#44 Self-Respect Changes Everything With Peg O'Connor

Julian Bermudez: Well then, Peg, welcome. It is so good to see you.
Peg O'Connor: It is so good to see you. Thank you for having me on here in a rainy day in Minnesota. Happy to find some sunshine and light in our discussion.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah, that's funny. 'cause I mean I'm here down in Florida, which is very, very sunny and we finally got a little bit of a break in the heat and the intensity, but some rainy Midwest weather just takes me back. I'm from the Midwest as well, so that's quite comforting.
Peg O'Connor: okay. Yep. Yep. We need the rain here. We're still in drought season, so hopefully we can get out of that. But it's just it's really hard to look at the fields and and see how dry and light the dirt is. It isn't that rich nutrient, rich soil that we need.
Julian Bermudez: You know, that's an interesting thing, Peg. So you you're a philosopher by by practice and really into ethics, from what I understand. And so this is tying directly into something that I think, at least in the continental United States, the overwhelming majority of people are dealing with is some sort of environmental degradation that's showing up in things like droughts, exactly what you're talking. I think it's a worldwide thing.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm. Right.
Julian Bermudez: And there's so many things that are playing into this, and that directly affects our health and well-being. So I don't really think of Minnesota as being a typically dry place, land of lakes, ten thousand lakes, right?
Peg O'Connor: Ten thousand low lakes. right now.
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: Or we've gotten massive amounts of rain, but they've been pounding so they run off and cause flash flooding. It hasn't been that kind of slow rain that really soaks the earth. And we
Julian Bermudez: Yes.
Peg O'Connor: had not great winters for a couple in a row. And that's the snow cover is such an important part of the amount of water that we have in our water tables. So it isn't just that we had a you know a dry summer, we had a dry Summer and torrential downpours and then more torrential downpours, but really, really dry. And you know, I have friends who are farmers, and they just say the planting season has just been so different. And to try to make sense of these changing realities, I mean the kinds of knowledge they have about the weather and about the soil and about the kinds of crops that will grow here. I mean, I just I'm amazed by how much they know. And I'm also amazed by how much they're struggling to try to earn a living. I mean, particularly with legacy family farms. You know, agribusiness is going to do fine. But the fourth or fifth generation small farm, we're seeing a record number of those have to shutter and sell the land. So the the changes that are happening in a state like Minnesota are pretty noticeable. And so what happens when we lose family farms? It's it's not good.
Julian Bermudez: Family farms and wild natural lands. I don't really see f farms as being like natural land, but in terms of the spectrum of development, I would much prefer to see farmland. In here d I'm down in Florida and I live off of the Spring Fed River. So it's a natur it's crystal clear water and like tens of millions of gallons of water flow from the aquifer into the river every single day. And here, historic lows. The water table is so low right now. And yet the bulldozers keep plowing through all of the natural land and they're paving
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: over everything. And so then the floods come in right afterwards and it's the same process. That you're seeing over there, which is the development is expanding so fast, so quickly, that the water process isn't able to actually happen. The water can't get into the ground. There's nothing
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: there to stop the water from flowing. And so you get these flash floods, all the water runoff, and then we have these continuous historic droughts.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah, it and it's just awful. Wasn't it in Houston a couple of years ago that they had such terrible flooding because they had so much concrete from all the building that they've suddenly done that the water has nowhere to go. I mean, and you can't contend with water. Water is always going to win. And so, you know, I also think about the ways we were talking in one of my ethics classes the other day about the notion of the commons and water is a common good. And you think about how do we figure out who gets water and where do they get it? And it you run into these crazy questions about, well, if a river starts in one state, does that give that state priority over that water, even if it runs through four different states? And you know, I just I so worry about the the southwest corner and the Colorado River and what are people going to do there? And yet we keep building and we keep having golf courses. And I think what happens when we don't have potable water, when we don't have water to drink? It water is perhaps one of the most prized now commodities, not just a natural resource, but a commodity. And that's never good.
Julian Bermudez: Ownership, exploitation.
Peg O'Connor: Exactly.
Julian Bermudez: This is the mindset that I think our society has been trapped in for several centuries now, especially since the major scientific revolution of we're going to try to understand the world in a materialistic standpoint. yeah, this this mindset is it's dangerous. It's very dangerous in terms of Owning and commoditizing and exploiting and profiting off of things. it hasn't been safe in this country for several centuries now to be sensitive and to be attuned and connected to the land around you.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: that has been seen as dangerous and hostile and met with. Ferocious oppression. And now we're seeing the consequences, as you're pointing out, of you know, the southwest states, Colorado, Arizona having to reduce so much of their water consumption. Meanwhile, you'll have these international companies that are pumping thousands, millions of gallons of water out of the ground every single day to feed their alfalfa chemiculture plants that they're gonna ship back to Saudi Arabia or anywhere overseas to feed their cattle. because the regulations over there around water are so much more strict. So this seems to be this ideology, this way of interacting with the world seems to be having terrible consequences on our health, our well being, and the way that we interact with one another.
Peg O'Connor: I think so. And it and it puts us all in competition. with each other.
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: I mean, down to the neighborhood association where they have rules about you cannot water your lawn after nine AM or you must do so after five PM. And I think it was the New York Times that had this story about just this fight. I think it was in Denver, where one guy has a totally green lawn, so clearly he's watering it in all kinds of ways, and someone else's is a brown lawn or they're trying to do some kind of restoration of more native plantings. And your your point is exactly on. I mean the person who says, I want prairie plantings, I don't want Kentucky bluegrass, could get a citation from the homeowners association or from the municipality for not having a properly maintained yard. And you want to say a properly maintained yard should be responsible to the context, should be responsible to the environment. And Kentucky bluegrass isn't designed to flourish in a desert setting. It maybe isn't designed to flourish In a very, very wet, cold setting. And yet, so it's just stunning that someone would prioritize having a lush green lawn in their front yard over will I have enough water to drink? Or will my neighbors have enough? I'll have enough, but will my neighbors don't care. So there's a kind of callousness. that always comes along with the overuse of shared natural goods by some.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah, w I I there's a a a saying that I've heard the boomer generation say so frequently. I won't say that all of boomers say this, of course,
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: but it's something along the lines of not my problem or somebody else's problem. It's just so frequent. I I I live again in Florida, so I'm surrounded by by the older generations, and that is just one of sure,
Peg O'Connor: With hair like this.
