Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

When we reduce complex ideas to nouns and categories in order to navigate swiftly through them, we start to become mindless. The important notion of transcendence, for example, is reduced to words like ‘God’ that no longer stand for anything and can be easily discredited. In the meantime, we might turn to addictive behaviour or waste our time on di

The Aristotelian telos (the idea that human life moves forward towards a goal) had returned, and we could now look gladly forwards rather than only backwards to Adam’s shame; there was now an acceptance of the idea that we might employ our virtue to move towards happiness. God was no longer the austere figure of predestination; He now bestows Grace

We try to fit in, and we neither convince ourselves that we do, nor, we suspect, those around us. At those times, what makes us different seems only to be the crushingly disappointing absence of what bonds everyone else together. Mill says that this difference is something to be celebrated. We may not have what they have, and this is a very good th

Armstrong, meanwhile, makes a refreshing point. He says we should pay attention to what we need. He emphatically does not mean by this that we should simply be frugal. Instead, as part of a considered life, he suggests we become more aware of what our priorities are: what we need to flourish. Some commodities will help us do that, and they may inde

According to Freud’s model, we seek to satisfy various unconscious desires created during early childhood but unfortunately must submit to the demands of civilisation. This tension denies us the fulfilment of our true, animal-like needs, and we are pulled between the two opposing drives: our aims, and the demands of society.

The pictures or voice might refer to the past (if we’re feeling bad about something that has happened, even a split second ago), or the future (if we’re frightened of something that might happen, like a conversation or meeting we’re dreading). These intermediary thoughts step in and interpret external events as a good reason to feel bad, mad or sca

Plato, as we’ve just seen, had set out his ethical system whereby such ethical notions as goodness, virtue and justice were identified as far-off, objective concepts, known to us only by their pale imitations that we are able to perceive here on Earth. No amount of human introspection could bring us closer to these eternal truths; instead, it was t

They can understand that entreaty for what it is: a way for people to make themselves feel more comfortable when faced with the death of another. It might be merely a way of avoiding an awkward subject, or a way of evading one’s own fears about death, or a desperate clinging to a hope for a cure, but ultimately it serves only the living and denies

Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways correctly) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now. We join the dots to tell one tale when we consider how, for example, we came to this point in our career, another when we consider how we developed our psychological foibles or stre