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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:45

hi Esme, welcome to the show.

Esme Wang  01:47

Thank you so much for having me. We’re

Eric Zimmer  01:49

going to be discussing your sub stack called the unexpected shaped newsletter. We might discuss one of your older books, the collected schizophrenias, and we’ll kind of just see where this conversation goes in general, but before we go into all that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think that

Esme Wang  02:38

parable is fascinating because you can look at it from kind of a macro level or a more micro level. In the macro level, it’s like, all right, what kind of life am I going to live? Am I going to live a good one or a bad one? And then by the time we die, and if you believe in the pearly gates, you reach the pearly gates, and then they declare you have lived a good life, or you have lived a bad life, and then in your obituary, the headline is, Esme was bad, or Esme was good. And the other way to look at it, which I think is also as interesting, if not more interesting, is the micro version, which is in every single tiny thing we do in the day, whether it’s deciding to let someone cross the street while you’re driving, or it’s, you know, walking by a houseless person on the sidewalk and deciding what to do in that Moment. And I think that it’s easy in some ways, to look at the macro view, but it’s very challenging to look at every single tiny moment in the micro view. And so I think that there is the great battle in our lives between the two wolves, in my view, but there are also millions, if not trillions, of battles between the two wolves all our lives. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  04:06

and I think you could argue to some extent, the micro is what makes the macro right. It’s all those 1000s of choices we make that add up to the bigger narrative of what our life has been. And I often think about that same thing that you’re describing, which is this sense that every moment and every choice matters, and how do I not get freaked out by that?

Esme Wang  04:33

Yeah, and I also think that things can change in our lives that will make us more likely to make one choice or the other. So there is a quote from the two kinds of decay by Sarah manguso, which I read when I first started getting really sick. And she says something like, when you become very ill, you either become a huge jerk, or you become more open and kind. I thought about that a lot when I was spending those years very ill, because I found that for me, my tendency was to become more open and kind and to think about what everybody else was experiencing when I encountered different people during my days, whether that be online or the few times I went outside. And as I’ve come out of the years where I was more sick and more unable to do things, I’ve found myself wondering, Am I becoming more closed now and more self focused now that I am feeling better? Am I becoming more selfish? Has there been another change in the choices that I choose to make because of what’s happened in my life? And of course, like in the last few years, my husband also developed cancer, so I was not only looking at my own illness, but also at his so a lot of things have changed, but I do think that there are things that happen in our lives that may push us one way or the other, like the tides.

Eric Zimmer  06:07

Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and asking people on this show a version of the question you just raised, which is, why does adversity seem to for certain people become something that grows their character in some way, shape or form. And when does adversity just break or embitter people? What causes that difference? And I don’t think there’s any clear answers, but I feel like you’ve alluded to this before, which is support is part of that answer.

Esme Wang  06:42

Yeah. And it actually reminds me of a quote that is from the book happy baby. It’s actually the epigraph, and I can’t remember where the quote is from, but I bring it up in part because it also has to do with canines. It has to do with dogs, and it’s about how x out of x, like number of dogs, when badly beaten, will become violent and rage against people and will bite, and maybe one or two of those dogs will become very coward and will hide and be afraid of people for the rest of their lives. And so there is a part of me that thinks, Okay, well, maybe there is some kind of nature element to it. In addition to the nurture, there could be something that makes a person more likely to respond to adversity in one way or another, but yeah, I don’t really know what that formula is, and I have talked to other people who have experienced severe illness or trauma, and found that it did make them closed up and bitter and mean. And I see it in my life. I see that happen to people, and I think while there is a small amount of making a decision at one point to be like, Okay, well, this has happened to me, so I’m going to make a decision. There is another aspect that is the voice in your head, kind of tapping on the shoulder, saying, what choice am I going to make today? There was this one time when I was taking lots and lots of medical tests, and my husband and I had just gotten back from the neurologist, and we’d gotten some pretty bad news, and we were very upset, and we went to Whole Foods because it was a place where we could get these supplements that the doctor said we were supposed to get. And so we were at Whole Foods, and we saw these people walking around, and I saw my husband bump into someone in front of us, and he didn’t notice at all, and he just kept walking. And the person he bumped into became very angry. I could see him become very angry. And I thought to myself, My husband is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I’m the person who will, like, burst out of elevators or burst into elevators without really considering what’s happening, or, like, making sure people come out first. He’s the one who pays more attention to things, but he’s so worried about me in this moment that he isn’t as careful as he usually is. And then my next thought was, well, I don’t know what’s going on with this guy who is very upset with my husband in this moment. Maybe I don’t know why this was the story I came up with, but I was like, maybe he can’t afford anything at Whole Foods. Maybe he just comes here once a week and he walks around and looks at the things that he can’t afford and dreams about affording them one day. And because of that today, having my husband bump into him was particularly galling. And so I think that was a really interesting thing to have happen during that time. And when I shared this story online, somebody responded with, I’m reading this while I’m in the parking lot of a Whole Foods, and I’m going to be thinking about this when I go inside. So it kind of had this. Effect to the people reading it. But yeah, I think about that a lot, like, what makes us consider other people when we might not otherwise? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  10:09

I don’t know the answer to what allows us to consider other people, and I think it’s a really interesting story that you told, because so much of what we do is we attribute things to people, right? You were able to attribute to your husband like he’s just really stressed out, so he did this right? And then you were able to make an attribution towards the other gentleman. Now, again, we don’t know how accurate or not, but it was an attribution of goodwill, though, to some degree, right? It was that there was a reason that he might be so angry. Yeah,

Esme Wang  10:45

I think I could have thought at one point in my life like, Gosh, what a mean spirited person who’s not willing to be open hearted, and to look at my husband, who might be going through a hard time, I think, to realize that we are all going through a hard time. We don’t know what everybody is going through. That’s something that I definitely learned when I was the most ill. So

Eric Zimmer  11:08

let’s talk about your illness, if you’re okay with it. So you wrote the book The collected schizophrenias, which was a collection of essays that documented your struggle with schizoaffective disorder, and later in that book, you are starting to talk a little bit about PTSD. You’re exploring Lyme disease. I know, as you’ve gone on, you’ve been looking at other conditions. Can you just give us maybe an overview of how you see your health now, what your challenges are, yeah, and how that’s changed over time.

Esme Wang  11:42

Yeah, it’s so funny. So among writers, there’s this general understanding that in the New York Times Book Review, most reviews are generally positive, and then at the very end, we’ll take a slight turn toward the negative. And so it ends with this kind of, like, more negative thing. It’s like the opposite of a compliment sandwich, you know, just to have it not be a complete rave. And what mine was was a generally very open and interested review, a positive review. And at the very end, the negative thing was that I perhaps did not understand what was going on with my health, and that even though I believed at the time that I was dealing with late stage Lyme disease, that I would probably change my mind about that in the next few years. And I thought that was so interesting when the review came out, it actually made me kind of upset, because I had gone through years of treatment. At that point, I was doing like automated hemotherapy, where I was having my blood removed and ozonated and pumped back into my body, and I was doing all of these different kinds of injections and IVs, and I had gotten treatment in different states and different clinics, and I was thinking to myself, how does this writer know anything about what’s going on with my health and then over the next few years? Well, to back up a little bit in the book, I do acknowledge that I’m not completely sure about the late stage Lyme diagnosis. It was a diagnosis that was controversial and continues to be controversial. It’s not recognized by the CDC. A lot of the doctors who diagnose people with chronic Lyme are seeing these patients after the patients have already gotten all the tests they could and seen all the doctors they could, and are still desperate because they’re very ill. And I do think now, even though I wouldn’t put my foot down on it and say like this is the exact right answer, I would say that a lot of people, because they are very desperate when they’re very sick, will end up trying anything and accepting any diagnosis, because what else are you going to do? And so even if I didn’t 100% believe in the late stage Lyme diagnosis, I was willing to take, you know, 50 kinds of supplements, and I was willing to go to all kinds of oddball clinics, you know, like around the country. And by the time I started to get a little bit better, and then a lot better. So by the time the book actually came out, the collected Schizophrenia has actually came out in 2019 I will say that I was probably past the worst of the years of my physical illness. And I started thinking, what does this mean, and what can I attribute my getting better to? I think that at this point, you know, five years later, I would say that a lot of my problems stemmed from chronic and complex trauma, and this is some. Thing that my original psychiatrist has suggested, which upset me a great deal, because I thought she was implying that it was all in my head, that it was some form of hysteria. But I’m learning more about how complex PTSD, which is not in the DSM or the Bible of mental illnesses, but it is generally accepted as a real thing and and the the difference, just to say really quickly, between that and regular PTSD is regular PTSD is generally one large traumatic event that then causes symptoms. And complex PTSD is an ongoing series of traumas that then kind of form who you are and can cause PTSD symptoms, but generally is more of a thing that will form who you are. And so I learned this even more because I ended up going through a five month autism assessment toward the beginning of this year, and at the end, the doctor said, what I think you have is schizoaffective disorder and complex PTSD, and I think that the combination of those things has created in you almost the equivalent of an autism diagnosis, but from a different angle or from a different source. And so I’ve started to learn more about the autonomic nervous system and how much is affected by trauma. And a lot of my problems to begin with, were all related to dysautonomia, which is why, at this point, when I’m discussing my physical ailments, I generally just call it chronic illness. If I really have to call it something, I’ll call it dysautonomia and fibromyalgia, because those are two diagnoses that I have received, and those are diagnoses that are generally more accepted by the medical profession, but it’s an ongoing conversation with myself and might end up being more of the topic of my next book, which will be a nonfiction book, The one I’m working on right now as a novel. But yeah, these are the things I think about. I

Eric Zimmer  17:11

would be remiss in my job if I did not ask you to share one of the autism tests that you were given. The one

Esme Wang  17:19

that I found really interesting was that he said, This is the gold standard for autism evaluation. And he brought me a baggie, and it had a bunch of items in it, and I looked at the items, which he dumped out on the table, and I was like, you’ve got to be joking. So like inside was a paper clip. Let’s see what else like, a block, a piece of string. Anyway, it just had, like, a bunch of assorted things. And he said, Okay, well, with these items, make a at least one to three minute television commercial. And I was like, Are you kidding? This is the gold standard for autism evaluation and and he was like, yeah, oh, okay, I have to mention one other item that was in there that I found hilarious. It was this miniature pair of spectacles made out of wire. I ended up thinking about it very long. I used to be an aspiring sketch comedy person, and so I just came up with something off the cuff and really hammed it up. But yeah, that was fascinating. Another thing that I had no idea was a part of the autism evaluation was the academic evaluation, which was asking me questions that I would have known back when I was in school, such as, how far is the sun from the earth? And I really didn’t remember a lot of those things, but yeah, it was, it was fascinating. I

Eric Zimmer  18:49

was struck as I was reading that first that the test you just described made me laugh out loud. What I was struck by, Though interestingly, was how thorough that that screening process is and how quickly in other cases, diagnoses are made. Well,

Esme Wang  19:07

not only are diagnoses made very quickly for some people, but also there’s been this very large movement towards self diagnosis. And so there are a lot of people now, especially on places like Tumblr and Tiktok and Instagram that are saying you’re okay to diagnose yourself. And while I understand where this impulse is coming from, and I do agree with it in a lot of ways, in that you know, if you feel like this diagnosis is helping you, if it helps you come up with workarounds for your life, or ways to live a life that is easier for you. Also, not everyone can afford an autism diagnosis. I did not have to pay for my evaluation because it was part of my HMO. But a lot of people are paying 1000s of dollars for these evaluations. But yeah, some people when they heard about. My five month long experience, and in part, it was five months long because I have so many other confounding factors. I have different diagnoses. I have the schizoaffective disorder. I have the trauma. They really wanted to be certain, or at least, this particular doctor wanted to be really certain when he was making the evaluation. And when I read the report, I was astounded by how thorough it was. It was a very thorough and very lengthy report, and when I wrote about it, a lot of people reached out to me to say my evaluation was not nearly as long. And there are places that you can pay, like, quite a lot of money, and you go online and you do this evaluation, it’s pretty quick, and then you can get a result. So I think there’s a spectrum of ways to get diagnosed or not diagnosed.

21:02

Foreign,

Eric Zimmer  21:09

you mentioned that the recent non autism diagnosis said that they thought schizoaffective disorder along with complex PTSD, was kind of what’s happening. So I’d like to go back to the book that you wrote, The collected schizophrenia. And there was a couple of things in there that really struck me. And one of the things that really struck me was you talking about, I’m just going to read a little bit of what you said. You said, it’s one thing to be able to say I saw blood dripping down the walls, or the landlord has installed cameras in my apartment. But it’s another to talk about how it feels under the skin to see and believe things that aren’t real. And I was wondering if you could just share some of that with us, because I’ve never read that type of description before. Yeah, I

Esme Wang  21:59

actually wish I kept a copy of the book on my desk, which I don’t because I would read a little bit of what I was talking about. But what I meant basically was the sensation of losing your sense of reality, and not just the actual belief or the thing you’re seeing or hearing, but the actual creepy crawly sensation at one point, I describe it as being in a pitch black room with no sight of where to put your foot on the next step. I think I also talk about crossing a wall that bucks you to and fro and won’t throw you back again, things like that. That was actually one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer, or at least wanted to be a writer that wrote about mental illness in this particular way, because I found that I was not satisfied as someone who has experienced psychosis and continues to periodically experience psychosis, I’d not read about what the actual sensations, the under the skinness was like. And I found it a great challenge, great both meeting big and also terrific challenge to be a writer and to try and make it something that people could parse even if they hadn’t experienced it themselves. We was

Eric Zimmer  23:22

thinking about potentially reading part of what you wrote. Can I just read a little of it? Yeah, yeah, of course. So it would be better in your voice, but listeners will get by with hearing it in my voice. You say, the more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists, or that it is swiftly losing either because it’s pulling itself apart, because it has never been cohesive, because my mind is no longer able to hold the pieces together, or, most likely, some jumbled combination of the above. And then you also say, after the prodromal phase, I settle into a way of being that is almost intolerable, and so I just thought both of those sort of spoke to how terrifying and unsettling this experience is, where you realize that this is starting to happen again. Yeah,

Esme Wang  24:20

there is a phase where things are starting to fall apart, and I don’t quite know it, although, if I were to step back, I would realize, Oh, you’re starting to cling really closely to your rituals and routines. Oh, you’re starting to write down more about the details of the day than you normally do, or Oh, you’re reading a lot more self help books than you normally do. But once I cross into areas of stronger psychosis, I kind of lose that insight, and I am less able to believe what should be. Unbelievable, or believe the real

Eric Zimmer  25:01

you said you still do continue to have times of being in psychosis. Yeah,

Esme Wang  25:06

it usually happens when I’m very stressed. The last time I experienced a more prolonged period, and it still wasn’t as long as it used to be, since I started taking Haldol, which I mentioned in the book, I have had far fewer symptoms than I used to but in about 2022 I did have symptoms for some days, and yeah, I probably will go on to have symptoms here and there for the rest of my life, but it certainly is much better now than it used to be, and these days I’m actually grappling much more with complex PTSD. So yeah, life is a rich tapestry, and things are always changing. I’ve

Eric Zimmer  25:52

said before about me and my depression that one of the things that has happened is gotten better at being depressed over the years, like when it comes on, I know how to do it better than I used to. Is the same thing true for psychosis? Can you do it better, or is the break so extreme that there’s no real way that, like your previous experience informs your later experience?

Esme Wang  26:17

I tend to experience with any kind of mental health issue, whether that be depression or mania or psychosis, something that I call phase blindness, which I would say is the biggest challenge for me when I’m dealing with these things. And I do wonder if it’s something that you deal with and is something that you are better at grappling with when you say that you are getting better at being depressed, and what phase blindness is this is just a term I made up myself. This is not, not an official psychiatric term, but what it means to me is being unable to think of a world outside of whatever phase you’re in. So when you’re depressed, never being able to imagine the sensation of not being depressed, being like I’ve been depressed my whole life. What are you talking about? Just like, I’ve never been happy, or when I’m in psychosis, like, Oh, this is just the world, like, I’ve just been psychotic all this time, and it will never not be psychosis. And so I think in some ways it’s the face blindness that’s the real trick of it, because being in it means that that’s here forever, and that’s your always. You’ve always been like

Eric Zimmer  27:24

that. That’s a great term for it, phase blindness. Because I feel like, if I were to give depression qualities, you know, like that would be one of its qualities, is this sense you’ve always been this way, you always will be this way. And I do think that is what I’ve gotten better at doing. I’ve gotten better at going, that’s not true. That’s not true. Yeah, I’ve described before, sometimes with depression, that I sometimes treat it a little bit like, I call it the emotional flu. And what I mean by that is, like, I’ve got a cold right now, you can hear in my voice, and so for a couple days, I’m going to rest a little bit more, and I’m going to take some vitamin C, and I’m going to try and take care of myself, but I’m not going to make much out of it. I will recognize like, yeah, I feel crappy, but that’s part of this thing, and it’s going to pass.

Esme Wang  28:13

This is not a holistic statement of who I am as a human being. And

Eric Zimmer  28:17

so it’s easy to do with a cold. It’s far harder to do, I think, with a mental health condition, but that’s part of what I think I’ve learned to do a little bit more, is go, okay. We don’t need to suddenly think that the world has gone wrong and that your life has been wasted, and everything you’ve done up till now doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve always felt this way, and you always will feel that way. I’ve gotten better at just going, okay, just relax, take care of yourself. For a little bit, this is going to pass. I know it doesn’t seem like it’s going to pass, but it will. And maybe it’s going through enough cycles of it, I don’t know. Yeah,

Esme Wang  28:50

I think something that’s helped me with that issue is that I keep very detailed records. So like, I keep basically, like, half hour by half hour records of every day, and I do it in a planner. And so it’s easier for me to physically turn the pages of the planner and say, Hey, you feel right now, very bad and sad and anxious, and you feel like this is how you’ve always felt and how you always well feel, but look, not that long ago, five days ago, you actually went to an event and you had a good time. It says right here, I was happy and I had a good time. And so you are proving yourself wrong here because you wrote that that happened. And so I think that’s very helpful for me. And then for longer periods of not feeling well or struggling with mental health issues. Then again, I can turn back. I can go okay. So it is true, the last three months have been really hard. But if you turn back to like the very beginning of the year, or like the very ending of last year, or even, like 2020 One there was this time when you were having quite a few good months that you have forgotten about. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  30:06

it’s great to be able to go back and look at that. Let’s change directions now a little bit. And one of the things that you do on your sub stack, the unexpected shape newsletter is you say that you provide inspiration for ambitious people living with limitations, such as chronic illness, caretaking, responsibilities and or disability. And one of the things that comes through your sub stack and came through your book also is that you are, by nature, a fairly ambitious person. You are a person who likes to do and create and make, and yet you have faced significant limitation in doing that, and so I thought we could explore that topic for a while. Both, what does it mean to be ambitious? Is this a good or a bad thing? And how when you are limited more than you would like, do you make peace with not being able to do all that you wish you could? Yeah, so

Esme Wang  31:01

this is a really big topic for me, as you can probably tell. So the kind of name that my company goes under, or my business goes under is the unexpected shape, and that comes from a story that I heard from a friend about her father’s analogy of a baseball diamond. And I’m not a big sports person, so I can’t tell you that much about baseball, but I feel like this works pretty well. So with the baseball diamond, there’s the certain shape of the baseball diamond, but there are also the rules of baseball. So you hit the ball and then you run from first to third to second to home, if you’re lucky. Now possibly it would be easier for you to win if you could just run from first to third to home, or from first directly back to home, and then score that way. But that’s not how the game of baseball is played, right? And so I look at limitations as kind of like the borders of the diamond or the rules of baseball. So we all have these unexpected shapes in our lives. We don’t know what the shapes will be when we’re born. We don’t know how they’ll change as we grow, but as we are living through life, it’s one thing to call them limitations, but I could also call them just boundaries, like they’re just the boundaries of the lives that we’re living, and part of the quote, unquote game, even though that can sound like a flippant way of putting it, is to live your life with those boundaries and within those boundaries. So one thing that I like to teach in terms of living with limitations, because limitations are frustrating, and I live with a lot of them, such as chronic fatigue is workarounds. So I started writing the collective schizophrenia, pretty much entirely on my iPhone, and I wrote basically the whole thing on an iPhone or an iPad, because I used to sit at my desktop and write for hours at a time, you know, like all day, really. And I did that with my first book, but with my second book, I couldn’t do that because I was too tired. I lay in bed all day. So I found that what I would do is I would tap out the draft of the book using one finger on the drafts app, and that’s a workaround. I mean, it might not be as fast as typing on your laptop, but it certainly is better than nothing. And so I think that one thing we can do is look at our limitations and see what our workarounds could possibly be. And our workarounds may also be based on resources. So we can look at our resources, maybe your resource is money, maybe your resource is community. If your resource is money, maybe you can pay someone to clean your home once a month. If your resource is community, you can barter something that you do for your friends for something they can do for you that’s harder for you to do based on your limitations or your boundaries. And so, yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about what limitations mean, especially if you are ambitious. And to speak of ambition, I think also my thoughts on ambition have changed over the last few years. I actually pitched my next two books. So the next book that comes out is a novel called soft creatures, and the book after that will be a non fiction book, but I am not entirely sure at this point what it’ll be, but it was going to be about being ambitious and living with limitations, but I have seen in the five years since I signed that two book deal, that society’s relationship with the word ambition has changed a lot. It is actually, I think, more of a dirty word, especially among the more liberal leaning community or the leftist leaning community, than it used to be, because it implies. Is work and drudgery and capitalism and not protecting yourself and your health in so many things that have become more valued in recent years. And so I’ve been wondering to myself, like is a book about being ambitious and living with limitations? Is that something that I even want to write anymore? But I think that these are all challenging ideas that I’ve certainly been thinking about, and I bet other people have too you.

