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What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello everyone, and welcome to academic life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Valerie Tiberius, who is the author of what do you want out of life? A philosophical guide to figuring out what matters. Welcome to the show, Dr. Tiberius.
- [01:31]
C
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:33]
B
I am so glad that you're here and that we are going to learn about your book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [01:42]
C
Sure. I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. I live in Minneapolis. Let's see. Tell you about myself. I have two adorable dogs that I'm devoted to. That's important. And a husband. Maybe I should have mentioned him before. Before the dogs. I that that's good. For now, you can ask me other questions about my background. I'm not sure what people would be interested in finding out.
- [02:17]
B
I will. And some of that you cover in the book. So we'll be having more questions about what led you to your field and your own experiences. But before we do that, I know that in order to become Dr. Tiberius, you had to go to school for quite a long time. When you were looking forward at going to college, did you know what you wanted to study.
- [02:37]
C
I didn't. When I went to college, which was quite a long time ago, it was so different from how students approach college now. Students these days, from my interactions with them, you know, they. They tend to be quite focused on careers and credentialing, and they have thoughts just right out of the gate about what they want to major in. And for me, one thing about me is my father was a professor at the University of Toronto. And so because my father had a PhD and my mother had a master's degree, whether I would go to college or not was never. That was never a question. It was just, you know, like a continuation of high school in my family. So before I got to college, I just. I was. It was just continuing education. And I thought, oh, I should take classes that they didn't offer in high school. And I. When I. So I took my first Introduction to Philosophy class and, you know, fall of my first year at the University of Toronto, and it just felt like a fish being returned to the water. I thought, oh, my God, this is. This is amazing. People think like this about, like, sure, there are books about these thoughts that I've had since I was a child, and there's. There are people who think about these weird questions just the way I think about them. So it was one of those experiences where really, the first week of classes, in my Intro to Philosophy class, I was 100% sure that's what I was going to major in. I did eventually start thinking that at some point I would need to have a job. So I. Because the academic job market was. It was not as bad then as it is now, but it was still not great. And so I. I did a second major, actually, in environmental studies, because that was sort of. This was the 80s, and that was kind of the beginning of profound concerns about the environment. And. And I thought, well, that, you know, there'll be useful careers there. But at that point, I was so into philosophy that I had professors who. One professor in particular who was really encouraging me to go to grad school, and he helped me figure out how to do that and where to apply. And that was the early part of that journey.
- [05:32]
B
And you kept going and you became a philosopher. You let us know in the book that while in many ways it was a perfect fit, in other ways, it was not quite that so much of the field and the foundational texts that philosophers point to were by white guys and women's concerns or practical concerns weren't really part of the philosophy.
- [05:56]
C
Right. That my, My, My origin story is a Little bit whitewashed. I've glossed over some of the conflicts that I had along the way. I should say the also that my, it's important that my dad was really interested in philosophy. He had studied it as an undergraduate and he didn't, you know, he didn't, he wasn't a philosopher, he was an educational psychologist. But in, at home we talked about a lot of philosophical problems in a kind of analytics style. So I, I, I grew up enjoying arguing with my dad. And that was part of the, I think the, you know, fish, return to water experience was that it was a style of conversation that I was very familiar with, but in the context of my home. My father of course, wasn't, well, not of course, but my, my dad was a good loving parent who had a degree in psychology. So he wasn't just interested in winning a point, he was interested in exploring issues. And that was very much conveyed to me that philosophy was about, that it was about using these analytic thinking tools to try to get at something. True. When I got to college, I found that often, often I had that experience, but just as often I had a different kind of experience where the point of talking was to win and you sort of use your analytic thinking schools as a, as a weapon to fight over who has the right point. I encountered quite a few fellow students who, they would want to win the point even if they didn't actually agree with the side they were arguing for. So it was much more like a kind of formal debate where you might be arguing for the side you don't agree with ultimately, but you're tasked with arguing for it. And that I found very alienating and difficult to deal with. So even in college I was a bit conflicted. Like, I loved the approach to questions. I loved that philosophy had this incredibly expansive sense of what it's possible to ask. You know, as a. We often, philosophers often say, like, the great thing about philosophy is you can do philosophy of anything. You can ask philosophical questions about absolutely anything. I love that. But I did not like the situations where I got into these heated arguments where it really did seem like the point was beating up the other person or vanquishing or something like that. I remember a story, an experience I had as an undergrad where I took very small seminar, just three students and the professor. And the