Self-Knowledge
You Don’t Always Need to Be Funny
Because we feel collectively very good about humour, and know a considerable amount about the dangers of despair and glumness,…
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Fear & Insecurity
The Five Features of Paranoia
There are perhaps five main features of the very sad, indeed hellish, condition we know as paranoia…
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Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
We ‘love’ pain for being profoundly familiar; we love it for taking us home.
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Calm
Our Anxious Ancestry
For far longer than we have been here, upright, in our office chairs, in our well-lit rooms, eating industrially made…
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Sociability
Abandoning Hope
Our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well and…
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Relationships
The Secret Lives of Other Couples
Despite all our recording devices, and all the ways we have of sharing information about ourselves, one of the things…
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Self-Knowledge
Why It’s Good to Be a Narcissist
Narcissism is one of the more misunderstood terms of our time. We’re so aware of the bad narcissist – one…
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Sociability
How to Leave a Party
It is possible to catch a telling glimpse of our levels of underconfidence in a sad quirk of our approach…
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Sociability
On Becoming a Hermit
It’s one of the telling quirks of history that just as the world was growing ever noisier and more urbanised,…
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Calm
Auditing Our Worries
One of the basic courtesies we almost never remember to pay our worries is to go back and check how…
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Calm
Why We May Need a Convalescence
The word ‘convalescent’ has – tellingly and sadly – gone very much out of fashion. In the olden days, it…
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Select themes
Calm
Our Anxious Ancestry
For far longer than we have been here, upright, in our office chairs, in our well-lit rooms, eating industrially made…
View
Sociability
Abandoning Hope
Our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well and…
View
Relationships
The Secret Lives of Other Couples
Despite all our recording devices, and all the ways we have of sharing information about ourselves, one of the things…
View
Self-Knowledge
Why It’s Good to Be a Narcissist
Narcissism is one of the more misunderstood terms of our time. We’re so aware of the bad narcissist – one…
View
Sociability
How to Leave a Party
It is possible to catch a telling glimpse of our levels of underconfidence in a sad quirk of our approach…
View
Sociability
On Becoming a Hermit
It’s one of the telling quirks of history that just as the world was growing ever noisier and more urbanised,…
View
Calm
Auditing Our Worries
One of the basic courtesies we almost never remember to pay our worries is to go back and check how…
View
Calm
Why We May Need a Convalescence
The word ‘convalescent’ has – tellingly and sadly – gone very much out of fashion. In the olden days, it…
View