Why do people commit themselves to the things they do?

Why are people so worried about sport? Why wine? Why video games?

I'm Brian Laurie, and in this season of my podcast, know what you see, I'm asking a simple question, but a really big one.

What's the point?

In conversations with people with a variety of passions and obsessions, we get the chance to look through a window

and see what it means to truly focus on the realm of human experience. Join me on Know What

You See. New episodes begin November 26th. Hi, my name's Alex Goldman. This is hyperfixed.

On this show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them.

Or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't.

So far, this show's been the small claims court of problems. Driving in New York City, grocery

store refrigerators, diarrhea buttons. I mean, sure, the stories were sometimes undergirded by complicated

science and historical deep dives, but the problems themselves are relatively personal and small.

Problems that whether I fix them or not, had definitive answers. But today's

question's bigger. It's way harder to answer, and it will have inexorably life-altering

consequences for its asker. This week, Kristen has doubts.

I had had doubts and questions brewing. I've always been kind of a questioner, a searcher, you know.

This is Kristen. She's 32 years old. She lives in California. And she works in education policy, using data analysis to help teachers get ready to teach in the classroom. But the life she leads now, this life of data and questions, is a far cry from the faith-centric life she was born into.

So my parents were ministers for a Christian ministry, like evangelical, but also it's a weird one.

It's one of the reasons I've spent the last seven years unpacking it.

This Christian tradition that Kristen grew up with, it didn't have the purity culture that's so prevalent amongst evangelicals, and women were allowed to be leaders, but it was still grounded in this idea of Bible-based faith.

But when I was 17, I was more committed to trying to find the best way to help the world.

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