Pandora Sykes

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Pandora Sykes: writer and broadcaster

Full transcript

“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

Madeleine Dore: In a short story for the New Yorker, Kate Walbert writes, “Are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off, or are we only what we still have left to do?” I came across this quote in Pandora Sykes’ new book, How Do We Know If We’re Doing It Right? A thoughtful exploration of not only how we overlook good enough in so many parts of our lives, but how we are vulnerable to a socially enforced perfectionism.

Instead of focusing on the task itself, be it in our work or our personal lives, we focus on how well we are doing it. It’s so easy to conflict perfection with completion. Going back to this idea of our to-do lists, I’ve long thought an incomplete to-do list reflected my own sense of incompletion.

If everything could be perfectly crossed off, then maybe things would be perfect. Of course that’s not only an extremely high standard, but it’s also a trap. A to-do list, a life, is never complete.

What helps me untangle from this trap is flipping my to-do list from a list of things I haven’t yet done into a list of possibilities. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by what’s still left to do, we can actually be guided by it, and sometimes perhaps even excited by everything we still have time to explore.

Diving further into how we can find our own version of what’s rightful, rather than right, is this weeks’ guest, Pandora Sykes. Pandora is a writer, journalist, and broadcaster, but as she shares in this conversation, she’s a gatherer. In her book, in her writing in columns, and in the acclaimed weekly podcast The High Low that she co-hosts with Dolly Alderton, Pandora is constantly collecting, exploring, and dissecting the work of writers, psychologists, cultural critics, philosophers, scientists, on everything from life’s trivialities to the political, and how the two are quite intertwined.

In this conversation, we speak about how sometimes smaller worries can sometimes feel like the biggest, how we can be driven by feelings like guilt and envy, rather than feel stifled by them, we talk about letting go and doing less, the beauty found in boredom, and finding our own version of what’s rightful.

So given our to-do lists differ day by day, here’s Pandora Sykes on how she is today.

PS: Oh, I am fine, thank you. It’s only 9AM here, so I don’t feel like I’ve had the full weight of my day yet, but I am feeling fine. Little bit tired, but that is very much the norm in our household, so I'm good, thank you.

MD: Have you been up for a while? If it is 9AM, are you someone who would describe themselves as a morning person, or something else entirely?

PS: I’m not not a morning person, in that I'm not someone who can’t function before 12 without coffee, but I always get up before I would wake up because I get to sleep quite late and I have a lot of sleep problems. So 7AM would probably be glorious if I’d fallen asleep by 10PM, but I never have, so as a result, I don’t love it.

I think right now is also quite interesting because so many people I know are struggling with their sleep. So in a way, it doesn’t make me particularly anxious that I’m not really sleeping. It’s just a bore because I have to get medication and I’m aware that I want to be on good form when I’m doing book press, but I’m not anxious about the reasons for it because we know the reason most people aren’t sleeping. That is a global pandemic, which is a pretty good reason not to be able to sleep that well.

MD: Exactly. There’s been a few different articles that have explained that those with anxiety have felt a sense of ease that there’s now a collective anxiety.

PS: I’ve read a few articles like that as well, and I found that really interesting. I agree. I think lots of people who have really serious health anxiety, particularly day-to-day, find themselves not so much vindicated by the pandemic, but they’ve already done all their panicking about it and so now it’s arrived, and they’ve got that preemptive freaking out out of the way.

MD: How have you internalised this time, when it comes to how it’s been impacting your days?

PS: The pandemic made me worried, like lots of people, and it made me sad. Not being able to do certain things, or grieving the loss of someone I loved, but anxiety-wise? I don’t think it probably had a huge impact because my anxieties have never really focused on the macro. Does that make sense?

MD: It does make a lot of sense, and it’s nice to be able to see that contrast as well, that what is worrying or what is ailing us can often be internal and smaller.

PS: I think often the smallest worries are the loudest. That was definitely something I wanted to investigate in the book, is a lot of those anxieties about modern life are not the huge day-to-day important things, like where will I sleep at night? Or where will I get the money to pay my next bill? Because if you’re worrying about those things, you’re not worrying about the smaller things.

Worrying and fussing about the smaller things is a luxury because it means you’ve got the big things licked pretty much, so if you’re worried about how somebody sounded on a text, or that you haven’t downloaded the must-see boxset, or that you’ve never tried hot yoga, then you’re worrying about those things because you’re safe.

So it’s that dichotomy of I feel like it’s good to have those small worries because that shows the quality of life elsewhere, and it’s not something to beat yourself up about, we all do it, but at the same time, how can we diminish those worries a little? See them for what they are rather than allow them to escalate and this idea that we’re not doing life right.

MD: Yeah, I think it’s a really intricate balance and I think it’s something that you do really well both in the book, but across your work, where you acknowledge your privilege and you really quite elegantly recognise that the way you walk through the world differs to everybody else, as it differs between all of us.

But at the same time, you’re quite balanced in not translating that acknowledgement into a feeling of shame or guilt. I don’t know if you pinpoint where you’ve been able to strike that balance, or even if you feel like you do?

KM: I think it’s really important that I do state when I’m talking about most things that the position of privilege that I come from because I’ve always been aware that the access I have to the world is… sorry, not always been aware, I don’t think I was as a child, but as a working woman, I’ve always been aware that the access that I have is not the access everyone has.

And I’d even say that from when I did a fashion column at The Sunday Times style five years ago. I don’t think I would’ve got that column, for example, if I wasn’t slim, which is an issue about magazines that deserves further exploring, but what I did get to do with that column is I got letters every week from women all over the UK, all different ages, all different sizes. I would say those questions were, to be fair, predominantly from white people, so I wouldn’t say it was the most diverse audience, but in terms of age and body size, it was.

And so even though I was working on a fashion magazine, which can be a little bit cut off from the real world, I really felt like I got to have this conversation with so many different women, so that when I left that job, it was really lodged in my head that the best work, as much as possible without plagiarising or trying to replace someone else’s voice so that they can talk about their own lived experience, but for me, the best work is when it’s polyvocal.

So whether it was on The High Low having different authors come on, or telling diverse stories, or signposting the work of a great journalist, that was something I really wanted to do in my book as well. And if I’m honest, I don’t think it’s something that everyone gets. It might not be something that everyone gets about the book. I know that some people have said in the past, why are you always talking about what everyone writes, or what everyone else says?

But I’ve always enjoyed most being more of a gatherer. I do really like assembling information and distilling it through my lens, so of course these essays or The High Low is my point of view, it can’t be anyone else’s point of view, and you can’t try and tuck yourself completely out of the way as if you don’t exist because that just doesn’t work. Ultimately, everything is filtered and funnelled through me.

But if I can always make sure I’m highlighting the context through which I’m making those points and bring in the voices of other people to fill in those gaps of experience that I don’t have, and that much of the time I’m lucky not to have. But, that said, I don’t think that believes. When we talk about privilege, we do sometimes, I worry, talk about it in a way that means that no one can feel pain. And when it comes to grief or mental health, I think we have to be quite careful about hierarchies of privilege. But certainly, for the most part, all of us, and I could do this so much more thoughtfully and I’m always trying to learn how to do it more thoughtfully, but I think all of us could be looking at how the way we experience the world is shaped by who we are. Like who we bring to the world as much as what the world brings to us.

MD: So back to that idea of the shame and guilt I think a lot of people might feel, especially in relation to what’s happening now and feeling like there’s this sense of not doing enough, in The High Low you did that wonderful episode of exploring the off-line versus the online of doing and, be it as an activist or be it as actively anti-racist. How do you circumnavigate this idea of guilt or shame?

PS: I always feel like I could be doing more. That’s my personality type as well. But I don’t know if it’s helpful to verbalise guilt and shame. I worry about any of this centring ourselves in this, so saying I feel guilty or I feel really ashamed is still talking about the I. So I think I’m being driven by the guilt, being driven by any shame you might feel to share more resources, to go mentor, to do more charitable donation, to share the books among your friends, to be having the hard conversations, to be considering the diversity in your business, or every time you enter a new work project, who else is working on it? I think we should be more driven by those feelings, than talk about how it makes us feel.

MD: I listened to the wonderful interview with you on how to fail with Elizabeth Day, and you spoke a bit about how you don’t put words necessarily to things like jealousy. If you have that feeling, you will look at ways to flip that feeling. Do you find yourself flipping a lot of feelings that you might have, and finding that way to make them constructive?

PS: Yes. It sounds really stupid, this is just a personal thing, but I think the word jealousy makes the person receiving that feel really awful. If you’re about to go on holiday and someone goes oh, I'm so jealous, or if you got a new job and someone goes, I'm so jealous, it just, I don’t know, it really dulls it for someone and makes them feel guilty. And I also don’t think it’s good for the person saying it. I think it’s horrible for you to feel it, and it’s horrible for someone to receive it.

I don’t think I am a jealous person. I think I’m highly competitive, but with myself, so that’s maybe the way that I sidestep feeling jealous about other people. But in general, I love when other people do great work because I get to enjoy it, and it opens up a new bit of my brain, and I really mean that. My work wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the great work of other people because most of the time I’m writing about someone else’s writing or finding or something they’ve created. That’s very much how I approach my writing as a writer, is through being a reader, and a consumer, and an enjoyer.

MD: It’s back to that gathering again. In the book, you articulate how sometimes success can be a difficult thing to celebrate or reflect on. How do you move through that? I think it’s quite a common feeling for the goalposts to keep moving.

PS: Arrival fallacy is just such a frustrating and ridiculous thing. I mean, it’s human nature, isn’t it, I suppose, in a way, because if we achieved something and then just said okay, that’s it, I'm done now for life, then progress would not keep progressing. But it does really irritate me that I am someone that can’t just luxuriate in a job well done.

But as you say, I think it is really common, and I think a lot of the other things I talk about in the book, it’s just a question of slowing down and checking in with yourself, and sometimes when you have a rival fallacy, maybe that’s because you weren’t gunning for something for the right reasons. I think it’s very easy for us to get more caught up in that end product, like here’s the piece of work rather than how did we feel doing the piece of work, what did we learn about making that piece of work, how did we change? Rather than just seeing it as this static thing that just ends.

MD: I think what’s somewhat related is being able to identify when to let go of certain goals or certain accomplishments when they no longer suit us. You seem quite good at that, especially when it comes to shifting the focus in your career. What’s been the catalyst for you in terms of knowing when to let go?

KM: Such a cliché, but I was about to turn 30 and I’d known for some time I wasn’t doing exactly what I wanted to do, which was fine. Masses of people feel like that, that they have a good job, and they enjoy their job, but they’re not quite where they thought they’d be.

I’d always written about stuff that wasn’t fashion, but in the main, I was definitely known for fashion. And when I decided I didn’t want to write about fashion anymore, I did feel like I had to be quite brutal almost with the different tentacles of my work because fashion is such a dominant gene and, if I kept doing some things, I just knew I’d muddy the waters, I knew I’d confuse people.

And whilst I do really extoll the benefits of a multi-hyphenate career, I think that means I want to be doing three things, which at the moment are podcasting, writing, and speaking, rather than six or seven things. I think that just wasn’t something that I wanted to be doing, and I didn’t want to be super confusing about what I was trying to put out there.

I think all the time about something a friend said to me, which is that, “gain involves loss”. And I did feel quite strongly that to gain a different job title, or maybe a different area of interest, I would have to lose other things, otherwise I couldn’t fully expect people to get on board with what I was doing now.

So that did involve social loss, because I wasn’t going on loads of fun trips or loads of fun dinners, and it involved economic loss because a lot of those kind of projects are well paid, but what I gained was the opportunity to try a hand at something new, and for the most part, my listeners and readers to come with me, which is an enormous privilege I think. But it’s great to try your hand at lots of different things, but it can be muddling for you and for the people consuming your content.

MD: And it can be so muddling as well, internally. I think there’s something to be said for doing less or for really honing your focus, and one line that actually stood out to me in How Do We Know If We’re Doing It Right? you wrote, “When I moan about how busy I am, what I actually mean is that I have a lot that I should be doing”. Could you speak a little bit to that?

PS: Yeah, the busy traps are a really interesting one because I think so much of our busyness is self-imposed. I know that about myself, but that doesn’t mean that that choice is easy to make. A social life is self-imposed. You could just say no to everything, but obviously that’s not the way that friendships work, and I feel like I’m probably one of many who are now easing out of this lockdown and wondering how to fit a social life back in again because, with two young children and a busy job, that’s always been something that stresses me out.

MD: It was interesting that you really looked at how you were spending your time when you were making these decisions and I wondered now, with those three things that you’re focusing on with podcasting, writing, and speaking, what would be the breakup of time for those things?

PS: Well, when I was writing the book, I was doing that much more. So I would do The High Low on Tuesday’s, but then I was writing the book Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday’s, Saturday, Sunday. Pretty much for six months. But normally… it’s really difficult to say because I suppose speaking stuff tends to happen in the evenings. Podcasting is about a day and a half a week. I’d say that they’re fairly even-handed, but it just obviously depends on that particular time. When you’re on a book deadline the book takes over.

So it just really depends on the week. But I can’t see myself adding anything else in for the moment. If anything, I’m trying to be really careful to keep things small because I haven’t really got my work-life balance down that well in the last few years, and I would like to have a little bit more time for my family and friends.

MD: In terms of not having it down, what do you think having it down would look like?

PS: Not working evenings or weekends. That would be having it down. I can do that, but it really takes its toll. Having not really had maternity leaves with either of my children. It does take its toll physically in that I'm really, really tired, but that’s never really been a problem. I’ve always managed to work when I’m very tired. But I think it can take its toll psychologically.

I’ve never really realised, even though I’ve somehow managed to do this twice now, and I really realised that the point of a maternity leave is to psychologically heal from birth, but also to navigate your new role. So when you’re having your first child, it’s negotiating a new identity as a mother, to sit alongside your other identities, and then when you have your second child, it’s negotiating a new identity as a mother of two. And when you don’t give yourself that time, mentally, to be figuring out those identities whilst also spending time with your children, I think then it just delays the process and I can end up feeling quite overwhelmed, like it’s quite hard to find peace in my brain.

So to me, success would look like having the mental capacity to be juggling those identities, as much as the physical capacity to juggle the roles.

MD: I really appreciate that distinction between the physical and the mental versions of juggling, and I think that comes back to so much of what you speak about in the book, is that it can feel like an elusive balance, but we really do need to find our own way of juggling.

PS: I think it is a really hard juggle, as you say, but I think what I didn’t realise is that it’s… and I feel like when we have the dialogue in popular culture, we’re only just getting to this, but what I didn’t realise is that it’s not just a physical juggling. I think when we talk about women juggling, it’s always very physical. It’s not a woman at the end of the day sitting there, looking really perplexed as she tries to figure out how those identities sit alongside each other, and that is something that needs as much breathing space as the rushing around, making the cupcakes, tidying the kitchen.

MD: You speak a little bit in the book about how it’s this working progress, especially this idea of FOMOG, the fear of missing out on goals, and this idea of that intersection of ambition, and motherhood, and identity, I guess. So if that is a work in progress, where do you feel that you’re at with that now?

PS: That one was really interesting for me because I think, before I came to that essay, I did. I did. I was definitely seeking to feel whole. But it’s a fool’s errands because we’re not made to be whole. We’re made to be in a state of flux until we die.

It, in truth, is something I’m still finding my feet with. And I might not find my feet with it until I also die because I think you’re meant to feel a certain amount of discomfort. Discomfort’s a word that we’re talking about quite a lot at the moment, aren’t we, because I think we’ve been labouring until this false pretence that life should be comfortable, because we’ve made it seamless in so many ways. It’s just completely friction-free for those of us with the expendable income. You can order in food, and you can book yourself a pedicure online, and you can order an Uber to get you anywhere, and you can book a holiday last minute, and everything is now just tailored towards this really seamless life, and I think that has really damaged us because it’s made us forget that discomfort is completely necessary.

So I still feel a bit uncomfortable about the melding of those identities, but I think that the best way for them to exist is actually to jostle alongside each other, maybe be pinching at one another, chaffing, to remind you that that bit of identity is there, and maybe that needs a bit of attention.

MD: Related to this idea of process, I’m sure I’m not the only one to be curious about goes into The High Low in terms of your reading habits and your assembling for that as well.

PS: I suppose, when you’ve been doing it for a while, it just becomes quite innate, so I will watch something because I think it’ll be interesting to talk about on The High Low. It used to be probably more loose, like oh, this is just what I’ve been enjoying this week. Whereas now, I do have to think ahead a little bit because it just comes back to time, really. In between work and my children, I don’t necessarily have the time to enjoy popular culture or books like I did before, so now I do do a little bit of thinking ahead, looking at my bookshelves thinking, what do I think would be good to talk about? Is there a debut author who I haven’t heard many people talking about or who I’d love to introduce to The High Low listeners, or is there a podcast or an article that I think would be genuinely really helpful? Perhaps it’s during a pandemic when I feel like people’s psyches are in a certain point and this could help them.

So over the course of the week, it’s something I’m thinking about. And of course the correspondence around The High Low doesn’t stop, but in terms of direct prep, I would say we talk about things on Monday, Tuesday morning is making notes, Tuesday afternoon recording, Tuesday evening editing, and then it goes out on Wednesday morning. We have a brilliant sub-editor called Abbey who helps us. She keeps us on top of the mailbox and the social media account throughout the week, and then helps us keep in contact with everyone, really, look at what’s come in that week that we should address in the episode.

We get so many great recommendations now from The High Low community, which is so brilliantly helpful, and also just so great for me. It means that we get to make The High Low where we recommend certain things we’ve enjoyed, but then also it’s completely circular now because The High Lows audience recommend loads of stuff to us.

MD: So it sounds like it’s got a great weekly rhythm to it. You do speak about a fear of wasting time, and so with the days that aren’t as rigidly tied to that schedule, do you have moments of distraction?

PS: I’m really busy at the moment, so actually I’m craving some boredom because I think it’s so important for your daydreaming and for your mind to loosen a bit. I think boredom’s quite an umbrella term, and actually a lot of the time people say they’re bored, what they are is frustrated, or lacking in motivation, or feeling unfocused.

But when I have the opportunity now to be happily bored, I really go for it. So if I can go on a long walk without my telephone, and at points you might be a bit bored, you’ll be like, god, I’m really far from home now and I haven’t got anything to listen to on my phone, and I can’t call anyone for a chat, and I’m not with anyone, and that’s quite good. I think of that as a productive boredom.

Or from sitting and playing Lego with my daughter. There’s a certain boredom that comes into playing with young children. It’s part of the love. Being kind of bored in a children’s game is really an expression of love, I think, because it would be so much easier, and it is so much easier, just to say, well, you play by yourself, or I’ll put something on the telly. But having that healthy boredom is what I try and engender in myself when I have the time, ironically, but it’s something that I’d also really like to pass down to my child as well.

It’s sort of like a stilling of time, and it’s an absence of the flurry of activity, and I think that, when we’re constantly filling those gaps and our attention, when we’re never letting ourselves get bored, that can be quite dangerous. I think that can actually just lead to even more feelings of boredom, which aren’t actually boredom.

MD: Beautifully put. It renders it into dissatisfaction, rather then the beautiful moment it can be. I loved how you had that nickname of Clipboard Pandy. I need to be really careful with overcramming my to-do list and inevitably putting a lot off, so I wondered now what your relationship is like with Clipboard Pandy, and whether you’re still fond of a to-do list?

PS: Oh, I love a to-do list. I’ll always love a to-do list. I think what is important if you’re a fellow lover of a to-do list is just to make sure that you’re not exhibiting symptoms of what I call tickboxery. So just writing something down in order to tick it off, as that’s when you lose any enjoyment or sense of satisfaction.

But also, I have absolutely no memory anymore, so if I don’t, I’m actually just looking at my desk, I’ve got all these little bits of paper. If I don’t write stuff down, I would just forget about it completely. And now that I’ve got to carve out this little space of not just arrangements for my own life or house, but the arrangements for two little people as well, if I don’t write all these things down, then someone’s not going to get fed, or some bills not going to get paid.

So yes, big fan of the to-do list, but again, it’s just trying to see it within its context. I have to say, I’m not doing it at the moment because it actually requires, as do a lot of these admin processes, actually requires quite a lot of brainpower to keep all those lists going, but I really like Stephen Covey’s four tier filing system of important and urgent because those things are different. So that’s something I try and really think about a lot. Is this important, or is that urgent? Important and not urgent, unimportant and urgent, and then unimportant and not urgent.

And I think what we can have a tendency to do is to reply or respond or engage with unimportant and not urgent because there’s less pressure on it, and what that means is that the important can get neglected. Not probably the urgent and not the unimportant and non-urgent, but the important can get left behind. So I think I'm just trying to make sure on all my to-do lists, that I’m always aware of the different scales there.

MD: That’s a really helpful matrix, and I just wonder, because a to-do list is never-ending and we never get there, we never completely finish our tasks for our life because that would be arrival fallacy as well. We need to be able to have something, that balance of striving for something. So for you, how do you know, at the end of the day, whether that is the day done?

PS: I find that really difficult, in all honesty. I’m not very good at stopping. I am quite nerdy. I’m very diligent, and I don’t say that as a well done, me, pat me on the back. But what I mean is that I’m not very good at just letting things lie if I need a time out. So I have to really challenge myself not to always be trying to do everything and not to get in a tizzy when I can’t be as diligent as I want to be.

So that’s definitely still a challenge for me. I can’t give any words of wisdom on that because that’s really something that I’m still negotiating.

MD: I suppose another part of that matrix that you mentioned is making time for the important, and I think a lot of our time, our creativity is in that important but not urgent box. And something that really struck me in the book was how you shared that, with your poetry, you did begin sharing it on social media and then realised that it was diminishing it. So I’m wondering how you make time for that now?

PS: I think that what often takes the hit is that creative hidden hobby work, I suppose. And actually that creative work is often quite threatened by a boxset because it can just be easier just to totally switch off and run to the telly, which is no bad thing. It’s absolutely great for some people to be able to do that.

If I ever get a snatch of time at the moment, I’ve been trying to prioritise reading, and specifically reading fiction rather than non-fiction. I read so much. I typically read a lot of non-fiction and I read so much for the book, and right now, like a lot of people, I’m craving a bit of escapism.

I think when maybe I’m in a period of slightly less pressure work, then that’s when I’ll probably try to make a bit more space to write poetry again, but because I’ve been playing with these boundaries of sharing and trying to really look at why we share what we share, and the impact that sharing has on us as the sharer, not the people necessarily receiving the information, because we talk a lot about the affects of comparison-itus where you compare yourself to other people on social media, or we talk about how other people’s accounts, or following what other people are doing, how that can make us feel.

But I wanted to look at how doing the actual sharing makes us feel. What’s the impact of that? And taking something out of the public realm when I could see that it had an audience is something that maybe felt quite counterproductive, but also quite important to do. And listen, that’s not to say that I won’t share my poetry again, just that I felt like I needed, or should be giving myself something that was not mined for public arrival, or potentially for profit. That was just something that I did that got my brain going and made me feel content and productive, but that no one else was seeing.

And I think maybe when you’re freelance, that probably is a challenge. How do you separate your hobbies from your work? Particularly if that work is creative.

MD: Yeah, and that other side of it is constantly looking to monetise those things and how that can really blur the edges. But it seems that, throughout your career, it’s been important to have those things that you’re doing just for you, and they’ve happened to lead to different opportunities work-wise. But it can be an interesting balance making time for them, when they might not have the immediate dividends, or never, and sometimes that’s the beauty of them as well.

PS: Yes, and I think that just plays into this idea of the importance of delayed gratification, which again is something that we have maybe moved away from as the world has become something that delivers constant dopamine hits or short-term gratification. And I think it means that we’re living life quite short-term now, which really doesn’t help those worries around if we’re doing life right. When you’re living things in the immediate, it doesn’t really give you much space to step back and interrogate and look at the long-term goals.

MD: Yeah, well, I think that your book so beautifully goes into corners that many of us haven’t been able to explore for ourselves. We can sort of hear that blanket, how do we know if you’re doing it right? And you unveil so many wonderful parts that we can interrogate, so thank you for doing that. And I think what is so wonderful is the conclusion that you reach about not the focus being on doing it right, but doing it rightful, and I wondered if you could maybe share a little bit about what rightful means for you?

PS: When I started writing the book, I knew that I didn’t want to answer these problems because that would feel really disingenuous, and also completely contradictory. Because so much of what I’m arguing for is that we need to sit with discomfort, or we need to sit with the idea of something being unfinished, or we need to sit with the idea that we are not one whole, or that we cannot be our most social selves, or our most productive selves, or constantly happy if we want to live a contented life.

And what I kept finding when I was finishing these essays, is just this very unsexy idea of compromise or narrowing the lens to look at, not so much what everyone else was doing, but to look at how our behaviour was serving ourselves and how it was serving society as a whole. And I don’t mean that in a grandiose way, but just quite literally, what are we putting in and what are we getting out? And how are those things in tension or in balance?

And it just really led me to this idea that we shouldn’t be looking at some static, uniform, right life, but at the idea of life being rightful or, to use Winnicott’s phrase, good enough, which is something that I also look at. That really takes off some of the pressure, I think, when you look at it like that. It’s something that the behavioural scientist, Paul Dolan, calls satisficing. So instead of maximising life, you satisfice it. And by that, he just means finding something satisfactory. Something good enough. And to me, that’s something rightful.

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.

MD: Pandora reminds us not to be narrowed by what we have or haven’t done, whether we are getting it right or fumbling along, but rather being satisfied with our own versions of enough, and continuing to step closer to what is rightful to us.

As she writes in her new book How Do We Know If We’re Doing It Right?, “The concept of more is something we need to turn inward as much as outward. To accept that gain involves loss, that to compromise is not the same as being compromised, that sensitivity does not eliminate resilience.”

I’m Madeleine Dore, and that’s what I hope to share with this podcast. For you to find your own way, be it with resilience, with compromise, with that’s rightful.