The Hidden System Keeping You Burned Out (It’s Not You) | Corinne Low - EP 749

What if your exhaustion isn’t a personal failure, but the result of invisible systems shaping your life? In this episode of the Passion Struck podcast, I sit down with Wharton economist Corinne Low, author of Having It All, to unpack one of the most misunderstood challenges of modern life: why so many of us feel depleted even when we’re doing everything “right.”Corinne introduces a powerful idea called “the squeeze”—a period where demands on your time, energy, and identity all peak at once, while your resources lag behind. Careers demand more. Parenting expectations intensify. Household responsibilities don’t disappear—they become invisible. The result? A life that feels full… but not fulfilling. Passion Struck is the #1 alternative health and personal growth podcast dedicated to human flourishing and the science of mattering. It is ranked #1 on FeedSpot’s list of the Top Passion Podcasts on the Web and is consistently recognized among the world’s top business and mindset podcasts. Check the full show notes here: https://passionstruck.com/the-economics-of-exhaustion-modern-burnout/Explore guided prompts, reflections, and a companion reflection guide connected to this episode at: https://TheIgnitedLife.netThank You to Our SponsorsLimited Time Offer – Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15% OFF online with my code PASSION at huel.com/passion. New Customers Only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show! Connect with JohnKeynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Get the book Having It All: https://www.corinnelow.com/bookIn This Episode, You Will Learn:How invisible “deals” shape your career, relationships, and identity—often without your awareness. Why do people stay in unsustainable arrangementsHow societal expectations distort your choices,What it means to design your life around your personal utility function—the things that will actually matter at the end of your life. Support the MovementEvery human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it. https://StartMattering.comDisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Connect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Substack:

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

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  For parents, we want to endlessly pour energy into our kids and we do let ourselves become depleted. We skip the gym or we skip the things that we need to take care of ourselves. I think the piece that we miss is that when we're not getting that energy in, the energy that's flowing out becomes degraded also. So what we're putting into our kids actually isn't as high quality when we are not getting that energy flow in that we need.

• 0:31John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

• 1:19John R. Miles?

  Hey friends and welcome back to episode 749 of Passion Struck. Earlier this week, we kicked off a brand new series for the month of April, Purpose by Design. And in that opening conversation with Arthur Brooks, we explored something foundational, that what many people are experiencing today isn't just a mental health crisis, it's a meaning crisis. Because we've built lives around achievement, productivity, and constant motion, but often at the expense of something deeper: coherence, purpose, and a sense that our lives actually matter. But that conversation raises an even bigger question. If meaning is something we're missing, what is shaping the way we live in the first place?

• 2:04John R. Miles?

  Because it's easy to think our lives are simply the result of our choices. But what if those choices are being influenced and sometimes constrained by systems we rarely stop to examine? And that's where today's conversation begins. Because if Arthur helped us understand why meaning matters, today's guest helps us understand why it feels so hard to actually live it. My guest is Dr. Corinne Lowe, economist, Wharton professor, and author of Having It All. And in this episode, we explore a tension that so many people feel but struggle to explain. Why does it feel like we're doing everything right and still end up exhausted?

• 2:46John R. Miles?

  Corinne introduces a powerful framework for understanding modern life, that we're living in a world where every domain is asking more of us. Our careers, our families, our relationships, even our own expectations. And the result is what she calls the squeeze. A period where demands peak, resources feel limited, and we begin to feel stretched in ways that are both invisible and unsustainable. In today's conversation, we explore why modern life creates chronic exhaustion, how invisible deals shape our careers, relationships, and identities. We discuss the difference between real constraints and the ones we impose on ourselves, and how to reconnect with what actually gives your life meaning and energy.

• 3:28John R. Miles?

  At its core, this episode is about a powerful realization that a meaningful life isn't about having it all. It's about having enough of what truly matters and learning how to design your life accordingly. Before we dive in, a quick ask. If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who might need it. You can also watch the full conversation on YouTube and leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps more people discover these conversations. Now, let's dive into my conversation with Corinne Lowe. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:11John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Dr. Corinne Lowe to Passion Struck. Hey Corinne, how are you doing today?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I'm great. Thanks for having me, John.

• 4:20John R. Miles?

  I am so glad that we were able to move this interview up because we've been discussing it for a while and we had a clear break, so I'm glad we could do this today. It's so nice to finally get to meet you in person.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so nice to get to meet you.

• 4:33John R. Miles?

  I want to start out with this whole idea that I think more and more of us today are feeling exhausted. And we don't know where this exhaustion is coming from. But I think so many of us feel like we're doing everything right, but we're still feeling this depletion. What do you think is really driving this exhaustion?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  I think when you look at the data, the world is asking more of us because we went from a model of division of labor where in the mid-century, men were focusing on market production, women were focusing on home production, and nobody was spending very much time with their children. You've had one domain to measure your self-worth against and to try to put your time and energy into. We had this labor force revolution, women entering the workforce, but we really didn't solve for what happens at home. How do all of those things that we call adulting get done? The fact that you've got to keep up with the male, the car needs repaired. You gotta both take the dishes out of the dishwasher and put them back in again. And if you want there to be food in the refrigerator,

• 5:41Speaker 01

  you have to go to the grocery store. And if you want there to be dinner on the table, you have to cook it. And on top of that, the time we spend with our children has doubled. Parents today spend twice as much time with their kids as parents' generation ago. And it's so much so that actually, working moms and dads spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home moms did in 1975. And the labor force, our careers, they're not letting up either because we have what Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin calls greedy jobs, where they don't just want the 40 hours a week, they want the 80 hours a week, right? They want your nights and your weekends because under capitalism, that's going to make them more money.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So every domain is asking more of us. And is it any wonder then that we're tremendously depleted?

• 6:32John R. Miles?

  I remember my time as a senior executive at Dell is where I probably felt this the worst. Because out of my team, which had thousands of members in it, about 90% of them were in five other continents. And so what would happen is I was waking up like 4:30 in the morning. I was logging on because I was trying to have conversations with people who were in Asia. And then the Europe market would kick in. And then afterwards, I'd get home, do a few things with the family. And before I knew it, I was back on with the Asian teams because I

• 7:13John R. Miles?

  had so many employees in Japan, India, Malaysia, and China. And it's just, after a while, unattainable because there is no time to rest.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Right. And if you're working around the clock, as you said, how does the rest of your to do list get done? And then when we have that feeling of being constantly behind and not on top of things, that is so depleting to our energy and to our sense of wholeness. Because I think we have that craving as humans to finish the job. And if the job can never be finished, right? We never get that closure. We never get that sense of satisfaction that we're chasing. And we don't get it in either domain, because I've got a pile of unfolded laundry and a pile of unanswered emails.

• 7:57John R. Miles?

  Yes. In your book, which we're going to be discussing today, which is titled Having It All, one of the things that you discuss was how when you had your child, you were having to do a two hour commute on top of everything else that was going on with the family and everything else. Could you bring us back to that time period and what this showed you about having to stack all these things on top of each other?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I say in the book that I gave birth to my son and also a midlife crisis because everything that I had stacked on top of each other and was balancing stopped balancing when I suddenly had an infant at home. So that commute felt like it could work, right? When I didn't have an infant, but then suddenly when I have a breastfeeding infant and I'm pumping in the Amtrak bathroom, it felt like it wasn't adding up at all. And that sense of incompleteness in both domains, I felt like I was falling behind my colleagues at work. I wasn't keeping up. I wasn't publishing enough papers. I might not get tenure. I was on the tenure track at Wharton. And then meanwhile, I felt like I was missing things at home. I was missing bedtimes. I was

• 9:03Speaker 01

  missing mornings and little cute things that they do with the daycare and the, those moments that were passing me by. And so I, and every time I would come home, I would feel like, okay, now there's tons of dishes in the sink and there's tons of laundry to do and there's packages that need to be returned. And it just felt like a never ending treadmill. And in that all, I really felt like I was losing myself, my fundamental sense of self as a, with my identity being a person who was like on top of things and who was successful and was able to set goals and achieve them. And suddenly it was all truly too much for one person to take on.

• 9:41John R. Miles?

  And I know your research has a lot of focus on women, but I think this feeling of overwhelmed, as I described with myself, is gender neutral. And what I think is it's actually a structural problem with modern life. And I think that's something you agree with.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. But I think there are these structural features, like I said, of workplaces demanding more of us spending more time with kids and there being no more juice to squeeze from time-saving home technologies that lifted the burden for our parents' generation. They said, oh, suddenly I can pop something in the microwave so I can stay a little bit later at work. But we don't have any more technology that actually can take over some of these routine day-to-day tasks and some of the deeper work that isn't routine. It's very hard to outsource, which is emotionally processing things with your child or putting them to bed, right? There's no one that can replace you in those moments. So I think there's a lot

• 10:42Speaker 01

  of things that are impacting both men and women. And I think one of the things that I do hear from women more And I mentioned it myself, is that the guilt or the feeling of not enoughness in the home domain sometimes weighs heavier on women. Conversely, I sometimes hear from men that that feeling of not enoughness in the career domain may weigh heavier on them, right? That kind of feeling of I need to achieve, or I need to accomplish, or it means I'm not good enough in some way.

• 11:12John R. Miles?

  I think there's definitely a lot of that going on. I think from a structural standpoint, the other thing I found is even your children's schools are asking for constraints of your time. I know for us, to get our kids into either a private school, or a magnet type school, or a fundamental school type of environment, there are requirements that they put on the parents for how much time they're willing to invest in the school. And if you've got two working parents, it's just such a barrier. Plus, everything you've got to do after school, and the after-school commitments that also hit you, etc.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Travel soccer and hockey, and oh my goodness, yes.

• 11:52John R. Miles?

  To me, the structural elements are at work, but they go far beyond work. And oftentimes, we don't even realize that even when we sign up to volunteer, or to be part of church groups, or other things, there tends to be far more commitments that come to it than first meet the eye. So I have been doing a lot of interviews lately, and one of, around my new book, The Mattering Effect, and one of those was with Barry Schwartz, who I'm sure you have probably know personally. And he and I were really talking about why he, I think, doesn't like rational choice theory, because it's putting so many constraints

• 12:37John R. Miles?

  on people's choices. And I wanted to ask you, what do you think are some of the biggest constraints that people don't even realize they're making that are shaping their choices?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Oh, such a great question because I think there's the actual constraints, right? Which are things like you have finite time and money. And there are trade offs in the world that if you choose to put more time into work, then you have less time for your kids. And if you choose to put time into your kids' schools, you have less time for your personal life and going to the gym, right? So there's real constraints. And then there's these forces that shape our choices that sometimes people think are constraints, but they're actually preferences or their norms or their obligations or expectations. So it's, well, I have to volunteer at the school because otherwise everybody's going to judge me. And it's like, well, that's actually a preference. It's a preference for not feeling judged, right? There's also the forces of evolution.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  So in economics, we distinguish between the things that actually increase your well being and the things that humans might think increase their well being and therefore choose to do, but don't actually increase their well being. You can think of it as if I could put a type of candy in front of you that you don't even like. And you might, if you're sitting working at your desk, you might mindlessly eat it. Because, you know, our brains have this old programming from millions of years of evolution that says, hey, if there's a calorie available, that calorie should be consumed because you don't know when you're going to get one again, right? And we know that is maladaptive in our now like nutrient rich environment that we now exist in, right?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Well, the same is true for other choices that we make with things like our time. One of the things we talked about is like volunteering at church. And for our genes, being liked by other people was a survival strategy. Because you had to keep your community happy with you and build those relationships so that they would share food with you during the winter, right? But right now, whether or not you're the world's best church volunteer isn't going to determine whether you survive the famine. But your genes sometimes can still feel like it will and say like this, John, this is an existential threat if somebody's unhappy with you or someone's disappointed with you. And so again, that can cause us to make choices out of guilt, out of a sense of social obligation,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  out of a sense of keeping up with the Joneses because that social status protected us in a much more violent and less secure world or environment that our genes evolved in. But that's again maladaptive now when so many things need our time and so few things are really about survival, but making those choices under the threat of survival can actually limit our thriving because we're always chasing that being okay, making everybody else happy. And we're not finding what we really value or what brings us to our kind of highest state of existing.

• 15:40John R. Miles?

  And I think that last thing you said is extremely important because when you're under this constant feeling of responsibility and then you don't get any relief, it, at least for me, had a major compounding effect. And I don't even think at the time I really realized it was happening because it's one of those things, the responsibility starts building up and you realize it, but then after that, especially when you have kids, it subtly becomes more and more additional burden. But it's slight burdens that are increasing, or you realize that all of a sudden it's become overwhelming.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, it's death by a thousand cuts.

• 16:25John R. Miles?

  How do you think when this is happening, it impacts how people experience energy day to day?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  I think what I was feeling was that sense of depletion of all of your energy going out and nothing coming back, nothing filling your cup up, right? Nothing nourishing you. And one of the things that I note, and as you said, my book focuses on women, but this experience is more universal, is that for parents, we want to endlessly pour energy into our kids and we do let ourselves become depleted. We skip the gym or we skip the things that we need to take care of ourselves. I think the piece that we miss is that when we're not getting that energy in, the energy that's flowing out becomes degraded also. So what we're putting into our kids actually isn't as high quality

• 17:16Speaker 01

  when we are not getting that energy flow in that we need. And I think that's important because otherwise, parents feel like selfish, right? When they're like, oh, I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm gonna skip doing the breakfast and the morning routine in the school drop off twice a week or whatever. Or, oh, I'm going to set a limit that says, look, sweetie, you gotta pick one sport. It can either be soccer or hockey. It can't be both because we can't drive in three different directions six days a week. And we feel like selfish, right? But I think what that misses is that your kid doesn't see the bigger picture. The same way your kid is always gonna ask for one more episode of TV or an extra dessert or whatever, and you're gonna set limits. That's your job as a parent because you see the bigger picture.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And if you zoom out, you can see the picture that says, if I keep letting the energy flow out, the quality of it is going to go down. And therefore, the time that I spend with my child that's most important for their human capital development, that's the economist term for kids' knowledge and their leadership skills and everything that they're gonna take into the labor force. The things that are so important for their human capital development are the relationship with you, the connected time with you, the ability to discuss things with you as a parent. And I really saw that with my son, that when I made choices that protected my energy a little bit, and I made some big changes in my life, you can read about them in the book, that our relationship actually blossomed

• 18:43Speaker 01

  because I was able to be present with him. I was able to be the kind of parent that he needed. So there's a reason, the rule is, put your oxygen mask on first. It's not because the parent's more important. It's because you might pass out and not be able to put the kid's oxygen mask on if you don't take care of yourself first. And I just think that's something that's so important for parents to keep in mind.

• 19:03John R. Miles?

  Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment because one of the themes in today's conversation is something I've been researching deeply for my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. What Corinne and I are talking about, this feeling of depletion, of being stretched too thin, of doing everything right, but still feeling like something is missing, is a loss of mattering. When we feel like we don't matter, or that what we're doing doesn't matter, or that we've optimized our lives around things that don't truly reflect who we are, it creates a quiet, powerful form of disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from meaning. The Mattering Effect is about understanding how that happens, and more importantly, how to reclaim it. Because when you restore a sense of mattering, everything changes: how

• 19:46John R. Miles?

  you show up, how you make decisions, and how your life feels. You can preorder The Mattering Effect now at thematteringeffect.com. Available October 6. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 20:06John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck, right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's return to the conversation with Corinne Low.

• 20:15John R. Miles?

  Corinne, I want to use that oxygen mask theory here for a second because in my book, when I describe mattering, I describe it like oxygen. To me, there are certain things that psychologically, we need safety, we need love, and I feel like we need to have the need to matter. And if that need to matter is like oxygen, and finally we're cut off from it, I think it's the same thing that you're alluding to with the oxygen mask. We start getting depleted of it, and all of a sudden, it then starts having unimaginable consequences that we never

• 20:59John R. Miles?

  Thought of. And when I was talking to Gordon Flett about this, I was asking him about loneliness and burnout and hopelessness and rising anxiety. And I asked him, do you think these things are all related? And his term is antimattering. Do you think antimattering is at the root of it? And he said, his research was, in his opinion, yes, this is the major cause and those are symptoms of it. If you think about that analogy with the oxygen, if mattering is like oxygen, do you think his premise has weight?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I think I haven't studied like that specific effect, right? But I think that is part of what I talk about in my work is that ourselves are the resource that we use to invest in these other areas of our life. And so if you just invest in your career, you just invest in your partner, you just invest in your kids, and you don't invest in yourself, each of those investments, right, is not actually going to pay off in the way that you think it is, because you yourself are actually a scarce resource, your time and your energy. And so

• 22:17Speaker 01

  I do think it's very important to protect the self, the energy for the self, right? And to tap into, what are the things that actually fill your cup? What are the things that replenish your oxygen supply? And to understand that when we do that, far from taking away from other people in our lives or other sources of that we could put our energy into, often you're going to end up replenishing those connections, because if you are whole, then you are able to give, you are able to be present. That's the concept that I introduced in the book. It's an economics concept that kind of everybody's taken Econ

• 23:02Speaker 01

  101 knows, this concept of the utility function.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I think it's a similar thing to your mattering effect, which is that I tell people you need to tap into what you most deeply value. And the things that give you utility, it's not about earning more money, but it's also not just about being happy. I think there's been some emphasis in the self-help literature on like happiness or joy. And I don't think that's everything that matters in life. Like one of the things I mentioned is that like, one of the most valuable things you can do is sit by the side of a dying family member. And nobody would describe that as a happy or a joyful experience. Often you're sitting there crying, but it has tremendous value. It's something that you would never regret at the end of your life.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  And so utility, I define it as the things at the end of your life, you would look back on and say, that is a life well-lived. That's how it, that's what I wanted to be doing. That brought me meaning, that brought me fulfillment. So utility includes taking care of your kids, taking care of loved ones. But it also just includes going for a hike on a spring day and smelling the way the air smells after the yucky weather of the winter has gone, right? Or after a rainstorm. So I think that concept, I think they have a lot in common of this, that fundamentally we need to tap into what matters to you. And that means tuning out a little bit of the messages that the world sends us about what we need to be whole. Cause the world is gonna say, you need a nice car, you need a nice house.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  You need to, if you're a woman, you need to like not be wrinkled and not age. You need to lose weight. And at the end of our life, again, when we think about this utility idea, often those are not the things that we would put weight on. So we've got to tune out the messages, right? The capitalistic, consumeristic messages that tell us to focus on those things. And we've got to tune into what actually matters to us. And ultimately that makes us matter.

• 25:06John R. Miles?

  Yeah, Corinne, are you familiar with Professor Gilovich's work out of Cornell?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  No, I'm not.

• 25:12John R. Miles?

  So he has been studying regret, like at people when they're in their third trimester of life, what do they regret the most? And his work is pretty eye opening because it showed that 76% of them regret not living to become their ideal self. And now, we could question, what does ideal self mean? Is that self transcendence? Is that self actualization? But to me, if you think about the utility function that you brought up, I think it's those things that our future self would value that you accomplished. And when you look back, that

• 25:54John R. Miles?

  you were proud that you took the time to do them is how I see it. Is that similar? Is how you would look at it?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:03John R. Miles?

  So what do you think are the keys for someone actually figuring out what their utility function is?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Great question. And one of the ways that I recommend people do it is by closing your eyes and picturing your life if money were no object, if you were a mega billionaire, what would your life look like? And I think for a lot of people, there's some material things, right? You'd be like, I'd have a nicer house, or I would drive a nicer car, or take lots of vacations. And then there's some things that are about how you spend your time that are like, oh, I wouldn't need to work so much. And so I would spend a lot of time visiting relatives that I don't get to see. And or I would spend a lot of quality time with my kids and I wouldn't feel rushed or stressed so that I had to

• 26:55Speaker 01

  finish something. I would be really present with them. Right? So do going through this exercise, and it's a little wistful, because obviously you can't have that life. You can't just snap your fingers and make it happen. Right? But it is revealing to you because that's the unconstrained maximization. In the real world, we're doing constrained maximization. But this still unlocks what you are ultimately trying to be maximizing. And it's often very telling to people because if you did this, John, for example, you would have never said, I would make sure to be on the phone with, at 9:00 PM with Singapore. You would never say, that's something you're gonna do again, if money is no object, if you don't face any constraints. And what that informs you is that it says, even people who love their jobs, like I love my job.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  But if in that fantasy world, it's a, yeah, but I would do it for like 10 hours a week, 15 hours a week. I would do it for 60 hours a week, right? Ultimately, we work because we get paid in money. And money buys other things that give us utility. It buys the things that you pictured, like the nice vacation that you need money to buy, right? But it's revealing about the things that you actually value. And then you can do the work, you can be a problem solver to be like, okay, that's what I value. How do I get more of it? And recognizing that if fundamentally, a lot of what you were picturing was about control over your time, that you can make choices right now to say, well, then I'm gonna make trade offs,

• 28:23Speaker 01

  invest less time into work, because work is a tool we use to convert our time into money, and more time into those things that directly give me utility, that directly are important to me, that directly matter to me.

• 28:36John R. Miles?

  It's interesting, Karin. I was having a discussion with Jamil Zaki, and we were talking about our worth. And it went along the lines of this whole personal utility function. That oftentimes, we don't even realize that our worth, in some ways, is being

• 28:58John R. Miles?

  erased from us because I use it in this example. We were talking about that what we're living today is really a market of mattering, a mattering market. And what Jamil and I were really discussing is when people optimize for what society rewards rather than what actually makes them happy, it's like an increment at a time of your self-worth that's erased. And when he and I were first talking about it, it was like the light bulb went off for me because that self-worth gets optimized all the time in things we do that we don't even realize we're doing.

• 29:42John R. Miles?

  And I realized this when I was in my late 30s, early 40s because I was like, I keep coming into work and one, I'm an introvert and an extrovert type of world, but two, I felt like I was optimizing so much of who I was to be productive at work and to show up in a way that would maximize my effectiveness in that work environment. But the more I started to look at it, it was almost like I was putting a mask on every day, hiding who I was underneath it and what was actually making me happy. Do you think that's a gap a lot of people are dealing with?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And I think it's so easy to lose sight of what's actually important to us because that's in everybody else's interests, right? Your job doesn't want you to think about what's most important for you. Your job wants you to think about how to be more productive, how to make them more money. And so they're going to put a lot of status incentives to make you feel like doing more for them is consistent with doing more for yourself. And you've got to actually recognize, no, there's a gap there, right? That fundamentally, our interests are not shared and I want different things. And if I had complete control and freedom over my time, I might spend more time sitting

• 31:05Speaker 01

  on the beach or playing with my toddler than is actually in the interest of my company that's profit maximizing, right? So. I think that's exactly right, and that's why it's important to take these moments to be really explicit and strategic in our own lives. The same way you do a quarterly plan at work or whatever, and you have to take that bird's eye view, to sit down and say, is how I'm spending my time consistent with what brings me value? Am I actually maximizing here? Am I actually living life in a way that gets me as much utility as possible, acknowledging that I'm facing constraints? And I can't just have infinite utility, but within those constraints,

• 31:51Speaker 01

  am I doing the best that I can?

• 31:56John R. Miles?

  Corinne, I want to park this whole idea of personal utility for a second, and I promise I'm going to come back to it. I want to go back to the concept of deals. I, a couple of months ago, was speaking with Alex Emes, and we were talking about his book that he co-authored with Nobel laureate, Richard Thaler. And we were talking about this in terms of deals that we think about in economic terms, where you're overpaying for things, and that's what causes the winner's curse. I was hoping that you could talk about deals and how they impact our jobs, our relationships, and our major life decisions, and what makes a good deal

• 32:43John R. Miles?

  versus one that is unsustainable.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Such a great question. And Alex is my neighbor and a good friend, and I love his book, so everybody should pick it up. But I think what's different about those deals in our relationships, in our jobs, versus the deals that we make about financial matters, is it's much less explicit that there is a deal happening at all. And so often, you fall into a deal that you then realize, you're like, wait a minute, this does not add up. This is a bad deal. I give the example in the book, and it was something I lived through, of women winning the bread and baking it too in their relationships, that we often see in the data, that when a man earns more...

• 33:28Speaker 01

  The woman, his wife, does more home production. They do more of the cooking and the cleaning. They do more of the childcare. But when a woman earns more, she still does more of the cooking and cleaning and the childcare. And that's what I call winning the bread and baking it, too. And you don't sign up for that. You don't make that explicit, right? It's that you get married. In my case, we had equal earning power when we got married. And then he at some point decided to leave his job and kind of try to start a business, had some setbacks doing that. I happened to, after I went to grad school, get a really good job at Wharton. And so it just started happening that an earnings gap opened up. And then because of some gender roles and some defaults, I was more of the primary parent and I was doing more at home. And I never would have negotiated that deal for

• 34:12Speaker 01

  myself, right? If it was me explicit, if it was like, hey, okay, does this arrangement work for you? I would have never negotiated that deal. But you don't negotiate it. You just fall into it. And then you open your eyes, you're like, wait a minute. And the same can happen at work, right? I know women who, you know, right out of college, they said, I want to make a difference. And so they went into a passion field. They went into labor organizing, or they went into a nonprofit, or they went into the arts or media. And they said, I'm willing to struggle because I want to be in this field. I want to make a difference. But then at some point, they realized, wait a minute, my employer is taking everything from me. And I'm getting this fulfillment back, but I'm not getting rewarded in money. And now I'm falling behind my peers. I can't afford to buy a home. I

• 34:55Speaker 01

  can't afford to feel like I have financial stupidity. And that amount of fulfillment I'm getting from my employer, it's not worth it. And I've seen some of those women choose to move into a more transactional career where they say, okay, I'm going to move into something where I clock in and I clock out. And then I'm going to volunteer on the side and get my fulfillment there. I'm going to spend time with my kids and get my fulfillment there. I think what's different about the types of deals that Alex is talking about and the types of deals that I write about, is that often we're not aware that we're making those deals, right? We don't think of it as there's terms of this agreement. And that's why I think it's important to like, actually zoom out and be like, what are the terms of this agreement? What is the balance of trade with my employer, right?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  How much am I giving? And how much am I getting? And the same in marriages, the same in friendships, right? If there are friendships where you say, hey, every single time, I'm the one chasing down to make plans, or every single time, I'm the one coming to the rescue. Just recognizing, where am I putting in more energy than I'm getting back?

• 35:58John R. Miles?

  Yeah, it's a person who's in a family ecosystem where if you think about this as the analogy of a house, all of a sudden, they become the floor that everyone is stomping on, or they become the refrigerator that's out in the garage, serves a purpose, but doesn't really get any constant love and caring, right?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:21John R. Miles?

  So I think one of the things that goes on in society is so many smart, capable people stay in bad deals for a very long time, whether that's at work or at home, as you were just describing. What do you think are some of the early warning signs that one of those deals or life arrangement is costing you more than it's giving you?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  One of the things that I think I should have recognized earlier in that bad deal that I was in was that when somebody needed to make a sacrifice or make a compromise, it was always me, right? That's if something feels one-sided, where, for example, your firm is asking you to kill yourself and stay up all night and finish something because there's an emergency, or bail somebody else out. But then, when you have an emergency, you don't get that grace, right? Where they're like, I get it that you couldn't meet this deadline, or I get it that you need to take this time off to be with a family member, or something like that. So when something is one-sided and only one person is making sacrifices, I think that's definitely a warning sign.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  When something is leaving you depleted, so if you are just unhappy all the time, and if you're constantly feeling that lack of energy, that like, you're making a pro and con list, should I quit this job? Or should I leave this relationship? I always say, if you're making a pro and con list, like you already know the answer, because it shouldn't feel like that. Because when you're fulfilled, when you're where you're supposed to be, yes, things feel hard, but you also know that you have a foundation that's worth preserving, right? And that's the like, are you making investments in people and institutions that are also making investments in you, right? And true community, true friendship is when you know, okay,

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yes, you might sometimes be the person who does favors for somebody who throws a party for them, who picks their kid up from school, who, whatever, but that's also there for you. And sometimes, for people who are like chronic givers, you have to let yourself test that. You have to sometimes let yourself receive to recognize that some of that giving that you've been doing can come back to you, right? But if you know for a fact, you know that, okay, I have asked that person to step up for me, I have asked my job, I have asked my relationship to step up for me, and it wasn't there, I didn't get that same grace, I think that's a big red flag.

• 38:49John R. Miles?

  In your book, Having It All, frame all of this, that life is a set of exchanges of time, money, energy, effort for a perceived payoff. So if we go back to what we were talking about with personal utility, and you think about the deals we were just talking about, how would us knowing our utility function shift or guide the big decisions or deals that we're making in our career relationships, etc.? How would it make things different?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  So in both of these, if you know that, you can map things over the arc of your life to, in a way that's going to work for you. So I talk about this in relationships, by saying, when we're getting into relationships, we often think about those in-the-moment feelings. So we think about who makes a good boyfriend or girlfriend, but we don't think about who makes a good partner in the enterprise of having a shared life. And you do want to think about things like, do you have shared values about how much to invest in career versus how much time to invest in children or other pursuits? Just shared values about how much time to spend on leisure and enjoyment versus capitalistic productivity. Are you both going to be there? Are you both willing to make sacrifices where if I have a career

• 40:10Speaker 01

  opportunity in another city, you'd have to quit your job for me to take it? Is that reciprocal? And not just an expectation that one person's going to sacrifice for the other person. So thinking about

• 40:21Speaker 01

  How you want your life to look and feel and then thinking about if you're aligned. One of the mistakes I see people make is where at the time you get together, you're like both living in like a bare bones apartment with Ikea furniture. But like one person is picturing, I want to have a home with holiday traditions and I want it to have the Christmas tree decorated and stockings on the mantle and I want to have it be carpeted and have paintings hung up and have nice furniture and whatever. And the other person is just like, this is fine, right? So that difference, that wide chasm between you has not been revealed because you're at this moment in life where you're both living this student, young person lifestyle. But you've got to be able to mentally hit fast forward a little bit to where do you want to be in 20 years?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  And see if you're lined up then. And the same is true in a career. As I said, I mentioned the people I know who've gone into passion fields because they said, yeah, right now in my twenties, this works for me and I want to feel like I'm making a difference. But you've got to mentally fast forward. Am I making investments in a career that's going to work for me? When I've got young kids at home and I've got bills to pay? And is this choice that I'm making now, is this going to pay off then? Thinking about like, how can a career support you over the arc of your life? And that doesn't mean, I don't think you have it all figured out from the beginning. My first job out of college was McKinsey Consulting. I did not stay there, but it gave me a lot of human capital. It gave me a lot of those skills and leadership capabilities and knowledge that I could use in whatever my next job was.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So you don't have to have it all mapped out, but you want to give yourself options for the future. You want to be building your durable, transferable human capital, which is more important than ever in the age of AI. Because we really don't know what fields are going to exist 10 years from now, right? But things like your leadership skills, things like your ability to communicate, your resilience in the face of change, that's durable, transferable human capital. And so building that up is going to help you map out a career over the arc of your life. But I think that in both cases, relationships and career, it's really about mentally fast forwarding and remembering that your utility function is you looking back at 85 years old and asking, how are the choices that you're making today

• 42:34Speaker 01

  setting you up for maximizing utility over the arc of your life?

• 42:38John R. Miles?

  You probably didn't know this, but I spent a number of years at Booz and Co.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  So you know that world.

• 42:45John R. Miles?

  I know that McKinsey world and I would always look at the partners thinking some of them had been there 20, 25 years. I was like, how in the world do you do this?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And I would say, as an economist, because of what my utility function is, I would say, these people are really poor because they're making a lot of money, but they are traveling four or five days a week away from their kids and they're missing a lot of the things that to me really matter in life. And so that to me is not wealth because of my utility function. That might be their utility function. It might be fine, right? But I think when you think about your own values, that's what you want to do. You want to look at the people who have been there for 20 years and you want to say, if I'm investing in building this career, is it a career that I want? Is it ultimately going to pay off in a way that is consistent with my utility function?

• 43:36John R. Miles?

  Corinne, one of the things you talk about in the book is something that you identify as the squeeze. And to me, this squeeze was something that I think my parents had warned me about, but I didn't really have a terminology for it until I found myself in it. But maybe you could describe for the audience what the squeeze is and how they might understand if they're living in it now or if they've already gone through it.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  The way I uncovered the squeeze was starting with the research question of why am I so tired all the time? And I wanted to look at how time use changed over the life cycle. And what I found is that we face this kind of mountain of childcare and housework time when our kids are young, which is typically mid 30s. So it's when you have the maximum number of young kids, like not just one kid, but you got two or three young kids. And It's at the point where we're still investing in our careers. Because if you graph income over that same time period, income still has a really steep slope. It's still increasing because you're still investing in your career. And it hasn't paid off yet. You have this time where like your time use is at this peak.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  It's this mountain, but your income hasn't hasn't peaked yet. So you can't like throw money at the problem. So you often feel squeezed on both time and money. You feel like I've got to stay at work because I've got to make these career investments, but they're not actually paying me that much yet. So it's not that I could just like hire a nanny and two housekeepers and whatever, a driver to take care of the car, right? I also have to save and be frugal. And like my kids need more than me than from me than at any other point in their lives. And what's ironic about the squeeze is that then both of those things abate within the next 10 years. Within the next 10 years, your career investments start to pay off. So you start to have more money.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  And the time that your kids need from you really starts to plummet. And then you end up like maybe in your 40s and 50s being like, oh, I have more time now and more money. Why was I so stressed out in those years in the past? And so I guess knowing that you're going to get to the other side of it. To me, as an economist who thinks about maximizing utility over the life cycle, it changes the way you approach it. And one of the things that I say is that because the squeeze passes, because it's so temporary, it means that your solutions while you're in it don't have to be sustainable. You can actually do things that you say, yeah, right now, we're not going to eat home cooked food. Doesn't mean we're never going to eat home cooked food. I don't need to get, I have this tendency to catastrophize.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Like when the house is a mess, I'm like, it's always going to be messy. I'm never going to catch up with it, right? So right now, you're in the squeeze. Things might not, things might be a little messy and imperfect. They might not be meeting your ideal. And I even mean that financially, that I even mean that for people with young kids and young careers, it would be better to invest in outsourcing and giving yourself back time and saving a little less, presuming that you are matching it, maxing out your 401k match, because that's the only thing you've got to max that out. It's free money, right? But presuming you're maxing out your 401k match, it would be better to actually save less or even take money out of savings to get through the squeeze and invest in your career because that's going to pay off later.

• 47:03John R. Miles?

  To summarize, what your research shows in the book is that home demands peak before income does.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:11John R. Miles?

  And so that intensifies the strain of the squeeze that people are feeling. So my question to that is, it seems like the squeeze is lasting for many people and longer regardless if they have the kids who are growing up or not. Have you seen that as well?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I think there's a couple of factors there. One thing that I hear about a lot is the demands of aging parents, and that is hitting us earlier in life because of generations getting more stretched out. The fact that we do have kids in our 30s, late 30s, early 40s now, means that our parents might be aging before our kids are self-independent. And so that's one reason. The other reason is longer career track. So careers are asking for more investments. It's not straight out of college to the kind of high-paying job. It's from college to more investments. In academia, the example is, it used to be that you went straight from college to get your PhD. And now it's college and you do a pre-doc and you get your PhD, and then you do a post-doc, and then finally you have a faculty position.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And so that is stretching out that length of that investment period where your job needs your time and the money hasn't paid off yet.

• 48:18John R. Miles?

  Thinking about that squeeze period, how should couples think about dividing responsibilities in a way that feels fair even as their circumstances change? Because I know this was something that when I had kids, we went through, like trying to think about it because our kids had a six-year spread, but they were both involved in different activities and it got really complicated as they got older, as they were both wanting to do things. And we were both trying to meet Their needs and meet our needs and the family needs, et cetera. You see where I'm going.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Totally, and it is very challenging. And I recommend that couples actually try tracking their time a little bit, because it's very hard to divide what you can't see. And often, there's a lot of invisible labor in the household. So I actually recommend, I have a time tracking tool on my website. You go to corinlo.com/resources/resources. And I recommend that you get some data in your household of what is all the stuff that's taking up your time? And then have those, some of those strategic conversations of, do we want to be spending this much time on this? Is this something we can outsource? If you find that actually, we didn't realize it was a huge time sink to do all the meal prep and cleaning out the fridge. Okay, is that something we can outsource?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  And then are there things that one person needs to take off the other person's plate? Where again, we didn't realize that, oh, this is so time consuming, that every day you're managing this stream of texts from the teenager. And we need to make sure that the teenager texts both of us or whatever, right? So getting some data and then using like the power of economics to understand, are there things that it makes sense to divide? Because one person is better at it, one person likes it more, right?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  But there's other areas where nobody really likes it. It's just the grime of everyday life that needs to be done, right? And then you've just got to make sure that like, you're both pitching in. And it's not, you're not letting some of that labor become invisibilized, where just one person does it and the other person takes it for granted. The refilling the toilet paper rolls and refilling the soap dispensers. Those are great examples. Tracking your time and getting some of that data, it lets you think, are we aligning our time within the household with our values? And if our values are shared, joint contribution, that's one thing we have to work on. And also, if our values are investing in the things that matter, spending time with people, spending time with investing in our careers,

• 50:55Speaker 01

  are there ways that we can get some of these things off our plate? Either by outsourcing them or some of them even just by letting them go.

• 51:04John R. Miles?

  So I want to go back, now that we've explained a lot of this, to that analogy that I gave earlier of you're living in a house, you're part of this family unit.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:13John R. Miles?

  So I think one of the things that happens in modern partnerships, and it's something that you highlight in the book, is that they often lack explicit negotiation. So I think what that ends up doing is it ends up, if you think about this in economics, in resource allocation being done in an unfair way. So when that happens, it leads to mismatched expectations and ultimately to resentment, which I think is what causes a lot of the breakups that we see today, or anger, or pent-up frustration that people have.

• 51:53John R. Miles?

  So from your standpoint examining this, how do you think partnerships could do a better job doing these negotiations? Because I think sometimes what we end up in is we get trapped where we're at. So you get trapped being that person who's the floor, and then you don't know, how do you go from the floor to being a chair again?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And then sometimes those, like where we get trapped in there, so those defaults, and those can be gender defaults, for example, where maybe the guy is trapped in this role of feeling like he has to be the breadwinner and go to work for 45 hours a week, but he's miserable and he would rather spend more time with the kids and invest more in her career. But it just ends up because it's such a strong societal default, right? So I think you need to take the time to really have these conversations about what do you value in life, what's important to you, and are you getting enough of it, right? And then understanding that the biggest gift you can give somebody is the gift of what they value. It's according to what their needs actually are.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  So you might think, well, when I come home from a long day at work, what I can do for the household is take the trash out and empty the dishwasher so she doesn't have to worry about it in the morning. But it might actually be that for her, what she wants is a hug and some emotional support when you get home from work, right? So I think it's, you've got to have that explicit conversation because it has to be like, what are your needs? And how can we each support one another's needs? And how can we constantly be questioning those societal defaults? And instead, Making really active choices about what roles we're going to play in the household.

• 53:35John R. Miles?

  Ultimately, what I kind of inferred from the book is that the notion of having it all is really unrealistic and poorly defined. But what I liked about it is what I think you're really proposing, which really goes to a lot of what I'm interested in is

• 53:55John R. Miles?

  it's really about having enough of what matters most to you.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly.

• 53:58John R. Miles?

  Going back to that personal utility and the value system. If you think about future self, what would be your advice to listeners on if they're thinking about that future self that they're crafting? How do they approach that in a way that they'll have enough of what matters most to them? So that they're not the 76% that Tom Gilovich talks about in the twilight phase of your life?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think you need to be relentless in seeking out what you actually value from life and not letting it become one kind of giant default. And that is very hard when we all feel so time starved, because when you don't have enough time, you're just trying to keep up, right? You're just trying to stay on top of the treadmill. But actually taking some time to carve out, this is how I want to use my time. Instead of just fielding the balls as they get thrown at you can be extremely valuable in that ultimately living a more regret free life. One of the tools I recommend in the book to do that is to actually name

• 55:08Speaker 01

  a couple of the things that fill your cup the most, that you value the most, whether that's getting outside for a walk, whether that's seeing your friends, whether that's having slow, connected time with your kids, family meals, a date night with your partner and.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Put that on your calendar as a non-negotiable instead of doing it with the time you have left over because we tend to leave ourselves, the time crumbles like in the bottom of the cookie bag for the things that we actually value the most, right? For the things that are the most important to us, where if we said at the end of our life, these are the things we're gonna put the most points on. And so why do we let those be the last things we do with our time? So it's similar to a personal finance adage that's pay yourself first, which is make your investments before you pay all your bills and you do all the other things you need to do. This is pay yourself first with time. Those things that give you the most utility actually are the most productive things you could do with

• 56:07Speaker 01

  your time because I define productivity as producing utility. It's not any more productive to go to work and make money and buy something that gives you utility than it is to make utility directly with your time. So those things that you would assign the greatest weight to at the end of your life, you should be assigning the greatest weight to right now. But don't stop, everybody listening, put them on your calendar right now and let those be the non-negotiables and let everything else claim the crumbs at the bottom of the cookie bag.

• 56:35John R. Miles?

  Thank you so much for that, Corinne. And last thing I wanted to ask you, because I have heard you talk about this, that you're not the biggest fan of chasing your passion, which when I think of passion struck, isn't what the meaning is. I'd love to ask this question. For you, now that I've given that prompt, what does it mean for you to be passion-struck?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  What I mean by that with chasing, with not chasing your passion is I mean it specifically in the domain of career because as I said, alluded to earlier, sometimes the thing we're most passionate about isn't going to produce the most utility in our career because it could be that there's no way to get a good conversion of our time into money in that career area, right? So I want people to focus on utility from their jobs and be passionate, but also be practical with their careers. But to be passion-struck in life is exactly what I'm talking about, which is that I should feel alive every day because I am doing things

• 57:38Speaker 01

  that I value. I'm doing things that ultimately matter in that sense of at the end of my life, that would be a day that mattered, that was filled with Goodness, right, that was filled with actual content that I value. And so every day I am passion struck by my children. I am passion struck by my work because I am lucky enough to have work that I'm able to find that kind of value in those sparks of passion in. I'm also passion struck by my volunteer work that I do. I'm someone who chose not to work in a nonprofit field, but I actually run a nonprofit in my spare time because it's something that I'm passionate about, but there was no way to make it financially add up as a career, right?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  So finding to be, for me to be passion struck is finding those moments each day that would go up on the point board at the end of your life. And I want every day to have those moments for you because every day should count.

• 58:39John R. Miles?

  Corinne, where's the best place people can go if they want to learn more about you and your work?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  You can go to my website, corinlo.com. You can follow me on Instagram, Corinne Low PhD. And of course you can pick up Having It All wherever you get your books. It's in hardcover, it's in ebook. You can also get an audiobook if you're somebody who likes to listen while you're at the gym or you're taking a walk to go see your friends, to do something that you value, something that, you know, brings you utility. And I hope that people will stay in touch.

• 59:09John R. Miles?

  Awesome. Corinne, it was such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for joining us on Passion Struck.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Thanks, John.

• 59:15John R. Miles?

  That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Corinne Low. What stood out most to me is this. We often think we're overwhelmed because we're not managing our time well enough. But what Corinne shows us is something much deeper. We're not just managing time. We're navigating systems, expectations, and invisible agreements that are constantly shaping how we live. And when those systems ask more than we can sustainably give, the result isn't just exhaustion, it's disconnection from our energy, from our priorities, and ultimately from what makes life feel meaningful. What I found especially powerful is her idea of utility, not as happiness in the moment, but as the things you would look back on at the end of your life and say, that mattered.

• 59:56John R. Miles?

  Because when you start living through that lens, you stop asking, what should I be doing? And you start asking, what is actually worth my life? That shift changes everything. And that insight leads directly into our next conversation. Because if Arthur Brooks helped us understand the inner foundations of meaning, and Corinne Low showed us how external systems shape our lives. Then next week, we take it one step further. I'm joined by Dr. Claude Steele. In his new book, Churn, Claude explores a powerful and often invisible force, the tension that arises between people of different identities in important moments. He calls it churn. It's the subtle discomfort, the self-consciousness, the unspoken pressure that shapes how we show

• 1:00:39John R. Miles?

  up, often without us even realizing it. You don't want to miss it.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  A concept that we call stereotype threat. And it's a very simple idea. I think people will recognize it when they hear it, that whenever you're in a situation or you're doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities, your age, your sex, your race, your religion, whenever a negative stereotype about one of those identities is relevant to what you're doing, you know that you could be judged and treated in terms of that stereotype. And if the situation is important to you, to your future, and that prospect of being seen and treated that way can be upsetting and distracting and can interfere with your performance right there in the immediate situation.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  And it can also deter you from walks of life where you feel that pressure.

• 1:01:32John R. Miles?

  If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it. Leave a five star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're ready to go deeper, please visit my Substack, TheIgnitedLife.net. Until next time, remember, a meaningful life isn't about doing more. It's about choosing intentionally what actually matters. I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck.