Do Nothing with Celeste Headlee

Kelly: Hello. Hello, Celeste. It’s such a thrill to talk to you today.

Celeste: Thank you.

Kelly: Just before you introduce yourself, I have to just kind of say how excited I am to talk to you, because it was about a year ago that I’d already known that I want to start a podcast. I wanted to start it with Aurora. I didn’t know how exactly that was gonna happen yet. And my husband just read this book. We Need to Talk and he’s like, you need to read this book. Like, this is – this is an amazing conversation and just you should know this stuff. And so I read your book and was like taking furious notes and and highlighting. And it’s just so cool that a year later I’m talking to you right now for the said podcast.

Celeste: Yeah. That is very cool.

Aurora: So thank you so much for being with us today, Celeste. And we’d love to start by asking you for those of you, not for those listeners that are not familiar with who you are, what you do, if you could sort of introduce yourself and also share your pronouns.
Celeste: My pronoun is she her. I have spent 20 years working for NPR and PBS hosting shows. I was a correspondent for a while, but I’ve been the voice of a number of shows over the years. I have a TED talk that went viral in 2015 called 10 Ways to have a Better Conversation with I think 20 million views – it’s close. And so my my first book was sort of the 65000 word version of that TED talk. And I have a new book coming out next year called Do Nothing: how to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Under Living. So I am now doing all kinds of different things, including public speaking and, you know, writing books.

Aurora: Beautiful.

Kelly: Can you take us back a little bit, Celeste, and give us a little bit of background about your upbringing?

Celeste: I was raised in California by a single mother, my father died when I was nine months old, but my grandparents, my grandfather was a very famous co mposer and mixed race and black and Jewish, and he was a internationally known composer. He’s the dean of African-American composers. So I thought I grew up in a normal family. But as I age, I realized I really hadn’t. And, you know, I’ve lived all over the place. I’ve lived in Arizona and Seattle and Detroit and New York and D.C. and Atlanta because of all my broadcasting work. But I grew up in California, Southern California.

Aurora: And how do you find that your upbringing, Celeste, was is connected to how you what you chose to do instead of unlocking conversations? That is – as you well-put – is quite difficult for most of us.

Celeste: You know, it’s interesting because if you if you do a Google search for my name, I think the second most common question is who is Celeste’s grandfather?

Aurora: Yes.

Celeste: And I think it’s because in my in my TED talk, I explain that, you know, growing up, because my grandfather, who he was who he was really interesting and famous people would come over all the time. But I was, you know, a little and I had no idea who they were. And we were not allowed to talk. So there would be these people sitting down at the dinner table to talk to my grandfather and eventually my mother would come over to us kids and say, “Do you know where that is? That’s Leopold Stokowski, that’s the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley,” etc., etc., etc.. And so it’s an odd thing occurred to me, which is that I grew up believing that there was some secret special information about pretty much everybody that I met and I just needed someone to tell me what it is. And I literally have just made that assumption my whole life. I think it has helped me in broadcasting because I have unending curiosity about other people. I still make that assumption that everyone has some sort of secret knowledge or secret accomplishment. And I still have it because it actually turns out to be true. Everybody does know something better than almost anybody else in the world. Everybody does has a story, have a story that’s unlike anybody else’s. And I I will continue interviewing them until I get that story, which really helped me as a reporter. It’s certainly helped me as a host interviewing different people on different shows. And it’s just helped me in life.

Aurora: Well, we love when you say: “Be prepared to be amazed.”

Celeste: Yes. Absolutely. Because it is amazing. You know, people will tell you stories all the time. And and it’s just absolutely flabbergasting. You know, one of the best ways to hear these stories is start talking to your Lyft in your Uber drivers, or your taxi cab drivers. You will be astonished by the stories that some people have. I was just talking to one guy who’s been working at a – this is my my Lyft driver yesterday – he’s been working at a hospital. He’s in charge of making sure they have all the correct medical supplies and doing that for 25 years. But for seven years, he’s also been working at Costco. And he does a a car service where people who are either visually impaired or elderly, they can just he’ll go with them for the day and he’ll just take them from one shop to another shop, make sure they get all their things. And he has four children. One of them is studying medicine in Emory. I mean, just this amazing life that he’s done through his hustle and the amount of work that he does and this unendingly positive personality. And those are the kind of stories that if you keep your head buried in your cell phone while you’re in, that, you know, 15 minute lift drive, you’ll miss out.

Aurora: Absolutely. And share with us. You know, I think this is is is probably obvious for many of us. But share with us. Why is that so important now, Celeste.

Celeste: Well, that’s a difficult question, and it’s difficult because it’s important on so many different levels that it’s hard to choose which one you want to hear about. So let me start meta and then I’ll bring it down to the micro level. I mean the meta importance of those kind of conversations is that the number one need for a human being, a homosapiens after our survival is taken care of, after we’ve got food and water and shelter is belonging, belonging is such a strong need among our species that it supersedes ethics or morality or sex. It is the number one need that we have. And we know this on an instinctive level because of if you were a zookeeper designing the ideal enclosure for your homo sapiens, you would never leave them alone. We know what solitary confinement does to a human being.

Aurora: Yes.

Celeste: So in recent years we have isolated, isolated ourselves more and more. And I don’t mean we’re not talking enough. We’re talking more than ever. I mean that we have replaced embodied conversation where two people are in the same place at the same time or we can hear a human voice. We’ve been replacing that with a far inferior replacement, which is any kind of text, even if a book, a newspaper, but a text, an email, social media, it doesn’t even it does not come close to the same kind of communication you get through the voice. But also, when we study the brain and the physiology they exchanges, you have over text, do not fulfill your need for belonging. I’ll tell you really quickly about a study that they did with a group of younger girls. They had them do something very stressful, which is they had them solving math problems in front of an audience. Very easy way to get people’s cortisol raised. So after they these girls did it, they would have them – their parents respond in one of several ways. Some of the girls got no response at all from their parents, and when they came offstage, some of those girls got a text message from their mother or father. Some of them the mother would call them. And in some of cases, the mother was waiting offstage for them to talk to them after it was over. And the whole time they monitor their cortisol levels, their stress hormones, for the girls who came off stage and either got a phone call from their mother or the mother was waiting for them, they saw a very similar decrease, significant decrease in their cortisol, meaning that they calmed down, their anxiety levels dropped almost immediately.

Aurora: Wow.

Celeste: The people who the girls who got a text message from their mother saw pretty much no decrease in their cortisol. It did nothing to their stress level. It didn’t affect their emotional well-being at all. In fact, it was pretty much the exact same result for we as the girls whose parents did not contact them a while. Meaning, that text had no no benefit so we send these texts thinking that, “Well, at least I’ll send a text.” I’ll say, “Oh, I’m sorry that happened” or, “good luck today.” But human beings haven’t evolved quickly enough to respond to text in the same way that we have to a human voice. You just can’t replace. I mean, listen, 50 years ago, more than half of the world couldn’t read. That’s how recent text is as a form of communication. If evolution doesn’t work that fast. So we simply don’t respond to text the way that we do the voice. So on a very, very meta level, that’s why those conversations are so important. We need them to survive.

Kelly: And when you’re saying conversations, you’re saying embodied conversations in person.

Celeste: Either embodied or on the phone. We need to hear a human voice to make it worthwhile.

Kelly: Gotcha.

Aurora: And honestly, there’s something I mean, when you saying that’s less. It’s chilling, right. Cause it’s like, thank God. Yes, please. More. Mm hmm. Yeah. Beautifully.

Kelly: So the difficult conversations we’re seeing, the more and more. It you’ve said it’s more important now than ever to have difficult conversations. How do you usually direct people in having difficult conversations?

Celeste: Well, I mean, first, they need to have the conversation because for many people, the solution is to avoid it. Right. I mean, you hearing all kinds of stories about people who are not celebrating holidays with their family because one person’s a Trump supporter and one person’s a Bernie Sanders supporter or overseas, maybe one person supports Brexit and the other one does not. So you have to have the conversation. But the best thing to do if you’re worried about that conversation. So two things. First, you probably don’t need to worry. You know, you hear all this sort of concern over Thanksgiving or Christmas in the States and everyone’s worried about how to avoid an argument over Thanksgiving or Christmas. But in fact, when they do surveys, the number of people who actually are likely to get into an argument over those holidays is about 4 percent of the population. So you can breath easy and relax. You most likely will not get into an argument as much as you hate the argument. The other person also does as well. The second thing is you can really avoid arguments by simply laying out some expectations. Right. So if if I’m meeting with somebody that I know has a different opinion than I do, I will say, “hey, listen, I really want to talk about this from you. I want to hear your perspective, but we’re not going to agree. So if at any point one of us tries to convince the other one to change their mind, it’s time to end the conversation. Let’s just make that agreement right now.” And if you can both decide your your purpose is not to change each other’s minds, but to exchange information, then you will be OK.

