What Is the Good Life?

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube In the debut episode of The Permanent Questions With David Brooks , David speaks with the philosopher Meghan Sullivan about perhaps the most important question of them all: How should we live our lives? Sullivan is a co-author of The Good Life Method , based on a popular course she teaches at Notre Dame.

Leading a good life, she argues, means not just maximizing our positive impact in the world, but cultivating virtue within our own souls.

Along the way, David and Sullivan discuss Iris Murdoch, finding bliss at CVS, and exercising our philosophical muscles before life slaps us in the face.

The following is a transcript of the episode: David Brooks: Hi, I’m David Brooks.

If you are listening to or watching this, you’ve stumbled across the first episode of a new podcast called The Permanent Questions .

The idea of the podcast is that there are a lot of shows about politics and business and health and tech, but there aren’t enough about the really big questions of life.

How do you find your purpose? How do you confront death? How do you save a relationship that’s going through a rough patch? How do you build a just society? Now, you may be asking yourself, “How the hell did a political pundit get into these deep waters?” When I was 18, an incredibly lucky thing happened to me: The admissions officers at Columbia University, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago.

I didn’t know anything about Chicago.

I’d never visited.

I never knew anybody who went there, but it was the only school I got into.

It turned out to be the perfect school for me.

My favorite joke about Chicago: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas.

And I fit right in.

There’s a saying, “If you catch fire with enthusiasm, people will come for miles to watch you burn.” My professors had caught fire with enthusiasm.