Finding Meaning In The New Age of Anxiety

The world doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, including other people and why they think the things they think and do the things they do. So I’m tapping in Steven J. Heine, professor of Social and Cultural Psychology and the author of Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times to talk about:

-How these times are actually kind of precedented by the Age of Anxiety

-How we make meaning

-How our stories drive our choices, and our choices make our stories

-A million other things.

You can buy Steven’s book here to support her, independent bookstores, and this podcast. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Um, how are you? Most of us say fine or good, but obviously it’s not always fine and sometimes it’s not even that good. This is a podcast that gives people the space to be honest about how they really feel.

It’s a place to talk about life, the good, the bad, the awkward, the complicated. I’m Nora McInerny and this is Thanks For Asking. If you are having an existential crisis, and who isn’t, this episode is for you.

Things right now are tough, to put it very mildly, the day that I’m recording this, the US economy is crashing, crashed in freefall. Just one line going straight now. Tariffs, they’re everywhere.

We’re tariffing, tariffing, is it a verb? We don’t know, but we’re doing it to penguins. Our government has been hijacked by a deranged billionaire with a breeding fetish.

Our few flimsy safety nets are being pulled apart thread by thread. I could go on, but do I need to? We are living in times that are, depending on who you ask, trying times, uncertain times, unprecedented times.

It feels like we are in a haunted maze with new horrors around every corner. Our brains and our bodies are just in a nonstop cortisol bath, and then we are still here living our lives.

Going to the grocery store where we can’t afford eggs, going to work if we still have jobs, trying to maintain relationships with the people that we care about, and trying to pretend like we are all doing fine when show of hands, who’s doing fine

right now. The worst thing about being a person, to me, is that we are conscious, that we think about who we are, where we are, what it all means, what matters. I had my first existential crisis in childhood.

I was just in my bed thinking about how big the universe is, how small I was.

I could see myself in my little bed, in our little house, in our mid-sized Midwestern city, on a planet that felt big, but was also, I knew, just a little dot flying through space, a planet that would someday not exist.

And I imagined it all breaking apart and floating off into nowhere, and I would be long dead, and so would everyone else I knew, but we’d just be out there, just atoms just floating apart from each other.

And, oh, my God, I had to go to second grade the next day. And I was just thinking, oh, my God, what is the point? What does it all mean?

How am I going to go to second grade tomorrow? And while the times do feel unprecedented, there is still some precedent.

And while the times are trying, we can still try to live a meaningful life in the face of things that just do not make sense to us.

And one of the things that do not make sense to us are things that do not make sense to us are often other people and the things that make sense to them, which is why I am so excited that I get to talk today to Steven J. Heine, rhymes with China.

I had to write that down. He is a professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

And tariffs be darned, he still sat down to talk with me about his new book, Start Making Sense, how existential psychology can help us build meaningful lives in absurd times. We are living in quite absurd times right now.

We are, like I said, we are living through the horrors. We are lonely, we’re depressed, we’re anxious. We are trying to make sense of it all.

And this book helped me, helped me make some sense. It really did. And it helped me make sense of what feels like senselessness from other people.

So this conversation that you’re about to hear, it goes a lot of places. It goes a lot of places.

We talk a lot about the current political climate, how other people got to the conclusions that they got to, and also on the personal level, what we can do to try to build and maintain meaning in our lives, even when things feel so out of control and

so scary. I cannot recommend enough reading this book. Get it from your library, go buy it from a local bookstore. This is, it is worth having and it is worth underlining and it’s worth keeping, honestly.

Okay, so enough of me. Let’s talk to Steven. Just granola or what do you eat with your granola?

Well, I had granola and blueberries and a banana.

Oh, okay.

That’s very healthy. That’s very healthy. Yes, yeah, pretty.

Okay. We always say, not we always say, but right now, you go on the internet, everybody is talking about unprecedented times.

And what I found so comforting right off the bat in your book is that these times are, well, unique in some ways, also precedented. Can you tell us about the original age of anxiety?

Yeah. So as anxious as things are these days, and there are many reasons to be anxious these days, I mean, the world has gone through many struggles many times.

But perhaps at most recent time that things were as anxious as they are now was a period dubbed the age of anxiety by an existential poet, WH. Auden. And this was right after the Second World War.

If you just imagine this time, the world had gone through the worst economic crisis in modern times, followed by the most destructive war, and then defined themselves at the beginning of the Cold War with the first realization that humans could be on

the edge of extinction with a nuclear holocaust. And so this was a time of great upheaval, of great chaos, and people really struggled to find a path forward.

And I think what is quite noteworthy about this time and something that we can learn from this time is this was a time that the world gave birth to a new philosophy, existentialism, which is a philosophy trying to understand how people can make

There’s a part of your book where that I keep coming back to, which is what it means to be in the absurd, which is where I think that so many of us are right now.

Like where we are collectively as a society, but also, you know, if you, and again, I’m gonna keep saying like when you get online, but that’s only because today I broke all of my rules and I scrolled, which is something I’m trying not to do.

What does it mean to be in the absurd?

