The One You Feed - What it Takes to Make a Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

In this episode, Miroslav Volf delves into the idea of what it takes to make a life worth living. He shares his understanding of the human experience and his unique perspective on nurturing meaningful connections. The discussion delves into the battle between good and bad within us, the impact of societal values, and the significance of introspection in nurturing the good within ourselves. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover how to define a life worth living and find your true purpose Explore the impact of moral choices on happiness and fulfillment in life Find out how to balance your desires for a happy, healthy life and nurture meaningful connections Reflect on human agency and choice, and how they shape your life’s direction To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joy has aboutness about it. I rejoice over something, right? This is not simply feel pleasure, but I rejoice over something good that has happened. 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. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love.

Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine.

A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Miroslav Volf. He's the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He's published and edited nine books and over 60 scholarly articles. Today, Eric and Miroslav discuss his book, Life Worth Living, A Guide to What Matters Most. Hi, Miroslav. Welcome to the show. It's great to be with you. I'm really

excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, which is called Life Worth Living, in a few moments, but we're going to start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, 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 fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent.

They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. Oh my goodness. That is a really wonderful parable. Very, very simple.

And at the same time, very profound. I love the parable. I think immediately what comes to mind is that these two sides that we have, each in our personality, that the relationship to the good is the one of feeding, strengthening it, making it thrive. And that's where I see the concentration of the story to be. And the negative is just not given food to eat, not just given resources. And it seems to me rather than simply combating the evil as we tend to do most of the time, feeding the good is much more important. The other thing that occurred to me, and we could have a whole pot hour talking about that story, but the other thing that occurred to me about the story is that the grandson, I think in the typical way in which a child would, and in which many of us would, ask the question, which one wins? us is that actually there is no victory to be had, strictly speaking, but it is how does one manage to give the upper hand to the good and to strengthen and increase the good, rather

than thinking, if I haven't managed to come to a victory, I haven't yet done what I'm supposed to have done. And that seems to me, in its modesty, this kind of approach seems to me both very hopeful approach, that is, every small step of the increase of good, it matters. It's important. Victory is not necessarily all that matters. That's a very thoughtful reading of the parable. When you were talking about giving more to the good than the bad, it reminded me of an article I read a couple of days ago, and this isn't anything new,

but it was just saying it again, which is that there are certain figures out there in the media space, particularly online, that their whole bit is to say something outrageous enough to get everybody who disagrees with them to start disagreeing with them. And it just amplifies and amplifies and amplifies the message. And in essence, the article was arguing again, nothing new, that we are giving these people a platform by arguing against the bad in their case, we would do better just if we collectively ignored them. And it made me as you were sort of talking about, you know, giving our attention to the good, it just made me think of that article I just read

the other day. It also reminds us that what we do and how we approach our own inner lives is connected with how the setup is, how society is organized in this particular case, social media. how society is organized, in this particular case, social media. And they want you to emphasize outrage. They want you to bash negative because it finds more echoes in the wider audiences. And in that sense, they lead us astray in our own inner struggle. So the inner struggle about the soul is also struggle about the conditions in which we live and what will feed us from outside

and not just what will feed us from inside. Yeah. So when I saw the title of your book, I saw it in a library. I love to be in libraries. And I saw it and I was like, immediately, okay, I have to have this person

or these people on the show because when I started this podcast and it's been, boy, almost 10 and a half years now the show. Because when I started this podcast, and it's been, boy, almost 10 and a half years now. Congratulations. Yeah, I know. It's amazing. About 10 and a half years ago, I wrote this line that said, it takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. That's in our intro that you hear every time this podcast runs, life worth living. So it's obviously a concept

that resonated with me way back then. As I've thought about that phrasing over the years, I still like it, but it raises a question to me, and I'm just curious how you think about this. It presupposes that there is some life that is not worth living. And I wonder how you think about that. Does that come to your mind at all when you hear that phrase, not worth living. And I wonder how you think about that. Does that come to your mind at all when you hear that phrase, life worth living, that raises the possibility that there are lives that are not worth living? It does. And often when I speak about those issues, you can almost see in the eyes of the audience a kind of flashes of fear that the very talk about life worth living might imply that there are lives

