How can we live better? It’s a big question for 2010, what with financial belt-tightening and becoming a bit more green. And it’s an opportunity to seize not shirk, a chance to focus on what really counts. It’s an issue the ancient Greek philosophers, those masters of good living, understood well. They lived through a time of uncertainty too and it sparked a lifestyle revolution. We call it philosophy.

So what would they advise us at the start of a new decade?  Here’s a few suggestions:

1. Diet, but not to lose weight. For there’s a more interesting and enriching reason for eating less. Epicurus, who was known as a hedonist, wasn’t like today’s hedonists. He didn’t argue that the pursuit of more was the key to happiness. Quite the opposite. He said he was as happy as Zeus when all he had to eat was a glass of water and a barley cake. Enjoying less, not more. Pleasure in small things. That’s the real test for us in a consumer age.

2. Work to live, don’t live to work. Cleanthes, who was a Stoic philosopher and also known as the water-carrier, worked by night so that he could do philosophy by day. He was clear that he would work enough, and only enough, to support his real passion, the thinking and writing. His story is timely, for in a year that will be marked by more job insecurity and credit crises, it will be even easier to work so hard that you miss what you want.

3. Meet a friend face to face, when you might have chatted online. Aristotle is our advisor on this matter. He argued that good friendship – soulmateship – is only possible when friends ‘share salt together’. He meant that they sit down with each other, not just over the occasional meal, but frequently and often. Then, you see each other body and soul. Texting and websites are part of modern friendship, but alone, they are not enough.

4. Start each day by contemplating the worst that can happen. It sounds like a  recipe for pessimism. But the odd thing is that it isn’t. In fact, the day will never look better. Zeno, the Stoic, advised this practice. His point was that we spend too much of our time anticipating the worst, when mostly there’s nothing we can do about it. So embrace the worst; it probably won’t happen. And enjoy the day.

5. Take a technology Sabbath. Take a break from the relentless churn of emails, blogs and websites. They flitter in front of your eyes, and it’s too easy to fritter your life away in front of them. So have one day off a week from IT. Read a book, talk to friends, go for a walk instead. Secundus the Silent is our advisor here. He vowed not to speak, realizing that words are typically wasted. And he found it made him wise.

6. Talk to a stranger. There is a source of knowledge and insight all around us, and yet we barely notice it’s there. It’s not Google. It’s the strangers with whom share our world. Socrates realized this, and so started to ask people questions as he walked the streets of Athens – what is friendship, what is happiness, what is love? It was an extraordinary thing to do, and led to nothing less than the invention of philosophy.

7. Go on retreat. To take time out, away from the world, is an old religious practice. The pace of life is slower. It creates time for reflection. It should be easy to do, but actually it’s slightly frightening, for fear of what might emerge. Which is what Onescritus discovered. He went to India, and sat with the sages. He came back a changed man.

8. Write a blog for one week. If there’s one quality that you need not just to live, but to live well, it’s curiosity. With that, you’ll really see the world, and your life, and imagine it in a different light. This is what Sappho could do. Her verse changed the world because she gave women voice. Poetry is hard, so turn your observations into a blog. And see how you see things differently.

9. Do something that will surprise your friends, and you. One day, Diogenes the Cynic observed a mouse running about. He was shocked at how free it was, and how inhibited he was in comparison. Immediately, he took up residence in a barrel. His philosophy was that conventions trap us. So try breaking one or two, he’d say. A real taste of liberty will be yours.

10. Decide what you want at your funeral. We are different from other creatures, perhaps in several ways, but one must be that we often contemplate death. Some philosophers, like Plato, believed that death directly or indirectly shapes our every waking moment, and perhaps those during sleep too. But it can be tamed, by befriending it. To learn how to die, is to learn to live well.

Mark Vernon

It’s a pertinent question as Arctic conditions grip Britain.  And as we enter a New Year that’s guaranteed to bring its further share of surprises.

For whatever our desire for control in our lives, one thing that life guarantees us is its fundamental unpredictability.

D.H. Lawrence wrote that every year we pass a personal anniversary unaware: the anniversary of our own death.  Our death may seem a distant prospect but life’s unpredictability forces on us a series of “small deaths” long before our ultimate demise. 

Dealing with extreme change – whether it’s life-threatening weather, redundancy, relationship breakdown, bankruptcy, illness or bereavement – is a subject about which philosophy and the burgeoning science of survival has much to teach us.

