Speaker 1: I think for a lot of people it's because they
Speaker 1: expect belonging to be there right away, and it never is.
Speaker 1: Belonging is something you always have to work at. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have
Speaker 1: recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like
Speaker 1: garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity,
Speaker 1: jealousy or fear. We see what we don't have instead
Speaker 1: of what we do. We think things that hold us
Speaker 1: back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good Thanks for joining us. Our
Speaker 1: guest today is Emily White. Emily is a former lawyer
Speaker 1: turned writer. She's the author of Lonely Learning to Live
Speaker 1: with Solitude. Emily is also written for The Daily Mail,
Speaker 1: The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian.
Speaker 1: Her latest book, which will be released in January, is
Speaker 1: called count me in how I stepped off the sidelines,
Speaker 1: created connection and built a fuller, richer, more lived in life.
Speaker 1: Hi Emily, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm happy that you could join us tonight. You've got
Speaker 1: two books that I found both pretty interesting, so I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to getting into discussing each of those in
Speaker 1: a little bit more detail. But we will start with
Speaker 1: the theme of the show, which is the parable of
Speaker 1: the two Wolves. So there is a grandfather who's talking
Speaker 1: with his grandson and he says, life, there are two
Speaker 1: wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he
Speaker 1: thinks about it for a second, and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. I found the parable almost
Speaker 1: kind of hauntingly apt to the work that I've been
Speaker 1: doing over the past seven years. Um. I started by
Speaker 1: writing about loneliness and momentess had been a really defining
Speaker 1: theme in my life for a long long time. And
Speaker 1: I'd say that would be kind of the first wolf,
Speaker 1: the wolf we don't like. And I if you had
Speaker 1: told me when I was writing my first book, which
Speaker 1: was about loneliness, that I would go on um to
Speaker 1: write a book about can action, I wouldn't have believed you.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have believed that second, better wolf was out
Speaker 1: there and in me as well. But I did go on.
Speaker 1: So I feel like i've sort of, I mean to
Speaker 1: stay within your parable, traveled from one wolf to the other.
Speaker 1: And I guess the main thing I take from the
Speaker 1: parable is just the truth of it that you wind
Speaker 1: up with what you feed, and that you can choose
Speaker 1: what you feed. And I traveled from loneliness to connection
Speaker 1: by making some specific choices and and and feeding that
Speaker 1: decision to connect. And I was kind of surprised with
Speaker 1: where I landed. Um. But I like the parable because
Speaker 1: it does represent these choices that we can make in
Speaker 1: life and how those choices shape us. And so your
Speaker 1: your first book was titled Lonely, and it was about
Speaker 1: your experience with loneliness as well as you spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time sort of studying loneliness in general. Can
Speaker 1: you share a little bit about what you learned in
Speaker 1: the researching and writing that book? Sure? I Lonely was
Speaker 1: published in two thousand and ten, and I was writing
Speaker 1: so I wrote it kind of in my mid to
Speaker 1: late thirties, and I was writing about a period in
Speaker 1: my early thirties, early to mid thirties when I was
Speaker 1: extremely lonely. That would be the bad Wolf. And I
Speaker 1: was sort of driven to write the book because I
Speaker 1: needed to understand what was happening to me. I wanted
Speaker 1: to learn everything I could about loneliness, and so I
Speaker 1: learned about I taught myself about the physiology, the psychology,
Speaker 1: the sociology, everything really I could to understand loneliness and
Speaker 1: to understand the role that it had played and was
Speaker 1: continuing to play in my life. And I found I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not everyone who can spend sort of four years
Speaker 1: reading about their demon or their bad wolf, but I
Speaker 1: found doing so extraordinarily helpful. It was sort of like
Speaker 1: a sustained period of mindfulness where I just stared at
Speaker 1: at what the problem in my life was, and I
Speaker 1: learned a lot. I talked to the irony was I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that helps. I wound up
Speaker 1: talking to just a huge number of people, mainly in
Speaker 1: the US about loneliness but also all over the world,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was really um. It was a great
Speaker 1: way to learn about more about something that I've been
Speaker 1: confronting me my whole life. Really, So, what are the
Speaker 1: main themes out of that book? Tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about what what loneliness is, maybe what some of
Speaker 1: the main causes are I'm curious about. As as you
Speaker 1: and I were talking briefly before the show, there's a
Speaker 1: couple of things I'm always curiousness, curiousness. There's a couple
Speaker 1: of things I'm always curious about in regards to loneliness.
