Greetings from Taipei. As you might have noticed, I haven't been posting episodes as frequently, and that's because I've mostly been spending time with family, my daughter, and just taking it a bit slower in Taiwan. However, I wanted to start putting out some older episodes. In the last year or two, I think my subscriber count has 4 or 5x, which means many of you probably haven't listened to some of the older episodes, which I think are just as good as some of the newer ones. So, without further
ado, I'll dive into this week's episode. Welcome to the Boundless Podcast, exploring the human side of work. I'm your host, Paul Millerd, and I'm fascinated with how we can imagine past the default path to do things that matter. I have conversations with entrepreneurs, freelancers, and thinkers who are questioning the role of work in our lives, who are thinking about how we can unlock creative potential in ourselves and organizations, and are carving new paths in the world
to create a more human future of work. If you want to support the podcast, check out the Patreon link in the show notes, and for more information, go to boundlesspod.com. Today, I talk with Andrew Taggart, who a practical philosopher, entrepreneur, and teacher. He has helped raise tremendous awareness over the last several years, and really been an inspiration for me about how our modern conception of work is undermining our attempts to seek out the good life.
Welcome to the podcast, Andrew. Thank you very much for having me, Paul. I'd love to start with something you wrote a few years ago in a book you titled The Good Life and Sustaining Life. In that, you quote, there may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life. I'd love to start there, and just
maybe lay down some definitions of what do we mean by The Good Life. That book was written in 2014, and it might help to know that as many books have written, it comes on a certain occasion. And the occasion, in this case, was just before teaching at a social entrepreneurship school in Denmark, K.A.S. pilots. And so the time I was trying to think about some questions that are a particular concern for social entrepreneurs, but obviously go well beyond them. And so I titled the book The Good Life
and Sustaining Life. There are a few basic thoughts in the book. One is that these are actually separate questions. How you sustain a human life, how it can continue to go on in its existence, differs a nature in kind from what the nature of an excellent life is. And I've noticed the various ways of making it into in this conversation today, that we muddle that distinction, running one
together with another. I also suggest in that book, The Good Life and the question of the Good Life has logical metaphysical priority over the question of Sustaining Life once you reach a certain point and your own reflections. That is, there are a number of people out there, for example, who, unfortunately, end up committing suicide, despite the fact that their own material needs were met and were continued to be met, in light of the fact that there are plenty of people who
suffer from nihilism, the view according to which there's no meaning in life, and in light of the fact there are a number of people who go through existential awe and we in despair to the point of actually thinking about it from being suicide, all this reveals that there must be some questions in life that supersede our ability to merely survive, get by, make it, or even be successful. To your question, then, The Good Life is really a placeful for those sets of questions.
The question is concerned with what is most real, what is most ultimate, what is most worthwhile, how it's a best to live. We can get into some answers that we provided to those questions, but first and foremost, it's a dwelling place for the kinds of questions that matter most in our lives and can't easily be answered by abaling ourselves. I don't think of the kind of work that we do
on ordinary everyday basis. Right. Yeah, I think in a lot of conversations I have with people as well, this idea of The Good Life, I think people grasp at a maybe conceptual or ambiguous level, and quickly mix it up like you say with the goal of sustaining life and instead kind of flip those. So I think you also go on, or you definitely go on and say one cannot deny that the question of
The Good Life must come before that of sustaining life. So how are people muddling those and flipping that, especially when it comes to thinking about making it income or other things like that? We can think of a number of recent coinages. I was just reverting Joseph Peeper's wonderful book, Leisure the Basit of Culture, Book Eurites in 1947, just after War War 2. And here's one example. He analyzes a considerable length, the neologism, the new coinage,
intellectual work or intellectual labor. And what he suggests is that that that neologism is actually combining one kind of question. The question of The Good Life, which goes to the nature and power of the intellect. Well, then other question, the question of labor. And he goes to show that those actually are brought together in a way that's entirely unhelpful. If the listeners want an updated version, we might think of new coinages such as meaningful work, purposeful work,
purpose driven work, mission driven work. And you can keep going on and on as a vain, in which you begin to find words that in the past would have referred to questions The Good Life being brought under the eagerness of work to the point of becoming agitives for work. So some of them might ask, what's the problem with that? Well, we'll get into that today, I think, in some
fashion or other. But one clue to what could be a problem to thinking in that way is that it limits your imagination with regard to the possibility that there are levels of consciousness or levels awareness or ways of being that actually are far more important. And indeed, are much faster than the kinds of things that can happen in and through work and working.
Another source which is interesting, you actually introduced this to me, Andre Gors, and he you highlighted a quote he said, which is the imperative need for a regular income is used to persuade people of their imperative need to work. And it's been interesting coming up against this in my own journey. And people will invoke the modern phrases almost, when are you going to get serious? And that is so closely linked to you need to have a steady income to be taken serious.
And it's been pretty interesting how people have brought that up, have you encountered other attacks or questions that people ask in this type of vein? That's a good one. Right, you need to have steady income. They will also, usually there's some reference to unbeknownst themselves across
work ethic. You are just, if you're not working, then you're sure, if you're not working in a sense of being gained to employ, since you may want to talk about in this conversation today, then you're probably lazy or you're a trust fund kid or your idol or there are any number of ways of pathologizing or moralizing. And it's amazing the degree to which, as you might have noticed in the, what the other person was saying, that's actually coming from a place of anxiety.
