Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 583: Jennifer Senior On: Grief, Happiness, Friendship Breakups, and Why We Feel Younger Than Our Actual Age

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

It’s likely uncontroversial to assert that Jennifer Senior is one of our finest living journalists. She’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and before that she spent many years at the New York Times and New York magazine. Jennifer’s written on a vast array of topics, but she has a special knack for writing articles about the human condition that go massively, massively, viral. One such hit was a lengthy and extremely moving piece for The Atlantic that won a Pulitzer Prize. It was about a young man who died on 9/11, and the wildly varying ways in which his loved ones experienced grief. That article, called “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” has now been turned into a book called, On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory.In this interview, we spend a lot of time talking about this truly fascinating yarn, but we also talk about her other articles: one about an eminent happiness researcher who died by suicide, another about why friendships often break up, and a truly delightful recent piece about the puzzling gap between how old we are and how old we think we are. Jennifer has also written a book about parenting, called All Joy and No Fun which we also reference a few times throughout.In this episode we talk about:Jennifer’s perspective on the Bobby McIlvaine story Lesser known theories of grieving from Elisabeth Kubler-RossThe work involved in finding meaning in lossWhy – from an evolutionary standpoint – we hurt so badly when we lose someone we loveCommitment and sacrificeThe puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you areThe power and perils of friendshipWhy Jennifer has chosen to focus so much of her writing on relationshipsFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jennifer-senior-583To join a live coaching session, sign up at tenpercent.com/coaching.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris. Hey everybody, this was an extremely fun interview for me. I do not think it's very controversial to assert that Jennifer senior is one of our finest living journalists. If you haven't heard of her, she's a staff writer at the Atlantic. Before that, she spent many years at the New York Times and before that at New York magazine. So she's basically done a triumphant tour of some of my favorite publications in the world. She's written about all kinds of stuff, including politics and science, but she has a really special knack for writing articles

about the human condition that go massively viral. One such hit was a lengthy and extremely moving piece for the Atlantic that won a Pulitzer Prize. It was about a young man who died on September 11th and the wildly varying ways in which his loved ones experienced grief. That article, which was called What Bobby McElvan Left Behind, has now been turned into a book, which is called On Grief, Love, Loss, and Memory. In this interview, we spent a lot of time talking about this truly fascinating yarn, but

we also talk about some of Jennifer's other articles, including one about an eminent happiness researcher who died by suicide, another about why friendships so often break up, and finally a truly delightful piece about the puzzling gap between how old we actually are, and how old we think we are. I should also say that Jennifer wrote an entire book about parenting, which is called All Joy and No Fun, which we also reference a bit throughout this conversation. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over

on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music

or wherever you get your podcast. Great, okay, cool beans. I don't think I've heard anybody say cool beans in a minute. Yeah. You don't know where that came from actually. It's not like that's a go-to of mine, but there you have it. Well, I think we're close to the same vintage, and I think it's a generational thing. I'm guessing. Yeah, I'm 53.

I don't know what you're, but... 51. Yeah. I have to say, I am the huge fan of of yours and I have these mixed feelings about reading your work because on the one hand it's so beautiful and the other kind of makes me kind of pissed because I can't write that well. And so I mean that is a very high compliment. Oh, well, that's very nice.

It's all perspiration. You know, it takes me forever. I mean, the exception of the McLevain piece, everything is like pure sweat. So, for what that's worth. So, the McLevain piece was not pure sweat? No, I know that's a really weird thing to say, but no, it was not. I did that from a standing start in seven weeks. Wow. Yeah.

Well, let's start there if you're cool with it. Sure. So I just curious, like, how did you get to this story of Bobby McLevain? I actually know the answer because I read it, but for those who haven't read it, how did you come to this story of Bobby McLevain. I actually know the answer because I've read it, but for those who haven't read it, how did you come to this story? Right, so Bobby was my brother's roommate. They were roommates in college for four years.

They were the laggards in the suite, so they wound up throwing their duffel bags on the same room in two separate punks. And then after college, they lived together for four years in New York when they were young men until they were 26. And then Bobby went to work on September 11th and never came home. And you have vivid memories of this person. It really comes through in the article slash book. Yeah, I do. I mean, he was this miracle of self invention. And I think all miraculously self-invented people are memorable. There's just something about them.

They're vectored. It's like they were sort of hurtled into the world as if from a slingshot or something. You know, he was irrepressible. He was charismatic. He was the first kid in his family to go to a fancy college. No one expected him to. Totally working class background, mom and dad were teachers who didn't really, you know, one taught reading and remedial stuff at a Catholic school and the other taught all variety of subjects to emotionally disturb kids didn't expect their board to go to Princeton. And Bobby applied there without ever having set foot on the campus and gone in. And you know, when he was young, he wasn't only smart.

He and high school managed to score 16 points off of Kobe Bryant and his teammates when they were in high school. He had this weird, zealot-like existence. Like, when he was a Princeton, he was selected to take a class with Tony Morrison, not by lottery, but because she chose his work. And the family got not one, but two condolences notes from her. When he died, I mean, he was that memorable. I think he was memorable to a lot of us. And I thought very precautions and adorable.

So the book is really not so much about Bobby. I obviously, he's a massive character, but really follows the trajectory of his family members lives and his girlfriend and slash, soon to be fiancee as well. Then I want to read you back to you and get you to hold forth if you're okay with it. This is a passage from early on in the book. You say early on, the Maccolvain spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you're all

at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can't help each other. You each have to find your own way down. That seems to be pretty close to the thesis of your book. Yeah, it was as close as I got to writing a thesis, because this was a sort of narrative nonfiction effort where I wasn't interjecting with a lot of experts. I think you might have read the one and only kind of outside or I have. And maybe there's one other voice. The book is all about the wide and improbable varieties of grief and how kind of varied it is for all of us, how different, how idiosyncratic.

