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

Practical ways to lead a good life. Kieran Setiya is the Peter de Florez Professor of Philosophy at MIT, where he works on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. He also maintains a Substack newsletter, Under the Net http://ksetiya.substack.com/. In this episode we talk about: How Kieran became interested in practical philosophy (and philosophy more generally) A brief history of philosophy The connection between philosophy and self-help Whether Buddhism is a philosophy? The upside of missing out (as opposed to FOMO) Kieran's mild beef with the Stoics techniques for dealing with grief and loss Why living well is not the same as feeling happy The connection between Plato, Aristotle and contemporary influencers today How to deal with physical adversity Navigating failure Kieran's case for meditation Operationalizing the cliché of "enjoying the process" rather than the outcome How to deal with the injustices of the world Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD On Sunday, September 21st from 1-5pm ET, join Dan and Leslie Booker at the New York Insight Meditation Center in NYC as they lead a workshop titled, "Heavily Meditated – The Dharma of Depression + Anxiety." This event is both in-person and online. Sign up here https://www.nyimc.org/event/heavily-meditated/! Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025! SPONSORS: Bumble: Thinking about dating again? Take this as your sign and start your love story on Bumble http://bumble.com/. AT&T: Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. Visit att.com/guarantee http://att.com/guarantee for details. Function: Our first 1000 listeners get a $100 credit toward their membership. Visit www.functionhealth.com/Happier http://www.functionhealth.com/Happier or use the gift code Happier100 at signup to own your health. To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Harris?

  Imagine buying your kid a toy only to find that the batteries are not included, an experience I've had many times, or buying furniture, but it's missing the tools to build it. Frustrating, right? Now imagine that exact same feeling, but you're paying way more. That is what buying business software usually feels like: fragmented, disconnected, and incredibly expensive. Odoo completely changes that. Odoo is a complete, fully-integrated business suite where all your apps actually talk to one another. We're talking automated lead routing for your sales team, seamless AI integration, and an intuitive point-and-click website builder. It's everything your business needs in order to scale, saving you time, headaches, and money. Stop piecing your software together. Go to Odoo.com/happier.

• 0:44Dan Harris?

  That's O-D-O-O dot com slash happier to learn more. This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? I think a common assumption that many of us, myself included, might make is that a good life definitionally excludes things like failure, chronic pain, grief, uncertainty,

• 1:28Dan Harris?

  et cetera, et cetera. But for millennia, philosophers have been thinking, often in very practical ways, about how you can lead a good life that includes all of the aforementioned vexations. Kieran Sariah is a professor of philosophy at MIT. He's written a couple of books, including Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. In this conversation, we talk about how Kieran got interested in practical philosophy and in philosophy more generally. We do a brief history of philosophy, what's it for, the connection between philosophy and self-help, whether Buddhism is a philosophy, the upside of

• 2:10Dan Harris?

  Missing out as opposed to FOMO, Kieran's mild beef with the Stoics, techniques for dealing with grief and loss, why living well is not the same as feeling happy, the connection between Plato, Aristotle, and the contemporary influencers of today, how to deal with physical adversity, how to navigate failure, Kieran's case for meditation, operationalizing the cliche of enjoying the process rather than always lurching toward outcomes, and how to deal with injustice in the world. This is the final week of our ambitious month-long series that we've been calling the reset. Every week this month, we've been tackling one area of your life where a reset may be in order. Last week, it was all about resetting your life and career.

• 2:54Dan Harris?

  This week, it's about your relationship with change and uncertainty and the future. Today, it's Kieran, and coming up on Wednesday, the great Brene Brown. Today's episode comes with a custom-guided meditation called How to Live with Loss. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Vini Ferraro, who has certainly lived with a lot of loss. It is filled with brilliant little wisdom bombs for bringing some levity into your heaviest moments. Here's one line that really struck me. "Grief," he says, "is not a problem, it is evidence that something mattered." If you sign up at danharris.com, you'll get custom meditations for all of our full episodes, designed to, as I like to say, kind of help you pound the wisdom of the interviews into your neurons in an abiding way.

