot I find the kind of practices of my tradition just enormously useful. I became a Christian into a part of the church that does have very formative practices but doesn’t think of itself as liturgical, doesn’t think of itself as intentional, puts high value on kind of emotional experiences, on things happening in the moment, on free prayer, those kinds of things. And honestly I still love that stuff. It’s still a big part of my life. I have no disdain for it. But I lost my faith, became an atheist or tried to be an atheist. I failed at being an atheist and then I found my way back in and I’m now very much aware of the glory.

So Rowan William talks about that. One of the hidden geniuses it’s probably my phrase, not his cause, it’s clumpy of religions are the way they help us structure time. And the way we structure time is how we structure attention. And the way we structure attention is the way we form ourselves, and so almost every religious or spiritual wisdom path will have really clear structure of time, really clear rhythm and, importantly, repetition. There’s a famous phrase no formation without repetition. And we live in a novelty culture, right? And so we try something new. We’re going to have green drinks this week. That’s boring. The next new thing is gong baths. The next new thing is microdosing or whatever it is, the search to stabilize ourselves and to be becoming the kind of people we want. To be right, I think it’s not a question that most people are asking that question implicitly or explicitly, but because of hedonic adaptation, because of the way capitalism works, explicitly, but because of hedonic adaptation. Because of the way capitalism works, the sort of undifferentiated secular marketplace runs on novelty, and so it will say this thing will change you, this other thing will change you, this other thing will change you and keeps dragging you into new and different practices, new and different focuses for your attention, new and different rhythms, and I think the kind of genius of things that have being done for 2000 years is there’s no novelty. We get up.

I live in this. We sometimes call it micro monastery, tiny, intentional community, two families we have. We’ve turned a shed at the end of the garden into a chapel and we pray not every day, but we pray a lot of days morning prayer in the morning, and at the moment it’s pitch black and we light some candles and we pray the same words, listen to different bits of the Bible, but we still pray the same words. And then in the evening we pray Compline, and it’s dark and we pray. There’s a different in the book. We use this different Compline for the day of the week, but we mainly do it on a few days, and so we’re always hearing Monday Compline, right, always hearing Thursday Compline. So I now know those words.

Teach me, dear Lord, to number my days that I may turn my heart unto wisdom. There’s a midday prayer that we pray a lot. Let the beauty of the Lord be upon me and establish thou the work of my hands when you’re worried that my work will be all about my beauty and my glory and my edification and my self-actualization, none of which, I think, is the root satisfaction. I am in a set of rhythms that mean I repeatedly, without having to choose to or remember to say the words let the beauty of the lord, our god be upon me and establish thou the work of my hand and those, the structures of regular, repeated written prayers, which my younger self would have been like. That sounds so boring. Repetition is boring. It’s all about free expression, god. I sound like turning to classic middle-aged conservative turn, but um, the, the, the way the things we repeatedly pay attention to form us are baked into my tradition, and so I’m just increasingly wanting to draw deep on those resources.

So, yes, a practice of Sabbath morning and evening prayer, sacred reading, being part of a congregation, right? The people that are not like me do not care whether how many followers I have on social media. I’m just Liz who is on the prayer team, or you know someone who they chat to over coffee and they might be they probably are from a completely different country, from a completely different socioeconomic background. Like being in community with people not like me who are interested in me as a person, not me as a product or me as a sort of status signifier they can hang on to, which is what we do with people in public. Far too often, we do this kind of attempt to stabilize our sense of self by being associated with the kind of people that we want to be becoming rather than working on it for ourselves. We’re like well, if I just you know, I can, just I can just get it from your aura working on it for ourselves.

KP That’s why I’m talking to you, elizabeth. Uh, that’s helpful asking this question. Who am I becoming? I wonder if perhaps another way of asking it is what is getting my attention. And what strikes me is not as much the subject of one’s attention though that’s of course like really important but the kind of attention you pay. So it’s not just the what but the how that makes a difference.

I feel like we’re kind of very well educated in how to instrumentalize our attention for some kind of future gain. Oliver Berkman uses the word etilic, I think, which means kind of non-instrumental. You’re doing something for its own sake or something that you know can’t be leveraged for a future payoff your soul but you’re doing it for its own sake. If you’re spending time with the diversity of your congregation and church or whatever, that is also not something with some kind of future payoff, but it’s inhabiting that moment and paying a kind of attention to that moment. That is kind of formative in itself. So I don’t know if I’m clear at all with this question, but I wonder if you could say something about the nature of attention and how it shapes and forms us.

EO Absolutely yes, and I think, as you know, I’m very influenced by the work of Ian McGilchrist and the shorthand he always uses is attention, is a moral act. And it’s a very radical change when I realized that the time I spend scrolling in Instagram is not just dead time, right, it’s not just lost time or passive time, it is active time and it is actively forming me. Those images are forming me, that restlessness of my thumb, looking, looking, looking. You know what am I looking for? Something, a sort of snackish, satisfying of something, something pretty, something funny. You know what is that? It’s just like I’m looking for some tiny hit of a positive emotion, that I was really uncomfortable saying it because I am so far from being effectively unaddicted to these things. Um, but I think that sense of when we ask the question, who do we want to be becoming? It’s really hard. It sometimes it’s really the stories that we tell about that are. Well, you know, you only have so much control over that. It it relates to your attachment model.

you know, it depends how much trauma you’ve had it depends, you know, what country you were born into or what world you were born into, and that is all true, right, these are all real influences on who we are becoming. A bit some people would say there, there is no control, it’s just your dna, right, genetic determinists, who you are is determined before you, even um are conceived. But I find the idea that there’s something that we can not control but we can choose, we have some agency around and it is our attention and that you know. It’s funny, because my tradition has talked about this for centuries, like literally for centuries, that um, uh, this idea of formation, that what you literally, what you read, what you sing, what you say and who you spend time with, is who you are becoming. And now we know, because of research into neuroplasticity, like the mechanism of that, that we have, you know, neural pathways, and the more we use particular neural pathways, the more they are strengthened. And it’s why forming new habits is so hard, because we have put so much other like repeated ritual, liturgical action of that habit has created a kind of easily is it created a furrow which is easy to go down, and in order to create a new habit, you kind of have to hack your way through the compacted walls of earth to create a new furrow, to create a new pathway for yourself. But I find it very, uh, both liberatory and sort of pleasingly achievable. So I’m like, okay if I set up my day knowing that it will be uncomfortable to pay attention to this poem because it’s not doesn’t have any notifications on it, or this prayer, because I didn’t write it and therefore it’s not completely tailored to my preferences. It might have, you know, a pronoun in it I don’t like, or some language in it I don’t like, but that’s fine, like that. That is not what this exercise about.

This exercise is about sitting in attention on something that I know has something to teach me, has something that I want to learn from. And living in community, we have a huge amount of time where we just invest in our relationships, we just spend time together, and I want to turn my attention to my members of our community repeatedly for its own sake, because I want to know them and I want to be known by them, and that doesn’t increase my comfort, it doesn’t increase my convenience, it doesn’t really help me optimize anything, but we deepen in love. These are one of these great virtues that I want to define my life. We deepen in our ability to live in intimacy and live in respect and live in um these things, that which really do satisfy our hearts, that are hard and slow and costly and which we are not trained to choose because we’re constantly being distracted away with things that are like easier, by sweets and flashing lights and shallow things, and I want to be turning my attention towards what’s deep and slow and real.

KP And I think what you said there that these things are not easy, they’re not convenient you meet resistance. You meet resistance when you’re trying to pay attention to things that don’t have, you know, bells and whistles and so on. I feel like that’s key. So, in terms of the relationship with technology, what technology has done is just make life easier and easier. It’s not demanding at all, it’s convenient, and we’re shaped in the mold of a convenience culture until you’ve got some dystopian, wall-e type future where everything is done for you but your character is withered away and so leaning into things that are uncomfortable and not, you know, being happily distracted I mean, yeah, from the task at hand, which is often other people, right, or ourselves. It seems to be that the two things we often want distracted from are ourselves and the challenges that come from our relationships.

EO Yeah, yeah, I think of that stuff as soul work. Am I, did I do any soul work today, or did I just do busy work on things that aren’t Do?

KP you do a bit of what is it? Ignatian kind of An examine.

EO Yeah, in no reliable way. So I go on retreat at least once a year and I’ll often do a kind of examine of the year where I look back and think right. The Ignatian word is consolations and desolations and in some ways they’re kind of highs and lows, highlights and lowlights. But they’re also in the Ignatian language, like when did I turn towards God? When did I turn towards love? When did I turn towards what is deep and real and true and when did I turn away? When did I choose the wide and easy path? When did I draw away from God? When did I draw away from love? When did I draw away from other people?

I talk about sin as disconnection, and so it’s. When did I really allow myself to connect with myself or other people or the earth, or with the divine, and when did I disconnect? When did I passively or actively choose disconnection? And so I will do that practice on retreat. But it is one of those intentions that I’ve never quite managed to do it late at night and look back over the day. I would love to.

KP Yeah, I mean likewise, likewise. I’m an, I’m an absolute failure at it, but you need to kind of it’s creating that space. You don’t really get the. It’s not something you can slip into the day very easily, unless you’re deliberately kind of boundarying some space for doing that. Uh, soul work as you say yeah, I mean.

EO It’s one of the reasons I live in community that I don’t have. I am not. I am not by nature of personally disciplined person.

I am distractible, I am. I like novelty, you know I am uh, I’m not someone with very much willpower and the the joy of community is there’s scaffolding, there’s trellis right For the plant that I want to be growing. I absolutely hate getting out of bed in the morning. I am like a bear with a sore head, but we get up and we pray at 6.30 on a Monday morning in a freezing cold chapel because there are other people who are expecting me to be there and therefore I don’t have to make that choice every Monday morning. It is sort of already made and that positive peer pressure works, and I have never had a time when I’ve got up for morning prayer and regretted it.

And so when I ask the question, who is it that I want to be becoming, the way I am answering or the way I am using? The answer is right. What do I need to set up in my life to make it easier for myself? What structures, what do I need to commit to publicly in advance to give my future self, who is as weak and feeble as I am, the best chance of making the choice I hope she makes right? How do I actually and this is a huge part of living community reduce my choices? How do I act against the formation of my society that says more choice equals better Go?

No, I’m going to narrow my choices, I’m going to rule some things out. We are now financially and legally locked in to living in community with our housemates because we wanted to covenant together, we wanted to commit together, we wanted to remove our ability to go. Man, this is hard, I’m off. You want to essentially get married because marriage can hold you when the feelings and the the fluffy and the you know the woman cuddlies are not there but you. Then you can move through that season and and come out in a deeper place. So, yeah, fewer choices.

KP I always need fewer choices yeah, the tyranny of choice, right, I mean, I, um, I’m with you in terms of, uh, liturgies, that that kind of support you when the enthusiasm isn’t there, but but scaffold, the kind of person you want to be. I I’d love at some point to trade notes with you, elizabeth, and how, how your community is going in lockdown. We did the same thing, uh, with another family, a big, and it’s the only time we’ve, I think, successfully managed to as you use the word trellis it’s a lovely word for it trellis our life around the rhythms of of prayer and cooking and meal times and so on, um, and the more we’ve been allowed to, kind of, since that, really, I you know it was a very spacious time in lots of ways Um, the more we’ve been allowed to be just individuals, that, the more that we failed, uh, creating that space to um, uh, to really lean into the question of who am I becoming?

EO Yeah, I wonder. We’ve only got so much capacity right. It is not. It’s a sort of Mark Zuckerberg thing of completely reducing his wardrobe choices. We have only so much decision-making capacity as a, and we’re using a lot of it on work or on caring responsibilities, and therefore, when we get to these big salt work choices of where do we spend our attention and what do we choose to orient ourselves towards, there’s not much left. And so I’m like okay, how do I mark Zuckerberg my spiritual life and reduce my choices so that I’m not having to repeatedly dig into an extremely empty well of willpower to choose the thing that I know that is actually good for me?

KP Yeah, yeah, yeah, just reducing the friction on that very significant soul part of life. I wonder if um you, so you’ve got this, this boot coming out and maybe, maybe you don’t want to talk about it at all. Uh, you’re keeping that in though, but if you’re happy to, I wonder if that question who am I becoming Um? Do you, you kind of rephrase that to yourself? Am I becoming more fully alive? Is that another way of um, kind of a kind of T loss for that question, if you like.

EO Yeah, I would say that’s probably the summary of my, of my answer to that question. I want to be fully alive and you know there’s things nested in there. I want to be brave, I want to be loving, I want to be free. The book was a really joyful way of scaffolding my attention right Once you’ve picked a book on who is the kind of person we want to be being, how do we pay attention to our souls? How do we steady our souls, um, in a turbulent world. It meant that I had a chance to really go deep and really really reflect. I used the framework of the seven deadly sins loosely to write these personal essays and so digging into that tradition and saying, okay, this feels a bit weird and a bit about day. You know the seven deadly sins are more often used as a joke, but I have a suspicion that there’s something good here, and so spending time thinking about envy and actually status anxiety and that’s related to the dopamine thing, right, the need for attention.

How am I so assured of my belovedness and my worthiness and my seen-ness that I’m not having to negotiate with envy and status, anxiety or with gluttony? How do I stop, sit with my hard feelings, rather than kind of drink or eat or party or whatever you know work in unhealthy, disconnecting ways in order to avoid grief or avoid fear or avoid sadness or anger? And then how do I find sources of kind of awe and ecstasy, which is what I’m really looking for when I’m kind of using and abusing substances or I’m using abusing activities? So yeah, the theme of formation emerged as I was writing about these things, these themes, these temptations in our lives and in our society as a repeated one, and I started with the sin of acedia, which is the kind of latin word that often gets translated sloth, and sloth, a bit like the word shalom, does not really translate into peace. The word shalom has many more meanings within it than just peace. The word acedia has got many more meanings in it than just sloth and the the way I think it’s been used over the centuries is is distraction, is um spiritual destruction, apathy, listlessness, spending our attention on the wrong things, and so when I started with Ascetium, I was like, oh dear, I am spending my attention on things that are forming me in a way that I don’t want to go.

What does it mean to actively turn my attention to the things that are more likely to help me become the kind of person both I want to be and that I think the world needs in this moment? Right, we need to be better than we are. We have been formed to be individual, self-actualizing consumers, and we are heading into a time when we’re going to need to be committed members of community who have each other’s backs and pool our capacity for the common good. I’m not there yet. I find other people annoying a lot of the time. I don’t want my freedoms encroached on. So how do I be becoming the kind of person that the world needs and that’s the kind of? And tradition and so on?

KP Though you have many people within your influence, within your orbit, who don’t hold the same presuppositions as you, who don’t have the same metaphysical kind of beliefs about the universe, and you know they don’t believe the Christian story that you believe. So I guess my question is is this a book for people who share the same worldview as you, or has it got a wider audience than that?

EO My question is is this a book for people who share the same worldview as you, or has it got a wider audience than that? I hope so. It’s not a book written for Christians. I think a lot of Christians might find it a bit disconcerting because, I’m very honest, a lot of Christian books I find difficult to read because people are being extremely careful and they’re really worried about getting it wrong, and they can be not all of them, but many of them can therefore be I find a little bit bland, and I knew that that wasn’t the kind of book I would enjoy reading or enjoy writing, and so it is very much a book for people who would not call themselves Christians, who would not call themselves religious, who don’t know what they think about any of that.

Um, but feel this thing I feel, which is the world is really unsettled and there doesn’t seem to be any uh hope that it’s going to get nice and easy again. Right, this like sunlit, the mid to late 20th century thing of like progress, is just gonna go on and on and humans, we’ve got this, we’ve nailed this, we’ve applied our reason and kind of liberal democratic enlightenment will just roll out across the world and all will be. Well. That’s a hard story to believe now and many people, I think, are going okay. What have we done? What is this world that we’ve left our kids? How have we ended up hating each other this much? You know why, given where I’m from in the West, we have so much actual material prosperity. Are there people sleeping on our streets? I think many of us just feel a background wrongness to the way that we are living and the way we want to be. What I want the book to bring is, even if you don’t know what you think about God and the idea of walking into church is either terrifying or just very unlikely because it does not seem at all relevant to you this is 2000s, years of incredibly deep reflection on how human beings work, what it is that helps us, what are the rhythms and the rituals and the practices and the ideas that steady us and ground us. And these ideas have steadied and grounded communities through, you know, plague, through the fall of the Roman Empire, through turbulent times, right through the Reformation. There’s so many times in which the world has been.

I’ve been reading about the monasteries, because we’re a sort of new monastic community. We’re only inspired by monastic rhythms. I’ve been reading about the roles of, because we’re a sort of new monastic community, we’re only inspired by monastic rhythms. I’ve been reading about the roles of the monasteries in the Middle Ages, and there is this sense in which ways of living collectively that very often come out of religious communities. They build capacity and they build resilience, but they also build beauty. Right, we have this legacy of monastic illumination, of the music of Hildegard of Bingen.

These guys were living in war-torn, plague-ridden, like poverty-ridden lives. Their lives were so unimaginably harder than ours and yet they were able to find time for beauty and care and compassion. And that’s what, um, I think some of these ideas can help steady us, can help ground us, can call us back into being people who are able to connect with our neighbors across our difference, to make the kind of choices that we’re going to need to make to live more simply in order to honor our world. You know the bit? The most challenging chapter of the book is about avarice, which is greed. The Christian tradition is incredibly frank about the love of money and the way that, if we keep choosing comfort and convenience over the needs of the poor or the needs of the earth, we will all end up in trouble and I that right. It’s like more like bracing medicine than moralizing buzzkill. I’m like we need to hear this money will not save us, stuff will not save us. Stop living these over-consuming lives because it is killing us it’s good to hear you talk about this.

KP It’s it’s something that you know I I’ve got a dimly aware of constantly, but I’m also crave it being brought to the forefront of my mind, because you’ve all got skin in this game yeah, we’re all implicated.

EO We’re all hypocrites yeah, uh, absolutely.

KP We, um, we kind of imbibe these values from the world around us and and often ignore what we know to be the truth about you know how we should be treating each other, how we should be treating the planet, that the amassing of wealth and materialism isn’t actually going to make us happy, and I was struck by particularly the Gospels in the New Testament, how directly and unapologetically these values are challenged and it’s kind of, you know, it’s something I need to hear and it refreshes how I think of you know faith, of Christianity that it’s not a set of, you know, moral guidelines to follow.

It’s ushering in a different way of attending, if you will, a different way of living.

You mentioned awe and beauty as as things which kind of call out to us and guide us, and maybe they say something about our yearning. I’m interested in a in a previous episode I spoke to the psychologist, dacre kellner, and our conversation I I really enjoyed it, but we spoke about, uh, the subject of his study. He looks at transcendent emotions. Awe, he says, points to what is most meaningful to us in life, and I think about it as also maybe some kind of veritas serum. It also tells us what’s true Moments of awe are when the kind of hierarchy of values that we have is often inverted and flipped and, you know, the holy and the good and the true seem up top and the instrumental and the pleasurable are relegated to the bottom, and there’s a sense that we’re actually always kind of looking for this all to, to realign what’s meaningful and important to us, and so lurking behind many of the toxic trends is is this desire for the transcendent. Would you, can you, speak into that? Does that make make sense?

EO Yeah, it does, and I think it’s another reason why I want to kind of dust off these spiritual jewels and say there is wisdom here, right, and they are misused, often by Christians, and they have been used to hurt people and exclude people. But actually the deep psychological astuteness of these traditions have power in them. Yet there’s a woman called Donella Meadows who was one of the very first people. She wrote a book called Beyond the Limits. She was one of the very first people to kind of sound the alarm about man-made climate change and she talks about how we are living in a society which takes these very deeply rooted human desires for community and distorts them to make them something we can buy.

So you see, you see it all the time. You know it’s that, uh see it all the time in advertising. We know the psychological astuteness of advertising. You know they put they put a legitimate desire on the screen people in deep friendship, people in romantic love it’s almost always relational. You know people in um having an adventure, people in uh, uh, these kind of situations that we long to be in, that, that that speak of meaningful lives, and then they incept a product that promises that we will you know, they never say you know, buy a Budweiser and you will have really good male friends who you can be completely yourself with and know and be known, but also laugh and not get too intense.

You know they never say it, but that is storytelling, right? It’s the beauty and logic and the power of images and storytelling. And so I think, not shaming ourselves for the way we’re living, not saying you know we are a terrible greedy tribal civilization, but trying to sort of dig down and think, okay, this longing to belong and to feel safe is part of what’s driving our tribalism, because when we’re in fight or flight or we’re anxious, it kicks off what’s called our homophily tendency. John Yates calls it people like me. You know our people like me tendency.

When we are afraid or unstabilized, as most of us are most of the time now, because of the actual world, but also because of the way our media environment works, we long to just be with people like me and we find people who are not like us scary and threatening.

And if we can come to okay, how do I get my need to feel safe and known and loved and connected and in relationship and in community met enough, then that natural tribalism response that we all have will be dialed down a bit.

That longing to be meaningful, to be not just one of a great crowd but to be seen and known and loved as ourselves, that longing for significance that drives so much of the performance on social media and reality shows and all of these. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me. How do we, through spiritual traditions or through psychological support or just through healthy interpersonal relationships, steady our soul enough not to have to go looking for that all the time to to be able to call bs on the lie that we will find it out there, you know, in the glare of um, in the glare of the media or in the glare of professional success. It it takes the vulnerability to admit that stuff in ourselves and then think what actually is a healthy response to that ability to admit that stuff in ourselves and then think what actually is a healthy response to that and I have so far to go on it.

KP Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s uh, as you say, finding those needs met, but also, like calling bs kind of removes the spell that it casts on us. So, paying attention and noticing and having the language for it, I think, think a lot of the conversations you have and what you write about is really helpful at helping people notice the way they are being formed, and so I wonder if I could just kind of pull together some of the threads and then land on one other question, land on one one other question. Um, so this question of who I’m, who am I becoming? Um, it is also like asking what am I paying attention to and what kind of attention am I paying, and how is my soul being shaped?

EO And, um, you know, and you don’t have to buy into the soul language. You can just say how are my neural pathways being shaped? If that is is your preferred language.

KP Oh yes, for anyone listening, absolutely. But I, I’m a hundred percent, I’m bought it. I love the soul language, I think it, I think. Why do I love the soul language? It’s partly my tradition, partly it feels intuitively right to me. It’s not talking about something that the surgeon scalpel will find or that we can find, but it’s talking about something, uh, with kind of weight and value and reality or whatever.

Anyway, it’s up to you, um listeners, whether you like the soul language or the pathway language that you’re. You’re furrowing those, those pathways for your um, for your being um. So we, we create spaces, hopefully, in our day, in our weeks, in our years. I like this idea of having a week, a year of switching off and devices seem central to that right, that’s, the, the devices of distraction that pull you away from it, um, creating spaces to realize this. But you, you also, you live in a community for lots of reasons, lots of, I think, really uh interesting and helpful uh reasons that are kind of well motivated, and I presume one of the questions that is maybe implicit there is how do we help each other become better? And so maybe that’s a question I’d like to kind of end on is how do we help each other become more fully alive?

EO I think we can just ask them that, to go back to the power of a good question, the answer will be different for each individual.

In our community we have this this phrase we use how can I love you well, which is sort of what do you need? But it is not assuming that we know what would bless them in that moment, and it is also a statement of I really want to love you in this moment, I really want to be your friend, I really want to be someone who is for you in this moment. How can I love you well? And I think being prepared to be the like, earnest, intense person like I am and go for those deep questions like what do you want your life defined by? What would you like people to say at your funeral, helping create that imaginative space. Because, particularly British people, we’re really scared of being earnest. We go straight to humor, straight to sarcasm, the vulnerability of looking these questions in the face. It’s really hard. We’d rather not, because it can be like a psychological depth charge.

It’s not uncommon for people to get a fair way through their life and then go. It’s not uncommon for people to get a fair way through their life and then go. Holy crap, I have been letting myself to become a person that I do not want to be when I die. Ah, like, how do I change course? That’s too much to deal with right now. So doing it with care and tenderness and an awareness of not deliberately setting off bombs in other people’s lives an awareness of not deliberately setting off bombs in other people’s lives. But curious, empathetic questions. Ask them where they are, ask them what they need, ask them if they are becoming the kind of person they want to be and and if they’re not small thing might help, like what tiny change could they make to turn their attention to the kind of things they want to be forming them, and away from the things they really don’t want to be formed by?

KP Thank you, that’s really helpful and practical. We’ve been talking a lot about formation and we’ve discussed the fact that you have a new book coming out Really exciting. So I wonder if, to kind of round off, you could finish this sentence for me If you like dot, dot, dot, you will like my book fully alive. What would you fill that space in with?

EO Oh, it’s such a stressful question. Sorry, I’m sorry. No, it’s all good, it’s fine. I need to get better at this sort of elevator, I mean.

KP I would say, if I’m presuming, knowing the, you know your writing and speaking. If you’re interested in what we’ve just discussed, right, In who you are becoming and finding some kind of compass and what is true North in this world that feels so confusing, then this is your exploration of that question. But I don’t want to, I just put words in your mouth.

EO No, it’s good. So honestly, I don’t know how to answer that question because I feel I’m too close to it, but probably and I know this because they’ve said nice things about it If you’re interested in the work of Krista Tippett in the States, who has a podcast called On being, she has been very kind about the book. If you have enjoyed the work of Oliver Berkman, who has a kind of philosophical reflection in public, he’s been very kind about it. And there’s a guy called Francis Spufford who wrote a book called Unapologetic which is probably the closest thing to it, although it’s much more female and has more jokes, I think.

KP Well, I’m absolutely sold. I love those three people you just mentioned, so I am very much looking forward to reading it. Elizabeth, it’s been such a pleasure to chat to you. Thank you for being so open, for sharing from your own experience and your learned wisdom and bringing the two together into this question. Who am I becoming? Which is one that I will try and create more space for in my days, my weeks, my years. Thank you.

EO Kenny, thank you so much for having me.

KP Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Examined Life podcast. I’ve been talking to Elizabeth Oldfield about her question who am I becoming? And I hope you can sense in the episode how the discussion here is once again about how to become kind of positively maladjusted to the world around us. The way we are so often formed by the cultural forces that we’re enveloped by is destructive to ourselves, to society, to the natural world, and therefore the question of deliberate formation is a really important one. It’s also perhaps the question that resonates most closely with my own concerns. If I was to be interviewed for this podcast which, let’s face it, it’s highly unlikely I’d probably come up with a similar question on who am I becoming, and in a sense it sits behind a lot of the other interviews and questions in the series, whether it’s talking about dopamine, addiction or how we inhabit time or all. The question that kind of sits behind them is how are we being shaped and formed, and is it kind of helping us? Is it helping us flourish? So I hope, like me, that you’ve found Elizabeth’s experience or wisdom or ability to articulate that has been really helpful.

I certainly have, as ever, if this has been helpful to you if you’ve enjoyed it. If you think others would, then please do share it, rate it, review it. That’s much appreciated. And also, if you haven’t done so, do perhaps sign up for the newsletter. It’s nice to have more subscribers. It’s where I’ll send out, you know, a few process thoughts about how I’m finding this experience of interviewing and how I’m trying to live out the questions. Thank you once again for listening and I wish you well. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks for another episode of the Examined Life.

Below is an abridged extract from an interview with Iain McGilchrist conducted in July 2016. In this short excerpt Iain McGilchrist explains the importance of his question, and why a good education should be ‘maximally irrelevant’.

KP: Given the time you have spent researching and theorising about how humans interact with the world,  would you be able to distil your main concerns into a question that you think it is particularly important for people to be asking themselves?

IM: The question that I think we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that my culture is preventing me from seeing? Not, what is it that my culture is banging on about – let me see if I can jump on that bandwagon, but let me see how disruptive and controversial I can be. What I mean is standing a lot of that stuff up on its head. Accepting that there is no truth, however good, that is always true in all circumstances. Or that can be taken so far that it doesn’t become a danger or a problem. Built into every truth is a hidden untruth, and it’s our job to uncover those. So, adopting that attitude to received wisdom – inverting it – and asking what is it that is hidden from me, is terribly important…

KP: Might you be able to offer an example?

IM: A very obvious one in the UK would of course be religious belief. A lot of people now think that religious beliefs are not beliefs that anyone very intelligent or well educated could possibly hold. This is patently untrue. I suppose another is the absolutely rigid view of the life sciences that the model that reveals truth about living things, is the mechanical one. It is just taken for granted by many in the biological sciences that everything is treated as a mechanism – though physics has long discovered that everything cannot be treated as a mechanism. That is an example of a dogma that cannot be questioned in the mainstream academy. If you do, you are branded as a bit odd or eccentric. 

KP: Would Rupert Sheldrake be a good example of this, his TED talk was initially banned for questioning scientific orthodoxy?

IM: Yes exactly. One would have thought that the whole purpose of science was to look at things from a different point of view, and be able to see what it is that one is not seeing. It is no secret that science is an establishment that rewards people who toe the line.

KP: Where then should we look for the answer the question you pose?

IM: There are a number of ways. It seems to me that education has become more and more about exam passing. And exam passing is more and more about saying certain things that people find important. It seems that education is more about filling brains, than teaching people to think.

Education ought to be about drawing something out, not putting something in. One of the things that people should be taught at school, is to think critically about the things that they consider most indisputably correct. So all the things that people assume are right, try and argue and find reasons why it might not be right. To be trained in school to argue passionately for something that you believe in, and then to argue just as passionately against it.  I think teachers should be subversive, they should be constantly subversive. Why are children bored? Because they are not being made to think. We are boring children, which is a sin. And we’re creating not very good citizens for the future, because they need to be able to think in the round. To think flexibly. And not to be so sure of their opinions that they can shout down people at universities because they don’t like their opinions.  Education shouldn’t be confirming what children are already believing – in that sense the worst possible philosophy is that education should be relevant. It should be maximally irrelevant. It should not aim to tell them all the things they are hearing outside school all over again, but it should be making them think about all the things that people in other times, in other places, believed. Not in the sense of ‘well, they were stupid and didn’t know what we know’, but in a respectful way. One of the things that impresses me is how fantastically insightful people living 2000 years ago were. How in their relatively short lifespans, they were able to accomplish so much. To find people like that nowadays, would be very, very difficult. So to benefit from the all-round wisdom of ancient scholars, because if we don’t understand the history of ideas, we don’t understand our own ideas. There is no context from which to gain perspective on our views. If you’re too close to them, you can’t see them.  If you’re too close to them, you don’t see the background against which to set them, which would automatically begin to mould them, to temper them, and to bring up contraries to them.

So as far as I am concerned, the absolutely key thing is to look for what it is that we may be missing, not for all the things that people are saying. It’s not until you consider other people’s truths that you begin to see how complex truth is, and you begin to doubt your immediate reactions – and that is the beginning of wisdom, when you start doubting the truths that you held.

KP Dr Lisa Miller thank you so much for joining me today

LM It’s wonderful to connect with you Kenny

KP I wonder if you could begin with the question you think we should be asking ourselves, and we can go from there?

LM So my question is really shared at the level of phenomenology the experience in being. I’m proposing, if you and our community is aware, of having the experience of being both a point and a wave. Which is to say connecting into the distinct separateness in life, perhaps at the mechanistic and material level, and at the same time connecting into the unitive reality of life – the phenomenological awareness of being part of one sacred consciousness field.

KP A point in a way that brings to mind the sea, is that the kind of the metaphor or image that you had in mind?

LM Yeah, white caps on one ocean; that there is a distinction emergent in an instant and in its deep essence and substance – we’re part of one sea of life.

KP It’s a beautiful metaphor. A wave has force, is measurable and is there for a time, but it’s, you know, connected to to the sea

LM And it’s emergent, as you say a wave is emergent – so the sea is already there right?

KP Yeah, and ephemeral too right? So there for a time and dissipates again, becoming part of another wave. I Wonder if you could help us kind of get into this idea of a point in a wave by maybe identifying a couple of your own experiences of, you know, maybe being a point or a wave?

LM So you know Kenny, I was taught by very very bright, extremely well-intentioned kind professors and before that k twelve teachers. In the air and water of my education I was effectively brought into a view of the world where we are like billiard balls bouncing around. That you’re sitting there and I’m sitting here, and we are different and we are separate, and maybe we have a few things in common but it was really the model of life as as billiard balls. It was a notion really of radical separateness, radical materialism. We exist insofar as you can detect us, measure us you know, height, weight, IQ, whatever it is – measure us up. And in my path in life at the most important moments in my life, it quickly became clear that the idea that we’re billiard balls, and even ever more so that were somehow so-called randomly bouncing into each other, that the sort of foundational tempo or nature of the universe is random – that was an assumption with which I was also raised in the air and water of my education. We randomly bump into each other’s billiard balls, sometimes good things happen, sometimes unwanted things happen. Well that was a model of reality, and it never as a young child quite squared with my early open eyed uncensored view of life.

But after a good number of years of school I started to look through life with those goggles as well, and it was only through really life changing moments of incredible pain and despair that I started seeing a model of reality that was much more consistent with the data in my life’s path. So as a scientist it seemed to me that the notion of a random universe of billiard balls bumping around did not hold the most transformative or the biggest catches in my life of meaning and direction and significance, it just didn’t hold life in its most meaningful moments. I’ll give you an example, in The Awakened Brain I talk about my husband and I really struggling, like down on the floor miserable struggling, for 5 years to become parents. and when I used door number one of the model of billiard balls I went about through a twentieth century scientist lens, I looked up all the doctors in Manhattan and then all the doctors and the northeast of the US, and then all the doctors in the United States who had the highest rates of conception for couples trying to become parents. And that approach yielded nothing but despair, and concomitant with that journey in the awakened brain I share we also were having an ego death. Really a death of the illusion of radical control in our lives. There’s a few things we can control: I can push the elevator button I can get in my car but but if there’s traffic, and if the elevator takes 10 minutes or 10 seconds, we don’t control 90% of life, and that other 90% started to show itself as a pathway. Really more than a pathway rolling out the red carpet in direction to actually becoming parents, that was the you know the ultimate journey. Shall I share a bit of that?

KP I would love you to if you’re happy to yeah.

LM Well okay, in our journey I was young, I was only about thirty, and it had never dawned on me. We’d been married for about 5 years, we were married young, and naturally, we’d be parents. I mean we had the jobs we wanted, you know he was a lawyer, I was an academic. That’s what we’d always wanted. We were living where we wanted in a city with nice friends and everything was great, until suddenly I started getting this horrible feeling. You know what if we can’t get pregnant? So you know we went off on a vacation. We went to the Caribbean, that’s where people go to start families – and we came back thinking oh any day now we’ll know the good news, and it was not good news. Not at all. So we said well you know who gets 1 for 1, and instead we went off into the southwest we went to Sedona, which had good energy and we thought oh we’ll get pregnant Sedona. I came back and again it was not good news, and after about six months I got this haunting feeling that something was wrong. And after a year I said you know we’re delusional to think there’s not an impasse here. So our greatest horror, you know, we got everything else we wanted. Well, the only thing that felt like it actually mattered at all to us was that we wanted to become parents, and it wasn’t happening. So I looked up all the best fertility clinics possible and I went to the first one and I actually have to confess, I felt even a little bit high on my horse – I’m so young I can still get pregnant right? Yeah and I went in and they said oh there’s nothing physically wrong and we went through the procedures. No baby. We went through and ramped up more procedures. No baby. And with in vitro, you know, it’s a pretty intense invasive procedure, when it doesn’t take and that tiny little embryo that was there is now dead, it starts to feel like a funeral. It feels really depressing. So much so, that I literally. woke up one night and my husband wasn’t in bed. I thought well where could he be? And then I worried what happened to him. He was down on the floor Kenny, he was literally on the floor flat on his back. This is a Manhattan lawyer in his mid 30’s and he says our lives are completely hollow and meaningless without children. Everything is for nothing. He was really depressed and that’s exactly how I felt as well. Right around this time of real despair people started showing up in our lives in a way that was far too unprobabilistic to have happened by chance. For instance, I just had a horrifically depressing failed in vitro. My husband was depressed I was depressed and I had to go to work nonetheless. So I hop on the bus to go up Broadway to Columbia. The bus is empty because I’ve gone in late because I’m depressed. And a gentleman gets on the bus who was a quite unique gentleman, and I was so depressed I thought oh no, he’s not, he was walking towards me and normally I try to be welcoming and gracious to people, but I just did not have it in me. And I saw this man get closer and closer and I thought no, he’s not, and he sits down right next to me on the empty bus and turns to me and he says ‘you know what lady you look like just that type of woman that goes all around the world adopting children.’ Okay. That is not a random universe, I would not be a scientist by any measure if I threw out the outlier; that was too improbabilistic to have happened by chance. It never happened in the years before, it never happened in the years since, and like all profound synchronicities, it starts with a little bit of annoyance. You know, let me be in my funk and you’re not who I’d planned to see today. No, don’t sit by me – and it was in fact, a meaningful guide. Synchronicity is our greatest gift to open up a new door, because it feels not as we’ve planned because it is a kerfuffling of what the ego had planned for the day. So Synchronicity really upends the ego and that’s part of its power.

KP Thank you so much for sharing Lisa. And so I suppose this interrupted the story you had about the nature of reality, and suggested that there might be something else going on. And that’s something else, would it be fair to say, is personal? Like there’s a force behind it that feels kind of interested and personal in your life?

LM Yes, and it’s not just me. I’m not special, I’m an emanation like everybody else from someone who is a very special source. My word is God, but you know, this isn’t just for a few of us – every one of us is part of this symphony, and we’re showing up for one another. Sometimes we know it, sometimes we don’t even know how much we’ve helped each other. Let’s tell it from the other side, you know Kenny can you think of a time where you’ve just felt like you’ve got to say something to someone I mean you don’t know why, but it’s on the tip of your tongue. And maybe you do say it, and it’s remarkable how much it affects the recipient.

KP Yeah, you bring that up in your book, and I could think of like several times where people had said things to me and I thought, they had no idea how much that meant and how appropriate that was, it feels like a gift.

LM Yeah, like a gift.

KP A gift that comes from somewhere else.

LM Yes, and what kind of somewhere else? It’s something loving and guiding, loving, holding and guiding. So I think we are messengers for one another, that relational spirituality of course has to do with our direct relationship to who I call God, Source, The Universal Spirit – but it also has to do with the presence of the greatest force in our love for one another. You know in all different types of love, like collegial love, and parental love, and romantic love, in our love for one another is the presence of this great guiding force. So when we feel ‘just say it’ by all means that is the most precious gift you can give someone. Do you want to share a story or I’ll share a story of that?

KP You go for, I’m super interested in more of your stories of this kind of thing.

LM Well, okay. So I’m standing in line at the health food store and in front of me, you know I always sort of peek into the next person’s basket I’m interested, I need ideas, so you know I see the fresh kale and I see the coconut milk, and I look at her and something says to me deep inside – I am compelled tell her tell her how healthy she looks. And so I respected that urge that felt to come from deep within, which is to say in us threw us and around a source, and I turned to her and I said ‘I just have to tell you how healthy you look’ and she bursts out crying and she says ‘I can’t believe it’, and she leans forward and very quietly she says ‘yesterday I started chemotherapy’. And I said, ‘well so you now you are healthy, and you’re taking the cancer out’ and she said ‘yes, thank you’.

KP So this obviously happened a bit further down the line when you’d learned to kind of, tune into those impulses, and is that something you exercise – that tuning in to knowledge from elsewhere?

LM Yes, in us, through us, around us; elsewhere meaning it was not from the level of ego, from what I call our achieving awareness – planned tactically, strategically. It came from a dialogue with spirit, a dialogue with life. You know, achieving awareness is going about things as we’ve planned, and thinking that we’re masters of the universe, and like I said, pushing the elevator button we can do that – but whether the elevator comes that has nothing to do with us. And so the 90% of life that’s not controllable, such as 3 years of a pandemic, such as a 52 card pickup of our global post-industrial culture. [Banging noise from outside] see, this is synchronicity Kenny can you hear it – right? as we talk about what we don’t control in my office at Columbia there is a kicking and a racket.

KP Ha, yeah.

LM Well, yeah, okay -point emphasized. So in the 90% of life that is flux and dynamic, we can hold a different conversation with life that is far more buoyant and effective, which is what is life showing me now? What is the deepest nature of life showing me now, and how might I live in dialogue? So that you know it’s just like a lover; you don’t control a lover, you want to get to know him or her. Do you want to know life, or do you want to step upon life and hold the reins tight and make it do what you think you want.

KP You put it quite beautifully towards the end of your book. You write that ‘We rise from the narrows of splintered self-interest, isolation and competition, and awaken our hearts to the world as it is.’ Did it take you some time to come to this as an academic, having been reared in a diet of materialism and billiard balls? To challenge that story is something significant, particularly if you’re a professor at Columbia University. What did your colleagues think when you started saying well these these things are more than coindences, this is the universe speaking to me – did you find that a hard argument to make?

LM Well, there were two things that really propelled this journey, despite the fact that 90% of people were naysayers. The first is that it the fact that no one else was even willing to entertain the possibility meant that the work needed to be done. So it didn’t mean it was wrong, it was being dismissed out of hand, I hadn’t heard a single shred of evidence to support the notion of a random universe or anything like that. So the sort of mass denial or vogue to turn the head towards radical materialism I took as a sign that the work needed to be done.

The second piece was that I was finding in my own journey a profound authorization of other ways of knowing, and these weren’t other ways of knowing that Dr Miller made up in 2 years; these were other ways of knowing that our rich human heritage has carried forward for thousands of years, much of which seems to have been inspired information. So you know, at the inner table of human knowing I had a very well built up empiricist and logician, as many of us do from mainstream education, but also at that table in our birthright, deserving to be there is the mystic, and the intuitive, and okay, the skeptic – and everyone can work together, multiple forms of knowing, multiple forms of perception which I have come to see as multiple forms of perceiving layers of reality now.

That to me was so important because it hurts too much to not live out fully our nature. It hurts as a way of kicking us, it’s an existential pain. It’s a spiritual hunger kicking us to open up and realize our full being. You know that we are in fact, mystics – every one of us, not just the most pious or the longest in meditation. Every one of us is built with an innate capacity for transcendent awareness. Now you know, 20 years down the pike I can show you our published MRI studies and top peer review journals that show we are all built with a neuroseat of transcendent awareness, through which we perceive a transcendent relationship and that presence and our love for one another. But back then, before we had access to MRI studies, and before we knew what to ask, I was looking through the lens of epidemiology and I could see in the very same data sets that everybody else used, nationally representative data sets measuring depression, and despair, and addiction – in the same way every other scientist did, that the only factor amongst everything in the clinical or social sciences that really protects against addiction, that really mitigates despair, is spiritual awareness – a strong spiritual core is what 80% protective. You never hear that, if something is 20% protective you buy it in a pill at the yeah pharmacy. A strong spiritual life is 80% protective against addiction, then it seems to me that the mass epidemic of addiction is because we haven’t realized our spiritual nature. You can’t locate that in an individual when half of Gen Z is depressed or addicted. That’s not an individual’s stumbling block, that is a mass cultural indoctrination out of our birthright, our spiritual core.

KP So The the statistics are absolutely staggering, which is why the the Pentagon employed you to try and to help with this epidemic of kind of depression and suicide. And the fact that we’re educated out of it, to some extent by the story that we’re sold, do you think you see it more acutely in children? This this kind of spiritual sense before um, you know we rush in with our measuring things and you know whatever Schemas we give people to live out of.

LM Kenny 100 %, I can say that both as a scientist and as a parent who’s raised 3 children, and I’ll give you an example. The first important piece of data is that if you look at twin studies you can determine the extent to which any human capacity is inborn versus taught. Okay so the gift of religion is 100% environmentally transmitted. It is taught by your parents, your grandparents, it’s given by the community. Religion is an environmentally transmitted gift. Spirituality and the deep capacity to perceive that we are white caps on one ocean, that we’re all emanations one source, that we show up for each other in divine appointment. Spirituality, the capacity to perceive our spiritual nature and who we are to one another that is, is one third innate – that means it is hardwired. Every one of us is born with a neuroseat of spiritual awareness. Now let me compare that with temperament, whether or not we’re laid back or high strung, whether we’re introverted or extroverted – temperament is half innate, half environmentally formed. IQ is 60% and forty percent environmentally formed. Do one-third innate, our spiritual capacity means that it is our birthright, but two thirds environmentally formed. That means that how we are raised, our culture, the air and water of our culture, of the silent curriculum, the pedagogical, deeply molding forces of k twelve and university all way up, shape our natural spiritual core. So when we are not realized when we are not supported in all that we might see and be, it atrophies – just as if we didn’t eat right or didn’t get enough exercise, or were raised in horrible experiments from the 50’s where animals are kept in a box and their eyes don’t form. You know that’s what we’re doing to our spiritual awareness. Locking it up in a lock box and letting kids starve, and it is little wonder that they then have profound despair when they come of age. That’s the first piece of data.

The second piece of data on the child, and I go into this in The Awakened Brain and also in The Spiritual Child, my first book, when you listen to young children They express what psychologists call implicit spiritual cognition. A religious person might call that the natural soul, but whatever one’s lens or lexicon, the child, unless socialized out of it, will perceive continuity of consciousness, or spirit after death that we go on, and will spontaneously speak in that way. The child, unless socialized out of it, will perceive that we can simply know.

But I would say we have direct access to the consciousness field in us through us and around us, we can directly know without being told. And I’ll give you examples of both. My oldest child Isaiah, I share in The Awakened Brain, I was so grateful and blessed to adopt from an orphanage north of St Petersburg in Russia. And when he came home, he was already in a direct connection to spirit, to God. He would yell out the door, you know up at the stars ‘Thank you God’, I mean I didn’t teach him to yell up at the stars. ‘Thank you God’, full of love. And yeah, we went to the beach once, and a highly acculturated Western child saw that Isaiah had his one treasured toy. The only toy he’d had the week he came home, which was a rinsed out cottage cheese container, and the other little boy snatched it. And Isaiah didn’t look angry. He looked puzzled because he hadn’t been raised with ‘mine’ hard boundaries, so-called property atomism, separateness. So he was born sharing and generous.

Another example is from the week that our great grandfather dies, Pop Pop. We’re Jews, and Isaiah was sitting as Jews do, right graveside by the open hole on the earth, and what in our tradition we do is we literally take a shovel Kenny, and put earth on the casket – because then body, mind, and soul – we get the picture that the person has crossed. Isaiah being so little was given little tiny garden spade and tiny bit of earth, and he looked at me, having done something for his Pop Pop to help bury him. He said ‘look mama the body goes back to the good earth, the soul goes to God’ I hadn’t taught him that, he knew it, continuity of consciousness. A week later we’re in the backyard of our garden, ‘Mommy come here now’ so we come, ‘you see mommy’, and there’s a dead turkey flat on its back ‘the body goes back to the good earth, the soul goes to God’, and his eyes sparkled. He wasn’t traumatized, he felt connected to the continuity of spirit consciousness, and the glory of the spiritual nature of reality. He’d figured that all out on his own. What I can do as a parent is not ruin it for him, I can say wow yes, how wonderful. You know if I don’t have anything to say about cosmology, I can honour his direct knowing, and it’s profoundly important, because he then knows he’s a direct knower – those are examples of the young child. Yeah.

Further transcription to follow.

Michael Sacasas: 2:54

I don’t know that I have this question formulated in the most elegant way possible, but I’ll try it this way. So some variation on this question, but I’ll try it this way. So some variation on this question. What is it good for people to do, even though a machine might be able to do it just as well, right? So the background here is just a promise that, whether it’s AI or other forms of technology, will automate or displace or take over some task that would have otherwise been performed by a human being.

Michael Sacasas: 3:29

And what are the question tries to get at? What are the criteria that we might use to evaluate whether this is a good thing to do? And it presupposes and I say even if right, so even if the answer is sometimes, well, the machine can’t do it as well as the person, and then maybe some threshold is crossed and all of a sudden it can. So if we allow for the fact that maybe there are any number of tasks that some machine, whether AI powered or not, will be able to accomplish it in a way that passes muster by a human standard, is it nonetheless good for a person to be involved in this kind of activity? So that’s both the short version and the long-winded version. Does that question itself make sense?

Kenny Primrose: 4:16

It makes very good sense. Yeah, you mentioned AI, and what comes to mind very quickly are large language models taking over thinking and writing and things like that. But we could go into history to start talking about central heating and, fairly now, basic technology that has, I suppose, displaced certain functions, and so maybe, before we get into some of the modern kind of challenges and technologies that we’re around, what are the things that come up for you, looking at history, and you think, well, here is a technology that made us more efficient, quicker, freed up some leisure time, but actually cost us something that we haven’t really acknowledged fully yet. Is there anything that comes up? Know, the last few hundred years.

Michael Sacasas: 5:06

Sure, my thinking goes to an example in the work of albert borgman. So I think albert borgman, who recently passed away, within the last um year he was a philosopher of technology, um, taught at the university of montana for many years I I find him particularly helpful in giving us some categories and concepts with which to approach this question. So there’s an example that he uses in his work that I think is helpful. Here he invites us to consider what was involved in heating a home prior to central heating, where you would use a hearth or a fireplace or some other kind of wood-burning technology to provide warmth. And what he’s trying to do is show us a contrast between what he calls focal, focal things and devices. The promise of a device, in his way of using this word, is that it will make something easier, more controllable, less effortful, safer. So it presents us with a kind of commodious surface that’s easy to use and manipulate, as opposed to whatever it is that it’s displacing. But the focal thing is the thing that engages us. It may require a little bit more work, effort, labor on our part. It may not be entirely without risks, but it gathers people, it focuses attention, it engages the user. So with that with those terms in mind, right? So he considers the work involved in heating a home, which may involve cutting wood, preparing that wood for the fire, someone bringing that wood in, lighting the fire, maintaining the fire, and how that involves all members of the household. In theory, right. If you have a household of parents and children, it would involve various members of the household in contributing to the performance of that task. Now, of course, we set a thermostat, we push a button or a few buttons, and all that work is displaced and taken over by central heating Obviously a lot easier, there’s no little risk involved, but you’re going to burn yourself in the process. It’s something we can now put out of mind.

Michael Sacasas: 7:30

I imagine the next step after Borgman wrote this in the 80s, we might now imagine an automated nest type thermostat device, which makes it even further out of mind. So the question I think that’s worth considering here is that these are very I like to think that these are people have to think about them in specific context and given their own particular situation in life, right? So what Borgman is helping us see is some of the differences that we might miss, some of what is lost, and he is not, I think, prescribing right. So this is in part why I tend to prefer questions rather than prescriptions, because in many cases we might arrive at different calculations of what it is good for us to do given our particular circumstances. So it’s not as if I think Borgman is trying to prescribe something universal Everybody must have a hearth.

Michael Sacasas: 8:22

If you don’t have a hearth, somehow you’re morally failing as a human being but rather I think he’s trying to help us think about some of the goods that were conditioned around the presence of certain kinds of technologies and the practices that they encouraged, and to ask whether the ease and efficiency that were promised when these are automated or mechanized in some way or form, whether it is an unalloyed good to opt for efficiency, or whether or not there’s some costs that are not just a matter of maybe binding a community together or family together in this example, but that it is good for us to have a certain skill set right. There’s certain skills that we can have that make us feel competent. There’s mastery over the world, sufficiency that is helpful for us psychologically, even just to flourish as human beings, a sense of satisfaction, be able to do certain things for ourselves, and again I want to stress that configuration of what those things may be may vary person to person, family to family, community to community, but that we require some things like that. And so when we begin to always opt for efficiency, comfort, safety, security, we delegate tasks, we lose skills. Because we outsource the skills, whether those are physical or intellectual, the some effect may be unconsciously depriving ourselves of some of the friction, the challenge, the need to apply ourselves, the intellectual, physical engagement with the world that to some degree may be a component of our flourishing, doing well in the world. So that’s one example, so we can then think of all sorts of other possibilities.

Michael Sacasas: 10:12

So much modern technology, from industrial age forward, of course, has been premised on this idea of time saving right. And the other question is how much time is actually saved? The classic work here is a text by the historian Ruth Cohen Schwartz. She has a book called More Work for Mother, written in the early 80s, examining the promise of labor-saving technologies from the early 20th century. It was the case that often these didn’t deliver on their promises because in some cases they multiplied tasks that weren’t possible before.

Michael Sacasas: 10:45

I think of email in a contemporary setting. How fascinating it must have been in the early years of email to think, oh, I’m saving so much time, I don’t have to write this out by hand, I can type it out quickly, it’s not taking several days to arrive, I don’t have to put a stamp in it, I don’t have to go to the post office. And lo and behold, here we are wondering where all our time went, many of us thinking that we spend most of our days in email because that threshold of efficiency actually created more, a higher quantity of work, even though it made some of the processes involved easier. So I’ll stop there.

Kenny Primrose: 11:18

I feel like I began to ramble a little bit, but yeah, I didn’t feel rambling at all. There was so much in it. I get your point on kind of the law of induced demand. I believe when washing machines and dishwashers were invented, what back in the 50s or so, it’s just the level of cleanliness and expectation went up for a household, there’s more to do.

Kenny Primrose: 11:48

It didn’t free them up. And, as you say, this idea of getting to the end quicker, whether it’s warmth or cleanliness, what you lose along the way is, as Borgman pointed out, it’s huge but it’s hard to quantify. It’s the fact that you’re a contributor to the household which gives you a sense of belonging rather than a consumer. I think of shopping. Presumably it’s the same in the us. In the uk I don’t know the proportion, I think many people get it delivered to the door and the community that that happened. When you went to the shops or the exercise, you got bringing back the shopping from the shops. There’s this.

Kenny Primrose: 12:19

It makes me think of marshall mcclune’s questions what is this technology extending? And then, when it’s overextended, what is that amputating? And it’s those amputations that are often harder to see, and I suppose then the Sorry, no, you go ahead. I suppose the question is what is good for people to do, even if it can be done by a machine, as you say. It presupposes that efficiency and the end product are not the goal, even though they are invariably the explicit goal A fire, the goal is to have warmth to dry your clothes or whatever, and so in some sense it requires you to think what are you trying to achieve if you choose the less efficient or less productive option? Maybe what comes to you with that kind of question?

Michael Sacasas: 13:13

Yes, I think that the underlying point here is that we are focused on those outputs and we tend to think that the means are a matter of indifference, right? So this is, I think, an important part to highlight here. So, as long as I get output X, it doesn’t matter how I achieve it. Now, it may be in some cases, that may very well be the case, but I don’t think we should assume that it is necessarily the case, right? So one example that’s now in the cultural era a little bit more, because large language models are able to do these cognitive tasks to produce essays, to produce writing. On the platform Substack, populated by a lot of writers, as you might imagine, on their notes feature, which is a social media aspect of the platform, I see a lot of writers addressing this question, right, trying to think through the implications, trying to deliberate or debate when is it appropriate to use generative AI in the writing process, et cetera. And so I don’t know that I want to suggest that it is always improper to use it or it is always wrong, morally or with regards to the craft, to use this, but we need to ask what makes the difference, right? So, in terms of writing, some have suggested. We use this. You can use this tool to write the first draft, right? You give it a prompt, you feed it the information, maybe the thesis statement. You use it to write the first draft, then you review it, you revise it, and so it’s still passing through your intellect, so to speak. Then you review it, you revise it, and so it’s still passing through your intellect, so to speak. But the question that comes to my mind when I think about that is that very often I learn what I think about something through that drafting process. And it’s not pretty. It can be laborious. It can mean sitting down for a while and writing some stuff and feeling like, wow, this was really not great. Scrapping it, starting again to get at the idea, develop the argument, learn that the argument maybe is weaker than you imagined at the outset, and I know it has been my experience that to begin writing about something, I’m surprised by where I end up at the end of it. So what this is suggesting is that the process itself is valuable, right? So you might say the end goal is you just produced a thousand words that your editor is requiring, or that your teacher is requiring, or whatever the case may be right that your employer is requiring for ad copy or whatever, but there’s something involved in the process of arriving at those hypothetical thousand words that is valuable. And so, across domains, I think about another example that often is used in these conversations is washing dishes. Right, so you mentioned washing machines earlier, but in this case, washing dishes For whatever reason, this is just something people keep coming back to and the dishwasher makes that relatively simple.

Michael Sacasas: 16:04

There’s maybe a genuine question about use of resources, thinking economically, thinking in terms of the environment, etc. The water usage in a community, there’s all that. But then if somebody were to ask, what do I gain by doing dishes by hand? And someone might say and I’ve heard people say they will say I have the option of using the machine, but I find that there’s this the nature of that work is such that I can become very thoughtful through that process. It allows me to think it has this kind of. It’s one of these tasks that is in that sweet spot of occupying our mind in such a way that it sustains reflection. Right, we’re able to. We don’t have to give the task our full attention. It almost just serves as a kind of. I’m trying to think of a good metaphor here, but it supports the ability to be 15 to 20 minutes in a state of relative internal calm, right so that we’re able to think. Well, is that valuable? I think that’s valuable. Anecdotally, I’ve heard many people tell me how valuable it is. In some cases, some people use the time for more meditative thinking or even prayer, and so this goes back to the observation you made at the outset of this question.

Michael Sacasas: 17:16

Often what we’re talking about when we’re trying to identify these goods one, they’re things that we wouldn’t have thought about until they’re taken away or until they’re replaced or displaced.

Michael Sacasas: 17:25

And two, they are very difficult to quantify in various cases. It would be hard for me. I’m not quite sure how I would approach quantifying the loss of a few minutes of reflection that might accompany a task like washing dishes after dinner or something like that. I’ve also heard people say again to bring in the communal dimension that maybe a young married couple that found that was a very productive time for them One would wash, one would dry and they would have good conversations around that time. And again, that may not be the case for everybody, but for some people there’s something that might be lost in the automating that works. So I think it just requires us to be very thoughtful about what is happening in the process. What are the things that are part and may but might even be part of the end goal? But but they are dependent upon doing the task in a certain way or deploying certain means. The means are not interchangeable, I suppose.

Kenny Primrose: 18:28

You mentioned, I think, earlier something about delegating these tasks, and it’s something you’ve written about. Like life cannot be delegated, and there’s a sense in which you what you’re saying is that life exists in these mundane I think it means like of this world and these kind of mundane tasks, and these are therefore not things that we have to get through in order to be able to be people of leisure or pleasure. Do you think this is a kind of broad misconception, that when you get through the kind of the stuff of life, and the quicker you do it, the more time you’ll have, you’re going to get to do what you were made to do, which is just to do something? Slightly Hellenistic philosophy?

Kenny Primrose: 19:14

about this, I’ll just get to sit and stroke my beard. Is that an idea that you think we need to disabuse ourselves of?

Michael Sacasas: 19:20

Yeah, I think so. That’s always, I think, a poignant question to ask when somebody is trying to sell you something. That will save you a great deal of time to ask what exactly am? You mentioned the idea that life is the perfect state, or the ideal state, or happiness. Or we find happiness when we’re able to enter a state of undisturbed contemplation. And this via contemplativa, the contemplative life, is the good life, as opposed to the via activa, the active life. There’s versions that are found in classical philosophy. There are versions that are found in religious traditions.

Michael Sacasas: 20:11

I don’t want to discount this altogether. Right, I think contemplation is a good. I think we could probably all use more time for contemplation, especially if you have religious or moral reasons to pursue that, and then, especially if you have religious or moral reasons to pursue that. So it’s not as if I want to discard that ideal altogether or to say that life should be all labor, but I think there’s a genuine correction maybe that we need to undergo, or just to ask ourselves when the labor is the point, and I think this is true, maybe easiest to see in cases where care is involved for other human beings. Right, my oldest, I have two children, the oldest about to turn 10.

Michael Sacasas: 20:56

So their sort of infancy and toddler years is not too far behind in their rear view mirror. And I think of how much technology now around infancy, childhood, exists in the space of helping you to monitor or to outsource really your attention, your care for a child, for an infant, or when we there are one maybe dystopic variation of this and the other spectrum of life. I’m trying to recall the. It was a commercial, I think, for either an Amazon device or maybe it was a device connected with Facebook where it would provide kind of companionship for the lonely elderly individual and it was essentially a kind of chatbot of some sort. Right, and in these cases I think the ideal is that there is human companionship, there is human involvement, that the parent is involved with the child.

Peter Gray: 21:49

And.

Michael Sacasas: 21:50

I will acknowledge that of course there are questions and discussions to be had here about the way in which some of these rules have been gendered and maybe unjustly distributed under certain circumstances. Right, no-transcript the point as a human being, to be involved in people’s lives and in the lives of our loved ones in these sort of care-laden ways, to accept some of these burdens as not burdens in the pejorative sense, but things that it is our privilege to carry and to bear for one another, for our communities, for our families. Charged cases where we can ask what exactly am I being freed up to do? Is it just to become a passive consumer of entertainment, of goods and services, without any real involvement in the world of people and things, in such a way that I would feel a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense of fulfillment? Yeah, I think that idea that it’s always good to save time, to outsource labor, is something we should at least not take for granted and interrogate a little bit more carefully.

Kenny Primrose: 23:41

Yeah, there’s something in what you mentioned on care of the elderly or of your children that brings out the. If you think of bots doing that, or have you seen the film Her where? Who is it? Is it Joaquin Phoenix falls? In love with an operating system. There’s a kind of disgust impulse to that and I sometimes wonder whether that impulse is telling us something. It’s a kind of revulsion to something that we’re getting information there.

Kenny Primrose: 24:08

There’s something dehumanizing in this that is, it felt rather than thought, in a sense because, if you could rationally care for an elderly person and stop them feeling lonely, wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that solve the loneliness problem in some way? And yeah, it would. But something doesn’t sit right in allowing that. My neighbors have recently purchased it’s, this device, and it’s several thousand pounds.

Kenny Primrose: 24:36

I think it’s a very fancy bit of kit and it basically it does everything for you and cooks you an amazingly well-balanced meal. It tells you what to do, you throw it all in the pot and you basically have saved yourself the labor of cooking. They love it. It’s one of those pieces of technology which I feel like is exciting to get. But what is the de-skilling? And the de-skilling is one part, and also just that process of chopping onions and chatting to someone while you chop onions and smelling it, and there’s something I think maybe I’m getting at the disembodied nature of these technologies that seems harder to put your finger on. As a problem, yeah, but it feels like a problem yes, I think that’s right.

Michael Sacasas: 25:22

And it’s hard because you can struggle to defend the thing that you feel intuitively is good and important here. Right, and there are. You know, I keep wanting to flag all of these tensions because I’m a working parent, you know, put in your hours at the job and you come home and cook a lot of meals and it could feel like, wow, this is. It’d be wonderful if I could just come home and not think about that and just have that. Somehow. Some technology, easily, you know, do this for me. That promise is very old, right. I think of in the 19, maybe 60s or 70s, the promise of what here in the States were called TV dinners, so you get these prepackaged meals, right, I think probably the quality has come up a little bit since then. But is there something? What I’ve discovered is I wrote about this maybe a year and a half, two years ago somewhere in the newsletter, realizing, you know, at first being a little frustrated also by the fact that my kids, who were a little bit younger, wanted to be involved and in a sense that makes the whole thing a little less efficient, right, but happily, I think, I realized wait, this is actually an opportunity, right, this could be a gift that I’m granted right, to be able to spend this time with my daughter time to talk, think over the day, to teach her. Right To learn myself, to teach her skills she enjoys. And even the.

Michael Sacasas: 26:37

I may not always have the time to savor every sort of tactile encounter, right, but I do think there was a Episcopal bishop from the last century who wrote a book about cooking and food and theology, and he has this section in there where he talks about just sitting with the onion and reflecting on its nature and the sort of thing that it is and allowing all of your senses to engage with it. And so at one level maybe somebody listening to my thing was just sort of ridiculous. And certainly even he says no-transcript common. It’s almost like a meme that you hear sometimes, right, that the average modern person has more spices in their, so many spices in their cabinet that it would make a medieval king blush, right, and then I’ve often thought that the rejoinder to that is but for that reason, do we even care and do we even take the time to appreciate right to enjoy that? Because we’re so rushed and we’re so focused on efficiency?

Kenny Primrose: 28:26

You’re listening to the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. Today I’m in discussion with Michael Sarkasas, who is helping people like me, and you think carefully about the way technology is shaping our lives and our characters. If you’re enjoying this, do please think about subscribing and leaving a review. It will help others find us. What you were just saying, michael, made me think about camping.

Kenny Primrose: 28:52

Camping is full of friction and difficulty and everything is hard and you get wet and tired and you sleep badly, and so I enjoy camping, and I enjoy wild camping, partly because it makes you very present and there’s something about the process that engages you in what you’re doing. There’s no shortcuts here and it also draws out your appetite. I think there’s this lovely essay by Laurie Lee called Appetite, where he talks about the TV dinner thing, the fact that our appetites are always blunted. We don’t know what it’s like to drink water from a stream, what that feels like to drink water from a from a stream, to what that feels like to parch lips anymore, and anticipation, and but this is true with food, but it’s true with everything, yes, that we have too much of too readily available. It blunts our longing for it and in the same, we fail to appreciate its goodness yeah, no, absolutely.

Michael Sacasas: 29:44

And I think you mentioned that life cannot be delegated. That’s a line from Lewis Mumford’s essay where he talks about the technological, the magnificent bribe that we’re offered. Right, you, modern technological society offers you all of these wonderful things, these things that, yes, by historical standards are just luxurious, and few human beings have ever enjoyed this level of access to transportation, to safety, instantaneous communication, entertainment on demand, et cetera, et cetera. And his wording is very eloquent and I won’t get it quite right, but at one simple cost, which is that we don’t ask for anything other than what the system provides and that we accept all that the system provides for us.

Michael Sacasas: 30:28

And I think you know, in citing that I said there’s in passing, I mentioned that there’s something very profound that speaks to the nature of human desire in our present sort of techno-economic milieu, and I think it’s related to what you’re describing. Right, the visceral experiences that you’re describing, our wants are programmed and conditioned in such a way that we may be missing out on a kind of quality and texture and richness of life that is inseparable from a measure of effort, involvement, engagement, struggle to some degree, and maybe even I’m not sure what the right word here is I want to say periods of measured deprivation, right, and I hesitate to say that because I don’t want to suggest that the good life is a life of deprivation, right, where people don’t have enough to eat, people don’t have access to medical care, right. This is always the kind of thing you hear is like well, you want a life without penicillin, right, and the point is never to go back, right. This is not about a romantic vision of the past, right. It is simply about asking how can things get better, right? What are we missing If we’ve developed a world in which we have a surfeit of goods at least some, and those again, not always justly distributed, but a surfeit of good for many people. And yet we find ourselves unhappy, dissatisfied, plagued by ennui or whatever the case. Whatever the case, something is off.

Michael Sacasas: 31:57

Okay, so what can we do? Not to go back right, but what corrections? What things need to be reconfigured? What have we maybe unwittingly traded away? Corrections, what things need to be reconfigured? What have we maybe unwittingly traded away?

Michael Sacasas: 32:12

Because, again, you imagine, through the early process of development of the modern technological milieu, you have things that are just making life tangibly better, alleviating suffering. At that point you’re probably not asking what am I losing? You’re losing pandemics and childhood mortality and all sorts of great lose, those things, and it’s after. Maybe then find other ways of incorporating practices and experiences that will give us a sense of competence, a sense of purpose, that will bring communities together rather than isolating individuals, that will not make us mere consumers. And, of course, we’d be, at this point, sort of resisting a lot of the underlying logic of modern economies, which find increasing ways to make us dependent on their goods and services, even beyond just satisfying basic goods needs and providing for basic goods. Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there, particularly again on the front of human desire and the, the kind of experiences that we are offered, and whether they are as rich as we imagine them to be lots of really dense and interesting ideas there.

Kenny Primrose: 33:42

Your point about the logics of the world at the moment are not going to be the way to to deal with our on we or whatever, because they’re only driving us in one direction. Arguably, it feels like we’re moving towards universal basic income and having our work lives taken over and, um, yeah, it’s a significant conversation to be had around what that would do for us to have our work removed. But where do you find reasons to be hopeful within our current context? Because there’s one way of looking at things that’s quite bleak. You can see where everything is headed. It’s got very stubborn logic to it. The people who hold believers don’t seem like they’ve got any interest in changing them. How, yeah, how can communities ask this question on a bigger scale?

