The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Seeing ourselves through the darkness
Dec 26, 2023
Mariana Alessandri, a philosophy professor and author of "Night Vision," delves into the importance of embracing darkness in our emotional lives. She critiques the societal tendency to equate light with positivity while dismissing dark emotions as negative. The conversation explores Stoic and Aristotelian perspectives on grief, advocating for emotional honesty and vulnerability. Alessandri emphasizes the need to acknowledge pain as a source of insight, challenging us to rethink our relationships with difficult emotions and promote deeper understanding.
55:54
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Quick takeaways
- The pursuit of happiness creates pressure to avoid unhappiness and leads to labeling unhappiness as failure.
- Plato's allegory of the cave and society's obsession with light and darkness creates a binary view of brightness as good and darkness as bad.
Deep dives
The danger of the culture obsessed with happiness
The pursuit of happiness creates pressure to avoid unhappiness and leads to labeling unhappiness as failure.
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