The One You Feed - Dr. John Kaag on How to Find Zest in Life

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Dr. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. He has written extensively on academic philosophy but his work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Paris Review, and Harper’s Magazine.  In this episode, John and Eric discuss his new book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Dr. John Kaag and I Discuss How to Find Zest in Life and …His book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your LifeWilliam James’s philosophy of sick soulsJames’s important message of not being alone in having a sick soulHow having a “maybe” means there is possibilityThe theory of emotions and how the body keeps scoreHabits are a tool that allows us to negotiate our world in an easier wayThe downside to habits is that they can make us less aware and go on autopilotThe danger of midlifeBeing able to expand our consciousness and view of the world Confusing the immediate for the important and meaningfulRealizing that your will can only take you so far How you can orient yourself to the circumstances you are faced withHaving zest for life is what makes it significant How we tend to repeat actions when we are in midlife, making it difficult to see the newnessHow his brush with death caused him to seek the zest in lifeLearning to find zest in the commitment is the task of lifeFinding the balance between habit and noveltyDr. John Kaag Links:John’s WebsiteTwitterBest Fiends: Engage your brain and play a game of puzzles with Best Fiends. Download for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play.   If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. John Kaag, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Unsafe Thinking with Jonah SachsMaking Time for What Matters with John ZeratskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

it is quite possible to live as the walking dead and then at the end discover that you haven't really lived and that's terrifying. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. John Kegg, the professor and chair of

philosophy at the University of Massachusetts. He's written extensively in academic philosophy, but his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, and Harper's Magazine. Today, John and Eric discuss his new book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks so much for having me. I am really excited to have you on. You're somebody I've wanted to talk to for several years now, so I'm glad we got to make this happen. We're going to be discussing, among other things,

your latest book called Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. But before we get into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in

your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's interesting. When you first invited me, I thought, oh my gosh, that's the story that my grandmother used to tell me, except it was two dogs instead. Yeah. So I've given it a bit of thought over the years. And at the center of the story is an issue of choice. The issue of choice about how you take up the circumstances in your life, a choice about how you interpret reality, how you interpret the events of life, and that it's up to you. You have the choice to feed the good wolf. My grandmother used to say that the act of feeding is an intentional action. So if you're driving your car and you throw a sandwich out the window

and a dog comes up and accidentally eats the sandwich, you haven't fed him in the way that the parable intends, that it's about intention and you have the choice. that between stimulus and response, there's a little bit of space, and in that space is our freedom, and that everything can be taken from a man except one thing, the ability to respond to particular events, or the ability to interpret one's reality. And I think that this is what the parable is getting at. My grandmother would also say something to me that I think is more or less true. She would say, feeding a dog is a daily thing. It's not once and done. So, there's a type of chance every day to feed the right animal. And that is what life is. It's just the time that we have to figure out how to improve the nick of time, as Henry David Thoreau would say.

Like, that's what we do here. Now, I think my grandmother's basically right about the daily feedings, but I think that if you think about it, a wolf can go a long time without eating and then gorges itself. And I think that there are those events in life that are occasional, that are momentous. We really have a choice about who we become, where we tap meaning, what we worship, what we obsess over, and those make us who we are. In short, that's what the parable means to me. Yeah. Well, I love first that this was something that your grandmother shared with you. And I also love pointing out both aspects of that, both the sort of daily consistent feeding and these other

sort of big moments. I think about my recovery a lot, and we're going to talk about that in a second, because William James was named by Bill Wilson, who founded AA. And AA saved my life a couple times. He said William James was an unintentional co-founder of AA, you know, because of his ideas. But it makes me think about in of AA, you know, because of his ideas. But it makes me think about in my recovery, you know, people often ask me like, well, what was the big, what was the big turning point? And I often say, well, here's a couple turning points. And those are important. And at the same time, they're not any more important than the thousands of choices I've made since, you know, it's kind of both those things. And I like that

you point that out. I mean, in part, my father, and I say this in American philosophy, a love story, my father was a serious alcoholic and died at 56 of esophageal cancer, and never took that chance to feed the right beast, or did in certain respects, but not in the respects that would save his life. And I can tell you that at the end of his life, he had an enormous amount of regret, which I now see as the scariest part of death. It's not the death part that's so scary. It's rather living a life that you're upset about at the end. Yeah, yeah, that certainly seems to be the case. So, William James is the subject of your book. And as I mentioned, he was listed by Bill Wilson as one of the unintentional co-founders of AA,

