From the Boston Book Festival: Panel on ‘How to Live’ Gives Attendees Hope

The pursuit of a good life does not just mean maximizing happiness — it also means listening deeply to loss and pain, which is inextricably linked to joy. In the panel “How to Live: Purpose, Joy and a Dash of Philosophy,” hosted by the Boston Book Festival on Oct. 29, authors Kieran Setiya, Ellen Warner, and Ross Gay shared attentive approaches to living well. As sunlight gleamed through stained glass windows into the sanctuary of Old South Church, each author presented a summary of their book and answered questions facilitated by Harvard psychiatry professor Robert Waldinger.

“Breaking news: Life is hard,” began Kieran Setiya, author of “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.” Setiya joked that while Instagram influencers often spread the message that people should “live their best life,” we can trace this frame of mind back to ancient Greek philosophers who imagined utopias. In reality, life is full of difficulties; through his own experience with chronic pelvic pain, Setiya set out to explore philosophy that acknowledges adversity rather than fixating on (often unrealistic) positivity.

Pain disrupts one’s ability to engage with others, but sharing invisible hardships can bring people closer together. Setiya introduced a thought experiment: If humans were plugged into a simulation that allowed them to fully experience a life free from pain and worry, they would not find that life meaningful. Thus, we should forget about the ideal or perfect life, and instead focus on “making the best of a bad lot,” Setiya concluded. He offered his book as a deeper philosophical exploration of maladies that people face in life and potential remedies.

The next author on the panel, photojournalist Ellen Warner, spent over 15 years working on “The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty.” Her book combines photo portraits with advice from women around the world who are older than 50. Warner shared a slideshow of photo portraits along with a rapid-fire distillation of her subjects’ advice.

People should widen their horizons and continue trying new things as they get older, and “cultivate an interior space” where they can retreat when life is difficult, Warner said. People need discipline: both in approaching diet and exercise, but also in pursuing new interests. “Love is not a given, you have to work on it,” she said. As people become older, there is more paring away of the extraneous, which she compared to making a “simpler meal with better ingredients.” Friendship and generosity become more and more important. “Forget all that self-interest. People need to be nurtured,” she said. What “you thought was important becomes less important”; there is “less doing, and more being,” she said. The bottom line, Warner concluded, is that the second half of life is better than the first, because now one knows how to deal with any obstacle.

Lastly, poet Ross Gay shared his essay collection “Inciting Joy.” He read directly from the book’s introduction, which challenges the common notion that joy is free of pain and sorrow — a notion which also implies that joy is a consumer state that one can purchase. Instead, he believes that everyone needs to widen their definition of joy: Joy emerges from how people care for each other through “the bleak stuff,” he said. Sorrow is a neighbor that people should invite in and seek to understand, including both personal sorrows and the sorrows of friends and strangers. Several essays in the book detail Gay’s practices that have structures of care embedded within them, ranging from gardening to pickup basketball. Gay concluded that joy is what humans use to help each other survive.

The crowd of nearly one hundred was animated, often breaking into laughter or murmurs of assent. “I've always wanted to come to the Boston Book Festival, but this is the first time I've ever made it,” said Marah Gubar, a professor of children’s literature at MIT. She said that October is especially busy, but she’s “glad she could come to the festival” and was excited to meet some of her favorite authors.

“I loved the common thread of human connection,” said Karin Dolce, a returning Boston Book Festival attendee who considers herself a new Bostonian. “Coming off the last two years of Covid, many of us have been reflecting on that common theme, whether we had significant human connection during the past two years, or whether that was something that was missing or looking very different in our lives.”

Another attendee, Lydia Mullan, felt hopeful after attending the panel. “Being sad is really easy right now. People have been really isolated and lonely, and there has been a lot of tragedy and atrocities in the world in the past couple of years,” she said. But Mullan stated that she wants to “invest in happiness and joy.” She believes that the panel reinforced that “we all have a choice to frame our lives in ways that can bring us more joy.”