Interview with Sarah Haider
Sarah Haider is a writer and political activist.
Sarah’s Substack Hold That Thought can be found here.
Outer Monologue
Max Raskin: So I wanted to start with the fact that you’re an immigrant to America. How did you get your English so good?
Sarah Haider: I don't know, actually. I remember the process of learning English…I wasn't that old. I was seven or eight. I remember it just coming together within the course of a couple of months as if it was a blurry picture that just got clearer and clearer.
MR: Did you watch certain TV shows or listen to any radio or anything that sticks with you?
SH: I don't think I did anything. My mother tried to teach me spelling, doing just sort of rote memorization of things. But we didn't do that very much, and I don't know if it helped. I just remember interacting with other kids, and that did the trick.
MR: What language do you dream in?
SH: That question is going to lead us to a very crazy tangent that we'll never come out of because I don't dream in any kind of language. I always find that to be such an odd question. I don't have an internal monologue either. I think that's related. But the language that I'm most proficient in now is English.
MR: What do you mean you don't have an internal monologue?
SH: I don't have a voice inside my head that's speaking to me or describing the situation. You do.
MR: I actually have five voices inside my head.
SH: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense.
MR: What do you mean you don't have an inner monologue? If I say to you right now, “think of a number between one and ten.” You thought of a number, right?
SH: Right. But then you evoked it from me. It's not something that is constantly going on without me forcing it. Because basically you said, "Think of a number between one to ten." You asked me to think out loud in my head, so I did. But if you hadn't asked me to do that, I wouldn't think in words in my head.
MR: So if you're being asked a question, will you think about what you say before you say it?
SH: I think about it, but it's not words. You know what I mean? Some people think about the sentence…their thoughts come in sentences, and they have those sentences in their heads. They don't see a distinction between thought and language because they're so connected in their own heads. But in my head, whatever it is that is a stuff of thought, it's something symbolized, and it only becomes language when I try to communicate with somebody.
Clean and Messy
MR: Do you floss?
SH: Not regularly. Not as much as I should. I do have an electric toothbrush though. I feel like that's like a toothbrush plus extra credit on the toothbrush end.
MR: Do you have any rituals? When you wake up in the morning do you go for a run? Drink anything?
SH: Coffee, definitely. I don't even know if, at this point, it helps at all. I know that I get a headache if I don't drink coffee. I like to clean up in the morning. That's my ritual. I like to start the day on a fresh, nice, neat and brand new place.
MR: How's your inbox?
SH: It's terrible. I don't look at it. I just avoid it as long as I can, and then I deal with the most important things.
MR: But you said you're very neat, so why are you so messy in your inbox?
SH: I don't know. I'm actually really messy on my computer too, that's what's interesting. Because my desktop is garbage, and files are not properly organized. It's crazy. I don't know. Maybe there's something to that, psychologically.
MR: But your house is clean.
SH: My house is clean.
MR: Do you vacuum? Are you obsessive?
SH: Yeah. I like vacuuming a lot.
MR: What kind of vacuum?
SH: I like vacuuming.
Is this going to be the interview? We're just going to talk about vacuums?
MR: Yeah.
SH: Okay.
MR: Freud wrote this book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. And he has this idea that from mundane things in your life, whether you floss or whether you're obsessive about cleaning up, you can sort of tell important things about someone's personality.
SH: Okay…so I have a theory on why my digital behavior is messy. I think it's because I struggle a lot with categorizing ideas in a way that feels true. But in the house you don't have that problem. But with a PDF that has to do with race, but also sex, but also social inequality, where do you put that in a way that makes sense, in a way that you can find it later?
MR: Are you a fan of putting yourself into groups? Are you a tribal person?
SH: No, I don't think so. I don't feel like I have a very strong sense of self. I think that's related to the lack of internal monologue thing. I wouldn't say that I'm not a tribal person. I think what people mean by that is do you have a loyalty to some group. When they use the word tribal, they mean political tribes usually. I think I do have a loyalty to a group, which is my family. I probably treat them differently than I treat others.
MR: I guess I know the answer to the religious one, but do you have loyalty to political groups? It doesn't have to be the Republicans or Democrats, but do you have a loyalty to any non-familial group?
SH: I don't know if I do. I've definitely felt a powerful sense of affinity for certain principles. And as a consequence, I felt a level of solidarity with people who shared those principles.
The Human Tribe
MR: You’re a member of humanist groups, right?
SH: Yeah, there's several groups.
MR: But are you into any of them?
SH: I belong to them because I was an activist, and I still do some activist work. So I work with those people in a very literal sense. They are my colleagues.
I don't know if I feel as if they are my tribe in the sense that I don't feel a profound sense of loyalty to them. That sounds like a really bad thing. But I mean in the sense that, would I give them a preference over others in kind of a fair environment?
MR: You’ve made your professional name for your secularism — would you say that that's your most deeply held belief? Or is there something that you feel strongly about that you just don't speak about — like are you really into saving the whales or something else that you never did?
SH: I don't think this is the cause that I care about most. I think this is the cause that I felt that I could have the most effect, where I could, given my strength and my talents and my placement, I could have a real effect.
MR: What do you think is the cause that you care about most?
SH: At the moment? It's hard to pick one that I feel really powerfully about. I guess I'm concerned about the ways in which American society is disintegrating socially. That's not really a cause, it's just a problem that I'm looking into at the moment because I don't know what the problem is exactly. I don't know why this is happening. So, step one, figure out why it's happening. Step two, attach yourself to a cause to fix it.
MR: You went to college?
SH: I did go to college.
MR: Where'd you go?
SH: I don't talk about my biographical details too specifically for security reasons. Awkward, but yeah.
MR: Is that weird for you?
SH: Yes. I think it's weird for everybody. It's not weird if you're really famous, I guess. But it is weird when you're just a nobody or just some online person, and then you have to start doing these kinds of things.
Hobbies and Hacks
MR: What was the last show you binge-watched?
SH: Project Runway.
I don't really watch shows much anymore. I cannot watch anything that requires my full attention because I don't really have time to give it my full attention. So it has to be something where it's really not important if I don't pay attention to half of it.
MR: What's the last album or song that you listened to fully?
SH: I don't know. I'm so bad. It's terrible. I don't listen to music anymore. I used to listen to so much music all the time. I'm trying to think about even the last time I was excited about a new band…I don't even hear about it anymore, about new music coming out.
MR: What do you…
SH: …for fun? In my free time?
MR: Yeah — do you have any hobbies?
SH: At the moment, I don't feel like I have a lot of time for hobbies. I'm a young mother, so that's why. That's the big one.
I work a lot. I write. I guess you can call writing my hobby because I'm not really making any real money off of it. It's just sort of a passion project at the moment. I read constantly. I don't know if I'd call it a hobby anymore.
MR: Do you have any apps on your phone that you recommend to people?
SH: Yeah, I have many. I've started to use one called Omnivore for saving articles. Often I'm browsing around, I'll find a really good article, I think "This is amazing," but I don't want to lose whatever it was that I was reading that got me there, I want to go back to it and finish that. Omnivore is a good way to quickly save that article, and you can tag it and whatever and go back to it.
MR: Are there any other apps you really like?
SH: I've started to use Logseq in an effort to become more organized with my note-taking. Have you heard of Logseq? Have you heard of Roam Research? They’re amazing actually. I'm so fascinated by this field of tools. They're called networked tools, but the idea is that you have something called bidirectional linking.
Let’s say I'm writing about AI, and I read something, I'm writing a note about AI, I can put a little tag AI, and then when I click on that tag, it'll automatically have created a page. And every time I've tagged AI, it all shows up. It's really, really cool.
If you're somebody who likes to read a lot, who has ideas when they're reading to follow up on, these kinds of bidirectional linking, networked thought tools are really, really helpful.
MR: In what physical location do you think you’ve gotten the most ideas for your writing?
SH: Shower's a good one. And when I'm spacing out and washing dishes, that's a good time for new thoughts to come. But I often use reading as a really good way to provoke new thought. And often it's something totally different. Maybe not exactly different than whatever topic, whatever problem that I'm trying to solve, I might pick something in a similar field, not exactly the same field. And I start reading, and I find that somehow I get answers to the questions in that other field that I was thinking about.
MR: So let’s say you’re doing dishes and an idea pops into your head for something, where do you go and write it?
SH: Right now, I'm try trying Logseq. But what I'll also do is I'll just note it on my phone if I have my phone near me, and that's usually the closest thing. I'll just put it in notes and then I'll move it into Logseq later.
MR: Are you a fast writer?
SH: No, extremely slow.
MR: Are you a fast reader?
SH: Very fast. Very fast.
MR: What was the last book you read cover to cover?
SH: I don't know if I read things cover to cover unless I'm listening to them, because I skip around, and I stop, and then I leave the book alone, and then I come back four months later.
MR: What about the last fiction you read?
SH: It was the Game of Thrones books.
The Rushdie Hypothesis
MR: Have you ever met Salman Rushdie?
SH: I have not.
MR: When he’s attacked, what does your phone look like on that day?
SH: People are calling, people are texting, lots of emails about something that happened. But yeah, I don't even know if I like to talk about it because it's one of those things that…I thought he was safe. I think he thought he was safe, and it was a really nasty shock to learn that he wasn't.
MR: And why don't you like talking about it? Because it exposes vulnerability?
SH: It's uncomfortable.
If you talk about the security thing a little too much, I think it starts to reveal things. Not that I think that that's what's going to happen in this. No one who's trying to kill me is going to read this and figure out anything. But it's better to be more careful and have certain habits of speaking about yourself in case you sometimes reveal yourself accidentally in a context where somebody who's threatening is listening. But it does make me deeply uncomfortable because you don't know if you're just being an idiot. You don't know if you're just being super paranoid and creating all these restrictions in your life for no reason. Or the opposite could be true. It could be that this is super necessary and you're not doing enough, but there's no real way to gauge risk.
MR: You can't test the hypothesis.
SH: You can't test it one way or the other. Anything where I feel like I cannot become more informed or I cannot just empower myself through reading, and studying, and diving deep, and figuring it out, and having an answer makes me uncomfortable. And this is one of those questions where I don't have an answer, and the stakes are really high.
Atheism
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
SH: No.
MR: You're a hundred percent no?
SH: I'm an atheist.
MR: Do you have any meditation ritual or anything like that?
SH: I tried meditation. I tried the apps for a long time. I don't know how much good they did me. I think, to some degree, the fact that I don't have an internal monologue makes some aspects of them not really that relevant.
MR: Do you have to think about your mortality more than you'd like to?
SH: Yeah. And I don't like to think about it at all. And it's not something that, prior to this kind of thing, I would've ever given much thought to.
I think about the mortality of others. Death, to me, my personal death means nothing. Doesn't make me sad. It's easy for me to dismiss it. But death of my loved ones, that is very hard to contemplate. It's very hard to think about. It's very hard to reconcile myself with. Causes a lot of emotional distress. So yeah, I obviously don't want to cause emotional distress to my family by my own death either or put them in any kind of danger.
Bucket Cooking List
MR: Do you miss any food from Pakistan?
SH: There's almost nothing that I can't get here that I could get there. But the native fruits and vegetables of Pakistan — they're different and then they also taste different.
MR: What is the difference?
SH: The peas there are not as sweet as the peas here. And I was a big pea fan back when I was in Pakistan, then I came here and peas here are very sweet. The corn here is very sweet. Just different. I had mangoes all the time. I had pomegranates all the time.
MR: Do you cook? Let's say Bill Maher's coming over for dinner…
SH: Ooh. Okay.
MR: …and you needed to impress him. What are you going to cook?
SH: I have a couple of dishes. I like to cook a lot, so I have some dishes that I have kind of come up with.
MR: Can we put it in the interview?
SH: No, because one of my bucket list items is that I want to publish a cookbook.
MR: You could share one dish, no?
SH: I guess I could, but why would I? People are not going to take advantage of this recipe either way.
MR: Yes, they would!
SH: Okay. Well, maybe I'll just email it to you. How about that?
MR: What’s your style of cooking?
SH: Well, there's multiple dishes that I've come up with, but they're like Thai-ish. I like Thai food a lot. I like Thai flavors a lot. And Italian.
Converting for the Jokes?
MR: What does your media consumption look like in the morning?
SH: I've not been consuming the news on purpose. It's a deliberate thing that I've done, and I wrote about it also a year ago.
It's so bad for you. It's destroying your brain. Your attention is a limited resource. Your brain can only be functioning well for a certain amount of hours a day, and you should use that. You should be thinking about how you're using this resource and be deliberate about how you're using it.
MR: So of the modern atheist popularizers — the Dan Dennett’s, Bill Maher’s — who is your favorite?
SH: I've liked Sam Harris for a long time. Lately, I read and pay attention to Daniel Dennett. That’s because I've been thinking about consciousness and things like that, and he has stuff to say about it.
MR: Are you a materialist?
SH: I don't know. I'm investigating whether I am. I think so. That's atheists, right? Technically. That's where you end up.
MR: Have you ever read Thomas Nagel?
SH: No.
MR: He’s an atheist but is skeptical of the materialist take on things — the book's called Mind & Cosmos.
Have you ever questioned your atheism or secularism?
SH: No. I know a lot of people who have had this sort of return to religion. And the ways in which they explain it to me is that they start to resonate again with a lot of the indirect benefits of religion. The community it provides, the sense of order that it provides. For me, those are not sufficient reasons. Because I don't find it difficult to enjoy the structure of something and appreciate the indirect effect something might give me without believing in it.
If I was born Jewish, I would be a secular Jew, and I might hang out in the community still and sort of part partake.
MR: Like converting for the jokes — you'd watch Woody Allen movies and eat matzo ball soup, but you wouldn't pray.
SH: Yeah. I think that would be me.
I don't know if the religious explanation of things satisfies me, I guess. But I have been more open-minded about that kind of thing than I was. When you first leave religion, a lot of atheists go through a phase of being very upset and angry…
MR: Someone's like, "God bless you" after they sneeze and they're like, "There's no such thing as God.”
SH: Yeah.
I think it's understandable why that phase happens, but a lot of us go through it. And I think that I did go through it, and I got over it very quickly. And now I've come to appreciate a lot of the social benefits of religion. I still don't know if it offers what I'm looking for in a philosophy or in ethics.
MR: Have you ever done psychedelics or anything like that?
SH: I did mushrooms in college, and I've been wanting to try psychedelics again because I think I could get good use out of it. But I haven't had the opportunity. I don't know anybody who has them. I don't run into the kind of people who would just be like, "Hey, here's some drugs."
MR: There's all the dogma and structures of religion, but are you interested in the personal subjective phenomenon? A lot of people explore that when they go to nature or Burning Man or whatever. Or are you pretty convinced that anything that you experience is just neurons firing and there's no non-material basis of explaining a spiritual phenomenon?
SH: I would say that I'm one of those people who thinks it's just neurons firing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not a valuable experience anyway, and that there's nothing you can't tell us about our material reality or our social reality either. So I would still be interested in having the experience. I highly doubt it would lead to a religious reawakening. Do you think that you have to go into it thinking that that is a possibility for you to experience that fully?
MR: This reminds me of the Niels Bohr joke — he had a horseshoe over his door and his students asked him how he, as a non-believer, could possibly have such a superstitious ornament. He allegedly said, “Of course I don’t believe it — but I’m told it works even if you don’t.”
Heidegger’s Girlfriend
MR: What are the ideas you want to be remembered for?
SH: I don't think about my legacy.
MR: Why not?
SH: I was reading some interview of Hannah Arendt and she talked about ambition and why does she think and what does she want to achieve in the world. And she said something about how she just thinks for the sake of thinking because she likes the feeling of understanding, but that ambition, she finds, is a male characteristic. I thought that interesting. She was like, "This is a very masculine thing for you to even ask me."
MR: That's interesting. Hannah Arendt, she was Heidegger's girlfriend, right?
SH: Yeah. It was so interesting, right?
MR: That's her legacy. She was Heidegger's girlfriend.
SH: That's her legacy. Yeah. I don't know if that's her legacy, but that's an interesting chapter in her life for sure.
More like Heidegger was her boyfriend.