If I Speak - 05: Are we trapped in a fantasy?

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Moya is joined by a special guest, author and journalist Shon Faye, to work out the lure of political fantasies and advise a listener who’s feeling guilty about inheriting money. Plus: trust issues and love-bombing. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello, this is If I Speak with me, Moyalothi McLean. Unfortunately, Ash Sarkar, my partner in crime, could not be here today. So I'm delighted to introduce an If I Speak milestone. Our very first guest who's now been promoted to co-host. She's a best-selling author, public intellectual and presenter who reminds the girls that yes, you can both be glamorous and a committed socialist. Let me please welcome to the if i speak studio the wonderful sean paye hi what an introduction and like i am filling ash's shoes big shoes to fill not

literally she's a very petite lady um uh listeners also i should let you know that i'm slightly ill i'm letting you know that not because you need to know but because i have to tell everyone i meet that i am slightly ill while recording today's show if I feel pain you have to feel pain with me um so today's show we will be tackling dilemmas including what happens if you're a socialist but you're also getting some of that sweet sweet generational wealth uh we'll also be talking about a big theory which is going to be coming straight from our whatsapp chats but first it is time for our traditional icebreaker vogue's 73 questions with 70 deducted that's three questions if you're following um so sean what was the last meal you cooked for yourself wow um i wrote a piece for

vittles uh last year explaining how I don't cook and I had to provide a recipe in which I said Weetabix with milk was the recipe. The last meal I cooked for myself will have been in 2021. I think it would have been a HelloFresh stew. That was the last meal I cooked for myself three years ago. That's incredible. What was the last meal you assembled for myself three years ago that's incredible what was the last meal you assembled for yourself was it weetabix uh the last meal i assembled for myself i mean like i guess if we're talking assembling then it would be like a lasagna from tesco that's fine taste the different no that's sainsbury's whatever tesco finest are we allowed to advertise other supermarket brands are available yeah okay who's

your problematic fave oh yeah I don't like the term problematic fave because everyone's fucking problematic um I'm actually perfect so with this this question the obvious answer I could say is like Azealia Banks but everyone says Azealia Banks if I was going to be like a little bit more highbrow I would actually say i'm currently reading a lot of philip roth and he's a real problematic fave because all of his male characters are like deep and reflective and tortured like middle-aged men and then like every woman character is called like pussy no characterization apart from the fact that she's blonde and like permanently up for it

that's funny because obviously we've talked before about Christopher Nolan movies given Oppenheimer recently won swept the Oscars and I actually bothered

watching it afterwards and I was shocked let me tell you shocked at the lack of characterisation afforded to Kitty which is a name very close to pussy

Kitty Oppenheimer's wife she's just there to act as an archetype who drinks a bit and gets anger on his behalf that's it what was the last book you didn't finish this is the question that will get me not like cancelled but like socially exiled honestly there's no one i can't name that i probably won't i'll talk about which there's all the books that i finish don't name it just tell us book I didn't finish. There's all the books that I finished of people that I don't know. Don't name it, don't name it. Just tell us why you didn't finish it. Because it was really, really dry. I'm going to say this. Let me say this and I'll say no more.

Left-wing political nonfiction writing, and I'm saying that as someone who does it, there's a lot of it that's very dry. And I feel like there's a little issue with people thinking that opaque language and making something actively difficult to read is a sign of seriousness and high intellect and no it's not in fact we have a short our responsibility as left

wing writers to communicate our ideas in a sort of dazzling interesting lively vital way and you know what people don't do it so i don't finish their books there is that tendency to go for this really you know dry dense almost pseudo academic language. Well, this goes to a larger point that I sometimes think that on the left, what people tend to do is that there is a sort of actual, it comes from a place of actual, I believe, actual pessimism about like any real success in terms of like winning bigger movements and power. And so people go into this quite like smug internal like you're just trying to impress your mates and it's actually about making you all feel superior and clever and actually not about trying to bring anyone along at all before we go into a segment i'm going to ask about you so i know you're working on some stuff at the moment can you tell us can

you give a little insight into what projects you're currently working on the follow-up to your first best-selling book the transgender issue yes I can thank you for this opportunity to self-promote I am currently um just finalizing my second book which should be out I can't say the exact month but it should be like early 2025 so a little way off yet but here's some pre-awareness uh stay tuned for a pre-order link later this year I'm sure um it's yeah it's a book um it's again another non-fiction book but it's about it's a bit more personal if people have read my first book this book is much more personal and it's about um it uses my own love life as a jumping off point to talk about um issues of like isolation loneliness um and uh romance and heterosexuality um in society as a whole and particularly with like a particularly for millennial people the

fact that we sort of are existing at a time where a lot has changed about society in relation to romantic relationships but a lot of our hopes and aspirations haven't changed and how i feel caught in that and i think how a lot of us feel caught just that's a good elevator pitch that's an amazing elevator pitch um where did the seed for this idea come from the seed from an interesting question I think the seed uh came from like I tend to over intellectualize anything that's like emotionally difficult so the transgender issue realistically was that I had transitioned in four years I kind of thought um all the like fear and panic about being a trans person in the UK I could somehow beat it by which you can't by the way by um acquiring as much knowledge about um transphobia and political arguments around

