The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert How an acceptance of our limitations can lead to a more fulfilling life and a more harmonious society We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible―a good-enough life for all. Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around. Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming in our great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today we're going to be exploring you ever thought that maybe gardening can improve your life?

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but you want to grab it until that unlimited time runs out. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author, as always on the show, Brilliant Mind, that's going to expand your mind so much it'll probably improve your sex life. I don't know. The attorney said I can't say that anymore, but I got it in there anyway. Avram Alpert is on the show. He's a multi-book author. He's the author of the newest book out, April 19th, 2022, The Good Enough Life. He must be describing mine or wait, mine's the horrible

life, but his book is called The Good Enough Life. And he's going to be talking to us about what's inside of it and what he found in his research. He is a writer currently based in Hamburg, Germany, where he is a fellow at the New Institute. He's the author of several books. And of course, this new one, welcome to the show, Avram. How are you? Thank you so much. I'm well how are you thank you for coming we certainly appreciate having you on give me your plugs your dot coms where people can find you on the interweb so i have a website it's just my name avramalpert.com i am a amateur twitter user i'm not there very often but you can find me avramalpert, I think that's probably the

main places. And then just, you know, scattered around. If you search Google, you'll find things I've written. There you go. There you go. So tell us what motivated you want to write this book. Well, I think I was just sort of looking around at a world where you had so many wonderful, talented, caring, committed human beings, And you have so much capacity and possibility and so many good enough humans. Good enough is in that sense that we're all flawed, but also we're all good. We're all at the capacity good and also we deserve enough. We deserve to have kind of sufficient means in our lives. And then when you looked at the world, you saw that in spite of all of our good enoughness among all human beings, some were doing fantastically well.

Some had more than they could ever eat. And, you know, billions, billions of people were living in poverty, millions dying of hunger every year, millions dying of lack of access to health care. And I wanted to understand how it was that the way that we thought about bloody finance purpose might be contributing to that. Obviously, there are many factors, structural factors, economic, so so on but there's also just a way that we think about the world and i think sometimes we sort of say well there's the the most talented there's the best there's the greatest among us out there and if we we give them more they'll make the rest of our lives better we can pull down vision of everything but what happens is actually you just give them more and sometimes our lives get better and sometimes they get worse but in the process

we're not kind of focusing on ensuring this goodness and enoughness for everybody that we all deserve. So I just wanted to explore that idea in the book. I look at it and how we kind of treat ourselves as individuals, how we think about our relationships, how we think about politics and society, and how we think about our relationship to nature. But it was really just a book to kind of, it was like, it's a plea for making a caring and decent world that really works, you know, well for everyone, but not perfectly because life isn't perfect. What is the concept of good enough? Is it, is the, we need to kind of, I don't know if the right word here, some people might use the word settle. It, you know, we live in a world and you may address this in the book.

We live in a world where, you know, everybody lives their lives based upon what's on Instagram. I mean, there's people that are unemployed that are out of work and probably unemployable actually at that point who are, you know, they go borrow some clothes or I don't know, they go to the store and pick up clothes. I know, I know there's some people that go on a date so they can take pictures at nice restaurants and they have no interest in the date. You know, we live in this kind of Instagram world. You know, the joke is that when the archivists dig us up years from now, they'll be like, wow, everyone in their whole, everyone was smiling in their society.

It was really weird. They never frowned at all or cried. So is that kind of what you talk about in the book? So I don't deal so much with social media, though. I think for Shandor, it is a force in our lives that really asks us to accept, right? You know, because you want to show, okay, was that the best restaurant

or I took the nicest picture or look, here's another most famous person or whatever. But there is also, I mean, I think there are potentials in social media, some of the kind of original things that attracted a lot of people to it, that it wasn't about what was amazing, right? It was about what was ordinary. You know, you'd get to see your friends having a picnic together and you'd sort of feel nice about it. And I think more and more it's become like,

oh, my friend just, you know, got this reward or whatever. It'd be sort of try and show how good we are as opposed to sharing these kind of just nice moments in our lives. But, you know, the idea of good and up, I mean, settling has a couple of meanings too, right? Settling can mean this kind of, well, I settled, you know, I didn't really want to take that job or whatever, but what was there and that can happen. And that's part of life, you know, that is some of the way of perfection. But settling can also mean kind of having a solid base, right? Having a good, happy place. I mean, you really, you're settled, you're feeling comfortable. I think it's more that, that sense that i'm interested in okay yeah sorry go ahead no i was just i was just agreeing with you okay so i mean so you know the one of

the problems of the instagram thing is people are just feel they never feel good enough you know they're they're like oh i've got to keep up with the joneses i've got to keep up with margie and margie's bought the latest you know rodeo Rodeo Drive, Hollywood bag, whatever, name your designer. I've got to go get that too. And it all has that FOMO effect, what we call the FOMO effect, the fear of missing out. It's like, oh, I've got to keep up with the Joneses. So is there a point where we just need to set that back then and say, you know, maybe what I have right now is good enough, or is it gratitude-based at all?

Yeah, I mean, some of it is part of dealing with FOMO is recognizing you're always going to be missing out, right? The nature of life is there are multiple possibilities, and you only have one you. You can only do one of them, and if you try and do too many things, right, you also miss out. And that is the origin of the phrase, right, good enough, comes from a psychiatrist named Donald Winnicott, who talked about the good enough mother, good enough, comes from a psychiatrist named Donald Winnicott, who talked about the good enough mother, good enough parent, good enough caretaker. And the idea being that, you know, when you have a child, probably, hopefully at some level, right, you want to be really good to that child. In fact, sometimes you want to be too good to that child.

You want to give them everything. You don't want them to experience pain. You don't want problems. And Winnicott's point was when you do too much for your child, you actually start to take away. Because you're taking away their understanding that life is flawed and can be difficult and we can't get everything we want. And it's from that childhood experience, he thought, that we become creative, we become adaptable. And so it didn't mean that we should then, you know, be mean to our children and have them fail the retirement, but that we should be good enough to them. We should give them, you know, love and care and affection, and we should provide them with material and emotional support. And so there's

a, it's not, the good enough doesn't mean you settle for whatever it is. It doesn't mean just, okay, life is like terrible right now, but whatever, I guess, you know, it's good enough. It's not going to be better. No, it really has to be both good and enough. And those metrics are things, you know, we all define for ourselves, but they're, you know, within some limits, right? There's a limited number of resources, limited number of attention. If we're taking too much for ourselves, we're keeping other people from having enough. So it's trying to get that balance right. That's good advice. Note to self, start being good to the kids. Now, yeah, I'm glad we, I'm glad we did. I mean, my father taught me you just give daily beatings, whether they deserve it or not, just so they keep in line. And, you know, I mean, CPS seems to have some sort of problem with it.

Anyway, we do the jokes around here. Help us try and understand how to embrace the good enough. So I think there are ways to do it at different moments, right? And you can think about it for yourself. But one of the things that I think about some in the book is, you know, how do you think about good enough in your relationships? Because I think one of the things you hear when you think good enough is you hear subtly, right? Like I couldn't be with the person I really wanted to be with, so I'm settled and it's good enough. But I really wanted us to think, you know, what would it mean not to chase the perfection, the perfect person who doesn't really exist, right? This is just not something where we're complicated creatures, we're moody,

sometimes we're tired, sometimes we're cranky, right? No one is going to be perfectly seamless or ideal together. But what you want is someone with whom, you know, you kind of share some values, right? You share kind of a sense of what's good and what matters in life, and you can kind of build that together. And also that you're enough for each other. You really are there to provide that kind of emotional support. You're caring again with your children, same, same basic, but also that you can appreciate each other's flaws, right? So that you're really not looking for, okay, I want this person that I'm with, they have to do everything right. And if they mess something up, like it's just going to be a disaster and everything has to kind of fit this form. You're going to, you're going to

drive yourself, your partner, right? You're going to kind of drive everyone crazy. So there has to be, again, there has to be a threshold here, right? At which point it's okay. It's not good enough, but beyond which it starts to also have kind of detrimental effects when, when we pursue too much, you know, and then one of the questions of the book is really, what can we do to think about this in society? You know, how can we think about it such that what kind of systems will make it possible that everyone has more or less what they need? And we live in a society that that's not really the goal, right? That's just not explicitly how we think about the world.