Yeah, well, so I think looking at this from a psychological perspective, the one thing that our brains are always striving to do is to make sense of what’s going on, that we have a real need to feel that we can understand things, make sense of what

is happening, but every now and then we find ourselves in a situation where we’re just unable to make sense, that things are just nonsensical. And what Albert Camus called the absurd, this idea where we see this mismatch between what we’re trying to

do, here we are trying to go out and lead a sensible, meaningful life, and sometimes we realize that that just is not possible in the current context, that things are just too absurd. And in this moment here, our brains give us the signal that we’re

I’ve been saying that to myself a lot lately.

I’m like, oh, we’re just in the absurd right now. Like this is where we are.

There’s, I think what’s so helpful about thinking about all of these modern issues that we have where, and we’ve talked about this a lot on the show lately, I feel like I’ve been having these conversations with everybody lately that people are

lonelier, even though we have more ways than ever to connect with each other. People seem to be more depressed, less happy, more disconnected, even though, and you point this out in your book, objectively, life has gotten better in a lot of ways

since the 1950s. If any of my ancestors who survived the potato famine were to be, you know, boing-flipped into the year 2025 and watching me have, you know, a mental breakdown over my Wi-Fi router, I think that they would have a hard time really

relating to some of my anxieties. But things have gotten easier in some ways, and yet we are existentially more lost than it feels like we should be.

Like, it feels like all of these advancements, like, we just cannot get past the fact that we are tragically people and people have to think. We can’t just be chimpanzees seem to have, like, the best of both worlds.

They’ve got amazing dexterity, but no depression.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think these are really unusual times because yeah, in so many ways, objectively, our lives have gotten better.

We have more leisure time. We have more money on average. We have more possessions.

We’re more time in retirement. We’re living longer. There’s less prejudice.

Things seem to have gotten better, but we’re struggling. I think a key reason why we’re struggling so much is because lately it’s been harder to find what is meaningful in one’s life.

And I think to understand this better, we need to consider what it is that a meaningful life is based on. And ultimately, meaning is about connections.

So if we talk about what is, say, the meaning of your podcast, it’s all the ideas that you can connect to your podcast. You know, the proud moments you’ve had, the frustrations you’ve had, you know, your favorite sessions and so on.

All of those things are what your podcast means to you, these connections. And it’s similar with when it comes to the meaning of our own lives.

It’s the connections that we have to our life that makes our life meaningful, that a well-connected life is a more meaningful life. And these kinds of connections come from a variety of different sources.

So first, and something you referred to earlier, it’s our interpersonal connections are especially important. When we’re feeling disconnected from others, when we’re feeling lonely, this is when we feel particularly meaningless and alienated.

And over the last while, people have become getting more and more disconnected from others, that people on average have fewer friends than they used to, family sizes are smaller, even the friends and family members that we do have, we see them less

often, we get together with neighbors less often. You can see there’s data documenting this, and it’s been a steady drop for the past 70 years.

And we also get connections from our community that a couple of generations ago was really quite common for people to belong to many kinds of communities that you don’t see as much anymore.

So people used to belong to things like the service clubs, like a rotary club or a lion’s club, or people would be really active in things like the Parents Teachers Association.

They would belong to sort of local recreational sports teams, like a bowling league or a bridge team. And people have been doing that less and less over the years. So we’re getting less connected with our communities as well.

Our work is an important source of meaning in our lives, but work has been changing in many ways that has been making this more and more challenging. That people are changing jobs more frequently than before.

They’re often trying to put together a lot of side hustles to make a living. And I think the aftermath of COVID, I think had sort of an unexpected challenge to our connections with work, is that remote work became more common.

And people were less likely to be engaged with their colleagues and to feel that they belong to an organization. And that kind of connection is weakened.

And then a last but important source of connections that’s been dwindling is people’s sense of connections to the transcendent. That having some kind of spiritual connections in their lives.

That these are especially associated with the feelings of meaning. But really, in most industrialized societies around the world, and we’re seeing it in particular in the US, that people have been leaving organized religion in droves.

That they’re less likely to have these kinds of connections. And so with these kinds of connections becoming more distant, more inaccessible to us, that we’re having a harder time finding a sense of meaning in our lives.

And meaning is so important for helping us to confront the challenges of life. That meaning helps us to deal with the anxieties that we face. But here we are struggling to gain a sense of meaning in our lives.

Yeah, I think you described us as meaning-making machines, sort of.

We’re trying to, and you see this when you’re, if you watch a child grow, or if you spend time with like a really little kid or a baby, right, you watch them sort of go through the world and try to figure out what everything is and what it means.

My youngest is in second grade now, so he’s like almost a big kid, but he’s still like a little kid, and he’s still, he’ll hear something, and then he’ll ask you what it means too. And he’ll say, what do you mean by that?

And so to even just explain like little turns of phrase or expressions to him, or, you know, he’s fully eavesdropping and he wants to know like, about the family drama he overheard. And I’m like, oh, uh, uh, uh. But you can see that like in children.

But I’ve also found if I can look at other people that I encounter in the world as sort of children, like I think we all are kind of like forever kids. We’re all still trying to like make sense of things.

