Ethical Adulthood with Andrea Fiondo
Ethical Adulthood with Andrea Fiondo explores non-duality, yoga, meditation, music, sacred texts, culture, and the ordinary work of meeting our lives with humor, compassion, clarity, responsibility, kindness, and respect for the reality we actually share. These are spoken reflections from a yogi who has stepped off the path.
Season 1 explores the five capacities that form the foundation of this podcast. How do we stay humane, grounded, and accountable when ethics are thin, certainty is collapsing, and maturity is rarely rewarded? Here, we stay close to what we can actually see, live, test, suffer, repair, and recognize together.
Season 2 explores ethical adulthood through music.
Each episode uses a song as a doorway into one of the capacities we need to navigate modern life with integrity: the ability to tolerate uncertainty, repair relationships, live with loss, hold power responsibly, question our own certainty, and stay connected to what is real.
Drawing from artists as diverse as Bill Withers, Joni Mitchell, Indigo Girls, Fleetwood Mac, Jason Mraz, Chicago, Rush, Carly Simon, and others, these reflections look beyond self-improvement and into the ordinary work of becoming a mature human being.
The songs become case studies. The lyrics become stories. The music becomes a mirror.
This is not a nostalgia podcast. It is an exploration of what these songs still have to teach us about love, responsibility, freedom, belonging, grief, courage, and the complicated task of sharing a world with other people.
Recorded in Detroit, these episodes invite listeners to think more deeply, listen more carefully, and practice the difficult art of growing up without growing hard.
Season 1 introduced the five capacities that form the foundation of Ethical Adulthood.
Season 2 asks what those capacities look like in real life.
Season 3 begins with a look at an old map—the 7 Chakras—but through a developmental lens.
Then the 0th capacity is named and discussed—the capacity for complexity.
Season 3 then explores one question:
What happens when we mistake the map for reality?
For thousands of years, human beings have created maps to explain personality, morality, suffering, spiritual growth, and God. Some have endured for centuries. Some have shaped civilizations.
Rather than asking whether these maps are right or wrong, we’ll ask:
What truth did they preserve?
What did they help us see?
What did they make harder to see?
From Hippocrates and the Four Temperaments to the Buddha, Krishna, Dante, and Jesus, we’ll examine some of humanity’s oldest attempts to understand ourselves—and what ethical adulthood asks of us today.
Ethical Adulthood with Andrea Fiondo
Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack | Fought and Lost by Sam Ryder and Brian May
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From the time we are children, we are taught to celebrate winners.
The champions.
The valedictorians.
The people who come out on top.
But most of life is not winning.
Most of life is showing up.
In this episode, I explore Fought & Lost and what it has to teach us about resilience, participation, and the courage to remain engaged even when success is not guaranteed.
Because adulthood eventually asks something difficult of us:
Can we continue to love, create, work, risk, and care when there is no promise of victory?
We will win.
We will lose.
We will rise.
We will fall.
The invitation is not to become a champion.
The invitation is to remain a decent human being no matter which side of the handshake line you're on today.
Welcome to Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack with Andrea Fiondo.