transness and then in the end I had all that knowledge and then I was like well I need to do something with it so I put it in a book with this it's just I kept having like disastrous relationships and kept getting my heart broken and then I was like well actually this is now something that like really preoccupies me because there's something here about my expectations and them coming up against reality again and again and again uh and it and and on a deep psychological level um you know it reaches into lots of aspects about my political identity my aspirations that like this is something that we don't tend to look at as like a serious political issue our emotional lives so i was like

let's write a book about that i think that leads on really nicely to what i want to talk about today which is i've decided to parachute in a big theory segment we haven't had a big theory segment in a while but uh who else better to do it with than one of the foremost public intellectuals in the uk you're doing this i feel like i'm being loved bomb right now if you were a man aged between 28 and 32 who like didn't have a job but was maybe considering a master's i honestly now would be thinking we're in love all right one of the most foremost public intellectuals in my life how about that and this this big theory is coming straight out of our whatsapp chats

okay which is gonna give the gonna give the public and the listeners a little insight into the conversations we have all right beyond sending each other tiktoks all the time have all right beyond sending each other tiktoks all the time so my big theory and i have said this to you before i think the 2024 is the start of an era of fantasy and by that i mean i think people are going to be talking about fantasy and the way we engage with fantasy a lot more obviously this is because we're talking about it quite a lot but I have seen more and more references to the fantasies we hold and either defenses of them or attempts to take them apart and I mean this in both a cultural sense and in a political sense so something that I've thought about quite a lot is JLo just released a bonkers movie about her life and she talks a load about fantasy within that uh and how her fantasies

her you know around love people have said no maybe you have issues around you know your fantasies and relationships she's like no i just love love like love's amazing um and then i see it also with stuff like the fantasy around couples like travis kelsey and taylor swift and this like romantic ideal that's being painted and everyone's bought into this America sweetheart and the quarterback who's not a quarterback actually he's a tight end just so you know I bought into it too but there's and then there's all this other stuff happening politically where there's a real gap between what we're being told and the fantasies being put forward by you know political parties from all across the spectrum and the reality we see every

single day i would even say there's fantasy involved in you know america's treatment of israel and what it imagines israel to be versus what it actually is um and i've been starting to think a lot more about how fantasy plays a role in our lives on the day-to-day so let's start from this idea do you think 2024 is the year fantasy i? I guess like on that premise, I mean, it's not a new concern, right? I think like I a long time ago was an English literature student and I actually think this like idea of fantasy. Certainly it's like there in the 18th century when the novel first emerges and there's like a lot of like social concern and like not quite moral panic, but social concern about the rise of like women who read too many novels like and silly novels by lady novelists and and this idea that it might not be good for like a young lady to like immerse herself in the

fantasy of this new form and novel was a pretty new form which is like you know before there this this long form prose yeah that, particularly like once Jane Austen becomes really successful in England, like focuses on like, yeah, like the social world of women and their like romantic aspirations. So that has been like a recurring concern. I do think it's like on steroids now.

Like when you were talking, I was thinking about a book I did finish recently was Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. And she essentially says, particularly on the political front, a lot of what you say, she uses this idea of doubling and doppelgangers and touches on like the difference between the right and the left in this idea of like um you know conspiracy theorists that cross over and it happened a lot in covid where they're living in a world where it's like you know unvaccinated people the most oppressed group ever and uh people who are vaccinated are shedding and um we've got to like get into schools and she she basically says that the central conflict now between you know people on the left and the liberal and liberals and people in the mirror

far right mirror world is that we're both arguing about which one is living in a fantasy. Actually very similar, like as a trans person, it's very similar to like gender critical to feminists and trans people is that like, if you actually hear like a lot of trans exclusionary feminist arguments are basically like Kathleen Stock, for example,

will say, well, trans people are just living in an immersive, she would say i'm living in an immersive fantasy as if i'm like walking around being like lady with my lady feels and everyone's like um participating in the fantasy and then i obviously think she's participating in a fantasy in which like trans women this tiny little group are the the real threat rather than like every other thing that's going wrong politically in our world so i do think this is like a time and i think it and i think the reason it's probably um yeah on on steroids you've talked you talked about romantic fantasy um i mean i think i think there is more scope for fantasy because we have less social conventions and rules around our romantic relationships than ever before like there's a lot of self-governance and self-determination for more people now but that gives much more space

for fantasy it's not like you know there was perhaps this idea before that for women for example they might have a brief romantic fantasy and then they get married and then they're like oh it's drudgery for the next 40 years and that must have been a real come down but but now like more and more women for example don't have to get married and then you pretty much can't get out of it but what probably you know like i'm weird i'm talking because you mentioned our voice notes like what we might think as women um who who date men and so participate in heterosexual dynamics is we might have still this fantasy of like what romantic relationships with men will give us that that have been fed to us culturally but we're finding it really unsatisfying for the

