If I Speak - 18: Why does everything feel so disposable?

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Ash presents a big theory about disposability and social shame prompted by a wardrobe clearout, and Moya responds to a dilemma about dating while living with parents. Plus: spot remedies. Come and see... If I Speak live at the London Podcast Festival on 15 September! Tickets available from kingsplace.co.uk now. Got a problem? Tell us: […]

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to another episode of If I Speak, the podcast industrial complex never sleeps. Moira, Lothian, McLean, it's been a while since it's been just the two of us. Have you been avoiding me? What's going on? I haven't been avoiding you. You know that it's election time
Starting point is 00:00:33 and therefore we're being sent out to the farthest reaches of the UK. You more than anyone, busy, busy little bees. So it feels like we haven't stopped. It feels like everyone's just moving on this carousel at the moment where we only see each other and it feels like we haven't stopped it feels like everyone's just moving on this carousel at the moment where we only see each other's like blur opposite i do find that like with general election being announced my body was just like adrenaline here you go and what's really weird is that for the first time in ages i'm just not excited about
Starting point is 00:01:03 the result so 2017 2019 because i was like, okay, we could, we could get something really different. And this thing, which I think is just so worth fighting for. So like running my body into the ground felt actually really life affirming, whereas this is all the adrenaline and none of the, none of the excitement, none of the hope. Have you been feeling that way? Do you know what, how do I describe it I haven't yeah I haven't felt the hope or the excitement or the sort of sense of community of being part of a political project that actually has a shot at getting something done from the top down although obviously there's disagreements about whether that's the most useful way of doing things but i have felt a real sense of okay this is an opportunity
Starting point is 00:01:46 to actually go and talk to people and get their voices out there and find out what they want for better or worse um i don't know maybe maybe i felt for the first time like i can i'm actually in a place where i can do my job as a journalist and i have enough skills to really perform that in a way that might be useful at, I don't know, expressing or articulating voices that maybe other parts of the, or stories that maybe the other parts of the media haven't missed.
Starting point is 00:02:11 Whether I'm actually doing that is up for debate, but that's certainly how I felt. Like it's an opportunity to do that and look at the places where perhaps the rest of the media isn't looking. So like everyone looks to Clacton, where do we look? Something I won't reveal yet. But that's the idea. It's like, where are the gaps and where do we look somewhere i won't reveal yet um but that's that's the idea it's like where are the gaps and how can we fill them well you know what i think
Starting point is 00:02:29 that that's something which i've not really been doing much of because a lot of the stuff i've been doing has been either going up against other journalists or politicians so i've not had that feeling of like okay well i'm connecting with real people i'm basically going into studios and talking to the world's biggest that's your job so i think that's also a part of your job though you're really good at that whereas i'm really good at going to small uh suburban constituencies and being racially abused which by the time this episode comes out the video will be out of that you know what like the thing is is i don't i should i know that like when you say stuff like that like we both like laugh about it and part of the reason why you do that is because it's a way
Starting point is 00:03:10 of transforming anger and humiliation into something else and you can laugh about it but it is fucking horrible do you know what i think it's fucking horrible for other people and i know you'll probably think i'm just saying that i think because i'm so aware that my I'm really light-skinned and a lot of the time I would they can't hear that on the podcast I'm really light-skinned and a lot of the time I think my racial identity has allowed me access to spaces I wouldn't normally be allowed to and also it has come with you know I don't think that I'm taken as seriously I do think there's lots of you know opportunities that perhaps I'm not put up for because I'm a brown woman and there is an automatic rating in the head of who is a serious journalist and who is you know right for this job but there's also spaces I've been allowed into in the first place to show what I can do because I
Starting point is 00:03:55 tick a box whereas other people who are less palatable to the white audience because they're darker skinned or you know they will be taken more seriously they start speaking i don't think i'm allowed those spaces in the first place so i'm really aware and i don't like using the word privilege a lot because i it's this connotation of like i'm gonna hand down my privilege rather than like everyone's gonna be empowered from the grassroots up but i'm really aware of like what being a light-skinned woman has done for me so when someone racially abuses me it doesn't touch me in the same way i'm just like wow you are really you have to be so racist to do to like do that but i think for someone like you where you get like i've seen the difference in the mentions that we get and the difference in the abuse that we get
Starting point is 00:04:34 and it's like someone like diane abbott or zara sartana the difference in the way they are treated and what they have to do in order to be taken seriously and i i know i don't get the same level so i generally don't think i almost have the right for it to affect me in the same way because I know ultimately my position is different um if that makes sense at all that does that does make sense I suppose the thing that I would say is that um we can all find ways of explaining how the thing that we experience isn't so bad, right? Because I do that all the time. I go, well, you know, it's mostly online. So it's not the same as being in a context where it's happening to you in person. Like we all find ways of doing that because again, it makes something which is deeply distressing, more
Starting point is 00:05:22 manageable. And I'm not saying throw that out the window because i love a good adaptive mechanism um but when something happens to you in person i think that there's a level of proximity and your brain and your body work in overtime to try and assess the level of threat and obviously the thing that happened to you it will be clipped and released and turned into content because that's all we're good for um and it's different because there's a camera there and there's someone else there you're not alone there are all these different factors but your body is still doing that light speed threat assessment when it happens because it's in person yeah and i i responded by simply
