52. Civilized to Death and Living on the Fringes with Chris Ryan, host of Tangentially Speaking

How do you construct a life worth living when your human animal needs are fundamentally at odds with the dominant culture’s agenda?

It’s this sort of questioning that has shaped the sordid path of Dr. Christopher Ryan, host of the Tangentially Speaking podcast and co-author of 2011’s Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships.

More recently, Chris has shifted his focus away from sexuality and towards civilization itself: What if all those hallmarks of modernity that we think we can’t live without are actually stifling our true potential and stunting our growth — not to mention, trashing the planet in the process?

In his forthcoming book Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity (set for release in late 2019), the author “explores the ways in which ‘progress’ has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.”

For episode 52 of the Good Life Revival Podcast, I had the rare pleasure of sitting down with Chris in his humble abode outside Los Angeles to gauge his feelings about the myriad existential crises our global culture faces, how we should react to it all, and whether we ought to be restructuring our lifestyles in light of what we know about the house of cards we call civilization.

I feel really honored to have had the opportunity to pick Chris’s brain like this, and I look forward to seeing his perspective fleshed out further when the book is released next year.