Episode 19 - Considering How You Would Describe Aspects Of Your Life To Other People

A friend of mine recently asked me to provide him with some information about myself. And the reason is because he's doing something quite nice and it might say even a little overdue for me. So nice on his part, overdue on my part, not on his. And that is to create a Wikipedia entry page about me as a person, as I suppose a public-facing philosopher, somebody whose work gets used and referenced by a number of different people.So today I have been compiling something that could be used as raw material for a Wikipedia entry. And he asked me for just a blurb and a few things, but I thought, well, why not take the sorts of things that I typically see with authors or musicians or other people that I am interested in on Wikipedia, and provide that sort of information and categories?And it's been an interesting exercise to do for a number of reasons. And one of them is that it winds up being a lot of work to go back and think about all of these different matters that people might want to know about and to put them into a document. I think that that to most people who know anything about me - and it's the reason why on occasion I'll have people come up to me and start talking to me because they recognize me - it's because of my YouTube channel. That is I would expect about 85 percent (and I'm just pulling this number out of the air) of the people who know me and then come up and interact with me, that's where they're getting it from originally.I mean, I do also have a couple podcasts, including this podcast. I have been writing public-facing philosophy in blogs and podcasts. Participating in interviews on podcasts and shows. And I have a radio show that I co-host with a friend of mine for quite some time. So it's not as if it's only the YouTube channel. But I think that is probably where most people know me from. That's my claim to fame if I have any such thing.And it's interesting, so this is a little bit of a digression, but I've had much more massive of an impact with the public-facing philosophy, particularly the YouTube videos than I am likely to ever have with the one academic book and dozens of articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries that I've written through the years,really going back more than 20 years now at this point, more than 25 if I'm actually thinking all the way back to my first article that ever came out. I've had much more impact with those sorts of media than I have with traditional academic publishing.And that's most likely, unless I really shift gears and spend a lot more time on academic publishing, that's what I'm going to be known for, I suppose, through the rest of my lifetime. And if I'm remembered beyond that, other than on personal notes, it'll be for those sorts of reasons.So today I've been engaging in a process of trying to remember, of arranging and organizing, thinking about what I would want to see if somebody were to actually produce a Wikipedia entry about me. What sorts of categories belong in there? What parts of my history or personal life do I want narrated, put out there for people to know about?And because it's Wikipedia, there's one other key thing in mind.Anything that goes in there, as far as I understand it, needs to be able to be documented in one way or another. And fortunately, when it comes to video work or blogging or stuff like that, the evidence is already out there for people to find.And it's kind of a good practice to engage in every once in a while to think back and consider your own biography, whether it's personal or professional, academic or public facing, whatever it's going to be. It doesn't hurt every once in a while to think about how you could explain what it is that you do, and what you've done, to somebody who doesn't know anything about you.What would you put out there first? What would you prioritize? What would you leave in? And what would you leave out?What would you describe in detail? And what would you just talk about in outline or perhaps even gloss over? And so this is where I think that it might be useful, not just for me, to engage in this sort of thing. But you, the listener, you could think about if you were put on the spot, if somebody said, hey, I want to write a Wikipedia entry about you, or I want to write a blog post about this aspect of your life or that aspect of your life. Or if you had a biographer that said, I would like to write an article or a book about your life, because I think that you're interesting, what would you actually tell them? Is it only the stuff that you're currently focused on interested in? Well our lives reach back decades and decades, and we've often forgotten a number of the things that used to be quite important for us and may have shaped us and created the opportunities that we are currently exploring, perhaps even enjoying in the present, but we left the other stuff behind.So, for example, in my case, I had to think about, well, when did I actually get started giving lectures to the non-academic general public? And the answer to that was way back in the early 2000s, 2000s when I started getting invited by various places to come in and give talks. And I don't think I was particularly good at it at that point in time. Or where did you get your interests from? Where did those arise from? I had to think about the fact that, and I think many of you know this, I never intended to become a college professor. That was just not on the horizon for me when I was in high school or even in college. It was only later on when I decided to go to graduate school that that became a viable option for me to even envision. When I was in high school I didn't even plan to go to college. I just thought i was going to go into the military and perhaps be a lifer, or even - and this shows you just how much our mindsets can change over time - perhaps a mercenary. A bit of a pipe dream that, of course, didn't come to pass. So I think it can be a useful exercise, and it may be one that a person person would actually want to do through writing or perhaps other alternative forms of putting something down. It could be talking to yourself with a recording, or it could be video recording yourself, but something that's more than just going off and thinking by yourself, delving into yourmemories and reflecting in your solitude.I think it would be useful for all of us every once in a while to do this, maybe not with the entirety of our life, but to ask this question, how did I get here? What was I doing today? Earlier on? Five years ago? 10 years ago? 20 years ago? That got me to this place where I currently am, that got me to the person that I currently exist as.And so this could be an interesting kind of exercise to carry out, you know. I'm telling you about this as the year is coming to a close, and we'll soon be talking about new years and what lies ahead of us. But perhaps we want to also from time to time take that time to look behind us and find the self who no longer exists as such, except in our own memories or the apparatus by which we have preserved those.And in some respects I may be better off than most other people because as an academic I have a curriculum vitae which I've had to keep current over the years. And I can go back to earlier ones and see the things that I thought were important back then, and perhaps have left off of more recent versions. I also have a lot of writings that I've done, and podcast episodes and videos, and things like that. But we could think about all sorts of other ways and in which we preserve stuff that we used to have, opening up a book and seeing what you underlined or what notes you took. Going into the garage or the attic or the basement and seeing what you've put in boxes from the last time that you moved, or when you needed to store things, and thinking about what those things are and why you held on to them and why they could be important to you.So I don't have any really grand philosophical reflections, but I was struck by this process of writing. And I thought it could be interesting, perhaps even useful, to reflect on it a little bit here in ways that perhaps you could apply within the scope of your own life, however long it has been up till this point. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregorybsadler.substack.com/subscribe