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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
Rosie Spinks - What Do We Do Now That We're Here?
Rosie Spinks Substack - https://rojospinks.substack.com/about
Kenny Primrose Substack - https://positivelymaladjusted.substack.com/
Moby Gratis Music - https://mobygratis.com/
Writer and journalist Rosie Spinks joins us to explore her powerful question: "What do we do now that we're here?" Drawing from her journey from ambitious journalist to burnout victim to advocate for a different way of living, Rosie offers a surprisingly hopeful perspective on navigating a world where traditional markers of success have lost their shine.
After achieving what looked like career success—writing for prestigious publications like The Guardian and The New York Times—Rosie found herself profoundly unhappy. The pandemic provided an unexpected reset, challenging her assumptions about what's guaranteed in life and what truly matters. She describes straddling two worlds: "here" (where we've accepted the limitations of growth and progress) and "there" (the conventional world of consumption and productivity we still partially inhabit).
The conversation takes a particularly powerful turn when Rosie discusses how becoming a mother revealed the transformative power of care. "I had never in my old life, in my twenties, in my ambitious journalist life, thought about anyone but myself. The work of caregiving is repetitive and you're never done, but in that is this extraordinary quality that you unlock within yourself." This insight extends beyond parenting—it's about redirecting our energy toward connection with others and our local communities.
Rather than dwelling in despair, Rosie offers practical suggestions for building what she calls "the village"—trading childcare with other parents, learning neighbors' names, replacing consumption-based leisure with generative activities. These small shifts can rebuild our sense of belonging while preparing us for a future that may demand more resilience and mutual support.
I don't want to live forever. I don't want to look like I'm 30 when I'm 60. I don't want to be more productive or efficient. I want to be human and I want to relish the limits and imperfections and messiness that entails, because there's so much richness there. And in fact, I feel like people who pursue those kinds of things. I feel bad for them because it tells me something about their inner lives that they are pursuing something so unattainable, out of some kind of endless quest at, you know, mortality or validation or whatever it is, that I don't think they're going to find it there.
Kenneth Primrose:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny Primrose. In this podcast, I speak to a range of influential thinkers about the question they believe we should be asking ourselves. In the season so far, I've had the opportunity to have fascinating discussions on childhood, parenthood, education, values, technology, community and much else besides. In this conversation today with the writer and journalist, rosie Spakes, I think we pull together a lot of those themes into one conversation. I discovered Rosie's work through her very popular sub-stack, which she started after a luminous career in journalism, where she wrote for publications like the Guardian and the New York Times. It was, as you'll hear, rosie's dream job Until it wasn't. In our conversation today, we discuss how we should orient ourselves when the stories of success that we grew up with no longer feel plausible or even positive. I found the conversation with Rosie enjoyable, interesting and genuinely uplifting, as I hope you will too, as ever. Don't be a stranger. If you're enjoying the podcast, then do please let me know or give it a shout out on social media if you're that way inclined.
Kenneth Primrose:My growth strategy for the podcast is essentially word of mouth, which means it's fairly incremental. Thank you for tuning in and I do hope you enjoy listening. Rosie, thank you so much for joining me on the Examined Life podcast today. It's a joy to be speaking to you. Thanks for having me. As you know, the podcast exists to kind of explore questions that animate influential thinkers. You've had a history in journalism and you're now writing a lot. There's a question that animates you and actually is the title of your Substack newsletter. Could we dive in with a question that you think we should be asking ourselves?
Rosie Spinks:Sure. So the question and the title of my newsletter is what do we do now that we're here? And implied in that question is this place here? Where is that place? I guess I would define that as this place where many people, myself included, have a sense that the way we live and have grown up is kind of coming to an end. It doesn't feel particularly convincing or stable anymore and the values and things we were brought up to believe, pursued in our education, feel really shaky and maybe even bad for us as human beings. When you accept that progress, growth and wealth are not on this guaranteed upward trend, what do you do with your life? What do you pursue when personal ambition no longer feels like a great thing to center your life around? Where do you go from there?
Kenneth Primrose:Okay, so the things you mentioned there like progress what do you mean by progress?
Rosie Spinks:Barack Obama was fond of quoting this line, and I'm forgetting who said it. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. That's probably me butchering the quote, but something along those lines. It's Martin Luther King. Okay, thank you.
Rosie Spinks:And I think I was really a child. I'm like the archetypal millennial I was 11 when 9-11 happened. I was 18 when the global financial crisis happened. Then I graduated from university in the Obama era, so I really believed that if you work hard, go to good school, do all the right things and get A's on all your tests and assignments, you will get the outcomes you want.
Rosie Spinks:That's sort of a personal story, but we also have that story at large. Right, I was listening to an episode of one of your past guests and you talked about this idea of developed and developing countries, as if every country and every culture is developing towards this same point. Right, it's like promised land, and even that construction implies that there's this ideal endpoint that we're all going towards. And then I guess, more practically, it's extractive capitalism. Right, it's industrialization, this idea that progress and growth could happen in an unending way without any consequences. And I think what I do in my writing is often connect how that sort of meta story manifests in our own personal stories. So you know, becoming obsessed with personal ambition is often a byproduct of growing up in a culture that tells you that progress and growth can happen forever with no consequences.