mainly because Bill Wilson was so inspired by the varieties of religious experience. But there's a great line in the appendix to the AA Big Book, where I kind of thought we could start, in which William James describes a couple types of religious experience. One is the type that he lists throughout the book and the type that Bill Wilson had, which are these overwhelming, you know, white light moments of transformative spiritual experience. But he also described something called an educational variety spiritual experience, which the founders of AA felt that was important to add in because people got this idea,

like if I don't have this huge spiritual experience and I'm not having a real one. And William James's point was, yeah, you can have those, but you can also have this educational variety, which is one where you slowly progress, you slowly learn. And yet, over a period of time, you find yourself in a really different place. And I was kind of curious, I just thought I'd start by sort of bringing that idea up from a William James perspective. I'm very interested that you hone in on this, the sort of sacredness of the ordinary. And in other words, the ways that we can orient ourselves to the universe

that break us out of our standard insular individualistic mindset and get us in touch with something a little bit bigger than ourselves. And I think that that's what William James wants us to think about from beginning to end. I mean, he suffered from depression for much of his 30s. He considered suicide very seriously. And one of the keys for James is to feel connected to something beyond yourself. Before David Foster Wallace came along and said that our insular mindset was our default setting for human beings, William James was also saying pretty much the same thing. In an essay called On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, he says that we have an innate tendency to think that we are absolutely

the center of the universe. And these educational devotional experiences or educational spiritual experiences were habits that James took up every day to make himself a little bit more aware of the universe at large and his part in it. So, in The Varieties, he says that there is a state of mind familiar to religious men and women, I would add, where you, quote, be as nothing in the water spouts of God. And it's just basically to be silent in the water spouts of God. Now, you can say that this is a grand sort of thing, but you can also, in other words, a huge transcendent mystical experience. But I can tell you that what James believed is that you could get tastes of that on a hike up your local hill, or, you know, listening to birds, or praying, or doing any number of small acts where your

egoism is dislodged. And you realize that the universe is not an antagonistic force, but rather a thou, James would call it in the varieties, that it was a place where you could inhabit and live, and live with the universe rather than simply against it. And you can do that in lots of little, as you call them, educational experiences. Yeah, I love that. There's so many different directions I could go with that. And I think where I want to go is kind of back to the beginning with your book and William James, although I want to get back to habit at some point, because I love the way you talk about this in your book. And I think you make some really

nuanced points around habit. But I want to start with the title of the book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. What does William James mean when he talks about sick souls? So he makes this distinction in the varieties of religious experience between these two types of individuals or two types of mindsets. And the healthy minded is the person who is born into the world and who immediately thinks that the universe is some way fitted to his or her purposes, that they feel at home in the universe. While the six-souled individual is born into the world and he or she feels themselves as alien, that the world is an antagonistic place, or as Albert Camus would later say, is completely indifferent to our human purposes, and that it's a really frightening place. And this is the six-souled individual. And I think that while James is often regarded as the father of American pragmatism, as a sort of go forth and conquer philosophy, a philosophy of action. What we

forget is that this philosophy of action, his pragmatism, was put together. And his psychology, he was father of empirical psychology, his psychology and philosophy was a response to his own sick soulless. So, he was the doctor who would cure himself. And he did this through his philosophy and through his psychology. Today, we don't think about psychology or philosophy as saving your life, but I think in William James's case, as he struggled with suicide and depression, the thoughts that he came across could have a life-saving value. And that's what I meant by the book. In moments of crisis, philosophy can respond in meaningful, emotional ways, I think. Yeah, I've always loved that six souls from William James and this idea of people who had to be essentially twice born. You know, the people who were born once, who sort of were born content

and happy and felt like the world was a good place, and those people who had to be sort of were born content and happy and felt like the world was a good place. And those people who had to be sort of born a second time. And I am definitely in that latter camp. You know, I would say for as long as I could possibly recall, I think I felt like, hmm, I don't quite fit here. You know, something just isn't right. You know, I don't quite fit here. You know, something just isn't right. You know, the world and I just rub each other the wrong way. And James had that feeling through his 20s and 30s.

