From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made on a Cleveland bridge overlooking the Cuyahoga River.

A young runner was doing A5K.

He had a rather straightforward goal to pace carefully for the first two miles, and then to go hard to the finish.

The race began on a congested bridge, and the runner felt like he was losing time immediately.

And then when the road opened up, he saw a much older runner flying past him, and he decided, I can't lose to that guy.

So this young runner cranked it up, abandoned his plan, and went hard.

When he passed the two mile mark, it seemed to be working.

He was on pace for a personal record, but he quickly discovered he was out of gas.

The final mile was brutal.

He crashed to one of his worst times ever, and by tossing out his pacing strategy, he ended up burned out.

I don't typically start the show with stories about me, but that was me.

Embarrassed by how distracted I became, how unfocused I was that day, and how miserable that race became.

And I was thinking about that story as I read a new book called the Art of pacing A Guide to Balancing Short term Demands with Long Term Thriving.

The author is a Brighton High School graduate named Elizabeth Svoboda, and she is a science writer.

Her book is part research, it's part storytelling.

From my perspective, it's all necessary.

For most of us Americans anyway.

More on that in a moment.

Svoboda taps into why so many people feel burned out at work, and yet end up tossing away so many hours doomscrolling before bed, or chasing to do lists with no end in sight.

She offers smart and practical ideas.

I found myself on more than one occasion thinking to myself, why haven't I thought about it like this before?

This hour, we explore the rot in American culture that has convinced too many people.

Yet you either go 110%, or maybe you quite quit and you withdraw entirely.

Not to be a spoiler, but you can't actually give more than 100%.

And as Svoboda writes, sorry, you can't give 100% all the time.

We think about budgeting our time an awful lot.

Maybe we should start thinking about budgeting our energy.

The book is called the Art of pacing.

Elizabeth of about the author and science writer.

Welcome to connections.

It's nice to have you.

Thank you so much, Evan.

It's wonderful to be here.

So, in June, you wrote the following.

I'm going to quote from you.

In June, you wrote, hustle culture is back for good.

If you take some overachievers word for it these days, many startup workers are expected to pull nine, nine, six shifts 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m., six days a week, and managers brag about subsisting on four hours of sleep.

End quote.

So why do you think hustle culture is ascendant again?

Well, I think we had a little bit of a period of some withdrawal during the pandemic where people were a lot of people were on flexible schedules.

They were working from home.

But then I think a lot of large companies and corporations decided we need to get everybody back to the office.

We need to get everybody on the same page.

We need to max out our productivity.

And so part of the trend back toward the hustle culture in the nine, nine, six, I think, was driven by these corporations who want to be squeezing the maximum possible, productivity out of their workers.

But we also have, influencers in high places that are setting that example as well.

I mean, you have Elon Musk, who's notorious for, having people, set up beds at work so they don't have to go home and things like that.

So, in very high places, people are being coerced and they're being influenced to really go this 110% all the time, which, as you say, is an impossible thing because we're humans with, human limits.

Well, and, you know, so you note that the influencers are big on time management strategies that break up the day into small blocks, 15 minute chunks, 30 minute chunks.

And you don't like that approach?

Why not?

Well, to be honest, it's because I have tried it multiple times and I have failed spectacularly at it.

I have actually, I have downloaded calendars that literally, cut your day into 15 minute snippets and you fill in exactly what you're going to do for each 15 minutes in your 24 hours, down to the sleep, down to the.

I didn't go down to the extent of bathroom breaks, but maybe some people put these in there, I don't know.

But the thing is, it's very seductive because it gives you a sense of control.

It gives you a sense.

I know I have budgeted for exactly how I am going to spend my day.

But then the trouble is, real life intervenes.

Your call goes 10 or 15 minutes over.

Your kid gets sick and needs to be picked up from school.

And when you have a time management strategy that is so just granular, it's also so brittle.

All that planning can shatter in in less than a minute, and then you feel like, okay, I've got to redo my entire 24 hour calendar because because of this unexpected thing that happens.

And and then maybe you try that, maybe you do that, and then something else unexpected happens.

And again, you're you're sort of back to square one and scrambling.

And I just found for myself it was not something that was sustainable or something that was realistic.

