Dr. Meghan Sullivan is an ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines the ways philosophy contributes to a good life and the best methods for cultivating philosophical thought. Her latest book, The Good Life Method, is based on her wildly popular introductory philosophy course called “God and the Good Life”. The book invites us to question our priorities, explore the underpinnings of virtue, and ask what commitments we should make to lead a meaningful life. Meghan joins the podcast to discuss if studying philosophy can actually make you a better person.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Tom Burnett: All right, Megan. Welcome to the show.

Meghan Sullivan: Hey Tom, it’s great to see you!

Tom Burnett: I like to ask all my guests about their childhood because I think that no matter what endeavors people have chosen as adults, we all have a childhood and that’s something we can all relate to. So, tell me about your interests and your passions and dreams, as a young child.

Meghan Sullivan: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, I grew up in North Carolina. It was not a particularly academically focused family, but I loved school when I was a little kid.

I went through phases in elementary school where I wanted to be a chemist and in middle school I think I really wanted to be a teacher because I really looked up to my teachers. But in high school, I got very involved with high school debate and I became totally convinced in Tenth grade that I was put on planet earth to be an attorney to be a lawyer.

hWn I was in high school, my best friend, e’sather was a philosophy professor at the local university. So, I knew a philosopher, and there were philosophy books around, but my friends thought it was totally dumb. Like, we just saw that this is, there’s no universe where being a philosophy professor is more important than being a lawyer, or if you had to ask, what is a real job? This is not a real job.

Tom Burnett: So how did you catch the bug?

Meghan Sullivan: You know, I went away to college, so I went to the University of Virginia, a hundred percent prelaw, planning on being a government major. And like, every freshman, I didn’t get into most of the classes that I wanted my first semester and was talking with my academic advisor about my interests, and he’s like, if you, if you really like arguing, you really like big ideas, you would love philosophy.

And I rolled my eyes or remembered my friend’s dad. I was like, I don’t think so. But he’s like, no, just give it a shot. And he put me in a big applied ethics class, It’s called issues of life and death and I absolutely loved it like everything I loved about high school debate was present in that class We got to take positions and then we got to argue the other side And I loved the readings that we did and the kinds of essay prompts that we got.

I remember the very first essay we had to write in that class. We were reading David Hume, and the prompt was, is it ever morally permissible to commit suicide? And I remember going to the TA thinking, am I allowed to like to answer this? Like are we allowed to talk about this? And he’s like, not only are you allowed to do it, but you must, you must think through this question.

So, I found it just totally exhilarating. I also did a pre-law internship between my second and third years of college. And that was when it really, you know, drove home for me that I was not called to be a lawyer. From that day forward, I just switched tracks.

Tom Burnett: And so, can you tell me what philosophy is good for, for regular people? What philosophy is good for, for those of us kind of outside that world?

Meghan Sullivan: You know, I was listening to a podcast last week, Tom, about Bill Bowerman, the very famous like track coach who helped found Nike and trained a lot of like elite runners in the last, uh, in the last century and Bowerman’s also famous for introducing America to jogging to the idea that a lot of people can run.

You don’t just have to be an Olympic runner to be into running.

And Bowerman had this famous quip that he’s like, you know, everyone is in some sense an athlete. Like, some people are capital-A athletes. That’s what they make their money from. But if you have a body.

You’re an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re using it, and you can use it for better or for worse. And I almost like to drive my car off the road because this is how I think about philosophy. Some people are paid to do philosophy, but everyone is, in a certain sense, a philosopher. We all kind of jog with our minds.

We all think about philosophical questions. You might not realize that you’re doing it. Like you might not spend your vacations reading Nietzsche on the, but you have questions about, am I a good parent? Am I being a good boss today? Anytime you ask the question, am I a good ex? You’re doing ethics. Like

Aristotle, someone like Aristotle says, “You’re doing philosophy”

Tom Burnett: I like the quote, the quote that you have in your book. The origin of philosophy is curiosity pursued with friends and that’s very relatable. Right?