How any of us react in a life-threatening situation offers critical pointers as to how we can better negotiate change in our everyday lives.  With extreme weather, we tend to attack the state, lamenting its shortage of gritters and the tendency of the railway system to collapse at the first flurry of snow.

When it comes to the question of personal survival in fast-changing times, such finger-pointing proves pointless.  Surviving change is a test of our sense of purpose, character, humour, and our ability to adapt. 

Analysts of disasters describe a structured pattern of behaviour that most of us exhibit in extreme circumstances.  One key stage in this pattern is denial – denial that that fire alarm means anything, denial that anything catastrophic could happen to me, denial of the new environment (or weather conditions) in which we might find ourselves.  Confronting change is firstly about coming out of denial and accepting where we find ourselves – even if it is somewhere that makes us feel literally or psychologically “lost in the woods”.

Consider three other areas of human selfhood critical to our riding extreme change:

Character

Captain Scott noted in a letter how the Antarctic weeded out those with inner personal resilience and those without it.  He noted that this was not necessarily anything to do with external personality.  The person who was the life and soul of the party could disintegrate under stress.  Scott wrote: “The outward show is nothing;  it is the inward purpose that counts.  So the ‘Gods’ dwindle and the humble supplant them.  Pretence is useless”.

When a person lives for themselves, they tend to become disorientated in a profoundly new environment.  On the other hand, those people who have a personal ideal, whether it be based on a religious, intellectual, military or even political set of beliefs, seem to manage more capably.  It matters little what worldview that idea is drawn from.  It is the idea itself in which their identities and values are rooted and from which they draw strength.

Humour

Humour is a mental weapon which enables us to retain perspective when we are sorely challenged.  As a prisoner-of-war in Korea, Major Gene Lam and his fellow inmates would steal anything they could from their Korean captors.  When they found a 50-foot long pole designed for use as a flagpole lying on the ground, the inmates stole it, cut it up and burned it.  It mattered little that one POW got 30 days solitary.  The prank raised morale and asserted the inmates’ control over at least one aspect of their situation.  Deliberately ignoring the seriousness of one’s situation can create a new level of mental flexibility and freedom.

Adaptation

One one occasion, Coleridge got stranded while scaling a peak in the Lake District.  The situation was life-threatening.  Yet far from panicking, he threw himself on his back and contemplated the sky for a period of time.  Distracting himself, he was then able to notice a previously unseen escape route from his predicament.  By accepting his environment and not trying to fight it, he found the key to his safety.  The science of survival shows we too often we fight life-threatening situations and try to work off old mental maps that we carry from past experience.  Coleridge’s example shows us that when life throws us a curved ball, we are better off accepting our new circumstances or environment and befriending them.

All of us will face extreme change at some point in our lives.

Philosophy, creative artists, and survival psychologists have important lessons to offer us about how to prepare for life’s unpredictability.

This blog is by Mark Brickman. Mark will lead our Survival Workshop: Surviving Everyday Life on Saturday 23 January. For more information click here.

Few dress with huge originality, and it would be exhausting if we did.  Clothes are visual autobiographies, their job not only to keep us warm but to tell the world how to handle us.  Hence many societies had sumptuary laws, restricting certain clothes to certain persons, ensuring everybody knew their place.  But fashion’s haters shouldn’t imagine that Vogue took over where laws left off.  Fashion is not style’s enemy or arbiter, but a resource.  Style is what we do with it. 

Coco Chanel said, ‘Fashion fades, only style remains the same.’  Certainly, many women stick to the same hairstyle – often from their happiest period – as if by Elnett alone, they can halt time.  Take Pauline Prescott’s crash-helmet (circa 1986 or whenever John began his rise to power).  But style must evolve, with our needs and ageing bodies.  The one transcendent element in all successful styles is they suit their creator’s purpose. 

What does style look like?  Nobody would hesitate to call Anna Wintour, editor of US Vogue, chic, but her chief stylist, frizzy Grace Coddington, could be taken for a cleaner.  Yet Wintour admits she has none of Coddington’s style ‘genius’.  Yes, her baggy black attire is light years from her stunning images, but it’s as effective as a cloak of invisibility, freeing her to feast her eyes on the world and decide how it could look prettier, and sparing long hours that Wintour spends under hairdryers.  So both women’s style works for them.  Both are stylish. 

