A few weeks ago I gave a speech at an event put on by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson in Southern California. Many people told me they really enjoyed the talk, and so I’m happy to share it.
Here are some highlights:
My own journey on this issue began after writing Apocalypse Never. I was getting ready to go on book tour, and save nuclear plants around the world, and then covid hit. It was very disorienting, as all of you can remember
I found myself feeling sad about it. I've been teaching myself not to say “depressed.” I'm going to reserve that term for people suffering clinical levels of depression. But I found myself disoriented, and not sure what to do.
I knew that I wanted to finally write on this question of what we call homelessness. What's it really about?
At the same time, I was starting to watch these old YouTube videos of Viktor Frankl. I was sort of raised on his book, Man’s Search For Meaning. He's this famous Austrian psychiatrist, who gets sent off to the death camps, sent to Auschwitz, separated from his wife and parents. The Nazis, when they took his coat, lost the book manuscript.
Frankl used that horrible experience of surviving the death camps to construct this beautiful new positive psychology that he called “peak psychology,” because so much of psychology had been “depth psychology,” focused on how to overcome bad things, as opposed to how to achieve beautiful, great things — about how to make yourself a bigger person.
I had a couple of funny experiences. The first was I could watch two minutes of a Viktor Frankl video and immediately feel happier. We call it “cognitive behavioral therapy,” now, where you talk back to your negative stories of which there's basically just three: I'm a bad person. The world's a bad place. The future is dark.
Those three storylines, by the way, are the three storylines of apocalyptic environmentalism. In the nature of the stories it tells, it’s depressing. There's something about the stories that we tell that creates a mentality that shapes our feelings and our emotions and moods.
The other thing was that everybody needs to have a goal. You know, we say purpose, but you need to have something you're trying to do. And some of us needed more than others, and I really needed that. And so I decided to do this book, San Fransicko.
