The End of the Hustle

Summary

Bewildered Podcast: The End of the Hustle

Hosts: Martha Beck & Rowan Mangan
Date: April 22, 2026

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Overview

In "The End of the Hustle," Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan delve into the cultural forces driving us toward endless striving—‘hustle culture’—and the profound discontent it leaves in its wake. With humor, vulnerability, and sharp insight, they question why so many of us feel alienated, what it would mean to reclaim our own instincts, and how reconnecting with “our dirt”—the literal and metaphorical hands-on work that makes us feel alive—could transform both daily life and society at large. Their conversation swings between relatable banter, personal stories about gardening and modern life, and reflections on deeper themes of meaning, agency, and joy beyond spreadsheets and corporate abstractions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Banter: Domestic Obsessions and Organization

• Rowan reveals her deep affection for their new chest freezer, likening the organization of its contents to a life skill and source of comfort ([02:01]).
  • "It's like a little gift to future you via the chest freezer." — Row, [03:09]
• Martha confesses her organizing compulsion with medicine: “I have huge numbers of plastic drawers labeled by symptom. ... I had to put [Fungus Among Us].” — Martha, [05:49]
• The playful exchange sets the stage for tackling more abstract "storage"—of energy, creativity, and labor in modern life.

2. Alarms, Pavlovian Triggers, and Technology’s Grip

• Martha describes a rogue Siri alarm on her phone that repeats, “Stop. Wait. Go back.”, symbolizing persistent self-doubt and regret ([07:03]).
• Rowan points out the generational divide on phone notifications, noting younger people rely more on silent haptics, whereas older generations tolerate or even enjoy a cacophony of alarms ([10:44]).
• Martha connects our fractured attention to Pavlov’s conditioning, suggesting we’re all “Pavlov’s dogs with infinite variety” of triggers in modern life ([09:55]).

3. Theme Introduction: “I Don’t Want to Strive Anymore”

• Rowan candidly expresses her exhaustion with striving: “I just cannot. I tried to can and not. Did not work.” ([13:43])
• Inspired by Ani DiFranco’s lyrics: “I don't want to strive for nothing anymore.” ([14:13])
• Martha and Rowan discuss how this absence of desire to hustle is not mere burnout but a genuine disinclination: “I'm not burned out. ... I'm disinclined. I don't want to. And it's different...” — Rowan, [17:24]
• Martha observes: “When you say I don't want to, it's like, clutch my pearls. She's breaking the rules here.” ([18:54])

4. The Hustle as Culture & Identity

• Martha recalls her mother’s adage, “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” and how deeply ingrained this message is ([18:19]).
• Rowan counters the culture’s narrative: “I want to keep [my energy]. I want to like, direct it at things that I want to do ... and I want to stop diluting my own power to give some to the man.” ([20:35])
• They define “the hustle” using dictionary entries, highlighting contradictions:
  • “One, hustle means to have the courage... to go out there and work it out... Two, force someone to move hurriedly... Three, coerce... Four, engage in prostitution. And five, obtain by illicit action, swindle, cheat.” — Martha, [29:12]
• Rowan laments the abstraction of modern labor: “It feels like at some level what I'm getting paid for is my own misery. It's a compensation prize because I sat at a desk being miserable.” ([22:10])

5. Abstraction, Meaning, and the Loss of “Dirt”

• Discussion on how “white-collar” life, spreadsheets, and layers of abstraction disconnect people from value and meaning ([21:12]).
• Martha invokes philosopher Iain McGilchrist: “The whole culture behaves like people with a right hemisphere brain stroke... We only use half our brains, and the half we decide is meaningless is the part that experiences things as meaningful…” ([25:49])
• Both recognize “hustle” as an institutionalized system that externalizes one’s value, rather than rooted in personal satisfaction ([27:02]).

6. Revelation: Reclaiming Power Through Creation & Connection

• Rowan describes discovering the joy and abundance in simply growing food: “Take your seeds out of the chest freezer. ... The seeds, they grow.” ([34:13])
• The gardening metaphor becomes a larger call to reclaim agency:
  • Rowan: “I feel like there is, like, it is seditious to grow a garden at this moment in time.” ([39:53])
  • Martha: “This could change everything. Food grows out of the ground.” ([38:41])
• Both share Promethean moments—Rowan with gardening, Martha with making fire by hand—realizing their own hands can alter their reality ([42:27]).

7. Beyond Gardening: “Everyone Has Their Own Dirt”

• Martha cheers the idea of micro-entrepreneurship, “Can you find your dirt? Can you find where you want to put your hands in the soil?” ([46:57])
• The "dirt" becomes a symbol for tactile, real, meaningful work—whether it’s literal gardening, art, or another personal pursuit ([47:33]).
• Rowan: “We're not gonna find it in the hustle... There isn't a finish line where you can sit down and look at your garden.” ([47:37])

8. Finding Meaning in Community and the Everyday

• Martha cites the famous African violet story from therapy legend Milton Erickson: The act of growing plants and sharing them brought an isolated woman purpose and community ([58:23]).
• Both argue that culture’s abstraction also leads to loneliness and that returning to simple, embodied acts can restore connection ([57:55]).
• Rowan: “Let's get back to the memory of being a human animal.” ([62:50])

9. Voltaire, Camus, and the Invincible Summer

• Martha references Voltaire’s Candide: “If we all can cultivate our own gardens, there's a sanity in that.” ([52:48])
• Camus is evoked: From “imagine Sisyphus happy” to discovering “in the midst of winter, [there] is in me an invincible summer"—a metaphor for inner resilience through genuine, hands-on living ([60:55]).

10. Conclusion: Hands, Agency, and Staying Wild

• Rowan recalls Ani DiFranco: “Let us look down at our hands and remember we’re armed.” ([54:08])
• Martha reflects on the power and potential of our hands to create meaningful change if freed from cultural cages ([55:15]).
• The episode closes with the encouragement to “find your dirt,” whatever your own source of tactile, generative agency may be ([62:24]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Hustle Burnout:
  • “I'm not burned out. ... I'm disinclined. I don't want to. And it's different.” — Rowan [17:36]
• On Meaning & Modern Labor:
  • “At some level what I'm getting paid for is my own misery. It's a compensation prize because I sat at a desk being miserable.” — Rowan [22:10]
• On Hands and Creation:
  • "Let us look down at our hands and remember we're armed." — Rowan quoting Ani DiFranco [54:08]
• On Micro-Production:
  • “Everyone has a version of the dirt.” — Martha [46:33]
  • “This is revolutionary. ... Food grows out of the ground.” — Martha [38:41]
• On Community and Joy:
  • "[Growing food] can add. Because it's not individualized either. It's incredibly difficult to support a whole family by one person's labor. ... It's part of the lie. ... You are just an individual cog knocking around in a meaningless universe." — Martha [57:55]
• On Realizing Agency:
  • "The amount of ideas you can materialize with these hands. If you take away the cage..." — Martha [55:32]
• On Rebellion by Rest:
  • “Find your fuck it. And then find the dirt where you want to grow something.” — Martha [62:24]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:01] Rowan’s chest freezer obsession and comfort in organization
• [07:03] Martha’s Siri alarm as accidental self-critique
• [13:54] Rowan’s emotional and existential “I cannot even” admission
• [14:13] Discussion of Ani DiFranco’s lyric and the urge to stop striving
• [17:24] Differentiating 'burnout' from refusal to hustle
• [22:10] Lamenting abstraction and commodification of labor
• [25:49] Iain McGilchrist and half-brained culture
• [29:12] The multiple definitions of ‘hustle’
• [34:13] Rowan’s gardening instructions and the symbolic return to agency
• [38:41] Martha’s awe at “food growing out of the ground”
• [46:33] Discussion of “finding your dirt” and personal agency
• [52:48] Voltaire’s “cultivating our own gardens” for sanity
• [54:08] “Look down at our hands and remember we’re armed”
• [60:55] Camus and the “invincible summer” inside
• [62:24] Final call: “find your fuck it,” “find your dirt”