Starting point is 00:06:05 like staying very calm and asking more questions and after we finished our lovely director um producer does everything uh camera person as well jonah who was with me thought i was crying because my eyes get really watery in the wind so he's like are you so sweet he was like you okay and like wiped a tear away and i was like oh no like this is the wind like and i's like, are you okay? And I wiped a tear away and I was like, oh no, like this is the wind. Like, let's run that back. Let's clip that up now. But I did leave the towns that we were in feeling a sense of hopelessness just because of the sort of, I think, narratives of white British nationalism that have set in there over many decades. And I do, I have this week felt more hopeless than i have in a while about maybe changing the hearts and minds of the british
Starting point is 00:06:50 public but we're gonna do that anyway aren't we ash in this episode so look we're gonna do that anyway you know what if lenin could do it so can we anyway coming up we've got a big old big theory don't worry it's not about lenin's state and revolution and we've also got a selection of audience dilemmas and as always we would love to hear from you we would love to hear from you if you've got big problems we'd love to hear from you if you've got small problems the only thing that's important to say is that you should only message us if you think that we can't possibly make your problems worse because I don't want to be sued at some point for blowing up someone's life that's buyer beware caveat emptor as the Romans would say um if you've got a problem that we couldn't make any worse just
Starting point is 00:07:37 email us at if I speak at navaramedia.com that's if I speak at navara media dot com but first as always it's time for our quick fire interrogation moya what have you got for me because i had a cumulative what's 13 plus 8 22 22 22 hours sleep i don't even know if it is that it's not that it's 21 it's 21 it took us so long to get there because i have to take the one from the anyway 21 hours sleep this weekend i have now i'm the now proud bearer of three different spots one of which i've picked so much i made into a full scab so my question to you ashes what is your best quick spot remedy i don't have quick spot remedies um i just use those spot patches because they're also a way of getting me to stop touching them and picking at them and making them worse um the thing that i find with my spots is that i feel they take so
Starting point is 00:08:38 long to like crown and i find that frustrating and i always try and speed it up and that's when that's when i fuck up my face so maybe there's no such thing as a quick spot remedy what's yours uh well usually the crowning thing is the problem isn't it because I was waiting for this to crown and then I prematurely blew my load as it were um I don't use spot stickers even though I think that's a good idea but they don't really do much they are more of a placebo to me honestly the best thing to do is just slap on every morning and night la roche posay effaclar duo and a like a splash of vitamin c when the spot is in its i don't know what you call it the coming up phase and then when it's gone and it's fading and there's just like a red mark i use a korean serum to fade it really quickly also good for scars like the best thing ever um but it is just a
Starting point is 00:09:25 case of time like i've got two others here which are now on the up and fading respectively and i'm just having to like sit and wait because i've i've learned such a painful lesson which i have to learn every three months with the one that i picked off my face um but you're right there's no quick remedies there okay question two um what song do you want played at your funeral? We did your wedding recently. Okay. What song do I want played? Are you getting cremated?
Starting point is 00:09:53 What are you doing? Yeah, I'm getting cremated, I think. As it goes through the curtains, into the furnace, what song do you want playing? The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Fire. I've never heard that in my life, curtains into the furnace what song do you want playing the crazy world of arthur brown fire i've never heard that in my life but i'm sure it's the one where it's like fire i'll teach you to burn is that because of the crim no you have to do what that relates to your life ash oh okay the jester again the jester came out no but that does relate to my life i okay as everyone leaves
Starting point is 00:10:29 as everyone leaves all right all right all right it's really it's really difficult because what you want is music that people can have some kind of connection to. I mean, I was thinking about this because I picked the music for my stepdad's funeral and it was very much about finding music that related to him, but also people could connect to in their own experience of grief.
Starting point is 00:10:59 And also like his taste in music wasn't always so great. Like he really fucking loved Jethro Tull and like Meatloaf and like me and my brother were like we are not fucking playing Meatloaf at his funeral that's just not happening um but then my brother remembered that like uh he had a real love for Sade so uh we started with I'll Be Your Friend by Sade there's a John Lee Hooker song called I think it was called like Peace Loving Man or like I Don't Want No Trouble Man or something like that um and then finding music that especially that my mum could connect to I found this um jazz flautist who's Indian
Starting point is 00:11:41 but was raised in South Africa and so there were all those influences in his music and that that for me was the principle of choosing it wasn't what's the song which can sum up his life it's like what can other people connect to so I don't know because my instincts would be okay well the thing that would convey my personality is a gag of some kind like you know maybe like one of those tupac songs that was like released you know released after his death like hail mary or something like really gothy and weird just so i can remind everyone like fuckers i'm dead but i'll speak from beyond the grave um but that was not the same as a song that people can connect to in their grief so i don't know i don't know it's my most honest answer to that what's yours what's your funeral song oh i've got lists of songs i won't play my
Starting point is 00:12:29 funeral i think maybe two of them would be nina simone to love somebody if i if it's like been a good death um or don't let me be misunderstood if i want to be really on the nose um and and graceland by Paul Simon, which I think is just such a beautiful song about traveling and what is death if not traveling and transitioning to a new state. And the Mississippi Delta is shining like a national guitar.
