Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Kara: Okay my friends, I am really excited for today’s interview with now of course, literally anytime I introduce someone new, I read how to pronounce her name. I’m like, I got it. And then I get on the screen or the mic and I immediately start being like, oh my God, I’m going to do it wrong. Like it’s just your brain, the brain never stops. So this is Kate Bowler. Is that right? Got it right. Okay.

Kate is a I don’t even know how many bestsellers you’ve written, like was like 73, like so has is a bestselling author times a million. But I really love her work because it is just I think the antidote to so much of the toxic positivity, spiritual gaslighting, blah, blah, blah stuff that we all know we do not tolerate on this podcast, but is a big part of women’s support space in the world. Anyway, so I’m so excited to talk to Kate, but first we have to do the gauntlet we make everyone do where we make women brag about themselves because more women should brag about themselves. So Kate, please brag about yourself. Tell us who you are and what you do in the most bragging, impressive way possible.

Kate: Okay. God, this is hard as a woman and as a Canadian. This is going and as a Mennonite who was raised to be the sweet and humble. Just find me scraping the ground where I belong. I am a professor at Duke University. I teach cultural history, in particular like religious stories about how we tell ourselves what we deserve in terms of health, wealth, and happiness. So I’m very niche in that I have interviewed most televangelists in this country, which is a lot of fun. I’ve written five New York Times bestsellers and eight books, so I write a lot of books. And I’ve got a podcast I really love called Everything Happens, not everything happens for a reason, just everything happens, period. But lately my deep love is I’ve got a great community on Substack and it’s just full of kind, smart people who are into education and over the culture warring, I think.

Kara: So I know that you have been through a lot in the last 10 years. You have had let me see if I get these all right, stage four cancer diagnosis, chronic pain, and then figuring out what life looks like after that crisis. And you have written in some ways that the crisis was easier to deal with than what came after the crisis. And I’d love for you to talk about that because I think partly because I’m so often coaching women who are sort of like, well, I just I got to get through this and then like everything’s going to be easy. Right if I just solve this problem, then it’ll all be easy. I’ll deal with my health or my wellbeing after work slows down. Obviously, work is not the same as a stage four cancer crisis, but I just think this sort of like that human like, I just got to get to the next thing or after this, then I’ll be transported to the fairytale land where everything’s always wonderful. So I’d love to hear about that experience.

Kate: Sure, I do think there’s two versions we get. One is we have a future forecasting of a perfect self who seems great and she’s really got it going on. Or we’ve got this nostalgic back-to-before self and as someone who has had, I’m on my ninth belly button after many abdominal surgeries, like there is this glamorized version of like, I will I just have to I have to bounce back, I have to get back to before. And I think looking to the past and to the future doesn’t give us enough cultural language for the achiness we experience now as a kind of hunger. And I think this is a place where both of our work really intersects is how women experience that hunger.

And I just found as a historian there’s very little cultural language for what I call the ache, is this kind of bittersweet longing that acts like an engine. It can be if harnessed well a very powerful engine inside of us, but normally what we’re doing is we’re holding the dagger from the wrong end and we’re just using it to tell ourselves a story that we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be hungry, we shouldn’t feel like there’s some missing piece. But I think it’s just important for us all to know that this achiness inside of us, I love the German word for it, Zensukt. It’s like this bittersweet longing. And that the longing isn’t like a glitch in the system. It’s a fabric of our humanity. So if we start there, I think we can begin with a more honest place than, wow, I wish I should have been better by now or let me just get back to before.

Kara: I love that. We didn’t plan this, but I literally just recorded an episode two hours ago in the same studio session called “the human void” because that’s what I call it is like that you are always going to have that void, but it’s not there’s something ache is a much nicer term. But there’s like but I’m a little more in your face. You’re a little more gentle.

Kate: But like I like that about you though.

Kara: Right, we got to be on your own brand. But that there’s that the problem is we’re constantly trying to fill the void, right? We’re like, I’m going to put this thing in the void, I’ll put that thing in the void. If I get this, if I do that, if I have this relationship, if this person changes, if I look different, like I’m finally going to be able to fill the void. But the void is like a black hole. You can never fill the void. And you know, I think the thing that we are both teaching with just different words is like you have to accept the void. It’s just part of being human is to be eternally dissatisfied.

