The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Season II summary: it's all about attention
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In this summary episode, we take the theme of attention which runs through most of conversations in the second season. In the episode you'll hear fragments of conversation from Iain McGilchrist, Dacher Keltner, Dougald Hine, Phoebe Tickell, Alex Evans, Elizabeth Oldfield, Jill Bolte-Taylor, Eve Poole and Todd Kashdan. Over this short episode, you'll hear discussion of a wide range of topics, from religion, AI and smartphones, to the role of awe and imagination.
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The Crisis of Meaning
Speaker 1You were born into the ending of a world. You were born into a story that was coming to an end, that doesn't have much longer left to run A very large majority of young people, over 80%, think that their life is meaningless.
Speaker 3We need to be better than we are. We have been formed to be individual, self-actualising consumers, and we are heading into a time when we're going to need to be committed members of community who have each other's backs.
Speaker 4It's worth it. It's worth it to live a real life of meaning, of richness, of value, of connection, and actually be part of the change.
Speaker 5Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. Over the course of this second season, I've enjoyed conversations with some absolutely fascinating individuals, with thinkers and writers who've made profound contributions to the worlds of psychiatry and neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and theology, and while each contributor explored a question that was important to them, there were themes that kept emerging across and between the conversations. One of those themes the one I'm going to focus on in this summary episode, is that of attention. The word attention is another way of describing the kind of contact that our minds make with the world around us. It's not only what we pay attention to that matters, but the manner in which we pay attention the how as much as the what. The way we attend shapes our behaviour and indeed our character. It determines what we look for and find. Or, to put it in the words of the psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist attention is a moral act. In this episode, you'll be hearing fragments from the different conversations over the course of the second season. Initially, we'll be exploring how the way we attend is shaped by the stories, the myths and the culture that we are part of, before pulling back to consider whether this is a good thing and how we might change it. I hope you enjoy listening. You'll be hearing the voices of Dacher Keltner, elizabeth Oldfield, ian McGilchrist, eve Poole, dougal Hine, phoebe Tickell, alex Evans, jill Balty-Taylor and Todd Kashtan. Links to individual episodes with them can be found in the show notes. Do please, as ever, like, review and subscribe the podcast if you haven't already. It really helps people to find it.
Speaker 5There's a well-known experiment that many people have seen about selective attention. You can find it on YouTube if you're interested. In the short film there are some basketball players passing the ball around and you are asked to try and count the number of passes. While this is going on, a man in a gorilla costume walks in front of the players, beats his chest, then walks on. Most people watching this for the first time didn't notice. I didn't because I was too busy counting the basketball passes. It's staggering when you see how obvious the gorilla is on second watch. It's a powerful example of the way that our attention can miss what's in plain sight simply because we're not looking for it.
Speaker 5The experiment raises the question, I think, of what else we might be missing in life more generally. How are we paying attention in a kind of selective way to the world around us. One of the most influential thinkers on this question of attention is the psychiatrist and philosopher, ian McGilchrist. Over the last 15 or so years he has published two enormous books tomes really which have been profoundly influential well beyond the fields of psychiatry and philosophy. Ian's work explores and explains the way the kind of attention we pay shapes the world around us and shapes us. It demonstrates that we have two brain hemispheres which attend to the world in very different ways. For good reasons, however, we have come to value one mode of attention at the expense of the other. I visited Ian at his home on the Isle of Skye to interview, where he explained the kind of attention that we've come to value in modern Western society.
Speaker 2I think that we've been led to adopt and become enslaved by a certain way of looking at the world which is mechanistic and reductionist, and with that, a sense of values, a sense of purpose, a sense of there being something wonderful or inspiring, and perhaps sacred in the world has gone missing, and it's very sad that it's not just my impression, but research shows that a very large majority of young people, over 80%, think that their life is meaningless.
Speaker 5As Ian points out here, this way of attending has significant consequences, not least of which is his point that a very high majority of young people believe that life is meaningless. The psychologist of emotion, Dacher Kellner, also commented on this in our discussion of how to find meaning in life.
Speaker 6The meaning crisis is real, you know. In the United States, the opioid crisis is a crisis of meaning, you know, and that's one of the central killers of young people today. The suicide crisis, which is at historic highs in for young people, is a crisis of meaning. Depression historic highs in the United States is a crisis of meaning. Polarization, you know, like why a person would look at Trump and think like, this guy is a reasonable steward of a democracy. That's a crisis of meaning, right, We've lost the big narratives of our lives and we've lost our pathway to what we find meaningful.
