Latest / Never Post / Can The Internet Ruin Your Sense of Self? [Archive Pull]

Transcript

Can The Internet Ruin Your Sense of Self? [Archive Pull] · Never Post

• 0:05
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:08
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:10
  Rugnetta, and we have a personal show for you this week. In this
• 0:17
  archive pull episode, we have resurfaced a conversation that I
• 0:21
  had with clinical psychotherapist Kurt White about
• 0:25
  how the Internet contributes to the formulation of the self.
• 0:30
  Kurt and I reflect on a number of anxieties. What does it mean
• 0:34
  to formulate an idea of who you are in a media environment that
• 0:39
  is always itself trying to formulate an idea of you so that
• 0:46
  it can serve you endless posts, videos, articles, and
• 0:50
  advertisements.
• 0:52
  And furthermore, as intoxicating as it is to be online and to
• 0:57
  recognize something of yourself in what you see in the feed, is
• 1:02
  it not possible to develop a false sense of the self? One
• 1:08
  built only upon a false reflection, or stranger yet, the
• 1:13
  false reflections of others. Kurt and I talk specifically
• 1:18
  about clinical diagnoses. What does it mean to see videos
• 1:23
  online about, say, autism or ADHD and think, wait. Is that
• 1:31
  me?
• 1:33
  Outside of a clinical setting, a setting in which Kurt has lots
• 1:39
  of expertise. Right now, we're gonna take a quick break and
• 1:44
  you're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member
• 1:47
  feed. But when we return, me, Kurt, and making yourself
• 1:53
  online. So Kurt, I'm curious if you are familiar with this thing
• 2:09
  that people say online. It's usually a comment that people
• 2:12
  leave under a video, and it says, I built this algorithm
• 2:16
  brick by brick, or I placed this brick myself or things along
• 2:21
  those lines.
• 2:22
  Kurt White: No. I don't know about that. What what does that
• 2:24
  mean?
• 2:24
  Mike Rugnetta: Do you wanna take a guess as to what
• 2:26
  Kurt White: it might mean? I I I have heard that people have a
• 2:29
  certain pride sometimes in the idea that the algorithm really
• 2:32
  gets them, you know, that they... That they're careful
• 2:35
  about the things that they like or even linger on, I think.
• 2:38
  Right? So that they're only getting that sort of special
• 2:41
  unique content to them.
• 2:42
  Is that is that what that would mean?
• 2:43
  Mike Rugnetta: You absolutely nailed it. Yeah. It's it's a way
• 2:45
  of describing, the work that you put in to training the algorithm
• 2:52
  on social media, right, usually TikTok or Instagram, to show you
• 2:56
  really specific things. So I... I've been thinking about this a
• 3:00
  lot, this like brick by brick idea, alongside I think another
• 3:04
  much larger and more abstract idea, which is that, like, in
• 3:09
  the process of being online, a lot of us like figure out like
• 3:13
  who we are, or we figure out like who we could be, like what
• 3:17
  the options are.
• 3:18
  And the comparison that I make to myself a lot when I'm
• 3:23
  thinking about this is that the Internet now is kind of like
• 3:25
  what the mall was when I was a kid. Just like a place that you
• 3:29
  can go and you can see lots of different people all at once,
• 3:33
  and you can kinda get a sense of what your options are, what you
• 3:38
  might imagine yourself as at some point. Mhmm. And I think
• 3:44
  maybe there's this thing that's happening, especially in the
• 3:46
  algorithmic Internet, where people are going to the Internet
• 3:50
  to make some versions of themselves, building this thing
• 3:55
  brick by brick, while we also in a sense are built brick by brick
• 4:00
  by it. So it's this strange, like, funny recursive loop,
• 4:04
  like, making a feed that influences our sense of self,
• 4:07
  which is then reflected in the feed, which then influences our
• 4:09
  sense of self, which then is reflected in the feed.
