Kristin Tiedman (2:41)

Yes. And I think we can feel that really, sometimes too close to home.

Dr. Dan Koch (2:47)

All right, let's Dig into this concept of boundary situations. You know, this is one of those. It's like a German term. There's not like a really good Eng.

Kristin Tiedman (2:56)

Boundary situations.

Dr. Dan Koch (2:58)

Yeah, yeah. There's some, some way to. To do it in German. I didn't learn the pronunciation. Sometimes in English we will talk about liminal space or a liminal place that someone is in this. These sort of in between like limbo type situations. That is pretty related to what we're talking about. But this idea of boundary situations was originally developed by an existentialist, a Swiss German psychiatrist and philosopher named Carl Jaspers. And he initially came up Yasss. Yes, King Jaspers.

Kristin Tiedman (3:33)

King.

Dr. Dan Koch (3:34)

He initially described this in individual terms. Right. Like so. So an individual goes through a boundary situation. Existentialists famously interested in individuals and the individual experience. Right. So the unavoidable conditions of human existence. Right. This is. These are moments when they cannot be solved, escaped or mastered. So for an individual this will be something like death. Either knowing your own death is coming or someone else's death. You know, intense suffering, intense guilt where we are sort of faced with the reality of what we've done. Intense struggle. And then another idea that is really common among existentialists and will come up here a lot. Chance or contingency, things that are seemingly random but that have major effects in our life. So a boundary situation is when an individual initially the idea is when an individual has one of these situations, I'm

Kristin Tiedman (4:36)

surprised and maybe even pleasantly surprised that guilt is on this list. I guess I wouldn't have expected that. Making it more of an expectation that this is what happens in life, this is what happens to people, is almost a relief in a weird way because I think people try to avoid guilt almost I think more than some of the others in that you're seen as never supposed to like do anything wrong. No one's. You're kind of supposed to avoid being culpable and thereby avoid guilt. And knowing that that's part of life in a way is freeing. Does that make sense?

Dr. Dan Koch (5:09)

Well, totally, yeah. And religions usually have a major function for dealing with guilt. This is one of the reasons that religion is so powerful for human beings. But for Karl Jaspers, including guilt was necessary because he was developing a lot of his thought in 30s and 40s Germany. He was heavily involved in sort of more on the resistance side of German thinkers. Right. He was not. He did not cooperate with the Nazis in a way that, you know, Martin Heidegger, his contemporary did, for instance. So there's a lot of tension There. And as we'll talk about later, Jaspers was a really big early prominent voice after World War II for Germans in like helping them think through what just happened. So historically speaking, guilt is there for really like Holocaust and Nazi reasons. Yeah, let's talk about religion a little bit more. So you know, we, we're generally trying to tie each of these concepts both to sort of global sociopolitics and also individual religious change because that's most of the clients that I work with as a therapist and coach. So for many people who are coming out of like certainty driven forms of Christianity, right, where really having a locked in, clear, more or less intellectually certain system is really important. So people who are coming out of that, that is an individual boundary situation in the way that Jaspers describes. Right. So because someone's beliefs about God, about heaven and hell or salvation, about scripture, what scripture is and how it works and how much we can rely on it or whatever, these ideas stopped working. But, but they weren't just ideas, right? They. It's not a cognitive experience only to change your beliefs if you're coming out of a system like that. Because that whole system, it also gave you meaning, it gave you moral clarity, it gave you a sense of safety. You are in God's hands. And we all agree exactly how we're in God's hands together. And we remind ourselves every week about that. And so when all this stuff fails, anxiety and maybe depression, grief, et cetera is just this natural consequence not just of loss, but of facing contingency, chance, uncertainty, without the net that used to catch you when shit hit the fan in your life. Previously.

Kristin Tiedman (8:00)

Yeah, in thinking about this, one of the ongoing struggles I have, like of course I had my own certainties kind of pulled out from under me, but it's not like I, well I am coming to terms with it. There's something that I, you know, am learning to accept. I think that a lot of these boundary situations actually again they feel good because it just feels like maturity. I'm sure I'll talk about that a little bit more later. But there's a juxtaposition when I think about this new way of me viewing things versus like my family and you know, I'm close with my family and my own parents and other people I grew up with in terms of going to church and everything, where it's like the focus is the blessed assurance and how there's the surefire thing to fall back on. And I, I would say yeah, this is a hard thing to reconcile because it Kind of separates us even more.

Dr. Dan Koch (8:50)

Yeah, right. So one way to think about that is through the language of isolation, which is in contemporary existential discourse. Like as in the famous psychotherapist Irvin Yalom talks about the four givens of human existence, one of which is isolation. And I normally talk about that with my clients in a way like, you know, you're born alone and you're. You die alone. So there's like some sense in which you, you are only yourself. I talk about it with marriage. You might want to really merge with your partner, but there are ways in which inevitably you recognize that you are not the same person. You're separate people and no one can ever totally join you. Interesting to think about the way that sort of God joining us functions there psychologically. But in this case, I would say you're distinct from your parents. And even though you have all this history together, it's impossible for you to fuse and share a mind on these issues. Like, part of your isolation is that you have your own mind and they have their own minds, and so you're just never going to totally meet. And the best you can do is negotiate and see what levels of agreement you can come to. But that is the limit.

Kristin Tiedman (10:05)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (10:06)

So, okay, for the individual, we're not yet at the collective, we're still an individual. So, right. Like this boundary situation, it's going to present itself initially as a problem to be fixed. I'm feeling distress, anxiety, I don't want to feel this. But really what Jasper says is we should think of this as a limit that exposes the structure of existence itself. When we encounter a boundary situation, we are forced to confront the fact that we are finite, we are vulnerable. Whatever control we have, an agency we have is partial. And if we think it's more than partial, then that is an illusion. And we may be deceived about that self deceived. Or other people telling us we have more power and that meaning in our lives cannot be guaranteed by larger systems that we participate in. This is another one of Yalam's givens of the human experience is that we participate in making our own meaning in a very serious way. So really, these experiences, they often evoke anxiety, despair, disorientation. But Jaspers back to last episode would say that's not pathological, that's natural, healthy anxiety. Those are appropriate responses to realizing existential limits. Right. Remember what Roald O. May said. Grass and cows and deer, they don't have these experiences, but human beings do. We are aware of our death. We are Aware of all these things. So what that brings up for Jaspers is, yes, pain, disorientation, but a profound possibility of awakening to existential reality. And if we resist fleeing, distracting, numbing, then it can lead us to greater authenticity, to seriousness and maturity. I think that's gonna come up as we talk about this and openness to our current lives becoming bigger. Openness to actually transcendence. Normally we think of transcendence as sort of within the realm of the religious, but there's a different kind of transcendence here that can happen where my world gets bigger and I can come to feel a part of something actually bigger, even if it's scarier and less secure.

Kristin Tiedman (12:39)

Yeah, it's funny. As you know, I've been trying to read more and even reading on substack, and a theme that's come up is like, writing towards life. And it's funny. There's a lot of pop culture sort of references that come to mind, and one of them is past lives. I don't know if you saw that movie.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:01)

Loved it. Been meaning to rewatch it for different reasons because I love the score. I've been listening to the score a lot, which is two of the guys from Grizzly Bear.

Kristin Tiedman (13:09)

Oh, no way.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:10)

And it's really great for, like, background reading, study music.

Kristin Tiedman (13:13)

I didn't realize now I'm due for a rewatch because unfortunately you're going to hate this. Pretty sure I saw it on an airplane where you know the score.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:22)

I don't hate that.

Kristin Tiedman (13:24)

Well, the music always suffers when you're watching on a plane because of that background.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:28)

But the emotions don't suffer. Watching emotional stuff on a plane. Something about the pressure and whatever. I don't know. I get way emotional on flights.

Kristin Tiedman (13:37)

The atmospheric pressure. No, yeah, Airplane. I've had a lot of good airplane movie moments. But anyway, there's a line where she's kind of talking about. Or actually it's her husband and he's like, you just make my world bigger. And he's kind of like, do I do that for you? And I'm like, whoa. I think about that so much and how there's the. It's this. Yeah, weird version of transcendence that's found sometimes in small things or unexpected ways. So different from, yes, the religious framework of growing up. But, yeah, maturity and then authenticity. Something that this reminds me of is radical acceptance, which I know is kind of more in the zeitgeisty language. Is that a good way to phrase it?

Dr. Dan Koch (14:22)

It's a part of it, yeah. So the term radical acceptance these days usually comes out of dbt, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which comes out of cognitive theory and cognitive therapy, but does have, I think, some existential vibes to it. There is, and definitely there is a shared core value of helping clients be really honest about themselves, about the world they find themselves in. DBT was developed for people with Borderline Personality Disorder. It's been applied well beyond that, but it can be helpful to think of it there, because borderline's main feature is really strong emotional experience, like someone with borderline would experience. Grief, frustration, whatever. Like just at a multiplier of what the average person experiences. And so that pain and distress can be so strong that you can wanna numb, distract, avoid, whatever. It's just a heightened version of what the existentialists say is true of everybody. So, yes, acceptance is a common framework across those two traditions.

Kristin Tiedman (15:36)

Got it. Got it. And regardless, something that comes up a lot, and I feel like, especially in philosophical texts and whatnot, as we're discussing, you know, in some way, but just this, taking responsibility for your own life, which is hard. It's really hard. And I think especially when we have more and more ways to avoid, to distract, to kind of numb. And. Yeah, I also. Again, my final pop culture reference right now. Have you seen the Smashing Machine at all?

Dr. Dan Koch (16:07)

The new. No, the Dwayne Johnson. It's on my list. I want to see it.

Kristin Tiedman (16:11)

I have not actually, full disclosure, have not finished it, but have gotten over halfway through and. Wow. First of all, amazing acting on his part. So different. So many prosthetics, too. Finally, he doesn't look like himself. It's crazy, but there's this moment where he kind of gets exposed and, as I'll say, numbing. I won't get into all the details. Obviously, it's complex. And he kind of just has this embarrassing moment where he's even kind of trying to hide behind this sheet. It's almost putting something between him and this person he's talking to.

Dr. Dan Koch (16:46)

Yeah.

Kristin Tiedman (16:47)

And there was something I read in college where, again, it stuck with me, but feeling anything strips you naked. It's embarrassing to be seen and have to face these tough, tough realities of life when you can kind of seem above it or too cool. And anyway, I was.

Dr. Dan Koch (17:05)

I'm like, yeah, you could call it. You could call it vulnerability.

Kristin Tiedman (17:08)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (17:08)

That, like, vulnerability is required for authenticity. That if you are just this immovable object, then that's not really authentic. Nope. Because that's not true of anybody. Right. What we're getting at here is these Things are difficult enough when it's just an individual thing we're going through.

Kristin Tiedman (17:26)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (17:26)

And the individual is going to matter here. But let's now talk about when we have collective boundary situations. Boundary situations that many people are experiencing simultaneously. So Jaspers also got into this, as I said, because of. Because of World War II. And so he thought about what are these boundary situations like for large groups of people, for millions of people at a time. And we can think of Post World War II Europe, right. That, like, that it didn't just return to normal after the Holocaust. Like, it entered a new moral and psychological space, like as a continent. In that case, you know, we could speak historically and we can say that World War II, World Wars I and 2, happening within, you know, a generation of each other, undermine confidence in, like, enlightenment, rationalism. Oh, humans are rational. We can solve these problems. The moral authority of Christianity, especially institutional Christianity, which of course was, you know, corrupted in many ways by the Nazis and joined the Nazis in certain areas, especially in Germany. National virtue, myths about our nation. We are good, you know, and any sort of linear progress narrative, like, oh, yeah, things just sort of keep getting better and better and better, and then within 30 years, you've got World War I and World War II smacking straight into people. And so Europeans and Germans especially were forced to confront collective guilt, moral responsibility that went beyond individual moral responsibility. Right. Would like. Well, that's not just like, I didn't build a concentration camp. Right. And yet I was a part of a thing that led to the extermination of 8 million Jews. So there's this participation in systems of harm that they had to come to. You know, people living today. You know, think back to George Floyd in 2020 and the sort of reckoning of systemic injustice. There's like a lot of overlap there. But World War II is. Is so interesting because it's just such a stark example. And it is also when this particular thinker was. Was thinking and writing.

Kristin Tiedman (19:54)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, I don't know if it's still there, but a number of years ago there was like documentary footage on Netflix of when they took German people from the surrounding villages of concentration camps and made them walk through, which is.

