This undercuts the quality of relationships (manifested in a distrust of strangers and status anxiety, for example). The resulting stress, in turn, is a major determinant of illness and chronic health problems.

I’d like to offer two final pieces of advice for everybody who is ready to put the ideas proposed in these pages into action. First, realize that there are more people out there like you. Lots and lots of people.

If there’s one place, then, where we can intervene in a way that will pay dividends for society down the road, it’s in the classroom. Yet that’s barely happening. All the big debates in education are about format. About delivery. About didactics. Education is consistently presented as a means of adaptation – as a lubricant to help you glide more ef

Now it’s up to us to reconsider these old questions. What is growth? What is progress? Or even more fundamentally, what makes life truly worthwhile?

When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview.

Mental illness, obesity, pollution, crime – in terms of the GDP, the more the better. That’s also why the country with the planet’s highest per capita GDP, the United States, also leads in social problems.

we need a good dose of irritation, frustration, and discontent to propel us forward. If the Land of Plenty is a place where everybody is happy, then it’s also a place steeped in apathy.

And second, my advice is to cultivate a thicker skin. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s what.

Let’s rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago.24 A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders … They’re all crazy dreams – but for how much longer?