Martha Beck:
So Roey, we just finished an episode of Bewildered.

Rowan Mangan:
We did, and it was such a fun one, I thought.

Martha Beck:
I had fun.

Rowan Mangan:
We were talking all about how what we think of as happiness and fulfillment, if we listen to what the culture is trying to sell us, what it really is is an unnatural state of hysteria.

Martha Beck:
And even our dictation software turned what we were saying into something culture-bound. You will hear all about it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, I think we’ve got a good spin on achievement and fulfillment for you today. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Yes, indeed. What are you trying to figure out today, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty, it’s funny you should ask that. It’s not really. It’s a convention of our show. We do it every week. It’s not funny at all. Yeah. It’s one of our little things that people either love or hate about us.

Martha Beck:
Either love or hate. Make your choice, folks.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s two people out there right now going, “Wait, this stuff is planned out in advance? They seem so natural.” Look, here it is. We live in the age, as you know, of the internet. And what I want to talk about today is how your son, my stepson, Adam Beck and I, Rowan Mangan, are very alike in one aspect of our use of the internet. And this is that we are both on a quest eternally to find out whether or not something exists.

Martha Beck:
You are literal existentialists.

Rowan Mangan:
Adam. It’s always a little bit heartbreaking for me. Every year when Adam puts his Christmas– Adam is Marty’s adult son who lives with us, who has Down Syndrome, and he’s a gamer. He loves everything. And when he really loves a game, this is another way that we’re the same. When he really loves something, he really loves it and tries to find everything about it that exists. That exists, right?

Martha Beck:
Key word.

Rowan Mangan:
So when he starts putting his Christmas present list together every year, he comes down as he’s working on it. And he says to me, he has a funny way of saying it, but the gist of it is, “Can you tell me if all these things exist?” Because he finds things like, oh my gosh, someone’s done fan art of where they’ve spliced together Kingdom Hearts 3 and Breath of the Wild, and it looks like it’s a new game with Kingdom Hearts 3 characters and Link from Breath of the Wild together.

Martha Beck:
Aww.

Rowan Mangan:
And so for the first time I had to say to him, “It doesn’t exist.”

Martha Beck:
Oh.

Rowan Mangan:
He’s like, “Okay, I’ll be okay.”

Martha Beck:
That’s what he always says: “I’ll be okay.”

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll be okay. Which is sometimes not that reassuring, but yeah, he always is. But for me, where this “Does it exist?” thing is quite different because I, as you have mentioned quite cruelly in past episodes of this podcast, Marty–

Martha Beck:
I have to be cruel to be kind, and I want to be very kind, so I have to be monstrously cruel.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you cruelly had a go at me for liking nice tools, liking the exact thing for the job. And then later, you told me that one of the things you were rude about you actually loved and you should issue a retraction. But anyway, I won’t get into it now.

Martha Beck:
I will retract! My renewable clean watercolor water dispenser that Ro got for me is really, really cool. It works well. I’ll say it. I’ll say it. I said it. Are you happy? Go on.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m delighted because I love a good tool. So the problem for me is that sometimes I just dream up tools. I just think, you know what would make life very slightly more convenient would be if there was such a thing as a widget for this, that, or the other. And the problem is that I can Google things and there usually is. It usually does exist.

Martha Beck:
Oh God.

Rowan Mangan:
And so anyway, that’s very good for me in the way that it’s bad for Adam that “Does it exist?” thing, except it’s not so good for my budgeting.

Martha Beck:
You buy a lot of weird crap, Roey.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You do.

Rowan Mangan:
One man’s weird crap is another man’s useful tool.

Martha Beck:
I love my watercolor water dispenser, but a lot of the shit that you’ve gotten is not that wonderful.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm. All right.

Martha Beck:
We should do a whole episode once on the weird stuff you have got because–

Rowan Mangan:
Show and tell.

Martha Beck:
–it is quite, quite breathtaking really.

Rowan Mangan:
How dare you?

Martha Beck:
Existentialism was always difficult.

Rowan Mangan:
Look, what are you trying to figure out if you’re so smart?

Martha Beck:
Well, I, as you know, have recently been trying to learn Spanish.