Speaker 5At least part of Ian's explanation for the meaning crisis is that we have come to see the world in reductive and mechanistic terms, and this has left people without a sense of value and meaning and purpose in life, without a sense that there is something sacred in the universe and something sacred to life. Part of this way of seeing has come about because of the decline of religion in the West. For better or worse, religion has been a profound vehicle for meaning for countless people over the centuries. It locates us in a story of existence. It gives value and meaning to our lives and brings people together in the service of something bigger than themselves. During difficult times, religion has been a source of hope and comfort. It's a force which can shape and direct our attention, and without it, people find themselves adrift, without a religious story to anchor them. This is something that has been preoccupying the writer, academic and founder of the organisation Larger Us, alex Evans, and. Founder of the organisation Larger Us, alex Evans.
Speaker 7In our conversation, we explore the question of what to do about the religion-shaped hole. I think historically, religions at their best big caveat there have performed various roles that lie at the intersection of our inner and outer worlds that turn out to be really important especially right now.
Speaker 5Dacher Keltner also pointed out that the way religion has declined in the West has left young people in a kind of meaning crisis. As he points out here, even when young people leave religion for good reasons, it leaves them without the dogma and the ritual that religion had provided, without the structures that helped them train their attention on something bigger than themselves.
Speaker 6There are all these forces that have led to a meaning crisis right the de-churching of young people. They're moving away from ritual and dogma, if you will, for a lot of good reasons, but they don't have that.
Speaker 5Alex also points out that we're at a point in history where we could really do with stories to help guide us. We're living in apocalyptic times and myths are particularly important for helping us to navigate through them, as Alex explains here.
Speaker 7The idea that we're going into apocalyptic times without those institutions to help us navigate them. That's really going to increase the premium on finding new forms of doing this collective self-help. That's both inner and outer, new stories and so on. All of that's going to become incredibly important, I think.
Speaker 5This consensus on the meaning crisis from these thinkers is compelling. If the stories that had trained attention in particular ways and given us values and meaning no longer function for many people anymore, then it raises the question what are people paying attention to instead? What are we being formed by? The answer to that is, of course, lots of different things, Though perhaps one of the most profound ones is technology, and our phones in particular. It's hard to overstate the influence that social media and the technology that we're surrounded by has on our characters. Where people spend upwards of five hours on their phone a day. This has to be a significant way that our attention is being shaped and trained. It's a concern that the writer and broadcaster, Elizabeth Oldfield, has when we explored her question. Who?
Speaker 5is it that I want to be becoming?
Speaker 3I realised that the time I spend scrolling Instagram is not just dead time, right, it's not just lost time or passive time, it is active time and it is actively forming me. Those images are forming me, that restlessness of my thumb, looking, looking, looking. You know what am I looking for? Something sort of snackish, satisfying of something, something pretty, something funny. You know, what is that? It's just like I'm looking for some tiny hit of a positive emotion.
Speaker 5There has been a raft of data and writing on this point over recent years, with psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge arguing that the mental health crisis among young people in particular has been largely influenced by smartphones and especially social media. The way that phones have shaped our attention also came up in discussion, with Dacher Keltner.
Speaker 6I think one of the real shortcomings of the new technologies, the smartphones and digital platforms, is they're flat. They are flat temporally. They only engage us in the present moment, self-focus, where we've lost sight of the deeper meaning to our lives.
Speaker 5This is something that I am personally very concerned about, both in myself and with my children. So, for example, a day a week I try to turn off devices and keep social media to a minimum outside of that, because I know I know that it is having a significant impact on what I pay attention to in who I am becoming. Ian McGilchrist would say that the way we're being shaped by technology is, in fact, a product of the fact that we're paying attention to what the left hemisphere values.
Speaker 2So we value, we seem to be valuing what the left hemisphere values.
Speaker 2The left hemisphere is essentially in the service of utility.
Speaker 2The reason we have two hemispheres and it's not just us, but all the creatures that we know that have brains have two hemispheres, and the difference is that they pay attention to the world in different ways, and the left hemisphere's attention is in the service of utility.
Speaker 2It's a very narrowly targeted attention to something that's already known to be of value, and it goes and gets it. Now, that is essentially how we look at. What do we need? What would we like? What would make us more powerful? Let's go for it and get it. So we value, we seem to be valuing what the left hemisphere values. The left hemisphere is essentially in the service of utility. The reason we have two hemispheres and it's not just us, but all the creatures that we know that have brains have two hemispheres, and the difference is that they pay attention to the world in different ways, and the left hemisphere's attention is in the service of utility. It's a very narrowly targeted attention to something that's already known to be of value, and it goes and gets it. Now, that is essentially how we look at. What do we need, what would we like, what would make us more powerful? Let's go for it and get it.
Speaker 5As Ian has argued at length in his books, there's evidence of this kind of left hemisphere attention to the world everywhere you look. It's particularly apparent in our technology. Not only is technology the way we use to manipulate the world, but it's now increasingly reflecting how we see ourselves. In a conversation with Eve Poole, she discusses the way that AI is being programmed with this narrow left hemisphere value system, because these are the characteristics that we think are important.
