From Robotics Dreams to Roomba Realities

Speaker 2
And more. You can learn more about Satya's work and book at satyabioc.com. So, Ache, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2
So to get started, can you tell us what, what quarter life is and why is this important for us to take seriously, both individually and collectively?
Speaker 1
is the first stage of adulthood. I define it as the first stage of adulthood between adolescents and midlife. So it's around 20 years or so it's a span. We talk more popularly about the quarter life crisis. And I really try to speak about quarter life beyond the crisis when possible. So that what we're exploring is a developmental stage of existence and not just crisis that people supposedly have. There is often a lot of crises back to back that are happening in these years as people are sorting out who they are. So I tend to talk about this stage of life as being really important to spend time in for a couple of reasons. I mean for all sorts of reasons because people are suffering. But the earlier we can anticipate what we want our life to look like and what we don't want our life to look like, the fewer big changes need to happen later on. The less likelihood there is for a major midlife crisis, where by that point, you might be married with children in a job that you've been at for a while that you don't like. I'd like to encourage everyone to be sort of anticipating these things earlier so they're not finding themselves trapped in a life they don't want later on. The benefit to society then is quite significant because we're not sending people down the wrong track early on in their lives. We're not sending people into marriages, households, careers, while they're raising children that don't feel satisfying. That has a cascading effect on a family. But we're also talking about the most generative, arguably the most generative time of adulthood. In the 20s and 30s, people are working extremely hard producing creative work. Most of our athletes, of course, are in this time of life, I could go on and on. We want people to have a sense of who they are when they're in this stage of life, both creating culture and participating as citizens for those decades and the decades to come. So
Speaker 2
what we're saying here is if we acknowledge this is a, this is a full developmental stage. And if we take it seriously, it can lead us to preventing problems further down the line and preventing things like a midlife crisis. It's like, what's that old saying? It's like an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or whatever, you know, it's like, that's sort of, that's the way we're thinking here. Absolutely.
Speaker 1
I think that's exactly right. And it's not just, you know, crisis, but, but mental health issues, trauma that's gone untreated, relational issues, addiction issues. It's the whole gamut. You know, there's real suffering that when not treated earlier on, we all know if you don't take care of a wound earlier on, it gets worse and worse over time. The treatment becomes harder and treatment may be more catastrophic when we don't take care of things early on. So I'm trying to counter the notion that therapy in these years or self-awareness in these years and self-work is navel-gazing or narcissistic, which I think is the standard trope from dominant culture, that if you spend time attending to yourself in these years, you're somehow a narcissistic young person. It's really quite the opposite.
Speaker 2
For sure. It just, it seems so obvious to me that, you know, these are the years that you're essentially choosing their trajectory of your, the rest of your life. So it makes sense to, you know, take it slow and make a really informed, uh, decision here before, before you commit to a path, I guess we all just sort of just jump into things and 20, 30, 40 years later, we're like, what happened? You know,
Speaker 1
yeah, there's a lot of jumping into things and some of that's necessary. You know, we, we have to often find work. We have to choose school programs, but I want to normalize changing course and reconsidering our paths earlier. So
Speaker 2
is there a specific timeframe we're talking to or you mentioned a 20 year period? Like when would you say the quarter life stage ends roughly?
Speaker 1
Roughly, I would say it's from 20 to 40. Okay.
Speaker 2
So
Speaker 1
because what we think about there's, there's infancy, there's childhood, there's the teenage years, and most of those years have really had quite a bit of attention in developmental psychology. then there's this kind of gap where everyone thinks about the years as being adulthood kind of it's really early adulthood or young adulthood or emerging adulthood or delayed adolescence. And then at some point we hit midlife. And so I'm trying to sort of carve out these years to say, roughly 20 to 40, we could say it's 18 to 38. Right? These years roughly are a stage of development too. And I'm calling it quarter life. Can
Speaker 2
you tell us about your own story and your own path towards doing this work, Satya? Sure,
Speaker 1
I can tell you a bit. Let me know if you want to fill in the details. But so, I mean, I was always an introspective person from very early and curious about the world and why the world worked the way it did and all this. When I went to college, I was, my years in college were marked by 9-11 in the states, by the war in Iraq, and my experience in college was this privileged climb, freshman year, sophomore year, university, I suppose, for many of your listeners, right? It didn't, I couldn't quite line up why I was climbing this gilded ladder to get a bachelor's degree in history. I loved it, by the way. I was loving studying. I loved what I was exploring. I was learning about the world, past and present. But I couldn't square what my degree was going to do to either make the world a better place or maintain a system that the adults prior had constructed that was leading us into catastrophic war after catastrophic war. It just, it didn't make sense to me. the war, wars, multiples, and finishing my degree, I just kept having a very deep sense of existential crisis of what this was all about. And that really didn't go away. You know, I finished with my degree and found various odd jobs. I was working really hard, but none of the jobs really made sense as to what the point of things was, you know, and I just continued kind of pursuing that until I ultimately stumbled upon, well, actually, that's not fair to say my mother in my crises sent me a couple of books that one of them was called Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. And then I asked for more and she suggested I get Jung's memoir, which is memories, dreams, and reflections. Memories, dreams, reflections, rather. And I devoured those books and really had a very clear sense then that there was this space in psychology that I needed to study because it was able to answer both the external questions of what was happening with society and the internal questions of what was happening in my life. The only problem was it was really anticipating people coming to this psychology in their 40s, maybe mid 30s, and I was 22 or something. So my focus then began to explore the psychology, but kind of pull it down into the younger years. And that's where it began. It's
Speaker 2
incredible. Just what something like your mother recommending those books can do, like the trajectory that can put you on and how that can lead to, you know, what you're doing now, the book that you've written, and all of the people you're impacting as well. Like, it's amazing. It
Speaker 1
is amazing. I am lucky to have had a mother who could see what I needed and could see me and had that experience. But it is remarkable, those moments for any of our lives that they seem from the outside very small. It's just a book in the mail, but it can have a very significant effect.
