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Friends,
This is the third* in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

At the end of each of these episodes, there’s an exercise – a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise – that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about. That way, you won’t only be participating by listening, but you can actually bring some of the vitality of the conversation forward.

This episode’s theme is CONNECT
And my guest is organizer, activist, and writer, DEAN SPADE

Our disconnection from each other is the negative space that power thrives in. It’s a void that threatens to overtake us with its heavy unfeeling emptiness.

Connection is the remedy, but more than that: it’s the great meaning we all seek.

The connections we form with each other can create networks of mutual aid, solidarity, safety, love, pleasure, and happy engagement with the challenges of our time.

Dean’s new book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together offers a powerful look at connection. And it gives everything its title promises: a wealth of practical steps you can take to learn how to live well in this world through what you learn in relationship with others.

It’s a book about relationships that takes nothing for granted from the dominant narratives that rule our lives.

Rather than trying to fit society as it is, the book asks us what it would look like if our relationships were built out of our desires, including our desire to create a better word through better relationships.

Dean was on the show just a few months back, talking with me and Shuli Branson on AEWCH 277 about the then-impending election. He’s always eloquent, always fun to talk with, and always breaking new ground in conversation. Here’s a powerful interrogations from his new book/

“Many of us turn toward self-help tools with the hopes of instantaneous change. Capitalism sells promises of total health, wealth, and blissful happiness. But in reality, being alive is a wild, constantly changing mix of beauty, suffering, agony, contentment, and dissatisfaction. No matter how we fight it, everything around us is impermanent. Everything we want and love will come to an end, just as our lives will.

We have to approach both our relationships with other people and our own healing with a humble outlook and reasonable expectations. One question often guides me when I am stuck: “What am I so afraid of being seen doing that I am willing to limit my steps toward what I want in life?”

I hope this episode brings you closer connections.

Please listen to through the ending music to hear my exercise to engage with the principles of this episode!

 *Here’s the first episode of the series, ENVISION with ROB HOPKINS, and here’s the second, PRAY with BASTIAAN BAAN