If you feel like the price of your work is too high in terms of your existential meaning, or your sense of significance, or your sense of being worthwhile, then the job is too much. It's asking too much, the costs are too high, and you need to change.
Wow.
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is John Kaig, an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He specializes in American philosophy and is the Donna Hugh Professor of Ethics and the Arts at
UMass Lowell. He's also the External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and advisor at Outlier dot org. John is published in many periodicals and is the author of many books, including Six Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life, American Philosophy, A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche on Becoming who You Are, and is the co author of the book discussed here, Henrie at Work throaw On Making a Living.
Hi, John, welcome back.
Thanks so much for having me back.
I don't remember when it was, but we talked about your book William James about Healthy Mindedness, and I loved that conversation. And when I saw you had a new book called Henry at Work thereaw on Making a Living, I thought it would be wonderful to talk again. So we're going to be discussing that book in a moment, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking to their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
It's such a good question, old one. The last three years have been rather tough. When I was forty three years ago, I had cardiac rest and had bypass surgery, and when the EMTs brought me back after the arrest, I had a lot of reevaluating to do about life, but more specifically about my work life. And it gave it a lot of thought and decided that when it came to my work, I had been really feeding the wrong wolf. I'd been feeding the wolf of greed and
self possession and fear. And what I needed to do is reorient myself back to my teaching, back to my family, back to those experiences that really nourished me. And thankfully I had a chance to do that with the help of Henry David Throw and his position on work.
So when you say you were feeding the wrong wolf at work, you didn't make a career change, correct, right, You're still a professor at Harvard, you still write books. So what was the nature of the change, or what was the nature of the way in which you were feeding the bad wolf and hopefully are feeding the good wolf today.
When it comes to work, I think that as you grow older and have a family, it's oftentimes very easy to get sucked into working for money that supports your family household. And one of the insights that throw gives us is that you don't need nearly as much as you actually do. And I had gotten sucked into this almost manic workpace. I was producing books almost every year. I was signing up for textbooks and lecture series based on monetary value rather than what I actually found meaningful.
And when you realize that life could be cut short at any moment, all of a sudden, you say, oh my gosh, I need to actually think about whether my time is being well spent. So you're right that I've not changed my job. I teach it, lul I'm a
professor there, and I've taught writing at Harvard. It's not that I changed my work as much as my orientation to why I was undertaking the tasks at hand and concentrating what actually drew me into philosophy in the first place, which was a study of ethics, the study of the good life, a study of what is the good life, and also drew me back to thinking about my students more carefully, and also my children and my partner more carefully, and not just blining for what seemed to be the
sort of most expedient or lucrative move.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think that you know, we're going to get into work and lots of different types of work and all that. But for those of us who are extremely fortunate enough to be in the type of work that probably best suits us, you know, that is, to use a word, our calling or something that we care deeply about or that matters to us, right, And that's a very fortunate position to be in. However, that alone does not mean that we
have a wise relationship to work. And I think that was my orientation for a long time, given that I kind of tried to come from a software career to doing this that I thought, well, once I get over here, it's all going to be straightforward, right. And since I've gotten over here, I've had to continue to reevaluate my relationship to work that does matter to me that I do think is important, but can also just start to run everything, and you're right, the motives that are in
it can get very confusing. You know, we all have different metrics by which we're measuring our work, and they tend to be money or approval or if you're in my business, it's downloads. You know, you've got all these sort of things. For me, it's been this consistent practice of over and over and over again going back to what is it about this that matters to me?
And I think that what you describe is very similar to my experience decide on what profession I was going to go into. I mean, I was brought up in a family that did not have a lot of money, and so the drive to get money, especially from my single parent mother, was very very intense. My brother became a surgeon. I was supposed to go work for Goldman Sachs right out of college, and I made a decision to go into grad school in philosophy, primarily because I
didn't want to follow that path. But that does not mean, or it didn't mean for me that I didn't then just simply import that drive and that logic into my own trade publishing, into my own scholarly pursuits. And I ended up publishing papers like crazy as if they were you know, Wall Street trades. And it's very easy to import your past, even if you think that you're escaping it. So I take your point really seriously.
I think that's absolutely true, and I think it's also confusing when you do you enjoy what you do, or you do see value in it, that makes it a little bit more confusing. But we'll come back around to this threat, I'm sure, But let's start with Thereau. And you say that work was at the root of Therew's philosophy, It's at the root of Walden. So say a little bit more about that.
So we all oftentimes think about Henry David Thoreau as this lotus eating, tree hugging loafer of a guy who took two years, two months, and two days to go hang out at Walden and escape all the pressures of modern life. We basically think of Walden as a vacation, but we oftentimes forget that Thoreau went to Walden to work, to support himself, to figure out what was actually required,
what was actually necessary in modern adult life. And Thoreau goes to Walden not long after his own brother, who was very close to dies in his arms, dies of gang in Henry David Throw's arms. And at those moments you really have to wake up and think what am I doing with my life? And what Throw does at Walden is famously he says I went to the woods to live deliberately. But really what I think it is is that he went to the woods to work deliberately.
He built his own house to a large extent, made his own clothing, grew his own food, really tried to think about what his life's work or as you said, the vocation or his calling is. And I think that that is very directive if we read Throw and read Walden as basically sort of handbook for how you might think about your own working life.
Yeah, there's so many things that I learned about Throw that I did not know reading this book. And one is, like you said, his sort of natural tendency towards work. I mean you say early on that you know nobody who has a two million word journal by the age of forty four is a loafer. And that Thereau even as he was walking, you know, he believed you were
working while you walk, you were ruminating. And he was using that term in the positive sense, not the negative sense that we often tie it to today, but that he was very industrious.
He was, and sometimes we don't think about writing or thinking as work, but it is. But Threeau then on top of that sort of occupation or vocation really undertook a handyman's life. I mean, he grew up middle class but also rural middle class, which basically meant that he lost a toe cutting wood. At the age of nine, he falls off a cow. I don't know what he was doing on the cow, but must have been some type of work in his teenage years and breaks something.
He then basically goes through eleven different jobs in his life and is trying to think about the relationship between manual work meaningful work, you know, and then also try to bring a sort of critical eye to immoral work, but also meaningless work and drudgery. So I think he's giving us some guidelines to rethink the concept of work, which in the West, if we think about work, sometimes we just view it like in the Bible, it's views as a curse. I mean, God gives it to human
beings as a curse. And oftentimes we think about work that way, and really, according to Throw, we ought not, because work is what sets us free.
For Threau, yeah, and we'll get into what degree is being able to think of work in that way what we would call privileged or elitist in a later part of the conversation. But you say Throw questioned why we work, and that he claimed that men labor under a mistake? What is that core mistake?
The core mistake, and I think we've alluded to it in the early section of this interview. The core mistake, for Thoreau is believing that we are rich only in terms of our monetary wealth, and that the riches of work and the returns of work ROI return on investment is really about monetary gain and about self interest and greed.
And that while we think that that approach, which has been encouraged in modern capitalism and modern consumerism, that that approach is either inescapable or is in fact beneficial for individuals because it makes them secure, it makes their houses secure. Thoreau is suggesting that we think about the health of a human being and the wealth of a human being in terms of what sort of experiences he, she or they can have in life and what sort of value can we add to the world at large through the
workings of our hands or minds. And I think that that's a very very important point, especially in our post pandemic age, when people are really rethinking how much do they want to work? Do they go back to the brick and mortar office, do they stay at home? And Throw's there saying, hey, if you feel like the price of your work is too high in terms of your existential meaning, or your sense of significance, or your sense
of being worthwhile, then the job is too much. It's asking too much, the costs are too high, and you need to change. In this midst of the discussion about the Great Resignation, when people are more and more leaving their jobs, Threeau is right there at the first part of the nineteenth century saying you can resign, you can drop out in order to reconnect with work that you find meaningful.
In the book, you talk about how Threeau believed that manual labor could be made into something beautiful, that work can be something that is beautiful. And there's the other view that says work is a curse, right, And I would say most of us float somewhere in between those two things. And I've worked with a lot of people over the years who come to me for coaching, and their core dilemma is do I need to get a new job slash career or do I need to learn
to relate to it differently? Do I need to change the meaning that I see? Or do I need to change the connection that I have with people? And I think this is a really big dilemma for a lot of people. It can be very difficult to figure out, you know, is this okay and the challenge is inside me? Or is this not okay and the challenge is outside of me.
It's such a great point. I mean Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is his birthday. Today's birthday is true mine too.
As a matter of fact, Ralph and I share a birthday.
Oh You're lucky. One of his best friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, your giant follows you wherever you go. In other words, you are yourself no matter where you go, no matter what work you take on, no matter what occupations. So sometimes it's not going to matter if you change occupations without changing yourself beforehand, changing your orientation to the world
or your coworkers or compensation. So I think the point that maybe sometimes the best thing to do is to try to change your angle of vision, try to change the way that you see things in your current situation. I think that there's a lot of wisdom to that. And Threau does that many different times in his life, especially around the way that he've used his own writings. In other words, are they public? Are they private? Are
they spiritual? Are they politically oriented? He's constantly thinking about how to reorient himself in what looks to be a fairly stable job. But he is also and Emerson would also say that sometimes you do need to break out, especially if you find yourself in a situation where you really have what you deem to be in a moral job. In other words, the compensation that you get is actually
derived by taking money from others or exploiting others. And this was the case for Thereau when it came to teaching. Quite famously, one of his first jobs was as a teacher, and the headmaster asked Thereau to exact corporal punishment on his students, and Thereau thought about it for a day, tested it out, and then quit. He just couldn't do it. He couldn't go ahead working in a sort of immoral situation.