• 4:12
  Mhmm. We ascribe a lot of agency to this technology, and we say
• 4:16
  it knows, and it puts you places, and it has figured
• 4:19
  something out. And it's just doing complicated math. And
• 4:22
  every once in a while, it's, you know, it's not imagining a
• 4:25
  version of me. It's it's running an algorithm that will sort of
• 4:29
  never never be able to know or understand.
• 4:32
  Kurt White: And the only thing it's really, the sort of way
• 4:34
  it's evaluating how it works is probably very simple, actually.
• 4:38
  Just are you... Do you stay doing it? How much do you do it?
• 4:41
  Yeah.
• 4:41
  And so it isn't necessarily even optimized. I mean, not only is
• 4:45
  there no mind there, but, right, it's not even necessarily
• 4:48
  optimized to give us the thing that we'd like the most. It's
• 4:51
  just optimized to give us the thing that we don't stop doing.
• 4:55
  People often conflate pleasure and and sort of reward. And,
• 4:59
  actually, they're like related things neuro...
• 5:01
  Neurobiologically, but they're not exactly the same.
• 5:04
  Mike Rugnetta: Wait. Can you say more about that just as it
• 5:06
  relates to, like, the feed?
• 5:08
  Kurt White: Yeah. Sure. I mean, you know, a lot I mean, a lot of
• 5:11
  this stuff I I studied and worked with folks with substance
• 5:15
  use disorders and addictions for a long time. And I really think
• 5:19
  an essential way of understanding that is to
• 5:22
  understand that there's a set of brain circuits that developed
• 5:25
  with a common ancestor that is so far back in the evolutionary
• 5:30
  tree that we share this set of circuits in common with as
• 5:34
  distantly related creatures as things like lizards. Right?
• 5:37
  Sure. Like, it's way before the mammalian branching and things
• 5:40
  like this. And this was a set of circuits to sort of get like
• 5:43
  like a lizard can't do meal planning. Right? I mean, it does
• 5:46
  very poor at that, you know, in a five year plan, absolutely
• 5:49
  nothing.
• 5:49
  Right? I mean, really low.
• 5:50
  Mike Rugnetta: Lizards lizard's not thinking about bacon, a
• 5:53
  bunch of chicken breasts for the week and then Exactly right.
• 5:55
  Yeah. Credit report.
• 5:56
  Kurt White: Yeah. But... So you have to develop a a system that
• 5:59
  has nothing to do with conscious thought that involves getting
• 6:03
  them to eat the right nutrients in the right proportions and
• 6:06
  kind of do most everything else that it does. It has to reward
• 6:10
  the things at a basic biological level. And that works so well,
• 6:14
  you know, as an adaptation to the environment, you know, over
• 6:18
  millions and millions of years that, you know, it's still kind
• 6:21
  of like the basic system that most creatures use today.
• 6:25
  But there are hacks to this as it's sort of really how it is.
• 6:29
  It's an unfortunate chemical accident that some substances,
• 6:34
  sometimes just naturally occurring and sometimes if you
• 6:36
  refine the heck out of them, they they sort of tell the brain
• 6:41
  that the reward part of it is super important when they take
• 6:45
  that in. Right? Cocaine, you know, like, oh, yeah. It's sort
• 6:48
  of like, you might feel good, the pleasure part, it's sort of
• 6:51
  a related circle in the dopamine, but then you take in
• 6:53
  cocaine and it also...
• 6:54
  Your brain says in a very particular way, I'm pretty sure
• 6:58
  this is a thousand times more important for me to do than
• 7:02
  anything I'm I've ever done I'm pretty certain I need to do this
• 7:06
  again. Right.
• 7:07
  Mike Rugnetta: Right? I've checked the math. I've looked at
• 7:08
  the numbers.
• 7:09
  Kurt White: I've checked the math. This... I've I've had this
• 7:11
  I've had this system a long time. Yeah. And I don't know how
• 7:14
  I didn't know about this, but I've gotta reorient what I'm
• 7:17
  doing.