I can soften my judgment towards them, or I can like have some more compassion or understanding, or at least see how they got to where they got, which is really hard to do, but I think also very important to do.

Yes, I think, exactly. And I think, so that we’re always seeking meaning and making meaning, and how we perceive things is really through what I call a meaning framework, like a sort of a broad set of connected ideas that we have together.

So that, you know, that we see the world through from a particular perspective that connects to the ideas that we associate with it.

And the challenge is because different people sort of have different perspectives, they have different meaning frameworks guiding things. So even when, you know, the same event can happen, it may be perceived really differently by people.

So you think of like COVID happening. What does COVID mean? Well, you saw some really dramatically different reactions to the pandemic, right?

Some people saw this as the worst health crisis in the past century and upon this very threatening. And other people saw this as, you know, as a big nothing burger. This was an example of the government trying to take away people’s freedoms.

The same event being seen entirely differently because we’re always looking at the world through these meaning frameworks that we have, through these ideas that we have assembled across our lifetime. We’ve learned them from our cultures.

We learn these from our conversations with others. And this comes to shape the way that we see the world. So, yeah, I think it can be really challenging to appreciate that other people are seeing things differently.

I’m always struck by, when I speak to some friends and family who have very different political views for me, that their news that they’re saying, there’s all these things in the news that they’re describing, and I haven’t heard of any of them, that

that’s not what I’m getting from my completely different set of concerns that my news is presenting with me. And so I think it can be really difficult to come to appreciate other’s perspective because it’s coming from such a different place as their

Yeah.

And I’ve been using that, basically that meaning making framework and trying to remember that about other people because I do have kind of a combative nature.

I do sort of like run towards conflict and I’m like, well, this is a good look to get through this and I’m going to be right and you’re going to be wrong. And I don’t think that’s a helpful way to go through the world.

I don’t think that is a changes a lot of minds. I don’t think that is a place to grow from.

But if you are on an airplane and you watch what other people are watching on their little screens and you do happen to catch the news that somebody else is watching that is very different from the news channel you would watch, you can see where they

are getting that information. And that is not to say that you have to rubber stamp it. That is not to say that you have to agree with it or just say, oh, well, we all have different perspectives.

But I do think that understanding why that might mean something different to another person is important. And I have no scientific background whatsoever, but I have a hunch.

I have this belief that one reason, too, why we feel so disconnected and why we feel so lonely and why it feels like things are so absurd, too, is because we have gotten so disconnected from each other that we cannot see each other in that way.

Yeah, I think you’re really on to something there. Yeah, I think that we really depend on a shared reality that we live in.

And this is one way that we get the sense that the lives that we’re leading in, how we’re thinking is appropriate, is normal, is based on how it’s reflected back to us from the shared reality.

And I think over the past generation or so, there’s been this increasing polarization, particularly in the US. And we no longer really belong to a shared reality anymore. There’s multiple realities out there.

And a liberal and conservative reality are really quite different. And it’s unsettling to feel so certain in our views and see that, meet someone else who sees the world entirely differently.

And I think that creates some anxiety in us, just knowing that I’m so sure that I’m right and here’s someone who sees the world completely differently.

And I think it sort of begs us to be a little more intellectually humble, to recognize that our views of things are a perspective. And it feels like we’re seeing the truth.

That’s what, you know, everything that I see is, I’m seeing reality as it is, but it’s always being filtered.

And I think it’s, you know, useful for us to keep that in mind and for dealing with others who differ from us and our perspective, that, yeah, just to keep this in mind and be open to, well, how are they seeing the world?

And I think we can have a much more engaging, productive conversation if we do try to keep other people’s perspectives so that we can, you know, find some common ground and then build from there.

I’m trying to budget all of my anger, all of my rage, all of my like just like frustration for people who are at the top versus people who are at my eye level, right? Which is hard to do because Elon Musk is not concerned with my opinions about him.

He’s not going to care. That’s not really going to make a difference.

And so I do think that it is easier to sort of like take out that frustration on a random stranger that you like, you know, who has like just a bumper sticker that just really like gets to you or something like that, right?

Like you have these minor interactions with other people where you can kind of take out those frustrations about the fact that we are living in two different realities.

And most of our interactions, right, with somebody who feels differently than us, believes differently than us, happen more at like, you know, at our eye level. So it is hard not to let that frustration out.

And when you write about understanding ourselves and understanding the world through stories.

Yes. So we’re very dependent on these stories that we have to make sense of the world. And it’s not just something that every day people do.

This is how science is based, too. Is that science depends on an overarching story of how we’re making sense of things, that we have these world views, these paradigms to make sense of reality. And so these stories change across time.

And what’s interesting to see is that these stories don’t seem to change in a gradual manner. They seem to change in a very abrupt manner.

And so an example is our understanding of the universe across historical time, that Ptolemy originally argued that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun would go across, it would go around the earth.

We would see it tracking across the day. And so this was a story about the universe. And this worked pretty well for a long time.

It was aligned with what the scripture said. It was aligned with people’s common experience seeing the sun move across the sky.

But as, you know, telescopes got better and more observations were made, there was a number of anomalies that didn’t quite fit with this. That, you know, well, why was the Mercury and Venus always so close to the sun?

Why did the planets not go across in a straight line, but they kind of went in these little elliptical lines? And so they sort of just kept adding these little, you know, caveats to these theories to try and account for like these deviations from it.

Until, it wasn’t until Copernicus, using a telescope, identified a completely different theory. No, the Earth is not the center of the universe. The sun is.

And this involves what was called a paradigm shift in science, that now we have an entirely new meaning framework for explaining things.

And what’s interesting, I think, about these changes in meaning frameworks, it’s very rare for someone to change their own theories themselves.

So this one famous scientist, Max Planck, said that science progresses one funeral at a time, meaning that the older scientists are really unlikely to embrace a new, better theory, a new, better story.

They’ve had one story guiding their understanding of their field throughout their career. And when a new, better story comes up, it’s still not going to seem right. They’re going to keep making tweaks and adjustments to their existing theory.

Rather, it’s the young generation that’s going to come around and is going to embrace these new, improved models. And so then I think this just shows how wedded we are to these meeting frameworks that we have. It’s very difficult to change them.

That this is how we see the world. It takes a lot of work to actually change ones, overarching meeting frameworks. It’s easy to make tweaks to it, but to actually replace it wholesale is a big project.

Yeah.

And when somebody shows up and has a whole new, like has something to sell you, has like a big idea to sell you, it has to be better than whatever you believed before. And I think that’s just an interesting way of looking at the world.

If somebody can tell you a story that makes your world make more sense, then you might buy into that whether or not it truly benefits from you, or whether or not it benefits you in any way. Which is, now I do have the page identified.

One second though. One second.

And I’m kind of focusing this conversation on like just the absurdity in our world right now, because I do think, you know, we have people in our community who have lost full relationships with people, you know, through like just the way that the

world is, and the way that, you know, they’re seeing the world and experiencing the world so differently from people who they really love and loved and like shared a life with and DNA with. And it’s a real hell of a time.

And I know a lot of people are struggling with this. And I really, I found a lot of, you know, comfort in your writing about this too.

And in sort of trying to really think a little bit more deeply, not just in an I’m right, someone else is wrong kind of sense, but in understanding how these stories that we believe and that help us make sense of the world can have people acting

Yeah.

Well, I think it just shows how dependent we are on these stories. That’s the way that we are always seeing the world, is in ways that are consistent with this overarching story, this meaning framework that we have.

And because of that, because it governs how we see things, interpret things, yeah, often we will work towards protecting this story, even if it has a significant cost to ourselves.

That it’s just the idea of to give up on this story means that I don’t understand anything that’s happening right now. And so making that transition to embrace a new and better story, yes, is a lot of work for sure.

Yeah. I’m going to quote you to yourself, so I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable.

But disadvantaged people find themselves part of a system that is oppressing them, and because they have less power and fewer resources than their oppressors, there’s often little they can do about it.

Members of disadvantaged groups not only participate in an oppressive system, but even more perplexing, they often act in ways that contribute to their disadvantage.

Yeah. Well, and so this is a phenomenon that’s been well studied in psychology. It goes by the name of system justification theory.

And really what this points out is that a strong drive that we have, a sort of a psychological drive that we have, is to assume that our understanding of things is correct, that what is familiar to us has a remarkable staying power.

So even if the system is set up such that it’s oppressing you, it’s still at least as familiar. It’s the status quo, and that’s just the way the world is.

And so it’s been found in many studies that people will, can be resistant to change, even change that can be improving their lives, because it’s unfamiliar. It suggests that the world is different than how they’ve always believed it to be.

And so this is one of the challenges we have with, you know, working to make the world a better place, is to getting people to be comfortable with change, and to give up on the existing stories that they’ve been embracing.

Yeah, it’s the devil you know versus the devil you don’t. And in that same chapter where, you know, you’re talking about system justification, there’s also this connection between that and this belief that people get what they deserve.

And I see a connection between that, and, you know, in America, we just love the rugged individual. We love the myth of the self-made.

We love a person who can overcome a small adversity and win big, and we will myth-make mostly men into an underdog, a superhero, who’s just done something amazing.

And when you believe that people get what they deserve, you will also believe that you deserve whatever happens to you.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s really quite an ironic effect. I mean, I mean, the world is a very complex place, and it would be very disturbing to think that stuff happens randomly.

That, you know, who knows something bad could happen to you today? Well, sadly, something bad could happen to you today. But having just this idea that at any point, you know, that random things could happen is incredibly destabilizing.

So, yeah, so people embrace this story, this premise of a story that people get what they deserve. And when you get something good happens to you, that’s great. It’s like, I deserve this.

I’m a good person, and I’m being rewarded for it. That’s not very puzzling at all. What’s more puzzling is when bad things happen to someone.

We see bad things happen to someone else, and immediately there’s a tendency to think, well, they must have done something to deserve it, right? That’s why this bad thing happened to them, is that they deserved it.

And even when bad things happen to ourselves, there’s a tendency for people to look for ways to blame themselves, because as horrible as that might be, at least if you can still keep this, embrace the story so that people get what they deserve, it

suggests that going forward, you can avoid it next time. You know, that I’m going to work towards becoming better and become more deserving of good things that I can improve my life.

And so ironically, people who’ve suffered many misfortunes often have this tendency to blame themselves, even when they are not at all blameworthy, they haven’t done anything to contribute to this, but believing that you are so, just makes you feel

Yeah, because it’s really, it’s scary to believe that the world is just purely random.

And it’s also scary to know that we have so many choices. And you wrote about this pretty extensively in the book too, which is, you know, there’s a different kind of anxiety that comes from having so much choice, having so many options.

And I have a college freshman right now. And she is, oh, she’s wound so tight, right? Because she’s 18, and she has decided what she’s going to do with her life.

And she’s got to take these classes in this order. And that class is not offered next semester. Steven, so what is she going to do?

Okay, she’s calling me, and she’s having a full on meltdown. Because she might be, she might be behind. She might be behind, she might need a whole other semester, six months out of her whole life, to graduate.

And I understand that feeling, because I was that girl too, right? And I get it, I get it. But we expect kids, children, they don’t even have a full prefrontal cortex, right?

They’re soup, just a blank, just a smooth brain up there to make these giant choices, spend tens of thousands of dollars, mapping out their lives.

You know, the world is like, when the world is a buffet, it is hard to feel good about your choice, because there could always be a better choice.

That’s right. Yeah.

I think this is such a curious challenge that we face because people love choice. They love to have the idea that it’s up to me. You know, I don’t have to do what someone else has set out for me, but that it’s up to me.

However, I think it’s important to realize a couple things about this. One, this is very much a cultural idea that people learn from their cultures. The US is the world champion hands down in freedom of choice.

That US celebrates choice, provides people with far more choices than any other cultures. And kids are raised.

I wouldn’t be surprised if when your daughter was young, if you would start morning, do you want to wear, you know, the yellow shirt or the blue shirt, like give them the choice, you know, what do you want for breakfast today? Yeah, that’s right.

And offering them these choices. And so choices seem great, but they are paired with anxiety and responsibility. So Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, he said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

And as he saw it, you know, when we’re facing a choice, we’re sort of standing in front of this big abyss and knowing that there’s no set path for us to follow, that that would make things easier.

You just do what you’re supposed to do, just do what everyone else does. That would be easy to do. Instead, it’s no, no, you have to figure out what is the direction of your life.

You have to figure out the person you’re going to be. And that this is really quite unsettling.

And something I talk about in the book, which I think is quite striking, is we have this sense that adolescence and young adulthood, the time your daughter’s going through right now, is a difficult time.

This is the idea that adolescence is a time of storm and stress has been around for a while. And it’s usually attributed to hormones, hormonal changes.

However, I don’t think this hormonal change argument can explain everything, because if you look around the world, the idea that adolescence is a difficult time is not universal. And in many small scale societies, people don’t share this view.

They don’t think of adolescence as a difficult time. And I think a key reason behind this, and some research points to this, is that it’s the choices for all the different lives that we can lead that contribute to our anxiety.

So if you’re from a society where everyone farms, you don’t have to figure out what you’re going to do with your life. You’re going to be a farmer. That’s one less thing you have to have to figure out.

And in the past, there were fewer choices. People used to inherit their occupations from their parents, daughters would do what their mothers did, fathers would often, I mean, sons would often pick up their father’s occupation.

That’s why there’s surnames like Smith and Miller and Cooper, like occupation was passed down. People were born into a religion. They really didn’t have many opportunities to see other religions.

Arranged marriages were common in the West centuries back and they still are common in many parts of the world where you’re not even having that much say in the partner that you choose.

And people, it was seen as very unlikely to change your status in life that St. Augustine said that a finger should not wish to become an eye, that it’s just that you accept your status.

And so the idea was that people were born into a world where it was kind of clearly mapped out what you’re supposed to be doing.

But now we have to figure out everything that, I’m not sure if it’s this way at your daughter’s school, but many universities now offer customized majors.

So it’s not that the, typically when you have a major, you know, the university says, well, you need to take these 10 required courses here and there’s a few electives that you can have.

But now many universities are allowing students to choose, you know, which combination of courses they’re going to take, they get to map it out.

I would have imploded. I barely graduated in four years. I was a senior year declared an English major because it was the only major I could finish.

And my parents were not giving me an extra semester at all. So I was like, I guess I’m an English major. I’m passionate about it.

It’s just because I’d been every other major, because I couldn’t decide because it was too much. It was too much. It was too much.

And then I took like two philosophy classes and I was like, now my mind has been blown and now I can’t see. I don’t know what anything means anymore.

Yeah. Well, I think that having all that choice is overwhelming. You need to find a romantic partner and you look in the app and there’s thousands of options.

And you’re supposed to choose the right one somehow out of all those thousands of options. And people now are leaving organized religion, but they’re not usually leaving spiritual beliefs completely. They’re choosing their set of beliefs.

They’re going to say, I’m going to take, oh, this pagan ritual is nice. Maybe some Zen meditation, things like that. And they’re putting it all together with some crystals or astrology, and so they’re planning out the way to the hereafter, too.

