Rowan Mangan:
Hey, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve got a good episode for the peeps coming up today.

Martha Beck:
I think so.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we talk about, in this episode, we talk about what it’s like to feel alien when you’re among the very people that you’re supposed to feel at home with. And that’s come from–it’s a Be Wild Files–it’s come from one of our beautiful listeners.

Martha Beck:
And we’re going to talk about how the spirit of community is different from the simple grouping together of people into clusters, and how if you have people that you feel different from, that can be a good thing because it enhances the wisdom of the crowd.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s like we sort of went in two directions, and I think it’ll be an interesting listen because on the one hand, we want to be with who we want to be with, and on the other hand, sometimes we need to challenge ourselves. So that is a great episode ahead for you. Settle down, make a cup of tea, enjoy, and we’ll see you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And you have arrived at yet another episode of Bewildered. You know it, it’s the podcast for the people who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
And as usual, that is us. So what are you trying to figure out right now, my Rowie?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty, I was going to talk about one thing that I had been thinking about, but in the process of setting up this podcast, we have had so many technical snafus that I just feel like I’m just trying to figure out–because I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I honestly feel like either they’re all spectacular actors, or shit doesn’t go as wrong for most podcasters as often as it does for us. Because they come on, and it honestly just sounds like, I mean we live together so it’s a bit different, but say there’s two people, they’re like, “Hey! Hi, how are you doing? Oh my God, I’m in Philadelphia.” “Yeah? Oh, I’m in New York…” And it’s like, honestly, they’re so fresh that they just–

Martha Beck:
Right? Their sound is perfect. Their look is perfect. They did not struggle with nine different types of ethernet connection or whatever. They just roll out of bed and everything works for them. That’s my theory on everyone but us.

Rowan Mangan:
I think what I’m trying to figure out today, Marty, is why me? It’s an original question that no one’s ever asked before.

Martha Beck:
No one’s ever asked that question before.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s no self-pity.

Martha Beck:
No, none at all.

Rowan Mangan:
The thing was that I decided to get incredibly high on caffeine before we started, and so at the height of our technical issues, it was also the height of my caffeine high.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s not good.

Rowan Mangan:
And so it was like I kind of got some version of roid rage with it.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, I could tell. It was real. It was real, man. It was real.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So that’s what I’m trying to figure out is just why don’t the things, why they don’t work?

Martha Beck:
For you, for me, for us.

Rowan Mangan:
For us, why they don’t work for us? I don’t know. And if anyone knows, please, answers on the back of a postcard, send them to freaking space. I don’t know because I don’t know how that works.

Martha Beck:
I know, they’ll never get to us.

Rowan Mangan:
Just write it on a postcard and throw it out your window. So I love you, everybody. Thanks for bearing with us until this moment and if we’re frazzled, that’s why. Caffeine and Mercury. Marty, what on earth are you trying to figure out? And this better be good.

Martha Beck:
Well, for me, it’s like I watch you put all the gizmos together, and you are like the gizmo girl. I knew when computers were invented that they would be a thing. I was prescient. I was like, someday I should learn to use one of those. Meanwhile, you’re doing all the, you do every kind of computerized function there is, but you also, you are, my dear, Homo habilis. Yeah, habilis.

Rowan Mangan:
Am I? I mean, Homo I won’t argue with. Homo is self-evident.

Martha Beck:
Yes, exactly. So do you know what the Homo habilis did? It was distinctive.

Rowan Mangan:
No, my darling.

Martha Beck:
Tool use. I think that you have a genetic, if we could do a genetic screen for massive amounts of straight-down-the-line tool-using, tool-inventing charisma, you would have inherited a huge amount of it. The problem is that I will do everything, literally, with a piece of wood and a toothpick. And I’m not even exaggerating.

Rowan Mangan:
No. She will eat–she actually told this story last week and I was like, this is so true and people don’t think this about you–if she wants to avoid human beings and she’s at a retreat center or something, she’ll have a jar of peanut butter and a Bic Biro. Do you say “Biro” in America?

Martha Beck:
Pen. Nobody knows what a Biro is.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, that’s stupid because it’s a type of pen.

