The suggestion is that we don’t need hope at all. All we need is a purpose for our action, a purpose that need not be conceived of as a hope. When people plan to, try to, aim to, work to, they are taking steps to achieve a desired goal. But when someone says they merely hope to, nine times out of ten what that tells you is that they have not yet set about doing what needs to be done to realise that hope.
ReadI wonder if there is a place for a contemplation of the negative that has no concern with turning it into a positive, which is how rumination is sometimes understood. Life consists of night as well as day, so don’t we need to learn how to live in the dark as well as how to switch on the light?
ReadWriters these days need to promote themselves as brands. A holiday job selling ice cream must be presented on a CV as evidence that the applicant is a highly motivated self-starter with excellent communication skills. This is now the way of the world. In a culture where everyone has to put themselves forward, the virtues of holding oneself back are easily lost. But retiring virtues need not be put into retirement. What we ought to do is distinguish them and unpick their benefits and drawbacks.
ReadA “pacy, readable and entertaining manifesto for a zoobiquitous approach to health and wellbeing, to be welcomed by vets and other human animals.”
ReadAndrew Marr goes in search of a better life with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips; the philosopher Julian Baggini; the poet Helen Dunmore; and the scientist Frances Ashcroft.
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