Podcast Episode

Episode Transcript:

00:01:44 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Douglas, welcome to the show.

00:01:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Hi, how are you? It’s good to be here.

00:01:48 – Eric Zimmer
I am very happy to have you on. We are sitting together in a studio in Columbus, Ohio. It’s very rare that I get to do interviews in person in Columbus, so this is a real treat. You live in Cleveland for people who don’t know, 2 hours away from here. So thank you for coming down. We’re going to be discussing your novel, which is a great adventure story called a short walk through a wide world. 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 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. Think 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.

00:02:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So my first thought goes to Carl Jung, because he always used to talk about, he had these twelve archetypes, and one of them was the shadow. And this is the first thing I thought when I hear this is, so the shadow is this part of you that you bury. You just bury it your whole life, like, way down there, because it’s really the darkest side of you. And a lot of people just don’t even realize it’s there and live in denial of it, so on and so forth. Everybody ignores this, and most people aren’t even aware of it. Although every once in a while, you know, you catch yourself thinking something or you lose your temper or whatever, and you. It’s there, and we all kind of know it’s there, but you bury it, so you never know. But what Jung used to say was that you really want to know it. You really want to be familiar with it. You really want to make friends with it. So, like, the impulse is say, yeah, you want to feed the good wolf, and you should. Because I remember, you know, for a long time, my writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. And I was just on the sidelines and I was living, you know, whatever, my domesticated life. And I would see even friends of mine who had all this success, and I could have been really embittered. And I remember making the conscious choice, I’m not going to be that person. I don’t want. I’m going to be very happy when someone else, like, gets wherever they get to because they’re living the life they want to live. And that’s great for them, and I want them success. But on the other hand, the other wolf, the one that you impulsively don’t want to feed, might not be the best idea because you think about even the best people out there, like, you can imagine. Like Mother Teresa, right? She goes down to Calcutta and she wants to feed the poor. And I think a lot of people picture this, like, this kind old lady handing out treats to the kids. And it’s not the way it was. This is a huge undertaking, right? It’s like running a corporation or something. It’s huge. And from what I understand, Mother Teresa was tough. She was not easy to work for. She was really demanding. She did not put up with fools, all that kind of stuff, because she had to do this incredible job. So it takes a certain amount of ruthlessness and relentlessness to get that done. And if she hadn’t tapped into that, maybe she would not have been able to do the incredible, miraculous things that she did.

00:05:05 – Eric Zimmer
She was an inveterate gambler too, I heard.

00:05:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I did not.

00:05:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, I’m making that up.

00:05:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was like, what?

00:05:11 – Eric Zimmer
I was trying to think of what insult I could lob at Mother Teresa that wouldn’t get me, like, permanent, wouldn’t infuriate the entire audience and not, the gambling’s not serious. But, no, that’s not true. Go on. Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

00:05:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s a good one. But, yeah, I think that was my whole point. This darkness in you kind of helps propel you forward. It kind of helps you get your task done. It kind of makes you focus. It kind of, like, cuts out the distractions around you. It can do a lot of good for you. So you don’t want to starve it to death, but you want to be aware of it, and you want to use it where it’s applicable, I suppose, is how I guess you’d say it. That’s the first thing I thought of.

00:05:49 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, interestingly enough, I was having a conversation. Just. Was it yesterday, day before, with another novelist? I don’t talk to novelists often, but a friend of mine, Matthew quick, and we were talking about this very idea, the jungian idea of the shadow.

00:06:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, really?

00:06:06 – Eric Zimmer
And we were talking about it in the context of that as particular type of men in the eras in which we’ve been raised. And by type, I mean maybe more liberal. And recognizing the overreaches that men often have had a. That there was a certain amount of trying to be the good boy. And that what that did for both of us was the thing that we couldn’t face in ourselves was anger. It was the thing that got shoved way down. My father was a very angry man all the time. And so I spent my whole early, like, adolescence through early adult years going, I’m not gonna be like that. I’m not gonna be like that. Shove it down. Shove it down. Right. And I think there’s been a cost to me for that. And it’s not that I’m even conscious of it anymore. Cause I think I’ve shoved it down for so long that it really is deep down there. But you see occasional flashes of it.

00:07:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Yeah. I’m the same way. You know, I love my dad and all that, but he was really short tempered.

00:07:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:07:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
And it made it really tense to be around him. It was like. It’s like living next to a volcano because you never know when he’s gonna go explode and all that kind of stuff. And so I mean, I was kind of raised to be angry. And I feel. I mean, like, sometimes I’m an angry driver, and sometimes, you know, I get. And I remember every time I’ve been angry, though, it has never helped me. And so I learned really quickly not to be so angry. I’m trying to think, actually, is there ever a time where it’s helped me? And I’m trying to think of one and I really can’t, but I remember really well the times where it just totally undermined what I was trying to do.

00:07:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah. And I think this gets back to talking about the two wolves, which is making a distinction between an emotion and the behavior that that emotion causes or pushes you to. So to try not to be angry. Like, the emotion of anger, I think, is probably destructive. Do not recognize, like, I’m angry. Like, shove that down. Don’t. You can’t feel that. You can’t feel that.

00:08:12 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. Right.

00:08:13 – Eric Zimmer
However, it does seem perfectly reasonable to me. And part of being a good person in the world of then not letting that emotion go to whatever it wants to do. And I think that’s an interesting thing. When we think about emotions, there’s almost always an urge with them. Like, the emotion is causing us to want to do something. And that’s often the place for me where I’ve tried to learn to separate. Don’t repress the emotion, but don’t indulge the action either. That’s sort of the ideal. Now.

00:08:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not the actual emotion of anger. I mean, you should be angry about certain things. You should be angry about whatever slavery, the holocaust, whatever it is. How you manifest that anger, though, is something you can control, and you’ve got to do it wisely. You’ve got to do it so it’s actually a productive thing as opposed to something that undermines you.

00:09:04 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Yeah, it’s the whole respond rather than react idea.

00:09:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:09:09 – Eric Zimmer
So let’s turn to your book. I’m going to let you maybe tell us for a minute or two your description of what the book is about, just to give listeners a sense of the type of book we’re discussing.

