Writer Elise Loehnen explores life’s big questions with today’s leading thinkers, experts, and luminaries: Why do we do what we do? How can we understand and love ourselves better? What would it look like to come together and build a more meaningful world?
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Oliver Burkeman discusses the modern obsession with efficiency and time management, arguing that our attempts to optimize life often lead to increased anxiety rather than fulfillment. He emphasizes embracing finitude and living at a human scale, rather than striving for limitless productivity. The conversation explores technology's role in exacerbating this issue, the instrumentalization of time, and the importance of finding meaning in the present moment rather than a future state of happiness.
“What I know is that no one is alone. There's no sense of isolation or sadness or disconnection that I think at times we mistakenly feel here because we get very stuck in the fact that we're in these physical bodies, right? And sometimes we're physically isolated or sometimes I think some of us are so distanced from our own truths and our own inner voice, our own inner wisdom that we get very confused on our life path. And then we feel spiritually distanced from being connected to this great fab...
“I tear up at the drop of a hand and got another facilitator who tears up quicker than I do. Uh, but like we tell the youth, the soul would have no rainbow had the eyes, no tears. And so whenever any of the youth tear up or any of the adults, we take the tears and we rub it on the drum so that the tears don't go to waste that reverberate, you know, when we, when we hit the drum. Yeah. So, yeah. So a lot of it's about getting it, you know, dealing with your feelings, you know, like, like me says,...
“I mean, the idea that we're colorblind or, or gender blind or age blind or something, is ridiculous. I mean, we categorize those things within milliseconds, right? When we see one another, it's part of our our development of our visual processing and our social, our social development. But it's a deep and challenging problem. Like how we create space between the categorization of one another and the evaluation of one another. I think creating that space is what allows us to open the door to a n...
“And I just feel that people, I now I have so much more perspective, but at the time, even I felt people who have already had so much adversity in their life. That's a big precursor to how people get behind bars. And then when they're there, I feel like that's the time to heal, but we have such a different mindset in our country and other countries do the same and such a punitive one. And that didn't, that's not how I am organized inside. That's not what feels right in me. And so I think right a...
“The focus of adulthood has been on stability, just, you know, find a job and don't leave it, find a partner and don't get divorced, have babies, you know, white picket fence, the vision of adulthood has been so wedded to stability that it was hard for me, even in writing the book and sorting this out, to pull them apart, you know, that the understanding full stop is that the goal of adulthood is to gain stability and then midlife, we now understand people have to search for meaning because ther...
“So natural intelligence has this ability to bring order when we allow it to. The reason that we don't see it so often in operation in human systems is because we are constantly interrupting those patterns. So that human intervention is constantly getting in the way of and disrupting the natural order. Therefore, every time it tries to express itself or reveal itself, we come in again and we see that most clearly, you know, during the pandemic, here, I think many places around the world, it happ...
“If you don't know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. I think there is so much depth to that. Mm-hmm and that's why it's so important that we help people begin asking. Is there a message that my body is trying to give me about this illness many times, uh, there's different ways to language this for different situations, but, um, is there a way in which a person is spending so much time, taking care of others or responding to the perceived needs of others instead of taking u...
Written and narrated by award-winning author and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, “History is US” is a 6-part audio documentary produced and developed by C13Originals that asks questions about who we are as a nation, and what race might reveal about our current crisis. Through the voices of distinguished historians and scholars, this limited series gives listeners the background and education to understand how we got here and how we can all use ...
“I think I find great comfort in this idea that when you form that bond, when you fall in love, your neurons are actually changed the way that the electrical firing patterns happen in your brain, the way that proteins are folded are changed because of this one and only person that you have spent time with. And from that perspective, when my dad died, he is still here literally right in my physical brain. He's physically in my brain. Now. That's not, I mean, that's data on the one hand, but I als...
“As a therapist, I started to discover that when people need boundaries, they start to have issues around anxiety in their relationships, some depression, because they're not able to really stand up. Or they feel hopeless about improving certain scenarios. Burn out—when people start to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I hate work. I have to work on weekends. Oh, this person keeps talking to me about this thing.’ So burn out frustration. Sometimes moodiness, when we get really mad at other people for asking us ...
“As scientists, we often look at one thing and we say, oh, that's the one thing it's competing for light. And then, and that's true. That's what people did. You know, the science, the experiments were simple, um, looking at one resource and not at the whole ecosystem. And so you miss all, you miss all these other ways that they're interacting. And if you, if we could look at the whole thing all at once, we would make completely different decisions about how to manage that ecosystem. But because ...
“There are 12 questions that enable every person who's willing to, to answer them, to reevaluate their life and their legacy. Because what I have found, um, with my father's death is I miss not a single material thing about my father. I mean, I have his hat on the shelf behind me and I have a couple of his old tools, but that's it, what I really cherish the inheritance, I really cherish are the values, the laughter, the music, the food, my love of nature. That's his legacy, his powerful bullshit...
“I didn't wanna be still, I had to be still, but I, I, I wanted more than anything to continue being a human doing. And the universe was insisting that I became a human being and it's profound. I mean, it's the greatest transformation of my life. You know, I went from being extremely supported on a business perspective to having to go buy stamps. And it takes me all day to mail a letter. You know, I'm really, I'm only able to do what I can do in a day and I love it. I really love it because as I...
“I talk about dysfunctional relational stances that would repeat over and over again. For example, angry pursuit is an oxymoron. Angry pursuit will never get complaining about how the person isn't close to. You will never get then closer to you. It is dysfunctional. That's what dysfunctional means. It doesn't work. It'll never get you what you want. And the first phase of the therapy that we do, relational life therapy. And in some ways, the first phase of this book is identifying what your repe...
