This is a special summary episode with reflection points from 2023 to take forward into the year ahead. The episode pulls together one key idea from each conversation, accompanied by some thoughts on why I found it particularly helpful and interesting. In this episode you will hear extracts from Oliver Burkeman, Anna Lembke, Lisa Miller, Tim Ingold, Will Storr, Helena Norberg Hodge, Sir Terry Waite, and Madeleine Bunting. Each of these people has a perspective which is worth attending to - one which might hopefully be a positive influence for the year ahead.
This is a special summary episode with reflection points from 2023 to take forward into the year ahead. The episode pulls together one key idea from each conversation, accompanied by some thoughts on why I found it particularly helpful and interesting. In this episode you will hear extracts from Oliver Burkeman, Anna Lembke, Lisa Miller, Tim Ingold, Will Storr, Helena Norberg Hodge, Sir Terry Waite, and Madeleine Bunting. Each of these people has a perspective which is worth attending to - one which might hopefully be a positive influence for the year ahead.
Welcome to a special seasonal episode of the Examined Life podcast. My name is Kenny Primrose, and today I'm going to be pulling together some of my favourite extracts from the interviews. In season one, You'll hear bits of Oliver Berkman, Anna Lemke, Lisa Miller, Tim Ingold, Will Stor, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Terry Waite and Madeline Bunting, as well as a teaser for next season. Each of these contributors had lots to say, but I've just selected a short section from the interviews and explained how it stayed with me since the interview. I'm forever on the lookout for guiding principles and wisdom to take into the year ahead, and if you are too, then I hope that this episode might provide you with some ideas. As ever, do please like, share, review this episode, send it to someone who you think might like it. Wherever you are, and whatever you're doing, I wish you the very best for the year ahead. I hope to be back in spring where I'll be mining wisdom from some fascinating guests, so do please stay tuned for that. Until then, enjoy the episode.
Speaker 1:The first interview I did was with the writer, Oliver Berkman, and it was a joy.
Speaker 1:If you've ever had the pleasure of reading Oliver or listening to him, you get the sense of a companion who is in the trenches alongside you offering soothing words of wisdom on how we should manage this experience of life that we're in together.
Speaker 1:It's like having a nurse reveal the extent of the wound while producing a bam that will transform the shock and pain of it. I think what Oliver brought out in our conversation is that we often think about life and our time that we're given as a problem to be solved rather than a predicament to be dealt with. Problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes. We shouldn't confuse the two. We treat our limited time as this problem that we can solve with time management solutions, the Pomodoro technique or time banking or whatever. They're all very helpful and they have a place, but they also prop up the illusion that we can fit everything into life. Oliver's question how do I embrace my finitude points out that we'll never beat time. It's not a game that we can ever win at. So what does it mean to embrace our finitude? Here's Oliver opening up his question a bit.
Speaker 2:Once you really see that there will always be too much to do and too many things that genuinely matter not just nonsense, busy work, but really, really important ways to spend the life. Once you see that there are far more of those, then you're ever going to actually have the chance to get around to in a finite life. How does that change everything? I mean partly, of course, one's choices about what you spend time on, but also just how it feels to be human in this situation. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think what I'm always coming back to is this sort of it's a theme or it's a sort of perspective or way of approaching things.
Speaker 2:It's always like there's some kind of freedom for me anyway and liberation in realizing that our situation is sort of even worse than we thought it was. If you think that it's really hard to make time for everything that matters in life, it's a very stressful and anxiety inducing situation. If you see that it's completely impossible to make time for everything that feels like it matters in life, that's not so stressful because you have surrendered to reality in some important way. You've accepted that things are the way they are and from then on you're sort of freer to choose a few things to spend your time on, because you're sort of no longer haunted by this impossible goal. I mean, obviously it continues to haunt me on a sporadic basis multiple times a week, but in terms of the ideal mindset here, the thing to sort of aspire to, it's that we might see just how bad things were in terms of our limitation and actually be freer as a result.