Rowan Mangan:
As have I.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yeah. And everyone said don’t bother getting online courses or whatever. Just go to the app Duolingo, which teaches all kinds of people, all kinds of languages. One of my kids is busy learning better Japanese than I will ever know on Duolingo. So I’ve been doing the Duolingo thing, but very beginner level. And they repeat things over and over and they have it in several different voices.

Rowan Mangan:
They have little characters, so you can really get to know them.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, little characters. There’s the goth teenager who’s like, “Ugh. Buenos dias.” And then there’s the little girl and the little boy, and I’m really quite worried about one of the characters. He has a very slow, deep bass voice. I think his name is Luis from what they say.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not Senor Perez, is it?

Martha Beck:
No, it’s Luis. And all he ever says is, “Por favor, no.” And I’m like in English, I’m not sure about the Spanish, in English you would say, “No, thank you.” But if you’re saying, “Please, no,” something bad is happening to you.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s a different context to that.

Martha Beck:
What are they doing to Luis that makes him over and over again say, “Por favor, no”? I’m really worried about Luis, and I think it’s impeding my language learning.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I think you are mistaking what’s going on for something more comprehensive. So maybe just–

Martha Beck:
Maybe I can send you to see if it exists. Yeah. Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing how Luis’s path unfolds. I hope he feels better. And I hope that I ever learn to say anything beyond “Por favor, no” because that only gets you so far.

Rowan Mangan:
You say it so well, though.

Martha Beck:
Really.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. All right. There’s so many things I could say that I’m not going to say.

Martha Beck:
And I’m not either. That’s why they let us run around loose.

Rowan Mangan:
Quite right. We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep Bewildering new souls. And you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven. And we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all.

Martha Beck:
Let’s get on to the topic!

Rowan Mangan:
The topic of the day, my friends, you thought we would never get to it, but here we are at it. Here’s the topic. I was listening to another podcast and I liked it, and so I wanted to do a podcast about it.

Martha Beck:
Another podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. I should have worked on that opening. Anyway, look, it doesn’t matter because it was so good. And you should all go and listen to Glennon Doyle being interviewed on Dan Harris’s podcast, excellent podcast, Ten Percent Happier. And I was driving around listening to this while I was running errands, and I was particularly struck, Marty, by something that Glennon said, which was very much about the kind of stuff we talk about on Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you don’t say.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so she was sort of describing how when you do life the way the culture tells you to do it, it’s weird because it almost works. She said, it’s like it kind of works, but there’s no there there. And what she said was, it’s like you’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to try and find what it is, and you think any second now as you scroll, I’m going to find it. But you never do. You just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And that as a metaphor for trying to do life by the culture’s rule book struck me so hard. And I thought about so many things. I thought about dopamine and the way that dopamine works with our brains in both those–in the analogy of what the culture sells us for life and in the scrolling things, like retail therapy, add to cart: “If it exists, you can buy it.”

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
You can buy it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I completely see what you mean. And I’ve had so many clients who get stuck in this, “I’m about to cash in,” and it’s really clear that what they’re doing is not making them happy, but they think it’s because they haven’t done it enough. So I’ve worked with very famous clients who are desperate, starving, insatiable to be more famous. And I’m thinking, and I’ll say to them, “You’re known all over the world. It’s not making you happy. Why would more of it?” And they’re just like, “No, but I need this one more!” It’s almost like a kind of addiction. Or it could be something like money itself or influence or whatever.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. This sense of, I’m almost there. This feeling like it’s bound to–what’s that joke about sex? If something you’re doing isn’t working, do it harder?

Martha Beck:
So wait, wait. That deserves its own– my gosh, I’m trying to remember the coach’s name who said this. I will in a minute. Sonja Alarr. She said, she wrote in a brilliant one woman show, she wrote, “Advice to men in the bedroom. If what you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.”

Rowan Mangan:
Ah, Sonja. A moment for Sonja. And that’s what we’re talking about today. So Marty, it just so happens that you plucked from historical literature, the perfect metaphor for this, when you were writing the Way of Integrity, instant New York Times bestseller hashtag why aren’t you reading it right now, hashtag just finish listening to this podcast first. And he, Dante, talks about something called Mount Delectable.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, but before I let you talk about it, I just have to tell the listeners something funny that happened as a side note. So Marty and I sometimes to prep for these podcasts, groundbreaking concept that we prep for these, I know it doesn’t seem like it. So sometimes do this thing where we have to run errands or whatever, and we are in our car and we make the robots type up what we’re saying as we explore a topic for the podcast. And it’s sometimes very interesting to see what robots think we’re talking about. Because when we were talking about this and we were talking about Mount Delectable, which is what Dante writes about, it came out of the robot’s process as Mount Electable. And I think that there is a lesson there for all of us.

