S2E5 - The Toll of Election Anxiety and How To Engage Meaningfully

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Fears of Totalitarianism, and Finding Paradise

Spooky season is still not over: In this episode host Chauncey Zalkin covers Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Gorging on Political Wonkery, and Where Beauty and Meaning Really Come From.

Topics Covered:

• Election Anxiety: Chauncey opens up about her deep concern over political divides and the potential fallout of the election outcome, capturing her personal struggles with the 24/7 news cycle and the toll it takes.
• Dopamine vs. Serotonin: She discusses what is known and unknown about the brain’s dopamine-reward system. No pop psychology here!
• Connecting Through Conversations: Chauncey talks about bridging gaps that feel like chasms but might be illusions.
• Art and Film as Anchors: Chauncey reflects on classic films Life Is Beautiful and Cinema Paradiso and our own imagination to get us to the other side.
• The Power of Community: From curbside chili potlucks to comparing memories of life at ten years old, to talking to people who might vote for the man you loathe most, there is nothing that can replace face to face conversations.

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

 Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic. 

Hi there. Welcome back. In the last month, I've had the chance to hear from some amazing creative minds. We have a lot of great interviews coming up. The last episode was an interview with the founder of the design publication, Creative Boom, out of London. And I have two more Londoners coming up who have done totally different, both amazing things to amplify creativity, one of which gave me one of my best opportunities years ago.

I also have a design essentialist who has lent his thinking to some very progressive endeavors state side and who I worked with in the past. 

I  have a nonfiction writer who's writing now about what it means to be a Jewish woman. And some of the realizations she's come to in this time of her life, about the role of  Jewish women in the popular imagination, and what that means for her. I've also interviewed a handful of psychiatrists. So get ready to go deep. 

I was starting to prepare for a podcast episode where I talk about how I balance my own creativity and work life with parenting  but I think.  That there's something a lot more urgent   in the atmosphere this week.  It's a time of high anxiety because of the election.  When you hear this, if you don't listen to it right away, you might know who won the election.  I recorded this on Halloween.  The sound effects are to add a little bit of levity to what is a really serious matter. Because it also may be that some violence has occurred as a result of the elections outcome. The possibility of this hit me hard in a poignant moment when I was walking around the little track  where my kids were playing touch football at the YMCA and I was walking with a friend of mine.   She said, I feel like something bad is going to happen. And she expressed to me how she just couldn't believe that half of the country would support Donald Trump.  She seemed angry and rightfully so,  I've felt this anger and confusion and disappointment myself .  The tendency is to want to try to examine it and try to understand why. I mean, you can't. Hate half of America,   that's not really productive.  I want to go to my therapist this week. I told her how I had just been spinning lately.  I  kept watching all of the news  I could find on the election from MSNBC to CNN, to the Atlantic to listening to the daily podcast. I now am starting to do TikToks. And on my TikToks, I react to the latest news  I become obsessed with the news and I listened to all the talk show hosts. I become really reliant on Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert and the daily show. Even Saturday night live, which has actually been pretty disappointing this season 

I think that they've kind of missed the mark.  I absolutely sit on pins and needles waiting for the Monday episode with Jon Stewart  to sort of be a salve. I use  late night television and these jokes to sort of self sooth.  I find myself staying up late at night and having a hard time waking up in the morning, just being more sluggish through the day.  I've really been.  Preoccupied. With the election 

 This came to a head when I was taking a walk around the lake and I was listening to  Pod Save America,  if you don't know Pod Save America, it's created by former Obama staffers.. It's a really deep cut as far as political opinions go. 

 I don't listen to this every week, but I'm like, oh, here's another thing. Maybe I can find out more.   They were talking about how the poles were neck and neck. And I said, how many times do I need to hear anybody say that it's a toss up and we really don't know what's going to happen.  What I'm doing is not productive. It's actually really depleting me.  I have no control. I've already voted. I have to let go. So I'm at my therapist office and she brought up the topic of serotonin versus dopamine. Because I had told her, in addition to all of this obsessive tracking of the news,  I'd also been finding myself feeling very hungry and eating something and then halfway through eating, it, thinking I'm not satisfied by this food.  I can't even find a food that I really want to eat right now. 

It's like nothing was filling that hole that the anxiety was producing because of the election.

 So I'm looking at the news too much. I'm staying up too late. I'm eating and not getting satisfied, and on top of that, I'm doing that October thing where I buy those Reese's peanut butter cups that are in the checkout line of every single store you go to and I'm stress eating them because I'm spending too much time looking at distressing political news.

 And there's another thing I'm starting to spend time on social media again. I don't have Instagram on my phone because it does nothing good for me so I took it off about six months ago. But I still had TikTok on my phone. And the reason I never took that off my phone is because I don't really look at TikTok. So I didn't think it was a danger. But then I started to make a few TikToks to promote this podcast and experimenting with short form reactions to what was going on in the news. So naturally because I'm making more TikToks, I'm looking at more TikToks. Along with looking at my news app on my phone. and listening to the talk show hosts and getting commentary and just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, I was  kind of spinning at this point. 

She said what's really happening is you keep hitting that dopamine button. And so your serotonin levels are dropping which is why you feel listless and empty.   Dopamine is there to motivate you  it's a reward system, but it's never meant to give you prolonged satisfaction.  It's serotonin that gives you that feeling of wellbeing, that controls your mood, that keeps you even keel. It  impacts digestion and nausea.

 That was   a   neat little explanation wrapped up in a pretty bow, but whenever I say anything on this podcast,  if it's not my subjective experience that I am recounting, I fact check it.  I think that's one of the number one problems with society overall is  people  saying whatever comes to mind or whatever easy theory they can grasp onto. I am not a neuroscientist. 

So I was going to start talking about how an excess and dopamine lowers your serotonin because that is what my therapist told me, but I can't find that anywhere online. In fact, it seems to be quite a complex dance of  neurochemicals that control and alter your moods. I cannot unpack all of that. I just spent about two hours trying to figure out a simple way to talk about how your dopamine and your serotonin interacts, but there is no easy way to explain it. Maybe in my future interviews with psychiatrists,  if they are connected to this research, they can explain it better than I can.  But I know this instant reward cycle that I have been on and that a lot of us have been on  is not actually solving any sort of problem. There's been a fad called dopamine fasting  one of those pop psychology fads that people have latched on to, but you can't actually fast from dopamine. It doesn't work that way., 

 Dopamine overload. Isn't the only cause of addiction or impulsive behavior in our body. It is more complex than that. Just like we are more complex. We can not be boiled down to one simple explanation. 

But whatever the neurotransmitters are doing, we know that if we just live off  of the fumes of instant rewards, that we do start to feel empty inside. Because even though joy and pleasure play a big part of the human experience,   we all could use more of them, it seems that for me, as I get older, I derive more pleasure and a sense of satisfaction from passions and beliefs and interests that I've accumulated over my lifetime. They range  from cuddling up in bed with my kids, watching a stupid TV show. Or connecting with my community in my little neighborhood  bringing chili out for all the neighbors to share. And a little play that my daughter put on for the neighborhood, with the other kids.  Or having a meeting with her drama teacher and learning about what she's actually doing and drama class that is serving her or not serving her or the work that I'm doing with a protein company  to help tell their story. Or trying to figure out what the characters are doing in a story that I've been writing   that kind of intellectual exercise.  Or sitting on the stoop with a bunch of adults and talking about what it was like for us as 10 and 11 year olds coming from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. And comparing that to what our kids are going through now. Or having a conversation I had with an Uber driver. last week, who comes from a long line of Republicans is in her forties and putting herself through. Law school.  She voted for Obama, and even wrote a letter to Obama asking him to ask his wife, Michelle Obama to please run for office, but is now considering voting for Trump.  We're talking to each other and she's really trying to understand me as I'm really trying to understand her. And both of us are trying to understand how to make sense of how politics is serving or not serving us. And looking at the nuance and the true humanity of people, not these extreme caricatures offered by the very insufficient and ego-driven mouthpieces of society. And I'm not talking just about Trump. There are so many people that are skewering nuanced thought and autonomy over our ideas.  We really aren't that one dimensional, everything has become so ridiculously extreme that is no wonder that our neurons are firing in chaos.

It seems to be that whoever shouts, the loudest gets the most attention. 

And it's now beyond the dumbing down of society, it's turned into a complete circus of surreality. We're hungry for answers. Yes, but what we're really hungry for is  connection.  

Imagine reality as a sort of fish that has flipped out of its ocean of truth.  It's on the shore outside of its element gasping for oxygen, and meanwhile, unreality is flourishing. Self-righteousness  is thriving.  Alienation and isolation persist and grow like a cancer in society.  And this is a week where it's really in its most concentrated form.  

It's very hard for anyone to find real clarity. There's a lot of nuance in the world and we have completely thrown that out the window.  It's a very slippery slope towards fascism. It's a very slippery slope towards extreme self-righteousness . And. It's really difficult and really important to connect with actual human beings to go out and hug your friends. To strike up a conversation with someone who looks nothing like you, and it's from a different walk of life than you. And just talk shit about anything. 

Just talk about the weather, talk about sports, talk about  family.  We really need to, with all our heart and soul, resist these extremes and this dogma of hate.    We don't know what's going to happen. Things could get a little dicey.  As I said before, my friend is really afraid there's going to be violence after the election. And there's a very good chance there is going to be. So you have to protect yourself and your family. And I think a way to protect yourself is to be connected to other people and to not go into a little bubble no matter what the outcome is.

If she wins, there's going to be a fallout from the right, for that win, and if she loses. God help us all. But we  will find a way to get to the other side of it. We have to have faith in ourselves and we have to have faith in other people. We can't let ourselves continue to drift to these extremes. That's what this podcast is about. My effort to try to connect with you. My effort to connect more with myself. And to connect with culture and connect with the creativity that drives us forward the imagination that only human beings can tap into   which is our unique superpower. And what makes life meaningful and truly beautiful. 

  I was actually thinking last night about the movie life is beautiful. With Roberto Benigni, which came out in 1998, before that movie came out. I'd actually seen quite a few of his movies.  In those earlier movies he shows us the absurdity of life inherent in our obsessions and our dramas. He's like a higher end version of Mr. Bean.  So full of joy and insightful and funny, able to make fun of himself.  . Hold up a mirror to culture and see things clearly. And in this movie, he plays that role again but this time it's amidst one of the most awful times in our history during the Nazi occupation. And he succeeds in diffusing, the fear and the terror of what is going on around. him without minimizing it. That kind   of beauty is always available to us and actually necessary.  Last night, I had my kids watch cinema Paradiso set in Sicily after world war two.  And in the movie, it's the cinema that brought people together. You see every corner of life being represented inside that movie theater.  From babies being born to young people discovering their sexuality  and the crudeness of human beings but also the loveliness and the,  beauty and the romance and deep emotions in people. 

All these people were congregating at this movie theater to connect with each other and to connect with life and to find a way to move forward after the war. And we always have art at our disposal and the art  within ourselves. And we can't lose that. We can not outsource that to social media and the internet and these mouthpieces , we have to make sure that we are still connected to ourselves and to each other, the people that are to the left and to the right of us standing right in front of  us.  That's all for today. Good luck and Godspeed. I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and share it with at least three people that you really care about and that you want to connect with and then come back next week and listen to an amazing interview with one of my deeply  creative. Awesome guests.  

Until next time.