00:09:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, I mean, I can give you my elevator picture for people who don’t know. So it starts off with Aubrey Torvell. She is a nine year old girl in 1880s Paris, and she gets really sick at the dinner table one night. So all her parents are all freaked out, her family’s freaked out. They rush her to the doctor, and the doctor tries to fix her, but gets to the doctor, and she’s totally fine. And the doctor’s like, I don’t see anything wrong there. And so she goes back home and she can’t even get inside the house, she’s so sick this time. And they take her back to the doctor, and now she’s even sicker. And the doctor has no idea what’s wrong with her. And he’s poking and prodding her, trying to figure it out, and she gets so frustrated, she just runs off into the streets of Paris at night and she feels fine. And she realizes that it’s this active exploration of being somewhere she’s never been before that cures her. And so she spends the rest of her life wandering around and around the world, constantly on the run from this disease. And so it’s an epic adventure. She’s going to climb the himalayas and cross the Sahara and raft down the Amazon. All these amazing things. And so that’s the exciting part. It’s a huge, epic adventure. That’s the fun part to read. But on the flip side, I mean, this is a girl who has lost her family, has nowhere to call home. She can’t fall in love because they’re all doomed. She just lives this life that seems to have no meaning. So how do you find a meaning in a life that feels like an eternal punishment? And that’s the dilemma that she’s facing here. It seems like it would be a great adventure. Terrific excuse to get out of there. A lot of people admire her and are envious of her because they see this woman who’s having this grand adventure, perfect excuse to do it, can’t hold it against her. But really, you know, it’s not so easy if you’re there. And I love to travel. Most people do love to travel. But I remember I was traveling. My wife is from China. We were traveling through China. I think we spent, like, three weeks there, maybe four. And we started in the south, moved our way north. By the time we got to Beijing, me and my kids were exhausted. And we didn’t, you know, there was no forbidden city, no great wall. We just slept for three days, you know, so, I mean, that was only four weeks. Imagine doing this for a lifetime. So it can be brutal. My dad used to travel all the time for his work, you know, so he hates to travel now. My wife is kind of similar. She’s a musician with the Cleveland orchestra, and they’re very much traveling or touring orchestra, and you get tired of it. You just want to stay home with your kids and enjoy your life and stuff like that. But so there’s a flip side. There’s the adventure of travel, which is why we go on vacations. But, I mean, most people don’t take a vacation. That’s more than, you know, a week, ten days, something like that. Then they come back home. If that goes on forever, it’s a whole different story.

00:11:57 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s ironic that we’re having this conversation, because in about ten days, I’m about to embark on a three month trip.

00:12:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Oh, my God.

00:12:04 – Eric Zimmer
To Europe. Now, it’s not a vacation.

00:12:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
I didn’t mean to spoil. I don’t interrupt you.

00:12:08 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, it’s not a vacation. I mean, parts of it will be vacation, but I will be working while I’m there. I’m working on a book myself, so I’ll be writing, I’ll be doing interviews. So it’s not a vacation, but it is three months of us moving our way, you know, covering a fair amount of ground over that time. And as we were planning the trip, I had sort of been reading your book a little bit. Not in preparation for the trip, but just they sort of aligned. But certainly thinking about that, like, how long do we want to stay in one place versus how many different places do we want to see and what’s the pace that you’re on? Right. Because to your point, like, when you’re always moving, that gets to be exhausting.

00:12:46 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I planned some vacations where it was like, okay, we’ll spend one or two days there, one or two days there. And that’s never the best way, really, the best way do it is to pick a spot, stay for a while, so at least you feel like you’ve gotten the feel of the place and so on. And because otherwise it’s hectic, it’s constant moving, you never get a break, and you need a break and just to enjoy the place, really. I mean, it’s not enough to just stop and see.

00:13:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we’ve interspersed a week here, a couple weeks there, but then there’s a couple weeks where, you know, we’re seeing multiple places where there’s a lot more movement. So I’m so fortunate that my work allows me to work from anywhere and get a chance to go do this. But it’s ironic that we’re talking about an epic journey when I feel like I’m going on. For me, what is an epic journey?

00:13:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
That is an epic journey.

00:13:29 – Eric Zimmer
Right. So you refer to the book as an adventure story. You’ve also referred to it as a spiritual journey. That’s a term that means all sorts of things. To all sorts of people. When you use it, what are you referring to? What do you mean?

00:13:45 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I mean it actually pretty literary. So this has a backstory to it. So when I was a kid, tell you the whole story, it doesn’t make me look good, but when I was like, I don’t even remember how old I was, like seven, eight years old, maybe, maybe not even. And I remember getting into a big fight with my little brother. I had four brothers. I had one little one. And it was over something stupid, too. It was like, what are we going to watch on tv? Or I wanted to watch a Godzilla movie and he wanted to watch. Knowing him, it was like 60 minutes or something. And I’m like, no, I want to watch Godzilla. And he got his way, and I went out into the backyard and I sulked. And I remember sitting under the tree in the backyard thinking, God, if you’re out there, just wreak total, unabashed revenge on my little brother. And weeks went by and nothing happened. And I was like, and because of that, I became an avowed atheist from like the age of like seven. I was like, you know, you really let me down. I’m not believing in you anymore. That’s my revenge, you know, my petty revenge. As I got older and I stuck to this, you know, my arguments got a lot more sophisticated than that. But as I got older, I started noticing that all the stories I was writing, not all of them, but a lot of the stories I was writing were about these characters who were either very atheistic or they didn’t like God, but God loved them anyway. And I was like, why am I writing these stories? I’m not that person. And then, of course, cursed me. Well, geez, maybe I’m not nearly as atheistic as I thought I was, and maybe there’s a lot more going. So these are the types of characters I write now. And because of that, I started studying the religions. I started studying all of them. But the Old Testament had these great stories that I loved. A great one would be Jonah, because Jonah’s given this task, he has to go down and convert Nineveh, right? And which is an insane thing for, you know, this guy who’s just minding his own business, and God comes down, says, go to Nineveh and convert him. And he’s like, I don’t want to go to Nineveh. I want to stay home. I was enjoying myself. I was perfectly happy before you came along. And he does everything he can to get out of that situation. And I’m thinking, well, you know, if you just do it, he says, your life’s going to be a lot easier. But he refuses. And in retrospect, because we all know how the story ends, he would have just been smarter just going along and doing as he was told. But you got to admire the guy who, like, butts head with God and says, no, not going to do it. Like, you’re going to lose this battle. You have no chance of winning this one. But he fights it anyway. And there’s something kind of admirable about that, even if he’s wrong. And I know, like, the bigger moral of the story is that it’s trying to show that if you turn your head away when evils are happening in the world, you’re not helping the world. So I get that. But at the same time, there’s something really admirable about a guy who’s fighting a completely futile war against something bigger, impossibly bigger, than he’ll ever be. He cannot comprehend how big this thing he’s up against is, and he fights it anyway. And I always thought that was admirable. And I think Aubrey Torvell is going through the exact same adventure because she’s stuck with this disease. She’s traveling around the world. She has no idea why she’s been singled out for this. She’s the only one in the world that has this thing and maybe the only one ever will, and she doesn’t know why, and it makes her miserable, where if she kind of embraced her fate, she would have been a lot happier. But people come up to me all the time. I love that character of Aubrey Torivell. She’s a great character. It’s because she’s making this futile fight. She’s very feisty, she’s very single minded. And there’s something about that that people admire. I think. I think that’s what it is. I’m off on a tangent there, but that was my idea, is that she’s up against this. It’s not until she kind of learns to look back on her life and say, you know what? That wasn’t so bad. And I saw things no one else gets to see. And there is something to that. She kind of comes around. This idea kind of manifests through a story. I don’t kind of say it outrightly, but there’s a voice in her head. There’s all kinds of other things happening, going on. And what does that mean? I don’t spell it out, but in my mind, I knew what it was, and I hope the readers get that this is also a story about enlightenment. There’s a lot of discussion between her and the prince in the middle of the story, and they’re talking about what it means to be enlightened, and how do you know? And it’s, you know, the idea is it’s kind of like waking up from a dream, from a dream life to your waking life. And enlightenment is when you’re waking up in your waking life into something even higher than that, and you see her go through that process, by the end, you’re there. So it’s a story of enlightenment as well. And to me, that’s all the way through the book, and that’s where the spiritual element comes in.

00:18:17 – Eric Zimmer
Right. Because it’s not a book about God in a direct way. Right. There’s no divine being. There’s no her taking on. But what you’re saying is this person fighting their fate being sort of one of the core themes there. And I always think it’s so interesting, and I think it’s one of the fundamental dilemmas that we face, particularly in today’s day and age, where choices are unlimited and every view of the world and every way to live is shown to you. You can actually see it all, is this question of what do I accept about my life being the way that it is, and what do I change? Because that’s the first question. Like, if you’re going to fight your fate, on one hand you look at that and go, well, it’s admirable. And on the other hand, you go, well, it’s a completely losing battle. Like, why? It’s obvious that if there’s something we can’t change, then accepting it is the reasonable course of action. And I think most people are wise.

00:19:19 – Douglas Westerbeke
Enough to know that that’s a very taoist take. You don’t fight the universe.

00:19:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, but that even shows up in, like, if you look at, like, parents who have children who have disabilities, if there’s just no chance of fixing it, in many ways their life is easier because they don’t have to try and figure out whether to fix it, how much time and energy to put into fixing it. They just accept. They get on with the business of, like, all right, how do we build a life with this thing that we’ve been given that we can’t do anything about? Andrew Solomon, who’s a great writer, wrote the noonday Demon, which is called the Atlas of depression. He also wrote a book called Far from the Tree, and it’s about children who are different than their parents. Maybe they’re blind, they’re autistic, but they’re different. And it was one of the main points I really took away from that book was this idea of these parents whose children, there might be a way to make them better, and they are caught in this pull. Like part of them is going just, all right, this is what we have. Let’s deal with it. But then there’s another part of them that’s going, it could be different. It could be different if you just did this. What if you tried this? So I think most of us in the modern world are closer to that ladder thing I was describing, which is we look at our lives, and if we just knew there were things that couldn’t change, like, I know my height isn’t going to change, right? I mean, I could do some crazy surgery that breaks all my bones and. But all intents and purposes, I’m the height. I am. And so you go about accepting that. I go, well, I’m not going to dunk a basketball. I just kind of move on.

00:20:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. If you’re raising kids, you’re dealing with this dilemma daily, right? Because you want your kids to be as perfect and ready for the world when it comes to them and all that. So you want them to be perfect at everything thing, and there’s just certain things they’re going to be good at and certain things they’re not going to be good at. And it takes time to, like, figure, maybe not time, patience and understanding to realize this is what they’re like. And the more you try to push them into being this ideal, the less of a credit they’re going to be to you. If you want your kids to turn out well, let them be them, and they’ll figure out their own way, and they’ll figure out their pluses and minuses. Yeah, it’s a lot like that.

00:21:26 – Eric Zimmer
There’s a line in the book where you’re talking about. Aubrey once believed it was possible to control the world, to make it bend to her personal sense of justice. What a child she was, how foolish she’d been, how haughty, and then goes on to say, without a doubt, she knew she did not command the world, but was at the mercy of it. It’s a lesson most people learn at some point in their lives, that the world is a bigger and more powerful thing than you.

00:21:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, that was a lesson I learned. It’s a lesson I see a lot of people learn. You start off young, you’re idealistic, and then you realize, I remember my dad telling me when I was a kid. You know what? You’re young, you’re full of energy. You’re idealistic. This is the time to try to do the things you want to do because when you’re older, you’re going to be crushed.

00:22:13 – Eric Zimmer
Wise. Wise, right.

00:22:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s true. Right.

00:22:16 – Eric Zimmer
I mean, I think that is wise and generous. Right. Instead of telling you not to be idealistic and not try that stuff, it’s like, go. That’s appropriate for this phase in your life of where you’re at.

00:22:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
I remember thinking of me when I was a kid because I was very idealistic. I have lots of other friends who are like that. And eventually life gets to you because I had already been planning to write books and make movies and do all this stuff by the time I was 20. It didn’t work out that way.

00:22:47 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are. I don’t know how old you are with a novel.

00:22:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
I ain’t 20.

00:22:51 – Eric Zimmer
You’re not 20? You’re not 60 either?

00:22:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, no. But this is my next stop, though.

00:22:57 – Eric Zimmer
It’s your next stop. Really?

00:22:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:22:59 – Eric Zimmer
So you’re older than 55?

00:23:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
I don’t know, actually.

00:23:01 – Eric Zimmer
I’m 54.

00:23:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
You must think I might be 54. No, I don’t. I forget these things.

00:23:06 – Eric Zimmer
All right, all right.

00:23:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
Genuinely forget.

00:23:08 – Eric Zimmer
I forget, too. But my birth year was 1970, so it’s always easy to figure out because I can just go, oh, well, what year is it? 2024. Add 30 to it. Okay, I’m there. Oh, crap.

00:23:17 – Douglas Westerbeke
So then I’m. No, no, I’m older than you. I didn’t even realize. I really, genuinely forgot.

00:23:22 – Eric Zimmer
Well, you look very young, by the way. You look very young. But my point with that was not to compliment you on your age. My point was to say you had this idealism of all these things you were going to do when you were young, and they didn’t happen.

00:23:36 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:23:37 – Eric Zimmer
And yet here you are with a novel that has done. I mean, I don’t know how you gauge how well a book does, but it’s been in windows of Barnes and noble. That’s good enough, right? I mean, that’s something. So, tie together this early disillusionment with creating art and lack of success with where you are today, how did that happen? How did you stay with it to get to the point where you were able to do it? How did you keep creating art in that period?

00:24:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
Well, so, I mean, I’ve been doing it since I was little. I mean, I started writing stories when I was in, like, third grade. Maybe even before that. I remember, me and my friends in third grade would get together, we would all write stories together, and we had all these imaginary characters and stuff like that. And mine was a blue raccoon. I think my friend had these family of pickles around, talking and stuff like that.

00:24:28 – Eric Zimmer
And the raccoons and the pickles get together, they did.