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Final Takeaways

• The antidote to hustle culture isn’t more strategizing or productivity—it’s direct connection to real activities that restore agency, creativity, and the simple pleasures of being alive.
• “Living your truth” or “putting your hands in the dirt” is profoundly political and subversive in a world that rewards endless striving and abstraction.
• Whatever your “dirt” is—gardening, cooking, art, community building, entrepreneurship—doing it for its own sake is a path to joy and meaning.
• The episode’s blend of laughter, honesty, and critique provides a witty, empowering framework for questioning hustle culture, and for daring to reclaim one’s life for pleasure, sanity, and connection.

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Stay wild. Find your dirt. Reconnect—with yourself, with others, and with the world.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Martha Beck.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Do you relate?

[A]

Me too. Yeah. And this episode is about things I really relate to, like dirt.

[B]

Yeah. I'm dirty. I'm dirty right now. I'm dirty.

[A]

Dirty episode.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. The way that we live so often is quite sterile, abstract. There's a certain fluorescent lights, spreadsheets, columns, profit and loss, KPIs.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

There are things, and we feel like that there's something is lost in that way of life. What would you say about that?

[A]

Money. And the reason we know is we hate it.

[B]

I didn't wanna. That's what I found.

[A]

Didn't wanna.

[B]

I went to, like, you know how you have to dig deep. Yeah. In the. In Hustle culture, you gotta dig deep. And I dug so deep. And at the bottom of all my digging was just this little creature that went. I don't wanna.

[A]

So we.

[B]

That's what we're exploring today.

[A]

And I, for one, am looking forward to it.

[B]

Me too.

[A]

Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty, Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called five five paths to your purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is, how do I find my purpose? Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out there are certain things you have to do to find your purpose. And I broke them down into five, and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to marthabeck.compurpose and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all.

[B]

So, Rohi.

[A]

Yes. What are you trying to figure out right now?

[B]

Right now, I am trying to figure out what is going on inside me that I love our new chest freezer in the basement so much that I spend, like, long minutes each day thinking about it. And I do. Yeah. It's a hidden side of me that

[A]

I find that unnerving.

[B]

Well, it's like there are YouTube videos about how to, you know, organize your chest freezer.

[A]

Yeah. And there are shows online about people murdering other people and putting them in chest freezers. That seems to be the only real use for a chest freezer. Freezer in murder shows.

[B]

Right. But then if you. If you switch to freezer organizing shows, you'll find a whole different genre there.

[A]

I bet there's a crossover.

[B]

What you do is you make food, more food than you need.

[A]

What?

[B]

That's okay.

[A]

What?

[B]

That's okay.

[A]

That's insane.

[B]

Put it in a Tupperware. Put it in the old chest freezer. Marty.

[A]

What?

[B]

Lovely. Put a little label on it. Here's chili from January 21st. There you go. And it's like a little gift to future you via the chest freezer. Here you go, future lazy rowie who doesn't want to cook. There's some chili for you. And it goes in the chest freezer. Like a little promise. And then also, in future, I'm going to buy a cow, you know.

[A]

Yeah. Half a cow, maybe, and put it in the freezer.

[B]

Into the freezer.

[A]

I certainly hope someone will dispatch the cow before you just stuff it in the freezer. I hope it's not alive when you stick it in there. I'm sorry. I'm obsessed with the murder thing. Like using it as a storage for a body, but also using it as an instrument of death. So this is why I don't go near the chest freezer. Also, I don't go near cooking. I never in my many, many years have had the slightest inclination to cook extra food and save it for when I'm too lazy to cook. Because here's my secret. Now I'll get around the whole thing. I never cooked, ever. Yeah, it was just like. I mean, I used to make spaghetti. I don't remember cooking anything else. Birthday cake, spaghetti, Christmas dinner, Thanksgiving dinner.

[B]

Okay, but look.

[A]

Look at you. You are cooking, putting things in freezers, and it's freaking me out.

[B]

It's awesome.

[A]

Did you figure out why you're obsessed with it yet, or are you just gonna leave that?

[B]

I don't know if it's to do with Tetris, you know, like.

[A]

Like a space that actually does make sense.

[B]

There's. There's, you know, this. It's three dimensional. It's. There's, like, different options for what to put. Where there's, like, a whole strategy that goes into it. I'm so glad you asked. There's a whole strategy that goes into it. Like, here are things that are, you know, for Adam. Or here are the bland, processed food that Lila will eat, and so on and so on. And then there's all the things that I made. And then there's my seeds.

[A]

Oh, Lord, you and your seeds.

[B]

My seeds in there. My special seeds.

[A]

See, now that sounds weird and biological to me, too. When you froze your eggs and put them in, only you're calling them seeds.

[B]

I think there's a lot of things to explore in this conversation, and it's all about your psyche.

[A]

You know what I figured out, though?

[B]

Don't point at me like that.

[A]

I will point out. Okay, I won't. I do a thing that you don't ever do. I label and file and organize medicine.

[B]

Oh, yes, you do.

[A]

I mean, at a major scale.

[B]

She has a drawer in her medicine cabinet of medica. Like, her little apothecary of pharmaceuticals.

[A]

I have huge numbers of plastic drawers labeled by symptom. Yeah.

[B]

Do you know which one is my favorite?

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

Fungus Among Us.

[A]

I had to put that. That's all. The rest of them are completely serious, you know, nasal blockage or whatever. But. Yeah, but fungus, it just begs you to write among us.

[B]

Of course it does. You also are, like, quite happy to leave things in there that expired decades ago.

[A]

They still work. Hey, they used the antibiotics from World War I in World War II, and they were just fine.

[B]

No. Yeah, because famously, nothing bad happened in World War II. Everyone was fine, and nothing hurt.

[A]

I'm proud of you for the chest freezer.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What are you trying to figure out?

[A]

Nothing nearly as interesting as a chest freezer, Right?

[B]

How interesting is a chest freezer?