Kelly: Would you also say that that would be your advice? I’m thinking more from an inter-generational standpoint. I hear a lot of you know, I literally four times the last week, like boomers don’t want to hear what the these millennials have to say. Millennials don’t want to hear what the boomers have to say. And so now what we have so many generations working in one workplace together. You know, what’s some common ground for for those conversations?

Celeste: Well, I will say the advice that I gave just gave is especially good in intergenerational conversations. And there is some truth to the idea that the generations don’t want to hear from each other. But when it comes down to it, what people are really saying is, “they refuse to believe what I think is right.” Right. I mean, if we’re going into this conversation – when we say boomers don’t listen, what we really mean is they continue to believe what they believe even though I’ve given them all these great data and statistics and all these arguments explaining why they’re wrong. So you have to understand that it is incredibly rare for any human being to change their mind about a fundamental value ever in any circumstance, even over the course of your life, it is rare. It is even more rare for that to happen over the course of a conversation. So you have to let that go. It’s not going to happen. I mean, maybe it will. And it’ll be like the kind of event that’s like, you know, on the road to Damascus and the light shines down from up above and it changes your whole life. Yeah. Not bloody likely. So it doesn’t matter what generation you are. Millennial Boomer. I’m Gen X. Everyone forgets us. Gen Z. It doesn’t matter. The number one most important thing is to stop trying to educate people or lecture them or convince them or change them. And it’s because it’s not going to happen. So of course, that conversation is gonna be frustrating for both of you because you’re constantly beating your head against a wall. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Go into the conversation with the idea that you’re just going to learn more about that other person’s view and perspective. You’re gonna educate yourself and then you’ll be OK.

Aurora: Yeah, and I think being okay is, I think, the hardest part for so many of us.

Celeste: Yeah. There it is. It’s difficult. I mean, something to it feels often times that the stakes are so high that you you want to feel as though you’ve made progress. Right. You want to feel as though you’ve made a change.

Kelly: Right. Like pun intended, you feel like you’re doing nothing if you’re not trying to, you know, have somebody have some understanding. Yeah.

Celeste: OK, so let me put it this way, because we’re not actually having the conversations mean that all we’re doing is presenting our arguments and not actually having a mutual exchange of ideas. Because of that, it means we’re not really having any conversations about tough things like immigration and gender identity and abortion and climate. We’re not actually having those conversations. You’re talking about them a lot. Mm hmm. But if you’re talking to people who agree with you, that’s often not really a conversation, because it’s not a mutual exchange of ideas. It’s just an echo chamber. And so what that means is that we’re all becoming less knowledgeable about issues like religion and abortion and gender identity. We’re becoming less knowledgeable because we’re refusing to allow any information to enter our brains except the information that we like and agree with. And I will have to I have to tell you what we’re really talking about here is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is where you believe something. Someone shows you evidence that that proves it is objectively wrong, your belief, and that makes you believe it harder. And both liberals and conservatives, all human beings, are equally prone to confirmation bias. I know it feels like the other side, whatever that side may be, is more prone to it. But there is zero evidence of that. Every time we get into any kind of study, every time we analyze it, every single human being is as prone to the confirmation bias as the person next to them, which means you are not hearing all the information that you need to hear in order to be a fully informed person unless you are actually hearing from someone who disagrees with you. That does not mean you have to hear abuse. It doesn’t mean that you have to hear someone saying things to you that are aggressive or insulting or bullying. But most conversations are not that way. On social media, they are. Because we’re not fully human, we’re not writing in. But either in embodied conversations or over the phone. It is rare that someone is going to start bullying you. It’s rare if it happens. Walk away. But otherwise, the discomfort you’re feeling is simply the discomfort of a homosapiens hearing. Something they don’t agree with. We don’t like it. We never have liked it. And yet it’s really good for you.

Kelly: That’s so good to hear. Because I think ninety five percent of our worries and having a conversation is just that, that it’s going to break out into some, you know, crazy fight.

Celeste: Yeah, it’s interesting that there’s actually been a number of studies of why people are afraid of conversation. And even if you’ve never had an actual argument with a stranger, you will still avoid conversations because you’re afraid of it happening, even if there’s zero evidence in your own life. It’s an odd thing.

