When we set out to study old age, we are to some extent studying recent history. We are studying the way the currently old behaved in their youth and middle age. And this can be 20, 50 or even 70 or more years ago, if we are looking at the very old.
Things have [...]
Continue reading about Societies Characterised by a Healthy Old Age, Care about Family
Some Australians (those as old as me), will be able to remember ‘Kingswood Country’ – a sitcom that ran for a few seasons and was quite popular.
It was about a family – the father was called Ted. Ted was a fairly crass and insensitive character. When Ted had a difficulty with something he [...]
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is a follow-up to a post I did earlier on dependence and independence. In the comments people asked about how dependence and independence applied to finance. This is my attempt to answer this question. This is the [...]
Continue reading about Financial Dependence and Independence
The World of Hamish McBeth
My partner and I don’t bother about Christmas very much. It doesn’t mean much to her and I loathe the commercialism; so we tend to leave it alone.
This year I did buy myself a small Christmas present – a Hamish McBeth novel, called Death of a Charming Man, from Amazon.
[The [...]
Continue reading about In Praise of Contentment (critiquing ambition)
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called The Spirit at Christmas.
In it I talk about experiences of spirit usually involving a sense of abundance and not mean-spiritedness. Also that there do seem to be things that diminish or demean spirit – shown in the [...]
This research was done in Britain. It is about the expectations of children when they enter high school. My reactions to it are quite mixed.
The study is Children’s Perception of the Value of Education by Croll and Attwood. A plain English summary is available here. The researchers surveyed 845 pupils during [...]
Two studies on the power of thought. The first found that counselling is 32 times more effective than money at increasing happiness (there has been a bit of discussion about this in the blogosphere) – some of the responses are quite possibly evil I think. The second study found that thinking of a [...]
Just a link to an initiative to alleviate world poverty. It is a micro-lending scheme called Kiva – where bloggers can start an account and the money raised is used to fund the starting of small businesses for people in poverty. This is a very worthwhile initiative in my view.
Would you like to [...]
