Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

Russ Roberts (0:02)

Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006

Our e-mail address is maile at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is September 14th, 2026 and my guest is author Meghan O'Gieblin. Her latest book, The Subject of Today's Conversation, is Will and Attention, a memoir. Meghan, welcome to EconTalk.

Meghan O'Gieblyn (0:50)

Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Russ Roberts (0:52)

Now, this isn't an easy book to summarize. It is a memoir, but its themes go deep into questions of addiction, rationality, religion, what it means to lead a good life. And just to set the stage, tell us a little bit about your personal story, which is the memoir part, which is the thread that runs through the book. You've had some interesting experiences.

Yeah.

Meghan O'Gieblyn (1:16)

So I was, I guess the first thing to say is I grew up in a very religious home. My parents were evangelical fundamentalists. And so that was a big part of my early childhood. I went to Moody Bible Institute to study theology. When I was in college, Moody is one of the oldest and most conservative evangelical colleges in the country.

And ended up, I had a lot of good experiences there, but I also ended up having a faith crisis, largely around the problem of evil. And I left the school after two years. I ended up leaving the Christian faith altogether, and had this period of sort of being in the wilderness, so to speak, where I was, you know, fell into, I was drinking a lot, I was working at bars, I fell into an addiction, was not really connected to anybody from my former life. And I ended up getting sober when I was 28 years old. And really found my way back into a sense of community and just a much more stable, healthy life, largely through my participation in 12 step programs. And yeah, and you know, that whole experience gave me my life back, or maybe gave me my life for the first time. I was sober for 11 years. I got married, I started writing during that time.

And then, you know, around the late 2010s, so I don't know, 2018, 2019, I became really attracted to Catholicism for reasons that were unclear to me at the time. I had not identified as a Christian for over a decade. I was not, you know, I called myself an atheist, but I found myself drawn back to attending Mass every day. I started talking with a priest and became very close to converting. In the end, I didn't.

And then shortly after that, I, you know, for reasons that were totally baffling, returned to drinking. And I drank for about a year in secret without telling anybody. And this was, you know, after I had spent years, you know, working with other alcoholics, you know, telling my story from the podium of church basements, talking about how much better my life was. So it was this completely irrational in both cases, this return to Christianity, which had not worked the first time and didn't work the second time. And then also this return to drinking. And so that's the book begins as I was sort of coming out of those experiences and trying to make sense of them and figuring out this problem of like, why do we keep doing these things that we know we shouldn't do? Is it a problem of willpower?

And yeah, that was really the starting place for the book.

Russ Roberts (4:13)

And I want to start with the quote, and we're going to talk somewhat about a thinker that I always thought was pronounced Simone Weil, W-E-I-L, but the sophisticated people say Simone Weil. So if you hear Weil, we're talking about a woman who was born Jewish, who becomes deeply attracted to Catholicism, does not convert though, finds it, as is in your story, a bridge too far for a variety of reasons. Maybe we'll get to those, maybe we won't. But you start early in the book with a really amazing quote from her, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And that's the quote. It's a seemingly simple sentence.

A chunk of the book is trying to untangle what that actually means. So take a crack at that.

Meghan O'Gieblyn (5:16)