“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel Smith
Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the category of emotions that are supposed to shame us. The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Boredom, Smith argues, is the price we pay for meaning. Our darkest emotions aren’t quite as dark as we fear.
Five Takeaways
• Boredom Is the Price of Meaning. The two thousandth breakfast. The four hundredth Madonna. That’s where the main event is.
• Perfection Is the Devil. Growth is capaciousness, not optimisation. Real therapy is deep change, not a quick fix.
• Social Media Is an Envy Engine. Bernays started it. Zuckerberg put it on steroids. People questioning whether their lives are alright.
• His Father Heard Voices. Kept it secret for decades. The border between sanity and insanity is more porous than we think.
• AI Chatbots Are Inherently Sycophantic. Validation, not therapy. Documented cases of AI psychosis. The illusion of empathy.
About the Guest
Daniel Smith is a psychotherapist and writer in Brooklyn. Hard Feelings is his third book.
References
Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions by Daniel Smith
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: Scott Galloway, male anxiety, and the anxiety memoirist
00:02:23 Hard Feelings: branching out from anxiety into six darker emotions
00:04:30 Why are envy and boredom considered dark? Blame the church fathers
00:07:04 The confession economy: priests, psychotherapists, and material interests
00:10:27 Thoreau and the art of writing from what’s closest at hand
00:13:15 Boredom is the price we pay for meaning
00:14:44 Joseph Brodsky’s commencement address and the M word
00:17:33 Social media as an envy engine: Zuckerberg and the stoking of FOMO
00:20:04 Edward Bernays: Freud’s nephew and the architecture of consumer desire
00:22:35 Perfection is the devil
00:25:49 His father heard voices: rethinking sanity and insanity
00:28:03 Rilke: it’s so often in the way we name things that we go wrong
00:31:12 Psychotherapy as countercultural space
00:34:27 AI chatbots are inherently sycophantic
00:36:10 Are we living in unprecedented times?