Kenneth Primrose:Okay, great, so that's helpful. So there's this broader cultural trajectory that you know, I think of Steven Pinker or Hans Rosling. You know the kind of enlightenment project, literacy and healthcare and all these things. Eventually we're going to lift all boats and that no longer seems plausible. But then this story on a personal level whether it's the American dream, you'll get the job you want, be fulfilled and satisfied and happy that also no longer feels plausible. Yet you were reared in this diet of keep beavering away. I mean, part of me wonders if there's an age and stage thing here. Similar to you, I think a few years. But there's a sense in which those things we were promised, even if they were tangible, don't actually seem that appealing anymore. Those promises seem somewhat empty when they're almost within grasp. Do you know what I mean?
Rosie Spinks:Right and we sort of see the effects that they have on us, you know, on our parents. We see how working so hard to provide this ideal life often to their own detriment the effect that that had on their life. For myself, being raised in this culture of achievement and almost perfectionism, where from the age of 12, everything is geared towards hopefully getting a scholarship into the best university possible, the effect that had on me in my mid-20s to early 30s. I really had to unlearn some of those values so that I wasn't sick. All I knew was go, go, go. It's not me blaming my parents for that. It was entirely the culture they existed in. It was the right thing to do help your kids succeed. Now burnout almost seems like a shared permanent state for most people in our world. So, yeah, it's sort of just interrogating those things. Once you accept that arc you were steeped in I was steeped in, most people were is maybe not going to deliver. Where do you go next?
Kenneth Primrose:So I wonder if we could go back in time and tell me about young Rosie and the values that were sedimented into you and how you began to unlearn those Were there trigger moments.
Rosie Spinks:Yeah, well, maybe I'll, in answering that, also tell you the story of how I came up with that question what do we do now that we're here? So I was one of those nerds who joined the student newspaper the first semester of university and was like, okay, this is what I'm doing with my life. I am going to be a journalist. I wrote my first story about some road on campus closing and what it was going to do to wildlife or something like that, and I was just like this is it for me. I was incredibly ambitious. I'm a dual citizen. So when I graduated from the University of California, I moved to London and embarked on this career of becoming a journalist. I hustled, freelanced, worked in restaurants and did temp jobs.
Rosie Spinks:And that was really the era of the girl boss and the side hustle. It was before we saw how toxic it can be to work. From the second you open your eyes to the second you close your eyes. In fact it was kind of glamorous to do that at that time. I did have a lot of success as a journalist. I achieved a lot of the things that I wanted to achieve. I was a regular contributor, freelance, to the Guardian and lots of other publications across the US and UK. I wrote all sorts of interesting investigative features. I got to go on trips as a journalist. I was living the life that 18-year-old me had dreamed of Right before the pandemic.
Rosie Spinks:I was covering the travel industry not in a way of like here's where you should stay when you go to Barcelona. More in like a business journalism, holding companies to account. The travel industry is a massive global industry and it's often not treated as such in the press. Covid happened and I experienced a really profound episode of burnout, sort of right before COVID kicked off, so February 2020. Right before COVID kicked off, so February 2020. Actually, I had been asked in my job to write an op-ed for the New York Times about the travel industry and the border closures happening around COVID, and it was like this pinnacle career moment for me. The New York Times came to the place I was on staff and said, hey, you guys are the travel industry experts. Do you have a take? And my boss said, okay, Rosie, you write the take. So dream stuff.
Rosie Spinks:As an ambitious person, I wrote the piece and it was not a disaster in the sense that it was wrong or factual, but it got caught up in a sort of MAGA Fox News wormhole. My name was then the target of the MAGA folks at the right as the pandemic was kicking off, and so it was this extreme moment of burnout and sort of internet world harassment and I was like what am I doing? What is this life that I am pursuing here? I remember sitting in my therapist's office and being like you know. I'm getting notes from people in high school saying they saw me in the New York Times actively miserable. Like this is ostensibly success. And what am I doing? It doesn't feel good at all.
Rosie Spinks:Fortunately, right around the time, the world completely stopped All of my routines, all of the travel I'd planned, everything just stopped and that was. I don't think this would have happened if not for the lockdown. But I sort of just started to see the trajectory I was on was not a good one and that I was so obsessed with external validation and success and success and it had just become a state of being to me that I was sacrificing so much of my own wellbeing and health in pursuit of that. Covid really changed the world and it's been five years since COVID, which I always just find incredible because nobody really talks about that period.
Kenneth Primrose:How does that feel to you? Does it feel like a long time ago, like yesterday?
Rosie Spinks:I mean, it feels yes and no, both and everything you said. I also become a mother in that time, so I'm a completely different person in many ways. I saw the way that the world changed so abruptly in the lockdown period and that really stayed with me. It really challenged my notions of what's possible in our world. Science fiction writers talk about a structure of feeling. When you write a sci-fi book, you're giving the reader a sense of what's possible in the world you're creating.