class was, I think it was epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge. So we were talking about things like truth and reasoning and justification, evidence. These are the kinds of concepts we were talking about. And there was a point at Which I thought, we're talking about these concepts. Truth, especially, I was interested in as a concept. And I realized a lot of what was happening in the class. Truth was not the point. The point was being better than the other person at arguing. So I wrote this paper where I basically made that point. I wrote this paper for the seminar where I said, you know, we're philosophers. We're supposed to be interested in truth. But from my point of view, it seems like the truth is secondary to winning and proving your argumentative superiority. The reaction to this paper was absolutely fascinating to me. So I was. I guess I was like 19 or 20 years old. I had no sort of awareness of feminism or. Or different gender. Gender differences or anything like that. I was pretty naive, I suppose you would say, with a different time. My professor found this paper so interesting that he took it to his graduate seminar and had them read it. My two fellow students, who are both very argumentative young men, they did not know what to do with it. And their reaction was kind of to say, oh, Valerie, we're so sorry we're making you feel bad with our aggression. Why don't you just tell us what you think? So I suddenly felt like, okay, that's not what I meant. That's not what I wanted. I didn't. I felt very much like. Not by my professor, but by the two students that I sort of put me on a pedestal and reacted by saying, oh, you can't handle our aggressive, argumentative style, so we're just going to leave you alone and let you talk by yourself. You know, we'll just sit here passively and listen. But that isn't what I wanted. What I wanted was a kind of conversation in pursuit of the truth that's critical and rigorous and analytic, but also collaborative and cooperative. And that sort of tension between the kind of mean argumentative style where the point is winning and that more collaborative style where the point is finding out something interesting and trying to get to the truth together. That conflict has followed me throughout my career. I actually feel like recently its philosophy has gotten better. And I think, honestly, I think it's partly because there are more women in philosophy. And I think women have changed the profession. And I also think a lot of men are very happy with how it's changed. Not all of them, but I think many of them are.
- [12:59]
B
You tell us in the book that you were raised in Canada, and sort of the cultural way that we perceive Canadians, especially as Americans, is that, you know, they're very nice, and you found yourself at odds with with your understanding of yourself at times, that your sister said at one point that she thought the way you were talking had become mean. And by bringing us into these stories in the book, you're giving us examples of real life conflict. Because one of the things you want us to be aware of in the book is that a life well lived, a life of purpose, is going to necessarily have conflicts. We can't meet all of our goals at the same time without examining them. We can't understand all of our values at the same time without looking at them. And then when we put them all in the same arena, there's going to be friction between a good number of our goals and our values. And the book really kind of digs into the fact that we're sort of always dealing with conflict. You also tell us in the book about how the book came to be. It's a little bit of a departure from how we think philosophers usually write their books. Can you explain for listeners what the book is about? And then can you take us into what inspired you to write it, please?
- [14:09]
C
Sure. So the book is. I guess it's. It's a book about how to. Broadly speaking, it's a book about how to live your life. I have a philosophical position that I've written about in other more academic books and papers where I think that to live a life well is to fulfill the important values that you have. So I think living well is about what I call value fulfillment. And I think values, not just in a meaningful life, but in absolutely any life, values come into conflict, even if it's a kind of minimal conflict, where it's just that, you know, you value success in your career and you value your relationship with your family, and you don't have enough time to be the perfect mother and also the perfect employee. So because we have limited time and resources, we just have to figure out how to navigate the different values that we have. The only solution to that problem that doesn't involve navigating conflicts is to just value a single thing. But I don't even think human beings are. Even if we tried, I don't think human beings are capable of that. The book is about how to think about what your values are first and foremost, and then about how to navigate conflicts between values in order to live a good life. I. The origin story for the book is that really my. My dad thought that I should. That the things I was writing about philosophically might make good topics for something that reached more people. You know, I think it. My work has always been fairly well informed by psychology, by research in psychology. And my dad's a psychologist and so he always liked to try to read some of the things I was writing. He did not, he did not respond well to everything that I've written. But with my, I had a book about this value fulfillment stuff in 2018 which came out, and that book, he kind of liked it. I actually got some praise out of him for that book. And that was when he said, you know, I think this could, this could be something that you could write in a more accessible form. And then I basically wrote the book in the pandemic and I was sending, you know, it was a way of keeping in touch with my father because I kept sending him pages and asking, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And you know, he was pretty ruthless. But I think the, you know, think the book benefited from his, his feedback.
