Episode 238: I Am Not Ivan Ilyich...Am I?

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist David Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] People always say shit like, I'm gonna pray for you. You're gonna pray for me so you're gonna sit in your apartment and do nothing? That's what your prayers are. You sitting around and not taking action as I struggle with the situation.

[00:00:31] Don't pray for me, make me a sandwich or something.

[00:01:19] I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, last night the Boston Celtics came back from down 15 late in the third quarter to win

[00:01:33] by 12 points against the heavily favored like dynastic Golden State Warriors. Can we just talk about that fourth quarter for this episode? Like the whole episode? That's what people turned in. Yeah, exactly. I just want to break it down. The 17-0 run at the end.

[00:01:51] Well, you know, I think you have punditry, sports punditry in you. We can break it down. You're sort of like the Skip Bayless of academic podcasting. I called that game. I predicted that we would win because nobody thought that we were gonna win that game

[00:02:05] including Golden State and I think they didn't take us seriously. They were like, oh, we're so cute. Look, there's such a young team. It's like us back in 2015. Yep, Golden State got caught slipping.

[00:02:16] This is as I told Tam, this is very painful for me because I both historically dislike the Boston Celtics because I grew up a Laker fan and just like the Golden State Warriors because they're from Northern California, but also they're just a bit too smug for my taste.

[00:02:33] Like I feel like they were a humble team the first year they won. And I really was like, OK, maybe I can root for them. And now wipe that smile off your face.

[00:02:41] And so for the first time in my entire life, I was rooting for Boston in a game. Yeah. And I knew because you didn't say you were going to root for them, but I bet I had a feeling you would find yourself. You know what I mean?

[00:02:55] Like you just all of a sudden, hey, look, I'm rooting for the Celtics. What? Well, I fucked up his life that I'm so fucked up like this world is upside down first covid and then school shootings and then you're rooting for the Celtics.

[00:03:10] No, but like they're a team of just clearly maybe in my mind, I have a heuristic of teams that play good defense equal like unselfish team work. Like playing good defense requires a sort of trust work ethic and trust in your

[00:03:29] teammates more than just playing offense and launching three pointers and then shimmying and then shimmying. Yeah, it's just dumb. And then who can root against Al Horford? The I know as a proud Latino man, I have to be on his side. Big turn 36 today. Happy birthday, Al.

[00:03:48] You have made anyone who grew up in Boston so happy over the last but that's not as much as I would like to what we are going to talk about. In fact, I'm happy we got in as much as we did. I ever edit this out.

[00:04:02] People have already tuned out these guys. What sport are they even talking about? It's the NBA finals, by the way. Yeah, it's the NBA finals basketball or as they say in Europe. I don't know, basketball, basketball. Yes, that's good.

[00:04:21] Yeah, speaking of bad Russian or actually you're good at accents. I'm not even going to pretend that you're bad at them, but. Of Russians just speaking of Russia. Just speaking of Russians about that. We're going to be talking about a very famous short story or novella,

[00:04:38] the death of Ivan Ilyich. Ilyich, Ivan Ilyich. Yeah, I guess so. Sometimes it's spelled Ilyich and sometimes spelled Ilyich, but yeah, I take that that's yeah, I'm excited for that. It is. I was trying to compose a tweet of like just saying, you know,

[00:04:54] coming next week, like I do sometimes. How would you like describe what the themes of it are? Because they are the most fundamental like themes that humanity faces. It feels like. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. A man comes to terms with death and the meaning of his life.

[00:05:13] Like, you know, it's so it hits every it just hits every one of my like deepest interest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was one I was worried about you actually because this is staring death, the black hole just right in the face with and it's just kind of

[00:05:34] relentless, just the momentum of it towards towards that, you know, that moment, even though you already know it's going to happen. But it's like, I was like, is Dave going to be on this?

[00:05:44] Dude, we'll talk about it when we get to that segment because you were right to worry. You're right. OK, man. Well, we'll see. But I love it. I mean, all I could say is I love it. So it wasn't that bad. Yeah, right.

[00:05:58] But first, Tamler, something close to death, something almost as important as the fundamental meaning of all life and existence and authenticity is this growing genre. Yes, tweets, essays, takes on an academia, an academia on leaving academia.

[00:06:19] It seems as if everybody I'm surprised there are any professors left to be honest, given how much. Given how like social media. Yeah, it really is a genre that didn't exist before of essay or blog post often.

[00:06:34] Why I'm leaving academia and as far as I can tell, doesn't exist in other professions to the same degree, but maybe that's just because I don't follow them. Like is this. Hold on. I'm in real time Googling why I am leaving beekeeping. Why so many new beekeepers quit?

[00:06:53] I found something mostly it's about bees leaving. Yeah, I know. I don't know. Maybe there is just like, I mean, for one, academics are skilled at writing, you know. You know what academics. They write a lot.

[00:07:11] So so you and I have talked about some of these tweets and we've been sort of disparaging about the approach, the whole approach that in particular, the negativity with which academia is portrayed.

[00:07:27] But I don't know if you were thinking along these lines, I want to be a bit more fair and try to really see what's going on. Yeah. And so you put a couple of articles in our slack to discuss. Yeah.

[00:07:38] I one thing I I've always thought about this, if you're going to write a why I'm leaving academia blog post, you should be like legally obligated to write a eight years later update, you know. Like that's one of the articles that you posted.

[00:07:56] Actually, somebody did this and a post titled I regret. Requit I regret quitting astrophysics. And I think that's quite enlightening. I would really love to see that. Yeah, I agree. And I'm not even saying that in a snide way.

[00:08:09] Like I think that I think some people might feel like, you know, things have been going great and I haven't looked back since and other people would be like this person. And but we always seem to get it, you know, at the low point of

[00:08:26] this person's experience in academia. So here's a question to maybe get us started. If you had to guess what the real situation is right between. So here are three options. Number one, this really is an unprecedented bad time to be

[00:08:44] in academia relative to other professions because the job market is brutal. These bloated administrations are just looking for ways to exploit academics and, you know, you see in COVID how they behaved. They were at least according to some people in the profession. I'm not among them.

[00:09:05] They were careless with our health and our lives trying to get us back into the classroom. So that's number one alternative. Number two, it's a little worse than normal because of covid and the job market. But it's not dramatic.

[00:09:21] It's kind of like the ups and downs of academic life. And if you're talented and you work hard, there's still, you know, there's still hope for you. And then the third one is, yeah, it's hard. All jobs are hired now, right?

[00:09:35] Most jobs in this stage of capitalism, whatever stage we're in, are rough. But the people who go into academia, this generation, I don't know, 24 to 35 somewhere in that range are just kind of breathtakingly entitled. You're blaming it on the zoomers. The zoomers are finally on the market.

[00:09:58] That's why I see what you're doing. Is this even the zoomers? Like I feel like the zoomers are a little younger. Yeah, no, yeah. The millennials. Yeah. Yeah. It's somewhere between zoomers and millennials if it's there because I know that those people get shit on sometime, that generation.

[00:10:13] So this is a serious question. Like which of those three do you think is closest to capturing the reality? Okay. So I know you asked me a three part question. So I'll try to answer it straightforwardly and then add my nuance.

[00:10:28] I think that it is the second option that this is much like every other work set of working conditions. Academia has not been miraculously protected from anything. So that we have not gotten raises. Did you guys get raises?

[00:10:48] Like for these past couple of years, like we just got, I think, a cost of living raise that didn't even beat inflation. So. Oh yeah. I mean, we don't even get that normally. What we get are big raises with the promotions, like really big, like substantial ones.

[00:11:02] And then we just get kind of little raises that they're not substantial, certainly not coming close to inflation this year. Your big raises are your promotions and everything after that is much, much smaller and based on merit. But yeah.

[00:11:19] Well, and what sucks that many people point out is that one of the easiest ways, if not the only way in some universities to get a raise is to go on the job market and get an offer from another institution.

[00:11:29] And that it may be something that is commonly done in other industries, but it's easier to do another. Like it's a huge deal to go on the job market in academics. There are not that many universities that are hiring and everybody would find out.

[00:11:44] It's not like getting you don't get emails from headhunters every other week like you do if you're working a real job. So so there are reasons why I think it's harder for. But that's been going on like my first job was like that, you know,

[00:11:59] like that's been going on forever. You to get anything substantial, you had to get an outside offer. And the problem was as my first job learned is that if you get an outside offer, you might take it and you're likely to take it because you see yourself

[00:12:12] there and you're already so pissed off at your your current institution for treating you like total shit. You know, I'm not a big fan of that strategy. But I mean, I remember the Dean flat out told me he's like,

[00:12:24] we think a lot of people here are not as coveted as they seem to think. And so this is our way of gauging that. It's a reasonable. It's I think it's a rational strategy for an institution. You know, it's just not it has its problems.

[00:12:39] But so by the way, I checked the youngest millennials are 25. So this is all a millennial. But I apologize to the zoomers. I apologize to our huge zoomer audience, which is we've given zoomers a lot more love than I think many people are millennials. They're the problem.

[00:12:58] Millennials. They're probably most of our audience. Um, so I think that there are two related things that give them that add nuance to this. One is I think as you and I have talked about the experience of being an academic is not universal at all. It's not homogenous.

[00:13:14] There's so it ranges from really, really crappy adjunct positions where you know, there are people who have to teach whatever class they can get in three different local colleges just to make ends meet. And even then they're making like thirty eight thousand dollars a year.

[00:13:29] And and or have no job security. And that's terrible. So the experience that I that I and you have had is we're obviously looking at this from the most positive, you know, yeah. No, like we hit the lottery as some people will say.

[00:13:47] Yeah. So that's what it makes me mad when people who have jobs like us chime in on Twitter and bitch about it because I'm like. Everything horrible that people say about like the way universities treat adjuncts, I think is is relatively right.

