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Lorraine Besser, "The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It" (Balance, 2024)
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
I'm delighted to have the chance to speak with Lorraine Besser about her new book, today, the Art of the what We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate it, published by Balance Books. Professor Besser teaches philosophy at Middlebury College in Vermont. And in this book she offers nuanced readings of classic philosophical texts ranging from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill. While providing entertaining and illuminating insights from everyday life, she also draws from her personal experience, showing that philosophy is not just an academic pursuit, but is ultimately about how we can live better lives. So I'm sure, like me, you'll find this topic very interesting indeed. And it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Lorraine Besser. Welcome to the new book.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Thank you. I'm looking forward to talking with you.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Thank you. Well, so let's talk about a little bit to set the stage. What brought you to this topic and tell us a little bit about your background and how you arrived at this fascinating book?
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, you know, it's, it's a conflux of factors. So my research has been, you know, for 20 years I've been looking into questions about the good life. So I started by working on virtue and the concept of eudaimonia, which is the Greek analysis of the good life. And. And then I worked on happiness. And I wrote a book about happiness. And, you know. You know, one of the things I learned through that book is that happiness is very, very important, but it's also pretty limited. And so I, you know, I. As I'm thinking through these two different kind of conceptions that I've, you know, studied in depth, it did seem to me that, you know, both eudaimonia and happiness were really, really important aspects of living well, but they weren't all that there was to it. And so there was a time where at a certain period where we began research on this, the concept of psychological richness, which is the driving force of the book. So a couple of things that kind of led up to that. I'd been doing these different kinds of lines of research, and so psychologists reached out to me to collaborate on a new idea that he had. And this is Shigehiro Oshii. And so we worked together to really try to identify this aspect of the good life that had really been overlooked. And this happened at a time in my life where I was actually just personally kind of crushed and really thinking about how to live a good life. I had just gone through a divorce. I was raising two young kids on my own. I was also just getting tenure. It was just a major moment in my life. And as I'm working on, you know, developing this concept of psychological richness and the value of interesting experiences, I really started to recognize and understand within myself how important this had been to me throughout so much of my life. But then how. Also how it had gotten kind of shadowed in the wake of the past couple of decades where, you know, it's just very easy. And I'd gotten into this habit of really just working and working. And I find my job so fulfilling and rewarding, so really just working and then just kind of, you know, crashing and just needing a, you know, a break at the end of it. And so I. This was a really kind of synthesis of a kind of trajectory of my career and a trajectory of my personal life. Quite honestly, that's fascinating.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
I mean, because it's not often for academics that you see this confluence of the personal and professional. And I have to say, part of the reason I reached out to you for this interview is I found it very resonated a lot with my own experiences and also accounted for some things that I've noticed. And I think what I think maybe you're alluding to there, in drawing this distinction between happiness and this notion of psychological richness is the fact that experiences can be psychologically rich but not necessarily always pleasant. And that's part of the point, right? That's part of the process.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah. I think this is one of the most interesting. The most interesting aspect to bring out because we very much tend to think in terms of our experiences. We define them on certain lines. And we tend to think that if an experience isn't pleasant that it shouldn't be part of our good lives. And I think we're finding that such a mistaken kind of framework to think about. So one of the values of psychological richness is that it challenges you, it drives kind of. These are complex experiences that really kind of work your mind and challenge you. And often they are unpleasant. Yet we're learning more and more. Right. That they're still valuable, people still think they're valuable. And there's a real value to be had in recognizing that things don't always just have to feel good in that pleasant kind of way to enrich our lives. And so making that distinction, I've found so important. It just allows you to look upon your life and your experiences in a different framework. Sometimes we're just not in a place where we're feeling pleasant or we're feeling those good feelings all the time. And I think often we get kind of bummed out about it when we are just like, ah, we're just not feeling, you know, we're just not feeling those happy moments in many stretches of our lives. And yet, you know, we can still have interesting, valuable experiences even absent the pleasant feelings. And I think that's a real game changer for a lot of us.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Absolutely. And the distinction that you really draw very clearly in the book, but I think is something that I didn't appreciate when I was studying Aristotle and the concept of his notion of eudaimonia and this idea of human flourishing as an aspect of what is conventionally defined as happiness. But what's the distinction then, between eudaimonia as a form of human happiness and the psychologically rich life? Because there are similarities, right? There's some similarities, it seems. Right. In terms of fulfillment and.