7 a.m. WAKE UP
I think, therefore I am - the alarm has just gone off and there's René Descartes trying to help you define the nature of existence. Philosophy can be a bit heavy-handed.
But is consciousness everything? The dreams of your unconscious linger on into your waking phase - not a bad thing, if clear-headed reality seems a bit too cold and concrete. Walter Benjamin said you shouldn't eat breakfast because it dissolves your dreams too quickly.
Waking, Mr. Smith suggests, can be a highly creative moment, "the twilight zone between consciousness and unconsciousness." Write a poem while you're still drifting through grogginess, before donning your work duds and recognizing the power of the outside world, a.k.a. Sigmund Freud's superego: Each sock you put on is a reminder that half your being is other people and their expectations (or your expectations of them).
8 a.m. COMMUTE
The numbing isolation of the mass commute is a perfect time to go cerebral. You're stuck in traffic and cursing those inevitable red lights: Why not see them as an acceptable model of fairness, in which the competing demands of "stop" and "go" have been outsourced to a disembodied judge who is above it all? The best authority, reasoned the pessimistic Thomas Hobbes, is abstract and disinterested, free from human conflict.
"If we could develop traffic-light systems in other parts of our lives," Mr. Smith says, "we'd probably be a lot better off."
Or maybe you're packed into a subway car with your nose crammed into someone's armpit, desperately fantasizing that you're somewhere else. Why not take Friedrich Nietzsche's advice instead? Once we start to fantasize, he argued, we are failing ourselves. Better to make ordinary life so tolerable that we can bear repeating it over and over again.
11 a.m. GOOF OFF
You just got to work and already you want to play hooky. It doesn't hurt to have the backing of John Stuart Mill, who thought individual liberty was as good as it gets.
But then Mill messed it up by insisting that our personal freedom couldn't harm others. So when we sneak off, are we hurting anyone - violating our employment contract, forcing co-workers to cover? Or do we justify it by saying we're redressing the unfairness of capitalism (nice try!). True goofing-off, Mr. Smith says, has to be guilt-free, a liberating act that rises above the daily grind.
If that sounds too demanding, there's always Seinfeld's George Costanza, who concocted ingenious schemes to shirk off while feigning a workplace presence - the sleeping alcove below the office desk or the car left in the parking lot that vouches for on-the-job dedication even as you disappear on your own.
6 p.m. SHOP
Could there be anything less philosophical than going to the mall? "Shopping is our least noble activity," Mr. Smith agrees. "It's about spending, and self-indulgent spending at that, a narcissistic appeal to want rather than need."
But it's also good material for the philosophical mind, a form of exchange that is bound to stimulate thoughts on the meaning of existence. Thinkers should be in the world, observing "real life," even when it carries an air of controlled-climate unreality.
Sure, sitting at a Left Bank café watching Parisians buy a baguette might seem more romantic or profound, but the synthetic reality of the shopping mall is just as much a truth of our world as 1940s Paris was to Sartre.
Neither "reality" is more real, and it's just as likely, Mr. Smith contends, that people will feel romantic longings for the mall's perfected artifice a century from now.
7 p.m. WORK OUT
Socrates liked to hang out at the gym, and not just for hard bodies - maybe all that repetitive physicality lets the mind float free. So pound the treadmill and let the questions abound: Are we being regimented to fascist perfection? Why can't we escape this need for physical order and laze about to our cholesterol-laden heart's content? If the gym frees the body from the mind, why endure a gruelling workout under the eye of some body expert? Better just to jog outdoors and be blissfully lost in the discomfort zone of elevated cardio.
And yet, Mr. Smith says, soft and sallow intellectuals would do well to share in the gym's body-consciousness: "It lets you zone out of being a mental being, because no matter how clever you are, it doesn't stack up in a gym. It's actually good to put ourselves in a different context, where we risk being losers."
9 p.m. WATCH TV
Yes, we all despise TV, at least when we start to contemplate it, as opposed to watching it addictively. The comparison goes back to Plato: People chained in a cave seeing shadows of existence believe they see reality. Isn't it even more extreme when we're chained in our rec-room caves watching reality TV, a figment of a figment?
But hold on, Mr. Smith says: Consider TV for the transformative miracle it is, bringing live images into our home in the most natural way (Go Canada!). Unlike many forms of culture that transpire in dark places with a reverent hush of observance, TV is noisy and democratic and everyday. We argue with it, talk about it with fellow couch potatoes, even eat and drink in its presence, as if we were toasting civic engagement in the Italian piazza.
A philosophical warning, though: TV, like alcohol, is perhaps best not consumed alone