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The Gallery of Attitudes: Which One Are You Hiding In? · Philosopheasy Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You are standing in front of your bathroom mirror at 6.40 in the morning,
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: tying a tie you do not remember choosing,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: and your phone lights up on the counter with a message
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: from someone you have not spoken to in a decade.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: They ask how you have been.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: You type three words before you delete them.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: You type the name of your company instead,
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: and your title,
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: and the city you work in now as if that answers the question, and you hit send.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you stand there a moment longer looking at a person in the mirror
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: who has somehow become a job description with a face.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Today's thinker is Simone de Beauvoir,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: and the book is The Ethics of Ambiguity, published in 1947.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of this episode, you will be able to name a very specific character.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir describes one she calls the serious man.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: You will understand why he is not the villain of her story so much as
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: the most tempting role in Movement 3.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Which you will get in Part 2,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: is the practice, the actual test, and what to do once you have passed or failed it.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the ache.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The scene at the mirror is a small one.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It happens most mornings, and most people do not notice it happening.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: But let's slow it down, because the smallness is the point.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody asks who you are in some form or other, and you answer with what you do.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not as a lie, it is just the fastest true thing available.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: You have a job.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: The job has a name.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: The name is legible to strangers in a way that your actual inner weather is not.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you reach for it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: The way you reach for your keys, it is simply there, by the door, ready to go.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now take that same gesture and run it through a Tuesday.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You wake up,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: and the first thing your mind does
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: before you are even properly awake is sort today's tasks by deadline.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: You eat breakfast.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Scrolling something work adjacent.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: You answer an email in the shower,
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: mentally composing sentences to a boss while water runs over your head.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: By nine in the morning,
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: you have made more decisions in your professional voice than in your own.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And here is the part that is easy to miss, because it does not feel like a loss.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like competence.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like being good at your life.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: The trouble is that somewhere in there the question
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: of what you actually want has quietly stopped being asked because
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: the role is already answering it for you.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: The role has opinions about what you should want.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: It wants you to want the promotion, the better title, the next rung.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And because the role is so fluent,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: so well rehearsed, it is easy to mistake its wanting for yours.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now stretch this out across years instead of a morning and you get the bigger version.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The one that shows up at retirement or at a layoff or at a diagnosis that forces
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: a leave of absence.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: People who have spent 30 years inside a title often describe what happens when
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: the title is removed as something closer to vertigo than relief.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the work was love necessarily,
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: though sometimes it was,
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: but because the title had been doing a job that was never really its job to do.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It had been standing in for the self.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when you pull a scaffold away from a building that was never actually finished
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: behind it,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: you find out rather suddenly what is really holding the walls up, if anything is.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is why the usual advice does not help much.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The usual advice says, find balance.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Leave work at work.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Cultivate a hobby.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Which is fine,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: as far as it goes,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: but it treats the problem as a scheduling issue,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: a pie chart that needs its slices resized.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: More time for painting, less time for spreadsheets, problem managed.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But that misses what is actually happening, which is not a distribution problem.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is a disappearing act.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The question was never really how much of your week belongs to work.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether there is a you left over,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: who is doing the choosing,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: or whether the role has quietly taken over the choosing on your behalf,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: so smoothly you stop noticing the handover.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can own a hobby and still have disappeared.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can have a rich weekend life and still answer every important question
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: about yourself, including to yourself, in the vocabulary of your job title.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: The scaffolding problem is not solved by adding a second smaller scaffold on Saturdays.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So here is the real question hiding underneath the dinner party version of this,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: the version everyone recognizes and nobody quite names.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is not.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is what happens to the part of you that is supposed to be doing the choosing,
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: once the choosing has been outsourced to a role that was never built to carry
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: that weight.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there is a name for the specific way this goes wrong.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: A name Simone de Beauvoir gave it nearly eighty years ago,
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: and once you have heard it you will not be able to unsee it in the mirror.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let's meet her properly.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908,
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: into a bourgeois Catholic household that expected a certain kind of daughter,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: a certain kind of future,
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: a certain set of rooms she would quietly occupy for the rest of her life.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: She did not occupy them.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: She studied philosophy at a level almost no woman of her generation
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: in France was permitted to,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: placed at the top of the national examination the year she took it,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: and spent the rest of her life writing,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking and refusing to let other people's ready-made answers stand in for her own.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: She is often introduced as Jean-Paul Sartre's partner,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: and the two of them did think alongside each other for decades,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: but the ethics of ambiguity is very much her own argument,
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: built to answer a problem Sartre's own philosophy had left half-finished.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Existentialism, the philosophy they both worked within, says roughly this.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: There is no fixed human nature handed to you in advance.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: You are free,
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: and you become who you are through what you choose and do,
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: not through some essence you were born with.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds liberating, and it is.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Beauvoir noticed the obvious follow-up question that this freedom raises and
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: that Sartre's earlier work had not fully answered.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: If nothing tells you in advance who to be,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: how do you actually live day to day That is the historical argument of her book.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom is not a reward you receive once and then relax into.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It is a condition you have to keep choosing inside,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: again and again, and most of us would frankly rather not.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to the key distinction the whole book turns on,
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: the difference between what Beauvoir calls genuine freedom and what she calls flight
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: from freedom.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Genuine freedom means you keep choosing your projects,
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: your commitments,
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: your values,
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: as yours with the full discomfort of knowing nothing outside you is going
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: to confirm you were right.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Flight from freedom means you find some ready-made role, some external structure.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you let it do the choosing for you so that you never have to feel the vertigo of
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: an open questioning.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And here is the core idea, the one you will hear three times today.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: No role can justify you, not your job, not your title, not even a role you love.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: A role can organize your time and even express something true about you,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: but it cannot do the work of being the reason you exist.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Only you, choosing again, can do that.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: No role can justify you.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir is useful here precisely because she does not just name one failure mode
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: and leave it at that.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: In The Ethics of Ambiguity,
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: she sketches out a small gallery of attitudes people take toward their own freedom,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: ways of either inhabiting it or running from it,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: and the one that matters most for our ache today she calls the serious man.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: A serious man is someone who takes an existing system of values, a role,
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: a cause,
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: a career ladder,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: and treats it as though it were simply given,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: simply true, the way a rock is simply hard.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: He does not choose the value of the role for himself, and then hold it as his choice.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: He disappears into it,
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: lets it absorb the frightening work of deciding what matters,
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: and mistakes his fluency inside that system for having solved the problem
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: of being free.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Picture someone who has spent fifteen years rising inside one company,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: and who,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: when asked at a party what they would do if the company folded tomorrow,
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: cannot actually answer.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the question is unfair,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: but because there is a real silence where the answer should be.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: The role had been quietly doing all the work of mattering on their behalf,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: and without it, for a moment nothing obviously does.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The sign of this is not ambition itself, and it is not working hard.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: The sign is what happens in that silence,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: the blankness where a person's own wanting should be standing ready.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: The serious man is not lazy.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: He is often the hardest worker in the room.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: What he has given up is not effort.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is the ongoing,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: uncomfortable,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: unfinished work of choosing the effort's meaning for himself over and over rather
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: than borrowing it once and letting the role keep paying it out forever after.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say it again differently,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: because this is the kind of idea that only lands the second
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: or third time you hear it.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: A role is a tool.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can pick it up and use it beautifully.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: What you cannot do,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir would say, is hand the tool the job of deciding whether your life matters.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: The title can describe what you do for forty hours a week.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: It cannot certify that you are worth something.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Only the ongoing act of choosing done by you can do that,
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: and it has to be done again tomorrow,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: because yesterday's choosing does not carry
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: over automatically like unused vacation days.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the part I want to say plainly,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: before we go any further,
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: because this ache is not a character flaw,
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: and I do not want you listening to the rest of this episode feeling accused.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: You did not build the system that rewards the serious man.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Workplaces are structured,
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: quite deliberately in many cases,
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: to make the role as absorbing as possible,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: because an employee who has fused with their title is a more predictable,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: more available, more manageable employee.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir was writing in 1947,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: but she would recognize instantly the modern version of this,
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: the open plan office,
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: with no clock on the wall,
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: the phone that follows you to bed, the culture that calls over work passion.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Disappearing into your job is not a weakness unique to you.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is often the path of least resistance that was built for you on purpose,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: by people who benefit from you not noticing you took it.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this is not about blaming yourself for answering the party question with your job title.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is about noticing that the answer has started doing more work than it should
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: and asking what it would take to hand some of that work back to you.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to Movement 3.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Practice.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to start with the hardest idea in the whole book,
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: because Beauvoir does not let you off easy here.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: The hardest idea is this.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: There is no final answer.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: You do not do this work of choosing once,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: get it right, and then live off the interest for the rest of your life.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom, in her sense, is not a trophy you win.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is closer to breathing.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: You do it again every day, and the fact that you did it yesterday buys you nothing today.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is uncomfortable to hear,
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: because most of us are looking for the version of this where we fix ourselves once
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: and move on.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir's book does not offer that version.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: It offers an ongoing practice instead,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: and I think honestly that is more respectful of how a real life actually works.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So here is her test in three questions.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to actually sit with these, rather than just nodding along.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Question 1.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: If this roll vanished tomorrow with no warning and no severance package
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: to soften it, what would you still want to spend your Tuesday on?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not what would you have to do to survive.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: What would you still choose with nobody checking?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Question 2.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: When you describe your work to someone,
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: are you describing something you chose or something that chose you so long ago and
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: so smoothly that you no longer remember agreeing to it?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Question 3.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the one that tends to sting the most.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: When was the last time you changed your mind
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: about something your role tells you matters actually changed it out loud in a way
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: that cost you something?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not a minor tweak, a real reconsideration.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you can answer all three with something specific,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: something that is not a shrug,
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: you are likely closer to what Beauvoir calls genuine freedom than to the serious.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: If the questions mostly land as silence, that is worth knowing, too.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a verdict on your character.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is information.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do a version of this live,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: right now, together, because I think it works better felt than merely described.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you are,
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: if you can let your shoulders drop an inch from where they have been holding them,
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: take one slower breath than the one before it.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, without reaching for your job title,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: without reaching for your company's name,
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to finish this sentence in your head.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Lately, I have actually wanted just that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Lately, I have actually wanted.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let whatever comes up, come up, even if it is small, even if it is embarrassing.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it is nothing more than a nap or a different chair to sit in.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: That small true thing is worth more right now than any line on a resume,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: because it is yours in a way the resume is not.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Who has own way out of this,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: and I think it is the most generous part of her philosophy,
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: is not to tell you to quit your job or burn the title down.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is to tell you to re-choose your projects as yours consciously,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: rather than letting them run on autopilot.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: In the Ethics of Ambiguity,
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: she is clear that engagement with the world, work included, is not the problem.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is doing that work while pretending you had no choice in the matter,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: as though the role simply arrived and you simply obeyed it.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a few objections, because I know some of you are already arguing with me.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: First objection.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot just rediscover what I want.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I have bills, I have a family depending on this job.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir's freedom sounds like a luxury for people with savings.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: That is fair, and Beauvoir would not disagree with the constraint.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Her point is not that you can quit tomorrow.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is that even inside real constraints,
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: there is a difference between performing a role you have quietly rechosen
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: and performing one you never examined at all.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: The bills do not disappear either way.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: What changes is whether you are present inside the work or absent from your own life
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: while your hands do the work for you.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Second objection.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: This sounds exhausting, re-choosing everything constantly.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Can I not just settle into something and relax for once?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can settle into a role.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir is not against commitment, and settling is not the same as disappearing.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: The test is not whether you stay.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is whether you could still answer those three questions honestly while staying.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of people stay in the same job for decades and remain entirely themselves inside it.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: The serious man is not defined by tenure.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: He is defined by having stopped asking third objection, and this one is quieter but common.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: What if I ask the questions and I do not like the answers?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: What if I find out I have actually disappeared?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then you have found out something true and true things,
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: however uncomfortable, are the only ground you can actually build on.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir's whole point is that the discomfort of an open question is better than
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: the false comfort of a closed one, even when the open question is scary.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Especially then.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say the core idea once more a third time,
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: because repetition is how an idea actually moves from your ears into your life.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: No role can justify you.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: A role can organize your days and even express something real about you,
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: but the work of deciding that your life matters is work only you can keep doing over
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: and over, and no title, however impressive, can do it for you.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the practice,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: specific and doable,
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: something you can start this week rather than merely agree with.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Pick one evening this week,
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: just one,
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: and before you go to sleep, write down a single sentence that answers this.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: What did I choose today that my job title did not require of me?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: It does not need to be dramatic.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: It might be that you called a friend back.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Or read ten pages of something with no professional use.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Or said no to an extra meeting you did not have to take.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Write the sentence down.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere you will actually see it again.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not a note that vanishes into your phone forever.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do this once this week.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: If it goes well, try it again next week.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is the ongoing re-choosing Beauvoir describes made small enough to actually happen.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: If this whole exercise feels uncomfortable,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: if the three questions sat badly or the sentence was hard to write,
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: that is not a sign you are doing it wrong.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Beauvoir would say that is closer to a sign you are doing it at all.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: The serious man never feels this particular discomfort because he has already let
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: the role answer for him.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Feeling the question is the beginning of the freedom, not a detour from it.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So picture the mirror again,
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: 6.40 in the morning,
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: the tie, the message from someone you have not spoken to in a decade.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: This time,
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: before you type your company's name and your title and the city,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: you pause for one extra second.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: You let the real answer sit there a moment, unfinished, a little embarrassing, entirely yours.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you still send the short professional version because it is faster and
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: the moment does not call for your whole life story.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you know now, that it was a choice, not a reflex.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that knowing is the whole difference Beauvoir is pointing to.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's gather what we found today.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: The ache was the job title standing in for the whole self, the role answering questions.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was never built to answer.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: The thinker was Simone de Beauvoir, and the idea was the serious man.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Someone who hides his freedom inside a ready-made role rather
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: than choosing his projects as his own.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: The core line to keep is this one.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: No role can justify you.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: The practice is small and real.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: One evening this week,
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: one sentence naming something you chose that your job title did not require.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Here is a question I would genuinely like to hear your answer to if you want
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: to leave it in the comments.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: What is one thing you have wanted lately that has nothing to do with your title at all?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: This month's live masterclass goes deeper into Beauvoir's full gallery of attitudes
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: toward freedom.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: The sub-man,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: the adventurer,
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: the passionate man,
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: and what each one reveals about the particular way you might be tempted
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: to flee your own freedom.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to see you there.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Go choose something today that nobody asked you to.