BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS

This week, I’m revisiting a topic that is a little scary but also extremely hopeful. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Grace Chang – she is the co-founder and CEO of Kintsugi, a tech start-up developing ways that AI can recognize biomarkers to help clinicians in diagnosing mental health issues.

I met Grace last summer at the SF Art Book Fair, and when I asked her what she spent her time doing, I got extremely excited when I heard her response. As someone, like Grace, who found the mental health system super difficult to navigate, I spent years trying to find a therapist that could help me alter my meds. I was told several times that all good therapists don’t take health insurance. That made everything cost prohibitive. And I am lucky.

For most, access to mental health services is a battle. This is not new news. But with the work that Kintsugi is doing, the AI takes speech biomarkers such as pitch, speed, and frequency from voice samples, compares them to a robust data set, and can detect depression. It doesn’t matter what you are talking about, or what language you are speaking, which is so amazing. I am super grateful to people like Grace who are working on new ways to serve people in their darkest hours.

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Lately I have been feeling under the weather without actually being sick with a fever - does that ever happen to you? I have a sneaking suspicion it is from the fluctuating weather we’ve been having. And I am not a doctor, but as a person who has a hard time with transitions and seems to get sick every time the weather changes, I am interested in alternative ways of healing/being in addition to my Western traditions.

Today I am revisiting my conversation I had with Susan Weis-Bohlen on Ayurveda, the connections between our health and wellness and the seasons, and her book Seasonal Self-Care Rituals. According to ancient texts of Ayurveda, “all diseases begin at the junction of the seasons,” and Susan offers some interesting insights on creating balance through each season.

A few topics in this video that I find really mind-boggling, that should have been kinda obvious to me:

* Our food cravings are telling us something.

* Eating seasonally is good for the planet, but also for your body on more levels than I understood.

* A new understanding of moods can predict what your body is needing.

* We need to live with the seasons, not against them.

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The idea that the universe is ultimately meaningless is something that I have been sifting through all of my life. Meaning is super sexy, offering an understanding for suffering, and a way to connect. Today I want to revisit my conversation with Wendy Syfret, and the comfort meaningless can provide.

Nihilism gets a bad rep. For sure. The problem I think people run up against is the question – if there is no greater meaning to life (“Basic ideas of good and evil are constructs of context, history, and social conditioning”), why not become hedonists? Why don’t we stay in bed or chase pleasure? If we start to question the systems that govern society, how will we be safe? Also, Nihilism has been used by groups to justify some bad things throughout history. Wendy Syfret talks about in her book The Sunny Nihilist how actually, Friedrich Nietzsche never thought we should be full-time nihilists, just part-time, that it is a helpful tool to critically look at how we are spending our time and what our time is worth.

The Sunny Nihilist is about how we are consumed with meaning, and so much meaning can make us miserable. Taking a step back, and understanding that all this pressure is self-imposed can actually be an enjoyable act. It lets go of expectations that hold us in patterns of unmet expectations.

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The older I get the more dubious I am of how much control we actually have over our lives. And question if the systems of knowledge familiar to us are actually serving us. This is depressing on some level because feeling a sense of agency and control is somewhat equivocal to having hope. I think the reason I am drawn to behavioral psychology is because it offers some form of science-backed understanding of the ways things are that makes sense to me.

This week, I want to share my interview with Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is an expert on motivation and decision-making and the author of Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.

From my understanding, people are out there seriously questioning if it is actually possible to change our behavior and patterns without changing our environment. The idea that one day you might just wake up and be able to resist temptation is in serious question.

We talk about how there is actually a lot of data that suggests that to make our goals happen, we need to make changes in our environment. We need to make the things that help us move towards our goals exciting, easy, and fun, and the things that move us away from our goals out of our minds.

I really hope you enjoy the interview. Sending love and appreciation.

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This week, I am super excited to revisit and share Whitney Goodman’s work with you. As someone who is drawn to the beauty inherent in sadness, I have been on a crusade against silver linings since the pandemic started. It is not that I want to deny that we can and do learn from things, but do they always have to make us stronger/better?

People tend to have strong reactions when I say that I am not sure about silver linings, and if they make you feel better, please keep finding them. But for me, sometimes things just suck. And there is a reality in that that I feel is denied when I have to sometimes force myself to see the “good” in every situation - even the most horrible.

Whitney’s book helps us locate our authentic selves by taking the labels of “good” and “bad” off of emotions. Emotions are not inherently negative and they can be used however we want to. We talk about productive ways to complain and also ways that you can support people without forcing everything to be positive.

Whitney started as a therapist because she loved giving out advice, and she’s learned over the years that what a therapist really does is listen. This book will help you listen - to yourself and others - in a more genuine, reality-based way.

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So, you came here for help. I am guessing. You want to know if you should leave your partner, quit your job, unfriend someone, leave the city you grew up in, etc. This feels like a transitional moment for everyone right now. I feel it. This week, I am revisiting a very exciting conversation I had with Annie Duke last year on quitting.

I was so excited when I heard about Annie Duke’s new book, Quit. I have been a fan of her for years - I love hearing her talk about how she was able to use biases against her as a woman to win 4 million dollars in poker. (Side note: I ask everyone before I interview them what they don’t want me to ask them about - Annie said poker. This is funny because we end up talking about poker for a good 15 min. BUT THE POKER bit is sooo good. You don’t have to like poker, I promise.)

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“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

―André Gide

I’ve been spending time thinking about originality lately. Is anything that we create really original? Or maybe as Austin Kleon writes in Steal Like An Artist, a good artist understands that nothing just comes from nowhere. All art is a remix. Even we are a remix, a perfect fruit salad of our parents’ and ancestors’ genetics. Do you believe in originality?