Martha Beck:
A “Bi-Ro” is you because you’ve dated men and women, hahaha. You homo habilis, you.

Rowan Mangan:
Full-time homo these days, hashtag blessed. Yeah. Well, Biro is a kind of pen, so congratulations. Yeah. Eating peanut butter with a pen out of the jar to avoid humans, and she’ll use a Bic Biro for anything.

Martha Beck:
If I don’t have a spoon. I mean, it’s not like I put in my suitcase a jar of peanut butter and a pen to eat it with. I put in my suitcase a jar of peanut butter, which I think is really incredible tool use. Usually I just smear peanut butter on. Now here’s the thing: I just grab whatever’s handy. I remember I used to do watercolor when I was a teenager and you need things to blot it with, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have a Kleenex or a paper towel around to blot my painting, I would just think, well, this shirt isn’t really that great. Take it off and start using it to blot paint. I use crossover tools.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s like we’re actually at sort of two ends of the spectrum.

Martha Beck:
We are!

Rowan Mangan:
Of how we interact with the objects and tools in our lives. I am always flabbergasted by how you can grab something, use it in a way that it wasn’t, as you say, ever intended to be used, but then as the function for the thing is made redundant by you using it, the object itself ceases to exist to you. This is true. So things just get dropped all around at all times and it’s very–whereas for me, it’s like I want the perfect thing. I want the exact thing. And I will want something, and I don’t know if it exists or not, and I will Google “Thing that is kind of like a blah blah blah,” and it’s a wonderful thing to live in the age of Amazon, that’s all I can say.

Martha Beck:
So here’s the thing, anything that I do or care to– anybody in the house, anything we do, Ro is scouting the gizmos for us. So something comes–

Rowan Mangan:
Because I love you.

Martha Beck:
–in the mail and it’s something like, for example, and I love you, but this thing that you bought, it’s for applying mascara, which as a good Mormon girl, you might not know this, a good Utah Mormon girl, we learned to use appropriate makeup when we’re like 12 and then you’re not supposed to ever go outside without it. So I’ve been putting on mascara with a mascara applicator for 130 years, and Ro bought me this thing that’s difficult to describe. It sort of looks like the mouth of an eel, and the function of it is you press it up against your eye in some way and then you can mascara the crap out of your eyelashes in a way that is supposed to be easier. But in fact, to me, nearly blinded me the first time I tried to use it. I would put on mascara with my fingers if I had to.

Rowan Mangan:
This is the first time I’m hearing about my thoughtful gift, by the way.

Martha Beck:
It was a wonderful, thoughtful gift and I’m very grateful that you went to the trouble. We got dinner–

Rowan Mangan:
China that came from. All the way from China for you.

Martha Beck:
I know! Speaking of watercolor, Ro bought me this little gizmo that– it’s a plastic bottle turned upside down on a plastic stand with a little button, and it’s meant to be that you press the button and you empty the dirty water that you’ve been using in your paint and then clean water flows into it, and it works. It works. It works very similarly to a bottle of water. It’s so fancy.

Rowan Mangan:
You use it.

Martha Beck:
I do use it because I love you, and it works as well as a bottle of water. It’s great. It’s fantastic. I love it. Oh boy, our relationship is degenerating as we speak.

Rowan Mangan:
Thoughtful, kind, loving gifts that until this moment I thought were very gratefully received.

Martha Beck:
I love the watercolor tool. I do love the watercolor water tool. Unfortunately, Karen, we just had a thing. We got her, Ro and I got together because Ro showed me something, and I understand how you feel because it was like this thing Karen will love! Because what Karen does for enjoyment—

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t buy for Karen. I just have to say, you cannot buy for Karen. She’s impossible.

Martha Beck:
You can’t! But she watches Scandi-Noir movies, so Scandinavian movies on her phone. Not on a computer and not on a television, on her phone. So she’s constantly– she will hold her phone up in front of her face for three to five solid hours. Now at that point, I would be losing an arm, right? So Ro found this thing that goes behind your head and over your shoulders, and it sticks out in front of you and holds your phone up at exactly the right level to watch.

