Hugh Mackay

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Hugh MacKay: researcher and author

Full transcript

“Because we're humans, because we exist together in this sort of shimmering, vibrating web of interconnectedness, everyone on this web, this social web, not just the Internet, but everyone we contact is a member of our species. And the only way we can maintain social harmony and thriving neighbourhoods, communities, workplaces, friendship, circles, groups of all kinds is by showing kindness and respect towards each other.”
– Hugh Mackay

Madeleine: What prevents us from showing kindness and respect towards each other? Perhaps it’s the same thing that can prevent us from really living and being all that we all. What if we don’t have what it takes? What if it’s too hard, too great, too impossible? What if we attempt to rise to the challenge and fall short? What if we discover that when we finally do try, it isn’t enough?

So instead, we hide. And in hiding, we become something we are not, creating tension and even despair  in our work, our relationships, our lives. As the psychoanalyst Winnicott said, “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” 

Where are we hiding?

In his latest book The Inner Life: The joy of discovering who we really are, social researcher Hugh Mackay explores our top twenty hiding places, including busyness, perfectionism, guilt, ambition, work and even the pursuit of happiness.

Hugh points out that it’s not just individuals who are hiding – entire nations do, ignoring devastating injustices and crises related to climate, racism, health and human rights. 

So how do we step out from our hiding places - because if this time, 2020, is showing us anything, it’s that we really need to show up.  

To come out of hiding requires acknowledging our outer self, confronting our dark side and nurturing our virtues.

We might think this means we should set more goals to be a good person, be more productive, compile to do lists and plan our lives – but Hugh has another suggestion: look inside.

It was incredible to listen to Hugh’s thoughts on coming out of hiding. Across his 60-year career in social research, he was also a weekly newspaper columnist for over 25 years and is the bestselling author of over 20 books, including The Good Life, The Art of Belonging and his latest novel, The Question of Love.

In this conversation, we also talk about how creativity can narrow the gap between who we pretend to be or hide, and who we really are. After all, as Hugh puts it, the creative process has the power to unlock aspects of the self that might otherwise remain hidden. 

We talk about compassionate love as a daily discipline, writing, walking as a crucial part of the work day, being a night owl, and delve into our common hiding places such as work busyness, projection, ambition, and perfection – and how we can find our common humanity inside ourselves. 

Just as we stumble in all aspects of our lives, we will stumble with this discipline of being kind and respecting each other. We will have good days and not so good days, so on that note, here is Hugh Mackay, on how he is today…  

Hugh: Well, that's very kind of you to ask that, Madeleine, really pretty well. 

I mean, I'm in total social isolation, partly because of my age and partly because my wife has an autoimmune illness, which means at the moment she's, because of medication she's on, she's very susceptible to any infection. So she can't go anywhere, which means I can't either. But that's alright. I mean, we feel physically isolated but not socially isolated. But of course, I do miss seeing my youngest grandchildren also live in Canberra, so I can't see them. The choir that I normally sing with is suspended for the time being. So I miss that enormously, and I miss coffee with friends. But these are minor things compared with people who, for example, lost a job. I mean, I've been working from home for the last 20 years and I don't have a mortgage. So in many respects, I'm having a dream run. It's a wonderful opportunity to think and read and write and walk. So I'm not complaining about it, even though there are those things I miss.

Madeleine: Mhm. Yeah, I can very much relate to that in knowing that I have had a dream run in many aspects. But there are still those things that we miss during this time and the things that are difficult for us as individuals. And what's been interesting is grappling with that and the potential for guilt to surface because of this dream run. I'm wondering if you have any insights on how to turn that into a positive experience, or rather a constructive one that can help us take action.

Hugh: It takes something like a pandemic or the Great Depression or wars or catastrophes and crises of those kind to remind us that actually all those individual differences are pretty superficial and that at a deeper level, the deeper truth about us is that we are indivisibly one species. We are interconnected with each other. We are interdependent, we're, because we belong to a social species, we are hopeless in isolation. We really do need each other. And I think the pandemic reminds us of how we need each other. And in many cases, I think people have had the idea refreshed for them that the actual the local neighbourhood is one of the places where we do need to connect with each other because it's in our street, that there could well be people who are suffering social isolation and potential loneliness, frail elderly people, single parents, people living with a mental illness or a disability of some kind. There are lots of categories of people who are often socially isolated. We're all just getting a little taste of it. But there are people in our community who are socially isolated or at risk of social isolation most of the time. And I think this, again, is a wake up call to us to remind us that in our local neighbourhood, there are probably people who experience loneliness a lot of the time. And we could be much more vigilant. We could be much more responsive to their need for a bit of, a bit of social contact, just stopping and saying g'day or dropping in a bag of lemons from a backyard tree or anything that reminds people that we know they're there, that we acknowledge them and we want to include them in the life of the community.

Madeleine: I love how you put it in the book about how compassionate love is a discipline and habitual loving as a daily discipline. And I think this is a beautiful example of nurturing that every day, even just in our local neighbourhoods and being alive to it.

Hugh: Yes, that's a lovely link to the whole idea of compassionate love, I think. I mean, love is one of those words that we that we spray around. You know, I love chocolate. I love my dog. I love autumn. I love my wife, as though this is all the same. And of course, there are a lot of different forms of love. 

But the kind of love that you mentioned, compassionate love, let's just call it compassion, is a very particular kind of love that we humans have the capacity to show. It's built into us because we belong to a social species, that we have this remarkable ability to show compassion towards each other and this kind of love, what's unique about compassion and what's so important and why I use the term discipline to talk about how we could exercise it, it's got nothing to do with emotion. It's got nothing to do with affection. Because we're humans, because we exist together in this sort of shimmering, vibrating web of interconnectedness, everyone on this web, this social web, not just the Internet, but everyone we contact, is a member of our species. And the only way we can maintain social harmony and thriving neighbourhoods, communities, workplaces, friendship circles, groups of all kinds is by showing kindness and respect towards each other, whether or not we happen to feel any affection. I think that's the important distinction, Madeleine, that compassion is something that we can show towards anyone. You don't have to like someone in order to show compassion towards them, you show compassion towards them because they like you, like me, are part of who we are and they're part of our neighbourhood, they're in our street, or they're on our bus or wherever they are. We don't have to agree with them. We certainly don't have to like them. But we do have to treat them kindly and respectfully simply because they're human—if we want our communities to survive and thrive, and if we want our species to survive as well.

Madeleine: It's a lovely way to put it. And I am particularly drawn to it being a discipline because it's not always easy and it's something to cultivate and continuously remind ourselves of. 

I'm also curious about your discipline in terms of your writing. It sort of strikes me that you've just so beautifully explained how there's so many different types of love and you've just put out a novel, The Question of Love simultaneously to The Inner Self. And so there must be a bit of discipline going on in your writing life as well.

Hugh: Yes. Yes. I mean, a lot of a lot of our life is about discipline, isn't it? I think it's a breakthrough moment when we realize that for example, the exercise of compassion is just something we can decide to do. We don't have to feel anything. It's just a decision we make once we have this moment of enlightenment when we realize what it means to be human.

So, yes, when it comes to my writing life, I am pretty disciplined about it. And I think that's in fact, I remember the previous book submitting the manuscript on the due date and the publisher saying to me, no one submits their manuscript on the due date. Well, I've spent my life as a researcher writing research reports to a very tight deadline, and for 25 years I was a weekly newspaper columnist. So those columns mostly appeared on Saturdays, which meant Thursday lunchtime it all had to be finished. So I've been deadline driven in a lot of my professional work. And when in the early 1990s, it's 25 years ago now, I started writing more ambitiously, actually writing books about all this I couldn't I couldn't kick the habit. If I had a deadline, well, I wrote to the deadline. 

So I tend to write — I mean I regard writing as a pleasure as well as work, I really do love writing, but I write in a pretty disciplined way. I mean I go to my office at nine o'clock in the morning when I when I've got a book on the go, I take a morning tea break. I have a lunch break, and then I'd ease back in the afternoon. I probably have a walk. In fact, a walk is a crucial part of the writing day for me because it's such a wonderful, rhythmic, reflective thing to do. I'd usually have a brief lie down, you know, like an actual rest in the late afternoon and then come back at the end of the afternoon to check through what I'd written that day and do a little bit of light editing. I used to work at night. I no longer work at night because I'm older and I get tired at night. So from being a night owl, I've switch to being a morning person in my later years.

Madeleine: Was that an easy switch to make or was there some resistance?

Hugh: Yeah, it's a good question. There was some resistance. When I was quite young and I was working and studying, I never had the luxury of being a full time university student. I was always an evening student going to lectures after work. So then I would come home and study and do other things. And even when I started writing research reports and running my own business, I would often do very productive work between about 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 AM and then have a pretty slow start to the day. And I did enjoy that — I mean it's a very, very peaceful time.  No one else is around. There are no emails coming in, there's no phone calls. The rest of the family are all asleep. And so it was a wonderful time for really productive, uninterrupted work. But anyway, that's all over. I can't work late, I do sometimes do a little bit of work in the early to mid evening, but I'm never working past ten o'clock. And I think now, without any question, my most productive time for writing is the morning.