Dr. Dan Koch (20:07)

I have. I've watched this footage.

Kristin Tiedman (20:09)

Oh, my goodness. I was like, how is this on Netflix? Partially what I was thinking, but also very, I mean, effective. But besides that, you're saying, you know, there was kind of all these things to wrestle with. Do you know how they approached those topics, like, culturally at large?

Dr. Dan Koch (20:25)

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not a historian and so this is really a summary that I've looked into a little bit. And actually just this weekend I purchased a Jaspers book, a short Jaspers book called the Question of German Guilt, which came out in like 47 or 48, like really shortly after the war, where he's sort of thinking about these different ways that the German people can and should be thinking about all of this stuff. And he's trying to sort of chart a path forward. It sounds like mostly that path was not taken. I'm sure that some serious people did. But the summary that I sort of came up with is that initially Germans coped through denial as well as focusing on like, economic survival, because the country was absolutely ravaged.

Kristin Tiedman (21:13)

Denial and economic survival is also how I cope, actually. That's my main go tos.

Dr. Dan Koch (21:22)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hustle. Like hustle and algorithmic scrolling. Yeah, just combine those two and you're good. You're totally good. Oh my gosh. There's a project in there somewhere. And really they sort of. They appear to have largely postponed moral reckoning until the country was kind of back on its feet. They sort of put that energy into economic reconstruction. And it's really the children, the kids who were kind of born later, really in the 60s, so kind of lining up with protest movements in the United States around Vietnam and civil rights issues sort of in that same era. That's really when Germany started to take it more seriously at a national level. Again, not my area of expertise, but that's my basic understanding.

Kristin Tiedman (22:08)

Wow, interesting.

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Dr. Dan Koch (25:19)

So here's my argument today. I think that the last 10 years, so 2016 to 2026 as we are recording this can realistically be understood as including up to Three or even more distinct collective boundary situations. Like that's really my way of saying, yeah, it's been fucking crazy. There have been three and some are ongoing of these collective boundary situations where old things are not working anymore. What's your, like, what's your gut reaction to that? Does that seem true to you?

Kristin Tiedman (26:00)

What's. I mean, in a gut way? Yes, I tend to doubt that gut reaction at times because relatively speaking, my life has not been crazy long. When you look back, I'm like, do people feel that the world got so crazy in the 80s or whatever or the 90s?

Dr. Dan Koch (26:17)

Sure.

Kristin Tiedman (26:17)

But also the influence of technology and the way things have changed. I can't help but think that this is so distinct because even the way information is being spread is just unmatched from any time prior.

Dr. Dan Koch (26:31)

Yeah, I would probably say that like media and informational technological change is the main or a main driver of a lot of this stuff, which maybe we can point back to as we talk through it. So here are some claims that I think are pretty uncontroversial. The first is that many democratic norms. I'm mostly speaking to Americans here in the last 10 years, but you could, you know, you can apply this more widely that many democratic norms like the peaceful transfer of power, respect for electoral outcomes, some sort of executive restraint by the President, that these were actually customs, these were norms, they were not actually secure, they weren't guaranteed by law. And that means that the continuity of democracy and freedom is not as guaranteed as we sort of like certainly I was raised and taught to think of American democracy, freedom, you know, freedom from tyranny, all this stuff as like, yeah, that's like, that's not ever gonna change. So to use boundary situation language here, I think Americans have been discovering that what we thought was stable is actually contingent, it's changeable, it might not last. And that results in anxiety.

Kristin Tiedman (27:59)

Yeah, it's. It's kind of funny. There's almost a. I don't want to like, almost like a cyclical component to it because if we were more serious and more responsible and mature, then I think there would be more good faith participation and you know, respect for others, which then would kind of feed into a sort of stability. But it's. We're not. I think we see a lot of evidence of immaturity, especially among our leadership right now. And that is what is then destabilizing, which is kind of ironic in a way. If we were to take more of the Jaspers attitude, it would help with the problem of you get what I'm

Dr. Dan Koch (28:35)

saying, yeah, so on that responsibility point, for instance, maybe a norm that we all assumed would continue. Now this is a very common sort of millennials criticizing boomers thing. And maybe there are some problems with that. But if I put it in this language, I think you'll find it, you'll recognize it. I think I assumed that as people get older, they get more mature. And one thing that I'm finding when I look to people of my parents generation, some of them fit that pattern and in fact have become almost heroic. And a lot of them don't. A lot of them seem to have gotten profoundly less mature as they've gotten older. Or maybe they just never were mature and they had the appearance of it because they were busy at work or they were, you know, doing respectable things in the community or whatever. But when left to their own devices, maybe closer to retirement, maybe this is in part media studies stuff, algorithmic stuff, whatever, they, they sort of have regressed. And you know, there's like articles now about sort of screen time, you know, the phone based childhood now being applied to retirement. Oh yeah, there's articles about the phone based retirement that like this sort of reversion of some of these retired adults to sort of childhood and just being on their phones all day and distracted and playing fucking Candy Crush and voting for Trump. I mean, like what, you know, whatever, like, so there's a kind of a. Yeah, I do think there's an interesting element there that's an example of something that like, oh yeah, older people, as they get older, they get more mature.

Kristin Tiedman (30:15)

Well, sometimes I'm just picturing an older person's dating profile where it says that their hobbies are playing Candy Crush and voting for Trump.

Dr. Dan Koch (30:27)

There's probably, there's probably a dating site just for those people, like their own kind of Christian mingle or jdig. Okay, so that was number one is about like democracy and norms and stuff. Here's another one that I think is uncontroversial, another sort of collective boundary situation way of talking about that. The sense that Americans, for instance, we thought we had more of a shared reality. And that has been severely challenged, like competing non overlapping accounts now of various events, of politics, of things like this have become institutionalized. You have like the right wing media narrative and the NPR MSNBC narrative. And they're just literally, they just don't meet on any number of issues and not just in the way that two individual people might disagree. There are massive machines and whole economies, you know, sort of tied to, to this, to this Stuff and so that has, you know, in part among, with, among other causes, drastically reduced trust in journalism, science, the courts, elections. So again, using boundary situation language here, where we didn't think there was a limit around knowledge and communication, obviously, like people could know more or less, but it's not like they would go all the way down a road in a totally opposite direction. And now we try and talk with family or friends who we have differences with and it's like, oh shit, there's like a full on wall here. There is a real limit, sometimes quite a hard limit, which is them also limiting my ability to be relationally close with this person, sometimes in multiple domains. I'll just speak personally. This is, this is what hurts most. This is where I get the most sad and angry that there truly is not a shared reality for people who get far enough in one direction or the other. And I'm like a moderate, I'm generally kind of in the middle and I simply cannot agree on basic facts with someone pretty far right and even some people pretty far left. And like, I am experiencing this as new. There might be people older than me or people who are like in journalism or something who experienced this 10 or 15 years ago, 20 years ago. But for me this feels new. And it's like just to tie it briefly into religious stuff, when I get my most upset about this lack of shared reality and this feeling of utter powerlessness, that is when I find myself wanting to call on God's righteous judgment. I want to use like apocalyptic imagery and language about like God sweeping down and justice flowing and you know, all the dark things will be shown by the light. And I feel in my own mind and body a direct relationship there between powerlessness and wanting to call on the judgment of God. Which is a major theme in sort of historical critical scholarship around like when did these movements become big in Jewish tradition and stuff like that. But I just, I thought it was interesting to note that in my own mind and body.

Kristin Tiedman (33:59)

Sounds like it's time to start your own cult, Dan.

Dr. Dan Koch (34:04)

Let me give you guys the new real answers. There we go. Yeah, the perfect answer.

Kristin Tiedman (34:08)

No. There's one point here where again, not my own research fact, but something that is a testament to that. It is different, it is new, is that historically landmark decisions in major US legislation were approved by the majority of both parties. Both Democrats, Republicans said, yeah, we're good. The majority of each will vote yes on this. We are now in a world where you almost have 100% of one party voting yes and then the other Party voting, almost zero voting yes. And that is different.

Dr. Dan Koch (34:49)

The question is like, can we get three senators from the other side to switch over? That's like now how all legislation, major legislation has to happen.

Kristin Tiedman (34:59)

And that I learned, citing my sources from. There's a Freakonomics episode on the duopoly of the kind of American parties which was extremely compelling and led me to my involvement with the Forward Party, which is a whole other thing. But I do think that older model is what we would aim for, is that most people on most sides feel good about some of these decisions. And it seems crazy that it's such a division and also that it's not like we're in a country where 60%, even of the country is firmly on one side or the other. It's such an odd 50, 50. Anyway, that's all that to say. I also feel this powerlessness and I also get upset. I don't, you know, I don't want to start my own cult, Dan, you weirdo. But no, I do feel like, very disillusioned, to say the least. These bad. I mean, it feels bad. Faith, that's part of it, too. And I guess that's like this goes back to the maturity thing. But I think we've had this trust and there was a decorum. Like, I started reading JFK's profile encourage profiles and courage, where he's looking at people. And I think he encourages this sort of, yeah, statesmanly sort of way of being. And a maturity is imbued in his writing that I just don't feel is emphasized anymore. Like the fact that some people who, frankly, even if they have expertise, have acted foolishly, are being rewarded with positions of power. I mean, it's just such a charade. It's so hard to understand how it's happening. So, yes, it's personally jarring. I could go on and on in specifics, but you get, you know what I'm saying?

Dr. Dan Koch (36:40)

Well, no, I think it's actually kind of a good bridge to where I was going to go next, which is I want to zoom out a little bit about the sociopolitics to the globe and then move into Covid, which was also a global situation. So, you know, we think about, like, one of the things that's being threatened in this second Trump administration and sort of his assaults on NATO and things like that is like, oh, yeah, we, you know, we sort of came of age in a time when it was assumed largely that liberal democracy is this naturally spreading idea that people want to be free, that they don't want, you know, radical demagogues running their country. They don't want masked federal agents roaming through the streets. And we may be learning, you know, not sure when this is coming out, but, you know, there's been all the Minnesota stuff. We're recording this in early February 2026. Who knows where all of that is going? But there are some signs that Americans will really say, no, we are not okay with that, and we'll sort of make collective action toward that end. There's still some uncertainty about that. And even if there's not, even if there were not uncertainty in the United States, there's a lot of these movements kind of ebbing and flowing in other countries, including Europe, which you'd think would have this stable post World War II thing. But, you know, there's. We don't know. There are certain narratives of continued progress and things like this, and existentialists would say a continued progress narrative is a great way to buffer against anxiety because it tells us that we are a part of something big and good, something inevitable, something effectively certain, if only certain in the long run. So given that those narratives are feeling much more fragile, we should expect people to be feeling more anxious. And let's just. Let's roll into Covid with that. Right? So Covid's complicated because there's sort of two ways to talk about COVID as a boundary situation. First, there's, like, the people like myself and you, I believe, who. We largely think that the government and health care officials and agencies were doing the best they could. Maybe a handful of bad actors who prioritize their own power. But like most healthcare officials, most people who go into epidemiology, medicine, that, you know, they're, like, doing the best they can, that they are there because they do want to help people. You know, maybe some of the very most powerful people have other incentives, but, like, you know, they tried. And that even for us who believe that that is what happened, that, you know, Fauci and others, like, made mistakes probably, but people were trying. Covid is still a massive disruptive boundary situation, the way that we experienced it. There's also a second way to think of it, which is, like, facts, knowledge, shared reality. But since we already kind of covered that around media and democracy, we're gonna. We're gonna set that aside. But that would be another way entirely to talk about COVID as a. A boundary situation around shared reality. So let's. Let's. Let's set that aside and think of it just in the former sense of, like, I'LL be speaking to people who more or less agree that Covid was a legitimate international health emergency, that millions and millions of people actually died, that those are not inflated numbers to, like, give people vaccines with a microchip and whatever other things, you know. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that every decision around Covid was the right decision that was made. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm not coming down one way or another on lab leak versus natural origins. I'm open on all of those things. I'm just saying we're going to go with the broad consensus of, you know, the MRNA vaccine worked. Covid is, was very deadly, especially for older people and immunocompromised people. And so though I want to kind of stick with that, I did want to tell one personal story about where these two versions overlap, please. And this one was. This was kind of tough. So I had a Bible study leader growing up in California who by the time Covid hit, was in his, I think, mid-60s and had decided, you know, he was big into the culture wars by that time. He was big into right wing media. And he was like, I'm gonna go, I'm not gonna get vaccinated. And he died. So he died of COVID Oh, my goodness. And, yeah, and I flew down for his memorial service in the Bay Area and met up with some old youth group friends, actually, and we sort of processed some of this together. It was sad, pretty cathartic. At the funeral, this was when people were still masking in big, crowded public spaces. People were not wearing masks. There was no mention of COVID I've told this story before on the podcast, but, you know, his grandchildren came up and spoke. They talked about how much they loved spending time with their grandpa, and he would drive them around in his old car. His classic Chevy Malibu that he had restored was sort of his baby. And nobody said anything to the effect of he died probably 15 years before. He needed to for, like no reason, just to say fuck you to the government or, you know, it's like junk science and whatever just cost him his life. And it was really disruptive to be in there and like hearing this and thinking, like, why is everybody ignoring why we're here? And I get it, that, like, a memorial service is about someone's whole life. It's not just about how they died. So I recognize that that shouldn't have been the primary focus of this person's memorial service. We all get one of those. We all get to talk. You know, people Will talk about our entire lives. But it felt to me really, it created a lot of anxiety. It felt very odd that we couldn't be honest about. We didn't need to be here. He could have been alive a lot longer. And this is actually proof, like we are here as living proof that we should not take this, you know, anti mask, anti vaccine stance or whatever. And even in that is like, nope. And honestly, that was kind of preparation for the last five years because yeah, if you, if being at the dude's actual fucking funeral is not enough to sort of jar someone out of this, then, then that, that unfortunately tells me something about the reality that I'm now living in.

