You Need To Be That Bright Spot (by Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic.com)

 

Another day of trolls on social media. Another day of vulgarity and partisanship in the media. Another day of needlessly rude emails and people shouting conspiracy theories instead of caring about each other. Another day with your neighbor who doesn't follow the rules. Another day of people speeding on streets where kids play.

It's enough to make anyone despair, what's wrong with everyone? Is everything going to pieces? Like the rest of us, you're probably looking for something to be hopeful about, something to inspire you. And it'd be wonderful if there was something major to point to, but there isn't.

No, if you want to see good today, there is only one option—do good yourself. As Marcus Aurelius writes, good news is something you make. You make it with good character, good intentions, and good actions, he says. You can't wait around for that to happen. In fact, he said, it doesn't matter if you hold your breath until you're blue in the face, people are going to stay selfish, stay mean, stay stupid.

All you can do is refuse to be implicated in that ugliness. All you can do is be the bright spot you'd like to see in the light. So will you? Can you? Please. Because we really, really need it.

The danger of fetishising foreign lands - Other nations don't need our hot takes (by Ben Sixsmith)

 

Imagine you were lodging in someone else’s house. You would not walk in and start vocally criticising their interior decoration. Nice furnishings, mate, but you should repaint those walls and throw out this old furniture. If you were asked your opinion, you might suggest a few improvements, but otherwise you might seem just a little obnoxious. And that’s why, even though I live in Poland, I tend to avoid writing about Polish politics.

Of course, the first instinct of a writer is to stick your nose into other people’s business. There is no point in bemoaning this, but it can have unpleasant manifestations, in the way they criticise, judge and misrepresent those around them. The same thing applies, to a certain extent, when people write about countries other than their own.

When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.

I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it.

You must also bear in mind our view of foreign lands tends to be a matter of ideological projection. Nations which appear to represent our beliefs are happy, thriving sunlit uplands, where the rain never falls. They are often presented in striking contrast to one’s own bleak, grimy, cloud-ridden homeland. Communists romanticising far-flung revolutions are an obvious example: Malcolm Caldwell, a British academic who idealised Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, was invited to Phnom Penh and then murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps, in their paranoid bloodlust, they mistook him for an enemy.

But there are less blatantly irrational examples. Consider how British advocates of remaining in the European Union portrayed continental Europe as a saner, smarter, more compassionate place — less because they were interested in life there, and more to make a comment on Britain. John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do It Better, which bore the insufferable subtitle Notes From a Grown-Up Country, was essentially a book-length stick to beat Brexiteers with. Kampfner contrasted Britons’ “monolingual mediocrity” with Germans, who are “taught two languages at school”. A moment’s thought should have made it obvious that British people are likelier to be monolingual than Germans not because they are less curious and cosmopolitan but because English happens to be the lingua franca in modern Europe.

A more comic case is provided by a man who call himself RS Archer on Twitter. Archer, who is nearing 100,000 followers, claims to be the author of the “David Saunders” book series (which does not exist). He has constructed a fantasy life as an English expat in France, satisfying Remainer prejudices with his tales of civilised bourgeois domesticity in the Dordogne — all wine, snails and jolly local mayors, and the stupid, backwards Brexiteer tourists who bother him. Perhaps “Archer” does live in France (and he certainly has the right to anonymity) but he is not interested in France as it is but as Remainers imagine it — as, in other words, the antithesis of England. They want to sink into a warm bath of oikophobia with a cool glass of “1983 Case Basse di Gianfranco Soldera Brunello di Montalcino Riserva”.

When a country defies our ideological preferences, of course, we cannot hear enough about what a cruel and benighted place it is. A telling example of the sort of credulity this encourages emerged during the Trump years. In perhaps the most outrageous case, an award-winning reporter for Der Spiegel, Claas Relotius, was found to have “falsified his articles on a grand scale”. Relotius’s pieces, many of which explored life in Trump’s America, contained such comically obvious fabrications as a town in Minnesota having a “Mexicans Keep Out” sign on display. You would think Relotius could never get away with printing such unbelievable stories, but he did, for years, because he told his audience what they wanted to read.

And when a reporter for the Right-leaning Wall Street Journal went looking for horror stories in Sadiq Khan’s London, meanwhile, he amusingly mistook an “alcohol restricted zone” sign in Whitechapel as evidence of Islamic rule in the British capital. Unlike in the case of Claas Relotius, this appears to have been an innocent mistake, but it illustrates the dangers of projecting your expectations onto a place.