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Absolutely. So eudaimonia from the ancient Greek perspective. Right. It captures the sense of living well as a human being. And what's distinctive about Aristotle's framework is that it really kind of gives this analysis of how we can live using the most of our capacities. And so Aristotle thought That we could live our best lives when we really use our rational capacities in the service of meaningful things like virtue and finding these aspects of our lives to which we can find a kind of deep fulfillment. All the while really tapping into something that is really part of our natures and allows us to. I think the best word is thriving. You know, eudaimonia translates pretty much to the word flourishing. And for Aristotle, that's all flourishing as a human being. And Aristotle, you know, he thought that the, the primary part of us, of human beings is our rationality and that this was our most important feature. So to thrive as human beings, he thought, was all about using our rationality. And this is where I really disagree with Aristotle. I think that our rationality is really one really super important, awesome part of us. But I think our minds are also capable of different things and particularly we can use our reason in the service of having different kinds of experiences other than just the kind of goal based directives of getting what we want or pursuing a certain purpose. And so I think our minds are equally capable of having this kind of. It's a robust form of cognitive engagement that we're talking about in psychological richness. And it's this idea that, that our minds can really push and explore things and that when we do that with our minds, even if we're just wrapping our heads around something, right, we're tapping into our curiosity, our creativity, we're bringing out other dimensions of ourself that honestly I think often get squashed in the name of rationality or pursuit of purpose.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Interesting. Yeah. And what you're getting at too is in terms of a more complete understanding of human nature that maybe is a product of some of the insights from psychology, modern psychology. And I was really fascinated to read some of Shigehiro Oishi's work with you and to see that collaboration. I'm just curious, what do you think the role of that kind of empirical work is in informing philosophy and informing theorizing?
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, thank you. This is a relatively recent tradition for philosophy or a recent stream for philosophy. And it really be began about, you know, 20 in around 2000, where philosophers started really kind of turning to what we know about ourselves from psychology in a way to understand, to understand the theoretical frameworks we're introducing. And when philosophers first started doing this, it was really as looking to psychology to really try to almost to try to really critique what a lot of philosophy, what a lot of philosophers thought. And so in the, you know, in the earliest efforts of, and we call this empirically informed in philosophy. And in the earliest efforts, it was really saying, all right, so we've got these, these, these really richly developed models of how we, how we think or how we act. And yet those, those models seem to stand in tension with a lot of what we are learning from social psychology. And so the empirical movement really started with a critiquing kind of aspect of using it to critique. But then there's a second way, and this is the way in which I've used empirical research the most is more of. As a building process. And so my central way in which I do philosophy is I want to start with the most empirically informed understanding of human nature that we can and then ask the questions that go beyond that. Right. So for example, in the context of living, well, it's like, all right, well given that human nature is like we are, right. And given that we are responsive to certain kinds of things, then how can we use social psychology to build our understandings of moral concepts, but also I think quite centrally of aspects of the questions about the good life. And I think that we can learn so much from psychology about who we are and how certain kinds of experiences can really impact us. And I think that's really the essential kind of aspect of it. If we learn about ourselves and how we respond to certain types of experiences, then we can really think about really on, I think, a more robust level, what it means to live a good life.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Yeah, it's. And I think that the fact that some of these ideas have been, have been talked about in humanistic psychology and positive psychology, they're very much debating these philosophical notions as well.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Right.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
And seeking to. I just saw again, Dr. Oishi's latest research where he's doing empirical studies to try and validate what it is that creates a psychologically rich life. Right. I mean, so it's both, it's both a two way exchange, no?
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yes, yes, absolutely. And so, you know, and I think the project that we've worked on together, you know, the early stages of the psychological richness research, I think that's a really great example of the kind of synthesis. And so he contacted me as a way of trying to understand how it is that this concept of psychological richness really fit into other areas of the good life or was distinct from them. And so the earliest kind of research we did together and this was through an interdisciplinary grant funded by the Templeton Foundation. So they were bringing together teams of philosophers and psychologists to work on, to work on different aspects in morality. And so we came together to work on this aspect of the good life. And the first really important stage of it was to understand what it is and how it is different than the other aspects of the good life that we know a lot about already. And so we worked together on building or thinking about the initial scales of what really would characterize this experience. And through those scales we've learned that psychological richness is really distinct from these other ingrained concepts of the good life we've already talked about with Eudaimonia or more Meaning Driven accounts and happiness. And I think that was a great example of this way in which philosophers and psychologists can work together. Because with positive psychology, which happened, this is the movement to study more the positive dimensions of human life. They're working in tandem with these concepts that have, as you mentioned, they have deep philosophical roots. And so there's been a nice synthesis of psychologists really trying to understand the good life, but also developing it through seeing these frameworks that have been well entrenched within philosophy. And I think it's been just such a productive relationship both in general, between philosophy and psychology. We're just interested in so many similar concepts and we, we think about them in from different angles, but we can really get to like a very deep understanding of, of these aspects of the good life when, when we work together.