Speaker 1:Like Oliver, I find having an awareness of my limited use, my finitude, to be hugely liberating. It means that I've got to make boundaries and can happily say no to a bunch of things that might be very appealing if time was only infinite, but I just cannot actually do. It's a perspective that sharpens the focus on what you value, because in a sense, you need to organise time in line with what you love. There are some things that are mutually exclusive for me, like spending quality time with family and friends versus working evenings and weekends to climb the career ladder. I need to choose because in my finitude I cannot do both For me. This is a thought with sharp teeth and lots of wisdom that I do well to think about as I move into the coming year.
Speaker 1:The second interview I published was with the addiction psychiatrist and author of dopamine nation, anna Lemke. Out of her work on addiction comes a question about what a relationship is with pain and pleasure. Anna is a wonderful communicator and she explains the science of dopamine in the brain and why our evolutionary biology is so ill-suited to living in a world of abundance. The fact that we live in a world where treats and dopamine hits are only ever within arm's reach has left us with some pretty devastating consequences, as Anna explains here.
Speaker 3:I use a simple metaphor to try to explain how our brains process pleasure and pain, and I'll share it here. First of all, one of the exciting findings in neuroscience is that pain and pleasure are co-located in the brain. So the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain and they work like opposite sides of the balance. So if you imagine that in your brain, in your reward circuitry, there's like a teeter-totter in a kid's playground and that represents how we process pleasure and pain when we experience something pleasurable it tips one way, pain it tips the other. But, like all living organisms, one of the driving realities is the desire or the need for all physiologic systems to return to homeostasis or a level balance. That means, with any deviation from neutrality, either in the direction of pain or pleasure, our brains are going to work very hard to restore a level balance. And the way that our brains do that, when it comes to pleasure and pain, is first by tilting equal and opposite amount to whatever the initial stimulus was. So, to give an example, I really like chocolate. When I eat chocolate, I get the release of dopamine, our reward neurotransmitter, and a specific circuit of our brain called the reward pathway. My balance tilts to the side of pleasure. But no sooner has that happened than my brain adapts to that increased dopamine by down-regulating dopamine receptors and dopamine transmission, not just to baseline levels but actually below baseline. And I like to imagine that as these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But they like it on the balance so they stay on until it's tilted equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That's the come down, the hangover, the after effect, that moment of wanting one more piece of chocolate. Now, if I wait just a few seconds or minutes or hours, those gremlins hop off, homeostasis is restored and that feeling passes. But if I live in a world of overwhelming overabundance, where at the touch of a finger I can have more of my drug which again is not the world that humans evolved in Then all of a sudden I'm overwhelming my neurological system with these high dopamine rewards and in order to compensate for that, my brain essentially has to continue to down-regulate dopamine transmission as a way to restore homeostasis. You might imagine that as the gremlins multiplying, getting bigger and stronger, eventually I've got enough gremlins on the pain side of my balance to fill this whole room. They've got their tents and barbecues in tow. Now they're camped out there, and essentially what that means is that I've changed my hedonic or my joy set point. Now I'm walking around with a pleasure pain balance semi-permanently tilted to the side of pain. That means now I need more of my drug, in larger quantities and more potent forms, not even to get high, but just to level the balance and feel normal.
Speaker 3:And when I'm not using my drug of choice, I'm experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, which are anxiety, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, dysphoria and craving or intrusive thoughts of wanting to use.
Speaker 3:And how this resonates or is relevant on the meta level is that in the last 30 to 50 years, what we've seen is rising rates of anxiety, depression and suicide all over the world, but especially in rich nations. Which is really this paradox of plenty? Why is it that, living in the richest countries in the world, with the access to everything we could ever desire and then some, we are more miserable than ever? And I would argue it has to do with the mismatch between our ancient wiring and this modern ecosystem. We were not evolved for this world of plenty. We are evolved to be eternal strivers, never satisfied with what we have always craving more, and this mismatch is leading to a kind of overwhelming population despair, essentially because, from our first potent cup of Joe in the morning and checking our smartphones to our Netflix binge in the evening and everything in between, we're overwhelming our reward pathways and our brains are reeling in an effort to compensate.
