Esther Perel

Can we slowly go back to something that is more real, three-dimensional, tactile, physical, and mutual? Because if we talk about interdependent parts, in order for them to be thriving, they have to be mutual. Mutual and sustainable. I think, like, in nature.

NARRATION

As I sat down to interview modern relationships expert Esther Perel. Or as I like to call her, your favorite therapist’s favorite therapist, she told me that she doesn’t usually get to talk about her work through the lens of nature. But to me, when I look at the natural world, I see it as a series of relationships like plants and pollinators or even humans and trees.

We all depend on one another to survive.

My name is Willow Defebaugh. This is The Nature of. Each week, we’ll look to the natural world for insights into how to navigate the experience of being human. Today, we’re exploring the nature of relationships.

I was so curious to speak with Esther about how we can apply her framework of growing healthy relationships with each other to our relationship with the planet. As Aire says, we live in a world of hyperconnectivity with everyone we’ve ever known accessible at our fingertips, and yet many of us feel more alone than ever.

So let’s listen together as Esther and I explore how to confront this modern loneliness epidemic and shift from a culture of isolation to one of interdependence.

Willow Defebaugh

Well, thank you so much for being here today, Esther. I’m so excited to dive into the nature of relationships. With you. To kick us off, something that you have shared before that really moved me was understanding or defining eroticism as proximity to aliveness. I think we still, many of us live in cultures where desire is often stigmatized, and yet we know we are also human animals and desire is very natural.

So curious as a place to start, what in your eyes, does healthy desire look like? And how do we cultivate that?

Esther

Can I do a little detour, please?

Willow

I love a detour.

Esther

Because I, I was thinking. There are many different ways to think about relationships first, huh? Because we are gonna talk about desire in relationships, and I was trying to think what’s my connection to climate, to nature, to biomimicry, to the biological world as I talk about interpersonal relations and I.

It’s a connection that I don’t often articulate, but it lives deep inside of me. Because I was trained as a systemic family therapist. I studied general systems theory for years, and that meant that I began to look at relationships as a living organism made of interdependent parts, which is kind of what you describe as you talk about nature.

Willow

Mm-hmm.

Esther

And, all these interdependent parts live with each other, knowingly or unknowingly. They affect each other. They’re shaped by each other. If you touch one, it affects the whole system. Problems take place in the context. So what? How is the system organized to keep the problem? In existence and what needs to change in the system for the problem to change, to dissolve or to be resolved, et cetera.

Um, and then how does the system regulate itself? How does a relational system regulate itself? It relates to, it regulates itself by straddling constantly the need for stability and the need for change. Hmm. And all of this fits nature completely. Yes. If you change too fast too soon, you go chaotic and you dysregulate.

If you don’t change enough, you fossilize and you die. So you absolutely need both. You need duty and obligation, and you need freedom and desire. And I kept thinking as I was, as I was reading you, like that’s the basis for our connection.

Willow

There’s so much there that I wanna pull out.  It’s a perfect starting place. No, it’s the heart of it. You know, one thing you said in particular, I love the idea of understanding a relationship as an organism, right? Because. The question of what is an individual? It’s all about scale, right? It’s…I’m Willow Defebaugh, but I’m made of over a thousand different species that live in my body, right?

I’m made up of all of these different relationships. That’s my biology. There’s bacteria within me, there’s microbes, and yet I’m still me and, relationships, similarly, we see you and then we see me. But also if you change your scale, then we see that the two of us are a relationship. We’re a unit, we’re an organism.

And you expand that further. And maybe we’re part of a community, maybe we’re part of a country, and there does seem to be so much of an emphasis now, particularly here in the United States on just seeing the individual. And what do you recommend for Willow Defebaugh cultivating a culture that’s more based on interrelatedness and creating more symbiosis between us and other people?

Esther

Whew.

Willow

Small question.

Esther

Uh, I mean, you know, I am a relationship therapist, so this is kind of what I’ve devoted myself to in families, in friendships, in work relationships, in romantic relationships, but as on a large scale level, I’m not very optimistic in this moment. Mm-hmm.

