Benjamin (Ben) Rogers

speaker

286 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Benjamin (Ben) Rogers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Hidden Brain · You Are Not Ordinary · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

In fact, I figured I'd join the corporate world and maybe become a consultant or do other types of things.

But shortly before I headed off to college, I had what I look at now as a really profound moment of shift.

Right before I headed off to orientation, my mom got really sick and had what we thought was appendicitis.

Over time, over the next month or two, we quickly realized that she had stage four pancreatic cancer.

And within just my first freshman year at college, she passed away from the disease.

And as someone who had never really experienced death before and had had by all other measures a pretty fortunate life, this was obviously something I was ill-equipped to deal with and was something that I needed to figure out.

And that, while I didn't know it at the time, was really my quest in college.

My studies were going fine and I was making friends.

But looking back on it, I was really lost.

I really needed to figure out how to deal with this profound change in my life.

And like many of the hero's journeys that we had talked about, I wanted to refuse the call.

I didn't want to change as a result of this experience because I really didn't want this experience to have happened again.

And so I wanted to put it away into a box and not have to return to it.

But what I realized over time was I needed to deal with it.

I needed to find some sort of broader sense of meaning.

And that really became something that I came back to time and time again in college.

And with the friends that I made in college and I actually met my wife while I was an undergrad at UT Austin, they helped me sort of realize that this was a very important thing in my life and this was a challenge that I really needed to face.

The way I ended up transforming as a result of it is I ended up, after a short career in terms of consulting, realized that I actually felt a grander calling.

I wanted to go back and do academic research to understand a little bit more about how people deal with things such as this.

I very quickly gravitated towards meaning research and narrative research as a way to find meaning.

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