I mean, he came out of this family that encouraged him to be free, to exercise a huge amount of choice over his life. He came out of a family that was quite affluent. And when you're told to be free all the time, it's no surprise that James felt constrained and felt anxious about the choices that he had. And so, through his 20s and 30s, he didn't know which way to go. He was paralyzed, paralysis by analysis. He also thought a lot about the fact that we are mortal beings. We have bodies that are subject to natural forces that decay. And how do you face human finitude? How do you face the fact that there's an inordinate amount of suffering in the world? And when you suffer, it seems like you're at the center of things, once again, as Wallace and James would say. And I think that James's philosophy begins to respond to that and say, let's see if these

six old folks can feel themselves a little bit more in harmony with a world that they once took as alien. In part, when he answers the question in the 1890s, is life worth living? That's what James is telling his listeners at the Cambridge YMCA. He's saying, at a very deep level, you are not alone. And all you need to do is look, open your eyes, and you'll see that you're not alone. And I think that's a very powerful message. Yeah. And I think that message of you're not alone in feeling like a sick soul is so important. I don't know how many people we would say are once born or need to be twice born or sick souls or not. It doesn't matter. There's a ton who have this sick soul sense. And I also think, I mean, James's answer to this question is life worth living is so trenchant, I think. Usually, we think about

this question being answered in two mutually exclusive ways. There's the yes and the no. And the healthy-minded will always say yes, right? Every day of the week. The sick-souled, when they're going through real sickness of the soul, say no, right? And they say, no, life is not worth living. This is like, this is not the place for me. Give me over to the blessed calm of non-existence. And James had flirted with that no through his 20s and 30s. And what he does in the 1890s, when he's invited to address a number of suicides on Harvard's campus in this lecture, which becomes the essay, Is Life Worth Living? He says, it's not yes or no, is life worth living? He says, maybe. It depends on the liver. You might think that it's flippant,

and in part, there's a bit of humor to James's comment, but actually, it's dead serious. Because James is saying, it depends. It's up to you. You get to choose the one you feed. You get to choose it. It's up to you to make life worth living in part. And so, when we're feeling disempowered, when we're feeling real sickness of the soul, we feel like we don't have freedom, like we don't have power. James is saying, maybe it depends on the liver. He's saying, it's still up to you. You still have the choice. Now, some of my students say to me, I just want a yes. Okay. I just want the yes. Tell me yes, Dr. Keck. And I say, maybe the maybe is better. Because maybe the maybe also says that your feelings are not invalid.

says that your feelings are not invalid. You are not crazy to think that you are out of joint with the world, right? But it also says, maybe you should hold on and not throw yourself off the bridge because the maybe is always there. It's like, hey, maybe, maybe life is worth living. Maybe tomorrow you'll wake up and see it slightly differently. Maybe there are possibilities out there. So, I mean, I'm curious to know what you think about his response to that or his answer to the question. I agree with everything you said. And I think the other thing about a maybe answer is that when you hear that, you're like, oh, wait a second. Somebody's kind of telling me the truth here. Because when somebody just goes, is life worth living? And they go, of course it is. And you're like, but it doesn't seem that way to me. I feel like you're not hearing me. When someone goes, maybe you suddenly go, maybe this guy's going to get me.

Well, hang on. Like you make a great point. You describe being at the Brooklyn bridge and there being a, I don't remember exactly what the sign said, like something like, life is worth living. And you make the point, like, how many people are dissuaded from jumping by that sign that says, life is worth living? You're like, well, but when you hear somebody state the truth, you know, it's what drew me to Buddhism so much when I first heard it as I went, again, depending on how you translate it, life is suffering, life is full of suffering, whatever you want to say. But I felt like somebody is starting from a position I can get on board with, you know, and I think that is life worth living,

maybe feels like it starts from a position that feels to me like this is somebody who has wrestled with the very real fact that sometimes it doesn't feel like it. So I can trust and believe this person. Absolutely. I mean, the sign wouldn't be at the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge if there weren't those individuals who proved that this is not a universal. I mean, the sign is there for a reason. It's because for many people, they decide that life is not worth living. And James is saying, hey, slow down. Let's just say maybe for the time being, right? The more I thought

about it, it's a deep philosophical point, which is, I think James is encouraging us to realize that the most meaningful things in life, where we tap meaning, where we tap significance, are actually shot through with a maybe. What I mean by that is, James was urging us to realize that the universe is full of possibilities, and that we get to explore them both at our own risk, but also at our own reward. That is what a maybe is. It's a possibility. And if I ask my students, I say to them, hey, what do you find most meaningful? And they're like, well, I fell in love with my girlfriend, or I like playing soccer, or I like playing music. In other words, those are the things that get them up in the morning, right? I say to them, I say,

would that first kiss or would that love have been as meaningful if everything was guaranteed about it? Wasn't there a big maybe? Isn't there always a big maybe at the base of love? Similarly with soccer, would you play the game if you knew the outcome already? It's a big maybe. And similarly with music, it's the variation and possibilities that you explore in music that actually are the most meaningful. So don't tell me that a maybe isn't important, James says at the end of the essay. He says, the world is full of maybes, and I think that that's probably where meaning comes from, James is suggesting, I think, to us. I love that. You say, I think William James's philosophy saved my life, or more accurately, encouraged me not to be afraid of life. Say a little more about that. I mean, there are a number of different aspects to James's philosophy that have helped me through some very, very dark times.