Rosie Spinks:Covid changed my structure of feeling. I really felt like all of the things that I've been working towards are not a given, and all of the things that I assumed were solid in the world are not. You can wake up and not be allowed to fly to the country where your family is. That's a thing that can happen, and so it unpicked a lot for me, and it made things like the climate crisis feel more alive to me. It made them feel less theoretical. That's what happens when the world changes. This is what it can look like, this is what it can feel like, and so that is the time that I changed the title of the newsletter to what do we do now that we're here? I'd essentially quit journalism. I felt like the ambition of my 20s. I couldn't do that anymore, personally or professionally, and I genuinely had no idea what to do next. I felt completely adrift. I did not know what to pursue if not success in journalism and on the internet.
Kenneth Primrose:So let me dwell here for a minute. Burnout it's a word that's used a lot and it describes something quite specific. What were the factors that led to yours and what were the symptoms that you experienced in that?
Rosie Spinks:I think they'll probably be familiar to a lot of people. I spent my life very much online. It was pre-Elon Musk Twitter, so it was the best of times, the worst of times, on Twitter, a lot of time there, and my experience of being online was kind of a performance. I was always putting stuff out, whether it was bylined pieces or 12 tweets a day. I was always serving myself up to the internet to potentially have something take off or to have something go horrifically wrong, get canceled or get sued all the things that can happen when you're a journalist and so I was kind of living in a state of hypervigilance in that way journalists and so I was kind of living in a state of hypervigilance in that way in my own life, symptoms of that kind of thing, insomnia or skin problems or just like not really ever being able to relax, like almost on a Sunday afternoon, feeling like a complete sort of paralysis about what to do if I didn't have plans, that kind of stuff.
Rosie Spinks:It's interesting because I was a person who went to yoga class and I was interested in Eastern philosophies and methodologies. It was there, but those outlets were always used as a brief reprieve from the hustle, from the pursuit of success, money, fame, whatever, not because you don't make money as a journalist, but you know, success, fame, all of that. I would never have allowed those ways of being to animate my life. They were just like okay, go to a yoga class so that you can get back out there and write another story that does well, does that make sense?
Kenneth Primrose:Yeah, totally. What I hear is a fragility to the way that you're living, mirrored in the fragility you see in the social contract that broke down at COVID, these assumptions that you can no longer traffic in. The other thing I hear and relate to is a sense of not being present. You're instrumentalizing your days and your time for some kind of future gain. You know Oliver Berkman's just so good at drawing this out and saying we're never here. We're always working towards some mythical endpoint where we can relax.
Rosie Spinks:Yeah, my husband and I call it the if I just syndrome. I love Oliver Berkman's work, like everything he says I love you know. Oh, I'll feel successful If I just publish a book. I'll relax. If I just finish cleaning out the garage, I'll enjoy parenting. If I just get to the point where my kid does X, y, z, you can, if I just your life away. It's. The work we're here to do is to not allow ourselves to do that.
Kenneth Primrose:You're listening to the Examined Life podcast with me, kenny from Roos. Today, I'm in conversation with the writer, rosie Spinks, discussing her question what do we do now that we're here? After the break, we'll return to discussing collapse care and how to build a community where you live pretty much in that order. If you're enjoying the podcast, then do please subscribe, rate, share it with others. It'll help other people find it. So, rosie, you wrote this piece about collapse that got a lot of attention. I'd love to come back to the fact that it got a lot of attention because that says something and you talk about here versus there. That might be a good thing to dig into here.
Rosie Spinks:Sure. So I was surprised that piece did as well as it did and it kind of felt like coming out of the closet a little bit. You know you can't really talk about societal collapse at like toddler coffee morning. Pretend you're a normal person who thinks about normal things.
Rosie Spinks:The collapse piece was about how I became collapse aware. It's how I started to think about the world in such a way that I stopped expecting that progress and growth and continued affluence would be guaranteed both at the societal level and the personal level. And so the kind of structure I gave that piece was I and many other people are now kind of straddling two worlds here versus there. Here is where I've accepted all these things about the future are not given. It's where I think about my child's life and don't necessarily think it's going to be better than my own. And there is kind of this place where I order groceries for pickup every week and expect my order to be perfect. It's where I earn money consulting on projects to do with AI or these very big money things that feel tenuous and tied up in this global financial system that feels very shaky. It's where most people are burned out in this way. That really closely mirrors the exhaustion of the earth. It's where everyone's working hard and not really stopping to think why they're doing that. There's a lot of hope in living here, and that's what the piece is about.
Rosie Spinks:I think it's a mistake to think that once you become collapse aware you got to give up on all of your old life. You have to stop shopping, you have to stop watching silly reality TV, you have to stop being like a normal modern human, because most people can't do that. Most people have to still pay their mortgage and buy things for their kids and do all this stuff. But that also doesn't mean you have to double down on there. You can sort of live in both places and start to reorient some of your life so that you are preparing yourself for this kind of different future, and I think there's some joy and brightness in starting to do that it sounds like here feels very authentic and there is somewhere you have to go to engage with the commerce of life.
Kenneth Primrose:Does it mean you show up less authentically in that sphere of life that you don't feel has a future?
