Slow questions for complicated lives.
Life Examined is a measured series of personal essays and long-form conversations about how people make meaning under pressure. It moves from bar stools and single life to Mary Oliver, Moby-Dick, coffee rituals, rivers, psychiatric medication, burnout, and parenting.
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Life Examined is a reflective show built around essays, interviews, and the belief that a serious question deserves room to unfold. Its center is not spectacle. It is attention. Recent episodes move easily between private life, literature, landscape, mental health, and the pressures of work and family. A piece on being single starts with bartenders, solo bar stools, and the small embarrassment of being known in public. It becomes a defense of openness, conversation, and the social risks that partnership can sometimes quietly replace. An episode on Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese treats poetry as a companion to grief, especially the kind of grief that turns inward as blame. The show is comfortable with sorrow. It does not hurry past it. Travel writing becomes another moral inquiry when St. John’s beauty is set beside Joan Didion’s warning about false promised lands and the fantasy of escaping the self. Literature gets similar treatment. Moby-Dick is framed as a strange, stubborn object that resists definition, with the whale becoming a possible figure for death, mystery, and middle age. In conversation, the show keeps a generous pace. Robert McFarlane’s visit centers rivers as living presences, cloud forests, patience, restoration, and the way landscape can return someone to themselves. Laura Delano’s episode brings firsthand experience to psychiatric treatment, medication, and the culture that medicalizes distress. Lori Santos brings happiness science into burnout, sabbaticals, parenting pressure, agency, and the unexpected good that can appear inside difficult periods. Across formats, Life Examined favors layered questions over quick answers. It is best for listeners who want depth, warmth, and a mind willing to sit with uncertainty.
Made for: For listeners drawn to reflective essays, literary thinking, and patient interviews about grief, attention, nature, mental health, happiness, and meaning. It suits people who prefer nuance over quick advice.
What sets it apart: Life Examined connects intimate scenes to large philosophical questions without losing the human texture of either. Its essays and interviews share a steady, contemplative rhythm that makes abstraction feel lived-in.
A weekly exploration of psychology, philosophy, endurance sports, and finding meaning in the modern world. lifeexamined.substack.com
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Jonathan Bastian gives complex questions about care, loss, work, relationships, and nature the time and attention needed to become genuinely useful.
Life Examined turns large questions about living into patient conversations with people who have tested them through scholarship, personal experience, or art.
A river might be alive; your small talk can take the day off with Jonathan Bastian.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A cloud-forest journey gives McFarlane's question about living rivers quiet emotional force.
A river becomes a way to think about life in Jonathan Bastian's conversation with Robert McFarlane, whose nature and landscape writing opens toward grief, patience, and the force of the physical world on human experience.
Laura Delano examines the cultural forces and personal cost behind her psychiatric treatment.
Laura Delano's story follows how teenage suffering became bound up with psychiatric treatment, medication, family duty, and the culture around stigma.
A thoughtful Life Examined conversation about burnout, rest, agency, and parental pressure.
Burnout, sabbaticals, and the pressure parents carry give this Life Examined conversation its stakes. Lori Santos, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale, looks at what it can mean to step back from work when burnout has taken hold, and how a sabbatical or…
Ocean Vuong reflects on grief, memory, and the beauty that can endure inside a static American life.
Ocean Vuong's conversation with Jonathan Bastian lingers on losses that drug stigma helped push out of public view: friends gone without funerals, photographs, or much record beyond memory, and in one case a police report.
A practical, grounded look at attraction, rejection, and the difference between lust and love.
Life Examined treats modern dating as a question of attention and motive, drawing a clean line between lust that takes and love that gives. Jonathan Bastian's conversation with relationship coach and author Jillian Turecki moves through rejection, emotional availability,…
Ryan Holiday pairs daily Stoic lessons with long-form guest conversations at his Texas bookstore.
Philosopher Barry Lam turns reported stories — gig algorithms, AI music, vampires — into philosophical inquiry.
Economist Glenn Loury interviews one guest at a time on race, religion, and geopolitics.
Peter Boghossian applies street epistemology to guests debating free speech, immigration, and belief.
Vox's narrative reporting on factory farming, pandemic risk, and its Good Robot AI safety series.
Ryan Holiday discusses Stoic virtue and justice, emphasizing that virtue is an action, not a state, and that doing the right thing often requires holding oneself to a higher standard.
Relationship coach and author Jillian Turecki joins Life Examined to discuss her book 'It Begins With You: The Nine Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life'.
Jonathan Bastian shares the first essay from his Life Examined newsletter, exploring two quotes he relies on daily.
A reflection on the social openness and connections of single life, using bartender acquaintances as a metaphor.
A therapist reflects on why Mary Oliver's poem 'Wild Geese' resonates deeply with grieving clients, exploring themes of loss, self-blame, and acceptance.
A poetic dispatch from St.
Jonathan Bastian reflects on the enduring complexity and frustration of reading Moby-Dick, arguing that its difficulty is a gateway to deeper contemplation and appreciation of great art.
The episode contrasts American distraction with Japanese focus, using a slow coffee experience in Tokyo as a metaphor for cultural differences in happiness.
Robert Macfarlane says Ecuador’s 2021 court ruling treated the river and forest as rights-bearing living worlds.
Jonathan Bastian of Life Examined talks with Laura Delano, author of Unshrunk and founder of Inner Compass Initiative, about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 14 and later counting 19 psychiatric drugs across her treatment history.
Jonathan Bastian and Yale psychologist Laurie Santos focus on burnout, sabbaticals, and "The Science of Well-Being for Parents" from Yale and Coursera.
Jonathan Bastian opens Life Examined by explaining KCRW’s funding cuts, the show’s move to being “untethered,” and a listener call for ideas on what the program should become.
KCRW’s Life Examined host Jonathan Bastian interviews Harvard historian Rebecca Lemov about brainwashing, coercive persuasion, and the human mind’s malleability.
Relationship coach Jillian Turecki discusses the nine hard truths about love and how self-reflection is key to building healthy relationships.
Psychologist Lisa Damour discusses the realities of raising teenagers in the digital age, challenging negative headlines with data showing teens are safer and healthier than past generations.
Philosopher Owen Flanagan discusses his personal struggle with alcoholism and the complexities of addiction in his new book.
Brad Stulberg discusses tragic optimism and the male identity crisis, drawing from his experience after Hurricane Helene and exploring why young men struggle to find community and purpose.