Reason for Living Newsletter | Introducing Reason for Living

The Reason for Living Newsletter, No. 1, 28 March 2024

Mar 28, 2024

Welcome to the first Reason for Living newsletter!

Whether you signed up at a speaking event or online, thank you for your support. I hope you will get value from these weekly emails.

In this issue:

Feature Article: Introducing Reason for Living;
Book Review: Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday;
This Week’s Video: “Learning to Love Work.”

Feature Article: Introducing Reason for Living

How do you achieve your goals? How do you choose which goals to pursue? How do you find purpose in life?

Many people today accept a dangerous false alternative: Either our lives get their meaning from something divine, mystical, unknowable, “bigger than ourselves”—or our lives have no meaning at all.

I reject this false dichotomy. I hold that you can, using the reasoning power of your own mind and observable facts of reality, find your own meaning, achieve your goals, and live a full, purposeful life.

To that end, I am launching Reason for Living, a project to promote a reason-based system for finding your purpose and achieving a flourishing life.

The name “Reason for Living” has two meanings:

That you can use reason to achieve the goal of living fully, and
That a fact-based system of philosophy can give you purpose, i.e. a reason to live—that is, to enjoy life and thrive.

To build this system, I will draw on the work of rational thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, as well as my own ideas, experiences, and integrations.

This project will consist of:

A book, titled Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life, to be released in mid-late 2024;
This weekly newsletter, discussing ideas for living fully and achieving your goals; reviews of relevant books, podcasts, and films; and information on my upcoming or recent talks, video releases, and articles;
A series of talks, in-person and online, about these ideas;
A series of courses on how to apply these ideas, which fit together into a structured curriculum to cover the various aspects of using reason to live fully.

I’m incredibly excited to go on this adventure, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride. If you’re interested, sign up to this newsletter, follow the project on social media (see links at the end of this newsletter), and look out for my upcoming talks, podcasts, courses, and appearances!

Book Review: Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday

Who’s in the driving seat of your life? Are you in control, or are you at the mercy of feelings, urges, and impulses?

In Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self Control, Ryan Holiday demonstrates the value of the Stoic virtue of temperance—achieving control over your feelings and actions. He details the lives of numerous successful individuals, from legendary baseball player Lou Gehrig to WWII general (and later U.S. President) Dwight D. Eisenhower, showing how each of them used temperance and discipline to achieve their goals.

Holiday’s message is powerful. He showcases the great achievements temperance can enable, and also the potential that can be lost when great people fail to control their urges—citing examples from Alexander the Great to Amy Winehouse to highlight how much more such people could have done if they hadn’t given in to their urges.

This is a powerful message, although it’s often unclear if Holiday sees greatness as something one should pursue for oneself or for only others. He sometimes criticizes “selfishness” as intemperate, but nonetheless frames temperance as being in your self-interest. “We have to ask ourselves,” he says, “who is in charge, our mind, or our slavish need to be the biggest? . . . We have to ask ‘what is this really bringing me?’”

Although his tools are useful for achieving concrete goals, they do not give much guidance on how to identify the right goals or rank them among your other priorities. Holiday celebrates Gehrig’s commitment to his sport, and details the cost which that exerted on his life in the form of physical injuries and Gehrig’s lack of social and leisure activities. But he does not question whether Gehrig’s choice was right, which would require a deeper exploration of how one forms and organizes one’s values.

Nevertheless, Discipline is Destiny is vital reading if, like me, you find yourself predisposed toward indulging desires and behaviors that can subvert your success and productivity. This is a book that will inspire you to live better, achieve more, and weather the hard times in life with confidence and resolve—provided you do the hard work of working out what values you’re seeking to achieve in life first.

This Week’s Video: Learning to Love Work

In my talk on “Learning to Love Work” at Ayn Rand Center Europe’s NICON 2023 conference, I discussed the way modern education systems set young people up to dislike the very idea of work, how many people mix up the concepts of “work” and “employment,” and why we should not talk about “work/life balance” but rather “work/rest balance.”

Check out the full talk here: https://youtu.be/1C3zL5cgpXo

This Week’s Reason for Living Quote:

“Some of your desires will bring you happiness, and some won’t. Achieving a flourishing life requires choosing the values that are actually good for your life using reason.”

Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life will be available for preorder in mid-late 2024.