Martha Beck:
There is a lesson, delectable was changed to electable because the deliciousness of a thing is not what we value. It’s how many people will vote for me?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, exactly. So what’s Mount Delectable?

Martha Beck:
Well, “Delitosemonte,” I don’t think I said that correctly, but “Por favor, no,” I just get all the language skills I have– none. But I put it through a million translators and it always came out “Mount Delectable.” So this is at the very, very beginning of The Divine Comedy. So Dante finds himself, comes to himself not knowing or remembering how he got there in this murky, horrible wilderness. And he’s desperate to get out. And he can see over in the distance a mountain rising, and it’s in the rising sun the shoulders of the mountain are golden and glowy and it looks so juicy and all these people are climbing up it, and he thinks that is the way out of my unhappiness. I will go there.

Rowan Mangan:
It sounds awesome.

Martha Beck:
And so he scrambles over and he starts climbing and he climbs and he climbs. But the further he climbs, the more, the more he just skids backwards. And he keeps running into things that make him very depressed or very afraid or just ravenous and unable to satisfy it. There are different beasts, actually, that attack him, that are talked about in these emotional terms. Anyway, long story short, it’s very much like people I know who are scrambling up the peaks of achievement that our culture has designated as good stuff. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
And the cultural myth is that when you get to the top of the mountain, that’s when you finally be happy. But what Dante is saying is it’s the wrong fucking mountain.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it reminded me of, I coached an Olympic gold medal winner once who said when he won the gold medal and he stepped down off the podium, it was the worst moment of his life because his entire life had been built up to if “I can win a gold medal, I will be fulfilled, I’ll be happy.” And he stood there on the podium and they played the national anthem and he wasn’t fulfilled. And then he stepped down the podium and he had nothing to go toward. He had no prognostication of happiness. There was no there there. He’d gotten to the top of the mountain and it was the worst moment of his life.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. Yeah. I think it’s so interesting your perspective on this because you do know more people who are close to the top of Mount Delectable than most of us happen to. And so I sort of trust your instinct on this when you say that it’s not going to be the right mountain.

Martha Beck:
Boy, does it ever, I have just sat on the front lines of this battle with so many really impressive people, really rich, really famous, really influential, whatever, and just gobsmacked by how unhappy they were and how simple their real needs were. We’ll get to that in a while, but it was heart-wrenching actually.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah and I think what’s so interesting is just this tendency that our brains have to just push harder at the same thing and never to see, no, no, this is an unfulfillable promise.

Martha Beck:
Unfulfillable, yeah. This is why I kept going to a little place I like to call Harvard.

Rowan Mangan:
Harvard?

Martha Beck:
You know, I graduated and thought, with high honors, and thought, “Well, I majored in Chinese, so I didn’t get highest honors. And that was my mistake.” I needed to go back. That was why I wasn’t fulfilled.

Rowan Mangan:
“Por favor, no.”

Martha Beck:
“Por favor, no.” And being at the time educated in religious fanatic schools of Provo, Utah, I knew much about the Bible. And in the Bible, this whole thing reminds me of this line in Isaiah, which says, “It’s when a hungry man dreams and behold, he is eating and he awakes with his hunger unsatisfied. Or when a thirsty man dreams and behold, he is drinking and awakens faint with his thirst not quenched.” I used to have that feeling over and over myself. And then I watched people go through it over and over and over until I finally realized, “Oh, that’s not real food.” It’s just not.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s dream food.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s dream food. It’s this strange mirage of real fulfillment.

Rowan Mangan:
So all that success, promises that you feel, however you’re defining success, what you’re actually doing is just eating dream food, drinking dream drink. Dream drink.

Martha Beck:
Dream drink. Ooh, I feel a Dr. Seuss book coming on. As we were talking about this, we were mentioning that I’ve seen so much more of this than you have, and I’ve experienced more. And I think that partly may be an aspect of American culture versus other cultures.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I definitely think that in America, my experience has been that success–and success in that kind of very glitzy way, successful, nothing in particular, sort of Kardashian-style. Sorry, Kardashians, I know you’re big listeners to Bewildered, don’t want to diss you. But yeah, that sort of Kardashian-style fame for nothing kind of fluff is much more pushed here, I think, than it certainly was my experience in Australia. There’s just Mount Electable: “I’m going to be Mount Electable! Miss Congeniality!” It’s all sort of there. And yet Mount Electable, and well, I won’t get into it, but look who we elect.

Martha Beck:
And a lot of us who never reached the heights of the mountain are like Dante scrambling around getting more and more and more exhausted. He writes about how completely exhausted he is and how the harder he climbs, the more he skids backwards. And it feels like he’s trying to go up the down escalator. But they didn’t have escalators, so he had to use a mountain.

Rowan Mangan:
Mountains: for when you don’t have escalators!

Martha Beck:
If he’d had an escalator, he would’ve been a much happier man, I think. No.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
Another Mount Electable thing. I’m doing it, see?

Rowan Mangan:
Not if you were running up the down one.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
That would just be like going to the gym.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly the same, but equally unhappy, but with massive quads.

Martha Beck:
Is that why? Yeah, right. But probably not big enough to make him happy.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the thing. That’s true.

Martha Beck:
That’s another, I’ve worked also with bodybuilders who could not get buff enough to make themselves happy. And they were turning themselves into–

Rowan Mangan:
Buff Enough: A Memoir.

Martha Beck:
–cartoon figures. It was–wooh, yeah. And breaking their own bones accidentally because they were lifting. Anyway, there are many ways people go up Mount Electable.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, they do. So Marty, how do we figure it out?

Martha Beck:
Well, first of all, we don’t buy the cultural patter that we hear and absorb by osmosis from the culture around us. And as far as what we do next, we’ll tell you in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, how do we figure it all out?

Martha Beck:
Well, I think there is a real hunger, there’s a real desire that drives us up Mount Electable, but it’s not–it’s dream food. So we have to find out what we’re really hungry for. We have to find out what the alternative to Mount Electable is. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It reminds me of someone we know who was telling us recently about a very big plex sort of professional success. And it was this big night where this huge success by the huge, I’m not saying who it is or what it was, but I’m just saying if you knew, you would be like, holy shit. But notice that we don’t drop the name.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
Because we’re just pure like that. So anyway, and this person who will remain nameless, even though they’re not really–

Martha Beck:
Let’s just call them Luis.

Rowan Mangan:
I prefer to know her as Senor Perez.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Senor Perez.

Rowan Mangan:
So Senor Perez had had the biggest night of her career and culmination of all this work, and it was finally this massive recognition by the culture of the work that she’d done. And she was telling us how she, after this night, she went back to her hotel room and there was this moment where she closed the door behind her and she was just like, “Ugh.” Because it was over and she was on her own. It was in the context of talking about looking for wanting a partner. And I asked her, “Okay, so if someone was there with you, what would that moment have looked like when you closed the door behind you?”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, what would’ve been perfect and fulfilling?

Rowan Mangan:
And she was like, “My ideal partner would’ve said, ‘Atta girl, let’s order ice cream and cookies.'” And I was like, that’s it. Ice cream, cookies, and “atta girl.” That’s all it would’ve taken after the glitz and the glamor. It feels so simple and so perfect.

Martha Beck:
It is. I do this thing all the time with groups on, I don’t know what I’m doing, corporate calls or trainings or whatever, and I ask people to just list things that they love experiencing with each of their senses. And they put it in the chat field on Zoom, and they go into this euphoria. And invariably– you can go through, I have them put in “three things that you love to taste, three things you love to touch.” And they put these things in and all these wonderful things are scrolling by on the chat, and everybody gets all mellow and high. And when I look at them, literally never does anything in that chat field require money or effort or recognition. It’s always something incredibly simple.

Rowan Mangan:
That you can detect with your senses, which is so key. You’re taking people away from concepts and structures of the mind and back into things you can feel.

Martha Beck:
And to the heart as well. So yeah, we were talking to this person, and I was like, she was telling us about this thing she had done that was just mind-blowingly amazing. And I thought, okay, for me to do my part of the conversation, here’s what’s really floating my boat lately is I get to get up every morning in color. Literally.

Rowan Mangan:
This is Marty’s modest way of saying, “I’m an amazing professional watercolor painter.”

Martha Beck:
I get to paint every morning. And then we, at the end of the day, something even more amazing happens. All of us get together, you, me, and Karen, our Karenthetically Speaking hero–

Rowan Mangan:
Our beloved.

Martha Beck:
Our beloved–and watch a show on TV.

Rowan Mangan:
And it is, it’s our trinity time. It’s our favorite time of the day. It’s heaven.

Martha Beck:
It’s literally Heaven.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s our cookies and ice cream and “atta girl” every day.

Martha Beck:
It’s just all day long you know that’s going to happen. You can get through anything.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think, okay, so I’m trying to, I’m sitting here trying to figure out what are the different things here? How do we break this down? What is the component of trinity time, which is what we call it when we snuggle up and watch TV. It’s a very grand name for a very simple activity.

Martha Beck:
We are the trinity! We have become godlike.

Rowan Mangan:
The trinity, godlike sits down to watch reality television. And so with the cultural model, the Mount Delectable thing, it seems like there’s always a component where you need more. It needs to be epic.

Martha Beck:
No satiety.

Rowan Mangan:
It needs to be upped every time. Not just no satiety, not just more, but more of it next time. I need it again and I need more this time. And that makes me think of the dopamine idea, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s not just dopamine. I’m not sure all of the brain chemicals that fire off when we achieve things that we think will make us happy. But it does seem to work the way, for example, a stimulant would work in the brain. So for example, if you’ve got serotonin, for example, and dopamine, all these things flowing through your brain and they’re like a drip system. It’s like a river flowing. It has to be continuously replenished. And what happens if you take the right chemical or if you have a really, really stimulating experience or you think you’ve found heaven, a burst of those chemicals is released. In fact, all of them, everything you’ve got, your whole supply is just like, let’s bash it out and have a huge party with all the feelgood chemicals. And then you’re fresh out very, very quickly. And this is why the big downside to the drug ecstasy is something they call a Suicide Tuesday where you have a wonderful time having–but the drug doesn’t give you the happy feeling. The drug allows your brain to release the chemicals that make you feel happy, but all at the same time. And then you’re fresh out, the river runs dry and you have to wait and wait for it to build up. And that can be very, very– It’s worse than just: “Well, that’s not permanently making me happy.” It’s: “I’m desperate. I’m miserable. I must have of what made me happy.”

Rowan Mangan:
Because you’ve fallen lower than your set point where you started. And yeah, I mean the other aspect of it is that I think we chase this thing that’s only meant to be momentary as though it could be a sustained state. And I think that’s sometimes what people think when they want to be happy. The idea of happiness, the sustained state of happiness, that that’s what that would look like is Saturday night all the time. Instead of Thursday mid-afternoon, which is a lovely time.

Martha Beck:
And I think–

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, it’s right now!

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it is! TV culture did a lot. It does do a lot. I mean, it’s on the internet as well, but television in particular, American television, there was this standard of ecstasy people were supposed to reach. I didn’t watch shows like The Bachelor or whatever, but I did watch the home building shows where they would rebuild a house for some people or they would redo a room. And there was always the reveal. And the ideal reveal was when someone literally fell to their knees, shrieking, incoherently with joy. And if they couldn’t get it there, and actually I participated in some of these, I remember, okay, I’m going to tell a story I’ve never told. I was doing this episode of The Oprah Show where I was supposed to help a woman switch her life by changing a room because a room is a metaphor for your inner life. We should talk about it sometime. Anyway, they were filming me. I had to transform this room with very little money to make her a happier person. So one of the best things you can do is change the color. So she and I were posed painting the wall with the rollers, and they were like, “Act like it’s a great color and you really like it.” And so we did some rollers and she’d say, “Well, that’s a great color. I really like it.” They’d go, “Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Give me some enthusiasm. That is a GREAT color! I really like it!” And she was like, “What? But I don’t.” And so they were like, “Okay, paint, paint.” And she’s like, “Yeah!! I really, really like it!” And they were like, “No. More.” And I remember turning to her, and this was hours into the shoot, and I said, “Just fake an orgasm.” And they were not pleased with me, those producers.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, in fairness, it would’ve been more ideal if she’d just had a real orgasm.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what they were looking for, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And that is not the fault of The Oprah Show in general. It was that particular– disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. But I remembered finishing the show, the first time I did the show. I was like, “I have reached Mount Electable.” And I remember standing in the airport and going, “That couldn’t have been right, because I don’t feel completely, totally fulfilled in all areas of my life. I have to go back, I have to do it again.” And I did get to go back and do it again. And I was encouraged to shriek about how much I was enjoying it. And what I realized was three things: Everybody’s chasing Mount electable stuff. Almost no one can get to the top of Mount Electable, so everybody thinks that that’s why they’re not happy. But the people at the very top aren’t happy. It’s like a whole dream society going on here.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so fascinating. And it is making the promise of universality to be that you can be in a state where your brain is dumping all its serotonin at once. Wake up in the morning: “Oh my God! It’s a beautiful day! So beautiful! Oh, it’s partly cloudy! Oh, I feel like there’s a nice southerly bit of a cold front coming in later!” So to Glennon’s brilliant analogy of you’re scrolling and you’re scrolling and you’re scrolling and you’re like, “Any second now I’m going to hit the perpetual state of something that is only to be experienced in a human body very rarely, if at all.”

Martha Beck:
And it’s, so much of it is connected with how you impress other people. When I think about this, I think, and when I coach someone, including myself, I think, “How would I feel about doing this if no one would ever know I’d done it?” If I would want to do something, even if no one ever knew I’d done it, that’s a thing that gives me real nourishment. But if all I’m looking for is that amount of prestige where somebody would envy me or love me or whatever, it’s always dream food. So there’s this–

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, I’m just picturing if they held the Oscars and when they came to open up: “And the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Feature Film goes to…” and it’d be like, “Aw, enjoy that if it’s you.”

Martha Beck:
We’ll send her a note after the show. Yeah. It really is about how other people view us because we get this craving addictive relationship to approval. And it makes us stupid. And I say this because of the famous, I may have mentioned it before, Spaghetti Tower Challenge. Have I talked about this?

Rowan Mangan:
You talk about it almost daily in my life, almost daily. But I couldn’t tell you for sure.

Martha Beck:
Psychologists gave teams of people a task. They were to build a tower out of uncooked spaghetti, marshmallows, a meter of masking tape, and a meter of string. And they gave this challenge. The idea was build the highest tower you can. And they gave it to MBAs and they gave it to, I’m almost sure I’ve said this before, but oh well, they gave it to lawyers.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I can absolutely guarantee you have said this before, it’s not your imagination. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s interesting.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, all right. So there was one group, all the groups did about the same, which is not very well except for one group who did incredibly well. And that group was 5-year-olds.

Rowan Mangan:
Life coaches.

Martha Beck:
5-year-old life coaches.

Rowan Mangan:
All five-year-olds are life coaches.

Martha Beck:
The only kind I’ll train anymore.

Rowan Mangan:
So the five-year-olds did the best.

Martha Beck:
Once you’re six, you are right out. No, but the reason was so interesting. They said it was because the adults were always jockeying for approval, praise, and avoiding conflict. And the five-year-olds didn’t give a shit. They were like, “Give me that. No, here. No.” They almost didn’t talk at all. But they watched each other and they saw what was working and they were in the task and not in their heads about how they looked to other people doing the task.

Rowan Mangan:
So when we are equating in our minds like success or achievement and equating that to happiness or fulfillment, where we are looking at the dream food and we are thinking, “This is going to fill me up.” It seems to me that one thing that we can kind of draw out if we talk about trinity time for us or our friend with the ice cream and the “attagirl” is that it’s about the experience of how that feels rather than a conceptual thing of what this represents. This is the gold medal. This represents the pinnacle of my athletic achievement. And what it represents is always going to feel empty because we’re animals and that doesn’t make sense to us. Things don’t represent anything. They just are, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
In reality.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Frogs aren’t out there doing things so that other frogs will admire them. In general, they’re not.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, sometimes it’s so hard for me to do a podcast and not just reference memes and videos. All right, so there’s this guy, and we’re obsessed with him and he’s called Vinny, Vinny something, and his handle is like @Vin_ayy and he’s so funny. And if you just go and find “first date with a Moray eel,” that’s just, you’re welcome. You’re just welcome for that. Yes, you are welcome. But he have this very funny thing where an alien is doing a press conference and the people ask if they have advanced technology and he goes, “Yes.” And they say, “Will you give it to us?” And he says, “No.” And they say, “Why not?” And he goes into this hilarious thing that culminates in: “For the same reason you wouldn’t give a refrigerator to a bullfrog. The bullfrog doesn’t know what a refrigerator is. To the bullfrog, it’s just shapes.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, we love him. So yeah, there is to an animal, the things that we torture ourselves to do because we think it’ll make us happy are obviously not going to make anybody happy. They don’t. Praise and approval, aren’t therir– maybe dogs, but that’s because–

Rowan Mangan:
Well, because it feels nice to have your ears stroked.

Martha Beck:
True. Although I think we may have bred some of our insanity into dogs just a little bit.

Rowan Mangan:
But that’s at least a real experience. It’s not something that it represents.

Martha Beck:
And even a dog knows that real appetites, real food is something that can be enjoyed over and over and over again. And always feels like fulfillment when you’ve got enough.

Rowan Mangan:
And you don’t need more of it.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. Yeah. So if you dream that you’ve eaten and you wake up and you haven’t eaten, you’re still starving and you want to eat again. It’s very simple to know that something is real because when you indulge that appetite, it hits the spot. There’s this, “Ahh.” And you look forward to building up some time like an appetite to have it again because it always has that “Ah, fulfillment” feeling. Trinity time, our cuddle at the end of every day, it’s like every single day we all are rushing in from our various things. I’ve been doing my mothering things with Adam. You’ve been doing mothering things with Lila. Karen’s been solving all the problems of the universe, I don’t even know. And then we all get together and we’re like, “Oh, do we just need to go to bed?” And then it’s just like, “No, no, this feels so nice.”

Rowan Mangan:
I think I’ve cracked it. So dream food, we’ve been talking about dream food. I think real food is any experience that makes you go like this: “Nummy nummy num nyum num.”

Martha Beck:
That’s probably true.

Rowan Mangan:
‘Cause don’t I do that every day at trinity time? Nummy, nummy, num nyum num.

Martha Beck:
I wonder if the next time someone is elected president of the United States, if they’ll be up there with their hand on the Bible taking the oath and then just go, “Nummy nummy num nyum num.” We’ll think, “Oh! For him, for her, it works. ”

Rowan Mangan:
It really is Mount Electable!

Martha Beck:
It’s Mount Electable.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s Mount Elected.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Right. But it’s a wonderful thing the way nature has built into us the capacity for incredible fulfillment that can be repeated, but doesn’t need to be increased.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, nice. Nicely put. Yeah. So ideas is not the same as experiences. If it represents something, it’s not a feeling that you can enjoy. And so I think it’s like ask yourself how your body feels or is going to feel when you do that thing or achieve that thing.

Martha Beck:
Your body and your heart. I mean, the things that put you back in that zone of presence that animals feel. They go to a place of peace. And peace looks boring to people who are climbing Mount Electable.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
But—

Rowan Mangan:
It looks boring

Martha Beck:
When you start to focus on it, it turns out to be an infinite country. It is full and rich, and your nervous system absolutely loves it. If you told me I had to stop coloring to go be on a TV show, I would be like, “Por favor, no.” Sorry, it really would be no. I’m like, “Dammit, I don’t want to be on another TV show. I want to color!” And life can be incredibly rewarding in that zone of peace. And even for those people who don’t have huge achievements or fortunes–I mean, you do need a certain level of being okay, but our culture is built on a truth and a lie that when you’re cold and hungry, having food and shelter will make you happier. But the lie is that having 10 meals and 10 houses will make you 10 times happier.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you need– not dream food– actual food.

Martha Beck:
Actual food.

Rowan Mangan:
Delicious. Nummy nummy num, actual food.

Martha Beck:
Nummy nummy num. Go out and find the thing that makes you go “Nummy nummy num!” and…stay wild!

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.