98 - Christina Crook-Living Joyfully Through Taking On “Good Burdens”.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about people who've turned their emotional shit into fertilizer for success. It's about seeing our darkest moments as opportunities for growth and transformation.

Christina Crook is a pioneer and leading voice of digital well being. As the author of, award-winning, "The Joy of Missing Out", "Finding Balance in a Wired World", and the leader of Global Jomo Movement, she regularly shares her insights in major media outlets and interviews other mindful tech leaders as the host of the Jomo podcast, her commentary on technology and daily life have appeared in The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, BBC.com, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, Times of India, and Glamor. She lives with her family in Toronto, Canada.

Welcome Christina Crook to the Ruthless Compassion Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Well, thank you again for coming on. This is your second time on the show. The last time we were talking about your book, The Joy of Missing Out and today we're going to be talking, in part, at least, about your new book, Brand New Good Burdens, which I've been leafing through and having a lot of fun with. But I wanted to actually do two things. The first thing is I wanted to ask you something about what you said just before we went on the air, which is about how you felt the need for some Ruthless Compassion today.

I thought we should start with that.

Let's start with that. Well, I am coming off of Launch Week. I'm coming off of my book Launch Week, and it was a whirlwind of excitement and fear, intrepidation and all of those things. And so I'm kind of exhausted and I write a lot in Good Burdens about how needs bring us closer to one another. And so it is a little bit ironic to me that I about at this point where I am really in need of support, of rest, of compassion for myself. So that's kind of where you're finding me today in a place of needing self compassion.

Don't you always find that we write about the stuff that we need to learn the most for ourselves?

Yeah. We write what we always need to read, right? Yes, indeed.

Well, I'll try to be kind today in this interview.

Well, that is very kind. But I will say I was reflecting with a colleague of mine this morning because I actually got choked up on this professional call. She's a colleague. She works for me, and that was a safe space. But I actually think it's a really healthy space to be, which your listeners knew no better than anyone, because it actually is shifting my posture in terms of really looking for the supports that I need to sustain me for the next 2, 5, 10 years in my career.

And I think I really needed to get to this point of, like a somewhat kind of desperation to get beyond myself, like my own capacity and reach out for more support. So financial support, practical coaching, support, all those different things. So anyways, just to put a positive note on it, I feel like I'm exactly where I need to be.

You know, it's funny. There's an old expression behind every great man is a good woman. But I think that behind every great woman, there's a team, and we really need our team. We cannot do it without the team. And this myth of superwoman is a myth.

Yeah, I like my Cape, but I think I need to put it in the drawer for a little while.

Or you can just tuck a bunch of people underneath the cave. They can all be under the cave with you.

I like this picture. Thank you for that.

Well, now that we've done that, let's remind the audience who you are and what you do.

So I'm a digital well being expert. I published, like you already said, a book called The Joy of Missing Out, Finding Balance in a Wired World, which was an early sort of call to action in terms of becoming more mindful of the ways that we are using technology. The Joy of Missing Out is the acronym is Jomo, which is the antithesis to FOMO, and Jomo became a thing in the world. It got to the point where Oprah was with her bestie saying, I'm Jomo. There was this sort of like peak of Jomo about a year ago.

So I've launched a podcast called The Jomo Cast, where I interview leading mindful tech leaders like chief creative officer. We transfer and one of the founders of Base Camp and Harvard's Dr. Ellen Langer, all talking with them about how to embrace the joy of missing out, to thrive in a rapidly changing world. So that is me. I also coach and teach a couple of different programs that teach digital wellbeing practices. So that's me.

Well, this is an important topic. I actually have had some issues with my brand new website the other day, and we realized that some of my passwords weren't so good. And I was reflecting on how when I made my website ten years ago, the world was a very different place, and you could get away with these not too strong passwords because there weren't a million people trying to hold your website for ransom or delete your files or insert malware. It's really changed a lot in the last ten years, and I've been reflecting on that very much because of my own current experiences with my website.

Yeah, in my program, we actually do a digital house cleaning party. So, like, Sparking joy in your inboxes and social media accounts and all these different things. And yeah, that's one of the pieces is looking at save passwords, changing those passwords. There's just so much more maintenance of these different spaces. And I like to think of digital wellbeing, is now an essential component to all the other parts of our personal. Wellbeing, many of us spend more time in front of our screens and our waking hours than we do with any individual or any other object.

So it does require regular maintenance and upkeep.

We change the oil in our car. We need to change the passwords on our different program.

Unfollow. And those things up, too, right? Yes.

For sure. I do a lot of that. That's the real compassion. Well, I wanted to get into your book. First thing I want to say to you is that you're a very sneaky person. You wrote this book about how to live joyfully in the digital age, but I really think that your book is about how to live joyfully, how to really live your best life, including in the digital age, because the things that you're saying in the book apply to every aspect of life, not just the digital part.

Absolutely. Yeah. And the digital age was meant to just be like the time we're in, not so much in the digital space. So I'm hoping that not everyone reads it like that. But now you may be aware that they will maybe. But yeah. I guess the purpose of that was to kind of get people to understand that if they're struggling with digital overwhelming, maybe this might be a book they want to pick up.

Absolutely. And even if they're just struggling with how to live a good life. So I would recommend this book, not just for people who are spending too much time on their technology and feeling unhappy about it, but people who are just feeling a bit lost in their life. I think it's a very helpful book. It just very concisely points to some very simple things that could make some very meaningful changes.

That was my hope. The word burden is a pretty weighty word. We don't have a lot of positive connotations with the word burden, but I made an amazing discovery writing this book, and that is that the capacity of a ship is called a burden. So I want to reframe burden as capacity. Okay. So our capacity to love, our capacity to be creative, our mental capacity, all of these different areas that we can have capacity in our lives. And so the idea with good burdens is that there are certain activities in our lives that once we get across a certain threshold of effort, the burden of it disappears.

So an example would be writing a book. It is a very burdensome activity, right to invest as much time and attention and effort. But once I was across a certain threshold of effort, now I'm into the joy of sharing this work with the world. That's an extreme example. A simpler example would be just putting dinner on the table. So preparing a meal and gathering loved ones around it. It's a burdensome thing to prepare the menu and buy the food and Cook the food. But once you're gathered and you're laughing and you're enjoying the food together.

Perfect example, Christmas dinner, Thanksgiving dinner. Then the burden disappears. And so why I think the burdens are so essential is because they are the place we find most meaning and joy or in these effortful burdensome things of investing deeply in relationships, investing deeply in our best creative work, investing deeply in things that are less passive and more and more engaged.

Years ago, I wrote this blog about how the quick and easy solutions to things are really a lie because they don't provide us with meaning or purpose or fulfillment when we have effort. And we are like you say, deeply engaged, that's when we get the payoff. And Unfortunately, I'm sure you believe this because you're writing it in your book that the digital age resupports us going for the quick and easy solution, and it deprives us of that pay off in the end because everything is kind of empty.

Absolutely. I'm writing it down really quickly, so I don't lose it. Well, digital world I know deprives us. I'm going to repeat it back because it's so important the digital world deprives us of- what did you say - of that pay off.

Right. And the payoff is not a pay off on superficial levels, the profound payoff of meaning, purpose and fulfillment.

Yeah. And so in the book, I write about the three big promises of big tech are convenience, control and comfort. Right. You can stay on your couch 24/7 and order your food and track your food. Right. So you're controlling. You can literally watch the human being. That is like taking the circuitous route to your house. You're in perfect comfort. It's all convenient. But those types of activities don't stay with us. They don't bring us meaning and purpose and joy. So we need to have some skin in the game.

The truth is we need to trade convenience and comfort and control for the other three seats I read about in the book, which are community and creativity and care, which a professor at Pratt University, Dr. Pamela Pavlisack discovered through a study she did of people's technology habits is that people that are happiest with technology use it differently and they use it for creativity, community, and care. So that's the shift that I kind of talked about throughout the book.

I love that. I really love that concept because there is a way that we can engage with our media with our digital world in a way that's meaningful and purposeful and supportive as opposed to kind of empty and debilitating.

Yeah.

No.

Absolutely. It's shifting from passive consumption to active engagement. That's the shift that we need to make.

So what is it about active engagement that makes us more joyful as opposed to passive consumption? You've done the studies or you've read the studies. What's the difference in terms of how they affect us?

Yeah. So the experience of joy requires attention and effort. It's about nurturing those things right, paying close attention and being more effortful. So the reason why we experience more joy in those things is because all of our senses are engaged. So Dr. Ellen Langer considered the mother of mindfulness. We'll talk about how mindfulness is just actively noticing new things. When we're actively noticing an attentive and putting some effort into the things that we're doing, we extract much more from them so you can be passively scrolling online.

But really, that requires no effort and you're not being attentive to it at all. So it's a nonevent. The reason why scrolling feels so bad is because we actually know we were made for more. We know it deep down in the core of our being that we have more capacity, we have more to give. We have more to receive. So yeah, it's a showing up in the world that is required in order to extract, like you said, to have that pay off to tell you a funny story.

