Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist Podcast with Joshua Fields Milburn and T .K.
Coleman, recorded live at Erthel Studios in sunny California.
Yes, yes, yes, although it's a bit cloudy today, but Malabama's voice is always so sunny.
Hello, everybody. Today we're going to talk about cynicism, we're going to talk about hope, we're going to talk about hopefulness, we're going to talk about hopelessness as well.
Joining us in the studio to discuss this topic is Dr. Jamil Zaki.
In addition to being a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, Dr. Zaki is also the author of a new book titled Hope for Cynics, the surprising science of human goodness.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, a caller has a question about finding hopefulness when she's felt hopeless for so long.
And then we've got a lightning round question about the surprising downsides of hope.
That's followed by our right here, right now segment and a listener tip.
You could check out the maximal edition of episode 466.
That's the full two hour episode where we answer three times as many questions and we dive deep into several simple living segments that Private Podcast is out right now at patreon .com slash The Minimalists.
Your support keeps our podcast 100 % advertisement free because sing along at home, y 'all, advertisements suck.
Let's start with our callers.
If you have a question or a comment for our show, we would love to hear from you.
Just give us a call.
Our phone number is 406 -219 -7839, or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcast at TheMinimalists .com.
Our first question today is from Aaron in Philadelphia.
Hi Minimalists team, um, I really love your content and the approachable means with which you explain things that are just conceptually really difficult to put into words and discuss.
Hope is certainly a prime example of that and hopelessness.
So for me, it's been quite the journey these last couple of years.
Anxiety just left me really debilitated for a long, long time.
But I'm now starting to live my life in spite of it and open myself up to possibilities and opportunities and just new ways of thinking.
That's because anxiety just takes it all away and anxiety just takes all your hope away.
you become too busy being afraid to see hope.
And so, as I'm trying to rebuild that reserve and even trying to rebuild the confidence and joie de vivre I lost, I, I still find myself continuing to slink away from the idea of hope.
You know, I reserve it for what you'd call the quote unquote, lucky few.
So, I was wondering if you could explain to me about the idea of rebuilding hope when you've been so used to feeling hopeless for so long.
And maybe you could possibly provide just some guidance on what it means to, quote -unquote, achieve hope in spite of doubts and anxieties.
Thank you so much for your time and have an awesome day.
Dr. Jamil Zakhi, I thought this was the perfect question to start with because we're talking about hope today, and I'll probably at some point one to distinguish from my own perspective, the difference between hope and hopefulness.
I'm sure we'll get there, the noun versus the adjective sort of thing.
And so I do want to answer Aaron's question about finding hope when you felt hopeless for so long.
But I thought maybe we'd talk about the other side to start, let's talk about cynicism.
What is cynicism? What is cynicism?
And does it sometimes mimic a false sense of hope?
Yeah. Thank you. First, I just want to say how happy I am to be here.
Long time listener, first time caller.
Just glad to be part of the conversation.
It's thrilling. I would say long time listener, first time caller, long time baller.
Man, I'm adding that forever.
I love Erin's question and her thoughtfulness, and the wind chimes in the background frankly, are just so peaceful.
And hopeful. Yes, and hopeful.
So let's talk about cynicism.
Cynicism used to be an ancient Greek school of philosophy, but now how we view it is it's a theory that we carry around, a theory about humanity.
It's the belief that in general, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now that's not to say that a cynic would be surprised if somebody were to donate to charity, for instance, but they would maybe suspect the person's motives.
Maybe they're in it for a tax break.
Maybe they want to look good in front of other people.
So it's a theory that we have not about what people do, but about who we are at the deepest level.
The thing is that that theory is heavy.
When you walk around with it, it's like a weight that you carry.
And it also fills your mind.
One thing that I loved about what Erin said is she described anxiety as sort of filling her mind with busyness, fear, overtaking her cognitive capacities.
And I think that happens a lot with cynicism as well.
