Social Roles and Meaningful Lives

Abstract

Many educators are also academic researchers and activists. This diversity can enrich our lives in important ways, allowing us to experience distinct domains of life and apply insights across them. Nevertheless, the responsibilities connected to these roles sometimes conflict in ways that undermine the meaningfulness of an educator’s life by undermining the coherence of its narrative structure. In this discussion, I argue that conflicting responsibilities connected to these, and other roles can undermine the meaningfulness of our lives, respond to the most pressing objections to this argument, and then offer a general approach for navigating these conflicts.