Speaker 1: A couple of things that come up to me when
Speaker 1: I think about it. And one is really the connection
Speaker 1: between loneliness and depression or I've heard people say that
Speaker 1: sometimes depression is um or yeah, depression is is masquerading
Speaker 1: is loneliness. And then the other thing I'd be curious
Speaker 1: about what you learned in that book is about the
Speaker 1: phenomenon of being lonely while in a group of people
Speaker 1: or around other people. Sure, I I think a lot
Speaker 1: of the confusion between loneliness and depression arises from the
Speaker 1: fact that it's okay in our culture to say that
Speaker 1: you're depressed, and it's really not totally okay to say
Speaker 1: that you're lonely. So people are kind of blurring. The
Speaker 1: blurring the waters, muddying the water is intentionally there. For me,
Speaker 1: I knew I was lonely as opposed to depressed, because
Speaker 1: for me, depression has a tendency to blot emotions out.
Speaker 1: And I found my loneliness was extremely acute. It was
Speaker 1: an extremely intense sense, and I knew what was wrong,
Speaker 1: you know. Depression and again I'm speaking for myself is
Speaker 1: often a sort of this global sense of what's wrong,
Speaker 1: you know, And I knew what was wrong. I felt
Speaker 1: too alone, and a lot of people are. Some people
Speaker 1: who write about loneliness and depression will talk about social depression,
Speaker 1: and by that they mean that it lifts when you
Speaker 1: feel connected. And I think when people say they're depressed
Speaker 1: and lonely what they often but sometimes they are. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can be clinically depressed and lonely at the same time.
Speaker 1: But I think a lot of the times I like
Speaker 1: the notion of social depression. We don't use that term
Speaker 1: in conversation. It's it's only used when people are writing
Speaker 1: about loneliness. But the notion of feeling better when you're
Speaker 1: connected is just so intuitively sound. And I found for
Speaker 1: myself that what I was calling depression, or what if
Speaker 1: I was calling loneliness, lifted when I found more connection.
Speaker 1: And that kind of flows into the sense of what
Speaker 1: the idea of being lonely in a group, because I
Speaker 1: firmly believe that you can be lonely on your own
Speaker 1: and you can be lonely in a group. My loneliness
Speaker 1: hit at its absolute worst. I used to be a lawyer,
Speaker 1: and I was spending every single day in an office
Speaker 1: filled with practiced a specific type of loss. So these
Speaker 1: were like minded people who have decided to join the
Speaker 1: same firm, and I felt entirely alone and having I
Speaker 1: think there's a fatigue that goes along with hiding depression,
Speaker 1: but I think there's a special fatigue that goes along
Speaker 1: with hiding a loneliness because you're you have to pretend
Speaker 1: that you feel connected when you don't, and that's exhausting
Speaker 1: and um so I think in some ways it's easier
Speaker 1: to be lonely when you're alone, because at least no
Speaker 1: one is asking you to pretend to be something that
Speaker 1: you're not. Um, it's often I hear this repeatedly. I've
Speaker 1: heard from many, many, many thousands of lonely people, and
Speaker 1: a lot of people will talk about and this is
Speaker 1: a dangerous thing that goes back to her, who do
Speaker 1: you feed parable? The danger is you feel better when
Speaker 1: you're alone, when you're lonely in some ways, and that
Speaker 1: can just start eating the loneliness. Is there a definition
Speaker 1: that you use for lonely or certain causes of loneliness
Speaker 1: that we could maybe explore. It gets just kind of
Speaker 1: pedantic when people start defining loneliness. I think everyone knows
Speaker 1: what it is. And when you start seeing the written definitions,
Speaker 1: they seem to sort of start to break from the
Speaker 1: lived experience of loneliness. I always say, lonely loneliness is
Speaker 1: a sense, a subjective sense, because you can be with people,
Speaker 1: you can be in a marriage, you can be anything
Speaker 1: of being too much on your own and feeling vulnerable
Speaker 1: and unhappy and resentful and angry because of it. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the isolation that's the problem, and again that sets
Speaker 1: it off from depression because so many things could cause depression,
Speaker 1: whereas with loneliness, it's this sense of just being being
Speaker 1: asked to be too much on your own. And what
Speaker 1: what causes that that loneliness? What causes, say, for example,
Speaker 1: or what are some of the causes of people who
Speaker 1: are in very similar social situations, for example, one to
Speaker 1: feel very lonely and another to not feel so lonely.
Speaker 1: I think not getting what you need from that social situation.
Speaker 1: I mean some people. I mean, you know, the idea
Speaker 1: has been put forward that people we have different social needs,
Speaker 1: and so I might actually need more than you socially,
Speaker 1: and if that means not being met, maybe I'll get
Speaker 1: lonely and you don't. But I think, I mean, and
Speaker 1: this is where we could start getting into, you know,
Speaker 1: which is what I think, as opposed to the research.
Speaker 1: I think we're entering an era where we're on our
Speaker 1: own so much, you know. Eric Kleinenberg's book Going Solo
Speaker 1: was a best seller because he documented what so many
Speaker 1: people were experiencing, which is the experience of living alone.
