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The Tools at Hand with Harrison Gardner Podcast
The Question I've Been Trying to Answer for 20 Years

The Question I've Been Trying to Answer for 20 Years

The Tools at Hand with Harrison Gardner vor 1 Monat

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57:59

When I was 19, I went to Kenya because I wanted to make myself
useful in the world. Instead, I found myself caught in the middle
of the 2007–08 post-election violence and came home with a
feeling of helplessness and a question that has stayed with me
for almost 20 years: why do some people keep believing their
actions matter while others eventually stop trying?

Years later, I went back to the journal I kept during that time
and started looking at the experience differently. In this
episode, I explore Martin Seligman’s famous dog experiment and
the psychology of learned helplessness, and how our sense of
agency is shaped by repeated experience.

I also look at where I see the same pattern today, from Irish
farmers dealing with wool that has almost no economic value to a
generation growing up with every global crisis in their pockets.
And I ask what it might take to unlearn helplessness and start
finding the levers that still work.

Pre-order my new book HEAT-SHELTER-WATER-FOOD

https://www.harrisongardner.net/heat-shelter-water-food

Support the podcast on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/HarrisonGardner

CONNECT WITH ME

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_harrisongardner

Website: https://www.harrisongardner.net/

Chapters

00:00 Intro: Kenya and Helplessness

01:03 Welcome Back

01:40 Why I Went to Kenya

04:10 Kenya's 2007 Election Crisis

13:03 Reading My Diary From Kenya

24:04 Martin Seligman's Dog Experiment

26:30 Learned Helplessness and Agency

28:00 Why I Thought I Could Change the World

31:20 Finding the Same Pattern Everywhere

33:42 The Irish Wool Problem

38:10 What Today's Generation Is Learning

42:30 What Really Happened in Kenya?

48:20 The Work That Actually Matters

52:50 Looking Back Twenty Years Later

55:40 Finding the Levers Around Us

56:50 My New Book: Heat, Shelter, Water, Food

57:35 Credits

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