The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast · Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey

PEL Presents PvI#113: Mary and Mark Pick Their Battles

·55 min·1 clip

Steve Harvey told me I need to live alone, and I asked him if he was going to pay for my apartment.

Philosophy vs. Improv is a segment of The Partially Examined Life podcast in which Mark Linsenmayer from the philosophy team and Mary Hines from the improv team try to teach each other something, with the audience invited along. This episode's topic is picking your battles, which Mark introduces after a playful exchange about mispronouncing philosophy. He frames the philosophical dimension: there is a separate question of whether you are going to raise an objection from whether that objection bothers you internally. He draws a distinction between self-obsession — being intensely irritated by how someone pronounces a word — and the practical social navigational question of whether to correct them. The stoic idea of not sweating the small stuff is raised, though both participants push back on whether it is actually all small stuff. Mark notes that this applies both within ongoing relationships — deciding which of someone's habits or positions to challenge — and to the meta question of whether to be in a relationship at all, i.e. what constitutes a deal-breaker. Mary brings immediate personal context: she has spent the past month processing eleven roommate candidates while maintaining multiple professional responsibilities, and describes her emotional management strategies for this repetitive disappointment: on person eight she spent a day in bed; by person eleven she took a cinematic walk down Hollywood Boulevard in the rain, got a eucalyptus body scrub, cried in the shower, and moved on. She frames each rejection as a question of where she has power and how she can grow through it. The episode is characteristic of the PvI format: intellectually playful, personally candid, and structured around a tension that neither fully resolves.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast