Daniel Coyle

It's very easy.

It's a modern experience, I think, to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering.

And we've come to a, I don't know, I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalized, that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines.

But what it looks like is isolation.

What it looks like is loneliness.

What it looks like is anxiety and depression, I think, in the end.

When we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning, without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language, without mattering, we're hollowed out.

It is a core need of us to be in community, in and growing.

And the litmus test that I use informally is like two questions.

Who do you feel most alive with?

Where do you feel most alive?

And what are you growing with someone?

What project are you working on that's creating something new in the world that maybe wasn't there before?

And if you can answer those questions and say, I feel alive here and here, and these are the projects I'm working on, then that's beautiful.

That's very human thing to be feeling that.

But if there isn't a part or a relationship in which you feel alive, or if there isn't a

project in which you feel like you're growing something meaningful that matters i think that's what our world sometimes can create i think it creates a profound hollowness that i think we all to one extent or another feel and the deeper challenge of it is that there's a trillion dollar economy of really smart people that are trying to pull us into that world that really

only make money if people are isolated and a little ticked off community neighborhood meaningful connection is not what pays the bills for those guys they would much rather have people typing angry things to each other and i think we're learning that it feels maybe your podcast is part of it but it feels like and it might be me because i'm writing about this topic so it's like

When you buy a Toyota Corolla, you just see a lot of Corollas on the road.

So I may be totally biased here, but it feels like there's a bit of a humanist revival that people now are understanding what's happening in the algorithmic world, right?