Something You Should Know - Weird Things That Really Affect Your Health & Do You Work to Live or Live to Work?

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

People claim to get great ideas in the shower. But is that a real thing? Is there something about taking a shower that can actually generate ideas and solutions? Listen as this episode begins with some interesting research about the power of a shower. https://www.headspace.com/articles/shower-epiphanies You are about to amazed at some of the unusual and random things that can affect your health in significant ways. Things like your birthday, if there is EZ Pass on a highway nearby, if there is a parade or a race through the streets of your town – all these things can impact your health and wellbeing in ways you can’t imagine. How so, you ask? That is what Anupam B. Jena is here to explain. Bapu, as he is called, is a medical doctor, economist, Harvard professor, host of the podcast Freakonomics M.D. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-m-d/id1577556965 and author of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health (https://amzn.to/3Y54hF4). You can certainly make the case that we are and have been a career-focused culture. So much of our identity and self-worth gets wrapped up in what we do for a living – our job. Is that a good thing? Maybe for some but not for everyone according to Simone Stolzoff. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED and numerous other publications. He is also author of the book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work (https://amzn.to/44MYZjI). Listen as he explains the downside of always looking for the perfect job sacrificing other aspects of your life for the sake of your career. He then offers an alternate way to look at work and life. How can brushing your teeth help you lose weight? It’s all about WHEN you brush them. Listen as I explain how good dental hygiene can reduce the size of your waistline. https://www.popsci.com/does-brushing-your-teeth-affect-your-appetite/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Take a bite out of summer with HelloFresh! From chef-crafted seasonal recipes to their new Fresh & Fit summer menu, HelloFresh brings flavor right to your door. Go to https://HelloFresh.com/something50 and use code something50 for 50% off plus free shipping! For the first time in NetSuite’s 25 years as the #1 cloud financial system, you can defer payments of a FULL NetSuite implementation for six months! If you’ve been sizing NetSuite up to make the switch then you know this deal is unprecedented - no interest, no payments - take advantage of this special financing offer at https://NetSuite.com/SYSK ! Now, your ideas don't have to wait, now, they have everything they need to come to life. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen - right now! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match U.S. Cellular knows how important your kid’s relationship with technology is, so they’ve made it their mission to help them establish good digital habits early on! That’s why they’ve partnered with Screen Sanity, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids navigate the digital landscape. For a smarter start to the school year, U.S. Cellular is offering a free basic phone on new eligible lines, providing an alternative to a smartphone for children. Visit https://USCellular.com/BuiltForUS ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why do people seem to get great ideas in the shower? Then the strangest things that can impact your health, like your birthday, if your doctor's out of town, and this is weird, if there's's out of town, and this is weird, if there's E-ZPass on a highway near you. It's totally random, right?

You live in an area, you don't move there thinking, oh, there's this new technology called E-ZPass that's going to be introduced. But it does get introduced, and if you look at infant mortality in areas when E-ZPass gets introduced, mortality falls. Also, how brushing your teeth can help you lose weight. And are we too focused on job and career? Should we maybe look at our work differently? The idea is to, rather than starting with work at the center and thinking about how our life can support work, we start with our vision of what is a life well lived and think about how our career

and our work can support that vision. All this today on Something You Should Know. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening

in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Something you should know.

Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. Thank you for joining me today for another episode of Something You Should Know. You often hear people talk about how they get good ideas in the shower, and I sometimes think that's where I get good ideas, or at least I get clarity on a problem. But is this a real thing, getting good ideas in the shower? Apparently so, according to research from Drexel University. They put showering to the test and found it to be one of the most effective problem-solving techniques out there.

In the shower, your attention naturally broadens and mental barriers tend to fade. Showering shuts down sensory stimulation from the outside world and puts you in a state that is similar to meditation. If you focus on the issue at hand in the shower, chances are you'll conjure up some more creative solutions than you would almost anywhere else. And that is something you should know. While there are a lot of things you do deliberately that can impact your health, good or bad, there are also a lot of things

affecting your health that you have no idea about. These are random occurrences, chance events, things like when you're born, whether or not there's a parade or some other event in your town today, whether the highway near you has toll booths or E-ZPass, all these things affect people's health. And you're probably thinking, what in the world is he talking about? Well, give me a second here to introduce you to a really interesting guy. His name is Dr. Anupam B. Jena. He is an economist, but also a medical doctor, Harvard professor, and he is host of the podcast FreakonomicsMD. He's also author of a fascinating book called Random Acts of Medicine, and he goes by the name of Bapu.

