What is a Good Life? #184
Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel - award-winning journalist, professor of communication management at the University of St. Gallen, and founder of ada learning. We explore a burnout that became a life-altering depression, the vulnerability of turning her private writing into her bestselling book Letter to My Life, and why she believes embodied experience - not intelligence - is what separates us from machines.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Next week I am taking a short break, I will be back with episode #185 the week after.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
What if the point of your existence is simply to experience whatever it is you experience in any given moment?
At different points in this week’s conversation, Miriam suggests what AI can’t replicate:
“It’s the embodied experience that we share as human beings - but we don’t share it in the sense that I know how it feels for you to embrace a tree. I can imagine it might feel similar to what I feel when I do it, but I don’t know. I will never know. I will never be able to step into your consciousness and feel how Mark feels this.”
It brings to mind what my guest, Ralf Wetzel, said last week about his first therapy session. He was showing the outside world something different from the inside and at one point his therapist said to him:
“Ralf, don’t tell me the facts, tell me how you feel. Stop reporting.”
He was initially exasperated by this, as he thought he was already sharing everything. This was uncannily similar to my first therapy session when I used to live in London:
“How do you feel?”
I began to explain my thoughts.
“Sorry to interrupt, I asked how do you feel?”
I started again, telling her of my interpretation of an experience that prompted me to start therapy.
She interrupted again…
After the third time she interrupted me she said as plainly as she could, “How do you feel, are you happy, sad, angry?”
I didn’t know. I sat in silence for a moment, then simply said, “I am sad.”
Over the last decade I have continued to fine tune my capacity to simply share whatever it is my experience is with other people. I don’t mean some wild, undiscerning disclosure, irrespective of time, context, and place.
But at the very least a nod to it.
Like Miriam alludes to in the interview, I find that articulating an experience in the moment seems particularly important.
It builds a strange type of resilience in me. The act of sharing my specific human experience and being with it myself.
This quote from a past guest, Adam Mastroianni, has remained close to my thoughts since I interviewed him last year:
“It hollows people out, pretending that something is important that you don’t think is important, a lot of us have the capacity to do that for a long time, but it takes such a psychic toll.”
Right now I am bewildered with my financial situation in life, and when I don’t hide that from myself or others, it very quickly falls into the sense of it being another experience. Just another experience.
I feel so much of what we consider a problem is our reaction to the situation and not simply the circumstance itself.
In this week’s interview Miriam reflected on the decision to publish her writings from the period of a burnout and depression, against the advice of many people in her circle at the time.
She eventually came to the conclusion that sharing it was a public statement: “This is me and I am not capable of performing all the time, so you have to accept that or you will not see me or get all of me.”
There is a considerable relief I find in not maintaining the image so much and more concentrating on the experience. Not only does it leave us more connected with ourselves and who we are, it also creates an abundance of connection with people around us.
If my focus is more on cohering what is happening internally and externally, and acknowledging my experiences, it profoundly changes my sense of peace. I find it easy to feel like I am simply fulfilling my role in this world.
And my experience of this peace seems consistent irrespective of outcomes.
2. This Week’s Questions
Is there a relationship in your life that could benefit from you sharing more of how you feel rather than merely stating the facts?
Is there something you are presently pretending in your life that is taking a psychic toll on you?
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3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel - What is a Good Life? #184
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel below.
(Due to some technical difficulties on my side, the full video is not available this week, clips and shorts are still available.)
For Apple podcast click here.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.