[A]

It's actually not, which makes my thing really, really pathetic. But I. I think what happened is I was trying to set up an alarm on my phone using Siri, and I said, hey, Siri, your old nemesis, like 15 minutes later went, huh? Because that doesn't, like, hurry up, Siri.

[B]

And she doesn't respect you.

[A]

So I said something to Siri, but then before she said, huh, I think I said the thing that I wanted on the alarm. But then she said, huh? And I was like, oh. And I must have said, stop, Wait, Go back. Because now every couple of hours, I get an alarm on my phone, and I look at it, and it says, stop, Stop. Wait. Go back. And I'm like, what? Where? Why? What did I do? And it's like, taking me back into the annals of my life, you know? Don't. Don't.

[B]

At what stage did I all do it so wrong?

[A]

Don't do it. And I'm thinking about everything that I could have averred. Averted. Aver is to talk about something, right? She averred, yeah. Average. Just say it's true.

[B]

Don't dig yourself deeper. Just continue.

[A]

I could have averted disaster if I stopped waiting. If I'd gone back and it's, like, ruining my life, this alarm that's reminding me of all the things that I've done that are irreparably harmful to myself. The world and all those who love me. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

[B]

Maybe you should set a second alarm for a minute later that says, actually, don't worry, you're doing fine. That's news. Keep going forward.

[A]

Oh, man. If only I can figure out how to do that. I'll be very. I know Marty.

[B]

The alarms on Marty's phone that bad. Go off and off and off and all through the evening, throughout the evening. And every time she goes like this, the alarm on her phone goes off that says, take your other kind of meds or whatever. And she goes, oh, God. And I'm like, so turn it off. No, no, no, no. That would be too easy. Instead, you reserve the right to swear at it and also act really surprised and really pissed off.

[A]

I always am, but you know. You know what? I've just been amazed lately. Have you? Yes. Listening to how many. You remember Pavlov's dogs, right? The bell went off.

[B]

I wasn't there at the time, but I have heard tell.

[A]

I was in one of the salivating. I was a champion salivator. They took me to the fair. Ring a bell, watch her drool. I was a champion. I could have been something. We're all okay. So they. Stop it. She said one of her things, you guys. She will laugh for fully half an hour, which I'm acting like it. It does annoy me when we're recording. But it is one of the reasons that you're in my life. No, that's one of the reasons you're

[B]

in that little cage.

[A]

Everybody's running around with cell phones making all these different noises. Like I have different alarms for all the different things. Now you've been crying. Oh, honey, are you okay? And I just thought we're all getting trained and there are so many different sounds to make us do so many different things. We're like Pavlov's dogs with infinite variety. Like, something goes and you know, you have to, like, make your bed. And then it goes. And you know, you have to, like, go to the chest freezer and rearrange the torsos you've been keeping in there.

[B]

All right, guys. And you know it's your mother in law calling.

[A]

Hey, you're the. I'm the only one here with the mother in law. I'm going to tell your mom you said that. Okay.

[B]

But I will say that I try not to do this too much, but there is a generational component to this conversation, which is that no one, like many of us.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Of a slightly more Youthful persuasion would not have any sense sounds on our phone. You would. At worst, you would have a mild haptic. Why?

[A]

You have all these sounds you can make. Why would you limit yourself?

[B]

Oh, my God. Remember MySpace and how you could have a song come on in on MySpace in 2006? It was so cool.

[A]

I think we better get to the podcast. I think we're. We're just wandering around and I actually just had an alarm come up on my phone that went, do a podcast, do a podcast. Do a podcast. All right, let's do one.

[B]

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.

[A]

So we talk a lot on the podcast about coming to our senses, which sounds like you could do it by yourself, but weirdly, it isn't.

[B]

No, you actually can't do it alone. And I think especially right now, when everything out there feels very polarized and overwhelming and noisy, people really often don't have a place where they can just go and be completely themselves.

[A]

Yeah. And that's why we started Wilder, which is our online community. And it's for people who really want kindness and connection and belonging without the strident, divisive argument that some seems to be everywhere these days.

[B]

Yeah. In Wilder, we explore a new theme every month to help us stay in touch with our true nature. And there are all these live events on Zoom that are so fun from, like, body doubling, co working, parties,

[A]

teachers, meditations, and classes.

[B]

Marty does Earth School, which is brilliant, and frequent meditations that we do together. And it is just a. A group of people who are the best. So if you've ever listened to this podcast and thought, I wish I could go deeper with this, or I wish I could talk to more people about these kinds of ideas, Wilder is where that happens.

[A]

It really is. So if you want to come join [e-mail] we would love to see you there. What are we talking about today, Ro?

[B]

Well, Mari, you know that it's all about me. And here's how I am feeling right now in my life. I cannot even.

[A]

Ah.

[B]

Like, I just cannot. I tried to can and not. Did not work.

[A]

Literally, cannot.

[B]

And I realized that there was an Anita Franco song that expressed my feelings. First time that's ever happened to me, actually.

[A]

Weird. Yeah.

[B]

So weird.

[A]

Anita Franco, you say, Just express my feelings. How strange. I've never heard you mention her. Right.

[B]

So anyway, it was totally random, but she has a song that just starts, I don't want to strive for nothing anymore. And I was like, yeah, I don't want to strive. I don't want to strive. I just want to be. And it feels like a very strong feeling that I have a strong feeling.

[A]

She said something that I identified with hard. I don't know if it was a lyric.

[B]

It's a line from a song. Yeah.

[A]

Is it? Yeah, it was. I'm tired of mining my own hillsides and that. I identified with that too strongly. I can't even express it. Yeah.

[B]

Sick of mining my own hillsides for jewels to sell at market.

[A]

Yeah. So I hear you. I hear you so deeply, and I actually think a lot of people hear you so deeply. A lot.

[B]

Well, I don't know, like, how much is the moment and how much is the moment in my life of, like, not to go on and on, but perimenopause is. Is upon one.

[A]

One and upon perhaps more than one out there.

[B]

That's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm guessing. And it is just like, it has brought on the. I don't give a. So hard for me. And it's just like. It's just an interesting. I. I don't want to say predicament, because it's not strictly a predicament. It's just like it kind of is. Persuasion. Well, I mean, this is the thing, right? It's a predicament because of the culture. Yes. That is my context.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Without that context, I would just be quite happy.

[A]

We think we can't test that, but I don't think it's just you. I don't think it is just. Did you say Hairy menopause? That's what I thought. Hairy menopause. Like. Okay. I don't know what the symptoms are for you.

[B]

Hairy menopause. He's my friend.

[A]

Hairy men. Okay, forget it. What I was going to say is I basically have made a career because we live in a cultural context that forces people to strive and strive and strive and believe me, you don't have to be in menopause or perimenopause or whatever. Men hit that in what I call the man cage, where they're just trapped. So trapped culturally. Women hit it when they're trying to. Like, you do everything, raise a kid, have a career. There comes a moment, I think, for almost everybody, maybe not. I think some people are able to just keep working and working and then retire and be happy. But a lot of us hit the. I cannot strive anymore. And it's like when people run marathons and at mile 20, you run out of all the glucose in your muscles and they call it hitting the wall, and you're running away just fine. And then it is literally like you run into a brick wall and you've got no glucose in your muscles. You can't run. People just fall down. And there are ways that they work around it and everything, but that's sort of an infamous thing. And it's a biological deficit. You can't force your way through it. Yeah.