lives we actually live what i'm also interested in is something i've realized i think of is this fantasy is quite negative i i conceive a fantasy as a negative thing and in the examples we've talked about then fantasy is almost leveled as a pejorative, like you're living in fantasy, you know, you're living in a fantasy. But we recently also spoken about Ursula Le Guin, I've just started reading Ursula Le Guin. I know that you are a fan of Ursula Le Guin, as any good leftist is. to really explore political ideas and nuances with them and open those horizons. And I would not say in a negative way at all, like that sort of like classic sci-fi fantasy was a way to bust open the neurons and say, well, this is what, you know,

anarchist society could look like. This is what a really socialist society could look like, et cetera, et cetera. But now fantasy seems to be something that's wholly like you're living in the clouds, like get back down to reality. What happened? Like, what's that shift? What do you make of that change from just like, this is a negative thing?

Oh, I mean, I think, I guess it's a question of degree and the idea, I guess the accusation and the negative is that you're stuck in the fantasy. I guess the thing about fantasy, and the negative is that you're stuck in the fantasy i guess the thing about fantasy and actually there's a there's a recent contra points has just put out a video about twilight fan fiction i didn't watch it all but um she talks a little bit about fantasy in that so i'm going to credit her with this idea because it's not something that i came up with um so succinctly although it is something i've thought about is that fantasies aren't like they're not like literal wishes that you wish something were so whether that's sexual fantasy romantic fantasy or indeed political fantasy it's usually about creating um a fantasy in which your emotional needs are met and that can be deeply comforting and it can be like fantasy can be a very safe way to explore what

your emotional needs are the I think the problem I don't think there's a problem with that I think the problem is is it can be deeply painful um when you're confronted with the fact that your fantasy is a fantasy and and what is your reaction then and I think a lot of people in sometimes in sexual fantasy definitely in romantic fantasy and certainly in political fantasy and you did mention I think um I said yeah I think there's a lot of that around Gaza and the projections onto uh yeah onto people defending Palestinians at this time is that when you come up against reality there's almost like a defensiveness and in some cases like a real aggression and that's because someone's challenging your fan if someone's challenging your fantasy and you're not able to psychologically deal with

that without perhaps like lashing out and blaming them that's a sign of some kind of dysfunction is fantasy you know really on the agenda is it just something that we've been talking about and now i'm seeing it everywhere you know like how when you get a pet and suddenly you see that breed of pet all the time or is that something that just happened to me what's it called confirmation bias um or is it something that is coming up as a topic again and again and again because of the social context having got so grim and the fantasies being so divorced that people are starting to really call out say actually maybe this is a fantasy i think like i said at the beginning i think it's always been there i'm actually just thinking about there's a in the final two episodes of just know the the penultimate episode of sex in the city the series um carrie

says that she's going to miranda that she's going to live in paris with alexander petroski this russian artist and miranda knows it's not a good idea and she says oh i'm going to Miranda that she's going to live in Paris with Alexander Petrosky this Russian artist and Miranda knows it's not a good idea and she says oh I'm going to go to Paris and live my life and Miranda's like screams at her in the middle of the street you're living in a fantasy

and there's an edit on YouTube where it's Miranda shouting you're living in a fantasy for 10 minutes I sometimes just play that but I just wanted to mention that um look at that no but the thing is is that like you know so that idea of it i think i think yeah i think there is a reason why um one of on a psychological level and i have listened when i was prepared like i write about fantasy a little bit in in the book that you mentioned the forthcoming book and i looked

and there are psychological explanations for people that have dysfunctional levels of fantasy which is something that like I certainly think I had when I was younger and for me it was often a way to displace the fact that there were certain you know like there are certain circumstances you feel you can't escape so a fantasy can take you out of them um and you know on a psychological level they'll you know if you listen to therapists a lot of them will suggest that if you're stuck or you're obsessing say about a crush or you're obsessing about someone that you went on three dates with and you don't know them that probably the origin of that is that something else is wrong in your life you might be also

dealing with chronic stress that might be right back to childhood if you really are someone that obsesses a lot and i think if we look at that culturally we have this bizarre um time we're in this bizarre time where i do think like there's the overlay of of the climate crisis in a sense of futility and a lack of futurity there are horrible things happening in the world and obviously there have always been horrible things happening in the world but we consume them in a very immediate way that we're not psychologically equipped to deal with i think a lot of people have talked about this that doesn't mean that we turn away but it does mean that we have to acknowledge that that um that we have all of this tech that is designed to change our behavior and mine us for data but it's also presenting us with an increasingly like horrific um yeah worldview but also is encouraging us into a

fantasy and again Naomi Klein talks about this doubling idea is that we all have double doppelgangers online where we're we're creating a we're creating a fantasy self like I mean if you think about your dating app profile or whatever on pause uh yeah mine's fully deleted babe babe. She's like three steps ahead of me. Yeah, I'm going to meet someone on the tube. That's fantasy. Yeah, literally. Yeah, so I think there is a time where, we're living in a time where the other word,

I guess, that springs to mind is dissociation. It's very easy for us to dissociate. And again, I the on the romantic relationships front i do think tech has a big role to play in this tech alongside the shift in like um one of the things i yeah i'm interested in my work and it comes up a lot on the vogue column actually is that we haven't necessarily explicitly come to terms with the fact that like romantic relationships have changed esther esther perel for example says this like um like our over the last like 100 years like friendship has changed a bit but a very slow rate uh our work relationships have like just gotten

deteriorated now like it's a similar principle but the biggest and fastest shift has been in our romantic relationships and we're not like equipped to deal with that so we've inherited all of the previous fantasies and I think my big sort of I guess overarching take on this particularly with heterosexual dynamics is that I do think I heard you and Ash discuss on a previous episode where you talked about being a fem cell right and you were saying about how men are not the men you meet are not on a level with you emotionally in terms of their emotional maturity. And what I was thinking about when I listened to that is that that is very true.

And that's also my experience. But also if we're going to turn the lens on women, I think I and a lot of women I know struggle with the fact that we are coming up against like a fantasy of who we're expecting men to be. And that's like something that we've like, we probably have to take responsibility for because I feel like I've had to,

it can be because perhaps our grandmothers thought men are there to charm you at the beginning for the first few months, then you get married. And then it's the fact that you've got social status as a mother and wife and you've got financial security and that's what you're provided. And now what we really want is like emotional security and we want i'm marrying my best friend and you want someone to

be like an emotional support and uh and i think you want the village in one yeah as you said before and i guess i see a lot of disappointment i guess in dating because i still think women are socialized to like look to men for that before we look within yeah and I think it's a it's a process of having to be like I might have to look within I might have to change my fantasies I might have to rewrite my script yeah well fantasy is a projection outward isn't it and it's like well can I give this to myself another question I want to explore is what is a dysfunctional level of fantasy like when do when we cross over from like oh this is a nice little daydream i'm having into this is changing the course of my life and driving my desires in a

way that is not healthy to me yeah i mean i guess it's when it's when the fantasy it's whenever the fantasy is there to uh is is used i, recurringly to avoid reality and to avoid living in the present. What is reality, though? How do we decide it? Because fantasy, like, for example, look at, like, sexual fantasy, right? Like, sexual fantasy can be, in particular,

a very safe way to explore certain desires. And most people, some of their sexual fantasies might be ones that they go that extra step to realise. And many that they will not, they will never realise and they don't want to. If you actually presented them with like, let's do this, they'd be like, no, no.

I think the dysfunctional level of fantasy, right, is when, yeah, it's sort of, it becomes a recurring way to avoid and detach from reality because at some point, if you're sort of like enraptured with a fantasy then your reality and your real life and your like ability to be in the present is going to corrupt you and like if you think about like again i guess when i think about the immersive fantasy of like

um online like conspiracy theorists and like transphobic conspiracy theorists which is what they are i think like you know i think i'm past the point of really calling them gender critical when it is that you know these people rot their own lives you know they get divorced they talk about the fact their kids don't talk to them you know and it's the same whether it whether it's trans women are like taking over and and women are being cis women are being pushed out um whether it's the great reset and we're going to a cashless society or whatever it is um or whether it's yeah like yeah like any any number of conspiracy theorists the vaccines whatever is in the end these people it's i think the best the strongest lens to view it through is addiction and i think i think with fantasy i do think there's a hugely addictive nature to

fantasy and i think a lot of what we've been taught is romantic is in fact addiction, which is, you know, so again, something I write about in the forthcoming book to plug again, but also like to me, you know, I write quite openly about being an addict in recovery.

And I think it's not that uncommon to me having like actually had like a kind of like bona fide addiction that everyone the medical profession everyone recognizes is it's not that dissimilar in some ways to the the psychological mechanism might be a little less chaotic for those around me sometimes but like i can see how there's like an addictive pull and i and and there are clearly people in the same way that some people do with well gambling addiction is a fantasy it's this time this time it's going to win and why wouldn't people do that with dating or relationships? This person's going to fix me. This is amazing.

They're the most amazing person I've ever met. That's Ariana Grande. This Ariana Grande album, let me tell you, she, this girl is not healing. This girl is not healing, let's just put it that way. The other question I obviously had was, what is an objective reality though like how do we draw that line because we keep saying you know fantasy versus reality but i think if we talk to

some of these people in the fantasies they'd be like but i am living in reality you're living in the fantasy and it's who decides what's the touching grass out here well here's the thing isn't it i think the crux of like trying to stay present in reality is you have to accept the unbearable reality that like other people are different to you and other people think differently to you. And actually, you know, we were talking earlier about left-wing ideas

is that I think a lot, like my experience of the left and left-wing organising is sometimes we can struggle to understand that other people... Well, we see it. We've got manifest evidence. We have a Tory government. But people can't quite fathom that what messaging might work for you or what kind of way that you've been brought along won't work for someone else. And so it's easier to project onto them. And when we're talking about fantasy I think I think that's that's the crux of it right is that what when you are heartbroken over someone that you

thought you got really excited about but you didn't actually know and then they sort of like break it off after three months or whatever is those that's why and I say this a lot in my column people say oh I dated this guy for three months and i'm heartbroken and i'm much more devastated than i was after my relationship of six years ended and it's like yes because you knew that person you knew that the relationship worked yeah and like the relationship ended because you knew it wasn't functioning and that you knew that you needed to take that next step whereas what you're left with when it's someone you didn't know yeah and what they were to you was a was a was a manifestation of your own psychology and i think um yeah so i think

i think the hardest thing about um it's not about the it's not about living in i guess an objective reality it's about recognizing um that there is a lot about other people we do not know and that we have to be more curious i think like a lot of fantasy is is shutting off our curiosity to self-soothe with our own about other people it's to self-soothe with our own i mean i when i was writing the transgender issue i had to really get i tried to get as much as possible in the minds of trans folks which like i don't necessarily think was the healthiest thing for me but like i do think it's a worthy exercise if you're writing a polemic is like what does the what does my counterpart think um because rather than your double your warrior yeah yeah exactly well it's like bigotry right isn't it like most bigots actually have a fantasy of something that

they're defending they think they're defending their country they that they're defending. They think they're defending their country. They think they're defending women. They think they're defending their religion. They don't think they're hateful, most of them. And so I guess it's, that doesn't excuse bigotry, but I think it's about trying to be like intellectually curious about the other party. I think that leads me on nicely to the final thought i had when you were speaking which is do you think the rise of individualism under late stage capitalism i'll just say the phrase say the say the line bart um do you think the rise of individualism has

made it both fantasy more um powerful to us but also made it harder to confront because we don't have shared fantasy in the same way that I think maybe, you know, in previous eras where the left was stronger, it's almost like you had the shared fantasy that you could buy into in a shared ideology and a shared goal. And now everyone's fantasy is like,

well, we're in libertarian age and everyone gets their own individual dreams and fantasies. And if you try and challenge and say, it's kind of this fucking bonkers or like, I don't think this is healthy for you. They they're like this is my path and this is the path i'm walking that kind of vibe i think consumer capitalism has a big role to play like particularly like us living in the uk quite a secular society um i was actually watching ash sarkar and aaron bastani's

downstream on religion and one thing that they they talk about in that is like obviously there has been an erosion of like a huge lot of like community ritual and even like life milestones and coming together as a result of the erosion of a spiritual life and what that has been replaced with is not only like secularism like there's no higher being but also like consumer capitalism i.e in order to make you spend money we're going to sell you a fantasy, which has been on, like started obviously, like probably, you know, really with the advertising of the 1960s, but now is everywhere. And we live constantly, like social media is constantly advertising and we're providing data for advertising. Consumer capitalism basically says like, if you engage in this consumer practice in this consumer practice you know you're going to be um gorgeous you're going to be sexy you're going to be hot you're

everyone's going to love you and um and yeah and i think uh miss miss eva elu um yeah the the end of love by eva elu is i mean i would guess we'd both recommend that to people i'm such a philistine i think it's elu, but I don't know. I think it's definitely Elu. She's like French. But I think, yeah, like, I mean, consumer capitalism, you know, sells us a constant fantasy. And like that is individualist, right? It's the way that you fill the void inside is not through, I guess, kind of um perhaps in the past people had more sort of

like either religious or spiritual like an idea that the material world isn't all there is and now we're told that a materialistic society is all there is and so we're sort of like rabidly consuming in the face of like knowing that it's destroying our environment um and our bank account yeah and that's in the pursuit of a fantasy and what's that like again that goes back to my point that that's almost an addictive process that we're sort of culturally addicted to to a fantasy that we think that just money will buy i mean shall we solve some other people's problems yeah great go for it dilemma number one this is from a listener obviously uh are you a hypocrite if you're a socialist in brackets like i am yet you're going to inherit land and wealth from your family what

should you do give it all away or use it as a resource for achieving social good through cooperatives etc i mean some of the coaches i know are fucking awfuls i guess they're actually a they are a social good i will agree with that what do you think well i mean the question like am i a hypocrite right like you're not a hypocrite for um i don't know like having the like the advantage and the genuine privilege like i mean that's one one one context in which we can say it's genuine privilege you're not um you know tony ben was a member of the aristocrat who grew up aristocracy you're not um yeah you're not a hypocrite and i think that like self-punishment is not going to be like that helpful right like um i think like excessive i'm not a big believer in like excessive guilt for the advantages that people have because

that can become quite self-involved quite quickly and also undermines leftist movements yeah i guess the question here about um like we know that i don't know if this person is a millennial let's suspect they probably are is that the millennials are about to become the richest generation ever because when what time yeah because they're well because their boomer parents are dying but of course it's at least some millennials but that like that transfer of inherited wealth like it's quite it's quite funny um i remember like three years ago the writer rachel connelly wrote a piece in the guardian basically saying that there was this like uniform uniform um idea that all millennials are really hard up or whatever but actually that's not true because some have like huge inheritances coming to them and that's about to transfer because boomers are getting older um and so yeah

