How to approach the daunting question: who am I? (w/ Brian Lowery) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. If you were to ask me as a joke to come up with two questions that we just could not possibly answer in the course of a single podcast episode, I'd probably say something like, what is the meaning of life or what defines a

Person's true self and identity. Those are pretty big questions. Those are philosophical questions. They're huge, and I would say they're almost comically impossible to answer in under an hour. And yet today's guest, the psychologist, Brian Lowry, he is going to do his best to dig into exactly those questions.

I'm not gonna say that we come up with a definitive answer by the end of this episode, but I will say that Brian has got me thinking about these really profound questions in new ways. And Brian is such a smart, thoughtful guy. I, I can't think of anyone who is better at getting deep, but still keeping it accessible and fun.

I mean, this is a guy, Brian, who gave a TED talk about how to have a meaningful life, right? That's what he's an expert in meaningful lives. It's incredible stuff. Here's a clip.

Brian Lowery: Life is amazing. Life is incredible. The experiences we have, the possibilities of personal achievement. You could summit Everest. I.

You could create a huge successful business. You could give a TED talk, and when you're successful, it feels incredible success, the flush of excitement, the celebration, and you should celebrate the congratulations. The posting on Instagram, wherever you put your stuff up, it all feels great, but when that fades, when that starts to fade, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once a question comes up.

Is this it? Is this all there is?

Chris Duffy: We will be right back with more from Brian in just a moment. Don't go anywhere.

Today we're talking with Brian Lowery about meaning, identity, and what makes you you.

Brian Lowery: Hi, I'm Brian Lowery, professor at Stanford University at the Graduate School of Business. author of Selfless, the Social Creation of You and founding co-director of Stanford's New Institute on advancing just societies.

Chris Duffy: You know, Brian, in your work, you think a lot about meaning, you think a lot about self and you think about the ways that we impact each other. In your book, selfless, you push back on the idea that we have one core unchanging self as an individual. In fact, on on page 59, you write, and I'm quoting, I personally reject the idea that anyone has an innate true self.

I imagine for many people who haven't read your book, that's kind of a big surprising idea. So can you tell us how you do think about what each of ourselves is? If it's not that.

Brian Lowery: Yeah, I, I think about the self as a, an amalgamation. A combination of cultural influences, which are relationships that preceded us.

Family influences as close relationships that for many of us are our firsts, our first relationships, close friends, romantic partners, interaction you have on the subway. And with all these interactions, I think combine. To produce our sense of self, who we are. I think that the self is made up of who we are with other people.

Chris Duffy: This is one of the things that I loved about your book is this idea that, and, and again, I'm, I'm quoting here, to have a self at all requires others, and I feel like that's a really interesting new and almost, um, counter-cultural idea because, you know, we live in the society, you and I, in a culture, in an economic system, all of which place a lot of idea on the value of an individual.

But I think your book and your work makes such a compelling argument that we actually don't exist as individuals in any meaningful way. Even just the idea that we could exist as an individual. The idea that you have a self without others isn't actually true in any sense of the word.

Brian Lowery: It's a powerful fiction.

It feels so real that it's hard to. See it as not the way things are. When you go a little deeper and start thinking about it, it kind of falls apart a bit, right? This, this sense that you exist independent of other people, starts not to make much sense. Like when you think about yourself as a man, what does that mean?

How do you know, right? If you think of yourself as a woman, same. It doesn't, I mean, as you think, when you think about your gender, how do you know what gender you are? So when you think about what makes you. Most you, I don't think people generally have in mind physical attributes. What they have in mind is how people engage with them and who they think they are in relationships and that requires other people.

Chris Duffy: Even what you just said, when I start to think about them, I kind of get a little like dizzy. I'm like, I feel like we're at the limits of how smart I am that I'm like, I am just barely smart enough to even comprehend what we're talking about because like it's so fundamental, the idea that I am this self and yet everything you're saying makes.

Sense and is true, but where's the solid ground to root myself down into?

Brian Lowery: I feel the same way. Just so you know. I feel like I'm at my limit of understanding. And you know what's, it's one of those things where some, sometimes I give this comparison to, um, physics, you know, I guess contemporary physics, people will say like, there's no intuition for quantum mechanics as an example.

There's just no intuitive understanding of it. Like you, there's math and we believe it to be true because the math suggests so, but it's. So far from our experience of how the world operates, that it's difficult to hold onto or think about it in just an intuitive way. There's like aspects of psychology that are like that, that we just have this sense of how the world is.

'cause we've moved through it and it feels a certain way on examination. The way it feels may not actually be how it is. Hmm. And that's tough. We're not designed to understand that. I don't think.

Chris Duffy: This is also one of the things that I really appreciate so much about you. This is a podcast that people are listening to because they, they want to, to do something to improve themselves and the world and, and I love how you argue that self-help I.

It cannot exist if you're just trying to help yourself. In fact, you say on page three, this book doesn't argue against the aim of self-help so much as argued that it is not possible. And then again, you say later on when you're talking about this like whole genre of self-help that you say, I won't pander to what we want to believe.

Like it, it just, that's not what I'm doing here.

Brian Lowery: Yeah, I mean, I think often what people want, especially when we talk about the self is. affirm my view of how the world is, and you can tell me things that I might not like as long as they fit with what I believe. Right? And it's a strange thing, like even when I wrote this book, people are like, well, what, what are people gonna do with it?

And I was like, well, sometimes I wanna say there are few things in life more interesting than other human beings. Why is it not sufficient to have a deeper understanding of human beings? Why? Why aren't we? Why are we unsatisfied? If you learn something. About yourself or about people that is challenging and illuminating and crazy.

Like, why is that not enough? Why do I have to tell you what to do with that thing? But I will tell you something you can do with that thing... I think, um, I try not to be prescriptive. Like I don't tell people this is how you should live. 'cause I don't know how people should live. But I will say that understanding that your relationships shape you also entails a, an acceptance that you're shaping other people.

And with that comes a, a deeper responsibility for how you engage with other people. So I think taking that on board will change how people behave and, and meaningful and, and, uh, I would hope positive ways

Chris Duffy: I. I know this is something that you say in talks, and also you say frequently on your podcast in many different eloquent ways that we each play a role in creating others.

That our existence makes demands of others, but it also means that this is, again, I'm quoting from your book, you have power in mundane, everyday interactions. You affirm or challenge other selves. You open or deny possibilities of being, and others do the same for you. That that feels at once, like a very practical and important thing that we can do in our everyday lives.

But for me it also answers why some issues or topics are so charged, why people get so upset. Why, why people are literally going to war or violence or, or, you know, burning systems down. Because if we challenge something that gets at the core of who they understand themselves to be, people are willing to do quite a lot to protect that.

Brian Lowery: It's incredible, right? That when you think about the things that people fight about and are willing to harm other people over, it's sometimes it seems inexplicable. Like, why do you care if someone wants to marry someone of the same sex? Why do you care if someone of a different race is, is immigrating to the country?

These things are, they seem strange to elicit such a strong response. The way I see it anyway is the reason people care is it goes to the core of who they are and and challenging sometimes who they are or who they can be. It also challenges the fundamental relationship, so if you are allowing someone to decide that they are a man.

When you think of them as a woman, what does that mean for who you are? Right? What does that mean about your relationships? Right. And I think that is what is really, um, powerful about these kind of identities and how people respond to others identities. And it, it really puts to the lie to the idea that we are individuals separate from other people.

'cause if we were, we wouldn't care that much, right? That we operate in a collective. And what other people do matters to us enough to get really mad about.

Chris Duffy: I have a friend who is trans who talked about how incredible he felt at something so simple as, uh, someone saying like, see you later, brother. That, that felt so affirming and felt like the person wasn't trying to make a political statement.

They were just recognizing the, the truth of who this person was.

Brian Lowery: That is, in my mind, a participation in construction of who that person is. They are participating and in that moment, constructing that person in a way that is affirming. To their sense of self at that, that time. But in doing that, it's also a communal act, right?

That's, I think that's what's missed, right? When someone else hears that, they see that as a challenge to how they think about gender. And in some ways, I, I, I wanna be sympathetic on all sides, like they're right. It is a challenge to how they understand gender, and it is a communal act. My own beliefs are that like we should try to allow people to be who they.

Aspire to be who they want to be, the way they understand who they are. But I also understand the challenge that introduces to others, right? And, and understanding that is, is I think, useful if you want to engage with it. Even if you wanna change it. I mean, understanding it is, is a useful thing.

Chris Duffy: But one of the big takeaways for me from your book was that actually all elements of our identity are socially created, not just the the culture war ones, right?

Like you say, society is an intricate social game, and, and you compare it to this card game that many people have played where you have a a card that you can't see that's up on your head. And so if you have a higher value card, like an ace or a king. People have to act deferential to you and if you have a lower card, they don't act.

And you talk about how people without any information about who they are in that game are very good at guessing what card they have up on their head and how actually all of our lives is kind of a version of that game is just figuring out where are we in relation to other people and what do they think we are?

Brian Lowery: 100%. I mean. W anything that you think of as an important part of yourself that's not like just really a, a, a straightforward physical attribute. Like how, how do you know what it is without somebody else helping you see it? This is kind of the, the point I make. Like the, the same way that we see our physical self in the mirror.

Like we see our social selves, all aspects of the social self in other people. Like they are constructing it for us. Hmm. With us

Chris Duffy: and even our, even our physical selves. Right. Um, I am, uh, five 10, maybe five 11. And there are times where I see myself as tall, and there are times where I see myself as regular height, and there are times where I see myself as short and, uh, it's, it's the same height all the time, right?

I'm the same height every day. And yet, uh, I can feel like I am very different because it's in relation to other people. Yeah.

Brian Lowery: Chris, I love that example because it, it does point to this thing where people confuse like your objective height with. In some sense, like the social idea of how tall you are, and those are not the same thing.

Chris Duffy: Hmm.

Brian Lowery: Like obviously there's actual a, a, a physical thing that is your height, but that's not what's affecting how you understand yourself. What affects how you understand yourself is like whether you're tall or short. Mm-hmm. Or medium height. And that is not just about your physical height, that's about how you understand yourself around other people.

Chris Duffy: My friend Julie, I'm gonna say her real name, just to kind of put her on blast here.. Um, Julie, I love you, but it was funny 'cause Julie was describing how I had gone to, um, like a New Year's party at her, at her mom's house several years ago. And Julie was telling her mom, I guess, that I was coming over and her mom didn't remember who I was.

And Julie to me told this story and said, and I was like, oh, you remember Chris? He's the hairy guy. And I was like, hairy guy. I'm not a hairy guy. I have a beard, I guess, but like that's, I'm so much more well groomed than most people. And I know people who have backs that are like covered in fur. I'm not a hairy guy.

But then to her, I was the hairy guy. You know? That's like how she described me to her mom, the hairy guy, Chris. Hilarious.

Brian Lowery: I love that. The funny thing about, about these things like height or the hairy guy, these things can be affected by other social things too, right? So height as an example. If people think of you as high status, they're likely to overestimate your height.

It's also like if people see you and they're like, oh, you are an important person that can affect their perception of your height. Right. That also is an interesting, um, kind of instance of how these, these things that we think of as objective or actually being constructed and moved around to some extent in these relationships.

Chris Duffy: You give the example in your book of, uh, a person who told you that, well, when he as a black man, when he walked through a white neighborhood at night, he would whistle Vivaldi so that people would see a, or hear, I guess a different identity in addition to the one that they perceived of him as a black man walking in their neighborhood.

Brian Lowery: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's actually, that comes from a, a book that a colleague friend of mine, Claude, still wrote actually. He has a book called Whistling Vivaldi, which is, uh, an excellent kind of examination of what you're describing, but. You think it means a certain thing to be black or white, and then you're like, you run into someone who doesn't exactly in your mind match that.

So you have to like try to make sense of it, right? Mm-hmm. And you try to assign that person to something that you can understand, that you can fit within your model of how people, what people are, how they can be. All these identities are incredibly complicated and people know that, but people want them to make sense.

They want them to be easy, they want. To use these identities to help figure out how to navigate the world. And I think we're constantly in the act of portraying ourselves as something or other to other people.

Chris Duffy: Hmm. Well it's like that Judith Butler idea that gender is a performance, right? In some ways everything is a performance.

Any social identity is a performance. Uh, being a New Yorker is a performance, right? being 25 is a performance,

Brian Lowery: and the part that I'm most interested in is like, what does the performance matter? If there's no audience?

Chris Duffy: Hmm.

Brian Lowery: Right then you're performing this thing because there's an audience and the audience is reflecting back to you where you are without the audience.

What difference does it make? What would it mean to be any of those things without an audience?

Chris Duffy: Okay. We're gonna take a quick break and we will be right back in just a moment.

And we are back. We're talking with Brian Lowry, the author of Selfless, the Social Creation of You about finding meaning in your life and what it means to create a self. I think the human

Brian Lowery: need and pursuit of meaning is both beautiful and profound because when you have meaning in your life, that means that someone else gave you the opportunity to participate in the story that is not your own.

On the other side, when you allow people to participate in your life, you're giving them the opportunity to generate meaning. And so in that way, the deep, deep human need for meaning connects us in a circle. I think a, a beautiful and profound circle of generosity and gratitude.

Chris Duffy: Brian, I, I'm curious to talk to you a little bit about yourself and your identities, if that's okay?

Yeah, of course. You, as a child, you, you moved around a lot Mississippi to Chicago, to California. You, you said that you went to six different schools in Chicago before attending college. I'm curious how that experience impacted your understanding and interest in the social construction of self.

Brian Lowery: I think that's in part where it came from.

I mean. You just see these kind types of characters, like I'm sure you, I mean, everyone has it like eighties movie tropes where it's like the high school kids. It's like the slacker, the cute girl, the jock, the nerd, blah, blah, blah. You know, these, these things. It's like, yeah, I went places. I saw all those characters in all these places, but their outcomes were so different depending on where they were and who they were around.

I just became interested in how does the environment affect. Who we are and who we can be. But it's also interesting that some of the same characters exist in such different environments. Um, and that says something about the strength of the broader community or the broader culture in constructing those or creating those, like the idea of a nerd.

Like every school has some concept of that, and every school has some person who, or people who are in that, in some version of that category probably. But I was just, um, struck by how important. Our environments are in affecting what happens to us. And I think it's easier to see when you move around than when you're in one place because you can see people who worked hard in different places, not producing the same outcomes.

And then you ask like, why is that? How does that work? Um, who they become. I. Is maybe not who they would've become in a different environment. So I've always been kind of been interested in that and I, and in the beginning it was like kind of a still it is to now to some extent, like a social justice issue.

From my perspective, the book is about not what happens to us, what opportunities do we have, but who can we be? I think that's a, a very. The thing that everyone can explore in their lives.

Chris Duffy: One of the big things that I've been thinking about in a new way, thanks to you, is that it is, it is that question, of course, who can we be?

But it is also this other question which I've thought about so much less, which is who can we allow others to be?

Brian Lowery: I'm happy you brought that up because it's really just the other side of the coin. I think it's easy to focus on the self and not focus on the effect we're having on others. Right? Hmm.

Chris Duffy: This is just a framework that I think of things in often is going back to when I was teaching fifth grade, right?

Like. I think I had strengths and weaknesses as a teacher, but I was not certainly some sort of master teacher, but some of the teachers who had been teaching for a really long time would sometimes say things that would just stop me in my tracks, and I was struggling to get some behavior changes. There were some like tough behaviors and it wasn't quite working.

I was not having great control in my classroom, and one of the teachers. I asked for advice and I, I kind of thought she was gonna say something like, make sure you have more red pieces of paper, and hand them a red piece of paper instead of a green one when they do something bad. And instead she said, why don't you try this?

Why don't you say you're disrupting the class? And that doesn't seem like you, like, make it so that the identity that you're giving them is the identity that you want them to have, that you know they can have, and that the action is at conflict with that identity. I thought like, surely that can't work.

And it was amazing how quickly the behavior changed and not just in like a weird manipulative way, but in like a building that internal sense of self. Because you know, with kids it's more explicit, but we all have that, that self that's made by the others.

Brian Lowery: I love that story. I think it's, um, I think that works at all ages when you tell people, here's who you are.

I mean, and it makes it harder for them to act in contradiction to that claim. Because people want to be consistent with who, who they are, and they're finding out who they are all the time by the people they're around.

Chris Duffy: So can you tell us about your first conscious memory?

Brian Lowery: My first memory is feeding ducks at a pond with my mom.

Chris Duffy: Hmm.

Brian Lowery: And at, and it was on the, um, hospital grounds singing river, the hospital I was born in, in Mississippi. That's the kind of thing I think. And, uh, whether or not that is actually true is another question. But my first memory. The first thing I can recall is being on these hospital grounds with my mom feeding ducks at a pond.

Chris Duffy: And you talk about how that's your first conscious memory, but that isn't where you believe yourself started because you were probably three at that memory. So, so there was a self that existed before you could even remember.

Brian Lowery: For sure. You come into a story already underway. I don't know why people sometimes behave as if things started when they got here, right?

Mm-hmm. And your parents' story about who you were and their hopes and dreams for you, or their fears for you, or who knows, like their fear for themselves. They didn't know you were coming, and there's all kinds of things that are happening that certainly will shape who you are to them and therefore shape how they interact with you and therefore shape who you can be going forward, right?

It's clearly the case that. People have ideas about you before you even physically exist.

Chris Duffy: And then as we get older, I think many of us have a moment where we say something or do something and we go, oh no, I am becoming one of my parents or both of my parents. That is a way in which our parents self is continuing past them.

Brian Lowery: 100%. Like you have a, a sense of who they are and you're carrying them with you and, and that relationship, I, I'd I give this example of you have a relationship with your, your mom or your dad or you know, you can think of whoever else and that you don't see regularly. Like they, maybe they live somewhere else.

That relationship doesn't stop when you hop on the plane and don't see them. Like you still believe they exist and you engage and, and, and think about them as if they exist. If something happened, they passed away.. You wouldn't know right away, but they would still exist for you and, and even when they do pass away, my argument is that they still still exist in that relationship with you and they do continue to affect you and you do continue to engage with your idea of them in the same way you do when you're not in their physical presence.

Hmm. The self as it exists in relationships, not as it exists in our bodies, but as it exist in relationships, certainly continue past the physical death and, and begins probably before a physical birth. I mean, here's the thing. I think I. It's evidence that people believe this, even though it sounds, they say it that way.

Sounds strange, but people clearly care about legacy, right? Leaving something behind. Why, why would you care about that at all if you thought it all ended as, as your physical death? Who ca who cares whether or not something persists after that? And I think that concern is, is some evidence, um, that people understand that there's something important about who they are that transcends their physical self.

Chris Duffy: I think that that idea that we leave a legacy or that we want to leave a legacy that dovetails so perfectly into this connection between. The self being more than the self, that it actually being a social construction, but also that meaning the the meaning of our lives. The answer to the question, do our lives amount to anything has to do with that social construction, with that community, with the way that people around us have been affected by us and have affected us.

Brian Lowery: I'm curious, what do you think, Chris? What is your life about?

Chris Duffy: I, I feel like honestly, that is, that's such a close and more eloquent encapsulation of what I believe the, the meaning of my life and of life in general to be, which is how can we leave things better than we found them? How can we do our best to make other people

Feel seen and respected and have dignity and comfort, and how can we be of service? I mean, honestly, if I was to boil my idea of what, what makes life meaningful, it would be to to be of service. I.

Brian Lowery: I love that and look at you. How lucky are you that you have a podcast called Better Human?

Chris Duffy: I mean, listen, this is the smallest act of service.

You know, I could be out there picking up trash on the street right now. Instead I'm in a comfortable room talking on a microphone. I'm not saying I'm doing it, I'm just saying that's what makes it meaningful there. There's definitely a guy out there right now sweeping the street, and he is doing more to be of service than I am.

Brian Lowery: Oh, I love the humility. But you know, it's nice to have a sense that what you're doing is. Participating in something larger. And I honestly believe that everyone is, the question is, can they see and, and feel that, and maybe we, we, um, expect too much when you go out and have that interaction with someone at the grocery store, like you're, you're affecting that person's life.

Hmm. Right. And, and, and maybe in a small way, I'm not saying every interaction has some, you know, huge consequence, but. It might matter for that person more than, you know, when you pick up trash, you are helping and engaging with some idea of how you think the world should be in a way that that matters or can matter for you.

Like I, I don't, you know, I think sometimes we, people think they have to go on this cosmic quest. I. Define meaning when it's, you know, maybe all around us in these mundane actions and more importantly, mundane interactions that we have all the time with people.

Chris Duffy: People talk about this in, in terms of like artistic, uh, pursuits, but I think it applies just as directly to, to having a meaningful life as well, is people get so focused in my mind on product rather than process, right?

Like, how can I write a great script or how can I write a great joke? And the answer is write. A hundred bad scripts. How can I write a great joke? Write a hundred bad jokes. By the end, each joke will get a little bit better as long as you pay attention, right? If, if you are working and striving to, to be a little bit better each time, that's how you actually get to be good.

And I think that, um, this idea of like, how can I have one perfect meaningful life is like, well, how can you try to do that? By the day, by the minute, by the second that, that's actually for me the answer. And I think you have a really beautiful anecdote about that. Um, in the book, this man you met who was a gay man who was living during the height of HIV in San Francisco, and he told you this story about his garden.

Brian Lowery: So he was a, a, a gay man, I think, you know, relatively young man at the time living in the Castro area of San Francisco, which is, um, considered like a, the, a gay neighborhood in, in San Francisco. And this is like, you know, I guess I. Early nineties, like near the height of the uh, uh, AIDS epidemic, people would just be disappearing.

Like people were just dying all over the place. So people lived through that. They might have some memory of how, how bad it was and how scary it was, especially, and obviously in the gay community. It was really frightening at the time. And eventually he gets diagnosed with HIV and he told me, the first thing he thought about was, what am I gonna do about my tomatoes?

Which you would think is a strange thing to think when you're diagnosed with a disease at the time that is fatal. Every spring, early spring, he'd plant tomatoes and get really excited about planting these tomatoes, needing tomatoes. They love garden grown tomatoes. And he was like, what am I gonna do about these tomatoes?

'cause I, I probably won't live to consume these tomatoes. His friends were like splurging on, on trips and doing all these other things. They got diagnosed with HIV, they were like, I'm gonna go out on a bang. They were partying, going on cruises, et cetera. And he's like, no, I'm just gonna plant my tomatoes and do what I do.

And he, and he said, you don't plant the tomatoes to consume them. , most of the planting and tomatoes is about the tending of them. It's just the day to day and the consuming them is just the pleasant bonus at the end. His point was that life is mostly tending tomatoes, and I thought that thought was just like a very compelling way of thinking about engaging with life.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, I'm just curious because you, you're, you're a comedian. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. You can tell jokes. What if you kept writing jokes and they weren't getting any better?

Chris Duffy: the way that you get better in my experience at performative comedy as opposed to just, you know, laughing with your friends and having fun socially, is you go out and you fail and then you figure out, ah, what.

Worked a little bit and you try and pursue that and pursue that a little bit more. And, uh, over time you construct with the audience this idea of what works for you and that is informed very much by who you are perceived by, by the audience versus how you are perceived by yourself. Almost always the reason why jokes will fail at the very beginning is because people think that people will understand who they are.

Like a lot of the things that make your friends and family laugh are because they have so much background information about you already, and the audience doesn't have that. So you have to figure out right at your start of your career as a comedian, what information are they actually getting and, and how can I play around with that?

Brian Lowery: I would think when people don't laugh, it challenges your sense of who you are. Mm-hmm. Like, and you can say this a simple way, right? Like, you think you're funny and now people are telling you, no, you're not funny.

Chris Duffy: Yeah, that's why it's hard at first. Now, it doesn't challenge my sense of who I am because I have enough accumulated experience that I know that I'm funny.

And so when people don't laugh, I say, oh, that joke is not clear. Or there's something that I'm saying that is not resonating in the way I want it to resonate. But at first it challenged my idea of like, but I thought I was funny, but I thought I was a likable person.

Brian Lowery: And then are you asking every time you go on stage, are you asking for affirmation?

Chris Duffy: Certainly at first. Now sometimes I, it's a little bit more like a research experiment, like I'm running an experiment on, I think that this joke works in this way, does it? But I have to say, even now as we're talking about, like me as a comedian, in the back of my head, I have this idea that someone who is a, a standup comedian, and I do standup too, but someone who is a standup comedian who says, well, a real comedian is out there,

Every night performing three times a night. That's what it means to be a real comedian. I have this fear in my head that they're gonna say, you're talking about like jokes and all that stuff, but you're not a real comedian. You don't even perform once a week sometimes. So there is this social idea of like even right now where I'm like, who am I to talk about comedy?

Am I a real comedian? I don't know. Well, you're funny to me, Chris. Thank you. Yeah, and you know what? Funny is not funny and comedian are not the same thing, plenty of people are real comedians and not funny at all, but, okay. I want to go back to your Ted Talk for a second. You gave this TED Talk that's about how to have a meaningful life.

How did you choose that as the topic that you wanted to discuss?

Brian Lowery: I feel like I'm at or nearing a transition point in my life, and I feel like I've gone through enough of those that I, I recognize it in a way I hadn't so clearly in the past. I also have this sense of, um, feeling community with other people who are experiencing that, that sense of becoming or imminent becoming like, I am something now and I will be something else in the future and I don't know what that will be.

And feeling that and seeing it approach. And in that space, I guess there's a, a wondering, at least for me, a wondering of what's the point, what do I want it to be? What's the meaning of all of this, you know? And, um, I, I guess I just kind of wanted to explore it for myself and put out there a way of thinking about it to other people.

'cause I think this is something that lots of people struggle with. Shifting from this individualistic focus on what I produce, right? Am I funny? Am I rich? Am I whatever? And, and highlighting the possibility that that's not gonna be enough. Hmm. That will not, in the end be satisfying, not don't poo-poos striving for success or, uh, adulation or whatever it is that people want.

That's, that's fine. But I think the kinda satisfaction that, that people, the deep satisfaction that people want will allude them if that's all they do. And so the conversation about meaning and the talk was really about thinking about what it means to transcend those things and pointing to the possibility that.

Participating in something larger than yourself is actually necessary. Not a nice thing to do if you're a good person, but something that we all have a deep need for that sometimes we don't recognize, and so much emphasis is put on what we produce in our, our personal success, that we lose sight of the fact that we exist.

In a larger community, and that community not only constructs us, but probably gives us meaning. And the participating in those stories is something that we can choose to do and focus on in a way that might make us. Much more satisfied with our lives.

Chris Duffy: Beautiful. Brian, it was, it was such a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you so much for being on the show.

Brian Lowery: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

Chris Duffy: That’s it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human! Thank you so much to today’s guest, Brian Lowery. His book is called SELFLESS and he hosts a podcast called Know What You See

I’m your host Chris Duffy and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at Chris Duffy Comedy dot com.

How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team that I define solely in the collective. But if we were to break it down into their individual parts: On the TED side, we’ve got Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles.

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