Hey, Bapu, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So to get people on board here, give an example of one of these random chance events, random acts of medicine things that you would never imagine that affect people's health. I think my favorite example is a story from my wife. She ran a race a few years ago and asked me to watch her on the race route. And I couldn't get to the place where I wanted to park, which happened to be the hospital where I work. It was on the race route and I couldn't get there because the roads were blocked.

And I see her a few hours later, and she says to me, well, what happened to everybody that needed to get to the hospital that day? And I was like, hmm, good question. So what we showed in the study, which is something that we write about in the book, is that when a city hosts a marathon, the mortality rate for people who have a heart condition, an older person, not someone running the marathon, goes up about 15% on the exact day of the marathon compared to all the surrounding days in that city. And the reason why is because the roads are closed and ambulances and people who are driving, people who need to get to the hospital can't get there fast enough. So it's a

random act or a chance occurrence because you don't choose to have your heart attack on any particular day if you're a 75-year-old American. It just happens. And it's chance that it happened on the day of a marathon, but that chance occurrence led to a delay in care, and we show a 15% increase in mortality. Well, and has anybody gone to the powers that be and say, you know, we have a problem here. People are dying because of our race, and they do something about it, or that's just it is what it is? Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it is what it is. And when this paper came out a few years ago, we published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it came out actually the week of the Boston Marathon. And so the Boston EMS crews are aware of this problem.

They try to adjust by locating ambulances in certain areas on both sides of the route, but still it's a huge problem because it's 26 miles or more that's blocked, and you cannot bisect the route to get from one place to another. If the quote-unquote good hospital is on the other side of the route, how are you going to get there? And we talked to a bunch of cities, EMS agencies, and they weren't even aware of the problem. So I wish I could tell you that A, they were aware of it, and B, that they were doing something about it, but they certainly weren't aware of it. And I don't think that they were doing a lot about it. Well, see, that's such a great example of and that's probably why you chose it because that's a random act that really like kills people yeah yeah i mean i like i met a woman a few years ago giving a talk

and she came up to me um it was a huge audience she came up to me afterwards and she says you know i've got this problem um a problem with my colon that predisposes me to have bleeding. And she was at work one day and she had a gastrointestinal bleed. She called the ambulance. There was a marathon right outside her workplace and the ambulance couldn't get to her. And so she called her grandma, who's like a 75-year-old woman who basically drove, who lived nearby her work, who drove a minivan on the sidewalk. People had to move out. Picked up her granddaughter, which was the woman, rushed her to the hospital. And by the time she got to the hospital, her heart had actually stopped. So she had what we call cardiac arrest. And she lived to tell me the story.

So you say that babies born in Pennsylvania and New Jersey after E-ZPass was introduced are less likely to be born premature. How could that – what? Yeah, it's totally randomized. So this is some work by economists named Janet Curry and Reed Walker. And basically what they were interested in trying to figure out is how does pollution impact health. And it seems like an obvious question to study, but it's not obvious how you study it. So if you look at areas that are heavy polluted versus areas that are not, you can't just compare outcomes, health outcomes in those two places because the populations of people who live

in those areas are very different. And you can't then say it's the pollution that's causing health outcome that's bad. Could be all sorts of other different risk factors in those two different groups. So their insight was let's look at how EZ Pass was differentially introduced across different cities, across different points in time, and what EZ Pass does is it allows cars who were previously just, you know, stalling on highways emitting pollutants to now go through the toll booth faster, and the local pollutants are less as a result of that because there's not that congestion. And if you look at infant mortality in areas when E-ZPass gets introduced, mortality falls and they link it to a reduction

in pollutants. So sort of a clever way to get at this question of how does air quality affect health. It's totally random, right? You live in an area, you don't move there thinking, oh, there's this new technology called E-ZPass that's going to be introduced. But it does get introduced randomly in your area versus another. And your, you know, child's outcomes might matter, might depend on the introduction. I was reading just before we started talking about this idea that, you know, presidents live, have a shorter life expectancy or they live a couple years less than their runner up than the runner up. But there's a lot of professions that that seem to impact longevity. So talk about that. Yeah.

