Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with Yale professors and two of the authors behind Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Initially a class in Yale��s humanities program, Life Worth Living sought to find answers to the age-old philosophical question: what’s the meaning of life? The book brings the classroom lessons to a new audience, and Sharon talks to Volf and McAnnally-Linz about how to go beyond TikTok and Cheetos and find true fulfillment. Special thanks to our guests, Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, for joining us today. Find Life Worth Living here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guests: Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad you're joining me today. I am chatting today with Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnally-Lins, who are two of the three co-authors of a new book that I think is going to really make you think. It's called Life Worth Living, A Guide to What Matters Most. And I loved that this book feels kind of like a college philosophy class. Instead of telling you what to think, it helps you learn how to think. And I'm all about that. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to be chatting today. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Great to be with you. You know, I read with interest your new book that you worked on together. You also have another co-author. But one of the things that I was really interested in from the very beginning, when I cracked the book open, which by the way, the book is called A Life Worth Living. One of the things that I was like, oh, well, let's see if that's true. You have one of the sections at the very beginning that basically says, this book might wreck your life. This book might wreck your life. And when I opened it, I was like, do I want that?

Do I want that? And maybe I do. Maybe I do. And I think you will lay out in the book why that might be true and why that might actually be a good thing. But Ryan, I'll start with you. Why do you feel like the audience might experience this book wrecking their life? Well, all of us have these tracks that we run on in our day-to-day life. And we've got ways of doing things that maybe we chose them a long time ago. Maybe they were really intentional,

but for the most part, and this is okay, this is kind of how human life works. You've got to, most of the time, just get by by doing what you do, because that's what you do. The thing is that can lead us into places of kind of momentum that have us going in a direction that from the inside feels all right to us. But if we were to stop and think about it, we might realize it needs to be totally upended. And so from the perspective of cruising along on those tracks, it might look like a wreck. But in retrospect, once you've had a chance to really struggle and get some new insights into what might be truly worthy of your life, the change looks like transformation.

It looks like even a sort of salvation, a sort of reorientation towards something that's deeper and better than what you had before. In what ways might this book be useful to somebody, Miroslav? If they pick this up, Life Worth Living, and they immediately encounter the introduction where they're like, it might wreck my life. What do you hope the reader takes away? In what way might it be useful to them to spend time in the pages of your work? You know, a lot of us have a sense that our lives are in a kind of a rut. Some of us feel that

we are like a hamster in a wheel, doing our steps and doing them faster and faster, and are not quite sure that all these things that we do day in and day out add up to anything that has some kind of weight. And I think for anybody who feels that way, that's for whom the book is written. They might experience it as wrecking their lives, but on the other hand, they might think maybe this kind of life that I'm living right now needs to be a little bit of wrecking. Something needs to happen. And I know it's sometimes difficult to speak about wrecking one's life, somebody who has a relatively decent life. Why would one ever want it? On the other hand, there are also people who feel that life isn't quite

right, isn't what it should be to feel oppressed by that life, who sometimes feel, to quote a very famous and very unpopular thinker today, Karl Marx, that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Then that can end up being something like a liberation. And that's what we are, in a sense, hoping. I would love to hear you each talk a little bit more about your background and what made you write this book. What was it that was pressing in your hearts where you were like, we've got to write this book, Life Worth Living, and we have to do it together. So we have been teaching together a class called Life Worth Living at Yale College since 2014. And that class came out of our sense that students were really yearning to have an opportunity in the classroom to wrestle with the kind of deep questions that

keep them up at night talking in their dorm rooms. And we wanted to be able to take them to a space where they could bring the best of their intellectual energies and marry them with these existential questions. And so we took a stab at it and it worked surprisingly well. Our first batch of students were really enthusiastic. And so we decided we've got to do this again. But then we found that it's not just college students who have that yearning. People from outside colleges kept asking, how do we get this? Where can we encounter these questions? Where can we have these kind of conversations? And that was kind of the genesis of the book project is saying, oh, I think we have something that our students are finding valuable. Maybe we can offer it to a broader audience in the form of a book.

book. You talk in your book about this sort of big question that people need to wrestle with. And there are several questions that people have to wrestle with, like what is worth wanting? And where are we starting from? And who do we answer to? And how does a good life feel? What should we hope for? And Miroslav, can you share a little bit about how you go about thinking about the answers to these big questions? How are we supposed to wrestle with these things? I know that your book has a lot of insight that we don't have time to go into the depths of. But how does one wrestle with these existential questions in a dorm room at 11 p.m.? I think the first thing in terms of how to do it is actually a decision that we need to do it. A kind of sense when we see the urgency of the question to let it be there and recognize it as something

that ought to be taken seriously rather than simply brushed off. And it seemed to us also that, especially as we live in a situation that is pluralistic, that many people have different conceptions of what is a good life, how to live a good life, that we need to approach this not simply from one particular tradition, but to try to illuminate that question and put into conversation different traditions, because people have for centuries actually wrestled with those issues. This is not about which type of ice cream do I like and which topping on a pizza do I like and which topping on a pizza do I like.

It is the question about what is worth wanting. You talk in this book at the beginning about how this sort of question that we all, you know, I almost picture it almost like a thought bubble kind of hanging above our heads. How the question has an unknowable quality. It's difficult to even articulate what the question is. And you give a few different examples of how people from different historical backgrounds or people from different faith traditions have wrestled with the question. And I wonder, first of all, Ryan, can you articulate what the question means to you? And how would you define the question? So for me personally, where this inarticulable thing gets its teeth is the sense, wow, I've

been given the gift of life. I'm here. That didn't have to happen. What do I do with it? What's a worthy use of the gift that i've been given the problem is if you try to put a specific articulation on it you're always going to shave off some really important part of it right so if you say oh it's what is the good life then immediately you got to say well there's one the good life you say what's worth wanting is it

all about desires there's probably more than desires that go into it. And so our strategy is to kind of pile up all these different questions and give you a sense that your life is the question and that as long as you're starting from a position of living, you're kind of faced with this, how do you respond? What sort of orientation is fitting for the kind of creature you are in the place that you are as the person that you are but again i mean i'm on the verge of rambling here precisely because no one way of putting it really ever captures it but in a sense each of us answers this question very on a very personal and individual level in some ways. And it seems also important to honor

the traditions in which we have grown, to kind of stand in some ways by them. We can revise them. But I myself have grown up as a Christian. I'm son of a minister who rebelled and somehow found his way back to faith, partly because I was asking just this kind of question. Who am I? What am I doing here? How should I respond to the gift of my life? And for me, the response was a certain kind of existential commitment to the faith of my parents, to which I saw exhibited in the figure of Jesus Christ. And that has kept alive this question. Rather than kind of closing it, it has opened it up so that one, as you said, it's kind of infinite question.

So I have kind of kept growing into the question, drawing on other sources, but yet remaining really deeply faithful to the original vision of the good life. You know, it seems to me that so many people seek certainty. That certainty is almost like what we desire, that we're searching for the answer to a question so that we can be certain of the answer. And it is uncomfortable to be uncertain in some circumstances. To what extent does your work encourage people to sit with uncertainty versus seek the idea that there is an endpoint, there is something that we can know to be sort of this capital T truth, that there is an answer that they can feel certain about when it comes to answering the question. I often like to think about responding to the question rather than

answering it, because answers sound a little too pat for something of this depth and significance. Because answers sound a little too pat for something of this depth and significance. And responses are things that we expect to be continuous. Just because you've responded to the question doesn't mean that it ceased being a question. I think the sort of stance that makes sense here, because it's not one of you cross it off your list and then you move on. The question remains with you even as you have relatively firm and stable responses to it. In some ways, even when response is given, and I agree with Ryan that it's not a kind of answers like a formula, which you can then just put off then on the shelf and now you know how your life ought to be. I think the response to that question is such that I am unable to live towards something that has weight even without certainty. We need in life a sense that we can rely on something, we can venture all of our steps of daily life, our ventures of faith, into something that we cannot fully know and cannot fully control.

I think we want to have a sense of direction, but not always have to have to second guess every step that I have made, and yet to be at the same time in the position not to be despairing if I have made a false step. This kind of a light touch, which is not a certainty, but a kind of a confidence, not withstanding uncertainties around us. You talk in your book about a few different historic figures like Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. And this concept of people wanting to live, you call it a long, happy, healthy life.

And both of those men were people who did not live long, happy, healthy lives. How do we make sense of that? How do we make sense of that? How do we make sense of wanting something that sometimes we cannot have when we define a life worth living as being a life that is long, happy, and healthy? And then that is something that is not granted to us or to someone that we care about.