Speaker 1:Anna's prescription for the situation that we're in in this world of abundance is to actually go against our biology, to embrace some kind of asceticism, denying ourselves easy pleasures and leaning into pain. Work brought to mind a lovely essay I read years ago by the writer Laurie Lee, called Appetite. I'll read a short extract. One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to preserve it. Appetite is the keenness of living. It is one of the senses that tells you that you are still curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your longings and want to bite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavors and juices. By appetite, of course, I don't mean just the lust for food, but any condition of unsatisfied desire and burning in the blood that proves that you want more than you've got and that you haven't yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart to desire, but sorry, or still, for those who did. I'd encourage you to read the rest of the essay, which you can find online. My takeaway from our conversation, from Laurie Lee's lovely essay, is to set up life such that I increase the friction in easy pleasures and lean into challenges rather than away from them. I think a realization of the necessity of this is actually growing. You can see it in the explosion of people embracing cold water immersion or distance running or whatever. These are two things that I hope to do more of in the year to come.
Speaker 1:The next conversation was with the psychologist, lisa Miller, who's a professor at Columbia University in New York. In this episode, we discuss spirituality and transcendent awareness, or awakened awareness. This is something that I was already very switched on to. I'm irrepressibly interested in the spiritual, but what I found very compelling about Lisa is that she weighs into this discussion as a serious scientist and she authorizes a way of seeing or knowing that doesn't just come from rationality or empiricism and is at odds with the scientific, materialist explanations for life in the universe that are so kind of dominant today. In this clip, lisa explains how she came to study spirituality or inner knowing, and why she thinks it's so important today.
Speaker 4:Well, there were two things that I really propelled this journey, despite the fact that 90% of people were naysayers. The first is that it felt that the fact that no one else was even willing to entertain the possibility meant that the work needed to be done. So it didn't mean it was wrong, it was being dismissed out of hand. I hadn't heard a single shred of evidence to support the notion of a random universe or anything like that. So the sort of mass denial or vogue to turn the head towards radical materialism I took as a sign that the work needed to be done. The second piece was that I was finding in my own journey a profound authorization of other ways of knowing, and these weren't other ways of knowing that Dr Miller made up in two years. These were other ways of knowing that our rich human heritage has carried forward for thousands of years, much of which seems to have been inspired information. So you know, at the inner table of human knowing, I had a very well-built up empiricist and logician, as many of us do from mainstream education. But also, at that table, in our birthright deserving to be right, there is the mystic and the intuitive and okay, the skeptic right, and everyone can work together, multiple forms of knowing, multiple forms of perception, which I have come to see as multiple forms of perceiving layers of reality. Now, that to me was so important because it hurts too much to not live out fully our nature. It hurts as a way of kicking us, it's an existential pain, it's a spiritual hunger kicking us to open up and realize our full being. You know that we are in fact mystics. Everyone of us, not just the most pious or the longest in meditation, everyone of us is built within innate capacity for transcendent awareness. Now, you know, 20 years down the pike, I can show you our published MRI studies and top peer review journals that show we are all built with a neuro-seat of transcendent awareness through which we perceive a transcendent relationship and that presence and our love for one another.
Speaker 4:But back then, before we had access to MRI studies and before we knew what to ask, and I was looking through the lens of epidemiology and I could see in very same data sets that everybody else used, nationally representative data sets measuring depression and despair and addiction, addiction, big one, in the same way every other scientist did, that the only factor amongst everything in the clinical or social sciences that really protects against addiction that really mitigates despair is spiritual awareness, a strong spiritual core. By what? 80% protective I mean? That's you never hear that If something's 20% protective, you buy it in a pill at the pharmacy 80% protective a strong spiritual life is 80% protective against addiction. Then it seems to me that the mass epidemic of addiction is because we haven't realized our spiritual nature. You can't locate that in an individual when half of Gen Z is depressed or addicted. That's not an individual's stumbling block, that is a mass cultural indoctrination out of our birthright, our spiritual core.