Meghan Sullivan: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s so funny in the Western world. Philosophy comes to us from Plato, who just describes these dialogues that Socrates is having with his friends. They’re having discussions about the government, so they talk politics a lot. They talk about being parents, they talk about love, and they disagree with each other, but they try to reason out together towards the truth.

Sometimes they get drunk, this is the funniest thing about this. Dialogues. Sometimes, they’re having a conversation, but they’re also enjoying each other’s company.

And that’s, really the essence of the, of, that’s like what jogging is for our minds.

Tom Burnett: That’s great. I want to turn to your teaching responsibilities at Notre Dame. I imagine when you first got there, you were assigned. Here are the responsibilities of courses that need to be taught, both for philosophy majors and maybe people taking distribution requirements. When did it first come to you where you thought to yourself, I need to teach a course for people to figure out how to live or how to just conduct their lives.

Meghan Sullivan: I came to Notre Dame in 2011, and pretty soon after I arrived, I started teaching our big intro philosophy course, which had about a couple hundred students in it. Almost by accident, the guy who had been teaching it left for a different job, and I was like, “Oh, I’ll volunteer.” I enjoyed teaching the big class, which is just an introduction to the philosophy major.

Like, you’re assuming students will take a bunch more philosophy classes. So, you sort of teach them about Plato and Aristotle, but you also teach them some logic puzzles and try to get them ready to write like many philosophy journal articles. and then you release them.

Now, Notre Dame requires every student to take intro philosophy, and most of my students have zero intention of being a philosophy major. So, it was insane to teach it that way. And that had started to bother me.

And when I went away for sabbatical, I went away the year that I got tenure at Notre Dame and did a lot of discernment and soul searching. And I returned, received tenure, knew I would be sticking at Notre Dame. You get this question of like, all right, what will you pour yourself into now? It’s time to pick up new projects like you’ve passed the tenure process. Time is no concern. And the most significant thing on my heart after that year going away for tenure was I, I want to change how we teach the intro philosophy course. And I really like this to be the course that helps. Students ask these questions about what kind of life they want to live.

You know, many of my students would have before thought that philosophy is just about learning intellectual history.

It’s learning a lot of trivia facts about dead Europeans. And they don’t grasp that they are the subject of philosophy. So that was what really planted the seed. And then I was so lucky I got back. I had a lot of support from my department, just incredible support from my dean here at Notre Dame when I pitched the idea to him. And they just said like, try to make it as envelope pushing as you possibly can.

Tom Burnett: One of the things I wonder about is that I had my own sort of crisis as an undergrad trying to figure out. You know, freshman year seemed fine. People were like, just study and explore, learn what you want.

And then sophomore year, come back and it’s like the exact opposite. So, what will you major in, and what will you do with the rest of your life? And that was just horrible. It was like night and day, throwing me into an absolute tailspin. I was also taking philosophy classes, which only made it worse because they would ask such deep questions. Probing questions that I couldn’t even rely on my own sort of fundamental assumptions anymore.

It’s very easy for faculty members like me who are already like well-established in their lives and have made their commitments to forget how important and how much is up in the air when you’re at that phase of life.

Meghan Sullivan: And it’s totally reasonable to be worried that you’re not going to find the job that you love.

You’re not going to find the people that you love. You haven’t found them yet. It’s like every year in this kind of period of radical uncertainty. And one of the most important things I think we can do as professors is not dismiss that, but kind of like lean into it and be like, you

know, you’re right. You’ve got some big decisions to make. Like, you’ve got some interesting challenges that you’re dealing with. And I’m going to try to give you every resource I possibly can to help you make those decisions while realizing that you’re at a key juncture in this journey.

Tom Burnett: Yeah. I’ve got a question. This kind of crisis of meaning, crisis of direction, and how we ought to live, do you see this as essentially a modern problem or maybe a Western culture problem? Or do you see it more pervasively, like it’s a human problem that spans time, space, and history?

Meghan Sullivan: I think it’s a human problem. I think we, I think we come up with the new names for it. It gets marketed in different ways. So, in the 21st century, we talk about burnout. Karl Marx spoke about alienation. You know, if you’re in, if you read the late 1800s, we were calling it alienation from your species being.

Aristotle, you go way back, you go back to Aristotle and the politics. he’s going around, he’s visiting different communities. In ancient Greece, and he’s kind of trying to judge how happy they are and how well they’re doing, and he talks about visiting communities that are obsessed with, quote-unquote, the getting of goods,

And they stop, uh, thinking about other things because they get so focused on basically money and trade, and these people turn out to be miserable, and he’s like, that’s probably a bad way to set up your government.

It’s like, you know, people have had crises if we’ve had enough rationality to think about the future and think

about there being ideals for our life and ways that we fall short. There’s not going to be a quick fix for it. It’s not going to be like a phone app that is finally going to cure burnout or a very regimented work week that is going to cure it.

When we start to have these questions, that is our invitation to philosophy.

Yeah. It’s almost like a byproduct or ability to think about multiple possibilities of both the now and the future. Absolutely. And there’s a great book, Kieran Satya, he’s a great philosopher at MIT. He wrote a book about midlife crises a few years ago, but Kieran not only talks about how we have this unique human capacity to think about all the different future possibilities, but we also have the capacity to think about all the possibilities we’ve left along the way.

Like, you know, when I was young, I could have been a lawyer or a philosopher. I chose philosophy. One of the things that’s distinctive about being a human is the capacity for regret. The capacity to like to play out the alternative world where we’d made a different choice. And

like, you know, animals don’t face those kinds of complex emotions the way we do.

Tom Burnett: Right. Right. I want to ask more about your class that you’re teaching at Notre Dame. I think it’s titled God and the Good Life.

Is that correct? So, I’m thinking, you’re at a Catholic university, Notre Dame. one would assume that God’s got to be somehow part of the good life. So, I’m wondering if you were to teach this class at a secular university, at a state university, say Indiana University, would you teach it differently other than maybe titling it differently?

Meghan Sullivan: I get this question a lot because I work with a lot of philosophy professors all around the country who are also trying to build philosophy courses around this idea of philosophy as a way of life, as a way of caring for your soul, and that’s a Greek idea, that’s not necessarily a Catholic idea, the Catholic Church discovers it and gets really excited about it, but that’s an idea that,  you know, can travel very widely.

I do think if I were teaching the class at a place like IU, I would still probably call it God and the good life, not because the Class proselytizes. It doesn’t. I don’t convince anybody to have a religion that they’re not called into in the class. It doesn’t even, religion doesn’t even work that way. But I do think questions about faith and questions about God, they’re some of the most interesting, like difficult philosophical questions you can wrestle with from either perspective. And so, they’re great to put in front of talented, smart young people.

The way we teach God in the good life. If you ever get a chance to read the book that the course is based on, God only comes in halfway through the course. So, how I describe it to my students, we had our first day of class yesterday. We will cover 10 topics over the course of the class in order of increasing difficulty.

And the very first topic we cover is what I consider to be the easiest philosophical question, but we still must spend some time on it, and that’s politics, and like political disagreement. And nowadays, my students like to laugh at me when I’m like, That’s the easy one, like teaching you how to have political disagreements.

Um, and that’s where we read Plato. But we start with politics and truth, and concern for the truth. And then we do money, and my students also think it’s funny that I think money in the good life is the second easiest topic. But we build our way up, we do moral responsibility, then we do work, then we do love.

And when they come back from spring break is when we introduce God, and the Course becomes God and the Good Life. And we talk about the role of what, what is a religion and what is it to have a religion. one of the things we learn quickly is once you introduce an omnipotent, morally perfect being into the equation, those questions that we were talking about earlier.

