January 28, 2025 • 41 mins
When Sal moved from California to a small town in the Pacific Northwest, they didn't know anyone. The solitude didn’t bother them…at first. But after their attempts at making new friends left them feeling confused, then rejected, then frustrated, their solitude turned into loneliness.
In this episode, Dr. Ellen Lee explains how loneliness is a social condition. Dr. Marisa G. Franco talks about the science of making friends (and the romance of queer friendship), and Jasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez shows us what we can learn from fungi about building community in times of crisis.
Links:
The Professional-Managerial Class w/ Catherine Liu | Jacobin Show
White Supremacy Culture Worksheet from White Supremacy Culture
Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends by Dr. Marisa G. Franco
Let’s Become Fungal! by Jasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's kay. Basket Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional, and so in the description of
this and every episode, I'll leave you with a list
of relevant resources and links to the things I'm reading.
And while you're listening, take care.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
When I first moved to the woods, I was here
kind of the end of summer going into fall, and
all the fall mushrooms started to come out. Oh, I
was like starstruck. I must have taken a thousand pictures
because I would just see something new every like every
single walk, mushrooms of every color, imaginable mushrooms that are
(00:42):
you know, traditional mushroom shape with the cap and the stem,
and then ones that come out of the ground looking
like coral. And I had never seen so many strange
and beautiful and wonderful mushroom and I had no idea
what any of it was.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
This is Baska Case, I'm nke And that was Sal.
I've followed Sal on Instagram for years, and so I
remember when, like a handful of years ago, they started
posting what I can only describe as nature porn. It
was like a gorgeous lakeside scene, a beautiful moody forests,
(01:29):
and so many different varieties of mushrooms. Mushrooms that grew
like staircases down the sides of trees, black ones, wide
and convex like little plates, and others that were gray
and reaching towards the sky like little plumes of smoke,
and even mushrooms that looked like little rolls of bread
slick with butter. Sala was learning how to forage, how
to find mushrooms in the woods.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And I would just like be on my hands and
knees on the floor, just like just in shock. And
it was absolutely incredible, and it still is every time
I walk in's where I'm from. There's no water. It's
just dry, desert y desert heat and stuff. And so
when I first moved here, I was just enamored.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, it was obvious they weren't in southern California anymore.
Where we met when we were both volunteers at a
rock camp for kids about a decade ago. I don't
play anything. I was just there for the feminists, utopia vibes,
salf Le's drums. Eventually I learned that Sal had moved
to the Pacific Northwest while they were working for the
National Park Service. They now live in a small town
near a national forest. Sal didn't know anyone in the
(02:33):
place that they moved to, and so they spent a
lot of time swimming and walking alone in the woods.
They also had a partner who lived on the other
side of the country, but who planned to join them
on the West coast eventually, so for a while Sal
didn't necessarily mind the solitude. But then the pandemic, their
(02:55):
chosen solitude faded into lonely isolation as their town and
most of the country went into lockdown. And then things
got even harder.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
My brother passed in this really super traumatic way. He
was twenty four, and my dad passed not even a
year after. And then I had like long COVID and
I was like really sick for like a year and
a half. And so I'm going through all of those
things while trying to navigate these like weird social experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Obviously, Sala's grief made their loneliness more palpable in a
time of crisis. They needed people more than ever.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And I don't mean social support like someone to process
it with me. I mean just a coffee level friendship
with people like I genuinely feel safe with. I think
I've felt lonely for lots of my life, but I
think it is a unique loneliness here.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Salism a part of southern California I called the Inland Empire.
Californians call it the Ie. And diversity, all kinds of
diversity was something Sala was used to. They had a
multicultural friend group from a range of backgrounds. They had
friends who were lawyers and friends who worked in warehouses.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It shaped how I understand the world and how I
expect the world to be. And then now that I'm
no longer there, things like don't make sense.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
The other thing they were used to was being part
of a network of care and.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I think that IE culture where your neighbor will drop
off plates of food just because, like not even for anything,
but just because they made extra food. And that is
the culture, and there's this sense of social intimacy that
is kind of innate to this place.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Sala's mom is Sicilian and their dad is Syrian. So
Sau grew up in a big, boisterous family in a
mix of Arab and Mediterranean culture where there was an
emphasis on food and closeness and being welcoming and warm
and enthusiastic and open, where guest culture, a willingness to
express care and a comfort with being care for was
just part of the value system.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And everybody's up in your shit. And my uncle's talk
to me this close to my face, right an inch
away from my face. There's this close physical like, you know,
just like slapping somebody and grabbing somebody and being.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Excited alone in the Pacific Northwest, sal missed that closeness,
that sense of familiarity.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I always think of like being drunk at the bar
with my friends and they gaze into each other's eyes
and they're about to kiss. And that's the joke, right
is like is that they're like secretly in love and
they never kid but this level of intimacy. My partner
refers to it as like romantic friendships where you're like
courting your friends, you're cooking for them, and you're buying
(05:49):
tickets to the movies so you can all go. And
responsibility responsibility for each other too, like I know what's
going on with you, and I'm being responsible for you
well being. So I feel like I come from people
invested in each other's thriving. I come from people who
have my back in that way.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
They tried to recreate that network of care with the
other thirty something transplants and their new small town, but
they kept hitting a social wall, Like Sala would give
someone a ride, but then the next time they saw
that person it was like they'd never met before. Or
they would invite someone over to their house for dinner,
but the invitations were never reciprocated. It was like what
(06:31):
they were used to, the culture they were used to
and the ways that they knew how to make friends
didn't seem to apply anymore.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
And then I come here and people are like, hugs
are problematic? And then like all the queers, all the
queers are like, I'm so uncomfortable around you, but could
you give me a ride?
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Though, I think I'm gonna call this episode hugs are problematic.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I was I was reeling like you guys know like hug.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I'm like, we need this, we need this for our
well being, Like fuck, like what world are we trying
to build?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So Saal got frustrated. They felt like there was a
code they were struggling to decipher, or a password, a
right thing to say in order to be accepted into
their new social ecosystem, and.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
It's like it's confusing because like we're at dinner on
a Saturday night, Like I'm just here in a spirit
of friendship, but there's hurdles that I have to jump
through before I'm seeing as like a person of worth
or a person of their same status. They have this
status and they're trying to see where I stack up,
(07:39):
and I don't have status actually, Like.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
What do you mean by status? There?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
So status as in literal money, like status as in
literal social standing. Like almost everybody here that I meet,
they went to a private liberal arts college or an
IVY league or like a little IVY league, and they
don't pay rent and they don't really work, like they
don't work for wages in the same way that I
(08:06):
have to work. Like they lived in Paris and they
have a secret master's degree that they don't talk about.
I put myself through college at the age of thirty one,
but I genuinely I'm genuinely curious. I'm like, I'm never
you know, I never got to live in Colombia, Like
what's up? Like what's up there? I want to know,
you know, I want to go. I would go too,
(08:27):
given the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Sl just wanted to swap lore, share stories, learn about
the past and present of the people around them. But
when they expressed that curiosity, Sal says, people were cagy
and since they didn't seem open around Cell, Sala didn't
feel safe enough to be vulnerable around them. And it
didn't help that they judged Sala's choices, for instance, to
pay for community college with unemployment checks. They judge things
(08:53):
like that against the sort of purest ideological code that
felt removed from Sal's lived experience, and the tendency to
lecture Cell and each other about things like economic inequality
or about policing realities Sala had experienced firsthand. Sale told
me that it was the work of an academic named
(09:13):
Catherine Lou who helped them understand at least part of
what they were experiencing. In twenty twenty one, Catherine Lou
wrote a book called Virtue Hoarders, The Case against the
Professional Managerial Class.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And so it's like peak white liberal, overly educated white
people specifically, but like they don't have to be white necessarily,
people who have access to these kind of elite educations
and how they use their understandings of social justice or
oppression or all of these things to punch down on
working class people.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
The idea of a professional managerial class the PMC, is
a concept first identified by the economist Barbara Ehrenreich in
the nineteen seventies, but by the early twenty and twenty tens,
the PMC could be identified by certain cultural signifiers.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
I think that these days when people talk about the PMC,
there's also they're also referring to a kind of affect
or like a kind of cultural component. And I was
thinking recently about do you remember the blog in the
early two thousands called Stuff White People Like, And I
think it became a book. Some of the references might
be like kind of outdated by now, but yeah, it's
(10:20):
like what you said, like Waldorf schools, Ted talks, kale salad.
Funnily enough, I think it's actually all stuff that the
PMC likes, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And when Catherine lou wrote about them in twenty twenty one,
she characterized the PMC using words like performative identity and
virtue signaling. Lusa's the PMC derives its powers from its credentials,
from having degrees, and not from the kind of authority
someone might gain from having hands on experience. So this
(10:53):
was all very specific and very interesting to me because
I love gossip. But also I have to say that
the whole thing to me was just giving white vibes,
the kind of white vibes described by Tama Okun in
the widely circulated worksheet White Supremacy Culture. As all give
me example after example of the kinds of social dynamics
they kept encountering. I couldn't help but think about some
(11:16):
of the behaviors that Okun identifies. Reliance on academic language,
this very.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Formal, almost corporate way that everyone speaks here.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Decision making is clearer to those with power and unclear
to those without it.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
When I speak, they act like I'm, you know, speaking
in completely different language.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
People in power are afraid of expressed conflict and try
to ignore it or run from.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
There's no real engagement. It's I'm professing this thing at you.
If you have a question or if you have a
different opinion, No, because I'm take.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Belief that those with power have a right to emotional
and psychological comfort.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
They get weird, right, I can ask someone about their
master's degree and they get weird, and they get up
from the table.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
When someone raises an issue that causes this comfort for
the response is to blame the person for raising the issue,
rather than to look at the issue which is causing
the problem. Yes, for what you're supposed to do is
be passive aggressive.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
What you're supposed to do is pressing forever. And I
think that's not rule.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I'm like, that's me.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I want to be clear that, as far as I know,
everyone involved in the scenario is white passing, which is
to say white, including tamo o'cun. But white supremacy culture
isn't the exclusive domain of white people. It's the water
most of us are swimming in unless you actively push
against it and resist, which is why Okun wrote the worksheet,
because the fifteen specific behaviors that the worksheet describes can
(12:37):
be embodied by white people and people of color perpetuating
a culture that harms everyone, though not necessarily in the
exact same ways. Okun says that one of the problems
with white supremacy culture is that it doesn't allow for
messiness or vulnerability, and that when communities unconsciously rely on
these behaviors and treat them as the norm, it can
make it difficult if not impossible to be open to
(12:57):
something different or to a diversity of experiences and points
of view. It also creates conditions in which new people
people excel can only be welcomed into the community if
they adapt and conform to the cultural norms that already exist.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
That actually tends to be a really strong driver of
loneliness in lots of different groups and populations.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And this brings us to doctor Ellen Lee, an associate
professor and the Division Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at the
University of California, San Diego.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
In certain studies where we see that, you know, people
of certain backgrounds are feeling more lonely, if you control
for socio economic status, the ethnic or racial differences tend
to go away. So it's possible that socio economic status
is a huge driver of loneliness.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Doctor Ellen Lee is a researcher focused on aging schizophrenia
and measuring loneliness in the general population, and she told
me that researching loneliness can mean studying levels of isolation,
the practicalities how often you're in close physical proximity to
other people, how much time you spend alone. The other
thing she studies is how feelings of loneliness have to
do with comparison, how you perceive your social life relative
(14:07):
to other peoples or in my case, relative to your
own expectations, or relative to your previous experience. But either way,
perception is a big part of it. If you perceive
yourself as more isolated than other people or without as
many meaningful connections, the loneliness connected to that perception is
not that different from the feelings that come up as
a result of actual isolation.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Loneliness in and of itself isn't recognized as its own
psychiatric diagnosis or its own disorder. Yet we do see
that loneliness tends to overlap a lot with depressive symptoms,
and so many people who are lonely are often depressed,
and likely people who are depressed also tend to feel lonely.
So it is a bit of a chicken in an
egg whether or not loneliness leads to mental illness or
(14:49):
mental illness leads to loneliness, but it does seem they're
pretty closely intertwined. And then, of course, many individuals with
psychiatric illness tend to have lower socio economic status, disability,
lots of other burdens that can then further reduce your
social opportunities, and so there's both stigma from the outside
but also that self stigma that could really be addressed.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I wondered about the stigma attached to loneliness when I
was making this episode, because it was one of the
hardest episodes to find people for and the one for
which I was ghosted the most. It seemed like no
one really wanted to admit that they were lonely in
a public forum, something which I completely understand but do
not relate to an ors. I got really serious and
(15:32):
decided to pursue the story. Is because I started to
feel it almost like physically. It was like physically painful
at a certain point, which feels distinct from the fact
that it was also distressing, like maybe I would feel
like I wanted to cry about it, you know, like
I would feel distraught, But that was almost like on
a different layer than like physical symptoms. And so I'm
just curious, you know, I guess, like how common is that?
(15:54):
What is that?
Speaker 5 (15:55):
It's a really interesting point. We did a study. We
asked people, do you feel lonely? And those who reported
that they do feel lonely, we asked, what is that
physical experience or what is I experience like for you
mentally or physically, and the resonance as we've got, we're
pretty interesting. A lot of people described it as like
an emptiness. Some people described it as hopelessness. Feeling alone
(16:18):
but in a way that there's no one to help
you was one of the things that came up in
that study. Some folks did say, well, when I feel lonely,
I go and do these things. They had a variety
of things that people were using to cope with those sensations.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
One of those things was doing something kind for someone else,
doing something that benefited other people.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
And we have done some studies that look at self
compassion and compassion towards other people, and both of those
things really seem to be associated with lower levels of loneliness.
So the more self compassion that you are, the less
lonely you are, The more compassionate to other people you are,
the less lonely you are. And it even seemed that
if your self compassion improved over time, your loneliness would
(16:58):
improve over time as well.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, you know, I'm thinking a lot about people who
are socially isolated or who are marginalized, and how loneliness
might impact those groups of people. So I mentioned queer people,
people of color, and you brought up something I thought
was really important, which was this idea of belongingness. What
has come up on your research about the idea of belongingness.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
Yeah, this is a really great question because there's some
very interesting studies about interventions to try to create social
networks for people who don't have a robust social network,
so you know, making a support group, creating a group
to join and do a specific activity, and those interventions
don't always show effectiveness for everybody, and it seems that
(17:42):
the elements of those interventions that really work are where
people have that shared identity. I think the idea is
it's not just more social interaction, but it's meaningful social
interaction where you feel heard, where you feel seen, And
so finding safe spaces for people to get together and
develop those meaningful social interactions, you know, it could be
(18:03):
really really powerful.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah, that sounds great and that makes sense, but you know,
if you have ever been lonely, you know that finding
those meaningful social experiences can be hard, especially if like me,
you work from home, or you've moved recently, or you're shy,
or you just don't have a lot of experience or practice.
How do you deal with your loneliness? Then let's get
into what it takes to create more meaningful social interactions
(18:27):
after this break So I started thinking about loneliness a
lot after I moved out of the US in my
late thirties. A year into living in my new city,
(18:48):
I had met a lot of people. People I saw
regularly for drinks coffees, people who would invite me to
parties but not to their house. When I moved, I
also moved in with the lover, the woman I had
been dating in Los Angeles. Yes, but I longed for
deeper intimacy beyond my romantic relationship. And by the time
I hit that one year mark, I was pretty lonely. Actually,
(19:09):
I was really lonely, Like I could actually feel this
emptiness inside my body, a space that used to be
filled up with text messages and plans to hang in
coffee dates and dinners and running into people and the
feeling of being seen and known and wanted. It was
a loneliness so deep that for a while it became palpable,
(19:30):
It became an ache. It actually hurt, because you know,
getting invited to parties is cool, but I want to
get into it. I want ease and familiarity, to be
near people invested in my thriving and in who's thriving
I could be invested. And also I deeply miss having
people you trust enough to get weird with, Like, yeah,
(19:51):
the thing I miss is having that level of trust
with people that I just don't have that with anyone here.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
You know, and the wildness the wild Like it's important
to have friends that you can be freaky, like like
get weird and you know, like you get weird, right.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So me and shal both wanted to make real friends.
We wanted relationships safe enough to people to be their
full weird of freakselves.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
But how it's like connection used to be the default state,
and now it feels like disconnection is the default state.
And like I think in Platonic, what I'm trying to
say is like you can overcome that and find connection.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Marisa Franco. She's a psychologist and the author
of Platonic How the Science of Attachment can help you
make and keep friends.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
But I feel ambivalent about it because I'm like it's
almost like such a hyper individualistic message when it's like,
when so many people are suffering, it's so systemic that
we need to think about systemic solutions too. But at
the same time, I've learned that if you want a
systemic solution, you might be waiting your whole life because
I'm I mean, like, fifty percent of us are lonely,
(21:01):
so clearly we can't trust society tell us what connection means.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Marissa also moved to a new city, Washington, d C.
A few years ago, and her book Platonic contains some
concrete strategies for making strong friend connections as an adult.
I told Marissa about my burning need for deeper friendships,
but Marissa told me that not everything can or should
be like that. She told me to embrace the small
things like grabbing coffee. And also she said there's value
(21:26):
in being the person who consistently shows up at the
monthly event or instead of going alone to the art thing,
the talk, the movies, whatever, which I love to do,
she suggested inviting someone to come with me to always
get that extra ticket. It is kind of like dating
in the sense that you have to put yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
You have to put yourself out there, and people that
think it happens organically when you track them over time
and when stead he found they're actually lonely or five
years later. Because the people that think it happens based
on effort, they're making that effort.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Right, Okay, it's a practice that they sort of internalize.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Second, it's Ianna feel uncomfortable, and that's fine. It's part
of the process.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That's not a sign that you're doing something wrong. That's
just part of the process of connection. So I also
tell people to, like, if it's uncomfortable, try to like
stick it out for a little bit of time. You
have to overcome something called overt avoidance, which is our
tendency to not show up because we're scared, but also
covert avoidance, which is our tendency to show up physically
(22:23):
but check out mentally. We're on our phone, we're talking
to that one person we already know, we're sitting in
the corner.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Okay, read me, Like covert avoidance is my social anxiety
b read of butter.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
You actually have to engage with people and say, like, Hi,
my name's Marissa, Like how are you doing? How have
you liked this so far?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And Marissa's third tip is assumed people like you because
people are actually a lot more open to you than
you think.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
There's a study that people were told they'd be liked,
then people went into talk to someone after they were
told to assume that they'd be liked, and then they
became open and more agreeable. Now this was deception. But
if you think about like when you think someone's going
to reject you, how do you act towards them? Like,
if I think someone's going to reject me, I don't
even want to talk to them. I'm closed off, I'm withdrawn.
(23:09):
I'm then rejecting them and then I'm getting rejected back.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And Marissa also writes about how your own attachment style
can impact your approach to making your friends. So you
have to have some level of awareness. Are you actually
ready to be open and vulnerable or not?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Risk regulation theory is this idea that we can either
be pro self sometimes or a pro relationship. And here's
what I mean. When you are pro not per self,
but pro protecting yourself, you don't want to be rejected
in any way. You are not initiating connections, you're not
showing affection or love, you're not being vulnerable, and it
feels like you're protecting yourself, but ultimately that comes at
(23:45):
a cost of your relationship. So it's kind of a
firm of self harm because the things that really protect
us the most are our relationships. But if your pro relationship,
you are inevitably making yourself more vulnerable to rejection. You
are initiating with people, you're showing affection towards them, you're
being vulnerable with them. And so that means that to
be good at making friends, you have to do things
(24:08):
that show other people that you will not reject them.
And so that could look like showing affection, telling people
how much they mean to you, or being responsive and reliable,
Like the better we are at regulating other people's fears
of rejection, the more free they feel to connect with us.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Okay, got it, And so what does the opposite of
pro relationship look like?
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Like being flaky for example, not being as responsive or
not following up, or when like someone's vulnerable with you
and you're not really vulnerable back, or they share something
affectionate towards you and you're not affectionate back, or you're
that friend that never reaches out and always expects people
to reach out to you. And I think part of
the reason people do this is because they have this
(24:51):
negative sense of self and they always think I'm burdening someone.
They don't want to hear from me, right, But for
your friend, that actually might feel like rejection because of
that breakdown reciprocity.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah, I feel like I see that a lot of
people not reaching out because they feel that their fear
of being a burden. Do you have like an explanation
for that kind of widespread fear or feeling.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Loneliness isn't just a feeling. It shapes our perception of
the world. I mean from an evolutionary perspective, you can
think of it like if you are separated from your tribe,
you were in danger, so you have to be hyper
vigilant to threat. But now it doesn't really make sense
in modern society, and that's the issue that we're in, right.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Marosa's approach to friendship is expansive and adaptable. It assumes
that connection is abundant and that every relationship is an
opportunity for unique experience shaped by the people inside it.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I went through a breakup and I decided to start
this wellness group with my friends where we met up
to practice wellness. We cook, we meditated, we did yoga.
Why doesn't this form of love matter? Like this, is
this like such a safe form of love for me?
Or why am I only worthy if I have one
kind of love romantic when I've always had this kind
of love. And so just having that really deep, revealing
(26:00):
experience of like the beauties of platonic connection led me
to feel like, oh, not only do I have this issue,
but I think I am reflecting a larger cultural issue
and trend. And so that's what drove me to write
Platonic to level the hierarchy that we place on love,
because I think all of us naturally desire not just
(26:21):
one form of connection, but community, and I think this
love narrative has disconnected us from what we actually want,
what we actually enjoy, what we actually thrive, and like
what makes us feel full and whole, Because for me,
each person brings out a different part of me. If
I'm just around one person, I have an isolated experience
of self because I'm only having one experience of self.
(26:43):
Because I truly believe that like, we don't have to
leave our relationships in these boxes we put them in,
like there's really no singular definition and Raina Cohen. She
wrote this book Other Significant Others.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Other Significant Others as a book about adults who make
a friendship the central relationship in their life.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
And she gave me this tip, like, what would it
mean if you met someone and felt that connection and
then decided where you want it to go from there
rather than saying we're a friend. And this is what
it means to me to be a friend. So no
matter how much we connect, our model of friendship is like, Okay,
we're gonna hang out at most once a week, and
maybe we'll get dinner together, or maybe we'll have like
(27:19):
happy hour together, Like friendship could be anything. My best
friend lived with me all summer and we kind of
became like platonic life partners, and it was so beautiful
to have her around. Like I felt like I couldn't
get as low as I would when I'm alone, So
it was just really beautiful to spend all that time together.
(27:41):
And I still, you know, I have great friends in
watching in DC, and I'm usually like out and about
every single day. But it's not the same as the
intimacy of the mundane.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Oh intimacy, the mundane. Yeah, I kind of love that
I've watched this way of thinking about friendship become more
and more mainstream over the last I don't know, ten
years or so, and to me, to both of us,
both me and Marissa, it seems obviously informed by queer culture.
It's inextricably linked to a queer tradition of romantic friendships
and family making the other things that inform like how
(28:13):
I think about friendship. I think one of the things
that I that changed my life is that I started
to examine the institution of heterosexuality. I kind of realized
that it was something that one could examine, and so
I set of out on this project that I called
at the time, queering my Life. I was like, I'm
going to queer my life. What I got from that
period of my life was flattening the hierarchy between different
(28:33):
kinds of relationships and different kinds of love. Once I
had a community of other queer people, then I was like, Oh,
there's like a whole different value system around friendship that
felt really difficult to achieve when I was still living
my heteronormative life goals. So after talking to Marissa, I
felt more optimistic about my ability to form connections. But
(28:54):
I weirdly couldn't stop thinking about mushrooms, about sal in
the woods and my celial networks. So let's take this
in a totally different but not really direction. Let's become
fungal after the break.
Speaker 6 (29:15):
So my name is Jasmine. I would describe myself as
a micro file but definitely also amateur enthusiast because I'm
not a trained mycologies but my background is in the arts.
I would preferred not to be a curator, but just
growing food.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
This is Jasmine austendor Frodriguez talking about her interests in
mycology the study of mushrooms.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
I'm also the author of a book called Let's Become
Fungal my Solium teachings in the Arts.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Let's Become Fungal as a beautifully illustrated exploration of Jasmine's
curiosity about fungui. You could say it's the answers to
a series of questions and observations that began when she
was working with mushrooms for the first time on a
Shataki farm in Brazil. On the farm, working with Chataki's
challenged Jasmine's romantic notions about growing and harvesting mushrooms. The
(30:09):
mushrooms were more challenging and unpredictable than she had expected.
So that was her motivation to reach out to many
more writers and artists, curators, indigenous teachers, and mycologists who
are already cultivating deep relationships with mushrooms.
Speaker 6 (30:22):
For me, what is somehow the most interesting about mushrooms
is not so much about eating them, or like which
one is the most delicious or psychedelic or medicinal, because
there is a lot to learn from thinking about nature,
not in terms of, oh, one mushroom or one tree,
(30:45):
but about all these relationships, like the whole bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
In the first few pages of Let's Become Fungal, you
learn that to find wild mushrooms in a forest you
have to be in a state of receptiveness.
Speaker 6 (30:59):
Don't think you can go forging like looking for something.
Oh I need to find the chantrau because that's what
I want to eat tonight. I feel like, if that's
what you want, you're not going to get it. I
think that's also like a big teaching of the mushroom.
If you're looking, you're not going to find, But if
you are open to an encounter, the chances of it
(31:24):
happening are much bigger.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
In this open and receptive state, U mushroom might capture
your attention and you might be compelled to get closer.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
And so I now try to not think about if
it's edible or what's it called, but just understand it
in its context, like where you discover it. So the
experience is less about finding it and taking it, but
more about the whole bigger system that it's in. And
(31:55):
this is very interesting for me.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
So in order to really know a single mushroom, you
actually have to zoom out and you have to slow down.
Speaker 6 (32:04):
Because as you go more often, you start seeing these
subtle differences. And if you just go there once, you'll
see things, but there's a lot that remains invisible to you.
So I really like this idea of spending time and
(32:24):
by spending time in that same forest, develop a relationship
to a place, and that's when you start seeing things.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
And even then what you see the mushroom is only
a part of the picture because mushrooms never grow individually.
They're always part of a network. Whether the mushroom appears
above ground or not, there's a whole fungal network beneath
our feet.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
For me, what's really interesting is even when you don't
see an actual mushroom. There's a big chance still that
the myceolium of that mushroom is below ground. That's the
part you don't see. So there is always this potential
of a mushroom coming up if the conditions are right,
(33:09):
when you trust, it will come back.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
An individual mushroom is attached to an underground network called
my celium. Below the ground, my celium networks stretch for miles.
These vast fungal networks are made up of sentient, self
learning membranes that connect mushrooms to each other, and that
connect mushrooms to soil and trees and other plant life.
These membranes can penetrate so deep into the roots of
trees and become so entangled that eventually it can be
(33:34):
hard to tell where the fungus ends and the tree begins.
But the relationship is mutually beneficial because this intelligent fungal
network helps unify different ecosystems by distributing resources between and
among different plant and fungal species, by distributing nutrients like sugars, nitrogen,
and phosphorates.
Speaker 6 (33:53):
So what I find really inspirational is that for fungi,
it's like an invitation to expand on relationships. Previously, there
would not have been a relationship between this pine and
this mushroom, but because there is some kind of environmental
(34:18):
threat or conditions have changed, they will decide to start
this relationship. So it's finding more relationships, more collaboration, partners,
more interdependency, and by having more diversity and different types
of relationships, you increase your chances of survival.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Jasmine writes that for humans, the pandemic was a dress
rehearsal for the times of crisis. We may face again
in our lifetimes times and we have no choice but
to be vulnerable with others, and how we treat each
other during times of stress can show us where we
still have room to grow to become more fungal.
Speaker 6 (35:00):
We tend to think, you know, when there is a
crisis or when there is fear of scarcity. What happens
more often is that we close off and it's like,
oh no, I'm only going to share with my direct
family or my direct community. Then when you have a monoculture,
(35:20):
you are much more susceptible for all kinds of disasters
and diseases. Funji do exactly the opposite, and for me,
this is so interesting because if you think about it,
it makes so much more sense. But we have to
switch that mindset, and fungi show us how to do that.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Some mycologists suggest that the kind of interconnectedness demonstrated by
the fungi is truly the natural order of things. It
used to be the default state. And if you think
about how fungi existed before humans and that we shared
detic material with fungi, it becomes clear that our relationship
to mushrooms is ancestral and intergenerational, and that we, like mushrooms,
(36:08):
have never been individuals. We are also and have always been,
part of small and large scale ecosystems. So to be
in community with mushrooms means returning as much as we
can to our previous symbiotic state.
Speaker 6 (36:22):
When we talk about climate change or the ecological crisis
that we are facing, we often think about the humanness
destructor it's like, oh, it's because we are extracting oil,
because we are emitting carbon emissions, whatever. But we are
also potentially creators of biodiversity because we tend to think like, oh,
(36:47):
if there were only no humans in nature would be perfect,
or everything would be in balance. But we can play
a beautiful role. If that's what we want, that is
something we can talk and think about more and make
different decisions about what we want our role to be.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And if you aspire as I do, to be in
community with fungi, to play a different role in the
ecosystem we're all a part of, we might have to
look more closely at the value systems that shape and
inform our relationships.
Speaker 6 (37:19):
It's not this beautiful, romantic metaphor about how we're all
going to be friends. It's also very pragmatic and very real.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
The way we fight, the way we share and cooperate,
the way we listen and ask questions, and even whether
you'll give your neighbor a ride to the airport or
help your friend move. Opening yourself up to a new
level of intimacy might take practice. It can be messy,
and it can be uncomfortable because it takes real vulnerability
to grow closer instead of farther apart.
Speaker 6 (37:48):
It's easier to look away when there is things happening
at the other end of the world, But when you
think about these my celial networks that actually are connecting
things directly, it's really interesting to think about. Ah, It's
not about the literal proximity, but it's about these relationships
(38:10):
that we have. My seleium can grow so far, like
it can grow be these oceans, and in our globalized
society where everything is interconnected, that changes this whole idea
about what's far and what's close.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Sala's partner eventually joined them in the PNW. They're slowly
piecing together a real sense of connection to the place
they now live in.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Every Wednesday after work, everybody's meeting up and having dinner together.
And I had a friend they let slip that they
had had a secret marriage and they had been married
for like benefits and for like military benefits specifically, and
so they start telling this story, and it made me
trust them immediately because I'm like, you've actually done weird
shit to survive too, And I still tell them now.
(39:04):
I'm like, that was the moment where I knew I
could trust you, was that you had been married for benefits.
My neighbor with the NRA shirt, he's like, he built
a fence for us and like hauled a bunch of
our shit out of the way, and he always jokes
around with us, and so like that makes me feel safe.
(39:26):
Is actual vulnerability we as a human species. And I
think especially now as we enter more laid stages of capitalism, right,
and as we enter the ages of climate catastrophe, and
then that's all we have, Like, all we have is
our connection with other human beings, and that's it, and
(39:47):
that's that's the point, right is I don't think there
is any social systems, especially in the US, that are
going to come and swoop down and help anyone. So yeah,
I should be on good terms with my neighbor and
we should be caring for each other on a deep
sense that goes deeper than transactional.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
The series is hosted, produced, and sound designed by Me
MK Nicole Kelly. I co created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green,
who's also our executive producer. This episode was produced by
Me and Siona Petros, with additional production support by Immani Leonard.
(40:33):
Adrian Lilly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue
and orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created
by Sinay Rolson, fact checking by Serena Soln. Legal services
provided by Rowan Maren and File, our executive producer. From
My Heart podcast is Lindsay Hoffman
Hey, it's kay. Basket Case gets into some heavy topics
about mental health. But keep in mind that I'm not
a mental health professional, and so in the description of
this and every episode, I'll leave you with a list
of relevant resources and links to the things I'm reading.
And while you're listening, take care.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
When I first moved to the woods, I was here
kind of the end of summer going into fall, and
all the fall mushrooms started to come out. Oh, I
was like starstruck. I must have taken a thousand pictures
because I would just see something new every like every
single walk, mushrooms of every color, imaginable mushrooms that are
(00:42):
you know, traditional mushroom shape with the cap and the stem,
and then ones that come out of the ground looking
like coral. And I had never seen so many strange
and beautiful and wonderful mushroom and I had no idea
what any of it was.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
This is Baska Case, I'm nke And that was Sal.
I've followed Sal on Instagram for years, and so I
remember when, like a handful of years ago, they started
posting what I can only describe as nature porn. It
was like a gorgeous lakeside scene, a beautiful moody forests,
(01:29):
and so many different varieties of mushrooms. Mushrooms that grew
like staircases down the sides of trees, black ones, wide
and convex like little plates, and others that were gray
and reaching towards the sky like little plumes of smoke,
and even mushrooms that looked like little rolls of bread
slick with butter. Sala was learning how to forage, how
to find mushrooms in the woods.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
And I would just like be on my hands and
knees on the floor, just like just in shock. And
it was absolutely incredible, and it still is every time
I walk in's where I'm from. There's no water. It's
just dry, desert y desert heat and stuff. And so
when I first moved here, I was just enamored.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, it was obvious they weren't in southern California anymore.
Where we met when we were both volunteers at a
rock camp for kids about a decade ago. I don't
play anything. I was just there for the feminists, utopia vibes,
salf Le's drums. Eventually I learned that Sal had moved
to the Pacific Northwest while they were working for the
National Park Service. They now live in a small town
near a national forest. Sal didn't know anyone in the
(02:33):
place that they moved to, and so they spent a
lot of time swimming and walking alone in the woods.
They also had a partner who lived on the other
side of the country, but who planned to join them
on the West coast eventually, so for a while Sal
didn't necessarily mind the solitude. But then the pandemic, their
(02:55):
chosen solitude faded into lonely isolation as their town and
most of the country went into lockdown. And then things
got even harder.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
My brother passed in this really super traumatic way. He
was twenty four, and my dad passed not even a
year after. And then I had like long COVID and
I was like really sick for like a year and
a half. And so I'm going through all of those
things while trying to navigate these like weird social experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Obviously, Sala's grief made their loneliness more palpable in a
time of crisis. They needed people more than ever.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And I don't mean social support like someone to process
it with me. I mean just a coffee level friendship
with people like I genuinely feel safe with. I think
I've felt lonely for lots of my life, but I
think it is a unique loneliness here.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Salism a part of southern California I called the Inland Empire.
Californians call it the Ie. And diversity, all kinds of
diversity was something Sala was used to. They had a
multicultural friend group from a range of backgrounds. They had
friends who were lawyers and friends who worked in warehouses.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It shaped how I understand the world and how I
expect the world to be. And then now that I'm
no longer there, things like don't make sense.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
The other thing they were used to was being part
of a network of care and.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I think that IE culture where your neighbor will drop
off plates of food just because, like not even for anything,
but just because they made extra food. And that is
the culture, and there's this sense of social intimacy that
is kind of innate to this place.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Sala's mom is Sicilian and their dad is Syrian. So
Sau grew up in a big, boisterous family in a
mix of Arab and Mediterranean culture where there was an
emphasis on food and closeness and being welcoming and warm
and enthusiastic and open, where guest culture, a willingness to
express care and a comfort with being care for was
just part of the value system.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And everybody's up in your shit. And my uncle's talk
to me this close to my face, right an inch
away from my face. There's this close physical like, you know,
just like slapping somebody and grabbing somebody and being.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Excited alone in the Pacific Northwest, sal missed that closeness,
that sense of familiarity.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I always think of like being drunk at the bar
with my friends and they gaze into each other's eyes
and they're about to kiss. And that's the joke, right
is like is that they're like secretly in love and
they never kid but this level of intimacy. My partner
refers to it as like romantic friendships where you're like
courting your friends, you're cooking for them, and you're buying
(05:49):
tickets to the movies so you can all go. And
responsibility responsibility for each other too, like I know what's
going on with you, and I'm being responsible for you
well being. So I feel like I come from people
invested in each other's thriving. I come from people who
have my back in that way.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
They tried to recreate that network of care with the
other thirty something transplants and their new small town, but
they kept hitting a social wall, Like Sala would give
someone a ride, but then the next time they saw
that person it was like they'd never met before. Or
they would invite someone over to their house for dinner,
but the invitations were never reciprocated. It was like what
(06:31):
they were used to, the culture they were used to
and the ways that they knew how to make friends
didn't seem to apply anymore.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
And then I come here and people are like, hugs
are problematic? And then like all the queers, all the
queers are like, I'm so uncomfortable around you, but could
you give me a ride?
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Though, I think I'm gonna call this episode hugs are problematic.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I was I was reeling like you guys know like hug.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I'm like, we need this, we need this for our
well being, Like fuck, like what world are we trying
to build?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So Saal got frustrated. They felt like there was a
code they were struggling to decipher, or a password, a
right thing to say in order to be accepted into
their new social ecosystem, and.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
It's like it's confusing because like we're at dinner on
a Saturday night, Like I'm just here in a spirit
of friendship, but there's hurdles that I have to jump
through before I'm seeing as like a person of worth
or a person of their same status. They have this
status and they're trying to see where I stack up,
(07:39):
and I don't have status actually, Like.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
What do you mean by status? There?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
So status as in literal money, like status as in
literal social standing. Like almost everybody here that I meet,
they went to a private liberal arts college or an
IVY league or like a little IVY league, and they
don't pay rent and they don't really work, like they
don't work for wages in the same way that I
(08:06):
have to work. Like they lived in Paris and they
have a secret master's degree that they don't talk about.
I put myself through college at the age of thirty one,
but I genuinely I'm genuinely curious. I'm like, I'm never
you know, I never got to live in Colombia, Like
what's up? Like what's up there? I want to know,
you know, I want to go. I would go too,
(08:27):
given the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Sl just wanted to swap lore, share stories, learn about
the past and present of the people around them. But
when they expressed that curiosity, Sal says, people were cagy
and since they didn't seem open around Cell, Sala didn't
feel safe enough to be vulnerable around them. And it
didn't help that they judged Sala's choices, for instance, to
pay for community college with unemployment checks. They judge things
(08:53):
like that against the sort of purest ideological code that
felt removed from Sal's lived experience, and the tendency to
lecture Cell and each other about things like economic inequality
or about policing realities Sala had experienced firsthand. Sale told
me that it was the work of an academic named
(09:13):
Catherine Lou who helped them understand at least part of
what they were experiencing. In twenty twenty one, Catherine Lou
wrote a book called Virtue Hoarders, The Case against the
Professional Managerial Class.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And so it's like peak white liberal, overly educated white
people specifically, but like they don't have to be white necessarily,
people who have access to these kind of elite educations
and how they use their understandings of social justice or
oppression or all of these things to punch down on
working class people.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
The idea of a professional managerial class the PMC, is
a concept first identified by the economist Barbara Ehrenreich in
the nineteen seventies, but by the early twenty and twenty tens,
the PMC could be identified by certain cultural signifiers.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
I think that these days when people talk about the PMC,
there's also they're also referring to a kind of affect
or like a kind of cultural component. And I was
thinking recently about do you remember the blog in the
early two thousands called Stuff White People Like, And I
think it became a book. Some of the references might
be like kind of outdated by now, but yeah, it's
(10:20):
like what you said, like Waldorf schools, Ted talks, kale salad.
Funnily enough, I think it's actually all stuff that the
PMC likes, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And when Catherine lou wrote about them in twenty twenty one,
she characterized the PMC using words like performative identity and
virtue signaling. Lusa's the PMC derives its powers from its credentials,
from having degrees, and not from the kind of authority
someone might gain from having hands on experience. So this
(10:53):
was all very specific and very interesting to me because
I love gossip. But also I have to say that
the whole thing to me was just giving white vibes,
the kind of white vibes described by Tama Okun in
the widely circulated worksheet White Supremacy Culture. As all give
me example after example of the kinds of social dynamics
they kept encountering. I couldn't help but think about some
(11:16):
of the behaviors that Okun identifies. Reliance on academic language,
this very.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Formal, almost corporate way that everyone speaks here.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Decision making is clearer to those with power and unclear
to those without it.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
When I speak, they act like I'm, you know, speaking
in completely different language.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
People in power are afraid of expressed conflict and try
to ignore it or run from.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
There's no real engagement. It's I'm professing this thing at you.
If you have a question or if you have a
different opinion, No, because I'm take.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Belief that those with power have a right to emotional
and psychological comfort.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
They get weird, right, I can ask someone about their
master's degree and they get weird, and they get up
from the table.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
When someone raises an issue that causes this comfort for
the response is to blame the person for raising the issue,
rather than to look at the issue which is causing
the problem. Yes, for what you're supposed to do is
be passive aggressive.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
What you're supposed to do is pressing forever. And I
think that's not rule.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
I'm like, that's me.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I want to be clear that, as far as I know,
everyone involved in the scenario is white passing, which is
to say white, including tamo o'cun. But white supremacy culture
isn't the exclusive domain of white people. It's the water
most of us are swimming in unless you actively push
against it and resist, which is why Okun wrote the worksheet,
because the fifteen specific behaviors that the worksheet describes can
(12:37):
be embodied by white people and people of color perpetuating
a culture that harms everyone, though not necessarily in the
exact same ways. Okun says that one of the problems
with white supremacy culture is that it doesn't allow for
messiness or vulnerability, and that when communities unconsciously rely on
these behaviors and treat them as the norm, it can
make it difficult if not impossible to be open to
(12:57):
something different or to a diversity of experiences and points
of view. It also creates conditions in which new people
people excel can only be welcomed into the community if
they adapt and conform to the cultural norms that already exist.
Speaker 5 (13:11):
That actually tends to be a really strong driver of
loneliness in lots of different groups and populations.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
And this brings us to doctor Ellen Lee, an associate
professor and the Division Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at the
University of California, San Diego.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
In certain studies where we see that, you know, people
of certain backgrounds are feeling more lonely, if you control
for socio economic status, the ethnic or racial differences tend
to go away. So it's possible that socio economic status
is a huge driver of loneliness.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Doctor Ellen Lee is a researcher focused on aging schizophrenia
and measuring loneliness in the general population, and she told
me that researching loneliness can mean studying levels of isolation,
the practicalities how often you're in close physical proximity to
other people, how much time you spend alone. The other
thing she studies is how feelings of loneliness have to
do with comparison, how you perceive your social life relative
(14:07):
to other peoples or in my case, relative to your
own expectations, or relative to your previous experience. But either way,
perception is a big part of it. If you perceive
yourself as more isolated than other people or without as
many meaningful connections, the loneliness connected to that perception is
not that different from the feelings that come up as
a result of actual isolation.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Loneliness in and of itself isn't recognized as its own
psychiatric diagnosis or its own disorder. Yet we do see
that loneliness tends to overlap a lot with depressive symptoms,
and so many people who are lonely are often depressed,
and likely people who are depressed also tend to feel lonely.
So it is a bit of a chicken in an
egg whether or not loneliness leads to mental illness or
(14:49):
mental illness leads to loneliness, but it does seem they're
pretty closely intertwined. And then, of course, many individuals with
psychiatric illness tend to have lower socio economic status, disability,
lots of other burdens that can then further reduce your
social opportunities, and so there's both stigma from the outside
but also that self stigma that could really be addressed.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
I wondered about the stigma attached to loneliness when I
was making this episode, because it was one of the
hardest episodes to find people for and the one for
which I was ghosted the most. It seemed like no
one really wanted to admit that they were lonely in
a public forum, something which I completely understand but do
not relate to an ors. I got really serious and
(15:32):
decided to pursue the story. Is because I started to
feel it almost like physically. It was like physically painful
at a certain point, which feels distinct from the fact
that it was also distressing, like maybe I would feel
like I wanted to cry about it, you know, like
I would feel distraught, But that was almost like on
a different layer than like physical symptoms. And so I'm
just curious, you know, I guess, like how common is that?
(15:54):
What is that?
Speaker 5 (15:55):
It's a really interesting point. We did a study. We
asked people, do you feel lonely? And those who reported
that they do feel lonely, we asked, what is that
physical experience or what is I experience like for you
mentally or physically, and the resonance as we've got, we're
pretty interesting. A lot of people described it as like
an emptiness. Some people described it as hopelessness. Feeling alone
(16:18):
but in a way that there's no one to help
you was one of the things that came up in
that study. Some folks did say, well, when I feel lonely,
I go and do these things. They had a variety
of things that people were using to cope with those sensations.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
One of those things was doing something kind for someone else,
doing something that benefited other people.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
And we have done some studies that look at self
compassion and compassion towards other people, and both of those
things really seem to be associated with lower levels of loneliness.
So the more self compassion that you are, the less
lonely you are, The more compassionate to other people you are,
the less lonely you are. And it even seemed that
if your self compassion improved over time, your loneliness would
(16:58):
improve over time as well.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, you know, I'm thinking a lot about people who
are socially isolated or who are marginalized, and how loneliness
might impact those groups of people. So I mentioned queer people,
people of color, and you brought up something I thought
was really important, which was this idea of belongingness. What
has come up on your research about the idea of belongingness.
Speaker 5 (17:20):
Yeah, this is a really great question because there's some
very interesting studies about interventions to try to create social
networks for people who don't have a robust social network,
so you know, making a support group, creating a group
to join and do a specific activity, and those interventions
don't always show effectiveness for everybody, and it seems that
(17:42):
the elements of those interventions that really work are where
people have that shared identity. I think the idea is
it's not just more social interaction, but it's meaningful social
interaction where you feel heard, where you feel seen, And
so finding safe spaces for people to get together and
develop those meaningful social interactions, you know, it could be
(18:03):
really really powerful.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah, that sounds great and that makes sense, but you know,
if you have ever been lonely, you know that finding
those meaningful social experiences can be hard, especially if like me,
you work from home, or you've moved recently, or you're shy,
or you just don't have a lot of experience or practice.
How do you deal with your loneliness? Then let's get
into what it takes to create more meaningful social interactions
(18:27):
after this break So I started thinking about loneliness a
lot after I moved out of the US in my
late thirties. A year into living in my new city,
(18:48):
I had met a lot of people. People I saw
regularly for drinks coffees, people who would invite me to
parties but not to their house. When I moved, I
also moved in with the lover, the woman I had
been dating in Los Angeles. Yes, but I longed for
deeper intimacy beyond my romantic relationship. And by the time
I hit that one year mark, I was pretty lonely. Actually,
(19:09):
I was really lonely, Like I could actually feel this
emptiness inside my body, a space that used to be
filled up with text messages and plans to hang in
coffee dates and dinners and running into people and the
feeling of being seen and known and wanted. It was
a loneliness so deep that for a while it became palpable,
(19:30):
It became an ache. It actually hurt, because you know,
getting invited to parties is cool, but I want to
get into it. I want ease and familiarity, to be
near people invested in my thriving and in who's thriving
I could be invested. And also I deeply miss having
people you trust enough to get weird with, Like, yeah,
(19:51):
the thing I miss is having that level of trust
with people that I just don't have that with anyone here.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
You know, and the wildness the wild Like it's important
to have friends that you can be freaky, like like
get weird and you know, like you get weird, right.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
So me and shal both wanted to make real friends.
We wanted relationships safe enough to people to be their
full weird of freakselves.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
But how it's like connection used to be the default state,
and now it feels like disconnection is the default state.
And like I think in Platonic, what I'm trying to
say is like you can overcome that and find connection.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
This is Marisa Franco. She's a psychologist and the author
of Platonic How the Science of Attachment can help you
make and keep friends.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
But I feel ambivalent about it because I'm like it's
almost like such a hyper individualistic message when it's like,
when so many people are suffering, it's so systemic that
we need to think about systemic solutions too. But at
the same time, I've learned that if you want a
systemic solution, you might be waiting your whole life because
I'm I mean, like, fifty percent of us are lonely,
(21:01):
so clearly we can't trust society tell us what connection means.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Marissa also moved to a new city, Washington, d C.
A few years ago, and her book Platonic contains some
concrete strategies for making strong friend connections as an adult.
I told Marissa about my burning need for deeper friendships,
but Marissa told me that not everything can or should
be like that. She told me to embrace the small
things like grabbing coffee. And also she said there's value
(21:26):
in being the person who consistently shows up at the
monthly event or instead of going alone to the art thing,
the talk, the movies, whatever, which I love to do,
she suggested inviting someone to come with me to always
get that extra ticket. It is kind of like dating
in the sense that you have to put yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
You have to put yourself out there, and people that
think it happens organically when you track them over time
and when stead he found they're actually lonely or five
years later. Because the people that think it happens based
on effort, they're making that effort.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Right, Okay, it's a practice that they sort of internalize.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Second, it's Ianna feel uncomfortable, and that's fine. It's part
of the process.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That's not a sign that you're doing something wrong. That's
just part of the process of connection. So I also
tell people to, like, if it's uncomfortable, try to like
stick it out for a little bit of time. You
have to overcome something called overt avoidance, which is our
tendency to not show up because we're scared, but also
covert avoidance, which is our tendency to show up physically
(22:23):
but check out mentally. We're on our phone, we're talking
to that one person we already know, we're sitting in
the corner.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Okay, read me, Like covert avoidance is my social anxiety
b read of butter.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
You actually have to engage with people and say, like, Hi,
my name's Marissa, Like how are you doing? How have
you liked this so far?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And Marissa's third tip is assumed people like you because
people are actually a lot more open to you than
you think.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
There's a study that people were told they'd be liked,
then people went into talk to someone after they were
told to assume that they'd be liked, and then they
became open and more agreeable. Now this was deception. But
if you think about like when you think someone's going
to reject you, how do you act towards them? Like,
if I think someone's going to reject me, I don't
even want to talk to them. I'm closed off, I'm withdrawn.
(23:09):
I'm then rejecting them and then I'm getting rejected back.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
And Marissa also writes about how your own attachment style
can impact your approach to making your friends. So you
have to have some level of awareness. Are you actually
ready to be open and vulnerable or not?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Risk regulation theory is this idea that we can either
be pro self sometimes or a pro relationship. And here's
what I mean. When you are pro not per self,
but pro protecting yourself, you don't want to be rejected
in any way. You are not initiating connections, you're not
showing affection or love, you're not being vulnerable, and it
feels like you're protecting yourself, but ultimately that comes at
(23:45):
a cost of your relationship. So it's kind of a
firm of self harm because the things that really protect
us the most are our relationships. But if your pro relationship,
you are inevitably making yourself more vulnerable to rejection. You
are initiating with people, you're showing affection towards them, you're
being vulnerable with them. And so that means that to
be good at making friends, you have to do things
(24:08):
that show other people that you will not reject them.
And so that could look like showing affection, telling people
how much they mean to you, or being responsive and reliable,
Like the better we are at regulating other people's fears
of rejection, the more free they feel to connect with us.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Okay, got it, And so what does the opposite of
pro relationship look like?
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Like being flaky for example, not being as responsive or
not following up, or when like someone's vulnerable with you
and you're not really vulnerable back, or they share something
affectionate towards you and you're not affectionate back, or you're
that friend that never reaches out and always expects people
to reach out to you. And I think part of
the reason people do this is because they have this
(24:51):
negative sense of self and they always think I'm burdening someone.
They don't want to hear from me, right, But for
your friend, that actually might feel like rejection because of
that breakdown reciprocity.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Yeah, I feel like I see that a lot of
people not reaching out because they feel that their fear
of being a burden. Do you have like an explanation
for that kind of widespread fear or feeling.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Loneliness isn't just a feeling. It shapes our perception of
the world. I mean from an evolutionary perspective, you can
think of it like if you are separated from your tribe,
you were in danger, so you have to be hyper
vigilant to threat. But now it doesn't really make sense
in modern society, and that's the issue that we're in, right.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Marosa's approach to friendship is expansive and adaptable. It assumes
that connection is abundant and that every relationship is an
opportunity for unique experience shaped by the people inside it.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I went through a breakup and I decided to start
this wellness group with my friends where we met up
to practice wellness. We cook, we meditated, we did yoga.
Why doesn't this form of love matter? Like this, is
this like such a safe form of love for me?
Or why am I only worthy if I have one
kind of love romantic when I've always had this kind
of love. And so just having that really deep, revealing
(26:00):
experience of like the beauties of platonic connection led me
to feel like, oh, not only do I have this issue,
but I think I am reflecting a larger cultural issue
and trend. And so that's what drove me to write
Platonic to level the hierarchy that we place on love,
because I think all of us naturally desire not just
(26:21):
one form of connection, but community, and I think this
love narrative has disconnected us from what we actually want,
what we actually enjoy, what we actually thrive, and like
what makes us feel full and whole, Because for me,
each person brings out a different part of me. If
I'm just around one person, I have an isolated experience
of self because I'm only having one experience of self.
(26:43):
Because I truly believe that like, we don't have to
leave our relationships in these boxes we put them in,
like there's really no singular definition and Raina Cohen. She
wrote this book Other Significant Others.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Other Significant Others as a book about adults who make
a friendship the central relationship in their life.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
And she gave me this tip, like, what would it
mean if you met someone and felt that connection and
then decided where you want it to go from there
rather than saying we're a friend. And this is what
it means to me to be a friend. So no
matter how much we connect, our model of friendship is like, Okay,
we're gonna hang out at most once a week, and
maybe we'll get dinner together, or maybe we'll have like
(27:19):
happy hour together, Like friendship could be anything. My best
friend lived with me all summer and we kind of
became like platonic life partners, and it was so beautiful
to have her around. Like I felt like I couldn't
get as low as I would when I'm alone, So
it was just really beautiful to spend all that time together.
(27:41):
And I still, you know, I have great friends in
watching in DC, and I'm usually like out and about
every single day. But it's not the same as the
intimacy of the mundane.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Oh intimacy, the mundane. Yeah, I kind of love that
I've watched this way of thinking about friendship become more
and more mainstream over the last I don't know, ten
years or so, and to me, to both of us,
both me and Marissa, it seems obviously informed by queer culture.
It's inextricably linked to a queer tradition of romantic friendships
and family making the other things that inform like how
(28:13):
I think about friendship. I think one of the things
that I that changed my life is that I started
to examine the institution of heterosexuality. I kind of realized
that it was something that one could examine, and so
I set of out on this project that I called
at the time, queering my Life. I was like, I'm
going to queer my life. What I got from that
period of my life was flattening the hierarchy between different
(28:33):
kinds of relationships and different kinds of love. Once I
had a community of other queer people, then I was like, Oh,
there's like a whole different value system around friendship that
felt really difficult to achieve when I was still living
my heteronormative life goals. So after talking to Marissa, I
felt more optimistic about my ability to form connections. But
(28:54):
I weirdly couldn't stop thinking about mushrooms, about sal in
the woods and my celial networks. So let's take this
in a totally different but not really direction. Let's become
fungal after the break.
Speaker 6 (29:15):
So my name is Jasmine. I would describe myself as
a micro file but definitely also amateur enthusiast because I'm
not a trained mycologies but my background is in the arts.
I would preferred not to be a curator, but just
growing food.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
This is Jasmine austendor Frodriguez talking about her interests in
mycology the study of mushrooms.
Speaker 6 (29:40):
I'm also the author of a book called Let's Become
Fungal my Solium teachings in the Arts.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Let's Become Fungal as a beautifully illustrated exploration of Jasmine's
curiosity about fungui. You could say it's the answers to
a series of questions and observations that began when she
was working with mushrooms for the first time on a
Shataki farm in Brazil. On the farm, working with Chataki's
challenged Jasmine's romantic notions about growing and harvesting mushrooms. The
(30:09):
mushrooms were more challenging and unpredictable than she had expected.
So that was her motivation to reach out to many
more writers and artists, curators, indigenous teachers, and mycologists who
are already cultivating deep relationships with mushrooms.
Speaker 6 (30:22):
For me, what is somehow the most interesting about mushrooms
is not so much about eating them, or like which
one is the most delicious or psychedelic or medicinal, because
there is a lot to learn from thinking about nature,
not in terms of, oh, one mushroom or one tree,
(30:45):
but about all these relationships, like the whole bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
In the first few pages of Let's Become Fungal, you
learn that to find wild mushrooms in a forest you
have to be in a state of receptiveness.
Speaker 6 (30:59):
Don't think you can go forging like looking for something.
Oh I need to find the chantrau because that's what
I want to eat tonight. I feel like, if that's
what you want, you're not going to get it. I
think that's also like a big teaching of the mushroom.
If you're looking, you're not going to find, But if
you are open to an encounter, the chances of it
(31:24):
happening are much bigger.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
In this open and receptive state, U mushroom might capture
your attention and you might be compelled to get closer.
Speaker 6 (31:33):
And so I now try to not think about if
it's edible or what's it called, but just understand it
in its context, like where you discover it. So the
experience is less about finding it and taking it, but
more about the whole bigger system that it's in. And
(31:55):
this is very interesting for me.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
So in order to really know a single mushroom, you
actually have to zoom out and you have to slow down.
Speaker 6 (32:04):
Because as you go more often, you start seeing these
subtle differences. And if you just go there once, you'll
see things, but there's a lot that remains invisible to you.
So I really like this idea of spending time and
(32:24):
by spending time in that same forest, develop a relationship
to a place, and that's when you start seeing things.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
And even then what you see the mushroom is only
a part of the picture because mushrooms never grow individually.
They're always part of a network. Whether the mushroom appears
above ground or not, there's a whole fungal network beneath
our feet.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
For me, what's really interesting is even when you don't
see an actual mushroom. There's a big chance still that
the myceolium of that mushroom is below ground. That's the
part you don't see. So there is always this potential
of a mushroom coming up if the conditions are right,
(33:09):
when you trust, it will come back.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
An individual mushroom is attached to an underground network called
my celium. Below the ground, my celium networks stretch for miles.
These vast fungal networks are made up of sentient, self
learning membranes that connect mushrooms to each other, and that
connect mushrooms to soil and trees and other plant life.
These membranes can penetrate so deep into the roots of
trees and become so entangled that eventually it can be
(33:34):
hard to tell where the fungus ends and the tree begins.
But the relationship is mutually beneficial because this intelligent fungal
network helps unify different ecosystems by distributing resources between and
among different plant and fungal species, by distributing nutrients like sugars, nitrogen,
and phosphorates.
Speaker 6 (33:53):
So what I find really inspirational is that for fungi,
it's like an invitation to expand on relationships. Previously, there
would not have been a relationship between this pine and
this mushroom, but because there is some kind of environmental
(34:18):
threat or conditions have changed, they will decide to start
this relationship. So it's finding more relationships, more collaboration, partners,
more interdependency, and by having more diversity and different types
of relationships, you increase your chances of survival.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Jasmine writes that for humans, the pandemic was a dress
rehearsal for the times of crisis. We may face again
in our lifetimes times and we have no choice but
to be vulnerable with others, and how we treat each
other during times of stress can show us where we
still have room to grow to become more fungal.
Speaker 6 (35:00):
We tend to think, you know, when there is a
crisis or when there is fear of scarcity. What happens
more often is that we close off and it's like,
oh no, I'm only going to share with my direct
family or my direct community. Then when you have a monoculture,
(35:20):
you are much more susceptible for all kinds of disasters
and diseases. Funji do exactly the opposite, and for me,
this is so interesting because if you think about it,
it makes so much more sense. But we have to
switch that mindset, and fungi show us how to do that.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Some mycologists suggest that the kind of interconnectedness demonstrated by
the fungi is truly the natural order of things. It
used to be the default state. And if you think
about how fungi existed before humans and that we shared
detic material with fungi, it becomes clear that our relationship
to mushrooms is ancestral and intergenerational, and that we, like mushrooms,
(36:08):
have never been individuals. We are also and have always been,
part of small and large scale ecosystems. So to be
in community with mushrooms means returning as much as we
can to our previous symbiotic state.
Speaker 6 (36:22):
When we talk about climate change or the ecological crisis
that we are facing, we often think about the humanness
destructor it's like, oh, it's because we are extracting oil,
because we are emitting carbon emissions, whatever. But we are
also potentially creators of biodiversity because we tend to think like, oh,
(36:47):
if there were only no humans in nature would be perfect,
or everything would be in balance. But we can play
a beautiful role. If that's what we want, that is
something we can talk and think about more and make
different decisions about what we want our role to be.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
And if you aspire as I do, to be in
community with fungi, to play a different role in the
ecosystem we're all a part of, we might have to
look more closely at the value systems that shape and
inform our relationships.
Speaker 6 (37:19):
It's not this beautiful, romantic metaphor about how we're all
going to be friends. It's also very pragmatic and very real.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
The way we fight, the way we share and cooperate,
the way we listen and ask questions, and even whether
you'll give your neighbor a ride to the airport or
help your friend move. Opening yourself up to a new
level of intimacy might take practice. It can be messy,
and it can be uncomfortable because it takes real vulnerability
to grow closer instead of farther apart.
Speaker 6 (37:48):
It's easier to look away when there is things happening
at the other end of the world, But when you
think about these my celial networks that actually are connecting
things directly, it's really interesting to think about. Ah, It's
not about the literal proximity, but it's about these relationships
(38:10):
that we have. My seleium can grow so far, like
it can grow be these oceans, and in our globalized
society where everything is interconnected, that changes this whole idea
about what's far and what's close.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Sala's partner eventually joined them in the PNW. They're slowly
piecing together a real sense of connection to the place
they now live in.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
Every Wednesday after work, everybody's meeting up and having dinner together.
And I had a friend they let slip that they
had had a secret marriage and they had been married
for like benefits and for like military benefits specifically, and
so they start telling this story, and it made me
trust them immediately because I'm like, you've actually done weird
shit to survive too, And I still tell them now.
(39:04):
I'm like, that was the moment where I knew I
could trust you, was that you had been married for benefits.
My neighbor with the NRA shirt, he's like, he built
a fence for us and like hauled a bunch of
our shit out of the way, and he always jokes
around with us, and so like that makes me feel safe.
(39:26):
Is actual vulnerability we as a human species. And I
think especially now as we enter more laid stages of capitalism, right,
and as we enter the ages of climate catastrophe, and
then that's all we have, Like, all we have is
our connection with other human beings, and that's it, and
(39:47):
that's that's the point, right is I don't think there
is any social systems, especially in the US, that are
going to come and swoop down and help anyone. So yeah,
I should be on good terms with my neighbor and
we should be caring for each other on a deep
sense that goes deeper than transactional.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Baska Case is a production of molten Heart and iHeart Podcasts.
The series is hosted, produced, and sound designed by Me
MK Nicole Kelly. I co created the show with Jasmine J. T. Green,
who's also our executive producer. This episode was produced by
Me and Siona Petros, with additional production support by Immani Leonard.
(40:33):
Adrian Lilly is our mixed engineer. Our theme is blue
and orange by Command Jasmine. Our show art was created
by Sinay Rolson, fact checking by Serena Soln. Legal services
provided by Rowan Maren and File, our executive producer. From
My Heart podcast is Lindsay Hoffman
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