The One You Feed - Melody Warnick

Episode Date: September 27, 2016

Join our new The One You Feed Facebook Discussion Group   This week we talk to Melody Warnick Melody Warnick has been a freelance journalist for more than a decade, she has written for Reader’s Digest, O: The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, The Atlantic’s CityLab, and dozens of other publications. She is the author of This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live.  How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment—the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being—then travels to towns across America to see it in action.  In This Interview, Melody Warnick and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable Moving often Liking where you live Committing to where you are and making the best of it The difference between people who are movers, stuck and rooted Always thinking happiness is "out there" somewhere Why walking more helps you love where you live What is your Walk Score Each town is different to each person depending on perspective- there is no objective town Where would you take visitors in your town? Taking advantage of the things your town offers The paradox of choice How important nature is in feeding your good wolf and loving where you live Buying local The power of "weak ties" Join our new The One You Feed Facebook Discussion GroupSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you don't want that store to disappear from your community, you have to support it. 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, 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. And together, our mission on the Really Know 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 reallyknowreally.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 Melody Warnick, a freelance journalist who has written for Reader's Digest, O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, the Atlantic City Lab, and dozens of other publications. She is the author of This Is Where You Belong, The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live. The book explores how we come to feel at home in our towns and cities. She dives into the body of research around place attachment, the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities, and increases our physical and emotional well-being. She then travels towns across America to see it in action. Here's the interview. Hi, Melody. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Eric. book, and we'll get into more detail after we do the parable, but the book is really about becoming

happier in the place that you live, how you can connect to your community in the place that you live and how that can increase happiness. So I'm looking forward to digging into that a little bit more. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in making choices and learning to choose the better angels of your nature. My story or the thing that led to me writing This Is Where You Belong was that I was living in Austin, Texas, and this was the fourth state I've lived in with my family. Texas, and this was the fourth state I've lived in with my family. And we weren't totally loving it, which is completely weird because everyone loves Austin, Texas. And when a new job opportunity opened up for my husband in Blacksburg, Virginia, at Virginia Tech, we jumped at it. And it really was very much about having a fresh start. You know, things get difficult in your life or you don't love your neighbors or you don't love your house. There's something incredibly appealing about just leaving it all behind and starting over. And that was kind of the goal with moving again, except we moved and we got to Blacksburg, Virginia, which is this small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. And I didn't like it very much either. You know,

it was this tiny little Southern town and it was foreign from anything I'd ever known. And immediately that same desire kicks in. Well, we're just going to have to move again. Like this isn't it. We have to find another place. And I realized that I was at this point of decision. I could either just keep moving and keep feeding this desire for novelty and change and restlessness, or I could commit where I was and I could make a choice to learn to be happy in my town where I was right now. So it's kind of like, you know, I think most of us have those competing desires between wanting to stay and wanting to move on.

And when is it right to do either? And this book was my way of investigating the benefits of staying and learning to be happy where you are. Yeah, you talk about in the book, three types of people, people who are mobile like you, the people who are stuck, and the people who are rooted. We tend to think of people who stay in one place for a long time, as maybe having something slightly wrong with them. Especially when we meet people who maybe still live in their hometown or live close to their family. That is not in our culture what upwardly mobile people do. Upwardly mobile people move a lot. You know, they go where the

job is and they take the next opportunity and they're kind of like always on the prowl. the next opportunity and they're kind of like always on the prowl. So we think of people who aren't like that as being stuck. But I realized, and this is something that the sociologist Richard Florida points out, that there's this whole other category of people who are rooted. So they're not mobile, they're not moving around a lot, and they're not stuck because they actually want to be there. They're making a choice to stay in one place and make their life there and be part of the community and be satisfied with it. Yeah. And then there's the people who are somewhere between stuck and rooted. Right. Which seems to describe a lot of people I know who are, they like it where they are,

but there's a lingering feeling like, well, maybe I'll go somewhere else at some point. Oh, yeah. But it's an interesting way to think about your situation. My first question to you would be around, so you moved to this town and you embarked on this process to try and learn to love the town that you're in. process to try and learn to love the town that you're in. And the book is really all about how you did that, the different experiments that you did, and a lot of the science and other writing out there that talks about how you do that and the impact that place has upon us. So I guess my first question would be, have you learned to love your town? That's like the spoiler, just like going straight to the heart of it. But yeah, I have. And it's weird because,

you know, I started working on this project and I wanted to become more attached to my community. And so I started, you know, doing all this research and figuring out, you know, okay, what makes other people attached and how can I apply that here in my town? And there was like this cynical little part of me that's like, this is not going to work. And I might have to fake it. I'm writing a book about it. And it's supposed to work. And so like, as I got closer toward the end of the project, it was almost surprising to me that I'm like, holy cow, this actually has worked. Like, you know, there's definitely days when, you know, I can acknowledge that there are things about my town that are annoying, or, you know, whatever, my community is not perfect by any stretch of

the imagination. But I'm totally satisfied living here. And I can't really imagine a better place for me or my family right now. I kind of have like this illness where I have a really hard time resisting thinking about that, you know, like thinking about moving other places. Like I always pick up those real estate magazines whenever I'm on vacation, you know, like, oh, what would it be like living here? I think a lot of us do that because we kind of just like to imagine, you know, the road not taken. What would life be like if I moved to Vancouver, Canada or New York City or whatever?

But that's okay. The place attachment is choosing to stay, choosing to be happy where you are in spite of those temptations. You know, the other wolf telling you that life would be better if you picked up and moved again and again and again. And, you know, in some ways that can be true. Certainly life is different when you move to a different place. That can be true. Certainly life is different when you move to a different place. But you lose something by refusing to commit to a town, refusing to invest in a community. You lose a lot of relationships. You lose the potential for a lot of growth and a lot of happiness and a lot of commitment where you are.

happiness, and a lot of commitment where you are. So I think what you're saying about place really applies to life as a whole very much. So right, we talk on the show a lot about how we can be in this sort of if then thinking like, if I had x, if I had y, then I would be happy. And I think we can do the same thing with place, we can think if we're somewhere else, then we'll be happy. And I think like you said, I think there's a there's one level of that, which is sort of curiosity about like, well, let me think about the road not traveled. And then there's the other side of that, the darker side of that, which is, we kind of feel like our life is always on hold until something happens that's different. So I think that it's it applies in a lot of areas of life. Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of us struggle with always looking toward the next big thing, the thing that is finally going to happen, that is going to make our life complete, whether that's a place or a job or a relationship. And I think the trouble part is that lots of times once we achieve that, we can't set aside our restlessness. We have become so used to, you know, that anticipation of something better that it becomes incredibly difficult to simply be satisfied. So, you know,

I wrote about place in this book, but I think you're absolutely right that it's kind of a problem that's endemic to most areas of our lives. And I think especially for younger people that, you know, we just get used to kind of hopping around from thing to thing. And if something's not working out for you right now, instead of actually taking the time and the energy to solve it, you just dump it and move on. So let's go deeper into some of the things in the book that you do. The book is called This Is Where You Belong, The art and science of loving the place you live. And you end up coming up with about 10 different strategies for loving the place that you live. And we're not going to go through all of them, but we'll touch on some of them. Let's start with the very first one, which is

walking more. Where does that and why does that help? So it's funny, walking has become this really big thing in the circles of people who talk about place, you know, urban planners and architects and city managers. And partly it's because it's important to, you know, the environment. We need to change the way we have become such a car centric nation. But when you walk, it gives you this ability to see your town in a completely different way. I've had that experience here in Blacksburg. I'm not a runner for exercise, but I'm a walker. And when you're walking, you're going at just the right pace to actually notice the things around you. You see things that you can't see in a car and it gives you a sense of connection to what you're surrounded by.

Sometimes that happens in social ways, like you actually run into people. There's a dog a couple of streets over and, you know, I've met the dog's owner. And now I know that the dog is named mango and i always you know great dog name right exactly i always say hi to mango when i go past um but simply being out in the neighborhood you know i noticed that there's you know plastic flamingos in this neighbor's yard or that this neighbor painted their door turquoise or something. And it sort of gives you a sense of ownership over your place, which, you know, aside from the obvious benefit of you learn your way around and that can make you feel more comfortable in a, in a new place, but you start to think of it as yours. You know, this is my neighborhood. I, I know this neighborhood. I know

how to get around. I know where everything is. And that makes me feel more comfortable here. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No 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.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. 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 signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio

app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Walking seems to be, in addition to the people in the urban planning movement, etc., also seems to be having a bit of a moment, just as an overall approach to life. Apparently, I read recently that it is the least quit exercise, as in people who walk do that more consistently and keep doing it for a long time than people who do any other type of exercise. Like, it's do that more consistently and keep doing it for a long time than people who do any other type of exercise. Like it's one that's very sustainable. Yeah. Personally, that's why I've chosen walking as my exercise. I have a lot of friends who run and who keep trying to entice me to run with them. You know, my daughter does cross country. And so

clearly there's something wrong with me. And I just, it does not appeal to me. Walking on the other hand, it feels like normal life. And so I can trick myself into doing it, you know, like, I'm just walking to the library, you know, I'm not exercising, I'm just running an errand. And so when I move to a new place, I always, you know, I look up the walk score and I try and get in a neighborhood that is walkable to, you know, shops and stuff. Unfortunately for me, I'm in walking distance to a really great French bakery that has not been good. But, you know, I think walking, it creates a sense of vibrancy in a neighborhood. Um, and that's really changing nationally. You know, the national association of realtors did a study a few years ago and, um, now more

people want to live in walkable, bikeable neighborhoods than want to live in, you know, car centric neighborhoods, which is one of the reasons why people are moving back to the cities. They don't want to have to drive everywhere. They want to be in a place where they can walk or bike and feel part of the community. And that really helps. What's a walk score? I mean, I know because I read the book, but for the listeners, they might not know because I didn't know until I read it. So walk score is a website. A guy in Seattle made this and you can punch in your

address and it pops out a score on a scale of zero to 100 based on how many places you can walk or bike from your house. So if you have restaurants that are within a half mile, or, you know, schools or churches or things like that, your walk score goes up. So I think there are neighborhoods in New York City and San Francisco that have walk scores in the 90s and 100, you know, like a perfect score of 100. My walk score where I live in Blacksburg, I think is like in the 50s or something. But I do live within walking distance of some restaurants and grocery stores. And that, you know, that makes it a fun place to get out. Yeah, well, in a quick check here, apparently my walk score is not so great. 41. Where do you live? I live in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Oh,

Columbus is a great city. Columbus is a wonderful city. Apparently that well, it's a 41. So certainly some places in Columbus would have a very high walk score and other places in Columbus would have a walk score even lower than mine. I think that there's there's a little bit of everything close to me, but not much variety in it. Like, you know, you're going to get like one or two restaurants and that sort of thing. Oh, Chris just did his house, which is where we are recording, and he's got an 87. That's amazing. 87 is fantastic. Unfortunately, Chris doesn't walk more than four steps if he doesn't have to.

I'm kidding. He actually is a walker. Now that he knows about the walk score, he's going to feel motivated. Exactly. So you did list 10 things that help you to love the place you are. Did you find any one of them to be more transformative than the others? For me, it was probably doing something fun. love the place you are. Did you find any one of them to be more transformative than the others? For me, it was probably doing something fun. And that relates a lot to one of the main things I learned from this project, which is that there is no such thing as a singular city, that cities are always just what we perceive them to be. And let me explain what I mean by that. As part of my research, I went on a trip to Sierra Vista, Arizona, and it's this town in the South of Arizona, and they were doing a branding project. And as part

of the branding project, I walked around town and talked to people who live there and just kind of asked them what they thought of it. And so I had just had a long conversation with a woman who owned a bakery there and just said, what a great city this was. And she was so lucky to raise her family there and the weather was great. And I went to the mall and I talked to a young woman who was working at one you know, one of those cell phone kiosks. And she said, Sierra Vista is the worst city in the world. It is such a hole. I keep trying to leave and I keep getting sucked back in.

I wish I could escape this place. And, you know, the cognitive dissonance of that, of realizing that you have two people who live in the same town, but have completely vastly different views of where they live, struck me. And, you know, maybe that's an obvious point, because we all know people who, you know, love where they live and people who live in the same place and just hate it. But it made me realize that how we choose to view our town is a huge part of our experience there, that our town is really just a bundle of perceptions. It is how we decide to see it. And so one of my big problems in Blacksburg was, you know, I came from Austin, which is a much bigger city, There's a lot going on. And here in Blacksburg, it's a lot smaller and people tend to complain that there isn't enough to do. So learning to love Blacksburg for me in part was just learning to see the things that Blacksburg was good at and do them.

For me, that was dumb stuff like going to Virginia Tech football games, even though I'm not a football fan, and learning to like that. Or, you know, attending festivals in town. Just finding the assets around where I live and engaging with them instead of focusing on, you know, my town doesn't have an amusement park and we don't have a big art museum and this place is terrible. Right. So, you know, it's all just choosing the things you're going to see in your town.

And one of the things that you recommend is that people try and look at their town through the lens of where would you take visitors and asking other people in your town where they would take visitors to help you kind of get a perspective on your town that's different. One of the things I've noticed as I have people visit Columbus is that I see Columbus through their eyes and I'm seeing it, you know, I sort of see it in a new way because I am, you know, doing the sort of things that there are to do in Columbus, but that I don't normally do on my own. Right. And, you know, you could say, well, of course, they like Columbus, because there's, they're just tourists, and they're only here for

three days. And they're not seeing the real Columbus that I know that, you know, has all its problems. And that is probably true to a point. But I think there's something really positive and beautiful about choosing to see your town the way, you know, an outsider might see it. The beautiful things in your town, the things that it has going for it. There's a group called the Project for Public Spaces that's all about this idea of placemaking. a project for public spaces that's all about this idea of placemaking people, you know, consciously trying to build, you know, community gathering places and making their towns better. And they have this idea of the power of 10. And, you know, basically, it's sort of this random number. But the idea is that if you have 10 things in your town that you can do for fun, you know, 10 spots that you would show a visitor, then you'll feel more satisfied there.

And the town will be more successful. That's definitely a good one to explore. And I think one of the things also that your book brought home to me was the active nature of trying to love the place that you are because it's very easy to get in a rut you know i talk to people a lot about like new york city versus columbus you know in new york city there's 10 times the number of things to do if not 20 times the number of things to do as there are in Columbus. And what I realized, though, is that I do about 1% of what there is to do in Columbus. Because, you know, life is life, and you're busy. And, and so I sometimes wonder, like, how much better is it for me to have 10 times more to do when I'm only doing a very small percent of what there is to do here anyway. And, and your book is really about taking advantage of those things.

do here anyway. And, and your book is really about taking advantage of those things. Right. And, you know, that's kind of the, the wolves, too, because I think, for me, it's always sort of a battle to force myself to do these things. I'm an introvert. And I am perfectly happy to spend, you know, every evening just watching The Good Wife on Netflix with my husband. And so doing these things in the community, you know, showing up for festivals and inviting the neighbors over and things like that, I kind of have to force myself to do it. It is definitely not my nature necessarily. And I think for a lot of us, that isn't our nature that the laziness wins and the self focus wins and the sense of, you know, just wanting to be internal to ourselves tends to win. So to start even thinking about the community or thinking about, you know, investing in it, showing up to events, doing the fun things that your town has to offer

takes a little bit of energy and a little bit of extra effort that you might not normally apply. But I think what you're saying is exactly right. The more we sort of push ourselves to do those things that we wouldn't always do, you know, the touristy things or the stuff we did once when we moved there and have never gone back to do again, the more we enjoy being in our place. And it doesn't mean that, you know, this is not like a fear of missing out thing where you have to be out every night, you know, partying. Yeah, I've heard people say that about New York, too, that they look at all the event listings, and there's so many things going on. And there's kind of the sadness and realizing that they'll never do any of them, you know.