Kristin Tiedman (43:47)

And you're saying so like, even with your, your friends in debriefing, like, not at the funeral, it wasn't really acknowledged.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:54)

No, no, no, no. The friends were, did acknowledge it and, and we were on the same page. And you know, I do believe we had, we had the vaccine by that point. So everybody, because he had refused the vaccine, so we were vaccinated. And so it wasn't like the really early, like everybody's always in masks, but it was like it was noticeable. It was that time where it was still spreading a lot and unvaccinated people were dying at pretty high rates. And so 250 people in a sanctuary was a time where I was wearing a mask even though I was vaccinated. That was still the sort of basic wisdom. And I understand some holes have been poked in some of that consensus and whatever, but at that time, it was just the sort of common sense kind thing to do, especially given that we were in a room full of at least some pretty good proportion. We knew they were also unvaccinated. You know, given that, you know, it was a time when that was very much a part of what was going on.

Kristin Tiedman (44:52)

I mean, yeah, it's so tough. Well, first of all, it's so sad hearing about that. But I think back, I mean, again, this theme of maturity and kind of, I think goes hand in hand with, I think nuanced thinking and being able to kind of balance things and not even go to the gut reaction of all of this is hogwash. Or, you know, or all these people are totally dumb. Like, I think I, I mean, listen, I was someone who was demonizing those who are not getting vaccinated. I surely was like, they're stupid. Why are they doing this to us? And then I think there were components of that where I recognize, okay, just because someone was vaccinated doesn't mean that they didn't get sick at all or that it just went away, you know, and there were things that I felt like maybe were a little over promised. Not like I, you know, I'm gonna say that just means everyone. Yeah. Was a bad faith actor. But I would say too, there, there's this kind of, you know, it's this ongoing like us versus them. And that just didn't need to exist and that didn't need to be like. I guess that's something that's tricky in this boundary situations is I feel like we made it more complicated than we needed to be by turning against one another. Is that like crazy to say?

Dr. Dan Koch (46:17)

No, I think that that's kind of what I'm saying is the, the medical realities of COVID were themselves a boundary situation. Right. Like a collective boundary situation. Oh, this is an international virus. You know, like Spanish flu and black plague and stuff had had some similarities, but there were some ways in which this was genuinely new. And, you know, the, the extent of, of international air travel was a big factor in early spread. Right. Stuff like that. Where it was like, oh, we like, we're actually in a different world epidemiologically, you know, we are in a different world in terms of pandemic studies than we were. Right. Because of technological change and transportation. And so, yeah, what I'm saying is Covid ended up being two layered boundary situations. You know, a little boundary situation, a little Covid Oreo, you know, kind of a thing. And I'm actually now remembering that we had a very. We had a brief individual boundary situation because our son was born three weeks before lockdown.

Kristin Tiedman (47:19)

Oh my goodness.

Dr. Dan Koch (47:20)

Our oldest son. And so we had, you know, and when your kids are born, they, their immune system is basically just whatever came from the placenta through the placenta. And then at around the six month point, they're sort of at their least immune. And then they build up their own immune system. There's some. I don't know exactly. I learned a lot about it back then and now it's been five and a half years and I've forgotten. But there was a moment there where eventually, pretty soon, it became clear that Covid is not really killing babies, not even newborns. It's really. It is much more deadly for elderly individuals the older you are. It's this sort of exponential curve. We figured that out within a month or two. But there was a moment there where we're like, holy shit, did we just have our first kid? The most vulnerable human being. Right. When a virus is gonna come through and maybe kill him, you know, like. And that thought is a perfect example of this collective boundary situation. It's like that would have never been on our minds through our birthing classes. You know what, when we're reading, what to expect when you're expecting, you know, we already know our lives are going to change. We're going to have our first kid. And you know, you and Beau are six months into this as we speak here today, and that is enough. But that's not a boundary situation really, because people know that that's coming and they can kind of anticipate it. You know, there may be some ways in which new forms of anxiety do show up. Because you have this kid, you know, this first child, you're responsible for them. So in some ways there's sort of boundary situation vibes. But to throw in, oh, maybe is he now susceptible to Covid, our brand new baby boy? That was like an intense short duration of boundary situation around that specific question.

Kristin Tiedman (49:09)

What to expect when you're expecting Covid edition, Where was it?

Dr. Dan Koch (49:17)

Yeah, Impossible to know what to expect should have been the title.

Kristin Tiedman (49:21)

It's a one page book. There's no knowing. Wow.

Dr. Dan Koch (49:26)

Yeah, but like, you know, there was like, you know, we're. There was that time where we're like, we don't really know what this is going to do. We don't know how big this is going to be. We don't know when the next one will come. You know, this is collective boundary situation type stuff.

Kristin Tiedman (49:39)

So in these sorts of overlapping situations, I guess there's one additional question. Obviously when they kind of mount like this, that would seem to mount the anxiety, which I think we feel. How do you encourage people to navigate that in a therapeutic sense?

Dr. Dan Koch (50:01)

Well, we're going to get there. One last brief note on the third potential boundary situation and then we're going to get to some practical therapy stuff. So the last one I want to talk about is AI And I think that AI is best conceived of as an ongoing boundary situation. Maybe we can do a whole episode on this later because there's different ways to go with it. But you know, there's kind of like at least two questions. There's the what will the eventual power and scope of AI be? And that is unknown right now. So again that, you know, there's boundary language there. Like we are at the boundary of what we know about the future. And an existentialist would say, well, that's always true all the time about the future. But AI being potentially world transforming and powerful Maybe, maybe not, or maybe partially. In some ways we expect, in other ways we don't expect the, the uncertainty of that. That is the human condition. It's just clear to us because our normal defenses that kind of keep us buffered from that are upset by the news around that. But since that's so unknown, I sort of want to bracket that maybe for another episode. If we want to go there and talk about AI as we currently have it in like the winter spring of 2026 is still a boundary situation just with what we've got currently with ChatGPT and all that stuff. I still think that even now we have destabilized many assumptions about like the unique human. Like the idea that intelligence is uniquely human. That, you know, we think about creativity as like, oh yeah, creativity happens by a person. That's like kind of what makes us human is that we can be creative. Well, sort of. Now you could argue that sort of the image generation stuff is not really creativity, it's repackaging other people's creativity, but another way, another one is like, oh, you get really good at a skill and that will make sure that, that will ensure that you can make a living. Well, unless the skill that you're good at is something that AI is better at. So, you know, there's still this, like, it's unclear when this is ending, but we certainly know that a lot of the way things used to work are already changing. And we may be able, it may turn out that we enact laws to protect certain sectors or whatever, but we don't know what those laws are gonna be and we don't know if governments will be able to come to any sort of international agreement about this stuff. And so a lot of people are like, well, what am I gonna do for work for the rest of my life? Am I replaceable? I saw myself as an artist. Do people want art? Do they? You know, and that's maybe a question artists have been asking forever, but there's just so much that we don't know. And you know, will there be a short term bubble? Will there be a long term bubble which workers will actually be replaced? You know, will we have super intelligence? All these questions, they just sort of remind us that we don't know. And that's what a boundary situation is.

Kristin Tiedman (53:30)

Well, I make a part time hobby out of being an AI skeptic, which is partially, it's my denial coping skill. Once again, just in case.

Dr. Dan Koch (53:42)

I mean, I'm not gonna accuse you of that, but I think that's an interesting Question.

Kristin Tiedman (53:46)

I do, actually. I read articles about AI skepticism, which do help me, but at the same time, it is changing. I mean, jobs for sure, in terms of things that can just be done much more efficiently with AI companies see that and get little dollar signs in the CEO's eyes and say, why are we using all these people when we can use AI? But I don't find that completely unique to human history and how other things

Dr. Dan Koch (54:15)

have changed certain industries, it's like automation in other forms.

Kristin Tiedman (54:21)

Yeah, yeah. And so again, that's me trying to stay hopeful. And yet at times I do get nervous. I do think I could say a lot about this in terms of what some of my, some of my readings have, how they've informed my opinions. But I think it's something. Yeah. Recognizing that change is going to come to a lot of professions. I think then you talk about, you go to a more practical state of policy and then there's universal basic income and other things that sound scary. And I would say this can definitely, at a baseline, though, cause anxiety. And I've had anxiety about this at certain times, which is why I'll be joining your cult. And then we're good to go. We don't have to worry about this stuff.

Dr. Dan Koch (55:08)

Well, speaking of cults and all that, I think like you are, you know, skepticism may be entirely justified. What I would want to point to as, you know, from this perspective, the least healthy approaches would be sort of, this is all a crock of shit. This is all nothing. Sort of pure denialism. Also on that side would be a sort of apocalypticism of this is. This is the opposite of a crock of shit. This is doom. This is the end of everything. On the other hand, I've met people who are like, this is our salvation. AI will make us God. And I think those responses to what is very clearly an ambiguous situation with a lot of unanswered questions, what those reveal is that those are sort of defense mechanisms. Those are ways of collapsing this uncertainty into certainty, into a felt certainty in the moment, which ultimately is unlikely to end up being the case. I mean, it is possible that it will kill everybody or that it will be angelic divine salvation, but the fact is nobody in 2026 knows the answer to that. So somebody may end up being right about it, but that doesn't mean that they know now that they are right about it. So they are performing certainty, probably for themselves to allay anxiety. That's what, that's what this approach would say.

Kristin Tiedman (56:39)

And, you know, can we really fault them for that all the time.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:45)

No, it's human. No, it's totally human. Okay.

Kristin Tiedman (56:48)

AI wouldn't do that.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:50)

So again, to connect this to the last episode, clients often arrive in therapy treating anxiety as the problem. Right, that makes sense. Anxiety is the problem, depression's the problem. But sometimes anxiety is a healthy signal that some boundary has been encountered, to put it in today's language. So what we want to figure out is like last time, there's the pathological anxiety which sort of sends us inward, cycles us through our own thoughts, becomes very self referential, makes our world smaller, and we want to treat that, sort of treat that directly. But healthy anxiety is organically occurring as a result of things that happen in our life. And it can often be the give us the energy we need, it can sort of spur us, it could point the way. Sometimes we can look at it and go, oh, yeah, I'm feeling anxious because actually something needs to change in my life. So if we can get to that point, then doing existential therapy, what we're gonna be working on is we're gonna be figuring out with each individual person what can be changed. Okay. And then let's, let's figure out how and if we want to change it and what do we want to change it to, what cannot be changed and therefore must be endured or accepted or whatever. Back to, back to the idea of radical acceptance. And finally, what do we need to reorient ourselves toward? Like, if this is a sign that something needs to change, like, usually part of that is internally. And so how should I be facing this in a way where I am meeting the moment that I find myself in?

Kristin Tiedman (58:50)

Yeah, I mean, all this, obviously it sounds good. I can of course also imagine people if they're already anxious and then they have to kind of address all this having mega super anxiety. So how, like, how do you get them into a space where they can address that and their concerns without that anxiety spiking really high?

Dr. Dan Koch (59:10)

Yeah. So again, back to last episode, we talked about bodily anxiety and sort of, if you're at like a 7 or above out of 10 in overall distress, overall anxiety, like you're not going to have as much of an ability to do that constructive work. And so we'll try and help someone come down through breathing or, or whatever else. And then also I would say the therapy room and the therapy session, they act as a kind of a safe container. So there's a bit of a buffering from the outside world. And it gives clients the psychological space to talk about it. I mean, it's talk therapy. So a lot of it is talking. We're normalizing these ideas, we're kicking them around, we're discussing them. Sometimes I'm often asking follow up questions about what clients are thinking or feeling in the moment as these tough things come up. And we will look for clues there that sort of orient us to, okay, where is the rubber really meeting the road for you? Where is the most distress really coming from? What can we do about that? So, yeah, it's about you create some safety and then you get to work collaboratively. Is the way that, that I tend to do it.

Kristin Tiedman (60:26)

Okay, well, I. Yeah, I love it.

Dr. Dan Koch (60:32)

I mean, what's your like, do you want to talk about your own therapy experience? Have you experienced sort of dealing with these sort of boundary situations or these limits, you know, where they become really clear to you? Like, how has that worked for you?

Kristin Tiedman (60:48)

Oh, Dan. It's so funny because first of all, in my therapy situations, the first thing I have to get through, which takes a number of sessions, is that I'm just trying to entertain my therapist and I hope that they.

Dr. Dan Koch (61:01)

You're trying to be a funny client.

Kristin Tiedman (61:03)

You have those, Dan.

Dr. Dan Koch (61:07)

I've experienced some of that from some clients. I think I have been that kind of client as well at times.

Kristin Tiedman (61:13)

Yeah, I'll leave a therapy session and be like, wow, I was on fire in that one. There's no way my therapist has a more entertaining client besides me, which is why I need to go to therapy. But I would say like, good thing

Dr. Dan Koch (61:28)

you have this podcast outlet.

Kristin Tiedman (61:30)

Exactly. Where I, you know, I get all of my approvals en masse by your audience. But yeah, I would say it's like the, I think the anxiety, like I like to think of myself as a realist despite being, you know, also a comedian, where I'm kind of like, okay, yes, we have to face this. Like it's almost in a way exciting and I think.

Dr. Dan Koch (61:55)

But it can be really exciting. Absolutely.

Kristin Tiedman (61:57)

Yeah. But that. And I would say that's also new though. Like, you have. I don't know how to even explain. And I'm sure you see this with clients where things have to kind of fall into the right space for you to be able to conceptualize responsibility and taking these things on as a positive.

Dr. Dan Koch (62:14)

Yeah, things have to click. You know, you are kind of looking for those moments where a particular insight, a certain way of phrasing something sort of lines, ideas up for a client. I think that's really common also. I think it's very common, probably standard for existential Therapy especially to produce a mixture of dread and excitement. It's both. And even naming, that is a microcosm of naming. The existential situation like so is the human experience. There is dread and excitement, you know, as we look to the future because things can be bad and things can be good and both of them are coming down the pipe. And that is just reality. That is the nature of human existence. Let's talk about religious change specifically. Right. Because we're always going to try and apply it there. So I mentioned earlier, you know, like a religious change client maybe having that loss of certainty, loss of systems of meaning. I will think of that as a boundary situation. It's not a spiritual problem. You know, certain types of, like Christian counseling or biblical counseling or other, other forms of therapy might, you know, want basically would see their job air quotes. I mean, some of it is real counseling. I do think Christian therapists can work with Christian clients in a totally ethical and clear way, encouraging them back to a more stable Christianity. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's not existential therapy. So that's just a different form of work. But I would not see it as a spiritual problem. It's not a lack of faith. Right. It would be, no, you're in a boundary situation. So it's also not a cut and dry sea. Religion is stupid. That's also a diminishing, a denial of complexity. So I would generally think of their natural anxiety as reflecting appropriately a collapse of guaranteed meaning that they used to have in their religious community. So we are working on primarily, it's increasing tolerance for uncertainty, contingency, chance, unknowability, and then, you know, naming grief, honestly figuring out what needs to be accepted. There might be guilt, there might be loss of relationship and what you must end up doing in that situation. Sort of like logically, deductively, you have to help a client figure out how can they trust themselves or discover other forms of trustworthy knowledge and direction. Because there will have been, generally speaking, like a whole system for that. They have to renegotiate that. And they also have to become value, authentic. They got to figure out what they care about. And usually this is not totally at odds with what they cared about in their religious group. Yeah, you know, like I would say most former Christians, for instance, retain plenty of Jesus ideas about, not necessarily about Jesus being divine or whatever, but like Jesus's teachings about how to treat people and, and like how to think of others. And like, you know, not all, but a lot of former Christians will Go, well, that's. I don't, I don't disagree with that. So then the question is like, great, how do you want to live that now after Christianity? And so you, you know, you sort of work on it without that larger system buffering it.

Kristin Tiedman (66:10)

Although it's funny, I think I've mentioned this to you before, Dan, that for me personally, it feels like selfishness to even say, oh, what would I want it? Well, I mean, what about what God wants? Like, it's such a new way of thinking and to kind of be like, man, I can trust myself. That seems like the wrong thing, like, instinctually. Well, from how, you know, you've grown up, it shouldn't be about trusting yourself. It should be about trusting God. And I wonder, I mean, I don't know if anything would come.

Dr. Dan Koch (66:39)

Well, I have something about that that I'd love to get your take on. So the way I think of that, and I wonder if you'd agree, is even when you're in a situation where you are basically, you are willingly handing over that authority to someone else or to the church or whatever, like, you still at all times could revoke that. So you're, you are. And I knew we do this all the time. I basically do that with my doctor.

White Claw Advertiser (67:10)

Right.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:10)

Like, I don't sort of take it on myself to do my own research. I go, no, no, no. If you have a strong opinion about what's going on with my physical body, I'm going to defer to you on that. But I could at any time find a new doctor. I could say, I don't trust modern medicine anymore, and I could go find some alternative medicine approach. A person who has said, you know what, I trust the Catholic Church to think about this. For me, that can be done totally authentically. And it's more about recognizing, hey, what you were doing was you were giving that authority to someone else. You are welcome to do that. But you also could have always pulled it back to yourself. You are like, you still have agency. You're not naming it. And maybe the way that the system talks about it doesn't name it as agency, but you talk to anybody. Have you ever had a friend leave your church and go to a different church or leave Christianity? Yes, I know people who have done that, and you could have done the same. So it's not like you didn't have that agency and now you're selfishly like, you were using it. You just were. You were choosing to give it to someone else. Basically.

Kristin Tiedman (68:26)

Yeah, I mean, I hear you.

Dr. Dan Koch (68:28)

Not as A child, but like, once you get old enough. Right. Not as a kid. Of course you don't.

Kristin Tiedman (68:31)

Yeah, I guess the. It's so funny. I can still play all the old scripts.

Dr. Dan Koch (68:37)

Yeah. Oh, I know.

Kristin Tiedman (68:38)

You know, where it's still, like, I would be like, well, that's because we're supposed to, you know, lay down our own fleshly desires and stuff like that and our, you know, sinful desires. And that's appropriate to give up that agency. So it's tough. I mean, it's tough. And that's where you can kind of, I mean, it's, I'm sure, quite the process. And I'm sure you see that with clients to have to kind of untangle that.

Dr. Dan Koch (69:04)

Yeah. And it can be a very slow process. Right. Because especially if you've spent years, decades, whatever, decades of adulthood, especially in these systems, but, you know, also being raised in them, that has a real strong way of sort of structuring and coloring one's worldview. There's just a lot. There's a lot to take out and look at, but ultimately it's about, you know, doing this kind of existential therapy, which, by the way, works for people who are wanting to remain religious or spiritual as well as people who are done with it. You know, this approach works either way. There are plenty of religious existentialists, including the grandfather of existentialism, Mr. Soren Kierkegaard himself, my son's namesake. Anyway, like that, you know, you can do it either way. But basically what clients are working toward is humility, sort of. I always love how Darrell Van Tongren says that humility is being right sized, so you recognize the limits of your knowledge, but also you tend to get serious about your morality and your values because you sort of need them to ground and orient your direction. It's sort of like one of the insights of existentialism is that people must. Must have meaning. This is Viktor Frankl's big contribution in man's search for meaning and his experience in concentration camps. He's like, even in this situation, we craved some meaning, some narrative, some directionality. Right. And you do get. You often get a real sense of exciting authorship emerging for people. And sometimes it's the first time they felt like the author. But you are, like I was saying earlier, you're pointing out to them that you've been the author. You have just. You've chosen to read other author's books instead, instead of write your own. And now you could continue to do that, or you can write your own. It's up to you.

Kristin Tiedman (71:25)

Wow. Well, I mean, I think it's still a struggle for me at times, but again, it's that broadening we talked about earlier that is in line with that authoring that responsibility, as again, it's feels like something that's a weight, but when you actually recognize it's freeing or it's empowering maybe is a better way of seeing it. And then it's also, you get past all the silly stuff that we keep seeing where people are eschewing responsibility or being that bad faith actor where it just increases that immaturity that is so unappealing in a long term. And again, I feel like we see the effects of it right now is it's this willful kind of opting into immaturity that then creates all these headaches for people, as opposed to saying, yes, this thing is actually hard or this thing is actually bad. Let's take the time to acknowledge that and then we can go for it, as opposed to ignoring or pretending. I mean, again, I'm not. I'm being vague intentionally, but it's just so frustrating.

Dr. Dan Koch (72:34)

Well, you're also pointing to something that's going to come up in the next two episodes in this series. So that's exciting, which is that there's a. I like to describe it as a photo negative. There's a move that we can do where we take our greatest suffering around this stuff, the moments that hurt us the most, and then we say, okay, turn that into a photo negative. What is the value that we must hold deeply that is being trampled in this experience, and that's why it hurts so much. Then you identify that value and then you go, okay, how am I gonna live into that value in a way that I. That is within my own agency and scope? So that's a little. That's a little.

Kristin Tiedman (73:20)

Ooh, teaser trailer. Yeah, I mean, we don't know. We know the real thing is what hurts the most is being so close and having so much to say and watching you walk away. This is another Rascal Flats.

Dr. Dan Koch (73:34)

Okay, Rascal Flats. How can I get through this without

Kristin Tiedman (73:38)

referencing the Rascal Floor School Platts? Come on.

Dr. Dan Koch (73:42)

Okay, so just to reiterate our main takeaways again from today's episode, we are living through collective boundary situations when the unavoidable realities of human existence become more clear to us in uncomfortable ways. And that anxiety, stress, depression are natural responses to that we want to lean into the healthy kind that gets our asses moving. These situations are not solved once and for all. We have to orient ourselves. We have to face them honestly and recognize the uncertainty and learn to live with the uncertainty. But the good news is, from the existential perspective, that's the human condition anyway. The boundary situation is just showing us what our life is like anyway. And we have to build up that existential resilience to be able to live in the world as we actually find it. So it is disorienting, but it can chart a path forward to genuinely new futures that might even be better in ways we can't even understand. That's the sort of hope to it. But it's not going to be a naive, guaranteed hope. Right. We're going to avoid making that mistake, and we are going to instead ground that hope in realism. And yet, what people find is when you get really honest, it can be pretty great, even though it's painful. And it. And it can really clarify what to do next.

Kristin Tiedman (75:11)

Wow. I feel like right now, if this episode's ending, you need some really powerful outro music to be like, da da da da da da da da da da da. Like, go get them. Go get them.

Dr. Dan Koch (75:21)

Jock jams.

Kristin Tiedman (75:22)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (75:23)

Yeah.

Kristin Tiedman (75:23)

Okay.

Dr. Dan Koch (75:24)

Yeah. So, yeah. Final Countdown or buh, buh buh buh buh. Basketball.

Kristin Tiedman (75:29)

Ooh.

Dr. Dan Koch (75:29)

Okay. You know, some, like, NBA and NBC vibes. All right, Kristen Tiedman, thank you as always. And we will be back next time to talk about this idea of the necessary, the impossible, and the desirable. In other words, how we clarify our values under constraint.

Kristin Tiedman (75:55)

And that's amore.

Dr. Dan Koch (75:57)

And that's amore.