They just become more complex, like they don’t become more manageable. God doesn’t solve them; He just adds all kinds of new dimensions to think about. And we build up to the end of the class where obviously we talk about death, and that’s the, that’s the ultimate, if you think politics is nothing, death is the ultimate challenge to the good life, and I want to leave them kind of up on that higher plane, so.

I think that these sorts of questions you face regardless of your religious beliefs. Inclinations. thinking about the philosophy of religion is a great opportunity to just look at all your other philosophical questions from a new angle.

Meghan Sullivan: it looks like Aristotle figures very prominently in your teaching, maybe in reading and whatnot. And I think to myself, given all the great philosophers and thinkers and visionaries of the last 2000 plus years, why lean on Aristotle so much?

Aristotle. He’s the goat. He’s one of the greatest of all time. No, he had, Aristotle had, first off, okay, first, Aristotle had a lot of, like, dumb views. I mean, there were just lots of things Aristotle did not know. Like all modern physics, for instance, he had no clue. So, he wrote a lot of scientific writings that are interesting as historical artifacts, but you go back and look at them, and you just think, like, this is insane.

His ethical and philosophical writings have really stood the test of time because a lot of people have found the framework to be very helpful. And many, many, many philosophers, at least in the Western world, are reacting to Aristotle’s ideas in some form or another.

So, you have to learn about Aristotle to understand any of the stuff that comes later. That’s my first argument. The second thing I’d share with your  listeners, and I share this with my students, is Aristotle’s not the kind of philosopher you just want to like, buy a book at Barnes and Nobles and read it beginning to end.

That is not the way to appreciate Aristotle. Aristotle’s texts are his lecture notes.

They’re his notes from teaching his students in the Lyceum. The best way to appreciate someone like Aristotle really is to have somebody teach it to you, like listening to lectures, listening to podcasts, listening to people who are talking about his ideas, and applying them. And that’s how you get into it.

Once you get into it, you realize that Aristotle has some ideas that. Totally jibe with the, the sorts of questions that we wrestle with in the 21st century.

I’ll give you one little snippet. Aristotle opened his class about the good life by telling his students that we’re all essentially goal-driven creatures. And that’s because in the back of our minds, we have this vague, indeterminate idea of what it is to be great. And we want it for ourselves. Like we want to be a great parent. We want to be a great athlete. We want to be great businessmen. We make New Year’s resolutions. We have this like drive towards improving ourselves, but we never quite know what the goal is. And in fact, a lot of times we pick goals, and they turn out to be terrible.

And he’s like, we find ourselves in life. Like archers who are trying to shoot at a target, and we just keep missing because it’s far away and it’s distant and if we could only learn how to shoot our arrows correctly, only learn how to direct things correctly, we would be happy. And we take it for granted now that that’s how we think of ourselves as humans, but we didn’t, before Aristotle, before the Greek philosophers in the Western world, like people didn’t talk this way about the human condition.

You think in the time that’s, past since Aristotle lived, do you think there’s been progress in understanding the good life? Or is this more a matter of each generation must start from the same point and work their way forwards?

I think that there’s absolutely been progress. It’s one of the oldest forms of inquiry and institutions imaginable. It’s far, far, far older than any of the sciences. That alone. I mean, what a tremendous success.

Aristotle thinks that. Learning to live a good life, learning to achieve flourishing, or eudaimonia. It’s not like learning a theoretical subject. It’s not like learning how to solve math problems. It is about developing habits that shape your day-to-day life and your way of life.

So, if we want to ask if philosophy is making progress towards the good life, and you’re an Aristotelian, you must ask, are we developing habits and carrying them on over time that are helping people get closer and closer to flourishing? And I think there, the answer is probably clearly yes.

