Andrew Taggart, Practical Philosopher on how "total work" has taken over our lives

[01:43] Paul: Today I talk with Andrew Taggart. A practical philosopher, entrepreneur, and teacher. He has helped raise tremendous awareness over the last several years and really been an inspiration for me about how our modern conception of work is undermining our attempts to seek out the good life. Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.

[02:05] Andrew Taggart: Thank you very much for having me, Paul.

[02:07] Paul: So I'd love to start with something you wrote a few years ago in a book you titled The Good Life and Sustaining Life. And in that you quote, there may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life. So I'd love to start there and just maybe lay down some definitions of what do we mean by the good life, right?

[02:34] Andrew Taggart: That book was written in 2014, and it might help to know that as with many books I've written It comes on a certain occasion, and the occasion in this case was just before teaching at a social entrepreneurship school in Denmark called Kaos Pilots. And so at the time I was trying to think about some questions that are of particular concern for social entrepreneurs, but obviously go well beyond them. And so I titled the book The Good Life and Sustaining Life. The— there are a few basic thoughts in the book. One is that these are actually separate questions. How you sustain a human life, how it can continue to go on in its existence, differs in nature and kind from what the nature of an excellent life is.

And I've noticed the various ways that we may get into in this conversation today that we muddle that distinction, running one together with another. I also suggest in that book that the good life, the question of the good life, has logical metaphysical priority over the question of sustaining life once you reach a certain point in your own reflections.

That is, there are a number of people out there, for example, who unfortunately end up committing suicide despite the fact that their own material needs were met and were continuing to be met In light of the fact that there are plenty of people who suffer from nihilism, the view according to which there's no meaning in life, and in light of the fact that a number of people who go through existential ennui and despair to the point of actually thinking about committing suicide, all this reveals that there must be some questions in life that supersede our ability to merely survive, get by, make it or even be successful. To your question then, the good life is really a placeholder for those sets of questions. The questions concern what is most real, what is most ultimate, what is most worthwhile, how is it best to live.

We can get into some answers that people provided to those questions, but first and foremost, it's a dwelling place for the kinds of questions that matter most in our lives and can't easily be answered by availing ourselves, I don't think, of the kind of work that we do on an ordinary everyday basis, right?

[05:04] Paul: Yeah, I think in a lot of conversations I have with people as well, this idea of the good life, I think people grasp at a maybe conceptual or ambiguous level and quickly mix it up, like you say, with the goal of sustaining life. And instead kind of flip those. So I think you also go on, or you definitely go on and say, one cannot deny that the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life. So how are people muddling those and flipping that, especially when it comes to thinking about making an income or other things like that?

[05:45] Andrew Taggart: We can think of any number of recent coinages I was just rereading Joseph Pieper's wonderful book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, a book he writes in 1947, just after World War II. And here's one example. He analyzes at considerable length the neologism, the new coinage, intellectual work or intellectual labor. And what he suggests is that that neologism is actually combining one kind of question, the question of good life, which goes to the nature and power of the intellect, with another question, the question of laboring. And he goes to show that those actually are brought together in a way that's entirely unhelpful. If the listeners want an updated version, we might think of new coinages such as meaningful work, purposeful work, purpose-driven work, mission-driven work.

And you can keep going on and on in this vein in which you begin to find words that in the past would have referred to questions of the good life being brought under the aegis of work to the point of becoming adjectives for work. So someone might ask, what's the problem with that? Well, we'll get into that today, I think, in some fashion or another. But one clue to what could be a problem to thinking in that way is that it limits your imagination with regard to the possibility that there are levels of consciousness or levels of awareness or ways of being that actually are far more important and indeed are much vaster than the kinds of things that can happen in and through work and working.

[07:32] Paul: Another source which is interesting, you actually introduced this to me, André Gores, and he You highlighted a quote he said, which is, "The imperative need for a regular income is used to persuade people of their imperative need to work." And it's been interesting coming up against this in my own journey. And people will invoke the— the modern phrase is almost, "When are you going to get serious?" And that is so closely linked to, "You need to have a steady income." to be taken serious. And it's, uh, it's been pretty interesting how people have brought that up. Have you encountered other attacks or questions that people ask in this type of vein?

[08:19] Andrew Taggart: That's a good one, right? You need to have steady income. They, uh, they will also— usually there's some reference though unbeknownst to themselves, is the Protestant work ethic. You are just— if you're not working, then you're sure— if you're not working in a sense of being gainfully employed, a sense we may want to talk about in this conversation today, then you're probably lazy, or you're a trust fund kid, or you're idle, or there are any number of ways of pathologizing or moralizing And it's amazing the degree to which, as you might have noticed in what the other person was saying, that's actually coming from a place of anxiety, I think.

So one of the things you can actually do if you're confronted with someone who says, "Well, when are you going to get serious?" is to ask that person, "Where is that statement actually coming from?" I know that's a point about meditation, but my hunch is that the person is feeling quite anxious in some way about the status of his or her own life. I strongly doubt it's that that person is caring for you for your own sake and wanting what's best for you. After all, we can go on a little bit and think about the need for steady income, and we can imagine any number of places and times in which, A, people weren't gainfully employed, The podcast listener might not know that before the 19th century, being gainfully employed, that is having a job, was not the standard.

