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0:01:11 Hey, everyone.
0:01:11 It’s Sean.
0:01:16 This week’s episode is one I recorded in June of 2023
0:01:20 with Mariana Alessandre, a philosopher who
0:01:23 wrote a book about depression and grief and what it means
0:01:28 to live with and accept those dark emotions.
0:01:31 I know the holidays can be hard for lots of us,
0:01:33 and the message of this conversation
0:01:37 was that that’s OK, and it doesn’t make any of us
0:01:41 a failure if we’re struggling when we’re supposed to be happy.
0:01:46 Rearing this episode has become a holiday tradition for us.
0:01:49 It’s an offering for anyone in the audience who needs it.
0:01:52 And even if you’re not struggling during this time,
0:01:53 there’s a lot of wisdom here.
0:01:56 And I hope you’ll find some value in it.
0:01:58 All right then, on with the show.
0:02:04 How can we find happiness?
0:02:07 That’s an old question.
0:02:09 One of the oldest, in fact.
0:02:11 Since the beginning of philosophy, at least,
0:02:14 people have been wondering what makes us happy
0:02:17 and how to get more of it.
0:02:19 And that’s all good as far as it goes.
0:02:24 Happiness is great and very much worth pursuing.
0:02:28 But if you’re a real person living in the real world,
0:02:32 you know already that it’s not possible to be happy all the time.
0:02:36 Life just isn’t like that.
0:02:39 And the problem with the culture obsessed with the pursuit
0:02:42 of happiness is that it creates a lot of pressure
0:02:44 to not be unhappy.
0:02:48 It also reinforces the idea that anyone who’s unhappy
0:02:53 is, in some important sense, a failure.
0:02:56 But is that really true?
0:03:00 Even if you believe that happiness is the ultimate good,
0:03:04 is it a mistake to assume that unhappiness is something
0:03:05 to be avoided at all costs?
0:03:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:26 Today’s guest is Mariana Alessandre.
0:03:29 She’s a philosophy professor at the University of Texas,
0:03:32 Rio Grande Valley, and the author of a new book
0:03:36 called Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods.
0:03:40 The book is not just a rebuke of what people sometimes
0:03:43 call toxic positivity.
0:03:46 It’s really an attempt to honor those darker emotions
0:03:48 that all of us feel sometimes.
0:03:51 It’s a very clear-eyed and intimate look
0:03:54 at the reality of our inner lives.
0:03:59 But importantly, it isn’t a celebration of sadness either.
0:04:03 It’s a meditation on painful emotions
0:04:05 and the important truths they can reveal
0:04:08 about the world and our place in it.
0:04:12 And this is something I wanted to explore with Mariana.
0:04:15 So I invited her onto the show to do just that.
0:04:24 There is a standard way of viewing darkness
0:04:27 that you’re pushing back against in this book.
0:04:31 You’re talking about dark emotions like anger, anxiety,
0:04:35 depression, and grief, but also darkness
0:04:38 in the sense of obscurity.
0:04:40 And the unknown.
0:04:42 So I just want to begin with you telling me
0:04:44 about this standard view and really
0:04:48 why you think it’s wrong, or unhelpful, or both.
0:04:50 OK, so to talk about the dark, it’s
0:04:52 like essential to figure out the light first.
0:04:54 It’s almost hard to see how we think of the dark
0:04:57 without it being in comparison with how we see the light.
0:05:00 And so in the book, I talk about Plato’s Cave
0:05:04 and how in the story, there are all these prisoners who
0:05:07 are looking at the cave wall and behind them
0:05:07 is a fire.
0:05:10 And behind the fire are these puppeteers
0:05:12 who hold up these puppets.
0:05:15 And they walk around with these puppets of people and trees
0:05:16 and dogs.
0:05:20 And those puppets project shadows onto the wall.
0:05:23 And then the people believe what they see on the wall.
0:05:25 They think that those things on the wall
0:05:28 are actually the actual things.
0:05:30 And so they give them names, and they have contests,
0:05:32 and they see who’s the smartest.
0:05:34 But it’s all based on shadows.
0:05:37 And one day, one of these prisoners
0:05:41 gets freed against his will, because they, first of all,
0:05:43 they don’t really know that they’re prisoners
0:05:47 until someone drags this person out into the light.
0:05:50 And in the light, first, the person’s blinded
0:05:52 and doesn’t want to be there.
0:05:53 So he first wants to look at the ground
0:05:56 and the shadows on the ground because those things look
0:05:58 real and truth.
0:06:01 And then he can look at the water that has reflections.
0:06:04 And then by night, he can see things clearer.
0:06:06 And little by little, Plato tells us
0:06:09 that this person acclimates to the light
0:06:10 and then can finally see truth.
0:06:13 So can finally see the real tree,
0:06:17 whereas before, he was seeing a copy of a copy of a tree.
0:06:20 And so a lot of people, I would say most people,
0:06:22 interpret this story as saying that the light is what
0:06:26 allows us to see truth, that the light is what saves.
0:06:28 I mean, if you take it into the religious realm,
0:06:31 a lot of religions talk about how the light is the savior.
0:06:32 I’m the light of the world.
0:06:34 The light saves you from darkness.
0:06:38 So then we have light like way up high in the sky
0:06:40 as this thing that is everything.
0:06:42 Light is intelligence.
0:06:43 We say you’re radiant, you’re beautiful,
0:06:46 you’re glowing, you’re brilliant.
0:06:48 Let me shed light on it.
0:06:50 Like we have so many small metaphors.
0:06:51 So I call them all the light metaphor.
0:06:55 It’s just this big way that we invoke brightness
0:06:59 as good and beautiful and holy and pure.
0:07:02 So then in the light of that, darkness,
0:07:04 think about all the words that it means.
0:07:08 It means ignorance, danger, ugliness.
0:07:11 Like if something’s dark, we don’t wanna go to a dark place.
0:07:12 We don’t wanna be there.
0:07:14 We wanna shed the dark and step out of the dark
0:07:15 and into the light.
0:07:17 And so we have created in our society
0:07:22 this very difficult dichotomy between light and dark.
0:07:25 And we spend a lot of us spend a lot of our time
0:07:29 trying to get brighter and lighter and shed our darkness.
0:07:33 And from my point of view, that’s not possible.
0:07:37 And so then we’re left feeling like failed bright creatures
0:07:40 because we’re also creatures of the dark.
0:07:45 And so I’m trying to hold a space open for the darkness
0:07:49 that values it and that honors it as part of who we are
0:07:52 rather than just as something that’s trying to overcome
0:07:54 or dismiss or get rid of it.
0:07:58 – It’s probably the most pervasive metaphor in our culture.
0:08:00 I’m not sure there’s even a close competitor, right?
0:08:01 The light and dark.
0:08:03 – And it’s so hard to doubt
0:08:06 because it just seems natural
0:08:08 that light is better than dark, you know?
0:08:10 – Well, I mean, you mentioned the allegory of the cave.
0:08:12 And as you were just saying, right?
0:08:17 The moral of that story typically is taken to be,
0:08:19 hey, look, get your ass out of the cave
0:08:20 and into the sunlight
0:08:22 so that you can see the real truth of things.
0:08:24 And you have a sort of alternate take
0:08:26 which is that, and now I’m quoting you.
0:08:29 Everyone is a potential puppeteer.
0:08:31 That for you is the sort of upshot of that.
0:08:33 What do you mean by that?
0:08:35 – Okay, so caves are dark, right?
0:08:36 But like I live in Texas.
0:08:39 I live where it’s like sunny 25 hours a day.
0:08:41 Like it is so crazy here.
0:08:45 And I would not want to just be in the sun my whole life.
0:08:49 Like just out there in the desert, you know, in the sun.
0:08:52 The cave provides us this like shelter.
0:08:54 If we see the metaphor or the allegory of the cave
0:08:57 as the cave was bad because it was dark
0:08:59 and the outside is good because it’s light,
0:09:02 I think we’re missing a huge part of the story.
0:09:03 And the part of the story
0:09:05 that I wish I could talk to Plato about
0:09:06 is these puppeteers, right?
0:09:08 He mentions them.
0:09:09 He doesn’t tell us who they are.
0:09:12 He doesn’t tell us if they’re also prisoners.
0:09:14 He doesn’t tell us if they’re doing it on purpose, right?
0:09:17 So you’ve got puppeteers trying to get you
0:09:18 to believe something, right?
0:09:22 They’re projecting ideas onto the wall in front of you.
0:09:23 You believe it.
0:09:25 So we don’t know if they’re fooling them on purpose
0:09:28 or if they are just misguided.
0:09:30 So anyone who’s giving us any messages
0:09:33 about how we should think, how we should be our bodies,
0:09:36 how we should feel, et cetera, what we should buy, right?
0:09:37 Those are all puppeteers who are trying to get us
0:09:40 to do one thing or another, you know,
0:09:42 including people who aren’t doing it for money.
0:09:44 Anyone who wants to sort of influence us
0:09:46 is a potential puppeteer.
0:09:47 So what I think is wrong with the cave
0:09:49 isn’t that it’s dark.
0:09:51 It’s that we’ve got a bunch of puppeteers in there
0:09:52 who are sort of like unchecked.
0:09:53 We haven’t examined them.
0:09:56 What if we just took out the puppeteers?
0:09:57 Couldn’t we just sort of live in the cave,
0:09:59 go out in the light sometimes,
0:10:01 go back in the cave, go out in the light?
0:10:03 It doesn’t have to be that there’s bad actors.
0:10:04 We don’t have to say that people are trying
0:10:05 to manipulate us or something, right?
0:10:08 It’s just that we’re getting a lot of messages
0:10:11 on the walls of our own society that I question.
0:10:12 And I want to say, like, can we doubt that?
0:10:15 Can we see that that’s actually harming us?
0:10:18 Because if we’re so busy chasing the light
0:10:20 and we find ourselves still in the dark,
0:10:21 we’re gonna blame ourselves
0:10:23 because that’s a lot of the messaging that we get
0:10:26 coming from self-help of today.
0:10:27 So I want to inspect the messaging,
0:10:30 see who’s projecting it and see what are their motives.
0:10:34 Is it closer to what’s real or is it closer to a shadow?
0:10:36 – So I want to back up a little bit
0:10:38 and just talk about the origin of the book
0:10:39 and then kind of work our way
0:10:42 back through the argument you’re making.
0:10:44 This book came out of the pandemic
0:10:47 and you talk about how you were granted this sabbatical year
0:10:49 right before all hell breaks loose
0:10:51 and the school shut down.
0:10:54 And how that really changed your experience
0:10:57 and very obviously shaped the book.
0:11:00 Do you think this would be a very different book
0:11:04 in the end without that pandemic experience?
0:11:05 – There’s a lot of things
0:11:07 about the timing of the book that are interesting.
0:11:09 I tried to sell a book like this,
0:11:12 like similar concepts in 2014.
0:11:16 And it didn’t sell because everyone was so full of hope.
0:11:20 Obama’s president, nothing’s wrong, no pandemic,
0:11:23 no one’s angry, no one was defending anger,
0:11:24 no one needed to be angry.
0:11:25 – That’s a lifetime ago.
0:11:29 – Yeah, and then Trump, right?
0:11:30 And then people are angry on both sides.
0:11:31 Everyone’s all of a sudden angry.
0:11:33 Everyone’s starting to defend anger.
0:11:35 Then it sold because it’s like,
0:11:37 yes, there’s a time now for this.
0:11:40 And so I was gonna write the book pandemic or not,
0:11:41 but I think what the pandemic did
0:11:43 was every chapter that I was writing,
0:11:47 I experienced what that chapter was about at the time.
0:11:50 So while I’m writing about anger, I’m experiencing anger.
0:11:52 I’m like, okay, I get it.
0:11:54 I have to be here in this mood
0:11:55 to be able to talk about this mood,
0:11:58 but it was really frustrating.
0:11:59 But that’s what it gave me.
0:12:02 It was like a very heightened experience of these moods.
0:12:06 – It’s all very relatable to me as a parent.
0:12:08 You talk about all the anger
0:12:11 you felt towards your kids during that time.
0:12:13 And the thing you noticed
0:12:16 was that it was producing the cycle of self-blame.
0:12:20 And for you that does feed this narrative.
0:12:22 That’s again, very pervasive in our society.
0:12:24 And you call it the brokenness story.
0:12:26 What is that?
0:12:28 – All right, so the light metaphor
0:12:29 is the opposite of the brokenness story.
0:12:31 They’re the same, they’re two sides of the same coin.
0:12:35 So the light metaphor is be like a proton, always positive.
0:12:39 Choose happy or like my kid’s principle says,
0:12:41 make it a great day or not.
0:12:42 The choice is yours.
0:12:46 When we’re doing well, we sometimes take credit for it.
0:12:47 And we’re like, I stayed sunny.
0:12:49 I did it myself.
0:12:51 I got myself out of the darkness, you know?
0:12:54 And it’s very seductive and it’s lovely and it’s empowering
0:12:57 and people wanna feel like wearing control of our feelings.
0:12:59 A lot of this kind of talk.
0:13:02 So the brokenness story is what happens
0:13:04 when you believe all those things
0:13:06 and then you feel the opposite way.
0:13:08 So let’s talk about anger
0:13:10 ’cause that’s the one you bring up.
0:13:12 I was trained to believe that I can control my emotions, right?
0:13:14 This is from the Stoics.
0:13:16 They say, you don’t have to feel angry.
0:13:18 You let yourself feel angry.
0:13:22 So if you’ve ever said to yourself, I’m sorry, I got angry.
0:13:24 Even if you don’t know it, that’s a Stoic tenet
0:13:26 because what it does is it implies
0:13:28 that you didn’t have to get angry.
0:13:30 That feelings are not a thing that have to happen.
0:13:34 You can, with years and years of training,
0:13:37 get yourself to not feel agitated by things.
0:13:39 And so you allowed it and it was bad, right?
0:13:40 So it’s two things, right?
0:13:44 One is optional and two, it’s not helpful for us, right?
0:13:46 So in our society, people say anger’s useless,
0:13:50 anger’s bad for women, anger’s ugly, anger’s irrational.
0:13:52 Nothing good comes from anger.
0:13:53 I mean, I hear these things every day
0:13:56 or I read them on the walls of my society, right?
0:13:57 That was my education.
0:13:58 Anger’s bad.
0:14:00 I can control it if I really want to.
0:14:03 If I’m strong enough, it’s in my power.
0:14:06 So then what happens when you’re angry?
0:14:08 That’s the brokenness story is now I’m a monster, right?
0:14:10 That’s the story I have been telling myself my whole life
0:14:12 ’cause I’ve been angry since birth.
0:14:14 I’m a monster.
0:14:16 I have these beautiful kids.
0:14:17 Everything’s wonderful.
0:14:18 What’s wrong with me?
0:14:19 Why aren’t I grateful?
0:14:21 Why aren’t I a better person?
0:14:24 I’m ugly and crazy and irrational.
0:14:25 So that’s the brokenness story
0:14:29 is when I feel that feeling I’m not supposed to feel,
0:14:32 up against a world that says that I don’t have to feel it
0:14:33 and I can be better than that
0:14:36 if I could only choose the right way,
0:14:38 then the self-blame comes, the shame comes
0:14:40 and that makes everything worse.
0:14:43 So I want to reconfigure our emotional society
0:14:46 such that we don’t place those expectations on ourselves.
0:14:48 – Has it always been that way for you?