[00:14:04] But when they quit, I don't see their essays. The people that like in the three things that we looked at for this, they are usually tenure track or commonly in that kind of postdoc limbo where, you know, but they're but they but they're not teaching five courses

[00:14:25] for thirty thousand dollars or something like that. Right. You know. And so I think that what's changed over time that might make this point be, you know, it's like it might make it so that these people have a point is that

[00:14:36] as the number of students continue to rise, the number of people on the job market continue to rise, number of jobs didn't. And then you have this this increased competition where before, you know, we all know professors who who got their jobs out of grad school

[00:14:52] because the chair of their committee called up their buddy at Princeton and said, hey, my guy's on the market. And then they just got that job and they took four years in grad school like that. That just doesn't happen anymore. Yeah. And those people are usually white males.

[00:15:06] Exactly. The stereotype has it. Like that's true. It's actually true. And and so so now you have people competing and this started happening when I was a postdoc. It became more and more common for people in the social sciences like psychology to take postdocs.

[00:15:21] And then you were on the job market competing with people who had been out for two years and had more publications. And that's just an arms race. Like the more people who are out there, the harder and harder it is.

[00:15:31] So you have postdocs who've been doing it for five years, who have 30 publications and they're still not getting jobs, which is absolutely shittier than than it was when I was on the job market. And so if you're a postdoc or if you're an adjunct,

[00:15:45] because you couldn't get a job, a tenure track job, then all like I think that it is it is a shitty position. Yeah, we're a visiting professor that has to pack up and move every every one to two years. You know, it's really tough strain on the family.

[00:16:00] I mean, that is the life. You know, and I've experienced again on the good side of it, but not like you where I just went from Yale, one Ivy League institution right to another one and everything was great.

[00:16:11] You went from you had a break in between your Ivy League institution. I went to my first job, which is in Morris, Minnesota. And I actually enjoyed my time there in spite of some poor salary kind of conditions.

[00:16:25] But that was not something that me and my newly born daughter and my wife like thought we were going to do wanted to do. And, you know, like and still that was a tenure track job

[00:16:36] that put me in a good position to without a really burdensome teaching load and put me in a position to get to a place which is kind of perfect for our family in a lot of ways. And, you know, like a lot of people just that doesn't happen.

[00:16:52] You just have to keep bouncing around. You have to keep getting up and moving and moving sucks. It's the worst. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. Every time I do it, I'm like never again, never again. By the way, I was a U.C. Irvine for three years.

[00:17:05] Thanks for remembering between my postdoc. So so you were? Yeah, I didn't know that actually. The question that I really want to ask, though, is suppose that you do have a tenure track job, forget postdocs, forget adjuncts who never got on the tenure track.

[00:17:22] This nature article that you link to called has the quote unquote great resignation hit academia. One where there's a lot of journalism that if you ask a question in the title, it's almost always no. The question is, are those people who are in the tenure track

[00:17:39] leaving at increased rates? And this article dances around this claim, making it seem as if they're providing some sort of evidence that that's the case. But they never do like they don't provide a single piece of data

[00:17:55] that this is happening at a higher rate than it ever has. Rather, they highlight, which is important to like they highlight the people who have left anecdotally, right? They sought out these people and they ask them, why are you leaving? I just don't think that.

[00:18:10] Institutions used to support you or make you work less. I like I don't know. This is also my question. So just for the listeners, the great resignation is. Like the great replacement. Just about to make that. It's not like the great replacement theory.

[00:18:28] It right when Biden and before him, Trump a little bit started paying people because of COVID who couldn't find work or couldn't go to work. People just started quitting their jobs even when they could go because it was like, oh, yeah, I hate my job.

[00:18:46] And and now I can afford to live. I won't die. I won't starve. I won't I won't not be able to pay rent if because we have this unemployment money and we have these checks.

[00:18:57] And so there was a period of time where it was like workers had leverage and they used it by quitting. And then that ended, of course, like all those benefits are gone. And so now you don't hear about it as much except now, of course, in academia.

[00:19:12] Right. So this article in Nature tries to mount this argument that this is happening also in academia and they highlight people who have left and they give their reasons. And some of them are like pushed out by systemic bias, right?

[00:19:26] And they highlight some people who didn't feel like they were getting supported because they're part of a marginalized group. I have zero problem with any of these people, and I even believe them. But to make that general claim that to me requires some evidence.

[00:19:43] Like these are just stories of people who left because they didn't feel supported. This is so this article bothers me by the lack of data that they have. So one, I would love to know how many people are actually leaving. Two, has that changed over time?

[00:19:56] Like actually three, if it has, how does that change compared to any other job that people might get at that stage of their careers? Right. So like, is there any substance to this? Or are we just doing like this fud, this fear, uncertainty and doubt

[00:20:12] of journalism trying to like latch on to a narrative because because people are kind of upset about life and the world right now. And so it seems like the kind of stuff that people want to hear about.

[00:20:24] Right. So the data that they do give is on this salary and satisfaction server. Yeah, right. Thirty seven percent of mid career researchers were dissatisfied with their current position, a degree of dissatisfaction that sent them apart from both early and late career research by five percent.

[00:20:43] By five percent. Yeah. Mid career researchers often face duties and administrative tasks that go beyond the lab in the survey. Thirty seven percent of researchers said they were unhappy with the amount of time they have for research, twenty one percent of early career, twenty eight

[00:21:00] of late career echoed that complaint. Again, you really start to wonder if this is a generational difference to some degree. Exactly. You know, there's no comparison over time, right? This these numbers could be vastly better than they were ten years ago when the housing crisis hit or something.

[00:21:18] And and also one reading of these numbers is that 80 percent of early career, 83 percent of early career researchers are satisfied. Like that's a very different narrative there. Right. If you if you surveyed like waiters or people in tech or people,

[00:21:40] you know, like again, it's really hard to know. But my feeling is again, we are on the luckiest side of this spectrum all that, you know, like granted. But my feeling is that that it's like it's it's not better in on average

[00:21:57] in some of these other professions that I think, you know, they imagine them themselves being a part of. It really is, I think, a shoddy article because what I don't like about what it's doing is is that it is, I think, planting seeds of real,

[00:22:20] real insecurity in people for for reasons that don't stand up to scrutiny. And again, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to leave academia. But this is a whole lot of nothing in this article. You've been very offended by this. Yeah, from the start.

[00:22:39] I also came across this why you need to leave academia by the cheeky scientist. Yeah, it's like a blog. It's a blog post. Yeah. He says, I felt like a complete loser. I grabbed a food stamp application and walked out of the poorly lit government assistant building.

[00:22:59] The building was in the middle of nowhere and it took me forever to find it on my bike. I made a last minute decision to apply for the stamps in between lab experiments and hurry down to the building, hoping my advisor wouldn't notice that I have gone.

[00:23:11] Then he starts talking about like the data, which he says he was developing a stress induced kidney condition. Oh, yeah. Again, this connects perfectly to our next. Yeah, after all, this is bolded, so I'm drawn to it.

[00:23:27] The whole reason I worked so hard to become a PhD so I could create a better life for myself and my own family someday. I thought climbing my way to the highest echelons of academia would give me this

[00:23:37] life. I thought I would be paid well, treated well and allowed to do meaningful work, but I was very wrong. So you'll see why we're making fun of this bit. But then he gives all these like stats like three times the fold increase in

[00:23:52] the number of people with graduate degrees who have had to apply for food stamps, unemployment or other assistance. Is it true that a lot of academics are on food stamps? I looked this up and it's like

[00:24:05] in the United States, it was like one percent of all people and that's including people with masters and above. Sixty eight thousand number of post stocks in the US alone waiting for tenured professorships. You are not above the data. You are the data.

[00:24:20] Don't fall into the trap of ignoring the dismal numbers telling you that academia is dying and that you better leave as soon as possible. If you're in academia right now, you are one of those numbers. The fairy tale is over. If you want to keep doing this, fine.

[00:24:36] Just don't act surprised the next time you get scooped right before publishing or when you're reduced to publishing in a very low tier journal, you are too smart and too talented to work in poverty your whole life.

[00:24:48] Imagine what you could do if you had all the reagents you needed and all the top level instrumentation you needed. That's what it's like in industry. OK, like I don't we don't need to keep giving this all this much time,

[00:25:02] but you keep reading this and it continues in this in this vein. OK, wait a minute. Why is this guy he wants to really help me get out of academia? If you get lost, confused, stuck or feel it alone, contact us and we will help.

[00:25:19] So it turns out this guy is a consultant transition specialist. They will help you navigate the from your just shitty academic job to something just phenomenally great in industry. Yeah, OK, so there's I've said this many times.

[00:25:40] I spent a year in Toronto working primarily in an industry job as a consultant. And I'm sorry, man, I knew at the end of that year any temptation that might have been there to go for a higher paying industry job went away.

[00:25:55] Like I didn't like the nature of that work as full time work. Like it was high pressure. You were essentially required to be on call at all times if your boss needed you to help with the presentation deck for these new potential clients.

[00:26:12] Like it was doing work that not that you had no real say over. If we're looking at sort of the equivalent lateral move from being an academic at a track job to a consultancy group, the job, I'm sorry, my humble opinion does not get better.

[00:26:27] And in fact, it gets worse in a lot of ways. I really want to let all of my students know that industry is a viable option for being a PhD, but I think it's bullshit to try to make it sound like

[00:26:38] it's the panacea like grass is always greener. Yeah. And then this brings us to the this last blog post. I regret quitting astrophysics. I think it makes really good points. So this is a guy writing that in 2013 he decided to quit his career in

[00:26:52] astrophysics, move back home and become a data scientist. He'd written a blog post back then. And so seven years later he's updating us and he says seven years after the fact it is time to confess I deeply regret quitting.

[00:27:07] This post is meant to give my point of view. Many people who left academia are very happy that they did. Here I present some arguments why one might not want to leave, which I hope will be of help for people facing decisions like these.

