How To Live Well—Even Amidst Failure, Uncertainty, Loss, and Physical Pain | Kieran Setiya

23:43This was back in 2001 or something like that. And she asked me where I lived and I said Upper West Side. And she said without missing a beat, oh, slow death. So it's not the coolest neighborhood, but it was close to my work. And so I have this feeling every time I'm in downtown New York, which is such a cool place, I have this feeling of missing out on what would my life have been like if I moved here? Although, just to add on to that, Lower Manhattan is not even that cool anymore. It's all moved over to Brooklyn. So I'm like on a derivative of having missed out. So anyway, next time I'm walking through Lower Manhattan feeling sad, what exactly is the reframe?

24:24Kieran Setiya:One thing you could think is just, well, suppose I had lived there. What are the odds that I would be walking around next time on the Upper West Side thinking, you know, I wonder what it would have been like to live here. I guess I missed out on that by living in the Lower East Side. So there's a way in which the thought is going to be available no matter what you choose in life. And you think, well, suppose I really wanted to avoid that thought. How could you do it? I mean, if New York didn't exist, that would take care of it. You would not be able to have these regrets. Or if New York was totally homogenous and every neighborhood was the same, there would be no prospect of saying, oh, I wish I'd lived in some other neighborhood.

24:59Kieran Setiya:But you don't want that. We want the world to contain evaluative riches. And yeah, it's just a side effect of that, that anytime the world contains a lot of good things, if we pick one of them, given how time works, some things don't get chosen. And so it's not that your regret isn't real or that it's unreasonable. It's just that it's, like I said, you don't really want a world where those regrets are not inevitable. A world where those regrets are inevitable is a richer world than one where they're not. And I think the same is true of bigger kind of decisions that we make where you're choosing between one job and another job.

25:36Kieran Setiya:Like you're deciding whether to stay in this relationship or go into another relationship. And sometimes it's clear what to do and one of the options is just not a great option. But often you're faced with options where you're like, it could be good either way. It's not like one of these is a terrible idea. And then you're inevitably going to be in a position, whichever option you make, of looking sideways at the alternative you could have lived. And that's really a great thing. It's a sign that the world gave you options. So the way those moments of missing out or regret can go is like, first, you're not trying to make yourself feel bad for having that feeling.

26:13It's OK. We can acknowledge it and validate it for ourselves. And the second move is to understand that you can never know how it would have gone otherwise. And the grass is always greener. And the third is, well, I'm glad I live in a world characterized by what Kieran calls evaluative riches, like where choice is an option.

26:33Kieran Setiya:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's this is really the best case scenario. Like if you're lucky enough to think, oh, I could have had this good thing. I could have had that good thing. Your things are going pretty much as well as they can go. And the other case where you're facing something terrible has happened that you wish hadn't happened, like you've lost someone or you're facing illness or something. That's a harder case. But I do think in a way, the way I would think about it starts on a similar pattern, which is you're not necessarily making a mistake. It's important to recognize that if you're having negative feelings about something, that can be a perception.

27:05Kieran Setiya:It might be that you're right to be seeing things that way. And again, grief is an example. Maybe we'll come back to this later. But it's the most vivid case where no one wants to be unhappy. But the unhappiness of grief also has this character that where you think, well, what would the alternative be? The alternative would be that I didn't care. I just wasn't moved. I wasn't pained by the loss of someone. And we don't want that. So this is another kind of case where a negative feeling is not something we should deny, but we can understand it as part of what it means to be living a good enough life.

27:43Kieran Setiya:the kind of life that's realistically available to us is going to involve those kinds of negative responses to things. And they're not mistakes. They're sort of genuine perceptions. So I'm recording this from Montauk, which is on the eastern tip of Long Island, where my wife's family has a home. And we were out here this weekend burying my father-in-law's ashes and also hurling some bits of his ashes into the sea, which he loved, the Atlantic Ocean. And so I've been thinking about grief. And I think that what I'm hearing a little bit from you is a kind of rescue of that old cliche that it's better to have loved and lost.

28:22Kieran Setiya:I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, first of all, sorry for your loss. I'm, you know, in a way, I'm glad you're able to grieve it. I think this is part of my thought was this is what living well looks like in the face of loss is not a kind of failure to feel anything. it's leaning into it, facing it, and recognizing that the alternative would have been not to really be attached to someone in a way that leads to grief. It's like the flip side of love. I mean, this connects with one of the ideas in philosophy that's had a lot of impact, I think, in the self-help area. And that I think has some real insight in it is stoicism.

29:04Kieran Setiya:But one feature of the kind of stoic approach to things like grief is a kind of instruction to detach from things you can't control. So sort of to say, well, they're gone. There's nothing I can do to change that. So while I might kind of think, I wish it hadn't happened this way or this wasn't great, you should do it with a kind of emotional detachment. You shouldn't be pained by this. Your intense feelings should be restricted to things under your control. And I think that's, in the case of at least things like grief, there's a real insight, a kind of connection with reality that we're experiencing when we feel even genuinely very painful emotions.

29:44Kieran Setiya:That again, even when we're feeling about things outside of our control, it's not something that we should, if we could take a pill to get rid of those feelings, I don't think we should do it. I think they're keeping us in touch with the people we love. Yeah. So maybe I'll weigh in with some, again, to the best of my understanding, with some Buddhist context on what you just said. If I heard you correctly, you had a mild beef with the Stoics and this idea of detachment, especially when it comes to grief. It just doesn't seem doable for most of us who are not lizards. And I would say that the Buddhist tweak on that, which is often misunderstood, is not attachment or detachment.

