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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it. And especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.
On this episode, a wide ranging conversation with Maria Popova about science and poetry, about how to make meaning in an indifferent universe, and about the value of dreaming.
How incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.
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You've seen the headlines. Technology is reshaping nearly every part of our daily lives. But have you stopped to consider what it's doing to your body? I'm Elise Hugh, host of TED Talks Daily, and this week we're taking a closer, more personal look at how tech is changing the way we think, feel, and physically experience the world around us.
Manoush Zomorodi is taking over as guest host to interview scientists, doctors, artists, parents, and more to explore your body on tech. Learn how to live a healthier, more grounded life in this high-tech era by listening to these talks and special conversations, only on TED Talks Daily, wherever you get your podcasts.
Maria Popova is a writer and reader who was born and raised in Bulgaria during the final years of communism. At 19, she immigrated alone to the United States, worked multiple jobs while attending the University of Pennsylvania, and began sending a weekly email to a handful of friends containing the most interesting things she had discovered that week.
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Chapter 2: How did Maria Popova's early life shape her perspective on creativity?
We don't live internally on those timelines. We don't. The inner life is not a hamster wheel. And also, partly, I was putting it out into the world and I was very conscious of I, as a person, don't enjoy clickbait and ads and snippet kind of shallow things. Why would I perpetrate that on other people if I'm making something in the world? Why not make the world we want to live in?
Your work is a refuge for people seeking depth and meaning online. And as the site eventually became more and more and more influential, you resisted all traditional models of monetization and growth. What have you been trying to protect in doing that?
My faith in humanity. In what way? Fundamentally people are generous and people are hungry for meaning and when we value something We show it. I really believe that. We don't need the middleman of advertising to turn us into data points and eyeballs in order to show someone else how much we value some kind of sellable commodity.
And I thought it's already a reward enough for me to do this, to read and to write and to try to learn how to live. I'm still learning how to live 20 years in. You know, that's why I write. And I already have my reward. If other people find it valuable, then they should decide how much they value it and in what way. I should not enforce that or sell it. You can't sell meaning.
After 15 years of publishing as Brain Pickings, you renamed the site to Marginalian. I was very happy. Marginalia is one of my favorite concepts and undertakings. Why had the original title stopped feeling truthful for you?
Oh, it's so gross. It's so gross.
I mean, just as a PS, I can't stand it when people ask if they can pick my brain.
Can you imagine when people ask me if they could pick my brain? They must be like, she started that word. No, I mean, you have to... Take into account the fact that in Bulgarian, we don't really have wordplay and puns. It just doesn't quite exist, this notion, this use of language. So when I came here, I was really excited about it. These kind of strange idioms and wordplay.
And I will say also, I studied multiple things in college in addition to communication arts. I also studied psychology and was very interested in neuroscience. And I am not proud to say I was a kind of neo-Curtisian. I really thought the mind is all there is. How we think is who we are.
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Chapter 3: How does Maria define creativity and its relationship to the self?
We cannot imagine what it was like to live in Kepler's day. Right. A time when Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. People lived to 40. There was no knowledge of genetics and hygiene and human rights. I mean, unimaginable world. This is just like a handful of things.
And I don't write biography, but I write highly biographically informed, I guess, portraits of the traits of those people that speak to me and that entwine with the traits of the other people involved. These books are each a kind of tapestry with these different lives woven together to paint a larger picture of something else, right, that's not about the people.
And I do think the responsibility of the writer speaking for and about someone else cannot be overestimated.
Does living inside these minds for as long as you do impact your own consciousness? Yes.
Oh, absolutely. I think we are all, to some extent, very porous. And I think the more sensitive a person, the more absorbent they are of the tone and way of seeing and way of worlding that another mind has, right? And so for me, spending seven years with Mary Shelley and Whitman, They taught me how to see. They taught me how to feel. Of course, of course. And then I miss them.
I mean, the most tragic thing about these books for me is that when I'm done writing them, I mean, I've been living with these people daily, right? When I'm done writing them, I feel this tremendous absence and grief. It's like a real person left.
I know how I'm impacted by doing research for a podcast and the weeks that I spend preparing, how that changes me, how that influences me. And in many ways, the research influences me more. more than even the conversations because I'm just able to take in everything that they're saying and thinking without having the responsibility to respond or to figure out what I want to ask next.
I can just, as you said, porous and take it all in. I can't imagine what living with characters for seven years does to you.
Well, you know, it's interesting because that's a bit of a chicken and egg or a self-selection issue because, I mean, you do, you started Design Matters in order to learn how creative people orchestrate and govern their lives, right? So there is a kind of hunger to be modeled different ways of seeing, different ways of being, to be inspired.
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Chapter 4: What role does wonder play in Maria's work and life?
And so, of course, that will feed you even more than the conversation. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think that the one thing that does keep me going, even when I'm feeling burnout or strain, stress, etc., is this endless fascination with how people create their lives. Not just their art, but how they choose to live in the world. And I also feel like you do that a lot in your work, which is what keeps me coming back to reading it every day.
But the comforting thing about the dead, who are my subject, yours is the living or not my forte. The comforting, greatly comforting thing about the dead is that they can choose your dead by virtue of their lives being foreclosed, meaning they can't surprise you. They can't suddenly turn out to be total assholes, you know.
With sufficient information and biographical records, we have a pretty good sense of who someone was in their life, in the world. And something about the finality of their life, the notion that you can have it down. I mean, you can never, of course, understand what it's like to be anyone else. It's so misleading. But there is a comfort to me to kind of know how their lives turned out.
Wow. But what do you do when you find contradictory information where one interpretation might fly in the face of another interpretation and you have to figure out what the actual truth is?
Well, first of all, I don't believe we can ever figure out what the truth of a person is. It's often obscure to the person themselves, right? With biographies, I just always go to the primary source material. I mean, these biographers took it from somewhere, right? So I would go and find the surviving notebooks and diaries and letters, which are, of course, incomplete and also self-mythologizing.
I mean, some people... And a big part of why I chose some of the people in Traversal, particularly Whitman and Frederick Douglass, is that they were tremendous self-mythologizers. For all the good that they did, they also co-created their own myth, right? And that comes through even in the diaries and letters of people.
But you go as close to the bone as you can, as the death of the flesh allows, you've
Thank you so much for having me. These books don't simplify existential ideas so much as render them emotionally accessible. What do you think children understand about reality that adults often forget or miss entirely?
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Chapter 5: What insights does Maria share about the impact of technology on our lives?
And then I have hubristically taken credit for it as conscious decisions.
Yeah. And you also write that anything you polish with attention becomes a mirror. And I'm wondering what has sustained attention taught you about yourself?
That the world beyond myself is far more interesting than the self. You know, I mean, I say this playfully, but also not, I think, our most rewarding experiences. You asked about wonder. Wonder is only possible in a moment of unselfing. Talk about what that means.
That means, I mean, it's a term I've borrowed from Iris Murdoch, who used it as a kind of aside in an essay about what nature and art do for us. She called them occasions for unselfing.
where this illusory package of narrative and interpretation and memory that we call a self comes disbanded for a little moment and the world comes in, the world, the otherness of the world, and also the belonging with that otherness. I think the self is such a tedious place.
We live in it, and especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.
You have described the unconscious as possessing secret knowledge that the analytical mind cannot access. Yes. Does that have any connection to selfing or unselfing?
I think what we call self is mostly the conscious self, the one doing the narrating of who we are. And the unconscious self is who governs how we conduct ourselves a lot of the time without us realizing it.
How do you become more aware of those two storylines?
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