Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out this week, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Well, as you know, we both went to a mycology lecture a little while ago.

Rowan Mangan:
We did.

Martha Beck:
It was freezing cold in this beautiful barnish thing.

Rowan Mangan:
It was cold and damp, much as you would expect a mycology workshop should be. It was atmospheric.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I was excited to learn about mushrooms because I was hoping that they would pass out psilocybin or something. No such luck.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the bit you don’t say out loud. That’s the bit that everyone knows when you say we went to a mycology workshop and then you don’t say it because you don’t have to, but then you did. That’s okay.

Martha Beck:
It’s implied in the term “mycology workshop.” Anyway, there we were and the teacher was an absolutely brilliant guy. I mean, there are so many fungi in the world that to understand and know them all, you have to be like a major genius. As you know, he talked of many fungi and at a certain point, well, as he went through, he would show us different mushrooms and things.

Rowan Mangan:
He had a presentation.

Martha Beck:
It’s the fruiting body of a mycorrhiza.

Rowan Mangan:
The mushroom is the fruiting body of the fungi.

Martha Beck:
Yes. The fungus is all under… Anyway, my point is he kept saying things like, “Well, this one isn’t… I wouldn’t put it right in the pan. It’s kind of leathery. And if you don’t cook it right on time, the leatheriness turns to slime, so probably not.” He kept talking about throwing things in a pan, and then at a certain point he said, “This entire genus of mushroom is deadly poison, except there’s one, looks almost exactly like the others, but if you get it right at the right time, you can cook it and eat it and you’ll probably be safe.”

Rowan Mangan:
“It doesn’t taste very good.”

Martha Beck:
“It doesn’t taste good and it’s a horrible texture. And if you leave it an hour too long in the fridge, your fridge will be full of black slime. That’s just how it is.” And then he says, “And here’s the deal, if you get sick right after eating it, you’re probably okay. I mean, you might want to go to the hospital for sure. Yeah, you do, but you’re going to be all right. If you eat it and you’re okay for 48 to 72 hours, but then you start to feel sick, that’s the real problem. So you need to go right to the hospital and they will try to give you a liver transplant.” He’s like, “But here’s the thing, you can do just as well with milk thistle. You need it intravenously. So they’ll be pushing the liver transplant.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Don’t listen. Don’t listen.”

Martha Beck:
“And you won’t be feeling well, but you need to tell them, ‘I want IV milk thistle.’ And you’ll still probably die.” He said, “But here’s the thing, liver transplants are dangerous. You could even die.” And the three words that were just screaming in my mind the entire time were, “Eat something else! Eat something else, people!” Why? They don’t even have calories. Like, why? I’m trying to figure out why this is a thing.

Rowan Mangan:
I will say, though, what was interesting about that morning mycology workshop was like I had a very strong need immediately afterwards to go to the store and buy a lot of mushrooms and fry them up in garlic. Throw them in a pan.

Martha Beck:
It was like a drunk going past a bar. We were like, “Let’s go buy some chanterelles.” I don’t even know what a chanterelle is. I do now, actually. But yeah, we bought a heaping helping.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think you ever ate your lion’s mane.

Martha Beck:
No, I bought a lion’s mane thinking I’m so inspired and it’s probably just full of slime now. But as long as I don’t feel bad for 72 hours, I have time to gather milk thistle before I eat it.

Rowan Mangan:
Imagine being pressured, peer-pressured by your surgical team to have a liver transplant being like, “No, this is not necessary. This is not medically necessary.”

Martha Beck:
You can’t be feeling well though. Anyway, what are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Just the usual sort of stuff about time rolling on, getting older, and just how times change. For instance, what’s so interesting to me is when I was younger, like perimenopause, menopause, that sort of stuff, it used to happen to older women.

Martha Beck:
Women of a certain age.

Rowan Mangan:
Of a certain age. Yeah. But it just goes to show how much times have changed because now these days, I’ll tell you, Marty, these sort of things are happening even to young women like me.

Martha Beck:
I know. Nubile, practically adolescent women like you.

Rowan Mangan:
Adolescent women like me. It’s so wild. It’s probably like the hormones they put in our food or something.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. That’s right. Get your period early, you hit menopause at 18. You got a short window to procreate.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So that’s about it. I’m just like, I’m pondering. There’s a Joni Mitchell line where she says, “We look like our mothers did now when we were those kids’ age.” And you try to do the math of that’s what they looked like to me when I was still me, but less so. And now I’m that, but I’m not. I’m me.

Martha Beck:
Right. The weirdest.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m still me.

Martha Beck:
One of the weirdest things about aging in terms of people’s psychological reaction to it is that everyone is surprised to do the one thing that is for sure: get older.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m not surprised about aging. I just am surprised to experience it myself. I am totally cool with everyone else’s experience.