Well, and okay, I certainly take that point, but let me push a little on the idea that, you know, I mean, I certainly don't disagree that hustle culture is ascendant, but at the same time, in the last decade, you know, one could argue that we've heard more about self-care than we've ever heard.

That was a phrase that wasn't even a thing when I was growing up.

And, you know, I admit that I wondered if your book would sort of be in the category of self-care, and I it did not end up in that category for me.

What do you make of self-care?

Well, I think sometimes, especially the way that corporations or large organizations do it, it unfortunately becomes more of a Band-Aid on a hustle culture that is still in place.

And so, for instance, during the pandemic, a lot of health systems and hospitals, they knew that their workers were going well above and beyond their capacities and being asked to deal with with some very over-the-top, situations and, and having to, kind of swim their way through that.

And so they're like, okay, we're going to bring in these outside wellness providers.

We're going to bring in the yoga guy who comes for 30 minutes once a week.

And then it's like, okay, we've done our due diligence.

We brought in our wellness consultants.

But at the same time, the workers, their experience and their feelings of overwhelm are not really diminishing because you haven't done anything about the culture and I actually had one emergency room doctor during the pandemic.

She's like, if I hear about one more, yoga seminar, one more, one more like, you know, many, many retreat, I'm just going to puke because it's not doing anything for the overwhelm that I feel every day.

Well, this book does seem to me ideally suited to most Americans that I know.

Most Europeans I know would be puzzled as to why such a book is even needed.

At least that's my perspective.

Do you think this is strictly an American thing?

I think it maybe not exclusively an American thing, but it is distinctly an American thing.

And just how American this hustle culture approach is was made clear to me when I did spend some time in Europe, in France.

And, I found out that they just think that it's absolutely goes to start any conversation with somebody about, oh, what are you doing at work right now?

What's your thing?

Right.

And this is just as Americans.

This is just how we start conversations with people that we don't know.

And just the way that we stake our identities on how we make our money, is something that feels very foreign to many people in other cultures.

In France, I think it would be ridiculed if you, you went to a dinner party and you went on and on about your job or your challenges at your job, that people would just find that really tiresome.

They want to know more.

What is your philosophy of life?

What have you been reading lately?

And and just the things that are more at the core of what makes you human, rather than what makes you productive or what makes you, quote unquote, matter to to society according to American definitions.

My guest is Elizabeth Svoboda, whose new book is called the Art of pacing A Guide to Balancing Short Term Demands with Long Term Thriving.

Had an event at Writers and Books and is in Rochester, and we're going to talk in a moment about her local ties here.

But this is a book that's getting all kinds of really high profile praise.

Olga Hazan, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant it's a long list, so congratulations to that, Elizabeth.

I mean, a lot of people already loved this book.

And let's talk a little bit about like, maybe your pacing problem started at Brighton High School.

So I've heard you say that when I've heard you say that when you were 15, 16, 17 years old, you would have found it un virtuous to consider pacing yourself more and maybe slowing down.

So what was the culture like in school for you growing up?

And tell me more about that.

Yeah, so I did go to Brighton High School and I would say, I mean, there were so many amazing things that the school offered in terms of the arts, in terms of wonderful teachers.

At the same time, I think that whether it was overtly intended or not, there was sort of an encouragement that you would pile your plate high with as many activities and classes and honors as you could.

It was sort of the the smorgasbord approach.

And for me, that sort of got locked in because the more things I piled up, the more honors I racked up, the more praise I would get.

And that sort of locked this cycle of, okay, this was good, I better pile more on.

It's going to be more good and more good.

And I didn't have vocabulary or really a concept around pacing.

I had never even thought about it outside of athletics.

And I do think that if, as an overachieving teenager, I had thought about the concept of pacing myself, I would have thought that it was very suspect.

Like, wait, doesn't that what isn't that used to being lazy, you said.

Yeah, exactly.

You've said lazy.

You've said that you're 16 year old self would have thought, you know, if I if I say no to this extracurricular, if I say I'm going to prioritize getting good grades, getting enough sleep, maybe doing a couple things I really like, but not overloading it, you would have found that lazy.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't think I ever had a conversation with an adult at that age where the adults said to me, you know, maybe think about why you're taking on what you're taking on.

Do you enjoy it or are you really learning from it?

It was more, you know, try all these different things and stick with them and just pile on something else.