OK, yeah.

So there’s all these choices. And then when you make a choice, you need to rationalize it.

You need to rationalize it so that you feel good about your choices, which is another part of the book that I underlined, because I loved your, I’m going to ask you to speak about the Vietnam example, because my father had a horrible draft number,

knew it, knew he was going to get drafted, knew he would not have a choice. And so he enlisted at age 17, chose the Marines, chose to be in Recon, which is particularly violent, and like chose, like decided like that choosing his own adventure was

going to be the best option. And reading that, you’re reading the study you were citing on it, it really helped me understand him, really helped me understand my dead dad.

Yeah. Well, yes, so that’s the challenge that we face. We’re making all of these choices, and we have to live with the consequences and all of that responsibility for our choices.

And yeah, the way that we tend to cope with this is that we tend to rationalize the choices that we make.

And the example that you’re pointing to, there’s a study done during the draft for the draft lottery for the Vietnam War, where birth dates were drawn out of a hat, essentially.

And so, I mean, rightfully so, so many people were trying to find ways of not going to Vietnam. And so one strategy that people pursued is to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps, ROTC, which it was a big commitment. Sorry, Siri.

I mean, it was a multi-year commitment that people had to make, but at least they knew they wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. And so they had to confront this decision. Do I join the ROTC or do I take my chances with the draft lottery?

And they had to make this choice before the draft lottery happened. And so this actually provided an interesting opportunity to see how people cope with their choices, because the lottery is random.

And so many thousands of Americans joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

And so what one researcher did, Barry Stah, he looked after, a year later after the draft lottery, all the people who joined the ROTC to see how are they doing, what do they think about their decisions. And he looked at two groups of people.

One group of people who their draft, the lottery draft was such that their birthdays, they found out that they had they not joined the ROTC, they definitely would have been going to Vietnam to fight in the war, risking their lives.

And the other half found out that they had a late birthday in the lottery draft, that they never would have been drafted in the first place.

And so looking at this, you might think, well, who would be happier with their decision, happier with being in the ROTC? And you would think that, oh, it must be the people who otherwise would have been sent to the war.

They would be happy that this is saving their life. That was like the best decision that they could have made. And the other group should be really regretting it.

I’ve spent all these years here for this thing that I wasn’t really interested in. I was just doing it to avoid the draft. But in actuality, the exact opposite pattern emerged.

It was the people who found out that they never would have been drafted in the first place. They were the ones who enjoyed their time in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. And actually, they ended up doing better in their coursework, too.

They took their studies more seriously than did the other group. And this is the power of rationalization.

Because the group that found out that, oh my God, had I not joined, I would have been sent to the front lines in Vietnam, they realized that their gamble that they took worked. And they didn’t have to do anything else to convince themselves.

They took a gamble and it paid off. They didn’t have to find ways of what was inspiring, what ways did they grow from being in the ROTC. They chose to go there to avoid being drafted and it worked.

It was the other group who made this decision that looked like it was being paying off badly for them. That they didn’t want to go to the war and so they took a gamble to join ROTC. And then they found out that they never would have gone anyways.

So they needed to convince themselves that they had made the right decision. And what they did, and I think it’s a very useful thing to remember, is that there’s often benefits in any decision that we make.

And so they were able to see all the great things about being in the ROTC, that they had a new sense of purpose in their lives, they were gaining a lot of new skills, they had a new group of friends, they were serving their country, they had many

reasons to view that as a positive choice. But we can only see that they started to view it this way when they realized that otherwise it would look like they had made a gamble that paid off poorly.

Yeah.

But I think that rationalization, you know, leading to increased satisfaction is, I think, another way to understand people who make different decisions than us and people who believe different things than us too, because, you know, it’s, I don’t

know, that was, I’ve been just really finding a lot of not peace, but like a lot of reassurance in everything that you wrote in this book, because it’s just a hard time to be a person in the world with other people in the world, and like realizing

Yes, exactly.

And I think we engage in these rationalizations again to keep with our story, that, you know, stay on the same story. Part of our story for many people is, you know, I’m a sensible person, I make good decisions.

And so, you know, after you made a decision, then you go all in here, that, yes, that was the right thing to do, that this is the right career for me to pursue, that was the right person I voted for, all of these things, and to convince ourselves.

And I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with these rationalizations. I think they really do help us to have peace with the path that we’re on, like we are, you know, we’re choosing where our path is going.

And I think if we kept questioning and regretting all of the choices that we made, that you’re in for a lot of misery if you do this.

So this is the way of coming to terms with your decisions, is by finding what’s positive in them and by framing things such that, yes, this was the right thing to do, and for looking for all the evidence of what is good about the life path that

Yeah.

There’s a part of your book, too, that I think is very helpful for this time, which talks about patriotism and the way that we feel about our country and our choices as we get older. This is very interesting. Okay.

When people are thinking about death, they are especially motivated to protect any icons that remind them of their cultural worldview.

In the face of their own mortality, people are motivated to protect anything that reflects upon their cultures, and this includes not be following the American flag in the course of a psychology study.

People have reflected on their own mortality temporarily become more patriotic. They come to think of their culture as the best. People also become more insistent that others follow the norms and laws of their culture.

People also become more likely to want to possess high status goods. Okay, that’s not as relevant. Thoughts about death lead people to strive for a sense of symbolic immortality.

They are motivated to view themselves as a key player in a meaningful cultural drama, and when they do so, they can feel that their own existences are part of the same immortal forces that characterize their cultures.

There is a podcast, TikTok, I only ever see the clips online, of these people probably my age, interviewing their parents who are very, very right wing, right?

And their kids are not, and they’re trying to understand their parents, trying to have these conversations with their parents, and in the face of even things that would not fly with American ideals of freedom and due process, their elderly parents

are like, well, yeah, okay? Like love it or leave it, get out. And I underlined that passage, because I was like, there we are, there so many of us are.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that points to this one key challenge that humans face, that like all species, you know, we have a drive to try to survive, like, you know, to avoid threats, to pursue, you know, opportunities for food and safety.

But unlike other species, from what we can tell, we may be the only species that knows that ultimately we’re going to fail at this survival thing, that someday we’re all going to die. And there’s nothing we can do about this.

It doesn’t matter how much kale juice you drink or how much you exercise. At some point, it’s still all going to come to an end.

And this creates a great deal of existential anxiety, knowing that this story that I’m participating in has an ending, that this is all going to come to an end, that all the things that I care about, that they’re going to end, that everything that

I’m working towards will ultimately be for naught, because we’re going to die. And so there’s this one theory in social psychology called terror management theory, which has explored this, how it is that people can come to cope with their pending

mortality. And yeah, and one thing that people do is that they strive to align themselves with their cultures.

And by aligning themselves with their cultures, they can feel some of the immortality that their cultures have, because, you know, after we die, our countries are going to continue on, that they feel a little more immortal than we do.

So as long as a person can feel that they’re embodying their cultures’ values and trying to be a good member of their culture, that they can feel a bit of that immortality rubbing off on them.

And so, yeah, when people are considering thoughts that, you know, reflecting on the fact that one day I’m going to die, they will do things like they will defend their culture, they will become more patriotic then, and think that, you know, well, my

culture is the best. They will, yeah, they want to enforce the rules of that culture, that to make, you know, as an idea that this is a system that is good, is right, and that everyone should follow.

And they tend to view themselves as doing a better job living up to those standards. And so this is one way then that we cope with this anxiety.

They thought that, while this is all going to end one day, is to live our lives in a way that makes us feel that, no, we’re part of this grander force. We’re part of this culture that’s going to continue to exist.

And so maybe part of me, too, is going to continue to exist alongside it.

Do you think writing this book has helped you survive and stay relatively sane over the past three months?

Yeah, so this is, I started writing this book in the pandemic, and this was very important to give me a sense of meaning over those difficult times. It gave me a sense of purpose.

And yes, so I also found that it helped doing all the research that I did and reading all the stuff and just sort of focusing on these questions of, you know, how is it that people can cope with their anxiety?

I do think that’s been really helpful in these difficult times. That it’s grounded me more. It’s given me a new perspective on things.

And it’s helped me, yeah, to figure out a way of going forward.

Yeah, to bring it out of, you know, the sort of political and interpersonal realm and back into just the normal run-of-the-mill personal existential crisis, which I’ve been having since probably second grade.

You talked about, you know, grounding and the ways that we make meaning are largely through connections.

And there I’m thinking too about, I got a message maybe last week from somebody who said, oh, I, you know, I was a nurse for 13 years and I’m on disability.

And I just am really struggling to like have any value, like to have like self-worth right now.

And I thought of your book and I thought of basically the pillars of connection, like those pillars of meaning, the, you know, work, spiritual, interpersonal, name the other ones because I’m running out right now. Community, right?

And like we need, we need like to sound like a corporate douchebag, like we need diversification, basically.

It’s like you need, you need to get that sense of meaning from many different places, because if one shuts off, you’ve got to find it other places.

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s true. Although I do think an encouraging part about this research is that it is possible to gain a sense of meaning without having every single domain of your life being, being richly connected.

That you can, you know, having in its, you know, good interpersonal relationships can help if your career isn’t so inspiring. So there is some, you can pay from different accounts.

But yeah, I think it’s useful to think of the kinds of strategies that people can take to help to build these connections. That some kinds of our interpersonal connections seem to be especially helpful for gaining a sense of meaning.

In particular, relationships where you’re taking on a caretaker’s role. This seems to be especially associated with feeling more meaningful.

So if you are, you know, taking care of the elderly or taking care of your children or taking care of pets, that you now have a sense that your life matters more and that you have a sense of purpose.

These are key facets of a meaningful life, this purpose and feeling that one matters. If, you know, one’s career is not so inspiring, that to seek other ways that you can have a sense of purpose.

So volunteering for a cause that you believe in is a good way of having the sense, again, that you are living a life aligned with your values and that what you are doing matters.

And I think being open-minded to any kind of spiritual tradition that resonates with you is, I think, a useful strategy.

That doesn’t mean to just try everything that you see, even if it feels uncomfortable, just being open-minded, too, because what research finds is that spiritual beliefs, and this is from some of our own research, and it doesn’t seem to matter what

kind of spiritual beliefs we’ve looked at. People who have these connections, even things like superstitions, belief in astrology, that people who have these beliefs report that their lives are more meaningful, that it seems to think that there’s

more than what meets the eye here. There’s more to life, there’s more to the universe than what we can see, that this is associated with greater feelings and meaning in life. So I think it’s important to be open minded to these kinds of things.

And I also think it’s important to attend to the story that we’re telling about our lives. And it might seem like an odd thing to say because, you know, while our life has already happened, like I can’t change what has happened.

However, you know, the stories that we tell, you know, our life, they’re vastly complex. There’s many things that have happened in our lives. And we do have some choice in what we want to focus on, what ways of thinking about our past.

And recent research has found, I think, an interesting set of findings that people who are instructed to think of their life in ways that aligns with what’s called the hero’s journey.

And this is one particular template for successful stories around the world. Example, stories like Star Wars or like Harry Potter or like Lord of the Rings. Frozen.

Yes, yes. These are some of the most popular stories of all time. And what they share in common is they have the hero who faces all these insurmountable challenges.

They have some allies and they go through some growth and transformation and help to overcome these obstacles. And those facets are probably true in your own life in some ways if you can think about them.

And so research has found that if people do sort of focus on those different elements and to think about their life in terms of, well, what are the obstacles you overcome? With what allies? How have you grown and changed over time?

That people afterwards report greater well-being, more of a sense of meaning in life, and they’re better able to resist or be resilient in the face of life’s challenges.

Yeah. And it’s unexpected allies, right? Like The Hobbit, he does not want to hang out with dwarves, right?

Right.

He thinks they’re gross, okay?

And guess what? Spoiler for The Hobbit, if you haven’t read a 100-year-old book or seen a movie that shouldn’t have been two movies. I think we can say that.

Why was it two movies? It was like a 100-page novella. Why was it two movies?

Why was it two movies? But he does get back to the Shire and he looks the same. He’s the only person who knows how transformed he was.

And I think that’s something to remember, too, is like you might not, like your life might not look wildly different, but like you, like the change might be very, very internal and only for your eyes, too.

Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that I didn’t ask you about?

Well, I, one thing I would say, too, is there are, when we think about our meaning in life, this, the feelings that we have, these feelings don’t exist at a constant level. It’s not that like every day we feel like equally meaningful.

Rather, you know, our feelings go up and down in these ways. And so, there are some strategies that people can use to help give themselves a temporary boost when things are feeling a little more difficult.

And so, some research has pointed to, for instance, when people reflect nostalgically on their past, like if you look through an old photo album, a soundtrack of your youth and remember these earlier chapters of your life story, that this helps you

gain a sense of self-continuity, of seeing the person that you’ve become, the journey that you’ve been on, and that makes people temporarily feel a little more meaningful, a little more engaged, a little less alienated. Also, any kind of spiritual

rituals that one might participate in, or any kind of meditation also is very important in giving that sense of self-transcendence, which provides one with a sense of meaning. One intervention that’s used in many psychological studies is to ask

people to reflect on their important values and write up, just write a paragraph of what it is that you really care about, what you stand for. And just making that salient and accessible to one really underscores a sense of who I am and what I stand

for. And people are more resilient in the face of difficulties for some time after. And also, just going out into nature is remarkably restorative, that gives you this boost in well-being.

So I think these are some useful strategies that one can keep in mind, just to help during those times when you just, you know, some days we feel a little disconnected, a little alienated, a little lonely, and that these are some easy strategies that

Sorry, I’m just writing that down, okay.

Okay, thank you so much. You are, this is wonderful. I hope that was even slightly beneficial to you, but…

Yeah, yeah, this was a lot of fun.

Okay, so that conversation went a lot of places.

It did not go to all the places that I wanted it to go to, partially because this book was so dense. It was so good. I did underline a little bit too much of it.

And while I was underlining it and reading the book, I kept thinking, I’ll talk to him about this, I’ll talk to him about this. I made a notes document. The notes did not make any sense to me.

The notes were like, whoa, page whatever, did not make any sense. But I really do hope that everybody reads this book. If enough of you read this book, like we can have like a little book club for it over on the Substack.

The Substack is where we have all of the episodes of the podcast that we’ve ever made. They’re all ad free. We do, you know, a lot of stuff over there.

I send out a weekly email. Again, there’s like no pressure for any of this. I think we all know that things are hard right now.

They are hard for everybody. If you can support the show that way, you can support the show that way. And if you can’t, literally no big deal.

I am Chris Barley and Tommy Boy. I’m the world’s worst salesperson. You say no, I say good.

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I really would. And we will see you back here in a few weeks. No, not in a few weeks.

We’ll see you back here next week, probably, probably next week. This is usually a call-in show about what matters to you. Every once in a while, I’m going to do interviews like this.

I hope it’s okay that we just are sort of kind of doing whatever our heart desires, but I love taking your phone calls. So if you want to leave a voicemail, if you want to text me, if you want me to call you, call me 612-568-4441.

Thanks for being here and I will see you again soon.