THIS COULD BE IT
Episode #2:
How Are We Supposed to Live in the Modern World?
How Are We Supposed to Live in the Modern World?
No one knows.
2
How Are We Supposed to Live in the Modern World?
Join us as we explore life's meaning, the impact of longer lifespans, and how to live authentically in a complex world. With insights on overthinking, making choices, and embracing uncertainty, this conversation offers practical wisdom for making the most of our time.
« We have roughly 4,000 Mondays to live »
Jodi Wellman
Co-host
Episode Stuff
Key Topics
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:59 The Quest for Meaning in Modern Life
05:43 The Burden of Choice and Procrastination
10:15 Living Longer: Quality vs. Quantity
15:09 Navigating Modern Life's Complexities
20:07 Cultural Nostalgia and the Burden of Expectations
29:20 The Value of Work Ethic
33:17 Navigating Life's Expectations
36:59 The Quest for Meaning
44:45 Imagining Alternative Lives
51:23 Balancing Responsibility and Adventure
- In this episode, Mike and Jodi explore the complexities of living a meaningful life in a modern, fast-paced world. They discuss how to navigate choices, the impact of longer lifespans, and the importance of action over overthinking.
- The finite number of Mondays and living intentionally
- The impact of longer lifespans on life choices
- Balancing overthinking and action in decision making
- The influence of modern technology and information overload
- Historical perspectives on work, purpose, and happiness
- The role of nostalgia and progress in shaping our outlook
- The importance of self-awareness and authenticity
- Simulating different life paths and the fear of regret
- Life is unpredictable and no one truly knows what will happen next.
- Focusing on making the most of the present moment can lead to a more fulfilling life.
- Accepting mortality can inspire us to live with more purpose and zest.
- Reflect on what makes your life meaningful today.
- Embrace uncertainty as a core part of life.
- Live with intention and make today memorable.
- "We have roughly 4,000 Mondays to live."
- "Life is accelerating and getting more complicated."
- "Life expectancy has increased, but are we happier?"
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:59 The Quest for Meaning in Modern Life
05:43 The Burden of Choice and Procrastination
10:15 Living Longer: Quality vs. Quantity
15:09 Navigating Modern Life's Complexities
20:07 Cultural Nostalgia and the Burden of Expectations
29:20 The Value of Work Ethic
33:17 Navigating Life's Expectations
36:59 The Quest for Meaning
44:45 Imagining Alternative Lives
51:23 Balancing Responsibility and Adventure
TRANSCRIPT
Mike Steger 0:00
If you're listening to This Could Be It, the podcast that uses conversations, research, just a touch, not even a scary amount of philosophy and random stories to explore, ripen the modern world with all of its challenges, glories, and perplexities.
Jodi Wellman 0:21
I'd listen to that. Welcome to episode number one. I'd like to introduce my friend Michael Steger. Hi,
Speaker 1 0:30
I'm Michael Steger. I'm a professor of psychology. I've spent 20 plus years studying meaning in life, purpose in life, meaningful work, well-being - all these sort of questions about why are we here and what the hell are we supposed to do now that we've realized it, and I'm lucky enough to be here today on this beautiful podcast with my friend Jodi Wellman.
Speaker 2 0:52
Well, hi there, I've been coerced to be here against my will. I'm Jodi Wellman, partner in crime with this could be it. I work as a speaker and an author, and I love nothing more than writing and thinking and talking about how we can make the most of this, you know. One time we have roughly 4000 Mondays to live.
Speaker 1 1:15
Yeah, it's a lot, right? Like, we have a lot on our plates now that we know we've come out of the cave, and we know we've only got 4000 Mondays, and we know there's a huge universe up there that we're supposed to find meaning in, and we know there's people all around the world that have different languages, different habits, different perspectives, different religions, different explanations for what the hell is going on, yet we're supposed to, with our tiny little three pounds of gooey little brains figure out for ourselves doesn't that seem like a lot, Jodi. It
Speaker 2 1:44
does. Also, I just have to say, if you're coming out of the cave and realizing we don't even have 4000 Mondays left, I just have to size the situation right. I think for most of us listening, depends on the
Speaker 1 1:55
velocity of the birth pushing, and whether you are, you could shoot out of the cave. I've seen that Monty Pythons means life had a baby flying through the air.
Speaker 2 2:03
Okay, easily shave off a year,
Speaker 1 2:07
that's true.
Speaker 2 2:07
Like, for example, I know I have 1738 Mondays left, give or take, to make the most.
Speaker 1 2:14
Yeah, I mean, I still have like a little bit over 3000 given my age, quite a young man, so I think I'm gonna squander a couple 1000 until I catch up with you, and then I'm gonna get super serious about what I'm gonna do with those.
Speaker 2 2:28
Okay, so thanks for saying that word, because that is exactly the thing that gets me jazzed up, is this idea of living a squander-free life, which really is going to be essentially the nature of our conversations, right? It's like, how to, how to analyze why we are so perplexed being here. Why it's perplexing, but we have this desire to often not screw it up totally. And then how do we maybe want to do that? Because it's true that we have all the answers, right? The two of us, we
Speaker 1 2:57
do. We do have all the answers. We dole them out a little bit of the time, because otherwise that's a quite dense, it's a quite dense one episode podcast. So we dole them out in part because people don't believe the good advice we tell them right away, right? I mean, they don't. We say here the things you can try, they're like, well, maybe I'll see what Joe Rogan thinks, and they're like, okay, well, it came, I hear you didn't like that idea, so, so, here's, here's a different approach, and they're like, well, I don't know, there's this influencer on TikTok who is talking to me from the inside of her Tesla, and so I think I'll do what that person says, right, so we have to keep saying the good advice, Jodi, because we've mastered this thing, this thing called life. People who know me know that I am completely free of worries, self-doubt, mistakes of any kind. I'm not at all self-conscious, the fact that I think I'm lisping and have like Invisalign that makes me look like George Washington with his wooden teeth. Our first president of wooden teeth, you can, you can make your own joke for our current president, but yeah, so it's a lot, right? And guess what? Guess what, Jodi,
Speaker 2 4:16
what?
Speaker 1 4:17
All that was a lie. We don't really have all the answers, we just have, most of the answers, and that's what makes us fun,
Speaker 2 4:23
and you know, even if it's not the answer, it's sometimes it's just fun to normalize and bed together on this situation we've found ourselves in, you know, when we asked to be born, right, and we said, like, bring me here now, we're here, 4000 Mondays, give or take, how do we handle this, and so I do want to ask, because I've come to know you're not exactly an optimist. To what extent will that flavor our conversations, you being a pessimist?
Speaker 1 4:54
Well, I try to mask
Speaker 3 4:57
it,
Speaker 1 4:58
you know, I. But it leaks out in complaining, snarky jokes, and hand wringing, such as Jodi, you're probably not aware of this, but life is very complicated and getting more complicated, and life is accelerating, so part of the issue of the modern world is you go from simplicity and ignorance to too much information, like too, like it's overwhelming. We're recording this right now at a time when there's conflicts around the world. We know people are starving, but we barely even hear about that because of other problems that are going on. We're neither here nor there, whether AI is going to annihilate us with robots, or it's going to create a super virus, or it's going to take all of our jobs, and we want to punch each other in the face for food. We don't know, right? There's just so many things coming at us, and all
Speaker 3 5:54
the while
Speaker 1 5:54
we have people like me and you getting on stage, saying things like we need meaning in our lives. We need to figure out a way to not squander, live a squander-free life, do something worthy with the time we've been given. That creates a bit of a bit of a mess for us to find our way through, right?
Speaker 2 6:15
It totally does. And I also aware that as you talk about the feeling about the tough world we're in, I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction as more of an optimist, and you can insert an adjective, for example, like maybe a naive one. I may choose to edit that out, but the world ostensibly is getting better, and I do feel the need, at least as someone involved, as you are remotely in the positive psychology world, and of this idea, like, can we acknowledge that, right? Like, right now, there might be lots and lots of things on fire, literally and figuratively, but that there's been a ton of progress. Like, can I just give you one really important stat that speaks to the cockles of my heart? If there are
Speaker 3 6:59
cockles, I mean,
Speaker 1 7:00
you do know where cockles are, though, right? Yeah, my heart is
Speaker 2 7:04
riddled with cockles. Okay,
Speaker 1 7:05
like basically like snails, right?
Speaker 2 7:08
It's really a lot going on. You want to
Speaker 1 7:11
share from the snails of your heart. I appreciate that. Lot
Speaker 2 7:14
1900 people used to live until like the age of 30. Now here we are. What are you talking
Speaker 1 7:24
about? People used to live till the age of 30.
Speaker 3 7:27
Yeah,
Speaker 1 7:27
I've seen what Einstein looked like. It was ancient. How can this possibly be?
Speaker 2 7:33
We didn't say that the stats had to be accurate, Mike. We said that we wanted to make points.
Speaker 1 7:38
Yeah, 30. I mean, Methuselah lived to 1700 years old just by himself,
Speaker 2 7:43
so there is a difference, though. In America, you could beg to differ on that big time, but like global life expectancy, because of the advent of a lot of medical technical changes, we're living twice as long, three times as long in some parts of the world, right, and so some might argue that we would actually rather not be living as long, given the world that we live in right now, but I wanted to offer an alternative perspective that yes, while we are going to talk about how life is troubling and we want to make something great of it, at the very least ameliorate some of the garbage it is getting better, so I had to put that little vote in. Thank you.
Speaker 1 8:22
Why I like this, I like this idea, right? Because, well, it does a couple things, one of which was not, is not great, but we'll, we'll rely on you to help us make it great. But it's kind of like if you had to play, so a typical soccer game or football is 90 minutes, right, and if you had just the first 30 minutes for that match, it would be like everything would be every mistake would be massive, every bad pass, every decision to kick it back to the goalie and reset, as opposed to charge forward and take a shot at getting around the defense, right, but we have more time, there's more time to make up for errors and judgment paths not taken, robots not married, whatever it might be that we've done not quite as well as we intended to in the first 30 minutes, a typical lifespan across the world for a lot of human experience into this modern world, we have years and years and years and years and years. I'm sure maybe we don't exactly look forward to the last year of our lives as a 90 year old or something like that, but the fact is we do have time. We'd have time to do life better, right? I thought you'd jump on that. I thought you jumped on that. You'd be like Mike. Yes, that is why I'm so excited. We live so long.
Speaker 2 9:44
Yeah, the thing about time is funny. It's that whether you have a lot of time, like some people wanting to live forever, you know, a lot of the tech bros who can buy immortality, maybe, or whether we have a short time. I think it's still the perspective of how we're going into it, right? Like, I think we could still squander the shit out of a 60 year old life if our life expectancy was 60, and I think that living longer, I think we dupe ourselves into thinking that that's going to mean that we have more time for joy, vitality, and all the things, so I'm a little bit lyric. I love the idea that we get to live longer. It's all been about health span. So, anyways, it's quality, quantity. We'll talk about that more in depth.
Speaker 1 10:30
Healthy, health-adjusted quality of no, quality of life, adjusted years of life, something like that.
Speaker 2 10:38
Qualities,
Speaker 1 10:38
yeah. What's that?
Speaker 2 10:40
They call them qualities over in the UK, don't they?
