In this thought-provoking episode, Mike and Jodi explore the profound topic of mortality, its impact on human behavior, and how contemplating death can lead to a more meaningful life. They delve into ancient philosophies, psychological theories, and personal reflections to uncover how awareness of our finite existence influences our choices and priorities.

Key Topics

• The influence of mortality on human behavior
• Lucretius' insights on death and life
• The psychological impact of fearing death
• Using the awareness of death to live more intentionally
• The role of scarcity and urgency in decision-making
• The paradox of human contradiction regarding death
• The concept of drawing and quartering as a metaphor for life choices
• The importance of facing mortality to reduce procrastination
• The societal and personal consequences of avoiding death discussions
• Practical strategies for living with purpose in the face of mortality

Sound Bites

• "What would life be worth if there were no death?"
• "The fear of death can cause crime, greed, and envy."
• "Would you want to know your exact death date?"

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the theme: Could this be it?
01:25 Jodi and Mike introduce their perspectives on death
01:55 The influence of ancient philosophy: Lucretius' insights
04:01 Fear of death as a driver of human behavior
08:00 The concept of drawing and quartering as a metaphor for life choices
12:00 The societal tendency to avoid discussing mortality
15:53 The contradiction of human nature: craving life and fearing death
20:04 The role of scarcity and urgency in decision-making
23:57 The impact of knowing or not knowing your death date
27:49 The importance of living intentionally and facing mortality
33:02 Strategies for overcoming procrastination and fear
37:03 The societal and personal costs of avoiding death awareness
41:02 The importance of accountability and taking action
45:04 The paradox of human contradiction: desire and avoidance
50:03 The potential of mortality awareness to inspire meaningful change
54:55 The influence of societal narratives and beliefs about death
59:59 Conclusion: Embracing mortality to live fully

TRANSCRIPT

Jodi Wellman 0:05
A welcome to This Could Be It, the podcast where meaning and purpose and life and death and all the foibles and fabulousness in between gets discussed and dissected, and oh man, it's a ride. Glad you're here.

Mike Steger 0:21
Yeah, yeah, so I'm, I unlike normal, I am in my basement now, which is not ideally suited for the type of, you know, big stage podcast that you're used to, Jodi, but we're gonna do the best we can. The nice thing is that you come off, you know, looking even more professional, and you know, on fleek people still say on fleek, you know, then the normal. So this is great, and I look like I literally look like you, you, you saw me somewhere,

Jodi Wellman 0:59
yeah.

Mike Steger 0:59
You took my, he took my hopes and dreams, and left me just crushed, and said you're on podcast today. It's not how I feel, though. This is definitely gonna be the most ornery, I think. Oh, this is gonna be

Jodi Wellman 1:15
this one's gonna be very prickly and interesting. It sounds like you're judging yourself in the same way, this is going to be transition, and are you ready for it? Just in case you're not, of you know, like how we judge ourselves so often about our sense of purpose, and it has to be said like that purpose is my purpose and bad enough and amazing enough, and so you know we're in this like pressure cooker in our culture of pressure, so yeah, or of purpose

Mike Steger 1:49
in this pressure cooker of a culture. I'm going to jump in and guess what you're saying there

Jodi Wellman 1:54
of purpose.

Mike Steger 1:55
Yeah, you know what, Jodi, normally I'm the one who's demonstrating that you don't have to be in any way competent to be a meaning and purpose expert, but it's nice that you made a mistake for once.

Jodi Wellman 2:06
Oh, well, see, it's my goal too, is just to make you feel comfortable, make you feel warmed up in your bunker, make you feel good.

Mike Steger 2:11
Yeah, yeah,

Jodi Wellman 2:12
yeah, a

Mike Steger 2:13
little prickly.

Jodi Wellman 2:14
Okay, let's de-prickle you. I have a really important question to ask you, just to get us going. Okay, but this is like stage setting. We're talking about pressure to have purpose today, because I don't know if anyone else feels this, but there's just a little bit of that out there. You have to have purpose, you have to, your job has to have a purpose, you have to.

Mike Steger 2:32
Yeah, yeah.

Jodi Wellman 2:33
But can we..

Mike Steger 2:34
it's the only sign that I had any impact through my career, is that now people feel pressure to have a purpose, and before they didn't even care, that's good, right?

Jodi Wellman 2:42
Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. You have ruined us, you single-handedly, as the world's most renowned meaning and purpose researcher, you have completely fucked us up. That's a claim to fame.

Mike Steger 2:54
Yeah, I think if you ask Chat GPT, whose fault is it, that everyone feels pressure to have purpose, and you said it's gotta be a real actual person.

Jodi Wellman 3:02
Yeah,

Mike Steger 3:02
you can't blame Aristotle or Nietzsche. Yeah, I think it'll be me, unfortunately.

Jodi Wellman 3:08
And then Viktor Frankl would be like just kind of wedged in there.

Mike Steger 3:11
He was so nice, so nice. No one can possibly blame Viktor Frankl for anything. It's always okay. Yeah,

Jodi Wellman 3:19
okay. So, conversely, you're well, because you are the meaning purpose guy. Can you do us just a quick favor and untangle the two, so we have our heads on straight while we talk about how this stuff is so insanity inducing?

Mike Steger 3:33
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this is this is this is gonna be a theme of the podcast, is every once while we will retreat to science to solve life's most persistent questions, and you know, from a scientific perspective, we're constantly still asking, and we're honing in on what we think we're capturing here with this phrase, meaning in life, and maybe you have a different approach, but I'm here to tell you that approach is wrong, because it's not been published in a journal no one reads, but the approach that has been published in a journal that no one reads has kind of come to the agreement that meaning life is like an umbrella term, it captures all sorts of things that make life worth living and that help us use the time we have here in a non ridiculous, wasteful, and absurd way, so purpose then is part of meaning in life, along with coherence and significance. I'm sure we'll unpack that later, and you know, so purpose is like the motivational side. Purpose is what do you want to do with your life, right? You know, as I'm sure we all remember the the video for Twisted Sisters, I want to rock. This is sure to have broad appeal, especially among the youth. But, yeah, yeah, so exactly. So, this angry dad is yelling at his, his little son. All the son does is sit around listening to music, and he's like, why do you. Want to do with your life, that's what purpose is. What do you want to do with your life, right? So it's like overarching set of objectives, goals, missions, aims, dreams that you have for your life that you want to put your effort towards. They're the highest priority to help organize all the other stuff you're trying to do, and it can even help you prioritize choices, right? Like, do I, you know, have a podcast with this strange-looking man, or do I go my own, which is what you're debating right now, Jodi. So this is this is purpose, and right, and if we're gonna do anything useful with our, I think it's something like 3000 or 5000 Mondays that we have in our lives, I

Jodi Wellman 5:40
wish we knew,

Mike Steger 5:41
wish we knew. Yeah, we have to have purpose, right? Because purpose pushes us through the hard times, it focuses on the stuff, on the way we want to have our impact, and it keeps us driving forward towards something that's worthy of our finite number of breaths.

