Why did they not teach us this in school?

There are so many things we all experience, think about and quietly worry about that we're strangely terrible at actually talking about.

The messy bits. The uncomfortable bits. The things you type into ChatGPT and pray no one ever sees your conversation history. The thoughts you have and immediately wonder if you're a terrible person. The things you assume everyone else has figured out because nobody seems to be admitting that they haven't.

I spend a lot of my working life trying to understand people. What they say, what they actually do and, usually most interestingly, the slightly weird gap between the two.

At some point I started wondering about all the stuff sitting in the gaps in our actual lives too.

Like whether everyone else is having more sex than you. Whether it's possible to be genuinely happy for someone and also a tiny bit jealous. Whether you're allowed to feel relieved when someone dies. Whether wanting more makes you ungrateful. Whether everyone else knows what they're doing with money. Whether you're the only person who sometimes looks at the life you've actively chosen and thinks... is this it?

You know. Nice light stuff....

I kept having these thoughts, bringing them up in conversations and discovering that other people had been thinking them too. They just hadn't necessarily been saying them out loud.

So I started a podcast.

Partly because I was curious, partly because I wanted an excuse to ask people questions you're probably not supposed to ask people you've only just met. And partly, if I'm honest, as a fairly elaborate way of avoiding having an existential crisis in my early forties.

There was no grand plan. I just wanted to have the conversations I wanted to hear.

About sex and grief and jealousy and money and our bodies and relationships and ageing and ambition and all the other things that somehow manage to be completely normal parts of being a person while simultaneously feeling quite difficult to admit.

Sometimes I go into a conversation convinced I think one thing and come out realising I might have got it completely wrong. Sometimes I learn something genuinely useful. Sometimes the main revelation is simply: oh thank god, it's not just me.

Nobody has five steps to living your best life. There isn't a neat lesson wrapped up at the end of every episode. I definitely haven't figured any of this out.

We're just talking about it.

Which, given how much energy we all seem to spend pretending we're fine, might actually be quite a good place to start.

Sprowt