Tag: philosophy

Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman

When this book came out, I learned that it was essentially a collection of his newsletters published as a book. I wasn’t interested. But over the ensuing months, I kept hearing people talk about it and praise it. So I finally decided to read it after all. I’m glad I did.

The book is divided into four parts corresponding to weeks and the chapters are titled by days out of the twenty-eight days in four weeks. In the introduction, the author suggests strongly that the reader consume only one chapter a day and let the content settle and simmer. Following this advice made the book not just a good read but a wonderful experience.

Essentially the book tells you to take it easy on yourself, experience the world. This would at first seem to be a way to disengage with the world and not get much done. But the pressure most of us put on ourselves keeps most of us from success as well. Following the advice here leads to a middle ground that feels just right.

My rating: 4.5/5

Adam Smith’s Other Book

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life book cover

Most people are familiar with Adam Smith’s book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, more commonly referred to as simply The Wealth of Nations. But seventeen years earlier he published his first and less famous book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is the book that Russ Roberts sets out to summarize and modernize in his book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

One of Smith’s key ideas that Roberts emphasizes is the idea of the “impartial spectator”, what we might today call a conscience. The concept is that we all operate with this spectator in our heads, judging us, telling us what to do. It is this “impartial spectator” that keeps us on the straight and narrow even when no one is looking. Ultimately, we all want to be seen as good and this is the tool by which we do so.

The book applies this thinking to other concepts like knowing yourself, how to be happy, and how to not fool yourself. I found that all the concepts really struck home for me. They rang true. And I found myself feeling like Adam Smith’s first book is the missing companion to his second.

There is much criticism in the world today for capitalism and markets. They are cold and have led to tremendous inequality. We lament that this system only sees people for their utility. Where is the humanity? It is in the first Adam Smith book! And in the last chapter, Roberts even touches on this.

At the end of the book Roberts points out that Smith’s first book is about the people close to us while Smith’s second book is about strangers. We need to learn to live with both, but in order to get much past subsistence living, we need a way to reliably work with strangers. Markets are how we rely on self-interest to direct public good among strangers. But for those we are close to it isn’t markets or money but culture and the “impartial spectator” that comes from shared culture that directs us. Perhaps the solution here is to combine what we learn from Smith’s two great works about how to deal with both strangers and our loved ones.