Martha Beck:
Who was it who said, “I know that death is inevitable. I just thought that in my case there would be an exception.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s true.

Martha Beck:
It’s so weird. I’ve known this forever and yet as it happens to me, I’m like, “Oh my God, I am completely befuddled and surprised by this fresh hell that greets me every morning.”

Rowan Mangan:
And yet it is a blessing, is it not?

Martha Beck:
I guess so in the sense that you’re not yet to the age where you’re like, “Oh, the apocalypse is coming and everything is horrible. Good luck, kids.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God.

Martha Beck:
There is a certain sense of oh no, that’s a terrible thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh Marty, that is such a massive bummer.

Martha Beck:
I’m sorry. No, no, it’s not though. It’s not a massive bummer because you get more and more joyful as you age and some people don’t like aging, right? But we are at a time in history when it’s potentially a really good thing.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, let’s do a podcast. So what we wanted to talk about today is, well, as we often talk about on Bewildered, the ways that the culture worms its way into our thinking and takes a lot of the joy out of life by making everything into a whole production—and I mean that in many senses.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
You, for instance, recently had one of these. You caught one. You caught a little culture worm.

Martha Beck:
This is what’s happening a lot. We’re catching culture worms. The more…

Rowan Mangan:
Did we just coin a phrase?

Martha Beck:
It’s a pretty disgusting one, a culture worm, but you want to get rid of them.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I hope they’re not like those zombie worms, but I digress.

Rowan Mangan:
No. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Don’t Google it. It’s terrifying. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
No one was going to.

Martha Beck:
All right. These little culture worms, the further we get, we actually are doing this. For those who have not heard this before, the culture wants us to come to consensus and nature—or being wildered, wild-ered—it makes us want to come to our senses, instead of to consensus. So we’re doing this. We practice what we preach.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
What happens, then, is it’s like you’re going along smoothly and everything’s fine and then you feel something in your brain catch on something difficult. Maybe a lot of people out there don’t ski, but that’s exactly what it’s like. You’re skiing along and you’re sliding down the snow and you hit a rock and it practically takes your leg off. Your ski just stops and you either crash or you have some serious rebalancing to do and that’s what we’ve been doing, rebalancing.

Rowan Mangan:
And so recently you were playing a piano.

Martha Beck:
Yes. That is what we were talking about because I do not think I am neurotypical. We’ve discussed this.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think anyone thinks that, love.

Martha Beck:
And so I have this thing called special interests. I now know it’s a thing because I have ADHD and paradoxically one of the symptoms of ADHD, which is attention deficit, is very, very intense attention. I used to think that that made it stupid, but it’s kind of true.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe there’s a comma, maybe it’s “Attention, deficit.” It’s just like a catch-all deficit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so there are these special interests that kick in, or maybe that’s autism. Once it’s my special interest, I will know.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s autism.

Martha Beck:
I decided that I would plink around a little on the piano and then it seized hold of me and now that’s all I want to do all the time. And I’m terrible. I mean, I’m legit terrible. I learned, I taught myself as an adult. I have no natural capacity. My fingers are tiny and stubby like the paws of a groundhog. I mean, it’s not good. Plinky, plinky, plinky. And I have horrible performance anxiety. So it’s not like I’m ever going to entertain anyone, no one. What the F am I doing with my life? I am too old to take up piano and do my 10,000 hours in time to like, “Bye, kids.” No, I shouldn’t be learning the piano at my age.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s right. And that’s how the culture worm speaks.

Martha Beck:
That’s how it got me because I was zip, zip, zip, and suddenly…

Rowan Mangan:
You know what’s better than skiing because I don’t ski and I’m scared of skiing and the idea of hitting a rock and taking my leg off, it doesn’t work for me as a metaphor, but you have talked about rumble strips and that I do believe.

Martha Beck:
They’re the sort of corduroy texture on the road off to the side.

Rowan Mangan:
Corduroy texture. I love that.

Martha Beck:
Corduroy. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, yeah, it’s right. It’s brilliant.

Martha Beck:
You’re on the road and the sound of your wheels—don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy, right? Isn’t that the song?

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t let the sound of your own wheels…

Martha Beck:
And then suddenly, a terrible sound in a rumble because you’ve hit the corrugated asphalt on the side of the road, which is there to keep you from straying out of your lane.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So as we kind of rid ourselves of these culture worms, we sort of spend more time, but then you just lose your wildness for a second and then … And you’ve got to just nudge yourself back. And we are lucky because we both think about this stuff and so we can remind each other, but we bring this to the listener today to say, look out for a culture worm and let’s talk about why you might want to play the piano.

Martha Beck:
Let’s do talk about it. Plinkity plink. That’s all I can think about. I go completely nonverbal.