Eric Zimmer  35:54

I have seen a change in culture around the word ambition, I think, and for many of the reasons that you’ve said, I think there’s a sense that if we are working hard for something, that it’s because either we are shallow or capitalist or all the things that you said, and I don’t necessarily buy that the same way that people used to say, like nobody says on their deathbed, like, I wish I’d spent more time in the office. And on one hand, I believe there’s obviously a lot of truth in a statement like that, and yet, for people whose work feels really important and meaningful to them, you very well might have wished that you had put more time and energy into whatever this thing was that you were bringing to the world. I was also thinking about a term that you used. You posted a picture of a bird. You’ve been sketching birds every day, and you said I wasn’t able to do anything useful today, but I created this bird and that we’ll have to do. And that term useful. I actually thought about and think about often, because that’s a term that I relate with very well. Actually, I think it’s good to be useful, because it doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily creating something, but it’s an orientation to being in the world for me, which is that what I do here is useful to other people in some way, shape or form,

Esme Wang  37:24

right? Like I was not selling that bird to anyone. It wasn’t part of the capitalist machine, you know, like it was a bird that I painted and then I shared online. And what shocked me, genuinely shocked me, you know, when people sometimes say, like, oh, I posted this tweet and it went viral. And I was so surprised. I often think to myself, yeah, right. Like, you thought that might go viral, but this genuinely, like, I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I do use notes on the substack app, and it went kind of viral. And I was genuinely very surprised, because I had not given it much thought. I genuinely was feeling like, I haven’t done much today, but like, here’s a bird, and like, I hope people like it. But people really, really did. And like, hundreds of people responded to this, saying something about like, how no This bird has brightened my day. Or like, This bird is enough for today, and this, you know, and beauty is enoughness and beauty is of use. And that really struck me, and so I did end up writing a sub stack piece called, like, what is it to be useful? Which was about that experience. But, yeah, I think usefulness is an underused word. Honestly. I think people like to use the word productive, or like productivity, or things like that, but I think useful is a very good word. Yeah, yeah. I

Eric Zimmer  38:40

think we have to watch for matter of degree where we don’t want to think that every moment has to be useful or productive, or whatever your word is. And at the same time, I think there is value in saying, Am I using my time in a way that feels valuable to me? And I see you wrestling with this question out loud through your sub stack, which is, given that I have these health challenges, could I be pushing myself a little bit more? And I think that all of us have some some measure of this. I think, like you said, we all have our own boundaries or our own shape. And so I think that it’s a very common thing for people who want to do things in the world to question, you know, when I sort of just said, like, I’m out of gas for today, I’m done, I’m just, I’m I just need to relax and do nothing. Like, did I really need to or could I have pushed? You know, could I have done more? And I wrestle with those questions. I wrestle with questions of my energy level at 54 is different than it used to be. It just is. I don’t know what’s appropriate energy level at my age. So you get into these like, well, am I could I do more? Should I do more? Should I do less? I think everybody wrestles with these questions. And

Esme Wang  39:57

I think that again, to go. Back to something we had said earlier, things that happen in your life will change how you feel about these things, whether that’s growing older or having less energy. For example, my husband was diagnosed with cancer last year, and he may have come close to dying several times, and I was very, very burned out. Recently, I might still be pretty burned out I had, I just relaunched the unexpected shape writing Academy, and I had also just turned in 130,000 word manuscript to my editor. And for a while I was like, Why am I feeling so unable to do anything? And then I remembered, oh, yeah, you just did all these really big things. And so, because I recognized that, I thought to myself, Okay, so instead of working this weekend, you are going to force yourself to rest on Sunday. And that was actually very challenging, because I kept finding myself starting to do work, and then being like, Oh no, no. I was gonna read like Prophet first. And then I was like, No, you can’t read Profit First as like reading on your resting day. So I decided to read a mystery novel instead. But then later that day, and I think that I might not have seen this as useful or productive, or whatever word you want to use before, but my husband and I made a steak dinner, just like a very modest little steak dinner, and we listened to records, and we sat and cuddled on the couch with our dog. And that was the best thing I had done all week. It was the best thing I had done all week, and I was so glad that I had taken the time to do that and to kind of refill my well a bit after being so tired, and also to think, no, this is the most important thing that I have done. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  41:56

you have a line where you said I found, in the end that aggressive pursuit of one’s ambitions is a skill that is not as important as living a good life, resting with my husband, C who’s in cancer recovery, cuddling with my dog, doing work that I care about in bits and pieces, instead of hours on end. And yeah, I think it is that balance of those things, because I do think that is the one thing that ambition can do, which is really pernicious, is rob us of the ability to appreciate actually where we are. Yeah, absolutely, we’ve got to be getting somewhere all the time. For me, that’s certainly a shadow side. And again, my ambitions are when I use that word, I don’t mean necessarily make more money, I just mean, do the things in life that feel important and meaningful to me? But it is true for sure, that too much focus on that is problematic, and so I’ve often spent a lot of time thinking about like, how do you do both those things? How do you want to change and grow and create and be these things? And how do you also simultaneously appreciate right where you are. Yeah, and

Esme Wang  43:03

this reminds me of something that I used to focus on just as much as ambition, which is legacy. And I think about legacy less these days, but I found that my happiest definition of legacy was not just like, oh, I want to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, or would want to win this or that, or make, like X amount of money. It was also really important to me to leave a legacy where people would say Esme was a really kind person, or Esme was a really generous person, or the legacy that you leave when you smile at the barista and give them a big tip, and they feel good for a few minutes. Again, we were talking about the macro of the wolf parable and the micro of it. I think there’s also a macro and micro of of legacy and productivity and ambition, something

Eric Zimmer  43:57

else that you wrote recently on sub stack that jumped out at me because I felt this way so often in my life, you said I found that one of life’s greatest fundamental frustrations, as well as one of its great terrors, is that I only have one life, and that every choice I make is finite. I have made certain decisions that have led me down certain paths, and whether I am happy or not with the path I am on is not so much the point. The point is that I did not choose any of the centilian other paths that I could have gone down. Yeah, and

Esme Wang  44:27

surely enough, science fiction movies have been made about this topic. I don’t know if sliding doors counts, but that is one. So yes, I agree with what I wrote. That is true of how I think about life. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about books, about writing. I contributed to an anthology that Penguin UK did, and it was called Why We read. And mine was generally about how there are so many things that I am not doing and cannot do at this point in my life. I was once told. Field, that the social psychology field, would be much poorer if I did not become a social psychologist. Well, I am not a social psychologist, and, you know, I’m sure they’re doing just fine without me, but what I can do, because of books, is read about social psychology, is read about what it’s like to be a social psychologist. I didn’t become like an expat and live in London, but I can read about other people’s experiences of being expats and living in London. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about literature, is that we get to experience so many other lives, even if we can only live one life ourselves.

Eric Zimmer  45:39

Yeah, I agree, it’s one of the things I love about reading. I think the other thing that is embedded in what you said is that recognition that whether I’m happy or not with the path I’m on is not so much the point. It also means that there is no other life except the one that I did choose, and that can be comforting also, because I realize that questions of, would I have been happier if I did this, or would I have been better doing that, they’re meaningless questions because they presume some reality that doesn’t exist, although

Esme Wang  46:16

I do find that some people look at Quantum mechanics as one way to comfort themselves in this manner, like they think, like, well, there are all these like, other dimensions out there where I’m doing all these different things, and I’m in this one, but there’s an Esme out there somewhere who did become a social psychologist, and so I don’t have to worry about like, I don’t know if I necessarily subscribe to that belief or that way of thinking, but I do know people for whom it is a great comfort. It’s back

Eric Zimmer  46:46

to what we said before about the micro and macro. It’s easy to think that there could be these other worlds at every decision point, there’s a choice made, and they go this way, or you went that way, and it spins off alternate universes. But when you realize how every moment is a moment of choice. Then you’re like, Well, wait a second. Hang on. A second. This becomes mind boggling. It’s not just whether I chose to be an author or a social psychologist. It’s also the 100 small decisions that I made all morning. Yeah,

Esme Wang  47:16

it’s like, oh, I lifted this water thermos and I took a sip. What if I hadn’t done that precisely?

Eric Zimmer  47:23

Well? Esme, thank you so much for coming on. I think we’re about out of time, but I really enjoyed talking with you. I’ve enjoyed reading your sub stack and reading your books, and I’ll be excited to read your 130,000 word manuscript. That’s a lot of words.

Esme Wang  47:42

Thank you so much. The words will get cut down for sure, but I really appreciated this. Thank you for having me. You

Episode Transcript:

00:01:36 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Austin, welcome to the show.

00:01:37 – Austin Kleon
Hi. Thanks for having me.

00:01:39 – Eric Zimmer
It’s a real pleasure to have you on. I’ve admired your work for a long time. But your latest book is called keep ten ways to stay creative in good times and bad. And we’ll get to that in just a second. But we’ll start like we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:27 – Austin Kleon
You know, it’s very dualistic, which I like. And, you know, we have bicameral minds, so it’s kind of impossible not to think in dualities. But for me, I think the wolves both have their place. For me, well, what I try to do is, I don’t know that I starve the dark wolf so much as I sort of follow where I’m trying to take the metaphor. I don’t know. I don’t know any wolves in my life. But, you know, I think about the parable. I’m like, where does the wolf go at night? Where does he feed? Because wolf, that’s kind of a funny parable because you don’t really feed wolves. They’re wild.

00:03:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. It’s been told as dogs before also.

00:03:10 – Austin Kleon
Yeah, it’s interesting. So if we switch it to dogs, it’s like dark dogs. You know, dogs track things and they run around. And one of the things I feel like I try to do is I try to feed my light wolf with things from the dark wolf, or I try to, you know, I try to pay a lot of attention to the dark wolf because I think the dark wolf gives me information. So I’ll put it another, if you want to use another metaphor. I think a lot about poison and nourishment. So there’s a lot of poisonous things that I find in my life, you know, like something like jealousy. Let’s just take jealousy. Jealousy is a very poisoning thing, but jealousy, as a feeling is also just information. So if you can kind of, like, hold your jealousy and kind of, like, look at it like an object and kind of spin it around, figure out where it’s coming from, sometimes jealousy shows you something that you want or something that you’re lacking. So then you can kind of think, okay, well, here’s the poison. What’s the nourishment? I’m someone who’s driven a lot by disgust and anger. I get angry about the world, and I get disgusted by things I see. But then I take that information, I think, well, what would be the opposite? So what’s the antidote to this poison? Or what’s the nourishment? And then that’s what I try to put in my work. And so when people say, you know, your books are so helpful, or they’re so upbeat, or that’s what I’m going for. But I don’t think people understand how dark the books begin. Like, how all the books come from that dark wolf, right?

00:04:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:04:54 – Austin Kleon
How all the books come from the Dark Wolf. And then the other wolf is the one I send into the world to greet people. You know what I mean?

00:05:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:05:01 – Austin Kleon
So I think that it’s about really looking at the wolf, really listening to its growl, seeing where it goes when no one’s looking, and then figuring out how to spin it. So that’s where, like, you know, it’s taken me years to figure this out, but a lot of my really good work has to come from a deep place of agitation. Like, I like to think of my work as being fairly positive and nourishing for people, but usually has its origins in something very kind of dark or ugly or painful.

00:05:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, well, you say it early on in this book that you wrote this book because you needed to hear it. And my experience is that the people often who have the greatest wisdom to offer are the people who have earned that wisdom the hard way, usually because it’s something that we’ve had to work through. I was talking with a coaching client about this earlier, and she was like, I just don’t feel prepared to teach people about mindfulness because I’m not totally at peace. And I was like, the fact that you are applying it to the situations this difficult is what’s going to make you someday a great teacher because you’re really practicing in real life with this stuff.

00:06:14 – Austin Kleon
Yes. And I would also say that the best teachers, and I’m plagiarizing a writer when I say this, you know, some of the best teachers are the ones that need to learn the lesson.

00:06:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:06:25 – Austin Kleon
All of my books are really the result of me not knowing about something. You know, that that’s the other thing about my books that I think people sort of misunderstand is that, you know, the books come from me trying to figure something out. And then the books are the product of that process of trying to learn something. And then the books are really just me saying, hey, here’s what I’ve learned. But then the other thing I think is really interesting is what you said. My mom used to be a guidance counselor, and she told me that every counselor she ever met really needed counseling. And so, you know, we’re drawn to things in our lives that, you know, what we need, we seek out. And then we become the kind of peddlers or not peddlers, but, you know, we dish out what we found or what we’ve looked for, you know, the dualism that you’re talking about. One of the reasons I love this idea about the one you feed is we’re in a time in a culture right now where you have to pick one side, where it’s like, it’s very, like, we’re not really good as a culture right now with ambiguity. We’re not very good with people who have 1ft in and 1ft out. So, for example, it’s very hard for people to process the idea that an artist might able to make beautiful or useful things and not be very beautiful or useful in their everyday life. We’re having this cultural moment where if we get information about the artist that contradicts the art, all of the sudden, it’s supposed to destroy the art. Whereas I’ve always been someone who, you know, the people I really looked up to when I was younger came from really dark places. And, you know, they were not perfect people in their everyday lives. And they did cause a lot of suffering, maybe, or chaos in their everyday life. The good thing about the culture now is that we don’t celebrate that we were getting away from that narrative, that you have to be destructive in your personal life in order to be creative in your work. But I also think there’s a way that that can go too far where we start dismissing the work of people that aren’t perfect in their everyday lives. And so I think it’s very tricky, and it’s a balance right now. And again, the reason I love the one you feed is that if you think about the culture and you think about human civilization throughout time, it’s usually just balancing back and forth between the forces. It’s just like things get caught out of whack, things swing back and forth, and it’s really just the pendulum.

00:08:53 – Eric Zimmer
That’s right.

00:08:54 – Austin Kleon
Or if you want to think of it the other way, it’s like the big wheel that turns.

00:08:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love what you said there. I mean, I think almost certainly anytime we correct something, we almost always overcorrect. You know, it’s almost inevitable that we swing way over to one side, we swing too far back over to the other, and then maybe there’s a little bit of a balancing over time.

00:09:13 – Austin Kleon
Exactly. It’s like when you’re driving, you know, they tell you when you’re driving not to swerve too fast, because in the swerve, you get the whiplash and you go too far over, you know? So it’s like, I’m not advocating for any kind of, like, mushy, you know, wishy washy path, but it is interesting to watch these forces come and play. And the nice thing about staying alive, which I know you and I are both interested in.

00:09:36 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, very much the nice thing about.

00:09:39 – Austin Kleon
Staying alive is you get to see those swings, and that’s where the wisdom comes from. You know, you start seeing all the swings, and even in your lifetime, and you can see a way through it.

00:09:49 – Eric Zimmer
It’s one of the reasons that I most wish I could live to be like, you know, 10,000 years old, is just to see how it all goes. You know, when people ask that question of, like, if you could sit down with anybody in history, who would it be? I’m always like, can I flip that and sit down with somebody 10,000 years from now to tell me what has happened the last 10,000 years? Because I really want to know.

00:10:11 – Austin Kleon
I’m curious. I mean, like I always loved. I think it’s Seneca, one of those old, you know, thousand year old writers who said, you know, when you read old books, you get to annex their lifetimes.

00:10:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:10:25 – Austin Kleon
So that, to me, is always, the value of reading is that if you can go back far enough or read enough people, you sort of accumulate the 10,000 years. It’s just on the other side.

00:10:35 – Eric Zimmer
That’s right.

00:10:35 – Austin Kleon
Of history. As much progress as we make, you know, I’m always shocked at how much life stays the same, you know, especially when you’re reading about, you know, people a couple thousand years ago. It’s always amazing to me how it’s still a lot of the same stuff.

00:10:55 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Underlying all of it, there is still the very basic human tendency to want to be happy and want to avoid what makes us unhappy and to want to care for the things that we love and avoid the things that we don’t love. And in some ways, that core never really changes.

00:11:12 – Austin Kleon
Love and death.

00:11:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:11:13 – Austin Kleon
It stayed true, you know? And I think that’s why whenever I look into the future, I think a lot about the pandemic and how the pandemic, rather than changing life, has felt to me a lot like it’s turned everything up to eleven. You know, like they say in spinal tap, it’s just like everything gets turned up, you know?

00:11:32 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:11:32 – Austin Kleon
Everything’s just cranked up and amplified. And so some of the really good things are even better now and then the bad or annoying things or even worse. I feel like the future to me, looks a lot like the past. Just, you know, I think that maybe just amplified. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m a long term pessimist, short term optimist. I really feel like, you know, in the end, we’re all doomed. But I’m very optimistic about the day. I’m very optimistic about what you can give with the time that’s in front of you that you can sort of manipulate.

00:12:05 – Eric Zimmer
I might be a medium term something, but I don’t know what. Anyway, let’s move on to the book. There’s a part early in it that you say everything got better for me when I made peace with the fact that it might not ever get easier. You were talking about creating art in that sense, but I think we can apply it to living. Why is it helpful? Why is it good when we make peace with that, when we stop waiting for things to get easier?

00:12:28 – Austin Kleon
You know? I think a lot of this came from being a parenthood, because when my kids were younger, I thought, God, if I could just get them out of diapers, you know, or then if I could just get them walking or whatever, you know, whatever. And suddenly I realized, like, oh, it doesn’t get better. It just changes. Everything changes, you know? And the minute I stopped worrying about when it was gonna get better, I just, like, sort of enjoyed the. Now, most of the great philosophical texts or the, you know, spiritual texts tell us that be here now, you know? But I think. I think for art and creativity in particular, you just harness whatever skills you have, whatever materials. It’s very punk rock for me. It’s very much like what’s in front of you, what abilities you have, what techniques you have, what tools you have, use them right now in the here and now. And I will say that I’ve been extremely influenced recently by this book that I read and not very well known, and it’s out of print, was by this guy named Joseph Meeker. And he wrote this book called the Comedy of Survival. And Meeker studied two things. He studied literature, and he studied ecology. And what Meeker sort of did is he talked about how much ecology mimics comedy. That if you think about animals and the natural world and plants and stuff, there’s so much adaptation going on. There’s so much improvisation that’s going on that, you know, nature almost resembles a comedy more than a tragedy. And what Meeker said is that western civilization runs on tragedy. This idea that there’s a great person, you know, like our dominant narratives are, there’s a great person, and they have a vision, and they mold the world into their vision, you know, and they change things. And, of course, in a tragedy, it all ends in blood, you know, I mean, it’s always. There’s always some tragic flaw, something that brings the person down in the end. And, you know, in a comedy, it’s usually about normal people that sort of, they struggle, but they adapt and they stay flexible, and they’re improvisational. And at the end there’s a wedding or there’s a celebration, you know, there’s drink. And Meeker’s point was just that if we’re to survive as a culture, it’s going to take a comedic perspective. It’s going to take a kind of flexible, improvisational approach to life. It’s funny because I read that book after I finished. Keep going. Well, keep going, of course, starts with another modern parable, which is Groundhog Day, the movie Bill Murray’s in, where he wakes up every day and relives the same day. And I thought it was really funny how, here’s this book that’s super influential on me, like, two years after I read this other book or a year or whenever, but I was already influenced by comedy. I just didn’t have somebody, you know, kind of showing it to me. And so I think, you know, for me, it’s just more about seeing myself as a comic character, as more of a, not a Buster Keaton, but a Charlie Chaplin, but, you know, more just like a guy who’s doing what he can with what’s in front of him, you know, and being flexible and not having too lofty, you know, just being flexible and adaptive and learning. To me, that’s just been, like, terrifically powerful. And that’s when you don’t expect things to change. And that was Meeker’s great point, is, like, if you don’t expect the world to change, then you work with what’s there. And it doesn’t mean that you’re complacent. It just means that you work with what’s in front of you and you try to make something out of that. You don’t wait for the right conditions. This is what you’ve got. And I think that what I just said has really been, I think the real message of my work, I hope, for readers, is that, you know, we all love the perfect conditions, but if you wait for them, you will wait and wait and wait, and pretty soon it’ll be over.

00:16:41 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. There are no perfect conditions. And, you know, my son just last year graduated college, so I’ve been.

00:16:50 – Austin Kleon
You’re on the whole other side.

00:16:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, but, but I related with everything you said, and I got better. Like, you it going, like, let me just try and enjoy this scenario and try not to worry too much about the next milestone. And looking back now, I’m like, well, the worry never totally goes away. Or the care, maybe that’s the better word. You know, the care is obviously always there. I’m not, I’m not too much of a worrier in general. We had Rainn Wilson on the show, the guy from office, and he talked about something that, I don’t think he created this, but I love it. It’s this if then thinking if this then, but in the negative sense, if I just had this, then I would do this. And you kind of talk about this at one point in the book, you know, we think if we had the perfect art studio and we ran around with the right crowd of people and we had all these things, then we’d be able to be creative.

00:17:43 – Austin Kleon
Yeah, that’s like a computer programmer type logic on steroids type thing if than statements.

00:17:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:17:49 – Austin Kleon
That’s literally how computers run. It’s like if this conditions should do this, and life just isn’t really like that. You know, it’s not, it’s not that linear. It’s not programmed that way. You know, my wife says something beautiful that I love, and there’s several pieces of fiction that kind of play with this idea. But she said, you know, just once in a while, I’d like to live my life out of order. You know, I’d like to live a day where they were babies and then I’d like to live a day when they were in their thirties.

00:18:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:18:19 – Austin Kleon
You know, of course, you know, the whole meaning of life would deteriorate if you got to do that, you know? I mean, it’s really the fact that you have to live it in order that provides. There’s a great book about this, actually. There’s a book called some by David Eagleman, and it’s tales of the afterlife. He imagines all these different afterlives, and one of them is that you have to live your life in a different order. But it’s like, okay, here’s nine years of you brushing your teeth. Here’s two years of you brushing your teeth, and then here’s 30 days of you making love. It’s just like, what’s beautiful about the story is it shows you, and this is the thing about parables, as you know, is it shows you the meaning in your everyday life. You’re right. If I did live it that way, it wouldn’t have the same meaning.

00:19:35 – Eric Zimmer
There’s such a common genre of writing, which is, you know, sort of letters to your younger self. What I wish I could tell my younger self, because that’s exactly it. It’s this sense of, like, well, I just sure wish at that age I could have the wisdom that I had then, but it simply doesn’t work that way. You know, I do think there are ways to help people as we’re younger to be wiser, but a certain amount of it is you’ve got to figure out your own life, and it’s going to have its own twists and turns. And I. That’s part of the game.

00:20:04 – Austin Kleon
Yeah. So I went through this weird thing recently where my book steal, like, an artist came out in 2012, so it has its 10th anniversary next year. And so we’ve been working on the 10th anniversary edition. It’s gonna be like a hardcover. And I wrote a new afterword for it. And, you know, I had to really reflect on, you know, the thing I wrote in the afterword is more time has passed in between the me now and the me who wrote that book than the me who wrote that book and the person he was writing it for. Because I was writing it for my 19 year old self. Like, oh, what I wish I had known when I was the young age of 19, when I was, like, 27 or whatever it was when I wrote that book. But then there was this really interesting thing that happened when I was rereading the book. I thought, I couldn’t write this now. And this is another thing people have a hard time believing if you’re a writer is that if you say that, you say, I couldn’t write this now. They said, what do you mean? You were you when you wrote this? And I’m like, but I’m not that guy anymore.

00:21:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:21:01 – Austin Kleon
You know, I’m not this person. And I love his energy. I don’t know where he’s getting it from.

00:21:09 – Eric Zimmer
He didn’t have kids.

00:21:10 – Austin Kleon
Yeah, I like his certainty. You know, I read the book. I’m like, yeah, this sounds great. Let me do this. But it’s not me. Like, I couldn’t do it again. You know, something I always try to tell young writers in particular is, you know, they want wisdom. And I’m always like, you know, sometimes it’s really the idiot or the fool or the amateur or the beginner that really makes the leaps. You know, when you’re younger, you should use your raw, nascent, gooey state to really play and figure things out because, you know, the amateur has just so many advantages over the professional, really, and the expertise. You know, a lot of my work as a creative person is trying to get back to that full state.

00:22:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:22:00 – Austin Kleon
You know, especially in the self help genre, everyone’s like, oh, mastery. You have to achieve mastery. Like, that’s what you need to go after and everything. And as a creative person, you know, of course I’m trying to attempt mastery and, like, I’m trying to put a sentence together. I’m trying to get really good at the craft and things like that. But it’s really being able to go back to that full state, that beginner’s mind, where I don’t know anything, that’s where the really good ideas come from. And again, this is very influenced by being a parent. I have this idea of the curious elder because I’m approaching 40 and I’m starting to think about middle age and how I’m going to do this and the relationship I’m going to have with my kids. Instead of thinking myself as the wise elder, I think of myself as the curious elder. I’m very much like you. Show me what you’re into. You know, you’re gonna get the model of how I live from just seeing me and what I do and everything, but I’m gonna be more interested in you.

00:23:00 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. Then that’s beautiful.