I'm sharing a special preview of A Slight Change of Plans, a podcast all about who we are and who we become in the face of change. Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who is an expert on human behavior, and she’s here to help us navigate the changes we all experience in our lives. She sits in intimate conversations with celebrity guests like Tiffany Haddish and Kacey Musgraves as well as everyday inspirations, like journalist Euna Lee, who was held captive in North Korea for 140 days, and ...
“I think the key is to really believe it when you see something that you're doing every day in your diet that is making your hormones off or your skin off it, a lot of women know what's happening to their bodies. We're more intuitive in that way than men are. So I think it sounds really cheesy and we've heard it over and over again, but please listen to your body because it's telling you something. And so I think that, I think that it's just important to listen and make a note of things that mak...
"If you are in a Western life and, and are designed as an empath or a spiritual being that feels things very deeply, it is important for you to hold and maintain your peace and to send, to usher that energy to others that may be experiencing pain and suffering at any given time. If you were in a period in your life in which you are in pain or suffering, would you want everyone else in the world to be suffering along with you? Probably not. If you were sick, you wouldn't want all of your family m...
"This to me is basic, but it feels like we've drifted really far from it in our culture. That to be a human, the basic condition of being a human is being needful. You know, like we need air, we need housing, we need food, we need companionship. We need all of these things. And somehow in our culture, it feels like you're asking for too much, if you need things, right, you're supposed to be super self-sufficient. You're supposed to be able to like pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You're supp...
"When we talk about the ghost of the unsaid, we're talking about the inherited feelings of our parents, unprocessed trauma, where the Phantoms that lived inside them, We're talking about traumas that our parents and grandparents would not process, and they are transmitted to us in some raw way. And I quote in the book, Holocaust survivors Maria Toric, Nicholas Abraham, who said, 'What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.' So says psychotherapist Galit...
"I talk to so many women who, you know, we talk about huddle and we talk about, I referenced, you know, back catalog friends, people who I've known for years and years, you are never too late to add to your huddle. You are never, it is, you are never too old to, to add to your circle of friends. And what Elise is alluding to is certainly something that I feel as well, which is, you know, we live in these various chapters in our, in our lifetimes, you know, things change. We go through different....
“One reason I wrote the book is that the lack of recognition is such a powerful harm done to patients. And I think until you've gone through an experience like this, it's really hard to convey why that is. But basically it comes down to having the dignity of your suffering possessing. Some kind of meaning, I think, right. And we're all social creatures, right. We don't actually get sick totally alone. It feels lonely. But one reason that my illness was doubly hard was that I had the loneliness o...
“Usually in high conflict, the conflict becomes the whole point. So you make a lot of mistakes and you can miss opportunities that would actually be in the interest you are fighting for. The reason you got into the fight to begin with, whereas good conflict is the kind of conflict where again, you can be angry, you can be yell, you can have radical visions for the future. You can and must, you know, organize and protest and hold people accountable. But you do it much more skillfully. You make fe...
“I’ve won arm wrestles with big muscular men, right out of prison because you align the energy. Everything wants to harmonize with it and things start to flow with you and it's silent and it's, it's quiet, it's gentle, but it's incredibly powerful. The strength you can access when you're in a state of integrity. So as that starts to grow, we're seeing the Putins and we're seeing the Trumps because they are so freaking loud. And we don't even know that in the silence all over the world, there's a...
You have to have something new to hope for sure. You might still keep hoping that somebody with a terminal illness might get better and indeed they do sometimes. Or you might hope as after 9/11, that somebody will be found who was in the trade towers when they fell down. And in fact, a few people were found in another country or in a psychiatric ward and not being able to remember who they were, but for the most part, you keep hoping and you move forward with life in a new way. Without that miss...
"So if we take that off the table, if we take off this, this goal of changing somebody's mind, then what are you left with? What's what's your purpose in the conversation? And I feel like not only is that more attainable to have a conversation in which you are exchanging ideas, just exchanging ideas, changing information, that's attainable every time. But also it relieves some pressure, right? I mean, sometimes I feel like people see conversations as frustrating because they keep trying to do so...
“I increasingly feel that modern life is becoming intolerable for everyone, whether they're neurodivergent or not. I think we've noticed it earlier. I think, you know, we've reached our point of unbearable discomfort earlier along the line. But I just begin to think that the way we are living is generally hostile to our brains and our neurology. We are, all of us, completely overwhelmed all the time. And you know, like the idea that some people had a good pandemic, well that's because the world ...
“I think we're due for a cultural rebranding around crying. I think that crying, you know, if we start to cry, we inevitably apologize or invariably apologize. We sort of suck it back in and make it as small as it can be. Like the way someone would pinch back a sneeze, we’re like holding the tears back, making it smaller, collecting ourselves. And you know, if you know, somebody who's crying frequently or you're like, they're in a bad place. And I think that we really need to see crying as this ...
"When I would witness somebody that I identify with in whatever capacity of what I'm calling in, have, what I want or are successful in what I would like to be successful in. Um, or, you know, they are on that path to what I'm shooting for. I really realize that that would actually be tremendously more effective for my subconscious to go, oh, if they could do that or if they are doing that, I can as well. So beyond all, all of the visualizing I did back in the day until I was blue in the face, t...
I think what makes it much more difficult to, to have the courage, to continue to experiment, you know, look at somebody like Joni Mitchell or Rickie Lee Jones, people that at their moment of peak success, commercially said, you know, I'm going to do jazz now, or I'm going to do instrumental now, or I'm going to do something else now. And you know, the word once again, you know, that changed the world. Even Dylan, when he went electric, you know, the world hates that, you know, we're supposed to...