Madeleine: It's interesting to me that you have this wonderful discipline in your writing, yet in the book you share that work isn't one of your hiding places. What would be your hiding place?

Hugh: Yes, I think I think in the past, probably at a difficult times of my life, for example, going through a divorce, I think work has been a bit of a hiding place. In fact, probably too much commitment to work might have been a contributing factor to a marriage breakdown, but I'm not sure, it's a bit of a vicious circle. But I certainly don't hide in work now. I'm perfectly happy to engage with the rest of my life as well as my working life.

But looking back, I think I've certainly been guilty of hiding in busyness. I don't think I've ever hidden in the popular hiding place of materialism, but I have no doubt throughout my life until I became very conscious of it, hidden in this in this thing we call projection, where we tend to criticize other people for faults or failings that are actually our own in our way. We deny the fact that we're a bit jealous, or we're a bit driven or whatever it might be by criticizing other people for having those qualities. I think that's been a hiding place for most of us and certainly for me. And there have been times later in life where I think I've hidden in nostalgia, looking back and thinking, you know, there were aspects of life that were better twenty years ago or something. When I think seriously about it, I realized that complete rubbish, that typically life is getting better. Although in some respects I think it's been getting worse, we have become a more individualistic and competitive society than we used to be, and I regret that social trend. So like most older people, I suppose I am sometimes guilty of hiding in nostalgia and wishing that some of the things that happened in the past were happening now. But I'm very conscious, especially since I wrote the book, The Inner Self, in which so much I've devoted so much time to the places where we hide from the demands of compassion, I have become very conscious of them and the need to avoid them in my life.

Madeleine: I have some of my favourites that I'd love to dove into with you in a moment. But I did want to ask, as you explain the book, it's our essence know in many ways that we're hiding from and I wondered if you could explain what our essence is, and the consequence of hiding from it?

Hugh: Yes, I think just to take a step back in order to talk about our inner self, we need to acknowledge that there's an outer self that we don't hide from. And the outer self, of course, is our sort of public identity, the way we appear to people. My identity is that I'm a son, brother, husband, a father, a friend, an author, a chorister, a neighbour. You know, I have this particular sense of humour and I have these views on religion or politics or whatever it might be. That's that's always sort of outer, that's my roles and my responsibilities in the world, which are the ways we tell the difference between us. You know, this is how I'm different from Madeleine. And our differences might be to do with gender or ethnicity or age, with our way of life and our beliefs, all those things. 

That forms our social identity, our kind of outer shell. But there does come a time for most of us, sometimes it's the classic mid-life crisis when this happens, sometimes it's much earlier than that. And sometimes it's triggered by a crisis or a catastrophe, or for some people, no doubt, it will be being triggered by the pandemic, where we think, well, actually, there's more to me than just all those ways that I appear to other people. There is a kind of there's an inner Madeleine. There's an inner Hugh, which has got not necessarily got anything to do with all those roles and responsibilities, all those masks we wear. And when we go deeply inside ourselves to discover our inner core, it sounds like a paradox. It sounds as though when you get really deep inside yourself you discover how you're really unique, how you're really different from everyone else, whereas in fact it's the opposite. It's the outer shell that tells us how we're different from everyone else. When we go into our deep, inner self, we discover our common humanity.  We discover that we belong to this social species that I was referring to earlier in the conversation.  

Even before we are Madeleine or Hugh, even before we are female or male, or old or young or rich or poor, or Australian or Kenyan or South American, or whatever, we are human. And because we share this common humanity, that's kind of the link between us and everybody else, and it's that common humanity that calls on us to be compassionate. The core quality that goes with our core identity as human, is the quality of compassion.

Madeleine: Yeah, it's a lot to get your head around, but at the same time, so simple.

Hugh: Yeah. You'd think the answer to the question, who am I would be, how am I different from everyone else? And that is half the answer. But we mustn't forget the other half of the answer, which is who am I? Answer: a human. And that tells us some very important things about our common commonality as opposed to our individuality.

Madeleine: I love how in the book you talk a lot about how it's a process of narrowing the gap between that inner and outer self.

Hugh: Yes, I think that is a very important way of thinking about the inner self. That if we are hiding from our inner self in our outer self, then there's likely to be a significant gap between who we think we are and how we project ourselves into the world, and this other part of the self, this inner core, our common humanity. And various psychologists, psychiatrists, thinkers, philosophers, mystics through the years have made the point that if our outer self is not an expression of our authentic inner self, then we are likely to experience feelings of anxiety, restlessness, tension. In fact, Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, said that when we are not being true to our inner self, these we're not his exact words but that was the essence of it, we will experience despair as if we are trying to be someone other than who we really are. The 20th century American psychotherapist Carl Rogers is a great hero of mine, made the same point, that until we really get in touch with our inner self, until we become who we really are, which is this essential humanity that we all have, then we will experience restlessness. We'll constantly wonder why we don't feel at peace with ourselves.

So there's a lot to be gained from this discovery and then from seeing how an understanding of our in a compassionate human nature might actually begin to modify some of the ways we live or even some of the ways we project ourselves in society or even in the family.

In the book, I've told a number of stories of people who've come to an understanding of their inner self and that has affected even a marriage in a positive way. You know, a wife saying of her husband who dropped some of his masks and disguises is now a much easier person to live with, now that I feel I know the authentic person.

Madeleine: It's lovely how you say that to be that compassionate person, you need courage and often to be creative we need courage as well. So there's this lovely kind of link there between creativity and compassion and courage.  

Hugh: Yes, there are things holding us back from being compassionate. We don't always want to be loving, sometimes we don't want to be kind, we want to be unkind. Sometimes we don't want to show respect to someone because we feel contemptuous of them. And they're all these ways in which we really do have to find the courage to stick to the discipline of compassion. 

But yes, you mentioned creativity. Just to come back to that. Participating in the creative and the performing arts is a wonderful way of getting in touch with who we really are. I mean, it's an odd thing but again, there's a lot of ancient wisdom supporting this idea. It's not original, that in order to find ourselves, we often have to lose ourselves. And one way we can lose ourselves is in the creative process, writing a poem, painting a picture, dancing, singing, even taking photographs, all of these things that that we can do to take us out of ourselves and put us in touch with a broader sense of our humanity. And not only the creative process. I mean, I quoted Gandhi in the book along the same lines saying, the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others, so that's another another pathway — creativity is a pathway, another pathway is just to commit ourselves to responding to the needs of other people. And that certainly helps us to find who we are, that takes us away from our sense of being an individual, unique person towards this deeper idea of shared humanity.

Madeleine: Hmm. Yeah, I find that idea really comforting because even in myself or conversations with other people, sometimes creativity can feel like this self-indulgent thing rather than something that can bring us closer to humanity. I'm wondering, does that link between being in service of other people, but at the same time doing the thing that nourishes you, even if it won't touch anybody else or no one else, will see what it is that you're creating?

Hugh: Yeah, this is a really important point you're making, Madeleine, which I strongly endorse. I mean, the creative process I don't think of is self-indulgent at all. For example, I sing in the choir now that you may say that's not terribly creative, but singing in a choir is a wonderful metaphor for being linked to humanity because I couldn't sing a solo to save myself. But when I blend my voice with the other voices in the choir, we produce spectacularly beautiful music. And that's a wonderful example of how that links me to a wider sense of humanity. I need those other people in order to bring out the best in me. Now, other forms of creative expression can have that effect. 

But even if they don't, this comes back to the question of whether it's self-indulgent, even if it's about personal reflection, replenishment and not only creativity, but meditation or reading or going for a walk. All of us need solo time or solitude time in order to replenish our resources for the undeniably demanding business of being a human. I mean, belonging to a social species is demanding. Exercising the discipline of compassion is demanding. We all need a break. And I think we have to build into every day some time that's just for us. It's not selfish; itself self-replenishing. It's topping up our resources for the business of being a fully fledged member of the human community.

Madeleine: Hmm. I love that frame. What does that look like for you, the self-replenishment or what examples have you come across?

Hugh: Well, for me, the daily walk is a crucial part of that. Reading, similarly, is a wonderful replenishment for me. Whatever I'm reading, particularly fiction. I think losing ourselves in a novel is a wonderful way of switching off from our responsibilities to be compassionate and just entering into... I mean, some people get that from watching a movie and some people, of course, more formally do it through meditation, particularly loving-kindness meditation, which is wonderful, which is people engaged in guided meditation not just about relaxing and breathing and going into themselves, but about focusing on other people that they need to develop feelings of compassion towards.   

But most people who who do engage in regular formal meditation do say that in the beginning it feels as though it's a bit self-indulgent, as though this is all about navel gazing. But once you get deeply into it, it opens up this sense of yourself as being part of the larger whole.

Madeleine: Yeah, I think I might put a ban on the word self-indulgent when it comes to these wonderful nourishing things.

Hugh: Yes nourishing is a much better word because then people say, why are you nourishing yourself? Well I'm nourishing myself to be a better human.

Madeleine: Exactly. And as you put so wonderfully in the book as well, it's not just individuals with hiding places, but whole nations can have hiding places. And if maybe as individuals, we're more attuned to our own we can kind of start to help a nation come out of them.

Hugh: I think that that's true. I mean, all nations do it, but Australia I mean, we have for a long time hidden from our shame about the treatment of our first peoples, for example. We're starting to come to terms with that. We are hiding, I think, as a nation from the terrible, terrible mental and emotional damage we're inflicting on people seeking asylum who are still being detained in our offshore detention centres. That's a way of hiding from something that we actually know to be true about what's being done in our name. But it's easier to hide and the government doesn't want to draw attention to it. In fact they want to distract us from it. We'll never mention asylum seekers by name. We'll never allow journalists to go in and film the conditions on detention centres. And so, that's a nation hiding.

In the book I mentioned another favourite hiding place for Australia, of course, is to think of ourselves as the lucky country, to congratulate ourselves on being the lucky country. Forgetting, of course, that when Donald Horne wrote the book The Lucky Country in the 1960s, that was a very ironic title. What he was saying was Australia has got where it got more by good luck than good management and the luck won't last forever. And we've got to take ourselves a bit more seriously and do a bit more serious thought about the kind of life that we lead here and not just say, she'll be right, not just leave it to chance. So I think a lot of us still feel, oh, well, we're okay. We live in the lucky country. It's a dangerous hiding place. 

Madeleine: Mhm. It can be. And so maybe it's a nice time to talk about how to let go of our hiding places. This podcast is Routines and Ruts and in some ways it seems like a rat can be the thing that points us to ask important questions like who am I, or to shake the malaise or the complacency. I'm wondering how you would define a rut and if you think it can point us to our inner self.

Hugh: Yes, I suppose there are two ways of interpreting rut. I mean, a rut can be like a groove that we stay in and it becomes a hiding place. It allows us to just go on as we are not having to think about some of these deeper questions. But I think the sense in which you're using it in the podcast is the different interpretation of that it's like a it's like a bump in the road. It's like something that's going to jolt us into thinking a bit differently about our way of life, about what we're actually doing and who we are becoming and who we want to become.

And I think that is often the case, Madeleine. I think it often does take a bump in the road. Now that can be negative. It can be something like a bereavement, or a relationship breakdown, or a life threatening illness, or a retrenchment, or falling out with a friend,  something that shocks us into thinking, well, who am I? What do I really want out of life? If I've if I've been told that I've got three years to live, well, what would I want to do with those three years? Or if I've been told I've lost my job and that industry seems to be drying up, or what else might I do? Those those things can be unpleasant. But many people looking back on those kind of ruts in the road, those kind of bumps, those kind of crises, say, I didn't enjoy it when I was going through it, but it was the making of me.

Many people who've lived through the Great Depression of the early 1930s, people who were adults then, most of them are now dead. But in my research, I often spoke to them, and they would say that was a terrible time. but it really jolted us into thinking about what really matters, what values we really embrace, what our priorities should be, to recognize that there are people in our street who are unemployed and may be hungry and they need help and so on. And those people often look back and say, that was the making of us. 

But sometimes the rut, the jolt, the crisis, the interruption can be pleasant. I mean, falling in love can do it. The birth of a child, it can often have a dramatic effect on the parents and the immediate family circle to recognise a new life has come into our midst and we've got to think about how we're going to nurture that life and teach it. So what does that say about us? What kind of person am I to be a father and what kind of father do I want to be? Getting a new job, a new opportunity, moving house can be very disruptive, but it can open up new possibilities and just a new environment can cause us to think differently about who we are. Some people use travel. There'll be less of it in the future now we know what terrible damage, particularly international flying does to the environment as well as being a very efficient way of putting bugs around the planet. But people often have said of travel, of seeing a new place helps you to see yourself in a new light. So I think these these kind of disruptions, which is a favourite word at the moment, when our lives are disrupted, we often don't enjoy it. But it almost always has a clarifying effect on us and that, in hindsight, often seems to have been a blessing rather than a curse. 

Madeleine: Yes, that wonderful sort of paradox with change about how we thrive on it. Yet we constantly bemoan it or we we become afraid of it.

Hugh: Yes, we do become afraid of it. And why does everything have to change? Why can't we go on as we are. Well, life isn't like that.  And also, the more we learn about human psychology, the more we realise what I've just been saying, really, the more we realise that change, uncertainty, unpredictability, disruptions, unexpected events crashing into our lives are very good for us in helping us to clarify this deeper sense of who we are and what we want out of life, and what we need to contribute to life.

Madeleine: Yeah, I really loved reading The Good Life, which is another one of your books. And you speak about the Utopia complex. And it strikes me that that idea of wanting everything to be perfect and everything has to be great, like have a great weekend is something you spoke about and that pressure of greatness, that's actually the thing rather than change or a bump in the road, this sort of striving for perfection, that can be the thing that puts us in a rut as well, in a rut that sort of more like a hiding place, I guess. 

Hugh: Yes, the rut that's like the groove. Yes, that's that's very true. In The Good Life, I talked about the hazards of expecting things to be perfect and saying to people that I have an excellent evening when most of us just want to have a reasonably pleasant evening without too much drama. Have an awesome weekend. Well, no it'll just be a fairly routine weekend.

But yes, we set up we set ourselves up for disappointment and we set our children up for disappointment when we use this extravagant language and talk about how everything's got to be wonderful and how life is meant to be glorious. And part of that, of course, is we're all meant to be happy. You know, the pursuit of happiness. I mean, perfectionism is like a hiding place from the self because it's so unrealistic. And the pursuit of happiness is like a hiding place as well, because it's a form of modern madness, this idea that we're all supposed to be happy all the time and if you're not happy, there's something wrong, you know, get on to drugs or go and have sex or whatever, go and see a funny movie or something to get you in a good mood and make you feel happy. 

Well, there are there are a number of things wrong with that idea. The main one is that happiness is just an emotion and it's one of a very broad spectrum of emotions that we have to help us deal with and interpret and understand what's happening to us and how we're responding to what's happening to us. And no point on that spectrum would make any sense without the context of all the other points on the spectrum. So, in fact, you wouldn't even know what it meant to be happy if you hadn't also experienced sadness or disappointment or loss. In other words, what one emotion in isolation is meaningless without all the others.

The other the other thing about the pursuit of happiness in particular or the so-called positive emotions is that they typically have much less to teach us about what it means to be human than the so-called dark or negative emotions. I mean, most people over the age of about 15 have already discovered that we actually learn much more about ourselves and about what it means to be human by having to experience setbacks, by having to swallow our disappointment, by having to experience sadness and loss.

You know, winners might be grinners, but losers learners. We learn a lot more from losing than we do from winning. And we learn a lot more from periods of sadness than we do from periods of happiness. I'm not against happiness, but I think we've just got to recognize that it's a fleeting emotion and just one among many. And it's not by any means our most important teacher.

Madeleine: I love how you've clarified that link between the pursuit of happiness and perfectionism in a way. And in the book you put it so lovely with the we're all good guys and bad guys rotating in and out of the light and just sort of making that clear within ourselves and within in other people. I think that's something that can contribute a bit more to this idea of compassion. 

But I also loved it how you sort of really made it explicit that there will always be lumps, there will be lumps in our days and I guess ourselves.

Hugh: Even in our exercise of compassion, you know, we're not going to be perfect at that either. There are going to be times when we fall short of our own standards, when we don't exercise the discipline, when we do act unkindly towards someone, or we do fail to apologize to someone that we've wronged, or we do fail to forgive someone who's wronged us in some way. Of course, we're human. We're frail. We do stumble. But I think to keep reminding ourselves that the dark stuff within us is only there because of the light within us. This is the metaphor I've used in the book of thinking of ourselves as a kind of personal solar system with the sun of love, the sun of compassion at the center. And yes, it does cast shadows and those shadows, are nice places to hide sometimes to escape from the demands of love or the discipline of compassion. But I think it's helpful to remind ourselves that the dark stuff is only there because we have this capacity for compassion. And that's a hopeful reminder that, yeah, sure, sometimes we find ourselves slipping into the shadows, but we can come out of the shadows, back into the light. We can become more authentic. We can become truer to our human nature as well. 

Madeleine: And I love how even the hiding places reflect that sort of light and dark. There's no sort of, this is a good attribute. This is a bad attribute. Take ambition, for example. That's a quality that is often hard to criticize, as you point out and someone who lacks ambition is often criticised. But there's ambition itself can be a hiding place and can be a detriment.

Hugh: Yes, ambition is a good example to choose because of all the the 20 hiding places that I've described as our top hiding places in the book and in most cases, I would say of them, they are not necessarily hiding place. I mean, even people who are who are sort of out of control busy, some of them are hiding in their business, but some are just at a phase in their life where it just happens that they are very busy and they can't do anything about it and they wish they could. 

But yes, ambition is a is a classic example. It depends what our ambition is for. When you hear someone saying, I always wanted to be prime minister, you think now why did you always want to be prime minister? Was that because you had this great ego-driven personal ambition to hold the top job, whether it was prime minister or the manager of a factory or the principal of a school or the managing director of a corporation or whatever it might be. Did you want to be boss? Did you want to be top, just because you wanted to be top? Now, that's a hiding place because that's a shadow in which we hide from the demands of compassion. That's all about me. That's all about indulging my personal desire to be something or get something or have something. But we could be ambitious in a completely different way. Someone could say, I've always wanted to be prime minister because I'm determined to eradicate poverty, or I always wanted to be prime minister because I want to close the gender gap, or I always wanted to be prime minister because I want to eliminate homelessness from our society or inequality from our society, whatever it might be. Now, this is still ambition, but this is ambition that expresses our compassion. 

I once had a schoolteacher, a wonderful primary school teacher, and long after I'd left school, I met someone who was a colleague of hers. And this person said of her, oh she she lacked ambition. You know, she was offered the position of deputy principal, and principal in a number of schools girls, but she always turned that down. And I kept in touch with that teacher, and I realized later in life why she would have turned down those promotion ambitions, because in her case—I mean, there's nothing wrong with having the ambition to be a school principal if it's to run a wonderful school which will enhance learning opportunities where children can flourish—her ambition was for the kids in her class. She only ever wanted to be a classroom teacher because she wanted to be in that hands on person-to-person situation with her class where she could encourage them, nurture them and show them how they could flourish. So that was the ambition of the good kind that was not a hiding place for her, that was her expressing her deep humanity, her compassion for the kids in her care.

Madeleine: It's a really interesting distinction. I know that in the book you quote Keating, well the ambition being to achieve something rather than merely be something. 

Hugh: A combination of both, I think probably in the case of both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, they had personal ambition, but they also had very clear ambition for reforms they wanted to institute.

Madeleine: Well, maybe that is about the combo then. I've been in a bit of a tangle recently with trying to differentiate when I'm just doing as a form of busyness, or the doing that becomes almost a measure of our worth where we need to do to do to sort of prove something to ourselves that other people. You know, often the antidote is focused on the being rather than the doing. But, in this example, it's kind of more about the doing the achieving something rather than merely being something. So it's a it's a complex tangle I've got myself in Hugh, with this doing and being and which can be a hiding place and maybe they both can be. 

Hugh: Yes I think it can be a combination. Absolutely. It's a question of what your primary motivation is, Madeleine. If your primary motivation is to look good in the eyes of other people or to indulge some ego driven desire of your own, then that's you know, that's worth a bit of self reflection and self-examination. But if your desire is to make the world a better place, if your desire is to respond to other people's needs, and doing that has made you busy and has got you doing these various things that you're doing. Like, for example, doing this podcast, which is obviously for the benefit of the people who listen to it's not an exercise in self aggrandisement by Madeleine, even though no doubt there's a bit of personal pride and pleasure in doing it, that's fine. But your fundamental driver is, let's have these kind of conversations that other people might listen in to and get some inspiration from or get some guidance from or some reassurance from. And that's a classic example of the compassionate motivation at work. So don't be too hard on yourself, I think is what I'm saying.

Madeleine: It's an interesting one. I guess we can be hard on ourselves thinking about everything we think we should be doing. And maybe sometimes being in service of other people can become a should or a checkbox, or am I helping humanity today?

Hugh: Yes, the discipline of compassion is a way of being in the world rather than a series of boxes that you have to tick. It doesn't mean you should give up this job and do some other job that involves working for the homeless or something. But it does mean whatever you're doing, needs to be done in a spirit of compassion, showing kindness, showing respect, tolerance, inclusiveness, etc. charity, towards other people. And that that doesn't mean there's only a certain number of activities we can do that tick the compassion box, that means whatever we're doing, we can do it in a compassionate spirit.  

If you do feel as though you're out of control with busyness, then that's a real warning. Busyness is the great barrier to social cohesion. I'm too busy to spend time with my friends. I'm too busy to go and have a drink with the neighbours. Too busy to stop and chat to the old guy at the end of the street for ten minutes when he really need someone to listen to him even for ten minutes. That's out of control busyness and that sort of busyness can be a hiding place. It can be a way of not having to exercise compassion because we are distancing ourselves from the people that we could show compassion towards, where busyness is kind of the ultimate form of self-absorption in a way — just so caught up in, you know, don't don't disturb Daddy. He's busy. Well, that's a great insulator. You know, I can't even spend time with my own kids. I'm so busy. 

Madeleine: I'll be the first to admit that I'm definitely not that busy, which I think is a beautiful thing to embrace because, as you say, not being seen as busy is sometimes equated as failure. But I think the more we embrace the ebb and flow. It's another example that I found really interesting as a hiding place guilt and shame and that you say that you're a great fan of guilt. Maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Hugh: Yes, yes. I'm a great fan of guilt because guilt is the sign to us that our moral machinery is in working order. If we were morally insensitive, if we had no ethical framework, if we were morally numb or blind, we'd never feel guilt.

Guilt is telling us that we have done something that we shouldn't have done. So that's healthy and we need to respond to it. Of course we need to put right the thing that has made us feel guilty and that will often involve an apology to someone for having wronged them in some way. 

Where guilt can become a hiding place is where people don't let it go, where they don't seek forgiveness. For some reason, they wrap themselves in guilt as though I'm a bad person. And that can become the personal narrative that I'm I'm carrying this burden of guilt or shame. And that's really all you need to know about, because that's who I am. I mean, it's a way of letting ourselves off the hook. We've got to deal with that. As long as we are trapped in guilt, then we are not going to return to that core place of compassion. We're not going to become the loving person that we can be because we're preoccupied with this idea that we're bad, that we've done something awful.

And if no one else is going to forgive us for, then we may have to forgive ourselves in the end. There's a story about that that I've quoted in the book where in the end, it may not be the person you've wronged who is going to forgive you, but you might have to finally say, OK, I've done the wrong thing. I wish I hadn't. Now I've got to move on.

Madeleine: Yeah, that's a really great reminder. I was also curious in your sixty-year career in social psychology and research whether you've met anyone who isn't hiding?

Hugh: And a very good question, I don't suppose I would always know. Even if I did know, I would never pointed out. But I think probably there are people that tend to be older. I think people are much less inclined to hide as they as they move away from the preoccupation with their social identity, with the masks they wear, the labels they wear, and become more authentically human, more compassionate. I think the older people are much more authentic, more transparent, more open, and probably not given to hiding. I'm just trying to think of particular cases.  

But yes, there are certainly plenty I know who are still hiding in one way or another. But I think some some people in my own circle, I would say, as they have grown older, have become noticeably more authentic. That's not always welcome. You know, sometimes they're a bit more brutally frank in their response to things. But I think most of us when we are younger are inclined to hide or not to have actually come to terms with the fact that there is an inner self. I think once we discover it, then we are much less likely to go on hiding.

Madeleine: Hmm. I've always thought there's so much to look forward to in the growing up process. And this is just another thing to grow into.

Hugh: Yes, well there's this wonderful u-curve Madeleine based on global research about people's life satisfaction, which shows that typically people's life satisfaction declines as they move through adolescence and early adulthood and reaches its low point in our 40s. And then it climbs again. So people who are 60 or 70 or 80 are typically getting much more satisfaction out of life than they were when they were 20, 30 or 40. 

And I think, you know, the reason for that is not mysterious. I think the reason for that is that in those later decades, we are much more likely to be in touch with who we really are, in touch with our common humanity, and much more likely to have a kindly, compassionate view of the world, then when we're striving to make our way in the world when we're younger.

Madeleine: Hmm. Well, speaking of satisfaction and fulfilment, which is a big theme of the book and your work, I wondered if you could put it down to a day. I'm very fascinated by days and how we measure them and how they ebb and flow and how they differ for everybody. So I wondered what a day well spent for you might be.

Hugh: A day well spent for me would certainly be a combination of time spent with the people I love. It's all bit old during a pandemic, but normally having created opportunities in the day to be open to neighbours, going for a walk, stopping chatting to people, checking in on someone in my apartment block to see how they're going. If I know they've been unwell or they've suffered as one neighbour recently did a bereavement. So I'd want to be sure that I'd made time for those relationship things, which are the top priority in my life.

But a good day would also be a day in which I had done some writing or some reading or some thinking which had contributed to something that I might write in the future. So it would be a combination of, first of all, the people, the relationships, the contacts, the responsiveness and the possibility that some of my own creative work would have been enriched by this day. It would also it would also be an incomplete day if I hadn't either played some music or listen to some music. That's an important part of a good day for me. 

Madeleine: Hugh Mackay reminds us that at our core we are kind, we are compassionate. But even still, as he points out in The Inner Life there will always be lumps.  

As he puts it so beautifully in the chapter on perfectionism: “Being human entails imperfection. We are all good guys and bad guys rotating in and out of the light. When we act alone, we have to live with our shortcomings and irrationalities. When we act together, those complications are compounded. We're all torn by competing desires, like the desire for love and the desire for control. We desperately want something until we get it and then wonder what all the fuss is about. We crave certainty and stability, yet our brains thrive on uncertainty and unpredictability. If we were. Perfectly rational, we might be able to create a perfectly ordered life, though it would be an excruciatingly dull one.”

I’m Madeleine Dore and that’s what I hope to share with this podcast - that our days become extraordinary because of the stumbles, the lumps, the imperfections, not in spite of them.