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Friendly reminder, your taxes are due soon. Sorry to scare you, but it's true. If you are dreading April 15th like the rest of America, listen to this week's episode of Net Worth and Chill, where I cover all things taxes and show you that, yes, it can be confusing, but I promise we can get through. Hey everyone, it's Sean. This week's episode is one I recorded in June of 2023 with Mariana Alessandri, a philosopher.
who wrote a book about depression and grief and what it means to live with and accept those dark emotions. I know the holidays can be hard for lots of us, and the message of this conversation was that... that's okay. And it doesn't make any of us a failure if we're struggling when we're supposed to be happy. Re-airing this episode has become a holiday tradition for us. It's an offering for anyone in the audience who needs it.
And even if you're not struggling during this time, there's a lot of wisdom here, and I hope you'll find some value in it. All right then, on with the show. How can we find happiness? That's an old question. One of the oldest, in fact. Since the beginning of philosophy, at least, people have been wondering, what makes us happy? and how to get more of it. And that's all good as far as it goes. Happiness is great and very much worth pursuing. But if you're a real person living in the real world,
you know already that it's not possible to be happy all the time. Life just isn't like that. And the problem with a culture obsessed with the pursuit of happiness is that it creates a lot of pressure. to not be unhappy. It also reinforces the idea that anyone who's unhappy is, in some important sense, a failure. But is that really true? Even if you believe that happiness is the ultimate good, is it a mistake to assume that unhappiness is something to be avoided at all costs? I'm Sean Elling.
and this is the gray area. Today's guest is Mariana Alessandri. She's a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and the author of a new book called Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. The book is not just a rebuke of what people sometimes call toxic positivity. It's really an attempt to honor those darker emotions that all of us feel sometimes.
It's a very clear-eyed and intimate look at the reality of our inner lives. But importantly, it isn't a celebration of sadness either. It's a meditation on painful emotions. and the important truths they can reveal about the world and our place in it. And this is something I wanted to explore with Mariana. So I invited her onto the show to do just that.
There is a standard way of viewing darkness that you're pushing back against in this book. You're talking about dark emotions like anger, anxiety, depression, and grief. but also darkness in the sense of obscurity and the unknown. So I just want to begin with you telling me about this standard view and really why you think it's wrong or unhelpful or both.
Okay, so to talk about the dark, it's like essential to figure out the light first. It's almost hard to see how we think of the dark without it being in comparison with how we see the light. And so in the book, I talk about Plato's cave and how in the story... There are all these prisoners who are looking at the cave wall, and behind them is a fire, and behind the fire are these puppeteers who hold up these puppets, and they walk around with these puppets of people and trees and dogs.
And those puppets project shadows onto the wall, and then the people believe what they see on the wall. They think that those things on the wall are actually the actual things. And so they give them names and they have contests and they see who's the smartest, but it's all based on shadows. And one day...
one of these prisoners gets freed against his will. Because they, first of all, they don't really know that they're prisoners until someone drags this person out into the light. And in the light, first the... person's blinded and doesn't want to be there. So he first wants to look at the ground and the shadows on the ground because those things look like real and truth. And then he can look at the water that has reflections. And then by night, he can see things clearer and little by little.
Plato tells us that this person acclimates to the light and then can finally see truth. So can finally see the real tree. Whereas before he was seeing like a copy of a copy of a tree. And so... A lot of people, I would say most people, interpret this story as saying that the light is what allows us to see truth, that the light is what saves. I mean, if you take it into the religious realm.
A lot of religions talk about how the light is the savior. I'm the light of the world. The light saves you from darkness. So then we have light like way up high in the sky as this thing that is. everything. Light is intelligence. We say you're radiant, you're beautiful, you're glowing, you're brilliant, let me shed light on it. We have so many small metaphors, so I call them all the light metaphor. It's just this big way that we invoke...
brightness as good and beautiful and holy and pure. So then in the light of that, darkness, think about like all the words that it means. It means ignorance, danger. ugliness like if something's dark we don't want to go to a dark place we don't want to be there we want to shed the dark and step out of the dark and into the light and so we have created in our society this very difficult dichotomy between light and dark
And a lot of us spend a lot of our time trying to get brighter and lighter and shed our darkness. And from my point of view, that's not possible. And so then we're left feeling... like failed bright creatures because we're also creatures of the dark. And so I'm trying to hold a space open for the darkness that values it. and that honors it as part of who we are, rather than just as something that's trying to overcome or dismiss or get rid of it. It's probably the most pervasive metaphor.
in our culture. I'm not sure there's even a close competitor, right? The light and dark. And it's so hard to doubt because it just seems natural that light is better than dark. well i mean you mentioned the allegory of the cave and as you were just saying right the the moral of that story typically is
taken to be, hey, look, get your ass out of the cave and into the sunlight so that you can see the real truth of things. And you have a sort of alternate take, which is that and now I'm quoting you, everyone is a potential puppeteer. That for you is the sort of upshot of that. What do you mean by that? Okay, so caves are dark, right? But like I live in Texas. I live where it's like sunny.
