Dr. Robert Waldinger

You don't.

And it's kind of amorphous.

It's like you don't, I mean, you more quietly would pride yourself.

Oh, I have some good friends, right?

I have a good partner.

I have good relationships with my kids.

But you don't really shout that from the rooftops.

You don't put it on your resume when you're applying for a job, right?

It's not a badge of achievement.

Yeah.

I mean, actually, one of my Zen colleagues who's a Zen teacher says that, in fact, all this striving for badges of achievement is really trying to make ourselves feel more real when the idea of a separate independent self is just a fiction.

Yeah.

But we all do it.

And I think one argument is it's because deep down we're all kind of afraid that there isn't much to us.

And I don't mean that we're bad or we're inadequate.

It means that we're not quite real because this is a Zen thing now.

But Zen teaches that there's no such thing as a separate, isolated self that's unchanging and goes through time.

Okay.

The idea is that we are completely interconnected.

You have more bacteria cells in your body than you have your own body cells.