Certainty is Boring

plus, when is it time to stop drinking?

Oct 18, 2024

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First: a sad update after my enthusiastic embrace of all things fall in last week’s newsletter.

My first night home from family vacation, as I was hurriedly trying to get the kids into bed before they turned into excessive time zone change zombies, I brought the full weight of my left foot down on something awkwardly shaped and sharp that was on the floor next to my daughter’s bed.

I injured myself on a mini pumpkin!

It’s one my 5-year-old daughter brought home in her carry-on backpack from Maine because she likes to sleep with it.

It’s been two days and I still have a slight limp from the bruising. So remember: fall glory can bite back.

How to humbly face your clumsiness and mistakes is also a theme of this week’s Death, Sex & Money.

I talked with PJ Vogt, host of Search Engine. He and I talk about interviewing — and his gift for making a detail concrete with just the right analogy — and we listen in one of my favorite episodes of Search Engine from the last year: When do you know it’s time to stop drinking? PJ talks to AJ Daulerio, who runs the excellent newsletter The Small Bow about living in recovery and also writes a Slate advice column about recovery called Ask A.J.

You can also hear me talk with PJ at the top of their Search Engine episode from a week ago. PJ says a lot of nice things about the show, which I very much appreciate, and we talk about both trying to make shows that create more ambiguity and complexity in our listeners’ minds. Because certainty can get in the way of a lot of discovery, and be quite boring. You can hear that here.

Notes from Listeners

We’ve gotten some nice notes from listeners about our past few episodes. Two stuck out for the stories they were prompted to share.

I just wanted to write in and say that your Oct 1 episode about Elizabeth, the British hoarder... it had me, quite literally, in tears. My mother is similarly a 'full-blown' hoarder (stacks of newspapers, National Geographic magazines, clothes that haven't fit since the 1970s, carpet pads that will never be used again, etc) and while my wife would probably argue that I have a touch of 'the bug' myself (my workshop space is a wreck), it's nothing even close to my mother, or to what Elizabeth described. Your story just brought me to tears thinking about the shame and guilt Elizabeth feels, and which I now assume my mother must feel….I've been trying for decades to help my mom declutter the house. I went to visit her for a week about ten years ago specifically to do this, and I worked with her to clean out one single room -- just one -- and it took the whole week. We worked together to bag up just one room's worth of crud, I asked her to make every single decision, and we confidently put the trash out at the curb for pickup. The next time I went to visit, I saw that she had brought all those trash bags back in (the crud was still bagged up, but it was back in the same room). It had been entirely futile. I guess the overarching message is one for Elizabeth: She may feel bad about it, but she's not alone, and it doesn't mean that people don't care about her. It's a real thing. The shame hides it, so that the reality shows might be the only glimpse many people get of this particular pathology, but it's very real, and I've seen it first hand.
-Name withheld

And we received this email from a listener after my conversation with Jason Armstrong about his father’s decision to die at 85 by refusing food and water.

Thank you for this episode. It was both heartbreaking and full of love and closeness.
In 2021, my father chose to take advantage of NJ's Medical Aid in Dying less than 6 months after being diagnosed with a painful form of lymphoma. The experience was the hardest and also the most surreal thing I've ever been through, but at the same time I feel so fortunate to have been able to have had those last days and minutes with him. I experienced many of the same emotions as Jason. The anger I felt at my father (and then the guilt for feeling angry) quickly turned into tenderness.
SInce that time, when I think about those last few days, just being together in the same house, helping my father write his own obituary, and watching as he made sure everything was in order so that my mother and siblings would all be "ok" and "taken care of," I often think of the last few lines of the poem In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
I've never experienced the kind of grief and loss I have felt after he died, but these lines remind me how fortunate I was to have had that kind of love and closeness for as long as I did.
-Becky

I love getting to make a show that prompts these kinds of emails from you all. Thank you for sharing.

Elsewhere on in the newsletter universe…

The Small Bow is the newsletter from AJ Daulerio, who is featured in this week’s Death, Sex & Money. I really liked this post this week: How To Be the Least Cool Person at the Cool Party
Elissa Strauss, whom I interviewed in our episode “I Was Afraid of Losing Myself to Motherhood. I Found Myself Instead,” alerted me via her newsletter about her new piece in The Atlantic about the philosophy of care. Her subject line definitely made me click immediately: Care Is Not Altruism.
Nora McInerny on rethinking her phone habits with Dopamine Menus. “Sex is great and all, but I love hunching over my little pocket supercomputer, watching 3-17 seconds of a video before moving onto the next one,” she writes.
Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra has a wonderful newsletter called RESIST PSYCHIC DEATH. I recently interviewed them for Death, Sex & Money and I can’t wait to share the episode with you, but in the meantime, dig into their music and read this to take you along on a rock n roll tour and how it can feel as it winds down.

Recommendations

I got up in some excellent streaming during my time off. If you are looking for a tv show that is very funny and has all sorts of pathos about the grown-up negotiations and tensions that can flare when you couple up, don’t miss Colin From Accounts.

It’s streaming on Paramount+.

And I can’t believe it took me this long to get to, but I really loved the Julio Torres movie Problemista. Anyone with a dream, or anyone who’s felt white hot rage at Filemaker Pro, needs to watch this.