Belonging, Honesty, and the Art of Radical Peopling with Becca Campbell – SMJ 004

You're about to Learn ...

• Why belonging starts inside you … and how to claim it.
• A fresh way to think about goals you secretly hate.
• The surprising power of asking loved ones, “Is this what you need?”
• What seeking the most efficient expression of self actually looks like.
• Why changing your mind is actually the highest form of respect.
• How radical honesty doesn't have to mean being careless with people.
• The art of amplifying others – and how to know when you're doing it.

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Resources and Items Mentioned in This Episode

Where to Find Becca Campbell Online

• Becca on Substack
• Becca's Business, Matching Sweaters Travel Company

Timestamps and Topics

• [00:03:21] How to build a life around the brain you have.
• [00:05:07] “Sloughing off the drag”.
• [00:07:18] Why Becca stopped setting goals and what she chases instead.
• [00:13:29] The one thing all humans share.
• [00:17:31] “The belonging starts with me”.
• [00:22:18] The radical parenting check-in most people are too afraid to try.
• [00:26:32] What truly amplifying someone looks like.
• [00:27:18] Why “I will not lie to you” changes everything in a friendship.
• [00:41:02] Changing your mind isn't inconsistency.
• [00:56:11] Why allowing complexity in the world means allowing it in yourself.

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Transcript

Joel: Welcome, Becca. Are you ready to get funky with me?

Becca: I'm ready to get funky.

Joel: I knew you were gonna say yes – that was a leading question, total softball. And you knocked it out of the park. One for one, batting a thousand. Okay, before we started recording we talked about: where do we begin? Multipotentialists like us who are interested in and fascinated by a bazillion things – where do we begin? I suggested something and your eyes got big, like, “ooh, yeah, I like that.” So we're gonna start here. What does it mean to build a life around how your brain actually works rather than forcing your brain to fit the life you want?

Becca: The whole concept requires that you actually know your brain. Not all the mechanisms, but you have to see the patterns. For so long when you're little, you're not even conscious of the patterns. You're just like, I'm living the life that I'm seeing everybody else live. It's like the early developmental stages of belonging.

Becca: Once you start to get that consciousness around who you are and what you're doing with your life, the actual way that your brain is organizing data, reflection, and experience starts to become clear. But then – I should use my I-statements – I noticed that the life I was seeing everybody else do seemed harder, less aligned, just clunkier than the way my brain organizes things. That switch is a developmental thing, too. I don't see a lot of nine-year-olds being like, “Yeah, this doesn't work for me. I'm going to do it my own way.” So it literally happens over time. At least for me, it had slowdown periods and accelerated periods.

Becca: Being in relationship with myself in that way – stopping looking at someone else's methods and starting to look at the way my brain is more efficiently designed to do a certain thing – it's eye-opening, because you start to slough off the drag. The only thing I can think of is: slough off the drag. It's like you're swimming with a backpack, and you think, well, everyone seems to be swimming with a backpack, so I'll also swim with a backpack. But they aren't really swimming with a backpack – that's just the perception of how hard it feels. The second you realize you're far more efficient if you just let go of the backpack and swim the maybe wild and chaotic way that you swim, you're actually much faster in that wildness. And then you have this whole other world open up.

Joel: There's the pinto engine and the porous body – or driving with the brakes on. Lots of car analogies about speed and efficiency.

Becca: Yes, that too. Once I really looked into how my brain does things – how do I do relationships? I do the exact same thing every time. And I know I do because I see the same moments. I'm like, oh, this is that moment between friends where we're at the next level, the intimacy-gathering or whatever. Anyway, it has been and continues to be a fascinating process to make my life follow my own efficiency rather than just look at a goal and say, that's what I want. It's one of the reasons I hate goals. A goal has this endpoint and a prescribed structure for how to do a thing. When I get there, it's going to change again. So I just stop calling it a goal. I'm seeking the most efficient expression of self.

