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!

Podcast ep #9 – How to make a happier world – with Richard Layard

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I’m very excited about the new episode of my podcast that’s out today. In it I talk to Lord Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the LSE. 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 happier lives.

In the first of 2 episodes I’ve recorded with Richard, I talk to him about his work on the subject of happiness and mental health, and how it has become one of the most pressing social issues of the modern world, with an ever-increasing base of scientific evidence behind it. We explore what is being done, and what more can be done, to build happiness more into our lives, politics and economies.

In the second episode – out on 11th May 2020 – I talk to him about what led him to set up Action for Happiness, and about the important work the organisation is doing.

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.

Listen to our conversation here. Please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, check out the others in this series and share them with everyone you know!

Podcast Ep 6 – How to improve old age – with Prof Tom Kirkwood

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In the new episode of my podcast (out today), I talk to Professor Tom Kirkwood, a biologist who for several decades has been a leading figure in the study of aging – how and why we age.

He has published several books, including Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging and The End of Age: Why Everything About Aging Is Changing. In 2001 he gave the annual Reith Lectures.

I asked Tom to be a guest on the podcast because I’d read some of his papers and books about the science of aging, and found them completely fascinating. They made me look at ageing in a completely different way. Most people think that our bodies are somehow ‘programmed to decline and die’, and that this is why we age, but as you’ll hear Tom explain, it’s actually the opposite – our bodies are programmed to survive. This has some amazing consequences for aging and how we might look to improve the quality of people’s lives in the future.

Our increasing life spans also raises some fundamental ethical, cultural and political questions about the attitudes we should have towards old age and old people.

I hope you enjoy our conversation. Listen to it here.

Please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and share it with everyone!

New podcast – Making the world better

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I’m very excited to announce that my new #podcast ‘Making the world better’ is now live!

In the podcast, I talk to people who are making the world better – not just those tackling big issues at a global scale but also those working at a local level or in less obvious areas too. I want to find out more about what these people do, the issues they’re working on and why they matter. In the end, I want to pay tribute to everyone who’s trying to make things better.

Each fortnightly episode has a different guest – and we’ve got some brilliant people lined up in the first few shows including CEOs of leading charities, political advisors, academics, fundraisers – and people who are working to help others in their local communities.

The podcast is available from all the usual providers, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts (coming soon) and Google Podcast (coming soon), as well as hosted here on https://richarddocwra.com/making-the-world-better/.

Please check out the podcast! I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with as many people as you can, and of course follow it on Spotify if you like it. And if you can take one further amazing step, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (when it’s live there) would be extra helpful and much appreciated.

Beyond words

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I’ve recently become tired of hearing people’s words – both those of others and my own. This evening I went for a walk on the hills of the South Downs as the sun set, and it reminded me of the joy of being without words.

Just standing silently and letting the sights and sounds of nature wash over me gave me the most profound feeling of peace and belonging.

As I stood there listening, breathing and looking, I realised that no words could convey the richness and complexity of the experience of just being in that natural landscape. You can only understand it if you experience it yourself.

And I realised that this act of ‘experiencing nature’ – just appreciating the experience of existing within it – is one of the great joys of my life.

The event that changed my world

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I’ve been thinking recently about my emotional reaction to a particular event in human history. I’ve felt it chipping away at me in recent years as I’ve continued to research it, and realised recently that it has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. I’d like to share it here – not, I hope, out of self-indulgence, but to show where it has led me.

Throughout history there have been countless examples of human beings being cruel or unkind to each other. Some have been at a small scale, such as the minor, everyday ways that people can overlook each other’s needs, and others have been at an industrial scale of pre-planned cruelty.

The event that affected me for life and changed my thinking was The Holocaust.

This event has broken my heart about human beings. It shows that the worst things you can ever imagine (or, worse than you can ever imagine) do happen and have happened. The emotional hammer blow is not just the fear that it’s within the capacity of human beings for it to happen again, but also the fact that it happened at all.

The possibility that human beings could do this to each other – in broad daylight, in a planned, sustained way and in front of each other – just shattered my trust in human beings and society. It’s changed my view of the world, life and human beings.

All the stuff above is simply my emotional reaction of course, and in itself may not seem particularly useful.

I’m well aware in theoretical terms about the factors that led to The Holocaust and other human tragedies – including how we think and behave as human beings, how circumstances and power can influence behaviour and how societies can change. But an emotional reaction can be a useful spark to set someone into action or down a different path in life, and I think it’s done that for me.

My emotional reaction to The Holocaust doesn’t reduce my love and concern for human beings, or my desire to help and look after other people. In fact, it strengthens my resolve to protect people and ensure things like this do not happen again. I feel as if my life should be devoted to this, in whatever ways I can achieve it.

The Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel put it far better than I ever could in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986, explaining how after his experience:

“…I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human being endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered and when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the centre of the universe.”

My initial effort at taking some action on this was in the Life Squared publication ‘How to be civilised’ – available to download here for free. But I must – and we all must – do so much more, not just as projects we work on, but as a commitment on how to live our daily lives. I am determined that there will be more work and action from me on this in the years ahead.

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.

How to stop the rise of manipulation

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Communication is power.

In the modern world, one of the most effective tools used by the powerful to build and exercise their power is communication. More specifically, it’s the ability to understand how human beings think and behave and then use this knowledge to influence people – both individually and in massive numbers.

This power is exercised through a wide range of channels – from advertising to social media – and surrounds each of us on a daily basis. It can be harnessed by anyone with the desire and necessary resources to influence other people – from politicians to companies to campaigning groups – regardless of whether their intentions are good or bad.

There are now plenty of agencies and consultancies helping the powerful to influence (or manipulate) people as effectively as possible  – and yet there is no-one helping to protect the public from the exploitation at the hands of this influential power.

In an information age, where the world has become more complex and information and communication have become weapons that can be used against people, the time has come for an organisation to help the public navigate this complexity and defend themselves against these weapons.

My not-for-profit organisation, Life Squared, has been helping people think about this issue for several years – through publications like ‘The problem with consumerism‘ and our forthcoming book ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it’ – but we need more support to raise awareness of it. This is a critical issue affecting a range of areas of modern society, including mental health, climate change and the rising influence of populism, and politicians and policy makers need to take notice of it – for the sake of our own lives, as well as a better society.

The Life Trap – coming soon

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I’ve just completed a booklet for Life Squared that has turned into a book!  It’s a piece of work that I’ve been putting off for years as I knew it would be large and complex, but I’m delighted to have finished it as I think it’s a critical issue, yet one that hasn’t been exposed in any significant way to date.

It’s called ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it’. Or – ‘how to think for yourself’. Here’s a brief summary.

You may not know it, but you’re probably caught in the Life Trap.

You live in a complex world where you are bombarded daily with a wide range of powerful messages and influences, but at no point in your life have you been given the skills or tools you need to manage this assault on your mind.

As a result, you have ended up caught in a trap, like most of us in the modern world – with worldviews, values and lives that are stifled and restricted, only following the path that we’ve been led down by the dominant ideas of the people and society we’ve grown up in. As a consequence, you pursue career achievement and material success, worry about what other people think of you and lead a busy, distracted life. Your life feels meaningless and isolated yet you find it hard to stop, take control and change it.

This book explores what causes the Life Trap and why it matters so much – not just for our own lives but for society as a whole.

You will find out how to escape the Life Trap – as well as how we can change our education system, politics and other areas of society to give everyone the best chance of independent, fulfilled lives, and build a peaceful and civilised society.

The book will be free to download from the Life Squared website in the next few weeks. More news as soon as it’s published!