How to Accept What You Cannot Change: Anxious Times, Part 3 (#389)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Religion on the Mind

Episode: How to Accept What You Cannot Change – Anxious Times, Part 3 (#389)

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guest/Collaborator: Kristin Tiedman
Date: March 26, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This third installment of "Anxious Times" dives into the existential psychology concept of accepting life’s non-negotiable limits—what existentialist psychologist Emmy van Deurzen calls “the necessary.” Dr. Dan Koch and collaborator Kristin Tiedman explore why so much anxiety springs from resisting these baked-in realities, and how true freedom comes when we accept what we cannot change. The episode breaks down the triad of "the necessary, the impossible, and the desirable," focusing here on the first: the limits we must simply live with.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Series Recap and Existential Anxiety

• [02:52]—Kristin: Previous episodes covered anxiety as a natural part of human experience and Carl Jaspers’s “boundary situations”—moments that reveal the limits of our world, collectively and individually.
• "Sometimes we think of [anxiety] as purely negative, but actually it can be healthy or unhealthy and that can make a lot of us feel more normal."
  —Kristin Tiedman [02:57]
• Boundary situations (big world events, illness, AI) expose those limits, now reframed as “the necessary.”

2. Introducing Emmy van Deurzen’s Triad

• [04:08]—Dan: Presents van Deurzen’s “the necessary, the impossible, and the desirable” as a way to parse existential limits and freedoms.
• “Her main book for clinicians is the one that I’ve been working through and that has really spawned these ideas for series and podcast episodes.”
  —Dr. Dan Koch [05:10]
• Next week will focus on “the impossible” and “the desirable.”

3. Main Takeaways of the Necessary

• [07:08]—Dan:
  • The necessary = the non-optional limits of existence.
  • A lot of anxiety comes from resisting these unchangeable realities.
  • Accepting these limits increases real freedom and agency; does not mean liking them, only facing them.
  • “Accepting the necessary... doesn’t mean liking it, condoning it, approving it, minimizing it. It just means accepting it.” [07:33]
  • Humans can identify and imagine limits in a way animals can’t; our brains both gift and curse us with this awareness.

4. Classic Examples of “The Necessary”

• Mortality
  • “Everything that lives also dies.” [10:30]
  • Religious traditions offer many visions of immortality, but no one escapes earthly death.
• Vulnerability
  • “We cannot seal ourselves off from the world. We are actually vulnerable to things that happen outside of our control.” [10:54]
  • Kristin notes our society’s many attempts to insulate from vulnerability—by staying indoors, living online, etc.—but says the cost of denying this is real.
• Embodiment
  • “We have physical bodies. Our bodies have certain requirements like calories and nutrition, sleep, shelter.” [12:02]
  • Kristin relates her own MS diagnosis; our needs and frailties are part of being human.
  • Relevance to today’s AI anxieties—AI lacks embodiment, which is fundamental to human meaning.
• Uncertainty
  • “Some level of uncertainty about any number of questions is just baked into the human experience.” [14:02]
  • We try to mitigate it with information, but absolute certainty eludes us outside of limited fields like deductive logic and math.
• Limits of Control
  • “We have some locus of control within ourselves... but that agency has real limits.” [15:51]
  • You cannot make people think what you think, or see what you see.
  • Joking aside: “Except for our children, whose minds we can shape in every aspect.” —Kristin [17:13] (sarcastic; quickly refuted)
• Contingency
  • Events are the product of real chance as well as choice; the world could always be otherwise.
  • “An existentialist would say, no, there’s genuine chance, genuine contingency built into the world.” [18:58]
• Illness and Decline
  • All bodies decline; denial wastes energy and adds to frustration.
  • “How much energy is wasted in pretending that I won’t get ill, pretending that my body will not decline?” [27:03]
• Passing of Time
  • “Time does not stand still. … You can’t pause the storm to plot out your direction.” [27:38]
  • Dan shares Kierkegaard’s “ship in a storm” analogy: you steer, but you don’t control the storm or the passage of time. Life goes on regardless of your plans.
• Sacrifice/Trade-offs
  • If you dedicate time to one thing (e.g., becoming a public intellectual), you do so at the expense of something else, like family.
  • “There’s no free lunch.” [32:11]

5. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The necessary, the impossible, and the desirable are the new screw, marry, kill of existential therapy?”
  —Kristin [06:16]
• “If they are, you’d want to kill the necessary, probably. You’d want to screw the impossible because it’s not really marriage material, and you want to marry the desirable.”
  —Dan [06:26]
• On mortality: “That’s kind of the exception of cockroaches.” —Kristin [10:49]
• Humor and philosophical asides (on The Netherlands, “all your vans" [07:06]), and the Big Lebowski reference:
  • “New shit has come to light, Dude. To quote the most quotable movie of all time, Big Lebowski.” —Dan [28:28]

---

Important Timestamps

• [02:52]: Recap of “Anxious Times” series; boundary situations and polycrisis
• [04:08]: Intro to Emmy van Deurzen and “the necessary” triad
• [07:08]: Summary of the key concept of "the necessary" and main takeaways
• [10:30]: Mortality as a fundamental limit
• [12:02]: Embodiment and its vulnerabilities; Kristin’s personal story
• [14:02]: Uncertainty as the human condition
• [15:51]: Limits of control; cannot change others’ minds
• [18:58]: Contingency and existential freedom
• [27:03]: Illness, decline, and denial
• [27:38]: The passing of time; Kierkegaard's ship analogy
• [32:11]: Life’s trade-offs; sacrifices required by reality

---

Tone and Language

• The conversation is honest, philosophical, and peppered with humor and personal stories.
• Accessible, slightly irreverent, and empathetic to listeners confronting these difficult existential truths.

---

Conclusion

This installment of "Anxious Times" leaves listeners with a clear existential message: accepting the hard limits—the necessary—of life is the first step to actual agency and a more authentic freedom, even if confronting these realities is painful. The episode underscores that so much of our suffering arises not from these limits themselves but from our refusal to accept them.

---

Tease for Next Episode:
Next time, Dan and Kristin will explore "the impossible and the desirable"—how we discover what cannot be changed, what we wish could be, and how we build meaning in the space between.

---

Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

Planning a wedding shouldn't feel overwhelming. The Knot brings everything together in one place. Vendors who get your vibe, a custom planning checklist, guest list tools, and a free wedding website that syncs with it all. So instead of juggling a dozen apps and spreadsheets, you can actually enjoy getting married. Get [e-mail] audio the knot let's plan your wedding together.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So good, so good. So good.

[Commercial Narrator]

Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now and they're up to 60% off. Stock up and save on Rag and Bone, Madewell, Vince, All Saints, and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Why do we rack for the hottest deal? Just so many good brands. Join the Norty Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Score more with the college branded Venmo Debit Card and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash Got paid back with the Venmo Debit card you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up [e-mail] collegecard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. select schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at venmo me stashterms max $100 cash back per month. It's crunch time at work and you need to bring wings to your workday. Visit redbull.com gettingitdone and answer a couple questions about your work style to get a Spotify customized playlist tuned to your productivity. Plus, score a can of Red Bull on us while you go from to do to done. And remember, Red Bull gives you wings. Supplies are limited, terms apply. Visit the website for more information.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind and more specifically to this miniseries we are calling anxious times. I'm Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and Psychology of Religion researcher, and I'll be joined in these episodes by a longtime friend of the POD and collaborator, Kristin Tiedman. For each Anxious Times episode, we're going to be highlighting one or more specific concepts from from existential psychology and practically applying them to living through unsettling periods like the present moment. This first set will include five or six episodes and we plan to return for more later on, possibly in the fall. Let's Dive. Kristen, how about you remind us where we've been on episodes one and two of this little series?

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah, sure. So we talked in episode one about anxiety and how that is natural in humans. Sometimes we think of it as purely negative, but actually it can be healthy or unhealthy and that can make a lot of us feel more normal. I would say me especially in episode two we talked about what Carl Jaspers called boundary situations and how we're living through them in aspects that are pertaining to geopolitics, media and information and things like the rise of AI. So we've seen commentary about this and how it could be called even the poly crisis. That's a similar insight. Or really that boundary situation language is just some. Something that can be appropriate for individuals who are going through challenges, religious challenge, my Ms. Diagnosis is an example or other kinds of change. And then today we're going further with that concept and talking about accepting natural limits and specifically using kind of concepts from the existential psychologist Emmy van der Zen and the concept of the necessary. So I'm excited for this.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

We are moving on from, from the Yasking Carl Jaspers and Emmy van der Zen is entering the chat. One way to kind of combine or to talk about today's episode in light of last week's episode is if that idea of boundary situation that exposes some of the limits of our current moment, individually or collectively, the necessary. This concept we're talking about today specifically names those limits and gives us concrete language for sort of what we're up against in the nature of reality. So let me just briefly introduce Emmy van Dersen Dutch British existential psychologist. She's still writing and speaking. I'm actually looking forward to hearing her speak in Denver in June at the World Congress of Existential Therapy.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Very, very official. Everyone get your tickets now.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Tickets now. It's like early June. I really love her ability to draw from both the existentialist philosophical tradition and the larger therapy psychology tradition. She gets very practical. I just sort of, I feel like she's able to pull from the whole pool and she deserves a lot of credit for this entire series. Her main book for clinicians is the one that I've been working through and that has really spawned these ideas for series and podcast episodes. And I find it really inspiring. And one of the first sort of core set of concepts of hers that really stuck with me is the necessary, the impossible and the desirable. It's this sort of three part triad. And next week we are going to be hitting the impossible and the Desirable. So between these two episodes, we're kind of getting through this really, this kind of way that she sees noticing limits, figuring out what we'd want to do, but that we can't do because of those limits, and then figuring out what we actually can do and that we are likely to really care about and find really valuable. That's the sort of thumbnail sketch of what it is to go through all three of those.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Hmm. Dan, do you think the necessary, the impossible, and the desirable are the new screw, marry, kill of existential therapy?

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, if they are, you'd want to kill the necessary, probably. You'd want to screw the impossible because it's like, it's not really marriage material, and you want to marry the desirable. That's where I would go if I had to pick.

[Kristin Tiedman]

And that will hopefully make sure no one ever forgets these concepts. I also like your affinity for the vans. The van tosses, Congren, and now the Vanders.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And yeah, I mean, John Van Dusen, one of my favorite current recording artists. Yeah, man, I got a real thing for the Dutch. Okay.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah. All right. Note that Dutch listeners

[Dr. Dan Koch]

watch our downloads spike in the Netherlands.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Send it to all your vans.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

So just like last two episodes, I want to sort of start with these main takeaways, and we will also conclude with them. So if you're going to only take a little bit away from the episode, this is what I hope that you would take away. First of all, the necessary. This term, this refers to the aspects of reality that are not optional. These are hard limits. A lot of unhealthy anxiety and distress comes from resisting these hard limits that are structurally built into existence. And on the other hand, on the flip side of that freedom, individual freedom increases when we can clearly distinguish what cannot be changed from what can be changed. And so accepting the necessary, moving toward that greater freedom, that doesn't mean liking it, condoning it, approving it, minimizing it. It just means accepting it. This is a part of reality, and I'm going to stop banging my head against a wall. That's the main focus of today. And when Van der Zen defines the necessary, she describes it as like, these are the givens of existence. So existence comes prepackaged with certain qualities that we cannot choose. We cannot erase them. We just have to live with them, even though that might be painful. And briefly, just to connect that back to episode one, you know, we talked about how anxiety is this naturally occurring effect in humans. By virtue of our big old brains, we can think about the past, present, and future. We can imagine dying. We can imagine nuclear holocaust. We can imagine the crumbling of democracy. We can imagine our children being harmed. All these things are imaginable to us in our minds in a way that we imagine most. We assume. I can only imagine. We can only imagine that, that other animals can't imagine those things. It's certainly not to the level that we can. And this is another way of saying this is also a cognitive capacity of ours. We can identify limits in reality with our brain. A deer does not go around thinking, if that car hits me, I'm dead. A deer does not go around thinking, oh, I can eat berries and plants, but if I eat this other thing, it's going to poison me. It's not, it's not doing that all day long. Nonetheless, those realities do exist for the deer as well. It's just as a human, I can

[Kristin Tiedman]

think about them for better or worse,

[Dr. Dan Koch]

you know, for both, for sure. So let's spend, let's spend a little time here, a few minutes kind of walking through some classic examples of what van der Zen calls the necessary, these sort of baked in realities, and we'll just, we'll see how long it takes us. Feel free to kind of pop in at any point. Kristen. So the first one and most obvious is mortality. Everything that lives also dies. It may be true, as in Christianity and other religious traditions, that there is some aspect of immortality, perhaps for human beings, perhaps for our souls, perhaps for other animals, in a sort of circle of life, or what is the one in Eastern thought, the wheel of life?

[Kristin Tiedman]

Reincarnation.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, right, whatever. Yeah, reincarnation. So, so maybe there is a type of immortality built into the structure of the universe. But insofar as we live an earthly life as an organism, from bacteria to human beings to elephants, everything that lives also dies.

[Kristin Tiedman]

That's kind of the exception of cockroaches.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

And even when they do die, they live on in our memories and our nightmares. Vulnerability is also considered a limit here. We cannot seal ourselves off from the world. We are actually vulnerable to things that happen outside of our control. That's another element of reality that we can't really argue with.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Although this one I would say was surprising to me when I saw it because I think many people do try to seal themselves off from the world and with relative levels of success, even. And you see that in some, you know, some ways of people kind of not leaving the home, not allowing others to really influence them, or living an online life, which I would say has different characteristics from, I think Being fully in the world, like, there's. You're not exposed to the same things. So I was, I guess, maybe happy to see this because I think it is important. I think it's important to be in the world, but I don't think everyone would see this as necessary.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I would say that's probably an example where you would say a bunch of distress and pain would come from trying to live as if you are not vulnerable to the world. So you're sort of cutting yourself off to create the illusion or sustain the illusion within your own mind that you're not vulnerable. But that Van Dursen would say, ultimately you're going to pay a cost for that. And that's actually a nice transition into the next one, which is embodiment, like Gnosticism. Aside, philosophy majors, whatever. We might. Well, you're the one with the master's degree in philosophy. As much as we might sometimes like to be disembodied brains in vats, we're not. We have physical bodies. Our bodies have certain requirements like calories and nutrition, sleep, shelter. I would say we have a need for touch. We have to touch and be touched by other bodies in some ways. And these bodies have unique vulnerabilities, person to person. So there's like a general. There's general embodiment vulnerabilities, and then there are individual ones. And, you know, we're going to talk about your Ms. Diagnosis today. Like, that's a place where that kind of thing fits in.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah. I obviously feel this one acutely and also chronically, but thank you, Dan.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Ah, nice little medical joke there.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah. You know, gotta get him in when he can. But I think it's also interestingly related to the AI conversation. I don't know. It's funny that this is vulnerability in itself. People would say. I think a lot of people say that we have these limited bodies, mortality, you know, also a component in this. But it's because of our embodied needs that we are distinct from AI and actually have. I mean, that's a whole other conversation, but I think it's an interesting given that allows us to be fully human that AI doesn't have. But that's a whole other. That's a whole other topic we could get into.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

No, I think that's a good application. The next one is uncertainty. And Van der Zen would say that some level of uncertainty about any number of questions is just baked in to the human experience. We will have more to say about this when we are applying this concept of the necessary to Religious change, which is my most common type of client that I work with. But I would say geopolitics and the sort of media and information stuff we talked about last week around boundary situations is also relevant here. Yeah, you can get information, you can pick your sources, but ultimately, if you're being honest, you don't know what's going to happen in the future. You don't know if all the reporting that you're reading is like 10 out of 10 in quality. Someone else could always say, hey, I think they have this bias. I think this other reporting doesn't have that bias. That's always sort of up for debate. And uncertainty of all these types is just a part of life. Unless we are doing physics, math, deductive logic, you know, a very small subset of whatever study or work, maybe certain kinds of chemistry. I don't know. Like, there's some really elemental stuff that is kind of sure and certain, but beyond that into the actual realm of human affairs, that breaks down and there is always some level of uncertainty present.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah, I imagine that people would look at this and say, some would say that area of uncertainty is quite small. There's, you know, only a few things we don't know about. And especially when we talk about religious change, you see a resistance to. Before the change, you see that resistance to uncertainty. And that's one of the most uncomfortable parts. Once the change begins.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, I mean, in some ways you could say an existential crisis for some people is just a big experience of rampant uncertainty in a number of areas. And one thing I like about existential therapy is it says, yeah, yeah, that's right. And then, okay, and a lot of people have thought about this and let's work with it. Right. Sort of, again, kind of normalizing it and, and using it as fodder. Another area of the necessary is limits of our control. So we talked about, we are vulnerable to things that happen outside of us. We, we have some locus of control within ourselves. We have some agency. Every human being has that. And in fact, we are responsible for using that agency. Well, but that agency has real limits. You know, this comes up like if I really want to convince somebody of something, going back to like geopolitics and journalism and stuff, it can be so frustrating that I could send them these articles and I think that it's going to convince them and it makes no dent on them and it's so frustrating. But also they can send me articles and it makes no dent in me. They don't have the ability to remotely change my mind. And I don't have the ability to remotely change their mind. That is a limit of each of our control and each of our agency

[Kristin Tiedman]

over other people, except for our children whose minds we can shape in every aspect.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Tabula raza's. Well, yeah, so we do have more.

[Medical Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

For instance, you have more agency over the way that your kids think than your uncle. Right. And that's baked in. So there are different levels there. And this leads to another one that is contingency. This comes up a lot across existentialism. Things are contingent. They are the result of certain things that happened one way but could have happened another way. And each of those sort of forks in the road is, has knock on effects and downstream effects in all kinds of areas. It's very easy for us to imagine how things might have been different if they'd gone one way or the other. So that's, that's to talk about it mentally. We can sort of, we can imagine that in our minds, but it's also genuinely true. You know, one of the big ones from politics is like, if Obama hadn't made fun of Trump at, you know, in front of the whole country at the, what is that, the correspondence dinner, you know, back when Obama was president, would Trump have run for president? Maybe, maybe not. Right. And so I don't know whether that's true. I don't know how to answer that question. But that's an example of contingency. Maybe Trump's sick that day or even, even wilder. Maybe Hitler's dad slightly changes position when he is impregnating Hitler's mom. And, and a different sperm goes in with different, a different genetic makeup. And you can say, some people say that's all determined. You know, they have a hard deterministic view of the entire universe. But an existentialist would say, no, there's genuine chance, genuine contingency built into the world. And that's part of what we need to accept when we are accepting these limits that we call the necessary.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah, yeah. Or Hitler just could have taken off as a painter and then avoided that whole thing. But no sells his first painting for

[Dr. Dan Koch]

much more than he thought he would. Yeah. Then what does that do? Right.

[Kristin Tiedman]

I don't need to get into this political stuff.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

My needs are being met.

[Kristin Tiedman]

I don't need to go totally evil to become synonymous with evil itself. I think. Yeah. This contingency one's interesting and it's reminding me a huge theme in existentialism is freedom itself and kind of even the staggering reality of freedom. But then it's funny that these givens almost provide structure to that. I guess that's something that is very helpful is because that's exactly how I would say it.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Oh, exactly. Oh, damn.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, really. And just to get a little ahead of ourselves, like for an individual person to go through these steps of the necessary, the impossible and the desirable. The end goal is coming up with things that you value that are actually possible for you to do. And so it is that, like we're sort of starting, zoomed out with the necessary. What do the laws of reality have to say about whatever it is that we're looking at? And then from there you get all the way down to what do I want to do? Yeah.

[Kristin Tiedman]

And it's funny, I mean, one of my motivating reasons to go to grad school for philosophy was actually questions around free will. And looking back, I think I was conceptualizing. I don't know, I didn't have the tools to really assess even. It was a very pop culture understanding of free will. But part of that was, I think you start to say free and you're like, oh, well, I should be able to do, you know, anything. And like. And that's just again, it's not nature, it's not how things are set up. Like, I might have free will, but it doesn't mean I'm free to go fly through the air, you know, And I mean, that's a dramatic example, but there's a lot of smaller examples and even capacity wise. And then, yeah, of course now being even more personal with the ms, like, there's a lot of things that change from that. So I think, you know, we hear that conversation of boundaries actually enable things, but I think we're seeing that here that just this acceptance actually does enable you to be like going deeper, going into it as opposed to just trying to hold on to some vague notion of freedom.

[Commercial Narrator]

Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EPGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

[Medical Advertiser]

Hemglis Lebrecizumab LBKZ, a 250mg per 2ml injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Eglis before starting ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

[Commercial Narrator]

Ask your doctor about ebgliss and visit eglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. New Maybelline Serum Lipstick maybe it's not just lipstick. It's lush color with endless possibilities. It's serum infused with a hyaluronic acid and oil blend for 8 hour plumping moisture in tone, enhancing shades. It's more than the shade, it's who's wearing it. You New Maybelline Serum Lipstick maybe it's Maybelline

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Springfest means more sun, more fun and more free at Lowes. Keep your yard in line with an additional free EGO 56 volt battery when you buy a select EGO mower trimmer or blower. Plus keep landscaping fresh with stay green 1 cubic foot garden soil 5 bags for $10. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Valid through 4 a while supplies last selection varies by location. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

[Commercial Narrator]

The UPS store is making packing and shipping Easter gifts quicker than ever this year with upsa. How quick? Quicker than a walk around the park? Quicker than eating all the Easter candies? Quicker than finding a golden egg that you know is stuffed with cash? When you ship UPS air at the UPS store, your items arrive on time or your money back. Guaranteed at no extra cost. Exclusively at the UPS Store US retail locations. Send Easter Joy on time at the UPS Store. Visit theupsstore.com airguuaranty for full details. Terms and conditions apply.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Quick break this surprised me. The most useful advice I get now doesn't come from experts. It comes from regular people on TikTok. What works, what doesn't. No filters. Download TikTok and see for yourself. Do you Remember the Kony 2012 campaign back in 2012?

[Kristin Tiedman]

I do. I do.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

In case people don't. So Invisible Children, which was this nonprofit, released this viral 30 minute documentary trying to like get the world to Capture the infamous war criminal Joseph Kony in Uganda, right, and get him arrested for war crimes. He was responsible for abducting thousands of children into this, you know, militia. Just incredibly evil, evil guy. And it like blew up virality wise. It was like one of the first sort of like kind of modern viral moments around geopolitics and stuff. And these guys were extremely adept from like a marketing and messaging perspective. And for a minute there it felt like we can fucking do anything, you know, we can get Joseph Kony. And it didn't happen. We didn't get him. And Jason, whatever his last name was, like one of the founders, like had a public nervous breakdown. And like, I think that's kind of an object lesson for what we're talking about here where it's like that was an attempt by a few very idealistic, very smart and well meaning young adults from Southern California to change something about the world on the other side of the world. And they thought this is doable. And it turned out that it wasn't doable, at least not in the way they wanted. And so how much energy was spent, how many dollars were spent, how much attention was, was spent on this thing that ultimately proved to be impossible to do? That's sort of a microcosm or maybe a macrocosm of what an individual might go through. Where am I banging my head against a wall because I am ignoring a real limit. And that brings us to our last two items here. One of them is illness and decline. We'll talk about Ms. For you in particular, but this is true of all human bodies. Like we decline. When I'm working with older clients in their late 60s, in their 70s or 80s, sometimes we talk about like, yeah, I mean, what you're describing there sounds like kind of standard. Your body's ramping down over the next decade or two. And we sort of know how that looks and how much energy is wasted in pretending that I won't get ill, in pretending that my body will not decline and break down. Right. That's wasted energy. That's just adding to my frustration.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah. I don't know if you saw my face there. I just started to be like, oh, yeah, we're gonna die. I had a little moment there myself.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah, yeah. And then the last one in this section is the passing of time. I think this is one that's maybe not quite so, maybe a bit more counterintuitive where you wouldn't necessarily put this in this category of the necessary, these limits of reality. But time does not stand still. And Actually, we can point back to the grandfather of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard here. One of my favorite images from him is that he describes people, the human condition, as like, being like the captain of a ship in the middle of a storm. So you're the captain of a ship. You have agency, you've got a steering wheel, you know, or whatever that affects the rudder. I don't know how ships work. Something's in the foc' sle. Anyway. You've got. You're on a ship, and you have. You know, you have control of the wheel, but you don't control the storm. Right. The storm is happening regardless of what you'd like. And furthermore, you can't pause the storm to plot out your direction. You are making real time choices of where to go as the storm rages on. And every moment as the storm changes, the details change and you have to readjust. And he says, that's what life is like. You can't just sort of, like, go into your study for three years, work everything out mathematically solve it, come out and be done. No. Life goes on. New shit happened. New shit has come to light, Dude. To quote the most quotable movie of all time, Big Lebowski. And that will keep happening as you live. And so the passing of time and the changing of circumstances, moment to moment is also one of these fundamental limits of reality that we have no control over.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah. So, yeah, actually, it's funny you're saying that randomly. I knew someone who. Not well, but kind of an acquaintance, but was a ex. Twitter person or, you know, now. Exactly now. XX person. Yeah, but they were, like, kind of a. A higher up and had enough freedom to make a lot of money so that once they left, they didn't have to work anymore. And so, you know, we're fairly young and dabbling in projects, you know, in. In their 30s. And so this person did kind of have the luxury of going into their room and, like, thinking about things. And I was like, oh, this is a reality I will never know. And especially once you have kids, you're like, now I'll really never. Any sort of time that's paused to just think about things. But it was funny because it made me like. He even said something like, oh, yeah, I'd like to go think about this for, you know, a few months. And I'm like, what? I was like, wait, what? That's what you're doing? Just work on it. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Well, I mean it. The way that our world works right now is there are a handful of people who do have luxury like that. Some of them, that's their job. They get paid to do that. You know, like, if you're a. Let's say you're a professor on sabbatical and your position is one where they expect you to be writing books and sort of adding novel theories to your field, then that is a part of your life. But if you are an adjunct lecturer and then you don't have that, and it would be good to not pretend that you do. Right. Like, you might think, oh, how do I get to that point in my career? Is that a viable path for my career? If it's not, then I'm going to potentially waste a whole lot of energy and cause myself maybe other people in my life a whole lot of pain by sort of ignoring the reality in front of me.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yeah, well, and I, and I would add to that, I think there's a little bit of. This isn't a little bit of an anomaly. Obviously there have been. We go down this path, but there have been people in history, you know, who have had, I mean, Kierkegaard, one of them, who, what, was going to get married. And I was like, jk, I actually just want to think for the rest of my life and which we respect.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. He may have been. He may have been engaging in some avoidance of his own, perhaps. I think some critics might say, well,

[Kristin Tiedman]

and I guess that's kind of what I'm thinking about is there, you know, people even who are deemed often wildly successful, they do have to sacrifice other things. And I think about the simplest thing being like the village, like the local, knowing your neighbors and all that sort of stuff. I know you've talked recently with like, Tony about that. If you're so focused on kind of being this, you know, super modern person doing your thinking by yourself, I think that can run a risk where you're kind of detached from the immediate reality. So again, I think van der Zen saying, the sacrifice, the trade off, if you're not acknowledging the things around, you can. Can play out in different ways.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. There's no free lunch. Right.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Like, you know, free lunch.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

If you say, I want to spend 25 hours a week to try and become a public intellectual, that is 25 hours a week that you are not spending doing something else. And at a basic level, just don't pretend that you could also spend the same 25 hours a week hanging out with your kids. You can't. You can.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Scrolling Instagram.

[Dr. Dan Koch]

Yeah. So. So let's talk about your msc diagnosis here.

[Kristin Tiedman]

Yes. You can listen to the rest of

[Dr. Dan Koch]

this episode by joining the [e-mail] Dan Koch. Sam.