- [17:42]
B
And in the acknowledgments, you take us into different people who read your book and we do meet your dad there. And you said it, one of your previous books, when you asked his opinion, he said, well, it was dense and so that you appreciated that he was always going to speak to you honestly, but you knew he cared about you because if someone else said that, that would be crushing.
- [18:05]
C
Yes, yes, that's quite true. I also have the decades of context that one of my father's favorite pastimes is complaining. So I think that helped me. I also know that he loves and supports me. You're right. That comment coming from a professor would have been pretty devastating. I'm not even sure he, you know, he might have thought it wasn't exactly an insult. But to me, given that I was with that book, I was even trying to write for a somewhat broader audience. So to have it, have it be called dense, I thought, oh dear, failed. But eventually I think I finally it actually the process of learning how to write something for a non specialist audience is so hard. You might think to yourself, I mean, I think students have the view that the hard thing is to write academic work, like writing an academic paper or a philosophy book. My goodness, how difficult. But once you have, you know, you've got decades of practice and seven years of grad school training you to do that. What you, if you're an academic, you never get trained to write for, for a larger audience. So that was a, that was quite a fascinating process and I'm really, really grateful to my dad for, for kind of pushing me to, to get better at that because it was hard.
- [19:44]
B
And for listeners who want to know more about what it's like for a book to get made. The acknowledgments names so many people who are crucial for the entire process of getting it from idea to manuscript to a book in your hands. And I really appreciated how you peeled back the curtain by thanking so many people and naming what they did. You jump right into the book by taking us to, you know, your life and how you decided to lay out what was going to be in the book. And you also tell us on page 162, you did not think you were going to write a book about sexism. How did sexism come to inform your thoughts about this topic?
- [20:27]
C
Yeah, I think. I think largely because of that conflict we were talking about before. Well, two sources, I think. One was that conflict between my love for doing philosophy, like, for the. What I see as the core of philosophy, and my experience with actual philosophers and philosophy students who just wanted to win the argument. And at the time I was going to grad school, that kind of culture of nastiness and philosophy was under the microscope. And the people who were putting it under the microscope and asking questions about, you know, do we have to do philosophy this way? Do we really have to be so mean? Those. The people who were asking those questions were women and feminist philosophers. So that's one source. As I was thinking, well, I want to write a book that reaches a broader audience. I was thinking about the books that exist, and there just weren't any written by women. And I had read some stuff about. I was reading some stuff about middle age, middle age crisis, living, trying to live a good life as you age. And the narrative was always about, you know, I thought I was going to be this great man, and now I'm not. What do I do with that? And it really struck me that, you know, I had a very supportive upbringing. I. I think my parents, I'm sure at some point told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, But I didn't ever get that message first in particular, that, like, I was gonna be some great hero or the, you know, the best in this field. It just didn't. That message did, Didn't. It wasn't the message I got growing up from the culture. So I thought, you know, in fact, very few people are going to be the best at anything. There's only one of each of those. And so what happens if you think about what it is to live your life and the struggles that you have with aging, if you haven't been thinking that way your whole life. And also maybe a person who hasn't struggled with this burden of thinking I was supposed to be the great philosopher. Maybe that perspective is different and interesting on some of these questions.
- [23:20]
D
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- [23:51]
B
You also take us into where you were in your own life when you were writing the book and you had this revelation, I think. And what I appreciate is that you said the quiet part out loud, which is you don't reach a magic age when everything sorts itself out and you talk about how the book was motivated by a desire to understand how we should think through our choices, goals and values in the face of continual change. Was that a surprise to you? That there isn't some point where like all the wisdom just lands on you and you somehow don't have these unexpected changes going on?