Because once you have an assumption about what people are like, those assumptions flood in and color all of your experiences about what they do.
So that weight, that busyness of mind can make it hard to see people for who they really are.
Okay, I think about Rob Bell, oh, he talks about how cynicism is lazy.
I think about cynicism being lazy, but it also requires a lot of work in a weird way.
I harken back to the late 1900s when I had my first job, and I was in telecom and there was a guy I knew who, on the surface, looked like he was working, but he did more than he could, he probably worked 50 hours a week to get out of work.
It was the strangest kind of laziness.
And I wouldn't say he was a cynic, but I think cynicism shares some of those same characteristics.
Where to be a cynic is to be dismissive of people or ideas or of actions or of companies and simply dismiss them because I know better.
What are your thoughts on cynicism?
I think it definitely can be a form of laziness, especially at the intellectual level, right?
where we're not doing the hard work of rethinking our beliefs and questioning the assumptions that we make, but it can also be a very hardworking discipline whereby we spend a lot of energy protecting ourselves against potential hurt.
It's sort of like what we see in sports sometimes.
I'm a Chicago Bulls fan, Chicago Bears fan, and sometimes I'm watching the game and my team is in the advantage position, and I say stuff like, you know what?
They're going to find a way to blow it.
I don't have any evidence for that belief, And you could say that I'm lazy, but I'm also trying to protect myself.
I don't wanna get my hopes up.
I don't wanna feel too disappointed.
And that way if they find a way to win which the evidence indicates they're probably going to do, I get to feel really good about it.
And so sometimes cynicism is a way that we learn how to cope with a series of disappointments that make us feel powerless and out of control.
And that's our way of taking our power back.
Dr. Zach, I think about the worst version of me is often cynical.
Easy to dismiss someone or something for who they are, what label they wear, what identity they contain.
The best version of me is not cynical, but can be skeptical.
Do you make a distinction between cynicism and skepticism?
Absolutely. So, cynicism, again, is this theory about people.
It's a black and white form of thinking, and TK, to your point, it often is something that we use to protect ourselves.
it makes complete sense to be disappointed when a person or a team, like the Bulls or Bears, have constantly, for the last 15 or so years, let you down, it makes sense to be disappointed with the source of that letdown.
What cynicism is is when we allow disappointment to morph into what I call pre -disappointment.
Say, well the best way for me to not get hurt again is to lower my expectations of everyone and not ever have hope in anything.
Now that's a great way to not be disappointed.
It's also a terrific way to shrink your life down to almost nothing, to close yourself off to opportunities for connection, friendship, collaboration, and love.
So that's cynicism when we have these presuppositions, these assumptions about people.
Skepticism is the opposite.
It's when we are open to evidence.
It's when we don't have the belief that people are great, which could be naive, or the belief that they're terrible, which is cynical, instead of thinking like lawyers arguing for or against human nature, skeptics think like scientists.
And because of that, they're able to learn more quickly, form connections, but still remain safe.
There's a non judgmental component to that skepticism that is different from cynicism.
Yeah. I want to cover this issue of how do we cultivate hope?
How do we make that leap, developing a spiritual practice out of you, if you will?
Especially for Aaron who, someone who has felt hopeless for an extended period of time.
Yeah, I think it begins with a critical reframe.
Hope is often contrasted with faith and we tend to look at faith as confidence expectation.
I have faith that things will go well, strong belief.
Whereas hope, I hope it goes well.
It's thought of in more passive terms. I wish that it will go well, I wish things will get better, but I don't really have any reason to believe that.
And I think as a contrast to passive hope, we can think about hope in terms of probabilistic hope or proactive hope.
Probabilistic hope is when you say, I hope things will get better, what's one thing I can do to increase the probability that it actually will get better?
And a second thing, the proactive hope, you can say, I hope things get better, what's something that I can control and what's a plan that I can make for the near future that gives me something to look forward to?
So maybe something like, I plan to go on a date with my wife a week from now or two weeks from now to see a fun movie.
Even if life's really busy and that seems like an irresponsible thing because that gives me something to look forward to that I feel like I can control.
And that changes the energy around my week.
I'm getting beat up by all these things I can't control but I know next Saturday we're going to a movie.
And that's a way of cultivating that sense of hope.
So probabilistic, what's one thing I can do to increase the odds that it actually will get better and proactive, what's some plan I can make that I can control that gives me something to look forward to.
You practice that, you'll develop a greater sense of hope.
Now, Jamil, I'm sure we'll talk about this because I'm a bit of a hope skeptic.
Mm -hmm. I'm not a hope skeptic.
I love that, but a distinction.
And we're going to talk about that during the lightning round, but I would like to make this distinction between a sense of hope, which is almost wishing for something to happen in the future.
There's a belief around it, right?
In fact, even if you look at the word belief, be and leaf, be as in to be or to exist, and leaf comes from the old Anglo -Saxon wish, it's an existing wish, I'm wishing for something to happen in the future, but there's something different between that for me and a sense of hopefulness in the moment.
There's a incredible presence with hopefulness.
It's almost, you could use the word optimism or joy or simply presence, right?
And I think that's where Aaron is, is the anxiety has something to do with some outcome that might happen in the future.
But hopefulness is not over there in the future.
It's not something that's gonna be achieved later.
It can be uncovered right now.
It's hidden beneath that cynicism in a way.
Yeah, no, beautifully put, I love where this is going in.
I think hope has been stereotyped in so many ways, as passive, as naive, even as toxic, right?
toxic positivity. So let's clear that up right now.
You know, the way that we think about it in psychology is that optimism is the belief that the future will go well, and that can make you happy, but it can also make you complacent.
It's like, well shoot, if the future is gonna turn out fine, I can just kind of sit on the couch and wait for everything to go my way.
Pessimism too gives us confidence in the future, confidence that it will go badly but you're still, you feel sure of what will happen.
I know a lot of minimalism psychologically is not just letting go of the past, but letting go of the future.
And hope is the idea that the future could turn out well, but that we don't know.
That uncertainty, that humility, that sense that we have no idea what the future holds is frightening in some cases, but can also be deeply empowering.
One, it can allow us to meet the moment as it arrives to us.
And two, to your point, it can allow us to plan.
Hope, unlike optimism, is not complacent.
It is actionable. The great Rebecca Solnit once wrote that hope is not a lottery ticket.
It's an axe that you break down doors with in an emergency.
And when you can see that future that you want, to your point, you can start to reach towards it.
This is what's known as way power.
So hope includes thinking of a future that you want, charting a path towards that future, and then walking that path.
Now you don't know what will happen, but you can probabilistically increase the likelihood that things turn out your way through your actions, magnetizing yourself towards the future you want.
Dr. Zaki, can we talk a bit about this part of Aaron's question, the rebuilding confidence piece.
And confidence is obviously different from arrogance.
Confidence is earned it's authentic.
Arrogance is often a fraud, right?
I haven't earned this level of confidence.
And she sees these other people and says, Oh, it's just the lucky few who are able to live that way.
Can you help dispel that myth?
Absolutely. So I think of cynicism and hopelessness almost as a form of social depression, right?
Depression is this state of mind where we are telling ourselves sweeping stories about our lives, about the world.
Nobody likes me, I'm worthless.
Things will never turn out well for me.
Well, those stories are simply too big.
they just don't accord with any form of reality because we don't know things that are that sweeping about ourselves or the world.
So again, I think that in depression and anxiety, we often turn to cognitive behavioral therapy.
We say, okay, you've got this feeling.
First of all, it's valid.
So let's own the feeling, let's be compassionate towards it.
Your feelings aren't wrong.
Exactly. But second, let's try to compare those feelings with reality because just because your feelings aren't wrong doesn't mean that they reflect the world around you necessarily, right?
So how do we fact check those feelings?
Well, in cognitive therapy you're asked to write them down, like scientific hypotheses, OK.
You think nobody likes you, great.
That's your hypothesis.
How would you test it?
Well, maybe you could ask five people if they want to go see a movie with you.
If all of them say no and don't give any excuse, well, maybe the depression is right.
But if one person says, yes, well, maybe you can revise that assumption and letting go of hopelessness, I think, carries a similar flavor, right?
Hopelessness is a story we are telling ourselves about the future, but you don't know the future.
So try to run some tests.
Try to collect some data.
Be open to what the world gives you, little by little, that can rebuild a sense of hope for the future.
I'm curious about that experiment.
Suppose I'm someone who fills this hopelessness, I conduct that experiment, and it just happens to be my luck, that five people are like, No, dude, I don't want to go to the movies with you.
And they give no excuse.
And I do it 10 more times, and the evidence seems to support it.
What would you suggest at that point?
Well first, I just want to stipulate that that is far rarer than we think it is.
So people, there's a bunch of research, mostly out of the University of Chicago, on what people think will happen when they reach out to others and what actually happens.
And it turns out that we vastly underestimate how good social life is.
So researchers asked people who were commuters, Hey, what do you think it would be like if you struck up a conversation with somebody on the train next to you?
And they were like, uh horrible.
It would be so cringe.
They put their headphones back on.
It would be the worst 10 minutes of my day.
And then these researchers had a separate group of people actually go and strike up a conversation with somebody on the train.
And they said, how was that?
And they said, wonderful.
We had this great conversation.
We maybe we'll see each other on the train tomorrow.
It was the best 10 minutes of my day.
That is the same pattern pops up for asking favors, offering gratitude, trying to help other people, deepening our connections with new friends.
So over and over again, the stories that we tell ourselves about social life are wrong and they're wrong in one direction.
They are too negative.
And so to your question, and I don't wanna deflect it because maybe 15 people will turn you down if you asked them to go see a movie.
Maybe it's a movie they don't want to see, but the evidence is overwhelming that when we reach out, good things happen much more than we realize.
And I think the same is true with the parameters you have around them.
Maybe it's softening the parameters as well.
Maybe it's not asking someone to commit three hours or four hours of their life to go to a movie with you.
But maybe it's, hey, do you have half an hour for coffee or, hey, would you be willing to help me out with this email?
It's smaller little chunks It's because, you know what people love to do?
They love to help someone who actually needs help, someone who's requesting help.
If you wanna build a strong friendship, genuinely ask for help without battering them for it, without needing the person.
Yeah, and one additional thought on it just to build is that one of the best things we can do for ourselves is help other people.
So when you ask somebody for a favor, you're giving them a chance to express the part of themselves that they believe in most deeply and to access that joy.
So after asking for a favor, make sure to tell the person, and you're welcome for the opportunity to help me.
You know, one of the reasons why that works is because vulnerability lies at the heart of the human condition.
And it's, why, when someone needs something that you have and they're angry at you for not making it easily available to them, and they go, well, you're a jerk, it makes you just disgusted by that person.
You want to just turn away from them.
But when someone is vulnerable and they're honest and they're like, hey, man, I really need that.
Can you help me out?
It just, it pricks on your heart in a completely different way.
We can't connect to people who aren't willing to be vulnerable.
Oh, that's so spot on.
Aaron, I wanna give you three things.
First off, I'm gonna give you a copy of Dr. Zaki's new book.
It's called, Hope for Signics.
Maybe I'll get him to sign this one and we will mail this one to you.
We'll put a link to it in the show notes as well for anyone else who wants to check out the book.
Also another book that I'm going to recommend to you there was a book called Emotional Clutter by my good friend T .K.
Coleman. It's a free download.
You can download it over at TheMinimalists .com, just click Resources there at the top.
We have a whole free resources page of things you can download.