that are lived in a way that they're not worthy of being lived. And I think for me, it's always important to emphasize, and we do that at the very end of the book, that each of the lives, each of the persons is infinitely valuable. And just because of the value of each individual, And just because of the value of each individual, we have to deliberate about what kind of life matches this infinite value that each of us has. thing to say. But nonetheless, I think it's not difficult to illustrate. We illustrated at the very beginning, I think it's a very beginning, by invoking the figure of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, who was seduced by Hitler as a young man, by the promise of creating works of architecture that the world hasn't seen since Roman times. And then he got himself involved in what is a deeply inhumane project, fantastically successful as an architect, but failing as a human being. Now,

that's a big scale failure, I think. But I think when I look at my life and when I ask myself where it is that I'm failing, I'm often failing in trivial kinds of ways. I don't take it seriously enough. I let myself be simply taken, whatever is before me takes me. And that seems to me the other very common and less egregious, but nonetheless a serious failure of our humanity. Yeah, well, you made the Nazi reference and it made me think of a recent movie you may have seen. I think it was called Zone of Interest. It's an amazing film, and it takes place across the street from Auschwitz, and it's in the home of the director of Auschwitz. And the thing that's crazy about it, to me, the most amazing part of it is his wife, The most amazing part of it is his wife, who is just focused on the things that we all want.

You know, a happy family, a nice home. Those things are what's so important to her that she's ignoring what's happening literally 100 yards away. I mean, you never once in the movie see the inside of the concentration camp. And yet it's always there, this looming. And I mean, I think the obvious thing that people take away from it, and I think it's part of the point of it, is this sort of banality of evil. And I think what you're saying is the reduced version of that, which is that my little choices may not fall into the realm of evil in that way, right? But they don't very often fall into the realm of good. And you've got a line somewhere in the book that has been bothering me since I read it.

And it was, Netflix binges may not be evil, but in the final accounting, there's something regrettable about ours simply fritted away with no connection to the good we could and ought to do. And that's a damning sort of line. I mean, books like yours, I love reading them. And I also find them unsettling.

It's like you reference Peter Singer a lot in the book, right? I read Peter Singer. I'm like, oh, for God's sake, like he challenges you so profoundly on are you living a good life the book. I read Peter Singer, I'm like, oh, for God's sake. He challenges you so profoundly on, are you living a good life? Yeah. And I think to me, it's important to kind of put things in the human scale. We can always place the demand so high that none of us can jump the hoop. On the other hand, we can excuse ourselves. And I think of that wife of that concentration camp. What was he? An officer there. He was in charge of concentration camp. I think of her. And in some ways, you can say she was doing good, not just as maybe frittering time that we

do in varieties of ways. She's doing ordinary good things in life. And yet, by doing only that, there is a kind of failure that shadows that goodness that she wants to instantiate by being blind to what's happening 100 yards away. So, I want to get into the book. There's so much great material in it. The core of the book is this question. You call it the question, which you could phrase, material in it. The core of the book is this question. You call it the question, which you could phrase, you know, what is a good life? What matters most? What is a life worth living? Talk to me about the importance of this question. So it dawned on me, interestingly enough, about 10 and a half years ago, 11 years ago or so,

when you started thinking about those questions, I did in a kind of concentrated way when we started designing this course we teach at Yale. And it was designed because of how I see the higher education going and leaving that question behind and culture more generally doing the same thing. And what occurred to me then, and what I think is true in our everyday life, we spend most of our times thinking about the means of getting from point A to point B and then traveling from point A to point B. The means then to life ends up being the thing that we spend most time about, reflect about it, and we have become, in varieties of domains, truly experts in means. I mean, just think, you can send a vehicle to the other side of the moon, gather rocks there, bring the thing back down here, and we can inspect what's going there.