- [24:29]
C
It was a surprise. I started to get surprised by that in my 30s, I think I thought when I turned 30, this is okay. Now I'm truly a grown up. And then I found out very quickly, I mean, the decade of your 30s, so much changes. So I thought, okay, I missed the boat on that one. But surely in my 40s I'm going to have my stuff together. And then more things changed by the time I hit 50, I think I thought maybe I have everything figured out, but I kind of doubt it at this point. So it was, I'm currently in my 50s. We'll see what happens in the next decade. So. But it, so it was definitely a surprise early on. And it's becoming less surprising the older I get. My mom, who's in her 80s, she says the same thing that like you, you're, you're never sort of done. Maybe there are some people who have that experience of getting older and feeling like, okay, done and dusted, I've got this all figured out. But I've heard, you know, my mom in her 80s and other people I've heard actually on podcasts recently who said that, who've expressed the same kind of surprise that things keep changing. I mean, if you think about as you age, your body changes and your capacities change and the people that you love start to get sick and eventually die. So there's huge changes to cope with as you, as you get old, older, I should say.
- [26:23]
B
I like that you point out that there isn't a magic age where you think, oh, I've got it all figured out. I, I remember thinking, okay, 30, I'm not a young adult anymore, I'm an actual adult. It's all going to settle in and make sense. And as you pointed out, nope, there isn't as yet identified magic decade where we feel like, oh, right, I've got all of this. I've totally got this. But one of the things you point out is that you were writing this particular book during 2022, where you were geographically situated, put you very close to where, where the George Floyd murder had happened. That was, for listeners, other parts of the world. Something that really concerned so many of us because it highlighted racial inequalities and police brutality in a public way that while those problems had been ongoing, it was inescapable because it was visually captured by a citizen journalist. In addition, in 2022, many of us in the States had been on a prolonged, what many people refer to as lockdown, the safer at home policy. And 2022 felt like a very uncertain time to be venturing back out because the COVID pandemic has really not satisfactorily handled. And so you're talking about writing this book in a time where you're asking questions about how do we anchor ourselves in times of upheaval and politically, socially, medically, personally. It was a time of upheaval for so many people.
- [28:00]
C
Yeah. So partly that context, one of the effects that it had on the book was that I think in a lot of my previous work about well being, which is the word philosophers use to talk about something like what we might call flourishing or a happy good life for a person. It had been quite individualistic because I take this value fulfillment approach. A lot of my academic work had been about individual people and their values and individual value conflict. Being at that particular time that you just very nicely summarized, there was a kind of moral urgency, a kind of. Because of the George Floyd tragedy. Suddenly, if the way in which we are in communities with other people was forefront in my thinking and our treatment of other people and how important that is, but also because of lockdown, the effects of not being physically in community with other people were just, you know, intensely felt by everybody. So what that meant for the book. I'm not sure if the book would have turned out this way if it hadn't been for that context. But I Started to think that the sorts of values that anchor us in times of crisis are values that are connected to other people. It is just a fact that if you ask people what their values are, family and friendship are crucially important. And for many people, specific communities also, like church communities or synagogue or religious communities, so people in fact value their connections and relationships with other people to a very high degree. It's also true that relationships broadly conceived are just one of the biggest predictors, predictors of happiness defined in the way psychologists define it, which is in a more sort of psychological. A happy feeling and the feeling of satisfaction with your life. So relationships, whether that's intimate friendships, people you can count on, community you can call upon in times of need, successful marriages, these, these are very highly correlated with psychological feelings of happiness. So looking at that and being in the context I was in, I was thinking if you're wondering what to value and which of your values to prioritize, prioritize other people, because it's natural for us to do so. It's very hard to avoid, given the way that we're psychologically constructed. And it has excellent consequences for your own personal happiness. So that's, that's one of the ways in which that time period really influenced the book.