0:14:50 The way you put it in the book was kind of striking
0:14:53 that you’ve always been genetically angry,
0:14:54 that this has always been in you,
0:14:59 that the world has always seemed to you just kind of tragic
0:15:02 and sad and you were another lovely line from the book
0:15:04 excruciatingly alive to the world
0:15:06 and maybe someone else’s quote,
0:15:09 but this is something that you felt in yourself
0:15:10 very early on.
0:15:14 – Yeah, those words excruciatingly alive to the world
0:15:15 are Gloria Anzalduas.
0:15:16 – That’s right.
0:15:19 – And she’s the sort of hero of my fourth chapter
0:15:23 on depression, but I don’t think I’m unique in this.
0:15:25 I think if you’re raised in a household
0:15:29 that doesn’t really love emotions, especially sadness
0:15:31 and crying, like crying would be made fun of, you know,
0:15:34 even for girls, like it wasn’t acceptable in my house.
0:15:37 And so everything kind of comes out as anger.
0:15:39 So when I’m scared, I get angry.
0:15:40 When I’m sad, I get angry.
0:15:44 And I always just wished that I could be a crier
0:15:45 ’cause it’s so feminine, right?
0:15:47 It’s so much more acceptable and sweet.
0:15:50 Like, and people would feel bad for me if I cried,
0:15:52 but like, because I’m angry, I get aggressive
0:15:54 and people just get mad at me.
0:15:56 And then I’m like, oh, no, I was really just sad, right?
0:15:59 So everything comes out as anger, pretty typical,
0:16:01 but it masks the other feelings too.
0:16:04 So it’s my ready, you know, it’s my go-to emotion.
0:16:05 There’s nothing wrong with it.
0:16:07 It’s just an interesting one to have
0:16:10 because it’s not one very readily accepted
0:16:11 for women in our society.
0:16:13 – You do something in the book
0:16:16 that is a sort of hobby horse of mine.
0:16:19 And I’m always here for anyone who’s willing to do it,
0:16:22 which is basically take a shit on what we think of
0:16:25 as the self-help industry.
0:16:26 We have these books that sort of pedal
0:16:29 this very crude version of, I guess, you know,
0:16:30 toxic positivity, we’ll call it.
0:16:32 I guess that’s the phrase.
0:16:35 Would your beef with these sorts of books,
0:16:38 the sorts of books that not just imbibe this idea
0:16:43 that light is good and sadness is dark and bad,
0:16:45 but these sorts of books that traffic in this idea
0:16:48 that you really are in control of your own happiness
0:16:52 and to the extent you’re not happy, it’s your fault.
0:16:53 – That’s it in a nutshell.
0:16:56 And the thing is, I love self-help books.
0:16:59 Like, I love them and I am drawn into them
0:17:02 in the same way I’m drawn into Marcus Aurelius.
0:17:04 I love someone telling me,
0:17:06 “Hey, you know what, you’re not a victim.
0:17:09 You can get better, you can feel better.
0:17:10 Just do these things.
0:17:12 These things worked for me.
0:17:14 They can work for you.”
0:17:16 So the sense of empowerment they give,
0:17:18 it’s really the author saying,
0:17:20 “Hey, you know what, I was in that place too
0:17:22 and I got myself out of it
0:17:23 and so I’m gonna help you get out of it.”
0:17:24 And so a lot of the authors,
0:17:26 I quote a few self-help authors,
0:17:28 I don’t think they’re bad people.
0:17:30 I think they’re confused into thinking
0:17:32 that they made their own way out of it.
0:17:35 Whereas we talk about privilege, we talk about luck,
0:17:37 we talk about other people.
0:17:39 And at this point, they’re being sustained
0:17:41 on the backs of people who think they’re broken.
0:17:44 So I go into the store, I feel broken,
0:17:45 I go to the self-help aisle, right?
0:17:49 Like it looks like someone’s going to help me get unbroken
0:17:51 and then they make money, right?
0:17:54 So they actually need me to feel bad,
0:17:56 they need me to suffer and they need me to feel
0:17:58 like it’s my fault that I’m suffering.
0:17:59 They need me to feel bad about it,
0:18:03 that I am in control of it and I want to be just like them.
0:18:05 And now a lot of these people are super rich,
0:18:07 but now they’re definitely peddling
0:18:10 because they’re dependent on us.
0:18:12 In the same way that a lot of industries benefit
0:18:14 off of people who are suffering.
0:18:16 I mean, I’m quoting someone who says,
0:18:19 “If you’re not happy, then it’s on you.”
0:18:22 And I just think, wow, is that a bold claim?
0:18:23 Is that such a huge claim to make
0:18:27 because you think that happiness is within 100%
0:18:29 within your control, that is incredible.
0:18:32 That’s like purely stoic and very dangerous
0:18:34 for a sufferer to read.
0:18:37 – And there’s got to be some kinship
0:18:39 between the light metaphor and the way
0:18:41 Americans understand themselves
0:18:44 that makes this place such fertile ground for this.
0:18:46 I mean, you mentioned the power of positive thinking,
0:18:48 the famous book by Norman Vincent Peel,
0:18:50 which came out in like the 50s.
0:18:52 And it’s sort of the foundational text
0:18:53 of this whole genre.
0:18:55 And I’m sure there’s just a ton to be said
0:18:59 about how those kinds of ideas really did shape
0:19:03 post-war America and helped cultivate and cement
0:19:06 all of these sort of attitudes and dispositions or whatever.
0:19:09 – Yeah, I think the US is a bizarre mix of stoicism,
0:19:12 like the revival of stoicism that’s so hot,
0:19:15 not just in California, but all over the world.
0:19:16 But specifically for the US,
0:19:18 stoicism says choose happy.
0:19:20 You get to be happy if you want to.
0:19:22 But they’re very careful.
0:19:25 They say you can’t control most of things.
0:19:27 You can only control yourself, your virtue,
0:19:28 what you put into the world.
0:19:31 So they’re actually more careful than most Americans
0:19:33 who sort of peddle similar theories.
0:19:36 But it’s stoicism plus Peel, exactly.
0:19:40 1952, power of positive thinking.
0:19:41 So if the stoics say, you know what,
0:19:44 you can’t control your outside circumstances,
0:19:46 Peel is like, no, no, you can.
0:19:48 If you actually think positively enough,
0:19:49 you can get that job.
0:19:50 And if you didn’t get that job,
0:19:52 this is the brokenness story.
0:19:53 If you didn’t get that job,
0:19:55 it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough.
0:19:56 You weren’t positive enough.
0:19:58 You had some negativity, pessimism.
0:19:59 You influenced it.
0:20:00 With that attitude,
0:20:02 you’re never going to get where you want to be.
0:20:11 – For many years, Mariana was a fan
0:20:14 of the stoics approach to managing emotions,
0:20:18 but soon found herself more attracted to Aristotle’s view.
0:20:21 I’ll ask her to unpack that philosophical switch
0:20:22 after a short break.
0:20:25 (upbeat music)
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0:22:44 (upbeat music)
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0:24:36 (gentle music)
0:24:38 (gentle music)
0:24:47 – Earlier in your life, you were a big fan of the Stoics
0:24:48 and maybe still are to some degree.
0:24:51 I mean, you mentioned even reading Epictetus’s handbook
0:24:55 every year for like 15 years, which is impressive.
0:24:58 But it does seem like you have arrived at the view
0:25:01 that the Stoic approach to passions
0:25:03 and their approach to dark feelings
0:25:06 is just ultimately not satisfying.
0:25:08 And that sort of led you to Aristotle.
0:25:11 So just tell us how that happened and why.
0:25:16 – Yeah, Stoicism is very, I guess, seductive
0:25:18 is a good word. – It is.
0:25:19 – It’s beautiful.
0:25:23 There’s so much in there that comes from the heart.
0:25:24 Like these are real human beings
0:25:26 who are really suffering.
0:25:31 Seneca, you know, he’s seeing crazy stuff going on.