Speaker 1: And if you live alone and if you don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of contacts outside of the home and maybe
Speaker 1: your workplaces in particularly social I think it's becoming increasing
Speaker 1: hard for us to make two ties that we need
Speaker 1: to fend off loneliness. And I guess I'm sort of
Speaker 1: supported in that, sadly in by the fact that lonelanness
Speaker 1: rates are going up depending on what group you look at.
Speaker 1: But almost all of these studies are carried out in
Speaker 1: the states of Summer in England. I guess, um, loneliness
Speaker 1: is just kind of increasing across the board. Um, there's
Speaker 1: one exception to that is kind of an anomalous study
Speaker 1: involving teenagers. But I think we're growing lonelier as a society.
Speaker 1: And I and that's part of the reason I wanted
Speaker 1: to write Count Me In, which is my second book
Speaker 1: about connection, to see what can we do about that.
Speaker 1: You know, the question I got so many times from
Speaker 1: so many people was, you know, how do you feed
Speaker 1: the second well of how do you connect in a
Speaker 1: disconnected era? And I kind of attack attack, I guess
Speaker 1: I explored would be a nicer word. I explored the
Speaker 1: problem for personal reasons, but I wound up getting really
Speaker 1: really interested in what do you do in this sort
Speaker 1: of um. In what Eric kleinbook is called The Going
Speaker 1: Solo Arra, he uses that in a in a positive sense,
Speaker 1: you know, um, that you can live alone and be happy.
Speaker 1: And I think that's absolutely true. But I think going
Speaker 1: solo is kind of a another way of what you know,
Speaker 1: Robert Putnam called the bowling Alone era. You know, if
Speaker 1: you get a book after book with these titles that
Speaker 1: they're they're kind of telling you something about how we're
Speaker 1: living our lives today. And so you went on to
Speaker 1: write you you reference it there your your new book,
Speaker 1: which I think is coming out in January, called Count
Speaker 1: Me In. And so in the book you talk about
Speaker 1: a definition of belonging that is, um, belonging equals the
Speaker 1: sense of being welcomed, need it, or accepted by a group,
Speaker 1: plus a sense of fitting in or matching with that group.
Speaker 1: I found that a really that was put forward by
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan nursing professor Bonnie Haggarty in the nineties,
Speaker 1: and I kind of made note of it when I
Speaker 1: started my research, But then as I started living the book,
Speaker 1: I found it was just bang on. Like if there's
Speaker 1: some academic definitions of belonging that seemed to me to
Speaker 1: just kind of fly right past the point, And I
Speaker 1: thought that one just nailed it. You need to feel
Speaker 1: welcome and needed, and you need a sense of fit.
Speaker 1: And so there's kind of two things that need to
Speaker 1: be in place. And when those things are in place. UM,
Speaker 1: I explored this through volunteering, I put it through phase.
Speaker 1: I explored it through political protests. I explored it through
Speaker 1: UM neighborhood. Um it Actually, she's right. I mean, you
Speaker 1: actually do get a sense of being part of something
Speaker 1: I keep saying larger and yourself. But I think it's
Speaker 1: so important because so many of our social tists today
Speaker 1: are about us and about our one on one relationships,
Speaker 1: and I was, for personal reasons, was really looking for
Speaker 1: something other than that. And I think what I came
Speaker 1: to call Haggardy's rule UM kind of captures what it
Speaker 1: was I was looking for. You explored this idea of belonging,
Speaker 1: and you you determined that you wanted more of that
Speaker 1: in your own life, and you went out to try
Speaker 1: and find it, which is really what a lot of
Speaker 1: the book is about. And I think there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things that you you just touched on there that
Speaker 1: that I found interesting in the book, and what you
Speaker 1: talked about, which was that it's that that ability to
Speaker 1: belong is out there, but that it's not necessarily always
Speaker 1: easy to find, and there's certainly not a one size
Speaker 1: fits all thing for belonging. That you have to kind
Speaker 1: of go out and experience different things and try different
Speaker 1: things until you find both that that being needed and
Speaker 1: welcome that you talked about, as well as being needed
Speaker 1: and welcomed by people that you feel like our for
Speaker 1: lack of a better word, your people or your type
Speaker 1: of people. And I think it's Yeah, the book is
Speaker 1: my exploration of belonging, and I set it out sort
Speaker 1: of as a series of takeaways or ideas that people
Speaker 1: could apply to belonging in our own lives. So I'm
Speaker 1: never expecting I'm not, you know. One of the things
Speaker 1: I did was volunteers zoo inspection of roadside zoos, and
Speaker 1: I'm not expecting anyone to do that, but that's where
Speaker 1: my search for belonging took me for various reasons. And
Speaker 1: I think we have an idea that it's easy to
Speaker 1: connect to it's easy to belong, you know, and you've
Speaker 1: mentioned having to do more than one thing. You you
Speaker 1: kind of have to try quite a lot of things
Speaker 1: in order to find a sense of belonging. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: will appear right at the outset. Other times you kind
Speaker 1: of have to kind of make your way through the
Speaker 1: woods and and stick with it, I think, and I've
Speaker 1: seen this happen. I saw this happenyone was writing the book.
