When I was 19, I went to Kenya because I wanted to make myself useful in the world. Instead, I found myself caught in the middle of the 2007–08 post-election violence and came home with a feeling of helplessness and a question that has stayed with me for almost 20 years: why do some people keep believing their actions matter while others eventually stop trying?
Years later, I went back to the journal I kept during that time and started looking at the experience differently. In this episode, I explore Martin Seligman’s famous dog experiment and the psychology of learned helplessness, and how our sense of agency is shaped by repeated experience.
I also look at where I see the same pattern today, from Irish farmers dealing with wool that has almost no economic value to a generation growing up with every global crisis in their pockets. And I ask what it might take to unlearn helplessness and start finding the levers that still work.
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https://www.harrisongardner.net/heat-shelter-water-food
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Chapters
00:00 Intro: Kenya and Helplessness
01:03 Welcome Back
01:40 Why I Went to Kenya
04:10 Kenya's 2007 Election Crisis
13:03 Reading My Diary From Kenya
24:04 Martin Seligman's Dog Experiment
26:30 Learned Helplessness and Agency
28:00 Why I Thought I Could Change the World
31:20 Finding the Same Pattern Everywhere
33:42 The Irish Wool Problem
38:10 What Today's Generation Is Learning
42:30 What Really Happened in Kenya?
48:20 The Work That Actually Matters
52:50 Looking Back Twenty Years Later
55:40 Finding the Levers Around Us
56:50 My New Book: Heat, Shelter, Water, Food
57:35 Credits