The One You Feed - Oliver Burkeman

Episode Date: January 11, 2014

This week on The One You Feed our guest is Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is a journalist for the Guardian and the author of a wonderful book called The Antotdote: Happiness for People who Hate Positive Thinking.  In This Interview Oliver Burkeman and I discuss...The One You Feed parable.Why you should ask yourself:  "What is the worst thing that could happen".Do you have a problem right now?.What musterbation is and why you should avoid it.Why positive thinking isn't all it's cracked up to be.Why focusing too much on your goals can be counterproductive.How many wars were started in world history because somebody forgot their coffee in the AM.What pop songs can Oliver not get out of his head.Why positive thinking abhors a mystery.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I do think that too much focus on happiness is counterproductive. 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. 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 Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Today we have the writer Oliver Berkman, who is a columnist for The Guardian and author of the excellent book The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, which was recently released as a paperback here in the U.S.

Oliver, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's good to be here. I recently just finished your book and have to say I genuinely enjoyed it. I looked forward to getting to read more of it. It's very refreshing in the, I won't call it self-help, but for lack of a better word, self-help space. It was very well done and very entertaining. Anybody who's going to quote Marlo Stamfield from The Wire is OK in my book. I'm very grateful for that, and I am not too offended by the self-help label. I think there's a lot of problems I have with books that are in that category, but I don't think the idea

of that category is a bad thing at all. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the old parable where there's a Cherokee grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, we have two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. in life, we have two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents kindness and joy and love and happiness. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents greed and sorrow and pain and pick your poison. And the grandson thinks for a minute and says to the grandfather, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So that's really what our podcast is about. How do people feed their good wolf in life, whatever that means to them. So I'd like to start off by just asking you, you know, what, how does that parable apply to you in your life, and then also in the

in the work and writing that you do? Well, I was thinking about this, and it and it, and I sort of got very confused at first, because I mean, let me just talk for just half a minute about the thesis of my book because it does sort of reflect my own personal ideas about happiness. And then I'll try and connect it right away to the story. a very dominant idea we have about happiness these days, which is what I call loosely positive thinking, the idea that by trying really hard to focus on happy thoughts, think happy thoughts, set very clear goals, put a lot of energy and effort into creating success and happiness, that that's the way we're going to get it. And actually brings a lot of evidence to suggest that this doesn't work, that we should open ourselves more if we can towards failure and sadness and these feelings of uncertainty, not be trying always to eradicate them and stamp them out. And so I sort of argue that it's much, much more fruitful if we

can learn to coexist with, even embrace that side of the coin. What it strikes me in the context of the story about the wolves is that maybe I'm partly saying that you shouldn't focus too much on feeding the good wolf because maybe the analogy breaks down because I do think that too much focus on happiness is counterproductive. I've been waiting. I've been waiting since I sort of came up with the idea for the show. I've been waiting for, uh, you know, I figured it would be somebody who was, who, who had studied Buddhism and was into Buddhism who would say, Hey, you know what? It's not all, you know, you, you know, you know, it is what it is, and you have to accept life and, you know, a little bit more of the less positive thinking. And for me, it's really not

about, and that's why I was so excited to get you on the show, as I said in my email, because I don't want this to turn into sort of, there's a guy named Tripp Lanier, I think he calls it, you know, foo-foo, no bullshit, you know, or bullshit, you know, hocus-pocus. And that's really not what we're after here. So – and we've had people talk about how feeding their goodwill for them means feeding the part of them that works on their art because that's what drives them. we, you know, the way you represent this is that, you know, if you just the constant positive thinking is not a recipe for happiness. So I'd like to jump into the book a little bit in a couple different places. The first thing that I would want to talk about would be, can you talk a little bit about Stoicism and the role that that kind of played in your book and in your thinking? Sure. So this is the philosophy from ancient Greece and then Rome.

It's typified by the work of Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. like Titus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Now, I don't think I can take responsibility for this, but I see more and more people recommending it as an interesting way to think about happiness. I, in my book, quite openly and blatantly sort of plunder the bits that I think are most helpful for the direction I'm taking. It is a very broad philosophy with all sorts of interesting aspects and a sort of quite theological aspect that I don't really get into. But I think

one very simple way of thinking about it is, firstly, it starts with an idea that's very familiar from positive thinking, actually, which is the idea that your beliefs about the world are what cause your distress, not the events themselves. So it's a question of, you know, emotions arise in a way that is dependent on thinking. Shakespeare has Hamlet say, there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, which is a really great statement of stoicism. But then the positive thinker says, well, and therefore you've got to make all your beliefs as upbeat as possible all the time and convince yourself that you're going to succeed in every venture or that nothing can go wrong. The Stoics, it's more a question, I think, best way of putting it, just more a question of saying, once you know that that is how distress arises, once you're aware that it is these beliefs about the world that cause your distress, well, firstly, that's just a much more calming place to be because you realize that it is, to some extent, self-created. You don't necessarily need to struggle to be positive.

You're just finding this new level of awareness about where things come from. Secondly, you can then in certain ways learn to think more rationally about events in the world and to render your beliefs more proportionate and rational. This is a very abstract way of talking about what I do in the book, which involves things like, you know, embarrassing myself on public transport,

trying to show that my fears about being embarrassed were disproportionate to the reality. I can talk about that a bit if you want, but it's that sort of rationalizing on some level your beliefs about bad things in the world so that you still, you don't have to pretend that they don't exist. You just have to see that they are in most cases, not going to kill you. And the Stoics would say, even in a few cases that they will, then there's still a limit to the appropriate level of

distress that you need to feel about. Have you heard of, uh, I've came across something on the internet a couple of months ago called rejection therapy, which, uh, sort of cracked me up because it's very similar to you, you know, riding on the on the bus or the train and sort of announcing the stops. The goal of rejection therapy is to go out and get someone to reject you once a day for 30 days. You just got to do something where someone rejects you. And the funny part of it is these guys will get out there and you'd be amazed by how many things you get when you ask. So they'll go ask something preposterous to get rejected, then they'll get it and so they're not done for the day they got to go and so right but when i was reading that part that in your book i

thought i thought a lot of that and and i the the inherent wisdom in that makes a lot of sense which is those things seem being rejected or or being loud on the train or standing out seem like they're such mortifying events that in, you know, but once you do them, you realize they're really, you know, there's not that much behind them. And it is your thoughts about them that is far worse than the actual event themselves. Right. And it's a slightly subtle point, because I think another thing that comes in here, and it might be also part of the rejection therapy idea is just sort of exposure. You know, the idea that if you,

if you're scared of spiders and you spend time in a room with a spider that you sort of numb out to the, to the, to the fear that you feel. And that is a sort of part of psychological approaches to phobias and, and all this stuff. But the really specific thing about stoicism, I think is that you can cut those thoughts down to size so that you, you know, it's not that you don't, it's not that you need to start thinking that it isn't embarrassing to speak out loud the names of the train stations on the subway train, which is what I was doing. It's that you need to, it's that you learn to have an appropriate level of worry about

them. And then you suddenly realize that you're going through life half the time worrying about things like embarrassing yourself as if they were things like, you know, a nuclear bomb dropping on your neighborhood or something. You are sort of, there's this sort of monochrome level of anxiety that we often go through life with that is just completely inappropriate to most of life's daily, daily hassles and anxieties. And into your point earlier, if you, you know, realizing that it's not the events, but your thought about the events is such a, if you, you know, I think in your book, you say, even just having that awakening for a little bit, really sort of put some distance between you and that anxiety, and you can start to work from that place. And I, you know, my sense is,

and a lot of people never, they don't see even that, even that gap where they're able to sort of realize that like, it's, you know, being stuck in traffic is not the bad thing. It's, it's how I'm reacting to being stuck in traffic. And you've talked about how you've kept some of those stoic things going today, even, you know, as you as you've gone on, how you've kept a little bit of things that you talk about sort of like being in the grocery line. And when it's long and how you work with that. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, little phrases come back to me, and I use them over and over again, even though I don't go and sort of deliberately embarrass myself on subway trains as a regular practice. I do use that question, you know, what is the worst thing that could happen here? All the time. The positive thinking approach is all about trying to persuade

yourself that the best thing is going to happen or that the worst thing is not going to happen. And I think when you do that, that's the sort of dangerous flip side of reassurance. When you try and reassure yourself or somebody else that everything is going to be OK, you are implicitly affirming this idea that if things didn't turn out OK, that would be an absolute catastrophe. And it's much more empowering, I think, to remember that actually if they didn't turn out OK, you'd be okay. So that question, what's the worst thing that could happen is a really, really helpful one.

If you are getting irritated by a long line in a store or something like that, that question just brings you right back down to earth because you realize that, okay, you know, it's not that there's nothing going to happen as a consequence of this. It's that I'm going to be 10 minutes late, or I'm going to not get to do 10 minutes of whatever thing I plan to do, uh, you know, with my evening, but you sort of see it for what it is suddenly. And you realize that the emotions that when they are not mindfully attended to what we're running wild in you were, were, uh, completely disproportionate to the real loss of the delay in the line.

A sort of related line that occurs to me a lot, which is less from stoicism, more from actually from Eckhart Tolle, the New Age writer who I write about as well, is that question, do you have a problem right now? It's amazingly interesting to me how frequently the answer is no. I think, you know, if you're in severe physical pain, it's possible to answer yes. But almost every problem that I think I have in my life is something that just happened or that I think is going to happen and is never actually afflicting me in the present moment. That is a really good one.

You, as we talked about you riding on the trains, that was from, I think it was Albert Ellis. Right. Who pointed you towards that. And he coined a word that I had never heard of before that he had in the book that just made me laugh. And I want to hear more about, which I know you know what I'm going to say, which is called masturbation. Right. So what is masturbation? It was meant to make you laugh, I think.

That was part of his sort of vigorous approach to psychotherapy. He died a few years ago, unfortunately, but he was he was a tremendous personality and swore an awful lot as a routine part of his public performances and and his writing. and his writing. The idea about masturbation is this idea that we plague ourselves with musts, with demands that things must be a certain way, that we must perform to a certain level, that other people must treat us in a certain way, or that the world in general must be a certain way. And he makes a very, very, very critical distinction between demanding that things must be a certain way versus having a strong preference, even a very strong preference that they be a certain way. There's a sort of binary distinction there between really, really wanting something to happen in a certain way, really, really wanting something to happen in a certain way, which is totally fine, and demanding that it absolutely must be that way. And he would say that if you can learn to relax those musts into preferences, you don't necessarily have to give up all desires,

which is one interpretation of Buddhist psychology in this area. But you have to relate to them in a different way such that they are preferences rather than demands, because it is those demands ultimately that cause a huge amount of suffering, because plenty of times they will not be met, because the world does not have an inbuilt reason, contrary to what it says in the secret. The world does not have an inbuilt reason to go the way you demand that it goes. And I think that's another one of those things. And it's sort of, you know, a thread that weaves through your book. But one of the challenges I have with the over-the-top positive thinking, and I'm a proponent of it to some degree,

the over-the-top motivational speaking, is that it paints this idea of a life that should be so perfect. And when your life doesn't measure up to that, it's very easy to feel like you're getting the short end of the stick, you're doing something wrong. You know, it paints this picture of perfection that, to your point, simply doesn't exist. And trying to achieve it is as you talked about frequently makes people feel worse right there's two interesting issues here I think one of them is what counts as the

perfectly happy life you know and whether actually immense wealth and sort of material benefits and things like that are actually the real path to happiness and then whatever your definition of happiness there is a uh, benefits and things like that are actually the, the, the real path to happiness. And then whatever your definition of happiness, there is a question about the path you take, uh, towards it. And it's there, I think that I try to focus and say that, you know, even if actually you think, yeah, millions and millions of dollars is what I want in my, in my life, uh, struggling vigorously and directly focusing on that alone is not the right way to achieve it because of various things we can talk about, like about how the human mind works. You know, that this kind of, it's not a machine that if you're thinking all the time about trying to stamp out negative thoughts, for example, just to give the most obvious example,

you'll be thinking about negative thoughts all the time and therefore you won't be free of them, you'll have more. 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. You sort of led into it there a little bit, and I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it. Golidacy? Yeah, well, it's sort of a made-up word by a scholar called Christopher Cayes.

So yeah, Golodacy. It's sort of derived from theodicy, which is a religious, a theological term. Anyway. So, and you describe in your book, you talk, you give a bunch of examples, you know, and basically the idea is, you know, if you focus so insanely on goals, you often make really poor decisions and things don't turn out as you like. And you talk about the Everest tragedy. You talk about corporations. And I've done a fair amount of work in the software development space. And I have a phrase that says, anytime somebody tells you that failure is not an option, you ought to prepare for a disaster. Because nobody says that unless your back is so far up against the wall that you're just never going to get there. And so I resonated a lot with that. Is there anything else you want to add about the, you know, about sort of goals and, you know, how do you strike the right balance between planning and having goals and, you know, doing it to the point where it has a negative effect

on your life? Well, it's fascinating part of the thing. I mean, it's part of the book I really, really enjoyed and benefited from researching. There's lots of different reasons why too much focus on the end point is a problem, partly to narrow a goal. You know, the person who determines that at all costs, they're going to be a millionaire by age 35, say, you know, and some people will fail at that, but others will succeed in exactly the wrong way. You know, you will succeed and alienate everyone you know, and your relationship will have collapsed and everyone will hate you, but you will have achieved this goal. And so that's an example, I think, of too much narrowness in goal setting. There's sort of a deeper spiritual aspect here, though, as well, isn't there, about the problem of always postponing happiness, fulfillment, whatever word you want to use, to some point in the future.

point in the future to the extent that every bit of present moment time that you have on the earth is actually only there instrumentally for some other point. And then, of course, you know, you fulfill your five year plan and then you just have to start another one because because you're not present to the moment. So I think that sort of that slightly corny, you know, it's the journey, not the destination thing, when you really take account of what it says, is quite a powerful side of this. It goes beyond just setting bad goals or pursuing them in the wrong way to this idea that actually some of your focus should just not be on the goal at all. Right. It's that sense that happiness is still always out there somewhere.

And when you achieve whatever that thing is and you don't feel that happiness, following the way the mind has been trained to work, you just set it out. Well, it must not be this thing. It must be that thing. You know, it's not. And, uh, you know, I, I, uh, that phrase, the grass is always greener. Um, I heard a great quote the other day that said the grass is greener where you water it. Wow. That's really good. Yeah. It's kind of related to the wolves as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. There was another part in the book that I really resonated with. And it's something that that I have that I've really worked to deal with. And you talk about, you know, procrastination and habits and rituals and sort of the idea that a lot of people don't do something because they they they think they need to feel like doing it in order to do it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, this was incredibly powerful for me. It's not only in the book, but it also is sort of why I ever got the book finished in the first place. This whole idea that is central to

motivational, the culture of sort of motivational speakers and motivational events and everything, is that doing great things in the world, whatever they are, is a two-stage process. First, you work up the right mindset, and then you're just so excited to do the thing that the action follows automatically. And the problem with this, of course, is that it's actually a lot harder to work up the right mindset about certain important tasks that you know are going to be very meaningful to you than it is to just, you know, move your limbs in the way required to complete them. So this particular line, which is a sort of way of putting into practice the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, I suppose, is that this idea

that you don't have to feel like doing something in order to do it. You can say to yourself, as I did many days in writing this book and do another context today, you know, I don't really feel like doing this thousand words today. I'd much rather in a short term hedonistic sense, you know, not bother and surf the internet or go and get another coffee or go back to bed. But I also know that I want to achieve this thing. And so I'm not going to try and get rid of these negative feelings. I'm not going to try and stamp them out and replace them with tremendous excitement for the task. I'm just going to say, okay, I don't feel like doing it. And at the same time, I'm also going to open the laptop and load up the file and do five minutes on the outlining or whatever it might be. And it's

obviously what happens a lot of the time then is that a good feeling follows, you know, motivation follows the action. But even when it sometimes doesn't, you know, you've done something that is meaningful to you without having to sort of get yourself into this psyched up, into this state. And I think things like the motivational seminar that I went to and write about in the first chapter of the book, they are fundamentally about, you know, too often they are not about providing people with interesting cognitive tools for their lives. They are about whipping people up into a sort of physiological state of excitement for a day. And, you know, it lasts a few days of excitement for a day and you know it

lasts a few days and then it fades away and you have to go back to another uh motivational seminar which is a great business model i suppose and so in some sense yeah no it certainly isn't it it gets to the point that in order to accomplish anything you have to have uh a certain mood and moods are really a tricky thing you know people have different set mood, and moods are really a tricky thing. You know, people have different set points for their mood. There's a lot of stuff there, and this was one of the things that, you know, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways I've heard it phrased. You know, you can't act your – you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.

Oh, nice. You know, I've got a, I call it the now rule, which is that if there's something I need to do, I just, I try and do it immediately, you know, I try and do it immediately, but I allow myself to do it for like five minutes. That's what I, I trick myself. I'm going to do this for five minutes. Right. And nine times out of 10, getting started, you know, gets me over the hump and I'm going. And it's amazing. I always think about how much momentum is involved in sort of all these things, in being productive and doing different things. Once the ball is rolling, it's much easier to keep it going. Yes, I completely agree. Yeah.

Yeah, we interviewed a guy a couple weeks ago who's got a website called The Value of Simple. And he had something that I thought was really great. He says, I plan out my week, and then when it comes time at 3 o'clock on Tuesday to do the thing that's there, I believe that old Joel, the one who made the schedule on Sunday, knows better than new Joel, the one who's sitting here today, which I thought was really interesting because it points to, and I think you talked a little bit about it, habits and rituals, right? If you, and that sort of takes the emotion out of it. And the other thing, and you phrased it really well just there, and it was the first time I ever heard it. It was a rabbi, and I cannot remember his last name.

He wrote something, The 48 Ways to Wisdom, which is really pretty interesting. But he talks about making the distinction between what you feel like and what you want. And that's exactly what you just said. You want a book. What you feel like is doing nothing. But if you focus on, and so many times, I think we say to ourselves, I don't want to write today. Well, not really. That's not really the reframing of, I do want to, in the grand scheme of things things. I just don't feel like. Right. And that really helps me. Transient moods are so, you know, all you can do is be aware of them. I don't think you can. I don't think there are all that many ways to sort of deal with them other than just being aware of them and acting alongside them.

them. But, you know, this is the way in which you can be sort of, you can get into some funk on some afternoon and feel like everything in your life isn't working out and, you know, everything's gone wrong and you need to have some huge overhaul of your life. And then you suddenly realize, oh, I didn't have lunch. That's it. You know, they are affected by the tiniest things. that's it you know they are affected by the tiniest things um yeah and uh you know just being a bit too hungry or not having slept well the night before can put a completely different frame on on everything unless you stop and realize that actually that those are the things that that cause those uh those things so yeah i often wonder that you know how many wars have been started in world history by you know someone not having had enough coffee that morning or something like that i'm jason alexander and i'm peter ten. 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. So I wanted to get into another big chapter you had is around Buddhism,

and I also have been to the Insight Meditation Center, although I only went for three days versus the whole week. But can you share a little bit about what that experience was like for you and how meditation still impacts your life today and how you use it? Yeah, so this was actually just under a week, I think, but it was a silent retreat at this place, Insight Meditation Society in Western Massachusetts. And in the middle of, you know, very isolated countryside, in the middle of a forest. Uh, and 40 of us were, um, doing a really quite entry level meditation, uh, retreat. You can do, you can go for, you know, you can go there for three months if you're, uh, if you're really, uh, hardcore. This involved, um, so

sleeping in a dormitory would be woken up at sort of 5.30, I think. It's in the book. I can't quite recall. But, you know, very early in the morning by a bell. And spend about nine hours of the day in alternating 45-minute periods of seated and walking meditation with a few breaks and a few, you know, chores you have the, around the meditation center. You, you, you'll know all this. Um, and you know, it's just a completely, I had meditated a little bit before, uh, in sort of 20 minute portions, but, but spending your whole day for multiple days in that context is, is completely eyeopening it for the first, uh the first couple of days as I write in the book, I just had like bad pop lyrics going around in my head forever. And it was...

Can you sing those for us? No. That's what I immediately wondered is which bands... It was Barbie Girl by Aqua, which is a terrible, terrible song you might remember from 1997 that I had never liked, never bought, never seen performed, but it came from somewhere. Somewhere, stored away. Exactly, exactly. Terrible. And gradually this sort of faded away. But what really changed for me in the middle of that process was um seeing that i wasn't actually there to try to

calm my mind down because when you're put in that beautifully silent uh serene environment the first thing you notice is how non-beautiful and non-serene is your internal uh world it's a complete cacophonous uh racket of you know, Danish pop song lyrics, but also, you know, just petty irritations. You get very, very irritated with the tiniest thing, like someone breathing wrongly a few feet from you. You know, and it's once you realize that you're not actually trying to get rid of all that stuff in a sort of eradicatory way that you learn then to let go of it. And that's when really interesting things start happening. I'd be interested in your experience because I don't think three days would have been enough for me in that context. It was actually only after about three days that something different changed. By the end of the week, I was

thinking to myself, I'd quite like to live here forever. I mean, I don't think I would have done, By the end of the week, I was thinking to myself, I'd quite like to live here forever. I mean, I don't think I would have done, but the thought did occur. You talk a little bit about Pema Chodron, who is among the top three guests I ever want to get on the show. So, Pema, if you're listening. She's not listening. She's on retreat in Nova Scotia, isn't she? I'm sure she is not listening. Nonetheless, I would love to have her on there. But you talk about that, the idea of insecurity and that, you know, trying to cling to security in a safe life is, A, ultimately sort of

pointless or fruitless. It doesn't work. But you sort of end the book with an idea, and maybe we can wrap up sort of talking about this, because I thought it was really interesting and profound, about this because I thought it was really interesting and profound, where you talk about if you get that level of security, which again doesn't exist, but the cost of that is sort of the loss of the mystery of life. And you sort of describe that mystery, that sense of awe, that sort of thing as a fairly passable definition for happiness for you, which I thought was really interesting. It's that learning to be with the mystery, the uncertainty, the fragile feeling, the tender feeling that is somehow synonymous with being alive in the fullest sense.

That you can have, in certain contexts, I don't think psychologically in life as a whole, you can have a great deal of security and certainty, but it is sort of akin to not living at all. uh, at all. Um, that, uh, that, that sort of openness and this idea from, from, from John Keats, you know, negative capability, the idea that maybe the real happiness talent, the skill we need to try to learn is to remain in a situation of not having things finished off and sorted out and concluded. Um, the question I ask in the book, which I borrow, I think, from Susan Jeffers, the self-help writer, is if somebody could hand you a list, actually maybe it's not in the book, if somebody could hand you a list tomorrow that had every single event that was going to happen

in the rest of your life to the day you die listed on it, and you're absolutely certain that it was correct, listed on it, and you're absolutely certain that it was correct, you wouldn't want, I don't think, to receive that list, even if every single item on the list was a good thing. I mean, that's the crucial point. Yeah, I don't want to know about the bad things that are probably going to happen to me. But even if there was nothing bad that was going to happen to me from now until the day I died at a very, very old age in perfect health in my sleep, there would be something about the knowing that would have sapped the point out of life. And I think there's something really profound in that. And it does basically entail being open to the, to the negatives as well as the positives, because if you're only open to the positives, you're not really open at all. open to the positives, you're not really open at all. Excellent. And I think you've got a lot in there. I think, is it, am I, did I paraphrase or is it a, is it a quote,

positive thinking abhors a mystery? Right. I think it's a kind of, it's a kind of refusal to accept that there are mysteries. It's a, it's an attempt to shut everything down and know that everything's going to be really happy and exciting and motivating all the time, that you're going to definitely hit your goals. It is, yeah, it's really intolerant in a sense, in that sense of half of what it is to be alive in the world. Is there anything that you would like to cover that we haven't talked about? Anything you think that's relevant to our theme? I have to say, I think we've covered it all in some great questions and some great discussion.

How much and how this applies to the wolves question is something that fascinates me. I'll be thinking about that for a while longer. Maybe it's to do with being okay with the bad wolf as well. I don't know. Or not assuming that bad things are the bad wolf. Right. And does one wolf have to win? Can't they just kind of get along? You know, there's lots of fascinating, we can really take this places. I know, I know. Like I said, I've been waiting for somebody with the Buddhist perspective to

give me the, you know, or, you know, give me the whole, you can't have light without dark argument, which was, which was inevitable. However, I do think that the, it's a, it remains a semi-useful metaphor if one that falls apart under too deep of thought. No, I think even if you, even if the process of engaging with it is such that you begin to think that it doesn't add up in certain ways, that then it's done its job as a story. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Oliver, thank you very much. This has been a great, great talk. Like I said, I genuinely enjoyed the book. And thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much indeed for inviting me on. thanks for listening to the one you feed you can learn more about oliver berkman and his work in our show notes at one you feed.net slash oliver