Ashlyn Harris
speaker
188 appearances
15 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Ashlyn Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Deny people social connection and put people in a state of deep uncertainty about the future and add into that political polarization, the noxious impacts of social media, which we were just talking about, war, climate change. And you have a very tough situation for individual minds.
I'm projecting a little bit here and guessing, but I sometimes think there's a difference between what people perceive to be the source of their stress or anxiety and what actually is driving it. So we might fasten on to things that are real for sure. I mean, like work stress, economics.
So there can be stress about the state of your job and then economic stress about the larger state of the economy. There's increasing stress around inequality and bigotry, increasing awareness of it. So the question is, are those the proximate causes for your stress, or could there be subterranean contributors that you might not be aware of?
So I think today's media environment, particularly social media, and I'm not anti-social media. We just talked about the fact that I recently went on it. But I think there are aspects of social media we need to be aware of. And too much comparing yourself to other people is, as you've talked about, the source. It's a really good source of unhappiness and stress.
I think also if you're spending too much time staring at a screen, two things can happen. One, you can get a distorted view of the state of the world because the algorithms feed off of conflict and anger and outrage and anger. They feed our anxiety. And then the other thing is the more you're staring at the screen, the less time you're spending connecting to actual human beings.
So I think this is the deepest contributor. We are, and this is to state the obvious, social animals. You hear this in every TED Talk. I think I said it in my own TED Talk, so I'm like deeply unoriginal here. We are social animals. We're designed to interact with other human beings. And yet everything about modern life militates against this basic, obvious fact.
Everything drives us into our own information silos, into curating our own resumes and working on our own little homes. And all that can be beautiful. But when you overlook... what we need, that is going to create stress and anxiety. And you might think it is observable things out in the world, and it probably is those things, too.
But I just wonder for many people whether it's this deeper contributor that they're not looking at.
One of the things that I really try to do in my work is move away from abstractions or cliches or big ideas and get really practical about how you can actually act on these things. Because it's easy to scroll on Instagram or read a book or hear a TED Talk and you hear these inspirational notions like we're built for connection and we need belonging and you need to invest in relationships.
And then what do you do about it?
And so I think about that a lot. And I think you just gave us an example. You made a deep friendship 18 years ago, but it's not enough to just have a connection with somebody. You need to invest in it over and over and over again. That's true for any level of deep relationship. It's true, I would imagine, with your wife.
I mean, you've written a whole book about this, so I'm not talking to you like you don't know what you're talking about. But I just think you're giving a great, concrete example of one little thing you can do, which is... Figure out who you like and then make an investment in that person and hopefully a few other people consistently over time because the rewards are huge.
And this isn't just like a nice to have. I know you're familiar with this research, but the study that comes up for me all the time is this study that was done that's still ongoing at Harvard University. It's overseen now by Robert Waldinger. And the idea is.
that they've been following several generations of people who live in the Boston area to see what contributes to a long life, longevity, health, happiness. And what comes screaming out of 80, 90 years of data is that the people who live the longest have strong relationships. And what's the mechanism for that? Stress is what kills us. You started this whole conversation with the idea of stress.
Stress is what kills us most of the time. And the best way to reduce stress is to have positive relationships. Waldinger has this great expression, never worry alone. And that's what you're doing three times a week with your buddy.
And there are obviously things you can talk to your wife about, of course, but the whole, and again, again, you know all of this, but you can't, you can't, your wife can't be the alpha and omega. Your wife can't be everything to you. And again, there's data to support this contention too, that the strongest,
marriages or romantic relationships uh in those relationships the the participants have other relationships that support it you know that that you're getting certain needs filled through your best friend um and yeah so i just go back to what you said that that seems to be a direction that people can move in when they're trying to think about how to operationalize this stuff in their own life
First of all, you said this thing about how you have struggled with social media. I just want to... ad that I have too.
I mean, I just started, as we've discussed, and I can't tell you how many times I've gotten sucked into either scrolling and looking at things that, I mean, I could be talking to my child during that time, or, and this is even more embarrassing, compulsively checking back to see how a specific video is performing. And so, yeah, I don't come to this conversation with any superiority.
I also think, and I will get to some things that have been useful for me, but I also want to say that I'm not against social media. I think there are beautiful aspects to it. I think there are also very difficult aspects, and we can talk about that if you want. But it is popular not only for the negative aspects for it.
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