You hear a lot about grief for, if you've experienced it firsthand, you may have bought a lot of books about grief, and you will discover that there are stages and that you do them sequentially, and all the, and then that's not really how it works. People don't tend to grief sequentially, and those books are more literary than literal, as I think I wrote in the book. So, I was really interested in just how differently the Maccolvains, meaning both of Bobby's parents

and Bobby's brother and Bobby's almost fiance grieved, because you really couldn't find four different ways of grieving. They had little to do with one another. And to me, it was kind of a miracle that the Maccovane's remain married, given how different their styles were of grieving. Yeah, well, we know a lot of people who lose children, the couple's often break up. So let's start with a father because his path is in some ways the most unusual. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I'm going to quote you back to you again. I hope you don't mind me doing this, but you describe how the father really makes a pretty robust foray into the world of conspiracy theories around 9-11, and then you write. Maybe hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend so much time immersed in the story, sensations, and forensics of his son's death. But for Bob Senior, that is precisely the point to keep the grief close. I don't want to get away from it. He tells me he wants to stay at the top of the mount.

Exactly. And that was to me, in some ways, one of the biggest lessons I took away from reporting on the Macluban family, it did not occur to me that there would be some people who would need their grief and have no interest in moving beyond it, moving around it, achieving closure, whatever dopey metaphors people use that are, I shouldn't say dopey, they're useful and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're in applicable. And here I just felt like it was really interesting to see, you know, Freud, this is a quote that has been mistakenly attributed to Freud, that he said grieving is another form of loving.

He said something pretty close in a letter to a friend who had lost a child, Freud himself had lost a child who was also 26, like Bobby, a daughter, not a son. And he had said something along those lines. And I think this is a way of continuously loving for Bob Sr. it's just really unusual and it's political and it's not have his wife chose or anybody else around him chose. He wakes up every day and for him it's September 12th, 2001. It's just as fresh. He cries just as easily. His feelings are all right there at the surface. He also treats 9-11 like it's a cold case, like it's a murder to be solved. I think he very much wants there to be a cause that you can point to.

The idea that it's just this irrational random act of evil is not the way that he can process it, metabolize it. He thinks about it differently that it had an origin and an aferious origin that was planned by our government. And I sometimes wonder, and this is something I never would have written. I'm just going to say it to you, Dan Harris. I think you'll appreciate it. I mean, this is really something I never would have felt comfortable writing.

But it's something I've thought about a lot. By embracing a theory that the mainstream press and most of the United States won't accept, which is that the government actually did it. He is able to continuously make the case for it and talk about it, and therefore continuously grieve. If he embraced a theory that there was some consensus around, he wouldn't have as many occasions to talk about it.

There'd be less to say. But by embracing something sort of more arcane, he can keep going. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, he may not be doing this deliberately, but psychologically, it makes a lot of sense to pick, you know, as you say, arcane theory, because then you've got to defend it all the time, which keeps the grief alive. Exactly. And because of what you said, this is a theory I am guessing at underlying mode of here, parts of his psychology that I really wouldn't have any right to speculate about. And I could be dead wrong, I should just say right now. And I certainly wouldn't have felt comfortable writing that. But I've thought about it and wondered about it. And it's the question I regret not asking him because weirdly, I don't think he'd be offended by it because I mean, he was very forthcoming

about saying, I don't want to stop grieving. He's sort of uninsultable in a weird way. You can ask him and the worst thing that could happen to a person has already happened to him. I think one of the most interesting parts of human psychology is how our motivations are often opaque if not outright hidden to all of us. Oh, totally elusive to us. And that's why I was venturing it here on this podcast and wouldn't necessarily venture it in the world at large or on another podcast. But yes, because our motives are so clandestine, they're hidden from us. We just don't know. You just have to sit there and think about it for a second. I mean, why go for the theory that absolutely we'll never get any traction

and we'll never be believed by the majority of Americans and certainly won't gain any kind of acceptance by the people who are telling the story and writing the history. And it's quite a contrast with his wife who, well, like you describe it, but she takes a very different road. Yeah, and thank you for letting me describe it.

That's very nice. Some interviewers are tempted to sort of pre-describe. So Ellen was, yeah, the polar opposite in a funny way, and that she does not ever want to think about September 11th. She would walk across the street and around the corner, forget that she'd go halfway across the world, not to have to talk or think about September 11th. And it drives her crazy when her husband had a dinner party and they don't go to that many anymore or at a lunch. And again, they don't jointly go to many. We'll talk about it. It doesn't help her. She doesn't want to be the victim. She has said that that she doesn't want to play

that role. She was so invested also in, I think, bottling up her grief and stuffing it deep inside her that she wouldn't even go to her local supermarket for years because she just didn't want to run into anybody she knew. And she didn't want to run into anybody she knew because she didn't want to explain. She didn't want people to awkwardly ask her how she was doing. She didn't want to be in that even more awkward position of having to console other people, which the grieving sometimes have to do. And she didn't want to be on the receiving end of all those sort of well-intentioned things that people say, but that wind up being inadvertently hurtful. She just started rattling them off for me, and it really is breathtaking. Like the number of wrong things that come out of people's mouths,

all with the most open-hearted warm of intentions. But people just don't know that they are saying things that just deep in the wound. So, yes, very, very different style of grief. I mean, she retreated into books that were really spiritual and thinking spiritually about Bobby did not want to concern herself with the material kind of aspects of September 11th at all. Those two things I want to ask you about Helen because I do want to talk about the spiritual theory she has been exploring, but first let's get back to the inadvertently painful things that her friends would say to her with the best of intentions. I'm wondering if you, Jennifer, learned anything about how to talk to people who

are grieving via your time with Bobby's mom. Yeah, it's a good question. And I wish I could say that like, yes, I did. And I mean, I think I did, but that doesn't mean at all that if I'm confronted with somebody who is in a profound state of bereavement or sorrow, I will suddenly then know the right thing to say. I think what are you feeling right now? How has your day been today? Is sort of a good place to start?

