Many things around us arouse our curiosity – yet there is a fundamental question about our own lives that we simply don’t delve into, says Agnes Callard

There is a question you are avoiding. Even now, as  you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it. You tell yourself you don’t have time at the moment; you’re focused on making it through the next fifteen minutes. There is a lot to get done in a day. There are the hours you spend at your job, the chores to take care of at home. There are movies to be seen, books to be read, music to be listened to, friendships to catch up on, vacations to be taken. Your life is full.

It has no space for the question, “Why am I doing any of this?”

If that question does arise, you are ready to reply that you have to do most of the things you’re already doing. A job is a source of things one has to do, in that you depend on the money it provides, and many people – clients, patients, students, co- workers, readers, bosses, customers, mentees – depend on your work.

If a job involves research, there might be a problem that has to get solved. In school, students are told what they have to do – attend class, complete assignments, study for exams. You also have obligations to your family members and friends, to live up to your (mostly tacit) agreements with them.

And then there are other extraneous obligations – political activism, community involvement, religious commitments – that a person might feel called upon to fulfill. All of these are “necessities,” and they bypass the “why” question.

That doesn’t cover everything you do in a day; no one would claim they “have to” pursue the simple pleasures of entertainment or companionship. But in those cases, the question is not so much “Why?” but “Why not?” Between the things you need to do and the things you like to do, your days are packed with activity. If you keep tacking one fifteen-minute period onto another, eventually it adds up to a life.

True, you might sometimes have to pause to ask: Should I take a vacation? Move? Have a(nother) child? Or you might find yourself faced with a moral dilemma or a romantic crisis. But in those cases you frame “What should I do?” as a question about which option fits best with what you had antecedently determined that you have to do and like to do. You are careful to keep your practical questions from exploding beyond narrow deliberative limits within which you confine them in advance.

It is fine to be open-minded and curious about all sorts of questions that don’t directly impinge on how you live your life – How do woodpeckers avoid getting concussions? – but you are vigilant in policing the boundaries of practical inquiry. You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn’t wander too far from how it is already going.

You appear to be afraid of something.

This is an extract from Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard (Penguin). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Agnes Callard will be talking about Socrates and the Philosophical Life on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler“, Thursday 13 March, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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