Michael Sacasas: 34:43

Yeah, that’s a great question and one I’ve inevitably asked for some version of it. Yeah, I think my impulse is to sort of bracket the question of scale to some degree. I don’t know, and I wouldn’t presume to say this is how the world will be saved. Now there are enormous issues of immense scale confronting us in various guises and dimensions, right, and so if you do see the whole apparatus of society bent in one way, it’s hard to imagine how does it get turned around? And invariably, I find myself wanting to say well, one. There’s a question of timeframe. How long would it take to do that? What is the timeframe in which we’re thinking when we ask the questions? What is to be done? And maybe we just need to extend our horizons and think about things in terms of generations. Right, returning the ship, as it were, in terms of generations. That’s part of it. But I think you has to. I don’t see how it doesn’t start at some level with choices that individuals and families and communities at a human scale are going to make differently. Now, if you ask me, what do I see that is hopeful, or where is there hope? I think part of it is that there is at least it seems to me a growing conversation around these sorts of questions, a growing willingness to question whether this, as Mumford put it back in the 1960s, this magnificent bribe, was in our best interest, whether there are not some ways in which we ought to refuse the bribe. Just becoming aware of how this technological infrastructure shapes us, of how this technological infrastructure shapes us this is something where I think I’ve seen a huge shift in public consciousness, even in the 10 to 15 years that I’ve been writing about these questions, where people do not just necessarily assume that all new technology is going to be good and beneficent and helpful to them, is going to be good and beneficent and helpful to them, and so I think it begins with a more critical attitude, more critical thinking about the nature of the technological milieu and then beginning to make more informed and constructive choices. I think there’s been a lot of conversation, at least here in the US side of things, about smartphones of late. Maybe it’s been going on for a while, I feel it’s been going on for a while, but I think it’s saturated the cultural conversation a little bit more. I think Jonathan Haidt’s recent book has had a lot to do with it, and so I think this is good.

Michael Sacasas: 37:38

I think we should something about the way that we come to feel tethered to this particular device, for instance, that many of us feel intuitively is off or disordered. So we begin to sense like, oh, there are consequences. These are not just neutral tools, it’s not just another way to make a phone call right, there’s something else going on here. I should think about it. I should think about what limits I might want to put on it. Some people may decide they don’t want this instrument to be a part of their lives anymore, right? So just that consciousness of the power of certain tools and technologies, whether they’re devices or systems, to think more critically about it and to be prepared to say no, a refusal, or to better negotiate the terms on which we allow these devices into our lives.

Michael Sacasas: 38:30

To the degree that we have agency, right, to the degree that we have agency and I think again, to make sure to make this point, not everyone has the same degree of agency the freedom to make these kinds of choices, even in small ways in their lives. So we should, in whatever way possible, make it so that increasing number of people are able to make these choices. There are those that will pursue solutions or regulation at the governmental level, that’s fine. My thinking is always for the individual who is going to wake up tomorrow morning and with regards to his or her life, personal life, the life of his or her family, their small community, we’ll have choices to make and we’ll not be able to wait for the next round of legislation or for the tech companies to wake up and become more conscious about their harms or whatever. That’s not, right now, the way forward.

Michael Sacasas: 39:23

So, to empower individuals to make choices, but to lead with the good, to say, I’m always saying by how the plot of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 begins, with the protagonist being asked are you happy? And it’s a very powerful question Are things going well for you? And there are many reasons why they may not be, obviously. But if we look around and say, I’m the sort of person that has a relatively decent job, sheltered, I have basic needs, but I’m not happy, what is off that willingness to think through the good life, the question of the good life, and to now recognize that your technological kit, if you will, is a part of that conversation and that we need to be more reflective about it. That more people are coming to that place, I think, is the beginning of what might be a larger kind of cultural shift that might just take a good bit of time to play out be a larger kind of cultural shift that might just take a good bit of time to play out.

Kenny Primrose: 40:30

I hope you’re right and I definitely noticed the same kind of thing. Ivan Illich, you quote him as saying hospitality is where he finds hope. I was curious to know more. There’s something very interesting about that as a kind of statement.

Michael Sacasas: 40:38

The face-to-face encounter, learning that we’re all human again. There’s so many dimensions to the things that are not well with us as a society. Part of it is the way that social media over the past decade has mediated our perception of the other and there, in particular, thinking about just a face-to-face encounter being just very powerful and necessary. Because when we’re mediated by social media and we see the worst and most outrageous elements of what we think of as our political other, our cultural other, it’s very easy to construct a false picture, a false and unhelpful and destructive picture of the social body. And I was thinking of this even when you were talking about about the jane jacobs thing, about those little micro encounters that we have when we live on a city block and we see the same people over and over.

Michael Sacasas: 41:29

We don’t know them very well, but we know them. They’re distinct people, they’re different than us, and there’s something humanizing about the total effect of those kinds of encounters yeah, weak ties, I think psychologists call them the important weak ties.

Kenny Primrose: 41:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a not insignificant part of life, I think.

Michael Sacasas: 41:47

Yeah, it was when you were talking about food and how you can order a whole meal. Never leave your house right. You don’t even have to see the person who delivers it anymore. Here, at least, the habit is that somebody will knock on your door and then you open the door. The food’s there? Seen a single human being that’s involved in the process of preparing that, or nothing. And those encounters. I think that we’re increasingly outsourcing so that the only people we ever see are the people within our affinity group. We lose all the kind of virtues and skills required to relate to others who are not like us. I think that’s a big deal.

Kenny Primrose: 42:18

It’s a huge deal. I think it was Helena Norberg-Hodges a nice line she. She said our arms have grown so long that we don’t see what our hands are doing anymore and that kind of detachment and disconnection is. Yeah, it’s a moral thing, right? Yeah, definitely, jean twenge her work on generation. She points out that technology is the driver in generational shift.

Kenny Primrose: 42:38

It would be interesting to think of whether a generation might grow up after us who actually are defined by their refusal to engage in certain types of technology. I wonder, from your knowledge, is there precedent for technology? Actually the Luddites smashing up their what was it? Their sewing machines or whatever, and obviously they failed in technology in an inexorable march forward to go over. Is there? Are there? Are there any cases that you can think of where actually people have said this is not good for us, this piece of technology and efficiency and whatever, and we’re going to reject it? Obviously you have communities like the amish who are the poster boys of this, but on mass such that it doesn’t achieve some kind of hegemonic dominance in the way we do life, or are we looking for a world first here?

Michael Sacasas: 43:32

Yeah. So I think the Luddite example is interesting, because it’s always telling to me when Luddite is used as a kind of casual slur of somebody right, they’re such a Luddite, but meant pejoratively, with the idea being that these are just people that hate technology, right, but I think we know the case is that it wasn’t the technology per se right, it was the way they were being de-skilled and economically deprived. They might have been fine with an arrangement of introducing these new technologies in a way that still honored their labor and allowed them to provide for their families, et cetera. I don’t want to pass over the Amish too quickly, though, also because here’s the and this goes back to the previous question that you asked me in my long-winded answer which is just the realization that we have to ask some questions, right.

Michael Sacasas: 44:17

I think, about 10 years ago I wrote a little post about how the Amish are. I call it the tech-savvy Amish and they got to this place faster than the majority of the population. Right and again, their distinctive characteristic isn’t that they reject technology. Their distinctive characteristic is that they’re willing to operate. They’re not just trying to freeze life in the late 19th century, they’re trying to preserve a certain form of life for themselves that they value, trying to preserve a certain form of life for themselves that they value, and they’re not willing to just throw it out the window because somebody has a new device that they want to sell. And so they have a kind of communally instituted process of weighing whether it’s going to be good to introduce a new technology or not. They have people who we might think of as early adopters, and they may deploy this technology in a limited way to evaluate it and then, as a community, decide whether to enthusiastically accept this new technology, accept it but with very clearly defined limits or whether to refuse it. And so it’s that willingness to think through and not just adopt first, ask questions later, often when it’s too late that I think it is a model for us, and in part because, again, I’m thinking I’m most familiar with sort of the American psyche, right, the American culture and technologies place in it. America has been a very techno-friendly culture. Right, we have a great deal of faith this is probably broadly true of Western nations but we have a lot of faith in new technology. I think that the default has been to think that of course, a new technology is good and it’s going to be good without complications. And so it didn’t occur to people to think right, there always have been. There’s a minority position. You can find it maybe in some of the romantics in the early 19th century, the arts and crafts movement. Both in the UK and here I think there are people who have said hold on, there’s a way of life that is at risk here, that there’s maybe something good in preserving, there’s something inhuman about these new arrangements. But I think the majority has always been very enthusiastic and has not recognized the need to even think. The fact that many of us are now recognizing that need that we ought to think. One of the framings that I think is very helpful about the introduction of smartphones over the last I don’t know 10, 12, 15 years, particularly for small children, is that we basically ran a society-wide experiment, but without the consent of those that we were experimenting on, because that is the nature of the impact of these tools. Maybe a willingness never to do that again, right? Or maybe the recognition within some critical mass of the society that recognizes that wasn’t a good thing to do, it wasn’t a wise thing to do. That itself, I think, is grounds for hope. So you know when people are, I hear people answer a similar question to this.

Michael Sacasas: 47:31

One example they push, they point to in recent years, within the last decade, is the example of Google Glass. This year was a company that developed this, these glasses you may remember, like circa 2012, 13 maybe, and there was a pretty strong reaction to it. Right, there was a cultural pushback against it and maybe the argument is oh, these simply failed because they hadn’t reached the requisite level of technological sophistication. I know there’s Facebook and Ray-Ban, I believe, have been issuing some similar sorts of glasses, augmented glasses that maybe are making better inroads, but that collapse of that Google Glass project, when there was so much talk about how inevitable this was. This is the future. I remember in particular. I think it was the CEO of Evernote at the time saying in five years, it’ll seem barbaric to live without these things. Of course that’s the rhetoric of people who have something to sell. But that’s maybe one recent case where what some people described as an inevitable technological progression was refused.

Michael Sacasas: 48:35

But by and large, I would say it’s only in the timescale of human history, only recently maybe, that we’ve learned that we ought to think these things through Now. That doesn’t mean that we have great publics in place, places of public discourse to adjudicate. This is the advantage of the Amish to have relatively small scale communities with deliberative processes. We may not have those, may need to find a what’s the word? I’m looking for a scale of community where we can make these choices. Maybe the school right, the local school board is one, maybe the church is one, maybe the neighborhood is another right when we can have meaningful input, feedback, communal decision-making, because if it’s just the individual in the corporation or the individual in the state, then then yeah, it’s hard to see how we have any leverage there. But if we can find smaller scale human organizations where there can be a process of deliberation, choice and in a community that comes together against a shared vision of the good life, I think that that would be the way forward life.

Kenny Primrose: 49:47

I think that that would be the way forward. That’s really helpful. I wonder if I can draw together some of the some of the strands of our conversation. We’ve been exploring this question of what is good for people to do, even if it can be done by a machine, and the question has raised up questions about what do we mean by good it? It’s not just efficient. Yes, the product is the way you’re formed by doing it. The additional goods that come with the process, and pausing to reflect like what’s being lost, is crucial in this. I wonder, as you apply this question to your own life and you have young children, this question to your own life and you have young children are there practices or habits that you have instituted that are a way of living out this question?

Michael Sacasas: 50:30

that’s a great question and to affirm, yeah, that. What is the good? Or even I didn’t make this very clear in the essay that I wrote, or I should have spent more time with it when I invited us to echo mumford’s rallying cry life cannot be delegated. What do we mean by life? What sort of life, right, what kind of life? That’s an important question to ask, and I recognize as well. Is that because you’re asking what, for many people, ultimately, are deeply moral questions or philosophical?

Michael Sacasas: 50:59

or religious and obviously they’re going to be competing narratives and claims about what that life entails, and I think that’s why the smaller scale community is an important context in which we can ask those questions right, because my answer may not be the answer that others may give, and that’s an important component of this In my case. So I think about when I talk to cases where I might be invited to speak to parents about this, or a parent just happens to ask me what do you do For kids? They’re worried, often they’re worried, and often they’re worried that their kids are spending too much time on a screen or something like that.

Michael Sacasas: 51:33

It was kind of an inchoate worry, but not unjustified, and I think the first thing I want to say was what is the good that you’re after? We should lead with the good was you, but it’s the good that you’re after right, that we should lead with the good. I think it’s just good practice in general, right To not simply say I feel this is bad, I want to limit this, I want to react.

Michael Sacasas: 51:52

It’s reactionary in a sense, right when instead I think we will, and also for children, I would say this is less than helpful because it just feels arbitrary. There’s just this thing that mom and dad don’t let me do, or whatever the case may be. But if we can say these are the good, the beautiful things that we want, these are the things that will instill virtue or a high degree of real enjoyment, fulfillment Again, those are contested things, right, but something I try to do is not some well, one way of looking at it is not, you know, what are we cutting out, although there is some of that, but what are we doing? What are we being intentional to do? So to get outdoors right, to be out in the world and this is depending on where you live can be a little challenging. I’m fortunate in that it doesn’t take a ton of work for me to get out to a place where we’re going to be in the midst of trees, walking on a trail, encountering flora and fauna in interesting ways. It’s been important to me to learn the names of these things in particular, so that I don’t just point and say, oh, there are some trees or here are some birds, but to be able to recognize, to name, to tie closely together this web of attention and consciousness and language, and I think this is empowering for people as they become more familiar with the world that is their home. So I try to do this for myself. I did not grow up I grew up in the city by and large, and this is not part of my upbringing. I’m having to learn and then impart this to my own children. I think the pace of whether we’re driven by efficiency, because we have crammed so much into our lives that we have to operate like a machine, as a household, in order to make it work. So this sometimes entails just saying no to certain opportunities or to weighing them and to not assuming that more is always better.

Michael Sacasas: 53:46

With regards to our family life, having times of quiet, encouraging that to some degree, reading a lot, as I described earlier, taking this time to prepare a meal together, I think is important to become a little ritual in my household. I think it’s something that will bear a lot of fruit in important ways. So the gist of all of these is to ask what are the good things that we want? And then I can say how does spending this much time on a device help us with that right? Or how does a certain tool or device or practice is it going to actually help us get these good things that we want for ourselves, that we know, feed our relationships, feed our commitment to our neighbors, to the world, help us know or enjoy the world?

Michael Sacasas: 54:35

And if we find that the tool, the device, it’s not conducive to those ends, we can say maybe that’s not something we need, it’s not something we need, it’s not something we want. So obviously there’s a kind of dense network of these sorts of questions and judgments that touch on all sorts of dynamics within a household. But that’s a small glimpse of how I try to think about these things. What are the things that will really nurture my relationship with my children and their relationship with the world and with others? And how can we at the very least not let our tools get in the way of that or circumvent it? But how can we?

Kenny Primrose: 55:14

if there are tools that will help us do that better, then we embrace those michael, I’m so appreciated, especially ending on these really practical, concrete bits of advice, but there’s a huge amount in what you’ve said and what you write about on your Substack that I think is provoking people like me to pause and think about how we interact with technology and that question what is the good that we seek? So I’m massively grateful for that. Is there anything that you’d like to plug?

Michael Sacasas: 55:44

Yeah, I think the sub stack is where I do most of my writing and thinking and it’s an important part of my work. Folks will check that out. That’d be great. But thank you, I appreciate the kind words and honestly I do think just if all that results from my writing is that people are just thinking a little bit more deeply about these questions, that’s good in my view.

Kenny Primrose: 56:04

It certainly serves me and I know it serves many others. So yeah, thank you for your work with that. Michael, thank you so much for giving up an hour of your time or so. It’s very generous of you.

Michael Sacasas: 56:13

Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, happy to do it, great conversation.

Kenny Primrose: 56:17

And that almost concluded my conversation with Michael Sikassas, though I did sneak in one last question before signing off and stopping the recording. I think his answer here is worth including. And finishing on Ivan Illich. You quote him as saying hospitality is where he finds hope. I was curious to know more. There’s something very interesting about that as a kind of statement.

Michael Sacasas: 56:39

The face-to-face encounter, learning that we’re all human again to recognize that because there’s so many dimensions to the things that are not well with us as a society. Part of it is the way that social media over the past decade has mediated our perception of the other and there in particular, thinking about just a face-to-face encounter being just very powerful and necessary. Because when we’re mediated by social media and we see the worst and most outrageous elements of what we think of as our, our political other, our cultural other, it’s very easy to construct a false picture, a false and unhelpful and destructive picture of the social body. And I was thinking of this even when you were talking about about the jane jacobs thing, about those little micro encounters that we have when we live on a city block and we see the same people over and over.

Michael Sacasas: 57:32

We don’t know them very well, but we know them. They’re distinct people, they’re different than us, and there’s something humanizing about the total effect of those kinds of encounters yeah, weak ties, I think psychologists weak ties.

Michael Sacasas: 57:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a not insignificant part of life, I think yeah, it was when you were talking about food and how you can order a whole meal. Never leave your house, right, it gets to. You don’t even have to see the person who delivers it anymore. Here at least, the habit is that somebody will knock on your door and then you open the door. The food’s there. You haven’t seen a single human being that’s involved in the process of preparing that or nothing. And those encounters. I think that we’re increasingly outsourcing so that the only people we ever see, the people we are within our affinity group we lose all the kind of virtues and skills required to relate to others who are not like us.

This interview was conducted at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August 2016

KP: ‘What is more important to me than my present desire?’ Why is this a particularly important question to be asking oneself?

RS: Because it’s the question that stops us being simply swept away by our appetite, and living only in the moment. Always, at any moment in your life, there’s something that you want. It might be something that you want urgently, but there are other things that are probably more important to you that are not urgent-in-the-moment things, so you put them out of mind. So, my present desire for yet another glass of wine, is in conflict with my thought that my health is more important to me than that. My current desire to plant a kiss on the lips of this girl, is in conflict with my view that marital fidelity is important etc. The more you think in this way, the more you downgrade your present desires, and increase the long term perspective on your life. It is that long term perspective where your happiness and fulfilment reside.

KP: Do you think that this question is particularly pertinent right now in our culture?

RS: Of course, totally pertinent. We are besieged on every side with demands to consume this or that, constant titillation by the media, and of course with the internet and everything – all the pornography and violence. Everyone knows when they get into that, that it’s wrong, and they are in the grip of something that has locked them into the present tense, and that their life is not only in the present tense. It has a past, a future and a fulfillment – and that they are destroying the possibility of that fulfillment. But of course, we know that this is the devil’s work, this locking of people into their appetites – and once children get into that, they’re lost.

KP: This question is one that does not necessarily mean that our lives will be more virtuous by denying appetite, as we could deny appetite for a questionable purpose – like a suicide bomber or an anorexic might do.  Should we be questioning those things that are important to us?

RS: It doesn’t follow that the things that are important to you are genuinely and objectively important, it only follows that they are important to you. But then you’re right, you have to learn to criticise them too – to look on them from a long term perspective. For everybody there is a point when he or she can say, this thing that I want to do now is not just something I want to do, but something that ought to be done. And if you get to that position, you’re in some kind of peace with yourself. This doesn’t mean that the suicide bomber can’t also be in this position as well, but there is no answer to him, other than to question his conception of what is important – but if it’s founded on a myth, it’s very hard to question it.

KP: I suppose there are two ways of taking the question. You could be saying that life is not about finding gratification, and if so – I’m curious to hear what you think it is about. The other way to read it, is that life is about gratification – but that gratification is best served through reaching bigger goals than appetite.

RS: Well, it’s a bit of both. We all distinguish pleasure from happiness. Satisfying a desire brings pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. Happiness is the state in which you are content with yourself. Happiness is the state of being at home with yourself, the feeling that what I am it is right to be. That is not a matter of desire, it is a matter of endorsement – to cast a positive judgement on yourself. We all know what unhappiness is, when you can’t find that positive judgement, where you’re always besieged by a sense of guilt or inadequacy, or of having done the wrong thing and so on. And obviously the opposite of that, is something that we all have an interest in achieving.

KP: What do you think the role of education is in cultivating the right desires, or the right things that are important to us?

RS: Right, well – this is an ancient question which was much pondered by the Greeks, and particularly by Aristotle in his theory of virtue. His view was that we do know in the long term what the right kind of character is. We know that there are virtues, and that there are vices – and that virtues are indicative of a successful life, or living in harmony with oneself. And we need to cultivate those virtues, so as not to be at odds with ourselves – so as to be able to flourish. But children don’t understand this, and you can only acquire virtues if you acquire the habits that are involved in them. You must do this first by imitation, even if you don’t initially know the reason you are doing it. We teach children to jump into cold water and not just squeal and run away – gradually we build up courage in a young person in that way. You build up initiative. You build up purity of heart. You build up a sense of justice – by encouraging children to imitate before they know why. Then gradually, as it becomes second nature to them, then they understand that indeed, there is a reason for it. Then you’re able to look on yourself with a positive judgement.

KP: Do you think that this question is pandering to the individual, in what is already an individualistic culture. Should we be asking, what is more important to society, or to the world, than my present desire?

RS: Yes. I’m not saying that there are not other important questions. But if we can’t give an answer to this one, then we won’t be able to give an answer to all the others, about what is more important as such.

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Kenneth Primrose: 0:30

Hello and welcome to the third season of the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. For the last eight years or so, I’ve been asking leading thinkers about the question they think we should be asking ourselves. A couple of years ago, this developed into a podcast series. In previous episodes you can hear conversations with Terry Waite, oliver Berkman, lisa Miller, anna Lemke, eve Poole, liz Oldfield, ian McGilchrist and many others besides. I found these conversations really stimulating and practically helpful and decided to do another series. For the next 10 weeks or so, I’m going to be dropping a new episode every week with a different thinker. You’ll hear conversations on childhood and parenthood values, purpose, technology, collapse and much else besides. If you follow me on my Substack channel, positively Maladjusted, you’ll find that each episode is accompanied by an essay where I try to think through and apply each of these questions.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:33

I hope that these conversations are both interesting and helpful. If they are, then do please rate and review the podcast. It really helps other people find it. Share it with someone who you think might enjoy it. In this first episode, I speak to the wonderful science writer, michaelene Duclef, who I first came across through her book Hunt Gather Parent what ancient cultures can teach us about raising happy, helpful little humans? In our conversation today, we dive into the universal elements of childhood and parenting that we find across cultures and throughout time. We also explore what might have gone wrong with Western parenting such that we’ve ended up with a mental health crisis among young people today. I found this conversation, practically as an educator and a parent, helpful and interesting, but I think it has value even if you don’t work with children or have children. I’m going to hand over now to my conversation with Michaelene Ducliffe. Michaelene, I’m delighted to be speaking to you and I wonder if we could just dive straight in with the question that has preoccupied you in recent years.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 2:39

Yeah, so I, like I was saying earlier, when my little girl was one years old. That was about 2016. So a while ago, almost 10 years ago, I started trying to figure out kind of what were the universal elements of parenting. What did parents do all around the world? You could find in every single culture and in maybe even throughout time, and that question led me to really want to understand and see. I started opening my eyes to this question of like how our culture Western culture, european culture influences our parenting and changes our parenting, and it also changes the way we view and see the child, like what we assume about the child, and it turns out that we do a lot of things that are really unique and you don’t find elsewhere, and those perceptions and assumptions really affect how we relate to children.

Kenneth Primrose: 3:34

Fascinating. A theme that comes out, I think, of various conversations in this podcast are the ways that our society has shaped us, and not always to the good. So you use the acronym WEIRD in your book. We are weird people if we are listening to this and we’re Western. And what is it? Educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Yes, I wonder if we could productively begin with that. What are the assumptions that we take into parenting, about childhood and so on?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 4:06

Yes, so we definitely like that acronym comes from looking at just our society as a whole. But then we have research. Anthropologists and psychologists have focused on the parenting aspect of that, and we are definitely weird parents in the sense that we do maybe 50 things that you don’t see really anywhere else besides places that have been westernized right, and these things have huge impact and they’re also like really deeply baked into our parenting. We think they’re like things that we have to do. We think they’re like truths. So do you want me to list off a couple of the big ones?

Kenneth Primrose: 4:40

Yeah, let’s go for a couple of the ones that really stand out for you, that you think this is a weird thing rather than a universal thing.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 4:47

So one of the things that affects us, maybe one of the most, is that we think that children need to be entertained or stimulated, or we are in charge of creating and managing their attention. So, for instance, like on a Saturday afternoon, by weird parenting rules, I’m supposed to plan what Rosie does, my daughter Rosie. I’m supposed to plan what she does, and a lot of times that, or really that planning that activity involves direct kind of instruction to her, whether it’s a class, whether it’s me managing it and doing it, or even a screen, if you think about it, when a child is in front of a screen, they are being instructed. That activity also needs to involve, oftentimes, some entertainment, right, so it makes her feel good, it makes her feel happy, it makes her like it often doesn’t have meaning or purpose, but it’s chosen by me, it’s managed by me, it’s executed by me, the parent, me being the parent, and so I’m this key part of it and she is supposed to do what I say and go with it and be happy.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 5:55

And what this does is it creates, kind of. One of the second big things that makes this weird is it creates this world that is only for the child and that world is totally separate from the adult world, and so one of the things that we do is we separate the child from the adult world. We rarely let children into the adult world until they’re grown, and then we say now it’s time, go into the adult world, be productive, have meaning, right. And so this is extremely weird, that children are just separated and excluded and we think it’s good for them, we think it’s helping them, it’s the right thing to do as a parent and, in fact, bringing them into the adult world is down upon and denigrated right.

Kenneth Primrose: 6:37

And so, but at least the way you’re speaking about this, you think there’s consequences which are not good. So we assume this is good for the parents to have these two worlds and that you have child-centric activity or whatever, but this has negative consequences, you think, for the well-being or development of the child.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 6:57

Absolutely. I think it’s a huge disservice to the child. I also think it’s and I think there’s good evidence for it it’s not just what. I believe. I think there’s a lot of evidence for it and I think it’s also. I think it really can cause a huge amount of conflict between the parent and the child.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 7:12

I think that children, human children and I think that there’s good evidence for this are made to be somewhat in the adult world. Right, they’re not made for the adult world at every moment, but they are made to move in and out of the adult world and then they’re made to create their own world themselves. So the child world exists in every culture, but the children create it. It comes from within them. It doesn’t, it’s not directed and created by the adults. In fact, the adults think they can’t create the child world. They don’t want to. That’s for children. Adults think they can’t create the child world. They don’t want to. That’s for children, right. So what you normally see across the world and probably throughout human history, is the children create their own world that they live in and they design it, they implement it, they execute it. It comes from within them and the parents think yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be. I’m not supposed to be in there. The parents don’t go in there, Maybe a little tiny bit when they’re babies, but that’s not the child world, that’s just the baby, right? A baby is very different than a toddler.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 8:13

And then the children pop in and out of the adult world during the day, on the weekends, after school, and they’re welcome in it. If they’re acting crazy and really making a mess or really like disturbing things, they’re kicked out. There’s some level of code of conduct and as they get older that level rises, but they’re totally welcome. In fact, when they want to come into the adult world, the parent is excited oh great, you want to learn, you want to grow. And the parent sees this as opportunities to teach the child slowly, over time, from like age two until whatever age they become fully capable.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 8:53

Teach the child how to live in the adult world, how to do meaningful tasks and develop meaningful, useful skills, and I would argue that’s what children need. You, that’s what children need. Children want to develop meaningful, useful skills that contribute to their home, their family and their society, and in Western culture we have really in many cases denied them that and I think it hurts them. I think it hurts them mentally and some children are more resilient to it than others. I can see they want to contribute to their home, they want to contribute to their family and they can’t because they’re in this child world.

Kenneth Primrose: 9:31

And they are consumers rather than contributors. They are passive recipients of whatever the parents or teachers or whatever are telling them.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 9:42

I think that’s a beautiful way to put it that they are consumers instead of contributors and, in fact, like, if we look at the data and this is the new book, I’m finishing right now most of what they consume is the screen. They’re consuming from the parents, right, the parents are giving them, and I think that the assumption there is that the parent has all the information, and the information comes from the parent and goes into the child, right? Or comes from the teacher and goes into the child, and so it’s a very one-way flow, right. So you’re exactly right, they’re consuming, they’re taking in.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 10:14

But actually, if you talk to many parents around the world and you look at how children learn and parents teach them, there is a two-way street that the child is actually also has something to give, even at very little age, something to teach the parent, that the child directs their learning, and I have a beautiful example of that recently.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 10:33

I was thinking about last night that recently happened in our home and so there’s this assumption that the child can’t do that, right, that the child can’t teach themselves something with your guidance, right, that you are going to teach, that the parent is going to teach them it. But actually, in many cultures. What is seen is that the child has this innate desire to learn, this strong motivation to learn, and they will lead the charge on it. The parent is there to guide, the parent is there to support, the parent is there to. It’s, like I say, like a stagehand hand almost, but the child is really leading their learning and it happens slowly and it happens by being in, that, popping in and out of that adult world so there’s something there isn’t there about developing an internal locus of control and, as psychologists put it, that it’s just not allowed, not given much oxygen when everything’s prescribed or done for you, and also like predetermined by the parent what to do and like where you’re going, and absolutely, and that locus of control.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 11:36

Data show that starts very young. This is a human need, right, like we need this autonomy, right, we need this. I’m going to make most of my decision. At the same time, we need cooperation, we need support, we need to be part of a group, we need to feel like we belong in a group. Cross-cultural psychologists and anthropologists talk about between being autonomous and being in control of yourself and also working together in a group, and that’s the skill that I think children develop through play in the child world and develop through interactions in the adult world. They need both. The play is the area. The child’s world is the area where the child practices these skills and there’s low stakes, right. They reenact them, they imagine them, they pretend them, and that allows them to practice them and learn from people, people that are closer to them in age and skill level. And then the adult world is where they really hone in and execute it I’m interested.

Kenneth Primrose: 12:38

you say this, in fact, because I’m going to be speaking to peter gray. Do you know play makes us human? Yeah, I’m going to be speaking to him, gray, do you know Play Makes Us Human? Yes, absolutely yeah, I’m going to be speaking to him for this series. I’m interested to hear more about the deprivation of play and what that’s doing to us and de-skilling things that are innately wired in children to learn through play. I wonder if I could ask a big question about this how do weird societies view children? Because I see childhood in our society. It’s almost sacred in a culture with very few sacred things, but at the same time, it’s like the data shows in mental health or whatever else. The way we’re viewing childhood clearly isn’t leading to flourishing children. So, yeah, I wonder, could you speak into that question? How do we view children as opposed to, say, an indigenous society in Tanzania?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 13:28

So I think your word sacred is really good. I think that there’s so a lot of this thinking comes from one of Peter’s close colleagues, of David Lancey. He has a whole book on how different societies view childhood. And yes, we’ve, he taught. He told me one time, like we view them as shrink wraps that’s what was really sticks in my mind Like we’ve wrapped them up in plastic and we don’t want them to get dirty, we don’t want them to get hurt. We like there’s this and that is sacred, right, and this hurts them mentally. It’s like you’ve alluded to right, because that’s not who they are. They’re not something, an object you put on a stand and try to keep it from being hurt and preserved, right. That is so far from the human need, right? So I think that in many indigenous cultures and I can’t speak for all, but you see some patterns and I think one of the patterns is that children are seen as little children.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 14:23

I think one of the patterns is that children are seen as little children. Little toddlers and babies are seen as these very irrational creatures, very illogical creatures. They don’t have emotional control, so if they yell and scream and hit, that’s just how they are. We don’t need to fix it right away. Emotional skills are these things that you learn over time, like math and reading, and they take time to develop, and so that’s one of the big differences in our society. We think these. We actually think that children are intentionally mean and nefarious, like little kings, like that. They intentionally want to hurt us. This is if you keep your ear open, you will hear this that they’re pushing our buttons, manipulating us, testing boundaries, all these things that are very negative socially, manipulating us, testing boundaries all these things that are very negative socially, antisocial characteristics right, but in many cultures, that behavior which looks nefarious is just viewed as irrationality and like crazy, illogical creatures that are growing into their logic and growing into their understanding. So that changes a lot of the way you interact with a young child. Instead of getting mad at them when they act crazy and mean and antisocial, you just like that’s the way it is and we need to teach them. It’s not personal Versus. I’m going to show you how to act right now and don’t do that to me this kind of very defensive thing.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 15:41

The other thing that they see children as and this is really important to mental health that first one is too for sure, but is they see them as capable, contributing members of the family and the society from a very early age, in the family, in the group, and the job of the parent is to help find that purpose and cultivate it. And examples of this abound when we traveled, when Rosie and I traveled, as we traveled to three different communities and lived with them. You see this everywhere that a little four-year-old can contribute, a six-year-old can contribute. Everybody has a purpose and the job of this society is to help find that purpose and bring it out.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 16:30

Whereas we view children as, like I said earlier, as these things that are to be entertained, right, and we they can’t. What could they do? What do they want to do? They don’t even want to help. I hear this all the time. My mother doesn’t want to help. No, every human being wants to help.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 16:45

It’s about that, isn’t? That was what makes us human in many ways. It’s about finding, first of all, cultivating that instead of denying it. We deny it at a very early age. We push them away A little.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 17:00

Two, three four-year-old comes over and wants to do the dishes, starts making a mess, starts spraying the water everywhere.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 17:06

We say get away, go play, go watch cartoons.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 17:09

I need to get this done.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 17:10

So that is denying them some purpose and meaning in life. I know it sounds silly, but like cleaning the dishes is needed and it has to get done and it’s done every day. And a child that comes in and wants to help with that in many cultures is seen as wow, this is great, she wants to help, she wants to contribute. I’m going to help her do that, and maybe we’re going to make a mess at first, but I’m going to teach her how to do that. And the thing, kenny, is, if you look at positive psychology right now, they’re starting to really figure out that we’ve missed this boat, especially with children. That happiness in life and feeling good in life isn’t just about being entertained and having things that, oh, that feels so good, and it’s also about meaning and purpose and eudaimonia, right, like this whole aspect of working, and then seeing that I’m helping and I contribute and we’ve just thrown that out when it comes to small children. And then that builds over time and by their time they’re nine, ten, what is their meaning, what is their purpose?

Kenneth Primrose: 18:17

Yeah, it’s hard to course correct, isn’t it In the teenage years, when you’ve taught someone that they’re not helpful and then you expect them to help when they’re 14, 15 and couldn’t find some kind of purpose? Yeah, it’s a first.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 18:33

You can, of course, correct. People ask me all the time like you can and you have to. I think you have to believe, like you have to believe, that a child has this desire in them, that every human being has this desire. If you don’t believe it, as a parent, it’s going to be really hard. Some kids are going to be like, yes, and it won’t matter what the parent does, right, they’re going to, they’re going to want to contribute. Rosie is like no matter what, I thought she was going to contribute, and but some kids they need their parent to see, it to see and believe that they want to help.

Kenneth Primrose: 19:08

So you think, this is like your question what are the universals? This is a universal, this is one of them that we are born to help, and it’s interesting that you’re. I had a conversation with the anthropologist tim ingold and he makes this really good observation that we only we think of generations as like strata, one stacked on top of the next, and they each got to remake the world and deal with the problems. And if you’re old, you’re useless. If you’re young, you’re useless. It’s that middle section who can work in an industrialized society that have any value, and so you’ve got this totally unsustainable, uh, model of generations stacked on top of one another rather than their ear, the metaphor of a piece of rope that’s intertwined and they each have which I I think is a beautiful picture.

Kenneth Primrose: 19:54

Yes, the industrialized, the weird model that we’ve grown up with, has a relatively bleak view of human nature. So if you think of um lord, of of the Flies, or even, I think, common understandings of natural selection, would suggest that we are selfish, self-interested.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 20:13

Obviously, it’s more complicated than that, the norm of self-interest. I think psychologists call it that. We are assuming that everybody is only interested in themselves. So we treat other people that way and we treat children that way. And I just got interviewed for a piece in New York Magazine where it was about this that two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds can’t share because they’re just so selfish. And if you actually look at that, I told the reporter that’s just wrong. That is just completely wrong. If you actually look at the data, a two, three-year-old is incredibly giving, incredibly helpful, incredibly able to think about other people. But they learn through what? The norm of self-interest? They learn that in their home, in their environment, everyone’s looking out for themselves, and so they become that.

Kenneth Primrose: 20:59

You’ve got this really helpful bit which would be good to explain in your book, about the Muller-lyer illusion and how it was based on 12 percent of the global population. But it’s universalized as this. This is how we, this is how we perceive. Could you explain what that shows us about the anthropology we inherit?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 21:21

yeah, this is actually from that acronym, weird, the research paper that coined that term from Harvard researchers. So I don’t know. There’s a very famous illusion where there’s two lines right and one line has the arrowheads on either side pointing out like a regular arrowhead, and then the other line has the arrowheads flipped out so that it looks very strange right, has the arrowheads flipped out so that it looks very strange right, and if you and I look at that, we think the one with the arrowheads flipped out is longer. I believe that’s right and it’s very obvious, right? You’re like oh, the one on the bottom is longer, for sure, it looks really longer. I think we say 20% longer or something so significantly longer, and that’s what psychologists thought. Everybody must see it that way around the world. But then in most studies they did, because in most studies the vast majority of studies were done in Europe or America.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 22:12

But then some researchers have gone around the world and given people, largely in indigenous communities, the same test and in many communities they actually don’t. So I should say it’s an illusion. Right, the two lines are the same. We see them as 20% different, but they are exactly the same. And when researchers give this test to people, some undergatherers, in Africa, many parts of the world. A lot of them see them as the same. They’re not tricked by that illusion. A lot of them see them as the same. They’re not tricked by that illusion.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 22:53

And to me it was such a strong finding because it means, look, if my culture can change how I see two lines, then of course it’s going to shape something as complicated as a relationship with another person, or human being, or parenting, right, and so that’s when I really was like, let’s see how my, what I grew up with as given, what I grew up with as what I believe was like basic human nature, let’s see how that’s actually um, shaped by industrialization, by capitalism, by these things that we are immersed in, and and, like you said, one of them, one of them really is that we are always acting, and it’s interesting because we are always acting selfishly. That’s what we’re, but it really is. We’re trying to get as much stuff as possible like you know, like that’s what this is.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 23:42

Because it? Because, actually, if you look at what makes us feel good and what makes us feel like a full human being, flourishing human being, it’s not stuff, it’s helping other people, it’s giving to other people. So we say it’s selfish, but it’s really just like accumulation of goods. Yeah.

Kenneth Primrose: 24:01

I think the psychologist Jamil Daki, who’s positive psychology? He says that there is good in us and it does good for us. We just feel better by being good, Whereas we’ve been slipped this lie by consumerism, anti-capitalism, that it’s status.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 24:15

Or yeah, absolutely.

Kenneth Primrose: 24:18

Yeah, so this is helpful. We’ve got one so far. We want to help, but what else? Because it sounds like you had a few rude to damascus experiences you mean, what are the other universals of parenting?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 24:30

yeah, like you know our human universals.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 24:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah sorry, human universals okay, there’s another one that’s huge and, like I alluded it to before, it conflicts with this one. Right, we want to help, but we also want to. Humans have this in very innate need for autonomy, to feel like they’re making their moment to moment decisions in life, that they’re in charge, kind, of their destiny. Now, it’s not independent, it’s not I’m doing this on my own, I’m separate from everybody. We would not have survived that way.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 25:04

That, like one of this, all of this kind of comes from this idea of what made homo sapiens win through time and the other Homo species not. And one of them is that we were very cooperative, right, especially raising children. I think that’s considered a key one. But at the same time, we have this really innate need for autonomy, to be in charge, to feel like, when I’m moving through my day-to-day, I know what’s going to happen because I’m making those decisions and I know that I’m capable of handling the things that come into my world and the problems that arise.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 25:43

And so if you ask American parents I’m not sure about French, english one, but if you ask American parents they will say that this is really important in their lives and this is a really important feature of parenting. But then if you actually look at what they do, their children in America, and I’m sure in England too, have very little autonomy, almost none, some. But this is absolutely a human, universal need and it conflicts it’s a little bit paradoxical with wanting to help and contribute and be part of the group, but they work together. They work together because it’s not like I say, it’s not independent. I’m basically in charge, but I also have to look towards the group and help the group and respect the group and do my part within this group.

Kenneth Primrose: 26:27

And the fact that we don’t give that much autonomy to kids at all is partly because we don’t trust them, right, because we don’t trust that basic. Their intuitions are good, they want to help. We think it’s nefarious. They’re going to end up in mischief. If they’re not, that’s right.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 26:42

Like I don’t want to Learning and growing with that autonomy, and we also don’t trust the society around us. Right, it’s actually really fascinating, because we don’t trust the physical, three-dimensional world, but we somehow trusted the internet, which I’m not sure I understand.

Kenneth Primrose: 26:57

This is like it’s insane. It’s insane and I’m glad there’s a movement now that’s waking up to it, but it’s yeah, we don’t need to go there at the moment. We both know this is crazy, that how much freedom people have online and how little freedom kids have in the physical space and they’re fulfilling that need there.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 27:20

Right, it we’ve taken away, like I think about. I have very many examples of this in my life where the parent doesn’t allow the child to walk a couple blocks to the park, even though no child has been abducted, no thing has been wrong for 10 years. Right, they don’t let the child walk a couple blocks to the park, but they let the child. So what’s the child doing? The child isn’t helping around the house. Right, we’ve gone over that. They’re not part of learning a skill inside the house that’s useful or was useful in the past. So what are they doing, right? Like, where do they spend their time? And they have needs as human beings. We have needs to help, we have needs to create, we have needs to grow, we have needs to explore.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 28:03

Peter Gray talks a lot about play and he’ll tell you all about play, but one of the things I was interested in is like, like, what aspect of play is important? Right, because you could say, oh, the child’s playing on the ipad, but actually what we need is adventure, exploration, learnings, and if we’re not letting them go to the park, we’re not letting them develop adult skills inside the home. So then, what are they doing right, and and what they ended up doing is is really sitting on a computer right which which does try to fulfill some of these needs, but it’s just. It’s like a hollow form of it there.

Kenneth Primrose: 28:38

It’s missing big components of it, and then you’re also got these risks that we alluded to and so that this, these kind of assumptions, are also the foundation of the way we educate in lots of ways, and that’s. I don’t want to depart too far from the parenting thing, but it’s part of the same piece, isn’t it? Because if the kids are coming in, if they’ve learned to be selfish and mean or whatever, then they require that same kind of I. Yeah, I wonder if you could speak into that.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 29:07

Yes, it is. It overlaps right, because a big job of parents is to teach children things right. And it’s fascinating because in some cultures, like in the Inuit with the Inuit, they actually have two words one for the way that, traditionally, children learn and parents teach and one for the way that westerners have come in and showed schooling basically right and they’re. They don’t. They’re completely different, they’re not the same thing at all, and because they didn’t have teaching like Western teaching for 5,000 years. And then it comes in. So they very clearly make this distinction. One is more of what I described earlier and the other one is I think I described them both. So the Western teaching is this idea that the child sits there and you tell them what to learn through words, through these abstract ideas, right, very little practical. And, yes, that is school, but it is parenting too, right? Okay, how am I going to teach Rosie fractions? Okay, I’m going to write them down and I’m going to show her on the board and then I’m going to ask her questions and she’s going to tell me the right answer Highly verbal, highly abstract. She’s going to tell me the right answer Highly verbal, highly abstract, but traditionally, in the way arguably children have learned for probably 100,000 years or more experience the anthropologist psychologist Barbara Rogoff and her colleague Lucia Alcala.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 30:23

They call it LOPI, l-o-p-i Learning through observation and pitching in.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 30:32

You’re there, you’re not pushed aside. When the parent is doing something useful cooking, cleaning, weaving, building a house the child is welcome to watch, encouraged to watch, and then the parent gives them tiny little things to do, but meaningful, real things to do and I have to say this is how I taught my husband to cook Through Lopi, through learning, the observation and pitching in. It’s a really beautiful way to learn because it’s not stressful. It’s very slow. It’s basically like the five minutes each day right, those build up right and it focuses on what the child already wants to day right. Those build up right and it focuses on what the child already wants to do right. And all through the process the child feels like the child is fulfilling this need we talked about of helping right and contributing and learning skills. So, for instance, if you wanted to teach a child to cook, you say, hey, come over and tell me about whatever their favorite thing is in all the world. Tell me about Sonic the Hedgehog 3 or whatever some kid wants to talk about, come tell me about it.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 31:37

I’m going to cook dinner and come tell me about it. And so you’re sitting there chopping up, doing your stuff, cooking dinner, and you’re talking to the kid and the kid’s there, and the kid is learning by just being there. I’m telling you I’ve seen it many times. Every parent around the world will tell you this and then you say, hey, can you grab those onions from the refrigerator? Or can you come over here and stir this pot for me real quick? I got to do this thing, right and you give them like one or two tiny things that they can accomplish and that are real, that you need, that are not fake, right? It’s not? Oh, go stir this pot over here that we’re never going to use. Or they chop the vegetables and you don’t use them. No, this is like real things.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 32:17

And I’m telling you, over the course of a couple months, an older child will learn to cook, I guarantee it and over the course of a couple years, a younger child will. Right, and the younger child will do a couple things and then walk away. And in our way of educating, we’d be like no, stay here and you’re learning. No, you can’t walk away. This is learning, but in many cultures. It’s no, that was enough. The child knows they’ve had enough. They’re guiding the learning and so they’re telling you I’ve had enough, I’ve learned enough, and tomorrow I’ll come back because I enjoyed it and it was fun, and nobody yelled at me, nobody forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do, and over the course of a couple of years they will learn incredible skills in the kitchen.

Kenneth Primrose: 33:06

Hope you’re enjoying this conversation with Michaelene Duclef. If you are, then do please like and subscribe to the channel. It helps other people find us and you’ll also be subscribed to many other fascinating conversations that have been and will be to come. So you’ve got this, you’ve got the autonomy there, you’ve got the desire to help and I see the way that sometimes we parent and you spoke about this in the early years of being a mother with Rosie, but also in schools. It’s the meeting of two oceans and it’s just tumultuous and wild and one must overcome the other in terms of this battle of wills. Yeah, mum, from your writing, from your learning in these indigenous cultures, that kind of confrontation and combative and authority top-down approach that’s nearly absent in those places.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 34:01

Oh, absolutely. In fact, in many places it’s thought of as immature. I would say it’s thought of as not understanding human nature. Right, if you yell, in some cultures you’re basically like a child. Right, if you’re telling somebody else what to do with a stern tone, it’s very it’s thought of as like a child. That’s like a bossy child. Well, yes, absolutely it’s. There is in some cultures. There is some hierarchy in the sense that, like elders are respected, revered, there’s some sort of respect hierarchy, I would say, and we listen and we learn. But it’s not this. I’m going to tell you what to do by. Any Autonomy is really respected. It’s really seen as a human need. It’s how you treat other people. You respect their autonomy and that conflict isn’t productive. And so it’s not earned autonomy.

Kenneth Primrose: 34:52

The autonomy is not earned. It’s like it’s part of you as a child, which I think is a distinction, because people in work cultures earn autonomy, but until then they can be micromanaged because you can’t trust them.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 35:04

I think it’s very similar. I think we just take how we treat children and we put it into the workplace and I think you made that very astute observation early on in the conversation that we this is all. I think some of it, or it’s probably cyclical, but it comes from this being useful in an industrial society.

Kenneth Primrose: 35:21

Yeah, the way we value, I suppose, the way it is invariably turned to, comes from productivity progress.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 35:29

that kind of thing In that context. This is like productivity, say, and making people feel good, productivity in the home. Right, think about what. Like? Rosie’s nine now and she’s incredibly productive in the home. She helps clean, she made dinner last night. She’s been making dinner now like crazy. I can’t even imagine. And I see that as valuable for us, not just because she could go and get a job with it, but as this is value to her because she feels pride and accomplishment and eudaimonia when she sees us eating her food and enjoying it.

Kenneth Primrose: 36:05

That’s really interesting because I think part of the damage we’ve done to ourselves in weird society is instrumentalizing everything for some future gain.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 36:14

Yes, yes, absolutely. That’s a very good way to put it. But this is in contrast to those societies where, yeah, as you say, flourishing or eudaimonia is present moment interesting there’s some really interesting research looking at latin american societies versus western societies, in this sense of if you look at I don’t know if you looked at this at all, but if you look at those happy surveys and happiness scores and you know, how, like, the scandinavian countries are always at the top and the happiest place in the world.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 36:46

but if you look, if you actually like scale that for GDP or like income, then the Latin American countries are really high.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 36:53

So there’s like something about Latin American communities that like creates really happy people for their economic situation right, because there’s a lot of issues in some places and there’s a couple of people that study this and one of the things that the he’s actually an economist One of the things that he’s found is that in Latin America, families value just the joy of other people and like helping other people, being with other people for no other reason. There’s no transactions. There’s no. I’m going to get this from you or you do this and I’m going to. I help you and you’re going to get this back to me. It’s they actually just really want to be and spend time and give to other people and help other people because it brings them joy. Long time to really understand it, but it’s like helping other people with just the sake of your own joy, and this is what I think is missing in a lot of people’s lives in western cultures today is just doing things for other people, with other people, because it brings you joy it brings to mind.

Kenneth Primrose: 38:08

So happening upon what you think are universals of childhood and parenting and so on is one of the hallmarks of something you think that is just fundamentally like our wiring, our human nature. Is it enjoyment, joy, happiness? Is that one of the tell signs? And do you know what I mean? So you could say we are clearly doing something wrong because we’ve got a mental health crisis. Let’s figure out what it is. But let’s say Latin American countries, people are happier. Or maybe you could look at blue zones they live longer, whatever and say they’re doing something right. What are the tell signs that something’s universal rather than context specific?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 38:51

I do think that the mental health crisis which I do think it is a crisis that we have is a tell sign that we’re missing some needs of children, that, like some multiple needs of children are going unmet. And I do think that, like, when you go into a society where the children are like thriving, flourishing, right, nothing’s perfect, of course, but like their day-to-day it’s different. There’s flourishing, right, nothing’s perfect, of course, but like their day-to-day it’s different. There’s a different feeling, right, when the children, when there’s like a cohesion between the children and the parents. Right, that’s what was really striking for me and that’s what really made me want to write this book, was when I traveled for my job, I could see this easiness, this cohesion between the parents and the children. Right, there wasn’t this constant tension and conflict and struggle, and maybe that’s like a telltale sign.

Kenneth Primrose: 39:40

It’s like the children live and exist and work together with the adults in a way that’s missing here, right, there’s a kind of like flow is maybe a word I think you use, and like intuition as well that this like resonates. This feels different from when your cortisol is up and you’re engaged in some kind of childish kind of argument with your kid. You’re like this doesn’t feel flowy or like intuitively, it’s like constant.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 40:09

It’s to the point where I didn’t want to be with her. And this is, and I read that at the beginning of the book, and readers write me and say this is how I felt. This is parents don’t want to be with their children. Think about the pandemic, like it was like this. It was like this crisis in our society because the parents had to be with their children. I should not laugh, I shouldn’t, yeah, but it’s true though. But it’s like something, if you go so in the Maya community that we were in the books.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 40:36

The researchers actually went there and interviewed them about the pandemic and the parents were happy to be with their children. The parents were happy to have the children out of school and they could be together, and there was not this oh my God, what do I do with the child? How do I interact? We’re going to argue, right, but if you, during the pandemic in America and in right, like, parents were like what do we do with this child? I don’t want to be with them all day, I don’t know how to be with them all day, and there was this enormous amount of conflict that was between the parents and children and it was documented To me. That’s a telltale sign something’s wrong. They can’t be with their children.

Kenneth Primrose: 41:14

Yeah, it goes against all of human nature and human history, right? Yeah, yeah, we’re supposed to.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 41:21

Like I remember one of the moms in the Maya village was like she told me. She said I love being with my children, like they’re my favorite people, and I think that’s a sign that, like, the society is working a little bit better and so this is actually before I ask the next question.

Kenneth Primrose: 41:42

It’s worth pointing out this really interesting bit of your book where you describe where we get our parenting techniques, and it’s a little bit shocking. Do you want to say something about that, because I think it’s a fantastic bit of advice, not a bit of evidence, rather, that our foundations are a bit shaky here yes, and it speaks to what you said earlier about the.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 42:02

The rope entwined right. The generations are entwined, they’re not. These stacked up right for thousand hundred years and in most societies parents learn to parent from their parents right, or from an older person or from their siblings that are older right. They learn through the knowledge that generations pass along right, and when a young woman has a baby, the mother or the neighbor or the aunt or the close friend will come and multiple people will help her and teach her. Not to mention she’s learned by watching her siblings or her cousins grow up right. So this knowledge is really experiential and passed down directly from family or neighbors or close or extended kin.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 42:52

But somewhere around, and it goes back pretty far, I think like 1600, 1700 is when it really started Kins and extended families started shrinking and parents lost that source of knowledge, started to lose that source of knowledge, and it depended on your economic class and many factors, and so they didn’t know what to do when they had a baby because they had lost the source of information or they were starting to lose it. And at the same time, doctors and nurses were writing manuals for orphanages or for hospitals that were taking care of 50 babies. So at the same time there was this kind of growing need for children that didn’t have parents. And so there are these places orphanages and hospitals that were taking care of many children kind of industrial scale and doctors and nurses started writing pamphlets to describe how to take care of all these children at one time, all these babies and what ended up happening was those turned into our parenting books and you can actually, like the parents that were taking care of their own baby were like oh, I need this information because I don’t know what to do or how do you handle this situation? I don’t know, I don’t have this source because the extended family was shrinking.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 44:10

And it’s really incredible because you can find many things in parenting books today, like the most popular ones today In these 1,700 pamphlets, many of them from England, and some of them weren’t even written by doctors or they were written by people that weren’t even parents, or many, most of them are written by men. One of them, one of the most famous one, was written by like a guy, a sports writer, who, like saw his hand off, like with a gun, like he was a really big gun enthusiast and he was probably the one, the most important person for popularizing a big sleep regime right now, and oh my gosh this stuff, everybody should know this stuff.

Kenneth Primrose: 44:48

This is what everybody should know. This stuff, this should is everybody should know this stuff, this should be, broadcast from the rooftops that your advice comes from foundling hospitals, not parents and men.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 44:57

And not clients. It’s always, I think, that there’s this idea that it comes from science, right From experiments, and but it’s it very little comes from science, very little. It’s really hard to do an experiment on babies and parents and get really any sort of in behavior right and yes, with nutrition and vaccines and there. But like behavior, sleep tantrums there’s no science cannot answer this question. I think one psychologist told me it is much easier for us to like land on mars than than to answer a question about, like, how to get into tantrums with science. It’s just, it’s as a big myth in our society and it breaks down very fast and I think parents know that because it doesn’t work. A lot of the stuff doesn’t work right.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 45:41

Yes, there’s a book written by an English journalist. I did my, I cite it, but it’s really fascinating. She reads all of the. She goes back in time and reads many of these pamphlets and these very early parenting books and then finds these threads to today and it’s really interesting. I think it’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate that we’ve lost this intergenerational knowledge that’s been passed down in many societies for thousands and thousands of years.

Kenneth Primrose: 46:08

And so, when you visited these societies, am I right in thinking they’d be more collectivist than individualist?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 46:15

Oh for sure, Absolutely, and if your eyes are open to it, you see it every moment.

Kenneth Primrose: 46:21

And so you’ve got our weird society, which is atomized, it’s individualized, it’s technologically advanced and there’s lots we could say about industry and technology and things like that playing into how we parent. How do we turn the clock back like how, what can you take from those cultures that actually works in an atomized society?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 46:40

people ask me this all the time and and I always tell them, like you know, just adding a little bit of it makes a huge difference. Right, there’s, there’s no way you can raise a child that’s going to be like a Maya kid or an Inuit kid or a Hadzabe kid in America. It’s just, it’s not going to work and it’s not. It’s not, it’s a fantasy, right, but we’ve just gone so far in the other direction, right, we just have.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 47:05

I really want to advocate for just a little bit more of a balance. Sure, they’re going to be in middle, in middle, upper class Western society. The kid is going to be learn individualism. The kid is going to learn the value, valuing a property, which is a big difference in the societies that we’re talking about. Is this valuing a property? Right, we teach children this very early in our society and they’re going to learn that you don’t need to teach them this, they will learn it, but you do need to push back on it.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 47:34

I think that’s what it is. It’s like pushing back with a little bit of autonomy, a little bit of helping, an expectation of helping, a seeing that they want to help. I say, like you, kids in violin lessons, they’re playing soccer. They’ve got all this stuff that they’re doing. Set aside a couple hours a week for the helping activity. One morning a week, saturday or Sunday make the activity that the whole family is going to help make breakfast. We’re going to all help do something together and like just adding back a little bit of that skill and that valuing of that activity and that of helping, I think can make a really big difference in a child’s life. A little bit more autonomy, a little bit less instruction, a little bit of room for them to explore how they would learn something. You don’t need to swing the pendulum all the way back, but just push it over a little bit.

Kenneth Primrose: 48:36

And you’re super helpful in terms of practical tips to do that in the book, which I really appreciated and I’ve tried to implement in bits and pieces. May I ask what you’re doing in terms of educating Rosie, because what’s the school situation there? Yeah, is that a question I’m allowed to ask?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 48:51

Yes, absolutely, it’s a fascinating question. So we actually we lived in San Francisco when I wrote the book and so we lived in the city and she was at like a very expensive private preschool and it was, but we actually moved. We live now in a very rural part of Texas and we actually live right at the Mexican border. So we live in a community that’s very influenced by rural, indigenous Mexican culture. So that makes our lives a little bit different than like an average suburban American Montessori school because, as some readers point out, there’s a lot of overlap, especially in the beginning of the book, with Montessori. It’s not the same, but isn’t it fascinating, right, that when people look for these universalities they find the same ones? But I put her in a Montessori school and I have to say, kenny, that it was missing these things. It was missing so much of what’s in Hug Other Parents, and so we opened a school. Wow.

Kenneth Primrose: 50:01

That brings up a whole new conversation.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 50:04

I should say it’s like a whole. I think legally it’s like a homeschool group.

Kenneth Primrose: 50:07

Okay.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 50:08

It’s not an officially like Texas doesn’t acknowledge it as a school but it’s like a homeschool group where we had at one point we had six kids, three different families, and where we had at one point we had six kids, three different families, and we it’s in our, it’s in our garage and in our backyard and where we try to implement these things and we try to teach more through these principles of autonomous learning and, and I have to say, I love it that’s fascinating.

Kenneth Primrose: 50:35

Yeah, we did in lockdown the first. We moved in with another family and it was like a commune. There was eight kids, six kids. We shared the cooking, everyone got involved, but it was loads of forest school, loads of autonomous learning. I feel guilty when I speak about it, because I know people had a hellish time, we had an amazing time, and then we had to go back to these walls and the structures that just, I think, certainly seemed to make my kids less happy than when they were free range. Is there anything in weird parenting that you would take into Indigenous parenting? Anything you think this is of value and Absolutely.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 51:22

I think, having worked now two years with the school that we have, I really think a combination of learning the two styles works amazing. I think that in the LOPI the learning through observation and pitching is very slow. It’s hard to teach math that way. It’s hard to teach reading that way. I think you need both and I think combining the two and really looking to the child okay, with this we’re going to take a little bit softer approach because it doesn’t come as easy and really being skilled at both ways of learning I think is incredible.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 51:54

I think it’s like blockbuster learning. So I’m not saying we should throw that whole thing out. I think it’s like blockbuster learning. So I don’t think I’m not saying we should throw that whole thing out. I just think that there’s value in the old traditional way too. So like we teach the combination method and it’s probably less Montessori than Maria Montessori would say there’s some memorization and there’s some me pushing her a little bit and like pushing kids and stuff, but it is looking also to that one valuing and knowing that the child can do things on their own, you don’t need to micromanage everything, and that children will really learn and tell you whoa, I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more in.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 52:30

But I also think Western culture is really good at teaching kids to use their imagination, being innovative, coming up with crazy designs and ideas. This is rare in many cultures this very imaginative play and kind of crazy, but this is what creates the things that we have in the innovation, and so I think that’s wonderful. I just I think parents and I tell parents this a lot, and actually I should say that there’s a woman that’s in the book in Alaska that’s doing this with medicine and health care. She’s an Inuit woman and she’s combining Western health care with the indigenous and she says it’s better than either of them.

Kenneth Primrose: 53:12

It makes sense that Western culture got some things right. They’ve done some tremendous things, but also the traditional and indigenous societies have a huge amount of value to teach as well.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 53:26

One of the researchers at UC Irvine she’s not in the book, belinda Campos. She told me one time she said she studies Chicano psychology and she said I think it’s also about understanding there’s multiple right ways, you know, yeah, yeah that’s. She said I think it’s also about understanding there’s multiple right ways, you know.

Kenneth Primrose: 53:39

Yeah, yeah, that’s liberating, I think it feels. And it’s interesting. You get these books totally contradictory, but they’ll say they’re the only method that you should use to get your kid ready for school or whatever. I wonder if there’s time for a third one. I like threes. We’ve got kids want to help. We’ve got kids want to help. We’ve got autonomy. Is there one other thing that bubbles up for you as like a universal this one is going to be controversial.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 54:06

Maybe we’ll end on it, and that’s a good way. Great. And I don’t talk too much about this in the book. But what is absolutely universal is that children don’t sleep by themselves.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 54:17

Ah, the sleep thing yeah yeah yeah, yeah people don’t sleep by themselves, but definitely children. It definitely not in their own room alone. This is if you and there’s tons of data to back this up yale has a. Yale has this amazing ethnographic database of like all the anthropology, cross-cultural psychology and you can search for things in there and in ethnographic record and you can find hundreds of examples from all over the world.

Kenneth Primrose: 54:47

And no, there’s no examples of a of a child sleeping alone yeah, and obviously, like in in the uk, you go to in any national trust they had the bed where everybody slept. It is quite a modern thing that you have your own room and also quite an individualized thing.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 55:02

Let’s like get painted the color that you want and get the it’s also a consumer thing, right, because that requires a lot more space, a lot more things, a lot more construction, the rise of privacy. So that’s another universal. Kids just don’t have much privacy. People don’t really have much privacy, right. Everyone’s always around. There’s somebody watching you do everything. So this is a very new thing. I have my private space and my private time. But yes, I made light of it. But I think it hurts some children to sleep by themselves. I think sleep is this incredibly vulnerable time for any mammal and, I think, some children. That’s why they fight it so much, like we’re really fighting an incredibly deep-rooted instinct.

Kenneth Primrose: 55:47

It makes me wonder you maybe know the research in this whether, if you have Bowlby’s attachment model and how securely attached kids are, are they more securely attached in indigenous cultures where they sleep with their family than when they’re sleep trained?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 56:04

Again, like it’s really hard to show that scientifically and people have tried. I’ve looked at those studies. It’s just really hard because there’s just so many variables. But just your personal experience and just looking at again, like you said, what are the telltale signs of the problems? Just think about how much energy and time and struggle and conflict and stress and cortisol families put in to getting a child to sleep by themselves.

Kenneth Primrose: 56:28

This seems like a good. It seems like a really good rule is like if there’s a spike in cortisol and it’s combative, let’s take a beat and rethink the approach here.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 56:40

The woman that I talked about in Alaska that is combining the healthcare. She read the book my book, hunt, gather, find and I got her to read it beforehand and I said, okay, tell me what you think about it. She’s actually half Inuit, half German, but she grew up and lives in a tiny Inuit village and she said to me she said the book is great. She had some issues and we fixed it, and she’s like you don’t need this. She’s like all you have to do is look to see is this going to cause conflict with my child or is this going to help our relationship? And if it’s going to help our relationship, then do it. If it’s going to cause conflict, then take a beat and figure out a different way of doing it. It sounds so simple, but I’ve tried that to implement that more in my life too.

Kenneth Primrose: 57:28

I love that as a piece of advice. It makes me, I think, with a bit of regret, though I wonder what you’d say. I have two daughters. One of them I was taking to drama club. She really didn’t want to go, she was super shy and things like that, and I just thought this is good for you. You’ve got to learn resilience. You’re going to come out happier. And it was like tears and it was all that stuff. It was horrible and I think it did remove a bit of a fear. There was a bit of resilience developed there. What do you say to that way of thinking that this character building this is going to suffer but ultimately there’s going to be some second degree fun perhaps, but also it’ll build you.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 58:08

It’s a very great example, I love it, and I think I would say this I think you could do the same without that struggle, or as much struggle so I, or as much struggle so I think you could probably get her to go to drama, but without kind of that much heavy handedness on it. Yeah, and it could have been a little bit of a slower process, right, it could have been a little bit like okay, this seems, if it’s really causing that much trouble, let’s wait on it, let’s try it next year or let’s try it the next day. So it’s a little it’s like I say, it’s not just throwing it all out, it’s just going a little slower, because you do run the risk of making her hate it. You also run the risk of teaching her to not listen to herself.

Kenneth Primrose: 58:57

Yeah, yeah, to kind of detach.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 58:59

Yeah, where she’s flying, all this fear and problems you’re feeling right now and which we need to do. I’m not saying we don’t need to do, but I think it it it can come a little slower, a little softer, and the child can be more of deciding when it happens. So in the book I’m writing right now, I list off seven fundamental needs of children and I always thought play was one of them, and you can talk to Peter about this. I actually think it’s like it’s risk, right, it’s adventure, it’s. This idea of this is scary but fun, right, it’s a little bit of a titrated risk and the child gets to decide that titration, right, that amount of risk, instead of the parent. And the parent can push a little bit and like guide, but at the end of the day it’s about the child learning. I feel a little afraid and then I overcame it. Wow, look at that. Right, but if the parent is like pushing the child off the cliff a little bit, I don’t think it teaches them that pushing the child off the cliff a little bit.

Kenneth Primrose: 59:59

I don’t think it teaches them that. Yeah, I’m a hundred percent with you in that. I it’s. Yeah, it’s interesting. What’s coming to mind is a line from the writer he wrote about improvisational comedy called Keith Johnson, and he said we think of children as adults in training but actually adults are atrophied children and you think there’s something in that I really love and it’s how keyed into intuitions and feeling and nature as well, Children are. And you’ve got a lovely few pages on awe and how close that is to a child’s experience all the time. And this is something we lose and then we force our kids to lose it. We atrophy them, yeah, yeah.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 1:00:38

Yeah, I think it’s a fine line. I think it’s. I think should I push her? Does she really want to do it? I ask Rosie. I say is this really scary, or is this like scary and exciting? And when it’s scary and exciting I know she wants a little push. That’s a great question, if it’s really scary and I don’t want to do it. I’m sorry I didn’t want to do it. Then let’s try it next year.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:00:57

I love that. I’m going to take that and use it with my girls. I want to be respectful of your time, micheline. There’s so much in what we’ve discussed I’d love to do, but also in your book we haven’t got onto your team acronym. Let me just recommend this to all the listeners that this is a really wise book. I think that I wish I’d discovered many years before I had it wasn’t written until a few years ago.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:01:22

Do you want to say anything about the book that you’re currently finishing or point people towards where they can find out more about your work?

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 1:01:29

Yes, so I’m writing a book called Dopamine Kids, which is about screens and food, processed food, ultra-processed food, and it’s the opposite. It’s okay. What are the things in our lives that we can’t use ancient wisdom for? And these are the things, and it’s about how they affect our brain and our children’s brains and then what we can do about it, and I think it’s coming out. I’m just finishing it and I think it’s coming out next winter. So it’s a little bit got a ways. Sadly, or not sadly, I’m, I don’t really well, I’m not on social media and but you can email me and I’m and I try to respond to everybody. So it might take a while, but and I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start a newsletter in a couple months, so I’ll have that on my website and hopefully I can answer questions there and that’ll be easier way of connecting.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:02:18

Thank you for responding to my email. I really appreciate it and it sounds like you’ve got your hands very full with the school in Texas. I’m fascinated that you’ve done that and a bit inspired too.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 1:02:29

Yeah, it’s interesting because I spend two hours at the school every day two and a half and it’s almost the same amount of time as I spent just dropping Rosie off and picking her back up from school. So it’s really not. Yes, it is more work in some ways, but in some ways it’s the same amount. But very enjoyable work Again. It’s that thing of like pure joy from helping other people.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:02:52

I hope you write about this school one day. I would love to. I’d love to read about it.

Michaeleen Doucleffe: 1:03:02

And there’s this combination of the indigenous cultures and the Western ones. So yeah that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure. It’s such a wonderful podcast, so thank you.

Kenneth Primrose: 1:03:12

I hope you enjoyed listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. For me, there were some really insightful takeaways, starting with the fundamental insight that the culture we grew up in and the conventional wisdom that we receive from it may well sit on very questionable foundations. I particularly valued Michaelene’s point that children need to contribute to the household and not just be kind of passive consumers. That way lies a lack of meaning and purpose. They also require autonomy freedom from constant supervision something I’ll pick up in a future episode with psychologist Peter Gray and also the truth of that adage that it takes a village to raise a child. I am personally grateful to the significant alloparents, as they’re called, in my own life and those of my children today. To me, it’s yet another reason to resist the atomized ideal of the nuclear family.