So I think there has to be a certain balance between resigning too quickly and staying on for too long.
Yep. Yeah, everybody's situation is kind of different in figuring out the pros and cons the trade offs. I mean, everything has a cost, right, and so what costs are you willing to incur? Which makes sense. I want to turn a little bit to this idea of work as a beautiful thing because it was reflecting before this conversation. And my father passed not too long ago, and one of the things I said at his eulogy, and I had been thinking about, is that what I got from
him was a really good work ethic. I started to examine that statement a little bit more closely after reading your book, and I thought about, like, why did I used to work so much, particularly as a teenager, Like I worked a lot and I didn't have to. I mean, I kind of wanted the money. I don't think that was the driving factor. It wasn't like I was trying to please my parents. What I realized is that I
actually really enjoyed it. I worked in the restaurant business, but there was something about being in a kitchen and being with other people and the fun that we had there, and there was something about that activity that was deeply satisfying to me. Now eventually it became unsatisfying, and I'm glad I don't still do it. But I think this idea that our work can be a satisfying thing is another element that I'd like to explore a little further.
Sure, I mean, Threau came at the issue of the satisfaction of work in a number of different ways, one of which was work at its base is the means by which we support ourselves in the natural world, in the world in which we live. And you might think about that very quickly, and you say, yeah, of course, I get a paycheck and then I get to go buy my food and my gas. That then gets me to back to my job where I can work some more.
But that's not exactly what Thereau meant. Thereau was living through a period of American history where individuals were being caught in the industrial commercial complex that we now call modern day life. The mills up in loll and Lawrence in the Industrial Revolution were basically within Thereau's site. And in response to that, Row returns to his little plot at Walden and he says, what can I do so that I am self sufficient in Emerson's words, self reliant?
And can I redirect my work back to those very simple practices that allow me to support myself, grow my own food, shelter myself, sustain myself. So there's one aspect that we oftentimes forget that work really is a form of self possession, a way to be self possessed. The other aspect, I think that you push on really nicely when you describe your teenage jobs where you're connecting with
others and you feel connected to the world. This is a Thorovian and Emersonian impulse too, that our work connects us either to the land or to the people, or to the community of mind. It connects us to something much bigger than our very local interests, which note is
very different than the sort of self reliance model. What it does is it allows us to reach out into your garden or into the natural world, for example, to sort of change the landscape in a productive way, or to make something that is out in the world that others get to enjoy and participate in. That sort of engagement is meaningful because I think it gives us a break from feeling so imperially alone in our little, as
David Foster Wall says, skull sized kingdoms. So work gives us that outlet and that communion and connection as well.
You say, THROW believe that a certain type of work allows us to inhabit the world in a way that makes us actually at home. And you know, I think that's work in its most beautiful state. Is it makes us, like you said, feel connected at home, purposeful. It's funny. I have this little device on my wrist. It's called a whoop band. It's an exercise fitness tracker, right, and
it's okay. They introduced a new feature and it's called stress response, So it's basically trying to tell you when it thinks that you are a little bit more stress than normal, that your heart rate is a little more elevated, not from exercise. It's very interesting, and this is only a couple weeks of data, and again, this thing isn't one hundred percent accurate, so I don't want to make
too much out of this. But what's interesting about it is that I find that my stress level is often at its lowest when I'm working, which is an interesting phenomenon because we tend to think of it the other way. But what I realized is that I'm much happier working
than I am worrying about actually working. There's an element I've always noticed in my life that when I am at work on something that matters to me in any way, shape or form, and that can take lots of different forms, I do feel more at home.
What's interesting the experience that you're describing, I think is the way that many individuals describe play like hobbies that they are really in meshton or immersed in. But the very interesting thing is that you can do that and should do that in your work. So one of my students came up to me, and I'm very engaged in class. I talk to them like real people, they talk to me like real people. It's very back and forth. And one of my students said, doctor Keg, you seem so excited.
Why do you teach this way? And I thought about it for a little while, and the reason is is because first of all, I want them to get something out of the experience. I find that meaningful. But I also, for better or for worse, it is an anxiety blocker. When I immerse myself in my classroom, I'm worried about them. I'm not worryorried about myself. I get lost in the flow of the conversation and in the flow of the lesson.
And it's really the case that that losing yourself, that sense, all those petty worries that you had before your work, once you quote and unquote get into it, all of those worries tend to go away. And I know that I'm describing a very very specialized and privileged sort of situation where you might say to me, hey, John, like, I work a job that is drudgery, and it's very hard to lose myself in these situations. And Throw has
very clear positions on that as well. And it's not necessarily that you need to just be zen about your forms of drudgery. He has a certain type of cultural critique about systems of occupations and employment that rest on large scale forms of drudgery.
Yeah, and this is an interesting point because Throw talks about the value of manual labor, right, like you can actually be at home and connected to the world through manual labor. You mentioned Zen. I've been a practicing Zen student for a long time. And how in Zen the phrase I've used is called samu means work practice, and it's basically taking something that is extraordinarily ordinary, sweeping the floor, chopping vegetables, whatever it might be that you can do
without thinking about at all. But the point is actually to give it very very close attention, thus elevating it into something that is beautiful. So on one hand, we've got this idea that this sort of manual ordinary, what could be drudgery labor, can be elevated into something beautiful. And then we have the experience of people who have to do that work as a living and it feels deadening, and that, you know, throw is also say and you
know in those situations you maybe shouldn't do it. How do you think through that what appears at one level to be a little bit of a contradiction.
It's a great question. I mean, Threau is famous for his positions on abolitionism and slavery, which in the middle of the nineteenth century. When we're talking about work, we have to acknowledge that lots and lots and lots and lots of people were working basically against their wills and forced to work. And Threau was not ever a person who would say, Oh, you're in this horrible situation, let's.
Pick your cotton mindfully.
Yeah, exactly, pick your vegetable of choice mindfully. But what he did suggest and who he was writing to, was a large number of middle class Americans, middle upper class Americans who had forgotten that very local, very manual labor, very mundane labor, can be very meaningful, and you can
make it not only beautiful, but for Threau sacred. And what he was suggesting I think is that individuals who read Walden, for example, or read Civil Disobedience would notice that if you change your orientation to material wealth, he says, simplify, simplify. At Walden, I mean he lived in a ten x fifteen foot cabin. It wasn't a big mansion. He ridiculed
individuals with big mansions outside of conquered. So if you reorient your position to material wealth and change the way that you think about quote and unquote good jobs, good jobs in thros day were becoming more and more capitalist jobs. In other words, owners of factories. Those were the good jobs, jobs in which you don't necessarily have to work with your hands, jobs where you hire others to do work that you don't want to do. So Threaw is pushing
on both of those points. Reorient yourself to material wealth, reorient yourself to manual labor, and you'll notice that you don't have to live in a society that is so dependent on the labor of others, in other words, forced labor, or on a government that would perpetuate in moral policies like the government of Throw's day that he pushes up against in civil disobedience. So it's all these different aspects of work and work life, balance and manual work are
all related. And so Threau is suggesting to us who maybe need to slow down a little bit and appreciate the sacred potentials of manual labor to do so. And it not only affects our own lives, but it also affects the societies in which we live.
Now, it seems that a big piece of this is is about choice, right, you know, when you are forced, whether by economic reality. And again I get that Throw would say not as many of us are forced as much as we think we are, because we could live on less than we do. But let's talk about people who are barely subsisting, right when you're forced either by in his day slavery in our day what we might call wage slavery, right, meaning that I've got to do
all this in order just to survive. It's very difficult then to elevate that work into something beautiful and meaningful, because it's not a choice. You're not choosing exactly of your own free will in the same way I would be choosing to go outside and chop would and be engaged in the process. Is that a fair way of sort of summarizing.
That's a fair way of summarizing it. I mean, I think about this. We live outside of conquered Massachusetts where through I live very close to Walden Pond, and there are a lot of big houses here with big lawns, and I see lots and lots of people who don't live in the houses working the lawns of these big mansions. And I just asked myself. My wife Kathleen said to me, she goes, why do you like to take care of the lawn and the gardens? And one of the reasons is, yes,
it connects me to the earth. But another aspect is I don't necessarily have to pay someone a very low wage to do something that I could actually enjoy doing. And the relationship between employing individuals to do work that you would rather not do. That issue was very much on the Roe's mind, and he was worried about choice but also exploitation, exploitation of those individuals who don't have
choices to work elsewhere. If you think about his location at Walden, it was right next to the railroad where Irish workers really on a sort of subsistence level, had to get by working on the railroad. And then similarly he was surrounded by former slaves and he lived on the outskirts of conquered and so Threau is very much aware of the way that our needs and desires have a tendency to place others under pretty onerous obligations to fulfill our own desires.