It's a fairly recent standard that we've adopted and it's become hegemonic, that is, it's taken over the way we think about what it is to work. People haven't always had steady incomes. People have lived with all kinds of ups and downs. Of unsteady flows. To my mind, that's not just an economic question, it's a constitutional question, you might say, a question of philosophy, meditation. How do I actually go about leading a life that is attuned to the kinds of uncertainties, the kinds of perturbations, the kinds of ups and downs and flows that seem to be a fundamental part of the way that reality actually operates?

[10:41] Paul: Right, and there's a lot to unpack. I mean, several people have written about the history of work, and one thing you've written about is both— and you touched on this a little earlier— which is the Protestant tradition, but also the role of time and how our conception of that has shifted and really contributed to— when you, when you raise these points, a lot of kind of silly phrases we use about managing our time, optimizing for that, and might even lead to some of the anxiety we're feeling today. So I'd love to— maybe you could just break down some of the concepts around how religion and time have led to our current state and conception of work.

[11:29] Andrew Taggart: Well, my point of departure is, is it's pretty far afield from something as mundane as work, and that is, it's the loss of a picture of the world, of the universe, a picture in which human beings used to be— let's use Christian language here— used to see themselves as being created beings, created in the light of the Creator. There used to be very common dualistic metaphysics in which there was this world and there was the other world. There was what Ecclesiastes calls living under the sun, and there were things that were above the sun. It's commonly said that Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud end up being great deconstructors because they end up at least being given credit for toppling a metaphysic, a metaphysic that used to hold out the idea that when you see your life or you see yourself, you see it in the light of something that is well beyond yourself.

You can call that God, you can call that an afterlife, you can call it another world or whatever. This is very important for various reasons. One way it's important is in the context of time. Once you have the collapse of any sense that there's anything beyond our ordinary and daily cares and concerns, then you also lose the possibility of there being a sense of time that's eternal. Or a sense of time that doesn't function according to the dictates of clock time, with a before and an after, something that can be actually standardized and made uniform, as happens in the 19th century. Well, that becomes quite troubling because there's no way therefore to even talk about, let alone to to put ourselves in the context of experiences that seem to be atemporal or eternal.

Right. But when you don't have that, then you have a sense of life that's totally anxious. Or in one of the articles I wrote, it's a sense of time famine. If there's no sense whatsoever of anything that allows you to lose ordinary time and gain a kind of presence for eternity, then you're only left with— and I may go on— if it's the case that you also think that the only reality is the one described by scientific materialism, which would hold that this is the only life you have, then you're suffused with a kind of restlessness. So now that language is popular with words like, I don't want to waste my time. Time is a scarce resource.

These are new ideas. Time is a scarce resource. I need to figure out how I'm going to I can't spend my time. Think about the metaphors here. And I might always be behind in the number of tasks I need to perform and the kinds of things that I need to do. It's a sense of life being overwhelming and of time being the kind of antagonist that is ruling your life in ways that are totally inhospitable for a good life.

And that's the kind of frenzy, as one conversation calls it, the frenetic mind. That's the kind of frenetic mind that's developed when you no longer have any kind of contact with a sense of reality where that is not the case. It's hard to even put these things into words, given the degree to which we've lost a metaphysical picture of the world in which human beings used to be able to dwell and reside and find themselves. I'll just, I'll just quote Pieper offhandedly. He says that acedia, which is one of the afflictions of our modern age, is not defined as idleness or whatever. He says acedia, which is a Latin term, is actually trying to describe being, quote, in disagreement with oneself.

So we can put this all together and say that our sense of modern time is rather like a clue or symptom of the degree to which we're in discord with ourselves, we're in disagreement with ourselves.

[15:55] Paul: So with Peeper, I'd be curious just to know when, when did these ideas start to resonate and kind of stir around? And as you wrote them, I mean, over the past year, I think this idea and concept has definitely struck a chord with many people. I share your article from Aeon If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living? And this article seems to really hit on a painful point for people. But when was it discovering Pieper or this idea of total work or the conversations you're having with people, when did this all start to pop up for you and say, I need to start writing and putting this out there?

[16:45] Andrew Taggart: That's a really great question, and that may get us a little bit into the autobiography. It's interesting that— and I'll preface my remarks by saying it's really interesting that I read Pieper, I think, as early as 2014, and I thought it was an interesting short book, a fascinating short book, but it didn't yet resonate with me or touch on. And I read it again, I think, in 2016, and also it was a wonderful book, that was illuminating, but it didn't quite grip me or grab me. It was only in April 2017 that I began to wake up to what he was really saying. I could feel it more in my heart, you might say. And this is because I had read— this is a nice little mystical story.

My wife Alexandra had sent me a very trivial newspaper article that appeared in the New York Times in April 2017. The article simply had to do with people who were retiring in the United States, and it was suggesting that people who were retiring would be better off at least working part-time. It was giving what might be called an instrumental account of work. Work is good for various sorts of things. It's good for your health, it was argued. It's good for having a sense of friendship or community.

It's good for having a sense of purpose and so on. And from a certain point of view, it's That's just common sense. And it's not something— if you just read it as a newspaper article, it's fine. It's trivial. It's no big thing. But I saw it had a good gestalt shift.

The gestalt shift was I could finally see what Pieper was getting at. And it made me want to throw my computer across the room. I was so angry with this. I was so angry with it. And the anger, as you might know, is totally disproportionate from what I described. So when something is A rule of thumb is if you feel an emotion that's disproportionate with the situation at hand, there's probably something very important to investigate there.

And what I began to realize is that I could go back and see the conversations that I had with conversation partners who were living all the way around the world. Some are living in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, some are living in New York, many of which are scattered throughout the world. And I could begin to see that the kinds of things they were talking about began to be intelligible in the light of Pieper's ideas about total work. So the first time I thought, wait a minute, could it actually be the case that what Pieper had prophesied in 1947— I'm using that word a little bit loosely here— actually is coming to pass now, that we actually are living in an age of total work? So it's something like a gestalt shift. It's like, holy shit, This is not just an interesting book, right?

This is among the many interesting books on my bookshelf. It's not just an interesting book detailing a particular period of time in Germany after World War II and wondering about what leisure could be and how it could be a state of the soul and saying some things that I feel are really antiquated. I thought, holy crap, he's actually speaking to us. It's that moment when I thought something has to be written about this. And then I wanted to think, it's simply not enough. And this happens often with people who have some kind of mission or in the Buddhist sense, service in life.

They begin to realize that it's really not enough just to talk one-on-one to people. And so I thought that one way to try to bring this out into the public sphere, and it should be borne in mind that I had been living quite reclusively from around 2007, 2013, 2017, pretty reclusively. I felt that it was so strong that it needed to be brought out into the public sphere, that I left behind a certain kind of contemplative reclusiveness. The things that I've been writing about before that had to do more with kind of the nature of higher reality, questions of philosophy and mysticism. I can talk about what that means.

It's a strange transition to make, to go from from a fairly secluded, remote, contemplative life to one in which I was confronting what I thought was not the only affliction, but surely one of the great afflictions of our time with a kind of ruthlessness, you might say, or a kind of in-your-face-ness. So it was a very strange transition for me to make from the first to the second.

[21:26] Paul: Yeah, and you use the phrase practical philosopher to describe yourself. I, I think just in terms of seeing that on the other end, it does make you appear at least approachable. And also the way you write is just very accessible. Is that— was that a conscious choice as you left academia and started writing a little more publicly, and then even more so with Total Work?

[21:55] Andrew Taggart: Yes, I think that that would take a while to go through the history of philosophy. Practical philosophers— I'm not the only one who's used it, but it's not used very frequently today, so far as I can tell. The trouble begins, according to some historians such as Pierre Hadot, historians of philosophy, at the end of the medieval period. The— if you go back to ancient Greece, or if you go back to India, or if you go back even to China, you find that philosophy, whether it's the kind espoused by Socrates or Plato, or the philosophical side of the Buddha or Lao Tzu or Confucius, is imminently practical. It is concerned— and by practical, I mean it's concerned were the questions of how to live, what our conduct in life is, what is wisdom, what is it to lead a wise life. It's not that they didn't ask other questions.

They did ask questions about what is ultimately real, so metaphysical questions. They asked questions about logic. They asked all sorts of questions. But as business people will say, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, philosophy, at the end of the day, the joke, we got to make a profit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Well, philosophy was grounded in the search for a good life, for leading wisely, for leading the best kind of life, not just on one's own, but it turns out in schools around other people. So that's the tradition I'm trying to recuperate in the modern world. The trouble is that philosophy, as it wends its way through the West up until modernity, loses, you might say, faith and loses track of itself to the point at which today if you talk to someone about philosophy, usually you'll have to clear up a lot of misconceptions. One misconception is that it's overly interested in theorizing. Another misconception is that it's only interested in asking questions and never in answering them. Another misconception is it's the only sort of thing that experts in a university do.

And you can go on through all these different misconceptions. And so Practical Philosopher was an attempt, kind of a creative attempt to try to move— I think it's redundant, frankly, but try to move philosophy back to its roots, right, without having to go through, as I've been doing right now, a very lengthy dissertation on what happened to philosophy such that it lost its way and no longer became relevant to the cares and concerns of ordinary people. So that's where I came up with Practical Philosopher. It tries to give someone the sense that philosophy is actually grounded in something, roughly speaking, practical. Now, it's not practical in the sense that it's going to help you build a bridge, But there are other uses of the word practical that Americans in particular are familiar with, namely something that can be, quote, applied to their lives. That would be considered practical.

[25:15] Paul: Right. So staying on that theme, I think you've written in a way that makes some of these questions of what is a good life and sustaining life, at least for me, easy to grapple with. You write about making a living and you break it down into really three things. Use what you've got, exchange what's in hand, and offer what you can. So how could people think about those three things as they might pertain to even work they're doing in a job or other things in life?

[25:54] Andrew Taggart: Right, so moments ago we were thinking about— we're thinking about philosophy and One of the things it does is it helps us shine a light on what's most worth living. That would be the question of a good life. So maybe the life that's most worth leading is attuned to wisdom or beauty or justice or the sacred, or I guess we can just call it meaning. There are all sorts of answers to that. Suppose you begin to think about that and you think, hang on a second, I need to somehow find a way to create the conditions of possibility for my continuing to deepen that investigation into beauty. I think we can make this more concrete.

Suppose it's the case I'm an artist and I want to make beautiful things. That's wonderful. Well, how do I go about actually making a living? And I take the word making a living to be a neutral way, a fairly neutral way, or having a livelihood is a fairly neutral way of talking about the question of sustaining life. And when I thought about this more, I considered that there could be 3 ways, and they can all be compatible with one another. So the first way— well, maybe we can set this aside for a moment.

We can say, hang on a second, people are narrowly confusing something like having an income with having a livelihood.

[27:19] Paul: Right.

[27:20] Andrew Taggart: A livelihood can be considered a very neutral, broad term which effectively says I'm able to survive and able to support those who depend upon me. And if you want, you can even care that I'm able to reliably survive and reliably support those who care upon me. So if we take that, then we can ask the question more broadly. If we ask the question, how do I get a good income, then we're already stuck with some answers such as, oh, I need to have a full-time job provided by a particular kind of organization, and therefore I need to live in a particular kind of place, You get a whole suite or a whole way of life, a way of being in the world that comes out of asking that question. So we're trying to ask a broader question here. So there seem to be 3 different answers in there.

They can be woven together in various ways. The first is an answer that comes from indigenous peoples and people who have lived off the land. It holds that it actually is possible to use the land in a wise and considerate and careful way. That might sound as if it's far afield from the lives that you and I are leading, but it's not necessarily. There still are people who live in eco-villages. There are people who, in the '60s we saw a back-to-land movement.

I think today we're starting to see some back to land. There are people who are trying to live closer to land. Maybe not on its own, but in concert with the other two. There's a poet named Wendell Berry who's been writing poetry for many years called The Good Life. Meanwhile, he's actually been a farmer for quite some time, sustaining life. So that's the first one.

There are various ways in which we think about living off the land. The second one is there are various ways we can think about not being gainfully employed in a narrow sense, but exchanging the sorts of things that are valuable in the marketplace. The marketplace, by my lights, is not necessarily a terrible thing. It's just a limited endeavor. So we need to learn how to use— we need to learn how to be involved in fair exchanges with other people. That could mean, given that you're a freelancer, being involved in exchanges of value that provide some kind of service in exchange for money.

There's nothing inherently the matter with that. But it may not be the end of the story. What if it's the case you live in a place with a low standard of living, so you're able to live off the land in a certain way, or maybe it's the case that you live off the grid. Meanwhile, you're able to be involved in forms of exchange with people that allows you to have some money coming your way. And there's a third way, the way that people are very unfamiliar with, and it involves the concept of the gift in a broad sense. If you begin to analyze certain kinds of ways of making a living or certain livelihoods, you notice that there have been people who have been involved in non-tit-for-tat relationships, in relationships that are not predicated on exchange or on forms of equivalence.

These are pretty obvious when you hear them. You can share something with someone. You can share all sorts of things with someone. And if you want to, you can take a heuristic. If you can share something with someone and you did that in lieu of buying it, then you're involved in gift. You can lend something to someone without interest.

So maybe I go over to my neighbor's house and she offers to lend me some tools. I don't have to buy them. And then I can just give them back when I'm done. And you can be involved in various forms of gift. Maybe that would be one we'll talk about further. So I live in a gift economy, and that does involve receiving money from people all the way around the world.

But the money I'm receiving is in order to sustain my life. It's not in exchange for something I have or have not provided that person with. So let's just imagine that you try to put these together. Then you might say, look, can I live in such a way that's closer to the earth, closer to the land? What's one question? Another question is, can I be involved in certain forms of exchanges that are fair-minded and equitable?

And third is, can I also be involved in certain kind of relationships in which exchange is not the principle by which we live? And frankly, that's the basis for all sorts of relationships in life. We just forget these. If you're involved in forms of— if you—

[31:56] Paul: anyone in a family can, I think, definitely understand this intuitively.

[32:01] Andrew Taggart: If you have a family, to be sure, if you have friends. And I think what's a bit tragic is that I don't see why we can't actually broaden the circle of trust, you might say, such that it includes people with whom we can be on friendly terms. So it's a bit of a bourgeois assumption that I can only be involved in gift relationships with family or with family and close friends? Why can't I actually expand that circle of trust? It's easier if one is involved in a religious tradition because then you just say we're members of a church, for example, members of the synagogue, and you're more apt to be able to engage in forms of gift. But there's really no reason, especially today is an interesting time, in which you actually couldn't expand that circle of relationships, that different kind of economic flow with people with whom you can become friendly.

[32:57] Paul: Yeah, and I wonder if also, I think especially in the West and in the US, I think things have almost geared so much towards number 2, exchange what's in hand, and focusing on exchanging time for work, um, that it's almost led to a failure of imagination rather than people's, um, inability to do these things. Is that something that resonates with the conversations you're having with people?

[33:28] Andrew Taggart: It does. I can give you one example that helps to bring this out, brings out the assumptions. So usually I'll speak with people for a number of years, but once in a while someone will write to me and, and we'll see whether or not I I'd be interested in having just one conversation with him or her. And this happened with someone living in Eastern Europe who happens to be from the United States. And so I had the conversation with this person and it seemed as if it was a nice conversation. And I will usually send someone extensive information about the gift they want from me.

This person said, I don't really understand Even though we've talked about it a little bit, I don't really understand the gift economy. In fact, I disagree with it. It was a really interesting email to receive. This is very common. I'm just trying to bring out the assumption. I'm not trying to pick on this fellow.

It's just a very common assumption. He said, I think of gifts as this kind of thing that you give for no apparent reason, kind of spontaneously. So that's one condition. Another condition is that you don't expect anything in return. And he went on in this fashion. And this is very puzzling because if you think of your birthday, right?

[34:49] Paul: Right.

[34:50] Andrew Taggart: You have the expectation that your parents will give you something. You don't know what it is perhaps, but they will. It'd be strange to say, actually, I had the expectation you're going to give me something on my birthday, and therefore that nullifies it as a gift. Right. There are all sorts of times in which gifts are not necessarily unexpected. They are expected.

And so he ended up trying to give money to me in the form of exchange based on the idea that it was a service. I bring this up because this is a very common assumption people make. So it was based on kind of the value I gave to him and the amount of time I quote spent with him. It's interesting because it's not that he gave very little. He gave a fine number, but it didn't feel very good. And so there's a phenomenology of giving and receiving that differs in nature and kind from the phenomenology of being involved in transactions.

The transaction is clean, it's frictionless, it comes with certain kinds of expectations, and if anything, you feel a bit relieved when someone pays your invoice, right? You feel a bit burdened until that happens. There's a whole set of experiences associated with that. That actually is much different from what it's like to receive a gift from someone who wants to actually support the life you're leading. It's really nice. Once you have the flavor of those two, it's kind of hard to go back.

You can still be okay with being involved in exchange. But it's like having some nice food, but then you have crème brûlée over here. It's amazing. I'm sure you've had this experience even with PayPal. I'm sorry, or with Patreon. It's not a great example, but at least it gives you some flavor.

Wow, someone out there, someone I don't even know, wants to support my life and not because I did something in particular. It's because there's some hint that there's something about the way that I'm living, the way that I'm living, this person wants to support. So that brings us full circle back to the question of the good life and sustaining life and how you lead a good life and how you're able to support that life in a way that's consonant with the good life that you're leading.

[37:10] Paul: Right. That definitely resonates for me as well. I've found the upsides of the relationships through the gift have just been well beyond what I've expected. I think a lot of my conversations or relationships with people have turned into something that you're, you're almost both acknowledging at the beginning that, okay, this is a long-term, um, relationship where we kind of believe in each other. We don't know what will come of it, but it's, uh, it's that commitment and it's pretty powerful. And just It's almost the, the other side of it is it's a little scary when people believe in you too.

So it's almost easier to avoid these type of relationships. I think this is why a lot of people reject, uh, the gifts when you offer them things, because it does have that binding effect. And it's like, well, now I need to, uh, invest— uh, not to overly use the, uh, a financial language or anything— in that relationship.

[38:14] Andrew Taggart: Right. It can't but be, for lack of a better word, more intimate. So gifts, as Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book called The Gift points out, are such that they entangle us more with one another. When you go and purchase something at a convenience store and use your credit card, you're doing something that's just fine, right? You're just transacting. I have no I have no, I have no truck with that.

The key to it is that it's clean. You have no relationship with the worker there. No problem. When someone gives you a gift, there is a kind of magnetism, or there's more energy associated with that gift, because it's not about a clean cutting off. Quite the contrary. It's about greater entanglement.

You're going to be more involved with that person. If I may use the word debt here in a metaphorical sense, so not in a financial sense, there is a kind of unpaid— not the right language here, but there is a way in which you are always already indebted to one another and you can never quite get out of that. There are ways of having a beautiful conclusion to the relationship, for sure. But it's the key to gift is the ongoingness of the relationship, the indefinite ongoingness of that relationship. So yes, the one reason people may not be ready for it is that it's just, it takes off a lot of guardrails. We've spoken about some of them already.

It keeps taking up more and more guardrails, the sorts of things that we're familiar with. And by doing so, it It requires more trust on both of our parts, and it invariably brings about greater intimacy, or at least a greater closeness if you want to use that word instead.

[40:13] Paul: So I'd love to get back to some of the, the guidance you've offered in terms of sustaining life and making a living. And I, I think you might be one of the first philosophers whose writing giving advice such as read up about the gig economy, um, but you also offer different perspectives such as do a wide range of things, begin a practice in living, cultivate good manners, consider being nomadic just so you'll have less stuff. So there might be two questions there. One is just what are some of the modes of living that you've experimented with in your own journey over the past 5 or so years? And have these evolved, or different perspective on these, in the past couple of years?

[41:06] Andrew Taggart: Yes. So I used to live in New York City on the Upper East Side, not far from Central Park. And that was— and my, my now wife and I moved from New York City at the end of 2012. And we moved not to San Francisco or Seattle, but rather to rural Appalachia down the tip of— very tip of Tennessee.

[41:32] Paul: That's probably not a common move.

[41:35] Andrew Taggart: No, it's not. Yeah, we moved into almost complete isolation. No, it's not a common move, and I'm not necessarily— this is not where the advice part comes in necessarily. It was wonderful though, because it was the first time that we started meditating quite religiously. So this was early 2013. And I think it helped us to challenge a number of assumptions about place and dwelling.

So it was since that time that we started to live rather seasonally nomadically. Picking up and moving on and seeing what a new place might have in store for us. And that was made possible in part by the fact that I began to realize, just from a practical point of view, that it was actually easier today to have philosophical conversations over Skype, or what's now Zoom, than it was to have them in person. So the very fact that I could speak with someone while I'm in Appalachia, and the person could be also living nomadically, and at one point could be in Bali, another point could be in South Africa, another point could be in San Francisco, made it possible for there to be those entanglements I was referring to before. And those entanglements I think this is really quite an interesting paradigm shift.

Neither person needs to be a settler at that point in order to maintain a relationship, and they don't have to meet face-to-face. The example I commonly use is that of, let's say, a barber. If one of your clients moves, that's the end of that relationship with that client. If you move, that's the end of your entire business, right? You have to start over. Imagine it's possible to cut hair in such a way that you're neither in one location one time, the other person, you know, you were in one location, that person's another location, and the next time you're in a different location, and next time the other person's in a location, and so on and so forth.

So I should just mention that as an aside, that's the backdrop to our experiments in nomadism. Yes, some—

[43:48] Paul: someone in the tech industry just took that as an idea to work on an AI solution.

[43:56] Andrew Taggart: Yeah, right, exactly. That's, yeah, spot on. Well, since that time we were living quite nomadically, experimenting with being in different places, mostly United States. I can say more about that, but nomadic living for us is not quite the same as the digital nomad who's picking up quite frequently and moving on, moving on, let's say, once every couple of days or once every couple weeks. We actually would be in a particular location for 3 months or 4 months or 5 months, in part to see whether or not we wanted to be there longer.

[44:39] Paul: Right.

[44:40] Andrew Taggart: And now that you had 2 questions there—

[44:43] Paul: no, I think that's interesting. It's, um, how are you thinking about just— I think you— we almost hear the extremes of things. We see, okay, now you can be this digital nomad and use that as a reason to just constantly move. How do you think about balancing that with trying to invest or dedicate time to your local communities and still building those relationships? How have you guys approached that in the places you've been?

[45:12] Andrew Taggart: I think that's one of the biggest open questions that's worth asking. And that question goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization. A historian futurist your podcast listeners might be familiar with is Yuval Harari, whose first book I think is much better than the second one, the first book on Sapiens. And he describes, as does James C. Scott in his book Against the Grain, how civilization begins to build itself around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture, single-grain agriculture. The reason I'm bringing this up is that that's the beginning of settlerism.

Civilization tends to require settlement. And so that's an assumption, you might say, in the background until quite recently. The assumption is that you might say a good life is the one that's settled. Within the context of a particular kind of community. It's one way of answering the question. And nomads and gypsies and people who are roaming have tended to be seen as being questionable, questionable status at best, right?

Not necessarily to be trusted. I'm bringing this up because it's an amazingly fascinating question that today we're going to be through the particular set of historical, cultural, and economic conditions, we're able to re-ask that question again. And the question is, well, what is the— is it better to be a nomad than a settler? What kinds of nomadisms are available to us? What kind of settlerism is available to us? And how do we begin to get that right?

I know the answer to your question, so now I'll come to my own. It's still an open question for me and my wife. I think against the backdrop of this is something that another writer named Robert Bellah has spoken a lot about. He's a late sociologist who talked particularly in the 1970s and '80s about the loss of community in American life. So if you're looking for, as we are in part, the kind of place where you can become rooted at least for part of the year, then It's not necessarily clear as of yet that community exists. Consider, by contrast, the case of Mark Zuckerberg, who continues to talk about Facebook bringing about, quote, connections and community.

But I have no idea what a global community means. That's a neologism, right? What in the world could that possibly mean? You have examples that you can come up with when you envision a community. You might envision it along the lines of what this New Yorker writer wrote about in a piece on Orange City, Iowa. It still exists.

It's a place where people ordain. It's multigenerational. It involves there being neighbors who come by when you're sick. It involves gossip. It involves a certain conformity. It usually involves a certain religious uniformity.

And so on. You can begin to imagine that, but apart from Orange City Iowa, where do you actually see that existing? So I haven't— on our travels, we haven't seen a lot. We haven't seen too much of this, too much of the idea that there is actually a rooted, grounded community that has a multi-generational character in which people of people are coming together not just for the sake of mutual interests, but because they've got each other's back, you might say. They've got each other's backs. So to me, these are questions that are being thrown into the air in what I call our unsettled time.

We're unsettled because we don't know whether it's best to be a settler. We don't know whether it's best to be a nomad, witness the growth of WeWork, of Roam, of other coworking spaces and co-living spaces, right? Witness that phenomenon. We also don't really know what community is. I think our language is actually deceptive here. The more we speak about community, the more we speak about folks, about there being folks, the less encounters we actually have with communities and folks.