I think so one of the things we can, you can actually do with, if you're confronted with someone who says, well, when you're going to get serious, is that a personal, where is that statement actually coming from? I know that's a point about meditation, but my hunch is that the person is saying quite anxious in some way about the status of his or her own life. I strongly doubt that that person is caring for your fear on the sake and wanting what's best for you. After all,
we can go on a little bit and think about the need for steady income. We can imagine a number of places and times in which A, people working in fully employed. The podcast listener might not know that before the 19th century being gained fully employed, that is having a job was not the standard. It's a fairly recent standard that we've adopted and it's become a gemic that is it's taken over the way we think about what it is to work. People haven't always had steady incomes. People have
looked with all kinds of ups and downs of anxiety flows. To my mind, that's not just an economic question. It's a constitutional question. You might say a question of philosophy meditation. How do I actually go about leading a life that is attuned to the kinds of uncertainties, the kinds of perturbations, the kinds of ups and downs and flows that seem to be a fundamental part of the way they actually operate? There's a lot to unpack. Several people have written about
the history of work. One thing you've written about is both and you touched on this a little earlier, which is the Protestant tradition, but also the role of time and how our conception of that has shifted and really contributed to when you raise these points. A lot of silly phrases we use about managing our time, optimizing for that and might even lead to some of the anxiety
we're feeling today. I'd love to, maybe you could just break down some of the concepts around how religion and time have led to our current state and conception of work. Well, my point of departure is pretty far field from something as mundane as work. That is that's the loss of a picture of the world of the universe, a picture in which in beings used to be, let's use Christian language, used to see themselves as being created beings
created in the light of the creator. There used to be very common dualistic metaphysics in which there was this world and there was the other world. There was what Clisiasis calls living under the sun. There were things that were above the sun. It's commonly said that Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud end up being great deconstructors because they end up at least being given credit for toppling a metaphysic, a metaphysic that used to hold out the idea that when you see your life
where you see yourself, you see it in the light of something that is well beyond yourself. You can call that God, you can call that an afterlife, you can call it another world or whatever. This is very important for various reasons but one way it's important is in the context of time.
Once you have the collapse of any sense that there's anything beyond our ordinary and daily care as a concerns, then you also lose the possibility of there being a sense of time that's eternal or a sense of time that doesn't function according to the dictates of clock time, with a before and an after, something that can be actually standardized and made uniform as happens
in the 19th century. Well, that becomes quite troubling because there's no way therefore to even talk about let alone to to put ourselves in the context of experiences that seem to be a temporal or a tromb. Right. But when you don't have that then you have a sense of life that's totally anxious or in one of our cause I wrote it's a sense of time famine. If there's no sense what so ever of anything that allows you to lose ordinary time and gain a kind of presence return,
then you're only left with and I may go on. If it's a case you also think that the only reality is the one described by scientific materialism which would hold that this is the only life you have. Then you're suffused with a kind of restlessness. So now that language is popular in words like I don't want to waste my time. Time is a scarce resource. These are new ideas.
Time is a scarce resource. I need to figure out how I'm going to spend my time. Think about the metaphors here and I might always be behind in the number of tasks I need to perform and the kinds of things that I need to do. It's a sense of life being overwhelming and of time being the kind of antagonist that is ruling your life in ways that are totally inhospitable for a good life.
And that's the kind of frenzy as one conversation calls it the frenetic mind. That's the kind of frenetic mind that's developed when you no longer have any kind of contact with a sense of reality where that is not the case. It's hard to even put these things into words given the degree to which we've lost a metaphysical picture of the world in which human beings used to be
able to dwell and reside and find themselves. I'll just quote people offhandedly. He says that a cedya which is one of the afflictions of a modern age is not defined as idleness or whatever. This is a cedya which is a Latin term is actually trying to describe being quote and disagreement with oneself. So we can put those all together and say that our sense of modern time is rather like a crew or symptom of the degree to which we're in discord with ourselves. We're in disagreement
with ourselves. So with people, I'd be curious just to know when when did these ideas start to resonate and kind of stir around and as you wrote them. I mean over the past year I think this idea and concept is definitely struck a chord with many people. I share your article from Aeon. If work dominated here every moment would life be worth living and this article seems to be
really hit on a painful point for people. But when was it discovering people or this idea of total work or the conversations you're having with people, when did this all start to pop up for you and so I need to start writing and putting this out there. That's a really great question
and that may give us a little bit into the monobography. It's interesting that and I'll preface my Marvel saying it's really interesting that I read paper I think is really as 2014 and I thought it was an interesting short book, a fascinating short book but it didn't yet resonate with me or touch on and I read it again I think it was in 2016 and also it was also it was a wonderful book and it was illuminating that didn't quite grip me or grab me. It was only in
April 2017 that I began to to wake up to what he was really saying. I could feel it more in my heart I might say and this is because I read it this is a nice little mystical story. My wife Alexander had sent me a very trivial newspaper article that appeared in the New York Times in April 2017. The article simply had to do with people who were retiring in the United States and it was suggesting that people were retiring would be better off at least working part time.
