Matthew Croasmun | How to Create a Life Worth Living

Matthew, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Matthew Croasmun: Thanks so much for having me. Yeah,

Srini Rao: it is my pleasure to have you here. So I actually found out about you by way of my publicist. And I think we're both in one of the same groups at Penguin. But when I saw the subject matter of the book, I thought to myself, this is a very deep idea.

And as I just was joking with you before, this was one of those books that gave me a headache in the best way possible because it was so deep in terms of forcing you to think. I feel like I walked away with it with more questions than answers. But before we get into the content of the book, I wanted to start by asking you what religious or spiritual beliefs were you raised with and how did that end up impacting what you ended up doing with your

Matthew Croasmun: life and career?

Oh, that's a great question. I was raised in a Christian home. We were, my, my sister had a little sister growing up who, when she was at that age of learning to memorize her home phone number. And her address and these sorts of things. We were rehearsing with her publicly Hey, look look, the little kid knows her phone number and she would recite it and then we'd ask her, and where do you live?

And she said, Northbrook Evangelical Covenant Church which was hilarious. That's not where we lived, of course. But it felt at times growing up that's where we lived. And yeah, church was a big part of my life. My faith became more meaningful to me personally in college.

There's for folks that grow up in a religious household many have a moment in college. If you go to college where it's. It's the first first Sunday or first Saturday morning or whenever you would or first Friday afternoon whenever you would normally go to your religious service when you think to yourself, oh wait, no one is Pushing me out the door to go do this I'm gonna decide on my own and usually it occurs to you in that moment.

Like it occurred to me, I remember thinking when I came to college, I don't have to take English this semester, no one is looking over my shoulder, making sure that I eat my vegetables intellectually. And I had a similar experience going to college and at that moment, I'd wait, I don't have to go to church and yet I found I found a faith community on campus that was really important to me.

Not just my faith life to my life large, because largely because it was a group of people who when I went to college, I went to study music. I was going to be like the conductor of a a big symphony orchestra and like a, and a composer in residence and I was on like the Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein track.

There are no tracks for these things but that's how I imagined myself. And and I had lived my life to that point, trying to like populate my life with fans rather than friends. Honestly, I'm not sure that 15 year old me knew the difference. And when I found that faith community in college, it was a bunch of people who cared more about me than they were impressed by me.

It's not too hard at Yale to find a bunch of people who aren't that impressed by you because they're all pretty impressive people themselves. I can relate. I was a Berkeley undergrad. So I know. Okay. All right. You get the vibe. But it was huge, right? To have this group of people who really cared for me, who wanted who at that point in my life, my, my faith was, I just thought look, everybody has the same goals in life.

If we all just want to make as much money as we possibly can, we want to. Get as much power and influence as we possibly can, but like a religious person, like that's they are, they all have this, we all have the same goals, but if you're going to be a religious person, you have to do those same things with one arm tied behind your back because you have to be like a good moral person while you chase down all those goals.

It's faith community found in college was. had a different sort of thought. It was like what if faith actually meant reconsidering what the goals, what the meaningful and most important goals of life actually are? And so rather than God being I don't know, like the policeman of my means slapping me on the hand when I tried to cheat or steal my way to power money success.

What if God actually wanted to have a say about what actually counted as success for me to begin with? Maybe it wasn't about influence and money. Maybe it was about relationships and belonging and giving one's life for. The sake of the other and that just really, man, that that really captured my imagination.

And I think really there's no way to tell the story of my life since that time without without that thread right at the center of it. This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite. 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system. NetSuite. By Oracle.

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The reason I

Srini Rao: started with that question is faith is one of those things that I find so fascinating.

Matthew Croasmun: Having

Srini Rao: grown up in an Indian household where, you know, going to the temple was just this nuisance that we would tolerate where it's okay and it, I always say the problem with being Indian, I told my mom, the reason I'm not religious is all Indian religious traditions are time consuming.

Go to an Indian wedding. They just take too long. And I'm not a patient person. But I wonder one, I think the way the media portrays the

Matthew Croasmun: evangelicals and what we've seen is

Srini Rao: that they're fanatical like crazy about religion trying to convert everybody.

Obviously, I know that's not true considering you and I are talking here. So I had two questions about that, like one, what is, what do you think the misperceptions that media creates about people like you and the ones you grew up with? And then two, I feel like you have these sort of opposite extremes where people grow up in these religious households and they just rebel completely against the whole idea of being religious and abandon it.

And then they see this as a freedom to go ballistic. And then you have the opposite people like you who have faith becomes an integral part of their life. So what do you think distinguishes those two people?

Matthew Croasmun: Yeah. You've asked a lot right there. These are good questions.

I think I think probably the more we live as hopefully just as as honest open human beings in the world, we more, the more I hope we come to realize that nobody like matches our stereotype of them. And that's that's clearly true as we interact along across racial lines, across ethnic or cultural lines.

I think it's true in terms of. religious lines as well. Yeah I always hesitate these days to drop the e word evangelical because that just, Yeah, in many circles, that just means something politically, that those aren't my politics or in terms of social agenda, that's not that's not my social agenda either.

At the same time and again, I appreciate you drawing the analogies because there are these ways that if nobody that we meet is exactly their stereotype, neither are we exactly our stereotype. And. So I guess for me, what that's meant is, yeah, there are things about my evangelical heritage that I would want to push back on or resist.

But there are also pieces where I just have to be honest, this is where I came from. These communities were important to who I've become. I even ended up as an intellectual in these like weird places where there's, you talk about fanaticism. One of the, one of the things that evangelicals are famously fanatical about is the Bible.

I'm actually, my PhD is in biblical studies. A lot about the Bible. Basically, there's like a certain kind of posture of evangelicalism that's sometimes described as biblicism. And not to get too into the weeds about it, but my biggest problem with biblicism, I think, is that it's unbiblical.

Like, when I read, like, how the authors how the writers in the Bible think about the Bible, they don't think about it in terms that evangelical biblicism would think about. Jesus himself, like. He says Hey, you search the scriptures because in them you think you have life, but they actually testify, he says, about me.

Namely the implication being life is found in in, in, in relationship with Jesus, who for Christians is a, that's a mediated, that's a relationship with God. But anyway, I'll say like the scripture, he's also saying that right there, you search the scriptures cause you think that life is there.

That's not where life is. Anyway. That strikes me as a rather un that's not biblicism but that is how the Bible thinks about biblicism. But what a weird thing to say I resist biblicism because it's unbiblical. I've now bored you with that word like eight times in a row. All to say, I find that even in my resisting, even where I resist my tradition, I find myself still formed by my tradition.

And I think You know, you asked by like different paths, I, at least for me, those are like the really interesting places that I have found myself occupying. And I found friends and colleagues who are in other religious traditions who are or who are in aren't, don't identify with any particular religious tradition.

A lot of us can sort of charts or parallel paths there, right? Where there's there's something from our background that we want to say, yeah that's not me anymore. But yet there is something about that background that's still, yeah, that's exactly who I am. And you couldn't possibly understand me any other way.

And I can't really understand myself without some kind of reference to that. Yaroslav Pelikan historian of Christianity, actually, I think he was at Yale way back in the day, he said he distinguished between tradition and traditionalism. He said tradition is the living faith of the dead.

Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And hey I've PJ Ivanhoe is a scholar of Confucianism invokes this similar idea. And he talks about these different things of like traditionalism versus what he calls living through tradition, which is what he thinks Confucius is advocating for.

And I think both of these thinkers are trying to point us to to ways of relating to tradition. Yeah, not as like dusty old ideas from a bygone era, but as, and not as things that are spoken once and forever remain the same, but as living conversations. Sometimes even I'll tell you like as a theologian, sometimes theology feels more like an ongoing argument than it feels like.

A sort of repetition of the same old thing. And I think if we're able to relate to traditions, be they religious or cultural or philosophical, if we can relate to traditions as living conversations rather than dusty relics, I think we can actually find that they're tremendous for continuing to shape our lives, even they, even at their best, I think provide us.

the tools to critique them. They actually help, they actually give us the tools we need, right? With our students each spring, we invite them to read the declaration of independence alongside the declaration of sentiments at Seneca fall authored by among others, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass is what to the slave is the 4th of July, right?

And here's that a sort of original in the American tradition, sort of original documents. And in two authors who are taking up those like that language, they each take up this phrase. We hope these truths to be self evident that all are created equal, right? And Elizabeth Cady Stanton says, if you mean all men are created equal, you must mean all men and women are created equal.

The principle itself helps us restate the principle better, right? And Frederick Douglass says the same. When you said all men were created equal, apparently you didn't mean all men, but you should have meant all men because you said all men. And I'll help you say that thing better, right? On what grounds are these folks critiquing that original statement?

In part, it's on the grounds of that statement itself. And at their best, that's what our traditions can do for us. They actually. Not only do they like materials to work with, they even offer us, I think, ideals with which we can critique

,

the traditions that we've been living in and through. and find our ways forward in our lives.

One thing I wonder is, when

Srini Rao: you grew up in an environment like the one you did, is it very strict no drinking, no partying, or is that just the stereotype? In my scene, my parents happened not to drink, but there wasn't like a big, there wasn't like a big it was like a Swedish context, so the Swedes at least in my neck of the woods the Swedes were pretty chill.

Matthew Croasmun: They were big on it really mattered to them that communities remained in unity. And so they really wanted to allow room for disagreement in these sorts of things. And so I think like maybe like among different evangelical spaces, it was a pretty tolerant, pretty open one.

Yeah. So I didn't, I don't think I had that sort of feeling of Oh, this was like this repressed childhood environment that like, I have to go go crazy. So my wild oats or whatever. Yeah. How in the world do you go from getting a PhD in biblical studies to teaching this class? Which like I said is a subject that is so vast.

Srini Rao: I was like you got this into one class. How? Actually, yeah, I mean it there's a sort of direct Process I was teaching introduction to the New Testament in Yale College while I was a graduate student And that course when I first taught it, it had a sort of shape that I had received from predecessors.

Matthew Croasmun: And my course was basically just like a course on ancient history. It was thinking about New Testament documents just as artifacts of their ancient context, which is a totally you know, reasonable way to read these texts. But it wasn't the one that my students came in really caring about, right?

So at the beginning of the semester, like any good seminar leader, I'd ask them why are you taking class? And one after another, they they'd begin, students would begin by like identifying their religious location. They'd say I'm not religious myself, but I've got a roommate who's Christian.

And I thought ah I should read these texts that seem to be so important to them. I just really want to understand like what they. Yeah what my roommate finds so meaningful in their lives or anyway, where you could write different answers like this, where, you know, one student I'm a Christian.

I really want to carefully study my own religious texts. And I'd always have to apologize to them at the end and say, Oh, I'm so sorry. At the end of the day, probably isn't the course you're looking for. We're going to, this course is basically going to be like a little parochial course on the ancient Roman world and this little east bizarre eastern corner of the empire.

Yeah. But when I was able to reshape the course myself, I tried to find room or somehow we would still do that historical study of the biblical text, but we'd also find time towards throughout the course and especially towards the end of the class where students will be able to take up like big life questions that they had and be able to bring those questions to this text and what are they.

If they had any particular religious attachment to the text or not, they were able to wrestle with these questions that were really important to them in dialogue with this ancient text. Anyway, I felt like it took a ton of work to rework this class and it really pushed against some of the prevailing winds in the department, but I felt so good about the outcome.

And then I heard that two, two folks who are now my colleagues Ryan McInerney Lenz and Miroslav Volf, my two coauthors in this book, they were teaching this class called Life Worth Living, where it felt like everything I had worked so hard to find room for around the edges of my class, they just made that the whole class, just the only thing we're doing.

We're just going to read. Religious and philosophical and cultural texts with these big questions of life in tow. And that's just the whole thing. And I thought at first I thought, man, that sounds like cheating. But then when I realized actually they, I was able to sit in on their last session, that first semester that they taught the course, I heard how it was impacting students lives.

And I just thought, shoot, I got to figure out how to this needs to become my job. And really we were in the. middle of writing a I was like hired grant that if we got the grant, I would have a job. And I made sure that my job once we got that grant was to direct the life with living program, which is now what I do.

Because it just felt man, this is what education. This is what education should be this is what it should be for it's great to have those 2 a. m. conversations back in the dorm room or whatever wherever you are having those conversations with your friends, but man why not use the curriculum for that, right?

Why can't we make space and that's been our pitch to students. If the Russian novel and organic chemistry or what have you are worth the best of your intellectual energies. And surely like the purpose and shape of your entire life are worthy of that same energy and it's just been a, yeah, it's just been an incredible joy to offer students that opportunity to marry the best of their intellectual energies with their most profound existential questions.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a perfect segue into talking about the book specifically when you're talking about an elite institution like a place like Yale because I was thinking to myself if you would ask me the question of what makes life worth living. When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, it would be your Ferraris and mansions and pretty much all the things a materialistic 20 year old wants, and I would probably think you were full of it.

If you start to pose these sort of deep questions, like this all sounds like a bunch of new age nonsense. So two questions, like one, you'd mentioned like making this part of their curriculum and I wondered, like, why is that not more prevalent when you're in an undergraduate environment?

But two, how does the environment, particularly when you're talking about Yale students, because Yale students are not exactly underachievers or been they've got like a profound social influence around them of like elite achievers on every field. It's doctors, lawyers, bankers.

I know this cause my sister was a anesthesiology resident at Yale. And same thing coming out of Berkeley undergrad, like half my friends are Harvard meds Harvard law school, business school, at some top school. And it was this is the path. This is what it means to live a good life.

And I wonder how that narrative informs people at Yale when we're talking about

Matthew Croasmun: this whole idea. To take the first question first it is there much ink has been spilled about this actually including a book by Anthony Kronman education's end. He called it the subtitle is why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life.

I'll warn you, I think he I think in some places, for example, when he starts blaming the quote unquote multiculturalists but but what he gets right, I think is when he he names at least basically there's what's called the modern research ideal within the university where we've.

There's the old joke about getting your PhD, right? This is like getting a PhD is about you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about absolutely nothing. And there's something true in that joke, right? About what specialized knowledge that's celebrated within the university looks another old joke about this is some president of the University of California, the UC system at some point said. A university is a bunch of unrelated, disjointed departments united over a common concern about shared parking, right? There's nothing that holds the university together other than complaints that there's not enough places to park your car.

And that is those are true caricatures in certain ways, right? Of, of the academy. The knowledge that's celebrated is highly specialized. And it's and the university on its own terms often has no way of relating any of those knowledges to any other knowledge. And the question of the meaning of life or any of these sort of big questions about the shape of flourishing life or about the good life, these questions aren't answerable by.

They require something more like wisdom, which is just really not something the university is tuned to produce or to celebrate or to offer students access to. And the other thing that's happened and we found a little, we found a little bit at our institution never stated explicitly, but maybe it's like between the margins here and there between the lines.

Is this sort of thought that you could have a community that where you took up these sort of questions about what's right and what's wrong, what's a good life, what's a life to be. Regretted. You could take up those questions maybe like in a pretty homogeneous community where you shared enough some sort of foundational commitments, some standards of what those various things might mean, but in a diverse community and a inclusive community like the ones that most of our universities are trying to cultivate you're just going to have to, you're just going to have to privatize those questions of the good.

And that's not just our university for what it's worth. I think by and large, our whole society has made a decision to privatize the question of the good life. And so each one of us has to answer it for ourselves for what it's worth. I think that's right. I'd much rather have that than some institution trying to tell us what what a good life is.

But privatizing it does sometimes leave us entirely on our own. And so we really think that those two options, that's a false choice. Actually, you can have an inclusive, diverse community that also takes up the question of the good life. And I think hopefully what we're trying to hopefully we demonstrated in our course and with this book is that actually those kinds of diverse, pluralistic, inclusive communities, those can be incredibly rich spaces to ask these questions.

And once you see it that way you start to you actually find the like communities that are convened around shared questions rather than around shared answers can be incredibly life changing and transformative when it comes to Yale students. You're absolutely right.

Like these are students who come in they've been told all along the way what a good life is. It looks like in part it looks like the kind of life that I came to college thinking was a good life, right? Power, influence, prestige, money all that a good respectable career.

And in part a lot of them haven't even gotten much gotten that far for a lot of them. Like the good life has just been reduced to like getting into an elite college. That's what a good life was for the first 17, 18 years of their lives. And when they get there our colleague Laurie Santos, who's, who teaches a sort of parallel course to ours psychology and the good life at Yale, the so called happiness class at Yale.

And she remarks on this as well as students get to Yale and they look around and think, is this it? And they were prompted, they thought, they just thought Yale admission was the good life. And suddenly they get to Yale and they look around and here's a whole bunch of people who got into Yale and not everyone seems to be all that happy.

Or at the very least, it'd be really sad if like your whole, like the whole purpose of life was achieved by the time you're 18 years old. What do you do next? What's valuable next? So in certain ways, like they are, they're actually super like tuned into these questions right from the beginning and because they itself like triggers something like a quarter life crisis.

But the, but the fact and that's made only more intense by the fact that I think a lot of these elite institutions it's very hard to live a balanced life as like a high schooler that also yields a so called well rounded like resume for college admissions. So they say it's really hard to get into one of these schools without having sacrificed.

Health and being in your life on probably usually on more than one front. And so students also come in just yeah, it's like they've run a marathon. They're absolutely exhausted. They've barely gotten over the finish line of elite college admissions and they're in.

And so they're both exhausted and wondering like what the run was all for. And so in certain ways, like that's, they're like. Clamoring for exactly these sorts of opportunities to ask these questions.

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com slash unmistakable. I wanted to bring back a clip from a conversation I had with David Epstein, which I think will make an interesting jump off point into talking about some of the questions that you asked, particularly when you're talking about these questions at such an early age. Take a listen.

We will

Matthew Croasmun: underestimate future change at every time point, even when we're very old at no time, is that more true than from about 18 to the late twenties, that's when you undergo the fastest time of personality change. And so essentially right at the start of that period, we're telling someone pick now, which, which is really asking them to pick for a person they don't yet know, and certainly in a world they can't yet conceive unless they have a crystal ball that most people don't.

And so I think it's a particularly bad time to make ironclad long term plans and we should be much more ointed toward do the thing that's going to give you a high information signal about

Srini Rao: whether it fits you or not. So the reason I wanted to bring that back is I thought it really was an interesting quote in the context of some of the questions that you pose, which to David's point like I look back even at 18, how well do you know yourself at 20?

How well do you know yourself? And you talk about this idea of the limits of control and you say an enormously stupefying complicated world is always shaping the situations you find yourself in. Not even who you are is fully up to you. Everyone goes through things that shape them in ways they wouldn't want if they had the choice.

So like with that in mind, and then David's question in mind, like when we start to ask these questions at such an early age what is the difference between asking them when you're 40 something versus when

Matthew Croasmun: you're talking about your own students. Yeah life stages are so real here.

In fact in the story of the of Siddhartha, the story of the Buddha his father, the king, his first response to the Buddha when he wants to renounce all of his earthly possessions and his earthly position and go seek enlightenment. His father's first answer isn't.

You're wrong. His father's answer is that's not. It's not for this season yet. You should do that later. There's a time for renunciation, and that time is essentially like that's retirement, and you should in the meantime, you need to do something more worldly. Buddha, of course, does not take that advice.

So there's there, there's that itself too, right? Which says the what the King is offering him there is in certain sense, a sort of a certain kind of Hindu common sense, right? It says there are different seasons of life and the good life actually just looks meaningfully different from season to season.

So there are. Great traditions in human history that have suggested not only is it difficult to ask these questions or different to ask these questions at different times of life, they may not just happen to have different answers to you because you think about them differently. They might even like normatively, or there might even just be like a different fact with the matter at different seasons of life, which is really like intriguing idea that in my religious tradition I had never encountered before.

Yeah, I mean it I'm very sympathetic to the thought that like we are, we ask, it's crazy that we ask students to chart their career paths when they're 18 years old. That's insane. Fortunately at Yale, we're not asking them to do that. They didn't even have to declare their majors until the ends of their second years.

And for better and for worse most Yale students, the Yale students majors aren't all that predictive of what they're actually going and doing in their lives anyway. Yeah most of my college friends are doing things more related to their extracurriculars than to their to their academic majors.

But these questions do show up in different ways at different times in our lives. And I've had the privilege of being part of parts of these conversations with undergraduates, with people in the middle of their careers, with. With folks who are incarcerated, who are looking back at particular seasons of their lives that sort of landed them where they are, have been able to sit with folks who are, whose big question about a life worth living is a question about what does a good life look like in retirement?

And even with some folks who are mostly looking back on their lives and saying what can I see looking back on my life that I could share with others about what my. What I have learned about what a good life is I guess all, like, all I can really say is like it, the questions do take different kinds of import.

The conversation looks different. Often conversation across different life stages is really potent and valuable. It's something that college campuses are sadly, like nearly entirely bereft of. I have a friend who teaches a life worth living course in a secondary school environment.

And in his version of the course he assigns students to go one of their papers. They have to have, go have a conversation about visions of the good life with someone who's over the age of 60, man, usually that ends up being a grandparent and they come back with all kinds of insights and all kinds of even just like different questions that that folks that in those life stages are asking, then they are at 16 or 17 or however old they are as they're taking these classes.

And I think. What I take from that is a sort of, this is a lifelong project. We have to be really patient with ourselves and yet also persistent throughout our lives to keep taking these questions up again and again. Because hopefully we are growing in wisdom, people around us are growing in wisdom and we're gaining access to new ideas, new cultural spaces, new worlds as we live our lives.

There's something that you say about

Srini Rao: the three aspects of a good life. You say agency, circumstance, and affect are the three basic aspects of a good life. Can you explain that to people and expand on that

Matthew Croasmun: concept? Yeah, sure. So we think about it, we can think about it in terms of something like, say, friendship, right?

A friendship is going to have there are at least three things we could say about a friendship and we can think about it in terms of these three Thank you. These three dimensions, right? So first of all a friendship is something that exists like outside myself. It's not I can't just declare that I have a friendship.

Either, I, there needs to be someone on the other end, right? So it's not just an exercise of my own agency. It's not just a feeling that I have. I could feel like I'm friends with Taylor Swift or whoever, right? But if they don't know that we're friends, then we're not friends, right? So there's a and many good things in life are like that.

They're part of the world outside of us. But we'd also say like a friendship wouldn't really be a friendship if we didn't ourselves put some energy into it. So there's also an aspect of my own agency. I have to be a friend to someone who is really my friend. And so there's, there are these agential sort of aspects of life and a lot of, again, a lot of important aspects of a good life or components of a good life.

are in this dimension. They're what we call, they're parts of what we call like life led. We're exercising what agency we do have in ways that are right and good and aligned with with the flourishing of our own lives and the flourishing of others around us. But there's also if we had a friendship and all right, someone, this person says, yes I am their friend.

I'm Matt's friend and I'm saying, yeah, I'm investing in this relationship too. But somehow there was no feeling to it. It felt cold, right? That wouldn't, we could maybe have some sort of reciprocal duty to one another. But that's not really a friendship either, right? There's a, there's an affective an emotional sort of feeling component to a friendship.

And again, similarly, there are many things in a, when it comes to a good life. Where we can not just ask what does it mean for life to go well in terms of life circumstances, or what is it to lead our lives well in terms of life's agential component. But we should also ask what does a good life feel like?

What's the emotional substance of flourishing life? And there are certain accounts certain sort of radical accounts that would say, Hey, only one of these really matters. Certain, a certain kind of understanding of the Stoics at least would suggest that the Stoics are radicals of this sort.

Only life led well matters to the Stoic. You shouldn't care about how you feel. You shouldn't be invested in any of life's circumstances. All that matters is that you do the, do what's right. You live according to virtue. That would be a sort of vision of a good life reduced to agency alone. And we can imagine analogous sort of radical views.

I'd say all that really matters is how you feel. Maybe happiness alone is the only thing that matters when it comes to a good life. But most visions especially the ancient ones are inclined most of the ancient ones are inclined to to think that there's somehow it's all three of these in concert.

There may be one is more important than the others. moral visions of a good life are going to say, push, come to shove, leading your life. How you exercise your agency, that's maybe actually the most important, but most of them, like I said, are going to see like actually all three of these things have to come together.

And when we see things like friendship where the good of these good things seems to participate in all three of these dimensions, I think we can build some intuitions towards thinking, okay, to me, there's good reason to think that a good life actually has all three of these components. This is something I wanted

Srini Rao: to ask you.

I was just grabbing a coffee earlier and I remember I just finished compiling the book notes and I like, I walked with him and said, wait a minute, there's something here that wasn't mentioned at all. And that's romantic love. Was that by design?

Matthew Croasmun: Oh, that's so interesting. I do think romantic love is conceivable in terms of these three terms. It's these three dimensions. It's gonna, it's gonna participate in all three of those. That is interesting. Romantic love is a relatively recent human idea.

I suppose if my wife listens to this, I should say it's really important to me. But but it's a relatively recent idea. And and in certain ways it probably the. heightened import that we societally tend to give to romantic love. Of course, there are plenty of sort of protest voices that say, I don't know how important that actually is.

Broadly in culture and movies and film and novels and these sorts of things, there's been a lot of attention paid to romantic love for the past few hundred years and especially in the West. I think in part our sort of fixation there maybe in part has to do with our fixation on the affective emotional sort of component or dimension of a good life.

I think in, it is a sort of like romantic love is a bringing together of all three of these things, but it really. In fact we're probably the first, certainly in the West before, I don't know, 19th century, you wouldn't have thought of love as even primarily having an emotional component. I suppose like Shakespeare's getting you there a bit earlier than that.

But the sort of thought that like love is primarily an emotion certainly in the Christian West, the thought would have been no. Love is primarily. A disposition of it's a virtue, right? It's a way that you choose to lead your life. You choose to love God, love neighbor, love oneself.

Yeah, so maybe that's why it's deemphasized for us. Cause we're reading these older traditions for whom romantic love. Either is like nearly just not a category for them or at any rate, I'm not quite nearly as central as it may be for us. Let's talk

Srini Rao: about this notion of uncertainty and limitations.

You say trying to understand the really big picture exhaustively is not necessary. We must acknowledge disagreement and be uncomfortable with uncertainty. And the. There's this sort of like mythical idea I think a lot of people have of this perfect time when they're going to do this thing that they say they want to do, whether it's write a book or whatever it is.

I realize that they never comes for most people. And they have this just delusional reality. But the other part of this that was just got me thinking this morning because I was writing about this because I just got back from Brazil Friday night and I kept thinking I have a friend and I kept trying to convince him that he should travel a bit and get out of the United States.

And he'll always joke with me. He's you mean we're not the center of the universe, but have no, you're not the center of the universe, you idiot. But got me thinking about the fact that the diversity of your experiences that you have actually

,

expands the range of your potential.

Whether those experiences are good or bad, whether they're pleasurable or annoying. But I think that there's this sort of mythical idea that somehow, and I think I have this idea at moments. It's oh, when I have it all together, I'll be ready to do X, Y, Z, get married, whatever, start a family. So talk to me about that in the context of this whole idea of uncertainty and limitations.

Matthew Croasmun: I think it, it comes in a couple different ways. So one is intellectual humility is for me a really important virtue. And especially when we come to these sorts of tasks. I mean we tell our students on the, I tell my students on the first day of class, look, the question of the good life is both inalienably your responsibility to answer, right?

Like you, only you can answer this question for yourself and you really have to do it. But it's also at the same time, it is above your pay grade, like you are, you're just never going to become an expert when it comes to the good life. And again, in an academic environment, that can be a sort of like a sort of uncomfortable or even surprising sort of thing to hear from an instructor, right?

If the concept of the university for a student is sometimes a sense that they're just going around becoming experts in one thing after another, right? To have an instructor say, Hey, I'm going to teach you this course, I'm going to promise you from the outset, you will not become an expert or expertise is just the wrong way to think about it.

So I think we tell students the course in certain ways is just it's like training and preparation for choosing as amateurs because that's all we ever do. And I take it that probably most of the, like the biggest decisions we make in our lives. We make as amateurs because they're because the biggest decisions in our lives are just bigger than we have reason to think that we could Become experts in whatever it would take to choose as experts, right?

So I think about my wife and I deciding to get married We never a lifelong commitment It's not this just not a thing that like you could ever be like, yes, I have this all locked down I've looked at this from every conceivable angle. I have entirely mastered this question and I've conquered it and I have come to the inescapable that this is the right path, right?

You do your best, but you also have to be humble in front of a decision like that and say, boy, there's just so much I can't know. Not just so much. I don't know so much that I can't know. I just think that it's important to keep that kind of humility. Humility in front of us as we as we think and choose.

Not just one or another path, but even the sort of standards of the vision of life that we're trying to trying to live into. There's a second part of your question and I can't quite recall. Yeah I think you answered it,

Srini Rao: but it was more about this idea of like dealing with the uncertainty or people having this mythical idea that there's some sort of date in the future where they

Matthew Croasmun: have it all together.

Oh yeah, someday in the future. Yeah, so I have so many students who like pitch me on this idea that it especially comes vis a vis money sometimes, right? The sort of thought is that there's like an earning time of life and then there's a giving away money time of life. And I'm just always I'm skeptical of myself when I propose to myself that kind of way of thinking about life, because I think you can't, the problem is that we're always in formation as people.

There's no there's no way to take time out of life, right? Students will sometimes, especially undergraduates will use language like, oh, I took a year off. You didn't take a year off. We think of taking a year off of school, right? But you don't, there's no years off of life. And so if you want to if it's for certainties in my life, I'm just going to amass power and wealth and influence or whatever.

And then at some point, I'll flip a switch later in my life. I'm going to leverage all of that power and wealth and influence for the good of the world somehow. I think that's, man, that's just a. That sounds like a really dangerous plan because along the way as you're amassing all that wealth and power and influence, you're also becoming the kind of person who is even that much more enamored by power, wealth and influence.

And by the time you get to the point where you wish your plan now is to flip the switch, you just may not be the kind of person who would flip the switch or who even could. Flip flip the switch. And so I think that's even true. And it's like someday I'll do this thing, right? The longer we go in not doing that thing, even if maybe we don't have such a wild sort of thing, but you just have a someday like every day that we're not doing that we may be becoming people who are less likely ever to do that.

And so I think there's just always a sense that it's a compound interest almost, right? Like our attention compounds and the more we give our attention to something, the more our attention will then naturally rest on that thing in the future as well. So every day that we choose to commit ourselves to something, we are fractionally committing parts of every day after that day as well.

Does that make sense? Yeah,

Srini Rao: no, it makes beautiful sense. But I had to literally just wrote down a note about that. I was like, oh, that sounds like a great blog post idea. .

Matthew Croasmun: Yeah. So I think all the more reason right, to seize the moment, take up the day yeah. If you know this is the day to start making that deliberate decision in whatever way it is, that intentional decision to invest ourselves in whatever it is we think matters most.

I think

Srini Rao: that the final place I want to finish here is with this idea of mortality. You say death is an inevitable part of life, recognizing mortality adds urgency and significance to our actions. The limited time motivates us to make the most of it. And I think that everybody listening to this understands this intellectually but the question is like acting on that idea because like I always said that whole James Dean quote of like dream is if you'll live forever and then live as you'll, if you're going to die tomorrow, I was like, that's ludicrous. Nobody, if people actually did that, nobody would do a damn thing.

They would literally if I were to live that literally. I'd be like, all right, you know do today? I'm going to go out and get completely wasted. I'm going to do every drug under the sun. I'm going to basically just go and do every, it's going to be the most hedonistic day of my life if I'm going to die tomorrow.

So I remember revising that. I said, don't do that. I'm like, live as if you'll die a year from now, because at least then you can do something with that time. But I think that there's something to be said for that whole idea of mortality, because I think I'm only becoming aware of it as I've gotten older, because this is the year I've seen a lot of friends lose their parents for the first time.

Like people I went to high school with, people whose parents I watched grow up, and I'm like, wow, they're gone and that, I think, just, makes me more and more aware of it. Like I, I have a eight month old nephew and I started writing a life advice book for him and I realized I can't write a children's book.

So I told my sister, I'm going to write this for him and you'll give it to him when he's 18, but you're never allowed to read it. It's meant only for him. And I opened it by saying, I don't even know if I'm still here. Yeah.

Matthew Croasmun: Yeah. Our colleague at Yale, Martin Hageland has written this book called this life in which he makes some of these arguments where he actually, he, he defines.

Something he calls secular faith and he thinks that secular faith is the sort of faith that all of us, whether we're religious or not, we have we, as we, and we demonstrate this faith every time that we choose to care about and care for him is a technical term. It means not just like investing ourselves in the wellbeing of someone or something, but investing ourselves in something or some, someone or something that.

we might lose. And he thinks that possibility of loss is actually part of what it means to care. And I think that's, I find something really persuasive and really beautiful about that. This way of reading that possibility of loss is actually part and parcel of what it means to be invested in the world.

And so every time we take up a relationship, we take up a project, we invest ourselves and our lives in someone or something outside of ourselves. Death, the inevitability of death means we are taking, we are investing, we're taking a risk. We are opening ourselves up to a certain sort of vulnerability.

And that's, I'm persuaded by Hagelund that's that may at some level be oh man, there's something natural within us that wants to like, strive against that or wish that were not right? We sort of rage against our mortality even as we know that is, it is inevitable. But there's something right, I think, in his account that says that actually the finitude of all, that's what we're talking about, right?

Our lives are not infinite. The things that we care about, the people that we care about, whatever we invest ourselves in, these things too are not infinite. The finitude of all of these good things are themselves, that finitude is part of the dynamic of what it feels like to be human and to care and to be invested in someone or something.

And that's, I think once we can start to see it that way, it doesn't, I feel like it's able to tell the truth about the world, right? We're able to tell the truth, but it's just that the truth is. It's pain, loss is painful. It's something when we experience a loss, when we experience a death of a friend or a family member, there's real loss.

There's no oh man, if you could see it from this certain perspective, then it wouldn't even look like loss or feel like loss. At least for me, it feels no, there's something real, there's real loss there. And at the same time. When we're in that experience of, in that place of mourning, we're in that place of lament and sorrow mourning is what love feels like when it loses its object.

When we, and so when we feel the pain of that sorrow of loss, what we're feeling is evidence of. The love that we, and in fact the love that we have, right? The love has outlasted its object and that's not, there's part of that's tragedy, but there's a part of that is beauty that's even success that is itself the substance of the good life to, to have loved in that way with love.

Even outlasts outlives its object and I share with your sort of thought, right? We want our, we hope someday whether it's our children or our friends or young people that we've cared for, we'll mourn our loss that we will be loved even beyond our own lives here. And we begin to think about that aspect again, it doesn't erase what's painful.

But I think it adds to it this sense of what is beautiful and what we would not want to learn about loss.

Srini Rao: I have one, a final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the unmistakable creative.

Matthew Croasmun: What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? I guess I, when I think of what makes someone or something unmistakable, I think of what sort of makes us our identity, our authenticity.

At the end of the day, I think what most makes us is not something necessarily that resides inside of us, but is it is at least as much who we are loved by who cares for us? Are we beloved by our family, by our friends, by our community? Are we beloved by God? Who are those people who, it's those who love us in the sense that like they were joyfully anticipating our arrival before they had even met us.

I think these are some of the most fundamental things that make us who we are and mark us takably as us. Beautiful. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom, story, and insights. This has been just an absolutely breathtaking conversation. And like I told you at the beginning, like I felt like this was one of that.

Srini Rao: really like you would return to over and over again. For everybody listening to you, tell them where they can find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else that

Matthew Croasmun: you're up to. Sure. I think the the best place for the book is LifeWorthLivingBook. com. Find not only your way to the book, but also to a discussion guide if you want to take up the book, conversation, in conversation with others.

We found over the years. The true joy here and all of this is not just asking these questions ourselves, but dialoguing with other people, being in conversation with other people who maybe see things quite differently. So check that out, lifewithlivingbook. com and I hope you have a great

Srini Rao: conversation.

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Matthew Croasmun: This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite. By Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

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