It’s no exaggeration to say that the world in 2025 can be ... a lot. Sometimes it may seem that tuning it all out is our only option. This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with researcher Sarah Jaquette Ray about how we can reclaim our sense of efficacy and purpose in the face of big, systemic problems like climate change. Then, we bring you an audio essay from writer Pico Iyer, who shares his thoughts on how we can regain our footing when life is overwhelming. If you're not yet a member of Hidden Brain+, this is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We’re extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January and you’ll get 30 free days to try it out. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, just go to the Hidden Brain show page and click "try free." Or you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click "try free.” Thanks for listening and supporting the show — we really appreciate it.
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 1906, the journalist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel based on his undercover reporting in Chicago's meatpacking plants. The book tells the story of a young couple, Yorgis and Ona, who immigrate to the U.S. from Lithuania along with their relatives. The optimism they feel about their new country is soon tested.
Family members find jobs at a meatpacking plant, but the work is dangerous and pays little. The family suffers illness and injuries. Work is tenuous, with periodic wage cuts, poor benefits, and seasonal layoffs. The family is evicted from their home and moves to a crowded, dirty boarding house. Unable to afford a doctor, Ona dies in childbirth, as does her baby.
When Jorgis and Ona's remaining son dies as well, Jorgis slides into alcoholism. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle with the aim of awakening the conscience of Americans to the desperate conditions of the working poor. He hoped to spark a movement that would reform the nation's labor laws. But the public did not respond the way he expected.
Readers did care about the quality of the meat they ate, but seemed indifferent to the plight of exploited workers. Journalists, activists, and leaders often get frustrated when their best effort to draw attention to a cause does not prompt people to get off their couches and take action. Sometimes this is because people feel apathetic.
They don't know how to respond or assume any efforts they make will go nowhere. Other times it's because they feel overwhelmed or consumed with paralyzing guilt. Whatever the driver, when it comes to existential issues such as climate change or war, inaction can have terrible consequences. This week on Hidden Brain, we continue our New Year's series, Wellness 2.0.
We look at how we come to feel disengaged and burned out, even on topics we might care about, and how we can begin to retrieve our sense of efficacy and purpose.
Many problems we face are easy to solve.
A missing ingredient for a recipe, a burned-out light bulb, a parking ticket. We make short work of these problems, briskly crossing them off our to-do lists. But modern life also seems full of issues that researchers call wicked problems, challenges so huge, complicated, and intractable that they defy our attempts to solve them.
When we come up against problems like these, we tend to respond differently. At California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, Sarah Jacquet-Ray studies how we respond to huge, overwhelming problems and how we can get better at dealing with them. Sarah Jacquet-Ray, welcome to Hidden Brain.
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