Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
There's not a lot to say about this book (I lie, look at this post length!). It is short, a very quick read if you're a reader. I do have some criticisms which I'll discuss because I enjoy being critical.
Mitch reconnects with his former professor Morrie, who is dying from ALS, and they discuss the meaning of life.
I recommend this book. It makes you think about life and what's meaningful. It encourages meaningful and thoughtful reflection. It advocates for goodness, for love, for kindness.
I might have read this book in high school, but then I definitely read it in my early 20s. I believe it hit me fairly differently now than it did back then. Back then I had a much less developed perspective on the challenges and meaning of life, so this book took the role of a wise guru who knows what's right. Now, it strikes me as just a man, who's speaking about his own life, his own experiences, his own sense of meaning - even if much of the language is presented as a teaching lesson to be taken as truth.
On this reading, it was definitely a reflective experience, a lot of nodding along, some criticism of things I didn't have the breadth to criticize a decade ago, and just a slightly stressful experience for reasons I don't totally understand. Any kind of non-fiction or serious book tends to cause me stress, which sucks because I quite like learning things, but I don't like being uneasy.
I have one major criticism of this book, and one more minor one.
The major one, which I've already touched on. The book is written in a prescriptive way: Morrie knows what's important in life, listen to him and take his lessons as your truth.
This tone shines brightly early in the book when Mitch is discussing the OJ Simpson trial and celebrity gossip magazines. The idea put forward by Morrie and by Mitch is that the OJ Simpson trial is not meaningful. That people are wasting their time by spending hours and hours watching the trial, something that has no bearing on their personal lives. The idea is that they should instead be spending this time on "meaningful" things like spending time with loved ones and pursuing passions (but not to the detriment of connecting with people you love).
The prescriptive nature of this perspective is bothersome to me. I watch Olexa, a YouTube content creator who plays Roguelike games. He has like a 15 episode series on Mewgenics so far, and I love watching it. I don't find it meaningful. Its not helping me connect with others. I'm not wanting a parasocial relationship. Its not helping me in my life.
But I like it. I want it to be part of my life, because I just simply enjoy it.
Morrie & Mitch's prescriptive perspective just doesn't acknowledge the reality that ... different people have different tastes and we don't all want our lives to take the same shape.
This is a major criticism I have, but it doesn't de-value the book for me at all. It doesn't keep me from appreciating the reflection encouraged by the book. It doesn't stop me from thinking about what's meaningful to me. It is something I was entirely unaware of when I read it a decade ago.
And a minor (or less major) criticism.
Morrie is extremely privileged. He has a wealth of people who love him, a wife who cares for him, money (or health insurance benefits) for medicine, for modifications to his home (which he owns, I believe), for special furniture, for a hospice nurse, for all the things that make dying better. He is also an accomplished sociology professor, and gets a spotlight on national TV (3-episode miniseries).
He speaks a fair bit about how materialistic our culture is, which I do agree with. And he talks about the issues with pursuing your career to unreasonable ends. I generally agree with his perspective here too. The criticism is really about the fact that his life worked out very well for him economically. He wasn't rich, but he was well-off. He lived well and had the wealth to be cared for in his final days as he didn't work. He also loved his job and from my understanding did give a lot to it, working until about 6 months before he died, even though he was already getting much sicker.
The TLDR is that he was successful in the material things, which gave him the privilege of not caring about material things. I don't think this is cause to dismiss his perspective, and I think his perspective is extremely valuable and worth considering.
I just think it's good to keep in mind the context of his life.
And my big mental reframing of this book was significant for me. As I already said - a decade ago, I accepted this a wise figure giving prescriptive advice. Now, I see it as a story about a man (or two men because the book is about Mitch as much as it is about Morrie) who is sharing what's meaningful to him. No matter the language used, this is still merely one man's story (Morrie's story) about what's important to him, and another man's interpretation (Mitch's interpretation) of that story.