Philosophers are generally expected to display wisdom and calm in the face of existential questions. I am just not one of those philosophers. I spent 30 years racing away from these thoughts by running and swimming obsessively, pretending that I had no physical limits. Certain evasions are bound to fail: At 40, I suffered a cardiac arrest after an ill-advised treadmill workout. The sheer physicality of the event—the stopped heart, the failing body, the onerous recovery—threw into sharp relief a question that had always lurked beneath the surface: Does my life have a purpose? Or, put another way, how can I justify my existence? This dilemma gnaws at us in times of crisis and whispers to us in quiet moments of self-reflection. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new book, The Mattering Instinct, helped me understand this feeling, to see it not as a personal quirk or a philosophical indulgence but as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human...
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/01/the-mattering-instinct-rebecca-newberger-goldstein-book-review/685536/?link_source=ta_thread_link&taid=6962eb8aa6d4360001c406ee&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads
No comments:
Post a Comment