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0:01:12 It shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear me say that I’m a fan of uncertainty.
0:01:17 After all, this podcast is called The Gray Area for a reason.
0:01:22 We try to live in the nuance as much as possible, and we try to explore questions with an open mind.
0:01:25 And it’s not just a shtick for me.
0:01:38 I really believe that openness is a necessity, especially today, when the loudest, most obnoxious voices take up so much of the oxygen.
0:01:44 But I wouldn’t say that tolerance of uncertainty comes naturally to me.
0:01:48 Like most people, I like to be right, and I fear the unknown.
0:01:52 The temptation to retreat into certainty is always there.
0:01:55 I think most of us are like that.
0:01:57 So why is this the case?
0:02:01 What is it about uncertainty that’s so scary?
0:02:05 And what could be gained by letting go of that fear?
0:02:10 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:26 Today’s guest is Maggie Jackson.
0:02:34 She’s a writer and a journalist, and the author of a delightful new book called Uncertain, The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.
0:02:39 Maggie makes a great case for uncertainty as a philosophical virtue.
0:02:47 But she also dives into the best research we have and explains why embracing ambiguity not only primes us for learning,
0:02:53 it’s also good for our mental health, which intuitively makes sense to me, but it’s not something I’ve really thought about.
0:02:57 So I invited her onto the show to talk about it.
0:03:04 Maggie Jackson, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:03:06 Thank you very much for having me.
0:03:18 So, I don’t always read the epigraph quotes in books, but you have one from the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and it caught my eye.
0:03:21 So I just want to read it to you and hear your thoughts on it after.
0:03:21 Sure.
0:03:22 He wrote,
0:03:30 I know seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact.
0:03:35 One always forgets the expression, I thought I knew.
0:03:36 Tell me about that.
0:03:44 Well, I think that’s a great encapsulation or illustration of our individual and general attitudes toward knowledge,
0:03:50 because we’re so proud of knowing, and I kind of picture knowledge as an island.
0:03:55 And after that, the implication is that there’s the abyss.
0:04:02 And his quote hints at what’s really, really important about uncertainty, and that is its mutability.
0:04:08 Knowledge has this dynamism that we are very loathe to admit to.
0:04:14 I like to think of uncertainty as wisdom in motion and not the paralysis that we think it is.
0:04:17 How did you come to this topic?
0:04:21 Why write a book on the virtues of uncertainty?
0:04:24 Well, it was almost reluctantly, honestly.
0:04:26 This is my third book.
0:04:35 I’ve been writing about topics that are right under our noses, that are woven into our lives, and that we don’t understand or that we deeply misunderstand.
0:04:38 The first book was about home, the nature of home in the digital age.
0:04:45 The second book was about distraction, but particularly attention, which very few people could define, and its workings are newly being discovered.
0:04:54 And then finally, I started writing a book about thinking in the digital age and what kinds of thinking that we need and what’s besieged and what are we gaining, et cetera.
0:05:08 And the first chapter was about uncertainty, and not only did I discover uncertainty hadn’t really been studied or acknowledged or prized in so many different domains,
0:05:14 but there was now this new attention to it, lots and lots of new research findings, even in psychology.
0:05:18 And at the very same time, I was really fascinated by this idea.
0:05:31 And yet, I was also reluctant because, like many people, I had this idea that it was just something to eradicate, that uncertainty is just something to get beyond and shut it down as fast as possible.
0:05:37 The book wanted to go there, and it was a hard sell for the author, so to speak.
0:05:39 But it was great once I got going.
0:05:44 Why do we fear not knowing what’s going to happen?
0:05:46 What’s beneath that fear?
0:05:47 It’s really simple.
0:05:58 We fear and dislike uncertainty because, as creatures, for survival’s sakes, we need and want answers.
0:06:01 We have to solve what to eat, what to do, et cetera.
0:06:15 And so, we evolved to have a stress response when you meet something new or unexpected or murky or ambiguous, and your body and brain kind of spring into action.
0:06:28 So that when it’s your first day on the new job, or you’re meeting your in-laws for the first time, or all those sorts of lovely life situations, you know, your heart might beat or your palms might sweat.
0:06:36 But at the same time, and this is newly discovered, neuroscientists are beginning to unpack what happens in the brain.
0:06:45 The uncertainty of the moment, the realization that you don’t know, that you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, instigate a number of neural changes.
0:06:53 So, it’s like your focus broadens, and your brain becomes more receptive to new data, and your working memory is bolstered.
0:06:55 So, this kind of rings a bell.
0:06:56 You’re on your toes.
0:07:01 And that’s why uncertainty at that moment is a kind of wakefulness.
0:07:12 In fact, Joseph Cable of the University of Pennsylvania said to me, that’s the moment when your brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.
0:07:26 So, by squandering that opportunity or retreating from that discomfort, we’re actually losing an opportunity to learn because your old knowledge is no longer sufficient.
0:07:32 You need to be wakeful, but you’re also able to take up that invitation.
0:07:33 So, what happens there?
0:07:39 Stress hormones flood our brains, and it’s exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time.
0:07:45 But the consequence of that is that you’re super plugged in, super attuned to what’s happening.
0:07:50 And is that what makes it fertile for learning and growth and that kind of thing?
0:07:50 Right.
0:07:51 No, exactly.
0:07:58 Because sometimes we think of learning as being associational, the kind of Pavlovian conditioning, etc.
0:08:06 That’s true, but really the more updated idea of what learning is that it entails surprise.
0:08:12 I mean, no surprise, no learning is what the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehane told me and writes about.
0:08:31 So, when we are jolted from our daily routine, i.e., when we are recognizing the limits of our knowledge when we’re uncertain, that’s the time when your body begins to, and your brain begin to turn on, so to speak.
0:08:43 What’s really also important to note about this is that what I’m describing seems like a kind of unconscious response and what can you do about it, etc.
0:08:49 But actually, there is a conscious approach to uncertainty that we have.
0:08:53 It’s really important not to retreat from the unsettling nature of uncertainty.
0:08:55 We can also lean into uncertainty.
0:09:05 And I’ve tried to find the right word for this, and I can’t think of any other than leaning in, because it’s sort of a deliberate embrace of that stress and that wakefulness.
0:09:09 But it’s really important to, again, recognize that this is good stress.
0:09:14 And another illustration of how this operates is in the realm of curiosity.
0:09:28 Many different studies related to the curious disposition show that one of the most important facets of our curiosity is the ability to tolerate the stress of the unknown.
0:09:43 So, in other words, to lean in to that uncomfortable feeling and to know that that’s your brain’s way of signaling to you that this is a great chance to think and to learn and to create.
0:09:59 And people who are curious, who have that capacity to push through or to embrace the awkwardness of uncertainty, also are more likely to express dissent and they’re more engaged workers, etc., etc.
0:10:07 I guess you can think of uncertainty as a precursor to good thinking, and I suppose it is.
0:10:17 But to me, that makes it sound a little too much like a passive state as opposed to an active orientation to the world.
0:10:23 Maybe what I’m really asking here is whether you think of uncertainty as a verb or a disposition.
0:10:26 Yes, I would say both.
0:10:31 Uncertainty is definitively a disposition.
0:10:35 We each have our personal comfort zone in relation to uncertainty.
0:10:41 Our impression is that uncertainty is static and that it’s synonymous with paralysis, etc.
0:10:46 To be uncertain also has that ring of passivity.
0:11:02 But when you are taking up that invitation to learn that the good stress of uncertainty offers you, there is a bit of a slowing down that occurs to action and to snap judgment and to racing to an answer.
0:11:11 So, in contrast to what we expect so often, uncertainty involves process, and that’s really, really important.
0:11:15 And so, you know, we can take one example of experts.
0:11:27 You know, today we really venerate the swaggering kind of expert who knows what to do and whose know-how is developed over, quote-unquote, so-called 10,000 hours.
0:11:31 That type of expertise needs updating.
0:11:43 That type of expert’s knowledge basically tends to fall short in new, unpredictable, ambiguous problems, the kind that involve or demand uncertainty.
0:11:51 So, years of experience are actually only weakly correlated with skill and accuracy in medicine and finance, etc.
0:12:07 People who are typical so-called routine experts fall into something called carryover mode where they’re constantly applying their old knowledge, the old heuristic shortcut solutions, into new situations, and that’s when they begin to fail.
0:12:10 Adaptive experts actually explore a problem.
0:12:13 They spend more time on a problem than a novice even.
0:12:17 And so, there’s this motion here, this forwardness, I think.
0:12:26 I think of uncertainty as honesty because that’s involved with wakefulness, but I also think of it as dynamic, very, very dynamic.
0:12:39 The idea that not knowing can be a strain does intuitively seem like a contradiction, in part because we’ve all been taught that knowledge is power, right?
0:12:43 Do you think that cliche is wrong or just a tad misleading?
0:12:50 Well, I think that knowledge certainly is power, and knowledge is incredibly important.
0:12:52 Knowledge is the foundation and the groundwork.
0:13:08 But at the same time, I think that what we need to do to update our understanding of knowledge and to look into the frontiers of not knowing is basically to see that knowledge is mutable and dynamic, ever-shifting.
0:13:32 I mean, that metaphor of a rock is my own, and that’s people who are intolerant of uncertainty think of knowledge as something that’s like a rock that we are there to hold and defend, whereas people who are more tolerant of uncertainty, who are likely to be curious, flexible thinkers, I like to say they treat knowledge as a tapestry whose mutability is its very strength.
0:13:45 That’s an important part, because I don’t think anyone, certainly you, would argue that ignorance is a virtue, but openness to revising our beliefs is, and that’s the distinction here.
0:13:53 Right, and that centers right in what you’re driving about, where does uncertainty lie?
0:13:58 And it’s really important to note that uncertainty is not ignorance.
0:14:00 Ignorance is blank slate, the blank slate.
0:14:03 I might not know anything about particle physics.
0:14:04 I am ignorant.
0:14:09 But when I’m uncertain, it could be this way, it could be that way.
0:14:10 I’m not sure.
0:14:17 I’m, again, reaching the limits of my knowledge, and that’s the chance where we can push beyond those boundaries.
0:14:25 And in child development, there’s an expression called the zone of proximal development, which is usually used as a shorthand for scaffolding.
0:14:30 That’s the place where a child is pushing beyond their usual knowledge.
0:14:40 They’re trying something complex and new, and the parent might scaffold a little bit and help only where necessary, but letting them do the work of expanding their limits.
0:14:45 But that’s actually very much something that is human throughout our whole lives.
0:14:52 Because it’s really, zone of proximal development is, as one scientist told me, the green bud on the tree.
0:14:54 That’s where we want to be.
0:14:57 That’s where we thrive as thinkers and as people.
0:15:07 When we get back from break, avoiding the pitfalls that come with uncertainty.
0:15:08 Stay with us.
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0:19:03 When does uncertainty become paralyzing?
0:19:06 I mean, at some point, you have to decide and act, right?
0:19:11 But maybe the mistake here is assuming that one needs to be certain in order to act.
0:19:19 Well, you have to be relatively sure, or the road does fork, you know, metaphorically and literally.
0:19:22 And you, you know, usually have to take one.
0:19:23 And you’re right.
0:19:27 Forward motion involves choices, involves decisions, and involves solutions.
0:19:30 And uncertainty is never the end goal.
0:19:35 Uncertainty is a vehicle and an approach to life.
0:19:47 But I also think another really important point is that most of the time, and again, I just kept coming up with this reiteration in my research again and again in different forms.
0:19:51 But most of the time, it’s our fear of uncertainty that leads to paralysis.
0:19:53 It’s not the uncertainty itself.
0:20:11 If we approach uncertainty knowing it’s a space of possibilities, or as another psychologist told me, an opportunity for movement, then we, you know, roll up our sleeves and be present in the moment and start investigating and exploring.
0:20:21 But if we are afraid of uncertainty, and if you are intolerant of uncertainty, you are more likely to treat uncertainty as a threat.
0:20:32 The very, very simplest definition of intolerance versus tolerance of uncertainty is treating being unsure or something surprising as a threat versus a challenge.
0:20:42 And one of the classic signs that you fall on the extreme of the spectrum is that you think surprises, et cetera, are unfair.
0:20:44 And, of course, we all do at certain points.
0:20:48 I mean, we all do think that the traffic jam is unfair.
0:21:04 But maybe if you can think of it as a challenge or reframe it, which actually there were studies during the pandemic, people who were intolerant of uncertainty were more likely to use coping strategies based on denial, avoidance, and substance abuse.
0:21:06 And, of course, hey, we all did some of that, too.
0:21:17 But people who are tolerant of uncertainty were more likely to use problem-solving-focused strategies such as reframing the situation.
0:21:27 You cite some research about fear of the unknown as a root cause of things like anxiety and depression.
0:21:32 It certainly makes intuitive sense, but what do we know about that relationship?
0:21:42 Well, this is a very new but rising theoretical understanding of mental challenges in the psychology world.
0:22:03 That basically, more and more psychologists and clinicians are beginning to see fear of the unknown as the transdiagnostic root or at least vulnerability factor to many, many mental challenges, conditions such as, you know, everything from PTSD to anxiety.
0:22:24 But by narrowing down treatments to just trying to help people bolster practicing not knowing, basically, boast their practice with tolerance of uncertainty, they’re actually beginning to find that that might be a really important way to shift even intractable anxiety.
0:22:34 So there’s been one gold standard peer-reviewed study by probably one of the world’s greatest experts on anxiety, Michel Dugas.
0:22:44 And he found that people who were taught simple strategies to basically try on uncertainty, their intractable anxiety went down.
0:22:50 They also worried just about as much as most people, which probably is still a lot these days.
0:22:51 It also helped their depression.
0:23:09 And then other studies with multiple different kind of populations so that these kind of very laser-sharp focused strategies about uncertainty actually boost at least self-reported resilience in patients with multiple sclerosis who are dealing with a lot of medical uncertainty.
0:23:12 So that’s, it’s really, really exciting.
0:23:15 And may I tell one little story about this work?
0:23:16 Absolutely.
0:23:23 Michel Dugas told me a wonderful story where he said there was a teacher, one of his early patients, who was afraid of birds.
0:23:29 And she was so afraid she’d run to her car even from the classroom when she saw one run, you know, fly by her window.
0:23:32 And he did one thing, one thing only.
0:23:34 He gave her a guidebook to birds.
0:23:37 And then she actually ended up adopting a pet bird.
0:23:40 Well, he said to me, that’s what I’m trying to do with uncertainty.
0:23:53 So if we can take a closer look and understand this state of mind as something that’s not something to fear, but as something that’s a source of wonder and delight, then we can move forward.
0:24:01 So much of this is about that need to control things and all the anxiety that comes when you realize you can’t do that.
0:24:02 And it really matters, doesn’t it?
0:24:10 Because so much of life is about our attitude, the way we choose to interpret what’s happening to us, the way we choose to respond to it.
0:24:12 You know, is it a problem or an opportunity?
0:24:16 Is it pointless suffering or a chance for growth?
0:24:19 And this not knowing we’re talking about, it’s the same thing.
0:24:23 It can be a source of wonder or it can be a source of fear.
0:24:28 And choosing is really our only superpower here, if we have one.
0:24:29 Right, exactly.
0:24:31 Choosing and practice, I would say.
0:24:37 Because there are opportunities to be uncertain that are threaded throughout the day.
0:24:48 They’re almost invisible because it’s so easy and innate in the human condition to stick with what’s predictable, to stick with the familiar.
0:25:04 In fact, one of the exercises that psychologists are going to be giving Columbus, Ohio, high schoolers in order to boost their resilience, to help them bolster their tolerance of uncertainty, is to just answer their cell phones without caller ID.
0:25:11 And I told a young relative of mine about that, and she said, oh, that would be terrifying.
0:25:14 And this is a very, very simple practice.
0:25:17 But another is to try a new dish in a restaurant.
0:25:18 And I’m pretty adventuresome.
0:25:20 I’ve lived all over the world.
0:25:22 I, you know, jump in the cold ocean.
0:25:26 You know, I really am fairly tolerant of uncertainty.
0:25:32 And yet, when I think about it, you know, what do we like better than that same old clam spaghetti on a Friday night?
0:25:35 And so that doesn’t mean you always have to be uncomfortable.
0:25:47 But I think that at this point in time, in this era, when the uncertainty, that is what humans cannot know, seems to be rising.
0:26:09 At this moment, the worst possible response we can have is to retreat into certainty and familiarity and obviousness that curtails our creativity and our ability to solve the precisely complex problems that are at our doorstep, the lethal problems at our doorstep.
0:26:30 And so by doing precisely the wrong thing, the thing that we don’t want to do, the uncomfortable thing, by flipping our worldview to make uncertainty at least something to admire, to explore, to embrace, that’s the way we can move forward at this time in our world history.
0:26:35 I think I think I have a more complicated relationship with uncertainty.
0:26:39 Philosophically, I’m a big believer in the virtue of uncertainty.
0:26:42 I mean, it’s built into the name of the show, the gray area.
0:26:53 But if I’m being honest, in my life, in my actual life, I think the fear of the unknown has kept me from living the life I truly want to live.
0:27:12 And the way it often manifests is in this instinct to stick to the refuge of routine or this impulse to constantly imagine all the ways something might go badly, which really, in the end, just becomes a justification for not trying anything new.
0:27:21 And it’s strange that intellectually, I’m very comfortable with ambiguity, but in my actual life, I often behave as though I’m terrified of it.
0:27:25 And this makes me feel a little schizophrenic, but maybe it shouldn’t.
0:27:26 Maybe it’s common.
0:27:29 Tell me this is common, Maggie.
0:27:29 Help me out here.
0:27:36 Well, I would say as a human, again, we dislike uncertainty for a real reason.
0:27:47 We need and want answers, and this unsettling feeling you have is your innate way of signaling that you’re not in the routine anymore.
0:27:54 And so it’s really important to understand, in some ways, how rare and wonderful uncertainty is.
0:27:58 At the same time, we also need routine and familiarity.
0:28:03 Most of life is what scientists call predictive processing.
0:28:12 That is, we’re constantly making up assumptions and predicting, you just don’t think that your driveway is going to be in a different place when you get home tonight.
0:28:17 You can expect that you know how to tie your shoelaces when you get up in the morning.
0:28:28 And so, therefore, we are enmeshed in this incredible world of our assumptions to the extent to which, you know, scientists say we live in a consensual hallucination.
0:28:33 It’s so human and so natural to stick to routine and to have that comfort.
0:28:42 If we were just a living mess of openness to newness and having to learn everything again, we really would be in trouble.
0:28:45 And I don’t want to say it’s a middle ground at all.
0:28:49 I actually think we should live more on the edge, far more than our culture permits us to do now.
0:28:56 And so, I don’t think you should feel, I don’t know, maybe you should change out of that purple sweatshirt tomorrow, Sean.
0:29:03 It’s more things like, you know, like my wife is a camper, you know, and she always wants to go camping.
0:29:05 And I didn’t grow up camping.
0:29:08 And when she brings it up, I’m like, yeah, well, but, you know, what if it rains?
0:29:12 What if my air mattress runs out of air and I can’t sleep?
0:29:12 You know, whatever.
0:29:13 It’s just all this shit.
0:29:18 You can constantly conjure up all the way something can go sideways, no matter what it is.
0:29:24 You can always imagine the million and one things around the bend that might, you know, derail whatever the plans are.
0:29:33 And I guess ultimately it comes down to whether or not you’re comfortable just adapting to that and kind of rolling with it or whether you perceive all these things that might go wrong as catastrophic.
0:29:53 Right. Well, there is work actually to help people deal with stress in a way and this, you know, the good stress of uncertainty by teaching them that when people are able to understand that their body and brain are revving up for this new occasion, they’re actually more present in the moment.
0:29:59 And so, isn’t that really what seeking routine, you know, isn’t?
0:30:06 I mean, you know, to be anxious about the unknown is to inhibit or close down your present orientation.
0:30:24 You know, when you are able to be in that moment and see the nuance beyond the campfire smoke or the bear who really was sighted two miles away and now is a mile away or all those sort of little factors, you can begin to see the more complex.
0:30:34 And one thing that’s really interesting about interventions to help people bolster their tolerance of uncertainty is that it harnesses uncertainty’s power and strength.
0:30:38 It’s not that it’s a jolly good thing to be uncertain all the time.
0:30:46 It’s just that it lends itself to peeking into the complexity of the world, the complexity that’s already there.
0:30:52 I’m glad you went there because there’s also a social and political dimension to all of this.
0:31:01 You know, history is littered with examples of otherwise sane people doing terrible things in defense of absolute truths.
0:31:05 And there’s actually an experiment you mentioned in the book.
0:31:08 It’s the Berkeley cat-dog experiment.
0:31:12 And it speaks to the political hazards of a closed mind.
0:31:20 And for people who aren’t familiar, the basic gist is people were initially shown a picture that very clearly resembled a cat.
0:31:28 But then they were gradually shown more drawings that bit by bit started to look more dog-like until finally it was just a picture of a dog.
0:31:34 But interestingly, a huge number of people refused to let go of their initial answer almost all the way to the end.
0:31:42 And it was a study in authoritarianism and the nature of the closed mind and how that manifests in a political context.
0:31:47 And somehow I wasn’t aware of this study, but it is pretty instructive, isn’t it?
0:31:48 Right, exactly.
0:32:02 And as the psychologist who created the study said, the people who just wouldn’t admit that it was becoming a dog refused to leave the safe harbor of their definite ideas or something like that, which is, you know, exactly.
0:32:04 Like, again, it underscores change.
0:32:14 And, you know, when we look around and we see 80% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats say the other side has few or no good ideas.
0:32:22 And you see the U.S. rankings among other countries, you know, we rank the highest on polarization rates by degree and et cetera.
0:32:33 You know, when you see 50% of people say they rarely, if ever, change their minds, I mean, you’re seeing this play out in life today, very much so.
0:32:40 It’s just a fact of life that things will change, you know, the world won’t conform to your wishes.
0:32:43 And so you end up going one of two ways.
0:32:51 You either embrace the limits of your own knowledge or you distort the world in order to make it align with your story of it.
0:32:53 And I think bad things happen when you do.
0:32:57 That’s why I think this is politically very important.
0:32:57 Yes.
0:33:08 And I think that it’s also backbreaking work, so to speak, to continually retreat into our certainties and close our eyes to the mutability of the world.
0:33:24 I mean, I had a real epiphany when I was doing some writing about a Head Start program that teaches people from very challenged backgrounds, both parent and preschooler, to pause and reflect throughout the very chaotic days.
0:33:35 And it seems like something that doesn’t have much to do with uncertainty, but they were basically inhabiting the question, even though it was a very difficult thing to snatch these moments of reflection within their lives.
0:33:46 And in parallel to that, there’s also a lot of new movement to understand the strengths of people who live in lower economic situations that are often chaotic.
0:33:53 Unpredictability is now seen as a real core issue in challenged situations.
0:34:16 But what was amazing to me is I realized how much I grew up expecting that stability and predictability was just an entitlement, that this is the way we should live, that this is the skill set you need to adapt in order to thrive, et cetera, et cetera.
0:34:26 So we basically have sort of airbrushed out of our psyches in many, many ways, the ability to live in precarious situations.
0:34:36 Yeah, I’m glad you said that because if you come from a place of precarity or if you exist in that space, comfort with uncertainty may not be a luxury you can afford.
0:34:41 If you don’t feel safe for good reasons, uncertainty takes on a different hue.
0:34:43 And that’s something that’s definitely worth acknowledging.
0:34:51 Yes, and there are tremendous costs living in situations where you’re experiencing higher degrees of precarity.
0:35:04 But at the same time, I think it’s really important for many, many people today to understand, again, that adaptability is a skill that maybe we all have to cultivate.
0:35:12 We don’t want anyone to live in poverty or to be abandoned in an international institution, an orphanage.
0:35:21 But at the same time, we do all of ourselves an injustice by not understanding the full spectrum of human capability to adapt.
0:35:30 After one last short break, Maggie tells us how embracing uncertainty has made her hopeful for the future.
0:35:32 We’ll be right back.
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0:38:49 Okay, guys.
0:39:03 Is there something in particular about this moment that makes this all seem all the more urgent to you?
0:39:04 I mean, things are always in flux.
0:39:06 Things are always changing.
0:39:13 Does now seem like an especially dynamic moment that really summons us to lean into the ambiguity?
0:39:14 I think it is.
0:39:22 I mean, you know, for hundreds of years, particularly in the West, we’ve been pursuing what Dewey called the quest for certainty.
0:39:34 I see this massive, long crumbling in humanity’s or at least many societies’ ability to assume certainty where there was none.
0:39:42 And so you can also see many, you know, different studies showing rise in precarity of work hours or rise in, you know, weather patterns, etc.
0:39:46 It does seem as though things might be in more flux.
0:40:00 And so that is the time when I think we need a sea change in our attitudes toward not knowing in order to face this moment and not hide in our devices or hide in our certainties.
0:40:10 Most people would say that confidence is a good thing and confidence seems inextricably bound up with knowing that you know.
0:40:12 What are we missing there?
0:40:14 Is that just the wrong way to think about confidence?
0:40:17 Well, there are different types of confidence.
0:40:19 There are different degrees of confidence.
0:40:24 So you can be confident while being open-minded to other suggestions.
0:40:35 Linus Pauling in the great race to discover the structure of DNA came up with a solution but didn’t listen to his colleagues, hardly did any homework, etc., etc.
0:40:36 Now, that’s hubris.
0:40:38 That’s not confidence.