25 hours a day. It is so crazy here. And I would not want to just be in the sun my whole life, just out there in the desert, in the sun. The cave provides us this shelter. If we see the metaphor or the allegory of the cave as the cave was bad because it was dark and the outside is good because it's light, I think we're missing. a huge part of the story. And the part of the story that I wish I could talk to Plato about is these puppeteers, right? He mentions them.
He doesn't tell us who they are. He doesn't tell us if they're also prisoners. He doesn't tell us if they're doing it on purpose, right? So you've got puppeteers. trying to get you to believe something, right? They're projecting ideas onto the wall in front of you. You believe it. So we don't know if they're fooling them on purpose or if they are...
Just misguided. So anyone who's giving us any messages about how we should think, how we should view our bodies, how we should feel, etc., what we should buy, right? Those are all puppeteers who are trying to get us to do one thing or another, you know, including people who aren't doing it for money. Anyone who wants to sort of influence us is a potential puppeteer.
So what I think is wrong with the cave isn't that it's dark. It's that we've got a bunch of puppeteers in there who are sort of like unchecked. We haven't examined them. What if we just took out the puppeteers? Couldn't we just sort of live in the cave?
go out in the light sometimes, go back in the cave, go out in the light. It doesn't have to be that there's bad actors. We don't have to say that people are trying to manipulate us or something, right? It's just that we're getting a lot of messages on the walls of our own society that I question. And I want to say like,
we doubt that? Can we see that that's actually harming us? Because if we're so busy chasing the light and we find ourselves still in the dark, we're going to blame ourselves because that's a lot of the messaging that we get coming from self-help of today.
So I want to inspect the messaging, see who's projecting it, and see what are their motives. Is it closer to what's real or is it closer to a shadow? So I want to back up a little bit and just talk about the origin of the book and then kind of work our way. back through the argument you're making. This book came out of the pandemic, and you talk about how you were granted the sabbatical year right before all hell breaks loose and the school shut down.
and how that really changed your experience and very obviously shaped the book. Do you think this would be a very different book in the end without that pandemic experience? There's a lot of things about the timing of the book that are interesting. I tried to sell a book like this, like similar concepts in 2014.
And it didn't sell because everyone was so full of hope. Obama's president, you know, nothing's wrong. No pandemic. No one's angry. No one was defending anger. No one needed to be angry. That's a lifetime ago. Yeah. And then Trump, right? And then people are angry on both sides. Everyone's all of a sudden angry. Everyone's starting to defend anger.
Then it sold because it's like, yes, there's a time now for this. And so I was going to write the book Pandemic or Not, but I think what the pandemic did was... Every chapter that I was writing, I experienced what that chapter was about at the time. So while I'm writing about anger, I'm experiencing anger.
I'm like, okay, I get it. I have to be here in this mood to be able to talk about this mood. But it was really frustrating. But that's what it gave me. It was like a very heightened experience of these moods. It's all very relatable to me. As a parent, you talk about all the anger you felt towards your kids during that time. And the thing you noticed was that it was producing this cycle of self-blame.
And for you, that does feed this narrative that's, again, very pervasive in our society. And you call it the brokenness story. What is that? All right. So... The light metaphor is the opposite of the brokenness story. They're the same. They're two sides of the same coin. So the light metaphor is, be like a proton, always positive. Choose happy. Or like my kid's principal says, make it a great day or not. The choice is yours. When we're doing well.
We sometimes take credit for it, and we're like, I stayed sunny. I did it myself. I got myself out of the darkness. And it's very seductive, and it's lovely, and it's empowering, and people want to feel like we're in control of our feelings. A lot of this... kind of talk. So the brokenness story is what happens when you believe all those things and then you feel the opposite way. So let's talk about anger because that's the one you bring up.
I was trained to believe that I can control my emotions, right? This is from the Stoics. They say, you don't have to feel angry. You let yourself feel angry. So if you've ever said to yourself, I'm sorry, I got angry. Even if you don't know it, that's a stoic tenet. Because what it does is it implies that you didn't have to get angry, that feelings are not a thing that have to happen. You can, with years and years of training...
get yourself to not feel agitated by things. And so you allowed it and it was bad, right? So it's two things, right? One is optional and two, it's not helpful for us, right? So in our society, people say anger is useless, anger is bad for women. Anger's ugly. Anger's irrational. Nothing good comes from anger. I mean, I hear these things every day. I read them on the walls of my society, right? That was my education.
Anger's bad. I can control it if I really want to, if I'm strong enough. It's in my power. So then what happens when you're angry? That's the brokenness story is now I'm a monster, right? That's the story I have been telling myself my whole life because I've been angry since birth. I'm a monster. I have these beautiful kids. Everything's wonderful. What's wrong with me? Why aren't I grateful? Why aren't I a better person? I'm ugly and crazy and irrational.
So that's the brokenness story is when I feel that feeling I'm not supposed to feel up against a world that says that I don't have to feel it and I can be better than that if I could only choose the right way. then the self-blame comes, the shame comes, and that makes everything worse. So I want to reconfigure our emotional society such that we don't place those expectations on ourselves. Has it always been that way for you? I mean, the way you put it in the book was kind of striking.
you've always been genetically angry, that this has always been in you, that the world has always seemed to you just kind of tragic and sad, and you were... Another lovely line from the book, excruciatingly alive to the world. That may be someone else's quote, but this is something that you felt in yourself very early on. Yeah. Those words excruciatingly alive to the world are Gloria Anzalduas. That's right. And she's the sort of hero of my fourth chapter on depression.