so I think there are going to be a lot of millennials who because millennials also aren't getting more right wing with age so there will be probably lots of people with this issue which is they know they've got a lot of money coming but they've got these like left-wing principals and left-wing friends and they feel all this guilt yeah i mean i guess you do i guess you can think about if you actually have a surplus of wealth and resources like how there's plenty of things that you could do with that that like will be a benefit to a society where there's no social welfare or infrastructure like get creative defo i think about this a lot because i have a lot of fantasies about fantasy again about winning

the lottery and what i would do with that money and obviously when you're younger it's stuff like i'll learn to drive i'll take my mom on holiday and now it's things like how can i buy several properties and sell them back to the community uh the way they do with this so there's this like um sort of like co-op association in Cornwall and some other places that have been doing this where they'll, the land trust where they'll buy houses from the council, do them up and then sell them back to the community and just like people for like one pound.

And I think about this loads because it's, how can I actually use money for good? Obviously billionaires don't think like this. They're just haunting. So if your conscience still manages to stay intact when you get this money, I would have prepared for it beforehand. If you know it's coming, you need to think about how can I invest this in a programme

where it will keep giving these returns rather than just like one dollop of money, give it to charity and then it's gone. I would think more about how can I have a long-term thing that's going on? not to become a landlord but is it something that you have i don't know a social housing association and you set that up and that becomes the way that you're reinvesting long-term the community that you do separate up you do you start a partner scheme where your money is the first big thing that goes in and everyone else is paying in and then you will get money that comes out regularly um do look to the past because when there was more capital and

more of a sharing economy mindset people did do these things it's just in the last x amount of years that's become about buying houses and flipping them and renting them out at the highest price and getting a portfolio um so we have the models out there to do this. And again, I also want to say I don't think you're a hypocrite and I do think that idea comes from sometimes the purity politics that are preached that come from resentment on the left because obviously when people get a lot of wealth and money and you don't possess that, there is a lot of resentment with that.

I find this resentment tends to come most from the middle class rather like the the cash poor middle class people rather than like working class people um yeah and i've never which is really interesting it's like the people are like you're you've got slightly more money than me and your parents paid this off even though my parents paid this off and you're not a real leftist because of this it tends to come from the people who have a little bit and don't and don't have everything they want aspirationally yeah i've never really like um yeah like fucked with that like whole um when people have left-wing politics pointing to the fact that like they're not working class because it's like well actually realistically we're going to need some people with some inherited wealth um to like i

don't know have functioning social movements in this climate and also yeah i mean like some amazing you know there are there are examples of housing co-ops and um and resources that's the thing that i think if you have like surplus wealth you can um yeah you can potentially you kind of talked about this like rather than a one-off donation of money there's actually the ability to like build some kind of resources and there's so many um social causes that need something just pick pick a cause any cause i would start with housing i think housing is the most pressing thing that you personally could if you have land and wealth housing to me is the sphere that you

should be looking at um obviously if there was a way to fix the nhs by parachuting in money uh we do it but the nhs problem is more to do with actually resourcing rather than funding i would say um arts and culture obviously that's been massively stripped back but things just like simple social services in your local community there's that rich lady that owns the lrb right and then like yeah they they all have quite sorry james butler they all have quite nice they all have quite nice no pretty decent salaries for writing yeah they have great salaries she's just a rich lady with a lot of money yeah it's it's it's that kind of thing it's and i would look also to your local community and first and foremost because trying to save the world in one go will not work. But trying to build a robust, localised space around you and help there will bring you more in the way of success, I would say, if that's your goal.

Shall we get to another dilemma? From the beginning, I had a terrible holiday with a girlfriend recently. I was upset with her behaviour towards me. She then stayed on the holiday, presumably, for an extra few days and went clubbing with a guy recently. I was upset with her behaviour towards me. She then stayed on, the holiday presumably, for an extra few days and went clubbing with a guy all night. He was a friend of hers whom she has repeatedly called

handsome and charming. She didn't message me all night and I obviously would have appreciated a text to let me know she was thinking of me while she was with him. I just... I'm desperate to know what this is. Sorry, I'm not laughing.

I'm shocked. I decided to break up with her, in brackets, over text, for two major reasons. One, for the fact she was ill-tempered with me during our trip together. And two, she then ignored me during her night out the day after I left. She has since replied to my message,

writing that he was gay. And also apologised for, I'm so sorry to this listener, I'm taking this very seriously. And also apologised for her poor mood throughout the trip. Do you think she will ever forgive me for sending a rash breakup text? Because I do desperately want the relationship to work.

Am I right to be upset about her failure to communicate? Is my immediate reaction to run away from the relationship understandable? Or is my lack of faith a huge red flag also a related question if you if i could please ask one more you can your answer to this one is the most important to me oh this is heartbreaking how do you learn to trust someone i find myself relating very much to a line from from albertine by jacqueline rose fulfilling despite himself the spirit of truth was which was his greatest torment that you never know what the other person is up to when you're not there with lots of affection i love everything you do a heartbroken holidayer this um that's so interesting that jacqueline rose quote because it literally

goes back to what we were talking about earlier about the fundamental like um disturbing reality that we don't know what's going on with other people. Gosh, there's a lot there. I'll sum up here. This person, who I'm presuming is a man, just from the fact that they were worried that their girlfriend was with a guy all night

and that he thought he was straight. And so they've gone on holiday. They had a bad holiday. He left early and she stayed on and went out all night with a really handsome friend of hers and she didn't contact him all night and he basically doesn't trust her so he broke up with her even though she said the guy was gay um and his main question is how do i trust someone yeah i mean actually i have quite a lot of empathy for this person because i really uh have historically had trust issues and yeah how do you trust someone I mean that's kind of I guess I guess like that but let's answer that first I mean I

think like how do you how do you fundamentally come to trust other people I mean I think it's an inside job isn't it because it's like you have to look at the reasons why you struggle with trust and that like realistically might be something that goes back all the way to childhood um because that to me sounds like a fear of abandonment and dread of abandonment very anxious yeah which is like fear of abandonment is often a childhood thing. It doesn't have to be that, you know, there could be a variety of reasons for it. But, you know, parents had a really traumatic divorce, someone that you were very close to died. You know, there can be many reasons. But what that can often do is set off, like, a chain reaction where, you know, whenever you, like, love someone or you're attached to someone,

reaction where you know whenever you'll like love someone or you're attached to someone you basically are like afraid that the the the minute that you sort of find someone that you like feel emotionally invested in the clock starts ticking on like am I gonna be yeah and I'm gonna be betrayed and you can almost bring that reality about through your own kind of imagination um and um i mean like honestly i would probably say with trust issues that's something that you have to kind of get into the ring with it and kind of work on it in a relationship it's not something that you can go and take a pill to trust people i do actually think this person might on the trust front might benefit from therapy because you probably need someone you can't bring i don't think it's healthy to bring all your trust issues to a partner either because that's that's an unfair expectation if

it's not reasonable what would you say on that point about trusting someone well i actually want to start with whether they should get back with the person okay because they've said do you think she'll ever forgive me sending a rash breakup text she might forgive you but i don't think you should get back together i think i do not think you should get back together because i think when you've had conflict in that sense that's so you haven't been able to resolve it in a healthy way on either side you know she was pissed off with them uh they went home early and then she went out all night and partied with this person who was a friend didn't communicate whatever i think a lot of this from the perspective of someone who doesn't trust and is just seeing

bad signs everywhere but i don't do not think it sounds like you at the moment like yourself enough and trust yourself and other people enough to be in a relationship where you could have the foundations to work on that i do think you need to work on this alone and i think once you've also broken the trust of a relationship by breaking up with someone angrily over text as someone who has done this before i don't think you should go back into that relationship yeah i mean i i think that to me really struck out because i've been on both sides of that i've had someone effectively like end a significant relationship by text and i was not able to move forward um in contact with that person i don't think you can come back from the trust on that side of her side she'll be like you just ended this over text yeah how do you rebuild the trust on that yeah exactly and

yeah and i agree i think i think on this point, the issue is, I think these people could easily patch it all up and get back together. They could patch it up, it'll be Frankenstein's monster of a relationship. But the trouble is, yeah, is that the underlying issue has not disappeared. And in fact, what will happen

after the makeup conversation and sex or whatever. And the honeymoon period. Yeah, is that like the same old doubts will creep back in and there's actually you know i can even it will just emerge again um it's going to be it's going to be chronic and recurring and yeah i mean i do think that this trust issue with this this person that's that's asked the question linking to my original answer is that i think this person needs to look at their own internally is that trust issues it's the hardest thing to accept that trust issues are often even when we've like been let down by people in the past because a lot of people get trust issues again something that comes up when

people are writing to my column is my my last partner cheated on me so now I have trust issues it's like well actually unfortunately that's not your current partner's problem there's something there that you have to you have to divorce your self-worth and value from what someone else did and recognize actually that like if someone cheats on you or whatever that's to do with them and with abandonment issues i think it's why i say mentioned about childhood stuff the reason that this stuff gets fixed in childhood is because when people usually adults caregivers whatever abandon us or we perceive that they've abandoned us in childhood developmentally we're not equipped to say that's because of them we don't have that those faculties as a child you're egocentric you're like well i've done something wrong and so

that fear subconsciously is there and also this sounds a lot like as someone that has sent really like um drastic texts that i regret is that for me i know that my nervous system is like like overactive and i'm so anxious you're so adrenaline yeah and and yeah it's done and you've blown it up before you've even had a chance to think and i've had friends say to me before take a day you don't have to respond now and it's just the hardest thing in the world because of nervous system regulation and so to me i think it's worth this person doing some taking the time out yeah to do i know it's going to be really hard because there'll be a lot of guilt about how things ended but i think the kindest thing to do would be you know i mean i i could i guess

