Good Life Project - How to Craft a Life Worth Living | Matthew Croasmun

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Dive into the profound exploration of life's most pressing questions with Matthew Croasmun, Yale lecturer and co-author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. In this episode, we dissect:• What really matters most in life?• How can we discern what's worth wanting?• How to develop the wisdom to navigate life's challenges?We unravel Matthew's philosophy of living a life of love, alongside his provocative take on his life-transforming Yale course that 'just might ruin your life'. From dissecting fleeting pleasures to understanding profound purpose, this episode holds the key to unlocking a life that is truly worth living. Get ready for a journey of self-discovery and reflection!Perfect for those on the quest to live a richer, more meaningful life, don't miss this deep dive into understanding what makes a life flourish beyond superficial gains. Tune in!You can find Matthew at: Website | Life Worth Living | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Matthieu Ricard about the true source of contentment and happiness in life. Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We need one another. We need people who won't necessarily share our answers to the question of the good life, but they share our questions. There is something uniquely powerful about community built around shared questions. We have lots of ways of phrasing the question, right? What is a life worth living? Or what is a good life? Or what is the shape of flourishing life?

But one way that I'm really starting to appreciate these days is what sort of life would be worthy of our shared humanity? I think it's in part just because of that sharedness, right? Of course, there is something irreducibly particular and individual. We're each going to come to our own answers, but there's something powerful about as a group of people, a community convened just for a moment to take up this question with this shared question about, can we think a little bit about the worthiness of our shared humanity? How do I lean into that? What's really the center of that? So what truly matters in life? How would you answer that question? Maybe you imagine a life filled with rich relationships, meaningful work,

or making a positive impact on others. Or perhaps you picture financial freedom that allows you to pursue your passions. There are as many answers to this question as there are people asking it. And my guest today, Matthew Krosman, a Yale lecturer and co-author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Life Worth Living, A Guide to What Matters Most. He believes the answer lies in living a life of love, but determining how to do that and what that actually looks like can be both elusive and challenging. We have all had moments where we wonder if we're on the right

path, if what we think matters aligns with what actually does. And navigating this complex set of questions is an ongoing journey of self-discovery and reflection and understanding what makes up a flourishing life that has purpose beyond fleeting pleasures or superficial gains. It can be elusive. So Matthew's new book, Life Worth Living, is based on a course that he has actually been co-teaching for years at Yale. And that course aims to guide students in answering one of life's most pressing questions, how are we to live? That very same class that, by the way, the opening lecture, he informs students, this class just might ruin your lives.

And as we discuss, he means that in the best of ways. A noted theologian and pastor, Matthew joins the podcast to really discuss pursuing a life of meaning and purpose amid competing demands and influences that often tell us the wrong things matter. And in our conversation, we go deep into the questions, the big questions, the meaningful questions, the ones that really elicit exploration that takes us down a path to awareness and insight. Things not just like what makes a life truly worth living, but how can we discern what is worth wanting in life? And how do we develop

the wisdom to navigate life's challenges with truth, love, and humility. So if exploring these questions and getting to the root, the heart of what really makes life good resonates with your own desire to live a richer, meaningful life, so excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him.

We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. As we have this conversation, it's an interesting time to be exploring the notion of a life worth living. Based around a course that you've been co-teaching for a number of years at Yale. And it's really around this question of, you know, like, what is a life worth living based around a course that you've been co-teaching for a number of years at Yale. And it's really around this question of what is a life worth living? What is a good life? Which is interesting to me also because one of the other wildly popular courses at the same institution that you teach is based on happiness. And I'm always fascinated around the conversation

between happiness versus living a good life. Tease this out a little bit for me. Yeah, it can be natural to assume that a good life is a happy life, that those are, even that you can mean in one of two ways, either that a good life, whatever else it is, it is also a happy life. Or we could draw an even tighter distinction and suggest that a good life simply is a happy life, that they're exactly the same thing, that there's nothing else that can be said about a good life, that it is happy and that anything else that it happens to be is just in order to make it happy. Looking across the scope of human history and across traditions around the world,

it seems that, at least we can say this, not everyone has thought that. That's not a universal human instinct that the happy life and the good life are the same thing, or even necessarily that the good life is always a happy life. So we like to pull those apart a little bit. When we ask about a good life, maybe we're asking about at least three things. Maybe we're asking about, yeah, about a good life, maybe we're asking about at least three things. Maybe we're asking about, yeah, how a good life might feel. Maybe happiness comes in there, though there may be other ways that we would describe a good life feeling. Maybe a good life is a life of contentment, or Oscar Wilde makes a case, maybe a good life is a life that's full of sorrow because that's just the way the world actually is. And that's what it would be to respond rightly to the world. But we could also

ask about what does it mean for us to lead our lives well? Maybe a good life is about what we do or how we seek to show up in the world. But we could also ask about what does it mean for life to go well? And we could think about life's circumstances. So all to say for us, we're inclined to think, at least in principle, to try to leave everyone in the conversation. We'd want to broaden out the question of the good life to include, yes, feelings and emotions and affect, but also circumstances and agency and to let different voices put the emphasis in different places and even sort of define each of those aspects for each of those dimensions differently. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I've been fascinated by sort of like there's a canon of happiness, both research and books and talks

and videos out there. And a lot of it was kicked off in a more public way, I think, back when Dan Gilbert came out with Stumbling on Happiness. And all of a sudden, everyone was just talking about it nonstop, and then you see a cascade of things happening. And it became almost like this centerpiece. And then you start to see all these featured articles in big magazines saying, is this really what we should be focusing on? Actually, is this causing more suffering than if we were focusing on something else? And it seems like there is actually some research to support that idea as well. Even if what we prize most in life is for life to feel a certain way, and even if that way is something like happiness or joy, it seems to turn out that happiness or joy are the sorts of things that they seem to recede away from us as we pursue them directly. It seems like they're best found sort of indirectly by seeking after some other good things, some relationships that are really, really important to us or some cause or some project, something bigger than ourselves that we want to invest ourselves in. And joy or happiness may be sort of indirect consequences of those sorts of investments in ways that if we sit here

stressing ourselves out about trying to be happy, we may find that happiness actually eludes us. Yeah. I almost feel like for so many, it can end up actually bringing shame into the equation because we feel like we're, quote, supposed to feel this. If I look at my life objectively, things are just going so well according to all the outer metrics I'm supposed to be managing by. I should be happy. And then the fact that I'm not actually then layers shame on top of the fact that I did not.

And it just becomes this negative spiral rather than being instructive in any way. Yeah. Pascal Bruckner, the French sociologist in his book, Perpetual Euphoria, suggests that somewhere along the way, be happy turned from an invitation to a demand. Or even for those in the United States, the right to the pursuit of happiness. Has that turned from a right into, again, a demand, a burden, a responsibility, some sort of sense like, yeah, if I'm not happy, I'm not doing it right. I owe the world something that I just can't seem to muster up for myself. And it does feel like something perverse is happening when we find ourselves sort of caught in those spaces. Yeah. And in addition, I mean, the research that I've seen, because one of the questions is,

you know, can everybody be equally happy? And in fact, it seems like, you know, there's at least some research that argues that a really healthy dose of your propensity for happiness is genetic, that we all have a sort of set point that we revert to barring actually doing work and doing things that might pull us away from it. So if you happen to be set towards a little bit more on the melancholy side, you're actually okay there and you revert back to that, but the world is telling you that that's actually not okay. Again, it's sort of like this, the world is telling you you're broken because you're not feeling giddy all the time, but you're actually kind of okay being just where you are.

Well, it can be these gaps that we talk about here and there in the book and come up again and again in our class, which is these gaps between sort of our definitions of success and the definitions of success of those around us or those who might have expectations for us or on us. And so you can end up in this place where you're succeeding as it were, according to your own terms. And the more profoundly you succeed, you sort of find your way into where you think the richness of life is found, where you feel called maybe. The further you go in that direction, the more you look like a quote unquote failure to someone who's got just a whole different sort of set of criteria. Boy, your life doesn't look all that good to me at all.

And we want to, part of what we're trying to do with the book is to say, again, as obvious as it might seem, well, what is a good life? Well, I mean, it's good. How does it feel? It feels good. All of these answers can feel really sort of simple at first blush. Again, you've been exploring this for years, so you know just how complex this is. These actually are contested questions, and it's really important for each one of us to

therefore take responsibility for answering these questions for ourselves. Because otherwise, we can get caught up in that game and just lots of confusion about, hey, why does, I think I'm finding my way into really what life is all about. But to me, for our undergrads who we work with, you know, but to my parents, this looks like failure. To my advisor, this looks like failure. Or maybe to some part of me that's still invested in some old ideal, it feels like failure. But we just have to be deliberate and intentional about what are our definitions of success? What is our vision of a good life so that we can attend to these gaps and just know, well, not everyone maybe is going to see it this way. And maybe I have things that I can learn from them. Maybe there

are ways that I can, maybe they do see more rightly than I do what a good life truly is. But at some point, we may just need to put a stake in the ground and say, as far as I can tell, this seems to be the substance of a good life. And this is what I'm going to chase after. And somebody else doesn't recognize it. That just may be a tension I have to live with. Yeah. It's got to be so interesting for you to be positing these questions and inviting people into conversation

in an institution where the thing that it takes people to do to actually be accepted into it and then be a participant in the community, to be a student, is essentially subvert a lot of all these questions in the name of that societally imposed, sometimes parent imposed, sometimes internally adopted definition of like, this is success. I am tracking towards this thing. And so far I've been tracking and I've been performing well enough according to this societal metric that I've gotten into this esteemed place that the world aspires to be. And now I'm here. And then they sign up for your class. Part of my curiosity is, why are they signing up for your class?

That is a good question. You know, we start the book in a way not dissimilar to the way that we start the class, which is to say, I tell all my students on the first day of class, you know, this course could wreck your life. You know, you could end up finding that you have different

intuitions about what really matters in life than you've been building your life around to this point. Now, of course, our sense is that that would ruin the life that you thought was worth building beforehand, but it might sort of rescue your life from another point of view, right? Looking back on it, you might say, oh no, this was the course might sort of rescue your life from another point of view, right? Looking back on it, you might say, oh, no, this was the course that sort of saved my life, as it were. But, I mean, you ask a really good question about why students find their way into the class. And I think for many of our students, you know, coming to Yale occasions what is sometimes called like a quarter life crisis. Because just as you said, there's been so much investment. I myself, I was a Yale undergraduate. I remember this experience

feeling like, man, when I sent in that admissions packet and back in my day, it really was a packet of, you know, a stack of papers. I felt like they had asked me to summarize my entire life, right? As a 17 year old, here it is, here's my whole life in this stack of paper. And I send it off to some office in Connecticut. And then they, you know, all right, Hey, that was good enough. You're in, you've got so much invested in that. And then they get to campus and they look around and the big feather that they've gotten their cap, everyone else around them also has that, right? Suddenly, you know, maybe back in your, you know, the community you came from being a Yale student. Wow. That was a, that was a real marker. And then you get on Yale campus and it's like,

we'll shoot. Like, I guess like everybody here has that. Now what, right? And they begin to ask the question, was that worth all of the time and energy? And honestly, in many cases, sort of unhealth that we invested ourselves in, you know, Lori Santos, who teaches that happiness course that you referred to earlier, you know, she and I have, we've talked about these dynamics in certain ways. And it feels like people at our institution, at many institutions of higher education are asking the question, why are students so unwell in various ways on our campus? And their students are making use of mental health resources at rates never seen before. And some of that, you know, university administrators will tell you,

