How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis

UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik's October 2015 cover-magazine essay. At 50, "falling apart" through divorce, depression, and the unraveling of her sense of self, she turns to Hume's argument that the self is just "a bundle of perceptions" — and traces the still-debated possibility that Hume encountered this idea via Jesuit missionary networks at the Royal College of La Flèche, which had links through Charles François Dolu to Buddhist sources in Siam. The essay is at once intellectual history, personal memoir, and a quiet argument that the Eastern-roots-of-Western-Enlightenment story isn't as Eurocentric as we tell it. Note: Atlantic blocked direct fetching; this summary is built from Gopnik's own bibliography, the Wikidata entry, and multiple secondary sources.