Derek Thompson

What's alienation?

To a certain extent, I feel like what you're calling alienation

I think of as the ability to maintain a connection with your inner values in a world that's constantly trying to pull you away and replace those values with some other value system.

So we had this conversation with the philosopher C.T.

Nguyen that you and I talked about that I thought was really interesting and so well connected to this show.

That was about the degree to which

We come into this world with our own set of values and constantly there are metric systems and quantification systems and external bureaucracies that are trying to replace our inner values with an external set of values.

Is that close to what you are calling here alienation?

The challenge of how do I make sure that I stay in touch with my own thoughts as I make my way through life?

Another way, I think, to get at this concept of alienation that I found really, really interesting from your book is there's this idea from, I believe, the Czech psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

And this idea is called flow.

And it's experience that people have when they're playing video games, when they're playing sports, when they're playing, you know, having a great conversation at dinner table with friends.

Where past anxiety and future anxiety and...

reminiscence, like it all melts away and you are entirely enmeshed in the here and now.

That's what he's calling flow and he thinks of it as one of the higher states of being.

You referenced this idea that was co-named by, I believe, the psychologist Paul Bloom of shitty flow, which is the experience of, say, doom scrolling for 30 minutes or being on Netflix and looking for something to watch for 20 minutes and not actually watching anything.

And it's interesting because in shitty flow, time is also melting away.

It's just not melting away in the direction that you would want it to melt.

It's melting away from you.

So maybe talk a little bit about this idea of flow versus shitty flow, because I thought it was one of the more fun ideas from the book.