Rowan Mangan:
It can rescue arms.

Martha Beck:
Karen just started laughing hysterically and refused to use it. It’s not the Danish way, apparently. She’s into the Danish way. It’s like, “We used ice for that.”

Rowan Mangan:
People don’t understand how much easier I can make their lives.

Martha Beck:
But I have to say, the joy of watching you use your special gizmos just makes my heart soar. And we recently went on a trip and every time we unpacked in a different room, Ro would go, it’s here. “It” is a special pad that she puts around one leg, one knee specifically, so that while she’s sleeping, the other knee will not knock against it uncomfortably. Really?

Rowan Mangan:
I love that thing.

Martha Beck:
Yes, you love it and I love to see how much you love it. It’s amazing. Oh boy, it’s like I’m confessing on a live public forum that I’m not as good a tool user as you, even when you buy me a tool that I should enjoy using, and I’m trying to be a better tool user, and that is what I’m trying to figure out.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I think we’ve all just learned a lot about you in this past little segment. And your gratitude.

Martha Beck:
Oooh, the librarian in you is coming out.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, let’s move on. We’ll take this offline, I think, my darling.

Rowan Mangan:
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 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.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, so we haven’t done a Be Wild Files episode for a while, have we? Which for any uninitiated listeners is the kind of episode where we talk about what you are trying to figure out for a change. Because as I like to say, it’s not all about us.

Martha Beck:
What?!

Rowan Mangan:
Look, hey, I don’t make the rules. So listen, today we’re going to hear from Alia.

Alia:
Hi, Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan. I feel like I’m connecting more frequently with my true nature and as a result, I feel like an alien from another planet, in particular when it comes to relating to people that have been part of my life for a long time, whether it’s friends or colleagues or extended family. And I grew up in a culture with an understanding that your family is central. It’s everything. You almost don’t exist. If you are not somehow enmeshed with your family, and that no longer feels true for me, and it’s a bit disorienting. Is it normal that I prefer to hang out with just a couple of folks who really get me? Shouldn’t I be trying to develop a greater sense of connection and community with others? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Thanks.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve felt like an alien from another planet. Have you?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes. This moment I do, and I have for years. And when I first told this to Karen, she panicked and called a bunch of people to come turn me normal and it didn’t work.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe she didn’t call them to turn you normal. Maybe she just called them for backup because she felt like you were about to turn into a giant lizard or a praying mantis, a human-sized praying mantis or something.

Martha Beck:
It’s a fair bet it, yeah. I could see why she would do that because most people need other people, and she needed other people around her to feel calm.

Rowan Mangan:
I think there’s something like we’ve talked about recently on episodes about neurodivergency, and I can’t help thinking that there’s a correlation between that alien feeling maybe for some of us at least, and having neurodivergent tendencies. Because if our brains do work differently and you’re in a group of people who are neurotypical, for example, I’m just saying that that could make you feel like an alien. I know I do.

Martha Beck:
I remember when I first heard the phrase “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which was the title of a book, but I think it comes from the Bible. And I remember resonating so strongly with that as a child, and I had never traveled. I had never been a stranger in a strange land. I grew up in this huge family and I felt completely alien. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a conundrum I think because we do, as you say, need each other. And I know that there are quite clear directives from the culture, as Alia is kind of intimating, that tell us how we should cluster into groups. Absolutely. There’s a sort of immediate family, extended family, close friends, it’s sort of smudged together. I mean, for instance. And then there’s things like there’s little social categories that you can fall into, like moms at the school drop-off or whatever.

Martha Beck:
Oh my gosh, the mom thing. I remember when I had grade-school kids and this other mom who was, she brought her kid over for a play date and we were talking and she said, “Isn’t it just amazing how you just want to watch your kids constantly?” And she and the other moms had been watching their kids at swim practice so intensely that the coaches had banned them. So they rented a hotel room across the window– across the street and watched through the window through binoculars. And she said, “Isn’t it just amazing how you feel compelled to do that? Because we all do.” And I just looked at her and thought, “What planet am I from? Not your planet.” And trying to fit in when it was supposed to come naturally, it drained my energy. You’re supposed to feel fulfilled in these clusters. That’s, I think, what Alia is saying that you not only are clustered with people, but that’s meant to feel fulfilling to you. But to me, trying to fit in with almost every group I’ve ever been in just sucks energy out of me. Now, being with a community of people I feel really relaxed around– just one or two people or a whole group– that actually adds to my energy. So that must be what it does for other people.

Rowan Mangan:
I think, so there’s almost something here that we can start to delineate is that there’s assigned community, which are the people that the culture tells you you should enjoy spending time with, and many people do– and good on you, nothing wrong with it, but if that works, that’s lucky. And then there’s what we’re going to call true community, and sometimes they could be the same thing, and we’re not saying otherwise. So Marty’s saying that being with people that we’re “supposed” to be with if they’re not true community is going to suck her energy. And being with people who is going to give her energy, which I think is sensible. I think that’s fairly sensible and fairly, to me, normal kind of thing. And I think the size, what Alia is saying about a few people versus a lot of people, I think that probably changes over time, maybe. And I also think these questions are, it’s just an interesting moment in history to be thinking about this stuff because I do think that these ideas of these assigned community notions that they feel like a sort of holdover to me from when the village would be the whole world. You know what I mean?

Martha Beck:
Yeah! When you read fairytales about the most beautiful girl in the kingdom, the most, the bravest knight in the kingdom– the kingdoms they’re talking about were about 135 people. That’s the span of human attention before the band has to sort of break up. We have the attention span to hold like 135 humans in our heads. And that was the village size and that was it. That’s who you got to see.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, I just thought of another correlation is what about high school? When you say about the most beautiful girl in the kingdom and the bravest knight, it’s like, oh, you can see that as your kind of, I dunno what you would call it, but your year level, your group of people that you go through high school with, that would also nourish that sort of idea of the village, right? Because there’s a whole little society in there.

Martha Beck:
There’s a really strong tendency to start a band size from 50 to 135 that our brains seem to have really locked in in terms of evolution. And whenever we’re in a group between those two sizes, we start to create the same dynamics. And you’re right, it’s a village environment and it takes hold of us whenever we’re in a subgroup. In the past, those were the only people you ever got to meet– ever.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s a survival need in that instance. Because otherwise you’re cast out, or I don’t know what, thrown in a well or something. I don’t know about villages. But now that we can connect in all sorts of ways, including the way we’re connecting right now with you listening on your little headphones in your little car. I don’t know where, but I know that we’re connected.

Martha Beck:
They may be in a well.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe they’re in a well. Save your battery!

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
So yeah, because it’s not a survival need, then suddenly just being shoved together with someone or being told that the people you are shoved together with should be a community, that doesn’t create the same sense. So it’s like, okay, so what does create a sense of community, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, I Iooked up the word “community” because I’m a massive nerd.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you’re a nerd, yeah.

Martha Beck:
And it comes from the Latin “communitas” and I was interested to see that there are two meanings. And one is that it’s just a group of people who happen to be together. And the other is a spiritual sense of communion that arises between people who feel connected. And that can arise whether or not somebody is physically with you. So somebody goes out traveling, that sense of community with them doesn’t go away just because they’re physically absent. So yeah, even back in the days of spoken Latin, they differentiated between the sort of physical reality of a group and the spiritual sense of connection.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s interesting. That it wasn’t assumed to be the same thing.

Martha Beck:
No. And then there was an anthropologist in the 1960s who started using the Latin word “communitas” to refer to the connection that can arise–and this is so interesting because we’re talking about stepping out of culture. Communitas arises when people who are together step out of their social roles. And this is why in villages, as you correctly surmised, where you have that necessary clustering of people, even there they did things, every pre-modern society did something that was meant to create, partly meant to create that spiritual sense of community, even though they were always physically grouped together and depending on each other. And the thing they would all do is ritual.

