In this episode, Dr. Michael Giles, a political science professor at LCC, delves into the intersection of philosophy and political science, with a focus on political theory, which he studied extensively in graduate school. His passion for the humanities stems from a deep interest in what it means to live as a good human being.

In part two of this episode, Jim and Michael move from talking about the need to pursue a virtuous life, to talking about specific virtues philosophers and psychologists have proposed as necessary for the good life. Aristotle would submit that while living a virtuous life does not necessarily promise a happy life, but living without virtue does promise living an unhappy one., They explore some of the neuroscience of developing the ability to make healthy behaviors a positive and enduring habit, and conclude by discussing what Aristotle mean when he wrote about defining the great-souled person as one who neither overestimates or underestimates one’s potential to do, be and receive greatness.

1. PDF: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

Welcome to Headroom, where we discuss all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm your host, Jim Owens, a licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College.

I'd like to emphasize that while this podcast does not contain medical advice, it does introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life. Having said that, let's get into the headroom and begin today's conversation with Doctor Michael Giles, professor at Lanson Community College.

Okay, thanks for coming back for part two of our discussion with Doctor Michael Giles, we're talking about philosophy, nicomachean, ethics, virtue, flourishing, happiness. And this is all really important stuff.

And I want to say why, as a counselor, why this is important, and I think critical for the human condition and health is because there are some foundational aspects that we've learned about what makes a human being happy, or we know a lot about what makes us unhappy, but to what should we be aiming in is flourishing. How do we flourish as human beings? How do we understand both corporately, just as a species, what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?

But even individually, which is a whole other problem, what am I supposed to do with my individual life? And I think we need to learn something about, and this is how counselors are trained.

We get trained about the basics of what all people basically need.

I hear I could speak of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or many other psychologists wrote a need taxonomies, and at the base are these, food, survival, shelter, et cetera. But once we get those, we're then looking for other things, because we are not satisfied with just food and sleep and shelter.

Something about us seeks more, and there is an end, I guess, ultimately is kind of what we were talking about. So where do we go from there? How do we talk about flourishing and happiness?

Yeah, so it's interesting, I'll remark, when I often talk about sort of the human flourishing. On Aristotle's model, students often bring up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and they are struck by the resemblance between them.

Now, what's different, though, is that at the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you'll notice maybe how empty it is of content. It's more of describing the kinds of content that might be there, but it's sort of left up to you to figure out what that content might be.

That's why I find Aristotle so helpful, that he sort of said, I'm going to stick my nose out there and tell you what it is a happy person actually has in their soul. And so then he has basically a list of virtues, relatively long list of virtues.

And I can talk about some of those, but some of them you might have heard of and some not.

So let's talk about some of those. I mean, a, he said we should be aiming at a virtuous life. So what are some of those virtues?

I guess so. Let me just think of one that maybe we have heard of first. One would be courage. Courage.

So courage is a virtue that we need to have because we have a certain problem as human beings. We are fearful. We are not. So every animal, I mean, every deer that's shot in Michigan every fall is surprised when it dies.

It is not expecting to die. It would never looking forward to the time when it would die. It is not afraid of death.

But here we are, human beings, quaking in our boots where we are rational, until we look forward and we see all the evil that could possibly happen to us. So we're very afraid. We have a fear problem. In fact, that fear problem could paralyze us.

We look at the danger in the world and we say, gosh darn, why should I do anything or risk anything? Because this is such a dangerous place. And so we need a virtue that helps us deal with this fear.

That's something that would help us to act in spite of fear. You'll notice every time there's someone who saves someone from drowning and they ask, were you afraid?

I mean, what they said, oh, of course I was afraid. I just. They overcame it, did it anyway. So that's what courage is.

Now he courage is helpful because for Aristotle, it's kind of a hitting on a middle way. It's, you could have courage is some is willing to endure some risk for the sake of something good.

So in the case of rescuing people trapped in a car that had gone over the bridge, there's something good there, the preservation of innocent life. And whereas, if you just decide to climb trees and jump off of them for no apparent good, he would call that rashness.

It's sort of like, why are you being so crazy? That's not a virtue. I've seen these videos of these really manly guys jumping off waterfalls. What are you doing with your life?

And I'm like, well, I'm trying to hold down a job. Be the husband, be the family, educate a nation.

Yeah.