To find your style, look not to Vogue but yourself.  An eye for image helps, and a feel for the signals that clothes send.  For a distinctive style, the message should seem consistent – the quality that makes a novelist’s voice or Van Gogh’s convulsive colours so recognisable.  But your look can change daily and be stylish.  However hard you work it, the key is to be happy in it.  As Epictetus advised , ‘Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.’  

Catherine Blyth

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere in the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties, something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture – and in the process don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave an auditorium vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening our experience is well on the way to dissolution – just like so much of what once impressed us and which we then came to discard: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

A student following a degree in the humanities can expect to run through a thousand books before graduation day. A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints – this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. The painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for a proper engagement with a set of ideas.

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas. We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

Alain de Botton

Why does the secular world tend not to say thank you? At the most obvious level, there seems no one to say thank you to. But, more importantly, offering thanks for relatively minor aspects of life risks appearing unambitious and undignified. The sort of things for which our ancestors bowed down, we pride ourselves on having done enough work to take for granted. Would we really need to pause for a moment of gratitude at the oily darkness of a handful of olives or at the fragrant mottled skin of a lemon? Are there not greater goals towards which we might be aiming?

In our refusal, we are attempting to flee a sense of vulnerability. We do not say thank you for a sunset because we think there will be many more – and because we assume there must be more exciting things to look forward to. To feel grateful is to allow oneself to sense how much one is at the mercy of events. It is to accept that there may come a point when our extraordinary plans for ourselves have run aground, our horizons have narrowed and we have nothing more opulent to wonder at than the sight of a bluebell or a clear evening sky. To say thank you for a glass of wine or a piece of cheese is a kind of preparation for death, for the modesty that our dying days will demand.

That’s why, even in a secular life, we should make space for some thank yous to no one in particular. A person who remembers to be grateful is more aware of the role of gifts and luck – and so readier to meet with the tragedies that are awaiting us all down the road.

Alain de Botton

The ability of effortlessness to raise one person’s achievements above another is not unique to our age. In 1528 Italian noble Baldassare Castiglione wrote a small manual of advice about desirable conduct in the Renaissance court, an arena every bit as conscious of success as any in the modern day. The Book of The Courtier urges the importance of the value of what Castiglione calls sprezzatura.  His advice is “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” 
 

However, we shouldn’t just note that Castiglione’s sprezzatura is about the importance of being effortless, but that it emphasises appearing to be effortless, and concealing the effort that goes into what we do. For how ever beguiling the spell of sprezzatura it has a paradox at its heart – it’s a lot of hard work. 
 

The overhead kick that seals the cup tie may look effortless, but it takes hours of practice on the training field. Sinking into the piano stool to spontaneously delight an assembled crowd with a collection of popular favourites disguises hours practicing scales. The perfect take in an Oscar performance is built on the hundreds on the cutting room floor and the rehearsals that went before. 
 

Indeed, the psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on the development of expertise has yielded the so-called “10,000 hour rule” – developing any skill to an expert level takes 10,000 hours of practice. Perhaps, then, when we reflect on the apparently limited rewards our own hard work has bought we should remember Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn’s reported witticism, “Give me a couple of years and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.”

Nick Southgate

The power of empathy has been recognised for centuries, at least since theatre audiences in Ancient Greece wept at the tragic suffering of the heroes on stage. What’s new is that in the last decade it has gained international prominence. Barack Obama has declared ‘the empathy deficit’ to be a scourge of modern society, while evolutionary biologists have shown that empathy is a natural trait not only in humans, but also in apes, dolphins and elephants. It is now old-fashioned to believe that we are primarily driven by individual self-interest: empathy has balanced the motivational picture.

Don’t confuse empathy with the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. This worthy adage involves considering how you – with your own views – would wish to be treated. Empathy is harder: it requires imagining others’ views and acting accordingly. George Bernard Shaw understood the distinction when he quipped, ‘Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you – they may have different tastes’.

Why does empathy matter for the art of living? Looking through the eyes of your jealous lover can help repair a broken relationship. A dose of empathising can resolve bitter family feuds – have you really tried to appreciate why your mother is so angry? And having conversations with strangers – from homeless wanderers to jaded bankers – can raise tough questions about your own values and ambitions.

So it’s time to imagine yourself in my niece’s schoolyard: whose shoes do you really need to step into?

Obliquity is the notion that complex goals are often best achieved indirectly.

Happiness is the product of fulfilment in work and private life, not the repetition of pleasurable actions, so happiness is not achieved by pursuing it.  The most profitable companies are not the most dedicated to profit.  Few companies in the history of the world were as profit-oriented as Bear Stearns and Lehman – so profit-oriented, in fact, they were ultimately destroyed by the greed of their own employees.  Buildings designed as ‘machines for living in’ proved to be machines their occupants did not like living in.  The planned cities of the world, like Canberra and Brasilia, are dull and lifeless; the great cities of the world, like Paris and London, grew over centuries with little assistance from any designer.

But surely we must be more successful in achieving something if we adopt it as our goal?  That would be true if we were clear about the nature of that goal, and knew not just all there is to know, but all we might hope to know, about the means of achieving it.   We find out about the real nature of our goals in the process of accomplishing them and our understanding of the complex structures of personal relationships or business organisations is necessarily incomplete.  We not only do not know what the future will hold but cannot anticipate even the range of possible events which might occur.  The world in which we operate changes, partly as a result of our actions.

The great utilitarian, John Stuart Mill, recognised in his autobiography that happiness was best achieved indirectly ‘aiming thus at something else [happy people] arrive at happiness along the way’.   Donald Trump expressed a similar sentiment ‘I don’t do it for the money.  I do it to do it.  Deals are my art form’.  The paradox of obliquity is all around us.

John Kay

Thanks to the volcano, we remember that we are the play-things of forces of destruction which can at best be kept at bay but never vanquished. We may enjoy local victories, a few years in which we are able to impose a degree of order upon the chaos, but everything is ultimately fated to be shredded back to a primeveal soup. If this prospect has a power to console, it is perhaps because the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals, and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing. A volcano hundreds of miles away invites us to live with the sense of awe and generosity of people who never allow themselves to let the thought of death slip too far away.
 
Early in the morning on the fifth of February AD 62, a gigantic earthquake rippled beneath the Roman province of Campania and in seconds, killed thousands of unsuspecting inhabitants. Large sections of Pompeii collapsed on top of people in their beds. Attempts to rescue them were stopped when fires broke out. The survivors were left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings shattered into rubble. There was horror, disbelief and anger throughout the Empire. How could the Romans, the world’s mightiest, most technologically sophisticated people, who had built aqueducts and tamed barbarian hordes, be so vulnerable to the insane tempers of nature?

The suffering and confusion – only too familiar today in the wake of the Icelandic volcano – attracted the notice of the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. He wrote a succession of essays to comfort his readers but, typically for Seneca, the consolation on offer was of the stiffest, darkest sort: ‘You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened…?’ Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in the spring of AD62 – that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must therefore at all times expect the unexpected. Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden volcanic explosions and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across generations, on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This Goddess can scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear along with our hotel in a tidal wave.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare’), we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by plane, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.

Alain de Botton

 ‘Carpe diem’ means, of course, ‘Seize the day’, and comes from an ode by Horace. Though a friend of mine, who happens to be a former secretary of The Horatian Society, and speaks Latin as you and I do English, tells me that it can be translated in a more interesting way.

It could equally well be phrased ‘Harvest the day’. And I like that. It’s a little less aggressive and opportunistic. After all, it is often said that you reap what you sow, and so harvesting the day suggests that you have quite a lot of responsibility for what the day offers you. In his own translation, my friend goes a step further and writes ‘Gather in today’ – which picks up the other sentiment from the ode, namely that we might live this day as if it were our last. Today is the day when we can enjoy life, for yesterday is gone, and tomorrow never comes.

That said, it’s remarkable how difficult it is to do so. So much in our lives would have us recall what has happened, or hope for what might happen. There’s the nostalgia tendency, the pressure to reflect on school days, or when the kids were young, or when we were young. ‘The best days of our lives’ are said to be behind us. And then there’s the pressure to look after tomorrow. We take out mortgages and devote our working lives to paying off the debt, hoping that the house will be ours. Or we pay into pension plans and life insurance. That’s all good. But put together, nostalgia and concern for the future do have the effect of distancing us from today.

In his poem, Days, Philip Larkin asked after what days might be for. He replied that days are where we live, for ‘Where can we live but days?’ Seize, harvest and gather in today.

Mark Vernon

Naomi Alderman

"I think we should all have a manual skill, however small. Something you can do in your spare time, when you disconnect from the normal routine: write on a piece of paper with a pencil, build something out of wood, work with tools to create something out of metal, paint, take photos and develop them manually, not with a machine. Whatever you decide is your manual skill, put all your heart to it. You’ll feel great, I promise." ~ Mnmal.org