Sarah Haider
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sarah Haider’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Definitely. Well, it was less of leaving the religion, which generally just left me with a sense of skepticism of religion. what I know and feeling very passionate about open discourse, civil liberties, freedom of speech and thought issues in general, because that was, I often thought about, you know, when I was young, what would have happened if I had just been raised in Pakistan?
What if my parents had never left and come to the United States? Would I have stayed religious for, you know, maybe forever? Maybe I would have never really left. Maybe I wouldn't have had the exposure to contradictory, like, viewpoints and perspectives. And maybe it might have been difficult for me to question. And I might have not come to those conclusions at the age that I did.
And so I value... what we have here. And I think of it from the perspective of an immigrant, which is that until I got my citizenship, which was kind of late in the game for me, I had always thought about the fact that I could be leaving, that this might not have been my permanent home.
So I held all these things that we have in the United States, the Western world more broadly, but I think in particular here, and I just cherish them so much. And I, you know, hold them as like these precious things that can be taken away from me at any moment. I just haven't shed that sense.
And I think that that's sort of the broad understanding that kind of anxiety that fuels the things that I tend to focus on now.
Like, I mean, it's cliche to talk about, but like cancel culture in general, you know, that kind of intolerance towards upsetting viewpoints, censorship on the internet, even for good reasons. I don't know how much the left cares as much about, I think they have a different perception on freedom of speech than they used to, on censorship than they used to.
So that led to a rift between me and other people I knew around me and then the culture at large.
Anytime we found ourselves getting too close to a prescriptive discussion, and that was often something that I fell into. I can't help it. I'm an activist. So I always seek, okay, here's this problem that we're having. What's the solution? Here's the solution. So people should do X. And I would voice it. I would voice how I felt about it. And that would lead to trouble.
I think there was a discussion on divorce that I regretted for such reasons, for these reasons that we've been discussing. I think the lead off to our discussion in that episode might have been this piece that was published by British Phetasy about her experience growing up in a divorced home. I think it was she and her brother that were growing up as children in a divorced family.
And she talked about how they had no attention from either of their parents who were very involved in their new lives that they were trying to build. I think she described herself as kind of a feral child, but just that they were just off on their own. without a lot of parental supervision, and that led her into a lot of trouble.
You know, drugs, not paying attention much to school, that kind of thing. And then there were, you know, some other people agreeing with her, talking about their stories in a similar environment. And so that led to a broader discussion of divorce and our conception of marriage. And that whole saying, stay together for the kids, that has been, for very good reasons...
not something that we recommend so much anymore and we push back on. But our kind of spice it'll take was maybe there is like a logic to it that is pretty important because these are young people.
And people were very upset. Yeah. Yeah, that is what I was saying. That is what I was saying. And I recognized as I was saying it that there are going to be a lot of people very mad at me. And I get it. I get why they're mad. Because here's a stranger who knows nothing about their particular circumstances.
I can't possibly know the details, the nuances of their challenges and why they made the particular decision that they made. And yet I am giving this... kind of a broad prescriptive opinion.
It's hard not to have that feeling of frustration at being misunderstood, but it's just, it feels so personal because I'm talking about personal things. I'm making recommendations about how people should live their lives, their real life. I'm not making a political comment. I'm making a very personal comment. And it understandably leads to very personal exchanges afterwards.
And when I get blowback, it tends to be very personal too. And I think partially because it was a conversation that I was having. It was my voice. We released videos of it, so there was videos of me out there too. It felt like it was a lot more of a personal capture of who I actually am that they were reacting to. And I think that might have been why it was a little bit harder to shake off.
Um... I'm not one of those people who does drugs recreationally very much. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Not that I'm judging. Not that I'm saying you shouldn't do it if you want to. But it's just never really appealed to me too much.
I drink socially. There were times in my life where I drank a little bit more when I was in my early 20s and going out a lot. I usually don't do marijuana. It has this paradoxical reaction with me. It makes me more nauseous rather than less nauseous. So it's just not that pleasant of an experience.
I tried magic mushrooms in college, but it was a very small amount and it didn't affect me very much. That's the totality of my drug experience.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember. There were conversations happening mostly on Twitter, on some other places as well, on my private chats with people. But there were some conversations happening about specifically ayahuasca as something that could one-shot people. Have you ever heard of this phrase?
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