I mean, means to achieve that are absolutely staggering. I can't even imagine them. And in so many other ways, we are doing just that. But we forget to ask the question, what end is worth achieving, coming to, going to? So we design our life around getting from point A to point B. But what is the point B that I should be at? What organizes my life? What gives it purpose?

What gives it a direction so that actually I'm not frittering, wasting my time, pursuing inhuman goals as I am spending so much energy, so much intelligence in trying to get to the point that I wish to get. So that was, to me, ended up being the central question. And in the essence, that is the question. The question is, what's worth wanting? And that question of what is worth for me to want, behind that question is, what kind of human being is it worth being? Who am I? Who should I be as a human being? Yeah, it's a big question. You have a line that says, if this all feels a little above your pay grade, it just means you understand the stakes, right? And it is. You also go on to say something that I think is important, and it's very

fundamental to my approach to things. I'm actually writing a book that's sort of focused on this idea of little by little, a little becomes a lot. And you say that this question can be overwhelming, but we can break it down. What are some of the ways to think about breaking that question down? What sort of human is it worth being is the big question. What are some of the ways we make that smaller? Well, what we generally do, and we have about six or so questions that guide the students as they read various texts from various traditions, and that's how we teach that course. And the

three central questions, first questions are, so how do I imagine a flourishing life? If somebody asks me, what's a flourishing life? And then we say, well, that flourishing life will have at least three components. One element of that life would be that I act in the right way. That's a question of my agency, what defines what goals I should pursue, but I am then active agent. The other second aspect is the circumstances of life. What does it mean for life to go well? Not just what does it mean for me to act rightly, but what does it mean for life to go well? And I imagine myself as if I was a plant and then ask myself, what kind of soil, what kind of environment would

I need and what kind of nutrients would I need in order to live a life that is truly worth living? So agency and then circumstances in which we find ourselves. And finally, a kind of emotional responses that we have. And some of those emotional responses are almost reactions, but other ones, in each of these reactions, there's also element of agency. How do I respond at an emotional level to what is going on in my life? And I need to have these three things aligned, right agency, right kinds of circumstances, and right emotional responses.

And then I can say, well, this is a life that is worth living. This is how it looks. It has these three components in a certain way. We ask the question, I ask the question often, well, what reasons do you have to live a life like that? Are there good reasons? Then the important question for me, what kind of help do you need? And in this story,

the parable with which we opened this conversation, which you open regularly, the conversations, it is, well, the help is to have proper food to feed the one and make sure that you don't feed the other wolf. The other question also that we raise is what happens when you fail? What do you do then? And there are different ways to answering that. So, we have this set of questions that all point you to answer and give a shape to the life that is truly worth living. And people will disagree on that. But at the same time, it will focus them to ask the question, and then we can debate the answers. Yeah, one of the things I loved in the book, you start off by stating your biases. You personally, and I believe the other authors are Christian, you're theologians, so you have

a certain bias. And yet throughout the book, I thought you guys did a really nice job of presenting differing viewpoints around all of these questions from different religious traditions, from different philosophers. I think there's a very balanced menu there if we're talking about feeding, right? That your good wolf can choose from a variety of different options that are there. And I thought you guys did a nice job with that. I want to come back to this agency circumstances and effect because I think it's a beautiful way of thinking of things. But I think to fully understand it, I'm going to ask you to make an analogy that you make in the book, which is between the game poker and the game war,

as an analogy for sort of our lives. You're making the point that in the game of poker, there's a certain amount of skill that you bring to it, and there's a certain amount of chance. And then you also make the point the game of war right you just flip over one card after the other but even within that there's a certain amount of choice which is like how are you as you play yeah which i think is talking about how much agency and control over circumstances we actually have so i just thought

it was a good metaphor that rose out of the frustration of one of our writers, Ryan, who's a very good poker player. He had to play with his son, War, and happily did, right? But it's very different, very much chance versus kind of skill in the game. You know, there are elements of chance in our lives. We don't choose our parents. We don't choose where our parents live, we don't choose so many other things in our lives, and they place a kind of constraint upon our life. But much of what we do, much of how we think about ourselves, much of our exterior lives and interior lives are subject to our choices and to our deliberation and are subject also to engagement over longer periods of time. Again, in the story, in the parable of the two wolves, which one you feed, feeding is not just a one-time event. Feeding is what happens over the course of a life.