[B]

And I think I'm talking about something very different.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

I'm not talking about when you cannot. Like. I'm talking about when you just don't want to anymore. It's different. It's like. It's not. I'm not burned out.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I'm disinclined. I don't want to. And it's different because in the past, I have been able to generate, like, some. Some fun. Right.

[A]

In.

[B]

In the doing of the things. Yeah. For the making of the money or the blah, blah. And it can feel a bit like a game. And you can find ways to get yourself, like, ra. Yeah. Like, we're gonna do this. Let's move some units. Y. And it can be good. And now I'm just like, I don't wanna. I don't wanna that.

[A]

That. I think that is even more universal, if anything. But it's. So here's the thing. When you said, it's not I can't. It's a disinclination. I could feel inside me the socialized reaction, which is, you don't wanna take too bad. I mean, one of my mothers, she must have said this every other sentence. We all have to do things we don't want to do. And boy, did I take that to heart. I didn't want to do anything that I was doing, but I just knew that I had to do it. So when you say I don't want to, it's like, clutch my pearls. She's breaking the rules here. Yeah.

[B]

And it's okay. Like, I guess this is the thing is that where you took what I said was towards what what kind of would be culturally. Okay.

[A]

You left it all on the field, girl.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I didn't. I want to keep some for myself. I don't want the field to get it all.

[A]

I really like this.

[B]

Yeah, I know it's quite seditious. I know it's.

[A]

It's deeply seditious. In fact, it's probably. I mean, talk about the enemy of capitalism, right? Like for somebody to just go, I don't want. I mean, that's in 1984 or Animal Farm, you know, that is not something people could say in the, like the well structured, like materialist farm. Yeah, this is seditious stuff. So what are you gonna do about it?

[B]

Well, there's so many different, like, ways in which I feel like I'm reclaiming something about what it is to be human. And you poo poo the perimenopause thing. And I think you're wrong to poo poo it because I feel as though there is a qualitative difference to how I feel, like how I feel about interfacing with the world at large now than I did a year ago. And the I don't give a fuck is really upon me. And with it comes this sense of like, okay, so here's the thing. When you're burned out, you don't have any energy to give anything.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Right. I have energy, but I want to keep it. And I want to like, direct it at things that I want to do. And I want like to find power in the things that I can do. And I want to stop diluting my own power to like give some to the man.

[A]

And, and you're not even like living in a way that is giving some to the man. You don't go to the office or whatever, but you do have to hook social mores around, like taking a kid to school and.

[B]

Yeah, that's not, that's not it. It's the spreadsheets, you know, the spreadsheets of it all. And I mean that in the larger sense.

[A]

Right, right, right.

[B]

You know, just. Okay, so here's the thing. It's abstraction. It's layers of abstraction in the corporate world that we live in. The way that we work, the way that we, you know, like white sort of white collar work, whether it's corporate or like public service or whatever, it's all like kind of fluorescent lights and comp. Computer screens, you know, and. And then you're separated from the means of production. And that's the whole thing is that I'm realizing we've moved to this land and I'm suddenly like, holy land, land, Earth, potential for things. And this is where we're coming into,

[A]

like

[B]

taking power back and out of abstraction, out of the spreadsheet life where my labor is turned into abstraction upon abstraction and put an abstraction. I don't even know what I'm getting paid for.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You know, like, it's just. I feel like at some level what I'm getting paid for is my own misery. It's a compensation prize because I sat at a desk being miserable.

[A]

Yeah. For eight hours. Very weird how everything has been turned into a sort of factory line that now is. You get a factory line and everybody does their widget, but then you get management in there to manage the factory workers. But how do you manage the managers? You put them on a sort of quasi factory line where information and leadership is part of what they're creating. Then you have to have higher managers to manage them. And it's all factory.

[B]

Exactly. And then I think. And there's that. So that happened. But then I feel like the bit that I'm really in complete revolt against is that above all of that that you're describing is where the culture has fetishized the hustle. The hustle itself. Yeah, the actual. So there you are and you're running on a treadmill under fluorescent lights. And it doesn't. You're not running from anything. You're not running towards anything. But you make the running itself into something glorious. And you talk about it. And the. And the. And the difficulty.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Of the pointless running becomes your identity until you fall into the void at the end.

[A]

You get slipped off the back because you can't keep up.

[B]

Yeah. And then you're done. And I don't wanna.

[A]

Yeah, I hear you. I don't wanna either. And it's interesting how everything pulls toward that because many, many years ago, I just grew up thinking I would be a professor because my father was a professor and that's how people made money in my world. But when I got into it, I realized I. I was writing articles that would be read by an average of 7 people about subjects like parsing some previous sociologist's work or at the very most, like massaging some numbers in a huge data set and nobody would read it. And then I would get tenure based on having done all. Jumped through all these hoops and nothing that I was doing, not the teaching, not the writing, not the meetings, not anything had any real connection with transfer of value. So I was like, I want to write something people would read for fun or to feel better like that I can give it directly to a person and say it has something for you. So, yeah, I made that decision a long time ago. But then publishing itself tries to become that tries to pull you in, and you end up working with people in the marketing department and sales and all these. And all of it has to do with people who are sitting in their offices, who get paid. No matter what happens, whether your book gets out there or not, it immediately starts to stratify and objectify. It's like it's such a powerful meme. And I mean that not in the sense of the social media, but of an idea that spreads like a genetic disease.

[B]

Well, I think it's a reflection of the way that our psyches are structured in some way, because we've talked before about the way we do that with spirituality as it becomes the institution of churches.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like organized religion is. Yeah, I think. I think we. We take something organic and we want to make it, like, organic and therefore inherently unpredictable and changing. Yeah, yeah. And. And plastic in a way. And. And we want to make it predictable and like to follow the rules. And boom, then we've.

[A]

And it's another example of my obsession because I wrote a book kind of about it. But the idea. Sir Ian McGilchrist in England, brilliant philosopher, neurologist, he says the whole culture behaves like people with a right hemisphere brain stroke. Like the right hemisphere of the brain is missing. Because all of that, like lining things up, chopping up jobs, assigning them to specific people, abstracting everything, is all part of the left hemisphere. It happens mainly in the left hemisphere. And that's all we use in this particular culture. We only use half our brains. And the half that we decide is meaningless is actually the part of us that experiences things as meaningful for any reason whatsoever. When you're just into the stratifying and the factory labor, analytical mindset, there is no meaning. And that's where I've found so many people not saying I don't want to, but just kind of wandering in to talk to me, going, what is. Is there any purpose for me, my existence at all? Because they've been sucked into that.