Joel: How many categories are there for the way a brain could work? You've thought about this more than I have. In all the humans you've interacted with – and tell me if this is somewhere you don't want to go – are there five core ways that a brain can work? A thousand different ways? Give me a sense of what you've encountered, because you and I see the world a bit differently. That's one of the things I love about us: you constantly educate and inform me. You're like, “Joel, guess what? Most people don't experience the world the way you do.” And I'm like, oh. That is super useful to know because I'm often in a bubble.

Becca: So this is bizarrely revealing, and you'll have to ask me questions if I start to float off into metacognition. I think of everything as a context. When somebody comes to me – let's say I'm meeting someone for the first time – I quickly give you the context: how do I know you, what are you about, how do you want to know me? It's more about them first. I'm almost doing an assessment: does this make sense for both of our leveling up? And that sounds weird, but it's 100% unconscious.

Becca: If somebody is not interesting to me – or I can notice that I'm not interesting to them – it's almost like there's this moment where I think: let's not waste time. You carry on to find your people and I'll carry on to find mine. It's so neutral. It's not even like, I don't like you. It's more like, I want to be the next iteration for you. If you can't find yourself iterating around me, let's shake hands and go to the bathroom. We're always at a party when I say that.

Becca: Once we find out that this seems like a generative and iterative moment, I move into: can you hear what I'm saying so that it's not confusing or annoying for you to use this interaction for yourself? That sounds backward, but I'll seek to be understood so that people will feel like I could understand them. I do that instead of trying to understand them first. That part's not hard for me – I can take in a lot of information very quickly. I don't know if that has to do with trauma-based skills I learned or just the way my autistic brain works. But I'm card-cataloging every single thing that's happening, more than I wish I was.

Becca: When it comes to encountering different brains, I'm not labeling it as “you process audibly, you process visually” – those are helpful if you're in a psych program and you need to write a paper. But I find that everybody is so complex that labeling without context doesn't make any sense, because most people will say, “Oh, this doesn't all apply to me,” and then it gets thrown out. You can come up to me and say, “I'm Myers-Briggs INFJ, I'm a Virgo, I like to eat orange food.” Until we get into a synthesizing mode, that's a social tool to box ourselves into places where we can agree to agree. I don't actually need to agree to agree. I'm totally fine disagreeing. If the disagreement is just you trying to persuade me because you think you're right, fine. But if you're giving me information as an argument – “hey, think about this, have you thought about this?” – that is beneficial to me even if we don't agree. Great, context.

Becca: The way that my brain works can't be separated from the experiences I've had, what first language I spoke, whether my parents were in my life. There are so many other things at play. My face is talking, and my face and brain are very close to each other. Most people say, “Hey, you're very cerebral.” And I'm like, well, that's because if I didn't talk, you wouldn't be able to intuit the body sensations happening. My face and brain are close to each other.

Joel: That might be one of my favorite things you've ever said. Just delightful. I mean, if that weren't the case, you'd probably be dead. What about the ways that we humans – at least the way you experience us – are the same? Do we process similarly or come to similar worldviews? Is that easier to talk about?

Becca: Sure. I have thoughts about it and I have experiences of it, which are going to be two different things.

Joel: Give me what you got.

Becca: I believe we all have a desire for belonging. The levels to which we desire, seek, and achieve that are wildly different. By belonging, I mean the feeling that you are to be here – not that you have a purpose, but that you are in a group of something: humans, your bioregion, your people. That sense of belonging is something I think we all share in varying degrees. People who are even clinically sociopathic – armchair psychology version – had that desire and it just got stamped down. Even hermits are in a collection, just not our collection. That similarity drives a lot of behavior.

Becca: If there's a mismatch or energy not aligned, I would usually identify it as: how you want to belong and how I want to belong are probably just not the same. We both want something of belonging – we just don't see the same way to get it or receive it. I know that love is the popular romantic way to phrase that very same thing with a different word, but I don't necessarily think love needs to be part of it. Inside belonging is love. But I think belonging is the top level – that goes above feeling loved. A sense of belonging has some of that inherently there. We just don't name it the same thing.

