This article by Justin Garson on the American Philosophical Association's blog is extremely relevant to my life at the moment. A few months ago, shortly before receiving a diagnosis of Overtraining Syndrom from a consultant, my GP prescribed me an SNRI deal with both physical and mental symptoms that I was experiencing. I'm still on it.
…This is a good episode of Philosophy Bites with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Summary via my LRF as I'm on the go:
Goldstein defines mattering as being deserving of attention, and her key move is that the attention we're most anxious to deserve is our own. That makes us normative, value-seeking creatures by nature, distinct from other animals. She dates the arrival of these existential questions to Jaspers' Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), framing them as a luxury that depends on baseline survival being met.
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