That's a really, really great question. It seems like from the perspective of, say, Lincoln and MLK, that this long and happy life is a kind of idolatry. How so? I mean, if you make that run your entire life, striving for long and happy, that you may find yourself pursuing a life that actually is shallow. And it may be long, but it is very thin. It may be happy, but it may be kind of happy in a kind of giddy little superficial way rather than a life of deep joy, rather than a life of weighty accomplishments as both of these men have had in their lives.

And so I think they serve for us as a way of calling into question and naming something as possibly idolatrous as the ultimate value that seemed to us so normal and understood. Ryan, do you feel like this idea of a long, happy, healthy life, that this is a new expectation that humanity has? That we have, in some ways, evolved to the point of almost seeming like we have the right to wish for a long, happy, healthy life. And when I consider how people have lived throughout millennia, it doesn't seem like they could have had that expectation. It seems like the expectation of a long, happy, healthy life is a modern construct. Yeah, I think in the mode of expectation, that's relatively new

and it's honestly relatively narrow even in the globe today. There's certain positions of social and economic privilege that sets you in a position where it sure seems like that's what most of the people around you get and so it ought to be your do as well.

And that's not to say that it's not a good thing, but the risk that comes with it is twofold, I think. On the one hand, it's a sort of a stance of entitlement towards life that these are things that can simply be demanded. And that can really distort our relations to other people, I think. that can simply be demanded. And that can really distort our relations to other people, I think. And then secondly, the risk is that we cease to be able to do what Miroslav was talking about and notice that there are other things that matter and that probably matter more deeply than the longevity and happiness and health of our lives. There are things that the weight comes from

somewhere else. And these are potentially very good things to have, but not the most important things. What do we risk by living a life that is one of shallow happiness? What if all I want to do is eat Cheetos and watch TikToks. What is wrong with that? Maybe that's fun. Maybe Cheetos and ice cream and TikToks and Netflix are fun. Why shouldn't I do that? Well, if you have really made a very considered decision that this is how you should lead your life. I mean, I don't know. I feel a little bit sad for you, but you are sovereign of your life.

And this is really interesting. I was going to say, I suppose I would say, it would be shallow, but you will tell me, what if I want a shallow life? What if I don't? What if I don't care?

You know, there's this picture in Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher in Zarathustra. He describes what he calls last humans. And these last humans, they're half-drug. They sit on their couches and blink, he says, and say, we have invented happiness. he says, and say, we have invented happiness. Now, we can think of this as, you know, this happy inanity of life. On the other hand, I would like to put next to that person also an image of life that has had impact, significance, that has built into something over time, that has helped shape lives around it. And that in the end, when it looks back, it's almost like it's not just a sound of one note that has been played all the time, but suddenly looking back on the life, there is this orchestra

of sounds. And it's not just orchestra of your own life that's being played, but orchestra of these many lives that you have helped shape, that have touched yours, that you've been shaped by. And suddenly you think, well, if you prefer just one sweet note over the incredibly rich orchestra, maybe that might be your preference. But if you want orchestra, hey, come on, join us. This is amazing music that can be played there. There's more to it than just the one xylophone note of TikTok. There we go. Xylophone is exactly the right instrument for that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office. With insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It's my girl in the studio! It's my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

You know, one of the things that I loved at the end of your book, you said your life is worth living. It is valuable. In fact, it's beyond valuable. It's invaluable. And precisely because it is so truly worth living, your life is worth living well. Your life is too valuable to be guided by anything less than what matters most. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about this is that it is not just a prescription for like, here are the five things that matter. You need to care about making your bed. You have to care about giving to charity. You have to care about making sure that you wash your car on Saturdays. But it really helps people explore what actually does matter and how they can live their life well. Ryan, can you give the listener one of your favorite tips or frameworks for how to think about this topic or maybe

something they could think about of how to consider if you are living your invaluable life well? That's a really great question. The way we tend to run it is in the direction of finding a question that you feel like you can get a little bit of traction on. It's not so big that it's your whole life. And then try to use that as a fulcrum to get yourself a earlier, of the weight of the life that I'm living? If I am in TikTok and Cheetos mode, am I confident that this is truly worthy of the value that I have as a human being? good life feels good, right? But then if you find some friends, whether your current friends now, or some friends who've been granted to us in the form of texts handed down over the centuries, who say something different, then you have a chance to really adopt a standpoint other than your reflexive, this is just how I think about things standpoint and see things a little differently. And then you might come around and say, I don't buy it. But if you return to a good life feels good after having had that reflection, then you've got a kind of firmer grip on your own answer here. And that doesn't mean you've reached certainty, but it does mean that you can act with a little

bit more confidence. And it's like when you're riding a bike, when you're wobbling, you're more likely to fall. But if you can kind of get that gyroscopic effect, these sort of questions can help you do that, right? They maybe give you a little nudge, but then they help you wobble back to stable and you can move on knowing that you can handle the nudge. I love the idea that what does the good life feel like does not necessarily lead us to the answer of it feels like sitting on my couch watching TikToks and eating Cheetos for eight hours, that it doesn't necessarily even equate to a life that feels like a life of pleasure, that it can equate to a life that feels like there is

an undercurrent or an underpinning of something like peace or something more substantial that means something bigger to us. And until we can wrestle with those questions and tease out the answer to those questions, if we are reflexively thinking about the good life feels, like if I can't feel like TikToks and Cheetos 80% of the time, then I'm not having a good life. Until we can examine the questions of what does that actually feel like, we might be misinterpreting what a good life, a life worth living actually means to us.

And we might wind up taking bad advice because if we're obsessing over techniques to make life a certain way, those techniques have built in a vision of the good life that they might be aiming towards. And we can get kind of sucked into whole ways of life that are orienting us in directions that if we were to really think about it, we would find unworthy of our energies. And so we really want to get to the practical, and I understand that. And that's really good and important. But the problem with the practical is it includes implicit answers to these big normative questions. So if you don't have at least some degree of confidence about those responses to

the big normative questions then your practical could really be misleading you yeah totally if the practical doesn't serve the answer to the questions then it's not actually going to lead you anywhere you want to go if somebody says wash your car but the washing your car doesn't serve the answer to any of the questions you have answered, paths in order to generate what you're expecting that would further draw you into not feeling precisely the way in which you want to feel. There is something self-defeating in wrong visions of emotional fulfillment. And that's why it's so essential to ask the question, what is really worth wanting in this case? What kinds of emotions are really worth having? What kinds of emotions are appropriate to who we are as human beings? What kind of emotions we can sustain and will sustain our life?

I love that. Let me ask you a question that I know that some people who are listening to this are going to wonder about. What if I read your book and I really spend time pondering some of the premises and I feel like, wow, this has been really instructive and transformative for me. And I've arrived at some of, you know, I feel confident, maybe not certain, but I feel confident in the answers to some of these questions. What happens then if somebody else arrives at other conclusions that I really disagree with, that I feel like, how can that be the answer? Your answer can't be wipe that other group of people off the planet. How do we give space? How do we allow others to arrive at their own answers while still being true to our own? I mean, this is like the million dollar question. If you have the answer to this question, I am all ears.

If you have the answer to this question, I am all ears. You know, there are answers to this question and there are answers to this question, right? We do live in pluralistic societies. And if we don't live in pluralistic societies, we live in pluralistic world. And we live in the world which is defined by strong tension, particularly right now. I think that part of any life that is truly worth living will be a life that can be lived with other human beings. And ability to live with another person who doesn't quite pull in the same direction, ability to create relationship where I can be empathetic with what the other person wants, try to put myself

into their shoes. And even when we profoundly disagree, I can honor that person. This kind of honoring of the person who disagrees without necessarily agreeing with them, that is a challenge. It's a challenge, I think, more of a life that hasn't been reflected upon, that is just lived almost as an instinct, rather than a life that one has stepped back, reflected. And pretty soon one realizes when one does that, that other people have a thing or two to say as well. And that what they say, isn't that dumb all the time, right? So that you don't have the monopoly on truth. And then this truth-seeking conversation can actually develop.

But that doesn't guarantee agreement. There may be points where the disagreement just runs all the way down. And that's a whole different question where you honor the person, but you don't necessarily have to agree with or even deeply respect their view. You can reasonably come to the view that some views are not worthy of your respect. That doesn't mean that some view havers are not worthy of your respect. Those are two different things. What does that look like? What does that look like in real life? Like somebody who says, yeah, I feel that.

I get what you're saying. What does that look like in the real world though? How do we respect people without respecting their ideas? So I would put it this way. If you cannot make a distinction between a person and what they do, you're going to have a difficult time with that question. But one of the deep convictions of many of the traditions is that some kind of distinction of this sort is really important to make.

We are now in a particularly difficult situation, I think, where the tensions are extremely high. We're belonging to one particular group. If you tend to see other groups as having anything good to contribute or to say, you suddenly feel like you're betraying your own group. And that kind of pushes us apart from each other and

stabilizes this adversarial relationships. And then we demonize other people. They're no longer humans. They are parasites. They are animals or whatever other dysphemism we want to use in order to characterize them. And I think stepping back and cooling down the rhetoric and realizing we are human beings above all, and only then fall into different groupings, only then do this or that, that will help us a great deal. Ryan, how do you disagree with somebody while still respecting their humanity? What if somebody is like, well, I just think that people who believe in the flying spaghetti monster, that they should all just crawl into a hole and die. And you're at, how would, how would one, you know, like in a practical

sense, how would you disagree with somebody who has that opinion that is really antithetical to your own values? I think, unfortunately, so much of it depends on the particularities. There are different degrees of severity of disagreement. Let's take the spaghetti monster hypothetical here. The best hypothetical, frankly. Yes, it's a wonderful one. Most of them who disagree with me are just like that. So this is a case where someone's denigrating other people's views. You can resist that action in various ways without ceasing to respect the person who's taking it. And again, it all comes down to particulars, right?

There may be social movement ways of doing that resistance. There may be political ways of doing that resistance. There may be just speaking up in opposition and saying, hey, I disagree. I think you've really misunderstood how you ought to treat people who hold views that you disagree with. for conversation than we would realize. And oftentimes it's best to start those conversations elsewhere and not on the topic of deep disagreement, but to find understanding of one another as human beings and slowly work our way in. But again, it's going to depend on the particularities of your relationship, right? If this is somebody you don't know and you happen to just always be coming across their views on social media, that's a really different position to be in than this is like the uncle who you have a long history of relationship and you might have some relational standing there to have harder conversations. So it takes a lot of what philosophers will call practical wisdom to discern the contours of the social and relational setting that you're in and to say, how can I act

and speak here in ways that expresses my respect for this person without sliding into, and your views are kind of okay too. I don't really want to have a disagreement with you because disagreement's uncomfortable. It's going to try to put up a wall against that so that you can hold the firmness of your views and use that as a place from which to have conversation if conversation is there to be had. You know, I agree with everything that has been said, but when Ryan spoke about practical wisdom, I think really the wisdom part is the key and the guiding thought of that wisdom. It's actually, I think, very, very simple. Honor everyone, right? It seems to me that if one nurtured in oneself that stance, as the situation arises, one would have wisdom

how to disagree without being disagreeable or dismissing the person or sliding into outright conflict. Honor everyone. I will wrap this up by asking you each the same question, which is, what is giving you hope right now? I'd love to hear from you, Miroslav. What is giving you hope right now? I'd love to hear from you, Miroslav. So I get up at 6.15 every day, and by 6.30, I hear small steps, first on the floor above me, and then coming down the stairs, and my daughter, who is five years old, comes, and she bears a beautiful smile.

She gives me a big hug. She kisses my bald head. And when we part, we tell each other that we love each other a little bit too much. And she says that's not possible to do. And she says that's not possible to do. And I start my day with what certainly gives me incredible hope. There is in, I think, all of us, a little child of this sort that awaits to be awakened, that awaits a space that would let it grow, so that we can actually live a life that we find so deeply satisfying and so deeply appealing. That gives me hope, and that makes me want to work toward that, because that hope will not be satisfied until all of us work together and think about and practice what in our lives truly matters the most. And most of us tend to agree, kind of a deep sorts of relationship of the kind that I described in the extreme,

positively extreme case with my daughter is what matters the profoundly in our lives. I love that. Ryan, what is bringing you hope? I'm also a father and I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old and they happen to be in the same multi-age group class. This is the one year they'll both be in it. And when I see how that little learning community of first through fourth graders is functioning, when I see the ways that they're being kind of led into, invited into a community where they all care for each other. They all have this deep willingness to chip in when they all support one another, even when their poems are bad during the poetry slam. And even across all of the little first through fourth grade

conflicts and things like that, that crop up. I think, wow, we're capable of this, at least on these little small scales. Here's, here's a community where, where it's not that they all agree about everything, but they, they know how to live and work together in, in this really important space that they all come to, to love and care for and be mutually responsible for. And I find that really hopeful. If seven-year-olds can do it, so can me. Come on, please. Thank you both so much for being here today. I really enjoyed your book. I really enjoyed

getting to hear from you. Thanks, Sharon. It's really great meeting you. Very good to meet you, Sharon, and have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for being here today. You can buy Life Worth Living wherever you prefer to get your books. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.