Speaker 1 10:43
They do, they do. I'm gonna say that that's true. I've heard it. I don't know if that's what I meant, but I mean, I've heard that that's a big deal. But the issue being that, okay, let's say that you're right about this, and now we live officially until we're 180 and everyone is excited about that. Why don't we feel a sense of relief that we have longer lives now? Why don't we get excited? Wow, I mean, just 130 years ago, people were keeling over at age 30 around the world. I mean, not in every industrialized country, necessarily, but there was a lot. There's a good chance that you really had not that many Mondays in your lifetime, and now we've got a lot. Shit, why? When are we going to see the dividends of that, right? Like, why is that? Why are we still so bad at living? I'm this is an obsession of mine. Like, we've been trying to figure this living thing out as humans for centuries, millennia, and we're still not good, and it actually feels like it's getting harder.
Speaker 2 11:51
I'm right there with you, and this is why we're just as giddy to have this conversation together, and it's troubling, because I think we both see it in ourselves, like, if this isn't a point of judgment about saying, oh, the people are struggling and just procrastinating life, because I think that that's what happens, right? This idea, we like the idea that we get to live longer, or even the fantasy of living forever, but in reality, like, we still need to figure out how to live now, like, with however many lives, like minutes or moments or years, right, so that tension point I think is exactly the core of this. It's like, how do we remedy, or maybe even have remedy? How do we just even just resolve a tiny fraction of that, so that we can, I think, what live even just a more vitality-filled or meaning filled, or both segment of years, you know, or moments that get spread out, because I think right now we're just procrastinating, and living longer means we have more time to procrastinate.
Speaker 1 12:52
Yeah, so I, so Jodi, among the things I know about you is that, like me, you grew up in a frozen, bleak wasteland,
Speaker 2 13:01
tundra,
Speaker 1 13:02
tundra, in your case that was called Toronto. In my case, it was called the Butthole of Minnesota, butthole of Minnesota, I guess you would say. And it got cold, and then there'd be that first spring day, it'd get all the way up to like 40 degrees for our American and Liberian friends, four degrees for the entire rest of the world, and people would like, you'd feel so much pressure. I felt pressure. I was like, oh, I can't waste this, I have to go outside, have to have a picnic, have to throw a frisbee, have to have a have some beers on in the snow or sit in the sun. He
Speaker 2 13:45
was a child needing to have beers in the snow.
Speaker 1 13:48
I mean, I won't say exactly what decade, but little children drinking beers was not so rare. I mean, I'm almost positive, and I don't want to embarrass anyone, but potentially someone who could have been my mother was smoking cigarettes while I was being, you know, baked in her tummy, and all that sort of stuff, no seat belts, all that sort of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2 14:08
product of a pack a day here, yeah. Gotcha,
Speaker 1 14:10
yeah. See, right. So the idea of me being given beer on the first spring day, I guess I was thinking of, like, maybe when you're a little bit older, like, because you know, you get that sense, I, this is like a metaphor I feel all the time, that, oh, it's so sunny out, or, oh, I have an unexpected day off, or, oh, I'm in London, I need to go apeshit and go do a bunch of things, right, like, have to go out there and do things, and then it feels a little bit like all our extended lifetimes, and the fact that we can sample through our computers, through stories, through friends, through books, through whatever we want, we can sample so many different ways to do life.
Speaker 2 14:52
Yeah,
Speaker 1 14:53
so that almost all of which seem way better than sitting around looking at your phone, seeing all these. Better ways to do things with life, that it kind of feels like we're just kind of like sitting on our asses, doing nothing.
Speaker 2 15:08
Oh yeah, you're touching on the pressure about the external comparisons that someone else surely is having a way better spring day than I am maybe with like three beers or surely like I'm supposed to do London in this way that and if I don't do it, what does that mean when we've lost touch sometimes with like what would you actually do if there was zero judgment on the outside or even judgment in, like, do you want to get up and out, and so what is the right answer? There isn't one, but it thinks so much of it has to come into what would make you feel alive right now. If you have four hours off in between work stuff in London, do you want to just curl up and read a book? Do you want to get up and out to Big Ben? Like, what do you want to do? And I feel like that's where we get twisted, right? Is like, what am I supposed to do? What, like, a good life is supposed to look a certain way, and that's tricky, because it depends on your culture, who you listen to, depends what you would scroll on Instagram, what you read, what philosophy, what podcast you listen to now will derail you, right?
Speaker 1 16:17
Yeah, well, we won't remember, we promised we would be doling out answers a bit at a time, so I mean, I guess, like, it's hard, right? It feels hard to reconcile a few of those things. We're supposed to, we know everyone knows we're supposed to find our own way, pretty much. Like, no one wants to be screaming from at the top of their lungs, I'm a follower, I'll do whatever anyone else is doing, and yet, if you look around, of course, most people are doing whatever what other people are doing, and you can find ways to elicit from people that there's a sizable percentage of folks who think it is actually really important and quite comfy to do whatever the authorities say to do, or do whatever some charismatic leader says to do, or do whatever your family expects, or whatever, right. So, there's actually people who do love the idea of kind of being told a little bit what to do, and if they follow those rules, and they feel like they got it figured out. And then people like me, or you, who are like, we need to find our authentic path through life, like it's not clear exactly from when we're standing on any part of this journey, what we're going to see around the next bend or over the next hill or through the next tunnel, we don't know, so we want to learn how to navigate as we go for ourselves, choose our own directions and destinations, and some people are like, why do you have to complicate things so much? I had this whole plan, right? I had this whole plan, and I'm laying a seed for another problem with the world, like I had a plan. I was gonna go to school, I was gonna get a job, I was gonna work away until I was secure, I was gonna store money in the bank, get the kids going, and then I was just gonna ride out into the sunset.
Speaker 2 17:57
Yeah,
Speaker 1 17:57
the little seed I'm gonna plant is that one of the problems of modern world is all of a sudden, all of a sudden, in our lifetimes we can't believe any of that crap, right? Because we don't know if anything will persist that way, but you know, we've, we're up two minds, right? We got to choose everything about our life, curate it, and at the same time, we're not supposed to overthink it,
Speaker 2 18:20
right? Yeah, that's the twist too. It's like, but be cool about it. You're making me think about my, my dear dad, who is 88 and lived a different life, right? So, growing up from the 30s was, let's just take the career, for example. You get a job, and you at that time are so lucky you found a job that pays decent enough, and you don't wonder if it's making you happy, you don't wonder if it's using your gifts and your strengths and your purpose, you don't wonder if it's meaningful, you know, my dad wrote it out with his pension till the very end, and fortunately wasn't miserable at it, but he also worked for many years as an accountant, and he did not enjoy being an accountant, but there was a different mentality in that day and age where you do it, and I would also say that he and his cohort may have been happier because they didn't have the option to say, but what would the career be for me that would bring me the most joy, you know, or is this my purpose in life to wake up and be an accountant, and so the burden of choice is also fabulous, but burdensome, so I like the comparison of just the different eras,
Speaker 1 19:38
yeah, yeah, absolutely right, because so many things were decided for us, or just making decisions about every little thing was was kind of a privilege you earn, but the main stuff doesn't change too much, like that, that has obviously accelerated, you know, the things that you can rely on as being a techno. You, that will still be around a line of work that will still be around. I mean, even if we accelerate into the future just a little bit, a city will still be around, or coastal community will still be around, right? Like, we love the sense that we're part of an unchanging tide of humanity, you know, as before, so in the future will be the sense, but you know it isn't the world is sort of telling us now we can't get by with that sort of thing, right? Whether it's because there's no such thing as a pension, like I don't think some of our listeners have any idea what you're talking about with a pension, which is like that's crazy talk. Like, is that like something you took for rheumatism or rickets? You know, they mean like scurvy,
Speaker 2 20:51
but we're not getting into that. Yep,
Speaker 1 20:54
yeah. Although I did, I did just see like a very interesting thing on one of the video feeds that I consume kind of talking about cod liver oil, and like this whole story about cod liver oil, and why that came about, and it was because in London, so everything goes back to everything is connected in London during the Industrial Revolution, it was so crappy, like it was so smoggy, smoky, polluted, disgusting, people were crammed into windowless rooms to live in giant tenements, that there they were never exposed to sunlight. They didn't develop vitamin D. Is that the one that comes from the sun, or is it A? It's D, right? Yeah, so they didn't get the vitamin D through exposure to the sunlight, so they had to start eating cod liver oil, because these little kids would have like little Bendy Ricketts legs, because of don't laugh, did I knew that's
Speaker 3 21:47
terrible,
Speaker 1 21:48
right? So they would have those legs, and they would eat coliver oil, right? And like, how far removed from that are we? Like 160 years, maybe, right? So it's really wild to think that there was a point where people didn't know that they were supposed to have cod liver oil because vitamin D existed, but they, you know, like the families who did have that thrived a bit better, and now we, now here we are, we're like, well, I don't really know if I'm making enough out of AI agents or if I'm living the best digital nomad life I could have, or you know, that just like it's endless now, the way that we feel like we're supposed to be making choices all the time,
Speaker 2 22:29
right? Right. I got a contract with myself, because a minute ago I told the story of my dear, lovely dad, Bob, and how life was simpler because there wasn't even a choice. When you
Speaker 1 22:38
reveal your, your dad was actually Bob Saget. Yeah,
Speaker 2 22:42
that's the big expose. There was ease, because it wasn't even a notion back then that your career is supposed to deliver on, you know, meaning, purpose, joy, happiness. It was just a paycheck, and ideally you didn't get, I don't know, beaten by your boss or something, but the things you're mentioning are often a reflection of a sped up society, and things were certainly slower back then. But is it not true that every generation has toiled with the experience of being alive, and isn't it all just relative, or do you really think we in today's day and age have it that much harder? It's harder to be happier.
Speaker 1 23:31
I'm gonna say yes.
Speaker 2 23:33
The pessimist would say that,
Speaker 3 23:35
keep
Speaker 2 23:36
going,
Speaker 1 23:36
and no.
Speaker 2 23:37
Okay,
Speaker 1 23:38
so there, there have been localized times in the world where it's been much, much worse to be a living person in the past than to be a person who can listen to this podcast, like if you can listen to this podcast, you are better off than you know someone living in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot, you know, cultural revolution there, or you know, living in the Midwest as an indigenous person during the age of expansion for the United States, just to, you know, have some cultural touch points in different places, or I mean, God forbid you were a little village somewhere in Poland when you know warriors, huge massive imperial tribes would and nations would sweep off the steps and show up and like Attila the Huns there and says you know this is your chance to surrender, if you surrender you become slaves, all of your children are castrated, and you know everyone else is sort of used for whatever we want, but if you don't surrender, we do all those things, and we burn you, right? So, like, the choices were pretty terrible. I don't think living in Florence during one of their many exciting plagues was all that hot, right, where 60% of the population of Florence died in. Is one of the plagues like that's not fun, like think of the smell, like it already smells weird in Florence. Now add like 60% of people there are rotting, right? So, like, you know, it can't have been always great in little spots, but I'm going to argue that one of the things that feels so messed up about modern life is it feels like we are all all of us watching huge things that where the world stakes are being gambled on dumb things a little bit differently, like maybe Bay of Pigs, but it feels like they were, you know, the world could annihilate itself in the nuclear apocalypse, but it feels like Bay of Pigs every day with AI, you know, tech, tech bros, super viruses that could be created at any moment.
Speaker 2 25:46
Yeah,
Speaker 1 25:47
global warming, plastics. I mean, it feels like stuff is happening all over the planet to all of us all the time, and I don't think that's super trivial.
Speaker 2 25:55
No, I totally agree, and I'm also going to just deflate the little argument I was trying to blow the balloon up on which was, yeah, but it's always been bad, yeah. So, what, like, all that we really care about right now is that, is that, or maybe, ooh, it's incrementally better than it was, but that's the same thing as saying, you know, eat your plate, starving children don't have that benefit. Like, all I know is I'm here right now, and so all we know is we are alive, whether it's better or worse than it was or will be. How do we more than just slog through? Right, so like relative to whatever's going on, how do I like my life just a little bit more, and or cope with this thing, and or maybe make it downright fucking fantastic sometimes? Yeah,
Speaker 1 26:40
I think you're absolutely right about this, Jodi, and yeah, we don't get to live in a different time that would have been better or worse. I mean, we do see cultural nostalgia, right, like Make America Great Again is an appeal to cultural nostalgia, where it felt like life must have been better in the past. So, in some sense, the kind of rhetoric I'm using, yeah, we're facing existential annihilation across the planet from multiple poly crises, right? Like that feeds into an escapism that, well, it must have been better in the past, at least for someone like me. I can imagine it being better, or something like that, or even if it was a little bit worse, you know, because refrigeration wasn't as good, it was hard to get ice for your cocktails in the 50s, or whatever. On average, I think it was better. So, let's do more of that, right? So, there's a, there's a backwards looking.. we are a little bit.. you and I have been on both sides of all of our arguments so far this whole..
Speaker 3 27:36
this
Speaker 1 27:37
whole time, right? Like, we're a little, little bit like Janice, right? The, you know, the myth of Janus, the two-faced person, who one face looks ever backwards, one face looks ever forwards, but we don't even like,
Speaker 1 27:49
if we want to do that, we should have a point
Speaker 3 27:53
to it,
Speaker 1 27:53
right? Like, like you say, we can learn all we want about all the things that could kill us, so that we're worse, we can all we want about starvation around the world, which is a critical crisis in many spots, right? Like, not just in Gaza, not just in South Sudan, but in a lot of places. But how are we going to use that information? How are we going to use that perspective, right? Like, if we look forward, don't we want to use information to make a better life? Isn't that kind of the point?
Speaker 2 28:25
Yeah, yeah, super right. Like, what was the secret back then? For example, to my dad being pretty darn satisfied in a career, is there something we can use and apply now in a world that's totally different, but maybe there's merit? Same,
Speaker 3 28:39
yeah,
Speaker 2 28:40
yeah, in small ways.
Speaker 1 28:42
I mean, did your dad want you to become an accountant, just like him, because that was an easier, more straightforward life? Or did he kind of defer some dreams to you, like Jodi, you can pay anything you want
Speaker 2 28:51
in the middle,
Speaker 1 28:52
American someday? I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 28:54
You could defect, yeah, not not extolling the virtues of mathematics in accounting. No, the lesson was don't do that. It was always a subtle observation about, oh, I would like to live a life where I don't have to say, well, I never really wanted to do this, but I did it anyways, even though I did admire and respect the quality and value of work ethic and doing what's right, even if it doesn't mean it's joy. So, like, he provided for family, and that was really excellent. And so there's lessons learned there, but he wasn't saying, you know, go be national baton champion, also because I didn't even know how to use the baton, that might have been probably part of which,
Speaker 1 29:42
which makes your victory in 1998 so much more shocking.
Speaker 2 29:47
It just came out of nowhere, you know. I was twirling, and it just.. it was like natural.
Speaker 1 29:53
Turns out the competition is not too stiff in Canada for baton twirling. Those of you who are interested in.
Speaker 2 30:00
Class of
Speaker 1 30:05
one,
Speaker 2 30:06
did your parents encourage you wildly to become a meaning professor?
Speaker 1 30:11
Yeah, I remember the encouragement I received was, do your homework, make your bed, no back talk. Here's a beer. Stop smarting off. Like those, that's the type of advice I remember getting. You have to play violin. Like, as far as I can tell, if I was to really just base it on what I really think my parents enforced upon me, I had to go to school and be a violinist, and yeah, I don't know, those are the two big values, I think. I think growing up, I don't think they had a dog in the fight of what I was going to be.
Speaker 2 30:56
Okay, and do you still play the violin?
Speaker 1 31:00
I wish I did. I picked it up like I played from five until 18, which is long enough that you figure out what you're doing. In my case, I was fine. I learned great. And then I picked the violin up maybe 15 years ago again, and it just like a screech fest, I could not make it, I could not make it do a decent sound anymore, like I'd lost all of that, like it's not like a guitar, you can't just like put your fingers in a place and go, like it's a, it's a tricky instrument, like it, like even those little screechy little children, like even doing that is, is takes practice to make it sound that bad, so I really regret that I'd lost that, but yeah, so, so that was a potential me who could have been like playing in some orchestra somewhere, I guess, like in an orchestra has very low standards, but yeah, like I don't think I got a message I'm supposed to do something, if I had, I wouldn't have listened, because I was, yeah, very obsessed with the idea that I was meant for something different than whatever anybody told me, and I mean, like, whatever it was, yeah, my town, the teachers, my parents, I'd be like, I'm almost positive you're wrong.
Speaker 2 32:22
Yep, even though you didn't know what was right, you just knew that they were wrong, and you were gonna go searching.
Speaker 1 32:27
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know if I knew the last part of that. I definitely knew the first part, like everyone was wrong about everything. Yeah, tell me nothing, right? So, I mean, what career did that set me up for? I guess that set me up for becoming professor and researcher of meaning and what it means to be a living human being, right.
Speaker 2 32:46
Yeah,
Speaker 1 32:47
and now it's set me up for trying to help people figure out, like, why is it so tricky, why does it just not feel as good as we think it should in this fancy, glistening, shining, you know, whirring, buzzing neon led lit up modern world.
Speaker 2 33:03
Yes. Okay, I used to coach one on one individuals, and this came up a lot. And I'm curious about your thought, and also your personal experience. To what extent it's your not too ripe age? I told you how many Mondays that I have left, that makes me 50.
Speaker 1 33:22
Mine was a lie, like I told you.
Speaker 2 33:24
Yeah, 3000
Speaker 1 33:26
I can feel, feel the disappointment and disapproval. Yeah,
Speaker 2 33:32
well, you're just being so coy. So, to what extent do you feel like you have arrived at this life that you're supposed to be living versus a I'm still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1 33:46
Yeah, well, that's a tricky question, right? And I'm really, I'm really into this idea, like, how do we know, and how do we process it if it, if we feel like we have arrived, but suddenly we're like, why did I choose this destiny? Why do I want to arrive here at this?
Speaker 2 34:08
I didn't want to get off the bus here.
Speaker 1 34:10
Yeah, like, wow, I cannot believe that I was really excited to get here someday, and I worked my ass off, and I sacrificed, and I was an accountant, or whatever your version is in your life, and I did this, I did that, and here I am. Woo hoo! I made it right. And do I give a shit? I don't know, right. So it's interesting, because I think that that is that is something that animates me a lot. Like, what is the life that I, that I want to have? Is there a life that I need to have driven by me is there life that I need to have driven by external reality, and how much you can tell I'm like I'm the type of person who bristles a little bit by at external reality, like I don't really like that I have to keep paying bills, I don't. Like a lot of things, right? So I did. I did. I'm very proud, and I feel like I've arrived in some ways, because you know it hasn't been there. Wasn't really a thing called a meaning researcher when I started, like, you know, I'm sure this will come up many times, because it both is true, and it shines me in a kind of a nice light that I'm proud of. Yeah, all the feedback I got, pretty much other than maybe one or two people, my son wanted to study meaning in life was extremely skeptical, right? Like, and it wasn't a good career decision at the time. Like, I wanted to get a job as a professor. No one was hiring meaning, no one really took it seriously. It wasn't what I should have been studying to get a good job, but on my terms it was non-negotiable. That was just something, for better or for worse, I can only make myself do things that are not aligned with myself for so long. You know, I mean, so, so, in that sense, I've arrived at this place where my, my career is me. It's like me being as good as I can be at the stuff that I truly love. However, there's another element to that, right? Like, what does it look like from the outside, whatever you think I am as, as a person who's arrived, like, how much of that do I care about, you know? And are there things that I, that just come along with being alive, that you have to do, or have to be good at, or have to spend time doing that I don't like? I mean, definitely, yeah, right, like, so it's a blend for me in that, in that space, right? For those of you out there who are similarly successful in your own, in some terms, or at least you have the life that looks great on paper, and you've done all these things, like it's not insane to still wonder what was the point of doing this, right? And what the fuck comes next,
Speaker 2 37:01
yeah, yeah, and I love the idea for us that maybe back to the metaphor of arriving, like, oh, that's like a pit stop, right, potentially, like it's not like there's just the one story where, well, that was the life I led, looking back, like my dad tells me from his assisted living home now, right. It's like, okay, I got off the bus there, and I thought that that was going to be the place. Okay, that was like, I spent a lot of time there, and then I get to redesign it if I want. Now, all of a sudden, just so you know, I'm like bizarrely hell-bent on getting you to somehow play the violin again, probably like cast, so that it doesn't sound like a screeching god knows what, like, but the point is, like, we can, we can fathom and fantasize and like plan this life that does seem different than where we are, which can feel super scary and you know, counter to the external factors, because it's like, oh, but wait, I have bills, yes, and, and so, anyways, I get excited about how we look at our lives the way they are now, whether or not we're happy with where we are now, like, compared to where we should have been, compared to where our friends are, compared to whatnot, and then also, just, what if we just blew it up, or we don't have to blow it up, because I find I find that notion scary. Doesn't have to press detonation, we could just press, we could just press like the blender button, or we could just press, press, maybe just like an edit, you know. This hope is what I'm getting out. I've
Speaker 1 38:38
got two thoughts. For one, I think that if I start playing, you make me play a violin, and it's successful, then I get to blow up your life. I get to encourage you to blow up your life. That sounds like
Speaker 2 38:50
a totally unfair trade, the violin for a blow up, but I'm game to discuss.
Speaker 1 38:55
Okay, well, game to discuss. There is, like, I'm obsessed with simulations, right? Like, I think a lot, not like Elon Musk thinks we're living in a computer simulation world, but trying to figure out what the future will be like. Like, this is what my brain is doing all the time,
Speaker 2 39:11
really.
Speaker 1 39:12
If I.. that's why I get very little done, and as much as I could, I guess.
Speaker 2 39:18
But if you were a futurist, you'd be like, it would all be
Speaker 1 39:21
done. I am a futurist, that's my new job. Thank you. Playing futurist who encourages people to blow up their lives, because I'm not done simulating what would happen if I blow up mine. You're simulating
Speaker 2 39:36
your life, life as we know it. What are you simulating?
Speaker 1 39:39
Yeah, okay. Well, this is like another issue I have with modern life.
Speaker 2 39:45
Number 29,004 9000
Speaker 1 39:48
is that we have the ability, and maybe even are encouraged constantly, and by modern I mean like not even. Like, as of the moment, but like, at least for a while, we're encouraged to wonder what might have been, even what is, is this a real Shakespeare line? More bleaker words have never been said than bleaker words of mice and men have never been said.
Speaker 3 40:16
Keep talking about life.
Speaker 1 40:17
Yeah, look that up and correct me, please. My ability to half remember things unmatched, I mean, no one has the ability to remember parts of things the way I can, and I'm owning that, right, but I think that it's easy to think through because we do focus so much on narrative and individuality and life as a story, and we've been trained by media, like sophisticated media, to understand the arc of stories, and we've been hooked on various ways of engaging our attention and thinking through things that it's hard not to think of our lives as stories and to understand the narrative junctures that we've crossed, right, at least as an 80s kid, I mean, if we get rid of a lot of the just incredibly creepy things about 80s movies, so many of them were where those two paths diverge in the woods with sliding doors, the parallel person who's who lived this life versus that life. I mean, there's a lot of weird time travel ones. There's a lot of, like, one of the protagonists is all set up for a very respectful life as an accountant, and then meets, like, you know, the surfer who, like, tricks her into, and whatever, right? Like, that's that could be one. I'm not really sure, but it's always like people are looking at one kind of life, even going back to, like, the graduate, right, Dustin Hoffman, like, there's one kind of life you're set up for, this, this is your trajectory, stay on this road, you will be fine, don't overthink it, and they're like, yeah, but what if I became a rock star, what if I became an artist, what if I started working for a zine in the 90s, like, whatever it is, right? Like, but what if, and I, I kind of feel like people get a little bit infected by that,
Speaker 3 42:11
right?
Speaker 1 42:12
Like, what, what would it be like to take on
Speaker 3 42:15
the
Speaker 1 42:15
life of the person who didn't stay on the right path and went off, like, off-roading, or just was looking the wrong way, and somehow fell out of their car and tumbled down a cliff, like, whatever it might be, right? Like, blow up, blow up the life. I run simulations like that a little bit, like, what if way back when I was in my 20s, I just, you know, like had one friend who said, "We got to go backpacking across Europe, right. We're gonna meet East German girls, they're still, I guess, not, yeah, you know, like all that sort of stuff that people were doing. Like, I had no one that did that sort of thing. I had people did crazy things that I should have done, but not that thing, or not, you know, like that idea. I had a friend who moved to San Francisco after college. How cool was that, coming from, as I've said, the butthole of Minnesota. That's a ballsy move, right? So,
Speaker 2 43:06
why
Speaker 1 43:07
didn't I get equally as excited, equally bonkers? So, you know, like, I do think that through. And so,
Speaker 3 43:15
then
Speaker 1 43:16
you know, I realized my life could have been different, many times worse in some ways. Who knows, maybe better in some other ways. Those trade-offs are what worry us,
Speaker 3 43:26
right?
Speaker 1 43:28
I simulate a future, I blow up my life. Like, you know what I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to be the first person in the world to row across the Arctic Ocean. I don't know, that's probably been done a million times, right? But, like, that's that's my new gold knife. It's not for me, really, because I don't like being cold or wet, but you know, like I'm gonna just do something ridiculous and screw the consequences. This is important for me to just blow up the structure, blow up the responsibility, the expectations, you know, the stuff that weighs us down when we get in our 30s, like I clearly am right, but, like, you know, there's something that starts to catch up with us is the accumulated weight of all of our decisions leading up to this moment. So, what would be like if I made, we realize, like, little decisions do pile up, yep, but they're also really hard to correct. Look at climate change, little decisions, it's hard to correct, but a bunch of little decisions do, so we're like, wow, there must be a
Speaker 3 44:24
yeah,
Speaker 1 44:25
there must be a blender button, there must be a detonate button, right? That's the only way I'll know a different way of living.
Speaker 2 44:32
Yep, you know, earlier I referred to you saying something that warmed the cockles of my heart, and now my cockles are really cockling in my heart, because this is the topic that I get so bezonkers into this idea might be
Speaker 1 44:46
talking about warming up the limpets of your heart at this point,
Speaker 2 44:49
the crumpets, oh
Speaker 1 44:51
my god,
Speaker 3 44:52
the idea that I don't know, our
Speaker 2 44:56
imagination that we can mad fathom. Simulate wonder, it's all indicative of like a desire for well, actually, what for you is it about could I have been happier, could I have felt more of a click in my life, like it was the right path I was supposed to be on, or is it just that it could be version number 19 eight oh 8.3 like it's in service of what, imagining these different versions, for what
Speaker 1 45:23
me could be all the above, right? So, so this is this is one of the things I'm thinking of, like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. Did you receive Napoleon Dynamite?
Speaker 3 45:33
Yes,
Speaker 1 45:35
we know people like this, they're stuck in high school, like I could throw this football over the mountain, right? Like, you can't lose, you can't lose your shit over deploying Dynamite Reference, right? But like, we know people who are like, oh, if only we'd won the championship that year, or if only Esmeralda had said yes to me for prom,
Speaker 3 45:54
yeah,
Speaker 1 45:55
those neither of those may be in that movie, but like we have this sense that if we had been, oh, Albert Brooks, defending your life, right, like that movie, if you've seen that one, it's amazing. I gotta, I gotta find it again, right. But, like, he goes, I think he's determined, he dies, right. And then they're not sure if he gets to go to heaven, because there was a moment in time where he could have invested in Casio, the watchmaker, and he thought no one's ever gonna buy a Japanese watch,
Speaker 2 46:24
stupid.
Speaker 1 46:26
Yeah, he's like, well, if you had, you go to heaven, like the idea that, like, how do you defend the fact that we were so complacent at times? I think there's a, there's a girl he could have, like, expressed his love for, taken a shot at. There was a job he could have expressed interest in it, or gone for there was like all these choices where you could have done a thing, you could have won the championship, could have gotten the girl right, could have invested in this, could have said yes to that job, could have gone on that trip. Like, I do think that there's that sense that sometimes our decisions cost us the good stuff, right? Like Uncle Rico ever leaving high school was bad for him, you know. Others staying in your hometown is bad, right? Like, there's just.. there's just a whole complexity of ways in which the I.. the knowledge that we could have made other choices, and then we're being bombarded constantly with people who seem like they made the choices that we were too chicken shit to make,
Speaker 2 47:26
yeah,
Speaker 1 47:26
or we just, it just didn't add up, like the accountant in us was like, okay,
Speaker 2 47:32
yeah,
Speaker 1 47:32
risk reward ratio is not good here, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2 47:36
yeah, yeah, yeah, we could drive ourselves crazy, and I think many of us very subtly do with those overthinking little tentacles, right, and this is why my cockles were cockling in my heart, was because this topic of wondering and thinking and overthink, because that it can be delicious in a way, but the one thing we can do is tune into what stuff would we really feel a sense of regret if we didn't do so again those regrets of omission, because all the stuff you're talking about, like the what ifs, that's the stuff that research does show that whether it's near the end or if you're just interviewing someone at a given moment in time, the play is like, what if I did ask Esmeralda, like, what could have been happening, you know? Could we have been happy in XYZ? So we will haunt ourselves with the wondering, and not everything is worth going and doing, or like trying to find Esmeralda now somewhere on Facebook, like that's not the answer for most of the things we wonder about, but I do think we owe it to ourselves to identify what I call pregrets, like if you were to be gonzo tonight, what would be the thing, or things that you'd be like, "Oh man, kick myself, like I never did the thing, like I never, I never wrote that poetry book that I always had in me, or I never figured out how to come out of the closet, and that was the thing I really just wanted to be me, or I never went, and I met a man this morning who, in his background, he has all these carved ducks and fish, and he's like, I'm a whittler, and I just became very interested in, like, I want to whittle if I actually don't want to whittle, but some people really want to become whittlers, but they're not whittling, and so you get the idea here, what will be the things, and that to me is where the most excitement is, is because the coulda, shoulda, woulda, is some of them you could pontificate endlessly, especially with a glass of wine, and or we could identify a thing that could be really cool and take action on it, because last I checked, we're not dead yet, and we still have the ability to do something with it, so for me that takes my breath away, because we could still do the thing, many of the things.
Speaker 1 49:46
Yeah,
Speaker 2 49:47
so that's where I think a lot of our conversations are gonna go. Do you not think?
Speaker 1 49:51
I do think, because we've got a lot, we've got a lot to deal with, right. There's there's stuff that is Bob the Counten side. Right, where we are going to have to figure something out about these looming modern world, you know, scary semis going the wrong lane, wrong direction down the interstate. Like, you can't just be like, I don't care if there's a semi coming at me at 80 miles an hour and I'm going at the semi at 80 miles an hour? What's that got to do with me yet, right? Like, we can see some things coming that we need to do stuff about, right? We can see universal stuff coming. We're gonna all gonna die someday, or people we love are gonna die. We're gonna get old. Hair, hair will be an issue. We'll, you know, we'll hate our jobs at some point. Obviously, that is not autobiographical for me, and you're self-employed, so that can't, that can't possibly work, right? But, like, you know, like, they're going to be things that we have to do stuff about. What is, what are the implications of AI for our lives? What are the implications of increased mobility, or the fertility cliff, or the rising cost of life, or the, or the violence in the world, like there's, there's Bob the accountant stuff, right? That definitely worth talking about, definitely worth trying to wrap our heads around. They're just gonna be, you can't just dream your way through.
Speaker 2 51:14
Yes,
Speaker 1 51:15
can't dream your way around the semi going the wrong way. But yeah, there's also another stuff that's like, little bit, yeah, we're doing it to ourselves, and we don't need to,
Speaker 2 51:23
yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the blending of both, because I lest anyone think that the notion of, you know, going and finding Esmeralda, or going and learning how to, you know, speak that language, or learning how to whittle means that we're not paying attention to the Bob stuff would be probably a recipe for like short-term delusional fun, and then like a crash in a hurry. So, yeah, I think that there's got to be the for each one of us, but that's tuning into it, and that's figuring it out. And I think that that's all part of the struggle is right, like there isn't a formula that we could follow, or, and even if you're anti-formula, still good luck finding your dose of responsibility versus adventure versus the stuff that is the eudaemonic versus hedonic versus whatnot. So, I think that I'm just, I'm just excited to keep having troubling conversations with you about the troubles of being alive.
Speaker 1 52:18
Yeah, yeah, me too, because I think we're people who we think about this stuff a lot, we hear a lot of stories from people who come up to us after talks, or whenever it might be, and want us to help clarify some stuff, and yeah, we're also people, right? Like, so, so we, we can have book smarts on a lot of these topics, but applying it is always a tricky bit, so I'm a meaning guy, but that's, you know, meaning shows up everywhere. I wouldn't, you know, I can't think of an area where meaning, the meaning of your life, the way you understand the world, how you make meaning, what you're going to do with your life, what are you going to do it in the next circumstance, what's the most important thing, how you, how do you juggle things, evaluate things, truly understand yourself, and just think, listen to the right voices and shout out the wrong voices, all that sort of stuff comes up and is really, really important. So, and because I'm a thinker, and I'm probably an overthinker, and I enjoy being an overthinker, I still want to get out there, like you said, like the in different words, we should have a bias towards action, you know, like we can't come up with the perfect simulation. I'm talking to myself here, we can't necessarily rule out or just redo like contacting Esmeralda after all these years, but we can do things that allow us at least to test the waters of some of those different men, right? Because in some sense, when we're talking about different paths, we're just wondering what other experiences could I have had, or what other me's could I be, could I have been?
Speaker 2 54:01
Yeah,
Speaker 1 54:01
right. So, we can do little versions of both. So, I think we'll, we'll have that as a theme too.
Speaker 2 54:06
Can I ask a quick question? How does one know if they're an overthinker? Do you think,
Speaker 1 54:10
well, other people are alarmed at how much you think about things,
Speaker 2 54:18
so it's externally
Speaker 1 54:19
thought about them,
Speaker 2 54:20
it's like your spouse or your friends or somebody, like, would you just..
Speaker 1 54:24
I get this feedback a lot.
Speaker 2 54:26
Do you ever think that you hang around with people who are under thinkers?
