The Unexamined Life is Not Livable

What are we afraid of?

Most of us know Socrates’ famous assertion, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In his book, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook, Ward Farnsworth points out that a more accurate translation is “the unexamined life is not livable.”

That’s a big difference. The former seems to scold us, and we may push back against it. Why should this annoying, dead, scolding philosopher tell me whether my life is worth living? The latter is an invitation—much more in keeping with Socrates—of encouraging us to continue to question all the assumptions, beliefs, dogmas, grievances, and on and on that make our life not as meaningful as it could be. If we kept stumbling into the same hole, wouldn't we want to stop?

We stumble into the same holes because we are masters at fooling ourselves into believing the nonsensical chatter in our heads. Simply having a bit of doubt about what we are sure we know is a Socratic pathway to self-improvement. Socrates is famous for acknowledging he didn’t know his own ignorance. Even when we do not fully embrace a Socratic mindset, we can adopt a questioning mindset, especially when our certainty keeps leading us into misery. Perhaps our chattering mind is not giving us sound advice worth following!

I recently started reading what promises to be a worthwhile book by University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard. Right out of the gate, in Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Callard asks questions relevant to our upcoming study of how we use our time. She writes,

There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home. There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full. It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”

Callard adds, “If you keep tacking one fifteen-minute period onto another, eventually it adds up to a life.” Beginning this Saturday, Seneca and Burkeman will bring to light what Callard points us to. Neither Seneca nor Burkeman are prescriptive; instead, they give us tools to find our way and not stumble mindlessly through life.

Callard calls us out on our strong, self-protecting, defense mechanisms:

You are careful to keep your practical questions from exploding beyond narrow deliberative limits within which you confine them in advance. It is fine to be open-minded and curious about all sorts of questions that don’t directly impinge on how you live your life—How do woodpeckers avoid getting concussions?—but you are vigilant in policing the boundaries of practical inquiry. You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn’t wander too far from how it is already going.

Then Callard adds this zinger: “You appear to be afraid of something.”

An existential fear lies underneath our more tangible fears. But since the world offers plenty of distractions, we are unlikely to look at the underlying fear. Even in Seneca’s time, distractions were plentiful, and he observed distracted people who ended up on their deathbed like those in our time, saying, I need more time. How did I miss what was important?

Callard understands profound questions can’t be answered quickly, and we try to avoid them. She’s with Socrates, who concluded that confronting those profound questions was the best “thing that ever happened to him.” Socrates, she writes, “pursued happiness not by avoiding or moving on from these questions, but by diving headlong into them.”

Socrates left no writing. What we know about him and what he taught is from Plato and other writers. It was 500 years later when Seneca came on the scene; by then, Socrates was in ancient history. Although Seneca only mentions Socrates once in “On the Shortness of Life,” Socrates considerably influenced Seneca.

Socrates and Seneca both taught that our willingness to expose and subtract our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.

Please join us this Saturday as we begin our study of Seneca and Oliver Burkeman to explore our relationship with time.

Mindset Shifts U is a 100% reader-supported endeavor.

Thank you for your support and for considering these ideas with me.