Contemporary books defined as “self-help” have mostly served the Boomer generation.
Millennials, and the Generation Z cohort that follows close behind, are realizing that these traditional self-help narratives—ones that focus on the development of the self for the benefit of one’s self alone—aren’t going to work for them. (Of course, whether those narratives ever worked, for anyone, is somewhat up for debate.) Instead, recent book releases are reflecting a cultural longing for collectivism; a desire for meaning that manifests in communal virtue and societal improvement.
In other words, millennials aren’t looking for lifehacks to win friends and influence people; they are looking for workable systems that will sanction and codify their behaviors. Luckily for them, philosophers have been working on doing just that for the past several thousand years.
In the past year alone, errors in books by several high-profile authors — including Naomi Wolf, the former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, the historian Jared Diamond, the behavioral scientist and “happiness expert” Paul Dolan and the journalist Michael Wolff — have ignited a debate over whether publishers should take more responsibility for the accuracy of their books.
Some authors are hiring independent fact checkers to review their books. A few nonfiction editors at major publishing companies have started including rigorous professional fact-checking in their suite of editorial services.
While in the fallout of each accuracy scandal everyone asks where the fact checkers are, there isn’t broad agreement on who should be paying for what is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process in the low-margin publishing industry.
You are welcome to offload your hard decisions to a quantum random-number generator, thereby ensuring that there is at least one branch of the wave function in which the best alternative was chosen. But let’s say we choose not to. Should the branching of our current selves into multiple future selves affect the choices we make? In the textbook view, there is a probability that one or another outcome happens when we observe a quantum system, while in Many-Worlds all outcomes happen, weighted by the amplitude squared of the wave function. Does the existence of all those extra worlds have implications for how we should act, personally or ethically?
In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card, a gringo in his degringolade. Naturally, I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance.
Sometimes, a single person, met casually on a journey, can be a powerful inspiration. I happened to be in Nogales, Mexico, to talk to migrants — and on that visit I saw a middle-aged woman praying before her meal in a shelter. She was Zapotec, from a mountain village in Oaxaca state, and had left her three young children with her mother, intending to enter the United States and (so she said) become a menial in a hotel somewhere and send money back to her family who were living in poverty. But she had become lost in the desert, and spotted by the Border Patrol, seized and roughed up and dumped in Nogales. The image of her praying did not leave my mind and it strengthened my resolve to take a trip throughout Mexico, but concentrating on Oaxaca, one of the poorest states; and on my trip whenever I felt obstructed or low, I thought of this valiant woman, and moved on.
Ideas, and ideas about ideas. Suppositions and suspicions about relationships among abstract notions — shape, number, geometry, space — emerging through a fog of chalk dust, preferably of the silky Hagoromo chalk, originally from Japan, now made in South Korea.
In these diagrams, mysteries are being born and solved.
The best writers — the best storytellers, in particular — possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in “The Water Dancer,” a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country’s original sin.
For Kaufmann, philosophy isn’t just about learning how to die. It is a discipline that prepares its faithful participants to be left for dead — following the great thinkers, prophets, and occasional martyrs of the past whose reward for defending a more honest and courageous way of life was to be ignored, shunned, betrayed, abandoned, and sent away. Though Kaufmann remained at Princeton until his death in 1980, as Corngold’s closing scene illustrates, toward the end of his life he began to lose favor with some of the same colleagues, students, and reviewers who once heralded his fresh iconoclasm. But in this, Kaufmann was simply living out a calling that required a sturdy enough disposition to fend off petty grievances and to be enriched by the suffering we all experience. In the face of such suffering, philosophy promises no comforts. But it does promise that we can die in peace having given an honest account of our short and frail existence. To give Kaufmann the last word, “It is better to die with courage than to live as a coward.”