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.