Accuracy may be a difficult standard to reach, given the incentives against it, but it is also a basic one. A more difficult problem is whether it’s justifiable to make value judgements about nations that are not your own. Almost no one is a pure cultural relativist; can anyone, for example, observe Kim Jong-un’s North Korea with ice-cold detachment? But a newcomer to a country should not dictate how it should be run, as if there is a single means of ordering societies and their enlightened perspective transcends that of their hosts.

Consider the beleaguered Americans. They have had to watch the English Piers Morgan tell them to give up their guns, the English Milo Yiannopoulos tell them who to have as president and the English Prince Harry lecturing them on the First Amendment. (The poor souls even have to deal with James Corden obstructing traffic.) It seems like you can’t turn on the TV in the US without hearing an English voice telling you what to do and what to think, which must be grating if you have no platform from which to project your American opinions about your own country.

An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.

As for me, I hope to write more about Poland, but as someone who is learning rather than lecturing. To do otherwise would be to do a miserable disservice to the many varied people who have helped me feel at home.

Humility is key — a humility which never places judgement before knowledge, nor assumes that one’s preferences must take precedence merely by the fact of being one’s own. That does not mean saying what you do not believe — an act which would be worse than saying nothing at all — but being careful with when, how and how much to say it.

 The danger of fetishising foreign lands - UnHerd

Facing it (8 min film by Sam Gainsborough)

 

Navigating a pub, Shaun’s anxieties are (quite literally) plastered on his face

You     who I don’t know     I don’t know how to talk to you

—What is it like for you there?

– from ‘Sanctuary’ by Jean Valentine, in Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (2004)

The opening lines of Valentine’s poem capture the disquiet terrain of the world as seen from the inside out, through the lens of an anxious psyche. Likewise, in Facing It, a young man of perhaps college age named Shaun grapples with the feeling of being trapped in the cage of his own mind, helpless to escape it. The viewer is given access to Shaun’s eyes and ears. His sensory perspective is dreamlike: imaginative, yet brushing up against a recognisable reality. But, as you might expect, it’s not a pleasant dream – his world is populated by characters with strange clay faces that sit atop human bodies, and their muffled voices echo incomprehensibly. As if submerged underwater, Shaun is out of his depth.

Following the trajectory of Shaun’s thoughts, the film floats back in time between the past and the present – the two indelibly interconnected. In the present, Shaun’s face is a vision of blue melancholy, melting and dripping as he makes panicked attempts to converse at a pub. We see these emotions at play, personified in the form of limbs that appear out of nowhere, stifling his efforts to socialise. Hands push and pull at his face, pluck out his eyes and cover his mouth mid-conversation; a foot kicks a glass out of his hand. Flashbacks reveal the ways in which he has become the embodiment of his past relationships; in particular, the troubled one with his parents.

To make Shaun’s raw emotions vivid and visceral, the UK filmmaker Sam Gainsborough deploys a mixed-media technique. Combining claymation, pixelation and live-action – a laborious and artful process – Gainsborough blends analogue and digital media. Through handmade indentations and growths on the clay faces, he inverts Shaun’s inner stress response, rendering it ever-present and tactile. And by integrating live-action human bodies and settings, he grounds Shaun’s experience in intertwined physical and emotional spaces, building an uneasy mood some viewers might find all too relatable.

By providing a window into Shaun’s internal world, Gainsborough highlights how our emotions and experiences are more complicated than even we can see, and tethered to our past, present and imagined future. The film reminds us that we can’t decode internal states by watching outward behaviours, since our exteriors are only the tip of a vast iceberg. As the speaker in Valentine’s poem ponders, even if we ‘imagine other solitudes’ and ‘listen for what it is like there’, it’s impossible to know what it is to be anyone else but us – even if, as Facing It seems to argue, it’s still worth trying.

Written by Olivia Hains

Facing it | Psyche Films

 

Hope is the antidote to helplessness. Here’s how to cultivate it (by Emily Esfahani Smith)

 

Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that revolutionised their field and changed the way we think about adversity. They called it ‘learned helplessness’ – when faced with a difficult situation that feels uncontrollable, people tend to act helpless and depressed.

In the wake of a pandemic that has upended life for millions, this idea feels more relevant than ever. But just as the concept of learned helplessness helps to explain many of the emotions we’ve been going through, it has also inspired work that offers positive insights into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable adversities. The key is having hope.

Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness in the 1960s, as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of the experimental psychologist Richard Solomon. Solomon was studying how dogs learned and responded to fear. His team restrained each dog in a cage with two compartments, and gave it multiple mild but unpleasant electric shocks, each time paired with an audible tone. Later, the dogs were untied and the tone was played – having learned to associate the sound with pain, Solomon predicted the dogs would jump across to the safe compartment to avoid the pain. But when the dogs heard the noise, they remained passive, and did not do anything to try to escape the pain.

As a test of Pavlovian-style learning, the experiment was judged a failure. But Seligman and Maier reached a different conclusion: the dogs’ passivity was the crucial finding. During the earlier part of the experiment, when they had been bound and exposed to a shock, the dogs whimpered, barked and tried to get away, but it was all in vain because of the restraints. So, Seligman and Maier believed, the dogs learned that, when they tried to escape a shock, it did not work. As a result, they acted helpless the next time they encountered a similar situation, even though the circumstances had changed and they could jump free if they wanted.

Seligman and Maier tested out their theory. They arranged three groups of dogs for the initial learning phase: some were restrained as before while they endured the initial round of shocks paired with tones, but another group could press a lever to escape to the safe compartment, and a third group received no shocks at all. Next, all the dogs were free to move, and the tones were played again. The dogs who had control in the earlier part of the experiment immediately escaped from the shocks by jumping across the barrier to the safe side of their cage. The dogs in the control condition also learned to escape the shocks. But as for the dogs who had earlier been restrained and made to feel helpless, they did not try to escape. Seligman and Maier’s seminal findings about learned helplessness were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1967.

Over the next decade, Seligman and his colleagues replicated the learned helplessness findings first in rodents and, later, in human beings. Moreover, when it came to provoking feelings of helplessness in human volunteers, Seligman noticed something important – after exposing people to non-controllable events, such as unpleasant loud noises or impossible anagrams, they would often begin to exhibit some of the classic symptoms of depression, such as feelings of worthlessness, sadness, loss of interest, poor concentration and fatigue. Ultimately, he concluded that learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.

But there was a crucial caveat – whenever the researchers ran these studies, there was always a proportion of the subjects who were exposed to uncontrollable, aversive events, but did not give up trying to exert control. Even though they learned that nothing they did mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?

Two researchers became increasingly preoccupied with that question – one was Seligman’s graduate student Lyn Abramson, the other was the Oxford psychiatrist John Teasdale. Teasdale and Abramson pointed out that being made to feel helpless is not enough to produce depression. What also matters is how people make sense of their helplessness – the attributions they make. Do they blame themselves or do they blame the experimenter? Do they generalise their helplessness to life in general, or just to the specific situation in the lab? How people interpreted the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient of the theory.

Seligman teamed up with Abramson and Teasdale and together they found there are three ways people can interpret what happens to them: they can form attributions that are either permanent (eg, I will always be helpless and nothing I do will ever matter) vs temporary (eg, I was helpless in that specific circumstance, but what I do at other times still matters); specific (eg, related only to anagrams) vs universal (eg, all problems); and internal (eg, it’s my fault) vs external (eg, it’s the fault of the world or someone else).

As Seligman would later put it, different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive events (ie, internal, universal, permanent), and they are more vulnerable to depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.

In later work, Abramson and her colleagues reformulated the learned helplessness theory of depression as the ‘hopelessness theory of depression’. Hopelessness depression emerges when people experience a negative life event, such as losing a job, and draw pessimistic conclusions about the causes and consequences of the event, and what the event says about who they are as a person. They might believe they are helpless to change their circumstances and will never find employment, for instance, and that they’re worthless as a result – thoughts that depress and demoralise them.

Over the years, research has confirmed the connection between hopelessness and mental illness. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioural therapy, found that a sense of hopelessness is a key driver of suicide. Conversely, having a sense of hope contributes to better overall mental and physical health. For example, people high in hope are able to tolerate pain for longer periods; they report higher levels of wellbeing after someone they love dies; when confronted with a stressful situation, they are able to think more creatively and flexibly about how to overcome it; and, as they move through a difficult period of their life, they’re more likely to identify silver linings. People high in hope also perform better academically, are less prone to loneliness, and – above all – are less likely to succumb to helplessness and despair when adversity strikes.

All of this points to a powerful insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard times?

The work of Seligman and Abramson suggests that changing the stories we tell ourselves about adversity can help instil hope. Rather than blaming yourself for losing a job or feeling sluggish, you can blame the COVID-19 pandemic; rather than focusing on the areas where life feels out of control, such as new strains of the virus, and concluding that life is unpredictable and chaotic, you can focus on those things that you can control, such as your routines, habits and the way you treat other people. You can remind yourself that this adversity, like all adversities, is temporary and will end at some point.

Another way to build hope requires rethinking its ordinary meaning. You might consider hope a form of wishful thinking, a positive and perhaps naive expectation that everything will turn out OK in the end. But according to ‘hope theory’, developed by the late American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is not blind optimism. It’s about having goals for one’s future, agency or ‘goal-directed energy’ (believing the goals are attainable) and specific ‘pathways’ or plans for how to reach those goals. In other words, hopeful people are not like Pollyanna, rather they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency in their pursuits – the opposite of feeling helpless.

Drawing on Snyder’s work, psychologists have developed interventions to instil hope. For example, therapists who practise ‘hope therapy’ help their clients conceptualise clear goals for their future, map out routes to pursue those goals, and reframe obstacles as challenges to be overcome. Rather than focusing on the client’s past failures, the therapist focuses on their successes, which can serve as models for future goal pursuits. In one study testing an eight-session group-therapy hope intervention, participants who were taught hope-building skills subsequently reported a greater sense of meaning, agentic thinking and self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety and depression, as compared with a waitlist control group. They also reported lower levels of anxiety and depression post-treatment.

Even in the bleakest of times, hope – of the kind articulated by Snyder – can make a positive difference. Consider the work of the physician and ethicist Chris Feudtner at the Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Working with parents whose children have life-threatening illnesses, Feudtner has found that, while they all of course wish desperately that their children could be cured, it is those parents high in hope who tend to adjust better to the reality of the situation. In one of his studies, it was actually the more hopeful parents who were more likely to decide to limit medical interventions as their child’s condition worsened, suggesting that having hope allowed them to relinquish a goal that was no longer attainable, and to adopt another focused on alleviating suffering.

Moreover, Feudtner found that a simple question could help kindle hope in parents. After presenting them with the horrible news that their child’s condition was worsening, incurable or terminal, he asked them: ‘Given what you are now up against, what are you hoping for?’ Parents tended to respond unrealistically at first, such as wishing for a miracle cure or to awaken from a bad dream. But then, when Feudtner gently asked them ‘what else’ they might be hoping for, their responses became more grounded and attainable. ‘The subsequent answers,’ he writes in ‘The Breadth of Hopes’ (2009), ‘tend to be qualitatively different from the initial hopes: they are more oriented to pain or suffering and the hope of relief, to the longing for home and the hope of homecoming, or to surviving not in a physical but in a spiritual sense and the hope of finding meaning and connection.’ It’s a most powerful example of how identifying goals that are attainable, and seeing pathways to them, can restore a healing sense of control, in this case bringing a measure of comfort to parents facing the most terrible adversity.

From that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that life brings.

Hope is the antidote to helplessness. Here’s how to cultivate it | Psyche Ideas

Blueberries (by Mary Oliver)

I’m living in a warm place now, where
you can purchase fresh blueberries all
year long. Labor free. From various
countries in South America. They’re
as sweet as any, and compared with the
berries I used to pick in the fields
outside Provincetown, they’re
enormous. But berries are berries. They
don’t speak any language I can’t
understand. Neither do I find ticks or
small spiders crawling among them. So,
generally speaking, I’m very satisfied.

There are limits, however. What they
don’t have is the field. The field they
belonged to and through the years I
began to feel I belonged to. Well,
there’s life, and then there’s later.
Maybe it’s myself that I miss. The
field, and the sparrow singing at the
edge of the woods. And the doe that one
morning came upon me unaware, all
tense and gorgeous. She stamped her hoof
as you would to any intruder. Then gave
me a long look, as if to say, Okay, you
stay in your patch, I’ll stay in mine.
Which is what we did. Try packing that
up, South America.

 

Why Children Need an Emotional Education (by The School of Life)

 

The most basic and never-to-be-forgotten fact about any infant is that it is born into a state of radical immaturity. It cannot understand its condition; it doesn’t know how to communicate; it has no way of empathising; it can’t help but be muddled about its own needs. Over many long years, it must be guided into developing into that most prized but elusive of beings: an emotionally mature adult.

 

The distinction between adult and infant is, confusingly, never assured by age alone. It cannot be determined simply by looking at someone’s face and body, let alone their outward status or profession. There are nonagenarians who, in emotional aspects, are still mired in toddlerhood, and 9-year-olds who rival many so-called grown-ups in their responses to life’s vicissitudes.

The curriculum of emotional maturity, of the journey between infancy and adulthood, encapsulates some of the following transitions:

 

– An infant believes, touchingly and unavoidably, that it is the centre of the universe. An adult has had to learn, through considerable sorrow and inconvenience, that other humans appear to exist as well.

 

– An infant insists vociferously on its wants. In its rages it is as categorical as a furious emperor. An adult has had to come to terms with the idea of compromise. It has learnt to be a diplomat. It has come to know that, oddly, there may be other points of view.

 

– An infant believes that others around it will be able to understand its wants and intentions without it needing to speak, that being loved means being magically understood, and falls into vicious sulks with those who do not correctly intuit its intentions. An adult has learnt the tedious requirement to speak calmly and explain the contents of its own mind: it has learnt to teach the world about itself.

 

– An infant cannot understand the influence of its body on its moods. It cannot tell that its despair has to do with tiredness or its excitement with an excess of sugar. An adult has learnt to coexist with its own body; it knows that at certain bleak-seeming moments, rather than giving up on humanity and its own life, it may simply need to drink a glass of water or have an early night.

 

– An infant is a relentless idealiser: those who please it are wondrous creatures to whom it freely gives affection and tenderness. By the same measure, those who frustrate it risk being framed as demons and monsters who deserve to be bitten or destroyed. An adult realises that there is no such thing as a wholly good or bad person; it does not fall in love quite so regularly – or in hate.

 

– An infant imagines that an adult must know exactly what it is doing. After all, it’s so big, it can kick a ball many metres into the air and drive a car. An adult knows how to tread a more nuanced path between trust and scepticism; it knows, in a benign way, that everyone is to some degree making it up as they go along.

 

– An infant is not aware of the pain or inconvenience it puts others to. It is blithely and beautifully selfabsorbed. An adult has acquired correct measure of the difficulties it causes others, especially those it loves; it can feel appropriate degrees of guilt; it can say sorry.

 

– An infant is wildly and erratically afraid: of being eaten by tigers, of being destroyed by teachers, of being swept away by the wind. Some of these are its own aggressions projected outwards. The adult has correctly repatriated its fears. It has a sound sense of where terror belongs.

 

– An infant is often either in tears or delighted. An infant is a creature of hope constantly buffeted by disappointment, and capable of being instantly thrown into rage or ecstasy. An adult has acquired a talent for poised melancholy leavened by wry humour.

 

– An adult doesn’t mind noticing aspects of its character that aren’t wholly mature. An adult knows that, at moments, it will revert to infancy. A child, especially an adolescent one, will insist with telling and implausible vehemence that it is fully done with childhood.

 

– An adult is someone who knows how to look after a child – chiefly because, somewhere in a fortunate past, someone else nurtured the child-like parts of them.

These lessons and many others like them belong to the process known as emotional education. Tediously, this cannot be imparted quickly. It may take at least five times as long as learning how to master a foreign language. Patience, therefore, has to be one of the central prerequisites of any parental instructor. The module on the unyielding nature of reality will, for example, have to be taught on a thousand occasions before it takes root: over Nounou’s broken eye, a sudden stain on a favourite pair of trousers, the end of screen time, the miserableness of going to bed, the boringness of the long car ride, the death of Granny, the entirely unnecessary arrival of a sibling – and a thousand other tragedies, small and large, besides.

 

Unlike a curriculum for a language, the emotional curriculum lacks a well-defined timetable. There aren’t clear sections like those on improper fractions or the use of the definitive article; one can’t limit lessons to Thursday afternoons or Monday mornings. There will be days when five separate learning modules will have to be taught before breakfast is over, and with no warning of an upcoming challenge having been given.

 

The child is at all times on the journey of striving to become a grown-up. Every waking minute the young brain is pushing on to become the more mature self it is destined to become. This doesn’t mean that emotional maturity is what everyone will eventually accede to, no more than every oak tree will reach the forty metres of which it is biologically capable; it simply means that this is the direction an infant is oriented towards and will be striving for unless impediments are placed in its way.

 

It is worth emphasising that all elements of immaturity – egocentricity, boastfulness, idealisation and so on – belong to health at a given age. The child has to go through every stage of juvenility in order one day to settle into an authentically mature position.

 

Parents who succeed at teaching the emotional curriculum should not expect particular prizes or signs of gratitude. The reward, if and when it comes, will be more indirect but all the more sincere for that: an offspring who is inwardly alive, who can be kind to themselves and knows how to care for less mature, still struggling others – perhaps, most touchingly, their own offspring.

 

This essay is an extract from our latest book The Good Enough Parent. 

Why Children Need an Emotional Education -The School of Life Articles | Formerly The Book of Life

 

Who wants to live forever? The social care crisis can't be fixed with more money (by Giles Fraser)

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy in the West has risen roughly three months per year. In 1900, a new-born child in the US would, on average, live to 47. Now it is about 79; by the end of the century, it will be 100.

Some will call this progress — in sanitation, diet, medicine — as if more is always better. But the cost of this “progress” is rarely factored in.

£12 billion every year is the latest pledge to fix health and social care, mostly for the elderly. But what are we doing with all these extra years?

It depends, of course. Some will work longer; some will have more time with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Others will be warehoused in care homes, living out their twilight years amid the background smell of stale urine, bored ridged between monthly visits from their guilty children. Many are not like this, but a great deal of them still are. My mother has made us promise we will take her to Dignitas long before it comes to this — and that when we bring her ashes back from Switzerland it will be in a Harrods bag, not a Tesco one. This, apparently, is dignity in dying.

Social care has come a long way since it was conceived in alms houses provided by the church: through Victorian workhouses, state-funded provision in the twentieth century and, more recently, to profit-making private companies. As our population gets older, so the need for such services grows ever larger. It is commendable that the Government is seeking to address the growing cost of social care, albeit through a tax levy that falls disproportionately on the working poor and the young. But the one thing that we are not talking about — and our silence is becoming ruinously expensive — is what a good life, and indeed a good death, looks like.

To put it another way, without a sense of what human life is for, and what its basic natural or even theological rhythms might be, we fall back on the idea that more is always better. Without some sort of agreed understanding that human life exists within fundamental limits, society will inevitably find itself unsustainable.

The idea of growth, of always seeking more, is built into the very nature of capitalism, as it is within liberal progressivism. In a secular society, meaning tends to get replaced by the idea of more; or rather, more becomes the meaning.

It is not a coincidence that just as we are pouring billions into end-of-life care, the fantastically wealthy are seeking their own way of outwitting ageing and death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now throwing his fortune at some comically ludicrous “eternal life” start-up that seeks to keep him alive forever. “Man plans, God laughs”, as the old Jewish proverb puts it. It’s not just that Bezos can’t succeed in this ridiculous vanity project, but that we shouldn’t want him too. Death, after all, gives life its purpose.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being.

This means that there is no way of solving the social care crisis in purely economic terms. Because one cannot address a metaphysical question through economic policy. Indeed, the very basic question of what human life is for is one that politicians, still less economists, no longer feel they have any use for.

The first stage to recover a basic metaphysical scaffolding would be to reclaim something of that story in which death has some sort of wider significance, rather than being viewed as just some anticlimactic end. Because if having more — going on longer — is the meaning of life in a secular society, then death is inevitably and always some sort of failure. Whereas we would once have said of the dead that they have passed into glory, we now hear the medics apologise that “there was nothing that we could do”. Death was once — potentially, at least — an expression of some ultimate triumph. Now it is the bitter failure of our technology. And whatever we spend on it, no amount of money will overcome this gap.

Death, then, is the political issue we are not talking about. Even after the pandemic, when the daily death figures were broadcast on every news broadcast, we continue to say little about death other than making the uncritical assumption it is always to be avoided.

And so we are sleepwalking into a state of affairs in which the young will resent the elderly for the burden they place upon them. Of course, we should support the generous funding for social care. What we ought to be challenging is whether the medical technologies that are keeping us alive for ever longer complement our understanding of what human existence is for.

But I see little appetite for that. In a secular society, we have few intellectual or cultural resources to challenge the pervasiveness of more-ism. And to live deeper, more meaningful lives is not the same as living longer ones.

Who wants to live forever? - UnHerd

 

A story is like a black box – you put the reader in there: George Saunders on storytelling

The US writer George Saunders is celebrated both for his masterful prose and empathic storytelling. A MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award finalist, Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim. In this short video, the author deconstructs what makes for an effective story, and describes his personal strategies for writing, revealing the importance of conversing with your characters, the pitfalls of fixing your intentions in place, and why good storytelling is a bit like being in love.

Directors: Tom Mason, Sarah Klein

Executive Producer: Ken Burns

Website: Redglass Pictures

25 July 2017

A story is like a black box – you put the reader in there: George Saunders on storytelling | Aeon Videos

One hot, sunny and very windy September day in beautiful Devon