Everything is absurd. That's what I love about it. You know, when you're thinking about this idea that we are all essentially quite meaningless,

scrabbling through life that will probably not make the history books, you know, none of us in Napoleon, there's an absurdity to how we take such pride and such tiny expressions of who we are.

You're listening to Doing It Right with me, Pandora Sykes,

a podcast where I talk to experts about the myths, anxieties, trivialities

and trends of modern life.

There's no such thing as the right life, but what might we be getting wrong?

In this series, I'll be exploring outrage culture, arrival fallacy, and the perils of instant gratification, and lobbing some pretty big questions

at my guests like, why do human beings find change so hard?

What would a more inclusive society look like?

And what is the difference between optimism and hope?

This is a podcast that looks at the little things and the big things and asks,

what can we do to live life better? Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. Raven Smith is a

journalist, author and probably the funniest man you know on Instagram. A columnist for British

Vogue and the author of an essay collection,

Trivial Pursuits, a linguistic acid trip of a book which moves deftly from IKEA meatballs

and the contents of his fridge to growing up in a single parent household and coming out.

He is one of those rare beasts who can write about the trivial and the profound with even hand. I spoke to Raven

in May when we were all very much under lock and key. We talk about wellness, arrival fallacy,

torso culture and why trivialities make a good life. You know, I love going out, I love going for martinis, all this stuff that is ultimately, you know, trivial and meaningless in the grand scheme of civilization.

But I also think it does protect you, these enjoyment in the small things protect you from this constant existential crisis

about your limited time on the planet, about genuine disasters and war. And I think that balance

gives you some sanity in this kind of, in the chaos. Do you think trivialities is how we construct ourselves? I mean, you wrote a whole

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