Jodi Wellman 6:00
Felt the need to take a breath. There, can we have more than one purpose at the same time? Can we be juggling purple to plural purposes? Is purple?

Mike Steger 6:09
No, not yet. So, so purposes can be plural. The word purposes will always be plural, and there's no data to suggest that there is a fixed number of purposes that you can have or can't have, because there's no way to know if your purpose is right. Okay, so that's that's maybe a little bit too spicy to come out of the gates, right? We don't really know if we have the right purpose until we die, and then we see the devil, or like, you know, cool angel with a giant book, I guess, is what we're expecting.

Jodi Wellman 6:43
Oh, so you're even going far enough to think that there'll be like a day of reckoning at the end at Pearly Gates or whatnot to say your purpose counted or not? If

Mike Steger 6:51
not, how will we ever know?

Jodi Wellman 6:53
How will we ever know? Yeah, okay, because I'm thinking some of this pressure that we want to unpack a little bit of today, just to, you know, poke the bear, and then get people listening more to, you know, more of the research that, again, you are at fault for, you know, ruining

Mike Steger 7:09
us. That's true.

Jodi Wellman 7:10
Is that if there's fresh pressure that we have to have the one way forward? Well, then that's a little bit tough, right? Like finding the one career or the one partner or the one thing, like, what if I, what if I pick wrong versus I can have a purpose for this stage of my life, and then I'm allowed to have a change, or I'm allowed to have multiple purposes. Yeah,

Mike Steger 7:32
yeah, yeah. I think so. Like, I think it'd be an awkward purpose for you to have to, like, right now say your purpose in life is to die with grace, you know? I think that's not probably great right now. You know, so yeah, so there's a lot of.. there's a lot of actual every good thing I'm about to say has a bad.. it's a bad shadow behind it, right? Because if I said, you know, so Viktor Frankl felt like there was a purpose.. there's like a U-shaped purpose hole in the universe waiting for you to fall into it like you're making snow angels, right. And so there's one purpose: you're the only thing in the universe that can fulfill it, and your job in life is to sort of, you know, eke your way towards it, until finally you're in there and you're doing your purpose. But at the same time he's also talking about purpose in a way that makes it really clear that that's not true, right, because he's talking about those who had something outside of the concentration camps. Just quick, quick spoiler alert, Dr. Franco wrote this incredible book called Man's Search for Meaning. He was a psychiatrist in Vienna, part of Freud's, a late addition to Freud's circle, right, and some other folks. I think Adler was probably running the show by the time Frankl got there, you know. So he's a psychiatrist trying to figure out what drives people, and he thought meaning, a will for meaning, drove people. And then the Nazis take over, right, and Frankl and his entire family - Frankl was Jewish - his entire family is taken to the concentration camps. Most of them were killed there. He only saw his sister again in his entire life. And he wrote this incredible testimony, first person account of like what got people through the concentration camps, and he uses examples that kind of feel to me a little clear that purpose can be a lot of different things, right? So people who had family defined later, people who felt like there were people who would rely on them, you know, like so almost anything important that people felt was on the other side of this experience in the future was enough to keep them going. So already we had this tension, right? So, okay, so maybe there's a ton of different purposes. That's good news, because it means if you choose one, that means you can always like add another one as a supplement. But if there's lots and lots, lots of purposes, then you know how you decide.

Jodi Wellman 9:53
Yeah,

Mike Steger 9:54
and if there's only one purpose for you, then that sounds great, because as soon as you find it one. Wonderful, but what if you're not fulfilled when you think you found your one purpose in life? So that's the dark side of all this sort of stuff, is that we're kind of left on our own to try and figure this out.

Jodi Wellman 10:08
Yeah, scary. And you're reminding me of the corporate world, there's like a mission statement, and then there could be a strategy, but there's also values over there. Do you see purpose and mission as cousins intertwining? What's the story there?

Mike Steger 10:27
Okay, first of all, in a lot of places, cousins intertwining

Jodi Wellman 10:31
is not so

Mike Steger 10:33
cool as you. Yeah, I mean,

Jodi Wellman 10:34
you had to get visual with it. I was, yeah,

Mike Steger 10:37
I mean, I'm assuming I'm not the only one, but this is a good time to point out again that Jodi is from Canada, Lord knows what goes on,

Jodi Wellman 10:46
it's just a liberal cousin definition,

Mike Steger 10:50
liberal cousin from Canada. Yeah, so, so, yeah, I don't even know, the question was something about your cousin, I've never

Jodi Wellman 11:01
intertwining mission and purpose, are they

Mike Steger 11:06
mission, vision, values, purpose, all these corporate things, right?

Jodi Wellman 11:10
Yeah,

Mike Steger 11:11
so almost anything that's come out of corporate probably needs to be reprogrammed to be useful for living humans, yeah, because something happens in an organizational system that has a set of objectives that oftentimes is not at all inspiring, but wants to inspire the people who it's paying to work harder than the pay actually motivates them to work, right? So, you know, we create these.. we know that people.. this is a great point. we know people are motivated by mission and purpose, given that corporations spend a lot of money trying to have cool missions and purpose to get people to work harder, right? So,

Jodi Wellman 11:50
yeah,

Mike Steger 11:51
I don't think they do that if it didn't work at all.

Jodi Wellman 11:53
Yeah, good point. Because I was going to touch on, yeah, like, say, wait, why do we care again? Because it's not just that someone somewhere said, even with like a really fancy ultra Venn diagram, like icky guy, like, oh, purpose is that we want purpose because it makes our lives better. Uh, bullet points on the list of benefits would include what

Mike Steger 12:16
living longer, if you care about that,

Jodi Wellman 12:18
isn't that okay? I've got some statisticals,

Mike Steger 12:21
okay, okay. Okay. Well, first of all, Jodi, can you remind us, roughly speaking, how long we have to live in our life?

