Olga Khazan
speaker
118 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Olga Khazan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But it was sort of just like, It's okay. Like nothing bad is really happening right now. You're literally sitting in a room in your house on a cushion, like meditating. But you kind of have – you still have your same negative, you know, strong emotions if you're someone who's prone to neuroticism. But it – I don't know. It just lets you like –
kind of not be as thrown off by them or like, because bad things are still, I mean, my meditation teacher would say this all the time, like things happen that you don't like, which is like very simple, but it's like, oh yeah. And like, you're just, you're gonna have to deal with that for the rest of your life. And it's all about,
you know, do you, you know, your mom, you mentioned is like, so not neurotic. I'm sure bad things happen to her, but she thinks about them in a, like somehow more Zen way than the average person. I'd love to know her secret.
This lasted a year.
Um, I honestly only had a year of book leave. So it was just like June of 2022 to June of 2023. Okay, cool.
So in some ways, but not in others. Since I did that, I had a baby. And that necessarily like changes a lot. about how you're thinking about things um especially in the beginning but i would say that there are still a lot of things that i carried through into even my life as a i guess i'm still a new parent technically um so one example is like just reaching out to other moms um so it's a very um
stressful time when you first have a baby. Like it just is. There's no getting around it. You don't know what you're doing and they're very tiny and they cannot speak to you. And so you're just like, what do you want? So I kind of made a point of reaching out to other moms and like I'm in a mom's group that's been really supportive. I also just like
Really, really try to even in day to day life, if I meet another mom with kids the same age, I really try to like reach out and at least see if she's open to the possibility of friendship. And sometimes that means that I and this is not something I would have done previously. I actually do a lot of reaching out. repeatedly.
So like if someone let's say I reach out to someone and they're like, yeah, let's have coffee and we have coffee and we both have a good time. I and then some time elapses and no one follows up. I might reach out again, even though it was me the last time too. And then I might do that like a third time. Like there are some relationships where I'm just always the person who
organizes things and that used to really bother me like I was like that person doesn't want to be friends like I'm going to move on because they're not putting in equal effort into organizing things and like I don't I don't want that but I kind of just realized through this that like everyone has stuff going on and like People just don't think about things the same way.
They are maybe swamped in other ways. They're maybe not as comfortable with reaching out. I don't know. It just made me a lot less sensitive, I guess, about these rules of social interaction that I had previously thought were like iron like laws, you know? So that's been one thing that I've noticed.
Like yesterday we went on a play date to this woman who I like barely knew just because I was like, I'm really bored. And if I have to like sing Baby Beluga one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. So I was like, let's go over to Yuchen's house. And yeah, that's what we did. And it was great, you know? So I don't know.
I know. I'm not very competent or capable as it is. But I will say that I think that doing this experiment helped me decide to have a baby.
Like it helped me get more comfortable with the idea of having a baby. Yeah.
Like you end up, you end up Googling. Don't worry about that stuff. Don't, don't worry about it right now. It's honestly, you will, you will be Googling. You will Google. The internet has answers. You Google everything. No one knows any of this stuff before they start.
My advice for people in their 20s is that it's okay to just pursue what you want. You don't have to do something that seems practical or like what other people want you to do or just because you've always been doing it. It's a time of life when you can completely pick the thing that is your biggest goal, the thing you most want in the world, and just go at it with full force.
That's what I would recommend doing.
Yeah. So our website is theatlantic.com. And I'm a writer there. You can find me and all my brilliant colleagues there. And you can find my book, which is called Me But Better, wherever books are sold.
Showing 101–118 of 118 · page 6 of 6
← Previous