People are living for a minute to minute when they are grieving. So, too broad a question doesn't work. Weirdly, I think Cheryl Sandberg talked about that. How are you today? And I learned that from Helen also. I sure learned some things not to say, which, I hate to say it, I think I could have been capable of saying them. I mean, she had people saying things to her like, I was hugging my child last night and I was realizing that you would never have that again. And the reason they were saying that was to show that, like, they were suddenly grasping the magnitude of her loss.

It was said from a place of, again, the kindest of intentions. But if you just stop and think about how hurtful that is, like, no one needs reminding of what they won't have again, and no one needs reminding of your random ill luck, and everyone else's sustained good luck, and that there before the grace of God go, they, I mean, you don't need that if you're grieving. That one really leapt out like a cricket when she said it. It was just like, whoa, yeah.

And I also thought, God, I bet I totally could have said something like that. Like I can totally imagine blundering my way through that sentence. But it's hard in real time when you were confronted with somebody who is hurting, just, you know, somewhere down in a missile silo, they're so low. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know spontaneously where I'd be or how if I'd be able to handle it, any better, honestly. It's hard. I've had the experience. I think many of us have a friend who lost a couple of young children in a plane crash. And this echo is, I think, something you've already said when talking about Helen.

One of the things he said to me over the subsequent years is how he understands it, but it's hard for him to deal with other people performing their grief in front of him. I mean, 100%. Helen definitely spoke about that. And I think that explains the supermarket, right? That's why she avoided her supermarket. She didn't want the performance, especially if it was in the form of pity. And she didn't

want to have to make them feel at ease. She was already feeling so uncomfortable in her own skin because her role didn't just turn upside down. And there was a giant, Bobby sized hole in the middle of it. So what your friend says makes so much sense to me, so much. Let's go back if you're okay with it to Helen's sort of spiritual explorations for lack of a better word. I'm gonna again read you back to you. And some of the top of this paragraph you've already said a little bit of this, but I think it's worth repeating. Here it is. Most theories of grief, particularly the ones involving stages, are more literary than literal.

People don't mourn sequentially and they certainly don't mourn logically. But there's an aspect of one of those models I keep circling back to whenever I think about the Maccabains. It's the yearning and searching stage of grief. First described by the British psychiatrist Colin Murray Parks and John Bulby in the 1960s. When searching, Parks writes, the bereaved person feels and acts as if the lost person were recoverable,

although he knows intellectually that this is not so. Yes, I would imagine that that has a pretty broad application. Like a lot of the grief books do and don't make sense, but this really makes sense, or at least it made sense in the context of the Magal Vains. And it made sense in the context of like, kind of every one I spoke to, it is the one common thing. So we can talk about it in the context of Helen,

but we should talk about it in the context of Bob Senior too, because think about it. Bob Senior, I mean, recoverable. There he is going deep into the archives of September 11th, and trying to get as much raw material as possible. He got the medical examiner's report for Bobby. He got so many different artifacts, and he reads so many books, but he saves everything that they different artifacts and he reads so many books but he saves everything that they were recovering for years. He is trying to recapture something, right? And by reliving every day as if it's September 12th, that is in some ways yearning and searching. And he has told me that he has this very powerful fantasy. I don't think it made it into the story slash book. He wished that he was with Bobby that day so that he could have protected

him. That was his fantasy. It's looping backwards always to that day. It is recovering that day. It's spinning the earth backwards like in the original Superman movie where Christopher Reeves spins the world backwards to re one time. It has that quality to me. With Helen, the searching took a different form.

She became very attached, very attached to the idea of recovering Bobby's final diary. And that is the sort of plot device in my story that gets the whole thing rolling. When Bobby died, he was in an aspiring novelist and an avid diarist. He did corporate PR to pay the bills, but this was not where his heart was, although we know it may have been where he would have ultimately wound up, but he was trying to write. And he had his final diary sitting

on his desk. And Helen couldn't even go up to his room to clear it out. Bob's senior went up in this total fugue state with my brother was there because they shared an apartment so he was in Bobby's room with Bob Senior and Jen his fiance they were in there and another dear friend of theirs named Andre and they were clearing out all this stuff and Jen opened up that diary that was sitting on his desk and saw that her name was all over it Then opened up that diary that was sitting on his desk and saw that her name was all over it. And looked Bob Senior and said, can I have this? And Bob Senior said, without really thinking, sure, of course, trying to be kind, trying

to be generous. And he said, you might find something in there that would be good for the eulogy. And so Jen was very happy to have this. But when Bob Senior, after however many hours it took to box everything up, when he came downstairs and he talked to Helen and he mentioned that he had given away this diary, she got so upset. Like so upset, how on earth could you give away our boys final thoughts, musings, words? This would have been a chance to hear his voice one more time, to spend some time in his

company, to have fresh conversation with him in this weird way. There are any more memories that we're going to get this as it, and you gave it away. You just gave it away. It became a source of tension. She really wanted this diary back. She asked Jen for it back and Jen wouldn't give it back. She'd have murdered for a while, jammed, she hawed, and in the end, she just put her foot down and said,

no. And this became an enduring source of mystery to me, a source of anger, if I would be honest, to me. Like I was as angry as Helen was. Helen was furious about this. And she shared it with her grieving group, a group of local women, all of whom had lost kids.

And they were furious on her behalf. Everyone wanted this diary back. And what is that? That's also a form of yearning and searching, right? You're as if the person were recoverable. It's the diary is a kind of stand in. It also seemed very important. You know, it seemed like a very legitimate thing to want.

And I made it in my business to try and get that diary back. And at the top, I'm blind, I did, and of course I did, but I save until the end to say what was in it. But that's a form of yearning and searching, like being stuck on that diary for years, a decade, 15 years, I don't know how long she thought about that diary. Coming up, Jennifer, senior talks about Bobby's mother's relationship

to grief quite different from Bobby's dad. Lesser known theories of grieving from the famous Elizabeth Kubler Ross, she went pretty far out there in some lesser known writings, how being a parent, herself influenced Jennifer's perspective on this story as she was working on it. The work that is involved in finding meaning in loss, why from an evolutionary standpoint, we hurt so badly when we lose somebody, And we'll talk about Bobby's diary. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday

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And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondry app. I want to be careful on your behalf and not give too much away because I want people to read the book. I realize I put a question to you in a maybe somewhat melodroid manner and sent you down a road that I'm glad we went down, but I wasn't actually intending it at the time.