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Podcast Host
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
I mean, and it's fascinating to think that while people have been debating these issues for at least based on the historical records that we have for, you know, 24 years or more, that we're making more progress on maybe validating and rounding out the understanding of what is the good for humans and all that. So that's really interesting. I guess one of the things that comes to mind in today's world is the way in which technology is now mediating all of our experiences of the world. And I thought it was very interesting that you draw this distinction between the kind of attention that is applied to some technology like Instagram, where people may be glued to their phones and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. But that's not the same thing as creating a psychologically rich experience. And I'm just wondering to what degree you see that in today's world, this challenge or this difficulty of finding psychologically rich experiences amid all of the distraction that we're. We're presented with.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, and I love the way you're framing it in terms of distraction that we're presented with. And I think understanding the nature of what we're doing through a lot of these social medias or just through looking through whatever on our phones, we always now have the ability to turn our attention to our phones. And I worry a lot that when we do that and we get into these habits, right, we think we're using our minds in some kind of a way when we're looking through these different, through whatever it is that we're getting, yet we're using our minds in a way that really just serves to distract us rather than to engage our minds. And the value that we can use our minds, you know, the value that we can get through engaging our minds is really lies within the interplay between what you're taking in and what you're doing with that in your minds. And when we're really, you know, the stereotypical scrolling doom scrolling mode, right? Like we're not. We're just looking, right? We're not letting that whatever we're getting impact us. And we're not pausing to think, think and react and let ourselves engage with the material. So I think that there are definitely great uses we can use our phones for. We can find interesting experiences on our phones, but we have to really be aware of the kind of value of what we're getting out of our experiences. And I think that begins by thinking about the difference between being distracted by information and engaging with information. When we're engaging with information, you know, there is an interplay where we're, we're being curious about it. We're thinking, you know, we're asking why. We're thinking about different connections. We're, we're letting ourselves kind of take the material in and respond to on that cognitive level, but we're also letting it sink into our emotions.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
It's not passive.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
It's not passive. Absolutely. Yeah.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Yeah, that, that, that's an important distinction. And I mean it sounds too like what, what you're, you're getting to is the, or at least one aspect of this is this very popular notion of mindfulness today, right. So that when you are engaging in these interesting psychologically rich experiences, you, you can't be thinking of something else. Right? It's.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah. And, and you know, I think, you know what we've, we've learned a lot about mindfulness and I, and one of the things I do talk about in the book is how we can use those skills of mindfulness to find more interesting experiences in life. So when you think about mindfulness, right, it's this metacognitive awareness of your thoughts and what's happening, where you're paying attention to your mind in a way in which you're just allowing yourself to take it in without evaluating it. And if you can take this kind of mindset, right, and engage these tools of mindfulness, which is really just focused, evaluative attention to your everyday experiences, to the things that are around you, then that's going to allow you to, you know, focus on something without evaluating it. So you're not just writing it off as good or bad, but you're really getting to the level where you can notice, you can notice these small details that are, that will really be helpful in triggering these kinds of cognitive engagement. And so I think that those are really important skills. We tend to talk about them the most in terms of our internal minds to use mindfulness within our own mental states. But I do think there's also this way in which we can turn those same aspects of non evaluative attention, of noticing out to things external to us. And that can be a really rich resource of interesting experiences.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Absolutely. And I guess I'm wondering where you think in today's world, is there a place for this kind of experience? I mean, it seems that in our professional lives and even in our personal lives, things are structured. They're hyper competitive. Oftentimes you talk to people, they don't have time to fit anything additional into their, into their lives. There's, there's no real space for this, these pursuits. I mean, is it is or is that just, you know, a flawed assumption? Is there, do you see that there, that there is space within, within the contemporary society for this?
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, I definitely think there is space. And you know, one of the things that I, that I think is really important about psychological richness in comparison to these other forms of the good life is that it can happen in moments. And it can, and through building up in moments, it can really enhance your life over time. So you can have psychological richness within your lives by seizing on different moments within it. And you can. And unlike these other kinds of forms of the good life, which require like a dedication or an immersion in a certain kind of pleasant experience or a real kind of purpose driven search for meaning, you can have an interesting experience without actually changing anything about your life or your day to day or even where you are. So I would encourage everyone listening. We're having an interesting experience listening to us. But you know, you can learn to really even just look out your window or look across the hall and find something to catch your mind with. And this is where the skills of noticing can be really helpful and to bring some curiosity and creativity to those experiences to help your mind along. But I think that if we can start in these small areas, then we'll really build up these habits and almost way of seeing and interacting with the world that is, that is going to enhance our experiences even if it comes in different moments. So one of the time, one of the things I think about a lot are the wasted time, right? The wasted time. We have all, all the time during our days, right. We're during the commute or during the walk across, you know, walk across town, during the sitting in the waiting office at a doctor's appointment. Right. These are all actually pretty wasted times for most of us, right? They're the times we just Z out or we pull out our phones and then we've just wasted our time. If you can kind of switch recognize when you're in these areas where your mind is just checking out and nothing's happening. If you can recognize that and switch gears, you can have an interesting experience within those moments that are otherwise really just wasted. And it just involves recognizing what's happening in your mind and yeah, giving your mind the broom to not think about your work all the time or whatever stressing you out or Whatever is on the forefront, it's okay. There's plenty of time within the day to think about those aspects of our lives, but there's also time within to just have moments where we can have interesting experiences.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Well, one of the things that I really liked about the book were some of your discussions of interpersonal relationships and the way in which the interesting experiences can be found in your family, in your friendships and all of that. And that seems to also correspond to some of the psychological research about really what is the most fulfilling way to live is, you know, having close relationships with people. And just wondering if you could comment a little bit about the role of our personal interactions. We've been talking about the psychologically rich life more from an internal perspective, but there's this important external aspect as well.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Right, right, yeah, absolutely. You know, so. So one of. One of the things I've researched a lot in the philosophical world is, is how it is that our emotions really can be enhanced through sharing them with somebody else. And so one of the things that I think is really important about the interpersonal dynamics is that it gives us a space to really kind of experience things more robustly through sharing our emotions, through. Through allowing each other to. To really witness the kind of pursuits and passions that. That drive us. And I think there's kind of like a springboard effect right when. When you're around somebody who, who is really just kind of like naturally suited or like, say you're around someone who's just naturally suited, who's just adventurous in. In life and, and. And maybe you're not so adventurous, but you can spend time with this person and then really kind of catch their spirit. And I found certainly throughout my life that there are certain relationships I have that are really well suited towards me having certain kinds of experiences. And one of the first things I did in researching the differences between psychological richness and happiness and meaning, one of the first things I did was think about the different people in my life lives who really are good at each of those things and who really, you know, I think all of us lean towards one of those. I think all three are really important aspects, but I think there's ways in which, you know, like, we lean more heavily towards one. And so I found that, you know, within. Within my own personal life. So I, you know, another one is these conflicts of events is, you know, during the time when I was researching this, I had begun dating my. Who's now my husband Jody. And he is like that. Like, yeah, thank you. So. So he is one of These just, he just sees the world very differently. He just literally sees the world out there and notices every detail and takes it in. Is always, always, you know, trying to understand or think about, you know, like, oh, well, why is this person walking down the road? Right. And even just, you know, like driving in the car with him, it would just be like, whoa, this is totally a different experience. And, and, and you know, I think that's a great example because it shows, it taps into, you know, it shows me this window into, into having this other different kind of rich inner life and through, through our, through, through experiencing these things together. It not only, I think really helps one to have those experiences, but, but it, it makes them more robust when, when you're doing it together. And I think especially, you know, when you're thinking about psychological richness. Interesting experiences. A conversation is one of the most interesting things that we can do. And, and I think we know that. Right? We, we really struck by interesting conversations. Yeah. And it's because it's the back and forth, forth, you know, like when you're with another person. It's, it's that it flows more naturally when you're having, you know, a conversation. It's really, you know, curiosity becomes more active. Right. And, and you can, you can, you can have a really interesting experience just, just within, you know.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Simple.
- [34:19]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
A simple knee up adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained. One who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules but behave as if they do not exist. The new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you. This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just need to hit pause and refresh. An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break. It's your chance to catch your breath and savor a moment that's all about you. Always refreshing. Still the same great taste. Diet Coke make time for you time.
- [35:10]
Podcast Host
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Experian.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Well, and of course that's the way the ancient Greeks did philosophy anyway. Right. So we, we, we've a lot of people have talked about how academic philosophy is. It's kind of becoming, let's say a little bit more, you know, paper based and you know, lacking that kind of exchange. Right. And it's those kind of conversations that are why many of us got into it, you know, at some point in the first place.
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
So that's a great connection. I hadn't really thought about that. But yeah, like philosophy gets a bad rap for being in our, in our towers. But yeah, it is true that the earliest I used to just this just seemed like the heyday for me of ancient Greek, where ancient Greece where philosophers were just literally having debates on this street and just holding, holding a street corner and talking about philosophy with different members of the town, with children and all of these different things. And I think for a lot of us, especially like when your first experiences with philosophy are often in the classroom. Right. And it is those just ordinary exchanges that are so valuable and spark something so important. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That's a great connection.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Well, and I guess that is unfortunately not the world that we live in in a lot of ways. In some ways there are these forums where you can have dialogue like we are now, but then in our day to day interactions they're fewer and further between. But I'm wondering about now thinking about the policy implications and thinking about what we need to think about as a society in terms of how we arrange ourselves and how do we accommodate this need for psychological richness that is one of the critical aspects of human well being. And you know, does our economic system for instance, is it calibrated to enabling these kinds of experiences and what might we need to change to better accommodate it? I was thinking, I mentioned to you before about the, some of the work that had been done in terms of, in the economics profession about thinking about alternatives to Gross Domestic Product as the basis for computing economic well being. And of course there's this notion of Gross National Happiness that Bhutan had adopted for itself. But do you see that there's a need to be thinking differently about how we define value and therefore what kind of societies that we're shaping and creating?
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Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, I think we can do. Yes. So I think that there are a lot of different ways and levels in which we can enable or call attention to psychological richness and enable people to, to really be aware and capable of having more. And I, you know, I I don't. Not sure that something like Gross National Happiness or anything kind of parallel to that would be the way to go. I do, you know, I. I don't think hap. You know, I think that the good life needs all kinds of different, different experiences. And so centering around one pillar of the good life is. I don't know that that is the most helpful way for us to think about how each member of. Each member of our countries can really be thriving. And I think that with respect to what we can do at the kind of national level to. To call attention to this and make it easier for people to have these experiences, I think we need more time and we talk a lot in the U.S. certainly, we know that we work too much and we know that other countries have vast more amounts of holiday time. And I think that. I think that. So that's one way to go. I mean, you can definitely have. Travel is one of the most important and effective ways to have interesting experiences. And so having time allows for that. But I also think that it's really worth considering more of the options of a shorter work week. And this gets back to the idea of just being able to integrate it into our lives so that on a weekly basis, right, we're prioritizing having different kinds of experiences and having the time for them. So I think that opening up some time within our lives to have interesting experiences and within that movement to call attention to getting back to this idea that work takes up one part of our lives and that we can leave it and then to consolidate it is, I think, really important. So it doesn't just filter out into all of our lives and leave us really kind of tired and then just like wanting to sit on the couch and watch movies or something. But the second thing that I think is going to be really important and I think it's at the national level, but it's integrating. It's integrating into our school curriculums more emphasis on curiosity and creativity. So these. Right. These are just so essential to. To having psychologically rich experiences and of course, more generally just to enhancing our lives. And I worried a lot that within our school systems, one thing that happens is that children are very curious and creative. And when we're raising young children, it's all about those things. Be curious, be creative. But then something happens in our school system where we start to pay much more attention to that rational, structured mode.
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Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
And, well, the whole stem. The whole STEM obsession now. Right, everybody?
- [42:50]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, yeah. So there's so much attention to pay to, you know, that One aspect of our minds that can, you know, calculate and that can seek things and attain goals. And those are important. But you know, somewhere along the way we end up losing curiosity and becoming less creative. There's so many, many people I encounter who just say like, yeah, I'm not creative. And I was that person for a long time. And that's because I thought that. Because I didn't really like, wasn't really that fascinated by art. And so, and I think, and I now just know that's so wrong that there are so many different ways to be creative. Right. It's all just about forming different connections and in different contexts. So it's, it's being able to highlight and hone in these skills and develop them throughout your lives of being creative and being curious. And I think we can pay a lot more attention to those within our school systems. And I think by having more focused and really actually focused, highlighted attention towards the benefits of curiosity, towards how we can expand our world with curiosity and develop knowledge and really just train our brains to react more with those responses of why is this happening? What is this similar to? What does this call our attention to? And that's where the creative synthesis can come into play. So I think that might be one of our most promising ways of shifting it. I believe that the best way to have interesting experiences is really to try to shift your mindset so that you can, can see the world in a way which opens it up to having more interesting experiences. And so I think just stemming, you know, instilling these traits and keeping live the emphasis on curiosity and creativity would just be transformative within our lives.
- [44:56]
Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
And there's some real, I think affinities with some of the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. I know the human capabilities and that as a way of framing and thinking about development and what development means. And it's this idea of. But in order to enable people to realize those capabilities, you have to create the structures and the freedom. Freedom as Sen in particular.
- [45:34]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Right.
- [45:34]
Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Puts this idea of freedom to be able to cultivate all of those aspects of ourselves.
- [45:42]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, this is very similar and it's in part just. Yeah, it's fairly similar to this idea that what we need more of within our policies is attention to how it is that we can, can develop and whether that's through developing through having the kind of basic needs. Right. Having needs met or having the ability to freely express ourselves. So there are certain, definitely structures and I think a lot of how policies look at the Sen and Nussbaum capabilities approach is, is somewhat limited because it's limited on these capabilities that society has deemed kind of most important and which are essential to our lives. Yet we can go beyond that. In that same spirit, we can go beyond that and really start to prioritize and value the kinds of experiences that we can have. And so it's a more robust aspect of fulfilling our capabilities. And that's going to be a way in which I think this, it's going to benefit our minds, it's going to benefit our lives. And I think it also, you know, as we're, we're increasingly moving to this world of artificial intelligence and questioning really, you know, what. What's left for us, you know, what will be left for our us and our minds and creativity and curiosity is going to be, is, I think, vital. And I think that is a way in which we can start to recognize that, that enhancing those capabilities is going to. I think it's going to be pivotal in our upcoming future.
- [47:32]
Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
That's a really good point. And of course on all sorts of levels there's evidence that there's a lot of stress happening in our societies now. And I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Judson Brewer. He's done a lot of work on anxiety. And what he argues is that basically our curiosity is the way in which you can overcome anxiety by applying your curiosity, getting out of your own head and engaging in the kind of psychological richness that I think you're talking about as well.
- [48:16]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's really fascinating to think about curiosity being the flip side of anxiety. And I'm not familiar with that work, but that's fascinating. I think that it is so true. It's a different way of turning your mind. Right. So it's being less kind of immediately driven by instinctive reactions and really able to kind of pivot in your mind what you're doing with new information.
- [48:48]
Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
And maybe that'll make our, our society a little better if we, if we had a little bit more curiosity and creativity.
- [48:56]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, I think, I think that helps. You know, earlier you had brought up how, you know, conversations or the focus of people are interpersonal dynamics are, are just less right now. Right. Partly because of the digital world, but I think also partly with, you know, within, within really charged political climates. And one of, you know, going back to this idea about, about psychological richness and what we, what we know about these valuable experiences is that they're really, they happen from this perspective where you are not being evaluative Right. So where you are bringing, right. A truly open mind to your, to your interactions, to your experiences. And this, I think, is a really important skill, right, to just be able to, to see the world and to see people in without evaluating things and just be how, you know, speak mind to mind, have a genuine curious conversation. And that I, that I think that's a really important aspect of our, of our daily lives that we need to harness.
- [50:04]
Interviewer (Tom or Sam)
Agreed. Well, thank you very much. This is really fascinating, and I, I hope that people are inspired to read your book. It's really a lot of fun and very informative, and it just might improve your lives as well. So thank you very much, Dr. Lorraine Besser, and appreciate your time.
- [50:29]
Dr. Lorraine Besser
Yeah, thank you, Tom. It was a great conversation, Sam.