[00:27:16] One, I miss being motivated and that's you can't write like if it's not for you, you'll figure out in grad school. If that's just not what you want to do. But what he misses is working on the questions that were pressing his curiosity,

[00:27:29] that were that were fundamentally intrinsically meaningful to him. And that's my experience too. Like I had to go in that year and work on stuff that other people wanted. That's what's beautiful about it is you work on the stuff that you want

[00:27:42] to work on and if you find something to be, you know, not worthwhile as I have come to think about certain parts of philosophy that I used to be more enthusiastic about, like you just don't have to keep doing it anymore.

[00:27:54] You know, but that's just not true in a like a consulting gig, like the one that you're talking about. Yeah. And I want to just like reemphasize now that like we've said this many times we're at the luckiest end of the distribution.

[00:28:08] But my lateral move to work at a consulting company was also at the very lucky end of the distribution and consultancy. Like I had as far as those things go, I had a great position. And but the trade offs are nonetheless there.

[00:28:22] So he says he misses working in academic institutions surrounded by people who are intrinsically motivated to do. So now you're also just around other people who are excited. You know, I feel that this is true of the people in our department,

[00:28:35] a relatively happy group that really enjoys teaching and researching. And and that's really nice, you know, to be at a place where you don't feel like you're competing with them. They're coming after your promotion, the one that you want. It's it's not like that.

[00:28:51] And you don't have a boss. You don't really have a boss, you know. Right. Exactly. But yeah, I loved what he said. Having visitors over from around the globe with interesting, perhaps related work was a big motivator journal clubs, coffee discussions, lunch talks, colloquiums,

[00:29:03] et cetera, all part of the job. It's something that even most scientists don't always seem to fully appreciate. He says, I miss passion and being proud of what I do. The internet says I have the sexiest job of the 21st century. But I think my previous job.

[00:29:18] Is that really does the internet release? He provided a link. You keep talking and I'll tell you what the link is. Data scientists, the sexiest job. Yeah, yeah. What is this? Harvard Business Review says. Sounds like sounds like a data scientist wrote that. I think so. Yeah.

[00:29:39] Objectively, they probably have like eight orgasms a day. You know, a data science. But that's because they're always at the computer. But I think my previous job was more enjoyable to brag about at birthday parties.

[00:29:51] Your job in America, I would think we were saying this on the Ask Us Anything. It really is like more a part of your identity in the states than in any other country, I think by a fair margin.

[00:30:04] But I mean, like, I think this is the thing to keep in mind. And I'm really glad that somebody did this. I, you know, someone who wrote one of those posts back when, you know, when he was doing it before it was cool to do it in 2013.

[00:30:16] Now he's updated it and this is another way that it can go. Yeah. And we're all staring death in the face, you know? Is this what you want to spend? But one of the people in that in that nature

[00:30:30] article does say, is this where I wanted to die? Like this this job that I took is where I want to be for the next 40 years or whatever. Speaking of like having a job that's part of your identity

[00:30:44] and then dying, we'll be right back to talk about the death of Ivan Iliich. OK, now a word from our sponsor, better help. You know, life can be overwhelming on all sides these days. And it's so easy to get burned out by all of it.

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[00:33:14] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the podcast where we'd like to take a moment and sincerely thank all the people who get in touch with us and all the different ways that you do

[00:33:34] and interact with other people in the Very Bad Wizards community. This is one of the things just got a bunch of emails recently that touched my heart sincerely and I just so appreciate that.

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[00:37:43] So thank you to everybody for your support. We really, really appreciate it. Yes, thank you. All right, let's talk about Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illich. Novella or short story. It's not too long actually. Strongly recommend that you read it if you haven't yet.

[00:38:02] He wrote it a few years after he completed Anna Karenina. And around the same time as he did this memoir called Confession, which in fact, I often I give a big chunk of that to my intro to ethics class. And it's great. Have you read that?

[00:38:18] No, we could do an episode on that. Holy shit. It's like is it about his conversion? It's about his like crisis of meaning science and philosophy can't help. And he really says he thought of taking his own life because the reality of death

[00:38:36] stripped like possible justification for any kind of life right out from under him. And in the end, it does kind of come around to some sort of faith. It's a defense of faith, the precise kind of faith that he's recommending and

[00:38:52] whether that fixes the problem is definitely worth talking about. But you know, he's he's obsessed with these and Warren peace and Anna Karenina like he's obsessed with these kinds of questions Tolstoy. And he writes about them so kind of unflinchingly that it's just very raw. It's very raw.

[00:39:11] Yeah. Without a lot of the flourishes that he did in those two like amazing novels too. This just goes right to the core of the issue. Right. I never read Anna Karenina. I don't think it's so great. We could do a whole thing on that or Warren peace.

[00:39:27] I would love to do both of them. I mean, I don't know when that would happen because of our stupid academic job. This is a story about a man who's just a pretty average guy. He's a judge in the Russian, you know,

[00:39:45] in the high levels of the Russian courts at the time. He's not a bad person, not a particularly good person. He's vain. He kind of sucks up to the upper classes and he gets a disease that originally comes

[00:39:59] after he just hits his the side of his body on a coffee table or some sort of table that as he was redecorating very proudly, his bourgeois house, that he bumped into it and that ultimately leads to his death.

[00:40:14] But really it's about and I read somebody saying something like this, it's just the basic observation that we're all on death row. Right. You know, we are all in the same position as even

[00:40:27] Iliac and post-o, it takes great pains and how he structures it and how he talks about it to sort of make it seem like, you know, he comes to feel that he's accused, we also start to feel accused like we're being like this.

[00:40:41] This story is an accusation about our lives to some degree. And like I said, in the opening, it's just, you know, once it picks up that momentum, it's relentless and takes you right to the very end with possibly, I don't know, a disappointing ending.

[00:40:57] I don't know. We can talk about that. But yeah, what did you think of the death? When was the first time you read it? And what do you think overall? I must have read it in grad school. Either late college or early grad school is my guess.

[00:41:14] It was long enough ago that but it never left me, man. Like I never this is not one of those stories that I was like struggling to recall because it certainly made its had an emotional impact on me back then. A different one now.

[00:41:30] But I think it's one of the greatest stories I've ever read. I love it. Yeah, like I, you know, I'm not well versed in the ways of literature. I'm not. You're just a cave man. I'm just a cave man.

[00:41:45] It's not like the denominator of short stories I've read is fairly small compared to a lot of people, but I can't imagine a story being more relevant to every human being who has ever lived. Yeah, you said you were I was right to be worried about you.

[00:42:05] Yeah. Oh yeah. OK. So the first time I read this, I remember feeling so anxious and so uncomfortable because it really is the story of his slow descent into death. All of the things that I know that I would be thinking like, you know,

[00:42:24] this can't be what I'm just going to alive and then dead. Right. For no reason. For no reason that can't be right. And like the physical changes that come along with death, like the visceral feeling that you are slipping away, the reaction

[00:42:40] that people would have to his emaciated body, the lies that people were telling him that he know no, there's totally hope. The pain that he was in, the clear lack of dignity that in the manner with which both he is dealing with his own death and others

[00:43:00] are allowing him to have his friends clearly just moving on. Right. Like what one of the opening lines is you see he's dead and I'm not. Right. Let's go play cards kind of thing. Well, yeah. And when we talk in detail,

[00:43:14] I want to talk about the choice to start out with it. It's almost like you have a little preface that takes place after his death from the perspective of one of his quote unquote friends. And then you get to his story before,

[00:43:28] but you start with him being in the coffin and people at his funeral. And it's told and we never see this person's perspective again, but it's told from the perspective of Piotr Ivanovich who is,

[00:43:40] you know, I think we're meant to think maybe the next even Iliac, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because he's having the same kind of reaction to this that even Iliac would have had if he himself wasn't the person that that was dying. Yeah. All that stuff.

[00:43:57] When I originally read it had me in sweats, like genuinely like panicky. This time when I read it, I found it as uncomfortable and as hard hitting, but I just have a little more experience with death than with life.

[00:44:15] And I recently actually, you know, I don't remember if I mentioned it, but my my uncle whom I loved dearly passed away and I sat with him through many days in hospice as he was dying and heard the death rattles and saw it

[00:44:29] all happen. And that could have meant that it would be even more distressing to me, but there was a certain piece that I had to have in dealing with his death. So so it wasn't as distressing,

[00:44:45] but I I was worried even going into reading it like am I going to be having a bad, good time? I mean, you know, as somebody who I think I'm on the pretty far to the not scared

[00:44:56] of death side of the spectrum, but there was something about this that really cuts to something that I do care about, which is like are we sure we're living like a meaningful enough life so that if something like this happens, which it could absolutely happen.

[00:45:22] Are we going to have a similar kind of experience? He's so good with the details and the description of of him first, you know, having the issue and then going to doctors and the way the doctors are interacting with with him.

[00:45:37] I mean, it relates to the lack of dignity, the sort of them treating you as something, you know, that's not another human being. You know what I mean? And my wife, we had this experience when she was going through cancer treatments,

[00:45:55] which so far has things are looking great at this point. But at the time it was really something that I don't know. Like it was it colored the experience in a just really distressing way.

[00:46:14] And you knew that there was nothing you can do and you knew that they probably have their reasons for talking to you like this. But it was, you know, it made you feel the opposite of comforted, supported, taken care of. And you know, we're freaking Houston.

[00:46:30] Like this is the best place to go through those kinds of treatments. You know, one of the three or four best places in the whole world. So I can only imagine it's much worse in other areas.

[00:46:42] But there was he captured the flavor of those interactions in a way that I was just so shocked by it just brought me back immediately to like three years ago or whenever however long it was that we went through this. So there's that.

[00:46:58] And then there's the I don't know, the stuff about his life. Yeah, which we should go through then because you you described a little bit of it, but it also goes to great lengths. I thought to portray his life not as that of a secretly bad man, right?