Rowan Mangan:
So the culture would say that you have to practice the piano, right? That’s what you do when you’re alone with the piano is you practice for the time when you’re going to play it for others, right? But can’t you just be playing the piano?

Martha Beck:
You know, actually, you’re like a good therapist. This cracked open a whole thing because when I’m sitting there at the piano, I literally, my brain is like, “Who will I have to play it for? ” And I go through different people and I go, “Oh no.” And I get all embarrassed and tense as if they’re in the room. They’re not in the room. That’s fascinating. But I’m always thinking, “Well, I mean, I have to do it in front of somebody who shall it be? Maybe Lila wouldn’t mind. No, she will not mask her scorn.” And then I get to the end of plinkity plink for however many hours I have free, and there’s no one I want to play it for.

Rowan Mangan:
But have you had a good time?

Martha Beck:
Oh…Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there is a part of our social primate nature that does that. There’s something called the “generalized other” where we’re always sort of thinking when we make a moral choice or when we decide to, I don’t know, clean a room or not clean it, there’s a kind of audience in the back of our minds. There’s just a few people usually, but it feels like everyone. It’s called the generalized other. And maybe a culture worm kicks in when the generalized other, like we start to… Maybe we can get away from the generalized other and we have to do that in order to get out of the culture worm zone.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’re saying that there’s like six people that we’ve turned into our whole world. Are they always in the room, though? Are they in the room with us now?

Martha Beck:
Maybe. I mean, they’re at the back of our minds. And you can be all by yourself and do something accidental and feel embarrassed about it. You’re not embarrassed, I mean, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about unless there’s someone watching, unless you are in some way judging and judging how you would look to another.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t think I do that.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Rowan Mangan:
I genuinely don’t think I do that.

Martha Beck:
That’s fascinating.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so aware of when I’m alone and I have spent so much time alone that I don’t think my generalized other is in the room for that. I really don’t. I know what you’re talking about and I do experience it, and I know what you mean with the piano thing because that totally—

Martha Beck:
Performance.

Rowan Mangan:
—makes sense as you sort of imagine a context in which that could happen. But I’m so interested that you could get embarrassed by something you do when you’re in a room by yourself.

Martha Beck:
This is amazing because number one, I’ve talked to many people about the generalized other and they usually have one almost always. I thought it was universal.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, I do have one.

Martha Beck:
Right. But this explains so much about you to me because for example, you just hauled on over here from Australia and—

Rowan Mangan:
Hog?

Martha Beck:
Hauled.

Rowan Mangan:
I do not hog.

Martha Beck:
Hauled.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
Hauled yourself away.

Rowan Mangan:
Hauled.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And you came to America and you’re hanging out with Karen and with me and you’re like, “Well, this is good.” We all decided let’s have a throuple arrangement. And for Karen and me, we were like just living off in the boonies. It wasn’t that huge a shift for us, and yet it was a huge shift. But you, to be able to say, “That sounds good” is completely countercultural, and it’s something that a lot of people would think was strange. And you didn’t, you never carried that into the relationship. You were without shame and without judgment of yourself and us, and actually that’s what allows it all to work.

Rowan Mangan:
But I’m super embarrassed about it when I have to talk about it in public, just not in my—

Martha Beck:
Right but when you’re alone.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, no.

Martha Beck:
The generalized other’s not there. And many cultures, especially religious and to some extent, cultural, like Southern girls or whatever, they train people specifically to be ashamed even when they’re alone. The whole idea is to inject the jailer into one’s own brain or into your children’s brain so that they will always do what the jailer wants them to do because well, that’s the whole God thing. “God is watching you.”

Rowan Mangan:
But then when do you rest?

Martha Beck:
You don’t. You don’t. You rest in God because God is always watching you, and he loves you so much that he will kill you for sinning. And he’s a he.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. We’re like blowing each other’s minds. So I’m autistic, and so when I’m in social scenarios and I’m masking, it’s very tiring for me. It’s fine, but it’s not easy, and it’s tiring. And afterwards I need to recharge, and so I have this lifelong feeling of the intense relief of closing the front door at the end of the day or my bedroom door, I guess, if I’m living with other people, and just being like [sighs]. And it all falls away, and I’m just like in this horror of pity for people who don’t get to close that door and take off all the masks and the robes of the culture and just like [breathes].

Martha Beck:
It sounds silly, but there’s a children’s Christmas song about Santa. “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good.”

Rowan Mangan:
Well Santa’s an exception. Obviously Santa’s there with me every night. I don’t mean like—

Martha Beck:
He’s very critical of my piano skills, I have to tell you. But no, that’s amazing to me because I really was trained to think, yes, there is an omnipotent being that is watching your thoughts very critically.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so wild.

Martha Beck:
Don’t you dare have a wrong one.

Rowan Mangan:
Now I just want to poll everyone to find out which camp do people fall in? Because we’ve never encountered people…

Martha Beck:
I bet you’re in a very unusual camp.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t believe so, because I really think you’re right that religion is a big part of it.

Martha Beck:
But I mean, the term “generalized other,” maybe it’s because it’s sociology that was done eons ago when I was but a child, but I literally did study things that said, no, everyone has this generalized other. And what’s interesting is you think it’s everybody in the world, but it’s usually like four to six people.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that I believe probably is universal and I identify with that. I just don’t believe that they were saying that the generalized other is in the room with you at all times. I don’t think that’s universal.

Martha Beck:
It’s part of the way you think at a certain…Yeah, I don’t know. I would have to go see the studies.

Rowan Mangan:
I would need to see the studies.

Martha Beck:
As soon as they update it. But no, it is fascinating to me that I have that and you don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
So we were talking to my father about songwriting and the process of writing songs and playing music and he… I can’t remember what we were asking him, but he’s like, “Just don’t forget that it’s called playing the guitar.”

Martha Beck:
For a reason, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And I feel like that’s kind of part of what we’re dissecting, whether it’s our generalized other or the culture worm or whatever it is that gets in there and stops us from doing things for their own sake.

Martha Beck:
Well, I love that. I love the parallel of playing and performing. I’ve never thought of those as being antonyms like each other’s opposite, but when you’re performing, you’re literally thinking about the generalized other, whether they’re really physically in the room or you’re just practicing because they will be. But when you’re playing, it’s not a performance. It is for the thing itself, right? So the opposite of…

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, hang on. This is such an us thing to be arguing about. I don’t think the opposite of playing is performing. I think the opposite of playing is practicing because I think you can play and I think if you’re performing, you can be playing at a certain level.

Martha Beck:
Oh, right. If you’re a master. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It can be play on stage, and probably ideally it would be. But I think that practicing and playing are the opposites with the musical instrument because to me those are two… Those are diametrically opposed to me.

Martha Beck:
That’s so weird because practicing and playing to me are the same thing. I love to practice. It’s the performance that scares me.

Rowan Mangan:
But what are you practicing for? There is a practicing for. You can’t just practice.

Martha Beck:
I think this has something to do with the difference between dedicated practice and sort of rote practice. All right, follow this here. There is a point here, okay? Rote practice is when you repeat something over and over again trying to get it better every time. Dedicated practice is a different way to practice, and they actually found it when they started studying kids in music conservatories to find out which ones of them were geniuses and were their brains different. And they found that their brains were exactly the same at the beginning, but they practiced differently. So the ones that did rote practice—ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding—they improved. But the ones who did deep practicing, this is the way it happens and this is what feels like play to me. This is in art, in writing, everything, you find something that inspires the hell out of you that you could actually not do, and you think, “I want to make that sound,” or, “I want to make that image.” And you try as hard as you can. You’re incredibly focused. And if you come close to it, the sense of exquisite joy is like nothing else. It’s delicious, delicious, delicious. And for me, that’s the payoff and that’s called “dedicated practice” and kids who do it that way get better faster.

Rowan Mangan:
Fair, but that’s just semantics. It’s like whatever, whoever did that called it “dedicated practice.” Why didn’t they call it “play”? It doesn’t matter. I’m just saying that the expectation for practicing is that you’re practicing in preparation for a moment, and I’m saying that moment doesn’t have to exist. You can still be getting better and better at one piece. I just think that the play vibe makes it about right now, and that’s the thing that I think is so key with this, any of these culture worms that are like, “Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting time on this? What’s it for?”

Martha Beck:
That’s it.

Rowan Mangan:
It has to be for something you’re practicing. It’s okay that you’re spending time in music because it’s for something that will edify people, bring money, give me prestige, give whatever.

Martha Beck:
Power, wealth, and status. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Whereas play is just in the moment and it’s just for the sound of the notes.

Martha Beck:
It’s interesting. This actually, I know it is just semantics, but it’s parsing in different ways in my mind right now. And I’m realizing that this—what’s been defined as deep practice and I think of it as play—I think that is the treasure. I think that is the goal because I think as we were talking earlier about aging, when you look back on your life, if you were good enough to perform and get applause and stuff, that might be a really good memory. But damn, the moments when you transcend your own ability to make something beautiful and the sound you’ve made or the image you’ve made or the phrase you’ve thought of is just pure beauty, you don’t have to share that with anybody else. That is like the thing itself.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yes. But why does it have to be at the end of your life you’re looking back and those are the moments? Why can’t they just be the moments? What if you completely forget everything and you never look back on it and it just becomes the ordinary feeling of a Thursday morning at home, and it doesn’t have to be for looking back on your life. It doesn’t have to be… Do you know what I mean? I’m just pushing you because it’s kind of interesting to note that we give so little weight to enjoying ourselves in the present without any future investment.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s true. But I have to say, I’m very much enjoying talking about playing the piano because I’m getting out of the culture zone. I’m getting away from the rumble strip, which is covered with worms in this very mixed metaphor.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Martha Beck:
Culture worms all over the rumble strip.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe the worms are the thing that make the rumble.

Martha Beck:
That’s what I was thinking. They’re very tough worms. Don’t put them right in a pan. They’re very leathery.

Rowan Mangan:
Nice callback.

Martha Beck:
Thank you. So I love this idea, this exquisite moment, you have to be deeply, deeply present to experience it. You have to be doing something quite hard, hard for you or—

Rowan Mangan:
You can’t—don’t enjoy yourself. You have to be very present. It has to be so hard. Don’t just have fun and enjoy the moment, okay?

Martha Beck:
Well, what is fun? what feels fun to you?

Rowan Mangan:
All I’m saying is you immediately went, “you have to.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah, I know.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s all. I mean, it’s not that I disagree. It’s just that there’s these little rumbles. I just want to interrogate the rumble strips. It’s not about you.

Martha Beck:
My brain has got worms. Me and a certain high government official.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right.

Martha Beck:
I like this, but please be gentle to me because you’re mocking my culture boundness.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Martha Beck:
Just because I was raised with an omniscient God judging every single thought I ever thought.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I’m sad that happened to you.

Martha Beck:
Please extend me an olive branch.

Rowan Mangan:
Mind you, I was raised by myself in a room just going, “Oh, no one’s here. Just little me.” So you know, there’s pros and cons each way.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s a give and take thin.

Rowan Mangan:
At least you had a god. At least you had some company from your generalized other. Must be nice.

Martha Beck:
Sorry. Sorry. Privilege check for sure. Oh my God. Seven siblings that were crawling everywhere.

Rowan Mangan:
Like brain worms.

Martha Beck:
So if we’re just thinking everything is about the present moment and the exquisiteness of deep presence, we can’t even talk about playing the piano right now because we’re not playing the piano right now. We’re doing a podcast. Then we have to find the deep pleasure here and not even think about anything else, but making the podcast and find the deep pleasure and not care that it’s a kind of performance.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
Riddle me that.

Rowan Mangan:
Listen, I’m going to say this doing this doesn’t always feel like play because they’re in the room. The generalized other is in the room right now. Who’s yours? What does yours comprise of?

Martha Beck:
That’s a good idea. Yeah, bring it up. I think it shifts a bit. It depends on who’s… But I will have long conversations in my mind with people I haven’t seen for ages, defending what I’m doing at that very moment.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and I know with writing books, it’s a really big thing for you. Like who are you writing to? “Who’s reading over your shoulder?” is one way we put it as you’re writing.

Martha Beck:
But for example, okay, there’s someone I haven’t seen in the flesh for probably five years.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m going to see if I can guess who it is.

Martha Beck:
Oh, you will. When Lila was born, he was very curious to see who was going to be the male influence on her life. And then we had the pandemic, so nobody came or left. So the only real figure in her life who is male is her brother Adam who has Down syndrome and then the dog Bilbo who is a fine gentleman and I think a very good influence on a young girl.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely.

Martha Beck:
But this friend of mine really was like, “No, you’ve got to put her in with some men.”

Rowan Mangan:
Put her in there with some men.

Martha Beck:
“Throw some men into the enclosure because otherwise she can’t grow up normal.” And so I sometimes argue with him about how a lot of men were raised by women on their own or in groups of women, but virtually no one—well, that’s not true, some people were raised just by men, like from birth all the way to adulthood, just men. But it’s very rare. It’s not at all rare for people to have been raised just by women. My takeaway was I’m not sure that she’s that disadvantaged. I mean, we have lovely men that are in our garden. Where are the men? Oh, they’re mostly taking out the old generator equipment. Okay, well that’s enough to socialize a child.

Rowan Mangan:
So as the listener can appreciate, Marty’s generalized others and her relationship with them is very intense, very real, very present. And that’s lovely.

Martha Beck:
I argue. Who do you argue with. Do you argue with people?

Rowan Mangan:
I argue with you. A lot.

Martha Beck:
Really?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Do you know when I do it? I do it after you’ve cleaned the kitchen and then you’ve gone to bed and I’m down there getting snacks about how much you would be criticizing me for not doing a good enough job keeping the kitchen clean after you’d cleaned it. And no, no, you wouldn’t like it because I get very strident. I’m like, “Listen, I’m good at this. I know what I’m doing. We’re not going to be ants because of this.” I’d be like, “Look, I’m soaking it.”

Martha Beck:
It has to soak and you know that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That’s mostly my thing is like the people who—

Martha Beck:
I’m your generalize other? That’s horrible. It’s like I’m your god. Oh dear. That’s not good. You need to get bewildered for sure.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Is there anybody else?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. All right. Let’s think. I mean, we do have to think about it in terms of—

Martha Beck:
I would like to just invite our audience because I’m concerned about that we’re performing. Think of your own generalized other. See there? It happened. An anonymous, generalized other person. It just is kind of this faceless being who comes running up and says, “I heard your podcast.” And I’m like, “Did we do it well?”

Rowan Mangan:
So your generalized other is one person with the head of your fifth grade teacher, the right arm of that guy who looked at you on the train funny once, your disappointed father’s left knee.

Martha Beck:
Right. It’s like a Mr. Potato head of all the critical influences.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I have my dad. It’s funny because I have positive ones as well. I have people that I want to impress.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I do too. Oh, so many.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

Martha Beck:
Yes, yes, absolutely.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
Here’s the big deal: Do they approve of you or don’t they in general?

Rowan Mangan:
So am I arguing with them, or am I blowing their minds with how cool I am? That’s the question, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, because I realized that I used to have almost completely critical voices and over time I have managed to sort of do this huge—and I’m just now figuring this out—this huge, almost inner revolution where almost all of them are unconditionally loving now.

Rowan Mangan:
That is so freaking cool.

Martha Beck:
And they would not—they did not love me. They were angry at me. They did not like me. And they thought I was just bad in every way. And I lived with that for, I don’t know, 35 years before it started shifting.

Rowan Mangan:
Is this what self-development actually is? Transforming your generalized other from a judgmental Frankenstein’s monster to a loving Frankenstein’s monster?

Martha Beck:
I think it is. And in fact, that might be the process of bewildering, be-wildering. It may be that very thing: to replace the generalized audience that is negative and critical with the generalized audience that is unconditionally loving and accepting, no matter what.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. All right. So here’s how I’m thinking.

Martha Beck:
All right.

Rowan Mangan:
I immediately said my father. Would your father have been on your list at any time?

Martha Beck:
Oh, at any time. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So here’s my little theory. I think that my dad is there, not as my dad, but as the father figure of the patriarchy that one is always trying and failing to impress adequately.

Martha Beck:
The platonic ideal of the father. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And as inexorably the patriarchy dissolves into the pool and the kind of the pool—Google it, Marty’s got a couple of YouTube videos about it, but make sure you watch the 2024 one, the lighting is better—and we dissolve the patriarchy, it collapses into itself and we become the village, which you could say matriarchy because what I’ve read that describes it is it’s not about putting a woman on top of the pyramid. It’s about—matriarchy looks like the adults standing in a circle facing outwards with all the vulnerable people in the middle of the circle being protected. And so maybe that’s the process that you’re talking about where you transform your generalized other from the judgmental father figure to the embracing, whether it’s mother or—but it does have that kind of family, like intimacy sort of feeling to it, right?

Martha Beck:
It is very intimate. And it’s so fascinating. As I’ve made this shift, there’s a concomitant shift in my view of the entire universe, which just shows my limitation as a primate. When I’m thinking about critical, angry, judgmental people all the time and being explicitly told that that’s God, everything feels dangerous all the time. And as I’ve sort of taken people down from the pyramid—my father used to be there as a very, very critical judgmental force. Then he died. And interestingly, I had a sense of his presence there that was completely different from anything else I’d ever experienced when he was alive. And it shifted from criticism to love, even though I was in the middle of a book tour for a book I wrote about him that did not…It criticizes him quite roundly in many ways. So it was very unexpected. So that was like a pivot point, and it took the patriarch down from the pyramid, and he became one of the people holding hands in a circle around the vulnerable, the moment he died. I mean, it was a very sort of paranormal experience. I didn’t know he’d died. I woke up at four in the morning and just felt this protective presence of him. Anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to go all paranormal there, but I just wanted to make the point that there are these archetypes and they tend to be gendered, but the thing about the patriarchy is it always does try to put someone who is very male identified, who’s very much the controlled dominion force power, whether it’s a man or a woman.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s not the point.

Martha Beck:
And when you switch from criticism and force to looking for people who are loving generalized others, you automatically start creating the circle, the matriarchal circle of protection and love and total acceptance.

Rowan Mangan:
And then you kind of like have a cheer squad walking around with you.

Martha Beck:
You do. And you know what I just realized? Sorry, this might be just too self-involved, but like we created this community online, Wilder, short for Be-wildered, and that is so strongly the vibe. That is such a strong vibe and it’s become part of my generalized other, I just realized.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, me too.

Martha Beck:
Deeply.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, wow. And it’s such a great—we mostly see these people on Zoom, and so it’s like the Zoom screen is like a really great representation of the generalized other, right? It’s just like the rows of people, and this is so true because Wilder is like where we talk to our audience of this podcast, and it is. It’s like the love.

