What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters

Oct 23, 2025

Dr. Valerie Tiberius, a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota, shares her insights on navigating life’s conflicting values in pursuit of well-being. She emphasizes the importance of identifying core values and relationships during crises. Valerie draws on personal experiences to illustrate how societal influences shape our goals, particularly around gender and community. She offers practical tools for introspection and experimentation, urging listeners to accept value conflicts while prioritizing what truly matters in life.

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ANECDOTE

Philosophy Felt Like Home

Valerie Tiberius discovered philosophy felt like "a fish being returned to the water" during her first intro course.
That early experience set her on a path to majoring in philosophy despite later conflicts in the field.

ANECDOTE

Seminar Paper Sparked Misread Reactions

Valerie wrote a paper critiquing aggressive debate styles in a three-student seminar and provoked surprising reactions.
Her classmates misread her critique as fragility instead of wanting collaborative truth-seeking.

INSIGHT

Well-Being As Value Fulfillment

Living well equals fulfilling the important values you hold, a view Valerie calls value fulfillment.
Value conflict is inevitable because humans hold multiple important goals with limited time and resources.

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What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money, work for justice, run marathons, sing in a choir, have children, travel the world? The things we care about in life—family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals—often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don’t always know what we really want, or how to define success. Blending personal stories, philosophy, and psychology, this insightful and entertaining book offers invaluable advice about living well by understanding your values and resolving the conflicts that frustrate their fulfillment.
Dr. Valerie Tiberius introduces you to a way of thinking about your goals that enables you to reflect on them effectively throughout your life. She illustrates her approach with vivid examples, many of which are drawn from her own life, ranging from the silly to the serious, from shopping to navigating prejudice. Throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of interconnectedness, reminding us of the profound influence other people have on our lives, our goals, and how we should pursue them. At the same time, the book offers strategies for coping with obstacles to realizing your goals, including gender bias and other kinds of discrimination. Whether you are changing jobs, rethinking your priorities, or reconsidering your whole life path, What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton UP, 2024) is an essential guide to helping you understand what really matters to you and how you can thoughtfully pursue it.

Our guest is: Valerie Tiberius, who is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Her books include Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well and The Reflective Life: Living Wisely with Our Limits. She lives in Minneapolis.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter at christinagessler.substack.com.

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