On the 84th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Wakanyi Hoffman. Wakanyi is an artist of life who paints the shades of each day as a storyteller, author, keynote speaker specialising in Ubuntu philosophy, scholar of indigenous knowledge, and narrative weaver of wisdom in AI.
Wakanyi is an Indigenous Knowledge Curator for ServiceSpace AI, a Research Fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg, and the author of Sala, Mountain Warrior. She sits on several boards, including the Kenya Education Fund, and her mission is to help co-create a world founded on continuous, naturally occurring, systemic intellectual and emotional progress that is in harmony with all other forms of emerging intelligence.
In this enlivening episode, Wakanyi considers what it would take to reconnect with ancient wisdom while living in a modern world. She shares Ubuntu values of survival, solidarity, respect, compassion, and dignity—dignity for human life and all of life. She explores the hospicing of the systems we presently live in and what has inhibited us from engaging with the wisdom of the heart. We also discuss resisting the urge to interfere with a natural process and the relief and joy of not being in control.
If you are struggling to integrate more wisdom into your life, if you feel you are holding on too tightly to the way things are, even when you realise they are no longer serving you, this episode will give you plenty of space, fresh air, and optimism to consider our next evolutions as people and as a society.
Subscribe for weekly episodes, every Tuesday, and check out my YouTube channel (link below) for clips and shorts.
For further content and information check out the following:
Wakanyi's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wakanyi-hoffman-77a9671a4/
- For the podcast's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/@whatisagoodlife/videos
- My newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
- My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
Contact me at
mark@whatisagood.life if you'd like to further explore your own lines of self-inquiry or create experiences that lead to more connecting and genuine conversations amongst groups of people.
00:00 Introduction
03:00 Reconnecting with our indigenous roots
07:30 Merging Wisdom with Modernity
11:00 The illusion of mutual exclusivity of experiences
17:42 Honouring our material and immaterial experiences
33:00 Creating spaces to allow our values to emerge
37:45 Growing out of old cocoons
42:50 Lessons from the do-nothing farmer
47:05 Lessons from observing a child’s development
51:20 The humility and awe of the human experience
57:44 What is a good life for Wakanyi?
What is What is a Good Life??
A project to help you realise you are enough, by noticing and inhabiting life more fully.
What Is a Good Life? is a long-form conversation project exploring how people actually live, feel, and make meaning of their lives. Over the past four years, I’ve sat with more than 300 people — artists, parents, executives, wanderers, therapists, and strangers and invited them into a simple but profound inquiry, "What is a good life for you?"
The conversations explore presence, paradox, uncertainty, and the moments that shape a life - love and loss, trust and fear, clarity and not knowing. It’s an invitations to slow down, to listen deeply, and to bring you into conversation with your own life. There are new episodes every Tuesday.