New Life Squared website!

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I’m thrilled to announce that the website for Life Squared (of which I am the founder) has had an upgrade and redesign, and it’s going live today – check it out here.

We’ve spent a long time making the site as user friendly as possible, enabling people to navigate the wealth of amazing resources on it and make best use of them. I hope you like it.

Alongside the new website we have focussed the mission of the website:

Life Squared helps you navigate the complexity of life so you can live in a happier, wiser and more meaningful way.

Our no-nonsense resources, courses and events help you explore what it means to be a human being in the modern world, and how you can live with clarity, curiosity and compassion within it.

Overall, Life Squared helps you live a thoughtful, well-informed and fulfilled life.

Click here to visit the website now!

Big thanks to Richard Slade (https://sladedesign.co.uk) a graphic designer and web developer who drove the design of the site, and whose enthusiasm and commitment to quality have been invaluable. Thanks also to Chandeep Khosha (https://www.chandeepkhosa.com/), a web developer whose patience, help and eye for detail have helped not just to bring about this version of the website but have helped Life Squared do its work over many years.

Podcast ep #10 – How to make a happier world (Part 2) – with Prof Richard Layard

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Out today in the latest episode of my podcast ‘Making the world better’, it’s the second part of my conversation with Professor Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the LSE. If you’ve not listened to the first part about his work on the subject of happiness and mental health, check it out after you’ve listened to this – it’s fascinating!

Richard is an economist who spent much of his life working on how to reduce unemployment and inequality. In more recent years though he has become one of the world’s leading figures exploring the science of happiness, as well as how better mental health could improve our social and economic life.

He is the author of a number of books, including ‘Happiness – lessons from a new science’, ‘Thrive – the power of psychological therapy‘ and his new book ‘Can we be happier?’, which is out now. He is also the founder of Action for Happiness – a not for profit organisation that is inspiring millions of people around the world to live kinder and happier lives.

In this second of the 2 episodes I’ve recorded with Richard, I talk to him about the charity Action for Happiness. We discuss what led him to set it up, what it’s achieved and what Richard wants to see it achieving in the future.

These are really fascinating discussions on a topic I’ve also been involved with for over a decade with the not-for-profit organisation I founded, Life Squared.

This is the last episode in this first series of Making the World Better but we’ll be back with some more episodes soon. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to listen to the rest of the series and stay informed of new episodes. Take care and see you soon!

Influence – a problem that goes beyond obesity

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An article has appeared today in The Guardian which talks about the many ways in which our everyday environments have been built to encourage us to consume fatty, sugary, junk food, and that we need to see some policy interventions from the government to change aspects of our daily environment in order to address the current obesity epidemic. Possible steps suggested in the article include “tighter controls on the advertising and promotion of junk food, and the closing of loopholes that allow social media to bypass regulations imposed on other media.”

Unfortunately, the issue of obesity is only one small part of a much bigger problem, which commentators and policy makers still don’t seem to have woken up to. The problem is this – the latest psychological research shows that human beings are not as rational as we think we are. We can be strongly influenced by the environment and other people around us, and we live in a complex world with more influences acting upon us than ever before – including politics, the media, advertising and many others.

As a result, many of us end up being moulded by these influences, leading to us getting trapped within restricted worldviews, lives and behaviours that simply follow the dominant ideas of the people and society that surround us – often for the worse. This includes the example of obesity but could equally apply to consumerism, greed, the rise of the far right or religious fanaticism.

This can not only be harmful to our own lives, but can also have serious implications for society, as it leaves us vulnerable to manipulation by others – including materialism, the press and the influence of political demagogues. At a time of political upheaval and rising populism, this is clearly an urgent issue.

Given this picture of non-rational human beings and the complex, pressurised world we live in, we need to be given the skills to live our own well-informed lives and not simply be moulded by other people – including the wealthy and powerful. We also need a society that helps to protect our mental freedom and provides the conditions for us to think for ourselves.

Sadly, the society we currently live in and the institutions that surround us – including our children’s education system – don’t recognise the importance of these skills and don’t equip us with them to anywhere near the level we need. In fact, we live at a time where the external conditions in society actually militate against us developing them.

We need to do two key things to deal with this:

a) We need to build a society and environment around people to help them flourish, and this has to include providing the conditions in which people can think for themselves without undue influence from other people, companies or anyone else with the power to manipulate them. A good example of this is when the food and retail industry spends millions of pounds trying to influence us to make unhealthy food choices, which damage our health and ruin our lives, but increase their profits. But it extends to many other areas of life – from advertisers trying to manipulate people, through to politicians trying to influence people into particular political decisions. Essentially, we need to help people build and protect their ‘mental freedom’.

b) We need to equip people with the information and mental tools to understand how they can be manipulated like this, and be able to resist it and truly think for themselves about what they want from every aspect of their lives (as far as it is possible to do this).

The new book I have written for Life Squared, called ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it‘, explores this issue in more depth and argues for it to be taken much more seriously as a policy priority. We are actively allowing ourselves to be manipulated, trapped and damaged by other people – especially those with the wealth and power to influence us – and we need to stop this, and build a society where the welfare of people comes before profit or any other priority.

The Life Trap – and how to escape it will be published as a free book and audiobook on 24th May 2018 at www.lifesquared.org.uk. To get an exclusive advance copy a week before its launch date, sign up to Life Squared’s newsletter here.

Must have it?

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Acquisition anxiety – how our constant need to acquire things is hurting us

Picture the scene. You’re walking through a beautiful village in the countryside. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the whole scene is idyllic. What is the first thought that enters your mind?  Is it something along the lines of “I feel happy to be alive” or it is more like “I wonder how much that divine 2-bedroom cottage is?”?

There seems to be something about modern life, perhaps in middle age when one has greater affluence, that makes it hard for people to just experience and enjoy things in their own right, and instead leads to them wanting to acquire them.

It would be tempting to label this thinking with the pejorative adjective of ‘childish’, yet it is quite clearly anything but, as I certainly didn’t have this tendency when I was younger, yet now I can see it in many of my friends and – to my great shame – in myself sometimes.

This need to acquire things isn’t just driven by an actual desire for the item under discussion (although it may be to some extent) – it’s also driven by a more defensive impulse – the fear of losing ground to other people and the desire to keep up with others in a competitive world.

We see the world as a race to maximise our own resources (in competition against everyone else), and in such a highly competitive worldview we become afraid of not making the most of our opportunities and losing ground on other people.

This leads to everyone feeling a pressure to acquire, protect or monetise things – from houses to new ideas – in fear of them being snapped up by someone else or rising in value because of the market so that they’re unaffordable in future. It’s a similar reaction to throwing your arms around possession defensively and shouting ‘it’s mine!’.

This isn’t simply a form of status anxiety – it’s a form of ‘acquisition anxiety’, jostling for resources within a highly competitive environment.

And this pressure never ends – as even when we have reached the enviable position of having a perfectly good house, we may be anxious about taking the next step to buy another one or a bigger one, in order to make the most of the decent position we have got ourselves into – even though in our hearts we may be perfectly happy with what we have and realise that this is adding unnecessary pressure and distraction to our lives.

Why does it matter?

This acquisition anxiety is a powerful influence in our lives and can have a range of negative effects on us. It reduces life to a series of acquisitions and our success in living to our ability to gain more material goods, which most of us know by now is no way to gain fulfilment. It distracts us from the things that really matter in life, including appreciating the experience of living itself. It stops us from being content with what we have. It also creates a massive level of self-imposed stress and pressure for us to endure.

The development of this trait isn’t simply a product of middle age, as it isn’t confined just to people in this group.  Instead, it reflects a broader and worrying cultural trend – namely, that neo-liberal, market-led thinking now dominates our culture so much that it has seeped in to influence our own individual worldviews.

How can we change things?

We mentioned earlier that this ‘acquisition anxiety’ was a feature of jostling for resources within a highly competitive environment.

Some of the resources in the modern world (like houses in the UK) are finite, but others (like ideas) are not.  The immediate issue is not with the availability of resources though, but rather with the culture of extreme individualistic competition, and if we got rid of this toxic atmosphere we would remove much of the ever-accelerating ‘race to the bottom’ that we are currently on.

The world doesn’t have to be hyper-competitive like this but for the past 30 years global thinking has been dominated by a neoliberal market-led view of economics and this has seeped into every area of society, including our own worldviews and attitudes as individuals.

We need a different economic model to drive a shift in culture away from neoliberal individualism and towards greater compassion, collaboration and a fairer distribution of wealth.  See my book ‘Modern Life – as good as it gets?’ for more thoughts on what such a world might look like and how we could get there.

This cultural shift would not only make life a great deal more pleasant and fulfilling for the majority of the world’s population (including us in the west) but would also provide a more viable way forward for a world with an ever-increasing population to share resources between. The alternative may be chaos and breakdown – or a dystopian picture of a future where 1% have all the resources and the other 99% have very little.

A final aside, on the specific issue of housing. Aside from the broader shift in thinking outlined above, we need to protect certain resources from the competitive pressure of the marketplace – and this includes housing. The UK is one of the most inflated housing markets in the world – in part due to scarcity but also further inflated by second home ownership, the buy-to-let market and other symptoms of an extreme, marketised housing system.

We should therefore ease the pressure on the UK housing market, not just by building more houses, but by seeing decent housing as a basic right for everyone, and therefore beyond the reach of the market – so that people are not able to own more than one property.  This would help to take the heat out of the housing market and lead us towards a saner vision of housing – one that is held in many other European countries.

The commodification of wisdom

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I like what the School of Life is trying to do – bringing philosophy, wisdom and broader thought into our daily lives.  Indeed, Life Squared shares a similar aim in much of its work.

Where we differ (apart from size, finances etc!) is that Life Squared is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to offer its ideas and output to anyone who needs it, regardless of their ability to pay – whereas the School of Life is a business, offering its wisdom only to those who can afford it.  This is not a criticism in itself – it’s a business with a positive social outcome.

But I worry that the finance-generating side of the business could be diluting the credibility of their content.

It was seeing some of their new products in a local shop that made me feel sufficiently queasy to write a post on it.  These products include 6 pencils, each embossed with a ‘key word’ (such as ‘tragedy’) from psychoanalysis, literature and visual art – all for the sum of £12.  Or a set of 3 essentially blank note books for £15.

Not only does this seem like a lot to pay for very little, but surely it also contradicts some of the wisdom and ideas that they are trying to spread to people?  And also by commodifying these ideas in a rather throw-away manner like this it feels like the SOL leaves itself open to accusations of being inauthentic, which may reduce its credibility as a source of wisdom and stimulating, challenging ideas.  Just a thought.