Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, that’s really simple. I just end up writing stories about where I am, what I’m eating, what I’m looking at, where I’m walking, what language I’m living in, what stories I’m hearing. I think all writers are inspired by where they are. When I was writing The Poppy War trilogy, or at least when I started, I was living in Beijing. Then, when I started writing Babel, I was at Oxford. When I wrote Yellowface, this was during mid-2021, so we were all at home and largely existing on the internet, which was the worst place to be. Now I’m writing a book that is nominally set in hell but psychologically set in a PhD program. Rates of depression amongst graduate students — they measure as being very high today in the United States and also, I think, in England. Why is that? It feels like it should be this wonderful time in one’s life. You get to work with ideas. There’s some chance you’re not pressured to earn money — not true for everyone but for many people. And yet, rates of serious depression can be 25 percent or higher. You’re in graduate school now. How do you think about what’s going on there? Do you work with graduate students now?…

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