What is a Good Life? #83
Realising You Are Loved with Tom Morgan
On the 83rd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Tom Morgan. Tom has spent the last 20 years in markets, on both the buy and sell sides. He has worked at several investment banks on Wall Street and his most recent role was with the wealth manager Sapient Capital. He describes himself as a "curiosity sherpa"; he spends his life seeking out the most interesting ideas and thinkers for curious people. He has just co-founded The Leading Edge, a network for curious people focused on their personal evolution, and he is also the writer of The Leading Edge newsletter. He graduated from Oxford University with an MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
In this enlightening conversation, Tom muses on whether we realise that the universe loves us. He shares his experiences of struggling with mental and spiritual health, highlights the significance of experiencing flow in a meaningful way, discusses the importance of being honest with ourselves and the world around us, and explores the relationship between disclosing truth and the synchronicity we experience.
Tom shares many insightful anecdotes and experiences throughout this conversation, making this episode ideal for anyone feeling stuck in life, considering career transitions, facing challenges with their well-being, or struggling to see the signs that the world or universe may be offering.
The weekly clip from the podcast (5 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (64 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
In this interview, there is a point when Tom refers to having an experience during which every time he said something that he didn’t fully believe, he felt like his heart physically hurt. During this experience, his senses felt extremely heightened, and he suspected this was always occurring, but that usually, we are not sensitive enough to be aware of it.
This is a process that I fully feel and recognise all too well in my own body. When I say something I don’t believe or know not to be true, I create a pain and distortion in my being. I fully believe this happens all the time.
My life moves slowly enough that there are natural points of reflection, space, and stillness that frequently occur in a day. Whenever I sense that I am deliberately trying to project something I am not, or when I have left intentional and specific breadcrumbs to lead someone to an outcome that isn’t true, I feel it in those quiet moments.
This isn’t about self-flagellation or labelling myself as a liar or dishonest; I don’t care much for the judgement of it. I simply know that unless I acknowledge it with myself, or with another person or group of people, this knowing will cause actual dis-ease in my body, mind, and soul.
Again, this isn’t about harsh judgement of my actions. I fully understand that being human is a complex experience, full of discomfort. We find moments awkward, or we find ourselves caught between who we are and who we’d like to be. There are many reasons why our relationship with truth wobbles or falters.
I’m simply pointing out a process that I notice in myself all the time, and I suspect it is one that we rarely feel comfortable acknowledging. From a young age, we are told how bad lying is by adults who most likely have complicated relationships with truth.
We live in a society that has moved a long way from truth. I’m not just talking about lies that can be publicly proven; that’s the basic level of truth. I mean being honest with your intentions, irrespective of what anyone else could credibly prove or accuse you of.
It’s normal for companies to put positive spins on press releases that show disappointing results. We have politicians who will deny, deny, deny until unequivocal evidence is produced, and then remorse is conjured up. We have sales processes that normalise overpromising, and marketing that convinces you to need something you don’t, while we market ourselves on LinkedIn or our CVs in incredibly one-sided and over-inflated ways.
From my perspective, there are so many ways we have normalised a bad relationship with truth that it’s no wonder we hardly reflect on what truth means to us.
Now, I can’t stress this enough, as we usually get very tetchy if someone insinuates a lack of honesty or truth in any aspect of our lives. I generally think humans are mostly honest and truthful creatures.
What I am noticing is that regardless of the ratio of truthful to untruthful acts, the untruthful ones will cause some sense of dis-ease in our being. When we say something we do not believe to be true, it creates an energy that can be felt within us—an energy that can disturb us until we address it.
Think for a moment of how even an act from years ago, regardless of whether others realised the truth of your actions or intentions, can come back to you on some random sunny day with almost the same energy as if it had just happened yesterday.
The busyness of our lives and the urgency they generate contribute to us not noticing, but I know these energies subtly persist until we acknowledge them, at least with ourselves or even with someone we intentionally misled. I don’t mean this in the sense of virtuosity—I mean this primarily for the sake of your own well-being, and for the sake of how well you know yourself.
I see little coincidence that the level of deception we have normalised on a wider scale, which often prioritises money over truth, coexists with so many people not knowing what they’d like to do with their lives—even when I hypothetically ask people that question under the condition there are no limits or obstacles to what they could say.
I sense one of the most under-appreciated areas of our development that we could focus on is our relationship with truth. Primarily, we should focus on the internal dynamics of that, getting more comfortable with calling out our distortions of truth to ourselves, which can then progress to external expressions of it too.
This isn’t about complete virtuosity of behaviour—we’ll still falter, wobble, and fall along the way. However, when we acknowledge it with ourselves or others, we have a chance to regain some sense of reality, rather than creating a tangled, messy web where we lose our sense of self. When done regularly enough, we might be surprised at how little effort is required to disentangle what we have just entangled.
In my experience, very few things in life forge stronger relationships or more trust with others than regularly acknowledging whenever my relationship with truth has frayed or split, and indeed, a stronger relationship with a sense of who I am and where I stand.
3. Full Episode - Realising You Are Loved with Tom Morgan - What is a Good Life? #83
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4. This week’s Questions
Do you feel or sense that the Universe loves you?
What area of your life has moved the furthest away from truth?
About Me
I am a coach and writer based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 200 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, experiences I create to stimulate more meaningful group conversations, trust, and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.