- [31:47]
B
You have a section in the book that's situated right between the preface and when we get into the meat of the book, which begins on, on chapter one. And it's called the Roadmap. And the Roadmap is really a helpful guide for people who haven't read much philosophy, and it's also a helpful guide for making a readable, public facing book. But one of the quiet parts you say out loud, there is. Philosophy can be hard to read. I appreciate you saying that quiet part out loud because there's often an expectation that if you just read enough, you'll start to get the gist of it. And as I shared off air, I took one philosophy class in college and I did not.
- [32:28]
C
Yeah, I really like this phrase saying the quiet part out loud. I have to remember that and maybe use that in my teaching. Yeah, so this is part of the reason it was so difficult to learn to write for a broader audience is the way there's a lot of different angles to this, but maybe I'll start here. I have a colleague who refers to this way of writing philosophy as the philosopher's crouch. So when you write philosophy, professional philosophy, you're in the philosopher's crouch, which means. And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You're on the lookout for any attack you could get on your argument. So you're in a defensive posture and you state your claim in such a way that it minimizes the chance of attack. And what does that mean? Well, it means you're going to qualify the crap out of it so that it's barely recognizable as a thesis, and then you're going to make your argument. But again, you're going to constantly qualify and allude to possible objections and anticipate reactions. And if you're not used to that, it just seems kind of insane. Like why, why is this person talking about what some other person might react, how they might react to what she's. You know, it gets so convoluted. It's really confusing for students, I found, because I have to work really hard to communicate to them. When you're reading philosophy, what this author says is not always what they are saying because they're often speaking as if they were objecting to their own argument. So I have to do. You've got to look at the context. Is this, is this the argument they're making or is this the author anticipating an attack? And it's really hard for students to follow that. But I think that's what makes philosophy so hard to read. But it's also what makes it hard for a philosopher who's been trained to write that way to suddenly write in a different way to it, to. To realize, okay, I just, I just have to write things, just say what I mean and not be constantly anticipating the attack. It's also, once you get, if you can get into it, it's so liberating. It just feels terrific to write like that. Well, I thought so anyway.
- [35:30]
B
And to that end, you put in a lot of real world examples so that you're not in the crouch. It's things that we would all could be presumed to understand. One example of figuring out goals and having goals without friction comes from your beagle. And how your beagle has a clear goal of getting enough belly rubs and does not see anything is going to be the dog's impediment. Belly rubs will happen. And you kind of compare that to how human beings are figuring out their goals and that our goals will have conflict. You also compare many of the things that you're going to be talking about, about figuring out goals and values with, with a garden. And you use the idea of planting a garden and, you know, weeds might show up and, and which maybe you need to change the soil. And that's a good example of how we may have to re examine a goal, particularly a goal that keeps being in conflict with other goals or values and see how we can reimagine that goal so that it's. If it's important to us to keep like keeping a rose bush, we might have to consider is the soil around it the problem. So you give us these real world analogies so we can start to grab onto these ideas. But you also break things down right away for us. We are not expected to come in knowing what you mean by goals. You get right into that. Particularly in chapter two. You ask the question out loud, what are goals? So that we're all on the same page where we're figuring out the difference between goals and values. What are goals? Dr. Tiberius?
- [36:55]
C
Oh, I'm glad, I'm glad that worked that, that approach. Yeah, I think metaphors can really help people see a point and I think different metaphors click with different people. I actually hate gardening, but I think the gardening metaphor works for people. And yeah, I like it. So goals to your question, goals. So if you think the most minimal way of describing human nature is that we are goal seeking creatures, goals are the desired state. You can think that something in your goal seeking capacities that you have in virtue of really in virtue of being an animal allow you to represent a preferred state of affairs. It allows you to kind of picture, maybe not visually, but to have an idea of the state you'd like to be in that you are not currently in. So for Sugar the beagle, if she wants a belly rub, she has her goal is that state in which somebody is rubbing her belly. So goals, you know, that's, that is a very broad conception of goal. Anything can basically be a goal. Flossing your teeth after dinner could be a goal. Having a sip of water is a goal. Buying a new car is a goal. So goals can. Goals are everywhere and they're at many, many different levels of generality. Values are more complicated. I take values to be a particular kind of goal. So they are something that's desired or preferred. They are something we move towards. But I think values are goals that have special importance to us and that ideally we are psychologically harmonized around. And what I mean by that is if you value something, you don't just want it. You also have a bunch of emotional reactions about it. So for instance, if you value your, your role, let's say as a, as a parent, you feel proud when you think you did some good parenting and you feel sad when you feel like you failed. You'll feel joy when your children are thriving, that there's a whole package of emotions that go along with valuing being a parent. And there's also if you value being a parent as opposed to just having it as any old goal, there's also some judgment that you, you actually think that being a parent is important to you. You take, you take account of it when you're planning what to do it. You think that being a parent gives you reasons to do some things and not others. Gives you a reason to, you know, take care of your children, for instance, and to make career choices that are compatible with being a good parent. So values are. They're sort of like souped up special goals that harmonize these different aspects of our psychology. That makes sense with kind of the value. That stuff gets a little technical, I think.