Rowan Mangan:
As a way of stepping outside the role.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a way of, there would be something where maybe you’d be isolated in a hut or a cave or something for a day or two so that you can find out who you are. Sometimes some societies would take the young men out, obscure their faces so they didn’t know who they were anymore, and bewilder them. It’s like the Bewildered podcast they take– I think in Australia and many other places, the young men would be taken out into the wilderness. And then the older men of the–

Rowan Mangan:
The Indigenous.

Martha Beck:
The Indigenous, yeah. The older male elders would use these things called bullroarers, which you’d whirl them in the air and they made this terrifying sound and it wasn’t natural. And they never, the pubescent boys, men, who were going out there would not have heard this sound. And it was meant to make them feel like they were in an alien place. And then they would have to figure out between themselves how to handle a completely new situation when they had dropped their social roles and they were in what’s called the liminal space on the threshold. Neither one thing nor another. And so in some ways nothing, and in other ways able to become or do anything. And that created a communitas, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and I think we had that experience. We went to Costa Rica earlier in the year, and we were basically on a retreat. We went to the Imiloa Institute where we’re going to be running retreats in the future. And we had that experience of communitas, of stepping out of social roles through ritual– and through getting away, which we’ve talked about before.

Martha Beck:
And since we are so antisocial–I expected there to be lovely people, and I always get along with people at a kind of surface-y level. I can mask up and be like a human even if I feel like a stranger in a strange land. But we did rituals that Imiloa had already established. There’s this gorgeous water– well, shouldn’t spoil it for people who want to go to the retreats. But there’s this sort of sacred place you go to. And they did a ritual where they have this special blue mud, blue clay, and you obscure your identity. Clay, blue clay. And it was shocking to me how it took me out of culture. Out of our culture. We do not typically in our culture– I don’t know if you know this, Ro, but in Manhattan, if you go for a job or something, typically they will not smear you with blue clay.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but wouldn’t you be expected to show up already pre-smeared?

Martha Beck:
Pre-smeared? Oh probably in some places.

Rowan Mangan:
Just to show you’re a self-starter.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but I have to say we were busy putting on the clay. I turned around and you looked like a character from Avatar, and it was super cool. There were other people there, as we said, and they all sort of looked like characters from Avatar. But as our faces became obscured and people’s bodies became obscured, at first people were really self-conscious, but one of the effects of the clay was it sort of covered up body flaws.

Rowan Mangan:
Body floss?

Martha Beck:
Flaws.

Rowan Mangan:
Flaws, okay.

Martha Beck:
Not even flaws, but things that people consider flaws in their body, or people– it was covering up, it made everybody look really smooth and Avatar and awesome. Everybody looked awesome.

Rowan Mangan:
Everyone looked awesome.

Martha Beck:
But not human.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s right.

Martha Beck:
And I could feel myself relaxing as everyone got a little confused and shy and then surrendered their identities because they could see that nobody could actually see each other’s faces the same way or bodies.

Rowan Mangan:
Even in that little tiny short-term microculture that we’d built up as retreat participants.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I was with someone who had gone through my coach training program, but I’d never met them ever. And when we had the blue clay on our bodies, suddenly I was like, I’d been thinking I need to connect with her because I love people who go through the program, but I’m so shy. Well when we had the blue clay on, my shyness went away and my sense of separation went away. That’s so cool. And it was very, very bonding with that person and many others.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel the same way. And I mean, it’s funny because it’s like that’s part of the purpose of going on retreat to retreat from culture. And we’re constantly having roles assigned to us and therefore groups that we’re supposed to belong to, and to have that opportunity to rediscover who we are separate from all those roles in the culture.

Martha Beck:
And the idea of– I love retreat because it’s a subtraction work. You’re not adding anything. And it’s like my favorite quote from the Tao Te Ching: “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment, every day something is dropped.” So you drop and drop and drop, you retreat from something. This world where we feel like aliens. And it’s not specified where we go because we don’t need to know who we are when we’re there. It subtracts our social identity and all the codes of how we’re supposed to associate with people who are supposed to be in our groups. And we don’t have to have an individual special self. We can just disappear. And weirdly, as you drop your sense of a separate self, which is so much what our culture is about: Be a separate self, be individualistic! As you drop that need to be a separate person, you drop into the nature of relationships without culture, and it’s really lovely and intimate.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so cool. Yeah. It’s funny because our retreat that we’re going to be doing at Imiloa is called “Pure.Wild.Self.” And we use the word “self” in a very different sense from the way you just used it, not as the egoic, individualistic, separate self but Self, the way that it’s talked about in Internal Family Systems therapy where “Self” is actually a stand-in word for higher self.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Or soul.

Martha Beck:
And as Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, told me himself, the Self is in everything and everybody. So part of what was so intimate about that– sorry, we’re raving about it because we had a really fun time– but the Self included these gigantic trees and plants and the waterfall, and it included the mountains and the ocean. Self was everywhere. So you didn’t need to do anything to protect yourself. You could go into that liminal space between what you used to be and what you’re going to be, and you’re just present as part of the Self that was the entire ecosystem.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I love that. I love that. So to be free of the role, in a sense, is an opportunity to find yourself in your essence, whatever it is beneath the role.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Drop the role, and you don’t feel that you’ve lost anything. You feel that you’ve found the essence of who you are.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, it’s normal, I think we’ve established, to need to cluster to some extent, right? As social apes, this is part of our makeup. So some people I think are very solitary creatures, and that’s good too. But I think that in our socialization, a lot of– within culture, again–a lot of our personality gets downloaded into us from our family of origin and local culture and all those sorts of things. So if that personality that you’ve downloaded is a good fit for who you are, that’s great. You might never need to question that original cluster. And people can get really into it as though, I don’t know, maybe this is just a personal sort of bugbear, but I think some people can take their family of origin or their community of origin–it can be a football team or nationalism or something, and people get so because it’s a good fit for them, then it’s superior or something. And that’s so strange because it seems to me like such an accident if you feel like a good fit in your family or in your community.

Martha Beck:
Speaking of parents and sports, there was a time many years ago, but these two children’s hockey teams were playing against each other. And two of the fathers got into such a violent fight over the game that one of them killed the other. He pushed a vending machine on him and it killed him.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the most American murder I’ve ever heard.

Martha Beck:
American Murder: Vending Machine. So true. “We dispense death.” But you’re so right. It’s completely arbitrary. They just group a bunch of people together. “Here. There’s a little thing, you push it around with a stick. Go on the ice and your fathers will kill each other because of it.” What?! I do think we fall into that, and part of feeling like an alien is maybe not having that gear.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I don’t think I want to kill the other hockey team’s parent.

Martha Beck:
So some clusters actually, what we try to create, and we’re trying to create with the Bewildered podcast is to gather people where the common culture is actually to encourage people to be their unique selves, to find Self with a capital S. But a lot of the groups you’ll fall into get into the othering that is very, very inherent in the human brain. And those groups, they prescribe conformity, and then they other anyone who’s outside the group. And if you happen to be in that and it doesn’t work for you, you get this feeling of being an alien. I had a client once who said it this way. She said, “I don’t love the people I belong to, and I don’t belong to the people I love.”

Rowan Mangan:
Just on the thing about the pressure to all be the same, I think that the idea of diversity and spectrums and any ideas that don’t just divide people into “us” and “them”– that stress plurality rather than duality among people– is always going to kind of confound that othering thing. That’s definitely part of our psychology. And you can see why it would be from an evolutionary point of view. But yeah, “I don’t love the people I belong to and I don’t belong to the people I love.” I totally, I mean, I do love the people I belong to now.

Martha Beck:
Now I do. And I mean, I loved my family growing up, but as I matured, I got less and less like them. And because we were all raised in a very sort of rigid religious system, there wasn’t a template for encouraging individuality that I could find. So if you just happen to be in a group that wants conformity and you naturally are like that, you’ll thrive. But if you aren’t, then the very pressure that holds bands together can make you feel pushed off your true nature. And then you may learn to act like you belong, but you’ll end up feeling lonely and isolated like a stranger in a strange land. And if you all are feeling that way out there in podcast listening world, we’re just validating that’s a real thing. And if you feel that way, it’s because of the dynamic we’re talking about.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think that there’s just a tendency towards absolutism sometimes. There can always be a both. There can always be an every in it as well. I love the people I belong to, and I live a really long way away from them because I connected so deeply with you and with our family that we’ve chosen. And I just mean it doesn’t all have to be so “all or nothing.” And I just wanted to say what I sort of brought up before about diversity, there’s almost a kind of problem with our post-village world where if you were in the village, and yes, you have a role and it’s all very problematic and you don’t get to express your true self and blah blah, but one thing that you do get access to is you have to learn to tolerate a lot of different people and a lot of different types of people.