Martha Beck:
The love. And it’s exciting because it means that this whole shift from performance to play, from constant anxiety and embarrassment to complete relaxation and all of that, is something that you can do as a creative project. You can actually start, like you can take… I don’t think I could have taken the threat of my father down off the top of the pyramid in my mind just by saying I wanted to do it. He was there.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a culture worm that’s like burrowed there.

Martha Beck:
And I want to talk about other people too, because it’s not just about our dads.

Rowan Mangan:
No. And our therapists can deal with most of this.

Martha Beck:
But by deciding that we wanted to go create a circle and using, you know, we were somewhat isolated, pandemic, blah, blah, blah, and then the technology became available and we were like, “Well, let’s make a community.” And it’s a deliberate act of creativity that results in the creation of a village, and now I will use a big word: autopoiesis. The weird thing is if you come to it with the intention of making that happen and you try all the different things— because we’ve tried many different things to create that. It’s kind of been a theme for us.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, to make our village in our lives, yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And if you keep your intentions strong and you keep working, when it forms, it forms by itself. It’s one of those, there’s a saying in spirituality, supposedly the god force says, “You will never find me by looking for me, but if you do not look for me, you will never find me.” So the idea is you’re looking, you’re sort of groping for what is going to replace this torment in your mind and because you have been socialized to it, you don’t have a model of what else can happen. But as you keep trying different things…the wonderful thing about this online community is it is its own thing. These people are equals. There’s not a sense of us controlling it or trying to make them be a certain way. Autopoiesis means that which creates by itself.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Or another way of saying it is that which hangs out by itself, with itself. That which hangs out.

Martha Beck:
That which hangs out. Autopoiesis is that which hangs out with itself in the fridge. It sounds like a mushroom thing. That’s all I’m saying. So this turns out to be my little epiphany of the day. Find the places where you’re performing and not doing it for the thing itself. Remove that, put some love in its place and what you have is a life full of the present moments of exquisite joy of learning, of playing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And can I say something about the time of longing that I certainly had before we created Wilder, while that intention was kind of forming and brewing? Because I know that we hear from people in Wilder and elsewhere a lot that it’s like, “I’m really trying and where are they? What’s going on?” And I was saying to you a couple of days ago that I’m just finally in this point where my people are popping up. And they are popping up, excuse me, but they really are popping up like mushrooms.

Martha Beck:
A circle of mushrooms.

Rowan Mangan:
A mushroom circle! A fairy circle.

Martha Beck:
Oh, your Irishness is coming up. This is great. Unpack that for the people.

Rowan Mangan:
Very well. No. Well, mushrooms aside because it’s too much metaphor.

Martha Beck:
They grow in rings around where the stumps of trees used to be because the nutrients are there. So they pop up in rings overnight, and they’re called fairy circles.

Rowan Mangan:
All I’ll say is do not step in a fairy circle, okay? Don’t follow the music. If you hear the music, do not follow it. Do not tell a fairy your name, and never say thank you to a fairy because it implies a debt. And listen, I cannot stress this enough: Do not step inside the fairy circle, but if you do, wildercommunity.com.

Martha Beck:
If you do, intravenous milk thistle.

Rowan Mangan:
Intravenous milk thistle. I just thought you were going to leave it at “intravenous milk.” And I was just like, that was such a gross…

Martha Beck:
That’s kind of Irish too.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s gross. No, bad. So this is the analogy I used with you was that I felt like for years and years through pandemic, through being in a kind of area that wasn’t really gelling for whatever reason, my longing for community, I was stretching a rubber band and I stretched it and stretched it and stretched it with pure longing.

Martha Beck:
You did.

Rowan Mangan:
I did. And now, mixed metaphor…

Martha Beck:
Smacked in the face by it.

Rowan Mangan:
Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mushroom.

Martha Beck:
And I think, I actually think that the… Okay, so I can’t help it, I go to procedural functional stuff. You run around the world, you’re always trying to perform well, you’re always answering to a critical generalized other. It means that you don’t let yourself play, and you’re always trying to do things that are proactive and culture-pleasing and everything, and life is yucky. But you don’t know what else to turn to. So you need community. You following this?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Because you need to change the generalized other in your mind from a totalitarian, oppressive force to an all-accepting loving force, but you don’t know how that happens.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
So what you have for a while between knowing you need something and its autopoiesis or self-forming, you have longing. Because longing is loving something before you believe in it.

Rowan Mangan:
Longing is loving something before you believe in it.

Martha Beck:
And this is what I can tell you after many, many, many, many years, that a genuine sense of longing? There’s always something waiting on the other side. You may not have exactly the picture of what it really wants to be, but it wants to be because say what you want about the present moment, part of us can slither forward in time and feel what wants to happen, and that’s another word for longing: It’s what wants to happen. And there are things that are absolutely impossible that I longed for and they’ve all happened. I don’t even know if I have any left that haven’t.

Rowan Mangan:
But don’t you think they happen more and faster as we are able to, I don’t know, reduce the rumble strips to raise the matriarchy, mushroom, the doodad, then the whatsit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I do think that the more we free ourselves from culture, the more we take down the critical voices from the pyramid, the more free we are to experience the autopoiesis of the thing we longed for.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And we keep turning towards the thing we long for rather than actively turning away or trying to bring down those other figures because they just don’t…it’s not about giving them attention.

Martha Beck:
So who else was, just for shits and giggles, because I want to see the structure of this, who else did you… We’re talking about replacing the generalized other and we talked about our dads, but who else is in there? I’m in there criticizing you for the kitchen.

Rowan Mangan:
The kitchen, yeah.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Point taken. But who else is in, or was in, the critical generalized other? And who has replaced it, or did you have to replace it at all?

Rowan Mangan:
I have mean girls from school. I have a teacher from school.

Martha Beck:
You still argue with that teacher?

Rowan Mangan:
No, the teacher is in the category of I want to impress them, but that’s an edge case because it’s like, but you can get it wrong real easy. So that’s that one. It’s like where you’re transitioning from the judgmental to the approving. Mean girls from school is probably the easiest one for me to pull up. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I had all the Mormons.

Rowan Mangan:
All the Mormons.

Martha Beck:
Literally all the Mormons.

Rowan Mangan:
In the bathroom with you.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes. It was quite an experience. No, but like for example, there was a guy that came to meet me because he’d grown up Mormon, and he’d been told that I was the embodiment of evil. And our third person, Karen—this is before you came into the relationship—but she was teaching social work and she met him. He was a student and he knew who she was, and he actually said his family had not wanted him to come to the program at Arizona State University because he would interact with my partner, and it was too dangerous for him to be around someone who was around me because that was how evil it was. And he decided that he was going to look evil in the face. So he asked if he could come for lunch and Karen said, “Sure.”

Rowan Mangan:
Of course.

Martha Beck:
Because Karen always says sure. So she said, “Okay, there’s this guy that’s coming to see you because he believes you’re the embodiment of evil, and he wants to see if he has the courage to encounter you face to face.” And so he came over, and I made cookies. You know, what does the embodiment of evil do? If you’re Mormon, you make cookies. And he told me that I was the embodiment of evil, and he sat at the table shaking like a chihuahua. And almost, at a certain point, almost had a seizure, I think. He said he did, almost. Anyway, he toughed it out, he survived, he left. I don’t remember his name, but sometimes I still argue with him. It’s not so much arguing with him as like, I’m just like, “Really? Really? Really? I’m the embodiment? Look around. I’m the evilest there is?” Sometimes I think about that. So those voices were very, very loud for a long time.

Rowan Mangan:
In fairness. We’re talking about hypothetical potential judgment, and you’re talking about actual, literal, terrifying, life-threatening judgment that happened to you. So it’s not exactly—

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so it was very stuck, the generalized other.

Rowan Mangan:
No kidding.

Martha Beck:
I mean, and there was a heapin’ helping of them. There weren’t just six. There were a lot of people, and I generalized it to millions, literally millions of people who believed in that belief system that I had been destructive toward and therefore had defined me as evil. So there was that whole thing, that whole pyramid was there. And yeah, I only in the past few years have really started to see that dissolve to level, to level. And I think it is because I have another community now because I’ve had lovely, incredible, wonderful people in my life. I’m so blessed, but I never had like a crowd. And it’s not like we have thousands of people in this community, but it is a pretty good-sized village and then that’s my new generalized other.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s so interesting how abundance breeds abundance as well. We started Wilder, we found this core of incredible humans that we love spending time with, and then the little bop, bop, bop, bop. And we started, like you’ve got two close friends living locally that you hang out with now.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
That was not the case in any of the time that I’ve known you.

Martha Beck:
It’s so wild. It is really weird how these things follow. We think that our minds follow the progress of the external events of our lives, but I really think it’s the other way.

Rowan Mangan:
The other way around. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Our external events follow the shifts in our minds, in our consciousness.

Rowan Mangan:
Totally. I feel like this is one that we’re going “to be continued,” right? Because this is a big juicy one.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, because I’m going to be noticing who pops up to have an argument with me, some person who’s been dead for 20 years, and I’m just doing battle with them in the kitchen as I clean.

Rowan Mangan:
Turn towards what you long for.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Turn towards what you long for. Look for your village, and in the meantime, play the piano.

Rowan Mangan:
Aww. Because in playing the piano, that’s how we’re going to stay…

Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan:
…stay wild.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

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.