• 7:18
  I kinda don't care about any of that other stuff anymore. And
• 7:21
  some people more prone to that than others and social context,
• 7:24
  but we could do a whole thing about that. But but, basically,
• 7:27
  that that set of circuits is the right way. But drugs is not the
• 7:30
  only way to overwhelm the circuit, actually. You can you
• 7:33
  can do it through clever manipulations of people that
• 7:36
  sort of get your brain to produce its own chemicals that
• 7:40
  that get you into basically compulsive compulsive action.
• 7:43
  Right? Gambling is the sort of classic one, of course. Right?
• 7:46
  But if you kinda look at what we've done with a lot of this
• 7:51
  kind of social social media, algorithmically based social
• 7:54
  media, it's people who know this and have consciously tried to
• 7:58
  optimize the algorithm to get as much of that dopamine to release
• 8:04
  to get you sort of compulsively behaving in that way, to not put
• 8:08
  the thing down, or to pick it up again as soon as it's down. Put
• 8:12
  it down.
• 8:12
  Pick it up. Put it down. Pick it up. They don't care if you like
• 8:15
  it. They don't care if you like it.
• 8:17
  Right? You... If you do great. Right? I mean, it's like it's
• 8:21
  like, you know, you like cocaine the first time you try it.
• 8:24
  The thousandth time you try it, there may not really be much
• 8:27
  pleasure in it anymore, but your brain still thinks you
• 8:30
  Mike Rugnetta: need it. I mean, it's amazing the number of sort
• 8:33
  of systems I have in my life to remind myself when I have spent
• 8:36
  too much time online that it's like, you're... You could be
• 8:40
  hurting yourself right now.
• 8:41
  Kurt White: That's
• 8:41
  Mike Rugnetta: right. It feels like maybe you're having a good
• 8:43
  time, but like, let's check-in with the body and the brain and
• 8:46
  see. You know, I talk to myself the way that I talk to my
• 8:48
  daughter, like, how are you feeling? Or we do... Should we
• 8:51
  take a moment?
• 8:53
  Kurt White: It makes It requires effort. I mean, isn't it...
• 8:55
  Isn't that wild? Like, I mean, that's what one of the hallmarks
• 8:57
  of recognizing Yeah. When you're in a compulsive process.
• 9:00
  Right? Like, if you say... Even if you're not using excessively,
• 9:03
  like if you say to yourself, when I go out tonight, I'm only
• 9:07
  gonna have three drinks. Right? Now you're having to put thought
• 9:10
  into controlling it.
• 9:11
  You don't say to yourself, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow. I'm have
• 9:15
  only two glasses of orange juice. You don't have to do it.
• 9:18
  Right? Orange juice isn't that rewarding.
• 9:20
  It's just not. And so, you know, you just drink the orange juice
• 9:23
  you drink. Don't have to think about it. Right? Even the effort
• 9:26
  to control that you suggest how out of control we are.
• 9:31
  Mike Rugnetta: Right? So how does this construction of self
• 9:35
  or even the feeling of you are constructing yourself through
• 9:38
  these actions, like how does that relate? Are we... I imagine
• 9:41
  it's probably different for different people, but is it like
• 9:44
  we have these compulsive actions and we want to justify doing
• 9:48
  them because we're just like, like, oh, but this is who I am,
• 9:51
  or are those feelings just making us feel like this is who
• 9:55
  I... Who we are because in some way they're positive, and we
• 9:59
  associate sort of constructing the self with a positive effect.
• 10:04
  Kurt White: Well, man, I kinda know you were gonna get my dark
• 10:07
  read on this. I know if you're gonna like my answer to this,
• 10:10
  but I don't... The darkest read of this, which I think is
• 10:13
  plausible, by is the that all of that is a made up after the fact
• 10:18
  justification, but on a part of the brain that is just simply
• 10:22
  doesn't like that it didn't know what it was doing. There's a
• 10:26
  part of your brain that wanted what it wanted, wanted to pick
• 10:28
  up the phone, wanted to not set it down, wanted to do this, and
• 10:31
  it did it. And now you sort of say to yourself, why did I do
• 10:34
  that?