Starting point is 00:12:57 So I think those two would be on the list somewhere. You know what? I think one of the ones that would be on the list for me is Nostalgia nostalgia which is off the ethiopeaks album the like ethiopian jazz album because every time i hear that song i just feel something in my heart this like slightly achy yearning floating feeling that i think i think would be good that or 21 seconds by so solid crew i don't know question three what is your least favorite trait in other people my least favorite trait in other people okay um so this is a trait which i find
Starting point is 00:13:35 really difficult in other people and i think that it speaks to my own dysfunction which is i find it really difficult when other people are good at asking for what they want, and they can articulate it and they can ask for it. Because I can't do that. Like literally the other week, I was trying to, you know, just say how I felt and I could feel my throat closing up like I was being strangled. And part of that is like a cultural script. Like in South Asian households, there's a kind of principle where everything works if everyone's telepathic so the ideal situation is no one has to tell anyone their needs because it's your job to perceive and meet them without them having to ask someone asking is a really big deal because either that means that you fail to perceive things or it's this really powerful thing because no one can say no um obviously the big problem in this
Starting point is 00:14:26 plan is that telepathy isn't real um and like also there can be like uneven levels of like perception or uneven expectations of what's reasonable so one of my really really good friends is just the opposite of that like she feels completely able to ask people for things and every time she does it it sends me spinning so she'll be like oh like something ridiculous she'll be like you know can I can I move in with you for two years or something and I'd be like oh my god she needs a place to stay for two years and I have to say yes but this isn't something that I want to do more and then like after having a nervous breakdown I'll be like I don't think I can do that she's like oh yeah that's fine don't ask don't get like for her it's like asking is not a big deal being told no isn't a big deal so I find it a difficult trait in others not because it's bad but because I've been raised in a different cultural script that
Starting point is 00:15:19 is so yeah that is really interesting it's not just like on your it's not an individual thing that you've kind of come up with as well. It is also like this cultural background that you have where it's like, this is literally means I have failed if someone has to ask me for something. I also just find people asking me something is like disconcerting.
Starting point is 00:15:37 It's like, what? You're breaking all the rules about like, you know, just quietly pass ag hinting at something so I can pretend to ignore it. And now you're directly asking me, so I have to say yes or no? What? Yeah, very, very thoughtful. We should probably come on to that in like a future episode in general, like asking for stuff that we want and discussing that.
Starting point is 00:15:58 Because I think we both seem like we'd be good at it and we maybe aren't that good at it. Very terrible. Very are very terrible very very terrible you've got a massive theory though that we need to give some time to i have a big theory and i've got like i feel this is as big as a big theory gets because it's kind of like a totalizing theory of our society and how we live in it so on and so forth so the other day I was going through my wardrobe to just get rid of stuff and by getting rid of stuff what I mean is sending it off to you know a charity shop and when I was looking through particularly things that I was buying a few years ago, just the quality of the items was
Starting point is 00:16:46 terrible. So sort of distended seams, faded colours, you know, pilly fabrics. And it's not like they'd been worn loads and loads and loads. It's that they were designed to be worn once and then never worn again. They can't survive even a basic 20 degrees Celsius wash. And it made me think about the way in which disposability, the creation of goods for them to be used once, maybe twice, and then just thrown away. It's a feature of consumerism. It's a feature of things like fast fashion, but it also extends so far beyond that. And it has, I think, an impact on how we relate to ourselves and relate to other people as well. So fast fashion, I think, is just the classic example.
Starting point is 00:17:34 Here is something which is designed to be worn once and thrown away. And there's a whole system of advertising which is designed to make you think that you've got to wear this particular outfit you can't wear the same thing more than once particularly if you're like going out out or at a party and the pace at which trends move it makes you feel that you're going to be left behind or sort of seen as less cool or less desirable unless you keep right on top of them because if you're out by even a little bit you are worth less and unless you are massively rich that means that you are going to be buying from companies which are up to the neck in exploitative labor practices which absolutely fucking destroy our environment. Like most of
Starting point is 00:18:28 these clothes are just made of plastic anyway. Plastic is basically made from oil. So that's one example of something which I think lots of people can connect with of like something being built to be thrown away. But then there's this other thing which is called built in obsolescence. And I remember hearing this phrase when I was in my late teens and being like, wow, this sounds really deep. But built-in obsolescence means that particularly with electronic goods, they're not built to last for ages and ages and ages and you can repair them and you can update them and you can make them better as the years go on. They're designed to just cark out, to like fucking, you know, drop dead, stop working in
Starting point is 00:19:14 time for the next one to be released. And the obvious way in which that plays out is like with iPhones or with like MacBooks. Apple's really, really famous for built-in obsolescence and also changing its features so you're just locked into only buying from that one company and that is on the opposite end to fast fashion because these are objects which are really expensive do you know what i mean like particularly if're renting, like your laptop or your phone, it's probably like some of your like biggest single expenses in a year, like in terms of one-off costs. And so the idea that these things are really expensive, but you're not supposed to treasure them. You're not supposed to have a relationship to them of like looking after them
Starting point is 00:20:02 and repairing them and patching them up and making them better again it builds in this idea of disposability so even the things that are expensive are designed to be impermanent they're supposed to be thrown away they're supposed to pass through your life and this thing about impermanence you know designed to be thrown away I think that we all feel that in terms of renting. So if you're a renter, the idea of being really attached to your home, changing it over the years, having it reflect your needs and the way in which you live in it and being shaped by your home and you shaping it like a relationship almost, like that's out the window because maybe you have to move every year because the rent goes up um there's precarity in work contracts zero hour contracts or contracts which are just like really really easy to like you know get you sacked um so the idea of you know a job
Starting point is 00:20:57 for life like as everyone knows that's such such a myth now for most people. But I think it's not just that. That kind of, you can be thrown away at any moment that we see in work and that we see in terms of the housing market. I think it plays out in dating and relationships big time. And I know I always go on about how much I hate the apps. I'm not trying to be a smug married when I say I hate the apps. I am being a concerned married about how much I hate the apps I'm not trying to be a smug married when I say I hate the apps I am being a concerned married when I say I hate the apps like you're