00:24:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So we have all these joint stories. It was like Marvel’s universe, and they would all, like, intersect and stuff like that. They would rob banks and stuff like that together. They’re always getting into these. Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, I kept writing these stories after they had stopped, and I couldn’t stop. So I was totally writing for pleasure. But I think around 6th grade, I was like, okay, this is what I want to do. And so I just started writing stories and more and more. And, see, I went to school for it. Afterwards, I would submit screenplays to competitions, and they did really well, and it would just always be enough to keep me going. Like, enough, like, encouragement. But it never happened. So I was optioned, like, you know, four times, I think, in Hollywood, but none of them ever got produced. And, you know, which is crushing after a while. Then you had kids and you take a break. But even when I had kids, I was like, oh, my God, I have to find time to write. You get the shakes when you don’t write. I mean, it’s like a physical reaction to not writing. And I’ve always had that. And so, I mean, I just constantly wrote. I probably have, like, 50 screenplays and five or six novels already, just because just yesterday, I’m working on a novel that I know is unpublishable. It’ll never be published. It’s insane. It’s a total vanity project is what they call it. But in between books, I’ll take off a month, and I’ll work on this thing just for fun. And all that time, I wasn’t doing it because I thought it would have, like, this tremendous, incredible payoff or anything. I’m doing it because I can’t stop. I don’t know any other way to live. Right.

00:25:52 – Eric Zimmer
It’s just an obsession, Aubrey.

00:25:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Am I.

00:25:55 – Eric Zimmer
Well, in the sense of, she can’t stop moving, or she gets worse than the shakes. You just described your inability to stop writing.

00:26:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, I guess so.

00:26:03 – Eric Zimmer
Without getting some sort of.

00:26:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I never made that analogy. This is going in my next story.

00:26:10 – Eric Zimmer
There’s another Aubrey connection that I picked up, which I don’t know. You may or may not know, but one of the things that appears to potentially be an inciting. Incident for her is when she’s young, she fails to take a certain act towards God.

00:26:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. A selfless act.

00:26:31 – Eric Zimmer
Right. It was sort of a battle with God. And you describe being a young child having a revenge fantasy and swearing off God because he didn’t take out your little brother. That’s another sim. I don’t know if you’ve connected that dot either to an extent. Okay. Okay.

00:26:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Maybe not quite so consciously, but I mean, that one I totally feel.

00:26:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.

00:26:54 – Douglas Westerbeke
Like, I can get that one right away. So it’s also a setup, like you get from, you know, the Garden of Eden set up. Right. Don’t eat that apple. Yeah, of course they’re gonna get it. Yeah.

00:27:03 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
So, yeah, throw out the puzzle ball. Of course she’s not gonna throw it out at that point. Oh, no. I’ve got to see what’s inside it so she doesn’t.

00:27:09 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:10 – Douglas Westerbeke
And that’s what sets her off in her journey. And it’s like she was set.

00:27:31 – Eric Zimmer
So there’s another line in the book that says, the best way to survive some things thought Aubrey was not to understand. Do you believe that?

00:27:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I read this great book called deep Survival. Lawrence Gonzalez, I think, wrote it because I love to write survival stories. So he was writing all about how people survive, what they survive. There are some situations people just can’t survive, but in certain situations, it is a kind of a personality that gets you through it. And I remember so many aspects of it. One was to just act, and the other one was, people who tend to survive tend to admire their situation. Like, there was a story about a plane crash, and the plane broke open in midair, and this girl strapped to her seat was literally tumbling through the air into the jungle. And, you know, because there was a jungle, she landed in the trees and actually survived this fall from an airplane. A bunch of them did. The airplane was low, I guess, but she describes it as, oh, look at these trees. They look like broccoli. She remembers this incident, and when she’s on the ground, she’s like, this is a beautiful jungle. And she’s admiring this like everyone else is. A lot of other people are looking at this like this is their grave. You know, this is. This is the worst thing that could happen to me. This is miserable. She’s actually admiring the place she’s in. She’s the only one that survived because everyone just froze, sat still, and she’s like, you know what? I’m just going to follow this river. I’m going to walk, because if I stay here. They’re not going to find us with all that. And so she just did something, whereas everyone else said, no, no, wait, they’ll find us here. She’s like, I don’t know, she took off. No one else will go with her. And she is the only one that lived. She eventually was picked up, and there’s a, I don’t remember where I heard this, a soldier saying it was a combat soldier, and he says, look, if you’re ever lost in the woods, just walk, because it’ll take you somewhere. I mean, you can stand there and freeze out of fear, and you can just sit there and not do anything, or you can take some steps and maybe it won’t help, maybe it will, but at least you’ll know more than you did before because you’re starting to see the place you’re at, and maybe you’ll come across something. Maybe you get a little lucky. Maybe you’ll find some food, maybe you’ll find a river you can follow, so on and so forth. But if you just stay in one place, you’re not improving your situation. So when Aubrey is saying that, I mean, Aubrey is not necessarily a great intellect. She’s an action oriented person. For her, you got to keep moving. First of all, she has to keep moving anyway. If she thinks about her plight too much, it’s going to make her miserable. And that’s what one of her flaws is, right? I mean, I hate to advocate mindlessness because I don’t think it’s quite there, but sometimes if you just do something, it’s the best antidote there is. And so instead of just sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, just get out there and walk. And maybe things, maybe they won’t improve. Maybe they will, and it’s certainly going to improve a lot more than just sitting there, you know, doing nothing.

00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I feel obligated to tell listeners we do not offer survival advice on this show. So the other amazing thing about that book, just if you’re in the. The show has no opinion on whether you should stay put or walk. Just.

00:30:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
But the other thing was, like, he actually broke it down by demographics. Kids under the age of six were more likely to survive than kids between the age of 17 and, like, 13, because the kids between 17 and 13, you know, teenagers, these young teenagers who don’t know how to control their emotions yet tend to get really panicky or they tend to get really depressed. Their emotions get ahead of them and take them over, and they tend to curl up and die, whereas under six, they’re like, oh, I’ll just look for food. And they go off and just do the things they have to do. They’re very practical. They don’t get hung up on emotions at all because they just don’t have that life experience, and it doesn’t mean much to them yet. They just do what they have to do. That’s why you hear, like, little kids being raised by wolves and monkeys and things like that, because they just let it happen, whereas these older group of kids, they’ll be freaked out. They’ll have self doubt. All these kind of things just undermine them. And then as you get older, the chances get better. Then you get to a certain age, and your chances drop off, and it’s all in the mind, and it’s because of where your mind is at that age. It was really fascinating, though.

00:31:37 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s wild. That is adventure novels or survival novels. I may not get this right. The author, Lauren Groff. Is that Lauren Groff?

00:31:48 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah.

00:31:48 – Eric Zimmer
She has a new book. Her latest book is sort of a survival story about a woman who wanders off from, I’m gonna say, a medieval village where it’s just a bad place to be. And so, anyway, she’s an amazing writer. Her prose is incredible. And so you might really enjoy that.

00:32:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m gonna look for that now. Yeah.

00:32:06 – Eric Zimmer
Back to this idea of Aubrey’s life as being both a blessing and a curse in that she has to keep moving. And we talked about how sometimes that may not be ideal. You make an analogy in the book between imprisonment and exile. Right. Somebody’s making the point that, like, punishment is to be imprisoned.

00:32:29 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:32:30 – Eric Zimmer
He can’t move. And she makes the point, well, people are often exiled. Also another type of punishment. And as I was thinking about this idea, it seems that either of those things or really any condition in the extreme, becomes really difficult. Right. Like, if you’re imprisoned in a prison cell, that’s awful. Horrible, right. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t, I mean, like, nothing. And to be forced to move to a new place you’ve never been every three days, as Aubrey is, is also a form of torture in its own way. So it seems like there’s this. And I don’t know if you think about this, but there’s a case being made for sort of a middle way here, that the middle way is ideal.

00:33:20 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I love Taoism, and that’s the philosophy there.

00:33:23 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. For sure.

00:33:24 – Douglas Westerbeke
But I have to admit, and this isn’t true for everybody, but I know for me, I would prefer exile, because at least you’re out there and you’re moving.

00:33:31 – Eric Zimmer
Agreed.

00:33:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
And then there are. But there are people I know, and I’ve met them, who would prefer to be in the prison because they can relax and they can just, you know, people are taking care of them, feeding them, and they just have to sit there.

00:33:40 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. To make it a little bit more realistic, because I think almost anybody would choose exile over prison cell because that’s so extreme. But we might.

00:33:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy who didn’t.

00:33:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Okay, well, and it’s interesting, some people who are out of prison, or I have a friend who was in prison, he just got out in the last six months. He was in prison for 20 years.

00:34:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. That’s a tough adjustment.

00:34:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, all of a sudden your life is completely structured in to a degree you would never want your life to be structured. And then suddenly there is nothing as far as structure goes. Anyway, I was sort of making the middle way point there a little bit. For most of us, somewhere in between those two things is going to be the ideal.

00:34:22 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, that’s how most of us live our lives. Right. Because we’re not sitting at home all day doing nothing. We’re out and about. We go on vacations once in a while and so on, so on and so forth. And most of us don’t cloister ourselves inside a room all the rest of our lives. And most of us aren’t wandering the world forever and ever either. There are people now, you know, hearing about these, what, digital nomads? And they do it for like a couple years, and then you go on YouTube and you read, well, what are they up to now? I was like, I broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore.

00:34:49 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I’ve known a couple people who’ve tried the digital nomad lifestyle, and it a seems to like you’re saying to be great for a while until all of a sudden it’s not.

00:34:59 – Douglas Westerbeke
One guy said something really interesting to me because he was going around the world seeing all these beautiful things. They stopped becoming beautiful to him. And he missed that. He missed the idea of going somewhere and being stunned by the landscape or the culture, whatever it is he was after. Or he missed being stunned and knocked bowled over by that because it was becoming routine for him. And that’s something that, it didn’t actually occur to me.

00:35:24 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, we habituate to almost anything, right? We habituate to almost anything.

00:35:28 – Douglas Westerbeke
Imagine habituating. Imagine habituating to, like, natural beauty. I can’t even imagine that, but I guess it would happen.

00:35:35 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, I think that raises a question that I think is at the heart of a lot of spiritual journeys or spiritual work, which is, how do you continue to see the extraordinary in what has become very ordinary? How do you continue to enliven your life even though it’s not changing much?

00:35:58 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Oh, my God. It’s like you want an answer from me.

00:36:00 – Eric Zimmer
No, no, no. I’m not looking for an answer so much as yes. I’ve been hoping.

00:36:07 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you do that?

00:36:08 – Eric Zimmer
600 episodes in. I figured you were the guy was going to solve this problem.

00:36:13 – Douglas Westerbeke
The other theme of the book is that our happiness, our sense of wonder, whatever it is that makes us happy, depends on the stories we write for ourselves, because we’re always writing a story. You have this internal monologue in your head all the time, right? You’re talking to yourself constantly. Although I’ve heard there are people who don’t have this internal monologue, and I never knew that was even possible.

00:36:34 – Eric Zimmer
I’ve heard that also, and I remain skeptical.

00:36:37 – Douglas Westerbeke
I can’t.

00:36:37 – Chris Forbes
I can’t.

00:36:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
How do you even think creative?

00:36:41 – Eric Zimmer
Exactly. Anyway, I’ve heard the same thing, and I’m like, obviously, that’s self reported, because we can’t hear inside anyone else’s head.

00:36:49 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. I mean, do they just walk in this kind of, like, vacant void? I don’t get it.

00:36:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. A little thought experiment I like to do sometimes, though, to this end, and it’s pretty much impossible to do, but it’s a little bit like a zen co op, is to try and process the world without language. Like, just imagine you don’t have language. I mean, I can’t turn language off it, because, again, I think in language. In words.

00:37:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:37:16 – Eric Zimmer
But it is an interesting sort of way of trying to put your brain on tilt, so to speak. Right.

00:37:21 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve wondered the same thing. I do like our way, way early ancestors. You know, the trove magnum. And how do they. How do they do it? How do they play? Put everything together? I mean, they were slowly getting there. I mean, is it visual? Is it. I have no idea how they do it. Frankly. It’s hard to imagine. It’s like trying to get inside the head of your cat.

00:37:36 – Eric Zimmer
100%. If there was any one thing that I like, if there was a God, and I could get to ask God a question, I think my question would be something like, can you put me inside the head of a dog for a few days? Or an octopus? Or pick your creature? What is consciousness like for a creature that doesn’t have language in the way that we do? I look at my dog all the time. And just what must that experience be like? Yeah, it’s just mind blowing, but it would be great to know.

00:38:08 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. So. But what I was saying before I got onto that was so everybody tells them their own stories, and they’re constantly building this in their head. They talk to themselves. They imagine their futures. They rewrite their past. I mean, you can do all kinds of stuff to yourself in the book. There are these libraries that Aubrey comes upon. They’re scattered all throughout the book, and it’s a recurring place that she visits these books. They’re not in a language, so she can read them anywhere in the world. They’re all in pictures, and they’re people’s stories. So she’s reading all these people’s stories. It becomes a major theme in that. Well, what’s her story? And what story is she telling herself? Because, like we were saying, she comes off, she’s miserable in the beginning, and what she’s got to do is she’s got to learn to change her story, or she’s going to be miserable till the day she dies. And so people can find their happiness by finding the right story. And a lot of people can get that story wrong. They will tell themselves the wrong story. I’m thinking of, what’s that movie, zone of interest where they run? Auschwitz. But to them, it’s just a day job, right, and a way to promote themselves and further their career, and they are totally telling themselves the wrong story. I don’t want to give away the ending, but at the end, that staircase scene, it manifests itself. This is not a guy who’s, well, right, and that’s because they’ve completely told themselves the wrong story, as long as you can make it. And this isn’t my idea, by the way. I’m not an intellect by any stretch of the imagination. But Viktor Frankl came up with this because he survived Auschwitz and he saw it happening firsthand. He would see people sitting there saying, you know what? I have a feeling we’re going to be liberated by the end of March. And then it wouldn’t happen, and that person would die. They would just curl up and give up hope and just die. And he saw this again and again. People telling themselves the wrong story, and sometimes it costs them their life. His. I shouldn’t say philosophy. He was a psychologist. His theory was that, look, you’ve got to tell yourself the right story. That story can change. It can adjust over time. If you get it wrong, it can have disastrous results. If you get it. Right. You can really make a meaningful life for yourself.

00:40:15 – Eric Zimmer
Fascinating. I have a bunch of responses to that. I mean, one is. I mean, there’s a type of therapy called narrative therapy, and the whole point of it is to do exactly what you’re saying. You rewrite your life experiences to tell a different story. Right. Because we’re making up the story. We’re making up the meaning. Right, right. In most cases. Right. There’s a fact, and then there’s interpretation. We’re making it up. And if you’re going to make it up, why not make it up in a way that leads to you being happier, healthier, and of more service to other people in the world. Right. Like, I mean, I think about this all the time. Like, I’m telling myself stories all the time. Most of them are about how something is going to turn out, and I don’t know how something’s going to turn out. If I did, I would be an inveterate gambler. Right? Like, I would take after mother Teresa, and I would be gambling all the time because I would know what was going to happen. But I don’t. And yet, predominantly, my stories, when I’m not careful, are ones of impending failure. And so I just try and remind myself, you don’t know the future, so if you’re going to make up a story, why not make up one that is a little bit more useful?

00:41:30 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was almost the opposite. I mean, you have everything can end in failure kind of thing going on. And I had a, like, everything is going to be great. I can’t wait. You know, that’s a bad story to tell yourself, too, because you’re divorcing yourself from reality, right?

00:41:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I guess I have my versions of those, too, where everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Which I think is like, a cognitive bias, where you just believe what you want to believe, and you’re right, that is an equally damaging story. If you have an infection and you just say to yourself, well, sure, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.

00:42:02 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:42:02 – Eric Zimmer
And next thing you know, you have sepsis. Right?

00:42:04 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I know people have gone through, like, terrible divorces, and then that reshapes their narrative, and now they’re, like, depressed all the time because, you know. Cause that’s the ultimate betrayal right there. And how do you survive something like that?

00:42:17 – Eric Zimmer
Absolutely.

00:42:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Rewrite your whole world right there and then. And you could either, like, say, okay, I’m gonna survive this, or this is gonna kill me?

00:42:25 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:42:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
And you choose it?

00:42:26 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, as a recovering addict and alcoholic, that’s a pivotal point for people who I think get better. Much, much better. There’s a rewriting of that story that happens very often with people when they’re able to help someone else with the thing they’ve gone through, because all of a sudden, it goes from this thing I endured to now this gift that I can give to others.

00:42:50 – Douglas Westerbeke
The story becomes the gift.

00:42:51 – Eric Zimmer
No. Well, in a way, in a sense. So my alcoholism or my addiction went from being this terrible thing to when I realized that now I had that power to help other alcoholics and addicts. Now this thing that was a curse or a burden, this addiction is now. I mean, a gift is a strong word for it, but is now it has a purpose and a use.

00:43:15 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I don’t think that’s a stronger word. I think that’s exactly right.

00:43:18 – Eric Zimmer
Oh, I know where I wanted to go with this. I kind of just ended up there in a roundabout way. But we’re talking about this idea of rewriting your own story and how Aubrey has to do that. And what’s interesting is that the way that she’s able to do that is very often by other people helping her see her story differently. Right.

00:43:38 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. Well, we get an example of someone who tells the wrong story to himself and who’s there. One of the setups of the book is that I was thinking, okay, well, here’s a woman who can’t actually settle down and marry anybody. She’s going to go through a series of lovers just because that’s the situation she’s in. Nobody can hold it against her. So I just went for it. So she’s going to have, you know, she’s going to fall in love with a very possessive man, and then she’s gonna have a very romantic affair, and then she’s gonna have a very platonic relationship, one relationship without words. One’s just unreciprocated, all kinds, one in old age. But one of them is the guy who’s telling himself, and they actually say this, he’s telling himself the wrong story. He thinks he can cure Aubrey. He can’t. He’s telling himself the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, too, because he’s very possessive and wants to hold onto her. And later on, we get people who are telling themselves various versions of themselves, and they have it in their head, and so we see that manifest through a lot of other characters. Yeah, I think the prince really helps her along because he kind of, like, opens her up to other possibilities. Vicente, at the end, very patient. He’s very much a curmudgeon, but he’s actually very patient and very, really good hearted guy, and he helps, good listener, too, and he helps get her through. You were saying the gift, you’re describing it as you’ve rewritten your story and that you can help others, and that’s exactly what ends up with Aubrey at the end. Because I was thinking at the end, because she goes through this whole enlightenment thing, she sees the world in a whole different way. But how do you explain that to other people, and how do you make them see it, too? And towards the end, it’s very much intimated that she’s going to help these kids, that she’s taken care of. She’s going to lead them through life, and she’s going to help them try to get there as well. So she’s kind of the same way. She’s been there. She’s seen enlightenment. She’s going to help others try to get there, too. And, like, you’re saying, it’s kind of like her gift to them, too. She has rewritten her story now, and that’s what she’s gonna. I just gave away the ending of the book, but that’s what’s gonna happen.

00:45:32 – Eric Zimmer
Well, not exactly.

00:45:33 – Douglas Westerbeke
Not exactly. There’s a whole lot to get there.

00:45:53 – Eric Zimmer
So you’ve alluded to Aubrey finding enlightenment or experiencing enlightenment a couple times. Describe that a little bit more in whatever way you want. What is it that she sees?

00:46:06 – Douglas Westerbeke
So it’s hard to articulate because I’ve never been enlightened, and I don’t know anybody who has. I’m using a lot of creative license here. I’m using it in a way that I don’t think is actually representative of what is typically what people will call enlightenment. I don’t think enlightenment is a state of being, for starters. I think it’s just like you have a moment of clarity, and then it passes, and you have to go back to washing the dishes and raising your kids and everything else. It’s kind of like an epiphany. You have an epiphany, and that’s your moment. I’ve done it differently in the book. It’s a fictional book. It’s magical realism or speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it. So what I did in the book is that she actually had a moment. It’s in one of the libraries, and she has decided she’s not reading anymore. And there’s one last book sitting there. She has this moment where that book has been left out for her and she knows it, so she looks at it, and I wanted to get that feeling of the prince described it as enlightenment, as waking up from your dream world into your actual world, and then enlightenment will be a wake up. Further then. So she reads a story about a blind kid. It’s all black and white, just pencil drawings. And then he goes blind, and it’s page after page of just blank pages. And then all of a sudden, she flips to one. It’s all in color. And that’s what I was getting at there. And then she has a moment where the prose itself becomes scattered across the page because it’s really hard to articulate. You don’t articulate enlightenment, right? You just kind of, like, create this impression. After that, she’s a different woman. She’s terrified. Because I’m thinking if you have a moment where it’s so clear and so precise that you think you see the whole universe in a nutshell type of thing or the face of God or whatever it is, that must be terrifying. So she is terrified and she can’t look people in the face. And she’s this terrified little old lady walking through the woods and scared of everything. And she has to get over this. And she gets over this because she has to take care of these children at the end. So she has no choice. She gets over it, but it lingers there. She knows she has seen something that no one else ever gets to see. And it a worldview that no one else ever has because she was one on one with whatever it was, whatever you want to call it, that’s been pushing her through the world and showing her all these wonderful things, things that she doesn’t necessarily think are all that wonderful. But now, in retrospect, now that she’s older, she can look back on it and say, you know what? That was pretty freaking amazing. And she’s been rewarded by it with this book or this moment, this beyond articulation. So to her, she’s gone through all that, and she doesn’t know what to do with it at first until she realizes, well, here I am. I’ve gotten what I always wanted. I have kind of a bit of a home here in the jungle, and I’ve got all these children to take care of, and I’ve got to somehow figure out a way to pass this on. And it’s a bit like there’s a branch of Buddhism. There’s several. One is, you know, you try to reach Nirvana, and then Nirvana is a kind of heaven. And then the other one is, you know, you reach nirvana. You see it. It’s beautiful. Now you go back to earth, try to help others get there. And that’s Audrey’s approach at that point on. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s where I was going with that.

00:49:15 – Eric Zimmer
It’s interesting that you describe her enlightenment in that sense of seeing, you know, with the mind of God or because I was reading very arcane thing the other day about what the different schools of Buddhism believe about omniscience and enlightenment. Is enlightenment a type of omniscience where you know everything, you see everything, or is that not what was meant in the book?

00:49:47 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think I was hinting at that. I don’t think that’s actually how it works.

00:49:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.

00:49:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
So I was taking a lot of dramatic license.

00:49:53 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:49:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
For me, enlightenment is a moment of epiphany about anything. It doesn’t have to be, like, world shattering or anything like that. You know, you have an epiphany about, you know, your kids or your marriage or, oh, that’s what a cat thinks. Like, something like that. All of a sudden you figure it out. Oh. Or something occurs to you and you have that moment and you can glide off that moment for a while because, you know, but then there’s reality, and you have to deal with reality and you have to cook dinner and you have to do this and that, and it’s gone. But you can remember it. You remember what you thought, but you don’t necessarily have the same feeling. And it’s not necessarily this gigantic worldview or anything. It’s not like you have stepped outside the universe and can see it all. Maybe if you’ve taken certain mushrooms, you can do that. I don’t know.

00:50:34 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Well, as someone who studied and practiced really diligently in Zen Buddhism, which is very focused on enlightenment, I mean, Zen’s sort of considered like the direct train. And so I’ve had a couple of those experiences, and I would say that I agree in that they were like waking up and yet they were very ordinary in another way. It was just sort of a like, oh, of course, they were what would be described as sort of oneness or unitive experiences. Right. Where, like, I truly felt like I was connected to everything else. And my personal sense of me as this limited individual was just kind of gone. I ran my life into the ground chasing heroin. And, you know, it was better than that. And I do think there’s a lot of debate in spiritual communities about does somebody become permanently awakened? What does that even mean? You know, let me be clear. I’m making no claim to that in my case at all. And for me, it was this really dramatic experience that really shook up my psychic landscape. I’ve had a few of them, but I really shook it up in ways that never went back to the way it was before. But then ordinary life and ordinary consciousness does very much reassert itself.

00:52:00 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s like an infusion of love for everyone, I would suppose. Is that.

00:52:04 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah.

00:52:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
That’s what it feels like.

00:52:06 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. As you’ve read enough about them to know and what you did in your book, I love the way you had the words scatter across the page, because that is the nature of these experiences. They call them ineffable. Right. Meaning you can’t. Anything you say about them is trivial compared to the experience. So it was a oneness experience. The great Zen teacher Suzuki said, and I love this, he said, not two, but not one describing this experience. So, like, it’s not like I thought I was you exactly. I could tell the difference between you and me, but on some deeper level, there was no difference.

00:52:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:52:42 – Eric Zimmer
It went from being something I intellectually sort of think about, like interdependence and interconnection, and know to like the experience of it. But yeah, it was one of amazing amount of love and freedom and just, ah, shit. Like all that stuff I’ve been worried about really makes no difference. I think a lot about these things. Having had a couple of them and study them. It’s interesting. In the Zen tradition, they describe this, as they call it Kensho, which means a moment or satori, a moment of awakening. Boom. This flash, like you’re describing. There’s one Zen teacher who makes this description of, it’s like you’re in a room that’s all enclosed, and you have this moment and it’s like, boom, somebody punches a hole in the wall and now there’s light coming through there. And over time. And this is what Koan practice in Zen is intended to do. Do is that it keeps punching more holes in that wall until eventually the whole, finally, one day, the whole structure completely crumbles.

00:53:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
Does that happen for people?

00:53:43 – Eric Zimmer
I think to the degree that it is ongoing is hard to know. But I do think people can have pretty radical fundamental changes in the way they experience the world. But again, I also do believe we habituate to anything. I don’t think that you get out of that. I often think of enlightenment as a sudden jump in consciousness, meaning you’re here and then all of a sudden you’re way up here and it happens like that, and you’re like, whoa, whoa. Because it’s so different versus a gradual thing where you change a little bit. A little bit. A little bit. A little bit. I’ve joked before that if you put the 23 year old homeless heroin addict version of me in my brain today, he might think he was enlightened. And again, I’m not saying I’m enlightened. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the difference between the level of psychic torment of where I was then and now would have seemed completely revolutionary to that poor kid. But it’s totally normal to me, right? Because I’ve gotten here little steps, I mean, with a couple what felt like sort of big jumps, but it’s been much more incremental.

00:54:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
So the wall coming down, would that be because you’re punching holes a few at a time until the whole thing comes down? Would that be the same as kind of, like, habituating to this sense of oneness?

00:55:05 – Eric Zimmer
That’s a good question. I think what they’re trying to get to there is that you have these flashes where you see the world in a certain way, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself. And then you have another flash, and then ordinary consciousness reasserts itself, actually. And then eventually the thing crumbles and ordinary consciousness isn’t there. But I think there’s an element of consciousness that things become ordinary. But I do think there is a degree of psychic freedom that is available that some people achieve in a pretty ongoing way. But what the experience is like for them, ongoing, I don’t know. Meaning if you or I were to suddenly drop into that head, we would be like, holy. But I don’t know what it’s like to them.

00:55:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:55:55 – Eric Zimmer
And then you get into the whole question of people who are in the business of selling. You could become enlightened. And so thus they have snake oil. And I don’t even necessarily mean snake oil, but I do mean, I don’t know. Enlightenment seems like it sometimes can turn into a contest with people like I am and you’re not. I don’t just mean straight out charlatans, either. I mean, people have had some degree of insight.

00:56:18 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right. I was thinking that if you ever do habituate to that, like, this is your normal state of being now, then does it become really difficult to fit in society? And are you in danger because you’re kind of disconnected? I don’t know.

00:56:31 – Eric Zimmer
I’m just wondering, what’s the nature of that phrase? Chop would carry water.

00:56:35 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’ve never heard this really, really chopped would carry water. What?

00:56:38 – Eric Zimmer
It’s funny because you alluded to, like, doing. Going back to just doing the laundry and doing things like that.

00:56:44 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, okay, right, right.

00:56:46 – Eric Zimmer
The zen phrase, you know, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Meaning you just do the basic same things.

00:56:53 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:56:53 – Eric Zimmer
I don’t think so, because again, to me, it wasn’t. I mean, I’ve done hallucinogens, right. I know what it’s like to be in an altered state where you’re like, whoa, I can’t function.

00:57:05 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:57:05 – Eric Zimmer
This was not that at all. It was. It felt.

00:57:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
No, I wouldn’t think it would be quite that bad.

00:57:10 – Eric Zimmer
But I’m thinking I’m at danger here of pretending that I know what enlightenment is about. So that’s. I want to. I want to just caveat the question, just really careful. But I’ve talked to a lot of spiritual teachers who seem to have some degree of that, but, you know, you wonder what any of that is worth or mean when you find these, you know, so called enlightened teachers that are sexually abusing their students.

00:57:32 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right.

00:57:33 – Eric Zimmer
Anyway, let’s change directions and end this. This. Libraries. You’re a librarian or were a librarian. I don’t know.

00:57:40 – Douglas Westerbeke
I was. Yeah.

00:57:40 – Eric Zimmer
Okay. I love libraries.

00:57:42 – Douglas Westerbeke
It was awesome being at one.

00:57:44 – Eric Zimmer
Nicole, who works with the one you feed, who’s a producer of the show and helps us do some other things, was a librarian. She actually left a job at the library to come work for us. So libraries are near and dear to our hearts. In the book, libraries play a big role, and they seem to be the one place that Aubrey can stay.

00:58:03 – Douglas Westerbeke
Right, right.

00:58:04 – Eric Zimmer
So they seem like a sanctuary to her. Was that the intention of her being able to stay without having to move?

00:58:11 – Douglas Westerbeke
Yeah. It’s the only place where she can go where she doesn’t have to worry about rushing off to the next place. Although she actually travels through the libraries, too, so she doesn’t actually notice this for a while. But if the idea is that, look, you’re set off on this journey, you’re wandering around and around the world. If the idea is that something out there wants to show you the world, and particularly these libraries, because the whole history of everything is in these libraries, and he’s showing off. He wants somebody to know, right. This is a very old testament idea of a divine being where he’s kind of proud of what he’s done. He’s got his own mood swings and so on and so forth, and he wants, like to show off his creation is the idea or not his. But whatever it is, I never specify. I’m very open about it. So there are these libraries, and the idea is, well, look, this is what the end goal is, to get into these places and see what’s in there. Why would he chase her out? Or whatever it is. Why would the world chase her? If the world wants you to see what’s in these libraries, why would the world chase you out again? So the idea is to take that away. It made no sense to have her finally find these places and then get sick and have to leave them because this would was the whole endpoint of her journey, really. And really, that kind of is where the whole journey kind of ends. And then there’s an epilogue in the Amazon. Just logically speaking, that’s where it would go. And why chase her out once you’re in, you know, this is the part that you were meant to see.

00:59:38 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. It’s interesting, in a sense, to say that on one hand, assuming there’s some force that is directing things in this novel, on one hand, I’m gonna force you to keep going around the world to see places like, I’m not gonna let you stop. You’re gonna just have to keep going. And at the same time, also then saying, but you can also get everything that you need to see from a book is an interesting juxtaposition there. Right?

01:00:09 – Douglas Westerbeke
It is. And I bring that up. She has a near death experience where she’s thinking this stuff through while she’s dying, and she’s realizing, you know, I’ve spent all this time, I spent, like, the past, you know, so many years of my life just reading books when, you know, there’s a whole library out here in the actual world.

01:00:25 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

01:00:25 – Douglas Westerbeke
I think about this often because, you know, I love to read books and stuff like that, but it’s a very solitary existence.

01:00:30 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

01:00:31 – Douglas Westerbeke
It’s not like going to the. You can go to the movies with your friends or the theater or concert. But a book, reading a book is something you just do by yourself. You can’t share it. It’s an antisocial behavior, actually. I hate to say it about, you know, the thing I’m in, but it’s true, is there’s no way around it. And so I often think about that because there’s a kind of a. Not a disconnect, a kind of conflict.

01:00:50 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yeah.

01:00:51 – Douglas Westerbeke
I’m a bit both. I can be very introverted. I can be very extroverted. And I suppose a lot of us can, which is why we do these things. We can be very sociable but then take time out for ourselves to read these books. So I’m not knocking it, but I am saying it is inherently an antisocial behavior. And so she does the deep dive and she doesn’t see anybody for years and she’s just doing this and she learns a lot and she sees everything else, but she misses a lot at the same time. You got to have a foot in both places and she doesn’t for the longest time. And then when she’s out in the world, she has to readjust to it and she has to learn how to talk to people again. She’s coming out like a hermit and she has to totally get used to the world all over again. Those are the thoughts that she’s having. And she realizes, you know what? I’m reading the stories of all these individuals around the world, but I’m a story too, and I think I make a pretty good book. As at the end, that’s where that was going.

01:01:43 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, Douglas, thank you so much for coming down. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book, and it’s a real treat. I hope listeners will talk.

01:01:55 – Douglas Westerbeke
Thank you very much. You know, you do these interviews all the time, so you’re used to it. But I never get to talk like this to anybody, so I enjoy this way more than you, I think.

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.