• 3:38Dan Harris?

  We're also, only for paid subscribers, now hosting live, weekly meditation and Q&A sessions. We're doing these now Tuesdays, 4 Eastern. Our next live session is with me, solo, tomorrow, Tuesday, the 23rd, again, 4 Eastern. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got an event coming up at the end of October. It's a meditation party event, that's what we call it. It's me, and Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones-Cortez at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. You should sign up. And we'll get started with Kieran Sethia, right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node

• 4:18Dan Harris?

  of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful.

• 5:02Dan Harris?

  You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow.

• 5:47Dan Harris?

  And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Kieran Setia, welcome to the show.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

• 6:11Dan Harris?

  Glad to have you here. I'd just be curious, like, how did you get interested in philosophy? And I guess more specifically, if I understand correctly, and hopefully you will feel free to correct me if I have this wrong, you were, I think, kind of interested in abstract philosophy, whatever that means, as a kind of escape. But then, over time, as your life progressed, you got more interested in the practical implications of philosophy. Am I in the right ballpark?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So I mean, the really long story of how I got interested in philosophy is as a teenager, reading H. B. Lovecraft, who's a horror sci-fi author, whose stories dramatize questions like, how can we know anything about the universe? Or how do we know that the laws of nature that apply here apply elsewhere? And I realized, reading Lovecraft, that I was more interested in our relationship to the cosmos, these philosophical questions than I was in science fiction. And then I went on, became a professional philosopher. And I work in ethics, I've always worked in ethics. But the questions I tended to work on for most of the first 15 years of my career were pretty abstract ones, like, how can we know right from wrong at all? Or how can there be reason to do anything? Or questions about skepticism, or about the

• 7:25Speaker 01

  nature of morality? And the big shift, I think, part of it came when, having jumped through the hoops of the academic career path, and got tenure, and got a promotion, I realized I didn't really know what I was doing. I had a kind of midlife crisis. And I thought, hold on, A, the midlife crisis is a question about how I should be living, and that's supposed to be what I'm an expert on. So maybe philosophy, philosophical ethics should have something to say about this. And at the same time, B, I think I just sort of realized that so much of what I was talking about with friends was ethical, like questions about parenthood, or how to divide

• 8:07Speaker 01

  one's time between work and other things, and what really matters in life. And that I wanted to draw connections between the kinds of academic work I was doing, and the kinds of questions about how to live that I was spending so much time agonizing over with people I knew.

• 8:23Dan Harris?

  So would it be safe for me to say that there's a, there's a whole branch, a whole field of philosophy that might be, to use the term that's often used in a derogatory way, might be dismissed as academic or theoretical or abstract? And then there's a whole branch of, or field of philosophy that you can bring to bear on your daily life?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I think there's certainly parts of philosophy which are just asking abstract questions about the nature of science or reality or metaphysical questions. Some of that is theoretically interesting, doesn't have immediate practical application. I actually think that the, a lot of the work that philosophers do in ethics that is quite theoretical about the possibility of moral knowledge, say, really does have practical applications. It's just that philosophers do not always join the dots. And so one of the things I try to do in my work is say, not, you know, let's throw out current philosophical work and go back to some other lost tradition. It's more, let's try to recognize the ways in which what philosophers are actually doing right now, like people like me in my academic

• 9:28Speaker 01

  work, does have practical relevance and we can sort of make it relevant to people's lives. Help, it can be used to help illuminate the kinds of challenges we're actually facing. So yeah, I think you can draw those distinctions, but I would like to be able to connect them up a little bit.

• 9:43Dan Harris?

