What if the reason so many of us feel exhausted, disconnected, and unfulfilled isn't because we're failing, but because we've been taught to live in the wrong mindset entirely?
That's the question I bring to Stanford professors and Designing Your Life authors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in this episode of the Be Well by Kelly podcast. Bill is the Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford, with decades of experience at Apple and in product design. Dave is a lecturer in Stanford's Product Design Program with a graduate diploma in Contemplative Spirituality and a life's work built around one question: what should I do with my life?
Bill Burnett has spent 45 years, across five companies and thousands of students, drawing and building things and teaching others to do the same. Dave Evans has dedicated his life to helping people get traction on the question of what they should do with their lives. And what both of them keep coming back to is this: a good life is not stumbled into. It is designed, on purpose, with the same rigor and creativity we bring to anything that actually matters.
Together, they've thought more carefully about meaning, purpose, and fulfillment than almost anyone I've spoken with. And what they've found is both sobering and hopeful.
The problem, they explain, is what they call the "transactional world", the default mode most of us operate in without realizing it. In the transactional world, everything is a metric, a performance, or a production. You do things to get things. You show up to be seen. You produce to be valued. The feedback loop of social media, productivity culture, and constant optimization keeps you there. Measuring, comparing, optimizing, never quite arriving.
It's why so many high achievers who have done everything right still wake up feeling hollow. It's why mothers who are doing everything for everyone else still feel like something is missing. It's why being more connected than any generation in history has not made us less lonely, it's made us more.
We talk about all of it in this episode: burnout, motherhood, social media, AI anxiety, loneliness, relationships, and what it actually costs us to stay perpetually in reactive mode. And we talk about what it looks like to step out of it.
This episode reminded me that what we feed our minds is just as much a health practice as what we put on our plates. The quality of our attention. The depth of our presence. The intentionality behind how we spend our hours and who we spend them with. These are not soft, secondary concerns. They are core to how we feel, how we function, and how we experience our own lives.
