There is a brand of literature called the “utopian”. It is where people imagine an ideal place and describe what it is like to live there. This is used to comment on the currently poor way that people live. This type of literatures takes its name from the first modern example – Thomas More’s Utopia. [...]
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is about what I think of as my bottom line: that compassion and joy (or better yet, compassionate-joyfulness) are good in themselves. They are what justify other things rather than being justified by other things. I also talk about how some [...]
Continue reading about Values, Technology and the Bottom Line: compassion and joy
There is a lot of emphasis on getting things right. From school to sport, to other recreations, to the workplace: the emphasis is on getting stuff right. I want to question this emphasis for several reasons. 1. It’s against learning. I remember vividly an interview with a research scientist on Australian radio. When applying for [...]
Continue reading about If a Job is Worth Doing; it’s Worth Doing Badly
Image by Hectorius Our society is prejudiced against emotion. It is still respectable to be ‘objective’ – and it is OK for this to mean devoid of emotion. It is still possible to lose an argument by getting upset – even if it is an argument about something we should care passionately about. In this [...]
I’ve made a couple of changes to the blog. The biggest that you’ll notice is a change to the blog theme – it looks quite different and now has a two column format. I hope you like the new look. The advantage of this new theme is that I can have text around images, instead [...]
I think there should be a collective noun for posts (a ‘swag of posts’ perhaps) but I don’t know what it is if there is one, so I’ve had to settle for “collection”. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve done a round-up of posts like this. These are spread over time and and [...]
Just a quick note about a great post on identity. Seeing identity as a combination of our individuation (knowing who we are and what makes us different) and our attachments (identification with others). It is written by Tony White (a therapist in Perth Western Australia). It is simply written but I think hugely insightful. It [...]
Continue reading about Identity – individuation and attachment
I have a guest post about perseverance on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is about perseverance. Firstly what it is – does it mean just doing something repeatedly? Then I talk about how we can know whether it is useful: are we to never quit doing something that isn’t working and just [...]