Julian Bermudez: sure. Again, I'm not saying that everybody thinks that way, but the laws that you're reflecting on and the policies are a reflection of this type of mindset. This idea that laws or that lawns, your grass lawns are mandated by laws and that you can get fined and people can go to jail, or that you can lose your
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: property if you don't adhere to these strict policies of irrigating. Creating an invasive species that provides no ecological benefit to the environment. And in fact, requires a constant input, not just of water, but of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides as well. that behavior and that mindset to me seems psychotic at best.
Peg O'Connor: Or or maybe just really callous at best. I mean, I I think that in many ways many people have become callous to the needs of others.
Julian Bermudez: Sure.
Peg O'Connor: And we live in a culture that is all about valorizing and prioritizing my rights and my opportunities to exercise them rather than one of the pieces pieces I teach in ethical theory is a wonderful essay by Daniel Wildcat, who teaches at at Haskell University. And he says, in effect, instead of talking so much about inalienable rights, why don't we talk about inalienable responsibilities?
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: That we can't just trade away or offload on others because responsibilities really are the flip side of rights, but we don't pay enough attention to that. It's my right. I want my green grass. I want to be able to do this. I should be free from impediment from others. And we have really stopped having a shared concern for the commons, and we've really expanded our bubble or our zone where we say, I really don't care. I don't really care. That younger generations are being left behind. I don't care what my neighbors can't do. I can do it. I don't care that they can. And so I think that kind of callousness is becoming a through line in many of
Julian Bermudez: Hmm. I d yeah.
Peg O'Connor: our kind of shared concerns and interests. We should all have a care. That people don't
Julian Bermudez: Disconnect.
Peg O'Connor: to me is shocking to me. yeah.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah, a disconnect. There's a real disconnect here of what you're describing. This this in my opinion is the hallmark of trauma right here, this disconnect that you're talking about, which is when life becomes too overwhelming. too over stimulating, too painful, and we don't have the capacity or the resources to navigate it, then we disconnect from it. We go away mentally. We can't feel
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: that feeling anymore. We don't know what to do with it. So we push it away. And of course, one of the first ways that we disconnect is from our own personal experience, the things that we're feeling, the things that we're experiencing, our own personal responsibilities, as you're as you're mentioning, very astutely right now. And when we become disconnected from each other, if I can't be with what I'm feeling, if I can't be with my own personal experience, then of course I can't be with yours. I can't
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: see the consequences of my behaviors or my disconnect on you. And if I'm disconnected from myself, I'm disconnected from you, then I'm disconnected from the world around me. And I can't actually be present with it or engage with it or have any sort of relationship with it. And then of course all the things that I do don't represent who I am. So So this disconnect as you're bringing up becomes this very destructive force. And we oftentimes As a response to trauma, are always trying to soothe that pain in a sense. So this is the rights that you're talking about. I have the right to do this. I have the ability to do this. I don't care. I don't care if the future generations are gonna have to deal with $40 trillion of debt. I'm stacking my own pockets right now. I don't care if future generations are gonna have no natural environment whatsoever. I'm building this subdivision. They'll deal with that. And so yeah, I think that one of the most powerful things that we can do is start looking at rather than what is my right, what is my responsibility? What can I take responsibility for? Where is
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: my accountability and what role do I play in this situation? And I think that that's a very scary thing for a lot of people.
Peg O'Connor: I think a lot of people don't know how to take responsibility.
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: In part because we tend to think responsibility is all and only backwards looking for the assigning of blame. And and I think that's a part of responsibility, but it's actually a very small part of it. I like to think that responsibility runs in multiple directions and it goes to the future as well as to the past. So responsibility, yes, you have to take responsibility for your actions and repair if you have harmed someone or you've caused someone. Distress of a certain sort. So when it looks backwards, responsibility needs to aim towards repair, not just saying I'm sorry, and have that just verbal gesture be the equivalent of repairing or taking responsibility, because it's not. And and I'm sorry given at the wrong time can actually just increase an injury in
Julian Bermudez: Course.
Peg O'Connor: devastating ways. But responsibility looks forward. If I take responsibility for something, I'm saying that I am no longer Committed to acting in this sort of way. I'm committed to acting differently. And part of that may involve taking others whom I hadn't taken into consideration before into consideration. Because I think one of the dynamics that's at work here, as we disconnect, we come to have less empathy and we're less able to see others as like us. And if I come to lack all empathy, you know, I don't see you, Julian. As a complex, complicated person in the world like I am. I just see you as an obstacle or an impediment or a pain in my rear end because you're asking me to do something. So the absolute deficit of empathy that we have in this country, I find debilitating. I mean, I I spend a lot of time with my students, so I have traditional 18 to 22 year old students, to say, you really Do you need to think about how we are connected to others? And it's really easy to just push away and differentiate yourself. But you have to see how we're connected. And if you can't do that, you can't be fully present ever to yourself. So there's a narrow self-interest argument to be made here. But the argument more is in connecting to others, we have the opportunity to become more of who we are, more of who we want to be. But we live In such a competitive environment where everything is a zero sum game. And I'm trying to tell my students, some things are generative. The more you practice generosity, the more generosity there is in the world, and it it may prompt other people to be more generous. But at times I feel like I'm I'm swimming upstream against our dominant political discourse and what's popular in various forms of media, to say we really do need to learn most basically how to be more kind. To ourselves and to others. We're all muddling. We're all embattled. We're all having a hard time.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah. This responsibility, this is very important of looking back and looking at how we have acted in the past and the consequences of our behavior, but also looking forward of how am I participating in this world around me? What am I contributing to? What am I creating? What am I what am I what what situations am I adding to? And that's very that's very difficult and very rare to find these days. you you mentioned this the idea of an apology and how it can actually do more harm. Yeah that's that's such an interesting thing. So when I was really connecting with some Japanese friends who were studying here at a university that I was working at. They were doing internships here. I was very I and at this point I was studying the Japanese language as well. I was really getting into the culture and I was struck by how they apologize
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: and how genuine and sincere an apology is where you don't have to, for the most part, you don't have to say you did this thing and it affected me this way. there's this deep level of consideration that's embedded in the ki in the culture, in the ethics over there that you're role here is to see how you're affecting those around you. And so very
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: frequently if they did something or even anticipated that they did something that might have affected you in a negative way or in a less than ideal way, they're very quick to say, I'm so sorry. And it's not just the words of I'm sorry, it's I've affected you this way and I will be sure to do it in a different way moving forward. I to this day have maybe heard Americans apologize on that level. I could probably count it on one hand. On the other hand, yeah.
Peg O'Connor: I I think that's right. Yeah.
Julian Bermudez: On the other hand, I hear people apologize for things that they shouldn't apologize for or they're constantly I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but it's just like this weird, not weird. It's a way of pleasing people to to maintain
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: a relationship, or it's, I'm sorry you think you deserve an apology. There's the entitlement here of I'm not going to apologize whatsoever, or it's the blame, your fault. And so this
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: apology, it's so deeply in t tied into can we take responsibility and accountability and be present with with our the way that we're living life.
Peg O'Connor: I think that's right. And and I think some people become knee-jerk apologists, like you said. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Apologizing for things that are so far beyond their realm of responsibility, including maybe even apologizing for their very existence. And that to me becomes a matter of I would think that someone who does that all the time is suffering from a lack of self-respect, which is a really
Julian Bermudez: Course.
Peg O'Connor: important moral good. But the person who who says to someone I'm sorry if you feel that way. Like you said, that puts the burden totally on the person who has perhaps been wronged. And just offer me a full apology, or someone who offers an apology and there's a but statement that comes
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: along, then the only thing I'm gonna hear is that but statement. But
Julian Bermudez: Right.
Peg O'Connor: in a an apology has to be at the pace that's appropriate for whatever happened. And I think a lot of people apologize because they want their own bad feeling to go away. And
Julian Bermudez: Mm.
Peg O'Connor: they get impatient for the other person to accept the apology. And they get mad when they don't. And so that's when you end up with someone saying, Well I apologized. I sorry. What else do you want? Again, putting the burden back on the person that's been harmed. And Things like apologies, they have to take time for the person to accept them or to Decide not to accept it because sometimes it might be a a mark of real self-respect to say, I don't accept your apology because I don't see changes or commitment to the future. I just see this as you're making this gesture like you're on an apology tour for something. And so for me, forgiveness isn't something that's just deserved or freely willy-nilly given. Forgiveness is something that is earned through hard work of the person. Who committed the harm or made someone else suffer. And that's about for me putting responsibility where it belongs. It's not my job, if you have harmed me, to try to make you feel better about yourself. But yet there's oftentimes an offloading of that kind of responsibility. And it can be very gendered for sure.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah, it's very common. It's that's very common. yeah, that's so frequent, this idea that I can apologize but not make any change whatsoever. And just by saying these magical words, somehow now you're responsible for accepting the behavior. That is the foundation of an apology: taking responsibility for the actions and then the accountability of saying, I'm going to make a change. I'm going to do things differently. I'm not going to continue to do that same pattern. To this day,
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: the United States has never formally apologized to Native Americans whatsoever.
Peg O'Connor: And and nor will it.
Julian Bermudez: Nor will it. Because if you apologize, there has to be some sort of change in behavior. And they're not willing to do that. The same patterns are still in place that have always been in place. And I think that you you you were using this this phrase self-respect. So far, almost everything that we've talked about, I think, comes down to self-respect of how much do we respect and value ourselves? Because Coming from a sense of entitlement and saying, I don't have to apologize, I can keep doing this harmful, toxic behavior, this destructive pattern that's harming you, harming my neighbors, harming everyone around me. Well that inevitably comes back to harm you as well or the person who's doing it. It's like again, it's
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: come into this disconnect of seeing myself as being separate from others around me and the world around me. And w that kind of is like the the idea of being cast out of the garden of I'm not a part of this world anymore. I'm different, which is s this self-respect, the self-value. I'm not important enough to contribute to mending relationships in this world. I'm not important enough to creating an environment where I and others can thrive in. I am so scarcity and conflict mindset that I have to hoard and hold all these and defend myself and grab all these resources to protect myself
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: from you. That's again seeing that I'm not valuable enough to to live in this world and to enjoy this world.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah, and and I think there being a deficit of self respect, it makes it too easy for people to think that they don't deserve anything better and that
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: nothing in their life is ever gonna change because
Julian Bermudez: Yeah.
Peg O'Connor: who was someone like them and fill in whatever that like them is to deserve better, or to see herself as an equal to others, or to be able to look in the mirror and say, I respect what I see here. I respect how I am in the world. I respect my moral character. I know my moral commitments. And we just don't talk about these issues all that much. And for me as someone who's been teaching moral philosophy for thirty years, if you don't have your self respect, you have nothing. Because at two o'clock in the morning, if you have no self respect because you've traded it away or it's been stripped from you, either, you know, through particular others or by oppressive social institutions and practices. You're going to be awake at two o'clock every morning, probably just beating yourself up for so much of what isn't your responsibility. And it's absolutely devastating because it leads to this kind of fatalism. And when you become fatalistic, you just believe nothing can change and you give up. Part of what it means to be human is to be able to act in ways to transform yourself and to transform the world. So I really do think that so many pieces of our humanity are being eroded in some cases, being shred in other cases, and that sometimes we actively trade away because we think we're going to get some kind of immediate benefit, or we have to do it in order to survive.
Julian Bermudez: intentionally, intentionally being stripped away and eroded and taken away. There there's definitely so many forces out there right now that want us having no self worth, having no self value or self respect, you know, I mean I work with I I've had a lot of older folks who have you know, older children, for instance, and they have estranged relationships with them. They don't talk to their children anymore. And it's very obvious we can get we can figure out exactly where that comes from, which is They treated their kids the way that their parents treated them. And they don't have a relationship with their parents either. It's a pattern of intergenerational trauma that's gone
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: been handed through. But they're usually, even if there's a denial of any sort of fault or responsibility in this, there's this blame that you're talking about that's maybe even unconscious. They're not directly aware of it. And so there's this mental dialogue of constantly beating themselves up.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: And so then it's keeping them up as you're saying. And you might be at 2 30 in the morning and you're just constantly on this loop of beating yourself up of unworthiness and undeservingness, lack of self-value and self-respect. A victim in a sense. And I found that with very simple short steps that people can easily turn that around and say, okay, well, what can I do right now to take accountability for this? What are some
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm. Yes.
Julian Bermudez: steps, some concrete steps that I can do to start to change the situation? But again, that requires the the belief of, well, I'm at least worthy enough of some sort of change.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah. And and that can be the absolutely monumental first step that feels like you're trying to traverse the Grand Canyon.
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: And that's and that's where people get stuck because we become so habituated to just beating ourselves up or those those tapes we play in our heads. And also the things that other people have said to us perhaps over the course of the lifetime, that those are the most ready at hand. They are the most familiar to us. So how do we try to break through the noise of all of that? And and I think you know, asking the right question or just for a moment disrupting what feels so familiar to people to say, well, wait a minute, what what if you had a different starting point here? Or instead of, you know, assuming all this responsibility that others are happy to place on you and have you assume it, what if you just look at the the situation from a different perspective? And that is so powerful and so I think under appreciated.
Julian Bermudez: Very challenging for people when they're in it too, because most of the times they don't they
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: don't know anything outside of this pattern. Their parents handed
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: it to them. That's all it's like you know, you're trying to see a color that you're blind to. One of the questions I usually ask people when they're in that pattern and that voice is constantly going, that's always putting them down, that very harsh negative self-talk that is incredibly painful. The question I usually ask is: where did you learn that? What who Wh who was the person or the people who said that to you? And it's always, my mom or my dad or my teachers or somebody. And it usually goes back to their very early stages in life. And so if we can start to see that voice as a learned response or a learned voice that has been internalized from somebody else, now we can start to engage with this a little bit. And we can say, hi, mom. Thanks. I don't need that.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: Where it gets where it gets really interesting too is that voice is usually as destructive and as harmful as it is, it's usually the intention is some sort of compassion. For these for these intergenerational patterns of trauma, that is usually what compassion and connection looked like was this harshness, this criticism. And so we have this grave mistaking of conflict and toxic patterns for connections and compassion. And so really reevaluating
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: these is coming back to, I mean, pretty much everything that we've talked about so far.
Peg O'Connor: Well and as you say that so many of these are f in childhood and they get fused right into how we see ourselves. They're just fused right into the scaffolding of our identities and we start building around these things as if they are just simply given and they are immutable and they are as things should be. And we can create these incredibly complex edifices. And we fail to see that that's exactly what they are. They're just constructions. We've we've made them, but they've become so familiar to us we forget that we have the power to change them.
Julian Bermudez: So challenging because we usually establish these patterns early in our lives, which is when our bodies are developing, when our nervous system, our hormonal systems, when our worldview is all developing, when all of that's taking shape, it's it's developing in relationship to our immediate environment. And so if those are the patterns that we're developing with, in a large sense that becomes who we are. But that's not true. We are so much more than the things that have happened to us and we have the capacity.
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: We have the capacity to enact changes. We are constantly growing. We are constantly able to make changes. The quest the problem is is we get stuck. It it's like when you get wounded, right? You get a scar that's really stiff and rigid and inflexible and it's either numb or it's very sensitive. But if you nurture it, if you rehab it, it can become flexible again, it can regain its feeling, it can become soft.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: And it's the same thing for us. We can become so much more than just those things that have happened to us.
Peg O'Connor: And I think the challenge is we're not just the sum total of the experiences we have. But what really matters is the meaning that we're able to make of those experiences and the sense we're able to make of them. So the philosopher Nietzsche says look, human beings just suffer. We suffer all the time. The world is a horrible place. What doesn't differentiate us is what we experience or suffer. What differentiates us is the meaning we're able to make of those experiences. And he says the most intolerable form of suffering is when suffering feels like it has. Absolutely no meaning. And and I think that we don't we pay attention to what happened to us. We don't pay as much attention to what kind of sense were we able to make of that. Because we always meet the world and the experiences through our concepts, through our frameworks for making sense. And if, say for example, a young child has just really been steeped in shame. You know, from the time she was just a little girl, that something like shame becomes a living attitude. It's a worldview that there are some people who just meet the world in shame. And to think about any kind of sense this person's going to be able to make of their experience is always going to be informed by that shame. And like you said, some of these things we can't even see anymore because, you know, they are the glasses we wear. They are what enable us to make sense. even if that sense is really horrible, even if that sense reinforces the view that we are worthless, we have nothing worthwhile. I mean, when it comes to shame, confirmation bias is functioning at full tilt. And so it just keeps reinscribing and that shame just keeps getting bigger and bigger, or you find yourself further down in this pit of shame and it it feels impossible to climb out of it.
Julian Bermudez: That's the lens, the glasses that we look at everything through. And the really good thing is, is yeah, we can take those out and one of the and look and look at it through something else. H. Almas talks about the difficulties in your life as being something that is yours specifically for you.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: In order to help you grow out of those same old patterns. And so yeah, when when we really look at these circumstances not as something happened to me or this thing keeps happening to me, but instead we can look at it as, well, this is continuous happen. Like if for instance I keep finding myself in abusive relationships. one after the next after the next and I say, well this
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: person was an a-hole and this person did this and this person did this. It's very easy to say, well they did all those things to me. They were narcissistic, they were self-centered, they were abusive, they were toxic. Okay. But if I kept finding myself in each one of those, doesn't the common denominator become me?
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: That's not excusing the behaviors that they did, but that's saying that I played a role in this situation.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: I have some accountability to to to take in this. And if I can start
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: to say, okay, well, I did contribute to this, what was that circumstance there teaching me? What was this suffering here to teach me? If I can really start to look at it this way, well, I'm not so much of a victim anymore, waiting for somebody to come and rescue me. I'm not depend my experience isn't dependent on
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: other people's actions. Now actually I can become very powerful. And this is where I can start to make choices and navigate life in a different way. So suffering can be it's exactly as you're saying. It's it's depends on how we engage with it, the relationship that we have with it. It can be a fantastic teacher, one of the best. Or or it could
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: just s suck.
Peg O'Connor: Exactly right. And so, you know, to think about the ways in which suffering is just such a part of life. So if you've read any Buddhism, you know that is the nature of life. But so to is joy. So when we start to think about, you know, how are we contributing to our patterns? And and what purposes are these patterns serving? And do the excavation work to figure out when these patterns really started to get, you know, laid down and then it's almost like they become prescriptive or it makes it seem like inevitable that yes, I'm gonna end up in another bad relationship or the work I do on addiction, we're gonna end up in another kind of relapse. I I think that we we fail to recognize the kind of agency or the power we have to act differently. And we tend to be more willing to think that we just have to be reactive to everything rather than responsive. So we kind of outsource the the conditions for which we find ourselves in. So like why do I keep ending up with these loser partners who just, you know, want me for my money or they want me for this or that. It's it's as you said, the common denominator and that is really Kind of world-altering when we see that, so long as we can see ourselves in a compassionate way. If we just kind of drill down into you keep finding yourself in these terrible relationships because you don't deserve any better and you're a loser, you know, there's all that shame and that self-recrimination. And it's it's so hard to interrupt that. And that really does come down to it's a matter of self-knowledge, but it turns out one of the best ways to get to know yourself. It is to get to know yourself in the company of good and right others who have your best interests at heart. And you know, we d we we don't pay enough attention to self knowledge and getting to know yourself. Now it's just been kind of I don't know, made fluffy, flufferized as it were, as being just self indulgent or navel gazing. And there's a whole string of philosophers who say if you don't know yourself, you really don't know anything about the world. And I tend to agree with that.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah. Yeah, there's this old saying that you you can't meet yourself directly, but through meeting others and living life then you are introduced to yourself. You know, in terms of the suffering of life and it being a teacher, you know, the four noble truths of Buddhism, life is suffering, but there is a cause to suffering and we can choose to do something else. And here's the path to do something else. So suffering is a fan did you ever see did you ever see the show Westworld?
Peg O'Connor: You know, I didn't. It was on my recommended list and then I never got to it. But tell me why I should watch it.
Julian Bermudez: Well, the f the first season is quite incredible. I started watching I watched like an episode or a half an episode of the second season and I was just I wasn't into it. But there was this really interesting philosophical discussion of what is sentience. And
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: I mean, essentially the way that they're breaking it down is Self-awareness, sentience is the ability to override the programming that you've been given. So they have these artificial intelligence, like robots.
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: And if they're able to step outside of their programming, then they would be considered sentient. And so what the programmers were actually doing was making them suffer terribly. Hoping that the suffering would promote them to say, no more. I can't do this anymore. I have to step outside of that programming. And that's how they would develop sentience. So that really gives an interesting framework to what
Peg O'Connor: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah.
Julian Bermudez: suffering could be, which is tied into that AHL Moss quote of it's here for a reason. It's prompting
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: you to do something different. And if you don't, it's going to continue to make you suffer even more.
Peg O'Connor: I I think that's right. And it it comes down to that responsibility question though, of do we have a s responsibility to our own selves to alleviate our suffering? And do we have a responsibility to others to help alleviate their suffering? And living to go back, living in a culture where it seems everything is adversarial or it's the zero sum game, you know. I I wanna believe that I would alleviate my suffering if the people around me weren't suffering in the way that they were and the local people around me or on a national or global level. So, you know, to see suffering as a kind of connective tissue between us should make us be more aware of how my actions over in my little spot in the universe, and let's say I want to do the universal equivalent of having the greenest lawn in the universe, so I'm just gonna vacuum up whatever resources I need to do that and to promote my family and my well being, to be able to see what the repercussions are of that, you know across the way from people to whom I believe I have no connection and have no responsibilities is really quite stunning. I never want to reach a point where I can't be present to the suffering of others. And I know we have to we have to modulate and we can't just take everything on all at once, but there's a kind of coldness or indifference that I hope I never experience, but we see that coldness and indifference if you spend any time, say in a large urban area where there's a an unhoused population and they're out in public sitting on steps or something. Most people do not see them sitting there as persons. They see them as hindrances or obstacles in their way, as a nuisance. And to be able to think of of human beings like that, we all have dignity that ought to be respected by others.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah. Well it's like the Buddhist says it's because you suffer and it's because I suffer that we can understand one another. But here the The precedence, the the goals, the objectives, the priorities of life in our society right now are not on understanding. They're not on empathy and connection. They're not on exploring the wonders and the awe and the mysteries of this world. They're not on asking, who am I and who are you and what is this incredible experience that we're having right now? None of that's even in the in the in the equation right now. It's on self-preservation, status, power, wealth. Accumulation of resources. Can I
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: dominate you before you dominate me? Can I protect myself in that way? And that that to me is it's very sad. And I really I my my goal is to really try to bring back the the reconnecting. And it's just so hard. I lived in Portland, Oregon for 10 years. the homelessness situation out there is not like anything I've ever seen. And at some point. You know, it it spreads that that's indifference, that danger. It spreads and it even if you're not directly interacting with the homeless population. It it comes to you. So when you're, you know, at a street light and somebody starts jumping into your car and grabbing your things, which has happened to me numerous times, you start to roll your windows up and get a little bit more self-protective.
Peg O'Connor: Right.
Julian Bermudez: When you come home and somebody has moved into your house and they're go threatening to kill you and the police will not help you in any way. Yeah, it's very easy to get this this callousness, this defensiveness, this indifference. And it's it's so hard to in these situations to again come back to that form of compassion. How do you take care of yourself? How do you protect yourself? How do you maintain a sense of internal well-being and internal peace when everything around you is destroying that? It's difficult.
Peg O'Connor: It is difficult and I just actually had this discussion in my class an hour and a half ago about human nature.
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: And is human nature to be all about my self interest and my self preservation and accruing enough protective features so that these things can't be taken away from me? Or is human nature to be more collaborative, to be more cooperative. And in the history of Western philosophy, clearly we've gone off on that first branch that
Julian Bermudez: Course.
Peg O'Connor: left to our own devices, we're gonna compete for absolutely everything and that our moral systems,
Julian Bermudez: Survival of the fittest.
Peg O'Connor: survival of the fittest, which was really meant as a species, but now it's been, you know, boiled down to it's like Julian versus Peg, round one, where everything
Julian Bermudez: Exactly.
Peg O'Connor: is adversarial in that kind of way. And that's a very dark picture of human nature that is very much, I would argue, a consequence of Western European thought. Whereas you look at other cultures, other kinds of philosophical approaches, that it's a very different picture of human nature that emerges. It's one that's more collaborative and cooperative. And so the point of morality isn't just to adjudicate fights and make sure that you have your for full portfolio of rights and I have mine, and then where they come into conflict, a third party can, you know, intervene. But instead it's to say, how do we take care of each other's and take care for each other and take care of communities as a whole? Western philosophical thought, we do not really take care of communities as a whole. Whole. You know, we've got constellations of individuals who bump into each other and we've got to adjudicate rights claims. But that's a particular picture that we've found bewitching. So I like thinking about, you know, I happen to believe that morality isn't just about protecting property or adjudicating conflicts. It's about helping people to be able to flourish, to be better, to find the internal resources to grow and to have the external resources available to help. help with that grow. And that's a very different picture of human nature. And it's not the picture that's dominant or winning right now. And and I hope that that we can change that because we we live in a planet where resources are becoming more scarce. And on the one hand that should argue for more collaboration. On the other hand, it's justifying those who have more will continue to take more because they can and they want to have it.
Julian Bermudez: We live in a planet that has such abundant resources that have been artificially made scarce. And
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: and this scarcity is what drives conflict. You know, in the The mid the late eighteen hundreds, eighteen sixties, going into the eighteen seventies when the United States Army and government was trying to fully destabilize and oppress every native culture here, one of the things that they did, this was argued by General Phillip Sherman as well as President Grant, was to destroy the environment.
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: destroy the environment that the natives are dependent on and then they will become subservient. You can disrupt their livelihood. You can make them more dependent on you. If you can put people in these little tiny boxes and get rid of all of their resources. So the only resources that they have are what you can give them. Now
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: they're completely dependent on you and they will never ever revolt against your your Oppressiveness. And so one of the things that they did was they reduced the buffalo population from what was it,
Peg O'Connor: Yes.
Julian Bermudez: 60 million to around 1,000? And that was intentional. That was the livelihood. That was the main resources for a lot of these native cultures. In a lot of the documents, the natives are talking about when the trails were opening up, the roads and the caravans were coming through, how this Colonization mindset was just to destroy everything. And they would just kill just for the fun of it. They would kill and they would eat right there. And then they would just discard the rest of it. 99% of the animal that they just killed, just thrown to the side of the
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: road. How destructive. And again,
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: what does that say about self-respect and our place in the world? Because that's your environment too. That's our environment. We're all sharing that. And here we can see how exactly as you're talking about, these resources are being made scarce in order to keep us fighting against each other and keeping us in that. This is my little square.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: I have the right to these resources. And now we're going to fight over it. It's one of the it's it's a programming.
Peg O'Connor: It it is. So I just in class taught an excerpt from Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide, about the genocide of Native Americans, and the way in which, as you said, they targeted the land, they targeted the resources that weren't regarded as private property because that was a concept that didn't really have application. And in the destruction of languages and the destruction of religions, the ways in which it was all about domination and subordination so that they couldn't rise up, they couldn't rebel in a kind of way. And the ways in which the colonization and the genocide the ways in which those continue today, that some of the particular dynamics have changed, the practices have changed, but we still in the United States, with Native American reservations, The dominant picture is, well, we, i.e., white people, allow them to live there. And when you think about the ways that that nations and tribes were just moved around this country because the US government and the settler population wanted particular pieces of land. I mean, it it's absolutely debilitating. And that the ways in which I was talking to my students about it. It's like, well, what did you learn about the treatments of Native Americans? And they were learning the same thing as I learned, you know, fifty-five years ago when I was in elementary school. And you think we're still doing so poorly. And I guess this goes back to your point about, you know, the United States will never apologize, in part because there hasn't nor will there be, so long as history is taught in certain ways, the pressures to say to the US government. government, look what you did. Look what was done in our name. And so we spend a lot of time talking about so what do we as citizens of the United States, what do we owe to Native Americans? And there's been this remarkable turn, you know, ever since so in in Minnesota, one of the biggest, most successful casino is owned by a native tribe. And then before you know it, you had many white people saying, well why only can Native Americans have casinos? That's racism. So, you know, we have come full circle where now it's white people being discriminated against by native peoples, and you just It's just devastating and that we're not supposed to talk about race or racism anymore. We're supposed to be colorblind, which is perhaps one of the most effective ways to be racist. And so we we live in this remember in Superman there was bizarro universe where everything is kinda upside down and backwards? A lot of that has
Julian Bermudez: Yeah.
Peg O'Connor: happened to how we understand
Julian Bermudez: Nineteen eighty four.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah, how we understand our place in the world. So the people who have the most privilege are feeling the most aggrieved and and put upon. The ones who are having their rights stripped from them. And so that's going to get in the way of any kind of cooperation or collaboration. I just but I I can't despair. I have to stay optimistic
Julian Bermudez: You know, when I Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: that just because things are this way, it doesn't mean that they will always be this way, and it sure as heck doesn't mean that they should be this way.
Julian Bermudez: Of course. Yeah. No, and to your point, you know, whenever I make videos about native history and, you know, calling for a unity and a new people, it's amazing how people will get on there and accuse me of spreading hate. Call me the hateful one and the racist one. And it's it's always
Peg O'Connor: yeah.
Julian Bermudez: white folks who are doing it. Anyway, you know, I just made this I was just talking the other day about how this ideology spreads. And you know, I was talking about how when Native Americans were being forced west of the Mississippi, so the eastern cultures were being forced west of the Mississippi, the Seminoles, the Cherokees, so on. And how that created territorial problems and resource problems
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: with the natives that were west of it. And of course the idea was just go west. This is what so many presidents, President Jackson, President Jefferson, all these guys are saying. Just go west of the Mississippi, you'll be safe there, we'll leave you there. Of course, that wasn't the case, then they all come west even further.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: And I mean, ironically, this whole thing is being perpetuated by Europeans who fled an oppressive system themselves.
Peg O'Connor: Exactly right.
Julian Bermudez: And so this idea of if you don't like it here, you can just leave, or if I don't like it here, then I'll just go somewhere else. The pro I mean, we got people right now who are saying we need to go to Mars to flee the problems of the Earth. The the problems are gonna follow us. They always do. It's one of those things that we have to address. And you know, Rupert
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: Sheldrake, this really interesting scientist, biologist, he was in what he calls morphic resonance, formative causation. This idea that nature doesn't abide by fixed constants. And he gives lots of examples of it's like the speed of light has fluctuated and changed constantly all through the times that we've been recording it. But we stick to this idea that it has to be this way. And that it's always this way. But I think exactly to your point, what you were just saying a minute ago is just because things are this way doesn't mean that they always have been this way or that they always will be this way. And so Sheldrake argues that rather than these fixed constants that nature actually acts inhabits. And in patterns, which is very similar to what in a lot of native cultures would talk about, specifically the seven generation prophecy or the rainbow people, which is we are in a pattern right now of destruction, of suffering. And through the course of this pattern of pain and suffering, is it's going to awaken the indigenous mentality. Of every single person, because everybody is indigenous to this world in some way or another.
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: And this is going to create a new people who come back to the balance of Earth. So again, it's these patterns, these cycles of the the you might call it the precision of the equinox, the moving through the celestial bodies of the world around us. Certain things come, certain things go. And
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: it's up to us to pay very close attention to where we're at in those and what ability do we have. to navigate and participate in this.
Peg O'Connor: Right. And what control do we have over those cycles? And I'm not sure how much control we have over those cycles. We have maybe some control within those cycles, but not them not necessarily over those cycles, and that's a big difference. and and and and I I wanna believe Like in that kind of trajectory, you know, that things have cycles and we're in a certain cycle, and then we'll reach a point and maybe something new will emerge. And I wanna believe that. And I know that even I, who am biggest optimist in the world, struggle with that because it seems to me right now that there's just such growing disparities between the well-being of some. in the well-being of others, that there's such a fundamental inequality that I think that really skews those cycles. You know, I d I don't know. I mean, to think about, you know, the growing wealth gap and how many people are being left behind. And as we think about artificial intelligence and how that's just supercharging everything. I just don't know. And then I also want to say, but what an amazing time we're living in. And
Julian Bermudez: Mm-hmm.
Peg O'Connor: we always need to keep our eye on the fact that everything isn't just happening around us and we're here, but that we're part of it and we can choose how we're a part of it and what we what we pay attention to or where we decide to focus and you know try to extend our connection. in energy. And and I think that people will make those decisions in ways that work for them. But I just hope that people know they get and deserve to make those kinds of decisions.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah, precisely. It's so easy to say it's all so big. All these things that are happening are just so big and powerful, and I'm so small, and there's not much I can do in it. And you know, perhaps coincidentally, that's exactly what those people who are in power want us to think and feel is that we're hopeless, we're powerless, we're small, and there's nothing we can do.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.
Julian Bermudez: But We do have a lot of ability to navigate. We make decisions every single day. And every decision, no matter how small we are, does affect the world around us. And so yeah, I my goal is just I really want to make it. Cool and desirable and safe to be intelligent and not just like mentally intelligent, like your Elon Musk, who's I can send the rockets to Mars and stuff like that. He's intelligent from the shoulders up. There's no emotional intelligence. There's no intelligence of the heart.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah.
Julian Bermudez: He's completely disconnected from it. It's all fear and control. I want to make it cool to be emotionally intelligent and connected again. And I think that the more and more people who are tuning into this. The more that we see these changes happening, those systems of power and control that we see, they only really carry power when people consent to it. And it's kind of like in the matrix where every single person is offered a choice, even if it's an unconscious choice, to
Peg O'Connor: Uh-huh.
Julian Bermudez: participate in the system. We all have that. And we can all start to take steps to withdraw from it. I'm curious, Peg, what do you think are some things that we can do as individuals? Individuals to enact said changes, one in our own personal lives and ideally two on a collective social level.
Peg O'Connor: So I'll I'll start with an obvious one given we're in election season. we need to vote. I mean that our our politics our a driving force, I think, in how we see the world and experience the world and the kind of political polarization. If you have the right to vote, you ought to exercise it because one of the things we've seen is that too many people have had that fundamental right stripped from them if they've got a felony conviction, for example. So voting is a responsibility. I would say vote. I would say pay close attention to the people around you. and never take them for granted and try to become more attuned to what their needs are and how they're suffering. And start local that Big changes can happen incrementally. Everything isn't just a revolution or everything isn't that sudden paradigm shift. That, as you said, we can do things. We do have agency, but we have to direct our attention and our focus and then have a willingness to act. And there are just so many ways and so many different things that we can do. And to instead of saying, you know, why me? Why do I have to do this? To be able to say, well, why not me? And I get to do this. Because for me, there's nothing better than making connections. Like we're making this connection here. We had this intentional discussion beforehand about how, you know, we wanted this to go organically. And I think that The opposite of indifference, like we talked about, is love. And so how do we spread love? Well, we've got to learn how to love ourselves. And you know, that love has to be efficacious. It isn't just an emotion. It's a matter of an emotion that's paired with action, that we actually show our love. We don't just express our love. How do we learn how to show our love in very real, tangible kinds of ways? And as I said, Including to ourselves. I think that's a starting point. Start with your own inner house.
Julian Bermudez: So mu so many people want to go straight to changing the world and changing society and without of course tending to your own house. It's kind of like being on a plane and it starts to go down and you want to put everybody else's mask on first. It it doesn't work. I've worked with so many people who start to see the intergenerational patterns that have gone through their family and have landed to them and that they've
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: given to their kids or to their grandkids, even. And a lot of the times they have this moment, it's so common where they kind of sit back and they go, it's just so big. Why me?
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: And then shortly after, that shifts and they go, It's so big. And I'm making changes in this giant pattern. My ancestors, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all carried this. And now my children or grandchildren even have some version of this. And right now I'm making changes in that pattern. And it might be, it might appear to be small right now, but
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: That small change, I always say to them, what would it have looked like? What do you think the effect would have been if your parents or your grandparents would have done what you're doing right now? How would that have affected your life? And the answer is always,
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Julian Bermudez: my gosh, things would be so different. So yeah, we can make these little changes. The pattern might be so big and so powerful, and we might be so small and why me? But it's also just like you said, yeah, it is me. I have the ability, I have the capacity, I'm alive right now, I'm in this, and I have the capacity to engage with it and to make choices and changes in that. And we have incredible power in that. And how fantastic and wonderful is that and inspiring in lots of ways.
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm. I I think it's so inspiring, particularly for people who have always felt nothing they do matters or they can never do enough, to
Julian Bermudez: Mm.
Peg O'Connor: have that insight where they see that something they have done has had a direct effect and a direct good effect. And the kind of joy seems too almost frivolous a word here, but that kind of deep joy to be able to see and acknowledge that I can do something. And so one of the ways that philosopher William James describes faith. Faith is just a willingness to live on maybes and possibilities where the results aren't guaranteed in advance. But you've got to act. And he goes on to say, your faith helps to make facts. And so the faith that what I do right here and right now, I'm not sure, but I'm doing it with good intention. I've you know, I'm making a good choice here Could it go wrong? Of course it could, because we don't control the results of our actions. But I still have to act, I still have to do something, and I need to keep doing that throughout my entire life. And that is that when we start to see that we can do smaller things, we our actions have more localized effect. Well, it turns out if we, you know, zoom out, if we pan back some, you know, we'll never have the benefit perhaps of that perspective, but the repercussions can be quite big. So you know, just because you can't do everything, it doesn't follow that you don't have to do anything. You still should be doing something. You you cannot just be passive, nor can you just be someone who takes and benefits without helping to pull on the oar so we're all rowing in the right direction. And we get to do that, and that's the thing. It isn't just that it's work, it's a burden, but It is a joy and an acknowledgement of our humanity when we realize that we can make important changes. And for people who have had their humanity, you know, suffocated or had it snuffed out or just, you know, trampled or steeped in shame, to be able to say, I did this and I made a difference is Absolutely your world will tilt on its axis and there'll be nothing better.
Julian Bermudez: Isn't that the truth, Peg? It's so easy to fall into the nihilism and the everything's so big and nothing matters and I don't matter, which is so common and especially in in scientific philosophy of the universe is so big it doesn't care about you whatsoever. But if we could say, well, I am here and I do get to participate in this. And I do matter on some level. I matter on resources that I consume. I matter on what I contribute to the people around me. I matter on If I take my dog for a walk today, there's emotions that are can that are felt here and that are experienced that radiate
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: into the immediate environment around me. It ma I matter if I can plant an oak tree across the street and in ten years there's squirrels or other birds and animals that are living in there. I can make a big difference. And it's not I have to do this. It's life can become very exciting. Yeah, and the the word that you were talking about when you were just talking about joy earlier, the thing that comes to my mind is like a zest, an exuberance, a bliss for life. Like Joseph
Peg O'Connor: Mm. Yeah. Yep.
Julian Bermudez: Campbell talks about. Follow your bliss. Find that feeling of engaging and participating with life, of that real yes, that zest of I'm doing this. And I don't think that we find it when we're just scrolling on our phones or getting sucked into social media or consuming all the
Peg O'Connor: No, no.
Julian Bermudez: politics and the news out there. It's when we're engaging with the world around us and the people around us and the feelings and emotions and beliefs that we hold on ourselves. Here we're very powerful and we can make a very big difference.
Peg O'Connor: I I love the term zest and I think all those things of scrolling on TikTok or online betting or, you know, addictions and other kinds of escapes from reality make us incapable of feeling zest. We we d we wouldn't know zest if it came and knocked us upside the head. Because so much of the way the world is organized, it's to dull us and You know, we we think that boredom is the worst possible thing ever. And it can feel like a torment, but being overly busy is a torment of another sort. So sometimes in the quiet of when you think you're bored is actually when your mind might be able to take flight because it isn't just overwhelmed by all these distractions and bells and whistles. And so when those quiet moments come, are you able to hear them and respect them? And I think that becomes harder. and harder to do, the busier we become and the more overstimulated we become. But to be able to just sit quietly with your own self for even 30 seconds now seems like an act of rebellion. It really does. And so I'm
Julian Bermudez: It really is.
Peg O'Connor: all for that rebellion. Put the phones away, put the podcasts away after you listen to this one, of course. And just kind of be present to what is going on around you. You'll notice things that you wouldn't otherwise. Wow.
Julian Bermudez: Yeah. That's that's a practice that I help people with immediately. Five minutes,
Peg O'Connor: Yeah.
Julian Bermudez: three times a day, sit, no screens, no noise, and just turn your attention inward and just try to notice what's present, what feelings, what tensions, constrictions. And yeah, boredom is something that I've struggled with in the past, still do to this day. and I think a lot of people do. And it's so easy to just get consumed by the noise and the I've gotta do all the things. But yeah, when you can be quiet and still and just listen. so many things can be heard. There's so much happening right around you. And I go
Peg O'Connor: Mm-hmm.
Julian Bermudez: in I go out to this river and I free dive in it. It's so beautiful. And when I'm floating down the river, just like on a paddleboard going to one of my dive spots,
Peg O'Connor: Mm.
Julian Bermudez: there's just always people just screaming or they got their, you know, their big boom boxes. Just the bass just constantly going. And
Peg O'Connor: Woohoo.
Julian Bermudez: it's just like it's like a nightclub. And You know, it's crazy how I go I mean it's a rural place. there's not a lot of people around here, but they will bring the city all the way out into the deepest parts of nature and yeah, finding that quiet. Yeah, to you know.
Peg O'Connor: Yeah. To have the noise. To have the noise. So what does it mean to kinda befriend to invite and befriend quiet? It's terrifying for people. It's terrifying for so many people. But when you befriend it,
Julian Bermudez: And that's where the magic's at.
Peg O'Connor: yeah. Yeah. And you have to be patient with patient with yourself. It's like you said, start out in small increments and it could be just p put the phone away for thirty seconds. However it is, however you do it, but yeah, invite and then befriend that silence because there's so much to learn in it.
Julian Bermudez: That's where life speaks.
Peg O'Connor: Mm. And we just have to learn how to listen to it.
Julian Bermudez: And so many people are disconnected from that right now. I think if we could on an individual level start to cultivate that ability to just turn inward and listen to what's being voiced, what tensions, constrictions, and pains are there, and what's the message? What's the teaching here? What's the lesson? We would start to see how we're contributing to these things and how we can participate in them. And so much wisdom and knowledge gets communicated there. All of it's inside of us, and it'll tell us exactly what to do.
Peg O'Connor: Yep. If only we can listen. So there's our challenge. To learn how to listen. And be patient
Julian Bermudez: That's right.
Peg O'Connor: with ourselves. Yeah. this has been great, Julian. I have loved this conversation.
Julian Bermudez: Likewise, Peg. We're we are really at time here too. man, that
Peg O'Connor: We are.
Julian Bermudez: this time just flew. I would talk to you all day. When when you reach when you
Peg O'Connor: I talked to you too.
Julian Bermudez: reached out and I looked at some of the stuff you've put out there, I thought, wow, this is one I'm really looking forward to. so
Peg O'Connor: Well, me too, having listened to some of your podcasts. So I mean again, here's the connection. It's it's reaching out, it's expanding and just I would say flourishing in in hearing new perspectives and and perspectives I think I know a lot about reframed in new ways. I mean, what what a joy. So thank you.
Julian Bermudez: Peg, where if for people who are listening, where can people find you, your work, any books that you've put out? Where's where's the websites or loc locations?
Peg O'Connor: So the best place to go to is my website, pegoconnor author dot com. So I've got several books on philosophy and addiction, and I'm someone who wants to argue that moral philosophy has an important place at the table in discussion of addiction and recovery, talking about things like self-respect and flourishing. so I've got several books, but I also have a whole lot of pieces that I've been writing for the last ten to fifteen years. I write for psychology today, even though I'm a philosopher, they let me play along. And a lot of those pieces are up there and there's other kinds of material like this ready to recover quiz. If you know you have a problem with an addiction, but you're not yet willing and ready to recover, how do you start to identify where you are in the gap between those two, which can be a special torment? That's there for free. But most importantly, there's a contact button there. You can reach me via email, and and I promise if you email me, I will always respond to you because I I'm honored to hear from people. I I love learning about people and thinking with them and just making these connections because I think recovery for me is about just expanding and growing. And I get to do that when I get to meet people that I wouldn't otherwise. So that that's the best way, is my website.
Julian Bermudez: Peg, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really glad we got to connect.
Peg O'Connor: I'm so glad we got to c connect. So thank you for accepting my invitation to, you know, have this discussion. I appreciate it.