0:25:33 And Marcus Aurelius is Emperor of Rome, right?
0:25:37 So he’s got to find a way to be okay.
0:25:38 And they’re giving us a way,
0:25:40 they call it tranquility or ataraxia,
0:25:44 freedom from worry because they think that what agitates us,
0:25:48 this is from Epictetus, is not the things themselves
0:25:51 but our judgments about the things.
0:25:52 And if that sounds familiar,
0:25:55 that’s very much what CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
0:26:00 teaches today, what upsets us is not the circumstances,
0:26:02 but it’s how we are interpreting.
0:26:03 It’s the narrative we tell.
0:26:06 It’s the story we tell about our circumstances
0:26:07 that makes us more upset.
0:26:11 And so the Stoics aim for us to be more neutral.
0:26:13 The house burned down, don’t say it’s bad.
0:26:16 Just say what happened, just say my house burned down.
0:26:18 Because you can take different people,
0:26:20 two people whose house burned down,
0:26:22 one of them is gonna be distraught
0:26:24 because they believe that it’s awful.
0:26:26 They’re gonna never get over it, you know,
0:26:28 they’re gonna be miserable forever.
0:26:29 And then on the other hand,
0:26:32 you can have another person who’s more Stoic
0:26:33 who says, okay, my house burned down,
0:26:34 what do I do now?
0:26:37 Right, like they can be more tranquil
0:26:38 and free from all that worry.
0:26:42 So the Stoic messaging is so seductive
0:26:44 because it makes you feel like these things are optional.
0:26:48 Like my big feelings, I can tone them down.
0:26:49 I can settle them out.
0:26:51 And yes, becoming a new mother,
0:26:53 I really got into Stoicism.
0:26:56 I had like a notebook, I did just a bunch of work.
0:26:59 There’s all different kinds of practices that you do
0:27:01 so that I wouldn’t hurt my baby, right?
0:27:04 So that I wouldn’t do things that are wrong
0:27:06 because you’re not sleeping and, you know, they cry,
0:27:09 like all the time and I needed something
0:27:11 to make me feel like I could be calm.
0:27:14 Like Seneca calls life a storm, right?
0:27:18 So that one can be calm, like on a ship, you’re calm,
0:27:21 even though life around you is raging.
0:27:23 And so it’s not a surprise to me
0:27:26 that a lot of Americans love the Stoic mindset
0:27:29 because it makes you feel like you can, it’s just hard work.
0:27:31 And I think Americans also like hard work.
0:27:33 I know I do, like give me something to do.
0:27:36 Like, but again, it is so strenuous.
0:27:38 You know, I’ll even go back now and I’ll be like,
0:27:40 let me read Marcus Aurelius again.
0:27:43 And then I go back and I walk away from the encounter
0:27:45 with him and I feel worse about myself.
0:27:49 This is our society where if the message being peddled
0:27:53 is your happiness is up to you, then any problem you have,
0:27:55 you can say, well, it must be me
0:27:58 because X person over here overcame 6,000 struggles
0:28:00 and they’re great and I’m not okay.
0:28:02 So it’s me and I’m the problem.
0:28:06 So the Stoics, they don’t leave a lot of room for luck.
0:28:08 Aristotle does.
0:28:09 So I moved into Aristotle
0:28:12 because I just find him so much kinder
0:28:14 to the human condition.
0:28:16 And so he says we have three parts in our soul,
0:28:21 feelings and predispositions and active conditions.
0:28:23 Feelings, we all know what they are.
0:28:25 You know, I feel mad, I feel sad, whatever.
0:28:27 He’s like, yeah, feelings come and go.
0:28:29 He doesn’t think they’re optional
0:28:31 in the way that the Stoics think they’re optional
0:28:35 and he doesn’t want us to spend our time trying to fix them
0:28:36 because he’s like, you know what,
0:28:38 there’s like bigger fish to fry.
0:28:41 So leave the feelings alone, know yourself,
0:28:43 know what are you likely to feel?
0:28:45 So for mine, again, it’s anger.
0:28:47 If something goes wrong, I can think like,
0:28:48 oh, I’m most likely to get angry.
0:28:51 So let me not get behind the driver that’s slow
0:28:53 because I’m probably gonna get really angry, right?
0:28:57 So what he thinks is worth all the gold in the world
0:29:00 is the active conditions and that’s the behavior.
0:29:04 So if you say something like, I got angry
0:29:07 and I’m sorry, I yelled at you when I was angry.
0:29:09 That’s a Aristotelian.
0:29:11 He’s not saying, I’m sorry, I got angry.
0:29:14 He’s saying, I’m sorry, I yelled out of anger
0:29:15 or at the worst, right?
0:29:16 I’m sorry, I hit you.
0:29:19 Like I should not have done this action
0:29:21 as a response to the feeling.
0:29:23 So he wants us to disconnect the feeling from the action.
0:29:26 And he says, even when something provokes you,
0:29:29 you need to be able to act beautifully
0:29:31 in light of that provocation.
0:29:33 So that for me felt like, oh, I can do that.
0:29:35 And Mr. Rogers is all about that, right?
0:29:37 Like our feelings are fine.
0:29:39 It’s the way that we handle them.
0:29:40 That’s the problem.
0:29:42 So a lot of people are actually convinced more
0:29:43 by Aristotle than by the Stoics,
0:29:45 especially in today’s day and age.
0:29:47 I don’t know a lot of people who really believe
0:29:49 that feelings are optional,
0:29:51 but I do know a lot of people who say,
0:29:53 okay, maybe feelings aren’t optional,
0:29:56 but I can definitely control my behavior.
0:29:59 So action is the most important thing.
0:30:00 – You talk a lot about grief in the book
0:30:03 as one must in a book like this.
0:30:08 And the Stoic wisdom on grief is,
0:30:12 as you’re sort of suggesting here, is to conquer it.
0:30:15 And on the one hand, that can seem kind of cold.
0:30:20 And you pointed the example of the letter Seneca wrote,
0:30:23 a grieving mother telling her to grieve no more
0:30:24 than was honorable.
0:30:29 And that definitely seems a little unempathetic, we’ll say.
0:30:34 But on the other hand, is this still possibly wise,
0:30:37 given how self-destructive runaway grief can be?
0:30:39 I mean, maybe the Stoics are right here to just say,
0:30:41 hey, you know, we can’t grieve forever.
0:30:43 We gotta stop sometime.
0:30:46 So why not wheel yourself out of it sooner
0:30:47 rather than later?
0:30:49 – No, I totally understand that.
0:30:51 And I had a student kind of raise a similar question
0:30:54 about a relative who she saw was just in grief
0:30:54 her whole life.
0:30:55 And she said, aren’t the Stoics right?
0:30:57 Don’t we have to get rid of it at some point?
0:31:00 We can’t just sort of let ourselves wallow forever
0:31:03 ’cause it’s destructive to other people, et cetera.
0:31:07 So Cicero comes to mind because he said grief is optional
0:31:09 because Cicero lost his daughter.
0:31:11 And he said, but I saw a soldier on the field
0:31:13 who had also just lost his child.
0:31:17 And that soldier on the field didn’t cry.
0:31:19 And he said, so proof, grief is optional.
0:31:21 You can actually just like stop it before it starts.
0:31:24 This is their big thing because it’s painful, right?
0:31:26 Like they care about us a lot.
0:31:27 Here’s a painful thing.
0:31:28 Do we wanna feel pain?
0:31:30 No, so let’s not feel pain.
0:31:34 Like we don’t need to succumb to these emotions.
0:31:39 But my take on it is that a lot of why we feel bad
0:31:43 about grief specifically is the shame element.
0:31:45 So for me, the definition of shame in the book
0:31:48 is feeling bad about feeling bad.
0:31:50 So here I am, let’s say I’ve lost someone
0:31:53 and I feel grief and I try to talk about it.