Jodi Wellman 12:29
Oh yeah, okay. I'm glad you asked. 4000 Mondays, give or take, in the USA, boys would get around 78 years, and women would get 83 ish, 82 and it varies by country, so check your stats online. So, based on this research, which is fascinating, because this feels very compelling, although I don't know if anybody actually tries to say, I want to figure out my purpose, so that I can live longer. Do you agree? Like, it feels a little bit,

Mike Steger 13:02
yeah, that's not the real reason to have a purpose, is to live longer,

Jodi Wellman 13:06
yeah, which actually I want to. Okay, let's go through the stats, and then I really want to get it. It's like, so why do we care? A 2002 study reported that older adults with the highest sense of purpose had a 46% lower risk of mortality over a four year period compared to those with the lowest scores of mortality, who are just apparently dropping like flies.

Mike Steger 13:27
Yes,

Jodi Wellman 13:28
I think that's the title, dropping like flies. I'm

Mike Steger 13:31
looking this up right now.

Jodi Wellman 13:33
Oh, you're such a nerd. The

Mike Steger 13:35
citation that Google Scholar brought back is the raw microprocessor, a computational fabric for software circuits and general purpose programs. God,

Jodi Wellman 13:45
I love that study.

Mike Steger 13:46
Yeah, that's a really good one. Okay, so at least for my satisfaction, I believe you, although I don't remember that study, which is mysterious to me. So, because there's there have been about 20 studies now that show a longevity benefit for folks who have higher purpose in life or higher meaning in life. There's lots of different ways to measure this. A lot of times they use Carol Riff's scale of purpose, which says there's things to look forward to tomorrow. I have lots of activities in my daily life, and I have a sense of energy, so that you would think that people feel that are going to live longer anyways, got stuff going on, and I feel energy, but even if you measure with the scale I did, which is like I have a clear sense of purpose, I understand my life's meaning, there's no like vim and bigger there, we still see advantages, so or with other folks like Neil Krauss has one, like there's been quite a lot of folks who've studied these sorts of things, so we see this mortality advantage. I have all sorts of hypotheses about this. Well, we don't want to add too much pressure for people to get purpose in life just to live longer if their lives are going to be dumb anyways, right?

Jodi Wellman 14:56
If their lives are going to be dumb,

Mike Steger 14:57
yeah, we don't want people to live longer, God. If

Jodi Wellman 15:00
so, wait, now we have purpose panel to be like your purpose is worth it, and we're gonna let you just..

Mike Steger 15:09
well, no, I thought we.. I thought we could, you know, be a little bit more ambitious than that, and like help them understand that there's other things they might want to purpose for, then for living longer,

Jodi Wellman 15:20
yeah. Okay. Well, allow me, I give one more little tranche of science before everybody falls asleep, and then you're going to wake us up. People with the highest purpose scores are 24% less likely to become physically inactive, 33% less likely to develop sleep problems, and 22% less likely to develop an unhealthy BMI, body mass index, and people with higher purpose scores perform better on tests of memory, verbal fluency, and executive function, and people with purpose age slower biologically. So, recent studies show people, I'm just gonna keep reading. Don't worry, I'm gonna read for like 79 more minutes, and then I swear I'll stop. Recent studies,

Mike Steger 16:00
telomeres are coming

Jodi Wellman 16:02
show that people with higher purpose scores show reduced epigenetic aging, which is indicative of slower cellular aging, and I think you're right. So that's just all like there's our data dump, but yeah, there's better reasons.

Mike Steger 16:16
You can add 1000 more data points to that, like you have strong, like older adults with purpose and meaning have stronger grip strength, which is a general indicator of physical health, right? They have there's been studies of HIV positive men who have higher levels of killer T cells and CD four cells, right? So you see immune systems function better, you see lower levels of inflammatory cytokines, right? Like interleukin four and interleukin 8r and all these sorts of things, and S interleukin 4r or something,

Jodi Wellman 16:50
or L. I just.. oh no,

Mike Steger 16:52
oh no, don't even try that. I know the first part, I just can't remember the second part of these interleukins. It's like, yeah, these are important. These are important.

Jodi Wellman 17:03
I want a better grip strength, so I need to really nail down my purpose. Your purpose

Mike Steger 17:09
first, then you, then you get the hand squeezers that rock climbers use. First purpose, then hand squeezers for grip strength. Yeah, like the list goes on and on and on, right? Like the benefits of having a purpose for health are actually pretty profound, and we're talking dozens and dozens and dozens of studies, which are replicated in different countries, different age groups, so we don't have to think, we don't have to overthink this

Jodi Wellman 17:37
one,

Mike Steger 17:37
it's just good for us, it's just good for us. So then people hear that, and they're like, I want to live. I want to be able to squeeze things hard when I'm 90, as well. You know, like, I don't want to be like the old person who can't.

Jodi Wellman 17:52
I want to put a jar,

Mike Steger 17:53
squeeze a little with little screaming stress guys who go like this, like one of those guys. Jars, no, those that stops happening at age 60, you can't open a jar after age 60, that's been proven. Yeah, so, but also there are benefits that don't show up in health, right? Do you believe that? Have you seen this?

Jodi Wellman 18:16
I've seen this, and I also see, because I think all the stuff you're talking about gets diluted, and maybe it's alluded to in someone's article about purpose, but I think that it's this like a social pressure that is created about why we need, and so it might be linked to what you're about to tell us about the non physiological benefits of purpose. Unleash the hounds. Go,

Mike Steger 18:40
yeah. Well, I want us to think about that, whatever study that is. You, 2002 Kim at all? I think actually I've seen some of those percentages, and I, I feel like it's from a 2022 paper, but I'm just being belligerent right now, because my hair was causing me problems early. Well, I said

Jodi Wellman 18:58
I meant 22 was out, 22 was 2002

Mike Steger 19:02
that's what threw me off. Okay,

Jodi Wellman 19:04
I'm so sorry, I meant 2022 Yeah, so now it all checks out. Let's check out, like Kim wasn't born yet.

Mike Steger 19:11
I mean, he was born, but I don't think he started grad school. Okay, Eric, Kim is quite fantastic. Yeah, so if we think about those studies. A lot of the data was getting collected in the 1990s early 2000s on people who are over age 65 already, right? So those people didn't grow up in a world where when you went to school, you're like, you're supposed to have purpose, and yet somehow when they called them up, as in part of, I think, some of those data from the Health and Retirement Study, some of those data from the midlife and the United States study, some of those, you know, are there's also large panel studies out of Canada. Someone calls them up and says, "Does your life have meaning and purpose? or some other question, and even though they didn't grow up in a society where they felt pressured to have purpose, they were able to say yes, I. Life has purpose, and then they live longer from that point on, right? So, so we don't need to, I'm going to caveat that we don't need to be throwing in people's faces. You must have purpose, you must have purpose, because people find it anyways, right?

Mike Steger 20:16
This sample of people was around for 6070 years before this, I need you today, feel so much pressure, you know. So, there's a little bit of that, right?

Jodi Wellman 20:27
That's interesting.

Mike Steger 20:28
One of the big things that's happened, though, that makes us feel a lot of pressure is the explosion of a science-driven well-being industry,

Jodi Wellman 20:37
that yeah, self-help industry, and in other words,

Mike Steger 20:41
well, we had this self-help industry, but it was like based on, you know, it would rip off a few ideas from psychotherapy, and then someone would tell a fancy story about some vision they had when they had an autobiography experience, or they'd be like, if you meditate enough, it was all the same sort of stuff, it was like just different people recycling their own autobiographical experiences with happiness, and like, well, I remember the time when I went to, like, Eat Pray Love, not to pick on that too much, but in Eat Pray Love, I only saw the movie, actually, Roberts goes to Italy and teach and teaches the Italians how to be happy, then she goes to India and teaches the Indians how to be happy, and then she goes to Bali and teaches the Balanesians how to be happy, you know. It's like, you know, like before those.. now that's just like that's her experience. And I think I think Elizabeth Gilbert is having quite different experiences now, but if the book reviews I've read are anything to go on, right? So they tend to be very autobiographical or based on the therapy clinic people were running, and then 2000s like, we really started cranking out data about meaning, or satisfaction with life, or positive emotions, or gratitude, or forgiveness, or grit, or a million different things, right, self-compassion, and I think that's when, once those books were hitting the bestseller list, and that you know every publisher probably wanted you to lead with, you will live longer if you buy this book, right? And you will definitely die if you don't buy this book. So people are like working in all these like high-pressure things, and they're saying, like, yeah, you'll earn - there's a 10% income, lifetime income benefit for being happy or having a meeting in your life, or whatever. So I think it was actually the culprits super society co-opted oftentimes with a lot of excited complicity, folks who wanted to peddle their happiness, including myself. I mean, yeah,

Jodi Wellman 22:38
can I ask you a question? You are on the research side initially, where people were taking your research and using that in a pop culture way. Dad, did I make any

Mike Steger 22:48
money off that? No, no, not a penny.

Jodi Wellman 22:50
You are writing a book now that is going to be more for the masses, not for the textbooks. Is there a tension for you about giving accurate information, but also extolling the virtues of meaning and purpose.

Mike Steger 23:05
Yeah, is there a tension for me between this book I'm writing right now between hewing only to the science and extolling the virtues of purpose? Well, I don't think that much of attention, actually, because the benefits of purpose, if you spend enough time on the science, you're finding studies that make you feel pretty darn confident that you're not making something up, and there's not other than the book, there isn't that much to sell, you know? I don't have a, you know, I don't have a product, don't have an app, all these sorts of things, maybe I will, maybe I will by the time I don't have a robot. I don't know, purpose robot, you can buy, you know. Although,

Jodi Wellman 23:43
wonder what you've been doing.

Mike Steger 23:45
Yeah, we're working on that. We're working on the robot side of this business.

Jodi Wellman 23:49
Okay, but there's not.. but it seems to.. it aligns for you. You're not..

Mike Steger 23:53
yeah, I don't like to oversell it, but you have to. You have to express every once in a while, you have to express what the research points to without a layer of caveats and exceptions, and it depends in probabilistic language, right? You just have to express things clearly. I think in a book that's meant for people who don't constantly read journal articles, where everything is couched in probabilistic terms and has been bludgeoned into, you know, passive voice by peer review. Right? Yeah,

Jodi Wellman 24:27
you said something a minute ago that's interesting. Just one thing a minute ago that was interesting.

Mike Steger 24:32
I probably stole that from that famous Kim 2002 artist, the

Jodi Wellman 24:36
idea that people seem to naturally have purpose, and that they were caught unawares by just asked randomly, and they're like, 'Oh, I do, in fact, have it. And then nowadays it's like shining a spotlight on it, maybe makes it seem like it's more gaping and problem, kind of like happiness.

Mike Steger 24:55
Yeah,

Jodi Wellman 24:56
that I was happy until I started trying to be. Happy, because everyone said I needed to try to be happier, and so it's interesting that left to our own devices we will find a sense of purpose in what we do. Yeah, do we need to craft it even tighter?

Mike Steger 25:12
What do you think? Like, you've known human beings at various times. Yeah, I mean, like,

Jodi Wellman 25:17
yeah,

Mike Steger 25:18
did they seem fine 20 years ago? Do you remember humans 20 years ago?

Jodi Wellman 25:22
I was one, and I do remember them then, and I think we've always struggled, and I think that the increase.. so back to when I used to do executive coaching, the word purpose would be like this instant anxiety inducer for people, because it was then riddled, and again, I'm not going to compare it, because I didn't executive coach 25 years ago, but I would say it's just as laced in terms of angst with, with like reaching your potential, you know, this feeling, and that's a whole other topic, but this idea of purpose, it's like, am I doing something significant enough, and part of it is about judgment, right, that someone's going to see that my volunteer thing isn't as juicy as yours, and like I'm not starting a nonprofit that's going to save this country XYZ, or so I think it's like a comparison issue, which may just be like everything these days a little bit inflamed with social media,

Mike Steger 26:22
yeah. I think that's right. Do I have a good enough purpose? I do not mean this to be derogatory at all, but I do think that most of the time when people have been asked, do you have purpose, and they're not freaking out. They're like, yeah, I've got purpose. They're probably talking about a purpose that's pretty common. It's like a shared experience, right? Like, the purpose could be, you know, purpose is family, or purpose is just being a good person or purpose is serving God, or you know, following the rules of my religion, right? And so, or just like, I just know there's a purpose because the deity has a plan. There's some sort of system out there, I'm part of that, so obviously I have a purpose, like I kind of have this, this hunch, because when I got started in this in about 2002 I was starting to collect data, and I would ask people about meaning and purpose, and the more you ask them, that more upset they got, right? And I think that's the dynamic we have now, like you're talking with executive coaching, these are these are like high achiever people, right? They, in some ways, think of themselves as a bit exceptional, right? They're not, you know, they're not part of a herd of sheep or whatever sheep cluster in, you know, they're like the leaders of something, so they feel probably like they're supposed to have a better grip on these, these big things, you know, so, so at one point there were philosophers, theologians, important people who could talk about purpose, civil rights activists, political leaders, you know, like the people on the big stage oftentimes could talk about purpose, or someone would ghost write a book where that was a feature, right, but then something happened when we started, I think when we started studying all this sort of stuff, is that the sort of out of the box absorbed inherited regular person purposes didn't seem good enough.

Jodi Wellman 28:40
Yeah, okay, needed to be shiny and special and

Mike Steger 28:45
personalized.

Jodi Wellman 28:46
Just made me think of this executive persona, the successful person, seemingly. What happens when what was working is no longer like they become disenchanted with their career or company or people or their mission at hand, and that's I find what falters people. It's that this was cutting it for me, but it's not anymore. And so, does that mean that our purpose expired? We naturally grew out of it, and we should just anticipate that and be cool with it, and say, "Oh, honey, something now, go find a new one, because is that because I think people get stressed when it's. I was working as a CMO, and now I need to find my purpose, because I'm just not happy. It's just not doing, I'm not fulfilled anymore.

Mike Steger 29:28
Yeah, what is the M stand for in CMO? I should know this, right?

Jodi Wellman 29:33
Oh, yeah, she was trying to come.. I was trying to come up with something funny, but it completely gapped me. Um, marketing,

Mike Steger 29:41
that is funny, though. I don't know half the things that I should know. That's funny. So I'm fascinated by this, because I think this is really this is this is a space that this podcast will get into, obviously. You know, what happens when you've been doing something, succeeding, achieving, getting to the top of stuff, and suddenly it doesn't feel like it fits anymore. Yeah, it feels like you could keep doing it, but you don't know which direction you're going in, or whether that's the reasonable direction to go. I think there's a lot, there's a lot to be said about the Wile E. Coyote experience of all this, like the Looney Tunes cartoons, Wile E. Coyotes running after the Roadrunner, Ronner steps aside, Wile E. Coyote is like shooting off the edge of the cliff, running, running, running, totally doing fine, looks down, goes like this, drops like a rock. Right, there's a little bit of that about modern life. I think we are running. We have no idea what is the rat race, right? We don't even know what. Why are we doing half the things we're doing? Why do we have half of the goals in our lives? I was watching someone give a talk just recently at a purpose and flourishing conference hosted by the Stern School of Management at New York University, and you know, someone was talking about the role of wealth, like, how does wealth figure into these, like, elite business school students, and one of the, one of the people was like, I, I have a goal, I need enough wealth so that I can have a helipad for each of my children,

Jodi Wellman 31:22
this wasn't a joke.

Mike Steger 31:24
This wasn't a joke. Yeah, I mean, it is a joke, a cosmic joke, but those are rarely funny. So, this was like someone who really felt that, and like, why? Like, why would you choose that? You could, I don't know how you'd even achieve it, unless you just have a lot of paint and like start painting high school parking lots with H's or something, but like that as a goal, I think a lot of people would feel like they'd made it if they could do that, or the one helicopter landing pad that's amazing, right? But I do think that there's a lot of that, like, why the coyote just running as you can, don't look down, don't question what you're doing, but once you start to question it,

Jodi Wellman 32:01
yeah,

Mike Steger 32:01
that's we run into the other problem that we have, right? Once we go outside of the box of the purposes and the meanings and the values and the visions and whatever these things, missions that we inherit just by being people and hearing other people talk and being told what to do all our lives, all this sort of stuff, once we run out of like those or we look down, we realize we never develop the skills to figure it out for ourselves in the first place, and that's where I think a lot of the pressure defying purpose comes from, is like we're supposed to do it ourselves, no one ever taught us how,

Jodi Wellman 32:36
right, like the idea that the soul searching, the self awareness, the really stopping and saying, if you separate yourself from what your friends or the pack or the herd or the whatnot, what do you really want? What would it be? And I've been so inspired by people who have stopped back again in the coaching realm of imagine for a second that none of that stuff mattered, and the realization of so many of the purposes that people would land on were impressively unimpressive, like back to what you were saying about back in the olden days, when it was just something that was simpler, and it was more granular than just, you know, being a good person. This was like one woman I remember distinctly, because she was just obscenely successful, and she had this pressure to come up with something next, and have this purpose, and she just landed on something beautiful. I sound like I'm judging it, but it was beautiful for her, and I just happened to think it was that it was like her purpose for this next phase was to just be the bright spot in people's days, so that she could like be a beacon, and she was going to impart that within different domains of her life, you know, with work and with family that was troubled, and so on. That for her felt like it was a way of being, and so actually, as I'm saying this, I feel the need to pressure test it with you. Does that sound like an example of a purpose, or would you call that something different?

Mike Steger 34:02
Well, as we all know, that's also my purpose, was to be the ray of warm sunshine in other people's lives.

Jodi Wellman 34:08
Oh, I guess I missed that.

Mike Steger 34:11
I thought it was doing pretty well. Yeah, I liked, I like that. So, a purpose has a few characteristics, and a lot of, ideally, a lot of robustness against other people's judgment, just like even intimated, right? So, okay, so purpose needs to be able to go for a long time, you might not ever be able to finish it right, like, so there's not like a goal that you're gonna check it off. Yeah, I was, I was a bright spot in every single person's life. Like,

Jodi Wellman 34:47
good luck. Yeah,

Mike Steger 34:49
my, from my Zeppelin, I was just beaming beatific smiles down at the people, and now I'm done, right? Like, that's not what this person means. This person means that when there's an. Opportunity, that's how she wants to be present in people's lives, and there's probably a reason behind it. People need some encouragement, you need a little bit of a sense that there is niceness out there, as well as, you know, bony elbows, jostling ribs. It needs to be consistent with who we are, right, living someone else's purpose means we're not really living purpose anyways, living, we're not even living our lives if we're living for someone else's purpose, right, which, which is why some of us maybe should just keep doing what we're doing and stop listening right now, because you know, once you start to think, like, am I living my life, am I living someone else's life? And then someone like me says, you know, if you're not living your life, you're not even living anybody's life, right? Like, or if you're living someone else's life, sort of stuff, right? Like, the authenticity piece is big. So, if this person feels like that's authentic, this is what she's good at, what she cares about, she's responsive to the world around her, so the purpose she's pursuing has some kind of, you know, impact. It matters in some way beyond herself.

Jodi Wellman 36:11
Yeah,

Mike Steger 36:11
ticks all the boxes, right?

Jodi Wellman 36:13
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for giving us the breakdown. They say that one in four people say they don't have a clear sense of purpose. Does that track with your research?

Mike Steger 36:26
Yeah, unless you ask the three quarters to give you their clear sense of purpose, and then more people say they don't have a clear sense of purpose,

Jodi Wellman 36:34
right? It's hard to be

Mike Steger 36:38
competent in this stuff, right? Because who's to know?

Jodi Wellman 36:41
Yeah,

Mike Steger 36:41
like, what? In when you look at the Milky Way glimmering above your head, like, what up there is telling you you're right about your purpose.

Jodi Wellman 36:50
This is

Mike Steger 36:50
why I think having a, having a process or a system ends up being so vital, right? Because maybe we're not always, I mean, a lot of times, in order to be sure we just get hard headed, right?

Jodi Wellman 37:04
Okay. Question, you work with people one on one. You've an advisory service where you help people figure out meaning slash purpose. Forgive me for conflating the two, but

Mike Steger 37:14
forgiven

Jodi Wellman 37:15
for the thank you

Mike Steger 37:16
again.

Jodi Wellman 37:19
What, so you have a process in a way, not that you need to share all the spill all the beans here, but I guess maybe even process aside, like what do people gain when they do sit and go, ah, I got one, is it there all along?

Mike Steger 37:37
Oh, those are, that's those are two really different questions, right? So the seeds are there all along. We don't always, we don't even always know how to access them, right? I think, especially like high, high achievement people, and you've known these folks, like your executive coach for a long time, get so good at things, get so good at doing things other people expect and be able to do things than they are able to do them. Some says, well, here's an even harder thing for you to try to do, and I'm like, I did that too, you know? Like, I'm a doer, I'm an accomplisher, I'm an achiever, I figure things out, I create big systems, I make big splashes, and that's what I do, but the why, you know, the personal connection to that kind of a life, the other dreams that were kind of buried under performance, even that, even if that, even if that performance is satisfying, you know, there's a lot of things we do that are satisfying that aren't a purpose in our life,

Jodi Wellman 38:36
yeah,

Mike Steger 38:38
part of part of the part of the issue of whether it's been there all along is that all of us have a lot of different things that we could do, depending on what parts of ourselves we want to give the most sun and water, and you know, earth to, and air, we could do a lot of different things, especially hype, you know, especially people who are good enough at something that people keep wanting to ask them to do stuff, which is actually a lot of people, right? So most people are asked to do things from time to time. Almost no one has no potential to do a bunch of different things, like I've never met anyone really who barely can only do one thing, like that's not that's impossible, right? So it's a matter of choice, and then how do we choose things that create a life that we feel deeply, deeply connected to, and that expresses something that's really profound within us, and that's not always a very quick thing to do, so like one of the first things that I try to do is just, you know, what does it feel like to look out at your life from inside your head, right? Like, when you're looking around, what are you seeing? What's what's stands out to you? You know, what you know, what's down some of the roads that, well, you love this one too. Like, what's down some of the roads you never followed, right? Like, what kinds of things. Have you left undone that like screaming to you? Just take a few steps down here, you'll like what you see, right? So there's a process that you go into without feeling like you have a right answer in terms of exactly what's supposed to happen, but like learning the perspectives, learning to listen to yourself, learning how to talk about all this stuff with someone else who expects you to be a kind of different kind of person, that's another big piece that I think people sometimes overlook. Like, okay, I'm a high achiever, I'm gonna, I'm crushing everything I do, and then I decide I want to be the source of sunshine in someone else's life. And you have to explain that to your partner, you have to explain that to your boss, your kids, your team, your neighbors, you know, the people at the Yacht Polo Club, where people play Yacht Polo, which is what I do in Colorado, right? You know, so like, how do you explain that without retreating is another thing.

Jodi Wellman 40:55
Well, that brings up the notion that we feel like we have to advertise it, and sometimes it is a very distinct private thing, so this example of the woman who wanted to be the bright spot. It was like that was an internal little for her to know, and not necessarily

Mike Steger 41:09
the Pillsbury Doughboy. Is that was that sound you're making? A

Jodi Wellman 41:14
lot of cinnamon buns were made in the process of coming up with that purpose. She knew she was like this is my special thing, and a dad, in that case, didn't need to be advertised. If it's an actual profession, and then actual taking the yacht and turning it and moving in another direction, then well, that's what can be apparent, I guess. In most cases, your purpose is something that's outwardly observed, right?

Mike Steger 41:41
Yeah, you have to do something with purposes, right? This is something I know about you, Jodi. Don't ever think

Jodi Wellman 41:48
it, don't do

Mike Steger 41:50
or do not. There is no think, that's your famous saying. Yeah, right. So, if you're gonna do, if you can have a purpose, it can't just be like a motto, you know, it can't just be an inspirational poster in an elevator somewhere. You have to actually do it, so then it should show up in your life. It should show up in your life.

Jodi Wellman 42:10
How long does it take typically for people, when they work with you, to come up with what their purpose

Mike Steger 42:16
is? Seconds.

Jodi Wellman 42:17
Yeah. Purpose,

Mike Steger 42:18
go. Yeah, totally, totally all over the place.

Jodi Wellman 42:23
Was there a time when you struggled finding your purpose?

Mike Steger 42:29
I think I still, I still am confused about how well I'm articulating my purpose, right? Because I, I kind of feel like there's a lot of things, lot of things, and one of the pieces of purpose that makes us doubt whether we have a purpose, as I'm explaining right now, is that some of our purposes tug us in different directions,

Jodi Wellman 42:52
like what do you mean?

Mike Steger 42:53
So I wanted to do something impactful with my work life. I also wanted to be a good dad. Okay, so sometimes doing something impactful, my work life means going to Sydney, Australia, where you don't even, you lose an entire day, it just disappears. I used to think that would be like the perfect alibi, like if I leave on the 13th and land on the 15th and like somehow committed to murder on the 14th, they're like, the murder took place on the 14th. I'm like, I didn't even have a 14th, idiot, because I didn't have a 14th makes it hard to do a murder on that day. Anyway, so like

Jodi Wellman 43:31
put thought into alibis, this like a whole, like a journal entry, like possible alibis.

Mike Steger 43:37
Every time I take a flight across international date line, I'm like, is there any way I can use it to my advantage?