Speaker 9Society and culture has kind of pivoted towards the primacy of the rational and the scientific narrative and materialism, all those kinds of things that we're very familiar with and, of course, because that's our current view of what's best about life and what's best about us, that's kind of the stuff we've prioritized. So the ai's, you know it started with maths and chess and all those kind of highly rational gentleman's pursuits of the educated. Um, and when you look at what ai is now deliberately programmed to do, it is all those kind of very rational decision making, computation, very computation, very individualistic. And when you start looking at the kind of implicit personality behind that, you start noticing that we are developing highly, highly able entities which are designed not to have any emotions or any conscience or anything else like that, but to be superhuman and better than us in terms of abilities to think, to think whatever you decide that means.
Speaker 5So really, we are making a master as a psychopath ian mcgilchrist once again voiced a very similar concern to eve that we're somehow losing a sense of what it means to be a human in the way that we talk about intelligence and the way we conceive of humanity.
Speaker 2My worries is that, in calling whatever artificial mechanisms we create intelligent, we are denying something very important about the human indeed animal mind, which is that it creates holes, which are built up from experience of something that has flesh and blood, that has emotions, that has an innate moral sense not something that's been fed into it by Cleber Chap in California and to create a simulacrum, but actually intelligence and intelligence.
Speaker 5Again, there are different words in different languages, but our word intelligence comes from Latin roots inter legere, to read between the problem, as Ian and Yves have both noted, is that we're losing a sense of what it means to be human, shaped as we are by technology and consumerist society with its left hemisphere values. Elizabeth Oldfield agrees here and, like Alex Evans, who we heard from earlier, she believes that we're moving into times where the stories we've been inhabiting about what the good life is are not well suited to our flourishing or indeed our survival.
Speaker 3We need to be better than we are. We have been formed to be individual, self-actualizing consumers and we are heading into a time when we're going to need to be committed members of community who have each other's backs and pull our capacity for the common good.
Speaker 5This idea that the cultural stories we've been raised with no longer work or are fit for purpose forms much of the work of Dougald Hine, the writer and activist interviewed earlier in the series. Dougal believes that modernity can no longer deliver on its promises of a better world, if it ever could, but, crucially, it's no longer a believable story. We are, in the words of his friend Paul Kingsnorth, living in the darkness between worlds.
Speaker 1A world is held together by a story, and when you're living at the end of that world, there's not much of that story left. And so when someone stands up and tries to appeal to the future, you know, when you're living at the end of that world, there's not much of that story left. And so when someone stands up and tries to appeal to the future, when you hear politicians trying to project forwards and bright visions that involve an extension from the recent past through the present onwards, it no longer sounds convincing, unconvincing. And I'd add to that, you know, maybe what you start to notice is that a lot of the political energy in the world that you're in seems to lie with people who are appealing to the past instead of the future, and that that might be one of these symptoms.
Speaker 5Dougald has constructive ideas about how we can forge a different and better future. Part of that, for him, looks to the past, for the dropped threads that need to be woven back into the way that we do life. I find Dougal's ideas really generative and helpful and are complemented, I think, by the work of imagination activist Phoebe Tickell, phoebe's organisation, moral Imaginations. Phoebe Tickell, phoebe's organisation, moral Imaginations, encourages people to think differently about the possibilities for how we organise life, society and our systems.
Speaker 4I'd rather be maladjusted than have to live my life pretending that this is okay. It's not okay and I think we can do better. I think we can and I think a lot of people, when they're given the permission and the hope which a lot of the work I do at the moment the moral imagination work, some of it is helping give people that sense of agency, sacrifice a lot and you don't get the big house and the car, whatever it's worth it. It's worth it to live a real life of meaning, of richness, of value, of connection and actually be part of the change. And what if? What if we think a hundred years, in a hundred years time, those of us who are standing up for life, you know what if, in a hundred years time, we look back and think, wow, those were the people, as well as all the people before us, who made this change happen. So it's helping that pro noia or that kind of hyperstition of what we might be able to do.
Speaker 5Phoebe mentions here that her work tries to give people permission to think differently. This is something that has exercised the psychologist Todd Kashtan, who says that people like the status quo too much to be okay with thinking differently. He calls on us either to create space for or become the principled subordinates that the world needs.
Speaker 7You're waiting for someone to anoint you and I would say is stop waiting for permission because you're never going to get it, because people like the structure if it works for them.
Speaker 5This feels like a good place to pause and to pull together some of the threads that I've been trying to weave in. The family resemblance across these fragments of conversations is a focus on attention. The way we understand and make our way in the world is massively determined by the kind of attention we pay to it. As Alex and Dacher point out, many of us have lost the big narratives that religion gave us, and it's not clear what will come to replace them, but they have left a void. We no longer connect deeply with one another. The natural world or the divine, technology makes us increasingly self-focused and is reshaping our values, as Eve and Ian both explain with reference to AI. All of these factors and more mean that we're living in a world which feels increasingly meaningless. Ian suggests that the problem exists because we've neglected the kind of attention that the right hemisphere pays to the world.
Speaker 2But the right hemisphere is seeing the whole picture. It has a sort of sustained not a sort of sustained. It has sustained broad, vigilant attention to the whole and it therefore sustains our sense of a whole to which we belong and where our position has meaning. But we've decontextualized everything. We now don't understand that a thing is not just a thing. It changes its nature depending on the context that it's in.
Speaker 2When we take it out of the context in which it belongs and from which it derives its meaning, it no longer seems to have any meaning. So the trouble with this world picture is it sees meaningless items whose only possible value can come from ways in which we can use them. And this has largely dominated, certainly in certain sectors, the way in which people now think of the natural world as a heap of resource which we can mine and use and exploit for effectively utilitarian purposes. But the kind of attention that the right hemisphere is able to give sees a living web of interrelationships. So it sees that nothing is just what it is outside of a context, but always is what it is because of the relations in which it stands to everything else.
Speaker 5There's an interesting segue here to my conversation with Jill Bolte-Taylor. You may know her work from her TED Talk, my Stroke of Insight, which went viral. In it she describes having a left hemisphere stroke. So the kind of attention she was paying to the world was entirely mediated through her right hemisphere. I'll let her explain what happened here.
Speaker 8And so, as I lost the left hemisphere over those four hours, what I gained was an uninhibited, a disinhibited right hemisphere of the right, here right now, and the blessing to my life, even though I fell off the Harvard ladder and I lost all the terminology of my expertise, what I gained was what it really means to exist in the present moment and to feel, to be, to know that I actually the energetic of what I am is as big as the universe connected to all that is, and it's lovely there.
Speaker 5I found listening to Jill Balty-Taylor's experience fascinating, as is her identification of the anatomy of what's going on inside her skull when her left hemisphere went offline. So if it's true that there are these different ways of paying attention and culturally we're being programmed to value what the left hemisphere values, then what is the solution? Elizabeth Oldfield is asking precisely this question.
Speaker 3What does it mean? To actively turn my attention to the things that are more likely to help me become the kind of person both I want to be and that I think the world needs in this moment? Right, we need to be better than we are. We have been formed to be individual, self-actualizing consumers, and we are heading into a time when we're going to need to be committed members of community who have each other's backs and pool our capacity for the common good.
Speaker 5In asking what it might mean to pay attention differently, it's worth thinking about the work of Dacher Keltner. Dacher's research on the transcendent emotions looks at the universal experience of awe, something inspired by music, the sacred, wild, beauty, life and death great ideas. Dacher argues that we're an awe-deprived generation, but when we experience awe that we're hardwired to experience, it can take us away from individualism and consumerism and help us to focus attention on what really matters.
Speaker 6What we get an awe inspired by tells us like this is what I really care about and this is what I want to be part of in the story of my life, and and that's why awe is here is to locate us in the grand narratives of existence.
Speaker 5I found Dacher's research on awe to be life-giving and really exciting, and I'm now much more conscious about seeking out experiences of awe. And it's true, I can feel the way experiencing awe changes the kind of attention I pay to the world. I'm going to finish this series of clips that I've threaded together by giving the last word here to Dougald Hine, who I think has a beautiful and enigmatic challenge to leave us with.
Speaker 1If that's your discernment, if your read on the signs of the times, is that you were born into the ending of a world. You were born into a story that was coming to an end, that doesn't have much longer left to run. What's worth doing? And he says well, first, to the extent that it's possible, stop worrying so much about making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, and then seek to make good ruins.
Speaker 5Well, what could I possibly add to that? I hope you have enjoyed listening to this summary episode of the second series of the podcast. If you're interested in listening to the full episodes of any of the conversations I've been having, then you'll find them linked in the show notes and on the podcast feed. If you'd be happy to take a minute and review the podcast on Apple or wherever you're listening, that would be hugely appreciated. I've so enjoyed speaking to these guests for this series. It's been a real honour. I hope it's also been helpful for some of you listeners that there's some nuggets of wisdom that you'll be able to apply to life.
Speaker 5Over the next few months I'm going into hibernation for a bit. I'll be working on the third series, which will be out sometime in spring 2025. Once again, exploring the questions that we should be asking ourselves, as conceived by some fascinating thinkers. I'll also continue to write on Substack under the name Positively Maladjusted. That title, positively Maladjusted, is a play on Krishnamurti's quote that it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. My attempt in this writing is to explore how these conversations and interviews I've done have played into my own life and thought. You never know, some of it might even land with you too. Until next time, then, I wish you all well and remain grateful that you found this podcast, thought it was worth your attention, and I hope very much to connect with you again for the third season.