Starting point is 00:21:30 literally looking at people's hopeful faces and you're like swiping past them like you are disposing of people literally every second and they're disposing of you in a way which is just so cutthroat it's such a cutthroat way of relating to people and it's such a cutthroat way of being related to and there are the experiences that so many people talk about like oh well I was ghosted or like someone was messaging me and then they weren't or like you know we slept together and they disappeared or like you know this never seemed to go anywhere because of the nature of app-based dating I think that those the algorithm encodes our behavior as well so you go in with like very low trust and a really heightened sense of one's own precarity and that then impacts how you how you treat the other person it's a bit like a prisoner's dilemma right who's going to be the
Starting point is 00:22:24 first to do the betrayal to stop themselves from being the one that's fucked over and as we've talked about many times like because of how dominant the apps are in dating even if you're not on them that then changes how people connect in a much more broader sense but it's not just to do with dating I think that when we're on social media like you're playing what I call ostracism roulette like you can always see people being like ostracized and like torn down and that creates a really high sense of like personal threat um you're seeing people being like shamed all the time and obviously that that makes you anxious like that is the cornerstone of having like a massive problem with anxiety is existing within a context of like high threat and low trust um and i think that we've ended up with like
Starting point is 00:23:11 you know interpersonal loyalty is downplayed and like actively disparaged because when you're in this context of total you know constant social shaming where someone's being pointed out and being like this is the bad person and sometimes they are sometimes they aren't but like that's the dynamic if you're seen as like sticking up for that person or being close to them then you're like tarred with the brush as well so we've ended up where like you know loyalty is seen as a bad thing and it's perceived as like clubbiness or chumminess or like closing ranks, which is like a very, very negative spin to put on something that was seen as like inherent to like, you know, honor or like, you know, they're being a social glue. And yeah, I guess the last thing that I'd want to say is that, you know, we often look at these
Starting point is 00:24:03 things in isolation. So you look at fast fashion over here, you look at like dating apps over there, you look at the work, you know, the labor market workplaces over here, you look at discourses around relationships and friendships over there. But I actually think these are all really deeply connected. I think that if you think about it, like a flowing river, I think that the social trends that we're talking about I think they're downstream from the economic ones so the economics you know that changes and then how we behave or changes because of it later down the line and yeah like what we've ended up with because of this culture of disposability is a real corrosion of a feeling of social belonging
Starting point is 00:24:46 like really heightened levels of anxiety uh a culture of low trust high personal threat but also like our our planet is just like totally getting fucked like like climate change is here and it's coming for all our mamas um and i think these things are all connected so that is my big big big big theory i was looking around while you were saying this because somewhere in this room is a book and that book is called the end of love by eva illewis illewis illlois? I say it's wrong every time. And this book is basically an examination of modern dating in particular. And I've mentioned it elsewhere on other Navarro shows I've done because it was really influential when I read it. And she makes the same argument as you, which is that the economic structures that a lot of us don't like looking at or don't like talking about because
Starting point is 00:25:45 it feels too thorny or too political or whatever um and when you say the word neoliberal people's brains go but when you when you say the words like i bought like 10 tops from h&m and i can't be asked to return them so i'm just going to give them to charity shop or oh i can wear one and then just chuck one away when it gets the stain on because i can't be asked to like fix it they listen more um but those things are not separate as you say they are connected phenomena and her argument in this book is basically that like this free market idea of capitalism where it's like which isn't actually how capitalism works but it's what they pretended is free market where everything is you know in competition and you choose the best one and the best one wins and that's you know choice it's all about choice all about this has created this world of like precarity and uncertainty and that has directly influenced
Starting point is 00:26:35 the way that we conduct our relationships as well she's saying the exact same thing you are which is that the social stuff that we're seeing which is you know being ghosted and that the social stuff that we're seeing which is you know being ghosted and finding that even not even commitment but even getting like a second date with someone even when you really like each other clearly it feels impossible that is not separate from what's going on at like this level of you know the economy or what's going on in terms of ideology when it comes to you know how people think how the bigwigs are thinking about what what the economy or what's going on in terms of ideology when it comes to how the bigwigs are thinking about what the economy looks like or what our economic structures look like. And the problem is because, as I said, a lot of people find it really either
Starting point is 00:27:16 boring or difficult or it just seems too big of an issue to even look directly at whether that's the climate or whether that is, when when i say the word economy i want to try and find different works i know people will be switching off but people don't people find that fucking boring so they don't connect the dots or they don't want to connect the dots so if you try and talk about connecting the dots it's just like again um which is exactly how it's exactly how politicians like set it up um but i think i think you're totally right and i think eva iller was totally right and when i read that argument i was like the book is so good end of love is really good and there are elements in there where she's she edges on like this this sort of like a bit conservative views of where she's almost being like well in the past you know you
Starting point is 00:27:57 had all these um relationship rituals where even if the relationship wasn't very good at least you like knew where you stood because there were strict almost promises and commitments that you made and to break that commitment you had to go through the ritual of breaking that commitment like you would you know whereas now it's like sex is a precursor to even creating an emotional bond and at times you're like do you say you're saying you want us to get back into like heterosexual uh you know commitment phases again or whatever but it's still a really good book and a really good analysis and she talks about stuff in there like situationships that i haven't seen other sociologists actually digging into a lot of the way that um i think it you know expressed when
Starting point is 00:28:37 we talk about the dating sphere in particular especially heterosexual dating is this idea about you know women being totally fucked over which is true quite a lot but like men are being fucked over too not to be like men's lives matter too but like you know men are being fucked over too but she talks about like the sexual dynamics and power how that works and how it's actually really thorny because women have much less power in a heterosexual market um and as she as she puts it and but that doesn't mean that the sometimes we don't use like our sexuality and try and like objectification as ways to try and gain a bit more power back it's still not enough power though she talks about this thing called scopic capitalism which is like how sex and sexuality have been transformed into a social currency which is basically equivalent
