Stop asking other people’s children: ‘What do you want to do?’

There is a terrible habit among grown-ups to ask teenagers and young adults who they meet occasionally – children of friends, neighbours, nieces and nephews, and so on – “What do you want to do?”

What seems like an innocuous question can be loaded with judgment in a society that tends to filter the population by status. While it may be asked with the best of intentions, it can heap pressure on young people who are told everywhere they must be driven, passionate and single-minded to get on in life.

Language matters. Conventional messaging about the nature of success plays no small part in generating anxiety and unhappiness.

Consider, for example, what is probably the most famous speech ever delivered to a group of students: The late Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, which has been watched tens of millions of times on YouTube. The address is revealing for what is not in it, as much as what is. They key mover behind Apple Inc speaks of the value of adversity but Jobs’ failures aren’t failures at all because we know he becomes fabulously rich and powerful. He speaks of the need to “Stay hungry!” but the aim of this self-suffering is unclear beyond the implication that, with enough drive, you can end up as rich and powerful as him.

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Fretful graduates looking for real direction are told: “You’ve got to find what you love… keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” Here the advice deserves particular scrutiny.

There is no guarantee that doing what you love will provide a living wage, let alone the sort of wealth Jobs accumulated. More to the point, he implies that with enough hard work your true love, or dream career, will - like a Disney prince - eventually materialise. That’s not how the modern labour market operates. It’s certainly not the experience of the low-paid employees at Apple’s Chinese factories where high rates of depression and toxic workplace practices have been reported. Does “Stay hungry!” apply to them too?

Contrast his speech with that of George Saunders, the Booker Prize-winning novelist who, in a less-widely publicised commencement address, spoke about the meaning of success. He had no life hacks to offer but he had this to say:

“Here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: what I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

Saunders’ address conveys a learnt wisdom equal in measure to the bulls**t in Jobs’ speech (for a definition of that word I rely on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s excellent essay, On Bullshit). However, it’s not enough to say that – we need to encourage people, both young and old, to improve their bulls**t detectors.

A welcome step in this direction has come with the launch of Thinkful, a new online platform seeking to “empower conversations in philosophy and mental health”. Founded by Dr Emma Farrell and Dr Áine Mahon, two academics at University College Dublin’s school of education, it seeks to promote research and public dialogue on “the unique promise of philosophy” in tackling anxiety, stress and depression.

Mahon recently published a book exploring the point of a university education, and Farrell is a founding member of Jigsaw, Ireland’s national centre for youth mental health, so they bring plenty of expertise, and are backed up by a network of researchers.

In a paper of their own published last year, Farrell and Mahon interviewed a number of third-level students who had undergone counselling for mental health problems. Students described difficulties they had identifying, or naming the problems, while also voicing frustration at conventional approaches that saw them as something to “fix”.

Farrell and Mahon reference the work of philosopher Cora Diamond, noting that for her “it is a characteristically human tendency to distort or diminish the complexity of our experience”.

Thinkful, they explain, “seeks to move beyond the given discourses of pathology and disorder to suggest new ways of accounting for distress or difficulty”. That is not to diminish traditional responses to mental health but simply to tap into an extra resource. “Philosophical thinking changes the conversation in interesting ways.”

An example was given this week by Cork comedian Tadhg Hickey who spoke candidly on RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor Show about experiencing a “breakdown” several months ago. He credits the philosophical writer Alain de Botton with helping him to reframe the experience as a “breakthrough”. “He [de Botton] says the sickness is before you break down; that makes sense to me, that your behaviour is probably off. Like, I was working 16-hour days. I wasn’t seeing friends, I wasn’t really exercising, and it became me against the world… That’s the sickness. Your ‘breaking down’ is your body and your mind telling you: come here, man, you’ve to cop on, you’ve gone totally haywire.”

In what might be seen as a riposte to Jobs, Hickey posed the question in an earlier interview with the Irish Examiner: “What’s the point in being busy if you have no peace of mind?”

One of the collaborators on Thinkful is Dr Rob Grant who recently set up Hear Listen, a network for promoting philosophy in the community. Its founder members include Senator Lynn Ruane, a Trinity College Dublin philosophy graduate. Grant says we tend to avoid asking deep questions because they leave people feeling frustrated or intimidated. Retreating “into the safety and security of certainty” is much easier than “turning towards difficulty and staying with it”, he adds.

Farrell and Mahon say part of their ambition with Thinkful is to reconsider conventional “ideas and terminologies” around human distress. In the coming months, the forum plans to host articles on loneliness, “belonging in a post-pandemic university” and the relationship between the third-level curriculum and wellbeing. A key objective is “to question if, in teaching or promoting certain words and ideas about mental health and well-being in schools and universities, we are altering the way in which a young person sees themselves and their life”.

Sometimes in philosophy, as in psychotherapy, it helps to turn a question around. So perhaps the next time a young person is asked by some elder about their intentions for life they should shoot back: “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

For more see: Thinkful.ie and Hearlisten.ie

Wittgenstein – as you’ve never heard him before

How do you put philosophical ideas to music? An audience will find out on Friday when the world premier of Wittgenstein Fragments will be performed at the Louth Contemporary Music Society midsummer festival.

It is result of a collaboration between prolific English composer Gavin Bryars and the society’s enterprising co-founder Eamonn Quinn. “For some time,” Bryars explains, “he and I have thought of doing something related to the times that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent in Ireland, usually in isolation and often in remote locations. After mulling over various options we agreed on the idea of setting fragmentary texts, in the manner of one of his major works the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in collaboration with the Irish writer Vincent Woods, who intersperses Wittgenstein with lines of his own.”

Woods’ text concludes with Wittgenstein’s most famous phrase: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” In life, as in music, there may be hidden meaning in a dramatic pause.

Wittgenstein Fragments will be performed at St Nicholas Church of Ireland, Dundalk at 8pm on Friday, June 17th, tickets €10. See: louthcms.org