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David Brooks: Hi, I’m David Brooks. If you are listening to or watching this, you’ve stumbled across the first episode of a new podcast called The Permanent Questions.

The idea of the podcast is that there are a lot of shows about politics and business and health and tech, but there aren’t enough about the really big questions of life. How do you find your purpose? How do you confront death? How do you save a relationship that’s going through a rough patch? How do you build a just society?

Now, you may be asking yourself, “How the hell did a political pundit get into these deep waters?”

When I was 18, an incredibly lucky thing happened to me: The admissions officers at Columbia University, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago. I didn’t know anything about Chicago. I’d never visited. I never knew anybody who went there, but it was the only school I got into.

It turned out to be the perfect school for me. My favorite joke about Chicago: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas. And I fit right in.

There’s a saying, “If you catch fire with enthusiasm, people will come for miles to watch you burn.” My professors had caught fire with enthusiasm.

Those teachers were filled with a certain conviction. The conviction was, if you read important books, had important conversations, and addressed big questions, you would have the keys to the kingdom.

They gave us new things to love: new ideas, new heroes, new activities, new subjects. They tried to teach us how to see, not only to see with your preconceptions and the things you think you see, but to see with the clarity of a Tolstoy, the moral depth of George Eliot, the empathetic outrage of James Baldwin.

Mostly, they introduced us to the Great Conversation. The Great Conversation is a tradition of debate that goes back for thousands of years. It’s a collective attempt to find a workable balance between the inevitable tensions of life—the tension between autonomy and belonging, between freedom and order, between diversity and cohesion, safety and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting spot that works in this or that circumstance.

I never wanted to leave the Great Conversation, and I never have. I went off and became a journalist and a political pundit, and that was a worthwhile thing to do, and I still do it. A lot of the big questions in life are political questions. Who should lead us? What does a just society even look like? But none of my six books are about politics. They’re about the kind of questions my teachers asked me back in Chicago: How do you educate your emotions? How do you survive a setback?

As my career has gone on, I came to the conclusion that we as a society are over-politicized and under-moralized. That is to say, we pay attention to every little political scandal, but many people have been given no instruction on the basic questions of how to live, of how they should find their calling, what they should really want.

And over the last 15 years or so, this sensation has taken a deeper urgency. Like a lot of countries, America seems to be going through some sort of spiritual, relational, and social, and maybe moral crisis. You know all the stats: rising loneliness, rising despair, rising distrust, rising polarization.

We’re living through a period of great technological advance, but we’re losing our humanistic core. Because of technological improvements and social deterioration, our lives are objectively better, but subjectively worse. The elements of civilization that lift the spirit and nurture the affections are playing a smaller and smaller role in our national life. Religion, literature, art, theology, history, philosophy, friendship, even conversation.

In previous periods of technological advance, there was a humanistic counterreaction. Humanists said, “Okay, bring us your science. Bring us your machines. Bring us your efficiency. Bring us your technology. That’s fine. But don’t turn us into machines ourselves.” And the humanists made an aggressive counter-push to say, “We will preserve our humanistic core. We will preserve what is essentially human. ”

This podcast is an attempt to be a small part of that kind of humanistic reaction.

We asked Meghan Sullivan to be the first guest on the show because she’s the kind of great teacher I’m talking about. Meghan teaches one of the most beloved courses at Notre Dame University, which is called “God and the Good Life.” She’s won Notre Dame’s Joyce Award for Excellence in Teaching, and as you’ll see, she’s got a dynamic personality. She co-authored a book based on the course, called The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning.

Meghan doesn’t just do education, providing students with facts they can regurgitate on a test. Meghan does formation. She helps students become better versions of themselves. And so it’s a great pleasure to welcome Meghan Sullivan to this table.

Brooks: Welcome, Meghan Sullivan. You are the first guest on The Permanent Questions. You are the founding figure of our podcast. So thank you for being here.

Meghan Sullivan: Heavy is the crown. This is a tremendous responsibility, David.

Brooks: I know. All future guests will be measured by your exemplary example.

Sullivan: Exactly. I’m hopefully gonna create a large ceiling for this podcast.

Brooks: So, you grew up in North Carolina, and I assume you had a moderately normal childhood. And then you became a philosopher. So how the hell did that happen?

Sullivan: I did not grow up in an academic family. My mom was a receptionist in a dental office, and my dad worked a bunch of different jobs, but for most of high school he worked at this company called Replacements. They basically replaced, like, broken plates. My dad was in the plate-replacement business. My mom was in the dental-billing business. So that was not particularly academic background, but very, very loving. And if you would’ve told me when I was a high-school student that I would end up a philosophy professor, I would have asked you to throw me off a bridge.

Most of my students have never met a professional philosopher before they take my class. But in high school, actually, one of my best friends, her dad was a philosophy professor at our local university, and we were very, very judgy, snotty teenage girls, and we devoted probably two years of high school to thinking, “We cannot understand this guy’s job.”

So in high school, I had a well-considered, extremely negative opinion of the profession of philosophy that was based on nothing but vibes about my friend’s dad’s books.

I got a scholarship and went to the University of Virginia, so this big public school where, as a freshman, you’re just sort of fed into the meat grinder. You just get whatever classes are left over after all of the big kids register for their classes. And my academic adviser was talking to me, and I was so stressed because I couldn’t get any of the pre-law classes that I desperately wanted, or econ classes. And he’s like, “I think that you would really love this ethics class called ‘Issues of Life and Death’ in the philosophy department. It’s really debate-y, and I just think given your background, you’re gonna have a blast in there. ”

So I was like, “Okay, fine. Philosophy. ” And I enrolled in that class, and I was hooked by the second week. The exact moment—I remember this really vividly—I was sitting in Alderman Library, in the library at UVA, and we’d just gotten our first assignment for all of our classes, our first writing assignment, and I was writing all these boring book reports for my other classes.

In “Issues of Life and Death,” the question we were assigned is: “Should you end your life?” And I remember talking to the TA being like, “Do you want me to write about what, you know, David Hume says about suicide?” And he’s like, “Absolutely not. I want the strongest possible argument about whether you should continue living.”

And I was like, “Are you allowed to ask me that? Like, is that allowed?” And he’s like, “Not only is it allowed, but there are better and worse answers, and if you don’t have a really tight, really well-argued position, you’re gonna get a bad grade in this class.” And I just remember sitting in the library, the kind of blinking cursor on Microsoft Word staring at me, thinking, Ah, we’re firing live ammunition here. Like, this is real. And that just totally got me hooked.

Brooks: Now, a lot of philosophers write abstruse academic articles with a lot of notations and numbers and diagrams. You actually teach this class, and you’ve written this book, on how to live. Why’d you become that kind of philosopher?

Sullivan: I had an epiphany my third year at Notre Dame. I was getting ready to go up for tenure, and I’d been teaching our big intro philosophy class. And when you go through the tenure process, at first, you’re only focused on keeping your job, and then you start to hit a point where you imagine a future where you’re just a professor and you’re not worried about getting fired all the time. And I was in that kind of mindset of thinking, What do I wanna do with the rest of my career after I hopefully survive this tenure vote?

And I felt very, very strongly that I wanted to focus the next chapter on my teaching. That’s what really I loved about my job. And I’d been teaching Aristotle. And we inflict Aristotle on every single freshman at the University of Notre Dame. And Aristotle has this line in the second chapter of his book about the good life that I’ve always loved, and I always assign students to write essays about.

He says, “We conduct this examination not so that we can know what virtue is, but so that we might be good.” We do all this not so we can know what dead people said about virtue and philosophy, but so that we can become happier people. Otherwise, there’s no benefit of it, he says. This whole enterprise is pointless if it doesn’t find some way to make us better.

Brooks: Now, you’re in the business of helping people become, as you said, happy and good. And this podcast is in the same business. I’m joining your team.

Sullivan: Yeah, all right.

Brooks: And so, as we enter this conversation, I thought I’d raise some objections to the life we have chosen.

Sullivan: Bring it. Objections are the love language of philosophy.

Brooks: So the first one is what’s—why is this necessary? I get up in the morning; I have my Frappuccino; I surf my media feed; I go to work, which is good, I like my work; I go home; I watch Netflix. Why should I read a bunch of complicated books and have hard conversations?

Sullivan: So one assumption I think we should challenge is that there are some people who do philosophy, a small number of people, like my friend’s dad, and then everybody else doesn’t do philosophy.

That’s like saying there are some people who exercise, and everybody else doesn’t exercise. I get why you’d make that assumption if you think that exercise or philosophy is this really, really narrow prescribed activity. But that’s just not true.

My doctor would be the first person to tell you, you use your body every single day. It’s just some people exercise well and train, and other people are potatoes (laughs) like me. Which is why my doctor brings this up all the time.

It’s the same with philosophy. If we think about philosophy in the ancient tradition, like Socrates’s tradition, philosophy is caring for your soul. And everybody has to do this. It’s just a question about whether or not you’re gonna do it well or you’re gonna do it in a really immature way. You could do better or worse at reasoning through these soul questions that are—they’re gonna slap you in the face. If you don’t use your philosophical muscle, then you’re gonna find it pretty atrophied at these junctures in life when you really need it.

Brooks: Let me know what you think of my answer. My answer would be: We live in a dangerous world, a spiritually dangerous world. You graduate, and you enter modern America, modern society, and there are a couple temptations.

The first is you’re gonna lead an aesthetic life. Well, I think Kierkegaard came up with this. An aesthetic life is like, you have some happy, pleasant experiences, and you treat all of life as: How can I have more pleasant experiences? And you treat your life sort of as a consumer. And that strikes me as a shallow way to live, and not a sturdy way to live, because you don’t have the substance to survive the hard times.

The second is, and I see this in a lot of my students, you become an insecure overachiever. You don’t know what your purpose is, you don’t know what the foundation of your life is, so you think you can make your life better by building a series of successive stories on top of a foundation made of sand, and eventually that comes crashing down.

And third, Iris Murdoch—who’s this novelist and philosopher—she said the purpose of life is to become more virtuous. Like, that’s the whole deal. And so to me, it’s almost a way to resist the temptations of the world.

Sullivan: I love Iris Murdoch. This is a deep cut probably for a lot of folks. They don’t know that she’s one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. But one of the things I love about Murdoch is, you read her essays—which can be pretty dense; I wouldn’t jump in in the deep end in her philosophical essays—but she always has these examples that strike me as very true to life.

And one of her examples is, she comes out of a faculty meeting, and she realizes she just really despises her colleague, who’s just irritating, and she can’t quite put her finger on what she doesn’t like about this woman, but she just doesn’t like her. And she’s sitting in her office, and she’s stewing, and it’s threatening to ruin her day, and then she realizes, she has this moment of realization that she can reconsider this person. She has free will. She can sit there and just ask herself to look again or imagine this person again, and that she’s not just a victim of her prejudices or situation, but in fact she’s able to work on her inner life just as much as she’s able to work on her career.

And it’s hard, but reading examples like that, I think she practiced what she preached. She really strived.

Brooks: She wrote one book that I could understand, which is called The Sovereignty of Good, I think it was called. And it’s short, and it’s very clear. And the thing I loved about it is that she was a devotee of Simone Weil, the French mystic from World War II era, basically, and Weil once said, “Attention is the ultimate form of generosity.” And Iris Murdoch builds on that. And she says, You think morality is mostly about what you do, but a lot of it is just how you attend to people. And she said, sort of as the story you’d said, You should cast a just and loving attention on people. And I like that, because it’s loving, but it’s also just.

Sullivan: You know who also does this? This is always so surprising, and I point this out to my students: Everybody thinks that the Stoics are these hard, emotionless robots, like the ancient Roman philosophers. But if you read Marcus Aurelius—who was the emperor of Rome and who killed scores of barbarians, right, was, like, a hard-core general—you read his Meditations, and the opening chapter of it is just a long list of all of the specific people he loves and what they have meant to him in his life. Before he gets into how to kill barbarians and be stronger and wake up at 5 a.m. and meditate, he thinks about love, and he pays attention to all of the people that have made him the man that he is.

Brooks: Second challenge: Okay, I wanna become a better person, but that’s the job for religion or family. Why the hell does a teacher think he or she can influence my life? Like, what business is it of hers?

Sullivan: It’s funny, I think the public discourse kind of wants to have it both ways. Sometimes they’re incredibly worried about college corrupting the youth in bad ways, like, giving the youth crazy ideas about politics or the way society works. Or, the other half of the time, they’re really nervous that they send their kid to college and nothing happens, and it wasn’t worth the money. I think this is a shame, because we have one of the most extraordinary higher-education systems in world history in the United States right now.

These universities that we’ve built painstakingly over 300, 350 years, they have always had these dual functions. They are places where you go to learn a trade and where the truth is kind of cultivated and maintained about all manner of subjects, but they’re also places where people go to be formed. And there’s a reason why in the college system from England and the United States, there’s typically a chapel and a refectory—a dining hall—and dormitories, and they have the kind of setup of a medieval monastery, is the idea, that we’re gonna take these folks who are just emerging on adult life and give them a period of focus and discernment before they set out on their odyssey, and that that’s a really tremendous and important gift that we offer to each successive generation that comes after us.

And for those of us who’ve had the benefit of a college education, and there’s only a handful of people in my family that have gone away to college, you see it. Not because we’re, like, morally better. I’m definitely not any morally better than my brother who didn’t go away to college and dropped out of high school. In fact, he would probably argue that he’s a lot more rational and sane and grounded than I am. But when we think about folks who are called to invest in this culture and hold up these ideals and remind people that there’s at least virtue for the rest of us worth striving for, universities have traditionally played that role. And I think that it’s just massively important in this big, complicated world that we live in right now that we continue to invest in institutions that still keep that fire burning.

Brooks: There are people like you at every university, but not always in the majority. And I say it this way, there’s a guy who teaches here at Yale named Tony—Anthony Kronman, and he argued that for most of American history, the job of schools was moral formation. They saw it as, he called it, the humanistic ideal. As late as the 1960s, the National Education Association, the teachers’ union, said the primary goal of education is morally forming students. That was assumed to be the primary purpose.

And Kronman argues that ideal was abandoned and replaced by the research ideal: The purpose of the university is to produce knowledge. And then everything gets hyper-specialized, and when everything gets specialized in that way, asking the big questions—like, “How do you find your purpose in life?”—he writes, not only are not asked, it seems almost unprofessional to ask them.

And you’re rebutting about that. When you go into a classroom, I forget who said this, What a teacher teaches is herself. When you go to a great math teacher, you not only learn math, you learn what it’s like to love math. And so, every institution, including the university, should be somewhat in the formation business, but especially the university.

Sullivan: Absolutely, and I’ve had some incredible academic mentors over my life. You don’t become a Ph.D. without having great academic mentors.

And I look back to my period at UVA and just think, yeah, I was in this really fratty and sorority, very wealthy southern culture, and none of that even registered that it was happening around me. I made friends with four nerdy girls in my dorm the first week of school, and converted to Catholicism, and became a philosophy major, and ran for student government even though there was probably a 5 percent probability that anybody would ever elect someone like me, and things just kind of kept working out. Maybe it’s Providence. Maybe it’s good luck. But I’m actually grateful that I didn’t let stereotypes about UVA at all affect my experience there. And I was homesick for about 10 minutes when I went away to college, and then it just opened the world for me. I had the most incredible time.

It’s funny, my baby brother—so I have two brothers, one who didn’t go to college, didn’t finish high school. My youngest brother, I applied tremendous pressure on him to go away to college. I started brainwashing him when he was, like, 10 years old. I would have him come stay with me each summer. We’d travel to Europe. I’d make him read books. And I had really set up in his mind this vision that college is this utopia, and he was really disappointed when he went away for his freshman year of college, because I’d set it up in his mind to, like, All of your life is gonna get sorted. And he went away to college and actually had to really fight it out for two years to find his people. So I don’t take it for granted that this happens for everyone.

Brooks: You tell the story in the book about how you paid his way through college. And I think he went to Brown. Is that right?

Sullivan: He went to Brown. And he ended up loving it at the end. Until COVID. But it was hard at first.

Brooks: But so, you were a junior faculty person, and it must have been a sacrifice. Why was it so important to you?

Sullivan: So, I’ve got a 15-year age gap between me and my baby brother. When he was in high school my family—my family’s hit hard times before. This is what happens to lower-income folks. You just, like, you can’t pay your rent, so your landlord kicks you out. You have health issues, and your family has to deal with it. And my father had a terrible heart attack, and he was in the hospital for months, in and out, had all kinds of complications after he had bypass surgery. My mom was just underwater with stress, and they’d had to move out of their apartment. They moved in with my grandfather.

And that was the kind of situation where me and my other brother were already grown and flown and could kind of watch from a distance and help, but had a lot of breaks from the really stressful situation. Connor was right in the middle of it. Like, he’s in the eye of the storm.

There was a lot that we couldn’t control. We couldn’t control much about my dad’s health. We couldn’t even control everything about their living situation. Those are kind of tough problems sometimes to fix. But we could focus on Connor. And I think a lot of families, when they’re going through hard things, really do focus their hope on the youngest person in their family, and think, like, He’s still got a big shot if we’re willing to invest in him. And so really committed, his sophomore year of high school, to the plan: He is going to college. It’s not gonna be a matter of luck. Like, it was luck for me that I got the scholarship that I did. This is, we are gonna control this. But we really all rallied around this plan. And when Connor got into Brown, I remember thinking, Now he’s on this track rather than the despair track. And we dropped him off at college. That’s the only time my parents have ever been to Brown University, was the day that we dropped him off. And I just locked myself in the stall of the ladies’ room in the Providence airport and just wept, just thinking, This is where the hope is. After this season, this kind of brutal few years for our family of thinking there’s not a lot of hope or future.

That was a tremendously important chapter in my life, and for my brother as well. I mean, 18-year-olds don’t quite know when tremendously important things are happening to them. Especially, 18-year-old guys don’t always know that they’re being tremendously loved by their family. But now I think he looks back and realizes, This is what it means for a family to have hope.

Brooks: Somebody could say, “Why worry about all these big books? I wanna lead a good life, and I know what that looks like. It’s, Do I have the most good impact on the world? And I can count the amount of impact I’m gonna have, and how much pleasure am I causing, how much pain I’m causing.” There’s a whole philosophy called utilitarianism about this, and these days there’s a movement called effective altruism, where the job of an effective altruist is How can I affect the most people?

Sullivan: Yeah.

Brooks: And so, if I become a minister, I can affect like 30 people, but if I go on Wall Street and make a billion dollars, and I send it all to Africa to cure whatever, then I can affect hundreds of thousands of people. So that’s the best life. What would you say to that?

Sullivan: One of my favorite David Brooks articles that I actually assigned to a bunch of my freshmen at Notre Dame is about this effective-altruism movement. I don’t know if you remember this, but there was this class at Princeton about ethics called “Practical Ethics,” where one of the big themes that the professor, Peter Singer, who’s a hard-core utilitarian, would hit with his students is: Look, you’re a very idealistic, high-talent young person, and you might think that the way that you’re gonna build a good life and serve the world is maybe going to join the Peace Corps, going to do Teach for America, doing direct service to the poor. But in fact, if you do the math, if you have the potential to enter a really high-earning profession, become like a high-frequency hedge-fund trader—right now, it’d probably be, go work for an AI company—and you could earn a lot of money, under global capitalism, you could redistribute that money to pay for 1,000 teachers or to cure the disease that you’re going to directly serve the poor that are suffering from. And wouldn’t—that just objectively is gonna have such a greater scale of impact than how you might devote your time if you did direct service. Do not do direct service. Go think about, instead, the ways that you can use your time to earn to give under this capitalist system.

And it’s a kind of radical idea, but also one that has a really logical deductive argument that gets you to that conclusion. And some of these utilitarians, effective altruists, have backed off or nuanced this kind of “earn to give” advice in the last 15 years. But it’s still very much a live movement. And so, one: It should be taken seriously. Utilitarianism was a fringe philosophy idea we would’ve debated when I was an undergraduate at UVA. Now it’s just taken as ethics in certain quarters, especially in the tech industry. Some of my colleagues in the econ department would say this just is ethics, doing a really rigorous cost-benefit analysis and opting for the option within your control that’s going to have the greatest possible impact.

I vehemently reject this worldview. And Aristotle and the philosophers from this virtue ethics tradition of the last 2,500 years that I deeply admire, they have considered this idea, and they have also vehemently rejected it. So you might ask: What’s wrong with trying to save people’s lives? What’s wrong with trying to use reason and skill to have the greatest impact in the world?

Well, one of the points that you made in your essay about this Princeton class that I thought was spot-on is: There is this foundational question about what a human being is. Is a human just a mechanism for redistribution in a society? So are you just an earner, somebody who receives money and then spits it out towards, hopefully, the best causes? Or do you have a rich inner life? Do you have a telos? Do you have a purpose that has to be cultivated and tended?

If you believe the latter, then you’re gonna have some serious questions about this effective-altruist strategy. One: What happens to you if you leave college and you go work in that high-frequency trading firm, and you’re around people that all day long only talk about making money? Like, what is that gonna do to the type of character you have, the type of person that you believe yourself to be? Maybe the first year you’re gonna be pretty tough. You’re gonna be living in your cheap apartment, you’re gonna be writing your checks to fighting malaria, and you’re gonna be able to tough it out.

But over time, you are gonna come to worship money. Because you’re gonna be thinking about it 24/7 all day at your job. And every minute that you’re not working, you’re gonna be thinking about what your money could be spent on curing out in the world. Money is going to be the sole focus of your life, and that is unethical. You have made yourself into something that’s less than what a human is called to be.

I think that’s gonna be one of the big tensions. Another big tension with effective altruism as a movement is, I think I would’ve been—I was more sympathetic with the movement maybe 10, 15 years ago, when the focus was on immediately relieving extreme suffering because of preventable diseases.

Like, they used to tell you, “Go earn a lot of money, and then use it to buy bed nets to stop kids from getting malaria tomorrow. ” So, all right, I can kinda feel the urgency of that. But this calculative system says you must devote your life to whatever is going to have the greatest possible causal impact. And one of the shifts that they’ve made in the last 10 years is realizing those kids with malaria, they’re a pretty good investment, but actually, right now, your dollars would be better spent building really well-aligned artificial intelligence that’s gonna help people 100 years from now in vastly greater numbers flourish much better than any human being could right now. And so actually I want you to give up on your dreams of serving the poor, having any kind of solidarity with the poor. Go earn a ton of money, and then give it to building really well-aligned artificial intelligence for generations of humans you will never meet. And that’s like, this is getting kind of weird. The kind of vision, the human aspect of it seems to have completely dropped out, and now I really am just one of many robotic humans who have devoted their lives to trying to create this completely robotic future.

Brooks: I think of effective altruism as an attempt to build morality without love, basically.

Sullivan: Yeah.

Brooks: It’s calculation.

Sullivan: Oh, they’re totally against emotions that don’t motivate you to just do whatever their cost-benefit analysis suggests.

Brooks: Now, there was a sentence in your book that, frankly, I found troubling and challenging.

Sullivan: Let’s go.

Brooks: So it was on page 230, so I got all the way through.

Sullivan: Oh, I have the thing memorized.

Brooks: So you write, “No achievement will ever provide your life with enough meaning or purpose to achieve eudaemonia,” which I hope I’m saying right. It means excellence, basically. Right, flourishing. So suppose I wrote the greatest book. Wouldn’t I feel like, Oh, this is it, I’m flourishing. My life has had a point? If I thought, This is one of the greatest books of the 21st century, or whatever, that would be a supreme achievement. Wouldn’t that be just enough?

Sullivan: It’s a psychological debate that we’re having, first off. Our colleagues in psychology can actually study and measure this. Philosophers pontificate about human psychology and what it ought to be like, but we also sometimes don’t have to guess. We can actually just do research on how people feel about their achievements. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who wins all these gold medals when she’s a teenager—10 years later, does she still feel like she’s achieved eudaemonia? Her life is completely set?

I think, probably, the evidence from high achievers is: If the achievements come early in your life, and then you have to keep living for a long time after that, you tend to not feel like your life is going particularly well. But there could be counterexamples. I’m always open to counterexamples.

I think even if you suppose, David, you write the great American nonfiction essay, you even die knowing that. Still, you can take a moment at this phase in your life and realize: We got about a hundred years of our lives in the scheme of a universe that’s gonna go on for billions of years. Quicker than you know, nobody’s gonna remember your book. They might not even be able to find a copy of it. There might not be books anymore. Heck, in the era of artificial intelligence, you could write the great American essay, and it might be just a matter of decades before human beings don’t consume essays anymore, and all of your efforts are gonna be erased.

So if you think the value in an achievement is that it’s a kind of a permanent mark, it’s a line on your CV, like the Roman emperors who would make you carve their CVs into these tablets that they would display in their cities, there’s nothing that you can do to make that value permanent.

Brooks: I would say I have a dual consciousness about this. On the one hand, I know what you say is true.

Sullivan: On the other hand, you keep updating your CV.

Brooks: I keep—yeah.

Sullivan: I updated my CV yesterday, so.

Brooks: I’ve achieved more career success than I ever thought I would, by far. And it felt like, eh. I remember, the first book I wrote was called Bobos in Paradise, and I was driving on Sunset Boulevard in L.A., and my agent calls to say it’s on the best-seller list. And this is what writers dream of or want, and it felt like nothing.

And yet I grew up in this culture, which is an achievement culture. And so, I wrote this book, it was called The Second Mountain, and it’s about how you shouldn’t think about worldly success, you should think about being a good person. And I’m checking my Amazon rating every hour.

Sullivan: Physician, cure thyself.

Brooks: So I think I’ve been so inbred in an achievement culture and I don’t even know how to think about these two things.

Sullivan: I’ll reflect on my own life—and a big part of the practice of philosophy is living the examined life, reflecting on your story and trying to retell it and attend to it in ways that draw out what was really meaningful about it—times in my life when I’ve just focused on clearing the hurdle, like getting tenure, getting into college, getting that thing, the book published, when I do finally clear the hurdle, I—like you say—usually feel kind of numb.

So if you just focus on getting the achievement as your way of locking in value, it just, psychologically, it does not work. It just doesn’t, for the vast majority of folks. However, some of the greatest joys I think I get in life is reminiscing about these periods of striving and struggle and failure and success, and narrating the story and re-narrating it and telling it to my friends who are willing to indulge me at dinner parties.

Brooks: I would say also, now that I think about it, the struggle itself feels meaningful at the time, when you’re in the middle of it. I have a book due in a few months, and I don’t know what the book’s about. I’ve written probably 200,000 words, but they’re like pfft. So I don’t know what it’s about. And this happens to me every big project I do.

Sullivan: The pit of despair.

Brooks: And that feeling, that intensity of struggle, feels itself intrinsically meaningful to me. I don’t—that might be stupid.

Sullivan: You brought up Simone Weil earlier, and this summer in our office has been the hot Simone Weil summer. It’s been like the summer of Saint Simone. (She’s not actually a saint yet.) But she has a beautiful theory about writer’s block that, every time I’m in the pit of despair, I like to recall. She wrote this short little essay called [“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God”]. It’s this little seven-page article about why boring homework assignments are important for young people. Why you should not make math homework more interesting. That was basically the fight she was having. But her theory is about writing and problem-solving and just acts of creation more generally. She says that there’s something extremely important about habituating yourself to waiting for the idea or the insight to come to you, rather than just expecting constant, steady, upward production. Because when you’re 10 years old, and you’re struggling with a long-division problem, and you’re waiting to try to see the truth, you’re developing this kind of skill and expectation that the truth is gonna meet you. And then when you’re writing, it’s what causes you to not settle for a dumb idea, but to actually have that moment of epiphany and inspiration.

And, she says, later on in life, when you’re praying, when you’re trying to cultivate loving attention for somebody that you really care about, a lot of times it’s out of your control. You just have to sit and wait and know that the good true thing is coming your way.

The reason why this has been such a popular article in Notre Dame this summer is because obviously, this is also the hot AI summer, when we’re trying to figure out some way to convince 19-year-olds to wait for an idea rather than to just, like, settle for the cheap artificial thing that their software is giving them. And we’ve been trying to introduce these ideas of, like, when you learn to wait for your big idea in a book, that also cultivates in you the kind of desire and waiting that you’re gonna need, to have all these other really deep and important parts of the good life.

Brooks: So let’s talk about the project that you do on campus or the project we’re doing right now or what you do over the dinner table or what you do at a bar. It’s talking. We’re just talking. And it’s just words. So why should we think a life can be changed by talking?

Sullivan: Aristotle’s my absolute favorite philosopher, and he didn’t get everything right. He thought women had fewer teeth than men, and he thought we could control goats’ minds by looking them in the eye.

Like, he was wrong about some key things.

Brooks: I’m gonna try that on a goat.

Sullivan: You should try. I guess I’ve never tried it.

Brooks: Then I’m gonna count my wife’s teeth.

Sullivan: You should. You should double-check. He thought sons couldn’t look like their mothers. This is—did you ever just make basic observations? Whatever.

But he had some insights about the good life that are really fantastic, and one of them involves language. So he writes this book called The Nicomachean Ethics. Nicomachus was his son and his dad, so we’re not really sure who he imagined the audience for the book to be, but maybe let’s just say both. But it’s his advice for people about how to navigate their lives, young and old. And in the eighth and ninth chapter, he takes up this question of friendship, which he thinks is so important to the good life that he says, Even if you have every other good in life, if you do not have friendship, you would not choose to live. Even if you get everything else in my course right, if you can’t nail the friendship part, it’s all been pointless.

And in Book 9, one of the most beautiful passages of philosophy comes about, and I’ll paraphrase it for you because it’s a little bit long. But he says, one, realize that you have these moments in the course of your day where you perceive your own existence, like you perceive your own inner life. You perceive, like, the lights are on inside of me, and it gives you pleasure.

I had one of these when I was waiting in line for a flu shot recently, of just thinking, I’m just so glad I am alive. Like, what a gift this is. It’s not always that you feel this way, but you have these moments. You have an inner—

Brooks: Mostly at CVSes, actually.

Sullivan: CVSes. Yeah, I don’t know what it was. I think I was bored and my mind was wandering and I was just like, How cool to have conscious experience again.

So step one, Aristotle says we feel this way. We’ve got these thoughts about ourselves. We’ve got inner lives and things that we care about and passions and desires. And the crux of friendship is not just doing things to help out other people, but it is sharing your inner life with them. And you do that through what Aristotle says, speeches and thought, through gabbing, through chatting, through, like, I call my dad on the phone when I’m driving to the airport from New Haven, and I just kind of blab about all the things that are on my mind.

Aristotle lands it by saying this is what makes human life special. This is the stuff that makes human life distinctive. Not as with cattle who merely feed together. Cattle live their lives by just chomping side by side, and they have a kind of sociality. They like to be together. If you ever see a bunch of cows in a field and it’s getting dark, or there’s a storm coming in, they’ll band together, but they don’t share their inner lives. There’s no kind of common inner life between two cows.

Or if they do, they’re really secretive about it. I just watched The Sheep Detectives, so now it has me looking at animals in different ways. But cattle merely feed together. Humans, we do something beyond feeding together, because we use language to open up that inner world that we’ve cultivated, and that’s the stuff that the good life is made of.

Brooks: I find a lot of people—and I see it in my students, but that’s who I talk about this stuff with most—have trouble when I ask them about their inner life. I asked a headmistress of a high school about her students’ inner lives, and she talked about all their community service. And so I was like, “Well, I just asked you about something internal, and you gave me an answer about something external.” I think a lot of people go to that when they’re trying to think about the inner life.

Somewhere I came across this, I did not make this up. Imagine two guys, Joe and John. Joe, every time he sees a beautiful woman in a bar, he desperately wants to sleep with her. He’s so tempted, he’s like, Oh, I would love to sleep with her, but I wanna be faithful to my wife. I wanna be faithful to my kids. So he doesn’t. He never does it. And John, or whatever the other guy’s name is, he is so in love with his wife, he never even thinks about it. He’s not even tempted. And so the latter has purity of heart, and the former doesn’t, is eternally divided. And you wanna become the—you want to become purity of heart. It’s part of Catholic teaching. I don’t know if it’s part of Aristotle.

Sullivan: Oh, it’s definitely part of Aristotle. Aristotle has four ways you could live your life when it comes to virtue. One is just pure vice. You know what the worst is, and you’re completely driven to go after it. And now we won’t name names, but I’m sure you could think of some celebrity exemplars where you think, there’s just no friction, they just know what the evil thing to do is, and they just, full speed ahead, go for it. Very few people are like that.

The other extreme is pure virtue. You know what the good is, and you just sort of effortlessly desire it and want it. And very few of us ever get even close to that category. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, and the other two categories Aristotle has are “incontinence” and “continence.” So continence is, you know what the good is, you don’t always want it, but you realize that it’s out there, and you try to summon the will to go after it anyway, even though there’s some friction. And incontinence is the flip side of that equation, where you kind of have lost your grip on what the good is. You’re vaguely aware that you’re not happy with the direction that your life is going in, but you just don’t even have the will or knowledge to pull yourself out of it.

And most of us fall into some part of that spectrum of continence or incontinence. And your guy at the bar who’s very tempted by the beautiful woman but very aware of his wife, he’s probably about to fall into incontinence. He’s really on the precipice. And the problem is that if you don’t monitor which side of that line you’re on over the course of your life, you could get sucked into the pit.

Brooks: I think my views on character formation have shifted, actually. I wrote a book called The Road to Character, so I learned that writing a book on character doesn’t give you good character, and even reading a book on character doesn’t give you good character. But buying a book on character does, ’cause you get to—

Sullivan: Just, just owning the book and having it on your shelf. The more books you buy, actually, my publisher told me, the more character you acquire.

Brooks: Yeah, it’s absolutely true. So the theory of that book was self-confrontation. You say, What’s my key sin? And so one of the characters in that book is Dwight Eisenhower. And his key sin was anger. He had a temper problem.

Sullivan: I didn’t know that.

Brooks: He produced this persona of being this cheerful, country-club kinda guy, but that was manufactured. And so, in the middle of World War II, when he was general, he would take all the people he hated that day, and he would write their names on a piece of paper, and he’d shred it.

And that was his way of trying to purge his hatred for these people, these incompetents. And so that’s one form, and I still think that’s—it’s a useful exercise to say, What’s my key sin? And, What can I do about that?

Sullivan: What’s your key sin?

Brooks: I would say shallowness. I’m very prone to being shallow. And I’ve tried to spend my entire life being a little less shallow. So that’s definitely my key sin. I won’t ask you yours.

Sullivan: Actually, I would say pride, which actually in the Catholic world is a really, really bad one. You’re playing with nitroglycerin if you’ve got that in your life and you’re not really trying to address it. But,yeah, that’s a pretty bad one for me, with a little bit of anger.

Brooks: I’ll try not to cross you.

Sullivan: Exactly. I need to try the Eisenhower trick, though. Did it work? I wonder if it worked for him. If it gave him release.

Brooks: It doesn’t work. There’s been research. The idea of purging your anger, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work.

Sullivan: You know, a really strongly worded email at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

Brooks: That totally works.

Sullivan: That makes it worse.

Brooks: But now I think it’s loving the right things. I’m less impressed by willpower than I used to be. But if you can love the right things in the right way, in the right order, and mold your heart in that way, then—for example, giving up cigarettes and alcohol is really hard. But millions of women do it every year, because they get pregnant, and they love their kid more than they love cabernet.

Sullivan: It’s amazing.

Brooks: And so, but, how you mold your heart is a tricky thing, but being aware of, of loving things in the right order. I’m talking Augustine to a Catholic philosopher.

Sullivan: Exactly. The ordo amoris.

Brooks: The question is how you change somebody’s heart. Like how do you change their inner life? That seems really hard. I mean, let alone your—even changing your own is hard.

Sullivan: Yeah one of the biggest insights from social psychology and 2,500 years of philosophy is if you think that caring for your soul is a solo endeavor, like you write down your New Year’s resolutions and you commit yourself quietly in your own mind to following it, that’s a fool’s errand. No human changes their habits in that way. Change is inherently social and, you know, for a woman who becomes pregnant, the realization that I’m two people right now in this body, that’s a kind of social pressure. Not a bad social pressure, not like, your unborn child is not going to shame you about your decisions. But just this feeling of love creates a second self. It creates another self that’s permanently intertwined with your own, and that absolutely shapes your perspective about what your endeavor or journey is.

Brooks: The one I think that we don’t do enough of is basic skills, moral skills. Like, how do you sit with someone who’s depressed? How do you sit with someone who’s just lost a child? A lot of students, and a lot of people, nobody’s ever taught, and I would include myself in this. My friend suffered from severe depression, and I had no idea how to react, and I think I’m kinda literate. I don’t know. But I think we should do more basic skill building.

Sullivan: Oh, absolutely. We spend the first two weeks of the “God and the Good Life” course just on this question of how to ask questions at a dinner party. Most of my students don’t go to very many dinner parties, because they’re teenagers. They will later on in life, probably. But they think that all questions are created equal. And so they think you ask a question in class to just demonstrate how smart you are, if you talk at all.

Or to try to nail another student if you wanna have a moral debate. Like get them on record, like a prosecutor, of saying something that you’re then gonna attack. I think they must learn some of this in high school, too, but we spend the first two weeks just trying to deprogram them and help them realize you can ask a question of another person because you just wanna hear part of their story.

And the very best questions you might ask are ones where you genuinely have no clue what the person is gonna say next. And this is a revelation. We’ll have our students write down sample questions about whatever topic we’re doing in class. Should you be religious? How much money is enough to decide you would quit your job?

And they initially want to just lock into simple yes or no answers, and then start immediately offering their reasons. And we’re like, “Hold the phone. We don’t want your reasons yet. You’ve barely thought about this.” Instead, I want you to try to understand all of the other people that are in this conversation with you and where they might be coming from and what their possible reasons are.

Brooks: I find a lot of people don’t ask those questions. Well, either they’re not curious about people, or else they’re afraid they’re gonna invade someone’s privacy. And I would say, I’ve been a journalist since I was 22, and my job is asking people questions, often in difficult circumstances, and how often has anybody ever said to me, “That’s none of your damn business”? And the answer is zero. Zero. I’ve asked this of other journalists or people in the question-asking business. If you respectfully ask somebody to tell you the story of their life, no one has ever asked them, and they’re delighted to do this.

Sullivan: We started teaching this Good Life class 10 years ago, so it’s the 10-year anniversary. And one of the things we have all the students do is write this long confessional essay, basically, their confessions like Augustine, their apology like Socrates, where they share key moments from their life and then debate with themselves about what its significance is in light of the philosophy that we’ve been reading in class.

And this is 40 percent of their grade, this one big confessional essay. And I remember when we were unleashing the course, I got a lot of criticism from well-meaning but mistaken faculty who basically said, “You cannot ask a student to disclose aspects of their life like this. That’s professionally inappropriate. And you can’t grade them on it, you fool. This is not possible. ”

And we don’t grade them based on are they good people or not. We grade them based on their philosophical reasoning. But I have taught thousands of students in the last decade in this class. I have never once had a student complain about going through this exercise.

Sometimes they’ll complain about their final grade, but they never complain about the self-disclosure part. It’s the opposite. I get notes and emails from students, oftentimes from their parents, often like a year after they’ve taken the class, saying, “Hey, I just want you to realize that meant a tremendous amount to me at the time. Nobody had ever listened to me or paid that much attention to me in my life.”

Brooks: I’ve gotta ask, I was curious about this, about the apology. Like, they’re 18, 19, whatever. What do they say?

Sullivan: There are some common themes. They have to pick three of 10 possible topics.

Politics, money, work, moral responsibility, suffering, love, death, God, contemplation, et cetera. I think I got nine out of the 10. They tend to always pick three. They never pick politics. You’d be shocked to learn, they never think that political debate is a very important part of their lives, which is hilarious because we’re constantly pressured now as faculty to teach our students how to have political debates, this is all the rage right now, and I wanna tell them, none of my students actually care that much about this topic. Maybe they should, but they just don’t.

They usually choose work and love. My students are obsessed with work. That part of their essays tends to be very funny, because I will more often than not read these extremely sincere sections of their essays about their experiences with what Karl Marx calls alienation from your “species-being,” which is when you feel like the capitalist conditions you’re forced to operate under separate you from your deep sources of meaning and your essence. And they will say that their experience being the treasurer of the Ultimate Frisbee team has been a constant grind and has caused them to believe that they’re only valuable insofar as what they produce for the Frisbee club, and they’re experiencing burnout because of that.

But they do put a high value on work, and we let them. We indulge that. I give the students about four weeks on work and money in the class to just talk through all their questions, ’cause you can’t try to suppress it.

And then the second big theme is love. And one surprise, or I don’t know if this would be a surprise or not. You would think lovesick college students would write about romantic love and what it means to them. And we do a little bit of readings on that. They never write about romantic love.

The vast majority of my freshmen have actually never had a serious boyfriend or girlfriend by the time I get them. That’s still in the future for them. They write about their parents, and occasionally their siblings. And so I get to read a lot of really beautiful essays about their reflections on what these relationships have meant to them. I think a lot of them are experiencing some homesickness by the time I see them. But that’s very moving. And again, figures like Aristotle that we obsess about in the class, Aristotle gives a whole chapter over to parent-child relationships. These are extremely philosophically rich parts of our lives.

The most profound moment for this actually was in 2020. I was teaching my Good Life class, and I had two young women in the class. This was peak pandemic. Notre Dame went back in person in the fall, so we were all sitting there. We taught that class in the football stadium, and we were all wearing face masks in one of the sky boxes that the donors have in this massive room, and wearing face masks and struggling through the pandemic. And I had two young women in the class, and they’d just worked on the first draft of their apology essay, and they were crossing the street coming back from an event, and were hit by a drunk driver and killed.

And they were international students, and their family had to travel to the United States a few days later for the memorial masses for these two young women, and it was a huge ordeal. And Notre Dame, to their credit, put on this big in-person memorial service for these two women, even though it was really challenging.

And we got to give the parents the first drafts of these essays that these women had written, and they’d both chosen to write about love, unsurprisingly. When people are asked what really matters in their life, that’s one of the key sections. And one in particular had written about how much she loves her brother and what that feels like for her now that they’re separated.

And for us to be able to give—they’d never vocalized these things, or they had maybe in a quick text, like, “LOL, hugging face.” But it had never—their parents had never experienced five single-spaced pages of, “This is what love of you has meant in my life.” And to be able to take that artifact and give that to these grieving family members reminded me: This is the most important thing we could do.

I don’t care, you know, your “Compare and contrast Kant and Marx.” Yeah blah, blah, blah. That’s great. This is a little fragment of these women’s souls that we finally managed to wrap our hands around that we could give back to you when the rest of it is just grievously ripped from your hands.

Brooks: Wow. That’s an incredible story. Very moving.

So we’ve talked about love a lot in this conversation, and so my question to you is: Are you in the wrong business? I think of philosophy as about cognition. And so that would imply that being a good person is about having the right beliefs. You guys work on beliefs. But it doesn’t seem to me that being a good person is really mostly about beliefs. If it was, moral philosophers would be better than the rest of us. And sorry, you guys aren’t. I mean, you’re obviously better than the economists.

Sullivan: Yeah, for sure.

Brooks: But, but they’re not better than—

Sullivan: No, definitely not.

Brooks: But then when you think about, say, the church scandals. The guys who abused those children and then covered up for it, they had sat through a million sermons. They probably had the right beliefs. But we would say there was something poisoned in their soul that they are willing to damage another human being or cover up that damage.

So how do you think about the relationship between what I would call the desires and emotions, and reason? Are you too much in the reason business?

Sullivan: I think you could definitely accuse a lot of philosophers of that. My friend Eric Schwitzgebel did this really interesting study about, a social-psychology study, where he basically looked at whether your typical professional philosopher is more or less moral in everyday decision making than the kinda standard human. And you’ll be shocked, stunned to learn that your typical philosopher is a little bit less honest in ordinary situations, a little bit less moral than maybe their baseline American.

But this should not come as a surprise to those of us who study the tradition of philosophy. Aristotle, our guy, our main man again, addresses this in his second lecture in Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics. He says, Here’s the deal with philosophy and the good life. A lot of folks spend time collecting data, collecting beliefs, collecting ideas. But they don’t actually practice what these beliefs preach. They are like people who collect a lot of advice from physicians and then never follow it.

Your doctor says, “You need to get healthy. You need to stop eating so many fatty and sugary foods, and you need to exercise every day.” And I collect this, and I write about it on Twitter, but then I never actually do the thing, and then I’m shocked that I’m not healthy.

So many philosophers are like doctors who don’t exercise. They have studied the theory of the case pretty well, and it’s good that human beings have this kind of theoretical knowledge, but if you’re not willing to actually make this a way of life, you are not gonna receive the benefits of it.

And unfortunately, way too many professional philosophers and professional scholars generally are like the doctors who aren’t willing to give up the sugary treats. They just collect all the data, but they don’t actually make it any part of how they care for their souls. So that’s not surprising.

That’s not to say we don’t want the data, we don’t wanna think about the ideas. It’s just to say the ideas get you, like, 20 percent of the way there. The rest of the 80 percent is actually trying to have a way of life.

Brooks: I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, and I am so grateful and honored, and now proud, if I can say that—

Sullivan: Ooh, dangerous.

Brooks: —to have had Meghan Sullivan as our first guest on The Permanent Questions. Thanks so much for being here.

Sullivan: Oh, it’s great to be with you, and I’m so glad that this exists.

Brooks: This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work, and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

See you next week.

This episode of The Permanent Questions was produced by Rebecca Davis, edited by Christopher Beha, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.