This week’s episode is a juicy one. I am talking with Austin Kleon – New York Times bestselling author-artist. We talk about Steal Like An Artist, if geniuses exist, marrying the right person, and Austin shares a fascinating secret.

Instead of finding the idea that nothing is original to be depressing, Austin finds hope. When we free ourselves from the burden of needing to be completely original, we can finally give space to embracing influence. So does Austin believe in the concept of genius? Did he marry the right person? And what is his secret? (Hint: it’s about an emotional state.) Give this post a listen to find out!

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p.s. If you like these conversations, and I hope you do, please considering supporting this endeavor by upgrading your subscription. It means the world to me and quite literally helps me keep the lights on. Thanks so much for being here today, and everyday.

A few months ago, I wrote about resources for people who were on the fence about if they wanted to have kids or not. Perhaps it is something that you are ruminating on? In this weird age of perceived expansion of choice, the question itself seems daunting. We are told that we can do everything, and have it all, but can we?

I reached out to Sheila Heti a while back with zero expectations on if she would write back to me. When I read her work, it feels like she is speaking about my personal life experience. About me, about her life, and about humanity all in the same moment. You could say that I am a fan. Or just her work makes me feel uniquely understood.

It’s perhaps disrespectful to start a review of sorts with the headline that Heti says she doesn’t like her work being reduced to - the question, “Should I have a baby?” Because it is so much more than that. And I agree - but I also want to take a moment to sit with the idea that this question is inherently reductive. I am not sure I know why. And it is too late to ask. I assume it is because the themes in the book can be translated and applied far beyond the concept of “motherhood.” Maybe there is an opposition to the perceived limitations of the term. I feel it, but I don’t know if I have the words for it. Heti’s opposition is important.

I choose to start with it because it is currently a topic that I am sorting through. And because you might be too.

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We talk about several of her projects - for she seems like a scientist trying to get to the core truth of existence. Heti enjoys fiction because there are fewer rules, and one can be free to explore topics that go beyond reality. There is a different sense of accountability. She says she has a bad memory. I try to argue that the weight of her memory might be located in an alternative form of reality. But yes, I concede they are different forms of reality and in this moment, we do need a distinction between them.

Pure Colour is a book that circles ideas of grief, loss, and comfort. It directly confronts choice and expectations. This book is for you if you have experienced unrequited love. Parental love. Loss of a loved one. This book longs to reclaim the narrative of life and death as beautiful. As one in the same. It does so naturally, and the narrator, Mira, makes a choice to move away from despair and towards a different spectrum of colour.

After the interview, I wrote to her because there were lots of questions I “forgot” while I fumbled nervously through my brief time with her. One was, is there a good reason to have a child?

I don't know if there are good reasons to have a child, or good reasons not to. It's not very helpful to say but a person should just do what they want to do. I'm teaching a course called Fate and Chance now and so all these things are in my mind, but essentially I think whatever life we choose for ourselves winds up being the right one. Unless it's a total disaster. But it's usually okay even if it is.

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Where do we draw the line between inspiration and copying someone else’s original idea? Do any of us ever have original ideas? I had the chance to speak with Danielle Krysa (aka The Jealous Curator) about all of the grey area in the concept of the “original idea.”

About 11 or so years ago, someone accused me of copying them. It was a performance artwork where I stood in front of San Francisco City Hall in a wedding dress with a candle, small alter, and asked to marry strangers.

See the below image:

A few days after I posted some project images online, I got a random email from someone telling me that I had ripped off this other woman’s art. That I had stolen her idea, and that people would find out that I was a fraud. That this other artist was in the MOMA collection and was a promising artist who was collected around the globe. This person was writing on the artist’s behalf.

I obsessed over this email.

I read it over and over. I looked for every meaning that could be behind so few sets of words. At first, I was convinced that I did copy her. She was right. I was wrong. I had taken something from her that was worse than money—credit. I had seen her work before and really enjoyed it. She had work where she got married in Central Park. I think she did it with strangers or friends, I cannot remember and I can not find a record of the work online (I also am trying not to mention her name, I want to respect her privacy). If you can trust my memory, she wore a white dress and took portraits with people in different places holding hands in the park.

The entire topic is a mess of a grey area that Danielle and I only scratched the surface of, but a couple things I’ve been thinking about: in a world where we are exposed to so many of the same things, do any of us really have any original ideas? And isn’t it also possible that two people can come up with the same idea from things they have seen and experiences they have both had. They’re both just making things they are inspired by. There is no wrongdoing in that, I think.

I guess, what I’m trying to ask is, what would it feel like if we were just inherently worthy? That we could all be valued and taken care of? I am in a position of extreme privilege as I write this. But I am no more creative, no more talented, and no more worthy to live than you.

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Sara Manning Peskin takes on the idea of "madness" in her book A Molecule Away From Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain. It reads like a detective novel and is basically impossible to put down.

On the one hand, the mind is shockingly vulnerable. When you think about the smallness of molecules and then think about how they may be holding together our sanity (!)—it’s harrowing. On the other hand, as Sarah puts it, it’s amazing that most of us are actually doing okay. The mind is fragile. Genetic mutations and inherited illness can put it at risk. But Sarah takes us through it with a kindness and straightforwardness that put me at ease. And she gives us some tips for preventing Alzheimer’s, which I found comforting. Thanks for seeing the hope and joy in at all, Sara. Can’t wait to read your next book.

Sara Manning Peskin, MD, MS, is an assistant professor of clinical neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude prior to moving to Philadelphia. She attended medical school and received a master’s degree in cellular and molecular biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed her neurology residency and a fellowship in cognitive and behavioral neurology. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, among other publications.

BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.