The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

by Eric Weiner

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates famously said. When I first heard that, as a mopey teenager, I sighed. Life is difficult enough. You want me to examine it, too? The examined

Corollary Number One: The examined life that doesn’t produce practical results isn’t worth living.

flourishing, meaningful life.

“Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so,”

Pleasure Paradox (also known as Paradox of Hedonism). The more we try to seize happiness the more it slips from our grasp. Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well. So

impasse.

Philosophy produces more problems than it solves.

too many impertinent questions.

sanguine,

“Crito,” says Socrates, speaking to his friend. “We owe a rooster to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.”

addled

Confused

One more question to experience.

Train travel, viewed through the rosy haze of nostalgia, represents a throwback to a simpler, analog time.

dawdling

felt like a projectile,” said one early passenger. “Like a human parcel,” said another. The speed—faster than humans had ever traveled on land—transformed

“All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

masochist.

walking is a private

walk by ourselves and for ourselves. Freedom is walking’s essence. The freedom to depart

Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “follow this way or that, as t...

an urban nomad. At home everywhere, and nowhere.

irascible

Chidcjida

squalor

high maintenance. “A difficult friend, a disappointing lover, and an impossible employee,” says

Mother Nature is something of a nag. She’s constantly reminding me of my core incompetence.