As you were talking, I was thinking about there's a show I love called Downtown Abbey. I don't know if you've watched. I just think it's a brilliant, brilliant show. But there's a scene in it where there is, in essence, the main character suddenly without knowing it inherits downtown Abbey. He becomes the guy who's going to take it. He had no idea it was coming, he had no idea
he was related. But he's the next male heir, and it's in a world where male heirs are there, and he comes and he arrives at downtown Abbey and the servants are trying to take care of him, and he is saying, no, no, no, no, I can do that myself. I can do that myself. And there's a scene where suddenly there's a sense that by doing that he is taking someone and not allowing them to do what they
think their job or their role is. I just was thinking about that as you were talking, because I do think a capitalist would say, well, you know, the person mowing the lawn for twelve dollars an hour has a job that they wouldn't otherwise have. Maybe they've come from Mexico and suddenly that's a much better living than they would be having. And so I think these are really interesting and sort of challenging questions.
I think so too. I think what Threat does is that he repeatedly goes and works with day laborers, and goes and actually works alongside of people cutting ice in very cold conditions in the middle of a pond. And I think that his willingness to work alongside people who make manual labor their living is I think an important instruction for us, because we if we're going to hire someone to do our lawn, at least we need to
know how hot it is in July. At least we need to know how thirsty you get when you're out there. At least we need to know. And this is not wholly dissimilar from William James. He has this famous essay called The Moral Equivalent of War, where he says that the gilded youth, in other words, the golden boys, girls and people of his time need to get the ideals knocked, the false ideals knocked out of them, with a good
amount of manual labor. And he thinks that walking in the shoes, or trying to walk in the shoes of someone who lives very differently and by other means of work, gives us some indication about how we are to treat those individuals who we might hire.
Yeah, yeah, And there's certainly an element of I think treating everybody, regardless of the station of their work, with a great deal of dignity, right, I mean, I think that, just to me is sort of a fundamental principle. Somebody who's a stockbroker is not better than a waiter, you know, like they both deserve dignity and they're both equal. So not so much of the class hierarchy that we often think about.
Yeah, I mean, I think about the way that the work of our lives is a certain type of leveler between people. What I mean by that is each of us, at the end of our life gets a chance to look back and say, what have I worked on? What have I done? And am I happy with that? Was
that my choice? Was that my life's work. And I think about Throw's famous comment in Walden that he goes to Walden so that he didn't reach the end of his life and discover that he hasn't lived as a real stop you in your tracks moment, my mother would say, like when it comes to your work, because do you want to get to the end of your life and just say, hey, I shouldn't have spent that extra hour in the office, or I wish I would have spent
more hours in the office. And so oftentimes we don't have those moments of pause but Threau says, take the moments because at the end you really would have wanted to.
Yeah, And it's one of the things I love about your work is you take philosophy and put it back into very practical terms that can cause us to do what I think is one of the most important things that we can do, which is to ask ourselves, like what am I doing and why am I doing it?
Or what's important to me? And as my life oriented that direction, and to ask that question often because things change, you know, And I think that that practice is so fundamental, is that questioning of what am I doing and why am I doing it?
You know?
Is it right? And I do love what Threau is pointing at, which is that we have more economic choice than we think. I mean, I interviewed a guy recently who wrote a book called The Pathless Path. His name is Paul Millard, and you might actually enjoy the book
given your interest in work. But he got into I don't know what, Ivy League school and he grew up fairly lower class, but he got into an Ivy League school, which then led to graduate school, which led to like trying to work in the top consultant, you know, management consultancies and doing all of it and just did not like it, and so he quit basically and now lives
far more simply doing far less. And you know, I asked him, I said, to the fact that you just had a child, does it change your perspective on the choices that you've made? And his answer was really interesting because the thought where my head was orienting was now I've got a child, I've got to be more secure, and his was, it makes me more confident in the choices I'm making because I am with my child far more. It sort of flipped that idea on its head of secure.
You know, where my sort of standard middle class brain would go to, which is like, now I've got a child, I must provide His was we can get by with way less. What I want is to be with the child.
And anyway, I just thought that was an interesting thing, and to see someone and talk with someone who's really making that choice, you know, who's making the choice to say like, I'm walking away from lots of money in order to have way less, which I mean, I guess is the same choice you make if you leave a job as a software executive and become a podcaster as a personal example might be a similar, similar type choice, but I did that at a different phase in my life.
I mean, it's been so enlightening to write this book with my co author, Jonathan van Bell. And Jonathan is about my age. He's a little younger, but he's a frugillionaire he calls himself, which is basically he's frugal and so he feels like a millionaire and he works on projects that he wants to and does not worry about having a full time job. But he lives on next to nothing and he is happy that way. And what's interesting is that I had a father who was a
banker at City Bank. He left when I was three. The money kind of ran out for my family, but he left me with a legacy of thinking that my self worth was bound up with how much money I was making. And what Jonathan's father, Jonathan Van Bell's father did was told him at a very early age, he said, the best type of job is the job that allows
your mind to be free. And he works. Jonathan's father works as a driver for a hospital from what I understand, in other words, he shuttles patients back and forth all day and does not make a lot of money, but he has this mentality, a really Thorovian mentality, where you don't need that money, and when you don't need that much, it frees up your mind to work different types of jobs.