• 10:35
  And the brain doesn't really like that. You know, we
• 10:37
  sometimes call it confabulation. The brain doesn't like a big
• 10:40
  hole in in its set of schemas, but that sort of compulsive part
• 10:44
  of the brain can connect directly to the motor cortex. It
• 10:47
  can get you in motion. It can get you doing things without
• 10:50
  being processed through sort of higher order cognitive
• 10:53
  functioning.
• 10:54
  You know? Even things just as simple as, like, intention and
• 10:58
  values and things like that. And so you say... You might say to
• 11:01
  yourself, I like this because I think it reflects who I am. And
• 11:04
  maybe that's actually total BS.
• 11:07
  Like, it's a lie your brain is telling yourself. That's a
• 11:09
  darkest read. K. But I I do think there's a slightly less
• 11:13
  dark way of of looking at it, which is that the world can be
• 11:18
  broad and narrow. And I think the great joy for me in
• 11:21
  discovering the Internet in 1991 was this sort of idea that the
• 11:26
  world that I knew in the suburbs of Metro Detroit was no longer
• 11:30
  the limiting factor in the people I could hang around, the
• 11:34
  kind of conversations I should have...
• 11:36
  Could have with people, the things that I was interested in,
• 11:40
  you know, the games that I I had, this love of this Japanese
• 11:44
  game, Go. Yeah. It's actually a Chinese game, Weiqi. And I found
• 11:47
  that I could play it on servers in the middle in the middle of
• 11:50
  the night with people from all over the world, which mostly
• 11:53
  just crashed at that time. But I...
• 11:54
  But it became like the most important thing in my life for a
• 11:57
  couple of years like that, like doing that. And there was a real
• 12:00
  solace to it, you know, and I and I do think that, like, if I
• 12:05
  hadn't had that, you know, if I hadn't been able to find
• 12:09
  something, you know, that commune... That group, that
• 12:12
  sense of self, even if it's playful and exploratory, I
• 12:16
  probably would have been more depressed than I was as a
• 12:19
  teenager. I think that's true.
• 12:21
  Mike Rugnetta: In the middle of all of this, right, you have
• 12:23
  access to this information, these communities that really
• 12:28
  lets you expand your idea of what's possible both in the
• 12:31
  world and for yourself. There's all different kinds of things
• 12:36
  that you can learn about yourself, about the world. Mhmm.
• 12:39
  An infinite number of ways that you can go. And I'm curious
• 12:42
  about one particular very narrow, though maybe you'll tell
• 12:46
  me it's very broad aspect of that, which is something that I
• 12:51
  see increasingly on TikTok especially, and that is
• 12:56
  diagnoses.
• 12:58
  Seeing videos on TikTok, commenting in this brick by
• 13:02
  brick sort of fashion, somewhere between I've worked hard to get
• 13:07
  this algorithm, but also the algorithm knows some things
• 13:10
  about me that maybe I don't. And then at the end of that is, has
• 13:14
  the algorithm given me this video because I have ADHD? Then
• 13:22
  people being served videos by therapists or psychologists or
• 13:26
  whoever who aren't diagnosing people online, but who are, you
• 13:30
  know, talking about symptoms, and then, you know, going to the
• 13:32
  comments and being like, well, that seals it. That's gotta be
• 13:34
  me.
• 13:35
  Kurt White: Yep.
• 13:36
  Mike Rugnetta: And I'm curious about your perspective about
• 13:39
  this kind of thing that like figuring out this part of
• 13:43
  yourself using the Internet. Because I imagine, as I said,
• 13:48
  it's... I imagine it's extremely complicated.
• 13:51
  Kurt White: I mean, can I give you a weird answer to it that
• 13:53
  backs that backs way up a bit?
• 13:55
  Mike Rugnetta: Oh my god.
• 13:56
  Kurt White: Absolutely. One has to see, I think, that the
• 13:59
  history of psychiatry and mental health treatment through the
• 14:04
  lens of its relationship, its complicated ambivalent
• 14:10
  relationship with science and medicine, and with the
• 14:14
  constructs of science and medicine as increasingly the
• 14:19
  unquestioned sources of truth and reality for us. Right?
