Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: Oliver Burkeman - From The Archives

Transcript

Premium: Oliver Burkeman - From The Archives · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up at
• 0:04
  uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe, enjoy the freebie.
• 0:12
  Happiness doesn't come to people who seek it too hard.
• 0:15
  People who try to find happiness too hard, who chase it, end up unfulfilled.
• 0:22
  This is an insight that I got from many people, but no one perhaps more succinctly than today's
• 0:26
  guest, Oliver Berkman. He's a writer for the Guardian. He's based in New York City, and his book
• 0:33
  is fantastic. I read it years ago. It's called the antidote, happiness for people who can't stand
• 0:37
  positive thinking. And it looks at frankly the upsides of negativity, and he's very comfortable
• 0:44
  with uncertainty and failure and imperfection. His Guardian column is well worth checking out.
• 0:50
  It's called this column will change your life. He writes about social psychology and the culture
• 0:55
  of self-help, and how to be more productive, and basically the science behind happiness.
• 1:02
  It's counterintuitive. Happiness is one of those things that, and I think I mentioned this in our
• 1:06
  chat, that it sort of comes as a byproduct of being useful in other ways. And if you try to,
• 1:10
  if you try to cling onto it too hard, it's like squeezing a bar of soap, it just slips out of your hand.
• 1:17
  And I felt like a little bit of psychological happiness and psychological advice about the
• 1:21
  science of well-being might be useful. I will be talking with the great Oliver Berkman,
• 1:27
  which I hope you enjoy. This is We The People.
• 1:35
  Oliver Berkman, thanks for being on the show. It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
• 1:39
  Let's just, I just want to get a background for people who don't know you about what it is that
• 1:43
  you write about and how it came to be that that is your interest. What do you do?
• 1:49
  I usually say I write about psychology, which is the closest I can get to narrowing it down.
• 1:55
  I have a column in the Guardian on a weekly basis, which is broadly about psychology, self-help,
• 2:03
  sort of popular philosophy, stuff like that. And then I wrote a book called The Antidote
• 2:07
  Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, which is about the benefits of pessimism
• 2:12
  and negativity and uncertainty and all the rest of it. I suppose I think one of the reasons I
• 2:20
  ended up with this kind of, I'm a journalist and trained as a journalist, but I guess one of the
• 2:24
  reasons I ended up with this specialism is that it kind of isn't a specialism and it's a way of
• 2:31
  sort of pretending to specialize while remaining a generalist because like, you know, everything's
• 2:37
  psychology really. Yeah, to say that you write about psychology sounds to me like saying like
• 2:44
  the Freakonomics guys write about economics. It's sort of, you take the principles of a discipline
• 2:50
  and then apply them to the universalities of human experience. Oh, well, I'm flattered by the
• 2:56
  comparison and yes, absolutely. If I'm really pompous, it's occasionally in some, you know,
• 3:01
  drinks party or something with the certain kind of crowd, I might claim that I do ideas journalism,
• 3:07
  but I kind of find that term phrase offensively. I think if you said that to me, I don't use it very often.
• 3:14
  I would either, I would either just sort of back away and find another person to talk to, oh,
• 3:17
  I throw my champagne in the face. Take that. Okay. Okay. Great. The most recent, the reason I wanted
• 3:24
  to talk to you more recently, and it's been a bit of a tricky lining up a time with you in New
• 3:31
  York with infant and me and Sydney with job, but there was a piece in the nation, which was
• 3:38
  basically suggesting that the problem is not a lack, the problem politically is not actually a lack
• 3:43
  of empathy, that this narrative that the problem with liberals who are living in the bubble
• 3:51
  is that they're not doing a good enough job of understanding the plight of disenfranchised,
• 3:55
  disaffected, regional, struggling whites, that there's is not the problem, the the subtitle of
• 4:03
  the article is progressive's want education, healthcare and housing for everyone and where
• 4:07
  the closed-minded ones. And it was interesting to hear your response to that because on Twitter,
• 4:12
  you said, I wonder if my partial disagreements with this piece turn on the meaning of the word
• 4:15
  empathy. Be more indulgent of views you'd firmly consider bigoted. No, but try to get inside the
• 4:22
  perspectives of those who hold them essential. In that second sense, it makes no sense really to
• 4:28
  argue that it's the other side that should be more empathetic. I mean, of course they should,
• 4:31
  but so what? What are you getting at there? Well, this is a really interesting piece and
• 4:37
  Catholic polity wrote it as a brilliant writer who I respect. I want to get that caveat
• 4:43
  in at the beginning, but I think that it's related to, it's an ongoing conversation and I see
• 4:48
  it a lot, this idea that there's somehow been too much emphasis placed on trying to understand why
• 4:58
  people voted for Donald Trump in the US election. And I think, you know, sometimes it's just
• 5:05
  sort of these articles and news reports are kind of done badly. And of course, nobody wants to
• 5:11
  read or listen to it to a bad report trying to get inside the heads of Trump supporters.
• 5:17
  But I don't think it has stopped being any more essential. And I think what I meant about the
• 5:24
  meaning of the word empathy is just that, you know, yeah, it's right. If by empathy we mean that we
• 5:29
  want the best for, ideally for everybody, including people who we disagree with and are dissimilar
• 5:38
  from in all sorts of ways, then yes, I think it clearly is progressive policies on health care
• 5:43
  and all sorts of other things that have that value. They tend to be much more about ensuring
• 5:52
  provision for large numbers of people. The right has its own arguments about why actually more
• 5:59
  individualistic approaches ultimately better for everyone. But that's very something that's very
• 6:02
  plainly there in liberal and left-wing policy. But I think if empathy means trying to understand
• 6:10
  somebody from inside their own heads, then it really doesn't make any sense to say, well,
• 6:16
  I'm empathetic and you guys aren't because that is a failure of empathy right there. I mean,
• 6:23
  I go from the assumption because I'm a sort of vague, vaguely secular buddhist type person on some
• 6:35
  level. I don't know that nobody is acting in a way in which they consciously consider to be
• 6:43
  bad, evil and wrong. You know, nobody gets up in the morning and says, I'm going to do things
• 6:47
  today and support policies that I think are the wrong policies. They on some level think that
• 6:54
  they're right. And if I'm going to tell them that they're wrong, I've got to at least assume that
• 6:57
  they are sort of honestly mistaken in some sense at worst rather than setting out to do something
• 7:06
  that they consider as wrong. So there's going to be a logic and it might be a sort of emotional
• 7:11
  logic to the other side's views, I mean. And that might be a kind of emotional logic that says,
• 7:16
  I can't afford to be thinking about other people now because I am under so much threat.
• 7:21
  You know, it's not necessarily that everyone thinks they're being selfless and altruistic.
• 7:26
  But anyway, that's a really good point. I think that's an important point in terms of the
• 7:30
  difference between a person thinking they're right and a person thinking that they're being
• 7:35
  altruistic or selfless. Because I think this is a trap that the left gets into, that liberals get
• 7:39
  into. If what you think is right, are things that are soft and squishy like free education and
• 7:44
  free healthcare and puppies for everybody, then somebody who's taking a hard line position that
• 7:49
  hurts other people's lives in the short term, strikes you as just primafaceae wrong and you can't
• 7:54
  even make the imaginative empathic leap to conceive of how they think that's right. But if you really
• 8:00
  think about the people who you've hated the most politically, I'm not going to go to hit by because
• 8:06
  that's such an easy example. But let's take someone like Dick Cheney, for example, who a lot of
• 8:10
  people on the left just don't understand. I was always at the opinion during the Bush years
• 8:15
  that there's a very clear moral internal logic to Cheney's support torture and war and Guantanamo
• 8:22
  Bay, which is life is tough. There's no such thing as a free lunch. The world is a tricky place to be.
• 8:29
  We've managed to establish something quite extraordinary in these United States of America over
• 8:33
  the past few hundred years. And the forces of darkness and chaos threaten to take it all down.
• 8:38
  They smash planes into our buildings. The world is not a friendly place and you can go to
• 8:44
  gay little Geneva with your United Nations all you want. But at the end of the day, it's the force
• 8:49
  of American firepower and balls that's going to grind us through this with the grit that we've
• 8:54
  always shown towards everything else that we've tried to approach. So don't stab us in the back
• 8:58
  with all your nebipambi Geneva conventions. That isn't a nice vision of the world, but you can
• 9:04
  imagine it being a morally convincing vision of the world if you didn't agree with you. I think
• 9:07
  that's an important but maybe source of empathy for the left. Yeah, I think so. I mean,
• 9:13
  it's certainly a philosophy like that can be internally consistent. And we should grant where it is
• 9:21
  internally consistent. Where its premises come from is a different matter. And I think it's also
• 9:28
  a time, it's also an opportunity to try to be empathetic about the emotional logic that
• 9:36
  gets those kind of arguments off the ground in the first place. And this idea that I've become
• 9:43
  very sort of found very appealing in lots of the reading and some of the writing I've been doing
• 9:47
  recently that nobody acts crazy to themselves in the sense that they're always trying to
• 9:55
  we're all just trying to make ourselves feel better on some level. And whether that is to do with
• 10:01
  feeling more secure in the context of these kinds of ideas, you know, because we fear
• 10:06
  the outside world that might that fear might be empirically justified or empirically unjustified,
• 10:11
  but wanting to not feel afraid is a sort of
• 10:16
  primophacy is a legitimate thing. You know, I mean, I can still disagree as
• 10:26
  vehemently as I disagree with anything about about the course that the reasoning takes from that
• 10:31
  from that baseline. No, of course, but the disagreement will come from a disagreement over
• 10:36
  intellectual arguments, not from a character assassination that the person must be able to believe
• 10:41
  such things. Right. And I mean, I just want to say as well, I kind of feel myself falling in and
• 10:47
  out of this viewpoint that I'm supporting here all the time. You know, I think it's incredibly
• 10:52
  important not to just attack the other side as bad, but the urge to do so on Twitter,
• 11:02
  most obviously, is one that I feel and succumb to all the time. And so you get into this very
• 11:10
  bizarre situation where, you know, I'm a sort of comment columnist. I'm allowed to just abandon
• 11:16
  all potential neutrality on lots of these some kind of issues, but you look at things that I consider
• 11:23
  to be really bad news in the last month. So you've got Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Now,
• 11:31
  both cases, I'm absolutely sure that these were victories for insularity and division and
• 11:40
  hunkering down in your own little group and not reaching out to other people and a sort of
• 11:45
  tribalistic thing that is, you know, it can't be the future. That's what I think. But then
• 11:51
  I am dimly aware that once I start attacking Brexit ears in a certain vein on Twitter or
• 11:57
  something like that, I'm actually just reinforcing the ethos of divisiveness and separation, right?
• 12:02
  I mean, it's like, it's very hard not to fall into that same sort of tribal logic that says,
• 12:09
  I'm going to hunker down with my people against you people, even though what I'm criticizing
• 12:14
  in you people is precisely the tendency to hunker down with your people. So, you know, I mean,
• 12:20
  we really have to take seriously. I think that, well, maybe you don't, I don't know, but we're all
• 12:25
  prone, a lot of us are prone to this thing. So, you know, I need to criticize myself as much as
• 12:31
  anything. Yeah, I'm also, I also find it useful to kind of inject a bit of epistemic humility into
• 12:39
  my mind and question how it is, how certain I actually can be that I know things as complicated
• 12:45
  as, that I know whether or not something as complicated as Brexit is going to be good or bad in
• 12:49
  the long run or even something as complicated as the election of Donald Trump. It reminds me a
• 12:54
  little bit of the old, the parable about the Zen Master where, yes, you know what I'm talking
• 12:59
  about here, that we will see story. Sure, but tell it. So, there are various different incarnations of
• 13:06
  it, but the one that I remember the most keenly is there's a farmer who's who just who find some
• 13:16
  who's horse, who horse some wild horses come and he manages to find them and his neighbor says,
• 13:21
  and this is in rural China or something. His neighbor says, oh, that's fantastic. He's got new
• 13:26
  horses and the Zen Master says, we'll see. Zen Master slash farmer, I don't know why he's a Zen Master
• 13:31
  farmer, but in my inclination. His 16 year old son is trying to train the horses the next day and
• 13:37
  gets thrown off the horse and breaks his leg and the neighbor says, oh, that's terrible. And the
• 13:41
  farmer says, we'll see. And then the the army comes around and they're conscripting all young men
• 13:48
  over the age of 15, but they can't conscript his son to go and fight in a doomed war, which
• 13:53
  is going to have enormous casualties because he's got a broken leg, so he has to stay at home. And the
• 13:57
  neighbor says, that's fantastic. His son doesn't have to go to war. And the farmer says, we'll see.
• 14:01
  And on and on, this cycle goes, the story sort of just never ends. And I think in some ways that's
• 14:08
  that's kind of helpful in helping me not to freak out totally about things going on in the world.
• 14:13
  Yes, I mean, it's got to be, it's got to be right, ultimately, hasn't it? But we can't
• 14:19
  really have any idea, especially as all these things that are happening are things that we were so
• 14:23
  certain we're not going to happen in the first place. Yeah. And also, when the people who are
• 14:28
  who seem to be most certain about them seem to be the most incompetent in so many other ways,
• 14:33
  I mean, on both sides of politics. We shall have to see, yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
• 14:39
  come back in a hundred years and we'll make sure. Exactly. Getting back to this question of empathy,
• 14:45
  I was in Germany recently, and a friend of mine was, and I was looking at these, and how kind of
• 14:50
  joyful and happy people were when they were out and about, at least seemingly superficially.
• 14:55
  And my German friend asked me what the difference is that I know between the culture there,
• 15:00
  because I was saying it reminded me a little bit of Australia in comparison to the harshness of
• 15:05
  what I feel is many American cities. And I said, I think there's just more empathy here,
• 15:11
  meaning in Germany. And he said, really, because I think of America as being a land of
• 15:16
  hugs and touchy feeling and trying on Oprah's shoulder and emoting. And I think of Germans as
• 15:23
  being quite rigid and drawn. And I thought about that. And then thought, maybe there's a difference
• 15:27
  between empathy and sympathy, that trying on everyone's shoulders and blubbering and talking
• 15:34
  about your feelings and that that's sort of a maybe a sympathy or a something saccharine and
• 15:42
  syrupy. And what I was actually referring to in Germany was an ability to be open to other
• 15:46
  people's perspectives on life and receptive and non-judgmental and non-judgmental.