And he likes the job that he has because it allows him to write songs in his head or to write poetry while he's waiting for his patients to come out. And I think that we oftentimes forget that when we just base our self worth so much on either monetary worth or status. And I think about Threau a little bit here, because Threau he never owned his own home. He lived with others, and that freed him up to actually work on jobs that did not pay that much.
He never had kids, he did not have dependence, and we can think, oh, poor Threeau, but we can also think that that was a conscious decision to sort of limit the economic necessities of life so that you could make different choices about the work that you take on.
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in the Outdoors retreat at the Beautiful Cropollu Center. This summer, I'll be co teaching the retreat with Ralph de l Rosa, who's a three time guest of the podcast, author, psychologist, meditation teacher and friend. During these five days together, will enjoy hikes, outdoor meditations, art, insightful workshops, and lively discussion. Our goal is for you to walk away feeling restored, with a firm awareness of new resources and a new
relationship with the gifts nature holds for us. To learn more about this special retreat and sign up, go to one you feed dot net slash nature. That is deeply countercultural to our general world and culture because we are all embedded so deeply in that mindset of more money is a good thing, and more things are a good thing, and fancier things, And it really is a question that I'm always sort of asking, which is like what is
enough and what causes happiness? And you get used to a certain station, right like, oh, well, now I've lived in a place like this. It feels hard to go backwards, but you can. You know, those choices can be made, but they are countercultural. But I do think you're right that we are at a moment where more and more people are asking themselves those questions, and this idea that we have to do what we're doing is not as
true as we think it is, right. I mean, we may have to do what we're doing in order to keep what we currently have right, we get caught up in this standard of living situation. But those choices can be made differently, but they're hard choices to make, you know, I think culturally, oftentimes, our family, you know, our spouses
might have very different opinions. You know, to make this choice to say I'm going to scale this all back right economically is a choice that I think takes a lot of courage and a lot of thought.
My wife, Kathleen is in corporate America, and in corporate America you don't have tenure, and so you change jobs pretty often, maybe every two years or every year, every three years, something like that, and so this question about like which job do I want to take is on our mind pretty often. In this sort of last iteration of job selections. I said, you know, we could move out of the house that we have and we can live anywhere who live in a much smaller house, and
it might allow us to pick different jobs. And that never really crossed either of our minds before that point, and it was thanks to Throw Thereau basically says, you can live in any type of house right that you want,
and all of a sudden your choices change. And that's, like you said, it's a very humbling and very disorienting thought because everything that you thought was so stable, and that what really mattered in life is this sense of security and having a particular type of home and car and all the acouterment of life, like that stuff doesn't factor that forcefully into what makes one feel happy and meaningful and flourishing. And so thereat's a nice reminder to
say you can live otherwise. He walked through our backyard, throw and Emerson two hundred and some years ago, and there were large what Thereau calls family farms in the area. And these family farms were not just subsistence farming, but I mean they were surplus farming, taking vegetables all over New England, and Thereau watched these farmers kill themselves on their family farms. But they were very respectable members of
the community, and they had these amazingly large farms. And Thereau said to his readers in Walden, I never want a family farm. The cost is simply too high, existentially speaking, morally speaking, personally speaking. And I think that that's a really important message for us today.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I think one of the things we hear about the gig economy these days, and we often hear the negatives of it, right, that people don't have benefits, they don't have steady work, and so there are definite downsides to it, right. But the flip side of benefits and steady work and all that is sort of a full time job. And I think if you want to be more intentional, the opportunities are better than they have
been in the past. You know. I often when I was in a software world, which was originally software startups but eventually became consulting in big corporations on very complex software projects. You know, one of the things that I'd bemoaned frequently was that, like, what I wish I could do is just say, you know, what I would like to work twenty five hours a week here, I would like to take this down a notch, but that wasn't sort of on offer in standard corporate America. That's not
the way it works. You just either work full time or you don't work. I mean, like in the sort of professional level I was at, and I think that has started to change. And so I do think there are some positives about the way the work world has changed, and there are also negatives, but there are positives if we are trying to be a little bit more intentional and craft a life, I think I think there are choices now that we're not around ten or fifteen years ago.
I think you're right. And I think also the way that the pandemic made everything virtual, and the way that work time and clocking in really became a thing of the past, and efficiencies of scale really began to matter a lot more. And the way that if I can get a task finished on my own time at two in the morning, because I'm a night owl, that's how it's going to be. And that I think is Thorovian in the sense that his body and his natural rhythms determined what sort of work he was going to do.
If you read Walden. You notice he's working the whole time, but his days are partitioned in this very natural way. So he'd get up and he'd read, and then he'd go out and plant before it gets too hot, and then when it did get hot, he'd come back and write. I mean, there's this ebb and flow of life which just suits certain types of people and certain types of bodies.
And listening to that ebb and flow on a very personal level is very hard to do if you have in a certain corporate brick and mortar establishment where you have to clock in it a certain day and you have to go to lunch at a certain time.
Yeah. Well, you say in the book today most of us are threaded by the TikTok, TikTok, right, time to wake up, time to shower. You say, the clock is after you, a crocodile that devours your adult life. I love that, and I was thinking about it because I work for myself. I get to choose kind of what I do when I do it, and yet the clock is still it's there, you know, it's like, well, the time to show for this, time to show for that. But it's been interesting for me to internalize and it's
taken me several years to really do it. I think like I could choose to schedule interviews in nine in the evening if I wanted. That's not what I have done traditionally, and there may be less people would be willing to talk to me, But that is a choice I can make. I could upend all these things that seem like they're defaults. And I love what you said earlier, where we import, you know, corporate beliefs into working as
a professor. You know, it's amazing the beliefs that I imported from so many years working in a standard sort of software development profession. How much of that I imported into working for myself. I just feel like, even four years in, I'm still unraveling so much of that learning to be more deliberate and thoughtful.
I have so many responses to that comment. I think that if you think about the way that education has been structured as a certain type of corporation, like I entered philosophy to teach. I love teaching, but the way that incentive structures work at lots of universities, they don't
incentifize teaching. In fact, you're doing better if you teach fewer students, less classes, and you publish more the way that corporate life is then internalized and reflected back into spheres of work that we really don't expect that occur in So that's one comment. The second comment that I make is that Threau goes to Walden in order to he says, improve the nick of time.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that phrase with like, I don't fully understand what that means.
So each of us, as surely as I am sitting here, time is passing. I'm getting closer to death. Like that's just the fact of the matter. Like, life goes in one direction to the end, and each of us have a chance to make those increments of time that lead to our grave more or less meaningful. And when he says improve the nick of time, what he's actually saying is can I make those moments that lead to my own demise more meaningful in the inter And that's really important.
I mean, when Socrates says that philosophy is preparation for death, it's just a euphemism for philosophy is figuring out how to live a meaningful life so that when you get there, you're not in big trouble. That's what he means, I think by improve the nick of time. And I think that comment about the alligator and the clock, I mean, I was watching Peter Pan with my kids, and for the first time ever, did I notice that Captain Hook looks a heck of a lot like Peter's dad, who
works too much. And that clock, which is inside that alligator who bid off Captain Hook's hand, is always after the father. The clock is always after the adults. And I think that that's a lesson that sort of throw wanted us to take home, which is pay attention to the clock because it's coming for us no matter what.
Let's pivot away from Threau for a minute. You've written about a number of philosophers, one of which is Nietzsche. Am I saying that correct? Yeah, Nietzsche, I butchered that for about the first twenty five years of my life. That's what happens when you're somebody who kind of reads a lot but never went to school or anything, so
you never know how anything is actually said. Anyway, that's off topic, but I'm tying this back to what we're talking about, because in Nietzsche you talk about something called the transvaluation of values. What does that mean?
I'm glad that you asked, and I'll try to also tie it to the Transcendentalists, because Nietzsche is reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, and we oftentimes think about Nietzsche as the person who said God is dead. But you know who actually said it. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He said
it first. And what Emerson and Nietzsche, then Nietzsche in the eighteen eighties was saying, is that our belief in institutions like the church, like standard political models, like standard forms of education or traditional forms of education, these institutions which we had often turned to to give us a sense of value. In fact, during our day and age and even his these institutions and the respect for these institutions was waning. That's what he meant when he said
God was dead. And in the face of that lack of meaning, that vacuum of human significance, humans like you and me and all of your listeners are tasked with making meaning for themselves, which is where the transvaluation of values comes in. The transvaluation of values, for Nietzsche and also for Emerson, was the task of figuring out how to create a moral system and a fountain of significance
for individuals in the absence of tradition. The way that he does this, at least for Nietzsche, is to figure out how to live in such a way that we emphasize creativity, feelings of power, originality, flourishing life over resentment, guilt, fear, and materialistic greed. And the transvaluation of values is overturning the values of the past and recreating values for yourself. So to overcome it's a process of overcoming the past and even overcoming yourself to some extent.
Yeah, and I think it ties back to everything we've been talking about with the row too, right. It's a question of saying what matters to me? What do I believe in? What work life balance which is not a great term, but do I want to have? How important is money to me versus time with my family? Like, these are all individual questions. They have to be worked out by the individual, and I think that's kind of
what is being pointed to there in the Nietzsche. I want to go one more step with that because there's an idea. I think there's a term that is used called the genealogy of morals, which I believe means looking at where did I get the morals and beliefs that I have, Where have they filtered down from? And what are actually mine? And I think this is a very
confusing process. And it's confusing because and I'm going to read something else that you wrote, which is you say, as it turns out, to become who you are is not about finding who you have always been looking for. It is not about separating you off from everything else. It is not about existing as you truly are for all time. The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it Selfhood is made in the active,
ongoing process. And I think this is what makes trying to figure out what our values are oftentimes very confusing, because we are conditioned so deeply and thoroughly by so many countless causes and conditions that to figure out what mine is and to try and tweeze it apart from what came before, feels to me often impossible.
It's good. One of the problems is that the investigation to figure out where you came from is always enacted by a person namely me or you in your case, that was given birth to and is in large part those very instances of the past.
That's a good analogy, yes.
And so it's kind of like a snake trying to catch its own tail, right, And we should be comfortable with that fact because we're never ever going to get out of it. So we try to figure out where I came from or what sort of inheritances took on from my father or my grandfather or my deep past. And those efforts are really valuable because they give us some sort of insight about both our limitations but also
what might enable us to move forward. And so that process of looking back to try to figure out why do I believe what I do, Why do I value this and not that, Why are my most cherished beliefs my most cherished beliefs. Those questions are all good Nietzschean and I would also say Emersonian and Throvian questions. But the idea that you would come to a single, one and fast answer to those questions and that you would be done the process, that's where all three of the
thinkers believe that you've gone awry. So in other words, you don't end up and you say, oh, now I understand my past completely. I can move forward to victorious Promethean self. No, like that does not work. It's an ongoing process of revision. Emerson says, I am but an experimenter, and he says that in what I like one of
my favorite essays called circles. I'm an experimenter. Sometimes I go in circles, right, I return everything, Emerson says, I unsettle everything is Emerson's words, and I think that that's one of the upshots of Nietzsche's philosophy and why he admires Emerson so much is that Emerson and Thureau were willing to unsettle things, even themselves, and that takes a great amount of courage, patience, and humility. I think, well, yeah, and oftentimes I'm not up for the task. But it's
hard work. But you have to be patient with yourself. I think I.
Love everything you said there, particularly that becoming comfortable with the fact that it's an ongoing process, that we are an evolving creature, and in many ways we are as
you were talking about. I was thinking a little bit about like quantum physics, like the minute you observe it, you change it, and you are the observer of yourself, and that's an ongoing sort of dynamic process, which is why I often think about when it comes to values and what's important to us, that asking that question often is really important, instead of the way that many of us think about it, which is like I'm going to go off on a mountaintop for three days and write
out my mission statement and then I'm done. You know, that's a good exercise. But the recognition that I sort of have to keep interrogating that at least has been my experience. If I want to be dynamic and alive and evolving is to consistently be saying what matters to me? Why does it matter to me? Does it really matter
to me? Knowing that you'll never totally tweeze it apart, right, you know, the minute you're like, now I'm letting go of the values of my parents, and I'm like, but oh god, but then I adopted the values of like that cool skateboarder in seventh grade, Like oh, crying out loud telling me that, you know, Derek Newle has been influencing my my sense of what's important for fourteen years now.
I mean, it's just this constant, funny process. That's why I love that Buddhist idea of countless causes and conditions, like you can't figure it out, but you can make decisions and informed decisions and have a way of living as close as you can to what you value.
I also think that in this process that you're so nicely describing about self recovery, discovery, actualization, this process, you do have feelings about the process, and tapping into how you feel about the process, I think is really important.
So I know, for example, that I'm getting somewhere if I feel uncomfortable, like genuinely uncomfortable, and I know that when I get scared in the process, or I see something that's scared or that I'm afraid of, that that's a moment when I'm supposed to go toward the thought rather than away from the thought. And that I think is present in both Emerson and Throw but also in Nietzsche. So Nietzsche says we must have courage for the forbidden
and forbidden questions. The forbidden questions are those that we don't even feel comfortable asking to ourselves, so it's hard to eat and give voice to them. But if I feel like they're forbidden, if I feel scared, then I know that there's something there that I need to take a closer look at, because it's probably the case that there might be some sort of prohibition or gag order
on me asking this question, and why is that? And that's the type of Nietzschean move that I think is really useful at least in my own life.
Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. John is same as the last time. I love talking with you. I really enjoyed this conversation. And again your latest book is called Henry Att Work Thoroau on Making a Living and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed having you on.
Oh thanks so much. It's such a wonderful program.
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