Addiction, Faith, And The Limits Of Willpower With Meghan O'Gieblyn

Why do we keep doing things we know we shouldn’t? And is that really a failure of will? Author Meghan O’Gieblyn spent years trying to answer that question, first in response to her struggle with alcoholism and her loss of faith, and then by means of Simone Weil, William James, and Iris Murdoch, who argue that the will is powerless over the things we want to change most. Listen as she speaks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about her new memoir, Will and Attention, which explores why paying attention does what effort alone can’t, why we can reason ourselves into doing destructive things, and why the choices that most shape our lives are the “choices in between the choices,” or the ones we barely notice making at all.

Listen to the episode here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of Will and Attention, published by Doubleday in October 2026, as well as God Human Animal Machine and Interior States. She writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, and other publications.

O’Gieblyn is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays have also been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies.

RELATED SOURCES

• Meghan O'Gieblyn's Website
• Will and Attention: A Memoir by Meghan O'Gieblyn on Amazon.com
• Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, translated by Arthur Wills, on Amazon.com
• Nobel Prize in Literature speech by William Faulkner
• The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1 by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by E. F. J. Payne, on Amazon.com
• “This is Water by David Foster Wallace“ (Full Transcript and Audio)
• The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by David McDuff, on Amazon.com
• The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch on Amazon.com
• Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith at EconLib
• Incentives Are for Losers (with Adam Mastroianni)
• Adam Mastroianni on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn
• "How We Wrestle Is Who We Are" by Brian Doyle at Awaken.org
• One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle on Amazon.com