If you’re not hungry and you don’t feel like getting drunk, it seems like there’s not much to do in the Gaslamp neighborhood of San Diego.
All I could figure out was to wander around and look at people and I kept feeling sorry for them in spite of myself. I’m sure the shaved-head guys in tight t-shirts and the apparently surgically-augmented girls in tank tops were happier and less desperate than they appeared to me. But try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that very few people were living a life of eudaimonia, and worse, it made me wonder what the hell I’m doing with my own existence, even though most of time—and especially when I’m with my family and/or in a classroom doing philosophy, things do seem mostly worthwhile.
It was interesting to contrast the mood in the mini-conference on Philosophy for Children with that of the overall American Philosophical convention; today I went to two talks in the latter event; in both of them, meat-faced white men with gray hair and scraggly beards ridiculed the views of some other guy who looked more or less like them; it was a far cry from the spirit of shared endeavor and focus on the welfare of children that marked the former experience.
Not that I’m dismissing the value of sitting in a room with a couple of dozen academics intensely concerned with the finer points of technical arguments that allegedly justify a point of philosophy that pretty much only those in attendance really understand and/or care about, but when you’re already ready to head home, it can get sort of surreal to subject yourself to such an experience. I mean, it’s certainly something to do other than eating or getting drunk, but is it only and just that?
Philosophy matters; I know that, but more and more I think it’s the practice of it that’s worthwhile; who cares what the dialogue’s about just so long as real dialogue is taking place?
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