  So that even, even the stuff that may seem hopelessly abstruse, or whatever the right word is, you know, theoretical or abstract, that it can be made practical. It's that your peers don't tend to do that. And I'm curious, therefore, are you looked down upon by some of your peers for being too self-helpy?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's, it's the kind of thing where if I was, they might not tell me to my face. I would say that there's been a real shift, I think, in the last, maybe just the last 10 years in academic philosophy towards what gets called public philosophy, which is to say, trying to write at least some of our work in ways that are more public facing and accessible. So I think I'm sort of, was an early adopter of that, but part of a movement in which a whole lot of philosophers who were established academics are trying to communicate more openly and in a more useful way. And, you know, being part of that movement means that it's less looked down upon. I think there's sort of safety in, in numbers, a sort of sense that this is something that was overdue and that it's not something to look down on.

• 10:48Dan Harris?

  That makes sense. I'm definitely not a historian of philosophy. I don't know much about philosophy at all, but to the extent that I think I know something, I guess I always assumed that philosophy began because it emerged out of practical questions about how to live a good life.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  That's basically right. So you find, if you go back to the Western, kind of beginnings of the Western tradition, you find a lot of philosophers doing metaphysics and talking about atoms and the void. But Socrates, who plays this pivotal role, what was definitive of what he was doing was that his questions were, what are the virtues? What's a good life? How should we live? And he wanted to make this practical. So he went out into the marketplace in Athens and confronted people about their ethical views. And the point was to change their lives, to make people live better and more virtuous lives. And even when his student Plato builds a theoretical framework around that, it's still supposed to be a theoretical framework that is applicable. That idea that philosophy

• 11:51Speaker 01

  should be practically applicable, and it is in a way sort of continuous with what we think of as self-help, survives for a long time. And then it's sort of in the 18th century that they, you get this parting of the ways where philosophy starts to model itself on science a little bit more and becomes more about just giving a theoretical description of things and is less about practical advice. And the traditions sort of continue in parallel a little bit, but I think what's happening now in my work and the work of some other people is trying to bring those two back together.

• 12:24Dan Harris?

  I don't know if you can call Buddhism a philosophy. I mean, I think in part it is a philosophy. It's also a faith. It's also kind of like a diet for your mind, like a set of things to do, practices. But one of the things I've often heard my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, say about the Dharma, i.e. Buddhism, is that what was really attractive to him as somebody who had gone to an Ivy League school and I believe encountered some philosophy there, that it wasn't just ideas about how to live a good life and what meaning can be extracted from life. It really was super practical. Like, here are some concepts for how you should speak to other people. Here are some concepts about what is a good livelihood. Here are some things you can do in your mind to understand reality better. And I'd just be curious to hear how you respond to that.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So I think the kind of work I'm interested in doing completely shares that aspiration. I'm not a religious believer, and so what I do is secular. And there are kind of versions of Buddhism, I take it, I'm not an expert, that are sort of non-theistic too, and a sort of naturalistic in a way. So there may be a lot, there may in fact be quite a lot of continuity there. And there are some ideas in Buddhism that I find really attractive, others I'm not so sure about, and certain practices like meditation, I think, is something that can be understood in lots of different ways, but is an important part of how I think about sort of leading a more engaged life and sort of coming to internalize some of the philosophical insights that I think can be brought to bear on life.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  I mean, one kind of difference is that although philosophers are increasingly trying to make their work practical, there isn't really an organized practice in the way there is with Buddhism. So, you know, I think that's a really important kind of difference. I think that kind of practice, that you can go somewhere and be with people and do things together, and that there are rituals or traditions, those things I think are often profoundly meaningful. And, yeah, reading a book about philosophy, even if you find it insightful and helpful, it's not going to quite give you that, I think.

• 14:27Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes. Two caveats before I respond to that. One is that I'm not a Buddhist scholar. I try to practice it to the best of my ability, spend my life thinking about it, but I'm not. I make mistakes when I describe Buddhism, for sure. Second caveat is that some of my listeners will have heard me say this before, but the Dharma is, I mean, there's no creator god in the Dharma. It can be practiced as a faith, and it is by millions of people, and I think often that's really healthy and amazing. I would, I would say that the Buddhist monks in Burma who are supporting the genocide would fall outside of what I would describe as awesome and amazing. But generally speaking, like, you can describe Buddhism as a religion, and it's not like most religions in that there isn't a creator god.

