How a top flight litigation lawyer got back his zest for life
Daniel Kalderimis tells us about his experience with depression and how he turned to philosophy to help him find meaning in his life again.
As far as legal careers go, Te Herenga Waka law alum Daniel Kalderimis has a lot to be proud of—he’s a King’s Counsel, a Fulbright scholar, has taught at Columbia University, and works as a top flight international litigator. But this isn’t going to be a typical Law School alumni profile, the kind where the subject talks about all the amazing things they’ve achieved in the legal sphere since graduating. Instead, Daniel wants to talk about how turning to philosophy helped him find meaning in his life again.
Daniel was making rapid progress up the career ladder and had (and has) a loving young family. From the outside, life was looking good. But in his early forties, he felt the colour drain from his world.
“For me, this experience of depression felt like being on a corkscrew, where I was getting more and more stuck in the grooves of my own head and thoughts. I felt less and less alive to all the things happening around me—there was a veil between me and the outside world which was thickened by all of these things that I was thinking and worrying about; trying to control and perfect. I could see that my real problem was that I was trapped in my own head and I felt stuck,” says Daniel.
“All lawyers know that there are very high rates of depression in the legal profession. Everyone knows that we should be creating safer and happier and more supportive and more fulfilling workplaces. But I feel like the tools we're typically offered are a bit like ointments — we’re told to keep striving to achieve and then take some time off on a Thursday afternoon for self-care. But perhaps we need to look harder at our striving itself, and how this fits in with what really matters in life.”
Daniel knew there was a place for medical treatment to tackle depression, and he sought psychological help too. But he wanted to get his head around all the other advice that was out there about how to help himself, so he set about researching. “A lot of advice seemed fairly sensible. But I was not satisfied with prescriptions, without also understanding the theory of living well to which they belonged. And here I was a bit lost. Did I believe in the power of meditation? Did I think that Stoicism from the time of the Roman emperors was a useful reference point? I needed coherence but, when I stopped to reflect, I was lacking it.”
After dabbling in the wellness movement, Daniel wasn’t finding the answers or fulfilment he was looking for. He did, however, feel a strong pull back towards philosophy, which he’d studied as part of his undergraduate degrees at Te Herenga Waka (he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and English alongside a Bachelor of Laws with Honours, graduating first in his year).
“Just as I do in my litigation work, I wanted to develop a ‘case theory’ for my life,” he says. “The more I looked, the more I could see similar threads of wisdom arising in different contexts. For me, the answers lay in George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, bits of western Buddhism and bits of modern Stoicism. All have noticed the way that humans are easily absorbed by the stories produced by our central nervous systems, how our thoughts grow out of our feelings and that we need to somehow guard against our small selves shrinking the world to fit.”
Not wanting to lose track of his insights, Daniel wrote it all down. “I started writing each lunchtime, just 15 minutes a day. I pretended to write a letter to my three daughters with the idea of offering a series of disparate thoughts on life. Over the course of about a year, lines of coherence started to emerge, and things became clearer to me.”
Towards the end of that year, he spotted an article about Deborah Coddington, who was setting up her publishing house Ugly Hill Press—she had said she didn’t want to be pitched any ‘misery memoirs’. “And I just thought, well, I don't want to be a self-indulgent writer of a misery memoir either. So I gave her a call and within two weeks I had a publishing contract.”
Daniel says the book, Zest: Climbing from Depression to Philosophy is not a memoir. It’s definitely not a self-help book, either.
"It's a personal essay," he says.
What first manifested as a medical event made me ask deeper questions about how to live well. I was absolutely not interested in getting stuck in my thoughts again and writing something that had nothing to do with my actual life. I was interested in whether and how I could change my outlook on life.
Daniel Kalderimis
Daniel maintains an academic interest—he’s an honorary lecturer at the Law School, teaching a course in civil procedure and advocacy—and firmly believes that what Te Herenga Waka has given him is an essential element of who he is today.
“The critical thinking, curiosity and engagement that I developed as a student at university has been crucial for me,” he says. “Philosophy has always been one of my great loves; returning to it by writing Zest has re-anchored me to my humanity and reconnected me to the world around me. It’s also given me a much more ethical base for—and is deeply important to—how I do my job now.”
Zest, which is already in its second print run, has been well received by those both within and outside the legal community. A recent review in The Spinoff by Te Herenga Waka Emeritus English Professor Heidi Thomson, entitled “George Eliot and Daniel Kalderimis and me: on the healing power of Middlemarch”, neatly summarises the kind of philosophical wisdom Daniel was able to extract and use from literature and how it can be practically useful for helping us live better.
"Some people who’ve read it like the idea of a lawyer writing a book on depression; others like the idea of a man talking about feelings. There are also people who like the idea of lived philosophy and feel that it should be more prominent in mainstream discourse—they’ve enjoyed reading about someone trying to apply philosophy to their own life. And there have been people who like the idea of a litigator looking at their life in a way that wasn't all about awards and achievements,” says Daniel.
“But for me the gift of this whole experience—depression and turning to philosophy for answers—is that I can now see with clarity how so much of what had driven me was narrow and based on trying to find meaning on the next rung of a career ladder. But the truth was that the ladder was just a wheel—you never reach the top; you just do the next thing. I could also see how my narrowed perspective was getting in the way of finding real connections with others, trapping me further inside my own head. It just felt such a dissatisfying way to live through the world.”
Daniel says he now strives to apply his renewed outlook to every aspect of his life.
What I try and do in my litigation work is not so much to tell, but to see through the story—to me, that’s what real justice is about. It's important for people to see issues in their entirety, especially in the litigation process, where stories can always seduce and distract.
Daniel Kalderimis
Daniel hopes Zest is a useful resource for people, not just those in the law profession. “To me the real value in it is that it hopefully explains the nagging doubt a lot of people have that the achievement ladder they're on is not giving them what they need—they probably need some other dimension to be fulfilled,” says Daniel.
“The dimension of religion that most people used to subscribe to isn't the prism for many people in our modern world. And I think most people know that wellness-speak will only get you so far. So, there's a lack and it's not obvious what should fill it. I think philosophy remains a pretty good candidate. I hope what I’ve shared in my book will help others, especially those touched by depression, to find their own answers get their zest for life back, too.”