Kelly: I totally feel that. And sometimes in conversation, I feel like I’m probing or something. And I’m like, my first inclination is like, “Maybe they don’t want to talk about this. I don’t know why I’m asking all these questions.” And I’m assuming that’s something in my conditioning that’s that’s bringing that up, because then I’ll be with Aurora and she’ll ask anybody anything you know, wherever we are. And we’ll be there for two more hours.

Aurora: And I just wonder, Celeste, you know, is it is it an aptitude or a proficiency with discomfort?

Celeste: Oh, I totally think you can become inured to embarrassment. Absolutely. And honestly, I think this is something that happens to a journalist if you stay in the industry for any period of time, because you got to get over it. Right. I mean, you have to ask embarrassing questions pretty much every single day. And so you just have to ask them. And if you and if you’re coming from a place of absolute, pure, non-judgmental curiosity, as most of the time, people are OK with it. You know, it’s funny. It’s I I relate this to another issue. OK. So for you know, I do a ton of public speaking. And one of the most common questions I get is, “do you still get nervous?” And I the answer’s no. Categorically. But the reason I don’t get nervous is because I’ve been doing public speaking for so long that every thing that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong already. It’s already happened. Right. And and I’ve survived and everything was fine and no one died. But it’s the same thing with like embarrassment and conversations, like all those things I’m afraid of, they’ve happened. Yeah. People. And yet it’s all OK. Still, I survived. I lived to see another day. Everything’s fine. I wasn’t physically injured. And that’s what makes you lose the fear. So when we’re talking about like developing a tolerance for that discomfort, absolutely it eventually goes away.

Kelly: What’s your like favorite weird question? Just totally. I don’t know, snap somebody out of their reverie of the day.

Celeste: That’s interesting. I almost always ask about tattoos. I have a story. I was down in New Orleans at one point in the bartender had this really cool looking tattoo. And I said, “what’s the story of that tattoo?” And he goes, “Oh, it doesn’t have an interesting story. It just happened when…”And then he proceeded to tell me this fifteen minute fascinating story about this tattoo. Every tattoo has a story. But if they don’t have a tattoo, I mean, I generally just look at the person and I see what is unique about how they look that day we all put some thought into the clothes we put on. Right. We put some thought into how we wear our hair. We put thought into the way that we appear. And usually there’s somewhere in the back of our minds, at least we are, you know, that the way we appear is going to make an impression of one way or another on other people. And so I’ll ask about it. You know, the jewelry that they’re wearing, the shirt that they have on their boots. The way they have their haircut. That’s what I ask about. Because it’s an it’s a really easy question to ask. They know the answer to it. Everybody likes talking about themselves. Everybody. And that way you can get into deeper things.

Kelly: It’s great.

Aurora: Beautiful. And so, Celeste, thank you so much for continuing to challenge us to stay curious because that’s, you know, stay curious with an open heart and a wonder of being amazed. And so you’ve given us that lesson. You’ve you’ve you’ve made that our rallying cry and now you’re asking us to slow down. Tell us a little bit about that.

Celeste: So far, one of the reasons that we choose email over conversation is because it’s faster. Right. Yeah. But the thing about it is by choosing email, we take all of the meaning and value out of the exchange. So the convenience of the email has totally removed the value. And so in some cases all of our time. Suppose a time saving devices and software and apps and all the other stuff that we have our hacks. Right. We want to hack everything. You are actually wasting our time there, wasting our time, because if you do something that takes 10 minutes less and yet it gets you no closer to accomplishing something, then you’ve just wasted all of that time anyway. It’s accomplished nothing. Yes. So if it takes me 15 minutes to talk to someone on the phone, but I actually accomplish something in that conversation and it takes me only two minutes to write the email. I’ve wasted two minutes. I’d say, yeah, zero via email. Let me give you an example. One of the emails, one of the things almost everybody puts into email is apologies. It’s really common for people to apologize over email. But here’s the thing. We know from, you know, f MRI is functional magnetic resonance imaging machines from watching the brain work. We know that moving from an apology – I’m sorry – all the way to, “I forgive you.” And being able to move on and put it behind you. It’s a relatively complicated neurological and physiological process. There’s a lot of stuff that happens between those two things, but it all begins. So take your right finger and put it at the top of your right ear. Now move it up about a minute. Just shy of an inch. And move it back about an inch. OK. So that is the part of your brain where that whole process begins. Right. We know the process has begun because we can watch the brain and an MRI and we see that part of the brain engage. I’m simplifying brain science, but you understand. So let me ask you a question. Why do we use e-mail? Why do we choose to apologize through e-mail? Why do we do that?

