Hi-Phi Nation

 The Bottom of the CurveSeason 2, Episode 1Complete TranscriptBarry: Right before graduation in 2017, I had producer Sophia Steinert-Evoy, then a senior at Vassar College, record some conversations with her graduating friends about how they felt as they were making the transition to adulthood.SSE: What is it like being 22?WS: like kind of lost but like kind of notCU: It's cool my body is very vivaciousWS: I feel lost in the way that coming into being an adult it's weird and scaryLO: I think most of the decisions that I make are about actually prolonging a bigger decisionJM: I don't know what I want right now so that's the problem is that I don't know I've haven't bad at thinking about what I want and even like to eat, today, so…KWB: I think I'm over it already I just want to be you just want to skip over your s really done I'm exhausted I'm just not into this socializing, drinking, hanging, out turning up. I just want to be settled and nesting and old.Barry: I've read a lot recently about Millennials being stuck in a quarter life crisis. A period of intense soul-searching depression and uncertainty in their mid-20s I don't know if this differentiates Millennials from any other generation, but there's something I do know: If you’re 22, your life is only getting worse. Kieran: David Blanche fire and and wells will have this very influential article now a series of articles in which they did surveys of people sort of overall life satisfaction, and what they found was that people's life satisfaction takes the form of us of gently curving U. It starts high in youth reaches its nadir in midlife average nadir around, and then it creeps back up again and ends higher in old age. Barry: Happiness seems to peak around eighteen to twenty, and you start sliding down the curve at around twenty-two, the curve peaks again in your mid sixties and stays high to the end of life.KS: And that's true around the world is true in different countries it shows up more in affluent countries than in less affluent countries but it still shows up in the developing world that seems to be a very very general pattern in human well-being.Barry: Actually it's not just human wellbeing. They did demographic studies of chimps and orangutans in zoos and found a U curve. There, think about that for a second, a bunch of middle-aged orangutans filling out surveys about how unhappy they are.KS: Is it just because parenthood is really hard? No, even if you factor that out the U curve still shows up.Barry: These kids don't know it, but they're on their way down to the bottom of the U curve. And you know who's there right now? Me and my friends...from Vassar College you're listening to Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. Today, The Bottom of the Curve. It's the story of a certain kind of existential crisis, the kind that seems inevitable in a meaning driven goal-oriented life.KS: Hi I'm Kieran Setiya, I teach philosophy at MIT.Barry: Kieran Setiya just wrote a book called Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, I'm gonna bring you stories of ways people slid to the bottom of the curve and the ways they're trying to climb out. One of those people is Kieran himself.KS: The guiding experience was this sense of repetition and futility. That I'd done worthwhile things but then I would just do it again, and again, and again, and that was gonna be it the most that was gonna happen between now and death was a lot more of the same things.DH: it was actually getting hard to make myself physically go into the office in the morning.KS: I was supposed to have found myself, I was supposed to have all these answers and I didn't.Barry: The philosophy of the midlife crisis.SSE: where do you peg midlife? Like what age?JM: Forty…?LO: I'd put it around fifty, you know I think that maybe it's because I just want to live to live to a hundred.SSE: What do you want by then? LO: You know at I guess I'd like to be settled in whatever I'm doing, having made progress in my career. Monogamy appeals to me…JM: Um hopefully I'll have a dog…Barry: One famous case of an existential crisis didn't happen at midlife but at quarter life. In autumn of a year old John Stuart Mill was feeling depressed. Mill had been raised his entire life by his father to be a kind of savior, someone whose whole life was aimed at reforming the political institutions of his day to maximize the happiness and minimize the pain of the greatest number of people. It wasn't the pressure of having to spend his life doing this that got to Mill, it was something else. Here he is from his autobiography:It occurred to me to put the question to myself suppose that all your objects in life were realized that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you're looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant. Would this be a great joy and happiness to you? And an irrepressible self consciousness distinctly answered, “No.” At this my heart sank within me. The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. I seemed to have nothing left to live for.KS: Even though he knew what he was doing was worthwhile, he was trying to reform the world trying to make people's conditions better, trying to reduce human suffering. The projects that man attained, the things that he was devoted to were ameliorative: they were devoted to removing problems, or solving problems, or reducing injustice, or reducing suffering. They were sort of answers to regrettable features of human life, and those things really matter I mean it’s not that those things aren't important. But there's a way in which if all you could do in life was help ameliorate the regrettable features, why live life at all? It can't be that the best we can hope for is to mitigate the really bad things about living. There has to be something positively good if life is to be worth living.Barry: John Stuart Mill was precocious. He realized before he even set about accomplishing his life goals that it wouldn't make him happy anyway. Most of us have to wait around and accomplish things and keep accomplishing before we realize that those accomplishments are empty.KS: How much of your life is devoted to making sure you get your job done? The kids are fed, they get to school, we gotta go on a date, relationship will otherwise start to fade. A lot of those things are devoted to answering needs. I think when that becomes too big a part of life, it can create the kind of crisis that Mill had. The sense, if this is the best life has to offer, what am I doing?DH: I've always been very career-driven up until my midlife crisis.Barry: Here's one of our midlifers, her name is Diane Hope.NH: Hi I'm Neil Hayward.Barry: Neil is another one of our midlifers, here's what they were like in their twentiesNH: I did biochemistry at Oxford and then I did a PhD in genetics at Cambridge University. I was very focused, I guess is the right way of putting it, and very focused on science. So I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a scientist.DH: I did a degree in mining geology, and I got a job straight away on a gold exploration program in Scotland, and it just felt like I was having this magnificent career.Barry: That's right, Diane started her adult life as a gold miner.DH: We were exploring for gold and it was the summer when that Spandau Ballet song came out that was called “Gold” and I used to be driving around between field sites listening hearing this on the radio and thinking, “This is it, I'm right on target.”Barry: Diane worked her way from gold miner to her master's and then a PhD in ecology, moving from Scotland to the desert of Arizona for a tenure track job as a research scientist at Arizona State.DH: I published research papers in a period of about six years which is a very high publication rate for international peer-reviewed journals, and I was only doing the research part of that job 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I was managing the whole project that I was doing research in a small part of.Barry: Neil meanwhile went corporate.NH: A guy in the university who I knew was setting up a new company and looking for new hires, but I needed some money. So I thought, “I'll interview for this job, and if I get it then I'll do that for six months and then I'll go traveling again, and then I can think more about what's ahead of me.” The sixth month passed, and I was still working there, and then a year, and I ended up working for eleven years.Barry: Neil worked his way up the corporate ladder the biotech company grew to be international and Neal became a general manager in Boston. He was a high-level executive good pay, stock options. Our mid-lifers are all high-achieving people. PhDs, Cambridge, Oxford, Aberdeen, Princeton. It speaks to a kind of inevitability in the slide to the bottom of the curve. If you don't achieve anything in the first half of your life it makes sense that you're unhappy. But if you've done as much as you can to achieve, you still end up feeling that something is missing.KS: For me the guiding experience was this sense of repetition in futility. What I'm calling my midlife crisis came after being on this very driven academic track for about twenty years. So I sort of got interested in philosophy as a teenager, I decided that's what I wanted to do. I was sort of amazed that it was a thing you could do, that it was possible to do this at university. That you could get a job, and I made that my mission, and I got a PhD, and I got a job, and I got tenure, and I got a promotion, and I had basically been living a life that was guided by a series of demanding projects until that point, the point when the last of the checkmarks on my career list, was checked off. I sort of came up for air and thought, “Now I, you know, what am I gonna do next?” And I realized I hadn't really asked that question for a long time. The motivation to get things done, that was driving my career, had been lifted, and I didn't feel about it the way I did when I was a teenager anymore. It didn't have this sort of magical otherworldly quality. It was a thing I could do, reasonably well, that was interesting, and I could just keep doing it again and again, and write another paper, and teach another class, and see another group of students graduate. And that all seemed worth doing, that seemed good, but there was a hollowness to it, and that was the point in which I thought, “Hmm this doesn't seem good.”NH: Okay so now I’m a very small cog in this large organization, the main focus of which is generating revenue for shareholders, and that's something that's harder to feel passionate about or to think, “Okay that's a worthwhile endeavor.”DH: I've always been interested in science, but most scientists that do environmental research, the research is never about aesthetics or the beauty of it. I felt like creativeness and beauty was missing from my career in science, and I just wanted to have a crack at having a career where I could actually work more with those elements. My body was finding all sorts of excuses where I was tired, or I just needed one more cup of coffee, or...and it was like getting to like ten o'clock and I still hadn't left to go in. I actually don't remember how I got away with being late for work like that towards the end of it. And then I used to sneak off early with a friend who didn't work at university somewhere else, and we used to sort of sneak out of work early some evenings cause we were both so disaffected, and we'd meet up a local bar and smoke a cigar just just to be rebellious.NH: I think one thing I found difficult is that I had in many ways ostensibly have a great job. I was I was very well-paid, very well-respected, had a lot of freedom in what I did and great job title. And yet I was still always embarrassed when people asked me what I did. You know if I met people and they said, “What do you do?” I felt this kind of disappointment or embarrassment in telling people what I did.DH: I was getting to this point where you're like halfway through possibly your working career. So you've maybe got years of work experience behind you and maybe a similar amount ahead of you and it's almost feels like it's a pivot point.KS: The most that was going to happen between now and death was a lot more of the same things that had happened so far. That sort of sense, that, “Is that all there is? Isn't there something more than this?” A sense that life is finite you're mortal and you now know what that means when you reach 40 or 50. Remember the last decade? You have about three more of those. Now I think that sort of association between death in the midlife crisis that sort of sense of finitude is actually behind lots and lots of different aspects of the midlife crisis. The sense that you're going to die in 40 years 50 gives you an upper limit to how many of the things you've wanted to do you can do. It gives you a sense that of the difficulty of starting over.Barry: When you're at the bottom of the happiness curve, which for most people in most cultures occurs at midlife, you're faced with a decision: do you change your life around? Or do you try and make sense of and come to terms with the life you've had as good enough.NH: So I quit my jobBarry: Neil our corporate executive decided on a big change maybe he could be an architect.NH: Told everyone I was going to do this architecture degree local college I started the first semester pretty soon I hated it I guess I rest I didn't have that much time left, you know, I'm starting off really late it's gonna take five years to do this masters, I'll be an intern for several years and then before I can start on my own I might be in my fifties.Barry: Neil gave it a year and then flamed out. Diane, our ecologist had her moment of realization one day also.DH: I was citing my office one day in downtown Tempe and I heard a train horn, there was a train line about a block away from my office, and I heard the sound of the freight train horn echoing across the neighborhood. I suddenly really heard that sound in a different way, normally you would just kind of screen it out and think, “Oh there's the train.” I suddenly realized, what makes me know I'm in a foreign country living on a different continent thousands of miles away from where I grew up and spent most of my life. That sound, because trains just don't sound like that in Europe in the UK, and so I thought gosh you know that sound it's very evocative, I suddenly have this realization I really love sound.Barry: So Diane quit her job to be a sound recorder and producer. Our other midlifer, Kieran the philosopher, didn't quit his job instead. He was determined to beat the midlife crisis, and he was determined to beat it by devising a set of philosophical principles to live by. In effect, he turned the midlife crisis itself into its own project.KS: One of the things I found most helpful in thinking about what was happening to me was this argument from Schopenhauer famous 19th century philosopher who's notoriously pessimistic has an argument about the futility of desire. And the argument is basically that getting what you want is terrible, because then you have nothing to do. You need desires, you need goals in order to have direction or purpose in your life, but wanting what you don't have, which is an inevitable feature of having goals or purposes, wanting what you don't have is terrible it's painful. I mean if you want things and don't have them that's awful. so you're kind of doomed either way. There's this terrible dilemma, either you have goals in life in which case you haven't achieved them yet and you're suffering, or you achieve your goals and then now what are you going to do? Total boredom.Barry: Neil Hayward now had no job and no path in architecture and was as lost in his midlife as our Millennials are in their twentiesNH: I felt like I needed to make up my mind quickly, I don't like that feeling of not knowing what I'm doing it's a really unsettling feeling, and I guess rather than addressing that and coming up with an idea I spent more and more time bird-watching. A big year is where you try and see as many species of birds as possible in one calendar year. It was in the back of my mind that that actually this would be a great year to do that. There was something very therapeutic about living in the moment which birding forces you to do. It forces you to spend time in the present, which stops you from worrying about things in the past and worrying about the future.Barry: So Neil started traveling from Florida up, the East Coast, to the deserts of Arizona, and anywhere where he can spot new birds.NH: So you can tell a number of species from the way that they fly, like woodpeckers have this great undulating flight. They flap only at the bottom of their arc, and that brings them up to an arc and they sort of dip down. I really like shorebirds, shorebird you can identify based on their silhouette. You don't have to know about what color they are, it's all about the shape. Different species are very different in the way that they behave. I think one of the most interesting in that habitat that are the jaegers or skuas, and these are birds that harass those like gulls and terns for their food, so the gulls will be feeding on fish and the skua is that, it's kind of like pirate at the ocean, it will people chase down these gulls and terms until they regurgitate their food onto the sea, and then the skua will dive down and eat the regurgitated food. So I spent over two months cumulatively in Alaska, such an amazing state, there's such a variety of habitats there. It's such a grand imposing state, mountainous wonderful sort of salt marshes. I went to Barrow in the winter, it is the northernmost city in the U.S., to look for Ross's gull which is a tiny pink gull that flies by Barrow on the first week of October. It’s only found above the Arctic Circle, it's very poorly understood, so there's only a few nests that have ever been found. It breeds remotely in northern Siberia along the coast. There's a very oppressive place it's a very kind of grey plumby light that just feels very heavy, you know there's almost no sunlight. I'm standing there looking for gulls and it was freezing cold, the sun was barely above the horizon, it was just before the sunset for two months.Barry: Neal never got to see Ross's gull, there was something else there.NH: I find this huge bear, this huge white bear, that's sort of galumphing across the ice. I knew they were polar bears there, I knew people had reported polar bears but I never expected to see one.Barry: In the last days of 2014 Neil Hayward stood on a boat off the North Carolina Shore and spotted a great skua, the last bird he would see in his big year. That made 749 species of birds and one polar bear. It was the new American Birding Association record for the most species seen in a big year.Have you ever thought about what it is about birds in particular as a species as opposed to small mammals or something like that? I mean birding is a thing, but you know raccooning isn’t.NH: Birding is a thing I think because it ticks so many boxes, like the number of species is kind of ideal. There aren't many raccoons to count, and even mammals, there aren't that many species of mammals. But there's almost a thousand birds in North America, okay which is about enough for you to learn and memorize and know all of them, and there's temporal separation as well, that you know you've got birds that are here in the summer but not in the winter, and then other birds here in the winter that’re not the summer, some that come through during spring migration, others that come through during fall migration. So if you're studying mammals you might see them all in January, whereas birds you have this change of the seasons and the change of the birds all the way through the year, so things are always happening, there's always new stuff coming in, and new stuff leaving. And as well as that temporal separation you've got quite an extensive spatial separation of birds, that some of much breed only in islands off Alaska, other ones on the the tip of the Florida Keys.Barry: Well I'm waiting for you to say that birds are just particularly more beautiful…NH: Well I guess that goes without saying Barry: Meanwhile in Arizona-VO from DH radio segment: The trains sound best to me here on Mars Hill overlooking downtown Flagstaff.DH: I was talking someone at the local radio station, and I said that if I ever made a radio program but I'd make it about this evocative sound of the freight train horn, and I ended up making that program for them. It won a Edward Amuro award, and then I ended up making the program again a slightly longer version for BBC Radio 4VO: A sound that seems to mirror the lonely beauty of life in the American WestBarry: With some success as a sound artist after leaving her job Diane Hope gathered her recording equipment and flew to Shanghai.DH: I had an artist residency in Shanghai for four months, and I had four months to literally wander around the city record anything I thought was interesting, the challenge was how do you make a project out of that? Scooters zipping by on wet streets, freight tug boat that chug up and down the HuangPu River, sound with someone in slippers walking down a paved cobbled street...I would wander into these little very narrow alleys of the old-style residential developments at all different times of the day and record that called shickermen and just record the sounds of everyday life down those little alleys. I would go down the street where music instrument selling shops were, and I would stick my head in the door stand inside the door and just record the sounds of people noodling away as they tried out various instruments that they might be thinking of buying...I actually sneaked illegally into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and into their practice rooms, and I would literally wander up and down the corridors. I met a professor of the shang which is this instrument evening you’ve never heard of [Music] and he turned out to be one of the world's best players and he invited me to a rehearsal of a big piece that he was soloing in, with a roomful of traditional Chinese instruments, and I ended up going to the premiere of that when it premiered in Shanghai. And then I would go to the parks the men like to play with these they're kind of spinning tops and they make this very sci-fi kind of a sound.DH: at the bottom of the curve there's a feeling that the solution is to do, it’s something that you have to do. It's the only thing that makes sense to climb your way out. For Neil Hayward it was bird-watching, for Diane it was walking around the streets of Shanghai recording any sound she liked, Kieran Setiya,our philosopher, found his solution too.KS: Goal-directed projects have this feature that in engaging with them you're sort of killing them. The way of interacting with them the characteristic of trying to achieve a goal is either gonna end in failure, or success will mean you've checked it off, it's gone from your life. Structuring your life around projects, letting them be the sources of meaning in your life, you're engaging with valuable things in a way that's guaranteed to remove those valuable things from your life, and there is something really perverse about that this. However, things are going right now the ultimate satisfaction is always in the future or the past, it's it's always not here yet or if you've got it it's always done. There is a kind of emptiness to the present, but there there is a solution, and the solution involves somehow managing to shift your evaluative focus so that you're more profoundly invested in atelic activities.Barry: Goal-directed projects are telic activities so activities that don't have a goal are atelic activities.KS: Which are activities you can engage in that don't have a terminal point to which they're sort of exhausted, so just strolling around for a while, hanging out with my family, parenting. They're all things that you'll eventually stop doing, you can't do them forever, but there's no point at which you're like, “Well I'm done, parenting over,” like it just goes on, it's an ongoing thing. or going for stroll you stop but unlike walking home where as soon as you're home you're done I mean there's no more walking to do, you can just walk, you can wander. When it comes to atelic activities there isn't this sense that satisfaction is always in the future or in the past. If what you want is just to be going for a walk, and you're going for a walk, you have exactly what you want right now, there's no nothing is deferred or archived it's it's here and now. If you value it in this sort of atelic formation then you can avoid the self subversion.NH: I knew that this was important, like I knew that there was something about bird-watching that was kind of important and it was helpful I didn't know how, and I didn't know what would happen at the end of my big year, and I was nervous as I got towards the end of the year, because I was thinking, “What now, what do I do now because now I've got something else to worry about.” But I knew that there's something important about this activity, it's something that I'm good at that enjoy doing and I've kind of ignored it for most of my life, I've sort of suppressed it while I've had you know normal or sensible career goals and that's always been sort of a hobby that I do in my free time, but it's something I kept returning to again and again and try out my life and I guess my big year told me that this is something that I’d really like to make more out of…DH: One day I was walking back under a big freeway overpass and I heard the thuds of the tires going over this join in the freeway and it was going duh-dun-duh-dun like that and I said “It's the heartbeat of the city!” Crazy it was just that sense of enjoying the moment unlike pictures, which tend to be very stimulating, sound you have to have time for sound, so in taking the time to listen it takes you into a more meditative space, and I think that's what this midlife crisis thing is all about and this is something that's come to me only very gradually it's like gradually getting more and more pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together until you can finally see the image. I think if you've experienced a midlife crisis what that really is is your life is transitioning from an emphasis on doing to an emphasis on being, and what you do with that turmoil of the midlife crisis is how ready you are to make that change in your life from doing to being.Barry: Not everyone is in a position to make a major life change midlife. If you can't shake the feeling that you're missing out on experiences, but you're not in a position to make a major change, what then? You haven't made major life changes during your midlife crisis, at least not yet, but feeling that you're missing out that's something that's a big part of the midlife crisis right? How do you, how do you get over that?KS: When I decided on philosophy I was giving up on things that I was really passionate about, so I had wanted to be a poet for a long time and it was sort of at this midlife point that I realized that ship has sailed, like I'm never gonna be a poet, and if I tried now, and I guess I could try now. maybe I should try now, but that wasn't what I wanted. The thing I'd missed out on was having been a poet my whole life, was having had an entirely different twenty years. There are these other lives that you now realize you're never gonna have.Barry: Kieran has an argument that missing out is a very positive feature of a good life.KS: When you make choices between things sometimes they involve a kind of sense of loss or regret or missing out, but sometimes they don’t. If I say to you, “Hey do you want some money do you want $10 or $20?” You'll take the $20 and you won't think I'm pained by the sense of loss, I missed out on the $10. That wouldn't make any sense at all, whereas in many other cases, maybe most decisions, what you're choosing between are things sufficiently different, that even if you're pretty sure which one you prefer, I'm coming here to do this interview I'm sure that was a good decision, I could have just stayed home and read a book. And the fact is this time is gone I'll never have those two hours back to read that book. There's a kind of loss there that I'll never recoup, and that's the mark of incommensurable value or incommensurability or pluralism and value, that values are sufficiently different that even the better one doesn't sort of subsume or compensate for the lesser one. What that suggests is that basically if there are many incommensurable values and you care about many of them, then it's going to be very difficult to avoid the problem of missing out. What in a way what the problem is a function of is something really great, namely that there is this proliferation of valuable things and that you care about so many of them. What would it be like not to be vulnerable to this problem? You'd have to rid the world of almost everything that's valuable, kind of narrow it down to just one thing.Barry: Consider this if the only thing of value in your life were money, you would have perfectly commensurable values. Decisions that led to more money are always better than the decisions that led to less money. When everything can be measured along just one dimension like this you won't have any conflicts of missing out.KS: That's what it would have to be like to live a life in which you're not subject to the inevitable problem of missing out, you would have to have this incredibly reduced existence.Barry: If you're staying put midlife and you're not changing your career or spouse or car, you are missing out, but that missing out is a good thing, it's an inevitable feature of having a plurality of values. And one more thing, missing out it's something that'll happen even if you do change your life, that's the tragic feature of the worthwhile life. Because when you do change your life, you miss out on the good things you would have had if you stay put. Is there anyway that life is actually not as good as it was?DH: Oh totally, there's lots of negatives. First of all you feel almost like you've kind of lost your identity where I have experienced it as you're very self-critical, you kind of analyze have you made big mistakes? And then the way I went about experimenting with a new career direction has not been ragingly successful in economic terms, in fact it's been fairly disastrous.Barry: Last question, where are you now in your midlife crisis?NH: Oh I feel a lot more passion about what I do today, but also a lot more confused, so I do a whole bunch of stuff now. So I volunteer for a lot of local organizations, I sit on birding boards, I write a couple of birding columns, I teach birding at a local college and lead some field trips. So it's sort of whole mismatch of different things that are all-around birding, and it's hard to explain that to some people in terms of okay that's what I do. During that big year I also met my girlfriend who became my wife, and that was a really transformative year for me in terms of developing that relationship, and I realized how important the birding was in terms of nurturing that relationship that it sort of slowed down, I was traveling a lot, so it actually became the sort of perfect beginning to a relationship.KS: For a while I thought I was making a lot of progress, but I I don't think that I really shook the telic mindset in doing it because my desire to just think about midlife as a philosopher fairly rapidly transformed into the project of writing an article about it and then I wrote another article, then I wrote this book, and I think that feature of my personality is more recalcitrant. I mean the thing I have been doing without the consistency I would like but I'm trying to be self-forgiving is trying to do mindfulness meditation, and that I think for lots of reasons has been very helpful to me helpful both because it reduces anxiety but also because I kind of have this hope that will also be a kind of training in attending to and appreciating what's going on right now without expectations for what it will come to or what it will achieve or what it will produce. That over the course of time, might be a kind of corrective to twenty years on really my entire life forty years of being in kind of educational and academic and other environments that that foster so relentlessly the achievement of goals, so I guess where I am is still working on it.Barry: Where would you say you are in your midlife crisis?DH: About halfway through. So that's like a year long midlife crisis, year after years gone by since I first had these feelings. On a day-to-day basis I try to have some spaces each day where I'm not thinking, I'm just being very experiential and just being totally in the moment like just before we talked I went out on the hill near me, walked through the pine forest, and watch the sun go down over this big pine forest from a high vantage point, and you can see all the individual trees that make up this forest, and how the light and the shadows are changing, and this lovely warmth of sunset sunshine shining across the trees in the little town. Because when you're in that moment everything is perfectly okay, there's never any crisis.Barry: Kieran Setiya’s book is Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, he's a professor at MIT. Neil Hayward is the author of Lost Among the Birds, you can find him at . Diane Hope is a sound producer and artist. You can find the entire Shanghai Sounds Guide as well as all of Diane's work at .Credits: This episode of Hi-Phi Nation was produced, written, and edited by Barry Lam. Production Assistance by Sophia Steinert-Evoy, Matthew Au, and Tatiana Esposito von Mueffling. Visit us at for a complete reading list and soundtrack for this episode. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. ................
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