Purpose in Life with Victor Strecher
Channel: Dr Luis de Miranda
Date: 19/05/2023

Victor Strecher, an award-winning pioneer in the field of behavioral science and professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, lost his nineteen-year-old daughter, Julia, to a rare heart disease that resulted from an infant case of chicken pox. This life event challenged every aspect of Strecher’s personal and professional experience and drove him to an exhaustive search, from ancient philosophy to cutting-edge science, to pinpoint the potential and impact of purpose in our lives. What is it? How can we discover it? And what does the latest research tell us about the importance of how purpose affects our overall health and happiness?

In a sort of vicious loop, metaphysical worry is sometimes interpreted as “depression”, “bipolarism” or others form of mental diagnosis promoted by the biomedical industry. Moreover, the current high-speed development of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics is generating an artificially deterministic society in which existential choices tend to be increasingly supervised by the state or corporations. Once we are statistically told by machines-who-know-better which education, partner, divertissement, health habits, profession or workplace to adapt to, the episteme of the modern subject, based on the ideal of self-determination, might collapse, generating a wave of pathologies of free will, the premises of which are already observable today. Cognitive diversity and philosophical health are under threat; the rise of a normative form of self-development sends wrong messages about “the right way” to live in order to be successful or “happy”, “well-adjusted”.

Luis de Miranda is the founder of the Philosophical Health Movement https://luisdemiranda.com

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