The Antidote • A Book Talk Episode!
In "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," you're introduced to the unconventional notion that the pursuit of happiness might actually lie down a 'negative path.' Oliver Burkeman invites you to consider embracing life's uncertainties and insecurities, challenging the prevalent culture of positive thinking. Overly optimistic mindsets, he argues, can lead to a denial of reality and set you up for greater disappointment. The book delves into the idea of "negative capability," encouraging you to become comfortable with ambiguity and resist the urge to hastily resolve doubt.
Burkeman guides you through the Stoic philosophy, which emphasizes controlling what you can and accepting what you cannot. He introduces you to the concept of negative visualization, a Stoic practice of contemplating the worst to temper anxiety and build resilience. This conversation also takes you through the paradox of control. Burkeman illustrates how accepting failure can be a conduit to success. He challenges the fixation on goals, advocating instead for a focus on routines, suggesting that happiness is better pursued indirectly, as a byproduct of a life lived in alignment with personal values.
Lastly, the book beckons you to confront the uncomfortable directly through practices like mindfulness and to appreciate life's fragility through memento mori. Burkeman introduces the concept of antifragility, where you gain strength from stressors. He proposes a balanced life approach, where accepting death, failure, and uncertainty can lead to a more authentic form of happiness. As you reflect on these ideas, you'll find "The Antidote" not just a critique of Western culture's happiness obsession but a practical guide advocating for a more realistic and accepting approach to the inevitable challenges of life.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh. Hi, Nikki. Welcome to book talk, part 2.
Nikki Kinzer:
Book talk, yes.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, we're back.
Nikki Kinzer:
The book that I haven't read yet.
Pete Wright:
Well, you started it. You started it. But this is a topic. I think this is more of a-
Nikki Kinzer:
Barely. I barely started.
Pete Wright:
I know, I know. But this is more of a topic of a set of ideas that we want to talk about, I think, more than anything else. And it just is a nice pairing to the book talk that we did last time. So I've got ideas and bullets from the book. It's been a long time since I read the book. And so really, we just want to talk about the overall idea set and why it resonates, if it resonates. And the book, of course, is Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. And it is just a nice pair to Four Thousand Weeks which we talked about last week. If you haven't heard that episode, go back one week and check it out and then read these books because they're great.
Nikki Kinzer:
They're, yeah, very good.
Pete Wright:
And so that's what we're going to talk about this week. I was actually, I'm glad that we're talking about The Antidote because we had optimism on our thing. We really wanted to talk about optimism in our editorial counter. I was like, "We just did optimism in October of last year. How bad will we need to talk about optimism?"
Nikki Kinzer:
We're just so optimistic here.
Pete Wright:
We're so optimistic. Oh my God. So anyway, that's what we're going to talk about. Before we dig in though, you know the drill, everybody. Come and hang out with us at takecontroladhd.com. You can get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list right there on the homepage, and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest, @takecontroladhd, and you can connect with me at Mastodon, petewright@mastodon.social. But to really connect with us, join us in the ADHD Discord community. It's super easy to jump in the general community chat channel. Just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you will be whisked over to the general invitation and login.
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Nikki, hi. It's me, Pete.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hi.
Pete Wright:
From the podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hi, Pete.
Pete Wright:
I'm the optimistic one.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. Really?
Pete Wright:
Why are you looking at me that way? Do I give off that vibe that I'm just so not optimistic that you have to give me the side eye when I pretend to be?
Nikki Kinzer:
No, but I'm going to say if it was a competition between me and you, I'm going to say I think I would win.
Pete Wright:
You would absolutely win. You would absolutely win. There is no... I don't know why. Maybe I have an easier time finding the depths than you do. I don't need a flashlight.
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
So we're talking about this book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. Oliver Burkeman's fantastic. He's done a lot of journalistic work for the BBC. He's got a great accent and his audiobooks are fantastic. We did Four Thousand Weeks last time. We all, both of us, felt like our time is running out. And so I guess this is the follow-up. Now, we're going to feel-
Nikki Kinzer:
I guess we're not being very...
Pete Wright:
We're going to try to.
Nikki Kinzer:
We're not optimistic about the time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I'm going to try to wrap that up. Recognizing that you haven't read the book, what do you think about it and what you know and what you've read about it?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, what I read was the back page. No, I did read the back and then I read the very first few pages where he talks about going to a motivational speaker undercover, which I thought was funny. But no, what caught me though is on even just the back page, it says, "And there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty, the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid." And I think that there's a lot of truth in that. I feel like you do have to have some darkness to really appreciate the light. And there's things that we learn when we're in those darker times that we wouldn't learn if we never had them. So I think it all important.
Pete Wright:
Yes. And that's a lot of the vibe of the book, which it opens with this negative path where he's talking about figuring out how to embrace uncertainty, insecurity as a part of the human experience. This is what we're going through every day. Why do we try to hide from it and why do we pay people so much to try to help us hide from it? He does not have, I would say, a high opinion of the self-help industry.
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
Even as he's writing a book that is a part of it, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right. Yeah. It's the same kind of vibe that you get from reading Four Thousand Weeks, that he's not big on the productivity experts either. So he definitely has a different opinion, and which is good. We need to have different opinions. I don't know if he's right or wrong. I don't know.
Pete Wright:
Well...
Nikki Kinzer:
It's interesting.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. There was a time when, and he's been a regular guest on our show, Dodge Rea, Dr. Dodge, he and I did this podcast called The Change Paradox. You were on that show. And so much of Dodge's bent was similar to Burkeman's, which was like if you go back to Buddhism or Vipassana, what we're looking at through these alternative spiritual practices is embracing everything, embracing discomfort, embracing uncertainty, to become one with it so that it no longer has power over you. If you're running from it, it can become a monster. That's the idea. As long as you have something in the closet, if you can't see it, if there's a monster in the closet, that monster is giant. But as Dodge has said, and I embraced, shame hates the sun. As soon as you bring something out into the light, it shrinks.
And that is a lot of what Burkeman is leaning into, which is this idea that we are fixating on positive thinking, on Instagram-perfect, in a way that's actually putting us in a space of denial. And that only sets us up for more fear, uncertainty, doubt in our lives. And I think that is really interesting. It goes on to cite research around it and leads into this conversation around a toxic positivity. Have we talked about toxic positivity on this show?
Nikki Kinzer:
We have a little bit, yeah. But tell us what it is.
Pete Wright:
Well, toxic positivity is it's a nickname for overly positive thinking. And it's been the subject of a lot of research. It refers to the excessive sort of ineffective overgeneralization of happy and optimistic states across all situations where we're just going to be happy even when things are objectively hard and sad. And it can, this nature, you run into somebody who's toxically positive who says, "Just smile," all the time. "Go ahead and smile." That invalidates genuine emotional experiences that you might be trying to have in your life or might be naturally experiencing in your life. And that leads to minimization and denial and all these sorts of states that allow us to hide from our authentic selves, our authentic human experience.
So we want to avoid toxic positivity. That's the kind of stuff where you find you're emotionally suppressing, where it can impact your relationships, where you are in denial about the state of your relationships because all you see are the positive and you don't see that things might be challenged between either romantic partners or social groups. You have reduced resilience. Because you don't know how to embrace negativity, you face higher degrees of rejection and RSD, rejection sensitivity. So there are all kinds of things that go on with toxic positivity or overly generalized positivity. And it's important enough for Burkeman that he opens the book with this. There are limits to positive thinking and we have to have what he uses, coined by John Keats, a negative capability, this ability to remain comfortable with uncertainty and doubt without the rush to find closure or resolution.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's a tough place.
Pete Wright:
It is a tough place. How do you see that come into play with your coaching, with the people that you're working with?
Nikki Kinzer:
We talked a little bit about this yesterday when we were talking about something else, and I think that where this gets uncomfortable is that with ADHD, it doesn't just go away. And so in coaching, it's not trying to necessarily... Well, we're not trying to make the ADHD go away. We're trying to work with the ADHD. We're trying to accept that this is part of how you may process time, how you take in information, how long it takes you to do something. ADHD affects all of those things. And we can find ways to work with it, but we can't just pretend that it doesn't exist or pretend like it's going to all of a sudden, if I can just do this, it's going to be better. It's still going to be there and there's still going to be bad days.
So what I think when I'm reading this information and hearing you talk is that there's still going to be bad days. We need to validate that. But it's okay to have a bad day and say, "This really sucked today. I just want to go to bed and start again later," and be okay with that. So that's how it's uncomfortable because no one wants to be in uncertainty and doubt. But we don't know. The future is uncertain. We really don't know.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think that's the challenge. And I think when in this space of ADHD, we've been thinking so much about these ideas of like, "Well, if we could just solve..." Or, "I want to mask my ADHD somehow. I don't want people to judge me. I don't want people to look at me and think, 'Does that guy have ADHD. Is this problem, you can't focus because of ADHD?' I don't want them to know. So I put all of these barriers up that protect me and I just try to live outside in this. I try to hide from the uncertainty, hide from the image that I'm presenting," when the truth is very few people care. And it's like the relationship.
Nikki Kinzer:
I was just thinking. When you said that, I'm like, "I wonder how many people are actually, actually really thinking what you just said." And I can't see it. It's hard to see-
Pete Wright:
Well, it is.
Nikki Kinzer:
... that people would say that-
Pete Wright:
But that's so much of self-judgment-
Nikki Kinzer:
... or think it.
Pete Wright:
... and self-loathing, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, for sure.
Pete Wright:
That's so much of it is feeling that way. And so when you look at the positive thinking industrial complex, you are creating a mask that doesn't exist. And when we go back to all the traits of toxic positivity, it can have a direct physical health impact. They're researching how not embracing or not understanding or leaning into negative thoughts and embracing the fact that everybody has, as you say, hard days. And there is such a thing as grief that you cannot hide from. Then it can have negative physiological impacts. And we have to be able to lean into all of those things.
Back to what Dr. Dodge taught me, which is the act of embracing, leaning into fear and uncertainty, admitting out loud with others. "I don't understand this. I don't know how to do this. I don't know why my brain works the way it does. I don't know why I'm scared of that thing, but I'm scared of that thing." And leaning into those things, that is the first positive step toward getting to the other side of it, to reducing the power that it has over you to actually being one with the uncertainty to the point that you can live your life without it looming over you.
And that is so much of the message that I get out of Burkeman's book, which is lean in. He's going to say it in a nice British accent, but really it's lean in. Don't be afraid of this stuff because all these other tools that the industry is giving you is just a mask. You haven't actually leaned in at all. He goes into the, he has this whole thing on visiting the Museum of Failed Products to look at all the failure of what we need to be able to learn from failure, the things that failure teaches us to be able to do better next time. And if we're so afraid of failing, if we're just trying to put a mask of positivity on uncertainty and fear, we're not going to learn. We're not going to learn.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I believe that.
Pete Wright:
He does dive into stoicism. What do you know of stoicism? Are you a stoic?
Nikki Kinzer:
Define what you mean by stoic.
Pete Wright:
Well, stoicism is the ancient Greek philosophy that advocates a more accepting approach to stoicism, that focusing on things within our control is the priority and just accepting the things we cannot change. It's the prayer, the, "Lord give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change." And there's a different, there's another layer to it, like the aesthetic stoic. The aesthetic stoic, which is I am. I'm a minimalist too. I'm trying to reduce the number of things that have any sort of control and authority over me in any way, shape, or form. And so I am disavowing as many material things that are beyond my needs or capacity.
But one of the angles that Burkeman talks about is the practice of negative visualization. This comes out of stoicism-
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, right.
Pete Wright:
... that encourages people to periodically imagine the worst case scenarios. So could you get in a car wreck right now if you're driving on the highway? Yes, you could. Now, there are some really worst case scenarios there. And his idea is or the idea presented in this section is that if you go to the worst case scenario, if you really allow yourself to live there for just a little bit, you actually find it reduces anxiety about the future and it makes you more resilient over time because you understand that when you compare your real lived experience right now present in time with the worst case scenario that you can possibly imagine, you realize how far the gap is between those two things, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
And that ends up being important in clearheaded mental health.
Nikki Kinzer:
So what's interesting about that is I've asked that question before to clients. Something will come up and I'll be like, "What is the worst case scenario here that can happen?" And I agree that it does put things in perspective because once they verbalize it, they realize that, "Okay, that really isn't that bad or it's really unlikely that that would happen," or they can start processing that. But what's so interesting about this is that I could go to the worst case scenario, have it be really bad, I'm talking about anxiety, and then have to go back through this whole Stoic philosophy of, "Okay, I only have what I can control right now and I can't worry about what's going to happen in the future if I don't know what's going to happen in the future and it hasn't happened yet. And I really don't have control to change it." I go through a whole thing there. So there's a lot of roller coasting. When I look at what Stoic perspective is. I think I'm in it in a lot of different places.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think so too. And me too. And this is where that falls apart, which is if you are living with anxiety, if you're living in that dark place, sometimes just disavowing the power of positive thinking is a bit of a slight. Sometimes what you need is not to imagine the worst case because if I go to the worst case too long, I will stay there.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
It's what mom said. If you cross your eyes too long, they'll stick. Okay. Well, so on the one hand, you know that that's home turf for me is living in that dark space. And so why would I want to invite myself to it? At the same time, let's go back to leaning into the things that make us uncomfortable. This is all about a practice. This is about creating a practice of not positive thinking but of being an authentic rationalist, which says, "Look, I'm going to recognize that things can be hard, but I'm going to live in the space of optimism. I'm going to live in the space that the stuff that I can control right now." This cup is clean, it is disease-free, and it's full of my favorite tea. I can control that. I don't have to worry about myself running into another car or a tree or something like that when I'm driving around because I'm not driving right now. So what can I really lean in on right now?
And this goes back to one of the things that he leans in on is meditation and mindfulness. And he talks about the Buddhist philosophy. And I think what's important to note is that because we say we talk about mindset all the time, that's a jam that we have. And I think it's important to say as a footnote to all of this. Mindset is not equal to positive thinking. And I think a lot of people, as I've been listening to other sources as we're working on this other project, a lot of people mistake setting yourself up for a certain kind of mindset as being veiled or coded language for just be happy all the time.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's really interesting. I've never seen that before. So mindset is not positive thinking. I have have to wrap my head around that.
Pete Wright:
Well, the idea is when we say growth mindset, let's talk Carol Dweck. Does Carol Dweck mean when she says, "Hey, you've got to have a growth mindset," do you think Carol says, "Be happy"?
Nikki Kinzer:
No, I think she's saying take failure as a learning opportunity and grow from that. Don't get stuck in the fixed mindset of this is all it is ever going to be always.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think that's the point. And I think the industry, when you talk about mindset, positive mindset, growth mindset, it has taken over the word in a way that becomes coded language for just be happy all the time. And I think a lot of people who are frustrated with the world around them and positive thinking and toxic positivity, what they hear when they hear the word mindset is just be happy all the time and resent it, emotionally resent it. And I think that's one of the things that we want to correct that says mindset can be growth mindset. It can be positive mindset. It can also be a negative mindset. It can be a mindset of embracing failure as a learning opportunity. It can be a mindset is just an ideological positioning at any given moment. And it can change with context.
And that is a thing that I think about with ADHD all the time. Sometimes when I let myself go or when I find myself lost in a project, last night I was up way too late, Nikki. Oh my god, it was just gone.
Nikki Kinzer:
I'm sorry because that's my fault.
Pete Wright:
Okay, it was your fault. But it was good, right? I was in a creative mindset. And what comes with the mindset is a cost, and that cost is sleep, diet, all the things that I'm quite familiar with, intimately familiar with the costs of creativity. And yet I was in it and I needed to be in it. I needed to work through some stuff. I had to work through some stuff, Nikki. And sometimes you have to do that. But I think the point of thinking about practicing confrontation of discomfort means not hiding from mindsets that make you uncomfortable, not hiding from the costs of where you are in any given context. And I think that's a piece that is challenged by The Antidote, which is you don't have to hide. You don't have to hide from your feelings.
Nikki Kinzer:
It makes me ponder. I want to think a little bit more about that because I think that's interesting. Because I agree, I think there's too much. It's so easy to think that they're the same thing, especially because I've used the words before. "Are you..." That negative internal conversation, that negative mindset, it's like, "Okay, wait a minute." That's more of how you're feeling at the time or how you want to approach something. It is different than-
Pete Wright:
This is a great question for you, though. This is a great question for you. How does this whole conversation on mindset impact you from the perspective of a coach when you think about limiting beliefs? What is the difference between the limiting belief and a negative mindset?
Nikki Kinzer:
You've stumped me, but I'm going to do my best without having a lot of time to think about it. I think they're similar in some ways, but I think you can still have a limiting belief and still have a growth mindset around it, if that makes sense. I think that if you think about limiting beliefs, what are those? That's that conversation that we're having with ourselves that's telling us that we can or can't do something. We think it's true. It may be. It may not be. Is it a limiting belief that I can't sing? Not really because I really can't sing.
Pete Wright:
It's just a fact.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's just a fact, right?
Pete Wright:
No, a limiting belief might be I can never learn to sing.
Nikki Kinzer:
I can never learn to sing, but I could. So what if that's something I really want to do, I think I believe I can work on my mindset to have it be more open to the opportunity and open to the possibility that maybe I could learn how to sing. Even if I still believe that, I am having a mindset that is letting me approach it in a different way to actually try and not just stay not doing it because I don't believe I can do it. So I don't know if that explains anything, but that's how I see it.
Pete Wright:
Well, I think it does. And just riffing a little bit, I think the whole idea of being able to accommodate the experience that, we'll talk about singing just because where you started, being able to accommodate the fact that I can't sing as a variance of I can't sing yet or I can't sing right now. I could sing if I wanted to. I don't. I don't want to learn to sing. Being able to embrace the fact that I've made a choice, I've had agency in this conversation, there are things that I have thought I might want to do in the past and now I don't want to do. It is in fact leaning in to the uncertainty and making a commitment and living in that space and saying, "Look, I know things can be, it could be hard and there are other hard things I'm going to do instead. I've made a choice."
Nd that feels to me the end run around the limiting belief. So much of the limiting belief is a fixed perspective. It's a binary that I'm in this space right now and I can't ever get out. I've fallen and I can't get up. And that's the thing that we want to work to the other side of. It also, he goes into this a bit of a riff on anti-fragility, which was term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who wrote a book called Anti-Fragile. And his entire perspective, Taleb, which is that we gain, systems gain from disorder. People should aim to be anti-fragile, embracing stressors and shocks as a way to grow stronger. And I think it's a response isn't academic. It seems to me like a response to some of the safe spaces that he's seeing around complicated conversations when the truth is we are capable of having hard conversations that don't resort to violence and rage and hurt and can just be conversations on ideology that don't impact us so deeply to our core.
And I like posing that question at those of us living with ADHD because that is such an identity card. We live with ADHD. Identity is ADHD. I identify as ADHD-positive. And that means that it comes with certain challenges. It comes with a roller coaster of figuring out meds. It comes with a roller coaster of trying to understand how mindfulness and peace exists in a mind that's constantly on fireworks. It's just complicated. It's complicated. It leads to judgment at work and at school and all the different places. And also, what am I learning from that disorder every day that helps tomorrow make me a little stronger? Even if I'm still living with disorder, how do I feel a little bit stronger and resilient as a result of it?
And so I walk away from thinking about this book again as an exploration of how I live with uncertainty and rejection in a way that leads not to just puzzling through what rejection is, but leads to what does courage mean? What does it mean to be courageous in the face of all of the things that I'm trying to hide from? If we're hiding from things, is the core not of The Antidote, which is you're hiding from stuff behind positive thinking models, if I stop hiding, then how do I use those things? Do I face them and stare at them right in their stupid faces and say, "I'm going to be courageous," and run right through it? What do you think?
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, I love that.
Pete Wright:
What does it mean?
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's great.
Pete Wright:
I don't know. I don't know if it's great.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, I think it is. I don't know what anybody else is going to think. But no, I think that just the word courage I think is important. And I think that when we're talking about resiliency and we're talking about the beginning of the conversation, ADHD is going to show up. So how do we work with that? How do we bounce back and have a good day tomorrow? Or maybe we don't have a good day tomorrow and that's okay too, right? That's going into leaning into whatever's happening as well. So no, it all feels very balanced to me. I think that it keeps going back to that these things are going to happen. So the fight is not about preventing them from happening. It's how do you stay standing? How do you get back up and still find joy and still find all of the beautiful things that life has to offer?
Pete Wright:
You could tell he's thinking about the time he has left, Burkeman, because he talks about mortality a bunch, which is definitely the core.
Nikki Kinzer:
We're all going to die.
Pete Wright:
We're all going to die, so it's okay. And reflecting on mortality. That's definitely a part of the book. He also, the other piece he talks about which I know I've mentioned in there recently is talking about this whole idea of the obsession. Not only do we have this obsession with positive thinking. We also have an obsession with goal-setting. And just as a reminder of Four Thousand Weeks is that being too focused on specific goals blinds us to opportunities that can create a constant sense of failure. It's that we're constantly thinking about these goals and we're missing things around us and we're not catching the forest for the trees kind of perspective, which I think is interesting.
And it goes back to the thing, the thing I'm actually thinking about is Mike Schmitz and his perspective. If you just take care of your routines, the goals take care of themselves. And in that light, Burkeman suggests that happiness should be approached indirectly. Instead of striving for happiness as the goal in and of itself, it's better pursued as a byproduct of living a life aligned with one's values. I bring you back to courage. If you value courage in your life, if what you are doing is looking through the negativity, if you're just doing the work every day in a courageous and open manner, that should fulfill the equation and lead toward the goal of happiness, whatever that is for you.
I am thinking more and more about that equation and what are the things that I'm doing every day that lead me to have a better end of day so that I have a better weekend, so that I have a better month, so that I have a better year, so that I have a better life. And so focusing on the daily exploration of values as leading toward larger experiences of happiness. So last little footnote.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
This is also the cultural reflection of us living in the West, that we have an emphasis on individual happiness and success. And Burkeman says, "You know what? That's pretty isolating and unrealistic. And maybe there are some other cultures in the world that have nailed this and we just rushed past it and should stop, slow down, and consider. Is there another model that might lead us to happiness if we stop thinking just for ourselves?" Just saying. Burkeman, not me.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And so, I don't know. I guess we've talked about all my other points as we get to the end. I think it's a really interesting book and leads to some reconsideration of a lot of our assumptions around positive thinking, self-help-
Nikki Kinzer:
Positive thinking.
Pete Wright:
... toxic positivity, the works.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Well, yeah, I agree because I do think there's this pressure of to want to be positive, I have to be positive, that I should be thinking of this in a positive way. And that's a lot. And that's that toxic stuff that you were talking about.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it's snake oil. It's snake oil. You don't have to be happy all the time. You don't have to buy into positivity culture. You can be authentic and human. And we recognize humanity is a thing. ADHD is not.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a thing.
Pete Wright:
ADHD is not solved, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
And in fact, you might argue, solving your ADHD would not make you happy. No.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's just like getting rich isn't going to make you happy.
Pete Wright:
Right, because that's not the point.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Right. All right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Good stuff. Thank you, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Well, thank you, Nikki. What a great opportunity to revisit the book and Burkeman and links in the show notes. You got to check these things out, and his shorts on Audible. I know I mentioned them last week. He's got a bunch of shorts that have been released that he did for the BBC, and they're great, great stories and give much more fodder for thinking.
So thank you, everybody, for hanging out with us on this show. Thank you for your time and your attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute about this conversation, we're heading over to the show talk channel in the Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright, and we will see you right back here next week on Taking Control" The ADHD Podcast.