Starting point is 00:29:23 of that is you know posting thirst traps on insta and that isn't equal to having like actual power but it gives us visibility and visibility gives us the the illusion of power um and it's just yeah it's really good all that kind of stuff what i think is also the heart of this is the idea that choice equals freedom and we've got really into this framework where we think that having choice and the ability to exercise choice, even if I think it's a limited choice and a constrained choice under certain parameters that we haven't set, so is it really choice at all? But this idea of choice, whether that's of clothes, of partner, of job, and being able to flick between those choices that's us exercising
Starting point is 00:30:05 freedom and autonomy when i actually think a lot of the time what it is is just heightening uncertainty and precarity and not really kind of we're not really in control of our fates at all it's just these very limited choices you can make and i think that's why as well we you know you buy so many clothes because you can't control who owns your house so you feed the dopamine first of all with like in the first instance with buying clothes but it's also the only way you exercise you know this feeling of i have control of my own life um i'm going to engage more in like the leisure side where i do have this illusion of choice um i guess those are my initial thoughts what do you what do you want to pick up from that well so when you're talking about choice
Starting point is 00:30:47 not being the same thing as freedom, I also think about freedom and security. So I tend to be quite a security oriented person. And I think that's got to do with my upbringing. I think that's me having absorbed a lot of my mom's personality traits and I think it's also a response to a job where like I'm under I'm under like constant bombardment so what you want is a social world which feels very very secure and like very very
Starting point is 00:31:19 protecting um and I would say that my partner's like a little bit more on the freedom side he's all about curiosity exploration and what's really funny is when both of us in different ways I feel so secure that I suddenly feel really like constrained and like trapped uh trapped in my own choices and trapped in my own sense of responsibility in times where he's been like oh like I just went off for like quite a long time by myself and now feel lonely like no one could have no one could have foreseen this happening uh and so the way in which like you know there is this relationship you know the flip side of like freedom can be atomization and the flip side of security can be feeling really really trapped and I think that what society is doing is chipping away at the security
Starting point is 00:32:07 bit a lot more than it is chipping away at you know a particular idea of freedom right um and that freedom is the one to like you know choose between endless and infinite options which can also produce like choice paralysis or the choices don't feel so meaningful. So if you're choosing between like, you know, two things, and if you're choosing between a hundred things, well, maybe when you're choosing between two, both those things feel more valuable. And when you're choosing between a hundred, they feel a lot less valuable. And then when you're put in that context, context right when you're one of the things being chosen whether it's for a job or whether it's for a tenancy or whether it's for a relationship there's a feeling of being devalued yourself and I think that like wherever you sit on the kind of
Starting point is 00:32:56 freedom security spectrum I think that there are fundamental things that we all want and that we all need as human beings. One, we need social connection. Like there is no human that can survive without social connection. Two, we need to feel respected. So we need to feel that we are in a context where we are being treated with our full human dignity. And the third thing is to feel valued. So that's your important. It matters whether or not you're okay. It matters whether or not you're happy and actually making you happy is important to the people around you. And it's not just a solo endeavor and all the things that we're discussing whether that's like how you're being treated by your landlord or like how you're being treated on the apps or like you know an idea of relationships where it's all about throwing people away because like they've given you the ick or like you know you've you've you've crossed a boundary and I'm not saying boundaries are bad
Starting point is 00:34:06 or crossing boundaries is fine, but it's like there are all these tripwires and like you're just, you know, people are waiting for you to like, you know, trip one of the tripwires. I think that means that you don't feel respected. I think it means that you don't feel valued. And it also means that social connection
Starting point is 00:34:21 is a lot more tenuous. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I do know what you mean. Yeah, yeah absolutely i think it comes down as well to the idea that we don't have the same shared uh or agreed ways of communicating anymore and i'm talking about dating here again but you know when eva lewis talks about ritual she's talking about within courtship those specific rituals you went through like you'd go out and you'd you know when eva lewis talks about ritual she's talking about within courtship those specific rituals you went through like you'd go out and you'd you know and if you asked again that meant a certain thing it was loaded in say the 50s or whatever and i'm not saying this is better i'm just saying that there were connected and understood uh meanings to the ritual of courtship
Starting point is 00:35:01 that acted as sort of like a universalizing almost promise or understanding where you could be like okay if I've gone out with someone x amount of times and then they have to either like present me with this ring or they have to fuck off and those are obviously broken a lot like you had you know extramarital sex or um sex before marriage and all these different types of things but there were specific courtship rituals that people still engaged in if you read oral testimonies and histories from the past that comes up a lot whereas now because we exist as individuals with our individual boundaries and understandings of ourselves as islands with our own like ideas about how relationships go or
Starting point is 00:35:38 how we move through the world we don't have that connecting language of like courtship or relating relating to one another that's it that's what i'm looking for we had a shared understanding of interpersonal relations that wasn't you know perfect and blanket but it was more shared than it is now and i think that also is where the friction comes in in just general because we've all been sold this myth that we exist as individuals and that we are islands and we don't everything in society relies on other people and other things and infrastructure that connects us all that enmeshes us all and there's a really great bit in a really i mean
Starting point is 00:36:18 the whole book's great but noami klein great public radical thinker um of our, has written a new book called Doppelganger. And we've both interviewed her about it in different places. And there's a bit in it where she talks about the appeal of these, you know, what are led by far right people, coalitions. And I'm talking about coalitions like the Trump coalitions, coalitions that contain people that range from a hugely diverse backgrounds. It's the far right and the far out, she calls it. And it's, you know, people from say neo-Nazis or QAnon conspiracy theorists to wellness influencers or just like concerned mothers. And she's like, what connects this coalition? What is bringing them all together? What connects this coalition? What is bringing them all together?
Starting point is 00:37:03 And I was wondering this because I'm like, we belong to the left. And I found it difficult, at least in our times, to see those diverse coalitions brought together except on Palestine, which is one of the few movements where you really do see it. It's like, why are we not as good at building those coalitions anymore as they are? I think partly it's because we'd startedising around identity rather than worker, the shared status. We're organising around individual status. But what Naomi Klein
Starting point is 00:37:32 says is that these people look like they're organising as a collective, but really what they're doing is they're organising on the basis of themselves as individuals. What they're asking for is a right to individuality still and they're still upholding the status quo. Organising around the vaccines was all about protecting their own bodily autonomy
Starting point is 00:37:47 as individuals. Organising against, I don't know, migration or whatever. That's all about protecting. They're like, we're protecting, you know, the world is caving in and I want to protect my homestead and my family. If you listen to what they're really saying,
Starting point is 00:38:00 it's not like we want to organise as a collective for collective good. She says they are organizing against the promise of enmeshment they're organizing against things that seem to them like for the collective it is actually really a lot of bodies together acting as individuals hyper individuals which is why people like gym freaks and wellness influencers were so into the movement during covid because what they had removed access from and I really get this as a gym rat myself was not spaces like third spaces where you go and you are in conversation with other people but she talks about the gym as a space where you go and you're actually just in
Starting point is 00:38:34 conversation with yourself and your body and this aspiration of what your body can be the only time you talk to other people is like can I pick up this weight can I have this it's not really a connective space and you look at these in these individuals who come together and they're actually really all organizing around protecting themselves and their own interests and this is the lie that we are told I think which is that um we are all individuals and we only have to look out for ourselves and so long as you're happy and so long as you do this and that's why sometimes I feel bad about advice I give because I'm like you can't control another person you can only control yourself you can only control your reactions and it's true but I do think it reinforces this message that isn't true that is like you are here alone you're born alone you die alone and you have no
Starting point is 00:39:14 responsibility really to others except yourself and I think what we are railing against is the fact that every day the world is telling us this is not true the world is screaming at us the way you've been taught to live the the way your society is organised, the way that you've been told you can get happiness by being an individual and buying things and doing all this is not true. And it's making the world sicker. It's making you sicker. And everything we do is sort of like this fight
Starting point is 00:39:38 against really deeping that knowledge and the tragedy of it because that would make us feel helpless. Because again, we've been made to feel alone in our fights against these wider structures rather than in the collective so when you deep the knowledge that fuck we are really all enmeshed and we have to organize collectively but where do we even like where do we even fucking begin doing that how do we like bring these connections something and i'll just finish off by saying something i hear so much nowadays is when you're doing panels or um you know events where audiences asking questions to the speakers a lot of the stuff I do because I'm on the left tends to
Starting point is 00:40:11 invoke this idea of collective whether it's like organ making a co-op or like starting a campaign and the question I hear most is people asking speakers or myself how do you even start like how do you even start organizing with other people and what they're really saying is how do you connect other people in the first place and because it feels like such an impossible task and the two almost there's a fear that there's a fear of even doing it like how do i start without being rejected because we are so seeped in this knowledge of i am an individual that even the ones of us who proclaim not to believe it it's it's all it's like it's like all the other phobias we have, all the other isms that are ingrained in you from society,
Starting point is 00:40:48 like the things you have to unlearn. We have to unlearn being these individual people. And that's very hard because it's so fucking seductive to be like, I am a unique individual and I am responsible only to myself. And you know what? Like, I don't wanna throw the baby out with the bath water right like one of the powerful things about individualism can be a sense of one's own agency can be a sense of
Starting point is 00:41:12 making moral decisions which can take you in one direction or another i think that's really important because when you're going well the world is as it is and it makes me unhappy you do need that sense of agency in order to even consider the idea that you might be able to change it and I think that that's something which is you know profound and important I think when it comes to you know what what can we change in order to make it easier to bring people together there's lots that's outside of our control all right like the the cost of housing and rent you know in order to create a sort of base from which you can organize that's outside of your control but something which is within our control and something which I think that we all need to change
Starting point is 00:41:59 and I'm also pointing at myself here because I think that you know particularly in my 20s I was quite happy to participate in kind of like rounds of social shaming and I think now I just think like I contributed to a culture which created a pervasive sense of personal threat for everybody right if you're the person being pointed at if you're watching someone else being the one to be pointed at if you're the one doing the pointing it's a culture of such high personal threat and when you create culture of personal threat what happens like people become reactive people become defensive people want to be on the attack first in case it happens to them people
Starting point is 00:42:46 don't want to be ostracized and this is the one bit of evolutionary psychology i buy into evolutionary psychology where it's like it's all about mating i'm like bullshit but the bits where which are like this is about survival is that look at look at our bodies as human beings look how shit we are at like surviving the natural world don't have fur don't have claws don't have long teeth like eyesight not that great oh yeah you do have fangs but you've got you've got nothing nothing i'm a siberian tiger you got nothing like hearing not so great sense of smell not so great the one tool that we have for survival and it's worked very, very well has been cooperation, social cooperation and collaboration. And what it meant
