Good Life Project - Colin Beavan: No Impact Man On How To Be Alive
Episode Date: December 28, 2015Colin Beavan burst into the public consciousness in a huge way with a documentary and international bestselling book called No Impact Man that documented his yearlong experiment to live in the mi...ddle of New York City with his family creating zero environmental impact.That experience opened his eyes to the power daily choices can have not only his own life, but the world around him. But, it also did something else. It triggered a deeper interest in exploring many of the big questions in life, the heart of which is not just how to be a good steward of the planet, but how to live a good life along the way.Consumed by the question he spent years diving into research, interviewing people and began to realize that our ability to live good lives is intimately tied to the way we relate to and serve those around us, and the planet that sustains us. It's about moving away from materialism and toward competence, and so much more. Diverging from convention, he shares much of what he's discovered in a wonderful new book, How to Be Alive.We sat down with Colin to record a deeply-personal and passionate conversation, geeking out on stories, eye-opening studies on rarely spoken about human needs and so much more, all in the name of pulling back the curtain on what really matters as we navigate our time on the planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Mayday, mayday.
We've been compromised.
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January 24th.
Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. The biggest gift we can give the world is to go out in front of people and accept the possibility of being wrong. So today's guest, Colin Bevan, kind of burst onto the scenes in 2009
when he was featured along with his family in a documentary called No Impact Man
and then published a book by the same name in the following year
that kind of exploded into the public's consciousness.
And it told the story of a family living in the heart of New York City
that spent a year trying to live with zero impact on the environment.
And some of the choices that they made looked like they were brutally hard from the outside looking in and probably from the inside looking out.
But what they discovered along the way was that the choices and the shift in mindset and experience was to a a large extent, an incredible gift. And that also touched off this
deeper exploration in Colin's mind about what does it actually mean to be alive on the planet? You
know, how do we live a good life? And how do we relate to other people and be in service of other
people and of the planet in general? And what does that mean in terms of our ability to actually just
live good lives? And that led him into a deep dive into the ability to actually just live good lives?
And that led him into a deep dive into the research on actually living a good life.
And it opened his eyes to a lot of things he wasn't expecting to discover and culminated in a new book, which is really fascinating, called How to Be Alive.
We dive into this in today's conversation.
I'm Jonathan Fields.
This is Good Life Project.
So we're hanging out here and it's kind of the eve of the publication, almost the eve of the publication of your next book. And I want to go deep into that because some really fascinating
stuff on there. But let's give a little bit of context too. And let's take a step back in time.
You kind of burst into the public's consciousness a chunk of years back because of, I guess, a blend of your value set and sort of like a big social experiment that you were doing.
Take me back.
So this is back in 2007.
That's when, as you put it, I burst into consciousness and we had a story on the front page of the New York Times about our project called No Impact Man.
And what had happened was I had, I'm a writer, I had written two history books. And then back in
2006, I was, well, the Iraq War was happening and the Afghanistan War was happening. And also,
I was becoming aware of climate change. And so these, we had these two things where we had this
war that we were prosecuting for oil. I mean, at the time, we were told that it was for weapons of mass destruction.
But I think no matter where you sit on the political, whatever side of the political aisle you're on now, everybody agrees it was for oil.
So we had this war.
We were fighting for oil.
And then the climate change, we had what was happening when we burned the oil, which was that we were making our actual habitat uninhabitable.
And then in between that, we had this way of life.
You know, the reason why we burned the oil,
the reason why we did the climate change.
And we were, I'd say, we were wrecking the place.
And then we had this life.
And so if we're going to wreck the place,
we should be having a party doing it.
And yet I looked around and I saw most of my friends
were working 10, 12, 14 hour days.
25% of Americans could be diagnosed with depression or major anxiety disorder at any time.
So there wasn't a party happening, and that's in the developed world.
In the developing world, you know, there's a billion people without drinking water.
So I was like, ah, what's going on?
We had this, we're at war, we're wrecking the planet, and we're not even having a party doing it.
And so I wanted to turn my writing career over to doing something about the things that I cared about. So the No Impact Man project evolved,
which was a year we lived living as environmentally as possible.
Were you attuned to sustainability and low impact before this? Or was this sort of like,
okay, what can I do that in some way?
So the progression of my career went that in my,
well, in my early twenties, I did a PhD in engineering. And the reason why I did that was
because I wanted to be rich. And this was at a time when electrical engineering was a thing,
you know, beginning of computers and all that. But I tried that and I found out that I hated it
and orienting my life around being rich didn't work. And so through a strange convolution of things, I ended up being a communications consultant, working only for
socially good organizations, which is about the exact opposite, the exact opposite of engineering,
right. And so I had this kind of social mission in my 20s. And then when I hit 30, I actually
realized that what I wanted to do was be a writer. And so I moved to New York, and I started writing
and I was, I wrote these two history books. And so I kind of that was I wanted to do was be a writer. And so I moved to New York and I started writing. And I wrote these two history books.
And so I kind of, that was my passion.
The 20s was my concern in the world.
The 30s was my passion.
And then we got to this place.
So your question was, was I into sustainability?
I wasn't into sustainability per se.
But what happened was when this kind of complex of the wars and climate change was happening, I realized that I was missing the mission orientation of my life.
I was writing, which was my passion, but I wanted to bring it all together where I was both pursuing my passion, but pursuing my passion in a way that helped the world.
So, no, I wasn't a sustainability guy, but I was a social justice guy.
I really cared about a world that was fair to people and that was safe for people.
And so that's what kind of brought it all together, bringing the concern of my 20s with the passions of my 30s.
It's so interesting the way you differentiate between passion and mission, because I don't think a lot of people go there.
I think there's a lot of conversation around discover your passion and then follow your passion.
And then there's a conversation around, you know, like find some cause.
You like find a mission, find something to believe in.
But the conversation around sort of like finding the intersection of those two isn't a conversation to hear a whole lot.
You know, so, I mean, I teach a class at Sarah Lawrence College called Using the Arts for Social Change,
which is really interesting because the idea that you should say use the arts for social change is kind of a new thing in terms of the evolution of
our culture. So what I'm saying is that passion and concern never used to be separate. If you
wrote, you wrote because you wanted to change the world. If you made art, you made art because you
wanted to, you know, help the world. If you made music, it was because you had, you know, and somehow over time, I think a lot of it has to do with the corporatization of media,
where the stuff is made without message so that it can be sold to more people. Somehow over time,
the concern for the world and the passion of expressing ourselves has become separate.
Like, I want to be an artist that means just making lovely conceptual pictures or,
you know, something that attracts attention without necessarily always coming together
with a concern. So that's why I differentiate them. Because to me, you know, I know you talk
a lot about the good life. The good life is a life where you get to bring your passions and
concerns together in one place where you get to be exactly who you are in a way that totally helps
the world. It's so interesting, though, because I think the vision of the artist now, like sort of
the modern day vision is that, you know, it's a quote, selfish pursuit, you know, it's sort of
like you become utterly absorbed in the quest to fully self express, you know, like there's
something there's a monster in your head that has to get out. And the idea is not getting out in
service. So the idea is just it has to get out. Like for me to be okay in the world,
I have to find a conduit, an outlet for that thing. How it lands is not my business. And it's
interesting. I had Liz Gilbert on not too long ago. We're talking about her new book, Big Magic.
And I'm a huge fan of her. I love her. She's got an amazing energy and so much of what she writes
inspires me. There was a line in the book that I kept stumbling over and I tripped on. It was a whole chapter,
which was really, don't write or don't create because you want it to be instructive or it's
serve a purpose for other people. Just do it because you have to do it. And I think there's
an interesting conversation around where's the right place for any individual that's not being had in something beyond a sort of a fluffy level.
Right.