We think, OK, if we get, again, the best people to have the most, it's going to benefit the rest of us somehow. It's a weird idea, right? I mean, I think of it like imagining, you know, you have a hundred fields and you want to figure out how to irrigate all of them. So you put all the water in one of them. And it's like, of course, the water is just going to stay. It's not going to spread around, right? And you really need to kind of make sure that everyone is getting something, feeling like they can grow and they can flourish and they can become the people they are with

whatever talents they have, whatever capacities they have. And so I try and think through some of the ways we can do it in society. I don't have a perfect solution here. I hope I have some good enough ones, but that's kind of what I'm encouraging us to think about. How do we do this for ourselves? And then how do we kind of bring the values that we want to see? Ordinary care, decency, joy, pleasure, the things that really make up a life. And how do we make a world that makes that more possible, more likely? So it sounds like you talk not only on the personal level,

but you talk about maybe doing in a world of a sort of view where we all decide that, hey, we should maybe approach something in a different way. Yeah. No, and I think a lot about, for example, about cooperatives, right? You know, instead of designing businesses that are really geared towards, let's get the one person that's going to invest all the capital and they're going to make all the money, right? You know, instead of designing businesses that are really geared towards, let's get the, you know, one person is going to invest all the capital and they're going to make all the money, right? We're all going to kind of go into this together and maybe, you know, maybe one person puts in more time or more energy. And so, you know, we can have some small differences, maybe

make a little more, they get more vacation time, put in more at some point, you know, that's fine. But like, how do we, how do we kind of think about kind of models will make it easier for us to all experience life. And there's other ways in which this happens, but it's not just money, right? We're also talking about attention. You know, when you write a book, it's really great. I love talking to you. I really like doing these podcasts.

It's really nice. But you know, there's so many good books published all the time. And sometimes what happens is one author, you know, you see them on every show. They win every award. Is their book so much better than all the other books probably not i'm sure it's always you know usually quite excellent you know it catches something it has a good publicist there's all sorts of ways of this

yeah but when we soak up attention like that right we kind of lose out on some other ways of thinking or other ways of understanding the world and so the hope is that if we think about how do we what you know how do we limit that kind of attention economy, right? How do we think about attention as a resource? And so I try to talk about that as well in the book, you know, so one, for example, one thing I'm really interested in is lotteries. So instead of having kind of selection committees, who just kind of, you know, this was the best book of the year, and everyone else said it was the best book, so we'll say it too. You say, look, here's a hundred amazing books that were written this year there's no way to really you know these aren't like things we can put out of scale let's put them all in whatever ones really

we think are beautiful and wonderful and well articulated and see which one comes out and we'll give that one the prize we're working all the time in practice there's a hundred best books go crazy so that's i try and think through some of those. That sounds pretty interesting. In the world that you're suggesting, does Instagram and Facebook and all the FOMO sort of apps still reign? Or do we have to put those away? You know, it's an interesting question because I don't go so much into it. And you might have a better answer for this than I do. But I did read some interesting studies recently.

Happy to hear more about it. Let's do. Yeah. Like that some of the, what happens on something like Instagram is very similar to what happens in the economy, which is that there are a few influencers, like a small percentage of Instagram, Twitter users, TikTok, whatever, like soak up the vast majority of likes, views. And again, right, we're having an attention economy that's really just showing kind of small parts of it, which is, you know, sometimes that's nice, right? There's something kind of nice. Oh, we all saw that same funny video, right? I know Charlie did my finger.

You know, like everyone kind of saw it and we could kind of laugh about it. What got left out in that process? What kind of other things got lost along the way? What kinds of cultures of iniquity or cultures of distrust? What kind of ways of feeling kind of jealous or angry, resentment? What kind of things are we building up in what appears to be pretty innocent? Just sharing whatever. So I'm concerned about that.

And I think if we don't think seriously about attention and its distribution, we'll have people feel really left out, really angry. And, you know, we'll see a lot of the kinds of problems we've seen today. Yeah. That kind of sounds like you described, you know, why we're having problems now, you know? I mean, everybody seems more unhappy than ever before. And, and for some people that happiness is the, the reflection that they get when they go on social media and they're like, well, you know, Bob's got a new car. I don't. And so I suck. And Bob's clearly winning at the new car game and life game. And so I'm going to be depressed and go drink a bottle of vodka, you know, I don't know, whatever the thing is. I do

that on Wednesdays. I really, I really follow Bob and you know, don't know whatever the thing is i do that on wednesdays i really i really follow bob and you know bob makes me depressed all the time because bob's bob doesn't drink vodka evidently on wednesdays but no i'm just kidding so a great way to get in touch with knowing if we're living the good life of the good enough life and and balancing you know in our mind like hey it's okay that maybe bob has got the new car yeah i mean i think a couple of things and again some of it's going to be what you can do individually and some of it will be you know what you do in terms of how you think about the world you want to live in politics your social arrangements um there isn't exactly

because life is dynamic if you live in a different right if you live in the northeast you need heat in the winter and if you live in the south of the united states you know you need you need air conditioning in the summer the kinds of things we need are just not going to be exactly the same so there isn't a simple straightforward metric but we can say look you have to be able to feed yourself and whoever is dependent upon you. You need to have housing, right? You need to have healthcare, some education. You probably need work or some kind of material means of sustenance. And then you also need, right, kind of things that make your life feel meaningful, right?

You need other kinds of sufficient support. So you need people who care for you. I think you need to be able to care for other people, right? Part of what makes life feel meaningful is that people are spread out on you and you can be part of that. You need to have something that makes you feel fulfilled, whatever that might be. And I mean, if something that makes you feel fulfilled is making other people feel terrible, then we need to talk about that. But assuming that your fulfillment comes from your pursuit of your passions and your interests.

What if my fulfillment is making other people feel terrible? Yeah, no, I mean, then I think we need to sort of say maybe that's not a good enough thing i mean it's right it makes me feel good enough i mean isn't that but it's it's exactly what you said too before right so it makes me feel good enough one time but then not the next time yeah it's a bit who i'm making feel bad yeah no i feel bad i don't know i think I need to see a psychiatrist for narcissism or something. I don't know. No, it's, I think, I think, yeah, assuming, assuming, right, that there are pathologies that we have and the ways that we act cruelly, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not. And those are things that, that will make our lives not be good enough, right? Because we'll constantly be in conflict with other people. We'll feel in conflict with our, and working those through a sign that provides that kind of goodness so you know if you're if you're finding that that you're you're kind of feeling like well

this person has like this kind of shiny object that i want you know you can look back at yourself well do i have what i need do my like i have meaning do i have decency do i have purpose i have all these things in my life and if the answer is and you know you have enough to get by like if the answer to that is is yes then it doesn't particularly matter. If though, right, we're looking at say the boss of the company has, you know, a helicopter and he's paying you 5.15 an hour and you can't afford to eat, then we're not talking about jealousy, right? We're talking about a political problem. We're talking about someone who's really exploited. And so that needs to be discussed. So it's a difference between, you know, the kind of minor, some people have more material

objects, whatever, within a certain range, I don't think it's necessarily a problem. But when it is, that other person has that thing because you are being impoverished, right? You're doing the labor but someone else is. That's when I think it becomes a different kind of concern. There you go. So

note to self, to be good enough, stop exploiting other people, Chris. That's a great idea. Yeah, I just, damn it. I have so much fun and that's actually my good enough. But I excel at that one. Okay. There you go. What are some other aspects that you think you should tease out in the book that people, I think, will find?

One of the things I think that's really important is that we are, of course, natural beings. We require an environment to sustain us. We don't live in a void. We need food, we need water, clean air. So our environment is good enough to sustain life, right? The natural world is not perfect. It's not endless. It can't just take everything we throw at it as much as it would be nice if that were the case. It has its own limits and thresholds and conditions that we are pushing drastically, not just in terms of carbon emissions, but in terms of biodiversity loss, in terms of the regeneration of natural resource, water, trees, minerals. We are putting too much particular substances, nitrogen, phosphorus into the soils. And all of this is having, you know, potentially catastrophic effects.

And we've already seen some of these, right, with changes, weather pattern, droughts, fires. And so, right, remembering that good enough isn't just about our own lives, but, right, the lives of the world around us and developing an appreciation. Again, I think one of the things we sometimes think, or I've seen people say about climate change is that, well, the earth is so big, it's just so vast, and the heavens are endless. There's no way that this is what's going on.

But it is. This is just not a perfect system. It was not designed for this. It wasn't designed at all. But it wasn't made in this particular way. And so we need to respect and care for this. It wasn't designed at all, but it wasn't made in this particular way. And so we need to respect and care for that. So that's, you know, the kind of end of the book deals with those questions. And again, one of the things I think we see when people are composited this issue, though, is they say, well, you know, what we really need to do is get the smartest people together and we'll have them invent these like technical contraptions and these like amazing tech devices. They're going to suck the carbon out of the air they're gonna come with this new kinds of electricity and

we absolutely need and and have many amazing technological inventions and innovations and i think that's wonderful but that that is also not really enough right there are just limits to how much we um consume and take without thinking about regenerative processes so there's i think the earth's ability to sustain human life is amazing i mean we're doing it with so far wild yeah so far but exactly like you said right it's so far and so we're not going to get some kind of quick technological fix right we really need to invest in all of us and and we need to make these situations that are good enough for everybody so it's not you know people talk about a just transition, right? That it's not just, okay, if you work, you know, people, genuine people, right?

Whose lives are dependent on cutting down trees or farming with pesticides or oil extraction, right? We need to think about how these people can really transition into something that is more sustainable, more renewable. It's not about throwing some people or some industries under the bus. It's, you know, how do we do this all together? You know, you may lose your 16th home in Las Vegas. Damn it.

Is it whatever, you know, but yeah, exactly. Sorry, Chris, we're going to, you know, you're losing your 16th house. You're down to 15 again. Yeah, but look, you'll be able to breathe the air. I think it's a good deal. Breathing 16. So this is pretty insightful. And, you know, I think it's time where we, you know, we used to live in a world where it was good enough.

We had the good enough boyfriend or girlfriend. We had the good enough, you know, like I see, you know, at 54, I've been sick all my life and I date. And I see these lists that people make when they date. You know, I want this and I want that and I want this and you know some people have like a hundred items on their list of what they're looking for as if you can order people out of a freaking catalog which you can't last time I checked unless you I think unless you order like a Russian bride then you can maybe get that out of the catalog but that's that's probably gonna not end well that's probably not gonna end well they usually don't not going to end well. They usually don't.

But although I don't know, I can't say that. I don't know. That is a fact. It could be like somebody's trafficking. I think we do. That's true. Yeah. We don't want to get into human trafficking, but I think some of the

pride's legal. I don't know. Well, anyway, it's we do. You know, people want to do things. That's fine. But as well, you know people want to do things that's fine but as well yeah they'd be very sensitive it's a very tough we do the jokes around here people that's what we do we set up a weird scenarios so you know it's it's we used to be a good enough society like people would start relationships with somebody i always meet these people and they're like i want that

love affair of that old couple that's 100 years old. They're holding hands, walking in the park. And you're like, well, you're 45 and you haven't settled down with anybody. And they're like, I haven't found anybody good enough. And you're like, well, what's your list? And they're like, I have 100 items on the list. And it's like, you know, I'm pretty sure that when that old couple met, like when they were 20s, you know, he came home from World War II. And she was, you know, helping out from world war ii and she was you know

helping out with the wartime effort on her end you know those riveter rosies and you know they met and had kids they didn't sit around and go well i'm not sure if you meet my hundred you know list and they just said you know what we kind of like each other, and we seem pretty good to each other, and let's see where this freaking goes. And they stuck it out. And a lot of people do that in this world too. They trade, you know, divorce rates are off the chart because everyone's always trying to trade up, and everyone's like, oh, well, maybe there's something better out there.

You know, one of the problems we have with social media is a lot of people get, you know, hit on DMs, especially if you're married, and they're like, hey, you're really hot. You shouldn't be with that dude anymore. And they're like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't. And it looks like the world's so much funner out here. And then they get single, and they're like, this isn't as fun as I thought it would be.

Not my children are bastardized. What am I going to do? So, you know, we really need to get back to some of the things you're talking about, I think, in this book. No, I think, you know, one of the interesting things I found reading this book was, I think he's a sociologist named Paul Amato at Penn State University. And he says that it's kind of fascinating that people who divorce when they remarry are more likely to divorce. Like the divorce rate for first marriages is like 50 percent, but the second marriage is like 70 percent. Yeah, it's like 67-70

and then it goes higher after that. Yeah, it keeps going higher because part of what happens is that you divorce because if you divorce someone because you have a problem, you have a really bad relationship, it's abusive or it just really changed in some way, that happens and I think that's okay. But if you divorce

because you think, oh, I really want the perfect partner. My partner is like 83% good. Those almost always, you're never going to find that person or you'll find them for five minutes. You know, like the first month, you have a honeymoon and it seems great.

But so I think, you know, what he says in his research is that the best, there's really nothing better than good enough, right? There's nothing better in which you, you in which you have a meaningful, supportive, emotionally caring, sustaining relationship in which you kind of enjoy and appreciate each other's company. And that's good enough.

And that's actually, that's human life. Because of course, people are going to get on your nerves. And of course, people are going to change and they're going to want different things. You know, there's a point at which, right, it becomes abusive. It becomes problematic. Of course, then divorce is absolutely what you should do or whatever. and they're going to want different things. You know, there's a point at which, right, it becomes abusive, it becomes problematic. Then divorce is absolutely what you should do or whatever. For various reasons, people do these things.

But if it's because you're searching for the perfect partner, you're likely to just keep searching all life. You know, yeah, I just, I think that the, that is part of lots of things that we do, right? With the way people raise their children as well can also be, you know, you really are pushing so hard and it's totally understandable, right? You kind of look at a world where you can either excel and kind of be at the top of the social hierarchy and have money and have comfort, or you can kind of fall and really feel like, I don't know where my next meal is going to come and where my next job is going to be. you hollow out the middle class i think some of what you're kind of pointing out here is that as you don't have a place to project yourself into kind of a meaningful decent life as a teacher as

a librarian as a police officer as a stodian i can have a good union job and make life work you start to there's all sorts of stresses that come to kind of filter out into that and then it affects how we treat our children that's not to say i mean obviously sometimes we romanticize the past when it wasn't always so good for women or for people of color and this continues in various ways today but there was i think some some of this that that you're describing there was a kind of solid middle class that you could live an ordinary decent life and and and that's you know beautiful it's you know it's people people you know i think they they see so many other people have stuff and there's so much of it that's faked like it's amazing how much it's faked like like i said i know people that are unemployed and

unemployable who you know they have all those best pictures they look like they're going places you know they even have places where you can go to now where you can take a picture of you in looking like you're on a private plane and it's really just a cut out of a plane it's like a scene set up and you can go pretend like you're sitting in the chair of some private plane zipping off to divide turns out you're just you know it's just a stage set so and and and it's interesting people get caught up in it and they and they believe it's true or they they have to keep up or else they're they're falling behind or something yeah yeah no no again i mean i i i'd agree with you you know that a lot of this is kind of media saturation a kind of propagandistic thing you know i do think it's important to say as well that sometimes, you know, it's not untrue, right? So my profession, you know, I write and I teach,

and there are fewer and fewer kind of good teaching. And so you do start to feel this pressure, like, well, if I'm not being the best at what I do, right, I'm not going to be able to make, like, if I'm not the best podcaster, I'm not the most charming, you know, whatever you say in your intro, the minds that are just going to change everything forever, I'm not the most charming, you know, whatever you say in your intro, the minds that are just going to change everything forever. I'm not going to make it. I'm not going to be able to do the things that I'm good at or care about. And so I think, you know, the being an elementary school teacher, being an aged care worker, being a custodian, you know, being someone who collects the garbage in a community,

like all these things are things that make our lives, all of us, right? We contribute to society's meaningful ways. And if we're not making it possible for that person to have a decent salary, to raise kids, to send their kids to a good school, to have somewhere to live, to have healthcare, to have education, have education. The basic things that make life feel meaningful and decent and connected. We're going to have problems. We're going to have people really fighting each other, trying to get to that

top. It's not going to work. It's going to tear us apart. And again, I think we're seeing that very clearly. We live in a world that is really fracturing. It's holding together, you know, but it's not working out so well for so many people and and i think if we don't start to transition in these kinds of ways to really think about a decent caring life for as many people as we can

we're going to keep having these pretty drastic problems and that's not even thinking about the nature side of it right do do politicians seem to take this then into account more? Like, do they need to maybe think about this as a political sort of, you know, thing that we need to do politically? I mean, I'd love if they did. I'm not a slogan writer. Probably good enough is like not the best rallying cry. I mean, I like it. You know, I'm totally into it.

We don't have jobs we'll just have good enough people yeah it'll just be a tv dinner on every table instead of uh or something maybe a little you know tv dinner is a plastic it's a it's an ecological disaster but you know i don't so i don't know what the like the best way to phrase it we know what what that sounds like you know as someone is trying, so I don't know what the, like the best way to phrase it, what that sounds like. You know, as someone who's trying to think about this kind of philosophically as a writer, I found the Winnicott's phrase resonated with me and I was happy to use it and play with it. You know, for a slogan, I don't know, but I do think the basic idea, right? What should we do as a society?

It's not about us finding like the best, the most talented and giving them everything and like hoping they work everything out for us. It's about all of us being involved and leading these kind of decent lives and appreciating that there's some struggle in that. And there's going to be some difficulty in that, but we're going to be in it together and literally like actually together, not this like we're in it together, but I'm on my private plane or whatever. We're in it together, but I'm on a giant yacht. No, we're actually, we're actually in this together because we all contribute and caring about each other, and that's our focus as a society. So I'd love to have

that be the political rhetoric instead of this kind of divide and conquer rhetoric that we so much, which is really about, you know, like, you are the deserving ones and other people are not. And it'd be much more beautiful to really hear, no, look, this is what it means to be human, is we all kind of care about each other, helping each other so i'd love that if you know if you or someone else

comes up with like the perfect political message for this that'd be great i'm happy people want to run with good enough like you know that's great but there has to be some something to carry that that message of decency care these material well well-being for all of us. And knowing that, again, it's never going to be better than good. Like, we're going to have to deal with this. Yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. Well, this has been an interesting, insightful discussion.

And definitely, we need to realign our values and everything. I think that's really important for us to take and do. Give me your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. If you want to find me, the easiest thing to do is avramalpert.com or at avramalpert on my much underused Twitter account. I'm currently at the New Institute here in Germany. You can find me on their website as well. And, yeah, I'm happy to be in touch.

I like hearing from people. I respond to most emails unless they're really mean, but otherwise I'm pretty easy to talk to. Those are the mean ones or the best ones emails unless they're really mean, but otherwise I'm pretty stuck. Those are the mean ones are the best ones. Maybe you're better. I just kind of like, I can't. There you go. There you go. So thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, Abram. This has been pretty insightful. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's really fun.

Thank you. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for tuning in. Go order the book, The Good Enough Life. Came out April 19th, 2022. Thanks for tuning in. Go order the book. The Good Enough Life came out April 19th, 2022. You can get it wherever fine books are sold. Go to youtube.com. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to goodreads.com. And all of our groups on Facebook,

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