And I and the result was that when I started to reach the limits of my physical capacity, my mental capacity, I really didn't understand what was happening.

I, in my senior year, I went into a pretty severe bout of, senioritis is, of course, what we called it.

But I kind of just after I got into college, I kind of just stopped doing any work, and a lot of my classes.

There was one time, actually, when, I received an art award in our end of the year, assembly at school.

And I felt guilty because at the time that I received that award, I think I had close to a failing average in the art class that I was taking at that time, because I had just simply stopped turning in any assignments.

Well, and that little bit of insight to me is interesting, because the book the Art of pacing, is going to be read by a lot of adults, but I do think the way we push kids and the way we, we get some kids obsessed with what you present to colleges and what's on your transcript and what's on your resume.

It creates this culture early on.

And listeners, if you want to weigh in on any of this, I'd love to hear from you.

But you think about pacing in your own life.

You think about burnout and you think about what works and what doesn't.

It's 844295 talk.

If you want to call the program toll free.

84429582552636 I'd call from Rochester.

2639994.

You can email the program.

As always, it's connections at cyborg.

You can join the chat if you're watching on the WXXI news YouTube channel in the Brighton High School.

Conversation actually gets at what I think is a really important point.

But I learned or kind of really was thinking about from your book, which is that a lot of people are told they just need to get better at time management, but and that the problem, the problem is them.

And maybe for some people that's true.

But you write that sometimes the problem is a system, a workplace, a system that doesn't really support pacing.

And I want you to tell us a little bit more about the difference between an individual who might have a pacing problem versus being part of the system.

That just doesn't kind of allow it.

Great.

I think so many of us, at one point or another, have had experience with being part of one of these systems where you are just expected to keep a pace that is beyond what you can sustain in the long term.

And also often within these systems, there is not one on one support.

Everybody is sort of suffering because they're going beyond what they can realistically do or attempting to go beyond, but they're also not talking about it.

They're not they don't feel that they can be honest about how overwhelmed they're feeling or how overloaded they're feeling, because they think that there's going to be a penalty attached to that honesty, that if they bring this up and in a meeting, everybody else is going to look at them askance and their manager is going to be like, well, maybe this person just isn't up to the job.

Maybe they just can't handle, what we're doing here.

But while I was writing the book, I was lucky enough to spend some time immersed in work cultures where they're attempting to set a different collective pace, so to speak, where there actually are regular check ins within small teams as to, oh, okay.

How are things going with your workload?

Is there anything that you need support with?

And then other members of the team, if they can offer that support, they have a chance to do so.

And then when you are having a similar challenge, you are going to pitch in and support the person.

And so it sort of becomes this culture where people feel like they can be honest about the challenges that they're facing with regard to pacing, with regard to feeling overwhelmed.

And they feel confident that they're going to receive that support.

And when you have that kind of culture in place, I think you can actually be putting in a fair number of hours a week.

But still feel like it is sustainable.

It is something that you can do, because the level of support that you were receiving along the way is so much higher.

So how would you discern whether you are the problem or a system is a problem?

I was speaking to a friend today who said that they are literally trying to answer that question for themselves because they feel burned out, they're torched at work.

They have not been able to strike a better balance.

They're wondering, you know, if I take a different job somewhere else, am I going to end up feeling the exact same way?

Is the issue?

Is it a lot of different systems are like this.

Am I the issue?

How do you start to sort of peel that back?

Yeah, I think especially if you've had experience in a variety of workplaces, you can sort of assess, okay, how does the atmosphere, the level of intensity, the level of pushing compare with where I've been before?

Have there been other work cultures or even community or organization cultures that I've been a part of where I haven't felt like I'm under the gun from above all the time?

And if you can remember, or if you can, just know that there is some other piece that you can keep that you've been part of a culture that's different than what you're experiencing now.

That's a pretty good indicator that the problem is likely the culture.

I mean, a lot of people get into their chosen field because they have enthusiasm for it.

They have energy.

They want to keep contributing.

And so if you're somebody who started out your career that way with so much energy and enthusiasm and now you find yourself in a place where you're still in the same field, but you feel like you were wading through the muck to make it through each day.

The problem is almost certainly the culture.

It's not you.

You know why you got into this job.

You know the level of enthusiasm that you've had when you're in an environment that supports you and acknowledges your human limits and you're the necessity of retreating for a little while, when you've put in a really hard push, when you've just given a really big presentation, been working around the clock for that.

That gives you the time and space to take a breath after things like that, before you rejoin the stream and re, reassert your normal pace.

I should be clear as well.

We're talking a lot about work, but the book the Art of pacing, is not just about workplace burnout.

I mean, it really is about pacing in your life in general.

And I think at the core of this book is a call for all of us to ask why we are doing what we are doing.

I mean, that means our jobs, yes, but it also means why we make the choices we make, why we structure our days the way we do.

Elizabeth, you write that sometimes we're so caught up in the to do lists and the daily grind that we don't, you know, sort of pull back, zoom out and assess whether what we are doing serves a greater purpose in our lives.

It's about sort of finding narrative threads or narrative reflection.

Tell me about that.

Right.

Yeah.

Just on a day to day basis, the urgency, the to do lists usually takes priority over these bigger questions of when I look at the whole trajectory of my career or just my life, what contribution do I want to make?

What kind of legacy do I want to leave?

And just in the day to day grind, it's very, very easy to get caught up in the to do list.

And maybe you're checking off every single box on your to do list, but your overall direction is diverging very significantly from what you say you want to be at the heart of your life.

And that is, that that's one reason why, at the beginning of my book, I introduce people to something that's called, restoring exercise.

It was developed by a researcher, Ben Rogers, at Boston College.

And it's actually based on the phases of the classical hero's journey.

Essentially, you are envisioning yourself as the protagonist, the main character of your life, and you answer a series of questions that that helps you to flesh out your life, envision it as sort of a hero's journey and see the whole arc.

So the questions are, okay, what is your goal?

What are you most striving for?

Who is helping you along the way?

Who your allies are?

What obstacles you faced along the way, how you overcame those obstacles, and then what legacy you see yourself leaving to the community.

And if you look at hero stories from a variety of cultures, they all include these same basic elements.

And I just found it really helpful to go through this restoring exercise for myself.

It's been tested, in the lab, and it really helps people in a short period of time, maybe half an hour or an hour.

Zero in on what are the key goals and values that matter most to you?

And then I think doing the exercise also encourages you to confront the question of is what I'm doing day to day actually congruent with these larger goals and these larger objectives?

And this larger legacy?

I want to leave that I uncovered in the restoring exercise.

So, it's sort of, a way to really get at what drives you, what you want your larger purpose to be.

And so I, I recommend it to everyone.

The restoring exercise is actually available online.

The researcher Ben Rogers has has made it available for free.

So you can do that as well.

And you said the research on it is pretty solid.

Yes.

That that when people go through this restoring exercise, they feel a larger sense of purpose and also that they're more motivated to overcome daily obstacles that they face in their lives.

And I think it's because when you have that larger purpose close to the forefront of your mind, just the daily things that that get in our way don't seem to matter quite as much.

Their significance sort of recedes because your, your larger goal is really at the forefront of your view.

And you're like, yeah, I have to get through this, but it's all in the name of getting to this goal or leaving this legacy.

And so I think it has a way of helping you put your problems in context and have a little bit of that energy when it comes to just just getting through those daily obstacles.

There was this idea that you picked up, I think, from an Olympic coach that I really like here.

They told you that, you know, sometimes when you think about those long term goals, it can feel overwhelming.

You feel like you're staring up at this huge mountain.

You feel like you're never going to get there.

And often we get kind of paralyzed by that.

And so a little trick or an idea on what to do is just to ask, what is the next wisest step now, even if it's incremental, even if it's small?

Tell me about that idea.

That's right.

Well, this is, something that I learned from Amy Balde.

Salo, who, was an Olympic athlete herself.

And now is a coach, like a high performance, coach.

And so she is really good at helping people through difficult moments during the day, moments of severe overwhelm, maybe, you know, the feeling, something big has just been plopped onto your plate, or just some personal crisis, has just landed and you are feeling absolutely frazzled.

Your heart rate is through the roof, your nervous system is completely overactive.

And just, how do you handle those moments?

And what Amy told me is oftentimes the best thing to do is just sort of to take stock of, okay, this is what's going on.

This is where I, given all of this, what is the next wise choice?

What is the next small incremental thing that I can do to keep moving forward here?

So, it might be that you feel like you need to take the rest of that day off from work to, to go the more extreme, route.

But it could be that maybe what you need is to take a 15 minute walk, go outside, get away from your email, get away from your desk.

And then just after that walk, assess.

Okay.

How am I feeling now?

And given how I'm feeling now, what's the next wise choice after that?

And it's something that's worked really well for me, and it's kind of its own form of responsive pacing.

Right.

Like you decide on the next wise thing you do, the next wise thing, even, especially if it's something very small, and then you check in with yourself again.

Okay, how am I feeling now?

And given that and given everything that's on my plate, what's the next wise choice from here?

So you can kind of get through a difficult day, just sort of moving from one small wise choice to the next and that that's what gets you through.

I mean, literally that's, has me thinking about dealing with things like even paying off a lot of debt, you know, working through big problems that can feel insurmountable.

I just found that, a really valuable idea.

That was one of those things where I go, like, why have I not thought about things this way very often?

And there was a lot of that in this book.

So I'm going to ask you about a few other concepts.

And then what we'll do is after we take our only break, we're going to get some listener feedback and questions, comments from the audience.

As we talked to science writer Elizabeth Svoboda who's a Brighton High School graduate of Rochester in, well, now she's a Californian, but she's the author of the Art of pacing A Guide to Balancing Short term Demands with Long term Thriving.

It's getting a lot of critical acclaim.

And this hour, I think you're you're seeing why, tell us what a brief candle moment is.

Yeah.

So this is something that I have witnessed and experienced in my own life.

Basically, a brief candle moment is sort of a short, intense encounter between two people that has potential or does change the trajectory of their lives afterward.

And, it's often if we look back at our own lives, we can often pinpoint these brief candle moments that when we were in a period of uncertainty, unsure about the best path forward, we had a critical conversation.

Maybe it was with a friend, maybe with an academic mentor or a mentor at work and these exchanges may be very short, but they they crystallize something for you.

And maybe after that conversation you feel empowered to move in a certain direction that you weren't sure about, or just to take a leap that felt like a very, very difficult leap to take.

And then 20 or 30 years down the line, when you look back, you realize that if that brief candle moment hadn't happened when it did, the trajectory of your life might have turned out entirely differently.

And, I include brief candle moments in a book about pacing, because I think a lot of us have the idea that if we want to be what researchers call generative people, if we want to give back to the community or to the people around us, well, that has to become our entire career, right?

We have to kind of do the Mother Theresa thing or go overseas and just spend all our days and all our lives, serving.

But I think in any life situation, no matter what your career is or what station you find yourself in, in life, you can find ways to offer these brief candle moments to the people that are in your sphere of influence or or within your vicinity.

And I actually, I talked to a family doctor who had one of these moments with a patient where he had known her for a long time, and he was on a phone call with her, and he picked up something strange in, in her voice and he said, why don't you come down to the office?

I think the two of us should, should talk in person.

And so she came in and as, as the two of them talked, it emerged that she had been feeling so upset at something that was going on at work that she was thinking of lashing out violently at her coworkers.

And so he, the doctor, was able to talk the patient down off a ledge and, and get her the help that she needed.

But if that brief candle moment hadn't happened, if that doctor's antennae hadn't been up when they were not just their lives, but many other people's lives might have unfolded entirely differently.

So that that sort of an extreme example.

But I think all of us can look for opportunities with people in our vicinity often, you know, if people are going through a hard time or they're on the horns of a difficult decision.

Sometimes those conversations or those brief exchanges can mean everything and can really change the course of someone's life.

When is selective mediocrity so selective mediocrity is a pacing philosophy that I love.

And maybe my teenage self would say that this is the lazy streak in me, but it's the idea that we need to.

In fact, we should strive to be just okay at a lot of different things and give what, my researcher friend Joe Arpaio calls the minimum effective effort.

So, in other words, with certain tasks that are on your plate, you do just enough and no more.

Or you can serve your energy for the things that are actually more important to you.

So, you know, if your kid has all this paperwork that you need to fill out for the track team, you're you're not spending an hour in that paperwork.

You were kind of, you know, checking all the boxes.

But maybe you try to get through it in about five minutes so you can move on to something else.

And I think sometimes selective mediocrity is difficult for those of us who have been raised or who have been in cultures where it's like, you do your best at everything, that's part of your identity.

But I think by being mediocre at some things, we actually can become better and have more energy for the things that matter much more to us.

So I encourage everybody to practice selective mediocrity.

Good is good enough is how I left that section thinking, especially for people who feel like anything you do, you have to do it at the highest, highest level.

And modulation is something that that you like.

Tell us about modulation.

Yeah.

So, so modulation is actually a pretty quick way that you can take control of if you're somebody who tends to get anxious or overwhelmed easily, that you can take control of dialing your nervous system down to a lower gear.

And it's actually the way it works is that you're breathing at a very specific pace, and it's the pace at which there's the greatest variation between the way your heart rate speeds up as you breathe in, and the way that it slows down as you breathe out.

And some of you might have heard of heart rate variability.

And so when there's the most variation between that speeding up, breathing in and slowing down, breathing out, that is generally when your nervous system is going to be most relaxed.

So that by breathing at this modulation pace, which for most of us is between 5 and 6 breaths per minute, as opposed to the 12 plus breaths that we typically take when we're not, monitoring our breathing.

And I actually found so I, I went to the office of a psychiatrist that practices modulation with many of his clients who are overwhelmed or, or overworked in different ways.

And, so he taught me my modulation piece, which turned out to be about 5.2, breaths per minute for me.

And so he then clipped a heart rate monitor on my finger and he's like, oh, okay.

Here's this guide video.

It's like the guides you had breathing at that certain piece for about five minutes.

And so I did that for five minutes.

And my heart rate was tracing on the laptop screen next to me.

And I was actually, as I was doing the modulation breathing, I was able to watch as the sort of jagged tracings relaxed into more S-shaped like sine waves, and indicating that my nervous system was easing into a lower gear.

And when I was at the end of that five minute period, doctor RPA asked me how I was feeling, and I was like, you know, I really feel very relaxed.

And he said, based on what I'm seeing here, if I had taken a sedative and pushed it into your arm five minutes ago, you would not be feeling as relaxed as you just made yourself feel right now.

And it was pretty surprising to me because I had gone into that appointment.

I didn't know if it was going to work for me.

I had tried different types of breathing exercises in the past, and they really weren't that effective.

But the modulation breathing has really become part of my, I would say, daily or near daily practice.

And the wonderful thing is you can do it in just moments between the commitments that you have in your life, like when you're waiting at a long red light, you might be able to do a couple minutes of of modulation, especially if it's been a stressful day.

You're feeling spun up, you're feeling overwhelmed.

It just gets you in a state of mind where not only are you feeling calmer, but you feel more equipped to make good decisions.

The kinds of decisions that's that's going to make your future, calmer and easier.

You're not going to fly off the handle at people.

And just your brain is going to work better when you're in that more relaxed state.

And so it's about feeling better, but it's also about allowing your natural decision making abilities to being able to perform those at their highest.

I'm predisposed to think that that kind of concept is a little bit out there, a little bit woo.

And yet there's good, good research behind it.

And I left that section going like, yeah, I should probably, I should probably do something like that myself as well.

Let's take our only break here.

You can see I'm trying to fit a lot in in this hour with author Elizabeth of about.

Her book is the Art of pacing a guide to balancing short term demands with long term, thriving feedback from the connections audience.

Next.

Coming up in our second hour.

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Is there something in the government files that reveal that area 51 or the little green men?

It's all true.

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But we bring back this conversation about his book called The Little Book of Aliens, and why he does think there are probably aliens out there somewhere.

We just haven't found him yet.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Chad writes to the show, says perhaps in the American capitalistic culture, we have come to associate one's productivity, how much money they make, or how important they are to the overall functioning of society as a direct reflection of their philosophy on life and moral values, which is definitely a problem in a society that often intentionally and unintentionally discriminates against others.

That's from Chad.

What do you make of that?

Elizabeth?

Yeah, I think there's so much that at the heart of our identity is oftentimes our productivity.

And in American culture, we are very much socialized that way.

And yeah, certainly the problem is when there are people who are really working their hardest, trying their hardest bit, are embedded in systems where it's very difficult for them to succeed or move up the ladder.

So so they are just trying their hardest that they're not making any progress.

They really start to feel left out because we equate someone's value with their productivity.

Once they're in a situation where they're not able to be as productive or they're not as able to stand out at work, unfortunately, those people can feel as if they don't have any value.

And we see this, I think, as communities have gotten hollowed out, is industry has left, Western New York and in the Midwest.

A lot of those people have lost their sense of identity.

And that is something that has fueled things like the opioid epidemic, and suicides and, and all of those sorts of things stem at least in part from this tendency.

We have to equate our work and our productivity with our worth when there are so many different aspects of being human that give us work that have absolutely nothing to do with how much money we are making or how much, quote unquote, value we're providing to companies.

And I think we need to as a culture, we need to do better at acknowledging the contributions that people make that have nothing to do with the work world, with the corporate world.

Well, on that note, Dallas writes to say, as long as we've been Americans, we've defined ourselves in terms of our jobs.

Europeans have been confused about this since we have existed.

I mean, he's right.

I think it's just a question of if we think that's a healthy thing.

Yeah.

No, no, it's very true.

And it goes so far back, there was a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville that in the early 1800s, he traveled throughout America to try to get a sense of what this new country was like.

And one of the big impressions that he came away with was, Americans are energetic, they are go getters, but they also have this tunnel vision.

Even then, he recognized that Americans were getting so locked in on their goals or on being productive on a sending up some kind of vocational ladder, that everything else kind of receded to the periphery.

Whether it was family life or just community involvement, sometimes those other things would just easily go by the wayside as they got locked into that tunnel vision.

And I think we see that tunnel vision persisting and maybe even getting worse nowadays.

This next one, I think, is in relation to narrative reflection.

And, if you missed it earlier, Elizabeth talked about, the idea of zooming out to a kind of a 30,000ft view of what you are doing and how you are spending your time, and whether that relates to your longer term goals in your life, whether that's leaving a legacy, whether that's bigger goals that you have for yourself in different ways.

And Tom writes to say, Bravo, such a smart conversation.

But what if we aren't obsessed with leaving a leaving a legacy?

We're always climbing the corporate ladder.

Yeah.

I mean, when I say legacy, it doesn't have to be something highfalutin or something that's going to get you in the history books.

It can be things like, who do I want to be in the hearts of my family and my friends when I'm gone?

What legacy do I want to leave to them?

So it can be very much on a daily scale, a personal scale.

I think sometimes the word legacy has these connotations attached to it, like, oh, it has to be something big, I have to be immortal.

But that's really, I think the legacy you want to leave is something that you should define, and it can be something very close to home.

It can be what do I want my life to have been about?

And it can be just about daily kindness.

It can be about making life better for just a few people.

And sometimes I think when we do that, when we focus on that kind of legacy, it, it gives rise to more concrete things that we can do every day.

And so I would say you define your own legacy, and don't let anyone tell you that it has to be something that puts you on a pedestal or something that's going to get you in the history books.

You decide what that's going to be.

Yeah.

The way I think about that in the context of what you just said and what Tom is saying is, you know, so, for example, instead of like this big, massive legacy that leaves a statue of yourself to Elizabeths Point, maybe it's smaller things.

Maybe you want what you want to do is maybe you would like to.

Maybe it's important to you to be recognized as a good neighbor, as someone who is, a productive part of your neighborhood.

But maybe you just don't know a lot of the people on your street or in your apartment building.

And maybe you wish you would set aside more of your energy and time getting to know people around you or providing some sort of positive value in the space around you.

You know, that's not something that's going to leave a statue, but that's something that, is a really beautiful thing to, to do and to frankly accomplish.

But it does take effort and intentionality, especially with the way we know each other less and like that's just what popped to my mind.

I mean, it's sort of a smaller scale, small legacy idea there.

Elizabeth, does that work there?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And it's very accessible.

Like if the legacy that we want to leave is to be the best player that ever entered the NBA, good luck.

That's not going to be in reach for a lot of us, especially not me.

But if the legacy you want to leave is local and communal, we can all take steps every day, and we can see the results of that immediately.

And the connections that we make in the feedback that we're getting from people.

So it's very fulfilling.

And if you look at sort of these longitudinal studies that follow people over the course of their lives, what makes people most satisfied and most fulfilled is often their local connections, like who are the people who are actually in their lives day to day?

How do they interact with them?

How do they support each other?

And so anything that you can do to nurture those, regardless of what your day job is, I mean, for some people, their day job doesn't have a ton to do with their legacy, but they're involved in the community in other ways that are more directly related to the kind of difference that they want to make.

Andrew writes in to say we shouldn't need a book to tell us to stop scrolling and go to bed.

Okay?

I mean, I don't think that's what the book doesn't say.

Stop scrolling, go to bed.

Although, there is plenty of written, in this book about, the digital influence on us and our time and our energy.

And, my guest, the author Elizabeth Svoboda does not advise us to delete every social media app.

Although, Elizabeth, you you've talked to people who have kind of gone cold turkey, you know, for a month at a time, things like that.

But why not?

Why why not just advise people, delete it all, and you're going to find yourselves a lot more energized with a lot more time.

Yeah.

I mean, in a perfect world, that may be true, but in the real world, social media is often it can be something that we need to be involved in for work.

It may be the primary means by which we keep in touch with people who are living in different states or who we don't see every day.

And so completely cutting it out of your life.

Well, maybe it makes sense for some people.

For a lot of us, it's just not all that realistic.

I as somebody who has kids, I, I'm part of some groups on social media where I find out about things that are happening at school that I probably wouldn't get to learn any other ways.

So it can be important for your sense of community.

But at the same time, these platforms, as many of you have probably experienced, are extremely addictive.

And they have consultants, on staff who are putting forth changes to make them more addictive, because the way these companies make money is that they coerce you to spend as much time as possible on the site.

So this idea of, well, we shouldn't need a book to tell us to stop scrolling and go to bed.

It's not that simple when you're dealing with a addictive platforms that every time a new message or a new post pops up, you get a little burst of dopamine in your brain, and that then encourages you to keep scrolling for the next burst of dopamine.

And it becomes sort of this addictive cycle, similar to how people are playing the slots.

They will just be pulling the slot over and over.

You are refreshing the page over and over.

So, in some sense saying stop scrolling and go to bed is kind of like saying, well, you know, just if you're an alcoholic, just stop.

Stop drinking.

It's a little bit more difficult than that.

Andrew, thank you.

And last comment.

It's interesting to think of this in context of the pressure to, quote, be happy.

What makes me happy?

Accomplishment or contentment?

It's a good question, Elizabeth.

What what makes you happy?

And is that a good question to be asking ourselves?

I think it's an excellent question, and I think a lot of us are socialized to think that accomplishment is going to make us happy.

But what tends to happen instead is that we move toward an accomplishment.

Maybe we reach it, and we do feel happier for a brief period of time.

But then there's something that happens that scientists call hedonist adaptation, where you just kind of get used to the new, your new life in which you accomplish this thing, and you're like, okay, I'm just back to my same mood baseline that I was at before.

And now I feel like I need to accomplish this other thing.

So it's possible, I think, to spend your whole life chasing one accomplishment after another, having these fleeting periods of happiness that dissipate much faster than we think they're going to.

And then you just feel like you're on the treadmill because you have to get another accomplishment, another accomplishment to get that fleeting rush of of happiness.

And I think something that's more sustainable and more realistic is to get your fulfillment from what you're doing, that the joy in what you're doing, whether it is maybe if you're a musician, it could be just playing your instrument, not winning an award, playing your instrument, but just playing every day for the joy of it.

For me, writing for the joy of it.

Even though I have some frustrating moments.

I do get into these periods of flow with my writing, where it feels like I am just so happy in the process, and I don't care as much about the result.

And so the more we can do that gets us in these periods of flow where we're just enjoying what we're doing for its own sake, the more we're going to lead satisfied and fulfilling lives, I think, in the long run.

All right.

The music's going to play.

Where do you want people to find the art of pacing?

Elizabeth?

You can find it on any online bookseller.

I definitely encourage you to go to bookshop.org.

You can choose your favorite indie local bookseller and order the book through them.

But yeah, just go to the art of pacing any online bookseller, and there are plenty of local bookstores in Rochester that have it.

And not just the Jeff Bezos big online one, but it's out now.

Wherever you find your books.

It's the art of pacing, a guide to balancing short term demands with long term, thriving.

Elizabeth, it's been great having you back in your home.

Digg, NPR station.

Thank you for making the time, and good luck to you.

Thank you so much, Evan.

It was a great time.

Great having you here.

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