So when I was 20 and I attempted suicide, James was there, basically saying anyone who hasn't considered suicide, he says this at the end of his life to his friend, Benjamin Blood. He says, anyone who has not at least thought about suicide or whether life is worth living hasn't really had a full education. And I thought, oh, well, at least I'm not crazy. And then when I look at James, what I see is a companion in misery. Arthur Schopenhauer often talks about this. A companion in misery, at least through his 20s and 30s. If you look at James's letters through those times, there's some deep suffering. And I think sometimes philosophy can afford us those individuals where we see, oh, this experience that I'm having right now, this dislocation that I feel, this alienation that I feel, is part of the human experience. And

individuals have the opportunity to form lives as a response to that threat of alienation. And James does this. I think that as he works through his psychology, which is published in 1890, James is crafting a sort of how-to manual on becoming better adjusted or as a means to being twice born if you're six old. the psychology looks pretty, the principles of psychology looks pretty dry. But if you look in it, James is noticing a couple of different things. He's formulating a theory of the emotions, which hadn't been formed before or developed before, which was that the body keeps the score, to use that famous expression. In other words, our bodily positions, how we use our bodies, how we hold ourselves, and what we do with our bodies can significantly change the way that you feel. James was ahead of his time when it came to yogic practice, right? He was a big early supporter of yoga in this regard. James also, in the Principles of Psychology,

articulated a theory of habit, which really did a lot for my psyche. James was not alone in the history of philosophy in thinking that habit was the great ballast of human behavior. Aristotle thought that too. But what James is interested in is how good habits are formed and how bad habits are broken. And I think that that's what James gives us in the principles. So let's go into habit a little bit more and talk about kind of what you just said there, how good habits are formed and how bad habits are broken. And then maybe we can go from there into what he saw as the downside of habit. In some cases, any kind of habit, you know, he saw a downside to. But before we get to

that, let's start with what did he have to teach us about how good habits are formed? Well, for better or for worse, organisms are plastic in nature. In other words, they're malleable. Our bodies are malleable. Our neural nets are malleable. And Donald Hebb found out in the 20th century that neurons that fire together wire together. And James says that patterns of behavior instantiate themselves in our bodies, and they prepare us to have those actions or have those events again. So habit is a type of heuristic or a shorthand tool that allows us to negotiate our worlds in much easier ways than if we had to start from scratch or reconstruct the wheel. James's theory of habit says that activities that you do form patterns in your body or in your way

that you carry yourself. And he says that this is a good thing for most of human life, but there's a downside to habit, namely that it can make us less aware of the surroundings in which we find ourselves. So James was very worried about autopilot in life. So James was a big proponent of choice and freedom. And he wanted to say that habit had its place, but then also it should be guarded against if it got a life of its own or if it took on a life of its own. Yeah, he has a phrase that you use, which is the irrepressible but subterranean force of habit. And I love that idea that, yeah, habits are, I guess it's kind of obvious, but they're good when they're good.

You know, good habits carry us along. Bad habits carry us along in a bad way. And then I think the point that you were making is this, even the things that seem sort of neutral, they deadness to life. We just go through the motions or we go through autopilot. I mean, it's one of the great things about humans is that we can automate a certain amount of behavior and thinking, but it's also equally bad news, I think. And I love that you referred to it. You say this was a personal insight for me regarding the dangers of midlife. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about that beyond just broadly,

but why to you did it feel like this was a particular danger of midlife? I think when you are young, you have all these great expectations. And then as you grow older, I'm 42 now, which won't seem very old to a lot of your listeners, but when I was 20, it seemed ancient. And when you get older, you realize that the expectations that you have, that you've fallen radically short of them, and that your life has fallen into a type of mundane rat race. So you go to work only to make money so that you can buy gas so that you can drive your car to work. And the cycle continues. And then one day on the subway, perhaps you