Like there are some weird missteps we make over time, but we know so much more about human health and the habits that go into healthy living now than anybody did a thousand years ago. We have. Like strong and beautiful religious traditions that we’re able to transmit to our children. Those are all signs of

progress. Do philosophers like converge and agree on philosophical truths the way that, you know, we’ve converged and agreed on truths in physics? Absolutely not. Oh my gosh. You get two philosophers in the room. They won’t agree on absolutely anything. They probably won’t even be able to agree on like a lunch order. the method of progress involves constant disputation but that’s also I think healthy because this is a bit of a mystery, but somehow or other in that process of constant disputation, we develop these habits that enable us to make progress. And I absolutely think we’ve done that.

Tom Burnett: I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, you know, and I’ve gotten winded up with several philosophy anthologies, but I tell you, women do not figure prominently in philosophy anthologies. So, from your vantage point, can you tell our listeners just a name or two that we should really keep in mind? Maybe there’s a good biography or a book they wrote, but let’s disabuse ourselves of this incredible ignorance we have here.

Meghan Sullivan: So, it’s been hard for women to become professional philosophers for most of the last 2400 years because it was hard for women to become professional during that period. There are some exceptions. Obviously, you know, there are a few women sages in the Greek world.

There’s fabulous work being done right now by my colleagues who work in early modern philosophies, like 1600s to 1800s philosophy, to go find women who are conducting research and writing but just were not viewed visibly as professional philosophers. And Anne Conway is a big figure in that era.

I would recommend. To your listeners that they look at the 20th century.

Susan Wolf, she’s recently retired at UNC, but she has this paper called Moral Saints, which, is just this awesome paper about what we mean when we say that we admire somebody as a moral exemplar. And the paper is funny. It makes a very profound point. It’s taught in like every intro philosophy course right now.

Judith Jarvis Thompson, who passed away recently. absolutely amazing philosopher. Iris Murdoch’s, Sovereignty of Good which are also essays about the good life and about how we come to perceive the good. I think she’s very profound. And then there are like amazing women philosophers that are doing research and writing right now. You look at like L. A. Paul out at Yale. I read everything that Lori writes.

I wish there were more women entering the profession of philosophy. I think it would make. Philosophy far more interesting and the questions, that philosophers concern themselves with would get a lot richer if there were more perspectives involved.

But there’s still, there’s still plenty of women you can read.

Tom Burnett: in today’s world, there’s no shortage of people who are giving us advice on, how to live, whether there’s some sort of happiness guru or whatever adjectives you put on there. They’re an expert somehow, and they want to tell you that if you just follow me, I will lead you to the good life, to happiness, to contentment. Is there any happiness advice that you’re particularly wary of and feel like it’s basically setting a trap for people to fall into?

Meghan Sullivan: Oh, absolutely. We need advice. you can’t do it all on your own in your own head. You cannot live a good life that way. You have to pick where you’re going to get that information from, and easy examples might be our family members. Like when we’re young, our parents and close relatives and older siblings probably play that role for us. But we all realize as soon as you hit adulthood, you’ve still got those advisors, but you need plenty more advice.

I think that we as a culture have stopped being as discerning as we should be about where we get that extra advice from, probably because we’ve become so obsessed with technology. I can watch a video on YouTube about how to repair my car and suddenly feel like I’m a mechanic. I can download a diet app and just use this app. Tell me what to eat for every single meal for a year of my life and track it and not really have like a bit of discernment about like what’s the app’s intentions are or whether it’s trustworthy. I think this is one of the biggest social problems we’re facing today.

I would say when it comes to good life advice. First, take with a grain of salt, anybody who says that they’re an expert until you have a little bit of understanding about where their expertise would come from. that’s one piece of advice.

The second piece of advice I have for folks is, there are no quick fixes to existential problems. So, I know plenty of folks who think I’m feeling a loss of meaning and purpose at work. and I decide I’m going to adopt this work-life balance system where I spend exactly eight hours a day from 6 a. m. to 2 p. m. doing work. And then I spend, you know, three hours doing yoga or whatever else. And that’s just the. The wrong way of approaching a problem, like a lack of meeting,

There’s always a much bigger question that you need to be confronting there, either with your therapist or with your priest or with your friends. That you’re, how you manage your time will follow from, but until you get to the root of it, you’re just putting a band aid on a big wound.

I think finally. You know, take a moment to reflect on all the different fads you’ve fallen into over your life. And I, I’m as guilty as anyone else of like jumping on intermittent fasting or, I’m going to make myself wake up at 4 am and take a cold shower and then I’m going to be a better philosopher.

Like do a little bit of empirical analysis of your own life so far. And realize like, well, that hasn’t really worked for me. What changes have I made in my life that stuck, and what habits have been wonderful? What was going on for me when it worked?

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment, but I think we’re oftentimes like too quick to look for a quick technical fix for something that’s a philosophical problem.

Tom Burnett: I imagine that as each of us pursues a good life for ourselves, it will look a little different for each person.

But I’m wondering, where are the universals?

Meghan Sullivan: My philosophical orientation is around virtue ethics. And I believe that the ancient Greeks and Confucius and the Chinese philosophers were right about one key assumption that guides their thinking, namely that for human beings like us to flourish, we must develop virtues. Virtues are, they’re stable personality traits that conduce to living a good life. And over time there’s been a pretty stable set of what the virtues should be that manifest in different ways, in different circumstances. But I feel confident that these virtues are probably the

secret. So, what are they? What are the ones that like I’d bet on? Love, so I’d be shocked to find somebody was leading a happy and flourishing life if they did not have the capacity to experience love of other people, love of things that transcend themselves. That’s got to be one key component, and love doesn’t just happen to you. It’s something that you cultivate over time. It requires a little bit of luck, but it’s something that also requires a deep investment.

I think courage is the ability to push yourself to do things that might be dangerous or might require uncertainty, but in fact, there’s like a greater goal in the background. You don’t, you don’t make any progress as a human unless you cultivate this.

Humility. I know this resonates hard with the Templeton Foundation, but this is a lesson I keep learning. I keep learning this one the hard way, but it is such, a virtue to have self-awareness to know what you don’t know and to be open to receiving new information that might correct some of your misapprehensions.

And I think these, these kinds of virtues, they show up cross-culturally. they’ve managed to endure, you know, 2,500 2,400 years of philosophical practice in Western and Eastern civilization. That’s there’s a lot to say that like these, you know, these are really the bedrock, I think.

Tom Burnett: I’m going to come back to that the first virtue that that you mentioned of love being a central pillar of virtue of leading the good life can studying philosophy help you become a more loving person.

Meghan Sullivan: Absolutely. And this is, if you ask me like why I, I’m so excited to be able to teach philosophy, it’s because we get to take virtues like this, and it’s the chief one that I think about, and show people new dimensions of it that they might not have been able to figure out just on their own. So, like, how does this happen?

Like, how could philosophy help you become better at love?

Well, you have someone you love, and you realize that they’re going through a difficult time. Maybe they’re going through a big change. Maybe they’re suffering, and you’re trying to figure out how to appropriately care for them. Sometimes, caring for another human being is a complex question.

One of the things that a bit of philosophical training can do is help us challenge our beliefs and assumptions about a person. A naive way of loving someone is just doing things to and for them.

So, you might say if I like, oh, if I love my brother, I’ll buy him birthday presents, and I’ll give him a ride if he needs one. and that’s what it means to love him is to just like causally affect him. That’s part of love, but real genuine love involves like. Understanding what my brother loves about his own

life and how my brother is distinct from me and, being able to have conversations with my brother where we investigate these topics like on a, you know, a long car ride.

We talk about how we think about our parents and how they are aging and reflect on these things. There is a deeper dimension of love, and if you have a little bit of philosophical training, you might have a lot more confidence in entering into relationships with the people you love.

Tom Burnett: I want to ask you about a couple of the, some of the tough questions that come at the end of your course.

Meghan Sullivan: All right, let’s go.

Tom Burnett: Having conversations about God. In your experience, how have you been able to have productive conversations about something that can often be very unsettling and uncomfortable and threatening to people?

Meghan Sullivan: There’s a reason why we kind of like build up over time and why we don’t introduce God till the middle of the course is because I want you to be thinking about all these other topics

And I want you to know how to disagree with others before discussing this topic. I want you to. Thought about, love and power and control and moral responsibility. Because when we try to introduce the idea of an omnipotent being, your preconceptions about that are going to become extremely important.

So, one is like walking before running. If you get freaked. out talking about religious topics. That’s okay. We could probably get you up to that point, but first, let’s do some other philosophical precursors to warm you up and stretch your legs.

And I think when a lot of people get fearful of talking about religion, it’s not because at the end of the day, they’re afraid of talking about the nature of the universe. or whether a morally perfect loving being is possible.

They’re afraid of the politics, and they’re afraid of all the ways that concepts from religion get weaponized and distorted into ways of contending for power amongst each other. And so, I think also being able to say here, here’s the scope of what we’re talking about. We’re talking about these philosophical questions today. if you want to have a fight about the most recent presidential election. Like, great, it’s a subject for maybe another conversation, but that’s not what we’re doing when we try to invite a philosophical discussion of this

Tom Burnett: Yep. Then I want to hit that last topic you covered in your class and at the end of your book as well: death. How does the inevitable fact of death Impact thinking about the good life, You can’t so much argue about death; It’s just final and it’s there whether you like it or not

Meghan Sullivan: A lot of my students love reading the Stoics. The Stoics came right after the ancient Greeks. One of the famous Stoic teachings about the good life is that you should set aside time every single day to think about death and not to think about it abstractly, but to think I’m going to die. My mom’s going to die. My siblings are going to die. My beloved will die. That’s extreme. Like, that’s the equivalent again of, like, running a marathon fast.

But I do think they were on to something, and it’s, it’s, it’s been interesting how much stoic philosophy has become part of cognitive behavioral therapy for people who are going through depression and are distressed right now. There’s something about confronting the reality of the things that most threaten us or scare us and confronting it habitually that helps us stop going through periods of intense anxiety and fear about it.

And I think what the Stoics were thinking is, we can’t manage death, but we can manage how we react to it. We can manage our emotions around it, and that could be very, very important for us to live happy lives with the short time that we have and become more empathetic and thoughtful about others.

This is a bit of a cliche, but it’s so true. Death puts things in perspective. Like, you know, we get in our heads with really short time horizons thinking, you know, if I don’t get that promotion my life is over, metaphorically.

the way our emotions are wired, they’re really presentist. They’re really focused on just like the next thing. And we oftentimes overreact or overvalue things that are nearby when really, we should be taking, taking the long

view.

Tom Burnett: Circling back to an earlier question we talked about, you mentioned that Aristotle thought that ethics and the, and the good life was a lot about building habits, so can you recommend, are there, all purpose, rituals or activities. They think, hey, give this a try. It’s worked for a lot of people.

Meghan Sullivan: as far as daily habits go, remembering that there are no quick fixes for the good life or for like existential crises.

Obviously, taking time out for contemplation doesn’t mean just staring at a blank wall. But we’ve known for 2400 years that the human mind requires rest from activity to grasp the truth. And so, there’s absolutely a reason why research in positive psychology shows that people are happier when they take contemplative walks, when they try to do short prayers when they take moments of rest from activity and the goal-seeking part of their lives to just, reflect on like the, the quality of their minds.

So, taking, taking moments for contemplation, um, and then, habits that invest in the philosophical dimensions of your relationships. So. Not being afraid at work to introduce a philosophical question into a discussion around the lunch table,

And I think you’ll find that, like it deepens your relationships, but it’s also these times having these philosophical conversations will be where you uncover deeper goals and values that make the rest of the way that you spend your day

Tom Burnett: Well, Megan, thank you for talking to me today. It was a lot of fun to explore these questions with you.

Meghan Sullivan: Thank you. It was a pleasure.