[49:43] Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting question. Almost as I'm thinking about this, it almost Brings me back to the idea of total work because, uh, I— this community you're describing could be a good descriptor of a small town I grew up in, in Connecticut. And then a lot of it still has that, but without a lot of my generation, because my generation's success was really going to the city and getting these jobs. So it's, it's been interesting to see the generations before me, everyone is still there and does have that close-knit community. But then it's very fragmented when you get to our age because we're spread out all over. And I mean, we have a lot of conversations, at least within our family, like how do you sustain this?

Everyone's living almost even on the same street. And it's very bizarre to be having these conversations because You're balancing that with the definition of what success is, which is highly tied to work with work increasingly in the city, right? And yeah, I mean, there, there aren't a lot of jobs where I grew up, but it's interesting to hear that, be having that conversation and also just be knowing what people accept as what is seen as the right thing to do for people. So that's—

[51:14] Andrew Taggart: And just to add to that, that particular movement has been really well described by any number of people. Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation writes about how in the early industrial period we began to see the forcible uprooting of people from the countryside and their subsequent movement into the city. You can— that's just one example. Raymond Williams' book The Country and the City describes this relationship as well, as does a recent book called War of the Last Thousand Years, in which we continue to see the movement from embeddedness in a small town or a village on the countryside and the shift to that in the city. And you can look at it in China. You mean the industrial the seemingly inevitable industrialization process gives rise to these kinds of movements.

Economists think this is a total upside. I think that I take a more measured view. It does allow for some people to disembed themselves from the problems with a small-town community. Both of us, I suspect, are weirdos, right? Right. That's— yeah, I like that word, right?

I mean, I'm using that in a kind of a cheerful way. We're weirdos, we're a bit strange. Well, small towns tend to be quite conformist in nature. They're a bit rigid. So there certainly are upsides to having that energy flow, the people movement, the movement of people into more cosmopolitan spaces such as New York City. It was wonderful the kind of people I met there.

So there is an upside, but people don't usually account for the downside. The various downsides, I think that's most evident, for example, in the case of the elderly. So how exactly are we going to care for elderly people as they continue to live longer and as families are no longer caring for them? You might say, well, it's obvious, it's category 2. We talked about that. It's exchange.

[53:20] Paul: Right.

[53:21] Andrew Taggart: But I'm seeing my grandmother right now who's nearing the end of her life. And she's going through various kinds of institutions as her health continues to erode. And that is not the kind of death— if we're thinking about the good life, what is it to lead a good life? What philosophers used to say is that to lead a good life was to lead the kind of life in which you'd also have a good death. Montaigne, the Renaissance philosopher, thought that a good life was most evident when it came to how you died. This desire for success, this movement to the city is kind of a negative externality, so to speak, is that we have certain kinds of— the rich social embeddedness, the rich social texture of life is being frayed.

We don't yet have tech solutions, so to say. I'm being a little bit cheeky here, but we really don't have tech solutions or some other social innovation solutions to overcome these problems, with the result that loneliness among the elderly is quite high. And I would also say that loneliness among all sorts of people is quite high.

[54:43] Paul: Right. It's interesting you touch on tech again. Maybe we dive into that a little bit. I mean, I've heard jokingly people say, "Oh, when I get old, we'll just get a—" or "When you get old, we'll get a medical robot for you to take care of you." It's already on the way in China.

[55:05] Andrew Taggart: Right.

[55:05] Paul: And I'm sure Japan as well with its elderly aging population. You speak with a lot of people in the tech industry and having these conversations around the deeper philosophical and ethical questions, and it does seem, I mean, if you just follow the big questions they're facing, they just seem to be totally missing the mark. So what's coming up in these conversations and what should they be, or how should they be framing some of these questions?

[55:40] Andrew Taggart: Great question. I recently started an LLC called Askole, which is from the ancient Greek meaning the withdrawal from leisure, which also means work. It's kind of an inside joke of sorts. I started Askole as a way of explicitly trying to talk with C-level executives and startup teams about the kinds of assumptions they have surrounding the technology they're trying to bring into the world. And it seems to me that we're at a time at which technology— so it used to be the case that you could say that Silicon Valley was the kind of the nerdy kid who was rebellious, as some articles point out. Now it's the case that it's no longer the nerdy, nerdy rebellious kids, the kid in power, right?

What's more, as Tristan Harris has pointed out over the last couple years in his campaign against social media and phones insofar as they're hijacking our attention, is that the You can no longer take the innocent, naive line that it's just technology, that it's just a platform that's utterly separate from, therefore not at all nested within broader cultural, ethical, and political questions. I think we're at a point that's quite awkward, so to say, because I don't think, based on what I've heard, that a lot of people in positions of power and technology necessarily have the ability to think through these broader questions even as they can't help but be confronted with them. So that's an awkward moment. It's a moment I might call a great muddle. It's a great muddle when you can't just sweep the questions aside. You remember Mark Zuckerberg talking before Congress.

It was just a muddled kind of answer. Right. So you can't sweep the questions aside, but you don't yet have the ability to think about them very clearly. That to me is an amazingly interesting time. And so we don't yet know the answers to those questions, but the questions themselves need to be raised over and over again and with greater urgency.

[58:06] Paul: Well, it's almost also just a lack of the right language to discuss these because everything is so technical. Tech and financialize that. I think philosophy gives a door to a different type of words or language to describe these. I think that's also why somebody like David Graeber seems to be resonating, because he's coming at it as an anthropologist. And, and some of these different models just give that different words, or even word phrases like total work, to help reframe or rethink some of these discussions. Right.

[58:44] Andrew Taggart: What this is, obviously, I don't want to say too much about instrumental case for liberal arts. I have a piece coming out next month in Quartz in which I'll be talking about the liberal arts tradition. So what I don't want to say, what follows, is simply the liberal arts are, quote, good for business. They are, but that's not their chief concern. But let's suppose that we want to speak secondarily of the liberal arts as being good in these places. That's because it is good.

That is, it does bring to bear a wider vocabulary with which to discuss society, psychology, philosophy, even religious assumptions. Take one word as an example, the word impact or scale. But let's stick with impact. Impact is a word that probably only makes sense based on consequentialist assumptions. Now in philosophy, consequentialism is the ethical view which holds that you want to bring about the best possible consequences, or at least the least undesirable consequences, or the most good, or least bad overall. You can only understand the fetishization of impact, or social impact, or technological impact, you can only understand that as a kind of fetish if it's the case that you already presuppose that you only want to look at the magnitude of your consequences.

But that is not the only way to look at any action whatsoever. You can look at it in terms of what Kant would call, I mean, what later on was called deontology, namely the intention behind the action, or you can look at it in terms of the one that I'm interested in, which is ancient virtue ethics. It holds that you look at actions in terms of the virtues that are being exercised in the salient case at hand. This is but one example. It's but one example in which the vocabulary is way too thin to talk about the impact, let's say, or the understanding or the significance of self-driving cars.

[01:00:59] Paul: Right. So you might have— I think I have people that listen to this who are in traditional corporate worlds, and they might say, all right, these, these are great ideas. I had a good time listening to this conversation. But to that population that might say, I can't just quit my job. How, how can somebody cultivate more of this philosophical mindset, or just one or two small practices they could do to perhaps move slightly further away from total work?

[01:01:36] Andrew Taggart: Oh yeah, that's, that's a lovely question. So I don't even think you necessarily have to quit your job to start off with, right? And to be sure, right, this is You can begin very, very simply and incrementally. One thought you can begin to have, or an exercise you can perform, would be called disidentification. What you can do, for example, is begin to take your work less seriously in virtue of disidentifying from the identity with the worker. So total work's basic premise is that we are all workers.

I mean workers from first to last. When you introduce yourself to someone, almost invariably you will ask the person's name and then you'll go on to ask what the person does for a living. That's a presupposition that's revealing total work in practice. So you can begin by just saying, hang on a second, I can actually perform the work that I'm doing for as long as I'm doing it. At least for the time being, without actually binding myself to the identity of being a CEO or being a middle manager or whatever is the case, or being a data scientist. Now, that's only a first exercise because what's really interesting about that is if you actually perform it, you really do.

So let's call it a meditation action. Then something opens up within you. It's a question. Well, who really am I? Who fundamentally am I if I'm not that? After all, if you begin to think about your life, you almost invariably think about it in terms of education as being an instrument for being in the workplace, and then being in the workplace as conferring upon you a particular kind of identity, and then being involved in the kind of game of ascending some kind of ladder or another, whether it's promotions or status seeking or or greater compensation or whatever.

You've been playing that game long enough. So if you disidentify from even playing that game, all the while still performing whatever duties or responsibilities you have, and you begin to ask the question, "Who am I? Why am I here if not that?" Then you have some starting points. The third thing you can really start to do is pay attention— this is the more interesting one so far— how it's actually not satisfactory. The first two exercises might bring you to the third, but you could also come to it some other way. You could say to yourself, wait a minute, is it really the case that the rest of my life is going to be, quote, spent doing this kind of work?

That each and every day of my life is going to be ordered according to dictates of work? That there's something that seems, if I just look at it closely enough, inherently unsatisfactory something doesn't quite quench some kind of thirst I have, then you're well on your way to what might be called seeking. And seeking can take place even as you have a job. And if you go from there, now that you're actually keen on seeking, you're keen on, wait a minute, what is this whole damn thing about if it's not actually about work first and foremost? At that point then, it's amazing what sorts of things might open up to you. You might start caring about other things.

Now this is usually people say, oh, you need to have a hobby. Hang on a second. Right. You know, usually older people say, well, you need to have hobbies. That's a little bit too thin. I mean, I'm not saying you can't have a hobby or some hobbies, but there definitely are things in life or aspects of reality that reveal themselves to you that are much more meaningful than having a hobby.

And those are the ones still to be discovered, right? So you disidentify from, from the claim that you just are a worker, and then you, you begin by slowly going into a deeper and deeper search or inquiry into yourself or into the sorts of things that you might start caring about. And that'll take you a long way, a long way away from the idea of being just a total worker.