It was giving what might be called an instrumental account of work. Work is good for various sorts of things. It's good for your health. It was argued. It's good for a sense of friendship or community. It's good for having a sense of purpose and so on and from a certain point of view that's just common sense and it's not something it's not if you just read it as a nice
paper article. It's fine. It's trivial. It's something. But I saw I had a good stolt shift because stolt shift was like I finally see what people was getting at and maybe want to throw my computer across the room. I'm so angry with it. I'm so angry with it and the anger as you might know is totally disproportionate from what I described. So when something is a real thumb is if you feel an emotion is disproportionate with the situation and there's probably something very important
to investigate there. What I've been to realize is that I could go back and see the conversations that have a conversation partners who are living all around the world. Some are living in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Some are living in New York. Many of which are scattered throughout the world. I could begin to see that the kinds of things they were talking about began to be intelligible in the light of people's ideas about total work. So the first time I thought
wait a minute could it actually be the case that what people had prophesied in 1947. I'm using that word a little bit loosely here. Actually is coming to pass now that we actually are living in an age of polar work. So it's something like a good stolt shift. It's like holy shit. This is not just an interesting book. This is, among the many interesting books in my bookshelf, it's not just an interesting book detailing a particular period of time in Germany after
World War II. I'm wondering about what leisure could be. How could be a state of a soul? Saying some things that I feel really antiquated. I thought, holy crap. He's actually speaking to us. That moment when I thought something has to be written about this. Then I wanted to think it's simply not enough. This happens often with people who have some kind of mission or a Buddhist and service in life. They begin to realize that it's really not enough
just to talk one-on-one to people. So I thought the one way to try to bring this out into the public sphere. Then it should be born in mind that I had been living quite like reclusively from around 2013, it was in 2017. Pretty, pretty, pretty reclusively. I felt that it was so strong and that it had brought out into public sphere that left behind some kind of contemplative reclusiveness. The things that I've been writing about before that, I had to do more with kind of the nature of
our readinality, questions of philosophy and mysticism. I can tell about what that means. It's a strange transition to make to go from. I've really secluded remote contemplative life to one in which I was confronting what I thought was not the only affliction, but surely one of the greatest afflictions of our time, within a kind of ruthlessness, or a kind of in your face, it does. So it was a very strange transition for me to make from the first line to the second.
You use a phrase practical philosopher to describe yourself. I think just in terms of seeing that on the other end, it does make you appear at least approachable. Also, the way you write is very accessible. Was that a conscious choice as you left academia and started writing a little more publicly and then even more so with total work? Yes, I think that that would take a while to go through the history of philosophy, practical philosophers, and not the only one who's used to,
but it's not used very frequently today, so far as I can tell. The trouble begins, according to some historians, such as Pirado historians of philosophy, at the end of the medieval period, the if you go back to ancient Greece, if you go back to India, or if you go back to China, you find that philosophy, whether it's the kind espoused by Socrates or Plato or the philosophical philosophical side, the Buddha or Lao Tzu or Confucius is is is
imminently practical. It is concerned and by practical I mean it's concerned with the questions of how to live, what are conduct and life is, what is wisdom, what is it to lead a wise life? It's not that they didn't ask other questions, they did ask questions about what is also in reals, physical questions they ask questions about logic, yes all sorts of questions, but as business people will say at the end of the day, at the end of the day,
philosophy at the end of the day, the joke, philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Well, philosophy was grounded in the search for a good life, for leading wisely, for leading the best kind of life, not just on one's own, but it turns out in schools, around other people. So that's the tradition I'm
trying to recuperate in the modern world. The trouble is that philosophy is it, it wins its way through the west up until up until the journey loses, loses you might say faith and loses track of itself, to the point at which today if you talked to some of that about philosophy, usually you'll have, usually you'll have to clear up a lot of misconceptions, one misconception, so that's already interesting theorizing other misconceptions that it's only interesting
to them asking questions, never an answering them. Another misconception is the only sort of thing that experts in the universe do, and you can go on through all these different misconceptions, and so practical philosopher was an attempt kind of a creative attempt to try to move, I think it's
redundant, frankly, but try to move philosophy back to its roots, right? Without having to go through, as I've been doing right now, a very lengthy dissertation on what happened to philosophy such that it lost its way and no one became relevant to the case and concerns of ordinary people. So that's where I came up with practical philosopher. It tries to give someone the sense that
philosophy is actually grounded in something roughly speaking practical. No, it's not practical, the sense that it's going to help you build a bridge, but there are other uses of the word practical that Americans are familiar with, namely something that can be, quote, applied to their lives. That would
be considered practical. So staying on that theme, I think, you've written, and in a way that makes some of these questions of what is a good life and sustaining life, at least for me, easy to grapple with, you write about making a living, and you break it down into really three things. I use what you've got, exchange what's in hand, and offer what you can. So how could people think about those three things as they might pertain to even work their doing in a job or other things in
life? Right, so moments ago, we were thinking about philosophy and one of the things it does is it helps the shy life on what's most worth living. That would be the question of good life. So maybe the most the life that's worth leading is attuned to wisdom or beauty or justice or the
sacred or I guess we can just call it meaning there are all sorts of answers to that. Suppose you begin to think about that and you think, hey, on a second, I need to somehow find a way to create the conditions of possibility for my continued to deepen that investigation into beauty. I think we can make this one concrete. Suppose it's the case in my artist, and I want to make
beautiful things. That's wonderful. Well, how do I go about actually making a living? And I take the word making a living to be a neutral way, a really neutral way, or having a live with it is a really neutral way of talking about the question of sustaining life. And when I thought about this more, I consider that there could be three ways. And they can all be compatible with one another.
So the first way, well, maybe we can set this aside for a moment. We can say, hang on a second, people are narrowly confusing something like having an income with having a live with it. Right. A live with it can be considered a very neutral, broad term, which affect if we say I'm able to survive and support those who depend upon me. And if you want, you can even care to make people to reliably survive and reliably support these who care upon me.
So if we take that, then we can ask the question abroad. If we ask the question, how do I get a good income, then we're already stuck with some answers such as, oh, I need to have a full-time job provided by a particular kind of organization. And therefore, I need to live in a particular kind of place. You get a whole suite or a whole way of life, a whole way of being in the world that comes out of asking that question. So we're trying to ask a broader question here. So there should be
three different answers in there. They can be woven together in various ways. The first is an answer that comes from Indigenous peoples. People have lived off the land. It holds that it actually is possible to use the land in a wise and considerate and careful way. That might sound as if it's far-field from the lives that you and I are leading, but it's not necessarily. There still are people
who live in eco-villages. There are people who, in the 60s, we saw back the land movement. I think today we're starting to see, in fact, there are people who are trying to live closer to land, maybe not on its own, but in concert with the other two. There's a poet named Wendell Berry, who's been writing poetry for many years, quote, the good life. Meanwhile, he's actually been a farmer for quite some time, sustaining life. So that's the first one. There are various ways which we think
about living off the land. The second one is there are various ways we can think about not being gainfully employed in neuroscience, but exchanging the sorts of things that are valuable in the marketplace. The marketplace, by my lights, is not necessarily a terrible thing. It's just a limited endeavor. So we need to learn how to use, we need to learn how to be involved and fair exchanges with the people. That could mean giving the ear a freelancer, being involved in
exchanges of value, that provides some kind of service and exchange for money. There's nothing inherently that matter with that, but it may not be the end of the story. What if it's the case you live in a place a lost, interdible living? So you're able to live off the land in a certain way, or maybe it's the case that you live off the grid. Meanwhile, you're able to be involved
in forms of exchange in people that allows you to have some money coming your way. And there's a third way, the way that people are very unfamiliar with, and it involves the concept of the gift and the broad sense. You can begin to analyze certain kinds of ways of making a living or certain livelihoods. You notice that there have been people who have been involved in non-tick for tar relationships, in relationships that are not predicated on exchange or in forms of equivalence.
These are pretty obvious when you hear them. You can share something with someone. You can share all sorts of things with someone. And if you want to, you can take a heuristic. If you can share something with someone and you did that in lieu of buying it, then you're involved in gift. You can lend something to someone without interest. So maybe I go over to my neighbor's house and she offers to lend me some tools down to buy them. And then I can just give them back when I'm done.
And you can be involved in various forms of gift. Maybe that will be one we'll talk about further. So I live in a gift economy. And that doesn't involve receiving money from people all the way around the world. But the money I'm receiving is in order to sustain my life. It's not an exchange for something I have or have not provided that person with. So let's just imagine that you try to put these together. Then you might say, look,
can I live in such a way that's closer to the earth, post the land? That's one question. Another question is, can I be involved in certain forms of exchange that are fair-minded and equitable? And third is, can I also be involved in certain relationships in which exchange is not the principle by which we live? And frankly, that's the basis for all sorts of relationships in which we just forget these. If you're involved in forms of exchange.
Anyone in a family can I think? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It definitely understands this intuitively. If you have a family to be sure, if you have friends, I think what's a bit tragic is that I don't see why we can't actually broaden the circle of trust you might say. So it includes people with whom we can be on friendly terms. So it's a bit of a bourgeois assumption that I can only be involved in gift relationships with family or with family and close friends.
Why can't I actually expand that circle of trust? It's easier if one is involved in a religious tradition because then you just say, we're members of a church, for example, members of the synagogue and you're more apt to be able to engage in forms of gift. But there's really no reason, especially today, is an interesting time in which you actually couldn't expand that circle of relationships that different kind of economic flow with people with whom you can become friendly.
Yeah, and I wonder if also I think especially in the West or in the US, I think things have almost geared so much towards number two, exchange what's in hand and focusing on exchanging time for work that it's almost led to a failure of imagination rather than people's inability to do these things. Is that something that resonates with the conversations you're having with people? It does. I can give you one example that helps to bring this out to present the assumptions.
So you should also speak with people for a number of years. Once someone will write to me and see what I'd be interested in having just one conversation with him or her. And this happened with someone living in Eastern Europe who happens between the United States. And so I had the conversation with this person and it seemed as if it was a nice conversation. I will usually send some extensive information about the gift they come in.
