Asking the Big Questions

In part one of our conversation with psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren, we heard about the power of humility to improve our relationships, make us better leaders, and give us a more grounded sense of self. If you haven't yet heard that episode, it's titled "The Cure for Self Importance" — we recommend you start there. In this second part of our conversation with Daryl, we talk about existential humility. He shares how a personal tragedy shaped his thinking about the world, and we explore the challenges and the benefits of being humble when it comes to the biggest questions we confront in life. In this episode, Shankar and Daryl talk about an idea known as "terror management theory," which looks at how our fears of death shape how we live, often in extremely subtle ways. Our episode about terror management theory is called "We're All Gonna Die," and you can find it in this podcast feed or at our website: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/were-all-gonna-die/