Willow

I mean, I see, I see two different things, right?

Esther

I see the splintering and the, the complete fracturing and fragmenting of people in separate atomization and little entities. Mm-hmm. And I see festivals and gatherings. But particularly festivals, the renewal of the focus on experiential, basically another way of bringing back religion.

Willow

Right.

Esther

Honestly. Um, so I see both. I see us really not completely giving up, but I do think that the forces of the moment are forces that separate us rather than forces that bring us together. So then sometimes I think where’s another model where we went from a certain kind of industrialization back to something more authentic.

And I think food is a good example. When I arrived to America, there was a ton of artificial food. It still is, but there was nothing else. And then they had what they called a health food store because the rest had become so unhealthy. And then slowly you began to see bread being baked and not just industrialized bread.

Willow

Mm-hmm.

Esther

And cheese that was, you know, and slowly these things, they don’t, they don’t reach the desserts. Not to be clear, but there has been a response that says, against artificial food and the industrialization of food, we need to go back to the real thing. And I’m thinking, can we borrow that analogy against an artificial intimacy?

Can we slowly go back to something that is more real, three-dimensional, tactile, physical, and mutual. Hmm. Because if we talk about interdependent parts in, in order for them to be thriving, they have to be mutual. Mutual and sustainable. I think like in nature, and what we see now is that wherever there is an emphasis on a relationship, it’s unilateral.

I talk to the machine. The machine makes me feel better, the machine answers me, but the machine has zero feelings and there’s nothing I need to learn to do. Is that still called mutuality or, at one point, does it become something very different in terms of the structure of the relationship? That’s a very, very interesting question.

Willow

Within ecology, there are three different forms of symbiosis. There’s mutualism, which is both parties’ benefit, commensalism, where there’s a neutral relationship, and then there’s parasitism where, only one is benefiting at the expense of the other. And it makes me wonder about our relationship with technology, does it fit into one of those three, or is it kind of creating its own new category.

Esther

It’s not mutual, that’s for sure. It is not totally parasitic. No, it’s not parasitic. So the other one is, it’s, it’s transactional. Is that it?. I think this is different. This is unilateral. You are there for me, it’s actually quite regressive. You are there to make me feel differently. I, but you are. There is no other. There’s no person on the other side unless I start to worry about the feelings of the machine.

Willow

I actually, I love transactional as being like the fourth kind of symbiosis that’s being created through technology. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

Esther

Transactional also means usually pragmatic.

Usually it includes no ambiguity. It’s an either or. It’s a one and a zero. It simplifies things. It takes the complexity and the nuance out of relational problems. All of that I put in transactional versus mutual usually involves existential.

Willow

Yeah. I think that is completely true and I also think that, more and more people are saying that they’re impacted on a daily basis by climate anxiety or eco-grief. And it’s this feeling of just ambiguous grief that I, the planet, our home, is under duress. And many of us, I think, feel this sense of not being able to do anything about it. And one of the reasons I was so excited to talk to you is because I do really believe that the, what we call the climate crisis is a crisis of relationship and we’ve lost the ability to really be in healthy relationship with the planet. It’s, our relationship with nature has become transactional.

It’s everything… is extraction. It’s one sided. Just as we were, yeah, as we were talking about. And so I also love to think about, we were talking about adrienne maree brown and something she shared with me is her philosophy. She calls it small, is all. On the small scale is where we really practice these things.

Esther

Yes, I say life is lived in the details.

Willow

Yes. Yes. Beautiful. And so relationships can also be where we practice becoming in better relationship with say the planet. Because I think to heal, one is to start to heal the other. If we’re gonna heal society, we’re gonna have to heal our individual relationships. And maybe that can be a scalable framework towards hopefully a healthier relationship with the planet.

Esther

It’s very interesting. I have two, two thoughts about what you say. When I grew up, I was trained psychodynamically, psychoanalytically at first in very individual, deep psychology, et cetera.

