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Chapter 3.
One of the most useful things about our minds is that they can in some moods allow us to step outside of ourselves – and consider our death from a wholly dispassionate perspective, as if it were someone else who would have to go through the event and as if…
A characteristic emotion on seeing a favourite novel turned into a film is puzzlement. We may not hate the actor playing a particular role, we might even find them rather beautiful,…
Some of the pain of feeling unattractive stems from the stories we tell ourselves about those we deem beautiful. They, the blessed ones, surely do not suffer. They, the gods and…
We tend to feel that concepts like ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ are things that can be objectively defined, are eternally valid and are founded on unarguable criteria. Someone is either beautiful or…
Most of what we would really like to do is annihilated long before its possible birth by a relentlessly forensic and masochistic sense of our own incompetence. We can’t possibly invite…
The School of Life has produced 500 films and written 5 million words. This is an enormous problem. To stand any hope of remaining in anyone’s mind, ideas – even very…
Some of the reason why adult life can be greyer and more miserable than it should be is that our earliest years are generally made up of a prolonged and highly…