How to Be a Better Human - How to be less useful (w/ Priyanka Mattoo)

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0:27Visit wise.com. Teas and seas apply. The biggest questions in life rarely have simple answers. Which is inconvenient because we have a lot of questions. About the people we love, the friendships we make, why we get lonely and whether the way we live now, especially with technology, has changed what it means to be human. So on Corner Peace, we investigate. We talk to experts, follow the evidence and occasionally end up somewhere we definitely didn't expect.

0:57We may not always find a clean answer, but that's kind of the point. This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Now, if you're the kind of person who is checking out a podcast called How to Be a Better Human, I have a strong suspicion that you, like me, can sometimes make your own life more difficult by trying to take care of everything or by trying to fulfill all of your duties and responsibilities, even the little, not so important ones at the very highest level. And what you and I think of as just functional, it might actually be something closer to over-functioning. And look, even if you aren't like this, if that does not ring true, you probably know someone who is. And this episode is gonna give you a peek behind the curtain and reveal how a lot of this is much more challenging than it looks. Because today's guest, Priyanka Madhu, she is one of those types of people.

2:03And she has an excellent new book that is out now called How to Be Less Useful. Priyanka is here to talk to us today about how to find things that you enjoy and allowing yourself to have pleasure and time that isn't for things that's just for enjoying your life. To get us started, here is Priyanka reading an excerpt from her book. At my 40th birthday party many years ago now, I bathed in the attention like a cat in a lake.

2:29On the outside, I was a serene and gracious host, leading people over to the drinks and tacos. I was just hosting a party, I thought. No big deal. The problem, as it turned out, was that the party was about me. And people kept trying to say things that indicated as such. There were a few toasts. There was much misty eye contact. A lot of warm, too long hugs. I felt like I was being addressed in my own wake.

2:56My brain kept vacating the proceedings, going elsewhere in a yowl instead of having to deal with the intensity of everyone's feelings. I don't think anybody noticed that I was being slightly insane, but I went to bed in my clothes, worn out by half past eight, and woke up mad at myself. Why couldn't I just let nice things happen? Why couldn't I absorb and enjoy the kind words of my loved ones? Why did I have to be so weird about it all?

3:23The birthday party had held the possibility of joy, the kind of thing I supposedly was desperately seeking, but I had experienced it like a howling, soaked cat. I knew true joy came from within. Years of therapy and meditation hadn't been for naught, but I seemed to have a specific resistance to it being handed to me. I had somehow become a person who body-blocked infusions of joy for my loved ones, and I wanted to become the sort of person who could picture celebrating with them.

3:51We're going to talk more about how to be less useful and other crucial life skills in just a moment, right after these ads. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com. Teas and seas apply. The biggest questions in life rarely have simple answers. Which is inconvenient because we have a lot of questions. About the people we love, the friendships we make, why we get lonely, and whether the way we live now, especially with technology, has changed what it means to be human. So on Cornerpeace, we investigate.

4:55We talk to experts, follow the evidence, and occasionally end up somewhere we definitely didn't expect. We may not always find a clean answer, but that's kind of the point. Get curious with Corner Piece, a podcast from Ted and hosted by us, the creators of Answer in Progress, available on Apple, Spotify, and more. And we are back. Today we're talking about the new book, How to Be Less Useful with author Priyanka Mathew.

5:26Hi, I'm Priyanka Mathew. I'm a former talent agent and producer and a current author, screenwriter and parent. I'm the author of the memoir Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. And my new book is called How to be Less Useful, The Joy of Inefficiency. One of the things I loved about how to be useful, and I really did love the book. I think it's so well written. I just finished it. I loved how it is both about trying to be less useful, trying to buy less into the idea that everything has to be perfectly put together and as efficient as possible. But it's also really about finding what you enjoy and allowing yourself to have pleasure and time that isn't for things, that is just for enjoying your life. Yes. Yes. That was a realization I came to rather late. I think some people are

6:20born with that or learn it along the way, but I was well into my 40s. Once I realized that a lot of my grumpiness and my resentment wasn't actually aimed at anybody, it wasn't caused by other people. I had really been a co-creator of the situation by assigning purpose to every second of every day.

6:41And once I started making this space for things that actually made me happy instead of we're purely utilitarian It's interesting how all of my relationships changed for the better. Tell me about that. How did they change for the better?

6:53Well, I think I had been stuck in this trap where I thought, well, I do all this stuff for all these people. I am married and I have two kids and I work and, you know, like a acts of service or my incoming outgoing love language. And so this is my purpose in life is to serve these people around me in the best way that I can. And I was incredibly efficient. Was I fun? Was I cheerful? Was I the kindest I could be? No, I wasn't. I was getting stuff done. And when you're in getting stuff done mode, which I do get, you know, I click into the sort of all business place, you know, the warmth and the joy and the fun kind of leaches away because everything becomes a checklist. So once I pulled back from that, once I pulled back from this sort of like urgency that I had around these duties that I had entirely created on my own truly, I realized that I all of a sudden had a lot more capacity

7:49to be gentle and joyful about it, and I was just much happier. It was so funny to pull back from like doing little things, like sort of like everything for my husband and kids, and feeling like I was abandoning them in various duties, like not pecking lunches all of a sudden, or not like preparing everybody's every meal or every snack, or not reminding my husband of this or that, which I felt like were my duties, but they were mostly self-imposed. Nobody had asked me to do them.

8:17Once I pulled back from that everyone was like, you're so nice. You're being so nice to me. She's so cheerful. She's so happy. You know, and my husband too is like, I just love you so much. You're such a wonderful person. And I was like, where is this coming from? I feel like I'm abandoning you. And he's like, you're not. He's like, this is all I want. He's like, you don't have to cook every meal. That's something you made up. You know, you don't have to do this or that for me. I just want to be around you. It's not about what you do for me.

8:46I mean, this is something I personally relate to so much. I'm not to literally quote from my therapy sessions, but something that I have thought about and talked about is when you are adding more and more balls to the things that you're juggling, and now you're juggling fire and you're juggling chainsaws. It becomes impressive to other people. Wow, you can do all that. But it also becomes Harder and harder for someone else to step in because it's like well, I don't know if I can juggle chainsaws Chris is juggling the chainsaws. How would I step in there? And I think it's really a challenge to realize like

9:24Actually, no one asked you to do this, like, incredibly complicated circus act. No one asked you to do it. And I think that's really hard because you do have to measure, like, what societal expectations are for parents, for wives, for husbands, you know? So there is kind of the back of my mind, like, oh, well, this is what's expected of me. And I'm mad at the patriarchy. And I'm mad at, yeah, I'm sure I'm mad about the patriarchy. I absolutely am. It's the system that, like, led to this. But currently in my house, I was at least, you know...

9:53Half responsible for my own oppression Not so much in the world, you know, but in my house. Yes. Yeah. Yes, absolutely I I'm not gonna say I was to blame but once I understood the role I was playing in creating the situation all of you know, I'd all started to dissolve I think that there are many people out there especially many people in you know heterosexual relationships with kids where it's like One partner, maybe almost always the mother or the wife needs to read the book how to be less useful. But the other partner, the dad, needs to read a book called how to be more useful, how to be more efficient. So I imagine this is something you've thought about, right? Like where is the line where some people do actually need to like focus more on the being useful versus not being useful? Yeah, that's a really good question. And that I think there is a lot of Agita

10:48Again, we're talking about very conventionally scripted, straight. partnerships, right? This is like where we see this is like I am in the conventional like caretaker role. I am and my husband works more and he works outside of the house and I work at home and everything I do is flexible by design. I have chosen this, you know, I've chosen to be home more. I've chosen to be with the kids more. It's what I saw my mom do. I'm super close to my mom. It was the motherhood experience that I wanted. So this is what I chose and yet, right? I can't do it on my own because I have work and I have not a village, you know, I live somewhere where I have no family, we have no family on either side. So I don't have the support that a lot of parents of your have had. And I hear this a lot from other women, which is like, I over function. How do I get my partner to like pick up the slack? And I was like, what I learned, I mean, I have been there too. How do I make my partner X?

11:39And I just want to remind you and the thing that I learned is that we're in a dance. We're in a dance together and we're doing this together. I mean, unless your partner has terrible intentions and hates you, that's a whole other story. If your partner is a kind person who wants the best for you and wants the best for the family, then it's likely that this is the story. And the story is he will not pick anything up until you put it down. And he wants to pick it up. And perhaps it won't be as graceful as it is when you do it, but it will not become graceful.

12:08until you allow. Then the opportunity to go through the steps, right? So he started with me just saying I can't do all this and here is what I am shedding and Here's what I am asking you to lean in and do here Let me present to you a problem that I'm having and I will try a new thing which is not solving it entirely on my own Let me talk to my partner who is meant to be my partner I am not to be doing I'm not meant to be doing this in isolation He desperately wants to be a partner, but I had been so so independent in a way that was not healthy, that we were working towards interdependence. And sometimes it took a little step like just saying, Hey, here's a problem. We're going on this trip and I don't have the time to figure out blah, blah, blah. What do you think we should do? Whereas before I would have like sucked it up, done it, been cranky, been tired, felt bad for myself.

13:02When the problem comes up presenting it to him was very new for me because I had always problem solved on my own from the time from before I can remember Problem solving you know like I was always that kind of kid. I was that kind of teen I was that kind of 20 something. I was that kind of 30 something and here I am thinking I need to do everything on my own, even though I have a willing partner who's just like, could you just let me in? Like, could you just let me into what's actually happening? Could you present the problems you're having and then let me solve them? And it just hadn't occurred to me. It just had not occurred to me. I have a lot of friends from college who are all straight men who have now become husbands and fathers. And a lot of them have read this book.

13:46fair play with their partner, which is all about like, how do you get to do the things so that people are actually both doing the same thing? And I think part of it is, you know, understanding what's actually being done. A lot of my friends have a hard time taking over a role from their wife because it won't be done exactly the way that she wants it to be done. And so there's this concept they have there of like the minimum acceptable product, right? It's like, if the goal is to feed the family dinner, what is the minimum version of dinner that looks like? And it's interesting because a lot of people have the hard time of being like, well, if you want to pick out the recipe and plan it all and then I cook it, you're still doing all the work. But if you want me to do the work and you're not happy with chicken and rice and broccoli, then how can I ever do it? Because I don't know what's in your head. So I think there's this version of having to be okay with things that are a little out of exactly how it would be if you were doing it, which doesn't necessarily mean worse or better.

14:44Yeah, there's a lot of discomfort that people are not willing to face because they would rather be in like their self-imposed cage, myself included. Yeah, but I'll take two things about fair play. I love fair play because it shows you exactly, you know, lists everything that needs to be done to take care of a house and family. So showing just being able to look at that for my husband who didn't grow up the way I did was not encouraged to take on sort of like domestic responsibilities in any way. Whereas I from childhood was kind of like my brother's mom. You know, like I just did. I made his meals and I made sure this and made sure that. Like that is something I was trained to do really early, not even by my mother, just by the soup that I grew up in. But once I stopped doing certain things and stopped expecting them to be done exactly my way, there's a beautiful process that happens. One is, yeah, it's going to be goofy. It's going to be goofy sometimes. Maybe the kids will have

15:40cold old pizza for dinner. But you know what? They're fine. They're fine. So the other beautiful thing is like, is like once I stopped holding on so tightly to how things were done, I saw how beautifully my husband did them and differently he did them because he really enjoys being a part of the household. He loves being involved. And yes, his ideas are different than mine because I have a very rigid kind of conventional idea of how these things should be done. But Oh my God, they think he's so fun and cool and awesome because it's like, oh, how are you spending the day? Oh, wow, that is not how I would spend the day. But these guys love it. Like when my daughter was smaller, you know, I've read this book a few years ago. So my daughter was like four or five. And he started washing her hair. And I have to tell you, I don't know what his trick is, but her hair.

16:25was so much, it was like glossy, gorgeous mermaid hair when he was done with it. And I was like, what? And he consistently would like wash her hair and she would come out like a, like a friggin shampoo model. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, I don't know. And he told me his little tricks and I was like, you're a genius because I'm just doing the thing that it says on the bottle and you are doing something on another plane entirely. So the interesting thing about sharing responsibility is And yeah, they're not done the way that I do them. They're done in different ways and they're often done like way better. And also fair play didn't exactly work for us because we don't have, I think if we both had office jobs and we came home.

17:07to divide up the tasks, then it would be easier to go 50-50. But I'm home. I'm home more. I work less. That is true. Like I work fewer hours. So for us, it's been more of kind of complimentary skills thing, you know? So like any research projects, any major organizing, he's great at he loves the little kind of dinky like what's for dinner, love who wants to go to the front. Like I do that. I do like the meal prep. I do the kind of low touch stuff because I walk around the house all day, frankly, you know? But like bigger projects, oh my God, he's like for that. So us figuring out what our specific balance was going to be, what our specific superpowers were, me starting to understand the question was not like, why isn't he doing exactly what I do? Why do you want that much overlap? You don't want to do, you don't want to do exactly the same thing. You want to be interlocking puzzle pieces. So like, what are his superpowers? What are your superpowers and how can they complement each other? Okay, while you ponder those questions, we're going to take a short break and then we will be right back.

18:15Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE.

18:42visit wise.com. Teas and seas apply. You have a tiny computer in your pocket putting a world of information at your fingertips, but it's hard to decipher what information is worth consuming when getting lost in the scroll. I'm Elise Hu and on my podcast, Ted Talks Daily, you can count on hearing ideas from experts that feed your brain, not slop, that rots it. Neuroscientists, technologists, world-renowned artists and more unveil complex ideas to help you make sense of the world.

19:12from breakthrough mental health research to advice on navigating tricky relationships to the latest AI innovation. It's a trusted place to get your daily curiosity fix. Listen to TED Talks Daily with new episodes every day wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. Here's Priyanka reading another excerpt from How to Be Less Useful. I want to be a baby bird, I announced to my husband after he returns from his trip.

19:45He's used to me setting vague intentions and then turning them into my whole personality for a time. I'm tired of being capable, I tell him. I don't want to be fine. I don't want to take care of everyone all the time. I want people to take care of me. I want to lean on the people in my life to be soft and squishy, to be less useful. He nods and gives me a hug. He's been waiting for me to get here for 16 years, I think, but it had to be my decision.

20:10Don't even know how to begin the journey to this new person, but I'm hoping that identifying a destination as a start I don't think I will ever stop being a feeder. I take too much selfish joy in it and it's not an urge I can repress What I can try to do is tune in to how my loved ones are trying to feed me back For people who aren't familiar with your work. I haven't read the book yet. Why did you write this book like what was the?

20:35What was the reason why you needed to become less useful? Well, the funny thing is I was trying to explain to someone the other day that both books I've written started out as like cheerful books of essays and then they turn into something else.

20:46My memoir was going to be a cheerful book of essays about food and family. And it was going to be called 16 Kitchens. And then it became this very complex, funny, I think, but complex investigation of intergenerational trauma, the meaning of home. And I was like, oh, dang it. It got real. It got real fast. And the same with this. This was also supposed to be a book of essays vaguely food related.

21:14And then I started writing and the thing about writing a personal essay is that you get a few essays in and you're like, oh, no, no, no, no. This book is not the book that I thought it was going to be. So credit to my editor and my publisher, who totally get me, it came to me three of our essays in where I was like, I started to recognize I was in a state. I was in a state where I was like, overwhelmed and overclocked. And I was looking around going like, why am I so unhappy? And I set out to figure it out. And once it came to me that I was in a self-imposed prison, that's when the writing started. And I emailed my editor, and I was like, this is the book. And she was like, great.

21:56you talk about this feeling that I I so have felt many many times and I've never really heard of anyone else articulating in especially not as well as you do in the book of wanting to burn your life down but also Liking your life, you know, it's like an easy narrative if you're like I want to get a divorce and I want to leave the city that I live in and I want to quit my job, but you're like I like my husband I like my job I even like the city I live in and yet my life does not feel rewarding and fulfilling and fun. Yeah. So how do I do that? How do I break out of this prison, which is actually a prison I still want to want to renovate the prison? Maybe like, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe make the doors like less creaky. So when I talk about being overly functional in my relationship to my kids and my relationship to my husband.

22:43That's a part of the book, yes. But I have always been an overfunctioner. I was an overfunctioner as a worker. I was an overfunctioner as a friend. I was an overfunctioner as a family member. So whether or not you have kids or a husband, you have probably family members and a job and friends. So we are talking about overfunctioning in every area of your life. And so if you can point out your overfunctioning, understand it and pull back.

23:07Learning to do that is one thing and we're learning to do less work in all of my relationships has improved all of my relationship So we're not talking about just parenting or or partnership. We're talking about just how you move through the world, right? So you were asking about the burning the burning everyone everyone has had that feeling, you know, especially over functioners that you want to burn down Burn down your life, you know, and I think that I think it is very much about looking around and assessing. The way that I put it is that I had all the ingredients for a delicious cake and it was just coming out wrong.

23:44Because I know I have everything that I ever wanted. I have everything. I have this wonderful partner. I have these amazing kids. I have an incredible family. I read a whole book about my family. I have a roof over my head. I have really good health insurance. I have everything anyone in the world could ever want. So what is my problem? And the answer is I'm my problem, you know? So it's all about changing your relationship with the world, you know? Because it's like...

24:12It's too easy to think it's the circumstances. It's not the circumstances. It's the mindset. Unless it is, unless truly, I mean, I'm talking about people whose basic needs are met, right? And there are too many people in this country, too many people in this world whose basic needs are not met. If your basic needs are met and you're miserable, you got to do some soul searching. The feeling that I think a lot of overfunctioners get is like the way to feel safe and secure.

24:39is to solve every other problem that could possibly come up. And of course, there's never an end to the problems that could possibly come up. No, it's an anxiety response. I know who we all were as children, right? We were children who maybe were made a little bit anxious by uncertainty. And if we had the skills or learned the skills, we learned that we could control.

25:02our surroundings. Not only were we able to control some things about our surroundings, but then also we were praised for it because competent children are praised. And so that becomes like a core pillar of self is like, I'm a problem solver. I'm resourceful. I can fix things. I can bend the universe to my will. You've built this beautiful garment for yourself. But once you get to like middle age and there's all kinds of factors, It doesn't serve you anymore to be that way because, yeah, like circumstances really force you to rethink who you are. And also everyone else is an adult. So they don't want you in their business all the time. They don't want you fixing their problems. They just want you there hanging out, maybe buying them a drink. That's all. One of the hardest things and also the biggest lesson that I've learned is that the way that I can be most helpful to people I love, to my wife.

25:56to honestly, even my young kids, but certainly to friends, is not to solve their problems, but is to listen to them when they are having the problem and to say like, wow, that sounds hard. They're not actually looking for a solution 90% of the time. 10% of the time they're asking for help. But most of the time I jump into like, well, what if I did this and this and this? And then they are actually much less helped than if I had just said, yeah, that sucks. They're mad at you. They're mad at you. They're like, I'm trying to talk. Why are you talking?

26:25but this is like this is the thing i'm waking up to you know is like people say okay to be less useful isn't it good isn't it good to be useful of course it's going to be useful i'm still extremely useful you know this is going to be a lifelong practice but learning the line learning the line which i should not cross because either either takes too much out of me or it pisses people off, or it's not helpful emotionally to the people around me. That's the line I'm always learning where it is. I mean, the polycule thing, I'm always falling into this nonsense where I'm giving people advice. It's not a perfect system, right? I'm still wired this way. It's a practice. Every day I have to be like, step back, listen, this is not your business. You know, like I will be practicing this for the rest of my life. But being just useful enough, I suppose, is the goal. Sometimes,

27:14people who are extremely productive and useful, they don't understand that 60% or 30% of their max capacity is still very good and still gets you through. One example in my own life is my wife is extremely efficient and productive and great at her job. And she started a new job while she was going through some serious health stuff. So she was starting this job and she just couldn't give 100%.

27:43And so their baseline at work was what she knew was like her 40%. But then she had her first review and they were like, you're amazing. We can't believe how much you get done. And she was like, what? Like this is so much less than I could get done. I am like not even close to a hundred percent. And I think for her it was this huge revelation that she didn't have to, you know, burn the candle completely at both ends to have other people think she was doing a good job.

28:09Yeah, I blame, you know, American work ethics, right? I mean, which are a wonderful thing. We achieve incredible things in some ways, but we're very extreme people. So, you know, it's like how to fill every second of every day with as much like work and nutrition and work product and all that kind of stuff. And what I have learned is that, yeah, the work gets done.

28:30the work will always get done and the work always gets done and the work always gets done to a standard that I like. It's like a plate of food, right? It's like I have to make sure that I carve out a third of my plate for things that bring me joy because they make me the kind of person.

28:44that is additive emotionally to the people in my life, you know, like the little bits of joy, the things I do, the fact that I can talk to my kids at the end of the day. Also, like what example am I setting for the kids? You know, I can't just be like, okay, now we've made rise and grind kids. No, I want them to be whole people who really care about their own family members and friends and have healthy relationships with everyone in their lives and have healthy relationships with work. So what am I doing for the people around me? What am I doing for myself that makes this life sustainable it is funny that you've several times in this conversation been like you know i have like less of a serious work i have like less it's like more flexible and from outside you have like a wildly successful career where you have written two books of essays you have a newsletter with an essay every week almost and then on top of that you also are writing and selling tv shows and movies and so like you are so far from a person who's just

29:42And no judgment against this. This is a big thing on its own too. If it's not like you're just at home, you know, and even if you were just at home, that's its own very big job as well. So you're doing a ton. I think the work fills the time you give it. So I put work chunks into my calendar and I'm like, this week we're going to write a chapter. And when I'm done, I'm done. I don't go, okay, now we're writing chapter two.

30:06The way I work when I'm writing taught me a lot about how long the work actually takes. So like I work really hard on my books and I'm very intense about my books but once I started blocking off work blocks I realized that I could spend three weeks on a chapter but why? Giving myself a deadline and understanding that I need to fit the work into the deadline. I have to go to yoga and I have to see my children and I have to because these are all like parts of the recipe for like my mental health. And then looking back and being like, oh, the work really did get done. And a lot of work got done, even when, even when I was taking care of myself and hanging out with my family and traveling and having good boundaries and, you know, nurturing my friendships. And it feels like a lot less work than I used to because it's all balanced out. You were a very, you know, high powered Hollywood agent. You found a lot of amazing people at the beginning of their careers and they went on to, you know, be.

31:06A-list celebrities. Yes. The reason why I want to talk about that for a second is you got to see fame up close. Yeah. And I think there's a really interesting parallel between usefulness and fame, right? Like we are chasing this thing and when you actually catch it, it turns out that it is a lot less desirable than you thought it was going to be. Like the most efficient, most useful life is actually not a very satisfying full life. The most famous career is actually not nearly as professionally and personally satisfying as you thought it might have been when you get there. Can you talk a little bit about whether you agree with that, disagree with that, but just the parallels you see between those? I do. I think sort of like pure, a frictionless pure efficiency is something aspirational to a lot of

31:58Americans maybe people in other countries I can only speak for what I experience here in this country this sort of like Productivity hacks and like getting fitting as much as you can into a day these people who want to live for 250 years I'm like for what so you can like drink Soymeal or whatever like okay, you know read a lot of books treat that as a curse that the character is trying desperately to escape I know I'm like there are books about this They don't read there are time to read they're like listening to like AI summaries of books on like three times the speed, right? It's so bizarre. I have a lot of empathy for famous

32:34people because I've been around it and it IS a prison. Most of the actors I know were just theater kids. You know, they were just theater kids and they feel compelled to...

32:45be on a set and be around other actors and express themselves through acting. And of course they want financial stability, but then it comes at like this insane price where you just kind of have to build yourself into a compound and you can't leave the house because everybody wants to touch you all the time. And it is not a way I could live. I think a lot of them do the math and they're like, okay, well, again, I've been given everything in the world. I have everything I ever wanted. And this is the calculus now is that I have to maintain a certain kind of relationship with the public. And of course they know, you know, they have healthy relationships for pride. They know it's part of the job, but at the same time, it's not something I could see myself doing. But yeah, it is just sort of again, this like extreme position of like my actor friends who are character actors, where I was like so grateful.

33:36Working character actors are the happiest actors. I know because they're like I get to do what I love I work all the time and I can walk down the street without anybody Recognizing me or maybe in a day or two one or two people would be like I love your work, you know, like I started to understand I'm like as lefty as they come I started to understand private jets when I was an agent because I was just like well you can't walk through the airport as a famous person it's insanity like walking even even from the lounge or whatever to the gate is like a hundred people stopping to touch you and take pictures and yell at you and scream at you and post you online. And it is madness. My wife, Molly, works in a much more has has our entire relationship worked in much more like traditional corporate environments. And so like I was a teacher and then I was a comedian and writer and podcast like none of those have ever been like you go into an office and you have like a

34:30Classic thing so she she is often my way of understanding what like a regular job is because she's worked in a lot of these places and Something that we were talking about the other day is like what burnout is what exactly that means Because it's something I hear people talk about a lot and I wasn't quite exactly sure what it meant and something Molly said that I have has stuck with me is the idea that one way that people know that they are either in burnout or Approaching burnout is the idea that it would be like so nice to get sick. Yeah have a break work from doing what they want to do and I bring that up because in some ways your journey of reevaluating Being useful it starts with you like being physically

35:14incapacitated who knows you know we always talk about psychosomatic illnesses and who knows if I was just so stressed out by everything I was doing that my body was just like stop it because out of nowhere I had an Achilles injury like I mean I go to yoga and I run but it's nothing I like run I like shuffle I'm like a very slow jogger so like there is no reason that I should have hurt my achilles tendon. I strained it and I went to the podiatrist and she was just like, sit down. Just sit down. Just sit down for a while. And I was like, I can't. I have kids. There's so much standing. There's so much standing. You have no idea. And she was like, nope, you got to sit down. I was like, well, who's going to feed them? And she said, throw them a rotisserie chicken. And I kind of...

36:02Laugh again. This is before I let other people handle meals I kind of laughed and then I came home. I was like, well, I gotta stay put I don't know what I'm gonna do and my husband was about to go to a conference in France this animation conference that he goes to every year and He was like, oh, I okay. Well, I need to cancel my trip. This is crazy You can't hang out with the kids here by yourself and I'm in France and I had a leap of moment because I'm a crazy person. And I was like, I think this has happened for a reason. And the reason is, the reason is I need to be less useful. And the reason is you need to go to France and I need to figure out what the kids can do and what I'm doing too much of because I am now physically being withheld from doing the normal things I would do.

36:54by pain, which I know is demented, but whatever works. Um, and so he went to France and I sat in a boot mostly on my butt for a week. And it turns out that they could do every like everything. They were packing their bags. They were like locking up at night. They were surprised getting their own water.

37:17Amazing how that works. Like the scales fall from my eyes. I needed that clean break to be like, oh, actually they can do it. So let them do it. Yeah. And not only can they do it, but often it's really rewarding and people get a lot of.

37:32self-worth and confidence from having done the thing themselves. Absolutely. I think that was the thing that also taught me that I'm a very confident person and it's because I think I understand now that it was because I was left to do a lot of things on my own. My father was a pediatrician. My mother was an educator. So they were very deliberate about their parenting. And so I understand that they were just like, you know you, you're smart. You can figure it out. I had not done nearly enough of that with my kids. So once my kids could like prepare their own snacks, get their own water pack, their own bags, lock up to house.

38:02My son was like turning the alarm on every night. They felt just like a real sense of purpose. It was all of a sudden I was not their robot assistant, which is the thing I kept complaining about. Oh my god, I'm the robot assistant. Well, I have cast myself in this role and nothing's gonna change unless you rewrite the role. So once I was no longer the robot assistant and they were doing all their own things, everyone was so much happier and so much again, so much confidence and asking for more to do. We talked a lot about this book, but also your first book, Bird, Milk and Mosquito Bones.

38:30is much more of, you know, your origin story and your family is from Kashmir. And then you spend a lot of your childhood in Saudi Arabia and then moved to Michigan and now live in Los Angeles. You know, we've been talking about it as though it is like a phenomenon in the United States. But what do you think having spent a lot of time, you know, growing up in other places, but also then your adult life, you've been in London, you've been in Italy. How much of this do you think is internal, like the type of person being an eldest daughter, that type of thing versus external cultural forces. External cultural forces. I believe if I had been raised in a more traditional household, then I would believe it was external forces. Oh, interesting. My parents were incredibly... There was no...

39:23discernment based on gender or anything like that. It was my nature and they let me run with it, 100%. There was no extra expectation that I as a girl should know how to do domestic tasks. In fact, my entire adulthood and with my children, my mother and father are constantly like, why do you not have any help?

39:46It's really weird. Can you hire someone to help you with that? Should we come out? They think it's really strange. And I go, well, you did this to me because my mother was a very hands-on mother and she was always, she worked, but she worked.

40:01academic hours, which were the hours I was at school. So I never really saw her work. It wasn't a big part of her life. I knew I was the son of her existence and in many ways it was wonderful. But in some ways that was the roadmap that I had to rewrite for myself because I talked to her in the book and I go, but you did everything by yourself. She was like, I nearly drove myself insane. Like I don't want you to do that. Like even today when she calls me and I am like cleaning something in the house, she's like please, just like please hire someone. And I'm like, well, again, all I know is what I saw. You know, it's interesting. You took that as kind of like the question as being about like traditional gender norms. And I was actually more thinking about it as like American hustle culture, like how much of this is America saying like you got to do everything all the time.

40:51This book is going to come out in England. It's going to come out in India. Everyone needs this book. Everyone has been saying they need this book. All the publishers are like, yeah, we need it here. It's everywhere because America has an outside cultural influence. So the Rise and Grind mindset, which we've created because we're insane, has sort of spread out to all these places.

41:10non-socialist places, you know, has spread out to all these like non-socialist places. And so I think that it's a trap that everyone, and not only, it's also because I think more is expected of us as humans, right? It's like, it's like certain amounts of like work productivity in an area with like all areas of disappearing jobs. So like the competitiveness is out of control, right? Like everyone feels the need to like hold on to whatever they can with whatever competitive edge they can rightfully so. And then when people start working, I mean, that's hard enough. But then when people become parents, it's like everyone is expected to be more present and put in more hours than we ever have before. So how are we going to fit that into your day? Everything becomes like a Jenga. So I think that is like universal and Western cultures. But India is also very, India is very capitalist. It's a very productive place. It's a very work oriented culture among a certain, you know, among a certain like socioeconomic subset. So it is a very similar, similar hustle culture in a lot of those places.

42:10You have a great sense of humor. Your husband has a great sense of humor. Your kids seem to have a great sense of humor. I mean, how much is the ability to laugh at yourself, something that has helped you to reevaluate these lies that you told yourself about how much you needed to do and how it needed to be all you doing it?

42:32I don't know any other way to be, but like as a culture, when you have been oppressed and in danger. I think that you understand that you have to laugh about it or things could get very sad and heavy and unbearable very quickly. So I come from generations and generations and generations of people who tell sad, scary, weird stories that will make you cry with laughter, you know? And I think it is, it gives you kind of perspective about everything, especially during hard moments. Because otherwise, yeah, I would be in a pit of rage about the patriarch.

43:10and other things. But instead, I have to examine it and I have to share it with my husband. We have to laugh about it and be like, look at the silly mistakes we've made. Look at how we got ourselves into this mess. Look at what we did. Look at what we've done. How are we going to do this differently? Oh, well shrug moving along, you know? I think you have to have a sense of humor about all of it. It's an important part of my voice, I think. Well, Priyanka, thank you so much for making the time to be on the show. Thank you for your book and your writing.

43:37It's such a pleasure to get to talk to you, and I really think that people should read this book. Thanks so much for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much to today's guest, Priyanka Mathew. Her new book is called How to Be Less Useful, and I cannot recommend it enough. I also recommend you check out her memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. She's such a fantastic writer. My name is Chris Duffy, and my new book Humor Me is out now too. You can find out about my book and my live show dates and all my other projects at chrisduffiecomedy.com. This episode of How to Be Better Human was unfortunately put together very usefully and very efficiently by a team who all pledged to be less useful in the future.

44:18On the Tedside, promising to do more unquantifiable and inexplicable actions are Daniela Balarezzo, Ban Ban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laini Lott, Tonsikasun Manivong, Antonio Lay, and Joseph de Bruyne. Ryan Lash demonstrated his passion for video by assembling this episode, and Mateus Ellis believes that useful or not, there's nothing more delightful than a fully fact-checked episode.

44:40On the PRX side, our team is a collection of baby birds eagerly collecting audio in their nests. Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to a friend or to a family member or don't tell them that they have the fun link for themselves. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, do at least one thing just because it is enjoyable and not because it has any other purpose. There are many podcasts you can turn to for work advice, but on our show, Fixable, We help real people just like you tackle real workplace challenges fast. I'm CEO and best-selling author, Ann Morris. And I'm Harvard Business School Professor, Frances Fry, and we are the hosts of the TED podcast, Fixable. Whether you're lacking confidence at your new job, feeling burned out, or struggling to lead your team through a big change, we won't shy away from any problem. We bring our clear thinking, honest opinions, and expertise to solve your toughest workplace issues through practical solutions. Hear new episodes of Fixable every Monday.

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