So I’m curious what you see. They’ll, when they see this interview, they’ll have just heard my whole opinion about how you deal with the void. But for you, like for the ache, whether it’s in your personal life or just as you think about it conceptually, like what do you think changes when we’re able to just accept that like no thing we do or thing we can get or like there is no making this go away. What happens when we make peace with it?

Kate: Yeah, and I had a couple different versions of that story I was struggling with. One is I’m a historian, I teach at the university, but I also teach in the Divinity School where I teach pastors. And these are people who go out and talk to people in the most tender and difficult transition moments in their life. And I think one story that we’ve all heard a lot is a faithful person of almost any religious persuasion is a peaceful and satisfied person who has no missing pieces and that like God will ultimately fill every missing piece. And I will just say, our marketing on that is poor because it’s just not true.

Kara: Think of St. Augustine.

Kate: I have a big fan of the Lord my God, but I will say that like the solving every problem is not really on the list. So I would say imagining that is unfaithful is not a helpful story. I think imagining it as being a bad woman is also very I think that we in that version have accepted the cultural narrative that a woman’s job is to basically become a professional happiness manager, is to run around and make sure that nobody else around us feels missing pieces, any aches and it’s our job to immediately look into the eyes of everyone who’s ever loved us and be like, do you want a snack? Is the air temperature okay?

Kara: What can I put in your void for you? How can I fill it for you?

Kate: Yes. Exactly. I will I will fill your void. You will never be a hungry hippo again. Yeah, I think a story about being a bad faithful person, a bad woman. For me, it also landed on the “am I a bad cancer survivor?” I mean, shouldn’t someone who’s lost so much just be so grateful that nothing could ever cause me to say that I am empty ever again?

And I think one of the weirdest parts about continuing to live is that you realize that this hunger persists and to name it not a deficiency, but to name it life itself. I actually think and this is I think another place where our work really is very similar is I don’t think I would have become a feminist had I not really been facing a life limiting illness. Is because it was only when I couldn’t say, oh, I can just run around meeting everyone’s needs. Don’t worry, there’ll always be more. When I had to say, this is limited, I only have a certain amount, would it be still okay if I could call this mine? And that honestly is what made me a feminist.

Kara: That’s so powerful. And I want to talk about that. This is maybe a little side tangent, but I think it’s important. It’s wild the way that women’s socialization operates such that the minute you get a new identity like cancer survivor, the first thing you start worrying about is am I doing it wrong?

Kate: I totally agree.

Kara: It’s like I just became a new thing. The first thing I need to think about is how I’m probably doing it wrong. Like whatever it is.

Kate: Shame, shame, shame.

Kara: Right, that’s just like such a, I like have chills that’s just such a good illustration of how changing your circumstance won’t change your brain. Like, right? Like we’re socialized so deeply that literally you’re facing a life threatening illness and your brain is like, you know, we should really think about, I don’t know if you’re performing this identity correctly. You should probably feel bad about that on top of everything else. That self surveillance that women are socialized into is just so deep. It just makes me imagine you’d be like, I don’t know, like right, the victim of some other trauma, like in a war being like, am I being a bad prisoner of war right now? Should I be like, like I feel like that is the insanity of our brains.

Kate: I like that so much. I’m positive that’s true. I think if there was a video crew following me for the first month of my catastrophic illness, you would have thought that I was starring in a reality show about a woman who gets cancer, but is like pretty grateful for it. She’s just learning lessons left, right, and center.

Kara: She’s not devastated. She’s totally in control. I’m imagining like a woman who’s a zombie being like, am I even eating these brains the right way? Should I be more into brains?

Okay, let’s talk about this thing you said about the feminist because I think that’s so fascinating and that’s such a like different women based on whatever’s happening in their life hit the point at different times, but like most people hit the point at some point of being like, oh, this is unsustainable. Right? Like I am not able to continue trying to fill everyone else’s void. But I would love to hear like how did that lead you to feminism? I you know, there’s like an implicit way it makes sense, but I would just love to hear you talk a little bit more about what was that like for you? Like was that an identity that you had previously been like, I’m neutral on or like, oh, I’m definitely not that? I would just love to hear about that.

Kate: Yeah. I think I’d always thought intellectually, I understand feminism and I am on board.

Kara: I was agree we should be able to vote. Like, yes, pro.

Kate: Well, also, you know, I being Canadian, I think we just have a more…

Kara: Humane default.

Kate: …setting of some sort of. I you know, my mom was really a role model for me because she was the first woman tenured at her institution. She became a professor of music at the University of Manitoba. And I watched what it cost her to grow up with virtually no expectation that she would go to college and then to get a PhD and then to try to create maternity policies and to try to realize that there’s not an institutional commitment to you as a woman, even if you make commitments to it.

And I saw how fulfilling and difficult it could be to reach for things that would then be quite painful. And so when I went on my own PhD journey, I really thought, oh, I’m just walking a path that’s been paved before. Not realizing of course that I would be the first woman to get pregnant at my own institution and to have to make my own maternity policies and it’s still not a very common thing to be a woman in that field.

But it really wasn’t until I was very sick and the immediate assumption was, well, if you only really have a year max to live, shouldn’t you just drop everything and just be at home with your family? And that sounds like a wonderful thing if there is not this churn inside, this desire to have a pure, separate space for one’s own brain to create. And so when I really thought this would be like my last Christmas and my last, I had a choice. I could stay at home all the time wrapped in blankets and having meaningful conversations. Or I could spend part of my day writing a hilariously niche book on evangelical lady celebrities that would go on to sell 500 library copies. And I knew it wasn’t a book that people would read.

It was a conversation I had with a couple of my colleagues who could see how torn I was and they said, Kate, you keep trying to make everything add up. But even if the worst thing happens, and they pointed, we were in like a library and pointed all of the like work around us. They said, even if the worst things happens, the people who love you can still find you here. And they gestured to my work.

And I thought, what a soulful way to be able to return to vocation with a new language, with a new category, and a new commitment to myself that actually it’s watching women try that is the fundamental story behind feminism and to allow them the freedom to do so. And that I would have never allowed myself that freedom.

Kara: That’s so interesting because I think sometimes there’s this well meaning advice that’s like, people on their deathbed often regret they didn’t spend time with their family and they regret they spent it on work and all of that. But I’ve always sort of and obviously like I love my family and I do want to spend time with them. But I’ve always felt like, yeah, but I think that those people were like accountants at a firm doing work they didn’t care about, right? Like, yeah, I think I would regret it if I worked to the point that my husband was like, we’re getting divorced because I never see you or something, right?

But like meaningful work can be a big meaningful part of your life and the idea that work just gets lumped into this one big category and then as you’re saying, of course, it would be like, well, if you only have so much time to live, you want to be with your family. And I, right? And you might be like, well, yes, some of the time, my brain and my creative work and my purpose, all of those things are still very important to me and I’m not, it’s not like, oh, because I’ve reached potential death, now I return to my essential nature as a woman and I stay in the home. And that’s such also a fantasy as if you’d be like, if I were in the house in a blanket for a year, my husband and I would be having many more fights than meaningful conversations because I would be losing my mind.

Kate: No. I didn’t want to be eclipsed by something I didn’t choose and that would prevent me from having any of the qualities that actually you can’t just have, you have to nurture. Like for me, it’s curiosity or rigorous thinking. I need words on a page. I can’t just ex nihilo have thoughts like that. And so what I ended up doing was, and I know this is so weird, but I was so I was at the Atlanta Cancer Center, it was the Winship Cancer Center for a really long time, almost two years. And I had to go once a week. So I started scheduling interviews with lady celebrities at the hospital and they would come to the hospital and I would and they’d come in my little chemo area and I’d say thank you so much for coming and I would interview them.

Kara: What did like the chemo nurses think was happening? Like…

Kate: Oh my gosh, they loved it. They were like, actually one of them we’re still really good friends. We’ve been on vacation together and they were like, wow, you held office hours.

Kara: I have like such a stereotype of a little evangelical lady in my brain right now. Like I’m just imagining the big hair and high heels and just being like into this area, which I’m sure is not really what was going on. So after you got through that crisis, how did you sort of mentally think about or cope with that experience of like, oh, I guess it’s not going to be crisis then over and then what was that like for you?

Kate: It was difficult to realize that ache, that void we’ve been talking about, still persisted and that it would require more than, and this is why I became kind of very interested in our happiness culture. Like, so then am I supposed to just go back to a kind of happiness, knowing that happiness just psychologically speaking is not just like, oh, positive feelings. Happiness is like a sense of ease. It’s the accumulation of nice things going your way. That’s because the word happiness comes from the word hap, like happenstance.

So happiness is what happens to you when things are adding up. And I was like, well, if I don’t think I’m going to end up having a kind of life where I can regularly be that happy. And I still have this constant ache. So what beautiful thing, and this is just something that I am really passionate about is like cultural myth busting and then also what beautiful thing can we still expect in a life that isn’t always happy? And that’s part of what got me so interested in all the research I did about joy.

Kara: Yeah, I would love to hear about that. I think in that same episode about the human void, I talked about the distinction that I usually make, which I think is like related but doesn’t fully map onto this about happiness as like a philosophical alignment in your life and happiness as like a fleeting emotion that happens to you and that we conflate them, right? So it’s like you might be living a life that is aligned with your values where you’re doing meaningful work, you have relationships with people who love you, like you are fulfilling your purpose for being here as a human. But then you feel irritated at your husband. You’re like, well, I’m not happy, so maybe all these choices are wrong and I need to change them all, right?

As opposed to like, well, no, I love that etymology of like happiness is happenstance. It’s like I teach it as your thoughts causing it, but it’s like either way that’s a fleeting emotion that you can’t rely on or spend your whole life trying to build. But so I’d love to hear it feels like you’re introducing another concept in terms of talking about joy as separate from happiness. So how do you differentiate between those and why do you think that’s an important distinction?

Kate: I think the you’re entirely right that the best version of happiness is that you can create a through line between your circumstances and your values and that even if you’re not always having a positive feeling at that time that you can kind of see that through line. I think also it points to the fact that happiness being an accumulation of context, like small nice things going your way or the promotion, the relationship that you always wanted, lovely things that we hope for. And sometimes we get these whole seasons in the sun where our life just really does go our way. I do think you’re also pointing to the fact that like our happiness culture can be very fragile.

And I think that’s what a “good vibes” culture is. The ugly side of it is because it’s so fragile, because it’s really a Jenga tower of nice things happening to you, one wrong move and it can just knock the whole thing over. And it really sets apart then the difference between happiness and joy. Joy is not relaxing like happiness is. Joy is like a big, bright, enlivening feeling. It feels like you’re startled awake.

And while happiness is kind of slow math that builds up with nice things happening, joy is a moment. It’s a moment in which there’s lots of kind of descriptions of it. They really touch on existential things. It feels like our soul says yes. It affirms our goodness. Yes, it’s good to be alive. And because it hits our dopamine or reward system, it’s so wonderful, but it also engages our stress system, which is so honestly very weird.

It’s a design flaw in the being a human. It’s so interesting. So while you can’t be happy and sad at the same time, you can be joyful and sad, which is a super neat trick. And it really helps explain why you can be going through a very difficult time. So like for me in the hospital or you could be at a funeral and the pastor mispronounces your mom’s name for the fourth time. And the first time it was weird and then the second time you started to feel the twitches and then by the fourth you’ve got silent tears streaming down your face because it’s so hilarious and she would have loved it and you can hate yourself for laughing in that moment. But it surprises us because joy is something we can’t engineer.

And I just think that’s a nice relief to know that we can hope for happiness, we can hope for things going our way, but when we can’t, we can know that we can still be completely interrupted by joy, which can take us from zero to 100.

Kara: That’s so important because a lot of, I feel like a lot of the coaching I do ends up being trying to convince people that they maybe don’t know for sure exactly how they’re going to feel forever in the future. Right? Like there’s such a desire to be sure about the future that it’s like your brain would rather be like, nope, I’m positive you are going to be miserable forever, rather than like admit that there could be that surprise of joy.

And I wonder if you experience either in yourself or just when you have these conversations, I think a lot of women who are, there’s just a lot of people who are sort of hypervigilant, right? Are like unwilling to let themselves experience happiness or joy or any positive emotion because of that fear of the other shoe falling. And I wonder how you think about that, especially as somebody who has had some like pretty unpleasant surprises happen to you.

Kate: Yes, not all surprises are good. It’s true. No, and I think when too many bad things have happened, because we are prediction making, coherence seeking, pattern recognizing machines, we like to anticipate a future that we’ve already had and always want to prepare for. And for most of us, it’s negative. A friend experiences a tragedy and then all of a sudden we’re just quietly rehearsing how we would manage the same situation.

And it does become very difficult and I do think especially for women to imagine joy as a surprise that will be an enormous relief. Here’s the expectation that would change if you thought the joy was going to happen to you. First of all, you’d have to let go of predicting that every horrible thing is inevitable. You would have to probably surrender a little bit of because one of the great joy killers is not sadness, as we know, because it can still coexist with sadness. It’s actually routine, efficiency and I think what you’re naming, this hyperprediction in which nothing can get in and an unsurprisable person.

And I know we don’t want to be surprised because we’re scared and being scared makes us very brittle. But if we could let go of that just for a second, I think what we would find is that we can look for joy in a couple ways. One, it will, it touches gratitude because it will make us say thank you. So next time you find yourself saying thank you in your heart, just notice if something brought you joy. The second, it makes us hopeful because that’s the voice that has to shout down despair and fear and every bad thing is always going to happen. Of course it happens to me.

But the thing I really want for women is that it inspires delight and we are not used to being delighted. Like it hits our weird wiring because it doesn’t come standard issue. Like joy is not the way I picture it is like a horrible Mennonite Christmas where like everybody gets the same pair of tube socks and you get tube socks and you get tube socks. Like it’s you don’t get, nobody gets the same present when it comes to joy. Joy has to be able to light you up in your absurd specificity. And I think because we don’t usually want to let people know what lights us up and we don’t want to be able to expect anything except the worst, it does make joy a little harder to break into some people’s houses.

Kara: The break into your house is just a great. Joy is like, I’m going to get in there. Don’t think I won’t.

So you talk about microjoys. I’d love to hear more about that because I think maybe that’s a little more accessible for people who are listening to this and are just like, I don’t know, man. I don’t know how joy is going to get into this house.

What are you talking about? Especially since everybody who listens to me are, they’re all, you know, like myself, little control freaks who listen to this podcast because they’re like, I’m going to create my feelings with my thoughts. So the idea that they’re going to be surprised by joy is going to be very distressing to them. So tell us about microjoys.

Kate: I totally hear you. I agree. And they do, you know, it happens in big moments, right? Like babies and weddings and whatever. But as long as we don’t think that these are guarantees, anything that loosens us up a little bit and reintroduces delight is going to make room for joy. So that’s why people love dance parties and they love singing louder than they planned to and they like impulse buying something that reminds them of when they were a kid because the feeling of joy is that everything matters and nothing matters. For this second, everything is lovely. And so if we can look for it in the little dance, the person who really makes you laugh, just know that’s not just like the happiness math where we’re trying to like, great, no, buy 200 of them.

Kara: Now I have to hang out with this person every Thursday, so joy is guaranteed.

Kate: Make it into a system. So as long as we let go of our robot self for a second, just notice the small delights and then try to imagine that you’re the kind of beautiful person that these things can continue for it to happen to. Karl Barth said joy is a surprise, right? It’s a gift, but it’s also a task. Like if we treat it like it’s a personality trait that we can cultivate, I think we can sort of carve out more space so it’s like joy like a little butterfly can land.

Kara: It’s making me think about the way in which so many of the women who like listen to this podcast or work with me or whatever, they really want to have more presence in their lives, but they’re doing the thing that creates the exact opposite of that, which is right, constantly trying to like plan and maximize and joy max or something present being like presence maxing, like you’re trying to like optimize or ruminate their way there whatever, right?

And like the whole so there’s just there’s something that seems to me connected between the idea like in order to know you’re experiencing joy, you have to be present. Like joy is happening in your body. It’s an experience like whether it’s in your soul as well, if you believe in a soul, but it’s like a thing that is, it doesn’t come just from thinking about something, right? It’s like comes from being present in your life, having an experience. And something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is novelty and like how novelty impacts your brain. As I get older, I think and I’m more like in a routine and like I now know who I’m going to marry because I’ve already done that and I like know where I’m going to live and I, you know, it’s like there’s less of these big questions of like, who knows, I’m going out on a Thursday and maybe this person is my partner or maybe I’m going to live move to Morocco.

So I’ve been thinking about novelty and the way that novelty like impacts memory formation and changes how we experience time. That’s why like the first day of your vacation feels a million hours long and by the last day it goes by really fast because you’re like more used to it now. It’s not as novel and so that’s, there’s something…

Kate: I love that.

Kara: There’s something here that seems like there’s they’re connected.