Rosie Spinks:that's interesting. No one's ever. I've never thought about that, but I think that's true. I don't feel any guilt about that because, like, what am I going to do? Stop earning money? I think the work is to figure out the extent to which you can orient your life around here. In my own story, I had my son in 2022. So after I asked the central question what do we do? Now that we're here, it's actually when things started to make sense for me, because I became a mother and caretaker because that's what being a parent is and that was just this extraordinary thing that I had never thought about before. I had never in my old life, in over there in my twenties, in my ambitious journalist life, I only thought about myself.
Rosie Spinks:The work of caregiving is so repetitive and you're never done, and it's quite boring and dull, but in that is this extraordinary quality that you unlock within yourself. I had that capacity all along, but I wasn't using it when I was over there, and so when I started using it, I was kind of like oh, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Parenting a small child is a very extreme way of using that, but there's loads of ways of using that quality, the structures we live under. Don't encourage us to use it. It's easier to just pick up your phone and order everything you need text your therapist and order your groceries. You don't rely on the care. We're encouraged not to rely on the care of other people in the world we live in, because of course, that's better for capitalism.
Rosie Spinks:Right when I had my son, I felt that for the first time and I saw what it did to me. I sort of started to see it everywhere. I looked like this act of care and how deeply human it is. Then I felt like, okay, this is it. I need to orient my life not around taking care of children, necessarily, but around this idea that this is the human work. How do I make more time for this in my life and in my writing? How do I help people find how to do the same in their own particular circumstances?
Kenneth Primrose:Maybe that's a helpful kind of guide to your work, discovering the human work that has in a sense sense been forgotten. I remember when I had my first child my brother described as a Copernican shift so the center of your universe, just kind of shifts, but in quite a liberating way, like you realize how exhausting it is to be serving your ego all the time, and there's something like your shoulders relax at the same time as you become busier than you've ever been.
Rosie Spinks:I think when I say this is what we're supposed to do, I don't mean have babies and take care of them. I know you didn't, but this has been a big challenge as a writer and an interesting challenge. How do I write about parenthood or motherhood in a way that feels interesting to non-parents, in a way that doesn't exclude them or go so far into the ins and outs of parenting that it becomes uninteresting? And I think that shift you're talking about, where you're like thank God it's not just about me and my own success anymore that can happen in a lot of different ways. I think accepting here as we're framing it, they can help with that shift, even if you don't want to have children.
Rosie Spinks:One of the things I've been writing about is this idea of building a village.
Rosie Spinks:The almost cliche phrase is it takes a village to raise a child. But what I'm finding is everyone needs the village, not just parents of young children. Parents of young children are often incredibly desperate and overwhelmed by the task at hand, that they create a village out of sheer survival. But all humans are psychologically adapted to live with the in-person, recurring support of other humans and our modern life has taken that away from us. So the work a non-parent, whether by choice or by circumstance is also to find ways to extend that care in your life Because so many people need it. As a new parent myself, I kind of don't want to have more children, because I want to use my energy to support other parents and make parenting more collective and be a catalyst for that in my community. The way we do it, this isolated, atomized nuclear family, is such an aberration in historical terms, in evolutionary and biological terms, you could almost say it's a social experiment in terms of human history, and I don't think it's a good one.
Kenneth Primrose:And I think you've interviewed her as well. But for this podcast series I chatted to Michaeline Duclef.
Tom Chatfield:You know Hunt Gather.
Kenneth Primrose:Parent who's just fantastic at drawing out the weird parenting that we do and how yeah how damaging it is for kids, but also for grownups who bear the whole load.
Rosie Spinks:That's got a really big effect on me. I didn't actually read a whole lot of parenting books, but my husband and I read that one.
Tom Chatfield:That's the thing I think.
Rosie Spinks:On an even deeper level.
Rosie Spinks:It's so reductive to say how we raise babies is not relevant to people that don't have babies, because we were all once babies.
Rosie Spinks:The way we were cared for and the support our mothers had or didn't have has a direct impact on our development, our quality of life. And then if you extend that out and say you know, most women in modern society are desperately lonely and under supported in the immediate months after having a child, as a society we have not grappled with the societal impact of the isolation of new motherhood. It's a social experiment gone wrong. As soon as you sort of dig into even other cultures, modern times, but certainly like any hunter-gatherer literature about how babies are raised and cared for, it's like being red-pilled or blue-pilled, I forget which one but you really see like, oh my God, we are doing this in a way that is having serious impacts on human society. I really am motivated to make people care about that, even if they are not parents, because it affects all of us. It directly shapes the world we live in the amount of support and care that new mothers, and then, by extension, their babies, get.
Kenneth Primrose:I watched the trailer for a new film Night Bitch. Have you come across it yet?
Rosie Spinks:I haven't seen it yet, but I've read the book.
