The One You Feed - How to Simplify Your Life and Find More Fulfillment in Your Work with John Kaag

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

John Kaag is a renowned philosopher and author who brings fresh insights into the timeless wisdom of Henry David Thoreau. With impressive academic achievements under his belt, including teaching writing at Harvard and serving as a professor at UMass Lowell, John possesses a unique perspective on Thoreau’s philosophy regarding work and intentional living. Drawing inspiration from his own life’s journey and the challenges of balancing personal fulfillment with professional obligations, John invites us to explore new ways of finding meaning and purpose in their work. In this episode, you will be able to: Explore how seeking purpose and meaning in your work enhances overall fulfillment Learn from Thoreau’s ideals on the balance between work, personal development, and conscious living Shift your relationship with work by placing emphasis on your core values and beliefs Embrace a simpler lifestyle that fosters a sense of satisfaction unencumbered by material expectations Engage in continuous self-discovery to refine your values and manifest a rich, authentic life. To learn more, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you feel like the price of your work is too high in terms of your existential meaning or your sense of significance or your sense of being worthwhile, then the job is too much. It's asking too much. The costs are too high and you need to change. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door

doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to reallynoreally.com and register to win

$500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead the Really No Really podcast follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is John Kegg, an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He specializes in American

philosophy and is the Donahue Professor of Ethics and the Arts at UMass Lowell. He's also the external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and advisor at outlier.org. John has published in many periodicals and is the author of many books, including Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life, American Philosophy, A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche on Becoming Who You Are, and is the co-author of the book discussed here, Henry at Work, Thoreau on Making a Living. Hi, John. Welcome back. Thanks so much for having me back.

I don't remember when it was, but we talked about your book, William James, about healthy-mindedness, and I loved that conversation. And when I saw you had a new book called Henry at Work, Thoreau on Making a Living, I thought it would be wonderful to talk again. So we're going to be discussing that book in a moment, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking to their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's such a good question, a perennial one. The last three years have been rather tough. When I was 40, three years ago, I had cardiac arrest and had bypass surgery. And when the EMTs brought me back after the arrest, I had a lot of reevaluating to do about life, but more specifically about my work

life. And it gave it a lot of thought and decided that when it came to my work, I'd been really feeding the wrong wolf. I'd been feeding the wolf of greed and self-possession and fear. And what I needed to do is reorient myself back to my teaching, back to my family, what I needed to do is reorient myself back to my teaching, back to my family, back to those experiences that really nourished me. And thankfully, I had a chance to do that with the help of Henry David Thoreau and his position on work. So when you say you were feeding the wrong wolf at work, you didn't make a career change, correct? You're still a professor at Harvard. You still write books. What was the nature of the change or what was the nature of the way in which you were feeding the bad wolf and hopefully are feeding the good wolf today when it comes to work?

I think that as you grow older and have a family, it's oftentimes very easy to get sucked into working for money that supports your family household. And one of the insights that Thoreau gives us is that you don't need nearly as much as you actually do. And I had gotten sucked into this almost manic work pace. I was producing books almost every year. I was signing up for textbooks and lecture series based on monetary value rather than what I actually found meaningful. And when you realize that life could be cut short at any moment, all of a sudden you say, oh my gosh, I need to actually think about whether my time is being well spent. So you're right that I've not changed my job. I teach at UMass Lowell. I'm a professor there, and I've taught writing at Harvard. It's not that I changed my work as much as my orientation to why I was undertaking the

tasks at hand and concentrating what actually drew me into philosophy in the first place, which was a study of ethics, the study of the good life, a study of what is the good life. And also drew me back to thinking about my students more carefully and also my children and my partner more carefully and not just beelining for what seemed to be the sort of most expedient or lucrative move. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that, you know, we're going to get into work and lots of different types of work and all that. But for those of us who are extremely fortunate enough to be in the type of work that probably best suits us, you know, that is, to use a word, our calling,

or something that we care deeply about, or that matters to us, right? And that is to use a word, our calling or something that we care deeply about or that matters to us. Right. And that's a very fortunate position to be in. However, that alone does not mean that we have a wise relationship to work. And I think that was my orientation for a long time, given that I kind of tried to come from a software career to doing this, that I thought, well, once I get over here, it's all going to be straightforward, right? And since I've gotten over here, I've had to continue to re-evaluate my relationship to work that does matter to me, that I do think is important, but can also just start to run everything. And you're right, the motives that are in it can get very confusing. You know,

we all have different metrics by which we're measuring our work, and they tend to be money or approval, or if you're in my business, it's downloads, you know, you've got all these sort of things. For me, it's been this consistent practice of over and over and over again, going back to what is it about this that matters to me. over again, going back to what is it about this that matters to me? And I think that what you describe is very similar to my experience deciding on what profession I was going to go into. I mean, I was brought up in a family that did not have a lot of money. And so the drive to get money, especially from my single parent mother, was very, very intense. My brother became a surgeon. I was supposed to go work for

Goldman Sachs right out of college. And I made a decision to go into grad school in philosophy, primarily because I didn't want to follow that path. But that does not mean, or it didn't mean for me, that I didn't then just simply import that drive and that logic into my own trade publishing, into my own scholarly pursuits. And I ended up publishing papers like crazy as if they were Wall Street trades. And it's very easy to import your past, even if you think that you're escaping it. So I take your point really seriously. I think that's absolutely true. And I think it's also confusing when you do enjoy what you do, or you do see value in it. That makes it a little bit more confusing, but we'll come back around to this thread, I'm sure. But let's start with Thoreau. And you say that work was at the root of Thoreau's philosophy.

It's at the root of Walden. So say a little bit more about that. So we all oftentimes think about Henry David Thoreau as this lotus-eating, tree-hugging, loafer of a guy who took two years, two months, and two days to go hang out at Walden and escape all the pressures of modern life. We basically think of Walden as a vacation. But we oftentimes forget that Thoreau went to Walden to work, to support himself, to figure out what was actually required, what was actually necessary in modern adult life. And Thoreau goes to Walden not long after his own brother, who he was very close to, dies in his arms, dies of gangrene in Henry David Thoreau's arms. And at those moments,

you really have to wake up and think, what am I doing with my life? And what Thoreau does at Walden is famously, he says, I went to the woods to live deliberately. But really what I think it is, is that he went to the woods to work deliberately. He built his own house to a large extent, made his own clothing, grew his own food, really tried to think about what his life's work, or as you said, the vocation or his calling is. And I think that that is very directive. is. And I think that that is very directive if we read Thoreau and read Walden as basically sort of handbook for how you might think about your own working life. Yeah. There's so many things that I learned about Thoreau that I did not know reading this book.

And one is, like you said, his sort of natural tendency towards work. I mean, you say early on that, you know, nobody who has a 2 million word journal by the age of 44 is a loafer. And that Thoreau, even as he was walking, you know, he believed you were working while you walk, you were ruminating. And he was using that term in the positive sense, not the negative sense that we often tie it to today, but that he was very industrious. He was, and sometimes we don't think about writing or thinking as work, but it is. But Thoreau then on top of that sort of occupation or vocation really undertook a handyman's life. a handyman's life. I mean, he grew up middle class, but also rural middle class, which basically meant that he lost a toe cutting wood at the age of nine. He falls off a cow. I

don't know what he was doing on the cow, but it must have been some type of work in his teenage years and breaks something. He then basically goes through 11 different jobs in his life and is trying to think about the relationship between manual work, meaningful work, and then also try to bring a sort of critical eye to immoral work, but also meaningless work and drudgery. So, I think he's giving us some guidelines to rethink the concept of work, which in the West, if we think about work, sometimes we just view it like in the Bible, it's viewed as a curse. I mean, God gives it to human beings as a curse. And oftentimes we think about work that way. And really,

according to Thoreau, we ought not, because work is what sets us free for Thoreau. Yeah. And we'll get into what degree is being able to think of work in that way, what we would call privileged or elitist in a later part of the conversation. But you say Thoreau questioned why we work and that he claimed that men labor under a mistake. What is that core mistake? The core mistake, and I think we've alluded to it in the early section of this interview, the core mistake for Thoreau is believing that we are rich only in terms of our monetary wealth. And that the riches of work and the returns of work, ROI, return on investment is really about monetary gain and about self-interest and greed. And that while we think that that approach, which has been encouraged in modern capitalism and modern

consumerism, that that approach is either inescapable or is in fact beneficial for individuals because it makes them secure. It makes their houses secure. Thoreau is suggesting that we think about the health of a human being and the wealth of a human being in terms of what sort of experiences he, she, or they can have in life and what sort of value can we add to the world at large through the workings of our hands or minds? And I think that that's a very, very important point, especially in our post-pandemic age, when people are really rethinking how much do they want to work? Do they go back to the brick and mortar office? Do they stay at home? And Thoreau's there saying, hey, if you feel like

the price of your work is too high in terms of your existential meaning or your sense of significance or your sense of being worthwhile, then the job is too much. It's asking too much. The costs are too high. And you need to change. In this midst of the discussion about the great resignation, when people are more and more leaving their jobs, Thoreau is right there at the first part of the 19th century saying, you can resign. You can drop out in order to reconnect with work that you find meaningful. In the book, you talk about how Thoreau believed that manual labor could be made into something beautiful, that work can be something that is beautiful. And there's the other view that says work is a curse, right? And I would say most of us float somewhere in between

those two things. And I've worked with a lot of people over the years who come to me for coaching and their core dilemma is, do I need to get a new job slash career? Or do I need to learn to relate to it differently? Do I need to change the meaning that I see? Or do I need to change the connection that I have with people? And I think this is a really big dilemma for a lot of people. It can be very difficult to figure out, you know, is this okay? And the challenges inside me, or's true. Mine too, as a matter of fact. Ralph and I share a birthday. Oh, you're lucky. One of his best friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, your giant follows you wherever you go. In other words, you are yourself no matter where you go, no matter what work you take on, no matter what occupation. So sometimes it's not going to matter if you change occupations without changing yourself beforehand, changing your orientation to the world or your co-workers or compensation.

So I think the point that maybe sometimes the best thing to do is to try to change your angle of vision, try to change the way that you see things in your current situation. I think that there's a lot of wisdom to that. And Thoreau does that many different times in his life, especially around the way that he views his own writings. In other words, are they public? Are they private? Are they spiritual? Are they politically oriented? He's constantly thinking about how to reorient himself in what looks to be a fairly stable job. But he is also, and Emerson would also say, that sometimes you do need to break out, especially if you find yourself in a situation where you really have what you deem to be an immoral job. In other words, the compensation that you get is actually

an immoral job. In other words, the compensation that you get is actually derived by taking money from others or exploiting others. And this was the case for Thoreau when it came to teaching. Quite famously, one of his first jobs was as a teacher, and the headmaster asked Thoreau to exact corporal punishment on his students. And Thoreau thought about it for a day, tested it out, and then quit. He just couldn't do it. He couldn't go ahead working in a sort of immoral situation. So I think there has to be a certain balance between resigning too quickly and staying on for too long. Yep. Yep. Everybody's situation is kind of different in figuring out the pros and cons, the trade-offs. I mean, everything has a cost, right? And so what costs are you willing to

incur, which makes sense. I want to turn a little bit to this idea of work as a beautiful thing, because it was reflecting before this conversation and my father passed not too long ago. And one of the things I said at his eulogy and I had been thinking about is that what I got from him was a really good work ethic. I started to examine that statement a little bit more closely after reading your book. And I thought about like, why did I used to work so much, particularly as a teenager? Like I worked a lot and I didn't have to. I mean, I kind of wanted the money. I don't think that was the driving factor. It wasn't like I was trying to please my parents. What I realized is that I actually really enjoyed it.

I worked in the restaurant business, but there was something about being in a kitchen and being with other people and the fun that we had there. And there was something about that activity that was deeply satisfying to me. Now, eventually it became unsatisfying and I'm glad I don't still do it. But I think this idea that our work can be a satisfying thing is another element that I'd like to explore a little further. Sure. I mean, Thoreau came at the issue of the satisfaction of work in a number of different ways. One of which was work at its base is the means by which we support ourselves in the natural world,

in the world in which we live. And you might think about that very quickly and you say, yeah, of course I get a paycheck and then I get to go buy my food and my gas that then gets me to back to my job where I can work some more. But that's not exactly what Thoreau meant. Thoreau was living through a period of American history where individuals were being caught in the industrial commercial complex that we now call modern day life. The mills up in Lowell and Lawrence in the Industrial Revolution were basically within Thoreau's sight. And in response to that, Thoreau returns to his little plot at Walden and he says, what can I do so that I am self-sufficient? In Emerson's words, self-reliant. And can I redirect my work back to those very simple practices that allow me to support myself, grow my own food, shelter myself, sustain myself? So there's one aspect that we oftentimes forget that work really is a form of self-possession, a way to be self-possessed.

The other aspect I think that you push on really nicely when you describe your teenage jobs where you're connecting with others and you feel connected to the world. This is a Thoreauvian and Emersonian impulse too, that our work connects us either to the land or to the people or to the community of mind. It connects us to something much bigger than our very local interests, which note is very different than this sort of self-reliance model, right? What it does is it allows us to reach out into your garden or into the natural world, for example, to sort of change the landscape in a productive way or to make something that is out in the world that others get to enjoy and participate in.

And that sort of engagement is meaningful because I think it gives us a break from feeling so imperially alone in our little, as David Foster Wallace says, skull-sized kingdoms. So work gives us that outlet and that communion and connection as well. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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Find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say Thoreau believed that a certain type of work allows us to inhabit the world in a way that makes us actually at home. And, you know, I think that's work in its most beautiful state is it makes us, like you said, feel connected, at home, purposeful. It's funny, I have this little device on my wrist. It's called a whoop band. It's an exercise fitness tracker, right? And it's okay. They introduced a new feature and it's called stress response. So it's basically trying to tell you when it thinks that you are a little bit more stressed than normal, that your heart rate is a little more elevated, not from exercise. It's very interesting. And this is only a couple of weeks of data. And again, this thing isn't a hundred percent accurate, so

I don't want to make too much out of this, but what's interesting about it is that I find that my stress level is often at its lowest when I'm working, which is an interesting phenomenon because we tend to think of it the other way. But what I realized is that I'm much happier working than I am worrying about actually working. There's an element I've always noticed in my life that when I am at work on something that matters to me in any way, shape, or form, and that can take lots of different forms, I do feel more at home. What's interesting, the experience that you're describing, I think, is the way that many individuals describe play, like hobbies, that they're really enmeshed in or immersed in. But the very interesting thing is that you can do that and should do that in your

work. So one of my students came up to me, and I'm very engaged in class. I talk to them like real people. They talk to me like real people. It's very back and forth. And one of my students said, Dr. Keg, you seem so excited. Why do you teach this way? And I thought about it for a little while. And the reason is, is because first of all, I want them to get something out of the experience. I find that meaningful, But I also, for better or for worse, it is an anxiety blocker. When I immerse myself in my classroom, I'm worried about them. I'm not worried about myself. I get lost in the flow of the conversation and the flow of the lesson. And it's really the case that losing yourself, that sense, all those petty

worries that you had before your work, once you quote unquote, get into it, all of those worries tend to go away. And I know that I'm describing a very, very specialized and privileged sort of situation where you might say to me, Hey, John, I work a job that is drudgery, and it's very hard to lose myself in these situations. And Thoreau has very clear positions on that as well. And it's not necessarily that you need to just be zen about your forms of drudgery. He has a certain type of cultural critique about systems of occupations and employment that rest on large-scale forms of drudgery. Yeah. And this is an interesting point because Thoreau talks about the value of manual labor,

right? Like you can actually be at home and connected to the world through manual labor. actually be at home and connected to the world through manual labor. You mentioned Zen. I've been a practicing Zen student for a long time and how in Zen, the phrase I've used is called Samu, means work practice. And it's basically taking something that is extraordinarily ordinary, sweeping the floor, chopping vegetables, whatever it might be, that you can do without thinking about at all. But the point is actually to give it very, very close attention, thus elevating it into something that is beautiful. So on one hand, we've got this idea that this sort of manual, ordinary, what could be drudgery labor can be elevated into something beautiful. And then we have the experience of people who have to do that work as a living, and it feels deadening. And that,

you know, Thoreau is also saying, you know, in those situations, you maybe shouldn't do it. How do you think through that what appears at one level to be a little bit of a contradiction? It's a great question. I mean, Thoreau is famous for his positions on abolitionism and slavery, which in the middle of the 19th century, when we're talking about work, we have to acknowledge that lots and lots and lots and lots of people were working basically against their wills and forced to work. And Thoreau was not ever a person who would say, oh, you're in this horrible situation. Let's- Pick your cotton mindfully.

Yeah, exactly. Pick your vegetable of choice mindfully. Yeah. But what he did suggest and who he was writing to was a large number of middle-class Americans, middle-upper-class Americans, who had forgotten that very local, very manual labor, very mundane labor can be very meaningful. And you can make it not only beautiful, but for Thoreau, sacred. And what he was suggesting, I think, is that individuals who read Walden, for example, or read Civil Disobedience would notice that if you change your orientation to material wealth, he says, simplify, simplify at Walden. I mean, he lived in a 10 by 15 foot cabin. It wasn't a big mansion.

He ridiculed individuals with big mansions outside of Concord. So if you reorient your position to material wealth and change the way that you think about quote and unquote good jobs, good jobs in Thoreau's day were becoming more and more capitalist jobs. In other words, owners of factories, those were the good jobs. Good jobs in Thoreau's day were becoming more and more capitalist jobs. In other words, owners of factories, those were the good jobs. Jobs in which you don't necessarily have to work with your hands. Jobs where you hire others to do work that you don't want to do. So Thoreau is pushing on both of those points. Reorient yourself to material wealth, reorient yourself to manual labor. And you'll notice that you don't have to live in a society that is so dependent on the labor

of others. In other words, forced labor, or on a government that would perpetuate immoral policies, like the government of Thoreau's day that he pushes up against in civil disobedience. So it's all these different aspects of work and work-life balance and manual work are all related. And so Thoreau is suggesting to us who maybe need to slow down a little bit and appreciate the sacred potentials of manual labor to do so. And it not only affects our own lives, but it also affects the societies in which we live. You know, it seems that a big piece of this is about choice, right? You know, when you are forced, whether by economic reality, and again, I get that Thoreau would say,

not as many of us are forced as much as we think we are, because we could live on less than we do. But let's talk about people who are barely subsisting, right? When you're forced either by, in his day, slavery, in our day, what we might call wage slavery, right? Meaning that I've got to do all this in order just to survive. It's very difficult then to elevate that work into something beautiful and meaningful because it's not a choice. You're not choosing exactly of your own free will in the same way I would be choosing to go outside and chop wood and be engaged in the process. Is that a fair way of sort of summarizing? That's a fair way of summarizing it. I mean, I think about this.

We live outside of Concord, Massachusetts. I live very close to Walden Pond. And there are a lot of big houses here with big lawns. And I see lots and lots of people who don't live in the houses working the lawns of these big mansions. And I just asked myself, my wife Kathleen said to me, she goes, why do you like to take care of the lawn and the gardens? And one of the reasons is, yes, it connects me to the earth. But another aspect is, I don't necessarily have to pay someone a very low wage to do something that I could actually enjoy doing. And the relationship between employing individuals to do work that you would rather not do, that issue was very much on Thoreau's mind. And he was worried about choice, but also exploitation. Exploitation

of those individuals who don't have choices to work elsewhere. If you think about his location at Walden, it was right next to the railroad where Irish workers really on a sort of subsistence level had to get by working on the railroad. And then similarly, he was surrounded by former slaves and he lived on the outskirts of Concord. And so Thoreau was very much aware of the way that our needs and desires have a tendency to place others under pretty onerous obligations to fulfill our own desires. As you were talking, I was thinking about, there's a show I love called Downton Abbey. I don't know if you've watched it. I just think it's a brilliant, brilliant show,

but there's a scene in it where there is, in essence, the main character suddenly, without knowing it, inherits Downton Abbey. He becomes the guy who's going to take it. He had no idea it was coming. He had no idea he was related, but he's the next male heir. And it's in a world where male heirs are there. And he comes and he arrives at Downton Abbey and the servants are trying to take care of him. And he is saying, no, no, no, no, I can do that myself. I can do that myself. And there's a scene where suddenly there's a sense that by doing that, he is taking someone and not allowing them to do what they think their job or their role is. I just was thinking about that as you were talking, because I do think a capitalist would say, well, you know, the person mowing the lawn for $12 an hour has a job that they wouldn't otherwise have. Maybe they've come from Mexico and suddenly that's a much better living than they would be having.

And so I think these are really interesting and sort of challenging questions. I think so too. I think what Thoreau does is that he repeatedly goes and works with day laborers and goes and actually works alongside of people cutting ice in very cold conditions in the middle of a pond. And I think that his willingness to work alongside people who make manual labor their living is, I think, an important instruction for us. Because if we're going to hire someone to do our lawn, at least we need to know how hot it is in July. At least we need to know how thirsty you get when you're out there. At least we need to know.

And this is not wholly dissimilar from William James. He has this famous essay called The Moral Equivalent of War, where he says that the gilded youth, in other words, the golden boys, girls, and people of his time need to get the ideals, the false ideals knocked out of them with a good amount of manual labor. And he thinks that walking in the shoes or trying to walk in the shoes of someone who lives very differently and by other means of work gives us some indication about how we are to treat those individuals who we might hire. Yeah. Yeah. And there's certainly an element of, I think, treating everybody regardless of the station of their work with a great deal of dignity, right? I mean, I think that just to me is sort of a fundamental principle. Somebody who's

a stockbroker is not better than a waiter, They both deserve dignity and they're both equal. So not so much of the class hierarchy that we often think about. Yeah. I mean, I think about the way that the work of our lives is a certain type of leveler between people. What I mean by that is each of us at the end of our life gets a chance to look back and say, what have I worked on? What have I done? And am I happy with that? Was that my choice? Was that my life's work? goes to Walden so that he didn't reach the end of his life and discover that he hasn't lived as a real stop you in your tracks moment, my mother would say, like when it comes to your work, because do you want to get to the end of your life and to say, hey, I shouldn't have spent that extra hour in the office, or I wish I would have spent more hours in the office. And so oftentimes, we don't have those moments of pause. But Thoreau says, take the moments because at the end, you really would have wanted to. Yeah. And it's one of the things I love about your work is you

take philosophy and put it back into very practical terms that can cause us to do what I think is one of the most important things that we can do, which is to ask ourselves, like, what am I doing and why am I doing it? Or what's important to me and is my life oriented that direction? And to ask that question often because things change, you know? And I think that that practice is so fundamental, You know, and I think that that practice is so fundamental is that questioning of what am I doing and why am I doing it? in work, but he got into, I don't know what, Ivy League school. He grew up fairly lower class, but he got into an Ivy League school, which then led to graduate school, which led to trying to work in the top management consultancies and doing all of it and just did not like it. And so he quit basically, and now lives far more simply, doing far less. And, you know, I asked him, I said, did the fact that you just had a child, does it change your perspective on the choices that you've made? And his answer was really interesting because the thought where my head was orienting was, now I've got a child, I've got to

be more secure. And his was, it makes me more confident in the choices I'm making because I am with my child far more. It sort of flipped that idea on its head of security, you know, where my sort of standard middle-class brain would go to, which is like, now I've got a child I must provide. His was, we can get by with way less. What I want is to be with the child. And anyway, I just thought that was an interesting thing. And to see someone and talk with someone who's really making that choice, you know, who is making the choice to say, like, I'm walking away from lots of money in order to have way less, which I mean,

I guess is the same choice you make if you leave a job as a software executive and become a podcaster. As a personal example, might be a similar type choice, but I did that at a different phase in my life. I mean, it's been so enlightening to write this book with my co-author, Jonathan Van Bell. And Jonathan is about my age. He's a little younger, but he's a frugillionaire, he calls himself, which is basically he's frugal. And Jonathan is about my age. He's a little younger, but he's a frugillionaire, he calls himself, which is basically he's frugal. And so he feels like a millionaire. And he works on projects that he wants to and does not worry about having a full-time job, but he lives on next to nothing. And he is happy that way. And what's interesting is that I had a father

who was a banker at Citibank. He left when I was three. The money kind of ran out for my family, but he left me with a legacy of thinking that my self-worth was bound up with how much money I was making. And what Jonathan's father, Jonathan Van Bell's father did was told him at a very early age, he said, the best type of job is the job that allows your mind to be free. And he works, Jonathan's father works as a driver for a hospital from what I understand. In other words, he shuttles patients back and forth all day and does not make a lot of money. But he has this mentality, a really Thoreauvian mentality, where you don't need that much. And when you don't need that much, it frees up your mind to work different types of jobs. And he likes the job that he has because it allows him to write songs in his

head or to write poetry while he's waiting for his patients to come out. And I think that we oftentimes forget that when we just base our self-worth so much on either monetary worth or status. And I think about Thoreau a little bit here because Thoreau, he never owned his own home. He lived with others and that freed him up to actually work on jobs that did not pay that much. He never had kids and he did not have dependents. And we can think, oh, poor Thoreau. But we can also think that that was a conscious decision to sort of limit the economic necessities of life so that you could make different choices about the work that you take on. We all know that genuine self-compassion and self-love are absolutely crucial in the quest

for healing, transformation, and everyday growth. But what if we struggle to get there? One of the most powerful yet effortless ways to settle our nervous system and reconnect with our true selves is by spending quality time in nature. It's for this reason that this August, I'll be offering an in-person Awakening in the Outdoors retreat at La Rosa, who's a three-time guest of the podcast, author, psychologist, meditation teacher, and friend. During these five days together, we'll enjoy hikes, outdoor meditations, art, insightful workshops, and lively discussions. Our goal is for you to walk away feeling restored with a firm awareness of new resources and a new relationship with the gifts nature holds for us. resources and a new relationship with the gifts nature holds for us. To learn more about this special retreat and sign up, go to oneyoufeed.net slash nature. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That is deeply counter cultural to our general world and culture because we are all embedded so deeply in that mindset of more money is a good thing and more things are a good thing and fancier things. And it really is a question that I'm always sort of asking, which is like, what is enough and what causes happiness? And you get

used to a certain station, right? Like, oh, well, now I've lived in a place like this. It feels hard to go backwards. But you can, you know, those choices can be made, but they are countercultural. But I do think you're right, that we are at a moment where more and more people are asking themselves those questions. And this idea that we have to do what we're doing is not as true as we think it is, right? I mean, we may have to do what we're doing in order to keep what we currently have, right? We get caught up in this standard of living situation, but those choices can be made differently. But they're hard choices to make. You know, I think culturally, oftentimes

our family, you know, our spouses might have very different opinions, to make this choice to say, I'm going to scale this all back economically is a choice that I think takes a lot of courage and a lot of thought. My wife, Kathleen, is in corporate America. And in corporate America, you don't have tenure. And so you change jobs pretty often, maybe every two years or every year, every three years, something like that. And so this question about like, which job do I want to take is on our mind pretty often. In this sort of last iteration of job selections, I said, you know, we could move out of the house that we have and we can live anywhere. We live in a much smaller house and it might allow us to pick different jobs.

And that never really crossed either of our minds before that point. And it was thanks to Thoreau. Thoreau basically says you can live in any type of house that you want. And all of a sudden your choices change. And that's, like you said, it's a very humbling and very disorienting thought because everything that you thought was so stable and that what really mattered in life is the sense of security and having a particular type of home and car and all the accoutrement of life. Like that stuff doesn't factor that forcefully into what makes one feel happy and meaningful and flourishing. And so Thoreau's a nice reminder to say you can live otherwise. He walked through our backyard,

Thoreau and Emerson, 200 and some years ago. And there were large, what Thoreau calls family farms in the area. And these family farms were not just subsistence farming, but I mean, they were surplus farming, taking vegetables all over New England. And Thoreau watched these farmers kill themselves on their family farms. But they were very respectable members of the community. And they had these amazingly large farms. And Thoreau said to his readers in Walden, I never want a family farm. The cost is simply too high, existentially speaking, morally speaking, personally speaking. And I think that that's a really important message for us today. for us today. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things we hear about the gig economy these days, and we often hear the negatives of it, right? That people don't have benefits, they don't have steady work. And so there are definite downsides to it, right? But the flip side of benefits and steady work and all that is sort of a full-time job. And I think if you want to be more intentional, the opportunities are

better than they have been in the past. You know, I often, when I was in the software world, which was originally software startups, but eventually became consulting in big corporations on very complex software projects, you know, one of the things that I bemoaned frequently was that like, what I wish I could do is just say, you know what, I would like to work 25 hours a week here. I would like to take this down a notch, but that wasn't sort of on offer in standard corporate America. That's not the way it works. You just either work full time or you don't work. I mean, like in the sort of professional level I was at, and I think that has started to change. And so I do think there are some positives about the way the work world has changed. And there are also negatives,

