Naming the Real

Are you happy right now? And what do we even mean when we use the word "happy"? Our society has implicit notions of what happiness is and how we attain it, but often these notions are incomplete at best and backwards at worst. In this episode, we explore a rubric for happiness and some practical steps for becoming truly, wildly happy. 

Virtue signaling is another feature of a rule-keeping morality and the flip-side to our obsession with calling out the hypocrisy of others. Talk of it is everywhere. What, then, is virtue signaling exactly and, more to the point, what drives it? In this episode (part 3 of a 3-episode arc), we explore the social science of self-justification and the human tendency towards self-flattery. Most import...

A central feature of a moral culture—like ours—which has caved to mere "rule-keeping" is an obsession with calling out the hypocrisy of others. This is part of our culture's tribalism. And yet this focus on hypocrisy is a symptom of a much larger sickness. In this episode, we explore how cynicism and loneliness ultimately drive tribalism and how our need to scapegoat hypocrites can be interrupted...

In a culture with few moral narratives or frameworks—and in which there is increasing doubt that that human life can have any true purpose or meaning at all—a huge void is created. This void is increasingly filled by a morality of rule-keeping which, while giving us a sense of purpose and community, often fails to give us a sense of real meaning. Morality-by-rule-keeping, while inviting us to chec...

Virtue, classically speaking, meant doing the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way. It was highly contextual, requiring wisdom and thoughtfulness. In contrast, we are witnessing, to our detriment, the ascendance of a "morality" based on rule-keeping. This morality (so-called) does not require the cultivation of inner goodness; rather, it simply requires adherence to an...

Because of a busy travel schedule (and so that episodes don't suffer in the midst of it), I'm taking a two-week pause from posting new episodes. When I'm back I'll be posting an episode on the rise of morality by rule-keeping as part of the Our Cultural Crisis series as well as an episode on happiness. Be back soon!

With all the talk of cancel culture, we turn to an issue at the heart of our cultural crisis: the human penchant to blame and scapegoat as a means of feeling righteous. In this episode, we explore René Girard's mimetic theory and "the scapegoating mechanism"—the human tendency to scapegoat others in order to relieve our own anxiety and demonstrate our own virtue. By understanding this mechanism, w...

Grief done well means moving into wholeness, a process in which we become people who help heal the world around us. But how do we get there? In this third and final episode about grief, we explore the role of anger and protest in moving us beyond sorrow and into meaningful action for the sake of hope and joy.

If grieving well is so important to a flourishing life, how do we engage it? In this episode, we explore five practices (and a bonus practice) for grieving well. The goal is not to avoid grief nor to wallow in it, but to become a person that can not only touch grief but ultimately be strengthened by it. If we do this with courage, we can become a bastion of joy and a source of hope for others.

Grief is more than the loss of a loved one; it wears many faces and has many expressions. Nevertheless, grief can feel elusive, overwhelming, and misunderstood, while remaining life's one inevitability. It is also one of the core practices for living an extraordinary, flourishing life. In this episode, we explore what grief is, how critical it is for living a life of joy, and begin to explore prac...

We counter polarization and anxiety with forgiveness and reconciliation. But we live in an emerging moral culture, called a Victimhood Culture, which at its worst can incentivize us to live in offense, comparison, and scapegoating. In this episode, we explore the history of three moral cultures and the implications of the emerging Culture of Victimhood.

Immaturity is marked by either-or, all-or-nothing, zero sum thinking…and our culture it steeped in it, especially in the form of false binaries. In this episode, we explore how false binaries help keep our culture stuck in polarization and anxiety and how, through recognizing them, we can transcend them. We can live in the maturity of both-and thinking, which leads to humility, empathy, and wisdom...

In our over-stimulated world, experiencing anxiety in the form of racing thoughts and a spun-out mind is a pervasive reality. We humans already have a negativity bias: as the metaphor goes, our brains are like Velcro for negative thoughts and Teflon for positive thoughts. But we can transcend our fixation on negativity. In this episode, we explore how to counter the anxiety of our culture (and our...

Since the 1970s, America's sense of community, measured in "social capital," has steadily declined, resulting in what sociologists sometimes call "the atomized self." We are more disconnected from one other now than we were in the past, which directly impacts how we go about getting our need for recognition and dignity met. And with two very different understandings of what dignity is (recognition...

Defining happiness—let alone what leads to it—is difficult, and yet the quest for happiness is at the heart of our modern cultural ethos. In this episode, we explore Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" and how the notion of "self-actualization" reigns in our culture, when "transcendence" is what really makes us happy. And we explore the difficulties in pursuing transcendence in a culture in whic...

Regret is looking back and wishing something had been different—a different choice made or a different path taken. And it is often linked to shame. In this episode we explore how to navigate regret in a way that ends strengthens us rather than burying us. And we explore principles and practices we can engage to deal not just with regret but pain in all of its manifestations. This, too, is part of...

In this episode, we explore how notions of personal freedom have changed over the last 400 years, post-Enlightenment, creating a new notion of the self and a rampant individualism across Western culture. This concept is key to understanding our cultural crisis of anxiety and polarization because our new notion of freedom and our new individualism fuels much of our contemporary anxiety and undermin...

Progressives and conservatives mis-understand each other's morality, that much is clear. But what exactly do they misunderstand? In this episode, we explore Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph's research into the 5 universal moral foundations (harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, in-group loyalty, and purity/sanctity) and the differences between the moral frameworks of progressives and...

How do we understand the rise in anxiety, polarization, and division in the US? More to the point, how do we name it so that we can transcend it and live free of its dominance? In this episode, which launches a new series, I explore two of the dominant archetypal impulses in human nature: conservatism (the desire to keep the good that is) and progressivism (the desire to pursue the great that coul...

There's an ancient paradigm for how we build our character: our desire for change can be funneled into practices . Practices, consistently engaged, become our habits , our instinctual, reflexive ways of behaving in the world. Our habits, quite simply, become our character , who we become, for ourselves and for others. It sounds simple, but it takes real work. Sometimes people get so caught up in "...

Every issue we face in life is, to some degree, a factor of how we think. Even how we frame issues, whether we see it as a problem or an opportunity, for example, is a function of how we think. Sometimes our problems really exist solely-or at least, primarily-in our own minds. We our are own jailers, and...we can be our own liberators. Bottom line, if you change the way you think, you can change y...