Kelly: Because we’re being lazy or just kind of sitting there and we can check it off the list by just tapping our fingers.

Aurora: Well, I also think it can be more comfortable for some people to apologize via text versus voice or face to face.

Celeste: Right. It’s way easier. OK. So when we’re if we’re having to talk to someone on the phone or seen them face to face and apologize, we stammer a little. We don’t know what to say. It’s difficult. We screw up. And what happens is the other person sees us struggling. They see how hard it is and they feel compassion for us. And all of a sudden, that part of the brain, you put your finger up, lights up and the process begins. It is the difficulty that gives it value. We know that if you read an apology in any form of text to that part of your brain is never engaged, which means that process never begins. Which means there is no forgiveness, which means you never can truly move on. It is the difficulty itself that gives value to that apology. And therefore, you have saved zero time. By sending it through e-mail.

Aurora: Wow, wow, wow.

Kelly: I just connected a lot of dots for me.

Aurora: That’s amazing. Why don’t we all know this?

Celeste: Because we don’t want to know it. We’d rather continue sending an email. We want someone in, you know, Business Inc. To write how to hack your apologies? Yeah. Yeah.

Celeste: And so to connect us back to you’re talking about and slowing down. Slowing down is necessary sometimes. Sometimes that is where the value and the worth comes from.

Aurora: But yet everything that we are reading, everything that we’re being propelled to is as you do and more and hack and streamline and make more efficient. So what are you hoping in addition to getting that part of our brain to actually receive? What are you gifting us, Celeste?

Celeste: I’m hoping to bring people back to their own humanity. So it’s interesting. When I started out to research this new book, Do Nothing. I ended up having to interview paleontologists and evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists. And the reason for that was, is that inevitably I was asking myself the question of, “OK, if if I think these particular habits are bad for human beings, not just for me, but for for most of us, then what is good?” Yes. Like what is it? What is the care and feeding of a human being? You know, you go in Petco and they’ll be like the care and feeding of your new lizard. Right. What is our guidebook say? Are there things that are universal for all human beings, regardless of what their geography, regardless of their culture? And so I ended up having to go back to even primatologists to figure out what is it that is that is universal for human beings. And that brought me to the idea of, is there such a thing as a universal human nature? And I believe there is that that there is a part of us that is controlled by biology. Like really we’re really comfortable understanding that dog’s behavior is to some extent controlled by our biology. Right. Like, we understand that when it comes to cows that there are individual personalities for a dog. But also some of it is is biology. And yet we really struggle to accept that for ourselves. But it’s true. It is both nature and nurture. And so therefore, there are some things all human beings do. One of them, I explained already was this need for belonging. But also, for example, all human beings in every culture and throughout history have played. We all play, we all speak. Language is a universal characteristic of a human being. We all like rules. Human beings are are unique in that we are the rule making animal. We make rules about it, whether or not you can kill somebody else, when and how you do that. We make rules about when you can eat, when you can, you know, build a house, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We really like rules. So there’s these things that all of us do. And and it brought me to the sort of holistic idea of the fact that, you know, there are things that we’re doing right now that we think are making life better for us. But in fact, they’re pulling us further and further away from our natural gifts and our natural state. And maybe that’s what’s causing our problems. You know that the life expectancy has has decreased in the United States for the past two years, too.

Aurora: Wow.

Celeste: And in the most recent study of this, yes, they asked one of the the the doctors, they they asked him why this is. And he’s he said, well, in one word, it’s despair. Despair is killing us. And I have to believe I truly believe that part of that despair is by the fact that we are who have we have veered so far away from what is actually our true nature. What is easy for us are real gifts and and without letting go of all the incredible advancements that we’ve made and we find a better balance between those and the things that we do naturally and in a healthy way.

Kelly: So your new book is called Do Nothing. How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Under Living. So, you know, of course, what we’re going to want to do is as perfectionists ourselves as OK. So what do we have to do? What are the tips for doing? What are my 10 steps here? So but what I hear you saying that it’s almost like a solution in their psyche. And a sitting with, is there is there some sort of mindfulness aspect of it? It seems like a very Zen approach is like it. Do you have a mindfulness practice or -?