i guess if i were in that position i'd probably be like look i'm really sorry about how this ended but i actually think it speaks to a bigger issue that i need to work on and myself and that's not about you i want to say on the trust how do you trust someone because i've been thinking about this and i recently interviewed someone um for a public piece so i feel like i can relay the anecdote and they were telling me about how they used to demand from their partner that they told them all the time were telling me about how they used to demand from their partner that they told them all the time that they loved them

and they needed to hear every day and they would say it so much. It caused so much, and they didn't trust them and they had all this fractiousness in their relationship because every day they had this void inside and they needed to hear it

and they needed to know they weren't going to be abandoned. And they started doing therapy and one day, it was on Valentine's Day, so very significant they thought what if i don't demand from my partner today that i need you know that they do this stuff for me or that i need to hear like every second that they love me what if i just this one

time say like to tell you to myself it's okay it's just one time i'm not gonna not gonna ask this of them today and they didn't and it started from there they kept taking those taking those little steps when they got the urge they'd had enough therapy to i guess do breathing or whatever it is for me it's breathing it's like taking 10 deep breaths before i do something thinking if i really want to do this i would do this later i will send this later i will ask this question later and just creating a space for yourself where you have a buffer between the impulsive action you want to do or the true acting on the intrusive thought that you have and taking that space and just being able to sit with it for just a few minutes more and that makes all the difference and that's how you build up the habit of starting to trust someone and let

that space happen because after that this person said that they were doing it more and more and more and their partner started coming to them and independently telling them the things they want to hear and they didn't need to hear it so much they didn't need to hear you know all this reassurance all this because they could finally see what was actually in the relationship and the love and care that they were being given and their partner was more also willing to come to them and meet them because they weren't being totally smothered and they weren't having to try and fill the void of their own insecurity and trust issues so it's a practice it's like everything else how do you trust someone you practice i found building my friendships up really helpful with this i talk about friendship all the time but in romantic relationships often the rawest part where we

find like our you know our childhood traumas or pain or whatever coming out because this is this one-on-one intense interpersonal relationship uh whereas friendships because i think there's socially less in like owners put on them even though they are just as important more important to me and now in in sort of healing yourself um so friendships can be a really good site to build up that trust in the first place and practice trusting people around you letting people care for you letting people do things trusting what people are saying and also practicing communication and conflict resolution so if you have issues with one of your friends and you can talk about in a way that i i find often i was unable previously to talk about in relationships but now it's this whole model of how i can communicate with people that i care about when

i'm upset or and like actually listen to what they're saying and not just have my narrative in my head of what this is and how I should react and actually take in, okay, actually I'm gonna reassess how I've read the situation. I'm listening to you, I trust you, I trust your intentions, I trust what you feel towards me and I know you care about me. And yeah, your trust is really a practice

that you have to do yourself because there are gonna be people out there who will break your trust, but you can't let them, your trust is really a practice that you have to do yourself because there are going to be people out there who will break your trust, but you can't let them destroy your trust for everyone else. Yeah. I mean, it's the difference between healthy interdependence and codependence and some therapeutic approaches will describe it as like open system relationships versus closed system relationships. Like an open system relationship is like we are two parties

and there's almost like a channel or a flow between us and that could be friends separate work you know we can go we can be apart and come back together and closed system is like a closed loop of of energy where it's like i need you to do this for me to be okay i need you to be okay in the way that i want for me to be okay and i have and that's like an excessive form of emotional reliance and like a lot of us don't really get taught what the difference is and we again we're like a product of often our families but um yeah like if you're going to be in that closed loop thing um that's why like you mentioned friendships I think it's because also friendships provide you with a lot like like nourishing friendships can provide you with a lot of um

examples of healthy interdependence like even if this person was taken away from me i would be okay because again like one the fact that someone is separate to you is one of the most disturbing things about romantic love of all that like you actually don't know who you're sleeping next to that's really freaky but it's true um and also the fact that like you don't you can it's never that healthy if it's like I need I need you to be something other than you are for me to be OK. Which is like the hardest thing because again we're not taught that that's like the essence of like what healthy love or healthy relationships is. But you need it because everyone's either going to break up with you or die. That's how all relationships end. Break up or death. that's how all relationships end break up or death and on that note um so listener yes you can learn trust but i think you should in the first instance start that process on your own

and not in tandem with this other person uh sean fey thank you so much for guest hosting if i speak thank you i do feel like we were just talking on whatsapp voice notes but this time i get to see your beautiful face. I love bombing again. I love bombing again. Yeah, literally. God, maybe I need some more therapy. I'm going to put you up on Instagram.

It's a hard launch after three weeks. This has been If I Speak with me, Moylo Thee McLean and guest host... Sean Fay. If you like the show, I'm just going to ask it now, please rate and review us on whatever platform you're

listening to this on we will be back probably next week see you then