[B]

Well, because you have become abstracted yourself, you've become an abstract thing, because you can only be defined in terms of your value to the culture and can only really be defined quantitatively. And so I think that's why we're on our treadmill to go, I'm running it this many miles per hour on this percent incline. And my heart rate is this. When I hold onto the thing, because we just want.

[A]

And I will get a prize for it, though it changes nothing in the world.

[B]

If I hit this KPI, then I get a prize. And that means something because it's a number. And we've lost. We haven't lost it. But there's a tendency in the culture to funnel us into a way of life which is lost from our own experience of the sensuous of being human.

[A]

Thankless labor for no reason. But there is one overwhelming reason. If you don't do this, your life will go to hell in a handbasket. All your loved ones will die. You'll become a bag person and freeze to death on the sidewalk. And I cannot tell you how many people have expressed those fears to me. People with vast fortunes, people who are working in crummy jobs where they'd be so much better off if they quit. They're all like, no, I can't quit. Can't quit. The hustle. You gotta hustle. And that's very American. You've pointed this out.

[B]

Yeah, not exclusively, but the Americans are

[A]

very good at it. It goes to a pretty extreme level in Americans, I think. But this whole hustle thing, the whole concept of hustling is anathema to me. And one time, Yikes. I had just written a book, and in one of them. In one of them, I had written a book. In one of them, I had written a book, and in it, in one chapter, I talked about hustling as the one word. Hustle as being sort of the epitome, the description of modern culture. And can I tell you, I have what I wrote right here. Can I read you what the hustle is?

[B]

Because you said, class, Martha would now like to read from her assignment.

[A]

Yes. These are definitions of hustle that I got from dictionaries, not the same dictionary. One was an urban dictionary.

[B]

The dictionary defines.

[A]

Yes, that's how we start every podcast. The dictionary in your French. Seriously. But the reason I like this is it's one word, and it is fully descriptive of the whole work culture you're talking about. Okay. One, hustle means to have the courage, confidence, self belief, and self determination to go out there and work it out until you find the opportunities you want in life. That was in a dictionary. Two, force someone to move hurriedly in a specified direction. Go do.

[B]

Go do northeast.

[A]

Three, coerce or pressure someone into doing or choosing something. Four, engage in prostitution. And five, obtain by illicit action, swindle, cheat. So there it is. Like, go out there, be determined, and, like, you will sell yourself like a sex worker and you will swindle people, because that's. If you don't do that, you'll end up a bag lady. And it is true that people who seem to have done. Who have bought into the culture are like, rolling in gold at the top of the social pyramid, right? And they're running the corporations where ostensibly, if you come in at lower managerial level, you can climb up until one day you too will be rolling in gold. Except that right now, 52% of Americans can't pay their monthly bills. And they're working hard. And I don't think they wanna. I don't think we want to. No. I mean, when I read that, we're

[B]

kind of collapsing different things here, but I think it's. Yeah, it's. It's impossible to live the Hustle in. In our current economic circumstances. It's. It's. I think it's like we've. We've exaggerated the problems so much. It's like those dogs that get overbred until, like, yeah, German shepherds can't stand on their back legs and stuff. And it's. I think it's sort of like that where the corporate choreography has got to a point where, yeah, you work three jobs because each job is designed to not pay you enough to be eligible for health care benefits. And so you earn too much, but you earn not enough. And all of this, like, sleight of hand, which is part of the hustle, right? It's. It's built into the institution of hustle that we are implicitly subject to. And I want to pose the question, but are we. Go, Martha, go ahead.

[A]

Well, first I want to say that when you said you could find some fun in it, like, yeah, let's move some units. That actually is like, the highest level of satisfaction and enjoyment you can get doing this hustling, right? And it's, It's. It's kind of. It melts in the rain. It doesn't really support you psychologically, even

[B]

if it supports you physically. It builds spreadsheet cells. It's not built of anything that you can smell or touch or taste.

[A]

And I think, here's my theory. Two. Two things. Number one, I think a lot of people are sick of the Hustle. Some people seem to love it. God love you. Keep going. Bless you. But a lot of people don't wanna. I don't wanna. Does everybody want like, find your.

[B]

Fuck it.

[A]

Right? So first thing is, it's not working at all for 52%. I'm not talking about 52% of people aren't filthy rich. 52% of Americans can't pay their bills. Monthly bottom dollar bills. Okay? So something's very badly broken in an economy that's doing that. 2. So historically, we've reached this time where the Hustle. You're asking people to just put their joy and their happiness and their love in this little weird container for the sake of not going broke. And go broke doing it.

[B]

Yeah, and go broke doing it.

[A]

It's insane, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So historically, there's something going on. But second thing, you. I can see you not wanting to hustle. I see why you don't want it because. Not because you've decided you're too lazy or tired, because you wanna. You want right now. You wanna more than I've ever seen you in your life. You just don't wanna do the things that the Hustle says you should do.

[B]

I discovered a secret.

[A]

What?

[B]

They don't want you to know about this.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So just keep it really quiet. Okay. We can make food.

[A]

What?

[B]

No, seriously. We can actually make food.

[A]

Yeah. What? She's. She's actually. They may think you're talking about the chili that you put in the freezer. A lot of people can make food in that sense. You're talking something more primitive, deeper, scarier, like literally making food.

[B]

Take your seeds out of the chest freezer. That's step one. I cannot stress enough how important the chest freezer is. Take your seeds out of the chest freezer, put them in the soil, water them, get a very expensive grow light.

[A]

Okay? Because you have to hustle because your ex.

[B]

You are outside of the capitalist system. So make sure it's a really good grow light. Okay? And then the seeds, they grow. And after time, you put them in a bigger, expensive pot and they grow and grow. And then they start to make a flower. And you get your electric toothbrush and you jiggle. You have to jiggle the flowers so

[A]

that they pollinate themselves, so that they fix themselves.

[B]

I don't make the rules, okay? This is how our ancestors did it.

[A]

I mean, this is really.

[B]

This is called holistic agriculture. From the chest freezer to the electric toothbrush.

[A]

Electric. You're not going in there with a cheap manual toothbrush. You get.

[B]

The higher.

[A]

You get the most expensive, expensive electric toothbrush. To go in there and get those happy flowers sexing each other themselves. Oh, themselves. Of course. That's why they need the toothbrush anyway.

[B]

That's why we all need the toothbrush.

[A]

But here's the thing. I saw this begin for you. You were like. You had this sort of.

[B]

I was like a seed.

[A]

No, you weren't. You were more like. You were more like a fairy that no one can see in the garden, floating around going, someday I'll make food. And you kept talking about it, someday we'll have a garden. We'll have a garden there, Marty. And backyard. I was like, yeah, sure, right. Because I've never. I have never been able to make anything grow. And no one that I knew growing up knew how to make anything grow. Everything, literally, our front yard was just dirt. It was so embarrassing. Anyway, nothing grew. So right around Christmas time, you get all this. This hobby and you buy these little plastic things and you put soil in them and then you put little seeds in there and you did quite a lot of them with a grow light and everything.

[B]

Oh, I didn't think it would work.

[A]

I know. Neither did I. I was like, that's not going to work. Have you seen my front yard growing up? So then right around New Year's, I went by and I looked and there was a little fish hook of green, like no thicker than a hair, poking up above the soil. And I was like, what the actual fuck is happening?

[B]

I know.

[A]

And then after that, I would go and check them, like, every hour, and they started coming up all over the place. And now, y', all for real. We have an entire room of our house that looks like Tarzan's jungle home. It is so full of these massive plants. They just keep growing.

[B]

I was really, like, way more successful than I thought. But now, and this is to the point, right, is it's like, oh, my God, the abundance is mind boggling.

[A]

Stop them.

[B]

That's.

[A]

That's the thing. You've had to, like, sort of start to kill. Some tomato plants I had to kill.

[B]

I had to cull some.

[A]

So that's farm life, though, right?

[B]

That's fun. Like, it breaks your heart.

[A]

Don't name them too late. But like, I. And you started composting, and I was like, oh, my God, welcome to Woodstock is happening. But then there's a bowl of compost that you haven't allocated to different, monstrous, like, Shop of Horrors plants that are just taking over this room of the house and out of the compost. Because there were potato eyes that were in there that didn't get smushed up enough. There are potato plants growing up there that would, like, tackle You.

[B]

And it's not what's happening.

[A]

What's happening?

[B]

There were just some. There were just. There's just some potatoes in there.

[A]

You just put potatoes in the compost? No.

[B]

Just temporarily.

[A]

And then watered them. Because they're taking. They're like. They're strong, Ro. I tried to.

[B]

They were in the cupboard like that.

[A]

I tried to confront one the other day, and it was terrifying. You just put these seeds in the dirt. You water them. This is revolutionary. This could change everything. Food grows out of the ground.

[B]

Oh, my God. Right?

[A]

What?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And this is why being separated from the means of production is a really big fucking deal.

[A]

Just to clarify, are we telling everybody out there, you can quit your job and start growing tomatoes in your son room? We call it the sun room because it gets sun.

[B]

I think that we're being sold our own helplessness and powerlessness around what we actually can do, because the spreadsheets have got us convinced that we live in a spreadsheet world. And in a spreadsheet world, you have to buy dinner at the grocery store or at the drive through. And so this idea, I don't. I don't know if it's gardening or if it's, like, just connecting with our senses again and just stop being pixels for a second. And. And, like, I don't know, like, I don't want to be too hippie about it, but I also feel like there is, like, it is seditious to grow a garden at this moment in time. Like it is. Even if it's in, you know, one. Like, the vertical things that people can do.

[A]

I know, it's crazy. When I was doing a lot of research on N in rural developing countries, I saw all these things about how you could grow enough family to. Sorry. Grow enough food.

[B]

Grow enough food for the chest freezer.

[A]

In they go. Grow enough food, they said, for a family of four on a piece of earth the size of a door. And then I had this thing in one of my books, I talked about how I had a client who was a lawyer, and she was super successful, living in a penthouse in Manhattan. And she was, like, dying of anxiety. And I did my usual things like, notice what's going on inside you. And one day she came to an appointment. Zoom appointment. She was all happy. And I said, what are you doing? And she said, I've started farming. And she took the computer in to this glossy Manhattan apartment kitchen, and she was growing peppers, and she was growing squash, and she was growing. And she was so happy. And I've thought About that, as I've watched you do this, because we went to a seed starting class together. I went to a seed starting class with you.

[B]

It was a date.

[A]

And we all got to plant seeds. There were, like 10 other people there. We planted seeds the way the teacher told us. And then we did that and we came home and Rowie put her seeds in the sunroom and they all started growing in, like, 10 minutes. They were like, we are here. We wish to give you food. Mine have not.

[B]

Well, you abandoned them on the kitchen counter for a while. You let them dry out. Because really, who cares? That's the thing.

[A]

Did you let them dry out? They were soggy. They were fully sogged.

[B]

You didn't close off the end of their bag to create the greenhouse environment they needed for germination.

[A]

Well, see, this is what I'm talking about. This is why I not only never grew food, I never cooked food. I have very little interest.

[B]

Never. MOANINGS OF PRODUCTION one who cares less about food than you?

[A]

I do not care.

[B]

You do not get any pleasure from food.

[A]

I do.

[B]

I do when I'm hungry.

[A]

You know, there's nothing like food when you're hungry. But I really don't care what it is, as long as it's not actively, like, running from me or molting or anything.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If it's food, I'll eat it. But here's the deal. There are other means of production that I have experienced. Like, I call them my Promethean moments. Moments when I've realized, holy crap, we've been sold a bale of goods. We could totally do this without the system.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And one was, for the first time, I was taught to make fire with no matches, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

With like, a fire bow. I forget even now what they call it. But you do your little thing. Yeah. You have a rock and another rock and wood and kindling, and you get it all together and you get it. Okay, 800 degrees. And there's this moment when you get the tinder. Yeah. You get the fluff, whatever it is, tree moss or whatever you've got, and you drop your ember into it. And then you start feeding it oxygen by blowing into your hand. And it starts to smoke, and then it starts to billow with smoke. This goes on for a gratifyingly lengthy and suspenseful time. And then you take one breath and go. And it just bursts into flame. It doesn't send out a little spark, it just goes.

[B]

Best feeling ever.

[A]

And I remember watching that and going, we can do anything.

[B]

This is it. Yeah, yeah, this is it. And why do we think we can't just do it?

[A]

Yeah, well, there are. Don't you run into ra. If we tried to, like, set up a farm and start making fires for ourselves in a city somewhere, they would be screaming at us about zoning and people would come and, like, beat on us with rocks and sticks. Is that not true? That is my supposition as a sociologist.

[B]

So you're just like, all right, so we'll go out into. Into a suburban front yard and we'll get our little tools and we'll go blow on the fire. Blow on the fire? No, like, can't we just, like, let's do this in stages. But first of all, let's have our pepper on peppers on the kitchen counter. And. And like, I just. Every. Every step back into nature, our nature, which is to tend and foster life and not pixels. Every step we take back in that direction is a reclamation of this power and a recognition that we have been tricked into thinking we don't have the power.

[A]

It has been revelatory. Watching you, because I see you going into that room and you're just completely surrounded by this wall of green that came in a paper packet six months ago. It's not to mention there was a time when Lila, our five year old, was smaller than a grain of salt and being stored in a freezer somewhere like that.

[B]

Chest freezer.

[A]

Chest freezer, exactly. And you start with fire and agriculture, and you end up being able to do that kind of magic. That's insane. So the means of production are very. They go to the high level of technology as well. And some people. I've watched you get your hands in the dirt and then this miracle explodes around you. But some people's hands in the dirt will be high technology. My hands in the dirt was when I was totally physically disabled, Completely overwhelmed with mothering and trying to work and everything. And I just had to figure out how to live. And that's. I've always. I used to carry around books in high school. Here's my theories about how to live. And then I started talking, living them out loud, kind of. I'd tell people about them and they started paying me just to tell them about it. And I was like, surely you cannot be serious. This is just what I do. And they're like, no, no, we want to pay you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that was me finding. Getting my hands in the dirt.

[B]

Right. Because what you discovered was that you had access to value.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That could be exchanged, that you could offer and you could take to my AT market. Right? Yeah. And so you could generate your own living.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

By creating value, even though the value was, in theory, not tangible. It feels tangible to people when you can relieve their suffering. Well, and that's part of being human, right?

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, when you talk gardening and cooking. Cooking. I'm like. But when you talk micro entrepreneur or micro self sufficient person in the world, I start to get very excited because I really believe everybody has a version of the dirt. Like, I had a client, one of my very first clients, loved the Tetris of fitting together three dimensional objects. You said in the beginning, oh, my

[B]

God, she would have loved my chest phrase.

[A]

And I was like, what do you enjoy anything? She was so depressed. She didn't want to. She was burned out. And she's like, well, this may sound weird, but I love arranging three dimensional objects. And it did a little research. Turned out there were really, really good opportunities for doing that and exchanging it for value. Barter, money, whatever. So it's just, can you find your dirt? Can you find where you want to put your hands in the soil? And it's not the ways you've been taught. It's never going to be the way you've been raised to think.

[B]

I believe it's not gonna. We're not gonna find it in the hustle.

[A]

No, that's right.

[B]

In the mentality of the hustle. There isn't a finish line where you can sit down and. And look at your guy. Oh, no, Never, right?

[A]

Never.

[B]

There's that Maria Bamford line, you know, she's talking about in la. And everyone's like, what are you working on? What's your current project? What are you working on? What are you working on? And like, it's so exhausting that finally she's just like, I finished.

[A]

I'm done. I finished early. She does it so much better than we do.

[B]

How dare you? I just killed her.

[A]

That's her dirt. And comedy is her dirt. And she fricking kills.

[B]

Yeah, she is the one.

[A]

Yeah. So devil's advocate position. We're sitting here going, yeah, we grew up and went to graduate school. And now after decades and decades of life, we're finding out that we can grow things in a garden. And my devil's advocate position is, aren't there a whole bunch of people out there who are like, they've been out gardening and being off the grid and, like, storing ammunition? I mean, I grew up among a very millennial people, people who believe.

[B]

And she doesn't mean the millennial generation.

[A]

No, I mean as in there's going to be a thousand years of peace when Christ comes. But first there's going to be a nuclear holocaust and only the Mormons will survive because we've grown food and stored it in our chest freezers and we have a two year supply of everything we need and a lot of ammunition because the non Mormons are coming and the people of God are going to need to kill those people. Obviously. Yeah.

[B]

Just like Jesus said.

[A]

Just like Jesus said. So how are we not just like late to the party like homesteaders here? Are we? Is that what we are right now?

[B]

You're sort of talking about like crazy libertarian preppers.

[A]

Well, that's what comes to mind.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I don't think homestead has to have that, that kind of.

[A]

I don't even know.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, maybe, but remember in the last of us when there was that crazy guy and he survived the zombie invasion and then he fell in love with a beautiful Australian man.

[A]

Episode four, was it?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You gotta watch that.

[B]

It's really good. So think about that. Like, maybe everyone's just waiting for a beautiful Australian man to like, through their defenses.

[A]

Are you a man?

[B]

I'm not a man personally.

[A]

Well, two out of three ain't bad. Beautiful Australian boom. But yeah, I do think that we buy into the hustle mentality that we wear ourselves out and that we get to the point where we don't want to. And nine out of ten people will say, I have to do it anyway, because that's what they've been told by everything around them.

[B]

Did you know that when we buy food from the grocery store, only 8 cents in the dollar, or so I've been told, is spent on the actual food, on the raw food itself. And the rest is all the costs associated with, you know, transport and treating and, and infusing with all the chemicals and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not Maha. I'm not like going in that direction. I'm. I'm crunchy, but not that kind of crunchy, but I'm just like, I, I really feel that there is a massive conversation being enacted on us in the form of the hustle.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think we need to like, get hip to it. And that's. It doesn't, it doesn't have to end with you planting a garden by any means, but like, get hip to it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So that you can find a way to circumvent it in a way that feels real and tactile and organic and physical to you.

[A]

Yeah. The departure from that lifestyle into the pyramid shaped like corporate lifestyle came with one word, and that word was surplus. When agricultural labor started, people realized, we can grow more than we need. And then immediately people said, I want to control more than I need. I'm going to take it all.

[B]

You want it? You want to take mine? Yeah. Well, fine.

[A]

So, you know, you have a chicken stand and you're selling fried chicken and it does really well, but now you want to do, okay, people like this chicken. I'm going to get. I'm going to get a chicken farm with a thousand chickens. Now, I've got to make the chickens all be in rows so they don't have lives, but I'm going to raise them. And I've got to have people to pay to, like, put things in with them. And we need trucks and we need. It's all for the purpose of growing an empire. So this is what I want to say right now, right here is if you need to grow an empire to be happy, the hustle is probably the way you should go. But if you don't need an empire, if you just need a freaking life, if you want things like peace and happiness and loved ones.

[B]

I'm not saying the smell of tomato plants.

[A]

Yes, yes, sorry. I sound very judgmental of people who own huge corporations because in fact, I am.

[B]

Yeah, no, that's fair.

[A]

But yeah, it's this madness over controlling vast amounts of material and wealth and control over other people's lives. I mean, those things go to a very sort of venal part of the reward system for human beings. But what you're talking about is what Voltaire says at the end of Candide. If everyone.

[B]

People are always comparing me to Voltaire. I'm sick of it.

[A]

I know it's the nose. No, no, you don't have my nose. Like Voltaire. Your nose is perfect and so is his, but in a very different way. A French. Like earlier, creative.

[B]

What did he say?

[A]

He said the only way to make life livable is if everybody just sticks to cultivating his own garden. Or her own garden. He didn't say his or her. He said his because he was still part of the patriarchy. Anyway, if we all can cultivate our own gardens, there's a sanity in that. And I think. I mean, he thought long and hard about it, and I think he came to a pretty good conclusion.

[B]

Men are better than women.

[A]

No, no. Gardens are better than other things. Gardens are better than, I don't know, being a surf or whatever. People were a peasant. They were still in the fields, they just didn't have their own gardens.

[B]

Go on. Reminds me of an Ani DiFranco lyric.

[A]

Does it? Amazing.

[B]

Because I really think that so often, like what, what we're coming down to in this conversation is between the tactile experience of having a beating heart and skin in this environment that is in so many ways inhuman. Or, you know, a human.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so anyway, Ani says, let us look down at our hands. I was like, is this too cute? And you were like, no, it's okay. Look, let us look down at our hands and remember we're armed. And it's kind of funny, but it's also kind of like that's. I mean, when we talk about gardens, I'm really just talking about, oh my God, I have a pair of hands and they're not just built for typing.