well, that's a good sign. You know, mental health challenges are being destigmatized. And so, students are willing to seek out help. And that's certainly true. That's important. But there still is this question, why is there so much need and so much demand? And at some level, it seems to me the answer has got to be, I mean, the admissions department is sort of, it's like selecting for unhealth, like indirectly. It's selecting for resumes that couldn't be put together if the top priority was getting eight hours of sleep a night and taking care of my body and taking care of my emotional well-being and all these sorts of things. And so anyway, all to say a long way of saying you've got students who have

sacrificed a whole lot, who have cashed it all in for access to this space and are kind of just asking like, is that it? Is that what this is all for? Is that what my whole life was for? Now what? And that can really occasion this sort of quarter life crisis of trying to say, well, what really does matter at the end of the day? Is it on this path that I've been going on? I just need to run faster and harder. But I think for most students, it's like, no, no, no, there's something else. There are deeper sources of meaning than the resume virtues, to use David Brooks language, the resume virtues that I've been putting together to get in, to give access to a community like Yale. But what are those things?

No one's really helped many of these students think carefully about what else might be sort of worth wanting in life, or much less what it would look like to build a whole life oriented around something else or something more. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Curious whether you have seen students show up, take your class, they get shaken in the best of ways, but also in ways that sort of shatter the model of their world that got them to this particular place.

And part of that model is being supported by social structures, not the least of which often is family. Have you had any conversations with students where they start to really wake up to something very different during the course of the explorations in their time in this class, and then really struggle with taking it to maybe their friends, even within their same circle of friends who just don't see the world that way at all. And then out to their parents, you know, who have championed everything that they've done to get to this place. And they're in this awakening saying, like, yeah, I'm actually really curious about doing

things differently. But the social support structures that they have, which are so critical to actually happiness and our flourishing, they don't support your desire to then say, like, I want to start pursuing things differently and asking different questions. Yeah. One of the, it's actually a video, I was going to say one of the texts that we read, but in this case, it's a video from a Reconstructionist rabbi. His name is B'nai Lappe. They describe a moment, I think something like what you're describing is what happens when your

story crashes. And they tell the story of actually the origins of rabbinic Judaism, as in certain ways, there was a story of the Jewish people that centered around the temple in the year 70 CE when Rome sacks Jerusalem and the temple is destroyed. That story crashes. Next, of course, is this incredibly fertile moment in Jewish intellectual history is this birth of rabbinic Judaism. This way of neither sort of sticking to the old story come what may, nor entirely abandoning the story, right? But the sort of third option of trying to say, well, like real new thought and insight is required here. But the best kind of new thought and insight here is going to be funded, intellectually

funded by, it's going to be in some sort of deep resonance with, it will rhyme with the deep resources of the tradition of the story that came before. And so we offer that last couple of years, we've been offering that paradigm to students. And I think many of them really resonate with that. And I've had students even this semester, sort of looking back at this and I said, I experienced a story crash. And I think, let's be honest, I think you don't have to take a class like Life Worth Living.

I think college can be that experience. I mean, frankly, outside of the university entirely, right? We experienced story crashes in our lives. But I think college in particular can be a story crash kind of moment in all kinds of ways. I hope one of the unique things that we're doing in our class and something I hope is going on all over the university as well is I think we're actually trying to help students pick up the pieces and make that next move, sort of figure out, am I just going to abandon this story for a new one? Am I going to somehow try to like, I don't know, resist the world and try to like get back to that world before the story had crashed? Or am I going to try to construct something new here that's drawing on sort of deep intuitions and insights that I've interestingly enough, in terms of family resources, I've had multiple students who take their final papers. Their final papers are their visions of a life worth living. And many students who take that paper and send it to a grandparent.

Oh, no kidding. Right? And say like, hey, let's have a conversation about this. I want to learn from you. I want to, what do you make of this? And I had one student a couple of years ago who, in fact, it's really interesting. She wrote her final paper. Again, this is a student rooted in the Jewish tradition. She wrote her final paper in part as a reflection on an experience she had had around the Passover Seder in her family home that very spring as she was taking the course in which she and her cousins were sitting at the Passover at the Seder table and they were arguing with one another about some big moral questions or whatever it was.

And her grandmother said to her, when I see you and your cousins sitting at the table and arguing, I know my work is done. And the whole paper was this beautiful reflection on those two things, right? Both of they were at the table, you know, they hadn't given up on the table. They were still back at the Passover table. They were in their community. They were in their family. They were in their tradition, but they weren't passively engaged with it either. They were arguing. The Passover table for her grandmother, at least, it should be a site of argument. That's how you know it's working well. And so, in certain ways, I would, would that we all had a grandmother like that, right? Who's able, I think, to sort of hold both of those and offer both of those pieces to us to say, hey, you can relate to your past

in ways that are still, yeah, where you still get to have the argument. You still get to engage. You still get to ask every question you'd want to ask. But the table that you're sitting at, this community, this tradition, this family, it's big enough for any question that you could ask there. And I think many of the world's cultural and religious and philosophical traditions are capacious in just that way. They are centuries long or millennia long arguments about the good life. They're not just repositories of a single vision of the good life. They're ongoing arguments about the good life. And what we get when we participate in those traditions

isn't just, you know, the library card to go get access to that vision of a good life as if it was a static thing. But we get an invitation to the table to actually participate and ask our hard questions and wrestle with the tradition and maybe even push it forward or in a different direction than it's been taken in the past. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. I love that story, by the way. And the notion of traditions as dynamic doctrines, you know, it's been taken in the past. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. I love that story, by the way. And the notion of traditions as dynamic doctrines, it's sort of like interpreting the constitution. You've got your traditionalist, your strict interpretation, and you also have people who are progressive and say, no, we actually have to evolve with the times.

