The School of Life

Ian Leslie on Why We Lie

Imagine, for a moment, attempting to get through a day in which everyone told the truth to you, and you reciprocated. Over breakfast you ask your partner what he’s looking at on his phone. “Pictures of my ex-girlfriend,’ he replies. ‘I still love her.’ Having dumped a mug of hot coffee in his lap you set off for work, and bump into a friend who has recently given birth. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ asks your friend, as you peer into the pram. Compelled to respond truthfully, you say, ‘No. He look likes the lovechild of Eric Pickles and Andrew Marr.’ Your friend pushes off, never to speak to you again.

At the office, you attend your team’s weekly status meeting. ‘How are you, Norman?’ you ask your colleague as he takes the seat next to yours. Rather than say ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Norman launches into a long and detailed description of his marriage problems. The boss arrives and asks why the deadline you’ve been working to has been missed by two weeks. You explain that an unusual combination of great weather, must-see sporting events and your own inherent laziness has prevented the project from moving forward. The boss nods, and says he has already made enquiries with HR about the possibility of firing you. 

In the evening you go for a drink with an old friend. She tells you that you’ve put on a lot of weight recently and you tell her that last summer her husband confessed to you that he had a one-night stand with a male colleague while on a business trip to Hamburg. As the evening reaches its tear-stained end, you look at your watch. It’s gone midnight: the day of truth is over. “Well, I must be going.” you say to your friend. “It’s been wonderful to see you.” 

We hate liars, and lying. “Liar” is one of the worst insults you can hurl at a person. For good reason too: lies can corrode trust and destroy relationships. But, alone amongst the major ethical transgressions, lying is something all of us practice, and on a daily basis. The psychologist Bella De Paulo found that people tell, on average, 1.5 lies a day. Another researcher established that two people will tell three lies within ten minutes of meeting each other. We hate thieves and murderers too  - but at least most of us can say, hand on heart, that we don’t steal things or kill people, most weeks at least.

After half a million years of human conversation, we're not really any closer to establishing whether it's ever OK to lie to each other. But perhaps we can start by investigating why we need to lie in the first place.

 

Ian Leslie is a journalist and author who has examined deeply our mixed-up relationship with lying in his book ‘Born Liars. Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit’ (Quercus, 2011). His previous book, ‘To Be President’ (Politicos, 2008), was described by Adam Boulton as 'brilliantly capturing the drama and emotion of Obama's successful run for the White House' and was extracted by Granta. He regularly appears as an analyst of American politics on Sky and the BBC. He has written about politics, culture, marketing, and psychology for Prospect, the Guardian and The Times.

Ian will be hosting the event ‘Why We Lie’ on Thursday 2 February 2012.  More information and details of how to book can be found here.

Charles Fernyhough on How Reliable Are Our Memories?

Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are.

It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. When I cast back to an event from my past – let's say the first time I ever swam backstroke unaided in the sea – I don't just conjure up dates and times and places (what psychologists call "semantic memory"). I do much more than that. I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and seaside smells. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of "now" intervene.

This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. The sort of memory I have described is known as "autobiographical memory", because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives. It is distinguished from semantic memory, which is memory for facts, and other kinds of implicit long-term memory, such as your memory for complex actions such as riding a bike or playing a saxophone.

When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. But this view of memory is quite wrong. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like.

We know this from many different sources of evidence. Psychologists have conducted studies on eyewitness testimony, for example, showing how easy it is to change someone's memories by asking misleading questions. If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events that never actually happened. These recollections can often be very vivid, as in the case of a study by Kim Wade at the University of Warwick. She colluded with the parents of her student participants to get photos from the undergraduates' childhoods, and to ascertain whether certain events, such as a ride in a hot-air balloon, had ever happened. She then doctored some of the images to show the participant's childhood face in one of these never-experienced contexts, such as the basket of a hot-air balloon in flight. Two weeks after they were shown the pictures, about half of the participants "remembered" the childhood balloon ride, producing some strikingly vivid descriptions, and many showed surprise when they heard that the event had never occurred. In the realms of memory, the fact that it is vivid doesn't guarantee that it really happened.

Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. The term "flashbulb memory" describes those exceptionally vivid memories of momentous events that seem burned in by the fierce emotions they invoke. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a consortium of researchers mobilised to gather people's stories about how they heard the news. When followed up three years later, almost half of the testimonies had changed in at least one key detail. For example, people would remember hearing the news from the TV, when actually they initially told the researchers that they had heard it through word of mouth.

What accounts for this unreliability? One factor must be that remembering is always re-remembering. If I think back to how I heard the awful news about 9/11 (climbing out of a swimming pool in Spain), I know that I am not remembering the event so much as my last act of remembering it. Like a game of Chinese whispers, any small error is likely to be propagated along the chain of remembering. The sensory impressions that I took from the event are likely to be stored quite accurately. It is the assembly – the resulting edit – that might not bear much resemblance to how things actually were.

When we look at how memories are constructed by the brain, the unreliability of memory makes perfect sense. In storyboarding an autobiographical memory, the brain combines fragments of sensory memory with a more abstract knowledge about events, and reassembles them according to the demands of the present. The memory researcher Martin Conway has described how two forces go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light.

One of the most interesting writers on memory, Virginia Woolf, shows this process in action. In her autobiographical essay, A Sketch of the Past, she tells us that one of her earliest memories is of the pattern of flowers on her mother's dress, seen close-up as she rested on her lap during a train journey to St Ives. She initially links the memory to the outward journey to Cornwall, noting that it is convenient to do so because it points to what was actually her earliest memory: lying in bed in her St Ives nursery listening to the sound of the sea. But Woolf also acknowledges an inconvenient fact. The quality of the light in the carriage suggests that it is evening, making it more likely that the event happened on the journey back from St Ives to London. The force of correspondence makes her want to stick to the facts; the force of coherence wants to tell a good story.

How many more of our memories are a story to suit the self? There can be no doubt that our current emotions and beliefs shape the memories that we create. It is hard to remember the political beliefs of our pasts, for example, when so much has changed in the world and in ourselves. How many of us can accurately recall the euphoria at Tony Blair's election in 1997? When our present-day emotions change, so do our memories. Julian Barnes describes this beautifully in his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, when a shift in his protagonist Tony's feelings towards his former lover's parents unlocks new memories of their relationship. "But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? … I don't know if there's a scientific explanation for this … All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me."

Of all the memories we cherish, those from childhood are possibly the most special. Few of us will have reliable memories from before three or four years of age, and recollections from before that time need to be treated with scepticism. When you think about the special cognitive tricks involved in autobiographical memory, it's perhaps no surprise that it takes a while for children to start doing it right. Many factors seem to be critical in children's emergence from childhood amnesia, including language and narrative abilities. When we are able to encode our experience in words, it becomes much easier to put it together into a memory. Intriguingly, though, the boundary of childhood amnesia shifts as you get closer to it. As a couple of recent studies have shown, if you ask children about what they remember from infancy, they remember quite a bit further back than they are likely to do as adults.

There are implications to the unreliability of childhood memories. A recent report commissioned by the British Psychological Society warned professionals working in the legal system not to accept early memories (dating from before the age of three) without corroborating evidence. One particular difficulty with early memories is their susceptibility to contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video. I'm sure that several of my childhood memories are actually memories of seeing myself in photos. When we look back into the past, we are always doing so through a prism of intervening selves. That makes it all the more important for psychologists studying memory to look for confirming evidence when asking people to recall their pasts.

And yet these untrustworthy memories are among the most cherished we have. Memories of childhood are often made out to have a particular kind of authenticity; we think they must be pure because we were cognitively so simple back then. We don't associate the slipperiness of memory with the guilelessness of youth. When you read descriptions of people's very early memories, you see that they often function as myths of creation. Your first memory is special because it represents the point when you started being who you are. In Woolf's case, that moment in her bed in the St Ives nursery was the moment she became a conscious being. "If life has a base that it stands upon," she wrote, "if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory."

What should we do about this troublesome mental function? For one thing, I don't think we should stop valuing it. Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does.

That's how I think we should value memory: as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. It's important not to push the analogy with storytelling too far, but it's a valuable one. Writing about her novel, Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel has explained how she brought the protagonist Thomas Cromwell alive for the reader by giving him vivid memories. When writers create imaginary memories for their characters, they do a similar kind of thing to what we all do when we make a memory. They weave together bits of their own personal experience, emotions and sensory impressions and the minutiae of specific contexts, and tailor them into a story by hanging them on to a framework of historical fact. They do all that while making them fit the needs of the narrative, serving the story as much as they serve truth.

To emphasise its narrative nature is not to undermine memory's value. It is simply to be realistic about this everyday psychological miracle. If we can be more honest about memory's quirks, we can get along with it better. When I think back to my first attempt at solo swimming, it doesn't bother me that I have probably got some of the details wrong. It might be a fiction, but it's my fiction, and I treasure it. Memory is like that. It makes storytellers of us all.

 

Charles Fernyhough is a founding faculty member of The School of Life.  This piece first appeared in The Guardian on Friday 13 January here. His book on autobiographical memory, "Pieces of Light: How we Imagine the Past and Remember the Future", is published by Profile Books in July. You can pre-order it here. He is the author of The Baby in the Mirror (Granta), and a reader in psychology at Durham University. You can follow him on Twitter at @cfernyhough

Elke Lahousse and Project In-Between on the Battle of Toblerones

"Mama always said life is like a box of chocolate. You never know what you're gonna get." It's a corny film quote, but Forest Gump knew it. The many varieties in chocolate are a useful metaphor for describing the different forces at work in the world. Even scientists use chocolate images in their studies. So I discovered this week during a social psychology course at the London School of Economics.

In professor Sandra Jovchelovitch's class I learned, to my own surprise, that I'm a Toblerone bar. Before you start giggling thinking you're probably more like a Godiva truffle; you're not. You're also a Toblerone. More than that, life turns out to be a battle of Toblerones. 

In 1999, two psychologists named Martin Bauer and George Gaskell published a paper in which they had developed 'the Toblerone model of social representation'. Social representation - a field of study within social psychology - refers to the values, behaviour, and ideas a group of people live by. Those ingredients together form a triangle; minimum two persons or subjects (S) who are concerned with an object or idea (O).

You can find the whole study online, but to simplify things it's enough to know that a triangle stands for an attitude of a group of people towards an object or idea. Within the triangle different dynamics are at work. To this basic triangle a time dimension is also added, the past and the future, because we might change our beliefs over time. The whole 'pack' of Toblerone demonstrates that we are not just part of one group, but of different groups at the same time.

"This model is being used by many people in marketing who study audiences", said Professor Jovchelovitch, who also directs the master in social psychology. "And by designers who want to understand how people use an object, so they can redesign it and make it more user friendly."

But could triangular chocolates also help us to understand where the Occupy movement was going? Or what the London riots last summer were really about? "Whenever you want to understand how social movements are shaped, this is a useful model", said the Professor.

So, how?

She explained that the Occupy movement, or the Arab Spring, often get criticised because the protesters can't exactly express a list of their wants. On top of that, the enduring economic crisis was putting us in a state of chaos without a strong alternative. That's all scary, but according to the professor it was exactly how social movements have always emerged in the past. It's what happens when different groups with different values clash. It's what happens when Toblerones fight. "Protesters have never had a new manifesto immediately ready. They're only very unhappy with the present. The Toblerone model helps us understand that a new set of values and opinions gets produced along the way. You see that process if you would freeze a movement at different moments in time. It's about naming, adjusting, categorising."

A crisis is a war of Toblerones, then? And order is the victory of the strongest triangle? The Professor confirmed. Right now we were seeing many groups of new social actors, and their actions, without a clear set of representations, pushing old Toblerones and the old leaders. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, she said, we're definitely leaving behind the world view created at the end of the 20th century. The old actors see this newness emerging, and find it very unfamiliar compared to what they know and want. "That's for example why the 'Occupy Toblerone' here in London clashed around Christmas with the 'Toblerone of the church of England'. The protesters were camping around St Paul's cathedral and one bishop wanted them to leave. But they're still there."

Today's changes are about the future making function of Toblerones, explained Jovchelovitch. It always requires a battle. And it takes time. "But it's extremely energising to realise and witness what's happening. Young people are asking big questions again. Our children will live in different structures."

The Professor could go on forever. Comparing Toblerones to volcanos, and how social movements of the 21st century differed from those of the 20th century because they lacked clear centres of eruption. Or about Chinese and North Korean Toblerones. Or the fact that each person is always part of different Toblerone bars at the same time. "We always relate to different people and objects simultaneously, forming triangles with them. As a Professor, I'm passionate about teaching and research. But I also love gardening, baking, or fashion."

After class I couldn't help but seeing Toblerones all over London. On the bus, on their bikes, at the sushi shop. I wanted to ask people how their Toblerone exactly looked like. That would have been the weirdest pick-up line ever.

Elke Lahousse is a belgian journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, here, here, and here.

Illustration by Sarah Vanbelle www.sarahvanbelle.be

Scott Parker on Bringing About The Joys of Running

The truth is that racing, even the purest version of racing—against myself—wouldn’t be enough to keep me running if there weren’t something about the activity itself that I found deeply satisfying. A race, after all, is focused on ends, be they victories or personal records, and how much do we ask of our ends when we ask them to bear the weight of our means? Do we really expect them to hold? I want the ends of my pursuits to be the means themselves. That’s about the best definition of happiness I know.

So what then keeps me running after all these years? It must be, I want it to be, I’m trying to convince myself it is, the running itself, the joy that comes from running qua running. I think that’s right. What else could bring me back and keep bringing me back to running?

Except, I hear the objection already, for it is sometimes mine: there’s no singular experience of running. The subjective experiences of running—what it really feels like to be a runner running—manifest in myriad feelings, and to the extent that these feelings are joyful (to the extent because so many times they are not) they ask to be understood in terms of their variety.

And what a variety they compose. The joys of running come from: self-reliance, when I complete a difficult run; self-improvement, when I go faster or farther than I have before; self-celebration, when I’m so full of life and energy I feel like I’ll explode; self-forgetting, when I run so naturally I can let go of myself doing the running; camaraderie with other runners. Sometimes the joy of running is an exuberance; sometimes it’s a peacefulness pervasive in body and mind; sometimes I earn the joy through hard work; sometimes it’s a gift that I receive just for being able to enjoy it; sometimes it’s a clarity of mind: my thoughts are as focused and purposeful as my confident stride. Sometimes it’s sort of like nothing else. And sometimes it’s painful and demanding of everything I’ve got, which doesn’t sound like it should be, but somehow is, absolutely wonderful. Any of these joys might come while I’m running alone in the middle of the night, or during the long middle miles of a marathon. They often come on trail runs or beach runs, sometimes they come when I’m just going around the neighborhood. What these joys do have in common is that whenever they present, they are always defined by the subjective joy of doing something for no reason in the world—except to do it.

Of course, to emphasize one more time, running is sometimes no joy at all. Sometimes it is painful and demanding and awful and I never want to do it again. And more often than that, it’s just running, just me out on the streets, not too much remarkable occurring. But the reason none of the contraries matter for very long is that when the joy is there, there’s just so much of it. I forget the unremarkable runs. I remember the bad runs and smile. I remember the great runs and swoon.

And so if the joy of running is what I want from running—the joys plural, really—how best to bring them about?

I think I know.

Run madly, foolishly, I advise myself. Make mistakes. Try for too much and be willing to crash and fail. Run in a state of spiritual intoxication. Don’t run unless the urge to is strong, unless compelled. And then, when compelled, don’t resist. Not because of yesterday’s run or tomorrow’s. Run only for today, for this run Right Now.

The trick I’ve learned, which is really no trick I’ve learned but a tendency I’ve observed in myself (and only subsequently tried to promote), is to not let running become a responsibility. Anything I’ve accomplished as a runner I’ve accomplished because I’m able to distinguish between love and willpower and see that Annie Dillard is right when she says, “Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong.” I don’t run because I should, not for exercise or to train for a race. I run, and I’m pretty strict on this, only when I feel like it, when it sounds fun. Luckily (luckily, I think), running often sounds fun. Particularly when it’s warm and the sun is shining and I can take my shirt off and feel free and alive, or when, in a deluge, I wipe the water from my eyes and feel like I can overcome anything—or any condition between—I don’t know when the inspiration will come. Depending on my mood, I like short runs, long runs, hilly runs, flat runs, fast runs, and slow. The only rational conclusion available to me: running must remain irrational.

Here’s another way to get at what I’m trying to say: running is my play. It produces in me the childlike absorption that comes from doing something for no reason in the world but to do it. When I run I am beholden to no one but myself. I make up the rules. I go where I want when I want how I want for as long as I want. And where I usually go is toward joy.

 

Scott F. Parker's memoir ‘Running After Prefontaine’ reveals and examines the subjective experiences of running, paying particular attention to a concept Parker terms the joy of ‘running qua running’, a kind of purposeless and experientially focused approach to the sport that encourages a sense of play, a celebration of body, and a spontaneous exuberance in life. Parker is also a coeditor of ‘Coffee Philosophy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate’.

Image: Steve Prefontaine

Tali Sharot on Looking Ahead

Imagine you had just received a bonus. You are debating whether to spend the sum on a vacation in Rio de Janeiro. This is a tough decision. You have never been to Rio. How do you decide if a week in Rio is the best way to spend your bonus?

Perhaps the most precise way to determine preference is to sample the options. To solve the “vacation dilemma” you may want to spend a day in Rio before buying a ticket. In some instances it is indeed possible to try out the alternatives before making a decision; most ice-cream parlours, for example, will let you taste different flavours prior to making a purchase. However, in many instances, sampling is not an option. Landlords will not allow sleepovers before you sign the lease, romantic partners will not wait around while you try out other possibilities, and no magic carpet will waft you to Rio for a sneak preview.

How then, in the absence of prior experience, do we determine which alternative we are likely to prefer in the future? One tool our brain uses to solve this problem is imagination. By using imagination we can simulate a range of future scenarios in our mind to predict the pleasure or pain they are likely to entail.

This is a useful tool in principle. However, there is an obstacle - our images of the future are inherently biased. This is in part because they are susceptible to our strong motivation to believe that the future will be bright (this is known as the optimism bias), and in part because to predict the future we rely on memories of our past. To estimate how much we will enjoy a week in Rio, for example, we will retrieve memories of previous holidays to sunny destinations. In theory this can be an effective strategy. The problem, though, is that we tend to recall the past as a concentrated timeline of emotionally exciting events. The boring bits just fade away. This leads us to predict that the future will be more colourful and more intense than it ends up being.