Sorry, I thought that was your team that up. Okay, go on, yeah. No, it's on me. You trust me. But I do want to hear a little bit more about Helen's interest in what we might call spiritual stuff. You referenced it before. She got really into sort of the aspects of Elizabeth Kubler Ross that a lot of people don't know about.

Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh, so you're talking about the recoverable in this sense, right? And you had, that's on me because you did mention his spiritual kind of explorations. If something goes wrong in an interview, it's always the interviewer's fault. Just just. Is that true? Yeah, that's my view. It's like the customer is always right on the phone podcast.

Oh my God, well, that's great to know. I'll exercise that prerogative liberally. I had no clue. So yeah, people don't know this about Elizabeth Kubler Ross. She eventually decided she believed in life after death, which is very surprising for someone who initially thought of this as a form of denial. It was part of her stages, right? That if you believe that your loved one is still with you in some way, that means you're denying the reality of what has happened to you. And she changed her mind based on what she claimed were thousands of testimonies from people all over the world. People seeing white light, people being clinically dead and then coming back and

Look, I think the only intellectual honest position when it comes to this stuff is to be an agnostic and to say that you don't know because how can you so Ellen's whole perspective is that There's just a lot we can't see that he is Probably here somewhere and that's her sense and that we can't see it. And she really, she holds on to that. And so does Jen, actually, they share that. And Jen thinks that, you know, when she dies, she's going to, in some way, be reconnected

with him because they didn't get to finish their business here. Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely another way of yearning and searching. It's either believing that you're going to see them in the next life or believing that they are here right now. Helen told me something very poignant, which is that sometimes she likes to, this wasn't in the story either, that sometimes she likes to just pretend that Bobby is still in New York, living his life. Yeah. You're a mom. You've written a lot about parenting. You have a great book called All Joy No Fun. I'm wondering as a mother, as a parent going through this

reporting, how did it all go down with you? Oh my God, that is such a good question. And it's such a astute question. First of all, I only have one kid, so it made me terribly anxious. And in fact, that might have been something very clumsy that I said to Helen early on, where I said, I had said something to her about my inability to process this based on the fact that I only have one.

So I mean, there's a moment in Downton Abbey where I can't remember the name of the hottie who I stopped watching that show early on, but the handsome guy who died in the car accident, but his mother this story and to have only one child, I thought quite a lot about that question. It also, I have to say, when I heard that Jen had walked off with the diary, I was not yet a mother, you know, when that happened, when I became a mom, I remembered thinking about that diary

with a kind of white hot anger, thinking, how could she have denied a mom, her son's final words? Like that seems like the very pinnacle of cruelty. It sort of exaggerated my own response to Jin. And it made me very self-conscious. Like, when I was writing her a note asking her if she would sit down and talk to me, like then I had to really, I mean, I wrote her a very warm note and I didn't mention the diary at all. I just asked her if she would be willing to talk to me

about how she metabolized her grief, how she had processed everything 20 years later. But I had to make a self-conscious effort not to let my anger kind of work its way into my initial note to her. Let me execute a little bit of a tease here because again, I do want people to go read the book because it's incredible. Jennifer does talk to the girlfriend and that conversation is incredibly illuminating and recasts the whole story, but I'm not going to say more because you should go read it. Thank you. As does the diary, the actual content. Oh my

God. Yes. Yes. Wow. Yes, and there is, I don't want to give away too much on the diary, but there is something I want to ask you about it specifically. But before I do that, just to go back to you as a parent navigating this fraught story that is both personal and even if it wasn't personal would be upsetting. You really strike what to my Buddhist eye seems like a dharma theme here around impermanence. And so again, I'm going to read you back to you. You say that's one of the most ruthless lessons trauma teaches you. You are not in charge. All you can control is your reaction to whatever grenades the demented universe rolls in your path, beginning with whether you get out of bed. diverse roles in your path, beginning with whether you get out of bed.

Yeah. And I think that's definitely what Helen and Bob senior both learned. Helen really went deep on that. She read lots and lots of books, but decided one day, this was, this was so interesting to me. She said to me that if she wanted there to be any meaning to this meaningless, senseless act, she was going to have to go and find it herself. Like that was the only part that she could control was finding the meaning. The meaning was not going to come to her. And people make this mistake of thinking that like there's some gain to be had when you when there's a loss and that it will reveal itself, no, you have to work at it. You have to

find what like it's work to find what the upside is and what the teachable or what the learning moments are. And Helen has been making it her project to do that work. Same with Jen, again, it's interesting that these two women are similar and maybe it makes sense. That's why maybe Bobby chose somebody who is like his mom and some deeper way than even he realized. But Same Deal applied to her. Like she realized that the only thing she could control

because it turned out her mother had died the same year that Bobby had died just a minute earlier. So she was grieving in a major way in 2001 and going forward. She had to make some radical decisions, like putting on pants in a shirt. Could she do that. That was for some days, all she could do in the beginning. Goes back to your theme of we all grieve differently there. This is not a logical universal progression. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't want to give too much away about the diary, but there are a couple things in there that I think we could talk about without spoiling the narrative. You referenced that Jen, Bobby's girlfriend, had lost her mom and Bobby writes about that in the diary. At one point, he says in the diary, while ruminating on his girlfriend's pain, he writes, why do we have to hurt so badly? Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be? And I guess I'm just curious for your thoughts as an incredibly smart and thoughtful person who's interested in human happiness, the human condition, human psychology.

