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0:00:29 We all have bad days, and sometimes bad weeks, and maybe even bad years.
0:00:33 But the good news is we don’t have to figure out life all alone.
0:00:37 I’m comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted’s How to Be a Better Human podcast.
0:00:44 And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life, actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day-to-day better.
0:00:48 Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house,
0:00:54 each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life’s ups and downs.
0:00:57 Find How to Be a Better Human wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:00 Why do we do philosophy?
0:01:02 What is it even for?
0:01:09 I can almost hear the water bong bubbling as I ask that question.
0:01:12 But seriously, what is it for?
0:01:16 It’s an old question.
0:01:17 It’s an old question.
0:01:20 One of the oldest in philosophy.
0:01:23 And the answer is not obvious.
0:01:28 Some people think the point of philosophy is to make the world make sense.
0:01:31 To explain how everything hangs together.
0:01:38 For others, philosophy is useless if it doesn’t tell us how to live.
0:01:43 If you’re in the latter camp, and I basically am,
0:01:49 then it’s fair to say that you think of philosophy as a form of self-help.
0:01:56 Philosophy should have a lot to offer us when we’re anxious or depressed,
0:02:02 or in one of those uneasy periods of life where you start wondering who you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going.
0:02:05 What’s otherwise known as a midlife crisis.
0:02:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:24 Today’s guest is Kieran Setia.
0:02:29 He’s a philosopher at MIT and the author of several books.
0:02:33 Most recently, Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.
0:02:36 And Midlife, A Philosophical Guide.
0:02:43 Setia is that rare academic philosopher who cares about writing for a general audience.
0:02:46 And more importantly, knows how to.
0:02:50 His book about midlife crises is a great example of this.
0:02:55 It’s intimate, accessible, and full of genuine insight.
0:02:59 I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to get him on the show.
0:03:02 And now, he’s here to talk about it.
0:03:10 Kieran Setia, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:03:12 Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
0:03:17 Could you just maybe tell the audience a little bit about the kind of work you do as a philosopher?
0:03:18 What do you study?
0:03:22 What are the big questions driving your work?
0:03:23 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:25 So I work on ethics.
0:03:28 So really, the big question is, how should we live our lives?
0:03:32 And that question leads me into lots of related areas.
0:03:35 So I’m very interested in the nature of human action, the nature of agency,
0:03:39 in the nature and possibility of knowledge in general,
0:03:45 and ethical knowledge in particular, and questions about human nature and what kinds of beings we are.
0:03:48 Yeah, tiny questions like, how should we live our lives?
0:03:48 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:49 Exactly, exactly.
0:03:58 Well, you are a professional philosopher, so let me just kick this off with a layup question.
0:03:59 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:00 Okay.
0:04:00 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:05 What do you think philosophy is really for? What’s the point of philosophizing?
0:04:06 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:09 Oh, good, yeah. No, it’s good to start with the easy ones. Thank you.
0:04:10 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:16 I mean, I think the best answer to the question of what philosophy is for is related to the question of what philosophy is.
0:04:19 And I think the best way to approach that is historical.
0:04:24 So when I try to explain what philosophy is, I usually start with ancient Greek philosophy
0:04:29 and the idea that philosophy encompasses all systematic inquiry into the world,
0:04:34 our relationship to the world, and how to orient ourselves to and conduct ourselves in the world.
0:04:40 And then what happens through the course of history is that particular disciplines sort of peel off from philosophy.
0:04:47 So you get psychology and economics in the 19th century, you get linguistics, computer science in the 20th century.
0:04:59 And what philosophy is left with are the big, demanding, difficult questions for which we don’t have any accepted results other than think really hard about it.
0:05:02 The negative way of putting it is we’re left with the detritus of inquiry.
0:05:12 The positive way to put it is we ask the kinds of inevitable, essential, important questions that the other disciplines can’t answer and don’t really even know how to ask.
0:05:17 Yeah, I sometimes get asked why I ended up choosing philosophy as a major.
0:05:22 And I don’t really have a great answer other than I always just kind of love the questions more than the answers.
0:05:25 And so that’s just where I naturally landed.
0:05:36 I mean, I think you have to have a certain kind of patience with questions to really sustain work in philosophy because the progress is fitful and uncertain.
0:05:41 And a lot of what you’re doing is trying to figure out what the questions are and how to make them tractable.
0:05:52 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable.
0:06:00 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks are ones you could probably go your whole life without really spending a lot of time confronting.
0:06:19 Some of them, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable, but still have this philosophical character that we don’t have an off-the-shelf method for answering them other than try to think it through using every tool you can lay your hands on.
0:06:24 Yeah, I’ve always found this debate in the history of philosophy fascinating.
0:06:41 You know, does philosophy exist to explain the world or is it supposed to tell us what to do, how to live, or is it just another human activity like painting that really only justifies itself by how much beauty and meaning it adds to life?
0:06:46 It sounds like you kind of land on, no, it should tell us how to live.
0:06:47 Otherwise, what are we doing here?
0:06:50 I definitely think that’s one of the goals of philosophy.
0:06:58 I think, just going back to the history again, one thing that happens is you have these pre-Socratic philosophers before Socrates in the 5th century BCE.
0:07:01 They’re mostly metaphysicians.
0:07:03 They’re interested in the nature of reality and how the world works.
0:07:12 Socrates then comes along and says, guys, the urgent question is how should we live our lives and is interrogating the ethos and the ethics of the Athens of his time.
0:07:18 And then Plato and Aristotle and some other philosophers who follow him say, actually, we’ve got to do both.
0:07:24 Like the only way to really answer the question how to live is through more abstruse metaphysical reflections.
0:07:31 So the idea that philosophy should answer the question how to live and try and guide us in our lives is there from pretty early on and is one that we shouldn’t give up.
0:07:36 If I had to place you in some philosophical camp, I’m not sure which one it would be.
0:07:44 I mean, is there a school or a tradition or a particular philosopher that you identify with?
0:07:51 Is there a label like Stoic or Existentialist or Aristotelian that you’re comfortable with?
0:07:55 I do have a philosophical hero and it’s the novelist philosopher Iris Murdoch.
0:08:09 She’s my hero in part because she is the person who really developed the idea that accurate description of reality is a demanding, complicated, arduous moral task.
0:08:15 And that it’s a much bigger part of what ethical reflection looks like than typical philosophers appreciate.
0:08:23 And she has a book called The Sovereignty of Good that it’s one of the few philosophy books that I go back to for solace.
0:08:26 Like when I’m feeling down, there’s not a lot of philosophy I think, this will cheer me up.
0:08:33 But with Murdoch, I find it so inspiring, the ambition of what she’s doing in this very short, dense book.
0:08:38 If I was going to declare allegiance to a philosopher, it would be kind of continuing the spirit of her work.
0:08:45 Well, the essay you wrote that caught my attention posed this question, is philosophy self-help?
0:08:52 Now, self-help is a strange term we can get into a little bit, but is that how you conceive a philosophy is essentially a tool of self-help?
0:08:54 A lot of it depends on the connotations of self-help.
0:09:08 So I think self-help as a distinctive genre now is often associated with a kind of narrow concern for one’s own happiness as opposed to how to live a good life in general, which involves how you relate to other people.
0:09:14 And it’s a kind of particular literary genre that is a little bit at odds with how philosophers tend to operate.
0:09:24 There’s a sense in which asking the question how to live in a way that’s practical surely ought to count as a project of guiding our lives and helping us to live better.
0:09:32 But it doesn’t fit neatly with how self-help is understood in this sort of contemporary, narrower, generic sense.
0:09:47 So I think the thing that’s easier to define pithily is the literary genre, which has a kind of definite origin.
0:09:59 So historians who write about the literary and cultural genre of self-help often trace it back to the amazingly named Samuel Smiles, the first self-help guru in 1859.
0:10:15 And he wrote this book, self-help, and he was a kind of social activist, but he had the idea that a book aimed at a general audience telling people how to change their own lives to flourish in the world was a good thing to do.
0:10:28 And that idea that there’s a kind of genre of writing that tells you how you can change yourself, and that’s the sort of self-help idea, and it’s on you to flourish in the world.
0:10:34 That descends from Smiles and then really kind of explodes through the 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.
0:10:40 So that’s one way to define it, is it’s a kind of literary genre that has some pitfalls to it.
0:10:43 I mean, one of the pitfalls is it’s very individualistic.
0:10:52 It’s very much focused on the idea that you can change yourself, and less focused on the idea of changing society or structures in which it’s difficult to flourish.
0:10:58 And also, it tends to be very focused on individual happiness rather than treating other people well.
0:11:07 On another understanding of self-help, it’s just reflective thinking about how to live a better life, and then it looks like really it is just philosophical ethics.
0:11:17 But if you go back to the beginning, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy was essentially understood as a form of self-help, right?
0:11:19 I mean, Plato definitely thought of it that way.
0:11:28 Yeah, I mean, certainly in the sense of there’s the project of making our lives better that drives Socrates.
0:11:36 And then when Plato writes the Republic, there’s a lot of metaphysics, there’s the nature of the forms, there’s the parable of the cave and the idea that we don’t really know true reality.
0:11:41 There’s all this metaphysical and epistemological stuff to do with knowledge.
0:11:49 But the guiding question is, how should I as an individual live, what would flourishing be, and how should the state be organized?
0:11:53 So in that sense, it’s self-help from the beginning.
0:12:00 The ways in which I think it differs from contemporary self-help have partly to do with the idea that the goal there is not just that you feel happy.
0:12:06 It is about living a flourishing life, and that’s understood in terms that this is a little anachronistic.
0:12:08 We’d think of it as partly moral.
0:12:11 It’s about justice and the treatment of other people.
0:12:14 You don’t get a lot of self-help books today.
0:12:21 Things that are about how to be a more just person or what your moral obligations are typically don’t get classified as self-help.
0:12:24 It’s much more about your own happiness and feeling good.
0:12:34 And the other thing that’s a difference and that’s a challenge is that Plato is writing in an often esoteric way, like the work is difficult, it’s demanding.
0:12:39 So genre-wise, it’s not quite as outward-facing as contemporary self-help.
0:12:50 And there’s a question, should we expect that philosophical reflection of this dense, theoretical, ambitious kind into the nature of reality is going to make us feel happy?
0:12:54 Yeah, Socrates may have been wrong that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
0:13:05 No, and there’s a sense in which certain kinds of philosophical reflection, this sort of more theoretical reflection, it doesn’t seem essential to me to living a good life.
0:13:08 There’s lots of people who are friends of mine who are living very good lives.
0:13:18 They do engage in ethical reflection, but it doesn’t look a lot like the abstract theory construction that one might associate with academic philosophy.
0:13:22 Well, you wrote a book called Life is Hard.
0:13:29 Not that your philosophy of life can be summed up in three words, but if you had to sum it up in three words, is that it?
0:13:44 I think it’s partly about the way in which philosophers like Plato and in the Republic and Aristotle and his ethics, these ancient Greek philosophers, tend to think about the question how to live in terms of the ideal life.
0:14:01 And that can be both unrealistic and in a certain way self-punitive. I mean, often the right way to approach the ideal life is to think that’s not available. I shouldn’t beat myself up about the fact that that’s not available.
0:14:19 Really, what living well is about, or living as well as I can is about, is dealing with the ways in which life is difficult. And I think when you think about the conversations you have with friends in which you start to worry about how to live, often they’re, “Should I quit my job which I don’t like?” or “I’m having trouble with my parents or my kids.”
0:14:26 It’s problems that generate the urgency of the question how to live, or the sense that life is absurd, or the world is going to hell.
0:14:38 And so I do think the right method for doing moral philosophy or ethics is to start with the ways in which life is hard, and think about how philosophy can tackle them.
0:14:49 When we get back from the break, why do we have midlife crises?
0:14:52 And can philosophy help guide us through them?
0:14:53 Stay with us.
0:15:03 How do you navigate an entire career change after losing everything?
0:15:11 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m chatting with Lewis Howes, the host of the School of Greatness podcast, with over 500 million downloads.
0:15:15 Lewis went from rising professional athlete to broke after a career-ending injury.
0:15:18 I believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams.
0:15:25 When we doubt ourselves, it doesn’t matter how talented or smart you are, you’re going to limit yourself on what you’re able to do.
0:15:26 But that was just the beginning of his story.
0:15:35 It’s an episode packed with raw honesty and failure, practical advice for career pivots, and the financial wisdom that comes from losing it all and rebuilding it.
0:15:40 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com/yourrichbff.
0:15:42 Hi folks, this is Kara Swisher.
0:15:52 This week on my podcast, on with Kara Swisher, I’m speaking with philanthropist, businesswoman, and women’s rights advocate, Melinda French Gates, on how she’s refocused after her divorce from tech mogul Bill Gates.
0:16:00 We talk about why investing in women in politics and business is playing the long and smart game, and we discuss her new memoir, The Next Day.
0:16:05 My mom used to say to me as I was growing up, “Set your own agenda or someone else will.”
0:16:10 I know society is better off when women are in positions of power.
0:16:21 I really enjoy this conversation because it’s an interesting moment where women in technology are having much more of an important impact than men who are still moving fast and breaking things.
0:16:24 Have a listen to “On with Kara Swisher” wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16:33 We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.
0:16:36 That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.
0:16:43 Vice President J.D. Vance, defending the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, hit China squarely below the belt.
0:16:46 And China hit back with memes. Cue music.
0:16:58 Americans on assembly lines, at sewing machines, in fields, eating chips, drinking coke, looking ill-prepared for factory work, to put it politely, which the memes are not.
0:17:04 China’s argument since this trade war began is that America cannot win it.
0:17:07 China is tougher, more resilient, and better prepared.
0:17:15 On Today Explained, as this trade war escalates, we ask, “What if that’s true?”
0:17:34 Today Explained, every weekday.
0:17:43 One of the things about life that appears to be hard is middle age.
0:17:47 And you wrote a book about midlife crises.
0:17:50 How do you define a midlife crisis?
0:17:55 Actually, kind of like the self-help movement, midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural
0:17:58 phenomena that has a particular date of origin.
0:18:04 So, in 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliot Jacques, writes a paper, “Death and the Midlife Crisis.”
0:18:05 And that’s the origin of the phrase.
0:18:10 And he is looking at patients, and also, in fact, the lives of creative artists, who experience a kind of
0:18:15 midlife creative crisis. So, it’s people in their late 30s.
0:18:21 I think the stereotype of the midlife crisis is that it’s a sort of paralyzing sense of uncertainty
0:18:26 and being unmoored. Nowadays, I think there’s been a kind of shift in the way people think
0:18:32 about the midlife crisis, that people’s life satisfaction takes the form of a kind of gentle
0:18:39 U-shape. That basically, even if it’s not a crisis, people tend to be at their lowest ebb in their 40s.
0:18:44 And this is men and women. It’s true around the world to differing degrees, but it’s pretty pervasive.
0:18:49 So, I think nowadays, often when people like me talk about the midlife crisis, what they really
0:18:55 have in mind is more like a midlife malaise. It may not reach the crisis level, but there seems to be
0:19:02 something distinctively challenging about finding meaning and orientation in this midlife period in
0:19:03 your 40s.
0:19:09 Well, I’m 42. I just turned 42. Sounds like I’m right in the middle of my midlife crisis.
0:19:14 I think you’re, you know, not everyone has it, but you’re predicted to hit it, yes.
0:19:22 Yikes. Well, what is it about midlife that generates all this anxiety and disturbing reflection?
0:19:26 I think, really, there are many midlife crises. It’s not just one thing. I think some of them
0:19:31 are looking to the past. So, there’s regret. There’s the sense that your options have narrowed. So,
0:19:37 whatever space of possibilities might have seemed open to you earlier, whatever choices you’ve made,
0:19:42 you’re at a point where there are many kinds of lives that might have been really attractive to you,
0:19:48 that it’s now clear to you and in a vivid sort of material way that you can’t live. So, there’s missing
0:19:52 out. There’s also regret in the sense of things have gone wrong in your life, you’ve made mistakes,
0:19:58 bad things have happened. And now the project is, how do I live the rest of my life in this imperfect
0:20:02 circumstance? The dream life is off the table for most of us. And then I think there’s also things
0:20:09 that are more present-focused. So, often people have a sense of the daily grind being empty. And that’s
0:20:15 partly to do with so much of it being occupied by things that need to be done, rather than things that
0:20:22 make life seem positively valuable. It’s just one thing after another. And then death starts to look like
0:20:29 it’s at a distance that you can measure in terms you kind of really palpably understand. Like, you have a
0:20:33 sense of what a decade is like, and there’s only three or four left at best.
0:20:41 The thing about being young is the future is pure potential. Ahead of you is nothing but freedom
0:20:51 and choices. But as you get older, life has a way of shrinking. Responsibilities pile up. You get trapped in
0:21:02 the consequences of the decisions you’ve made. And the feeling of freedom dwindles. That’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with.
0:21:07 I think that’s exactly right. I mean, part of what’s philosophically puzzling about it is
0:21:13 that it’s not news. That in a way, whatever your sense of the space of options was when you were, say,
0:21:17 20, you knew you weren’t going to get to do all of the things.
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:22 So there’s a sense in which it’s kind of puzzling that when, at 40, even if things go well,
0:21:26 you didn’t get to do all of the things. That’s not news. You knew that wasn’t going to happen.
0:21:33 What it suggests, and I think this is a kind of philosophical insight, is that there is a profound
0:21:41 difference between knowing that things might go a certain way, well or badly, and knowing in concrete detail
0:21:47 how they went well or badly. And that’s something that I think we learn from this transition that we
0:21:52 make in midlife. The kind of pain of just discovering the particular ways in which life isn’t everything
0:21:56 you thought it might be, even though you knew all along that it couldn’t be everything you hoped it
0:22:02 might be. That suggests that there’s a certain aspect of our emotional relationship to life that
0:22:07 is missed out if you just ask in abstract terms what will be better or worse, what would make a good
0:22:12 life? And so I think philosophy needs to kind of incorporate that kind of particularity, that kind
0:22:18 of engagement with the texture of life in a way that philosophers don’t always do. I mean, I think
0:22:22 there’s another thing philosophy can say here that’s more constructive, which is part of the sense of
0:22:28 missing out has to do with what philosophers call incommensurable values. The idea that, you know,
0:22:34 if you’re choosing between $50 and $100, you take the $100 and you don’t have a moment’s regret. But if you’re
0:22:40 choosing between going to a concert or staying home and spending time with your kid, either way,
0:22:45 you’re going to miss out on something that is sort of irreplaceable. And that’s pretty low stakes.
0:22:50 But one of the things we experience in midlife is all the kinds of lives we don’t get to live
0:22:56 that are different from our life, and there’s no real compensation for that. And that can be very painful.
0:23:01 On the other hand, I think it’s useful to see the flip side of that, which is the only way you
0:23:06 could avoid that kind of missing out, that sense that there’s all kinds of things in life that you’ll
0:23:12 never get to have. The only way you could avoid that is if the world was suddenly totally impoverished
0:23:17 of variety, or you were so monomaniacal, you just didn’t care about anything but money, for instance.
0:23:21 And you don’t really want that. So there’s a way in which this sense of missing out,
0:23:25 the sense that there’s so much in the world we’ll never be able to experience,
0:23:30 is a manifestation of something we really shouldn’t regret and in fact should cherish. Namely,
0:23:33 the evaluative richness of the world, the kind of diversity of good things.
0:23:36 And there’s a kind of consolation in that, I think.
0:23:44 So is that to say that FOMO is always and everywhere a philosophical error? Or is it actually valid in
0:23:44 some ways?
0:23:49 I think it’s a philosophical insight in a way. I think this kind of existential FOMO is part of
0:23:53 what we have in midlife or sometimes earlier, sometimes later. But I think that sense that
0:24:00 it really is true that we’re missing out on things and that there’s no substitute for them. That’s really
0:24:05 true. The kind of rejoinder to FOMO is, well, imagine there weren’t any parties you didn’t get to go
0:24:11 to. That wouldn’t be good either, right? You want there to be a variety of things that are actually
0:24:16 worth doing and attractive. We want that kind of richness in the world, even though one of the
0:24:19 inevitable consequences of it is that we don’t get to have all of the things.
0:24:30 One of the arguments you make is how easily we can delude ourselves when we start pining for the roads
0:24:37 not traveled in our lives. And, you know, you think, what if I really went for it? What if I
0:24:43 tried to become a novelist or a musician or join that commune or, I don’t know, pursued whatever
0:24:51 life fantasy you had when you were younger? But if you take that seriously and consider what it
0:24:59 really means, you might not like it. Because the things you value the most in your life,
0:25:07 like, say, your children, well, they don’t exist if you had zigged instead of zagging 15 or 20 years
0:25:12 ago. And that’s what it means to have lived that alternative life. And I guess it’s helpful to remember
0:25:16 that sometimes, but it’s easy to forget it because you just, you’re imagining what you don’t have.
0:25:21 This is, again, about the kind of danger of abstraction that, in a way, philosophy
0:25:25 can lead us towards this kind of abstraction, but it can also tell us what’s going wrong with it. So,
0:25:30 the thought, I could have had a better life, things could have gone better for me, it’s almost always
0:25:35 tempting and true. But when you think through in concrete particularity what would have happened if
0:25:40 your failed marriage had not happened, often the answer is, well, I would never have had my kid,
0:25:45 or I would never have met these people. And while you might think, yeah, but I would have had some
0:25:51 other unspecifiable friends who would have been great, and some other unspecifiable kid who would
0:25:57 have been great. I think we rightly don’t evaluate our lives just in terms of those kinds of abstract
0:26:02 possibilities, but in terms of attachments to particulars. And so, if you just ask yourself,
0:26:09 could my life have been better? You’re kind of throwing away one of the basic sources of consolation,
0:26:15 rational consolation, I think, which is attachment to the particularity of the good things, the good
0:26:20 enough things in your own life, even if you acknowledge that they’re not perfect and that
0:26:24 there are other things that could have been, in a certain way, better.
0:26:31 This is why I always loved Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, this notion that you have to say yes to
0:26:37 everything you’ve done and experienced. Because all the good and bad in your life is part of this chain of
0:26:43 events. And if you alter any of those events at any point in the chain, you also alter everything
0:26:47 else that followed in unimaginable ways.
0:26:53 I mean, I do think there’s a profound source of affirmation there. I think my hesitation is just
0:26:58 that it’s not that all the mistakes that we make or the terrible things that happen to us are redeemed
0:27:04 by attachment to the particulars of our lives. It’s that there’s always this counterweight. At the very
0:27:11 worst, we’re going to end up with some kind of ambivalence, and that’s better than the situation
0:27:17 of mere unmitigated regret. But it’s not quite the full embrace of life that a certain kind of
0:27:27 philosophical consolation might have given us. What precipitated your midlife crisis and what role did
0:27:31 your philosophical education play in helping you through it?
0:27:36 My philosophical education probably created it, and then it did help me to work through it. Which
0:27:42 was that I think I loved philosophy. I still love philosophy, but I loved it as a teenager and a
0:27:47 college student in a way that was not professionalized. I mean, I just loved these
0:27:51 questions. I love thinking about them. I love talking about them. And then I wanted to keep doing it. And the
0:27:58 way academia works, there’s a tendency for love of a certain kind of intellectual engagement to get
0:28:06 channeled into getting into a grad program, finishing your PhD, getting a job, getting tenure, getting
0:28:12 promoted, publishing a book, getting this article into this fancy journal. And what happens, and this is
0:28:19 sort of the diagnosis I came to, is that something that is not really directed at particular achievements
0:28:25 becomes transformed into something that is. And then what you find yourself valuing is these achievements
0:28:29 one after another. And you finish them, and then you’re like, “Well, what next?” And what you lose is
0:28:34 the sense of the love of just doing philosophy and thinking about it and engaging with it.
0:28:38 At the time, what happened was I thought, “I’ve got everything I want, everything I’ve worked
0:28:43 for for 20 years. But there’s something deeply hollow about the idea that I’m just going to write
0:28:46 another article, and then another article, teach another class, and then another class.”
0:28:52 There’s an emptiness to this. And then I thought, “Well, that is very philosophically puzzling. Like,
0:28:58 how can it be that I’m doing things that I think are worth doing, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be
0:29:03 able to do them, and yet I still think there’s something deeply wrong with my life?” And I thought,
0:29:08 “Well, maybe I can work on that philosophical problem, since that seems to be my problem.”
0:29:14 And then, you know, the judo move of using philosophy to solve my problem with being a philosopher.
0:29:19 And I think when you put it that way, I think what I’m describing was in some ways idiosyncratic to me,
0:29:24 but I think it is one of the canonical forms of midlife crisis. It’s the type-A project-driven person
0:29:28 who is achieving quite a lot of the things they set out to achieve, and then has this sense of
0:29:34 hollowness, and what next? Just more of that forever, until I die? And that was the shape my
0:29:36 particular midlife crisis took.
0:29:38 And how has philosophy helped?
0:29:44 In terms of the midlife crisis, I think the biggest thing was the shift from valuing what I
0:29:49 call telic activities, from the Greek telos or end, where you’re aiming at an endpoint, a project or
0:29:54 achievement, which has this problem that the thing you want is always in the future, and then the moment
0:29:59 you’ve got it, it’s over, and it’s in the past. And what you’re doing is basically pursuing something
0:30:05 with a view to getting it out of your life, like you’re checking off the box. And I think not all
0:30:11 activities are like that. So having a kid, that’s a thing you can finish doing. But then parenting is
0:30:17 just this ongoing process. Or writing a book, you get it done. But thinking about a topic, that just goes
0:30:22 on in this what I call an atelic way. And with atelic activities, where they’re not directed at a
0:30:27 particular accomplishment or outcome, you don’t have the sense that you’re deferring the thing you really
0:30:32 value to the future. If you want to be thinking about a topic or talking about philosophy as we are right
0:30:37 now, it’s happening right now. It’s not like we’re putting it off to the future or trying to, you know,
0:30:43 finish something. And so insofar as you value the atelic process of what you’re doing, that can mitigate
0:30:50 this sense of emptiness. I think the way in which philosophy can help us grapple with difficulties
0:30:56 like failure or loss is often not by saying, I’ve got this grand theory, I’ll apply it to whatever’s
0:31:03 happening in your life. It’s by saying, let’s try to describe what the problem of loss or grief is
0:31:06 in a way that helps us to understand and come to terms with it.
0:31:16 Yeah, you know, I have a decent philosophical education and I have all these ideas I’ve encountered over the
0:31:27 years in my head. But, you know, often when real pain strikes, it is not always easy to find relief in ideas.
0:31:37 Two of the hardest moments of my adult life were the sudden loss of my mother a few years ago and
0:31:47 the unexpected loss of a baby last year. And I think like a lot of people, I did that thing where I felt
0:31:53 victimized, you know? Like, the world is conspiring against me and, you know, you go through the anger of
0:31:59 all that. But then you remind yourself that you’re not, in fact, uniquely unlucky that this happens to
0:32:06 people every day and no one’s immune. Pain and loss are part of life as central to life as anything else.
0:32:16 And philosophy can help with that awareness. And in that way, it can bring real peace. But it’s hard.
0:32:17 It is very hard.
0:32:23 Yeah, I’m so sorry to hear about both of those losses. That sounds incredibly hard. And I think
0:32:28 what philosophy has to do is what human beings have to do faced with those kinds of difficulties,
0:32:35 which is not switch too rapidly into what I call assurance advice mode, which is saying,
0:32:41 it’s all going to be fine. Or, hey, here’s what you do. And those are things we do in personal
0:32:46 interaction. But there are also versions of philosophical approaches to the difficulties of life.
0:32:51 There’s the kind of theodicy where philosophers argue that all is for the best. They’ve got some
0:32:56 proof that although this seems bad, it’s going to work out well. Or they have some kind of theory
0:33:01 where they say, my philosophical principle is this. I’ll just apply it to your situation. And those are
0:33:06 rarely good philosophical tactics for dealing with the kind of difficulties you’re describing
0:33:12 for reasons that are not unrelated to the fact that they’re rarely good interpersonal ways of approaching
0:33:19 difficulty. So the fact that as people to people, the starting point is sitting with difficulty,
0:33:25 acknowledging it, trying to take in what’s really happening, really describing the particularity of it.
0:33:32 It is connected with a kind of philosophical methodology that I have come to embrace. And this,
0:33:38 it’s sort of a shift from thinking, well, philosophy is going to be about coming up with really cool arguments
0:33:45 that prove you should think this or that to thinking there’s a real continuity between the literary
0:33:52 and human description of phenomena like grief and philosophical reflection. Because often what
0:33:59 philosophical reflection provides is less a proof that you should live this way and more concepts with
0:34:05 which to articulate your experience and then structure and guide how you relate to reality. And seen that way,
0:34:10 we can sort of understand how philosophy can operate as self-help when just saying, hey,
0:34:16 here’s some philosopher’s argument, feels like it’s not making contact with the texture of the difficulties
0:34:23 we’re dealing with.
0:34:42 After one more short break, we finally get to the easy questions. Like, what’s the point of life? Stay with us.
0:34:54 25 years ago, McDonald’s restaurants across the country were being robbed by a masked man who always
0:34:57 entered through the roof and was always polite.
0:35:02 He was a gentleman going so far as to use ma’am, sir.
0:35:12 And I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be scared because, you know, you see in the movies, robberies are not like that.
0:35:22 I’m Phoebe Judge. Listen to part one of The Roof Man right now on Criminal and listen to part two early by becoming a member of Criminal Plus.
0:35:32 The regular season is in the rear view, and now it’s time for the games that matter the most.
0:35:35 This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here.
0:35:39 On Small Ball, we’re diving deep into every series, every crunch time finished,
0:35:43 every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run.
0:35:45 Who’s building for a 16-win marathon?
0:35:48 Which superstar will submit their legacy?
0:35:51 And which role player is about to become a household name?
0:35:56 With so many fascinating first-round matchups, will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate?
0:35:58 Will the East be as predictable as we think?
0:36:00 Can the Celtics defend their title?
0:36:04 Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
0:36:10 I’ll be bringing the expertise to pass in the genuine opinion you need for the most exciting time of the NBA calendar.
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0:37:22 We’re not always right, but our hearts are in the right place.
0:37:23 We’re more raging than moderate.
0:37:40 There is an ethos in our culture that says happiness is the goal of life.
0:37:44 So if you’re not happy, you must be failing in some sense.
0:37:48 Is this something that you really do want to challenge head on?
0:37:50 Yes, I do.
0:37:54 I mean, I think philosophers often make this point in a way that may be a little bit unrelatable,
0:37:57 which is with kooky thought experiments where they’ll say,
0:37:59 you know, you think happiness is the goal of life?
0:38:06 Well, let’s imagine someone who is suddenly deceived and plugged into a kind of matrix scenario
0:38:10 where they’re fed a stream of fake experiences and they feel great and they’re super happy.
0:38:14 But suppose they don’t interact with anyone ever again.
0:38:18 They’re just plugged into this machine and nothing they think they’re doing or hardly any of it are
0:38:18 they really doing.
0:38:20 And it’s all an illusion.
0:38:23 Is that what you want for your loved ones?
0:38:26 And the answer is for most of us, rightly, I think, no.
0:38:31 But that person could be experiencing a state of mind of great happiness.
0:38:36 I think what we should be aiming for is to live the way we should.
0:38:38 And all of the things that matter in life come into that.
0:38:42 Living the way you should is being responsive to all the kinds of reasons there are.
0:38:46 Not just to worry about your own feelings, but about other people, the world around you,
0:38:50 injustice in the world around you, the needs of other people.
0:38:56 And so when we re-conceptualize the goal of self-help from just feeling happy to
0:39:03 living a good enough life, living as well as we can, it starts to look much less narcissistic.
0:39:08 And also, it looks like sometimes the answer to the question of what’s the best way I can
0:39:12 live in this circumstance is, well, it’s going to involve a fair amount of unhappiness.
0:39:19 And I think grief is one case that many of us have experienced in which it seems clear that a
0:39:26 certain amount of sadness is not in opposition to living the way we should is grief. The pain of
0:39:30 grief is not as it were something that would be better if we just didn’t have. It’s not like the
0:39:36 ideal scenario would be one in which when people we love die, we just feel nothing. It’s part of
0:39:40 something we deeply value, namely loving attachment to others, that we have to go through this.
0:39:46 Again, that’s just a more concrete illustration of the contrast between happiness as a kind of
0:39:53 positive state of mind and living well as responding to the real world we’re confronting
0:39:55 in the kind of ways that it calls for.
0:40:03 I think this is the main reason why I recoil at a lot of the new-agey self-actualization
0:40:09 nonsense, because in the end, it is a lot of sublimated narcissism.
0:40:15 And the message is that you help yourself. And of course, conveniently, you help the world
0:40:22 by loving yourself and taking care of you. That’s the road to happiness and fulfillment.