I don't think I'm unique in this. I think if you're raised in a household that doesn't really love emotions, especially sadness and crying, like crying would be made fun of, you know, even for girls, like it wasn't acceptable in my house. And so. Everything kind of comes out as anger. So when I'm scared, I get angry. When I'm sad, I get angry. And I always just wished that I could be a crier because it's so feminine, right? It's so much more acceptable and sweet.
And people would feel bad for me if I cried. But because I'm angry, I get aggressive and people just get mad at me. And then I'm like, oh, no, I was really just sad. So everything comes out as anger. Pretty typical, but it masks the other. feelings too. So it's my ready, you know, it's my go-to emotion. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just an interesting one to have because it's not one very readily accepted for women in our society.
You do something in the book that is a sort of hobby horse of mine, and I'm always here for anyone who's willing to do it, which is basically take a shit on what we think of as the self-help industry. We have these books that sort of peddle this very crude version of, I guess, toxic positivity, we'll call it. I guess that's the phrase. What's your beef with these sorts of books, the sorts of books that not just...
imbibe this idea that light is good and sadness is dark and bad. But these sorts of books that traffic in this idea that you really are in control of your own happiness and to the extent you're not happy, it's your fault. That's it in a nutshell. And the thing is, I love self-help books. I love them. And I am drawn into them in the same way I'm drawn into Marcus Aurelius. I love someone telling me...
hey, you know what? You're not a victim. You can get better. You can feel better. Just do these things. These things worked for me. They can work for you. So the sense of empowerment they give, it's really the author saying, hey, you know what, I was in that place too, and I got myself out of it, and so I'm going to help you get out of it. And so a lot of the authors, I quote a few self-help authors, I don't think they're bad people. Yeah.
I think they're confused into thinking that they made their own way out of it. Whereas we talk about privilege, we talk about luck, we talk about other people. And at this point, they're being sustained on the backs of people who think they're broken. So I go into the store, I feel broken. I go to the self-help aisle, right? Like it looks like someone's going.
to help me get unbroken. And then they make money, right? So they actually need me to feel bad. They need me to suffer and they need me to feel like it's my fault that I'm suffering. They need me to feel bad about it, that I am in control of it, and I want to be just like them. And now a lot of these people are super rich, but now they're definitely peddling because they're dependent on us.
In the same way that a lot of industries benefit off of people who are suffering. I mean, I'm quoting someone who says, if you're not happy, then it's on you. And I just think, wow, is that a bold claim? Is that such a huge claim to make because you think that happiness is within 100% within your control? That is incredible. That's like purely stoic and very dangerous for a sufferer to read.
And there's got to be some kinship between the light metaphor and the way Americans understand themselves that makes This plays such fertile ground for this, you know, I mean, you mentioned the power of positive thinking, the famous book by Norman Vincent Peale, which came out in like the 50s. And it's sort of the foundational text of this whole genre. And I'm sure there's just a ton to be said about how.
those kinds of ideas really did shape post-war America and helped cultivate and cement all of these sort of attitudes and dispositions or whatever. Yeah, I think the U.S. is a bizarre mix of stoicism, like the revival. of stoicism that's so hot, you know, not just in California, but all over the world. But specifically for the U.S., stoicism says, choose happy. You get to be happy if you want to. But they're very careful. They say, you can't control most of things.
You can only control yourself, your virtue, what you put into the world. So they're actually more careful than most Americans who sort of peddle similar theories. But it's Stoicism plus Peel, exactly. 1952, power of positive thinking. So if the Stoics say, you know what, you can't control your outside circumstances.
peel is like no no you can if you actually think positively enough you can get that job and if you didn't get that job this is the brokenness story if you didn't get that job it's because you weren't trying hard enough You weren't positive enough. You had some negativity, pessimism. You influenced it with that attitude. You're never going to get where you want to be.
For many years, Mariana was a fan of the Stoics' approach to managing emotions, but soon found herself more attracted to Aristotle's view. I'll ask her to unpack that philosophical switch after a short break. Meet Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C. If you're running a business, it's about revenue, right? And keeping a store, steakhouse, or even a stadium filled with happy repeat customers can be hard.
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Hi, this is Kara Swisher, host of On With Kara Swisher. Over the past few weeks, I've been covering President Trump and Elon Musk as they continue to attack the federal government and dismantle our democracy. At least that's my opinion. I hosted a panel on Elon's takeover with Ann Applebaum. Owen Higgins and Ryan Mack. I had a conversation on the constitutional crisis we may or may not be in with Preet Bharara, George Conway, Jamie Gangel and Jonathan Cantor.
And I took a look at Trumponomics with economists Oren Kass, Paul Krugman and Mariana Mazzucato. But life is too short to only talk politics. And honestly, politics may make our lives shorter these days. It's important to find moments of levity, too. So I've also interviewed brilliant actors like Laverne Cox, Ben Stiller and Cynthia Erivo. We've talked about.
And to listen to any and all of these conversations, search for On With Kara Swisher wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow On With Kara Swisher for more. Earlier in your life, you were a big fan of the Stoics, and maybe still are to some degree. I mean, you mentioned even reading Epictetus' handbook every year for like 15 years, which is impressive.
But it does seem like you have arrived at the view that the Stoic approach to passions and their approach to dark feelings is just ultimately not satisfying. And that sort of led you to Aristotle. So just... Tell us how that happened and why. Yeah. Stoicism is very... I guess seductive is a good word. It is. It's beautiful. There's so much in there that...
comes from the heart. Like, these are real human beings who are really suffering. Seneca, you know, he's seeing crazy stuff going on. And Marcus Aurelius is emperor of Rome, right? So he's got to find a way. to be okay. And they're giving us away, they call it tranquility or ataraxia, freedom from worry, because they think that what agitates us, this is from Epictetus, is not the things themselves.
but our judgments about the things. And if that sounds familiar, that's very much what CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, teaches today. What upsets us is not the circumstances, but it's how we are interpreting. It's the narrative we tell. It's the story we tell about our circumstances that makes us more upset. And so the Stoics...
Aim for us to be more neutral. Your house burned down, don't say it's bad. Just say what happened. Just say my house burned down. Because you can take different people, two people whose house burned down. One of them is going to be distraught because they believe that it's awful. They're going to never get over it. You know, they're going to be miserable forever. And then on the other hand, you can have another person who is more stoic.
Who says, okay, my house burned down. What do I do now? Right? Like they can be more tranquil and free from all that worry. So the stoic. Messaging is so seductive because it makes you feel like these things are optional, like my big feelings. I can tone them down. I can settle them out. And yes, becoming a new mother, I really got into stoicism. I had a notebook. I did just a bunch of work. There's all different kinds of practices that you do so that I wouldn't...
hurt my baby, right? So that I wouldn't do things that are wrong because you're not sleeping. And, you know, they cry like all the time. And I needed something to make me feel like I could be calm. Like Seneca calls life a storm. Right. So that one can be calm, like on a ship, you're calm, even though life around you is raging. And so it's not a surprise to me that a lot of Americans love the stoic mindset because.
It makes you feel like you can. It's just hard work. And I think Americans also like hard work. I know I do. Like, give me something to do. But again, it is so strenuous. You know, I'll even go back. now and I'll be like, let me read Marcus Aurelius again. And then I go back and I walk away from the encounter with him and I feel worse about myself. This is our society where if the message being peddled is your happiness is up to you.
then any problem you have, you can say, well, it must be me because X person over here overcame 6,000 struggles and they're great and I'm not okay. So it's me and I'm the problem. So the Stoics, they don't leave a lot of room for luck. Aristotle does. So I moved into Aristotle because I just find him so much kinder to the human condition. And so he says we have three parts in our soul, feelings, and...
predispositions, and active conditions. Feelings, we all know what they are. You know, I feel mad, I feel sad, whatever. He's like, yeah, feelings come and go. He doesn't think they're optional in the way that the Stoics think they're optional. And he doesn't want us to spend our time trying to fix them because he's like, you know what? There's like bigger fish to fry. So leave the feelings alone. Know yourself.
Know what are you likely to feel. So for mine, again, it's anger. If something goes wrong, I can think like, oh, I'm most likely to get angry. So let me not get behind the driver that's slow because I'm probably going to get really angry. Right. So what he thinks is worth. All the gold in the world is the active conditions, and that's the behavior. So if you say something like, I got angry, and I'm sorry I yelled at you when I was angry. That's Aristotelian.
He's not saying, I'm sorry I got angry. He's saying, I'm sorry I yelled out of anger or at the worst, right? I'm sorry I hit you. Like I should not have. done this action as a response to the feeling. So he wants us to disconnect the feeling from the action, and he says even when something provokes you, you need to be able to act beautifully in light of that provocation.
So that for me felt like, oh, I can do that. And Mr. Rogers is all about that, right? Like our feelings are fine. It's the way that we handle them. That's the problem. So a lot of people are actually convinced more by Aristotle than by the Stoics, especially in today's day and age.
I don't know a lot of people who really believe that feelings are optional, but I do know a lot of people who say, okay, maybe feelings aren't optional, but I can definitely control my behavior. So action is the most important thing. You talk a lot about grief in the book as one must in a book like this, and the Stoic wisdom on grief is, as you're sort of suggesting here, is to conquer it.
And on the one hand, that can seem kind of cold. And you point to the example of the letter Seneca wrote to a grieving mother telling her to grieve no more than was honorable. And that definitely seems a little unempathetic, we'll say. But on the other hand, is this still? possibly wise given how self-destructive runaway grief can be. I mean, maybe the Stoics are right here to just say, hey, you know, we can't grieve forever. We got to stop sometime. So why not?
Will yourself out of it sooner rather than later. No, I totally understand that. And I had a student kind of raise a similar question about a relative who she saw was just in grief her whole life. And she said, aren't the Stoics right? Don't we have to get rid of it at some point? We can't just sort of let ourselves wallow forever because it's destructive to other people.
etc. So Cicero comes to mind because he said grief is optional because Cicero lost his daughter. And he said, but I saw a soldier on the field who had also just lost his child. And that soldier on the field didn't cry. And he said, so proof, grief is optional. You can actually just like stop it before it starts. This is their big thing because it's painful, right? Like they care about us a lot.
Here's a painful thing. Do we want to feel pain? No. So let's not feel pain. We don't need to succumb to these emotions. But my take on it is that a lot of why we feel... bad about grief specifically is the shame element. So for me, the definition of shame in the book is feeling bad about feeling bad.
So here I am, let's say I've lost someone and I feel grief and I try to talk about it and then the person shushes me. And they say, don't say that. Don't talk about that person. Let's go out dancing. We are... stifled by a society that is so inept at handling our dark moods that it adds insult to injury. And then what happens is that the griever is left completely alone with their grief.
Because nobody understands. And so I draw heavily on this book by Megan Devine called It's Okay That You're Not Okay, Understanding Grief in a World That Doesn't Understand. And she's amazing because she shows. All of the horrible things that people say to a griever that actually make them feel worse. It's like Job's comforters were anything but comforting. They were just like blaming him. Grievers are feeling this like loss and this pain and this tenderness. And a lot of times.
Either a person is so uncomfortable that they just ghost you. They just run away. And they're like, well, I didn't know what to say. So I ran away. And that's terrible because then you're left alone in your grief and feeling like I thought that person was my friend. Or.
They'll give the platitudes. At least this, at least that. I mean, I have a quick story. My mom lost her child, one of my brothers. It was before I was born, but he died at the age of nine. And my mom already had like six kids by then. And people told her all sorts of things that she had to just put up with. Everything from it happens for a reason, God wanted an angel, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, you can sort of imagine like all the bad things that someone could say. The worst thing that they said to her, according to her years later, she said, they told her, well, at least you have all those other kids. Like if we understood the implication of that phrase, we're so well-intentioned, but we botch grief so badly.
It's like we go in, we've got scissors on our hand, and we go in to hug the griever, and we cut them up with our, at least you have this, and if only, and just not allowing the person to grieve. And so... I think that a lot of the reason why long grievers are long grievers is because the world is the way it is. And I think that if the world were different, then the griever wouldn't be as afflicted. And so what I'm trying to do...
is turn the lens and say, hey, you know what? You live in a sick society. So society may be calling you sick, but let's look at the world in which you're grieving and let's see how those... People around you are affecting you and they're making you feel shame and loneliness on top of grief.
So I don't need necessarily to tell the person who's already suffering, well, you need to do X, Y, and Z. You need to get out more. You should open your blinds, go for a walk. You need sunshine. That's not it. It's us, the comforters who need to back off and who need to really. really approach grief differently and approach all of the dark moods for ourselves but also for other people. Right now our expectations in our society are set at hashtag no bad days and I just think we're screwed.
Because one, that means one bad day is you failed. And so grief is like a big failure, right? Like, oh, you're sad more than two weeks? Well, let's see what we can do with you, right? Yeah. Everyone else wants to change the person. And I want to say, hey, you know what? I don't think it's you. I think you're living in a world that is emotionally intolerant. You just mentioned hashtag no bad days. And I want our listeners to know.
what you're referring to there. And this is, I think, toward the end of the book, you bring up a guy, it's your kid's soccer coach. And he's wearing this sweatshirt and it says, hashtag no bad days. And your point in bringing him up is to say, even that guy knows that, in fact, there will be bad days.
Why does that person buy and wear that shirt in the first place? I mean, I've been so tempted to ask him, but I never wanted to insult him or sort of like come at him. But I've been so tempted to ask him, like, what made you buy that? Why do we hang things in our house that... say, like, it'll get brighter, good days are right around the corner, stay positive, stay sunny. I mean, the whole point that he's doing is he's spreading sunshine. He's just a good American.
Like he's reading the walls of our society that say, hey, you know what? Smile. It cheers people up. When people are sad, make them feel better. Buy them something or make them smile. So he's living in a world where that's what we should do when we have a bad emotion. We should not give into it. We should not listen to it. We should do our best to combat it. So combat negativity with positivity. And so he's just reading.
the walls of our society absolutely correctly. I'm the weirdo here. I'm the one who's saying, wait. Aren't the walls of our society projecting shadows? Aren't those shadows of actually what really is? And what really is, is that we are dark and we have these moods and we have bad days. And my whole argument is that they, in fact, for a lot of us, okay, I'm not even speaking for...
everyone here because maybe some people read the book and they're like, that's not the world I live in. That's okay. But for a lot of us, wow. The world that we live in is pressuring us to stay positive, and we can't keep up, and we don't want to keep up. There's no need to stay positive, because we're not going to drown in negativity.
The pressuring is a big point. And this comes up in your discussion of grief and your description of it as a sort of juggling the prospect of falling apart, which... When people experience grief, it is this experience of falling apart. And at the same time, there's this tension between that experience, which is true, and then the simultaneous desire.
to not want to fall apart. And you have people in your life, friends and family who genuinely don't want to see you fall apart. And so navigating that tension is really hard. I want to push back even on that word though. Yeah, please. Because right now, like I'm sitting in my office and down the hall, my mom is dying. Okay, she's on hospice. It looks like she's in the active phase of dying. So I have been caring for her and it is absolutely exhausting.
I don't know what date is, but I'm not falling apart. That's what I'm tempted to say. I'm tempted to say, I'm going crazy, I'm falling apart, I can't handle this. Everything that points to the person, that there's something wrong with me. And really what I want to replace that with, I just want new vocabulary. I want us all to pitch in.
Can we get better descriptions of this? Because it's not a feeling of falling apart. That's within a framework that everything is held together, right? So in my intro to the grief chapter, I talk about a person who congratulates another person on keeping it together when your wife died. It's so amazing that you kept it. And I'm like, what does that even mean? I don't relate to those words anymore the way that I used to be kind of seduced by them too. So now I just think...
I'm not falling apart. I'm going through something incredibly difficult, but I'm not broken. It just means that I feel like there's a great weight on top of me now. And that feeling will go once I know that my mom is okay. But for now, that's the life that I'm living.
And I don't want to turn against myself because a lot of this light metaphor and the brokenness story, it's when I turn against myself and say, what's wrong with me? Why can't I handle this better? Well, who would? Who's not anxious right now? Who doesn't have reason? for sadness why is the expectation set that we're better than this like what does that even mean like i'm experiencing something so poignant and rich and beautiful and like
Seriously honest, Socrates preaches intellectual honesty. And I want to say emotional honesty is just as important as intellectual honesty. So I would like to see a world in which we would be brave enough. honest enough to be emotionally honest with one another so that we could sort of like lower our expectations of what we think life is. So I want to get away from that kind of falling apart metaphor too.
It says something about the pervasiveness of the metaphor that I sort of unreflectedly became a vehicle for it there without even thinking about it. Can I ask how you're preparing for your mom's potential death? I mean, are you almost...
In some ways, it does almost feel like you're kind of pre-grieving. I mean, I talked about this on the show. I lost my mom about three years ago, but it was very sudden. There was a car crash. There was no time to prepare or reflect on anything. It just happened.
And the grieving process for me, I don't even really know how to talk about it. It was just like this sort of shadow that just kind of followed me around for a long time. And then one day it was a little... lighter and then another month or two or three down the road it was a little lighter and you just sort of get on with it but how are you as someone who thinks so deeply about these sorts of questions
how are you preparing for this um how do you think you'll handle it um no i think there's just something about losing your mom that's like i lost my father in february so these are like back to back but There's something different about losing my mom. And because it was more sudden, she thought she had six years, but then her cancer came back. And so it's not sudden like yours.
but it feels more like I'm not prepared. Whereas my father had had a stroke four years ago, you know, we had more time to sort of recognize that he wasn't immortal. When I teach like Seneca on grieving and... He says, practice death in advance. And I asked my students, what do you think that means? Right. And some of it to them means spend time with the person.
tell these people that you love them, like recognize that your parents and grandparents are mortal, et cetera. But then some of them also pick up on the fact, I think he's also saying like, You're actually doing it. I'm doing grief right now. I'm practicing my mom's death by looking at her every day and putting drops of water into her mouth. She does not look like a person who's alive. So I'm practicing death.
And with that, I'm allowing myself to grieve. So I just cry spontaneously. I cry talking to friends. And this is something that, like I said earlier, I'm not a crier. So it's weird for me. And it's usually very quick. It's like a quick cry and then I'm done. But then it comes back. But in terms of testing my own theories, what I believe is that sharing your pain is a gift to other people. And I think we've been raised to believe that...
My pain is a burden, so I should shield somebody else from my pain. So if I really love you, I will not tell you what's going on with me because it would hurt you. Because I don't want to make you suffer, I shouldn't tell you that I'm suffering. I believe...
That if we're in pain, the loving thing to do, if you feel like it, is to tell other people, to invite them into the world of pain, and to say, like, it's okay here too. So one thing I'm doing a lot is with my kids, because obviously they live here.
And they're seeing all this. And so I talk to them about it every day and talk about different angles of it. And I warned them the other day. I said, you know, I think I'm going to cry a lot for Itab. But I said, just know that a lot of my crying will be relief. Because right now, I'm taking care of her. So I'm under a lot of stress, making a lot of decisions that I don't always know are right. But it's going to be relief. It's not just sadness.
crying is so mixed and beautiful and like it's so good to cry and talking about it talking to people normalizing it right it's not a secret and I want to make more normal real-life stuff. So Miguel de Onemuno is a philosopher I use in the second chapter on sadness, and I call it dolor because in Spanish that just means like emotional pain and physical pain.
He says that we are like guitars, whereby when two guitars are standing next to each other, if you vibrate one of their strings, if you pluck one set of strings, the other set of strings starts to vibrate.
That's beautiful. That's the way it should work. And that's the way it often works. So if I'm talking about my mom, you don't have to say, no, no, we don't have to talk about that or whatever. Like your strings, your heart strings should vibrate. And they did because then you told me about your mom. And someone asked him, why doesn't it always happen? And he said, well, I guess the other person doesn't have heartstrings. Or, he says, they're frozen.
And I think that happens to a lot of us when we feel numb at the sight of other people's pain. It's because they got frozen because we've been taught that pain is like taboo. We're not supposed to talk about it. Oh, maybe I don't know you very well. Oh, this is awkward, whatever. But it's about thawing out our heartstrings to allow them to vibrate. Even in the case of my mom, there's no tragedy here. It's just pain. It's hard and it's...
real and it's natural and all of that, but it's what's going on. So it's emotionally honest. Is that what it means for you to find, to create dignity in these sorts of emotions? To not do what... there's a lot of social pressure to do, which is to mask it, to paper over it, to tamp it down for the sake of not making someone else have to acknowledge it and deal with something actually real.
Is that where the dignity is to be found? And again, not bludgeoning people with it, but also not running away from it. Yeah. Being honest about it and being almost proud of it, actually. I had to think about this a lot because it's not the mood that I'm trying to dignify. It's very difficult to dignify depression because then you slip into the five gifts of your depression, the thing you didn't know that was so great about this thing.
That's not the point of the book. The point of the book is to actually dignify and see and recognize, because I can't give you dignity. I can recognize the dignity in you. Recognize the person who suffers as dignified. Yeah. So whether it's my mom right now, she's like physically suffering and cannot speak and she is dignified. Or whether it's the person who's depressed and on the bathroom floor and can't get out of bed, that person's dignified. We just have to see it and we don't see it.
And I want to show us why we don't see it. There's a temptation not to see it because we've been closing our eyes because we're so blinded by the light. that we close our eyes to the darkness, pretend it's not there, so then when it's there, we don't know what to do with it, and we end up kind of ignoring it or, like you said, tamping it down.
There's a million ways that we can try to negate it or overcome. You should see the titles. If you go to the titles section of self-help, it's like overcome your negativity. And I'm like, oh, as an existentialist, I just don't think that's what we do. I don't think we overcome. I think we just live with negativity. So it's not about dignifying the mood, it's about dignifying the person, showing us that whoever's suffering is also dignified. We're fully human beings.
We're going to take one last quick break. But when we come back, if we try to shake off these bad feelings when they arise, is that dishonoring these emotions? Are we doing an injustice to ourselves? I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. For Lucky's Season 13, we looked at 2,000 companies and selected 12 of the very best founders to pitch in Miami. They flew in from all over the country and the world. My name is Mikele.
And I'm from Italy. I'm originally from Medellin, Colombia. I was born and raised in Maysville, Kentucky. I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. And I am from Finland. This season, we're diving even deeper into the human side of venture. as these founders pitch the sharpest early-stage VCs in the game. I normally don't like EdTech, but I really like you. I echo those sentiments. I do want to push back, though. Toughen up there, lady. That's healthcare. I feel like I'm the lone dissenter.
Ooh, Charles, spicy. So I'm out. I'm sure when they air this episode, they'll be like, Charles was really dumb. For those who can't see, my jaw is currently on the floor. Season 13 of The Pitch starts March 5th. episodes are available to watch on YouTube or listen on your podcast player of choice. So subscribe to The Pitch right now.
You mentioned depression, and this is something I struggle with a little bit when thinking about my own thoughts. And as you said, you'll find a lot of psychologists, a lot of physicians, and many other people saying that. We should seek to eradicate depression. That's nonsense. That's not realizable. And I really do appreciate your point about the need to honor people's depression or to honor.
their dark moods, because that is a reality of life. And then I find myself just wondering if you think it's possible to honor those feelings and seek to transcend them at the same time. And I'd like to think that that is something that we could do without telling people that they're broken, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Under our current framework, it doesn't seem like there's any way to do it without telling someone that they're broken, because that's the well-worn path that says my students will tell me, well, I'm great, except for I have depression, and so that's the trash part of me. And so I'm broken. And like you said, it's not realizable to get rid of it. And so I say, okay, well then here's you and here's your depression and you want to trash.
the depression part of you, but that depression part of you is stuck to you, and so you're going to end up trashing yourself. That's what I think we end up doing by calling ourselves broken. And so I'm trying to put better words out there, like better ways to talk about depression. And I use Ansaldúa as an example. She calls it the Cuadlicue state. She creates this colorful metaphor out of Aztec philosophy.
And I use it simply as an example of a way that someone who has depression, who suffers or lives with depression, can talk about their depression in a way that is not demeaning to them. She does not... like her depression. She still hates it. So you don't have to say, and then I realized that depression was my gift. That's not the book. It's, oh, how can we talk about this so that I don't turn against myself so that that's not my
dirty secret that I don't tell anyone. And as soon as they find out, they're not going to love me. It's how to incorporate something like depression or anxiety into the story of my life that honors it or honors that that's part of me. on the premise that we can't get rid of it. So we're not talking about a world in which we have the choice, get rid of it or not. We don't have that choice. The only choices we have are we trash ourselves.
Or we find better ways to talk. And when I say we, I don't even mean the individual. It's not up to the individual. It's up to society to create a world that's more emotionally flexible and tolerant. And not even just tolerant, but embracing, seeing. all of the connections that can be made once we become emotionally honest. There's so much...
They're not about the depression, but about sharing it, about sharing the stories of all these pains that really, really, really connects people. And this is Unamono's idea that pain, sharing pain connects people. We connect better. Our souls connect better when we're in pain. And I agree with him. He says our bodies connect better when they're in pleasure. And I agree with that too.
Our souls connect when we're in pain, and so if we're constantly hiding our pain, we have these very oftentimes superficial relationships with one another because we're not allowing ourselves to go there. That's right. So it's about the way we talk, the way people respond, but writ large on a societal level. I have to say, when I was reading your book, I kept coming back to my life as a parent. My son is about to be four.
And how all of this really does apply to that experience. And one thing I have realized, sometimes very painfully, is that parenting is a test of your principles in a very concrete way. And that really is the case here. I mean, you know, you open the second chapter with childhood memories of being told, stop wallowing, you know, don't linger in your pity party, right? All that kind of shit. And my son is extremely...
emotional, insensitive, and strong-willed. And I don't want to suppress that, but Man, I also have a hard time doing anything but trying to make him stop and suppress it when he gets carried away by those dark or explosive emotions. And I don't know, it's a real...
struggle. And I know you know what I mean. And, you know, I really don't want to do the dumb masculinity thing where I teach him to code vulnerability as weakness. But there is this like stoicky side to me that really wants him to overcome. these feelings. And some days I do better than others in trying to manage it, but it's, it really is a kind of testing ground for, for this stuff. All right. How about this then? If you want to hang on to the overcome, maybe overcoming comes from feeling.
Like give in and then it will be overcome. I really believe that if someone's in pain and you sit with them instead of running away from them. they'll actually stop crying sooner. Like the thing that I hear, once I start crying, I'm never going to stop. I'm like, that's not true. That's just something people say.
Or people tell me, I really like to cry in private. And I said, maybe that's true. Or can you think of a time that you tried to bring your pain to someone else and they squashed it? They denied it. They wanted you to overcome it.
So I think that one of the paths to lessening the suffering is to accept the suffering. Like if you could go about it that way, it would give you a reason to not try to shut him up. I mean, I always have to check myself and sometimes my husband checks me because... I want to say stop crying and I'm like no I wrote a book about this I cannot tell my kids to stop crying I have to get curious
I had a real win one time when my kid was really little, like your kids. My kids are now eight and nine and ten, so they're a little older. But my son was crying, crying, crying, and I was breastfeeding my other baby. So I had him come in and I said, draw it. And so we started drawing it and I said, is this how you feel? Is this how you feel? And we drew like mad face after mad face and sad face after sad face. And it was amazing because he was like, yeah, there it is. That's how I feel.
And if you can give them a mirror, that's how I feel. I think this is my theory. Test it. I think the sadness goes down. And a more recent example is... My 10-year-old son was crying about something that the world would consider very frivolous. He couldn't go to two parties, and he had to choose which party, so he's crying. The temptation is to be like,
That's nothing. Don't you know that Ita's dying? You know, like that's the trump card. I can always say that. But I just went in and I rubbed his back and I said, yeah, it's really hard. And then my heartstrings started vibrating. So I started crying. And he like whipped around and he's like, why are you crying? And I was like, well, I'm crying because Ita's dying. And he just rubbed my back. He did not wipe away my tears. And so I thought, oh, I did it because...
We don't have to wipe the tears. The point of this isn't to get through it as quick as possible or to stop it. It's like, let's just have a nice cry together and then... We're joined together, and we're hugging, and it's not traumatic for him. Like, it's just for a 44-year-old, that's what I'm crying about. And for a 10-year-old, that's what he's crying about. And that's okay.
I never want to compare my sadness to his and say, like, you have no right to be sad. Like, we just all get a right to be sad about whatever it is. And we don't have to say first world problems or anything like that. We're just sad. It's not really a big deal. Obviously, what you're saying in this book and what you're saying now is we need new stories. We need better stories about our dark moods, stories that honor those dark moods and that don't seek to expunge them.
Is there a simple way for you to maybe sum up what that story might look like? The story we should tell ourselves about our dark moods? Yeah. I mean, I have one concrete suggestion that I think is a kind of summary. So much of our... Pain comes from believing that we're supposed to cheer each other up. And how do I make my friend happy when she's sad? If we could eliminate the idea that it's our job to make another person happy.
or cheer them up, we can just be there for them. So I think whether we're talking about anxiety or grief or depression, once we relieve ourselves over the responsibility for other people's moods... then we were just like, oh, oh, I can just come over and have pizza with you. Great. Like I can do that. But when I thought I had to cheer you up, that stressed me out. So I ran away.
If I could change one thing in our world immediately, it would be to get people to stop believing that our job is to cheer each other up. I do think that our job, if we love the person, is to not leave them alone. I think we want other people around and the sufferer always gets to decide because maybe they don't, then you go away. But like to not leave somebody alone in pain, your job isn't to cheer them up. It's just to kind of sit there with them. If that.
And sometimes saying nothing at all really is much better than these phony condolences that are so awkward. Again, the book is called Night Vision. Mariana, this was a true pleasure. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode and the spirit in which it was offered. Like I said at the top, I know the holidays can be difficult for lots of us.
but every time i listen to this conversation i'm reminded of how isolating grief and depression can be especially during times of celebration but also that Despite those feelings, you're never as alone as you think. And there's a lot of power in transforming your relationship to your own pain while honoring it at the same time.
But as always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area at Vox.com. And when you're finished with that, go ahead and rate and review and please subscribe to the podcast. That really helps. This episode was produced by Eric Janikis, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and edited by A.M. Hall. Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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