Welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophy professors contemplate the nature of everyday existence.

I'm Dr. David Peña-Gusman. And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

We want to give you a heads-up that today's episode will involve some discussion of suicide,

not in any graphic detail, but periodically as a theme. To be or not to be. That is the question.

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.

To die.

To sleep no more.

We get it.

You're a theater queen.

I wish I could say I remember that all by heart. I did once know it by heart, but I pulled it up to read it for you. I will stop there, though. That's enough of Hamlet's soliloquy. You were reading that? I honestly was quite impressed that you were just reciting that from memory.

I did. Like I said, I did used to know it, but no longer. So this is Hamlet,

if you didn't pick up on that. And, you know, when Hamlet asks himself this question, he is, of course,

thinking about the possibility of death. And the reason that this is one of Western literature's

most important scenes is because it captures in the form of a very simple question,

what we could argue is a universal feature of human experience, which is that moment when each of us confronts the ungroundedness of our own existence, of our own being.

Of course, this is truly an OG soliloquy, one of the most

famous ever in Western literature. And I think it's for good reason. I mean, we're obviously

a philosophy podcast and Shakespeare is a playwright, although many would also consider him a philosopher,

but whether or not you consider

Shakespeare himself a philosopher or whether you even think that there is a historical Shakespeare,

...