Speaker 1:Lisa seems like one of a number of really significant, weighty voices talking about the importance of kind of other ways of knowing and authorizing spirituality. E McGillchrist's new book the Matter with Things has chapters in arguing for imagination and intuition as ways of knowing, and the longest chapter in the book is entitled A Sense of the Sacred. Like Miller, he argues that these are different ways of knowing, perceiving different layers of reality, and, as Lisa points out, when we attend to our spiritual core, as she puts it, we are healthier, happier and more resilient. This is something that has been well established in the literature on human flourishing. The conversation with Lisa was an encouragement, I think, to pay attention to the soul, if you'll accept that language, because, as she says, it's an intrinsic part of who we are as human being.
Speaker 1:You might have heard that both Anna Lemke and Lisa Miller have different explanations for the current addiction and mental health crisis that we're seeing around us. I think both of those explanations can be true. We are in a dopamine deficit state and suffering because of it, and this also means that we're not spiritually well-attuned. It's no coincidence that the 12-step program, as well as many other addiction kind of therapeutic programs, involve belief in a higher power, and I suppose these thinkers, although very different, point us towards the way that we are naturally wired and why it is that the culture around us is not always conducive to human flourishing.
Speaker 1:My fourth conversation was with the noted anthropologist, tim Engeld. Anthropology is, I think, a particularly powerful discipline in helping us to see the water that we're swimming in. Those quiet assumptions we make about the world are put into stark relief when set in contrast to other traditions and ways of living. It's against this background of other cultures that Tim sees the way we're thinking about the passage of human generations as both unhealthy and unnatural when looking at history or other cultures. Here's a clip of Tim explaining the way we think about generations and how it's contributed to a sense of perpetual crisis.
Speaker 5:If any generation is going to have a future that it can call its own, then it has to displace whatever future had been designed for it by the preceding generation. Each of these generations, the succeeding one another. Each of them is trying to, so to speak, put an end, make the future, design what the future is going to be, put it all up as a plan for the generation that follows. That offers two alternatives. One is simply to fall into line with the plan and simply be a consumer of the history that the previous generation has already made for you, which means you've got nothing to do and it's pointless, or to say, well, no, actually they got it all wrong and we're going to put a new one on top of the old one.
Speaker 5:So, which is generally what happens, that history proceeds, as in the history of science, through conjecture and refutation. You set something up, you say that's no good, that's obsolete. We set something else up that's no good, it's obsolete, and each one is supposed to set an end to history. So what we have, rather than the perpetual beginning, a continual process of development and growth, we have a series of end points, of finalities which are imposed one after the other, and the sense of continual crisis is the one that none of these actually offer loose ends to follow, offer possible paths to pick up and carry on into the future. So we continually think that the world is about to come to an end and I think a lot of this extinction anxiety stems from that way of thinking.
Speaker 1:It's a really perceptive point. I'm one that is hard to find the answer to. It's impossible to turn back the clock, but Tim does suggest that we need to introduce people to the world so that they think about traditions as things that are not stuck in the past but allow sustainability, the allow life to carry on into the future.
Speaker 5:What seems to be very important is that we find an understanding of tradition that allows us to see it not as a way of living in the past, but a way of being able to carry life on into the future in continuity with the values of the past, not by breaking from them.
Speaker 1:As both a father and a teacher. This had me thinking about what it might mean to introduce new people into the world such that they feel connected to it and responsible towards it. A sense of the past here seems essential, as does an allergy towards narratives of progress that deny our limitations, whether they're biological or economic, or environmental. Sustainability is not a thing about progress, but seeking a form of life that can carry on into the future. In this sense, tim ended our conversation with some challenging wisdom. He said that it's morally incumbent on us to live an exemplary life, that is, a life which we are happy to pass on as an example to others.