• 15:10Dan Harris?

  And I guess if you get really deep into it, there are levels of existence where there may be... What are roughly described as deities, but they're not the boss of our lives. And also, the Buddha very clearly said, don't take what I'm saying about the nature of reality at face value. His catchphrase was, come see for yourself. And so I'm a Buddhist, but I don't know about these god realms that allegedly exist in the Buddhist cosmology. I have no idea. I practice in a very sort of naturalistic, materialistic way, based on what I can confirm in my own experience. And so in that way, it's a philosophy slash faith slash set of shit to things you can

• 15:53Dan Harris?

  do, a bunch of shit you can do in your mind and in your life, that is, I think, easily endorseable and practicable, I know that's not a word, by secular people such as myself.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That's really interesting. I mean, I think the thing about that that really brings out the continuity between the kind of philosophical work that I do is not taking it on faith, as it were. So when I, there's a way in which nothing I write as a philosopher can be an edict. It's, here's what I think, here's my experience, I'm trying to convince you that something in your experience is like this and try to help you see things a certain way. But you have to, as a reader, reflect on whether you find that convincing and maybe you see things differently and you kind of argue with it. And I think that spirit is something that's very important to the kind of philosophical enterprise. And it sounds like that was sort of something that you approached to Buddhism shares.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And I think that's one way in which, when people talk about self-help, there's a certain kind of queasiness, because it's easy to associate self-help with various things that I'm wary of. One is a kind of guru-like status of just sort of telling people, here's what you do, and having them blindly accept that. And I don't, I don't want to be operating that way at all. I want to be persuading people that this is in fact helpful to them and having them confirm it, as you said, from their own experience.

• 17:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I sometimes joke with my wife about being her spiritual leader and a spiritual leader generally, but I definitely have this, I'm not a guru myself. And although I have joked with her, we sometimes will watch like documentaries on cults and I'm like, this is a great business model. Like, your customers will just give you everything. But no, I am deeply suspicious of, of the all-encompassing guru model. All right. Having said that, we've done a non-trivial amount of throat clearing here before we get to the, to the meat of the, the conversation, just as a reset here. We reached out to you to talk about the notion of resetting one's relationship to one of the non-negotiable facts of life, which is that everything's changing all the

• 17:54Dan Harris?

  time and therefore, things are uncertain. And one of the things I talk about a lot is, and think about a lot, is how, one of the many design flaws in the human animal is that we live in a world of ceaseless change and we hate change. And so, how do we deal with this situation? So that's what we wanted to talk to you about. You did this very helpful thing where you sent me an outline, and it starts with this line. "Big picture. Change often means that life is not what you hoped it could be. Even when things don't go badly wrong, choices that lead to change inevitably mean that you miss out on other things." So, I just want to give you a chance to hold forth on that overarching thesis.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, I think there's sort of two parts to that. One is the thought that even when things go well, there are changes and adjustments that we have to make to the fact that options are constantly closing. So, any path we take in life, there are all kinds of things we're not doing. And one way in which every change can be hard is that it brings with it the closed-off options, all the other things you can't do. And especially as you get to middle age, you can start to really find that difficult, to sort of think about all the lives you haven't led, and feel, even if your life's basically fine, a kind of sense of nostalgia and missing out. So that's one kind of thing that I think we have to come to terms with. The other kind of thing is just changes that are really

• 19:21Speaker 01

  particularly painful, like health problems or grief or loss. And, you know, I think that the ways to approach those two are somewhat different, but I think they're both ways in which there are, I think in both cases, there are sort of philosophical kind of strategies we can use for trying to understand what's happening and orient ourselves towards it in ways that are more productive. So, I don't know, we could talk about missing out, we could talk about grief and loss and pain and suffering, whichever seems more attractive to start with.

• 19:50Dan Harris?

  I want to talk about all of it, but since you hit on missing out, let's start there. So, in a world where we need to make choices that provoke change, we're, you know, constantly in this like ever branching decision tree in our lives, you're saying in philosophy holds that one of the...

• 20:12Dan Harris?

  Tricky aspects is living with the regret or the feeling of having missed out based on the choices we've made.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think there's a kind of philosophical way of thinking about values that helps to illuminate what's going on there. So, so I mean, there are some choices where you you make a certain choice and there's no regret. So if you say to me, you can have fifty bucks or a hundred bucks, I'm going to say, okay, I'll take the hundred. And I'm not going to think, ah, the fifty bucks I left on the table. I mean, I got that and more. But almost every choice we make really isn't like that. Anytime you choose something, you're doing something rather than something else. And they are, as philosophers sometimes say, incommensurable, or there's kind of a plurality of values. And when there's that kind of pluralism, a side effect is going to be just deciding to stay home tonight and not go out. I'm going to miss out on the movie.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  If I go to the movie, I'll miss out on whatever would have happened at dinner or home with my family. And those losses are not compensated. I think the thing that's helpful philosophically in trying to come to terms with that is in a way to recognize that it just how inevitable it is and how much worse it would be if that didn't happen. So a useful experiment, I think, is to think, well, okay, what would the world or you have to be like not to inevitably face that kind of loss? The only way you could do it is if, instead of containing all these different good things, like being home with family, going to the movies, this career, some other career, staying home with the kids, promotion at work, whatever it might be that you're choosing between,

• 21:47Speaker 01

  the only way you could avoid missing out would be if the world just didn't have that variety in it. If it didn't offer you all these different things, or if you were somehow so impoverished in your capacity to engage with the world, that only one thing actually mattered to you. Like, maybe if all you cared about was money, well, you just want more money. But no one really wants that. So there's a way in which, although it's painful to be missing out, it's actually a kind of inevitable side effect. There's something that we really can't regret and shouldn't regret, which is the fact that the world contains so many things and so many different things that are actually meaningful and valuable. I think when you sort of see it that way, partly the inevitability, but partly the sense

• 22:30Speaker 01

  that this is the side effect of something incredibly wonderful about the world. I think both of those are reframings that help us to sort of see that what we wanted was was sort of illusory. What we kind of wanted was we wanted to be able to have everything in a way that actually doesn't make sense.

• 22:46Dan Harris?

  Okay, let me see if I can make this practical and I'll do it in my typically selfish way, refracting it through my own personal experience. But I very often feel sad when I'm in downtown New York, because I love downtown New York, but in 20 years of living in New York City, I don't live there anymore. I live about an hour north. But in 20 years of living in New York City, or actually 21, I always lived on the Upper West Side. Side note, I remember being on a date with a much cooler woman. She was much cooler than I was. This 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,

• 23:31Dan Harris?

  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 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?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  One thing you could think is just, well, suppose I had lived there. What are the odds that I will be walking around next time on the 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 this 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 homogeneous, and every neighborhood was the same, there will be no prospect of saying, oh, we should have lived in some other neighborhood. But you don't want that. We want the world to contain evaluative riches. And yeah, it's just a side effect of that,

• 24:42Speaker 01

  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, it's a, 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.

• 25:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  And I think the same is true of bigger kind of decisions that we make where you're choosing between, you know, one job and another job. 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.

• 25:38Dan Harris?

  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. It's, it's okay. That's, 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.

• 26:08Speaker 01

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

• 26:49Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 27:29Dan Harris?

  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. 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.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I think that's right. Yeah, I mean, first of all, sorry for your loss. I'm, you know, I, in a way, I'm glad you're able to grieve it. Like, I think this is part of, 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, there's a kind of, this connects with a kind of, one of the ideas in philosophy that's had a lot of impact, I think, in the kind of self-help area. And that I think has some real insight in it is Stoicism.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  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, ah, I wish it hadn't happened this way, or I wish, you know, 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. But again, even when we're feeling about things outside of our control,

• 29:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so maybe I'll weigh in with some.