The whole shift to systemic thinking. Which was the revolution of the fifties, was to begin to think about ourselves contextually. So it wasn’t the individual, it wasn’t the unconscious, it was actually, the relationship was not just what was inside of you, but what was between you and another. From there, it went to the family, from the family, it went to the community.

That community and the family needed to be looked at in relationship to religion, to ethnicity, to class, to race, but nature was never mentioned. That’s the piece I wanna highlight. It’s nobody ever talked about the relationship to the universe, to the planet, to the air, to the water, to the sky, to, and therefore, what is ours.

Connection and our interdependence with it. We are all here today saying, what a beautiful day. And some of us are saying, this is eerie. It shouldn’t be so warm. We are at the end of October and, but part of us enjoys it. Last week I went for my first time to a workshop, a retreat the whole weekend on More than Just Human.

And it was about human rights, that are about rights for other species, for nature, for rivers, for water, for air, and we did a series of exercises and practices that had to do with our relationship, our alienation, and our connection to the natural world around us. And I, it was literally what I do with couples in most cases, or individuals in relational systems, let’s put it like that, and broadening these relational systems to the forces that they depend upon, but don’t really pay attention to.

Willow

Is there anything from that weekend or that workshop that has really stuck with you in particular?

Esther

It was a lot of the exercises that we did, but the first one was walking in, walking outside and basically picking up things that expressed our connection and then finding things that expressed our alienation and how do we define those terms? The most interesting to me was what is the definition? What makes me feel connected? What is the connection made of and what makes me feel alienated? What do I throw? What do I discard? What do I never see? What scares me? That actually is very useful.

Why do I get bothered by certain little rodents? I sat at one point… I looked at the bees and the flowers and the pollen, and I remember saying to my sons at one point when they went to college, make sure to take an intro to art history or architecture because you will never travel the same way again.

It’s not just that you won’t look at art the same way, you will not travel the same way. And I think they had the same experience by doing these exercises in nature. Then writing about it and picking up things, then creating sculptures. We did, I mean we did. It was all about art and nature as well. I had the feeling that I’ve just gone through.

The art class where one teaches me to look with a different eye, to sense with different senses to pick up information that I don’t usually even pay attention to, and I, I imagined the memories of being taken to see artworks and realizing that I had not even seen any of this before and doing the same thing when I explain what I’ve just seen in a sequence between people and how I’m tracking the interaction at every level, overt, covert, spoken, unspoken, physical, the contradictions, the tension that I can read this, but I cannot read nature, and I had a feeling that I’ve had the first introduction to that language.

Willow

Interdependence, it is all in the details, right? You said that you were studying bees with pollen, and you think about in an ecosystem, if the pollinators disappear, the whole thing falls apart.

It’s literally the tiniest parts that keep the whole thing functioning. It’s everything added up, right? And I think…

Esther

So this thing, the tiniest part, keep it all going, is connected to one of the most important understandings of power. That power often comes from the bottom up. That power is not just a matter of who has the most power, but who has the determining power. Who is doing the function or who has the power to dismantle the thing upon which the whole system rests when you just said that thing, when typically I say, everybody who’s had a 2-year-old understands that, but this idea that if this function of the pollination does not happen, the whole re reproduction system is hampered. That the, a small function has the power to hold or dismantle an entire system, and that makes you think about power very differently.

Willow

Yes, and what we’re seeing right now is, we have really created this anthropocentric structure where humans are at the top. It’s a pyramid, and at least that’s how we see everything as opposed to an ecological worldview as like a web.

Esther

The anthropocene is we are at the center, but it changes. It changes the soil, it changes the footprint. It’s not just at the center. We determine the fate of many other…

Willow

Yes, absolutely.

Esther

Elements.

Willow

Yes. And I think shifting towards a more ecological worldview is recognizing exactly that. That when we put ourselves at the top, we’re determining we’re at the center.

We’re changing the building blocks of life, and we need to start thinking more from a place of, okay, we are just one strand in this web, and we need to be thinking about the pollinators, and we need to be thinking about the small actors that have big ripple effects within our ecosystems.

NARRATION

Nature is all about interdependence. It’s a web of reciprocity, but we’ve created a pyramid, a hierarchy that places ourselves at the top, and that breeds isolation between our species and the rest of the natural world. 

We don’t want to see other life forms as intelligent or conscious because that allows us to create domination over them through agriculture and industry, not seeing other life forms as conscious, creates space for us to hold power over them, to not feel a sense of empathy. 

For so long, particularly in the realm of Western science, it’s been taboo to anthropomorphize other species, to see our own humanity reflected back in them. Think about how quick we were to ascribe consciousness and intelligence to machines, and yet so reticent to do so with animals and plants, but more and more scientists are coming forward now and declaring that other life forms are intelligent and do display consciousness. Many of the emotions that we think of as being integral to the human experience can be found in other animals as well, including what’s at the heart of Esther’s work and what’s the starting point of this conversation…desire.

Esther

So you started with desire. Yes.

Willow

Bring us back to desire.

Esther

It started with desire, and of course the question has always been do, you know, do little fish and do plankton? And do, you know, other creatures have desire? Can do as because desire is sentient. Desire is premeditated, desire is conscious, it’s willful.

It, you are aware of it. So I think in many areas we say we have desire. We are the only ones who have a erotic life. Other species have a sexual life, but we have a life that is there to amplify excitement and pleasure. Sure. And connection. I’m not sure that’s, we are the only one.

Willow

No. There are some other animal species that have sex for pleasure.

Esther

The bonobos for example. We are not the only ones who are queer. We are not the ones that are trans. We are, it actually, in that sense, it’s a very interesting thing. It’s not just that we think of ourselves as more intelligent, it’s that we think of ourselves as more complex. And the complexity makes us then think that we are more intelligent.

Willow

The complexity makes us think we’re more intelligent.

Esther

Yes. If you wanna see monogamy, that’s a big one. Monogamy, there’s very few mammals that are really monogamous. Probably 1 or 3% of mammals are monogamous.

This is a cultural system. There’s nothing intrinsically monogamous about human beings. We are socially promiscuous or socially monogamous and sexually promiscuous, let’s put it like that, and all these things that I have studied, I think it’s a very interesting moment for me and for many to go and look in the broader ecological system.

How does that play out there? To what extent do we really think we’re so unique?

Willow

It’s fascinating. Given that monogamy isn’t something that is baked into our biology or isn’t some kind of dictate by nature for our species. Do you feel like it’s realistic for our species this day and age?

Esther

I think that the history of monogamy in itself and of the term needs to be quickly laid out because for most of history, when people talked about monogamy, they meant one person for life.

Now they’re talking about monogamy, and it means one person at a time. People easily tell you, I am monogamous in all my relationships, plural. My grandmother would not have understood that statement.

Willow

Fascinating. I didn’t know that.

Esther

Okay. The, we are not mon… we as a famous philosopher whose name now escapes me once, said to me, he says, monogamy doesn’t exist in reality, it doesn’t exist in history, in your memory. So it exists in your imagination. Meaning it’s the way we define it and people who come to marriage or to committed relationships having not been monogamous, at least in the West, they often today will not be monogamous afterwards because 50% of marriages pretty much will not last or pair bondings of that sort.

And sometimes they don’t want to be monogamous inside the relationship. They say, if I had freedom before, I want to maintain that freedom on the inside. Monogamy is a cultural system. It’s an economic system. It’s a social system. It has not much to do with the natural inclinations of people sexually, but that doesn’t matter because we live in those structures.

Now the definition of monogamy has changed in and of itself. So that structure is gone. It’s not one person for life. And gender has come in here because basically men have practically had a license to cheat throughout history, supported with scientific evidence that they are natural rumors. There’s reasons to justify why women are more inclined with domesticity and security than men. Is it because they are naturally more inclined to that or is it that women know them well? What they please, what pleases them, but they know to choose what will make them more secure? Is it a valid system today? Depends on all of what we’ve just discussed, where, this is a very, the fact that we can even question it is a very western privilege of people who proclaim to have a cell, a level of equality with each other that they can ask that question.