After having spent so much time writing this book and thinking about grief, do you have any thoughts on why from an evolutionary standpoint, we hurt so badly when we lose somebody. I mean, I guess you can make a case that it doesn't make sense. God, I have not. No, I feel like we have to like phone Bob Wright, you know, ask him because he thinks about both Buddhism and evolutionary psychology and equal measures. And he like is really the right guy for this. It's a brilliant question and I'm trying to think of what possible use it could serve. I mean, if the evolutionary prerogative is to keep the species going,

is there some value to grieving that protects the family, keeps the family integrity together. You know, is the idea that the shared love you have for your, I mean, look, if you lose a spouse, then you're gonna try and find another spouse and you're gonna mate again, right? So from an evolutionary perspective, it seems useless to remain stuck on one person.

Like it would stand in the way of procreating. So, I mean, it is a stump for all of the emotions that are either difficult or destructive, like anger, I always sort of find myself wondering what the evolutionary purpose is. And you do wonder if instead, rather, there are artifacts. Like whether they're the byproduct of something that was evolutionarily necessary

and they're tagging along for the ride. So depression or anxiety is a byproduct of something that was evolutionarily necessary and they're tagging along for the ride. So depression or anxiety is a byproduct of something that we'll later discover is associated with X and you need X, you know, but I don't know. Look, you can say this, grief is love inside out, right? Grievous joy inside out. It's the price that you pay for loving somebody. And the species can't survive without love. So in that way, I don't think that we could form deep bonds if we didn't have the ability to grieve them. There are two sides of the exact same coin. So by the way, I'm quoting George Valleant there that Greve is joy inside out. That's not me. That's a storied psychiatrist who was in charge of the grant study, that longitudinal study at Harvard that looked at how men did over the course of 50 or 60 years or something

unbelievable. But I think that would maybe be my answer. Then maybe it's just, we wouldn't grieve if we didn't love. And species can't exist without love. Well, I felt bad there for a minute that I had asked you an unfairly abs-truse question, but then you came up with a beautiful answer. So I don't feel bad anymore.

Well, yeah, thanks for letting me wine my way there. Right? Talk about getting down a mountain. That was a serious thing. That was like, whatever the dinner trails are, I'm like on a steep socials worth, they just take forever because they wind so much. That's what that was.

A lot of switchbacks. Well, you navigated it well. One more question about his Bobby's diary. He reaches an epiphany that really sticks with you. And I think I'd like to dwell here because you really, you dwell here in the book. The epiphany is, and this is Bobby writing, there are people that need me, and that in itself is life. There are people I do not know yet that need me. That is life. Why do those words strike you so powerfully?

Well, in a weird way, it goes back to the thing that I just circuitously arrived at. I mean, what are we here for? If not our commitments and our bonds, right? Sometimes those bonds aren't even fun. You know, this goes back to my book too. That sometimes raising children is not fun. It's a duty. It's an obligation, but it's a moral obligation.

But it gives meaning and shape and weight to a duty. It's an obligation, but it's a moral obligation, but it gives meaning and shape and weight to a life. And so I think that he decided that that in itself was life. Being needed, being needed, and being able to give. And I think that that is what keeps people in the game. It's what keeps us here, even when things are hard. You don't want to default on those applications to those around you. And it goes back to another thing you said earlier,

which is that love is the reason why we became for better or worse, the apex predator or implanted earth. That is the central feature of the human experience. It is. I mean, unless you're associapath, it totally is. I don't know. I mean, I think other animals certainly experience love, not in the way that humans do.

And I guess also other animals kill for love. If you just think about the many, many crazy behaviors that love engenders when human beings are astonishing, I mean, we do all kinds of crazy things, and it does seem to distinguish us in ways that are both beautiful and bonkers. True. Too. Coming up, Jennifer talks about commitment and sacrifice,

the puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are, the power and perils of friendship, and why Jennifer has chosen to focus so much of her writing on relationships. This might be a decent segue to another piece of writing from you that I wanted to ask you about. They're actually several because this issue of commitment comes up in a piece you wrote back when you were at the New York Times, called

Happiness Won't Save You. And you want to describe this article and then we can wind our way to how commitment comes up in that piece as well. Yeah, yeah. So, and it's not readily apparent. This was my favorite thing that I did at the times. When I was a columnist, they let me write 6,500 words. They basically let me write a magazine story about a fellow named Philip Brickman. You know, it's perverse to say that it was my favorite piece. It was a very challenging piece and it was a super sad piece. I've been obsessed with Philip Brickman ever since I discovered who he was, which was probably 2006, but I didn't get around to writing this story until 2020. So Philip Brickman did this chestnut of positive psychology. He was a psychologist who did one of the most famous studies ever, showing that lottery winners

and people who become paraplegics and quadripleggic, basically they are much less happy and much less sad than one might think, and is the way to sort of say it. And that if you compare lottery winners to randomly plucked people from a phone book, they are no happier statistically. And people who get into terrible accidents, while they are sadder, they are not nearly as sad as one might imagine.

This was a very small sample size. It was a highly flawed in its design. It was ridiculously designed. It would never be done today. It would never survive the scrutiny of peer review. But what was interesting is how much he was interested in human happiness and human affect and what made life worth living.

And at 38 years old, he decided life wasn't worth living. He went to the tallest building in Ann Arbor. He was teaching at the University of Michigan. And he climbed up onto the roof and he jumped. And I just couldn't believe that this storied eminence in positive psychology had died by suicide. And he's not the only one that there was another fellow named Shane Lopez who wrote a positive psychology book who died in 2016. And there was a Princeton economist who concerned himself quite a bit with happiness who died earlier in the pandemic who died by suicide. I mean, it's probably not a coincidence that people who are preoccupied with leading the good and meaningful life are often people who suffer.

Yeah. What did you learn about the specifics of Brickman's case? Was there an answer to why he died by suicide and what if any connection that had to his interest in human flourishing? So I learned a lot about suicide from this piece. The biggest takeaway, and by the way, K. Redfield, Jameson's night falls fast is one of the finest books you will ever read on this subject.

