Things Meghan O'Gieblyn Has Said on Podcasts

“The great thing about having a taboo is that you don't waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating. … Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind.” — Meghan O'Gieblyn, EconTalk

Russ Roberts had said it is far easier to eat no potato chips at a party than to eat just one. O'Gieblyn agrees, drawing on her own experience that willpower was useless against drinking even when it worked everywhere else in her life.

EconTalk · 2026-10-05 Permalink → Listen →

EconTalk Around 32:14 into the episode

Meghan O'Gieblyn

…is the center of their lives. And that sometimes we just need to respect that there's a hard limit to something and something that we can't understand. You know, I'm never going to figure out why I'm an alcoholic. But, you know, I know for a fact that my life is better when I heed that one rule.

Russ Roberts

…For them, alcohol is not an issue. It's just, it's never an issue. And you can't, in your case, you can't have one. You can't have the potato chip. And so is it a part of our nature for some of us that we struggle with certain things like that? Or is it everyone who has that for different things?

Meghan O'Gieblyn

…And I think that thing is different for everybody. But yeah, what you're saying about the potato chips, too. I mean, the great thing about having a taboo is that you don't spend, waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating. Like, okay, when is one chip turn into two chips? And when do I need to stop? Can I do another one? And you're completely distracted and outside of yourself. Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind.

Russ Roberts

I had a friend who would tell me that there should be no overweight Orthodox Jews because Orthodox Jews are really good at self-control. They don't eat pork. Certain types of food even that are non-pork, that are certified as kosher. They don't use their phone on the Shabbat on Saturday. So they…

Meghan O'Gieblyn

It is a mystery. Yeah, and there's been a lot of, I mean, what you're talking about, about the will being sort of finite. I think there was a really popular framework called ego-depletion theory that was, yeah, throughout the late 90s, early 2000s, maybe that was sort of the dominant paradigm for…

Russ Roberts

My dad smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for a good chunk of his life. And we, his children, when we were younger, would beg him to stop. And I would talk to, I would be maybe, I don't know, 13, 14 years old. I'd talk to his mother, my grandmother, and say, can you get dad to stop smoking? And…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“I had always thought of my drinking as a failure of will. And what if it was actually a failure of attention?” — Meghan O'Gieblyn, Search Engine

O'Gieblyn on the idea her memoir is built around, which she took from a line of Simone Weil's: that we should try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. She had come to believe willpower couldn't get her out of an addiction. What Weil gave her was the thought that by the time a temptation arrives the contest is already decided, by what you have been paying attention to before then.

Search Engine · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →

Search Engine Around 36:37 into the episode

Meghan O'Gieblyn

…in their addictions and like remembering what it was like, you know, remaining in this ongoing dialogue with yourself. And when you do have thoughts about drinking, like really taking time to respond to them and saying like, no, that's a lie and not just letting the fantasies fester in your mind.

PJ Vogt

…felt like I was tracking was an evolving belief you had about the way to manage like your own divided self. Like it felt like you were shifting from an idea that it was about willpower and practice. And in the end, that it was maybe about something that was like slightly more complicated than that.

Meghan O'Gieblyn

…where she says, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And I was so fascinated and mystified by that quote. I mean, on one hand, I read this like shortly after I came back from the relapse. So this idea that will had limits, that I couldn't will myself out of an addiction was very much something I already believed. But attention, I had never really thought about before. I had always thought of my drinking as a failure of will. And what if it was actually a failure of attention? You know, what if it was that I had, you know, not stayed the course in this commitment to something that was working and, you know, paid enough attention to that part of my life to ensure that it continued working. Because again, once you get to that point where you're faced with a temptation or decision, like the battle's already up by then.

PJ Vogt

Maintaining a habit of attention, that also requires discipline, but it feels like a discipline that I can actually reasonably commit to while knowing that like for me, like I've eaten four popsicles today. I'm on a diet. Thank

Meghan O'Gieblyn

you for sharing that. Yeah. I walked out of the kitchen

PJ Vogt

and my partner saw me eating a popsicle and was like, didn't you say you wanted to eat healthily? And my brain flashed to the wrappers of three other popsicles.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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