0:31:55 And then the person shushes me.
0:31:56 And they say, don’t say that.
0:31:58 Don’t talk about that person.
0:31:59 Let’s go out dancing.
0:32:05 We are stifled by a society that is so inept
0:32:11 at handling our dark moods that it adds insult to injury.
0:32:13 And then what happens is that the griever is left
0:32:15 completely alone with their grief
0:32:18 because nobody understands.
0:32:20 And so I draw heavily on this book by Megan Devine
0:32:22 called “It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay,”
0:32:25 understanding grief in a world that doesn’t understand.
0:32:30 And she’s amazing because she shows all of the horrible
0:32:32 things that people say to a griever
0:32:33 that actually make them feel worse.
0:32:36 It’s like Job’s comforters were anything but comforting.
0:32:38 They were just like blaming him.
0:32:40 Grievers are feeling this like loss
0:32:42 and this pain and this tenderness.
0:32:46 And a lot of times either a person is so uncomfortable
0:32:47 that they just ghost you.
0:32:48 They just have run away.
0:32:50 And they’re like, well, I didn’t know what to say.
0:32:52 So I ran away and that’s terrible
0:32:53 ’cause then you’re left alone in your grief
0:32:56 and feeling like I thought that person was my friend.
0:32:59 Or they’ll give the platitudes.
0:33:00 At least this, at least that.
0:33:02 I mean, I have a quick story.
0:33:06 My mom lost her child, one of my brothers.
0:33:09 It was before I was born, but he died at the age of nine.
0:33:12 And my mom already had like six kids by then.
0:33:14 And people told her all sorts of things
0:33:16 that she had to just put up with.
0:33:18 Everything from it happens for a reason.
0:33:21 God wanted an angel, et cetera, et cetera.
0:33:24 I mean, you can sort of imagine like all the bad things
0:33:25 that someone could say.
0:33:27 The worst thing that they said to her,
0:33:29 according to her years later, she said,
0:33:33 they told her, well, at least you have all those other kids.
0:33:37 Like if we understood the implication of that phrase,
0:33:41 we’re so well-intentioned, but we botch grief so badly.
0:33:43 It’s like we go in, we’ve got like scissors on our hand.
0:33:45 And we go in to hug the griever.
0:33:48 And like we cut them up with our, at least you have this.
0:33:53 And if only, and just not allowing the person to grieve.
0:33:57 And so I think that a lot of the reason why long grievers
0:34:00 are long grievers is because the world is the way it is.
0:34:03 And I think that if the world were different,
0:34:06 then the griever wouldn’t be as afflicted.
0:34:10 And so what I’m trying to do is like turn the lens
0:34:12 and say, hey, you know what?
0:34:14 You live in a sick society.
0:34:15 So society may be calling you sick,
0:34:19 but let’s look at the world in which you’re grieving
0:34:24 and let’s see how those people around you are affecting you
0:34:26 and they’re making you feel shame
0:34:29 and loneliness on top of grief.
0:34:32 So I don’t need necessarily to tell the person
0:34:34 who’s already suffering, well, you need to do X, Y, and Z.
0:34:35 You need to get out more.
0:34:37 You should open your blinds, go for a walk.
0:34:38 You need sunshine.
0:34:39 That’s not it.
0:34:42 It’s us, the comforters who need to back off
0:34:45 and who need to really, really approach grief differently
0:34:48 and approach all of the dark moods for ourselves,
0:34:50 but also for other people.
0:34:52 Right now our expectations in our society
0:34:55 are set at hashtag no bad days.
0:34:58 And I just think we’re screwed because one,
0:35:01 that means one bad day is you failed.
0:35:05 And so grief is like a big failure, right?
0:35:06 Like, oh, you’re sad more than two weeks.
0:35:09 Well, let’s see what we can do with you, right?
0:35:11 Everyone else wants to change the person
0:35:12 and I wanna say, hey, you know what?
0:35:13 I don’t think it’s you.
0:35:15 I think you’re living in a world
0:35:16 that is emotionally intolerant.
0:35:20 – You just mentioned hashtag no bad days.
0:35:23 And I want our listeners to know
0:35:24 what you’re referring to there.
0:35:26 And this is, I think, toward the end of the book,
0:35:29 you bring up a guy, it’s your kid’s soccer coach.
0:35:30 And he’s wearing the sweatshirt
0:35:33 and it says hashtag no bad days.
0:35:36 And your point in bringing him up is to say,
0:35:39 even that guy knows that, in fact,
0:35:41 there will be bad days.
0:35:44 So why does that person buy and wear
0:35:46 that shirt in the first place?
0:35:47 – I mean, I’ve been so tempted to ask him,
0:35:51 but I never wanted to insult him or sort of like come at him.
0:35:52 But I’ve been so tempted to ask him like,
0:35:53 what made you buy that?
0:35:56 Why do we hang things in our house
0:35:58 that say like, it’ll get brighter.
0:36:00 Good days are right around the corner.
0:36:02 Stay positive, stay sunny.
0:36:03 I mean, the whole point that he’s doing
0:36:06 is he’s spreading sunshine.
0:36:07 He’s just a good American.
0:36:10 Like he’s reading the walls of our society that say,
0:36:13 hey, you know what, smile, it cheers people up.
0:36:15 When people are sad, make them feel better,
0:36:18 buy them something or make them smile.
0:36:21 So he’s living in a world where that’s what we should do.
0:36:24 When we have a bad emotion, we should not give into it.
0:36:25 We should not listen to it.
0:36:28 We should do our best to combat it.
0:36:31 So combat negativity with positivity.
0:36:33 And so he’s just reading the walls of our society
0:36:34 absolutely correctly.
0:36:35 I’m the weirdo here.
0:36:36 I’m the one who’s saying,
0:36:39 wait, aren’t the walls of our society projecting shadows?
0:36:42 Aren’t those shadows of actually what really is?
0:36:44 And what really is is that we are dark
0:36:47 and we have these moods and we have bad days.
0:36:49 And my whole argument is that they, in fact,
0:36:51 for a lot of us, okay, I’m not even speaking
0:36:53 for everyone here ’cause maybe some people read the book
0:36:54 and they’re like, that’s not the world I live in.
0:36:55 That’s okay.
0:36:59 But for a lot of us, wow, the world that we live in
0:37:02 is pressuring us to stay positive
0:37:05 and we can’t keep up and we don’t want to keep up.
0:37:07 There’s no need to stay positive
0:37:09 ’cause we’re not gonna drown in negativity.
0:37:11 – The pressuring is a big point.
0:37:14 And this comes up in your discussion of grief
0:37:15 and your description of it
0:37:18 as a sort of juggling the prospect of falling apart,
0:37:21 which when people experience grief,
0:37:23 it is this experience of falling apart.
0:37:25 And at the same time, there’s this tension
0:37:28 between that experience, which is true,
0:37:32 and then the simultaneous desire to not wanna fall apart.
0:37:34 And yet people in your life, friends and family,
0:37:37 who genuinely don’t wanna see you fall apart,
0:37:40 and so navigating that tension is really hard.
0:37:42 – I wanna push back even on that word though.
0:37:43 – Yeah, please.
0:37:47 – Because right now, like I’m sitting in my office
0:37:49 and down the hall, my mom is dying, okay?
0:37:51 She’s on hospice.
0:37:53 It looks like she’s in the active phase of dying.
0:37:58 So I have been caring for her and it is absolutely exhausting.
0:38:02 I don’t know what date is, but I’m not falling apart.
0:38:04 Like that’s what I’m tempted to say.
0:38:05 I’m tempted to say, I’m going crazy.
0:38:06 I’m falling apart.
0:38:08 I can’t handle this.
0:38:09 Everything that points to the person,
0:38:12 that there’s something wrong with me.
0:38:14 And really what I wanna replace that with,
0:38:15 I just want new vocabulary.