Speaker 1: If someone would show up once front events. But there
Speaker 1: was a community garden that I attended and found a
Speaker 1: great sense of belonging at, and they would show up
Speaker 1: once and they would disappear. And that might be for
Speaker 1: the very valid reason that they decided it was the
Speaker 1: wrong fit. But I think for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: it's because they expect belonging to be there right away,
Speaker 1: and it never is. Belonging is something you always have
Speaker 1: to work at. You have to. That's why I liked
Speaker 1: your parable. You have to feed it, you have to
Speaker 1: stick with it. Um. It's something in a strange way
Speaker 1: that I think we today um have to learn. It's
Speaker 1: I don't know that it comes so easily to us anymore. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, I start the book, I'm early in the book,
Speaker 1: I talked very very briefly about my father's life. And
Speaker 1: my father was born in small town Kentucky and the
Speaker 1: late nineteen twenties, and he and I think he in
Speaker 1: some ways was the inspiration for the book, because he
Speaker 1: just was born into these various senses of belonging to
Speaker 1: He had an incredibly rich sense of place. He had
Speaker 1: a huge family, he had local place, UM, he had
Speaker 1: his religion, and he seemed to know how to belong
Speaker 1: in a way that I didn't. And my father passed
Speaker 1: away many years ago, and UM, I think I needed
Speaker 1: to relearn. I think I will not say we, I
Speaker 1: needed to relearn something that he was sort of given,
Speaker 1: um that I don't think we're given today. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a loss to us. So I was like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: how do I recreate this in a completely different setting,
Speaker 1: in a completely different era. Um. And you know, there's
Speaker 1: lots of things you don't want to recreate about what
Speaker 1: my father was born into. But there's kind of a
Speaker 1: a given quality to the belonging that he had that
Speaker 1: I don't think we have any more, that I tried
Speaker 1: to reproduce and that I think I found UM. And
Speaker 1: that goes back to here. Parable I was astonished at
Speaker 1: how much belonging is out there, um, kind of just
Speaker 1: waiting for us. And it was an amazing discovery. It
Speaker 1: was an amazing feeling to realize that we still can
Speaker 1: belong today and ways to look really really, really different
Speaker 1: from my dad's life, but ways that are still really rich.
Speaker 1: And I go back, you know, we were talking about
Speaker 1: social depression. They just it gives you this rich sense
Speaker 1: of connection that is energizing and makes you more enthusiastic
Speaker 1: about life and just gives you so many more resources
Speaker 1: in terms of social support and and all of those things.
Speaker 1: But I think are really good for us, and I
Speaker 1: think we can create it. Maybe you could tell us
Speaker 1: about a couple of the areas or things that you
Speaker 1: tried UM and found for belonging. A couple that I
Speaker 1: thought were particularly interesting were the ones around um the faith,
Speaker 1: and then the other around the civic activism, around around
Speaker 1: some of the animal rights. Right. Well, I knew I
Speaker 1: wanted to try and belong through safe because um, first
Speaker 1: of all, the first of all, there's a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1: You know, people are still engaged in faith in a
Speaker 1: way that they're not engaged in you know, the p
Speaker 1: t A anymore. So I knew I wanted to try it.
Speaker 1: And Chris belongs to three or four different PTA groups
Speaker 1: across the city. He doesn't have any kids, and but
Speaker 1: but it's he just goes is he a shrine or two?
Speaker 1: Well only in his house, he's got he's got a
Speaker 1: little car here. Um. So a lot of people are
Speaker 1: still engaged in faith, right, So it was something I
Speaker 1: wanted to try again because I had a religious education, um,
Speaker 1: meaning I went to Catholic school until I was sixteen,
Speaker 1: and I had kind of and that was maybe the
Speaker 1: one sort of sense of belonging that I was given.
Speaker 1: Though it's all sort of fraught today. This was in
Speaker 1: the seventies. I started Catholic school, um, and I didn't
Speaker 1: find a sense of belonging there, and I kind of
Speaker 1: tried to get away from it into other religions and
Speaker 1: it just wasn't working. So I had to come back
Speaker 1: to Catholicism. So part of the book is about me
Speaker 1: trying to me trying to navigate finding a sense of
Speaker 1: belonging through faith and it's tricky. And I come to
Speaker 1: this as someone who doesn't have trouble with faith. Um.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a matter of me trying to cultivate belief.