- [40:56]
E
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- [41:24]
F
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- [41:51]
G
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- [42:21]
B
Well, you explained us in the book that most people have values, but it's pretty common not to really have interrogated them or know what they are. And in chapter three, you bring us into this example from Pride and Prejudice where we have this character who's sure she knows what she values and she kind of has a mild existential crisis as it occurs to her that she didn't. So you use that story from Pride and Prejudice to illustrate for us that we all are walking around with values, but we might have unexamined values and we might have values that aren't serving us. Can you take us into that example from Pride and Prejudice? Because I think it really illustrates where we are in the conversation.
- [42:56]
C
Right. So let me make sure I don't get the names confused. So Lizzie, Elizabeth Bennett is. She thinks that she hates Mr. Darcy, and there's a point at which she realizes that she actually loves him. I think what's happening with Lizzie is that some of her psychology is pulling her towards Dart. Just kind of oversimplifying it a bit here to explain pulling her towards Darcy as a goal. And other aspects of her psychology are pushing away from him. So she's. I think she's physically attracted to him, you know, especially if he's played by Colin Firth, as he is in the BBC production. She is really attracted by his intellect and the conversations that she has with him. So she's got some emotional reaction to him, but she also has other emotions that come from the way he treated her family and the snobbish behavior he's had. That she has a certain reluctance, an emotional reluctance from that. She also has a bunch of judgments that are conflicted on both sides. You know, she can rationally see that he would be a very good match. He's very wealthy. And she can also rationally see that he has treated her poorly at times and that he's a snob. So she's got this. She has conflicting goals here. She's both drawn to him and repelled by him. And what she ultimately does is she moves into a more harmonized psychological state, more integrated, where the reluctance that she felt initially, she kind of reinterprets as well. Maybe a sort of early unfair reaction, not based on enough information, she kind of got it wrong. And also maybe he's changed a bit. So she comes to realize that she loves him, even though at first she thought she hated him. I mean, I think part of it is that the emotions that she has attracting her to Darcy during the early period where she's telling herself she hates him, those emotions she's not really owning. She's. She's not very aware of them. So she's at some level, kind of subconsciously, really, she finds that his company very compelling. And she's. She's excited by the conversation, and she actually kind of is excited when he's around, but she has not let herself admit that she has those emotions. So they're kind of blocked off. And eventually when some. Those emotions get strong enough and these other alternative explanations for his bad qualities come to come to the fore, she's able to harmonize all these feelings into a pro feeling towards Darcy, and you.
- [46:44]
B
Let us know in the book that it's normal for all people to have what you call hidden goals and hidden values. And part of the book's goal is not to tell us how to live our goals or values or even what's a good goal or value, but to help us do an actual inventory and to understand how they work together. Why is it normal for us to have both hidden goals and hidden values?
- [47:07]
C
Well, I think so. If you. If you talk to psychologists, you. You'll hear that most of what's happening in our minds is not subject to conscious attention at any moment. So we have huge brains, lots of things going on in there, but conscious attention is a very small window on what's happening. So at any given time, most of what's happening in our brains is stuff that we're not conscious of. That's obvious when it comes to the kind of physical, like, physical behaviors and automatic behaviors that our brains participate in. So lots of things that we do automatically that the brain plays a role in those things, but we're not at all conscious of it. But it happens with emotions and even judgments, too. I think just because our attention is really limited and there's just no way we can think about everything at once. This is. I think if you doubt this, you can think about therapy. If you haven't gone to therapy yourself, think of representations of therapy in the media, or even think about conversations with friends where in talking through something, you come to realize, oh, God, I didn't. Didn't realize I was so angry about this. You know, like, imagine, for example, something happens at work. You react to it by thinking, oh, I must have done something wrong at that meeting to provoke this kind of reaction. I feel bad. I just feel bad. Then you get home and you find yourself. This is a total hypothetical. You find yourself just exploding in anger because, I don't know, the toilet's broken. And as you perhaps talk to a friend or your husband about it, you realize, I'm not actually angry about the toilet. I'm angry at that person who was actually really disrespectful of me. I didn't do anything wrong at that meeting. I just said what I thought and got treated poorly because of it. So there's a sort of. That's a kind of like everyday common sense example where psychological reactions are not immediately accessible to your conscious attention and you have to figure out how to unearth them. And I think conversations with friends often.
- [50:13]
B
Helps with that as we Go through the book, we realize that it's really in many ways a book about conflict management. And it's really at a micro level, how are we in conflict with ourselves? How are our goals and values working together or not? And what do you do about it? So that you end up with a meaningful life, so that you end up with well being and fulfilling your values and goals in life. And so part of it is uncovering these unconscious or hidden values, these unconscious or hidden beliefs, but also looking at things like internalized oppression. You take us through in a later section of the book, some philosophers that you, that you looked at and writers you named, James Baldwin and a host of people. And you thank them for really naming this, this internalized oppression and how it acts on us, against us. So that's one example of how if we haven't examined our values and goals or we haven't under examined what sort of internalized things are not serving us, we can end up with more conflict, more sudden conflicts we didn't know were going to happen. You describe yourself in the book as someone who started out, maybe thinking of yourself as a people pleaser so that you would write a book about conflict. Might the face of it seem unlikely? And yet, as you point out, conflict, particularly when it comes to our goals and values and a life that has continual change, um, and these external upheavals which happens in, in a, in a later chapter, chapter five is values in an unfair culture. We are going to need to be able to keep doing this calibration and assessment because conflict is going to be a normal part of a life, particularly a well lived life. In, in chapter five at six, sorry, it's called when all else fails. You talk to people about being aware of, you know, what we can't change and considering radical change. Chapter seven takes us into the values of others. Chapter eight is called fulfilling our values morally. And this is where we get into social relationships. And it's clear in the book that your social relationships are really important to you. The book is dedicated to your sisters. We meet much of your family in the acknowledgments and you place the book in conversation with philosophers you studied in school and people you continue to learn from going forward. These social relationships that are really important to you, they talk a bit about how we ought to treat others. You get into the value of friendship, family, community, and you talk about these kind of values as the special goals, something that you named and defined for us a few moments ago. Why was it so important for you to have a Chapter dedicated to this.
- [53:12]
C
So that's a great question, and don't forget it. But I want to. There's something I wanted. I realized, I really wanted to clarify, which is about the hidden goals. So actually. Or hidden values. I don't think that people. That people's basic values are hidden from them. I think when people tell you that they value their family and their friendships and their communities and their meaningful work and their spiritual practice and their dogs and music and whatever it is they say they value, I think they're just right. And there's. There's not much hidden there. I think what is hidden is some of the. The texture of these values. So for each value we have, there's a way of thinking about what it means to fulfill that value. So if you go back to parenthood, you know, for some parents, it turns out that they're not entirely conscious of the fact that to be a great, a good mother, they have to be a perfect mother. And they have to do everything perfectly according to some rigid standard that was from their childhood or some. Something like that. So I think the part that's hidden has to do with the kind of what we take it to mean, the values that. What we take these values to mean, what does it mean to fulfill them? And I think that's important because the thing about me being a people pleaser, it's not my value to be a people pleaser. My value is to be a good person. But if you dig down into my subconscious, you find out that, oh, well, for me being a good person, when you unpack that, you think, what's. What does that mean to Valerie? What's her standard? What's she looking for? It has a lot to do with pleasing people. So that's just something I wanted to kind of clarify because otherwise the view doesn't sound very plausible. Because we all think I know what I value. And I think you do know what you value. You just don't know exactly how you value it and how it turns up in your life. So back to your question about the community and the chapter on internalized oppression. And I guess, you know, I think partly that was important to me because we kind of touched on this earlier. But as I set out to write the book, I had no intention of writing a chapter like that. But everything that happened that. That year, including George Floyd's murder and my own as I wrote the book, my own sort of realization of how much the gender dynamics and philosophy had made my life difficult, the more I thought it was important to actually Say something about that. Does that get to your question?
- [56:43]
B
It does. And the second half of it was about the deep importance you put on social relationships and family and how that affects our goals and values.
- [56:54]
C
Right. And that does have to do with the fact that if you're writing a book and you're looking for a common denominator, valuing relationships is a great common denominator. People value relationships in different ways and they value different kinds of relationships. But almost everybody cares about other people and how they are in relation to those other people. So it's something that you can kind of count on being present for anybody. And also because, you know, I talk in the book about the importance of having a system of values that works together. So you're not going to eliminate conflict completely. No one can do that. But you can have sets of values that cohere better or worse. And I think that valuing relationships with other people, it actually helps our system of values cohere better. And that's because so many of the other things we value are actually in other people are involved in those things other people help. So I think, you know, we all value our physical health, we all value our mental health. Well, having relationships with other people helps you be a happier person. It also actually is correlated with good health outcomes. So paying attention to the value of relationships instead of, I actually think it just paying attention to the value of relationships reduces conflict in the whole system of values that you have. Because relationships are actually so important too. Sometimes they even contribute to our other values. Like if you think about the kinds of things people do for fun, I think people value having fun, doing leisure activities, doing artistic activities. So many of those other activities involve other people. You know, we play sports on teams, we play music with other people. Even people who run join runners clubs, people who read books join book clubs. Other people are everywhere. And so I think valuing those relationships is. You could think of it as just a good strategy for a goal seeking organism to highlight those goals that help the whole system help success in the whole system.
- [59:42]
B
Chapter three is called what are our values and what should they be? And that chapter can really help listeners dig into this process of figuring out what matters. You offer several tools, but I can briefly summarize as introspection, the lab rat strategy, learning from others and exploration. And this book is not a how to book, it's not a self help book. But it is something that can help people start to dig into these core concepts that we hear about all the time, but we seldom have defined for us and we seldom have a place to just really see, sit with what these things are, how they work together, how they work against each other, and ultimately how they can work for us. As you pointed out in, in your last answer that you were dealing with external factors when you were writing this book. Many people are dealing with external factors. And you say this book won't save the world, but it will help us get our priorities straight again. Chapter three is a great place to dig in and start with that as we come to the close of our time together. I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners.
- [60:57]
C
At this current moment? So I'm actually my new project. I just finished writing a book about AI and friendship, friendship with chatbots, that sort of thing. So I'm kind of obsessed right now with the concern that people will lose touch with or forget, temporarily forget, the importance of human relationships. Chatbots are very alluring. They're always there. They don't judge you, they're always supportive, but they're not people. And given, I mean, a lot, given the kinds of questions you had, a lot of this came up in our conversation. But I think relationships with other human beings are extremely valuable for us. And so I hope some of that part of the conversation will inspire people to think about the importance of, of relationships and community and connection. Because at this moment in history, I'm a little concerned about that being forgotten because I don't think we can forget it for long. I think it will come back to get us if we don't pay it enough conscious attention.
- [62:31]
B
And finally, what do you hope listeners take away?
- [62:35]
C
I hope that the framework of thinking that conflict isn't avoidable, that it's kind of a natural part of life, not much you can. The only way to eliminate conflict completely in your life, this value conflict or goal conflict would be to live a very boring life in which you only have one goal, but that there are things you can do about that and that the. The first step is to really be clear about the things, which things matter the most. So that when you're trying to navigate conflicts and you're trying to reduce their effect on your life, you don't sacrifice the important stuff for the trivial stuff.
- [63:31]
B
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Valerie Tiberius, and sharing from your book. What do you want out of a philosophical guide to figuring out what matters? I'm Dr. Christina Gessler. You're listening to the Academic Life. Please join us again.