How To Live Well—Even Amidst Failure, Uncertainty, Loss, and Physical Pain | Kieran Setiya

10% Happier with Dan Harris

Practical ways to lead a good life.

Kieran Setiya is the Peter de Florez Professor of Philosophy at MIT, where he works on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide and Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. He also maintains a Substack newsletter, Under the Net.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Kieran became interested in practical philosophy (and philosophy more generally)
• A brief history of philosophy
• The connection between philosophy and self-help
• Whether Buddhism is a philosophy?
• The upside of missing out (as opposed to FOMO)
• Kieran’s mild beef with the Stoics
• techniques for dealing with grief and loss
• Why living well is not the same as feeling happy
• The connection between Plato, Aristotle and contemporary influencers today
• How to deal with physical adversity
• Navigating failure
• Kieran’s case for meditation
• Operationalizing the cliché of “enjoying the process” rather than the outcome
• How to deal with the injustices of the world

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