30:24It's non-attachment, which is very different from dissociation. It's a kind of radical association where you are with your grief, not denying it in a state of mind that we call mindfulness, where you're open to whatever you're feeling. you're investigating how it shows up in your mind in your body you're letting it move through in a fully metabolized way there's no denial but you're also not swamped by it you're not completely owned by it or you're you're neither drowning in it nor compartmentalizing you're you're actually being with it fully and letting it move through so does any of the foregoing make sense to you that makes

31:07Kieran Setiya:sense to me i mean i think part of it is that what you're describing is a kind of the question of how attached or detached I am from my own feeling, kind of how I relate to my own feelings of grief. The thing that seems that I was sort of pushing back against in the Stoic tradition is about whether I'm attached or how I'm attached to my loved one, like the object of grief. And there's this sort of extraordinary, kind of amazing passage in Epictetus in which he says, when you smash a plate, you're like, well, you know, plates break. But you knew when your wife dies, you know people are mortal, so what were you thinking?

31:44Kieran Setiya:She was going to live forever? And there's a way in which he is advocating not just a kind of detached relationship to one's own emotional response, but a kind of almost preemptive mourning, a kind of pulling back from kind of full engagement with or full attachment to another person. And I think it's true that we can kind of over-invest in things we can't control, and that can be damaging, and that's a real insight in stoicism, but we shouldn't let our relationship to other people be sort of muted by a kind of recognition that we can't control what happens to them. And that's the aspect of stoicism that I think is sort of, it's too resistant to what I think is a kind of insight in love, an insight in love that we feel when we're really, we feel the loss of someone that we love.

32:35Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. I'll jump in on a phrase, preemptive mourning, which I actually think you used as in not a flattering way. And I took the spirit of what you were trying to say. I think what you meant was a cutting yourself off from your actual emotions and from the power of the relationship while it lasts. But preemptive mourning actually could be spun as the right approach, which is interacting with everything and everyone with the constant re-upping of the understanding that we're all impermanent and therefore you're relating to things with the urgency and vitality they require, you know, sleepwalking through life, but also the wisdom that allows you to see that everything is a broken plate anyway.

33:26Kieran Setiya:Totally on board with that. I mean, I think in a way, another kind of big idea that guides my work in this practical area of philosophy is the idea that the starting point is acknowledgement of reality. Here's an experience that I don't know if you've had it, I've had it, I've been on both sides of it, where you share a problem with someone, and they immediately go into what I call assurance advice modes. They're immediately like, it's going to be okay, here's what you do. and they absolutely mean well but it feels like a form of denial or rejection and that what you need first when you're facing something difficult or when you're thinking about mortality is just to sit with it and acknowledge you're not wrong this is really what's happening and often in fact attend to it or lean into it and really try to figure out just to describe what you're going through and i think that's important both in terms of intimacy or solidarity a connection with other people.

34:21Kieran Setiya:It's also important, I think, because part of what's hard about the hard things in life or changes that are difficult is often not just that they're difficult, but that we don't really understand them. And not understanding them, feeling disoriented in that way, adds to the difficulty. And so being able to sit with them enough to pay attention to the point where we can feel like we understand them better or comprehend them better, even if that doesn't go anywhere else, It's already a kind of consolation. But often it does go somewhere else, that sitting with something and really being able to pay attention to it, acknowledge it in a way that gives you understanding, allows you to orient yourself towards it better.

35:01Kieran Setiya:Maybe it answers the question what to do or how to feel, or at least gives you a kind of guide about how to feel about it. I think how that plays out with respect to any given change in life is going to be different. It will depend on the details of the change. But I think that's in the spirit of what you were saying about mortality, that avoidance is not going to be a way of living well in the face of difficulty or things that are hard realities. Yes. It's also not possible. Like, again, as I said before, like, unless you're a reptile, like you are, you're just compartmentalizing and it's going to pop in the psychological game of whack-a-mole.

35:36If you tell yourself you're detached, it's going to come up in some other part of your mind and your other part of your behavioral repertoire. It just doesn't work. Yeah, just to get back to what you said about when somebody's telling you about a problem and you go right into fix it mode. I used to do that. But learning to sit in the dark with somebody has been a game changing interpersonal skill for me of, you know, seeing, especially with my son, just being with him in the problem rather than trying to fix it. Like that is what people want.

36:14Kieran Setiya:yeah no absolutely and it's maybe some people know this their whole lives but for many of us including me the way i learned it was screwing it up with someone else and sort of immediately trying to fix their problems and then i was then in a situation very much like the one they had been in and someone did it to me and i was like ah i now i get it now i understand what it would mean to take seriously what i'm actually describing and also just how much like i said how much consolation there is in simply sharing the reality and understanding the reality of what you're going through. And that the sense of unintelligibility, or I don't really understand what's happening, is itself such a source of suffering and disorientation.

36:56Kieran Setiya:And you're not going to get rid of that unless you're able to sit with difficult things. Yes, yes. And it helps to do that as a team support. Coming up, Kieran talks about some game-changing techniques for dealing with grief and loss, not easy, why living well is not the same as being happy, what self-help gets wrong, the connection between Plato, Aristotle, and our contemporary influencers, and a crucial key to living well.

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38:55There's a phrase you use on this subject of grief and loss. There's a phrase you use Comfort in bleakness. What does that mean?

39:06Kieran Setiya:Well, I mean, I think that the kind of comfort in bleakness is, in a way, the comfort of accepting inevitability and of accepting the positive side of, it's the way in which the capacity to feel terrible loss, that kind of pain of it, is a reflection of something, again, that we don't want to live without, namely deep, loving attachment. I think that's the sort of idea there. So it goes back to the theme we started with of the ways in which difficult emotions can be both insights into things and also reflect features that, although at the time we don't want to be suffering this emotion, it reflects a feature of the world that we don't really want to change.

39:51Kieran Setiya:We don't really want to wish away. Another bullet point on your outline as it pertains to grief and loss is the notion that relationships with people we've lost don't end but change. Yeah, I think this is a really important kind of illusion we're often subject to. I think one way in which to kind of get it into view is to think about two different kinds of grief that we experience. So one is grief about the end of a relationship. So the philosopher Sam Scheffler has this nice terminology where he calls relationships that in some sense end, like a friendship that breaks up or a romantic relationship where you break up with someone.

40:30Kieran Setiya:He calls those completed relationships. And then when someone dies, he calls that an archived relationship. And there's a kind of grief that we experience when someone breaks up with us or friendship ends, even though the person isn't dead. There's a kind of loss there. And the loss involves the fact that the relationship is sort of severed or changed in some way. And something else happens when someone you love dies, namely, they're gone. There's the loss of their existence from the world, the loss to them, not just the loss of your relationship. But one thing that happens is that your relationship changes.

41:08Kieran Setiya:You can't relate to them in the same way. And I think it's a mistake to think of that as the end of a relationship. It's not like there's no ongoing relationship. It's that, well, you can continue to have a relationship with them. You will still think about them. They will still have this role in your life. It's just that the role they have in your life is going to have to change. And I think one way to think about what we're doing when we come to terms with loss is not living without a relationship. It's trying to think, well, what role can they play in my life given that they're not temporarily present anymore?

41:45Kieran Setiya:And the answer is they can still play a role. There's still ways in which you can still sort of think of them as present or mentally relate to them. And those are often things people draw great solace from. I think the more you conceptualize that explicitly and sort of think consciously about that relationship change you're going through and think of it in those terms, the more likely it is you'll be able to find a way to manage it that's actually productive or that shapes things in a way that actually makes sense to you, rather than just allowing the relationship to be severed and then just letting it sort of do whatever it does.

42:21Kieran Setiya:It's sort of like when you're breaking up with someone. You can do it mindfully, where you kind of think, okay, well, are we going to be friends? How are we going to relate to each other now? Or it can just be a bad breakup. And something similar, there's a similar kind of contrast that applies when people die, when we lose them that way. But we don't often think of it in those terms. We just think we're often passive about that kind of change. And I don't think we have to be passive about it. I think We can kind of actively think through how we want to reshape the relationship. It's different from a breakup, but it has that kind of relational structure, I think.

42:58So in either of these situations with a breakup or a death, practically speaking, what would an ongoing relationship look like? I mean, one thinks of sitting at a graveside and conversing with the person. That's a move. The other is that I can think of is, you know, especially with people who are no longer in my life for whatever reason, nuggets of wisdom that they gave me that I still operate. Like, I'll give you an example. I had a very young assistant for a while. Her name was Grace, and she died at age 32 of ovarian cancer. The whole time I worked with her, she was sick. and she recommended to me because she noticed that I was a little bit militaristic about my workouts, which was something that she had done when she was healthy.

43:45And she said, look, just every time you get on the bike or go swimming or whatever it is, just drop the word gratitude into your mind. Like you get to do this. And so I think of Grace literally every day, even though she's been dead for four or five years, because I do that thing. so that's an ongoing relationship with somebody who's not here those exactly the kinds of things

44:07Kieran Setiya:i'm thinking of and i there were two things that make this hard i think one is that when most people were parts of an organized religion there was a kind of imposed structure of how you were supposed to remember someone there were the rituals of mourning were kind of relatively prescribed you might have yard sites or whatever you had a sitting shiver you had this sort of structure you could slot into for people who are not part of an organized religion you don't have that the other thing was that I wrote the book where I talk about this, Life is Hard, was written during the pandemic when my father-in-law died.

44:37Kieran Setiya:And at that point, the ordinary rituals of mourning or sort of honoring the relationship with somebody you've lost were really curtailed. We couldn't go and visit, we couldn't be there. And so there was a lot of invention. And a lot of it takes the kind of form you're describing where you think, well, what could we do that would be in some way reflective of or honor the importance of this person and why they mattered and why their relationship mattered. So when my father-in-law died, he was a huge college basketball fan. And the March after he died, we watched as much March Madness as we could.

45:12Kieran Setiya:And this was sort of a meaningful way of communing with him and thinking about, it was sad because all the games where he was a huge IU fan, all the games where IU won and he wasn't there. Actually, maybe IU didn't make it that time. So anyway, he wouldn't have cared. But there was a way in which we sort of had to invent things to do that were in some way our kind of makeshift rituals. And I think a lot of people do that. So the things you're describing are exactly instances of that. So thinking consciously, how will this person still be part of my life, even after they're gone, is a way to sort of recognize that what's happened is not an absolute severing in a relationship.

45:52Kieran Setiya:It really is just, it's a relationship with someone far away. They're far away temporarily, but it's not like you don't continue to care about and have an important kind of connection with people who are far away on the other side of the world. And it's kind of like that. You have to shift how you relate to them. They're no longer present, but there are ways to maintain that kind of relationship. They'll be more one-sided and less interactive than before, but that doesn't mean they're not genuine forms of relating to someone. That's very helpful. Let me just step all the way back for a second.

46:25There's a phrase you use at least twice, once in relation to the subject that we began this discussion on, which is missing out when you make a choice. Inevitably, you're going to miss out on the other things. Then you use it again when you're talking about grief. And the phrase is, why living well is not the same as feeling happy. Can you hold forth on that?

46:51Kieran Setiya:Sure. I mean, this is something that philosophers like kind of wild thought experiments. So let's start with the wild thought experiment, and then we'll bring it down. I'm sure you will make me bring it down to Earth. But it's a wild thought experiment that is at least very familiar, which is it's like the matrix thought experiment. So imagine you're plugged into a simulation. None of it is real. But you can't tell that. And you think you're having all these experiences. Now, in the matrix, there's lots of people plugged in. But imagine in this simulation, it's just you so all of the apparent interactions with other people it's just computer avatars there's no one really there if you don't know that this is all fake you might feel totally happy if we engineer things right you play the game right maybe you're feeling really great but you're not actually doing most of the things you think you're doing you're not actually having relationships with people and most of us think it's not like i wish for that kind of life for myself it's not like if someone said, hey, here's an option for your kid.

47:49Kieran Setiya:I know you really care about them and want them to have a good life. How about we plug them into this machine? I'll guarantee they're going to feel great. Yeah, I think I'd rather take my chances as my kid actually engaging with reality. And what that suggests is, not surprisingly, that there are things that matter to us and rightly matter to us in living well, other than just how it feels. There's actual engagement with reality. I think that's the thought experiment. The mundane cases where I think this is vivid are things like grief, where there are negative feelings we have that actually it wouldn't be better if we didn't have them, because the negative feelings are a kind of registering of reality, or missing out is like that too.

48:26Kieran Setiya:So I think those are more mundane cases where you can see that there's a difference between what a good life might look like in the circumstances and just feeling happy. So one way in which I think a lot of self-help, not all of it by any means, but a lot of self-help sort of frames itself around the goal of individual happiness. And I think that's just not the right way to think about what we're aiming for. What we should be trying to do, and this is sort of a tautology, but an important one, is we should be trying to live the way we should live. And the way we should live is going to involve actually engaging with the world, not just feeling a certain way.

49:00Kieran Setiya:Part of where that matters is that this goal of just feeling happy is really quite selfish, quite self-centered. It's not that happiness doesn't matter. But a good life is one of engaging with the world and other people in ways that makes you vulnerable to unhappiness. And when, as will happen to all of us, those forms of unhappiness come, that doesn't mean you would have been better off living a life where you weren't vulnerable in those ways, where you didn't experience that kind of pain, where you just felt happy. And that thinking about being plugged into the simulation is one dramatic way to sort of bring out that contrast.

49:35Yeah, I mean, I completely buy that. A good life involves the full repertoire of emotions and not just happiness. Although I will say that the word happiness is doing a certain type of work in that sense. Like my understanding of happiness is broader and it involves one understanding of happiness is just having the tools to deal with whatever emotions come our way. So you might say that my version of happiness is close to equanimity?

50:05Kieran Setiya:So I think there's several interesting things happening there. So one is, you're right, by happy I was meaning just feel good. And you might think, well, when I talk about happiness, I mean something more complicated. It's not just the buzz of emotional high. The other thing that's going on there, I think, is that there's another element, which is not just about the kind of diversity of feelings. It's about engaging with reality. It really matters that we're in touch with reality. A good life is one in which you know what's happening. You're not just deceived about what's happening around you or about other people and how they relate to you.

50:39Kieran Setiya:It will be better to know often if someone has a problem with you than for them to hide it. And even if your feelings are being saved, you're not actually having a good relationship with them if they're just closed off in that way. So actual engagement, like real engagement, is part of what I'm getting at here. It's partly that I expose you to negative feelings, but it's not just the feelings. It's that this is real. And that's, I think, something that we'll lose touch with if we just think in terms of feelings as opposed to real contact. And so would you say that in moments of change or uncertainty, a one reframe could be allow yourself to feel this fear or sadness or whatever it is that this tumult is provoking for you?

51:26so we're not trying to deny our feelings, but to understand that these feelings are naturally the result of being in touch with reality.

51:34Kieran Setiya:Absolutely. I think that is a kind of key idea for me is the idea that if we're in touch with reality, sometimes reality is hard and we're living better even if it feels worse when we take in the ways in which it's hard. And then also I think it helps us to make things better. I think it's also true that when we're paying attention to how things are hard, we've got a better chance of figuring out how to change them or how to make a difference. But even just in itself, I think that kind of contact with reality is part of living a good life. And that's what makes a good life radically different from just being plugged into a simulation.

52:12Or on a much more grounded level, because most of us don't have the access to a simulation. we have simulated simulations like we could be on our phone all the time or you know live in vr but yeah right that's actually the better example is like instead of living in denial or distraction which is a failing strategy because reality will come for you eventually better to be constantly in touch with reality or consistently in touch with reality in a way that allows you to navigate it in a more supple sophisticated way yeah no i think that's exactly right i mean this connects with another idea that I think is really kind of important at a big picture level.

52:53Kieran Setiya:And this is an idea I want to push back against that connects Plato and Aristotle and these great ancient philosophers with contemporary social media influences, which is a kind of focus on the ideal life or the best life. And there's a way in which Plato in the Republic describes the ideally just state. Aristotle in his ethics describes the ideal life. Like if you could design a life however you wanted, what would it look like? And those exercises are not a good guide to how to live in the circumstances we're actually in. And something similar happens when you see people kind of portraying their ideal life on social media.