I think as a whole, the conversation around monogamy at this moment is also, and a conversation about polyamory, which follows is also a question about a different iteration of community building. So once you put it like that, it’s less about sex and about lovers and about double lives and all of that and it’s or triples or quads, or it’s really how do we create new forms of interdependence.

Willow

I love that you brought the interdependence piece back in because it reminds me of something that you’ve shared as well about how what we used to get from a whole village, now we get, try to get from one person. And I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to that and how we’re, that shift away from community dependence has impacted our expectations on relationships and how maybe now we might be evolving away from that. Is that what you’re saying?

Esther

So when we live, typically I can trace it just as a kind of a line from, you live in villages, you live in communal structures, tribal structures, you have a sense of continuity.

A sense of belonging and a sense of identity that is given to you. Through that sense of belonging, you move to the city and for the first time, you are more free and more alone. And you have to begin to define yourselves by yourself about this. You have to find your people to create your sense of belonging.

From community, you go maybe to extended family, but the group really narrows and gradually romantic love becomes this place where you are trying to experience a sense of belonging, anchoring, grounding, continuity, identity. And one person gradually is giving you what previously you got from an entire social structure, a village, a community.

And then I thought, I want that thing about intimacy now becomes paramount, but the definition narrows. It becomes really transcending my existential aloneness a self against the wounds of life is what I’m going to feel with you. And the less religion there is in our lives, and the more secular we become and the more all of this gets transferred onto our romantic relationships and now onto our work relationships.

And so I think that the breakdown around monogamy, the opening up of these barriers and the reconceptualization of relationship away from just the dyadic is actually a redefinition of new forms of communal living and interdependence. And when you put it like that, it’s about something very different than just where do people go with their excitement.

Willow

It makes me think of another parallel, I think you’ve spoken before too, about how we used to also, speaking about religion, we used to, what we used to look for in God. Now we’re looking for in a partner. And it makes me think about even before the rise of so many monotheistic religions, many cultures and peoples worshipped nature.

And many still do. And there’s this interesting thread here too, where if we can restore a sense of reverence for the natural world, for the larger world, I wonder if that might take some of the pressure off or the expectations off that we’re trying to put in one person. It’s part of this maybe shift towards cultivating interdependence that we need.

Esther

And towards understanding that you belong to something that is bigger than yourself. And something that you don’t necessarily control. Part of having so much choice and decision making power is also an illusion of control. You are in charge of your life. It’s all inside of you.

You can be whatever you want. And I think that once you connect to nature in a bigger way than just, if you have a tsunami in your backyard, then you realize that you are part of something that will, that started long before you and will continue long after you, and it should humble you a little bit and it should also make you more connected to your vulnerability that you are part of something and you have to interact with those pieces. You can’t just deny them. 

Willow

There’s responsibility there.

Esther

There’s a responsibility, there is an interdependence in the full world. There is a need for rev, for reverence, for respect because if you don’t respect it sooner or later, it’ll kick you and it’ll kick you in a way that will destroy everything you build.

Willow

And we are seeing that with hurricanes, and floods and…

Esther

Earthquakes and the, the whole thing. So I think, it reminds me of and about this moment after 9/11 it’s a, it’s an aside, but it always stayed with me.

People came down the stairs and we, my kids were in the school literally next to it. Now that was a manmade, that was not a natural disaster, but disaster it was. And there were people who didn’t do very well afterwards, and those were the ones who typically thought, I’m in charge. I make things happen. I’m in control.

Those people had many more signs of depression than people who lived with the notion that shit happens in the world. Things happen. They had wars, they had floods, they had earthquakes. They had lots of experiences that told them there’s a whole other set of forces that you don’t have, that you’re not in control of.

Those people did a lot better because they saw themselves as part of something bigger. That they were not in charge of and that they had to learn to live with. And I thought that is very interesting is that when you have a more humble, more interconnected sense of yourself, you actually do better in the face of adversity.

You understand that grief is not about getting over something. Grief is about making space for it to live inside of you while you continue living.

Willow

Can you say that one more time, that last line?

Esther

Yes. It’s actually from the work of David Kessler that when you grieve, the goal is not that you’re gonna get over it, but that you learn to live with it, and that you basically grow around it and you become large enough that it lives inside of you while you continue living.

Willow

Beautiful. And I think it is that, connecting it back to eco grief, I think so many people are just wanting to deny the fact that grief exists, suffering exists, and we wanna turn further towards distraction, towards technology, whatever it is that will keep us away from this truth that we suffer.

Which to your point, spirituality and religion, by reminding us that we’re part of something bigger has always helped with that and so many people I think about the, secularization of the world. And so many people are scarred by religion and spirituality, and I understand why.

And at the same time, spirituality is really just a, some kind of practice that you’re connected to something larger. And it’s part of why I write so much about what’s called spiritual ecology, which is, essentially just saying, it’s from a biological perspective, from an ecological perspective, we are part of something larger.

And that thing is called nature. And so spirituality has become this very loaded, I think term, but to me science is very spiritual.

Esther

So how do you understand the denial? It’s like the Romans, right? How do you understand the fact that, the distraction, the, if it’s gonna go down, let it just go down sooner, or I’ll go down while drinking and partying and celebrating and deny.

What why is it so scary, difficult, repulsive?

Willow

I think it’s the great dilemma of our species, right? We’re constantly trying to search for an escape from pain or. To pretend it doesn’t exist or to find some cure. And the great, catch 22 of our species is that always makes it worse, right?

It’s like we’re running away from it. And actually, if we just, and this is what I always think about with, the climate crisis is just so many people I know or I talk to, they just won’t engage with it ’cause it seems too scary. The reality is if everyone engaged with it, it wouldn’t be scary.

And for me, that’s like this just little microcosm of just like how we interact with suffering and how we interact with pain is we try to run from it ’cause we don’t like being hurt. And then typically the wound grows when the wound is always where the medicine is to speak. I’m sure, suddenly I feel like I’m in the therapist’s chair.

Esther

No, I’m asking because if, I think, if I think of what did religion in its traditional structure offer I go back to the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, when he would say, religion helps you with the unintelligible. What can’t you make sense of? It helps you with the question of suffering and pain.

It doesn’t, never tells you won’t be suffering. It just provides you practices, structures, rituals, community to tolerate the suffering. To live with it, and it helps you with the question of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? And the morality question, so it’s just the mystery, the morality, and the suffering and those needs haven’t disappeared one iota.

We still need loads of things from culture, from art, from science, from anywhere to help us with those three questions. But we have not, it’s not the first time in history that we have a hubris where we think that we are above. And I think a certain form of techno-optimism is that kind of hubris too, that we are above and we, there is not a problem we cannot solve.

And there’s always been a tension I think, between that humility of, no, we are part of something bigger versus we are the biggest and we sit on top. This is not a new tension, I think. And so then I ask myself, why are we so inclined? On the one hand, we wanna solve a lot of problems at this moment with technology, and we are addressing an enormous amount of things that this new technology literally helps us.

And on the other hand, we become grandiose. It’s really the tension between humility and grandiosity is our relationship with nature sometimes I think…

Willow

Absolutely. And what you pointed to with technology, we see this with like climate tech solutions, right? There’s things like geoengineering, which is, oh, maybe if we control weather systems, if we can control aspects of nature, we can get us out of this problem.

And there, I can’t help but feel like there’s a part of that’s just us further trying to exert this hubris or this dominance, as opposed to returning perhaps to interdependence, which is what it keeps coming back to. I want to go back to something you. You shared though too. In speaking about this religion piece and moving away from religion, we’re more free than we’ve ever been, but we’re also more alone than we’ve ever been.