0:38:17 I want us all to pitch in.
0:38:19 Can we get better descriptions of this?
0:38:21 Because it’s not a feeling of falling apart.
0:38:22 Like that’s within a framework
0:38:24 that everything is held together, right?
0:38:26 So in my intro to the grief chapter,
0:38:29 I talk about a person who congratulates another person
0:38:32 on keeping it together when your wife died.
0:38:33 It’s so amazing that you kept it.
0:38:35 And I’m like, what does that even mean?
0:38:36 I don’t relate to those words anymore,
0:38:40 the way that I used to be kind of seduced by them too.
0:38:42 So now I just think, I’m not falling apart.
0:38:45 I’m going through something incredibly difficult,
0:38:47 but I’m not broken.
0:38:51 It just means that I feel like there’s a great weight
0:38:52 on top of me now.
0:38:56 And that feeling will go once I know that my mom is okay.
0:39:00 But for now, that’s the life that I’m living.
0:39:02 And I don’t wanna turn against myself
0:39:03 because a lot of this light metaphor
0:39:05 and the broken history,
0:39:06 it’s when I turn against myself and say,
0:39:07 what’s wrong with me?
0:39:09 Why can’t I handle this better?
0:39:10 Well, who would?
0:39:12 Who’s not anxious right now?
0:39:16 Who doesn’t have reason for sadness?
0:39:19 Why is the expectation set that we’re better than this?
0:39:21 Like, what does that even mean?
0:39:23 Like, I’m experiencing something so poignant
0:39:28 and rich and beautiful and like seriously honest.
0:39:31 Socrates preaches intellectual honesty.
0:39:34 And I want to say emotional honesty
0:39:37 is just as important as intellectual honesty.
0:39:38 So I would like to see a world
0:39:40 in which we would be brave enough,
0:39:43 honest enough to be emotionally honest with one another
0:39:46 so that we could sort of like lower
0:39:48 our expectations of what we think life is.
0:39:53 So I wanna get away from that kind of falling apart metaphor too.
0:39:56 – It says something about the pervasiveness
0:39:59 of the metaphor that I sort of unreflectedly
0:40:00 became a vehicle for it there
0:40:02 without even thinking about it.
0:40:04 Can I ask how you’re preparing
0:40:06 for your mom’s potential death?
0:40:08 I mean, are you almost,
0:40:09 in some ways it just almost feel like
0:40:10 you’re kind of pre-greaving.
0:40:12 I mean, I talked about this on the show.
0:40:15 I lost my mom about three years ago,
0:40:16 but it was very sudden.
0:40:17 There was a car crash.
0:40:20 There was no time to prepare or reflect on anything.
0:40:22 It just happened.
0:40:26 And the grieving process for me,
0:40:28 I don’t even really know how to talk about it.
0:40:30 It was just like this sort of shadow
0:40:33 that just kind of followed me around for a long time.
0:40:37 And then one day it was a little lighter
0:40:39 and then another month or two or three down the road,
0:40:42 it was a little lighter and you just sort of get on with it.
0:40:46 But how are you, as someone who thinks so deeply
0:40:48 about these sorts of questions,
0:40:50 how are you preparing for this?
0:40:52 How do you think you’ll handle it?
0:40:55 – No, I think there’s just something
0:40:58 about losing your mom that’s like,
0:40:59 I lost my father in February.
0:41:01 So these are like back to back,
0:41:04 but there’s something different about losing my mom.
0:41:07 And because it was more sudden,
0:41:09 she thought she had six years,
0:41:11 but then her cancer came back.
0:41:13 And so it’s not sudden like yours,
0:41:15 but it feels more like I’m not prepared.
0:41:17 Whereas my father had had a stroke four years ago.
0:41:20 You know, we had more time to sort of recognize
0:41:22 that he wasn’t immortal.
0:41:25 When I teach like Seneca on grieving
0:41:29 and he says practice death in advance.
0:41:31 And I asked my students, what do you think that means, right?
0:41:35 And some of it to them means spend time with the person,
0:41:36 tell these people that you love them,
0:41:38 like recognize that your parents and grandparents
0:41:40 are mortal, et cetera.
0:41:42 But then some of them also pick up on the fact,
0:41:45 I think he’s also saying like, you’re actually doing it.
0:41:46 Like I’m doing grief right now.
0:41:49 I’m practicing my mom’s death by looking at her every day
0:41:52 and putting drops of water into her mouth.
0:41:55 She does not look like a person who’s alive.
0:41:58 So I’m practicing death.
0:42:01 And with that, I’m allowing myself to grieve.
0:42:02 So I just cry spontaneously.
0:42:04 I cry talking to friends.
0:42:06 And this is something that like I said earlier,
0:42:06 I’m not a cryer.
0:42:08 So it’s weird for me.
0:42:09 And it’s usually very quick.
0:42:11 It’s like a quick cry and then I’m done,
0:42:12 but then it comes back.
0:42:15 But in terms of like testing my own theories,
0:42:18 what I believe is that sharing your pain
0:42:20 is a gift to other people.
0:42:23 And I think we’ve been raised to believe
0:42:25 that my pain is a burden.
0:42:28 So I should shield somebody else from my pain.
0:42:29 So if I really love you,
0:42:31 I will not tell you what’s going on with me
0:42:33 because it would hurt you.
0:42:34 Because I don’t want to make you suffer.
0:42:37 I shouldn’t tell you that I’m suffering.
0:42:39 I believe that if we’re in pain,
0:42:42 the loving thing to do, if you feel like it,
0:42:43 is to tell other people,
0:42:45 to invite them into the world of pain
0:42:48 and to say like, it’s okay here too.
0:42:50 So one thing I’m doing a lot is with my kids
0:42:51 ’cause obviously they live here
0:42:53 and they’re seeing all this.
0:42:54 And so I talk to them about it every day
0:42:57 and talk about different angles of it.
0:42:58 And I warned them the other day.
0:43:01 I said, you know, I think I’m gonna cry a lot for Ita.
0:43:05 But I said, just know that a lot of my crying
0:43:08 will be relief because right now I’m taking care of her.
0:43:11 So I’m under a lot of stress making a lot of decisions
0:43:13 that I don’t always know are right,
0:43:15 but it’s gonna be relief.
0:43:17 It’s not just sadness.
0:43:19 Crying is so mixed and beautiful
0:43:21 and like it’s so good to cry
0:43:23 and talking about it,
0:43:25 talking to people normalizing it, right?
0:43:26 It’s not a secret.
0:43:30 And I wanna make more normal real life stuff.
0:43:33 So Miguel de Unimuno is a philosopher I use
0:43:36 in the second chapter on sadness.
0:43:38 And I call it dolor because in Spanish
0:43:41 that just means like emotional pain and physical pain.
0:43:45 And he says that we are like guitars,
0:43:49 whereby when two guitars are standing next to each other,
0:43:51 if you vibrate one of their strings,
0:43:53 if you pluck one set of strings,
0:43:56 the other set of strings starts to vibrate.
0:43:57 That’s beautiful.
0:43:58 That’s the way it should work
0:44:00 and that’s the way it often works.
0:44:02 So if I’m talking about my mom,
0:44:03 you don’t have to say, no, no,
0:44:05 we don’t have to talk about that or whatever.
0:44:08 Like your strings, your heartstrings should vibrate.
0:44:10 And they did because then you told me about your mom.
0:44:15 And someone asked him, why doesn’t it always happen?
0:44:16 And he said, well,
0:44:20 I guess the other person doesn’t have heartstrings.
0:44:23 Or he says they’re frozen.
0:44:24 And I think that happens to a lot of us.
0:44:27 When we feel numb at the sight of other people’s pain,
0:44:30 it’s because they got frozen because we’ve been taught
0:44:33 that pain is like taboo and not supposed to talk about it.
0:44:36 And like, oh, maybe I don’t know you very well.
0:44:38 Oh, this is awkward, whatever.
0:44:41 But like it’s about like thawing out our heartstrings
0:44:42 to allow them to vibrate.
0:44:45 Even in the case of my mom, there’s no tragedy here.
0:44:46 It’s just pain.
0:44:50 It’s hard and it’s real and it’s natural and all of that.
0:44:52 But it’s what’s going on.
0:44:54 So it’s emotionally honest.
0:44:58 – Is that what it means for you to find,
0:45:01 to create dignity and these sorts of emotions,
0:45:05 to not do what there’s a lot of social pressure to do,
0:45:07 which is to mask it, to paper over it,
0:45:11 to tamp it down for the sake of not making someone else
0:45:14 have to acknowledge it and deal with something actually,
0:45:15 you know, real.
0:45:17 Is that where the dignity is to be found?
0:45:19 And again, not bludgeoning people with it,
0:45:21 but also not running away from it.
0:45:21 – Yeah.
0:45:24 – Being honest about it and being almost proud of it,
0:45:25 actually.
0:45:26 – I had to think about this a lot
0:45:30 because it’s not the mood that I’m trying to dignify.
0:45:33 It’s very difficult to dignify depression.
0:45:35 ‘Cause then you slip into the five gifts of your depression,
0:45:39 the thing you didn’t know that was so great about this thing.
0:45:41 That’s not the point of the book.
0:45:42 The point of the book is to actually dignify
0:45:46 and see and recognize, ’cause I can’t give you dignity.
0:45:48 I can recognize the dignity in you.
0:45:52 Recognize the person who suffers as dignified.
0:45:53 – Yeah.
0:45:54 – So whether it’s my mom right now,
0:45:57 she’s like physically suffering and cannot speak
0:45:58 and she is dignified.
0:46:00 Or whether it’s the person who’s depressed
0:46:02 and on the bathroom floor and can’t get out of bed,
0:46:04 that person’s dignified.
0:46:07 We just have to see it and we don’t see it.
0:46:10 And I want to show us why we don’t see it.
0:46:11 There’s a temptation not to see it
0:46:13 because we’ve been closing our eyes
0:46:16 because we’re so blinded by the light
0:46:18 that we close our eyes to the darkness,
0:46:19 pretend it’s not there.
0:46:20 So then when it’s there, we don’t know what to do with it
0:46:23 and we end up kind of ignoring it
0:46:24 or like you said, tamping it down.
0:46:27 There’s a million ways that we can try to negate it
0:46:28 or overcome.
0:46:29 You should see the titles.
0:46:31 If you go to the titles section of self-help,
0:46:32 it’s like overcome your negativity.
0:46:35 And I’m like, oh, as an existentialist,
0:46:37 I just don’t think that’s what we do.
0:46:39 I don’t think we overcome negativity.
0:46:41 I think we just live with negativity.
0:46:43 So it’s not about dignifying the mood,
0:46:44 it’s about dignifying the person,
0:46:48 showing us that whoever’s suffering is also dignified.
0:46:49 We’re fully human beings.
0:47:01 – We’re gonna take one last quick break,
0:47:03 but when we come back,
0:47:06 we try to shake off these bad feelings when they arise.
0:47:10 Is that dishonoring these emotions?
0:47:12 Are we doing an injustice to ourselves?
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0:48:38 (gentle music)
0:48:41 (gentle music)
0:48:45 – You mentioned depression,
0:48:48 and this is something I struggle with a little bit
0:48:51 when thinking about my own thoughts.
0:48:54 And as you said, you’ll find a lot of psychologists,
0:48:56 a lot of physicians, and many other people saying
0:49:00 that we should seek to eradicate depression.
0:49:03 That’s nonsense, that’s not realizable.
0:49:06 And I really do appreciate your point
0:49:08 about the need to honor people’s depression
0:49:11 or to honor their dark moods
0:49:13 because that is a reality of life.
0:49:15 And then I find myself just wondering
0:49:18 if you think it’s possible to honor those feelings
0:49:21 and seek to transcend them at the same time.
0:49:23 And I’d like to think that that is something
0:49:26 that we could do without telling people
0:49:29 that they’re broken, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
0:49:31 – I mean, under our current framework,
0:49:32 it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to do it
0:49:34 without telling someone that they’re broken
0:49:37 because that’s the well-worn path
0:49:38 that says like my students will tell me,
0:49:41 well, I’m great except for I have depression.
0:49:43 And so that’s the trash part of me.
0:49:45 And so I’m broken.
0:49:49 And like you said, it’s not realizable to get rid of it.
0:49:52 And so I say, okay, well then here’s you
0:49:54 and here’s your depression
0:49:57 and you want to trash the depression part of you,
0:49:59 but that depression part of you is stuck to you.
0:50:02 And so you’re gonna end up trashing yourself.
0:50:03 That’s what I think we end up doing
0:50:06 by calling ourselves broken.
0:50:07 And so I’m trying to put better words out there,
0:50:09 like better ways to talk about depression.
0:50:11 And I use Anzaldua as an example.
0:50:13 She calls it the Coaliqua state.
0:50:17 She creates this colorful metaphor out of Aztec philosophy.
0:50:19 And I use it simply as an example
0:50:21 of a way that someone who has depression,
0:50:24 who suffers or lives with depression,
0:50:25 can talk about their depression
0:50:27 in a way that is not demeaning to them.
0:50:29 She does not like her depression.
0:50:30 She still hates it.
0:50:31 So you don’t have to say,
0:50:33 and then I realized that depression was my gift.
0:50:35 That’s not the book.
0:50:38 It’s, oh, how can we talk about this
0:50:39 so that I don’t turn against myself
0:50:43 so that that’s not my dirty secret that I don’t tell anyone.
0:50:45 And as soon as they find out, they’re not gonna love me.
0:50:48 It’s how to incorporate something like depression
0:50:51 or anxiety into the story of my life
0:50:54 that honors it or honors that that’s part of me
0:50:56 on the premise that we can’t get rid of it.
0:50:58 So we’re not talking about a world
0:51:01 in which we have the choice, get rid of it or not.
0:51:02 We don’t have that choice.
0:51:05 The only choices we have are we trash ourselves
0:51:07 or we find better ways to talk.
0:51:10 And when I say, we, I don’t even mean the individual.
0:51:11 Like it’s not up to the individual.
0:51:13 It’s up to society to create a world
0:51:16 that’s more emotionally flexible and tolerant
0:51:18 and not even just tolerant, but like embracing,
0:51:21 seeing all of the connections that can be made
0:51:24 once we become emotionally honest.
0:51:27 There’s so much there, not about the depression,
0:51:30 but about sharing it, about sharing the stories
0:51:33 of all these pains that really, really, really connect people.
0:51:35 And this is Onamono’s idea
0:51:37 that pain sharing pain connects people.
0:51:38 We connect better.
0:51:41 Our souls connect better when we’re in pain.
0:51:42 And I agree with him.
0:51:45 He says our bodies connect better when they’re in pleasure.
0:51:47 And I agree with that too.
0:51:50 But our souls connect when we’re in pain.
0:51:52 And so if we constantly hiding our pain,
0:51:55 we have these very oftentimes superficial relationships
0:51:58 with one another because we’re not allowing ourselves
0:51:59 to go there.
0:52:00 – That’s right.
0:52:01 – So it’s about the way we talk,
0:52:03 the way people respond,
0:52:06 but like writ large on a societal level.
0:52:09 – I have to say when I was reading your book,
0:52:12 I kept coming back to my life as a parent.
0:52:14 My son is about to be four.
0:52:18 And how all of this really does apply to that experience.
0:52:22 And one thing I have realized sometimes very painfully
0:52:26 is that parenting is a test of your principles
0:52:27 in a very concrete way.
0:52:29 And that really is the case here.
0:52:33 I mean, you open the second chapter with childhood memories
0:52:36 of being told, stop wallowing,
0:52:38 don’t linger in your pity party, right?
0:52:39 All that kind of shit.
0:52:43 And my son is extremely emotional
0:52:46 and sensitive and strong-willed.
0:52:48 And I don’t wanna suppress that,
0:52:52 but man, I also have a hard time doing anything,
0:52:55 but trying to make him stop and suppress it
0:53:00 when he gets carried away by those dark or explosive emotions.
0:53:02 And I don’t know, it’s a real struggle.
0:53:04 And I know you know what I mean.
0:53:08 And I really don’t wanna do the dumb masculinity thing
0:53:11 where I teach him to code vulnerability as weakness.
0:53:14 But there is this like stoic-y side to me
0:53:17 that really wants him to overcome these feelings.
0:53:19 And some days I do better than others
0:53:20 in trying to manage it,
0:53:24 but it really is a kind of testing ground for this stuff.
0:53:25 – All right, how about this then?
0:53:27 If you wanna hang on to the overcome,
0:53:31 maybe overcoming comes from feeling.
0:53:34 Like give in and then it will be overcome.
0:53:36 I really believe that if someone’s in pain
0:53:38 and you sit with them,
0:53:40 instead of running away from them,
0:53:42 they’ll actually stop crying sooner.
0:53:44 Like the thing that I hear,
0:53:47 once I start crying, I’m never gonna stop.
0:53:48 I’m like, that’s not true.
0:53:51 That’s just something people say.
0:53:54 Or people tell me, I really like to cry in private.
0:53:56 And I said, maybe that’s true.
0:53:59 Or can you think of a time that you tried
0:54:02 to bring your pain to someone else and they squashed it?
0:54:03 They denied it.
0:54:04 They wanted you to overcome it.
0:54:07 So I think that one of the paths to lessening the suffering
0:54:09 is to accept the suffering.
0:54:11 Like if you could go about it that way,
0:54:14 it would give you a reason to not try to shut them up.
0:54:17 I mean, I always have to check myself.
0:54:18 And sometimes my husband checks me
0:54:20 because I wanna say, stop crying.
0:54:22 And I’m like, no, I wrote a book about this.
0:54:24 I cannot tell my kids to stop crying.
0:54:26 I have to get curious.
0:54:29 I had a real win one time when my kid was really little,
0:54:32 like your kids, my kids are now eight and nine and 10.
0:54:33 So they’re a little older,
0:54:34 but my son was crying, crying, crying.
0:54:37 And I was breastfeeding my other baby.
0:54:41 So I had him come in and I said, draw it.
0:54:42 And so we started drawing it.
0:54:43 And I said, is this how you feel?
0:54:44 Is this how you feel?
0:54:46 And we drew like mad face after mad face
0:54:48 and sad face after sad face.
0:54:52 And it was amazing because he was like, yeah, there it is.
0:54:53 That’s how I feel.
0:54:56 And if you can give them a mirror, that’s how I feel.
0:54:59 I think this is my theory, test it.
0:55:01 I think the sadness goes down.
0:55:04 And a more recent example is my 10 year old son
0:55:06 was crying about something like that.
0:55:07 The world would consider very frivolous.
0:55:09 Like he didn’t, he couldn’t go to two parties
0:55:11 and he had to choose which party, so he’s crying.
0:55:13 You know, the temptation is to be like, that’s nothing.
0:55:15 Don’t you know that it does dying?
0:55:16 You know, like that’s the Trump card.
0:55:18 I can always say that.
0:55:20 But I just went in and I rubbed his back
0:55:22 and I said, yeah, it’s really hard.
0:55:25 And then my heartstrings started vibrating.
0:55:27 So I started crying and he like whipped around
0:55:29 and he’s like, why are you crying?
0:55:32 And I was like, well, I’m crying because it does dying.
0:55:34 And he just rubbed my back.
0:55:36 He did not wipe away my tears.
0:55:38 And so I thought, oh, I did it
0:55:41 because we don’t have to wipe the tears.
0:55:43 The point of this isn’t to get through it
0:55:45 as quick as possible or to stop it.
0:55:48 It’s like, let’s just have a nice cry together.
0:55:51 And then we’re joined together and we’re hugging
0:55:52 and it’s not traumatic for him.
0:55:55 Like it’s just for a 44 year old,
0:55:56 that’s what I’m crying about.
0:55:58 And for a 10 year old, that’s what he’s crying about.
0:55:59 And that’s okay.
0:56:02 Like I never want to compare my sadness to his
0:56:03 and say like, you have no right to be sad.
0:56:05 Like we just all get a right to be sad
0:56:06 about whatever it is.
0:56:08 And we don’t have to say first world problems
0:56:10 or anything like that.
0:56:11 We’re just sad.
0:56:12 It’s not really a big deal.
0:56:15 – Obviously what you’re saying in this book
0:56:17 and what you’re saying now is we need new stories.
0:56:20 We need better stories about our dark moods.
0:56:22 Stories that honor those dark moods
0:56:25 and that don’t seek to expunge them.
0:56:28 Is there a simple way for you to maybe sum up
0:56:30 what that story might look like?
0:56:33 The story we should tell ourselves about our dark moods?
0:56:34 – Yeah.
0:56:36 I mean, I have one concrete suggestion
0:56:39 that I think is a kind of summary.
0:56:42 So much of our pain comes from believing
0:56:44 that we’re supposed to cheer each other up.
0:56:48 And how do I make my friend happy when she’s sad?
0:56:52 If we could eliminate the idea that it’s our job
0:56:57 to make another person happy or cheer them up,
0:56:59 we can just be there for them.
0:57:02 So I think like whether we’re talking about anxiety
0:57:05 or grief or depression, like once we relieve ourselves
0:57:09 over the responsibility for other people’s moods,
0:57:11 then we are just like, oh,
0:57:13 oh, I can just come over and have pizza with you.
0:57:15 Great, like I can do that.
0:57:16 But when I thought I had to cheer you up,
0:57:19 that stressed me out, so I ran away.
0:57:21 Like if I could change one thing in our world,
0:57:22 like immediately it would be to get people
0:57:26 to stop believing that our job is to cheer each other up.
0:57:29 I do think that our job, if we love the person,
0:57:32 is to not leave them alone.
0:57:34 I think we want other people around
0:57:36 and the sufferer always gets to decide
0:57:38 ’cause maybe they don’t, then you go away.
0:57:42 But like to not leave somebody alone in pain,
0:57:44 your job isn’t to cheer them up,
0:57:45 it’s just to kind of sit there with them.
0:57:49 If that is good and sometimes saying nothing at all
0:57:52 really is much better than these phony condolences
0:57:54 that are so awkward.
0:57:58 – Again, the book is called Night Vision.
0:58:00 Mariana, this was a true pleasure.
0:58:02 Thank you so much for coming in.
0:58:03 – Thank you.
0:58:05 (upbeat music)
0:58:08 (upbeat music)
0:58:21 – All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode
0:58:25 and the spirit in which it was offered.
0:58:27 Like I said at the top,
0:58:31 I know the holidays can be difficult for lots of us,
0:58:35 but every time I listen to this conversation,
0:58:40 I’m reminded of how isolating grief and depression can be,
0:58:43 especially during times of celebration,
0:58:47 but also that despite those feelings,
0:58:50 you’re never as alone as you think,
0:58:55 and there’s a lot of power in transforming your relationship
0:58:59 to your own pain while honoring it at the same time.
0:59:05 But as always, we do want to know what you think.
0:59:09 So drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com.
0:59:10 And when you’re finished with that,
0:59:12 go ahead and rate and review
0:59:14 and please subscribe to the podcast.
0:59:15 That really helps.
0:59:21 This episode was produced by Eric Janikis,
0:59:25 engineered by Patrick Boyd, and edited by A.M. Hall.
0:59:27 Alex Overington wrote our theme music,
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