But that's rashness. There's no apparent good other than the cool water that you jump into and the sharp rocks underneath. But there could be a deficiency, too.

That's to say, that deficiency is like, you know, the good, but you don't have courage, and that's cowardice. A coward basically does not have the moral strength to do the job that needs to be done. So you could fall in either.

You could have an error on either side. And now courage is a tough virtue. It's maybe the most strenuous and demanding of the virtues.

And the reason is that while all the other virtues, they help you flourish and they help you succeed.

And all this stuff, courage might cost you your life, so you might die in battle, maybe if you're fighting in defense of your homeland, so that it's the most kind of strenuous and demanding. But it's a good illustration of an Aristotle would say, look, it's like what Stephen Crane says in the red badge of courage.

I mean, he says, look, if you know yourself to be a coward, like, you look at things honestly, squarely in the face, you say, man, I am a coward. I just. I can't. You know, you're sitting there by the edge, on the bridge, watching this family go under the water, and you're like, I can't act.

Aristotle would say that person is profoundly unhappy with themselves. And, in fact, it might even be better to die in a good cause than to have to live with being.

A coward, with that kind of suffering.

I'm glad you talk about courage, because this, as you're describing, like, surviving our physical falling off a bridge or a waterfall or dying or a deer and all this thing. I'm thinking of that, but more likely the psychological death that people are afraid they're gonna experience.

And here I'm speaking of social anxiety and the courage it takes. And this is a conversation I have in my office every single day with people.

They are so aware of their need to connect with other human beings, and they are terrified of risking doing that. It could be something as quote unquote, simple, and I really don't mean to put it down as simple as going out to the.

The front star zone area and asking someone a question, asking for help. I need help with my registration. I don't want to do that. You know, it's scary. What if. What if.

What if to asking someone out on a date or for their hand in marriage, which you were sharing earlier, that took courage.

Yeah. Right? And it shows that.

So happiness is not just the easiest way, because a lot of the things of the most worth are the hardest things to do, in fact. So when I did ask of my wife, you know her okay. Yeah. I was feeling ludicrously ill.

I felt like, I was going to pass out right there on the sand of Leelanau Peninsula. So, thankfully, I did not. I had somewhat held it together.

I remember when I. Similar story when I went to ask for my wife's parents hand in marriage.

I drove to their house for lunch, and I drove around the block, like, at least three times, mustering all the courage, like, trying to find every kernel of courage I could find and sweep it into a pile so I could get in there and do it.

Yep.

So that's why Aristotle says, look, you can't maybe be happy in the fullest extent if you don't have courage precisely because the things that bring us the most happiness require courage. So that's hard. I mean, to submit a job application, you have got to have guts.

Anyway, so he's attuned to kind of like, what is life like for limited human beings that we are.

I want to explore this a little bit further, and maybe you have some insight on this, because I often will explain this concept of courageous. It's an interesting thing about courage.

Like, after you do the thing you're afraid of doing, and it turns out okay, you actually, as a result, get a deposit of courage. It then becomes easier to do it the second time. Slaying that dragon the first time is the hardest time it's ever gonna be to slay a dragon.

Yes.

And we kinda know that. I don't think we have to necessarily educate people about that.

But what I'll often say when I talk about courage, and you and I both know the root word of that in the Latin is core, which means hearth. And I will then say to my clients, tell me if this makes any sense.

I'll say your mind is saying, let's not do this, but your heart is telling you, let's do it. And you need to listen to your heart, or you need to act from the heart, in a sense, because you're not really.

I don't know if the heart's gonna trump the mind. You just gotta go do it. Knowing this is risky. I could die social death or real death.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's interesting because our reason and our will, in a way, they have to chasten each other, because if we. Yeah, if we're. We're all.

If we let our heart do all the telling, then we'll. We won't have as good a knowledge of a target, potentially, so. But at the same time, you know, reason is totally powerless.

We sort of need good habits in a way. We need practice. And so every occasion that if you have that growth mindset, you are. You are practicing.

Yeah.

And with, you know. And practice does help.

Yeah. Yeah. Boy. I could get into the neuroscience because we've learned a little bit about the neurobiology of courage.

Yes. Okay, tell me.

We do know. I'll keep it very high level, very general.

But there is just like everything in the brain, there is an area of the brain dedicated to this function, just like there is to hearing and vision and language and emotion and all these things and intellect and reasoning and stuff.

