The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates said this at his own trial, knowing it would cost him his life. What kind of examination did he mean?
Not introspection in the modern therapeutic sense. Socrates meant something more ruthless: the willingness to question your foundational assumptions, to follow an argument wherever it leads, to discover that you do not know what you thought you knew.
The Socratic method was a form of intellectual midwifery. He asked questions — apparently simple ones — until his interlocutor discovered that their confident beliefs were riddled with contradiction. What is courage? What is justice? What is love?
I know that I know nothing. This is the beginning of wisdom, not its absence.
The examined life is not a comfortable life. But it is, Socrates insisted, the only one that earns the name human.