And the strength of one depends on how much attention in terms of feeding it we give it. And in that sense, those are the important choices that we are making, including for many of us the choice in which direction we would go. in which direction we would go. That is to say, the great religious tradition and great philosophical traditions always assume that you can step back and that you can ask the question, am I on the right track, or do I need something like a significant turnaround? In Christian tradition, we talk about it as a kind of conversion. But I have friends who used to be Christians but have become atheists, whether Marxist or Nietzscheans. That was also a conversion of sorts. Sure.

Aversion from something and turning toward something else. In all of these areas, we have agency and we can deliberate and act. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I

think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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.

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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, 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.

Find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed

to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. You guys say in the book, first, you have some responsibility for the shape of your life. Second, that responsibility is not unlimited, it's constrained. And I just love that because it's pointing away from either of the extremes, right? It's very easy to be like, well, you know, I'm just a product of my circumstances. And, you know, I have the genetics I have, and I grew up where I grew up, and I went

to the schools I went to. Or it's very easy for people to take the other thing where they're like, you can do whatever you want. I'm like, well, no, it's actually both. It's both those things, right? We have some degree of agency and we have some constraints to that agency. Even in the simplest way of you wouldn't be able to choose Christianity if you'd never been exposed to it, right? And there are people in the world that are in that circumstance. So, you know, even what we're exposed to is a constraint on our choices. Yes, and I think it's very important for us not to fall in either of these two extremes.

In a certain tradition, respectable tradition, which I admire, for instance, Stoic tradition, the sense of agency is such that actually one ought to be able to live unperturbed life, irrespective of any circumstances that appear. That's a worthy goal. But most of us, even after long practice, find ourselves not quite able to do that. And we have to kind of take into account circumstances that are conducive to a life that we wish that we think is responsible to leading. And that's why we talk about this. Well, what kind of soil do you need is necessary? What kind of environment

is important for you? And so forth. You talk about four different modes of being in the world, and that each of those modes has a different question associated with them. And I thought it just would be good to talk through those. Yeah, we describe this as a deep dive. How do you get to the question that we think ought to be asked? And most of our lives are led not particularly attentive to the question, the big question. We think that's rightly so. If you're going in the right direction,

if you know what's happening, you can just let go and be on autopilot and switch off the seeking of direction to following direction and simply ride, which is actually the most pleasant kind of life to live. But you want to make sure that you are doing it rightly. The next level, what we tend to ask as a question is, well, what do I want? That's the question that now you're becoming aware of where you are, and you're asking for the direction. What is my desire, in particular desire? But then at the next step, you ask yourself, but is what I desire really what I desire? Because we have these two levels, right? Surface level, at which we articulate our desires.

And in many instances, we discover, oh, no, this is not really what I was wanting. I was going after something else. And often when we are in psychological therapeutic situations, a good guide would tell us, well, just think about what you want, really want, and what you're trying to achieve with what you're doing. Why do you want that? Why you want it? What's driving this? And then the question behind all of these questions for us is, it's not just what question

is deep down driving all of my decisions, but what kind of thing is worth really desiring. And that takes us at a level of transcendence, self-transcendence. We are no longer alone with ourselves. With our desires, we are on the surface of desires. We desire what we desire. Heart wants what the heart wants, right? And second, we go a little bit deeper and says, well, who am I actually? And who, out of this authenticity of who I am, what should I do?

