Megan Sullivan

Like they would have thought, along with their parents, that there was kind of only one way Athens could go.

There's like only one way the world works.

And Socrates, by asking them questions, by teaching them philosophy, helped them realize they had a lot more options than they might have believed they had based on who was in power.

And I see that same dynamic playing out today.

You know, I teach a lot of young people.

I teach this

really big course on the good life at Notre Dame, which has a lot of Notre Dame freshmen in it.

And a lot of them have been fed this

diet of visions of the good life from the high school system and the AP, SAT exam system that we inflict on all of our teenagers.

And then they're exposed to visions of the good life from TikTok and social media, which tell them they need to be looks maxers.

and which tell them they need to attain certain kinds of social perfection.

And those are the only visions of the good life at all that they get in their formative years.

And those kinds of limitations in our imagination, those are one of the hardest forces for us to overthrow if we actually want to achieve flourishing.

And Socrates certainly realized that.

What he, if you read his speeches—

He didn't want to tell people exactly how they should live their lives, but he wanted to help them realize that they had options that they were not even considering.

I think it's actually easier to have this conversation today than it might have been when I was a college student.

The young people that I teach right now, the young people who...

were in middle school and high school during the pandemic, they're maybe a little bit more tenderized by the world than, I don't know about you, than I was when I was their age.

When I was their age, I was probably more likely to just do whatever a powerful adult told me to do.