but there are positives if we are trying to be a little bit more intentional and craft a life. I think there are choices now that were not around 10 or 15 years ago. I think you're right. And I think also the way that the pandemic made everything virtual and the way that work time and clocking in really became a thing of the past and efficiencies of scale really began to matter a lot more. And the way that if I can get a task finished on my own time at two in the morning, because I'm a night owl, that's how it's going to be. And that I think is Thoreauvian in the sense that his body and his natural rhythms determined what sort of work he was going to do. If you read Walden,

you notice he's working the whole time, but his days are partitioned in this very natural way. So he'd get up and he'd read and then he'd go out and plant before it gets too hot. And then when it did get hot, he'd come back and write. I mean, there's this ebb and flow of life, which just suits certain types of people in certain types of bodies. And listening to that ebb and flow on a very personal level is very hard to do. If you have in a certain corporate brick and mortar establishment where you have to clock in at a certain day and you have to go to lunch at a certain time. Yeah. Well, you say in the book today, most of us are fretted by the tick tock, tick tock,

right? Time to wake up, time to shower. You say the clock is after you, a crocodile that devours your adult life. I love that. And I was thinking about it because I work for myself. I get to choose kind of what I do when I do it. And yet the clock is still, it's there. You know, it's like, well, the time to show up for this time to show up for that.

But it's been interesting for me to internalize and it's taken me several years to really do it I think like I could choose to schedule interviews at nine in the evening if I wanted that's not what I have done traditionally and there may be less people would be willing to talk to me but that is a choice I can make I could upend all these things that seem like they're defaults. And I love what you said earlier, where we import, you know, corporate beliefs into working as a professor. You know, it's amazing the beliefs that I imported from so many years working in a standard sort of software development profession, how much of that I imported into working for myself. I just feel like even four years in, I'm still unraveling so much of that, learning to be more deliberate and thoughtful. I have so many responses to that comment. I think that if you think about the way

that education has been structured as a certain type of corporation. Like I entered philosophy to teach. I love teaching. But the way that incentive structures work at lots of universities, they don't incentivize teaching. In fact, you're doing better if you teach fewer students, less classes, and you publish more. The way that corporate life is then internalized and reflected back into spheres of work that we really don't expect that occur in. So that's one comment. The second comment that I'd make is that Thoreau goes to Walden in order to, he says, improve the nick of time. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that phrase. I don't fully understand what that means. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that phrase. I don't fully understand what that means.

So each of us, as surely as I am sitting here, time is passing. I'm getting closer to death. That's just the fact of the matter. Life goes in one direction to the end. And each of us have a chance to make those increments of time that lead to our grave more or less meaningful? And when he says, improve the nick of time, what he's actually saying is, can I make those moments that lead to my own demise more meaningful in the interim? And that's really important. I mean, when Socrates says that philosophy is preparation for death, it's just a euphemism for philosophy is figuring out how to live a meaningful life so that when you get there, you're not in big trouble. That's what he means, I think, by improve the nick of time. And I think that comment about the alligator and the clock, I mean, I was watching Peter

Pan with my kids. And for the first time ever, did I notice that Captain Hook looks a heck of a lot like Peter's dad who works too much. And that clock, which is inside that alligator who bit off Captain Hook's hand is always after the father. The clock is always after the adults. And I think that that's a lesson that Thoreau wanted us to take home, which is pay attention to the clock because it's coming for us no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. Let's pivot away from Thoreau for a minute. You've written about a number of philosophers, one of which is Nietzsche. Am I saying that correct? Yeah, Nietzsche. I butchered that for about the first

25 years of my life. That's what happens when you're somebody who kind of reads a lot, but never went to school or anything. So you never know how anything is actually said. Anyway, that's off topic. But I'm tying this back to what we're talking about, because in Nietzsche, you talk about something called the transvaluation of values. What does that mean? I'm glad that you asked. And I'll try to also tie it to the transcendentalists because Nietzsche is reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. And we oftentimes think about Nietzsche as the person who said, God is dead. But you know who actually said it? It was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He said it first. And what Emerson and Nietzsche then Nietzsche in the 1880s was saying is that

our belief in institutions like the church, like standard political models, like standard forms of education or traditional forms of education, these institutions, which we had often turned to to give us a sense of value. In fact, during our day and age and even his, these institutions and the respect for these institutions was waning. That's what he meant when he said God was dead. And in the face of that lack of meaning, that vacuum of human significance, humans like you and me and all of your listeners are tasked with making

meaning for themselves, which is where the transvaluation of values comes in. The transvaluation of values for Nietzsche and also for Emerson was the task of figuring out how to create a moral system and a fountain of significance for individuals in the absence of tradition. The way that he does this, at least for Nietzsche, is to figure out how to live in such a way that we emphasize creativity, feelings of power, originality, flourishing, life over resentment, guilt, fear, and materialistic greed. And the transvaluation of values is overturning the values of the past and recreating values for yourself. So to overcome, it's a process of overcoming the past and even overcoming yourself to some extent. Yeah. And I think it ties back to everything we've been talking about with Thoreau too, right? It's a question of saying, what matters to me?