Starting point is 00:43:34 to be socially ostracized would be to die. You're being like cast out of the tribe and you would literally die. And I think that when we create this context of like social shaming being so pervasive you are creating a fear like a low-level fear of like death all the time for people like I think it just goes like straight to you know our our most primitive brains and that doesn't get good reasonable rational behavior rational behavior out of people. And I think that the process of social shaming can also create the worst versions of people, you know? And I think that does contribute to people's, you know, radicalization. Yeah, responsibility comes into that, you know, a willingness to listen, a willingness that you know a willingness to listen a
Starting point is 00:44:26 willingness to learn a willingness to grow and change but we've also created an environment which is so unconducive to learning growing and changing and so I know that I've participated in that and that's something which I want to change I want to change people feeling so disposable I just feel that like my threshold for throwing someone away now that I'm 32 is higher than when I was like 25 or 26 yeah I'm thinking I'm thinking about the because obviously the context you talk from is one where you exist in specific left-wing circles where ostracization is also like political social and you're much more likely as well to see someone radicalized by that in in like a sense of they might go from you know talking about left-wing beliefs to like the complete opposite thing um because that is i
Starting point is 00:45:19 mean there's a really good episode if you guys want to know more about like radicalization in 15 minutes that isn't a boring way of being delivered there's a great vox episode on netflix that i watched which just basically boils down to the idea you can apply this to anything the idea of radical being someone being radicalized is basically they're ostracized by one community and they're taken in by another and what happens with radicalization is you're ostracized by the community that maybe holds the normative view and then the community that holds the extreme view because you might you know start questioning things or start saying stuff and then your community reacts really strongly because that is the knee-jerk thing it's like someone's saying something that is you know goes against the beliefs that we hold and values and that is like
Starting point is 00:45:58 threat threat threat threat I have to like shut this down now like I have to show this person is terrible um and I really understand that like as I say i've participated in this too but the problem is the way to make sure someone isn't radicalized is not to do that and it goes against everything in us um because as soon as you push them away they immediately go to where the warm arms are and go further down the rabbit hole because when you're part of the community you adopt those shared values like the whole point is like you fit in with the the like i don't know the dominant the dominant beliefs etc that's part of being the community um and when you and you don't question things that you might disagree with as much because it maybe would disrupt your worldview or your place in the
Starting point is 00:46:36 community and i don't mean that in a way of like it's all militant like stalin or whatever i mean just like that is just like general tenor. We tend to like let something slide and accept and talk about things we accept. Whereas when you're radicalized, you go and you go to like a new community and they're like, come in, come in. We won't treat you that way. We're really nice.
Starting point is 00:46:55 We'll listen to your questions. Oh, and then slowly but surely you just go further and further and adopt more of their beliefs. And the way to de-radicalize someone, unfortunately, is to keep them in a community and just like talk. And sometimes that, the problem is it's not like a one size fits all. You cannot sometimes stop that
Starting point is 00:47:09 process of radicalisation just through that talking and that love and care, but it's the only method. And when you watch this doc, it talks about that. But you're talking about that place of left-wingness. And I think in general, this idea of disposability, we can't community our way out of someone not replying to us on the apps. And it's all like, we can't community our way out of someone not replying to us in the apps and it's all like we can't community our way out of not buying more clothes and pretty things so it's like what are the ways it is because it also the answer unfortunately does come down to like making those individual choices in the first place like okay i'm looking for a dopamine hit because maybe deep maybe the underlying feeling is i am worried about the state of the world and dissatisfied and i feel totally um what's the word i feel totally hopeless and not optimistic
Starting point is 00:47:51 and i need a dopamine hit and you're not even realizing that's what's happening unconsciously but consciously like i'm gonna buy a new dress on pretty little thing i guess the question is how do you fit in the opposite action how do you fit in the action which is actually actually what i'm gonna do is text three of my friends and meet up for a coffee and we're going to sit and chat because people like people aren't going to do that i don't know i've been thinking a lot this past year about consumerism and like all the ways in which i'm invested in consumerism and all the ways in which people i know who are like very very very politically switched on are also so invested in consumerism it's me it's me do you like my hair I'm not saying that like you have to fucking like you know
Starting point is 00:48:36 live in like a burlap sack and you don't have to feel good and feel desirable but it's just like when the idea of what is desirable is so intimately connected to what you buy you've got to fucking break that you and and it does it does start with yourself and it does start with like training and coding different behaviors um speaking of training and coding different behaviors people have problems they need to be reprogrammed do you want to do you want to read a dilemma maybe two if you've got time this is i'm in big trouble which i always start by saying if i'm in big trouble which doesn't make any sense and i don't know why my brain my brain needs rewiring when it comes to that. Right, first dilemma. What are your slash people's attitudes in the London dating scene
Starting point is 00:49:30 towards someone who lives with their parents? Some background on me. I'm 27, living with my parents in London. While I enjoy freelancing, it doesn't offer the stability I need to move out. To achieve this, I'm aiming for a full-time job with a consistent income. However, finding the right one has been challenging because of my field being so saturated with applicants and that in itself is makes me lose faith if i'm ever going to move out i'm halfway to being an adult to being 28 and i feel like a failure because i don't even feel like an adult because i can't even bring a
Starting point is 00:49:58 date home or have a space of my own and the dilemma ends what do you think do you want to go first oh do i want to go first um what do i think about this dilemma i think it's so difficult it's we've talked about this before in that you are your choice back to choices but you're everybody got choices everyone's choice our choices then choice is the main way to freedom. But we are, okay, the messaging you have in society now, back in the day, you living with your parents would not be, you know, at 27 maybe it would be a cause for concern, but like it wouldn't really be seen as weird if you as an adult you're living with your parents. You would only move out when you got married. So you actually did a bit of nostalgia there. But now the way to realize