Speaker 1:Surely this is a challenge that we could all do with a bit more of. So interview five was with the writer Will Store, where we discussed his wonderful question how are you keeping score? We'll explain that we are wired to be playing status games, and we do so all the time unconsciously. One of the ways Will has been really helpful is in bringing these games into conscious awareness that we can talk about them. It allows you to think a bit discerningly about the status games we often end up playing and the way that these games will change as we age and become more picky about what games we want to engage in.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, that's the sort of caveat to the advice that was given about playing multiple games. Is that actually? I think when you're in your teens and twenties, you should just probably focus on one. You know, you should be a bit more ego driven and because what you're doing in your teens and twenties is you're creating the rest of your life, it takes a long time to truly be of value to society and that's what you're doing in your teens. You're figuring out your game and you're throwing certain, you're learning from the people who are already up there and so and that becomes really successful.
Speaker 6:I think takes a bit of single-mindedness, but it's certainly true what you're saying about the kind of second half of life where you can take a broader view and slow down and start playing some sort of more interesting games. But it's very hard. I mean, one of the things I see myself which I can't it just cringe all the time, is when I've got like teenage nieces. You know what one is nearly 18 and one is sort of 1415. And every time I'm with them I'm like you know, I found myself lapsing into that. I was young once too. You know down with the kids and it's like, oh God, and it's like you with the, when you were just talking about how you just hear yourself, you've become a competitive. I just become this tragic middle-aged man trying to be cool, and you know it's just, oh, stop it, stop it. I can't stop it though.
Speaker 1:If you're of a certain age you can probably relate to this. I certainly can. I see in others and cringingly, I do see it in myself and to the point here that I think has real practical value is in becoming consciously aware of the games that you're playing and then being picky about which ones you're happy to be part of and which ones just aren't going to go well for you because perhaps when you think about it maybe they're a bit beneath you and maybe you're at the wrong age and stage of life to be playing them. So Will thank you for raising our awareness and therefore giving us a bit more agency about the status games that we play.
Speaker 1:If Will made me more aware of the unconscious status games that we play, then Helena Norberg-Hodge brought to my attention the perversity of modern industrial Western culture that I've grown up around as normal but always kind of suspected. There was something I miss with. Helena. Norberg-hodge is a fascinating woman, an activist, a writer, a linguist, a filmmaker, and we discussed in this why and where things had gone so wrong with the way that we're living, the way they were interacting with each other and with nature, and what it would mean to reclaim some of what's been lost.
Speaker 7:As we start listening more to our inner voice, as we start listening to our bodies and, if you like, our hearts and souls, we'll become more aware of the dissonance between what we really want to, we really are and the system that we ensnared in.
Speaker 7:So that's something that's already happening, and so I feel very encouraged by having witnessed over these 45 years that I've been at this and I've been in so many different cultures, talking to so many different people and many different language groups.
Speaker 7:And there's a clear pattern that, as people actually experience the urban, industrial, competitive lifestyle, which often means being completely cut off from nature I mean literally, you know windows that don't open, no animals, no plants and, as you know, when we go into the big cities, we don't even look each other in the eye, we don't say hello. So, paradoxically, we're piled on top of each other but we don't know each other. So this is completely unnatural and we feel it. We feel it and that's why we see more and more people developing hunger for nature, a more conscious appreciation of nature, a more conscious longing for more community and connection with people. And I think what's in our DNA is also to have more collaborative relationships with others, and they occur quite naturally when there's more intergenerational contact in the way we live. What modernity and this economy is trying to cut us off from that and segregating children into these monocultures, which is so dreadfully unhealthy and unnatural.
Speaker 1:What Helena said to me made a lot of sense and I love that she's actually optimistic about the future. You can read more of her work in her book the Future is local. It's fascinating and compelling. But what she said about listening to her hearts and her bodies really resonated, particularly listening to those moments and situations that I feel more alive in.
Speaker 1:I recently went to a Fixit Cafe down the road at a volunteer-run cinema. People there were serving free food and helping to fix broken appliances that people had brought without charge. It was just a kind of beautiful example of community in action and it kind of made my heart sing to see it. It was both a service given out for free in the community and the desire to be less disposable with the stuff that we had. It felt like such a different way of thinking from the drift of commercial society.
Speaker 1:Proactively and deliberately seeking out and being part of initiatives that reconnect us to each other and to nature is humanizing and it's surely the only feasible pattern for more sustainable ways of living. So Terry Waite was my next guest and it's hard to meet such a person without being utterly humbled by their character. Speaking to him brought to mind the observations of psychiatrist Victor Frankel, who said that there is always a choice, when all else has been taken from you, to decide how you're going to respond to a given situation. This happened to Terry Waite. He was held in captivity and somehow managed to retain a sense of freedom and dignity within it, as you hear in this clip.
Speaker 8:When I was taken and told I had five hours to live, was to be executed, I mean, I said to myself three very simple things. I said to myself you have the power to break my body, and you've tried. You have the power to bend my mind, and you've tried, but my soul is not yours to possess.
Speaker 1:Sir Terry Waite was released after five years in captivity, most of which was in solitary confinement. He went on and had continues to do incredible humanitarian work in the UK and abroad. His life really embodies a sentiment he echoes here.
Speaker 8:I do think that, if at all possible, we should try and redeem situations or change situations that have been, at the time, extremely negative.
Speaker 1:This advice and Sir Terry's example of how to live it out is an incredible challenge, but one I think that probably everybody could do with hearing. There seems to be a possibility in taking our portion of suffering and pain and investing it creatively in something generative. It's good to have role models in life, I think and I think Terry Waite seems like a particularly strong one that I would like to feel the influence of. My final guest in the podcast series was the writer and journalist Madeline Bunting, where we discussed the fascinating question what is home of the various ideas that bubbled up in the conversation? It's the discussion of rest and peace that really stayed with me.
Speaker 9:The really, really crucial thing is our desire for safety and security and rest. What security gives you is rest, and it's that kind of peace. I mean. I kind of think peace, it's such a kind of crucial idea that we have so little grasp of in our own lives, let alone geopolitics. But what does it like, what does it mean to lead a peaceful life and a life that expresses peace?
Speaker 1:There is so much here that one could explore an unpack, but I'm just gonna finish with a brief thought on this notion of peace and rest, for there's no rest without peace, as Madeline says, and so I guess a search for rest, which I associate with my own search for home, really entails a search for peace, something that is demanding relationally and spiritually, and is surely something that we could all do with more of as we move into 2024. As I draw this series of reflections to a close for the year, I'm going to leave you with a question of my own, one that I've been asking myself, and perhaps you can ask yourself too, if you're in a reflective mood. So it's this how is it that you are searching for rest and peace, and how is that working out for you? It's a question that, as I say, I need to interrogate myself.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this episode and any of the other content you've engaged with. It's been for me a learning curve, and I'm very grateful for the feedback I've received. I am, of course, indebted to those people who've contributed to the series in content, in music, in moral support. My aim is to release a new series in the spring of 2024, for which there are some fascinating guests lined up. I'll leave you with a teaser from an interview that me and my good friend Ian Porter did with the psychologist Dacker Kalner. Dacker studies the emotion of awe and sees it as a signpost to what is meaningful in life. I'll leave you with his sonorous voice ringing in your ears as you make plans for the year ahead.
Speaker 10:What we get an awe inspired by tells us like this is what I really care about and this is what I wanna be part of in the story of my life, and that's why awe is here is to locate us in the grand narratives of existence.