"What's the Point?" – A Simple Answer to Life's Biggest Question | Lili Taylor

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? One of the biggest ongoing issues in my life is that sometimes I feel like I'm just trudging through my to-do list.

There's this great quote from a former mayor of New York City, I forgot which mayor, but many decades ago this mayor coined a nice phrase, the squalid succession of days. And if you're just in a constant state of toppling forward, uh, looking at everything through the lens of productivity, life really can feel like a squalid succession of days. So today we're going to talk about doing stuff just for the pleasure of doing it. No ulterior motive, nothing to gain. The only purpose is the experience itself.

Although actually, and this is interesting, these types of activities, which again, you just do for the fun and pleasure of the activity itself, can also put you in touch with awe, which is an incredibly powerful human emotion that is genuinely transformative. My guest today is Lily Taylor, who you've probably seen in innumerable movies and plays and TV shows. She was in Mystic Pizza and Say Anything back in the eighties. Then she was in I Shot Andy Warhol and Ransom. She was also in High Fidelity, Public Enemies, the TV show American Crime, also The X-File, Six Feet Under.

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