[00:47:18] Which which he could have done, right? It could have been that the decision is, well, he was he was actually deceptive and selfish and that's not at all what you get from this. You get just a normal person who is looking to, of course, get promoted at work.

[00:47:40] But like by doing good work, you know, he was very proud of his unbiased decisions. He took the work seriously. He enjoyed the power trip of it, but he he didn't abuse the power. You know, the feeling of it all is that he is doing

[00:47:58] the things that are expected of him to do that society thinks are good. At this age, you enter the workforce, you get your education, you enter the workforce, after a while, you maybe get promoted enough, you want to have a family.

[00:48:13] Yeah, that's a good thing. And it is right? In fact, why not get married? He said. And so he gets married. He has kids. That's what I'm supposed to do, right? That's that's that's and so he is a little superficial, I would say, as a as a person

[00:48:32] like his vanity and kind of superficiality. He really is just trying to live. And there's a lot of people like this, including some people that I like. But they just want to live a pleasant life. Yeah. You know, and he's not a Russian aristocracy.

[00:48:46] He's definitely like the bourgeois Russian class, which so he has to work for a living unlike the aristocracy. You know, like he has to have jobs. Disrupted 86 that that era of Russia. Yeah, late 1800s in Russia. So so you know, like he he has his wife.

[00:49:08] He doesn't seem like he treats her that well, but she also doesn't seem like she treats him that well. He doesn't seem overly close to his kids, but he is seems like a dutiful father

[00:49:19] in as much as like the expectations being what they were during that time period. Interesting. Yeah. If I if like I were going to write a tale of my dying, my kids would play a more prominent role.

[00:49:33] And they called the sun, I think, you know, intentionally the schoolboy. The schoolboy. Yeah. You know, and some of the stuff that he does, like he's doing it ostensibly for the sake of his family, like he really is excited to get that promotion.

[00:49:46] You know, he sort of takes a risk and goes to St. Petersburg and and finds out that his friend has been promoted and his friend gets him a promotion. So he's really excited to prepare the way for his family to come because

[00:50:00] his family is staying at the vacation home with his in-laws. And he you know, he goes to great lengths to decorate the apartment. And there is a phrase in there. Sorry, a description in there that's so apt. Just about many people I know, which is that

[00:50:18] they they bought and decorated the place as people who aren't rich but like to think they're rich would. So this means they all kind of look the same. Which is we all know people like that. Just spend a little too much on some nice things.

[00:50:35] Be a little too proud of like your kitchen island. Exactly. The granite. The granite countertop and and and you know, and is happy because he you know, he downplays to his family like the place is OK because he really just wants to surprise them

[00:50:53] with a happiness when they get to the apartment and wants to see that their faces of like delight that he's actually gotten them something that's even better. One thing about Tolstoy that is true also in Anna Karenina and in War and Peace.

[00:51:07] And like it doesn't matter if it's late 18th century, kind of Russian professional life or like the Napoleonic Wars or like, you know, being a landowner with a lot of serfs. Like you feel like you can relate to all of it.

[00:51:21] Yeah, like Tolstoy is so good at capturing the kind of universal human qualities and the character. And it's like it just it stuns me how much you can relate to his characters and their and their struggles and their questions and their relationships.

[00:51:39] He can get at that better than I think any other author can. And this is, I would say, even in some sense, like because he's so it's so kind of tunnel visioned this story, like I think you even get a little less of that

[00:51:53] in this story than you would get in some of his other stuff. But you still get so much of it, you know? And I felt like I know these people. Yeah. Yeah, I guess there's a reason that Ikiru was loosely based on this, right?

[00:52:05] That was I was thinking of that. Can we talk about the opening first and like what that does? So you get from the open just, I guess, I don't know, the first like 10% of it or something is just the story of his funeral.

[00:52:17] And you see that he didn't have people who who loved him, essentially the guy, the perspective of the person you're getting is somebody who's a colleague of his that feels obligated to go. And the whole time wishes that he could go to play cards with his friends.

[00:52:36] And what's I just wanted to read this one quote at one point he hears. He talks to the wife and he hears about the three days, last three days of his life where it was just all suffering and then death.

[00:52:47] And he says, why that could come for me too. Right now, any minute he thought and he was momentarily afraid. But at once he did not know how himself, the usual thought came to his aid that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich and not to him.

[00:53:01] And that should and could not happen to him. And that in thinking so, he had succumbed to a gloomy mood, which ought not to be done as was obvious from Schwartz's face. And Schwartz is just this good nature of

[00:53:13] genial guy who's like, I'm getting out of here, go play cards. And and and I think like that's like, I think Tolstoy is saying, you're probably thinking that too. Oh, this is just a character or this this can't happen to me.

[00:53:25] And so we're really getting kind of a lot of readers' perspectives when we get it from Piotr Ivanovich and. Yeah, he says, apart from the reflections, this death called upon in each of them about the transfers and possible changes that work that might result from it.

[00:53:38] The very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was not he who is dead, that it was he who is dead

[00:53:47] and not I. And then he quotes, you see, he's dead and I'm not. Each of them thought or felt. Yeah. And yeah. And I love that that he takes the time to walk us through the deep surprise that.

[00:54:05] Ivan has to have that no, this is actually happening to him. Yeah. Right. Right. And that's I think because he was Piotr Ivanovich before. It's like, this is the thing that happens to other people. It doesn't happen to me.

[00:54:18] And even though we all know that it happens to us at some point sooner or later, but it's it's there's it's just like you know it and you don't know it. Yeah. At the same time, you are so protected. You know, it is the denial of death.

[00:54:32] Right. It's so it's so our minds are so protected to not dwell on the fact that we're going to die, that it does seem to catch people by surprise in a weird way, which is like, you know, everybody who has ever lived has gone through death. Right.

[00:54:50] It's just like a weird, weird, weird thing. Like, yeah. And it's interesting that he's a judge in his that's his profession and it's his job to like issue judgments about the accused.

[00:55:06] But then in the story, you know, what he comes to realize is that he, like all of us are the accused with this final sentence hanging over our head that we really can't escape and that, you know, I think is a nice irony that will

[00:55:22] come that comes back in all sorts of different ways during the story. Yeah. The banality or the normalcy of his existence, I think is was extra meaningful to me this time around because again, it's not as if he was doing anything wrong like he wasn't a dishonest judge.

[00:55:43] He was, as you said, probably a dutiful father. He had problems with his wife, but you know, these the kinds of problems that they had. Yeah, who among us cast the first stone? Right. They seem just like normal sort of like, you know, you're married to somebody for

[00:55:59] 20, 30 years, you're going to have moments, long periods in which you're not getting along and then he calls them islands of I take it fucking. That's what he was referring to, like little islands. And so when he is having to come to terms with his death, but really

[00:56:17] with his life, right, is what he's having to come to terms with. It is a bit surprising that he starts feeling this. This question of like, did I live my life right? Yeah, like, is it my fault? Yes, it starts asking is it my fault?

[00:56:37] And then he's like, no, it can't be because I've lived like as like I'm supposed to live right. Wait a minute. Have I not? So the plausible. So one central question to me was, I think this at the heart of at least

[00:56:49] one theme that resonates with me on paper, his life was right. It was nothing wrong with it. So what was he regretting? Yeah, I think that's the central question of the story because he

[00:57:03] he is trying to, as we all are to some degree, make his life more pleasant. You know, as pleasant as possible because, you know, you might think, well, we only go around once. There's no reason to be unhappy all the time.

[00:57:16] So he set up his life to kind of maximize his own degree of pleasure. I think that if you wanted to say something bad about him, it's that it doesn't feel like he ever had like a really close friend that he

[00:57:34] depended on and that depended on him or, you know, that his relationship with his wife, it's not like it started out and they were each other's soulmates and then they kind of drifted apart or they just got

[00:57:45] kind of annoyed with each other as you tend to do over 25 years or whatever. And same with the kids, like it feels like he never had like the that kind of depth of connection in his relationships that I think it's

[00:57:59] fair to say a lot of like that a lot of people do have. And so he was unusual maybe in the superficiality of his connections with other people. Yeah, it sounds to me like most people in his society were like that.

[00:58:15] It doesn't sound like as if he was like an outlier in that way, but he's having a realization and it feels like it is some realization about, again, a word that is always problematic to me, but authenticity, like about whether he lived his life authentically. Yeah.

[00:58:36] And what that it would even mean. Because it's not because he doesn't express, you know, he's not like Schindler taking off his jewelry and saying, like I could have saved one more person with, you know, there's no clear concrete thing that he's saying.

[00:58:49] Like if only I had done this, right? He just sort of comes to the realization that this wasn't the sort of life that he should have lived. Yeah. But and it's interesting. One way to frame that is he didn't live authentically, but you never got

[00:59:02] the sense that there was some real, even Iliac essence that he kind of at one point in his life was aware of, but then chose to do the more kind of, oh, I have to fulfill these roles and these expectations because that's what society

[00:59:17] expects and I want to move into the classes. So I'm just going to leave my, you know, I wanted to be a dancer or a painter or a great lover or something. It's not nothing in the story makes it great lover.

[00:59:33] It just doesn't feel like he like he kind of did the things that like, you know, as they keep saying it's coming off. Like I was about to say coming off. Yeah. And that's that's I think what he's condemning himself for is that

[00:59:46] he did everything that was expected of him. And in some sense, he was authentic to his superficial self. He just never tried to like find out who he was at any in any kind of deep way. Yeah. Right.

[00:59:59] It's like he never tried to find out what what is the alternative to doing comilfo like, yeah, like what is the eternal alternative to doing? What is expected of you in life? And I don't know that he has an answer, but he certainly

[01:00:13] rejects the way that he lived his life. And you're right. Maybe if he had had deeper relationships, you know, if he had formed more bonds, I don't even know if he knows that that's what would have helped his life.

[01:00:26] You know, as far as I know, like these are just how friends are. Like, of course, you know, these assholes are probably going to be wanting to go play bridge as soon as the funeral is over. You know, like there's this great where he's talking about the problems

[01:00:40] with his wife and he says there were islands they would land on temporarily, but then they would put it that's the fuck islands. But then they would put it but then they would put out again

[01:00:50] to the sea of concealed enmity that expressed itself in estrangement from each other. This estrangement might have upset Ivan Ilyich if he had considered that it ought not to be so. But by now he took this situation not only as normal, but as the goal of his

[01:01:05] activity in the family, his goal consisted in freeing himself more and more from these unpleasantnesses and in giving them a character of harmlessness and decency, and he achieved it by spending less and less time with his

[01:01:16] family. And when he was forced to do so, he tried to secure his position by the presence of outsiders, which again, like I know people like this. Oh my God, I was thinking the same exact thing.

[01:01:27] People who are spending more and more time at work because they can't stand to be home. And when they're with their family, they always have other people around. Yeah, they always like take vacations with other people and stuff like that.

[01:01:38] I definitely that that struck again, like he knows people told story. And I think like but the key line there is if his estrangement from his wife might have upset Ivan Ilyich if he had considered that it ought not

[01:01:54] to be so, but he just thought this is how like you were just saying this is just how marriages are like this is how it works. This is how life works. You're supposed to like figure out a way to kind of minimize the unpleasantness

[01:02:06] and go on enjoyment of your days. Right. And that that attitude of minimizing unpleasantness clearly leaves things unresolved. Yeah, in that same vein I have here highlighted as his wife became more irritable and demanding. Ivan Ilyich transferred the center of gravity of his life to his work, became

[01:02:28] more ambitious that he had before. Very soon, not more than a year after his marriage, Ivan Ilyich understood that marital life while offering certain conveniences was essentially a very complex and difficult affair with regard to which

[01:02:39] in order to fulfill one's duty, that is to lead a decent life approved of by society, one had to work out a certain attitude as one did to one's work. So it's like, all right, I guess like I didn't know marriage would have these problems,

[01:02:52] but let's do whatever we can to minimize the trouble. And I guess there that complacency that of not saying like, OK, what's actually wrong with my relationship? And maybe even the sort of like moving from promotion to promotion rather than

[01:03:09] flourishing in one place, maybe is along the same theme. And asking what I really do, I like that, like, do I think this job is important and meaningful in some way rather than, no, this is a great job.

[01:03:22] Everybody seems to admire the fact that I have it and it allows us to have important influential people over and get nice furniture. Yeah, yeah. And society deems it important. So it must be. Yeah, like I am valued by society. I'm a damn good judge, you know?

[01:03:38] And that's an important thing to be. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think you're right. Like the crime is, you know, the kind of existential crime that he's guilty of is just not ever questioning the expectations and norms and of how, you know, how things ought to be.

[01:03:57] And, you know, just kind of taking it all at face value. Well, I guess this is just how life is. This is how marriages are. This is how work is. This is how life is without ever trying to dig deeper and really confront

[01:04:12] the shallowness, the kind of insignificance of all of it. You know? Yeah. And the tragedy of intertwining the process of death with the process of this moral realization is an interesting one. It's like, yeah. You know, throughout I'm just amazed.

[01:04:35] It feels like Tolstoy had to have died in order to write this. Like, how did he do this? I totally agree. He feels like, you know, and I've never had a mortal illness, but he feels like these are the thoughts that I'm going to have.

[01:04:50] Like, how does he know? Right. It's the same thing in Anna Karenina. Like he tells like part of a chapter from the perspective of a dog. And it's like he must have been a dog. Like I think that's absolutely right. Yeah.

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[01:07:49] Like just I'm just going to read some little descriptions of his work life, so he says there's this part where he's like takes very seriously that his job is about official relationships with people and that he doesn't mix his human relationships with the official relationships.

[01:08:05] And he had mastered this practice of separating the two said in the highest degree and through long practice and talent had developed to such a degree that like a virtuoso, he sometimes allowed himself as if jokingly to mix human and official

[01:08:18] relations, he allowed himself that because he felt himself always capable of separating the official when he needed to and of discarding the human. And then this will come back to haunt him when he's on the other side. Right, exactly. Doctors. Right.

[01:08:33] For even Iliac, this business went not only easily, pleasantly and decently, but even with virtuosity during recesses. He smoked, drank tea, conversed a little bit about politics, a little about general matters, a little about cards and most of all about

[01:08:46] promotions and weary, but with the feeling of a virtuoso who has given a perfect performance of his part as one of the first violins in the orchestra, he returned home. Yeah. He's playing a part.

[01:08:56] He is like running lines, you know, like he's just doing the what is expected to him, like not just in his work, not just in his home life, you know, like based on like what society says husbands and fathers should do.

[01:09:12] He's just like he's playing out the string, you know, in every way, you know, like he has his own little uniqueness and his own talents and his own flaws, but he really is just like he's acting the part. Like he's acting a part.

[01:09:29] And it's not and that's where I think that he doesn't have an authentic self. He has a part and he's playing and it's like an actor that all they did was act. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And the words were written by someone else, like by a society. Yeah.

[01:09:44] At the height of his like professional success and domestic success when they've redone the home to make it look like all these other people's homes that are trying to make it look like a McMansion, you know, it's like the equivalent of a modern McMansion. Yeah. Totally exactly that.

[01:09:59] You know, like right then it's just this little remark that same evening over tea when his wife, Braskovia Fyodorovna asked him among other things, how he had fallen, he laughed and acted out how he had gone flying, frightened the upholsterer. It's not for nothing I'm a gymnast.

[01:10:16] Another man might have been badly hurt, but I just got a slight knock here. Hurts when you touch it, but it's already going away. A simple bruise. Right. And now and then just the way the description of how that progresses is

[01:10:32] like you said, like how did he know? At this point it is kind of merciless on the way it just picks up in the story just and you know the finish line, it's him dying. Yeah.

[01:10:45] And it just takes you there just with this kind of single mindedness that's chilling. It's really chilling. Yeah. You're pointing out about the opening Piotr being just like sort of dismissive good thing is not me. It really does bring us full circle in this way where it's like

[01:11:06] you could just see that just happening constantly. This little cycle, the person who's dying is like, no, you guys like dying sucks like this is the end. Have you ever thought about it? Of course.

[01:11:15] But then you put it away and then it's your turn and then like the next person you could see this as an eternal loop of a hundred percent like a mobious strip of just people doing this and Piotr is next.

[01:11:28] And you know, and of course we're it's the same thing is true with us. You know, and that's what this story conveys. You know, Ellen, this is the thing I didn't get about it the first. Yeah, exactly. I've said a million times on this podcast

[01:11:41] and to you that this is one of my favorite parts about the Sopranos is that everybody acts appropriately shocked when somebody else dies, whether it's in the first season when the what's his name dies of cancer or any other reason.

[01:11:54] And then boom, it's like they're right back to doing the same shit. It's like they were given this moment. They're given this moment to really think about what life is. But it's the human condition is to not dwell on that. To not confront that.

[01:12:08] And Tolstoy has really think about what it means. Yeah. And Tolstoy, through the structure of this story, is dragging it out. He's saying, yeah, this isn't just about a guy who died. I'm going to make you because this is the plot of my story.

[01:12:25] I'm going to make you think about dying for all of these whatever, 30 pages of story and all of the things that he's thinking almost. I feel like it's a service to humanity that he's doing. Right?

[01:12:39] Unless we act like I think I certainly did it when I first read it, like Piotr, you know, like the friend, like because that's what I did before. And who knows? Maybe I'm not thinking that now. Yeah.

[01:12:51] But hard to know what we're supposed to do with that thought. It's very hard. That's the issue. And also, I think I'd like what you said a little bit earlier that to confront these existential questions while also undergoing the process of dying.

[01:13:09] Yeah. I mean, maybe that's the only way to really come face to face with it. But there's something just the juxtaposition of what you have to face as you slowly, as your disease just gets worse and worse. And it really reminded me of cancer and I've lost,

[01:13:25] you know, I lost my mother to cancer. I lost like it is where and it's always like people don't exactly know what's wrong with you at first. And there are times where you think it's going to get better and then it doesn't or it's going to get worse.

[01:13:38] And then you get a little bit of like reprieve or hope. But it's and the doctors, like the stuff of them talking to the doctor. So I'll just read this one quote. Such the doctor said, such and such indicates that there is such and such

[01:13:52] inside you, but if that is not confirmed by the analysis of this and that, then it must be assumed that you have such and such. If we presume such and such then and so on. For Ivan Ilyich, only one question mattered was his condition dangerous or not?

[01:14:05] But the doctor ignored this inappropriate question. From the doctor's point of view, it was an idle question not to be discussed. There existed only the weighing of probabilities. This is so like I just got immediately transported back to talking with doctors about my wife's condition.

[01:14:22] A floating kidney chronic catar or appendicitis. And then he says this is kind of sums it all up. It was not a question of Ivan Ilyich's life, but an argument between a floating kidney and the appendix. It's just like just weighing these probabilities.

[01:14:38] And then the kicker is he says all this was just exactly what Ivan Ilyich himself had performed as brilliantly a thousand times over the accused. The doctors performed his summing up just as brilliantly and triumphantly, even merrily glanced over his spectacles at the accused.

[01:14:55] From the doctors summing up, Ivan Ilyich drew the conclusion that things were bad and that for him, the doctor and for anyone else you like, it was all the same. But for him, things were bad. And of course doctors have to act like this because if they

[01:15:09] if they fully were invested in every one of their patients as like individual human beings, like they probably couldn't get through their own lives. Right. And, you know, also who wants to deal with that mess of telling someone, no, fuck, come here, look at this tumor.

[01:15:26] Oh shit, man. Even close friends and families like get and this story conveys that brilliantly, too, is how other people behave around you when they're sick. And partly it's your just existence now is making them face facts about their own condition that they'd rather not face.

[01:15:44] But also it sucks to be around as it's really hard. It's hard emotionally. And there's so many ways that you would rather not deal with, you know, even though they're like your fucking parents. You know, so it's like even when the relationships are strong and good,

[01:16:01] you still get this feeling as a sick person that how these people, they don't want to deal with this, you know, and they kind of think at some level it's your fault. Right. And and you do see a shift

[01:16:16] in him from resenting everybody around him knowing that they don't want to be there and sort of being like just don't fucking be here then to then. Feeling more at the very end, something like compassion for them, like not wanting them to be there for their sake.

[01:16:36] Yeah, the variant. And but yeah, all of the shame, I guess, it's hard to know what that emotion is, but like your body is changing. There's a very poignant scene where his brother-in-law sees him or somebody for the first time in a while and he

[01:16:56] like about to he's about to like audibly gasp, covers his mouth and and he because Ivan Ilyich didn't realize how much he had changed physically. And so he's like, is it that bad? Have I changed that much?

[01:17:08] He looks at he picks up an old photo of himself and looks at himself in the mirror and realizes, yeah, that's bad because it's gradual. You know, like that's the thing is if you if you haven't seen it,

[01:17:18] like a person who has a disease, like a disease that will end up taking their life and you but like the people with them are more used to it. But then when you see the person for the first time,

[01:17:29] if you haven't seen them in like six months or a year, it's shocking. Yeah, you know, yeah, you know, when you were I think I think it was you I was talking to in my when my uncle was was dying in hospice and you said

[01:17:42] something about hospice being amazing. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. And it really is as I was reading this, I was thinking to myself how amazing those people were because they are people who are. That's what they do. They help people transition from life to death.

[01:17:58] That's their job and they allow people this dignity. They give family members the ability to talk about it. They inform them about what's going to happen. This is going to happen. You know, you're going to he's within the next 24 hours. Maybe he'll start death.

[01:18:13] But the death rattles will come. We're giving him painkillers for this. All that kind of stuff that is that you didn't get to that point, right? It's like a freaking you go from like being the scum of the earth

[01:18:27] to like being just like princes and and like kings and queens. You go from being a problem almost overnight. Yeah, you go from being a problem to just being and the people there who are taking care of you. It's like they're like saints.

[01:18:40] It's like they're dying for everyone else's sins. They're freaking they're doing the most disgusting work possible in some ways, you know, or like what most people because like people don't want to be around old people and dying people because it freaks everybody out at the visceral level

[01:18:59] and they just do it and they seem like they want to do it. Like exactly. And it's it's saying it feels saintly. Absolutely. And it is like now I'm blanking on his name because I was looking up how to pronounce it, his servant, Gerasim.

[01:19:17] Yeah, that totally reminded me of like a hospice person. Yeah, who is not outwardly put off or disgusted. He has to clean his shit basically and and sits there and lifts his legs to give him more comfort. And it was almost like a Christlike figure,

[01:19:36] like bearing the burden for even Iliadj as he's dying, taking on that burden just to give him some relief from from the pain and not. Being shocked himself, like it must be a terrible feeling to see your children

[01:19:53] walk in and be like, like, you know, and then talking. He hears people talking about it behind. They won't say it to him. So he's he starts getting really, really upset about how much he's being lied to, that nobody seems to want to tell him he's dying.

[01:20:08] And he very gradually comes to realize it himself. Like he there's this I think fairly famous passage where he says where he first learned the syllogism, chaos is a man, men are mortal. Therefore, chaos is mortal had seemed to him all his life to be correct

[01:20:26] only in relation to chaos, but by no means to himself for the man chaos, man in general, it was perfectly correct. But he was not chaos and not man in general. He had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings. And I'm telling you, I feel this.

[01:20:42] Absolutely. It's so on point. Was it was it chaos? The smell of the stripe leather ball that Vanya, his childhood name, had loved so much. Was it chaos who had kissed his mother's hand like that?

[01:20:53] And was it for chaos that the silk folds of his mother's dress had wrestled like that? Was it he who had mutinyed against bad food in law school? Was it chaos who had been in love like that? Was it chaos who could conduct a court session like that?

[01:21:03] And chaos is indeed mortal and it's right that he died. But for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich with all my feelings and thoughts, for me, it's another matter and it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible. God, man.

[01:21:16] God, that's so good because it also shows like what being when you are when you have some sort of disease or some sort of condition and you're seeing doctors who are viewing you more as man in general for the first time, human beings in general,

[01:21:34] not the particular people that you are with your particular thoughts, your particular relationship, your particular feelings. And it's like shocking. It's like, wait a minute, I'm not those people. I'm not the kind of person that just gets cancer and dies. Like that's that's man in general.

[01:21:51] I'm like me. I have to be the main character of my story. Like it's not main character is used in this disparaging egotistical way nowadays, but like, but we are the main characters and we're complex. And we have thoughts and hopes and dreams and desires.

[01:22:05] And we're not statistics and we're not probabilities. And in my mind, I've always existed. Right. So the thought of me not existing is like, well, does that mean then the rest of the world will crumble? It can't be. How could I not be here? It's crazy.

[01:22:20] Yeah. And I think this is like, you know, a lot of the last later parts of the story is him really slowly coming to terms with this. You know, he's actually going to die and people aren't being honest about it

[01:22:33] because, you know, like we don't talk about that. You don't and you certainly don't want to talk about it with somebody who's facing that, you know, the fact that you're going to die. And I think that sort of it's understandable, but the dishonesty of that

[01:22:46] starts, even though he would have 100 percent been doing the exact same thing that they're doing, like it starts to he before he gets to the point where he feels compassion for them, he feels like a hatred for them. Like he feels a real hatred for his wife.

[01:23:00] How and again, like him, she doesn't seem like she's being especially good, but she definitely doesn't feel like she's being especially bad. Right. It's very clear that if we if the story were told from her

[01:23:13] perspective, she would be the one who led the normal life and he was the grumpy one. And like, you know, yeah, exactly. And it really also hit home that like toward the end, most of his memories were about his childhood. The good ones. Yeah.

[01:23:30] All the good memories were just about from childhood. And it's really sad that people say that people often call for their mother when they're dying, you know? Is that yeah? It's but he said there is a passenger where he waited until Gerasim, his servant,

[01:23:47] went to the next room and then he stopped holding himself back and wept like a child. He wept over his helplessness, over his terrible loneliness, over the cruelty of people, over the cruelty of God, over the absence of God. Why have you done all this?

[01:24:00] Why have you brought me here? Why? Why do you torment me so terribly? And yes, it's like again, like you said, we've said multiple times like it happens to everybody, but that doesn't prevent anybody from saying, why me? Yeah.

[01:24:17] And I think there is something at the end, which we should talk about where he has to first accept that he's dying, but he also has to accept that there that he hasn't really left as he ought to live.

[01:24:32] Right. Like he and the way he gets there is as you said, right? He starts to think he has a conversation with his soul, right? To live, he says, as I've lived before nicely, pleasantly. And you lived before nicely and pleasantly ask the voice.

[01:24:46] And he started going over in his imagination, the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange thing, all the best moments of his present life seemed now, not at all as they had seemed then, all except for the first memories of childhood.

[01:24:59] There in childhood there had been something really pleasant, which one could live with if it came back. But the man who had experienced that pleasure was no more. It was as if the memory was about someone else. So he doesn't identify with the child and his childhood memories.

[01:25:12] That's the authenticity like where he is not, he's now just devoid of his it's been a different person has been created. Yeah. And there is, I mean, this is one of the things when you have a kid, you start to get a little bit of vicarious.

[01:25:28] I see the world through these kind of innocent eyes that is just like for a trip is just looking forward to it was such uncomplicated a kind of joy. But then when he starts to get closer to what he does identify with himself,

[01:25:43] it doesn't doesn't feel pleasant anymore. It feels worthless and often vile, he says. You know, and it's got he's got a bad he's got a literal bad taste in his mouth from what he's going through

[01:25:54] from the disease, but he's also he has a very sour feeling about how he's lived his life as a as the person that he now takes himself to be, that he he identifies with.

[01:26:06] Yeah. And that's and he and he says court is in session, court is in session. Here is that court, but I'm not guilty. What for? He cried out angrily and he started weeping and turning his face to the wall and began to think about the one

[01:26:21] and the same thing why for what is all this horror? Yeah. Yeah. I guess he finds. I don't know, like how do you interpret the ending and the bright light? And then yeah. Before I get there, I want to read more of that portion that you were reading

[01:26:37] when he says when he's talking about the memories from his childhood toward his adulthood, it just all goes downhill says if I was steadily going downhill while imagining I was going up. And so it was in public opinion, I was going uphill again in what other people

[01:26:51] thought and exactly to that extent life was slipping away from under me. And now that's it. So die, but what is this? Why it can't be? Can it be that life is so meaningless and vile?

[01:27:01] And if it is indeed so vile and meaningless, then why die and die suffering? Something's not right. Maybe I did not live as I should have would suddenly come into his head. But how not if I did everything one ought to, he would say to himself

[01:27:12] and at once drive this soul solution to the whole riddle of life and death away from him as something completely impossible. So still as it's going, he's getting closer. He's like iterating on some sort of insight, but it's still taking him time. Yeah, exactly. He's like getting closer.

[01:27:30] It is like these cycles of like, OK, but every time I get a little closer to really confronting what it is. And it seems like pain, the more pain he experiences, the more he's able to and that's very start to face it.

[01:27:45] That's a very, very sort of like Christian kind of view. Like this suffering you get this clarity. I suspect Tolstoy was a Christian. I think he yes, he absolutely was the kind of Christian that he was, I think, changed over the course.

[01:28:04] And I think he went through atheistic times too. You find out in confession, but Tolstoy had a very mystical leanings and got frustrated with the orthodoxy of the Christian church from what I understand in Russia.

[01:28:22] But I think this I got very Christian, like physical suffering leads to insight and a kind of redemption, I guess. Cleansing. A cleansing. Yeah. That's sick. You guys are sick. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is once again brought to you by NordVPN. My favorite VPN. It's fast.

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[01:30:57] Our thanks to Nord VPN for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. So so let's get to the end there because I suspect we're going to have to talk a while about what the hell went on.

[01:31:12] Yeah. So his wife says, you know, do you want to take communion? Do you want to make a confession? And at first he says there's no need, but she starts crying and he says, OK, fine, I'll do it.

[01:31:23] And the priest comes and he feels eased for a moment, but he still says he wants to live. And then his wife comes to kind of congratulate him and she said the usual words and added, isn't it true that you're feeling better?

[01:31:37] He said, yes, without looking at her. Her clothes, her figure, the expression of her face, the sound of her voice. All told him one thing, not right. All that you've lived and lived by is a lie, a deception, concealing life

[01:31:51] and death from you. And as soon as he thought it, his hatred arose. And together with hatred, his tormenting physical sufferings and with his sufferings, the consciousness of near inevitable destruction, something new set in and twisting and shooting and choking his breath.

[01:32:08] And then he just yells for her and everybody else to go away. So this is three days before his death. And I don't know if it's a low point because he's had a lot of low points, but it's definitely, you know,

[01:32:25] this is kind of the closing chapter before he just goes into three days of pure physical suffering. Right. I was going to say this, three days of ceaseless howling might be a low point. I managed to up till now. Yeah. So it's like he has this insight.

[01:32:43] You know, he says not right all that you've lived and lived by is a lie, a deception, concealing life and death from you. And he had that insight right after his communion with the priest's confession. I'm still not quite sure like what he thinks was so wrong.

[01:32:59] Like, like what was it in that moment that that made him think that everything has been a deception? Isn't it been a culmination of just, you know, the the weeks up till this point where he's starting to go back through his memory as we talked about and any

[01:33:17] part of himself that he identifies with, he doesn't find, you know, like those memories to be pleasurable. And it's only when he has the memories of his being a kid that he finds like genuinely pleasant moments, but then that feels like the memories of somebody

[01:33:33] else not of him. So it's like that all all of that insight congealed in that one moment. I guess. Yeah. When the when the priest comes and it, you know, the one thing the priest also does or what seems to be a trigger is the

[01:33:46] last three days of just pure suffering howling. Yeah, definitely. Just that phrase three days of ceaseless howling is haunts me. But then so he's full of hatred when he has this insight, which is weird, because it's like he's not fully there insightfully.

[01:34:05] Like he's still angry at the world or something. Definitely at his wife. Definitely. I don't think they had a very good relationship to him. I think she's also like a mirror of him. Like she's living the way he lived and he hates himself.

[01:34:21] And so he hates her, you know. Yeah. And it says in that next section, when the three day ceaseless howling begins, the moment he answered his wife, he realized that he was lost, that there was no return,

[01:34:32] that the end had come, the final end and his doubt was still not resolved. It still remained doubt. And it seems I don't know like how you interpret this, but like this the thrashing around and there's this black sack, like a black hole that's

[01:34:46] beckoning him and I take it that's death. But he's at first he struggles, he doesn't want to like he says as one condemned to death struggles in the executioner's hand. And then it says he felt that his torment lay in being thrust into that black hole

[01:35:03] and still more in being able to being unable to get into it. What kept him from getting into it was the claim that his had been a good life. That this justification of his life clutched at him, would not let him move forward

[01:35:16] and tormented him most of all. So I think the thing that keeps him pushing death away is because he still wants to cling to the possibility that he led a good life. Yeah. Even though he knows in his heart that he didn't. Yeah.

[01:35:32] And like the pain it really is, as he mentioned before, it's like more the moral suffering than the physical suffering. He's fighting the death. Do you think it's because, right? So he says it wouldn't let him move forward. Do you think like he wants a second chance?

[01:35:48] Like at this point, he's like, give me that chance to live a better life, like a more authentic life. That's what's not allowing him, at least to this point, I think, to die in peace. You know, I think yes. And he wants to live.

[01:36:00] He wants to live right. If he's, you know, what's the what's the benefit of knowing that you've lived wrong if you're just now going to die and you can't, you have no way to kind of redeem the time that you have left. And yet I don't know.

[01:36:15] It's a Pyrrhic moral victory. Yeah. I mean, it's it's yeah. It's like, oh, Henry or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. That's actually what like what bothers me upon like reading this end is that he would have this realization and really not be at the point where he

[01:36:33] can even tell anybody that he had it. No, he can't even make the smallest gesture. That's right. Right. Aside from we know his inner thought. So he so he, you know, he finally does accept that he is tormenting his family,

[01:36:52] both probably by the process of dying and fighting the death, but also maybe just in life and he does get to this point where he realizes that he must forgive and let go. But nobody else knows. And that scares me that that's

[01:37:06] well, and he wants to say forgive me like, you know, like I haven't been a great. I thought I was a good, dutiful husband and father, but I don't think I was. And but he can't say it. He says forgo.

[01:37:19] But the little boy comes and puts, you know, holds his hand. He tells him to take him away. This is the first time he's really thought of other people in a deep way. You know, and so even if he even if he's not able to articulate that,

[01:37:35] he's definitely he's definitely feeling it. Do you want to read the last part of this? Yeah. Yeah. So he says right after he tries to say forgive, but says forgo. He says, and suddenly it became clear to him that what was tormenting him and

[01:37:50] would not be resolved was suddenly all resolved at once on two sides, on 10 sides, on all sides. He was sorry for them. He had to act so that it was not painful for them to deliver them and deliver

[01:38:02] himself from these sufferings, how good and how simple he thought. And the pain he asked himself, what's become of it? Where are you pain? He became attentive. Yes, there it is. Well, then let there be pain and death. Where is it?

[01:38:16] He sought his old habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death. Instead of death, there was light. So that's it. He suddenly said aloud, what joy for him?

[01:38:30] All this happened in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed. For those present, his agony went on for two more hours. It's like a twisted. At least it was instant for him. Something gurgled in his chest, his

[01:38:43] emaciated body kept twitching, then the gurgling and wheezing gradually subsided. It's finished, someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul. Death is finished. He said to himself, it is no more. He drew in air, stopped at mid breath, stretched out and died.

[01:38:58] Yeah, that's it. That's powerful, man. It is. You know, I have to confess that I was a little disappointed in these last lines. When I first read it before I went back to kind of think harder about it,

[01:39:11] it seemed like, oh, wow, cheap last minute kind of redemption. And now he goes to heaven or something and the light represents heaven. And I think that's I don't think I interpret it that way anymore. But what about you?

[01:39:26] Like, do you find this to be redemptive and even almost straightforwardly kind of Christian where because he confessed and had a realization, he gets to go to heaven? Even less than before. I wasn't didn't feel like Tulsa was trying to give a redemptive story here

[01:39:48] very well, because I think that that he's more aptly describing just physical death and maybe the death rattles and what your body must go through. He's not doesn't say much about, yeah, the gurgling, the death rattles, which if you've been next to someone dying,

[01:40:04] it's really does last a long time and you know they're going and their body is kind of fighting it. So I think on this reading, I think that this is actually like a pretty pessimistic take.

[01:40:17] I think that the one good thing is that he is able to let go. Yeah. And I think that the best he gets is this realization at the very end that none of this matters, maybe like all of the concerns that he had that were inauthentic

[01:40:35] during life don't matter and all of the concerns that he had in the last few moments that his life was inauthentic and that he should have lived otherwise. Those kind of don't matter either. And he just gives in to the natural process of dying. Yeah.

[01:40:53] And what do you see the light as just a kind of relief? A relief. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's how it made me feel at least. And and and it's still optimistic to me, you know, I think it's a nice thought to think

[01:41:10] that you would have this moment as you're fighting death. Of acceptance. Of acceptance. Yeah, I mean, you know, it reminded me a little as Christian as it all is with the three days of suffering or whatever. Yeah. And and by the way, that it's finished,

[01:41:25] which is what Jesus says right as he dies. I didn't know that. But I also got it reminded me of Buddhist ideas in a couple of different ways. Like the idea of like, where's the pain? And what's become of it? Where are you paying? He became attentive.

[01:41:42] Yes, there it is. Well, then let there be pain. It's like by detaching from it, detaching slowly, detaching from all these kind of worldly things, he becomes able not to. It's he's still acknowledging them, but they're not a part of him anymore. And and he can accept it.

[01:42:00] And it's this just letting go a ceasing of resistance and a more just natural flow into death that I think reminds me just of how Buddhists want you to live, but also want you to die. And it does seem like he is able to now

[01:42:20] view his life from a kind of remove that's that transcends like you were saying just now, like ordinary concerns. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. He used to not only used to care about and be overly attached to, but they were just him. They constituted as whole identity.

[01:42:39] Yeah. And now he's able to see that none of that matters. But it is it's tragic because it took like his entire life and like a slow death, a slow terrible agonizing death for him to to finally also think and have

[01:42:57] compassion for other people in his in his family and actually want to express things to them, which he's not able to express. But it took that for him to even get to the point where he's he's out.

[01:43:09] He's not as self-centered as he has been throughout the entire story. So I think that there is something I must be any kind of spiritual tradition of recognizing that the larger dwarfs your you know, drop in the ocean. Yeah. It just yeah.

[01:43:29] Throughout it, it really did make me think that we need to do a better job sort of shepherding the death process. And even the family who at some point, I'm sure they just want him to die. But like the wife is even as unhappy as she's been,

[01:43:49] she's just like trying to do everything she can like the doctor, this medicine. Yeah. Go to this new doctor. We're paying takes a myvermectin. Inject the myvermectin in his ass or have the servant do it. Yeah, I have. He does seem pretty willing to do anything.

[01:44:10] Yeah. And like, you know, like I was saying before about being in hospice with my uncle, like those people really seemed to have it down. They've seen so much death that they, I don't know,

[01:44:25] the way that they talked about death as a transition and the way that they explained what would happen. It's just this like weird thing that we just don't talk about that much. It's people like me who fear death so much that we'd rather not have those conversations

[01:44:38] or people like me who just don't really accept that it's going to happen. Right. Yeah. Either way, you're not talking. Either way. I mean, I think this idea of the justification of his life clutched at him. That's such a vivid image.

[01:44:55] This claim that he's had a good life is stopping him from that release, from that acceptance, from that. And once he lets it go and I don't know, maybe it's something about the boy. Yeah, that's right. He's very rarely named or possibly never named.

[01:45:11] He's a terrible father, but his little son grabs his hand. And yeah, that's like the last thing that happens before he. I don't think he's a terrible father. He's just not. He's just a very removed father. Like by my standards, because I'm so awesome.

[01:45:25] I would name my child. It's a nice little detail that Tolstoy just always calls him the schoolboy. He's told third person perspective, but he kisses his hand and then he has the realization that he's tormenting them and that he wants.

[01:45:44] He doesn't need to just give himself a release, but like them a relief, let them live their life. I got I got I got vibes of the metamorphosis and the ending of there where he's become just there. It's much more dramatized by the surrealism of it.

[01:46:01] They really just want him to die with that with that apple in the back, actually, which is very much like this disease. Yeah, right. Right. You know, another thought I had when reading this is people say I don't know how true this is, but

[01:46:19] how much people read into this. But I've heard this claim that when a predator is attacking prey, that they fight it, they fight it, they fight it. But at the very end, like they the animal just sort of gives in very peacefully. Yeah. Have you heard this before?

[01:46:36] Like, yeah. And you can see it kind of, you know, in the like whatever the gazelle being chased down by the lion fighting, fighting, fighting and until they just sort of they have this peaceful look on their faces, their their throats are getting torn apart.

[01:46:51] And I've always thought maybe that is it would be nice if that were a part of the whole natural process of dying that we would have this. By the way, have you ever read or heard of?

[01:47:03] I don't know if we've talked about this before of the the philosopher Val Val Plumwood who was attacked by a crocodile. And she wrote about it, but it's a really interesting essay that she wrote with her as her experience with essentially being

[01:47:19] the prey for a crocodile who takes her down into these death rolls over and over again to the point where she was just ready to die like she was just she'd prefer to die than to survive. But now here I'm reading from her Wikipedia.

[01:47:33] It says the experience gave Plumwood a glimpse of the world quote unquote from the outside, a world that was indifferent to her and would continue without her an unrecognizably bleak order. As my own narrative in the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed a

[01:47:47] shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being the thought this can't be happening to me. I'm a human being. I am more than just food was one component of my terminal incredulity.

[01:47:58] It was a shocking reduction from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Now that's like that's chaos is more of all men are exactly right. And and the inside is framed more negatively here than the sort of light.

[01:48:13] But it, you know, there is something to the well, like we can't in the end. What was it all like in the end? What are we? We're just these things that are going to die. But you know, he says what joy?

[01:48:26] It doesn't sound like she is saying what joy. She definitely didn't have the what joy probably from the you know, yeah, being scared shitless. So I'm not sure. Like I think Tolstoy might mean this more kind of positively. Yeah, and positively. Well, so here's.

[01:48:43] And I don't know what Val Plumb would say, but there is still something common to both of those experiences, which is something we can't live with every single day. We can't constantly be thinking this is all meaningless.

[01:48:57] But rather like I think that the visceral knowledge that at one point it won't matter at all is a good reminder for how to live your life. Like it and it's not that like dumb kind of like, well, fuck everything then. Like nothing matters.

[01:49:13] But rather like as we've said so many times when we talk about our existential stuff is like, no, like what matters is how you spend the time you actually have. Because it's going to be ripped away from you. Yeah. You know.

[01:49:25] And that's what's tragic about this is the realization that he finally comes to is that there is no justification for how he lived. He did not live as he ought to have lived as he thought.

[01:49:36] And that, you know, at least I guess realizing that and not dying as total deception and a lie, you know, like he's been afraid to confront it at every level. And finally he confronts it and the confrontation allows for the release. And you're right.

[01:49:56] I think you could read it both ways, just a kind of just a recognition of our cosmic unimportance and the relief that comes with that. But it's a kind of bleak relief or something maybe like because he finally feels

[01:50:13] compassion and finally feels and finally feels a kind of honesty. There's a kind of honesty with how he's reckoning with himself. That is a part, you know, like that that that leads to a light of some kind.

[01:50:26] Yeah. And I want to think that Tolstoy in this he's really in this visceral way. Let us through the death of his protagonist in a way that I think makes us feel some measure as pale as it might be, some measure of the finality of existence.

[01:50:47] And I think this is why I think this is one of the great just the great stories. It gives it gives you a reminder that at some point, not I don't take it in a bleak way. It's just true at some point.

[01:51:02] What you will have is the last few moments where you assess whether you lived the life that you wanted to have live and then nothing. You know, if assuming you don't get like hit by a bus, which I could totally see as something happening to me.

[01:51:19] I also like to think that in this, maybe maybe the last like in that bore history where the moment between the bullet leaving the gun and hitting him. He gets to live like a whole life. Yeah.

[01:51:32] So I think when I read it the first time when I was young, I don't think I was poised to have any of this kind of insight. I was just scared of dying. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:51:45] I took it and like I said, I think at the beginning of our conversation, I started to feel accused by the story too. And in a sense, I think that's what this story is. Like we kind of go through as as you said earlier,

[01:52:02] kind of the protagonists of our own novels and also the kind of judges of others. But but really we're the accused like everybody else. And there was something about this story that was just telling me like, are you doing what you ought to be doing right now?

[01:52:18] And are you asking yourself this question? And that aspect of it really, really moved me really like as like, you know, the aspects of my life that I think are like if I have an Iliadge is when I'm doing bullshit.

[01:52:35] You know, you know, the times I spent online, the times I don't know. Like I did like really cheesy things like I gave Eliza a hug at one point while I was reading, reading this, I texted a heart to Jen while she was at work.

[01:52:49] And they're like, are you dying? You know, because we take stuff for granted often, you know, and we live to try to make our lives pleasant and less unpleasant as we can manage to.

[01:53:03] And there's the risk when when you do that, as we are kind of conditioned to do that you're missing out on some really important deep things about life. And that's not something you want to really think about yourself when you're about to die and it's all over now.

[01:53:19] Yeah, the way you put it really makes me think that the Ivan, Ivan saying I am not chaos. It's very easy for me to say I am not Ivan Iliadge. Right. Right. Totally. Yeah. Good. All good and well. Well, good story told story, but that's not me.

[01:53:38] And that would be the exact wrong take home message. It's like, oh yeah, Piotor, even over to whatever Piotor from the beginning of the story, he's even Iliadge and he doesn't even know it and the wife was also even Iliadge and she doesn't even

[01:53:55] know it. Fortunately, I'm not. You know, what we were saying earlier reminds me of this. Did you ever see Norm McDonald's tweeted back to Neil deGrasse Tyson? Neil deGrasse in his, of course, annoying obnoxious way. This was in 2019 he sends out a tweet.

[01:54:17] The universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day. Yeah, very douchey. Yeah. So Norm McDonald replied, Neil, there is a logical flaw in your little aphorism that seems quite telling. Since you and I are part of the universe,

[01:54:32] then we would also be indifferent and uncaring. Perhaps you've forgotten, Neil, that we are not superior to the universe, but merely a fraction of it. Nice day indeed. Shit. Isn't that sweet? Yeah. Did you see his special, by the way? Oh, yeah. Have you? Yep. It's great.

[01:54:45] So good. I'm so glad. But you said that. So a little worried that you were going to say. I really liked it. Yeah. I'm kind of amazed by it. So maybe we'll talk about that in an episode. I saw that somebody requested it.

[01:55:01] All right. Any other thoughts about it? I love this idea of it's just this continuous cycle of people. And also what you were saying about Ivan Ilich kind of getting closer to the realization, but always pushing away from it.

[01:55:16] Again, I get this Buddhist kind of cycle vibe where you keep being reborn and dying, but you make a little progress and make a little progress. And finally, maybe you come to understand what's important or what's unimportant. Yeah. And I feel like that's kind of what

[01:55:35] the good life is to me. I know that I can't have all of these realizations at once and I can't just change the way that I live at the drop of a hat. And moreover, I couldn't have in my 20s had the same sort of

[01:55:53] wisdom, whatever you want to call it. And so to keep moving forward, which is at some point Ivan Ilich says something about moving forward, to have the luck of being able to keep moving forward and the luck of having a sort of ability to lead a reflecting life.

[01:56:12] That's. But you have to take advantage of it. You have that luck, you know, and you have to get out. You know, I think Ivan Ilich, he's not a bad guy, but he was a self-centered person. And, you know, that's the struggle is to become less self-centered.

[01:56:30] Well, you know, when I read it, I also texted your wife that I love her. And it texts your daughter that we've learned our lesson. You know what? Like we have to really think about whether doing this podcast is something

[01:56:47] we're going to look back on and be like, what the fuck? I mean, three days. Some episodes, but we get to talk about this. Like I genuinely is the case that we are lucky enough to have the ability to do

[01:57:01] this and make time to have conversations like these and reflect like this. So I hope it in communicating it to the rest of the world, we're adding a little bit to the moving forward. Yes, I hope so too. However, you know, slight the probability.

[01:57:22] And however slow the moving forward is. However slow. Two hundred and thirty eight cycles down. Who knows how many to go? All right. Well, I hope I hope you do read the story if you haven't yet and join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.