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Ben Slater is a high school English teacher in San Francisco.

He teaches everything from Dostoevsky to Yagiyasi to Adrian Rich.

But his favorite class to teach is not an English class at all.

It's called Examining the Good Life, based on Socrates's famous quote, the unexamined life is not worth living.

I actually wanted to just call it The Good Life because that was the central philosophical concept.

But then the administrator was like, that just sounds like you're all just going to be having fun.

So let's keep examining in there.

And what they're examining are different ways of understanding what makes a good life.

It was sort of a general philosophy class and I shifted the focus to be like what makes

for a good life.

So like what makes us happy, how to deal with suffering, uncertainty, freedom, like in the

broadest sense, like how should you live?

The syllabus is broad.

They talk about everything from Simone de Beauvoir's Death of the Serious World.

I kind of wish I could go back to the serious world, to be honest.

I liked having blind faith in something.

To the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.

He's super, super dramatic, and that's what I loved about him.

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