I mean, I think a couple of things, like every medicine is for the particular disease.
And I think in this kind of post whatever era or in postmodernist, where art lacks a certain sort of messaging. So it means
that the medicine for this disease is, let's actually care about the audience and the effect
that we're going to have on them. And also, who I am, and kind of who I call to, are people who
really need a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives and a sense of connection to the world at large.
So, you know, there may be people for whom pure self-expression is fine, and God bless them too.
I tend to think about, to me, the highest calling is at the intersection of the two.
Like, what does the world need, and what do I need, and how can we make them happen together?
Yeah, and we're definitely going to circle back to that in the not too distant future of this
conversation, because it's an important thing that you go into in your most recent work.
For those who don't know, really, because we didn't really explain what No Impact Man and
what that project was really about, can you sort of thumbnail it?
Sure. So just to give a little more background, I decided that I wanted to write about what was,
you know, write something that would bring broader public interest to climate change and the wars and also how we live.
And at first I was going to write this finger-wagging story about how you people, you should stop riding your SUVs.
And then one day I came into my house.
It was a hot summer day.
It was August.
I was boiling in the corridor outside my apartment, and I opened the door to my apartment,
and this cold air came whooshing out because I had left the air conditioners on all day long
because I didn't want to wait 15 minutes for the apartment to cool down when I got home.
And for some reason, for the first time, it hit me.
Like, well, if I'm leaving the air conditioners on all day
long, just because I don't want to wait 15 minutes for the apartment to cool down, and young men and
women are fighting in a war for energy. In other words, they are dying for energy, and I am wasting
that self-same energy. What does that actually mean? And I realized that I shouldn't be writing
a book about how all you people should change.
I thought maybe I could write a book about how I change, like how I actually bring my
life in line with my values.
And so that became No Impact Man.
And basically, it was a year with me and my then family as it was comprised them living
together in Manhattan, living with as low environmental impact as possible, which meant on the one hand,
reducing the resources that we use, reducing our negative impact. And on the other hand,
increasing the good that we did in the world. So increasing our positive impact. So the idea was
that our reduced negative impact and our increased positive impact would be no net impact, which
technically makes no sense, probably. but philosophically, the question was,
is it possible for any of us to live a life doing more good than harm?
How'd you answer the question?
Oh, I think it's totally possible for us to do more good than harm. If you think about it,
the amount of harm that any of us can do is limited. You can only do as much harm as,
especially in the environmental sphere,
it's limited by the number of resources that you use. And one person can only use so many resources.
But the good that we can do, because it can magnify out into the world, it can be endless.
And I think it's, and it's also, of course, not one of the questions that came up a lot in No
Impact Man was, well, if you're trying to make no impact, you might as well be dead
because you're breathing air. That creates carbon dioxide. So why don't you just kill yourself?
The ultimate No Impact Man.
People ask me that question a lot.
Really?
Why don't you just kill yourself and call yourself No Impact Man, but you have a dog.
How could you have a dog if you're No no impact? I'm like, why are you picking
up my dog? But the real question is, is not, I don't think, and how many resources we use,
but what do we use the resources for? So, you know, on the level of one person, like,
what are you doing with your life? Are you using your life for good and helping the world? Or is
it only for you? If it's only for you, then it may be a waste of resources, especially when you realize
that you yourself are going to die at one stage. So everything you do, if it has no positive effect
on the rest of the world, could be called a waste. But it's a good use of resources if it does help.
Yeah. From that project, I mean, there's a huge amount of publicity and media and then documentary.
It seemed like that also, well, you tell me from the inside looking out.
From the outside looking in, it seemed like that kind of exploded a conversation about
all the things that you were talking about in a fairly public way.
But it also seems like it really, it sent you career-wise in an interesting new direction.
Both things, yes.
Both things happened.
One, I think, I mean, obviously I've pondered a lot,
why did it explode in that way?
And I think there was a conversation
that we needed to have as a culture that wasn't happening.
And part of the reason why it wasn't happening
is things like climate change
and consumption as a way of life
seemed like big policy wonky, far away issues
that people couldn't quite wrap their head around.
But No Impact Man looked at those issues from the point of view of one person's life. Yeah, that's such an interesting point. wonky far away issues that people couldn't quite wrap their head around but no impact man
looked at those issues from the point of view of one person's life that's such an interesting point
and so all of a sudden people are like oh this is where those big issues intersect with my life
like now i understand about environmental resource use and you know i understand about you know big
far away government things and my civic engagement know, my personal civic engagement, that's the intersection.
So I think it was like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle in terms of like,
there was a lot of pressure or wanting to have a conversation, but not knowing how to have it.
And then somehow or another, I stumbled over a way to have the conversation.
By the way, that conversation went worldwide. It was the book got adopted at many, many college
campuses and in both in the United States
and Europe, and was really interesting for me because I became also the recipient of what a
lot of people were doing. In terms of my own career, people often would say to me, well,
what was the hardest part of No Impact Man? And they expected me to say something like
washing our clothes by hand, which I did, or living without electricity, which we did for six months.
But in truth, those things were just habit changes.
They weren't that challenging.
Once you learned how to do them, it was fine to do them.
It was amazing in many ways.
Many amazing things happened.
People thought, would say, oh, you're depriving yourself.
But actually, in many ways, we found out that we had already been deprived.
And when we lived that year, we found out that we had already been deprived. And when
we lived that year, we were getting things back. But the truth of what was really hardest for me
and what changed my career is that suddenly I was getting all this attention and people were
basically saying, well, what do we have to do to save the world? And I remember I was doing an
interview in Paris with this journalist and he said, what do we have to do to save the world?
And I was like, you're asking me?
And he was like, vous êtes un guru, non?
I mean, my French accent is terrible, but he was saying, are you a guru?
It's like, no, I'm a man.
Yeah, like, no.
And so all of a sudden, I was put in this position where I was expected and had to use my voice and trust my voice.
And that kind of changed my career in the sense that I've never been,
I'm not a person who gives other people directions,
but I encourage them to find directions within themselves.
And stepping into that space in my career is the greatest privilege I've had in my life
and is wonderful and was hard to learn to do.
Yeah. Hard in what way?
Because, well, so for example, I mean, I probably overestimated my importance and my influence at the time.
But there were all these things happening in the environmental movement.
And people were trying to mobilize people in a certain way.
And I remember I called up before my first appearance on Good Morning America.
I called up this famous environmentalist.
And I said, I don't know what to do.
What should I say? And he said, tell them changing our light bulbs is
not enough. We need to change our senators. And it's true. We do need to change our senators,
of course, but that wasn't my message. You know, that wasn't my personal message.
So the hard part was being willing. And my message was, you know, each of us needs to find inside of
us our gift for the world, right? What do we have that we can give the world?
Because not all of us are going to go on marches.
Not all of us are going to turn vegetarian.
So to actually go on television and talk about this stuff
without the endorsement of somebody else,
to actually have the background to say my truth
in front of, at that stage, millions of people,
that was the hard part.
Yeah. How did you deal with it? A lot of trusting in the of, at that stage, millions of people. That was the hard part. Yeah. How did you deal with it?
A lot of trusting in the world,
like trusting that I could do right or wrong
and things would turn out the same way.
And also, you know, something that I tell everybody
is that sometimes the biggest gift we can give the world
is to go out in front of people
and accept the possibility of being wrong.
Like just tell, you know, just to go and tell our truth and do our best. We're so scared of showing our light,
right? We're so scared of going out. So many people as I've traveled the world, it's like one
time, I remember this third grade teacher. And we were in an auditorium, I'd just given a talk,
she raised her hand, she stood up, she said, I'm a third grade teacher. I teach a bunch of eight-year-olds.
How do I teach them the importance of the environment?
And I was like, what did you say you do?
And she said, I'm a third grade teacher.
And I said, I'm not a teacher.
You're a teacher.
You tell me.
How do you teach?
You know, so people, I mean, nothing against her because I thought it was, you know, she had this wonderful motivation.
Yeah, of course.
But what was left, what she needed was for me to say to her,
you just have to trust yourself and accept the possibility of making mistakes.
We so don't want that.
And I'm not sure where.
I think it's a fear thing.
I think it's a fear of being judged, cast out.
What if we're wrong?
We're kind of told that.
I remember some research recently.
One of the most terrifying things you could ever say is, I don't know.
I mean, to this day, every adult lies about that nonstop.
You know, we're in a meeting and somebody, oh, did you see that movie?
Did you read that book?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Because we're terrified of just saying, I don't know.
And then having to take ownership of the responsibility to figure it out.
I think we want, we just want people to tell us everything. Well, I actually think it has to do a little bit with how we're educated, how our whole society.
When you go to school, the teacher doesn't say, look deeply inside yourself and ask yourself the answer to these questions.
The teacher tells you two plus two is four, three plus three is six.
Right, turn to page.
Right, that's right.
So that actually we're taught to receive truth. And religion is in, meanwhile, that kind of acceptance of the mystery and learning to turn inwards, which used to be the kind of province of religion, religion is in such a turning point at the moment. So many of us in the United States don't accept it as it stands. So it's in transition. How do we have that new conversation
about looking for our lights within ourselves? Yeah. No, I so agree. And I think when you think
back to Days of Aristotle and stuff like that, it wasn't transmission. It was conversation.
And the conversation would eventually tease out, quote, knowledge or wisdom. I do believe,
and this is not, neither of us are slamming teachers in any way, shape, or form. It's an extraordinarily
noble profession. But I do think there's a huge amount of transmission that tends to happen over
conversation. It seems like a lot of that comes out of a desire for order in the system that we've
had. But I think you're right. I think, you know, society is changing, what we need is changing, what, you know, and the answers that we need to problems that we've created aren't
going to come necessarily from the educational approach that's created those problems.
Right.
So from this place, you get vaulted into this big public conversation, and you're playing this new
role, comfortable or not comfortable or dancing between them.
And over the course of the next few years, you know, it seems like you also, you become,
you kind of keep a fair amount of that public profile and consult and teach and travel.
But it also seems like this book, because a lot of what we've been talking about is seem to be the nuggets of your latest deep dive into like the bigger question, which, you know, I'm obsessed with as well, which is like, how room and lots of travel. And at that stage, I started a little nonprofit called
the No Impact Project. And our flagship program is to help people live as environmentally as
possible over the course of a week. It's an immersive educational program. And we run that
in institutions. So I was running that and then traveling around the world talking and running workshops and all this kind of thing.
And then having people again and again ask me, well, what can I do?
What can I do?
Which worried me when it became too close to instead of what can I do, how can I be like you?
Because what I feel is so important is that we stop following directions because the directions tell us to go to work or first get ourselves into mountains of college debt, then go to work and be stuck in that work to pay the college debt off.
Meanwhile, because we're stuck in work, we may not necessarily like the only consolation we have is to buy stuff. Like once you have a car, well, then you need a car with a Bose stereo, then you need an Eames chair in your office, because you're stuck in this system
that's not really making you happy. But the best you can do for yourself is buy more and more stuff.
And meanwhile, we're turning ourselves off to ourselves and and stop hearing that the fact
that the world is suffering, right? So that's following directions. And so when people would
come to me and say, Well, how do I now follow your directions? That concerned me because it's following directions is
what's gotten us into this mess. I mean, so the real question is, you know, how do you become
like you, but, but even more like you, where, where that third grade teacher trusts herself
to go and teach the kids about the environment because she's trusts in being herself. And so that conversation, the kinds of things that were people were asking
me, finally led me to write this current book, which is called How to Be Alive, a guide to the
kind of happiness that helps the world. And it's very much a book about figuring out who you are,
because all the directions are breaking down. I mean, even if you do happen
to get a good job, like I say, the best you can get after that is the Bose stereo in the Ames chair.
So the and meanwhile, the feeling that you're wrecking the world somehow, a lot of people have
that kind of disease feeling. So how do you actually figure out who you are and what your
gift is to the world and not just your gift, like the big career changing gift, but how can you live in, because some of us are just stuck in our situations.
How can we make incremental changes in our lives where we get to feel more and more like
we're living in line with our values?
Yeah.
And one of the things that you talk about also is that distinction is sort of like materialism
versus intrinsic.
And yet it really does seem like a lot of the pursuit of materialism is almost like self-medication and distraction, both from not stepping into your true self, like however you define it.
Maybe we'll explore that a little bit.
And also, you know, not stepping into owning what your current reality, the impact your current reality may be making on the greater society around you.
You know, it's sort of like, let me just immerse myself in stuff.
Well, I mean, I think that's the kind of current discourse, you know, people will say it's
because people are selfish or people aren't farsighted enough.
I think it's really important to say that, and it's true that buying stuff can anesthetize
us, that we can basically get on this kind of hedonic treadmill where we're getting small shots of pleasure from buying things.
But I think it's also important to note that we're all living in a system and that it's not about all of us being too weak or too selfish to do the things that we need to do to change the world. But actually, from childhood, we've been born in a certain way
and told certain things and educated certain things
and been subject to 10,000 advertising messages a day
to tell us to live a certain way.
And our degrees of freedom are small.
We have mortgages.
We might have our own, our kids' tuitions to pay
and this type of thing.
So I'm not so sure that it's about that we – so you have to be very awake to change
things in a big way and to have a lot of that kind of backbone that I talked about, like
a lot of that trust in yourself.
So I just think it's important to not say that it's about us always trying to anesthetize
ourselves, but that we're in a system and it's easy to go along to get along, go along to get along in the system. And one of part of my work
is about pointing out is that slowly but surely, you can actually wake up to your life, to the
power to change your life and the power to change your world. And it doesn't have to be necessarily
a big drama, you can start slowly and, and, start slowly and educate yourself on your power
more or less.
Yeah, of course,
I can't help having visions
of the matrix popping into my head
as you're talking about this.
Well, we are.
In many ways, we are in a matrix.
Right.
It's like you don't want to be
all big and dramatic like that.
But fundamentally, yeah,
if we live under a veil,
like you said,
I think understanding
that there is a system
that we all exist in and certain rules and certain assumptions.
Many of them, we don't stand up and say, these are the rules that I accept and that I live by.
It's just by default.
The way that we live our lives is a default acceptance of the ethos that guides us without ever just kind of stepping back and saying, huh, does that actually make sense? And I think, you know, speaking of the Matrix,
that business, you know, when Orpheus gives,
I forgot the name of the Keanu Reeves character.
Neo.
What's his name?
Neo.
When Orpheus gives Neo the pill, you know,
and suddenly he can see that he's part of the Matrix.
Actually, each of us gets that pill many, many times every day.
It's not like we're completely asleep.
We all know that we care
about our friends. We care about our children. We want the best for our neighbors. We want the
best for our friends. Most of us want the best for the world, in fact. And actually, all the bad news
in the world at the moment is kind of helpful in a certain way, because every time we hear something,
for a moment, boom, it's Orpheus's pill for a moment wait this isn't the way it should be it should be something else
but i have to get to work by nine so blah and then we get another orpheus's pill over and over again
and so the question is how can we actually start with these little enlightenment experiences we
have where we are suddenly awake to the world and we see it suffering we see our own suffering and
we want to do something about it how do we actually take 15 minutes each day to act in line with that?
And I think it's interesting too, because I totally agree.
When you look at your first big social experiment, you know, like the No Impact Man of the Year,
it was big and massively disruptive.
And I wonder if sometimes, you know, we kind of tell ourselves, well, the only way to
really start to shift to, you know, live in our lives more comfortably in a more aligned way and
potentially make a difference beyond ourselves is we've got to make this big, massive disruptive
shift rather than kind of taking a step back and saying, well, maybe that's right for some people.
But, you know, what if I I just took one tiny step today?
I have a story about this kind of thing.
It's in the book.
It's about my friend Jonathan, and he always wanted to learn to play guitar, but he always
felt like, what's the point?
I don't have the time to really learn.
There are so many great guitar players in the world, so what's even...
But he had this kind of, I want to be a music maker, you know, thing. But he had a job and he was busy. And he, you know, he always kept talking
himself out of it. And let's face it, guitar is hard to learn, you know. So one day he was
transferring flights in Atlanta. And his friend lived there. And she picked him up at the airport.
And they hung out for a couple of hours. And they went to the park. And she had a ukulele.
And she played the ukulele, which, by the way easy to play and she handed it to him and taught him three chords
and all of a sudden he played the ukulele right and on the way back to the airport they picked
up a ukulele and he bought it and he took it home and for five minutes each day ten minutes each day
he would strum on this ukulele sometimes he would you know there's ukulele there's lessons on youtube
he would look and all of a sudden in just just by doing little things, he was making music.
And he had set himself up all those years by play the guitar, play the guitar.
But then all of a sudden, the ukulele, which is easy, entered his life.
And suddenly he became a music maker.
So I call that taking the ukulele approach, you know, and I encourage people to take the
ukulele approach, which is simply if you notice something in the world that's troubling you, look at that place where that
problem in the world intersects with your life. Let's say Black Lives Matter. If you're concerned
about institutional racism, you can find a place in your life where you see institutional racism,
maybe at work, maybe your employer has the habit of hiring only through
personal networks, which means that it only reaches, you know, friends of friends. So maybe
you can just take the time to go and talk to your employer and say, hey, let's advertise these jobs.
Let's not and make sure that they go to all sections of our community. Let's not only hire
our friends. And then in that way, we combat institutional racism. So that actually, and
that's the ukulele approach, right? That's's just saying i don't have to change the whole world i can just
change this little part of the world that i have influence over yeah and i love that because i
think we just become you know feel like well we can take on the crushing burden of like doing the
big thing so we're not going to do anything at all so i love that because it's like it gives
you permission to say baby steps is actually okay. Like, and maybe even preferable,
maybe that's actually the most intelligent way for most of us to proceed rather than
blowing up our lives in the name of something big, you know, capital big.
Blowing up your life is okay for some people, some people's paths, but, but, but that's like
the guitar, right? But, but, but for some of us, we just can't, you know, at this moment. But we can progressively, this is what I talk a lot about in How to Be Alive, is progressively change your life. And, you know, coffee has all sorts of consequences for
labor, has consequences for the environment, has many, many consequences. And so she has kept
hearing about this and she feels like there's nothing she can do. But one day she just decides,
oh, hell, today I'm just going to do what I can. And when she goes to the grocery store,
she looks at the aisle at all the labels on the coffee and she buys, you know, which one,
and she just decides the one that has the most certifications, the kosher certification, the rainforest certification, you know, every certification.
And she buys that one.
And she feels like, well, you know, I made one step forward.
Now, if she stopped there, it would be trivial.
But her energy was such that each day she was going to do a little bit more. So then the next day she goes online and she researches it,
and she finds out that some of the certifications are actually difficult
for the farmers because they're so expensive,
and that that causes a problem in itself.
And she finds a coffeehouse that sells direct trade coffee,
where the coffeehouse actually goes and buys coffee from the small farmer
without the certification, right?
Then she becomes friends with the people at the coffeehouse,
and the next thing you know, they take her to their community garden.
And then the next thing you know, they take her on a climate march. So suddenly,
she's moved from just buying a different coffee to being an actual out and out activist,
and her life has changed, and she has a new community of friends. And any of us can take
that little bit at a time approach. I'm not saying we should all be activists. That's where she ended up. But the point is, you start with 15 minutes today, and then you add 15 minutes
tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You ukulele it.
Yeah, you ukulele it.
You use the term life quest and life quest, or deconstruct that a little bit for me.
So where we are is that we have what I call standard life approaches, another term that I use in the book.
I mentioned a couple of them.
You know, standard life approach is to go to the best college.
That's a standard life approach.
To earn as much money as you can is a standard life approach.
To buy a big house is a standard life approach.
They're kind of like these are the things you're supposed to have to have a good life. But more and more, the standard life approaches are either not accessible to us, or they don't bring us happiness
the way that they're supposed to. And part of the reason why they don't bring us happiness is because
they ignore the fact that the world itself is in trouble. So we get this kind of feeling like we're
changing deck chairs on the Titanic, like the ship is going down, and we may have a better deck chair,
but the ship is still going down. So the standard life approaches don't work. And yet we don't have as a society,
a new mythology, a new set of directions for where to go and how to live. So what that means
is the only thing that we have to trust is what's deep inside ourselves, like our own light inside
ourselves. So a life quester is somebody who's questing after the good.
So the good life is not yet defined.
A life quester is somebody that's questing after the good life.
And the good life is a life where we get to be safe and happy
and help the world at the same time.
So a life quester are the many, many thousands of people that I've met
as I've traveled the world talking about this stuff
who are actually looking for their own version of a good life that helps the world.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. And you actually speak to this also, which is the role of
story. You use the word mythology, you know, and you also talk about and write about the idea of
story and how the stories that we tell about our current reality and about our
capabilities and our limitations profoundly impact our behavior and our actions and the lives that
we construct. And we take that on a macro scale, you know, it's huge. There are actually a couple
of things that I wanted to reference this directly that you wrote about this, because there are two
lines that jumped out at me. I was just like, whoa.
In the context of story, one was you write, every time we tell ourselves a story about how we're less powerful than we truly are, we become less powerful than we truly are.
And then shortly after that, you shared this line which kind of stopped me in my tracks, which is, underneath all human suffering is a false story about the world. We don't suffer because of what is. We suffer because of our stories
about what is. Talk me through that a little bit.
Well, let me take a step back first. So one of the ways that I talk about how story creates
the world we live in is imagine your mom,
when she was growing up, got bit by a dog. So when she's raising you, she always tells you,
dogs are not safe. Dogs are not safe. So as you go about the world, when you see dogs,
you have this software, the dogs is not safe software, and it loads into your hardware,
your brain, and dogs are not safe. Dogs are not safe. And so when a dog comes running up to you, you always are like,
get away from me, get away from me. And because you have this story, dogs are not safe in your
mind. You don't know that when the dog is wagging its tail and it runs up to you, it's a friendly
dog. But when the dog's tail is straight out and its lips are curled up in a certain way,
it's not a friendly dog.
Now, so you always are saying, get away from me, dog, because dogs are not safe.
Well, what happens is if you tell all the friendly dogs, dogs are not safe, then the
friendly dogs stop coming.
But the mean dogs that want to bite you, they are not encouraged.
They're not discouraged by you saying, go away.
So all that ends up ultimately coming towards you are the mean dogs.
And so you've
actually created a world for yourself where dogs are not safe. Your dogs are not safe story creates
that world. So similarly, if we tell ourselves that we're not powerful, which is we do, like
you talked about this, like saying, saying that I don't know whether I'm powerful or not is much
better than saying that I'm not powerful. Like I'm going to try this and I don't know whether I'm powerful or not, is much better than saying that I'm not powerful.
Like, I'm going to try this and I don't know the result.
I'm going to try.
My small self is going to try to help the world
and I don't know what the results will be.
As opposed to, I'm not powerful,
therefore I'm not going to try to help the world
because I can't help the world,
means that you don't even try.
So your power is taken away by that story.
And actually, you've read the galley proof. You haven't read the final version of the book. And
I actually changed that a little bit. And I said, so it says we don't suffer because of what's
happening in our world. But I'd say we usually suffer because of the story as opposed to making
it absolutely. That's an important distinction. Yeah. So in Buddhism, they talk about two arrows.
And the first arrow of suffering is you stand on my toe.
Ow!
You stood on my, you know, ow!
Just the ow.
That's the first arrow of suffering.
But what most of us lumber over under more of the time is the second arrow,
which is why did you stand on my toe?
I was here first.
The kind of story that we tell ourselves about the fact that you stood on my toe, right? The
second arrow of suffering. So there's no getting away from, ouch, you know, but then continuing
to tell ourselves a story about that is where the bulk of our suffering comes from.
Got it. So you've referenced a couple times
Buddhism in various forms, whether you call it Buddhism or whether you're just sort of like
drawing from the ideas. I'm curious what your relationship is with that.
I have, I'm always reluctant to identify by any religion because it's so divisive in our society
to say that we're Muslim or Jewish or
Christian or Buddhist. And underneath all of the religions is the same thing. You know,
there's this basic principle, which is don't do that, which is bad. Do do that, which is good.
It's not just a moral principle. It's not just like the rules of society. It's actually what
makes us feel good about ourselves. It makes us able to function and be happy in our lives. Don't do that, which is bad. Don't do that, which is good. And then
kind of the rest is just discussion more or less. So to me, it's all the same. And as it happens,
you know, it's like ice cream is all the same. And, and, you know, I happen to like peanut
butter ice cream. And as it happens, the practice that I pick up is a meditation practice through a
Zen school called the Quantum School of Zen.
As a matter of fact, I'm a teacher, a Dharma teacher in that school.
But in How to Be Alive, the book, you'll see that there are stories from all the different traditions,
from Hasidic tradition to Christian parables to everything,
because what I really love is to study and see where the wisdom
from all the religions actually links up, where we're actually saying the same thing.
Do you find that there are a lot of points like that?
Sure.
I mean, the whole, you know, I am that I am, you know, just that kind of, that comes out
of the Old Testament is very similar to in Buddhism.
It's just not knowing.
Like this is it.
There's no – it just is.
Everything is just like this.
You can't say it.
So there's that.
There's all this – there's constant emphasis on trusting the lamp within yourself.
Trust yourself.
And by trust yourself, what we don't mean is trusting like,
I want this car or I want that big a house, you know,
that most wisdom posits that those types of things
are not the deepest parts of our, aren't truly ourselves.
Those are just thoughts that we have.
Yeah. And you, I mean, you explore this in an interesting way also.
There's a sort of a whole category of conversation around wanting what you want
and the difference between materialistic or extrinsic goals versus intrinsic.
Talk to me about that a bit.
So there have been studies around the world that have been done, particularly I referenced once by my friend Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College.
And the studies are around people's goals.
What does all human behavior aim to do?
And these studies have been replicated over and over again in different cultures, different
numbers, different economic backgrounds.
And depending on the study, they identify between 11 and 13 or 14 goals that all of our behavior works towards.
We all have the same goals, but we put them in different priority, right?
So, some of the goals like social status, conformity, financial reward are what they call extrinsic goals.
And the reason why they're called extrinsic goals is because pursuing them
in itself doesn't make you feel good. You only get to feel good if you achieve some extrinsic thing,
you know, like the money. Intrinsic goals are things that are, if you like, psychologically
closer to us. They're more in line with actual our psychological needs. And these are goals like the need for to pursue our own health,
to do something for our communities, to be close to other people. These are what they call
intrinsic goals. And they're called intrinsic because they're intrinsically satisfying to
pursue them. You don't actually have to achieve anything before they start being fulfilling. And some people actually posit that the extrinsic goals,
like for the money, the social status,
are actually a roundabout pathway to get to the intrinsic goals,
if you see what I mean.
Like I need money so that I can make people like me,
or I need to conform so that I can be part of this group.
Actually, what you want is just to be part of the group.
So pursuing intrinsic goals, I like to think of this group when actually what you want is just to be part of the group. So pursuing intrinsic goals is,
I like to think of it as in some ways more human.
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like the extra,
it's like a proxy for the intrinsic.
Because you do hear,
there's that classic self-help line,
you know, it's about the journey,
or it's about the destination, you know, at the end.
But I think what's kind of interesting
is it's almost like,
well, it depends. Some of it actually is just about the destination. There's not a lot of joy
unless you actually pursue it in a way, which is more aligned with a sort of like that intrinsic
approach to it. But yeah, the idea of pursuing things that allow you to experience joy and reward and fulfillment, you know,
just through the pursuit. It sort of goes to the classic, you know, it's like be non-attached to
the end. And I think when the end doesn't have that built-in system to enjoy the process of
achieving it, then people have a lot of trouble saying, well, like, how do I not be attached to the end? But when the process of pursuing it kind of just is manifestly enjoyable and deeply
rewarding, I think it's a lot easier for people to actually wrap their heads around the concept of,
yeah, the end would be nice, but I'm actually, this is pretty awesome along the way.
Well, some of the things are, so for example,
the need to do service to your community. Our brains are actually wired that way to cooperate
with each other because we come, if you think when we were coming from the apes, if you like,
in the jungle, the only way we could survive is if our communities thought we had value. Because
if the community felt we had value,
then the community would take care of us if we were sick,
feed us when we didn't.
So our brains are actually wired to need to help,
to prove that we're of service to our community.
So just the proving, just the doing of that,
automatically makes the endorphins and the dopamines
and all of that flow in your brain.
Whereas chasing after money or a car, you don't get the endorphins or anything until you actually
get the money. No, no, that makes a lot of sense. So you brought up the idea of community. And this
is something I know, which is really close to your heart. And it's something that you write about in
a lot of ways, which is sort of the importance of finding your people and then being in service of your
people. And I think that's such a huge pain point for so many right now is that they feel like they
don't know where is their community, you know, like is where do they look to, to find it, or do
they create it themselves? And then what's important when they're trying to actually find or create that?
Right.
I mean, I believe it's 40% of adult Americans report being chronically lonely.
Yeah.
I've seen that too.
But it's not just that.
And by the way, loneliness is correlated with illness and death as much as smoking and obesity.
It's as big a predictor of heart disease as those other things.
Not to mention that it also stands in the way of our success in other ways. So it turns out that social connection is one of the, well, what I call social interconnectedness,
which I'll explain that in a minute.
Social interconnectedness, which kind of means just being part of a community, is one of the biggest predictors of success
in whatever you want.
Like in How to Be Alive, my book, success means becoming happy by helping the world,
right?
That you actually find a way to use your passions to help the world, right?
And so, one of the reasons why I talk about community there is that you will be most successful in
happily helping the world if you have a community. And the other reason why I talk about it too is
because community is actually the base from which we can help the world when we come together in
groups. So, what I say in the book is that we need to be interconnected, not just connected. So,
in other words, it wouldn't just be that I'm friends with you, and then I'm friends with Alex, and then I'm friends with John, but that I'm friends with you,
and I'm friends with those two, and those two are also friends with you, so that we're
interconnected, so that the bonds are all kind of crossing over. And it turns out that that kind of
interconnection is what is a predictor of success in the things that we pursue.
Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing how, and I think we experience that less and less these days, or we start to default more and more to digital, to the online world, or not even the online world, but texting and online and apps to form connections and an attempt of forming interconnectedness.
And we do to a certain extent, but the depth of those connections stays at a level where
it doesn't entirely, I think it's a great starting point, especially for so many who
may be in remote parts.
My fear is that so often so many of us stop there or we don't go much deeper.
And that really doesn't, A, it doesn't, I don't think it gives us what we really need on the deeper level. And I wonder if it allows us to then turn
around and be, you know, in service of on the level that really makes the biggest difference too.
Well, so first of all, they talk about weak bonds and strong bonds. And the connections that we make
on Facebook and elsewhere, it's not that they're not valuable, because they are. Weak bonds are really good for bringing us information,
right? So, a lot of us get our news from Facebook, and our job opportunities from Facebook. Our
strong bonds are the people that we associate with and who are our close community. We see them
every day. They don't bring us information so much because they know the same people that we know. So our weak bonds are important, but we've come to rely on them to the exclusion of our
strong bonds. The strong bonds, on the other hand, are the ground from which we do so much.
So for example, I have a friend and her name is Mae Bovee. She's the executive director of 350.org, which is a climate
organization. And what happened to her was she was really lonely on campus when she was at
Middlebury College, because she felt that people weren't caring about climate the way she was. This
was, say, 10 years ago. And so she started attending a Sunday night dinner where she and her friends
got together every Sunday night and they talked about climate. Well, then they became so close that when they graduated from Middlebury College, what they did was they actually did this.
They geomapped microbreweries in the United States because they like good beer, and they also geomapped where up-and-coming coal mines were because what they wanted to do was go and protest against the coal mines while drinking good beer.
And they found a place in Montana.
They had their priorities, right?
That's right.
That's right.
And they were planning to go and do this.
And then Bill McKibben, the guy who wrote End of Nature and so much, the climate activist, came to them and said, actually, would you work with me?
And that's how 350 came to be born. And May told me, she said, when she talked about the founding of 350, she said, all I wanted to do was provide a place where other people could have friends who cared about the same things as them, just as I did.
So, in other words, the very act of forming a community around something, an interconnected community around something you care about, actually leads on to action around something that you care about. And it makes a lot of sense.
Because I think when those people come together around shared values, beliefs, aspirations,
there's something in us that then just wants to harness that energy to do something.
That's right.
Yeah.
There's some really interesting conversation that you explore also.
And it's around three needs.
And I guess research, and it's kind of funny because I'm a little bit of a research dork,
and I love devouring stuff, and this was all new to me, which I love.
And it was research around these three, I'm going to call them needs,
but correct me if that's not quite the right label.
I believe it was autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Take me into this a bit. That's right. So you got it right, and relatedness. Take me into this a bit.
That's right. So you got it right, first of all. And this comes from what's called
self-determination theory. And the background to it's really interesting, because back in the 40s
and 50s, behaviorists were kind of the heads of psychology, like the behaviorist movement
in psychology. And the behaviorist movement believed that human beings had no self or soul or whatever, or organism or whatever you wanted to call it. They were basically
complicated biological machines that either move them towards pleasure or away from pain. And that
was it. And the behaviorists were able to- So we call them coders today.
That's right. All right. No offense to all the coders. We love you guys. It's a joke.
But the coders were trying to make the machines not act that way, you know, with the artificial intelligence.
So, and the behavior is also, their strength was that they designed a lot of experiments to prove what they said about themselves, right?
Their theories.
On the other hand, there were the humanists like Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls.
And they kind of said, well, actually, human beings have this wonderful – what they call the organism or the self with a capital S.
Or Carl Jung was one of them too.
And the organism or self strives to fulfill itself by using its highest capacities in service to person kind, right?
Well, the thing is they were great theorists, but they had no experiments to prove what they said.
So, the behaviorists were winning out because they had actual proof.
Anyway, so this guy named Ed Deci and his colleague, Michael Ryan, who called themselves self-determination theorists out of the University of Rochester, set out to prove the humanist
stuff, the stuff that we have this self that wants to actualize.
And so how they did that is that they unpacked it and they said, we have a need for autonomy, Right. because it actually comes out of our authentic selves. That's to be autonomous. They actually proved experimentally it's a psychological need within us to feel autonomous.
And then the second thing they prove is that we have a need to feel competent.
We need to feel that we are able to rise up to our challenges and fulfill them.
So that's why we don't like trivially easy challenges because they don't make us feel
like we've tested ourselves.
We don't like ridiculously difficult challenges because they make us feel
powerless. We like what they call optimal challenges. And then the last thing is relatedness.
That's that feeling that we're in community and that we're using our autonomy and our competence
in service of our community. That's the feeling of relatedness. So altogether, what it proves is basically that
we want to become ourselves in ways that help or save the world. It actually proves that we
have a psychological need not to be on the hedonic treadmill, not to be going to our corporate
cubicle and working at things we don't believe in, but we actually want to be out there becoming
ourselves and helping. A big reason why I put this in the book is because it's not about being moral or ethical, you know, like the world's in crisis and you should
do what needs to be done to help the world. But actually, it will make you feel fulfilled and
happy more so than pretty much anything else if you're out there trying to help.
So it's not like this is your responsibility. It's like, no, this is what you're wired to light up when you're doing.
That's exactly right.
And so a big point in the book, I talk about this thing, standard life approaches in the book, which is the kind of standard way we approach life, which is mostly about following directions these days.
And what we're saying, following directions to get everything you need.
But actually, you should be following yourself, finding out who you really are to give what you really need.
Where does security enter the conversation?
So security is also, that would be the fourth need, the fourth psychological need. Deci and
Ryan don't really talk about security, but other researchers do. They add in the security too. What that just means is that in order to do that stuff, to pursue autonomy and relatedness and competence, you need to feel safe, right?
But you have to be careful because what we mean when we say security in the United States is like a $2 million home.
It's a lot of illusion and delusion there.
That's right.
We need to be safe.
We don't need five 36-inch flat-screen TVs.
Yeah, and that's the whole quest for certainty, slash security.
Same thing fundamentally.
But when we equate it with what we were talking about earlier, materialist possessions, like when equate security with I have, therefore
I am, that becomes this thing that never ends. And if you end up devoting all of your energy to that,
you kind of lose out of the gate. That's exactly right. What happens is you give your energy to
the materialistic or extrinsic goals instead of the intrinsic goals. And because you give so much
energy to the extrinsic goals, you don't have enough energy left over for the intrinsic. And this is another
thing that they've proved is that pursuing materialistic goals actively makes you unhappy.
And part of it is because it takes time away from the intrinsic goals.
Which makes a lot of sense. You have a fixed number of units of time.
That's the one thing you can't expand. It is what it is.
That's the one thing you can't expand. It is what it is. That's right.
As we're having the conversation,
part of my head,
mind also goes to like,
well, how does this overlay
with Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
Because it seems like it's actually,
it's four categories instead of six, I guess.
But is it more or less the same
or is there some major branching off
or distinction that I don't know?
I don't know that much about Maslow, but I i will say but i learned about him in high school and it does it does make a certain
amount of sense to me that we have a hierarchy of need you know we need it's true the acr needs the
autonomy competence related needs are what we call psychological needs right and and i would add
security as you did and then there's the biological needs the needs for food and water and shelter and
all that type of thing right so those are those are what Maslow would call lower order
needs. And then the others are the higher order needs. We do need those things. But one thing that
I think you mentioned something that I think is really important, the search for certainty.
There is no- So brutal.
And there's no such thing. Right.
There's, you're a freelancer and I'm a freelancer too.
And one thing that I discovered, all my life I've been like, oh, I wish I had the security of the people with jobs.
And if you remember when it was five or six years ago when there was an economic collapse, it turned out that the freelancers were the ones with security and the people with jobs were not.
There's no such thing as certainty.
There is such a thing as making ourselves feel safe enough so that we can pursue our
purpose.
That is probably meaning making ourselves feel safe for today, tomorrow, next week,
if we're lucky, next month.
But there's no such thing as making yourself safe for the next year.
And if you pursue making yourself safe for the next year, then you lose out on fulfilling
your purpose.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think the opportunity to sit down with Milton
Glaser a few years back, and at one point in the conversation, he looks at me and he says,
certainty is a closing of the mind. But it's not, and it's so powerful, but it's not just
a closing of the mind. It's essentially a closing of your life. It's a closing around possibility.
And it's an illusion that makes you chase it while gobbling up all that time and energy that could have been pursuing something that's intrinsically rewarding along the way and maybe even attainable if there's an extrinsic thing that's sort of, you know, a carrot which is being dangled, while certainty can never, like, it is the one, you know,
the one thing I'm certain about in life is that certainty can never be had.
That's right.
You know, but we spend so much of our waking hours pursuing it,
and it creates so much suffering along the way.
You know, and it's one thing, we talked a little bit about religion earlier,
and I'm by no means a religious zealot,
but what really does fascinate me is where you find the wisdom in religions that the happiness psychologists are trying to prove now, right?
So, the science and the religion kind of overlaps.
And if you take the fact that, you know, we have a very – a lot of mixed feelings around religion in our culture.
But so, for this commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Now, leave alone the fact that God and – but there is something that we're supposed to pursue,
and it's mysterious, and we don't know what it is, but we put these attempts at security in the way, right?
I'm going to be – I'm going to worship this, you know, my job, or I'm going to worship earning this much money.
Instead, we put another god, as it were, before the main thing of becoming.
You know, I find that so fascinating that actually we can decode the old religious wisdom and find it telling us the same things.
Yeah, it is incredible.
It's funny, when I look at a lot of the research being done now, especially in the field of
positive psychology, to me, my inner thought is, oh, well, it's the pursuit of scientifically
proving the fundamental tenets of Buddhism.
Yeah.
Because you're looking at all the same practices that have very often arisen out of Buddhism
over thousands of years and say, okay, finally, well, here's, now we're actually
running experiments so we can actually say, like, scientifically it works.
We still can't necessarily say why it works, but we have enough data to show it does.
But also, I mean, Buddhism or mystical Christianity or mystical Judaism, like all the mystical
sects come together.
Right, yeah.
No, completely.
Thank you for sort of broadening it that way.
Yeah, it's so fascinating.
So what's coming to me through the conversation now, also just sort of trying to close the conversation around, you know, security,
autonomy, competence, and relatedness, contrasted with Mesler's hierarchy of needs, is that after
security, it doesn't really seem like the other three are stacked on top of each order and some
sort of order priority. It's just like, these are the other things that we need on a regular basis to be okay.
They work together.
And here's what's another overlap that's really interesting.
If you're familiar with Joseph Campbell's work on the monomyth, the hero myth, right?
So on the one, we have autonomy, competence, and relatedness, right?
And if you think about it, the hero myth is about autonomy.
That is, I'm going out on my quest.
I'm leaving the everyday and the ordinary.
I'm following some hidden call that's within me that only I can hear.
That's the beginning of the hero story.
Then there's, eventually, there's find my guides, right?
Which is kind of like finding your community of people who care about the same stuff as you.
Then there's the big
challenges. The big tests.
That's your competence right there.
Then there's the hero's
return when the hero brings back
that which he or she thought
was weird or freaky
in their community and now
they've discovered it's actually what makes them
strong and special. They bring it back to their
community and help the community. That's relatedness, right? So it's really interesting that these things keep,
they just tell us the same thing over and over and over again.
Yeah. And it's so, I love that you brought up Joseph Campbell's work. I'm so fascinated
by that overlay, you know, where the monomyth or the hero's journey, you know, you may have heard
of, but you look at almost every story that we're drawn to. And I guess that's where his work came
from. He literally crossed every society, every like storytelling culture, and he found the same
exact pattern. And it's because I think that's the way that the human condition is wired to move
through life. But so that brings up an interesting question for me, which is the hero's journey is also largely known as moving through some stages of profound challenge, complete dismantling of your existing state, brutality on internal and external levels before you, quote, find the elixir and then begin to integrate and return home completely new.
You also write about sort of like the general category you would describe as the gentle path.
So where's the overlay?
So remember that the hero's journey is symbolic, right?
So it doesn't mean when we think about the hero's journey in our own lives,
because of the way the stories are told,
we think that it's got to be something gigantic and massive
and it's going to take over our lives and it could take years
and we might even die while we're at it.
But actually, what is really happening is the way that the stories are told
are big and symbolic because we may fear that we're going to die
and we may fear that it's going to take a long time,
but actually the hero's journey happens.
It doesn't happen just once in our life.
It happens thousands, probably thousands of times if you're alive, you know, and you're
willing to heed the call.
Some of us are, you know, we've closed ourselves down and we're kind of dead spiritually.
So, the gentle path that I talk about in the book is to say, look, don't start by thinking
I'm going to necessarily, you can, but it doesn't have to start with I'm going to change my career or I'm going to change where I live or I'm going to change who my partner is.
Those are big structural changes, and sometimes thinking that we have to change those things stops us from trying in the first place.
Remember, I talked about Annie who started off just by buying a different kind of coffee and found herself next thing being part of the climate movement.
And what that means is just figure out what you can change for 15 minutes today.
There's got to be something in your life that's in line with something in your values that you haven't been living.
And you can just, it could just be make a phone call or anything.
Just take that gentle path, right?
And that leads you slowly and gently around the
hero's journey once. And then when you return, you rest for a little while, and then you go around
the hero's journey again. It's not a big, gigantic, you know, cataclysmic thing that you have to go
through. It can be something that you go through. You can go through the hero's journey every week.
Yeah, I mean, it's like the ukulele approach that we were talking about earlier. That's right.
It's really funny, too,
because one of the things that actually started Good Life Project
was an annual report that I wrote
where at the end of it I teased.
At the end of every year I would write this long reflection of the year
and then sort of thinking about the year ahead.
And I started writing this one in January 2012
and it turned into a 40-page annual report.
And at the end of it,
I teased this thing that I was working on, which didn't even exist at the time. I said,
hey, I'm going to be doing this cool thing called Good Life Project. I had no idea what it was going
to be. But at the end, classic entrepreneur move, right? But at the end, I did know. I just wrote,
I thought to myself, I'm like, why? I've been helping people in various ways engage with what you might call
conscious entrepreneurship. Like, what are my distinct beliefs around that? And just like
really fast channel through me these like 10 beliefs. And so I just for the fun of it,
call them my 10 commandments. And one of them was thou shalt do epic shit.
Epic shit?
Yeah. And what's interesting is over the last three years, I've backed away from that for the exact same reason that you're talking about.
Because when you put that out as a proclamation, people think of themselves, well, is this epic shit?
This matters to me.
This is cool.
This would be like one little thing that would make it, but it's not on the scale of epicness.
It's not going to change the world.
So they don't do it.
And it's funny.
I just was giving a presentation on it.
And I,
and I shared with the audience that,
you know,
I said,
I've come full circle where I,
I,
I think actually I did a disservice by using that language.
And it's really just about contribute to the world in a way that matters.
Even if it's like the smallest little thing,
just doesn't have meaning to you, you know, and might it have meaning for others. It's really interesting that you're
talking about that. One of the things I say that the central principle in the book, How to Be Alive,
is just that, I mean, the book's, I think, 438 pages, but here is the central principle.
Give more energy to what is true for you. Give less energy to what is not true for you.
And if you just keep doing that,
it doesn't mean give no energy to what's not true for you
and give all your energy because none of us are in that place.
But if moment by moment,
you keep moving that compass needle closer and closer to true north,
as you called it before, right?
Just keep moving closer and closer, then you'll get there.
You'll be guided there.
And I really appreciate your, you know,
we all want to feel as though we're doing epic shit, right?
As you've done it, which is a great thing.
But it actually stops us from moving ahead.
Yeah, and I think it's funny because I rebel somewhat fiercely
to the term life purpose because I think when, you know, like some people are like, well, you have to know your
life purpose, you know, before you can really do the stuff that you're here for.
And I'm like, but that is not a motivator for the vast majority of people.
It is a massive, massive roadblock.
And most people, if they ever actually find their quote, you know, like big umbrella life
purpose, they find it much later in life when they can look back and there's quote, you know, like big umbrella life purpose, they find it much later
in life when they can look back and there's enough, you know, like of Steve Jobs dots to
connect to actually see how they come together. Right. So that's so important. This is again,
something that we talk about vocation, our calling, right? Vocar, it means to call in the book. And,
and people say, you know, what's my life purpose. And it's so interesting that you said that,
like people don't know until they look back and connect the dots, right?
And that's because vocation doesn't actually – there is no life vocation, as it were.
I call it moment vocation.
Like when you're free to act from your true self, how do you act in this moment?
And then – so the trick is to build a life where you can actually go where you're called moment to moment to moment.
So if you're stuck paying for a big mortgage, you can't, right?
But if you build a life where you are free, then you go where you're called this moment, and you go where you're called that moment, and you go where you're called that moment.
And then eventually, after some time, this is, by the way, why I think it's horrendous that kids have to choose what they're going to do in college when they're 18, because what do they know? They don't know. But eventually,
if you keep going where you're called, mom, you can see where you've gone over and over and over
again. And something, some trend, at least, is revealed to you. Yeah, you start to see the
pattern. Right. And then that's the point at which you build a life. Yeah. So we're so much on the
same page with all this. And I've had this conversation, I'm sure you have also, with so many people where they're like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going
to build it and make it big. I'm like, why don't you actually just look at it as an experiment
first? Like first. Because then you'll allow yourself the breathing room to just kind of say,
well, this is what I'm doing for the moment because I want to see if it's actually
interesting to me. Does it call me?
Does it matter?
But maybe it won't be.
But at least if it's not, it will give you the freedom to say, okay, well, let me move to the next moment.
To me, it's funny.
A while back I was asked, I don't know if you get asked this a lot too, but I've been asked the question, what would you tell your 20-something self?
Oh, no, I've never been asked.
I don't know why.
I've gotten asked asked. I don't know why.
Get off drugs.
Well, there's the public thing.
There's like the real thing.
So at one point I made a video and one of them was like, you know, like your 20s are just about like, don't worry about locking into anything, man. Just like run a series of experiments purely with a metric of gathering data to just figure out like what lights you up and what doesn't.
You know, don't worry about finding the thing that like and then building it and having to succeed.
Just run experiments like that's what it's about for and beyond your 20s.
But, you know, like until you actually can hit that point.
And by the way, this is it's so interesting because these things fold back on themselves.
What can make your life safe enough so that you can experiment that way is a
strong interconnected community.
Yeah.
And not only when you build that strong interconnected community,
not only does it make you safe,
but it makes everyone else in the network safe.
And there's no guarantee that you're going to have everything you've always
wanted,
but at least you always have a couch to sleep on.
I love that. There's one other thing that you talk about that I wanted to explore with you,
and that's the notion of parenting. And, you know, it's a big question. Should you,
shouldn't you, bio-parenting versus, you know, sort of trying organically. I don't even know
if that's the right language or if I just completely offended anybody. But just take me into this conversation around parenting,
the way that you explore and also why you thought it was really important to actually
have the conversation in the context of your current work. Okay, so just to explain how to
be alive is it the basic thing is become yourself to help the world. And the first part of the book
is around kind of the theory about that and learning how to access yourself. The second part of the book is, then
talks about small relationships with the world, like what we purchase, how we transport ourselves,
whether we're civically engaged, which aren't necessarily small, but easier to fix. And then
the third part of the book talks about kind of bigger things, like how do you build a community?
How do you choose whether to parent or not,
and how do you run your spiritual life.
So that's why parenting is in there because one of the biggest relationships we have with the world is parenting.
And the name of the section on parenting is, it's not called should I parent or how should
I parent, it's called who should I parent.
And I say that very advisedly and then I quickly say in that section that
because we're all already parents to 7 billion people, none of this question of there, you don't
have it, you don't get a choice of whether to be a parent or not, you get a choice to be as to
whether you're going to be a responsible parent. We all are called to nurture people in the world
already. So then the question becomes, how do we fulfill that role as parent? Do we have our own biological children? Do we adopt children? Do we help with other people's children? Do we help people who wouldn't be called children, you know, maybe because they're elders, but they still need nurturing? How do we actually bring out that nurture in ourself? And the reason why I, there's a bunch of reasons why I address it. One is because the capacity of our habitat is too small to continue dealing with the continued population growth. There's two important components to how we drain the habitat's resources. One in the developing world should have fewer children because of food.
But actually, it's people in the developed world because, you know, Americans use so many more resources than Northern Europeans.
So that's what led me into it.
But as I got to it, what I realized is that we have so many standard life approaches, so many ways where we're supposed to parent that don't suit everybody, right? And so, what I came up with
is, what about a scheme in which people who have kids, who find that biologically or psychologically,
they just feel as though, well, let me take a step back. So, the point, whether we have kids or not
should be a consciously made decision. It's not that it's right to have them or not right to have them.
It's that if we do it, we should do it because it makes it's really right for us. So and then the next thing is those of us who have kids support the people who choose not to have kids
by sharing our kids with them. And those of us who don't have kids support the people who
have chosen to have kids by helping with their kids. And that way, we're actually,
it's like car sharing, but with kids. Because it turns out there's 14 to 18 million young people in the United States who are at risk because they don't have enough adult attention. On the other
hand, it turns out that being a parent, much of your time is actually spent earning a living,
driving the kids to soccer games, doing the laundry, not actually mentoring young people. So what you need, you know, if nurturing is what you
need to do, then having a biological child might not be actually the best thing for you. It might
because you're spending so much time earning the money to support the kids. So the question is,
how can we actually all together make sure that everybody gets to be a parent and every child gets properly taken care of?
Yeah. It seems like all things just keep circling back to the community also and to like
acknowledging the fact that we are a part of something bigger than just us.
Right. That's right. So, I mean, and what a consolation that is, actually,
that we're not just responsible for the world,
but the world is also responsible for us.
And I don't know about you, I'm sure it's the same as you,
I've found that the more that I realize I'm responsible for the world,
the more I find that the world acts as though it's responsible for me, too.
I'm just letting that settle.
That's a powerful statement.
So I think it's probably a good place for us to come full circle.
So the name of this is Good Life Project.
So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what bubbles up?
I mean, it's so interesting because we share this.
I think we both think a lot about what makes a good life.
To me, well, let me put it to you this way. My daughter Isabella,
she doesn't do it anymore. But when she was younger, I used to say to her, Bella,
why are we alive? And she would say, to laugh. And I would say, and what's our responsibility?
And she would say, to make sure other people can laugh too. And admittedly, six-year-old kids are
like programmable computers. You can get them to say
what they want. But the good life is one where you get to actually follow your passions,
help in the ways that you want to help, and also make sure that other people can follow their
passions and help in the ways that they want to help. So that means, you know, first of all,
we have to make sure that we all have security, You know, that actually, because, and the truth of the matter is,
it's no fun having a good life if everyone around you doesn't.
You can't laugh if there's no one to laugh with.
So the good life is one where we actually get to pursue who we are as people,
and part of that is making sure everybody else pursues who they are as people.
And this is not an elitist thing,
because the first thing we have to do is make sure people have their basic needs met.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you found something valuable,
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people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.
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