Naming the Real

In a culture with few moral narratives or frameworks—and in which there is increasing doubt that that human life can have any true purpose or meaning at all—a huge void is created. This void is incre…

Virtue, classically speaking, meant doing the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way. It was highly contextual, requiring wisdom and thoughtfulness. In contrast, we are wit…

Because of a busy travel schedule (and so that episodes don't suffer in the midst of it), I'm taking a two-week pause from posting new episodes. When I'm back I'll be posting an episode on the rise o…

With all the talk of cancel culture, we turn to an issue at the heart of our cultural crisis: the human penchant to blame and scapegoat as a means of feeling righteous. In this episode, we explore Re…

Grief done well means moving into wholeness, a process in which we become people who help heal the world around us. But how do we get there? In this third and final episode about grief, we explore th…

If grieving well is so important to a flourishing life, how do we engage it? In this episode, we explore five practices (and a bonus practice) for grieving well. The goal is not to avoid grief nor to…

Grief is more than the loss of a loved one; it wears many faces and has many expressions. Nevertheless, grief can feel elusive, overwhelming, and misunderstood, while remaining life’s one inevitabili…

We counter polarization and anxiety with forgiveness and reconciliation. But we live in an emerging moral culture, called a Victimhood Culture, which at its worst can incentivize us to live in offens…

Immaturity is marked by either-or, all-or-nothing, zero sum thinking…and our culture it steeped in it, especially in the form of false binaries. In this episode, we explore how false binaries help ke…

In our over-stimulated world, experiencing anxiety in the form of racing thoughts and a spun-out mind is a pervasive reality. We humans already have a negativity bias: as the metaphor goes, our brain…

Since the 1970s, America’s sense of community, measured in “social capital,” has steadily declined, resulting in what sociologists sometimes call “the atomized self.” We are more disconnected from on…

Defining happiness—let alone what leads to it—is difficult, and yet the quest for happiness is at the heart of our modern cultural ethos. In this episode, we explore Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of ne…

Regret is looking back and wishing something had been different—a different choice made or a different path taken. And it is often linked to shame. In this episode we explore how to navigate regret i…

In this episode, we explore how notions of personal freedom have changed over the last 400 years, post-Enlightenment, creating a new notion of the self and a rampant individualism across Western cult…

How do we understand the rise in anxiety, polarization, and division in the US? More to the point, how do we name it so that we can transcend it and live free of its dominance? In this episode, which…