And I think part of that is the paradox of choice. I think actually, you probably have a better chance of actually engaging and doing something when there's only two things going on in your town and you get to choose. effort in choosing to get involved because it is, I mean, we're all, we all live very busy lives. You know, it's easy to get tired. There's a lot of complexity. There's digital devices to draw us in like never before. And so that activity of getting out and doing things does take effort. And I think that's pretty consistent among people. I know it certainly is for me. I was talking to somebody about this the other day. I was talking about skiing. And I, every time I go skiing, I love it. But the thought of getting ready to go skiing, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be able, you know, like, it's just, there's so much effort to get to it. And yet I'm always happy. And I also find that every time I force myself sort of out into doing something that I wouldn't normally do, well, I'm going to just go to the museum

today. Every time I do that, I always enjoy it it and I always feel good about it and I almost always I'm like I need to do this more and so I do think you're right it is a it is a focus on choice I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No 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. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. 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 signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. another one of your things which is one that i love to talk about a lot because as i've gotten older and as i've looked at how you feed your good wolf more this one keeps coming up again and again and again and has been a very powerful one for me which is exploring nature right that was a big one for me here um because blacksburg i'm from cal California, grew up in Southern California. And Blacksburg has, it's like the inverse of California as far as scenery. It's very treed and lush. There are these small mountains everywhere.

And for people like me from the West, it can feel kind of claustrophobic. And that's how I felt moving here was that these were the evil forests and, you know, they were, they were going to get me. It felt very enclosing, um, and in a way that I didn't enjoy. And the way we feel about how something looks, the aesthetic value of our place is really important. There's a study by Gallup and Knight Foundation called Soul of the Community. And they looked into factors that made people feel attached to their town. What made them love where they lived and feel happy there? And the three factors that kept coming up were social offerings, or when people feel like there's things to do and people to do them with kind of like what we were just talking about, and openness or feeling like your community is welcoming to all kinds of people. And the third one is aesthetics or feeling like where you live is

beautiful. And that always struck me as kind of a difficult one because, you know, your sense of aesthetics of a place's aesthetics seems so personal and internal. Like, you know, it's like your taste in music or your taste in books, like you like something or you don't, it didn't feel very like something that you could control. Um, so when I realized the importance of loving the beauty of my town, I decided, okay, I have to get over this. I have to feel better about it. And the thing that I did was I just started hiking a lot. Um, the Appalachian trail runs not far from where I live. There's lots of hiking trails. It's a really outdoorsy kind of place. And, um,

I, again, with the forcing forced myself to become an an outdoorsy person and spend a lot of time hiking the trails around here. And, you know, doing some other stuff to camping and kayaking and things like that. And simply having positive experiences in these outdoor environments. There's a million health benefits to it. But it really did change the way I felt about it. And probably just because I'd made these happy memories in these different places. So now, you know, when I drove past and I looked at these forests, I didn't see, oh, my gosh, there's like a witch in there or something, you know, she's going to get me. I saw, hey, that's where I went on that big hike with my friends. And, you know,

the kids had so much fun and it became this really positive thing. And, you know, that maybe you asked me at the beginning, do I love where I live? And I do. And that may be one of the most dramatic changes I experienced that I love how where I live looks. And I didn't at the beginning, you know, I didn't really connect with this kind of nature, kind of how everyone has what they gravitate toward. And some people love the ocean and some people love the mountains. And this was not my thing, but it has become my thing just by spending time in it. Yeah, that shows adapting very well to your circumstances. There are 10 of these, so we've only hit a couple of them. And so there's a lot of great ones out there that we're not touching on. And I'd encourage people to take a look at those and we'll have links on the website to where they can get your book and your website and all that. But the one I want to talk about is buy local. And I'd like to not maybe talk about there's a lot of reasons why buying local is really good for your

community, ways that are well beyond what most of us even know. And it's worth looking into if you don't know that. But I'd rather focus on for this, why buying local helped you to love the place you were. Buying local is a little different from some of the other things I recommend because I recommend a lot of things that are beneficial for you. And buying local is more like one that's beneficial for your community, or at least that's what it seems like at first glance. But the project I did for learning to buy local was I decided to shop at this local toy store called Imaginations. And the thing you need to know about me is I am really cheap. Or we should say thrifty because that sounds more positive.

I'm a pretty thrifty. Frugal. I am frugal. I am conscious of my money. I'm a pretty frugal. I am frugal. I am conscious of my money. And the way I have been conscious of my money in the invited to, I would see a deal on Amazon and I would buy, you know, 15 of the $5 coloring book or whatever, and just put it in a, on a shelf. And this was it, this was our present for this year. And so Imaginations is this independent local toy store around the corner from our house. And we'd wander in there every so often. And my

daughters would always like beg for stuff. And I'd just be like, no, like, it's really expensive. I happen to know we can get this cheaper online. And, you know, I never wanted to shop there. But one thing that I learned that someone said to me is, if you don't want that store to disappear from your community, you have to support it. And I had never really done that in the past. Like, you know, there have been so many bookstores and, you know, cool clothing stores or whatever that I go in and I'd like window shop the heck out of it. And I'd never buy anything because it always pained me to pay full price for anything. But I had this rethinking moment where I realized I valued this toy store in my town. Like I loved looking at it when I drove past, I loved that it was there. And if I loved it, I needed to actually buy things there.

And so I made a commitment that whenever we bought birthday presents from now on, we would do it at that store. The thing that's been really rewarding about it is I've actually come to realize that there are humans that own businesses in my town, which, you know, was something that I never really thought about before, because my interactions tended to be online, you know, that's where I bought things. And I preferred it that way, because I didn't want to have to, you know, interact with a human being. It's funny, I've gotten to know the owner of imaginations, whose name is Paula really well. And especially because of the book, because I write about her store in the book and I came and gave her the book and I mean she was so happy she's been so supportive of me I just did a reading there you know she's she is my number one fan in Blacksburg and you know, I think it's because she just loves her customers. She is,

she values them, which is not a target or an Amazon interaction. And so, you know, I think we, we develop relationships with the people who run these small businesses and they rely on us and we in a way rely on them, and it can be socially rewarding. Yeah, I thought the thing that was interesting about that, there were a couple things. One was that, you know, those things are referred to as commercial friendships, right? Friendship exists because you go to that place to conduct some sort of commerce, but that the science really shows that those are what we would call weak ties, and that those are very valuable in our ability to feel happy in a place and for our

overall social well-being. And so that those things do add value, maybe more than we might give them credit for. Right. And when you think of it like, you know, when you're in a city or community for a while, you accumulate social capital, which is based on all those connections you have with everyone in the community. And some of those relationships are really close, your family and your close friends, people you're spending a lot of time with. weak ties where, you know, it's saying hi to the checker at the grocery store or having a conversation with the person at the dry cleaner or the Chinese restaurant or whatever. And we tend to not think of those as mattering, but they do. There's something really primal and powerful about having someone know your name, you know, when you walk into a business. Yeah, I think the other thing about the book in general, I'll just say as a last thing before

we wrap up is that you have very, what I would say doable steps for each of these things. So it's not suddenly like you have to go buy everything local, and walk everywhere you go. And you know, you've got a sort of what I would call sort of a baby step approach to some of that stuff. And you don't have to do a ton of it to make the changes in your life that that you can feel about the place. This isn't a overhaul your entire life and never use Amazon again type thing. Right. And I will be the first to say I still buy stuff on Amazon. I still go to Target a lot. So I, you know, but I try to be more conscious of it. And I think that's sort of the idea in general is become conscious of your place,

you know, become conscious of the fact that you're a member of a community that you're contributing to it or can, and that there are a lot of benefits to doing so. And, you know, you don't have to redo everything in your life, but you rethink a few things, and it makes a difference. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed the book. And thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye. You can learn more about Melody Warnick and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Melody.