Starting point is 00:50:47 adulthood is through this idea of autonomy and living independently. And we've got this model where if you're not living outside the house, you somehow failed. But at the same time, society has made it so that it's... Or the economic state of Britain has made made it so it's actually really fucking hard to live outside of the family home uh at a higher frequency than it was in the past because rents are sky high especially if you're in london if you don't have that generational wealth you're not going to get a flat bought for you or you know money given to you to buy a flat or unless you have a really you know high powered job and it what you've said is you know you're freelancing and you're doing good you're in some sort of field that doesn't pay a
Starting point is 00:51:31 hundred grand a year and you can't afford a flat and the rental crisis is also going to be really um impacting that so for even forgetting like the idea of like dating and whether anyone will want you i think this is about how you feel towards yourself because you started like what are your you know what people's attitudes in the london dating scene towards someone who lives with their parents well obviously there's no one-size-fits-all answer to that but you end by saying you feel like a failure and that's really what this dilemma is about it's your own feelings of you've somehow failed because you haven't managed to game the economic system and this is this is also a problem because we only see the winners i think if you're someone who's young and plugged in on social media the only people you see are the
Starting point is 00:52:11 people like the people who live with their parents or whatever don't tend to talk about it as much or it's not like that's not something that's aspirationally fetishized on in the influencer world or the pictures you take we only see the highlights real we you know that's mentioned a lot and you don't see like someone who's living at home and grinding you only hear afterwards when they're like oh i had to live with my parents for four years but now i've bought this house and it's amazing you only see the end of the journey you don't see the actual journey so you will be looking around all this stuff and only perceiving like i'm a failure because i haven't got to the end of this journey or I haven't you know managed to leave my parents home but god the problem is now you you don't we've been we
Starting point is 00:52:51 again we were told that you could have all this choice and you'd be able to do everything you ever wanted which means living independently while also earning money and doing the job that you love most in the world and having an amazing relationship and guess what that's not true that's literally not possible under the neoliberalism that we've been saddled with by our politicians. These were, sorry, we've been lied to. We've been fucking lied to. And that's what creates a void in our lives where we have to feel like we have to buy stuff because we don't have a sense of either spirituality that holds us together and gives us direction in our life all we have is consuming and buying and you
Starting point is 00:53:25 know material possessions and that will make you feel like a failure if you can't attain any of the trappings of that lifestyle but even the people who have that shit don't feel spiritually whole at the end of the day anyway ash i'm sure i'm sure you have other things to add to this i mean no i think i think that's completely true and that, um, disjuncture between what your expectations are and what the economic realities are is massive. So you're being told where you should be independent and you should be living this life where you're like dating can bring people back. And, you know, you, you live in a, in a flat by yourself or maybe a house share, but actually what's available and you've, you done everything right and you've you know
Starting point is 00:54:05 gotten the degree and suddenly there's like no jobs in your field like you're living at home there being a massive mismatch between what is seen as aspirational and what is actually possible like that's where low self-esteem and feelings of personal failure come in and they're not they're not your failures um I suppose maybe to give some advice about how to cope with the place that you're at the first thing is that you know the reason why you're saying oh well what what are people's attitudes to you know someone who lives with their parents I mean I think it's increasingly normal I mean when I was 26 27 I was living at home um and I think the bit which feels sticky icky is that when you are living by yourself or you're in a house share for the most part your dating and sexual decisions are just your own you don't really have to think that much about
Starting point is 00:55:06 how they look to other people whereas here there is the dimension of your parents being there so I think it's less so about what does your date think of the parents it's much more about what do your parents make of the date and what does you know what do your parents make of your dating and sexual behavior and will they be making comments or do they have particular ideas about what is or isn't okay and I think the only way to deal with that if you can is to kind of sit down with your parents and talk about it and you have to you have to take some of that fear and some of that sting out and say like you know I do want to be dating but I'm kind of you know I'm kind of worried about you know you guys um not just having perceptions but expressing them to me in a way that makes me feel like very very surveilled and
Starting point is 00:55:56 like kind of trapped and so if you can like opening up that conversation a bit um to sort of say like you know what what is a way I can do this in a way that feels like respectful to you guys in your home but also allows me a degree of like freedom and independence and yeah open that up if you can um it's interesting because a friend of mine was in this situation not that long ago she was dating a guy who lived with his parents and she lives alone and so he was always at her house which she didn't mind but then she was like I guy who lived with his parents and she lives alone and so he was always at her house which she didn't mind but then she was like I feel so not a part of your life and I think because he was living with his parents he was just like no like you know I I want an independent life
Starting point is 00:56:37 and not one which automatically involves my family like if you if you come and stay at mine it's just like no no no and it ended up not working out and i think that was that was one of the reasons it wasn't that he lived with his parents it's that because he lived with his parents he completely shut her out from his life and his world and it felt really uneven so the thing that i would say is that the thing which i think can be like harmful for like dating and relationships is perhaps not the fact you live with your parents it's how you relate to that fact um and like the way you maybe internalize a feeling of like failure or a sense of shame or sense of low self-esteem because of it and then the behaviors which which pile up on top of that
Starting point is 00:57:21 um but yeah that's my advice I think I think we've got to end things here, Moya, because we are way over time. But maybe next week we can do two dilemmas. Yeah, I would love to do two dilemmas. I think we owe them two dilemmas. We'll do two. We're always way over time, Ash, because we love to yap.
Starting point is 00:57:39 We're little yappers. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. Okay, well, we'll end the yapping here for now. But if you stay tuned for another round of yapping in a week uh same time same place see you next tuesday oh rude bye Bye.

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