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- [00:00]
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- [00:37]
Sarah Wilson
And we've straddled, I guess, 30 years of incredible growth and opulence and abundance and of an over medicalization of these very human and very necessary conditions and a masking of these conditions. These conditions are now going to be really important to our survival and so we should be unmasking them and having the conversation around building resilience, acceptance and a deification in some ways, of these particular responses.
- [01:07]
Omari Edwards
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, the podcast of the Institute of Art and Ideas. I'm your host, Omari Edwards. Today I have the special pleasure of being joined by my colleague Eilish Astrid, Head of Arts and Culture.
- [01:26]
Eilish Astrid
Hi. It's great to be here.
- [01:28]
Omari Edwards
It's great to have you. Eilish, I think this is your first time on the podcast. Is there anything you want to share with the audience about what you're interested in that has inspired you to join the Institute of Art and Ideas team?
- [01:41]
Eilish Astrid
Well, like most of my colleagues, I studied philosophy. I found a great love for aesthetics, especially the kind of epistemological side and how we can use aesthetics and art to kind of learn and grow and how we can use it more practically as well.
- [01:58]
Omari Edwards
So in this interview that you did with Sarah Wilson, you really got to dive into the psychology, the philosophy and the general culture around a deep anxiety that I think we can all say is being experienced by more and more people today. What was your biggest takeaway from the conversation?
- [02:19]
Eilish Astrid
It was interesting because I think she's very easy person to talk to. She has quite an interdisciplinary background. So it's not necessarily like academic philosophy that she focuses on, which I think makes her very relatable and very easy to follow. And she talks about a lot of ideas that I think affect everyone today. So it wasn't going into it thinking, oh, you know, I have to make this understandable to the audience or I have to really dig into this particular philosopher. And obviously it was a philosophical conversation, but it was also a very wide reaching, practical conversation.
- [02:57]
Omari Edwards
Well, that's really exciting. So we're going to hand over to Past you to hear your conversation with Sarah Wilson. Thanks for joining.
- [03:17]
Eilish Astrid
So welcome. Sarah Wilson, author, activist and thinker, whose books First we make the Beast Beautiful and this one, Wild, Wild and Precious Life, explore anxiety, disconnection, and how we might live meaningfully in turbulent times. Thank you for joining us today.
- [03:31]
Sarah Wilson
Thank you for having me.
- [03:33]
Eilish Astrid
So the journey you frame in this one Wild and Precious Life is described as a soul's journey. Can you expand on what you mean by soul in this context?
- [03:41]
Sarah Wilson
For me, yeah, yeah. As you know, I come from a perspective that's not just strictly philosophical. I sort of incorporate psychology, I guess, popular culture, science, evolutionary theory and so on. So my particular take on the soul is that it's. It's the aspect of ourselves that is deep within us and kind of cries out to be expressed. You know, some people might call it the spirit and so on, but it's that part of ourselves that calls us to be the best version of ourselves. And it's sort of. It brings in moral thinking and our responsibilities as a human, as a. As part of a collective, but it also speaks to a deep seated yearning. And I think it brings forward our ancestry and deep longings from our evolutionary past as well. I think there's an element of that as well in what we conceptualise as the soul.
- [04:39]
Eilish Astrid
So talking about yearning, you've written that we live with a primordial lack of an itch that manifests in despair, consumption and distraction. From the Stoics to the Existentialist, many thinkers have wrestled with this void. How does your own philosophy interpret this itch?
- [04:55]
Sarah Wilson
Yeah. So the itch is the felt experience of the incongruency or the lack of attunement. I think that many of us feel in contemporary life when we are not living the life that matches what we know we are meant to be doing. And James Hollis, the Jungian therapist, he has a beautiful line and I quote it in the book. And it's like our souls are calling us to an appointment with life. So our souls are constantly trying to get us to meet life in that congruency and that attunement. And when we don't. And James Hollis talks about this. He says at first we get a whisper. Okay, so that might be a little bit of a niggling itch, you know, and it might be in the middle of the night, you wake up and go, oh, God, you know, that cringe feeling or the ick, you know, and then if we ignore it and if we go into denial and we just get on with our consumptive lives, it'll then become a bit of a push. And if we ignore that, it becomes a shove and then it becomes an almighty slap down. And that's. That's the itch. The itch is the thing that gets us stuck to attend to our deep, I guess, you know, moral pursuit and what our souls are asking us to do. So that's. That's what I mean by the itch. And I think most people can kind of conceptualize it when they think of it as a physical manifestation.
- [06:22]
Eilish Astrid
So for the people that don't experience this itch.
- [06:25]
Sarah Wilson
Yeah.
- [06:26]
Eilish Astrid
Would you say they're lacking something innately human or would you say that they just haven't felt it yet and they will later on in their life? Like, is it a necessary thing to human existence to feel this yearning or this itch?
- [06:40]
Sarah Wilson
I don't know that it's necessary to feel it. It's more important probably to say it's necessary to attend to it when you do feel it. So if you are living in a lack of attunement, a lack of congruency with life, with what your soul is asking you to do in this lifetime, and you ignore it, then it will manifest as the shove and then the almighty slap down, which in many cases takes the form of, well, anxiety, depression, I think illness, physical illness. It often presents in that form and just a general discontent, you know. So I think, yeah, the more interesting question is if you do get the itch, it is a problem if you ignore it. And so living in denial. And look, one thing I would say is that generally most people can't live in denial forever, not at least in a calm, contented way, which is why we've always had philosophers and spiritualists and religions to actually steer us on that inquiry, because it is so fundamental to the human experience.
- [07:43]
Eilish Astrid
So you suggest that in our age, this lack is amplified by loneliness, technology, and the neoliberal model itself. If these forces are so deeply interwoven in into the fabric of modern life, how do we begin to reconnect and fill this void?
- [07:57]
Sarah Wilson
We have to be defiant. We really do.
- [08:00]
Eilish Astrid
So how in your daily life are you defiant?
- [08:02]
Sarah Wilson
Oh, gosh, in so many ways, I land in trouble for it. But I think that's what we need to do. You know, I think Charles Bukowski said, get yourself into a bit of trouble, you know, and that is part of the philosophical pursuit. It's part of being a human being. You've got to land in a little bit of trouble. Pima Chodron talks about going to the edge. The edge is where we're meant to be when we're in discomfort, that's when we come online, that's when we, we come alive. And so I think that some kind of dissent is required. And, you know, an awareness of, you know, for instance, neoliberalism as a structure that we are stuck in now is really important. So once you sort of are able to see things a bit further back in a cinema, you know, a bit. So when you're right up close to the cinema screen with your nose pressed against the screen, you think that this structure is existence, you think this is reality. When you sit further back, you go, ah, I'm in a movie theater and I'm watching a particular story unfold. So one of the techniques is to get further back in the cinema screen. And like I said before, philosophical discussions like this festival are so important for that. And I think the reason we suffer today is because we don't have those discussions. And, you know, a big theme of this festival this year, from what I can gather is AI AI is just galloping ahead with none of these kinds of considered conversations about how is this going to affect the human experience? It's been done to us and there's no discussion about what we want. So how do we, yeah, how do we kind of, I guess, attend to our soul's yearning within that model? We need to have more discussions around it so that everyday person can identify that what they're feeling, that deep pain, is in fact a crying out for a discussion around this kind of thing. It's a crying out to not be trapped inside a system that's not serving, serving the human species, the human condition.
- [09:59]
Eilish Astrid
So would you say it's about dismantling the system or is it about learning to live within the system?
- [10:05]
Sarah Wilson
Yes, it's a little bit of both. And I used to get stuck in that quandary previously as a climate activist. There was always this idea, gosh, we don't have time to dismantle the system. We are in the neoliberal system. We are going to have to work with it. And so let's decarbonise, let's have a green economy, let's work within the capitalist framework, because we don't have time to tear this down. What I would say now is, and perhaps this is something of a gift, and this is the subject of my book that's coming out next year, is that the system is going down. It is going down. And so we don't need to have that discussion anymore. And so the Conversation is firmly about adapting, adapting to the new way without that superstructure in place. So that's where I sort of exist now. The system is going down. And so it's like, holy shit, now what? You know what I mean? Like we are now in that sort of space that the existentialists referred to as freedom, the dizzying, like frightening anxiety of the freedom of going, who are we now without this superstructure?
- [11:06]
Eilish Astrid
Well, speaking of anxiety, you've talked a lot about civilization being on the brink of collapse, as you just said. At the same time, you've also written about anxiety as something we can and should find beauty in and sometimes embrace. How do you reconcile collapse, which seems to be itself like the ultimate source of anxiety for many people? How do you reconcile your view of anxiety with the reality of collapse?
- [11:32]
Sarah Wilson
Well, I would say that having a really serious reckoning with anxiety is going to be the superpower that is actually going to assist you through what is ahead. Very, very uncertain, declining times. So part of the argument I make in first we make the beast beautiful. And that was. That came out quite a long time ago. It was when that sort of discussion in, around framing anxiety outside of the medical model was just starting to get a little bit of traction. So it's not such the, it's not the controversial idea that it was back then. But anxiety has generally, well, has always served a purpose, a much larger purpose. About 1.2% of any population around the world tends to be OCD or have bipolar traits. And that's for very, very obvious reasons. You need people who are highly sensitive to noise and sound, you know, in, in prehistoric times to be able to hear the tiger approaching or to be able to smell when a mushroom is poisonous and to be sitting on the outside of the clan going, you know, what do we need to do? And have no friends to distract you, right? So these loner OCD types, you know, who in our culture are ostracized back then, were really vital to our survival. So that was sort of the thesis. And I would argue that using anxiety as a sort of a trigger to coming online, becoming alert, listening to what it is that the anxiety is telling us, like developing those skills is what we're going to. It's one of the many skill sets we're going to need going forward. And it's about building resilience rather than slipping into this victim mentality. And we've straddled, I guess, 30 years of, of incredible growth and opulence and abundance and of an over medicalization of these very human and very necessary conditions and a masking of these conditions. These conditions are now going to be really important to our survival, and so we should be unmasking them and having the conversation around building resilience, acceptance and deification in some ways, of these particular responses. So it's a very different kind of conversation. So I would say that, yeah, that argument that I made, however many years ago it was now eight, nine years ago, I think, is actually probably more true and more pertinent than ever. Yeah.
- [14:00]
Eilish Astrid
So how would you distinguish between the kind of anxiety that galvanizes meaningful action versus the kind that paralyzes us? Do you think there is a difference, or do you just think it's about how we deal with our anxieties? It does all anxiety have the potential to be meaningful?
- [14:16]
Sarah Wilson
And, yeah, I think it's almost like the distinction between evolutionary anxiety versus, like, where there's a tangible threat versus an existential anxiety, where we sometimes think it's a sort of an indulgence and we've got to sort of snap out of it and get. Get a bit of framing, you know, obviously, lots of overlap, obviously. And I think the way to understand it is to realise that in the past, anxiety existed literally to get us to bolt when the tiger was approaching. Right. Or to be vigilant, you know, to danger. And the way that our bodies respond to anxiety is that when we were in danger, we would have these heightened, flooded, you know, flooding of emotion, of chemicals in our body that would prime ourselves to be able to either fight or flee the situation. And there was obviously a third response, and now we talk about a fourth response, fawning and freezing. The freeze response was when running. Outrunning the tiger was not an option, nor was fighting the tiger an option. So you would play dead. You know, if you think of a deer that can't outrun the tiger, can't fight it, so it plays dead. And literally its heart and its lungs stop. And that is a final way of potentially surviving, because the tiger goes, well, listen, I'll go and get my cubs. We'll come back and have a leisurely lunch. The deer's dead. And then the deer just jerks back online and bolts again. I explain all of that, because what happens, and I think this is what you're sort of picking up on, is in modern times, our anxiety often presents as this kind of being anxious about something. Then we get anxious that we're anxious, and then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious and we go down this hell hole until we eventually go into a Freeze response, because we can't run from that. We can't. And we don't know what the hell's going on. So we go into this freeze response. But unlike the deer example, the deer eventually does jerk back online and gets to release those chemicals. Right. So when you fight it, you get to release. When you flee, you get to release. And when you eventually do flee after you've frozen, you get to release. Unfortunately, the kind of anxiety a lot of people are existing in today, they don't get to release those chemicals, the adrenaline, the cortisol and so on. So we have a culture where we're in a constant freeze response. And so it's really hard to have a purposeful, anxious experience. It's a really long answer, but I think that answers it. You know, that distinction. It's still very legit, the anxiety that we feel, because we might not be feeling the threat of the tiger, but we might be feeling the threat of, for instance, not living out our soul's calling. And that is existential. It really is. You know, for those reasons I mentioned before, we will get sick, we will get prompts, we will get shoved into action. If we don't act, there'll be repercussions.
- [17:09]
Eilish Astrid
So looking back, do you see a philosophical line between your I quit Sugar books and your work on anxiety and now collapse, or do they feel like very distinct chapters to you?
- [17:21]
Sarah Wilson
Yeah, a lot of people sort of can't quite work out what my career trajectory has been. I've never mapped it out. It's kind of evolved, and I've virtually. Well, really what I've done is gone from a complex problem that seems to be really upsetting a lot of people around me, which I then go and do a deep dive in amongst the science and all of the terminology, the jargon, excuse my language, but the dick swinging that invariably goes on in complex sort of realms. And I sort of merge with a sort of a way that people can perhaps understand it and apply it to their lives when they've got everything else going on. So Sugar was very much that. It wasn't just a sort of a let's just go on a diet. It was a lot of scientific research that was quite new at the time, exploring, you know, going to diabetes conferences, endocrinology conferences and so on, and really trying to come up with something that would help everyday people. And it was also about fighting the system. You know, Big Sugar had such a stranglehold on the way we were eating. It was exposing, simultaneously exposing what was going on at the meta level. And I guess then I moved on to anxiety. And it was the same thing. Big Pharma was doing the same thing. So it was about exposing, exposing and revealing to people why they felt so stuck in an issue. And then, you know, exposing philosophical and scientific perspectives so that they could have an under. A more beautiful understanding of things. And then the next thing that I was feeling around me was the climate crisis, specifically the way that people were just frozen in action. We know that this is all happening, but we still struggle to even, you know, recycle. And so that was another exploration where I went hiking for three years around the world in the footsteps of different philosophers and poets and thinkers who tackled difficult subjects to find a kind of a path through it that could actually make sense for the everyday person. And then I went, oh my God, we've lost the climate fight. Like, this whole notion of hope is a fur fee. It's actually keeping us in a denial. The next big issue that's itching at us is the broader systems collapse is the fact that everything's pegged to everything else. And it seems like there's nothing we can do. We're powerless. And the tech bros and the oligarchs and then the fascism that's creeping in and all of this kind of thing, there was no way to understand what the hell's going on because everyone was trapped in a linear way of thinking. And so there you go. I went down another rabbit hole. So for me, they've kind of evolved according to where people's pain point is at. That's kind of probably the thread.
- [19:52]
Eilish Astrid
Amazing. So if you could imagine one radical shift that everyone could make in their life today that maybe would help solve this itch or help fill the void.
- [20:06]
Sarah Wilson
Yeah.
- [20:07]
Eilish Astrid
What would that be like? What would your advice to the listeners?
- [20:10]
Sarah Wilson
Can I. Can I list a few things? New, tangible things, rather than one thing, I would say engage in discerning thought. So philosophy. I call it soul nerding. So basically, you know, really taking it on as a thing to do, where you go, I want to learn more about this. The great thing about soul nerding is that it's generally the brightest minds that have felt the most pain in history. So. And they go on to write books about it. So there are so many books where you pick it up and you rent. You realize that, oh my God, for hundreds of years, people have felt the same way that I do, and it's incredibly, incredibly comforting. So just go on a journey to learn about different people who experience the same Thing as you at different times in history. And then you'll feel less alone. And that's. That would probably be a really sort of a service, a bit of a silver bullet answer. I would also add to that, and it's of a complementary process as well, is engage with a relationship with your body. A lot of people talk about meditation. If you are anxious, meditation can be a bridge too far. Do you know what I mean? Like, I used to have horrible panics when I used to have to sit down and meditate. And I used to run these meditation courses for people and I'd be the one panicking because it was just too much. So for me I have to engage with my body. So I hike, I get out into nature, I move in nature. And I think, you know, in Japan they've done 42,000 studies on the benefits on the human experience of moving in nature. So it doesn't have to be any more complex than that. It can be a walk in the park, right? Literally. And the benefits of sort of tick off all those things I've been talking about coming into congruency with the natural flow of life, all the rhythms of life, experiencing attunement, even just simple things like when we see patterns in nature, the fractals, which are just absolutely perfect, beautiful patternings. There's this study that's been done that shows that we have fractal patternings in our retinas, in our eyes. And so when we see the patternings in nature as we're walking, you know, going for a hike, we get this sense of congruence and it plays out in our brain. And what it does is makes us feel safe and we belong to something bigger. So they're probably the two things I would say and they work beautifully together with meditation.
- [22:41]
Eilish Astrid
I read that you had the same issue as I did. So I find it really hard to get the voices to quiet down. And I was just wondering if you could share the really, I thought it was funny but also very hard hitting advice that you got from the Dalai Lama.
- [22:58]
Sarah Wilson
From His Holiness. The Dalai Lama, Yeah. I mean, it's a great anecdote to start a book with. Right. So I was a ambassador to His Holiness. God knows how that happened, but the ambassador to Australia. So I would host him when he was there and I interviewed him for a TV show and things like that. And when I first met him, his people said his holiness tends to go on and on. So just have one question, just one. And I was like. And of course, you know, I'm a Very, very anxious person. I'm very earnest and I research things. I could not decide on what the one question I was going to ask His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And so eventually I just gave up. I was in an absolute panic. We were in his hotel room, he had. He had his tissues stuffed off his little sleeve and he pulled them out and blow his nose. And he was sitting cross legged and he said, okay, go for it. And I could only ask what was the first thing that came to mind was how do you stop your mind from just talking all the time? And he said to me, ah, waste of time. Don't bother. This is my His Holiness the Dalai Lama accent. And he said, you know, if. If I was sitting on a mountaintop in a cave for two years on my own, maybe I could do it. But he said, it's a waste of time. I've got more important things to do, you know. And he said, I am trying to spread altruism around the world. He said, oh, you know, I've been just recently in Japan where I was speaking to 3,000 people. Tonight I'm talking, you know, 3,000 people here in Australia. He said, that is more important. And that I thought was a very, very, very powerful lesson. He obviously understood the Western, you know, sort of predicament. And when, you know what, sitting cross legged in a yoga studio or doing sound bars and drumming circles like that is indulgent. There are bigger things that you need to be doing right now and rise to those instead. Give yourself a break from having to quieten the mind. You know, I think Krishnamurti, I think it was. Krishnamurti said it is no sign of a. Was it a. Of health to be well adjusted to a sick society? You know, so trying to be sort of all Zen when the world is going through a really rough time, it is a hard ask. And so it's not. It doesn't have to be for everybody. I do meditate, but I use it as one of many different practices to ground myself. And the easier, the easier practice is, is physical engagement in nature. Yeah.
- [25:33]
Eilish Astrid
Thank you so much.
- [25:33]
Sarah Wilson
My pleasure.
- [25:34]
Eilish Astrid
Thank you.
- [25:43]
Omari Edwards
That was anxiety and the Soul's itch with Sarah Wilson. How to find meaning in an age of collapse. So, Eilish, did you find meaning? Have you struggled with the soul's itch or you still in the search and the hope or waiting for the almighty slap?
- [26:03]
Eilish Astrid
I actually think I'm starting to feel the itch. Very recently I've started to feel itchy. So like Sarah Wilson said, I think I have to go scratch that itch. And I have to figure out a way to scratch that itch.
- [26:17]
Omari Edwards
Brilliant. Well, I hope to all of our listeners if you too feel the soul's itch, we hope that the IAI can help provide some of the philosophers, religious thinkers, theologians, etc. That will be able to help you explore and deep dive into how to deal with this age of collapse. And if you enjoyed this week's podcast, please leave a like and review and share it with your friends. We'll see you next week. Thank you.
- [26:49]
Eilish Astrid
Thank you.
- [26:56]
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