are looking around and a question comes to you that is tinged with weariness and amazement. And the question is, why? Like, why the hell am I doing this? And I think that that was one of the drives to go back into William James. Additionally, when the book came out, I was going through some serious health problems. I had a cardiac arrest at the age of 40 after running on a treadmill. And it was a wake-up call after the bypass surgery that my habits needed to change, that I needed to stop drinking as much as I was, that I needed to eat more, that I needed to exercise less, that I needed to not be so obsessive about life,

that the habits that I had formed are just, were killing me. I mean, it was a congenital issue, but it was also an issue brought on by certain types of behaviors. And I needed to change those habits. And James really has now helped me a great deal out of that. James says that you should do two things that are difficult every day just for the habit of it or just for the practice. And sometimes the hardest thing to do is to break even rigorous habits. In other words, if you have a habit of treating yourself poorly and pushing yourself to extremes, the hardest thing that one can do is simply sit and rest. And with bypass surgery, you have no choice. But James was there to say,

hey, you formed habits now, unfortunately, or fortunately, you have to break them. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think this idea of habit is so interesting because I generally think I've created good habits in my life that support me and my overall well-being, and they do narrow the experiences that I tend to have. So I've been really interested in this idea that we need a certain amount of habit and a certain amount of flexibility. How do we have both? How do I have enough habit that it supports my well-being, enough positive habits, and yet how do I have enough flexibility

in life that things don't get so dull? Right. I mean, for James, it was also an issue of consciousness. It wasn't just the actions that you took, but it's also the ways that you can look at the world and the willingness to look at different things. Usually our angle of vision is so narrow that we see the world through a very circumscribed frame. It's usually a frame of utility. It's usually a frame of like, do we have money to pay rent? Are our kids doing okay? Are our partners doing all right? Do I have clothes for tomorrow? It's usually about me, you know, all about me, all about I. And James was repeatedly saying that consciousness is mind-blowingly large. I mean, the abilities that we have to take in the world are actually quite astonishing. Our habitual lives narrow what we can see and what we can make sense of.

But he was always encouraging us to see beyond them. He tells this famous story about going through a poor community in Appalachia, And James goes by a house and he admits to his listeners, he says, at first, this house looked so horrible. I couldn't imagine how anyone would live there. It didn't look at all like my Cambridge house. And then James says to himself, he says, how narrow and how silly that perspective is. And that's the certain blindness in human beings. I mean, it's just that you interpret reality through yourself, right? And then James comes to the position, he says, overcoming that certain blindness would be something like realizing that others live lives that are as vibrant as your own and as meaningful as your own,

and absolutely different from you, but still meaningful and vibrant. When we talk about habit, it's not just an action. It's also about the way that you take in the world. It's about how you see the world. Yeah. You say in the book at one point, our volition and the practical pursuits that structure and organize our lives is what keeps us from recognizing the full range of experience. We regularly confuse what is urgent and immediate with what is actually important or miraculous. Right. And I am guilty of this in the extreme, right? I confuse the immediate for the actually important. And I mean, whatever I urgently need to do in a day takes over my entire world,

right? And I might very easily miss what is actually significant or meaningful. I mean, I think about your two wolves again, and I think that the bad wolf, the wolf of selfishness or the wolf of fear, the wolf of insecurity, the wolf of cruelty. This wolf is fed. If we don't actively choose the other wolf, right, we're going to fall into the wolf that you wouldn't want to find in a dark alley. I mean, like, it's just going to happen because of the fact that we are limited by our own vision, or we think we are limited by our own vision. We're taught that the most important things in life are the most immediate, the most, you know, local. And that's simply not the case for James and for a number of other philosophers who have helped through the years. Right. To quote James, he says, blind and dead does the clamor of our own

practical interest make us to all other things. I just love that idea. You know, can we look beyond what seems like our to-do list or the things that we think will make us happy and be present? It's why, for me, I have chosen Zen as my spiritual practice, because Zen is obsessed on this point. You know, Zen is very much focused on your direct and immediate experience, like all the thoughts about it, all the thoughts about everything that you need to do, like just experience what you're experiencing, but try and experience it more deeply, whatever it is. It's why for me, it's the practice that I have sort of landed on is because I become imminently practical. Just what's the next thing that needs done? You know, just let me,

give me a list of things that needs checked off. I love it. Let me just work my way through the list, you know, but that's not where the deeper experience of being comes from. The comment blind and dead is telling. If we are blind to this wider or deeper reality that we have a chance to experience, the maybes of life, right? If we are blind to those, there's a very good chance that we're going to reach the end of our days and discover that we haven't lived, like Thoreau says. I mean, James is inheriting that American philosophical position that was expressed in Transcendentalism. Live deliberately. That's the message of Walton, so that when you get to the end of life, you don't discover that you haven't lived. And when I saw my father,

watched my father die, I thought to myself, it is quite possible to live as the walking dead, and then at the end, discover that you haven't really lived. And that's terrifying. And it really drives a person into living more deeply or meaningfully, I think. So for example, I think that finitude and the fact that we only have a certain number of years, and who knows when the end is actually going to come, is an impetus to live more deeply. If you only have a few more years, your eyes get wide. Some people sense things more deeply. I guess some people also shut down. But I'd like to think that the end is an impetus to live now. Yeah. And I want to talk about something else that you say here in this section of the book, where you're talking about William James kind of has a can-do

mentality, right? There's this will to believe, you know, there's a lot of, you know, taking life sort of by the horns. But you say that this deeper experience of being is something that we can't just force to happen. We can orient towards it, we can block it, but there's an openness to it and a receptivity to it that I don't quite know how you describe in the book, but I think you use the word that that's unsettling in a way. And I agree. I feel very similar. Like I've hit this point in the book, but I think you use the word that that's unsettling in a way. And I agree. I feel very similar. Like I've hit this point in the last several years where I've gone, okay, my will is a really useful tool for me in a lot of ways. And yet when it comes to this deeper experience of being, there's a certain openness, receptivity, almost a grace that I'm not real comfortable with.

You and I both. I mean, I was brought up on action. I mean, I was taught that if you work hard, work yourself to the bone, that maybe you will be worthy of love. I mean, like, and I was just taught that. I mean, my mother didn't intend that message to come through, but that's the one that came through. And I love her to death. She did a wonderful job if she's ever listening to this. But if we go back to that quote about to be as nothing in the water spouts of God, the first part of that quote is telling it's to hold your will in abeyance and be as nothing in the water spouts of God. Abeyance. In other words, you realize that the will can only take you so far,

and you actually do nothing, and you just receive. And for somebody who's so used to working and doing and going and going and going, that's incredibly difficult. Because you feel if you're not acting, then you're not worthwhile and that you're not worthy. And one of the things that I've learned very recently, very, very recently, is that that is not the case. That you can receive and the proper response to receiving life is gratitude, rather than just working your butt off. I will say one thing about the book, about how it's structured, is that the chapters proceed in this way, where you start in the sixth soul, you talk about William James's

go-out-and-conquer-the-world attitude with a will to believe, and then you get into consciousness. And like we say, it's an issue of receiving sight, seeing things again. It's more passive. And then you get into this issue of transcendence and hope, and then wonder. And what I was trying to do is to very subtly suggest that these are the steps that one might take. And for me, the hope, gratitude, wonder, transcendence are really difficult. I'm still way back. I mean, I'm still most days, I'm still way back in just the work your butt off mode. As I grow older, I'm getting better. Or at least I hope I am. Yeah. Well, I think that sort of, in some ways, mirrors my journey in some ways. Certainly,

think that sort of, in some ways mirrors my journey in some ways, certainly, you know, getting over alcoholism and addiction, there was an element of very active work in that, you know, you go to meetings, you help other alcoholics, you read the books, you know, there was a real element of that. And I still find, you know, if I look at my own spiritual life, there is an element of will in it, for sure. And there's an element of openness and receptivity. And it's both. And in Zen, we talk about this paradox all the time, this paradox of, like, you need enough will to sort of practice, and then yet you have to completely let go at that point. And it is paradoxical. It's challenging to do. If it was just do one or the other, it'd be easier to figure out like, okay, just will your way through it. Okay, we'll figure that out. Or if it was like, just sit

back and do nothing and wait for things to happen. Okay, I could probably wrap my head around that too, eventually. It's the both that I think makes it tricky. I think so too. I mean, I very recently discovered a couple of William James's copies of Frederick Nietzsche. And Nietzsche in the 19th century was talking about the same thing. I mean, Nietzsche's famous for the will to power and philosophy of the hammer and all this masculine action stuff. But he also believes that we need what he calls the amor fati, or the love of fate, which is to say, you can orient yourself to the circumstances that you are faced with. This is not an issue of changing them. Some things you can't change. I can't change my father. I can't change the genetic disposition I was given. I can't change

lots of things. But I can orient myself to those things in ways that I come to embrace them. And even the most embarrassing or disgusting or despicable things, you can come to not only accept, but understand it as just part of yourself, of what you became, which is not simply resignation. It's orienting yourself to things that you cannot change in such a way that you wrote here, and I want to talk a little bit about it. You say, when my sick soul struggles, it is, I think, because I can't find, generate, or even feign the zest. James is right that it can be found everywhere in activity, perception, imagination, or reflection, which I have to say is little comfort when I can't find

it anywhere. So let's talk a little bit about what does that zest mean? And I would say that that is also my primary way that I feel sick-souled anymore, is it manifests as a lack of zest. Zest is at the center of an essay that James writes called What Makes Life Significant. And he says that what makes life significant is the zest of life, that feeling of excitement, the feeling of utter connection, the feeling of having your eyes wide open. And he was always on the lookout for it. I mean, James might have talked about putting your will in. I'm Jason Alexander.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. ...beance, but he was always on the lookout and on the move to find zest. He bored very easily. And I think that your question is a good one. In other words, how do you maintain interest? How do you maintain attention? How do you actually see something new that you've seen over and over and over again? So we're returning to the question of habit and the question of the midlife. And when you're in midlife or the middle years, you tend to repeat yourself and repeat actions that you take over and over again. And it's very difficult to see the newness in them. It's very difficult to see anything particularly significant or meaningful or valuable about them. Just doesn't get you here, right? Right in the solar plexus, right? That's the feeling of zest.

And I think one of the keys to maintaining it, I mean, in part, it's imagination. And it's the ability to see things anew. I will go back to David Foster Wallace in This Is Water. He says that he's standing in a supermarket convenience store in a line and everybody's pissing him off because they're ahead of him. But if he can just use a little bit of imaginative insight and to choose to think differently about this situation, then all of a sudden, the line changes. He notices people in the line. He notices that the cashier is overtaxed. He notices that the person who is behind him probably deserves to be ahead of him. And the ability to see things differently, I think, is crucial in maintaining the ability to sense

zest. And James said that the real task of philosophy is to think otherwise. In other words, to think outside the box. And I think that also has existential value because it allows us to see zest in the ordinary or experience zest in the midst of the ordinary. I'll tell you something very personal, which is before bypass surgery, I performed my duties in parenting very dutifully, right? And I did the same thing every day. But after a while, I wasn't experiencing the zest. And now after surgery, for some reason, even the little mundane things in life can sometimes. I'm no Buddhist master here. I'm not feigning to be.

But sometimes I can feel something new in an experience that I've had repeatedly. But then I realize that I actually haven't had it repeatedly, that there is newness, right? You just have to open your eyes to it. My grandmother would say, you can't step in the river at the same place twice. It's like, she's a very, very wise woman. So I fully agree with what you're saying, though, about zest.

Yeah, it's so interesting, because I think my Zen training has taught me look more closely. Just look again, look deeper, don't seek variety, just look at what's already there, look at it more deeply. And that is wonderful and really good training. And I've started to also say, hmm, you know what, I'm going to introduce some novelty. I'm going to allow myself to do things that I don't normally do, to try and shake things up a little bit. And can I come at this zest thing both directions? One is to see more deeply into the ordinary moments, to look at them differently, you know, and then the other is, you know, can I just do a few more things? There's a

woman named Julie Cameron who wrote a book called The Artist's Way, and she has this great idea. She calls them artist dates, and she just says, go out once a week by yourself and do something you wouldn't normally do. Take your inner artist out on a date and just do something a little bit different to sort of wake that and shake that person up. And so I've sort of found for me that it's both those that helped me. I've had periods in my life where I focus on the novelty, just give me something new, give me something new, give me something new. And it's not very sustainable and certainly not healthy in a lot of different ways. It leads to a lot of less than healthy behavior. And it's not very sustainable and certainly not healthy in a lot of different ways. It leads to a lot of less than healthy behavior. And then I found, on the other hand, just hitting the same drum again of look differently is useful, but I'm finding a little bit more

success with blending the two. I think that that's 100% right. And I think that if you look at James's own life, in very normal interactions, he's surprisingly insightful and compassionate and look at things differently, look at things differently, look at things differently. I just got back from several months in Shakurwa, New Hampshire, where James summered. And he bought that house because he said that he needed a little bit of wildness. And he was. He was a wild man. My teacher, Doug Anderson, called him a Roman candle. He put some expletives before the Roman candle. And James was constantly on the move, both looking for new experiences, but then when he did have to settle down, he tried to see things differently. Yeah. You say in the book something I like too, which is you said, sometimes I try and identify what I find most zestless, so to speak, what leaves me feeling wholly numb or empty. And then I try not to do that.

How does that resonate with you post-surgery? I think that the need for zest becomes much more crucial when you have a brush with death. In other words, you really look for the zest. when you have a brush with death. In other words, you really look for the zest. So, this via negativa way where I say, this is not giving me zest. I mean, I think about Marie Kondo saying that you should throw away everything that doesn't give you joy. But I mean, this is kind of the, it's like, this is not zest, this is not zest, this is not zest. And then you kind of outline a space that has potential for zest, and then you tread that that way. That's been helpful, especially since the facts of life are that a lot of life consists of very boring things. And I'm not sugarcoating it. It's boring. It's mundane.

But to figure out what is really not giving you zest, and then to move toward the path that you've created, I think is a way to go. Pete That's funny as you're saying that. I was thinking, depending on the day, me following Marie Kondo's advice might mean I end up throwing everything away. It's like, well, nope, it's all got to go. Pete Burn it all down. Pete Burn it all down.

Pete I mean, the truth of the matter is that I've done that several times already, and it doesn't work out very well. So I mean, burning it all down has its virtues, but it's also very, very painful, difficult, and I'd prefer not to have to burn anything else fully to the ground again. realization as I've gotten older and hopefully a little bit wiser is like that idea of chasing what's new has a pretty limited shelf life to it, right? Like you just, you can only do that so long before it becomes very problematic. You can't go very deep into anything if all the time you're just like, this is not interesting, throw it aside. Right. I think about this with relationships and also with, well, let's just stick to relationships. But I mean, it's just in my limited experience of moving from one to the next and next and next and next, settling down and committing to something is very difficult. And finding zest in the commitment, I think, is the task.

I mean, I think it's the task of life. In other words, to find stability that is not deadening, to find work that is not drudgery, to find a relationship that is long but still interesting. When we're talking about the balance between habit on the one hand and then novelty on the other, I think we're talking about the same issue here. novelty on the other. I think we're talking about the same issue here. Absolutely. 100%. And I think I have the same sort of realization in relationship as somebody who sort of used to perpetually be like, okay, I'm in this one. It's not good enough. I start looking for the next one. You know, I did that for a lot of years and I finally sort of realized like that's not going to work. You know, like how do you find the deepness, the intimacy and the interestingness and zest in the commitment?

And I think if you look at also doing work that's valuable, you've got to develop a certain degree of expertise. Correct. You know, that takes time, that takes focus, that takes staying with something. And, you know, how do I discover what's new within what's already here? Right. I mean, I also think that there's something about flow that I think William James would have been very, very much aware of, and that flow states are real, and they have will, that flow states are real and they have will, but they also have a type of receptivity or easiness to them. I mean, laughter and falling in love, these things you can't will yourself into,

but the will is not gone. I mean, these are choices, but it's not the type of choice that you can force yourself into. And so the habits of life that I formed when I was younger about pushing so hard and thinking that this would be the only way for me to be lovable and that I had to earn everything, that led to two destroyed marriages. I mean, other things did too. But I'm sitting there after bypass surgery, or I'm laying down after bypass surgery, and I can't do anything. I am just in the hospital room at Tufts. And I'm thinking to myself, I almost killed myself. Like, I pushed it way too hard. And I did it for a reason. But actually, it was deeply counterproductive to work this hard, you know? And then Kath, my partner, came in and she just laid beside me in the bed. I couldn't do anything. I mean, I couldn't move.

I couldn't make good small talk. I was just a, you know, a piece of meat. And she laid there next to me and moved over all the tubes. And I thought, oh my God, I think she loves me and I'm not doing anything. That was a very deep realization that, oh, I don't have to do a gosh darn thing. That there's at least a small part of the universe that is connected to me. And I don't have to work for it. I mean, that's a deep thought, at least for somebody like, well, our friend William James, I think probably had that

realization as well. I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. John, thank you so much. I have really enjoyed this conversation. Like I said, I've wanted to have you on for a while, and I just had a gut sense it would be a great conversation, and it has been. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Eric. And I just want to say that I really admire what you've been doing here. So thanks for having me on.

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