It's my favorite thing on that resources page.
It's called Emotional Clutter and it might help you declutter or minimize some of those emotions that are sending you into that anxiety spiral.
And then finally, speaking of clutter, T .K.'s been doing something called clutter counseling where he helps people with their physical clutter but also their mental clutter, emotional clutter, spiritual clutter, calendar clutter, career clutter, relationship clutter.
And I think he'd be able to help you out with that as well, Aaron.
So I'd love to offer you one hour of clutter counseling.
TK will be in touch. Bama, before we get to our callers, the rest of our callers, what time is it?
You know, what time it is.
It's time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon community chats, Question of the Week.
Yes, indeed. Now, Dr. Zaki, during the lightning round, we each have 60 seconds to answer your question with a short, shareable, minimal maximum.
Don't worry about that though.
We have our pithy answers already preordained here.
You can find this episode's minimal maxims in the show notes over at TheMinimalists .com slash podcast and every minimal maximum ever at MinimalMaxims .com.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox, including seven new maximums every Monday for free.
If you sign up for our email newsletter at TheMinimalists .email, we'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements, but we will start your week off with a dose of simplicity.
While you're over there at theminimalists .com, by the way, that's where you can find TK's clutter counseling.
If you go to theminimalists .com, click on Counseling at the top and you can book an appointment with him directly.
Bama, what is the question of the week this week?
What are the downsides of hope?
The downsides of hope.
What do you got for me?
You got anything pithy TK?
Yeah, I have a literal proverb, not something that happens to be proverbial, but a literal proverb.
Hope deferred, makes the heart sick.
Let me say that again.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick straight from the Book of Proverbs.
I think the conventional take on that is something along the lines of, hey, if what you're hoping for, it doesn't come to pass that just has a way of making life feel miserable.
But I want to give kind of a new spin on this.
And that is one of the best ways to keep hope alive is to not demand too much of it.
So imagine Josh, you're on life support and you're really down and out.
And the doctors like, hey, TK, it's your job to do the best you can to keep this guy alive.
And as soon as the doctor walks out of the room, I say, okay, Josh, get up, man.
I need you to help me move this weekend.
And then we got three podcasts, we need to record. That's not doing a very good job but helping you stay alive.
In order to help you stay alive, I have to be willing to give you a break and not demand more of you than what you can provide.
The same is true of hope.
If you're relying too much on hope, your whole life is in the future.
You're never rewarded now and your happiness is anchored in hey, something's gonna get better.
Something other than now was gonna happen.
And the end of it all to that is gratitude.
to cultivate a practice of gratitude, to balance your reliance on hope.
The best way to keep hope alive is to practice mindfulness, stay in the present, look at what's beautiful right now and let that be the foundation upon which you build.
There is a particular hopefulness in the present moment that is not about what's going to happen in the future.
Dr. Zaki, my pithy answer for this is, hope is a measure of future regrets.
That's something that often happens with me.
In fact, I would argue that, here's why I'm the hope skeptic.
Hope is probably caused more suffering in my life than anything else.
Now that's a weird statement, right?
I know not a lot of people, hope is almost the sacred Cal.
It's this virtue we're not even allowed to question.
Hope is 100 % good, 100 % of the time.
And I'm in the small bucket of it's like me and Capil Gupta, and maybe Alan Watts.
Alan Watts said that, that hope is a perfect hoax.
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. And I think the essence of that is thinking that there's going to be something good or better out there.
I would call it experience consumerism.
Consumerism is the ideology that acquiring things, these external things, is going to make me better or happy or complete.
And then we trade the things sometimes for relationships, we do relationship consumerism.
the relationship will make me happy or better or complete.
I sure hope that person gets into a relationship with me.
I sure hope I get the house that I want.
I sure hope that I can afford to buy that couch. I hope, I hope, I hope.
I'm hoping all over myself until I'm miserable because I hoped for all of these externalities.