Kenneth Primrose:It looks very close to the bone. I haven't seen the whole film so I can't comment, but it looks like it's picking up on exactly what you're talking about, this kind of shift in your center of gravity, your center of care. Right, it's less self-focused, more other focused. That would be one of the things we do now that we're here. We realize that this story that we've been reared on doesn't work anymore. What are the other values, what are the other things that actually perhaps before that you mentioned here is a place of hope. It's interesting because I think there's a sense in which the hope that we grew up with dies with the realization of collapse Over there is no longer plausible, and one reaction to that is kind of cynicism, you know, disengagement, like if I can't believe this story, then what else is going around? But you mentioned here is a place of hope. Can you say something else about that?
Rosie Spinks:You see this in declining birth rates, right, some people are choosing not to have children because they have that sense of like I don't want to bring a child into this world. I really do sympathize with that. I used to think that way too and I get it. But I think what having a child showed me is that, by recentering my capacity to care, as you put it, it gave me hope because it made me see the work we should be doing.
Rosie Spinks:In the collapse piece I quote Jem Bendel, who's a seminal thinker on this. His definition of collapse is an uneven ending to our normal modes of acquiring sustenance pleasure, identity, meaning all these kinds of things, but he doesn't say it's the end. He doesn't say it's the end to sustenance pleasure, all these kinds of things, but he doesn't say it's the end. He doesn't say it's the end to sustenance pleasure, identity. It's just we need new ways of getting those things right, and so the work is to sort of pick a few, you know, and you can really start small with that. I think the big one for people is and I'm not like this anymore, but I used to be but if you are so wrapped up in your status and income bestowing job that you have no time for anyone else outside of yourself and your immediate family. You don't even have to quit your job. Could you reorient your priorities or your energy a little bit where you could say maybe I could give 10% less to my job and instead direct that energy somewhere else? That can look like being more active in the neighborhood group chat or the parent group chat where people are asking for things. It could be making an effort to learn your neighbor's names, inviting them over for a drink or offering to cat sit. It could be any number of just directing some of that energy to the immediate area where you live and exist, because, as a human before their times, you would have naturally done that because you would have had to. So it can look like that. It can look like a good one is.
Rosie Spinks:Does all your pleasure and leisure time rely on extractive, resource intensive things? Is it, you know, weekend trips or shopping or expensive beauty treatments? Can you dial back on some of that stuff and start spending your time and energy on generative things or free things like singing in a choir, working in a garden, creating art, doing things that are more cyclical and generative and give back to the world around you rather than just taking from it. So what you notice with these examples is that they sound kind of appealing. That's the shift. The way we live now. A lot of it kind of sucks. It's convenient and comfortable, but a lot of people are depressed and anxious and burned out. What would it look like if the conditions of how we acquire pleasure meaning identity, shelter, et cetera didn't leave us depressed, anxious and burned out? How would that look?
Kenneth Primrose:You wrote a piece, what was it called? Be the person that asks twice. I find that a really helpful advice because this takes persistence right To break down those atomized communities. The street I live on. I live on this fairly unique street, to be honest, where there's gardens but they're porous and so the kids kind of roam free and the adults do a bit too. We've started doing a pilgrimage together. St Oswald's Way is a hundred mile pilgrimage across Northumberland Once a quarter. We do a section of the pilgrimage, not in a particularly religious way. There's this generative, cyclical way of developing relationships as we walk. I'm a big advocate for it. Actually I'd love streets to start doing walks together. It's such an unusual kind of grouping, but I guess it wasn't in the past, right.
Rosie Spinks:Yeah, there's an organization called Play Out which sort of helps people facilitate making streets safe for children to just play on them, and their kind of raison d'etre is that by doing that there's all these positive downstream effects for the adults. In the act of organizing, you know whether it's the supervision or whatever you need to do to get it safe for kids to play Neighbors start talking to each other and they start like creating you know whether it's the WhatsApp group or just more saying hello on the street more it creates this feedback. Of course we didn't used to need to have parents organize that. When I was growing up I'd say bye, mom, I'm going to so-and-so's house, I'll see you at six.
Rosie Spinks:But the way the world is right now, we sort of have to actively do that work. Like you said, be the person who asks twice. Most people, when they extend a bid for connection or an invitation, will only ask once and if it's not accepted they won't reach out to that person again. But when you live here and see the importance of building this village and our connection to each other, you start to be that person who asks twice. You not only know that you're working against the grain, but you also want to kind of model a behavior that is beneficial to everyone.
Kenneth Primrose:So has this been generative for you as you located out of London and began a new life as a mother further north?
Rosie Spinks:I would say that I mean and this has been very public in the newsletter, like I, cause I've sort of written through all this, right? I definitely experienced pre and postnatal depression, and I think at one point I had a therapist who was quite, I think, progressive in the sense she said I don't think depression it, postnatal depression is a neurological condition. I think it's a rational response to the conditions of new motherhood, right? So basically, if you feel isolated and you don't have support and you have this enormous care burden, of course you're going to be depressed, right? It's not how we're meant to do it, like we were saying before. So once I kind of made that shift in my own head and said okay, the reason I feel like this is because I am doing this in a way that I am not psychologically adapted to do as a human with a human brain, and so the way out of that is I need to redirect my energy towards finding support and creating support, camaraderie and weekly interactions with people.
Rosie Spinks:When we moved almost a year ago, I was already writing about this. That was, and has been since, my organizing principle of my life, really, and has changed my experience of motherhood so much. I have this double feedback because I write about it and then I see the comment section of these posts in my newsletter. The different ways that people come up with to connect with other people is just so beautiful and gives me so much energy and motivation, and the fact that my writing about my very normal struggles in this way has prompted that is such a privilege for me to see.
Kenneth Primrose:It's wonderful. It feels like you're doing a service to lots of people in those newsletters. Your mention of kind of depression being a normal reaction to the shift brings to mind Johan Harry's book Lost Connections. Did you read that Really helpful book, his point being that we're wired for connections that are broken, connection to land, to other people, to meaningful work relationships and so on. One of the tell signs that all is not well are feelings of isolation, loneliness and depression. That can be reversed with some of the things you're saying, right. What do we do now that we're here?
Rosie Spinks:Yeah, the response to anxiety and depression is medication. I've been on medication for a relatively short time. In the early days of taking it it really did help me and I don't regret taking it at all. But we can't just respond with that fix. We have to address the conditions that are creating the situation where so many people are anxious and depressed. It feels like normal now to be anxious and to have anxiety and depression.
Rosie Spinks:I think it's more hopeful to say there's not something wrong with your brain chemistry. As Johan Hari goes into that book, the brain chemistry argument is far from scientific consensus. So that's interesting. But it's not that something's wrong with your brain that you need a pill to fix. It's that the conditions you live in are not good for you. And it's more hopeful, I think, that way of looking at it because it means you can change some of those conditions. You can't change all of them by yourself, especially if you are living in economically insecure circumstances, but we as a collective can change some of it for other people and I think you know the journalism I did for the decade in my 20s.
Rosie Spinks:It was very focused structural, societal solutions. Individual actions don't make a difference. You need to create change from the top. That's where you need to direct your energy. But, living here, we've seen what happens if the structural change doesn't come. We just elected Donald Trump for a second time. Things aren't looking great on the structural change doesn't come. We just elected Donald Trump for a second time. Things aren't looking great on the structural change front If you're a person of a certain political bent.
Rosie Spinks:So again, what do you do now that you're here? Maybe we need to go back to okay, what can we do where we don't have to wait for politicians to do it for us? What can we do before we get universal paid maternity leave? What can we do before all of these Scandinavian social policies that we dream of happen? Like we can trade.
Rosie Spinks:One thing I've been doing recently is trading playdates with other moms. I'll take your kid this Friday, you take my kid next Friday. That is free, it's generative, it builds connection, the kids like it and all of a sudden you have some childcare you didn't pay for. You know and like yes, that's a very small act, but it's how you're using your energy. It's a good example of a non-transactional or non-monetary way of building. Connection facilitates people getting together so they build those connections. Make those offers, do those swaps, build that resilience. You can do that now and by doing that you can help people who are maybe less able, whether because of financial or mental health, to look outside themselves and do that. That, I think, is the work and that's really motivating.
Kenneth Primrose:There's a real emphasis in what you're saying and your language on action and obviously your question is what do we do now that we're here? I had initially thought of it as a shift in values, which it is, but I wonder if you find that those values actually follow downstream of action. Do you know what I mean?
Rosie Spinks:I think five years ago I would have said, no, you got to do the inner work and then all action flows from there. But I'm starting to feel like sometimes you need to just get outside of yourself, get outside of your internal monologue and dialogue and go connect with, do the active connection and see what comes from there. I'm a pretty outgoing person but I would say I'm an introvert. I realized that during the lockdowns. This is work for me. I don't always feel like making these bids, showing up to things or sending messages. I don't always feel like doing it, but I know that what follows downstream from the action has been really positive for me. Seeing that is motivating and it fosters more of it. I think I'll bring up one more thing.
Rosie Spinks:A few years ago I interviewed this Aboriginal scholar and author called Tyson Yankaporta.
Rosie Spinks:He's based in Australia and has this phrase the thousand year cleanup.
Rosie Spinks:So it's this idea that in Aboriginal storytelling, the kind of timescales they're dealing with are way larger and longer and more expansive than the timescales we are accustomed to planning our lives on. So yeah, I may not feel great about what society and government and life may look like in my lifetime, but I would like to think that myself and the way that I'm raising my son are to be participants in this thousand year cleanup, to have more optimism about humans, to have an optimism that says there's other ways we can live. This way we've been living for the past 150, 200 years. We can actually do better than this, but along the way we're going to need models and guides and cleanup crews and transition people who are thinkers that help us bridge from where we are to where we're going, and so I like to think of my work now as participating in that thousand-year cleanup and preparing my son for that world rather than, you know, hoping he gets into the best university possible so he can get a job earning a lot of money.
Kenneth Primrose:It's interesting because you say, quite rightly, that we grew up at least I was, I guess you were the kids of boomers with this idea of progress and we're probably going to earn more than our parents, and so on. That became untrue, and it's even less true for the younger generation. And yet this is really nice to hear how hopeful you feel, as you say. Well, actually, we're kind of speaking in a different register now. We're part of a different project.
