Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. You’ve been here before. You know us. We’re the bewildered ones. This is the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Which we always are. Sadly. On and on we go. Ro, what are you trying to figure out these days?

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s been a while since I’ve brought to the listener one of the many things I’m trying to figure out about you, my love.

Martha Beck:
About me?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You sound so surprised. And yet you are such a mystery.

Martha Beck:
I’m a mystery to myself. Yeah. What is this? I’m feeling very vulnerable.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, there’s no need. So there’s this thing between us where I have a way of needing the exact right tool for every job. And you have this thing where you can make anything that’s lying around the tool for that job.

Martha Beck:
I pride myself, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so you should, but I just suddenly this morning had this memory from back in the summer when we were sweet summer children and we had no idea what was in store for us, and you were training for your anxiety walk as I recall, and you were going out every morning and strolling along. So off you went in the morning training away. It was summer. It was beautiful. And one of the things you’ll find with walking in summertime, and I think our listeners will agree, is that at a certain point you’re going to want a little hydration.

Martha Beck:
Well, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah?

Martha Beck:
That’s what streams and puddles are for.

Rowan Mangan:
And you would’ve done that too, but you’re just ever so slightly more civilized than that. Just very slightly. And so you thought, “No problem. What I’m going to do is I’m going to get a water bottle,” which I applauded you for. I could not see anything wrong with that water bottle. Sure. You can carry water in it. Right? And so off you would go. And Marty, I once drove past you and you were out there walking very, I mean, a very impressive figure that you cut.

Martha Beck:
Walking. Yes, I can walk. Did you know this?

Rowan Mangan:
You were striding out across the landscape, striding and carrying in your hand, not so much a bottle of, well, it was a bottle of water. I can’t misrepresent that. You know, for the listener, I want to paint a word picture. You know you eat in a diner and they have plastic bottles that they put. There’ll be a red one. That’s for the ketchup. There’ll be a yellow one. What’s that for, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Mustard.

Rowan Mangan:
Traditionally it’s for mustard.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So as you strode very impressively across the landscape, were you or were you not carrying a yellow mustard bottle?

Martha Beck:
It was only a dollar. I got mustard, ketchup, and mayo bottles for a dollar. It was 33 cents. I ask you, are you going to get a more economic water bottle than that?

Rowan Mangan:
I swear to God I was not querying the economic rationalism of your decision. I was just—

Martha Beck:
Were you under the impression that I was sucking mustard as I walked?

Rowan Mangan:
I was not. I was not. Because I do know you slightly better, but it’s still baffling to me that that would. I mean, let’s not even go into that’s not enough water. I would have needed liters, but it literally had a picture of a diner waitress on the bottle. She’s looking for it. Yeah. So she—there I am—for those watching on YouTube, what does it? I can’t get it in focus. Mustard. It literally says mustard. And then if you weren’t getting that it was a mustard bottle from a diner, there’s a diner waitress figure holding the mustard bottle.

Martha Beck:
I also use it for watercolor.

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s like a dream within a dream. It’s like Inception. It’s like a mustard bottle on the mustard bottle is painted a picture of someone holding the mustard bottle. It’s really deep. It’s very deep. Anyway, you will never be completely figured out to me, and I love that about you.

Martha Beck:
You on the other hand, would only use this bottle ever for mustard.

Rowan Mangan:
Correct.

Martha Beck:
And if you got some other condiments, say, I don’t know, horseradish, and you needed to have a bottle for it and the mustard bottle was available but empty, you would buy a horseradish bottle rather than put horseradish in the mustard bottle. True or false?

Rowan Mangan:
Actually, I need to go back one step because I wouldn’t put just, like mustard is not specific enough for me. I would need a bottle that said Dijon mustard or whatever, yellow mustard. I can’t. Yeah, so it’s all moot.

Martha Beck:
“Don’t turn the eggs with that spatula. We have a special egg spatula for when you’re doing easy over as opposed to scrambled.”

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s how everything works.

Martha Beck:
There are so many tools in our house. You are—what is—Homo Habilis is the tool-using ape. You are a Homo Habilis.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I’m trying to figure out our car.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh gosh.

Martha Beck:
That car that we did purchase, which is a wonderful, I will not say the name of it, the brand.

Rowan Mangan:
Can you me give a clue, though?

Martha Beck:
It’s the one I drive to take the dogs for a walk.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, got it.

Martha Beck:
And when we got it, our insurance agent who got us the insurance for this car was beyond thrilled because apparently it’s very, very safe. He was like, “Oh God, this car is so—this car is safe. It is so—” We just sat there blankly waiting for him to do the paperwork.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we actually talked about this on a podcast before. He seemed to be having some sort of sexual epiphany.

Martha Beck:
He did. Okay, but that’s not my point. My point is that the engineers who designed this car had this bizarre obsession with people needing the radio to go on automatically.

Rowan Mangan:
Ah, yes.

Martha Beck:
I picture them sitting in meetings. Every day when I get into this car and have to deal with this issue, I think of them sitting around going, “Okay, so what can we do to make this car really special? Well, the second you turn it on, the radio goes on full volume.” Yeah. Always, always, always, always. Doesn’t matter if it’s turned off, it goes on. All right, when you—

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, wait sir, sir. But what about if they turned it off before they shut the car off before?

Martha Beck:
No matter. It turns on anyway. And when they stop the car, if the radio is off, it’ll turn on then.

Rowan Mangan:
When they stop the car, the radio will turn on?

Martha Beck:
Yes, it will. What do people really want when they’re backing up? Say to maneuver through a parking lot? I know! The radio should turn on automatically.

Rowan Mangan:
KCMW. Classic hits.

Martha Beck:
What if, oh, say they’ve got the little phone service on linking with the car and they make a phone call? Well, clearly the radio should go on! And it’s always like the polka station at full volume.

Rowan Mangan:
Like the polka? Polka, polka. Okay. I was thinking poker. Royal flush.

Martha Beck:
Wonderful genre, for all you polka lovers out there, it’s a fabulous genre of music, but it’s either that or it’s like some weird arch-conservative radio station or something. It’s never—somebody in that car design team managed to get this through all the barriers that there are to the different gizmos. What made them all think we need the radio to go on every time we change lanes?

Rowan Mangan:
I think, like, deep existential fear of silence.

Martha Beck:
You know what? I think you’re right. This just went from light comedy to deep, deep tragedy that people at this particular car thing are just sitting around going, “Somebody turn the radio, I cannot stand my thoughts.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And when you drive, you’re prone to think.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Even if it’s like, “Am I about to run over something as I reverse?”

Martha Beck:
Right. “You don’t want that thought. Here’s the polka station.” Yeah. I cannot figure it out. Can’t figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
No one can.

Martha Beck:
Anyway. It’s like, did I ever tell you I—Do you know how many levels of investigation medications go through to get to the public? They have to go through all these boards. And I once was on a medication that had passed all those review boards and it was because I couldn’t stop feeling like I needed to pee. So they literally gave me a medication called Urispas. It was to calm spasms of urine, I suppose? Sorry, this was unrelated. The car—I think what happened is the guy who named Urispas went over to this car company and he said, “Look, I don’t know cars, but I have some great ideas.”

Rowan Mangan:
I’m an ideas man.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, he’s an ideas man. So if y’all have a car that does this too, perhaps we can commiserate online at some point. Anyway, I haven’t figured it out.

Rowan Mangan:
No, clearly.

Martha Beck:
Haven’t figured it out. But let’s talk about our topic for the day.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi there, I’m Ro, and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out, great. Review, subscribe, join, and you all have a great day now.

Martha Beck:
What’s our topic for the day, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty, I’m so glad you asked because that topic for today is kind of about the game of life, I guess you could say. I mean, it wouldn’t be Bewildered if we weren’t going to plunge deep into a metaphor that we can’t fully ever unpack. Right? But I’m going to tell you and the listener about this game that we’re all playing here, right? I’ll tell you some of the rules and how they work. So this doesn’t really explain the topic of the podcast, but I’m building to it. Imagine you’re in a car and someone’s about to blare a radio at you.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And you’re building, you’re building. Build some more, Roey.

Rowan Mangan:
Let me build, let me. Here we go. So at the beginning of the game, we all get a human. Yes. So here you are given your human, you’re given your human, you’re given your human.

Martha Beck:
You don’t mean you are a human who owns a human. You get a body, a human body.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. You are given the full equipment of one kind of human or another at the beginning of the game called life. Yes. Boom. You’ve been given your human. “You get a human. And you get a human and you get a human.” Right.

Martha Beck:
That’s right.

Rowan Mangan:
So this human will be ours for the duration. And even though we’re going to have some say over what it ultimately does, it’s going to turn out to some extent the way it’s going to turn out. It is a human. I mean, bless, at the end of the day, it’s a human. It can only do so much. And so it’ll have a personality and it’ll have preferences. And I’ll be completely honest, sometimes those personalities and preferences may not be what we ourselves might have chosen. Or what the culture might’ve chosen.

Martha Beck:
Right. Definitely. Don’t you notice, here we are with our culture coming from consensus, which is culture to coming to our senses, which is nature. So you’re saying that nature doesn’t always give us the body that our culture would’ve wanted us to have, yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
Body, brain, the whole shebang. So Marty, tell me about what sort of human you got this one around.

Martha Beck:
I got a small warped human. It hunches around, it needs way too much sleep. It loves to color and it loves animals and babies. It habitually forgets. Its favorite activity is forgetting appointments. And then when gently nudged, you just say to it, “Marty, do you have an appointment right now?” And it gives its alarm call, which is, “Oh shit!” but much, much, much louder than that. It also, oh my gosh, it cannot human like the other humans when it comes to human things that humans do together. It cannot do a party. It cannot do a crowd. It cannot do a party at a crowd or a crowded party. It definitely can’t do crowds and parties with people drinking and loud music and the radio turning on in the car. It can’t. I’ve taken it to so many parties and it just can’t. It leaves. I have no control.

Rowan Mangan:
The worst thing about it for your human, I imagine, is that it goes running out of the party and gets in the car. The radio turns on.

Martha Beck:
Because humans, they seem to want loud sounds from other humans all times. All times.

Rowan Mangan:
And we didn’t get those humans this time around. We weren’t left to those humans.

Martha Beck:
So what kind of human did you get, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m glad you asked. I had an encounter where I got a great deal of insight into my human recently, and it’s kind of the little moment in my life that kicked off this whole episode. I’m going to tell you about it in some detail, and it may not sound like a big deal, but for me, I really felt like I connected with my human in that moment, which was my human had wanted some shoes for dropping off the child in.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Because there can only be one tool for a specific task. You wear a different pair of shoes to drop off your child as opposed to, I don’t know, walking yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s to do with the fact that one wears slippers in the winter and slippers slip off. So this shoe should slip on. I’m not going to go into it in a great deal of detail. Well, no, I am, actually. Let me tell you.

Martha Beck:
The function of each object must be precise and calculated to match your animal’s proportions. Do not buy Roey any gifts and send them to her because they will have to fit her proportions and her human’s demands.

Rowan Mangan:
My human is very particular and I just had this moment because a lot of the time and the point of this episode is a lot of the time we forget that we’re not our human. We get into, we look out from our human’s eyes. So we think that that’s who we are. And I had this moment of separation from that and it was I got home from dropping off our daughter and it was time to take off the dropping-off-daughter shoes and put the slippers back on, for indeed, lo, I had returned to the house where the slippers are. So there I was in the mudroom where the slippers and the shoes are kept, obviously. And I slipped—well anyway, sort of a physical moment, but let’s just say I watched my human slip off her shoes in a very specific way, slip on her slippers in a very specific way, put her shoes on a shelf and bask for a moment quietly to herself in the perfection of what had just happened with the shoes. Now my human has not actually been diagnosed with OCD, but I hasten to add, nor has she ever been assessed for it.

Martha Beck:
I said nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So my human is like that, but only 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time she’s running around, she doesn’t have any shoes, she can’t find them, she hasn’t seen them for a week and a half. And that’s how it is. And somewhere are all the shoes for every possible occasion. And she has no fucking idea where she left them. So I think sometimes we have to recognize that, oh, that’s a real thing to have to walk around in a human like that.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. Wow. You made it through that turnover from shoes to slippers and back again really, really well, which your human cared about.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, she was so happy. She was so happy, and I was happy for her, quite honestly. I was happy for her. And that was quite a countercultural moment. Dare I say it, right? Because—

Martha Beck:
How so?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, what does culture say about how we should treat our humans in this game? I think—do you think it would be fair to say the culture says your human should be a beast of burden?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. For sure.

Rowan Mangan:
You work that human, ride it hard and put it away wet. Right?

Martha Beck:
And I would go further. I would say there is no such thing as you having a human. You are nothing but the body and mind and personality that is walking around looking human. That is all you are. And the sense that you are looking out from it doesn’t come into our culture, I guess into some it does, but not into ours. And by the way, you’d better damn well control the thing. Make sure that your body looks and acts and sleeps and parties and does everything the way the culture prescribes. Yes. And you can. That’s part of it. You can, if you really tried, you could.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh, and it’s such a relief when you can come to realize that you don’t have to be the human at all. You can just ride it around like a horse a bit. And in doing that, and I guess that’s what we’re talking about today, it’s like learning when you let it have its head a little bit and trot forward and go eat some lovely grass. And when you’re more like, “Hey, I think we need to go over here now.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, so you have a relationship that is influential but not controlling. Is that fair to say? With your human.

Rowan Mangan:
I’d like to say that that was the case. I can’t say that it always is.

Martha Beck:
But it’s a nice goal.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Nice. Actually, it’s so interesting to me that I see things like I just bought a book by an Indian guru whom I love, and it’s called You Are Not Your Body. And I was like, okay. So I started and it’s literally just this man talking for an hour about you may think you’re your body and your mind, but you aren’t I. And I don’t know, I never ever felt like I was this body or this mind. Have you ever felt like you are your body/mind? Did you grow out of that or something?

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like, I mean, I think I’m a weirdo in many ways, and so I wouldn’t like to speculate, but I think for many of us it’s like a—I know I’ve never felt like my body or my mind, not for a single second, but I think for some of us, there’s a subculture within our general sort of, you call it the weird cultures western whatever, industrialized where within a certain kind of yoga, New Agey sort of set, there’s an understanding that we’re not our body, I think. But I guess what is fun to push towards and what we can talk about today a bit is that we are also not our mind. We are not a personality. I think that’s a bit more of a stretch sometimes. Not for everyone. And I know there’ll be a ton of the Cahoot who are just like, “Yeah, no duh.”

Martha Beck:
Right. I am going to push this one step further and it may freak people out. But I have just always felt this way. And I remember I said it to Karen once before we knew you, and her response to this was to call as many people as she could find to come over and just hang out.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, what did you say to her? I am not clear on what you said.

Martha Beck:
I said to her, “I’ve never felt human. I’m in a human. Like, I’m going to die, but this is not what I am.” And she got really, really unnerved by that.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I can see that for Karykoo it would be like, “She doesn’t think she’s a human. You know what this calls for? Shit ton of humans. We’ll get some humans in here. We’ll teach her how to human.”

Martha Beck:
Exactly. Oh, and the worst thing I can deal with is a bunch of humans. Anyway. So I don’t know if I’ve just said something incredibly radical that is going to upset people and make them want to come after us with pitchforks or something. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I’ve never felt human. Have you ever felt human?

Rowan Mangan:
No. Well, no. If you ask me that question, I’ll say no. But do I go around as though I think it? Yeah, of course.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, sure.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m still pulling up my pants or whatever. It’s not like I’m floating around.

Martha Beck:
With the special grip instrument you get for pulling up that particular pair of pants. And if you can’t find that instrument, you’re just screwed there with your pants around your ankles the whole day long.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you think there is one?

Martha Beck:
I bet there is, honey. You want to Google? I know you’ll be Googling it as soon as we’re off this podcast. Okay, so really seriously, the reason I liked Asian philosophy and meditation when I came to it in my early adulthood was that this whole thing of “You are not your body/personality” is just kind of stipulated there. And the whole idea of meditation is that you become the observing presence, this thing that is watching you affably from a short distance or from inside, and you don’t try to force your human to be something that the culture wants. You’re watching it as an observer. You’re seeing it with some kind of fondness and it actually, instead of separating you from it and giving you less control, it actually gives you more efficacy. Your human starts to cooperate with you more. It’s just like befriending any other animal when you know its nature, you know sort of the parameters in which it can function. And if you love the animal, you don’t try to force it out of those limits. But culture will say, “Take control and make it what we say. Make your human be a morning person. Make your human love parties.” My human is not a morning person, and it doesn’t love parties. It can’t morning, it can’t party. It has tried.

Rowan Mangan:
And I think when you let your human do what it’s built for and just nudge it a little bit when it gets off track so that everyone gets fed and wears a sweater or whatever, then your human’s going to work better. It’s going to be better at human-ing. And I guess what I want to say quickly with that is I don’t mean that your human is going to become a more productive cog in the machine and make more money for Jeff Bezos. That’s not what I mean. I mean it will, what do I mean? I mean—

Martha Beck:
Function?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’ll just enjoy human-ing more and whatever the game is for this individual perspective, for this point of attention that each of us gets to hover behind somewhere, then we get to do that more. We’re more likely to—

Martha Beck:
The thing that your human is born to do, you get to do that. It’s like if you took animals and tried and you had an otter and you decided the otter was not allowed to go in the water ever, and it had to act like a dog or something. It is like culture wants everybody to act like a certain animal. And your animal may be different from other animals. I’ve made an exaggerated difference by making it different species. But let’s take two dogs, a water dog like a golden retriever or Labrador retriever and maybe a guardian dog, like a chow chow.

Rowan Mangan:
And there’s a third dog, which is the kind of dog that can only speak in animal metaphors when it tries to explain things.

Martha Beck:
Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
I love it. I love that dog.

Martha Beck:
“Oh shit.” But every single creature has its own profile of preferred activities and it groups by species, but it’s different for individuals. And culture is all about homogenization: Make everything the same. So of course I love this idea of find out what your human does and let it do. But unless we go completely off the grid and live in the woods, we have to sort of negotiate inside our human as we move through culture. It’s like you’re inside your human. And when I’m coaching people, we often figure out, “Oh, this is the kind of human I am, but that’s not what is wanted at my company.” So we make up cover stories and go-to behaviors to help the human feel okay doing what it wants but look to the culture like it’s doing what the culture wants. It’s just a little bit of deception. It’s not there to hurt anyone, but you have to get a cover story and a sort of cover act to go through culture without getting people’s eyebrows raised and voices raised.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I’m going to push back a little bit about that. I think we can raise the odd eyebrow. I think to some extent it’s our job to raise the odd eyebrow, actually.

Martha Beck:
Which of my eyebrows is the odd one? I don’t know what that means.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, well that’s just, look, my human speaks that way. What can I say? I think the thing is that when we’re talking about how to train our human to go among the culture, to go among the humans, it’s sort of like giving, it’s very much like in parenting where it’s about, I always think, well, I have needed, my human personally has needed to have a certain degree of cultural literacy as in I know how to talk when I go to the DMV, and because of that, they let me drive a car, which is handy.

Martha Beck:
Yes. This is what I was trying to explain. You’re doing a better job.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you, thank you. And so it’s like, I’m so overwhelmed by the compliment I just completely lost my train of thought. We need to understand the culture so that we can be undercover in the culture while letting our human to the extent that we can, which is actually quite a lot if you’re good at playing the game.

Martha Beck:
I love undercover in the culture. I love the idea of conspiring to be free while appearing to be in the culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s fun, isn’t it? That’s the game. Maybe that’s the game. And so we learned to work with our human once we’ve got that degree of cultural literacy, we sort of work with our human. When I used to work in a university library many, many years ago, lo these many years ago, my human does not like offices and it very much does not going to offices every day. I can remember when I started my first full-time job and it was like my alarm goes off and you’re like, “They can’t expect me to do that again. I literally just did that twice in a row. This is not.” And honestly, this is one of those things that I’m being silly about, but it was a bit of a non-negotiable for my human. It was genuinely, really hard for me to do full-time work in an office.

Martha Beck:
How did you do that? I literally can’t understand how that’s possible.

Rowan Mangan:
But I’ve done enough of it that I see that for a lot of people it is a really viable way of life. And I respect it.

Martha Beck:
It appears to be.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, I respect their way of life. I just ask them, don’t rub it in my face all the time.

Martha Beck:
I gave the memory, I know I’ve said this before, but about when I quit academia and I said, “I am so depressed when I go into my office that the only way I could keep this job is to go on massive antidepressants.” And the dean of this college said, “Well, I’m on antidepressants.” And it was like, how many people are drugging themselves insensate because their humans don’t love an office, but they go there every day?

Rowan Mangan:
And I’ll say, some humans I think do enjoy an office and there’s that too. But—

Martha Beck:
It’s possible

Rowan Mangan:
When the culture tells you that something is right for you and it’s not, that can be a real pickle.

Martha Beck:
But didn’t you figure out ways at the library?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so I worked there for about seven years and over time I began to learn the system really well. And so the first thing was, I might’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but I figured out this—now, we were in Australia, so there were a lot more options for koalas. There was a lot more protections and rights for workers enshrined in law. And one of the things I discovered that was possible to do is, I’m not going to go into it, but there was a policy that meant that I could take a small pay cut and work four days a week and then—

Martha Beck:
Nice.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that was lovely. Then I cut that down to three days a week by rewriting my position description as a part-time one, creating a new position description, hiring someone into that position description and fucking off home. I took my toys and went home.

Martha Beck:
See, that’s the ultimate outcome of putting only dijon mustard in a dijon mustard bottle: You know how to work a system. I would’ve just gone in there and tried to hang on until I had a nervous breakdown and then cause an enormous scene and probably end up in captivity somewhere.

Rowan Mangan:
There was a time in, I think 2010, late 2010, that I did take a month off and watch every season of Survivor. So I am not saying that I was without that, but yeah. So anyway, it’s like this thing where I just came to the office less and less and less until I completely disappeared.

Martha Beck:
I love that. Oh my gosh. I think it’s an incredible: how to train your human to slowly disappear from situations that it doesn’t enjoy. Is that how we come to our senses? How do we come to our senses? We’re all being pushed to drive our humans, number one, as though they are us. And number two, as though they fit the culture’s prescriptions. It doesn’t work. So how do we come to our senses?

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll tell you in just a moment.
So how does one train one’s human? AKA how do we come to our senses? Martha Beck, take it away.

Martha Beck:
Well, this is where my human likes to jump in. Somebody asked me how to do something? I don’t care if I’ve ever even heard of it. I will tell you how, and there will be steps because my human loves steps.

Rowan Mangan:
I think there should be a kind of offshoot episode or something that’s just called What to Do if Your Human Turns Out to Be a Life Coach.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, it’s horrible. I tried so hard to be anything else, but it loves it. What can I say? It’s a dorky little human. So anyway, yeah, if you’re going to come to your senses and you decide you’ve got this concept now, “Okay, I have a human. I’ve been given a human, and it has these characteristics and they’re not all malleable. Some of them I can’t negotiate.” The first step, and we’ve already mentioned it in passing, and that is to take the sort of amused, compassionate observer position. So instead of thinking of yourself as human, and people might have trouble with this, but I just have never had human as an identity, ontologically speaking. Ontologically. I was asking Ro about, “Is it ontologically or epistemologically?” And she knew. Ontologically means—

Rowan Mangan:
Well, ontologically means “as it relates to being.”

Martha Beck:
Yes and epistemology as it relates to thinking. So ontologically, you decide that you are someone who simply is. That’s the ultimate ontological position. I am. I exist. I don’t have to define what I am. I just know that I am, and I seem to be driving around in the body, brain, personality of this particular human.

Rowan Mangan:
And the radio will not turn off.

Martha Beck:
It will not freaking stop turning on. Oh, it’ll turn off, but not by itself. And then it turns on by itself. Sorry, I’m getting a little verklempt again. Yeah, yeah. So you’re kind of, then you can be sort of gentle and amused by the peccadillos of one’s human.

Rowan Mangan:
But not mean amused, like fondly loving amused.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, somebody carried a brand new baby past me in the grocery store the other day, and that’s one thing my human does. I will follow a human baby as if I’m stalking it, but only to smell its head. Really, truly. And I watch that characteristic of me, and then I look at that little baby and think, I feel the same amused sweetness for us as I do for that tiny, tiny baby. That’s all we really are. We never get much past the little, “What? What am I doing here?” And they’re so darling, they’re so adorable.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. And so it’s almost like a practice that we can develop to step back and view our human in that way. And that’s sort of what we were kind of trying to model, I guess, a little bit in the last segment where it’s like, oh, what a silly human. Look at it.

Martha Beck:
That’s what you felt when you changed from slippers to shoes and back again. You were just like, oh, that’s adorable.

Rowan Mangan:
Look at you, cutie. You just have to have it that way, don’t you? You just have to, you funny little thing.

Martha Beck:
It’s like my beagle used to jump up every morning, land on my tummy on the bed, he’d jump up and then he would roll over and my job was to scratch his tummy and he would lick my wrist while I scratched his tummy and then he would roll over again. He’d give one howl and then we would go out to breakfast. And that is just—not all beagles do that. That was just Cookie, the beagle. Oh, I loved that dog.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, dogs are really good at making rituals and so are our humans, I think.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. And look for the rituals your human loves because allowing your human to do its rituals is very sweet.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. Yeah. So our first step to come to our senses and train our little cutie pie of a human is that we step out a little bit and go, “Oh, you. Look at you doing your thing.” What do you do next?

Martha Beck:
Oh yes, more steps. Oh, good. So step two, after you’ve taken that sort of change of ontological identity, is to sort of become like Jane Goodall watching primates. She watched chimps. But start to walk around. She would walk around for years. She would go out with a little notebook and look for these chimpanzees, just to watch them do what they did. And she would write things about them in her little notebook. And you don’t have to have a literal little notebook, but to think of yourself as Jane Goodall watching yourself, well, the human you’ve got, as a chimp with that kind of scrupulous attention, you become very present when you start to really have to write down, in anthropology, they call it thick description. Really notice what your human is doing and what it likes. Become Jane Goodall.

Rowan Mangan:
So my human, I can totally see how “become Jane Goodall” is your human’s way, your human step two. My human step two is become Dian Fossey. Gorillas in the Mist. Right? Similar timeframe except she accidentally got murdered for being not very respectful of the local people.

Martha Beck:
Her human did not respect the local people.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but this is the point is also get your notebook if you’re that way inclined. That’s all right. But also, I just want to put in a good word for crossing all professional boundaries and make friends with your human and hold hands with it sometimes even if you’re not supposed to. Also, she faked. She faked having appendicitis before she left to go to Rwanda because you weren’t allowed to go if you had an appendix and she couldn’t afford to get the surgery.

Martha Beck:
Wait, wait, wait. You can’t go to Rwanda if you have an appendix? Doesn’t that mean in a book?

Rowan Mangan:
Louis Leakey famously recruited Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and another woman who went to Indonesia or Malaysia for orangutans, I can’t remember her name. Those three. Yeah. He liked getting young women and sending them off to be among the apes.

Martha Beck:
It does seem to be a bit of a pattern of his human, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I think it was one of his conditions is thou shalt not have an appendix when one goes among the great apes.

Martha Beck:
Oh. Because it might rupture and then you’d be in trouble. Gotcha.

Rowan Mangan:
That was not, as it turned out, Dian Fossey’s biggest problem. It was more like machete-to-the-head kind of, that’s not her, sorry. My human can be a bit irreverent sometimes.

Martha Beck:
You think? Yeah. And I mean she was an interesting human, that one. I think she was probably quite neurodivergent, and she was very good with gorillas, but I don’t think she—I would hear stories at Harvard where, I don’t know if you know this, I went there.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh wait, what? You went to Harvard?

Martha Beck:
I personally did.

Rowan Mangan:
Something about that makes me thirsty.

Martha Beck:
She had come to give a lecture there, and apparently her behavior was just incredibly odd. And she was at the home of a professor and his seven-year-old daughter came in and there was a whole group gathered to hear her talk. And apparently she just went off the hinges at this child and she was like, “Child, be gone!” And very odd behavior. And her inability to get her human to negotiate the humanness of other humans, I think ultimately tragically contributed to her early demise.

Rowan Mangan:
So I used to love her so much that I did my hair like her. She had this way of doing a plait that was like, you did—

Martha Beck:
That means a braid.

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry. Sorry, braid. Sorry, sorry. I have a different vocabulary. Sorry. I come from a different country. God. Yeah. She had to braid her hair on the side for some reason. It was like the Dian Fossey.

Martha Beck:
Because that’s how the gorillas do it, obviously.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, got it.

Martha Beck:
And she wanted to blend in.

Rowan Mangan:
So she could go among a culture. It just wasn’t a human culture.

Martha Beck:
And she really was an extraordinary person. And this is step three, really. No matter how odd your particular human may seem to the culture, accept it, the things you cannot change. I mean, for example, if you moved to a different country and you needed to learn another language in order to get along.

Rowan Mangan:
Like American?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s right. So you don’t talk about plaits here so much. Only with gorillas and Dian Fossey and Australians.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m American. I braid my hair and eat freedom fries. That’s dated. Hashtag dated reference.

Martha Beck:
At the same time, sometimes I accidentally braid a freedom fry into my plait.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s delicious.

Martha Beck:
The gorillas want to bite it.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, this is coming up off the rails.

Martha Beck:
This is a serious podcast, darn it. But if I moved to a different country, I would want to be able to change the language that I spoke. I would make a big cultural change and be fine with it, is what I’m saying.

Rowan Mangan:
Gotcha.

Martha Beck:
But there are certain things about your human that if you try to change that human, it will be fundamentally unhappy and not itself. And once you’ve identified a thing like that, your job is then to start accepting the things you cannot change about the human.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I say, so in that scenario, we ourselves, however we’re identifying the we that is not our human. We take the form of the culture then by saying, thou shalt not be like this. Even though thou clearly are like this.

Martha Beck:
Mm, we become the cultural—yeah. We become the overseer and the jail warden and our own torturer. If we don’t accept the things we cannot change about ourselves.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s your human, what do you want to change about your human? Or how do you accept? What do you accept?

Martha Beck:
My human, I am going to confess this because I have not liked this about my human for all these years, and I have finally realized it can’t change. My human is very easily bored and impatient. I wish this were different, but I have never been able to change it. So when, for example, somebody is, say there’s somebody at the DMV, you talked about this, who is going very carefully through a large stack of paperwork and then rereading things. I want to start leaping and screaming like a chimpanzee. But what I’ve done is learn to use that as a meditation time, take a deep breath and start to go into that amused, friendly perspective and watch and maybe even take notes on how my human is chewing off the inside of its lips. And I’ve learned to actually, oh yeah, once I remember that, I remember to relax. I start to breathe more easily. And I can accept this thing in my human and basically sustain what I need to do to get along with the culture too. So what does yours do? What’s something you accept about yourself?

Rowan Mangan:
So this is boots on the ground. This is us training our humans. Right? In a way. And that’s what you’re doing in the DMV. So my human will never be consistent through say a year. So she’ll have months of being really on top of things and months where the things are on top of her. And there just does not seem to be a way around that. Each, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but each mode that my human goes into feels like the ultimate personality. But—

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you always feel like, “Now I’m myself.”

Rowan Mangan:
Now I’m truly myself and this is how—

Martha Beck:
“Now I’m going to make stews.”

Rowan Mangan:
And this is how it will continue for the rest of time. But I’m getting much better at understanding that it won’t last. It is what it is right now. And just letting that be as one season gives way to another. And knowing that they do come back around as well.

Martha Beck:
And the culture does have this permanency and consistency thing, like “Be the same creature throughout the year and for always.” And that’s just not how my human works at all.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no. We’ve talked about that quite a lot I think on this.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And also, I should say though that while we talk about oh, the things our humans do, if your human likes murdering people in a serial kind of way, I don’t mean one little murder here or there, but if it’s getting to be a bit of a pattern, maybe look at that. Also, if you’re human chews loudly in public, that’s something you might want to curb.

Martha Beck:
Right. That said, I used to always make those disclaimers. Like, if your inner child turns out to be a psychopath, you may need to take some steps. But I have to say, I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds of people and the whole goal always was find out who you really are. Let’s find out who you really are. I didn’t use the word who your human is, but it was pretty much the same. And I’ve never found—

Rowan Mangan:
I think human was implied.

Martha Beck:
Implied for most, but I think there’s never been a person who found their own happiness, what brought them joy and lit them up that was harmful to other people. Quite the opposite. It was always, as they became happier and more relaxed, their human made other humans feel better.

Rowan Mangan:
And whether or not that’s true of all humans running around, we can’t say. But you’re just saying in your experience.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, there are people I fired because yeah, they didn’t seem that way to me. But yeah, I’ve worked with prisoners in jail and everything. And at their core, when you got through it all, if you let them be their human, their human was beneficial to all beings.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so where are we in our how to train your human steps?

Martha Beck:
We are to step four.

Rowan Mangan:
Love it.

Martha Beck:
And that is, once you’ve accepted what you cannot change about your human, work out covers—speaking, in my coaching, we always do this—work out a cover story and a cover act. You know how comedians go on and they look like they’re just riffing, but they actually work that material really in detail, some of them. Very few of them are just improvising as they go. So when you went to the office or to the library—

Rowan Mangan:
There was an office inside the library, point of fact.

Martha Beck:
There was a Starbucks inside the Starbucks inside the library.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a dream within a dream.

Martha Beck:
It’s all these fractals. We’re making a podcast within a podcast within a podcast within a mustard bottle. Now, my point was going to be that you can get your human trained to have an act that makes it move smoothly through the system wherever you are. And that’s what you did. You slowly figured out how to let your human not go to the library and yet fill all the requirements that the culture gave you for appearing to work at the library.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right.

Martha Beck:
So your cover story and your cover act, it means that you’re working together with your creature to negotiate the cultural waters you have to navigate without catching too much flack or even causing too much attention, let alone ending up in prison.

Rowan Mangan:
Especially if you’re working towards the ultimate exit strategy from the culture. I mean, I don’t know, I think there’s a recipe for lives of quiet desperation in there if we’re not careful, but um—

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, yeah. You can’t take this, here’s the thing. If your animal loves to do, doesn’t love to be in the office, and you make it be in the office all the time, it will ultimately fail to do it. It’ll burn out. I’m so fascinated that service dogs, which are bred to be of service to humans and love, I mean, you can breed dogs to love things with such specificity. A Basset hound will drop and die in its tracks rather than stop hunting something that you’ve told it to hunt. I mean, dogs are really specific about their jobs, and service dogs love to serve, but if the owner doesn’t play with the dog, take off the little harness and throw a ball, play some kind of game, the animal will lose its joy, and then it won’t be able to do the job that it really does genuinely love. Because nothing can be shackled to one system of behavior forever, not if it’s alive. And our humans are alive. So yeah, those are the steps. You learn to see your human, befriend it, accept it, and then coach it to go through the world, the world of culture without losing its essential nature. And then I think you’ll be much more at peace with yourself and with the world the way wild animals seem to be at peace just being what they are.

Rowan Mangan:
So basically we called this How to Train Your Human. And I think that where we’ve landed is how to train your human is be in cahoots with your human. Right?

Martha Beck:
It was right in front of me all the time, I didn’t see it.

Rowan Mangan:
We want to have our human’s back above all and be tolerant and amused at its foibles and very forgiving. And I think honestly, at the end of the day, that’s how we…

Martha and Rowan:
…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.