So if you look at photos of President Obama or Clinton back in the day, you know, they grade considerably. And I think you would look at that and say, well, wow, is it the stress of being in office that's leading these two men to have a lot more gray hairs than they started with, more than you would expect for eight years of aging? And it's possible, right? Being president or prime minister is an enormously stressful job and the lifestyle is very difficult, all things that might accelerate your aging. But it's a hard question to study because if you look at the presidents or prime ministers, they live longer than the general population and that shouldn't

be a surprise, right? They come from different educational groups. They're very typically wealthy. So it's just a whole different ballgame. You can't make that comparison. So what we said is, all right, is there a natural control group, a group of people who could have been presidents or could have been prime ministers, but for the flip of a coin, almost randomly by chance, did not. And so that's what we did. We compared presidents and prime ministers and chancellors, the country's leaders, to runners up in the elections. And what we see is that being elected, the leader of a country shaves off about two and a half years worth of life. So it does speak to this idea that running a country can be stressful and have an impact on your health. But that's as close as you get to a real answer, right? I mean, it's more of a generic-y, it must be the stress of the job. That's right, correct. Because, you know,

the way in medicine that we would solve this problem, if we wanted to figure out cause and effect, we would say we take a bunch of people and we randomize some of them to be a world leader and randomize a bunch not to. And because we've randomized the two groups, they're basically going to be similar on average, but only differ by the exposure to being a leader of a country versus not. Now, no one would ever do that in a democracy, right? But, you know, think about elections. They're basically 50-50. So it's almost by chance that someone is exposed to the life of being a leader of a country versus not.

Now, is it the stress? Is it the lifestyle, meaning lots of hours? Is it what they eat, the lack of exercise, all these other things that have an impact? It's impossible to say. But what we think is happening, it is the cumulative effect of being a leader of a country, whether it's stress of financial markets, stress of war, diet, lifestyle, all those things combined, we can't say. All of these random act things are really interesting, but you pick one of your favorites that you found in the research. All right. So let me tell you one of my favorite ones. This is something that I

experienced as I'm a medical doctor and also an economist. And when I was in training here in one of the Boston teaching hospitals, I happened to be working in the cardiac intensive care unit during the dates that cardiologists have these national conventions. So there's two conventions that are big. One's called the American Heart Association and the other is called the American College of Cardiology. And these are enormous scientific conventions that lots of cardiologists go to. And I remember being in the hospital as a young trainee thinking, hmm, the staffing just feels a little bit different here. And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it made me wonder whether or not people who are hospitalized with heart conditions would have worse outcomes during the dates of

these meetings because all the cardiologists were out of town. And so I dug into the data, and what I found was actually the opposite. What you see, I'm just going to pick cardiac arrest. It's a life-threatening condition. To give you some numbers, 70% of people who have a cardiac arrest who are lucky enough to make it to the hospital, 70% of people are dead within 30 days. So it's enormously life-threatening condition. If you happen to have a cardiac arrest, though, on the day of one of these two cardiology meetings or in the few days surrounding it, your mortality falls from 70% to 60%. And to give you a sense of the magnitude, that reduction in mortality is larger than what you get by taking aspirins,

blood pressure medications, cholesterol medications, having a stent put in your heart. If you had a heart attack, all those things, you put them together, they don't generate that same magnitude of mortality benefit as we observe for people who, again, by chance, randomly happen to have a heart attack when all the cardiologists are out of town. And the last thing of that piece of the puzzle that we found out was that there is something about the intensity of care that changes. It actually looks like it's lower during the dates of those meetings, maybe because there's less cardiologists around to do procedures or to do more invasive medical things. And so it suggests to us that at least for some group of people, reducing the intensity of medical care that they receive could actually be better for them.

An idea that we sometimes say less is more. Isn't that amazing? So maybe you should just leave people alone. Yeah, sometimes. The way I describe this or I think about it is imagine there's two people. One is a 40-year-old guy who is a construction worker, and let's say his only advice is that he smokes. Otherwise, no other medical problems. And he has a heart, he has chest pain when he's at the construction site, and he gets taken to the emergency department,

and they do an EKG, and it shows that he's having a heart attack. What happens? He's going to get taken to the cardiac catheterization lab where someone will put in a stent and he'll recover and he'll go home in maybe a couple of days and live a long, happy life. Then you've got a nine-year-old woman who has the exact same chest pain when she's at her nursing home. She gets brought to the emergency department. She has the exact same EKG, but on top of her chest pain, she also has seven or eight different medical problems. She's on a number of different medications, but because she had a quote-unquote heart attack, she also receives a stent, but then she passes away two weeks later from complications of the procedure. Now, that

kind of story in medicine, we see all the time, and it's disheartening to see that. But these two people had the same quote-unquote condition, but their likelihood of benefit was so different from the procedure. And so for her, maybe if we had not done the procedure, she would have done better. And so that idea that less is more, we've started to kind of understand that there's a lot of instances where we probably over-involve ourselves in the medical care of somebody. We're discussing how random events, chance occurrences, can impact people's health significantly.

And my guest is Dr. Bapu Jena. He is host of the podcast Freakonomics MD and author of the book, Random Acts of Medicine. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com

to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Bapu, you say that kids born in August are more likely to get the flu than kids born in September.

And that just makes no sense to me. Yeah, this is totally random. And this is also based on a story of mine. We have got two kids. A few years ago, one of them was three years old, our son, and I took him to the pediatrician's office in August for his three-year-old checkup, and anybody who has kids would know that you go for your annual checkup for your kid around their birthday. So he's got an August birthday.

I took him for his three-year-old checkup for your kid around their birthday. So he's got an August birthday. I took him for his three-year-old checkup in August. And I'm walking out the door, and the nurse says to me, oh, come back in a few weeks. We'll have the flu shot ready for your son. And I was like, huh. Had my son just been born two or three weeks later, I would have gotten the flu shot in the office. But because of his birthday, I had to actually come back to the office. And I probably,

Mike, I probably spent hours trying to arrange it because all the flu shot appointments filled up. I couldn't take him to a CVS or Walgreens where you can go as you're, if you're an adult. And finally, I was able to get him a flu shot, but it got me wondering, you know, maybe kids with these summer birthdays, because they go to their pediatrician's office before the flu shot is actually available in doctor's offices, that happens around late August or early September, they might be less likely to get the flu shot because it's not just automatically given to them when they're at their doctor's office. And if you look at the data, kids who have, let's say, October birthdays, they're about 15 percentage points more likely to get the flu shot than a kid with, let's say, a July birthday,

simply because they go for their three-year-old checkup or four-year-old checkup in October. The vaccine is already available in the office, and the pediatrician says, well, you're here, just get the vaccine, just done. And then no surprise, those summer born kids who are less likely to get the flu shot, they're also more likely to get the flu. And their family members, we show in the data, their family members are also more likely to get the flu because it's infectious. Just because they don't have to come back for a second visit to get the shot. Exactly, yeah. I mean, think about in medicine and in healthcare, we think a lot about why it is that people don't get the health outcomes that we want them to get. And there's so many factors, things like insurance coverage. We spend a lot of time thinking about the cost of care. One of the things that we don't think about as much

is the sort of the non-financial cost of care or the convenience, right? The time it takes a parent to take their child to the doctor's office, it can be half a day. So if you've got a busy job or your job doesn't let you do that, you're not going to take your child to the doctor, you know, without giving it some thought. Or if you live in a major city and the hospital is in the city and the parking is $20, on the margin, that's going to make you less likely to want to go to the doctor for yourself or for your child unless you absolutely need to. So, there's all these other things that affect access to care and health outcomes that we don't really think about. Yeah.

Well, I've often thought about that just because, like you say, if you need to go to the doctor for something really simple, like a flu shot, depending on what it is, maybe not the flu shot, but how often have you had to wait an hour past your appointment time because the doctor's bit? And so you, it starts to build up in your head is this is going to take half the day. And it does take that year. For example, for our kids, when I, my job is fortunately more flexible than my wife's, but anytime we've got an appointment for the kids, I literally block

out half a day on the calendar because I know if I get out in less than half a day, I'm lucky and I'm considered a blessing. But typically, it's a full ordeal. You've got to drive there. You've got to park. There's often delays. You've got to come back home. So it all takes a lot of time. And I don't think we fully appreciate how much convenience and access or accessibility matters for getting medical care.