Speaker 1 54:30
Oh, I know I do. I know I do. No, I think you know thinking is great, thinking is fantastic. It's my favorite thing to do. I'm a thinker more than a doer, and I'm probably a beer more than a doer, also, but I'm a thinker more than a beer, a beer more than a doer. So I know that the solution to a lot of what I need to, what I need to figure out in life is doing right, and so the thinking is a part of reminding myself of that, but
Speaker 1 54:58
under thinkers. Are a little bit terrifying, I'm not gonna lie, right? Like, they're they're great in, in short-term bursts, but long-term, I think under thinking is not great either, right? So we want to want to be able to blend all this stuff up,
Speaker 2 55:12
the golden mean of thinking.
Speaker 1 55:14
Yeah, and you're an overthinker or not an overthinker?
Speaker 2 55:17
Yeah, I am on the like 60 percentile of think overthinking.
Speaker 1 55:23
Okay,
Speaker 2 55:23
and then my motto, in order to get into action, which I value greatly, even though it's scary, is don't think just do.
Speaker 1 55:31
Well, that's an exact play, but playbook for what's gonna happen next, because we're at the end now. I don't think we're at the end. We are at the end. So, everybody, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2 55:46
This could be it.
Mike Steger 0:00
If you're listening to This Could Be It, the podcast that uses conversations, research, just a touch, not even a scary amount of philosophy and random stories to explore, ripen the modern world with all of its challenges, glories, and perplexities.
Jodi Wellman 0:21
I'd listen to that. Welcome to episode number one. I'd like to introduce my friend Michael Steger. Hi,
Speaker 1 0:30
I'm Michael Steger. I'm a professor of psychology. I've spent 20 plus years studying meaning in life, purpose in life, meaningful work, well-being - all these sort of questions about why are we here and what the hell are we supposed to do now that we've realized it, and I'm lucky enough to be here today on this beautiful podcast with my friend Jodi Wellman.
Speaker 2 0:52
Well, hi there, I've been coerced to be here against my will. I'm Jodi Wellman, partner in crime with this could be it. I work as a speaker and an author, and I love nothing more than writing and thinking and talking about how we can make the most of this, you know. One time we have roughly 4000 Mondays to live.
Speaker 1 1:15
Yeah, it's a lot, right? Like, we have a lot on our plates now that we know we've come out of the cave, and we know we've only got 4000 Mondays, and we know there's a huge universe up there that we're supposed to find meaning in, and we know there's people all around the world that have different languages, different habits, different perspectives, different religions, different explanations for what the hell is going on, yet we're supposed to, with our tiny little three pounds of gooey little brains figure out for ourselves doesn't that seem like a lot, Jodi. It
Speaker 2 1:44
does. Also, I just have to say, if you're coming out of the cave and realizing we don't even have 4000 Mondays left, I just have to size the situation right. I think for most of us listening, depends on the
Speaker 1 1:55
velocity of the birth pushing, and whether you are, you could shoot out of the cave. I've seen that Monty Pythons means life had a baby flying through the air.
Speaker 2 2:03
Okay, easily shave off a year,
Speaker 1 2:07
that's true.
Speaker 2 2:07
Like, for example, I know I have 1738 Mondays left, give or take, to make the most.
Speaker 1 2:14
Yeah, I mean, I still have like a little bit over 3000 given my age, quite a young man, so I think I'm gonna squander a couple 1000 until I catch up with you, and then I'm gonna get super serious about what I'm gonna do with those.
Speaker 2 2:28
Okay, so thanks for saying that word, because that is exactly the thing that gets me jazzed up, is this idea of living a squander-free life, which really is going to be essentially the nature of our conversations, right? It's like, how to, how to analyze why we are so perplexed being here. Why it's perplexing, but we have this desire to often not screw it up totally. And then how do we maybe want to do that? Because it's true that we have all the answers, right? The two of us, we
Speaker 1 2:57
do. We do have all the answers. We dole them out a little bit of the time, because otherwise that's a quite dense, it's a quite dense one episode podcast. So we dole them out in part because people don't believe the good advice we tell them right away, right? I mean, they don't. We say here the things you can try, they're like, well, maybe I'll see what Joe Rogan thinks, and they're like, okay, well, it came, I hear you didn't like that idea, so, so, here's, here's a different approach, and they're like, well, I don't know, there's this influencer on TikTok who is talking to me from the inside of her Tesla, and so I think I'll do what that person says, right, so we have to keep saying the good advice, Jodi, because we've mastered this thing, this thing called life. People who know me know that I am completely free of worries, self-doubt, mistakes of any kind. I'm not at all self-conscious, the fact that I think I'm lisping and have like Invisalign that makes me look like George Washington with his wooden teeth. Our first president of wooden teeth, you can, you can make your own joke for our current president, but yeah, so it's a lot, right? And guess what? Guess what, Jodi,
Speaker 2 4:16
what?
Speaker 1 4:17
All that was a lie. We don't really have all the answers, we just have, most of the answers, and that's what makes us fun,
Speaker 2 4:23
and you know, even if it's not the answer, it's sometimes it's just fun to normalize and bed together on this situation we've found ourselves in, you know, when we asked to be born, right, and we said, like, bring me here now, we're here, 4000 Mondays, give or take, how do we handle this, and so I do want to ask, because I've come to know you're not exactly an optimist. To what extent will that flavor our conversations, you being a pessimist?
Speaker 1 4:54
Well, I try to mask
Speaker 3 4:57
it,
Speaker 1 4:58
you know, I. But it leaks out in complaining, snarky jokes, and hand wringing, such as Jodi, you're probably not aware of this, but life is very complicated and getting more complicated, and life is accelerating, so part of the issue of the modern world is you go from simplicity and ignorance to too much information, like too, like it's overwhelming. We're recording this right now at a time when there's conflicts around the world. We know people are starving, but we barely even hear about that because of other problems that are going on. We're neither here nor there, whether AI is going to annihilate us with robots, or it's going to create a super virus, or it's going to take all of our jobs, and we want to punch each other in the face for food. We don't know, right? There's just so many things coming at us, and all
Speaker 3 5:54
the while
Speaker 1 5:54
we have people like me and you getting on stage, saying things like we need meaning in our lives. We need to figure out a way to not squander, live a squander-free life, do something worthy with the time we've been given. That creates a bit of a bit of a mess for us to find our way through, right?
Speaker 2 6:15
It totally does. And I also aware that as you talk about the feeling about the tough world we're in, I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction as more of an optimist, and you can insert an adjective, for example, like maybe a naive one. I may choose to edit that out, but the world ostensibly is getting better, and I do feel the need, at least as someone involved, as you are remotely in the positive psychology world, and of this idea, like, can we acknowledge that, right? Like, right now, there might be lots and lots of things on fire, literally and figuratively, but that there's been a ton of progress. Like, can I just give you one really important stat that speaks to the cockles of my heart? If there are
Speaker 3 6:59
cockles, I mean,
Speaker 1 7:00
you do know where cockles are, though, right? Yeah, my heart is
Speaker 2 7:04
riddled with cockles. Okay,
Speaker 1 7:05
like basically like snails, right?
Speaker 2 7:08
It's really a lot going on. You want to
Speaker 1 7:11
share from the snails of your heart. I appreciate that. Lot
Speaker 2 7:14
1900 people used to live until like the age of 30. Now here we are. What are you talking
Speaker 1 7:24
about? People used to live till the age of 30.
Speaker 3 7:27
Yeah,
Speaker 1 7:27
I've seen what Einstein looked like. It was ancient. How can this possibly be?
Speaker 2 7:33
We didn't say that the stats had to be accurate, Mike. We said that we wanted to make points.
Speaker 1 7:38
Yeah, 30. I mean, Methuselah lived to 1700 years old just by himself,
Speaker 2 7:43
so there is a difference, though. In America, you could beg to differ on that big time, but like global life expectancy, because of the advent of a lot of medical technical changes, we're living twice as long, three times as long in some parts of the world, right, and so some might argue that we would actually rather not be living as long, given the world that we live in right now, but I wanted to offer an alternative perspective that yes, while we are going to talk about how life is troubling and we want to make something great of it, at the very least ameliorate some of the garbage it is getting better, so I had to put that little vote in. Thank you.
Speaker 1 8:22
Why I like this, I like this idea, right? Because, well, it does a couple things, one of which was not, is not great, but we'll, we'll rely on you to help us make it great. But it's kind of like if you had to play, so a typical soccer game or football is 90 minutes, right, and if you had just the first 30 minutes for that match, it would be like everything would be every mistake would be massive, every bad pass, every decision to kick it back to the goalie and reset, as opposed to charge forward and take a shot at getting around the defense, right, but we have more time, there's more time to make up for errors and judgment paths not taken, robots not married, whatever it might be that we've done not quite as well as we intended to in the first 30 minutes, a typical lifespan across the world for a lot of human experience into this modern world, we have years and years and years and years and years. I'm sure maybe we don't exactly look forward to the last year of our lives as a 90 year old or something like that, but the fact is we do have time. We'd have time to do life better, right? I thought you'd jump on that. I thought you jumped on that. You'd be like Mike. Yes, that is why I'm so excited. We live so long.
Speaker 2 9:44
Yeah, the thing about time is funny. It's that whether you have a lot of time, like some people wanting to live forever, you know, a lot of the tech bros who can buy immortality, maybe, or whether we have a short time. I think it's still the perspective of how we're going into it, right? Like, I think we could still squander the shit out of a 60 year old life if our life expectancy was 60, and I think that living longer, I think we dupe ourselves into thinking that that's going to mean that we have more time for joy, vitality, and all the things, so I'm a little bit lyric. I love the idea that we get to live longer. It's all been about health span. So, anyways, it's quality, quantity. We'll talk about that more in depth.
Speaker 1 10:30
Healthy, health-adjusted quality of no, quality of life, adjusted years of life, something like that.
Speaker 2 10:38
Qualities,
Speaker 1 10:38
yeah. What's that?
Speaker 2 10:40
They call them qualities over in the UK, don't they?
Speaker 1 10:43
They do, they do. I'm gonna say that that's true. I've heard it. I don't know if that's what I meant, but I mean, I've heard that that's a big deal. But the issue being that, okay, let's say that you're right about this, and now we live officially until we're 180 and everyone is excited about that. Why don't we feel a sense of relief that we have longer lives now? Why don't we get excited? Wow, I mean, just 130 years ago, people were keeling over at age 30 around the world. I mean, not in every industrialized country, necessarily, but there was a lot. There's a good chance that you really had not that many Mondays in your lifetime, and now we've got a lot. Shit, why? When are we going to see the dividends of that, right? Like, why is that? Why are we still so bad at living? I'm this is an obsession of mine. Like, we've been trying to figure this living thing out as humans for centuries, millennia, and we're still not good, and it actually feels like it's getting harder.
Speaker 2 11:51
I'm right there with you, and this is why we're just as giddy to have this conversation together, and it's troubling, because I think we both see it in ourselves, like, if this isn't a point of judgment about saying, oh, the people are struggling and just procrastinating life, because I think that that's what happens, right? This idea, we like the idea that we get to live longer, or even the fantasy of living forever, but in reality, like, we still need to figure out how to live now, like, with however many lives, like minutes or moments or years, right, so that tension point I think is exactly the core of this. It's like, how do we remedy, or maybe even have remedy? How do we just even just resolve a tiny fraction of that, so that we can, I think, what live even just a more vitality-filled or meaning filled, or both segment of years, you know, or moments that get spread out, because I think right now we're just procrastinating, and living longer means we have more time to procrastinate.
