Introduction
During my late twenties, Tuesdays with Morrie was one of my favorite books. I read in multiple times and I wanted to think and love just like Morrie. I still admire and mostly agree with Morrie. But the book reads a lot different. Tuesdays with Morrie really appeals to a younger idealistic reader (me in the late 2000s).
After a decade plus more knowledge and experience, Morrie is a lot more cliche and shallow. Morrie's personality, loving nature, and positive mindset make readers fall in love with him. He clearly had large impacts with the people around him. Morrie was a five star person and he deserves all the fame he received.
I wanted to write a reflection explaining why I love Tuesdays with Morrie, like I did for Why I Love Into the Wild and Why I Love Siddhartha, but after several attempts, I'm just not that interested in Tuesdays with Morrie. I'm a lot more interested in diving deeper in Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman and moving on to rereading another book I used to love.
I've demoted Tuesdays with Morrie to a book I really like. Below are a few excepts I shared or discussed with my friend AJ, who I am rereading our favorite books with.
On Marriage
“In this culture, it’s so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that. But the poor kids today, either they’re too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced. They don’t know what they want in a partner. They don’t know who they are themselves—so how can they know who they’re marrying?
It’s sad, because a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well. Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful...
There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike. And the biggest one of those values: your belief in the importance of your marriage.
Personally, I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.”
The poor kid today is a highlight of the cliche and simplistic view. And his ideas on the value of a loving relationship isn't very deep or groundbreaking. It isn't anything your grandmother couldn't tell you.
With that said, the advice here is good. The values must not be alike, but I'd strongly encourage the values to be alike. It makes solving later problems, raising children, deciding how to live or where to live, and making big decisions less painful. But many readers may already be married. Morrie's audience at the time was a married man.
The value of the importance of the marriage. This is a great simple idea. "The biggest one of those values: your belief in the importance of your marriage." When times get rough, this could save marriages. What isn't stated is how to achieve and maintain this. Saying it is one thing, but how do you keep it and live it? Morrie has suggestion on that in plenty of places in the book: being loving, forgiving, and communicating well to name a few.
I don't accept the missing out if you don't try marriage. There's an opportunity cost. You're always missing out! Maybe if a couple can survive middle age, there is a large payout. I believe that is possible, and it might be enough to justify the risk of marriage. If you add the argument for having kids, it's probably less risky and provides greater rewards. I suspect the payout on raising kids is one of the best ROI people can make.
Exploitation
The author Mitch Albom summarizes Morrie's goal to never exploit people twice in the book. Here they both are stripped of their context.
"He made another vow that he kept to the end of his life: he would never do any work that exploited someone else, and he would never allow himself to make money off the sweat of others."
"Having rejected medicine, law, and business, Morrie had decided the research world would be a place where he could contribute without exploiting others."
This comes off to me a combination of elitist and naive. Morrie has the privilege to be a professor. He was lucky enough to have the upbringing and ability to stay in school until finishing his PhD. He went to good schools. He somewhat randomly was hired to do research in mental health institutions in the 1950s and that lead him to write three books on the subject. And he eventually became a tenured professor of sociology.
Morrie's ideas here are my motivation for Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. I know Friedman was an advocate of the benefits of voluntary cooperation between individuals. The stereotype is sociologist are Marxist and don't understand economics. I'm tempted to make that assumption about Morrie, but rather, I'm going to investigate Friedman's claims further and see how they have held up to economic research the last few decades.
The Eighth Tuesday
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