There's something you write about that I think is so interesting, and it's that cognitive bias thing about a person's age. So explain how that works in medicine. The way I describe it is if you go to the store and you see a bag of Doritos that's $1.99, you might think to yourself, why is it $1.99 and not $2? And the reason why is because of a cognitive bias that human beings fall victim to, which is called left digit bias. It's the tendency of the mind to focus on the leftmost digit in a string of numbers. So $1.99 is technically cheaper than $2. It's only a penny cheaper, but it feels much more cheap because of that one. The one's like, oh, this is a $1-ish item versus a $2-ish item. And that sort of thing that leads a car salesman to say that the car should be, you know, $9,999 as opposed to $10,000, that same sort of

trick. You might not think that it applies to medicine and to a high-stakes physician like cardiac surgery, but it turns out that it does. So if you look at patients, look at people who have a heart attack, and they come to the hospital, and let's say they're 79 years old and 51 weeks, they are more likely to be offered a cardiac bypass surgery than someone who is 80 years old and one week, literally just two weeks apart. And the reason why is because the older that patients are, the less likely doctors are to want to intervene on them

in a sort of invasive way. So you see a patient who's 80 years old in a week, oh, this person's in their quote-unquote 80s. You see a person who is 79 years old in 50 weeks, oh, this person is in their quote-unquote 70s. And so because this person's in their 80s, maybe I don't want to recommend a cardiac bypass surgery. And so that same behavior that you see in grocery store pricing tactics

also applies to a decision-making process that cardiac surgeons go through. And the really interesting thing is that the people who are 79 years old and 50 weeks or 51 weeks who are more likely to be offered the cardiac bypass surgery, their mortality rate a year later is no different, even though they're about 20% more likely to get the surgery. So it suggests that on the margin, those people who are receiving a cardiac bypass surgery, it's a major surgery, they don't do any better than the people who just turned 80 who are 20% less likely to get the surgery. Well, I love these kind of conversations where two disciplines, economics and medicine collide and reveal all these things that nobody ever knew. I've been

speaking with Dr. Anupam B. Jena. He is an economist and medical doctor, Harvard professor. He's host of the podcast Freakonomics MD and author of the book Random Acts of Medicine. And there's a link to the podcast and to the book in the show notes. Thanks, Bapu. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure and look forward to connecting later. Bumble knows

it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not.

With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. People who listen to something you should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.

A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. It's safe to say that for many of us, work, our job, our career, it's a big part of life. When you meet people, one of the first questions is, so what do you do for a living?

We identify, or at least many of us do, with our job. We often create a personal life around our job because a job can take you to a different part of the country. It can eat up a lot of your time and attention. And many of us have grown up believing that the way to a good life is to work hard, grow in your career, and that work is what will fulfill you. Yet more and more people are questioning that thinking. Should we put career first and everything else second? One person who has explored this topic thoroughly is Simone Stolzhoff. Simone is an independent journalist and consultant whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. And he is author of a book called The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work.

Hi, Simone. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me, Mike. So I imagine other people have said this, and when I first saw the book, the title of your book, and I thought, well, you know, here's a guy that's like telling people to lower their sights, don't shoot for the stars, settle. And it's not that. And how is it not that? No, you know, even just looking at the title of the book, The Good Enough Job, it would be easy to assume that it's this slacker manifesto that's letting workers off the hook and letting them kind of sit on their couches and relax. But in fact, it's about just right-sizing

work's role in our life. And so I argue that the best benefit that we can have for our lives, both in and out of the office, is if we diversify our identities beyond just what we do for work. I have no problems with doing excellent work or striving to find a job that aligns with your interests. It just becomes risky when work is the sole source of meaning and identity in your life. There has been and always has been, I remember, you know, when you get, when you're looking at graduating from school, there's this idea of what do you want to do? You know, what's your dream job, you need to like, find a path and follow it. And, and it kind of becomes all

consuming that that's what you live for. Yeah, and it starts even earlier when we start asking children what they want to be when they grow up. You know, I think it's nothing new to conflate our identity with our profession. If your last name is Miller or Baker, you might know this firsthand. But in the last 40 years or so, with the decline of other sources of meaning and identity, things like organized religion and neighborhood and community groups, work has come to fill an outsized role. It's something people are looking to not just for a paycheck, but also for their primary source of identity and community and meaning. And this is our burden that our jobs are not always designed to bear.

