How to live better, according to philosophers

HOW many days do you think you have left in your life? Imagine you’re a 43-year-old Singaporean man (a fairly typical profile of The Business Times reader), born and bred in a country where the average life expectancy of a man currently stands at around 83 years. If you multiply 365 days by the remaining 40 years, the number of days you have left in this world is a mere 14,600. Sure, life expectancy would have gone up by a few more years by the time you hit 83, but that still doesn’t seem like a lot of days left for all the things you might still dream of doing.

This simple calculation is suggested by Dean Rickles in his book Life Is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide To Making It More Meaningful. The book was published in late 2022, about the same time that another book titled Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way written by Kieran Setiya was released by another publisher. 

Both books were written during the pandemic when movement and travel were restricted and death tolls were high. Both writers are university professors of philosophy: Setiya teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rickles at the University of Sydney. And while both sometimes unwittingly end up using some similar references (Plato, Sartre, eudaimonia, mid-life crisis, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, PD James’ Children Of Men), they differ somewhat in their proposals on how to live a better life.