How do I want to live? What's appropriate for me to desire? But that leaves unanswered the question whether the desires that we have are really worth desiring. Are they worthy of my humanity? So, our goal is then to think, well, once you come to the level of asking what's worthy of my humanity and start to move in that direction, ideal case scenario is you know what you're doing and you can go back onto autopilot and live your life without too much worrying about the question, the entire question about which we wrote this book. about the question, the entire question about which we wrote this book. We want you not to have to read our book all the time or to think about the subject matter all the time. Right. There's a bunch of things in what you said there. I mean, one points to the fact that

our habitual responses to things, that can be a good or bad thing depending on what those habits are. You know, whatever our autopilot default is, that could be good or bad, right? There's another level that you also insert in there, which is, you call it the effectiveness level, what we are doing, getting us what we want. And you say something I think is really important. You say that oftentimes, the effectiveness question is the most profound question many of us know how to answer. Meaning, we don't actually go deeper to figure out what it is we really want and is that thing worth wanting. We just take that surface level idea of what we want and we figure out how to do it better, right? But doing the wrong thing better isn't really a victory. We use the extreme example

of Albert Speer earlier, right? He became an amazing architect, right? And built amazing buildings. And yet, we could argue, I think few of us would disagree that he could have used some deeper reflection than that. So, there's this effectiveness question. I can talk a little bit. I don't know whether that's where you want to go, but we could talk what we need at the level of this surface, not autopilot, but effectiveness. How the goals that we set for ourselves are generally filtrated to us by observing how others live. And these kind of comparisons then that we made with others are what drives the decision making.

I want to be like that. Somebody has a, I drive a perfectly fine car, let's say a Honda Fit, it's parked in front of my garage, I've had so many miles and the car never breaks down. It's an amazing car that I'm driving and the next door my neighbor buys new Audi or new Porsche and I suddenly this wonderful car that I have has shrunk to insignificance when I look at the Porsche that stands in front of my neighbor's driveway. I want a Porsche now, but what kind of desire is that? What has it done to the value of my car?

What has it done to me that I've simply, just because I saw something, have desired it and then I pursue it with vengeance and want to be effective in achieving that, right? Those are the kinds of questions that we need to interrogate if we want to live fulfilled lives rather than lives that constantly are chasing after something that cannot be achieved. Hi, everyone. One of the things that I know many of you struggle with is anxiety. And very recently, I shared some tips on managing anxiety in our newsletter. Specifically, I shared a practice on clarifying your values.

In the practice, you write down one or two of your core values and then identify one action step that aligns with them. I find that taking one positive action towards things that matter to me really helps reduce anxiety. Also, I have a reflection question. What positive experiences have you had today that you could focus on instead of your anxiety? Every Wednesday, I send out a newsletter called A Weekly Bite of Wisdom for a Wiser, Happier You. And in it, I give tips and reflections like you just got. And it's an opportunity for you to pause, reflect, and practice. It's a way to stay focused on what's important and meaningful to you.

Each month, we focus on a theme. This month's theme is anxiety. And next month, we'll be focusing on acceptance. This month's theme is anxiety, and next month we'll be focusing on acceptance. To sign up for these bits of weekly wisdom, go to goodwolf.me slash newsletter. I do almost no social media, and if I'm watching TV, I'm watching a movie or I'm watching a series where I don't encounter commercials. commercials. And the reason that I do that, one of the big reasons is I think I am very susceptible to what you're talking about, which is this mimetic desire. All of a sudden, I see something and it looks good. And there's a vague sense of dissatisfaction in me, which I have for a variety of different reasons. And so it would latch on to all sorts of nonsense if you put it in front of me.

And I think I know that about myself well enough that I avoid it because I know that you see the Porsche, I'm not going to go so far as to go get the Porsche probably. Nothing wrong with having a Porsche, by the way. We're just making an example here. But it still causes an internal turmoil in me of wanting something that I don't have. I feel like I can do that well enough on my own without advertisers doing it for me. So I just am very sensitive to this thing that you're talking about. Yeah, both in terms of what advertisers are doing and what other people

actually have. And I think some of these comparative judgments about value are what drives the problems that especially teenage girls have with social media. One constantly compares oneself with the image of the other and this striving for a certain kind of striving for superiority to be just slightly better than the other person. It's devastating for us, and it's not worthy of our humanity, and yet it's very hard to escape it. You're on a college campus. I'm curious about whether you think this has gotten worse, because it's always been there, right?

I mean, I was in high school, I don't know, 30 years ago, let's say. It's hard to keep track anymore. I mean, I remember comparing myself to the other guys, and that's always been there, But it does seem amplified today. Do you detect it in your time being at a university? Do you see a change over time that it's gotten worse? I don't have any hard data, but it strikes me that it has become worse, especially with social media, because you have immediate comparisons here, and not just comparison with living and breathing people whom you know, like my neighbor, for

instance. I might pretty soon realize, I know why he wants to have Porsche. That's where his preferences are. I can frame that relatively easily if I know something about the person. But if I don't, if my image of others is mediated only through the images that come to me, then it becomes a very difficult issue. Maybe when we had traditions to which we deeply belonged, which defined what is valuable for us, we were less susceptible. We were always tempted by that. This is a part of our human DNA.

This is one of our bad wolves, which is there to stay. But we've become much more susceptible when we kind of lost a deeper grip onto values which we ought to pursue. to my own performance in comparison with other people's performances. That ends up accentuating a competitive nature of things and a certain kind of devaluating my own self as just valuable because it is the self. Yeah, yeah. It's funny you bring up the car thing. I have a car similar to yours, probably. It's about maybe a decade old, and it runs fine. It was a nice car at the time. Like, it's fine. I mean, it gets me everywhere I need to go. And yet, I've had the experience of riding in both a Tesla and a brand new BMW. And I get back in my car after driving one of those, I feel like I'm driving the Flintstones

car, right? Now, I drive my car a little bit longer. I just kind of forget all about that. But that comparison is so stark. I'm like, wait a minute. Am I on a horse? These new cars are incredible. Anyway, you talk about something called the Walgreens vision of life that I think we as a culture have very much adopted and adapted. think we as a culture have very much adopted and adapted, and I certainly know I have to a large degree, which is this idea of a happy, healthy, and long life. That becomes the sort of core value

that everything orients around. Yeah, and interesting thing here is, right, that there's absolutely nothing wrong about any of these goals, to live a healthy life, to live a happy life, to live a long life. All of those are appropriate goals. And in some ways, what's lacking for them is they're lacking a larger frame in which one can situate those goals. We pursue them as if they were the very pinnacle of life that is truly worth living. Whereas there may be constitutive elements of a very good life that we should be willing to sacrifice for something that's much more important.

give examples how people who have not had long life like Martin Luther King, nonetheless had absolutely splendid and great life, and that we should rather desire to have life as his than the life that is long. In other words, we admire the courage that he had to stand by his principle. That's the feature of the truly good life, rather than desire simply to prolong one's life. And so one can relativize these natural goals that we have, situate them, and they become an interesting then window how much we are willing to stake so as to live a life that we truly think is worthy of our humanity. Or you can flip it on the other side.

I've just recently watched some movie on Netflix. So this is my free-turning away, my life. Do you know how many illiterate children you could have helped in that hour? I know, I know, I know. And it ended up being interesting. It was a movie where there was a technology that you could suck the years of a life of a person. They can sell you or give you a certain number of years, and you can then place this into another person, and so they become younger. You become 40 years older, and they become 40 years younger, which is a completely crazy idea.

But it's interesting as an experiment. And then you have this case where people are desperately wanting to prolong lives, go into this inhum pursuing youthfulness, what as a main goal, what effects it would have on others. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.

It doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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And you also talk about a not healthy life, a woman who basically by doing hunger strikes has dramatically shortened her healthy window, you know, caused herself to get sick. And so these are sort of examples of something that might be worth wanting more. of something that might be worth wanting more. I referenced Peter Singer earlier, who always calls out this level of morality that is like very hard to achieve, right? I'm wondering how you personally think about squaring the natural desires of a happy, healthy life,

which we all have, and this other calling, which is, for lack of a better word, I'm going to call happy, healthy life, which we all have. And this other calling, which is for lack of a better word, I'm going to call a more ethical life for simplicity sake. Those things to me feel like they are always in tension. Do you feel that? And is that sort of just a sign that you're paying attention? Yeah, I do feel that tension. I feel it almost every day. It's behind all the financial decisions I make. It's a difficult tension to keep inviting into your life, and I consciously do, because I think that if I don't, I will just slide into whatever I want and whatever I can afford.

I can simply satisfy my needs, my family, maybe here and there a person that I know, but I feel that I have an obligation to do and care for people who aren't just in my immediate surroundings. And different religious traditions have different ways in which that is being reinforced. When I was growing up, my parents used to give 20% of their income. Whatever they got, 20% went to some kind of cause that is outside of the family concern. I've set for myself similar kinds of requirements. And that helps me then to say not to have a tortured relationship to my choices, even though even in these kinds of settings, can I do more? I probably could do more, but I'm not doing more. Why am I not doing more? I think this kind of conversation is healthy unless it is completely obsessive and paralyzing.

And it shows that these moral decisions have weight for us. I was reading recently Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer at one point, right, you can sometimes disregard the demands of morality, but if you slap morality in the face, you've done something wrong. as for feeling guilty. And kind of this guilt of not having done as much as I could have is always, always there. And I called it just a minute ago, maybe unhealthy, but in some ways, I think also is the sign of health. And I think that's where you partly were gesturing with your question. That's funny. You can look away from it, but don't slap it in the face. It makes me think of a long, long time ago when I first started my first business. And I was like, well, okay, there's a little bit of a line here between like my personal expenses and my business expenses, right? Like, you know, what do I claim where? And my accountant said, well, you know, you just want to remember pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.

Which I think is similar to slapping morality in the face versus just looking away from it for a little while yeah i think this right here speaks to this question of is a happy healthy life the only thing that's worth wanting because i can tell you that when i'm wrestling with moral questions i don't feel particularly happy because inevitably I feel like it's not enough. I can just look around me and be like, well, you know, yeah, I mean, I try and do lots of good things for people. My work is in helping people and I can find examples all around me all the time of people who sacrifice way more for people than I do.

So that question is an uncomfortable one that sort of makes me unhappy. And yet, like you said, it's one that I feel compelled to at least invite into my life from time to time. And you know, this struggling with moral choices that we make, feeling a pressure of a moral demand, that crosses and seems to undermine a certain kind of happiness of satisfaction, sense pleasure, include a span of time, whether I have lived aligned with who I think that I am, that I should be. If there's no alignment, I can look back and if I'm honest with myself, I'd be unhappy with myself. So that I think these serious considerations are part of discernment of the kind of life that will give us a judgment as a whole. This was a life that had weight. This was not some superficial sliding through life

in the easiest possible way with as much pleasure as we could and as little pain. I think it's very good for us to then also define different emotional responses we have in the light of those moral choices. I say that there is a distinction, for instance, between pleasure and joy. Now, there is such a thing as a pleasure pill, right? Or pleasure smoke. You feel really cool. All is great. But joy has aboutness about it. I rejoice over something, right? This is not simply feel pleasure, but I rejoice over something good that has happened. And that seems to be a kind of a proper way to think of one's own emotional states when it comes to life that is lived. Ah, I need to rejoice about the life. I don't just need to feel pleasure at any given

moment. And that's joy. You make the example in the book, or you give an example in the book, of if you could just take a pill that would cause you to be ecstatic all the time, you know, would you do it? Is that a good life? Now, as a former heroin addict who ended up homeless and possibly going to jail for a very long time, I have tried this experiment. Fortunately, or unfortunately, in the world we live in, that thing doesn't exist, right? Because what comes up has to come down, kind of, I guess, is a simplified way of summing up many years of agony. But it raises the question of, would you do it if you could? Or the idea of, like, if you were just a brain in a vat that was just being stimulated to feel happy all the time, is that a good life?

We've asked this question of students over time. And the character of answer shifts. I think increasingly, students at least, that we ask, increasingly they're happy with being VATs. Being brains in the VAT, just simply have enjoyable experiences. I want to push against that idea, against the unreality of that and artificiality of just having goodness at the level of emotional experiences without any touch with real life. And I realized that, as is the case with other questions about nature of the good life, there is a fundamental question here about who we are as human beings, that is being always at stake when we talk about what the good life is, what is the life that is worthy of

our humanity. And my sense is that something like truthfulness to the circumstances of life is essential to being properly human, so that I might have enjoyable experience over a period of time, but I would deny something fundamental about my humanity. And that always is part and parcel of it. We discuss our anthropology when we discuss ways of living and ways of living well. Yeah, this points towards another question that I've had with a number of guests that has come up recently, and I've just been reading about a little bit, and it's this idea of AI companions. And I think I take a middle road on this. I think that an AI companion would not be as good as a real companion. And there are a lot of people who are incredibly lonely who have no companion,

and an AI companion is a better companion than none. But once you start doing that, you start having to ask very fundamental questions about what does it mean to relate to something and what's real there, what's not real, what should be real. I mean, I think these are really deep questions that I think we're starting to face far faster than we may have anticipated. You know, I don't think five years ago, if we'd had this conversation, that any of us might have thought that I could reasonably have an AI companion, like a chat companion,

that would be indistinguishable from a human. And I think we're there, or we're very close to it. I think so. And I think Japan is ahead of us from little reading that I have done. Because they need to be, right? Because of their age crisis. They need to be.

And they've had those companions almost the way somebody might have an animal, say a dog. You could have an AI little companion that is there present in a sense with you. I can completely see why somebody would want that, just like I can see why somebody would want to have a dog or some other animal as a companion. So for me, I think the decision would be made, what am I seeking? First, I think, as you put it, am I consciously removing myself from human company? Or am I, for a variety of reasons, being thrust where I cannot get any other help or company than that? And the other is, what am I actually trying to achieve? What am I seeking?

that we have unlearned how not to have pleasure in order to have deeper experiences that have deeper meaning. I can imagine a situation in which, you know, human beings are difficult to live with. AI might be, unless they kill us, they might be much more programmed to be much more conducive to us. They might be much more programmed to be much more conducive to us. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think about my partner's mother.

We took care of her through about a six, sometimes I say eight years, sometimes I say six years. I don't know how long it was. It was a long time battle with Alzheimer's where we were sort of her primary caregivers. We were lucky that we were able to get additional help. But I think often that like a robot might have been a better caregiver for her, right? Then us or any of the other caregivers, because we're human. And after a certain point, you get tired of answering the same question you answered three minutes ago. But a computer doesn't care if she didn't know the difference. But yet, there was

something profound for us in being the caregivers to her. And I hope for her on some level, you know, on some level that was not cognitive, there was a comfort there, right? But it was not a pleasant experience. We used to make the joke all the time that like living life according to your values is not necessarily all that fun. Right. There were a lot of times where like I lived in Columbus and had to take care of my mom. She lived in Atlanta and we went every month. We drove from Columbus to Atlanta back and forth now looking back, I think we're very glad that that's the way we chose to handle things. daily chores and care that we have. We've introduced a lot of those in our life, ordinary life. It seems that it is fine. But I think that if this is an occasion for kind of human detachment, if it is a help to human interaction, that seems to me really great. If it is a substitute for it, it seems to me that there is a loss. And there is a loss not so much in some cases of the

person who is sick, but of the person who is supposed to, in some ways, feel connected with that person and with the state of human condition in which they are. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are at the end of our time here. You and I are going to continue in a post-show conversation where we're going to talk about the question, who do you answer to? And how Smokey the Bear and the Forest Fire campaign is a very fascinating way to think about this. Listeners, if you would like to get access to the post-show conversations, become part

of our community, we have monthly community meetings and all sorts of other great things. We'd love to have you. OneYouFeed.net slash join. Miroslav, thank you so much. I can't recommend the book enough, although it will, as we've discussed here, make you profoundly uncomfortable at points, uncomfortable in a good way.

Thank you for being here. Oh, it's great to be here. It's a wonderful conversation. You're a great conversation partner. Oh, well, thank you. Very kind. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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