In practice, you know, you're always responsive to that question, you know, am I wasting my time?

What am I doing? We shouldn't see that hovering anxiety as something that's like, oh, like,

wish I could just bliss out. That's part of what it means to be a free being that you're actually

fundamentally like, so when the risk of failing like shit, I wasted five years of my life, that's

constitutive freedom. You have to run that risk.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me? Your host, Chris Aes. Well, this one I guess we

can call a special request popular demand episode of the podcast. And the reason it's by popular

demand and by popular demand, I mean, like, maybe a few dozen of you who emailed us and responded,

I forget when it was. I think it was at the year in mail mail bag where I talked a little bit about

I think somewhere between normal and slightly compulsive obsession with my own mortality and joked

about like, that would be a fun podcast. Like, ha ha, that would not be a fun podcast. And a lot of

you're like, no, that would be a fun podcast. And it was in the midst of that, I think that someone

on Twitter just replied and said, oh, you should read this book. And the book is called This Life.

And it's a book by a philosopher at Yale named Martin Haglund. And the book is a meditation on what

the meaning of life is and what the meaning of life is, particularly in a secular tradition in which

there is no afterlife and which this existence is the only one we have. If you're freaking out right

now as I say this and think, this is too heavy and I want to listen, I would urge you to keep going.

And the reason I would urge you to keep going is that I picked up the book with the same thought of,

like, do I want to read a whole book about this, about a meditation on my one life being my only

life and the fact that there will be nothing after it and all the people I love, I won't be around

for and they will have to mourn my death and I will return to permanent non-existence for the rest

of eternity, which even as I say that now, I get like a little panicky, but I actually found the book

...