Our tendency to mispredict the future can lead to bad decisions. We may, for example, decide to spend a large amount of money on an upcoming vacation, believing that the time spent away will be extremely pleasurable. But studies show that people expect to enjoy a vacation more than they end up doing. If we are made aware of our biases, however, we can use that information to adjust our predictions accordingly and make better choices. 

Tali Sharot is author of “The Optimism Bias” (published in the UK by Constable & Robinson).  She will be hosting 'Looking Ahead' at The School of Life next Monday 16 January 2012.  For more information and for tickets click here.  A longer extract from the book was featured in The Guardian - to read more click here. 

Project In-Between: Stories That Change Everything - part one

There are books that tickle the mind (even change lives), and books that don't. I love books that clarify intrinsic complex topics (capitalism, love, freedom) in a beautiful and original way. If this Project In-Between is a humble quest for patterns to understand our shifting society, then books are my indicators.

I first picked up Monoculture by the Canadian F.S. Michaels for its colourful cover. Then the back flap tickled my mind. "As human beings, we've always told stories; stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we're going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture."

These words had that promising 'Once upon a time' ingredient. Although the aim of the book is to explain how something more hard-core and less fairy-tale - our economic based society - is changing our life.

In agriculture, 'monoculture' refers to growing only one single crop over a wide area, instead of mixing different crops. Monoculture in agriculture means potato, potato, potato, potato. Monocultures can lead to the quicker spread of diseases.

But monoculture can also be used in a broader sense, as F.S Michaels shows; to describe a society's dominant way of thinking. When you're inside such a master story, though, you just call it reality since you're not always aware of the forces at work.

During the Middle Ages, the dominant monoculture was one of religion and superstition. Then, by the seventeenth century, the scientific monoculture was born. Ours, as the writer argues, is a monoculture shaped by economic values, and influencing six areas of our world (work, relationships with others and nature, community, health, education, creativity).

Extract from the book; "A monoculture doesn’t mean that everyone believes exactly the same thing or acts in exactly the same way, but that we end up sharing key beliefs and assumptions that direct our lives. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error."

I could have (tried to) read Marx' Das Kapital to expand my economic knowledge. But that's something only devoted PhD students do. And I did read (and enjoyed) David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. But Monoculture, not even 200 pages thick, did the trick in all its simplicity.

It's a talent to admire these days; being able to explain a difficult idea (one that took ten years of research, see interview) in an easy way. Writers like Clay Shirky and Jeremy Rifkin master it too. It makes us go from insight to practice.

 

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, here, and here, 

Illustration by Sarah Vanbelle http://www.sarahvanbelle.be/

Read Part Two of this post: An Interview with F.S Michaels here.

Project In-Between: Stories That Change Everything - part two

Elke Lahousse interviews F.S. Michaels,  author of Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything. She recently won America's 2011 NCTE George Orwell Award, for critical analysis of public discourse.

 

What made you write this book? How long did your research take?

FS: "The seed of this book began about 10 years ago when I was at business school working on my MBA. I was in a Human Resources class, and we were talking about how companies could build profits by putting their people first, and I suddenly realized that putting people first wasn't the point, of course. Building profits was the point, and putting people first was just a means to that end. I asked the professor about that and she said, "That's just the way we have to sell it in order to be heard."  It wasn't seen as legitimate to talk about human dignity, or treating people decently in and of itself. You could only talk about that if you could link it to financial performance. And I started wondering why that was.

By the end of my MBA, I was working on another project on corporate social responsbility and ethics, and what I discovered was that the same kind of thing was happening there. Researchers were telling companies to be ethical because "ethics pays." That's a total reworking of the idea of ethics. I started to wonder how many other ideas had been rerouted to an economic end. I kept trying to figure out what I was seeing and to name it. And the pattern kept getting deeper and deeper. So following my curiosity ended up taking the better part of the next ten years."

 

How did understanding our economic monoculture change your life (the six areas you mention)?

FS: "Good question. I'm still coming to terms with how the economic story takes over our other stories, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. I'm still trying to figure out how to live alongside the monoculture - being in it but not of it, so to speak. But one way it definitely changed my life is that I decided to leave my PhD studies in organizational analysis after five years of work. I had come to a crossroads, because I was told the research I was doing was too broad, covered too many systems. PhDs are very specialized, so to finish the degree, I was going to have to shelve the idea of the monoculture for a few years, or drastically reduce the scope, which I thought destroyed the point of the whole thing. Too, I was looking at how the economic story was changing higher education, and I could see those changes playing out because I was living inside that system, and I didn't think the writing on the wall looked good. (Education, for example, has moved from being thought of as a public good to a private good - a commodity - where students become buyers, schools become sellers, tuition goes up, faculty becomes contract staff, and that all contributes to the rewriting of the purpose of education.)

But that was still a tough decision to make. Understanding the economic story helped me understand what I was going through in trying to make that decision, and it helps me understand what I'm still going through now that the decision has been made. Plus I also look at the world entirely differently because I see so many examples of how the economic story is still spreading - into our communities, our creativity, our relationships, our governments, our physical and spiritual health, our work - and how that's affecting us."

 

2011 was a drastic year for our economy, and many surrounding systems involved. Do you think we're going towards a new narrative/monoculture?

FS: "I think the Occupy movement is a sign of people starting to question some of the more overt things that happen when we adhere to the values that make up the economic story: the gap between rich and poor widens, the poor get shunted to the side of the road to fend for themselves, and getting ahead becomes the ultimate goal. At the same time, I don't think most people know how powerful the economic story is because it's such a natural part of our mental landscape, and it shapes how we think, feel and act. 

The Occupy movement gets criticized (at least in North America) for not having cohesive demands - a top 10 list of what protestors want, what the issues are (you can see a sample of the range of issues at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/). But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the bigger picture. Because once you understand the economic story, you can interpret the Occupy movement as people being upset about the changes that are happening in the spheres that they're involved in. So if you're in education, you see what's happening in education, and you worry about it. If you're in health care, you see what's happening in health care, and you worry about it. If you're in the private sector, you see what's happening in corporations like yours, and you worry about it. If you're in the public sector, you see what's happening there, and you worry about it. So people look like they're protesting unrelated things, but these issues are actually very closely related. They're all components of what changes as the economic story spreads into these different systems.)

In terms of the next story, we're always evolving, but evolution tends to only become recognizable over long time periods. Dominant stories in a certain era last maybe a century or two, and we're only about 40 years into the economic story.

That being said, I believe other stories are absolutely possible, and that the seeds of other stories are still in play. But they're buried, and you have to look hard to find them. Mostly you have to understand exactly what it is you're looking for, in the same way that once you understand exactly what the economic story is, you can see it everywhere. That's something I'd like to write about in the future: what those alternate stories are and how they're playing out around us in hidden ways. What all those seeds will grow into as they mature is a huge question. It's hard to see. Imagine looking at a seed and knowing that inside that little thing is a six-foot tomato plant, or an oak tree. You never know. Seeds surprise you."

 

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, here, and here, 

Follow F.S. Michaels' blog at: www.fsmichaels.com

Roman Krznaric asks 'Is Social Media Killing the Art of Conversation?'

There is a crisis in the art of conversation, and it's making us hungry. On the one hand, we face a famine of quality conversation in our relationships. The typical British couple spends more time watching television together – on average, 55 minutes a day – than talking to each other. And the most common reason given for divorce in the West is wives complaining that their husbands don't speak or listen to them.

On the other hand, thanks to technology, we are awash with superficial talk. Think of all the staccato texts and Facebook posts sent last year – how many of those words really added depth and meaning to our lives? We're stuffing ourselves with chatter, but ending up starved of the quality conversation that Socrates savoured.

So should 2012 be the year to put ourselves on a digital diet, as several self-help gurus have suggested? Is it time to worry less about inches on our waistline and more about our hours online?

Any tour of the history of conversation should begin in the 18th century. This was the golden age of the London coffee house. Presiding over hundreds of conversation clubs was the imposing figure of Dr Samuel Johnson, generally acknowledged as the greatest talker in British history.

If only. Contrary to reputation, Johnson was one of history's most disastrous conversationalists, and we have barely recovered from his legacy. "None of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blameable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation," he declared in The Rambler on 4 January, 1752.

In doing so, he admitted that his preferred form of talk was showing off, just as it was in the literary salons emerging in France in the same period. The doctor was full of clever quips and epigrams that served to end conversations rather than open them out. The lesson from the 18th century is that we should avoid that superficial game of spouting witty one-liners and name-dropping the latest opera we've seen.

The 19th century gave birth to the era of hidden emotions. A stark divide arose between how men and women expressed themselves. Men came to prize cool rationality and emotional reserve, while women were more likely to share their inner thoughts and feelings – at least with one another – and showed a greater capacity for sympathetic listening. Just think of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, who was unable to reveal his feelings for Elizabeth Bennet, held back by pride, social convention and emotional reticence – a good recipe for psychological torture.

Victorian marriage guides said it all, advising women not to burden their husbands with personal troubles, while children were encouraged to repress their feelings.

All this emotional starvation gave way, in the 20th century, to the era of intimate conversation, a transformation born of a new culture of self-reflection in the West and spurred on by the invention of psychoanalysis and the self-help industry.

It gradually became acceptable – especially for men – to talk openly about their emotions with friends and family. And following the sexual revolution in the 1960s, couples were starting to discuss the touchy topic of sex, which lay at the root of so many relationship troubles. It all culminated in The Oprah Winfrey Show, where everyone from butch truck drivers to Hollywood celebs publicly unpacked their emotional baggage in a way that would have shocked a Victorian paterfamilias.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 20th century a conversational revolution had occurred, with spouses and families being able to talk with each other in ways unimaginable in the past, mainly because men had become – emotionally speaking – a little more like women.

We've come a long way in the history of conversation, and should make the most of our inheritance by opting for a healthy portion of emotional openness. Hiding behind a mask has become old-fashioned. Being open about our fears and vulnerabilities is a key ingredient for better conversation. Why? Because if you do it, others will too, with the magic result of a human bond.

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the Middle Ages. And if George Orwell were alive today, he'd be the first to warn us off our technological sweet-tooth. Back in the 1940s, he had already noted a sinister development:

"In very many English homes, the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent."

Just imagine what he would have said about TV, Twitter and texting. Orwell would have led the digital diet brigade, urging us to lock our televisions in a cupboard for a month. Or requesting dinner guests to leave mobile phones on silent in the hallway, just as medieval diners used to leave their weapons at the door.

But the digital age has brought welcome guests to the conversational table, too. My three-year-old twins sit down for breakfast in Oxford every Sunday morning and, courtesy of Skype, are joined by their grandparents in Sydney. And only last month, my high-school history teacher found me, 20 years on, through Facebook. We met for a moving conversation.

It's clear that we can't blame all our conversational woes on living in a wired world, nor will we find all the solutions in a digital detox. So, apart from avoiding vanity-driven repartee and being more open about our emotions, how can we make the switch from high-quantity chatter to high-quality conversation?

A good starting place is to cultivate curiosity about strangers, especially those outside our usual social circles. This doesn't mean making polite chat about the weather: rather, it means exchanging thoughts on beliefs and experiences that matter to us, from love to religion, politics to death. We could even invite them to a meal: as W S Gilbert (the other half of Sullivan) said: "It isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs."

Up for a bigger challenge? Then tackle the empathy deficit in your relationships and make the imaginative leap of looking at the world through the eyes of others. Maybe you haven't fully appreciated the strains of looking after three toddlers all day. The biggest conversational crime we can commit is to assume we already know what others are thinking and feeling.

Ultimately, though, the art of conversation is to treat it as an adventure where two or more minds meet with the prospect of creating something new, whether it happens online or eye to eye. Honour the credo of the historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin: "A satisfying conversation is one in which you say what you have never said before." Bon appétit.

Roman Krznaric is a faculty member of The School of Life. This article first appeared in the Independent on Sunday and is based on his new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live published by Profile Books. Roman will be giving a series of five talks at The School of Life based on the book, Life Lessons from the Wonderbox starting with The Six Varieties of Love  on January 11.

From The Archive: Making Resolutions by Alain de Botton

We don’t tend to make resolutions about things we completely believe in. Few of us would ever resolve to be appalled by war or disease.  It just comes naturally.  But we do resolve all the time to be kinder or more hardworking, because a sizeable part of us loves being cruel and sitting around.  A resolution always hovers over a grave inner conflict and constitutes a vow by one part of ourselves against another.  Which is why – according to some - we should never be so foolish as to make a resolution.

And yet we need resolutions - even if we don’t actually manage to carry them through or rather, precisely because we rarely manage to do so.  Trying to lead a moral and a good life must mean regularly daring ourselves to be good.  It’s sometimes said that deep down we are all essentially honest, well-meaning and kind.  I’m not too sure: left to our own devices, we have a frightening tendency to be self-indulgent, selfish, narcissistic and lazy.  So we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws: to keep ourselves in check. 

A resolution is a voluntary abdication of our freedom and immediate gratification in the interests of a higher goal.  As such, it is a symbol of civilization, defined as an institution which regulates our wilder, more destructive desires for the sake of the common wealth and our own flourishing.  Resolutions are minor laws that we pass against our unruly selves.

We might be tempted to mock the public nature of resolutions.  Why resolve things at New Year? Why tell people? Precisely for the same reason that we tend to go in for public marriage: because it can be useful to back up our own resolve with the pressure that stems from the expectation of others.  It is often not bad enough to let ourselves down, so in addition, we need the fear of letting lots of people down to keep us on track.  By being declared in public, a resolution gains confirmation and amplification.  We can use the energy that surrounds the birth of a new year to lend our own inner change some impetus.

Alain de Botton will be kicking off our new year secular sermon series at Conway Hall on 22 January 2012 to coincide with the launch of his new book: 'Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion' (forthcoming 2 February 2012).

Image: Katrina Wiedner

Elke Lahousse and Project In-between: do we need a new -ism?

Inventing new words, something journalists just love to do, is like a game with different levels of difficulty. Level one is rather simple and silly. This year we saw bromance, helicopter parents, boomerang children, planking and FOMO - fear of missing out - being included in our dictionaries, describing our modern behaviour and absurd hobbies du jour.

On level two, words destined for the longer term were expanding the lexicon, introducing new social classes in society. Soulitarians, the precariat, and knowmads were invented by writers and academics. All contractions of familiar words and forgotten values. All trying to describe the rise of a new working class defined by the new technology and globalisation of the 21st century.

Level three could be the (more unconscious) stage where large cultural, philosophical and economic movements are being named. The umbrella level, where we name the systems and 'isms' that determine our thinking and aesthetics. Minimalism, communism, feminism, capitalism. Today level three seems to be in a state of flux.

When looking back in history, technological innovation has often been the catalyst for new movements and eras. Our shift from a rural to an industrial society, the inventing of steam trains, the introduction of the printing press, radio, or television, all changed people's lives. They were important steps towards the democratisation of knowledge, bringing new ways of communication and changing people's attitudes.

Now we have super fast and interactive internet. When Belgian workers went on a 24 hour strike last week, in protest at pension reforms, a large amount of twentysomethings wrote and shared open letters online, claiming that striking and paralysing national railways for those who wanted to get to work - not the first time this year - was not the smartest thing to do. "Battle of the generations?" asked the media.

Could it be that the global battles, tensions, and bottom up reactions of citizens we see today - The Occupy movement, Arab Spring - are pushing level three profoundly? To use a buzzword, is there a paradigm shift happening? If so, how do we name it? Who's leading the way? Do we need a new -ism to express our needs?

Postmodernism seems to be over, now the V&A museum is hosting a retrospective on the movement. Can we continue to use the word capitalism by adding a bit of post-, meta-, or neo- to its principles?

How did they do it, back in the days of 1789, going from political upheaval to accepting the ideas of the Enlightenment? On a neuroscience website I read that it takes thirty years of research to approve or oppose a new paradigm.

Even Tate Modern, that modern temple of wisdom and perspective, can't seem to answer what our future narrative will be. On the 3rd and 5th level of the museum they have a timeline running, written by illustrator Sara Fanelli, describing the biggest ideas of the past hundred years: symbolism, constructivism, surrealism. But the timeline stops at the year 2000.

Downstairs in the museum shop, meanwhile, the hints of where we might be going are clearer. Slavoj Žižek's book Living in the End Times has a prominent place in the category 'bestsellers'. And a huge banner is announcing John Martin's exhibition Apocalypse at Tate Britain, at bit further down the Thames. The banner reads: "Apocalypse at Tate Britain. Take the boat outside." 

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, and here.

The Canadian based organisation Adbusters is organising a competition to come up with a new -ism to capture the 21st century. Adbusters was launched in 1989 as a not-for-profit "... global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."  They're probably most known for branding the Occupy Wall Street movement by designing posters and creating the new Twitter hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. More information on the competition (deadline in May) can be found in the latest issue of their magazine, or at www.adbusters.org/noname.

Illustration Sarah Vanbelle www.sarahvanbelle.be

Timeline at Tate Modern by Sara Fanelli www.sarafanelli.com

Dear Bibliotherapist

Dear Bibliotherapist,

After the madness of Christmas coming to an end, I long for calm, peace, tranquility and solitude! Oh, for a month to do nothing but read. That’s not possible, as I work in a hospital, and my services are frequently in demand. However, maybe you can suggest something I can read in snatched moments? Something that’s the antidote to excesses of all kinds?

Dear Frazzled,

If you’re reading in snatched moments, and need something to take you far away from the stresses of spending, overeating and generally overegging all kinds of puddings, “The Call of The Wild” by Jack London is your antidote. Published in 1903, it is the compelling tale of a dog named Buck, who is kidnapped from his comfortable home in the Santa Clara Valley in California, to pull sleds for gold diggers. Buck epitomises a morality of noble suffering, loyalty to the right man, and the ability to obey his instincts, which always turn out to be true. His life is frequently harsh, as he escapes death by falling through thin ice while attached to a sled, avoids the treachery of men and fellow creatures, and eventually becomes a legendary ghost dog. He is passionately devoted to his final master, but the Wild itself pulls him away. You may find yourself sneaking off for a quick read more frequently than you desired.

In contrast to this romantic and very masculine tale of canine integrity, Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain” (1977) is a meandering diversion of a tale that aims to help you to see the world “as the world sees itself”. Shepherd frequently gives you an eagle-eye view at the same time as describing the view from the snail beneath your feet and the hair on the back of your neck, so that your understanding of this place, the Cairngorm Mountain, is multi-faceted and omnipresent. She feels the mountain with all of her senses, describing the incredible ability of the hand to experience textures, temperatures and touch, and she mourns the loss of this daily exploration of the world with our bodies as much as our minds. Her major plea in this book is for us to live “all the way through”. You will find yourself dreaming of sleeping on a juniper bush, to be woken by a robin’s claw. Hovering over yourself, one part of you will be in a mountain in Scotland, while your body fulfils its functions at your workplace.

After this you may feel the need to lose yourself in a longer book, enjoying the slow pace of a quest through the himalayas, for both the elusive snow leopard of the title and for enlightenment. “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthieson describes an expedition with the famous field biologist Georges Schalle to North Nepal to find the mystical creature, during which the author ponders the philosophies that he discovers there, both Buddhist and more ancient Himalayan beliefs. Matthieson’s reflections are perfectly balanced by his everyday concerns about avalanches and altitude sickness. Written in 1978, it describes a world that is way beyond smart phones and satellites, and it will take you far from your own everyday concerns into a mystical country which, we hope, might still exist.

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist at The School of Life.  To find out more about the service click here.

Ben Irvine on Roko Belic's Film 'Happy'

Charm works wonders; which is why persuasion is often sweetened with entertainment. Examples of this can readily be found in theatre, literature, cinema, song, comedy, political broadcasting, and, of course, advertising. The film Happy belongs in this broad tradition, but its cast of characters is anything but stereotypical, especially when compared to onscreen protagonists today. Instead of the usual figures of “inspiration” – pouting actors, fawning politicians, grinning goons selling car insurance – Happy introduces us to pensioners from Okinawa, Danish co-housing inhabitants, Namibian Bushmen, a disfigured former debutante from America, a surfer from Brazil, an Indian rickshaw driver, an amateur crab fisherman from Louisiana, and some unusually down-to-earth academics.

The film enlists all these unglamorous people in order to explain where happiness comes from. Strikingly, their most potent tool for the task is their most natural one – their smiles: genuine, warm, deep, long, enticing smiles. In a culture where vox-pops keep popping up all over the place, like those whack-a-moles in the fairground game, it’s unusual to see such lingering earnestness. It makes you pay very close attention.

In doing so, you are reminded of some plain, simple truths, which many of us had forgotten amid the distracting sensory bombardment of modern life: enduring happiness comes from such staples as supportive families, friendly communities, calm mindfulness, regular exercise, enjoying food in company, helping others, and savouring the beauty of the natural world. All of which – note – are relatively inexpensive, if not cost-free.

Note, also, that we’re not usually reminded of any of this. The psychology of human admiration is somewhat trigger-happy, a fact which consumerism exploits, day in day out, in persuading us to part with our money. Typically, a happy-looking person is paraded before our captivated eyes, and we instinctively resolve to emulate whatever they are doing at the time. Driving a big car. Carrying a designer handbag. Drinking an expensive bottle of wine. Much of human behaviour is associative, and, unless we are given good reason to do otherwise, we’ll keep pressing levers when we’re promised rewards. The problem is, many of these “rewards” not only fail to make us happy, they actually make us unhappy, through encouraging futile one-upmanship rather than sociability.

Watching Happy gives us reason to pause. The experience is like waking up from a caffeine-fuelled nightmare – one in which you were half-conscious, albeit manically suggestible. Real happiness, we rediscover, is delightfully normal; nothing we didn’t know about already, deep-down; it is a nostalgic feeling, which we can amplify, any time we like, into real and present pleasures. We are like the character ‘Winston’ in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, inundated by phoney promises of happiness, a ‘newspeak’ version which is in fact a big lie; yet, unlike him, we can choose to embrace oldspeak happiness, the real thing, instead.

In reminding us of this, director Roko Belic’s Happy is a hugely inspiring film. We must keep that mood moving.

Ben Irvine is editor of the 'Journal of Modern Wisdom' (www.modernwisdom.co.uk) and 'Cycle Lifestyle' magazine (www.cyclelifestyle.co.uk).  To find out more about the film visit www.thehappymovie.com 

John-Paul Flintoff on New Year's Resolutions

Are you thinking of making a new year's resolution? If so, why not consider making a late-December resolution instead?

The only good reason for waiting till the beginning of January is to make a resolution that is specific to January: such as (perhaps) resolving to eat and drink more modestly after a Christmas of excess. If your resolution is not specific to January, why wait?

When it comes to the really big issues facing us, there can be no time like the present to do what is most important to us.

That's partly because we never know how long we have got. In the months before he died, last week, Christopher Hitchens wrote and stated frequently that the inevitability of death focuses the mind on what is important. (Steve Jobs, who died not long before him, did the same.) Buddhists teach us to consider that every day may be our last, and to base our conduct on that insight – while also bearing in mind the contradictory idea that we may live for quite a long time. If we hold both those ideas in mind at once, we learn to plan for the long term, which is important, but also to focus on what we can do now.

Big issues are too big to fix all at once. The only way to tackle them is to break them down into small steps. Every great achievement of the past was completed that way: building Stonehenge, painting the Mona Lisa, landing on the moon.

So: don't wait till January but start working on those small steps at once. Because if you can't manage a small step in the next day or so, what makes you think you ever will?

John-Paul Flintoff is a faculty member of The School of Life and will be teaching our How to Make a Difference class on Saturday 14^th January 2012, for more information and to book tickets please click here.

Loretta Breuning on Why Goals Don't Bring Satisfaction

Reaching a goal triggers dopamine. That feels great, but the spurt soon ends. Then you become who you were before the spurt. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can get caught up in endless efforts to stimulate more dopamine with more goal-seeking. 

We're uncomfortable with dopamine dips for good reason, of course. Unhappy chemicals command your brain’s attention the moment happy chemicals droop. Things may seem awful all of a sudden, even if they’re not. 

Unhappy chemicals evolved to alert you to survival threats. They feel bad because that gets your attention. Sometimes we can relieve unhappy chemicals by fixing the underlying problem, like eating when you’re hungry or sleeping when you’re tired. But some unhappy chemicals will always be there to remind you that life is finite and you’re not the boss of the world.

You can mask your unhappy chemicals by doing things that triggered your happy chemicals in the past. But that will only work for a short time. Happy chemicals did not evolve to surge all the time. Their job is to get your attention when something promotes your survival. They turn off soon after they turn on so they’re ready to get your attention to the next good thing. 

If you haven’t learned to live with your unhappy chemicals, you might get into the habit of scrambling for another dopamine burst in any way possible. You seek the next promotion or the next party or the next donut or the next mountain or the next confrontation, depending on how your brain got wired. Your create frustration, which means more unhappy chemicals and a more frantic quest to trigger happy chemicals.

An recent monkey study makes the ups and downs of dopamine amazingly clear.  Researchers trained a group of monkeys to do a small task in exchange for a spinach leaf. Then the experimenters rewarded the monkeys with squirts of juice instead of spinach.  Juice is a lot more rewarding than spinach because it has much higher energy value. The animals’ dopamine soared. Dopamine is the brain’s way of saying, “this reeeeally meets your survival needs.”

Then something curious happened. The monkeys’ dopamine fell over time. They continued getting the juice reward for the task each day, but their brains stop reacting to it. This shows that dopamine is the brain’s reaction to new information about new rewards. Once the juice was part of the routine, no effort was needed to get it and no dopamine was needed to record the survival lesson.

This experiment has a dramatic finale. The experimenters stopped the juice and switched back to spinach. The monkeys responded to the spinach with fits of rage. They had come to expect the juice. They were clearly unhappy when they didn’t get it, but it didn’t make them happy when they got it. 

This is the survival mechanism we’ve inherited. Old rewards don’t make us happy because the brain soon habituates to them. It takes what you have for granted and focuses its attention on new rewards. If you could get bigger and better rewards in every moment, you would never have to experience the core unhappiness of being a mortal human being. But that desperate seeking causes unhappiness of its own.

This unhappiness is usually blamed on “our society” because people don’t understand how they are creating it in their own brain. You are free to step off the “hedonic treadmill” whenever you choose. You can do it in one instant, just by accepting your unhappy chemicals instead of rushing to mask them with happy chemicals. You will find that your unhappy chemicals are not nearly as terrible as the habit of running from them. 

Instead of getting frustrated with your neurochemical ups and downs, you can thank your brain for trying to promote your survival. This brain we’ve inherited from earlier mammals has successfully promoted survival for two hundred million years.

A hungry lion spurts dopamine when it spots prey. A thirsty elephant releases dopamine when it finds water. A monkey’s dopamine flows when he nears a juicy fig after climbing a high tree. Dopamine kept our ancestors going on long efforts, whether stalking game or storing grain for winter. Dopamine tells your body to release energy reserves because the goal is near. 

Today, dopamine fuels a student through long years of medical school. It fuels an athlete through long hours of training. Dopamine plays a central role in our survival. But the effort to manipulate your brain into giving you constant highs is not really in your own survival interest. You are better off accepting the ups and downs that humans have been heir to for millions of years.

Loretta Breuning writes for Phychology Today her new book ‘Meet Your Happy Chemicals’ will be available in early 2012. MeetYourHappyChemicals.com

 

Elke Lahousse and Project In-Between On Visual Storytelling

In-between journalism, art, and a bit of science, lies an emerging new field called data visualisation.

Do you know what Marshall McLuhan in 1964 really meant when he said "the medium is the message"? His one-liner has become an overused and often misquoted cliché.

A few months ago, The Guardian launched the philosophical Big Ideas Podcast on their website. They kicked off the first edition by discussing McLuhan’s most famous line, with some help from writer and McLuhan’s biographer Douglas Coupland.

Although "the medium is the message" line might be overused, it has never made more sense than in today's hyper-connected world of sharing, tweeting, streaming, smart phones, public voting, Wikileaks, satellites and new technology.

A quick refresher: McLuhan used 'medium' in a broad sense. Every tool that people create is a medium. The wheel, a gps, a hammer, a pen, a guitar, a light bulb, a newspaper, you get it. We shape tools, they shape us.

The Canadian media theorist argued that a medium affects society, not only by the content delivered over the medium (light, information, transportation, music), but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. The effects it has on our human sensorium. Watching a crime report on television may be less about the individual news story itself or the content, and more about the change in public attitude towards crime.

To make his point clear, McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message" changing it to "mess age", "mass age", and "massage", as in the title of his book "The Medium is the Massage" published in 1967. New tools massage our brain. Wired magazine named McLuhan the real patron saint of the digital revolution, being decades ahead of his time.

Although some theorists have attacked McLuhan's broad definition of 'medium' for being too simplistic, McLuhan understood that the most powerful tools of media are those that help convey ideas, like language.

Media and society have come a long way since Gutenberg introduced the printing press in the 15th century, helping spread the ideas of the Renaissance. Very recently, journalism discovered a new tool to transport and explain ideas and complex topics. It's called data visualisation. Synonyms are info graphics, or information design. It's not about simple pie charts, but about using illustration to say more than a thousand words.

You can read a pile of reports about the Antarctic meltdown, or you can simply look at this map Condé Nast Traveller published, made by the renowned John Grimwade.

You can read a dozen books about how Palestine has shrunk since 1917, or you can look at the diagram that Good magazine made.

If you master some Italian, then the work of art director Francesco Franchi, presented in the monthly magazine Il - Intelligence in Lifestyle, is simply brilliant.

In the Monocle shops you can buy posters that visualise the perfect airplane or train station of the future.

The blog Paris versus New York City shows that information visualisation can also be fun and lighthearted.

Every 24 hours, Fast Company sends out an info-graphic of the day. Last week it explained how drunk you can get at your office Xmas party.

Visualising a message is a powerful aid to human thinking. Show it and you’ll remember it. Just as film has many genres, info-graphics come in different shapes and forms. Combining research, software, emotions and aesthetics, data visualisation rapidly became a field and profession on its own. Way past the point of just using dots, curves and lines.

The 'infobesitas' unleashed at the turn of 21st century democratised information visualisation. Never has there been more data available then now. "The 19th century was about reduction, breaking nature down into the simplest possible elements and defining rules on how these elements interact", which is written in the foreword of Visual Complexity: Mapping patterns of information. "Today, interest lies in understanding phenomena of complexity (chaos theory, climate change), which is reflected in the kinds of visualisations we find appealing."

Manuel Lima, the man behind the book and website visualcomplexity.com, claims that data visualisation is well on its way to becoming as important to 21st century as photography and film were to the 20th century.

"What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around data - and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level", says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. When you glance at The Map of the Future, made by Density Design for the Italian Wired, you get what he means. These are visuals worth putting on our computer desktop and hanging on our walls.

It is not only print media that is experimenting with information visualisation, but it is also tv and the internet. Nederland van boven is a new program on Dutch television, launched last week. From up in the sky, with helicopters and balloons, data journalists look at rhythms and patterns that define daily life in the Netherlands. There are the famous RSA Animate videos, explaining theories about education, choice, the brain.  The New York Times use infographics in their newspaper, and interactive versions online.

Art schools and universities are setting up new courses and workshops to learn this profession. Visual journalism is a new way of telling stories and requires cross disciplinary skills. Tashen and Gestalten are publishing books about the trend, Information Graphics is due out in January 2012, Gestalten recently published Visual Storytelling. The blog Information graphics news bundles all the curiosities that happen in this field.

You get the message, and the medium. Graphic journalists, information designers, whatever you call them, they master a skill to help us prioritise and convey structure in a world of abundance and change. Who said print is dead? Praise to the new rock stars!

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous post here.

Illustration John Grimwade  www.johngrimwade.com

llustration Francesco Franchi www.francescofranchi.com

 

 

We All Need Words on Why Jargon Isn't The Problem And 'Plain English' Isn't The Answer

Every year the Plain English Campaign gives out gobbledegook awards to the worst examples of incomprehensible writing at work. But most writing problems in an organisation can’t be solved with a Plain English crystal mark.

About this time every year the Plain English Campaign has its gobbledegook awards. It goes roughly like this: they pick some prize pieces of incomprehensible twaddle, which fill some easy column inches in a few newspapers. We roll our eyes at all the rubbish jargon and business clichés we use at work nowadays and then we move on.

It’s good PR for the Plain English Campaign and, in a small way, it highlights how much nonsense people write in the name of work. What it doesn’t explain is who the main culprits are, why they do it and the root causes of it.

One reason why we never get to the bottom of why there’s so much incomprehensible writing at work is because we too easily dismiss it with one all-conquering word: jargon. But most of the words we label as jargon, such as the Latin or Greek medical terms doctors use, are harmless, as long as they make sense to the people who need to use and understand them.

No, jargon is relatively easy to spring clean. The problem is woolly thinking – when the words hide that there’s nothing to say. And that’s where the Plain English Campaign falls short. Writing can get a sparkly crystal mark and it can do it without saying very much at all.

You can spot writing that’s running on empty thinking as soon as words like ‘experience’, ‘solutions’ and ‘environments’ crop up. They’re not made-up words or jargon, exactly. They’re empty vessels that apply to everything, but say nothing. Going to Westfield is an experience, not shopping. A new phone is an experience, not a way to call your friends (the word ‘device’ probably gets flung in for good measure). It’s a one-size-fits-all strategy, what we call brand slop, and you find it in middle management at most big organisations.

Once you realise brand slop uses essentially empty words, it’s not much of a leap to notice that most of these departments operate on a meta level, creating strategies, PowerPoint presentations and charts that don’t have any reason to exist. Try translating brand slop into simpler words (or ‘Plain English’) and you soon find that you can’t. Or if you can, you find that it says nothing, just more simply.

Most of us come across brand slop at work. A while ago we met a friend of ours at his office. He’s a social worker and his job involves making lots of difficult decisions about whether a child would be better off with their parents or in care. As you’d imagine, it’s stressful and emotionally draining. Meanwhile, his well-meaning managers decided that the best way to help him would be to give him some positive words, or ‘values’, of encouragement. And what had they come up with? ‘Think’ and ‘Inspire’. Plastered over the screensaver of every computer screen ‘think’ and ‘inspire’ were spinning around in 3D. Some help.

Brand values are one of the biggest examples of brand slop. They’re either always open to interpretation so everyone can claim they’re ‘living the values’ (yes, these phrases exist too) by being ‘warm’ and ‘friendly’ and whatever. Or, as someone in the brand team of a big mobile network once explained to us, it’s nigh on impossible to take these mushy words out of PowerPoint presentations and make them work in real life. When someone from a call centre asked him ‘how exactly can I be more “bold” on the phone when I’m talking to a customer?’ there wasn’t an easy answer. Again, it’s easy to test this sort of brand slop. Let’s say your company’s values are ‘open, honest and passionate’. Now ask the opposite. Who’d want a business that’s closed, dishonest and indifferent?

Values are broad and are usually thrashed out internally to get buy-in. But as a result they’ve become a kind of pep talk for organisations to convince and reassure themselves that la-la-la everything’s ok really, without tackling any of their ingrained problems. Actually, ‘the opposite test’ is a good way to reveal what an organisation’s problems really are. We once worked with a company that had ‘adventurous’ as one of its values. We soon found out that they’d come up with this because their people were timid and they wanted them to take more risks. It didn’t work. Despite the words on all the walls, Ranulph Fiennes wouldn’t have fitted in very well there.

So where did all this brand slop come from? You’ll see its roots in the theories of management books, journals and consultancies, and the sort of things business students learn on MBAs. A lot of the original theory and research is sound enough. Pick up an old book by a management guru like Peter Drucker and it’s all pretty no-nonsense. Or read a bestseller by Jim Collins and you’ll find yourself nodding along.

The problems happen somewhere after that. Because what brand slop does is take management theory and tries to fit it into a neat model everywhere else, even when that doesn’t work.

You simply can’t sum up a brand – the irrational bit about how people feel about one company over another – by squishing it into a triangle, or wrapping it up in a list of (often the same) words plucked from a thesaurus.

It’s not just marketing and branding, it’s the same story in every management department. Once upon a time Human Resources was called Personnel and its main role was to do the practical things that companies need for its people, from hiring and firing to all the things in between. But in the seventies management books started talking about people as if they were numbers. Soon ‘human capital theory’ and ‘human asset accounting’ were all the rage. By the time the Harvard Business School introduced Human Resources to its MBA at the beginning of the eighties, there was no turning back and no one questioned the idea that ‘people are your greatest asset’. Well, not until the book ‘Managing Brand Equity’ came out a decade later and then brands were crowned the latest, greatest asset.

The idea of turning brands and people into ‘assets’ reveals a lot about the underlying problem with brand slop. It’s not that it isn’t quite true, it’s that you can’t treat things like brands and people in the same way as capital. Numbers can be moved around on Excel sheet, but in the real world people’s skills and talents can’t.

In the end most big companies are good at being just that: big. Using their muscle to cut costs in production and distribution. And business books or MBAs can help with that. You can learn how to make logistics (or the supply chain as the MBA-ers call it) more efficient from a book. The same goes for anything to do with distributing products and financially restructuring a business. But what do all those things have in common? They’re all about operations: the nuts and bolts of running a company. And, despite what all the strategic presentations tell you, most big companies still get their profits from these sort of operational tweaks. Whether that’s by finding more places to sell things, making more of them, or by or cleverly restructuring the way they’re made or work.

So the process stuff is easy to solve. Creativity, innovation and making people feel good about a brand aren’t. This is when big organisations turn to brand slop. Except it never works. All the good ideas and innovation usually come from copying smaller, gutsier start-ups or by buying them and, more often than not, messing them up with layers of process and bureaucracy. Just read What happens after Yahoo acquires you to get a first-hand account of what goes on behind the scenes when a smaller start-up is taken over and infected by brand slop.

But what about Apple, the consultant’s favourite anecdotal branding success? Funnily enough, if you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, one of the most striking things is how little time Jobs had for PowerPoint, idea-sucking research, and elaborate strategies. You could argue that one of the reasons Apple are so successful is that they manage their supply chain well and they’ve cut out the brand slop altogether.

It’s not a bad thing to write down what your brand is or to improve how your company works. The problem comes when you over-simplify difficult things and use empty language to do it. It doesn’t add anything or help you run your business better. And if all the money you’re spending on marketing, management, and HR strategies isn’t doing anything, what’s the brand slop actually there for?

 We All Need Words run regular writing workshops at The School of Life.  Visit www.weallneedwords.com

Elke Lahousse Introduces Project In-Between

I am in-between. I'm living in-between cities (London vs Leuven). I'm in-between jobs (journalist vs student). And I've always been in-between haircuts.

I'm taking a career break from my job as a fashion editor, to cultivate the wondrous state of 'being in-between'. This may sound very Amélie Poulain meets Alice in Wonderland, living in an interstitial world where anything can happen at any time. But the truth is more, let's say, urgent. A eureka moment hit me, about a year ago. A moment that caused a snowball effect of epiphanies.

The trigger for my aha-experience was a book that I bought at The School of Life, Cognitive Surplus, written by Clay Shirky. In short, the book is about how the world has never been so connected before, how together we've always known more, and how we should start using new technologies like YouTube and Facebook in their most efficient way.

Meaning: don't just share Lady Gaga's latest video, but share better, collaborate smarter. Think the Arab Spring, or Occupy this and that, as recent examples of people gathering together online to change something profoundly offline.

The examples given in the book were exciting, because - strangely - I hadn't realised the power of social networks before, in the accumulating way Shriky describes them. On a personal and local level, yes, cavemen also shared information and goods. But this was about taking it to the next level, the global power of the crowd, and seeing patterns.

Then the snowball did its thing, leading me to a world where everyone was thinking in a new way. We Think, explained in this beautiful video. What’s mine is yours, explained here. Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Professor Manuel Castells' research, and a dozen of TED talks and real life examples. Was there a mind shift happening in how we work, consume, think?

In the wonderful Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes the history of great ideas, and how it can take twenty years for society to be ready for an idea - isn't it always about perfect timing. Putting all these symptoms together, what exactly were we getting ready for?

American economist Jeremy Rifkin came into the picture and spoiled the party. After watching his YouTube hit, there was no way back. "I’ve never seen a moment in history like this before. We’re really asleep, all across the world.” Rifkin explains  - terrifying clearly – the three crises that are threatening us today.

Then it hit me: the whole world is in-between. Banking crisis, Eurozone crisis, capitalism under attack, climate change, energy crisis, overpopulation, greying population. Old structures are crumbling, and new super structures are not clearly visible yet. No political or economic solution seems big enough. And yet, there is a communication revolution going on, and we never had more access to information. How will we name this period in history, looking back fifty years from now?

Not knowing what to do with all these urgent insights, I decided to move to London for a while, looking for perspective in the city that bursts with ideas and great universities. So I'm a visiting student here and there, reading more books, talking to very smart people, and having loads of coffee, in order to better understand *deep breath* the challenges of the 21st century. I call it 'Project In-Between'.

When The School of Life asked me to blog about my quest, I said yes, only in the name of research and because of the alarming bells that I could no longer ignore. Project In-Between will try to be a collage of projects and people illustrating the shift that's happening around us. Some people are doing really exciting things out there.

But I'm not a specialist. Little do I know, but I understand the power of networks. Together we know more. So let's play a game. This is how it works: free association. The following weeks I'll share symptoms of ‘being in-between’, and you can share related links or ideas to that topic. It’s what we call crowdsourcing in journalism, going from A to B. Testing hypothesis by trial and error, by wisdom of the crowd. It can be messy, but we'll take it from there.

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. Knack Weekend is part of the weekly magazine trilogy Knack + Knack Weekend + Knack Focus. www.knack.be, www.knackweekend.be, www.knackfocus.be

Illustration Sarah Vanbelle www.sarahvanbelle.be

Dear Bibliotherapist

 Dear Bibliotherapist,

An enormous drill shattered my peace last night, just outside my window. I looked out in dismay to see the town's Christmas lights being attached to my wall. Bah, humbug! With the advent of advent, I ask myself how will I survive the endless parties of next month. The coming of the lights reminds me how little I enjoy the desperate mirth of December. Do you have any ideas of how I can survive this period?

 

Dear Dismayed,

You need stories. You must tell stories, and collect them. When the cold is eating into your bones and the world outside is increasingly bleak, it is the time to come together and tell tales of every kind. The warmth of human contact is what we crave, and our restless minds need stimulation from all kinds of fable- true ones of terror, false ones of fantasy, seductive stories of utopian eras, dramatic descriptions of sacrifice and sweat. Embrace this time of year as an opportunity to gather friends and strangers with whom you can exchange, pass on, and celebrate the yarn.

Muster a group of cronies, preferably somewhere near a roaring fire and some fine malt whiskey. While the flames inquisitively lick the logs, shadows scuttling into  corners, pick random books from your shelves and fling them carelessly into piles around your friends feet. Strew newspapers artistically over the edges of armchairs - some tabloids, some broadsheets,  Have some blank paper to hand. Then be ready to make merry with the art of telling tales.

1. Turn to your neighbour and ask him or her about themselves. Delve into their history and discover something about them that you never knew, whether it is the story of their birth, something peculiar that happened to them today, or an extreme event in their life. Encourage them to embellish, exaggerate and use dialogue. They will soon be telling you a story. Everyone should do this at the same time, so that no-one feels self  conscious.

2. Each teller picks up two books at random. They write down the first line of one book and the last line of the other, on the same piece of paper. When everyone has done this, take it in turns for each of you to go on a verbal journey from the first line to the last. Thus if you have for instance the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") and the last line Jamrach's Menagerie, ("Very far away, still on my journey, very far away and more beautiful than you could ever imagine."), then you five minutes to fill the narrative gap in whatever way you like.

3. Separate out. Go to different rooms in the house (bathroom, bedroom, broom closet - even in the garden or front doorstep - a bit of freezing air whistling up your shirt could help your creative juices no end). Sit down with pen and paper and write automatically, whatever comes into your head for ten minutes.Start with the word "Once". Come back together and pass your paper onto someone else. Take it In turns to read aloud.

4.Each pick up a newspaper. Turn to page 6, column 3, line 22. Write down the sentence you find there. Do the same thing with page 8, column 1, line 45. And page 12, column 5,one 18. Now use these 3 sentences to create a 5 minute story that you tell the group. Don't spend time planning. Leap in.

Take this storytelling urge into everyday life. When you are at parties, bring out your inner fabulist. Draw upon your memories, imagination and observations to fascinate your friends and colleagues. Enjoy language, make deliberate repetitions, sprinkle your anecdotes with wit. Emulate the great bards. Check out Chaucer. Grab the Gawayne poet, and aspire to his alliterative powers. Read great writers of the present; David Mitchell, Jon Mcgregor, Ali Smith. Copy them shamelessly. Think like a writer. Jot down observations about your day, snatches of dialogue, moments of beauty glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. Weave them into your small talk.

You will soon be the star of the show, and no party will be worthy of the name without you.

You will be desperate to retire to an armchair for a nice quiet read. Put your feet up by the log fire and pick up a good book...

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist for The School of Life.  For more information about the service, click here.  This Christmas, our bibliotherapists have created bespoke prescriptions for the ‘Christmas Fanatic’ or ‘Christmas Sceptic’ available as a beautifully designed card offering solace or cheer in equal quantities….  Available for £3.99 alongside other gift ideas at our Bloomsbury shop.

Interview with Tom Chatfield on Real-World Living

Please provide a brief introduction about yourself and tell us what you do...I’m the author of three books about digital culture, including one on games, and also do a lot of speaking, consulting and design around game and digital experiences. Perhaps my greatest interest is in how and why people use digital technologies, and what it means to improve their experience.

What is exciting about the gaming space right now?  I’m most excited by the fact that games are breaking out of the specialist mold of being something for “gamers” and becoming something for absolutely everyone, of all ages and aptitudes. This is overwhelmingly due to the spread of mobile and tablet devices, and social networks. In the last few years, digital play has become a part of hundreds of millions of people’s lives in a way that is genuinely open and accessible, and I think this is changing what it means to create a game, or indeed any kind of fun, sociable digital experience.

What are the interesting ways that you’re seeing games being used? Education, problem solving, skill building, health etc? Education is always the most exciting thing for me: good games are engines for learning, and I’ve seen them starting to be used in schools in the UK and elsewhere to engage pupils who it can be incredibly hard to reach through conventional educational approaches. Then there is the use of games in professional settings — from medicine to the military — to train people up for scenarios that are simply too serious to be done for real. And finally there’s using them to learn about ourselves, from economic behavior to thinking about how we behave towards each other in any kind of complex, task-oriented setting. These are young fields, but ones with immense potential.

What’s your feeling on the use of social games? What is their ability to create collaboration? When you have people playing together, they are fully themselves in a way that you don’t get in almost any other area: you get the whole person, willingly collaborating on a task with others, and alongside this you can get some wonderfully complex behaviors. From things like Guilds in massively multiplayer online games, I think we can learn a lot about what it means to collaborate with other people on a task through digital media; perhaps more importantly, I also think that playing with others like this can build interpersonal bonds, and help us experiment with ideas about how we work best in teams, and what it means to work effectively together, both as a leader and as a follower.

What are the compelling motivations for people to play/participate? Games are all about satisfaction, of various complex kinds: you can use the word “fun,” but it doesn’t necessarily get to the root of the deep sense of achievement and mastered obstacles that some games offer. Ultimately, though, all games can be thought of as mechanisms for generating emotional responses – they are their own justification, and if they are well-made, they are intensely satisfying because they offer many layers of emotional satisfaction, from the simple delight of being transported to another world to the rewards of working with others towards a common goal, and gaining skills and achieving mastery. Unlike the world, a good game is fair: you know that you can win, and get credit for your skills. This kind of fairness is a huge advantage that games have over life.

What are your thoughts on the role of sensors, tracking and data? I think we’re going to see a steady integration of some kinds of play into real-world living: games able to respond to where we are, who we are with, what we are doing. But I’m not sure that this is as big a deal as some people make out – because ultimately it asks an awful lot from people, and they may not be willing to share data or information in this way. Data in general is a much more exciting field — because the fact that you can measure absolutely everything that someone does within a game presents you with a staggering opportunity to learn new things about behaviour, or to answer questions of what people like and want very precisely indeed. The kind of calibration you can achieve already, in terms of getting things just right to keep people playing and engaged, is powerful and a little frightening.

What are the big opportunities within the space? What’s the future hold? As I said in the beginning, the biggest opportunities for me are the ones that involve the most people: games not as highly complex experiences, but as casual, mobile, social experiences that tens or hundreds of millions of people can do while they go about their daily lives. Smartphones are fast becoming the world’s most important gaming platform, and I think this is a field that has huge growth in it — while specialist gaming machines, like consoles, have their work cut out in surviving against this competition for attention.

The future, for me, is above all about engineering play experiences to be as pleasurable for ordinary users as possible – Angry Birds is an excellent example of something that stands out because of the emphasis it puts on ease and seamlessness of experience, and because of its universal appeal. Although we mustn’t forget that games are a fertile area for innovation, too. Look at Kinect: digital play is one of those areas in which, if it’s made pleasurable and delightful enough, people are willing to embrace novelty in a way they wouldn’t even consider in most other fields.

This interview was conducted by Timothy Ryan and featured on PSFK in preparation for their upcoming ‘Future of Gaming’ report.   Tom Chatfield is a faculty member of The School of Life, and has recently developed our new class ‘How to Thrive in the Digital Age’, which will be running again on the 20 February 2012. 

Click here to watch Tom Chatfield  at TED Global 2010 on the ‘Seven Ways Videogames Engage The Brain’.

We All Need Words on the Positives of Negativity

“Bah, humbug!” We All Need Words on how a can’t-do attitude will help your writing.

’Tis the season to be jolly. Good will, good cheer, good tidings to all men, women, children and pets. Pah. All this tinsel-wrapped positivity is tiring. We’re told time and time again to look on the bright side, but we’ve been looking and it’s all, well, a bit bland.

We like a bit of negative thinking. It has more oomph. It makes for interesting views, different angles and new perspectives. And it packs a punch. Imagine the Ten Commandments without the ‘thou shalt nots’. They’d boil down to ten different ways of saying ‘thou shalt be nice’. (Please.)

We’re conditioned to look for the silver linings in everything, to the point where it seems pretty clear cut: negativity = bad, positivity = good. A whole self-help industry peddles these myths, as US author (and School of Life sermon star) Barbara Ehrenreich sums up in the title of the book she wrote after she was diagnosed with cancer: “Smile or die”. Frustrated by the expectation that she should be relentlessly positive about her illness, she delved into America’s self-help industry and found that these reasons to be cheerful can do more harm than good. And as Richard Wiseman says in 59 Seconds: “Attempting to ‘think yourself happy’ by suppressing negative thoughts can make people obsess on the very thing that makes them unhappy.”

Negativity gets a bad rap. But it shouldn’t. It can also be practical, pragmatic and realistic. And funny. Imagine the British sense of humour without a healthy dose of cynicism. A whole guffaw of comedians would be out of work for a start. Victor Meldrew and Edmund Blackadder would be reduced to high-fiving, can-do team players and Charlie Brooker’s Guardian columns swapped for saccharine pills of sugar and spice. No fun. No fun at all. 

In our day jobs, we see the cult of positivity in the things we’re asked to write. Every company says they’re ‘open’, ‘honest’ and whatever, until they all blend into a big pile of soppy mush. Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ mantra loses all its oomph if you give it a positive spin. ‘Be good’? In fact it’s saying a different thing altogether.

We’ve become obsessed with hiding bad news (a blinkered optimism that Barbara Ehrenreich argues helped contribute to the collapse of the US banks). It’s why you read about ‘efficiencies’ or ‘restructures’ not ‘redundancies’. ‘New call plans’ not ‘your bill’s gone up’. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a smile through gritted teeth. Spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down. And it doesn’t help anyone.

So don’t be afraid of warts-n-all writing. If you’re struggling to pen a dating ad, start with how you’re always late (and say sorry in advance). In amongst the admirable achievements on your CV, sprinkle a little bit of real life to show there really is a human being behind those polished words. We once interviewed someone who wrote “and I’m not as posh as you think I am” after she mentioned her well-to-do hobby. She got an interview for that line alone. No one wants to date or work with Mr/Ms Perfect really and your foibles will help you stand out. Try it.

We’re big fans of negativity. To put it another way, positive thinking sucks. Pass the humbugs.

We All Need Words are running the last 'Words for Life' class of 2011 this Saturday 3 December. A day of putting pen to paper for all those things people never tell you how to write: CVs, dating ads, complaint letters, tweets. There are a few places left if you're feeling wordy...please click here for more information.

 

Lynda Shaw on the Brain Benefits of Common Decency

Last year I had a meeting in Fulham, London.  I parked my car and walked through a small park to get to the street I needed.

As I hurried along in my high heels concentrating that I didn’t slip on the falling leaves, I noticed a rather dirty looking man lying on a bench asleep.  On the ground next to him were three carrier bags that looked as if they contained some old rags.

I kept walking.

I went out of the gate, had my meeting and went back through the park.

The man was still there, he hadn’t moved.

I kept walking.

I was just about to leave the park the other side when I stopped.  I turned round and walked back past the sleeping man, back out of the park and found a small supermarket.  I bought a sandwich and an orange juice.

Yet again I entered the park.  I very quietly approached the sleeping man.  The last thing I wanted was for him to awake startled, especially if he was sleeping off the effects of alcohol.  I gently put the food and drink by his head and carried on back to my car.

For sometime I said nothing about this.  But some months later I was giving a talk on altruism and kindness and decided this story would help illustrate a point.  This is why I’m typing these words now – to illustrate a point.

The point is, after this encounter, I felt good for several days.  I did what we teach our children to do, to care for one another.

I know a bit about brains.  So I know that one of the reasons I felt good after this was because all those wonderful, free neurotransmitters were working their magic in my head.  Because doing something for someone else without expecting anything in return is the best way to put our brain in the finest possible state.

It’s funny how science now ‘gives us permission’ to practice common decency.

Lynda Shaw is a cognitive neuroscientist specialising in consciousness and emotion. She will be leading an event around understanding depression at The School of Life in January.  For more details click here.  www.drlyndashaw.com

David Baker on Compassion and Oxytocin

With perfect timing, TED recently released Paul Zak’s talk on “Trust, morality - and oxytocin”, first given at TEDGlobal in July and now on the TED website. A “neuroeconomist” at Claremont Graduate University in southern California, Zak argues that values such as compassion, empathy, trust, respect, love and so on are hard wired in our brains because it makes good evolutionary sense for us to cooperate. And he says he has isolated the molecule - oxytocin - that makes them happen.

People with more oxytocin in their bloodstream appear to be more trusting, more empathic and more respectful than others. Most of us have it to a greater or lesser extent, depending on our mood and the situation (dancing and sex are good for oxytocin production, stress isn’t). Five per cent of us barely produce it at all, and they’re the people not to to business with. Testosterone dilutes its effect, which may be why many men have such a hard time “sharing”. And hugs make the body produce more (which sounds like good news for us oxytocin-depleted Y-chromosome carriers).

It’s not always comfortable to hear moral values, such as compassion, trust and empathy, described in chemical terms. Somehow it feels they should left to moral philosophers and saints. But, even as a non-scientist, I think we should welcome scientists’ investigations into the forces behind moral decisions. To discover a molecule that correlates with compassionate behaviour doesn’t mean that being compassionate is not a moral stance. We’re not slaves to the chemicals in our brains, we are the chemicals in our brains and we do plenty of things to raise or lower their levels at will. To make a decision to raise the level of oxytocin in our bodies - Zak’s prescription is “eight hugs a day” - and reduce, say, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, seems as conscious a moral choice as giving to charity or embracing a religious creed. And if the outcome is the same, then let’s get hugging now.

David Baker is a faculty member of The School of Life and former managing editor of Wired Magazine in the UK.  Head to www.davidbakeronline.com for some more. 

It's the final week of our 'Month of Reaching Out' - follow the campaign on via our facebook page here.

Melanie Challenger on Reaching Out to the Natural World

When we glance across the road at the faces of strangers in our vicinity, it is mirrored by looking out over a field or a stand of trees and having no knowledge of the other species living in our midst. Altruism in humans may have arisen through sexual selection as an attractive quality in mates or as part of a reciprocal process of favour-sharing in return for protection, sustenance, and so forth, we do not know. Certainly, neuroscientists have pinned down regions of the brain associated with altruistic acts, compassion, empathy, the mental seeds of moral conduct. Regardless of its innate biological existence, altruism is associated with knowledge. 

And so, in an age where many of us have little knowledge of the habits or even the identities of many of the plants and species that surround us, I recommend a daily effort to recognise something you have not noticed or understood before. Step outside and take a different path. Stop at the first bird, insect, blade of grass, flower, tree, bush, fruit, etc, you don't know, and watch it for as long as the creature or situation permits. Gather in the mind every detail to make it memorable - using metaphor, simile, anything to encourage its recall later. Then go home and try and identify it. You may have to make several trips to be absolutely sure, but once you know what you've seen, begin to notice it more and more. And begin to read about it from others of our generation who do have knowledge of this species. Is it endangered? How can you help it thrive? As the world comes more and more into lavish detail and focus, it will begin to speak back to you. It will whisper against some things you do and take for granted. It will call out for you to take different routes by different means - to think differently altogether. It will counsel you to care about more than the human world and to espouse new values and discard others. 

Melanie Challenger is a freelance writer. She is the author of ‘Galatea’, her award-winning first collection of poems, and co-author, with Zlata Filipovic, of ‘Stolen Voices’, a history of twentieth century conflict compiled through war diaries. During her research for ‘On Extinction’, she was a Fellow of the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London from 2007-2010 and International Fellow at the British Antarctic Survey for International Polar Year 2007-2008. Her work was also a recipient of the British Council Darwin Awards. 

Melanie will be speaking next Monday 28 Nov here at The School of Life on 'Reconnecting with Nature'. Click here for more information.

Mark Vernon on the Difficulty of Compassion

Compassion is like happiness. Obviously a great good. And yet, I think it is also like happiness in another way. Its realisation is far more tricky than perhaps first meets the eye. A number of thoughts came to mind as I tried to think it through.

Take the business of practicing compassion, as the month of reaching out encourages us to do. One can clearly will oneself to do a kindness here, offer a comforting word there. A fraction of the world would be a better place for it. But a concern came to my mind that reaching out might become like the injunction to eat five pieces of fruit’n’veg a day. It becomes a burden, one that you chastise yourself for not fulfilling. Your efforts to show compassion to others become a regular reprimand to yourself.

There is also the danger of tokenism. One act of compassion is used, perhaps unconsciously, to alleviate the guilt of the many quietly abusive acts that can fill an average working day. Or, do I visit my uncle in the care home because I care for him or because I feel secret remorse for his being there in the first place?

This is all counterproductive, if you follow Gandhi’s line of thought that you must be the change that you want to see in the world. So, I have the sense that being compassionate towards others requires being compassionate towards yourself too: serious intent, light touch.

To develop the thought further, you might say that the aficionados of compassion possess a certain freedom with themselves. I think this is shown in the well-known story of the Good Samaritan. A priest and a Levite pass by on the other side of the road from the man who has been beaten by robbers, though there is no suggestion in the story that they are not compassionate people. Rather, they are constrained by their fear of a half-dead man. And who can blame them? A half-dead toddler, Wang Yue, was recently passed by on the streets of Guangdong by over a dozen people. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15401055] What the Good Samaritan had was an inner freedom that trumped any fear. He wasn’t tied by convention, or fright, or lack of time. He was free to respond to another human being. Am I that free?

The risks associated with being kind are, in fact, multiple. Will an unexpected act be unwelcome or aggressive? Might it be thought an intrusion or demeaning? Can you judge accurately whether it’s appropriate? Am I free enough to take these risks? Also, there’s an art to receiving acts of compassion: you mustn’t read too much into a warm smile or the squeeze of a hand!

There are interesting parallels between these concerns and the research on empathy. Empathy too is often taken to be an unalloyed good thing. And yet, as Colin Frith, Emeritus Professor at UCL, London, recently told me, an empathic feeling might as easily lead to an unkind response of fight or flight as a good response of compassion. Feeling viscerally upset by someone else’s pain might make you turn your back. Alternatively, collective empathy for my in-group can lead to collective animosity towards those perceived as others. Such empathy powers war. The risk is that my compassion for some leads to self-righteous anger at others.

All that said, compassion has to start somewhere. And to a certain extent it seems possible to train oneself by attempting to form habits of reaching out. Perhaps the best advice is to aim high but start small. For it seems to me that compassion is really aimed at something big and difficult – nothing less than a transformation of your life and yourself. A good question to ask is whether you really want that to happen.

This piece was first published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday 18 November 2012.

Mark Vernon is a philosopher, author and faculty member of The School of Life. www.markvernon.com

Follow our compassion campaign ‘A Month of Reaching Out’ via our facebook page: www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon

Michael Landy on Acts of Kindness

In celebration of last Sunday’s World Kindness Day artist Michael Landy talks about his project Acts of Kindness with its curator Cathy Haynes.  Acts of Kindness is an Art on the Underground commission calling for stories of kindness on the Tube. Since the project began in June 2011 the public have sent in over 300 stories. Over the coming year Landy is placing his selection of stories as artworks in Central line stations and trains. To find out more and send in your own story of kindness on the Tube, visit the Art on the Underground website.

Cathy Haynes: On the Tube on the way here, I had this weird little shock of self-awareness. I’d settled into my seat a bit like I would at home and was vaguely watching all these strangers around me almost as if they were on TV. I was daydreaming and wondering about their lives, but making no real connection. Then my eye drifted onto a safety sign and it broke the spell. I suddenly became properly aware that I was surrounded by real people. And I remembered how at the beginning of this project you talked about the way we retreat into a bubble on the Tube. We’re in intimate proximity with strangers Underground but we do our very best to ignore each other, in an amplified version of the way we treat each other in the city above.

Michael Landy: Yes. You enter the Underground and suddenly the atmosphere is completely different: how much eye contact you can give, how close you can get. You become much more aware of people because you’re in such a condensed space. Perhaps because of that we close off and disappear into ourselves. And because of the way we act there, the Underground is the perfect platform (boom, boom) for this project to manifest itself.   

I’m interested in what makes us human in a basic sense apart from our economic identities, especially at this time when people have lots of financial worries and the world seems to be a very troubled place, and we don’t really know how to move forward. I want to find out what makes us human, and what connects us, beyond material things. For me the answer is compassion and kindness. And this project is a way of collectively exploring that idea. I mean I don’t know if it’s going to help create a kinder place on the Underground. I think that’s probably too big an ambition to have. But, in the way that it can make you feel uplifted when you see someone be kind on the Tube, I’d like to think that the artworks presenting the stories will also do that – that they’ll become life-enhancing for people. In other words, I hope the artworks are an act of kindness in themselves.

I’m trying to place the story artworks on platforms and in trains in ways that echo the unexpected ways you encounter acts of kindness in the flesh. They pop up when you least expect them. And I’m hoping the stories will have the same kind of effect on the reader as seeing an act of kindness. That’s what I’m hoping.

Click here to read the full interview. The School of Life's campaign: 'A Month of Reaching Out' continues for the rest of November, with Karen Armstrong delivering our next secular sermon this Sunday. Visit our facebook page to check for your daily task.

Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne, Cruelty and Conviviality

There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, some mutual obligation. -- Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)

Michel de Montaigne was a Renaissance philosopher whose profound horror of cruelty was unusual in his own time – and perhaps it still is today.  This revulsion came from his belief that all humans share an element of their being, as do all other living things. ‘It is one and the same nature that rolls its course,’ he wrote.  We are similar to other animals – but even if we were not, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.

This obligation applies in trivial encounters as well as life-or-death ones. We owe other beings countless small acts of kindness and empathy. Montaigne followed the passage quoted above with this remark about his dog:

I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.

He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.

History has largely dismissed the significance of Montaigne’s thoughts on cruelty and kindness. But there are those who find in his essay ‘On Cruelty’ the signs that mark him out as the first completely modern thinker. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, wrote that Montaigne’s modernity resided precisely in his ‘intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings’ – as well as of non-human beings.

Even a pig or a mouse has, as Woolf wrote, a feeling of being an ‘I’ to itself. He went on to apply this insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for small individual selves. On a global scale, he wrote, no single creature can be of much importance; yet in reality these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.

For Montaigne as for Woolf, human beings do not live immured in our separate perspectives. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of Montaigne’s call to ‘be convivial’, one answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.

 Sarah Bakewell is hosting Dinner with Montaigne on Wednesday 23 November 2011.  For further information about this and our other upcoming meals, click here.

Chris Irons on Developing a Compassionate Mind

It’s a truism to say that life can be difficult and involve a great deal of stress, strain and at times, suffering. We all recognise that work can be fraught and stressful, with constant targets looming, difficult managers to deal with, and frequent assessment of our performance and productivity. With the current financial turmoil gripping Europe, inflation rising and bills going through the roof, money can be very tight, and we can worry about how we are going to keep afloat. And at times, relationships can be unsatisfying. Loved ones and friends may be uncaring and distant, or they may cheat or let you down. In fact, at times it can feel like these things occur so often – or so intensely – that they are life, that they just reflect how the world is.

The above examples can be common experiences in modern life, and for many years, psychologists and sociologists have been interested in the impact of ‘stress’ (in one form or another) on our mental health and well-being. In particular, some psychologists have also been interested in looking at whether the way in which we deal with life’s difficulties changes the likelihood of whether these might leading to mental distress, and even mental health problems. Another way of looking at this might be: Why might some people who experience these types of life difficulties become distressed and overwhelmed, whilst others seem better placed to tolerate them and cope? 

There appear to be a number of key findings in regard to understanding this. One interesting avenue of exploration has been in understanding the different ways that people may treat themselves under times of stress and difficulty. For example, do we tend to treat ourselves in a harsh, critical and hostile way, blaming and beating ourselves up for what has happened? Or, alternatively, are we able to treat ourselves with empathy and kindness, keeping in mind that life is often stressful and out of our control, and that we try our best to cope. Our findings are showing us two important things: (i) that high levels of self-criticism and feeling ashamed of ourselves seem to be related to higher levels of mental distress (e.g. in the form of self-reported stress, anxiety and depression symptoms); and (ii) that having a degree of self-compassion for the difficulties we encounter can help to reduce our level of self-criticism, and lower our level of stress, anxiety and depression.

Taking this idea - that treating ourselves with kindness and compassion may be related to psychological resilience (and as some of the research has shown, psychological well-being) - a number of psychologists and researchers have also begun to explore whether we might be able to teach people to become more self-compassionate, as a way of helping to ameliorate stress and suffering. This idea, sometimes known as developing a compassionate mind, has shown some promising results, and is the basis of a relatively new psychotherapeutic approach known as Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT). However, whether it’s in the form of psychotherapy, or as an approach we try to develop informally for ourselves, it appears that becoming more self-compassionate may be a helpful way of dealing with some of the stress we encounter in daily life.

Dr Chris Irons is Clinical Psychologist at Bow & Poplar Community Mental Health Team. He is speaking on Developing a Compassionate Mind at The School of Life on Wednesday 16 November.

 

John Paul Flintoff on Compassionate Correspondence

After the riots in London this summer, I was happy to join the riotcleanup movement that saw individuals rush out with rubber gloves and broomsticks. But cleaning up broken glass was never going to be enough. What about the psychological mess?

I was struck by a newspaper column arguing that we must listen to the rioters if we’re to understand them. I thought: that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write to one of them. I’ll try to give them a bit of encouragement, at a difficult time. If a correspondence develops, great. If not, I've lost nothing.

I wrote to others involved too. First to Tariq Jahan, who lost his son Haroon in Birmingham, then my local police (in London), and my MP.

Finally, I wrote to one of the people involved in the looting. He'd attracted a lot of media attention because he was older than most, at 31, and had a job as a classroom assistant in a primary school.

I said I imagined it must be painful to have so much anger directed at him, but wanted him to know that some people wish him well - including, I was sure, the children he helped at school. I said that I am very lucky to have an interesting job, a home and lovely family, but that when I was younger I took part in criminal activity just as serious as what he had done. I was always reluctant to join in, but didn't have the strength to stand up against what I knew was wrong. The only difference between us was that I never got caught.
"I know that you will survive this horrible experience, and flourish," I wrote. "Despite the terrible difficulty and pressures on you, I hope you will find the opportunity to exercise the wisdom and compassion that, I'm sure, enabled you to get your job as a classroom assistant."

I posted the letter to his solicitor, whose name I found in the newspapers. (You can read all the letters here: http://tinyurl.com/5s3543f) And a couple of weeks later I got a phone call while I was driving. I pulled over to talk – and it was him.

He said he was really surprised to get my letter, and very grateful. He said he felt very encouraged. He wanted to know why I'd written it, to which I could only reply that I thought it might be helpful. He said it was. I asked him to keep in touch. He said he would. It wasn't a long conversation, and nobody said anything very profound, but we made a strong connection, and something very powerful rubbed off on me. I came off the phone feeling elated.

I'm not entirely happy to blog about this because I fear that it might come across as self-serving. But I'm very glad I wrote that letter, and would encourage anybody to do something similar.

John Paul Flintoff is a Faculty member of The School of Life  - join him for the next session of 'How To Make A Difference' on Wednesday 23 November 2011.  Read his postings at http://jpflintoff.tumblr.com/

Richard Reynolds on Compassion for the Cracks

Trampled across, shat upon, dumped on. We let the wasteful abuse of these poor downtrodden sods carry on day after day. Most people are blind to it until they end up tripping up and only then realize what peculiar and ubiquitous little things they are. I’m talking about tree pits, those usually muddy, gravelly openings in our pavements from which a tree grows or perhaps used to grow. I urge you to show them compassion.

These little openings in our hard landscape are direct and public access to the earth and from that ground comes great potential. Their creation is almost always to serve the grander ambition of planting a tree. But this opening can be more than a conduit for a tree trunk. In the early years of a tree’s life the pit serves a crucial purpose in helping the tree take in water. Theoretically a protruding plastic tube or a pavement plughole should provide this, but how many times have you seen anyone re-fueling a tree with a thirst-quenching nozzle? Never I bet. Watering is left to nature and so it’s down to that tiny little tree pit to capture what it can and offer it up for what ever can grow within it. The tree relies on its pit for water until its roots have found other deeper sources of water.

The tree hugger in you will see now how vital a healthy tree pit is. At the very least don’t trample them, litter them or worse still, let your local authority fill them with that deceptively fancy looking resin-bonded gravel which only prevents the tree pit of providing any service it may provide, except as a dog toilet. Better than that, show the tree pit some active compassion. Clear the scrappy tangle of weeds, lightly fork over the soil so it can absorb more water, enrich the ground and in dry weather occasionally carry out a can and give it a really good soaking. Get comfortable with these PDAs and then get more expressive. Plant something joyful there. The open ground is your canvas. Let this tree pit show its potential! Around a mature tree plant daffodils, tulips, crocus, sunflowers, hollyhocks, petunias, cornflower, nasturtium, poppies, mint, marjoram - I’ve had them all flourish in tree pits by guerrilla gardening there, regardless of who should really be tending them. Gardening here is conspicuous compassion and like a wrist band or the red paper poppy it will mark you out to passers by as appreciative, conscious and grateful for the service the tree pit is providing. Get talking to them – I mean the passers by - win them round as compassionate gardeners. Together we can turn these the put upon tree pits into a network of micro parks.

Richard Reynolds is a faculty member of The School of Life, active Guerrilla Gardener and founder of www.guerrillagardening.org. 

If you tend a pavement tree pit in London or know of a beautiful pavement garden then you might like to consider participating in the new Chelsea Fringe London garden festival this May and June. Please contact Richard@pimpyourpavement.com

Roman Krznaric on The Radical Origins of Compassion

So you think compassion means being nice to people? Sure, it's Latin root literally means 'to suffer with another', which is pretty close to the psychological concept of 'affective empathy', where you share in or mirror someone else's emotional state. When I feel your pain or suffering, I may well do something to help you out.

But there's much more to compassion than that. It's time we recognised it as a source of radical social change which can erode prejudice, create human bonds across social divides, and spur political action. A flowering of compassion was at the roots of the anti-slavery movement in the eighteenth century, the creation of organisations to tackle child poverty in the nineteenth, and countless other political initiatives. 'So often when people hear about suffering in our world they feel guilty,' says Desmond Tutu, 'but rarely does guilt actually motivate action like empathy or compassion.'

What are the origins of this more politically charged approach to compassion? I trace it back to the year 1206, when Giovanni Bernadone, the twenty-three-year-old son of a wealthy merchant, went on a pilgrimage to the Basilica of St Peter's in Rome. He could not help noticing the contrast between the opulence and lavishness within the basilica – the brilliant mosaics, the spiral columns – and the poverty of the beggars sitting outside its doors. He persuaded one of them to exchange clothes with him and spent the rest of the day in rags begging for alms.

Not long after, when Giovanni was out riding near his home town, he met a leper. Lepers were the outcasts of medieval society, and were both shunned and despised. Many were deformed and crippled, with missing noses and bleeding sores. They were forbidden to enter towns and to drink from wells or springs. Nobody would touch them for fear of contracting their dreaded disease. But Giovanni forced himself to stifle his immediate feeling of revulsion for lepers, which he had harboured since childhood. He dismounted his horse, gave the leper a coin and kissed his hand. The leper kissed him in return.

These episodes were turning points in the young man's life. He soon founded a religious order whose brothers worked for the poor and in the leper houses, and who gave up their worldly goods to live in poverty, like those whom they served. Giovanni Bernadone, known to us now as St Francis of Assisi, is remembered for declaring, 'Give me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.'

St Francis's life was an instance of radical compassion in action, one which has been an inspiration to social and political activists for over 800 years. If we want to take compassion seriously, we should think about how we might follow his example by stepping into the shoes of those whose lives might be very different from our own. Clothes swap anyone?

You can watch the famous moment when St Francis meets the leper in Roberto Rossellini's superb film The Flowers of St Francis (1950)

Roman Krznaric is a faculty member of the School of Life. His new book, The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live, will be published by Profile Books in January 2012. He blogs on empathy and the art of living at www.outrospection.org

Karen Armstrong, TED-Prize-winning author of Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, will be delivering her sermon for The School of Life on 20 November, for more information please click here. In her honour, every day throughout November, The School is collecting and offering ideas for ways to make Compassion part of our everyday routine, via our facebook page.

 

Dear Bibliotherapist

Dear Bibliotherapist,

My partner is struggling after recently losing a close friend . She is keeping it all bottled up and making our home life unbearable. Can you suggest anything I can read to survive this period together, or perhaps to give her to read? I have to admit that I am struggling to remain sympathetic at all times.

Dear Unsympathetic,

It sounds to me as if you may be experiencing a case of compassion overload, and you need to read some great books to overcome this lack of sympathy.

A great, short novel that would almost certainly help you both is Helen Garner’s book, “The Spare Room”. This excellent work is a description of what happens between two friends when one comes to stay for three weeks, knowing that she has terminal cancer, but determined to fight it with unusual therapies. Nicola, the cancer patient, is desperately keen to show no signs of weakness or despair, and is convinced that a course of extreme Vitamin C treatment will chase out the cancer. Helen, the compassionate friend, is selflessly keen to help and support in whatever way she can, while remaining sceptical about the efficacy of the treatments, which seem to make her friend far worse than she already is. The deep friendship between the women is what makes the novel funny and something we can all relate to; they can still laugh themselves into puddles on the floor;  Helen  spoons Nicola in her bed to reassure her while she gets the shakes. We live through Helen’s journey from compassion to rage, despair, fury and relief in a way that anyone who has lost a loved one will identify with.

From this book you could turn to the enigmatic “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto. This tale concerns the life of Sakurai Mikage, whose grandmother has just died. This redoubtable ghost was Mikage’s last living relative, and she finds the loss devastating; unable to do almost anything other than sleep in the kitchen where her grandmother spent so much time, she curls up near the humming fridge for security. By chance she has the fortune to move in with a fellow student and his transvestite mother, and they create an alternative family that gives her new courage. The strength of feeling for the dead relatives who haunt the pages is intense, but the lasting sense is of lightness and gentle amusement. This book will help you both, shedding new light on the mourning process, with a Japanese perspective that allows you to stand back and see death from a more distant view.

 

An excellent book to distract you both from your own preoccupations and delight and entertain you, make you laugh and above all, re-awaken your compassion for your fellow man (as well as, perhaps, each other), is Craig Taylor’s “Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now, As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It”. This is a fantastic collection of accounts in the words of the speakers, of life in London by every kind of Londoner from a Muslim currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace; from the marriage registrar at Westminster Town Hall to the director of the biggest Bethnal Green funeral parlour, to a dominatrix and the fruit sellers of the New Spitalfields market who exist only in the hours before dawn. This book contains eighty accounts, each a few pages long, so they are perfect to read aloud to each other. Hearing the tales of other people’s triumphs and tragedies in life will re-open lines of communication in your own relationship. Reading aloud may well counter the bottled- in feeling that your partner has. Taylor has acted a listening ear, erasing his own personality from the accounts, but giving them to us as fascinating snippets of every kind of life. Inhabiting the skins of these very different people will give her new ways of expressing her own anger, confusion and finally, hope.

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist at The School of Life.  For more information about the service click here.

This is for You: We All Need Words on Dedications and Acknowledgements.

When I was five, I lied.

I told friends at my primary school that an author had dedicated a book to me. In print. And everything.

This white lie got me in a bit of hot water. “Bring it in and show us then”, they said. “OK.”

Except the book didn’t exist. One fib led to another and I decided to write my own dedication in a way that (I thought) looked like type: For Molly Mackey.

(I wrote it in pencil, because I wasn’t old enough to write in pen.)

The book was Terry Jones’s Fairy Tales, which included a story called ‘Brave Molly’, so it made sense to me that it would be dedicated to a real life Molly. I wrote it on the inside page, hoping my friends wouldn’t get to the actual dedication: these stories were written for Sally Jones in the summer of 1978.

I still have the book. And you can see my hand-written ‘dedication’, along with the very faint ‘for’, rubbed out after my super sleuth friends quickly discovered the truth:

It’s a laughable forgery. I think I knew it at the time, but I really, really wanted to have a book dedicated to me. I thought it was the Best. Thing. Ever. That someone could write a book and say, “here, this is for you” blew my mind.

 It still does. The first thing I do when I pick up a book – any book – is look at the dedication in the front and the thanks at the back. If I’m in a bookshop, browsing the three-for-two mounds, I don’t read the blurbs. I head straight for the names, the little bit where the author writes in their own voice.

Sometimes they tell you how they’re connected to that name on the first page (for Kate, my mother). Mostly I have to settle for the bare bones. For… but then my brain goes into overdrive (“must be his partner/wife/sister/mum/best friend”). I swiftly make up my own stories about how the name in print is connected to the name on the front cover.

Sometimes authors give you a little more, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Once again to Zelda. In Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, the dedication reads: for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing, next to their four photos, as well as and for Jonathan, my life. You don’t have to be a Nobel prizewinner to know that’s Jonathan Safran Foer. Ahhh. Lovely! Two authors! Together! In love!

All the time I search for scraps of information. Something, anything, about the author. Why? I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that I spend a lot of time with an author when I read their books. I hear their voice. I’m in their head, and they’re in mine. Even if it’s outlandish fiction, their book becomes like a familiar friend. And as the book goes on I want to know more. So much so that I feel a bit of disorientated when I pick up a book written by someone else. And although it’s exciting to read a new book, I have to get to know the writer’s little wordy eccentricities and foibles all over again. And each new dedication gives me a teeny tiny glimpse into their real life. 

And then there are the acknowledgements. Tucked away at the back, it’s often where you can find out where the author put pen to paper (thanks to such-and-such-research centre, writers’ retreat or Starbucks), who helped them get their facts straight, who edited their book and who they relied on to look after the kids while they wrote it. I love these sneak peeks into an author’s real life. There are books I’m just not interested in reading, but I’ll always have a look at their acknowledgements. Just a few little words, but they’re a story in themselves – admittedly one that’s often made up by me.

Three years after my playground dedication debacle, I finally got what I’d boasted about. My mum’s friend was writing a book and her illustrator needed some children to photograph to help her draw the pictures. If by any (small) chance you have a copy of Rose Impey’s Scare Yourself to Sleep, you’ll see it’s For Tom, Molly and Alice (me, my brother and my best friend). Too late to prove my point to the five-year-olds, but a fib come true all the same.

We All Need Words dedicate this blog post to the people who’ve come to our Words for Life class at The School of Life (there’s another one on 3^rd December).

Dying of Nostalgia; Thomas Dixon Explores Homesickness

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions. 
 

 

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records. 

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well.  The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II,  and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

 Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. 

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

Jules Evans interviews Stephen Greenblatt on Lucretius

When he was a student at Yale University, Stephen Greenblatt wandered to the local bookstore to pick up some holiday reading, and his eye was caught by a strange-looking book with a painting by Max Ernst on the cover, showing disembodied torsos copulating in the sky (Men Shall Know Nothing of This). Naturally he bought it. It turned out to be a copy of Lucretius’ poem from the 1st century BC, On The Nature of Things.

Greenblatt tells me: “ The book came to me at a moment when I was intensely receptive to it. It’s an experience that most of us have - a book seems to speak to you directly across a vast chasm of time and culture. It was as if Lucretius was speaking to me.”

The poem is Lucretius' attempt to put the philosophy of Epicureanism into verse. It’s envisaged as a form of therapy - honey lining the rim of a cup of medicine, as Lucretius puts it - that would spread Epicurus’ therapeutic ideas to a wider audience, revealing to them the atomistic nature of the universe, and freeing them from their deluded fear of death and eternal punishment.

The young Greenblatt didn’t fear his own death, but he was instilled with a deep fear of his mother’s death, thanks to his mother, who possessed “an absolute certainty that she was destined for an early grave”. Greenblatt writes: “My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell...even when I simply left the house for school, she clung to me tightly, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again.”

Mrs Greenblatt's fears turned out to be unfounded - she lived until she was almost 90 - but Stephen was very struck by how the fear of death could make life unliveable. And this Lucretius knew and described well: “The poem crystallized things I’d been grappling with - the impatience that Lucretius gives voice to with excessive anxiety in the face of death. ‘Death is nothing to us’, he wrote. There’s a celebrated passage where he expresses quite powerfully how our endless complaints about death just get in the way of living:

 

Sometimes the phobia of death can grip a man so tight

He comes to loathe his very life and looking on the light,

And in his mournful heart resolves to die by his own hand,

Oblivious this fear’s the source of what he cannot stand.

 

In his new book, Swerve: How The World Became Modern, the Renaissance scholar examines the story of how Lucretius’ intensely modern poem was rediscovered in the 15th century by a Florentine book-hunter called Poggio Bracciolini, who brought it back to Florence and re-introduced its scandalous ideas into European culture, thereby helping (Greenblatt suggests) to create the modern world.

I spoke to Greenblatt to discuss Epicureanism, Lucretius’ vivid take on it, and its place in the modern world.

JE: Would you say you’re an Epicurean?

SG: Well, I’m not card-carrying. My card has expired. There are some aspects of it I don’t share. But if being an Epicurean or Lucretian means that I try to enhance pleasure and reduce pain, then yes. If it means that I don’t believe in a personal deity who intervenes in human affairs, or an afterlife where we’re rewarded or punished for our actions, then yes. I share Lucretius’ sense of hilarity at the belief that a deity cares about the outcome of the US election, or a sports match.

JE: What strikes me about the poem is how incredibly modern it is. In the last few years, we’ve had works by secular humanists like AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins that have tried to create a sort of secular poetry or myth to rival religious myths - but Lucretius has already done that, 2,000 years ago.

SG: What’s remarkable and moving is that this person who rigorously denies the efficacy of prayer begins his poem with the ‘Hymn to Venus’, which is one of the greatest prayers to a god ever written. Why? The answer has to be that he understood in a very deep way that humans have a natural longing for wonder and awe. And whatever the consequences of grasping an atomistic universe, it mustn’t be presented to the world as a deep disillusionment. A commitment to secular rationality doesn’t mean that the world is emptied out of wonder and ardour.

JE: The poem seems to me to put forward different views of nature. In the Hymn to Venus, nature is presented as a sort of festival of love, connecting and uniting all things. But in other parts of the poem, nature is scene as an atomistic clash or struggle between warring elements. And then the poem ends with this long and horrific description of a plague, which is like something by the Chapman brothers. Is there an ambivalence there?

SG: Yes, the poem expresses multiple views of nature. It’s one of the things that makes it an interesting work. It’s not a tract. The Hymn to Venus is extraordinary. It’s an erotic frenzy, an ecstatic and weird moment, when all of nature’s creatures feel an intense and ferocious urge to reproduce. They give up their food, they wade across rivers. It’s not a decorous or orderly moment:

Then beasts, the wild and tame alike, go romping over the lush

Pastureland and swim across the rivers’ headlong rush,

So eagerly does each pant after you, so do they heed,

Caught in the chains of love, and follow you wherever you lead.

All through the seas and mountains, torrents, leafy-roofed abodes

Of birds, and greening meadows, your delicious yearning goads

The breast of every creature, and you urge all things you find

Lustily to get new generations of their kind.

And then, at the end of the poem, there is this ghastly account of the plague. I think that Lucretius is looking at the worst that could happen, and attempting to think through it. He’s trying to show that the plague is not some divine punishment, but the outcome of ‘invisible agents’, as he refers to what we’d think of as pathogens.

JE: But it’s not very consolatory. You don’t find many long and graphic descriptions of a plague in self-help books. 

SG: It’s not consolatory at all! That’s the hardest idea to grasp in some ways. There’s no reason in principle to think that existence is better in any sense than non-existence in Lucretius. In that sense, you could say his philosophy is Nietzschean. Now, I myself was brought up in a Jewish household that followed the Deuteronomic principle of ‘choose life’. So I’m not fully onboard with Lucretius’ vision of life. But I’d suggest it’s a consistent vision.

JE: Your book makes a juxtaposition, broadly, between the freewheeling and sexually liberal ethos of the ancient world, and the body-hating, ascetic and uptight Christian culture. But is it so black-and-white? Asceticism after all comes from a Greek word, askesis, which was central to Greek philosophy.

SG: Well, the juxtapositon is made grosso modo, so I’m not going to defend it belligerently. It could easily be disputed. But I would argue that, in the early Middle Ages, there was a quite sustained and very impressive collective attempt to reconceive the place of pain. It’s not that the ancients didn’t embrace pain - they had Stoicism in their culture, and the gladiator’s arena. But its quite significant that Christianity in the early Middle Ages erected a battered and bloody divinity at its centre.

JE: But, just to pursue the point, Lucretius himself was very suspicious of sexual love - didn’t he suggest that men should masturbate or go to prostitutes rather than fall in love?

SG: Lucretius is an interesting part of the conundrum. He was wary of sexual love because he understood deeply that certain ecstatic experiences of love are very close to pain [there’s a wonderful analysis of love-bites in Lucretius]. The flip-side of that, as we know of some ascetic practices in the Middle Ages, is that certain experiences of ecstatic pain are very close to pleasure.

[Greenblatt raises an interesting point here, which we didn’t have time to pursue. I wonder if Sado-Masochism, or the Marquis de Sade’s extreme philosophy of pain-pleasure, is a challenge for Epicureanism. Epicurus conceives pleasure as the absence of pain. But what if pleasure is actually mixed up with pain? Epicurus would obviously (and perhaps rightly) say that the Marquis de Sade is hardly a good model of ‘healthy pleasure’. And yet one doesn’t even have to get into S&M to argue the point: perhaps the greatest pleasures of human existence necessarily involve some pain: the ache of love for one's children, or the music so beautiful it makes you cry. Perhaps Epicurus’ definition of pleasure as ‘the absence of pain’ is simply too dull to be either realistic or alluring.]

JE: Do you think Epicureanism is for the few or can it be for the many?

 SG: That’s an interesting question. It’s not just flag-waving on my part that I end the book with Jefferson. Before him, Thomas More imagined a society founded on Epicurean principles in Utopia, but he clearly thought that the only way you can have an Epicurean society is if you insert the idea of punishment in the afterlife, because otherwise the people will behave too badly. It’s not until the Scottish Enlightenment, and Jeffersonian democracy, that the idea of a truly Epicurean society is put forward. The key moment is the Declaration of Independence, when Jefferson inserts that phrase about the ‘pursuit of happiness’.

JE: Do you think we live in an Epicurean society today?

SG: Of course not! But we could live in a more Epicurean society. That’s the hope.

JE: But how would you bring Epicureanism to a wider audience? Would that mean an expansion of the role of philosophy and the humanities?

SG: Well, I hadn’t thought of it in such self-serving terms! I’m not going to climb onboard that particular train. I think if anything we need more sciences as well as the humanities. We need people, including politicians, to come to terms with the implications of the world we live in. Have you read the Book of Mormon? Well...we better not go there.

Jules Evans is a journalist, blogger and writer, who writes about philosophy and psychology for several publications, including his own blog,www.politicsofwellbeing.com.  He is also Policy Director at the Centre for History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London.  Read this interview and others at: http://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/

Smells like... the Future

In recent years our concern for smell has become heightened – helped by smoking bans, and air pollution. It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve also seen an increasing obsession with managing our own personal impressions, through the use of deodorants, air fresheners, perfumes, car fragrances, clothes sprays, body creams and even flavoured breath mints.

Once considered to be the least important sense, 2004 Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientists, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck, conclusively proved the power of smell. Since then, products, conversations and aroma possibilities have abounded. But, despite our ability to recall over 10,000 smells, we still have an incredibly stunted vernacular to describe smells without naming the object or cause of the aroma. There is also no agreement, between individual or master perfumers, about what smells good and what doesn’t. Our olfactory values are social, cultural, gender specific, age related and genetically determined.

From the 1980s onwards, we’ve known that crucial factors in purchase decision-making were based upon the emotional and sentimental state. This makes smell a hugely powerful tool for retailers, as this is exactly where smell and memory come into their own. Olfaction is passive, and the experience of odour types can be pervasive and subtle, working at a very different level of cognition. It’s not surprising that brands are increasingly waking up to their powers.

Scratch ‘n’ sniff may seem like something from a time gone by, but the use of scent is the biggest developing trend in sensory marketing and branding today. Fragrance logos which are unique to a product or company are increasingly being used. Diffused when the brand and/or product is present, the limbic part of the brain responds to sensory clues and hard-wires the response in the body-memory.

Odor-styling looks set to diversify and possibly to replace a large percentage of current advertising techniques which are not engaged on a sensory level. Since the advent of digital technologies and cyber worlds, odour biometrics and artificial fragrances are being developed and explored to their full potential.

So, take a deep breath, because you are about to get a scents of things to come. The world of ‘aromanomics’ is about to infiltrate our world; and what is more, we may never know it!

 Dr Morgaine Gaye is a Food Futurologist - academic, consultant and presenter, who looks at food and eating from a social, cultural, economic, trend, branding and geo-political perspective.
She will be part of the team leading 'A Day of Good Scents' on November 26. Click here for more details.

 

 

 

 

David Baker on Reflecting on Death

Last Saturday was the Jewish Day of Atonement. For 24 hours, from sunset to sunset, we neither eat nor drink, we don’t wear leather (a sign of comfort and luxury), and we don’t wash or bathe. Synagogues are full – many non-observant Jews attend on this day – and the liturgy and music are raised to new heights of intensity.

Yom Kippur, as it is known in Hebrew, comes ten days after the Jewish new year, and during that time we are encouraged to reflect on the mistakes we have made in the previous 12 months – the friends we have fallen out with, the resolutions we haven’t kept, the dreams we didn’t act on – and consider ways of doing things differently in the year ahead.

As I sat through the services, a little spacey from the fasting, I found myself reflecting on what stops us acknowledging mistakes in “real” life and how it sometimes takes something as significant as an awe-filled religious festival to bring our lives back into focus. We all have dreams, plans, good intentions, and at the time we make them they seem so full of promise. Yet let them lie for a few days and they tend to get swept aside by the minutiae of life, so we find another 12 months has passed without having given them a chance.

I think – and this is a personal view – that our clumsiness with good intentions comes from being just a little too comfortable, which makes us risk-averse. Why bother changing jobs when our current one is “kind of” OK? Why get in touch with someone we have fallen out with when we have enough friends as it is? Why take up a new hobby when we have so many half-hearted ones already?

Steve Jobs, who died just before Yom Kippur, gave an inspiring speech to Stanford University students that is very much worth taking 20 minutes to watch in full on YouTube. In it he quoted the Whole Earth Catalog’s advice to “stay hungry, stay foolish”, and on Saturday I found myself making a resolution to try be a little hungrier and more foolish in life myself. I think one leads to the other: if you have less to lose, you will risk more. And more risk, in the end, means more reward.  

The prayers on Yom Kippur return again and again to the inevitability of death and our absolute inability to know when it will come. Jobs, whose death has unleashed an almost Diana-like wave of grieving, seems to have understood that lesson more than many. “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he told the Stanford students. “Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

We shy away from thoughts of death, for obvious reasons, but perhaps Jobs’ own death gives us a chance to transform its influence in our lives from a terrifying prospect into a powerful motor for change.  As the old adage goes, we won’t look back on our deathbeds and think, “Thank goodness I stayed those extra hours in the office.” But do we really know what we will look back on with joy and satisfaction? Perhaps it’s time to give that some thought and engage with those things that will make our lives a little more meaning.

David Baker is a new faculty member of The School of Life.  His next session will be How To Balance Work With Life – 20 October and How to Find a Job you love – 22 Oct.  If you're keen to take stock of this and consider how we think about death and approach life, come to our next 'How To Face Death' class on the 15th November.

Head to www.davidbakeronline.com for some more.

 

Oliver Burkeman on Self-Improvement and the Law of Reversed Effort

We've grown accustomed, in recent years, to news stories and psychological studies purporting to show that happiness isn't all we might have imagined it to be. Increased economic growth doesn't seem to lead, in any reliable way, to happier societies. More choice often makes us more miserable. Positive thinking can make at least some of us feel worse (read this).. and so on. In the years I've spent exploring some of the more dubious corners of the self-help industry, I've certainly encountered plenty of prescriptions for happiness that turn out to be utterly counterproductive. To me, though, the compelling philosophical question is whether these wrong approaches to happiness might all be wrong for a similar and interesting set of reasons. Is there something about the very act of striving for happiness that sabotages our efforts to attain it?

The observation that happiness seems to come most easily when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, rather than aimed for directly, is an old one. ("Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so," noted John Stuart Mill.) But the question remains urgent: what, if anything, can we do about this seemingly intractable paradox?

In the book on which I'm currently working, I've been exploring this idea of a "negative path" to happiness — that it's our constant efforts to eliminate the negative (uncertainty, unhappiness, failure) that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure and unhappy — and that there's an alternative approach that involves coming face-to-face with, perhaps even embracing, many of the things we spend our lives trying so hard to avoid. Aldous Huxley was getting at something similar when he wrote of the "law of reversed effort"; the Sixties counterculture philosopher Alan Watts called it "the backwards law".

Take, for example, the advice of the ancient Stoics to practice the "premeditation of evils" — to spend time visualising not the best-case scenario, as hyperventilating motivational speakers would have us do, but the worst-case scenario, both to heighten an appreciation for the advantages we currently enjoy, and to remove the gnawing fear that we wouldn't be able to cope if the worst befell us. "Set aside a certain number of days," advises Seneca, "during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" Or consider the Buddhist notion of non-attachment, which runs so directly counter to the mood-boosting advice of our present-day self-help gurus. Instead of trying to fill your brain with positive thoughts and emotions — a ceaseless struggle that, ironically, isn't really enjoyable at all — learn instead to step back from identification with thoughts and emotions, letting both negative and positive ones be. Which, apart from a potential path to spiritual enlightenment, happens to be excellent anti-procrastination advice: instead of trying to psych yourself up into the right mood to act, learn to act alongside whatever mood you're in.

There are countless other approaches, from ancient philosophy to present-day experimental psychology, that belong on this "negative path" to happiness. Deep in the human psyche seems to lurk a fundamental ironic principle: striving for what we want seems all too often a recipe for not getting it. Learning to work with that irony may be the happiness technique we've been missing.


Oliver Burkeman will be leading our event:  'Self Improvement' on 19 October.  Sadly tickets are now sold out, but a collection of his Guardian columns, entitled Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, has just been published in paperback. His blogs at www.oliverburkeman.com and is @oliverburkeman on Twitter.

Roman Krznaric on How to be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian and a Jew

There is an intriguing thesis at the heart of Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Harvard psychologist argues – contrary to popular opinion – that humankind has become progressively less violent over the past few thousand years. We might feel surrounded by terrorism, civil wars and gun crime today, but murder and warfare is in fact on the decline. And the reason? One of Pinker's key explanations is the rise of empathy as a force for social change: we are now more likely to look at the world through other people's eyes, and consequently take action on their behalves.

What I find missing in Pinker's worthy tome – and books which make a similar argument, such as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization – is a clear steer on how we can expand our capacity to empathise in everyday life. How exactly can we get better at it? And how can we integrate it into the way we approach the art of living? An answer lies not in the musings of psychologists or all those neuroscientists who have become obsessed with finding the empathic hotspots in our brains, but in the ideas of one of the great empathic adventurers of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi.

His philosophy of empathy is embodied in what is known as 'Gandhi's talisman':

I will give you a talisman. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

The talisman contains a moral framework that each of us can choose to live by: to consider the perspective of the most marginal members of society when making decisions on ethical issues, and to ensure they benefit in some way. Gandhi challenges us to imagine ourselves into the lives of people whose everyday existence might be vastly different from our own. Beyond this, the talisman is a guide to confronting our existential difficulties. When we feel paralysed by doubt or entangled in personal problems to the extent that we don't know what to do, we can find liberation and direction through an act of empathetic imagining. The talisman may provide clarity in our state of confusion or indecision. 

Gandhi lived out his empathic ideals. He worked as a nurse in South Africa as a young man: during the Zulu rebellion in Natal, he nursed Zulus who had been flogged and left by the British, whose regular nurses refused to attend them. His experiments living on ashrams were also an exercise in stepping into other people's shoes. 'Our ambition was to live the life of the poorest people,' he said. That's why he tended goats and cleaned toilets, alongside leading the resistance against British rule in India.

But his great originality was to stress the importance of empathising with one's enemies. During the growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the years leading up to independence in 1947, he declared, 'I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew'.

The half million deaths that occurred during partition in violence between Hindus and Muslims showed that the moral challenge of empathising with one's adversaries was too great in that turbulent moment in history. But I still think we can learn from Gandhi's approach. Trying to look through the eyes of those whose views we don't agree with – whether it is a nasty boss at work, an argumentative sibling, or a neighbour who does not share our religious creed – has the potential not only to challenge our own prejudices and forge social tolerance, but can create new and nurturing human bonds in our lives.

Roman Krznaric is hosting The School of Life's Curry With Gandhi on 25 October. His new book, The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live, will be published by Profile Books in January 2012. He blogs on empathy at www.outrospection.org

Wellbeing on Campus

 According to the popular image, most students indulge in years of hedonism capped by raucous post-exam celebrations – a privileged minority enjoying the “best days of their lives”. No doubt there is some truth to this caricature, but a recent report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists reminds us that every silver lining has its cloud.

 

Mental illness is a serious problem on UK campuses, explains the report, which is entitled Mental Health of Students in Higher Education. In the last ten years, studies have shown as many as 65% of female and 54% of male undergraduate students scoring positively on the General Health Questionnaire, which screens for minor psychiatric disorders. One team of researchers found 29% of students describing clinical levels of psychological distress, whether anxiety, depression, obsessiveness or social alienation. More recently, a survey of higher education institutions revealed that, of those who responded, 80% recorded an increased demand for mental health provision over the previous five years.

 

Why? The report cites a range of possible explanations. Financial difficulties among students, pressure to perform in anticipation of a competitive job market, misuse of drugs – especially alcohol – and higher rates of family breakdown. But the facts remain obscure. There is, the authors warn, a ‘paucity of recent, high-quality research into the nature and prevalence of mental disorder… in the UK student population’. What is certain is that ‘it is unrealistic now (and probably for the foreseeable future) to expect health or counselling services to be able to offer direct face-to-face therapy for all those who may wish to avail themselves of it’.

 

That’s especially tough when you consider that, bizarrely, another group which students generally aren’t face-to-face with enough is academics. Here the report’s explanation is more obvious: ‘Academic staff are under constant pressure to maintain and improve research output’. To hear confirmation of this, just spend ten minutes in any research department. Academics don’t agree on much, but there’s one thing they all agree on: the pressure to publish has become excessive. It emanates from the government and is transmitted via university administrators through Big Brother-like ‘productivity’ dictates – such as the following which was levied at members of Imperial College's medicine department: ‘publish three papers per annum including one in a prestigious journal with an impact factor of at least five.’

 

You might think that a kick up the backside is just what researchers need, but they don’t. Recently I was chatting to a senior academic who explained how she and her colleagues used to be perfectly capable of balancing and policing their own publishing and pastoral priorities; another lamented the fact that her publishing load is so heavy she barely has time to read: a ludicrous, counter-productive irony (apparently everyone’s speaking and nobody’s listening). Then there’s the more subtle fact that pressure to churn out papers stifles deep thinking, creativity and originality. At worst, academia has become an arms-race of hastily-penned pedantry, a situation perfectly captured in the slogan “publish or perish”, leaving researchers wearily bereft of the opportunity to cogitate in the way that their vocation would ideally allow them.

 

The Royal College’s report, in effect, advocates using one stone to kill two birds – addressing the problems of demoralized staff on one hand and distressed students on the other. The authors call it a ‘settings-based’ approach, one in which ‘the university or college is seen not only as a place of education but also a resource for promoting health and well-being in students, staff and the wider community’. I couldn’t agree more with this ethos – and it’s great to see innovative new organisations such as Mental Wealth setting the agenda in this direction. But I’d emphasize the importance of relieving publishing pressure in order to achieve the desired ends. For one thing, freeing up academics’ time will enable them to interact with students more, thus increasing ‘social capital’ in universities, which is a well-known protector against mental disorder. Why not, indeed, get students more involved in running and even maintaining their department? That way they’ll gain valuable skills and help reduce costs too.

 

But, most importantly, this amounts to a call for wisdom. Universities should primarily be institutions for educating and inspiring – thereby producing confident, considerate citizens and future leaders. Key to this ideal is the learning dynamic which exists between profoundly thoughtful, patient teachers and engaged, nurtured students. By relieving publishing pressure on academics – or perhaps by them recovering some of their old activism and demanding change – we can make our universities places where teachers can read deeply and profess sensitively, and become role models from whom students can learn the knack of living wisely and happily.

 

Ben Irvine is editor of the Journal of Modern Wisdom. www.modernwisdom.co.uk  

For more details about The School of Life's Psychotherapy service and MOT for the Mind click here.

We All Need Words on Status (update) Anxiety

Rob is sipping prosecco and munching crostini in Tuscany.
Molly ran 10km in a new record time.
Rob has booked a boutique hotel in Baja California.
Molly bought some shoes half price in Selfridges. 
Rob loves his job.

About now Molly could also be telling you she loves her kids and how much they love her back. If she had some. And if Rob was a dad he might've even swapped his profile picture for a snap of his little ones.
We can make up all sorts of status updates because neither of us is on Facebook. I know, I know... young(ish), cosmopolitan(ish) things like us, not on Facebook? We might as well pack up our quills and cast ourselves into a social wilderness. But most of the people we know are on Facebook, so we can't help being a part of it and hearing highlights about friends-of-friends' lives. Sometimes we think we're the last to know everything. "Did you hear that…?'' "Yes, I saw it on Facebook."

That'll teach us for being such luddite stuck-in-the-muds.

Granted, everyone loves to see what everyone else is doing. But we've noticed something else about the way people respond to Facebook. A niggling feeling that everyone is having a better time of things than they are. While friends' walls are covered in snaps of their little one's first smile, or learning to walk, your baby is crying his or her precious little eyes out. And won't stop. If you've been made redundant there's nothing worse than seeing friends' holiday photographs, or reading that someone has been on a shopping spree. It's even weirder still to hear what an amazing time your 967th friend (whom you haven't seen since you were at school in 1993) is having compared to you.

Status anxiety is as old as Mark Zuckerberg. The School of Life's founder, Alain de Botton, wrote a book all about it and coined the term in 2004. And there have been others like Oliver James's Affluenza too. Even the London riots were blamed on this growing desire, not to mention a gaping gap in wealth, to have things that we can't have.

So it's all the more surprising that people (especially advertisers of flashy mobile phones) talk about social media with words like 'connections' and 'communities'. You'd imagine that Facebook (and social media sites like it) are a wonderful utopia where people share ideas and are supportive of each other. Some of that does happen, of course, just look at the response to the London riots. But a good portion of Facebook's walls are still plastered with a montage of our best bits. A tightly managed, airbrushed version of what we want people to think of us. We're all in public relations now, whether you're updating your CV on LinkedIn or seeing who can make the funniest jokes about X Factor. And like those celebrities on the covers of gossipy magazines, it's hard not to be left feeling a bit empty by all this online one-upmanship.

The other day we were talking to the  artist Grayson Perry (there’s a status update for our non-existent Facebook page) about status update anxiety. He dreamt up a brilliant antidote to it: Arsebook, a socially-dysfunctional, alienating site where we share all the crappy misfortunes and bad things that happen to us. One-downmanship, perhaps...

Rob's fingernail broke.
Molly's fingernails fell off. All of them.
Rob broke his leg.
Molly broke both her legs.
Rob's hair went grey overnight.
Molly's head fell off.
Rob's only got one friend (and her head fell off).

Rob Mitchell and Molly Mackey are running our Words for Life class this Saturday (and in December).
They'll be tackling all the wordy things you're never taught to write: CVs, dating profiles, complaint letters, and yes, Twitter updates.

Dear Bibliotherapist......

Dear Bibliotherapist

Part of the joy of reading novels for me is that I feel like I’m getting to know a total stranger inside and out.  Not just one stranger, a whole set of them.  Often by the end of the book, these people are no longer strangers – they feel like very close friends, or even relatives. I love meeting real strangers, and trying to get to know them, but sometimes it’s easier (and possibly safer) to pick up a book. Also, I love the fact that the characters you meet in books remain as strangers – I like the element of mystery, both with real aquaintances and fictional ones. People can get boring when you know them too well.

Can you suggest some great books with strange people – or just with strangers who you never quite understand?

 

Dear Stranger Lover,

If you are looking for strangers whose hands you can hold for a short while, then let them go back into their imaginary worlds, yet be changed fundamentally by the experience, then Krik? Krak by Edwidge Danticat is your perfect book. In Haiti a story teller will ask “Krik?”, then anyone wishing to hear a tale will reply “Krak”. This collection of short stories, then, contains nine tales that are self-contained, but they also hang together as a collection in which characters criss cross through time and space. The first story is set on a boat leaving Haiti, while many of the later episodes take place in the States once the refugees from Papa Doc’s terrifying regime have escaped. Rape, brutality and witchcraft are hinted at and referenced, but Danticat’s power is her poetry and the pure insights we gain into her character’s minds, briefly glimpsed, then let go again into their own past, present and future.

A British writer whose novels are eternally strange, and full of strangers who hardly know each other, let alone reveal their thoughts to you, is the great bus driver Magnus Mills. His previous six novels, most famously “Three to See the King”, and “All Quiet on the Orient Express”, all hinge around characters who find themselves in incomprehensible situations, where logic at once pervades the setting and flees its boundaries. “A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In”, his seventh novel, is just as baffling in its circumstances, but, like the other books, utterly compelling, hilariously funny, and highly memorable. The novel's unnamed narrator is the principal composer to the imperial court of a place called Greater Fallowfields, which bears no relation at all to real geography, just as the concert hall that is the most significant landmark in the novel, known as the “Cake”, bears no relation to a real, physical building. Mills’ latest book, just published, is just as brilliantly mischievous and odd as all his others. Take this book with you on the bus and it will be far better than sitting next to a stranger.

A book to make you worry about any strangers you meet in a profound way is Michel Faber’s  “Under the Skin”. I can’t reveal what happens in the book, as you are kept in a state of gently prickling fear for the first half of the novel -but suffice to say that after reading this, you would never dream of hitch hiking again; you will look at broad chested men in a very different way for years from now; you may seriously change your dietary habits; you may find yourself a little bit shy of strangers.

After scaring yourself with this book, read JD Salinger’s "For Esme with Love and Squalor", to restore your faith in the fun of meeting strangers. The title story of this collection describes a thirteen year old girl meeting a soldier temporarily stationed in Devon, England. We know they both survive as the story starts with an invitation to the soldier from the girl, Esme, six years later. Their meeting is incredibly inspiring and perfect – describing roughly an hour of their lives, we know that they touch each other profoundly. Here, two strangers meet and form a close, tangible bond in a very short space of time. The other stories in the collection are equally brilliant, each offering you a glimpse of a character that emblazons itself on your memory, but leaves a huge amount unexplained.

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist at The School of Life.  For more information about the service click here.

 

Not Just a Talking Shop

People often say, after a class at the School of Life, that they weren’t expecting to enjoy talking so much, and especially not to complete strangers.  Perhaps there is a freedom there, they muse; no past, no baggage, just the meeting of curious minds.  I think so too. It is an unusual environment: a place of conversation about the things that matter between people who have probably never met before.  Jurgen Habermas said that in the London coffee houses of the 18th Century we find the origins of a properly public space that had no affiliation to the state - a place where conversation flowed and where ideas thrived.  John Stuart Mill saw conversation as one of the primary sources of progress in human civilization; to put ourselves outside of our assumptions about who we are and what we believe is exhilarating and, at best, down-right life affirming. 

So the conversations that really matter, said Theodore Zeldin, are the ones that change us.  You want to change the world?  You want the future to be brighter than the past?  Start talking, to anyone and everyone, about what matters. Imagine those future professors, sifting digital archives of our times, forced to conclude that we were a wise and subtle people who pursued each other’s company with vigor and abandon, brave souls who knew, if only by dimly lit intuition, that simply to talk to others across boundaries and barriers of difference would be a powerful tool for shaping a better world.  Is that too optimistic? Plug in, log on, dial up, connect, interrupt, catch an eye or just go ahead and introduce yourself.  How ever you like to do it, just think this to yourself:  with whom shall I converse, freely, on this most extraordinary of days?

Hugo Whately is a faculty member of The School of Life and regular teacher of our classes.  Join him for the next session of 'How to Be Alone' this Thursday 6 October. 

Utopiascope

A string of articles that share a startling pair of words have appeared in the press recently: 'Capitalism' and 'Failed'. Communism, of course, is a word we easily associate with the word failure. Our gut reaction to the prospect of communism is similar to that that we might have to an over-enthusiastic choir leader rushing into the street and calling on us to spontaneously fall into perfect song. The result will, of course, be atonal, and we can rightly accuse the choir leader of having no understanding of human nature.

Capitalism on the other hand is more often presented as holding up a mirror to human nature. As Guy Sorman has written, “the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.” Human nature can certainly be flawed, but it cannot fail -- it isn't a system that we artificially impose, we don’t have an assortment of other options. To say that something is in our nature is essentially to say that it's our base condition, our lot in life.

So, if capitalism can fail, then far from being in our nature, it follows that it is instead an ideological system that requires belief on our part. We may have thought that we were behaving as perfect cynics, ruled by our instincts, but in fact we were closet idealists. If capitalism has failed, then it means it never was in our nature. And that leaves us with a daunting and terrifying question: if the secret to economic and social harmony lies in living according to our nature, how do we routinely fail to live according to our nature?

Far from being fated to live by instinct, as sceptics or as cynics, it would appear that we are fated to live as idealists, dreaming and designing a new society just as our current model begins to reach its limitations. There is no perfect political system, but instead humans are involved in a process of imagination named utopia in order to uncover the values that they use to develop their political and economic systems. Human society runs into trouble when this process of imagination is discouraged and labelled avoidable.

Over the next few weeks, meandering through the philosophy of Walt Disney, le Corbusier, Plato, Orwell, Borges, and Ayn Rand, I will endeavor to show how our concepts of love, happiness, community, work, death, sex and family change shape as they pass from the hands of different social architects. Odds are that we won't find a single utopia that we would like to call home; but in visiting them, we may find the perfect therapy for a society that is undergoing great upheaval and change.

John Lidwell-Durnin is a writer and regular contributor to The School of Life.

Happiness Is Just a Neurochemical Spurt

Happiness is just a neurochemical spurt. Different happy chemicals produce different ways to experience happiness.

Endorphin happiness is triggered by physical pain. The body's natural morphine masks pain, which allowed our ancestors to run from predators when injured. Humans experience endorphin as euphoria, but it obviously did not evolve to trigger a constant feeling of joy. You would touch hot stoves and run on a broken leg if your brain were always releasing endorphins. Nature saves them for moments when they help you do what's necessary to survive.

Dopamine happiness is triggered when you get a new reward. When you see a finish line, your brain releases dopamine. It's nature's reserve tank of energy. Dopamine keeps you going until you catch the prey you've been stalking, even when the chase is long and frustrating. If you surged with dopamine all the time, your energy would be depleted when you really needed it. We evolved to save dopamine for those moments when an important goal is within reach.

Oxytocin happiness is triggered when we trust those around us. It promotes bonding between mother and child, and between sex partners. It's stimulated when you're with a group of like-minded people, or when you get a massage. But we did not evolve to feel oxytocin happiness all the time because there's no survival value in trusting people who are not trustworthy.

Serotonin happiness is triggered when you feel important. Animals release serotonin when they dominate a resource. Their serotonin falls when they cede a resource to avoid conflict. Being one-up feels good, but conflict can cause painful injuries. The brain is constantly analyzing information to balance the risk of pain against the satisfaction of winning.

Each of the happy chemicals evolved to do a job. They work by making you feel good, which motivates you to go after whatever triggered them. You have inherited a brain that motivates you to go toward anything that promotes the survival of your DNA.

Sometimes you stumble on happiness. When an ape accidentally stumbles on a luscious fruit tree, its brain surges with dopamine. That creates memory, which helps the ape find the tree in the future. New rewards trigger dopamine whether the rewards came by accident or with sustained effort.

The happy chemicals feel so good that we use our big cortex to figure out how to get more. Apes negotiate groomings with each other, and it stimulates their oxytocin. Apes dominate their troop-mates when they think they can get away with it, which stimulates their serotonin. Apes invest time teasing termites out of a mound, and it stimulates their dopamine. Apes are not known to hurt themselves in order to get an endorphin high. People do all kinds of things once they find that it stimulates their endorphins, or their dopamine, or their oxytocin, or their serotonin.

Sometimes it works.

But the brain only releases happy chemicals in limited bursts for specific aims. It did not evolve to release them all the time. If happy chemicals flowed all the time, they could not do their jobs.

When your happy chemicals dip, however, you notice. Something feels wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling.

If you expect all the happy chemicals all the time, you're going to be disappointed. And if you focus on that disappointment, you wire your brain to see the world through that lens.

Try as you might, you can't control your environment in a way that ensures a steady flow of happy chemicals.

You could instead accept the fact that happy chemicals evolved to promote survival behaviors, and just appreciate them as they come and go.

Loretta Breuning is author of ‘I, Mammal – Why Your Brain Links Status And Happiness’.  For more details visit her website at: www.imammalthebook.com . 

Happy Day Image: Pavel Sevela / Wikimedia Commons 

Robert Wringham on Collecting Data About Ourselves

I sometimes fantasize about a rather square afterlife: a dataporn epilogue in which we're given a wealth of terminal data about our lives. It’s a kind of existential debriefing.

Sometimes I visualise this afterlife as an austere 1970s science lab, with ranges of analogue counting wheels, each halted eternally at their final numbers. Other times I imagine it as a live TV event: an enthusiastic presenter delivers a piece-to-camera from the top of Telecom Tower, finger pressed to her earpiece and declaring that, “Yes, the results are in!”

In this great auditing house in the sky, every metric is recorded: the number of times we went to the bathroom, the number of hours we slept, the number of good or bad decisions made, the number of moral victories or ethical betrayals.

Some of the metrics won’t really matter. Number of blinks or heartbeats are beyond my control and do not mean much either way. But some of the metrics in this Valhalla databank will be causes of pride or shame.

A statistic for which I—the editor of New Escapologist, a magazine about the exercise of free will (whether imagined or actual)—would take pride in being high would be number of days of freedom. Every day spent living freely is a victory. If the celestial auditors are indeed watching, I hope they’re able to record that the total number of these victories outweighs the number of days spent serving forces other than my moral will.

A statistic I would like to keep low is "Number of intentions unrealised". It’s very acceptable to abandon something deliberately, or to reform a plan partway through. But there's nothing more shameful than when a plan falls to the wayside, is forgotten about, or is simply never taken seriously as a possibility.

Alas, there is probably no afterlife and we’ll never be given such a cache of perfect data (and if we are, it’ll be largely pointless once our lives are over). If we want to collect data about our living patterns, we must simply resolve to document more. A longhand journal will provide qualitative data. A tally against certain metrics will provide the quantitative. At the end of a given period, we can analyse the data we've gathered; draw conclusions, make predictions, and make changes to our habits.

To measure my “unrealised intentions” and to keep this statistic small, I have started maintaining a “Maybe Someday” list. Any ideas I have, whether big or small, go onto this list. I will later incorporate them into my plans or decisively obliterate them from my ambitions once and for all.

I’m also trying to reconnect with things I enjoyed in childhood: dinosaurs, chemistry, puppets, astronomy, fossils, wildlife. Maybe this way I can identify some early ambitions never acted upon, and have them scored from my shameful tally of forgotten plans.

There is something vaguely perverse about analyzing such water under the bridge. It’s like making notches on a bedpost, or examining the fresh contents of a handkerchief. But so what? A toilet that analyses one's poop for nutritional excesses and deficiencies would be a wonderful thing. There's no such thing as "TMI" when making changes to our lives is concerned.

So what data would you record? What would you like to change?

**

Robert Wringham is a humourist, travelling performer, and the editor of New Escapologist: a magazine that celebrates 'flight' over 'fight'. The sixth issue of this publication is now available, as well as a growing wealth of related online content at www.newescapologist.co.uk

Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Connections

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time.

They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.

So, forget Jesus.

The stars died so that you could be here today."

 Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona University, will lead our next sermon on Sunday 16 October, to show how each of us is connected to the cosmos in ways we’d never imagine. From the stardust we’re made of, to the atoms we breathe, to the curving of space time that governs the way we make our way through traffic jams, to time travel itself. Ordinary life just isn’t that ordinary.

For more information and to book tickets please go to: www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Lawrence-Krauss-on-Cosmic-Connections

NOWNESS interview Geoff Dyer on America

The cultural observations in eclectic author Geoff Dyer's recent freewheeling speech debunking Anglo-American stereotypes at London's School of Life are captured in these illustrations by Paris Vs New York's Vahram Muratyan. In a typically irreverent sermon straddling literature, comedy, etiquette and language, Dyer combined his encyclopedic knowledge with witty digressions into high and low culture. The author of four novels of genre-defying fiction, including Paris Trance and the savagely comic Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which traces a disaffected journalist's cocaine-fueled trip through the Venice Biennale, Dyer has also written discerning essays on everything from photography and haute couture to donuts and Andrei Tarkovsky. The writer told NOWNESS: “There's a great essay by D.H. Lawrence where he ends up in New Mexico and says, ‘something in my heart expanded’—I get that when I see the American West, the sense of endless possibilities.” Here the reluctantly London-based Dyer muses on the best aspects of life on the other side of the pond.

Unfulfilled dream
My life is a total failure because of my failure to live in San Francisco. To me San Francisco is where that project which I think of as being American—combining individual freedom with civic responsibility—has been taken to some sort of furthest point. It really is like experiencing what life is like a few rungs higher up the evolutionary ladder. 

American literature
I got turned on to reading contemporary fiction through American writers. Salinger, Kerouac, and Joseph Heller: On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye and Catch 22. There's been something about that American voice, the demotic richness of American language that is not at all class-bound, and is so varied. 

Walker Evans
Walker Evans really established the paradigm of how America looks. From an early age you're so exposed to America in films and television, that there's this weird thing that happens when you go there: it seems so different to England but at the same time exactly like you've always pictured it. When we see pictures of old American towns, or old American cars, I wonder, did it always look nice? Or did we start to think it was nice because Walker Evans photographed it? 

Comedy central
One of the ways we console ourselves with living in England is that we like to say Americans have no sense of irony. There's a beautiful irony in that comment because America is the country that has produced Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, some of the great ironists of our time. I find Don DeLillo screamingly funny. The irony is raised to such a level that is seems both sincere and funny at the same time.

Service culture
Americans are friendly. It's not just friendliness, it is some sort of daily manifestation of American democratic principles. The first time I heard the expression "You're welcome" was in America. I really noticed the transaction being wrapped up in a nice social exchange. You can't help but notice the way that social ripples––friendly, American ripples––extend way beyond the immediate interaction that created them. I'd go for that “have a nice day” superficial friendliness over deep-seated English hostility any day of the week.

Read the interview with some fabulous illustrations by Vahram Muratyan at NOWNESS.COM

Our next sermon will be Professor of Space Exploration, Lawrence Krauss on 16 October 2011. For tickets and more details, click here.

 Photos ©Stephanie Wolff 

If you set up a free school, what would yours be like?

One thing's for sure, ours wouldn't be like the West London Free School, the new school run by parents and led by the author and Telegraph columnist Toby Young.

Of course, you might object to the idea of setting up a free school altogether, least of all because many of the first free schools have been set up by parents in well-off areas to start with. But if we sidestep those thorny issues for after class and just look at the style of the West London Free School, it's clear it wishes it was a five-hundred-year-old grammar school. You can see it in the pupils' blue blazers, the headteacher's black gown, traditional subjects and compulsory Latin. It even has its own Latin motto "Sapere Aude" (dare to learn). It's all very Harry Potter. 

So who cares if parents want to make their school feel so old-fashioned? Well, we do. Without getting all debating society about it, it says a lot about the confidence in our children's future to dream up something that so desperately wishes it was in the past. Imagine if The School of Life had the same rigid ideas of right and wrong subjects and rules. That we wouldn't teach you unless you wore the right blazer and you'd polished your shoes. But when a bunch of well-meaning parents in West London were given a blank slate (and chalk) that's the vision they came up with.

One thing that attracted us to The School of Life in the first place (we were students and fans first, weekend teachers second) was that it didn't feel anything like school or a typical evening class. The style of a school matters and has an impact on us in our later lives. We know this because people who come to our writing class at The School of Life tell us. We've seen it on the faces of some of the more nervous writers at the start too, and in their I-didn't-know-I-could-do-it faces when they realise there's been a brilliant writer inside them all along.

If you think of a writing class most people instantly have flashbacks to lessons about grammar, apostrophes and the dreaded red pen. We don't do any of that. Not that a few rules don't matter, they do. It's just that for most people steadfast grammar rules are wrapped up with fears of getting them wrong. So they worry more about the grammar than about what makes writing a bloody great read.

So if you've been thinking about coming to our Words for Life class but you've been worried about whether you're up to it, or if you've been held back by the autumn (shudder) feeling of going back to school, then this is the writing course for you. We won't get out a red pen once. That's our school motto. 

Rob and Molly run We All Need Words, helping companies with words and branding. They're running our Words for Life weekend on the 8th of October and 3rd of December.

F.S. Michaels on Monoculture and the Stories That Shape Us

"It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." - Ben Okri 

As human beings, we’ve always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, becoming something we take for granted as our very reality - a governing pattern that the culture obeys, a nearly-invisible framework that structures our lives and narrows our diversity, creating a monoculture.

A monoculture doesn't mean that we all believe exactly the same thing or act in exactly the same way, but that we share key beliefs and assumptions about how the world works and what our lives ought to look like. Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the master story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities — even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist — or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how. 

Monocultures rise and fall with the times. In sixteenth-century Europe, the monoculture centred on religion and superstition (think of Galileo being accused of heresy by the Catholic Church for claiming that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the solar system). Roughly a hundred years later, the master story was about the discoverability of the world through science, machines and mathematics.

Now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing - or have already changed - in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and with the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.

F.S. Michaels is the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, in stores now.
More at www.fsmichaels.com

Life is not a Rom Com: Finding a Partner in the Real World

What is love supposed to be like? How will we know when we meet our ‘perfect’ partner?

Hollywood, in the form of romcoms, has given us very strange ideas about what is appropriate when it comes to meeting and mating with potential partners. The rules which they whimsically lay out for us, through the vehicles of overconfident men and spineless, dithering women, would end up in disaster if applied in real life. For the record, for most non-sociopathic men, if you say you’re not interested, he is going to believe you; don’t be surprised if he actually leaves you alone, rather than showing up outside your bedroom window with a boom box!

When we are looking for happy, compatible, long-term matches, we don’t tend to meet them the way they do in romcoms, whether it is someone whom we have made bets with our friends about, have pretended to have kids in order to meet, or have been found by our 8 yr. old son from a call in radio show.

In this blog, I will discuss two, of the nine important steps, from my course, ‘Finding a Perfect Partner.’ Two important factors to consider when searching for well-suited matches are commonality and proximity. 

Commonality is critical in our quest to find a partner. While the well-known saying, ‘opposites attract’ is an old favourite, is it actually true? Probably, not. Instead, it should be ‘attraction increases as similarity between partners increases’. People tend to be attracted to people who are similar to themselves.^[1] It is even advantageous to the relationship that our partner also enjoys seven-course tasting menus at poncy French restaurants, or would rather sing karaoke than go to a jazz club. By them sharing similar outlooks and interests, it helps to legitimise our preferences. It also increases the ‘we are on the same wave-length’ appeal or, if you are a die-hard romantic, the ‘soul-mate’ ideology.

Proximity is also important when finding a good match, because when we are near these ‘like-minded’ people, the number of interactions we could have with them increases. Another benefit from frequent sightings of the cutie in red, is that we will like him or her more. Research has shown that we prefer people whom we see more often, even if they are strangers. This is called the ‘mere exposure effect’^[2]

So, while commonality and proximity are important factors, the ideal is when they overlap. We often find people whom we have things in common with are already in our immediate proximity. They are sitting at the table next to us at our favorite restaurant, they are doing a downward facing dog in the row behind us at our local yoga studio, and they are in the same queue while buying vegetables at the neighborhood Saturday market. Open your eyes, the people whom you are well-matched with, are doing the same things that you’re doing, and most likely, in your proximity. Your own neighborhood is the best place to begin your search. So this weekend, I recommend sitting outside your favourite cafe: when looking for love, you need to see and be seen!

Jean Smith is a cultural and social anthropologist – an international expert in human attraction, body language and how we flirt with one another.  She will be leading 'How To Find the Perfect Partner' on 27 September and 7 November at The School of Life.  For more details and to book, click here.

 

---

 

^[1] Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. New York: Academic Press.

^[2] Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1-27.