Conversations with the Walking Dead

What is the secret to the good life?

The story goes that the philosopher Zeno asked this of the Oracle of Delphi. Her response: “The secret to wisdom and the good life is to have conversations with the dead.”

What she meant was reading.

For Zeno, reading the works of Plato and Socrates was a direct conversation with the greatest minds of the past.

Fortunately for us—with how quickly a book can now be written, published, and printed—we have access not just to the dead, but to the greatest living minds of our time.

And yet, we spend our lives listening to the walking dead.

The news media: Profiting from your panic and feeding on your fear.

The social media influencers: Selling a filtered reality they don't actually inhabit.

The AI Slop: The soulless content flooding your internet feed and stealing your focus.

The average person: All of us who substitute digital conversations for a real life one.

We listen to the living who aren’t actually living. Behind the filter, the generated content, and the pixelated image is just another person struggling and languishing in the same void.

Instead, try something radical. Take your phone and put it in a dark drawer in the furthest corner of your house. Then, go and do something that makes you feel alive:

• Read a book. Engage with a mind that spent years crafting a single message.

• Take a walk. Notice the world that exists outside of a five-inch screen.

• Have a real conversation. Sit across from a human being and start with this: “What’s something that is really important to you, but you don’t get to talk about a lot?”

See what happens when you stop listening to the walking dead and start talking to people who have lived or are living.