Speaker 1 12:52
Yeah, so I, so Jodi, among the things I know about you is that, like me, you grew up in a frozen, bleak wasteland,
Speaker 2 13:01
tundra,
Speaker 1 13:02
tundra, in your case that was called Toronto. In my case, it was called the Butthole of Minnesota, butthole of Minnesota, I guess you would say. And it got cold, and then there'd be that first spring day, it'd get all the way up to like 40 degrees for our American and Liberian friends, four degrees for the entire rest of the world, and people would like, you'd feel so much pressure. I felt pressure. I was like, oh, I can't waste this, I have to go outside, have to have a picnic, have to throw a frisbee, have to have a have some beers on in the snow or sit in the sun. He
Speaker 2 13:45
was a child needing to have beers in the snow.
Speaker 1 13:48
I mean, I won't say exactly what decade, but little children drinking beers was not so rare. I mean, I'm almost positive, and I don't want to embarrass anyone, but potentially someone who could have been my mother was smoking cigarettes while I was being, you know, baked in her tummy, and all that sort of stuff, no seat belts, all that sort of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2 14:08
product of a pack a day here, yeah. Gotcha,
Speaker 1 14:10
yeah. See, right. So the idea of me being given beer on the first spring day, I guess I was thinking of, like, maybe when you're a little bit older, like, because you know, you get that sense, I, this is like a metaphor I feel all the time, that, oh, it's so sunny out, or, oh, I have an unexpected day off, or, oh, I'm in London, I need to go apeshit and go do a bunch of things, right, like, have to go out there and do things, and then it feels a little bit like all our extended lifetimes, and the fact that we can sample through our computers, through stories, through friends, through books, through whatever we want, we can sample so many different ways to do life.
Speaker 2 14:52
Yeah,
Speaker 1 14:53
so that almost all of which seem way better than sitting around looking at your phone, seeing all these. Better ways to do things with life, that it kind of feels like we're just kind of like sitting on our asses, doing nothing.
Speaker 2 15:08
Oh yeah, you're touching on the pressure about the external comparisons that someone else surely is having a way better spring day than I am maybe with like three beers or surely like I'm supposed to do London in this way that and if I don't do it, what does that mean when we've lost touch sometimes with like what would you actually do if there was zero judgment on the outside or even judgment in, like, do you want to get up and out, and so what is the right answer? There isn't one, but it thinks so much of it has to come into what would make you feel alive right now. If you have four hours off in between work stuff in London, do you want to just curl up and read a book? Do you want to get up and out to Big Ben? Like, what do you want to do? And I feel like that's where we get twisted, right? Is like, what am I supposed to do? What, like, a good life is supposed to look a certain way, and that's tricky, because it depends on your culture, who you listen to, depends what you would scroll on Instagram, what you read, what philosophy, what podcast you listen to now will derail you, right?
Speaker 1 16:17
Yeah, well, we won't remember, we promised we would be doling out answers a bit at a time, so I mean, I guess, like, it's hard, right? It feels hard to reconcile a few of those things. We're supposed to, we know everyone knows we're supposed to find our own way, pretty much. Like, no one wants to be screaming from at the top of their lungs, I'm a follower, I'll do whatever anyone else is doing, and yet, if you look around, of course, most people are doing whatever what other people are doing, and you can find ways to elicit from people that there's a sizable percentage of folks who think it is actually really important and quite comfy to do whatever the authorities say to do, or do whatever some charismatic leader says to do, or do whatever your family expects, or whatever, right. So, there's actually people who do love the idea of kind of being told a little bit what to do, and if they follow those rules, and they feel like they got it figured out. And then people like me, or you, who are like, we need to find our authentic path through life, like it's not clear exactly from when we're standing on any part of this journey, what we're going to see around the next bend or over the next hill or through the next tunnel, we don't know, so we want to learn how to navigate as we go for ourselves, choose our own directions and destinations, and some people are like, why do you have to complicate things so much? I had this whole plan, right? I had this whole plan, and I'm laying a seed for another problem with the world, like I had a plan. I was gonna go to school, I was gonna get a job, I was gonna work away until I was secure, I was gonna store money in the bank, get the kids going, and then I was just gonna ride out into the sunset.
Speaker 2 17:57
Yeah,
Speaker 1 17:57
the little seed I'm gonna plant is that one of the problems of modern world is all of a sudden, all of a sudden, in our lifetimes we can't believe any of that crap, right? Because we don't know if anything will persist that way, but you know, we've, we're up two minds, right? We got to choose everything about our life, curate it, and at the same time, we're not supposed to overthink it,
Speaker 2 18:20
right? Yeah, that's the twist too. It's like, but be cool about it. You're making me think about my, my dear dad, who is 88 and lived a different life, right? So, growing up from the 30s was, let's just take the career, for example. You get a job, and you at that time are so lucky you found a job that pays decent enough, and you don't wonder if it's making you happy, you don't wonder if it's using your gifts and your strengths and your purpose, you don't wonder if it's meaningful, you know, my dad wrote it out with his pension till the very end, and fortunately wasn't miserable at it, but he also worked for many years as an accountant, and he did not enjoy being an accountant, but there was a different mentality in that day and age where you do it, and I would also say that he and his cohort may have been happier because they didn't have the option to say, but what would the career be for me that would bring me the most joy, you know, or is this my purpose in life to wake up and be an accountant, and so the burden of choice is also fabulous, but burdensome, so I like the comparison of just the different eras,
Speaker 1 19:38
yeah, yeah, absolutely right, because so many things were decided for us, or just making decisions about every little thing was was kind of a privilege you earn, but the main stuff doesn't change too much, like that, that has obviously accelerated, you know, the things that you can rely on as being a techno. You, that will still be around a line of work that will still be around. I mean, even if we accelerate into the future just a little bit, a city will still be around, or coastal community will still be around, right? Like, we love the sense that we're part of an unchanging tide of humanity, you know, as before, so in the future will be the sense, but you know it isn't the world is sort of telling us now we can't get by with that sort of thing, right? Whether it's because there's no such thing as a pension, like I don't think some of our listeners have any idea what you're talking about with a pension, which is like that's crazy talk. Like, is that like something you took for rheumatism or rickets? You know, they mean like scurvy,
Speaker 2 20:51
but we're not getting into that. Yep,
Speaker 1 20:54
yeah. Although I did, I did just see like a very interesting thing on one of the video feeds that I consume kind of talking about cod liver oil, and like this whole story about cod liver oil, and why that came about, and it was because in London, so everything goes back to everything is connected in London during the Industrial Revolution, it was so crappy, like it was so smoggy, smoky, polluted, disgusting, people were crammed into windowless rooms to live in giant tenements, that there they were never exposed to sunlight. They didn't develop vitamin D. Is that the one that comes from the sun, or is it A? It's D, right? Yeah, so they didn't get the vitamin D through exposure to the sunlight, so they had to start eating cod liver oil, because these little kids would have like little Bendy Ricketts legs, because of don't laugh, did I knew that's
Speaker 3 21:47
terrible,
Speaker 1 21:48
right? So they would have those legs, and they would eat coliver oil, right? And like, how far removed from that are we? Like 160 years, maybe, right? So it's really wild to think that there was a point where people didn't know that they were supposed to have cod liver oil because vitamin D existed, but they, you know, like the families who did have that thrived a bit better, and now we, now here we are, we're like, well, I don't really know if I'm making enough out of AI agents or if I'm living the best digital nomad life I could have, or you know, that just like it's endless now, the way that we feel like we're supposed to be making choices all the time,
Speaker 2 22:29
right? Right. I got a contract with myself, because a minute ago I told the story of my dear, lovely dad, Bob, and how life was simpler because there wasn't even a choice. When you
Speaker 1 22:38
reveal your, your dad was actually Bob Saget. Yeah,
Speaker 2 22:42
that's the big expose. There was ease, because it wasn't even a notion back then that your career is supposed to deliver on, you know, meaning, purpose, joy, happiness. It was just a paycheck, and ideally you didn't get, I don't know, beaten by your boss or something, but the things you're mentioning are often a reflection of a sped up society, and things were certainly slower back then. But is it not true that every generation has toiled with the experience of being alive, and isn't it all just relative, or do you really think we in today's day and age have it that much harder? It's harder to be happier.
Speaker 1 23:31
I'm gonna say yes.
Speaker 2 23:33
The pessimist would say that,
Speaker 3 23:35
keep
Speaker 2 23:36
going,
Speaker 1 23:36
and no.
Speaker 2 23:37
Okay,
Speaker 1 23:38
so there, there have been localized times in the world where it's been much, much worse to be a living person in the past than to be a person who can listen to this podcast, like if you can listen to this podcast, you are better off than you know someone living in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot, you know, cultural revolution there, or you know, living in the Midwest as an indigenous person during the age of expansion for the United States, just to, you know, have some cultural touch points in different places, or I mean, God forbid you were a little village somewhere in Poland when you know warriors, huge massive imperial tribes would and nations would sweep off the steps and show up and like Attila the Huns there and says you know this is your chance to surrender, if you surrender you become slaves, all of your children are castrated, and you know everyone else is sort of used for whatever we want, but if you don't surrender, we do all those things, and we burn you, right? So, like, the choices were pretty terrible. I don't think living in Florence during one of their many exciting plagues was all that hot, right, where 60% of the population of Florence died in. Is one of the plagues like that's not fun, like think of the smell, like it already smells weird in Florence. Now add like 60% of people there are rotting, right? So, like, you know, it can't have been always great in little spots, but I'm going to argue that one of the things that feels so messed up about modern life is it feels like we are all all of us watching huge things that where the world stakes are being gambled on dumb things a little bit differently, like maybe Bay of Pigs, but it feels like they were, you know, the world could annihilate itself in the nuclear apocalypse, but it feels like Bay of Pigs every day with AI, you know, tech, tech bros, super viruses that could be created at any moment.
Speaker 2 25:46
Yeah,
Speaker 1 25:47
global warming, plastics. I mean, it feels like stuff is happening all over the planet to all of us all the time, and I don't think that's super trivial.
Speaker 2 25:55
No, I totally agree, and I'm also going to just deflate the little argument I was trying to blow the balloon up on which was, yeah, but it's always been bad, yeah. So, what, like, all that we really care about right now is that, is that, or maybe, ooh, it's incrementally better than it was, but that's the same thing as saying, you know, eat your plate, starving children don't have that benefit. Like, all I know is I'm here right now, and so all we know is we are alive, whether it's better or worse than it was or will be. How do we more than just slog through? Right, so like relative to whatever's going on, how do I like my life just a little bit more, and or cope with this thing, and or maybe make it downright fucking fantastic sometimes? Yeah,
Speaker 1 26:40
I think you're absolutely right about this, Jodi, and yeah, we don't get to live in a different time that would have been better or worse. I mean, we do see cultural nostalgia, right, like Make America Great Again is an appeal to cultural nostalgia, where it felt like life must have been better in the past. So, in some sense, the kind of rhetoric I'm using, yeah, we're facing existential annihilation across the planet from multiple poly crises, right? Like that feeds into an escapism that, well, it must have been better in the past, at least for someone like me. I can imagine it being better, or something like that, or even if it was a little bit worse, you know, because refrigeration wasn't as good, it was hard to get ice for your cocktails in the 50s, or whatever. On average, I think it was better. So, let's do more of that, right? So, there's a, there's a backwards looking.. we are a little bit.. you and I have been on both sides of all of our arguments so far this whole..
Speaker 3 27:36
this
Speaker 1 27:37
whole time, right? Like, we're a little, little bit like Janice, right? The, you know, the myth of Janus, the two-faced person, who one face looks ever backwards, one face looks ever forwards, but we don't even like,
Speaker 1 27:49
if we want to do that, we should have a point
Speaker 3 27:53
to it,
Speaker 1 27:53
right? Like, like you say, we can learn all we want about all the things that could kill us, so that we're worse, we can all we want about starvation around the world, which is a critical crisis in many spots, right? Like, not just in Gaza, not just in South Sudan, but in a lot of places. But how are we going to use that information? How are we going to use that perspective, right? Like, if we look forward, don't we want to use information to make a better life? Isn't that kind of the point?
Speaker 2 28:25
Yeah, yeah, super right. Like, what was the secret back then? For example, to my dad being pretty darn satisfied in a career, is there something we can use and apply now in a world that's totally different, but maybe there's merit? Same,
Speaker 3 28:39
yeah,
Speaker 2 28:40
yeah, in small ways.
Speaker 1 28:42
I mean, did your dad want you to become an accountant, just like him, because that was an easier, more straightforward life? Or did he kind of defer some dreams to you, like Jodi, you can pay anything you want
Speaker 2 28:51
in the middle,
Speaker 1 28:52
American someday? I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 28:54
You could defect, yeah, not not extolling the virtues of mathematics in accounting. No, the lesson was don't do that. It was always a subtle observation about, oh, I would like to live a life where I don't have to say, well, I never really wanted to do this, but I did it anyways, even though I did admire and respect the quality and value of work ethic and doing what's right, even if it doesn't mean it's joy. So, like, he provided for family, and that was really excellent. And so there's lessons learned there, but he wasn't saying, you know, go be national baton champion, also because I didn't even know how to use the baton, that might have been probably part of which,
Speaker 1 29:42
which makes your victory in 1998 so much more shocking.
Speaker 2 29:47
It just came out of nowhere, you know. I was twirling, and it just.. it was like natural.
Speaker 1 29:53
Turns out the competition is not too stiff in Canada for baton twirling. Those of you who are interested in.
Speaker 2 30:00
Class of
Speaker 1 30:05
one,
Speaker 2 30:06
did your parents encourage you wildly to become a meaning professor?
Speaker 1 30:11
Yeah, I remember the encouragement I received was, do your homework, make your bed, no back talk. Here's a beer. Stop smarting off. Like those, that's the type of advice I remember getting. You have to play violin. Like, as far as I can tell, if I was to really just base it on what I really think my parents enforced upon me, I had to go to school and be a violinist, and yeah, I don't know, those are the two big values, I think. I think growing up, I don't think they had a dog in the fight of what I was going to be.
Speaker 2 30:56
Okay, and do you still play the violin?
Speaker 1 31:00
I wish I did. I picked it up like I played from five until 18, which is long enough that you figure out what you're doing. In my case, I was fine. I learned great. And then I picked the violin up maybe 15 years ago again, and it just like a screech fest, I could not make it, I could not make it do a decent sound anymore, like I'd lost all of that, like it's not like a guitar, you can't just like put your fingers in a place and go, like it's a, it's a tricky instrument, like it, like even those little screechy little children, like even doing that is, is takes practice to make it sound that bad, so I really regret that I'd lost that, but yeah, so, so that was a potential me who could have been like playing in some orchestra somewhere, I guess, like in an orchestra has very low standards, but yeah, like I don't think I got a message I'm supposed to do something, if I had, I wouldn't have listened, because I was, yeah, very obsessed with the idea that I was meant for something different than whatever anybody told me, and I mean, like, whatever it was, yeah, my town, the teachers, my parents, I'd be like, I'm almost positive you're wrong.
Speaker 2 32:22
Yep, even though you didn't know what was right, you just knew that they were wrong, and you were gonna go searching.
Speaker 1 32:27
Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know if I knew the last part of that. I definitely knew the first part, like everyone was wrong about everything. Yeah, tell me nothing, right? So, I mean, what career did that set me up for? I guess that set me up for becoming professor and researcher of meaning and what it means to be a living human being, right.
Speaker 2 32:46
Yeah,
Speaker 1 32:47
and now it's set me up for trying to help people figure out, like, why is it so tricky, why does it just not feel as good as we think it should in this fancy, glistening, shining, you know, whirring, buzzing neon led lit up modern world.
Speaker 2 33:03
Yes. Okay, I used to coach one on one individuals, and this came up a lot. And I'm curious about your thought, and also your personal experience. To what extent it's your not too ripe age? I told you how many Mondays that I have left, that makes me 50.
Speaker 1 33:22
Mine was a lie, like I told you.
Speaker 2 33:24
Yeah, 3000
Speaker 1 33:26
I can feel, feel the disappointment and disapproval. Yeah,
Speaker 2 33:32
well, you're just being so coy. So, to what extent do you feel like you have arrived at this life that you're supposed to be living versus a I'm still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1 33:46
Yeah, well, that's a tricky question, right? And I'm really, I'm really into this idea, like, how do we know, and how do we process it if it, if we feel like we have arrived, but suddenly we're like, why did I choose this destiny? Why do I want to arrive here at this?
Speaker 2 34:08
I didn't want to get off the bus here.
Speaker 1 34:10
Yeah, like, wow, I cannot believe that I was really excited to get here someday, and I worked my ass off, and I sacrificed, and I was an accountant, or whatever your version is in your life, and I did this, I did that, and here I am. Woo hoo! I made it right. And do I give a shit? I don't know, right. So it's interesting, because I think that that is that is something that animates me a lot. Like, what is the life that I, that I want to have? Is there a life that I need to have driven by me is there life that I need to have driven by external reality, and how much you can tell I'm like I'm the type of person who bristles a little bit by at external reality, like I don't really like that I have to keep paying bills, I don't. Like a lot of things, right? So I did. I did. I'm very proud, and I feel like I've arrived in some ways, because you know it hasn't been there. Wasn't really a thing called a meaning researcher when I started, like, you know, I'm sure this will come up many times, because it both is true, and it shines me in a kind of a nice light that I'm proud of. Yeah, all the feedback I got, pretty much other than maybe one or two people, my son wanted to study meaning in life was extremely skeptical, right? Like, and it wasn't a good career decision at the time. Like, I wanted to get a job as a professor. No one was hiring meaning, no one really took it seriously. It wasn't what I should have been studying to get a good job, but on my terms it was non-negotiable. That was just something, for better or for worse, I can only make myself do things that are not aligned with myself for so long. You know, I mean, so, so, in that sense, I've arrived at this place where my, my career is me. It's like me being as good as I can be at the stuff that I truly love. However, there's another element to that, right? Like, what does it look like from the outside, whatever you think I am as, as a person who's arrived, like, how much of that do I care about, you know? And are there things that I, that just come along with being alive, that you have to do, or have to be good at, or have to spend time doing that I don't like? I mean, definitely, yeah, right, like, so it's a blend for me in that, in that space, right? For those of you out there who are similarly successful in your own, in some terms, or at least you have the life that looks great on paper, and you've done all these things, like it's not insane to still wonder what was the point of doing this, right? And what the fuck comes next,
Speaker 2 37:01
yeah, yeah, and I love the idea for us that maybe back to the metaphor of arriving, like, oh, that's like a pit stop, right, potentially, like it's not like there's just the one story where, well, that was the life I led, looking back, like my dad tells me from his assisted living home now, right. It's like, okay, I got off the bus there, and I thought that that was going to be the place. Okay, that was like, I spent a lot of time there, and then I get to redesign it if I want. Now, all of a sudden, just so you know, I'm like bizarrely hell-bent on getting you to somehow play the violin again, probably like cast, so that it doesn't sound like a screeching god knows what, like, but the point is, like, we can, we can fathom and fantasize and like plan this life that does seem different than where we are, which can feel super scary and you know, counter to the external factors, because it's like, oh, but wait, I have bills, yes, and, and so, anyways, I get excited about how we look at our lives the way they are now, whether or not we're happy with where we are now, like, compared to where we should have been, compared to where our friends are, compared to whatnot, and then also, just, what if we just blew it up, or we don't have to blow it up, because I find I find that notion scary. Doesn't have to press detonation, we could just press, we could just press like the blender button, or we could just press, press, maybe just like an edit, you know. This hope is what I'm getting out. I've
Speaker 1 38:38
got two thoughts. For one, I think that if I start playing, you make me play a violin, and it's successful, then I get to blow up your life. I get to encourage you to blow up your life. That sounds like
Speaker 2 38:50
a totally unfair trade, the violin for a blow up, but I'm game to discuss.
Speaker 1 38:55
Okay, well, game to discuss. There is, like, I'm obsessed with simulations, right? Like, I think a lot, not like Elon Musk thinks we're living in a computer simulation world, but trying to figure out what the future will be like. Like, this is what my brain is doing all the time,
Speaker 2 39:11
really.
Speaker 1 39:12
If I.. that's why I get very little done, and as much as I could, I guess.
Speaker 2 39:18
But if you were a futurist, you'd be like, it would all be
Speaker 1 39:21
done. I am a futurist, that's my new job. Thank you. Playing futurist who encourages people to blow up their lives, because I'm not done simulating what would happen if I blow up mine. You're simulating
Speaker 2 39:36
your life, life as we know it. What are you simulating?
Speaker 1 39:39
Yeah, okay. Well, this is like another issue I have with modern life.
Speaker 2 39:45
Number 29,004 9000
Speaker 1 39:48
is that we have the ability, and maybe even are encouraged constantly, and by modern I mean like not even. Like, as of the moment, but like, at least for a while, we're encouraged to wonder what might have been, even what is, is this a real Shakespeare line? More bleaker words have never been said than bleaker words of mice and men have never been said.
Speaker 3 40:16
Keep talking about life.
Speaker 1 40:17
Yeah, look that up and correct me, please. My ability to half remember things unmatched, I mean, no one has the ability to remember parts of things the way I can, and I'm owning that, right, but I think that it's easy to think through because we do focus so much on narrative and individuality and life as a story, and we've been trained by media, like sophisticated media, to understand the arc of stories, and we've been hooked on various ways of engaging our attention and thinking through things that it's hard not to think of our lives as stories and to understand the narrative junctures that we've crossed, right, at least as an 80s kid, I mean, if we get rid of a lot of the just incredibly creepy things about 80s movies, so many of them were where those two paths diverge in the woods with sliding doors, the parallel person who's who lived this life versus that life. I mean, there's a lot of weird time travel ones. There's a lot of, like, one of the protagonists is all set up for a very respectful life as an accountant, and then meets, like, you know, the surfer who, like, tricks her into, and whatever, right? Like, that's that could be one. I'm not really sure, but it's always like people are looking at one kind of life, even going back to, like, the graduate, right, Dustin Hoffman, like, there's one kind of life you're set up for, this, this is your trajectory, stay on this road, you will be fine, don't overthink it, and they're like, yeah, but what if I became a rock star, what if I became an artist, what if I started working for a zine in the 90s, like, whatever it is, right? Like, but what if, and I, I kind of feel like people get a little bit infected by that,
Speaker 3 42:11
right?
Speaker 1 42:12
Like, what, what would it be like to take on
Speaker 3 42:15
the
Speaker 1 42:15
life of the person who didn't stay on the right path and went off, like, off-roading, or just was looking the wrong way, and somehow fell out of their car and tumbled down a cliff, like, whatever it might be, right? Like, blow up, blow up the life. I run simulations like that a little bit, like, what if way back when I was in my 20s, I just, you know, like had one friend who said, "We got to go backpacking across Europe, right. We're gonna meet East German girls, they're still, I guess, not, yeah, you know, like all that sort of stuff that people were doing. Like, I had no one that did that sort of thing. I had people did crazy things that I should have done, but not that thing, or not, you know, like that idea. I had a friend who moved to San Francisco after college. How cool was that, coming from, as I've said, the butthole of Minnesota. That's a ballsy move, right? So,
Speaker 2 43:06
why
Speaker 1 43:07
didn't I get equally as excited, equally bonkers? So, you know, like, I do think that through. And so,
Speaker 3 43:15
then
Speaker 1 43:16
you know, I realized my life could have been different, many times worse in some ways. Who knows, maybe better in some other ways. Those trade-offs are what worry us,
Speaker 3 43:26
right?
Speaker 1 43:28
I simulate a future, I blow up my life. Like, you know what I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to be the first person in the world to row across the Arctic Ocean. I don't know, that's probably been done a million times, right? But, like, that's that's my new gold knife. It's not for me, really, because I don't like being cold or wet, but you know, like I'm gonna just do something ridiculous and screw the consequences. This is important for me to just blow up the structure, blow up the responsibility, the expectations, you know, the stuff that weighs us down when we get in our 30s, like I clearly am right, but, like, you know, there's something that starts to catch up with us is the accumulated weight of all of our decisions leading up to this moment. So, what would be like if I made, we realize, like, little decisions do pile up, yep, but they're also really hard to correct. Look at climate change, little decisions, it's hard to correct, but a bunch of little decisions do, so we're like, wow, there must be a
Speaker 3 44:24
yeah,
Speaker 1 44:25
there must be a blender button, there must be a detonate button, right? That's the only way I'll know a different way of living.
Speaker 2 44:32
Yep, you know, earlier I referred to you saying something that warmed the cockles of my heart, and now my cockles are really cockling in my heart, because this is the topic that I get so bezonkers into this idea might be
Speaker 1 44:46
talking about warming up the limpets of your heart at this point,
Speaker 2 44:49
the crumpets, oh
Speaker 1 44:51
my god,
Speaker 3 44:52
the idea that I don't know, our
Speaker 2 44:56
imagination that we can mad fathom. Simulate wonder, it's all indicative of like a desire for well, actually, what for you is it about could I have been happier, could I have felt more of a click in my life, like it was the right path I was supposed to be on, or is it just that it could be version number 19 eight oh 8.3 like it's in service of what, imagining these different versions, for what
Speaker 1 45:23
me could be all the above, right? So, so this is this is one of the things I'm thinking of, like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. Did you receive Napoleon Dynamite?
Speaker 3 45:33
Yes,
Speaker 1 45:35
we know people like this, they're stuck in high school, like I could throw this football over the mountain, right? Like, you can't lose, you can't lose your shit over deploying Dynamite Reference, right? But like, we know people who are like, oh, if only we'd won the championship that year, or if only Esmeralda had said yes to me for prom,
Speaker 3 45:54
yeah,
Speaker 1 45:55
those neither of those may be in that movie, but like we have this sense that if we had been, oh, Albert Brooks, defending your life, right, like that movie, if you've seen that one, it's amazing. I gotta, I gotta find it again, right. But, like, he goes, I think he's determined, he dies, right. And then they're not sure if he gets to go to heaven, because there was a moment in time where he could have invested in Casio, the watchmaker, and he thought no one's ever gonna buy a Japanese watch,
Speaker 2 46:24
stupid.
Speaker 1 46:26
Yeah, he's like, well, if you had, you go to heaven, like the idea that, like, how do you defend the fact that we were so complacent at times? I think there's a, there's a girl he could have, like, expressed his love for, taken a shot at. There was a job he could have expressed interest in it, or gone for there was like all these choices where you could have done a thing, you could have won the championship, could have gotten the girl right, could have invested in this, could have said yes to that job, could have gone on that trip. Like, I do think that there's that sense that sometimes our decisions cost us the good stuff, right? Like Uncle Rico ever leaving high school was bad for him, you know. Others staying in your hometown is bad, right? Like, there's just.. there's just a whole complexity of ways in which the I.. the knowledge that we could have made other choices, and then we're being bombarded constantly with people who seem like they made the choices that we were too chicken shit to make,
Speaker 2 47:26
yeah,
Speaker 1 47:26
or we just, it just didn't add up, like the accountant in us was like, okay,
Speaker 2 47:32
yeah,
Speaker 1 47:32
risk reward ratio is not good here, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2 47:36
yeah, yeah, yeah, we could drive ourselves crazy, and I think many of us very subtly do with those overthinking little tentacles, right, and this is why my cockles were cockling in my heart, was because this topic of wondering and thinking and overthink, because that it can be delicious in a way, but the one thing we can do is tune into what stuff would we really feel a sense of regret if we didn't do so again those regrets of omission, because all the stuff you're talking about, like the what ifs, that's the stuff that research does show that whether it's near the end or if you're just interviewing someone at a given moment in time, the play is like, what if I did ask Esmeralda, like, what could have been happening, you know? Could we have been happy in XYZ? So we will haunt ourselves with the wondering, and not everything is worth going and doing, or like trying to find Esmeralda now somewhere on Facebook, like that's not the answer for most of the things we wonder about, but I do think we owe it to ourselves to identify what I call pregrets, like if you were to be gonzo tonight, what would be the thing, or things that you'd be like, "Oh man, kick myself, like I never did the thing, like I never, I never wrote that poetry book that I always had in me, or I never figured out how to come out of the closet, and that was the thing I really just wanted to be me, or I never went, and I met a man this morning who, in his background, he has all these carved ducks and fish, and he's like, I'm a whittler, and I just became very interested in, like, I want to whittle if I actually don't want to whittle, but some people really want to become whittlers, but they're not whittling, and so you get the idea here, what will be the things, and that to me is where the most excitement is, is because the coulda, shoulda, woulda, is some of them you could pontificate endlessly, especially with a glass of wine, and or we could identify a thing that could be really cool and take action on it, because last I checked, we're not dead yet, and we still have the ability to do something with it, so for me that takes my breath away, because we could still do the thing, many of the things.
Speaker 1 49:46
Yeah,
Speaker 2 49:47
so that's where I think a lot of our conversations are gonna go. Do you not think?
Speaker 1 49:51
I do think, because we've got a lot, we've got a lot to deal with, right. There's there's stuff that is Bob the Counten side. Right, where we are going to have to figure something out about these looming modern world, you know, scary semis going the wrong lane, wrong direction down the interstate. Like, you can't just be like, I don't care if there's a semi coming at me at 80 miles an hour and I'm going at the semi at 80 miles an hour? What's that got to do with me yet, right? Like, we can see some things coming that we need to do stuff about, right? We can see universal stuff coming. We're gonna all gonna die someday, or people we love are gonna die. We're gonna get old. Hair, hair will be an issue. We'll, you know, we'll hate our jobs at some point. Obviously, that is not autobiographical for me, and you're self-employed, so that can't, that can't possibly work, right? But, like, you know, like, they're going to be things that we have to do stuff about. What is, what are the implications of AI for our lives? What are the implications of increased mobility, or the fertility cliff, or the rising cost of life, or the, or the violence in the world, like there's, there's Bob the accountant stuff, right? That definitely worth talking about, definitely worth trying to wrap our heads around. They're just gonna be, you can't just dream your way through.
Speaker 2 51:14
Yes,
Speaker 1 51:15
can't dream your way around the semi going the wrong way. But yeah, there's also another stuff that's like, little bit, yeah, we're doing it to ourselves, and we don't need to,
Speaker 2 51:23
yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's the blending of both, because I lest anyone think that the notion of, you know, going and finding Esmeralda, or going and learning how to, you know, speak that language, or learning how to whittle means that we're not paying attention to the Bob stuff would be probably a recipe for like short-term delusional fun, and then like a crash in a hurry. So, yeah, I think that there's got to be the for each one of us, but that's tuning into it, and that's figuring it out. And I think that that's all part of the struggle is right, like there isn't a formula that we could follow, or, and even if you're anti-formula, still good luck finding your dose of responsibility versus adventure versus the stuff that is the eudaemonic versus hedonic versus whatnot. So, I think that I'm just, I'm just excited to keep having troubling conversations with you about the troubles of being alive.
Speaker 1 52:18
Yeah, yeah, me too, because I think we're people who we think about this stuff a lot, we hear a lot of stories from people who come up to us after talks, or whenever it might be, and want us to help clarify some stuff, and yeah, we're also people, right? Like, so, so we, we can have book smarts on a lot of these topics, but applying it is always a tricky bit, so I'm a meaning guy, but that's, you know, meaning shows up everywhere. I wouldn't, you know, I can't think of an area where meaning, the meaning of your life, the way you understand the world, how you make meaning, what you're going to do with your life, what are you going to do it in the next circumstance, what's the most important thing, how you, how do you juggle things, evaluate things, truly understand yourself, and just think, listen to the right voices and shout out the wrong voices, all that sort of stuff comes up and is really, really important. So, and because I'm a thinker, and I'm probably an overthinker, and I enjoy being an overthinker, I still want to get out there, like you said, like the in different words, we should have a bias towards action, you know, like we can't come up with the perfect simulation. I'm talking to myself here, we can't necessarily rule out or just redo like contacting Esmeralda after all these years, but we can do things that allow us at least to test the waters of some of those different men, right? Because in some sense, when we're talking about different paths, we're just wondering what other experiences could I have had, or what other me's could I be, could I have been?
Speaker 2 54:01
Yeah,
Speaker 1 54:01
right. So, we can do little versions of both. So, I think we'll, we'll have that as a theme too.
Speaker 2 54:06
Can I ask a quick question? How does one know if they're an overthinker? Do you think,
Speaker 1 54:10
well, other people are alarmed at how much you think about things,
Speaker 2 54:18
so it's externally
Speaker 1 54:19
thought about them,
Speaker 2 54:20
it's like your spouse or your friends or somebody, like, would you just..
Speaker 1 54:24
I get this feedback a lot.
Speaker 2 54:26
Do you ever think that you hang around with people who are under thinkers?
Speaker 1 54:30
Oh, I know I do. I know I do. No, I think you know thinking is great, thinking is fantastic. It's my favorite thing to do. I'm a thinker more than a doer, and I'm probably a beer more than a doer, also, but I'm a thinker more than a beer, a beer more than a doer. So I know that the solution to a lot of what I need to, what I need to figure out in life is doing right, and so the thinking is a part of reminding myself of that, but
Speaker 1 54:58
under thinkers. Are a little bit terrifying, I'm not gonna lie, right? Like, they're they're great in, in short-term bursts, but long-term, I think under thinking is not great either, right? So we want to want to be able to blend all this stuff up,
Speaker 2 55:12
the golden mean of thinking.
Speaker 1 55:14
Yeah, and you're an overthinker or not an overthinker?
Speaker 2 55:17
Yeah, I am on the like 60 percentile of think overthinking.
Speaker 1 55:23
Okay,
Speaker 2 55:23
and then my motto, in order to get into action, which I value greatly, even though it's scary, is don't think just do.
Speaker 1 55:31
Well, that's an exact play, but playbook for what's gonna happen next, because we're at the end now. I don't think we're at the end. We are at the end. So, everybody, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2 55:46
This could be it.
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