This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
This one is just me, no guest, no notes, recorded on a Tuesday morning and published the same day, which is the version of this podcast I like most, because I press record without having any idea what will come out, and then something does. It was short and it stayed close to what has been going on in my own head over the last weeks, so here is the rundown.
The question I end every journal entry with. For a long time I tried Steve Jobs’ mirror question, if today was my last day would I want to do what I am about to do, and I could never get a usable answer out of it, partly because I do think this life ends and then continues, so the whole framing kept sliding away from me. What I write instead now, at the bottom of one small page every morning, is: am I living from my honest voice right now? It is a yes or no question, it takes a second, and it has turned into something I can carry through the whole day rather than something I contemplate once.
Why that question works better for me. Life is a constant flow of micro decisions, small responses, moments where you either say the thing or you don’t, and the honest voice question gives me a way to catch myself in the middle of that, to notice when I am hiding behind something, or not voicing what I feel, or not saying what I need, and then to ask what exactly I am hiding from. I can check it on three layers, in my voice, in how my body reacts, and in what my intuition is saying, which makes it far more grounded than an abstract question about mortality.
The I don’t know intelligence. This came from my conversation with Rohan last week and it has not left me since. How often do we produce an answer purely for the sake of producing an answer, not only in conversation with other people, but with ourselves, about what is next, where we are going, why that, who we are, what the plan is for the next six months. I have started saying I don’t know, and meaning it, and the relief is immediate, because most of the pressure we feel is not coming from society or them or the people, it is coming from the narratives we have built about ourselves, and once you look directly at those stories the mind gets a lot freer.
Confusion is the root of most of the suffering. What I keep coming back to is that the moment we start negotiating with reality as it is, the irritation and the anxiety arrive on schedule, and I don’t know is a way of stopping the negotiation before it starts. Reality as it is right now is already fine, and approaching it without an answer ready leaves room for spontaneity and creativity that a fixed position never allows.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.
Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.
Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.
The community is capped at 150.
Sam Garrett, mantras, and Nirvana. At the Yoga Chunky Festival in Vienna, where my friend Max Freiler and his partner Alissia ran a brilliant Wim Hof workshop, the closing was a two hour concert by Sam Garrett, who I did not know beforehand and who is mostly known for devotional songs and mantras, the kind you can sing along to after hearing them once. Halfway through he started playing Nirvana covers, Come As You Are, Smells Like Teen Spirit, then Oasis, then Britney Spears, and the contrast with the mantras was fantastic.
What he said at the end. He told us he had been living inside a spiritual box, a very beautiful box that felt true at the time, and that he had come to see how much he was repressing inside it, how easy it is to get lost in positive thinking and love and everything is fine while neglecting your actual human existence. He also named the strangeness of people worshipping him as a guru, and questioned the whole ladder we build in spiritual circles, higher vibrations, higher consciousness, someone further along than you, when the premise of the thing is supposed to be that we are all one. He remembered being eleven or twelve with a mohawk, climbing onto stages at punk concerts and throwing himself into the crowd, and next year he is going back towards that, into psychedelic rock.
Whose essence are you arriving at. This is the part I share with him completely. Coming back to your natural essence does not mean becoming a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu, or a Krishna. Those are examples of people who arrived at theirs. Yours might look nothing like that, and it can be anything, so the question is not which one to imitate but who you are underneath the layers, and what is trying to be expressed through you at that very natural state.
Synthesizers, and a chocolate review that is overdue. My friend Gabriel and I got talking at the festival about the Telepathic Orchid ORC1, which is a beautiful piece of hardware with a proper homage to the eighties in the design, and I have been circling synthesizers since I stumbled on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field back in February. I love that they let people like me play with music without first learning an instrument, and I am hoping to afford one by the end of the year, at which point there will probably be live experiments in this podcast and a new intro song. If you play with synths, tell me which one to look at. Also, I have not done a dark chocolate review in far too long, and I intend to fix that.
The invitation. Give yourself permission to say I don’t know more often. If you don’t know, say it, rather than forcing out an answer for the sake of having one, because I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable response to most of the questions life puts in front of you, and it keeps you open, curious, and closer to the mind of a child, which is roughly where the good stuff lives.
