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It's the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing?

Smarter people than I have made the point that if you love anyone or anything, the price you will ultimately pay is grief because eventually everything changes. Relationships fizzle, careers, and people die. You get the picture. In our culture,

we don't often talk forthrightly about loss and grief. We'd rather dwell on the happier stuff,

the dopamine hits of accumulation and

sense pleasures. But while all of that stuff is great, I'm a big fan of all the pleasures. If you

ignore the reality of impermanence, you are setting yourself up to suffer. My guest today is a young

journalist who suffered a grievous personal loss and then set out on a quest to see what works and what doesn't

to handle grief. Cody Del Estrada is the culture editor at the Wall Street Journal magazine.

He's also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and the Atlantic.

And his book is called The Grief Cure Looking for the End of Loss.

We talk about why our culture is so repressed when it comes to grief.

We dive into the many, many experiments that Cody launched to help cope with loss from book and laughter therapy to psilocybin to AI.

We talk about the concept of grief as an addiction, the importance of rituals,

the scientific possibility of deleting our memories to avoid pain, and much more. Just to say,

before we dive in here, this is part one of a three-part series we're doing this week on grief,

which I know may sound a little unfun, but actually we've got three really interesting and enlivening guests.

It's Cody Del Estrade today, and then we've got the great podcaster Sam Sanders on Wednesday and the author Sloan Crossley on Friday.

I promise you that these episodes will be moving and thought-provoking and at times quite funny.

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