Rosie Spinks:Right and like there's the material realities of our lives which under extractive capitalism if you live in a Western, educated, industrialized, rich country have been pretty good, right, like we can't deny that, and advancements and you know science, technology, et cetera, but also just how easy it is to you know, relatively easy to just get food on your table. These are things that in human history are kind of staggering. But there's also the spiritual, emotional and collective reality of how we live and I think those are pretty poor in our current era, as we've talked about with mental health et cetera. So what I'm saying is there is more than just the material reality and a lot of aspects of our material lives are sort of why our emotional, psychological, spiritual lives are poor.
Rosie Spinks:Right, I mean, there's lots of examples of that, but from sedentary lifestyles to the food we eat, when we make life this convenient, it sort of takes something from us as humans as well. We lose something in that. So it's not about going back to the land and living like a peasant so that you can prove a point about how resilient you are, because it's not realistic for most people, but it's just thinking about. I think the Jem Bendel definition I said before is so useful because there's lots of ways in that definition. You can think about alternative ways of acquiring some of these things that build a life, and you don't have to start by growing your own food.
Kenneth Primrose:It seems to me a lot about being discerning, a good listener. I spoke for this series to the writer Elam Tsarkasis. The Convivial Society.
Rosie Spinks:Who? I don't actually.
Kenneth Primrose:I think he's wonderful Writes about human flourishing in an age of technology. His question is on what is it good to do for ourselves that a machine can do for us, and so it wasn't like this reaction to all the technology. There's some great things like modern dentistry, but actually sometimes going the slow way. He's got this nice line that life cannot be delegated. It exists in those moments of friction.
Kenneth Primrose:Relationships are friction. Trying to glide through life conveniently, it means you skate over the surface of it rather than actually you know and you lose so much.
Rosie Spinks:You just lose so much detail and sort of texture too like. I have some seed trays on my windowsill right now and the joy that I feel when I see that they've germinated is like. There is no purchase on the internet that can make me feel that way. They have just been there doing what they do, using the light as energy, and they will become something either we eat or, you know, look at and like, just adds beauty, and then they will be helpful to the pollinators and when they're done, I'll cut them down and put them on the compost pile and they will do their next job. It makes me feel like I'm a participant in something that I should be. You know, it feels. It feels very nourishing. It's certainly not like it would be much easier if I just went to the store and bought lettuce or kale which I obviously do that too sometimes but even to the small degree that I can participate in that cycle, it gives me so much more back than just the calories from the food.
Kenneth Primrose:Yeah, 100%. And interesting, I think, a few of the things you've mentioned. Interesting, I think, a few of the things you've mentioned, things that are generative and cyclical and organic. I wonder if, in your shift from pre-collapse aware to being collapse aware, there's been anything of a shift in metaphor. So it seems like you and Harry's book Lost Connections. The way he describes depression it's kind of like mechanical, and the way he describes depression it's kind of like mechanical the body's a machine, the brain's a computer, which I think is actually widespread as a way of thinking and also deeply alienating from our bodies and from one another. I wonder if there's this need to transition to much more organic metaphors of what it means to be human.
Rosie Spinks:I think it's a much bigger topic and sometimes can be divisive for some people. The very idea that mental health is cordoned off from physical health, which is so prevalent in modern Western medicine, is wild to me, knowing what I've learned about being well in my own body. Those two things are inextricably linked. And I think the more you observe the natural world or the kind of non, the non-capitalist world, you just see that over and over, you see that sense of connectivity in everything, in every natural system. And Robin Wall Kimmerer has in her well, it's in Braiding Sweetgrass, but then her really successful book. But she's just recently had a shorter kind of follow up called the Serviceberry Pulls on this thread more.
Rosie Spinks:She wrote one of my favorite sentences of all time, which is all flourishing is mutual. And I think you see that on every level of life. You know, from flora and fauna, the microorganisms in the soil all the way up to our bodies and brains. The relationship between a mother and a baby is you know, one cannot flourish if the other isn't. And then our communities, right, if you are doing super well financially but everyone around you is struggling, that's not flourishing. You are, by definition, not A lot of the answers to this stuff is in the natural world and natural systems, but that's simply because we are of that world. We're not separate from it. Our bodies are a natural system, so it's no surprise really that that's where the answers both the metaphors and the answers lie.
Kenneth Primrose:I love that quote as well. Thank you for sharing it. It's also quite understandable, maybe forgivable, because we live asunder from nature, from the natural world, the whole transhumanist movement treating us as you mentioned the need to live within our limits, and that actually being a good thing. Lots of the mischief that modern life entails is pushing at those limits, trying to pretend that we're something that we're not.
Rosie Spinks:And I think the more this has happened like the biohacking and the tech bros who are trying to live forever and conversation around AI and enhanced productivity and efficiency the more I have this attitude of defiance where I'm like I don't know if I can swear on your podcast, but I'm kind of like I don't want to live forever.
Rosie Spinks:I don't want to look like I'm 30 when I'm 60. I don't want to be more productive or efficient, I want to be human and I want to relish the limits and imperfections and messiness that entails, because there's so much richness there. And in fact, I feel like people who pursue those kinds of things. I feel bad for them because it tells me something about their inner lives that they are pursuing something so unattainable out of some kind of endless quest at immortality or validation or whatever it is, that I don't think they're going to find it there. You've got to find that radical acceptance of the limitations of being human and sort of the the kind of the mess of that, but also the joy and upsides of that, which are numerous.
Kenneth Primrose:That's a. That's a really kind of beautiful place to begin to draw this in. So, if I can reflect back a little bit of what I've gathered about this question, what do we do now that we're here? We can no longer put faith many of us yourself myself included in the stories that we grew up on, and that shift is actually a hopeful one, towards being more rooted in a local place, in relationships around us, in our own limitations, and that's actually where, if I hear you right, you're finding life-giving activity and engagement.
Kenneth Primrose:These things that we've been taught to deny about ourselves are actually contain the seed of our generation, the way that we might recover a sense of humanity. There are various guides. So intuition like we intuitively kind of know what's good for us and we know that sometimes by its lack that, our sense of alienation or loneliness or whatever is telling us something fundamental. I would point people to your newsletter, your sub stack. One final question would be are there any other places we should be looking to for guidance on what we do now that we are here?
Rosie Spinks:Gosh, okay, you're putting. I wish I had thought about this before, because there's so many and I'm going to be kicking-.
Kenneth Primrose:Sorry, it's a big old question to end on, isn't it? Sorry, it just came to me now.
Rosie Spinks:Well, I have to credit Sarah Wilson. She just did book serialization, meaning she wrote a book-length project but released it on Substack about collapse. She wasn't who introduced me to the term, but her boldness in writing about it has made it okay for me and a lot of people to put it front and center in our minds and talk about it more. I really appreciate her work. Interestingly, her project got picked up by a major publisher, which I find testament to her. But as someone who has a little bit of knowledge of trying to sell a book, I can't imagine writing a proposal about societal collapse going down very well in a big five publisher. So the appetite for the work is outpacing the gatekeepers in that sense, and I think that's what the success of her project is showing. And, to a much lesser degree, the success of the piece I wrote shows that people are ready for this conversation. It sounds really out there and sort of like apocalyptic, but, as you said, it's an emotional truth. People already feel it, they intuit it. I think Sarah is great.
Rosie Spinks:I love Oliver Berkman's work and I think that idea of I know you interviewed him on this podcast that idea of accepting your human limits is just so freeing, and his work has really had a profound impact in how I approach my time as a parent, my limited time as a parent.
Rosie Spinks:I'm really grateful to him for that. There's a sub-spec called the Auntie Bulletin by Lisa Sibbitt, and if you are a person interested in building a village and connection, but do not have children, her newsletter is for that. It's for the auntie tradition prevalent in other cultures, this idea that children are a shared project and you don't have to be biologically related to play a role in their lives. I think what she's doing is beautiful because it shows that this ethic of care can be prevalent in your life, even if you don't choose the parenthood route, and that it's not just an act of service or charity to help out a sleep deprived parent, that it can actually add so much joy and richness, creativity and laughter to your own life as kids tend to bring. I just think what she's doing is so needed.
Kenneth Primrose:Those are beautiful tips. As you say, it can feel some of this a bit apocalyptic, but it's sometimes worth going to the root of words. That word apocalyptic means kind of unveiling. Apocalyptic times help you see more clearly what's of value and what's not, and I find that kind of helpful. Rosie, thank you so much for your time this morning. I've really appreciated chatting to you and exploring this incredibly necessary question like what do we do now that we are here?
Rosie Spinks:Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the chat.
Kenneth Primrose:I'm very grateful to Rosie for that conversation and I really hope you enjoyed listening to it. To hear more from Rosie, head over to her Substack channel entitled what Do we Do Now that we're here, where you'll find beautiful and generative pieces of writing exploring this question. Any backing music you heard in this episode was generously supplied by Moby, who has offered up a lot of his music for anyone to use, which I'm very thankful for. If you did enjoy the conversation, then have a look at the back catalogue on examine-lifecom, where you'll find conversations with a host of really interesting thinkers that it's been a privilege to speak to, including Ian McGilchrist, Terry Waite it with a friend on social media. Write a review, sign up to my positively maladjusted sub stack and become a patron. All proceeds go into producing this podcast and are really valued, or you can also write and say hello. I'd love to hear from you.
Kenneth Primrose:In the next episode, I'll be diving into a discussion on the evergreen theme of technology with the writer and philosopher, Tom Chatfield. Tom is as wise and erudite as he is articulate and made for a fascinating conversation partner. I'll leave you with a clip from the forthcoming episode.
Tom Chatfield:I guess the key question for me is are some of the stories that we most commonly tell about technology wrong or dangerous or misleading? And I guess linked to this is the idea you know, what story should we tell about technology? And I use the word story because I think a lot of people, when they talk about singularity, ai technology and governments all these important things don't necessarily think in terms of stories and narratives, but people think they're dealing in objective facts, and my contention is that actually, not only is the idea of storytelling incredibly important, but that it's the story that makes the difference.