This person said, I don't understand. Even though we've talked about a little bit, I don't really understand the gift kind of. In fact, I disagree with it. It was really interesting in email every see. This is very common. I'm just trying to bring out the assumption. I'm not trying to take on this fellow. It's just a very common assumption. He said, I think of gifts as this kind of thing that you give for no apparent reason kind of spontaneously. So that's one condition.
Another condition is that you don't expect anything in return. Anyone on in this fashion. And this is very puzzling because if you think of your birth, you have the expectation that your parents will give you something. You don't know what it is perhaps, but they will. It'd be strange to say, actually, I had the expectation you're going to give me some of my birth date and therefore that nullifies it as a gift.
Right. Sorts of times in which gifts are not necessarily unexpected. They are expected. And so he ended up trying to give money to me in the form of exchange based on the idea that was a service. I bring this up because this is a very common assumption people make. So it was based on kind of the value I gave to him and the amount of time I quote, spent with him. It's interesting because it's not that he gave it very little. He gave it,
you know, a fine number, but it didn't feel very good. And there's a so there's a phenomenology of giving and receiving and differs in nature and in kind of phenomenology of being involved in transactions. The transaction is clean, it's frictionless. It comes with certain kinds of expectations. And if anything, you feel a bit relieved when someone pays your invoice. You feel a bit burdened until it happens. There's a cool set of experiences associated with that.
That actually is much different from what it's like to receive a gift from someone who wants to actually support life-threatening. It's really nice. Once you have the flavor of those two, it's kind of hard to go back. You can still be okay with being involved in exchange. But it's like having some nice food but then you have crème brûlée over here. It's amazing. I'm sure you've had this experience even with a paper or a Patreon.
It's not a great example, but at least you can use some flavor. Wow, someone out there, someone I don't even know wants to support my life and not because I did something in particular. It's because there's some hint that there's something about the way that I'm living,
the way that I'm living is personal wants to support. So that brings this full circle back to the question of good life and sustained life and how you leap a good life and how you able to support that life in a way that's called consummant with good life and your leading. Hey there, it's Paul and thanks for listening to the Pathos Path podcast. I wanted to take a quick break to ask you a small favor. I'm really loving doing this show and for the first time,
have the support to help me take it to the next level. Unfortunately, it's still pretty hard to spread the word on podcasts, but that's where you can help me out. If you enjoyed these episodes, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Apple or Spotify. You simply shared the episode on social media or with some friends. Finally, if you're enjoying this conversation, you probably like my book too. It's been read by thousands from around the world and each week,
I get notes saying how much the book helped people on their path. You can grab the audiobook, read by me or other versions in the link in the show notes below. Let's get back to the show. Right. That definitely resonates for me as well. I've found the upsides of the relationships through the gift have just been well beyond what I've expected. I think a lot of my conversations or relationships with people have turned into something that you're almost both acknowledging
at the beginning that this is a long-term relationship. We believe in each other. We don't know what we'll come up with, but it's a commitment and it's pretty powerful. The other side of it is it's a little scary when people believe in you too. It's almost easier to avoid these type of relationships. I think this is why a lot of people reject the gifts when you offer them things because it does have that binding effect. It's like, well, now I need to invest not to
overly use the financial language or anything in that relationship. Right. It can't above be for lack of better word more than intimate. As Lewis Hyden has wondered for a book called The Gift, points out, are such that they entangle us more than one another. When you go and purchase something at a convenience store and use your credit card, you're doing something that's just fine. You're just transacting. I have no I have no I have no truck with that.
The key to it is that it's cleaning of no relationship with the worker there. No problem. When someone gives you a gift, there is a kind of magnetism or there is more energy associated with that gift because it's not about a clean cutting off quite the contrary. It's about
greater entanglement. You're going to be more involved with that person. If I may use the word debt here in a metaphorical sense, so not in a financial sense, there is a kind of there is a kind of unpaid not the right language here, but there is a way in which you are always
already indebted to one another and you were never quite get out of that. There are always of having a view of a conclusion to the relationship for sure, but the key to gift is the on-goingness of the relationship, the indefinite on-goingness of that relationship. So yes, the one reason people may not be ready for is that it's just it takes off a lot of
guardrails. We've spoken about some of them already, but it keeps taking up more and more guardrails, the sorts of things that we're familiar with, and by doing so, it requires more trust on both of our parts and it invariably brings about greater intimacy or at least a greater closeness if you want to use that word instead. So I'd love to get back to some of the the guidance you've offered
in terms of sustaining life and making a living. I think you might be one of the first philosophers who's writing giving advice such as read up about the gig economy, but you also offer different perspectives such as do a wide range of things, begin a practice in living, cultivate good manners, consider being nomadic just so you'll have less stuff. So there might be two questions there.
One is just water some of the modes of living that you've experimented with in your own journey over the past five or so years and have these evolved their different perspective on these in the past couple of years. Yeah, so I used to live in New York City on the upriside, not far from Central Park, and that was my now wife and I moved from New York City at the end of 2012 and we moved not to to San Francisco or Seattle but rather to rule up Alaska down the tip of
very tip of Tennessee. That's probably not a common move. No, yeah, we move into almost almost complete isolation. No, it's not a common move and I'm not necessarily the advice park who's then necessarily. It was it was it was wonderful though because it was the first time that we started meditating quite, quite religiously. So it wasn't really 2013 and I think it helped us
to challenge a number of assumptions about place and dwelling. So since that time that we started to live rather seasonally nomatically, picking up and moving on and seeing what a new place might have in store for us and that was made possible in part by the fact that I began to realize just from a practical point of view that it was actually easier today to have philosophical
conversations over Skype or what's now zoom than it was to have them in person. So the very fact that that I could speak with someone, well I'm an appalachian, the person could be also living nomatically and at one point could be in Bali and at another point could be in South Africa and another point could be in San Francisco. Need it possible for those entanglements I was referring to before in those entanglements. I think this is really quite an interesting paradigm shift.
Neither person needs to be a settler at that point in order to maintain your relationship and they don't have to meet face to face. The example I come on the use is that of let's say a barber. If that if you find your clients moves that's the end of that relationship with that. If you move that's the end of your entire business. You have to start over. Imagine it's possible to cut hair
in such a way that you're neither in one location one time. You are one location, it persists another location and the next time you're in a different location, I mean the person in a location and so on and so forth. So I should just mention that as an aside that's the backdrop to our experiments and nomadism. Yes. Someone in the tech industry just took that as an idea. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We're counting AI solution. Yeah, right. Exactly.
Yeah, it's spot on. Well, since that time we were living quite nomatically and experimenting
with being in different places, mostly in the United States. I can say more about that, but nomadically living for us is not quite the same as the digital nomad who's picking up that quite frequently and moving on, moving on, and say once every couple of days or once in a couple of weeks, we actually would be in a particular location in four, three months or four months or five months in part to see why not we wanted to be there longer.
Right. And- No, you had two questions there. No, I think that's interesting. It's how are you thinking about just I think we almost hear the extremes of things? We see, okay, now you can be this digital nomad and use that as a reason to just constantly move. How do you think about balancing that with trying to invest or dedicate time to your local communities and still building those relationships? How have you guys approached that in the places you've been? I think that's one
of the biggest open questions that's worth asking. One, and that question goes all the way back to the beginning and civilization. A historian and futurist, your podcast listeners, maybe familiar with his Yubel Harri, whose first book I think is much better than his second one, his first book on sapiens. And he describes as does James E. Scott's book against the grain, how civilization begins to build itself around 10 to 12,000 years ago with the advent of
a agriculture, single grain agriculture. The reason I'm bringing this up is that that's the beginning of settlerism. Civilization tends to require settlement. And so that's an assumption, you might say, in the background quite recently, the assumptions that you might say a good life is a one that's settled in the context of a particular kind of community. That's one way of answering that question. And nomads of gypsies and people who are roaming have tentatively
seen as being questionable, questionable status at best, right? Not necessarily to be trusted. I'm bringing this up because it's an amazingly fascinating question that today we're going to through this particular set of historical, cultural, and economic conditions were able to re-ass that question again. And the question is, what is it better to be a nomad than a settler? What kinds of nomadisms are available to us? What kind of settlerism is available to us?
And how do we begin to get that right? I know to answer your question. So now I'll come to my own name. It's still not a question for me and my wife. I think against the backdrop of this is something that another writer named Robert Bell has spoken a lot about. He's a late sociologist who talked to him in the 1970s and 80s about the loss of community and American life.
So if you're looking for, as we are in part, the kind of place where you can become rooted, at least for part of the year, then it's not necessarily clear as a yet that community exists. Considered by contrast, the case of Marva Zuckerberg, who continues to talk about Facebook, bringing about quote connections and community. But I have no idea what a global community means. That's a neilagism, right? What in the world, what in the work that possibly means?
You have examples that you can come up with when you envision a community, you might envision a community along the lines of what this New York writer wrote about in a piece on Orange to the Iowa. It still exists. It's a place where people, that's multi-generational. It involves their being neighbors who come by when you're sick and involves gossip, involves a certain conformity.
It usually involves a certain religious uniformity. And so on, you can begin to imagine that, but apart from Orange to the Iowa, where do you actually see that existing? So I haven't, on our travels, we haven't seen a lot. We haven't seen too much of this.
Too much of the idea that there is actually a rooted, grounded community that has a multi-generational character in which people are coming together, not just for the sake of mutual interests, but because they've got each other's back, you might say, they've got each other's backs. So to me, these are questions that are being thrown into the air, and what I call it on subtle
time, we're unsettled because we don't know whether it's best to be a center. We don't know whether it's best to know mag, witness the growth of we work, a realm of other co-working spaces and colluding spaces, right, witness that phenomenon. We also don't really know what community is. I think our language is actually is deceptive here. The more we spot, speak about community, the more we speak about folks, about there being folks, the less encounters we actually have. Communities and folks.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. As I'm thinking about this, it almost brings me back to that idea of total work because this community you're describing could be a good descriptor of a small town I grew up in in Connecticut, and a lot of it still has that, but without a lot of my generation because my generation's success was really going to the city and getting these jobs.
So it's been interesting to see the generations before me, everyone is still there and does have that close-knit community, but then it's very fragmented when you get to our age because we're spread out all over. We have a lot of conversations, at least within our family, like how do you sustain this? Everyone's living almost even on the same street, and it's very bizarre to be having these conversations because you're balancing that with the definition of what success is, which is
highly tied to work. Work is working. Increasing in the city. Right. Yeah, there aren't a lot of jobs where I grew up, but it's interesting to hear that, be having that conversation and also just be knowing what people accept as what is seen as the right thing to do for people. Engine is just out of that particular movement, and has been really well described by a number of people.
Carole Polanian has booked a great transformation, writes about how, in the early industrial period, we begin to see the force of the brooding of people from the countryside and their subsequent movement into the city. That's just one example. Raymond Williams has booked the country in the city, describes this relationship as well, as does a recent book called Worth the Last Thousand Years, in which we continue to see the movement from embeddedness and small
town or a village on the countryside and a shift to that in the city. You can look at it in China. You mean the industrial, the seemingly inevitable industrialization process gives rise to these kinds of movements. Economists think this is a toll upside. I think that I take a more measure of you. It does allow for some people to disinvent themselves from the problems with a small town community, both of us, I suspect, are weirdos, right? I like that, right? I mean, I'm using that in a
kind of a cheerful way. We're weirdos. We're a bit strange. Well, small towns tend to be quite conformist to nature. They're a bit rigid. So there's really our upsides to having that energy flow. The people movement of people into more cosmopolitan spaces, which is New York City. It was wonderful the kind of people that met there. So there is an upside, but people don't usually account for the downside, the various downsides. I think that's most evident, for example, in the case of
the elderly. So how exactly are we going to care for elderly people as they continue to live longer and as families are no longer caring for them? You might say, well, it's obvious. It's kind of weird too. We talked about that in this exchange. Right. But I'm seeing my grandmother right now, who's who's nearing the end of her life and she's going through various kinds of institutions as her health continues to erode. And that is not the kind of death. If we're thinking about the good
life, what is it to lead a good life? What philosophers used to say is that to lead a good life was to lead the kind of life of which you'd also have a good death. When Tanya, the Renaissance philosopher thought that a good life was most evident when it came to how you died. This desire for success, this movement to the city is kind of the negative externality, so to speak, is that we have certain kinds of the rich social embeddedness, the rich social
texture of life is being fraed. We don't yet have text solutions, so to say, I'm being a little bit cheeky here, but we really don't have text solutions or some other social innovation solutions to overcome these problems. With the result that loneliness among the elderly is quite high. And I would also say that loneliness among all sorts of people is quite high.
Right. It's interesting to touch on tech again. Maybe we dive into that a little, but I mean, I've heard jokingly people say, when I get old, we'll just get a medical robot for you, if you care of you. It's already on the way in China. Right. I'm sure Japan as well with its elderly aging population, but you speak with a lot of people in the tech industry and having these conversations around the deeper philosophical and
ethical questions. It does seem, if you just follow the big questions they're facing, they just seem to be totally missing the mark. So what's coming up in these conversations and what should they be or how should they be framing some of these questions? Great question. I recently started a NLLC called a school, which is from the ancient Greek meaning the withdrawal from leisure,
which also means work. It's kind of an insight, a joke of sorts, and started a school as a way of explicitly trying to talk with sea level executives and start up teams, both the kinds of assumptions they have surrounding the technology they're trying to bring into the world. It seems to me that we're at a time at which technology used to be the case, you could say that Silicon Valley was the kind of a nerdy kid who was rebellious as some articles point out.
Well, now it's the case that it's no longer the nerdy rebellious kids, the kid in power. Right. Well, it's more as Tristan Harris has pointed out a last couple of years and has campaign against social media and phones in so far as their hijacking or attention is that you can no longer take the innocent naive line that it's just technology, that it's just a platform that's utterly separate from, therefore not at all nested within broader cultural ethical and political
questions. I think we're at a point that's quite awkward, so to say, because I don't think based on what I've heard that a lot of people in positions of power and technology necessarily have the ability to think through these broader questions even as they can't help but be confronted with them. So that's an awkward moment. It's a moment what I might call a great model. It's a great model when you can't just sweep the questions aside. You remember Mark Zuckerberg
talking before Congress, it was just a model kind of answer. Right. So you can't sweep the questions aside but you don't yet have the ability to think about them very clearly. That to me is an amazingly interesting time. So we don't yet know the answers to those questions but the questions themselves need to be raised over and over again and with greater urgency.
Well it's also also just a lack of the right language to discuss these because everything is so tack-in financialized that I think philosophy gives a door to a different type of words or language to just describe these. I think that's also why somebody like David Graber seems to be resonating because he's coming at it as an anthropologist and in some of these different models just give that different words or even word phrases like total work to help reframe or rethink some of these
discussions. Right. What? This is it obviously. I don't want to say too much about instrumental case for liberal arts. I'll be I have a piece coming out next month in courts in which I'll be talking about the liberal arts tradition. So what I don't want to say and what follows is that the liberal arts are quote good for business. They are, so that's not their chief concern. But let's suppose that we we want to speak secondarily that liberal arts is being
good in these places. That's because it is good. That is it does bring to bear a wider vocabulary with which discuss society, psychology, philosophy, even religious assumptions. Take one word as an example or impact or scale. Let's go stick with impact. Impact is a word
that probably makes sense based on consequentials assumptions. Now in philosophy, consequentials consequentialism is the ethical view which holds that you want to bring about the best possible consequences or at least the least undesirable consequences or the most good or at least bad or overall. So you can all understand the fetishization of impact or social impact or of technological impact. You can all understand that as a kind of fetish. If it's a case you are depressed suppose
that you only want to look at the magnitude of your consequences. But that is not the only way to look at any action whatsoever. You can look at it in terms of what you later on is called deontology, namely the intention behind the action or you can look at it in terms of the one that I'm interested in which is which is ancient virtue ethics. It holds that you look at actions in terms of the virtues that are being exercised in the salient case at hand. This is about one
example. It's one example in which the vocabulary is way too thin to talk about the impact let's say or the understanding or the significance of self-driving cars. Right. So you might have I think I have people that listen to this who are in traditional corporate worlds and they might say all right these these are great ideas. I had a good time listening to this conversation. But to that population
that might say I can't just quit my job. How can somebody cultivate more of this philosophical mindset or just one or two small practices they could do to perhaps move slightly further away from total work? Oh yeah that's that's a lovely question. So I don't even think you necessarily have to quit your job to start off with. Right. And to be sure right this is you can begin very very simply incrementally. One thought you can begin to have or an exercise in the
platform would be called disidentification. What you can do for example is begin to take your work less seriously in virtue of disidentifying from the identity with the worker. So total works basic premises that we are all workers. I mean workers first to last. When you introduce yourself to someone almost invariably you will ask the person's name and then you'll go on to ask what the person does for living. That's a that's a preceptosition that's revealing total work and
practice. So you can begin by just saying hang on a second I can actually perform the work I'm doing for as long as I'm doing that at least for the time being without actually finding myself to the identity of being a CEO or being a nail manager or whatever is the case or being a data scientist. Now that's only a first exercise because what's really interesting about that is if you actually perform it you really do. So let's call the meditation action. Then something
opens up within you. It's a question. Who really am I? Who fundamentally am I if I'm not that?
After all if you're being to think about your life you almost invariably think about it in terms of education as being an instrument for being in the workplace and then being in the workplace and it's conferring upon you a particular kind of identity and then being involved in the and the kind of game of ascending some kind of ladder or other whether it's promotions or status seeking or or or or greater compensation or whatever right you've been playing that game long
on. So if you disidentify from even playing that game all the while still performing whatever duties or responsibilities you have and if you can ask the question who am I why am I here if not that then you have some starting points. The third thing you can really start to do is pay attention this is the more interesting one so far is how it's actually not satisfactory. The first two exercises
they might bring bring into the third but you could also come to it some other way. You can say yourself wait a minute is it really the case that the rest of my life is going to be quote spent doing this kind of work that each and every day of my life is going to be ordered according to dictates of work. That there is something that seems if I just look at it close enough inherently unsatisfactory. Something doesn't quite quench some kind of thirst I have. Then you're well in your
way to what might be called seeking and seeking can take place even as you have a job. And then if you go from there now that you're actually keen on seeking you're keen on waiting what is this what is this whole damn thing about if it's not actually about work first and foremost. At that point then it's amazing what sorts of things might open up to you. You might start caring but other things. Now this is usually people say oh you need to have a hobby. Hang on a second
right you know usually old people say well you need to have hobbies. That's a little bit too thin. I mean I'm not saying you can't have a hobby or some hobbies but there definitely are things in life or aspects of reality that reveal themselves to you that are much more meaningful than having a hobby. And those are the ones still to be discovered. So you just identify from from the claim that you just are a worker. And then you begin by slowly going into a deeper and deeper search
inquiry into yourself one of the sorts of things that you might start caring about. No take you a long way. A long way away from the idea of being just a total worker. That's amazing and I think a gift to people and very practical if I will advice. I might offer step four would be subscribing to your total work newsletter. So if people if people did want to engage more where where can they find what you're
working on and writing about. Right I'm writing a book on total work and newsletter which comes out once a week or once every two weeks can be found. If you google my name and your tag or total work newsletter or you probably include a link and the podcast it's going to be I think get review backslash and your taggers like this. Yeah I can link to it. That's great. Well fantastic I think you've offered so a lot of wisdom for us today and I definitely
learned several things so thank you so much for spending the time today. Well thank you very much Paul. It was really a pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Boundless podcast. If you have feedback, guest suggestions or ideas I should explore I'd really love to hear from you. One of the best things about this journey I've been on is connecting with all the people from around the world who are resonating with some of the ideas some crazy some better some worse
that I'm putting out into the world. You can email me at Paul at think-boundless.com or find me on the various socials which I link in my site. So I'm focused on keeping this podcast at free clear of requests for ratings on various platforms. Basically I just want to keep it useful interesting and worth listening to. You guys hear enough about different underwear and sleep mattresses that people are pushing. I mean how many mattresses can people sell? It's
unbelievable. Anyway if you do want to support this podcast and support this crazy journey I'm on you can do that on Patreon through the show notes link and this is just so much fun and I really thank you for listening and continue to feedback and support.