I was listening to an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and he said that people contribute to Wikipedia for free because they want to do something useful with their time. And yes, I agree. I think people hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of kind of uselessness, time uselessly spent. But also something ennobling with their time — this can't quite be quantified. There's no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. But I deeply believe that people want to be good, that more than that, we want to be better, to grow, to ennoble our souls. And I have hope for this medium with that lens.
MS. TIPPETT: I was so intrigued. You sent out, at the end of the year, at the end of 2014, the best Brain Pickings articles of the year, best meaning those most read and shared shared by others as well as those you took the most pleasure in writing. And it's kind of a long list, but I want to read it. We might not have time for it on the whole show. But I think it's really a fascinating list. “An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety,” “Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence,” “How to Criticize with Kindness” — that’s philosopher Daniel Dennett. I won't read all of them — I’ll skip. “How to Be Alone: An Antidote to One of the Central Anxieties and Greatest Paradox of Our Time.” You can hear — I printed all this out, so I’ve got all the pictures I’m looking at. “The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters,” “The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busy-ness and the Art of Living Wide Rather than Living Long.”
Anyway, there's definitely a — there's such a deep theme, a thread that runs through all of that. And if somebody had heard about Brain Pickings but not read it — I mean, you do — there's a lot of big ideas, but this recurring thread is how we bring big ideas and aspirational ideas and also real kind of spiritual and social technologies to become whole integrated, evolving people. I just — I want to ask you if that — the list from 2014 is different from the list nine years ago. I mean, have those themes deepened? Have you — what have you seen along the way?
MS. POPOVA: Oh, absolutely. They’re radically different. I am radically different.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: I was a spiritual embryo nine years ago.
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] You were 21.
MS. POPOVA: Yeah, yeah.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: I would also say, because Brain Pickings is just such a subjective, private sort of one-woman labor of love, it's so aligned with the events of my own life…
MS. TIPPETT: ...of your own evolution.
MS. POPOVA: ...and the things that I struggled with. Yeah, the evolution, but also the struggle and the aspiration and the questions that I'm constantly trying to answer for myself. That list is really the list of my year. What were the things that I was preoccupied with this past year? And it's been — I can't recall off the top of my head what the previous year’s most — what my favorite pieces were, but I would imagine they were pretty different.
MS. TIPPETT: There is a very spiritual aspect to that — the word “spiritual” being expansively understood. And I sense that that's grown in you as well. I don't know. Is that right?
MS. POPOVA: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this goes back to the whole thing about growing up in Bulgaria and the atheism and the extreme resistance, not just to religion, but to spirituality, to not seeing the nuance and what that can mean. I think we never see the world exactly as it is. We see it as we hope it will be or we fear it might be. And we spend our lives going through a sort of modified stages of grief about that realization. And we deny it, and then we argue with it, and we despair over it. But eventually — and this is my belief — that we come to see it, not is despairing, but as vitalizing.
We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is. Was it — I think it was William James who said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to, and only those things which I notice shaped my mind.” And so in choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we’ll ever know. And to me, that's the substance of the spiritual journey. And that's not an exasperating idea but an infinitely emboldening one. And it's taken me many years to come to that without resistance.
MS. TIPPETT: While I was getting ready to interview you, Seth Godin’s blog came across my desk — into my inbox. And I just — I want to read it because it just seems so resonant with…
MS. POPOVA: I love his mind, so please do.
MS. TIPPETT: I do too. “Giving the people what they want isn't nearly as powerful as teaching people what they need. There's always a shortcut available, a way to be a little more ironic, cheaper, more instantly understandable. There's the chance to play into our desire to be entertained and distracted regardless of the cost. Most of all, there's the temptation to encourage people to be selfish, afraid, and angry. Or you can dig in, take your time, and invest in a process that helps people see what they truly need. When we change our culture in this direction, we're doing work that's worth sharing. But it's slow-going. If it were easy, it would have happened already. It's easy to start a riot, difficult to create a story that keeps people from rioting. Don't say, ‘I wish people wanted this.’ Sure, it's great if the market already wants what you make. Instead, imagine what would happen if you could teach them why they should.”
MS. POPOVA: I love that. But that's always been the case.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: We orient ourselves in the darkness of the unknown by grasping kind of blindly for familiar points of reference. And we seek to construct out of them a kind of compass, out of similarities and contrasts relative to our familiar world and our existing knowledge. And I think it's especially true about such nebulous subjects as art or philosophy or really how to think where there is no true north. So we seek tangibles like the market to orient ourselves in this maze of merit and meaning. And it takes something, but I really believe most people, all people have that capacity in them to do what he says, basically — to not orient ourselves to what's been done, what's been thought, to the market, to the familiar, and try ever so gently to expand our private locus of the possible.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And Maria, you are an old soul, and you are East-Central European by birth. I don't like asking people to speak for their generation, but I do wonder if you feel like your generation and the new generations may be more open and to — and powerful with that possibility, equipped in some way to be present to that possibility.
MS. POPOVA: Again, I can only express my hope and not my prediction, but especially because I feel like I'm profoundly under qualified to speak to that, in part, because most of my friends are dead people. [laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right.
MS. POPOVA: People — the authors and artists and so forth...
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: ...are long gone. But my real-life friends, the majority of them, are significantly older than I am. My partner is significantly older than I am. My youngest friend is six years older than I am.
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] OK.
MS. POPOVA: So I don't feel — I feel like I'm such a profound failure of representing my generation. [laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Alright. You are who you are. How — if I ask you how you measure success, like, in any given day, what comes to mind?
MS. POPOVA: Well, once again, I am going to side with Thoreau. And he said something like, if the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers, it's more elastic and more starry and more immortal, that is your success. And for me, that's pretty much it — waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. I mean, there's nothing more than that, really.
MS. TIPPETT: And in terms of the effect that you can gauge externally, I do hear you that you don't measure success on number. But what feels like success to you when it comes to you from outside?
MS. POPOVA: Well, we are such — and I'm not — I'm far from being on the sort of high moral horse of, I don't — I'm immune to these metrics that we all respond to. I think we're such Pavlovian creatures, and we thrive on constant positive reinforcement. And we live in an era where the tangibles of that have become very readily available. You can see things like Facebook likes and retweets.
MS. TIPPETT: Right, right.
MS. POPOVA: And it is so tempting and so easy because they're concrete. They're concrete substitutes for things that are inherently nebulous. It's so easy to sort of hang your sanity and your sense of worth on them. And I have certainly suffered from that earlier on when these metrics first became available. And they’re right there. I mean, they are right there. And I think it takes a real discipline just to not hang the stability of your soul on them. And so one thing that I've done for myself, which is probably the most sanity-inducing thing that I've done in the last few years, is to never look at statistics and such sort of externalities. But I do read all of the emails and letters — I also get letters from readers. And to me, that really is the metric of what we mean to one another and how we connect and that aspect of communion. I mean, I heard from a woman yesterday who said that she's been living with stage IV cancer for 26 years.
MS. TIPPETT: Oh, gosh.
MS. POPOVA: And she goes and tells me this remarkably moving — it's not a story, it's her life. And it makes you go, wow, these are the things that matter. And her — she was writing very, very generously to say that she was finding nourishment in all of these thinkers and these ideas. And that, to me, is success, the feeling that somebody more enlightened and living a harder life and, in some ways, a more beautiful life than I am resonates. That's what it is.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. You wrote somewhere, “We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we've collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we are is simply a finely-curated catalogue of those.” Which brings the word “curation” — which I understand you're not as fond of anymore — into this — into the answer of what it means to be human, that we curate our lives. How do you think your sense of what it means to be human, that grand question, has evolved? How would you start to talk about that?
MS. POPOVA: Hmm. I think much of it has shifted from an understanding that's based on concreteness to an understanding that's based on relational things. That this notion of not just who we are but who we are in relation to our past selves, the people around us, the culture that we came from, the culture that we live in, all the different lives we've had. And for me, certainly, I feel like I've had all these different lives. I grew up in a country that is pretty much the exact opposite of my life right now. I grew up having nothing, and then I sort of clawed my way up and out. And now I live in New York City.
And I am able to afford my own life and live my own life without worrying about things that I worried about for many, many, many, many years. And it's so strange how we're able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves. And I — and from our past selves most of all. And I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? I mean, how — am I the same person as my childhood self? And sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so different. It’s unrecognizably different. Our lives are so different. Our ideas and ideals are so different. And to me, this question of what it means to be human is always a question of elasticity of being. It's never an arrival point, you know?
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: But I want to also go back to this — you mentioned the fragments, this notion of the fragments. I mean, consider that — the things that we encourage when we talk about a full life, wholeheartedness and mindfulness. And of course, we are so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds and our perfect abs or whatever fragment we fixate on. [laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right.
MS. POPOVA: But yet, we compartmentalize our experience in that way. We divide it into these fragments to be divided and conquered. And I was reading this morning, actually, for a piece that I'm writing for tomorrow, Virginia Woolf's diary, which is not a journal, but a diary.
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] A diary. Yeah.
MS. POPOVA: And she says, “One can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” And she talks about the slipperiness of the soul and the delicacy and complexity of the soul. But I think the fullest people, the people most whole and most alive, are always those unafraid and unashamed of the soul. And the soul is never an assemblage of fragments. And it always is.
MS. TIPPETT: Maria Popova is the creator and presence behind Brainpickings.org. In 2012, Brain Pickings was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive. You can listen again or share this conversation with her at onbeing.org.
MS. TIPPETT: Like Maria Popova, On Being is also in the business of curation. Each week, our executive editor pulls together the best of what’s happening in all of our media spaces into an email newsletter — connecting ideas from inside On Being with the outside world. And did you know that Sharon Salzberg has now joined Parker Palmer, Courtney Martin, and Omid Safi as a weekly columnist on our blog? Sign up and never miss anything by clicking the "newsletter" link at onbeing.org.
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