But there's a very interesting little area that's been discovered only recently with some experiments at Stanford called the anterior mid cingulate cortex. Okay, so it's in your neocortex. It's kind of in the middle of the top of your brain, if you want an image of where this would be.

And there is an area of your brain there called the anterior cingulate cortex. And in the middle of that, it's called the anterior mid cingulate cortex. Right.

It's this little area that has different size lot, if you will, if you think of a plot of land, depending on how courageous you are.

Okay, sure.

So people who cower away from things, they have a small area here, and people who lean into the storm and go for it, they have a bigger area of their brain dedicated to this. We might say it's a larger anterior mid singular cortex, but it's truly, it's all, you know, gray and white matter in there.

But what area is dedicated to that? So there is.

But the thing is, the more you make yourself do things you don't want to do that are good for you, that area grows and it becomes easier to do it. In fact, sometimes we call this the area of the locus of willpower. So we all know, why do you even have to tap into willpower?

Why do you even have to tap into, you tap into your will when it's difficult to do something, when there's resistance, if it's easy, not really calling on anything, but there is an area of your brain that's dedicated to this, and it will grow with exercise.

That is.

I love the positive vibes you get from that and the encouragement that that brings, because what we're in effect saying is that we can actually affect our future capacity to make the right kinds of choices that we really do want to make in our heart of hearts, which now is so difficult. And so, yeah, there's such room, then, for this is why education is so important.

The education, really, that we receive from the time with the youngest on up. That is a kind of habit building process. And the old fashioned word, it's habituation.

Gotta be habituated.

And you need that sort of fiber, that part of your brain, and you need it to be pressed.

Yeah, let me give two other words there and then we'll jump back to philosophy. When you bring up habituation, kind of the antithesis of that is sensitization. So we teach habituation and sensitization.

Sensitization is something you often will hear about in connection to PTSD, which is, go with the classical stereotype.

You're overseas fighting in a war and bombs are going off and guns are getting fired, and then here you are in the states, it's safe, but you hear a door slam and you think, oh, that's a gunshot. You're sensitized. And now it produces anxiety in you. But another thing could happen.

You could be exposed to so much slamming of doors and guns going off that you get habituated to it and it just rolls over you like a breeze. You don't even notice it, which is kind of like you and I pushed ourselves through many, many years of college.

So let me point to what it means to be a student, because many of our listeners are students. Doing schoolwork was harder when I was new at being a student. It was harder for me to sit down and make myself do the work.

I wasn't as skilled as it, and I had to call on something that was barely there to make myself sit and do the work, studying, preparing, writing, producing. Now it's easy when I know I have about a work to do, I know I can do it and I know I can get it done.

And it's not that much resistance for me to do it. I don't know if your experience was similar.

Yeah, I think there are seasons for me. I think it's been a bit more seasonal. I think there are seasons where I really am on the ball. But I often.

I'm aware of just how easy it is to kind of lose your steam and lose track. And I think that's so no matter how much we practice, there is never. We're never beyond the present moment.

We're never beyond the need to try and do the next best right thing that we can for ourselves. So that's the glory and the peril, I guess, of a human being. But you're right, I think it is. I remember some of the same struggles.

And I think one thing that helped me, actually, one thing that helped me learn was actually something that I wouldn't really have thought of as connected to learning. And that was just sort of taking responsibility. I found that it was easier to learn once I, paradoxically, I had, like, just about.

Just about the right amount of responsibility that I can handle. And I felt like there were times in my life when I had no responsibilities at all and I didn't learn, I didn't flourish.

There were times in my life when I had almost too much responsibility and became very hard to learn to, but sort of like the right amount of responsibility and having to take responsibility for things that are totally unrelated to education, things like going to the DMV or whatever, saying, hey, this is my life, I gotta go do this. And you make yourself do something and take care of yourself. That's so important for learning. And so that, to me, has been helpful as well.

And I guess that's what I was asking, too.

Now, do you find, even though you're as imperfect as we all are, do you find that these habits, and we call them habits because we're kind of saying it's become easier because it's a habit.

However, I will say, just like you're saying, I think here, yes, habits do come into our lives, and we can persist in something with maybe less effort in a discipline that's good for us. But we have to keep that knife sharp. Cause it will dull.

We are either we say this in music, as a musician, I'm either getting better or I'm getting worse. I'm never staying the same. If I stay away from my instrument for a week and I sit back down at it and to play, I've lost something.

Maybe I can go a week, but two weeks, you start to lose it. But if you push yourself at it for a while, you retain it and you grow and it becomes easier.

So, I don't know, is that a conception of our sort of skills and competencies that is. That's not at odds with homeostasis, is it? Or how do you bring those together?

That's a good question. Because that concept of homeostasis, which means I being in a state that is balanced, that is at rest, almost at peace.

Now, we're getting into paradox, because I'm most at peace when I'm struggling. Some of my happiest moments are when I'm on my bicycle in the middle of a hundred mile race against 500 people.

That is probably physically and maybe mentally, not emotionally, but physically and mentally the hardest thing I'll ever do.

Yeah, I'm. I've been invited to do a century, and I am a coward.

Okay.

I've declined an instance, but I will.

Say now, it's funny. Once you've done, I've done a couple of centuries now, anything below 100 miles sounds easy. Like, really easy.

Like if somebody said, let's go do an 80 miles ride after work, no problem, you know, so you, I did get that thing on the other side of it. This, in a sense, courage, in a sense like, oh, that sounds, that won't take any bravery at all.

Yeah. Right. So it is amazing the adaptability. You really do adapt to your circumstances.

And, yeah, I mean, I would consider a hundred mile bike ride to be, like, well beyond the limit of my endurance.

But I think, and this, I want to turn to one of the other versions in Aristotle because, you know, people often say, I had some family members who've gone in the National Guard or who friends have gone to military service. It's sort of cliche, but true. They sort of said, I learned that I was capable of far more than I thought. Capable of far more than I thought.

And so in a way, that's what you're alluding to with this 100 miles bike ride.

Is that, for me, like, sitting here right now kind of a little bit on the out of shape side, having gotten, hit the LCC gym in this summer break, I'm looking at that and saying, that is well beyond my capacity. And that might even be a true statement. Maybe not, but how do I judge my own capacity?

Yeah, yeah.

And he calls it a virtue.

Now, you might be wondering about this, and certainly, maybe you might even be suspicious of this because we often think of humility as a virtue, saying, well, it's good to be humble. It's good to let.

You're almost getting to megalomaniac here.

But no, Megalo Sukiya, the great souled person. And I wanna discuss him a little bit because this kind of gets to the heart of what we really think is possible for us.

And so I don't know if you agree with. I can just kind of continue, but please.

Yeah, I'd love to hear more about this graceful. Yeah.

So this graceful person. This is in book four. And let me just maybe read from a section of Aristotle. So this is book four, chapter three.

So the greatness of soul, even from its name, seems to be concerned with great things. Let us first take up what sort of things they are.

The person who seems to be great souled is the one who considers himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them. So there's a certain estimation of oneself that the great souled person has. They say, I deserve great things.

In a way, everyone wants great things to come to them. But the great soul person takes it a step further and says, no, I'm actually worthy for the great things to come to me.

So Aristotle is saying that once again, with this virtue, there are also two corresponding vices.

So the one he calls it, I think he calls the person vain, who believes that great things are they deserve great things, but they're actually not so great as to deserve those great things. So they have an overestimation of themselves. They're like me sitting here saying, yeah, I for sure, for sure could do that 100 miles.

That would be vain to say that. And on the other hand, what about the person who has too small an estimation of themselves?

And you might call this, the latin term for this is pusillanimous, a small souled person. They're small souled. They are capable of far more than they think. They deserve far more than they think.

And they're basically, in Aristotle, destination unjust to themselves. They're not willing to give themselves.

They're more powerful, they're more beautiful, they're more capable. All these things.

Yes, right. But they're saying, no, no, no. I'm just, you know, I'm just another speck of trash on the trash heap. So. So he says that this is a virtue to be great.

So in order to be great, you have to be good. So he's saying, you really do need to possess genuine moral virtue. You've got to be something that's actually admirable.

But once you're there, it's a vice to not think that you're not worthy of something great.

So, anyways, I bring this up because he suggested at the very end of his discussion, in kind of chapter three, chapter four, he says that he intimates that most people are small souled. Most people are capable.

Not only are they capable, they're actually, in the present moment, deserving of far greater things than they themselves will give themselves. And that's to say nothing of their capacity, what they could really get through future action.

And so that, to me, is really interesting that he says, if you take humanity as a whole, we basically have too low an estimation of what we really are. And I take that to be encouraging. But we'll also get into this magnanimous person is also scary in other respects, and we can kind of discuss that.

And in particular, the magnanimous person, he says, we'll never ask for help. So they often seem very arrogant and aloof because they're very driven by justice. They want to receive just what they deserve.

They want other people to receive just what they deserve. And so for them, it's kind of an indignity to be seen asking for help. So maybe if you.

So this, even this magnanimous person is not without their faults.

And Aristotle suggests maybe attention, then that, in fact, people experience that if we have too low an estimation of ourselves, we're often more willing to ask for help. Whereas if we have, we really think we're awesome, and we know that awesome things will come to us, that we're unwilling to ask for help.

And so that's something that he sees as part of the great soul person.

We could divide probably 25 years of my professional work into a 90 ten split where 10% of the clients I've helped have this problem of the mega side is out of order. But 90% are in the small sold. Yeah, they truly do not.

And if a counselor gets frustrated in therapy, it is not at anything other than this person does not see themself as powerfully, as beautifully, as capable, as good as they actually are. And much of our work.

And you could look in cognitive behavioral theory, you could even look back in the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic traditions, defense mechanisms and ego defense mechanisms, and all these things that we do. These, I was gonna say circus. The circus in our mind, all these.

But really, it's mental gymnastics and acrobatics, because once we know we're being too small souled, we suffer in that. So we try not to notice our small souledness. Sure.

Absolutely. And once that becomes obvious to us, it's sort of a disincentive to take a growth mindset, because we sort of say it's too much trouble.

I mean, it's too much cognitive dissonance to try and sort of say, I wanna become. I wanna lean into it, what I really am. And so, yeah, so then you become a stranger to yourself.

And that, too, is like, maybe it's a painful thing, but maybe it's the least, it's the most serviceable option going forward. And so people can kind of settle. They settle for a mental state of affairs or a way of relating to themselves.

That is, in fact, again, unjust to themselves. So it is a certain matter of justice that the great soul person is concerned with.

And so as much as we're concerned with doing justice to others, he would say, look, it's a virtue to do justice to yourself.

So let's talk.

I want to talk about this a little bit in the context, if I can, now that we're in ancient Greece of the hero's journey, because I see such a strong analog to this small souled person that Hollywood gives us in the protagonist.

Often it's this person in a small town or totally incapable of doing anything great, but then they go off and they have this long quest, and they come back to the village totally changed.

We could do the Lord of the Rings with these little hobbits, which are physically described as inferior to basically every other biped in the middle age, but there's always this character of they underestimate their capability to save the town or the world, but yet they then go and do it. And I think that's such an inspiring thing. And we retell that story.

We've been retelling that story in novels and in plays and in theater and movies for so long. Ooh, that's an exciting notion. What if I could become a hero? What if I could become great souled?

Yeah, but the catch is that you will never discover that unless you're willing to go on an adventure in the first place.

I know.

You have to be willing to possibly suffer risks. So one of the things that Aristotle teaches us about the magnanimous person, the great souls person, is that they are willing to take great risks.

That is, like, the essence of they are willing to do that because they see that is, I am capable of so much, and so I can risk a lot. And so if we're unwilling to risk a lot, we may, in fact, have a very low estimation of ourselves.

So, yeah, you've got to be willing to go on an adventure, and to do that means you can't. You go on that knowing you don't know what the outcome is. And so. But I love the description and the Hobbit of Bilbo Baggins.

There's a turkish side of him that. The adventure seeking side that. The side that says, look, in a way, I need this journey. In a way, I have to discover who I am, my limit.

But then he says, there's the Baggins part of him which wants to stay home that would much rather just be eating cake and being comfortable and well fed. So I think that is a great image, then we need the adventure. But the thing is that it's the adventures that inflame our imagination.

Yeah. In some ways, that's kind of the point of life, is to get out. Well, I don't know if I should. I don't know if I can go that far, really.

But what is so is a human being directed at. What would Aristotle say if I brought him in here? Should a human being go on these quests of journeys to find the limits of oneself?

Because that's what therapy is. Let me just plug that in for a second. Therapy is daring to show.

And let me tell you, almost everybody who shows up for a counseling, especially their first counseling appointment, is scared or ambivalent about it, because who are we gonna be talking about? Them.

Oh, yeah.

Who they've been avoiding looking at them. And they're gonna be analyzed.

And then we're not analysts, and we're not doing that on purpose, but we're listening to everything they say in the context of their life and all this stuff. They're being evaluated and analyzed. In a sense.

I'm not trying to scare anybody, but it's all in the service of them becoming great soul, to use your language.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So this is why I've avoided all counseling in my life.

The spotlight is on.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I don't. The idea of a journey. I mean, certainly aerosol knew about it. I mean, he grew up reading Homer.

He would have known that there is such a thing as being taken out of your ordinary circumstances. And at the same time, though, he would say, look, there is a crucial distinction between speech and action. And you referred to that earlier.

Like it is, he said, the hero. In the end, no matter what they say, they end up doing the right thing.

It's the action that, in effect, make the big difference for them, despite all their words to the contrary. And so there's a difference between speech and action.

And I wonder about what he would have thought about psychoanalysis with regard to that distinction, then, because so much of the analysis is using speech as a revealer of what we really think about ourselves or the way we are, and in ways that are frank and disconcerting. But I think he would say that the life there is, in a way, there are two lives.

Then there is the contemplative life that says, look, it really is concerned with speech. It really is concerned with an adventure of words and of the mind and of what is what does not call for action.

But just, like, discovery of new knowledge and that new knowledge, I mean, you have to be very strong to be able to really face the truth about yourself. But there's also the political or active life, which is concerned not with knowledge, but with deeds, with action. And so those are two.

So the happy person is gonna. He suggests that a contemplative life is better that.

And so if the psychological hero's journey is a journey of contemplation, which actually demands more courage than action would demand, then, yeah, maybe there's something in that that he would approve of.

So here and here I could speak of Alfred Adler and his concept of social interest. So you guys can look that up if you're interested. But here's what I'm gonna go with.

Aristotle's life is so much like what I see across from me at the table here. You're a professor. So you are someone who is a contemplative, and yet you are a man of action. You are disseminating information.

You could, there are some, and I think there are researchers at universities, professors, who just work in the lab or they work at the computer working on ideas, and then there are those who then take those ideas and go out into the classroom and share them. So I see you as an educator, doing the thing Aristotle did, because he may have held contemplation higher, but there was an academy.

He did teach, he wrote, he published, in a sense. I mean, he did work. He did contribute socially. So he had social interest. It was not just knowledge for knowledge.

Yeah, yeah. This is totally key to his conception of human flourishing, is that we are social and that we are that way just by virtue of being human.

And that we do need to be part of a community, and we do need to be part of something bigger than we are. So that is, that's foundational for him.

And, yeah, you think about, it's like, well, why does he need to share, smart guy that he is, why does he need to share all this stuff with us? And so there's something in a kind of compassion for the rest of us. We just don't have the time.

We don't have the interest, the inclination, or the mental strength and courage to investigate these matters, but we can learn about them and we can look, figure out, okay, who is my teacher going to be? Everyone needs to look to a teacher. That is kind of the upshot of it all. So I think you're right.

I.

That I'm grateful for that.

Yeah. Well, we need to just about wrap it up here. Maybe you can come back at some point in the future.

And we could talk about this connection I'm seeing now to all of this, into the existentialists, which they, even the nihilists wrote things. So the ones who believed in nothing told us to believe in nothing, which is a contradiction in a sense. Right?

Yeah.

The real nihilists are the ones that went away and didn't do anything. They stopped eating.

Yes, that's right. That's right. I think that's a crucial question. I think for every discipline, if you're a student, you're thinking about, what do I study?

You need to be kind of shrewd and hard minded and say, you want to ask that discipline? Give an account of yourself. Why is it that you study what you study? Why is it that you do what you do?

Can you ask a philosopher, give an account of the way of life of a philosopher? What are the politician? What is your account and why you do what you do? And same thing for psychology.

Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

I appreciate you spending so much time, you know, with me in the studio going over these things.

And no, I feel like this was a real pleasure and I definitely contributed to my mental health. Okay, so there's that. But no, I love chatting about these things.

All right, thanks.

For anybody who's interested in having a conversation with a counselor in the future, LCC offers free counseling to LCC students, and you can come in and go on this journey with a helper. If you're interested, you can learn more at LCC.edu. thanks, everybody. Have a great day.