Speaker 2
Are there any of Jung's ideas in particular you think are most helpful for helping people to navigate the quarter life stage of life?
Speaker 1
Oh man, it's a good question. There are a lot of his concepts that are somewhat esoteric and hard to understand, and some of the easy ones, I think, are even themselves not terribly well understood. so disoriented and how disconnected we are from our souls and from nature and from our instincts. So I often have this image of like little ducklings circling around somewhere near the pond, not fully even sure what they're looking for. There's no sense of true mentorship and guidance for us to follow to find our souls, to find our core sense of the reason that we're alive, right? So he talks about the notion of the soul, simply right, and also of a deeper self. And that alone, I mean, there's so many things that he explores. And he also, what was very critical for me, had a deep understanding of what happens in a culture that is guided by, you know, these are not specifically words that he used that often he used the word patriarchy and understood that we had a patriarchal society. capitalism so much, though he did speak about white supremacy and what happens when a culture has kind of veered off in such a lopsided direction. So his work is also really a balancing for these social systems that expect us to fit in very, very narrow categories and the inevitable feeling of that we're missing something when we do. So there's an enormous amount in the work that truly I still, I just taught a class exploring memories dreams reflections and once again got so much out of it. It's remarkably rich stuff that that is hard to sound bite, sometimes.
Speaker 2
Um, so I'm just thinking back to my own, like my early twenties after leaving university, I, I was in, I would jump from thing to thing quite a bit. So I left university in my final year to start my first business. And I did that for just under a year. And then I left that and then I jumped to another business and that was something that was totally sold, destroying, was basically sourcing products in China and selling on Amazon. And every moment that I spent on that project, I just felt like I was dying a little bit inside, you know. And then it just, one day I just thought I can't keep doing this, like this is just, this is destroying me internally, you know? And I thought about the things that had most energized me in the past and the things that it really brought me to life. And it was always like creating experiences, events, and these sorts of things. So I thought, why don't I try and work in the events industry? You know, but I remember this is a, I remember my dad's going to hear me for saying this if he listens to this, but I remember that evening after I made the decision, I went to speak to him about it. And he basically, he turned around and he said, putting again now, putting again. And to me, that just stung so bad, you know. And I suppose what I'm getting at here is what would you say to someone who might be in a similar place as I was back then that hasn't found their thing yet and they're maybe jumping around a little bit. Would you tell them, like, is there any guidance you would give somebody in my situation then before, before that they, they do find your thing? Because for me, I eventually did find that. And I found a source of work that brings me a lot of meaning and fulfillment. And I feel very lucky for that. But it might not have ended up that way. So any thoughts there?
Speaker 1
Well, it's a poignant story. Thank you for sharing it. because everyone has a story like that, although it may not be that their father is, is, you know, sort of suggesting that that they're failing in some way by quitting another job, you know, for others, it can be much more subtle and for others, it can be outright abusive, you know, what you're experiencing that I talk in my book about the four pillars of growth quarter life, and the first pillar I speak of as being the need to separate. And when we are in these stages of sorting out who we are or trying to sort out who we are, we're not only trying to find our souls again in societies as you express. That job is soulless and soul crushing. And yet I imagine you're looking around you and seeing, well, other people seem to do this without being as miserable as me. And now my father thinks that I'm a failure if I quit this too. He thinks that I shouldn't be fine. This is fine. Why am I not fine? There's this almost cinematic thing that so many of us go through where if you could see it in a film on the outside, you would think, run, find yourself, go after your dreams. Right? But when you're living it, it's just that you think, what's wrong with me? Everyone else seems fine. So the-
Speaker 2
That was the central question. What's wrong with me? That's the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1
yeah, it's real and it's remarkable. So many people are going through it, but because we are not talking about it as often as we should and because there's so much social pressure to kind of keep us in line, to keep quarter lifers in line with these systems that are incredibly broken, and that our parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles or friends inadvertently participate in trying to keep us in line. I don't think, no one is saying I've signed up for this broken system. And I am going to be a soldier for this broken system. But we're all raised in it in different ways. And we're all pathologizing each other in different ways and pathologizing ourselves. Right. So what I hear happening for you is, and these are kind of core ideas in my book, but you were you were for a combination of stability and meaning that was valuable to you. And the bummer in a certain respect for all of us is that there is not a single script to guide us to getting there. Every single human being has to find their version of stability and meaning. And that requires quite a difficult journey. I mean, this is part of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey stuff and a lot of Carl Jung's work, but it's really an understanding that actually each of our souls are trying to find how to exist in time and space in this moment in history in a way that works for us. Right. Part of the obstacle along the way is often our parents and so we need to separate from their perceptions of us. systems when they don't serve our own sense of purpose and meaning. And that can be very difficult work. I mean I really genuinely applaud you for sorting it out for yourself because it is not easy and there's a reason that the midlife crisis is so often tied to parents passing away, at least people could finally say, oh, I'm free of my father's judgment. You know, and I really advocate trying to do that while we can still have some relationship with our parents if possible, while they're alive.
Speaker 2
Let's imagine that I came to you and in the first few sessions you identified that my parents were still having a strong influence on my thinking, behavior, internal world, etc. How would you go about starting that separation process? How would that work? Well,
Speaker 1
probably quite carefully and slowly. I mean, I am not terribly, what's the word? I'm not a wallflower. I mean, as a therapist, I'm often quite direct and clear, but I also know that this work of separating from parents can often be a little bit like trying to get somebody out of a cult because no matter how much they're being harmed by these belief systems or these values, children are often holding their parents up on pedestals in different ways. And that's a survival mechanism. We, for, you know, this is not the case for everyone, but it's very common through quarter life that people are really struggling to normalize their parents or relativize their parents or see their parents as humans to say, yes, he does this to me and it's not good, but I love him and I see him as a person or whatever. It's really more that it's a binary of, if I turn against him here, that means I'm not loving him. I'm not not respecting him. So it's very subtle work of sort of disentangling someone's or supporting somebody to disentangle themselves from the belief systems they've been raised with, and be able to start seeing the on their own in a different way. And so it's, it takes, it often takes quite a bit of time and a lot of wrestling. And then often a decisive move in a direction that is more aligned with one's soul and not with the old value set that they were raised in.
Speaker 2
powerful this, this influence is on people. You know, I think that we have some kind of cognitive bias or whatever that causes us to see our parents almost as like demigods for the first what, 10 years of our life or whatever. And you know, I'm reading Martin Luther King's biography at the moment. It's a new one. It's called King by a guy called Jonathan Eig. And it's so good. It's amazing book. But one of the things that he talks about in that book is that like, whenever the things were happening in Montgomery and Martin's life was, was starting to get under threat, his dad would come to Montgomery and try and get Martin to like, you know, leave and come back to Alabama and or Atlanta story and sort of take the C for option and Martin was like, crying and like, really struggling to like make a decision after himself. Because even then as a fully grown man at 28, his father still had this influence. And then I've heard people like Ervin Yalom say like, he realized at the age of like 50 or 55, that everything he had done in his career until that point was trying to impress his father.
Speaker 1
Exactly. Which is, this is the thing, to that final point, that's the classic story. That has been the story in developmental psychology, truly. I think it is more of a white male story. I say that with no condescension or anything. It's just that people who are more comfortable in dominant society have less inner struggle to push against the general narratives, the dominant narratives. I talk about in my book, an African-American writer named Richard Wright, who I adore, and a lot of the feminist movement and others. And I think your example of Dr. King is tremendous. When people are more under the thumb of society or more under the thumb of their parents expectations, whether for gender or career or any number of you know, also for for gay people that struggle to say yes to your parents for 55 years, is life threatening. It's much, much harder. And so it's easier then for certain people to adhere to these rules and expectations until their father passes away, as you express for Irving Yalem. I like him a great deal as a thinker, right? But I think it's an interesting point. And so it then also suggests how much of our life we're participating in dominant cultural narratives versus working to upset them. And your example, again, of Dr. King, I think is very profound in terms of, of course, what he was able to do in his quite short lifetime, his tragically short lifetime, because he was saying no to the dominant cultural expectations of oppression. And he was saying no to his father's fear for him, that if he continued to listen to his father's fear, he wasn't going to do his life's work. And what a perfect example to your first question of the importance of this for society, too. These are tremendously generative years. What if what if we use them upholding a broken culture versus taking it down and transforming it. It's not just about taking it down. It's making something better. For
Speaker 2
sure, for sure.

Inside iRobot: How the Roomba Sparked a Revolution in AI Robotics with Rodney Brooks

The Eric Ries Show

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts