“Your best self is the same as your worst self” (w/ Heather Havrilesky) (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Chris Duffy: You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. What would it mean if you were totally honest with yourself and other people about who you are and what it is that you want? Well, for one thing, I feel certain that it would mean for me and for probably you too. That we would be contradictory and messy and complex, and we wouldn't always make sense, but that messiness and that complexity, that's exactly what today's guest Heather Haki is all about.

She's one of my favorite writers. She is hilarious and sharp and so often beautifully eloquent about what it means to be human. Whether Heather is writing a memoir about her marriage called Foreverland, or writing one of her two advice columns, ask Polly or Ask Molly. She is always pushing for people to be more, more themselves, more honest, more fearless, more messy sometimes.

So today on the show, we're gonna talk about a big, huge question that every single one of us has to navigate every single day of our lives. How do you be you? To get started, here's a clip where Heather is talking about the kinds of letters she gets from people asking for advice.

Heather Havrilesky: I really love answering letters from people who are in their twenties, early thirties, partially because it's such a terrible time, honestly, even though you.

Come outta college, you know, high school or come out of your youth. Having had a lot of structure, a lot of very rigorous expectations of your behavior. Theoretically, in many cases, when you enter into your twenties and it's up to you, the sudden loss of structure and someone telling you what to do and people saying, this is how the real world works and this is how life works can induce this kind of.

Sense of vertigo and I mean, my own experience months after landing in San Francisco felt like I was a complete failure. I think a lot of people in their twenties and thirties put pressure on themselves to hit certain marks at certain times to be a success overnight. There's a lot of pressure by the culture to be a pheno, to be a precocious 20 under 2030, under 30 40, under 40.

My first book came out when I was 40. I had some early successes, but I did a lot of flailing year after year after year. And I think my main advice for young people is just do not take those years So personally, do not take them so seriously. You have a lot of time. To figure things out, and you have many times to start over and you have a million mistakes to make from now until the time you're dead,

Chris Duffy: Whether you are 22 or 92. I feel certain that there is gonna be something in this conversation with Heather today that provokes you, hopefully provokes you to think deeply about who you are and who you want to be. So let's get into it.

Heather Havrilesky: Hi, I'm Heather Havrilesky. I'm the author of four books most recently Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage.

I write the advice column, ask Polly, which is on Substack, and I also write a newsletter called Ask Molly, which is written by Polly's Evil twin.

Chris Duffy: I think of you sometimes in, in some ways as like the, the poet laureate of being yourself, like you're allowed to be who you are, and you don't have to feel ashamed of that.

I feel like that comes up a lot in your writing and you write about it so beautifully, both about your own personal experience, but in responding to people who are, you know, genuinely struggling and really like suffering from trying to be someone who they're not.

Heather Havrilesky: It's interesting. I think I've just had a lot of different experiences with being my complete self and being half of myself and being a third of myself.

I started out in the world as someone who was a little bit. Less in tune with other people's needs? A little bit. I mean, I used to say I had a kind of a sociopathic streak to my behavior when I was really young. You know, it's a defense mechanism that you sometimes have if you are determined to have a kind of bluster and swagger when you're young.

I wrote a cartoon when I was 25 for one of the first websites online, and my whole thing was. Being kind of an asshole. My cartoon was about my coworkers. They loved it. They were all assholes. I rode that horse until it died and then I had to reassess and I had a bad kind of late twenties, early thirties kind of come to Jesus.

Oh my God. I make everyone mad. No one likes me moment. I recognize that I was very insecure, a little narcissistic. I had a lot of different problems. I was definitely a drinker. I wasn't necessarily completely over the top with any of these things. I just didn't know what was going on. And. I didn't know who I was, and so I spent years rebuilding.

Then I had kids, which insights its own kind of crisis of identity. I struggled a lot with mom, friends, kid playgroups, the social scenes formed from. That my kids chose, that I didn't choose. I mean, that was hellish for me. I lived in the suburbs and now I just four years ago, moved to North Carolina from la, lived in LA for 23 years.

So I'm undergoing this whole new transformation, adjustment to southern culture adjustment to much more polite, much less extroverted culture. I have been through the ringer. I've tried everything. I've failed at everything and I am not really that naturally good at that many things. So that's at the heart of the whole column.

It's just about the joys and terrors of being humbled over and over again.

Chris Duffy: Yeah. I think so much of, of what you're talking about too is at the core for me of like a good sense of humor and I think like, you are so funny and you have such a, a. A great sense of humor that I, I think sometimes when you've broken out into like the broader world, people don't.

Fully, like appreciate that you have a sense of humor and it leads to people like misinterpreting your work in a way. You can't really make a good joke about yourself unless it's true, right? No one laughs when you're like, I am so put together and I have my life on track. That's just not funny. But I think being like able to look at yourself with clear eyes and then make a joke about it, that's to me at the core of like a really good sense of humor.

Heather Havrilesky: Well, I mean, I wouldn't wanna write an advice column where I didn't mock myself, make fun of myself, joke about things. It would be. Excruciating for me. I mean, in some ways my, my sense of humor helps me in everything I do. I don't think that I would still be interested in writing, ask Polly if I couldn't swear and insult myself and go on tangents and do a lot of messed up stuff.

You know, in terms of my personal writing, I don't know if it's, part of it is that Polly is sort of serious. A lot of the time and earnest a lot of the time, and so people confuse that with my tongue in cheek writing. They just, or they assume that I'm in earnest saying, for example, everyone hates their husbands.

It must be so, you know? Mm-hmm. As opposed to just love and hate are things that exist hand in hand. Being an artist includes hating yourself and trying to create things is necessarily a battle of good and evil at some level. And day-to-day kind of trivial choices you make can feel heavily moralistic and moral and you know, feel like giant moral failures.

I take a lot of artistic license. I veer around a lot. I've work hard to. Sort of drill down into the core weirdness of my being in order to do any of the stuff that I do. And when I stop doing that, when I feel like I'm just, what do people want? I gotta give them the product that they signed up for.

Mm-hmm. And you know, that's when I really lose the magic. And so I think because I have to do that myself. In order to produce work, it's easy to give people a lot of advice about when you're speaking from your core self. You know you are naturally being your best self and also your best self is the same as your worst self.

They are the same person.

Chris Duffy: It's been interesting to see some of the like public reaction, especially to your book, which I loved Foreverland I thought was so funny and so great. And you wrote about marriage and relationships in a way that was so truthful and I had never read before. But it's interesting to see that I think people were, they didn't always want to acknowledge that you could be joking or funny.

And there was this very moralistic tone around some of the parts of the book, like what you said of like writing about like sometimes you're gonna hate your husband, which to me is like. I can't think of a more innocuous and true statement than if you're in a long relationship with someone. There will be times where you're like, oh my God, this person.

Chris Duffy: And yet I think because it was coming from you, that was like almost like shocking people, like clutch their pearls about that kind of an idea.

Heather Havrilesky: Definitely. People who had read my stuff for many years were sort of like, no, no, you don't understand. She writes, this is how she writes. Yeah. I, I, I never really figured out.

What it was, what kind of preconceptions people were bringing to the table. I mean, for sure, women talking about marriage don't have a ton of leeway. Women have less leeway and talking about almost anything. After the book came out, I beat that drum a lot and I'm an outspoken feminist, always have been, always will be.

So that's pretty natural. Honestly. Part of what I love about what I do is. Challenging these kinds of like ways that people wanna pigeonhole you and sort of pushing the new, apparently new notion that each individual can be a lot of different contradictory things and. It's much healthier to embrace a lot of the contradictions in who you are, and it's more fun to bring your whole self to everything you do.

I mean, I started Ask Molly my other newsletter written by Polly's Evil Twin, partially because there's so much room for experimentation with creative projects and with your identity. I mean, is a, it sounds like hopelessly 2025 to say that I'm confused by the fact that people, that they feel like a brand, they have to be a brand and the brand has to give one thing.

I do understand the temptation. It, it's hard not to worry about confusing people. Because when you confuse people like you do end up not selling that many books, right? Like I, you know, I'm very proud of my, my book Foreverland, but it didn't sell that well. People, I think were like a marriage. Is it a, are you talking about happiness?

Are you talking about hating your husband? Why aren't you divorced? Why isn't this a divorce memoir? I mean. But I still feel like it's one of the most powerful messages I have to share is that, hmm, we cannot be tempted to turn ourselves into brands because we're hollowing ourselves out. The more you bring your full self to anything you do, the happier that thing will make you, and the more satisfying and the more brilliant the thing will be.

You know,

Chris Duffy: I think it feels really in line with the arguments and the. The points that, you know, I think you make so, so persuasively across, across a lot of your work about being all of the complicated mess of yourself and not feeling ashamed of that. But people sometimes feel like, especially because there's this, like what are we putting out publicly and how will I build my career and my friends and people want this thing for me.

I have to have a thing. And yet you don't want friends who are that, that flat, but we think that we should be that flat.

Heather Havrilesky: That's absolutely true, and I think that people are confused. I mean, people in general who do things that are public facing are, you know, you know, reasonably bewildered by how to manage to manage that.

Universe to manage the contradictions between private and public. It's just everyone's kind of learning on their feet, right? Like we're, we're all sort of watching everyone do a lot of different levels of marketing, of themselves and even, you know, people who don't have anything to sell are almost marketing themselves.

And I think that it's, it's very natural to see someone doing it. In a way that you would not like to do yourself. It's not that smart to do things that you don't feel great doing. You know, I just remember when Foreverland came out. I got on a podcast and it turned out to be video, and it's like, hold on a second.

You know, I'm running to the bathroom. I've got like gray roots in my hair. I mean, all of your fears and insecurities, right, are triggered by this particular moment in. Self-marketing and self-branding, it's very difficult to be a peaceful, self-branded human being.

Chris Duffy: This is certainly what I struggle the most with personally right now in like my own work, is that I really love like.

I love having conversations for the podcast. I love writing essays and I love performing live comedy. Like I love those things, but they all require me to do this other thing that I don't like am not very good at like, like objectively I'm pretty bad at. And that makes me kind of go crazy, which is the like post short clips or get people to come to a show, but also like entertain them in between that stuff.

And it's like. That's the thing that makes me be like, maybe I should just do a completely different career. But then the thing is, I love the other parts that I do.

Heather Havrilesky: I think it's good to resist a lot of the dumb imperatives that are foisted on you. If you gave in, if you surrendered to it. The angle is just find the thing that you can tolerate, like find something that you want to create.

It's only loosely related to what you're promoting. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like if it's pancakes, you know, something small and weird is good. I mean, you know, we talked about being misunderstood, but I think that. It's important also to, to understand as a person, whether we're talking about branding or just socializing, people understand you better than you think they do.

The people who love you, love you more than you think they do. The people who you think hate you care a lot less than you think they do. They're just not invested. And what's important is when you choose something that you find exciting. You serve everybody, you turn off the people who don't give a shit anyway.

Heather Havrilesky: You know, you turn on the people who care and want the purest, highest level of hit of your thing that they can possibly get. You know, Molly has been very nurturing to my soul and almost keeps Polly afloat just by allowing for a place for me to be ridiculous at Sometimes though I feel like. I need to remember that Polly is also Molly and Polly always was Molly, like from the very beginning.

And that's how Polly got popular in the first place. Mm-hmm. And Polly doesn't need to always be service oriented. Polly can also just be fun.

Chris Duffy: I think this is also a hundred percent in line with. What we're talking about in the sense that like you could reduce the work that you do with Ask Polly and ask Molly into like their advice columns, but honestly, like for me as a fan of them, as someone who reads them and really enjoys them and gets a lot of meaning out of them.

To me, like the least thing that they are is advice columns. They're so not just about, like someone writes in with a problem and you give them a solution. They're like these big essays on life and meaning and culture and your own experience. Like they're not, like, I was wondering how do I invite people to my wedding and then someone, and then you write back like, well, you should try like a heavy card stock and put it in an envelope with a nice personal signature, like that's an advice column. You know, yours are much bigger than that. And yet I understand how it's really hard to say like, this is like a humorous, but also quite earnest at times, like meaningful column that uses as a launching place, like someone's real problem.

You can't communicate that. And yet that's what people like about work is the complicated nuances of it.

Heather Havrilesky: Yeah, I mean, in the beginning I called it an existential advice column. Uh mm-hmm. I love that.

I probably need to call it that in general whenever asked and everywhere, but there are times when I fall down the rabbit hole of writing about what's wrong with culture right now and then, or what's wrong with the way people do things or, you know, what's wrong with the way people text, or how passive people are, how avoidant they can be, how, you know, anxious that they can be over so many things, myself included, I'm very.

Anxious about a lot of dumb things, but sometimes I forget that like I am partially giving people a kind of optimism mixed with cynicism about having to go out and endure other human beings and to endure just. The stupidity of the culture, you know, which is so oppressive. I mean, I would say that like the, the core Ask Polly reader is always surprisingly smart and, and alienated from mainstream culture in a way that I don't, I don't think of it that way.

I think it's appeal is a little wider than. That kind of like alternative grumpy person in a cave, but you know, the grumpy person in the cave exists. In a lot of us. There's not a lot of culture that caters to that grumpy person in the cave. You know what I mean? Hmm. You, when you're grumpy in your cave and you go to your phone and you say like, I need something to just, oh, fucking get me through this.

The combination of just apocalyptic dread. And optimistic nightmare realm. You know, I need something that's not those two things. That's not hysteria, that's not realistic. Fear over the future. There are days when you just want like the internet to sound more like a smart friend who's like, yeah, don't worry.

Of course you're going crazy. It's normal. I've been trying to think of what my next book should be and I just keep coming back to like, the World's On Fire. Why shouldn't you be? Um, because, you know, occasionally I'm like, just write a book about something at, it's the maximum shallow that you could possibly write.

You know, like stop trying to write literature and just write. The stupidest, most insane thing. That just sounds fun. You know, Uh-huh, I mean, I do think we're in a moment of like, where do we find the fun under these conditions?

Chris Duffy: We're gonna find more fun with Heather right after these podcast ads.

And we are back. So Heather, when you're writing and you're drawing on personal experience, you're at least giving the impression of someone who figures things out by writing. So how do you find the difference between like a first draft that is for you versus a draft that's gonna work for other people and you don't wanna revise it too much and lose the searching and the quality of, of messiness that other people can relate to?

How do you find that balance in your writing?

Heather Havrilesky: I'm gonna make it sound too easy, but it's also really hard sometimes. The best things I write, honestly, I start at the beginning and I just follow my whims and they go to the end and I'm like, yes, I did. You know, I'm just on I'm just in the zone, and I just have it.

The best Ask. Poly columns were all written in that way. The best ask are like that. Although Ask Molly is slightly more, go back, fix the joke. You know, I mean, when you're writing jokes, ask Polly. Is not like, it's not precision work. Right? But Ask Molly is sort of, everything's gotta be funny for Ask Molly, I'm sure you struggle with this.

Oh yeah, of course. When you're trying to be funny, right?

Mm-hmm.

Heather Havrilesky: It's kind of crazy because. Funny people are also very moody. Definitely. It's like, what are we doing to ourselves? Right. How many times do you sit down and you're like, I'm gonna be funny today and you can do it.

Chris Duffy: Oh, well, I was gonna say very often the first part, very rarely the second part where I'm like, I'm gonna be funny, but then successfully doing it almost, almost never, oh, it, it never works.

Then I'm like, I end up writing the saddest or like most serious thing or the most boring thing I've ever thought of. Like, it's just very hard to get into that.

Heather Havrilesky: Like sometimes if I'm trying to be funny or I'm trying to write something that's worthwhile and I just veer in the total opposite direction and just go negative.

It can be funny too. Yeah. Like you let the some beast out and then you can, you have to follow what you have inside. You have to follow your soul. You know, you can't just force yourself. To be one thing or another. But I was gonna say that when you put funny stuff down, it seems the start of something funny.

You pick it up again, make it a little funnier. I mean, that's how I used to write my cartoons. Put it down, pick it up, write another joke, put it down. But I would say though, that if you want, like how do you know something's done? How do you get to the place where you're not over? You know, second guessing yourself.

I feel like sometimes you just write bad drafts of things. And then forget them. And then one day you get up and you know you're in the right mood and you're like, maybe I'll write about that thing that I tried to write about before and then you've got it. The second chapter of Foreverland is about going to Europe with my soon to be husband and just hating him the.

Hating him the whole time and just we're about to get engaged and I've like, I've never been less into this person and now I'm about to get engaged, which was just a weird moment in time. It was just like I had high expectations of Europe. I had high expectations of getting engaged. I had high, you know, I just wanted everything to be magic.

And of course everything was shit because I wanted too much. But I tried to write that experience so many times. I think I wrote, actually wrote bad versions of it maybe five times. And then. One morning I was like, I wanna try to write that. That's just a funny story. I'm gonna write it. I think I sent it to Corey Ood at the New York Times and I said, this is a crazy piece.

I don't know if you'll like it. He was my editor at the All and hired me to write Ask Polly in the first place. He's so great.

Hmm.

Heather Havrilesky: And he was like, oh, I don't wanna change that many things. I want it to be just like this. And I was like, yes. You know? That's the magic that you love. But it took a lot of work to get to.

You do have to do the drudgery, the just tedious, terrible work. I mean, every now and then you're just like, ah, I, I'm just on fire today. I can write about anything and it'll be great. And half the time you're like, oops, that wasn't actually that great, but I hit publish before I knew that. Yeah. And other times you're like, wow, I just had the magic.

But generally speaking, especially stories that are yours, like from your past, it takes a lot of like processing that out, but fast processing, that's what I wanna recommend. Fast.

Chris Duffy: Yeah.

Heather Havrilesky: You know what I mean? Like get it down, move on, come back.

Chris Duffy: I, I mean, think especially like with a true story from your own life, almost always the best way is the way that you would tell it if you were telling it to someone who was in person.

Exactly. And that does require, like you have to have the story, but you also have to not like overwork it and get it overly complicated.

Heather Havrilesky: That's exactly right. And if you're that kind of person who enjoys entertaining people. Live and in person, right? If your favorite thing that you, most human beings never let you do damn them, is talk forever about your your thing.

You know? It's like, like how do you tell a story conversationally? Like let some story, tell a, tell a damn story. I love it when people go long, but anyway, if you're that kind of person, it is like talking and it's sort of like essentially writing becomes building your relationship with the page so that you're, the page is a good friend that you tell everything to.

Yeah.

Chris Duffy: Yeah.

Heather Havrilesky: And you. You try to enter that state as much as you possibly can.

Chris Duffy: I think like the funniest moments come from not trying to make a a joke, but it just like it exists because you're being honest or you're just having a natural reaction and that ends up being the funniest moment in a Ask Polly column somewhat recently, there was a moment where like.

You were writing and then you paused and you said like, I'm right now I'm sitting next to Bill in bed and I paused because I liked what I was writing so much that I wanted to like push this over into another day. I just like thought that was so funny and so perfect, but it's because it was like a very.

Truly honest, like this is this thing where I wanted to sit with your letter for a little bit longer, and here's where I am right now. We have a spotlight, and I think whatever that moment is in people's writing where you get to see them, that's always the most for me. That's what I live for when I'm reading people's work.

Heather Havrilesky: Yeah, that's true for me too. It's, I, I need to remember that because I forget. That, that's part of my job. Sometimes the more off the cuff you can be, I don't know, it's, there are a lot of warring impulses with writing, right? Like you just, there, you can have these heavy things that you're carrying around.

Like, I'm a great writer, I'm really great, so I gotta be, I. More literary, more whatever that is, and then you read, you know, OV or whoever and you're like, Jesus, these people were just casual actually. I mean, sure they had a beautiful way with words. They also put in, you know, Moby Dick. The sperm whale. You know, I'm obsessed with whales, so I'm just gonna tell you about whales for a while.

Very much like an whales,

Chris Duffy: very much the energy of like a third grader telling you a lot of whale facts in some chapters for sure.

Heather Havrilesky: You're just like, what? Why would I whale? Okay. You know a

Chris Duffy: lot about the whales. You're, you definitely know a lot about whales.

Heather Havrilesky: There's a way that that, that those parts of Moby Dick though are so great because certain writers like.

Making you pay a little bit because some of the prose in that book is so insanely good and so relatable. It's just like these soulful, relatable moments. It's almost like you pay the price. On your knees, you know, you're about sperm whales. Polly is like that too. You know, I just like go on too long. I mean, I think that the main thing for me is just, is there momentum?

Does it feel like it's getting bogged down like a book, like a heavy book, or does it feel like there's something important to say here?

Chris Duffy: We are gonna take a quick break for some podcast ads, and I really hope one of them is whale related. I mean, that would be incredible. Hopefully they were able to find a whale company that wanted to advertise.

Either way, though, we will be right back after this.

And we are back. We're talking with Heather

Chris Duffy: How about how to be true to yourself and how to navigate relationships the world, and finding your voice. When you're starting out as a writer, I think it's very natural to want to, or maybe even unconsciously, emulate writers who you like. You start by kind of being like, I'm gonna try and sound like that other person.

And your writing does sound like a bad version of them. Mm-hmm. How do you get past that? Right? Like, how do you find the. Amalgamation of all these other people and yourself, that is your actual writing voice or your tone so you can get to this place where it is. Just talking to the good friend who is the page, what advice do you have for people who are starting out as writers?

Heather Havrilesky: I think it was just, if you read enough of someone you love, you end up through osmosis, kind of imitating them whether you want to or not. And my thing I think was just, I love Joan Didion so much. I mean like so many cliche white women of the universe. Um, I lo also really loved John Updyke, and I think what happened was I would just, I had been writing in journals so much that I could freely write in a conversational tone pretty early on in my career.

The key with me was if I managed to write about something that I was emotionally invested in, either angry or, you know, I mean, in the old days it was. TV shows I loved a lot. I could write really well about when I was a TV critic for Salon. I could write passionately, passionately about them, and something would kick in about a third of the way through the piece where I'd start sounding a little didian like I don't think it sounded imitative actually, because I wasn't aiming for it.

It was just part of my subconscious that. That conjured it. I personally feel like that's the ideal. It's like you read enough books that you love and writing that you love, and I think when you read someone who's funny enough, you just

mm-hmm.

Heather Havrilesky: You just end up kind of like, it's not that you're imitating their style, it loosens you up because the funniest writers are always very loose.

They're just like, you know, they go on weird tangents and you're like, yes, yes. Go on a tangent. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. You, you trust them. You trust their tangents. I mean, that's like a good writer you trust. You trust them to run with the ball, you know? And then when you trust yourself, when you see that, it teaches you to trust yourself to run with the ball when you're feeling it.

So I feel like feeling it is like 90% of the battle. I mean, that makes it sound a little bit magical thinking like, but I don't think it's, that's it. It's like you put in the practice. Until you can feel it.

Chris Duffy: Yeah. I mean for me it started like when I started in comedy, it was like very clear to me that I was like, if you are looking for a less funny John Mulaney.

Here I am. Oh, like I can, I can copy him but not be as good at the thing. And then, and a few times my, my wife and I would like go to his shows. You know, I'd be like performing for like five people in a basement where I was begging people to come. And then we'd go and see like him tape a special at Radio City Music Hall.

And he would have like just objectively. Same topic, but so much funnier and better. And she'd be like, well, I guess you gotta stop talking about that joke. And I'd be like, no, why did you have to do it? Why are you so good? But it was also, like you said, it was this real like path of like, oh, I see what the craft is and like how you can do it in these ways.

And I think it, it, it does help to be like, okay, I think that I wanna be like that, but actually I'm gonna be, myself and myself might be different. And it, it may not be. You know, it may not be a radio city music hall level of comedy, but it may be something that's more me that I won't then be like a weird carbon copy and I don't feel like I'm a carbon copy of him anymore.

But I also still don't feel like I'm as funny. Both of those are okay.

Heather Havrilesky: I had a little thing with Cheryl Strayed for a while where I was like, I mean, you know, I was sorta writing advice before she started writing advice, but like she did it in a way that was amazing and I was like, she's great. Yeah, I love her.

But then, you know, I started writing advice too and I was like, I don't know, maybe I hate her just because it's, you know, you're competitive and you're like, I don't do it that way. I do it this way. You're just, like you said, you're always gonna bring your own weird. Shit to the table, you're always gonna innovate and the more you follow your own whims, I'm kind of just repeating what you said.

Chris Duffy: If there's one thing I love, it's someone saying back what I said. I love that. That's, that's truly why I do what I do.

Podcasting. It's a lot like therapy. Exactly.

Chris Duffy: Well actually let's, let's talk about like the podcasting and the advice com. 'cause one thing I I think is interesting, especially about like a show called How to Be a Better Human exists in this space that is like.

I don't think of this as a self-help show, but it is in like a self-help adjacent place. At the very least, there's this idea that's kind of implicit in a lot of self-help that's like, you need to change, you need to like make yourself better. You need to like do all this work to improve who you are. But I think that you have have pushed back a lot on that idea of like, you need to be someone different and better than who you are.

That in fact, probably what you need to do is to be exactly who you are and to understand that and accept that more.

Heather Havrilesky: I always sort of flinched at the concept of living your best life, even though Oprah's awesome, I love Oprah, and obviously anything you come up with, other people are just gonna kick it over and say, you know what?

I hate self-care. Self-care is bullshit. You know, every day you should whatever. But. Everything is a balance. Okay. Today I literally wrote an Ask Polly column, where I said, we all want total control and total perfection, and we all wanna live forever at some level. Uh, and we're all a little self-obsessed that way, and we're willing to be hated at some level just to kind of honor that neurotic perfectionist inside us.

But then the other side of that is. Just as you have to honor that inner perfectionistic, neurotic, you also have to honor the grumpy bridge troll that lives inside you, and also invite the chaos of other human beings into your life. You know, failing to connect with other human beings as well as you might if you just seeded some control or to surrender to the moment.

Learn to surrender to the awfulness of other people a little bit more often. So. I feel like I have so many self-improvement impulses just poised and ready to go inside me that are just really awful. There was a time in my life where I was a little bit chubbier and I would look at myself in the mirror and I was like, I don't feel like myself.

I don't feel like this is me. And it's like. That's not a good place to be. If chubby were myself, it would be great. I'd be able to eat more snacks. I would like it. It's just you have to be true to whatever crazy, crazy, crazy mix of beasts exist inside you. So. A lot of the problem with self-improvement culture is that there's an inherent shame to believing that you should always be making progress in life.

There's also just an inherent anxiety about it. It's depressing to think that you're supposed to always get better because people just don't do that. People don't understand that if you're not. Good to yourself, especially like if you don't learn to be good to yourself when you're younger, you grow up and have this like terrible punishing, neurotic idea that you're supposed to keep improving and that.

Marriages don't get better and worse and better and worse, and that relationships with people don't require all kinds of special care and attention and a lot of frustration and a lot of like, blah. One of my main purposes in life is to just tell people, once you cut out the shame of not being. This idea, this fantasy idea of what you're supposed to be, you're gonna be 80 times happier, you know?

Mm. You just, and it's hard because you don't wanna stifle people's ambition or their dreams. I mean, dreams are a huge part of feeling happy. Dreams in and of themselves can make you bring you satisfaction even when you don't achieve them. Because it's just good to have dreams. They're part of your sort of like imagination and part of your ability to feel the possibilities in any given day, right?

So that balance between putting too much pressure on yourself, triggering your shame with your ambition, it's a hard path to walk. Creative people have very naturally ambitious, creative people have a lot. Of struggles for a very good reason because you can't be Zen and be ambitious at the same time. You actually have to be both things.

You have to be dark, light, optimistic, skeptical. You have to be all of it, you know? And you have to accept all of it and play with all of it to create. So I'm pretty anti self-improvement. On the one hand, I'm obsessed with it and I love it. But I think that the language of self-improvement is just lazy and sloppy, and it presupposes a kind of like capitalism of the soul where you're optimizing your product for the masses.

I mean, there's nothing worse for you than that creatively,

Chris Duffy: Heather Havrilesky. Thank you so much for being on the show. Really. This was great. Thank

Heather Havrilesky: you. I had a really good time. It was, uh, fun and I hope I can come back.

Chris Duffy: That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Heather Havrilesky.

Her latest book is called Foreverland. And she's the author of the Ask Polly and Ask Molly newsletters. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects@chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team of geniuses, constantly doing battle with their evil twins.

On the TED side, we've got the radically honest Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bojanini, Lanie Lott, and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles who know that the only true Foreverland is the truth. On the PRX side, they give audio advice that cannot be denied: Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, thanks again to you for listening. Without you, we are not a podcast. We're just me talking alone in my basement. Please share this episode with a person in your life who you think would love it, who you think would enjoy it. We would so appreciate you helping us to spread the word about our show.

We will be back next week with even more How to be a Better Human. Until then, thanks again for listening and take care.