Pandora Sykes
Interview by Madeleine Dore
Pandora Sykes is a writer, journalist and broadcaster—but as she shares in this conversation, she’s a gatherer. In the book, How Do We Know We're Doing It Right?, her writing and columns and in the acclaimed weekly podcast The High Low she co-hosts with Dolly Alderton — Pandora is constantly collecting, exploring and dissecting the work of writers, psychologists, culture critics, philosophers, scientists on everything from life’s trivialities to the political—and how the two are interconnected.
In this conversation, we speak about how smaller worries can sometimes feel the biggest, how we can be driven by feelings like guilt and envy rather than feel stifled, satisficing, arrival fallacy, healthy boredom, tick-boxing and finding our own version of what what is rightful, rather than right.
Pandora Sykes: writer and broadcaster
““We shouldn’t be looking at some static, uniform, right life, but at the idea of life being right or, to use Winnicott’s phrase, good enough. That really takes off some of the pressure, I think, when you look at it like that. So not living the best life, not living the glossiest life, the most polished life, the most successful life, the most impenetrable life. But living a life that’s rightful. That’s good enough.”
– Pandora Sykes
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