I think it's just fantastic. I don't think it's had an equal or a rival since it was published in 2000. But what you learned is that I think the line I use in the piece is that you're kind of like a police sketch artist. You're getting secondhand information from people you're getting theories and only theories from the living about why the person who died might have died by suicide. And I think that to try and venture a guess would be a little presumptuous. I can tell you what the external circumstances were. He and his wife were

getting a divorce, his wife wanted out of the marriage, and he was blindsided by this. I can think he thought they were on much sturdier ground than they were. He was not doing as well in his new job that he had hoped for. He was in this very prestigious job, one that is highly competitive, and his grant proposals were getting rejected, and he was getting criticism, and he was flying straight into a cloud of flak, from the faculty, and people were not happy

what the job he was doing. So there were reasons to be depressed, but he had three kids. So there were also real reasons, compelling reasons to stick around. But we can't know, we can say we know, we can chalk it up to those circumstances. He was always a depressed person. He was, since the time he was young, so that certainly played a role, you know, was, I'm sure, congenital depression.

But who's to say for sure? But it's interesting that and this brings us to commitment. He had three kids and he had written about how no amount of worldly pleasures are gonna do it for you and in a biting way often referred to as the hedonic treadmill and He had landed on a different answer. Actually, I'll quote you again. This is you writing in the Times about Brickman in your article,

what on earth do you live for if not happiness, your commitments according to Brickman? They were the true road to salvation. He decided the solution to an otherwise absurd existence. He recognized that they didn't always give pleasure. They may even oppose and conflict with freedom or happiness as he wrote in his book, Commitment, Conflict and Caring, published five years after his death. But in many ways, that was the point. The more we sacrifice for something, the more value we assign to it. Yeah, relates to parenting too, right? But exactly. And I think that he may have been writing that in part as a depressive. There's a Philip Brickman archive at Northwestern where you can find letters

home from camp that were quite depressive. And you can find him talking, frankly, about his depression when he was writing letters home from college. He said that he didn't know if he would ever be happy. So it sort of makes sense that he would search elsewhere. And so you're going to go to meaning and what's more meaningful than a commitment, than the commitments you make to others. And again, it gives you a purpose, right? It gives you something to wake up for in the morning. I think what's devastating is that even our commitments are soluble, right?

Like they are, are dissolvable or whatever the word. I mean, his wife wanted out of their marriage. He thought that this would be enduring and it was not. We lose people, people die. You're still as a human, continually forming and reforming bonds. And I had spoken to more than one person who knew him who said, if only he could have held on until he fell in love with someone else again, because inevitably, of course, he would have.

And he would have had another commitment to live for. If only he'd switched jobs, he would have been profoundly committed to his job again. But there's a paradox because he abandoned many of his commitments when he died. So the ones that he had, obviously, were insufficient or it's not that. It's that his pain was so great that it didn't matter. I think that's the better way of putting it. I'm sure those commitments matter to him so much that can you even imagine what kind of pain he must have been in for the commitment to your children

to not override it? It was intolerable to him. And by the way, thank you for bringing up the hedonic treadmill. That phrase came from him and his colleague, Donald Campbell. And it's a go-to phrase in psychology. And it was his coinage, his idea, that like, we try and get more and more things to keep us happy. And it doesn't work, right? Like the more stuff you get, you just wind up getting accustomed to it. So I think, and you could look at this rather darkly and say that like, he might have thought, look, you know, I've got this perfect job, and it's still not making me happy. I thought I had everything I

wanted. And nothing seems to move the needle. I'm no happier. Lottery winners are no happier. Nothing I can do will improve my mood. Nothing. I will always feel this dark. Maybe in the end, what this really said was just something about the nature of major depression, major, major, major treatment resistant, everything resistant depression. But you know, most people who attempt to aside and are saved, don't try again. Most are grateful for having been saved. So again, it goes back to that if only moment that Philip Rickman's friends had. While I have you, let me ask you about a much lighter piece you recently wrote, you have switched from The New York Times, The Great Lady to The Atlantic. I will say by way of shout out here. I'm a subscriber and fan of the Atlantic.

Somebody great writers over there. Arthur Brooks has been on this show, Olga Kazan, who's interviewed me. She called me a funny name in the Atlantic. You can go look that up. I gotta kick out of that. And Mark Liebovich, also formerly of the New York Times, who I went to high school with.

So shout out to the Atlantic. Thank you. Mark is one of my favorite colleagues to pal around with. He's divine. I haven't seen him in a long time, but please give him a hello for me. So your recent article, which I forwarded to my whole staff because it was just delightful, the headline was, the puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are. Can you describe how you got interested in the subject and what you learned?

Yes, I totally can. Okay. so here's how I got into it. Well, in a funny way, I got into it sort of gradually. There comes a point in every middle-aged person's life where you look in the mirror and you think that there has been some kind of system error. You just think, you know, and that like this is just wrong. There's been some kind of mistake. I look in the mirror now and I see my best friend's mom from high school. I just think, Joan Cune, what are you doing looking back at me? It's the weirdest thing to be looking at this face. That was part of it. Part of it is that I have long COVID.

I was just sitting in bed and I'd been thinking about the question a lot. I tweeted out the question wondering whether anyone would reply and everyone replied like I got all these replies and I thought wait is this an actual thing? Am I not the only one? And it turns out I'm so far from the only one. It turns out that it's got a name, subjective age, you know, that internally most of us are a different age. And that's not to say, I don't mean like how old you feel, which is like of great interest to gerontologists and people who study your actual health health. I'm talking about how old you are in your head. And the best study I saw on this said that once you are north of 40, you shave on average 20% off of your age.

I shave more in my head on 36, and I'm 53 in real life. And there are lots of different theories about why we do this. And not everyone does this. Some people are older. If you're younger than 25, you probably think of yourself as older. The young want to be older, the old, or think of themselves as older,

overestimate what they're capable of, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, it came to me because I was looking in the mirror and seeing my best friend's mom from high school. I'm thinking, what is that? I remember Joseph Goldstein, who's, I think he's now 78 or 79, but he's a great meditation teacher, Buddhist master, and I've known him for quite a while. And I remember him saying to me a few years ago that every time he looks in the mirror, he's surprised. And I took that in and I thought it was funny, but I didn't, when he first said it to me, it must have been 10, 15 years ago,

I didn't apply it to my own experience, but man, it is increasingly true. Or if I look at a picture myself, or look in a mirror, or actually the biggest source of this kind this particular pain is I have an eight year old son who loves to point out how gray I am, or that I have a bald spot.

And he's a very sweet boy. He often also comes up to me afterwards and says, you know, daddy, I pick on you because I love you. So he's not a mean kid, but he does like to mess with me, which I actually like about him. And yeah, I mean, no, it hurts a to mess with me, which I actually like about him. And yeah, I mean, it hurts a little bit.

And I guess I would say I kind of consider myself 40, and then every time I look in the mirror, I'm like, oh man, you are not 40 at all. Yeah, well, you just said something though, also that I think explains it partly for people of our generation, which is, we had our kids late. Yeah.

So we also, our version of the 50s is not, I mean, by the time my parents were in their 50s, the kids were launched, right? Yes. Whereas I've got a 15 year old. So it's a whole other ballgame, I think for people like us, somebody blew my doors off after this piece came out by telling me that Carol O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were in their 40s when they played Edith and Arthie Munker. I know.

What? It seemed too good to check. Maybe we should, but I'm gonna roll with it. They were pretty reliable, the person who told me that. And so, and if you held a gun to my head, I would have said they were in their 60s. They would have said that they were like dusty copies of AARP magazine, like sitting in the corner, which by the way, you and I are eligible for it because you will have 50. But to your Buddhism teacher's point, once this piece came out, I expected it just to be like a little bag of tell, you know, I did not expect it to go viral and it had this unprobably

kind of viral life. I got all these replies, all these crazy, wonderful, interesting rich replies that I wish I'd gotten before I wrote the story, because it would have been like a thousand times better. But one consistent theme that really rhymes with what you just said is, I can't tell you how many people wrote to me and said that they would take their mother to assistant living. And their mother would say, I mean, this is also a terrible thing. It says something about how we treat the agent in the United States, but it's a whole other conversation. But their mothers would say, please get me out of here. It's filled with old people. They wouldn't be dropping their 85 year old mother off,

and that this would be their reply. But also, it's a great argument for remaining an intergenerational household. I think that there's probably something to that logic. But anyway, you want to talk about, like, what's the evolutionary purpose of that? I mean, like, we know where our bodies are in space when we're walking around. Why don't we know where we are in time? Like, why would that be?

I'm curious to hear what your theories are. I mean, you could link it to a fear of getting older or it could be a cultural thing. Like in the West, we don't value older people as much as in other cultures. Maybe it's our innate optimism. I don't know what cocktail of psychological factors are at play here.

Yeah, I think that it is like a combination of culture and maybe there's some kind of evolutionary imperative. I looked at one very good meta study that looked at, I don't know how many countries, like I wanna say 100. It was a lot of countries. And the countries and in Asia and in Africa, people do not shave as much off of their age.

They do still think of themselves as younger mentally, but in collectivist cultures, where there's more respect for the elderly and where you will live in extended families or there's more kind of social ties and social capital, I think people are less inclined to do this. So that's some of it. I think Americans also treat people like stocks,

like we love looking at people's potential. So sort of proves us to think of ourselves as young. You could take it as a positive sign that if you are young in your head, it means that you think that you have one or two or three more career pivots left in you, that you are still, you've got lots of generative years ahead,

you know, that you shouldn't be discounted. Lots of reasons. My mom's in assisted living, although she's actually quite pale. Am I even using that term correctly? I'm thinking of hail and hearty anyway, my mom is high. And shout out to you mom if you're listening. But she, I was hanging out with her recently in assisted living. She has a new friend and her friend, I was meeting for the first time,

wonderful woman and we were chitchatting and she said to me, you look so young. And I was over the moon about that because of all the things my son has been saying to me recently. Until this woman then revealed that she's 97 and she has children in their 70s. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, their 70s. You could have been her grand kid.

Yes, you actually, yeah, you could have. Yes, totally. Yeah. Well, but she knew how old you were and you looked young, take the compliment. Yeah, take the win. Take the win. But yeah, she was 97 you said. Oh my God. I'm just trying to think

of what that means. That means that that woman was in menopause around the time of Vietnam. Basically, not quite. Paramanopause. You know, actually, they're bringing up, before I let you go, there's so many great articles you've written, but there's another that's pretty iconic and recent for the Atlantic, which you wrote about friendship,

and this new friendship that my mother has, is actually, it's really important to both women. My mother is actually quite a bit younger, not even 80, but this is a real bond, and it's very important. It's very important to my mother. When I met her friend, she said to me, I can't believe at this age, I have this new friend. You wrote this great article about friendship, the power, but also some of the perils of

friendship. It was called, it's your friends who break your heart. I know we don't have a ton of time, but I'd be curious to see, you know, if you have, if you could give us a description of that article and what comes to mind in terms of takeaways and lessons. Oh, yeah. Well, I was interested in kind of all of the tripwires, the invisible tripwires of friendship in middle age. There are all these things you would not necessarily expect that can dissolve friendships as times. And in middle age, here's the paradox. You need your friends a lot more, I think, the older you get, right? Because first of all, like the ambition monkey is sort of off your back, you know, the contours of your life are kind of set. What you're really looking to are your relationships

to sustain you. And your kids are, you know, teenagers are the rest of the house and they don't need to as much anymore. So it's really your friends who you look to for meaning and companionship and your spouse is your spouse and you either you might be married, you might not be married. If you're married, you sort of know what that bond looks like. And if you're single, then you really again need your friend. But and also, by the way, we have such weak social institutions right now in the United States. Religious attendance is down.