Jodi Wellman 43:44
First question, murder,

Mike Steger 43:46
I mean,

Jodi Wellman 43:46
yeah,

Mike Steger 43:47
that just seems like dumb words, dumb,

Jodi Wellman 43:54
our

Mike Steger 43:56
next, our next swag, this could be it, murder is dumb, you know, but I don't know, you, you're obsessed with jewel heists, maybe I could do a jewel heist somehow on the 14th, and I'm flying on the 13th round the 15th, and, like, sorry, sorry, Cluso, Inspector Cluso, there was no 14, exactly,

Jodi Wellman 44:14
I was an Air Singapore, or whatnot,

Mike Steger 44:16
yeah, what are we talking about before the flying? Oh, yeah, competing

Jodi Wellman 44:19
purposes,

Mike Steger 44:21
imagine though, if my child's birthday was the 14th. I want to be my one of my purposes to be a good dad, and other purposes to be, you know, trying to make an impact with this stuff. I'm going to dedicate my time and effort to, and one, the work one means I'm not even, I don't even exist on my child's own birthday, that hasn't happened yet, but that's actually kind of wacky to think about, right? So they're talking, tugging in different directions, or I want to experience everything in the world, everything in the world, you can't write automatically, that means that means choices. Because there's not enough time, I don't have enough resources, whatever age I am, there's probably things I'm already not fit enough to do, or don't have time to learn the skills to do right, so yeah, there's a lot of saying no, and seeing that this is just not in the cards after a certain point, but the fact that these, that you can have like sincere purposes that pull you in different directions also makes us feel like well, then maybe neither of them is a real purpose, or whichever one I choose as a purpose, and the other one's not, all that sort of stuff. So, like, clearing up the fact that, yeah, our purposes can conflict, and then that's just how that is. It's not going to be a fully satisfying settled, it's not settled law, right? Like, like it's still being debated in your own life, like, which is going to be the, which is going to be the center of gravity at a given time.

Jodi Wellman 45:53
Yeah, just to juggling trade-offs all the time. Yeah, yeah. yeah, totally, yeah, yeah. Because I look at that too, I've always used the language around that, as with values that you could value achievement, you could value family time, and then same thing, they're gonna butt up against each other, and the dance, I guess, of prioritizing, but I guess back to this notion of people feeling like they don't have the right purpose or the right purpose or a big enough, to what extent does purpose have to overlap with vocation, if at all? Because I have an opinion on this one too.

Mike Steger 46:36
Oh, good. So you're setting me up to be wrong again. Yeah, so I think it depends, yeah, yeah, the classic, classic hedge, I.. oh, well, honestly, though, I think, okay, so we now, in your 4000 Mondays, I have calculated recently how many of those represent a work week in a typical adult's life? I've also worked out how many of those weeks of our lives are spent in the bathroom.

Jodi Wellman 47:15
Fascinating.

Mike Steger 47:16
Yes, I've worked out how many of those weeks are spent slowly dying at the end of our lives, right, sleeping in commute, commuting,

Jodi Wellman 47:28
yeah, right, you know,

Mike Steger 47:30
and we're still left with some time, don't worry, but you, you know, I guess this is a preview, or I don't know if this will make it to the final version of the book I'm writing, but something like in a typical life of the non sleeping, non pooping, non commuting, non slowly dying, and receiving medical care weeks work will still take up like 476 of your Mondays, and so then people oftentimes say, you know, and isn't it sad that you know work isn't that just sad like no one ever said on their deathbed, I wish I spent more time at the office, and I like to flip that around a little bit, like that's fantastic, someone's gonna pay you 476 weeks of your life to do your purpose right, so work week is a terrible thing to waste, is my new motto for this, right? So, why not see if you can hook it into your work, since you got to do it anyways, unless you're truly in the Yacht Polo Club, you know?

Jodi Wellman 48:36
Yeah, yeah,

Mike Steger 48:37
so gotta do it anyways, might as well figure it out.

Jodi Wellman 48:40
Well, that figure it out, that's the part that I think sounds easier than it is, because I think, and I guess just,

Mike Steger 48:48
was this your opinion that you wanted to, like, I don't want to skip past, you have an opinion on this, so

Jodi Wellman 48:52
sure, sure, yeah, well, I'm slowly picking it now to check on, like, is your perspective, your work now, and your passion overlap on a Venn diagram for Mike Steger.

Mike Steger 49:05
They do, they do, and I wouldn't say that my job overlaps necessarily with what's meaningful to me all the time. In fact, a lot of times it doesn't, but my overall career does. Yeah, I chose my career to be me and live my life right, like that's that was the primary thing that shaped what I study, as you talked about before. How about you?

Jodi Wellman 49:28
Cool. Well, I come from a place now where I've made and helped. I have an absolute nice alignment with the work I do, feeling like it's the purpose I want for now, subject to change. I like to think that, and come back to that, the degree to which we just want to take a swerve, but I think that the trouble can emerge when people are not in a role that feels right, like back to the CMO example from before, of this isn't cutting it for me anymore, I used to be a challenge, or used to like the I'm. I hate this environment or my boss or the work or whatever it is, and then this idea: do the work you love and you'll never work a day again in your life. That idea, and that your job does need to be purposeful. That also means that it needs to in some way check a box that society has about whether it is a good kind of thing, like, is it a B Corp? Is it the right kind of thing that other people would say, 'Wow, you know that that's doing good in the world, or whatever. So, I think there's undue pressure for work to be the source and home and place where you're going to find your purpose and meaning, and also just total satisfaction, and I think it set us up for a lot of disappointment, because there are only so many, maybe of those cool jobs, or a job for you that is, you can find if your passion, for some reason, is all about sea turtles. Well, maybe there are only so many sea turtle jobs out there that you can get. So I have a philosophy, I suppose, which is don't not like your job, don't still try and find a way, and maybe will eventually align with purpose, but maybe seek it out, perhaps outside of the bounds of work, if it's not already there, and then watch it, maybe even funny enough, emerge in work, because maybe you've changed in a way, if you've been finding, you know, meaning and vitality outside of work, so that's the story I'm sticking to. Yeah, off work.

Mike Steger 51:30
Yeah, I think that's great, because, like, that there is a whole research field on job crafting, using your strengths at work, aligning your values, things like that, right? That if you can't find the perfect job title, or you can't, you know, launch your own business, or you need to do things on the side as you're launching a business, making you feel strung out, or you launch a business, and it kind of crashes a little bit, because people aren't ready for it, or whatever the issue

Jodi Wellman 51:58
is,

Mike Steger 52:00
there's still ways that you can use the time wisely in your working day. I think that would be the thing, and you can use your time wisely by bringing who you are, or maybe looking for those little, those glimmers of when it's going to really be a good thing, even if it's not like the job title.

Jodi Wellman 52:16
Is it true that purpose increases as we age? A sense of it.

Mike Steger 52:22
This is more complicated than it looks. This particular question, so it depends on which measure you use. Measures that emphasize having lots of things to do and look forward to tend not to increase that much towards the very end of life.

Jodi Wellman 52:38
Okay,

Mike Steger 52:39
but what is interesting is that even among folks who are quite old, right, where we might think surely they don't have a huge agenda for the rest of their life. Well, one surprise is they seem to may say their life has a purpose, it just might look different, right. My life might be to, at that point, leave, you know, a good set of memories that my grandchildren can use as inspiration or to make them feel like they were part of a family or have some heritage or something like that, right? Like, there's a lot of things we can do that aren't getting shit done at the end of life, and the research also shows that it kind of does seem to increase. It'll be interesting to see, like, once we start digesting a few different things, right? We have to digest the fact that we do feel a ton of pressure now to have purpose, and we didn't used to. It's nice to have, but maybe it wasn't even for everybody, or if we had one again, it was like out of the box. It was like, do good religion stuff for a lot of people, right? Yeah, but now we have this, like, you got to figure it out yourself, which is hard. There are advantages if you can do it. So, I don't want to say don't try, but it is hard, harder than never thinking about it, that it, but once you start thinking about it, it's hard to convince yourself that it doesn't matter, which is an accidental feature of a podcast like this, you know, but like we're also hopefully filling, filling in the gaps a little bit on how to, how to work this system out. Another, another thing we hardly have touched on at all today, and we don't really have time to get into it. We will keep touching on it is the fact that the modern world is pretty difficult to find purpose in right now, right? Like, there's there's features of the modern world that make it harder and harder to have a purpose, if only because purpose implies we're going to do something familiar for a period of time, and so little in the world seems like it's going to be familiar to us for an extended period of time, so only for that, even if we didn't do social media, even if we didn't, you know, need to buy a sex bot or didn't need to figure out how to have AI agents. Yes, book our next vacation, whatever it might be, right? Even without that sort of stuff, the world is changing a lot, and we're hearing about it, and so it's hard to, it's hard to see sometimes how our purpose is going to move into that future world when we don't even know what that future world's gonna look like. It's all just gray fog,

Jodi Wellman 55:21
gray fog, interesting. Makes me think maybe a guaranteed purpose that would last for a while would be to be the creator of sex spots.

Mike Steger 55:29
That's guaranteed, that's guaranteed. Some legs, yes. We really encourage people to do that.

Jodi Wellman 55:38
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Steger 55:40
And then, and then sponsor us. Why not? Right,

Jodi Wellman 55:42
that feels right. Okay, so would you rather have a consistent one clear life purpose you must follow forever, or would you rather have one that changes every five years and evolves as life changes and you change and you get to switch a room every five years,

Mike Steger 56:01
yeah. For me, I want the purpose toolkit, right? One that's adjusting all the time, and can sort of figure things out as things change, things pop up. I know how to use that system. Sometimes it's harder than it is at other times, but you know, things can rock my life, and I'm ready to process and re-navigate you. yeah, but some people who have like these superpower carved in stone purposes, that that purpose meets all all challenges, and it's like a, it's like those waves, those pictures of the waves on that lighthouse, right? The lighthouse is still there. The waves, like, but chow, and lighthouse is like,

Jodi Wellman 56:43
fine,

Mike Steger 56:43
please try, loser, right? But if that lighthouse goes, that's, that's, yeah, that's scary. But a lot of people, a lot of people just power through wave after wave, no big whoop. How about you?

Jodi Wellman 56:55
I like variety, so I like the idea of the stints, mm. stints, I think there's going to be a through line, right? There has been so far in life, and it hasn't. There's

Mike Steger 57:08
gonna be.. I'll make one up some days

Jodi Wellman 57:11
when I'm at the end in hospice doing that life review. I will find a way to narrate it as being related, but yeah, I think that there's, there's consistency with, you know, in some way making life better in some way for other people, certainly not trying to make it worse, but the specifics around it, I like that. I like that changing, and I like the idea of you having a toolkit, and I want more people to take advantage of that.

Mike Steger 57:43
Yeah, I mean, do you think that? Do you think we've solved it? We've solved the purpose crisis, because people will just do what we just said there, what you just said.

Jodi Wellman 57:52
Well, I think if it involves yes, getting into sex spots, and yes, just knowing that if you find a purpose, it'll increase your grip strength. I think immediately we have solved a lot. Yeah,

Mike Steger 58:04
really wish you hadn't, you know, put those two together. Twining, intertwining cousins, I mean, this could be it, as you're saying, but I almost.. I, as my grandma used to say, I dassent think I know some, like she just created a whole new verb, dassing and dassenting, but I dassent think what you'll come up with next, if we could be more time to link grip strength and sex box,

Jodi Wellman 58:36
yeah, just just try me, yeah, but to answer your question, have we solved things, I think we have very aptly opened the worm can, and now we get to watch them slither around, and it's just fascinating, because we'll just keep talking about them. Does

Mike Steger 58:51
yeah, well, that is going to be my, my cheeky answer as well. That again, a lot of this stuff takes time, it's hard to feel confident in it, so I kind of feel our job as showing what that looks like over time, right, and giving people enough touch points that they can start to feel confident

Jodi Wellman 59:13
grabbing

Mike Steger 59:14
those worms, stick them back in. Why do I have so many worms in the first place,

Jodi Wellman 59:19
right? And they don't have to go back in the can, they could, we could do other things with them, and, but what I am hearing, though, is that it is worth it to continue on the mission of finding the purpose, because there is, it's worth it, not just because we will live longer and better with better sleep and stronger fingers, but we will also benefit from greater sense of well, like happiness, it was worth it. So, we don't want to, we want to stick with the program, even though it means it's pesky and awkward, and we'd sometimes rather just not play the game.

Mike Steger 59:49
Yep, we're happier, we have less mental illness, better health, people like us more, we're nicer, we're actually rated as being more fun. Do we have better hair? Yeah. Well, I mean, Jodi, we don't have time to get into here. You don't have time to get into hair. That's its own episode later on. So, in terms of why do people feel a pressure to feel purpose, we can easily summarize by saying that there's been a lot of consumerism around it, right? Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like people saying, like, there's a program, there's a this variable is really important to you. The volume keeps getting turned up to get people's attention, so we feel like we're missing out on something. We can say that the modern world has its own unique, mysterious, horrifying logic to it that makes purpose harder. And we can also say that once you start thinking about it, it can be hard, unless you've done other types of work, can be hard to feel confident in your answers if people keep bugging you about it reasons, and you're not alone if you're, if you're in this process, wondering what purpose is, because we're here too, and you know we'll keep talking about

Jodi Wellman 1:00:57
it, and with that, I really think this could be it. Next time we're going to talk a little bit more about dying. Does it sound lovely?

Mike Steger 1:01:04
If I, if I wasn't such a disaster, I'd have my cool mug, but I'm a disaster today.

Jodi Wellman 1:01:10
Fine, we're just, we're working on purpose. Can only do so much once. Enjoy your yacht polo

Mike Steger 1:01:20
sweep in the nation. Welcome to This Could Have Been It if Mike had his shit together.