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Kenny Primrose:
Dr. BJ Miller, it is such a pleasure to have you on the Examined Life. Thank you for joining me today. So the kind of theme of the podcast is to use questions as a kind of tool to shine a light on things we might not think of or be paying proper attention to. I know you’ve got a lot of questions that you’ve kind of explored in your work and your life. What is the question that’s kind of bubbling up for you at the moment as something that we should be paying attention to?

BJ Miller:
Yeah, there are a lot of ways we could go with this prompt. But one question that comes up for me again and again and again these days, as though it’s like screaming at me, is to ask myself and others, you know, how or where are you grieving these days? And I like that question for a number of reasons, including it kind of presupposes that you are. That you know you ought to be, you know, yeah boy, should the language of should is really uh generally unwelcome, especially around grief. But I guess I would pose this question to all of us to prompt us to look more closely. You know, for one, I think a lot of us have misbegotten notions of grief, that it’s only relevant if someone close to you died, for example. Um, and so I’ve asked a lot of people, you know, their relationship to grief, and they say, Oh, well, I’ve never, you know, no one I’ve never lost anyone close to me. And it’s an interesting kind of tell that our our notions of grief, if we have them at all, have gotten very kind of narrow, very kind of sort of sense in a sense that that’s kind of optional and only for this big stuff of death. But the truth is, it’s really the wiring is around loss, and we have losses, experience losses all the time, and just some are bigger than others or more dramatic. You know, so one one prompt in this question is democratize the notion of grief that is relevant to if you’ve been on the planet for more than a few moments, you have some access to grief. If an infant were able to communicate, I would imagine that the infant feels a sense of loss of being in the womb. I certainly know that I feel a little bit of grief on you know Sunday nights that the death of the weekend, you know, or certainly have felt grief uh around losing relationships, friendships, romantic relationships. So anyway, I’m going on a little bit, but just to say my question presupposes that we all have some relationship to grief, which I believe we do whether we acknowledge it or not. And and then let’s talk about why I think that’s so important. But first to start us, let’s get in the ballpark. Everyone, every human being, whether they know it or not, knows something about grief.

Kenny Primrose: 05:60
We just have to impoverish the notion of what grief is. If we’re not grieving, it’s not because there’s nothing to grieve, it’s there there’s a blockage somewhere in the system.

BJ Miller: 06:11
That would be my take for sure. Very strongly so.

Kenny Primrose: 06:16
I wonder, BJ, if you could tell us a bit about your your personal story with

Kenny Primrose: 06:20
grief, if we’ve all got a kind of grief narrative, when did when and how did you become acquainted with it as a as a part of the human experience?

BJ Miller: 06:31
Well, uh, you know, and one answer to that question, Kenny, would be very early on, I just didn’t know what to call it. You know, I just felt I was a m you know, I remember kind of being referred to and kind of not and not minding the language of being kind of a melancholy kid. You know, I had real access to sadness early on. My own, just others’ empathic sorrows. So I think for me it goes way, way back. It’s an early experience of being alive, but I didn’t know it wasn’t no one, it wasn’t called grief. I did I didn’t have a name for it. And then at times I kind of wondered if I was sort of depressive, and I’ve treated myself for depression on occasions, and that may have been true. Then, you know, when I was 19, I had a big accident where I lost some limbs. I came close to death myself and lost both legs below the knee and one arm below the elbow. And that certainly came with a big sense of loss. But even then, the the G word wasn’t coming up. If someone was talking to me about grief at the time, I don’t recall it. Um, so there too, I probably would have thought, well, I didn’t die, you know, no one died. So, you know, so I greeted. So that’s you know, it takes me to my early 20s, and I watched myself increasingly be kind of whipped around by my emotional state and surprised by it. Um, I kept trying to apply logic to my emotions and that I should feel this way, or now that I’m so far out from this experience, I should I should feel that way. And I was doing that all the time. Um and then um there’s some other, you know, all sorts of big examples in my 20s of very of loss of various kinds, still no g word in sight. Then I lost my sister when I was 27 or so. And that finally, you know, finally the g word appeared uh because I had lost someone close to me, I died. So that narrow definition now worked. But there too, didn’t we didn’t have any, there was no catchment for grief, there was no holding it. My parents and I certainly talked. My parents are, it’s not as though the family’s closed off emotionally, we just didn’t have really uh language for it and hadn’t really dug into it. So we were all grieving, but I I intended I wasn’t, I I thought I could kind of beeline, I needed to get to acceptance because this had happened. Lisa wasn’t coming back, so okay, I know it. So I just wanted to try to like use my brain, like a lot of us do, to intellectually kind of beeline to acceptance, convince myself to accept the situation, and my emotions should follow suit, was the thinking you know I mean it’s a tremendously, tremendously hard thing to happen.

Kenny Primrose: 09:27
Do you say in your book that you wish you could go back to that kind of gut-wrenching grief of your sister that you passed over too quickly? You said you left your kind of emotions in a pile. I mean, we think of those gut-wrenching times as a valley that we want to move through the really quickly and move on. So tell me a bit more about that, BJ.

BJ Miller: 09:50
Yeah. And you’re right, Kenny. I mean, these are not very savory feelings, or some of them, but you know, it’s not it’s not a zone, especially if you’re uninitiated, that you it doesn’t seem like a place you want to hang out. And also the cues I would get from the public was, you know, pull yourself up from the bootstraps, kind of get back on the horse language, and you know, that was cast as sort of a sympathetic supportive talk, which is basically, yeah, yeah, get keep moving, get going, and you know, just kind of keep keep keep moving, don’t before the feelings set in, you know, essentially. And I tried to do that for a number of reasons, for my own sake, because I thought that that’s what uh my parents would be good for them, because the cues I was getting from around me some seemed to suggest that’s what I should do. That’s what a strong person would do. So I had some identity hangups there that, you know, if I looked really closely, that, you know, if I interrogate my my my feelings about my feelings, it was as though sorrow was for chumps, you know, or for weak folks who were weak or something like that. I mean, somewhere in my nervous system bought into that. So for all these reasons, I was trying to just leapfrog over the hard stuff, go right to acceptance. I was rewarded. People would say, Oh gosh, you’re back at school already, or God, I didn’t expect to see, you know, I got some sense of welcome surprise that I was doing, quote, so well. And the so well was measured by my lack of tears or by some sense of normalcy in my expression and my behavior. But I was, of course, just faking it. It was all performative. So, but it took me a while to realize that. But sorry, Kenny, you were gonna say something there.

Kenny Primrose: 11:39
Well, I was gonna ask,

Kenny Primrose: 11:40
who were you performing for? You point out that people are kind of allergic, are afraid of grief like it’s contagious, like they are with you know, death. Do you think it was a performance to make other people feel less awkward or yourself? For sure, for sure.

BJ Miller: 11:56
In a in a loving way, you know. I I I really it was I thought I was doing myself a favor by not getting bogged down or not getting lost. You know, the feeling was like if I if I give in to these feelings, I’ll never get out. You know, and it’s like this abyss that you fall into and you’re screwed, you know. So I I I thought I was doing myself a favor, certainly, but you bring up a really important one, Kenny, that we all kind of conspire in our culture and society for these things. Friends don’t know what to say, it’s awkward, you know. So, you know, and so me as the as the bereft, anything I can do to let them off the hook. So, oh, you know, it’s okay, or change the subject. So we’re conspiring to avoid the subject for their purposes, for my purposes. Everyone’s it just seems like it’s better off if we just smile and keep going, you know, essentially. This is all shorthand, of course. At the time, it wasn’t so coherent. I couldn’t explain this to you, but in retrospect, this is what I was doing. But but to your question, a big driver was what I thought I was doing other people a favor, sparing their awkward feelings. But that’s not the whole story, of course. But then I and I realized some things um along the way is you know, friends sometimes friends of my sisters would tell me they had dreams about her, or she visited them, you know, and I felt so sad. I couldn’t, I could, I couldn’t even really think about my sister by trying to wall myself off from these harder feelings. I came to realize I was walling myself off from her memory because thinking about her, conjuring her, feeling her, came with some hard feelings. I tried to avoid them, and therefore I avoided my sister by accidentally. So I couldn’t even like I would talk about, I couldn’t, I could mention her name, but as though it was like there was nothing, I couldn’t, there was no purchase. I couldn’t feel her in ways that some people were telling me they could feel, and I felt really left out and I felt cut off from my sister in ways that I in retrospect didn’t need to be. And it was um working with my patients as a physician who taught me about the lessons I’m getting to here. But let me just pause there, Kenny. Was there a question or see your face? Was there something to jump into on that point?

Kenny Primrose: 14:24
So many questions. Yeah, I I can relate to lots of it too. I think I grew up with a kind of script message from childhood that my my sadness or my fear or or whatever it was not welcome. We needed to just like get distracted. That was your medicine, yeah. And and everybody just kind of functioned on. Maybe we can come back to the kind of societal pathology behind that. But this this idea that you you you numbed yourself from those memories, I I did that for my mum passed when I was you know 21, and I find it still quite hard to access those kind of visceral memories. Um and I think it’s cause like there have been moments they get kind of charmed out by a talented therapist or the right piece of music. But did you manage to did it did it resurface for you? Did you manage to reconnect to to that?

BJ Miller: 15:20
Yeah, yeah. And thank you for that example, Kenny, and such great language. Recharmed by yeah, something exactly it’s like uh something like conjured or something needs to be pulled up and out of this sort of a vague, abyssy stew of feelings. And yeah, so so with time, I watched myself, I could see myself because I if we were talking back then, you would recognize me back then. It’s not like I I was very interested in the hum full human experience, including the emotional one. I I just was laboring under the sense that this is what I should be doing, and I didn’t know how to do it otherwise. There was no, I had access to a therapist, and that was helpful, but that was in the language of pathology and psychology, and there was no there wasn’t, it was a little bit threatbare in terms of the visceral experience. But anyway, to your point, and so I I would have held up my hand saying, hey, I’m one of those guys that’s interested in feelings. I I, you know, and of course sadness isn’t an enemy. I would say all those things, but if you watch my behavior to myself with myself and others, I was in shades of gray of playing into this sort of sidestep of feelings for all the reasons we’ve said. So, and I got so I could see how by my late 20s, this may be an amalgam of experiences of loss and practicing medicine certainly didn’t help. I was going farther and farther into a numbed-out state where I couldn’t access uh feelings about my sister or memories of her. I couldn’t access all sorts of things. I was starting to see, I was really I was starting to get the clue that I was pretty blocked and and against my will at this point. It’s not like I could just say, go home, take a deep breath, realize I’m safe, and turn on the emotions. They just I couldn’t find them. And even I had them, I was so at the receiving end of them in some undifferentiated. See, I was just being whipped around in a way that I couldn’t even experience what I was experiencing consciously. I was just moody, kind of cut off. And I knew that’s how I didn’t want to be. So then I engaged in more performance. I knew I wanted to be a warm person, a nice person. So I would do those things out of memory, muscle memory, and habit, but I was increasingly not present in my own experience. And um, and that has fallout fallout for me, of course, personally, but also your relationships begin to feel it. If you’re not relationship is an active, dynamic thing, whether you’re relating to a dog or a best friend or a stranger or yourself, it is a dynamic, engaged process inherently, if you’re if if you want to really be there. So, anyway, all these cues and clues are coming in. And meanwhile, I’m functioning as a hospice and palliative care physician, you know, talking to people about things like grief in a cancer center, you know, all the time. But so it tells you one thing about the sort of the medical model and how it makes space or doesn’t for this stuff, even if you’re sensitive and want to be dealing with it, it’s just not much there. Sort of a desert. So and then so I’m sitting with patient after patient, one way or another for months and years. And I, you know, as it goes, of course, you know, I’m supposed to be doctoring them. But as it happens, they’re doctoring me, of course. And that’s that’s good, that’s nothing but good news. And one of the ways I got doctored by my patients was seeing people grieve, people wail,

BJ Miller: 18:55
the tears flying out of their face, and them not corking it, you know, one way or another, letting themselves emote, and even in this deep heaving cries and not didn’t look comfortable, but you could see also the relief in their eye, the you could feel how they were touching this person that they still loved and had access to. And I just got really curious and even a little jealous of my patients. Like, how are you doing this? I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t cry if I wanted to. I couldn’t even get to so the my patients were the ones who were showing me, like, a that you can have these feelings and let them out, be with them. And what it said that it’s some sort of package deal that with those feelings, first of all, the feeling, the hard stuff doesn’t stick around forever. These are not permanent states, big, big important point. And secondly, I got to see, like I say, I’m repeating myself, but I got to feel how connected they were to themselves and to this thing or person that they lost. And I was like, okay, I’m I gotta I gotta revisit that, I gotta learn some new tricks here. So that that’s in my 30s, and then ever since then has begun began an apprenticeship with grief one way and another, my own and other people’s. And I have come to see it, well, see grief everywhere. What I really think I see is unrecognized grief, unacknowledged grief, and then it does, then it starts creating other problems, and we can talk about that. But let me shut up for a second.

Kenny Primrose: 20:25
Please don’t, it’s absolutely fascinating. This this kind of portal you get into your own grief through watching other people grieve. You bring to mind a line from C.S. Lewis, and I might badly paraphrase it, but he said, I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief. And I think you which I think is a beautifully astute line, and he he says something similar to what you said in your book, the grief masquerades.

BJ Miller: 20:55
Yeah.

Kenny Primrose: 20:55
And presumably there are some masks that feel authentic and helpful, and other masks which are not doing anyone any favors. Can you speak into that?

BJ Miller: 21:06
For sure. Yeah, can you? It’s such a good point. Well, and also want to make sure I circle back to your last question, to and we can talk about it more, but I want to make sure that the listeners know that grief is not on this sort of linear time horizon. We talk about six months or a year of grief. Don’t be too seduced by that. It’s not on a timeline. And many, many years after my sister’s death, when I finally came around to the wisdom of grief and actually daring to feel the stuff, I did get to feel reconnected to my sister in new ways. So it in some ways I want to make it make the message it’s it’s never too late. The connections are subtle. I don’t make too much of them, but I feel connected to Lisa in ways I did not have access to before. And that was many years down the road that I was able to circle back. So I I definitely want to make that point here. We can talk more about it. To your uh uh other question. So yeah, grief is you know, what’s the difference between grief, sorrow, depression? Ah, you know, they all smell a lot alike, and depending on what lens you’re pulling, looking through a medical one, psychopathology one, or spiritual one, etc. So um I I I can’t tell you really, there are not a lot of really very firm lines between these emotional states. That’s one point. But grief is not like you know, it’s like an altered state, essentially. Like as I say in my book, when we were lowering Lisa’s casket into the ground, I started like I was such a odd experience and so surreal that I started like sort of laughing, like a cackling laugh came out of my face, and it was so I was so freaked out by my own, like, what the hell was that? What was it even laugh? It was just a weird, laughy kind of sound at the absurdity of everything. And and and I was very embarrassed by it, but I’ve come to realize that was grief. You know, I it it it it’s an inherently subjective state, and how any one of us experiences grief, anyone else saying you should feel this way and not that way, just throw me out the window and everything. It just it’s really you’ve got to just go with the feeling itself in your version of it. And there are moments where sure you can follow Elizabeth Kuber-Ross’s teachings around sort of the stages of grief, you know, bargaining, anger, etc. Those those those are in there. You could you can identify those. You can identify a zillion other ones too. So to your point, like the uh it has a lot of proxies, it doesn’t always show up as recognizable as just plain sorrow. It can be laughter at weird moments, lightness when everything else feels heavy, or just a strange heaviness where everyone else is light, altered the force that moves through you and morphs. And and I think to T. S. Elliott’s wisdom there is not just interesting, grief has all these proxies like anger, for example. It’s not just a note of intrigue. If we don’t really get to know these feelings, then you’re at the receiving end of something else. So if you if you mistake your grief for your your for anger, if you are just acting on that intense anger feeling, well, you might lash out at others, you might blame people for something, you might look for cause and effect, you might make meaning around that anger that is actually just totally wrong. You know, our feelings, our thoughts, they’re not necessarily so linked up with the truth in any one moment. They just think, you know, you have to interpret them. So if you’re not really acutely aware of how grief can work, and if you’re not interested to look at the nature of your own feeling, not in some eggheady intellectual way, intellectualizing your feelings, I don’t recommend it. It’s a great way to not feel your feelings again. But I do think knowing these feelings helps you see what’s actually

BJ Miller: 25:25
happening. And then this is the public service thing of why I think re these days would be so helpful. Like I think a lot of our politics right now, um, and in the sort of foul divisive nature of it, I would bet all my money that if you could unwind all of this and get to some core place that that out of which all this our current time sprung, I think you would find a lot of sad, mostly boys, little boys who lost something and didn’t have the space or the language to grieve it. And did that again and again and again, got scarred down, misread their feelings. Anger, for example, lights up and they have it’s such an intense feeling. Well, they gotta have be anger at something, so they start scapegoating, and away we go. So, anyway, let me pause there.

Kenny Primrose: 26:25
It’s such a good point, a really important one to pause on. I read an essay called the Grief to Grievance Pipeline, and it was talking about exactly this. So, an example could be where I live in the northeast of England, you’ve got all these closed coal mines, and when they close, you know, environmentalists were dancing on top of the closures think this is wonderful. There was no space to grieve the livelihoods and the communities that were kind of gutted through it, and those same communities are where you’ll find quite a lot of scapegoating and xenophobia and like grievance pointed towards outsiders as if that’s like the reason that this all happened, and it feels like uh a good example of unprocessed grief. Amen, Kenny.

BJ Miller: 27:12
Oh, totally. I mean, I you know, I completely believe that. And boy, interesting to note the word grievance. Being in there. Yeah. No, I I think there’s and if this isn’t actually the whole enchilada, it’s certainly a piece of it. But this is where I begin. I think it’s grief and us re-engaging with this ancient force of being alive, for one, will help us actually really feel alive. And for two, will help us sort of unpack some of our wayward meaning-making efforts, the blame, the scapegoating, the externalizing, the otherizing, et cetera. All this is fallout from us trying to keep hard, unpleasant feelings away. Um, and so one way or another, we’ve got to come around to learning how to feel these feelings and pause before acting on them as though they’re some fact, that anger two mentions, et cetera. So yeah, I couldn’t believe this more strongly.

Kenny Primrose: 28:15
You’re listening to The Examined Life with me, Kenny Primrose. Today, in conversation with BJ Miller. Just taking a brief pause from the conversation to say that if you are enjoying this conversation, then you might also enjoy receiving the newsletter and updates from this examined life on Substack and checking out previous episodes. The simplest way of supporting the show is to share the examined life with someone who you think might enjoy it, and to leave a review on Apple, which will help others to find the show. That’s my plug. I’m now going to return you to my conversation with BJ Miller. The words grief I looked

Kenny Primrose: 28:55
up today, I thought I wonder what the etymology is. It comes from gravis the Greek, you know. I guess you get gravity from its like weight, but it feels as if, at least implicitly in what you’re saying, that grief doesn’t only take away. There’s some kind of something generative about it. You know, Rumi said the the wounds are where the light gets in. I think partly we run away from grief because we’re scared of being annihilated by it.

BJ Miller: 29:20
Isn’t it?

Kenny Primrose: 29:22
But there might be something life-giving in moving towards it.

BJ Miller: 29:27
Absolutely. So, Leah, let’s keep going with this. So uh one, so so far we’ve talked about like grief being an important voice force to connect us to people and things we’ve lost and to ourselves with the feelings of loss. So that connecting force, huge. If we live in a world everyone feels disenfranchised, disconnected, lonely, et cetera. Well, this might be a really important sort of conduit to reconnect. So that’s that’s in here. Um, we’ve also talked about it a little bit, touched on it as sort of a harm reduction effort, because if you don’t know you’re grieving and you’re just at the receiving end of your own feelings, and you know, you could follow, you could take your own bait and get yourself really angry at the wrong thing or the wrong person. So, in some ways, there’s the public service here of grieving would be so that we sort of stop the hemorrhage and you know, this phrase hurt people, hurt people. Like, yeah, like okay, if we realize that we’re the source in some level, we are hurt, then tend to that, tend to that wound and before you start externalizing and hurting other people. Um, so there’s a that’s so the sort of harm reduction piece, I think, is really important. Now you’re pointing us to something else, which is this um that grief can be this very beautiful thing, and it kind of touches on the connected aspect of it. So so, yes, there are those hard feelings of loss, but if you really let yourself be with that loss, you begin to see how amazing it is that you’re alive at all to have experienced loving something or someone so much that they’re lost is agon, that the loss of that person or whatever is agonizing. It it’s tricky, but it does tell you how alive you are and how amazing it is that we get to feel these love connections at all, and that they’re so powerful that that they hurt when they end or seem to end. So, so it can, if you let it, if you keep rolling with the feeling, it will tell you that you are very much alive and that that life, by virtue of learning how to lose things, you realize it is precious, it doesn’t stick around forever as such. So it can help as a quickening force, it can kind of wake you up to your aliveness. Um, it can also help you experience hard feelings and build your capacity to be with hard things. And a lot of things in life are hard, including lots of pain of various kinds. So it can build your capacity to have a much richer access to the to feelings of being alive, to be alive. And also when you acknowledge what you’ve lost, you also that’s a way of honoring it. And when others see you honor that loss, they’re more likely to feel okay with it. It sort of builds on itself, they’ll feel okay with their losses. They’ll also, like as a doctor, if I signal to my pay, if if one patient sees how moved I was by the loss of another patient, it sends a signal to them when it’s their turn to go, they know that their doctor actually cares about them so much that he’s not afraid to shed a tear uh about losing, that that person mattered. So it signals this mattering to anyone watching, which is its own powerful course. And then maybe lastly, by showing you you know what you have lost and acknowledging that you’re still here, it has this way of pointing you back to all that you still have. Yes, what you’ve lost, but as a dark and light kind of shadow, sort of form and emptiness, you get to also see all that you still have. And that primes you to appreciate what you still have while you still have it, which is so much of the game of life for me. Like all this work, really, I think, in some ways, for two for two things. One is can I learn to love reality and and and realize my place in generating it? Can I be okay with what actually is? Can I get there? Can I really love life? Not love life if it absent this thing or that thing, or if you know if I can avoid this feeling or that you know no, life becomes much more, much bigger than just avoiding pain. So, and then I’ll just say lastly, Kenny does it and let’s open up Michael’s just to say can I come to appreciate all that I have while I still have it? I’m really good at appreciating things right when I’m about to lose them or I have lost them. That contrast helps me appreciate, but can I, can I, do I need to have the loss to love who I love? Do I need to lose them before I realize how much I love them? And that appreciation, I think, is so much the point of all this. And if you act from that appreciation of life, including its sorrows, then you’re cooking with gas, and you’re in a whole other place, and kindness becomes possible to yourself and others in new ways, and feeling all the connections among us in new ways becomes possible, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a sort of a virtuous circle opens up. So now, anyway, Kenny, thank you.

Kenny Primrose: 35:00
Thank you. That was so beautifully poo. And my experience is very much that when you deny the hard stuff, all the other stuff is denied as well. You get that, yeah. And it makes you very present, right? Grief seems like but partly because you’re not running away, I suppose. And a lot of the time you’re not grieving, it’s because you’re running away looking for distraction and you know the next thing. Yeah, I remember oh, sorry, carry on.

BJ Miller: 35:28
No, I was just gonna say that’s such a huge point. When do you realize how much work each of us is doing every day to keep all this hard stuff at bay? It’s a lot of work. Like another thing that happens is life just you can ease into it. Life doesn’t like it, it’s not that life gets easy, but you learn how to hold life and easy with more ease. And so things can feel lighter, and you’re not this burdened, and you’re not so adding to save a lot of energy by putting it elsewhere besides resisting reality.

Kenny Primrose: 35:58
So it’s a huge point, and it’s something that you can be trained into, right? Once I’ve been through some of those oscillations of grief, I’ve moved into it, I can feel the feels, move through it. I’ll laugh

Kenny Primrose: 36:10
again, you know, that will happen, but I’m crying right now. Yes. I mean, I think of this a long time ago, I was very young when Princess Diana died. Do you remember? Did that that make waves over in the States? Yeah, it did. It did. I mean, she was she was much beloved in the UK. She was a symbol, like a totem of various things, and it was interesting because there was a real kind of collective mourning. And I don’t think it was just for Diana. It was like the the cork was off, and people unplugged from their headphones and they spoke to each other in the underground. And you know, there was something kind of special that happened there. And what was quite clear is that we are in desperate need of those rituals that allowed us to have that. You know, I think of the you know the acronym weird, like Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. So like 12% of the globe do life so differently. Education, child rearing, and things like that. I’ve not read anything on death, but it seems that we do that too. So we’re we’re atomized and hyper-individualized, and we’ve instrumentalized our time for some future gain. There’s all sorts of stuff, and this came out in a really pronounced way. So my my brother was married to a Kenyan woman, and there’s a Kenyan funeral and a Scottish funeral, and the morning was so different. And I think that us Scottish people didn’t really know how to do it, and the Kenyans were kind of leading the way, and there was something about their culture that that had remembered how to do this, I think. So I mean, yeah, when you look at our fairly secularized culture, do you notice an illiteracy, if I can say that way?

BJ Miller: 37:56
It’s great, it’s very well put, Kenny. I I absolutely do. Like, you know, my it’s been my own experience. It’s a lot of people I work with, people I talk to. And then again, you once you get an eye for spotting sort of unrequited or unaddressed grief, you start seeing it all over the place. And of course, there’s our weird times, you know, 150 years ago, whatever, and for most of human history, your community would be only so big, and you would only need to be in touch with so many people, the loss of that might have befall so many people. Now, with all our connectivity, hijack that word, it’s connected and it’s not, right? So, you know, I can be aware of all sorts of death and destruction all over the planet. Any one day, my eyeball, my body might is receiving news of so much loss, so much just so much sorrow. Like we we have not figured out how to deal with sort of this grief at scale. And each of us, if you’re online, you are experiencing this scaled version all the time. And so you’ve got this double whammy, this sort of much more fodder potentially to feel about. And then, you know, it’s all happening through a screen, and at a time where our sort of weird society has been secularized and cut off from ancient rituals around grief, where society would shut down for a period, or you’d hang crepe in the window and nothing would be expected of you for months, you know, because you they’re honoring this altered state you’re in. So now, you know, you could be in intense grief and be surrounded by people who you work with, and they would might have no idea that you’re grieving. They would have no, you know. So anyway, so back to your point. It’s just we are living in a really hard time where there’s never been more need for grieving rituals, and have we, and we’ve never been more cut off from them. So we need to reconnect, re-create new rituals or or reinvest in old ones. But something needs to hold what we’re talking about. It’s very diffuse and vague, and it needs a container and needs some habits so that you don’t have to think that people can acknowledge what’s happening. Um so yeah, we need this is a call to arms for uh re-ritualizing grief in our society in ways that we can all participate in. Yeah.

Kenny Primrose: 40:24
Yeah, I sometimes think of the Jewish Shiva mourning rituals. I’m kind of jealous of just such a handrail, isn’t it?

BJ Miller: 40:30
Exactly. And you know, you don’t have to think, you know what to do. People have been doing for millennia, just you this is ancient, it tells you what you’re going through is not new. You don’t you don’t have to you you you you’ve got a sort of an autopilot for your body to engage in and to s to see and be seen. So anyway, yeah.

Kenny Primrose: 40:49
In your book, you mentioned the previous rituals where you were black or an armband or whatever, and it was this external sign of your internal state that made me think about what you’ve said previously of your injuries that so that you suddenly had a body that reflected uh kind of inner hurt or turmoil, and the that consonance this you know put aside the the pain, the anguish and the sadness. There was something helpful about that. And uh yeah, I felt like there’s a there’s an an analogue to you’re a great point, Kenny.

BJ Miller: 41:29
Yeah, that is absolutely true. I think one of the ways we get so life can be so hard as a human being is you know just communicating between two people all that’s happening, you know, and the vagaries of language and and attention, and you know, it’s just it’s really difficult to see and be seen in some faithful way. It’s the sort of gaps, so the gaps can easily open up between people, but intra-personally, gaps can open up so easily, sort of by virtue of like, you know, the way the world treats me versus how sees me versus how I see myself can be so wildly disparate. I mean, just you know, it’s to be so confusing and distracting. So, yeah, I really there’s something about externalizing the internal state. So it sets up at least the potential for a more faithful alignment of what’s actually happening and communication of what’s actually happening. So you’re you yourself know how you’re feeling, and others around you can see that too. And engage on that on that thread. So there’s a it’s uh it’s a way of uh creating alignment that is otherwise so difficult these days, I think. Um Yeah, and you have something else you said that sparked another thought for me, but anyway, back to you.

Kenny Primrose: 42:48
Yeah. Well, tell tell me if it comes back. Yeah, the the the idea of alignment and being seen authentically, it is such a deep, deep need that it’s not being met for so many people. I wonder if you think of BJ as a boy who felt kind of a bit melancholic, as you say, and then you you have your time in in Princeton and the injuries and the loss of your sister. What architecture do you wish was there for you? Or what what would you like to have said to yourself?

BJ Miller: 43:22
Well you know, I this very conversation, Kenny, you know, sanctioning, deputizing, evincing holding my greed and helping me reprogram kind of metabolize all this change, but also you know, I spent so many years in the problems of identity and kind of receiving the programming around sadness was weakness or otherwise unwelcome, you know essentially. The signals that you should be doing this better, that you’re doing it wrong, that you’re not enough. Yeah. Man, we humans, I don’t know, these days, I think a lot of us suffer from feelings like that, that we think that we’re sending ourselves these signals or we think others are sending them to us, and constantly on the hunt to do it better. And if we did it better, then I wouldn’t feel so bad. I wouldn’t really disabusing ourselves of that these hard feelings are themselves what help generate, they’re they’re connected to strength. And and and screw the strength-weakness language anyway. Like, just can you be real? Like, and watching how we just can’t help ourselves but put things in a hierarchy. Something’s got to be better and something’s got to be worse. If you want to be a winner, well, you need a loser. Like, we’re just constantly in this, like in this comparing zone. And it is it’s so back to your question, Kenny. If I’d had more conversation and sort of role modeling, like you’re doing me here, around how to hold these feelings, how to interpret them, what to do with them, what they mean, what they don’t mean, and all the freedom we have within ourselves to work with our the raw material of our feelings and our our life circumstances. Um, I feel like I could have sidestepped many years of walking in the desert cut off from my own feelings, feeling embarrassed to be sad, feeling embarrassed to be, quote, disabled. You know, of course, I learned a lot from walking around in that desert. And it helped me arrive at a new relationship with myself ultimately that was probably pretty durable. I don’t want to make the mistake in answering your question of actually then just slipperily in a slippery way playing into if only we had had this conversation, then I would have sidestepped these harder feelings. Because that’s so so much the mega point is don’t bother trying to sidestep the hard feelings. So I don’t want to accidentally play into that to see how I could have made this better. It’s such a seductive path. I know that’s not why you’re asking, but that’s how I hear myself trying to answer the question. And this is the way it’s so slippery. This self-judgment critical piece were not is wow. So but what’s your the actual nature of your question? I would have longed to have conversations like this where this would have felt just accessible and not exotic. Not necessary to sidestep my feelings, but really to help me be with them. That’s what that would have been really cool. And so I think that’s what I’m kind of trying to do in my work life now is set up structures, places, ways of thinking, languaging, programs, so that we can have safe places to fall apart with each other.

Kenny Primrose: 46:58
I love that line. And you use that to describe metal health, right? Um and the Zen hospice project that you set up. So you’re a reformer and you’d like to see changes in medicine, particularly palliative care. What are the changes you’d like to see that would create spaces to

Kenny Primrose: 47:15
fall apart?

BJ Miller: 47:16
Yeah. Well, so you’re right. I mean, so I’d love to see changes in our sort of in our health in our systems through healthcare, certainly. Healthcare, I really have a lot of antipathy towards it as a system, but it’s also true that that system saved my life. It’s also true that many amazing, devoted, dedicated people work within that system and do beautiful work within that system, but often in spite of the system, not helped by it. You know, since the late 19th century, medicine kind of took the bait that of you know that you call anything a we call illness a problem, and you go to war with that problem and you fix it and live forever. And similarly, so we’re gonna fix death, and therefore then we’ll live happily ever after, which I just couldn’t be more wrong. 150 or so years into this, we’re seeing the insistence of suffering, of death, of mortality, that maybe we’re able to get the signal that death, loss, these are parts of life. This is a meta-theme that we’ve been talking about this whole morning here. That death, loss are parts of life, sacred, therefore, parts of life, part of a whole experience, not at odds with it. Death does not rob life. You will die by because you are alive. It’s not a foreign invader. We are programmed to die. We do this by our nature. It’s in it’s in folded into this thing called life. Same with so that if we really get that signal, then can we stop being at war with reality, at war with ourselves, at war with each other for having these feelings, for getting sick, for dying? So everything we’re talking about now, I want to get that into the DNA of medicine and the healthcare system redesign itself around that fact. Uh, it would be importantly different. But so, but healthcare is one system, society, our political systems, this duality where I really think it’s a dialectic. You know, a dialectic would be so like life is a dialect, like life and death are a dialectic because it’s one thing. You can’t separate death from life, as we just said. It’s not a dual, it’s not duality, it’s a dialectic, and that’s an important distinction. So, you know, I so sorrow and happiness and joy could be a dialectic. You need each of them to have either experience, they’re not two experiences at odds with each other, as it might seem. So driving sort of dialectical thinking deeper into our our politics, the way we think about ourselves in the world, our relationship to nature. Oh my lord. So I won’t be around. I think if we just keep trying to name the mother here, the what’s underneath all of these problems per se, these constructed problems of modern society. I think if we dig deep enough, you will find fear of death at its core. And so I’m really interested in having these conversations going to this stuff, and then watching how what what unfolds as those truths get metabolized into our experience of civic life. I think the structure and systems changes will flow relatively automatically from that. If we can get underneath it all, underneath our roles, if we can touch this core thing that we’re talking about, then I think a lot gets righted automatically. That’s my hope.

Kenny Primrose: 50:59
So interesting. It’s so interesting. I was speaking for this series to Stephen Cave, the philosopher, who’s written a book on immortality and the the as you say, the fear of death being the the driving force for so much of culture. I wonder if you see your kind of priorities or your you know the work you want to do within medicine and palliative care as as almost the antithesis of Brian Johnson, you know, the or the the transhumanists who are like, don’t die. That’s the my ambition is to be death.

BJ Miller: 51:28
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You’re right. I mean, that would be interesting to spar with with those guys. I I can’t help but feel some real sympathy there too. I think it’s probably a scared, really scared little boy who is putting all this effort into avoiding this thing called death. As we’ve talked here today, I think he is setting himself up to avoid life. Um I think it’s it’s it’s going to foment an over-indexing on his on the importance of him versus the importance of life. Part of what death does for us is it puts us in proportion to the world around us and within us. You know, yes, you and I are drops in the ocean, but it would and it would be a different ocean without our little droplets. And one way or another, you and I, as we move through our life, have to come to terms with both the bigness of ourselves. Like I really matter in my experience. Like, you know, I’m a huge in my experience of being alive. And in the grand scheme, I’m a teeny teeny little thing, but I’m part of it still. So you have to be in touch with your bigness and your littless, your littleness, sort of simultaneously, maybe paradoxically. And the Brian Johnsons, not that I know him, but that kind of spastic effort at immortality. Um you know, God bless him. I wish him well. Um, I hope he really the the way through for him is, you know, maybe he advances science, but those guys, I hope they really enjoy what they’re doing along the way because they’re still gonna die. And if they have devoted themselves and hung the hat of their happiness on whether or not they’ve beat death, I’m really scared for them. Um, so but if they are actually just really relishing it, this is them living, then and they happen to maybe advance the science of living a little longer, great, fine. But I worry that the signal that they are sending to themselves and each other and the world is just further playing into this. Do anything you can to avoid this part of reality. We’re talking. That’s just a setup to avoid being really alive. That seems problem.

Kenny Primrose: 53:40
You put it so helpfully, this dialectic idea that you cannot run away from you cannot run away from death. We’ll stop. It’s a futile task, but you can’t run away from death without also running away from life. What have you found helpful

Kenny Primrose: 53:55
personally, DJ, in terms of coming to terms with your own mortality? I don’t know. Is there anything that you you know you work with dying people a lot? How do you help them come to terms with their own affinitude?

BJ Miller: 54:11
Well, uh for one is to just say from the start, lest it’s so slippery, lest I accidentally send signals to people that they should do this or that, that they should feel this or that, if they just follow these steps, then what’s waiting for them is a deathbed filled with joy and laughter and you know kumbaya. So one thing to get super clear from the start before as we answer this question is like let go that death needs to look any which way. I mean, what we’re talking about is feel it all, including the hard stuff. So I want to say for anyone listening and encourage anyone listening, like when I actually am actually at my you know horizon and and actually really finally dying, I reserve the right to freak out. Like I reserve the right to lose my mind and clutch at anything. I mean maybe I will, you know, and I think I don’t want to seduce myself. Oh, I’ve been around death, I almost died, I got this thing. No way, it’s much bigger and more mysterious than that. So, and again, we’re yes, we’re making a pitch to accept a full life, and a full life includes death, but it also includes these hard feelings. So again, success, failure, let those words lose their meaning. You know, free yourself from death as being an achievement of Jesus. We don’t need another one more accomplishment achievement thing to because well, but does that that’s a setup to feel like a failure? Right again, we’re just priming ourselves to feel like we’re failing for dying, but we didn’t do it right. Yet another thing that we didn’t do right. So sorry to go on like that, but your question’s a really good one. And I need to really bury that statement in my answer. So in terms of my own mortality, I see it as a work in progress. I see myself always remembering, forgetting, clutching, uh letting go. Ooh, you know, it’s daily, you know, life is in motion, so nothing stands still. You don’t sound like you find your balance point, you just hold it. It’s constantly trimming your sales emotionally, physically, we’re subtly and obviously you know, in this sort of dynamism all the time. So in this way, nothing’s static. Some things last longer than others, but all of it’s in motion. So therefore, you could imagine like a tight rope walker. You’re constantly making teeny little adjustments here and there, you know, sometimes big ones, to kind of hold this line, to be in your life, to be in the world, to be in your to inhabit your own experience. So every day, all day I’m working on it and letting mortality, you know, letting myself feel attached to oh my god, like this place I’ve been in southern Utah. I love it so much. This landscape is so beautiful. Um, and I can’t clutch, I can’t, I want to freeze it, and so I can experience it forever. But that is, you know, it’s sort of back to Brian Johnson’s and uh immortality, like we have movies and art to show it’s like this is Frankenstein stuff. If you try to like, you know, zombies, like we have this is what happens if you try to live forever or try to fix a moment in time and let it nothing change it. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work well. So back to your question, letting myself remember that death is all over place and it’s in me, and appreciating it as this point, this foil for for life, this reminder of its package deal. And so I’m constantly so getting right with my mortality really means me being right with reality. And do I love reality? Do I even love this sorrow that I’m feeling for telling me that I really miss this thing or this person? Like, can I really can I really live the words that you and I are kind of are playing with today? So, and in answer back to your question, you know, am I making progress? By some measure, probably certainly. I can catch myself with sort of wayward meaning making and interrupt it before I do too much damage. I can catch myself doing that sooner more quickly now. I have a little bit more access to joy, a little bit, you know. And and here’s maybe an important note. When I’ve come to see as something like what I would call well-being or or health, you know, I think a lot of people it’s like if if life is just all good and all happy and no loss, no sorrow, that’s somehow health or something. No, no, no. Like for me, health and well-being would be can I be in a place and I have equal access to sorrow, to joy, to anger, to all my feelings, not just the good stuff, not over-indexing the easy stuff. So I I chart my health as do I have easy access to like, you know, side-splitting laughter and just as much access to my tears. And by the way, I don’t. I still struggle to get to all the way to tears. I’m still working on this. I know I have feelings in me that I just can’t get at still. So it’s a work in progress, and death is part of the sculpting tool that helps sort of unearth reality and lets me feel it again and again and again. I keep practicing it one day after another.

Kenny Primrose: 59:33
It’s so helpful to hear that.

Kenny Primrose: 59:35
I I want to be respectful of your time, BJ, but the what the the one question I might end on, if that’s okay, is we we haven’t discussed the fact that you’re an askete, that you you did art history before doing medicine. And beauty is has got a lot to do with, well, it’s it’s being imbued in the language that you’ve used today. If you could kind of change one thing about the let’s say hospitals in the US thinking with uh an aesthetic eye, what would you what would you change? How would you make beauty more part of the process in in the way that we kind of see does that make sense as a question?

BJ Miller: 01:00:14
Totally does. And you know, uh yeah, you know, beauty why, you know, it’s like a sort of the height of irony that especially if you know places where we’ve had final moments like acute care hospitals, nursing homes, you a place where you might soon lose your body. Like, why do I why is it so exciting to have a body in the first place? It moves around and feels things. It is literally like it’s a sensory, it’s a sack of sensors. And so I can experience my world by virtue of having a body. I don’t, you know, spirit, consciousness, disembodied, you know, states, um, I it’s hard for me to comment on, but while I have a body, I’m glad I have a body so that I can feel things. So why with the higher height of irony, like you know, when you’re at a risk to lose this beautiful sack of sensors, that we in those very environments, we they are the most anesthetic, numbed out, sterile, etc. Uh, it’s it’s it becomes um sort of besides some ironic, it starts getting kind of sad because I think we know that feeling connected to nature, to wonder, to the stars, to a tree. Um, to beauty is a is a way of dying before we have to die. Like it’s a starvation. Beauty is at the base of any uh sort of hierarchy of needs, sort of that feeling alive. I don’t mean beauty as in something really pretty or nice looking, I mean truth incarnate. So Hegelian or philosophical definition of beauty, truth in form. You know, give me that. Like let’s like let’s be there’s an honesty to it, there’s a reverence to it, there’s an embodied piece of it, and therefore a preciousness. Give me that. And I I wholly believe that access to beauty, access to nature, access to truth is inherently therapeutic. So back to Metal Health, a company my partner Sonia and I started a few years ago, back to what we were trying to do at Zen Hospice years ago, which by the way predated me. I think I just want to be clear your comments. I didn’t start Zen Hospice, but I got to work there for a few years. But um, and now to a company called Common Denominator that we’re just beginning to start a little laboratory. We’re gonna be looking to build a place, a respite and end-of-life center to really realize this aesthetic potential as a therapeutic agent and architecture as a therapeutic agent. So we’re gonna be working on the next we are now, and hopefully it’ll be breaking ground in the next year or two.

Kenny Primrose: 01:02:53
So exciting. That’s it so beautifully put, and I couldn’t agree more. I think it was Dostoevsky who said beauty will save us. And yeah, it so much of it goes beyond what we’re able to describe, and that’s why you need it to be incarnate.

BJ Miller: 01:03:06
Exactly. Yeah.

Kenny Primrose: 01:03:08
Yep, right on. Sorry to cut you off. I just couldn’t agree with you more, Kenny. Well, likewise. BJ, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you. There’s so so many things I would have uh loved to unpack more, but what we’ve discussed has felt to me really rich and I think helpful for listeners. I hope it has been for me.

BJ Miller: 01:03:27
Well, I’m so glad, Kenny. It’s a pleasure talking with you, my friend. And and if we ever want to dip into this other stuff anytime, it’d be fun to talk again. So thank you. And thank you out there for folks listening and tuning in. I mean, this is these are shared human states. So we’re all part parse of what we’re talking about today. This is this is stuff for literally for everyone. That’s another reason I love it so much. There’s the most inclusive subject matter.

Kenny Primrose: 01:03:52
It’s so democratic, isn’t it? We’re all we’re all involved. We’re all going to the same

Kenny Primrose: 01:03:56
place. So it’s well, I really hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation with BJ Miller. Having just listened through it myself to do some edits, I’m struck again by BJ’s depth and insight. To me, I feel like he’s pointing us in the direction of growth, depth, wisdom, and becoming more present to our human condition. If you’re anything like me, this is the stuff I instinctively run away from. So here’s my takeaway from BJ’s question on grief and our conversation. Sit with the hard feelings. Allow yourself to feel the feelings, talk about them, let them show you what it is about your life that is beautiful and precious and valuable. We can do such harm to ourselves and those around us by endlessly running away from the hard stuff. The resources are there to help us in ritual and poetry and scripture and communities that remember how to grieve and embrace our human condition. They’re just buried beneath the frantic pace of modern life and its many distractions from reality. If you have enjoyed listening to the episode, if it’s given you a nudge in the right direction, the direction of growth and wisdom, then do please share it with others. Stay up to date with the podcast through the Substack This Examined Life. All relevant links will be in the show notes, as are links to BJ’s work. Thank you once again for tuning in, folks. A big thank you to PJ Miller for being my guest today. Thank you to Moby Gretis for some of the music and my brother for some of the music. Really appreciate it. And anyone who’s given me feedback, encouragement, or practical support, I deeply appreciate it. I’ll be dropping another conversation in a few weeks’ time with the wise, the witty, and the really quite wonderful Dr. Catherine Mannix. Until then, wishing you all well.

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In this conversation with psychologist and awe-research pioneer Dacher Keltner, we trace the hidden emotional architecture of meaning itself. We talk about awe—not as some rarefied experience reserved for mountaintops and sacred temples, but as a vital, everyday emotion with physiological effects and existential reach.

What emerges is a compelling diagnosis of our culture’s malaise. We’re not just distracted or tired—we’re awe-deprived, cut off from the very experiences that connect us to each other, to nature, to the sacred, and even to a coherent sense of self. In Dacher’s view, awe helps us stitch together meaning when other threads fray. It shuts down the ego’s chatter, reorients us to what matters, and—crucially—it’s within arm’s reach.

We explore how awe is not just a private feeling but a social glue, a moral motivator, and perhaps, as I suggest to Dacher, even a compass for truth—a notion he generously takes seriously. There’s also a challenge for education: to make room for the mysterious and the sacred, for the kinds of questions that don’t yield to multiple-choice answers.

Dacher Keltner: 0:00What we get an awe inspired by tells us like this is what I really care about and this is what I want to be part of in the story of my life, and that’s why awe is here is to locate us in the grand narratives of existence.

Kenny Primrose: 0:21Welcome to the first episode of the second season of the Examined Life podcast. My name is Kenny Primrose and today I’m delighted to be joined by my good friend, ian Porter, where we’ll be in conversation with the psychologist Dacher Keltner. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at UCLA Berkeley, where he teaches on positive psychology happiness, among other things and writes and researches about the emotion of awe, something he has written an excellent book about. I think this is a really fitting episode to kickstart the new season with.

Kenny Primrose: 0:53A theme that runs throughout the conversations I’ll be having this season is what does it mean to be positively maladjusted to a society where we’re often taught to value the wrong things, and I think this conversation is a great starting point for that. So if you’re interested in what it means to live a meaningful life, then I think you’ll find this conversation as compelling as I did. Please do sign up for the Examined Life newsletter, where I process my thinking, and send you all the relevant links to the episode. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did Dacher Keltner. It is a joy to be speaking with you as I did. Dacher Keltner, it is a joy to be speaking with you.

Dacher Keltner: 1:27Thanks so much for agreeing to come on the Examined Life podcast. How can I turn it down? What a great title. So, and it’s good to be with you, Kenny.

Kenny Primrose: 1:32Wonderful. Well, as you know, the theme of this project, Dacher, is to explore a question that a thinker such as yourself has been animated by or thinks that it might be a really helpful question to be asking ourselves. So I wonder whether we could just dive straight into that and explore what question you have been preoccupied by, professionally and or personally.

Dacher Keltner: 1:54Yeah, I think that you know, the question that I’ve really been intrigued with for 20 years, and in my science and then in my teaching, is how does the individual find the meaningful life? You know, in the science of happiness we differentiate between sensory pleasures you have a wonderful meal and you feel good and then you know social relationships and all the delights that those bring. And then, more recently, in the last five years, there’s been this interest in something that’s a little bit, I don’t want to say deeper, but more complicated which is meaning, right, which is what really matters to me, what really brings whatever I’m doing in my life purpose, and then how does it fit in a kind of a larger narrative of life, right? And so I have been just thinking about and seeking to study and bring to our public discourse how we find meaning in life.

Kenny Primrose: 2:53Gosh, what a wonderful question. You mentioned the kind of academic study of happiness of which you are part, but it’s a question that sounds as much personal as it is professional. Is that right?

Dacher Keltner: 3:05Yeah, you know, I mean, it’s interesting when you, when you look at happiness and this vast scientific terrain and terrain and inquiry across all kinds of different disciplines we’ve been thinking about what makes us happy for a long time and you know you can find the people who love delight and aesthetic pleasure and sensory pleasure, right, you can find the people who really thrive in, you know, achievement or success. And you find people who love social relationships. And then there’s this little kind of individual that really is intrigued by meaning and obsessed with meaning. And I’m one of those people.

Dacher Keltner: 3:39You know I love good food and I love relationships and like, but I’ve always, since I was a little kid, like what’s, what’s the whole point of this, you know, and and that turns out to be a big question in this new literature on wellbeing and and for me personally, you know it was really it’s. You know I grew up without religion, I grew up in a very, almost countercultural type of context raised by, you know, kind of activist parents, artists, and my mom taught literature and they were really like, you know, it’s great to feel pleasure, it’s great to have the most wonderful relationships, but really always be wondering what’s the point of your life, and so it is indeed, I’m embarrassed to say say, a personal inquiry as well may I ask like, so this, there’s so much I’d like to go into and I’m I’m 100 with you in terms of this kind of the question that animates me what does it mean to have a meaningful life?

Kenny Primrose: 4:37but I suppose we could have meaning with a, with a big m, like there is a meaning to life and we are to discover it, or the kind of slightly more postmodern meaning is something we create in our lives. Are you approaching it kind of from both or one angle.

Dacher Keltner: 4:52Yeah, I think both are true, right.

Dacher Keltner: 4:54I think that you know, in some sense, evolution and the history of life on Earth has brought to the human species realms of meaning that we can find our purpose in right.

Dacher Keltner: 5:06Our relationship to the natural world is a fundamental source of almost spiritual meaning for humans around the world Our relationship to music, our relationship to visual art, our relationship to morality and the moral beauty of other people in all right, those things are realms that have been crafted or shaped by evolution, that we find in our, in our live lives, that bring us meaning and then, at the same time, so much of it is constructed in cultures and individuals, given our family histories and our political moment in history where, you know, I am a child, as a personal example of the late 60s, raised in a radical place, laurel Canyon, by two early counterculture parents, and I had given that history in that moment and what they taught me in the words and the concepts I had to find meaning in art and in, you know, forms of activism and going into prisons to see what is the human character.

Dacher Keltner: 6:07So it’s, both are true and that’s what’s. You know, I really shy away from these Manichaean debates. It’s either constructed or it’s biological. Both are rich, and true and inform us how we can find what matters to us.

Kenny Primrose: 6:25It feels like this question of meaning is especially pertinent right now. I’ve become aware of various people John Vervaeke or Jonathan Rousen talking about a meaning crisis. We’re in a kind of crisis of meaning at the moment. Does that? Kind of occur to you as well Is that kind of occur to you as well, is that?

Dacher Keltner: 6:50Oh, you know, I. You know, if you just take the United States and perhaps the UK and Western Europe, look like this you know, just historic rise. And I teach young people, right, who are on their quest for meaning. I’ve taught them for 33 years. You know I have 660 Berkeley students in my happiness class really pursuing what is meaningful to them.

Dacher Keltner: 7:10And you know, there are all these forces that have led to a meaning crisis, right, the de-churching of young people. They’re moving away from ritual and dogma, if you will, for a lot of good reasons, but they don’t have that. The breakdown of intergenerational contact and community, the. You know, the. I think one of the real shortcomings of the new technologies, the smartphones and digital platforms, is they’re. They’re flat, they. They are flat temporally. They only engage us in the present moment. They are flat temporally. They only engage us in the present moment, self-focus, where we’ve lost sight of the deeper meaning to our lives and, as a result, the meaning crisis is real.

Dacher Keltner: 7:52You know, in the United States, the opioid crisis is a crisis of meaning, you know, and that’s one of the central killers of young people today. That’s one of the central killers of young people. Today, the suicide crisis, which is at historic highs for young people, is a crisis of meaning. Depression historic highs in the United States is a crisis of meaning Polarization. You know, like why a person would look at Trump and think like, this guy is a reasonable steward of a democracy. That’s a crisis of meaning, right, we’ve lost the big narratives of our lives and we’ve lost our pathway to what we find meaningful. And it’s interesting, you know, just to like the crisis in America. You know people are no longer enrolling in courses of the humanities literature, history, art, history. I asked my undergrads today, why would the Holocaust have ever occurred? And they’re like, remind me of what that is. So we have a lot of work to do to restore meaning.

Kenny Primrose: 9:03It feels. Here too, the humanities are declining and as, as our cultures become, I think, more technological, um, it’s, it’s not an accident, it’s not just like the hand of society. It’s actually transforming the way that we, uh, we interact with the world and attend to it. Yeah, um, but as it’s become more instrumental and utilitarian as a way of looking at life, it stripped us of the relationships that we did have with the natural world, with one another, with meaningful work and so on. And yeah, as you say, that question has sharp teeth, like where do I find meaning when that’s all gone? How do I find my way back?

Dacher Keltner: 9:46Yeah, you know, I I really feel we’re at this, this apex of the crisis of individualism in some sense, and there are remarkable strengths to the historic rise of individualism.

Dacher Keltner: 10:00You know, beginning, some would say, in the age of enlightenment.

Dacher Keltner: 10:03Individual rights you know, beginning, some would say, in the age of enlightenment individual rights, the freedoms we have to think what we want, to feel, what we want, you know, to have the identity that we would like to.

Dacher Keltner: 10:13That feels right, you know, and it’s a remarkable development in human history and at the same time it has separated us from people and from the natural world. It has built into us, thank you for, you know, a utilitarian, instrumental, transactional view of life of you know, it’s all fungible, we can buy it and trade it, you know, and it has blinded us to these deep truths, like we’re all part of this interconnected social system and ecosystem, that there are things that you can’t buy, you know, and that we are also collective and not separate from each other in profound ways that science is showing. So I hope these meaning crises will get us back to some of those complementary truths, to who we are, that we’re collective, we’re storytellers, there are things that are sacred, the idea that I think in the academy we challenge the idea oh, the sacred is just constructed, but no, there are pretty deep things that are sacred around the world and I think we need to remind ourselves of these deep tendencies we have.

Kenny Primrose: 11:24And I think we need to remind ourselves of these deep tendencies we have. I’ve heard voices like yours, but there are other ones too. Whether you’re talking about, I suppose, michael Sandel and the morality of markets, or what the Harvard flourishing project has come out with, the good life, there are like signs catching up with grandma right. These are things that generations ago, you were told yeah, you need to kind of be part of ritual, part of collective society, part of yeah, there’s intrinsic worth to things that you don’t have a price tag on.

Kenny Primrose: 11:58And now people like yourself are discovering the kind of neurophysiology, of why that actually, why that works out.

Dacher Keltner: 12:07Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, this stuff is old, you know. Like you know, finding your meaning meaning in music, which, which people do around the world, that’s old, I mean, that’s music is 80,000 years old. The archeological records suggest we sing similar songs around the world to our children, that’s old. Finding meaning in visual patterns and spiritual tendencies, all deep human universals that are old, but we’ve lost sight of them In this individualistic, globalized world. We don’t practice the rituals, we don’t listen to music intentionally, we really are deeply disconnected from nature, which is remarkable.

Dacher Keltner: 12:53And when you think about what we were like a couple, three, 400 years ago, yeah, so I am proud to be the scientist who says grandma was right. And, by the way, so were those indigenous peoples around the world. They’ve been writing about meaning and transcendence and a different sense of self and consciousness, people like Dr Uriah Salidwin. So you know that, in part, science reminds us of the enduring truths, the perennial truths. But I will say, you know, the neurophysiology really matters, right, that awe, as one example, shuts down parts of the brain that are associated with rumination and self-focus, activates the vagus nerve and branches of your immune system that are healthy, right? So that’s important knowledge for us today, as we confront this crisis of meaning yeah, it’s fascinating and I’d love to dig into that.

Kenny Primrose: 13:51Yeah, I think ian. Did you have a question? I feel like you had a question on that.

Ian Porter: 13:55Yes, um, I was just curious. Are there, then, universal elements of meaning to to us all, or is there a universal, like balance, to be to be found, that you almost I think Kenny alluded to it earlier a sort of a fundamental truth that we should all be sort of seeking, or is it going to be different for everybody? How would you characterize it?

Dacher Keltner: 14:25Only the hardest question in social science.

Dacher Keltner: 14:29Outside of and next is what is consciousness. So thank you. Yeah, you know I’ve struggled with this one for 25 years and you know you take meaning and you know my sense is evolution. You know our hominid evolution, this incredible symbolic brain that we have, that’s evolving, gives us kind of the structures that are universal right. So we are a storytelling species and that’s how we understand things. It emerged linguists, think, with you know, when we started to gather around fires and cook meat and build tools and represent our natural world in stories. And that’s a structure to meaning of like. Where am I in this story of my culture, my family, my identity, my people, and that is human, universal right. And then there are people who have looked at the content of stories. You know, people looking at folklore and the like, who say you know there are 2630 universal human themes that make their way into stories, right, you know revenge and injustice and murder and family dynamics and power and generosity and saintliness, and I think that those would be universal.

Dacher Keltner: 15:50Susan Langer, the great music philosopher, incredible, thinking about what she wrote about significant life themes that make their way into the musics around the world. Right Of I’m falling in love, I’m connecting to the divine. I am grappling with war and death. Those are universals. But then God it, you know it. Just it varies so much around the world about what you think death is where you think you go, what you consider to be. You know a family structure, and so I think both are always at play in you know again, this great dynamic of what evolution gives us and it’s universal and then what culture does to transform it in mysterious ways. So you know, it’s so, that’s you know always. The social scientist says both are true. Apologize.

Kenny Primrose: 16:48So you mentioned awe as like one of the kind of, I suppose, scientific. You made a scientific study of awe lenses through which you understand meaning. Can you say a bit more about that? So you’ve got a definition of awe. You’ve got the kind of the wonders of awe in your great new book. I wonder if I could hand it to you to explain what you mean by awe.

Dacher Keltner: 17:15Yeah, you know, I’ve been studying the, you know the kind of transcendent emotions for some time in my career that you know Darwin wrote about the field, ignored a lot of inquiry into them right now. And they, you know the moral emotions, as Jonathan Haidt has said very rightly so, and they’re incredible, right, you know, compassion is just the emotion that gets you to take care of harm, and that’s a deep human need and universal of harm, and that’s a deep human need and universal Gratitude is where you like, recognize how you’re connected to friends and in trading relationships and giving to each other. And then I stumbled into the study of awe, which you know, this incredible emotion that we feel when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand, and it’s so striking. We have an emotion that’s about mystery, you know, and that animates us to figure mysteries out. We can chart the physiology of awe. That helps define it, you know, deactivates the default mode network in the brain, which is part of self-ego representation, produces tears, which are part of the parasympathetic nervous systems, opening of the body to other people, elevates the activation of the vagus nerve, gives you those goosebumps and chills which are incredible, pretty universal, right. So awe has these sensations, this meaning to it. And, as you said, kenny, you know we feel it in response to, in some sense, what, like Einstein said, like what is just the most human stuff of existence Art, music, spirituality, moral beauty of other people, moving with others, big ideas, life and death, right, these wonders of life that I write about in this book, awe that are universal sources of awe.

Dacher Keltner: 19:03And then to the theme of our conversation. I was like our lab was grappling with, like what’s the point of awe? You know why? And one thing it does is it really makes us better citizens of communities. We share, we cooperate. You know, if you go out and you look at the sky for a minute or two and take in a sunset, or these wonderful trees nearby on the Berkeley campus and elsewhere, it makes you share and cooperate and like. But what it really does for the mind is that it tells you what is most meaningful to you, right, it says to you what we get. An awe inspired by tells us like this is what I really care about and this is what I want to be part of in the story of my life, and that’s why Oz here is to locate us in the grand narratives of existence.

Kenny Primrose: 19:57It’s such an uplifting thing to study and to have as part of our physiology. It’s human beings in their element, being kind of the most human, like fish and water. But I well put I wonder if, um, you know, as you say, as you say, it kind of reveals what you value, and often it kind of reverses what you value.

Kenny Primrose: 20:21So if you have this hierarchy and often like the instrumental, utilitarian and pleasure tend to be at the top, uh and, and these days in our culture, like the sacred and the holy is is pretty low down and that is kind of an interconnectedness is right there at the top and connection to maybe to divine, to nature and so on at the top, when you have all experiences, I I wonder, and that like you’ve got the evolutionary kind of um pragmatic function, yeah, but, is it also a compass for truth in some sense, like it’s true that we’re interconnected, it’s true that you know the, the sense you have in experiencing awe is you’re, you’re resonating with something that is just true in the fabric of the universe and being human.

Kenny Primrose: 21:10But maybe I’m too imposing something too grand on this visual.

Dacher Keltner: 21:16I don’t know what’s your response to that god, kenny, you know I mean, of all the conversations I’ve had with about awe, that’s the first time somebody’s raised that possibility. It’s such a great idea, thank you. You know compass for truth, and certainly you know William James when he was writing about religious awe or mystical awe, and you know a lot of the new interest in psychedelics builds upon James’s discoveries that a core piece to a spiritual experience, be it meditating or in a spiritual contemplative context or psychedelics, is what James called the noetic dimension to that experience. Like this is true, you know, I know this is a fundamental quality of reality and I think you’re right. But I’ll just, you know, complicate things a little bit, which is that you know, and again borrowing from your wonderful summary, which is, I think, that evolution built into us very sensibly a lot of mechanisms that are about self-interest and self-preservation.

Dacher Keltner: 22:21You know, do I get rewards here? Am I gaining strategic advantage? Do I have elevated status compared to my friends, so I have more reproductive opportunities? That’s self-interest, utilitarianism at its raw foundation. But we became this collective species which needed us to recognize those truths too, that we are part of a collective, we are part of a culture, we share things with other people. I have a collective sense of self, and that’s what all, I think, all makes us realize, and we’ve lost sight of this that there are these truths. Like I have a collective mind, my physiology is linked up with other people all the time, right, we all share in this shared consciousness that culture gives us, and so is awe, a compass for truth. I think it’s a compass that shines a light on these truths of our collective consciousness. So it’s a little bit constrained.

Kenny Primrose: 23:26That’s absolutely fair and very, very scientific uh, I sorry I was.

Dacher Keltner: 23:29I was hoping I could go to your lofty reaches, but next time I am.

Kenny Primrose: 23:33You know, I’ve like, uh any excuse to to try and find a uh, a north star um life. You know, uh, I was looking at james’s varieties religious experience and it seems like all is like. So he’s talking about religious all, but it maps on to the others passive, transient, ineffable, um, yeah, they just kind of resonate what you’re mentioned this in the email. I think, um, what your uh, your insights and your work really seem to chime with to me is Ian McGilchrist’s work on how the let the right hemisphere attend to the world. Are you kind of familiar with that and is it something that you’d recognize?

Dacher Keltner: 24:14yeah, you know, I know that hemispheric is. You know symmetrical division of labor in the mind. You know Richie Davidson worked on it for a long time. I don’t know what the status of it is and I know McGill-Chris’s arguments and I think he’s on to something and that’s the kind of insight we need in this search. For you know, these higher order forms of meaning in the psychedelic literature, where you know the truths, you believe in panpsychism and collective consciousness, right, and that’s I think there’s going to be. I think that’s going to be verified, if you will, in the study of psychedelics.

Dacher Keltner: 24:53And awe is there are big chunks of the brain that give you oceanic feelings of connectivity, like the oxytocin network in the periaqueductal gray and other regions. There are chunks of your cortex that represent and other regions of the brain that represent like, wow, I no longer feel like there are these boundaries between me and other people. We’re all part of some organism, right, and those are fundamental truths, whether it’s in the right versus left hemisphere. That’s a controversial thesis that really grouchy neuroscientists probably wouldn’t endorse, but I think they’ll go Chris’s right in spirit and I think that’s one of the great frontiers of inquiry. Is this oceanic brain that emerges with awe and psychedelics and dance and music and meditation, and we just don’t know what those regions are. And great theorists like McGilchrist point us. They say go get him. He may be wrong whether it’s right or left hemisphere, but I think he’s right in the in the claim.

Kenny Primrose: 25:57Yeah, in terms of it, it changes the kind of attention you pay to the world. If you have the oh my God his left hemispheres, utilitarian instrumentals, doesn’t get context, doesn’t get relationships, but that all mine, that’s, it’s front and center for all of that interconnection and commuting with the divine and so on.

Ian Porter: 26:16Is it too simplistic to just map sort of individualistic utilitarian thoughts to the left of the brain and all to the right? Is there sort of evidence in support of that?

Dacher Keltner: 26:31It sounds very a lovely model.

Ian Porter: 26:34It’s easy for everyone to understand.

Dacher Keltner: 26:37But yeah, I well, you know, I think it’s that there’s a whole. You know I’m always in the science world and there are deep skepticisms about right, left hemisphere. I mean, those are massive chunks of the brain, right, you know, 40 billion neurons in each side, so we got to have more specificity, uh. But I think I think an ambitious, provocative young neuroscientist could probably show that’s the case, that you know, utilitarian, narrow self-interest, reward driven behavior probably is in the left parts of the cortex. More oceanic, hyper-connected stuff is in the right, and you know you need the right tasks and measures. But that would really shake the field up and I think there’s possibility to it.

Kenny Primrose: 27:22So ah, it’s a. It’s a very interesting frontier of science, huh yeah, I agree um, would you say that? So we’ve talked briefly really about how maybe individualism kind of, maybe since Reformation and Enlightenment, we have perhaps decreased our exposure to experiences of awe. Would you say that we are more awe-deprived than we were before, and this is perhaps connected to the meaning crisis, if we can bring it back around to that. So I guess two questions there is yeah, do you see?

Kenny Primrose: 28:00us as more all deprived and like what. The hallmark of that and yeah is that is that connected to this, this meaning crisis that you see in the opium crisis, suicide crisis and so on.

Dacher Keltner: 28:13What a terrific question. Yeah, you know, in some sense the understanding is that four or five hundred years ago we lived in these communities. They were tighter, we weren’t traveling, you know, there were smaller communities organized by religion and rituals and social practices and and, and there was a lot of that deep shared. All right, there are a lot of downsides, obviously, to community life and we have to remember they’re usually not very good for women and in often, you know, that kind of community life there are often pretty rigid hierarchies and dogmas and the like, and we’ve had this sort of move away from that to our individualistic era and I think so in some sense. What we yearn for are those structures and Alain de Botton and Boyer and Caspar Turk, kyle, coming out of Harvard Divinity School and others are saying like let’s just, let’s return to our lives the strengths of of community that aren’t necessarily judgmental or sexist or patriarchal, right of of rituals and music and shared eating and narrative and opportunities for awe.

Dacher Keltner: 29:40The data are clear, which I referred to, that says we are awe-deprived that young people really not, they don’t. 40% of Americans don’t have somebody, a role model who inspires them, which is just. You know we need those people. You know we are not getting out in nature like we used to get out in nature, so that’s worrisome. You know, we listen to music much more differently than we did 100 years ago or 40 years ago, when I was young. We don’t listen to it together, we listen to it in a fragmented way.

Dacher Keltner: 30:16So we’ve lost a lot of opportunities for awe. Education has become so narrow. It’s amazing what young people learn. It’s better than at any time in human history. But they don’t step back and think of the broader context, and that’s well-documented context and that’s well documented. So we’ve lost a lot and I think it’s why you know why we hunger for meaning and why you see things in young people today, because this is irrepressible. They’re interested in communal living. They’re challenging the institution of marriage right. They are interested in various green movements. So they’re interested in festivals. You know festivals are at historic highs because they provide awe. So it’s very much at play with this crisis of meaning is our need for awe and where we can find it.

Kenny Primrose: 31:10That’s a fascinating connection between festivals and kind of awe deprivation. I’d never thought of that connection before. Yeah, I absolutely see it. I mean one thing that comes to mind Alain de Botton and Caspar de Cullet and people like that who are trying to construct kind of, I suppose, containers for meaning, but without the metaphysics that came before from religion, and sometimes I wonder if that’s like how possible that is, to have the fruits without the roots, as it were. I mean, maybe it is and they could kind of.

Dacher Keltner: 31:48I think, kenny, you’re right to question that. There was a wonderful essay by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker on Robert Wright’s book on Buddhism, where he’s like Robert Wright. There’s a wonderful essay by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker on Robert Wright’s book on Buddhism where he’s like Robert Wright, who’s a great writer, kind of secularizes Buddhism and he takes out all the metaphysics you know of afterlives and multiple selves and transcending time and so forth. And humans love that you know. So why not allow for that as well? And I think of that you know. So why not allow for that as well? And I think, I think you know, all leads us in that direction. Uh, it led william james to it, right, and so I think we, I think you’re right to suggest we need that well, it’s.

Kenny Primrose: 32:25I mean, yeah, it’s interesting, it’s. I think the fact that I know you, the end of your book, you, you’ve got you, you know what is all for it, brings us together collectively. It’s got kind of phenomenological coherence and reveals the system we’re part of. It brings to mind, I suppose, my kind of trading in philosophy and theology. Yeah, cs Lewis has this kind of argument. Uh, yeah, cs lewis has this, this kind of argument. He says we’re, we’re born with these desires, the, the, you know, for hunger for sex, for, uh, community and so on, and there’s something to to meet them. But that, that hunger for meaning, he said well, it means we’re wired for, you know, for the divine, uh or whatever. And it’s uh, I don’t know when you, when you unweave the rainbow or kind of disenchant the world, um, how, how you find re-enchantment, um, is, is, it is, it feels like a big question yeah, yeah, and you know, and that’s why I love, uh, william j, pluralism.

Dacher Keltner: 33:34It is a big question and CS Lewis is right, we secular, rational, you know, ethics type people struggle with our urge for the divine, but it is as universal as any social tendency. Right, it is. People do it. 81% of Americans believe in the divine, and so it’s there, and I agree. I think that we need multiple conversations to allow people to approach that question.

Dacher Keltner: 34:03You know, as a reductionistic scientist, when I got into the sort of my own narrative of awe, in particular in losing my brother who passed away and wondered you know, what is his life like, what is his consciousness when his body goes classic question and I still felt him around and I had these supernatural experiences. I felt his hand on my back a couple times, you know, I heard his voice, uh, I sense him around and and you know so. Then, as a scientist, you like me, you or a secular person, you shift to a different layers of meaning, like quantum physics, and you know the quantum self and and, and that’s that’s part of this inquiry, our hunger for deeper meaning, uh, that I think we need to encourage, whatever the pathway.

Kenny Primrose: 34:55I find that very moving reading about your brother Rolf and your experience of all there. So you mentioned education and I kind of agree. I’m, maybe in a different sense, in awe of what young people are learning. There’s so much, maybe in a different sense in awe of what young people are learning there’s so much.

Kenny Primrose: 35:23But it does feel like there is very little actual awe in a school curriculum there. And, yeah, I wonder if you could do two things Maybe say what good it would do if all was part of education, and like whether you’ve got any idea of what that might look like. Um, I, I would love to be part of a curriculum which tried to engender a sense of awe.

Dacher Keltner: 35:48Yeah, you know, I, uh, I think it’s a central challenge of our times. You know there, you know there are economists, you know there’s something called the Flynn effect, which is people are getting smarter. You know, in sort of the you know kind of the rational, utilitarian scientific method. They’re better at data, they’re better at statistics, they know genetics, they know the brain, they know ecosystems, they can. You know, it’s amazing what people know and young people know.

Dacher Keltner: 36:19And at the same time, I think it’s you know, as you referred to earlier, kenny, it’s, it’s become really narrow and and process oriented and reductionistic, like, oh, I figure out algorithms to you know where input turns into output and I know the answer. And what they’ve lost is broadly a sense of mystery. And then the bigger questions that are accompanied by awe. Right, writing this book and just look and reading people’s lives, most of the great discoveries in human history are accompanied by experiences of awe religious discoveries, darwin’s discoveries of evolution, einstein, et cetera. It is the, as we’ve called it in our lab, an epistemological emotion that drives knowledge forward, and our students have lost that, and so we’ve actually created a course that brings more awe into schools, targeting like 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and you just return to the big questions, right, and remind students whatever they’re studying like what is you know, what is the system that what you’re learning about is part of.

Dacher Keltner: 37:35You might be learning baseball, like football statistics in the UK. You know well what is the system of football in the UK and think about its history. What are the origins of the phenomena that you’re considering? This comes out of Rachel Carson, which is you’re starting a little, studying a little piece of a domain of knowledge. Right, you’re studying this moment in British history. Well, let’s shift brain and think about the broader context of things to get students to reactivate awe. So let’s cross our fingers. I think we really need it.

Kenny Primrose: 38:23What would you do? Well, I mean, if I could and I try to do this with some of my students get them into nature as much as possible and understanding that they are part of nature. So we even our language suggests that we’re distinct from it right, we talk about going into nature as if we’re being apart from it. Um, so I think getting into nature uh feels to me like fundamental, fundamental, um learning to, I think, learning to listen to each other better. Uh, we’re, we’re bad at that, and what comes is a kind of lack of connection. Yeah, uh. Oh, I mean, it’s a good question I should have asked myself already no, well, you’ve hit two on the head, right.

Dacher Keltner: 39:10You know?

Kenny Primrose: 39:10nature-based education, listening, you know I mean those feel not feeling like you’re part of a machine like you’re a sausage factory of you know, like here’s some, the questions and the mystery should be more interesting than the answers and more rewarding. Um, so I said I suppose that that being kind of front and center and, as you say, I love the idea of zooming out so you have a context and you feel like you’re part of something vast, those are all ways of, yeah, sparking awe.

Dacher Keltner: 39:52Yeah, I love your emphases and it’s worth just dwelling upon it for a minute, nature listening. But you know, the word that just stayed with me through writing this book is mystery, and it’s so relevant to knowledge and education. Our topic right now, you know so much, is animated by mystery and it is the great fount of discovery, and oz is the emotion around mystery and and you know, are watching my daughters go through such an intense education these days that they just they lost the mystery you know of of biology or economic history or whatever it is, or mathematics, and and I think you’re right, that would be a, that could be a whole movement of mystery-based education I mean, I think mcgill christ, if he was here, would be like chiming in with this, because it’s when we remove things from their context, uh like looking at a cell in isolation under a microscope without this, because actually fundamentally you’re looking at a different thing.

Kenny Primrose: 40:55Isolation under a microscope without this, because actually fundamentally you’re looking at a different thing because you’re not looking at what it’s part of the way it’s interconnected. Uh, it ceases to be what it is when it’s torn from where.

Ian Porter: 41:05You know, from its context, um great connection how do practices like the modern well-being practices like meditation and gratitude, journaling, how do they relate to all, seems like you, mysteries about curiosity, and you know, journaling allows you to kind of take a step back and look at the bigger picture and you mentioned, I think, at the start of the conversation uh, or has a way of turning the rumination side of the brain off, and meditation seems like it maybe does that to you. So are there other practices that relate to, to developing a sense of awe or an openness to all?

Dacher Keltner: 41:49thank you, and you know the one of the. You know it’s so interesting how blind scientists are and people who study things like we shouldn’t have answers to your question. You know what is the relationship between meditation 2,500 years old, 3,000 years old yoga is older. And awe I mean so much of it is a way to become awestruck by our natural worlds, the world around us is a way to become awestruck by our natural worlds, the world around us, humans, life and death. Bhutanese practices get you to imagine the life cycle in the Himalayan Buddhism tradition and we just don’t know. And I think it’s gonna be.

Dacher Keltner: 42:28One of the big areas of discovery in the study of mindfulness is that there are practices that can bring about awe through mindfulness that are good for us, things like this Bhutanese practice that is being tested now of just taking people you love and imagining their life cycle from being an infant to passing away, and people feel more awe at the wonders of the life cycle and actually feel more connected to the world, nature immersion. Meditation is a medication and that’s coming in a big way that we have evolved tendencies to feel contemplative in nature. And one thing I’m really interested in that we totally forget. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been teaching mindfulness stuff for 20 years in my class, like focus on your body, feel your breath, imagine you’re eating a raisin. That’s all good, but we forgot music and visual art, like listen to music and see what your identity is revealed. So there are a lot of techniques to bring about awe and we’ve tested them scientifically. They’re great for people and I think they’re a future of that literature.

Kenny Primrose: 43:45Is your experience that? So, if you talk about like a mindful mindset and you can talk about a mindset that’s maybe primed for awe, did you in your studies when you looked primed for all? Did you in your studies when you looked at the physiology, did you notice it more in younger children? Is it something they kind of they unlearn as they get older?

Dacher Keltner: 44:05man, your question just gave me goosebumps, because which goosebumps? The physiological correlate of awe arises when we feel like we’re sharing something. You and I are sharing something that’s really important. That idea, um, yeah, you know, it’s so funny. Um, and again, this is how scientists are extraordinarily blind. Um, you know the?

Dacher Keltner: 44:31For a long time people felt like you couldn’t measure awe, you couldn, couldn’t study it. It’s the ineffable, it’s mysterious. You can measure awe in several different ways. You know there’s an awe vocalization, whoa. It’s deeply universal. So you can measure it, you can study it.

Dacher Keltner: 44:47And there are like two papers on awe in children, which is astonishing.

Dacher Keltner: 44:52We’ve done one and then another lab at the University of Chicago is working on it and there is the possibility and we’re starting to study infant baby awe that it is one of the early emerging emotions, right, uh, you know, maybe at a year where you know they, you know and, if you want proof, like there are these funny youtube videos of babies in tunnels, where a little baby in a car seat will go through.

Dacher Keltner: 45:20They go into a tunnel and they’re in pitch black and existence has stopped and again in their early minds, and then they come out of the tunnel and it’s bright and there’s mom and she’s driving and you look at their facial You’ve got to see them and their facial expressions are pure awe. They’re just like whoa. So we now have the capacity to figure out, like maybe the Buddhists and Einstein are right, like awe is a basic state of consciousness, basic Wow. That’s something vast that I can’t make sense of. There it is, and maybe we unlearn it through life. And that’s what Rachel Carson, who’s a hero in this book, the great American environmentalist, said. You know, it is our signature strength and it is an antidote to how civilization can crush us as we grow older.

Kenny Primrose: 46:19And an important reminder to return to. Yeah, maybe one of the reasons is because you’re educated out of it, like everything is flattened and reduced, and know there’s the. There are no miracles, no mysteries, no enchantment here, uh, and there’s no wonder that you, you end up an adult until you have kids, right? Yeah, you know you’ve got chapter kind of birth and death and, um, me and ian both have kids and there is that like that, that initial experience, but also that kind of continuous experience as they’re growing up and wide-eyed and you know there’s uh it’s a good note yeah, and you just highlight.

Dacher Keltner: 46:52You know it’s so fascinating and you guys are asking good questions. I wish I had better answers but you know I got. I knew I could study awe and you know I was lost in the worlds of compassion and gratitude and other emotions. And and then my first daughter, natalie, was born, you know, 26 years ago. And just watching her come out, looking at her face and I write about this in the book and I study the face and I was like God, her face looks like the perfect mixture of of Molly and my faces and generations of faces I was just like the whole world was new Right of faces. I was just like the whole world was new right.

Dacher Keltner: 47:31And then that’s, we find that as a universal elicitor of awe. But the deeper, unexamined question, kenny, you point to is how parenting and the child as we coexist through life is just a perpetual source. It’s a source of horror and disgust as they vomit on you and you know terror and so forth, but all you know there is so much awe in watching children develop it and no one studied that and there will. There should be all based parenting. Yeah.

Kenny Primrose: 48:00I think it’s so. I did a bit of study the other year on presence, actually as a virtue, virtue like becoming present to the moment and it’s, it feels like that’s all makes you present, makes you kind of savoring, absorbing the moment.

Kenny Primrose: 48:16um, maybe it’s also a condition of awe, you know. You know if I, if I go to see my daughter in the christmas show, which will be in a week or two, and I’m checking my phone, not being pregnant, I’m going to miss it. But I think one of my favorite takeaways from your book is always at arm’s reach. What am I trying to say? Within arm’s reach, within arm’s length, it’s available to us, but you need to be kind of primed for it or attentive to it.

Dacher Keltner: 48:50Yeah, thank you. Thank you for bringing that into our collective awareness. You know this is why we do science. You know a lot of it confirms what your grandmother would have told you, and maybe your grandmother would have said this too that awe is always around us. She would never have said that. To be honest, I did never catch her feeling awe. Maybe your grandmother would have said this too that awe is always around us.

Ian Porter: 49:09She would never have said that, to be honest.

Kenny Primrose: 49:12I did never catch her feeling awe Interestingly. As she’s gotten older that’s come back to her. You know how old people kind of become a bit more like kids. In one she is more like she will well up. Anyway, we’re not talking about my grandmother. Uh, I want to talk about your grandmother, she’s 99, all right and so she’s feeling all uh, yeah, sorry, carry on, yeah, but no, you know.

Dacher Keltner: 49:36But this is why we do science and, and you know, I think when people hear the word awe, they think, oh, it’s that extraordinary moment. You know where I’m at, stonehenge, and you know the. The storm goes past and a lightning bolt hits and I hear the voice of God, and it’s once in a lifetime. But our research shows in 10 different cultures we feel it two to three times a week and we can feel it every day. It’s at arm’s reach, it’s around us and when you think about the implications, it’s a basic state of mind. Right, if we just pause for a minute, put stuff away and we recently tested this and published it and it’s not in the book because it wasn’t yet published.

Dacher Keltner: 50:18But you know, we had medical doctors, nurses, during the height of the pandemic in the United States and it was chaos and they were watching people die without family around and understaffed and overworked. These are really people in the hardest times of medical care and we had them do an all awareness where it’s just like one minute a day. You stop, put stuff away, you take some breathing, you put aside your kind of labels and you know checklists and then you just think like what’s a big thing? I’m part of right now.

Dacher Keltner: 50:54You know, and when I you know, I look at you and Ian, I’m like man. These guys have asked such incredible questions. We’re part of this broader conversation about awe and meaning. So we did that with healthcare providers just be aware of it for one minute, and then for the next 21 days they did that and they were less depressed and anxious during the pandemic, you know, significantly. So. So, yeah, it’s around us and a lot of things are conspiring, like we’ve talked about in this show, to make us forget that. Oh, you know what’s your next goal? What’s on your smartphone, who’s doing, who’s at the great resort on your instagram and why do I envy them?

Kenny Primrose: 51:32you know, and and all right here, the the, the, the way that the technology, particularly screens, leech into everything. I’m a big fan of um shabbat. I don’t keep it really, but I love abraham. Joshua heshel says that it’s like building a palace in time, and it’s this time, without technology, without work, where you’re just kind of dwelling, abiding, I suppose, um, and it’s, it’s those kind of ancient practices that have carried communities through, and maybe they’ve hardly carried communities through because they’ve created that space for all for kind kind of, you know, appreciation.

Dacher Keltner: 52:09Palaces in time, and you know there’s a wonderful book Palaces for the People in the United States by a sociologist about our public spaces that really are, are really meant to be, public spaces for awe. And you know galleries and museums and concert halls and squares and natural history museums and one of the really fun things to grow out of awe is now I’m part of conversations with museums and art art museums like how do we bring a little bit of all back? You know, uh, rather than I was in the louvre recently and I was like mud wrestling with 80 000 tourists just to take a selfie in front of the mona lisa, and that was the experience of the louvre and I’m like, come on, you know, this has got to be, it’s got to be better than that, and so I think I, I love your, your thought there, kenny, of like what are our palaces of time and sacredness? That awe is part of.

Ian Porter: 53:09Sorry, I almost wonder. Is it almost like awe is our default state and I think it’s called automaticity? You know, when you learn how to do something, you develop a model in your mind and then you fit everything that you can to that model and then you stop thinking about the model and so you stop being awestruck by those things that once were novel are now automated. Does novelty factor in alongside vastness and mystery, or is it part of the mystery? Is that where it factors in, it seems like novel things are more. If I see an amazing mountain vista once, it’s awe-inspiring. If I see it 20 times, I’m really going to have to sort of meditate on it and focus and use those tools to try and bring back that sense.

Dacher Keltner: 54:03Yeah, man, you asked again two of the harder questions in this space.

Dacher Keltner: 54:08You know the first is and this again is why we do science default state.

Dacher Keltner: 54:13You know a lot of Western European people would be like no, awe is just a luxury, it’s a construct of culture, it isn’t part of our natural state, if you will, they would even contest the idea of a natural state. And although people in the contemplative traditions, like the different branches of Buddhism, are very interested in natural states, and I think awe is a natural state of the human mind, as is compassion, and this is why science is really interesting, because compassion, we know, and this is why science is really interesting, because compassion, we know, engages parts of the brain that are in the mid, which is? It engages old regions of the brain, oxytocin networks, vagal tone, very old system in the malian nervous system that says this is a natural state of responding to vast mystery which mammals do. Jane Goodall really felt that the chimpanzee she observed felt awe, as I write about in the book Novelty. You know, and this is where I really find inspiration from the contemplative traditions, beginner’s mind, right, you can always feel things are new, you know, because in some sense they are, you know.

Kenny Primrose: 55:41Beginner’s mind. That’s exactly the phrase that’s been occurring to me for the last like 10 minutes or so, thinking this is where we’ve got to go, uh to, to find more awe. I wonder if I’m aware that you’re at the beginning of a day, the beginning of a week. I wonder if I can just try and pull some threads together and ask you one last question, if that’s all right. Um, so the the question? Um, am I phrasing it right?

Dacher Keltner: 56:07I, how do we find meaning in life? Is that, yeah, how do you find meaning in life? How do you know the things you do matter, that they’re part of a larger story? Uh, that you understand? And? And my answer is awe. You know, it is the emotion that connects most deeply to our quest for meaning.

Dacher Keltner: 56:24Um, and so what I do, and and I really learned, you know, with, through grief, in losing my brother, where I felt like life was meaningless because he was such a source of meaning for me throughout, you know, since he was born 14 months after I was born is, you know, like we talked about earlier, cultivate an awe mindset. Pause, open your mind, put away labels and conceptualizations and think about the things that are bigger, that you’re part of, and then rely on those eight wonders to find meaning. You know moral beauty, people’s kindness and courage. That will give you a lot of meaning. Who those people are. Music Young people find so much meaning in music and we forget that right. Visual design, moving with others, spiritual, ethical contemplation. So the wonders of life, which are very intuitive and around us, get us to meaning if we just pause for a moment and open our minds I love it.

Kenny Primrose: 57:29That’s so uh kind of beautifully practical and incredibly profound. Um, and yeah, I’m I’m gonna try and be deliberate about creating those palaces in time for for all to fill them awesome daca thank. Thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a real joy to speak to you.

Dacher Keltner: 57:50Kenny and Ian. I am scribbling notes over here because I’ve got lots of new ideas to pursue, thanks to you, and thank you for getting us all to think about the exam. In life, we need more of it?

Kenny Primrose: 58:01Not at all. I mean, there’s so many other places I’d love to go, but time is what it is. I hope you have a wonderful Monday and thanks so much for joining us today.

Dacher Keltner: 58:11It’s been uplifting to be with you guys. Thank you Cool, thank you.

Kenny Primrose: 58:22Thank you for tuning in to the first episode of the second series of the Examined Life podcast. I hope you found it as helpful and compelling as I did to hear about the insights that we can get from awe on living a meaningful life. I am drawn to this idea that awe can kind of be like almost a Veritas serum for telling us what is true and good and like worth our attention and worth pursuing.

Kenny Primrose: 58:46A theme, as I said, that runs through the second series of podcasts is being positively maladjusted, and that’s kind of riffing on the Krishnamurti quote that it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. The question that then raises is what does it mean to be maladjusted in a kind of healthy, positive way? And oh, according to Dacher Keltner and I’m with him on this can act as a kind of compass for telling us what is worth our attention and how can we align our lives more to what is genuinely valuable rather than what the world around us has influenced us to pursue, which, as I’m sure we all know, doesn’t always lead to human flourishing. I do absolutely recommend Dekker’s book on awe. I find it fascinating and the science behind it is really, really compelling, for more on this, do please sign up for my newsletter.

Dacher Keltner: 59:37In it.

Kenny Primrose: 59:37I try to process my thinking and apply it to my own experience. I hope that that is helpful for some people. If it is for you, do please let me know or send it to somebody else who might enjoy it. As ever with podcasts, it’s a really crowded market, so if you enjoyed this one, then please do like, subscribe, share it. It really helps other people find the podcast and it’s very nice for me to know that other people are enjoying it. Thank you once again for tuning in and thank you to my friend, ian for sharing in this conversation with me. Do stay tuned for the next episode, where I’ll be talking to Elizabeth Oldfield, the writer, coach and podcaster, about what it means to work on the soul, to cultivate the character, the kind of human beings that we’re becoming. I found it a rich and fascinating conversation and I hope you will too. In the meantime, I hope you find some awe in your week that can point to what is meaningful in life and help you to become positively maladjusted. Thank you for listening.

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.

Substack newsletter

Audio podcast

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.