[A]

I had such an interesting experience about. This is kind of woo, I guess I was in a yoga class and we did this.

[B]

It can be kind of woo, woo.

[A]

Anyway, we'd done this. Impossible. It was a very brutal yoga class because that's what Westerners do with yoga.

[B]

Well, in fairness, so do Easterners.

[A]

Yeah, well, we'd been holding this impossible pose for a very long time and I was like going slightly insane and I looked at my hands and suddenly it was like something was looking at them that wasn't really identified with me. It was just this amazed, interested, huge consciousness. And it looked at these hands and it went, oh, they can do all kinds of things. I could do so many things with this. Like you've got this, this machine. Yeah, let's do some things.

[B]

It's so cool. I was just like breaking bits off a cookie earlier and eating them and I just had that like, like moment of like, oh, look at the little monkey with its little hands. And it can just use them, can just use it for so many things. Yeah, just break off a bit of cookie, put it in your mouth.

[A]

It's so like the amount of ideas you can materialize with these hands. If you take away the cage, you know, this, as I said, I call it the man cage. Because men get even more stuck in the hustle thing than women. Because women know if I want to have a family, there's sort of room because women bear children and you can't actually throw the cat.

[B]

It's a different cage.

[A]

It's a different cage. And believe me, men get much, much more of the power, wealth and status. I'm not under any illusions about that. But they also get really mind blind to anything but the hustle. A lot of them do. At least those that come to me. And when you take off the blinders that the culture has put on about how you have to hustle to make

[B]

a living,

[A]

these arms, these hands can do so many things. Right. I mean, it's just astonishing beyond words. Yeah.

[B]

We saw a thing that was a short video that was talking about, like, in this economic environment, if you are underemployed, you should try growing food. Like that. You can cut through so many of these tricks.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That the culture has constructed around this $0.08 out of the dollar or whatever. Like, yeah, there's. We can circumvent them. And it's just the beginning. Like, it's just like poke your finger into the, like the part of the story that says you've got to buy pre cooked food at the grocery store or the drive through on your way home from work at 9pm Right. And we just start deconstructing that a little bit around food. It's such a basic process of being human.

[A]

Think about that. You have to earn a dollar for every eight cents of food you buy at the store. So if you buy a seed packet for $2 and later you've got 28 tomatoes, like every tomato you eat is 92% cheaper than the one you bought at the grocery store because, I mean, you've put your time into it. The thing I loved about that is it said any member of a family who is underemployed should start growing food because you can add. Because it's not individualized either. It's incredibly difficult to support a whole family by one person's labor. Right.

[B]

Yes, impossible. And also, like, I just need to put as like a little side note in this is that part of the process of being abstracted into pixels that the culture does to us in the way we live has also led to so many people being isolated in like, oh my God, you know, living alone, not being part of community, not being part of a social network in which these kinds of processes, like growing food.

[A]

Part of the lie.

[B]

It's part of the lie.

[A]

You are just an individual cog knocking around in a meaningless universe. You better sit at the, at the fluorescent lights if you want to buy that food for, you know, 8 cents of food for a dollar. It makes me think, I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but there was this famous, I think it was Erickson, famous therapist. And one of his most famous cited cases was he had this woman who, very isolated and very depressed and he gave Her a project which was to. She liked growing African violets. That was the only thing she liked. So he told her that she should go through, like, the obituaries and take an African violet to the families who'd lost someone in her neighborhood. And she started doing this. And then she started becoming well known for it. And then she became, like, this famous legend in the city where she lived. And she got so many friends, she was so happy. And it was all because she went back to touch the soil, Right? It was all, I'm getting quite excited about you touching the soil. That's why I said, if there's a member of the family. But I do think that everybody can find their own dirt. I really do. When you were quoting Ana DeFranco, I was remembering two quotes by Albert Camus

[B]

that just sums up everything about who you are and who I am.

[A]

I am old. You are young, over educated. Well, I won't mention the H word. Anyway, Camus said at one point, the struggle itself alone is enough to fill a man's heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, right? So that right there is the culture. And so his whole thing. That's another thing. He said, this is three quotes. Another one is, you know, I get up in the morning and try to decide, should I have a cup of coffee or kill myself. Yeah. Because really, when you've decided that you have to imagine Sisyphus happy, that rolling a rock up a hill for no reason so the gods can roll it back down under the fluorescent lights and tell you to do it again in the morning, that should fill your heart. Of course, you're going to be like coffee suicide. But then in a different context, he said, in the midst of winter, I finally learned that there is in me an invincible summer. And when you started growing these little tomato seedlings right around Christmas time, New Year's, which terrible, terrible time, you started class, the teacher was stunned when we told her what you had done.

[B]

She was so disappointed in me.

[A]

Started tomatoes at Christmas time. But there we were in this really difficult winter, this really harsh first winter in the Catskills, and there you were. And now, even when it was like 0 degrees for weeks on end, with 3ft of snow on the ground and no light and everything, I'd walk in and see you in there, and you were in this invincible summer. I think if you find the way to put your hands in the dirt, for me, it's interacting with the intricacies of people's lives and how to make them happy. It's also like Any kind of art or music or anything. I put my hands on that stuff and it changes me. It starts to bring me alive. And people need that, too, everywhere around us. You say art isn't necessary, but why are we sitting in front of this wall that was designed this way, at this table that was also designed? All of this is design. All of this is art. We push it to the sides of the culture in terms of prestige because it doesn't fit the factory as much to say to somebody, go create something. Go create a design. So I think everybody has the dirt. So find your. Fuck it, and then find the dirt where you want to grow something.

[B]

Yeah, I love that.

[A]

That.

[B]

I've got nothing to add except that you stole our find your it topic.

[A]

Or maybe we can go back and we'll go.

[B]

We'll still do it. We'll still do it. Don't cut this. No, no, don't cut.

[A]

What do we have left to say?

[B]

I think find your dirt. Or at least, you know, because I feel like we're going to get letters. I don't like dirt. I don't want to.

[A]

Yes. Good for you.

[B]

Yeah. And. But to me, it's like, find the element. Like, you were talking about making fire. Like, go outside and smell the wind. Like, you know, it's. Yeah, it's like, let's get back to the memory of. Of being a human animal.

[A]

The Promethean moments when you realize that you can make something with your hands in a wild way.

[B]

Yeah. And that's. That's got to be the big part of what we're here for. Right? That's what we came here to do, is, like, use our little paws to create little shapes.

[A]

Because you know what? When. When I do that. When you do that, we really wanna.

[B]

Yeah, I wanna.

[A]

There's no question we're having coffee. We may not even need coffee. We're so interested in going out and doing what it is we do.

[B]

So I think, if anything, that's how we stay wild. But also have the coffee. 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. We're also on Instagram. Our handle is Bewildered podcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the Brilliant team at mbi. And remember, if you're having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.