What do I believe in? What work life balance, which is not a great term, but do I want to have? How important is money to me versus time with my family? Like, these are all individual questions. They have to be worked out by the individual. And I think that's kind of what is being pointed to there in the Nietzsche. I want to go one more step with that because there's an idea, I think there's a term that is used called the genealogy of morals, which I believe means looking at where did I get the morals and beliefs that I have? Where have they filtered down from? And what are actually mine? And I think this is a very confusing process.

And it's confusing because, and I'm going to read something else that you wrote, which is, you say, as it turns out to become who you are is not about finding a who you have always been looking for. It is not about separating you off from everything else. It is not about existing as you truly are for all time. The self does not lie passively and wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process. And I think this is what makes trying to figure out what our values are oftentimes very confusing. Because we are conditioned so deeply and thoroughly by so many countless causes and conditions that to figure out what mine is and to try and tweeze it apart from what came before feels to me often impossible. That's good. One of the problems is that the investigation to figure out where you came from

is always enacted by a person, namely me or you in your case, that was given birth to and is in large part those very instances of the past. That's a good analogy. Yes. And so it's kind of like a snake trying to catch its own tail, right? And we should be comfortable with that fact because we're never ever going to get out of it. So we try to figure out where I came from or what sort of inheritances I took on from my father or my grandfather or my deep past. And those efforts are really valuable because they give us some sort of insight about both our limitations, but also what might enable us to move forward.

And so that process of looking back to try to figure out why do I believe what I do? Why do I value this and not that? Why are my most cherished beliefs my most cherished beliefs? Those questions are all good Nietzschean and I would also say Emersonian and Thoreauvian questions. But the idea that you would come to a single one and fast answer to those questions and that you would be done the process, that's where all three of the thinkers believe that you've gone awry. So in other words, you don't end up and you say, oh, now I understand my past completely. I can move forward a victorious

Promethean self. No, that does not work. It's an ongoing process of revision. Emerson says, I am but an experimenter. And he says that in what I like, one of my favorite essays called Circles. I'm an experimenter. Sometimes I go in circles, right? I overturn everything, Emerson says. I unsettle everything, is Emerson's words. And I think that that's one of the upshots of Nietzsche's philosophy and why he admires Emerson so much, is that Emerson and Thoreau were willing to unsettle things, even themselves. And that takes a great amount of courage, patience, and humility, I think. And oftentimes I'm not up for the task, but it's hard work, but you have to be patient with yourself, I think.

I love everything you said there, particularly that becoming comfortable with the fact that it's an ongoing process, that we are an evolving creature. And in many ways we are, as you were talking about, I was thinking a little bit about like quantum physics, like like the minute you observe it you change it and you are the observer of yourself and that's an ongoing sort of dynamic process which is why I often think about when it comes to values and what's important to us that asking that question often is really important instead of the way that many of us think about it, which is like, I'm going to go off on a mountaintop for three days and write out my mission statement, and then I'm done. That's a good exercise. But the recognition that I sort of have to keep

interrogating that, at least has been my experience, if I want to be dynamic and alive and evolving, is to consistently be saying what matters to me why does it matter to me does it really matter to me knowing that you'll never totally tweeze it apart right you know the minute you're like now I'm letting go of the values of my parents and I'm like but oh god but then I adopted the values of like that cool skateboarder in seventh grade like oh crying out loud you're telling me that you, Derek Newell has been influencing my sense of what's important for 14 years now. I mean, it's just this constant funny process. It's why I love that Buddhist idea of countless causes and conditions.

Like, you can't figure it out, but you can make decisions and inform decisions and have a way of living as close as you can to what you value. and informed decisions and have a way of living as close as you can to what you value. I also think that in this process that you're so nicely describing about self-recovery, discovery, actualization, this process, you do have feelings about the process. And tapping into how you feel about the process, I think, is really important. So I know, for example, that I'm getting somewhere if I feel uncomfortable, like genuinely uncomfortable. And I know that when I get scared in the process or I see something that's scared or that I'm afraid of, that that's a moment when I'm supposed to go toward the thought rather than away from the thought. And that I think is present in both Emerson and Thoreau,

but also in Nietzsche. So Nietzsche says we must have courage for the forbidden and forbidden questions. The forbidden questions are those that we don't even feel comfortable asking to ourselves. So it's hard to even give voice to them. But if I feel like they're forbidden, if I feel scared, then I know that there's something there that I need to take a closer look at. Because it's probably the case that there might be some sort of prohibition or gag order on me asking this question. And why is that? And that's the type of Nietzschean move that I think is really useful, at least in my own life. the type of Nietzschean move that I think is really useful, at least in my own life. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. John, same as last time,

I love talking with you. I really enjoyed this conversation. And again, your latest book is called Henry at Work, Thoreau on Making a Living. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed having you on. Oh, thanks so much. It's such a wonderful program. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

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