The Things We Talk About While Walking | Long Conversations #2 | St-John On-Air

What happens when two best friends disappear into the mountains with 20 kg backpacks, no real plan, a coffee grinder, some chocolate, and several days to talk?

This is the second episode of Long Conversations, a monthly series from St-John On-Air where I step away from the usual structured podcast format and simply talk about the experiences that shape us.

Every year, my best friend and I go trekking in the mountains. We don't plan everything. We find somewhere to sleep—sometimes a bed, sometimes a floor, sometimes a room full of strangers—and spend hours walking.

We're both English teachers, so naturally we talk about work, students, colleagues and the things that have been bothering us.

But we also talk about completely different things:

running shoes.
the new Slipknot single.
snowboarding destinations.
coffee.
food.
life.

And somewhere between the stupid conversations and the serious ones, something happens.

We start talking about our lives.

Our problems.

Our worries.

The things we're trying to figure out.

This episode is about male friendship, mental health, emotional intimacy, conversation, walking, nature, time and the strange freedom of having nowhere you need to be.

It's also about why some of our most meaningful conversations don't happen when we sit down and say, "We need to talk."

They happen while we're walking.

Research into walking and wellbeing, nature, attention restoration, physical activity and social connection offers some fascinating explanations for why these experiences can feel so powerful. But this isn't a psychology lecture.

It's a conversation.

About friendship.

About mountains.

About getting away from ordinary life without necessarily escaping it.

And about what happens when you spend several days with someone who knows you well enough to listen to your problems...

and then spend twenty minutes discussing whether your running shoes were a terrible purchase.

St-John On-Air: Long Conversations — real experiences, bigger questions, no particular plan.

Listen to the episode and take a walk with us.

Imagine that nobody would ever know.

Nobody would praise you. Nobody would criticise you. Nobody would find out.

What would you do differently?

In this episode, we explore authenticity, social approval, conformity, and the uncomfortable gap between being a good person and appearing to be one.

How much of what we do comes from our genuine values—and how much comes from the desire to be liked, respected, admired, or simply seen in a certain way?

Drawing on psychological research and real-life examples, we explore what happens when we remove the audience and ask ourselves a deceptively simple question:

Who are you when nobody is watching?

Because perhaps our most revealing choices are the ones nobody ever sees.

Have you ever wondered who you might have become if you had made one different choice?

If you had taken that job.
Stayed in that relationship.
Moved to another country.
Started the business.
Picked up the guitar again.

We all carry imaginary versions of ourselves—the people we might have been, the lives we might have lived, and the paths we didn't take.

In this reflective episode of StJohn-On-Air, I explore counterfactual thinking, possible selves, nostalgia, and narrative identity to ask a deeper question:

What can the person you could have been teach you about the person you still want to become?

Drawing on the work of psychologists Neal Roese, Kai Epstude, Hazel Markus, Paula Nurius, Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, and Dan McAdams, we explore why we imagine alternative lives, when those thoughts can help us learn, and when they can turn into regret and rumination.

Because you cannot go back and live the life you didn't choose.

But perhaps you can still carry something from it forward.

Maybe that imaginary version of you isn't saying:

"You should have been me."

Maybe they're whispering:

"There is still time to become a little more like the person you wanted to be."

A quiet episode about regret, possibility, identity, and the lives that exist somewhere between memory and imagination.