>> what is the secret to living a good life?

a popular course at Yale tackles that question and tonight they share their guide on life and what matters most as MetroFocus starts right now.

♪ >> this is MetroFocus with Rafael, Jack, and Jenna.

MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and Edgar Whack and Chaim the third, Joan Ganz Cooney Fund , Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, and Jody and John Arnhold, Dr. Robert C and Tina Sohn foundation, the Ambrose foundation, estate of Carl and.

Jack: good evening and welcome to MetroFocus.

I am Jack Ford.

What makes life worth living and how can we feel truly fulfilled?

those are -- the book is based on an undergraduate class taught at Yale.

The course has expanded to other universities and now will be available in book form for those seeking deeper meaning in their lives.

Joining us are the authors of the book, Marisol and Matthew, the director of the life worth living program at Yale, and the associate director from the Yale Divinity school.

Thank you for joining us.

Let's start with the course.

Ryan, how did it come about?

Ryan: 10 years ago we noticed that students have a real hunger to ask the deep questions of life, not just in dorm rooms, but in the classrooms with the best of their intellectual energy and guide from professors and with each other in the structure of a seminar.

There is often the hesitancy to do that sort of work because we worry that by putting questions of meaning on the table, we risk being exclusive, that you can really only have that conversation if you all already agree on some sort of -- philosophical overarching framework.

Life worth living was our attempts to say you can have chewed seeking conversations in a pluralistic community where not everyone agrees starting in or coming out but you can all learn from each other and really pursue the truth.

You do not have to give up the meaning questions Jack:.

Were you surprised at how many students became interested in this so quickly?

Ryan: it was a little surprising.

The most surprising was the end of the first semester.

As a teacher I find I almost never know how things are going as the class goes along and there was a session at the end where we set aside to say, we were doing something experimental, can you give us feedback?

we got the feedback that everyone should take the course and it should be two semesters long and the energy we got from the students made us feel like we needed to build it into something that lasts.

Jack: let's talk about how this moves forward into the book we are talking about.

This is an enormously successful course for almost a decade.

What was the motivation behind saying let's make this a book?

>> pretty soon as we started teaching the class and in fact before, we realized this was not just a question our Yale students are interested.

It is a question of the time.

It is a more broadly distributed feeling that we are ill at ease how to understand the deeper meaning of our lives.

That can be illustrated by images.

A lot of us feel we are stuck on a hamster wheel.

We are running after a satisfying one desire after another and as soon as we are finished with one, the other one comes.

We look to the side and see what other people want and pretty soon the wheel starts moving very fast and we lose a sense of what it is we are actually trying to do as we run on the wheel.

The hamster wheel might be great for hamster's but it was never a great image of the fulfilled human life.

The second image, we get this image from sociologists, of a painter in a studio and a painter normally knows roughly what they want to do.

They want to create art.

Yet suddenly this painter gets obsessed with all the kinds of things that need to be there in order for them to be able to actually do the art.

How are the paint?

how are the brushes on the light in the studio?

is the heat comfortable?

and so forth.

It ends up being lost in means that are necessary for the craft without ever actually doing it.

That is very similar to what we experience ourselves today.

We are dedicated to means because we cannot altogether agree on what the ends are and so we lose the ability to perceive the ends that are appropriate to us as human beings living in this particular setting.

Jack: I want to talk -- I want to go back to some of that.

It is a marvelous book.

I sat down thinking I would just leave through it a little bit -- leaf through it a little bit to get ideas but I did not stand back up until I finished it.

It is compelling.

A lot of people I suspect this book sounds really interesting and by the time I get to the last page, I will have the answers I am looking for.

Is that this book?

>> if you get to the end of the book and you have the answers, it will be because you have done a lot of work along the way, and we hope you will, to go through and sort through the questions and to your own answers.

What you will not have is a bunch of our answers.

We are most interested in all of our engagements in the community, the book, and at Yale, with empowering folks told wrestle with questions for themselves, to benefit from and learn alongside some of the world's great religious, philosophical, and artistic fingers.

But at the end of the day, what we are doing chapter after chapter is helping you understand the stakes of the question.

Helping you understand the lay of the lands, different answers that different thinkers in different communities, times, and places have offered.

We say at the end of every chapter that it is your turn.

Jack: that is actually a section at the end of every chapter, it is your turn.

>> we do not want to feed you the answers and our hunches you do not want us to do that, either.

Each one of us has the responsibility to wrestle with these questions ourselves.

That is what we tell our students on the first day of class.

We tell them the question of the flourishing life is probably above your pay grade.

No one is an expert in this.

And yet it is also your responsibility to answer.

So at some point we have to do our best, listen broadly, think carefully, it reflects it diligently, and then we need to do the work ourselves.

So at the end of every chapter we just try to offer some short exercises or a few questions to reflect on, may be to have a conversation with trusted friends, and those conversations are what I am most excited about.

The idea that this book could spark of those conversations in a family or community, that is what we have enjoyed for the last 10 years at Yale.

Does -- those conversations spurred in the community.

Jack: and this book is a marvelous vehicle to spark that.

The book is life worth living, a guide to what matters most.

And yet in the introduction, you see something that might be a little troubling.

You say this book might wreck your life.

Now.

Explain that to me so people do not see that and think, why am I doing this?

What does it mean?

Ryan: a lot of us have ingrained ways of living.

We have habits, plans, implicit values.

They are all working themselves out.

We are chugging along.

If it doesn't feel like a hamster wheel, maybe it feels like a race or just one thing after the other.

There are some structures to our lives that help us manage this and go whatever direction we are going.

The thing about really deep reflection about the good life and what makes life worth living is it can up and any and all of that.

-- it can upend any and all of that.

It can disassemble or break down various structures you have in your life, but when it does, it comes with a promise.

This is why I think you not toss the book away.

Because the promise is it will reorient you and put you on a better path and you will have a more firm grip on what it is that really matters in your life and be able to orient to -- orient yourself more truly towards it.

So the life it wrecks, we hope you look back and say yes, it needed to be racked.

>> I was struck.

I am a visiting lecturer at Yale.

I was struck as a teacher by one of the lines where you say in your classroom and by extension in the book you talk about your words, a seminar table that breaks the rules of time and space.

What does that mean in your course and what would it mean for the people who are going to read this book?

>> We moderns tend to live in a very short time span and look little to the past.

Maybe we stretch ourselves a Biddle it -- a little into the future but we are immersed in the present and what is lost in the process is the sense that human beings have been wrestling with issues of meaning, of worth, of what kind of life is worthy of our humidity, for centuries.

They have spent years reflecting upon that question, building one Breck -- one brick at a time.

What we invite the readers and students is to go visit these different ways in which people have constructed ways in which we can inhabit the houses of meaning.

That conversation is very important.

There is a value of being out of joint for maritime and look at our experiences of life from the vantage point of the past.

It enriches our lives and allows us to see things from a different perspective and go deeper into who we are as humans.

Jack: Matt, the book is this overarching question and chapters are some questions that are all probing and compelling.

Let me ask you about one of them.

What should we hope for?

I was struck by, you mention a survey that talked about 83% of students done in 2017 who said they are hoping to be well-off financially.

Then the chapter goes on to talk about what that means.

That means.

Money?

Influence, what does it mean?

Is that what we should be open for?

Matt: this is an important question for many of our students.

We think of this as the question about what kinds of circumstances of our lives are worth wanting, not just which ones do we happen to want or been told to want or which desires of errors have been carefully cultivated by marketers, but -- desires of hours -- ours have been carefully cultivated by marketers, but what do we actually hope for in life when it comes to our circumstances?

A colleague of ours taught a course on this at another university and at the end, a student said, of course about the good life, I thought there would have been a lot more about yachts.

There was very little about yachts.

But what is desirable in life's circumstances at first can seem obvious.

You can get really large numbers of people agreeing what is meaningful, it may be being stable financially, or simply health and happiness and a long life itself.

Some of those are circumstances for our lives.

They seem obvious and it is worth pausing and considering, we think, which among those are actually worth wanting or having .

Where should we place our hopes?

Jack: this is where the input of the ancients can be helpful.

Money is obvious because it can get you almost anything.

You talk about Aristotle in the book and the notion of Aristotle flourishing, means.

>> and Aristotle has a nice measured view on such things.

He is a very well-thought-out polished version of common sense but then something like the Buddha comes along and this is someone who is born a prince, has wealth and power and influence and he leaves it all and there is a really compelling story and tales of his life where he comes back home after finding enlightenment on his son who he left on the day of his birth to pursue enlightenment comes back and says, give me my inheritance.

You were a prince.

Give me your wealth and power.

It is mine by right.

And the Buddha says if I give him that inheritance, I am inviting him to suffering.

I will give him a greater inheritance.

He starts to teach him and welcomes into the community monks.

In this view, wealth is bad for you.

It turns it on its head.

Jack: I suspect in your conversations with students, you might get some pushback on the idea of wealth being bad for you.

I mention you have a variety of leaders.

You talk about the Buddha.

Ida B Wells, Simon Peter, compelling personal stories about them.

And let me ask you, because there are some things that might sound counterintuitive but lead you to think as someone who is reading this, one is you talk about the notion of the value that pain and suffering can have in helping you find a life worth living.

Explain that for us.

Miroslav: the immediate reaction for pain and suffering is that we want to get rid of it.

And yet in this great tradition, surfing has -- suffering has often been, they have realized that suffering can open you up to understanding who you are as humans and understand your place in the world and to start asking questions about the meaning of life.

We encounter this in our contemporary settings.

As long as everything is on course we do not seem to be arrested enough in order to step back and ask whether the course is worth pursuing.

And once certain forms of suffering arrest us, we are freed in a sense by it to ask the question that comes to our benefit.

That is not to say we want to affirm suffering as intrinsic good, we often want to struggle against it.

But the challenge that we face, what to do with suffering that you cannot eliminate, that inescapably comes and you might hope to eliminate it and in the future you might but now you are stuck in the middle of it.

What kind of resources do you have two lives life worthy of your humidity -- humanity when you are stuck in suffering?

That is a very important question.

>> who do we answer to?

How should we live?

What should we hope for?

Matt another passage I found interesting, you talk about it is possible for us to succeed in our highest aspirations yet fail as humans.

Once again, I suspect your students might be initially puzzled.

How can we succeed in what we are aspiring to do and yet be confronted by failure at the same time?

Matt: if I remember the passage rate, the example we have on the table at that point and early in the book is we tell the story briefly of Albert, a young man who simply wanted to be an architect and had a calling as an architect so he pursued that in 1930's Germany, we get the sense of how the story is going to go badly.

He gets the opportunity to build all the buildings he ever wanted to build but it comes in aligning himself with the Nazi party and Hitler's.

-- and Hitler.

Later in his life, corresponding with another family member, his daughter, he gives an account of his life and he says, I was above all an architect.

And as an architect, one would say he is a success.

>> looking at the grandeur of the structures, it is easy to say that.

But the rest of his life -- Matt: and he had a goal to be an architect.

He became an architect.

He was a success in that sense.

And success is what we warn our students against.

It is a formal good.

It just means you had a goal and reached it.

It doesn't make any assessment over whether the goal is worth having in the beginning or if it was a terrible thing.

If you have a bad goal, successfully achieving it is a disaster.

And this is what we see in Elbert in dramatic ways and -- Albert in dramatic ways and if we get lost in the projects we have taken up for ourselves and in pursuit of our goals, we can find that we have succeeded in some project or another but we have failed as human beings, we have failed to live it into what is worthy in our shared humanity.

Jack: I could consult -- continue this conversation for hours with you.

I have one minute left.

Ryan, the last question, what would you hope readers will walk away with?

Ryan: my greatest hope is that you come away with a sense of the deep worthiness of your life.

Just because your life is valuable, it is worth living well.

And so it is worth thinking well about what that means.

There are also notes of -- all sorts of forces that push us toward triviality in our lives and it is easy to get on board with that.

Who are we to drink something great?

And if -- who are we to dream a something great?

and if you are dreaming to be a great human, it is exactly right.

Jack: once again, this book is "Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most."

it provides us with guidance and requires us to think.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us.

It has been a real pleasure talking with all of you when I look forward to connecting with you again down the road.

Be well.

Thank you for tuning into MetroFocus.

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>> MetroFocus is made possible by Sue and walk in iii.

The Ambrose Monell Foundation, estate of Roland Karlen.

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