"The unexamined life is not worth living" is a line from Plato's Apology (38a), where Socrates explains why he won't stop examining himself and others. It's about examining how you live. It isn't a statement about anyone's life, or about what any life is worth.
The old man is more than seventy, and he has never spoken in a court before.
The men accusing him have just finished, and they spoke well. So well, he says, that "they almost made me forget who I was". They also warned the Athenians not to be taken in by his eloquence.
So he opens by promising them none. They won't hear "a set oration duly ornamented with words and phrases" from him, he says. He'll use the words that come to him in the moment, the same words people have heard him use "in the agora, at the tables of the money-changers", and he asks them not to be surprised by it. If it helps, they can think of him as a stranger, one "whom you would excuse if he spoke in his native tongue".
That's how Plato's Apology begins. A man facing serious accusations, and the first thing he sets down is the voice the room expects.
What does "the unexamined life is not worth living" mean?
It's Socrates' explanation, in Plato's Apology, of why he wouldn't stop questioning. For him, talking every day about how to live, and examining himself and others as he went, was the greatest good a person could have, and he wouldn't give it up even when asked whether he couldn't simply keep quiet.
If the phrase lands hard for you right now, or you're having thoughts of ending your life, please reach out today. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line now, and see a doctor.
Where did Socrates say it, and what was he answering?
Late in the speech. The first vote has gone against him, and he has to propose a penalty of his own. He weighs exile, one of the penalties open to him, and sets it aside. At his age, he says, he'd be "wandering from city to city", driven out of each in turn, because the young men would come to listen to him wherever he went.
Then he answers a question he expects to hear: "Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?"
His reply, in Benjamin Jowett's translation, holds the line this article is about: "if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me."
So the line was never written as a motto. Plato gives it as an explanation, offered to listeners Socrates expected to doubt it, of what his days had been for. It sits at section 38a.
People often link Socrates with know thyself, the maxim I've written about in know thyself meaning. This line is his own, and it's about a practice: talking, every day, about how to live.
If you'd rather start with yourself than with Socrates, the Who Am I? masterclass costs nothing with the code GIFT26. Receive the masterclass. Or read on.
What did Socrates set down before he began?
The polished voice. The room had been told to guard against his eloquence, and a skilful speech was what it expected. He declined to give one. He'd speak, he told them, the way he always spoke in the marketplace.
It's an easy moment to pass over. His accusers had drawn a picture of someone else, a man whose words were dangerous because they persuaded so well. Listening to it, he says, he almost forgot who he was. Rather than answer the picture in its own style, he stepped out of the style altogether. He took the performance off instead of polishing it, and what was left was the plain voice he'd always used.
I don't read him as a forerunner of anything I do. He was an Athenian speaking to his own city in his own way. I notice the shape of it only because my own work runs in that direction: away from adding, toward what was there first. I've looked at the gap between the self we show and the one we are in true self vs false self.
What goes unexamined in an ordinary life?
Plenty in a busy life gets examined. What rarely does is the measure behind it all: the standard we use to decide whether a day, or a year, went well.
Socrates was blunt about the measure he saw around him. He told the Athenians he'd keep asking anyone he met why they heaped up "money and honour and reputation" and cared so little for "the greatest improvement of the soul". I won't put that question to you in his tone. But it's worth asking where your own measure came from.
For most people, nobody chose it. It soaked in over the years, from people whose approval mattered: a grandmother who judged a day by how clean the house was by noon, a father proud of his long hours, a first job where staying late was how you got noticed. Repeated for long enough, a measure stops sounding like anyone else's, and starts to pass for plain common sense.
That's the ground my own work stands on. A measure that was learned isn't the person who learned it.
The Who Am I? masterclass takes up the question its own page opens with: someone asks who you are, and you give a name, a role, a title. A guide to what sits beneath those answers is on this page.
A plain note before the practice. If any of this stirs something heavy, please tell someone, and see a doctor or a mental health professional. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. If you're already working with a doctor or therapist, keep working with them. What I offer is neither therapy nor medical care, and it doesn't replace either.
How can you examine one measure of your own?
Socrates did his examining out loud, in conversation, every day. You can try a single round of it whenever you have ten minutes to yourself. Say each answer out loud. It's harder to skim past words you've heard yourself say.
- Name the test you use to decide whether a day went well. It's rarely something you say to anyone. How much got crossed off the list. How many hours you were at your desk. Whether you trained. Choose one.
- Say out loud what that test counts as a good day, in one line. Say it the way you'd explain it to someone new to the city. "A good day is one where everything on the list gets crossed off."
- Hold that line up against a day you remember with some warmth. Recent or long ago, a whole day or a single hour: an afternoon in the desert with nothing planned, say, or a day you got lost in a new city and didn't mind. Ask out loud whether your line would have called it a good day, and say what you notice.
Step 3 can stay empty. If no such day surfaces, steps 1 and 2 are a full round on their own, and you can come back to the third whenever you like.
That's the whole exercise. You don't need a new definition yet. You've examined one measure you live by, which is the kind of examining Socrates said he did every day.
Is the Who Am I? masterclass the right place to start?
It's likely a good place to start if:
- You'd rather begin by reading. The first layer is a written guide of ten pages, in PDF, meant to be read slowly, annotated and returned to.
- You'd like it explained as a conversation. In the second layer I walk you through it on video, against slides, more as a conversation than a lecture.
- You can set aside twenty quiet minutes. The last layer is guided, and the page asks for headphones and real space while you do it.
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Receive the Who Am I? masterclass
Socrates began his defence by refusing a voice that wasn't his, and later explained why he couldn't stop examining. The question at the centre of my own work is a plain one. Who were you before the world told you who to be? Socrates put his questions out loud, to anyone he met, young or old.
A record from the client stories on our stories page. A lawyer's years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. The masterclass page asks whether you've ever answered "Who are you?" truthfully, after a lifetime of answering it with a name and a title. When you have an evening to give that question, receive the Who Am I? masterclass.