Episode 45 of The Butters Podcast is my conversation with Ganesh Cherian.
On the topic of processing thoughts by talking things
through.
"An idea, until you can articulate it, it's not practical. Until somebody else can understand it, it's not particularly useful."
“We’re all narratives. We’re the expectations of our parents. We’re the hope of our future. We’re the desire for what’s to come. So we’re constantly evaluating ourselves and others by articulating our position and deciding if it’s real or not.”
On the topic of mask wearing and how it might be affecting our psyche in not seeing facial expressions as often.
“If babies get lots of facial validation, expression back, they tend to grow more. They feel comforted. But if parents or faces are deadpan and don’t change and don’t validate, they get very despondent and distressed.”
On the topic of how conspiracy theories arise.
“It’s tricky to deconstruct and it’s tricky to try and be balanced in your particular viewpoint. Because you often surround yourself with people who are in the same situation as you, feeling the same way, and you can exacerbate your scenario. I don’t know what to do about that except to try and bring together voices that are across the board.”
“We all tend the write the narrative like we are the hero. And I think there’s a little bit of positive narcissism. Like I think you need to feel like you’re the hero, at least a little bit, in order to live. Because there are competing resources for our time and attention, and unless we think we are important and worthy of the resources available, we might sacrifice to a point where we have nothing. But the flip side is also true, if we do that too much, if we invest solely in ourselves and not in others, then we don’t build community and we often put ourselves into areas where we might take advantage of people, which wouldn’t be good either. And the other end of the scale where you let anything happen to you because you don’t value yourself at all; other people’s needs are always more important than your’s and you’re always self-sacrificing hoping that someone will notice or that the rewards will come. So finding that balance is really tough because we’re people and we have to interact with other people. And that’s relationships and families and communities and workplaces. At what point is my voice valuable, and at what point is it overbearing, and at what point is it undervalued. Those are narratives that we’re playing out in our head.”