Celeste: Yeah, I’m a I’m a Buddhist, so I do meditate every single day. Some people tend to be nervous about meditation, which confuses me a little bit because meditation is not religious. It’s not doesn’t even necessarily have to be a spiritual practice. It’s just the only way at this point that we know how to train a mind. So, yeah, there is absolutely a great deal about mindfulness in there. You know, it’s it’s interesting. I am one of the things that I did for that book is I took a two week train trip around the entire country. So I got in a train in D.C. I rode it to New Orleans, and then I rode another train across to L.A., another train up to Seattle across to Chicago, to Boston, and then back home to almost two weeks. And yeah, it’s the most trains are the most mindful version of travel, I believe are the more you don’t have to drive a car, you can just sit there. But the thing about a train is when I arrived in L.A., I felt as though I had journeyed. I hadn’t just gotten on a plane, been really uncomfortable and irritated for four hours and then gotten off. You know, when you when that happens, you’re like you just arrive at another airport. You could be anywhere. But when you travel on a train, there’s a sense of place. You’re watching the geography passed by you. You’re seeing the elevations go by. You’re seeing the weather change as you move from Louisiana into Texas, et cetera. And so when you arrive, you feel as though you have arrived somewhere. It’s yeah, it’s kind of an incredible feeling that we don’t often get.

Kelly: So like the train rides, the phone call and the plane rides the e-mail.

Celeste: Exactly. That’s exactly my point. That to a certain extent, the value of that journey was partly because I watched the miles passing.

Kelly: I love that you experienced it. You didn’t flash over it.

Celeste: Exactly. And that doesn’t mean we’re always going to be able to take a train. Right. That’s not going to be always possible, but it is possible sometimes we don’t have to default to the plane.

Aurora: It almost it almost sounds like feeling so less. It’s it’s it’s instead embodying the feelings versus the sort of transactional thinking of of how we’re interacting, how we’re communicating, how we’re experiencing, how we’re being versus doing.

Celeste: Yeah. And one of the things I say in the book is we’re so focused on becoming that we never were never just being.

Aurora: Can you share more about it?

Celeste: Yeah. I mean, I think there is an inherent good in in how we always are trying to improve. I think that’s great. But again, all things in moderation, right, at every moment you shouldn’t be thinking about what you could be doing to make yourself better. At some point, you have to sit back and enjoy who you are and how far you’ve come. And and the person you have, you you are rather than who you might be in the future if you just did this one little thing. And so right now, we don’t really have a balance. Right? People will. Whereas people would just say, oh, I got to make cupcakes for my kid’s birthday party and then, you know, make the cupcakes. And if they’re terrible decorated, that is slather the frosting on and you’re done. Now we search online for the ultimate cupcake recipe and then we look on Pintrest for the decoration ideas and maybe we zoom around the city trying to find those these specialized ingredients or whatever the decorating tool is that we’ll never use again. That’s going to clutter up our kitchen because it’s only for this one hundred articular project or whatever it may be. And then we’re not able to replicate what we saw on Pinterest anyway. So we feel like complete failures, maybe so much. One of my friends went through this exact process but with a cake and then threw it all in the garbage and bought something from the store. Right. Like at some point we have to speak able to sit at home and enjoy our home, not be thinking about how we could hey, maybe we could learn to crochet something or make new curtains for the windows. It’s interesting. I bought a home in April of this year and there was one point when I sat down on my couch and I’d finally gotten everything basically unpacked. And I sat down on my couch and I looked around my living room. And I loved every single thing in my living room. Like every object in my living room was something that I had picked and chosen and loved. And this this the I can’t even describe the feeling that suffused me at that point, just this contentment. And I just had to sit there and just enjoy my living room. And I think to myself sometimes, do we all take that those moments to enjoy what we have or are we always searching for the next best thing?

Kelly: And I’m I’m happy for you that you’re able to enjoy. Because sometimes I feel like I have a fear of enjoyment. It gets easier for me to get up and organize something and, you know, start the next meal or or task mask my way because I’m comfortable with that level, energy level or frenetic, you know, checking off the list. Is there a fear of enjoyment? No.

Celeste: I want to dig in this more with you. So let’s imagine that you were in my shoes and you sat on your couch and you looked around your living room and you start to feel enjoyment. And then it’s cut off by fear. Explain what’s happening there.

Kelly: I think there’s some sort of. Like I’m not. I’m not allowed to just sit and enjoy that there’s there has to be labor first before I can enjoy and then even there there’s then I have to go back to the labor. There’s not just where there’s some ticking clock in my mind of, “I can only enjoy for so long.”

Celeste: So this breaks my heart. And honestly, that question I was. I feel like I was exactly or in a very similar place to that a couple years ago, two and a half years ago. And that’s really what motivated me to start the research for this. I had no idea that this was the book I was going to write. All I did was I wanted to figure out why I had that feeling you just described. Because, you know, that’s not logical or or healthy. Right. Correct. I making an assumption.

Aurora: And I would also offer Celeste I think so many of us are on that gerbil wheel. And all that perspective of fear. And so I can’t wait to read your book.

Celeste: Yeah, that was the answer I was looking for. And it took me on a three year research journey and frankly, a lot of conversations with extraordinarily smart people to figure out what was going wrong. And I can say that to a certain extent, I can let us off a hook.

Kelly: Yes.

Celeste: Yeah, which is that this all actually started more than 250 years ago. And it’s just that every single generation since the industrial revolution has leaned in. And now we’re at the point where it has become so toxic that we have some choices to make and we have for our own well-being with a life expectancy going down. We have to we have to sort of really get a clear picture of where we are and why we believe the way we do believe and make some better choices.

Aurora: And where can we begin?

Celeste: So I think this this idea of becoming aware is always going to be the first step and into a to a certain extent, this connects back to mindfulness, right? But one of the things I point out in the book is that we actually all of us have more time than we think that we do. So one of the very first things that I did was I spent a few weeks just tracking all of my time and what I was doing every half hour. I would say, OK, what did I do for the past half hour? And it is time consuming. But I did that for several weeks. And I and I when I went back through it and realized how I was spending my time. it turns out I actually have way more free time than I think. I’m just using it on stuff that doesn’t relax me or make me feel good. You know, we keep doing study after study showing that Facebook makes you miserable, like there’s almost no way around it. And yet when I tell my friends this, they say, “oh, I totally believe that’s true, but I also don’t think it applies to me.” So we have some hard truths that we have to be aware of and we have to accept first. One of the early sort of inspirations for me was I was again sitting on my comfy chair in my living room and feeling overwhelmed at that point, just feeling exhausted. And I started looking around my house and thinking, “Wait a second. How many timesaving devices do I have? Like, how much more time do I have every week that my grandmother or great grandmother didn’t have?”.

Kelly: Bingo.

Celeste: And so I went around with a notepad and started adding up the time. Like, how much time do I save with a microwave and a dishwasher and a washer and dryer and a refrigerator? Because my great grandmother had to buy ice for her icebox. Right. I have a Roomba. I have a robot that like how much time am I saving? And it it turned out that I was saving somewhere between 20 and 30 hours a week.

Kelly: Wow.

Celeste: Because my grandparents were members of the alt clubs. Right. And they had card games on Friday night with their neighbors. And they did crafts and they made their own ice cream. And they had time for all kinds of stuff in addition to their full time jobs. They had neighborhood barbecues. So what am I doing?And so that sort of began this whole process of figuring out. OK. So what am I doing with my time? And for I think for everyone, that is going to be your first step because we overestimate how much we work. In fact, the more that you say you work, people who say they work like 70 or 80 hours a week, they are the the least accurate about that. So you’re probably not working as much as you think you are. That doesn’t mean that you’re deluded or anything. I bet it does feel like you’re working that much. But in order to address that feeling that you have, we have to start really getting an idea of what your schedule looks like and where that time is going.

Aurora: And is that where the disconnect is?

Celeste: It’s possible. That’s not the full source of the disconnect. Some of it is the myths that we have been sold in and taught. Honestly, I think work has replaced religion in the United States and in many developed countries. Our identity comes from our jobs. We worship it. We. We don’t believe someone is a good person unless they are working hard. We don’t think someone deserves good things unless they’re working hard. I mean, think about this for a moment. That is crazy. And yet that is what we believe. We have a myth. We have a mystique around hard work that is totally unnecessary. When I was talking about the things that human beings need, I have a whole chapter on do we need to work? Is work an inherent need for human beings? And it is a long chapter and very well-researched. If I do say so myself. But let me give you the TL;DR, which is no. It’s not you can survive perfectly well without working a day in your life.

Aurora: That’s great to hear. Okay, Celeste, you can’t. Okay. So give us an additional aspect. How? As a recovering workaholic, how? How can I survive without working?

Celeste: Well, most of us can’t. I mean, most of us have to get a paycheck, right. Work has has bled through the lines, but so is your personal life. Right. Like, not only are we answering emails, work emails when we’re at home, but we’re also shoe shopping when we’re at work. OK. The hours, the afternoon hours of weekdays are the busiest times for online shopping. They also happen to be the busiest times for watching porn, which I have to assume is not connected to most people’s jobs. So we’re doing stuff on the clock that is personal and we’re doing stuff at home that is work. And I think we need to start rebuilding those boundaries. And that’s going to require a change among many managers. In other words, we need to change our mindset. It does not take us eight hours a day to do our jobs. That’s the honest truth. Totally. So quite for the vast majority of jobs. So we need to come to the mindset to you, finish your work for the day and then you go home. And while you’re at home, you don’t work. We need to rebuild the boundaries between the office and the home.

Kelly: We have to get this book out to a lot of managers and CEOs. Yeah. Not now. Right.

Celeste: I’m hoping I’m really hoping to start a conversation about this.

Aurora: My mind is going in a thousand different directions, which I’m sure you would say. Please. No.

Kelly: Stop doing that.

Celeste: Actually, I think that’s great. Let’s spark a billion neurons. Yeah.

Aurora: But, you know, I think one of the one of the questions that we would have is, you know, when you you know, you’ve been on this journey for two years and you know, what would you share is one of the key things that from the start of this, the research to today, sitting in your living room and absorbing and really feeling the moment of gratitude and presence of your living room in the beautifulness of your surroundings, what are you hoping our listeners opt in to by by hearing that story?

Celeste: I hope people can begin to realize that idleness is not laziness and idleness is not the opposite of work. So, for example, a fisherman is idle while working and active while not working, right. You can be idle while active so I can be riding a bike. But that’s me in idleness. And I say this because there’s this thing called the idleness theory, which is this idea that evolutionarily the species that are the most successful are those that have to put in the least effort in order to survive.

Kelly: Wow.

Celeste: Which means that the more idle you are, the more successful you are. That’s what that means.

Kelly: The ultimate hack.

Celeste: Yeah. Which is the opposite of what we believe we believe in just running on this treadmill, which means we’re not going anywhere.

Kelly: Totally. And you’re saying just one sprint every so often.

Celeste: Yeah. And then step off. Step off. Lean out. You are such a plus a prop puller. Start over.

Kelly: You are such a plethora of information whilst you, you know, immersing it in imbuing it in our life, you know, immediately we’re downloading this right now. What inter-generational wisdom. Wisdom that spans generations. Would you impart with us today?

Celeste: You know, it’s interesting, if only human beings could learn to actually learn from the mistakes of the generation before them. Think how advanced we’d be if teenagers actually listened to the advice of their parents were like, oh, yeah, that’s really smart. I’m not going to make that mistake. Think about that if we didn’t have to recreate the mistakes of our parents. We have a lot of contempt for older people at this point and I understand it. I feel as though I understand it. And there is some truth to the idea that the older you are, the the more out of touch you can become. There is truth to that. But there’s also truth to the fact that older people have had more practice living. They’ve made more mistakes and we can learn from them. You don’t have to believe everything they believe. You don’t have to accept everything that they’ve accepted. And you can have new ideas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them. You know, if you were hiring somebody from a job and one person had 30 years experience and the other one had one year experience, there’s no question you’d go with the person who had 30 years experience. Well, by ignoring our elders, we’re ignoring those who have much more experience.

Aurora: And that experience is priceless.

Kelly: Very excited to read this book. Celeste comes out to day. Everyone grab your copy of Do Nothing. And what is next for Celeste HEADLEE?

Celeste: I am working on a third book I can’t talk about quite yet. And I have a podcast that I do with the conferences for women that’s called Women Amplified Beautiful, which is conversations with mostly incredibly brilliant women and a few men about, you know, what we can learn from each other and what we can learn from people who have become experts in their chosen fields.

Kelly: Wonderful.

Aurora: Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.

Kelly: Yeah, hopefully we can spend some quality idle time together soon.

Celeste: I hope that you can sit in my living room. Thank you. You asked. My pleasure. Thank you, guys.

Kelly: I feel like lightbulbs were going off the whole conversation with Celeste.

Aurora: Yes! What a well of wisdom.

Kelly: Seriously. I am so excited to read her new book Do Nothing. We’ll link where to buy her new book in the show notes.

Aurora: Speaking of doing nothing…want to have some tea after this?

Kelly: Yes!

Kelly: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: Talk soon.

Aurora: Bye.