And part of that freedom is it feels like, particularly here in the US living under capitalism, there’s just endless choices. And you’ve talked about romantic consumerism. Before to what extent is that, there’s so many parallels to the planet, right? We’re consuming more and more resources and that’s impacting nature.

And then in the world of our loved lives and dating, there’s just, there’s more options. There’s more people to swipe. So how is…how is romantic consumerism impacting our relationships? 

Esther

So the consequence of the freedom we have is that we start to feel commodified. You don’t realize that there’s another person with a heart that beats and that hurts if you just, say I’ll, we’ll have a date at eight o’clock and at 7:15 you send them a text and you say something came up.

Can’t see you. You can’t meet. It’s this disregard. But you can only have disregard when there is a bit of dehumanization. That dehumanization means that you’re not really thinking there’s another person who would offend them or hurt them. Them or they actually, you have no idea what they prepared in order to be there, that to be able to come and meet you, and you don’t think about any of this.

You’re just thinking in a exploitative, consumerist way, what do I get? Not what has been given to me. Not, what am I receiving? Not what is another person’s effort in showing up here? It’s just how convenient is it to me, part of this consumer mentality is convenience. God forbid I would have to walk two blocks to go find something.

But the convenience piece of it is enormously important. And people are not there necessarily as convenient, or at least that’s not how we’ve thought about it until now. Romantic consumerism is emotional capitalism, but that’s a term of ever I lose, it’s not mine. And that mentality translates in our human interactions and it translates in many instances in our interaction with the environment.

I have always these images of the beaches of Greece after the summer. And you just think, my God. It’s what, what do we actually think be, because everybody thinks in that moment, there’s already so much garbage. One other piece. So on what level do you begin to realize that there is an other?

So then you lose your empathy, your connection to other people, that is done to you too. It’s a back and forth, right? And so now you start to feel like, numb and it’s that whole thing. It’s like you don’t look at the consequence, right? When ultimately, freedom and choice is not measured by what you do.

It’s measured by the consequence of what you do. And the consequence is its effect on others as well as on you and on what’s around you.

Willow

And I feel like there’s a real invitation in what you’re saying to practice reciprocity and practice mutualism in dating. And that’s not even just, you can go on a date with someone and realize they’re not the right person, and it can still be an opportunity to practice a level of mutualism by having kindness and…

Esther

Kindness is a, is more than respect these days. It’s kindness. Because kindness implies a level of humanization.

Willow

Yeah.

Esther

You see, there’s a tenderness in the word kindness. And that tenderness means, I feel for you. I understand you have feelings in respect. You don’t think about another person having feelings.

Willow

So there’s one more question I wanna ask that I think will thread a number of these things together, which is the problem that seems to be at the heart of so much of what we’re talking about here, both for people and for the planet, is isolation, right?

Interspecies. Isolation and intra species isolation, right? We’re experiencing a sense of loneliness with each other, but then also with the other aspects of nature, the other species we share this planet with. So what in your eyes, and I recognize this is a big question, but what is the cure for modern loneliness?

Esther

Honestly, I can tell you a lot of things, but I feel like they’ve been said, and I don’t, I, it doesn’t feel enough, right? Stop thinking about family in a nuclear way. Family is much broader than that. If you don’t have your own kids, take care of other people’s kids, join in the caretaking of, but basically create a level of responsibility and interconnection between you and others.

That to me, others that have an obligation for each other to protect, to nurture, to, to do, to provide the basics of what we, so that’s that’s another way of connecting. Another one would be move around a little less. We move, we are moving around way too much. I’m one of them though, but we are moving around too much.

We can’t want belonging and change jobs every two years. It’s that level of moving around too. Why do we need to live alone? One person per flat. What happened to us that we began to see these as success stories. I can have my own apartment.

Willow

When did we stop seeing community as the success story?

Esther

And community provides you with obligation, but it also provides you with freedom when, especially the new types of communities that we create ourselves. The goal is that they support you. They give you access to things. They make certain things easier for you. They give you freedom. This idea that other people are a restriction on your autonomy and on your freedom, and that your autonomy is the plus ultra is just very strange and sad for many people. Actually sad. Can we have dinner and talk about death as some people have created.

Willow

My favorite dinner topic, truly.

Esther

All of these things are experienced at this moment. Even having children are experiences that are isolating. All these experiences that used to be connective are now isolating and everybody writes about it.

Everybody keeps saying isolation is a mental health issue. It’s a longevity issue, it’s a health issue. It’s, you gotta address it, but nobody really knows at scale, how to defy the very forces that are constantly splintering us and atomizing us at this moment. And so that’s where technology has to come in is how do we make technology that brings things to people and doesn’t replace people.

Willow

And last but not least, but what about romantically?

Esther

Romantic loneliness would be in two ways. One is I haven’t found a partner with whom to have that kind of adult love that is unique and called romantic love. But it also can be, I am alone and I feel lonely in the midst of a relationship.

It’s both end and, on both levels. My first and foremost thought is you want many people in your life. You want people who love you differently than this person will, or with whom you have other connections.

Don’t ask one person to be a whole village for you, but there’s certain things that maybe you need to go and ask somewhere else, and so the level of disillusionment.

And loneliness. The loneliness is also relative to the expectations. I thought with you, I would not feel those things ever again.

Willow

I would never suffer.

Esther

I wouldn’t suffer. I wouldn’t feel lonely. I would be met. I wouldn’t feel insecure. I wouldn’t feel anxious. I would feel confident. All of these things that you and our relationship would provide to me, but it’s really you, our relationship.

And when that doesn’t happen, then I have real romantic agony.

I don’t have an answer for how we change that narrative, sorry. I do know that friendships are crucial that today our emotional landscape. In our family life is such that if I don’t like my parents, I don’t feel obliged to attend to my parents. Whereas in the past, how I felt about my parents was rather irrelevant.

If I was the child, I would take care of them when they age, when they get sick, when they are on their way out. That is finished. So intergenerational today has to go beyond blood kin. It has to be really in the framework of friendship, mentorship, guides, collaborators, creative pairs in all those kinds of bonding lies, less loneliness and less isolation.

Willow

So it all comes back to interdependence. When we place everything in the context of the one relationship, that’s where we can run into these challenges. But when you blow up the scale or you zoom out and that one relationship is just part of a web of relationships in your life, that starts to change things.

And the same is true in ecology. An ecosystem needs diversity, it needs biodiversity, otherwise it dies. All of the individual relationships within it do.

Esther

I think you’re absolutely right. I think that what you get by looking closely at nature, and this is new for me, is the word interdependence is more subtle than just, I rely on you.

You rely on me. It’s actually this peace of mind that you rely on, that nobody even knows you’re relying on it. It’s the details. It’s the details. And I think once you begin to really study biodiversity. Then you can get a lot of very creative ideas for human relationships.

Willow

Beautiful.

NARRATION

At the end of each episode, I offer three prompts for guided self-reflection to help internalize and investigate how this week’s themes show up in our daily lives and how we can apply the principles discussed.

For this week, my questions are, which relationships in my life feel the most mutualistic? Are there any that feel transactional?

What makes me feel lonely? And what makes me feel connected? 

How can I create more community in the ecosystem where I live? 

Follow the links in show notes for additional resources related to the episode.

The Nature Of is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Julia Natt, Eleanor Kagan, and Daniel Hartman. Our sound designer is Kristen Mueller. 

The Executive Producers of The Nature Of are me: Willow Defebaugh, Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Nuzum.

Atmos is a nonprofit. To support our work or this podcast see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome.

I’m your host Willow Defebaugh and This is The Nature Of.

Atmos is a nonprofit media organization focused on the cross pollination of climate and culture. In addition to our podcast, we deliver award-winning journalism and creative storytelling through a biannual print magazine, daily digital features, original newsletters, and more. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome.