Why Pain Isn't What You Think It Is & The Disappearing Joys of Everyday Life

People often assume that someone with brown eyes appears more trustworthy than someone with blue eyes. Research suggests there may be something to that belief—but not for the reason most people think. In fact, eye color may have very little to do with it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3541379/ Pain seems simple. You get hurt, you feel pain. Problem solved. Except it isn't that simple at all. Why can two people experience the same injury yet report very different levels of pain? How can amputees feel excruciating pain in a limb that no longer exists? Scientists now understand that pain is not merely a signal sent from the body to the brain. Instead, pain is a complex experience shaped by biology, psychology, memory, expectations, emotions, and environment. Dr. Rachel Zoffness, a leading pain expert on the faculty at UCSF School of Medicine, joins me to explain what modern science has discovered about pain, why many traditional assumptions about it are wrong, and how understanding pain differently may help people suffer less. She is author of Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal (https://amzn.to/4afunMR). Life has become incredibly convenient. We no longer unfold paper maps, collect ticket stubs, browse record stores, save newspaper clippings, or carry around many of the physical objects that once filled everyday life. Digital technology has made countless tasks faster and easier—but has something been lost along the way? Ian Bogost believes the answer is yes. He argues that many of the small physical experiences we've eliminated weren't just clutter or inefficiency. They added texture, meaning, memory, and satisfaction to life. In our conversation, he explains how the disappearance of these seemingly insignificant things may be quietly changing our relationship with the world and what we can do to reclaim some of what we've lost. Ian is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (https://amzn.to/3SDVFXf). You've probably heard the travel hack: search for airline tickets too many times and the price will go up. That's why some people clear their browser history, use incognito mode, or switch devices before booking a flight. But does any of that actually work? The answer may surprise you. https://nypost.com/2025/06/03/lifestyle/will-clearing-your-search-history-make-flight-prices-cheaper-experts-reveal-the-surprising-truth/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to https://Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, what does a person's eye color say about who they are? Then, the new science of pain: why it hurts, where it hurts, and where it comes from.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  While it's easy to believe that pain lives just in our bad knee or just in our aching back, neuroscience says that isn't actually true. Ultimately, pain is constructed by our brain.

• 0:28Mike Carruthers?

  Also, if you search for airfares too many times online, does it drive up the price? And simple things are sadly disappearing from our lives: concert tickets, newspaper clippings, cash.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  I call this dematerialization. You don't have a paper map in your car, right? You use your GPS. I have a flight tomorrow. I'm not going to get a boarding pass on paper. I'm just going to scan it on my smartphone. I don't start my car. I push a button. I don't close the hatch. I push a button.

• 0:57Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in ShopCash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in ShopCash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website,

• 1:42Mike Carruthers?

  you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million ShopCash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something You Should Know. With Mike Carruthers.

• 2:40Mike Carruthers?

  So can you tell much of anything about a person based on the color of their eyes? Well, maybe, sorta, but it's not as simple as you think. So we will untangle that as we begin this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. The moment someone looks at your face, their brain starts making snap judgments about you. Are you friendly, intelligent, trustworthy, attractive? And surprisingly, eye color may play a role. Research has found that people tend to rate brown-eyed individuals as more trustworthy than blue-eyed individuals. But there's a really interesting twist to this.

• 3:21Mike Carruthers?

  When researchers digitally changed eye colors in photographs, the trustworthiness ratings didn't change. In other words, it wasn't the eye color itself that mattered. What seemed to matter was the facial structure often associated with different eye colors. Brown-eyed men, for example, tend to have facial features that observers perceived as more trustworthy. So while people may think they're judging your eyes, they're actually responding to subtle facial cues that they don't even realize they're noticing. It's another reminder that our brains are constantly making assumptions about people, often in a fraction of a second, and for reasons we're completely unaware of.

• 4:05Mike Carruthers?

  And that is something you should know. When you feel pain, it seems obvious what's happening. If your back hurts, the problem must be in your back. If your knee hurts, it's in your knee. Pain feels so real and immediate that we rarely question where it comes from. But what if pain isn't simply a signal sent from an injured body part to your brain? What if pain is something your brain actually creates? And it is affected by your thoughts, emotions, expectations, stress levels, past experience, even the people around you? Understanding that could change the way you think about pain, and more importantly,

• 4:50Mike Carruthers?

  how you deal with it. Here to explain this is Dr. Rachel Zoffness. She's a leading pain expert on the faculty of the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, and she also lectures on pain science at Stanford. She's author of a book called "Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal." Hi, Rachel, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me on, Mike.

• 5:17Mike Carruthers?

  So, explain this idea of the new science of pain, because I don't think of it like it's a new science. You know, if I slam my finger in the car door, it hurts like hell, and I don't really think about the science of that. Pain hurts, and it hurts because you just slammed your finger in the door.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Right. Pain science has been evolving for 65 years, and the neuroscience of pain is so rich, and we know so much more now about the many, many factors that contribute to the pain experience beyond anatomy and physiology.

• 5:54Mike Carruthers?

  And what could those factors be? Because again, if I slam my finger in the door, the only factors involved in the pain is how hard I slammed the door, and that's about it.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  So, one of the most important myths that we have all been told and sold about pain is that it is a purely biomedical problem. By that, I mean something to do just with anatomy and physiology, and it therefore requires a purely biomedical solution. And by that, I mean pills and procedures. But while it's easy to believe, like you said, that pain lives just in our bad knee or just in our aching back, neuroscience says that isn't actually true. Ultimately, pain is constructed by our brain. And one of the reasons we know this is due to a condition called phantom limb pain.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  And phantom limb pain occurs when someone loses a limb, an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part. Now, if you can have terrible leg pain in a leg that is no longer attached to your body, that tells us pretty definitively that pain cannot just live in our leg, it cannot just live in our back, and it also has implications for treatment because it means that when we treat pain, and chronic pain in particular, we are doing ourselves a disservice if we are only going to back doctors and we are ignoring the brain.

• 7:29Mike Carruthers?

  So if it's in your brain, but it's also in your leg or your finger or your arm, like, assign some percentages, can you? I mean, is it 10% in your brain? Is it, like, how much?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Right. What a fair question that is. So, the way I like to talk about this is, it's never, pain is never just in our brain. And I want to clearly say, I am not saying pain is all in your head. That is never true. That is a stigmatizing, terrible message that a lot of people with chronic pain have gotten. That is never, never, never true. But pain is also never just all in our bodies. Pain is an experience that is bio-psychosocial. That word, and I think that word is so important, it's also so intuitive for so many people. And what it means is that, yes, of course, there are biological drivers of pain.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  There's genetics, and tissue damage, and system dysfunction, inflammation, diet and exercise, and sleep. But what I want us all to notice is that if we're only focusing on The bio domain of pain, we are literally missing two thirds of the pain problem. Because pain scientists have known for decades that pain is bio psychosocial. So we have these other two domains. And in the psychological domain of pain, we have a number of things that are misunderstood, primarily emotions. And, and Mike, the science of this is really mind blowing.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  What we now know is that the parts of our brain that make emotions also make pain. So 100% of our sensory messages from the body filter through the brain's emotion machinery before they become the thing we call pain. And then the final domain of pain is the sociological domain of pain. That's everything else, that's socioeconomic status and access to care and race and ethnicity and social support or lack thereof. There have been so many studies showing that social, social isolation and loneliness actually affect our physical health, chronic illness and pain.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And also trauma. We know that our environment affects our bodies and our pain as well. Like the body does keep the score. That is true. So pain lives in the middle of these three domains of pain.

• 10:02Mike Carruthers?

  If you're in a lot of pain, my guess is, I don't think I want to hear that. I want a pill. I want you to fix the pain. I want you to, you know, put, give me something that'll numb me up or whatever so that I don't feel the pain. Maybe we could talk about the psychosocial things later, but right now it hurts.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and that's really important to say, you know, pills and procedures can be life saving, especially when it comes to acute pain. So to define our terms, acute pain is pain that's lasting three months or fewer. So a broken bone, an acute illness, even like.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  The pain of childbirth, those are examples of acute pain. Chronic pain is pain that lasts three months or longer. And what we know about chronic pain is that chronic pain is considered a disease process in its own right. And chronic pain, by the by, is when the central nervous system, our brain and our spinal cord, are malfunctioning. They are on high alert. They are in danger mode in a chronic way. So the way I like to explain the science of chronic pain is the pathways in our brain are like the muscles in our body. The more we use them, the bigger and stronger they get. So if you said to me, Rachel Zoffness, I want big, strong biceps.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  I would say, Mike, go lift weights and you'll see with repetition and time, your biceps will get big and strong. This is also true of the pathways in our brain. The more we use them over time, the bigger and stronger they get. This is unfortunately also true for pain. The longer we practice pain inadvertently, accidentally, the bigger and stronger the pain pathway in our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord, become. And when that happens, we say that the brain has become sensitive to pain.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  So a highly sensitive brain that is trained in pain over time is now detecting small bits of sensory data from the body and amplifying them to get your attention and tell you that something dangerous and bad might be happening. And I think that's why it's so important to relocate pain from just the body part that hurts ultimately to the brain because it helps guide treatment and recommendations.

• 12:36Mike Carruthers?

  And so if you have chronic pain, like you have bad back pain, which is something you hear about, people have back pain forever, maybe for the rest of their lives. What would you suggest they do different than if so much of the problem is not in your back? What do you do about it?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so up to 80% of us, I believe, will develop chronic back pain in our lifetimes. And what research shows is that there is always a recipe for pain. And it's actually, it's literally the reason I wrote Tell Me Where It Hurts, because I feel like people living with chronic pain have not been given a roadmap for healing, at least not one that is supported by science and evidence. Chronic pain is on the rise. There's 1.9 billion people around the world living with chronic pain, 100 million in the US alone, and those numbers continue to rise. And here we are, stuck in this opioid epidemic that everyone is sick of talking about and hearing about, but it isn't going away.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And one of the reasons for this is that we continue to erroneously treat chronic pain as a biomedical problem that requires a biomedical solution. And the answer, of course, is that if pain is a bio-psycho-social problem, and we know that it is, it requires a bio-psycho-social solution. What do I mean by that? So just as there's a recipe for brownies, there is always, always, always a recipe for pain. So when my patients come into my office, I will ask them, "Hey, Mike, what are the ingredients that go into making a bad pain day?" And usually, they can tell me, "Do you have pain? I hope you don't."

• 14:22Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I'll answer that question, and we'll continue our conversation about pain in just a moment.

• 14:29Mike Carruthers?

  My guest is Dr. Rachel Zoffness, and we are talking about pain. She is author of the book, Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal. So to answer your question, yes, I have had pain. I've been having a little back pain recently, as a matter of fact.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Can you offhand tell me a couple of factors that go into making a bad pain day or make your pain worse? Sometimes people know, sometimes they don't know. But do you have a sense of what makes your back pain worse?

• 14:58Mike Carruthers?

  I don't. Well, it could be a lot of things, but my experience is it hurts when I get up in the morning and within about 30 seconds, it's gone.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 15:10Mike Carruthers?

  It stays gone until I sit down or until I'm stationary for a while, and then I get up from the chair and I feel it again. And after 30 seconds, it's gone.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yes, great. So you just gave me a great ingredient. Being sedentary, those are two ingredients. Being sedentary and movement are two ingredients in your pain recipe. So that's true for me, too. My high pain ingredients, and I often hear patients name some of these, and I suspect they'll resonate with your listeners, too. So some of the ingredients in a high pain recipe for me are sitting and staring at my screen for too many hours, not protecting time to stand up and move my body or exercise, poor sleep, eating a crap diet, having extremely high stress at work, not setting boundaries

• 16:03Speaker 01

  around asks on my time and feeling crushed and stressed for time. And, you know, what I want listeners to notice is that those are bio-psycho-social ingredients, and we all have them. So, you know, for some of my patients, I was just seeing someone who has terrible leg pain, and for him, cold, wet weather is one of the ingredients in his high pain recipe. So it's different for everyone. But what I love about this concept is that just as there's a recipe for high pain, there's also always a recipe for low pain. And our low pain Recipe is really just the opposite of our high pain recipe.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So I know if poor sleep is a high pain ingredient, and it often is, there's so much data that shows that insomnia and sleep issues amplify pain. There's actually a word for it in the pain world. It's called painsomnia. And we know that insomnia actually amplifies pain. And then high pain leads to poor sleep and poor sleep leads to more pain. So I know that I need to address sleep and implement a sleep hygiene protocol as part of my low pain recipe and as part of my treatment protocol. So some of the things that I might do are set a sleep time and awake time. I might stop taking so many naps because I know that will reduce my sleep quality at night.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  So there's all these different ingredients we can look at when we're targeting chronic pain to actually change the pain recipe.

• 17:35Mike Carruthers?

  So the pain, though, the back pain or the leg pain that people have, those, those things you mentioned may be in the recipe, but they're not the cause. You don't get back pain because you're not sleeping well, right? Back pain has a biological cause that these other things make worse. Is that true?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So for acute pain, usually we want to go and have all the scans and all the tests and all the examinations because it's really important to find out what's going on with the body part that hurts. So when we were talking about what pain is, pain is our body's warning system. It's our danger detection system and it exists to warn us that something might be wrong. Pain is also an indicator that things are out of balance. So if you've ever had a hunger headache, or if you've ever been dehydrated and gotten a headache or body pain, pain is often an indicator that things in our body are out of balance. The word for that is homeostasis. So pain can be an indicator that we are out of balance. That can be physiologically, that can be emotionally.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  There can also be things going on in our environment that make us out of balance. So when We talk about pain. We are always looking at the complete bio psychosocial recipe. And I have a story that sort of breaks this association. So the association you're making is one that most people make. And it's the belief that hurt or pain is the same as harm or damage. But what science tells us, and this is part of the new neuroscience of pain, what science tells us is that hurt and harm are not the same. Hurt and harm are not the same. So I'm going to tell

• 19:22Speaker 01

  you a quick story, if I may, that will elucidate this point. I call these stories a tale of two nails. And these are from medical journals because I am a nerd. I've been studying pain neuroscience now for more than 30 years, and I have read pretty much every single scientific paper on pain that is out there. So these are my favorite stories from the medical literature. So medical researchers wrote about a construction worker who was on a job site, and he jumped off a plank straight onto a seven inch nail. And that nail drove through his boot, clear through to the other side. And he could see the top of the nail protruding from his boot. He was in terrible

• 20:06Speaker 01

  pain, and his colleagues, construction workers, rushed him to the emergency room. And the good doctors gave him a lot of really good drugs, like opioids, I believe, fentanyl. And they removed his boot, and they discovered that a miracle had occurred. The nail had passed between the space between his toes. There was no puncture wound. There was no blood. There was no tissue damage. But the man's pain was real. How did this happen? His brain, aka his danger detector, used all available information to decide whether or not to make pain and how much. Our

• 20:49Speaker 01

  brains are always using all available information to make that determination to save our lives. For example, this man's brain used knowledge of his dangerous work environment, memories of past pain experiences, visual data, like data from his five senses, including the visual of this giant nail protruding from the top of his boot. It used emotions like panic and because his brain perceived danger, it made pain to protect him. Tale of nails number two. A second construction worker on a job site in Colorado was using a nail gun

• 21:30Speaker 01

  and the nail gun accidentally discharged and ricocheted backwards and clocked him in the jaw. But he saw a nail go shooting across the room and bury in the wall across from him. And he had a bit of jaw pain and mild toothache and a mild headache, but he continued on with work and life for six days. The end of six days, he said to his wife, you know, I'm going to get this toothache checked out. He went to the dentist and much to both men's surprise, they discovered a four inch nail embedded in his face. What do these tales of nails tell us? They tell us that hurt or pain and harm or damage are not the same.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But that's not what we've been told about pain. We have been told that if you have pain, that means necessarily that something is wrong, that something is damaged in your back. And here's a fun fact about back pain. Scientists and medical doctors have done a bazillion studies now showing that when you scan the backs of healthy people with zero pain, up to 90% of us are walking around with slipped and bulging discs and abnormal spines and absolutely no pain. Because hurt and harm are not the same. It's the mistake we make. In fact, when people have chronic back pain,

• 22:57Speaker 01

  they are often recommended back surgery. And back surgery is so often unsuccessful. There's now a diagnosis to go along with that lack of success. It is called failed back surgery syndrome. As if you failed the surgery and not the other way around. Chronic pain is always biopsychosocial. It is driven not just by biological drivers, but also by psychological drivers, cognitive and emotional drivers, and also sociological drivers.

• 23:28Mike Carruthers?

  And so when, do you also find people who have back pain, who have You said that there are people who have no pain and have what you would think would be physical symptoms of back pain. Does it work the other way? Are there people with back pain who have no reason for it, physical reason for it?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  The most, in fact, I think it's up to 80% of back pain has no known physiological cause.

• 23:54Mike Carruthers?

  Well, for many people, myself included, this has opened up a whole different way of looking at pain that's kind of empowering, actually. I've been talking to Dr. Rachel Zoffness. She is a leading pain expert. She's on the faculty of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. She lectures on pain science at Stanford, and she's author of the book, Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. And Rachel, thank you. Thanks for being here.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike, so much for having me. I hope this was helpful for your listeners, and it was a pleasure to be here.

• 24:34Mike Carruthers?

  Over the last few decades, something profound has happened to the way we live, and most of us barely noticed. Little by little, the physical world has been disappearing. Airline tickets became apps. Photo albums became clouds. CDs, maps, newspapers, paper files, books, even cash have all been replaced by digital versions that promise to make life easier, faster, and more efficient. And in many ways, they have. But what if something important was lost in the process? What if our rush towards convenience has quietly made life less satisfying, less memorable, and even less human? As our experiences become

• 25:19Mike Carruthers?

  increasingly virtual, are we giving up more than we realize? Ian Bogost says we are. Ian argues that many of the small, tangible things that we've discarded weren't just clutter. They played a meaningful role in how we experience the world. Ian is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of several books, including The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. And he joins me to explain why the disappearance of everyday physical things matters more than most of us think. Hi, Ian. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 25:56Mike Carruthers?

  So I just explained briefly what it is you're talking about, but dive in deeper what you mean by we're losing touch with the physical world.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I call this dematerialization. And the idea is that over the last few decades, we've systematically lost contact with everyday life, with physical interactions. And this has happened in a lot of ways. You know, you don't have a paper map in your car anymore, right? You use your GPS on your phone. I have a flight tomorrow, I'm not going to get a boarding pass on paper, I'm just going to scan it on my watch or my smartphone. When I'm at the airport and I go into the restroom, I won't probably touch the faucet or the towel dispenser because there'll be sensors there. I don't start my car, I push a button. I don't close the hatch, I push a button. You kind of can't touch products in stores anymore, partly because maybe you'd rather

• 26:50Speaker 02

  buy them online and partly because maybe the stores and the products don't exist. A lot of times, a restaurant menu is just a scannable code now. And a lot of those changes, they are useful and convenient, but they have removed that opportunity for, just for sensory engagement with the world.

• 27:09Mike Carruthers?

  So as I was thinking about this in preparation of us talking today, I remember, because I come from radio, I worked for many years on the radio playing music. And there was a guy that I worked with who was substantially older than me, and he has since passed away, but he was also a radio guy from the old days. And as radio got more and more digital, he would sit and by his computer and do his show, but he held a stack of 45 records and then later on CDs, because to him, radio required that. It had to, there was, there's a physical part of radio, if you're playing songs on the radio, where that you handle the songs.

• 27:54Mike Carruthers?

  And so I think that plays in exactly to what you're talking about.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  It's exactly what I'm talking about, yeah. And that, that feeling of, of opening up a record, of unfolding it. Of pulling out, carefully pulling out the vinyl or even a CD for that matter, or a cassette, doesn't matter what the format is of having that contact. The smell, remember the smell of cassette tape liners or CD liners? That sort of, sort of earthy, like petricor kind of smell. All of that's, all that's gone. And, you know, many people don't even know that it's gone. They don't remember those things. And so they don't know what they've lost. But it's, it's also not just something to be nostalgic about, right? Like, that's not the answer is, oh, we need to kind of go back to like analog culture because we kind of can't go back.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  We have to live in, in the present and find new ways of finding that contact with the world.

• 28:43Mike Carruthers?

  Why? Why, why does this even matter? What, what's so important about physically touching the world? If there's seemingly a better way that doesn't require that you physically touch the world? I mean, a lot of people, for example, don't like to use money because we've learned that money is pretty filthy. So why touch it?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Because we are physical beings in the material world. We live inside of our human bodies. No matter how like much you look at your phone or use your computer or whatever, you're still a physical being with a body in the world. And your whole existence is about connecting your senses with all of the stuff around you. And so you're missing out on a major part of your life when you don't get to or don't choose to or don't just do those interactions with your senses in the world. And they're still available. They're just different than they used to be.

• 29:44Mike Carruthers?

  But we're, yeah, because we're not going back to cassettes. That seems unlikely. So what, you know, what do you, if you feel that void, how do you fill it?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, this like small scale interaction, I call it gratification. This sort of sensory enchantment of everyday life, that, that feeling of being sensorily connected through your sight and your sound and, and smell, anything that you do. And if you kind of go through your life and you add these little bits and pieces. Of experience that are already happening to you. If you just kind of like accept them as a part of your day rather than rushing past them because you're trying to get something done and you're busy or you think they're indulgent or maybe you even think they're like sinful because they're sensory pleasures, then you build drip by drip this little container of contentment that just makes your life better.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  And you don't need to go back to do that because I still put on my shoes in the morning and walk outside and feel the gravel underneath my feet as I walk to my car or I feel the coldness of the steering wheel between my fingers or I feel the heat of the coffee mug in my hand or the taste of it as it goes down my throat or all of the other things that I encounter all the time. They're always right there. So even though there's been that loss, that dematerialization effect, you're still in this kind of surplus of sensory engagement. It's always around you all the time. It's easy actually, which sometimes makes it harder for people to see and to accept it because they think that being happy requires difficulty, like they have to work hard. Otherwise it's a cheat or something.

• 31:22Mike Carruthers?

  So is this stop and smell the roses?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  In a way, in a way it is stop and smell the roses or maybe, maybe even better that you're already smelling the roses, just let it happen. You don't even have to stop to smell the roses, walk by them if you want, but just take in the smell, linger on it a little, accept it rather than rushing past it.

• 31:43Mike Carruthers?

  And is all of this science or is it just a belief or like where is this coming from?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I'm glad you asked this because I think that we, it's so hard to trust our senses, to trust our experience. We're always looking for evidence. We're looking for like outcome driven evidence or data these days. And my approach to this problem is a lot more philosophical than it is scientific. In fact, one of the like kind of enemies is popular psychology. There's this old study or series of studies starting in the 1960s about gratification that kind of created this idea of instant gratification. Instant gratification is bad and that if you take in sensory pleasures in the moment, you're missing out on opportunities for for future engagement.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And there was these psychologists at Stanford that studied this and they tried to prove with science that if you can only defer gratification, then your life will be more, you know, it'll be better and more successful and whatnot. And like all of that supposed science was kind of unwound decades later anyway. But when you think about it, when you actually like stop and think about it, why do you need a scientific proof that when you touch or smell or taste or engage with your senses in the world, that it feels good and then it connects you to that world? So, you know, the argument I'm making is trust yourself, trust the experiences you're already having, because they can deliver dividends.

• 33:12Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but I think the science would be interesting because otherwise it's a benign pleasure. I mean, it's nice to stop and smell the roses. But, you know, sometimes people want, well, so what would be the benefit of that? I mean, why would I want to do that?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, it's funny because I think that we're part of the problem is that we're always looking for the for the benefit. You know, I need to pack something away for later. I need to put something in my bag in case I get hungry. And this immediacy of gratification is really important to me. Like, if you don't take it when it happens, it's kind of gone forever. You can't hold it in reserve and come back to it later. And so to me, the idea that you can wait for gratification to pay off, that's sort of a mistaken notion. And the, you know, the argument I would make is that not all of our sensory encounters are over indulgences.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  That's kind of how we started to think about them, that either we were engaged in like this sort of indulgent life of overeating, or of sex, or of drugs, or of smoking, or of alcohol, or whatever. And that's kind of where sensory pleasure lives. Or else we have to be ascetics, and we have to withdraw and withhold our desires for those things in order that we can pursue bigger goals. And I just don't think that's a choice that we have to make.

• 34:36Mike Carruthers?

  When you were talking a moment ago about there was this whole scientific stuff about delaying gratification, can you give me an example of what those people were talking about and what the case they were making was?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, these studies were started by a psychologist named Walter Mitchell in the late 1960s. It's a very famous series of studies that were known as the marshmallow test. And what they do is they take preschoolers and they put them in a room alone and they have some toys. And they say, you could play with the toys later. I'm going to put a marshmallow or another kind of treat on a plate. And if you wait 15 minutes until I come back, then you can have a second marshmallow. So that was the, that was the test. And then they did longitudinal studies over time where they tried to show that the kids who waited, who waited for the second marshmallow had more success in life, they made more money, or they had better SAT scores, they got into better schools and that kind of thing.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  So that was the idea, that postponing gratification would make you more successful.

• 35:37Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I've heard about this before. And essentially, the test was, or the question they asked these kids was, you can have one marshmallow now, or if you wait, you can have two marshmallows later.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Like, imagine you're a three-year-old kid and you see a marshmallow. It's not just about, like, consuming the marshmallow, indulging in it. Like, even just seeing a marshmallow is incredible. Holding it in your hands and it's so squishy and soft, what a weird object. And in some ways, like, listening to children's intuitive sense of the world, their curiosity and their interest and their intrigue, this sort of thing gets missed in studies like this. Like, the idea that you can only consume the marshmallow by devouring it instantly and then waiting for another is already kind of mistaken. But also, if you're a kid, you know, like, imagine, like, here's a marshmallow, wait for later. If you come from a background where you don't have that much at home, then you're just gonna, you're just gonna take it, right? That's not about delaying gratification.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  It's about taking something that's given to you in the moment. So when they tried to kind of prove their point about these later life successes, what they found is ultimately, it wasn't really about the marshmallow, it wasn't about delaying gratification. It was about, you know, coming from a wealthier family and having more support and all. Those are the things that made you successful, not whether or not you ate two marshmallows instead of one.

• 36:57Mike Carruthers?

  And so I get what you're saying to enjoy these physical pleasures in the world in the moment, and you're not claiming it cures cancer or does anything other than you're enjoying. But what does it do? Does it do anything? Or does it just, it's just pleasant?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  It connects you. It connects you to the world. It's like, one way to think about it is, of all of the ways that you could be happy or content, don't you want to pursue all of them? Like, why would you withhold some of them because they're not as important or they don't seem as large scale as others? So if, you know, we think of happiness in terms of like, big stuff, this big overall life contentment, your career, your family, your community, your purpose in life, and all of that stuff is important. I'm not against any of that. But then all that little stuff, this, you know, even the sound of something outside my window as we're talking now, it's available to me. It adds like a little bit of connectivity between me and the world. It's a good feeling of connecting my body

• 38:00Speaker 02

  and my senses to the world. It's easy, it's immediate, it doesn't require any work, it doesn't come at any cost. And so, accepting that, taking that in, makes your life just a little bit better every time you do it. And over time, that little bit adds up. And I think that's an important point. So it's not just like, it's not indulgences on the one hand, but it's not nothing either. And as you allow yourself to feel more gratified, then over time, you feel more content in a more general sense.

• 38:29Mike Carruthers?

  When I think about the physical world that I touch every day, most of it seems pretty mundane stuff that, you know, I need to get this done to empty the dishwasher, whatever I'm doing, but I have more important things to do.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  We have more important things to do. We think that they're distractions or diversions. We're always trying to get, get past them, to get on to the stuff that we really think we are meaning to do. Like, I can't believe I have to empty the dishwasher, I can't believe I have to fold the towels. If only I could excise this from my life, if only I could outsource it, if I didn't have to do all that meaningless stuff, then I could get on to the meaningful stuff. But the little stuff happens so often that if you make it more meaningful, then you'll enjoy it doing it, and you won't miss out on it. But also, that's a part of your life, right? Like, why wouldn't it be meaningful? I also think there's a sense in which it's like it feels a little weird to people. If I tell you that when the towels come out of the dryer and they're all warm and fluffy

• 39:30Speaker 02

  and soft, that that's delightful, that I love that, you would kind of nod probably and say, yeah, that makes sense. Like, who doesn't like a nice, warm, clean towel? But unless we like really identify it and talk about it and make it feel a little more normal than it is, it's not automatically something that we would ponder. Whereas if I tell you that getting on with that of like finding more time in my life so I can spend time with my kids, or I can work, overwork at my job even more so I can get that promotion, that's like sort of socially acceptable. So there's also a sense, in other words, in which gratification has become like kind of a social oddity, and we have to make it more normal again. I think the best way to do that is just to talk about it, to surface those things, to tell people about them.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  And they're probably experiencing the same delight you are, but maybe they're embarrassed to admit it.

• 40:18Mike Carruthers?

  But there is, you know, I hadn't really thought about this until I was reading the material about you, and there is this kind of very low-level dissatisfaction I think people have with things like digital tickets, automated faucets. And it's never something that's worth even bringing up. But your digital ticket, you've got nothing to put in the scrapbook now because it's a digital ticket. I guess you maybe you could print it out or something, but...

• 40:52Speaker 02

  You can still print it out, yeah, but it's different, right?

• 40:55Mike Carruthers?

  But it's still not the same as, here's my ticket.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you can print it out. Even when you print it out, though, the piece of like printer paper you get it on is different from that printed card stock that you, you know, you'd kind of like hold it and fidget with it in line in your hands, and you'd bend it a little bit, and it would give you something to do, but it would also sort of just give you some kind of novel contact with the world that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Concert tickets were always like this for me, you know, like you'd go and you'd get tickets to a show, and then you'd be worried about losing them until you taped them to the back of the cab. Or you'd sort of check three times that they're in your jacket pocket before you leave for the theater. And all of that, it felt like nervousness. There was also delight in this, this sort of like part of the experience you are about to have at the show. It's why you might like take a program.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  There's always like some alternative that you can pursue. You can take the program at the show. Or when, you know, when I'm in line for the airplane, there's usually something I can engage with physically. It's just something different than I would have expected previously. And I think, I think part of the advice I give to people is that when, when you're in an ordinary activity, especially one where you feel a little bit of that loss, that sense that maybe your digital life is less gratifying than your previous one was. Stay with something that's present a little longer than you would otherwise. I'm completely convinced that in airports, one of the reasons why the coffee lines are always so long. Obviously, like people love coffee and they want coffee, but it's partly because they don't have a boarding pass anymore. They're looking for something to do and something to hold.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  You know, it's something to kind of feel alongside this strange experience that they're going through where they have to be traveling. And if you can make that like a more active experience of just staying with the space that you're in, the physical interactions that you're having, the sensory life that you're always leading, then it can help.

• 42:47Mike Carruthers?

  What's your, what's your suggestion though about like, how do you do this? Like, am I supposed to think, okay, well, the next time I unload the dishwasher, I should really enjoy the experience of touching the dishes and the silverware? Because it seems like that would be hard to remember.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  In a lot of ways, it's the wrong way of thinking. Cause you kind of tie your brain in knots, kind of going, oh my gosh, like I need to remember that when I unload the dishwasher, that when the glasses tinkle against one another, that's gratifying and I should, I should take that in. I should notice it. It's kind of like a recipe for disaster. So instead, what I've done is think of it rather than as a mindset, as something in me. It's something in the world. It's like a gift. And if I can get myself to accept those gifts when they happen, knowing that they're always going to be available a moment later, if I don't take it the last Moment, then that's, that's really helped. If it's not that footfall, it's the next one. If it's not that twig that I'm crunching, it's, it's the rock that's a, you know, a quarter

• 43:49Speaker 02

  mile down the road. If it's not that, that version of the dishwasher that I'm unloading, it's the next one. If it's not that bite, it's the next one. It's just a matter of kind of understanding that this is always happening, that it's easy instead of hard, and that you can give yourself permission to feel gratified.

• 44:05Mike Carruthers?

  You know, what's interesting is, you know, I've thought about this before. I've thought about, I kind of missed the concert ticket or having a boarding pass to hold in my hand, the paper boarding pass. But I didn't think anybody else thought much about it. So I appreciate the fact that not only you, but I imagine lots of people have thought about it to some extent, and they miss it too. I've been talking with Ian Bogost. He's author of the book, The Small Stuff, How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Ian, great, thanks, thanks for being here.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I really appreciate you spending some time with me.

• 44:44Mike Carruthers?

  You've probably heard the advice to never search for the same airline flight twice, and that you should use incognito mode, clear your cookies, switch browsers. Otherwise, the airline will know you're interested in that flight and jack up the price. It's one of the most persistent travel myths around, and it's most likely not true. Travel experts who track airfare for a living say there's no convincing evidence that airlines raise ticket prices simply because you've searched for the same flight multiple times. In fact, tests comparing browsers, devices, and incognito mode generally find little or no difference in airfares.

• 45:29Mike Carruthers?

  So why then does the price often seem to jump up right after you've looked? Because airline prices change constantly. Airlines sell seats in price tiers called fare buckets. Once the cheaper seats are gone, seats in that next bucket may cost significantly more. It feels personal, but it's happening to everyone. And that is something you should know. We have talked about some interesting topics today, and I hope you'll share this episode and the things you've heard with people you know, and help us grow our audience. I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.