0:40:28 I’m not against loving yourself, to be clear. But I don’t think that’s the way to a meaningful,
0:40:37 good life. The greatest gift of parenting and marriage, for me at least, has been caring about
0:40:45 other people more than I care about myself. Spending less time in my own head, which I have always done,
0:40:52 quite naturally. And just spending more time being present for other people, directing my attention
0:40:58 towards other people. And too much of the self-help stuff seems to lead people in the opposite direction.
0:41:02 It seems to lead them inward. And that’s a moral dead end.
0:41:08 I think we’re exactly on the same page about that. I think there are dangers of narcissism in a certain
0:41:13 kind of self-help tradition. And it’s not that happiness isn’t a good thing and doesn’t matter,
0:41:18 but sometimes unhappiness is not a sign that there’s anything going wrong with you.
0:41:24 It’s that your unhappiness registers something wrong in the world, and you’re right to be unhappy.
0:41:29 So if you look at injustice in the world around you and you’re angry, and in that sense, really
0:41:35 unhappy about it, the fix to that is not going to be, I think, changing you. It’s going to be trying
0:41:40 to change the world. And if you can’t change the world, you’re going to find yourself in a situation
0:41:46 where part of living well and responsively might well involve a certain feeling of unhappiness. And I
0:41:51 think the consolation has to be not there’s some secret ticket to happiness. It’s my unhappiness about
0:41:58 this is not a sign that I’m going wrong. It’s a sign of me facing reality in the way that I should.
0:42:05 And there’s a recent fashion for a certain kind of Stoicism, a kind of neo-Stoic movement in
0:42:10 contemporary self-help that has a philosophical pedigree. But one of the ways in which it risks
0:42:15 going wrong is that there’s this sort of Stoic idea that you should let go of what you can’t control.
0:42:21 And for the Stoics, this is backed by a picture of the cosmos in which the divine mind,
0:42:25 Zeus, ensures that everything works out for the best. There’s this theodicy. And if you think
0:42:30 everything works out for the best, I can see why you’d say, well, if you’re raging against something
0:42:34 that seems bad, you’re just kind of missing the divine plan. But if you take away that backing,
0:42:42 I think this Stoic advice to just accept what’s out of your control is often an advice to not pay
0:42:46 attention to reality and not respond to reality in the way it calls for. I think sometimes we have to and
0:42:53 should feel grief or anger about things we can’t control. And that’s part of living well,
0:42:55 even if it involves unhappiness.
0:43:04 I’d say maybe the most common platitude you find in the self-help, self-improvement space is some
0:43:11 version of what people call the law of attraction. You know, this idea that positive things happen to
0:43:15 positive people. You manifest the things you want. So if you just assume the right attitude,
0:43:21 the right posture, you will be happy. Do you think this sort of thing is wise or helpful?
0:43:26 I mean, there’s a kind of empirical question of which I don’t quite know how to judge about what
0:43:32 the likely effects are of being more or less upbeat. It’s not that I could say, hey, my more downbeat
0:43:36 approach has paid off in spades. I mean, I find the world difficult to cope with. And I think this idea
0:43:41 of positive thinking, like, look at the positive, don’t dwell on the negative, the risk is partly that
0:43:47 we won’t have the acknowledgement of difficulty that connects us to others. And in that way, it is a kind of
0:43:54 isolation and drawing away from other people. I think being willing to dwell on the negative
0:44:00 is a condition of certain kinds of supportive intimacy. And, you know, I think we lose that
0:44:02 if we just say, hey, be positive, get over it.
0:44:09 It’s not that I think it’s good to be negative or that it’s not healthy to maintain a positive attitude.
0:44:16 I mean, sure. Yeah. Hell yeah, actually. Why not? The issue is that taken too far,
0:44:24 it can make you become a little blind to the tragic dimension of life. You start seeing people as
0:44:31 responsible for their suffering or their happiness in a way that isn’t really true. And more importantly,
0:44:38 isn’t compassionate. Both parts of that seem right to me. I think there’s a kind of honesty and realism
0:44:43 that you risk if you take that kind of positive thinking approach. I think one of the kinds of
0:44:49 moments of bonding we have with other people is sharing difficulties. That’s a kind of intimacy that
0:44:55 is unavailable if you refuse to take in the negative. And it can be punitive as well. It can be a way of
0:44:59 saying to people who are dealing with difficult things that the problem is with them and their
0:45:04 attitude. Often the compassionate and just and honest response is that the problem is with the
0:45:07 world in which they’re dealing and that we should change the world around them.
0:45:14 That is well said. And again, I don’t think anyone should wake up every day and spend the first eight
0:45:21 hours ruminating on all the terrible shit in the world. I just mean living purely or mostly for
0:45:29 individual happiness can blind us to other moral pursuits that require more sensitivity to the
0:45:30 suffering of other people.
0:45:36 Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. In Life is Hard, there’s a chapter on infirmity where I talk
0:45:42 about my own experience with chronic pain. Having written about it, people will contact me and say,
0:45:48 “Oh, have you tried this?” or “I’m experiencing something similar.” And there is this solidarity and community
0:45:53 that comes out of sharing difficulty. And I think that is a really profound and important thing.
0:45:57 I don’t think it’s inevitable that confronting suffering in your own life will be a source of
0:46:04 compassion, but I think it can be. I mean, I remember when I was first facing this diagnosis that was
0:46:10 chronic, it’s not going away. I remember sitting outside the clinic, looking at people walk by with
0:46:15 this sense of incredible bitterness, thinking, “You people, you don’t know how good you have it. You’re
0:46:20 walking past pain-free.” And then there was a beat and I thought, “I have absolutely no idea what’s
0:46:24 happening with any of these people. They could be going through much worse things, worse pain,
0:46:30 grief, loss. What am I thinking here? What am I talking about?” So that moment where you flip from
0:46:36 the kind of self-pity of thinking, “Other people don’t realize how hard I have it,” to saying,
0:46:42 “Yes, and by the same token, I am often unaware of and insensitive to the difficulties other people
0:46:46 have.” I don’t think it’s inevitable that thinking about your own suffering will lead you in that
0:46:53 direction, but I think there are moments where it can pivot from recognizing one’s own invisible
0:47:00 difficulties to acknowledgement of and reaching out towards the invisible difficulties of other people.
0:47:07 And so, yeah, I think we would lose something if we didn’t dwell in difficulty to a certain extent.
0:47:12 Not for its own sake, not because we want to dwell in hardships, but precisely because
0:47:19 it’s by dwelling in it that we can find solidarity and find ways of coming to terms with or changing
0:47:23 the world to cope with it. So if individual happiness
0:47:28 shouldn’t be the goal of life, what should the goal of life be? And I apologize for the
0:47:33 ridiculously hard question, but if anyone can answer it, it’s you, so I’m going to ask.
0:47:37 Well, I feel like we’re going back to the, yeah, we started with what is philosophy and now we’re
0:47:42 coming back to the other easy question, what should we aim for in life? I mean, I think it’s very hard
0:47:49 to say in general terms what that should be. I do think that what we can say is that it’s about responding
0:47:55 to reality as we should. So, taking in reality, that’s an essential part of living well. And then
0:48:00 responding to it as we should, I think there are limits to how much philosophical argument
0:48:07 can show us about how we should respond. I think the way we actually are guided is by trying to describe
0:48:13 reality and let those descriptions guide us. So, when I think of how philosophy contributes to this,
0:48:20 I think of concepts philosophy provides. So, allowing us to think about the distinction between, say,
0:48:25 TELIC and ATELIC activities and say, “Hey, am I putting too much value on projects when I should be
0:48:31 thinking about the ongoing process of what I’m doing?” Or when philosophers coin concepts like structural
0:48:37 injustice or alienation and we think, “Hold on, something feels wrong with the world. Is this a
0:48:42 way I can conceptualize it?” And I think the way in which we find an answer to this question, how should
0:48:49 we live, is by finding descriptions that capture the problems we’re facing and then orient us towards
0:48:56 them. So, I think it’s not going to come in the form of a kind of pithy slogan that goes beyond,
0:49:02 find the right kinds of descriptions of reality and let them guide you in your responses to it.
0:49:07 And then the philosophical project is not necessarily that they’re going to prove to you
0:49:11 this is how you have to live. It’s that they’re coming up with a kind of conceptual structure that
0:49:17 allows you to understand a situation and that understanding then guides and orients you towards
0:49:24 it. So, I think attention to reality plays this absolutely central role in philosophical reflection and in ethics.
0:49:31 And I love what you say, that this is really the great achievement of moral and political philosophy,
0:49:40 that it gives us a language to think about and frame and conceptualize our own lives and its relation to
0:49:44 other people. I mean, this is always why existentialism was very important to me when I was younger, because
0:49:49 it gave me this language, freedom, engagement, responsibility. Those terms have a concrete meaning
0:49:53 for me. And that’s what philosophy at its best can do.
0:49:59 David I totally agree. And I think philosophers should be attentive to the fact that, as it were,
0:50:06 what people remember and take away from philosophy are those concepts. So, probably what even philosophers
0:50:13 remember about a text that they studied intricately is not every intricate detail of the argument. It’s a kind
0:50:19 of concept that orients them towards problems. You know, you could say, well, you know, this is a terrible
0:50:24 failing. But really, ideally, we’d remember all the details of every little intricate argument in a
0:50:29 philosopher’s work. And there’s value to engaging with those intricate details. But the fact that what
0:50:36 people take away into their lives are the concepts that articulate their experience and that then they can
0:50:42 lean on to kind of guide themselves in situations should inform how philosophers think about what
0:50:48 they’re doing. And I think that helps us understand how philosophy can operate as a form of self-help,
0:50:55 even if some of the esoteric, intricate arguments philosophers write about are important but not widely
0:51:03 accessible. Often the concepts and understandings and orientations that arise from them are shareable and really can help
0:51:06 help people grapple with the kind of problems they’re facing.
0:51:15 I do think modern philosophy has lost its way a little bit and become too academic, too specialized,
0:51:24 too removed from everyday life, which is why I’m very happy to see someone like you doing more
0:51:29 public philosophy in this way, because I think that’s what we need. And I think there’s a real
0:51:34 hunger for that. It’s one of the reasons I do the show, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s
0:51:38 a privilege to have people like you on it. So, yeah, thanks.
0:51:44 Thank you very much. And I think shows like this are important for that reason. I think there’s a
0:51:49 real movement in philosophy to do more public-facing work. It’s a time where there’s a lot of excitement
0:51:52 and potential. I’m really optimistic about it.
0:51:56 Is there anything else you’d like to say before we get out of here?
0:52:04 I think we’ve covered a huge amount from the birth of philosophy to the ills and prospects of
0:52:08 contemporary philosophy. So, we pretty much covered it.
0:52:12 Kieran Setia, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you.
0:52:34 This episode was produced by John Ahrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:41 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:46 Alright, I want to hear from you. Hit me up. You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:52:52 This was a personal one. I guess I say that a lot because, I don’t know, I get personal on some of
0:52:57 these. But this one was especially so. And I think it had to be because of, well, the topic.
0:53:03 I’m curious if any of it resonated with you or if you had any thoughts at all, good or bad.
0:53:08 Let me know. The email address is thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:53:23 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
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0:00:29 We all have bad days, and sometimes bad weeks, and maybe even bad years.
0:00:33 But the good news is we don’t have to figure out life all alone.
0:00:37 I’m comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted’s How to Be a Better Human podcast.
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0:01:00 Why do we do philosophy?
0:01:02 What is it even for?
0:01:09 I can almost hear the water bong bubbling as I ask that question.
0:01:12 But seriously, what is it for?
0:01:16 It’s an old question.
0:01:17 It’s an old question.
0:01:20 One of the oldest in philosophy.
0:01:23 And the answer is not obvious.
0:01:28 Some people think the point of philosophy is to make the world make sense.
0:01:31 To explain how everything hangs together.
0:01:38 For others, philosophy is useless if it doesn’t tell us how to live.
0:01:43 If you’re in the latter camp, and I basically am,
0:01:49 then it’s fair to say that you think of philosophy as a form of self-help.
0:01:56 Philosophy should have a lot to offer us when we’re anxious or depressed,
0:02:02 or in one of those uneasy periods of life where you start wondering who you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going.
0:02:05 What’s otherwise known as a midlife crisis.
0:02:12 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:24 Today’s guest is Kieran Setia.
0:02:29 He’s a philosopher at MIT and the author of several books.
0:02:33 Most recently, Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.
0:02:36 And Midlife, A Philosophical Guide.
0:02:43 Setia is that rare academic philosopher who cares about writing for a general audience.
0:02:46 And more importantly, knows how to.
0:02:50 His book about midlife crises is a great example of this.
0:02:55 It’s intimate, accessible, and full of genuine insight.
0:02:59 I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to get him on the show.
0:03:02 And now, he’s here to talk about it.
0:03:10 Kieran Setia, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:03:12 Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
0:03:17 Could you just maybe tell the audience a little bit about the kind of work you do as a philosopher?
0:03:18 What do you study?
0:03:22 What are the big questions driving your work?
0:03:23 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:25 So I work on ethics.
0:03:28 So really, the big question is, how should we live our lives?
0:03:32 And that question leads me into lots of related areas.
0:03:35 So I’m very interested in the nature of human action, the nature of agency,
0:03:39 in the nature and possibility of knowledge in general,
0:03:45 and ethical knowledge in particular, and questions about human nature and what kinds of beings we are.
0:03:48 Yeah, tiny questions like, how should we live our lives?
0:03:48 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:03:49 Exactly, exactly.
0:03:58 Well, you are a professional philosopher, so let me just kick this off with a layup question.
0:03:59 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:00 Okay.
0:04:00 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:05 What do you think philosophy is really for? What’s the point of philosophizing?
0:04:06 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:09 Oh, good, yeah. No, it’s good to start with the easy ones. Thank you.
0:04:10 Kieran Setia, PhD
0:04:16 I mean, I think the best answer to the question of what philosophy is for is related to the question of what philosophy is.
0:04:19 And I think the best way to approach that is historical.
0:04:24 So when I try to explain what philosophy is, I usually start with ancient Greek philosophy
0:04:29 and the idea that philosophy encompasses all systematic inquiry into the world,
0:04:34 our relationship to the world, and how to orient ourselves to and conduct ourselves in the world.
0:04:40 And then what happens through the course of history is that particular disciplines sort of peel off from philosophy.
0:04:47 So you get psychology and economics in the 19th century, you get linguistics, computer science in the 20th century.
0:04:59 And what philosophy is left with are the big, demanding, difficult questions for which we don’t have any accepted results other than think really hard about it.
0:05:02 The negative way of putting it is we’re left with the detritus of inquiry.
0:05:12 The positive way to put it is we ask the kinds of inevitable, essential, important questions that the other disciplines can’t answer and don’t really even know how to ask.
0:05:17 Yeah, I sometimes get asked why I ended up choosing philosophy as a major.
0:05:22 And I don’t really have a great answer other than I always just kind of love the questions more than the answers.
0:05:25 And so that’s just where I naturally landed.
0:05:36 I mean, I think you have to have a certain kind of patience with questions to really sustain work in philosophy because the progress is fitful and uncertain.
0:05:41 And a lot of what you’re doing is trying to figure out what the questions are and how to make them tractable.
0:05:52 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable.
0:06:00 And I think some of the questions philosophy asks are ones you could probably go your whole life without really spending a lot of time confronting.
0:06:19 Some of them, like, how should I live my life, are ones that people are implicitly and often explicitly asking every day and they’re really unavoidable, but still have this philosophical character that we don’t have an off-the-shelf method for answering them other than try to think it through using every tool you can lay your hands on.
0:06:24 Yeah, I’ve always found this debate in the history of philosophy fascinating.
0:06:41 You know, does philosophy exist to explain the world or is it supposed to tell us what to do, how to live, or is it just another human activity like painting that really only justifies itself by how much beauty and meaning it adds to life?
0:06:46 It sounds like you kind of land on, no, it should tell us how to live.
0:06:47 Otherwise, what are we doing here?
0:06:50 I definitely think that’s one of the goals of philosophy.
0:06:58 I think, just going back to the history again, one thing that happens is you have these pre-Socratic philosophers before Socrates in the 5th century BCE.
0:07:01 They’re mostly metaphysicians.
0:07:03 They’re interested in the nature of reality and how the world works.
0:07:12 Socrates then comes along and says, guys, the urgent question is how should we live our lives and is interrogating the ethos and the ethics of the Athens of his time.
0:07:18 And then Plato and Aristotle and some other philosophers who follow him say, actually, we’ve got to do both.
0:07:24 Like the only way to really answer the question how to live is through more abstruse metaphysical reflections.
0:07:31 So the idea that philosophy should answer the question how to live and try and guide us in our lives is there from pretty early on and is one that we shouldn’t give up.
0:07:36 If I had to place you in some philosophical camp, I’m not sure which one it would be.
0:07:44 I mean, is there a school or a tradition or a particular philosopher that you identify with?
0:07:51 Is there a label like Stoic or Existentialist or Aristotelian that you’re comfortable with?
0:07:55 I do have a philosophical hero and it’s the novelist philosopher Iris Murdoch.
0:08:09 She’s my hero in part because she is the person who really developed the idea that accurate description of reality is a demanding, complicated, arduous moral task.
0:08:15 And that it’s a much bigger part of what ethical reflection looks like than typical philosophers appreciate.
0:08:23 And she has a book called The Sovereignty of Good that it’s one of the few philosophy books that I go back to for solace.
0:08:26 Like when I’m feeling down, there’s not a lot of philosophy I think, this will cheer me up.
0:08:33 But with Murdoch, I find it so inspiring, the ambition of what she’s doing in this very short, dense book.
0:08:38 If I was going to declare allegiance to a philosopher, it would be kind of continuing the spirit of her work.
0:08:45 Well, the essay you wrote that caught my attention posed this question, is philosophy self-help?
0:08:52 Now, self-help is a strange term we can get into a little bit, but is that how you conceive a philosophy is essentially a tool of self-help?
0:08:54 A lot of it depends on the connotations of self-help.
0:09:08 So I think self-help as a distinctive genre now is often associated with a kind of narrow concern for one’s own happiness as opposed to how to live a good life in general, which involves how you relate to other people.
0:09:14 And it’s a kind of particular literary genre that is a little bit at odds with how philosophers tend to operate.
0:09:24 There’s a sense in which asking the question how to live in a way that’s practical surely ought to count as a project of guiding our lives and helping us to live better.
0:09:32 But it doesn’t fit neatly with how self-help is understood in this sort of contemporary, narrower, generic sense.
0:09:47 So I think the thing that’s easier to define pithily is the literary genre, which has a kind of definite origin.
0:09:59 So historians who write about the literary and cultural genre of self-help often trace it back to the amazingly named Samuel Smiles, the first self-help guru in 1859.
0:10:15 And he wrote this book, self-help, and he was a kind of social activist, but he had the idea that a book aimed at a general audience telling people how to change their own lives to flourish in the world was a good thing to do.
0:10:28 And that idea that there’s a kind of genre of writing that tells you how you can change yourself, and that’s the sort of self-help idea, and it’s on you to flourish in the world.
0:10:34 That descends from Smiles and then really kind of explodes through the 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.
0:10:40 So that’s one way to define it, is it’s a kind of literary genre that has some pitfalls to it.
0:10:43 I mean, one of the pitfalls is it’s very individualistic.
0:10:52 It’s very much focused on the idea that you can change yourself, and less focused on the idea of changing society or structures in which it’s difficult to flourish.
0:10:58 And also, it tends to be very focused on individual happiness rather than treating other people well.
0:11:07 On another understanding of self-help, it’s just reflective thinking about how to live a better life, and then it looks like really it is just philosophical ethics.
0:11:17 But if you go back to the beginning, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy was essentially understood as a form of self-help, right?
0:11:19 I mean, Plato definitely thought of it that way.
0:11:28 Yeah, I mean, certainly in the sense of there’s the project of making our lives better that drives Socrates.
0:11:36 And then when Plato writes the Republic, there’s a lot of metaphysics, there’s the nature of the forms, there’s the parable of the cave and the idea that we don’t really know true reality.
0:11:41 There’s all this metaphysical and epistemological stuff to do with knowledge.
0:11:49 But the guiding question is, how should I as an individual live, what would flourishing be, and how should the state be organized?
0:11:53 So in that sense, it’s self-help from the beginning.
0:12:00 The ways in which I think it differs from contemporary self-help have partly to do with the idea that the goal there is not just that you feel happy.
0:12:06 It is about living a flourishing life, and that’s understood in terms that this is a little anachronistic.
0:12:08 We’d think of it as partly moral.
0:12:11 It’s about justice and the treatment of other people.
0:12:14 You don’t get a lot of self-help books today.
0:12:21 Things that are about how to be a more just person or what your moral obligations are typically don’t get classified as self-help.
0:12:24 It’s much more about your own happiness and feeling good.
0:12:34 And the other thing that’s a difference and that’s a challenge is that Plato is writing in an often esoteric way, like the work is difficult, it’s demanding.
0:12:39 So genre-wise, it’s not quite as outward-facing as contemporary self-help.
0:12:50 And there’s a question, should we expect that philosophical reflection of this dense, theoretical, ambitious kind into the nature of reality is going to make us feel happy?
0:12:54 Yeah, Socrates may have been wrong that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
0:13:05 No, and there’s a sense in which certain kinds of philosophical reflection, this sort of more theoretical reflection, it doesn’t seem essential to me to living a good life.
0:13:08 There’s lots of people who are friends of mine who are living very good lives.
0:13:18 They do engage in ethical reflection, but it doesn’t look a lot like the abstract theory construction that one might associate with academic philosophy.
0:13:22 Well, you wrote a book called Life is Hard.
0:13:29 Not that your philosophy of life can be summed up in three words, but if you had to sum it up in three words, is that it?
0:13:44 I think it’s partly about the way in which philosophers like Plato and in the Republic and Aristotle and his ethics, these ancient Greek philosophers, tend to think about the question how to live in terms of the ideal life.
0:14:01 And that can be both unrealistic and in a certain way self-punitive. I mean, often the right way to approach the ideal life is to think that’s not available. I shouldn’t beat myself up about the fact that that’s not available.
0:14:19 Really, what living well is about, or living as well as I can is about, is dealing with the ways in which life is difficult. And I think when you think about the conversations you have with friends in which you start to worry about how to live, often they’re, “Should I quit my job which I don’t like?” or “I’m having trouble with my parents or my kids.”
0:14:26 It’s problems that generate the urgency of the question how to live, or the sense that life is absurd, or the world is going to hell.
0:14:38 And so I do think the right method for doing moral philosophy or ethics is to start with the ways in which life is hard, and think about how philosophy can tackle them.
0:14:49 When we get back from the break, why do we have midlife crises?
0:14:52 And can philosophy help guide us through them?
0:14:53 Stay with us.
0:15:03 How do you navigate an entire career change after losing everything?
0:15:11 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m chatting with Lewis Howes, the host of the School of Greatness podcast, with over 500 million downloads.
0:15:15 Lewis went from rising professional athlete to broke after a career-ending injury.
0:15:18 I believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams.
0:15:25 When we doubt ourselves, it doesn’t matter how talented or smart you are, you’re going to limit yourself on what you’re able to do.
0:15:26 But that was just the beginning of his story.
0:15:35 It’s an episode packed with raw honesty and failure, practical advice for career pivots, and the financial wisdom that comes from losing it all and rebuilding it.
0:15:40 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com/yourrichbff.
0:15:42 Hi folks, this is Kara Swisher.
0:15:52 This week on my podcast, on with Kara Swisher, I’m speaking with philanthropist, businesswoman, and women’s rights advocate, Melinda French Gates, on how she’s refocused after her divorce from tech mogul Bill Gates.
0:16:00 We talk about why investing in women in politics and business is playing the long and smart game, and we discuss her new memoir, The Next Day.
0:16:05 My mom used to say to me as I was growing up, “Set your own agenda or someone else will.”
0:16:10 I know society is better off when women are in positions of power.
0:16:21 I really enjoy this conversation because it’s an interesting moment where women in technology are having much more of an important impact than men who are still moving fast and breaking things.
0:16:24 Have a listen to “On with Kara Swisher” wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16:33 We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.
0:16:36 That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.
0:16:43 Vice President J.D. Vance, defending the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, hit China squarely below the belt.
0:16:46 And China hit back with memes. Cue music.
0:16:58 Americans on assembly lines, at sewing machines, in fields, eating chips, drinking coke, looking ill-prepared for factory work, to put it politely, which the memes are not.
0:17:04 China’s argument since this trade war began is that America cannot win it.
0:17:07 China is tougher, more resilient, and better prepared.
0:17:15 On Today Explained, as this trade war escalates, we ask, “What if that’s true?”
0:17:34 Today Explained, every weekday.
0:17:43 One of the things about life that appears to be hard is middle age.
0:17:47 And you wrote a book about midlife crises.
0:17:50 How do you define a midlife crisis?
0:17:55 Actually, kind of like the self-help movement, midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural
0:17:58 phenomena that has a particular date of origin.
0:18:04 So, in 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliot Jacques, writes a paper, “Death and the Midlife Crisis.”
0:18:05 And that’s the origin of the phrase.
0:18:10 And he is looking at patients, and also, in fact, the lives of creative artists, who experience a kind of
0:18:15 midlife creative crisis. So, it’s people in their late 30s.
0:18:21 I think the stereotype of the midlife crisis is that it’s a sort of paralyzing sense of uncertainty
0:18:26 and being unmoored. Nowadays, I think there’s been a kind of shift in the way people think
0:18:32 about the midlife crisis, that people’s life satisfaction takes the form of a kind of gentle
0:18:39 U-shape. That basically, even if it’s not a crisis, people tend to be at their lowest ebb in their 40s.
0:18:44 And this is men and women. It’s true around the world to differing degrees, but it’s pretty pervasive.
0:18:49 So, I think nowadays, often when people like me talk about the midlife crisis, what they really
0:18:55 have in mind is more like a midlife malaise. It may not reach the crisis level, but there seems to be
0:19:02 something distinctively challenging about finding meaning and orientation in this midlife period in
0:19:03 your 40s.
0:19:09 Well, I’m 42. I just turned 42. Sounds like I’m right in the middle of my midlife crisis.
0:19:14 I think you’re, you know, not everyone has it, but you’re predicted to hit it, yes.
0:19:22 Yikes. Well, what is it about midlife that generates all this anxiety and disturbing reflection?
0:19:26 I think, really, there are many midlife crises. It’s not just one thing. I think some of them
0:19:31 are looking to the past. So, there’s regret. There’s the sense that your options have narrowed. So,
0:19:37 whatever space of possibilities might have seemed open to you earlier, whatever choices you’ve made,
0:19:42 you’re at a point where there are many kinds of lives that might have been really attractive to you,
0:19:48 that it’s now clear to you and in a vivid sort of material way that you can’t live. So, there’s missing
0:19:52 out. There’s also regret in the sense of things have gone wrong in your life, you’ve made mistakes,
0:19:58 bad things have happened. And now the project is, how do I live the rest of my life in this imperfect
0:20:02 circumstance? The dream life is off the table for most of us. And then I think there’s also things
0:20:09 that are more present-focused. So, often people have a sense of the daily grind being empty. And that’s
0:20:15 partly to do with so much of it being occupied by things that need to be done, rather than things that
0:20:22 make life seem positively valuable. It’s just one thing after another. And then death starts to look like
0:20:29 it’s at a distance that you can measure in terms you kind of really palpably understand. Like, you have a
0:20:33 sense of what a decade is like, and there’s only three or four left at best.
0:20:41 The thing about being young is the future is pure potential. Ahead of you is nothing but freedom
0:20:51 and choices. But as you get older, life has a way of shrinking. Responsibilities pile up. You get trapped in
0:21:02 the consequences of the decisions you’ve made. And the feeling of freedom dwindles. That’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with.
0:21:07 I think that’s exactly right. I mean, part of what’s philosophically puzzling about it is
0:21:13 that it’s not news. That in a way, whatever your sense of the space of options was when you were, say,
0:21:17 20, you knew you weren’t going to get to do all of the things.
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:22 So there’s a sense in which it’s kind of puzzling that when, at 40, even if things go well,
0:21:26 you didn’t get to do all of the things. That’s not news. You knew that wasn’t going to happen.
0:21:33 What it suggests, and I think this is a kind of philosophical insight, is that there is a profound
0:21:41 difference between knowing that things might go a certain way, well or badly, and knowing in concrete detail
0:21:47 how they went well or badly. And that’s something that I think we learn from this transition that we
0:21:52 make in midlife. The kind of pain of just discovering the particular ways in which life isn’t everything
0:21:56 you thought it might be, even though you knew all along that it couldn’t be everything you hoped it
0:22:02 might be. That suggests that there’s a certain aspect of our emotional relationship to life that
0:22:07 is missed out if you just ask in abstract terms what will be better or worse, what would make a good
0:22:12 life? And so I think philosophy needs to kind of incorporate that kind of particularity, that kind
0:22:18 of engagement with the texture of life in a way that philosophers don’t always do. I mean, I think
0:22:22 there’s another thing philosophy can say here that’s more constructive, which is part of the sense of
0:22:28 missing out has to do with what philosophers call incommensurable values. The idea that, you know,
0:22:34 if you’re choosing between $50 and $100, you take the $100 and you don’t have a moment’s regret. But if you’re
0:22:40 choosing between going to a concert or staying home and spending time with your kid, either way,
0:22:45 you’re going to miss out on something that is sort of irreplaceable. And that’s pretty low stakes.
0:22:50 But one of the things we experience in midlife is all the kinds of lives we don’t get to live
0:22:56 that are different from our life, and there’s no real compensation for that. And that can be very painful.
0:23:01 On the other hand, I think it’s useful to see the flip side of that, which is the only way you
0:23:06 could avoid that kind of missing out, that sense that there’s all kinds of things in life that you’ll
0:23:12 never get to have. The only way you could avoid that is if the world was suddenly totally impoverished
0:23:17 of variety, or you were so monomaniacal, you just didn’t care about anything but money, for instance.
0:23:21 And you don’t really want that. So there’s a way in which this sense of missing out,
0:23:25 the sense that there’s so much in the world we’ll never be able to experience,
0:23:30 is a manifestation of something we really shouldn’t regret and in fact should cherish. Namely,
0:23:33 the evaluative richness of the world, the kind of diversity of good things.
0:23:36 And there’s a kind of consolation in that, I think.
0:23:44 So is that to say that FOMO is always and everywhere a philosophical error? Or is it actually valid in
0:23:44 some ways?
0:23:49 I think it’s a philosophical insight in a way. I think this kind of existential FOMO is part of
0:23:53 what we have in midlife or sometimes earlier, sometimes later. But I think that sense that
0:24:00 it really is true that we’re missing out on things and that there’s no substitute for them. That’s really
0:24:05 true. The kind of rejoinder to FOMO is, well, imagine there weren’t any parties you didn’t get to go
0:24:11 to. That wouldn’t be good either, right? You want there to be a variety of things that are actually
0:24:16 worth doing and attractive. We want that kind of richness in the world, even though one of the
0:24:19 inevitable consequences of it is that we don’t get to have all of the things.
0:24:30 One of the arguments you make is how easily we can delude ourselves when we start pining for the roads
0:24:37 not traveled in our lives. And, you know, you think, what if I really went for it? What if I
0:24:43 tried to become a novelist or a musician or join that commune or, I don’t know, pursued whatever
0:24:51 life fantasy you had when you were younger? But if you take that seriously and consider what it
0:24:59 really means, you might not like it. Because the things you value the most in your life,
0:25:07 like, say, your children, well, they don’t exist if you had zigged instead of zagging 15 or 20 years
0:25:12 ago. And that’s what it means to have lived that alternative life. And I guess it’s helpful to remember
0:25:16 that sometimes, but it’s easy to forget it because you just, you’re imagining what you don’t have.
0:25:21 This is, again, about the kind of danger of abstraction that, in a way, philosophy
0:25:25 can lead us towards this kind of abstraction, but it can also tell us what’s going wrong with it. So,
0:25:30 the thought, I could have had a better life, things could have gone better for me, it’s almost always
0:25:35 tempting and true. But when you think through in concrete particularity what would have happened if
0:25:40 your failed marriage had not happened, often the answer is, well, I would never have had my kid,
0:25:45 or I would never have met these people. And while you might think, yeah, but I would have had some
0:25:51 other unspecifiable friends who would have been great, and some other unspecifiable kid who would
0:25:57 have been great. I think we rightly don’t evaluate our lives just in terms of those kinds of abstract
0:26:02 possibilities, but in terms of attachments to particulars. And so, if you just ask yourself,
0:26:09 could my life have been better? You’re kind of throwing away one of the basic sources of consolation,
0:26:15 rational consolation, I think, which is attachment to the particularity of the good things, the good
0:26:20 enough things in your own life, even if you acknowledge that they’re not perfect and that
0:26:24 there are other things that could have been, in a certain way, better.
0:26:31 This is why I always loved Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, this notion that you have to say yes to
0:26:37 everything you’ve done and experienced. Because all the good and bad in your life is part of this chain of
0:26:43 events. And if you alter any of those events at any point in the chain, you also alter everything
0:26:47 else that followed in unimaginable ways.
0:26:53 I mean, I do think there’s a profound source of affirmation there. I think my hesitation is just
0:26:58 that it’s not that all the mistakes that we make or the terrible things that happen to us are redeemed
0:27:04 by attachment to the particulars of our lives. It’s that there’s always this counterweight. At the very
0:27:11 worst, we’re going to end up with some kind of ambivalence, and that’s better than the situation
0:27:17 of mere unmitigated regret. But it’s not quite the full embrace of life that a certain kind of
0:27:27 philosophical consolation might have given us. What precipitated your midlife crisis and what role did
0:27:31 your philosophical education play in helping you through it?
0:27:36 My philosophical education probably created it, and then it did help me to work through it. Which
0:27:42 was that I think I loved philosophy. I still love philosophy, but I loved it as a teenager and a
0:27:47 college student in a way that was not professionalized. I mean, I just loved these
0:27:51 questions. I love thinking about them. I love talking about them. And then I wanted to keep doing it. And the
0:27:58 way academia works, there’s a tendency for love of a certain kind of intellectual engagement to get
0:28:06 channeled into getting into a grad program, finishing your PhD, getting a job, getting tenure, getting
0:28:12 promoted, publishing a book, getting this article into this fancy journal. And what happens, and this is
0:28:19 sort of the diagnosis I came to, is that something that is not really directed at particular achievements
0:28:25 becomes transformed into something that is. And then what you find yourself valuing is these achievements
0:28:29 one after another. And you finish them, and then you’re like, “Well, what next?” And what you lose is
0:28:34 the sense of the love of just doing philosophy and thinking about it and engaging with it.
0:28:38 At the time, what happened was I thought, “I’ve got everything I want, everything I’ve worked
0:28:43 for for 20 years. But there’s something deeply hollow about the idea that I’m just going to write
0:28:46 another article, and then another article, teach another class, and then another class.”
0:28:52 There’s an emptiness to this. And then I thought, “Well, that is very philosophically puzzling. Like,
0:28:58 how can it be that I’m doing things that I think are worth doing, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be
0:29:03 able to do them, and yet I still think there’s something deeply wrong with my life?” And I thought,
0:29:08 “Well, maybe I can work on that philosophical problem, since that seems to be my problem.”
0:29:14 And then, you know, the judo move of using philosophy to solve my problem with being a philosopher.
0:29:19 And I think when you put it that way, I think what I’m describing was in some ways idiosyncratic to me,
0:29:24 but I think it is one of the canonical forms of midlife crisis. It’s the type-A project-driven person
0:29:28 who is achieving quite a lot of the things they set out to achieve, and then has this sense of
0:29:34 hollowness, and what next? Just more of that forever, until I die? And that was the shape my
0:29:36 particular midlife crisis took.
0:29:38 And how has philosophy helped?
0:29:44 In terms of the midlife crisis, I think the biggest thing was the shift from valuing what I
0:29:49 call telic activities, from the Greek telos or end, where you’re aiming at an endpoint, a project or
0:29:54 achievement, which has this problem that the thing you want is always in the future, and then the moment
0:29:59 you’ve got it, it’s over, and it’s in the past. And what you’re doing is basically pursuing something
0:30:05 with a view to getting it out of your life, like you’re checking off the box. And I think not all
0:30:11 activities are like that. So having a kid, that’s a thing you can finish doing. But then parenting is
0:30:17 just this ongoing process. Or writing a book, you get it done. But thinking about a topic, that just goes
0:30:22 on in this what I call an atelic way. And with atelic activities, where they’re not directed at a
0:30:27 particular accomplishment or outcome, you don’t have the sense that you’re deferring the thing you really
0:30:32 value to the future. If you want to be thinking about a topic or talking about philosophy as we are right
0:30:37 now, it’s happening right now. It’s not like we’re putting it off to the future or trying to, you know,
0:30:43 finish something. And so insofar as you value the atelic process of what you’re doing, that can mitigate
0:30:50 this sense of emptiness. I think the way in which philosophy can help us grapple with difficulties
0:30:56 like failure or loss is often not by saying, I’ve got this grand theory, I’ll apply it to whatever’s
0:31:03 happening in your life. It’s by saying, let’s try to describe what the problem of loss or grief is
0:31:06 in a way that helps us to understand and come to terms with it.
0:31:16 Yeah, you know, I have a decent philosophical education and I have all these ideas I’ve encountered over the
0:31:27 years in my head. But, you know, often when real pain strikes, it is not always easy to find relief in ideas.
0:31:37 Two of the hardest moments of my adult life were the sudden loss of my mother a few years ago and
0:31:47 the unexpected loss of a baby last year. And I think like a lot of people, I did that thing where I felt
0:31:53 victimized, you know? Like, the world is conspiring against me and, you know, you go through the anger of
0:31:59 all that. But then you remind yourself that you’re not, in fact, uniquely unlucky that this happens to
0:32:06 people every day and no one’s immune. Pain and loss are part of life as central to life as anything else.
0:32:16 And philosophy can help with that awareness. And in that way, it can bring real peace. But it’s hard.
0:32:17 It is very hard.
0:32:23 Yeah, I’m so sorry to hear about both of those losses. That sounds incredibly hard. And I think
0:32:28 what philosophy has to do is what human beings have to do faced with those kinds of difficulties,
0:32:35 which is not switch too rapidly into what I call assurance advice mode, which is saying,
0:32:41 it’s all going to be fine. Or, hey, here’s what you do. And those are things we do in personal
0:32:46 interaction. But there are also versions of philosophical approaches to the difficulties of life.
0:32:51 There’s the kind of theodicy where philosophers argue that all is for the best. They’ve got some
0:32:56 proof that although this seems bad, it’s going to work out well. Or they have some kind of theory
0:33:01 where they say, my philosophical principle is this. I’ll just apply it to your situation. And those are
0:33:06 rarely good philosophical tactics for dealing with the kind of difficulties you’re describing
0:33:12 for reasons that are not unrelated to the fact that they’re rarely good interpersonal ways of approaching
0:33:19 difficulty. So the fact that as people to people, the starting point is sitting with difficulty,
0:33:25 acknowledging it, trying to take in what’s really happening, really describing the particularity of it.
0:33:32 It is connected with a kind of philosophical methodology that I have come to embrace. And this,
0:33:38 it’s sort of a shift from thinking, well, philosophy is going to be about coming up with really cool arguments
0:33:45 that prove you should think this or that to thinking there’s a real continuity between the literary
0:33:52 and human description of phenomena like grief and philosophical reflection. Because often what
0:33:59 philosophical reflection provides is less a proof that you should live this way and more concepts with
0:34:05 which to articulate your experience and then structure and guide how you relate to reality. And seen that way,
0:34:10 we can sort of understand how philosophy can operate as self-help when just saying, hey,
0:34:16 here’s some philosopher’s argument, feels like it’s not making contact with the texture of the difficulties
0:34:23 we’re dealing with.
0:34:42 After one more short break, we finally get to the easy questions. Like, what’s the point of life? Stay with us.
0:34:54 25 years ago, McDonald’s restaurants across the country were being robbed by a masked man who always
0:34:57 entered through the roof and was always polite.
0:35:02 He was a gentleman going so far as to use ma’am, sir.
0:35:12 And I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be scared because, you know, you see in the movies, robberies are not like that.
0:35:22 I’m Phoebe Judge. Listen to part one of The Roof Man right now on Criminal and listen to part two early by becoming a member of Criminal Plus.
0:35:32 The regular season is in the rear view, and now it’s time for the games that matter the most.
0:35:35 This is Kenny Beecham, and playoff basketball is finally here.
0:35:39 On Small Ball, we’re diving deep into every series, every crunch time finished,
0:35:43 every coaching adjustment that can make or break a championship run.
0:35:45 Who’s building for a 16-win marathon?
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0:37:22 We’re not always right, but our hearts are in the right place.
0:37:23 We’re more raging than moderate.
0:37:40 There is an ethos in our culture that says happiness is the goal of life.
0:37:44 So if you’re not happy, you must be failing in some sense.
0:37:48 Is this something that you really do want to challenge head on?
0:37:50 Yes, I do.
0:37:54 I mean, I think philosophers often make this point in a way that may be a little bit unrelatable,
0:37:57 which is with kooky thought experiments where they’ll say,
0:37:59 you know, you think happiness is the goal of life?
0:38:06 Well, let’s imagine someone who is suddenly deceived and plugged into a kind of matrix scenario
0:38:10 where they’re fed a stream of fake experiences and they feel great and they’re super happy.
0:38:14 But suppose they don’t interact with anyone ever again.
0:38:18 They’re just plugged into this machine and nothing they think they’re doing or hardly any of it are
0:38:18 they really doing.
0:38:20 And it’s all an illusion.
0:38:23 Is that what you want for your loved ones?
0:38:26 And the answer is for most of us, rightly, I think, no.
0:38:31 But that person could be experiencing a state of mind of great happiness.
0:38:36 I think what we should be aiming for is to live the way we should.
0:38:38 And all of the things that matter in life come into that.
0:38:42 Living the way you should is being responsive to all the kinds of reasons there are.
0:38:46 Not just to worry about your own feelings, but about other people, the world around you,
0:38:50 injustice in the world around you, the needs of other people.
0:38:56 And so when we re-conceptualize the goal of self-help from just feeling happy to
0:39:03 living a good enough life, living as well as we can, it starts to look much less narcissistic.
0:39:08 And also, it looks like sometimes the answer to the question of what’s the best way I can
0:39:12 live in this circumstance is, well, it’s going to involve a fair amount of unhappiness.
0:39:19 And I think grief is one case that many of us have experienced in which it seems clear that a
0:39:26 certain amount of sadness is not in opposition to living the way we should is grief. The pain of
0:39:30 grief is not as it were something that would be better if we just didn’t have. It’s not like the
0:39:36 ideal scenario would be one in which when people we love die, we just feel nothing. It’s part of
0:39:40 something we deeply value, namely loving attachment to others, that we have to go through this.
0:39:46 Again, that’s just a more concrete illustration of the contrast between happiness as a kind of
0:39:53 positive state of mind and living well as responding to the real world we’re confronting
0:39:55 in the kind of ways that it calls for.
0:40:03 I think this is the main reason why I recoil at a lot of the new-agey self-actualization
0:40:09 nonsense, because in the end, it is a lot of sublimated narcissism.
0:40:15 And the message is that you help yourself. And of course, conveniently, you help the world
0:40:22 by loving yourself and taking care of you. That’s the road to happiness and fulfillment.
0:40:28 I’m not against loving yourself, to be clear. But I don’t think that’s the way to a meaningful,
0:40:37 good life. The greatest gift of parenting and marriage, for me at least, has been caring about
0:40:45 other people more than I care about myself. Spending less time in my own head, which I have always done,
0:40:52 quite naturally. And just spending more time being present for other people, directing my attention
0:40:58 towards other people. And too much of the self-help stuff seems to lead people in the opposite direction.
0:41:02 It seems to lead them inward. And that’s a moral dead end.
0:41:08 I think we’re exactly on the same page about that. I think there are dangers of narcissism in a certain
0:41:13 kind of self-help tradition. And it’s not that happiness isn’t a good thing and doesn’t matter,
0:41:18 but sometimes unhappiness is not a sign that there’s anything going wrong with you.
0:41:24 It’s that your unhappiness registers something wrong in the world, and you’re right to be unhappy.
0:41:29 So if you look at injustice in the world around you and you’re angry, and in that sense, really
0:41:35 unhappy about it, the fix to that is not going to be, I think, changing you. It’s going to be trying
0:41:40 to change the world. And if you can’t change the world, you’re going to find yourself in a situation
0:41:46 where part of living well and responsively might well involve a certain feeling of unhappiness. And I
0:41:51 think the consolation has to be not there’s some secret ticket to happiness. It’s my unhappiness about
0:41:58 this is not a sign that I’m going wrong. It’s a sign of me facing reality in the way that I should.
0:42:05 And there’s a recent fashion for a certain kind of Stoicism, a kind of neo-Stoic movement in
0:42:10 contemporary self-help that has a philosophical pedigree. But one of the ways in which it risks
0:42:15 going wrong is that there’s this sort of Stoic idea that you should let go of what you can’t control.
0:42:21 And for the Stoics, this is backed by a picture of the cosmos in which the divine mind,
0:42:25 Zeus, ensures that everything works out for the best. There’s this theodicy. And if you think
0:42:30 everything works out for the best, I can see why you’d say, well, if you’re raging against something
0:42:34 that seems bad, you’re just kind of missing the divine plan. But if you take away that backing,
0:42:42 I think this Stoic advice to just accept what’s out of your control is often an advice to not pay
0:42:46 attention to reality and not respond to reality in the way it calls for. I think sometimes we have to and
0:42:53 should feel grief or anger about things we can’t control. And that’s part of living well,
0:42:55 even if it involves unhappiness.
0:43:04 I’d say maybe the most common platitude you find in the self-help, self-improvement space is some
0:43:11 version of what people call the law of attraction. You know, this idea that positive things happen to
0:43:15 positive people. You manifest the things you want. So if you just assume the right attitude,
0:43:21 the right posture, you will be happy. Do you think this sort of thing is wise or helpful?
0:43:26 I mean, there’s a kind of empirical question of which I don’t quite know how to judge about what
0:43:32 the likely effects are of being more or less upbeat. It’s not that I could say, hey, my more downbeat
0:43:36 approach has paid off in spades. I mean, I find the world difficult to cope with. And I think this idea
0:43:41 of positive thinking, like, look at the positive, don’t dwell on the negative, the risk is partly that
0:43:47 we won’t have the acknowledgement of difficulty that connects us to others. And in that way, it is a kind of
0:43:54 isolation and drawing away from other people. I think being willing to dwell on the negative
0:44:00 is a condition of certain kinds of supportive intimacy. And, you know, I think we lose that
0:44:02 if we just say, hey, be positive, get over it.
0:44:09 It’s not that I think it’s good to be negative or that it’s not healthy to maintain a positive attitude.
0:44:16 I mean, sure. Yeah. Hell yeah, actually. Why not? The issue is that taken too far,
0:44:24 it can make you become a little blind to the tragic dimension of life. You start seeing people as
0:44:31 responsible for their suffering or their happiness in a way that isn’t really true. And more importantly,
0:44:38 isn’t compassionate. Both parts of that seem right to me. I think there’s a kind of honesty and realism
0:44:43 that you risk if you take that kind of positive thinking approach. I think one of the kinds of
0:44:49 moments of bonding we have with other people is sharing difficulties. That’s a kind of intimacy that
0:44:55 is unavailable if you refuse to take in the negative. And it can be punitive as well. It can be a way of
0:44:59 saying to people who are dealing with difficult things that the problem is with them and their
0:45:04 attitude. Often the compassionate and just and honest response is that the problem is with the
0:45:07 world in which they’re dealing and that we should change the world around them.
0:45:14 That is well said. And again, I don’t think anyone should wake up every day and spend the first eight
0:45:21 hours ruminating on all the terrible shit in the world. I just mean living purely or mostly for
0:45:29 individual happiness can blind us to other moral pursuits that require more sensitivity to the
0:45:30 suffering of other people.
0:45:36 Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. In Life is Hard, there’s a chapter on infirmity where I talk
0:45:42 about my own experience with chronic pain. Having written about it, people will contact me and say,
0:45:48 “Oh, have you tried this?” or “I’m experiencing something similar.” And there is this solidarity and community
0:45:53 that comes out of sharing difficulty. And I think that is a really profound and important thing.
0:45:57 I don’t think it’s inevitable that confronting suffering in your own life will be a source of
0:46:04 compassion, but I think it can be. I mean, I remember when I was first facing this diagnosis that was
0:46:10 chronic, it’s not going away. I remember sitting outside the clinic, looking at people walk by with
0:46:15 this sense of incredible bitterness, thinking, “You people, you don’t know how good you have it. You’re
0:46:20 walking past pain-free.” And then there was a beat and I thought, “I have absolutely no idea what’s
0:46:24 happening with any of these people. They could be going through much worse things, worse pain,
0:46:30 grief, loss. What am I thinking here? What am I talking about?” So that moment where you flip from
0:46:36 the kind of self-pity of thinking, “Other people don’t realize how hard I have it,” to saying,
0:46:42 “Yes, and by the same token, I am often unaware of and insensitive to the difficulties other people
0:46:46 have.” I don’t think it’s inevitable that thinking about your own suffering will lead you in that
0:46:53 direction, but I think there are moments where it can pivot from recognizing one’s own invisible
0:47:00 difficulties to acknowledgement of and reaching out towards the invisible difficulties of other people.
0:47:07 And so, yeah, I think we would lose something if we didn’t dwell in difficulty to a certain extent.
0:47:12 Not for its own sake, not because we want to dwell in hardships, but precisely because
0:47:19 it’s by dwelling in it that we can find solidarity and find ways of coming to terms with or changing
0:47:23 the world to cope with it. So if individual happiness
0:47:28 shouldn’t be the goal of life, what should the goal of life be? And I apologize for the
0:47:33 ridiculously hard question, but if anyone can answer it, it’s you, so I’m going to ask.
0:47:37 Well, I feel like we’re going back to the, yeah, we started with what is philosophy and now we’re
0:47:42 coming back to the other easy question, what should we aim for in life? I mean, I think it’s very hard
0:47:49 to say in general terms what that should be. I do think that what we can say is that it’s about responding
0:47:55 to reality as we should. So, taking in reality, that’s an essential part of living well. And then
0:48:00 responding to it as we should, I think there are limits to how much philosophical argument
0:48:07 can show us about how we should respond. I think the way we actually are guided is by trying to describe
0:48:13 reality and let those descriptions guide us. So, when I think of how philosophy contributes to this,
0:48:20 I think of concepts philosophy provides. So, allowing us to think about the distinction between, say,
0:48:25 TELIC and ATELIC activities and say, “Hey, am I putting too much value on projects when I should be
0:48:31 thinking about the ongoing process of what I’m doing?” Or when philosophers coin concepts like structural
0:48:37 injustice or alienation and we think, “Hold on, something feels wrong with the world. Is this a
0:48:42 way I can conceptualize it?” And I think the way in which we find an answer to this question, how should
0:48:49 we live, is by finding descriptions that capture the problems we’re facing and then orient us towards
0:48:56 them. So, I think it’s not going to come in the form of a kind of pithy slogan that goes beyond,
0:49:02 find the right kinds of descriptions of reality and let them guide you in your responses to it.
0:49:07 And then the philosophical project is not necessarily that they’re going to prove to you
0:49:11 this is how you have to live. It’s that they’re coming up with a kind of conceptual structure that
0:49:17 allows you to understand a situation and that understanding then guides and orients you towards
0:49:24 it. So, I think attention to reality plays this absolutely central role in philosophical reflection and in ethics.
0:49:31 And I love what you say, that this is really the great achievement of moral and political philosophy,
0:49:40 that it gives us a language to think about and frame and conceptualize our own lives and its relation to
0:49:44 other people. I mean, this is always why existentialism was very important to me when I was younger, because
0:49:49 it gave me this language, freedom, engagement, responsibility. Those terms have a concrete meaning
0:49:53 for me. And that’s what philosophy at its best can do.
0:49:59 David I totally agree. And I think philosophers should be attentive to the fact that, as it were,
0:50:06 what people remember and take away from philosophy are those concepts. So, probably what even philosophers
0:50:13 remember about a text that they studied intricately is not every intricate detail of the argument. It’s a kind
0:50:19 of concept that orients them towards problems. You know, you could say, well, you know, this is a terrible
0:50:24 failing. But really, ideally, we’d remember all the details of every little intricate argument in a
0:50:29 philosopher’s work. And there’s value to engaging with those intricate details. But the fact that what
0:50:36 people take away into their lives are the concepts that articulate their experience and that then they can
0:50:42 lean on to kind of guide themselves in situations should inform how philosophers think about what
0:50:48 they’re doing. And I think that helps us understand how philosophy can operate as a form of self-help,
0:50:55 even if some of the esoteric, intricate arguments philosophers write about are important but not widely
0:51:03 accessible. Often the concepts and understandings and orientations that arise from them are shareable and really can help
0:51:06 help people grapple with the kind of problems they’re facing.
0:51:15 I do think modern philosophy has lost its way a little bit and become too academic, too specialized,
0:51:24 too removed from everyday life, which is why I’m very happy to see someone like you doing more
0:51:29 public philosophy in this way, because I think that’s what we need. And I think there’s a real
0:51:34 hunger for that. It’s one of the reasons I do the show, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s
0:51:38 a privilege to have people like you on it. So, yeah, thanks.
0:51:44 Thank you very much. And I think shows like this are important for that reason. I think there’s a
0:51:49 real movement in philosophy to do more public-facing work. It’s a time where there’s a lot of excitement
0:51:52 and potential. I’m really optimistic about it.
0:51:56 Is there anything else you’d like to say before we get out of here?
0:52:04 I think we’ve covered a huge amount from the birth of philosophy to the ills and prospects of
0:52:08 contemporary philosophy. So, we pretty much covered it.
0:52:12 Kieran Setia, this was a genuine pleasure. Thank you.
0:52:34 This episode was produced by John Ahrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:41 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:46 Alright, I want to hear from you. Hit me up. You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:52:52 This was a personal one. I guess I say that a lot because, I don’t know, I get personal on some of
0:52:57 these. But this one was especially so. And I think it had to be because of, well, the topic.
0:53:03 I’m curious if any of it resonated with you or if you had any thoughts at all, good or bad.
0:53:08 Let me know. The email address is thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:53:23 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe.
Philosophy often feels like a disconnected discipline, obsessed with tedious and abstract problems. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes philosophical inquiry has a practical purpose outside the classroom — to help guide us through life’s most challenging circumstances. He joins Sean to talk about self-help, FOMO, and midlife crises.
This episode originally aired in April 2024.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Kieran Setiya, author of Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way and Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.
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