53:30Kieran Setiya:You get these sort of models of what life should be like, and they're problematic in part because they're unrealistic, and life isn't going to be like that. As you said, we're going to face difficulty, in part because there are often a way in which you beat yourself up for not having the kind of life you should have. But in part, it's just because they're not actually a very good guide to how to live. It's not a good guide to how to live in the circumstances we're talking about, where you're facing something difficult and really trying to pay attention to it. Often the advice, well, think of your dream life and aim for that.

54:02Kieran Setiya:It's not actually a good way to try to go. If you're dealing with something difficult, it might be that you have to change, You have to really shift your sense of what the dream life is going to be. So here's an analogy would be, you know, you might be baking and you want to make a chocolate cake and you realize you don't have any cocoa. You could say, well, let me try to make the cake that's most like a chocolate cake. But that's not necessarily going to be the best thing to do. It might be the fallback is to say, okay, I have to work with reality as it is. And that might mean giving up on certain kinds of ideals that I had beforehand.

54:36Kieran Setiya:And so I think one thing you learn from really trying to allow the facts of your situation, even the difficult facts, to orient you is a kind of willingness to let go of certain kinds of ideals that can be punitive and just sort of unhelpful as a guide. And that kind of idea, the idea that we should aim for the ideal, I think it's weirdly a kind of deep connection between the roots of Western philosophy and American social media culture where people are kind of promoting these kind of ideals that then, you know, we feel like we ought to have. It's not actually leading us to live our lives in ways that are really engaged with reality.

55:21Well, let's dig in on that for a second. I definitely agree that we shouldn't aim for ideals that are arbitrarily established by some schmuck on Instagram. Having said that, can't it be useful to have a goal and then be willing to pivot as you move forward?

55:42Kieran Setiya:So I think that's right. So certainly having a goal can be very useful. And in fact, even having ambitious goals can be really, really useful. But I think that it's the willingness to pivot, and it's the question of what the pivot looks like. If the pivot is come up with something that looks as much like the original goal as possible, you're sort of constraining yourself in a way that's risky. You may find that the right pivot to make when one of your goals is not working out is not, well, what's as similar to that as possible? It might be that the best pivot in the circumstances involves saying, huh, well, what other goals are there that are actually really meaningful, that are more fully available in my new circumstance?

56:22Kieran Setiya:And maybe I'll go that way instead. So I think this is a way to go back to our original theme of change. There's a kind of resistance to change that I think we're subject to, which involves not just having goals or ideals, but thinking of them, allowing them to guide us beyond the point at which they've outlived their usefulness. and that is again like I said it's like baked into how philosophers have thought about how to live that the ideal life is the guide and it should always be the guide from you know way back in the history of philosophy but I think it really isn't actually fruitful it can be self-undermining yes it can prevent us from being nimble in the face of a ceaseless change something I talk about a lot with the CEO of my company Tony her name is Tony, T-O-N-I, is a concept that I heard from one of our prior guests.

57:16I can't remember who said it, but I've definitely incorporated the concept. Tony and I spent a lot of time on whiteboards thinking about what is the future of this company, et cetera, et cetera. But we also always throw in the phrase, expect adversity.

57:31Kieran Setiya:Yeah. Yeah. And being able to be flexible in that way and unrigid is incredibly important to being able to have a good enough life. I mean, I think there's two ways to put a kind of clarify or kind of sharpen that. One is to say, well, look, what we're aiming for, if we have some humility, is not the ideal life. It's a good enough life. So we should be thinking always, yeah, if things are going pretty well, it's going pretty well. It will be a kind of avarice to expect that we're going to have a dream life. And the other is just to acknowledge that what a good life looks like is never going to be static.

58:04Kieran Setiya:So the good life is not getting to a point where things are good and saying, okay, here we are. living well is a matter of constantly adapting to change because change is going to be there all the time and that means that the ideals you have while they're useful you're always facing this question of judgment uh for which there are no rules i think but you have to just you can't avoid it which is at what point do i say yeah i'm gonna change my goal or my ideal to something else but thinking of living well as a matter of rolling with that constantly rather than as a fixed goal i think is is an important kind of ethical and psychological shift plus one

58:49coming up kieran talks about how to deal with physical adversity how to navigate failure his case for meditation how to operationalize the old cliche about enjoying the process rather than the outcome and much more

59:10You have a couple of other areas of adversity where you have some practical thoughts. I'd love to see if I can hit as many of them as possible before I lose you. One of them is physical adversity. what are your thoughts about how we can handle the fact that our bodies are changing all the time

59:29Kieran Setiya:often in ways we we do not enjoy this is something that's a particular interest to me is really why i started thinking about this topic was that i have a chronic pain condition that i've had since i was 27 and it's one of those things that like lots of chronic conditions you spend about 10 years going from doctor to doctor trying to figure out the magic cure and then the point at which things get better is the point, at least it was for me, the point at which I said, okay, the goal here is not fix this. The goal here is live a good enough life with this. And for me, the strategies we've talked about really helped there.

1:00:08Kieran Setiya:So part of it was just asking myself, why is this so difficult? What's the problem here? And understanding it better. When you're dealing with physical suffering, physical pain, lots of people deal with it either chronically or they have it for some period of time. You might think, why is pain bad, is a silly question. I mean, if anything's bad, pain is bad. What's to say? But actually, there's quite a lot to say about why pain is bad, actually, in ways that I think are helpful. One of the problems of physical pain is, when you're not in pain, often your engagement with other people, the environment, is sort of transparent.

1:00:40Kieran Setiya:You don't even really notice you have a body. One of the problems with physical pain is that you're aware of your body, and it's sort of your interaction with the world and other people. It's constantly this distraction or impediment of your body sort of feeling like a rough interface. It's not transparent anymore. And that's kind of just understanding that helped me a lot. But it's also, I think, the fact that when you're dealing with a kind of pain condition that's either chronic or you're not sure how if it's going to get better or what's happening, anxiety is a huge additional source of suffering.

1:01:15Kieran Setiya:Part of it's the pain, and part of it is the, is this going to go away? Is this going to get worse? And this is to go back to something that has Buddhist echoes. I think one of the key insights for dealing with this is a kind of thinking about living in the present and sort of attention to the present. Because the thing that dawned on me at a certain point was like, you can have a pretty good day while being in some degree of background pain. Many of us, if you just have pain for a day, you're like well I'll just get on with it if you know it's going to get better you'll just get on with your day and you'll have a pretty good day just irritation in the background you can have a pretty good day with chronic pain unless it's really disabling but for a long time I wasn't having pretty good days because it was so clouded with the sense of anxiety and actually kind of limiting my temporal focus and thinking okay I'm just not going to think about tomorrow I'm going to just live today and focus on what I can do today that will be meaningful was a massive sort of shift in my experience.

1:02:20Kieran Setiya:It goes back to that living well is not the same as feeling happy, because it wasn't that made the pain go away, but it made me think, yeah, yeah, but there's all the good things I can do. Don't worry about tomorrow, just do today. And that is a hard thing to maintain because anxiety is very sticky. But that's a kind of practical shift that I found incredibly helpful. And I think it doesn't just apply to things like chronic pain. I think many of the difficulties we go through, we exacerbate them ourselves by projecting forward what's going to happen. And there are practical situations where you have to plan ahead, but we do so much projecting forward that is not about practical planning.

1:02:57Kieran Setiya:It's about, in effect, a kind of self-inflicted anticipatory suffering. It's hard to get rid of, but it's not doing as any good. And And if we could get rid of it, that would be really transformative. Two quotes coming to mind based on the foregoing. One from Mark Twain, some of the worst things that ever happened to be never actually happened. Speaking to the power of mental projection. And the other, going back to the beginning of your utterances there about how pain can remove you from full contact with the world. I think it was Aristotle who said, when you have a sore thumb, the self is in the thumb.

1:03:35Kieran Setiya:I don't know. It could be. I should know the answer to that, but it's a good quote. Yeah, right. It gravitates your attention. And attention is a bit of theme throughout this conversation, like attention to things and other people. It's incredibly central to being able to live well. And if your attention is being sucked into your thumb, there's just a limit to how well you can live. So trying to acknowledge that and try to figure out how to redirect your attention is really important. It's not necessarily easy, but I think understanding that that's what the The part of the problem is not under your control, namely the pain, often not under your control.

1:04:09Kieran Setiya:Part, you can potentially try to control which is the way in which your attention interacts with the pain. And that is something you can sort of work on at least. AI is telling me there's no attributable source to the quote about the sore thumb. It's just to say, let's move on to failure. part of living in a utterly contingent, constantly changing world is that the things we set out to do don't often work, either because of our own mistakes or the world setting in on us. What useful things does philosophy have to say about navigating this? I think there are two big things. One is about narrative, and the other is, again, connected with living in the present and has a kind of Buddhist-adjacent flavor.

1:04:52Kieran Setiya:But let's talk The narrative thing first is really that there's actually a history to this idea. There was a kind of shift in the language even from thinking about particular projects we engage in as being successes or failures. You try to do something, you succeed or fail. To the idea of thinking of people that you would categorize yourself as a failure or a loser, a winner or a loser. that shift sort of happened in the course of the 19th century and as kind of metrics for evaluating how someone was doing overall often financial metrics came to be very central so you could take the measure of someone as a whole became really central and i think that's really the fact that it's historically contingent is helpful because it tells us we don't have to think about our lives that way but also it's really toxic so i think one of the key ways to kind of liberate ourselves, not from the fact that we will sometimes fail, but from the way in which the idea of failure can be a stick with which to beat ourselves, is to try and resist the idea that our lives have or have to have a kind of narrative arc in which there's one defining goal that if we reach that, we are a success, and if we don't, I am a failure.

1:06:09Kieran Setiya:And instead to think, no, no, there's just lots and lots and lots of things I'm going to do in my life, in some of which I will succeed, in others of which I will fail. So that's sort of the main character syndrome where you're like, I'm the hero, there's going to be this one big story. I think it's not just that it's risky, because if things don't work out, you're going to feel like a giant failure. It's also that it can be impoverishing, because it prevents you from seeing all of the little things you're doing that might be going well, or that you might be succeeding at. So I don't think this takes away the fact of failure, But again, I think there's a way of thinking about failure as a kind of measure of us as a whole person that is not inevitable.

1:06:49Kieran Setiya:And I think we should really try to push back against that kind of conceptualization of failure, really. Right. So just to put that in practical terms, I was part of a meditation app. Didn't work out for me in that app. The reframe would be, I'm not a failure. I was part of something that didn't work for me. Right. You had a project, it failed. But to think then, I'm a failure, I'm worthless. If you bind your identity too much into one or two or small number of projects, there's a real risk that they will come to have that significance for you. I think it's sort of smart strategy to diversify as it were to think To have lots of things in your life that are projects that seem worth doing and not to think well This is the one that will define me like this is if they were going to make a movie about me This would be the central narrative like your life is not a movie No, one's good.

1:07:44Kieran Setiya:Well, some of us don't make movies about but most of us They're not going to make a movie. That doesn't have to be a central narrative There's just lots of things we're doing. So yeah, you can think about Something like that as a case where you tried something and it failed But I think resisting the idea that that's identity defining is really helpful. You said there was another branch of this, which is something about valuing the activity itself, not just the outcome. Yeah. So this, I think, is something that applies to every project, not even if you don't have one big project, is projects where you're trying to achieve something valuable, they matter and they have real value.

1:08:19Kieran Setiya:But there is something troubling about the structure of projects. So suppose I have a project like getting a promotion at work or getting a job or having a kid or winning a race, whatever it might be. What I'm doing when I pursue a project like that is I'm taking something meaningful and I'm putting the thing that matters at a distance from me. I don't have it yet. So there's a kind of frustration in the present. I'm trying to get something I don't have. And then the moment I've got it, it recedes into the past. So in the present, it's never really there. And it's even worse than that because what i'm doing when I pursue a goal like that is i'm trying to Extinguish it i'm trying to get the thing done It's as if i'm taking this source of meaning in my life and saying well, let's get rid of that as quickly as possible There's something sort of self-undermining about that.

1:09:03Kieran Setiya:So there's a way in which projects themselves have a kind of Unfortunate evaluative structure. It doesn't mean they don't matter, but there's something problematic about them Not all activities are like that. So as well as say, you know recording this podcast which is a project you'll finish there's also just talking to people about how to be 10 percent happier which you know you can do that forever you make you'll eventually stop doing it i guess but it's not like there's an end point at which you're like you're done there are no more people there's nothing more to say or think of parenting you have all kinds of projects as a parent you get them done but then there's just the ongoing activity of parenting there are these things that i call projects telic activities because they have a telos or end where you're trying to finish something.

1:09:47Kieran Setiya:These activities that don't have an endpoint are what I call a-t-lick. And when you have an a-t-lick activity, like parenting, going for a walk, talking to someone, it doesn't have that project-like structure. It doesn't have the feature that the thing you want is at a distance in the future. If you want to be talking to someone, that's happening right now. If you want to be parenting, here you are. That's what you value. And you're also not extinguishing it because it's not finishable. And they also have a very different relationship to success and failure. When you value a project, at the end of the day, you'll either succeed or fail.

1:10:21Kieran Setiya:If you fail, that's bad. If you succeed, that's kind of bad too, because it's gone. Now you've got to figure out what to do next. One of the virtues of valuing activities, valuing being in the process, is that they're not vulnerable to that kind of failure or success. It doesn't mean they're always easy or you can always do them. It's not that they're instantly available. So there are frustrations that come with valuing activities, but they don't have this success-failure structure. And so I think one thing we can do that's better for us in living meaningful lives in general, but especially in relation to success and failure, is to really think about, of all the things we're doing, all the projects we're engaging in, which of them can we really value not just getting it done, but the ongoing activity we're engaging in.

1:11:10Kieran Setiya:And that, as a non-expert on Buddhism, I think there's a sort of affinity between this idea of the value of the present, the value that's imminent in what's happening right now, and the way in which we tend to not appreciate that, and some kind of threads in Buddhism. At any rate, it's a case where I, although I'm not a Buddhist, I found meditation a kind of useful practice. Because one thing I get at least out of a certain kind of breathing meditation is just the capacity to sort of be present in the moment, value simple things that I'm doing, not be always thinking about the future or the past, but just what's happening now, try to appreciate it, and then try to carry some of that orientation into the rest of my life.

1:11:55I was just going to ask you about it. I think meditation is one answer. Are there answers for operationalizing this cliche around enjoying the process rather than the outcome?

1:12:04Kieran Setiya:for me that's meditation has been the biggest thing this is a case where a lot of philosophy i think when it takes a kind of self-help form it's a bit like cognitive therapy except philosophical cognitive therapy existential cognitive therapy so where your cognitive behavioral therapist might say try to identify false beliefs or mistakes that are affecting your relationship with your mother like you think she finds you boring or you think she never wanted to have another kid but there's no real evidence for that what philosophical therapy does is often say, you're thinking there's some alternative to missing out, but there's no real alternative to missing out.

1:12:38Kieran Setiya:So there's a kind of cognitive error there. If you get rid of it, maybe you'll feel differently. And I think often, as with cognitive behavioral therapy, the cognitive shift does affect how you feel. Just seeing things differently can change how you feel. But not always. People doing cognitive behavioral therapy run into this sometimes where they're like, no, I understand the mistake I'm making, but my feelings are not changing. I think that can often happen when you're doing a kind of philosophical therapy of your life, philosophical self-help. And so I do think you often find yourself in need at that point of practical strategies that are less intellectual.

1:13:15Kieran Setiya:And so this takes us back to something really right at the beginning. I think meditation is one of them, but I also think certain kinds of communal engagement with others, where there's not a specific new thing you're learning, but being with others as you share this and as you kind of relate to it, sometimes ritualistically, there are emotional changes, I think, in which you internalize things you understand that you can't easily get just by understanding them. So yeah, I think meditation is part of it. But also, if you're thinking about insights where there really is a community that's built around it, often being part of that community allows you to engage with something and sort of internalize something in a way that just sitting and reading a book may not be able to do.

1:13:59Right. So what I'm hearing is there are a couple ways to make this insight practical. One is just on a very broad macro level to try to the best of your ability to reframe your activities as things that you're going to consciously enjoy for the value that they create in the moment instead of obsessing about the outcome. The other, if that's not enough, is to meditate because meditation is a training in waking up and being present for whatever's happening. And then finally, surround yourself by people who take this project of living an a-tilic life of doing things because they're worthy and enjoyable in and of themselves rather than focusing on the outcome can create a kind of carpool lane effect.

1:14:50Kieran Setiya:I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think two tiny things to add to that. That's exactly how I was thinking about it. When it comes to the kind of reframing, even just identifying, like, what is the, not the project, but the ongoing process that I'm engaged in here that matters to me? Just articulating to yourself what you're doing. So I think remembering in the midst of parenting, I'm parenting. Like, this is part of parenting. I'm having a relationship with my kid. I know right now what I'm doing is, you know, dealing with a screaming toddler. But this is part of a thing that is deeply valuable.

1:15:21Kieran Setiya:The particular project I'm engaged in this morning, not so great. So I think that's one thing, is just articulate to yourself what it is you value. But then I do think, yeah, that one thing community can do if you're engaged in a project is just make more vivid to you and make more... Something about being with other people doing something allows for a kind of engagement in the present that is much... It's doable, but it's harder in a solitary endeavor. Trevor Burrus That's super helpful. We've only got a few minutes left, but I wouldn't mind getting, at least in soundbite form, your thoughts on how to deal with change and uncertainty on a macro level.

1:15:59So in our own lives, of course, we deal with physical pain, grief, loss, failure, the consequence of our choices. But as we watch the news and see injustice and violence and bigotry and polarization in the world, how do we deal with that from your POV?

1:16:19Kieran Setiya:There's a lot to say. I'll try and keep it kind of focused. I think a lot of what we've talked about can apply here too. So one thing is to say, recognizing injustice in the world around you, the way in which other people are suffering, is a source often of unhappiness. That doesn't mean you're not living well. In fact, it may mean the opposite. It may be that living well in these circumstances, the only way to live well is with a certain kind of pain, the pain of acknowledging the way in which things are difficult. So don't look away. Another thought that I think is really important is that the The biggest difference is the difference between doing nothing and doing something.

1:16:56Kieran Setiya:And it's easy to feel like you can't make a difference, that nothing you do will really make large-scale change. And it may be that nothing I, as an individual, do makes large-scale change. But everything is about collective action, and there are collectives at every scale. So if you can't change the world, probably you're part of smaller communities, like your school, your college, your workplace, your family, where there is a smaller collective, where you do have the chance to make meaningful change. And so you're engaging in collective action at a smaller scale. That can be really important.

1:17:29Kieran Setiya:And the difference between doing a tiny bit and nothing is all important. If everyone does nothing, nothing happens. If everyone does a tiny bit, the world could be transformed. Like that's hugely consequential. It's also true, going back to the point about community, that engaging with other people in fighting any injustice, it could be small scale, it could be immediately in your backyard. engaging with other people also makes it much easier. It gives you a sense of solidarity. It gives you the sense of community and support that scaffolds you in dealing with something difficult. And then the final thing I would say is about hope and despair.

1:18:07Kieran Setiya:A lot of us, I think, find ourselves oscillating between the two. We read terrible news. The latest, you know, for me, it's often about the climate crisis. There's some terrible melting ice, and I'm like, ah, despair. And then I read that there's some breakthrough in solar cells, and I think, okay, maybe hope. I think it's really important to get off that seesaw and to reframe the question there. The question is not, should we hope or despair? It's always, what should we hope for? There's always something that's the next good thing that could happen. And that's where you direct your hope. So I think it's taking away the binary and thinking, well, what's the next reasonable thing I could hope for is really helpful.

1:18:50Kieran Setiya:To connect this, I think that's a general thing about hope and despair. I'll connect this with my own life. I think for a long time I thought of coming to terms with chronic pain as giving up hope, saying, really, hope for the next treatment was what kept me on this roller coaster for 10 years. When I gave up hope, it all got better. I now think that's not the right way to describe it. what happened was I stopped hoping for a cure and thought, well, what can I hope for? And the answer was, well, I could hope to live as good and engaged a life as you can while just having this background hum of irritation that screws up your sleep or makes it hard to pay attention sometimes.

1:19:31Kieran Setiya:That's what I can hope for. So I didn't give up hope. I just shifted what I was hoping for. And I think the same thing has to be true, Even though it's painful in facing political realities, if things you really wanted are just not possible, you might have to give up on certain hopes. But that doesn't mean it's hopeless. It means you have to think, okay, what realistically could I hope for still that would be meaningful to me and to other people and aim for that? Well said. All of it was well said. And before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the names of your books? And like, do you have a website, social media?

1:20:13Kieran Setiya:Yeah. So I'm easy to find if you spell my name, even if you approximately spell my name, Kieran Setia, Google will take you to my website. And I have a lot of, I have some academic stuff, but I have a lot of general audience writing and essays there. The two books are Midlife, A Philosophical Guide. And then the latest one is called Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. And I also have a Substack newsletter, which is kind of all over the place. Sometimes it's philosophical self-help. Sometimes it's about art museums I went to or a book I read. Sometimes it's about some annoying thing in academic philosophy that I feel like complaining about.

1:20:49Kieran Setiya:But that's easy to find too. Kieran, thank you very much. Thank you so much.

1:20:58thanks again to kieran don't forget we've got a guided meditation that comes with this episode it's all about how to deal with loss it comes from the great vinnie ferraro who's our teacher of the month over at danharris.com which means that he is producing custom meditations to go with all of our monday wednesday episodes he's also leading a couple of live video meditation and q a sessions we're now doing these every week tuesday at four o 'clock eastern i'll be doing the next one tomorrow, September 23rd, solo. Sign up at danharris.com. And also, if you want to meditate with me in person, I'll put a link in the show notes.

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1:22:48Thank you.