Kate: Yeah, and one like exercise sometimes I ask people to do is if you just imagine your predictive life, like your zig and your zag, just you know have your regular zigs, what could be a small zag? What introduces a small surprise, a small novelty to that? It is because you’re right, it restores an experience of time and attention back to you, as long as we don’t use those things as yet another doer self robot self maximize self.

Kara: But that’s what’s so great is you can’t, I don’t think. Like the way you’re describing it, it’s like you can’t operationalize joy. You can like create conditions that would allow it to maybe flourish a little bit more, like bring your awareness to it, but you can’t be like, I have my vitamins and then I do my Peloton and then I have my joy moment. And then it’s time to do my emails.

Kate: 8:07, I experience transcendent joy for three minutes and then it’s time to do my emails. I think that’s why joy isn’t just a positive emotion. It’s a story that we have to tell ourselves. And the story is, it is good. Not just for somebody else, but it is good for you to be alive. Your life is not just worth living, your life is worth loving because you have an enormous capacity to be fully alive. And just letting yourself like just if it feels like just letting your guard down.

For me, the reason I felt that to be such a relief is I am such a doer. Like I will make a system and a plan for everything, but it was in my worst moments and frankly my worst behavior where I was like, screw this, I hate everybody. I don’t want to do, I like nothing I did worked exhaustion and heartbreak. It was in moments like that I’ve experienced really like in the hospital in weird moments, I have felt visited by joy and that created a belief.

And the belief is the story that our lives are still there’s a voice that can for a moment silence our fear and our despair. And I think partly why this is so precious to me is I grew up with a very depressed dad. I’ve had a lot of bouts of depression in my own life. I know what diseases of despair look like. We sometimes get very fleeting images of what it would be like if we didn’t feel that way. So when we get them, we have to treat it like a little miracle, like a little thing that reminds us that we are like capable of that kind of delight. And we won’t always get a lot of our minders, but when we do, we just have to be able to say that, that was joy.

Kara: Yeah, and I think part of what’s beautiful about this is it is supposed to be fleeting. It’s by its nature fleeting, right? I think part of the reason, it’s like we don’t want to let it in because then what if we can’t make it last? There’s sort of a I think that if you can accept that all emotions are transient, right? Like we’re often I feel like people learn about emotions are like, okay, cool. So I’m definitely I’m going to let my allow my negative emotions so those can go away, but then I’m going to get to keep the positive ones, right? I’m like, no, they’re actually all transient.

But I think there’s something about like, if you can stop believing you’re supposed to always feel that way, then you can allow that it will be the surprise. It will come up and then it will go. It’s fleeting. It’s like a rainbow or whatever, a butterfly, right? It’s like not only can not be predicted or controlled, but it’s not dangerous. I think it’s like almost like people don’t want to, they’re like, I don’t want to let myself feel good because then I’ll be disappointed when I stop feeling good. But if you just practice believing ahead of time that you’re not supposed to always feel good, it’s actually very freeing. People find it depressing, but if you get to the other side of that, it’s freeing, right? Because then when it comes, you’re like, what a beautiful visitation. And then when it leaves, you’re like, right, of course, it wasn’t ever supposed to stay.

Kate: I totally agree. I totally agree. And then you can also use that information to judge people who say, I’m joyful all the time. And you’re like, you’re not actually.

Kara: You’ve had a stroke actually. You’re having a medical emergency and you should get that looked at. So I know you have a new book out. Can you tell folks a little bit about the book and of course where to find it?

Kate: Oh sure. The book is called Joyful Anyway and it’s about this discovery. It’s my research and personal kind of memoir around trying to discover joy. Its weird qualities, how strange and mysterious the ways to kind of put yourself in the way of joy and I think the first part of it too is just about how to sort of find your way through some of the obstacles that stand in the way before we can be somebody who screams, Choose joy on the internet.

Kara: Which we all aspire to do. That’s a job all of us should have. Choose joy. Thank you so much. So everyone, obviously go buy Kate’s book. You don’t get five New York Times bestsellers by not being a good author. So go buy her book. Where can people find you as well? Substack, it sounds like you’ve got a Substack.

Kate: I do. I’ve got a great community on Substack and I’m on Instagram and socials at Kate C. Bowler.

Kara: Amazing. Thank you for coming on today.

Kate: This was really a lot of fun.

Kara: A moment of joy, in fact.