Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
UPDATE: This newsletter now goes out on Wednesdays.
This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Nikkolas Smith – artivist, Hollywood concept artist (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Sinners) and #1 NYT bestselling illustrator. We talk about art as empathy, how art has helped him process grief and injustice, and the making of his hand-painted picture book The History of We. This is a conversation about holding onto our humanity as a way of meeting the broken bones of the world.
If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
There is a beautiful thread throughout this conversation of really seeing the humanity in each other.
Nikkolas talks about how his portraits deliberately seek to look out at you, make eye contact with you. They look to humanise what are often marginalised people.
I first became aware of his work through a stunning picture book called The History of We. It was for a time in the daily rotation of books I’d read to my daughter at night. It goes back to the origins of humankind in Africa and traces the incredible innovations that modern humans were making there for tens of thousands of years before we spread further throughout the world.
As he discusses in this podcast, the intention of it is rather beautiful:
“It’s that core of humanity and can we just remind ourselves that we’re all related, we’re all connected. There is a lot that is done to try to split us up, divide us, and do all these things. But we’re literally all one human race, quite literally.”
It’s funny how whenever I hear someone speak those kind of words with sincerity, how much it can move me. And then I look around at the world and wonder how it is possible that we do what we do to each other.
What has amazed me in recent years is just how possible it is for people to feel and remember this connection.
After becoming a father three years ago, I’ve shared many an intimate moment with a stranger.
Whenever a father is carrying their toddler in their arms and Ava is in mine, there is an incredible warmth to the acknowledgement of each other. Proper eye contact is made, there is little awkward glancing away, but a comfortable smile is often my experience.
I’ve had similar moments with my dog over the last 6 years in Berlin. People are so open to stopping and chatting when the dogs engage or play with each other. Waves, even from across the street, are exchanged.
It is almost poignant then when some of these same people don’t look to engage if I have neither my daughter nor dog with me.
It is strange with the thousands of commonalities and experiences we share – breathing, replenishing cells, thinking, heartbeats, emotions, family, friends, heartbreak, love, despair – that one more thing in a given moment can lead to an effortless connection. It can dissolve a barrier that otherwise might exist. It shows to me how flimsy that barrier must be in reality.
I have mentioned before that saying hello to as many people as possible in my neighbourhood has profoundly changed my life. It all started by missing the daily greetings I’d get from locals when I lived in the countryside in Peru for a year. How when I arrived in Berlin that my day felt emptier without those brief moments of contact.
Even though I didn’t speak the language, how the sincerity of one particular older lady with a warm wrinkled face struck me. With only greetings of the time of day shared, I felt we built something through our daily eye contact – I could see something in her eyes that really meant something, like her heart was pressed into the gesture. How I’d look forward to passing her house in the hope she was sitting in front of it.
When I came to Berlin and repeatedly greeted my neighbours, how after initial tumbleweeds, a real warmth with my neighbourhood developed.
I know there are many material things we may suspect are part of a good life, but I don’t know of many more valuable experiences than sitting outside my local café, on an ordinary weekday, and the likelihood of at least a dozen people greeting me as I sit there and they go about their day.
The more I stay open to that connection, the more the judgements and the feeling of separation feel fleeting rather than the background noise to my life.
Much of what I am noticing from the hundreds of interviews I have conducted around the question of “what is a good life?” and from my own life, is that if we consistently pay attention to the subtlety of the multitude of relationships in our lives, something extraordinary happens.
Something really shifts in how we view people at large. It can be the difference between feeling at home in this world or feeling wary of it. The repeated seeing, acknowledging, and connecting with others is all that is required.
There is a quote often (wrongly) credited to Einstein that has nonetheless stayed present with me during the last decade:
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
I don’t know who said it, but it makes sense to me.
2. This Week’s Questions
Is there someone in particular in your life right now that you would benefit from seeing and acknowledging their humanity?
Do you believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Seeing The Humanity In Each Other with Nikkolas Smith - What is a Good Life? #191
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Nikkolas Smith below.
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.