• 14:24
  Freud, for example, was really kind of more of a humanist. You
• 14:29
  know, he was actually excluded from studying neurology because
• 14:32
  of antisemitism.
• 14:34
  And so he had to sort of invent psychoanalysis as a way of
• 14:39
  understanding what people are. And there were ways that his
• 14:42
  approach was scientific in a sense and in other ways not so.
• 14:46
  But he used these sort of beautiful terms like soul, you
• 14:50
  know, psyche. I mean, they just would have conjured that. They
• 14:53
  use psyche, you know, meaning soul, you know.
• 14:55
  And having those associations more to sort of classical
• 14:58
  literature and experiences than this. The id is just the it, the
• 15:02
  I, and the beyond the I. Right? I mean, this is poetry in a way,
• 15:06
  isn't it? And that kind of played in Europe.
• 15:09
  But he said when we translate this into English, you've got to
• 15:13
  think about the Americans. And the Americans are not going to
• 15:16
  buy this. They're not going take that seriously. And so I want
• 15:19
  you to use the Latin words for these things because that's what
• 15:22
  they use in science. They use the Latin words.
• 15:25
  And they'll they'll buy that, you know. So we have ego and id
• 15:28
  and superego. Right? And the rest. And so sort of ideas that
• 15:33
  were sort of fundamental to the way that mental health treatment
• 15:36
  developed in America and the psychoanalytic version of that
• 15:39
  in particular had to do with this sort of wishing to be more
• 15:42
  a part of the structure of knowledge power dynamics that
• 15:45
  come from medicine and science.
• 15:48
  Medicine however never really wanted psychiatry, you know, and
• 15:52
  so I think there's been this struggle to be taken seriously
• 15:56
  as a profession and the sort of wish to have diagnoses that, by
• 16:00
  the way, we have like almost no lab tests for. Right? It's
• 16:03
  diagnosis by checklist, basically. You know, it's
• 16:06
  symptoms, and it's a serious business. I'm not trying to poo
• 16:08
  poo it, but it's different than I think the way you often get
• 16:12
  diagnosed with a lot of things in medicine.
• 16:15
  The rest of medicine I guess I should say. And so finally maybe
• 16:19
  it gets to a point where people are sort of saying, oh okay,
• 16:22
  it's a medical thing, it's like that, I can take it seriously. I
• 16:26
  can have a medicine. I can have a diagnosis. And then almost
• 16:29
  right at that moment, on comes the Internet, you know, like a
• 16:33
  like a damn freight train, you know, and it's like, ah, here we
• 16:37
  are.
• 16:37
  Here's the... We don't need to decide. We could just have a
• 16:39
  YouTube video about it, you know. And I... Maybe it's the
• 16:43
  internal chaos agent in me where I'm like, bring it on.
• 16:46
  That's great. You know? You figure you out, man. You know?
• 16:49
  That's okay.
• 16:50
  These categories, whatever. You know? I I really don't feel like
• 16:54
  as a representative of the field that I personally don't really
• 16:59
  wanna to feel gatekeepy about it, you know. Which isn't to say
• 17:03
  I don't believe in the construct validity of diagnoses. I do
• 17:06
  actually.
• 17:07
  But I don't really believe that that science and medicine and
• 17:12
  psychiatry or anyone else gets to fundamentally decide how you
• 17:18
  divide those things up, how you divide those categories up. And
• 17:21
  what I see in the Internet, even in this sort of weird versions
• 17:24
  of it that come out, is this beautiful interstitial
• 17:28
  intermediary play space version of things where people can toss
• 17:34
  around different ideas of the self and they can be true for a
• 17:38
  minute and not true for not even a minute, ten seconds. It could
• 17:41
  be true for ten seconds, and then you're on to Scottish kids
• 17:44
  swearing.
• 17:45
  Mike Rugnetta: You I mean, you almost like took the next
• 17:47
  question I had out of my mouth, which is like, do you worry
• 17:49
  about people over committing to things that they... This is very
• 17:53
  loaded, think they've learned about themselves online? It
• 17:56
  sounds like the answer to that is no.
• 17:58
  Kurt White: I don't really worry too much about it. Yeah. I mean,
• 18:01
  probably like if you were to study this, you'd find the most
• 18:04
  common thing is that people kind of toss it around in their mind
• 18:08
  for a while and think about it, and maybe it gives them a
• 18:11
  different sense of their self. Maybe they talk to a couple of
• 18:13
  people about it, but they're not going to go schedule an
• 18:16
  appointment and and get a prescription for something or go
• 18:19
  see a therapist. There...
• 18:20
  But probably far more people don't do that than do that. But
• 18:23
  the experience of it might really mean something to that
• 18:26
  group too. Right? It may have done something meaningful to
• 18:28
  them in opening up the sort of window of possibilities of the
• 18:32
  self just a little bit for them in a way that, like, I don't I
• 18:36
  don't think we can... We could be in danger of underestimating
• 18:39
  the impact of that sometimes.
• 18:41
  And if and if some people do, they go, know, like, jeez, like,
• 18:45
  sometimes it's not subtle. You know what I mean? It's sort of
• 18:48
  like, yeah, I don't know. Like, I'm I'm seeing people here
• 18:51
  talking about, I discovered that this is why I have no friends,
• 18:55
  and this is why I've never turned a paper in on time ever,
• 18:58
  and I'm not... And I gotten fired from three jobs because of
• 19:01
  this, and I'm late constantly, and I'm in trouble for that.
• 19:05
  And these are real areas of suffering. And you go like, oh
• 19:07
  my god. I thought I was just a screw up. You know? And they see
• 19:10
  that.
• 19:10
  They said, no. I I went and I saw someone, and I I have this
• 19:13
  trouble now, but I'm getting help for it and it's not liked
• 19:15
  anymore. Look, I'm in a relationship, I have a job, it's
• 19:19
  better for me. And if that person calls the phone and picks
• 19:22
  up someone and says, I know, do I, don't like great. Great.
• 19:28
  Great. Great. You know? And if you don't have it, what's the
• 19:32
  harm? Really, what's the harm?
• 19:34
  They're just labels. We shouldn't be so precious about
• 19:37
  it.
• 19:38
  Mike Rugnetta: It's just a... It's a perspective about this
• 19:41
  kind of thing that you just never ever hear online. And
• 19:45
  it's, I will say, extremely refreshing to hear a
• 19:48
  professional say, so what?
• 19:50
  Kurt White: So what? And I don't... You know, I prefer to
• 19:54
  this idea, like if you really want to talk about self, you
• 19:57
  know, and self, how that develops. You know, I've used
• 20:01
  this word play a couple of times, not accidentally exactly.
• 20:04
  Because I think you could say fundamentally that the self
• 20:07
  develops through play relationships in a developmental
• 20:12
  way, right, of sort of like you come out of the womb in a
• 20:15
  symbiotic way.
• 20:16
  You're not really exactly a person, but you develop being a
• 20:19
  person. You know, you're a person in the sort of usual
• 20:22
  legal sense of things. I'm not gonna say that. But, like, you
• 20:25
  know, you don't really have an identity yet. And you develop
• 20:28
  that in relationship to others and in relationship to the parts
• 20:32
  of you that are only for you.
• 20:34
  And you do that by trying it on, moving in and out of letting
• 20:38
  things be true and not true at the same time. That's what play
• 20:41
  is really. Right? It's you could have it's true and it's not
• 20:43
  true. And you do that over time, and then that gets...
• 20:46
  And and then that's the sort of, we think, the sort of
• 20:49
  psychological basis for development of creativity,
• 20:52
  actually. That this kind of play structure never goes away. We
• 20:55
  just learn to do more with it, and we learn more about
• 20:59
  ourselves in doing that, which is more of a process than a
• 21:03
  result. Right? The self the self as development rather than the
• 21:06
  self as a sort of a...
• 21:08
  An entity that way. I built it.
• 21:10
  Mike Rugnetta: I built the self, and now
• 21:10
  Kurt White: it's built. That's right. That's... And that's the
• 21:13
  part that's wrong about that. It's not built.
• 21:15
  It's that you built a prison for yourself. Any rigid idea about
• 21:19
  yourself is a prison. Any rigid idea. Right? We always...
• 21:23
  If we don't have playfulness about things, then then we're
• 21:26
  going to start suffering eventually. Maybe not
• 21:29
  immediately. And there might be some times we really need to
• 21:31
  have that rigidity. It's a protective function. But if we
• 21:34
  can't get it back, then they were in real trouble.
• 21:38
  And I think like the Internet can like... It can be like a
• 21:40
  seed of that. It can sort of sort of like, I'm not alone.
• 21:43
  Here's an idea. But you need the relational part of it to
• 21:47
  metabolize it.
• 21:49
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Kurt, that's so good. It's making me a
• 21:52
  little emotional.
• 21:53
  Kurt White: Yeah. I'm glad. I see it in your eyes.
• 21:58
  Mike Rugnetta: I think the thing that's really beautiful about
• 22:00
  that is that there's a hopefulness to it that
• 22:02
  especially in this moment, like right now, you know, this week
• 22:07
  on the Internet is very absent. And it feels agentive in a way
• 22:15
  that I think a lot of people don't at the moment. People feel
• 22:18
  really controlled. People feel really hemmed in, and people are
• 22:22
  really trying to like search for how it is to be themselves. Some
• 22:26
  people feeling I think like doing that is dangerous.
• 22:31
  And so knowing that there's this like way to think about this,
• 22:35
  which is just like, look out for you and just pay attention is I
• 22:39
  think really empowering.
• 22:41
  Kurt White: Well, I think even the dark moments in in life are
• 22:46
  things that we can bring some some of that quality of openness
• 22:51
  to if we find the right way to do it, I think, you know, with
• 22:55
  some people, with some with some community, I think you might
• 23:03
  find even that sometimes even things like despair, you can
• 23:07
  have a little bit of playfulness that creates a room around
• 23:12
  despair where all of a sudden possibility opens up again where
• 23:18
  there was none for a minute. And I think that's the task of being
• 23:22
  human, quite frankly.
• 23:24
  Mike Rugnetta: Even online.
• 23:26
  Kurt White: Especially online. Why not? Not? Bring it on, man.
• 23:31
  It on.
• 23:32
  The online is just bad in the way that we're bad. And it's
• 23:36
  good in the ways that we're good. And if can find ways to
• 23:41
  use it to open us up, then let's rejoice in that. Let's rejoice
• 23:45
  in that. If it's bad, then let's work together to put it down
• 23:49
  when we need to.
• 23:50
  That's important too.
• 24:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. I really
• 24:03
  appreciate you taking some time to chat with me about these
• 24:06
  huge, complicated, extremely important subjects. Thank you.
• 24:11
  Kurt White: It has been a pleasure.
• 24:12
  Mike Rugnetta: Where can people find you and your work online?
• 24:16
  Kurt White: Oh, well, we're at the Brattleboro retreat where we
• 24:19
  have a... We have another podcast, Unraveling. If you're
• 24:22
  listening to this on the Never Post feed, check it out. We have
• 24:26
  some really interesting stuff going on, and, you can find me
• 24:29
  primarily on LinkedIn as sort of the only only place I keep a
• 24:32
  real presence, on on the socials.
• 24:34
  Mike Rugnetta: Legit. LinkedIn, real hot right now.
• 24:36
  Kurt White: Oh, yeah. Oh, well.
• 25:47
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the archival episode we have for you
• 25:50
  today. If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news
• 25:54
  and interstitials, you can find a link in the show notes. Never
• 25:58
  Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this
• 26:02
  segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st.
• 26:06
  You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping
• 26:09
  us keep the show going.
• 26:11
  Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton,
• 26:14
  and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior
• 26:17
  producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason
• 26:20
  Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta.
• 26:25
  Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
• 26:28
  distributed by Radiotopia.