Rowan Mangan:
And now I think there’s this sort of trend where we’re kind of algorithmically connected or exposed only to people who think the way that we do. We never have to be exposed to different opinions, and that’s much more comfortable for us. But is it shrinking our comfort zones? And are we kind of vulnerable to being triggered really easily because we are not building our resilience again to difference, to different ideas? What are we losing at the same time as we’re gaining so much opportunity to connect with people? And I just want to say as disclaimer, I’m totally like that. I hate dealing with people whose politics are different from mine. I will go to great lengths to avoid it. I’m not saying I practice anything different. I’m just saying that could be a bit of a problem.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like the first time in history there can be a vast crowd of introverts. Right? I remember one time we were planning a conference and the extroverts were going, “You know, we should have a special meeting for the introverts. They should have a place to go. And I was like, “We do. They’ll all have their own hotel room. I’ll be in mine, they’ll be in theirs.”

Rowan Mangan:
They know where to go, guys.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. They don’t need a crowd. It doesn’t make us unhappy the way it makes you unhappy when there’s no crowd. And when we went on our little retreat as research for the retreats we’re running, I was like, “Ugh, there’s going to be other people there? Oh dear.” And when we got there, okay, it was very self-selected, people who are sort of into the same things we are. But I was out of my comfort zone, and my comfort zone got bigger because I connected so deeply. And I have to say the ancient tradition of ritual was very, very powerful in creating that. There’s also something, it reminded me that when we avoid diversity, we lose a bit of what is called the wisdom of crowds. I may have mentioned it on the podcast before, but it’s this weird thing in economics where if a group of people, a crowd of people all try to say, come up with the number of beans there would be in a barrel, the average, if you add them all up and divide by the number of people, the average guess will be closer to accurate than any one person’s guess.

Martha Beck:
So a crowd–

Rowan Mangan:
So what’s the benefit of that?

Martha Beck:
A crowd, ostensibly, is wiser than any individual in the crowd. And here’s the big, big thing that we’ve got to remember. The more diverse the crowd is, the more wise its decisions are. So for example, when my son Adam was diagnosed with Down Syndrome at Harvard, I was surrounded by Harvard professors and Harvard doctors and they were basically saying, “You really need to get rid of this kid. He’s not going to be smart, he’s not going to be like us.” But the wisdom of crowds says that a group of people that has that person with Down Syndrome and people with all kinds of diversity is going to be wiser than a bunch of intellectuals who are all alike.

Rowan Mangan:
For me, the equivalent of that would be, and where that would be confronting for me is that would include people who wear red baseball caps with letters and words on them that make me feel scared. But that’s also true that the crowd’s going to be wiser if it includes those people too, which ugh.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So let us accept our individuality and our differences in our sense of being alien and the urge to belong with the people we love. And let’s keep– this was a huge light bulb for me that we can– you were saying you should challenge the algorithm once in a while. You should challenge the–

Rowan Mangan:
We mustn’t get too comfortable in our algorithm.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You can find people who are really, really exactly like you, at least when you’re both chatting online. There may be times, as I used to say, remember when we went to the Redwood Forest and I was obsessed with nature and just wanted to be out in nature, and then it got dark and there were no stores, and all I had to eat was cheesecake. And I was driving along in the dark going, “I’m all about nature until I need something.” So yeah, it was a huge thing for me that let’s bond with our alien pals, but as you said, challenge the algorithm periodically to keep our lives from shrinking and our purview from getting smaller and less wise.

Rowan Mangan:
And in doing so, we will all…

Martha Beck:
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.