Speaker 1: I mean that was sort of already there. And I
Speaker 1: would never suggest to anyone that they go down this path,
Speaker 1: you know, and try and force themselves to believe in
Speaker 1: in something they don't believe in. That just isn't gonna work, right, Um,
Speaker 1: But if you've kind of are already kind of tilted
Speaker 1: that way. UM. Faith was interesting because UM, we tend
Speaker 1: to be or I was born in nine you know,
Speaker 1: I was born into a faith tradition. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: choice I made. It was something that was handed to me. Um.
Speaker 1: And kind of trying to make that work in many
Speaker 1: decades later in the here and now was interesting and
Speaker 1: challenging in all sorts of ways that I wasn't expecting, um,
Speaker 1: but was also very rewarding. So that was kind of
Speaker 1: the intuitive thing that I did, which was kind of
Speaker 1: what happens when you try and find a sense of
Speaker 1: belonging through faith. And that was kind of a fraud
Speaker 1: area for me because I'm gay, So you kind of
Speaker 1: prepare homosexuality up with Catholicism and you just get kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, electric sparks flying. But it's still
Speaker 1: it's still kind of worked. Um. Whereas the political protest,
Speaker 1: I did a lot of work. UM. I used to
Speaker 1: be an environmental lawyer, and I did a lot of
Speaker 1: work in the book. Um, one of you know, one
Speaker 1: of the kind of overarching principles that guided my work
Speaker 1: in the book is that you know, to belong you
Speaker 1: sort of have to root it in what you value.
Speaker 1: You know, if you if you start looking for belonging
Speaker 1: in something you don't particularly care about, you know, in
Speaker 1: my case faith, team sports, which I'm not putting down
Speaker 1: by any sense, it's just it's not going to take
Speaker 1: you anywhere because to me, team sports just they don't
Speaker 1: they don't resonate that, it don't connect with anything. Whereas
Speaker 1: for me, animals have always been became an environmental lawyer,
Speaker 1: largely to protect species, and um, it just mattered so
Speaker 1: so so much to me my whole life. So I thought,
Speaker 1: what can I do? You know, I know, there's got
Speaker 1: to be a way of belonging through animals. Um And
Speaker 1: I tried. Since I had a very old cat at
Speaker 1: home at the time, I couldn't foster, I couldn't volunteer
Speaker 1: at animal shelters. So I wound up quite to my surprise, um,
Speaker 1: and this is what I mean. But you gotta feed it,
Speaker 1: you gotta go where they're you know, where the arrows
Speaker 1: are pointing. Quite to my surprise, I wound up with
Speaker 1: an animal protest group in Toronto called Pig Saves Um
Speaker 1: that involved bearing witness um near an avatar on a
Speaker 1: very very busy roadway in Toronto, which is a massive city. Um.
Speaker 1: And I found it. It was one of the most
Speaker 1: complicated forms of belonging that I found, not because of
Speaker 1: what I was being asked to do, though it is
Speaker 1: hard if you don't have any variance, uh, protesting, if
Speaker 1: you don't have any experience, start of building a sign
Speaker 1: on the edge of a roadway, as I did. But
Speaker 1: I'll just put as in a side. You get used
Speaker 1: to holding a sign on a roadway very very fast. Um.
Speaker 1: But because I think you know, protests involves us joining together,
Speaker 1: and we don't do that so much in public anymore.
Speaker 1: So I think my caring, which really started out being
Speaker 1: about animals and and did take me into all these
Speaker 1: really interesting places related to animals and people who cared
Speaker 1: about animals, also taught me a lot about kind of
Speaker 1: joining with others in public today and how um unaccustomed
Speaker 1: some of us, many of us are to it today.
Speaker 1: I really had to learn. But it was okay to
Speaker 1: kind of stand with a group in public and and
Speaker 1: you know, our cause happened to be pigs, with which
Speaker 1: a lot of your listeners won't care about or agree with.
Speaker 1: And that's okay. But I think what's impoor and is
Speaker 1: learning to stand together for something. And um, I now
Speaker 1: feel that that's the skill that I have that I
Speaker 1: can apply um in other areas, you know, if it's
Speaker 1: climate change or if it's the Keystone Xcel pipeline. You know,
Speaker 1: I know how to do that now. And I would
Speaker 1: really you know, for people that one thing from the book,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd like them to take a lot from
Speaker 1: the one thing would be, you know, learn how to
Speaker 1: to be with other people about a cause that you
Speaker 1: care about, because it's a it's a really great skill
Speaker 1: to to have. Well, that part of the book was
Speaker 1: striking because you you said something there that I thought
Speaker 1: was really really interesting, and it was that, um, you
Speaker 1: were out there, you know, standing on the roadside sort
Speaker 1: of protesting about the treatment of these animals, and that
Speaker 1: you realize that there were people who really hated what
Speaker 1: you were doing and it and in a lot of
Speaker 1: cases it had a lot less to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that you what the cause was, but that that
Speaker 1: in our culture today, caring too much about something is
Speaker 1: oftentimes looked down upon. It's considered un hip or not cool,
Speaker 1: and that and and that caring about things in itself
Speaker 1: was what was being judged. Yeah, I felt that. It
Speaker 1: took me a long time to figure I mean, it
Speaker 1: was with the protest group for quite a while, and
Speaker 1: people would always scream the most banal comments, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I love bacon, you know, the baby screaming from criers,
Speaker 1: so they'd be completely protected, and they were also isolated
Speaker 1: in their own little vehicles. You know, I love ham,
Speaker 1: I love bacon. You know, you'd hear the same things
Speaker 1: over and over and I couldn't figure out why these
Speaker 1: people were doing this. I mean a lot of people
Speaker 1: drove past or a lot of people would honk and support,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people felt compelled to scream their
Speaker 1: love of bacon, which is really not something no matter
Speaker 1: how much you like your b lt s, most people
Speaker 1: feel compelled to scream about So I thought, why are
Speaker 1: they doing this? And the more it stuck with the
Speaker 1: and the more I looked at people's faces as they
Speaker 1: were screaming at me, would you also get used to Um?
Speaker 1: I realized it was caring, just as you said they
Speaker 1: didn't like. You know, in an individualist culture, which we
Speaker 1: have in spades, you're not supposed to say that you're
Speaker 1: connected to something else, or that what happens to another
Speaker 1: creature affects you or upsets you. You're supposed to be
Speaker 1: in your own little, self contained bubble. And if you
Speaker 1: step out of that and you start pointing to all
Speaker 1: the links between us or saying, you know, what happens
Speaker 1: to that miserable, miserable pig and that horrendous pick truck
Speaker 1: affects me, you're kind of breaking the rules of individualism,
Speaker 1: and that really really harshly judged. You know, you're called
Speaker 1: I was called all sorts of things. I've got a
Speaker 1: pretty healthy ego, so you know, calling me names doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter. Um. That also helped with my gay Catholicism.
Speaker 1: But and and I know other people won't be like that,
Speaker 1: but it was amazing the stant to which people are
Speaker 1: invested in in individualism today, are invested in the idea
Speaker 1: that we create our own destinies or that we're all
Speaker 1: responsible for ourselves so that we're not linked. And that
Speaker 1: was spelled up for me, very very very clearly in
Speaker 1: my Caring project. Yeah, I think it's you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly what that is, but when you were
Speaker 1: talking about the feeling of being out there and initially
Speaker 1: being embarrassed to be out there and being embarrassed to
Speaker 1: care about something, that really hit home with me because
Speaker 1: there is such a there's a real vulnerability to showing
Speaker 1: that you do care about something and that you're willing
Speaker 1: to to stand up for it. And I realize that's
Speaker 1: something that I am myself. I get very anxious about.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's starting to change, but if you take a
Speaker 1: stand for something, you're sort of judged. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a massive, massive shortcoming in our culture, that this
Speaker 1: hesitation we feel about coming together and taking a stand
Speaker 1: and connection is part of that. There's a very very
Speaker 1: deep sense of connection and belonging that flows on the
Speaker 1: side of the subject from being part of a group
Speaker 1: like that, because when you do overcome the anxiety that
Speaker 1: you feel, and it's not easy. I'm not suggesting that
Speaker 1: people are going to go out and do this. For me,
Speaker 1: it was really really important to challenge that anxiety. When
Speaker 1: you are able to connect in that way, it's a
Speaker 1: very deep, deep sense of connection that you feel to
Speaker 1: the other people that you're with in that group. We
Speaker 1: talked a little bit earlier about belonging versus connection, but
Speaker 1: you there's this idea of public versus private belonging or connection,
Speaker 1: and that that private connection tends to be very intense. So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, we've got our we've got our good friends,
Speaker 1: and we share a lot of things, but the public
Speaker 1: belonging tends to be a less intense thing, and that
Speaker 1: that is not a bad thing, that's actually a good
Speaker 1: thing in a lot of ways. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I um love you know. I described public belonging what
Speaker 1: people used to call a civic life, you know, and
Speaker 1: my editor, in a sort of a demoralizing moment, said,
Speaker 1: you can't use that phrase because no one's going to
Speaker 1: know where most people are going to know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about anymore. And I thought, my gosh, she's right
Speaker 1: to know. She's right. We don't know what a civic
Speaker 1: life means anymore. So I kind of stuck with the
Speaker 1: terms private, which everyone did they understands, and public, which
Speaker 1: is a little more counterintuitive doing things that don't involve
Speaker 1: you know, some of these groups that I joined, I
Speaker 1: did make friends, but a lot of them, Like the
Speaker 1: community garden. You don't know people's last names, you don't
Speaker 1: know where they live, and it doesn't matter because you're
Speaker 1: still part of the group that's doing the gardening and
Speaker 1: tending to the tomato beds, and you get to know
Speaker 1: them in this way that's less intense. And we see
Speaker 1: that as a failing. Well, you know, these people aren't
Speaker 1: your BFFs. Well, you know what, I have BFFs, and
Speaker 1: they're fantastic people. But we need more than that. You know,
Speaker 1: as people sometimes say they're too tired to go out,
Speaker 1: and I say that too, And sometimes what we mean
Speaker 1: by that is I'm too tired to go and kind
Speaker 1: of have a high voltage conversation in Starbucks about my
Speaker 1: personal life. You know, I just it's too much. And
Speaker 1: there's this wonderful ease that comes with being with people
Speaker 1: not having to talk possibly at all, or not having
Speaker 1: to say much. Um. Again, this is getting back to
Speaker 1: what my dad had, Like he kind of seemed to
Speaker 1: have his intuitive sense of being with people without you know,
Speaker 1: he wasn't want to, you know, kind of have a
Speaker 1: lot of conversations. But you can be with people in
Speaker 1: the public sphere or in the specific sphere in a
Speaker 1: way that's different, and it's relaxing because you're not sharing
Speaker 1: secrets um, you're doing things. You know, there's there's a
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful sense of just you know, having an
Speaker 1: activity as opposed to just talking um. It's great for introverts.
Speaker 1: You know, I am um in many ways. So it
Speaker 1: sounds like it's surprising given the book, but a big
Speaker 1: introvert and I found that being in these big public
Speaker 1: groups didn't drain me of social energy. It actually gave
Speaker 1: me energy because I wasn't exchanging things on a one
Speaker 1: on one basis. And because we have so so so
Speaker 1: many of us have less belonging in our lives, we've
Speaker 1: kind of lost sight of how important that is. And
Speaker 1: I think we we definitely value our private relationships, but
Speaker 1: I think we might overvalue them to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: or if not overvalue, they should be balanced with public
Speaker 1: relationships so that we don't have to be on all
Speaker 1: the time when we're with other people. What struck me
Speaker 1: about the book was that just the very way of
Speaker 1: framing that belonging and it's it's again back to that
Speaker 1: belonging versus connection. I tend to think of going out
Speaker 1: there and connecting with people, making a new friend, or
Speaker 1: you know, if it's a romantic relationship or and and
Speaker 1: I think as a culture, we we do a lot
Speaker 1: less thinking about belonging to two groups. And it seems
Speaker 1: to be very different. As you said, then maybe when
Speaker 1: you know a generation ago. Yeah, I mean I was
Speaker 1: fascinated by Robert Pattin's Bowling Alone. I mean kind of fascinated.
Speaker 1: It's probably the wrong word, and I've read it over
Speaker 1: and over and I just it captured, I mean not
Speaker 1: just for me. It was a huge bestseller, captured this
Speaker 1: sense people had that were missing, in another word, that
Speaker 1: we're not using a community, that we're missing community where
Speaker 1: we have our one on one relationships if we're lucky,
Speaker 1: because increasingly people are losing those one on one relationships.
Speaker 1: You know, people's social circles, their private social world are shrinking,
Speaker 1: and we no longer have the public world to support us,
Speaker 1: so we kind of have less support in general. But
Speaker 1: you know, the Robert Puttinon's whole argument is what we've
Speaker 1: kind of lost, or let go of, or had taken
Speaker 1: away from us, this public sense of belonging that people
Speaker 1: used to have, and they used to root their private
Speaker 1: relationships in that larger sense of belonging, and when you
Speaker 1: take it away, you're putting too much weight on your
Speaker 1: private relationships. You know. I used an example in the
Speaker 1: book where something personally hard happened to me and it
Speaker 1: was wonderful to go to a group and know that no,
Speaker 1: not one single person there had to support me. You know,
Speaker 1: it could be one person or the other, and I
Speaker 1: could just kind of go from person to person and
Speaker 1: talk casually about what had happened, and if they wanted
Speaker 1: to engage, they could engage. You know, in an asking
Speaker 1: less of people, they can give us morey. They can
Speaker 1: provide us with all sorts of different ways to support,
Speaker 1: you know, in a way that my best friend kind
Speaker 1: of called on to sort of be on, you know,
Speaker 1: and I have a problem, she has to help, you know,
Speaker 1: not everyone in our life has to serve that role.
Speaker 1: And if you free people up from serving that role,
Speaker 1: they can be so many other things to you. And
Speaker 1: I think that was one of the best things that
Speaker 1: I learned in the book was just how good it
Speaker 1: felt um And I think this is why I liked
Speaker 1: Catholic school as a child, actually, was just how good
Speaker 1: it was to be kind of part of a group,
Speaker 1: and that today sounds like the ultimate conformist thing to say,
Speaker 1: and I think it's actually one of the most radical
Speaker 1: things you can say in a culture where we're expected
Speaker 1: to be so much on our own, you know, we
Speaker 1: don't have to be We can be with other people
Speaker 1: too well. I think it's an interesting transitional time because
Speaker 1: I think that like everything there are, there are good
Speaker 1: and bad sides of everything. And I think that the
Speaker 1: fragmentation of some of these larger so that there used
Speaker 1: to be is positive in some ways because I think
Speaker 1: it it allows for I do think there's a value
Speaker 1: to individualism, and I do think there's a value to
Speaker 1: being able to be who you are, and and the
Speaker 1: the broader that a group gets, the more conformity is
Speaker 1: potentially needed to fit. So I think it's an interesting
Speaker 1: where do you find that that middle ground. I've always
Speaker 1: been fascinated by and um English philosopher Alaine de Boton,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book called Religion for Atheists, and
Speaker 1: his his general premises, you know, he's an atheist, but
Speaker 1: he looks at everything that we've that we've lost by
Speaker 1: not having um religion in the sense of the things
Speaker 1: that are religion provided to us, as far as the
Speaker 1: community and the rituals and the and the support and
Speaker 1: all that. And I've really that really resonates with me
Speaker 1: because I do think we've lost a lot of that,
Speaker 1: and yet in some ways, I think it's very positive
Speaker 1: that some of them, some of the loss of religious
Speaker 1: belief I think has had also some positive impacts to society.
Speaker 1: So it's it's one of those of finding the right
Speaker 1: balance between between those things. Oh absolutely, I mean I
Speaker 1: write as a twenty one century lesbian who I mean
Speaker 1: was born into Catholicism. But ultimately it was my choice
Speaker 1: to make in a way that um, the generations before
Speaker 1: me didn't have any choice. I mean that's what you were. UM.
Speaker 1: But I think it's kind of a baby in the
Speaker 1: bath water scenario where we've thrown out in our quest
Speaker 1: for personal autonomy, which is so important and again, you know,
Speaker 1: and kind of living example of this, I get to
Speaker 1: live a life openly that no one else in my
Speaker 1: family would have been allowed to live. Um. We've probably
Speaker 1: gotten rid of too much. UM. So I think you
Speaker 1: know you've used the word balance. It's really restoring that balance. UM.
Speaker 1: And maybe we're at a tipping point where we're realizing
Speaker 1: we've gotten rid of too much and we need to
Speaker 1: start to work to bring some of it back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm certainly not you know, you know, emphasizing that
Speaker 1: we all have to be one thing, or we have
Speaker 1: to be what we were born into. You choice. My
Speaker 1: chapter on faith is actually about me trying to make
Speaker 1: various choices, um, other than Catholicism, and exploring different faith
Speaker 1: and ultimately winding up back at Catholicism. And that's a
Speaker 1: very different journey, you know, choosing to be there. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess in a sense, I chose my tradition, which
Speaker 1: is a mix of individualism and and tradition. But um
Speaker 1: it is about balance, and I wouldn't ever want to
Speaker 1: come across the saying, oh, you know, we need to
Speaker 1: go back to the old ways where no one had
Speaker 1: any choices. The takeaway from me that that sort of
Speaker 1: hit if I tie tie your your first book and
Speaker 1: your second together for me was that loneliness is a
Speaker 1: real thing, and I think it's something a lot of
Speaker 1: people deal with, and we all tend to think there's
Speaker 1: a tendency to think of the cure for loneliness is
Speaker 1: another friend or a girlfriend. And I think what count
Speaker 1: Me In does is a book as points to a
Speaker 1: lot of other ways to counter loneliness that are not
Speaker 1: dependent on those individual Very was very important personal relationships. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much so, and I mean I think it's very doable.
Speaker 1: I mean, telling someone who's lonely to go find a
Speaker 1: partner or go find a best friend as a pretty
Speaker 1: tall order. And that's kind of the advice thing given
Speaker 1: out ta meetings all the time, because it's just not
Speaker 1: that that that has not worked out. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's this sort of a middle zone where you can
Speaker 1: get to know people in other ways and it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be a best friend relationship, and you might
Speaker 1: very well find some good friends in the groups that
Speaker 1: you join. Exactly. Well, Emily, thanks so much for taking
Speaker 1: the time to come on the show. Your book is
Speaker 1: out in g Anuary of two thousand fifteen, and uh,
Speaker 1: I'd encouraged the listeners to check it out. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. Thank you very much. We'll take care and
Speaker 1: we will talk again soon. Thanks a lot, all right,
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