You know, all the things that Robert Putnam wrote about and bowling alone, and they're all still true. You know, civic participation is down. Neighborhood organizations are down. We have, we don't know our neighbors as well. All these things, right? So, you really want your friends. Okay, but by the time you've reached middle age,

a lot of your friends have kind of disappeared. You have lost them to marriage. You don't like their spouse. You've lost them to geography. They have moved. You've lost them to divorce. Suddenly, there's just something awkward about the reconfiguration. You've lost them to success or failure, one or the other. They've moved, it's too difficult to navigate that gulf in either direction, right? There are all these things that sort of stand in the way.

So it can be really a source of tremendous heartbreak when you lose friends at this stage. And yet, they're kind of our proxy families. We really need them. And our families are so small in the United States, you know, among the demographic I was writing about, they're smaller, and there's more geographic mobility. So that was what I was examining.

What did you learn about friendship, the trails and breakups? Well, I mean, the cliche is true that we don't have script, right? We don't know how to handle them. But trails in friendships, this I found really fascinating. Or if you ask somebody, which is more hurtful, to be broken up with by a lover

or to be broken up with by a friend, everyone will say a lover. And then as you follow people longitudinally through time and you follow their friendship dissolutions and their romantic dissolutions, you will discover that they are equally rated. It is just as painful to lose a friend. And think about how many more times we have friendship breakups.

I mean, ideally, you should have more friends than spouses in your lifetime. And that probably means more busted up friendships. And our friendships have shorter cycles than we think of. I think that we replace about half of our social circle once every seven years or so. I mean, people go through friends with astonishing rapidity. I mean, there are some that stick around forever and ever, but it's surprising how often they don't. So I was surprised by the

churn, the sheer numbers impressed me. We've only talked about four of your articles in this discussion. And of course, we've made mention of your book on parenting, but the through line through all of these is the nature of human relationships. And I'm wondering if that's a conscious choice in your writing career. Yeah, I started college thinking I wanted to be a shrink.

I was pre-med for a year. And then I thought, if I wanna do that, I probably don't have to go to med school. I can probably do clinical psychology or there are I want to do that, I probably don't have to go to med school. I can probably do clinical psychology or there are other ways to do it. I sometimes feel like I lost my calling. I don't know if I lost my calling. I love to write and I love to report

and I love to talk to people. So it's fine, but this is sort of the way that I a little bit get to do that. Even whenever I write profiles, you know, you're sort of trying to figure out what makes a person that particular person. So you are right.

You have definitely picked up on something. I mean, even when I read about politics, which I do an awful lot of, or I used to do an awful lot of, what I was most interested in always was the way to flip the saying around, the way that the political was personal. I always thought that it was really interesting that so much of what happened in the Senate was predicated on friendships and relationships and strategic alliances. And I was always fascinated by all these unlikely bipartisan friendships that are vanishingly few these days. But back when I came of age, there were tons of the tons of them, Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy. I think Lamar

Alexander and Chuck Schumer, they're friends. I've always been fascinated by that. I was always interested in what it was like to work for Bill Clinton and how much his aides felt like they had to talk about him because it was so hard just to be around that personality. That always interested me. You know, so yeah, you're not wrong. Just getting back to the McLevans and your new book at the end here, why do you think this story,

I mean, you mentioned another of your stories going viral. This one, you know, people really talking about this one. Why do you think it gained such traction? Because it was about grief. If it were a September 11th story, I think it would have been, I've been meaningful to a certain subset of people, but I think everyone has lost someone. And grieving, I mean, this is something that if you

haven't lost someone, you live in dread of losing someone. And there's a certain narrative neuroticism in your life about the moment that you will conscious or not, that you're going to lose someone and that you're going to be a person who grieves on day. And because it's about love, because this is actually a story about profound love, parental love, romantic love, fraternal love, friendship love, every kind of love is in this story. So I think that's some of it and our impermanence, like the thing that interests you as a Buddhist, that kind of how we could be here one minute and flukecially disappear the next. I think that's immediately something that people respond to because September 11th was such a surprise.

Just the sky opened and that happened. But I think I would say mainly because it's about love. I really do think that's it. I would agree. Also incredibly well-written and a great yarn, but at the heart of it, but love. Yeah, the last diary thing was a cool device, I will say, like, you know, chasing that, it gave it a plot.

Yes. But, you know, diary Schmirey, you know, it's love. Let's just go with love. Yeah. Jennifer, is there something I should have asked you, but failed to ask? No, you're a really good interviewer. No. Oh, I was.

You asked me things I've never been asked before. I mean, as as as evidenced by my skiing down the bunny hill in a big switchback, he's exact. Well, sorry to put you through, but I'm glad we did it because the results were fantastic. Yeah, I know. That was cool. Are you willing to at the end here, just please plug your new book and any other stuff you've put out into the university. You want people to go access? Oh, God, you're so nice. Okay. Well, my book is called On Grief, Love, Lost, Memory.

It is exactly the same, actually, as the piece that appeared in the Atlantic under one of two different titles, depending on what format you read it in. It was called What Bobby Mac all they left behind, or it was called 20 years gone. And yeah, it won me a Pulitzer who knew. I mean, that was never on my bucket list because I was a magazine journalist and they didn't use to give us those. So it's got the cool little stick around the cover, like, yay. I've got another story that I'm working on now, but I don't think it'll be out until the summer. So I'll wait on that. But thank you for asking. I look forward to reading it. Thank you for doing this and thank you for just the sheer quality of your work. You manage to illuminate and the light at the same time. And that's

no small feat. They say, don't ever meet your idols, but you have not let me down, so I really appreciate your time. Oh my God. That is so nice. I'm going to say, and I have to say likewise. I mean, this was just as fun and as stimulating and as challenging as I was hoping. And yeah, right back at you. Thank you. Thanks again to Jennifer. great to have her on. Thank you to you for listening, very grateful for your years. And thank you most of all to the people who work so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justin Davy, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson.

Our senior editor is Merce Schneiderman and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the great Rock Band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-replus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.