Sutterfaction Evan Sutter

We all want our kids to be happy. We want them to be healthy. To be creative and curious. Interested and interesting. We want them to be liked, to form strong and beautiful friendships, to do well at school, and to have options. We want to hear them laugh, smile, think independently and critically, to be open, kind and full of joy. And, of course, so much of this is out of our control as parents and caregivers. So much is influenced by so many different things. So, we try to control what we can. And, with Christmas just around the corner, the thought of gifts and their influence over our young ones is a pertinent topic. Do we want to bring things into their lives that end up making their lives more difficult? Because things are already challenging enough for them. Will the new iPhone be helpful, or will it end up having negative consequences? Will new clothes or fancy toys lead them down a life of seeking joy in material possessions? Where and how do we strike the balance between what makes them smile now and what will help them lead meaningful and joyful lives long-term? Because, let’s face it, there are going to be presents under the Christmas tree - but what they are could be one of the most important choices we make as parents, uncles, aunties and elders.

An interesting 10-minute talk that is compelling listening and couldn’t come at a better time!

In this 30-minute discussion, various relevant subjects will be covered, such as technology, consumerism, capitalism, entertainment, competition, and success. The argument presented is that these factors make it significantly more challenging for individuals in the modern Western world to lead a good, healthy life. Supported by research and ideas from renowned thinkers like Socrates, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Bertrand Russell, the talk advocates for peacefulness and tranquillity over more desired things like happiness and success. Competitiveness is denounced for creating a plethora of unhealthy individuals and interfering with truly admirable human traits, such as collaboration and creativity.

The listener is taken on a journey, one that is profoundly interconnected, and leads to tranquillity. Tranquillity is one of the seven precious treasures in Buddhism or one of the seven factors of awakening. The talk connects the dots every step of the way, demonstrating the importance of valuing tranquillity and, more crucially, how to achieve it.

Welcome back, this is the Sutterfaction podcast. The show about looking deeper into society and culture, politics, current affairs, conditioning, and all that is around us, so we can then look deeper with more clarity and awareness into our own lives - so, we can enjoy our lives more - more deeply, more authentically, more vibrantly.

In this episode we go around the grounds to get a unique look into the death of the Queen of Britain. Controversial - yes. Important - definitely. And we also have the fast 13. A spitfire bunch of small, but important, ideas to get you thinking, and being. Explore technology, communication and family, kindness, playfulness, elders, nature and death. All seamlessly and skillfully blended in a fast, fun and highly engaging 15 minute talk that will get you thinking. Punchy. No BS.

But first it’s over to the Queen. Yes, the Queen is dead. The Queen of Britain that is. And there has been a huge public outpouring of love and sadness. Is it just me, but does anyone else find this whole tradition quite absurd and perplexing. Here is a super rich woman, who was born into great wealth, born into a life of luxury based on nothing more than a fictional story that too many people believed. People adore her. The same woman who was immune from more than 160 laws - so much for everyone being equal before the law - maybe thats how her son got off all those child sex charges. Not too mention her role in Indigenous genocide, slavery, indentureship, colonialism. All the poor people who rush to the city to mourn her could have done with some redistribution away from castles, private jets and lives of luxury. A luxury that allows them to escape criminal punishment - the police aren’t even allowed in her premises, she is and was above the law, they can even rape under age girls and get away with it - but we still adore them.

Then - 13 cool ideas to suck the marrow out of life. To avoid the unlived life. To step around the noise and do something cool before you die.

This is Sutterfaction. Punchy Talks. No BS.

This is a very cool and important talk that will examine the wealth vs health conflict.

It will look at how to:
-Eat better, move better, think better
-Find balance
-Enjoy your life
-Create a new recipe for optimum physical and mental health.
-Find meaning at work
-Make better use of your finite time.

For many of us, when we think of preparing for retirement, we think somewhat automatically about what that looks like from an economic lens. In fact much of our lives is looked at from an economic lens. The world we’ve inherited is an economic world, and much of what makes humans human - humans beautiful and unique - is clouded or diluted by our need to survive financially.

Finding balance between fostering adequate financial resources, while actually having time and energy to live your life well, might just be one of the most difficult, and most important, of life’s balancing acts. Money is only one investment of many for our retirement, but you’d think it was the only one. We need to be very careful about what we want, because if we aren’t careful or skillful, we may end up with money, and a lot of it, but not much else. Our investments in bitcoin, houses, shares, pokemon cards, red wine, gold, etc - should allow us to have more time and more vitality - when often it does the opposite. They can take our time and energy and capacity away from interests, relationships, connection, love, meaning, purpose, and freedom - while destroying our health.

Don’t go to the gym until you’ve listened to this talk.
Don’t look at bitcoin prices until after this talk.
Don’t eat.
Don’t go to work until you’ve listened to number 6.
This is Sutterfaction.

Learning for a job or merely to advance your career is too often one dimensional and rigid, the other - learning for life - is interconnected, holistic and open, and then it flows into all areas of our lives. And, afterall, a life well lived, a good life, has to be connected. Our world is full of people with great careers and financial success, who are miserable in almost all other areas. They linger in the realm of quiet desperation, like Thoreau would say, appearing to be doing wonderfully well to those equally blindsighted by the traps of our economical world. A lack of positive relationships, positive emotion, interests, intellectual wealth, joy, and thus freedom act to imprison them in a type of slave like existence with no chains in sight.

Sutter instead asks us to learn for life, for life itself, showing us how to live with curiosity and awareness. He pleads that we must make a change to our way of learning in order to prevent the misery so rife in our older (and other) populations. He calls for a shift in education so we can create new norms and conditions for the full growth of the human being.

When we stop learning we replace curiosity, openness, playfulness and a lightness of being with narrow views that are ignorant and fickle. We just see problems, and barriers, and roadblocks and a tone of negativity takes over our entire lives. The lifelong learner, on the other hand, is less reactive and sees chances to enjoy themselves, and thus their lives, before they die.

And of course this isn’t just a cautionary tale for when we get old - it is something we need to do now - a habit we form now, and a value that we cherish now. Because that’s the trick, maybe one of the greatest, that we can start doing the things we want when we get older and have ticked off all those other things that we have to do. No, you can’t. If you don’t do them now it is difficult, almost impossible, to then shift deeply ingrained patterns and behaviours after 30 years of doing the opposite. You will have money and lots of time - maybe, maybe not - but you will be in a type of coma, lacking the creativity to think differently and paralysed in doing anything you really want, and need, to do.

A punchy and important 20 minute talk to help you construct a life worth living.

To construct a life worth living - a connected, interesting, interested and fulfilled life - we need to examine and explore everything outside and inside of us, and perhaps with a greater emphasis on the inside. We can tend to think of exploring in an external sense and think travel in this way is all the exploration we need. Travel is great, but in this day and age even this beautiful tool of self-discovery and emancipation is becoming slightly more superficial and limiting in what it can do for us.

Sutter continues counting down his list of 12 ideas to construct a life worth living, and number 4 is one worth listening to. He tells us to travel, and mainly to travel our inner worlds. He uses his experiences travelling to over 50 countries and compares that to his experiences meditating in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Monastery and his introspective journeys using psychedelics to show us that maybe “the way out is in.”

This punchy and interesting talk combines the ideas of Socrates, Jung, and Nietzsche with real life anecdotes and travel, research on the benefits of meditation and psychedelic drugs; all combining seamlessly to softly nudge us to this idea that maybe the best exploration happens when we aren’t moving at all.