But then how did they get to be that way? Yeah, you know, there's a few different ways in. One is the consequences of losing work, particularly in the U.S., are so dire when, for example, we tie our health care to our employment status. Then there's sort of the upside of work, you know, the way that our economic system is set up in this country, starting from early days when sort of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic entwined to form our country's DNA into our current tax structure that allows people to consolidate more wealth with the more hours they work. But the one I really focus on is the sort of idolization of

the dream job. And it's no wonder, you know, with the decline of some of these other sources of identity and community, people are turning to where they spend the majority of their time. Certainly an office can be a social hub. It can be a great source of meaning or a vehicle for making a difference in the world. But as so many people found out during the pandemic, if your job is your sole source of identity and you lose your job, what's left? Yeah, I've always found it interesting that people so identify with their work. I mean, I do. I mean, I have a successful podcast. I'm the host of a pretty successful podcast, but I also, I also like to cook. I'm a husband and a father. I like to travel. I play ping pong pretty well. But nobody wants to hear that. Or nobody, when they ask, what do you do, wants to hear about my ping pong playing. They want to know about the podcast, what I do for a living, what makes me money. People identify with what they do to make money. Yeah.

And even when we define success, you know, we rarely mean someone is happy or healthy. When we say someone is successful, we mean that they've made a lot of money. In addition to the sort of extreme case of losing your job, I think there are also a few other risks, one of which is just the expectations that we put on our jobs. So even the title of the book, The Good Enough Job, is an allusion to this theory that was devised in the mid-20th century by this British pediatrician named Donald Winnicott. And Winnicott was observing how there was this growing idolization of parenting in England where he lived in sort of the 1950s, 1960s. And these parents were hoping to be the perfect parent. They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any negative emotion or harm.

And then when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or sad or angry, the parent took it extremely personally. They thought it was a reflection of their own shortcomings. And Winnicott proposed an alternative. He said, rather than thinking about trying to be the perfect parent, what if you could try and be the good enough parent, or more specifically, the good enough mother was the title of the book. And he thought with this approach that valued sufficiency over perfection, both the kid and the parent would benefit. The kid would learn how to self-soothe and take care of some of their own issues,

and the parents wouldn't lose themselves in their children's emotions. So obviously, I'm making a direct parallel to the working world. And I think part of what creates so much disappointment and suffering are these sky high expectations that we have for our jobs, that they should always be perfect, that they should be free of tedium or the mundane aspects that exist in any line of work. So there's that sort of expectations argument. And the third is just the neglection of other aspects of who we are. You know, certainly we are more than just workers. We are neighbors and friends and citizens. But, you know, the psychologist Esther Perel has this great phrase, too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work and bring the leftovers home. What does it look like? You've painted the picture of what things are and how people

kind of are very focused, centric on their job. In your view, what's the better picture look like? So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of their investments, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. It might sound simplistic, but if we want to derive meaning outside of work, we have to do other things than work. So it's a little bit difficult to think about how you can deprioritize work. But as an alternative, I advocate for sort of prioritizing the other aspects of your life, finding space in your days, in your weeks, in your months where work is not an option, and filling those spaces with other relationships, activities, behaviors that reinforce other identities.

And when you talk about the good enough job, what is a good enough job? In short, I think a good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be. That definition is sufficiently vague, but what I like about it is it's subjective. So you get to define what good enough means to you. Perhaps it's a job for one person that pays a certain income or is in a certain industry or has a certain job title. But perhaps for someone else, it's a job that is more of a means to an end, a job that gets off at a certain hour so they can pick up their kids from elementary school or allows them to go on that weekend bike ride that they so crave. The idea is to, rather than starting with work at the center

and thinking about how our life can support work, we start with our vision of what is a life well lived and think about how our career and our work can support that vision. Which sounds great, but I imagine if you've lived the other way for a while, it's very hard to do that. It's not a simple, like, it's kind of like, where do you even put, put your toe in the water there? Yeah, definitely. You know, I interviewed the psychologist and she told me that she sees a lot

of sort of ambitious type A folks. And when she encourages them to try things other than work, they say, okay, I've got it. I'm going to sign up for an Ironman, or I'm going to try and read 52 books this year. And in many ways, they just convert their leisure into another form of work. And so what she advocates for is starting small, thinking about how you can find a weekly friend date where you can have breakfast with your best friend, or to invest in learning a new language or an instrument, not to become a master or fluent just for the joy of the actual learning process itself. It's in these little votes of our attention and our energy that we

can begin to derive meaning in other forms. One of the problems with a work-centric existence is it doesn't just take our best time, but our best energy as well. And it's no wonder why so many people go home and all they have the energy to do is to turn off their brains and to maybe turn on Netflix and nothing against Netflix. But if we want to derive meaning and other sources of our lives, we have to actively find forms of leisure that can nourish us, that can give us the relationships and meaning and community that actually reinforces these different parts of who we are. I get what you're saying, and it makes perfect sense, but why can't you do all these things and also have a great, perfect job?

I don't think it has to be at the expense of having a job you enjoy. I just think the expectations of a job being perfect are unrealistic, and especially for young people where we tell them messages like, the only way to do great work is to do what you love. And if you haven't found what you love, keep searching, never settle. Or, you know, WeWork, the co-working space plasters always do what you love on the walls of their offices. It just creates this system, this belief that there's something perfect waiting there for me. And if I haven't found it, I should be spending all of my

energy trying to find it rather than thinking about a more balanced point of view where some people do what they love for work and other people do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble. I think we live in a culture that loves to revere people whose identities and their jobs neatly align. And the truth is the majority of people don't work to self-factualize. They work to survive and they really find more meaning and love outside of their jobs. I remember talking to Mike Rowe about this idea of, you know, you go to a four-year college and then you get some big professional career underway.

And that just leaves out a huge percentage of people who have no interest in that at all. And they do very well in more what you would call blue-collar jobs, you know, mechanics, air conditioning, those kind of jobs. And it's not that those people are lying in bed at night thinking about air conditioning and fixing cars. It's their job. And that's what they do. But they have other things in life. And that that is a lot of people, a big percentage of people. Yeah, you know, the research shows that people who have more obsessive passion for what they do, often burn out at a higher rate. And people who have wider, what researchers call more self-complexity, who have cultivated other sides of who they are, tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes sense if you have tethered

your sense of self-worth to your work and you have a bad day at the office or your boss says something disparaging, it can spill over into all the other facets of your life and you have a bad day at the office or your boss says something disparaging, it can spill over into all the other facets of your life if you haven't cultivated other parts of who you are. The research also shows that people who have more diverse interests and hobbies tend to be more creative problem solvers and innovative. I think we're entering this new age, especially with knowledge work, where there isn't always a direct relationship with the number of hours you put in and the quality of the output that you get out. And so I think many people are learning both from these clinical

trials and these four-day workweek experiments that actually cultivating our lives outside of the office can not only make us more well-rounded humans, but better workers, too. We've talked before on this podcast about this whole idea of, you know, follow your passion and the money will follow. And that the fact is that a lot of people, probably most people, don't have a passion that then translates into some career. You could be passionate about cooking or coin collecting or bicycling, but it's tough to turn that passion into a job that's going to pay you money. You may have passions, but that doesn't make them necessarily good careers. For most people, passion is the result of expertise, not the cause of it.

We work hard at something, and through that hard work, we develop a passion for what we're doing rather than the other way around. And in a recent op-ed that I wrote for The Times, I argued that passion or this kind of labor of love ethic can often be treated by employers as a stand in for fair pay or fair compensation or job security. It can be used as sort of air cover to cover up exploitation that exists in many of these creative or mission-driven or prestigious fields. And so, you know, for young people in particular, as they're thinking about different paths to choose, I always try and encourage them to develop expertise, to try and find a skill that they can really cultivate. In the words of Cal Newport, try to be so good that

they can't ignore you and the passion will follow. Well, I've always found it interesting too, that, you know, we ask kids in high school, you know, or younger, what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, how would they know? They haven't experienced anything that would give them any clue other than some sort of maybe intrinsic skill, like they're a good artist or a good, you know, whatever. But they have no sense of what's out there. And to make them come up with an answer to that question seems somewhat ridiculous to me. Yeah, and even most of the most interesting adults that I know have had meandering careers.

You know, this idea of what do you want to be assumes this sort of static state that once you maybe get a law degree or become a doctor, that defines you. But for the majority of most interesting adults that I know, some really identify with what they do for work and others don't. Others really get meaning from the community organization that they're a part of, or the recreational softball team, or their identity as a parent or as a grandparent. And I think limiting who someone is to their job title is a failure of imagination. And I think we're pushing that expectation on young people to younger and younger ages as a sort of professionalization of school starts to creep into not just high school, but middle school and elementary school too.

One thing I've always found interesting is if you ask people who are fairly far along in their career, how did they end up there? How did they get into that career? It's very often very happenstance, chance events, or, you know, maybe it's a business their father or mother were in, or that it's not this planned, you know, straight line. It's often just life happens and here you are. And one of the most interesting things that I'm taking away from the reporting process is interviewing and spending time with people who are very quote unquote successful. You know, they've achieved all of what David Brooks would call the resume virtues. You know,

they've risen to the top of whatever career ladder they were climbing. And many times, and not across the board, but the case has been true where people reach the top of the org chart and realize that the perch isn't all that it was cracked up to be. I think when we solely live our lives thinking about what the market values as opposed to considering what we ourselves value. People can find themselves playing a career game that they don't actually want to win or being on a ladder that they don't actually want to be on. But I think it's important to caution against the alternative as well. If you're solely living based on what you yourself value without considering what the market or what the world values, it can create its own host of problems as well, where, for example, a student

might assume a lot of debt to go into pursuing a degree that might not lead to stable job prospects on the other end, or someone wants to go all in on their art, but is so preoccupied with how they're going to pay rent that they can't actually focus on the art that they hope to create. And so I think the balance that we must strike is like holding what the world values in one hand, what we ourselves value in the other hand, and trying to find a way to make a living that sits at their intersection. I know plenty of people, and I think I would put myself in this group of people, that I've been very focused on my career most of my life, and it's a big part of my life.

And I think, you know, if that's what you want to do, that's fine. But it is interesting when you think about that there will come a time when your career is over, but life goes on. And then what do you do? Definitely. Yeah. One interesting demographic of people that the book has seemed to really resonate with are recent retirees. You know, these are often people that were very career focused, that derived a lot of their identity from their job and then retired and had to sort of build their identity back up from the bottom. And so even if you are very aligned with what you do or really identify or derive a lot of meaning from your work, I hope

that you're also investing in other aspects of who you are as well. It becomes a more stable foundation upon which you can stand as opposed to sort of rising and falling with your professional accomplishments, which can be a very narrow platform to balance on. Well, it certainly gives you something to think about, especially people who have been very driven in their career and made a lot of sacrifices for their career and maybe have come to think, is it really worth it? I've been speaking with Simone Stolzhoff. He is author of the book, The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work. And if you'd like to read the book, you can get it at Amazon and there's a link to the book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks, Simone. Thank you so much for having me on, Mike. There's a weight loss strategy that people don't talk about much, but it really does seem to work, and it has to do with brushing your teeth. There isn't a lot of research to indicate why it works, but it seems to have to do with association. When you brush your teeth at night before bed, you make that association that the day's over, so you're pretty much done eating for the day. So if you brush your teeth earlier in the evening, you will make that association that you're more or less done eating for the day,

so you're less likely to binge on snacks later in the evening. And the flavor of your toothpaste could also be playing a role. Most toothpastes on the market today are mint-flavored, and mint itself is often used as sort of a refreshing taste to cleanse the palate and signal the conclusion of a meal, which will also reinforce the idea that you're done eating for the day. And that is something you should know. As always, I would love it if you would tell someone you know, or a total stranger, about something you should know and suggest they give a listen. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games,

and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures. You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true?

Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict.

And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as

well including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.