Joel: How do you know that you are loved or that you belong when you're in community?

Becca: I'm somebody who is adding to another person's experience. You don't need to love me, love me – you don't need to say, “I love you.” That to me is just a bunch of words we've socialized ourselves to use for direct communication. But if somebody says to me, even if it's a negative thing, “I really don't like what you said about this” – job done. You've clarified to yourself what your convictions are by pushing back against me. You feel stronger in yourself because of something I showed you about yourself.

Becca: My sense of belonging and feeling loved probably has a little more neutrality around it. I just need a smaller group of people that have that reciprocal communication.

Joel: So love is reciprocity. But you can find belonging somewhere that no one else is finding belonging – you can feel like you belong here even if everybody else says you don't – because dissent is allowed. You're able to be generous in the ways that you want to be generous, or contribute in the way you want to contribute.

Becca: Yeah. I said this one of the first times we were interacting in front of that big group of people: the belonging starts with me. I bring it. If I belong to the space, I already belong to it. You don't need to deem me belonging. If I have to wait for you to validate my belonging, then my head has to be on a swivel every five seconds: do I belong, do I belong, do I belong? I'm making this a little more psychological than spiritual, but that is the feeling I think people have when they believe they have a purpose from something higher or that they're here for a reason. I don't even need the on-high part. I can just be like, yeah, I made you upset. Great. You have feelings. I can move on.

Becca: And I'm not glorifying antagonizing people – I don't love when people reject me, I'm a normal person. But every time I test the theory of where do I belong, what do I do, how do I fit, when I externalize it I always come up short. But when I have it inside – when I can find it inside myself – I'm just like, oh, cool. It doesn't mean I'm not insecure. That's a different part of me that's insecure or getting rejected. That's a little kid part of me. But for the most part, I'm constantly seeking the highest version of myself, sharing it, and seeing if that is the highest.

Joel: Do you use the word “reflect” on purpose? You said you're trying to reflect the highest version of yourself – because normally you have to look in someone else's eyes to see how you're reflected back. What did you mean by that?

Becca: It's a little bit like how namaste works – the light in me reflects the light in you, or something like that. There are versions of that: the highest blank of this reflects the highest blank of that. I've probably totally butchered it since it's not from my cultural background. But I have a version of that where if I think the best of humanity is present in this moment, am I acting as the best of humanity? People can call that a godlike figure, something bigger than myself – I really don't even care how people think about that.

Becca: It's a sense I have in my body where I'm just like, that was just not the best of myself. And it's not perfectionism. It's more like: could I be more kind? Could I be more patient? Could I ask better questions? Could I be more curious? It's so normalized now that I don't even think about it. I was given all this goo in a meat sack. What's the best way to be that goo?

Joel: Right. I mean, that's exactly it.

Becca: I'm not seeking enlightenment. I don't care about that. But if I'm constantly seeking the highest, getting there is not the point – constantly moving toward it is the point.

Joel: The highest, for you – you mentioned kindness, patience, curiosity. Are these how you're weighing yourself, whether you're being the best version of that goo?

Becca: I'm using general terms. If you want specifics: can I tell the best joke? Can I be the best parent? Can people feel the most understood and seen? Those are actually my parameters.

Joel: How do you know? Do you evaluate yourself after interactions with a person or group? Do you go through a little checklist – an assessment of how you were with them?

Becca: Yeah. And I do it to their face, too. Here's how I do parenting. My kid is 13 now. We had a rough time in the beginning – I didn't understand his limitations, and at the time I didn't understand mine. Over time I've drastically changed the way I parent, the way I interact with him, the way I see and experience him. And I literally do a check-in: “Hey, I know that this part of your life was actually really challenging. How are you feeling about our relationship right now? Do you feel like you're getting everything out of me that you need to feel supported and able to access what you want in life?”

Becca: Most people – and I can already see your face – will be like, are you asking a 13-year-old that? I 100% am. I've asked versions of that question even when he was younger, because I was like, I don't want you to have to wing this if you don't have to. I also said: if you ever have a moment where you reflect on something that felt traumatic as a kid, I'm available to hear how that affected you. He is 100% teenage boy in response. He is not going to intellectualize that with me. He goes, “No, you're a great mom,” and the conversation is literally over. But I want him to hear that I am assessing this, because I chose it. I chose to be a parent. I chose to have one child. I chose to have him with his dad, my husband, Josh.

Joel: Josh, yes.

Becca: And I just want to be front and center every time. My kid is actually pretty good about being honest with me.

Joel: I love that.

Becca: And I try to do the same with my friends, but they do not love that question. I'm like, hey, is our friendship the way you want it to be? Most of my friends are like, please stop asking me weird questions.

Joel: I love that. I can see how that would make a lot of people super uncomfortable.

Becca: Oh my gosh, because then they don't know what to say if it's not going the way they want, right? There's not a lot of –

Joel: That's when you're required to be honest, and a lot of people have a lot of issues with honesty.

Becca: Well, they don't want to hurt my feelings. They don't want our friendship to change. All the good reasons. And again, I don't put this question to most people. But I do clarify often. Some people have a tone of voice with me where they imagine my response – they pre-imagine it, and then say, “I know what you're thinking.” And then they say something I'm absolutely not thinking.

Becca: I've done this many times with several friends where I reach back out – usually over text or video – and say, “I'm going to be super clear about how I feel about you, because I am not thinking that. And if I'm the voice in your head telling you not-so-kind things about yourself, fire me in your head from that job. That's not what I'm doing.”

Becca: If you sense that I'm judgmental of you – I'm not going to lie, I have judgments of every single thing. I'm discerning about everything I'm thinking, and I'll change my mind immediately if it's not working. But that has nothing to do with you. That is only mine. So undo this muckiness you think I'm representing in your life. I can't control whether they do it or not, but I really want to be clear: I'm not judging you. This is the pot calling the kettle black if you think so. I have no stones and one big glass house.

Becca: It's hard because most people just really don't want to engage and say, “Actually, that one time on Wednesday really felt bad the way your tone of voice changed.” And I'm here for it. I'm not saying it'll be easy – I absolutely feel super self-conscious when people say I'm not being a good friend. But if you're living a life with me and I'm not being a good friend and you're not telling me and I'm not asking, what are we doing here?

Becca: Feels like a waste of time – back to my original thing. If I'm not amplifying you in some way and you don't feel like you're amplifying me in some way, what are we? History is not enough to keep it going.

Joel: There's that word – amplify. It keeps coming up for me the past few months. I'm feeling it inside as someone who I believe is starting to get better at amplifying others. And I love the feeling that you are amplifying my energy, my personality, the gifts I bring to the world. So I'm just appreciating your use of that word.

Joel: One thing I was thinking about is honesty and situational honesty. You asking that question, you being candid with people all the time and asking others to be candid – that's a tall task for a lot of people. It's very easy for you, and in fact it's very easy for me too. I've said this to many people many times: I will not lie to you. Unless someone's life is on the line – and despite my son Clark, who's 12, challenging me on this just yesterday, asking, “What about a rat? What about an ant? Would you lie to save a rat's life?” – I stick by it. Preteen logic.

Joel: I try to tell as many people as possible that approximately six or seven years ago I made a commitment to myself and everyone else that I would not lie anymore, even about small things. I've found it's really hard for people to grasp that because they're expecting some reciprocity, and I'm not asking for it. I'm just telling them – hopefully without judgment – that I will not lie to you. What kind of world, what kind of relationships could we have if everything we heard was truthful, at least as far as the person telling it? That's what I'm trying to find out, by being very public and making these declarations as much as I can.

Joel: This is why I enjoy you so much too, because I see you as someone who's just like, let's bring it all out there. Everything doesn't need to be disinfected. We don't need sunlight for everything, but let's just bring it out there, and then we can see: oh, this is really messy. Do we need to clean it up? Maybe not, but at least we know what's out there.

Becca: Yeah. It is a tall order. I do get pushback. It's not like the whole concept of radical honesty – I'm not careless with my truth-telling. I'm absolutely gauging people's ability to receive it. And I don't need everybody to tell me the truth, because I usually have a sensation ringing in me when I can tell something's not right. I don't want to call someone out and say, “You're lying to me,” because that's also weird. There's a reason they're not telling me the truth – the need they have is higher than the truth-telling to me. As I like to say about children's behavior: the behavior is seeking a need to be met.

Becca: But I'll also say this. I do consider you one of my truth-telling friends, and I don't love every truth you've told me – to be clear. It hasn't meant anything against our friendship. It just shows me what I need to protect and makes me ask why. You telling me the truth has nothing to do with you – it still has to do with me because I'm receiving it in a certain way.

Becca: So back to what you said: I think I asked you once what you thought about coaching. A long time ago, you said, “It's really hard to make a living.” I was so mad at you. I was like, you don't know me, I can do this. You did not say anything that was not true. You were not being mean. You were telling me what you'd seen in the world. My anger passed. You were right – it actually wasn't what I wanted to do in the way I had pitched it to myself and to you at the time. And there's nothing to go back to you for. You weren't trying to be a dick. But not everybody has that level of trust with everybody else. That takes time to build. And we often prioritize other things over building that type of relationship, so we don't build it even if we have the time.

Joel: So much to say about what you just said. Wow. I'm thinking of rules, and who has to or gets to explain why the rules exist – the history behind them, the context in which they're applied. I get into problems with people because if you have a problem with a rule, guideline, or boundary I'm putting down, my general expectation is that someone will push back on me. I love it when people challenge me. That's just the default way I want to interact: I want someone to have total confidence and total permission always to say, “BS – or why do you think that way? Please unpack that for me.” But most people are expecting you, in addition to the what and the how, to bring the why along for the ride. And for me, the why is the hardest and longest part of any conversation. So I tend not to introduce it, because in my mind the meta-conversation going on is, ain't nobody got time for that. If they really want to know, someone will ask. But that tends not to work so great for a lot of other people.

Joel: I've come across as someone who's not curious. And I often won't ask other people about their whys in terms of rules they've applied to themselves or others. I might disagree with them – maybe significantly – but it's rare for me to be like, “What? Why did you do that? Why do you believe that?” I don't know if you have similar experiences.

Becca: This is part of my neurotype. I'm always going to ask the why if I don't agree or if it's pushing up against me too much. I agree with you that giving context to other people is time-consuming and arduous if they're not interested. But I've also found that people tend to not challenge a thought they've already had. So when they say things like, “I can't do this, this doesn't make sense, I don't want to do this” – I kind of want to know why. Because if it came from something they can't source, it's a belief they've probably inherited or borrowed, or – back to belonging – they've agreed they need to belong to the group that believes this thing. So it doesn't even matter that they don't believe it themselves. The fitting in is more important than anything else.

Joel: 100%. 100%. And it sounds weird that I would say that, but it's true. We're social animals. We've evolved to be this way. Not fitting in, in the vast majority of human history, means you are not part of the group anymore and therefore at potentially immediate risk of death.

Becca: 100% right. And if we can all just agree that what we're doing is trying not to die through our belonging, then we probably make a lot of progress. So I ask why, and I want to offer why if people are interested, because I want to make sure we are thinking our own thoughts – and at least open to a better version of those thoughts, if there is one. Which is why I don't mind disagreement. If you have a better version of the thought than mine, and that rings for me, I'll be like, oh my God, great. Slough off green – blue is actually what I feel. And I just don't think a lot of people love that. They'd like to sit in their comfort zone and not challenge what they've picked up off the shelf. But that is not the highest expression of yourself.

Becca: Also, my brain changes over time, so why wouldn't I keep listening for a new iteration of the thing?

Joel: It's really confusing.

Becca: Oh, sorry – go on.

Joel: It's really confusing for people to have you change your mind all the time. Because from one interaction to another, you might be a pretty different person, even with some of the people you interact with the most. Another issue I have is that I evolve frequently, constantly, and often in big ways. I like to think it falls under the general banner of when you know better, you do better. But a lot of people are like, “Whoa, hold on – you said this last time we got together and now it seems like you're saying something totally different. How do I square this?” And maybe the next time I see you, you won't even care about that thing anymore. You'll be onto another topic, another belief, another passion.

Joel: It's a tricky position to be in as someone who wants to change so often, who is open to so much – because people want to have an idea of who you are and what you stand for. And if that changes too much, then your relationship suffers in some ways.

Becca: Only if they have not agreed that change is inevitable. It doesn't make any sense to me that people are like, “But last year you had a different point of view.” Yeah. I had different information this year. Shouldn't I change my mind if I have new information? That's my rule. If I have new information, I move on to the next thing.

Becca: If you are telling me that I should show up on Tuesday a certain way and you expect that nothing between Tuesday and Thursday is going to change or affect me – you have effectively said you're not interested in change. No offense, but we don't care if you're not interested. It's happening whether you like it or not. Your body is changing without your permission – your cells are generating and dying. The fact that you'd think someone should hold the same point of view over time means you're pushing back on actual evolution.

Becca: And if you want somebody who doesn't change, you don't want me. And you probably don't want a lot of people who do those big-changing things – people who invent, people who create, people who change their minds about what feels good and what doesn't. It is not a compliment to me when someone says, “Oh, sounds like you've changed a bit.” That's maybe the worst insult.

Joel: Yeah. Right. I don't want to be who you met. I'm so excited that nobody recognizes me from high school – because if I look and act like I did in high school, I've arrested my own development. I should look and feel differently than I was back then. And when I'm watching a child grow, people say, “Oh, I wish they were still like they were at five.” What? You have an amazing eight-year-old in front of you. That five-year-old changed into the eight-year-old. You want that. Every parent who has a child that doesn't do those big changes or whose brain doesn't develop beyond a certain age – that feels pretty bad too. And I know it because I've seen it happen.

Becca: I know you want to say that there are going to be people who are like, “Every time I see you, something's different,” and it makes them feel unsettled. That is not because of the person who's changing. It is because of the person who decides not to change. It cannot possibly be my fault that you're upset that I'm changing. Because I'm going to do it anyway, even if I don't want to – it's happening.

Joel: Yeah, there's the scientific truth of it.

Becca: And it even expands into the universe – everything is constantly changing. It's so cliché, but it is scientifically true. And it often feels very spiritually true that the only constant is change. But how do you actually live into that, believe it, and use it as something that propels you forward instead of holds you back?

Joel: That's where I get tripped up sometimes.

Becca: I will just say that for me, if I see how I was and I see how I'm changing, I'm thinking about that whole process all the way through. So it isn't one day I've decided to wear all yellow and the next day it's all orange. I thought about the transfer between yellow and orange, and I'm happy to share that with people. The people who have stuck with me over time know that I'm not leapfrogging to leapfrog. It's not change for change's sake.

Becca: I do not want to leave people in the dust. If somebody came up to me and said, “Man, you're different from high school,” I would have answers for why that's true – not just time happening. I'd be like, yeah, back in high school I was really scared, really worried about people's thoughts, and not yet developed into who I thought I wanted to be. So what you're seeing is the evolution of that process.

Joel: How often do you think in colors? You've already given two examples – going from green to blue and from yellow to orange. Are colors really important to you?

Becca: Absolutely. You know how some people are pitch perfect – you can say a C and they can sing a C, or hear the exact tone? I have that with color. I look at colors and I could go to a paint store and find that exact color. I get very precise about the hue, though I can't always put it into mathematical terms.

Joel: Does your brain know the six-character hex code for something? Like, you just see a color and you know – oh, that's CEF0DE?

Becca: No, I don't have that. That's memorization. But I have an internal version of it.

Joel: You kind of have that internal version, where you're constantly noticing. Like, the blue of the walls in my current office is very similar to the blue in my previous office, and you noticed that – which nobody else has ever noticed. That's really neat.

Becca: Yeah, I'm just a visual person.

Joel: You've got a color superpower, I think. And I'm trying to figure out what the utility of that is – maybe it's just something that you are, and that's it. Obviously it helps in art, right?

Becca: My kid is colorblind, which is a fascinating thing to me since I am definitely not colorblind – I'm literally the opposite. Every time someone says, “Can you see the color difference between these two things?” I can always see it. He thinks almost everything is gray or red.

Becca: It helps because it's a visual depiction of nuance. A cool blue versus a warm blue – color theory can tell you why, there's more red in one and less in the other. And that's just a microcosm of the macrocosm of the world. The world is not just red or blue. It has all these variations, extending to how much black and white is in it, and then all the other things that mix with it. I did study design for a little while. But I was just reflecting on when we last saw a Van Gogh exhibition – his work was really light-based, a reflection of how light can depict color. All the ways you can see a thing, whether through color or through music – some people hear sound the same way I see color. And it's infinite. It's a way to see infinity without being mathematically overwhelmed.

Becca: It's like any category of thing that has too many iterations to count – like species of birds. Similar makeup: it flies, it has claws, it has a beak. And there are so many iterations of this one type of thing. So how could I possibly strip my decision down to am I a Democrat or a Republican? Allowing for complexity allows for complexity.

Joel: I think I know what you mean when you say that. But you say profound things that just stop me in my tracks, and I almost want to say, “Time out, Becca, I need at least a minute to absorb what you just put down.” Your complexity comment gave me one of those. So I want you to riff on it, because there was something that felt right and true about it. You said it as a statement, and I want to understand how you can do that.

Becca: Should we have a moment of silence?

Joel: No, no, no. I want you to riff.

Becca: This is all probably going to speak back to the philosophy that's starting to unfold as we talk. If I have all the answers – this set of goo in these bags – that feels scary. But if I know for a fact that I don't have all the answers, somehow that's freeing. Because it means the world is unknowable all at once. We know it over time. The earth is not flat – we got that. But it's back to black-and-white thinking.

Becca: I don't need a conviction. There is too much going on in the world to dwindle everything down to something purely knowable. Math is an absolute thing, quote unquote. Not to me. There are still people studying it who know there's more to know. The complexity keeps people engaged with it. If we were done with math, we'd be done with math. It is its own complexity.

Becca: It lives alongside the change thing. I want things to be complex because I want things to change me. If I say I'm a simple person, I like blank, blank, and blank – that's almost personifying atrophy. Then what's the point of continuing on if I already know the end of it? If I'm not this complex, if I don't think these really intense thoughts – okay, great, I guess that's it. You don't need to try or strive for anything else. And I can't imagine that.

Becca: If you already have all the answers, there's no point in asking questions. And to me, that might be the best part of life – asking and receiving and getting cool questions. Curiosity is a very adorable way of saying you like complexity. The reason you're curious is that you know there are going to be more answers to a thing at some point. And if I'm comfortable with that kind of complexity in the world, then I must be comfortable with it inside of myself. The paradox is always there – we just ignore it because we really want to feel like we are absolutely a thing. We want to stand for something, be labeled as something, own the thing and be known as it. The only thing I can hold onto is that I'm super complex and I have no idea how it's going to change over time. And that's very exciting because it means I have all the options ahead of me. I'm not stuck.

Becca: It's basically how hope works for me. It's not just the idea that things will get better. It's the idea that things will change. And I like knowing that.

Joel: What else do you like knowing? What kinds of questions have you been asking yourself or others lately?

Becca: I like knowing what brings me joy – what I find joyful. It doesn't always mean I can follow it or pursue it or feed it. But there is something about the constant intellectual pursuit of self that is tiring. And I rest through my joy.

Joel: You rest through your joy?

Becca: Yeah. I talk about letters all the time, about writing letters. I know a lot about the whole concept and history of it. But there's just something about writing “dear” and then a word or a name after that – it allows me to rest in that feeling of: I'm about to tell you about myself. I'm about to give you a part of myself. I'm about to tell you a story. That feels restful. It's very regulating.

Becca: I love knowing what I love so that when I need it, I have it in my mind. Someone standing in front of a red British telephone booth – the sight of that gives me joy. I thought: it's good to know that. Because sometimes I need a break from all that thinking and reflecting and changing. And the joy part is the body feeling, where I'm like, hey, you don't even have to think right now. You love a red telephone booth. There it is.

Joel: I wonder if it's doing the same thing for you that the United States Postal Service does for me. I know you enjoy snail mail, and that seeing a post office is a very different experience for you than for most people. I don't want to imagine a world without post offices or without your ability to send a snail mail letter to people.

Becca: I just came from New York last week – we were in Chinatown, and it's not a remarkable post office, the one in Chinatown. But I was walking down the street and it bent at a certain point where I was looking straight at it, and I was like, oh my God, I have to take a picture of that. And I looked back at the photo and thought: this is a typical cement, not-at-all decorative post office. But it said “Chinatown” on it – that was the location of the post office, and it said it right there. And I just thought: why does that make me so happy to see? I take pictures of mailboxes. I take pictures of post offices. They're not even always picturesque. I don't know why it brings me joy – maybe it's just the idea of a letter going from one person to another.

Joel: Maybe because it helps us have belonging even when we're not together.

Becca: 100% yes. Right there. I don't have to have anybody share that moment with me. In fact, nobody did – my relatives or whoever I was walking with were like, “Okay, you're taking a picture of a post office.” And I was like: somebody works at a post office. Somebody sends mail through a post office. Somebody also sees a post office and gets excited about it. I belong to that group of people whether we've all acknowledged it or not. I don't need us all to have a conference over it.

Becca: It's a sense of belonging without needing a membership card. I just decided I'm part of a group that loves post offices. And I know the group exists because I can find them – they're everywhere.

Joel: I know you said earlier that you don't need to say “I love you” and you don't need anyone to say it to you – but I love you, friend.

Becca: I love you too. Just endlessly delightful. I enjoy us so much the way that we are together.

Joel: We should probably figure out an endpoint – a way to land, at least for now. Is there something else you want to discuss, ever so briefly, before I prompt you to tell people where they can connect with you?

Becca: I'm going to say this because it's something I thought about beforehand, and maybe it's a private moment, but maybe it's okay to share. Your interest in how you “friend” people is remarkable. And I'm not trying to compliment you in the sense of just saying you're a good friend – cool, that's not what I'm saying. This sort of seeking that you do with people is remarkable because it is uncommon. I know lots of people who like friends and relationships and community – we have all these words for it. But I find it – inspiring feels too distant, so that's not the word. Is it conspiring? There's a way that I'm allowed to show up when you are in that moment of “how do we friend, how do we interact, how do we seek together?” that is unparalleled. That's rare.

Becca: And it makes me leave the conversation and think about it again. I don't know who else has that experience. It's like a fan club of you. But if you don't know that about yourself from somebody – you know it about yourself, but maybe not everybody is telling you – I just want to be in the group that's telling you: this is next-level peopling. And I so appreciate it. I could write a book about it. So thank you for your time, but also your intent. Those two things together are the juice.

Joel: Feeling very, very full energetically after that one. You don't have to write a book about it. Maybe you can just start with a letter – mail me a letter and see if it turns into a book. Oh, Becca. Oh my goodness. What about if people want a little bit more of the way that you think, the good that you do in the world, online or offline – where would someone connect with you?

Becca: My two spaces are beccacampbell.substack.com, which is where I'm at generally on Substack, and my travel design business is at matchingsweaterstravel.substack.com. Both are up and live right now. I'll do the website thing over time, but those are the places where you can find me thinking my thoughts.

Joel: Groovy. Thank you, friend.

Becca: Thank you. This was awesome.