0:40:45 Confidence is, I think, being open-eyed and open-minded and flexible.
0:40:55 And people have come up to me when I’ve been doing talks about this book saying, for instance, one woman who headed state budget for Rhode Island came up to me afterwards and said,
0:41:01 Ah, I always used to end meetings saying, Is there anything more we should know?
0:41:06 And she felt somehow sheepish about that, as if it was a weak thing.
0:41:09 And now she really feels as though that was actually wise.
0:41:12 So you can be confident and be open.
0:41:15 I think I’m going to jump off that cliff.
0:41:20 But maybe you might want to be stopped by somebody.
0:41:20 Don’t do it, Maggie.
0:41:27 It’s also, uncertainty very, very much is about knowing the limits of your knowledge.
0:41:37 So even, for instance, something as simple as a Google search is associated with people thinking they know more than they do, even if they actually didn’t find what they were looking for.
0:41:44 And that’s really important, really important, because if you don’t know the limits of your knowledge, you can’t push beyond it.
0:41:49 You can’t know what you don’t know, which, of course, is the starting point of all learning.
0:41:53 Can we learn to be more tolerant of uncertainty?
0:42:00 Because if we can’t teach this, if we can’t absorb it, then what good is all this knowledge?
0:42:01 Exactly.
0:42:03 No, of course we can.
0:42:15 And all great understandings of wisdom and knowing and learning throughout the ages have been infused with this respect for uncertainty.
0:42:25 And it’s really important also to mention that this spectrum, this disposition of tolerance or intolerance toward uncertainty is situational as well.
0:42:36 We might live on the spectrum, we might be able to change or bolster our tolerance of uncertainty, but also on any given day, you know, you will maybe lean one way or the other.
0:42:57 So when you’re tired or you have information overload or studies show when you feel compelled to give an answer, which basically describes daily living today, you’re more likely to tend to be seeking an answer and also seeking what’s called need for closure, which is really important.
0:43:05 You need and want to close down on an answer when you feel stressed and beseeched.
0:43:23 And I think we certainly can in little possible ways, you know, just adopting some of those daily practices like trying something new or perhaps one strategy that’s gaining attention when it comes to understanding the other, people who oppose your different views, is perspective taking.
0:43:39 And taking the perspective of another is just jolting yourself from your assumptions about the fact that you do know someone’s perspective, you’re reminding yourself, you’re jolting yourself into what Socrates called perplexity, productive perplexity.
0:43:46 It definitely seems like certain people are wired in such a way that uncertainty is just untenable.
0:43:51 You know, we just did an episode with Robert Sapolsky about the illusion of free will.
0:43:56 And so that’s rattling around in the back of my head as we’re talking about this.
0:43:58 Yes, I think so.
0:44:09 And yet I also think on the hopeful note, we maybe need to make more visible the way in which our entire cultures are predicated on certain types of language.
0:44:17 You know, for instance, hedge words, words like maybe and sometimes they’re seen as weak, linguistically give people two different signals.
0:44:23 One, that you’re receptive to another’s point of view, and two, that there’s more to know out there.
0:44:29 So just by throwing in the word maybe, studies show that you don’t look weak as you might assume.
0:44:34 What you’re just saying about the power of words like maybe, I’m really skeptical of that.
0:44:37 And it goes back to the political problems here.
0:44:38 You actually talk about this in the book.
0:44:41 Do you know what people don’t like in leaders?
0:44:46 Leaders who are intellectually honest and say things like, I don’t know, or I’m not sure.
0:44:52 If you want to not get elected, just be intellectually honest in that way and humble in that way and see what happens.
0:44:53 We don’t like that.
0:44:54 We don’t like it in ourselves.
0:44:57 We certainly don’t like it in leaders.
0:45:02 And I don’t know what to do about that, but it would be better if it were otherwise.
0:45:09 But, you know, on the other hand, medicine is sort of, you would think, the final frontier for unsureness.
0:45:17 And yet there are beginning programs by cutting-edge leaders to teach doctors to say, I don’t know.
0:45:22 It’s actually seen as more positive among patients than expected.
0:45:33 In Maine, there was a program to teach young residents to say, gee, I need to look that up or, wow, I don’t know, which is, you know, of course, really almost impossible to utter.
0:45:37 And yet the word that kept coming up was that it gave them courage.
0:45:44 The courage to think and rethink, to consider based on what was actually happening rather than their assumptions.
0:45:52 You would never think of courage and uncertainty being, you know, associated or close related, but they are.
0:45:55 In fact, William James talked about the courage of a maybe.
0:46:00 So I think, yes, all right, maybe politics is, needs some dire help.
0:46:14 But medicine in business and in AI, there’s a new movement to create robots and models that are unsure in their aims, which is a sea change, a complete reimagining of the field led by Stuart Russell.
0:46:18 They’re creating robots that are more teachable, honest, transparent.
0:46:29 And here we are, again, looking at a sort of element in our culture, you know, technology or politics or language that influences us.
0:46:38 But if you can create a technology that holds up a mirror to our better selves, you might have a good influence on us from our technologies.
0:46:41 And so I see the seeds of change.
0:46:44 I actually came away from writing this book hopeful.
0:46:48 You’ve now referenced Dewey and William James.
0:46:50 Are you a fellow pragmatist?
0:46:52 Are you on team pragmatism?
0:46:53 Because we are on this show.
0:46:55 I am totally.
0:46:59 And I just never studied philosophy, which I dearly regret.
0:47:00 I was too daunted.
0:47:04 And so I’ve been an amateur reader.
0:47:17 And I just, I try to read all sorts of types of philosophy that helped me understand what I might be studying at the time or researching.
0:47:21 But I went back and back and back and back to Dewey and I dearly love him.
0:47:25 And I feel like going to Vermont and visiting his grave or whatever there is.
0:47:40 And I would feel honored to consider myself a pragmatist because on one hand, I spend so much of my life out on journeys of the mind, you know, asking what if questions and walking around and around to try to get a 360 degree look at some of the things I’m looking at.
0:47:45 And to say something or something pragmatic about that, woo-hoo.
0:47:49 I read something about your morning swims.
0:47:50 What’s the story there?
0:47:54 Well, during the pandemic, I had been New York, Rhode Island, New York, Rhode Island.
0:47:55 And then we switched.
0:47:58 And so the grand experiment was to live in the country.
0:47:59 The pool’s closed.
0:48:00 I’m a swimmer.
0:48:02 It’s really important for my writing and all that sort of thing.
0:48:09 And then I got hooked, like many people, it’s kind of a global phenomenon, on ocean swimming.
0:48:14 So four seasons, rain or shine, snow, I do it with a wetsuit.
0:48:20 But I actually began to realize I’m really fascinated by why is this so joyful?
0:48:21 Oh, there’s the exercise.
0:48:22 There’s a social camaraderie.
0:48:26 You’re kind of swimming with your subway car, I call it, because a bunch of strangers get together.
0:48:45 And then I began to feel or understand that really it was a daily dose of uncertainty, that you’re living at the edge because you might see the app or you might know that particular beach, but you really don’t know what’s going to happen even in the 30 minutes you’re out there.
0:48:55 And so I began to realize that maybe the joy in it and the edginess and the discomfort there was really just what I was writing about.
0:49:05 So when someone is confronted with that feeling of fear that comes with not knowing or that anxiety that comes with not knowing, how should they sit with that?
0:49:07 What is your practical advice?
0:49:32 Well, I think first telling oneself that this is, you know, your body and brain’s way of signaling that there’s a moment when the status quo won’t do, that this might be uncomfortable, but that is not, you know, a situation or a state of mind that is against moving forward, but actually propelling you forward.
0:49:40 Because it is discomfort to admit to or to see complexity, nuance, other people’s perspectives.
0:49:46 I mean, you know, I don’t like it when an editor says this needs to be improved, et cetera, et cetera.
0:49:59 So I think that if we truly understand, and it’s just changed my life to write this book and to at least loosen a little bit of the fear that I might carry into really new situations.
0:50:07 From giving a speech to being in the presence of someone who’s very upset, a friend or a daughter who’s really upset.
0:50:17 And I used to want to just offer a solution and give that silver lining and, you know, get that moment over with and, you know, get them on the road to happiness.
0:50:28 And now I feel much more patient and with that comes the ability to follow a path down an unexpected path or even take a detour.
0:50:40 At one point I said to a friend, I’m writing this book in a spiraling fashion, going around and around like those kind of labyrinthian walking gardens or, you know, Zen Buddhist.
0:50:45 And, of course, she looked at me with absolute horror, but I think she actually understood what I meant, too.
0:50:46 Yeah.
0:50:54 You write in the book that embracing uncertainty is really how we become alive to the possibilities of life.
0:50:57 And that really is the bottom line here for me.
0:51:07 Clinging to our preconceptions and our fears of the unknown is probably the sheerest way to miss out on a well-lived life.
0:51:09 And so I guess that’s the note I want to end on.
0:51:12 Is there anything else you’d like to add, Maggie?
0:51:15 No, I think you said it perfectly.
0:51:25 I think that this is all about being fully alive, both to the disquieting and the beautifully joyous, positive elements of life.
0:51:37 Because if we can’t contend with uncertainty, then we can’t contend with life because life will always be contradictory, paradoxical, mutable, dynamic, everything we’ve been talking about.
0:51:43 Once again, the book is called Uncertain, The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.
0:51:46 Maggie Jackson, this was a pleasure.
0:51:47 Thanks for the chat.
0:51:48 Thank you.
0:51:49 It’s an honor talking with you.
0:52:06 Our producer is John Ahrens.
0:52:08 Jorge Just is our editor.
0:52:11 Patrick Boyd engineered this episode.
0:52:14 Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:19 If you dug the show, please rate and review.
0:52:21 And also, I want to hear from you.
0:52:23 Tell me what you think of the episode.
0:52:26 Drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com.
0:52:31 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:52:32 Listen and subscribe.
0:52:48 We’ll see you next time.

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0:01:19 how often do you find silence? I mean real silence. It’s always been hard, but in today’s world the clamour of technology and distractions is unrelenting. And there’s a part of us that likes this, that wants to be distracted, wants to be diverted, wants to be occupied by someone or something. Which means that when we do actually find a bit of silence, we don’t always know what to do with it. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s have a moment of silence
0:01:20 together.
0:01:52 So what happened? Did you think about your to-do list? Did you worry? Did you panic? Did you almost switch to another podcast? Or did you enjoy it? Regardless, that moment in which seemingly nothing happened was an experience. One that could, if you let it, affect you as profoundly as any other experience.
0:02:15 So what would happen if we allowed ourselves to sit in silence more often? Could moments of silence be restorative or exploratory? Could sitting in silence prepare us for the times when we can’t block out the noise? Let’s try it again. This time I’m not springing it on you, so maybe it will feel different. I’ll try to do it for the same amount of time.
0:02:28 I’m Sean Ealing and this is The Grey Area.
0:02:38 Today’s guest is Pico Iyer. He’s the author of fifteen books and a long time columnist for many publications around the world.
0:02:48 He’s also spent decades travelling with Adhavi Lama as a friend and travel writer. His latest book is called A Flame, Learning from Silence.
0:02:53 The book is what it sounds like, a meditation on silence.
0:03:22 And it’s based on Pico’s experiences over thirty years at a Catholic monastery on the coast of northern California. Pico isn’t a Catholic or even a Christian. In fact, he’s not a religious person at all. But he is a curious open-minded writer with a deep interest in spiritual and religious experiences. And his work, this book in particular, reflects that. So I wanted to speak with him about how we can all find silence and hopefully benefit from it.
0:03:30 Pico Iyer, welcome to the show. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:32 I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Sean. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:00 I’m happy to have you here. It’s such a curious thing about you that you’re not religious, you’re not a meditator or anything like that, and yet you’ve spent so much of your life inhabiting these spiritual spaces, living among monks, uh travelling around the world with the Dalai Lama. I mean how does all that happen? How do you make sense of that tension? Or do you even see any tension in that? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:30 Yes, I don’t think I see attention. I think I see a complementarity. It feels to me like breathing in and breathing out. And I don’t think my travels or experience would begin to make sense unless I had enough stillness and peace to to try to put them in perspective. And I’ve always, I think, or not always, but since a fairly young age, I’ve thought I don’t want to neglect the inner life. And the external is becoming so deafening and overwhelming, as you know, that I feel y
0:04:45 I almost have to take conscious measures these days to ensure that I’m putting things in perspective and that my inner life is not neglected, because if the inner life is gone, then it’s like a car without an engine. In other words, all the travel in the world makes no sense at all. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:49 Did you grow up in a very religious home? What did your parents do? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:19 probably did actually, which sent me in the opposite direction. You’re running away from religion. But I I know you’re a political theorist and philosopher and that’s exactly what my parents were. They were both philosophers um, both teachers of comparative religions, which means that they were interested in all religions personally as well as professionally. Uh and I suppose beyond that I maybe ha had the advantage of being born to two Hindu parents who’d grown up in British India
0:05:47 and therefore knew the Bible back to France. And I was born and grew up in England and so I went through very classical Anglican schooling, so by the time I was in college um I probably had some kind of grounding in the Christian world and I had you know my Hindu genes and D_N_A_ too, and my first name is actually Siddharth named after the Buddha. So I think my parents were equipping me for uh being conversant with lots of religious traditions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:14 I wanna get into the book a little bit. Um i people may not know this about you, but you lost everything you owned, including your home and a fire, something like thirty years ago, give or take. Um you say that wasn’t exactly what brought you to the monastery in the first place, but you write that it did clear the way for many things. What did it clear the way for? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:45 Well, it left me in something akin to a desert, a vast open space from which I had to begin crafting my life anew. So I was caught in the middle of that fire, which was the worst in Californian history at the time, for three hours. And when finally a fire truck could get to me and say it was safe to drive downtown, I went to an all-night supermarket, I bought a toothbrush and the toothbrush was the only thing I had in the world, and then I was sleeping on a friend’s floor. And had I not
0:07:15 in that somewhat diminished state. I don’t think I’d have been so responsive when another friend came and saw me on the floor and said oh why don’t you try going to stay at this Benedictine hermitage um up the road. Uh I don’t think th I ever would have thought of going to stay in a Catholic monastery otherwise as somebody who’s not a Christian and who also uh spent fifteen years going through Christian schools and I thought oh I’ve had enough of that tradition, I was more interested in the traditions I didn’t know about. But uh my friend uh told
0:07:39 me that this hermitage that if nothing else would give me a bed to sleep in and a wide desk and a private walled garden above the Pacific Ocean, all the food I could eat for just thirty dollars a night at the time. So I thought well, if nothing else, that’s going to be to sleeping on the floor. Um so I tried it and as you know, that was thirty four years later and I’ve been more than a hundred times since and it’s really become my secret home.
0:07:49 Well tell me about that monastery up in the Big Sur area in northern California. What was it like, how did you spend your days there? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:19 I suppose the first thing to stress is that although it’s a Catholic monastery, and there are fifteen monks there and ten workers who live with them sustaining the community, they’re open to everyone. And really um the monks are responding to St. Benedict’s call to hospitality, and so there are no rules. Everybody is welcome, you don’t have to do anything, uh they provide you with all that you want, and I think they have the confidence to know that whoever
0:08:49 you are and whatever you’re longing and whatever your background, just three days in silence, without distraction, free from cell phones, uh in this radiant stretch of coastline above the ocean will help you find what is most sustaining. And some people would call it God and others would give different names to it, but I think it comes to the same thing. So just to give um our audience uh a sort of visual, you drive along Californian highway one which grows emptier and narrower and you’re
0:09:19 just in this vast elemental landscape with golden meadows running down from the hills to the one side and the flat blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then you come to this even narrower road that snakes and twists for two miles around turns to the top of the hill uh where the retreat house um stands. And so everybody who goes to stay has either a trailer on the hill or a very simple room, but with your own garden twelve hundred and fifty feet with a
0:09:42 unbroken view over the ocean on nine hundred acres of uh glorious natural landscape. So between the nature and between the silence that’s been constructed by years of prayer and meditation, um and between the freedom from all that usually cuts us up into many pieces, um it’s hard not to be transported there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:50 How different is the Christianity practiced by those monks from the Christianity practiced by most other Christians? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:21 So these monks belong to the Kamaldalese congregation within the Benedictine order, and that is the most contemplative uh congregation within the Catholic church. So it’s closest to Zen meditators and people who meditate in every tradition. And so just as you say, I think one of the first surprises for me is that the monks I meet there are much more open-minded than I am, much less dogmatic. When I went and have uh dinner one evening with a prayer who runs the
0:10:51 On his wall there’s a picture of Jesus in the lotus position meditating. Uh they actually maintain a Hindu ashram in southern India where the Catholic priest wears a doty, sleeps on the floor, eats with his hands, and the motto for that Catholic Hindu ashram is we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. So I love that. If you were to ask me why I go there, I would say it’s to wake up wake up first and to cut
0:11:21 through the illusion of separateness and to feel closer to everyone and everything around me. And of course they are trying to cut through the illusion that they are separate from the other traditions of the world. So it seemed to me the perfect motto. And then I found out that we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness actually comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, and I thought how wonderful that these Catholic monks are open and wise enough to take as their motto the sai saying of a contemporary Vietnamese
0:11:51 That openness is what is so interesting to me. I mean I I’ve never liked conventional religion because, I’ve never liked dogma. I I think r I think religions often lose their connection to the experiential roots of faith and instead become these dogma enforcing institutions. But the fact that these monks seem to have no need for dogma at all is so surprising. O w why do you think they have no need for that? I think it’s
0:12:21 because they’re so deeply rooted in their own tradition and commitment, that they’re open to learning from everyone. Because they know where they stand, they’re not defensive, they’re not protective, and they’re n the last ones ever to say that their religion is the best or the only one. So I think it’s people who are uncertain of themselves or their faith who are likely to cling to it uh tenaciously or or belligerently, and it’s those who know who they are who are at least
0:12:51 to do that. But I I love what you say, and I think that’s the reason after thirty four years that I decided to publish a book about these guys and their silence, because I’ve never seen the world as divided as it is right now. And as you say, I think it’s divided because of our words, our beliefs and our ideologies. Uh and the ho the more fiercely we hold to them, the more we’re cutting the world up into us and them. So I was keen to shine a spotlight both on these monks who are so open to
0:13:21 and and not making distinctions, and are cutting through the illusion of separateness. And I was so eager also to shine a spotlight on silence, because it’s it’s the place that doesn’t ask us to prove or disprove a thing. I think silence lies on the far side of our beliefs and ideologies. And so I find if I start to talk with anybody, however sympathetic that person is, maybe after forty five minutes we’ll find that we’re on different sides of some important issue. But when we’re joined in a moment of
0:13:36 silence, I think we’re united in that part of us that lies much deeper than our assumptions and our ideologies, and that silence that actually is a bit of a corrective to the divisions that are cutting us up so violently across the nation and across the world right now.
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0:18:08 You refer to the monastery as a in the book as a a a place beyond divisions. Um and you know, it’s something I think about a lot as a political theorist is how these deep psychological needs play out in our social world, you know, as powerful as the ego is, as much as we all want to be recognised as individuals
0:18:37 We also have this longing to lose ourselves in the whole, and this is part of the appeal of tribalism in some of our darker political movements, but the kind of self-emptying you describe in the book, the kind of self-dissolution that these monks practice is very different from that, and it feels much more like a kind of love and attentiveness. And it’s it’s honestly awe-inspiring. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:08 Oh, so so beautifully said. Um and I loved it when you were talking about losing the self in the whole, because I think that’s pretty much my definition of happiness. My sense is that we’re happiest of all when we’re deeply absorbed in something, and we lose ourselves, we forget the time, in an intimate moment with a lover, in a conversation, in a concert, suddenly w we’re gone. And we’re filled up with something much richer than we could ever be. And and and we’re
0:19:38 without even knowing to use the word or to think in those terms. And that is actually what I experience every time I go on retreat. And all the agitation and all the thoughts of um my fears, my deadlines, my resume, it’s all left down on the highway, and I’m just open for once to everything that’s around me. So I’m in a state of wonder both, as you say, at the monks and seeing their life of devotion and at the fact that I found something
0:19:50 that is lost, that is there in me and in everybody in the core of our lives, but as we’re racing from the bank to the supermarket, we misplace and then we feel this emptiness, but we don’t know how to address it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:19:53 We’re so conditioned to think of freedom as
0:20:22 a freedom to. Free to do this, free to do that, free to pursue whatever I want, but this kind of spiritual freedom you’re talking about is a freedom from, right, freedom from constant striving, freedom from the never-ending push and pull of distractions, freedom from ourselves really, I mean I maybe that’s the kind of freedom T_S_ Eliot had in mind when he talked about the life we lost in living, which you quote in the book. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:54 Exactly. I was just going to cite that very line. And yes, freedom from the need to make anything of yourself in the world, freedom to decorate your C_V_, freedom to make an impression on anyone. And the interesting thing is that deep radiant freedom that they’re experiencing comes through a vow of obedience. Because when you look at them, they they a vow they vow to l obey their God, obey their prayer, and obey everybody else in their community. So to
0:21:24 initially it looks like the opposite of freedom, because they’re living within circumscribed limits in very simple rooms with a strict regimen. But that very s very strict regimen is precisely I think what gives them a certain freedom, because they know where they’re going to be and what they’re going to be doing every day of their lives. And they’re freed again from a lot of the clutter that confuses us. And I think the biggest freedom maybe, which I find in my life, is that in the w age of acceleration and information
0:21:43 There’s so much com coming in on me every minute. I can’t dis distinguish the trivial from the essential. I can’t put my hands on what really matters and what I care about They. have consecrated our lives only to what they care about. And so I don’t think they have any of the the confusions um or doubts that the rest of us have. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:02 you know the this era is defined in so many ways by our our our technology and the attention economy that drives it and you know a a tension I struggle with in my life and I know I’m not alone is this dual impulse to
0:22:23 on the one hand you wanna pay attention to all the news happening all the things happening in the world you wanna care about the problems and the existential threats and all of that because on some level being a responsible citizen means caring about the world. But on the other hand there’s so much noise there’s, so much nonsense there, are so many
0:22:53 problems that I as an individual cannot fix and paying attention to all of this makes my life less satisfying and less silent. Um so how do you decide when to retreat into silence and when to open yourself up to the noise and the clamour of the world because you are of the world and you’re responsible for it and our own little ways and you care. So how do you how do you walk that line?
0:23:24 Yeah, such a good question. I would say I’m responsible for those things that I can affect. And so to speak to the the example you just gave, I remember during the pandemic, I thought every day when I wake up, I can either attend to what’s going to cut me up or I can attend to what’s going to open me up. And I felt that if I were to go online or take in the news, I would hear about morgues being over-full in Bolivia and a thousand
0:23:54 just dying in Iran. And it’s really tragic, and of course one has to care for it, but I really thought there was nothing I could do about that. And conversely, I would look out of the window this radiant spring afternoon, and I would think about the friends and families and neighbours nearby, and I thought that’s what I can really affect positively. Sadly, there’s very little I can do about most of the external world, but my immediate world is really what I have to attend to, and I don’t want the news to take me away
0:24:24 from the parts of the world I can positively affect. So I think being a responsible citizen really means thinking about the people whose lives you can positively affect and how you can gather the strength and resources to be a help to them. And I find I don’t gather those resources by uh w reading The New York Times, driving the freeway or watching C_N_N_, and I do gather them by going for a walk or sitting quietly or most of all by
0:24:25 on retreat. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:32 I found myself wondering uh when I was reading the book and just now listening to you, what the monks
0:24:54 would say to someone who accused them of defeatism or quietism who said you know you’ve abandoned the world and gave up on it. I don’t think that’s quite fair, but I I’m sure it’s a common critique and I just wonder how they would respond to that. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:25:25 I think they would respond much as the Dalai Lama does. You can only change the world constructively by having dis the discernment to see what would be good for the world. If you just blindly race in um and try to tend to the world, you’re often going to make it worse than it was before. It’s like if suddenly I see somebody fall down on the sidewalk, I will race to help her, but it’s much better if I’m a trained physician who races to help her and can s exactly assess the situation and know what is
0:25:55 best response to it. You know, I mention in the book I see the Dalai Lama as an a physician in the emergency room, and I think that’s what my monk friends are too. Um they’re not stepping away from the world, they’re stepping into a deeper reality, so it’s better to understand the world. The monks um that I spend time with live for only one thing, and that’s to help others. Um and I think therefore they’re more engaged with the world than many a CEO
0:26:03 even many a a a a politician. But certainly um they’re not they’re not abandoning the world. I think they’re trying to tend to the world. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:08 And have you come to think that kind of attentiveness is only possible after
0:26:12 spending a lot of time in silence?
0:26:15 In solitude perhaps? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:46 Yes, I think meditation is famously um the means for gathering the resources for reple replenishing the inner savings account. And it takes v many different forms. It can be silent. Um but I do find that it’s those people who’ve taken the time to develop themselves inwardly, who have the most to give to the rest of the world. You know, the great German philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart said as long as the inner work is strong, the outer work will
0:27:08 never be puny. In other words, as long as you take care of what’s inside you, then your career, your relationships, your l life as a responsible citizen will take care of itself. But if you don’t do that, it’s questionable how much you really have to offer to the world. Um good intentions perhaps, but not um the discernment to turn those good inte tensions into fruitful results. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:38 We imagine silence and solitude as as kind of inseparable, but it is fascinating how much actual deep connection is possible in sharing silence with other people. You you put it, I think, quite beautifully in the book You. um you say I’m reminded that the best in us lies deeper than our words. And so th again we think of these monks as like o like the hermits and recluses, but it’s such a wonderful little community and it doesn’t
0:27:43 require a lot of chatter, and yet the connections are are as deep as any. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:28:13 Yeah, I think that connections are maybe deeper because they’re not simplified or reduced by words. So in answer to your observation, I would say two things. First is another beautiful surprise uh for me was that as a bit of a loner who loves being by myself, one surprise of going to this place was that every time I walk along the monastery road, I’ll meet a fellow traveller, another retreatant. And we’ll stop and we’ll talk for maybe two minutes, three minutes. And I’ll quickly feel this is one of
0:28:43 closest friends. And that what we’re engaging in exchanging is really rich because we’re not joined by the fact we work in the same business or we come from the same town or we went to the same college. We’re joined by the fact we’ve responded to the same longing. We’ve both come in search of the silence. So we’re both in search of our deepest lost selves. And what we say to one another arises from silence. And so even the briefest interaction there is very rich. And I trust those people that I it’s strange as
0:29:12 I meet along the road, in a way sadly I wouldn’t trust the stranger I just bumped into on Fifth Avenue in New York or if I’m walking down the street in Santa Barbara. And secondly, as you said so beautifully, the monks are essentially living to look after one another. And as you know in the book one of the things that moves me more and more is how because they’re in this remote location um they’re often cut off from the world entirely by winter storms. And since many of the monks are quite elderly, they have to be
0:29:43 And the prior, who became a very good friend of mine, would tell me that there was one secret back road only open between eight in the evening and five in the morning. And he would drive five hours through the dark, through the night, night after night after night, just to be with one of his brothers in the hospital. The hospital’s two and a half hours away um by road. Uh so a monk would get helicoptered out and then the prior every night would make the long drive through the dark just to sit by the side
0:29:58 of his fellow monk. And he said, I am their father, I am the only family they have, I am their brother, literally as a monastic brother, uh I’m their mother in a sense. Uh and to see that degree of service and compassion is really humbling. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:14 All these trips to the monastery over all these years, have you ever thought about just not coming back into the world and just staying there to to stay in that silence and and and stay in that that space cut off from from all the the craziness? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:30:44 uh much too often and much too powerfully. And one good corrective um was when I started s staying with the monks in their enclosure I found how busy their lives were and there wasn’t s as much silence as a a visitor has and that they were leading round the clock um busier li you know busy lives they were in the office twenty four hours hours a day with their colleagues every hour for the rest of their lives and that in many ways it’s more all consuming than a
0:30:55 job would be. So my temptation to become a monk has always been too strong, but again and again I’ve seen it’s my romantic illusion of what being a monk is rather than the real reality. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:12 Well look, perhaps becoming a monk is a b a bit extreme, but w why remain secular after all these years of religious exploration? I mean have you ever felt tempted to make that leap? Does it seem almost irrelevant to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:42 I’m I’m so happy you said it might seem irrelevant, ’cause I I think that’s the best answer. In other words, I think what I believe is much less important than how I act. And the beliefs in some ways are material or they’re a luxury, because we all know people who strongly will assert their belief and act in ways that horrify us. And we all know people who claim to have no beliefs and act with a selflessness and compassion that could put a cardinal to shame. So I’m I’m happy not to get into the realm of belief, which can seem an
0:32:12 indulgence and certainly can divide the world. And I’m much more concerned on how can I be a better friend, a better husband, uh a better father. So I’ve never felt a need to join a group or to subscribe to a theory or a system of belief or a uh a particular understanding of the world. But I have wanted to try um to lead a kinder and more wide awake life. Um and I think again I began by saying maybe an inner life is um a way of putting
0:32:32 it that I respond to more happily than talking about spiritual spirituality or religion or any of those. I think if you have a rich inner life, you’ll be able to give more to other people. And if you neglect you in a life, there’s going to be a certain emptiness that you share with other people. And I prefer, I think, um to put it in those terms. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:37 What does a word like God mean to you at this point? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:08 And it’s a beautiful way of describing a truth that all of us um know and, intuit but lose sight of, and I go to the Hermitage to be reminded of that, and I don’t always happen to use that word for it, but it’s like many many languages. I can’t speak Aramaic, but it doesn’t mean that words in Aramaic are false, it just means that I don’t happen to understand them because I can only function in English. Um as you know, there was a moment in this book when actually I was on in my birth on my
0:33:38 there. And I went to have um an interview, a television interview. And I was told uh before the interview by the producers, you know, at the end there were going to be some rapid-fire questions. So we’ll tell you what they are so you can be prepared. So they told me the questions to anticipate. And I went and I had the hour-long interview. And at the end there were rapid-fire questions, but they were totally different from the ones the producers had prepared me for. I think they’d got it mixed up and given me the questions for somebody else. So out of nowhere the interviewer said uh
0:34:08 what what’s your definition of God? And because I was completely unprepared, I said reality. And I realised if I’d been prepared for that question or thought about it for a hundred days, I couldn’t have come up with a better answer for how I see things. Um but because it came out of me unthinkingly, it was exactly the right answer, the answer I could trust. Uh and so what does that mean? Does it mean that God is real? It could mean that. Does it mean, as the Buddhists will say, that really the divinity we have to bow before
0:34:38 reality could mean that. But um, you know, I think the n notion of God is a is a really helpful one if it um helps people navigate the complications of the world. But if people choose to use other words, that may be more helpful to them. You know, the Dalai Lama wonderfully says that there’s a reason that there are many religious traditions in the world, and it’s the same reason that there are many um medical traditions, because some people find their system responds best to Chinese
0:34:56 others respond well to ayurveda, others respond best to western medicine. Um all of us have the same problems, but each of our systems perhaps is most helped by one medical system rather than another. Um and I think that’s how I feel about um religious traditions.
0:35:26 a word you use a lot is mystery, and I quite like that. Um I think like you I’ve I’ve always enjoyed the questions more than the answers and to the extent that spiritual and religious traditions are just trying to keep us in contact with the mysteries of existence, I I find them very valuable. Um but I still think I’ll always believe that the dogmas and the
0:35:38 which are all too human do, more harm than good. But maybe I’m being too harsh in that judgement, I don’t know. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:36:08 No. No. I mean I I ag I happen to agree with you one hundred percent. And the sorrow is that the church is so imperfect, members of every church are so human and flawed, um dogma is so pernicious that many of us attempted to throw the baby out with the bath water. And we see so many terrible things done in the name of religion that uh we assume that a religion itself is corrupt, which I think is unfair. What
0:36:38 do with the heavens is always going to be human and extremely fallible and often destructive. What the heavens do with humans is much more inarguable. Right at the centre of my previous book uh was a chapter on Jerusalem, which to me speaks for exactly what we’re describing. Because I’m not Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and yet I move to tears when I go to Jerusalem. And sometimes I’ll be walking down the street in Japan and I’ll be magnetically pulled toward Jerusalem. So
0:37:08 powerful and charismatic is that place. And yet, as of course the city of faith is the city of division, and for as long as we can remember, Jerusalem has been a centre of bloody and violent conflicts, precisely because my sense one person’s sense of heaven is very different from his neighbour’s. There’s something real and inarguable about our longing for the divine and for the beyond, and yet what we do with it and the ways in which we try to cut it up into names and ideologies w exemplifies the
0:37:38 of of our humanity and and makes a mockery of it. So I agree with you. I mean I think mystery is is wonderful if it’s a n way of speaking of the ineffable. And I think most wise souls have said if we were to try to understand God it wouldn’t be God. But I mean w the net the nature of it divinity is it’s beyond words and expressions. And I think that’s another reason why I stress silence, ’cause I think silence touches me as no scripture ever could. The Bible, the teachings of the Buddha, the
0:38:07 they all have great wisdom in them, but I can’t one hundred percent subscribe to them. I c I can’t trust them in the way that I trust silence, which I think again lies beyond all of them in some part of me that I couldn’t begin or try to name or express. And and for all the horrors that are perpetrated in the name of religion, I don’t want to assume therefore that religion is a fraud. I think it’s just that t humans are not always worthy of the possibilities that are given to us.
0:38:17 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
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0:41:57 Well, as you know um when you’re not at the monastery leaning into that silence, being still, meditating, intensive reading, these things are hard to do and when we try to do them we often get carried away by distracting thoughts or events.
0:42:12 So I’m curious what your advice is to people for how to practice silence in the day-to-day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, rinse, wash, repeat world that most of us live in most of the time. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:42 Yeah. I think the harder it is, the more urgent and necessary it is. And when I have friends who say I don’t have time to be silent or I don’t have time to go on retreat, I think they’re the ones who are really in need of it, because somehow they’ve lost control of their lives. And all of us know that if you’re very very busy, you’re unlikely to be wise, and that those people who are really wise are never too busy. So to a typical person um who shares the concerns you just voiced
0:43:12 I would say go for a walk. Uh go and meet a friend without your cell phone. Try instead of killing time to restore time. I’ll give an example. Uh sitting in this apartment I every evening used to wait for my m wife to come back from work and I never knew if it would be twenty minutes or seventy minutes. So I was just waiting. And I would I would kill the time. I would scroll through the internet or I’d turn on the T_V_ there, there’s never anything to watch on Japanese T_V_. And then one day I thought um why don’t I just
0:43:42 turn off the lights and listen to some music. And by di and I did. And very quiet music at first, but not so quiet music later. And I was amazed at how much fresher I felt when I heard her key in the door, how much more I had to give to her, how much better I slept, how much less jangled I was when I woke up. And it’s a t tiny example of how I made a little space in my day for doing nothing when the alternative was doing useless stuff. And th doing nothing
0:44:12 really the best response to that, and the kindest thing I could share with my wife when she did come home. And I think all of us have those um spaces in our days, and it’s up to us how we choose to u to use them. Our aim in this world of distraction is to put ourselves in the space beyond distraction, because so long as we’re cut up and living in little fragments, we’re no use to anyone at all. And as I said, my prejudice is to think the more deeply absorbed we
0:44:42 something the happier and the fuller and the richer we are. I mean Simone, very years ago said attention is a form of prayer and I loved it when you were talking about the attention economy and I don’t want to give my attention uh to Google and Facebook if there’s a chance of giving my attention to Dostoevsky or Emily Dickinson or the beauty of the the Deer Park down the street from me um or wherever you happen to be. I think there’s beaut natural beauty around you. Um so uh I I think the beauty of
0:45:00 of of silence and the quality as I associate with silence is that they’re non-denominational and they’re available to everybody in her life. And if her life feels too full and too stressed, that’s a sign that she has to do something akin to taking medicine or or going to t to the to the doctor. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:15 i in this world of increasingly stunted attention spans, do you do you worry that the monastic life is disappearing, will disappear, and if it does, what do you think will lose? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:45 I worry a huge amount. And of course there are more because of uh diminished attention spans there are more and more spas and yoga centres and new age places, but unfortunately many of them are based around a single human who’s mortal or around a certain exclusive philosophy and not responsive to people who don’t subscribe to that. And so I do think if monasteries and convents die away and with them the example of people who have given their lives up twenty four hours a day for the rest of their
0:46:15 to a certain commitment, we’ll lose something very very significant. And all the retreat centres in the world are never going to compensate for that loss. It’s a it’s a severe concern and and the place that I go to uh New Camaraderie in Big Sur, they’re having a great trouble, as all monastic institutions are, getting new people to make a commitment for life. Um and so w wherever you are in every order, we’re losing um those places and and I think that’s a
0:46:33 loss and I don’t know how it could be repaired, because I’m a perfect bad example. In other words, I go there on retreat and I enjoy all the benefits of it, but I haven’t made the commitment to join them and and to support them in that way. Um so I hope there are lots of people who are wiser and more committed than I am who can keep these places going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:46:42 I’m never gonna become a monk, but I’ve always wanted to visit a monastery and and write about the experience. Uh maybe I’ll go now. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:12 you’ll never regret it, Sean. And the one though is there’s a monastery near you, wherever you happen to be. I mean there are plenty of them and they many of them open their doors to visitors and all of them I think offer a version of the same silence. My suspicion is if you go once, a uh well you it may well in induced to start going more than once. But even if it doesn’t, just knowing that medicine is nearby, just the memory and just the prospect of a place that brings you closer to what is essential in
0:47:42 life is going to transform your days. And the more confusing and painful those days are, the more useful it is to recall well, there’s there’s a response to them and there there is um medicine at hand if if I really need it. Um so I yeah, I I g I’ve seemed to have come back in this conversation a lot to the to the medical analogy, but I think it’s because many of us are uh are sick or lost and confused and uh looking for anything that can address that and in my experience
0:47:48 on retreats and silence has been a one of the best and most irreplaceable medicines I found. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:15 I think we’re all probably a little sick lost and confused and only aware of it to varying degrees. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:20 Questions. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:33 Well it’s a beautiful book um and it was a joy to read um and once again the book is called A Flame, learning from silence. This was wonderful thank, you so much Pico. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:39 Thank you so much Sean um this is a kind of medicine you’re sharing with your listeners and I’m so grateful for it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:01 Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. This conversation genuinely changed how I think about the value of silence and how much I need to balance out all the noise and chaos in my own life.
0:49:23 But will it change how I actually use moments of silence? I don’t know. But I guess the only way to find out is to keep trying. Keep looking for those moments where we can find them. And if we can find them, I guess we’ll have to make them. Let’s do that now. Just sit and enjoy a few more seconds of silence together.
0:50:02 I would love to know what happened during your moment of silence. Did it feel the same as the moment of silence we took before the show? I would also love to know what you thought of the episode or any episode So. drop us a line at the grey area at box dot com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at one eight hundred two one four five seven four nine. And once you’re finished with that, please go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the
0:50:03 podcast.
0:50:32 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the grey area drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox, support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:01:18 I think all of us, at some point,
0:01:21 have wondered why we are the way we are.
0:01:24 Maybe you’re a little neurotic, a worrier,
0:01:28 or maybe you’re a tad abrasive, confrontational,
0:01:30 or a bit evasive.
0:01:32 Maybe you don’t think enough about others,
0:01:35 or maybe you do, but just a little too much.
0:01:38 We see our faults as faults.
0:01:41 But aren’t they really just our personalities?
0:01:43 And what is that exactly?
0:01:45 A personality.
0:01:46 Is it something we’re born with?
0:01:49 Does it shift over time?
0:01:51 Can we think and act our way into being a different and,
0:01:53 hopefully, better person?
0:01:59 I’m Sean Elling, and this is “The Gray Area.”
0:02:07 Today’s guest is Olga Hazan.
0:02:08 She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic
0:02:11 and the author of the book “Me But Better–
0:02:14 The Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
0:02:17 The book is a joy to read, full of ideas,
0:02:19 but also personal in the sense that Olga documents
0:02:22 her year-long effort to change things
0:02:24 she doesn’t like about her own personality.
0:02:28 Along the way, she does a nice job of weaving in the science
0:02:31 and marking the limits of what we know and don’t know.
0:02:35 It’s honest, curious, and reflective.
0:02:37 And so, it turns out, is Olga.
0:02:39 So I invited her on the show.
0:02:47 Olga Hazan, welcome to the show.
0:02:48 Thanks so much for having me.
0:02:51 So let’s start with the basics here,
0:02:55 because personality is one of those concepts
0:03:00 that we all intuitively understand what it signifies,
0:03:01 at least loosely.
0:03:04 But it is pretty tricky to define.
0:03:06 You’ve now written a book on it, so give me
0:03:10 your neatest, clearest definition.
0:03:16 Yeah, personality is the consistent thoughts and behaviors
0:03:18 that you have every day.
0:03:21 And some researchers think that, in addition
0:03:24 to just having those thoughts and feelings and behaviors,
0:03:26 they also help you achieve your goals.
0:03:29 So depending on what your goals are,
0:03:32 your personality kind of helps you get there.
0:03:34 An example of this would be the personality
0:03:38 trait of agreeableness, which helps you make friends
0:03:39 and social connections.
0:03:42 So people who tend to be more agreeable also
0:03:45 tend to value friendships and connections
0:03:47 and achieve more of those.
0:03:50 You use the word consistent there.
0:03:54 To what extent is personality just a performance?
0:03:57 And to what extent is it something much more concrete?
0:04:02 So personality is, in some ways, a performance.
0:04:05 Let’s say you describe yourself as an introvert,
0:04:07 but you have to give a big talk.
0:04:09 And it’s very important to your career
0:04:12 that this talk go well, right?
0:04:16 You are probably going to perform, to a certain extent,
0:04:17 extraversion.
0:04:20 Or let’s say you’re going into a room full of investors,
0:04:22 and you have to raise money for your startup,
0:04:25 but you’re just a very introverted coder guy who just
0:04:28 wants to code all day and not talk to anyone.
0:04:31 You’re going to perform extraversion in that situation,
0:04:33 too, because it’s very important for you
0:04:37 to get whatever is at the end of that performance.
0:04:39 The money or the professional accolades
0:04:42 or whatever comes with it, it doesn’t have to be financial.
0:04:45 It could be going on a first date is kind of a performance
0:04:46 as well.
0:04:50 So we do all perform elements of these traits
0:04:52 every single day.
0:04:54 But what most researchers think is
0:04:57 that there is sort of a tendency that we all
0:05:03 have toward a certain pattern of behaviors and thoughts that
0:05:06 are more or less consistent, especially if we don’t try
0:05:08 to change them in any meaningful way,
0:05:11 that you kind of get up and you have these little patterns
0:05:12 that you fall into.
0:05:14 And that’s sort of like your, quote, unquote,
0:05:16 “natural” personality.
0:05:22 So we have what people call the big five personality traits–
0:05:25 neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness,
0:05:28 which you just mentioned, openness to experience,
0:05:31 and conscientiousness.
0:05:33 Are these categories generally accepted
0:05:38 in the field of psychology, and how useful do you find them?
0:05:40 They are generally accepted.
0:05:43 That’s now, if you read a personality study,
0:05:46 it will be most likely based on the big five.
0:05:48 So things like Ania Graham and Myers-Briggs
0:05:51 are not generally accepted.
0:05:54 That said, they are imperfect.
0:05:57 There are some cultures that have traits
0:05:59 that are very important in those cultures
0:06:02 that the big five doesn’t really pick up as much.
0:06:06 Meanwhile, things like openness, it’s sort of a catch-all.
0:06:12 It doesn’t really map very cleanly onto someone’s personality
0:06:14 as other people would observe it.
0:06:15 So yeah, it is valid.
0:06:16 It has weaknesses.
0:06:22 But personality is so hard to measure and kind of scientifically
0:06:24 get your head around that it’s sort of the best
0:06:25 that we have right now.
0:06:29 Well, part of the inspiration for this project
0:06:36 is that you wanted to change some things about yourself.
0:06:37 So what did you want to change?
0:06:40 And why don’t you love yourself, Olga?
0:06:42 Don’t you know you’re good enough and smart enough
0:06:43 and people like you?
0:06:45 Why do you want to change?
0:06:47 Yeah, so I did want to change.
0:06:50 And I also love myself.
0:06:53 The two are not mutually exclusive.
0:06:55 Though I know that it can feel that way,
0:06:58 that if you admit that you want to change,
0:07:01 that it can feel like you’re saying that you don’t love
0:07:02 yourself.
0:07:05 But I think that’s where the idea of personality traits
0:07:07 as tools to help you achieve your goals
0:07:09 can be really helpful.
0:07:11 Because we all have goals we want to achieve,
0:07:14 even if we all like our lives and ourselves.
0:07:17 And for me, what I realized is that things were going well.
0:07:20 I had a pretty nice life.
0:07:21 Nothing was seriously wrong.
0:07:26 But my reactions to situations were not benefiting me.
0:07:31 They were kind of undermining me and making me not
0:07:32 able to enjoy my life.
0:07:37 So I start the book out with this actually great sounding
0:07:41 now as a new parent of this great sounding day in Miami,
0:07:43 where honestly, all that happened
0:07:46 is that I got a bad haircut, then immediately
0:07:48 had to get professional photos taken,
0:07:51 then got stuck in traffic, and then
0:07:57 had this weird debacle with a grocery store shopping cart.
0:08:02 And honestly, just because of my high neuroticism at the time,
0:08:05 the accumulation of all of those small things
0:08:09 made me have this epic meltdown when I got back to my hotel.
0:08:13 And I realized that that happened a lot in various ways.
0:08:17 Small things would happen that would make me not
0:08:19 able to appreciate the big picture or not
0:08:23 able to just be happy with what I have or be grateful.
0:08:25 And so that’s really what I wanted to work on
0:08:27 is appreciating my life for what it was.
0:08:31 And also just outside of neuroticism,
0:08:34 I was feeling the COVID social isolation.
0:08:38 And I wanted to deepen my social connections as well.
0:08:40 So that’s why I wanted to change.
0:08:45 Would you say that you had or have a tendency to catastrophize?
0:08:46 Because I do.
0:08:48 And I don’t know if that’s a function of neuroticism
0:08:51 or something else, but I would say that is the one thing
0:08:55 that I’m trying most aggressively to stop.
0:08:58 Is that tendency part of neuroticism?
0:09:00 Or is it a little more complicated than that?
0:09:04 Yeah, it’s definitely part of neuroticism.
0:09:06 Neuroticism is sort of the trait that’s–
0:09:09 so to kind of simplify it, it’s associated
0:09:10 with depression and anxiety.
0:09:15 And basically, all those are just like a feeling of threat.
0:09:19 Like you just constantly see threats everywhere.
0:09:21 The reason you’re catastrophizing
0:09:24 is not because you’re silly or because you’re not realistic,
0:09:27 but because you kind of can see the threats coming
0:09:29 from every direction.
0:09:32 And you’re like, how do I prevent those from happening?
0:09:35 And that’s what makes people who are high in neuroticism
0:09:36 so miserable.
0:09:38 Well, I like the–
0:09:41 I think it was Jud Brewer argument
0:09:45 that you talk about in the book that anxiety is a habit loop
0:09:51 where anxiety triggers the behavior of worry, which
0:09:53 feels like it’s a temporary relief,
0:09:56 but really it just makes us more anxious in the long run.
0:09:57 And this is something–
0:10:01 this is something neurotic people do by default, right?
0:10:04 I mean, it’s just the first instinct.
0:10:05 Oh, yeah.
0:10:08 I always thought anxiety and worry were the same thing.
0:10:09 But worry is actually–
0:10:10 it’s a behavior.
0:10:13 It’s almost like a self-soothing behavior.
0:10:15 And people who are very anxious think
0:10:19 that if you just worry enough, you won’t be anxious anymore.
0:10:21 But instead, worry kind of sometimes
0:10:23 can make you more anxious.
0:10:25 Like you’re never going to get to the end of the worrying.
0:10:28 Well, it’s also about the discomfort with uncertainty,
0:10:29 right?
0:10:30 You talk about the neurotic person
0:10:34 is the one who gets the have a second–
0:10:37 do you have a second slack from your boss and freaks out?
0:10:38 I’m the type.
0:10:40 If I get that, do you have a second out of nowhere
0:10:41 from the boss?
0:10:46 I’m filing for food stamps before lunch.
0:10:49 It’s just my mind just goes there.
0:10:51 OK, this is becoming too much about me already.
0:10:52 No, it’s OK.
0:10:52 Yeah, I know.
0:10:53 I’m right there with you.
0:10:55 But uncertainty is wrapped up with this, right?
0:11:01 It’s just– it’s an uneasiness about what the future might
0:11:04 hold and our ability to control or not control.
0:11:08 And so you’re just anxious about the world.
0:11:13 And I mean, I’m sure there’s evolutionary utility in that.
0:11:15 But boy, past a certain point, it just
0:11:18 becomes pathological, really.
0:11:21 Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge part of it.
0:11:23 Neuroticism is all intertwined with a feeling
0:11:27 of wanting control, of really fearing uncertainty.
0:11:29 In the modern world, it’s all about learning
0:11:33 how to live with uncertainty and accept
0:11:37 that there is uncertainty in the world without letting
0:11:40 it rule you, basically, this fear of uncertainty.
0:11:41 What about agreeableness?
0:11:43 Agreeableness sounds pretty agreeable.
0:11:48 I mean, nobody wants to be called disagreeable, I don’t think.
0:11:51 But is agreeableness more complicated than that?
0:11:53 I mean, how much agreeableness is too much?
0:11:57 When do we need to be a little disagreeable?
0:12:02 Yeah, agreeableness was one of the ones that I was working on.
0:12:07 And it’s basically like warmth and empathy toward others
0:12:09 and also trust.
0:12:13 And that element of agreeableness can be really good.
0:12:15 And it can deepen your relationships
0:12:18 and give you more fulfilling friendships.
0:12:22 Where some people say that they’re actually too agreeable
0:12:25 and they want to pair back is when they feel like they’re
0:12:27 being people-pleasers.
0:12:30 And they feel like people walk all over them
0:12:32 or they don’t know how to say no.
0:12:34 So part of agreeableness is learning
0:12:38 how to communicate boundaries, how to make friends,
0:12:40 but also not just by saying yes to everything
0:12:42 that your friends ask of you.
0:12:46 And to still have your own boundaries and your own things
0:12:48 that you’re willing and not willing to do.
0:12:52 So for your year-long personality transformation
0:12:55 project, you did focus on all five of these traits
0:12:57 to varying degrees.
0:13:01 Which did you find was the hardest to tweak in any direction?
0:13:05 So neuroticism was the hardest by far for me.
0:13:11 It is because the way to improve on neuroticism
0:13:15 is meditation or any kind of mindfulness practice.
0:13:23 It can be yoga, not core power, like slow contemplative yoga.
0:13:26 It can be different forms of mindfulness,
0:13:28 but it’s basically mindfulness.
0:13:30 And I found that really challenging.
0:13:33 I am not a natural meditator.
0:13:37 I kind of have a loop of ongoing concerns and worries
0:13:42 and to-do list when I’m not thinking about anything.
0:13:45 I don’t like it when people are too relaxed.
0:13:48 I find that irritating.
0:13:48 Really?
0:13:50 Why?
0:13:52 I just– I think it was a little bit hard for me
0:13:54 to let go of my anxiety.
0:13:58 Because on some level, I think–
0:13:59 and I still sometimes kind of think this–
0:14:04 I think that anxiety is protective, at least for me.
0:14:07 It forces me to do things.
0:14:07 And it helps me.
0:14:10 It is like the fire under me.
0:14:14 And I think at times, I was a little bit like, oh, sure.
0:14:17 This is fine for people who don’t have a lot going on,
0:14:19 but I need my anxiety.
0:14:21 How long did you try meditating?
0:14:24 I mean, did you ultimately find it to be helpful?
0:14:30 Did you score less neurotic at the end of that practice?
0:14:32 I think I did meditation really, really seriously
0:14:34 for about six months of this.
0:14:39 And it did work in the sense that my neuroticism went down.
0:14:44 But when I said that neuroticism is depression and anxiety,
0:14:47 it was actually mostly my depression score that went down.
0:14:49 So I became less depressed.
0:14:54 And my anxiety also went down, but it was still quite high.
0:14:56 It was not as high as it had been,
0:14:59 but it didn’t go away completely.
0:15:02 But I think one reason why I became less depressed
0:15:06 is that the class that I took, which was called MBSR–
0:15:08 it was the meditation class that I took–
0:15:12 had a lot of Buddhist teachings that were part of it.
0:15:14 So one of the things that my meditation teacher said
0:15:18 was things happen that we don’t like.
0:15:21 And for me, even though obviously things
0:15:23 happen that we don’t like, I realized
0:15:26 that I was someone who, when things would go wrong,
0:15:29 I would start to blame myself very intensely.
0:15:32 And I would have this very intense self-blame that would
0:15:36 be very hard to break out of, even if it was something that
0:15:37 was clearly not my fault.
0:15:42 It was like an act of God or really awful traffic
0:15:46 or just something that had nothing to do with me.
0:15:48 I would start to be like, well, I should have left earlier.
0:15:50 I should have, blah, blah, blah, I should have predicted this.
0:15:54 And I think just this reminder that things happen that we don’t
0:15:56 like and that everyone has things that happen in their life
0:15:57 that they would rather not happen.
0:16:00 And we all have to deal with that.
0:16:03 I don’t know, that was weirdly very helpful to me.
0:16:06 What is the scientifically best personality?
0:16:09 And look, there is a part of my philosophical soul
0:16:12 that shudders, even at asking this question,
0:16:14 because I don’t think science can make these kind of value
0:16:15 judgments.
0:16:19 But what I’m getting at is, what does the research
0:16:21 on happiness and personality tell us
0:16:25 about what kinds of traits tend to be most correlated
0:16:29 with happiness and well-being and a flourishing life?
0:16:32 If your goal is happiness, which I am not saying that it has
0:16:34 to be, there’s more life than happiness.
0:16:38 But as far as happiness, well-being, longevity,
0:16:42 all those goodies, it’s basically being high but not
0:16:45 too high on all of the five traits.
0:16:48 So being pretty extroverted, pretty agreeable,
0:16:53 pretty open to experiences, quite very conscientious,
0:16:57 and then very emotionally stable.
0:17:00 You say in the book that extroverts are happier, in part,
0:17:05 because they interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively.
0:17:06 How true is this?
0:17:08 I mean, I’m sure there are some people out there
0:17:11 who might find this kind of claim a little crude.
0:17:15 So how clear is the evidence on this?
0:17:19 How confident are we that extroverts in general are happier?
0:17:22 I mean, they certainly look like they’re having more fun,
0:17:24 but that’s anecdotal.
0:17:26 So the evidence that extroverts are happier
0:17:28 is pretty consistent.
0:17:31 It’s been replicated quite a few times,
0:17:33 including by researchers who weren’t connected
0:17:36 to the original studies and were dubious,
0:17:39 and they replicated it.
0:17:41 And the one researcher who did that, who I talked to,
0:17:43 is himself an introvert.
0:17:44 So it is pretty clear.
0:17:47 The reasons why are less clear.
0:17:49 So as you mentioned, one interpretation
0:17:52 is that they walk into a room full of people,
0:17:56 and they’re all strangers, and they don’t immediately
0:17:57 get a smile out of anyone.
0:18:01 It’s just kind of a straight-faced kind of people
0:18:03 are like, what are you doing here?
0:18:05 I, an introvert, would be like, oh, my god.
0:18:07 I’m not supposed to be here.
0:18:09 Nobody likes me.
0:18:12 I need to leave kind of just like flea, flea, flea.
0:18:13 It’s that self-talk, right?
0:18:15 All that self-chat-er.
0:18:16 Right, right, right.
0:18:19 An extrovert would be like, oh, awesome.
0:18:21 I just need to introduce myself around.
0:18:24 And pretty soon, people will warm up to me.
0:18:27 They just have a different interpretation of events
0:18:30 that helps them be happier.
0:18:32 They are more active.
0:18:34 They’re just always out and doing things,
0:18:36 like the people who are signed up for a million clubs
0:18:39 and things are extroverts.
0:18:43 And they have more social connections, not just friends.
0:18:46 They also have more weak ties, more acquaintances,
0:18:49 just people they talk to throughout the day.
0:18:52 And that helps them feel happier.
0:18:55 (gentle music)
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0:22:38 (upbeat music)
0:22:55 – Well, let’s talk about change,
0:22:58 the science of personality change.
0:23:02 As you say in the book, there is this idea
0:23:07 that at around 30, our personalities are set like plaster.
0:23:11 How true is that?
0:23:15 I mean, how fixed is our personality?
0:23:20 – So that idea is sort of not considered
0:23:23 totally true anymore.
0:23:25 There’s been quite a bit of research that shows
0:23:29 that even when people don’t try to change,
0:23:31 they actually end up changing
0:23:33 over the course of their lives.
0:23:37 So one example is that people get less neurotic
0:23:38 as they get older.
0:23:40 They also tend to get less open to experiences.
0:23:44 So if you ever notice that people get more conservative
0:23:45 as they get older, that could be
0:23:48 because openness to experiences goes down.
0:23:49 In studies where they follow people
0:23:52 over decades and decades, most of those people
0:23:55 in those studies change on at least one personality trait
0:24:00 from young adulthood to late adulthood, their 60s.
0:24:04 So it’s true, you’re not gonna be like unrecognizable
0:24:08 probably, but people do change over time
0:24:09 just kind of naturally.
0:24:12 But what kind of the heart of my book is about
0:24:15 is about changing your personality intentionally,
0:24:18 which is sort of an even newer branch of research
0:24:20 where they actually ask people
0:24:22 if they would like to change their personalities,
0:24:24 give them activities that are meant
0:24:26 to help change their personalities
0:24:29 and then kind of measure their personalities after the fact.
0:24:33 And so then your personality would change even more.
0:24:34 – This part of it is so interesting to me.
0:24:37 I mean, I’ve had psychologists on the show
0:24:40 before people like Paul Bloom who I love.
0:24:42 I think he’s just fantastic.
0:24:47 And I may be bastardizing his argument here.
0:24:49 So if you’re listening, Paul, you can write in and tell me.
0:24:52 But he always says something to the effect,
0:24:55 not necessarily that we look, you are your brain
0:24:56 and that’s it.
0:25:01 But he does suggest that by the time you’re pretty young,
0:25:04 five, six, seven, eight, whatever,
0:25:08 somewhere around there, your personality is kind of clear
0:25:09 and it’s kind of constant.
0:25:11 You kind of are what you are.
0:25:12 You can tinker a little bit at the margins
0:25:14 and the environment matters.
0:25:15 Of course, it always matters,
0:25:19 but you really are sort of, you kind of are what you are,
0:25:22 which isn’t to say that you can’t change anything,
0:25:24 but you kind of are what you are.
0:25:27 I mean, do you think that is a little overstated?
0:25:29 – Yeah, I mean, I think,
0:25:30 so there is a little bit of truth to that.
0:25:34 So part of personality is inherited, right?
0:25:36 It is genetic.
0:25:39 So like, in some ways you start to see
0:25:41 someone’s personality emerge in childhood
0:25:45 and like they’re gonna be kind of like that.
0:25:47 You know, probably for the rest of their lives,
0:25:51 like, you know, barring anything major.
0:25:53 But when you talk about tinkering at the margins,
0:25:56 like that is actually like quite important.
0:26:00 Like a lot of therapy is basically
0:26:02 just tinkering at the margins.
0:26:05 Like one of the books that I read kind of
0:26:08 in reporting out my book is 10% happier.
0:26:11 And that was Dan Harris meditating every day
0:26:16 for like an hour a day, just to become 10% happier.
0:26:18 – That’s a lot though.
0:26:18 10% is a lot.
0:26:19 – Yeah, yeah.
0:26:21 I mean, but that’s, so like it kind of is,
0:26:22 it depends on how you look at it.
0:26:26 Like, I was a really anxious kid and I’m an anxious adult.
0:26:30 You know, does that mean that I am exactly the same
0:26:31 as I was when I was seven?
0:26:34 I mean, you know, I’m recognizable,
0:26:39 but I also think that I have knowledge and tools now
0:26:44 to like control my anxiety a lot better obviously
0:26:47 than I did when I was a kid or a teen, even a young adult.
0:26:48 So I don’t know.
0:26:51 I think that’s true, but also the margins
0:26:53 are really important.
0:26:56 – Yeah, no, there’s a lot of difference in that.
0:26:58 Little tweaks here and there do matter.
0:27:01 So, you know, thoughts and behaviors
0:27:02 are these two elements of personality.
0:27:05 I mean, how much power do we really have
0:27:08 to alter our behavior by consciously,
0:27:11 deliberately altering our thoughts?
0:27:13 I mean, how clear is that relationship?
0:27:16 Because if it is fairly clear that that is,
0:27:19 seems like one of the more reliable ways to go about,
0:27:23 you know, making some of these tweaks.
0:27:25 – The traits where it’s all behavioral
0:27:28 are definitely the easiest to change.
0:27:31 So conscientiousness is a good example of this.
0:27:34 It’s the one that’s all about being organized
0:27:37 and on time, eating healthy, you know, exercising.
0:27:40 What they’ve found is basically that
0:27:43 you don’t have to like really want it
0:27:45 in order to become more conscientious.
0:27:47 You just kind of have to do the stuff
0:27:49 associated with conscientiousness.
0:27:51 So like making the to-do list,
0:27:53 making the calendar reminders,
0:27:57 leaving, you know, whatever, 10 minutes earlier,
0:27:58 you know, decluttering your closets.
0:28:01 Like if you do enough of that stuff,
0:28:03 kind of regularly and consistently,
0:28:06 that is conscientiousness.
0:28:07 Like you will become more conscientious.
0:28:10 You will get stuff done and like achieve your goals
0:28:14 and have a higher level of conscientiousness.
0:28:16 With some of the other ones like neuroticism
0:28:18 or even agreeableness,
0:28:21 like the reason why they’re harder to change
0:28:23 is that you have to really want it.
0:28:26 And it is kind of more about your thought processes
0:28:29 and like challenging your thoughts
0:28:33 and, you know, thinking about situations differently.
0:28:37 Like if I was to revisit that day in Florida,
0:28:39 now or in Miami,
0:28:42 I wouldn’t necessarily like do anything differently.
0:28:44 I would just think about it differently.
0:28:47 And I would be less anxious
0:28:49 as a result of how I was thinking about it.
0:28:52 But like that is obviously harder
0:28:53 than like making a to-do list.
0:28:58 – Well, I did, I like that quote from Jerome Brunner
0:28:59 in the book.
0:29:01 You more likely act yourself into feeling
0:29:05 than feel yourself into action,
0:29:07 which kind of just feels like, you know, fake it
0:29:08 till you make it.
0:29:10 – So Nate Hudson, who’s like the main researcher
0:29:12 that does the personality change research
0:29:15 is I think my quote from him was like,
0:29:18 fake it till you make it is a reasonable way
0:29:21 to do personality change.
0:29:24 And that’s because a lot of this is sort of like
0:29:26 the actions kind of make you think
0:29:27 about things differently.
0:29:31 So one example for me was with Extraversion,
0:29:34 where I really did not want to go to all the stuff
0:29:35 that I signed up for.
0:29:38 So I signed up for like improv class
0:29:41 and I just really dreaded it every single time.
0:29:43 I did not really want to go,
0:29:46 but I kind of found that if I like made myself go,
0:29:47 it would make me happier.
0:29:50 And I did have a good time and I enjoyed it,
0:29:54 but it just like my thought process around improv
0:29:55 was I’m not good at it.
0:29:56 I’m not going to have fun.
0:29:57 I don’t like this.
0:29:58 I’m an introvert.
0:30:01 So that was like sort of the clearest example of how
0:30:04 sometimes you just kind of have to do something
0:30:07 and the thoughts will follow from there.
0:30:09 – I want to talk more about improv.
0:30:11 I’ve always wanted to do it.
0:30:12 But again, I’m an introvert.
0:30:15 And I feel like I would just be paralyzed up there.
0:30:18 But tell me about how long you did that
0:30:21 and how transformative it was.
0:30:24 – Improv was probably one of the best things I did.
0:30:26 And also the scariest.
0:30:30 I did that for about a year kind of like,
0:30:32 but it was like several sessions of improv
0:30:35 that I guess altogether was about a year of a year’s worth.
0:30:40 And I was at times so afraid that I froze up
0:30:44 and like didn’t know what to say next.
0:30:47 But something that’s really cool about improv is that like,
0:30:50 it’s all about learning that other people
0:30:54 can supply part of the interaction, right?
0:30:57 Like you’re not responsible for everything
0:30:59 going right in improv.
0:31:04 It’s okay if things are just kind of chaotic and strange
0:31:06 and not going perfectly.
0:31:08 And I don’t know, it’s like a good lesson
0:31:09 to have for social interaction.
0:31:12 ‘Cause a lot of times when you’re just out there
0:31:15 dealing with people, it’s going to be kind of crazy
0:31:17 and you just kind of have to roll with it.
0:31:21 And I don’t know, to me that was like a good thing to see.
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0:34:48 (upbeat music)
0:34:56 – Well, look, there’s a,
0:34:59 I think a very important question you posed near the end.
0:35:01 And I wanna ask it here.
0:35:07 How do you know when to keep trying to change?
0:35:09 I mean, how do you know when you’ve tried enough?
0:35:12 I mean, isn’t there some point at which
0:35:15 you do more harm by resisting who you are?
0:35:19 And would be better off just making peace with that.
0:35:19 – Yeah.
0:35:21 I mean, this is like, you know,
0:35:25 it’s not gonna be a hard and fast rule for everyone.
0:35:28 But what I found is that when I was doing things
0:35:31 that were like no longer enjoyable on any level
0:35:36 and were not getting me any closer to like what I valued
0:35:37 or like what I actually wanted
0:35:40 is sort of when I would give up on them.
0:35:44 So the big example of this is that I led a meetup group
0:35:48 for a while based around foreign films, which is my hobby.
0:35:53 And I just like didn’t really enjoy it.
0:35:54 I just don’t like running meetings.
0:35:58 I do moderate professionally for work,
0:36:01 but like I just don’t like to do it in my free time.
0:36:05 I guess I just, and it kind of like wasn’t, you know,
0:36:07 I didn’t have that high afterward,
0:36:09 like I did after improv where I was like,
0:36:10 yes, that was so fun.
0:36:13 I kind of felt just like, oh, thank God that’s over.
0:36:14 And to me, that was like a sign
0:36:16 that it was maybe just time to wrap up
0:36:19 and like hand it over to someone else.
0:36:20 And I think that’s okay.
0:36:22 Like you don’t, you know,
0:36:23 trying something doesn’t mean you’re like stuck with it
0:36:25 for life.
0:36:27 – Yeah, and look, I ask this in part
0:36:31 because I am sympathetic to the idea that,
0:36:36 you know, being a little maladapted to a world
0:36:39 that’s actually pretty shitty in lots of ways
0:36:40 isn’t the worst thing.
0:36:43 And our society has a way of conspiring
0:36:47 to make good and honest people feel weird and unlikeable.
0:36:50 And that’s a society problem, not a you problem,
0:36:53 but also it is generally healthy to be well adjusted.
0:36:56 So I don’t want to gloss over that either.
0:37:00 – Yeah, and I mean, even things like neuroticism,
0:37:03 you know, in small amounts or in certain situations
0:37:05 can have some benefits.
0:37:08 Like, I mean, I never did away with my anxiety completely.
0:37:10 It’s now like at more manageable levels,
0:37:12 but it’s not like gone.
0:37:17 And, you know, in the last chapter,
0:37:19 I interviewed Tracy Dennis Tawari,
0:37:22 who is a psychologist.
0:37:25 And she talks about how anxiety can have
0:37:27 some positive elements.
0:37:32 And when her son was born, he had like a heart condition.
0:37:35 And she talks about how anxiety really helped her
0:37:38 prioritize like finding the right specialists,
0:37:40 you know, getting him the right treatment,
0:37:42 coming up with a good treatment plan,
0:37:44 you know, all of the things that are involved
0:37:46 in caring for a sick child.
0:37:49 It would be hard to do that stuff
0:37:51 if you were completely not anxious,
0:37:53 like if you just didn’t care about anything.
0:37:56 Like anxiety is in some ways a way of caring.
0:38:00 So, you know, I think it’s fine to like find ways
0:38:03 of living with your anxiety,
0:38:06 but to not like do away with it entirely.
0:38:10 – Well, what are the most concrete,
0:38:14 practical interventions you discovered along the way
0:38:17 that people might find useful in their own efforts
0:38:22 to improve or align their values and actions?
0:38:23 – Sure, I will just toss some out
0:38:25 that I found worked really well for me.
0:38:27 I would sign up for something.
0:38:30 Don’t just tell yourself you’re gonna go out
0:38:33 to drinks with your friends more.
0:38:37 Like sign up for a thing that like requires you to be there.
0:38:40 With improv, you couldn’t miss more than two classes.
0:38:43 So you had to go, even if you didn’t feel like going.
0:38:44 – Accountability, right?
0:38:45 There’s some accountability.
0:38:46 – Yeah, like that’s what I would do for extroversion
0:38:48 is I would sign up for a thing.
0:38:51 For conscientiousness,
0:38:54 I would actually start by decluttering.
0:38:57 Like if you feel like you’re really disorganized
0:39:01 before trying to like quote unquote get organized,
0:39:04 I would just throw away as much stuff as possible.
0:39:07 That was like the loud and clear thing
0:39:09 that all the professional organizers told me
0:39:13 is that like it’s all about just like having less stuff
0:39:14 in your life.
0:39:16 And that can be like, you know, commitments too
0:39:19 and like sort of extraneous stuff that you’re doing.
0:39:25 And I honestly would take a meditation class
0:39:27 for anyone who’s interested in, you know,
0:39:30 reducing their neuroticism to whatever degree.
0:39:32 Even if not, like it’s just like an interesting
0:39:38 intellectual exercise and, you know,
0:39:39 possibly an emotional exercise.
0:39:44 – Yeah, I found the ACT acronym, the ACT acronym,
0:39:48 pretty handy actually.
0:39:51 It’s, you know, accept your negative feelings,
0:39:55 commit to your values and take action.
0:39:57 And you can say anything you like about that,
0:40:02 but certainly the acceptance part seems really fundamental.
0:40:04 I mean, one thing that comes across
0:40:07 in a lot of the stories you tell in the book
0:40:10 is that it doesn’t matter who you are,
0:40:12 what you do, where you are,
0:40:15 you’re going to have negative feelings all the damn time.
0:40:19 And we add so much unnecessary suffering to our lives
0:40:22 when we resist those feelings.
0:40:25 Anyway, I’ll let you say anything you want about that.
0:40:26 – Yeah, absolutely.
0:40:28 Yeah, I thought that’s so helpful.
0:40:31 And that was really how a lot of the people who
0:40:34 I talked to who did change their personalities
0:40:36 kind of muddled through
0:40:39 because those first few attempts at, you know,
0:40:41 being extroverted or, you know,
0:40:43 even being conscientious can feel really uncomfortable.
0:40:45 Like getting up at, you know,
0:40:47 5 a.m. to go for a run is uncomfortable.
0:40:49 And so they really were just like,
0:40:51 I’m going to feel uncomfortable.
0:40:53 Like I’m not going to like this at first,
0:40:54 but it’s important to me that I keep doing this.
0:40:57 And so I’m going to take action and actually do it.
0:40:58 And I don’t know.
0:41:01 I think that’s like a good little rule to live by
0:41:03 for things that matter to you.
0:41:08 – How important is it to really believe in your own agency?
0:41:12 Is that a fundamental precondition of any kind of change?
0:41:14 To believe that it’s possible
0:41:18 that you have the freedom and the will to do that?
0:41:21 – The argument that I always get into with people is like,
0:41:24 some people think that like people never change, right?
0:41:26 And kind of the extension of that is like,
0:41:29 I will never change because people never change.
0:41:31 And if that’s truly what you think,
0:41:33 you probably aren’t going to try to change
0:41:35 and you probably won’t change.
0:41:38 There does have to be like some fundamental openness
0:41:42 to change in order to even like embark on something like this,
0:41:45 because it takes a lot of like energy and courage
0:41:46 to do some of this stuff.
0:41:50 And you can’t follow through on it
0:41:53 if you think that like it’s not going to work.
0:41:54 – All right.
0:41:57 Once again, the book is called “Me but Better,
0:42:00 the Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
0:42:03 Olga Hazan, this was fun.
0:42:03 Thank you.
0:42:05 – Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
0:42:06 This was great.
0:42:09 (upbeat music)
0:42:14 – All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:42:16 I know I did.
0:42:18 Personality change is something I thought about a lot
0:42:21 over the years in part because I’m constantly trying
0:42:24 to fix things about myself.
0:42:27 This book and this conversation gave me
0:42:29 some useful perspective on that,
0:42:31 both that it’s completely cool
0:42:33 to want to improve things about yourself,
0:42:36 but also it’s important to make peace with who you are
0:42:39 and not make yourself miserable fighting that.
0:42:43 But as always, I want to know what you think.
0:42:46 So drop us a line at the grayarea@box.com
0:42:49 or leave us a message on our new voicemail line
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0:43:01 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
0:43:05 edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:43:08 fact checked by Melissa Hirsch,
0:43:10 and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
0:43:12 New episodes of the grayarea drop on Mondays,
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0:43:38 – All right, Sean, you can do this promo
0:43:41 talking about all the great Vox media podcasts
0:43:43 that are gonna be on stage live
0:43:45 at South by Southwest this March.
0:43:48 You just need a big idea to get people’s attention,
0:43:53 to help them keep them from hitting the skip button.
0:43:53 I don’t know.
0:43:56 I’m gonna throw it out to the group chat, Kara.
0:43:57 Do you have any ideas?
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0:44:07 What do you think, Scott?
0:44:10 – I’m more of an X-man fan myself.
0:44:12 Call me professor.
0:44:13 Can I read minds?
0:44:14 I can’t really read minds,
0:44:17 but I can empathize with anyone having a mid-life crisis,
0:44:20 which is essentially any tech leader, so.
0:44:24 – Mines are important, Scott, but we’re more than that.
0:44:29 I think that you can’t really separate minds from feelings.
0:44:31 And we need to talk about our emotions
0:44:33 and explore the layers of our relationships
0:44:37 with our partners, coworkers, our families, neighbors,
0:44:39 and our adjacent communities.
0:44:41 I just wanna add a touch more.
0:44:43 From sports and culture to tech and politics,
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0:44:51 – That’s it, All-Stars.
0:44:55 Get your game on, go play, come see a bunch of Vox Media
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0:45:11 Go to voxmedia.com/sxsw.
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0:01:19 Who hasn’t heard the phrase, ignorance is bliss 1,000 times?
0:01:23 Like all cliches, it sticks because it’s rooted in truth.
0:01:28 But it’s worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying.
0:01:30 If you read the history of philosophy,
0:01:32 you don’t find all that much interest
0:01:34 in the delights of ignorance.
0:01:38 Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth,
0:01:42 which is assumed to be a universal human impulse.
0:01:47 As Aristotle famously claimed, all human beings want to know.
0:01:49 And that’s not entirely wrong, of course.
0:01:51 Most of us do want to know.
0:01:54 But denial and avoidance are also human impulses.
0:01:58 Sometimes, they’re even more powerful than our need to know.
0:02:02 These drives, a need to know, and a strong desire never
0:02:05 to find out, are often warring within us,
0:02:07 shaping our worldview, our relationships,
0:02:11 and our self-image, which raises the question,
0:02:14 when is ignorance really bliss?
0:02:15 When isn’t it?
0:02:16 And how can we tell the difference?
0:02:22 I’m Sean Ellen, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:27 Today’s guest is Mark Lilla.
0:02:30 Mark is a professor of the humanities
0:02:33 at Columbia University and the author of a new book called
0:02:36 Ignorance and Bliss on Wanting Not to Know.
0:02:39 The questions I just asked are the questions Mark
0:02:41 grapples with in this book.
0:02:44 It’s short, elegantly written, and maybe the highest
0:02:47 compliment I can give is that it reads like a book that
0:02:51 could have been written at almost any point in modern history.
0:02:54 What I mean by that is that it’s not reactive to the moment.
0:02:57 It engages one of the oldest questions in philosophy,
0:03:00 to know or not to know, and manages
0:03:04 to offer fresh insights that feel relevant and timeless
0:03:06 at the same time.
0:03:08 So I invited Mark on the show to explore why we accept
0:03:13 and resist the truth and what it means to live in that tension.
0:03:16 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:03:29 Mark Lilla, welcome to the show.
0:03:32 Good to see you again, Sean.
0:03:33 Likewise.
0:03:37 And it’s great to talk about this lovely book of yours.
0:03:40 Obviously, the book is about our will to know
0:03:42 and our will to not know.
0:03:45 And of course, the book opens with a kind of parody
0:03:49 of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
0:03:53 And I think people know the basic story of Plato’s cave.
0:03:58 You have these prisoners who spend their whole life bound
0:04:03 by chains in a cave, looking at shadows being cast on a wall.
0:04:06 And they mistake those shadows for reality,
0:04:11 because it’s the only reality they’ve ever known.
0:04:14 Why don’t you take it from there and just say a bit
0:04:17 about how you play a little bit with that story?
0:04:20 Yeah, well, in Plato’s copyrighted edition
0:04:25 of the story, a stranger comes in and turns
0:04:28 one of the prisoners around so that he realizes
0:04:32 that he’s been living in a world of shadows
0:04:36 and is invited to climb up to the sun,
0:04:39 and then lives up there until he’s
0:04:41 told to come back down and get other people.
0:04:45 In my version of the story, he’s got a little friend
0:04:49 with him, a young boy, who also goes up.
0:04:53 And when it comes time to go back down,
0:04:59 the man tells him he can stay up in staring at the forms
0:05:02 and being in the pure sunlight and seeing what is.
0:05:05 And it turns out he’s desperate to return.
0:05:07 It’s a cold life.
0:05:10 All of his fantasy and imagination have dried up.
0:05:13 He misses his virtual friends.
0:05:16 And eventually he’s taken back down.
0:05:20 And so I start the book saying, it’s an open question
0:05:25 whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing.
0:05:29 So when Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle,
0:05:34 writes that all human beings want to know,
0:05:37 do you think that statement is just very importantly
0:05:41 incomplete, that the impulse to not want to know
0:05:44 is just as strong and maybe just as important?
0:05:46 Yeah, I think it’s incomplete.
0:05:50 And it’s not as if there’s a certain class of people
0:05:54 who are resisting knowledge and we the enlightened do not,
0:05:57 but rather that the struggle to know and not
0:06:00 knows going on in all of us all the time.
0:06:02 And that we ought to be aware of that
0:06:08 and be able to try to sort out when that’s a healthy instinct
0:06:09 and when it’s not.
0:06:12 When is it rational to not know?
0:06:14 Oh, there are all sorts of cases.
0:06:17 A lot of them are trivial.
0:06:18 We wrap presents.
0:06:19 Why do we do that?
0:06:23 Because we want to build the suspense.
0:06:29 Some people don’t want to know the sex of their unborn child
0:06:33 because they want to have a surprise.
0:06:39 We don’t want people to recount the entire plot of a movie
0:06:40 we want to see.
0:06:43 We tell them spoiler alert.
0:06:45 And then there are more serious situations
0:06:49 where we have to think about how to raise children
0:06:56 and when they are prepared to absorb new information
0:07:00 and knowledge and to have certain experiences.
0:07:02 We also have to think about whether there
0:07:09 are healthy taboos in society that there are places where
0:07:12 we try to not have people look in order
0:07:18 that we can somehow keep our society together.
0:07:20 One of the problems you play with a little bit
0:07:25 is that we need to be ignorant.
0:07:28 We want to be ignorant of certain things.
0:07:33 But we also really, really hate to admit our own ignorance.
0:07:37 So we’re constantly playing this game of hide and seek
0:07:38 with ourselves.
0:07:43 That’s a bit of a strange, untenable dance, don’t you think?
0:07:44 It is.
0:07:45 It is.
0:07:48 People don’t want to feel that they’re
0:07:53 insurious in holding things at arm’s distance
0:07:56 and not thinking about them.
0:07:58 And I’m not sure where that comes from.
0:08:00 But certainly it’s the case.
0:08:01 It certainly is the case.
0:08:06 And part of it, I think, is to use a metaphor
0:08:09 that our opinions are not things that we just
0:08:14 have in a bag that we pull out when they need expression.
0:08:18 But rather, they feel like prostheses, like an extra limb.
0:08:24 And if someone refutes our argument or mocks it,
0:08:29 it feels like something quite intimate has been touched.
0:08:35 And so that is an incentive to not admit your ignorance
0:08:38 and to build up all sorts of defenses
0:08:43 and appeal to bogus authorities in order
0:08:48 to remain convinced of your own rational capacities
0:08:51 and your independence.
0:08:54 And so it becomes a kind of perverse thing
0:08:59 where you’re constantly trying to patch things together
0:09:01 to show to yourself and others you understand.
0:09:04 And in the meantime, you can start
0:09:06 pulling in some preposterous things that
0:09:10 become part of your worldview.
0:09:16 Is there a good model of a wisely ignorant person,
0:09:18 a sort of counter-socrates, someone
0:09:21 who climbs the mountain of knowledge
0:09:25 and says once they reach the peak, you know what?
0:09:28 I like it better down there in the cave or in the matrix
0:09:31 or whatever metaphor one prefers.
0:09:34 Is that ever a justifiable position?
0:09:36 I think you’re leaving out an option.
0:09:40 And that option is something that Socrates explores
0:09:43 in the other platonic dialogues, which
0:09:47 is learning from your own ignorance.
0:09:54 That is to recognize that you’re genuinely and generally
0:09:55 ignorant about things.
0:09:59 And to continue inquiring with the understanding
0:10:01 of what you come up with is tentative.
0:10:04 Especially right now, we live in a world where we’re more
0:10:07 and more aware of the uncertainty of our knowledge
0:10:10 because things change so quickly.
0:10:15 It was very striking to me during COVID just how frustrated
0:10:19 people seem to be by the fact that the public health
0:10:22 authorities kept changing their advice.
0:10:25 First, they said it was all about washing your hands.
0:10:29 And then they said it was all about masks and so on.
0:10:30 They get angry about that.
0:10:33 But that’s the way science works.
0:10:34 But people don’t like to live that way.
0:10:37 They like to hear from an authority
0:10:39 that this is what you do.
0:10:42 They want a doctor who doesn’t hem and haw
0:10:45 and doesn’t constantly change the meds and say,
0:10:47 let’s try this, let’s try that.
0:10:49 It’s very destabilizing.
0:10:52 And so I think we have a yearning
0:10:55 to live standing on solid ground.
0:10:58 But we don’t stand on solid ground.
0:11:00 Part of what made Socrates so annoying
0:11:02 is that he went around pretending not to know anything,
0:11:06 yet undercutting everyone else’s claims to knowledge.
0:11:08 So there is that.
0:11:12 But he also says that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
0:11:15 I think if anyone knows a line from Socrates, it’s that one.
0:11:17 And that’s fine up to a point.
0:11:19 But I would also say, and I don’t know
0:11:24 if you would say this as well, that a life that’s nothing
0:11:26 but examined is equally unworthy,
0:11:31 that there’s more to life than knowing and understanding.
0:11:32 Do you agree with that?
0:11:34 Oh, I do.
0:11:37 Yeah, if by that you mean that certain things in our lives
0:11:42 we need to take for granted, that’s for sure.
0:11:44 I mean, when you think about parental love,
0:11:46 and not just with young children,
0:11:49 I mean, if you were really convinced
0:11:51 that every morning your parents wake up
0:11:53 and have a working hypothesis
0:11:56 of whether they love you or not,
0:11:58 whether you’re lovable or not,
0:12:02 that would be very destabilizing to feel.
0:12:05 And it would keep us from establishing bonds
0:12:09 that presume that the bonds will continue.
0:12:11 You know, Socrates said the unexamined life
0:12:12 is not worth living.
0:12:15 He did not say that the thoroughly examined life
0:12:17 is worth living or that it was livable.
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0:15:46 (gentle music)
0:15:48 (gentle music)
0:15:58 – I think everyone knows the dictum knowledge is power.
0:16:00 And I think that’s sensible enough, right?
0:16:01 You can do a lot of things in the world
0:16:03 if you know and understand.
0:16:11 Do you think that ignorance also has a kind of power?
0:16:13 That maybe we overlook?
0:16:17 – Yeah, I began the book with a quotation
0:16:21 from George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda,
0:16:25 saying that we thought a lot about the power of knowledge,
0:16:28 but we haven’t thought about the power of ignorance.
0:16:31 And what she means there in the novel
0:16:35 is the power of people who are ignorant
0:16:39 to mess things up in life.
0:16:43 That it’s a kind of social force out there.
0:16:46 And I think which is certainly the case.
0:16:49 But ignorance is also power
0:16:56 if not knowing certain things
0:16:58 or leaving certain things unexamined,
0:17:04 permit you to, in fact, continue in your life
0:17:09 and not be paralyzed.
0:17:13 I use an example at the beginning of the book
0:17:16 what would happen if we each had an LED screen
0:17:19 on our embedded in our foreheads
0:17:22 and we could read the thoughts of everyone around us.
0:17:25 I mean, social life would grind to a halt
0:17:30 because you can’t control your thoughts, right?
0:17:33 You control what you say.
0:17:36 And we would constantly be looking
0:17:38 to see how people are thinking about us
0:17:42 and we could never develop a stable sense of ourselves.
0:17:45 And so we need not to know what other people think about us
0:17:49 even if we’re going to live a philosophical life.
0:17:53 – There are lots of people who are willfully ignorant
0:17:56 and there are lots of people who are ignorant
0:17:58 of their ignorance.
0:18:03 But then there’s this other species of cynicism
0:18:06 you talk about in the book
0:18:10 that knowingly exploits ignorance.
0:18:15 And historically that has been a potent source
0:18:17 of political power.
0:18:22 I mean, is this just an eternal challenge for society?
0:18:27 – Yes, and the reason is one reason
0:18:32 is that people need certainty
0:18:35 and they will demand it.
0:18:40 And so political leaders, demagogues in particular
0:18:43 can provide simple answers to things
0:18:48 that seem very complicated
0:18:53 and that stir people in a way that can be directed.
0:18:58 That’s classically how a demagogue works
0:19:02 and how a demagogue becomes a tyrant.
0:19:06 And so especially now,
0:19:10 I’m not surprised that we’re facing
0:19:15 the kind of aggressive ignorance
0:19:20 among populists and those who are moved by populists
0:19:26 because making sense of things right now
0:19:28 is just very difficult
0:19:32 because we just don’t know various things
0:19:34 because our experience is so new.
0:19:36 For example, what do you do about the fact
0:19:41 that the state of any nation’s economy
0:19:46 depends on an international economy
0:19:51 and that no country has a say, full say,
0:19:54 in how that international economy operates
0:19:58 and it will continue to affect everyone in every country.
0:20:00 So it’s hard to accept the fact
0:20:04 that our political leaders do not control the economy.
0:20:08 And so you go to whoever says he’s the answer man
0:20:10 or she says she’s the answer woman.
0:20:16 And so it’s very hard to confront the present
0:20:21 with an open mind and a very sense of the tentativeness
0:20:22 of how you understand it.
0:20:25 – You know, there’s a deep philosophical question
0:20:26 lurking in all this.
0:20:28 And the question is,
0:20:32 what is the actual point of knowledge?
0:20:35 Do we want knowledge for the sake of knowledge
0:20:39 because it’s inherently good
0:20:43 or is knowledge only valuable if it’s useful?
0:20:45 And if knowing something isn’t useful
0:20:46 or if it’s even worse than that,
0:20:48 if knowing something is actually painful,
0:20:51 why would we want to know it?
0:20:56 – The question that you’re asking for me,
0:20:59 at least in the book,
0:21:02 is really a question of different kinds of human characters.
0:21:07 There are some people who simply something quickens within
0:21:12 when the opportunity of new knowledge presents itself.
0:21:18 And so why the soul responds like that is a mystery.
0:21:25 And Socrates tells various myths about why that might be,
0:21:27 but it just seems to be a fact.
0:21:28 And not everyone has it.
0:21:31 – Do you think there’s anything worth knowing
0:21:32 regardless of the cost?
0:21:39 – Self-knowledge can be harmful if it’s partial
0:21:46 or if just the way you are is such that
0:21:50 one of your failings or limitations
0:21:55 is that you’re paralyzed if something in you unpleasant,
0:21:58 is revealed.
0:22:01 That’s the story of Augustine in the Confessions
0:22:02 at the moment where he says,
0:22:05 “God ripped off the back of me,”
0:22:08 which was this other face and everything
0:22:09 that everyone else could see.
0:22:12 I couldn’t and holds it in front of me and I see myself.
0:22:14 And in that moment, I’m so horrified
0:22:18 that something clicks and I give myself over, right?
0:22:20 And so there could be limits to that.
0:22:25 But Socrates assumes that all self-knowledge
0:22:27 is in the end going to be helpful
0:22:32 because you are now clear to yourself
0:22:37 and that knowing itself makes people good.
0:22:42 That once you know the power of your ignorance
0:22:46 is no longer holding you, so it just goes poof.
0:22:50 And now you are in the driver’s seat.
0:22:51 And-
0:22:52 Do you think that’s true?
0:22:53 I’m not sure.
0:22:54 I don’t think that’s true.
0:22:55 I don’t think that’s true.
0:23:00 And so it’s hard to believe whether Socrates,
0:23:01 whether he thought that.
0:23:06 And the reason is that the way he deals with other people
0:23:08 in the Platonic Dialogues,
0:23:11 you see that he has a lot of knowledge
0:23:13 about how people fall short of that.
0:23:15 Yeah, I could definitely make a case
0:23:16 or I could see a case being made
0:23:18 for always wanting to know.
0:23:22 You know, abstract truths
0:23:25 and truths about the external world.
0:23:27 But when it comes to self-knowledge,
0:23:28 sometimes when you peer in word,
0:23:31 what you find is that you’re just a bundle
0:23:32 of contradictions that can’t be squared.
0:23:35 And I’m not sure it’s necessarily good
0:23:38 to be intimately acquainted with that
0:23:40 and to get hung up on that.
0:23:42 There is one way in which it is,
0:23:44 and that’s the Montaigne option.
0:23:46 You know, the picture Montaigne gives of us
0:23:49 in the essays is that we’re exactly what you just said.
0:23:53 And his advice is live with it.
0:23:54 Just go with it.
0:23:56 You’re a contradiction.
0:23:58 I think that’s easier said than done.
0:24:01 But perhaps still wise, but easier said than done.
0:24:06 But do you think there is a link,
0:24:09 maybe even a necessary link
0:24:11 between self-knowledge and knowledge
0:24:13 of the external world?
0:24:15 In other words, on some level,
0:24:17 do we have to know ourselves
0:24:21 in order to know the truth about the world outside ourselves?
0:24:24 – I can think of a couple of answers to that.
0:24:26 I’m not sure which one would be mine.
0:24:30 One is that these things are detachable.
0:24:33 You know, if you meet scientists or,
0:24:37 you know, I remember spending a year
0:24:39 at the Institute for Advanced Study,
0:24:42 and I would sometimes go and sit in this place
0:24:46 where the scientists and mathematicians were.
0:24:50 And you could tell these people just had no self-awareness
0:24:53 in terms of how people reacted to them.
0:24:55 Perhaps they were just wrapped up in their problems
0:24:58 and they were discovering things.
0:25:03 On the other hand, one barrier to us
0:25:08 in knowing things about the world
0:25:12 is to know what constitutes knowing.
0:25:14 And that requires an analysis of ourselves.
0:25:17 So self-knowledge in the sense of knowledge
0:25:19 of the human animal.
0:25:21 And then the third sense,
0:25:24 while not strictly necessary,
0:25:27 the exercise of trying to know oneself
0:25:30 is a kind of training exercise
0:25:34 for inquiring about the world outside.
0:25:37 (gentle music)
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0:28:21 – I do want to talk a bit about nostalgia
0:28:23 before we get out of here,
0:28:27 which you’ve written about, we’ve spoken about before.
0:28:31 And I think a conversation about knowledge and ignorance
0:28:34 is also a conversation about nostalgia.
0:28:37 The truth is we can’t unsee what we’ve seen,
0:28:40 though we can, I guess, repress and delude ourselves.
0:28:41 I think my question to you is,
0:28:45 at what point in our journey of knowledge,
0:28:48 as individuals and societies,
0:28:50 are we overtaken by nostalgia?
0:28:53 At what point are we just longing to go back
0:28:57 to a previous time when we didn’t know what we now know?
0:29:01 – When it comes to whole societies being nostalgic,
0:29:07 I think that it has to do two things.
0:29:12 One is illegibility, if I can put it that way.
0:29:15 And that is when the world becomes illegible,
0:29:17 the present becomes illegible.
0:29:20 That means you don’t know how to act.
0:29:24 And if you don’t know how to act,
0:29:28 it’s deeply disturbing because you want to be able,
0:29:31 that’s the second point, to control your environment
0:29:35 and control things so you can reach your own ends.
0:29:39 And so a dissatisfaction with the present
0:29:43 and an absence of knowledge about how to improve things
0:29:48 are spurs to imagine that just as
0:29:52 being eight years old seemed less complicated
0:29:56 and easier than being 68 years old,
0:30:01 that there was a time when life was ordered in a better way
0:30:07 in which we knew less about various things
0:30:10 or certain changes hadn’t happened.
0:30:15 And maybe we can reverse the machine
0:30:17 or reverse the train.
0:30:23 That desire to go back, even on the more individual
0:30:26 psychological level, there’s always a connection
0:30:30 between individual and the social manifestations here.
0:30:34 But it’s part of the reason why we romanticize childhood
0:30:38 so much, it’s that innocence, it’s the simplicity,
0:30:41 it’s the freedom from anxieties,
0:30:44 it’s the freedom to be ignorant and happy
0:30:46 without judgment or guilt.
0:30:49 I mean, I think maybe the most beautiful thing
0:30:54 about my five-year-old son is precisely this kind of freedom.
0:31:01 He’s not a self competing for status among other selves.
0:31:05 He is ignorant of all the posturing and insecurities
0:31:09 that come with being a fully self-conscious person
0:31:11 in a social world.
0:31:17 I realize we cannot remain in that state of ignorance forever.
0:31:21 But surely there’s a lot to learn from it.
0:31:23 – What do you think is to be learned from it?
0:31:27 I’d be interested to hear you elaborate on that.
0:31:31 – I think there’s something to be learned about happiness
0:31:36 that there are real things in the world
0:31:38 about which to be anxious and insecure.
0:31:40 And there are many, many more things
0:31:42 that we conjure up in our minds
0:31:47 because of our own neuroses and pathologies and anxieties.
0:31:51 And to the extent we can be free of that,
0:31:54 and to the extent we can be like children,
0:31:58 which is to say, just be present in the world
0:32:02 moment to moment without any real concerns
0:32:05 about the past or the future.
0:32:08 I think we’re better for that.
0:32:12 And of course, you have to be responsible
0:32:14 and you have to take accountability, right?
0:32:16 You can’t be the child forever.
0:32:20 But surely there’s some tension between those polls
0:32:22 that we can live in.
0:32:23 – See, I don’t think you can.
0:32:25 And the reason you can’t–
0:32:26 – Not even a little bit, do you know what I’m thinking?
0:32:29 – No, but what you can preserve is something else.
0:32:32 But the very fact that you were able to describe it
0:32:36 means that you’re past it, right?
0:32:37 That you’re a–
0:32:38 – Well, shit.
0:32:41 – Yeah, I mean, you’re aware of Knight.
0:32:45 The child doesn’t know that he’s Knight, right?
0:32:47 But what I do take from what you say
0:32:52 is that it can get you refocused on,
0:32:59 yeah, on being more in the moment,
0:33:05 perhaps not trying to control your life so much
0:33:08 and to let things happen and to take opportunities
0:33:13 for play, just play and how healthy it is.
0:33:16 – Play in a sense of awe and discovery,
0:33:19 which we tend to lose as we move through the world,
0:33:22 you know, year after year after year,
0:33:24 that sense of freshness and awe dissipates.
0:33:30 And to the extent we can still grab ahold of that instinct,
0:33:31 I think it’s useful.
0:33:34 – Yeah, well, the first thing with play,
0:33:36 certainly it’s something that’s totally absent
0:33:40 from play to an Aristotle and the philosophers
0:33:43 until they come to Montaigne,
0:33:46 where he reflects at various points about play
0:33:48 and he famously says, so what is it?
0:33:51 Am I playing with my cat or is my cat playing with me?
0:33:55 But for me, there’s a difference between adult wonder
0:33:59 and a childlike wonder.
0:34:05 We’re trying to think myself back
0:34:07 into a child or just observing children
0:34:12 that when novelty affects them, wow, here’s something new.
0:34:22 And so a lot of it has to do with that,
0:34:24 but they don’t walk away with warm feelings
0:34:27 about our wonderful world.
0:34:30 They just, new things happen and they get excited about them
0:34:32 and you see their smiles
0:34:34 and they’re running around the room.
0:34:39 But with us, the wonder, at least for me,
0:34:42 is tinged with knowledge
0:34:46 that everything in the world is not wonderful.
0:34:51 And so when you have these epiphanic moments of wonder,
0:34:57 it’s the contrast between that and our daily lives
0:35:01 that seems like manna from heaven when it happens.
0:35:06 – I do wonder as we kind of careen towards the end here,
0:35:09 what the upshot of all this thinking and writing
0:35:11 was for you personally?
0:35:15 We’ve already sort of gone in a personal direction.
0:35:17 But I mean, have you changed your relationship
0:35:22 to your own ignorance as a result of this project?
0:35:25 – I would hope so, I would hope so.
0:35:30 I think I have a better understanding of what philosophy is
0:35:32 and what philosophy can do.
0:35:33 – What is the answer to that?
0:35:36 What is it that philosophy can and can’t do?
0:35:41 – That philosophy that is aware of our ignorance
0:35:43 is a step forward.
0:35:48 The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings
0:35:50 is getting to maybe.
0:35:53 – I like that.
0:35:54 I’m gonna leave it right there.
0:35:58 Once again, the book is called “Ignorance and Bliss.”
0:36:00 Mark Lilla, always a pleasure, my friend.
0:36:01 Thanks for coming in.
0:36:02 – Thanks so much, Sean.
0:36:10 – All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:36:12 You already know I did.
0:36:16 But as always, you know we wanna know what you think.
0:36:20 So drop us a line at the gray area at fox.com.
0:36:22 And if you have just a little bit of extra time,
0:36:26 please rate and review and subscribe to the podcast.
0:36:35 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
0:36:38 edited by Jorge Just,
0:36:40 engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:36:42 fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,
0:36:44 and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music.
0:36:48 New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays,
0:36:51 listen and subscribe.
0:36:52 This show is part of Vox.
0:36:54 Support Vox’s journalism
0:36:56 by joining our membership program today.
0:36:59 Go to Vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:00:33 – Thumbtack presents the ins and outs
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0:01:06 – You’ve no doubt heard the phrase
0:01:09 loneliness epidemic many times.
0:01:11 But what does it mean to say
0:01:13 that there’s a loneliness problem?
0:01:16 More to the point, what does it mean to be lonely?
0:01:20 At the very least, loneliness implies two things.
0:01:23 One, that you’re alone.
0:01:25 And two, that you don’t wanna be.
0:01:28 That second part is important.
0:01:32 To feel lonely is to yearn for connection and company.
0:01:34 If you don’t wanna connect with someone else,
0:01:38 you’re alone, but you’re not lonely.
0:01:40 Here’s a question we haven’t really asked
0:01:43 in these conversations about loneliness.
0:01:45 Are Americans alone because they don’t have anywhere to go
0:01:47 or they don’t have anyone to go with?
0:01:51 Or are they choosing to be alone?
0:01:53 And if they’re choosing to be alone,
0:01:56 even when we know that’s not good for us,
0:01:58 why are they doing this?
0:02:03 And what does it mean long-term for society?
0:02:08 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Great Area.
0:02:16 Today’s guest is Derek Thompson.
0:02:18 Derek is a staff writer at The Atlantic
0:02:20 and the author of a recent essay called
0:02:23 The Antisocial Century.
0:02:25 The piece challenges the conventional wisdom
0:02:26 around loneliness.
0:02:30 Derek gathers a ton of data, much of it alarming,
0:02:32 and concludes that we’ve mostly
0:02:35 misunderstood the situation here.
0:02:38 It’s not that we’ve become lonely.
0:02:41 It’s that we’ve started to prefer solitude.
0:02:43 We’ve become antisocial,
0:02:45 and that’s a very different kind of problem.
0:02:48 One, we absolutely have to solve as a country.
0:02:51 So I invited Derek on the show
0:02:53 to talk about what he discovered
0:02:56 and why he thinks self-imposed solitude
0:02:58 might just be the most important social fact
0:03:00 of the 21st century in America.
0:03:16 Derek Thompson, welcome back to the show.
0:03:17 It’s great to be here.
0:03:18 Thank you, Sean.
0:03:20 Everyone’s been saying for years now
0:03:24 that we have a loneliness epidemic,
0:03:26 and you think that’s not quite right.
0:03:29 So tell me what’s actually going on.
0:03:32 So it’s probably worth defining loneliness.
0:03:35 Loneliness as the sociologist that I talked to,
0:03:38 in particular NYU’s Eric Kleinberg,
0:03:40 is a very healthy thing to feel.
0:03:43 Loneliness is the felt gap
0:03:45 between the social connection that you have
0:03:47 and the social connection that you want.
0:03:50 And so when I’m home working a lot,
0:03:51 taking care of my kid,
0:03:53 not hanging out with friends that’s at my house,
0:03:55 sometimes I feel lonely,
0:03:57 and that inspires me to reach out to my friends
0:03:59 and hang out with them, get a drink.
0:04:02 But something else, I think,
0:04:05 is the social crisis of this moment
0:04:09 and this century for America, and that’s social isolation.
0:04:13 If you’re spending more and more time alone,
0:04:15 year after year after year,
0:04:19 and you are choosing to socially isolate yourself,
0:04:21 and you’re even, in many cases,
0:04:23 as I see sometimes happening on TikTok,
0:04:27 celebrating when your friends cancel plans
0:04:30 because it means you can add another heaping scoop
0:04:33 of a lone time on top of the historic amounts
0:04:35 of a lone time they’re already spending,
0:04:39 well, my feeling is that’s not loneliness.
0:04:44 That is a choice to socially isolate more and more,
0:04:46 month after month, year after year,
0:04:48 even decade after decade.
0:04:50 This is not loneliness,
0:04:52 and the last thing I would say is,
0:04:56 if you choose to see this moment as a loneliness epidemic,
0:05:00 you have a research problem, you have an empirical problem,
0:05:04 because right now, two things are true from the numbers.
0:05:07 Number one, we spend a historic amount of time alone,
0:05:10 and number two, it doesn’t seem like for many Americans,
0:05:14 loneliness is spiking at the same rate
0:05:16 that social isolation is spiking.
0:05:20 What we have is not a crisis of loneliness
0:05:22 as it is broadly understood,
0:05:25 but actually something much more gnarly,
0:05:27 something much more toxic,
0:05:30 and actually something much stranger
0:05:32 than a mere crisis of loneliness.
0:05:34 – Well, just so we have a point of reference,
0:05:36 give me a sobering stat here.
0:05:41 How much more time are people spending alone,
0:05:43 relative to how much time we used to spend alone
0:05:45 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago?
0:05:48 – So between the 1960s and the 1990s,
0:05:53 Americans were withdrawing from all kinds of associations
0:05:57 and clubs, this was the thesis of and point
0:05:59 of Robert Putnam’s book, “Bowling Alone.”
0:06:01 But in the last 25 years,
0:06:04 the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been running a survey
0:06:06 called the American Time Use Survey,
0:06:07 which asks Americans a bunch of questions
0:06:09 about how they spend their week.
0:06:11 How much time do you spend sleeping?
0:06:13 How much time do you spend eating dinner?
0:06:14 And they also ask how much time do you spend
0:06:16 in face-to-face socializing?
0:06:18 And the amount of time that all Americans spend,
0:06:21 the average American spends in face-to-face socializing
0:06:24 is declined by over 20% in the last 25 years.
0:06:28 For some groups, like black men and young people overall,
0:06:31 the decline is more like 40%,
0:06:34 negative 40% face-to-face socializing
0:06:36 over the last 20, 25 years.
0:06:40 So that brings us to a point now where there is no period
0:06:42 in modern historical record,
0:06:45 going back to the mid-1960s at least,
0:06:48 and probably going back decades before then,
0:06:52 that we have spent so much time by ourselves.
0:06:56 – And how does this break down across class lines?
0:07:00 Are we seeing the same trends across class lines?
0:07:02 Or are there noteworthy differences?
0:07:05 And if there are, why might that be?
0:07:07 – So what I would say is,
0:07:09 as a matter of sort of coming to a firm answer
0:07:12 to this question, is this an income-based phenomenon?
0:07:16 Is maybe, but because the best data we have,
0:07:18 it doesn’t have very large sample sizes
0:07:20 for the richest and poorest Americans,
0:07:23 it’s hard to say that this is a fact,
0:07:26 the same way we can say that it’s a fact
0:07:28 that for all Americans,
0:07:31 face-to-face socializing is at its lowest point
0:07:34 in 25 years or maybe 60, 100 years,
0:07:36 and a lone time is at its highest.
0:07:37 – Well, I just wanted to ask,
0:07:39 because we have a tendency to talk about
0:07:43 upper-class problems as though they are universal problems,
0:07:46 and this ain’t that, whatever else it is, it’s not that.
0:07:49 – I think it’s really important to say that,
0:07:50 you’re exactly right,
0:07:52 especially I would say in this space,
0:07:54 in talking about the way we live today,
0:07:56 the problems of modernity,
0:07:59 always very difficult to avoid the temptation
0:08:01 to talk about the upper middle class
0:08:03 as if they are representative of the entire country.
0:08:07 So when we talk about the problems of intensive parenting
0:08:11 or anxiety, college-based anxiety for kids,
0:08:14 a lot of times those fears are about
0:08:17 a large part of the country that is not all of the country.
0:08:19 In this case, however,
0:08:22 you will find that face-to-face socializing
0:08:24 is declining for men and for women,
0:08:26 for literally every age cohort,
0:08:28 the young and the old,
0:08:30 for white and black and Hispanic Americans,
0:08:32 for the bottom quartile, for the top quartile,
0:08:35 for married Americans, for unmarried Americans,
0:08:38 for college graduates, for non-high school graduates,
0:08:42 this is something that is absolutely happening to everybody.
0:08:44 And so therefore, if you want to understand it,
0:08:49 I think we need to look for causes
0:08:52 that are more universal than income inequality.
0:08:56 – So why was the first half of the 20th century so social?
0:08:59 What changed around the ’70s?
0:09:01 And why is the answer clearly neoliberalism?
0:09:03 – And why is the answer clearly
0:09:05 the election of Ronald Reagan?
0:09:08 So the simplest way to summarize what happened
0:09:11 is that there was a revolution of individualism
0:09:13 that struck this country
0:09:15 and affected it at many different levels,
0:09:18 at the political economy level, at the social level,
0:09:23 and it ended, as you said, a very social century.
0:09:28 Between the 1910s and the 1950s and early ’60s, certainly,
0:09:33 just about every measure of sociality in this country
0:09:35 was rising.
0:09:39 The marriage rate spiked in the middle of the 20th century.
0:09:43 Fertility rates spiked in an incredibly unusual way.
0:09:46 You had a surge in unionization rates.
0:09:50 You had more associations created, more clubs created.
0:09:53 So by so many different measures,
0:09:57 socializing was surging in the middle of the 20th century,
0:09:58 and that ended.
0:10:02 And I think that among many, many things,
0:10:03 two things that ended it
0:10:07 were the two most important technologies of the 20th century.
0:10:11 The first was the car that allowed us to privatize our lives
0:10:12 and move away from other people.
0:10:14 And the second was the television,
0:10:17 which allowed us to privatize our leisure time
0:10:19 so that we could spend it alone looking at a screen
0:10:22 and not necessarily spend it throwing a dinner party.
0:10:24 – Well, you talk to a psychologist,
0:10:26 you talk to a sociologist.
0:10:29 Why do we choose solitude?
0:10:32 If we know it, it won’t make us happy in the long term.
0:10:33 And I say we know not just in the sense
0:10:35 that there’s a lot of research telling us so,
0:10:39 but we all pretty much know this from lived experience,
0:10:42 as tempting as it is to stay home and Netflix or whatever.
0:10:45 Most of the time we all feel better
0:10:47 once we actually get out of the house
0:10:49 and spend time with friends.
0:10:53 So what’s behind this pathological behavior?
0:10:55 – I think it’s a very good and a very complex question.
0:10:57 And the first thing I’d say is that
0:11:01 we do things that we know aren’t good for us all the time.
0:11:02 You know, this is the whole problem with nutrition,
0:11:03 is that you have people coming up
0:11:05 with ever more complicated ways
0:11:06 of explaining what’s good for us,
0:11:09 but you inject anybody in the world with truth serum
0:11:11 and you say, you know, is the Twixbar good for you?
0:11:13 Is going to the gym good for you?
0:11:15 Is celery good for you?
0:11:17 Everyone knows the answers to these questions,
0:11:21 so the problem is actualizing the answers in your behavior
0:11:23 because we’re cross-purpose machines
0:11:25 and the relevant cross-pressure
0:11:30 is that we are dopamine-seeking creatures
0:11:34 and we’re also interpersonal creatures, we’re social animals.
0:11:36 And sometimes those drives
0:11:39 are totally a cross-purpose with each other
0:11:42 that seeking dopamine in the most efficient way
0:11:45 necessarily means not spending time around people, right?
0:11:48 Like if I were trying, for example,
0:11:51 to simply solicit as much dopamine as possible
0:11:55 and be surrounded by maximal stimulative novelty
0:11:57 as much as possible on a minute-to-minute basis,
0:11:59 what would I do?
0:12:01 I would never leave my house.
0:12:03 Our homes are so much more comfortable than they used to be.
0:12:05 They’re so much more diverting than they used to be
0:12:07 with their television sets and their smartphones
0:12:12 and their speaker systems and their streaming and their cable.
0:12:15 There’s so much that is interesting that we can do
0:12:17 just staying at home.
0:12:19 And so I think many people just do.
0:12:21 Now, I’m not here to say the television’s evil.
0:12:25 I am trying to say that the invention of television
0:12:29 was akin to the discovery of this element of human nature
0:12:31 that fundamentally wants to turn ourselves
0:12:33 into passive audience members.
0:12:35 And so we invented this technology
0:12:38 that seemed to elicit from us this aspect of ourselves
0:12:41 that just wants to lie back, open our eyes
0:12:45 and be awash in novel visual stimuli.
0:12:48 And I think that, unfortunately, when you ask,
0:12:49 why don’t we just leave the house?
0:12:51 Why don’t we just hang out with people more?
0:12:54 I think that we are complex creatures
0:12:56 and that this is a really relevant cross-purpose for us.
0:12:59 – Well, I mean, having an economy increasingly built
0:13:03 on personal convenience, it’s just such a huge part of this.
0:13:04 You know what I mean?
0:13:06 From streaming services to online shopping,
0:13:09 I mean, everything is curated, everything’s on demand,
0:13:10 everything is easy.
0:13:12 If you have a phone and Wi-Fi,
0:13:15 you don’t have to leave the house for damn near anything.
0:13:17 I mean, that kind of economic order
0:13:20 has to condition us psychologically
0:13:23 to want to avoid the messiness
0:13:27 and the unpredictability of the actual world.
0:13:28 – It’s a beautifully made point
0:13:31 and I wanna be really, really clear about my reaction to it.
0:13:33 The on-demand economy is good.
0:13:35 It’s good for busy families.
0:13:37 It’s good for the disabled.
0:13:38 It’s good for the elderly.
0:13:41 It’s good for the chronically sick.
0:13:45 The on-demand economy is an absolute economic mitzvah.
0:13:50 But life is complicated and progress has trade-offs.
0:13:52 The industrial revolution was good.
0:13:57 It allowed us to be rich enough to take a world
0:14:00 where the average person had a 50/50 shot
0:14:03 of living to see their 16th birthday
0:14:06 into a world where the vast majority of people
0:14:09 have a very, very good chance to turn 16.
0:14:12 But we also know that the industrialized economy
0:14:14 had costs and trade-offs.
0:14:17 One of them being that it took us a while
0:14:21 to recognize that industrialization was coughing up
0:14:24 all of this pollution that was choking the biosphere.
0:14:26 It took us a while to realize the cost of progress.
0:14:29 And it took us a while to recognize
0:14:33 what the cost of this economic mitzvah was.
0:14:35 And in the same way, I think a world of entertainment
0:14:38 and a world of on-demand convenience
0:14:41 is wonderful in many, many ways.
0:14:43 It just takes us a while to figure out
0:14:45 what the costs of that progress are.
0:14:46 And what I’m trying to do in this piece
0:14:49 is to hold up a mirror to Americans’ behavior
0:14:51 and say, this is the receipt.
0:14:53 What you bought is an economy
0:14:57 of extraordinary dopaminergic reward systems.
0:14:59 And it’s helped your life in many ways
0:15:01 and made life more fun in many ways.
0:15:04 But here’s part of the cost.
0:15:07 Here’s the receipt that you haven’t seen
0:15:09 for the progress that you’ve purchased.
0:15:11 And it’s not so much to say
0:15:13 that I want to move progress back.
0:15:15 I think we just need to find a way to adapt to it.
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0:19:05 (upbeat music)
0:19:26 – Did you ever see the Adam Curtis documentary,
0:19:27 The Century of Self?
0:19:31 He’s really about the birth of modern public relations
0:19:32 and consumer society.
0:19:35 And The Century of Self, the way he uses it
0:19:38 isn’t quite solitude or anti-social,
0:19:39 but it’s part of the same story.
0:19:44 I mean, there’s this shift from a needs-based culture
0:19:46 to a desires-based culture.
0:19:49 And more of life becomes about
0:19:51 eliminating inconvenience and friction.
0:19:53 And that ultimately leads to eliminating other people
0:19:57 because other people involve inconvenience and friction.
0:20:00 – It reminds me of what the University of Chicago
0:20:02 psychologist Nick Epley said to me.
0:20:06 And he talks about the ways in which
0:20:09 there’s an expectations gap that we suffer from
0:20:11 or several expectations gaps
0:20:14 that we suffer from in our social relations.
0:20:19 And one is that often we withhold ourselves
0:20:23 from talking to strangers
0:20:25 or asking people to hang out with us
0:20:28 because we’re afraid that we might be boring to them.
0:20:31 We’re afraid that we might disappoint ourselves
0:20:33 by being in that conversation
0:20:36 and seeing other people react negatively to us.
0:20:39 And he points out that a lot of human interaction
0:20:41 is instead governed by a principle of reciprocity
0:20:43 such that when you’re nice to someone
0:20:44 they tend to be nice back.
0:20:47 When you initiate a little bit of conversation
0:20:49 they tend to talk back to you.
0:20:53 And so there’s an expectations gap between the withdrawal
0:20:56 that we sometimes conduct ourselves with
0:20:58 and the social interaction
0:21:00 that would actually make us much more happy
0:21:02 in the next 15 minutes of life.
0:21:05 And the second gap that he talks about
0:21:06 that I think is really profound
0:21:10 is an expectations gap about depth of conversation.
0:21:13 And I think that people,
0:21:15 they wanna be asked deep questions.
0:21:18 They like talking about things that matter to them.
0:21:23 And often we’re afraid of initiating
0:21:24 deep conversations with people.
0:21:28 So I think that one of these just really wonderful points
0:21:33 is that despite the fact that we’re social animals
0:21:38 we live under this patina of illusion about asociality
0:21:43 where we withhold deep and meaningful conversations
0:21:45 both from ourselves and the people around us
0:21:47 because we have false expectations
0:21:48 about how those conversations are going to go.
0:21:51 – Well, speaking of connections and depth of connections
0:21:55 or lack thereof, it leads to I think a very important part
0:21:57 of the piece where you’re talking about these
0:22:03 three rings of connection, inner, middle and outer
0:22:08 and how this middle ring, which is key to social cohesion,
0:22:09 that’s disappearing.
0:22:10 Can you say a bit about that?
0:22:13 ‘Cause it seems really, really important.
0:22:15 – So Mark Dunkelman, who’s an author and a researcher
0:22:18 at Brown University, when I called him
0:22:20 to talk about this piece,
0:22:23 what he said was that ironically, our digital devices
0:22:26 which might seem like they alienate us from each other
0:22:28 actually make some relationships much closer
0:22:30 than they used to be.
0:22:33 For example, at the inner ring of family,
0:22:36 it is possible for families to be connected
0:22:37 throughout the day, throughout the week
0:22:40 in ways that were totally impossible 50 years ago.
0:22:44 I mean, the amount of times per day that I text my wife
0:22:47 or my wife texts me is just enormous.
0:22:51 We’re just in constant contact and constant communication.
0:22:54 He said at one point, if my daughter buys a Butterfinger
0:22:56 from the CVS, I get a notification on my phone
0:22:59 which intensive parenting, take it or leave it,
0:23:01 like at least it’s a connection
0:23:04 that you could not imagine happening 30 years ago.
0:23:08 And then so at the inner ring, you have lots of intimacy.
0:23:11 And then there’s an outer ring that he describes,
0:23:13 which is you can sort of think of it as tribe,
0:23:15 people who share your affinities.
0:23:17 So if you’re a Cincinnati Bengals fan
0:23:20 or if you’re a New Orleans Saints fan, for example,
0:23:25 for the NFL, you can follow the world of Saints fans
0:23:28 and be in touch with them in a way
0:23:31 that was absolutely impossible 40 years ago.
0:23:33 Mark talks about the fact that he lives in Providence,
0:23:35 Rhode Island and he’s texting the beat reporters
0:23:38 from Cincinnati, Ohio about how the Bengals
0:23:39 should change their offense.
0:23:42 I mean, that is a connection that you could just never have
0:23:45 before the rise of group chats and acts and things like that.
0:23:47 So what he says is you sort of in a weird way
0:23:50 have this inner ring of family and friends
0:23:52 which can be strengthened by digital communications.
0:23:54 And this outer ring of tribe,
0:23:56 which can be strengthened by digital communications
0:23:59 because it puts us in touch with the crowd,
0:24:01 but there’s an inner ring that atrophies
0:24:03 and that inner ring he calls the village.
0:24:05 And the village is the people that live next to us.
0:24:06 It’s the people that we live around.
0:24:09 It’s the people that we might see at grocery stores
0:24:10 or form clubs with.
0:24:11 It’s people we’re not related to
0:24:14 and that don’t necessarily share our opinion
0:24:15 about everything in the world.
0:24:16 And that’s what makes it so important
0:24:19 because if the inner ring teaches us love
0:24:23 and the outer ring teaches us loyalty or ideology,
0:24:25 it’s that middle ring that teaches us tolerance.
0:24:28 It requires tolerance to be in the world
0:24:30 of people you’re not related to
0:24:32 who might disagree with you about things.
0:24:34 And in a world with that middle ring is atrophying,
0:24:36 you would predict if you knew nothing else about the world
0:24:39 that our politics would become a lot less tolerant.
0:24:41 There’s a section in the piece titled
0:24:44 This Is Your Politics on Solitude.
0:24:49 And you make the case that this drift towards solitude
0:24:52 is really rewiring our civic and political identity.
0:24:54 Is this how it’s rewiring it?
0:24:59 That it’s basically teaching us to love the people we love
0:25:01 perhaps even more,
0:25:04 but also hate the people we don’t really know?
0:25:05 – I think it might be that.
0:25:07 You know, the two implications that I draw from the piece
0:25:09 are one that you would expect
0:25:13 the political winners of an age of solitude
0:25:16 to exist in that sort of all tribe, no village level.
0:25:19 They’d be great at stoking out animosity
0:25:22 and they would be almost celebratory
0:25:23 of their lack of tolerance.
0:25:25 And certainly I think both those things
0:25:27 describe Donald Trump.
0:25:29 The second is that the conventional wisdom used to be
0:25:31 that all politics is local,
0:25:33 that people vote based on issues
0:25:34 that are local to the village.
0:25:37 But in a world with a village atrophies
0:25:41 and a more global sense of reality concretizes,
0:25:45 it’s not that all politics is local,
0:25:49 it’s that all politics is focal with an F.
0:25:52 All politics is what national media gets us to focus on
0:25:55 whether or not it’s relevant to our local interests.
0:25:58 So one example from the right,
0:26:00 and then maybe one example from the left.
0:26:00 Some of them from the right,
0:26:02 and this anecdote didn’t make it in the final piece,
0:26:04 but are the Russell Hawks child,
0:26:08 who’s a sociologist in California just published a book
0:26:10 and I was emailing her about that book
0:26:11 as I was writing this piece.
0:26:16 And she pointed out that there are folks in rural Kentucky
0:26:18 where she was doing some of her ethnography
0:26:20 where you walk into their trailer homes,
0:26:22 you walk into their houses and the television
0:26:24 is just the biggest piece of furniture in the house.
0:26:28 And for them, the most important issue in the 2024 election
0:26:30 was the rise of illegal immigration
0:26:33 and the hordes of migrants crossing the border.
0:26:35 This was incredibly alarming to them.
0:26:38 And you look at these census reports of rural Kentucky
0:26:39 and these are some of the places
0:26:44 with the smallest share of immigrants in the country.
0:26:47 So in a world where all politics is local,
0:26:51 rural Kentucky does not care about immigration politics
0:26:54 at all, but in a world where all politics is focal,
0:26:56 they’re paying attention to the same news stories
0:26:59 that a conservative living in downtown Chicago
0:27:02 or New York or San Francisco is paying attention to.
0:27:04 And that struck me as very interesting.
0:27:06 And the point that I made about the left
0:27:08 which got me into trouble among sunk people
0:27:11 is that I think that progressives
0:27:14 have comforted themselves with the understanding
0:27:18 that Trump is a kind of political alien
0:27:23 who is inexplicable to anyone who shares progressive values.
0:27:26 But it’s led them to simply not understand Trump
0:27:29 as a political phenomenon in a way
0:27:30 that I think has hurt the left
0:27:33 by not allowing them to take seriously
0:27:34 some of the values that underlie
0:27:37 this incredibly successful right populist movement.
0:27:40 The left would be better at understanding itself
0:27:43 which is to say the country that it lives in
0:27:47 if we spent more time around other people
0:27:49 who lived in our so-called village.
0:27:50 – I never thought of the village
0:27:52 as a moderating mechanism in that way,
0:27:54 but it makes all the sense in the world.
0:27:58 The lack of engagement, the lack of understanding
0:28:01 that has been brewing because of this disconnection
0:28:05 has just been toxic to our politics.
0:28:08 And I don’t know, I’m just whining out loud here.
0:28:11 – No, I accept your whining in the spirit
0:28:12 in which it’s intended, I think.
0:28:16 I’m not particularly optimistic about
0:28:21 Americans agreeing with each other.
0:28:23 And one thing that I don’t want to happen
0:28:25 and that I can see happening
0:28:29 is a world where people fall so out of touch
0:28:31 with where they live and the issues
0:28:35 that are material to their communities
0:28:37 that they vote for people that are giving them something
0:28:40 that’s bad for them and bad for their neighbors
0:28:43 who agree and disagree with whoever’s in the White House.
0:28:46 So I think there are material consequences to a world
0:28:49 where voters are fundamentally disconnected
0:28:51 from their local material realities.
0:28:56 How does the antisocial turn, especially among men,
0:28:59 lead to what you call chaos politics?
0:29:03 I think even use the phrase a grotesque style of politics.
0:29:06 – Yeah, it’s a term of art from a Danish researcher,
0:29:08 a Danish political scientist named Michael Bank Peterson
0:29:10 called Need for Chaos.
0:29:12 And he’s done a series of studies
0:29:14 with some of his co-researchers
0:29:15 and they’ve essentially felt
0:29:16 that there’s a certain demographic
0:29:21 that responds very positively to conspiracy theories
0:29:25 about any establishment politician left or right.
0:29:28 And they tend to agree with statements like,
0:29:30 I don’t believe in the political process,
0:29:32 I just want to see everything burned down.
0:29:33 And he calls them Need for Chaos
0:29:37 because his theory is that this is a cohort of the electorate
0:29:40 that is essentially given up on institutions
0:29:41 and establishment processes.
0:29:45 And they see politics at a distance
0:29:48 as a kind of, as a piece of entertainment
0:29:51 where the most destruction visited
0:29:53 on existing institutions, the better.
0:29:57 And while certainly it sounds like this movement
0:29:59 would lean far right, there are elements of the left
0:30:02 that he sees associated with it as well.
0:30:05 And what he found and the reason that I included
0:30:08 his findings in my piece is that one of the things
0:30:10 that correlates most highly with Need for Chaos
0:30:13 is self-described self-isolation.
0:30:15 And he says, these people aren’t seeking out friendships
0:30:19 the way that someone might if they were lonely
0:30:22 in a typical way, that is seeking out a friend
0:30:24 because you feel that gap between felt
0:30:26 and desired social connection.
0:30:31 Rather, they take stock of their own social isolation
0:30:34 and they seek to remedy it by going online
0:30:36 and seeking power in some way,
0:30:40 typically by joining some online horde
0:30:42 trying to tear down some establishment
0:30:45 or criticize some institution.
0:30:47 (upbeat music)
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0:33:07 (upbeat music)
0:33:20 – So what is a different pass we can go down at this point?
0:33:22 I mean, if the antisocial trend continues,
0:33:25 where does that leave us?
0:33:30 If we course correct, what might that look like?
0:33:35 – So should we do gate to hell first,
0:33:38 then gate to heaven so we can end in a happy note?
0:33:40 – Yeah, let’s lead with gate to hell.
0:33:41 – Okay, good.
0:33:47 I can’t imagine a world where artificial intelligence
0:33:49 continues to advance at the rate it’s advancing
0:33:53 and it not meaningfully inflecting this space.
0:33:53 – How so?
0:33:57 – We already see that if there was a big article
0:33:58 in the New York Times just a few days ago
0:34:01 about people falling in love with chat GPT
0:34:03 and having deep personal relationships
0:34:07 with a genitive AI software
0:34:09 whose guts live in some data center
0:34:12 in the Dallas quarter of Virginia.
0:34:15 That’s weird, but it’s gonna get less weird
0:34:17 because it’s become more common.
0:34:20 Jason Fagone, who’s a journalist who I spoke to
0:34:23 is writing a book about people’s relationship
0:34:26 with AI companions and the stories that he told me,
0:34:27 some of which I reported in the piece
0:34:28 and some of which were off the record
0:34:30 were just absolutely extraordinary.
0:34:33 I mean, mothers with families married to a man
0:34:37 but who feels bisexual and has a engaged emotional
0:34:41 relationship with an AI that identifies as a woman.
0:34:46 Men who having lost a girlfriend or fiance
0:34:50 creating avatars of their lost loves out of silicon
0:34:55 and having ongoing relationships with chat GPT
0:34:59 or with other AI companions that essentially mimic
0:35:03 the emotional life of their ex.
0:35:04 This is all gonna get more common
0:35:05 and it’s all gonna get weirder
0:35:07 because the technology is going to improve.
0:35:10 And also because these technologies
0:35:12 are gonna become more multimodal,
0:35:14 which is I guess maybe just a fancy way of saying
0:35:16 they’re gonna get better at talking to us,
0:35:18 literally talking to us and not just texting us back.
0:35:20 And in some ways people are gonna find
0:35:22 that silicon-based friendships and relationships
0:35:25 are just richer than carbon-based relationships
0:35:26 to put things so much frequently.
0:35:30 So I think this is coming and I think we need to see
0:35:33 it clearly for the threat that it could have
0:35:35 to the way that humans deal with each other
0:35:37 in the physical world.
0:35:40 – You know, I have to say, I think this is where some
0:35:44 of those old curmudgeonly cultural critics
0:35:46 like Christopher Lash, you know,
0:35:48 who famously wrote the culture of narcissism
0:35:53 are a little vindicated as you point out in the article,
0:35:56 you know, like one of the reasons we’re so prepared
0:35:59 for chatbot friendships is that we have come
0:36:02 to expect different things from our relationships.
0:36:07 And what a lot of us really want is a set of feelings.
0:36:09 We want validation, we want sympathy,
0:36:11 we want someone or something to make us feel
0:36:13 a certain way about ourselves.
0:36:16 That’s about self fulfillment.
0:36:21 That is kind of narcissism and it’s kind of where we are.
0:36:27 – Yeah, I mean, you know, this is maybe where we dust us
0:36:30 some of your favorite existentialist writers
0:36:32 and, you know, think about like what,
0:36:35 what, like phenomenologically,
0:36:38 what is friendship for the most part?
0:36:41 It’s a lot of spending time with people
0:36:44 in the physical world, hopefully,
0:36:48 but for a lot of people, it’s phone calls and it’s texts.
0:36:50 And it’s the feeling of, hey, I’m having an issue with work
0:36:52 or hey, I’m having an issue with my kid
0:36:54 or I’m having an issue with my relationship.
0:36:55 Hey, man, can we just like talk on the phone?
0:36:57 Can I just give you a call?
0:36:58 Can you just respond to a couple of texts
0:37:01 while we both watch the national championship game at home?
0:37:02 What’s happening there?
0:37:05 You’re picking up a piece of hardware
0:37:07 and you’re holding it to your ear
0:37:09 or you’re holding it in your palm
0:37:13 and you’re having a voice-based or text-based conversation
0:37:15 with an entity who is not there,
0:37:20 but an entity within which you entrust with love
0:37:24 and a host of complex feelings
0:37:27 that make it so that you want to spend time
0:37:32 with someone who is physically a ghost to you.
0:37:35 Well, like, you’re just talking to someone who isn’t there,
0:37:38 that you’ve decided to put trust in.
0:37:42 What’s phenomenologically so different than it being an AI?
0:37:44 – Hell, I probably have half a dozen friendships now
0:37:48 that exist solely through the exchange of funny memes
0:37:49 – Right. – on Instagram.
0:37:51 – And my point isn’t that my best friend
0:37:54 or your best friend is no different than an AI.
0:37:58 I want people to think capaciously
0:38:03 about the ways in which relationships with AI
0:38:06 won’t be weird to lots of people.
0:38:08 It’s weird to me.
0:38:10 I have no relationship with an artificial intelligence.
0:38:11 I’d be surprised if you did.
0:38:13 I’d certainly be surprised if my wife did,
0:38:17 but I don’t think that many people growing up in an age,
0:38:18 especially young people,
0:38:20 who, by the way, one of the first points made in the show,
0:38:23 spent a historic amount of time alone on their couches,
0:38:26 interacting with the world through their smartphone screen,
0:38:29 is it really going to be so strange for them
0:38:33 to have friends at school and friends on their phone?
0:38:36 I just don’t think it takes an enormous amount of imagination
0:38:37 to see how this is coming.
0:38:39 – Yeah, and I should say, I don’t think people today
0:38:42 are any more inherently narcissistic or self-involved
0:38:44 than people were really at any other point,
0:38:47 which is we have built a world optimized
0:38:48 to cater to these sorts of impulses.
0:38:50 – Oh, yeah, no, we’re no different.
0:38:51 I mean, biologically, how can we be different
0:38:54 than our grandfather’s, grandfather’s,
0:38:56 grandfather’s, grandfather.
0:38:57 We’re not.
0:38:58 Nothing’s changed about human biology.
0:39:01 Nothing’s changed about human biochemistry or very little.
0:39:03 Very little’s changed about human psychology.
0:39:05 We’re different because of technology,
0:39:07 and technology of different times
0:39:09 elicits different aspects of our personalities
0:39:12 because we’re incredibly cross-purposed.
0:39:18 We are designed to replicate our genome through history,
0:39:19 but that’s not all.
0:39:22 We’re designed to seek novel stimuli
0:39:24 and also designed to seek familiarity
0:39:26 and designed to seek safety and designed to seek adventure.
0:39:28 We’re so, so complex.
0:39:30 And we just live in a world right now
0:39:31 where I want people to recognize
0:39:35 just how much intelligence and treasure and talent
0:39:37 has been devoted to the job
0:39:40 of keeping us stimulated inside of our homes.
0:39:42 And what if we actually confronted
0:39:44 the costs of that world?
0:39:45 – When I asked you earlier
0:39:47 about the different ways forward,
0:39:51 you gave me the vision for the road to the gates to hell.
0:39:53 You didn’t give me the vision
0:39:55 of the path to the gates of heaven.
0:40:00 What’s the utopian optimistic sunny scenario?
0:40:05 – So the difference between science and culture
0:40:07 is that science tends to move linearly
0:40:10 and culture is a cycle.
0:40:11 Culture goes up and down.
0:40:13 Culture is backlash.
0:40:15 Culture is not just one thing accumulating
0:40:16 over and over and over again.
0:40:17 It’s backlash.
0:40:20 And a proper understanding of the antisocial century,
0:40:23 I think, will inspire its own backlash.
0:40:25 And we’ve backlashed before.
0:40:30 The late 19th century was a highly individualistic time.
0:40:34 And around the progressive era of the early 20th century,
0:40:37 up until the middle of the 1900s,
0:40:40 we had a social revolution in this country
0:40:43 that was inspired by religion and the social gospel,
0:40:45 that was inspired by a change of political economy,
0:40:48 the New Deal and the rise of collectivism,
0:40:52 and was reinforced by everything from behavior
0:40:55 and habits to technology.
0:40:59 It was a physical time, a time of physical togetherness.
0:41:00 And we can have it again.
0:41:02 People need to make new choices with their lives.
0:41:04 And those new choices need to be inspired
0:41:06 by a clear understanding of what we’ve done to ourselves
0:41:07 in the social century.
0:41:09 That year after year of being alone
0:41:10 is unacceptable.
0:41:14 And we can make choices as small as,
0:41:16 I’m gonna call my friend when I feel like I miss them.
0:41:18 I’m gonna spend more time outside of my house.
0:41:22 I’m gonna go out every single weekend absolutely for sure
0:41:25 to make sure that I prioritize a Friday or Saturday hangout.
0:41:27 The people who are in my life that I text
0:41:29 but don’t see physically,
0:41:31 I’m gonna make a point to see them.
0:41:34 I think that behaviors can cascade
0:41:36 and they can create norms.
0:41:40 And I think norms can cascade and they can create movements.
0:41:41 And this is a disease.
0:41:44 The anti-social century is a disease.
0:41:47 The cure is free and is well-known.
0:41:49 And that makes me optimistic.
0:41:53 – Is all of what you just said personally aspirational
0:41:56 or are you becoming the change you wanna see in the world?
0:41:58 Derek, after having thought this through so deeply
0:42:00 and reported this out,
0:42:03 are you changing the decisions you make day to day?
0:42:07 Are you out in the world engaging with more people?
0:42:08 – A thousand percent.
0:42:09 I’m an introvert.
0:42:11 I’m a couch potato, I’m a bookworm.
0:42:15 I love to stay home and read and think about things.
0:42:20 And writing this piece was a reckoning for my own behavior
0:42:25 and the ways that my own hour-to-hour
0:42:30 minute-to-minute preferences were affecting my life
0:42:31 and affecting my happiness.
0:42:34 As Nick Epley says,
0:42:36 you have a great conversation for 15 minutes
0:42:38 rather than be alone.
0:42:39 That doesn’t change your life.
0:42:42 It just changes the next 15 minutes.
0:42:46 But life is just one 15 minute block of time after another.
0:42:47 And the way we spend our minutes
0:42:49 is the way we spend our life.
0:42:54 And that understanding has affected me really deeply.
0:42:58 And I’m thinking so much more about how I spend more time
0:43:02 around people and how I reach out to people more.
0:43:04 That’s such a beautiful place to end.
0:43:05 We love your work around here.
0:43:07 So thanks for coming back on the show, man.
0:43:08 – Thank you, man.
0:43:09 Total pleasure to be here.
0:43:12 – All right.
0:43:13 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:43:16 I always love talking to Derek.
0:43:18 As always, we wanna know what you think.
0:43:23 So drop us the line at the gray area at vox.com and tell us.
0:43:25 And if you can spare just another few minutes,
0:43:27 please rate and review the podcast.
0:43:30 That stuff really helps our show grow.
0:43:33 (upbeat music)
0:43:37 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
0:43:41 edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:43:44 fact-checked by Anouk Dousseau,
0:43:46 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:43:49 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:43:50 Listen and subscribe.
0:43:53 This show is part of Vox.
0:43:55 Support Vox’s journalism by joining
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0:44:00 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:01:27 A friend of mine once told me that you are where your attention is. That line
0:01:31 always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all
0:01:37 make is also the most common one. We make it a thousand times a day, every day of
0:01:43 our lives. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay
0:01:52 attention to. One of the primary features of this age, the age of the internet
0:01:58 and smartphones and algorithmic feeds, is that our attention is everywhere and
0:02:02 nowhere at the same time because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of
0:02:07 distractions. Your phone’s ringing. Your Apple Watch is blinking. You got a ping
0:02:11 on Slack from a co-worker. You’re getting an email notification as you’re
0:02:18 sitting down for dinner. It’s always something. Which is probably why, if
0:02:22 you’re like me, it’s hard to remember the last time you watched an entire movie
0:02:26 or show without checking your phone. Hell, I barely made it through recording
0:02:33 this intro without checking my phone. This level of distraction is not an
0:02:38 accident. Our devices have engineered these impulses and a whole industry has
0:02:43 emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention in all these ways and then
0:02:49 selling it to the highest bidder. And their tools and tactics are getting better
0:02:58 every day. I’m Sean Elling and this is the Grey Area.
0:03:15 Today’s guest is Chris Hayes. You of course know Chris as the host of All In
0:03:23 with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. But he’s also a writer and has a new book out called
0:03:30 The Sirens Call. How attention became the world’s most endangered resource. The
0:03:36 discourse on attention and digital technology is crowded. So when we have
0:03:40 someone on the show to talk about it, it’s because we think they have something
0:03:49 new to offer. And Hayes certainly does. For him, the reordering of our social and
0:03:54 economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, in his words, a
0:04:01 transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism. It’s a bold
0:04:07 claim and I’m not sure Chris is right about that, but he might be. And in any
0:04:12 case, it’s a smart and ambitious book and I’m excited to have Chris back on the
0:04:19 show to talk about it. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. It’s great to
0:04:24 be back. I think you’re officially now a friend of the show. Oh, definitely. Yeah,
0:04:29 absolutely. And is it true? A lot of people are saying that the ideas for this
0:04:35 book were actually planted in our last conversation. Actually, yes. I mean, in
0:04:39 large part, I remember that conversation and also your work, your book, which I
0:04:45 read and really enjoyed. You opened the book with this famous image of Odessius
0:04:51 strapped to the mast of a ship by his own command in order to resist, shall we
0:04:58 say, certain temptations. Why start your story with that story? It’s one of the
0:05:01 most potent images in the entire Western canon and I’ve always been kind of
0:05:07 obsessed with it because it’s a metaphor for so many things. I mean, one, I
0:05:10 think we think of in terms of addiction. If you’ve ever been around to someone
0:05:13 trying to quit smoking and they like buy a pack and then they throw the, they
0:05:17 smoke one cigarette and they throw the pack out, right? As a sort of commitment
0:05:21 mechanism to bind myself to the mast to resist the temptation. So it’s such a
0:05:27 potent metaphor for so many things. But fundamentally, what, what started with, I
0:05:32 was just thinking about the word siren and how weird it was that we, there are
0:05:40 two meanings of that word. One, the, you know, from the Homeric epic, these
0:05:46 creatures, some people say they look like birds. Usually in movies, they’re
0:05:51 just like super hot women that seduce and warble you to death in the words of,
0:05:57 of Homer. And then the thing that’s on top of an ambulance or a cop car. Very
0:05:59 different things, but they’re both doing the same thing, which is they’re
0:06:04 compelling your attention. And that experience of having your attention
0:06:11 compelled and trying to manage that compulsion through, in the case of Odysseus,
0:06:17 extremely elaborate means is to me, the experience of contemporary life at all
0:06:21 times in some ways. And so that was sort of there almost from the beginning of
0:06:28 working on the book. How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the
0:06:34 more useful or practical ways to think about what it actually means in human
0:06:39 life? So there’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s
0:06:45 not really even a coherent a concept. And some of the critiques I take seriously in
0:06:50 some ways, I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it’s useful to use
0:06:55 in the everyday sense because I think it is naming something real. So one way to
0:07:00 think about it is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope, right?
0:07:04 There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about
0:07:07 attention quotes because it’s so good, which is withdrawal from certain things
0:07:11 to focus on others. If you think about what a stagehand of the spotlight does in
0:07:17 a Broadway play, like I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a
0:07:24 million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus
0:07:29 on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So
0:07:32 that’s how we think about attention, the ability to focus basically, willfully
0:07:37 focus. But then there’s other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious
0:07:41 attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Like right
0:07:46 now, if someone, I have a door to my studio right now, if someone busted in
0:07:52 here and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible.
0:07:57 Before I had any conscious will over it, before I made any decision, no matter how
0:08:04 disciplined I am, pre-consciously, a system would fire that would wrench my
0:08:09 attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary
0:08:13 attention, right? And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention,
0:08:18 which I think has its own kind of particular weight and depth, which is
0:08:22 it’s not just that we could pay attention to things in the world. We can pay
0:08:27 attention to people, and crucially, people can pay attention to us. We can be on
0:08:31 the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so
0:08:36 psychologically and socially and emotionally rich. Well, you call it the
0:08:39 substance of life, attention. I mean, is that just kind of another way of saying
0:08:43 it’s really everything or the most important thing, certainly one of the
0:08:48 most important things that we have? I think it’s the most important thing, and I
0:08:52 think to go back to William James, one of James’s philosophical preoccupations is
0:08:59 free will, whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him, attention is
0:09:05 indistinguishable from will, because that ability to focus is the essence of
0:09:14 will. And for me, if you’re not a religious person, so you don’t think that
0:09:20 the kind of meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power or some sort
0:09:28 of spiritual essence, in a secular sense, what we get is one life. And what we do
0:09:34 during that one life is we go around through the world and this one body and
0:09:39 brain we have, peering out at it, and from moment to moment paying attention to
0:09:46 this or that. And what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. And I
0:09:50 don’t think there’s any way to, it’s elemental in that sense. And I don’t think
0:09:54 there’s any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty.
0:10:00 We do sort of become what we pay attention to. And given how important it
0:10:04 is, it is kind of nuts. I’ve said this a bunch on the show, and I’ll probably say
0:10:09 it a bunch more, but it’s wild how thoughtlessly we give it away every day.
0:10:13 And I have no doubt, almost no doubt, that when we’re all at the end of our
0:10:17 lives, our biggest regret, certainly one of our biggest regrets, will be that we
0:10:22 gave our attention away to the wrong things. Yes. And I think there’s a
0:10:27 few reasons for that. One is this aspect of compelled attention, right? So we have
0:10:33 these biological inherences that are very deep that have produced a faculty
0:10:38 that’s there to like warn us of danger, right? Or to do all kinds of
0:10:43 things that may be evolutionarily necessary. So that faculty’s always there.
0:10:46 So we’re always being sort of drawn towards certain things, whether we kind
0:10:50 of consciously will it or not, you know, the lurid, the prurient, like this whole
0:10:53 category of things, we have a whole set of words to describe things that draw our
0:10:58 attention, even though we don’t necessarily want to go there. So we’re
0:11:02 always fighting that. And then there’s the fact that we have a hard time sitting
0:11:06 with our own thoughts. So there’s, there’s these sort of two sides of this
0:11:09 coin stuff is always trying to take our attention, but we’re always trying to put
0:11:14 it somewhere. So the and this is an experience of modernity, I think it’s
0:11:18 really interesting in research to the book, talking to reading anthropologists
0:11:25 who work with hunter gatherers, basically, people that live outside of fully
0:11:30 outside of what we call modernity, even outside of like, modernity circa, you
0:11:35 know, 1000 or the Roman Empire, right? They’re hunter gatherers. Don’t have words
0:11:40 for boredom. Don’t really talk about being bored, literally, like, in an
0:11:44 aboriginal indigenous tribe, like the word boredom has to be imported from,
0:11:48 from English to the wallpaper, because they don’t have word for it. So at some
0:11:54 level, this isn’t a elemental human inheritance, but it is constitutive
0:11:57 majority in some ways, being bored. So you’ve got these two things, there’s stuff
0:12:00 always trying to take our attention. And we’re then also always trying to get
0:12:04 it away, because if something isn’t taking it, talk about, you know, sitting at
0:12:11 the breakfast table as a 10 year old, just desperate to read something and
0:12:16 reading the back of the cereal box, like, please, don’t like, you must give me
0:12:21 something to, for my mind to chew on, or it’s gonna chew on itself. Yeah, there’s
0:12:25 that famous Pascal quote, right, that like, all of man’s problems stem from his
0:12:29 inability to sit quietly in a room. Exactly. It’s true. And it’s amazing to
0:12:34 encounter that quote now, right. I mean, he wrote that in 1650, I think,
0:12:38 somewhere around thereabouts. It’s funny because of how much we think of this as
0:12:45 a contemporary conundrum, right? Yeah. That it’s born of, of the smartphone. And
0:12:49 one of the things that I think was so enjoyable about working on this book and
0:12:54 thinking about it is that the conditions of contemporary life, which I think are
0:13:00 distinct in many ways, end up being, drawing an arrow to like the core of the
0:13:05 human conundrum. So you end up kind of wrestling with these deep things that
0:13:11 manifest in different ways under different social or technological conditions,
0:13:16 but fundamentally come back to like, living with our own conscious mind in
0:13:22 the world. Well, you make it really interesting. And as far as I know, novel
0:13:29 argument about the transition we’re experiencing now, comparing it to the
0:13:35 emergence of wage labor in the industrial revolution. And you make the case that
0:13:41 the modern attention economy does to attention something very similar to what
0:13:49 industrial capitalism did to labor. So lay that out for me. Yeah. So labor is the
0:13:55 product of a specific set of legal, market, social institutions that produce
0:14:01 this thing called a wage and a laborer, even though humans are doing stuff as soon
0:14:05 as they get to the planet, right? Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it exists
0:14:11 prior to that. Labor is turning to commodity. And there’s a bunch of weird
0:14:17 things about that. And Marx is, I’m not a Marxist personally, but I think his
0:14:24 observations here are quite prophetic. There’s something weird about it, you
0:14:28 know, like, first of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a
0:14:32 guy who runs a shoe shop who’s a cobbler, which exists prior to industrial
0:14:36 capitalism, where like, you’re making the, you’re making the whole shoe, you know,
0:14:39 first you’re putting, you’re cutting the sole, then you’re putting the upper on,
0:14:41 then you’re putting it together. In the end, you got this thing, it’s a shoe. And
0:14:45 now you own it, and then I sell it to you, Sean. You pay me money, now you own it.
0:14:50 Okay. You go from that to, I work in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where I just
0:14:56 stamp soles all day. I’m completely alienated, like, it is external to me the
0:15:02 shoes I make. I don’t actually own them in a market sense. And also, like, it’s a
0:15:08 much different experience of life. This thing has been taken from me in some
0:15:12 deep sense. Like, I don’t want to stamp soles all day. That’s, that’s like, that
0:15:17 kind of sucks. And maybe making shoes kind of sucks too, but it sucks in a more
0:15:23 interesting way. That’s more mine. So you have this extraction of this thing that’s
0:15:26 so essential to you. And not only extraction of things that are essential to you,
0:15:32 the other thing that’s weird about it is, in the grand scheme, labor in the
0:15:38 aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. So it’s incredibly
0:15:44 valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially
0:15:49 valueless. You’re like, this is all I got. I got this one body, and I go and stamp
0:15:53 soles 12 hours a day, and I get nothing for it. But that’s it. That’s, from my
0:15:57 perspective, that’s all I got, right? So all of these attributes are there for
0:16:05 attention, right? Attention pre-exists before its marketization, right? It now
0:16:10 has a value out in the world. It’s now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate,
0:16:17 it’s wildly valuable. Google, Meta, right? All their money comes from this. I
0:16:21 argue in the book, Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. So
0:16:26 the aggregate is wildly valuable. Individually, like, they’re paying tiny
0:16:30 slivers of sense for your attention in any moment. The amount of advertising you
0:16:34 get shoved in a day, the amount of content you get shoved in a day through
0:16:38 these algorithms, I don’t know, maybe it’s like cost someone somewhere in the
0:16:43 aggregate 20 bucks. But to you, it’s like, that’s all you got. That’s all you have is
0:16:47 what you’re paying attention to in any moment. So that same sense of extraction,
0:16:53 right? A thing in us, it gets named and commodified. A set of institutions take
0:16:58 it from us, assign it a market value. Carl Pogliani, who’s a sort of socialist
0:17:04 economic thinker, calls these fictitious commodities, right? Like, there are certain
0:17:08 commodities that exist in the market. And then there’s certain commodities like
0:17:14 labor, attention, Pogliani argues land. They’re not, like, made for market
0:17:18 production. They’re just out in the world. And yet they get turned into a
0:17:24 commodity. And that, and the, it requires a reorientation of the world, of all
0:17:30 social relations in some ways, to make them function as commodities. So attention
0:17:35 is the most important resource in the world now. And a key argument in the
0:17:41 book is that this is very different from previous eras built around resources
0:17:46 like land or capital or coal or whatever. What is the most significant
0:17:48 difference here for you?
0:17:52 The argument I make in the book is that what we think of as commonly referred to
0:17:56 as the attention age, and you could decide when you want to start that, the
0:18:03 1980s, the 1990s, the 70s, is truly the information age, that you have a switch
0:18:08 from physical market production to non-material market production, information
0:18:14 economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters, like you and I, right? All doing
0:18:19 these things that don’t amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And
0:18:23 in that world, we think of it as like information being the defining feature of
0:18:28 it. But information is limitless. Information, there’s just tons of
0:18:33 information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone’s
0:18:38 got to fight over that. And the more information there is, the lower the
0:18:41 barriers it is to get in front of someone’s face, the more competitive it
0:18:46 becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now as more and more of the
0:18:50 world moves from sort of industrial modes of production to post-industrial
0:18:54 modes of production, that it’s just necessarily the case that under those
0:18:59 conditions, the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the
0:19:01 most valuable is our attention.
0:19:08 And I love the point you make in the book that unlike coal or land, which is
0:19:12 outside of us, right, that this resource, attention, is in our minds. It’s in
0:19:17 our heads. And so that involves cracking into our minds, as you put it.
0:19:23 Yeah. Now it’s like traffic or air travel. Like, it’s a thing that we all
0:19:27 just experience as a bummer. Yeah. That you just talk to about like, doesn’t it
0:19:32 suck that, you know, we can’t pay attention. The phones are always going
0:19:32 off.
0:19:40 I am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us on the show and to
0:19:45 basically everybody in my life to their great annoyance. But I don’t have a
0:19:54 compelling response necessarily to the arguments that no one’s forced to stare
0:19:59 at their phones all day. We’re choosing this. We want this. And that’s not
0:20:04 exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so
0:20:09 exploitable. And even though we’re not being forced in the literal sense, I’m
0:20:13 also not sure we’re really free in any meaningful or recognizable way.
0:20:16 Well, I mean, I think that’s, I think that’s the deepest question, right? I
0:20:20 mean, I don’t think I can resolve the free will question. Come on. You’re
0:20:24 Christopher Hayes, guy, your podcast. Come on. But, but I, but I think you’re
0:20:29 right. I mean, I do think it implicates, it implicates our freedom in a profound
0:20:33 and deep way. I mean, when you get that notification on your phone, and again, I
0:20:36 want to be very upfront here. I was joking, my wife, that like, I feel like
0:20:39 I’ve written a recovery memoir and I’m still drinking, like people are going to
0:20:43 go to me and like, well, here’s how you do it. It’s like, I’m still fighting all
0:20:46 this stuff. I’m, you know, I’m not, I’m not great about it. So I don’t want
0:20:51 anyone to think that I’m on some elevated plane here. Like I’m in the muck with
0:20:55 everyone. Okay. When you get that notification on the screen time
0:21:01 notification, that like, this was your average screen time for the week. That
0:21:07 is a profound moment of like, who am I and what is my will? And we fail the test
0:21:13 every day. I’m like, what are you talking about with that number? That number is
0:21:18 shocking. The saddest part of my week. Who am I? The saddest part of my week,
0:21:22 every week on Sunday morning between nine and 10, I get the notification from my
0:21:27 phone about the average amount of screen time this week. And it’s horrifying.
0:21:32 It’s a horrifying number. But it’s a horrifying number also in that deep way
0:21:38 of like, what does it say about you? It’s wild. Again, I fuck it. I guess I’ll just
0:21:43 go full philosophy seminar here. But if we no longer have meaningful conscious
0:21:47 control over our attention, at some point, we do reach a level of passivity
0:21:52 that makes us more of an object than a person. Yes. And that has profound
0:21:56 implications for, for instance, democratic theory. Yes. I mean, and when, and
0:22:00 when you, and these are, it’s interesting because there was a round of these
0:22:05 conversations, particularly in the 20s and 30s, the sort of collision of mass
0:22:10 media, mass propaganda, mass advertising, and, and, and, and industrial
0:22:14 democracy all coming together. And these debates that happened during that period
0:22:19 of time, where everyone’s sort of trying to deal with this exact same question
0:22:26 that we’re now dealing with, which is, can people be subjects in a meaningful
0:22:31 sense under these conditions of like, mass media? Like if everyone is just
0:22:38 listening to the same propaganda all day on their radios, in what sense do we
0:22:42 have individual subjects with free wills making decisions about self
0:22:47 governance? You know, and this is the Lipman. This is Lipman’s big experience,
0:22:52 right? He’s the chief propagandist to get us into World War One. And he, and
0:22:55 again, I think it was much easier to manipulate public opinion then, to be
0:23:00 honest. But he does it, and he’s like, oh my God, that was way too easy. What
0:23:05 does it mean about democracy if you can just propagandize a whole population?
0:23:10 And we have a different set of questions now that aren’t about, in some
0:23:14 fascinating way or sort of the converse, right? That was all about massness. It
0:23:20 was like, everyone’s listening to the same thing. So it, it’s subsuming the
0:23:25 individual. And we’re watching fascism as this sort of, this sort of the mob
0:23:28 basically come to life. And the mob is all getting the same propaganda. The mob
0:23:34 is acting as one. We’re now seeing this like weird hyper individuation, which
0:23:39 like, no one seems, it sees exactly the same content all day. And what is that
0:23:45 radical individuation and sort of self selection do to the, you know, the
0:23:46 Democratic project?
0:23:51 I love that you went here because this is where I wanted to go. Well, this is
0:23:56 what what your books about, I mean, in a lot of ways it is. Yeah. And to the
0:24:00 point you’re making here and in the book, if we also lack the capacity to
0:24:05 pay attention together, what the hell does that mean for democracy? I mean,
0:24:09 democracy on some level is a shared culture. So if mass culture isn’t
0:24:15 possible anymore, is democracy? I mean, there’s a few things I say. One is, I
0:24:18 do want to be, I want to always in this book, and I try very hard to sort of
0:24:24 resist the temptation, dehistoricize everything. Like, you know, as I say in
0:24:28 the book, like, they didn’t need Facebook and Salem to like, start having
0:24:33 viral rumors that so and so was a witch. Like people, people are very good at
0:24:38 spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is like the core of the
0:24:43 human condition. And like, you know, that’s, that’s our lot. And, you know,
0:24:46 democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just
0:24:53 want to say that. But yes, I think there is a profound question about what
0:24:56 this is doing to our democracy. And particularly because, as I write in the
0:25:02 book, and this is really key and it’s something that I live every day,
0:25:11 attention is not a moral faculty. It doesn’t, it is distinct from what we
0:25:18 think is important. You know, Lipman in public opinion lines about this, he
0:25:22 wants about a lot of things. You know, he says, you know, he’s talking about the,
0:25:25 the, he’s talking about Versailles actually, right? So talking about the end
0:25:28 of the war and the reparations, he says, Americans have an incredible interest
0:25:33 in this, but they’re not interested in it. Like, it, we have a, he’s like the same
0:25:38 way the child has an enormous interest in his father’s business that he will
0:25:44 inherit, but is not interested in it. So this problem is old, but I think it’s
0:25:52 so sheer right now that overcoming the compelled, the sirens call the, the, the
0:25:57 sort of lowest common denominator, tabloid casino effect of everything in a
0:26:00 very competitive attention environment where we’re driven towards the lowest
0:26:06 common denominator, we’re driven towards what compels it, malforms the public
0:26:15 collective ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what
0:26:18 just sustains our attention from moment to moment, because what sustains our
0:26:22 attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we
0:26:26 all know that we, everyone understands that. And yet it’s very hard to
0:26:30 counteract sort of what’s being done to us through the technologies.
0:26:34 And of course, look, the problem isn’t just that we’re losing control over what
0:26:39 we pay attention to. We’re also losing the capacity to pay attention for more
0:26:43 than 10 seconds. You know, I mean, you talk about the, the Lincoln Douglas
0:26:47 debates in the book, we talk about it in ours as well, you know, and it really
0:26:51 is striking how much more sophisticated the language was back then.
0:26:52 It’s wild.
0:26:56 It’s wild. And people had the capacity to pay attention to it for so long. And
0:27:03 there’s just no question that more people think and speak in soundbites now,
0:27:05 because that’s how we consume information. I mean, maybe it started with
0:27:10 the telegraph and radio and TV, but it’s ratcheted up to a whole other level
0:27:14 with digital tech. We are a meme culture now. And if you live in a meme
0:27:18 culture, you’re going to have a meme politics in a citizenry that can only
0:27:21 communicate at the level of memes. I don’t know what you do with that.
0:27:24 Yes, no, you’re right. I mean, and yes, and your discussion, I think your
0:27:29 discussion on Lincoln Douglas actually was what sent me originally back to
0:27:33 read them. I also have no doubt that if those people attending the Lincoln
0:27:38 Douglas debates could go home and stream CSI Toledo or whatever, they would.
0:27:43 Dude, all I mean, go back and like people, that is, again, this is one
0:27:46 of these challenges with this whole discourse is like, what’s distinct?
0:27:52 What’s old? Like, go read, all Marx did is just fight with people online,
0:27:56 essentially, for what his day was. Like, that’s all he spent his whole life.
0:28:01 Like, he was a compulsive poster. He’s constantly having 15 different
0:28:06 factional fights. People always forget the conus manifesto is so funny.
0:28:09 It’s basically, it’s like 15 pages of like, you know, all this stuff.
0:28:12 People know workers of the world unite. And then there’s an addendum that’s
0:28:17 like why every other factional tendency in the broad anti-capitalist movement
0:28:21 is wrong, like goes through each one like this one’s wrong for this reasons.
0:28:24 And then there’s like, there’s like this like weird formation of kind of
0:28:28 monarchist right wing Catholics were also anti-Buschwan anti-capitalist.
0:28:31 They’re wrong for this reason. And literally, just like, it’s just like
0:28:36 a set of fights he’s picking with every different person.
0:28:41 So some of this, again, this is the thing that I say all the time.
0:28:47 Democracy is a technology for managing the conflict endemic to human affairs.
0:28:51 It’s the best technology we have come up with for managing conflict
0:28:56 endemic human affairs, but conflict is endemic to human affairs.
0:29:01 So that, that doesn’t go away. You know, people are going to be disagree
0:29:05 and fight with each other. And the question of how we manage that
0:29:09 is the question of how we collectively govern.
0:29:13 And I do think that like all of us having our brains stripped to the studs
0:29:16 is not helpful in that enterprise.
0:29:19 What a hot take there, Chris.
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0:32:42 You know, we’re talking about TV and, of course, we all know what you do.
0:32:45 You’re the host of a cable news show.
0:32:49 And you grapple with some of these questions in a really interesting way in the book.
0:32:56 You have a point of view as a journalist, as a TV host.
0:33:01 You want to inform and presumably persuade your fellow citizens,
0:33:03 but you also work in TV.
0:33:05 You work in the attention industry.
0:33:09 And the logic of that industry and the logic of that medium
0:33:11 is constantly imposing itself on you.
0:33:13 So how do you navigate this?
0:33:18 How do you play the attention game without compromising yourself?
0:33:19 It’s really hard.
0:33:23 It’s what I spend most of my life thinking about, most of my working life.
0:33:27 I mean, it was the rudest awakening when I moved to Primetime,
0:33:29 partly because the first TV show I had, which was on weekend mornings,
0:33:33 I just didn’t think about intentional imperatives at all.
0:33:37 And I was just like, wouldn’t it be cool to do a two-hour sort of like seminar
0:33:39 about 80 topics at a roundtable?
0:33:41 And then it did well.
0:33:42 It rated pretty well.
0:33:44 And it was like, oh, well, then.
0:33:46 And then I tried to do that at 8 p.m.
0:33:51 after people had just gotten home from like a day teaching third grade
0:33:55 or a shift in the hospice.
0:33:59 And it didn’t really work.
0:34:04 Partly because I think people just started to have different attentional capacity
0:34:08 at 8 p.m. on a weeknight than they do at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning.
0:34:10 Like, you’re pretty clear.
0:34:11 You can sit and think a little.
0:34:19 So I had to deal with those attentional imperatives and I always have to.
0:34:23 I mean, the thing about attention, I say, is that it’s mere.
0:34:25 It’s always necessary and never sufficient.
0:34:29 That’s what’s so fascinating about it.
0:34:31 You always need it to do anything else.
0:34:35 Like, in a relationship, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
0:34:37 Like, what you want in a relationship is love.
0:34:41 But you need attention to get love.
0:34:44 Like, you need your spouse to pay you attention and listen to you
0:34:46 and they need you to do the same to them.
0:34:49 But if all you’re doing is paying attention
0:34:51 and sometimes people get into toxic relationships
0:34:53 where they’re paying negative attention to each other
0:34:56 and they’re fighting with each other in this desperate attempt to get that,
0:34:58 it’s not enough.
0:35:02 So that’s the same about the conundrum I have, right?
0:35:05 It’s necessary, but not sufficient.
0:35:10 I need to keep people’s attention as a means to the end
0:35:14 of doing something that I think improves civic life
0:35:16 to be as highfalutinous possible.
0:35:21 When I first started in journalism, I was more of a,
0:35:24 I guess you would call it a take writer.
0:35:26 And I did some cable hits.
0:35:30 And it didn’t go well, in part because
0:35:34 I just didn’t understand how performative it was,
0:35:35 especially when you’re in the guest room.
0:35:39 You know, I wanted to be deliberate and make arguments,
0:35:43 but that’s hard to do when you’ve got a few minutes, maybe.
0:35:44 It’s entertainment, right?
0:35:47 And so you have to capture and hold attention.
0:35:51 And that incentivizes a certain style of communication.
0:35:53 So I kind of just stopped doing TV.
0:35:55 If I did it again, it would go better
0:35:57 because I understand that world now
0:35:59 and I can perform if I need to.
0:36:04 But I didn’t think it brought out the best version of me.
0:36:06 Yeah, I don’t know if it brings out the best version of me
0:36:07 either, to be totally honest.
0:36:10 I mean, one thing that you mentioned there that I think is
0:36:15 part of this discussion is just time and the speed.
0:36:15 That’s right.
0:36:19 People don’t realize how the pace at which they talk
0:36:20 and how compressed it is on television.
0:36:23 And actually, this is a thing I kind of love
0:36:24 about the kind of podcast resurgence.
0:36:28 And to my point about not everything is terrible,
0:36:29 like Lex Friedman is a great example.
0:36:33 He’s a podcaster who has a very, very popular podcast.
0:36:36 I listen to him sometimes, some of them I love,
0:36:38 some of them I’m not that crazy about.
0:36:42 But he’s very deliberate and he’s very slow
0:36:43 and it would never work on television.
0:36:47 And I love the fact that it does work in the medium
0:36:48 he’s working in.
0:36:50 But one thing about TV for people that I haven’t done it is,
0:36:53 if you’ve ever had the experience of going to a batting cage,
0:36:58 and putting it up to like 70, 80, 90, like professional,
0:37:01 and you’re standing there and the ball is just past you
0:37:04 before your muscle even twitch.
0:37:08 You’re just like, whoa, that ball got on me very fast.
0:37:12 That’s how TV feels when you, if you’re not used to it.
0:37:15 It’s just, it’s like trying to hit majorly pitching.
0:37:19 All of a sudden, everything is moving way faster
0:37:22 than it does in normal conversation, in normal thing.
0:37:26 In anything you do normally, it’s happening way, way, way, way faster.
0:37:31 I will say, and it’s not just because you’re a friend of the show.
0:37:33 I think you do it as well as it can be done.
0:37:35 Well, thanks, I appreciate that.
0:37:38 All right, let’s back up a second.
0:37:43 Because I do want to ask, and it’s something you ask in the book.
0:37:47 You point out, every time we have these periods of change,
0:37:51 we do have to pause and ask, what’s really new here?
0:37:52 What’s not?
0:37:55 What’s really harmful and what isn’t?
0:37:57 As you say, people freaked out about comic books, right?
0:38:00 And that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect.
0:38:04 But people also freaked out about cigarettes or worried about cigarettes,
0:38:06 which was clearly wise in retrospect.
0:38:12 So how do we know the attention age is cigarettes and not comic books?
0:38:14 It’s a great question.
0:38:18 I think there’s a few ways to answer this question.
0:38:25 So one, I think, is on the sort of Jonathan Haidt who wrote The Anxious Generation question of,
0:38:31 what does the empirical research say about what this is doing to us, right?
0:38:34 In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence.
0:38:35 This is terrible for our health.
0:38:39 Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 17th century,
0:38:43 16th century, who were like, boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do.
0:38:46 You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs.
0:38:48 I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
0:38:53 So I think, in some ways, the empirical question, while important, like,
0:38:55 is it making us more depressed?
0:39:01 A very difficult causal question to resolve, as all causal questions are.
0:39:08 Is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like,
0:39:09 are we, is this good?
0:39:10 Do we like this?
0:39:14 Like, is this forming my soul well?
0:39:16 And I don’t need data to tell me that.
0:39:19 That’s a human question.
0:39:25 That’s, in some ways, why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy.
0:39:30 You could tell me, you could come back and be like, actually, none of the empirical data,
0:39:33 like, it doesn’t cause more anxiety.
0:39:34 It doesn’t cause depression.
0:39:35 You know, fine.
0:39:37 That might be true.
0:39:43 But the bigger question is like, our experience of majority is an experience
0:39:47 of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation
0:39:50 that we then have to wrestle with as people.
0:39:55 And whatever the data says in the end, we all got to live in this world and in this environment,
0:40:00 which I think a lot of us, understandably, are not enjoying.
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0:40:59 It’s Today Explained.
0:41:02 I’m Noelle King with Miles Bryan.
0:41:04 Senior reporter and producer for the program.
0:41:04 Hello.
0:41:06 Hi, you went to public school, right, Miles?
0:41:08 Yes, go South High Tigers.
0:41:10 What do you remember about school lunch?
0:41:15 Oh, I remember sad lasagna, shrink-wrapped in little containers.
0:41:16 I remember avoiding it.
0:41:18 Do you remember the nugs, the chicken nuggets?
0:41:23 Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option.
0:41:24 I actually liked them.
0:41:28 But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed.
0:41:32 And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs.
0:41:36 It’s true, we are collectively very down on processed food right now,
0:41:40 none more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee,
0:41:42 Robert Floride Kennedy, Jr.
0:41:45 I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.
0:41:50 About half the school lunch program goes to processed food.
0:41:55 Hen the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches.
0:42:00 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:42:17 Well, the final chapter of the book is titled Reclaiming Our Minds.
0:42:20 So does that mean you have a blueprint for how to unfuck
0:42:23 ourselves in the world?
0:42:26 I need a 10-point, money-back guarantee plan.
0:42:27 I know, I’m bad at this, you know.
0:42:29 It’s the worst part of writing a book.
0:42:33 I know, this is my favorite last chapter I’ve written because I actually do think,
0:42:36 I do think there’s some concrete stuff here.
0:42:42 So the individual stuff, I think, you know, people are doing all the things they’re doing,
0:42:46 mindfulness, playing their phones in boxes, you know, schools, for instance.
0:42:50 I think like schools, it’s crazy to me that schools have only started taking kids’ phones
0:42:52 at class at the beginning, totally crazy.
0:42:53 Insane.
0:42:54 Insane, like what do we do?
0:43:00 Like also, have you ever watched, have you gone to a conference recently or any kind
0:43:02 of adult meeting where people can have their phones?
0:43:05 Like no one’s paying attention.
0:43:08 You just take them for all of that stuff.
0:43:15 So individually, like, you know, taking long walks without listening to a podcast and
0:43:19 letting, being along with your thoughts, like a cult trading, you’re forcing yourself to do that,
0:43:21 even if it’s 20 minutes a day.
0:43:26 I’m gonna do 20 minutes where I take a walk by myself and I think, and I just sit with
0:43:26 my own mind.
0:43:27 I really think that’s useful.
0:43:31 Not just like an individual thing.
0:43:33 And there’s a million different individual things.
0:43:41 Hobbies, habits, things we do that are neither work or the phone, being with other people.
0:43:44 Then there’s like social stuff.
0:43:47 And here’s where I do think the food stuff is really important and interesting.
0:43:53 A bunch of people in the 60s started, for specific ideological reasons, rebelling against
0:43:58 a whole bunch of aspects of industrial food production.
0:44:04 People that started opening up whole food stores, not like the brand name, but like whole grain
0:44:11 stores, health food stores, natural food stores, people starting green markets, farmer’s markets
0:44:15 in the early 1970s, Alice Waters and sort of farm to table stuff.
0:44:23 All this was like a rebellion against basically like the slop people were eating,
0:44:29 the Chef Boyardee, Jell-O-Mold, Peak TV Dinner, 1970s cuisine.
0:44:30 People were just like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:37 Like, there’s an empirical question about is that stuff good for you and how much is it
0:44:38 causing obesity?
0:44:41 But then there’s also a question like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:51 And that at the time seemed fringe and bespoke and avant-garde.
0:45:01 It was on to something and has become an entire alternate universe of food production.
0:45:05 Now some of it co-opted, you know, by big agra.
0:45:08 We haven’t like defeated corn syrup, for instance, in America.
0:45:11 But it is so different.
0:45:15 The food landscape, the way we think about food and talk about food
0:45:18 between now and like the 1970s.
0:45:21 And that is the product of activism.
0:45:24 It’s the product of like free spirits.
0:45:26 It’s the product of entrepreneurs.
0:45:29 I think you were going to see something coalesce around attention now.
0:45:35 And again, this is like all this stuff feels like kind of precious and bespoke.
0:45:41 But like jogging and fitness were precious and bespoke at some point.
0:45:43 Like jogging was like a weird avant-garde thing.
0:45:48 That like is a sort of silly thing.
0:45:51 George W. Bush lost his first congressional campaign when he moved back to Texas
0:45:53 because there was an ad by his opponent of him jogging.
0:45:55 He was like, “Get a load of this, dude.”
0:46:01 So I think there are going to be social movements.
0:46:06 And there’s some interesting folks around, you know,
0:46:09 the Struthers School for Radical Attention, which is here in New York.
0:46:11 You may have seen the name D. Graham Burnett.
0:46:15 He did podcasts with Azra Klein and he’s going to have a book about this.
0:46:20 And a whole bunch of people around, there’s like this sort of secret society
0:46:24 they have that was profiled in New Yorker, thinking about this,
0:46:27 rebelling against it in a very similar kind of back to the land way, right?
0:46:34 Like born of a kind of spiritual ideological set of principal commitments to like rebelling against this.
0:46:40 Well, as you point out, you know, in the 19th century, the labor movement
0:46:45 basically arrived at two big regulatory responses, right?
0:46:50 Abandoned child labor and limitations on total hours worked.
0:46:56 What are, what could be the equivalent regulations today?
0:46:58 I mean, I think that’s an interesting place to start.
0:47:02 So I think first of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention
0:47:05 is just an area that we need to explore.
0:47:11 I mean, there’s a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media.
0:47:13 A lot of people on the left think it’s bad precisely around
0:47:17 kids having access to LGBTQ information.
0:47:19 And I totally hear that.
0:47:25 Also, they think there’s sort of toxic ways in which like the particulars of a bill can empower,
0:47:27 you know, right wing attorneys general to do bad stuff.
0:47:28 And I totally hear that too.
0:47:31 I think as a general principle, the idea that
0:47:37 companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14 year olds is just obviously true.
0:47:42 And a huge part of that too, this goes hand in hand.
0:47:45 So when I talk about the sort of social movement before I even get to regulation,
0:47:50 non-commercial spaces for connection.
0:47:54 Just the way that like we have non-commercial public space, I can meet you in Prospect Park.
0:47:55 We can walk on the street.
0:47:57 We don’t just exist in a mall.
0:48:02 So one big part of it too, before we even get to the regulatory part of it,
0:48:08 and this is why I’m saying this, is we need to build non-commercial space.
0:48:15 Like all of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying
0:48:16 to buy and sell your attention.
0:48:20 And then the regulatory question, I think is a deep one.
0:48:23 Like, first of all, there’s constitutional issues because of speech.
0:48:28 But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating the attention,
0:48:32 like an app just can’t take more than an hour of your attention today.
0:48:35 I don’t know.
0:48:37 Maybe we pass the law and do that.
0:48:42 Like that seems crazy at some level, but is it?
0:48:47 And so I think we need to be thinking about regulating attention.
0:48:49 I think that, and part of that is breaking up the big tech firms,
0:48:50 which are too big and things like that.
0:48:58 But more specifically, like this does feel like a place for governments to do something.
0:49:03 Your book is rightly grounded in political economy,
0:49:05 because that’s the driver of a lot of this.
0:49:08 And it’s just very hard to imagine meaningful solutions
0:49:12 that don’t involve a serious rethinking at that level.
0:49:13 Yeah.
0:49:17 I mean, I think there’s a deeper question about the form of the general form of capitalism
0:49:21 and kind of gilded age oligopoly that we found ourselves in right now.
0:49:24 And all these things are converging at the same point.
0:49:29 I mean, Elon Musk is both kind of an allegory, but also very real.
0:49:34 It’s sort of wild to me how much he just over the course writing the book
0:49:37 became the full embodiment of everything the book says,
0:49:42 both in his own personal compulsions, which he clearly can’t control.
0:49:44 I mean, he’s very obviously addicted to posting.
0:49:48 To his kind of, through his own personal brokenness,
0:49:52 I think finding his way to understanding that attention is the most valuable resource,
0:49:56 to iterating on Donald Trump’s key insights,
0:49:59 to capture it and become the main character all the time,
0:50:01 and then the power that that’s given him.
0:50:06 It’s pretty dystopian, but it is playing out right in front of us.
0:50:08 Do you have any final thoughts you want to add?
0:50:11 I mean, if someone listens to this conversation,
0:50:14 if they go and read your book after listening to this conversation,
0:50:16 what do you hope they take away from it?
0:50:18 Maybe more to the point, what do you hope they do?
0:50:25 I do think there are parent groups that are working.
0:50:26 There are a whole bunch of groups happening.
0:50:30 You can go to the Struthers School for Radical Attention, you can Google that.
0:50:32 There are more and more grassroots groups.
0:50:38 A lot of it have been associated around Jonathan Hyde’s book and kids, particularly teenagers.
0:50:44 But one of the things I think is important is that there’s a little bit of an
0:50:45 instinct to be like, this is a teenager problem.
0:50:53 I sometimes think actually teenagers are better about this than boomers, for instance.
0:50:59 But I think you should find other people
0:51:02 and see if there are ways to plug into local people that feel the same way.
0:51:08 And then I think also doing things like joining a book club.
0:51:13 Collective ways that you manage attention together.
0:51:18 Again, as I start subscribing to a physical newspaper,
0:51:21 going for a walk 20 minutes just for your thoughts.
0:51:27 These are small ways to begin to connect with other people, particularly
0:51:31 around all of us kind of reconceptualizing this collectively.
0:51:34 That’s a good place to end it.
0:51:37 Once again, the book is called The Siren’s Call.
0:51:41 How attention became the world’s most endangered resource.
0:51:46 I legitimately love the book and I appreciate having a chance to read it.
0:51:48 And I’m glad you wrote it.
0:51:50 Chris Hayes, thanks buddy.
0:51:50 Sean, that was great.
0:51:51 Thank you so much.
0:52:06 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:52:08 You know I did.
0:52:12 And in case you’re wondering, my screen time was actually down this week.
0:52:13 Was it down a lot?
0:52:16 No, but it was down.
0:52:18 And that’s a start.
0:52:23 As always, we want to know what you think of the episode.
0:52:26 So drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com.
0:52:30 And please rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
0:52:31 That stuff really helps.
0:52:38 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:43 fact-checked by Kim Eggleston, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:47 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:52:49 Listen and subscribe.
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