And my sense is it's probably the same in almost any faith-based tradition. You're going to have people saying, there is a very strict interpretation. We don't have any right as people that came later to actually put our thumbprint on or adapt it to the times. It is what it is. And I think, frankly, that's why a lot of people are actually running from a lot of that approach to almost any faith tradition these days, because they're looking for something that is more dynamic and adaptable and meets the moment in a way that just feels better to them. What you're describing is interesting to me also in that I would imagine the very class, the students within this class are all going through a similar journey with their own unique facts. But I almost wonder whether that class becomes almost like the new temporary congregation, like the new community where, okay, so if the people outside of that aren't entirely aware of what's going on, maybe they don't support your shifting view of what it means to be in the world. You've got a group of kids who are there together and you're all like, we're asking the same questions and we're challenging the same norms. And you can share that with them at a bare minimum. You write about this in the book, right? The importance of developing new practices and also exploring them, not just in isolation, but in a sense of community

who's traveling along with you. Yeah. We take our students every semester on just a short, it's not an overnight, just a day-long off-site retreat. And the goal there is each seminar sort of meets, you know, so it's like 15, 16 people, including students and a facilitator, instructor. And we're just sharing our stories with one another. We're taking that moment to establish just what you're talking about,

that community where we're able to share our histories, share some of our hopes and our aspirations. And I think that's something that our students regularly comment on at the end of the semester looking back. I think this is like, I've never had a class like this where I'm friends with everyone around the table by the end of the class. And that's not just like, you know, warm fuzzies. I mean, who wouldn't like some warm fuzzies? But that's actually material to what we're doing. Just as you said, in the course, we need one another. We need people who won't necessarily share our answers to the question of the good life, but they share our questions. And, you know, C.S. Lewis in his book, I think The Four Loves, he talks about, he says like, well, you know,

like you'll have some people in your life who will be your companions. They'll share some activity or some hobby, or maybe he puts the people that like are part of your same religious community in that category. It's like, you know, you're co-religionists, you're, you're, you know, you're, you're, you're golf buddy. You know, you walk your dogs together. All those people go in the same category, but he says, your friends, friends are, that's a different thing. He says people who believe that some question much neglected by others, people who believe that that question is of central importance.

He says, these people will be your friends. They need not agree on the answer. I think we find every spring as we come back to the course, we just see that happen again and again and again. These communities built not around shared answers. We know in our society, and look, I'm not against communities of shared answers, be they political parties or social organizations or religious communities or whatnot. I think community built around shared answers has its place. But there is something uniquely powerful about community built around shared questions. And then we're here to support

one another in our truth-seeking quest, right? Trying to discover in what does the worthiness of our shared humanity consist or where is that located or how could we invest ourselves in that more? And there really is then a shared, there's a shared quest. And that's actually, you know, we even say in the book, it's good that I guess we have many ways of phrasing it because it would be very boring if we didn't in a book, right? But we have lots of ways of phrasing the question, right? What is a life worth living? Or what is a good life? Or what is the shape of flourishing life? But one of the ways of life would be worthy of our shared humanity? I think it's in part just because of that sharedness, right? Of course, there is something irreducibly particular and individual. We're each going to come to our own answers,

but we do have a shared object of inquiry, right? We're trying to figure out together, like it's an extraordinary thing to be a human being. And we think it's extraordinarily worthy thing to be a human being. We think that every human life is a life worth living. with our students or for folks that would want to read this book together, for a book group, whatever it would be, a community convene just for a moment to take up this question with this shared question about, can we think a little bit about the worthiness of our shared humanity? How do I lean into that? What's really the center of that? And it has been some of the richest forms of community that I've experienced. Yeah. What's so interesting also is both the book and the course are built around this notion that I'm guessing a lot of students would show up and say, sweet, finally, I'm going to get some answers. And a lot of people buy books because they're looking for answers. They're like, I already got all these questions in my head. Please, somebody just give me the answer.

And they buy a book and they open the book and they're like, okay, you're going to have a book full of questions now. If you started with questions, you're going to get a whole lot more questions. And at first blush, you kind of think, well, this is really unsatisfying. But then the deeper you get into it, you're like, this is actually profoundly satisfying because there is a certain joy in knowing that you are in pursuit of a set of questions that will very likely morph and expand over time and take you the entirety of your life to pursue. And maybe it actually never gets fully answered, but there's a certain joy in just pursuing the question itself that I think we just don't think about. We don't center that as something that can even,

I think, add meaning to our lives, just the pursuit of meaningful questions and even what are the meaningful questions. So I thought it was really interesting that you're very upfront about the fact that this is not about giving you the answers. This is about taking you into a life of question, which is kind of counterintuitive and counterculture to a certain extent. Well, I appreciate you picking up on that in the book. I mean, it really was, I mean, this is part of the reason why it took us almost 10 years of teaching the course before we felt like we could write this book because the pull always felt like, well, you got to write a book of answers. And we just kept persistently feeling like that's just

not what this course has been about. That's not what this experience has been about for us as facilitators, instructors of that course. It has been about the questions. And really, I think for us, it comes from a commitment to the dignity of the reader, as it is a commitment to the dignity of our students to just say, you have a responsibility here to answer these questions for yourself, that it would be inappropriate and ultimately profoundly unhelpful for us to try to take over that responsibility for you. You know things that we don't. You have intuitions about the worthiness of our shared humanity that we don't have. We don't have it as authors.

And even as we bring to the table all of these ancient voices from various different religious and philosophical and cultural traditions, you have insights maybe that aren't found there. And even more importantly, you have this responsibility of just because you're you, you have to answer these questions for yourself. And so, I hope what we're doing in the book is not just piling on question after question, but also helping chapter by chapter. If you'd understand what are the stakes of this particular question? What are the possible kinds of answers that folks across the ages have offered? What do

you get when you go that way? When you go right versus left? What do you get when you go up versus down? And then, yeah, every chapter ends with that your turn section. We just say, hey, yeah, this is not for us to answer. As it happens, us three authors, we're all Christian theologians. So, our answers are probably, well, we diverge probably in some important places, but our answers are going to be in particular directions. But we want to know what's your take? Where are your intuitions? What do you think is worth giving your life to when it comes to each one of these questions that we take up chapter by chapter?