It seems to me though, Dr. Zachie, that that's not what you're talking about when you talk about hope.
I think that's right.
I love these aphorisms, if I can add one, Frederick Nietzsche, also not a fan of hope.
He said that it is the worst of men's torments because it prolongs our misery.
And again, I think if we view hope as this grabby, itchy desire, this need for something in the future, I completely agree with your hope skepticism.
But I don't know that that's the way that scientists define hope.
And again, as a research psychologist, part of my job is to separate our linguistic peas and carrots so that we are all talking about the same thing all the time.
Again, I think that optimism is this idea of an expectation.
I don't just want to be in a relationship with this person.
I kind of am banking my entire happiness on one future outcome.
And if, as a lot of neuroscientists see it, happiness is a comparison between what you thought you would get and what you actually get, then those huge, high expectations.
We're gonna do three podcasts even though you're on life support.
I'm gonna be in a relationship with this person who barely knows me, right.
Then those expectations can be the thief of joy.
Because they cause a comparison between what we want and what we get.
I want to, again, double, triple down on the idea that hope is humble and receptive to the future.
The great nun and author Pima Chodron said that we can stop treating our lives like a plan and start treating them like an experiment.
Woo. Interrupting the normal flow and allowing the future to come to us.
Hope, to me, is that openness, but also with a plan, with a sense of who do I want to be as the future arrives?
How can I prepare myself now to maximize the likelihood that the future matches not just maybe what I want or what I need, but how I want to meet it.
That's beautifully said.
Do you have anything to add to that TK?
Man, that distinction between plan and experiment, that's the whole podcast right there.
Because a plan has as its goals success and experiment has as its goals discovery.
And when you're banking on a plan, failure becomes a possibility.
But when you're experimenting, you always learn something even if things don't turn out the way you expect it.
I also like to make a distinction to capture what you're saying between hope and hopium.
I would say it's like the distinction between wine and an alcohol addiction.
A glass of wine is amazing.
Great for an evening night with jazz, but an alcohol addiction is ugly and it's self destructive.
In a similar way we can rely too much on hope, build too much of our lives around it and take it to extremes.
And just like anything else leads to a disorderly life.
We've got so much more to talk about.
We're coming to the end of page one here, but we are just getting started.
but we have an entire switchboard of listeners to talk to on pages two and three.
But first, real quick for right here right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of The Minimalists.
I've got two things for you.
We do a monthly Zoom call with our listeners.
We call it FAMS Friday afternoon and Minimalist Zoom, the first Friday of each month, 3 p .m eastern.
Our next one is coming up here on November 1st, which is Ryan Nicodemus.
He'll be there, but it's his wife's birthday as well.
So maybe she'll join us for her birthday.
She'll be in town. I think they're actually gonna be staying with me during that time.
Let's go. Looking forward to that.
What are your favorite things, Bama, about our Friday afternoon minimal assumes.
Oh, I love the frequent flyers.
It's always exciting to see new faces and new people that chime in and get used to that kind of space and explore that and meet with each other in the chat.
But I love being able to check in with my regulars of like, hey, how's your cat doing?
Or how was your trip to Germany?
Things like that. it's also as a polyglot it is really exciting to be able to say hello in as many languages as I know and try to get to practice that.
Everybody's just so kind and wonderful like checking in with each other too not just with us but with each other in the chat and on camera it is an unparalleled community experience.
Totally agree. We have so many people there from Argentina or Germany or the UK or Australia we timed it in a way that just about anyone in the world and sometimes their people are getting ready to go to bed and they show up for it.
It's the first Friday of every month.
It's called the Friday afternoon minimalist Zoom.
You can subscribe to our Patreon to get access to that.
Any audio plus subscriber gets access to the monthly Zoom call and you can just turn on your camera.
You have an interaction with us or turn off your camera, microphone.
You can be on a fly, a fly on the wall and observe all of the conversations are going on there.
Patreon .com slash the minimalist, we'll see you on November 1st. Also coming up.
I only do this twice a year.
I teach a writing class, I've been doing this for 12 or 13 years now.
And it started because so many people started emailing me when the Minimalist blog was popular.
Before the podcast, before the Netflix films, the blog really took off and a lot of people started, say, I love the way that you write.
Can you give me some writing tips?
And I got tired of just responding to every email every day.
And so I started a writing class and I teach it two times a year.
The next one opens for 72 hours on November 4th, I think that's the day before the election.
So you can join me and 100 other students, we do this just twice a year.
It's a four week writing class and I'll walk you through composition and editing and publishing, answering your questions and there's a whole community of people that get to learn how to write better together.
You can find all the details at howtowritebetter .org.
If you give me four weeks, I guarantee you that I will help you learn how to write better.
or in fact, there's a 100 % money back guarantee.
You can read the testimonials and you can also download my free ebook.
It's called, 15 ways to write better over at howtowritebetter .org.
Malabama, what else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hi minimalist, my name is Abby.
I live in Alameda, California and I have a minimalist insight slash tip.
So, I have bipolar I with psychotic features and one thing during my only psychotic episode I was seeing numbers and signs like billboards or you know things of that nature, colors, everything was a sign from the universe for me and that led me down a really scary path because though it might seem innocent, it led me to be doing very dangerous, really, really strange things that were not safe.
And so, I kind of have trauma from that now in my current state that I'm stable, I'm trying to have a spiritual practice, and I see that you know, I want to take things as signs from the universe but at the same time I don't want to go back down that scary path so I was talking to my mom and she used the word simplify and I thought of you guys and I think what I need to do is just simplify my perception of my spirituality and just look at it like take only what is going to improve my life and that's how I'm looking at my spirituality.
And I think doing it that way, it'll ensure that I don't become too obsessed with any type of concept or spiritual, you know, practice or phenomena.
And yeah, that's my minimalist tip.
I hope that can help someone and thank you guys for all that you do.
Bye. Well, Abby, thank you so much for that heartfelt comment.
Dr. Zagi has a lot to say about overthinking and how that can cause anxiety and make us feel totally hopeless as well.
For anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode or any other episode, you can leave a comment on Patreon or YouTube or better yet, send a voice memo to podcast at theminimalists .com so we can feature your voice on the show.
All right, that's the first 33 % of episode 466.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full Maximal edition with Dr. Jameel Zaki, which includes answers to a bunch more questions.
Questions like, how can I walk away from a hopeless relationship?
If the other person is unwell.
Is there a way for me to lovingly combat my spouse's cynicism?
And how can a cynical person stop catastrophizing?
Plus we've got a million more questions Simple Living segments over on the Minimalist Private Podcast. We also have an outstanding home tour from one of our listeners this week.
It's number 100 in our home tour series.
Just visit Patreon .com slash The Minimalist, or click the link down in the description to subscribe and get your personal link so that our weekly maximal episodes play in your favorite podcast app.
You also gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to Episode 001.
That's from 2015. That was a while ago, TK.
a while ago all of our archives are over there on Patreon by the way Patreon is now offering free trial So if you'd like to test -drive our private podcasts, you can join for seven days for free big Thanks to dr. Jamil zaki for joining us today.
We'll put a link to his new book.
It's called Hope for cynics We'll put a link to that in the show notes also his website and his lab at stamford Well, those links will be in our show notes as well.
That is our minimal episode for today And a big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, who will be here in two weeks by the way, for his birthday.
Ooh! Oh man. Finally old enough to drink, Nicodemus.
On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, TK Coleman, Malabama, Post -Production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, AB, Savvy D, and the rest of our team, I'm Joshua Fields Milburn.
If you leave here with just one message, I hope it's this.
love people, then use things because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Keep Hope Alive. Every little thing you think that you need, every little thing you think that you need, every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'd be fine without it.
you
