The Examined Life – Details, episodes & analysis

Dr Alex Curmi is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who also hosts The Thinking Mind podcast, and is a gifted communicator on mental health and self-development. 

Alex's clinical work and training has given him acute insights into troubling aspects of modern life, and how we might prepare for an uncertain future. The question which formed the spine of our conversation was ‘ In a world where technology has been quite disruptive psychologically for a lot of people, how do we prepare for an increasingly technological future?

We examine how modern technology reshapes attention, confidence, morality and meaning, and Alex offers practical tips for staying human as machines grow more capable. Among the topics explored you will find:

• tech-driven overstimulation dulling joy and focus
• confidence built through voluntary discomfort
• psychiatry and psychotherapy as complementary lenses
• intolerance of uncertainty and stoic control
• integrity, congruence and moral habits that scale
• social skills as a proactive practice
• AI as tool versus thinking crutch
• career durability through uncommon skill stacks
• financial resilience over consumerist drift
• community as the container for lasting change

If you do enjoy the show, please follow or rate it. It really helps others to find it. For future episodes and news on the show, please sign up to the substack - https://thisexaminedlife.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips

Support the show

Technology is taking on a mythic mantle as we look to our creations to supply us with a sense of belonging and purpose, but this is a category error because tech cannot honestly deliver on these promises. In this podcast Tom Chatfield explores some of the issues bound up with the ways we are thinking about technology.

• Technology is not a bolt-on or optional extra, but has been integral to human existence since before our species evolved
• The delusion of neutrality allows us to abdicate responsibility for design choices and embedded values in our tools
• Technology has affordances that push us toward certain behaviors – email "wants" more emails, cars "want" highways
• The delusion of determinism suggests technology drives history along a predetermined path, diminishing human agency
• We've confused progress with salvation, imbuing tech with religious qualities like transcendence and apocalyptic narratives
• Understanding ourselves as "dependent rational animals" helps us appreciate our fundamental interdependence
• Each new generation must be taught a way into modernity, allowing them to question, change, and remix our culture
• Being a "good ancestor" means considering how our technological choices will impact future generations

"Even if you're the richest person in the world, let alone the poorest, you don't have perhaps as much leverage as you might wish to. Nevertheless, that's what you've got, and it does no good whatsoever to say, therefore I have no power, no control, no insight, nothing to give. You do what you can within the limits of what you can know and bring into being."

Support the show

This is a distilled version of last year's conversation with the writer Oliver Burkeman. In it, you'll hear Oliver talk about our troubled relationship with time and how to more fully inhabit it.

Oliver believes our obsession with productivity and efficiency is no route to happiness, quite the opposite. In order to inhabit time more fully, we need to embrace our limitations. This will mean admitting that however many worthwhile ways there are to spend our time, we can't do them all. This is a liberating fact, and can help us enjoy those things we have committed to all the more.

Oliver's new book Meditations for Mortals is now available to buy, and focuses on helpful ways to resist the culture of efficiency, and embrace our finitude more fully.

Support the show

Phoebe Tickell is a biologist, systems thinker, and 'imagination activist'. Phoebe works across multiple contexts applying a complexity and systems thinking lens and engaging people in how to think differently about the planet and its problems. In 2020 Phoebe created 'Moral Imaginations', which researches and implements collective imagination exercises and training to inspire change and find new solutions in an era of unprecedented disruption and potential for transformation.

In this episode we explore the ways in which western culture has shaped the way we think and approach the problems of our day. Phoebe suggests that taking a step back and questioning received wisdom might provide more promising solutions to the crises we are currently facing.

Support the show

What do we lack when we lack religion? In this episode Alex Evans explores the role that religion has historically played in both collective and individual life, and the shape it leaves behind when it disappears. The stories that we locate ourselves within and the rituals they enshrine, are formative in the way we attend to the world. Religion has historically provided the structure for this work, and its absence leaves a vacuum. The conversation explores the various pretenders to the religious throne, any why many of them fall short. 

Alex works at the intersection of where the state of our minds meets the state of the world, and the way these influence one another. His organisation Larger Us is seeks to drive positive change address the crises of our day by bringing people together, you can find out more on their website - www.larger.us.

Support the show

Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor was a neuroanatomist at Harvard when she suffered a severe stroke on the left hemisphere of her brain. It was an experience which profoundly changed her life, and opened her up to the agency we all have in choosing our attention. She explores this in her TED talk back in 2008, which became one of the most popular TED talks ever. In this conversation we explore Jill's question 'who are we, and what are we doing here?', doing so through the lens of neuroanatomy, as well as her experience of having a stroke. Many of the ideas we explore are unpacked further in her book Whole Brain Living.

Support the show

Show links:
Todd's website - https://toddkashdan.com/
Todd's Substack - https://toddkashdan.substack.com/
Kenny's Substack - https://positivelymaladjusted.substack.com/
Examined Life youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpKC6L_IJ2zvL6E6M8Ly1AA

What if the most influential voices in our society are those often left unheard? In this episode, I sit down with Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University and the mind behind "The Art of Insubordination," to unravel the complexities of influence and dissent. We begin by discussing how individuals with little power, status, or majority support can still make a significant impact. Todd and I explore the significance of offering constructive ideas, no matter how imperfect, and the necessity of ensuring diverse participation in discussions to amplify marginalised voices.

Next, we shine a spotlight on the indispensable role of principled dissenters in driving societal progress. Through the inspiring stories of Richard Feynman and Nelson Mandela, we highlight how challenging groupthink is not just courageous but essential for improvement. We dissect whether individualistic or collectivist societies are more conducive to nurturing such brave voices, drawing lessons from Mandela's resilience and leadership within a collectivist context. This chapter delves deep into the sacrifices and personal risks associated with being a change-maker, offering listeners tangible examples of how dissent can lead to monumental shifts.

Finally, we navigate the virtues essential for fostering a culture of curiosity and intellectual humility. We discuss the trade-offs one needs to make for a meaningful life, and the importance of creativity, experimentation, and living authentically. We discuss how education systems can nurture or stifle the principled insubordinates of tomorrow and the critical need for inefficiency and curiosity in both educational and professional settings. This episode has practical tips on how you can cultivate the power pave your unique path against societal norms. Special thanks to Todd Kashdan for his invaluable insights.

Support the show

Iain McGilchrist is a rare polymath who draws on his background in literature, philosophy, medicine and the sciences to make a profound argument that the kind of attention we pay to the world determines not only the kind of people we become, but also the world we create. He argues that the brains left hemisphere has a disenchanted and mechanical view of the world, and it is this that has come to dominate the Western World. A consequence of this is that we've lost a sense of the sacred, of belonging, and of the reality of the values of truth, beauty and goodness.

In this episode we discuss what it is about life that we might be missing through the way we are paying attention. The conversation is wide ranging, exploring the brain hemispheres,  the reality of values, and indeed the purpose of life in the universe.

Further information on Iain's work can be found on his website.
A full version of this interview  will be available on the Examined Life's youtube channel.

Support the show

As AI evolves and replaces different human functions, it raises questions about what it is that makes us distinctively human, and whether that distinctiveness can and should be programmed into AI. This is a question that Dr Eve Poole has thought and written a great deal about. Her recent book Robot Souls takes this question seriously, and explores possible trajectories for our future with AI. In this episode we discuss the necessity of human 'junk code', the increasing importance of the humanities in education, and whether we should trying a bit harder to make AI beings in our own image.

Support the show

Are you optimistic about the future? Do you think we're heading in the right direction as a species? If not, you're in good company. In this episode the writer and speaker Dougald Hine explores what's gone wrong with 'modernity', and what it might mean to think generative thoughts about the future.  Dougald speaks with wisdom and clarity about our current predicament, and what kind of thinking and acting we are being called to in this moment.

Support the show