Yeah, I love that. You use the word responsibility also, and you use this in your writing as well. There was actually one line where you said, it's a responsibility to discern as best as you can, what kind of life would be truly worth thinking the responsibility to see the question and respond to it. That word responsibility is both powerful and loaded because you're basically saying to somebody, this is on you, not me. And this is going to be potentially hard work for a really long time. And yet we're sort of inviting you to think about this as something that you don't actually get to opt out of. Yeah. I mean, so on the first day of class, I tell my students like, this is this responsibility to answer this question is both inalienably yours. There's no getting out of it. You could try to like give the responsibility

for answering it to someone else. But even in doing that, you are exercising your responsibility, right? And handing it off to somebody else. So it's inalienably yours. And it's also like fundamentally like above your pay grade, especially at a university where in a lot of places, at least in the university, the sort of instinct is like, you're just going to develop expertise and you're going to go take a bunch of courses. And eventually you are going to become an expert at whatever it is that we're studying. And we just have to let our students down on day one. You are not going to become an expert in the good life. I'm not an expert. I just think that's just not possible when it comes to this sort of realm of knowledge, which is probably better thought about as wisdom rather than knowledge.

When it comes to wisdom, it's not about cultivating expertise. It's about maybe sort of trying to enter into a process aimed at sagehood of some sort, right? But that's a very different sort of thing, right? Than like, oh, I'm just going to like, you know, get this certification and that certification and, you know, check off that prereq. And then eventually like, I'll understand whatever, you know, get this certification and that certification and, you know, check off that prereq. And then eventually like, I'll understand whatever, you know, quantum mechanics is probably going to end up mysterious at the end of the day. Anyway, this is a different sort of thing, but those two things are still both true. Even though you're never going to become an expert,

you still are going to remain responsible to have to choose. And so the course, and I hope the book, are these offers of help, mostly not from us, but from, again, from the Buddha, from Confucius, from the Muslim tradition, from philosophers across the ages, just some help so that we can choose wisely as amateurs. We're never going to be experts, but we can take seriously as amateurs, as people seeking to grow in wisdom, we can take seriously the inalienable responsibility we do have to choose not just individual choices in our lives, but choose the vision of life that we're trying to live into or live towards. Yeah. As you're describing it, I love the vision of life that we're trying to live into or live towards. Yeah. As you're describing it, I love the notion of reframing a life of being an amateur or a beginner, not as something that your job is to get past, but as something that your job is to

live into. I mean, I think about moments in my life and it's almost like the day after I think I've actually figured everything out, I realize I figured nothing out. But just on sort of like the next level of exploration. And you could be destroyed by that, or you could be actually elated by it and say, how cool is it that there's so much more to explore and to discover? But it does, I think, take a little bit of a mind shift. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So you've kind of teed up, you know, the big question that leads into the book, that leads into the course that you explore, which you phrase in a lot of different ways, what is a life worth living? What is a good life? But within that, you also start to invite people to explore these sub questions.

And it feels like some of the sub questions are really where you really get into. One of those that jumped out at me was what's worth wanting? Take me into this a bit. Yeah. I mean, for me, well, I should say, first of all, this question, I think I got from Andrew Delbanco, who teaches in the great books program at Columbia and has written a great little book about college, what it was, what it is, what it still should be. I think it was a student reflecting back to him on their, an alum many years later, reflecting back to him on their time at Columbia saying, Columbia helped me figure out what, not just what I wanted, but what was worth wanting. I've thought about our work and tried to explain it to folks over the years.

I often found people would sort of too quickly nod along and agree when we were still at the stage where we're talking past each other, but it felt like we were agreeing. So I kept trying to like find like, what was the language that would help surface those disagreements? Because I thought they were important, right? And so in the book, we lay out these different sort of three layers of reflection, right? We talk about the sort of strategic level of reflection where we ask, you know, is what we're doing getting us what we want, right? And we're just trying to like tune strategies and come up with better plans to get where we're trying to go. But that's a different question from a sort of self-awareness question, right? Which is this first question that Columbia alum mentions for Del Banco, right? Which is what do I actually want in the first place? Forget like I could have a really

well-tuned strategy that gets me something I thought I wanted, but then, you know, sometimes you get exactly what you thought you wanted and then you realize it's not, it wasn't actually what you wanted in the first place. So that's an important sort of question, right? The self-awareness question. What do I really want? Not just what is my life like de facto oriented around, but what am I really after? But then there's this third, deeper, different question, right? That says, even if I got what I wanted and even if what I wanted really, I had sorted it out, that really was the thing that I was after. There's still a possibility that what I really wanted wasn't actually worth having. I mean, this happens to me all the time when it comes to like, you know, foods that I choose, right? The problem with eating another bowl of ice cream isn't that I finished the bowl of ice

cream and then think to myself, oh, that's not really what I wanted. It was exactly what I wanted, but it just wasn't worth wanting in the broader picture of my holistic health, right? And I think in more fundamental ways with the whole shape of our lives, that question about the worthiness of our desires, I think is one that is easily glossed over, but is a really, really important question. It's one that, again, the philosophers, the theologians, the mystics over the ages, they have returned again and again to this question. And I think really often in our modern world, we miss this level. We just ask, what do I want and how can I get it? And we skip over this question of, is what I want actually worth wanting? That has for me become a little bit of a shorthand of a way to try to get to this distinction of what these philosophers and mystics and theologians are really offering to us compared to often what we are pursuing in our own lives. Like I said, usually rarely gets much

deeper, at least in my life, rarely gets much deeper than just strategy and desire, right? This is more at the level of truth, right? We could be right or wrong about what's actually worth wanting. And it's a crazy thing, but I experience it as a real thing in my life that I actually just want things that I think from the ultimate perspective just aren't really worth it. And admitting that possibility of that gap, I think is actually, that's a necessary step to opening ourselves up to the sort of wisdom that I think, again, the sort of great wisdom traditions are trying to offer us. Yeah. I mean, the question resonated so deeply with me. I started just thinking about a lot

of similar things in my life. And then of course I started thinking, well, how do I even answer this question? Like what's the process for me to answer this question? Immediately I start to turn to external sources, but then I'm answering what somebody else would be telling me should be worth wanting in my life. And that can't be it. I mean, that's almost the antithesis of what we're talking about here. It's got to come from the inside, which is where it gets hard. But to me, it also related to another question that you posit, which is how does a good life feel? Because in part, I would imagine that's a part of the way that you get to the answer. But it could also take you off the rails because in the moment, that ice cream is going to

feel really good when you're eating it. But afterwards, you're going to be like, wow, that is not the way that I want my health and my wellbeing to feel long-term. It's complicated. Right. And what if instead of ice cream that you're obsessed with, it's, you know, fame or it's wealth or it's, you know, some sort of professional achievement that maybe you have a sense both that you're, yeah, no, I'm pretty profoundly invested in this. And yet I also have a sneaking suspicion that maybe it's not worth all that I'm investing in, right? Those are harder challenges. And, you know, I think your suspicion that maybe it's not worth all that I'm investing in, right? Those are harder challenges. And, you know, I think your intuition that it can't not have to do with us, that's a double negative, right?

It has to have something to do with us. We can't just, we were saying earlier, we can't just pawn off this responsibility on somebody else. Oh, you know, it's above my pay grade. I don't know. Let's look it up. What does Aristotle think? All right, now I'm done.

That's not going to work. And yet the thought that it's only within, I think is also potentially misleading. Now I want to be careful here, right? Because there are some sort of, for example, some sort of Buddhist traditions that might suggest, yeah, no, the answer really is just basically within. But even there, it's within in a part of yourself that takes a lot of discipline, let's say, a lot of practice to be able to tune into and be able to hear, to be able to quiet yourself enough to be able to hear that part of yourself that maybe does have better intuitions than whatever the, you know, self-gratification monkey part of my brain has about what's worth wanting. But again, I think the vast majority, the majority can be wrong, but the vast majority of the world's, again, mystics and theologians

and philosophers, these folks are inclined to think that when it comes to the question of worth and the question of truth down at that level of what's worth wanting, we actually need somehow to get in touch with something that's from the capital O outside, right? And you should be suspicious of me now because I already admitted to you I'm a Christian theologian, right? So, you'd be like, oh, that's just what you mean by God. That's true. That is what I mean by God, in part. But I think it's broader than that. I'm not just talking about a consensus among theists. I think there are other, you know, Plato would think about the forms. Confucius would talk about Tian, the will of heaven, or the Tao, or something like this. There are these norms outside of us

that you're still quite right, that in some way we have access to in part by looking within, but it's sort of like, I don't know, you look far enough in that all of a sudden you're like, well, that's what we call that last level of what's worth wanting. We call that the level of self-transcendence, right? That you look within enough that actually you are no longer the point. And in importantly different ways, but nevertheless, in ways we can see some sort of analogies, many of these different traditions are going to point to God or to the good or to the Tao or whatever it might be as something that does help us get leverage on these questions that can feel sort of beyond our control. And yet, again,

we'll never be able to escape the fact that the only way to get access to those things is inside our own heads and subject to our own subjectivities. And, you know, what I hear God saying to me is going to at times sound pretty suspiciously like a wish fulfillment or whatever it might be, right? We're not going to get outside of those things. But again, I think we have sort of invitations throughout human history to nevertheless incline our ear to something outside the self to see if we can't align ourselves to what is good and true and beautiful and most worthy in our humanity. Yeah. It gets to another question, which is where does wisdom reside? And I, no doubt we all have, and I'm raising my hand to

her also. We all have an inclination to say like, well, what did this person say? And this person saying, what did this person write? And like, what have I studied? And because we want to know, like, what have people figured out who've come before me? And yet at the end of the day, some of those same traditions, depending on what they are, will also say like this source, this being, it actually resides within you too. So the process of trying to explore, of seeking wisdom and then towards self-actualization in my mind has got to always be to a certain extent limited by the quality and depth of your self-awareness at the moment of exploration. Because if we spend as much time studying and trying to take in what other people

say, if we spend an equal amount of time actually training in our own development of self-awareness, I wonder how much we would still be looking outside for both the questions and the answers, but we just don't as a culture do that. I think in other cultures, Eastern traditions are much more oriented towards that contemplative traditions are much more oriented to that. But the general population, especially like a Western mindset, we just, as a general, we don't go there. And I wonder whether agreed, I think we can learn so much from the experiences and wisdom of others. I wonder if often we discount what's possible to bubble up from within because we've never actually trained in the skill of allowing it to bubble up.

Yeah. In many ways, one of the things that we find when we look at these wisdom traditions is we find suggestions of practices and disciplines that help us quiet ourselves in order to hear ourselves or in order to understand ourselves better, to grow in self-awareness. And we can look outside not for the answers, but maybe for habits and practices and disciplines, tune ourselves to understand ourselves. Yeah. So I think even in our model, right, sort of self-transcendence is going to come sort of after or alongside, right, that self-awareness, right? We don't skip over self-awareness. It's not unimportant. And I guess maybe it depends on like which kind of self we're talking about, right? Right. Little S self or capital S self.

Right. Yeah. The sort of thin self, you know, yeah. The sort of impulsive self. Yeah. It's interesting. And I love the ideas that so many of these traditions do in fact have all these practices as part of the things which say like, you know, like it's not just about us saying like, here are the rules, but here are a set of of practices and the more you do these the more you actually and it's not just about so like i feel like a lot of the practices are less about self-awareness it's about stillness with the assumption that the stiller you can become the more indications of like what's truly going on will start to to arise you know like mindfulness meditation insight-based meditation you like you mentioned, the Buddha,

which is, Buddhism is largely steeped in mind-stealing practices and not so much answers, but it's sort of like the big problem is assumed that you just can't see clearly enough. And that if you could, the questions and the answers would just start to present themselves more readily. So the bigger issue is that we're just, we live in a state of semi-delusion and like, how can we strip those veils away? Yeah. I think that's quite right. I do think that's probably a place where there is some disagreement among these different wisdom traditions, right? So Al-Ghazali is a Muslim sage, roughly contemporary, I think of Aquinas, 13th, 14th century, something like that. I may have those, I may be off by a century or two, but he talks about transformation as a way

of, he says, you have to relate to your soul like a new business partner. That is to say, you're hoping that you can do good business with this character, but you got to be careful or else, you know, that person on the other side of the table is going to rip you off. But the person on the other side of the table he's talking about is you, right? So, I think there are, you know, I think to be honest about the different wisdom traditions, I think there actually is some disagreement on just this point of how trustworthy is the self? How many of life's questions, or even as you phrased it a few minutes ago, where does wisdom reside? And I think for Ghazali, it's really important. Wisdom resides with God, period. And am I created by God? Yes. Am I created good by God? Yes.

In that sense, Muslim, as well as other kinds of mystical Abrahamic Jewish Christian sorts of traditions, ways of thinking about the divine within and these sorts of things. But for someone like Ghazali and for many other folks in Abrahamic traditions, there's going to be a sense that wisdom importantly resides in the capital O outside. And we quiet the self in part so that in that moment of stillness, we might be able to hear the voice of God. And again, there's going to be a lot shared there in terms of practices and instincts of quieting and of meditation. But I think it's also important that we recognize there's a real disagreement there too about when we get quiet, when we clear the stage of our minds,

who or what are we waiting to appear on that stage? And I think, yeah, for the Abrahamic traditions, for many in those traditions, it's important that we're clearing the stage for God to speak. And I think that's a different sort of expectation. And again, as we said early on, we will not agree on all of these questions, but I think just there, maybe it's worth noting. I think there are some disagreements among these different traditions there. Yeah, no, I mean, it is really interesting. And even as you're describing that, it's sort of like how you feel about what you were just offering, like sort of like where you lie in that debate. Also relates back to the idea of responsibility. So then is the responsibility

just to do the practices that create the stillness to allow the voice to emerge from the outside? Or is the responsibility to do the work to actually try and embrace the questions and figure it out yourself from the inside? And it sounds like this, again, is going to be like, some people will say this and some people will say that. There's going to be divergence. Absolutely. Yeah. I know there are times, I think it's Luther who talks about the revelation of God is like a summer thunderstorm. You never know when it's going to show up. The best you can do is like dig some channels, some irrigation channels, I think is what he's imagining, right? To sort of catch the

water when it falls, right? So that would be like on that first side of that divide that you were suggesting. I'll say even as a Christian, I hear that and I think, ooh, I don't know, that might be letting me off the hook too easily, right? And my responsibilities may be more than to simply dig the ditches so that when God does God's thing, I'm in some sense prepared for it. We may have a little bit more agency and responsibility than that. But yeah, I think once we're in the moments of asking these questions, just as you and I are in this conversation, I think we found ourselves into a really good and really rich place to take up these questions. And I think that's a fun place to be. And it also relates to something that you

circle around to later in the book, which is the notion of suffering which like nobody gets hopped out of that right you know there's stuff is going to happen to us and we may make things happen to us and also to those around us that causes our own suffering and their suffering and if we love them unconditionally like they're we may suffer vicariously through them. And relating back to what you were just saying also about sometimes wanting certain things to be a certain way, because it kind of lets you off the hook. There's this line you wrote that says basically, just because a way of thinking about suffering makes us feel better, doesn't make it true. And just because a practice for weathering suffering helps get us through, it doesn't make it good. And I thought that was a

really interesting point. Yeah, well, and I think that goes for the question of suffering, and that's such an important one, and it cuts so close to home and close to the heart for each one of us, whether we're in the midst of a season of suffering, someone close to us is profoundly suffering. There's all the suffering that we see on the television screen, that we see in media, various forms during our days. That question is huge. But if we want to have our answers to that question, as to any other question, to be indexed to truth, then we're going to have to hold open the possibilities that just because it makes us feel good doesn't mean

it's right. Just because it is a useful strategy doesn't mean that it's right, right? We're really allowing, I mean, this happens when we do the sciences, I take it, right? Like you can have like an explanation of like why the apple falls from the tree that makes you feel really good or that you find really useful for whatever you're doing. But if that explanation doesn't also explain why the moon is up in the sky i think your explanation is not as good as newton's right so if we're accountable to the truth then that really has to be our ultimate criterion for deciding these questions that can put us as sort of in uncomfortable places because we can there's so much in our culture that suggests to us that visions of the

good life or answers to life's fundamental questions are like orders in a restaurant or something like that. You know, the, it's funny, I mean, it used to happen like just in dialogues with servers in restaurants, right? Whatever you chose. Oh, excellent choice. It's even more transparent now with so many like web apps or like you're ordering on your phone or whatever you're, you're, you're using the touchscreen somewhere or whatever. It always praises. Oh, excellent, excellent choice. It's like, I don't know, man, I just ordered like a large fry and a milkshake at like, you know, at like two in the afternoon. I'm not sure that is a strong choice, but anyway. So there is the, I think it can be disorienting for us to

think, oh shoot, maybe there is more to wrestling with these questions than simply getting an answer that makes me feel good or that I can live with or gives me a good coping strategy. I mean, it's not to talk down on a good coping strategy. Sometimes that's what we need in life, but it may not be the same thing as really getting in touch with the truth, with the facts of the matter at the end of the day. Yeah. I think of that in the context of trauma. A couple of years ago, we sat down with Bessel van der Kolk, who's done just some incredible work in this space. And I've talked to a number of people about trauma over the years. And pretty universally, they'll say, we effectively become stuck in time at the time that we were traumatized.

And we don't really ever move forward from that. We think we move forward because we cope, we compartmentalize, we figure out all the workarounds to be able to open our eyes in the morning and move through the day and feel like we're reasonably okay. But a certain part of us remains forever stuck in that moment unless and until we do something to integrate it, which is kind of what we're talking about here. We do the things that make us feel good in the moment and let us get it through the day. It's not a knock on doing that. about here. Like we do the things that make us feel good in the moment and let us get it through the day.

And look, it's not a knock on doing that. Right, right, right, right. We need to do that to a certain extent, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're ever freeing ourselves from being able to move on from that original thing. And quite often, right, that part of us that is stuck, right? It's our bodies, right? I think of like Risma Menachem's work, right? Or this sort of the body keeps the score kind of thinking, right? That's like, yeah, you can have whatever coping mechanism you want, but at some point your body remembers the

trauma. And so there is this, I think trauma is a great example of the sort of sturdiness of the real world that whatever kind of sense-making work that we're doing, and we need to do sense-making work, and we need to have coping strategies, and we need to have all of these things, that's quite right so far as they go. But there's something, but the world is pretty sturdy. And the truth is pretty sturdy. And the facts of the matter are what they are. And all we're trying to really advocate for in this book is that that doesn't change when it comes to these questions about a good life, questions that seem to us maybe more about morals or ethics, or there still may be a fact of the matter at the end of the world that we have to wrestle with. And that can be uncomfortable, but lots of truths, as they say, can be inconvenient at times, but they are no less true for being so. Yeah. One of the things you also kind of circle around to towards the end of the conversation in

the book is this exploration of trying to figure out what actually matters. And this idea that what matters most may not actually be the thing that you're attuned to, which is a little bit frustrating because I think a lot of us would like to think that we can pick out what actually matters most and then say yes to it and take the actions and develop the practices and allocate resources behind it. That's the one thing we can figure out is what actually matters here. But that's not entirely true all the time. No, and in parts because we are awash in a world of influences and voices that are constantly giving us, I think, misinformation about what matters most. I mean, especially, I mean, this happens to us constantly with our students. I mean,

in an environment like Yale, within the sort of elite world that Yale offers access to, you're just awash in folks that are constantly telling you that if you make a bunch of money or you have a bunch of influence or you get a bunch of fame or people get a sort of reputation of a certain sort, that's exactly what matters most. And for a lot of us, at least in the final accounting, when we're able to quiet ourselves, as we've been talking about and take a step back and listen to some of the wisdom traditions or even that sort of voice from the outside, those things don't seem like they're really what matters most. What matters most maybe is something more like, again, I don't want to bias it. I'm not here to give you the answers, right?

But it seems like often it ends up in a constellation of things that look more like relationships, more like deep senses of belonging and investment and projects and communities that we really care about. It has to do with futures that we will never see, but that we can build towards and hope for. It looks like, you know, for me as a teacher, it looks like the lives of my students where I am entirely off screen. That's not going to redound to my reputation, right? But it's maybe what matters much more. What one of my students does, you know, in 30 years in the quiet moment of their life to choose for or against what really matters most.

That's what maybe matters most for my life, right? But that's not going to clamor for my attention. I'm not going to be giving pats on the back. I'm not going to get likes on my social media or whatever, right? So we're just, we're awash in these influences that are consistently inviting us to tune our entire lives around things that in the final accounting may actually be trivial, but they don't feel trivial because of all these folks around us who are constantly cheering us on or on the flip side, telling us we're worthless because we don't have those things, whatever it might be. We're just in these perverse cultures of value, right? Where we're in cultures that I think have gotten value wrong, aren't able to recognize what matters most and what is trivial. We've got in some cases, those things exactly backwards. And so, it takes a lot of discipline to routinely, and that's where we end the book, is to say to folks, it's not over. It may have taken a lot of exertion to start to formulate some of our

intuitions or maybe even start to write them down. But they say those insights, they're like buried treasure in a desert. You may have uncovered it, but the sands, the winds are gonna blow those sands back over and it'll be lost before you know it unless you routinely come back and come back to these questions yourself, build a community, build sets of practices that are gonna help you sort of like build that resistance

against the flow of the river as it were. But again, at least in my estimation, I think many of the rivers I find myself in the midst of flow in the direction of triviality in the name of great importance, right? And it takes a lot of discipline to resist that current. That feels like a good place for us to start to come full circle as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? For me to live a good life is to live a life of love. For me means having that life built on a foundation of knowing myself as loved, hopefully by family and relationships that are really close to me.

For me as a theist, that also means like loved by God, loved in some way that's not something I earned or something that I have to worry about, but it's a really foundation for my life. And then a life of love in the sense of being able to offer myself for the good of others, to see others flourish, to be involved in communities of mutual belonging where we are committed to modes of mutual flourishing. Robin Wall Kimmerer says, all flourishing is mutual. And I think there's a deep, deep insight there. And so for me, a good life is a life of love in what King called the beloved community, a community that is loved, that loves within the community and loves,

and hopefully those are ever-growing boundaries of love that eventually encompass the whole human community and indeed the entirety of the creation. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Matthew Ricard about the true source of contentment and happiness in life. You'll find a link to his episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.

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