00:23:02 – Austin Kleon
You know, I’m gonna be the curious elder, and you’re gonna show me things. You’re gonna teach me. And that’s sort of been my mo for a few years now with my kids, and I’m trying to, like, continue it. I’m like, what you just said, which I love, is that, you know, you can read all the books in the world. You could. I love, you know, reading. That’s what I’ve, like, staked my life on, you know, like, books and reading and wisdom and stuff. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to live your life. The experience is really what’s going to drill it into you. Yeah, I love it. But for me, it’s, like, professionally, the thing to do in my position is to be like, I know these things. I’m the expert, and today I’m going to teach you about creativity. Or, you know, I’m gonna sell you my whatever. And I really try to be honest with my audience that, you know, I can. I can tell you what I know, which is I feel like a decent amount. But I would tell you that the things that are the most valuable to me are the things you have available to you right now. You know, like, the things that are the most raw and pure and available you could get tomorrow, you know? And so that’s part of the wisdom, too, I suppose.

00:24:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, totally. I mean, so much of what you were saying in there reminded me of why I have been so drawn to Zen practice for big parts of my life. You know, that idea of beginner’s mind and the sense that not knowing. You know, there’s a phrase from Zen, not knowing is most intimate. It’s the best state to have. And that same thing that you said there at the end, too, which is that every bit of our life is the path. There’s a thing, I repeat, I don’t know what it is, whether it’s the four bodhisattva vows, it doesn’t matter, but I say, and it’s dharma gates are countless. I vowed awake to them. It basically means everything is a dharma gate, meaning a path to freedom, a path to insight, a path to awakening. Every little thing.

00:24:53 – Austin Kleon
Yes.

00:24:54 – Eric Zimmer
You know, one translation of it says, I vow to experience them, which is a beautiful idea that, you know, like you’re saying, whether it’s creativity or growing wiser or whatever it is, we do have what we need here.

00:25:06 – Austin Kleon
I say in the book, it’s like ordinary life plus extra attention.

00:25:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:25:09 – Austin Kleon
And that’s how you get the extraordinary.

00:25:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:25:12 – Austin Kleon
Everything that feels ordinary, if you can just pay the right attention to it, it becomes extraordinary. And that’s what all the great texts teach us, is that there’s a different level of attention.

00:25:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:25:25 – Austin Kleon
There are different vibrations or different visions that we can have. Just kind of have to poke beyond the surface of what’s presented to you.

00:25:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I loved that chapter of the book very much. It’s called the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary. And I just think that’s so great, and it’s so in line with. In the spiritual habits program, I do. We have a module. It’s called no ordinary moments. That’s the basic idea. Like, you know, the way you make a moment non ordinary is you pay closer and closer attention to it. And you and I both quote John. I don’t know. Do you say it, Tarrant? I think it is. You say, attention is the most basic form of love that he wrote, and I’ve got another quote of his that I use, which is to learn to attend is a beginning. To learn to attend more and more deeply is the path itself.

00:26:12 – Austin Kleon
I love that, you know, attention is one of those things that the greats kind of get around to. They read a really great biography of William James, who, of course, said the famous, you know, my experience is what I choose to attend to. Yeah, I just feel like, you know, the reason to read old books, too, is that, you know, people think that there’s some sort of, like, truth or progress that’s, like, set in stone. And I’m always, like, fascinated when I realize just how much deep wisdom there is in ancient stuff. Like, for example, in the old days, people thought that your eyes actually shot beams out, that the way that you saw things was that your eyes actually projected. It wasn’t that light came and hit your eyes. It’s that your eyes actually shone out into the universe and like a spotlight.

00:27:06 – Eric Zimmer
It’s fascinating.

00:27:07 – Austin Kleon
And you think, oh, ha ha, how funny but I’m very interested in useful fictions. I’m very interested in things that, like, I guess this is kind of a pragmatic thing, but it’s like, okay, what would be the behavioral result of that belief? And the result would be, well, you would feel that you had control over where you put your eyeballs. Your eye beams. Where you shoot your eye beams is in your control. Right. You know, if you think about light just hitting your eyes, and that’s how you see, that’s a very passive idea. It’s scientifically true. But if you think about your eyeballs as something that shoot out beams and, you know, you look around, then all of a sudden it makes you active.

00:27:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:49 – Austin Kleon
You know, so I’m very interested in when it comes to ideas. And this is why metaphor is so beautiful and history so beautiful gives us these examples of images we can keep in our mind or stories we can keep in our minds that influence our behavior and how we’re supposed to act.

00:28:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I love that. What are some of your favorite ways for deepening attention?

00:28:10 – Austin Kleon
I like that. You know, I’m a writer and an artist and a musician, so a lot of the ways that I pay deeper attention are about just practicing my craft. So, for example, drawing. There’s nothing easier in an artist’s tool belt than drawing. It’s cheap. It’s something you can practice with almost anything, and it’s something you can do your whole life. And the minute you sort of really look at something to draw it, then you really see it because you think, you know what a lamp looks like, but then really, when you’re trying to trace it with your eyeballs, you know those eye beams again? You’re like, wait a minute. This is much stranger and even more beautiful than I thought it was. You know, my friend Wendy McNaughton just gave a really good TED talk about drawing. And specifically, she practices a kind of drawing that’s blind contour portraits, where you draw without looking down at your paper. And she practices that a lot. And that’s something that I do a lot, too. It really becomes a looking activity. So there’s that, and then, like, it depends on what I want to pay deeper attention to. If there’s a piece of writing that I really want to pick apart, I will copy it by hand, or I’ll type it out, and then I’ll go line by line and circle it and look up words. You know, poems I was going to mention before, the poets are the people who are really good at taking ordinary life and making it extraordinary.

00:29:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:29:49 – Austin Kleon
Like, so if you don’t read a lot of poetry, I recommend it. You know, just start, like, reading. Go to, like, poets.org or I, some online poetry website. They all have, like, daily poems or like, daily poem newsletters and stuff. People who don’t read poetry just, you know, start reading poetry every day. Just take five minutes. And that’s a different kind of attention that if you’re just, yeah, if you’re just going to work or doing your commute, you’re not paying that kind of attention that the poets do. So that’s something close reading, copying. I do that a lot. And if you think about drawing as a form of trying to copy, you know, what’s in front of you, that’s copying, too. Most recently, I’ve been pointing to my piano back here. I have been blown away lately by how I can take a song that I’ve heard for 20 years that I’ve listened to over and over again. And if I sit down and learn to play it on the piano, all of a sudden it’s a new song.

00:30:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:30:50 – Austin Kleon
Like, I know how it works in a way that I never knew before. Some more practical things. Taking a walk, taking a daily walk as a way of paying attention to your neighborhood. Like, if you drive somewhere all the time and then you walk it on foot, that is a revelation. If you walk away that you normally drive, and if you drive away, you normally walk, you realize how much you’re missing or not missing. And so I love taking a daily walk. Yeah. I’d say walking, drawing, writing, that’s pretty much my ways of paying attention. I practiced meditation for a little bit, and I like the way I feel. But drawing and walking are very meditative for me, as is copying. I think the most important part of my practice is every morning I keep a diary that’s sort of like half sketchbook, half writing notebook. And I just fill, like, three pages, you know, like the Julia Cameron morning pages. I just do three pages in the morning. And I find that keeping a daily diary, if I do it right, and what I mean by right is if you just hold a pen and kind of start moving it and let things come out, you aren’t just like, oh, what did I do yesterday? Oh, I did this. One of my biggest teachers is a woman named Linda Berry. And she believes really powerfully in this idea that you just kind of start making letters and things come. And she’s taught me a lot about, you know, just kind of channel what you’re trying to do with those morning pages or with your diaries, you’re not trying to recount life as much as you’re trying to, like, figure out what’s actually going on. You know, not what went on, but what’s actually going on.

00:32:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:32:34 – Austin Kleon
You know, and I find that that morning practice helps me pay attention to my own life. It helps me pay attention to what I’ve paid attention to, too, which is, I think, is really important.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
I’m an abysmal drawer. I mean, it’s hard to, like, really look too closely at life when you’re like, well, I’ve got a stick figure. But no, I sometimes try and look like an artist would look like, where are the shadows? Where are the lines? Where are the shapes? Because it all of a sudden gets your mind to go from, as you said earlier, sort of passively taking it in to sort of shine in your light beams, you know, on something. All of a sudden, I’m like, oh. Because I think that’s what artists are so good at doing, is saying, all right, off autopilot, study this thing. Another that is good is taking pictures. Yeah, there’s a great book out there called Zen Camera by this guy, and it’s all about, you know, photography is a contemplative practice, and it’s the same thing when I’m sort of doing the practices in that book. It’s like, as I’m out and about, my brain is engaging in a different way. I am paying closer attention. So I think art is so good for that.

00:34:04 – Austin Kleon
Well, you mentioned, like, how you try to look at the world like an artist might like seeing the shadows. And that’s such a great point, is that, you know, my friend Rob Walker has a book called the Art of Noticing, and one of the exercises Rob suggests people practice is take a photo walk without a camera. So, like, you walk around and you look for good shots without actually having the camera there. And then what happens? Well, of course, you see a million things that you’d love to take a picture of.

00:34:33 – Eric Zimmer
That’s awesome.

00:34:33 – Austin Kleon
If only you had your camera. You know, it’s funny, when I carry a pocket notebook, I have more ideas, and I don’t think it’s because I have more ideas than I do when I’m not carrying the pocket notebook. It’s just that, well, now, that’s not true. I think actually having this in my pocket, sort of rubbing against my leg all day, the same way your phone, you get that phantom weird thing from your phone being in your pocket. I think having this in my pocket all day, just invites things. You know, Thoreau said that, you know, your diary was like a nest egg. And we think of nest eggs now. It’s like saving up for the future. No, there’s, like, a thing called a nest egg, which is. It is a fake egg that you put in a nest to get a bird to lay another egg next to it.

00:35:17 – Eric Zimmer
Huh.

00:35:17 – Austin Kleon
So he thought thoughts were nest eggs. If you write one thought down in a notebook, it’ll invite other thoughts to come down. Down. It’s interesting how much when you read, because I love reading old books so much, you have to really understand what they’re talking about, you know, because nest eggs, like, who has a farm or a chicken coop? I mean, more people than they used to. Yes, some ways, but, like, what’s a nest egg? You know? Oh. You know, so it’s like, stuff like that. And it’s funny, like, some of my friends, because I have a lot of artist friends and people who are drawers, and they talk all the time about how drawing is a different kind of attention than taking pictures. And I think it is a different kind of attention, but I don’t think it’s a better kind. I mean, it might be a slower or whatever, but I think there’s something about taking pictures, because I love to take a lot of pictures, too. I think what’s fun is just have, like, an arsenal, just a tool belt, just all these different ways of paying attention. And if you can ask yourself, what am I not getting? You know, like, what am I deficient in right now? Or, like, it’s kind of like when you’re hungry, if you think about what sounds really good, it’s usually that’s what you need in your diet, you know, if you really kind of think about, you’re like, oh, salad. I should really, you know, like, if you ask yourself, like, spiritually or mentally, like, what am I kind of missing here? Then you can kind of look at your tool belt and say, well, maybe I should do, you know, maybe I should take a walk or something. With all that said, it’s like so much of this stuff is subconscious, you know, you got to kind of train yourself, and then you do a lot of it on autopilot. It’s not like I sit around in my office, like, oh, I think it’s walk time. It’s like it doesn’t really happen.

00:36:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Yep. Somewhere in the book, I don’t remember which chapter, but you quote Kurt Vonnegut saying, you know, just write a poem and tear it up. You know, and something in what you just said, reminded me of that line.

00:37:10 – Austin Kleon
Yeah. And Vonnegut’s daughter was really funny. She was kind of like, yeah, you first, dad. You go first. You know, because she was kind of goofing on his idea. And I use it because I do think it’s true. If you could write a poem knowing that you were going to tear it up, that’d be great. Except Vonnegut wouldn’t have torn up his poem. That was what his daughter was joking about, which I love. But I do feel like if you can do things for the doing, it’s so hard now because it’s so easy to share things.

00:37:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:37:40 – Austin Kleon
And I think, you know, one of the problems that young writers and artists and creative people in general have is that they haven’t really known. I mean, if you’re under a certain age, you don’t really know a world in which making and sharing were separate, you know, because now it’s like if you make something you can take a picture of and put it on your instagram immediately.

00:38:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:38:02 – Austin Kleon
And so, you know, there’s a kind of merging of making and sharing where it can get very heavy if you’re trying to make while thinking about sharing.

00:38:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:38:11 – Austin Kleon
You know, there’s something about you need to be in the making state and not thinking about the sharing state. Well, we’ve all been under surveillance so much, and self imposed surveillance. I mean, we all have, like, so many people have Instagram accounts, and I wrote a book called show your work. So it’s not like I’m, you know, I’ve contributed to this, this idea that if you want people to know about your work, you have to show it to them. You have to share with them and in a regular frequency and in a certain way. But you can’t really do a lot of really good, raw, new, scary, interesting, creative work if you feel like you’re under surveillance. And I think part of the problem with having an Instagram or a Twitter or a blog or newsletter, all these things that we have there such wonderful tools to build audience and connect with audience and get our stuff out there and run our lives. You kind of have to forget all that stuff or be able to tune that out in order to get to that raw kind of creative state. You know, I am a completely amateur piano player. I have tried to do Instagram lives before as, like, just fun. Just like, I jump on Instagram live and play some debussy, just, just as, like, a fun thing. And every time I do it, I can’t believe how much worse I am. Because I’m so, like, yeah, totally. You know, even though there’s, like, 40 people on there, all of a sudden, I’m like, oh, my God, you know? Cause I’m not a performer, and performance is a whole different thing than, like, writing in the studio or composing.

00:39:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, it is.

00:39:49 – Austin Kleon
You know, performance is a whole different thing. And so I think about that all the time, how it’s like, you know, if you think all the time about if I’m drawing, I’m like, what’s this gonna look like on Instagram? You know, that’s very limiting. Yeah, but it’s so easy to have happen to you, you know? So to try to, like, get away from the surveillance mindset, to try to get away to disconnect from the world so you can connect with your work, that’s something that every creative person, and I would argue any human living today, really needs to figure out. How can you disconnect so you can connect with yourself?

00:40:25 – Eric Zimmer
Agreed. I think that is so true. And I feel really fortunate that I don’t know how long it’s been now. A decade, maybe. Maybe not quite that long ago that I sort of, with music went, you know what? Like, nothing’s gonna happen with this. This isn’t going anywhere, and I’m just not gonna care about it going anywhere. And it’s easy to say that sounds like I just did it and it was over.

00:40:47 – Austin Kleon
Right?

00:40:47 – Eric Zimmer
I’m talking about a process here. But when I re emerged on the other side of it and I just played the guitar, and, you know, I don’t even anymore very often even record, like, a good idea. I have. You’ve got a chapter called Forget the Noun, do the verb, right? It’s forgetting about being a guitar player and just playing the guitar. But it’s turned that into a true source of solace and joy in my life because I really have no agenda on it except that, like, it’s very satisfying. Now, in our show, we do all the music breaks, so the music shows up in there. But, I mean, that is, like, the lowest form of, like. Yeah, who cares? No one cares, you know, I mean, and most of what I play in guitar never does, but it’s just nice to have something like that in life. And I loved something you said in your book. I’ve been talking a minute here. I’m going to shut up and let you talk in a second. But you talked about making gifts. You know, you said, we’re now trained to heap praise on our loved ones by using market terminology. The minute anybody shows any talent for anything, we suggest they turn it into a profession. And, boy, that really hit me as so true, because when I let go of the guitar as something that might get me something, it became a solace. But that’s not the way we are oriented in today’s world at all. We are all taught if you’re good at something, do more of it and sell it.

00:42:10 – Austin Kleon
Anything worth doing is worth doing well, or, you know, or professionally or on stage. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is something I learned too late, I think. You know, like, I was lucky in that I sort of knew that the musician’s life wasn’t going to be for me. Like, it’s funny because I used to say, like, I don’t know, getting up in front of an audience every night and trying to bear, you know, that sounds too hard. And now, of course, you know, like, a big part. Part of my job is, like, getting up on stage and talking to people. But for me, it was like, I got lucky because I kind of, like, knew music wasn’t going to be a thing. And so it happened to me. Like, that’s suddenly became the hobby.

00:42:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:48 – Austin Kleon
And hobby has become such a pejorative term now. Oh, it’s just a hobby. He’s just a hobbyist, you know, and at different points in time and in different cultures, I mean, hobbies are of what make life kind of worth, you know?

00:43:05 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:43:06 – Austin Kleon
I mean, the English have a much different approach to hobbies. For example, there’s a really wonderful essay by George Orwell that he wrote during the war, and he said that one of the reasons he felt that the English had resisted fascism was that they were very fond of personal hobbies, things like gardening or puttering around or tinkering. Orwell really thought that one of the reasons that the english people were good at resisting fascism was because they practiced hobbies. If you think about America right now, I mean, everyone’s trying to professionalize. Everything is a side hustle or, you know, whatever. And I, particularly with creative people, it’s like, most of us have tried to turn our hobbies into professions, and so then it becomes very, very, very important that you find another hobby.

00:44:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:44:03 – Austin Kleon
That you find something outside, whether it’s gardening or, you know, like whittling, whatever it is, that thing that you could do for no reason.

00:44:13 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:44:13 – Austin Kleon
You said something so beautiful. It’s like, once I stopped looking at my guitar as something that could get me something, you know, get me something. Oh, that’s it, really. You know, like that. That’s it. Once you stop looking at the thing as something that will get you something, then something can happen. Like, then you can really make something happen. And I do, though, I think the way out of that market mentality is to make gifts. If you’re a painter and you’re really feeling, I think, like painting something for your mother or something, or you make something for a hero of yours who’s been dead for 200 years, you know, just getting into that idea that I’m going to make something for someone else, and I don’t expect anything in return. I’m going to take the gifts they’ve been giving me, and then I’m going to pass them on, because that’s really what the gift is about. And there’s a great book about that called the gift by Lewis Hyde, where he talks about, like, all really great art has a gift element and that someone’s brought to their gifts from the gifts of others, and then they pass on that gift through their work. So if you can kind of, like, just pull yourself out of that market thing for a while, long enough to get in touch with that gift again and to kind of grow it, then you can kind of like, get back in the game, or you can just pull it out completely, you know, you can just say, I’m not doing this for work anymore. I mean, if you have that luxury.

00:45:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:45:42 – Austin Kleon
You know, and there have been multiple artists throughout history who have said, no, I’m gonna work at the post office and write at night, or I’m gonna. Yeah, you know, I’m gonna become an insurance vice president of this insurance company, and then I’m gonna write these wild poems. You know, poets. It was very helpful to me as a young man to look up to so many poets because they all had day jobs.

00:46:04 – Eric Zimmer
That’s right. Poets. Yeah. Yeah.

00:46:06 – Austin Kleon
By and large, there’s never been any market in poetry, so they’ve been able to kind of stay pure, in a sense.

00:46:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, well, I really related to that. Not that creating a podcast is exactly a deep art, but it was my love. And, you know, when it became something that went from something I just did because I loved doing it to something that pays the bills, there is a real change there. And, yeah, I consistently have to sort of do what you’re talking about, which is like, how do I get back to what started this? What was the fire that was here? Yeah, you know, like, it takes work to get back to that place, you.

00:46:39 – Austin Kleon
Know, I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot. My kids went back to school, and I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers and just how many teachers. I talked to a lot of teachers, and they all, you know, you have to be passionate to do that because you are not going to get rewarded in a way that is commensurate with what you do, especially in this economy. There are so many professions that that happens. You know, you’re brought to it because you love something, and then it becomes your bread winning. And I. And, like, how do you get through that? That’s a big part of the job in some ways, and very few of our jobs train us in that, you know, how to recover some of that joy, how to recover some of that early energy, some of that rawness. You know, you’re obviously a musician. I’m a musician, so it’s fun to think about how musicians do it. Mick Jagger jumping on stage at a bar. It’s like a musician jamming. Prince used to, when he was on tour, he’d just show up somewhere and play. You know, he’d do his big show at the arena, but then he’d show up somewhere, you know, do a set and then leave immediately, you know. Cause he just wanted to play.

00:47:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Can you imagine sitting in a bar and prince walk in and climb up on stage and just blow the roof off the place? I mean, it would be unbelievable. The guy was so talented. I just think about, like, it would be mind melting to see that.

00:47:59 – Austin Kleon
My friend’s name is Matt Thomas, and he was a prince fan long before I was, and Matt saw him on his piano in a microphone tour, and I just think, like, oh, man, that’s. That’s a. That’s a big regret of my life, not going to see Prince when he was. When he was here on the planet. So. Yeah, but, I mean, you know, it’s finding those things in your life. How can you just practice? You know, it would be like if LeBron did a pickup game in Akron or something, you know, whatever it was that, you know, to try to go back to that and to recapture that. I just think a lot about energy these days. Like, one of the things I love about art and books is that I feel like the good stuff, it’s embodied energy. There’s some sort of energy that’s been, like, locked in the piece. The reader, like with books, really good books, have a kind of energy to them that is activated once the reader comes and opens it up. It’s like the reader has to breathe life into it, and then all of a sudden, it works again. And all that energy that the writer put into it, it’ll be there forever. Yeah, like when you pick up Moby Dick, whatever weird, dark, crazy energy Melville channeled into that, whoever picks up Moby Dick and opens the page like it’s there for them. And that, I think, is part of the magic of art and it’s what really sustains me in my rougher days is trying to find, you know, I’ve got books around here where it’s like, I need some of that. I need some of that Linda energy. I need some of that thoreau energy. I need some of the Hockney energy. It’s like, go to it and it’s there for you.

00:49:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap up with thinking about the energy that’s embodied in great works of art. Austin, thank you so much for coming on the show. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation, and what I really want to talk about is a chapter title called demons hate fresh air, which is such a, such a great idea. We’ll talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners, if you’d like access to that, as well as a special episode I do each week called teaching song and a poem and all the other benefits of being a member, go to oneyoufeed.net join Austin, thanks so much for being here. We’ll have links to all your work in our show notes and I’ve really enjoyed this.

00:50:15 – Austin Kleon
Thank you. It was really fun.

Episode Transcript:

00:01:42 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Oliver, welcome to the show.

00:01:45 – Oliver Burkeman
Thanks very much for having me back.

00:01:46 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I was saying to you before we started that you were one of the first few interviews we ever did, which was a decade ago, and I was so excited when you said yes, because the title of your book, the happiness for people who hate positive thinking, sounded like the book title I wish I had come up with. So I was so excited to talk to you then, and you’ve been on a couple times since, and I always enjoy speaking with you. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Meditation for mortals. Four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. But before we get into that, we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking to their grandchild, and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d love to know how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:54 – Oliver Burkeman
While I hope in my book and in my work, I have some sort of counterintuitive interpretations of things, I feel like what that says to me, certainly right now feels very plain. It’s just straightforward and right and true, which is that where you focus your. Your energy and your finite time and your finite attention and all the rest of it is the life that you create. I know from listening to the podcast that people have a wide variety of interpretations of this story, but to me, that’s just like, what could it mean by that?

00:03:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, on one level, it is very straightforward and very simple.

00:03:27 – Oliver Burkeman
And I don’t say that as a criticism. Right. I feel like at a place I’m at, certainly in my career, certainly and probably life as a whole, it’s like I don’t want to shy away from the straightforward, obvious thing, if that happens to be the true thing.

00:03:39 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. In your latest book, you’re delving into something you’re calling imperfectionism, and I can’t remember whether that’s a term you used in the previous book or you’ve started to use it, but it’s a good encapsulation for what this book is about. What is imperfectionism?

00:03:56 – Oliver Burkeman
It really is, you know, an umbrella term for the things I want to talk about. You’ve got to have a proprietary label, right?

00:04:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:04:03 – Oliver Burkeman
Malcolm Gladwell would have gotten nowhere if he just said, like, well, there’s a threshold sometimes, and on one side of the threshold, things behave different. No, it’s the tipping point. I’m kidding. But I think it does identify something real. I guess this book, in terms of what it means, for me, it’s a book about addressing the challenge, because I myself found myself constantly encountering this challenge of going from knowing very well how you want to be living a more meaningful life, showing up for a more meaningfully productive, attentive, energized, enjoyable life, and, like, actually doing it. And in some ways, even off the back of my last book, 4000 weeks, right, I felt like I had really understood something as a result of writing that about what it means to be finite and what it means to have such limited time and limited ability to control the time that we do get. But discovering that that doesn’t automatically add up to, like, okay, now you just live differently from now on, successfully, because you’ve developed this. So the book, and we can talk a bit about both the messages in the book and kind of the structure of the book, maybe because I think that’s an important part of this whole idea of going from thinking about to actually doing them. But essentially the answer to how do you go from knowing the right thing to do to actually doing it is the set of outlooks and techniques that I group under imperfectionism. It is an approach that prefers taking action right now, even if it feels like you don’t quite know what you’re doing or like you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to turn it into a long term habit or if you’re nothing sure that the quality of the work you produce is going to be any good over these kind of long term schemes of fixing all your problems, changing all your habits, setting up the ideal morning routine, and becoming a different kind of person. And I think that personal development and self help culture and all the rest of it, while it has a lot of useful stuff in it, can really end up making this problem worse. Right? Embarking on a path of always being in the process of getting to the place where you’re going to feel in control at last. You’re going to feel in the driver’s seat. You’re going to feel like you know what you’re doing or like you’re on top of all your demands and pleasing everybody, whatever version of it it is for you. And so what I wanted to do was really kind of zero in on this question of like, well, that’s not working. So what does work, right?

00:06:20 – Eric Zimmer
And it is true that we face a lot of limitations, and those limitations are different from person to person. But I feel like one of the things that this show has done over the years that gets reported back to me, maybe more than anything else that’s helpful is people realizing that it’s okay, that they’re struggling or that things aren’t easy or that there is difficulty in life, that that’s just to be human. You don’t get out of that.

00:06:48 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. I think, you know, two opposite things are true here. What you just said. Life is difficult, and then in a certain sense, life is easier than we make it, but they’re connected because the reason that we struggle in life more than we need to, or so I claim in this book and elsewhere, is that we’re trying to sort of transcend our limitations. We’re trying to get out of the condition of being human instead of entering more fully into and almost kind of harnessing, in a sense, the condition of being fully human. So, yeah, if you stake your self worth on being able to answer any number of emails and you’re in a job where you’re getting an impossible number, then you are going to feel very bad about yourself. If you can learn in certain ways to understand that that is an impossible situation, that meeting that sort of infinite demand is not on the cards for a finite human, then actually you’re much more free to now focus on the important emails, feel better about yourself, make some time for other things in your life. So that kind of pattern repeats itself again and again. I feel like in what I’m writing about, it’s the struggle to get out of our built in limitations that causes the extra layer of difficulty. And that’s kind of the same point as saying that it’s difficult and there are problems with being a human.

00:08:04 – Eric Zimmer
Oftentimes I just think of it as like, how do I not, this sounds pessimistic, but how do I not make things worse? Right. Like by thinking that I should be able to fix this or I should be able to do this and that there’s something wrong with me when I can’t.

00:08:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right, yeah, absolutely.

00:08:19 – Eric Zimmer
And that ability, like you’re saying, to just embrace that doesn’t make the difficult stuff go away, but it certainly stops us from, at least in my case, compounding the difficulty.

00:08:34 – Oliver Burkeman
It stops you from compounding the difficulty and sort of allows you to live in a way that honors all that stuff as a part of your life and that makes it meaningful. Now, it’s easy to say, and I’m always wary of somebody listening who’s recently experienced a tragedy far greater than any I’ve experienced yet. So I was saying, you know, well, that’s easy to say, but I think it is true. I think life can make it harder to accept or easier depending on your situation. But it is true that once you’re no longer treating life as a problem to be solved, that’s when the problems that it will throw you away all the time, unendingly, can become sources of meaning instead of things that you have to somehow get rid of. And you’re a failure because you haven’t yet reached the part of your life that has no problems in it.

00:09:25 – Eric Zimmer
You talk a lot about how if we try and control the world, that a, that’s not a strategy that often works. Right. Because it just slides right out of our hands.

00:09:37 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, right.

00:09:38 – Eric Zimmer
But that, furthermore, the attempt to control deadens us to our lives. You use a phrase, I don’t know who it is, but life loses its resonance.

00:09:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. This is a german thinker called Hartmut Rose, whose work sort of blew my mind when I encountered it, especially because it’s in such a sort of academic setting, you don’t expect it to be so incredibly useful and illuminating in a personal sense. But this is just from my own experience, right? As a kind of somewhat insecure, quite driven, slightly fixated on productivity and efficiency type person, you’re engaged in this effort to make life feel okay by exerting more control over it, by feeling like you’re on top of things, by feeling like you’re keeping track of everything or that you’ve optimized yourself so well that you can handle everything that’s thrown at you. And sure, a lot of time it just doesn’t work. And I wrote a little bit in my previous book about how getting really good at answering email just means you get more email and doesn’t actually leave you more in charge of things at all. But also, yeah, and this is where Hartmut Rose’s work was so important. It squeezes the thing that makes life worth living out of life. It makes things feel less resonant. His term is resonance, and he’s referring to the way that, not that we should just sort of give up attempting to have any influence over life that’s taking things too far in the other direction, but that really organizing both our lives and our societies on some level as efforts to expand our control over things predictably has this unintended consequence of making them feel not enjoyable or meaningful anymore. So quick couple of examples. It might be helpful. I know that I’m not alone among sort of productivity geek people in having this experience of coming across some exciting new system for setting goals in life and coming up with what you’re going to do in the next 90 days or the next year and making it all really specific and breaking it all down into the. And feeling so excited about it on like Monday, drawing up the schedule, and by Tuesday or Wednesday. This is like the worst thing in the world, right? It just feels completely oppressive, this prison that you’ve built for yourself in an effort to get control over your life, because now it feels like you’ve just got to follow these steps and there’s no sort of real intuitive engagement with the moment anymore. It’s just like carrying out all these tasks that this jerk, namely me, two days ago, has instructed me to carry out. But right at the other end of the scale, just quickly, I don’t know anyone has either got experience of working in, or knows people who work in education, healthcare, sort of government, social services, things like that, and this is a Hartman Rose’s point. In all these sectors of work now, people complain all the time that they can’t do their jobs because there’s so much documentation and paperwork around doing their jobs. They have to spend so much time accounting for themselves and recording things that they don’t get to do those moments of human connection where the work really gets done. And he points out this is companies and governments wanting to make everything controllable and visible and predictable in a somewhat similar way to the productivity geek, really. And as a result, making it harder for a teacher and a pupil to connect or for a social worker and a client to actually have a moment of, you know, getting to the core of what the problem is or something like that because of this fixation on control. So I was really interested in the way that that seems to apply both to my sort of day to day routines and to whole swathes of society at the same time.

00:13:10 – Eric Zimmer
So this new book, Meditations for Mortals, is four weeks of reflections that we can do to help us, I would say, internalize some of these ideas and as you said earlier, help us maybe live some of them out. Why that structure?

00:13:25 – Oliver Burkeman
I really wanted, if I was going to write a book that was about this challenge of actually living differently instead of just thinking about it and planning to do it, I wanted to make sure that the book, as far as any book could, and there are limitations there, but embodied that right, that it didn’t turn into some new system that you could read and store away in your head and then put into practice one day when you get a spare moment, because there aren’t any spare moments. When did you last get a spare moment? Ridiculous. So I wanted the book to be something that people could read. Again, you don’t have to follow my instructions, but the invitation is that you read one of these short chapters each day, take a few minutes, and if some of those sort of shifts in perspective or those suggested tools and techniques work for you, that’s going to change in a small way how you live that day. Not some big character reinvention that you’re going to get involved in six months from now, but just on the day to day texture of life. And on the level of what I’m explicitly saying in those chapters as well, I’m sort of constantly pulling the rug, I hope, under, away from any attempt to say, okay, this is great, I’m going to note it down and have a whole new system of habits. It’s like, no, just do this one thing today, because it’s actually quite hard to do that for a certain kind of person, of whom I am, to just try it once, to just behave a little bit differently in a positive sense towards one person without having any confidence that you’re going to make this stick or keep it up as a regular habit or anything like that. And so that’s what I’m really trying to drive home every day. And then the four weeks sort of build on each other, right? So they’re intended to be a bit of a journey from starting more philosophically, getting quite concrete, and then ending a bit more philosophically again.

00:15:11 – Eric Zimmer
I guess the thing about habits is we know repetition can be a very positive thing, right. If we’re pointed in the right direction, a habit can be beneficial to us because it just sort of allows a good behavior to happen a little bit easier. And at the same time, they can be deadening, right. Just go through the motions. It sort of interviewed a guy, I don’t know, Michael Norton, who wrote a book about rituals. But the core idea, which is just that habits almost have the meaning sucked out of them. You don’t think about the meaning because you just do the thing. And again, it’s good and bad, but a ritual is an action that you take that you’re trying to imbue with emotion specifically. And so I love this idea that you’re pointing at, which is you don’t have to do something again and again and again and every day for it to have value.

00:16:01 – Oliver Burkeman
Right? That is absolutely right. And, you know, the other thing I would add is that very often, I think certainly if I examine in my own life the habits that have stuck, what happened was that they emerged through that process of just doing it sometimes. Right? They were not always these sort of top down willed efforts at exerting control over how I lived my life. And so I’m not even in some level making a point against habits. I’m just making a point about how habits can emerge. Everything has to start with a willingness to just, right now, do something that feels meaningful for ten minutes. You know, one thing, and I guess part of this point of this book is it’s a reaction to seeing in me as much as in anybody else the incredible sort of seductiveness of not doing that. It makes you feel much more secure on some level to believe that you’re involved in a process of reaching towards perfection, but you’re not there yet, than to say, actually, I’m just going to live a little bit differently today.

00:16:57 – Eric Zimmer
Which is ultimately all you can do, because you can’t live next Thursday. You can only live today.

00:17:03 – Oliver Burkeman
Right.

00:17:04 – Eric Zimmer
And you can only take action today. And it’s overly obvious, but when I was coaching people, I would. The same thing would happen. They’d be doing great with whatever it is that they wanted to do. But there was this constant. But I just know next week I’m not going to be able to stick with it.

00:17:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right, right. That’s interesting because that’s not so much putting it off until later. That’s saying, it’s going fine now, but I’m racked with anxiety about whether I can keep it up and amounts to the same thing. Right. Which is that the real value, the real sort of payoff moment in life where you get to say that you did well or not is always in the future. And if you live too completely in that way, you just reinforce the idea that the meaning of life is in the future.

00:17:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Day seven kind of talks about this directly. Let the future be the future on crossing bridges when you come to them.

00:17:52 – Oliver Burkeman
I write in that chapter about the moment not many years ago when I, like, finally felt like I understood what cross bridges when you come to them means. People say it all the time. It’s like, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Of course, you will only cross that bridge when you come to it. There’s no other time that you can cross a bridge. But I think that for the sort of habitually anxious and worrier people like me, a lot of what is going on with worry is this attempt to sort of achieve in the present the security that would have come from crossing all the bridges, from dealing with everything that could go wrong in the future. And, you know, it’s useful to prepare yourself for things that could go wrong. That’s a sort of old stoic technique, isn’t it right to sort of think about what could go wrong so that you’re sort of mentally girded for it. But you can’t ever in the present, have the security of knowing that you survived something that happened in the future. That’s just not the kind of thing that humans get to experience. Because one of the ways we’re limited is we’re sort of temporally limited, right? We’re limited to this spot in time. You can’t sort of like, just look over the fence and see how it’s going to be a week or a month or a year from now. And like all the things I’m discussing in this book, or many of them, that is both incredibly sort of stressful and depressing and requires you to admit defeat in a way. And then as soon as you begin to do so, you realize that it’s. It’s amazing, it’s liberating, and it’s energizing and it’s empowering, because now you only have to care about the very next moment ever. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t sometimes use the very next moment to do some planning. Sure. Like, you know, definitely write a will, you know, make certain kind of judicious plans in your life, but all you’re ever doing is using the next moment in whatever seems like the most important, meaningful way. You’re not sort of pinning down the future so that you know it’s all going to be fine. And that’s why worry is so repetitive, right. Because we’re constantly trying to get to this place of security about the future and then realizing, like, no, we’re not going to get there. That’s not how it works. So we worry some more.

00:20:16 – Eric Zimmer
I think one of the things that you do well in the book is avoid the binaries, right. And it’s really easy to be in, I think, one of two binaries when people paint them, right. One is just live for the moment, now is all you have. And the other is this idea of, like, make sure your future self is totally set up for success, and you’ve actually got one of the meditations that talks about your future self, but it sounds like you’re trying to sort of split that difference between these. Maybe that’s a wrong way to say it, but to find some place between these binaries that we often tend to.

00:20:51 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I mean, I think, as always, when there’s a binary, really, it’s like a, there’s some sort of synthesis or transcendence of those ideas that can usefully take place. And in that context, yeah, I mean, I think live in the moment very often means, you know, put all this effort and self consciousness into trying to feel like all you’re doing is just sensing the world around you and not caring about the future and not behaving in ways that society deems responsible, but just really soaking it all up. And in that sense, sure, that’s an extreme, just as a sort of fixation with your future self is an extreme. On the other hand, the fact that we always are only in the moment is just a brute fact of being temporal, finite human beings. So the question then is how much of those present moments you’re going to use for things that really only get their meaning in the future, or whether you can make sure that there are things you’re doing in your life that have meaning in themselves, perhaps meaning in themselves, meaning for the future. And the point in the section that you mentioned there that I’m sort of addressing this directly is, I think that a lot of people who are sort of attracted to ideas like this read books on personal development, spirituality, even though many of them may pay a lot of lip service to the idea of being present in the moment. They’re really focused on, almost to the exclusion of anything else, on sort of becoming a different kind of person in the future, on making sure that their future self thanks them for the decisions they’re making now. So it’s quite easy, I think, from my experience and people I’ve met to sort of adopt a path of meditation or non duality or, you know, something that really does try to sort of, in its content is all about being here now and just embark upon it as a completely future oriented, goal focused process towards becoming a. A kind of person that you like more than the person that you are right now. There’s a quote at the very beginning of the book that I use from Marian Woodman. It’s easier to try to be better than you are, than to be who you are, which I think is quite a powerful one. A lot of us, I don’t want to group anyone else in, but certainly me, are very prone to really deferring gratification too much to saying if I’m going to have a time in my life when I can relax or just enjoy things, enjoy people, enjoy being alive. That’s got to come at the end of this very long, arduous process of doing all the things I’m obliged to do first.

00:23:21 – Eric Zimmer
At the same time, you also, in another chapter, talk about you can’t hoard life, like on letting the moment pass. And this really resonated with me. Say more about what you mean by that.

00:23:32 – Oliver Burkeman
I think this is really in keeping with that, but it is a different angle. I’m writing there while I begin in that section with this awareness that I’ve had myself, that even when good things are happening, to give the example in the book, even when I’m sort of living in a landscape I always wanted to live in, walking at a beautiful day through beautiful countryside that I’ve always loved, there can be this thing that stops you fully enjoying it, which is a desire to sort of take ownership of it or to convince yourself that you’re going to be able to have lots more of this experience going on into the future or really encode it in your mind so that you can always remember it, or just something that takes you away from the experience itself. Buddhism is especially good on this. Right. One of the specific ways we make ourselves miserable is not just that we don’t yet have what we think we want or that we have things that we wish we didn’t have, it’s that we do have what we did want.

00:24:24 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:24:25 – Oliver Burkeman
And cling so hard to it that it actually undermines the sort of the resonance of that moment. So that’s what I’m referring to as hoarding life. Whether it’s busily taking photos of the place you are to try to keep it permanent or if even just the thought that I was having there, you know, okay, I’ve got to make sure that my life works such that I can carry on having this kind of experience, like, every day for the rest of my life or something. It’s like, no, that’s not quite fully being in the experience.

00:24:53 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, yeah. That’s an experience I’ve had so many times where it’s like, all right, let’s say I’m getting ready to go on a beach vacation. It’s like, I just got to get to the beach. I just got to get to, you know, like, when I get there. So the whole day just kind of waiting to get there. Waiting to get there, get there, walk out, have about 30 seconds of like. Like, oh, wow, that’s really beautiful and amazing. And then my brain immediately will say something like, I wonder what houses around here cost.

00:25:17 – Oliver Burkeman
Right, right.

00:25:18 – Eric Zimmer
Because I’m suddenly like, I need to be here all the time. But there’s another flavor of this that I get. You sort of talk about it by saying that you fail to savor a moment in nature because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, which is that I often have this moment of, like, what’s the way to say this? It’s the beautiful countryside there, and I feel like a more evolved version of me would be content with just what’s right in front of me, and I don’t feel quite content with what’s right in front of me. So now I’m even further away from being able to enjoy what’s right in front of me.

00:25:56 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. Yeah. And, I mean, you know, you can very easily get into loops where you’re then beating yourself up for being like that. Right. And it’s like, well, before you know it, you’re just a huge mess. It’s sort of a twin process, isn’t it? Of sort of allowing yourself to enjoy that experience just for itself, but also allowing yourself to have all these kind of other parts of you that want to do this. This is not a unique argument at all, but I’m very big, really, on the idea that it doesn’t help to try to sort of beat up or extinguish the parts of your personality that are causing these sort of ridiculous situations. I think what I’m sort of constantly hoping to indicate in the book is like, they are a little absurd. Right. It’s not that you should feel bad that you have something in you that wonders about house prices. There’s a great power in being able to notice that. That’s quite funny, because the place from which you’re laughing at that is a very big and all encompassing space. Right. And it’s like, yeah, on some level, you’ll probably always have that kind of thought anywhere that you’re not living, that you go, that you enjoyed being in. I mean, that comes up in another section. But that strategy that I’m borrowing from Bruce Tift, the psychotherapist, is like, you know, what if the trait that you most deplore in yourself, what does it feel like to imagine that you would have some version of that for the rest of your life? Never getting rid of it? You’re always going to have a little bit of a tendency towards worry or being dissatisfied in beautiful places or easily distracted by nonsense, you know? And I really find that a very relieving thought. To imagine that I might not eradicate that kind of issue because it feels like, okay, then I can give up that fight and just spend my time and energy on things that I care about instead of constantly struggling with something that on some level, is just who I am.

00:27:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, this is one that I talk about on the show a lot because I was diagnosed with clinical depression sometime in my late twenties after getting sober from heroin addiction. And have thought about myself in those terms a lot. But what I wrestle with all the time is sort of a version of what you’re saying, which is like, what if this is just how I am? I’ve referred to it before as treating it a little bit like the emotional flu. Like, oh, it comes here and get it for a few days, then it goes away, and then it comes back and just, like, just letting it be instead of thinking that there should be some way to change it or fix it. And I don’t know if you know Andrew Solomon. He wrote a book called the Noonday Demon in Atlas of Depression, but he also wrote a book called Far from the tree. And the thing that stuck out from that book to me the most was it’s about children who often have some sort of difference from their parents blindness or autism. Or if the parent knows that there’s nothing that can be done to change that condition they get on with the business of building the best possible life they can with a child.

00:28:48 – Oliver Burkeman
Oh, wow.

00:28:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And if, on the other hand, they absolutely know it can be fixed, then they just focus on that. But everybody else is caught in this.

00:28:57 – Oliver Burkeman
Middle ground of not knowing if it can be fixed.

00:28:59 – Eric Zimmer
Not knowing if it can be fixed and getting your hopes up again and again because someone else comes down the street saying, I know how to fix that. I can fix that. Maybe if you just ate this way, maybe if you just. And so they end up in this limbo where they’re neither fully committed to changing it and they’re also not fully committed to accepting it. And I think a lot of things in life fall into that middle ground which makes them hard.

00:29:22 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And that is fascinating because obviously there’s a kind of a glib acceptance response to that that just says, well, you know, acceptance is always the way, but that makes no sense. If there’s a really serious chance that you can relieve your kid of a serious issue, that’s crazy to not try. So it comes down to that very sort of subtle position of saying that you accept how things are right now in this moment, including your desire to make changes, including the possibility that the changes might or might not work. There’s a sort of level of acceptance that I only occasionally glimpse myself that includes non acceptance.

00:30:00 – Eric Zimmer
Right. In the book. Several times you talk about this and you just used a similar reference to it a couple minutes ago. Although I don’t remember the exact words. I think you were talking about making more and more space. But you talk a lot about contraction and expansion as ways of thinking about these ideas.

00:30:18 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, I mean, one of these came up in 4000 weeks and I return to it in this book, which is the lovely line from James Hollis about asking whether a certain life path or choice enlarges you or diminishes you instead of will it make me happy? Will this be enlarging? And that’s just very powerful because it seems to connect intuitively to something a lot of people really do get. There’s a certain kind of attitude of growth that you can take in life that will sometimes take you through very happy and enjoyable things but sometimes through quite difficult terrain. And equally, there is a path of pure hedonism you could take that sometimes might be meaningful, but a lot of the time would be not meaningful, even though it was sort of fun on the surface. And so that question, does this enlarge me or diminish me? Is quite important. I mean, I’ve seen so many different references to this all over the place from different sources, but just that idea that what I’m doing wrong or what I’m doing unwisely, when I worry, when I feel like I need to get into more control over the world than I am or anything like that, is best understood as some kind of clenching. And for me, and I think for a lot of people, actually, is accompanied by sort of muscular tensions, that part of worrying about something is like tightening the muscles in my face, and that this is somehow girding me against the world in a way that will keep me safe. And part of worry for me certainly is always, like, in the bottom of my stomach. That’s where anxiety lives when it comes. And it’s all this kind of way of being braced against reality, which is both unpleasant and kind of makes no sense. Right. Because you’re just part of reality and you’re not going to be able to prevent events happening through sort of that sort of bracing. So I think the advice I’m giving in this book, which as ever, is advice to myself as much as to anybody, is like, maybe just relax in that very specific muscular sense a little bit and see what it is to go through life in that way instead.

00:32:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You mentioned non duality earlier, and I studied with a non dual teacher for a while by the name of Adyashanti. And he said two things that were relevant to this. One is he said that ego is nothing but contraction, which I think is just sort of an out there sort of phrase to contemplate. Right. But the other one was, he said his teacher told him at one point, less of this and I’m making a fist right now, and more of this, I’m opening my hand. And I like that because, like you said, when I do that, I feel some sense of what I’m trying to do psychically.

00:32:55 – Oliver Burkeman
Totally. I really feel. I mean, I’m only at the beginning of a journey of the sort of embodied and somatic part of these ideas, but it really is where the rubber hits the road. And I’ve even found, you know, just to give a completely sort of self absorbed example from writing and wanting to promote a book. Right. It’s just like, just what I’m doing in my life. It really is true that the more I can just enjoy myself, the better it goes for everybody, including the readers that I’m addressing in my newsletter, including the, I hope, the host of the podcast who’s who I’m talking to right now. You know, just including book sales, just like all of it, is not helped by this sort of excess of furrowing one’s brow and clenching one’s fist and trying to make it work out. And it’s a real leap of faith. The glib way of talking about it is it goes better when you don’t really care about it, and that makes it sound like you’re being sort of irresponsible. But actually, yeah, it goes better when you stand up on a stage and mostly you’re dedicated to just having a good time. It goes better for other people.

00:34:23 – Eric Zimmer
Let’s turn in the next, oh, 20 minutes or so to a couple more practical things that are in the book. We’ve kind of been philosophical to a large degree up till now, and I want to get some of the great practical things that are in the book out. And the first that I wanted to talk about was this idea of too much information on the art of reading and not reading. We are like obsessed with getting more, knowing more, learning more, remembering more. What are some ways to navigate this that are sane?

00:34:57 – Oliver Burkeman
I love this topic partly because, you know, it’s just a big deal in my own life, the feeling that there’s too much that I need to read or should consume or that would be useful for me to digest, but also because I think it really is a good example of a much wider phenomenon when it comes to being. Being a finite human. We are convinced that there must be some way of getting to all the most important stuff, and we feel bad because we haven’t done so. So it might not be that we get to read every book that we think of, but it certainly is that we should be able to, like, at least make the right choices and then make sure that the books we do read or the articles we do consume, or whatever it is, are the ones that we really needed to consume, and the rest didn’t really matter. And of course, the real problem that we have in the modern world is that there’s far too much interesting, compelling, important stuff that does matter. It’s not that with a really good filter, you know, with really good discernment, you can get rid of all the stuff that you don’t need to consume. It’s that actually, you know, if you had 48 hours in each day and nothing to do but consume books and articles and podcasts and videos, there would be enough good stuff, important stuff, to fill that time. And in that context, the only sane way to approach the glut of information is the metaphor I use is to treat it like a river rather than a bucket, right? So it’s not something you’re trying to drain, it’s not something you’re trying to go through every single item and at least consume the stuff that really matters until the bucket is empty. It’s just this endless river of infinite stuff. And you’re just picking a few things that seize your interest and attention as they go by. And you’re not feeling bad about all the things that flow by without you ever seeing them. Because to feel bad in that context, to feel overwhelmed, although it’s very understandable, and I don’t want people to beat themselves up for it, it is ultimately to believe that you ought to have the capacities of a kind of infinite being, of a God. It really is a sort of denial of what it actually means to be a finite human, especially in the modern world, which is to be just surrounded by so much more interesting stuff to read. And that’s just one example, right. Could be places to go, people to get to know, obligations to fulfill, ambitions to realize there’s so much more than we could ever get to do that actually. There’s a little bit of liberation to be. There’s a separate section of the book where I talk about how like, it’s so liberating to realize that these things are worse than you think. Because if you think it’s really bad, how many emails you’ve got and it’s going to be really hard to answer them all, or you think it’s really bad, how many books you feel you need to read, and it’s going to be really hard to get through them all, that’s very stressful. But when you realise that it’s worse than that, and that it’s completely impossible that you’re never going to make it through all the things that feel like they need your time and attention, not even close, then you can just give up that fight and you can use your time and your energy and your attention in ways that really matter, which is going to be to make some good enough choices about what to focus on and move forward.

00:37:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, absolutely. I love that river analogy. I think that’s a great one. And I think the other thing that comes in here is also losing a belief that if we just get the right book or the right article or the right whatever as you say, we’re going to be on top of it, right? We’re going to be fixed. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to arrive at some place. We just need to find the right one, which is not really true because it doesn’t matter. What we do. Is the point of the book being you never fully feel on top of it or complete, or that, you know, everything’s under control because it doesn’t exist.

00:38:35 – Oliver Burkeman
Right. What we’re trying to do in all those moments, however, forgivably and understandably, is sort of get up and out of the situation in which we all are in as finite humans. Limited time, limited control, limited ability to know what’s coming next or to even to understand other people, right? We’re looking for some secret to sort of master the situation of being a human, and we don’t find it. We spend a lot of our lives struggling to find it. We beat ourselves up for not having found it. We get sort of angry or jealous or envious of people who we think have found it, and it’s just not there, because what it really is is a desire to renegotiate the terms and conditions of the human condition. And that’s what all those lovely Zen phrases mean. When Charlotte Jacobec says, what makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured. And when Mel Weitzman says, our suffering is believing there’s a way out, the problem is not the problems. The problem is thinking that there ought to be a complete solution to the problems. Yeah.

00:39:40 – Eric Zimmer
There’s some version of a story where I don’t think it’s an actual buddhist tale, but it’s this guy who comes to the Buddha with all these problems. Right. It’s just this list of problems. And the Buddha’s found, like, 99 problems, which he’s basically saying infinite problems. He’s like, I can’t help you with any of those. And the guy gets very frustrated and thinks, why am I talking to someone so wise? And again, this is not an actual buddhist story, but it’s attributed that way. I don’t think it is. And the Buddha says, well, I can help you with one problem, which is that you think you shouldn’t have problems.

00:40:12 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah, exactly. And there’s a section in the book on this idea of giving up hope, of getting to the problem free phase in life, which I contend you would not actually want to be in if you did reach it, that it would be kind of a death to have a life with no problems. There are obviously very bad problems that one hopes never to have to experience and there’s nothing good about. But that idea that a problem is doubly problematic because there’s the problem itself. And then there’s the fact that by this stage in my life, I ought to have figured things out so that I don’t have problems. You know, it’s like an extraordinary recipe for unnecessary self hate.

00:40:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I had a conversation with. I don’t know how it happened. My partner Ginny will just start conversations with people wherever we go, and they go very deep, very quickly. I’m like, how does she connect with these people like this? But one of them was with this 25 year old american woman we were in Paris at the time, who was living in Paris and feels like she just doesn’t know what she’s doing or that all of her friends are ahead of her or all these different things. And a big part of the conversation was just like, I’ve got bad news, which is that feeling is not necessarily going to go away. You’re not like two years away, where you’ll figure it out. I mean, I’ve got some disconcerting news to give you, which is, and I love you, just sort of used a phrase about renegotiate. I feel like we’re always renegotiating. We have to be the terms of reality. Right? We think we’re going to get to a place where we strike a deal, and that’s it. But it’s not. Life is an ongoing negotiation with reality.

00:41:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Yeah. And the example that you give there, it’s a classic case of the liberation of seeing that it’s worse than you think because it’s a tormenting thing to feel. That imposter syndrome or, you know, not that youthful idea that other people understand life if they’re a little older than oneself. It’s tormenting because you think it’s somewhere that you can get and you haven’t got there yet, but when you really let it sink into your bones that no one ever gets there, or maybe that the few people who really do think they know what they’re doing in life are the most dangerous and deluded on the planet, that’s kind of worse than you think because it turns out it’s not possible. But that’s wonderful, because then you’re just. You’re free. You’re free to just, like, try things now because you don’t need to postpone them to this point at which you know what you’re doing.

00:42:35 – Eric Zimmer
Right? Yeah, I’m not sure that. But those statements to her were initially consoling. I think she’s got a little bit more of wrestling with that. Oh, no. You gotta be kidding me. I’m gonna. It was not instantly liberating, I don’t think.

00:42:50 – Oliver Burkeman
No, no. None of this is instant, in my experience, whatever certain Zen masters say.

00:42:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes. I’m just gonna jump around at a couple here. Set a quantity goal on firing your inner quality controller, which is day 20.

00:43:05 – Oliver Burkeman
This is part of a week of reflections on the ways in which sometimes what we really need to do is not make things happen in our lives to build more meaningful ones, but just to let them happen, to stand out of the way and, you know, born of seeing this tendency in myself over and over again to make things harder than they need to be. I’m coming at it, in this case, through the lens of creativity and talking about how difficult it is to, in my case, write good stuff when you’re ahead trying to write good stuff. And this was an experience totally borne out by this book, because my last book had done a lot better than I expected. And so naturally, I had this predictable reaction of being, like, paralyzed and thinking like, oh, no, I’ve got to meet the same standard. And if I mess it up, more people will see my humiliation or whatever. And the first step through that was to let myself. And it’s not easy, right? It’s sort of unpleasant at first, but sort of let myself put quality to one side, at least at first. Just write. Just do free writing exercises where you set a timer for 20 minutes and fill the page with words. All these things that, to be quite honest, I had always deeply disdained, because I’m like, oh, yeah, free writing exercises are for, like, amateurs. It’s like such b’s, right? I just sit down and I write the damn. Not perfect, but it makes sense, you know? And actually, behind that kind of attitude, there is something a bit perfectionistic. It’s not perfectionistic in terms of the quality of the sentences, but it is perfectionistic in terms of what mood I ought to be able to bring up whenever I want to. And, you know, this is in the book, right? That seemingly great quote from Chuck close that’s so famous. Like, inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. And there’s something really great about that, but there’s also something really bad about it, which is that implication that it doesn’t matter how you feel, you just get there and you write good stuff or you paint good paintings or whatever, because you’re a professional and actually I think that what we need to do very often in those situations is to relax the quest for quality and standards that we hold ourselves to. And a very simple down to earth way to do that is, as I say, to set a quantity goal right, to make your creative practice about the number of hundred words you’re going to put onto a page or the number of minutes that you’re going to work on something for. And really to be careful that that doesn’t turn into I’m going to spend this many minutes and do something really amazing. But that actually completion for the day, the state of being done, the state of having done what you showed up to do is measured totally, at least at first, in those quantities because it really has a wonderful way of taking the drama out of it. And it sort of obliges you to trust processes that are bigger than you or beneath your consciousness. You have to say, look, I really am going to write 500 words a day. And if I think the 500 words I’ve written are terrible, I’m going to write another 500 words. I’m not going to spend the next six months finessing that 1st 500 words. Now I feel honour bound to add that by the time I was actually writing this book and editing it, I wasn’t just free writing nonsense onto the page. I don’t think it’s full of nonsense now, but it’s absolutely critical at the beginning to not really mind and to see that that sort of little taskmaster inside you that is barking that this isn’t good enough and that you need to do better. I’m sufficiently familiar with internal family systems therapy and stuff to know that he does want the best for you. He’s not evil, but he really needs to be sort of indulgently chuckled at rather than obeyed.

00:46:42 – Eric Zimmer
I. I think the headline out of this is Burkeman thinks latest book not much better than free writing exercises.

00:46:51 – Oliver Burkeman
That would be great positioning.

00:46:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, you call them quantity goals. I refer to them as effort goals. For me, I’ve been in the midst of this with trying to write a book for myself. Now I’ve had the problem of having read a decade’s worth of books like this by many people who are extraordinarily good authors who I would consider you in that camp and that I know that what’s coming out of me isn’t that good. And the phrase that I’ll use is yet and I have no idea. Can I write 500 words a day? Should I be writing a thousand? I have no sense of any of it. So for me, it’s number of 30 minutes sessions. Yeah, it’s just that. And if I get that done, at the end of the day, I do everything I can to just shut off all the voices of doubt. And it’s not good. Nothing good came out and just be like, I did it. Like, I showed up and did my best for this window of time. And that’s just gonna have to be good enough for now.

00:47:46 – Oliver Burkeman
And the crazy part is, I totally agree, what is represented by that attitude, which is really engaging with reality, which is putting aside perfectionistic fantasies in favor of action that really matters, that will be in the book just as a result of having approached it in that way. Right. Separate from which words you end up writing in the final draft. Like, the book will live and exude that in a way that I don’t even understand. Right. I don’t know how it works. It seems a bit supernatural, but that sort of down to earth approach, I firmly believe will be reflected in the sort of usefulness and ability to connect to people that will be in the end product.

00:48:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I imagine my editor is probably going to be like, okay, we’ve got the idea that writing this book has made you nervous. Like, we don’t need it in, like, every fifth sentence.

00:48:32 – Oliver Burkeman
Right? The other reason not to submit a perfect book is you. You’ve got to give your editor something to do. Otherwise, where’s the meaning in your editor’s life? Right? You’ve got to give them something to get their teeth into and send back and say, do this differently.

00:48:43 – Eric Zimmer
All right, let’s end with a phrase that I really liked. I’m just going to read a couple sentences and let you talk more about it. Striving towards sanity is never going to work. You have to operate from sanity instead. What does that mean?

00:49:00 – Oliver Burkeman
It means that whatever counts for you is the spirit of the kind of life you want to live. And when I think about for myself, it’s calm and energized, focused, attentive and available for other people and sort of getting important things actually done, all of that. Call that sanity by my standards here. In some sense, you have to live from that identity right now and sort of manifest that in the world rather than viewing it as something that you’re working towards, but that you can’t have yet. Because if you define it in that way, that will become a self fulfilling prophecy, and you will never get it because you’re defining it as something that has to be in the future. So that sounds very, very vague and abstract. I think to make it a bit more concrete, if you feel that at this point in your life, as I do, a certain amount of more like rest is probably appropriate than you’ve been granting yourself up to this stage. Striving towards sanity would be saying, okay, I need to rest. I’m gonna take a sabbatical in a year’s time, and until then, I’m gonna. You wouldn’t necessarily say it consciously to yourself, but right until then, I’m gonna work really, really hard so that I’ve got everything running and, you know, the business is self sustaining and everything’s working. Out of your intuition that you need rest, you start doing the exact opposite of resting and reinforcing all those parts of your psyche that think that what you have to do in life is strive harder and harder and harder. Starting from sanity would be allowing yourself today maybe only for 20 minutes, maybe it doesn’t feel very great at first, but allowing yourself to take that, a little bit of rest, a little bit of enjoyment and savoring of the world right here and now. And there’s lots of other examples that don’t necessarily apply to rest per se, but it’s that idea of finding some way to embody the life you want to have now, instead of working towards some kind of amazing, full spectrum, perfect manifestation of it that only comes later.

00:51:10 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation. We’re going to talk about distraction and interruption, what it means to be a good person in this world, and answering the question of do you really have to do that thing that you’re convinced you have to do? Listeners, if you’d like access to the post show conversation ad free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a poem, and you want to be part of supporting something that’s important to you, go to oneyoufeed.net join and we’d love to have you as part of our community. Oliver, such a pleasure. Thank you again.

00:51:50 – Oliver Burkeman
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

00:52:08 – Chris Forbes
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Episode Transcript:

00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Kristen. Welcome to the show.

00:01:45 – Jolenta Greenberg
Hey.

00:01:46 – Kristen Meinzer
Hi. Thanks for having us.

00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’m excited to have you guys on. I have been fans of your work for a long time. You had a great podcast called by the book where you tried to live by self help help books, which is a great idea. I love the way you did it. Then you change to a podcast called how to be fine, and now you have how to be fine with friends. And so we’ll be talking about all of those things. But before we do, let’s start like we always do, with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:46 – Kristen Meinzer
Well, I think for me, a lot of it also comes down to not just feeding the good wolf, but knowing that sometimes feeding the good wolf initially might feel like more work until it becomes second nature. Something I used to always say is, bitterness is easy and being happy is what’s hard. It’s so easy to just be a complainer. It’s so easy to look at what’s wrong in life. It’s so easy to be mad at things because there’s so much to be mad about, and I’m not in denial about any of that. There’s a lot of crap in this world and I think it’s so easy to give into that. I think that’s one reason why it can almost feel addicted. Go on to angry message boards. It can be so addictive to just complain online and complain to others because it’s easy. I think it’s much harder to actually do the work of saying no. I’m going to look for what’s decent in the world and in other people. I’m going to try to spread that decency. I’m going to try to make things more kind. But at least what I have found in life is that after the initial hurdles of doing that, which seem hard, that actually eventually becomes easy, too. And so to me, that’s what feeding the good wolf is about, is maybe feeding the good wolf initially feels like it’s hard, but eventually that wolf will feed me back.

00:04:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. How about you, Jolenta?

00:04:04 – Jolenta Greenberg
I would say it’s similar to Kristen, where you try and put your focus where it can be most useful. Not like. Cause something’s like calling for your attention, essentially.

00:04:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:04:17 – Jolenta Greenberg
The loud, flashy thing might not always be, like, the best use of your time.

00:04:21 – Eric Zimmer
There are a lot of loud, flashy things that are not the best use.

00:04:24 – Jolenta Greenberg
Of our time, but they can be so distracting and, like, appealing sometimes feel really urgent, you know? Yeah.

00:04:32 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes, yes. So we’ll get into how to be fine with friends, which is your latest, I don’t know if you want to call it series or endeavor, which is really about how do we create and sustain friendships as adults. So we’ll get into that in a second. But I’d like to go back first and talk a little bit about by the book, because the first time that I heard about what you’re doing and listened, I loved it, because I think I have interviewed many of the people who’ve written some of the books that you guys have had on, and so there’s a little element of crossover, but you guys take it a step further in which you read the book and then you really pick out, like, okay, here are some of the key things this book says we should do. And then you try and do those things for a period of time, and then you come back and do a podcast about those things, which is such a great idea. What I’d love to know is this. I mean, you started that a long time ago. We’ve all been in this business for a while, and this question may be impossible, but I’m going to put it out there anyway, and you guys can modify it in whatever way you want, which is, what do you think doing that for that long caused? In what way are you fundamentally, maybe you’re not, but different than before you started on that endeavor.

00:05:53 – Jolenta Greenberg
Wow, good question. I feel like we’re different in lots of ways. Speaking for myself, I’ve become less trusting over the years of people claiming to be experts about certain things. You know, there are lots of self help books that are written by actual doctors and practitioners who have, like, sound advice based on research. But there are lots of people who are self proclaimed experts who want to tell you how to live and where to spend your money. It’s surprising how many of those types of authors there are in the self help world. So I feel like my view has become a bit more skeptical, if I’m being honest.

00:06:34 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah. And I would say the flip is true for me, because when we first embarked on this show, which, you know, was about eight years ago, Jowenta was the one who was like, I really want to believe these promises. Oh, my gosh. Look, I can do this in six easy steps. I was exactly the opposite. I’m like, these people are all charlatans. They’re trying to sell us stuff. Most of them are not legit experts. And the people who read these books are frankly pathetic that they’re falling for people who are so clearly not real sources, not real scientists. And I was very judgmental about the books in the beginning and also embarrassed to even be seen in public reading them. I remember going to a bar with a secret and thinking, oh, God, what if somebody sees what I’m reading? What are they going to think about me? And as time went on, I really came to change my tune, where I started to develop a lot more empathy for the people who turn to these books because we live in a culture. The US is really a pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture. And shouldn’t we all be aiming to be better, to be stronger, faster, to optimize ourselves in some way? And of course, some people are going to, as part of our American culture try to do those things. And it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid people or bad people for falling for these books that are calling to them. And also, our healthcare system is designed where we’re not always, especially as women, getting all of the help and answers we need. Women historically have been so dismissed in the world of medicine and wellness and been treated as secondary men are the default. These studies are done on boys who are 18 to 25, who are white, who are this tall. It’s very rare that women are the center of these studies. Up until recently, we didn’t even know what heart attacks looked like in women. And to a certain extent, we still don’t know. And so it makes sense that a lot of women would turn to these books, women in particular, because most self help readers are actually women. And so I think over time, I became a lot less judgmental of the people who read the books. In the beginning, I was very judgmental. And now I’m like, I get it. I totally get the idea of wanting to get answers or wanting to make ourselves better. But I also get that for some people, it’s just a little dose of hope when things are feeling hopeless. And I get that.

00:08:55 – Eric Zimmer
I relate with what you both said. I’m pretty particular in what people I interview on the show. Like, I tend to have people on that I think have something that’s useful to say. And I don’t think a lot of what’s in self help is useful, necessarily. And Kristen, I really relate with the desire to be better, whether that be a striving to be better or that be a, I’m in a lot of pain and I just don’t want to be. So how might I not be? I think that is a noble impulse. I think that this distinction between expert and non experts is an interesting one because I come from, my sort of first introduction to this sort of world was in twelve step programs, and there are not experts. Right. It’s pointedly non expert. It’s the fact that, like, I’ve been through this, I’ve had the same problems you have. So I have something to share with you. And experts are almost sometimes dismissed in that culture, which is not good. I actually don’t think that’s good. I think there’s a place for both. I think there’s a place for people who have studied these things and have some, quote unquote, credibility. And I think there’s a place for people who’ve been through these things and have personal experience. And like you, I think that a healthy dose of skepticism is useful in both cases. Right. Experts have done all kinds of harm over the years. Right. It’s not like just because you’ve got a PhD after your name, you’re not completely full of it. Also.

00:10:34 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right.

00:10:34 – Eric Zimmer
It doesn’t mean that, but we do need to be sort of careful. So I really relate with what both of you guys said. So that was sort of how your orientation to the self help world changed. In what ways do you think that you might have changed for the better, besides the way you viewed the self help world? Like, are there any ways you look back and you’re like, you know what, year three, we did this book and I started doing this one thing, and boy, I still do that. And that’s been really helpful. Or if anything like that stands out. I mean, questions like that are really hard. It’s like asking like, well, what’s your favorite episode? Well, I did 300. I loved like 150 of them. So I may be asking you to go with too narrow of a comb here, but anything come to mind?

00:11:19 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah. For me, there was a season that we lived by the best selling self help books by decade in American history. And I believe we started with the 1930s, thirties, forties, fifties, and so on. And we lived by Dale Carnegie’s original version of how to win friends and influence people. And one thing from that book jumped out at me, and I still continue to do it to this day. And it is to be the dog. When you see the dog, the dog is excited to see you. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the dog in five minutes or 5 hours. It meets you at the door and says, Eric, it’s so good to see you. You are the best. I love you the most. You’re fantastic. And I’m so lucky that I get to have you in my life. And if we greet people with that spirit in mind of being the dog, not the first thing out of my mouth is a complaint. The first thing out of my mouth is something that shows love or gratitude. It makes me Happier. I found, and it makes my relationships better, because I do think that in the past, it would sometimes be easy for me to lead with a complaint or lead with a ho hum or, you know, barely notice, like, oh, hey, you know, a roommate or a partner or whatever is coming home after a long day. And it’s just Nicer for me, at least when I try to feel like that dog, when I try to be.

00:12:38 – Jolenta Greenberg
The dog, just be the dog.

00:12:41 – Eric Zimmer
Dogs are good.

00:12:42 – Jolenta Greenberg
Plus, I would love it if I had a Talking Dog. That was really like, hey, Eric, great to see you.

00:12:47 – Eric Zimmer
I would love that.

00:12:48 – Jolenta Greenberg
That’s straight where my mind went when you described that. Kristen. Sorry. I would say for me one thing that stuck with me almost reluctantly because I thought it was super hokey when I read it was, I think it was from the book why good things happen to good people, where the author recommend you play the glad game, where you just list things you’re glad for along with another person. And I was in a horrible mood, and I was like, I’ll do this with my husband while we walk the dog. And I was like, this is bullshit, whatever. And then by the end, I was, like, smiling and laughing and reluctantly having a good time. So that’s always stuck with me, that you can shift your focus and your mood a little bit with some effort.

00:13:29 – Eric Zimmer
Have your partners been largely excited to be involved in these adventures with you, or have they been like, oh, for crying out loud, not another one?

00:13:40 – Jolenta Greenberg
I’d say they, at least for mine, started excited, got a little rundown at certain points, especially books that have to do with relationships or how I’m interacting with my partner. Like, he got confused when we were living by why men love bitches. And I would, like, ask him for a favor and then remind him, like, I don’t need you, you know?

00:14:05 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah, I’d say that for my husband, it’s pretty much the same. There have been times where he’s been really excited about it, and other times like, oh, God, are you recording this? Yes, I am recording it.

00:14:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You guys are always recording little audio diaries of things. I’m always impressed when people remember to actually do that. I guess that’s just part of your job, though. You kind of get used to it.

00:14:27 – Jolenta Greenberg
Get used to it. And our husbands are almost trained at this point where sometimes they’ll be like, you might want to get your phone out for this combo.

00:14:34 – Eric Zimmer
Is there a again, I’m asking you to pick one out of. I’m sure you could give me a very long list. But, like, the worst advice that you’ve come across, like, I mean, what? I mean, I’m sure you’ve read, oh, there’s so much of mountains of garbage. Mountains of it. But maybe we could phrase it as, like, what is something that most people might think is good advice that you guys have read and learned? Like, hang on a second. Like, everybody sort of accepts that at face value, but that’s really a dumb idea.

00:15:05 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah.

00:15:06 – Kristen Meinzer
Well, one thing that is the case for me at least, is everyone should meditate and the idea that if it works for me, it should work for everyone. So almost every self help author that we’ve read, whether they’re an expert with a PhD or whether they’re speaking experientially from their lives, one of the most popular phrases is, if it worked for me, it can work for you. And it’s like, first of all, that’s not true. And a lot of the people saying that are very pro meditation, and not everybody likes to meditate, and not everybody gets a sense of enlightenment out of laying still in one spot or sitting in one uncomfortable position for 30 minutes. Or in the case of one of our authors, I think it was 4 hours a day. Maybe he did it. And we don’t think that everybody should sit still and be quiet for 4 hours a day. We don’t think that works for everyone. I think we’re all wired differently. We all have different things that can help us feel happy and in the moment, but it doesn’t have to be meditation that does that for us. For some of us, it’s just going on a nice walk every day or spending a half hour in the kitchen making a beautiful dinner. There are a lot of different ways to feel in the moment, and it doesn’t have to be sitting still and being quiet. And as a woman of color, I particularly feel uncomfortable when so many of the authors are white men telling me a woman of color to sit down and shut up. It just does not feel good to me. And so, yeah, that’s one example from me. The list is much longer, but that’s just one.

00:16:37 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah, that’s a good one. Another thing we encountered, not a ton, but a surprising amount of times, is the idea that you can forego sleep for productivity’s sake, or you don’t need as much as you think. And for some people, it just doesn’t work. I always would get sick when we lived by books that, like, told you to limit sleep. Turns out I had an autoimmune disease and it was egging it on. And it is surprising that so many people are like, yeah, I’m no expert in this, but also deprioritize sleeping.

00:17:09 – Kristen Meinzer
Wake up 4 hours earlier each day and start the following twelve steps, which.

00:17:13 – Jolenta Greenberg
Or, like Randy Zuckerberg, her book pick three is just like, have a certain number of categories in your life, and only pick three to focus on each day. And one of them is sleep or, like, rest. And I’m like, you need that daily. So I don’t know how we’re like, not prioritizing it on some days.

00:17:31 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I have been guilty of the probably overly pushing meditation thing in my life. I think it was really helpful to me. But over time, I’ve certainly come to believe it’s not helpful for everybody. And I’ve even gone back and really questioned myself on it, like, okay, is this true? Is it just that you were influenced strongly by people who believe this is true? And it turns out by having times where I did and didn’t, it actually turns out, I think, to be a useful practice for me. But, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s certainly not for everybody. And it’s interesting because maybe you guys have noticed this trend. I think there was a period of time where sleep was sort of deprioritized, and then it has felt like the last couple years, the sleep police have come to town. Whereas, like, if you’re not given 8 hours of sleep, you will die in three days, which, I don’t know, that’s.

00:18:26 – Jolenta Greenberg
As good as smoking a pack a day or something.

00:18:29 – Eric Zimmer
And I’m always, you know, I get what you’re saying, but what about people who are, like, having trouble sleeping and now you’re making them so stressed about getting enough sleep, putting that pressure on you now? Yeah, I always think things like that are interesting. It’s the same thing as with loneliness. And you guys are tackling loneliness and friendship in your new series, and, you know, that’s the new one. Like, it’s the new terrible thing. And I’m like, I think that’s useful to know that being isolated is not great. And there are a lot of people who are isolated, and it’s not necessarily for want of trying. And I feel like we stress those people out. And so it’s always this strange thing, I think of, like, pointing out, like, whoever it is, here’s a healthy thing and here’s the data that supports it. It’s healthy, but how do we also not then turn it into something that you freak out about?

00:19:21 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right. And we encounter that, too with, like, books that talk about going into nature. Like, there are so many studies that say it’s good for you, but then they also go so far as to be like, yeah, like, kids don’t need ADHD meds. If you, like, make sure they hike enough where it’s like, that may not be the case, and, like, you no longer need. You’re not gonna be depressed anymore. It’s like someone with clinical depression could still be depressed after spending much time outside.

00:19:45 – Eric Zimmer
Like, 100%. I mean, I think all of these things are. This is a personal. It’s a wiring in me. But when anybody is too certain of anything, I want to rebel against it. I can even agree with you. But if you’re too certain, I’m going to feel inclined to argue with you, because life isn’t that simple.

00:20:06 – Kristen Meinzer
And that’s one reason why Jolenta and I try to be the guinea pigs for everybody out there to show. Like, Jolenta and I are just a sample size of two people. And just between the two of us, we don’t always agree on is a book or is advice helpful for us? You know, one book, even if it looks like Malarkey, might help one of us quite a bit and then not help the other. And you can actually hear the audio diaries of us fighting with our husbands over one thing, that the other person is getting closer with their husband over or with our current season. You mentioned our current season of how to be fine, which is about loneliness. We have guests on, and every other episode we have the guest on. And then the next episode, Jolenta and I do the same thing as by the book. We try that advice on for size. We record ourselves trying to make friends. We record ourselves trying to grapple with solitude and loneliness and all of these things. And in some cases, a piece of advice might work really well for Jolenta, but not for me and vice versa. And we think it’s important for listeners to hear, like, there’s no such thing as one size fits all advice. Just because it works for this one person doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for everybody.

00:21:12 – Eric Zimmer
That is such an important idea. Yeah, I think there are some things, principles that are useful that we can look at and go in general, these things are, you know, like nature. It seems to be probably a good idea that if you can, to get a little bit of time in nature. But my partner and I are very different on this. Like, I get a lot out of it. And she’s like, I don’t know. I mean, I guess fine, I went, but, like. Right. It’s just, you know, I love the way you guys sort of. You can see that just in a sample size of two.

00:21:41 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right.

00:21:42 – Eric Zimmer
And two people that are different, but also a lot of similarities, too. Right. So even within, like, two women who live in New York who are in a similar age range, even in that, there’s these big differences. So what about the difference between somebody who’s 30 and lives in a small town in Iowa and somebody who’s 70 who lives in Seattle, Washington, like, very different, right?

00:22:06 – Kristen Meinzer
Exactly. Yes.

00:22:32 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s turn our attention to the latest work that you guys are doing around friendship. But before we get into the tips that you have gotten around different areas, I’d first like to just explore your friendship with each other.

00:22:47 – Jolenta Greenberg
All right.

00:22:48 – Eric Zimmer
Were you guys friends before you guys started by the book?

00:22:53 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah.

00:22:54 – Eric Zimmer
Tell me kind of how you guys got into doing this.

00:22:57 – Jolenta Greenberg
We were work friends. We were both working for a news radio show. Kristen was a producer, and I was, like, the administrative assistant, catch all person on the show, and Kristen was the person that reported on most of the sort of pop culture, books, movies, things I was interested in, because I have a background in theater. I’m a comedian. And so, you know, Kristen’s the only person who’d seen, like, the latest blockbuster that had came out or, like, she knew who the Real housewives were, so I could talk to her about them. And we just sort of slowly bonded at work. And actually, at that job, one of my duties was to get all the mail for the news show, and I’m sure you probably get a lot of press mail at this point. We used to get sent lots of books to cover, and for the most part, a hard news show is not going to cover, like, the latest self help book. So I would hoard all of those self help books and be like, someday I’m going to get my shit together and change my life. Because I was also working, like, three other part time jobs at that point. I was a struggling actor. I had no idea what I was doing with my life. And Kristen was always a friend I had who, like, had her shit together. You know, she has a retirement plan. She, like, owns property, she knows lawyers. And because I’m an exhibitionist and, you know, performer by trade, I was like, what if I recorded myself trying to change my life, living by these books? And then I brought it up with Kristen, because I’m like, you could be someone fun to do this with. Also, you’re the opposite of me. You’re gonna be like, this advice is B’s where I’m like, I don’t know, maybe it’ll change my whole life. So that’s how this all sort of came about.

00:24:39 – Eric Zimmer
So I assume. I mean, it sounds like you guys get along well, so it sounds like you have a good chemistry on air, I assume that is sort of off air. Have there been challenges? Working together is a challenge in its own, and then friendship can be a challenge in its own. Have there been periods that were difficult where you felt like the friendship was challenged by work or work adversity or things like that.

00:25:07 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah, we have an episode of how to be fine where we actually talk about the challenge of the work wife relationship. And we have two work wives on who we adore, Liz Kraft and Sarah Fane. They host a show called Happier in Hollywood. They’ve been best friends since high school, but they also work together. They are screenwriters, they’re co authors of novels. They co host this podcast together. And we talked with them about, you know, sometimes things can be stressful, sometimes when work is tough. How does that come out between you and your work wife and so on? And how do you talk about things? And Jalanta and I have definitely had times where we’re working on a project that’s different or new to us, and it means that we have to rejigger how we schedule things, how we talk to each other. If we’re getting frustrated with something, what is the best way to express that frustration? And, you know, I can say for myself, I’ve definitely had to learn to put the brakes on sometimes where I’m, like, sending late night emails at two in the morning about something that’s making me tense. And I think, oh, I can vent to Jolenta. And Jolenta’s receiving those emails, and she’s like, oh, my God, is everything burning down? Is it okay?

00:26:14 – Jolenta Greenberg
What do I need to do to fix this?

00:26:15 – Kristen Meinzer
And I just feel like, oh, thank goodness. I can just go to Jolenta for comfort and just dump all of this on her. And Jolenta’s not accepting my dumping on her as comfort. She’s feeling like she just got drowned in an avalanche. And, holy crap, what are we supposed to do now? Oh, my God. Is Kristen having a nervous breakdown? And so that’s just one example of, you know, what we’ve had to learn at different points to communicate about things in a different way or approach different projects in different ways and so on. Because at the end of the day, no matter what Jalanta and I make together, it’s going to be fine. But I don’t want it to result in Jalanta and I resenting each other over it. I don’t want it to result in. The shows we make together should be collaborative and cooperative, just as our friendship is.

00:27:02 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense as listeners know. Chris is the editor of this show, so we’ve been working together for, you know, a decade, and our roles are very clear. Like, I mean, I do this part, he does that part where you guys are kind of, you know, far more like, both sitting in the same seat to some extent.

00:27:21 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah, we are.

00:27:23 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s explore some of what you’re learning about friendships. Why did you guys choose to dedicate? I don’t know what to call it. It’s more than a season, but probably not the rest of your life, of dealing with topics of friendship and connection and loneliness. What was the impetus that sort of made you guys decide, we really want to focus on this for a while?

00:27:52 – Kristen Meinzer
Well, our listeners really came to us with this topic because Jalanta and I, we lived by self help books for ten seasons. We still do, by the way, on our Patreon feed. But in our regular feed, we were living by self help books for ten seasons. And then new topics were coming out faster than books were through social media, through TikTok, and so on. And so we’re like, we’re going to be behind the times if we only live by self help books forever. We want to talk about the topics while they’re hot. So we started shifting to, what are our listeners bringing to us? And over the past year, it would range from, what is Ilaria Baldwin’s story? She is a yoga wellness mommy influencer. What’s the deal? Why are people mad about that? From that all the way to simpler things like ice baths. And we would explore these topics. Cause our listeners would ask us to. And one topic that they kept on asking us again and again and again to discuss was the surgeon general’s loneliness epidemic and their own challenges making friends as adults and feeling lonely, especially since COVID loneliness went through the roof and dealing with socializing with people in the current social media age. And question after question after question about friendships. And we just collected so many questions that eventually, Jolent and I are like, we just need to do a whole season about friendship. And we have hundreds of questions piled up from listeners about this topic in particular. That means a lot to them, and there are so many directions to go with it. So we’re just trying to honor what our listeners want, and we are trying to, once again, as I said, be the guinea pigs we talk to people, get their expertise, their advice, their experiences, and then Jolental and I try their advice on for size so people can hear us out in the world, trying to make friends and in some cases, not doing very good at it. In some cases, doing great.

00:29:50 – Jolenta Greenberg
And I’d also have to add, like, our own lives played a major part in this, too, where we both are at a point where we feel like we are losing friends left and right as people move out of the city. Or have babies and have to reprioritize or get new super demanding jobs. And we just feel like we’re at sort of a time in our lives where friends are sort of falling away. So it’s like, how do I either work on upkeeping these relationships better or, like, get some more people in my life? I guess we were going through the same thing as our listeners.

00:30:19 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, you’ve talked about a variety of different things, geographic friendships, you know, how to maintain friendships over a distance. You’ve explored what does it even mean to have a social network? What is a social network? How do you grow it? You’ve talked about best friend breakups. You’ve talked about tips in general for loneliness. So we’re not going to walk through every one of those individually and get the tips from each of them. But let’s start by thinking around in general. I’m not connected enough. I’ve noticed that either a friends have moved away and I don’t have as many or I noticed in my own life, and it’s been a few years now, but when I had two boys that were growing up in high school, that took a lot of attention, and I also had a full time job, and I was doing the podcast. So basically I just was kind of heads down for a long time. And then I was fortunate enough to sort of do the podcast full time. So the full time job went away, the other full time job went away.

00:31:22 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right.

00:31:23 – Eric Zimmer
And the kids went off to school, and all of a sudden I was like, oh, well, then now there’s space. And you know what? There’s not a whole lot to do with it around here as far as, like, lots of other people. And so I think there’s a variety of different reasons why we find ourselves in a spot where we’re suddenly like, I don’t have as much connection as I want. I mean, Kristen, you’ve talked a lot about how so many of your friends have left the city and how hard that’s been for you. So by whatever means we find ourselves there, what do we do when we go, hey, I don’t think there’s enough connection in my life, actually. I’m even going to back that question up for a second, and I’m going to ask, how do you know? And you guys address this a little bit, because, as we said, the surgeon general is saying there’s a loneliness epidemic. And we have this tendency, at least many of us do, to always think if it’s good, there should be more of it. I need more, more, more. So how do I know even, do I need more connection? Do I need more friendships? Do I have enough? Like, how do we even start to think about that question?

00:32:25 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah, well, one of our experts, Doctor Nobel, actually said to maybe sit with yourself and consider, what are you actually going through? Is it some sort of existential loneliness? Is it a loneliness that is predicated on the fact that society is leaving you out in some way due to a minoritized status like disability or race? Or is it that you’re lacking real connection with people? So he urged us to sit down and really look at if we are feeling lonely, what is this loneliness about? And then once we know what kind of loneliness we’re experiencing, it makes it easier to actually address that kind of loneliness. So if it is a sense of being left out of society because of a minoritized status, one way we can work beyond that is to connect with other people who are of the same status as us. People who understand our story, people who live through what we do every day. People who maybe can help us feel less alone and feel a greater sense of hope in life. So it’s not just, I’m alone here, it’s miserable, I have no choices, I’m trapped in this situation. But to connect with other people who can help lift us up and understand us. So that’s an example of that. But let’s say we’re feeling a lack of genuine connection. There are small ways we can go out into the world every day and get more of that connection. One way I loved jolinta has a dog. I love her dog frank. I’m definitely allergic to it. But one thing that Doctor Nobel suggested, be active. Go out into the world and walk your dog. Just walk around the block and smile at people and maybe have tiny little micro conversations. Get to know your neighbors. Maybe the first time you are walking around the block with your dog, you might just nod at a neighbor with a similar breed dog. Maybe the next time you’ll actually say hello to that person. Maybe the time after that, eventually you’ll get to know each other’s dogs and you’ll be like, oh, that’s Fido’s mom. And then you and Fido’s mom might eventually have more connection. But just tiny little things we do every day to interact more with our world can make a big difference. But also relying on the tools that are already there. Most of us know somebody, for example, who is social connector themselves. You know that one person in your life who seems to have a million friends for a lot of us those are the inroads to making more friends is just connecting more with that one person, you know, who’s social hub, you know, that person. Or joining a club or starting a club for something that you’re really interested in. Like Eric, I know you’re a big music buff. Like, if you posted something saying, I want to start a club, will you join me? And the more specific the club, the better. What we’ll do is get together once a week and each of us will bring one record from the late eighties in the alternative or punk rock genre, and we’ll each play records together and talk. And that way it’s not being general like it’s a music club, it’s being as specific as you can be. Like, week one will start with bad brains. Week two, it’ll be bad religion. Week three, you know, whatever you want it to be. But be as specific as you can be. The more specific, the more likely people are to be invested in to show up. So those are just a few examples of tips we’ve gotten.

00:35:42 – Eric Zimmer
That was a deep cut on the eighties punk rock band bad. Wow, look at that.

00:35:47 – Kristen Meinzer
I’ve listened enough to your show. I know what you’re into. And I used to love that music too. So, yeah, in another life, I like.

00:35:56 – Eric Zimmer
To explore this idea a little bit more. The difference between, I think I get what you’re saying by the sort of left out of society feeling. The age group that came to mind for me were older people. Right. I think as you get older, it seems like you can become less and less relevant. Right. So there’s. That’s sort of jumped to mind. I know. Depending on whatever our sort sort of. For you, Jolenta, it might be people who are dealing with autoimmune issues or forced to still wear a mask. Right. Because of autoimmune issues and feeling ostracized because of that. The other was existential loneliness, which is a term that just sounds wonderful to me. What was that? What is a way of knowing whether what I’m feeling is existential loneliness versus I don’t have enough friends?

00:36:44 – Jolenta Greenberg
That’s a tough one. Cause that’s sort of like, yeah, it’s like the human condition versus like, I need more companionship for that issue. Multiple experts have recommended cognitive behavioral therapy. And just talk therapy in general can help you figure out, like, am I lonely or am I dealing with like, an internal loneliness that isn’t being changed by external factors? When I try to make changes, and I think that’s another, like, good litmus test is if I’m trying to put myself out there, if I know, like, I am making new connections, but I’m still feeling that, like, deep angst and loneliness, then that could be a good.

00:37:28 – Eric Zimmer
Indicator at that point, you form a club for existential lonely people and you see what happens.

00:37:35 – Jolenta Greenberg
Who like eighties records, right?

00:37:37 – Eric Zimmer
Who like eighties? Yes. You have to be specific about your.

00:37:40 – Jolenta Greenberg
The kind of existential.

00:37:42 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly like, you feel like you have been turned into a roach, like in Kafka, versus, say, what Camus was going.

00:37:50 – Jolenta Greenberg
Through as an example, versus, like, standing.

00:37:52 – Eric Zimmer
At the edge of an abyssal weirdos. Yes. Okay. So I now I think about a sense of which of these things I might want to do. I think building friendships as adults is really challenging. I found it challenging, and I feel like I’m reasonably adept at that sort of thing. And I think part of what I have found challenging is that it often is a slow or slower process. Right. Like, I want to go to the existential meeting and walk away with a best friend.

00:38:25 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
And oftentimes that doesn’t seem to be how it works. What have you learned about what are reasonable expectations?

00:38:33 – Kristen Meinzer
One expert we recently talked with at the time this episode comes up with you. I don’t know if this episode will be out in our feed yet, but we talked with an expert named Kat Velos, who said that sometimes as we get older, the reason it can feel like it takes longer to gel with people is because as adults, so many of us have gotten lackadaisical because we’re not forced to see you every day at school or in the dorms, or.

00:38:57 – Jolenta Greenberg
We don’t have that, like, proximity and sort of like, repetition of just seeing each other all the time.

00:39:03 – Kristen Meinzer
Yes. And so as a result, we’ll fall into the pattern of just saying, oh, it was great to meet you. I hope we can see each other again sometime without creating a specific way to see them. In the past, we could do that because we would see them the next day in the food hall at the dorm. Right. But we can’t rely on that as adults. Like, okay, I hope I see you again sometime. We need to make plans, and the sooner we make the plans and the more specific the plans are, the more likely we are to have those magic moments where we just gel with somebody quickly. Maybe we’ll meet somebody and say, hey, this has been so fun. I would love to grab coffee with you this week or go on a walk with you this week or do this activity with you this week. I’m free in the afternoons except for Thursday do you have an hour or so to spare? And if you get specific and do that repeatedly with people, that magic thing that seemed to come out of nowhere when we were younger, we can do that as adults. We just have to set it up that way because the world isn’t setting it up for us in the same way that it used to.

00:40:23 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve done a fair amount of research looking at this, and there does seem to be a certain amount of time of spending with people that is indicative of a chance of becoming friendship. It’s why we build friendships with people at work more often, just because there’s the actual amount of time that you’re talking about. I think one of the other things that’s challenging, and I’m curious if you guys have seen this, is that sometimes you will meet another person that you would like to be friends with who is an adult, who is like, let’s just say they were me five, six years ago. Like, I really like you. I enjoyed hanging out with you. But if you ask me to do something with you, I’m probably just gonna be like, I don’t know, I can’t. It’s gonna seem like rejection to me. Cause I have more friend space to fill up. And so I’m trying to put people in, and I’m trying to grab a friend to put in there whose life is already full. Right. With the things that they have. Do you guys encounter that? Have you gotten any tips for how to sort of work with that, how to not take that personally?

00:41:24 – Jolenta Greenberg
Kristen, you’re shaking your head yes. I don’t remember what our tips are.

00:41:29 – Kristen Meinzer
Well, something that our experts have said that we’ve had on the show is that that’s okay. It’s part of life. You’re not, Eric, necessarily gonna want to hang out with everybody who wants to hang out with you, and vice versa. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you are unlovable or that they’re unlovable, but sometimes we’re just going to not necessarily want that. And that is a good thing when people are forthright about it. So if someone says, I don’t really think so, Eric, what’s great about that is you’re not wasting your time with somebody who doesn’t want you. Why would any of us want to spend time with people who don’t want to be with us? That’s a waste of their time. That’s a waste of your time. And in a way, it’s a gift. When somebody makes it clear, like, mm, no, because you’re not wasting your time then, in a one sided courtship trying to make this friendship happen. So in a way, it’s something to be grateful for, because there are a million other people, or on this planet, 1.5 billion other people you can be friends with. With, and why waste your time on that? One person who doesn’t want to go to the other 1.5 billion, they’re out there. And there are so many people who want to be friends, people who you could potentially click with that you could laugh with, that you could connect with over music or anything else. Don’t bother with the one who doesn’t want to be with you.

00:42:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think what I found is it’s not that we don’t click or want to be together. It’s that our ability to spend time together is very different. Like, they have a very busy life, and so it’s like, well, you know, yeah, once in a. A while, they could get together, whereas I’m looking for friendships, you know, and I find those harder to sort out. The people that there’s just, like, we don’t connect, or I try and connect and I don’t receive it back is one thing. It’s. I found it. It’s harder with the people that you actually do kind of click with. And yet the contours of their life are very different than the contours of your life, and it ends up sort of being this weird sort of dance of who’s more busy or less busy or that kind of thing.

00:43:24 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah. And I think a good thing to remember in situations like that is, like, you don’t need to write the person off entirely. Like, it is just like a timing issue. In time, perhaps things will be better. And it’s sort of, you know, relationships ebb and flow depending on, like, the phases of life that we’re in. That’s one thing we’re definitely learning. And you probably aren’t gonna be as tight with your friend who just had a baby, but, like, in five years, you could be just as tight again once that kid’s in kindergarten. So being able to sort of wait and, like, let things shift is hard, but it’s something that can pay off.

00:44:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think that’s such an other interesting challenge of adults that we don’t have necessarily as children or college age. Like, when you’re in college, your lives basically look the same, more or less.

00:44:13 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah. You’re all juggling, like, a college workload, maybe a job, and then hanging out.

00:44:18 – Eric Zimmer
When you get to be an adult, our lives can look very, very different. Right. You know, you could have a very demanding job and be a single mother. Your ability to take on friendship is very different than, say, you know, somebody who has no kids and has a pretty easy job.

00:44:33 – Jolenta Greenberg
Right?

00:44:34 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about geographic friendship tips. You know, Kristen, you’ve talked a lot about how many of your friends have left Brooklyn or New York. And so what did you learn and what’s working for you in keeping these friendships alive where people are sort. Sort of geographically dispersed?

00:44:53 – Jolenta Greenberg
One thing that has worked great that, you know, it’s sort of like, duh, when you hear it, but it’s harder to, like, remember to do is try to recreate things that you would do if you were together. Like, Kristen did this, where she, like, had a movie night with a friend who lives far away, but they, you know, sync up the movie, watch it at the same time, and can talk to each other. And I know people that, like, go shopping on the phone with their mom when their mom lives across the country. You know, you can find ways with technology to include people that are far away. It’s not always the same level of interaction and excitement, but, like, it keeps that tie connected.

00:45:37 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah, yeah. And Jolenta just gave some great examples. There I go on a weekly walking date with one of my friends who no longer lives here. The movie date thing that I do with my one friend, it’s now turned into something we do every three weeks together. It was initially like, oh, let’s try to do this thing that we tried to do once at the beginning of COVID but now we do it every three weeks. And it’s always a bad eighties movie, or it stars somebody who was a big star back in the eighties and is now, like, 70 years old, and it’s just a little club of two people, and we love it. And something else that some of our experts have suggested is to just make sure you’re using technology to keep the conversation going. Instead of every once in a blue moon texting, like, how are you? You know, send them a meme of something that reminds you of the last time you talked with each other. Like, oh, this is just like that thing with your boss. You know, keep the conversation going so it doesn’t feel like every time, it’s a fresh start, even if it’s two months passing since you last texted each other. Send something that keeps that conversation going.

00:46:38 – Eric Zimmer
You guys know about my friend Chris, but I’ve also got a friend, Jolenta, who lives in San Francisco, and Steve, who lives in Los Angeles. And we were all friends when we were young, and we have had a text thread going between the four of us for, I mean, probably at least a decade now. And rarely does a day go by where somebody’s not putting something in there and no one of those things is particularly important. But it’s an accumulation over time that just keeps, like, some level of currency between the four of us that I have just found to be really effective. And I’ve heard this from lots of other people that something like that with their family, like, four people in their family or, I mean, I think those sort of things. The other thing that I’ve been doing, I try and remember to do more often is occasionally I’ll sit down with my phone and I’ll just start scrolling back through all my texts because it’s amazing what gets buried, right? And I’m like, oh, wait a minute. We started a conversation with so and so three weeks ago and I’ve completely forgotten about it because there are currently 875 fundraising requests from whatever your political party happens to be at the top of my text queue at the current moment. But down underneath all that are some friendships that I’m trying to continue to sort of keep alive that way.

00:47:57 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah, I think that’s a really good thing to do. I literally have a list in a notebook in my day planner of people I should be keeping in touch with. Because it’s easy to forget how many people you have in your life, too.

00:48:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. After listening to your geographic friendship episode, I think the main thing that I would like to ask is, Jolenta, will you crochet me a teddy bear? That’s kind of what I want to know.

00:48:23 – Jolenta Greenberg
Oh, for sure.

00:48:25 – Eric Zimmer
I was amazed. You were like, oh, I thought of my friend and I thought I would send her new booties for her baby, which you then whipped up in, like, an hour. And then the next thing I know, you’re working on a teddy bear that it’s. By the time the episode hits, you.

00:48:38 – Jolenta Greenberg
Know, it’s only like a few inches. It’s like five inches high.

00:48:41 – Eric Zimmer
But did you stuff it or is it just the sort of a limp teddy bear?

00:48:44 – Jolenta Greenberg
Stuffed it? Yeah.

00:48:46 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:48:46 – Jolenta Greenberg
So it’s proper teddy bears. Just, you know, that’s kind of a.

00:48:49 – Eric Zimmer
Cool skill to have to be able to just make things for your friends like that. Like, if I made something for my friends, they would be like, why did you send me a teddy bear that looks like it was genetically crossed with a turkey? You know, or something? I’m not going to give that to my child. That would be terrifying and confuse them about the nature of animals for the next 30 years, they’ll be confused. So all of your episodes are sort of two parters, right? You interview the expert, and then you have your own conversation. And one was about best friend breakups, and I thought this was a good one to do because friendships do end, and they can be really painful when they happen.

00:49:30 – Jolenta Greenberg
Yeah.

00:49:31 – Eric Zimmer
What did you sort of learn from sort of going into that experience about the nature of friendships ending, and how do we work through that? 

00:49:41 – Jolenta Greenberg
Well, I think it’s super interesting because we don’t really treat them this way, but they act this way where, you know, friendships are our relationships almost like romantic ones. And one thing we’ve just sort of realized is, like, there is some stigma around friend breakups. You know, you feel like a failure. You don’t necessarily want to talk about, like, how someone rejected you or is just, like, out in the world not liking you anymore and just remembering that everyone goes through this, even though it feels like you’re totally alone and, like, no one talks about. This is something that I’ve really taken away from our conversations about friendship breakups, where usually they’re always done, like, in silence or not in silence. Usually they’re always sort of done in solitude. And you’re not getting calls from your friends about their girlfriend breaking their heart as much. I’m not gonna say girlfriend. That sounds confusing.

00:50:36 – Eric Zimmer
Girlfriend, boyfriend, partner.

00:50:38 – Jolenta Greenberg
I would say you’re not getting calls from friends saying as much as being like, my friend, I think, ended it. But you will hear a call being like, my romantic partner ended it. And just giving yourself time to be upset and grieve is okay, and it’s normal, and you’re not alone in going through that. It’s just something good to remember about friendship breakups is they happen a lot, and they’re super impactful. You know, a lot of times, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, your best friend, at least in my experience, is your plus one, is your in case of emergency contact. Like, they act as a romantic partner, and then they get sort of, like, replaced sometimes with a real romantic partner. And, you know, it’s difficult terrain that we don’t always talk about.

00:51:27 – Kristen Meinzer
Yeah. Yeah. Chelsea Devantes, who was the guest we had on to talk about that, she did some research on it and found that over 80% of people have gone through a best friend breakup. That’s not even friend breakups more broadly, but a best friend breakup. Over 80% of us have gone through that, and on top of that, a lot of us have friends that we’ve just drifted from or that we felt ghosted by, and we don’t necessarily know why things ended. Or maybe we drifted apart. And we do kind of know why things ended, but it still is painful for us, and we shouldn’t have to suffer alone. Just to echo what Jolental said there, it’s like we’re not alone in this. Most of us have gone through this. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s part of life, and it’s something that gets stigmatized a lot. What happened to BFF? What happened to the second f? I thought best friends were forever, and now you’re not able to even sustain a friendship. What’s wrong with you? And it’s like, nothing’s wrong with you. Sometimes friendships end, and sometimes they were not healthy to begin with. Maybe the roles we played within those friendships weren’t necessarily the best roles for us to play long term. Maybe they were a good role for us at that moment when we first met. But, you know, maybe that role is something that we grew out of, and let’s make room for other friendships that are meeting us where we’re at now. And one other thing about the best friend breakup episode that other guests have elaborated on is that we sometimes tend to really worship and valorize the lifelong friend, the best friend, the friend we’ve had since childhood. And we shouldn’t necessarily do that because the new friends in our life are loving us for who we are now, not for the history, not because we’ve done certain things together, but they’re loving us because they’re meeting us as the fully formed human we are at this moment. And maybe we should be celebrating that a little bit more rather than constantly going back to, what about your best friend? What about the BFF? That new friend could be just as beautiful and important and life changing in a different way. And let’s celebrate that, too.

00:53:32 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a really interesting perspective that I had not thought of, which is, you know, have friends from way back. But I find this, a lot of times my friendships from way back are, we are friends because of that, not because of who we are today, to your point. Like, if we were to meet today, I’m not certain that we would be friends. Right? Like, I’m not really sure I’d be like, ah, you know, no, but we’ve got a history that is valuable and means something and is good. But you’re right. Like, the friends we make today or the people we connect with today are a better reflection in many ways of who we are today versus who we were when we were 18, which hopefully we’re very different than then

00:54:11 – Jolenta Greenberg
One would like to think.

00:54:15 – Eric Zimmer
So any last sort of thoughts on friendship or connection that we haven’t hit? Any last thing we’d like to leave walking away, whether that be a tip or an experience that you’ve had as you’ve gone through this experiment over the last period time.

00:54:33 – Jolenta Greenberg
I think one thing that we heard from a lot of experts that was reassuring was the fact that, like, I know a lot of us are, like, afraid to reach out or make that first step of, like, hey, we should reconnect or hang out again, or, like, sorry, I dropped the ball, but most people, like, want to hear from you, you know, if they’re friends in your life. And that’s something I think we forget or we’re too ashamed because we dropped the ball. So, like, we don’t want to, like, pop back up on their phone when it’s like, most people who are in your life do value you and do want to hear from you. You. So you’re not, like, putting them out when you reach out.

00:55:07 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up, and that’s a great last tip, which is, you know, reach out even when in doubt. So thank you both so much. I’ve enjoyed listening to the show. There’s a part of me I’m like, I want to go back and listen to every episode of by the book now because there’s so many great books that you guys tried to live by. So all that stuff is in your feed as well as, as the new episodes around friendship, which are also really excellent. We’ll have links in the show notes for how to do that. And do you want to tell people where they can find you?

00:55:39 – Kristen Meinzer
The name of our show is how to be fine. This season. It’s how to be fine with friends. We’re available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And in that feed, in our main feed, you’ll hear all ten original seasons of by the book as well. If you want new episodes of by the book, those are on our Patreon, which is patreon.com dot included. There is the artist’s way, which all twelve weeks Jolental and I lived by. If you want to hear us doing that, and you can also always find us on social media. We’re on Instagram. How to be fine pod.

00:56:13 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, thank you both so much for coming on. I’ve really enjoyed this.

00:56:16 – Jolenta Greenberg
Thank you. This was a delight.

00:56:18 – Kristen Meinzer
Thank you so much Eric. This has been great.

Episode Transcript:

00:00:00 – Jonice Webb
It’s that attacking voice that can really get you into trouble and SAP your energy. But when you talk to yourself with encouragement and compassion instead, it really can turn things around.

00:00:17 – Chris Forbes
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good. Wolfenheid thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonice Webb, the pioneer of childhood emotional neglect awareness. She’s a licensed psychologist and has enriched and kindled discussion of this overlooked and under addressed topic by writing the first self help book dedicated to cen recovery entitled running on Overcome your childhood Emotional Neglect. Janice also continues to inspire thousands of people on her weekly blog on psychcentral.com comma and her work as an expert partner on yourtango.com dot. She’s been interviewed about childhood emotional neglect on NPR and over 30 radio shows across the US and Canada.

00:01:53 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Janice, welcome to the show.

00:01:54 – Jonice Webb
Hi, thanks for having me.

00:01:56 – Eric Zimmer
I am happy to have you on. We are going to be discussing your book running on empty overcome your childhood emotional neglect. And this is a topic I’m going to take a wager that nearly everybody who likes the one you feed podcast has some degree of this. That’s my guess. But you’re going to talk to us about a questionnaire where people can learn that. But I think a lot of our listeners are going to resonate with this. But before we get into that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who says to their grandchild, there’s two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

00:02:54 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, well, I really like this parable, partly because it conveys a really important thing, which is that it basically suggests that we all choose who we are and we choose who we become. And I think that’s something. It’s impossible to live your entire life and never really feel that power that you have to shape yourself because the world throws things at us and we have to deal with them. We don’t have control over what the world throws at us, but what we do have control over is our internal world. And how we respond to those things is what really determines who we are as a person. And in terms of the bad wolf, through the lens of psychology and I work in childhood emotional neglect, I would say the bad wolf is just a natural human part of us all, because there’s not a human alive who hasn’t felt all of those things and much more that they’re not proud of. Since we can’t choose our feelings, we’re not at fault for feeling that way, but we are responsible for what we do with those feelings. And if we run from them, that wolf will keep chasing us. But if we turn around and face it and let ourselves consider the fact that we’re feeling greed, we’re hatred and kind of process with our brains what our body is sending us, that’s our best chance to become the best person.

00:04:17 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a lot of things you said in there that I could run with, but I’m going to run with what you said near the end, which is it’s not our, how we feel, but we are responsible for it. And I think that’s a great way for us to lead into talking about childhood emotional neglect. And I want to define what that is a little bit more deeply in a moment. But that’s kind of the premise of your book, is, hey, a lot of things happened or didn’t happen. Often would be the case as you were growing up that have influenced the way you react to the world. So you’re not at fault for what happened to you when you were a child and how you were parented, but you are responsible for healing any of that that needs healed. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

00:05:05 – Jonice Webb
Yes, absolutely. A lot of children grow up in households that really don’t teach them that it’s okay to have the bad wolf or that it’s human or even either wolf. You know, there are a lot of families that discourage positive feelings and have low tolerance or pretend negative feelings. Don’t exist. And I call that childhood emotional neglect. It’s basically just if your parents don’t respond enough to your feelings as they raise you and if you grow up in a household that’s not really attentive or responsive to your feelings, you basically learn that your feelings are something to be ashamed of or to hide or ignore, because at best they’re useless. Right? But it’s when we don’t pay attention and we try not to have feelings or we feel ashamed of our feelings that really can interfere with your adult life. And, you know, you end up running from your actual internal self instead of owning who you are, owning those feelings and dealing with them.

00:06:11 – Eric Zimmer
So we’ve become a lot more trauma informed as a culture these days. Right? We talk more about trauma. We recognize that that trauma is very destructive. We’ve always known, and most people have known, like, if you’re abused as a child, you’re gonna have some impact from that. But I think what a lot of people do, and I was in this boat for a long time, is we sort of look at our childhood and go, well, I don’t think I was abused. Like, nobody was beating me or, you know, I wasn’t sexually abused. And so thus we conclude that, hey, you know, my childhood was fine, happy childhood, good childhood, move on. And what you’re talking about is that there are much more subtle layers of neglect that often happen. And not even, like, you know, when we say neglect, we don’t mean like, you were left on your own to fend for your own food, right? We’re talking about emotional neglect, but that it’s often a lot more subtle and that people who may look back and go, I had a good, happy childhood, everything was provided for, may still have had some developmental needs that simply weren’t met. Yeah.

00:07:18 – Jonice Webb
And that’s not something that you’re going to remember because our brains are geared to notice and record things that happen, and our brains are not geared to notice what doesn’t happen, especially when we’re kids, and to notice what’s invisible. Basically, I always say childhood emotional neglect is not what your parents did to you. It’s what they failed to do for you. And what they failed to do was to notice when you were sad, hurt, angry, upset, confused, nervous, afraid, or any other feeling and respond to that enough and name it for you and help you understand it. And if you grew up without having enough of that emotional instruction and education and response, then you end up being confused about feelings, and they’re such a major part of who you are. But you won’t remember what didn’t happen. So I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, I had a really great childhood. I had good education. I was driven to every soccer game I wanted to go to, but I feel so empty inside. I don’t understand.

00:08:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. You say this is the danger of emotional neglect. Perfectly good people loving their child, doing their best, while passing on accidental, invisible, potentially damaging patterns to their children. In this book, the goal is not to blame the parents. It is only to understand our parents and how they have affected us. And I think anybody reading this book who is both a child, which would be everyone, because we’ve all been children, and is also a parent, is going to have a couple of kind of interesting reactions to this if you’re both those things, you know, if you’re a child again, which we all are, and you’re a parent, which I am, you’re reading this almost through two lenses. One of, like, what was my childhood like? And then the other inevitable lens for me was like, oh, okay, well, my child’s 23. What things did I do there or not do there? And, you know, do you think anybody gets out of childhood without some degree of, of not having emotions modeled perfectly well or some degree of this?

00:09:25 – Jonice Webb
I think some people do. You know, there’s been research and all kinds of writing about the good enough parent. And really, you don’t need to have perfect parents to turn out really well. You just need to have parents who are good enough. And I think this only becomes a problem if your parents weren’t good enough at this, if your parents had a blind spot in general when it comes to emotions, then they weren’t able to respond enough and give you enough education, validation of your feelings. And that is all it takes, even if you with everything else. But I think there are a lot of parents who are good enough and a lot of people walking around who don’t identify with this at all.

00:10:05 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting. We interviewed a couple times a gentleman by the name of Rick Hanson, who’s written a bunch of books about neuroscience and the brain and Buddhism. And he’s got a podcast now with his son. And it’s fun to hear his son say, like, I think my dad did everything right. You know, he knows all this stuff. And, you know, it doesn’t mean my life is easy, right? You know, he’s still a human being. And so I think that what we’re saying here, and I love that phrase, the good enough parent, is that everybody’s going to have some degree of difficulty and difficult emotions in life. That’s being human. But when there’s emotional neglect, there are some particular things that show up. And I don’t want to go into all the different types of parents who cause emotional neglect. You’ve got twelve of them. It’s a really great read. I just don’t think we can hit all twelve of them. But I’d love to talk about what are some of the symptoms of emotional neglect? What sort of things might we notice if this has affected us so one.

00:11:06 – Jonice Webb
Of the biggest signs of having childhood emotional neglect is having a lot of discomfort with feelings and emotions in general and confusion. And for some people this doesn’t show up until it’s time to find a mate or get married or once you’re a parent, then you realize you can just feel like, what is this torrent that’s been released on me? I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with all these feelings. So I call it alexithymia. It’s also another word for it is low emotional intelligence, which has nothing to do with regular intelligence. It’s really just how well you understand the world of emotion and can deal with it in a confident, reasonably capable way. So that’s one way that plays out over your adulthood. Another is quite a bit of self blame, self doubt, getting angry at yourself versus other people when it’s even if it’s someone else’s fault. So self directed anger, self blame, self doubt is rampant. And I think that’s because if your parents aren’t coaching you through mistakes enough and helping you understand your feelings enough, then a lot of kids develop this sort of harsh parental voice for themselves, and that just stays with you as your coping technique. But in the end it ends up doing a lot of damage. A lot of people with childhood emotional neglect or cen end up feeling kind of empty inside. And that’s because their feelings are kind of walled off. And because your feelings are such a deeply personal, biologically built in part of who you are, if your feelings are walled off, you notice it. There’s something missing. And that gives people that grew up this way the sense of being different from other people. I call it the fatal flaw, where you feel like you’re just kind of different and there’s something other people have that you don’t have. Some people call it emptiness, but different people have different words for it. So those are probably the main ones.

00:13:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. There’s another one you listed, poor self discipline.

00:13:08 – Jonice Webb
Yes. It’s kind of like a correlation between not paying attention to children’s feelings, you kind of miss when your child needs structure or consequences or limits. So certain kinds of emotionally neglectful parents don’t really end up teaching their children how to talk themselves through difficult situations and force themselves to do things they don’t want to do and stop themselves from doing things they shouldn’t do. And if you don’t learn those basic skills, they’re not really basic if you don’t learn them as a child. They’re only basic if you learn them. If you don’t, then you just have to teach them to yourself as an.

00:13:46 – Eric Zimmer
Adult and this poor self discipline you might have discipline when it’s coming from outside structure. It’s just when it’s sort of you on your own, that’s where it manifests. Is that kind of the gist of it?

00:13:59 – Jonice Webb
Yes, absolutely. Most people with childhood emotional neglect are very functional. A lot of them do great in life in many ways, but they have this internal struggle where they feel like other people can’t see who I really am because I am not what I appear to be. I’m struggling all the time with self discipline, for example.

00:14:17 – Eric Zimmer
Well, I am someone who definitely, I think, suffered from emotional neglect as a child. Mom, if you’re listening, I love you. But many listeners know this story. I got sober at 24, heroin addict. So clearly I had some, some difficulties. And it was interesting, though, at that time when I got sober, it was 1995 in Columbus, Ohio. The world was a very different place. And the general theme in AA was, don’t worry about why, don’t blame your parents. Just take responsibility for your actions. And that actually was sufficient to get me sober and actually kind of saved my life. But a few years down the line, like you said, when I realized, like, oh, I’ve got a marriage that’s crumbling. I’ve got all these other things that are happening. I sort of went, oh, all right, I need to look into this. And that’s when I sort of got exposed to a lot of these ideas and sort of recognized, you know, despite my parents wonderful best efforts and their love, there was a lot of things that didn’t go well for me, particularly when it came to emotion as a child. And so I’ve been circling these topics for a long, long time. So I’ve got a lot of personal experience. So some of my questions are going to come from that place, and some of them are going to come more from, you know, somebody who’s maybe newer and exposed to these ideas. But I want to talk a little bit more about. Did you say it’s alexithymiathymia? I’m terrible at pronouncing things.

00:15:44 – Jonice Webb
Alexithymia.

00:15:45 – Eric Zimmer
Alexithymia. I’ve heard that described as the inability to feel, but you’re describing in a much more broad, nuanced way than that. Can you say a little bit more about that term? Because you do say that this might be the common denominator of people who have suffered emotional neglect. So you describe some of it as like, well, you don’t really know what to do with your emotions, but in my case, it seems to be more, not an inability to feel, but oftentimes not a lot of it.

00:16:20 – Jonice Webb
Not a lot of feelings. Yeah, that’s one of the primary symptoms of childhood emotional neglect. It’s part of what I call emptiness. Some people feel it as emptiness, some people feel it as numbness. Basically it is because when you’re growing up receiving all kinds of subtle, usually unspoken messages from your parents that your feelings don’t matter or are unacceptable or are a burden, your child brain knows just what to do and basically walls off, puts all your feelings over there so they won’t bother you, they won’t bother anybody, which can get you through your childhood. But then when you grow up, you really need to have access to your emotions because they are really what connects you to other people, tells you what things you’re passionate about, what to pursue, what to avoid, who you enjoy being with, who you should avoid. I making choices. And if you don’t have access to that really rich resource, you’re going to notice it, you’re going to feel it. Or maybe your spouse is going to say something’s wrong here. You say you love me. I don’t feel it. Or those kinds of things.

00:17:28 – Eric Zimmer
Do you notice people who have this? I’m going to try and say the word again because alexithymia. Yeah, alexithymia. More than two syllables. In my old age, I’ve given up on three syllable and beyond words. I get it. I understand emotions coming out in weird places. For example, any emotional scene in like a movie or a tv show will choke me up. And yet, when it comes to my own life again, I’ve done a lot of healing. I’m not the person I was, but I still notice lack of emotion in some ways. Is it common for people who have this, for those emotions to sort of leak out in other places in different ways?

00:18:06 – Jonice Webb
Anytime you have emotions that have been walled off or repressed, they will at times leak through, attach themselves to other things and give you emotional reactions that are out of control when you least expect it. And so a lot of people who have walled off emotions, the times that they do feel something is either indirectly, when it’s not about themselves, like watching a movie or something, or when some feeling gets so strong that it breaks through the wall and then it’s big, usually. So you might only have feelings about really big things. Part of my online recovery program and what I do with people in my office has to do with trying to reconnect with your feelings, with your physical, emotional feelings. And that can be done purposely. If you choose to, you can recapture those feelings and start processing them and using them at any time in your life.

00:19:25 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that I found challenging having alexithymia is, and again, I’m better than I used to be. And I’ve talked about this with my depression also, which is it’s hard to work sometimes with what feels like nothing, like when there’s strong emotion for me, it’s fairly easy to learn to process that, to use that, to understand it. I feel like I’m pretty emotionally literate in that way. What I found more challenging is working with what feels like nothing. So some of your work talks about identifying feelings and becoming, more broadly speaking, emotionally literate. Learning to know what you’re feeling, learning to express what you’re feeling, all that. What’s the path forward when what you’re noticing is a bunch of nothing?

00:20:14 – Jonice Webb
There’s an exercise that is in my first book, running on empty, which it really just like walks you through the process of sitting down every day, focusing your attention inward and asking yourself, what am I feeling right now? And then really trying to tune in to. Because feelings are physical, you feel them in your body. Tune into your body and try to identify some feeling because you’re always having feelings. It’s just that you’re disconnected from them so that you’re not aware of what they even are, and you don’t notice them. They’re just basically non existent for you, even though they are happening in your body. So a lot of people will try that and they’ll say, I come up with nothing, right? And that’s fine, and it’s normal. You know, when you start, you’re going to get nothing if you keep doing it. Every time you do it, it takes a little chip out of that wall between yourself and your feelings because you’re reaching out, you’re trying to reach through the wall and get those feelings. And the more you reach, the more little glimmers will start coming through. So it does take some work and dedication.

00:21:21 – Eric Zimmer
I love that. And that aligns with a lot of the things we talk about here and our spiritual habits program and different things, which is this idea of little by little, a little becomes a lot, right? So if you just keep showing up to your feelings, even if when you show up, you’re like, there’s nothing there. I remember when I started doing, like, body scan meditations years ago, I’d be like, I got nothing here. You know, you’re telling me to feel my foot and there’s not much happening down there. You know, the person leading the meditation’s going on and on about the personality of his big toe, and I’m like, what is he talking about? I still don’t know what he’s talking about, to be honest with you. That said, though, the more I did it, the more I became aware of sensations that were in my body that I just had not been in the habit of paying attention to. And the more I paid attention to them, the more they developed. So I think you’re saying something very similar there. Let’s talk about IaA, which is not a retirement fund. Listeners may have heard a recent spot we did for AARP. I cannot believe I’m old enough that AARP wants to advertise on my show. We could talk about all kinds of emotions around that, but we’ll stay on topic here and talk about IaA, which is not a retirement fund. What is it?

00:22:39 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, AARP sends me letters all the time, and I really don’t like that at all. Just a little comment there.

00:22:45 – Eric Zimmer
Welcome to the club. Yeah.

00:22:46 – Jonice Webb
So at the suggestion of one of my readers, instead of calling it the IAA, which is very hard to say, I call it the I AAA.

00:22:54 – Eric Zimmer
So anyway, now I think it’s about getting my car fixed, but we’re better.

00:23:01 – Jonice Webb
There’s no answer. So it’s basically a way to process a feeling. It walks you through dealing with a feeling, and the letters stand for the steps. Identify the feeling that you’re having. Accept that feeling. Fully accept it. Even if it’s hatred, even if it’s greed. Whatever it is, however ugly it is, accept it. This is how I feel. Attribute that feeling. That’s the second a. Attribute it to a cause. So is this something from my childhood? Is this something going on now? Is this something going on now that’s touching off some old feelings from childhood? What is happening in my life right now that I would be feeling this hatred? And where is it directed? Who’s this hatred at? Or what is this hatred about? That’s the attribution. And then the last step is act. And that is basically, it doesn’t mean you’re supposed to always act on your feelings. It just means, what can I do? Or what should I do with this feeling? Or for this feeling? Every emotion that you get is a message from your body. It’s your body talking to you. It doesn’t mean your body is always right. So there are feelings that come up that are way out of whack because they’re from the past or they’re just not telling you something good or healthy to do. But then if you connect with it with your brain and think about it and consider, what is this hatred telling me to do? Is it telling me that I need to go strike out at this person and call them a name? Is it telling me, well, no, I don’t think I should do that. Maybe it’s telling me that I need to talk to this person or write a letter or connect it to what happened to me as a kid that has nothing to do with this person. And maybe I’m putting all that old stuff on them, or do I need to self soothe?

00:24:47 – Eric Zimmer
Whatever it is, let’s hang on to self soothe because I want to get there in a minute because I think that’s a particularly important area to talk about. I want to talk, though, about attribution for a minute. Attribution is another one of those things that can be sort of difficult, particularly if you don’t remember a lot from your childhood. So part of my challenge is with my childhood, there’s just not much back there to go. Like, this is a feeling from my childhood because I’m like, well, I don’t remember much of anything from back there. So how much time do you spend on attribution? And at what point do you sometimes just go, I’m not quite sure why, but it’s okay, I feel this way.

00:25:25 – Jonice Webb
I think you should only do that if you really just absolutely cannot figure it out. But even then, I think you should file it away and watch for that feeling in the future and see if you can start to figure out you have this feeling often. For example, why do I have this feeling so often? Because every feeling has a reason. And figuring out that reason, I mean, I’m not suggesting people get obsessed with this thing because of course we’re going to have feelings that come and go that we’re not able to process this way, but if it’s a strong feeling and it’s bothersome. I think it makes sense to try to figure that out as best as.

00:25:59 – Eric Zimmer
You can before we move away from alexithymia. I wanted to hit one other thing because you said, I’ve observed that many people with alexithymia have a tendency to be irritable. And irritability is one. It’s probably the tendency in me I most wish I didn’t have. I’ve gotten pretty good at managing it. But, you know, my partner Ginny knows when I’m irritable. I mean, you know, it’s not like it’s hidden. She also is emotionally astute enough to know it has nothing to do with her and she can set it aside, but it’s still something I would love to have less of. And I’ve looked around a lot for, like, well, what causes irritability? And so my ears kinda of perked up when I read that. And irritability is a strong family trait. It is a very strong family trait. What do you do with irritability? Because that’s the one that when I try and get to attribution, I just kind of go, I got nothing here. I got nothing for why all of a sudden you making a noise, filing your fingernails, makes me want to claw my eyes out today. Whereas yesterday, that didn’t really bother me. It’s not constant. And I go back and I’m like, well, if somebody’s coughing, am I getting upset because my brother had asthma and it used to scare me. And I mean, there may be some of that, but the irritability is the one that feels very difficult to attribute anywhere and feels very difficult to work with.

00:27:28 – Jonice Webb
Yeah. So the reason I think that people with childhood emotional neglect end up with irritability. Some people are more on the active side, have more anxiety, and others have more irritability. And either way, the answer is to not stop with naming your feeling irritability, because irritability is a catch all trash can. It’s like all of your feelings have pooled together on the other side of the wall. When they all mix together, that’s what they come out as. So if you don’t let yourself use that term, irritability, and instead you say no, what are you really feeling? Because it’s probably upset about something that day in your current life that you’re not dealing or aware of the feelings that you’re having, and that’s what’s making you irritable. If you go beyond the word irritability, you might be able to name, well, I’m feeling frustrated that this podcast guest canceled at the last minute and this up. Obviously, I’m feeling worried about how I’m going to fill in that slot in the future when that slot comes up. And now I’m angry because that puts me in a spot where I have to, like, really, you know, go and find somebody else. So then you’ll get a lot further with it, and once you figure out what you’re actually feeling, then you can go through the action part, like, and just going through that tributing, figuring out what you’re feeling and why is a really important part of how to take away a feeling’s power. It could make you stop being irritable.

00:29:01 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea of it, you know, thinking of it as a trash can. I think the other trash can feeling, for me is tired. Sometimes it is tired, right? I mean, sometimes it’s legitimate. That’s a physiological thing, but I think sometimes there’s maybe more under there. I want to dig a little deeper into this. Feelings always have a cause thing. I’ve read about and talked about people who are considered, like, highly sensitive, like their nervous system is tuned in such a way that sound is hard for them to tune out and can cause irritability. And, you know, I’ve often sort of thought of myself as that. One of the things that defines me is that I’ll be in a room and there’ll be background noise, and other people will just be carrying on, and I’m like, there’s a buzzing up there that is difficult to tune out. So those things seem neurological almost, or physiological more than emotional. Do you think that there are emotions that are driven from neurological or physiological or physical causes that are not necessarily attributed to events in your life and things that are happening or happened?

00:30:08 – Jonice Webb
I wouldn’t really go about thinking about it quite in that way. Okay, so let’s take the buzzing microphone as an example. I wouldn’t call that irritability. If you are in a room full of people and people are talking and everyone seems fine, but you are really bothered by that microphone, that is a physiological response that you have because of the way you’re wired, where your nervous system is wired, and it’s perfectly legitimate, it’s how you’re built. And I don’t think there’s anything you can really do about that. It’s not a matter of processing a feeling. You can’t do anything except act, which is, what do I do about this? I can’t focus on anything.

00:30:48 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:30:48 – Jonice Webb
Instead of letting yourself get irritated about it, you could say, what am I going to do to cope with this? Is there something I can do? Maybe I can ask them to turn that microphone down. Maybe I can unplug something. Maybe I’m just not going to be able to stay in this room. But it doesn’t have to become irritability if you understand what’s going on and just deal with it in the best way you can.

00:31:11 – Eric Zimmer
And so if what comes out of that is irritability or frustration, then it is attributable in that case. Right. I can say there’s this thing happening. It’s grating on me. I don’t have the ability to turn it off. So I’m feeling frustrated. And now I can attribute it, is what you’re basically saying. I think that’s helpful. All right, so let’s move to self soothing. I’ve interviewed a lot of people for this show. When I look at psychological responses, the literature out there, the different approaches that are out there, and I see this in both psychology and in spirituality. I see a cognitive approach and I see an emotional approach. I see, on one hand, people saying, hey, look, you’ve got these feelings. Those are coming from thoughts. And if you change your thoughts, you’ll change your feelings. And then there’s another approach, more bottom up. Start with what your feelings are, allow those feelings to be there, and oftentimes the emotion is causing the thought. How do you think about that?

00:32:13 – Jonice Webb
I don’t think it can be nailed down to an either or thing, because I see it going both ways. I think you can get yourself very upset about something by continually cranking on it in your head. You know, you can increase your feelings that way. You can also manage your feelings by involving your head. It can go both ways, and I don’t think it makes sense to address it from just one direction for most people. I think most people need to deal with the emotional part and the cognitive part together.

00:32:45 – Eric Zimmer
And which of those you do first might just depend on the situation and what works for you.

00:32:51 – Jonice Webb
I really believe in starting with the feelings, because we’re much more comfortable with our thoughts in general, because we can control them much better. They’re more understandable. We can put our thoughts into words much better. Feelings are a lot more mysterious, and we get the sense that they just come, and so we feel like we have no power over them, but that’s what makes them so powerful. We’ve got the cart before the horse. I think when we start from the cognitive so much. And so that’s why I really encourage people to start with the feeling part and start working out your feelings. Pay attention to your feelings, apply your brain to your feelings, and that’s what’s going to make the biggest impact on your life and who you are.

00:33:33 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. And so, as I look at the I AAA process, right, I think the second a attribute is when I start to bring in at least some degree of cognitive, because I’m trying to figure out where is this coming from? What caused it?

00:33:47 – Chris Forbes
Right.

00:33:47 – Eric Zimmer
At that point, I am slightly cognitive because I’m trying to make a connection. I know what the feeling is. It’s anger. I’ve identified it, I’ve accepted it. Maybe I’m even feeling it in my body and becoming more familiar with it. Now I’m moving into something more cognitive. Would you agree with that?

00:34:04 – Jonice Webb
I would call it engaging your brain. Yes.

00:34:07 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. I would say so, yeah. Yep, yep.

00:34:09 – Jonice Webb
Even this first step of identifying what you’re feeling requires your brain as well, because you’re putting words to what you’re feeling. And if you cannot stop at the big words, like I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m anxious, I’m irritable. If you cannot stop at those big umbrella words and instead try to drill down and name it more specifically, anger can become helplessness and hurt and all kinds of things.

00:35:03 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s talk about self soothing, because one of the things I’ve noticed for sure in myself and others is that if the emotional storm is really strong, you’re not going to be able to cognitively work with anything. Right. You’re overwhelmed by it. So I assume self soothing is the ability to at least turn that down enough that you can work with your emotions more skillfully. How would you describe what self soothing?

00:35:30 – Jonice Webb
Self soothing to me is having a series of things that you can choose to do that will basically what you said, start giving you more control over what you’re feeling. A series of healthy things. So, different things might work in different situations, but the whole IEEe is part of self soothing because it requires you to actually sit with your feeling and process it. And that’s the single most powerful thing you can do to take control of a feeling. But sometimes even that doesn’t do the trick, and you need more. And so I really encourage every human being to have a list of things that they know helps them feel better. It could be laying down with your pet and petting your pet. It could be taking a walk outside, looking up at the sky, you know, calling a friend or going to visit your favorite store. As long as you don’t overspend while you’re there. For example, cooking, cleaning. You know, it’s different for everybody.

00:36:33 – Eric Zimmer
I love that idea, and I’ve talked about it before, having this sense of, like, knowing what things have worked for me in the past and having them written down. Because the problem that I’ve experienced is in the moment, if I look at any of those things, I go, that’s not gonna help. Are you kidding me? Like a walk. So I just need sort of, like, just do it, you know? The other example I make is, I know, for me, music is very helpful in those moments.

00:37:01 – Jonice Webb
That’s a great one. Yep.

00:37:02 – Eric Zimmer
And yet, what I also know is that, particularly if what I’m dealing with is sort of a really low mood or depression, if I go to my music, I’ll be like, none of it will look like it sounds good. I’ll be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And so what I’ve got is a pre made playlist of things that I know help, and so I don’t have to figure it out. I just go, all right, just turn on the playlist. Hit, shuffle. One of these songs should do it, you know? So I love that idea of having sort of written down. As a recovering person, I certainly talk about this with other recovering people and certainly early in my recovery, which is, what are you gonna do when a craving hits?

00:37:38 – Jonice Webb
Yes.

00:37:38 – Eric Zimmer
Because in the moment, the emotion, as you say, is so strong. Do you have any other sort of go to self soothing tools that people might consider beyond naming your emotions? And you listed a couple other really good ones, but did any others come to mind? I feel like giving people a good menu is really helpful.

00:37:54 – Jonice Webb
Yeah. One of my favorites that I forgot to mention is sitting down and writing. And I think you can use your computer or your phone or whatever and type, but I think it’s best to have paper and pen because there’s something about your brain, to your heart, to your hand, to the paper, and then it’s visually there in your own writing. You can write a letter to the person that you’re upset with that you’ll never send, or you can just write down. It’s called automatic writing. When you just write, write, write, write, write, write, write everything that comes into your head. I think that’s a great coping technique.

00:38:25 – Eric Zimmer
I got a ton of mileage out of that one. At different points in my life when I had a lot of anger, my first marriage ended in a very hurtful way to me. I’m not saying I didn’t have a role in why the marriage wasn’t good, but I mean, I just wrote the most hateful letters. I mean, you know, things that I’d be ashamed to say out loud, but that’s what was coming up. And I just would write and write and write and then I would just destroy it. You know, it was so helpful to me as a way, particularly of processing anger. That is a great one. As we’re talking about attribution, I’m going back to that for a second. You say, one way to get to the real heart of a matter is to practice vertical questioning in addition to horizontal questioning. Could you explain what vertical versus horizontal questioning is?

00:39:13 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, this is a communication technique. Usually when I talk about it, it’s talking to someone else.

00:39:18 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.

00:39:18 – Jonice Webb
So it’s really a good way to form or deepen a friendship or a relationship or even with someone you just met. So horizontal questions are about facts and details like the weather, the traffic, things that you’ve done, activities you’ve done. And vertical questions are more thought provoking questions that require a person to focus internally a little bit and consider themselves and maybe even consult their feelings. So instead of what did you major in in high school or college, it would be how did you choose that for yourself? And what is it about that that captured your passion like that? So really the whys that help someone think more deeply and that enable you to connect with them more?

00:40:05 – Eric Zimmer
It strikes me that that’s also a horizontal question in like a conflict with someone else. And I’m just more or less thinking out loud now. But a horizontal question could be kind of about what are the facts of what actually happened here? And then the vertical question is how do we both feel about it? But I often feel like conversations with people, particularly conflict, are almost diagonal, right. Those two questions get mixed into the same thing. And it can be very helpful if you can tweeze them apart and be like, well, hang on a second, here’s what actually happened. Can we agree on that? Like, I did not take out the trash. Okay, agreed. We both did. Like, now how does that make, you know, how do we feel about that? Versus combining them into the same sort of conversation?

00:40:45 – Jonice Webb
Oh, absolutely. Especially couples do that. It just, it all gets mixed together. And considering every two people has a different perception of everything, it’s really important to keep your perceptions of the facts separate from your feelings about it. Usually the solution lies in the feelings part.

00:41:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. We’ve sort of talked about healing this and you’ve said that the primary thing is to get more comfortable and literate with my emotions to go seek them out and inquire more deeply into them and learn more about them and welcome them. What else is there that we haven’t talked about that you feel like would be important for healing this emotional neglect?

00:41:29 – Jonice Webb
Well, the first step is figuring out whether this really applies to you or not. And I think for most people that have a significant case of emotional neglect, like, if someone’s listening to this podcast and they feel like, oh, my gosh, this sounds like me, I think that is a really good indicator. And that’s the first step in healing, is really owning and understanding. Okay, this is how I grew up. This is how it affected me. And a great place to start that, because most people can’t remember emotional neglect. So a good way to find out whether you have it is to go to my website and take the emotional neglect questionnaire, which is just a series of yes or no questions about your current life now. So take that test, then start learning everything you can learn about emotional neglect. There are lots of free resources available on my website. And, you know, I think the biggest part of healing is about just changing your own relationship with your own emotions and starting to view them as your friends instead of just irrelevant or enemies, and starting to just treat them differently and live differently with them. And then once you’re doing that, you start getting more glimmers of emotions and more and more feelings, and then you can start learning what to do with those feelings. And that’s the emotion skills that you didn’t learn in childhood. You kind of have to be having enough feelings to apply the emotion skills to.

00:42:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:53 – Jonice Webb
And then the final stage is applying all of that. You have more depth, you have more feelings, you have more skills, and you can start putting all that into your relationships. When you get to that point, people in your life start to notice that you’re actually kind of different, and it’s pretty cool.

00:43:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And we’ll have links in the show notes to your website and to that quiz. So, listeners, you can just click right through the show notes and get right there. We’re back on self soothing here. But you said self talk is probably the most useful and versatile of all self soothing strategies. So talk to me about what good self talk looks like.

00:43:31 – Jonice Webb
Good self talk is compassionate, but it also holds you accountable for how you act. But basically it’s encouraging and helpful. So it can be all the way from, you know, you can do this. You absolutely can do this. Talking yourself through something that you’re worried or afraid of to you didn’t do that on purpose. You know, that you didn’t, but you still have to take accountability for it and deal with it. You know, now you just have to deal with the fallout of that mistake, but you didn’t choose it. It’s not your fault. You know, things that are reasonable and compassionate. I think that’s one of the traits of cen people that I didn’t mention, is low self compassion. And it’s that attacking voice that can really get you into trouble and SAP your energy. But when you talk to yourself with encouragement and compassion instead, it really can turn things around.

00:44:29 – Eric Zimmer
What’s the difference? Or how do you tell when you are giving yourself encouraging and helpful self talk and when you’re trying to sort of minimize an emotion internally? So, for example, let’s say I’m feeling afraid I might do some self talk about like, hey, you don’t need to be that frightened of this. You’ve handled this before. So is it really, as you said, I start with the recognition, I’m afraid it’s okay that I’m afraid. The reason I’m afraid is this situation. And then the self talk sort of falls into that act, the final a a little bit, which is like, okay, Eric, you got this. You’re okay. You know, you’ve been through this before. If it goes that way, you can handle it, that sort of thing. Is that where it would slot into that?

00:45:15 – Jonice Webb
Yes, and I wouldn’t call that minimizing a feeling. I would call it managing a feeling. And there is a big difference.

00:45:22 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, there is. How do you know the difference? I love the distinction. What are some ways of knowing the difference?

00:45:27 – Jonice Webb
Minimizing is basically when you’re trying to escape or deny that you have a feeling. One of the factors that plays in is whether the feeling is useful or not. So if it’s a feeling that’s telling you not to jump off a cliff, then pretty useful. Pay attention and listen to that feeling. Because it’s, if you used your brain to process it, then you certainly don’t want to minimize that or manage it because it’s a healthy feeling. But if it’s an unhealthy feeling telling you to do something that could be bad for you, then use your brain to process it. But instead of trying to tell yourself that that feeling isn’t important or you don’t have it, actually take it on and say, what do I do with this feeling? What does it mean? What should I do with it? How do I manage it?

00:46:13 – Eric Zimmer
So it sounds to me like if I’m talking about being afraid. The difference is not, you shouldn’t be afraid of that. You know, don’t be scared. It’s more, I’m afraid. Here’s why I’m afraid and I can handle it. It’s subtle, but it is a definite difference in I’m allowing the feeling instead of saying, you shouldn’t have that feeling, or there’s no reason to feel that. It’s, I do feel it. That’s okay. Here’s how I’m going to respond.

00:46:39 – Jonice Webb
Yes, you just said that way better than I did. Thank you.

00:46:43 – Eric Zimmer
Well, we’re going to end with something that you said really, really well, though, and then I’ll let you respond to it, which, when you’re talking about self talk, you said, and I just, I love this line, remind yourself of simple, honest truths which will help you keep things in perspective. That is so well said. Simple, honest truths. So give me an example of a simple honest truth or two.

00:47:06 – Jonice Webb
Well, some we’ve already given it would be, you’ve done this before, you can do it again, or you know you have the skills for this, or you know you didn’t do that on purpose. Every human being makes mistakes.

00:47:18 – Eric Zimmer
Hmm. That’s a good one.

00:47:20 – Jonice Webb
You’re just a human being trying to think of different examples or situations. You deserve this. You’re worth it. Trust yourself on this.

00:47:29 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. One I love also is some version of like, well, whatever happens here, you’ll be able to handle it. If I’m fearing an outcome, I can even go, well, even if that outcome comes okay, I can handle it. That’s one that helps me a lot, is sort of reminding myself of my ability to cope.

00:47:45 – Jonice Webb
Yeah, some of those things, if they’re ones that you need to hear a lot from yourself, just turn it into a mantra and have it right there in your metaphorical back pocket, ready to grab out and use whenever you need it.

00:47:56 – Eric Zimmer
Awesome.

00:47:57 – Jonice Webb
I think most people need to have a mantra or two.

00:47:59 – Eric Zimmer
They are very helpful. All right. Well, Janice, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. There’ll be links, as I said in the show notes to your website to where people can find, find the questionnaire, find your book, and all your other work. So thank you so much. It’s really been enjoyable for me, too.

00:48:17 – Jonice Webb
Thanks for having me on. I’ve really enjoyed it.

00:48:35 – Chris Forbes
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