Something that I remember from when I was twelve years old. I remember I was studying for a test. I can't tell you what test it was, but I spent the whole day studying, and I remember it because I was lying on my parents bed staring up at the ceiling memorizing stuff that I had to remember for the test. And I remember that at the end of the day, the sun was setting and I looked up at the ceiling and I felt this sense of incredible. Wellbeing, and it wasn't because I had written the test yet.

The test was the next day. But I felt such a deep sense of satisfaction for having put in the effort throughout the day to study. And I felt like it didn't matter if I passed or failed because I felt so good about the work I had done studying. I had this little epiphany at age twelve about how putting in the work is what made me the happiest.

What a lesson to carry with you. That is so amazing.

Yeah. So now I only have rolled up sleeves. All my sleeves are rolled up. I'm always ready.

I can see the photo. I'm even looking at you on the screen is rolled up.

Sleeves, always sleeps are always rolled up.

It's like my symbolic thing to remind myself I'm always ready to put in the work and there is a time for rest, like back to I'm coming off of there's these points of, like, extreme exertion, right? And so ruthless compassion as I would understand it in my own life. Is that permission to rest that need to rest and recover so that I can give more. And I think that that is definitely a season that I am entering because I want to be at this for the long haul.

Yeah, it's the balance, right? It's the balance of the time to reason, the time to sew and the time to just chill out.

Yeah.

Let your brain rest well, there's some other stuff you were talking about in the book, which I thought was super interesting, which was about how people are constantly comparing themselves when they're engaging with digital media. Right. They're looking at the images and they're feeling like not good enough. They're feeling like other people are doing better, living more exciting, more glamorous lives. And how that can be really a very detrimental thing about social media?

Absolutely. So, I mean, social media is built in a way to maximize her engagement. So the more minutes hours you're there, the more money that is made because you're seeing more and more sponsored ads. It is a business. These are not public health services. These are not for our benefit. They are multi billion dollar corporations that want to make money. And so what we're told at every turn. And this isn't new to the digital world. This isn't new to social media in particular. I know it's been true since the dawn of advertising that FOMO the fear of missing out core messages are that you don't have enough, that you aren't good enough, that you're not enough.

Right. And so these core messages are being fed to us all the time. I don't have enough. I'm not enough. And so, yes, it's an extremely toxic place to be when those are voices that you're hearing over and over again.

And then, of course, you have to go and spend your money and consume things which are supposed to make you feel better. But then again, that's a passive consumption, as opposed to going out and doing something meaningful, like talking to a human being or going for a walk or working on your poetry.

Absolutely. I think it is so hilarious. I think so often about social media and all of the inspirational posts that are on social media. And we read what hundreds of them a day. But how many of these inspirational quotes can we actually put into practice? We talk about attention and effort. Right. What brings joy, like, maybe one a month, maybe to internalize it to put it into action. Really meaningfully. Maybe there's a few people out there that can do more than one a month. I'm thinking maybe a one a month person.

So, yeah, just to constantly be in a posture of consuming, but not even right, because it's like we don't even take it like a quick sip. And then we're onto the next cup. So, yeah, we need to tread more deeply.

And I think there's something kind of soulless about the commodification of everything that has really become the thing online. Everything now is a product, including us people. So how do we switch around from that?

How do we switch out of that sense of everything is consumable reclaim a part of your life that cannot be commodified. So I recently did a podcast interview with another individual, and she was sharing through the course of our interview that she threw a conversation realized that she turned every single hobby into a business, somehow wants to monetize it. And I think that is such a modern phenomenon. So her big takeaway from our conversation was that she was going to paint and she was going to paint only for herself and that she was not going to share it with anyone.

And it's such a radical Act, I think, to hold some joys only for ourselves and to not share them with anyone else. And that's not being stingy. That's compassion that is like putting yourself first in the healthiest possible sense. So I think it is a radical act to decide to not be commodified. I've been reflecting on that, too. In my own life, I'm considered a thought leader. I'm not a big fan of the term. You are, too. And so it's dangerous to think of yourself at every turn as being a commodity.

And I've been reflecting on how some of the most analog, personal, non scalable things I've done in my career have actually had the biggest impact, things that could not be commodified, like writing a personal note to someone I really, really respect and something quite magical and true and deep and good coming out of that that professionally. This is happening in my life right now in the background. I can really talk about it. But I wrote a note to someone that I deeply respect because I disrespected her and gifted her a package in the book.

And these types of things and a really, truly beautiful thing is coming out of that. And I think that the more we can connect into what feels true to ourselves, what feels truly joyful often is not in the commodifying of self. And I guess the encouragement would be to lean into more of those things.

I was talking with what we call "a thought leader on Trauma" the other day from my podcast, and we were talking about how trauma makes us get out of touch with our feelings and ourselves. And so there's a lot of people walking around today with some type of trauma. I mean, life can be quite traumatic, especially lately, and it alienates us from ourselves. And so then we go online and we become commodified and that alienates us further from ourselves. And so we have so much work to do to connect to our authentic self and what we truly want and what we truly need to do.

Yeah. You're giving me so much food for thought. Aren't I supposed to be offering that to you today?

It's a conversation. It's a conversation

Yes. I love it.

Well, so I'm going to ask you a question then. So according to Good Burdens, what would be a way to move through all that alienation from self into more of a sense of that connection with self. So then we can connect outward with others and with our work.

That's a big question. So I think the way into good burdens. So in the book I have quests at the end of each chapter. It's actually quite an interactive book there's. Sidebars you actually, over the course of the book, write a list of 100 joys, 100 of your own personal joys. And I think a way into good burdens is to understand that we've been fed a lie about where the good life comes from. We've been fed a lie that tells us that faster, better, quicker is not only the path to happiness, but it's also an inevitability.

I think that's one of the real dangers of the age that we're in is that we're being told that it's just technology and the way it's developing. Even with the announcement of Facebook last week now becoming meta and the Metaverse like that, this is all an inevitability and we do not feel like we have control. We don't feel like we have any kind of agency around the pace and posture that we're being forced into on a daily basis, like thinking back to what we just talked about in terms of modification.

And so I think good burdens. It's very countercultural to say no, I'm not going to keep up this pace to say no, that I'm not going to just be a commodity to say no. Burdens aren't bad. Burdens are something that I should be wanting for because I want to increase my capacity. I want to deepen my relationships. I want to leave something lasting in the world and treading at this shallow level digitally is not doing it for me. It's never going to do it for me.

So I think my hope and challenge is that by choosing and finding a few things that are really worth your effort. So one relationship that you really want to go deep on. I've heard of people making their year, like the year of mom, like they're going to invest super deeply for a year, and their mom, that is a good burden to invest deeply in one or two relationships, to choose one big project that you want to sink your teeth into, to look around in your community and find one way that you can invest into it.

Our family hosts an annual pumpkin carving party for our neighborhood that is our big public investment in our neighborhood. And I can tell you that it gives me so much more back than I ever put into it. And I think that is always true of good burdens.

Yeah, I love your answer. That's the powerful answer. As you were talking, I was thinking about greed. I was thinking about how these corporations who drive all these platforms, their goal is more money, greed. And when you think about it, so they're all billionaires already. They don't need more money, but they want more money because all the money they have is not enough. They're not satisfied because it's all superficial. And so they think erroneously that more money eventually will make them feel that sense of peace and fulfillment and satisfaction, the joy that we talk about.

But of course, more of the wrong thing does not lead to ultimate happiness. It's like an addiction. So they have greed, which is this addiction to money. And so they hurt all these people. They put all these people in this situation where they're all living the superficial life of comparing themselves to others and consuming stuff passively to feed the greed of the corporations that don't make the people at the top happy either. So nobody wins like nobody wins, right?

No.

It's so tragic.

It's really tragic. Maybe while I'm feeling so sad and low is because I actually watched the full Meta announcement, and I actually cried when I watched Mark Zuckerberg announced that they have co opted yet another word, which is they are launching a product that something presents. So they're trying to coopt presents now and sell it back to us like they did with FaceTime. But why? It's to drive the bottom line. And it's not for Mark anymore, right? It's for the investors. It's for the Corporation. I mean, he has more money than he could ever use.

100 lifetimes. One is beholden to another to another. Right. Where does it stop? And so I love that you're calling out greed because that's absolutely what it is.

I'm so moved that you talked about how you cried because I totally agree with you. It's tragic because it reminds me of that. Was it Brave New World or 1984? I always mix those two up where, like, war is peace and truth is lies. So here in Mark Zuckerberg's world, presence is really absence, right? They're calling the opposite thing. They're calling the thing. What really is the opposite in his world? The thing that he calls presence is a way for us to be more absent, more alienated, more disconnected because we're on the superficial.

We're just passive consumers, as opposed to going deep and having meaningful connections, meaningful work, meaningful pastime.

Yeah. I'm glad that that resonated with you, because I wasn't sure if I should share it.

Oh, no, absolutely. And it really makes me feel that you're walking your walk. You're not just talking your talk. You're feeling the actual gravity of the situation. And it is. It's very grave. It's very scary, especially for all the young people who really don't have anything to compare to from before they're being funneled into this system where this is their normal. But it's a kind of horrifying normal when you think of it.

Yeah, it really is. And so it's not an inevitability. It does require the few brave to stand up and say, no, this is not the way. This is not the path forward. This is not for me. This is not for my family or my community. And hopefully there's enough of us say, real FaceTime, please. Real presence, please. Yeah.

Not pseudo presence. Well, that's why it's so important for me to have people like you on my show to talk about these things, to help people see what's going on and to show them that there are alternatives.

Absolutely.

Well, there's another word used in the book, which I thought was also apropos, which is the word commitment.

Right.

And I think again, it's like, what are we making our commitments to? Are we committing to having better hair so we can look like the Insta famous people online? Or are we committed to our creativity, our family, our community? So can you say something about the way you discuss commitment in Good Burden?

We're a commitment phobic culture. Yeah. We want to keep every option open. There was a famous Harvard commencement speech I think that went viral a year or so ago. You can look it up about this very topic. And their point in that speech was that keeping your options open is just like we talked about all the other things. Like it's not the path to joy. It is not the path to meaning. Making commitments to a few good people and a few good projects is what actually brings joy.

And I'll just speak candidly. That commitment is not something that came easily to me. I was the person that was easy to over schedule or bow out of a commitment I had made, and it feels terrible. It feels terrible to not be true to your own words. And I write a chapter in Good Burdens called Be Committed. And the only way to become committed is to commit, to commit to one thing and consistently see that through. And then when you build that capacity to commit to yet another thing and it builds our capacity for relationship for doing better work, I'll say in my profession as an author, commit and see a project all the way through.

Right. Build that capacity in me and commitments necessary for deep, warm relationships. I write in the book about the Harvard grant study, and you know that our greatest source of human flourishing is warm relationships. And if we aren't committed to people and are consistently there for them and vice versa, then we aren't able to nourish those relationships. So that's why commitment is so important.

Yeah. And again, it's like the difference between staying on that superficial level where everything is easy and investing time, energy and effort into creating that bond with someone else or creating that commitment of your work.

That's right.

Well, it's a really interesting book you've written because like you're saying, you're talking about how to live joyfully in the digital age. But I'm thinking part of what you're really saying is how to live joyfully despite the digital age.

Yes. Just going to go to a few bookstores and get a Sharpie out and correct that.

Yeah. It's an interesting time. Like with that old curse you live in interesting times, right.

Oh, Yeah.

I appreciate your muck raking approach because so many people are buying into it and they're becoming sponsored content. They're saying, I'm going to make the Bucks by letting myself be a shelf or this product or that. And you're saying that's not where it's at, folks. That's not what's going to make the person selling or the person buying happy.

Yep.

No.

100% agreed. And it's just so refreshing when someone just does something to do it. I'll tell you, I'm sorry to come back to this pumpkin carving party thing. It's such a random thing. But I will tell you that we do this event and we buy all the pumpkins and we've got, like, all the supplies because we've gathered them over the years. It's like not a big investment, honestly, but we do it. And there were people here at our event this year that were crying like they had tears in their eyes.

It was just a thing that someone did. And they could just come to for free. And we just did it because it was fun to do. And that was it. And I think we have so few of those experiences today. There's always something to sell. There's always something attached. And I think it is a rare gift we can give when we give with no strings attached.

That's such a great thing for you to share, because that's so true. So much of what's dangled in front of us, there's always something some cost, right. There's something that somebody else wants. And they say, I have a gift for you, but it's not a gift.

It's a trick.

And so when you just give an actual gift, the person is going, is that it. Is there nothing that you want in return? Yeah. And they have to come to understand that what you're getting is you're getting the deeper things, the connection, the joy of giving, the joy of participating, the joy of seeing other people happy. And that's like learning a new way of interacting, learning a new way of being, which is that we can enjoy without having to be transactional.

Absolutely. It feels so good.

So you're also saying how to live joyfully without living a transactional existence.

Yeah. That's well put. Absolutely cool.

Well, I like that. I'm all for that.

On that note about the transactional life. So I was with one of my closest friends, Sarah Siloki. She's a phenomenal author. One of her books has been optioned by Amy Adams to be made into television phenomenal friend. She and I exchanged letters, and I saw her recently, and I said, I owe you a letter. And she was like, no, it's not transactional. She's like, I reserve the right to send you a letter whenever I feel like it right. So to unlearn that right tip for tat, you do me I do you.

It requires attention and effort to be attentive to that default setting. Right.

How to just be in a quid pro quo world.

Yeah. I just did it because I wanted to that's it no need to return it because it made me feel good. Yeah.

We have to learn how to give again. Right. We have to learn how to just give without this expectation that there's something coming back to us on some kind of material level.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And that maybe that's what's coming back to us is deeper and more even better, more meaningful, more fulfilling than the thing we think we want, which is the material payoff.

And I'll just say that good burden is really about aliveness. At the end of each chapter, I say take up the good burden of whatever the thing is of being amazed or being here. That's kind of how I frame the chapter. And then I end each chapter with the goal is aliveness and the purpose is love, and it really is a call to aliveness. Tapping back into the things that bring you truly alive. There was an article I read by an author in the New York Times a number of years ago around the season of Lent, right.

Which is a season of fasting in the Christian tradition. And she was writing she was saying the reason why she chooses to fast is because we should always fast from all that dead ends and dulls. And that line has always stayed with me because I think there's so much deadening and dullness we experience online. And so good burdens is really acclamation a reclaiming of aliveness the things that truly make us come alive.

Which takes us back to our earlier conversation about how when we put in time, energy and effort, when we put in that commitment that makes us feel alive and when we passively consume, we feel dead and numb because we're not engaged. Our mind is not engaged. Our heart is not engaged. Our soul is not engaged. So it's really about taking action on every level of our being.

Yeah. Exactly. And I am deeply aware that those of you listening, none of us have margin, right. No one has extra time. And so what I really aim to do and good burdens was it's about an orientation? It's not a to do list. I just wanted to call that out in it. You will find absolutely no new tasks to take on. It's really about orienting your life towards joy.

Maybe taking some time off social media and putting it into things that might give more of an emotionally meaningful payoff.

Yes. Wiser words were never spoken. Yes.

Well, you spoke them first.

Do that.

What are you currently doing now that you're taking a little break from all the publishing world and all the launching what's next on the horizon for you? Maybe it's a vacation.

Well, I have decided to take next week off, so that is exciting. And I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it. And that makes me very excited. But something I did. So last year I beta tested and launched a digital wellbeing program called The Jomo method course. And so that's the big thing that I've been invested in. So it's really built to help professionals beat FOMO and digital distraction to crush their next big goal. So it was a joy to create. And it's been my joy to serve all the students in that program.

So that's really where my attention is on moving forward for the next for the foreseeable future.

That's a great project. That's a practical way for people to apply some of the lessons that you're sharing and to practice them and find some success.

Yeah. That is my hope. Yeah. I've been able to work with artists and doctors and designers, educators at Oxford and Shopify, Yale, Adobe, Gamblet Media. So it's been really exciting to see these sort of the early adopters in the program, been able to help them save tens of thousands of hours of wasted time, effort and stress online. So that is my mandate. That is my joy. I feel really grateful to be investing in that work.

I'm sure that your students are pretty grateful to have that resource as well. Yeah.

Thank you.

So where can people find you if they're looking to explore all the different things that you're doing?

Yeah. Just simply Christinacrook, that's C-R-O-O-K.com. You'll find everything there.

Wonderful, and just before we wrap up, I always like to ask my guest for a call to action. And I'm sure you've peppered this whole discussion with multiple calls to action, but maybe something to leave them with just at the end, something for them to reflect on and not a task list. But like you said, an orientation or a way of looking at things.

I will read on the first page a word of welcome and good burdens. And this is what I'll say, my dearest hope, is that this book "Good Burdens", but not just this book that you take this with you. My dearest hope, is that this book teaches you to love to know that caring for your small corner of the world matters and helps you channel your energies online and off towards good burdens, caring relationships, community and creative projects that bring joy.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Well, thank you so much, Christina Cook, for coming again on the Ruthless Compassion podcast. It's been wonderful talking with you, and we need more people like you doing this kind of work. But you're a good start for sure.

Thank you.

That was the compelling Christina Crook, and I'm Dr. Marcia Serota, if you like this podcast, review it wherever you listen, and you can sign up for my free bi weekly wellness newsletter at MarciaSerotaMD.com, where you'll also learn about my online courses and my YouTube video series.