And your jubilation I have to break understanding.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back in to Ethical Adulthood, a Detroit soundtrack. And today we're talking about Sam Rider's Fought and Lost, featuring Brian May, the guitarist of Queen. And we're looking at winning and losing. You can do everything right and still lose. You can show up, try hard, care deeply, be brave. And life can still go. Cool story, bro, but not you. Not this time. And then what? That part, the part after the loss, is where people either grow up or they get a little sideways for a while. Because winning is easy to metabolize. Losing is where you find out who you really are. We're trained for victory like it's the only storyline that matters. We have confetti for winners. We have trophies, podiums, and highlight reels. But we do not really have a shared language for being passed over, failing at something you wanted, getting cut from the team, trying again when you feel embarrassed, or losing a person you love. We know how to celebrate, we're good at that, but we're still learning how to lose without turning into a cartoon villain, a ghost, or a puddle. Which is so unfortunate because everybody loses. Even the winners lose sometimes. So this song, Fought and Lost, by Sam Ryder. Brian May plays lead guitar on the recording. So it makes sense that the singer leans into Freddie Mercury's style. So for me, naturally, we are the champions by Queen came to mind. That song is basically tattooed into the brain of anyone who's ever been near a stadium or a TV or a bar with sports on in the past 45 years. And at first I thought, oh, nice symmetry. One anthem for winners, one anthem for you for losers. And then I listened closely to the lyrics for We Are the Champions, and I realized I'd sort of misunderstood it for years. The chorus is what people shout when they're celebrating, right? But the verses, well, they're about getting knocked around. Mistakes, paying dues, humiliation, and continuing anyway. This is not the voice of someone who's never lost. It's the voice of someone who's lost plenty. And just did not let that be the end of the story. So these songs, they're not opposites. They're cousins. One ends with triumph, one ends with defeat. But the posture is the same. I showed up, I gave what I had, and I am still standing. This is not shallow win-lose storytelling. That's ethics for adults. I love sports. Not the politics of it or the spectacle and the celebrations. I like the game and the handshake line. The handshake line is spiritual, and I'm not kidding. Y'all just tried to beat each other for two hours, and now you're like, good game, good game, good game. That's emotional regulation with sneakers on. It's a ritual that says, okay, we competed hard, and no matter what the outcome, I am not going to pretend that you're evil just because you challenged me. You know, yoga teaches the same reality in a quieter way. Life is made of opposites. Win, lose, gain, loss, joy, grief. If you're waiting for a life where you only win, where you only feel good and you only get your way, respectfully, good luck with that. The practice isn't avoiding the hard half of the pair. The practice is staying kind when it shows up. And the distinction between an opponent and an enemy matters. Most adults still confuse I'm challenged with I'm threatened. And you can happen, you can watch it happen daily on social media. Someone disagrees and suddenly it's not just a disagreement anymore, it's a character assassination. Ethical adulthood asks for something more mature. Stay in contact with reality. Feel what you feel, and don't dehumanize the other person to regulate your own discomfort. And most of our fights aren't actually about the other person anyway. Often we're just we're bumping into stress, money, exhaustion, fear, old history, misunderstandings, the simple fact that maybe nobody ate breakfast. Yeah, there, I said it. Eat something before you declare war on somebody. So when a lyric lands on so we will see you here, same time, same place next year. I don't hear a need for revenge. I hear the grown up version of conflict. We will meet again and we will see what we learned. We will see who we are next time. Not I will destroy you. But life is not a straight line to a trophy. It moves in cycles, expansion and contraction, trying and failing, winning and losing, holding and letting go. And if your identity is built entirely on winning, losing can feel catastrophic. Not just I lost, but I am a loser. And that is where people sometimes become harsh, numb, or hopeless. So the real question is not can you win? The real question is can you lose and still remain a decent human being? Rupture is inevitable. Cruelty is optional. You will be disappointed. You will be hurt. You will fail. People will misunderstand you. Life will hand you outcomes you did not order. But you do not have to turn that pain into poison. Ethical adulthood looks like being upset without becoming contemptuous, being wrong without collapsing into shame, being hurt without becoming righteous, losing without needing someone else to suffer. You can keep your dignity and not tear anyone else down. This is where yoga or any practice really either becomes profound or stays superficial. If a spiritual practice only helps you feel calm when things are going well, it's often more about mood management than growth. Real practice trains you for the moments when you want to bail, when the outcome is uncertain, when you are embarrassed, when you're disappointed, when life gives you bad news. The goal is not to eliminate struggle. The goal is to stay present inside it without losing your humanity and without borrowing someone else's humanity to soothe your aching nervous system. And there's another thing we don't usually discuss. Sometimes the win is internal. Sometimes the win is that you stayed kind. You stayed honest. You stayed engaged, you didn't abandon yourself, you didn't dehumanize anyone else, and actually learned something real. That's not a consolation prize. That's the whole point of being alive. A world full of people who can only function when they're winning becomes brittle and aggressive. A world where people can strive, lose, and still remain decent. That world isn't just survivable. That world is one worth showing up for over and over again. And yoga at its heart teaches exactly that. Or it teaches nothing at all. So yes, fight. Care. Try. Go all in. And if you lose do not add the extra tragedy of becoming smaller, meaner, or colder. Do not turn pain into a personality. Just say the clean sentence. I fought and lost. And then add the second sentence, the one that separates the kids from the adults. And I'm still here. I'll see you next time.
