143. The Concussion Episode Part 2: Anxiety is a Dizzyness of Freedom

Explicit content warning

01/11/23 • 60 min

This episode is a continuation of our last episode with Razi Shaban where he talks about having a major concussion before the pandemic started and how that experience changed his outlook on life. As an ex-Google employee, he had a lot of fun creating and building new things, but after the concussion started prioritizing joy over stress more, and left his job at Google last January. We talked about the difficult project of finding work that truly speaks to you, as he liked his work in many ways but started finding it difficult to find meaningful computer work to do that wasn't contributing to a potential fascist project. But at the same time, it is a blessing to have stability, and having a job you can clock in and clock out of, with a degree of non-attachment, can be tremendously freeing.

We also talk about the differences he has found between eastern and western medicine. Living in San Francisco and working at Google afforded him the ability to go to the top neurologists in the country but they were never able to offer him much, which made him realize that the western model doesn't understand the brain nearly as well as the eastern model does. When it comes to traumatic brain injury, there usually isn't a convenient pill you can take to solve the problem, but when he went to an eastern medicine practitioner, they told him to move the chi in his head down to the root, to focus on the breathe, to "sleep without sleeping." And there were immediate, effective, and repeatable results.

Links:
Razi's Website: https://www.therazy.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Links:
Razi's Website: https://www.therazy.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Previous Episode

142. The Concussion Episode Part 1: "OK: I am alive. And I am in a body. And everything hurts."

Traumatic brain injury can change your entire relationship with the outside world. That's what happened to Razi, who has sustained multiple concussions throughout his life starting in college, but suffered his worst concussion in 2019, right before the pandemic. When that happened, he was completely knocked out of his normal routine: for months, all he could do was sit in the bathtub with no light, maybe a candle. He likens this experience to going back to the womb.
But it also highlighted to him how much the modern world we have built is constantly at war with our bodies and our biology: for example, artificial light is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, and our almost constant exposure to it is so vastly different from the "natural" light environment we evolved to be in, where the sun shines so many different kinds of light on us throughout the day that our biological clocks have grown to be naturally attuned to. And artificial light has forced us to ignore these biological signals we evolved to have to be able to be productive and entertained long into the night.
Another example is being able to travel around in cars and trains: modern transportation is very loud, can go very fast, and for most animals would be a relatively scary and traumatizing experience that we have completely grown accustomed to. It makes you think about how many other things in our daily lives condition us to ignore signals from our own bodies.

We will continue this conversation next week in Part 2 of the concussion episode.
Links:
Razi's Website: https://www.therazy.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Next Episode

144. The Girl Moss Episode: The Girl Boss is Dead

We have probably all seen the late stage capitalism memes by now: "Stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is" is a famous one, though there are many more. In this episode we talk about the societal shift towards glamorizing doing nothing. We talk with Winx Vestrit, a friend who works with Isabel on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance, about a tweet that really resonated with them which goes: "The girl boss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature)".
So much of the rhetoric around burnout and rest in the mainstream culture has been about resting for the purpose of getting back to being productive, but there is also a more anticapitalist movement towards resting for resting's sake, because you as a human deserve rest, or for the purpose of healing from a society that never taught us how to have work-life balance. We talk about how our current mindset will potentially harm us in the future if the economy does begin to shift towards mass unemployment with the automation revolution and what we would all choose to do if we were truly given the choice to do whatever we want.
The reset afforded to many remote workers by the pandemic allowed so many people to look inward and think about topics like gender and the nature of society in ways that our parents' generations and many generations before them likely did not have the bandwidth or energy to imagine on the scale that we are now as a generation, simply because they were too exhausted at the end of the day from working.
Obviously the Girl Moss tweet is a repudiation of modern-day hustle culture, but we also talk about what would happen if we were suddenly thrust back into a state of needing to grapple with nature, such as in the scenarios posed by the world of Station Eleven, a popular fiction book that talks about what would happen if there was a pandemic that wiped out 99% of the global population, or by Tim Urban on a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast where they talk about a hypothetical in which a witch came and took away all of our modern-day technology and we had to re-create society with only the knowledge in our heads now. We decided it probably wouldn't hurt to start learning some survival skills.
Links:
Girl Moss Tweet (the original tweet seems to be deleted so this is a link to a screenshot from another person's Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/p/Cehw4pmNNGe/
Instagram Isabel References with the Frog with Stilettos and a Mushroom Hat: https://www.instagram.com/maybell.eequay/?hl=en
KnowYourMeme Article explaining the "Stop Galmorizing the Grind and Start Galmorizing Whatever This Is" Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-glamorizing-the-grind-and-start-glamorizing-whatever-this-is
Lex Fridman podcast episode with Tim Urban where they talk about the hypothetical in which a witch takes away all our technology: https://lexfridman.com/tim-urban/
We don't talk about this book explicitly, but much of what we talk about in this episode is also discussed in Tricia Hersey's book, "Rest is Resistance": https://thenapministry.com/
National Home Funeral Alliance: https://www.homefuneralalliance.org/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.