• 29:37Dan Harris?

  Again, to the best of my understanding, with some Buddhist context and what you've 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, it'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,

• 30:20Dan Harris?

  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 neither drowning in it nor compartmentalizing, you're actually being with it fully and letting it move through. So does any of the foregoing make sense to you?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  That makes sense to me. 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? 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

• 31:26Speaker 01

  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 isn't 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.

• 32:11Dan Harris?

  Yeah, 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.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  That's, yeah.

• 32:21Dan Harris?

  And I took the spirit of what you were trying to say, like, I think what you meant was a 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, you're relating to things with the urgency and vitality they require, you're not sleepwalking through life, but also the wisdom that allows you to see that everything is a broken plate anyway.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  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 mode. They're immediately like, it's gonna 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.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And if 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 or connection with other people. 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

• 34:28Speaker 01

  to pay attention to it, acknowledge it in a way that gives you understanding, allows you to orient yourself towards it better. It's sort of, 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.

• 35:01Dan Harris?

  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. If you tell yourself you're detached, it's going to come up in other part, 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

• 35:44Dan Harris?

  with him in the problem rather than trying to fix it. Like, that is what people want.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And you're not going to get rid of that unless you're able to sit with difficult things.

• 36:36Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes. And it helps to do that as a team support.

• 36:41Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Karen 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.

• 37:02Dan Harris?

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• 37:46Dan Harris?

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• 38:53Dan Harris?

  There'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?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  We don't really want to wish away.

• 39:52Dan Harris?

  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.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  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 Sheffler 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. 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 a friendship ends, even though the person isn't dead. There's a kind of loss there.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  And the loss involves the fact that the relationship is sort of severed or changed in some way.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Something else happens when someone you love dies, namely that they also, 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 you, your relationship changes. 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.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  It's trying to think, well, what role can they play in my life, given that they're not temporally present anymore? 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.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  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? Are we gonna, 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 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.

• 42:56Dan Harris?

  So in these, either of these situations with a breakup or a death. Practically speaking, what would an ongoing relationship look like? I mean, one thinks of, you know, 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

• 43:39Dan Harris?

  my workouts, which was something that she had done when she was healthy. And 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.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Those exactly the kinds of things 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 yachtsites or whatever. You had a sitting shiva. 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, you know, I wrote the book where I talk about this. Life is Hard was written during the pandemic when my father-in-law died. And at that point, the ordinary rituals of mourning or sort of honoring the relationship with someone you lost were really curtailed. Like, we couldn't go and visit, we couldn't be there.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  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 the relationship mattered? So, you know, 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. And this was sort of a kind of a meaningful way of communing with him and thinking about, you know, it was sad because all the games were, he was a huge IU fan. All the games were IU one 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.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  That were in some way are kind of makeshift rituals. And I think a lot of people do that. So that 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. It really is just, it's a relationship with someone far away. They're far away temporally, 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 then 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.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:19Dan Harris?

  That's very helpful. Let me just step all the way back for a second. There's a phrase you use at least twice. Once in relation to the subject that we began this discussion on, which is, you know, 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?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  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, it's, it's, 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.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  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. 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, 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, you know, that's the thought experiment. The mundane cases where I think this is vivid are things like grief, where there are negative

• 48:13Speaker 01

  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. 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. It's a one way in which I think a lot of self-help, not all of it at all 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.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Part of why 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 has, 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.

• 49:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, I completely buy that. A good life involves a 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.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  So I think there's several interesting things happening there. So one is, you're right. By happy, I was meaning just feel good.

• 50:09Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  And you might think, well, it's when I talk about happiness, I mean, something more complicated. There's a 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, like 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 their relate and how they relate to you. It will be better to know often if someone has a problem with you than for them to hide it. And even if, you know, 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.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It's partly that exposes 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.

• 51:09Dan Harris?

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

• 51:32Speaker 01

  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 to a simulation.

• 52:10Dan Harris?

  Or 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.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 52:22Dan Harris?

  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.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  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. And this is an idea I want to push back against that connects, you know, Plato and Aristotle and these great ancient philosophers with contemporary social media influencers, which is a kind of focus on the ideal life or the best life. And there's a way in which, you know, 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 there's something similar happens when you see people kind of portraying their ideal

• 53:26Speaker 01

  life on social media. 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. Like, it's not a good guide to how to live in the circumstances you were 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. It's just, it's not actually a good way to try to go. You know, 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.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  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. 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

• 54:55Speaker 01

  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 that are really engaged with reality.

• 55:19Dan Harris?

  Well, let's 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?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  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 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? And maybe I'll go that way instead. So I

• 56:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:40Dan Harris?

  Right.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  And that, 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's, it can be self undermining.

• 56:59Dan Harris?

  Yes, it can prevent us from being nimble in the face of ceaseless change. Something I talk about a lot with the CEO of my company, Toni, her name is Toni, T O N I, is a concept that I heard from one of our prior guests. I can't remember who said it, but I've definitely incorporated the concept, is, you know, Toni and I spend 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.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  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, 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's, it's not, 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. 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

• 58:12Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 58:42Dan Harris?

  Plus one. Coming up, Karen 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.

• 59:07Dan Harris?

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• 59:48Dan Harris?

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• 1:00:30Dan Harris?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was us. 10% happier. It's the best way to support this show. My wife Bianca just went on a major shopping spree on Wayfair.com, one of our favorite spots to buy stuff for the home and a longtime sponsor of this show. Thank you, Wayfair. Bianca did the readout on what she bought. A lot of kitchen stuff, like platters, serving platters, and espresso cups. Basically, she's prepping for all of the hosting we are going to do throughout the holiday season. We love to host. It's something that makes us very happy, and it's much easier.

• 1:01:12Dan Harris?

  Easier when you've got some great stuff that you've acquired through wayfair.com. We love Wayfair and Wayfair has something called Wayfair Verified, which helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value and trusted reviews. Products are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. You can shop thousands of products across every style and every budget at Wayfair, whether you're simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from top to bottom for the holiday season. Don't just take my word for it. Wayfair has more than 20 million verified five-star reviews. Lots of people out there use and love Wayfair. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home.

• 1:01:56Dan Harris?

  That's W A Y F A I R dot com.

• 1:02:04Dan Harris?

  You 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, often in ways we do not enjoy?

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  This is something that's of particular interest to me. It's 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. So part of it was just asking myself, why is this so difficult? What's the problem here? And understanding it better.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  And like 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, and in ways that I think are helpful. So one is, like, 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. 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.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  And that, 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 if it's going to get better or what's happening. Anxiety is a huge additional source of suffering. The part of it's the pain and part of it is that, is this going to go away? Is this going to get worse? And this is to go back to something that has Buddhist echoes. Is 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.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  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 a 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. It goes back to the living well is not the same as feeling happy because

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  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 it's 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 in 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 it so much projecting forward that is not about practical planning. It's about, in effect, a kind of self inflicted anticipatory suffering. And it's hard to get rid of, but it's not doing as any good. And if we could get rid of it, that will be really transformative.

• 1:06:03Dan Harris?

  Two quotes coming to mind based on the foregoing, one from Mark Twain, some of the worst things that ever happened to me 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.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  I don't know. It could be. I should, I should know the answer to that, but it's a good quote. Yeah, right. It gravitates your attention and attention is like been a theme throughout this conversation, like attention to things and other people is 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, 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 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.

• 1:07:13Dan Harris?

  AI is telling me there's no attributable source to

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 1:07:17Dan Harris?

  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's setting in on us. What useful things does philosophy have to say about navigating this?

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  I think there were 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. But let's talk about 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. You sort of, you could take the measure of someone as a whole became really central.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  And I think that's really, the fact that it's historically contingent is helpful because it tells us that we don't have to think about our lives that way. But also it's really toxic. So I think that 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. Instead to think, no, no, there's just lots and lots and lots of things I'm going to do in my life.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  In some of which I will succeed, in others of which I will fail. So that's sort of the, 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, and I think we should really try to push back against that kind of conceptualization of failure, really.

• 1:09:49Dan Harris?

  Right. So just to put that in practical terms, I was part of a meditation app. Didn't work out for me and that app. The reframe would be, I'm not a failure. I was part of something that didn't work for me.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Right. You had a project, it failed, but like 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 will be the central narrative. Like your life is not a movie. No one's good. Well, some of us they'll make movies about, but most of us, they're not going to make a movie. There 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

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  you tried something and it failed. But I think resisting the idea that that's identity defining is really helpful.

• 1:10:56Dan Harris?

  You said there was another branch of this, which is something about valuing the activity itself, not just the outcome?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  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. Like they matter and they have real value, 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 for me. I don't have it yet. So there's a, 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's recedes into the past. So in the present, it's never really there. And it's even worse than that because what

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  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. 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% happier, which, you know, you can do that forever. You may, you'll eventually stop doing it, I guess. But it was not like there's an endpoint at which you're like, you're done. There are no more people.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  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. These activities that don't have an endpoint are what I call a telic. And when you have an a telic 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 what you're, the thing you want is at a distance in the future. If you want to be talking to someone, that's, it'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.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  One of the virtues of valuing activities, valuing being in the process, is that they don't have, they don't, 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's, 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. And that, as a non-expert on Buddhism, I think there's a sort of affinity between

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:48Dan Harris?

  I was just gonna 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?

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  For me, 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. 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.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  It can, 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. 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

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  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 to sort of internalize something in a way that just sitting and reading a book may not be able to do.

• 1:16:52Dan Harris?

  Right. So what I'm hearing is there are a couple of 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 atelic life of doing things because they're worthy and enjoyable

• 1:17:36Dan Harris?

  in and of themselves, rather than focusing on the outcome, can create a kind of carpool lane effect.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right. And I think, too, tiny things to add to 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 like, this is part of a thing that is deeply valuable. Like, the particular project I'm engaged in this morning, eh, not so great. So I think that's one thing, is just sort of 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

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:41Dan Harris?

  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. So 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?

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  There's a lot to say. I'll try and keep it 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 biggest difference is the difference between doing nothing and doing something. And it's easy to feel like you can't make a difference, that nothing you do will really make large-scale change.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  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. 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. That's hugely consequential. It's also true,

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  There's always something that's the next good thing that could happen. And that's where you direct your hope. So, 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. To connect this, I think that's a general thing about hope and despair. I'll connect this with my own life. Like, 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,

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  while just having this background hum of irritation that screws up your sleep or makes it hard to pay attention sometimes, 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. It's, it's 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.

• 1:22:55Dan Harris?

  Well said. All of it was well said. 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?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  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. But that's easy to find, too.

• 1:23:46Dan Harris?

  Karen, thank you very much.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:23:52Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Karen. 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 and A sessions. We're now doing these every week, Tuesday at 4 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. If you want to sign up for Meditation Party, it's a weekend-long workshop at the end of October at the Omega Institute in upstate

• 1:24:33Dan Harris?

  New York. You should join that party as well. Lots going on at DanHarris.com these days. In addition to companion meditations to go along with all of our Monday and Wednesday episodes, brought to you by our Teacher of the Month, we're also now offering weekly live meditation sessions on video, where you get to meditate with me and then ask me questions. Sometimes I'll be there. Sometimes it's the Teacher of the Month. Sometimes it's the two of us together. It's always great. It's really a way to access all of the benefits of meditating in the HOV lane. These sessions are available only for paid subscribers over at danharris.com, so sign up to access our full slate of guided meditations and to join me for the weekly live gatherings. Join the party.

• 1:25:17Dan Harris?

  Finally, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Kara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kazimir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme.