Hello everyone,

I really hate keeping secrets. So, it’s with great relief that I can finally share some exciting news: I’m ready to share my philosophy. After more than ten years, I’ve written a book about what I think is some of the best wisdom in history.

It’s called The Art of Enough, and it makes the case for a gentler and slower kind of happiness. It’s about Epicureanism, an ancient Greek philosophy that says a good life is one where you give yourself room to reflect, nurture close relationships, and pause to savor the many joys in life. Don’t seek the pointless, impossible validation of thousands, but become a local legend. Become a hero in your living room and on your street.

I’ve long thought of philosophy as a kind of medicine or therapy, and Epicurus said that philosophizing is pointless if it does not make life easier. And so, Epicureanism is a practical wisdom that helps us navigate the muddy reality of existence. It’s a time-tested remedy that gives us the means to live happier lives on our own terms.

My book explores four tools for the sick-souled among us: Introspection, Intention, Connection, and Commitment. These are intended to be used as strategies for anyone feeling anxious, unmoored, disconnected, exploited, overworked, lost, and dizzy in the modern world.

If that’s you, then this is the book for you. If you want to learn about ancient philosophy, then this is the book for you. If you want to dance your way around 2,500 years of ideas, this is the book for you.

Epicurus never wanted thousands of followers. He wanted a garden full of friends. This newsletter has always felt a bit like that garden to me, which is exactly why you’re hearing about it first.

If you’d like a copy, you can preorder it here.

Thank you, friends (a very Epicurean sign-off),
Jonny

Preorder now

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at best friends.

I flew to America last week.

I packed a travel bag full of books, articles, and intellectual fodder to gorge myself on. Which was either aspirational or hopelessly naive, depending on how you look at it. I spent the entire flight messaging people, staring absently at clouds, and watching Deadpool & Wolverine.

I was flying to America to meet some friends. Now, I might still be jet-lagged and deliriously sleep-deprived, but I hope you will forgive me a moment of sentimentality. Because I would say that these friends have very quickly become some of my best friends. If I had my way, I’d see them every week. But in the meantime, I’ll have to settle for the occasional transatlantic jaunt.

I’m limping my way into middle age. I’ve more salt than pepper in my beard, and my forehead is a crinkly mesh. I’m too old to have “best friends.” You have best friends when you’re ten years old. You swap notes, play video games, and giggle over sexual innuendos. As it happens, I still do all those things. So, what does a best friend look like to me?

Well, of course there’s no one simple thing. I trust these friends totally. I think each of them embodies certain characteristics I want to develop in myself. I love them and have told them so. But one thing I want to examine today is something overlooked but oh so important. It’s overlooked because we often take it for granted: You have to enjoy being around your best friends.

So, this week we look at the philosophy of best friends.

Go well,
Jonny

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We were sitting around a table, playing the guitar.

I’m not especially good at the guitar. I can shuffle my way around something that sounds a bit like the twelve-bar blues, but my friend is one of those people who can hold a coherent conversation while absently plucking something straight out of a recording studio. I was shuffling, he was riffing, his wife was singing. It sounded okay, but, more importantly, it felt good.

There’s an ancient need in all humans to both make music and participate with one another. Chanting, drumming, dancing, and playing the blues are primal. Music is nice in itself, of course, but playing music with someone is a different kind of nice.

Because there are sounds and songs you can never play on your own. There are things in life you need others for. In philosophy, an “emergent property” is something that emerges only when you put various parts together. A traffic jam made up of cars. Birds swooping in hundred-winged union. And the music you get from “jamming” or “just playing” is a kind of emergent property. Join a choir, join a band, sing around the campfire after a few too many beers. You’ll feel it.

The best kinds of friendships are emergent properties. Yes, there’s a form of therapy that involves “making friends with yourself,” but friendship is usually seen as an interaction between different people. You are who you are, I am who I am, and we’ll whip up a jazzy infusion. This is what some psychologists call an “ecosystemic” relationship — where all members not only take a place within the whole but are conscious of being part of the whole.

The opposite of an ecosystemic friendship is an “egosystemic” one. This is where everyone fixates on themselves. They stay in their own heads, obsessed with their own thoughts, and see “listening” only as a necessary pause before they can talk about what they want. An egosystemic friend is like a guitarist who changes tune in the middle of a song. It’s the chorister who refuses to read the sheet. It’s the drum soloist who won’t stop drumming. An egosystemic table is really just a collection of discrete individuals who happen to be near each other. I wouldn’t be so categorical as to say these aren’t friendships. I follow Aristotle on this and think there are a few kinds of friendships — some better, some worse. And ecosystemic friendships are the best kind.

One good way to identify an ecosystemic friendship is by listening to what it sounds like. Because when you’re sitting around the table with your best friends, the conversation often flows. It adapts to what one person says and picks up the same rhythm. You listen, and you reply. You offer a bit of yourself, and you nudge the conversation somewhere else. Another friend picks up that nudge and joins in. It could be funny, sentimental, or philosophical, but the point is that the conversation plays with the swinging joy of a jazz band lost in the jam. Hi-hats tapping, trumpets blaring, and the bass thumping. On and on in a sweaty, joyous euphoria.

Best friendships are ecosystemic, and they are rare because they require two things:

First, a basic degree of empathy and other-regardingness. Ecosystemic friendships need you to attend to another person. They take your partner’s step and dance with it. Second, they require that far more elusive je ne sais quoi we often call “being on the same wavelength.” When one person finishes a thought, someone else knows where to take it. It’s not quite finishing each other’s sentences, but it’s the feeling of union that explains why best friendships often feel so relaxed. So familiar. Because for the briefest of moments around a table, your thoughts are dancing together.

Of course, this goes beyond just nattering around a table for a few hours with a guitar, and an ecosystemic relationship will look different to each of us. It might be a breathless, cackling back-and-forth in the pub. It might be a slower, contemplative unearthing of the soul. It might be years or decades of mutual support. “They’ve always been there for me.” But in each case, best friends reach beyond the self-concerned parameters of their own minds to engage with someone else.

In an ecosystemic relationship, all members care for each other, and each feels cared for. This is why the members of an ecosystemic group work hard to nurture the friendship itself. The ecosystemic friendship is treated as a thing — an identifiable emergent property.

“I like jamming; let’s keep doing it. I love not only you, but this relationship. I will protect it.”

As I touch on in this week’s Mini Philosophy column, this je ne sais quoi factor of clicking with someone isn’t necessarily common. We need to meet a lot of people, try a lot of things, and accept that not all friends are meant to last forever. Not all friends have to be best friends. But if you are lucky enough to find them as you’re limping into middle age, it’s important to pause and appreciate them. Invest, nurture, protect. And book another flight to America as soon as you can.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at what’s needed for change. And to do that, we’ve partnered with the team rereleasing V for Vendetta, a film I enjoy, and whose Guy Fawkes mask has arguably become one of this century’s most iconic political symbols of change.

V for Vendetta hits theaters on November 1 & 5 in the U.S. Click here to get your tickets.

I increasingly like Threads.

Threads is Meta’s version of Twitter, and I find myself pressing its squiggly little logo more and more often. There’s the usual AI slop and bilious nonsense, but I find these few are outweighed by genuinely funny jokes and mostly interesting people.

Every so often, though, my Threads is overwhelmed by a pile-on. Disney+ has upped its prices, Netflix is cracking down on account-sharing, YouTube is changing its payouts, and Meta has updated its TOS to the disadvantage of the everyday user.

“It’s time to go!”

“So, where are we heading then?”

“This is the last straw,” says John from Inverness.

People angrily, vocally, performatively declare they’ve had enough. They’re going to leave. They’re going to join this new app. They post screenshots of a canceled subscription.

And yet, these apps get bigger and richer. Disney keeps raising its streaming prices. YouTube brought in more than $60 billion last year, and Americans now spend more of their TV time on it than on Netflix — or the whole of Disney. Meta’s apps are used by 3.6 billion people a day, and Threads alone passed 500 million monthly users in June. And when Netflix told password-sharers to pay up, more people signed up.

The thing is, these companies have spent decades and billions creating what the business lot call a “moat.” A moat is when your audience essentially has to stay with you because there’s nowhere else to go. It might be OneDrive hoarding all your family photos. It might be a Facebook page you need for your company’s visibility. It might be that no other company has all the Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars movies all together.

And so, when you are trapped behind a moat, it can feel like you’re trapped. John from Inverness wants to let Netflix know he’s unhappy, but he’s small fry. “Let’s boycott Meta,” people say on Threads, owned by Meta, which also owns WhatsApp. And thousands download a new app created by an exciting new startup alternative, only to return within days after finding it glitchy, boring, or empty.

This feeling of trapped hopelessness is not unique to capitalism. It’s in politics too. So this week I want to explore the question: Just how far can any of us actually change things? How far can we shake up the world?

Go well,
Jonny

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The need of a hero

The problem with any “what would you do?” scenario is that hardly any of us actually know.

“What would you do in 1930s Germany?”

“What would you do if you had to kill five people to save your family?”

“Would you sacrifice yourself to save ten strangers?”

When we answer these questions, we do so in the calm and rational light of day. But if you ever found yourself in a war zone or in any life-or-death situation, there is very little that is rational. What we think we’ll do now and what we would actually do are worlds apart.

In 2025, I spoke with Paul Lynch about his Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song. The book explores the messy reality of what life would be like for those caught up in things. The novel is set in a dystopian Ireland turning toward totalitarianism. And, like many in 1930s Germany, the main character, Eilish, has opportunities to leave. Go to Britain. Go to America. Go somewhere else. But life is complex. Eilish has kids in school, a job that pays for her life, and family to look after. Totalitarianism doesn’t plop down with a swastika or a Stalin; it creeps. It edges in. And as with all creep, it’s hard to know when things go too far. It’s apparently false that frogs will stay in warming water until they boil. What’s true, though, is that humans will often stay around and do nothing until it’s “too late.” But then, when was it the right time?

The writer Susan Sontag supposedly said that “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” And if you’ve spent any time looking at the bystander effect — either in formal publications or in real-life examples — you will likely agree. People tend to go along with things. Charitably, we could call this evolutionary wiring — we’re built to get along and fit in. Less charitably, you could say we’re mostly selfish. We care only for our own skin. So long as I’m okay, what does it matter?

There is both hope and dread in those minority fringes. In any society, it often takes a surprisingly small number of people to pull everyone this way or that. In the 2010s, the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth popularized the 3.5% rule. Chenoweth analyzed 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 and found that every campaign in her dataset succeeded or partially succeeded after achieving active participation of 3.5% of the population at the movement’s peak. (She's since noted that the 3.5% figure is a tendency, not a law.) In Moral Ambition, the historian Rutger Bregman points out the disproportionate power a few determined individuals can have in changing things.

And this is where we find the idea of the hero.

In movies, a hero will often have special powers. Magic hammers, superintelligence, laser eyes. In real life, a hero is someone who rallies the forces of good in the world. I’m sorry if that sounds a bit like Lord of the Rings, but sometimes a cliché does the job. A hero catalyzes people. They remind us what the right thing is, and they become an emblem.

This is something explored well in the movie and graphic novel V for Vendetta.

V for Vendetta is set in a dystopian future where a totalitarian government called Norsefire runs the country with fear, propaganda, and brutality. Into this comes V, a freedom-fighting antihero in a Guy Fawkes mask. Near the end of the movie, V says, “Beneath this mask there is more than flesh.” He follows this with, “Beneath this mask, there is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof.”

Yes, V for Vendetta is a superhero movie of sorts. A superantihero movie, really. But it also explores something brilliantly philosophical — something morally gray. Because the main character, V, is not a Socratic model of heroism. He hasn’t reflected on justice to Do The Right Thing™.

While V might object to Norsefire, he was also radicalized. He was tortured and abused by the system. As V tells Evey, “What was done to me was monstrous.” Her reply: “And they created a monster.” V fits my Tolkienesque definition of hero not because of his motivation — ultimately, a vendetta — but because of what he represents. He is an idea incarnate. He is a Guy Fawkes mask, and it’s vitally important to the movie and the message that the man underneath is not seen.

So, should we feel hopeless? Probably not. It takes only a small minority of good people — 3.5% if Chenoweth is right. And 3.5% will often just need to follow someone. John from Inverness was never going to bankrupt Netflix on his own. But if John’s message took off, if John became a symbol, then he might well start the process. Just look at Spain to see the power one person — one tragic story — can have.

What history shows is that you don’t need everyone. You need a few people who mean it, and who stay fighting for long enough for others to join in. Beneath the canceled subscription, there has to be an idea. And an idea is bulletproof.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at animal role models.

On Oct 20th, I’m hosting our first Mini Philosophy Salon for members. In the salons, I’ll introduce a topic and invite people to share their thoughts. The first topic is “Being authentic.”

If you’d like to register, upgrade to become a member.

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This might be my most controversial opening.

You might have noticed how I tend to stay clear of all the culture-war, shouty stuff in this newsletter. I talk about the philosophy of religion and political theory, of course, because they’re key parts of the discipline. But as a general rule, I try to avoid the especially inflammatory things. This isn’t because I don’t have opinions or thoughts about them, but it’s just that I think some conversations are better had in person.

Until today. Because today, I’m going to put my cards on the table and say something controversial: I dislike cats.

Not only do I think dogs are superior to cats in almost every category, but I think cats, in themselves, embody certain vices I dislike in human beings. That’s why, in my Big Think column this week, I take issue with philosopher John Gray’s argument that we should all be more like cats.

I think cats are cold, vain, and aloof. They will love-bomb their human when it’s clear they need food, or warmth, or have gone too far.

What with the Gray column and a recent visit to the zoo, I’m a little animal-minded right now. And this focus has got me thinking about just how often we turn to the natural world to understand our own nature. We easily fall into this habit of seeing animals as embodying certain virtues and vices. Like some Stone Age cave dweller, drawing bears on the wall, we extrapolate from animals.

And so, this week, I want to look at the moral archetypes of animals.

Go well,
Jonny

Be like the crane

In the early weeks of September, I was at The Cotswold Wildlife Park with my dad. The kids were off meddling somewhere, and we were sitting on the bench overlooking the prairie dogs.

“What animal are you?” I said to my dad.

“Huh?”

“What animal are you most like?”

“Well, a donkey, of course,” he said, and we chortled. It’s funnier when you’re in your late 70s.

“Yes, very good, Pops,” with a roll of the eyes. And then he sat thinking for a while.

“I think a crow,” he said. “I like puzzles and stuff, but I also like to be alone in my nest. Also, I like to think I’m some kind of evil omen to curse you.”

It’s a nice answer. I’m sure you’ve had a similar conversation because humans often look to the animal kingdom for examples. It’s why all those “What animal are you?” quizzes or “What’s your spirit animal?” questions are so popular. We want to embody what the animal represents.

This is an ancient tradition. Culturally, shamans, totems, and prehistoric religious rites almost always feature animals prominently. Egyptian falcon-heads, Indian monkey gods, and a Greek Minotaur roaring around a labyrinth. In a bygone world, we simply lived among animals much more.

Philosophers, too, have long leaned into animal metaphor — “Be more like the lion: brave, proud, and strong!” For a long time, before science took all the fun away with “empirical proof,” philosophers even built a kind of biological metaphysics around animals. In the 17th century, it was common to say that humans were a microcosm of passions, virtues, and vices, whereas animals contained only one or a few. Meanwhile, “theriophilia” is the belief that animals are morally superior to humans. To be a good human is to be more animal.

So, let’s look at what history’s theriophilists had to say about five animals.

The ant

In the book of Proverbs, we get this line: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard… Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer.” And Plutarch observed that ants nip seeds so they can’t sprout while stored inside the nest. The ant embodies diligence and prudence. They work hard for the greater good. They toil through the summer to give themselves fodder for the winter.

To be more ant-like, we should plan better. Put money away into your retirement account. Nurture your friendships. Invest in your skills and talents. Do Pilates. Tomorrow will come in a blink.

Fact check: Mostly true; ants do just do their thing without a “ruler.” The beauty of DNA. But when it comes to seed nipping, it’s only harvester species that do that.

The elephant

The elephant is probably philosophers’ most cherished animal. The ancient Greek and Roman world became borderline obsessed with them, first through dubious secondhand accounts from distant empire-building armies like Alexander’s, and then when the Romans faced Hannibal and his elephants firsthand. Pliny calls elephants wise because it was thought they could follow orders, practice things they got wrong, and bury their fallen tusks so as not to attract hunting humans.

So to be more elephant, we should reflect more. Take stock of when things went wrong, why they went wrong, and work out how to prevent it in the future. Practice. Get better.

Fact check: All pretty much true, but we’ve not replicated Pliny’s observation of hidden tusks.

The dog

A classic. Dogs and wolves are the archetypal pack animals. Both Pliny and Cassius Dio retell the story of Titius Sabinus’s dog, who stayed by his executed master and then swam into the Tiber trying to keep Titius’s body afloat. More recently, you’ve probably heard the story of Hachikō, the Japanese Akita dog who waited for his owner at Shibuya Station for nearly 10 years after the owner’s death. Heartbreaking, yes, but also deeply admirable.

To be more dog means putting aside all the many temptations of life to stay true to your people. Stand up for a friend in a meeting. Go see your sibling when they need you. Never sell your mother.

Fact check: Hachikō existed, and this makes Titius’s dog more likely. Dogs are famously loyal and protective — there are countless data points to prove it.

The crane

Pliny again, but it was repeated often enough to become an ancient legend. The story goes that night sentry cranes will clutch a stone, so a drowsy guard drops it and is found out. The crane has developed a tool to keep itself alert, like a dozing grandfather holding some keys.

Be more crane by “self-binding” yourself. When you want to do a task, make failure unthinkable. Make yourself accountable, put something valuable up for forfeit, deny yourself something you love if you get it wrong. Find a “rock” to hold that will let others know you’ve fallen asleep.

Fact check: Most dubious of them all. Even Aristotle, before Pliny, called out this folk legend as nonsense. Cranes — like a lot of birds — will eat rocks to mash up their food as part of digestion. But what is true is that cranes will often simply share and rotate their watch duty as any human guard might do.

The cat

The anti-archetype. Thomson (yes, me) observed that cats are cold, vain, and aloof. He thinks they use affection as a weapon to get what they want. So, “to be more cat” means to schmooze your boss the week before your review, eat the last chocolate in the box, and trash the house and expect others to tidy it up for you.

Fact check: Thomson’s theories are almost entirely based on a childhood experience with an especially grouchy, scratchy, aggressive cat called Mabel, who he likely rubbed the wrong way. His anecdotal prejudice is not corroborated by millions of powerful, wealthy cat-lovers who have the means to sue Mini Philosophy for libel.

So, what is your spirit animal? What virtue or passion do you want to embody more from the natural world?

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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A young girl looks out of the classroom window. It’s the end of the day, and she’s bored. She spots a goldfinch land on the ground outside. It hops about and twitches for whatever reasons goldfinches do that, and then takes off. It swoops and dives around the playground, as if doing it all for the girl. Oh, how she would like to fly.

Humans have long looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration. We envy their skills and talents: flight, speed, strength, sociability, and so on. Religions almost always feature animal imagery, and flags will often blazon a lion, an eagle, a wolf — something bold or heroic. And philosophers are in on the game as well.

Even in the earliest historical records, people were exploring the philosophical side of animals. What can this animal teach me? What virtues does it embody? What can I learn about myself by studying this creature?

Joining in an ancient line is John Gray’s book Feline Philosophy. In the book, Gray examines what we can all learn about life from spending more time around cats. His conclusion: We should all be a bit more feline.

Mo the Philosophical Cat

A cat does not do philosophy, and that makes it a better philosopher than anyone else. Gray argues that for humans, philosophy acts as a kind of medicine. We are full of doubt and anxiety about how to live, yes, but most of all we are filled with the existential dread that comes from knowing that we will die.

To combat this, we create systems like religions and ideologies. We try to soothe our death-terror with stories. We become obsessed with “the good life,” “the examined life,” and “time well spent.” We have turned the word “happiness” into a multi-billion-dollar industry, but as a species we are no happier than we ever were. We are sick, craving a cure, but the medicine we have isn’t working.

Cats, though, have no such sickness. Imagine a cat called Mo. Mo does not search for meaning in her life, and she is not trying to become a better cat. She does not experience her life as a project that could fail, and she doesn’t wake up with the imagined burden of a thousand cats’ expectations.

Mo hunts, she sleeps, and she sits in the sunlight. When she suffers, she does not add to her suffering by asking why. She does not need to invent systems or stories because the world is as the world is. Gray’s point is not that Mo is wise; Mo wouldn’t write books even if she could. The point is that Mo is not sick. Humans are.

Be more cat

Gray starts his book by saying that we cannot become a cat. We can try to transfigure if we want, but you’re mostly running up against the immovable wall of cellular biology. Still, we can mimic a cat. We can do more cat things and try to see things like a cat. Gray leans on a point that Blaise Pascal makes about ritual and religion: If you do something enough, it changes you. If you force your mind a certain way, it stays like that.

As the philosopher Mark Vorobej pointed out, it’s not entirely clear why Gray has singled out cats. What’s true here of cats is true of dogs, birds, rats, squirrels, moles, badgers, or mongooses. Should we be more mongoose? It’s a fair critique, but it is somewhat pedantic. I’m sure Gray is not some feline exceptionalist. I take his book to be a lesson in intentionality. We can try to become more like a cat, rat, or badger, and I think he chose cats because they’re both cute and far more present in our lives. We see cats at home or on social media. All over social media. It’s just much easier to talk about something so available. Yes, he could have chosen dogs, but hey — take your pick.

So, how can we be more cat? Well, we need to distance ourselves from this sick and broken human way of seeing things. Stop seeing your lives in terms of some huge, overarching metanarrative. Don’t try to find meaning in your suffering. Stop seeing the world in terms of puzzles to solve. Don’t try to persuade other people to be more reasonable. Recognize that you are who you are, and it is what it is. Sometimes life just happens. So climb trees, play with a ball, sleep a lot more, and lie by the fire when things get cold and dark. Cherish life and think only as much as you want.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at why facts matter for Christians, with Andrew Henry (@religionforbreakfast). You can watch our full hour-long interview at the end.

Why does it matter if Jesus existed?

One of the most common topics in debates about Christianity is the historical accuracy of the Bible.

“Aha! Look, there’s no evidence of a global flood.”

“There’s no way Jericho could have been under siege anywhere around this time!”

For Christians, the most important question, of course, is about Jesus. Did the man exist? Likely. Did he do a lot of the stuff in the Gospels? Likely, with some poetic license. Did he say all those things? Possibly, but everyone needs a good editor. Did he perform miracles? Well, that’s where things get tricky.

The questions of miracles, resurrection, and divine intervention are matters for another day. It’ll probably take more than a day, in fact. No, the question I want to explore in this newsletter is: Why does it matter that Jesus existed at all? Why does it matter whether a flesh-and-blood Jew was really walking around ancient Palestine saying he was the Son of God?

After all, in some religions, it’s a matter of shrugging indifference. A lot of Daoists happily accept that Lao Tzu is not one person but likely an amalgamation of many people or sages across time. Who cares? The Daodejing is still awesome. Many Buddhists will smile at the (usually) Western attempts to chronicle the Buddha’s real life. Who cares? All that matters is that we can walk the path.

So why is Christianity so fact-obsessed? This week, we explore just that.

Go well,
Jonny

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Who cares if Jesus existed?

I was wrong.

It happens a lot, and I actually get a strange, intellectual spark of joy when I find out when and how I was wrong. And this week, I was wrong about Christianity.

I was interviewing Andrew Henry, the hugely popular YouTuber and scholar of religion, about common misunderstandings about religion. As you can hear below, we spent a great deal of time debating what makes a religion a religion. It turns out I’m an “essentialist.” A new label to add to the collection.

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As we were talking, I got waylaid by a passing point I’d never much thought about: Why is Christian apologetics so concerned with facts? There is a minority belief within Christianity that accepts Jesus is fictional or mythological. But for most Christians today, it matters that Jesus existed and did what the Gospels say he did.

I presented my theory.

“Does it connect to the fact that Christianity has always been a highly proselytizing religion?” I offered. “It involves missionaries, and the disciples, and Christians going out into communities saying, ‘Look, guys, your gods are wrong, my god is right,’ and so therefore I have to present you an argument to convert you.”

And Henry did that thing that all kind, gentle scholars do when someone gets it wrong. He gave me a “Yeah, kinda.”

Yeah, Christianity is “definitely a missionizing religion,” but he added that it was probably more a spiritual, almost magical mission rather than a rational or philosophical one. The missionaries converted people by demonstrating “the power [Christ] claimed to have over demons and evil forces.” In other words, I’d wrongly assumed my conclusion. Why would people — potential converts — in the early years of Christianity be any more interested in “facts” than those elsewhere in the world? They just wanted a religion that worked for them.

So what’s the better answer? Why do Christians care about facts so much today? Well, there are broadly three arguments.

First is the idea of sacred time, which was popularized by Mircea Eliade. The Indian religions like Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism see the universe in terms of cycles. The wheel of time turns, and what is here now will come again. Someone like the Buddha — a pure sage guiding us toward the path — will pop up again. In the meantime, bodhisattvas are reborn to help the rest of humanity. And so, the individual body or personality of any one bodhisattva or Buddha is less important than the path itself. In Christianity, though, time is a line, not a wheel, and God steps into it once — as one man, in one place, at one datable moment.

Second, the event of Jesus’ life and death is key to Christian theology. It matters that Jesus beat death — not a spiritual, metaphorical kind of “death of desire” as you might get in Buddhist mythology, but an actual conquest over death. Christians believe we will be bodily resurrected. And so, Christ’s real, provable resurrection has to be the template. Similarly, the role of Jesus’ crucifixion is important because Jesus was the Lamb of God. He was sacrificed to atone for the sins of mankind. God is just — so He cannot let humans off the hook. And Jesus came along to take the punishment on our behalf. If Jesus didn’t exist and wasn’t executed, then humans are still up for punishment. And that isn’t very salvational for a salvationist religion.

Third, and this is Henry’s position, is that Christian apologetics got distracted by philosophical debate. “[Defending factual claims] became particularly salient with the rise of modernism. You have David Hume, who really put out these fusillades against belief in the supernatural, and so in many respects the question of fact-seeking is a hangover of the past 300 years, and less the past 2,000 years — that there really is this need to prove historicity empirically, through empirical methods.”

So, all this fact-obsession may be younger than it seems. Hume drew the battle lines, and the apologists who came after accepted them. From William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) to Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (1998), which cross-examines the Gospels like witnesses on the stand, Christians will often treat their belief as a hypothesis to prove rather than a creed to accept.

Of course, with a big question like this, none of these will be the full answer. It’ll be a combination, and many other factors to boot. But the question is an interesting one.

If faith isn’t science, and metaphysics is beyond the physical, why does it matter so much what happens in this life? If any Christians are reading, please do add your thoughts! I’ve been wrong once already this week; I’m happy to be called so again.

Sign up for a paid membership to watch my full interview with Henry below.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at who gets heard, with Francis Fukuyama.

I block people on social media quite a lot.

I’ve wrestled with this for a long time. I’ve debated it with friends and dithered for months, but I’ve decided I’m happy with blocking people. But some cases are easier to decide than others.

The easy cases are with trolls and personal abuse. If you see hurling vitriol as a sadistic playground game, fine. Please find a playground with others just like you. Mini Philosophy is not that kind of place. And if your contribution to a discussion is to call me an idiot, mock my accent, or make some snide comment about my age, gender, or upbringing, save it for in-person. It’s hard to banter over the internet affectionately, and so I’ll just have to assume you’re being an arse.

The difficult cases, though, are about those people who aren’t necessarily rude. It’s just that they simply want to borrow my megaphone.

It is an undoubtedly privileged position to own such a large following on social media as Mini Philosophy does. It has taken seven years of near-constant work, but here I am, with a few million people enjoying my stuff. And so, occasionally, someone sees that audience and decides they would like to speak to it too. Yes, there’s the usual political stuff, but you also get the self-promotional things: “Check out my video on this topic,” “I wrote a blog post last week over here,” or “Follow @mypage to learn about Y.”

None of these people are being abusive, and they are perfectly entitled to say those things. But are they entitled to say it to my audience from my page?

And so, the question I want to ask this week is: Does everyone deserve an equal right to speak — or an equal right to be heard?

Go well,
Jonny

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Who holds the megaphone?

Last week, I interviewed Francis Fukuyama. Paid members can watch the full thing at the end.

Fukuyama is famous for his idea that liberalism is the “end of history” because no other political philosophy can ever hope to beat its particular blend of freedom, security, and affluence. For Fukuyama, liberalism is defined by many things, like equality before the law and individual autonomy, but one essential, indispensable element of liberalism is freedom of speech.

We could debate for weeks about what “freedom of speech” means. And the first thing to point out is that there is no such thing as total, unrestrained freedom of speech anywhere in the world. You cannot post how to make a bomb on the internet. You cannot tell a child they should hurt themselves and how to do it. You cannot invent job qualifications while interviewing to become a doctor. You cannot stand outside my front garden shouting four-letter insults for hours at a time.

Freedom of speech is a spectrum, and the job of philosophers, politicians, and judges is to put a pin along that spectrum to say, “Anything up to here is acceptable. Anything after here is a crime.” And it’s no easy job. Fukuyama, for example, argues that the American First Amendment “is a better system” than the European one because it’s “much more expansive and … more tolerant of a broader range of speech.”

For Fukuyama, the real problem isn’t really about free speech, because that’s a known problem and the demos can decide on that any way they want. The less discussed problem is amplification.

Some people have always been able to be heard more than others. On a basic physiological level, some people just have loud, clear, authoritative voices. A classically trained Shakespearean actor doesn’t need a microphone to be heard at the back. One step up from here, you have charisma and presence. I’m sure you know a few people in your life who speak with a kind of gravity that just makes you want to listen. There are some philosophers like G. A. Cohen who call this a kind of injustice. It’s not fair that Ian McKellen can speak louder and better than me. It’s not right that good-looking, funny, and personable people get the job ahead of others. We’ll have to park that one for another day.

The issue becomes more explicitly political when we talk about amplification technologies. Historians will often tell you how so much of what we know about the past comes from the literate, educated classes. We know less about life for poor, outcast, marginalized demographics because they couldn’t pass that information along. Up until the 20th century, publishing houses, printers, and the literati had a huge impact on what was said and what was heard. Everyone can speak, but only a few get to write books. Then came press barons like Hearst, followed by radio, TV, and media moguls like Murdoch who have always made sure a few voices are the loudest.

Today, we have the internet. The internet was originally seen as the great democratization of speech. Anyone can write a blog. Anyone can start a Twitter account. Say what you want, when you want, how you want, you long-silent masses.

For a time in the 2000s, it was thought that 12 million Americans were blogging — more than half had never published anywhere before. But being able to speak is one thing; having an audience to hear you is another. Over time, the internet did what markets tend to do: consolidate. Today, two companies — Alphabet (Google and YouTube) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) — oversee a huge chunk of our online consumption. If you throw in TikTok, WeChat, X, LinkedIn, and Snapchat, you have only a few gatekeepers facilitating who the world hears and sees. So, while you might live in a free-speech country, how loud your speech is depends on the mercurial algorithms and rules of a handful of companies.

A lot has been made of why Elon Musk bought Twitter (and then rebranded it to X). But I suspect a large part of it was that it bought him a megaphone. It gave him a way not only to control speech but to amplify his own. You can still be the world’s richest man and get ignored. You can still be worth $200 billion and have to sit by the phone for the BBC, CNN, or Fox to call. That must have been hard. And so his money bought him amplification.

This is what Fukuyama said:

“Certain individuals control big media platforms, and their speech is much more impactful than the speech of ordinary people that don’t own a media platform. And I don’t think we’ve really worked out the limits of the kind of influence in speech that you can have if you’re, say, Elon Musk, or now we have this David Ellison that’s accumulating this gigantic media empire.

“Do his speech rights have any limitations? I think in a democracy, there probably ought to be some limits.”

There is a difference between naming a problem and offering a solution. And there’s no easy or obvious one here. Fukuyama himself has proposed that governments could require dominant platforms to allow “middleware” — independent services that sit between you and the platform and let you choose who ranks, filters, and recommends what you see. Instead of Musk or Zuckerberg deciding what gets amplified, users could choose different systems of curation. The legal scholar Tim Wu offers a more structural answer centered on antitrust law. For Wu, the problem is the consolidation: If a tiny number of companies have acquired extraordinary control over information, then reduce their power by breaking dominant companies apart and preventing them from swallowing up-and-coming competitors. Wu has specifically argued for breaking up Meta — separating Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and so on.

But neither answer is painless. Middleware sounds like a slippery slope toward constructing our own echo chambers. And breaking up companies creates more owners of megaphones without necessarily answering the deeper question of how powerful any one megaphone should be.

So what do you think? Is it unfair that some voices are heard louder than others? And if so, is there anything we can actually do about it?

Sign up for a paid membership to watch my full interview with Fukuyama below.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at Louis Theroux.

I met Louis Theroux over the weekend.

I was at a philosophy festival and was lucky enough to be lounging about in the greenroom — an exclusive tent for speakers, hosts, and world-famous philosophers to relax a bit. I was showing how talented I am at constructing small wax figurines from the shell of a complimentary Babybel when in walks Louis.

I appreciate that for most people Louis is not quite up there with Taylor Swift or Matt Damon, but among a certain subtype of millennials, he certainly is. When you meet any real-life celebrity, the first impression is a kind of deflation. Makeup, lighting, and expert camera crews are great at turning flesh and blood into some kind of luminescent effigy. The celebrity is a simulacrum of reality. Seeing them, you usually get an instant sense of “Oh, they’re just a person.”

But this person was Louis Theroux. And in shameless desperation, I hurled my wax-man at Laura and jumped up to meet him.

“Hi Louis!” I chirped. “My name’s Jonny Thomson, I work for Big Think. I just wanted to say I love your stuff. Do you mind if I get a photo with you?”

Louis turned, smiled, and said, “Of course.”

“You know, a lot of my followers tell me I look like a cross between you and David Tennant.”

Louis laughed.

“I wish I looked like you, Jonny,” he said. A compliment I’ll likely put on LinkedIn.

One selfie later and we’re done. Louis dissolves away into a crowd of fans, producers, and various agents.

This week, in honor of the occasion, I want to explore something I’ve long called my “Louis Theroux Effect.”

Go well,
Jonny

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The Louis Theroux Effect

Despite my clinging fanboy selfie, I’m actually relatively late to Louis Theroux. Louis is probably best known by a lot of people for his documentaries about the Westboro Baptist Church (2007’s The Most Hated Family in America) and Scientology (2015’s My Scientology Movie). But I first came across him in 2019, a year after his documentary about polyamory. Once I started, I was hooked.

I probably spent a week watching and rewatching the entire Louis Theroux canon. I downloaded podcasts with Louis and various YouTube interviews. And then, I noticed something disturbing. I started talking like Louis. Not necessarily the accent or intonation, but more like the noises he makes as he’s listening. I found myself leaning on Louis’s stock phrases:

“I suppose what I’m wondering…”

“Can you help me understand…”

“Right. I see.”

More than this, though, I found myself listening in a Louis-like way.

Louis is famous for letting silences drag on longer than most people would. Into that awkward space, people will often add detail or self-incriminating extras. But I hate long silences. For most of my life I’ve been cringingly attuned to any silence longer than a nanosecond. And yet, after days of watching Louis, I found myself more comfortable with them. I found myself thinking more about what someone was saying. It turns out that when you stop scrambling around for things to say, you can actually listen much better.

I’ve since called this the “Louis Theroux Effect” — which is the tendency I think we all have to start talking, behaving, and even thinking like those we spend a lot of time around. And there is a philosophical lesson to this.

A common refrain in philosophy and self-help says we need to transform our mindset before anything else. If we introspect hard enough, we can get our values or beliefs in order. Once they’re in order, our behaviors will follow suit. Change your beliefs to change your actions. For example, someone might pause to introspect a bit to find out they are actually pretty sexist. They look down on female authority figures, they expect a female partner to do more domestic work, and they’re far more willing to talk over a woman than a man. And then they change it. They say, “Right, I’m not sexist anymore,” and then they’re a different person.

This seems like a somewhat dubious tale. It’s not entirely clear how you can just turn your beliefs on and off like a light switch. The idea that you have voluntary control over your beliefs is known as “doxastic voluntarism,” and there’s not much evidence at all to support it. If I paid you $3 million, could you believe in Ba-Pef, the Egyptian god of terror? Likely not.

To change your inner life, you have to change your outer life. In the modern psychological lexicon, we talk about behavioral activation or self-perception theory, but this idea appears far earlier than that. It was there 2,500 years ago in China.

Confucianism has always been a highly ritualized philosophy. To many outsiders, it can seem peculiar to have year-long mourning rituals or highly regimented ways to eat food. But there is a good reason behind this. The third-century B.C. philosopher Xunzi argued that character is something we cultivate from the outside in. You cannot turn on patience, bravery, or temperance like an RPG character at a level-up screen. There’s no button to press or new costume to wear. Instead, we have to surround ourselves with good books, good experiences, and good people, and over time that works its way into our being.

The good news is that this isn’t especially hard. Our brains will adapt to the environment we find ourselves in, and we are built to copy others. And so, most people with even a modicum of emotional intelligence and theory of mind will do this kind of mimetic growth automatically.

In the last few years, I’ve interviewed a lot of people. Not as many or as well as Louis, of course, but I’m still early in my career. But one thing I’ve noticed is that if I use an uncommon word in the lead-up to a question, the interviewee will often — either in their answer or later in the conversation — use that same word. Try it in your own life. Use a word like “belligerent,” “obnoxious,” or “obscene” in a sentence and see if it comes back around within a few minutes.

This is called “priming” in some contexts, or “leading” in others. But we are all being primed and led all the time. If you watch someone you respect being kind to someone else, that’s etched somewhere in your psyche. If you hear someone use a really warm turn of phrase, you will start using it as well, given enough time. And if you watch your far more successful doppelganger interviewing people on TV, you will end up being better at listening.

The Louis Theroux Effect is not two-faced fakery. I like to think that I’m more than some Louis Theroux cover band. But I also genuinely think that binge-watching Louis has made me better at my job and at being a human being more broadly.

As Aristotle points out in his Poetics, imitation is natural to being human, and it’s the best way any of us will learn something. So, we can be more intentional about this. Find a room filled with good people. Watch YouTube videos of funny, intelligent, generous, curious human beings. Watch how someone expertly makes a wax figurine out of a cheese cover. Dig out the Louis Theroux back catalog. In your next conversation, see what happens if you let silences go on just three or four seconds longer.

Let yourself be led and let yourself be primed because it’s happening anyway. And you might as well take some control over who’s doing the priming.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everyone,

Would you like to watch me interview Malcolm Gladwell about his new book, The American Way of Killing? We’re going live on Wednesday, September 23, at 9:30 a.m. ET (or 2:30 p.m. BST) and I’d love to see you there.

Become a member to register and tune in to ask Gladwell questions.

This is part of a new and deeper integration between Mini Philosophy and Big Think where I will be hosting at least two live conversations each month. We’ve got Malcolm Gladwell, Jared Henderson, Carlo Rovelli, Annaka Harris, and Alex O’Connor set to join us over the coming months. We’ll also soon be starting a regular salon event where I introduce an idea and we explore it together — like a book club, but for ideas.

If you’re not signed up yet, and you want to become a member to join us for this and future events, please do sign up today.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Go well,
Jonny

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He’s known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at the Buddhist philosophy of laziness with Tulku Lobsang Rinpoche. Paid members can find the full version here.

On Monday, I spoke with a reincarnated Lama.

That’s a sentence to invite an eyebrow raise and a bit of old-fashioned self-analysis. For one, it’s made me appreciate how lucky I am to do what I do. To speak with a Tibetan Buddhist master on Monday and a cognitive scientist on Friday is a rare and wonderful thing. But it’s also made me aware of just how little I know about philosophical schools outside my niche.

I’ve spent decades studying mostly the Greek to Roman to European to American philosophical tradition. Everything else is kind of an embarrassing darkness. It’s like having a house and living only in one room. This room has all the lights on, pictures on the walls, and all the fluffy pillows you’d like. But all the other rooms are hidden behind locked doors.

Well, this week I unlocked a door. I interviewed Buddhist master Tulku Lobsang Rinpoche with the intention of exploring the other rooms in the house, and it was a joy. I don’t know if it’s Rinpoche’s ability to teach so well or something structural to Buddhism itself, but everything is presented in neat, numbered packages: “Three roads to enlightenment,” “Three kinds of laziness,” or “Four kinds of liars.”

Buddhism is a content creator’s dream. Hook the audience, pull them along, and give them an actionable mnemonic to wear on their belts. And here I have selected one of the best. Today, we look at “the three elements of love.”

Go well,
Jonny

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The loving cure-all

There’s a particularly saccharine quote I’m rather fond of: “If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were.”

It might look good plastered all over Facebook, but it’s also got philosophical pedigree. It’s there in Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca, all the way up to Simone Weil, Erich Fromm, and Iris Murdoch. Of course, these names are all firmly inside my wheelhouse. They live as books on the shelf in that well-lit room of my house. It turns out that Buddhism has a similar but subtly different angle to offer.

Rinpoche argues that there is a difference between attachment and love. Attachment is when we cling to another person. We get possessive of them. We get jealous. We don’t give them space. But for Rinpoche, love is something else entirely. And he told me that the love of another involves three things.

First, there is kindness. Rinpoche frames all of these elements of love as “antidotes” to something that wears us down. Love is a force that cures the “three poisons” of Buddhism that often cause us to suffer. And kindness is seen as the antidote to anger. Because we get angry when we feel people are out to get us.

Imagine you’re in the shop and someone barges into you. You turn around, angrily thinking someone has wronged you. You’re ready to be furious at an aggressive lout. But then you see an embarrassed 7-year-old pushing a shopping cart. Your anger dissipates.

Anger is often about perceived offense, and kindness is what sees people not as obstacles or as enemies, but as allies. Kindness softens the way we look at others’ intentions. It assumes it was a mistake rather than malice, and asks what someone might be struggling with before grumpily assuming they are out to get us.

Second, there is compassion. Compassion is the antidote to attachment, because attachment is what holds people too tightly. Attachment is what keeps the bird in the cage.

Compassion, though, gives somebody space. It allows them to make mistakes, to be imperfect, and to try something new. In a lot of relationships, we become attached to a certain version of a person. It might be the person we first met at the start of a relationship or an idealized, disconnected image we hold of them in our heads. But compassion gives someone the room to change into somebody different from what we might have expected of them. Love allows the other to move forward on their own terms and not according to some rat’s maze we’ve constructed for them.

Third, there is bodhicitta. Rinpoche describes bodhicitta as the antidote to ignorance, and it’s a great way to understand the idea. Because it is ignorant to try to understand the world from only your point of view. It is ignorant to assume the limits of your mind are the limits of the world. As Francis Bacon put it, when you spend your life living in a cave, it’s poor philosophy to assume that is all there is. The limits of your cave are not the limits of the universe. My reading philosophy in one room is not the same as learning all philosophy.

Bodhicitta accepts this and seeks to see things not only from another point of view but, in love, from another person’s point of view. It tries to see the world with their eyes, to understand their needs, and to experience things from their position. For example, I will often get irritated at my wife for leaving things too late. It takes 30 minutes to get to a 2 p.m. meeting, so why is she still getting changed at 1:40 p.m.?! Bodhicitta is what puts me in her shoes — or, more precisely, into her bare feet as she frantically looks about for her shoes that our eldest has hidden under the kitchen sink.

And so, the question of love actually comes down to three different questions:

Do I see them in the best possible light?

Do I give them enough space?

And do I see the world from their position?

Because love is not about desperately clinging to somebody or seeking your own happiness in somebody else. It’s when you find your own joy in the joy of another. It’s when you make a home into the room that they live in.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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It turns out, it’s nothing especially Hollywood-worthy. There’s no thrashing around like someone possessed. There’s no standing up with a glow and supernatural powers. Sometimes, there might be a sense that you’re gradually and partially reclaiming past-life memories. But, mostly, the title is a spiritual vocation.

“[A Lama is] born in this world consciously,” he told me, “they live life consciously, and they die consciously…they need to make a reincarnation because they need to help humans.”

A Lama’s job is to help humans find the path. There are always humans who need help finding the path. And so, a Lama’s job is never done.

I, for one, am glad for it. Because over the course of our conversation, Rinpoche not only introduced me to some areas of Buddhism I never knew but also offered me a handful of diamonds to take into real life. The Greek word praxis meant the practical application of an idea or philosophy. And it seems that Buddhism is an inherently praxic philosophy — it’s one that offers real recipes for how to live better and how to walk a path toward peace.

The full video is below for you to watch at your leisure, but I have also taken the time to write up what I see as three valuable pieces of wisdom I can take away from what Rinpoche has to say about truth, karma, and love.

Thank you, as always, for your support.

Go well,
Jonny

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at progress with John Gray.

I’ve talked about Dave before.

Dave was an old colleague of mine back in my teaching days — with slicked-back Elvis hair and an undiluted Cockney accent. Dave was a kind of mentor who knew his way around the place. He was also a willfully technophobic Luddite who’d ask me why his unplugged computer wasn’t working. We paid each other in kind, like a symbiotic bird-rhino relationship.

One day, we were resentfully carted from our peaceful savannah to sit in a cramped hall for the spring term’s training day.

“New Approaches to Learning: The Whole Child Theory.”

“Thanks, everyone,” the facilitator said after an hour-long presentation. “We’re going to now go into breakout groups.”

As luck would have it, Dave and I were placed together at the same table. Bird and rhino reunited to glue together cut-out cards all about The Whole Child™ — an exercise that was somehow infantilizing, infuriating, and impossible all at once.

Then came the reflection period.

“So, what do you think about the theory, Jonny?” the facilitator said.

“Well, yeah, I think it makes sense. I’ll have to change a few resources, but it seems like it’ll be some decent effort that’ll pay off later.”

Suitably agreeable. Suitably vapid. A box gets ticked, and we can all move on.

“What about you, Dave?”

“Sorry, mate?”

“What do you think about Zhang’s approach to The Whole Child?”

“Zhang, eh?” Dave said. “Isn’t this exactly the same thing that they were saying in the ‘90s? When I first started, this is what we were doing. Of course, we didn’t call it this back then. JT, you’ll back me up, do you remember that bloke who…”

As became clear over a ten-minute monologue, Dave had seen the pendulum swing. Dave’s theory was that in most learning and development environments, a fad will always, given enough time, come swinging back around. It’ll have a new name, a new representative, and probably millions in venture backing, but it’ll all seem like old hat to someone like Dave.

And so, this week we’re going to look at the swing of the pendulum and ask: Is there such a thing as progress?

Go well,
Jonny

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Seeing history with Gray-tinted glasses

There are two different kinds of stories.

The first is the linear story. The characters start at position A and end at position B, having beaten all the baddies and married the right person. The real story is about the transformation that happens along the way. This is a story about direction. Mostly, it’s about progress. We move from naïve to wise, raw to cooked, NPC to hero.

In terms of philosophy, the linear-progressive story is best represented by the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel argued that history is measured by a series of resolvable battles. One side represents red, the other represents blue. The two struggle over days, years, decades, or centuries until eventually they bleed so much they bleed into each other. Red and blue become purple. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Movement, countermovement, resolution. And so, for Hegel, we move forward in a constantly improving run. Each battle makes us better and wiser.

Over the summer, I spoke with the philosopher John Gray about this idea of “progress,” and Gray doesn’t think much of it.

“If you go back to Greek drama or Shakespeare, or Hinduism or Buddhism, none of these assumptions are made about the future of mankind being potentially better than it’s ever been in the past. It’s a modern Western myth, and I would say it’s a kind of neo-Christian myth, because it comes about by secularizing certain Christian assumptions about sacred time, about human history being meaningful.”

I encourage you to watch the full video because Gray has that kind of easy, enviable erudition where he can just drop in an obscure quote or historical anecdote to color his argument. But, as far as I can tell, this is what Gray argues in a good ol’-fashioned premises-to-conclusion form:

1. Progress is not the same as improvement. Progress means a cumulative advance that does not unwind over generations or centuries.

2. In technology, we do make progress. The gains are cumulative and retained over millennia.

3. In ethics and politics, though, gains are not cumulative — they unwind depressingly often.

Therefore: There is no such thing as progress in ethics and politics.

It’s a persuasive argument, and much does depend on Gray’s definition of progress as something that’s basically permanent. If we accept that, well, then it doesn’t take a macrohistorian to point out that almost all civilizations do tend to unwind over time. We oscillate between periods of peace and war; order and madness; security and terror. Politically, history is a pendulum. So, too, ethically. For all our talk of human rights, liberty, and universal love, we still kill and destroy each other with Neolithic ease. And here we have the second kind of story: the cyclical one. The pendulum one. This story sees history as oscillation, and we just happen to occupy a certain position on the swing.

But what about those Hegelian ideas of progress? For example, what about Karl Marx’s idea that our systems of governance are moving forward? Marx argued that we can see a movement from something like despotism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Each was different from the one before, each a step better, and there was no “unwinding,” as Gray put it.

But Gray doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t think there will be any “end of history” in either the Francis Fukuyama or Marxist sense. Rather, Gray sees things in terms of revolutions and countermovements. In politics and ethics, nothing stays still long enough to be called progress.

On that, I think I agree with Gray. On an individual level, I believe most people are only one or two catastrophes away from utter moral ruin. If you murdered my children, threw me into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and gave me a gun, I have little doubt I’d become unrecognizable to who I am right now. We are all just a comic strip away from our villain origin story.

On a social level, I think the same is true. If you just look at how wildly irrational the crowd becomes in times of shortage or fear, I think you can appreciate how much things rest on a knife-edge. In the UK, it only took a few headlines of “there might be a supply problem with toilet roll” for the entire country to panic-buy the stuff. People get weird when things get bad. The next great revolution might come in one bomb, one virus, or one intergalactic threat. Or it might be the drip effect of constant deterioration and deprivation. Either way, I see the world with Gray-tinted glasses.

So, what do you think? Are we progressing socially, politically, and ethically? Or do you think we just happen to be riding one swing of a colossal pendulum of the gods?

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at shallow and deep solutions.

The tap and I had an understanding.

The Americans call it a “faucet,” and my editor and I usually have a kind of cat-and-mouse battle about these kinds of things. How many Britishisms can I slot into a newsletter edited by an American? We shall see. Because for all the rubbish bins, pavements, car parks, trousers, crisps, torches, and trainers in the world, I’m going to insist he keep “tap.”

The tap in the shower never worked properly. The on-off side was fine, but the hot-cold one lived by its own chaotic rulebook. It could technically turn 180 degrees either way, but there was really only one spot you could have it in. A fly’s push one way and you’d be cold plunging. A strong wind the other way and you’d be off to the minor burns department.

And so, over the years, I had mastered the art of finding that oh-so-perfect sweet spot. I enjoyed waiting to hear guests’ yelps or curses. I took pride in how artfully I could position that tiny, well-worn knob.

But then, one day, we had a plumber come around to fix our toilet. Big James we called him because he had large biceps. Sexy James, our cleaner called him.

“You know,” Big and Sexy James said, “I could get you a new shower tap for about £20.”

We bought the tap, dear reader. James put his arms to use, and our shower was fixed for less than $30 plus labor. No more freezing. No more skill required. It even had a safety button to prevent you from scalding yourself.

For years I had managed to cope with my dodgy tap. For years I had been happy with a “shallow solution” to my ablutionary needs. All it took was for one plumber with a well-used gym membership to show me a deep solution.

This week we look at why that difference is important.

Go well,
Jonny

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The deep thinking space

I’ve always found the idea of a “game space” interesting.

The game space is a hallowed ground, set apart from the “normal world” where certain rules, laws, and instructions apply. On the rugby field, you have to pass backward. In an RPG, a wizard cannot wear heavy armor. In chess, a bishop can’t move straight. And so on.

I wonder if there is also a kind of game space when it comes to thinking. For example, if you were to join me for a Mini Philosophy seminar next month, the rule would be that we talk about things in a philosophical way. We’d unpack ideas, we’d reference books, we’d dive into the mysterious depths of why we do what we do. But when I talk to a friend over brunch or in the pub, the rules are different. This is a social occasion. It’s a light catch-up. There is a time and place for “shallow,” and there is a time and place for “deep.” No politics at Christmas. No penis jokes in a newsletter.

But what happens when we confuse our spaces? When we try to bring deep thinking to a shallow setting, it can often be funny or eye-rolling but very rarely problematic. If I try to unravel the underlying psychodynamic motivations behind my need for constant validation at a kids’ birthday party, my friend will probably just tell me to stop. Have a day off, Jonny.

The problems come when we offer only shallow thinking in a deep space.

Imagine you’re sitting in the car driving with your friend somewhere, and they say, “I’m really unhappy, mate. I’ve not been happy for years.” Now, the game has begun. The rules are in place. This car, this moment, has become a sacred space that demands deep thinking and deep conversation.

“Ah, cheer up, mate,” you say, “let’s go get a drink.”

Now this is a solution of sorts. No doubt a drunken revel capped by an early-morning McDonald’s distracts your friend from their pain, but it doesn’t resolve it. They’ll wake up the next day just as unhappy as before but now with a hangover and a sesame bun sticking to their face. You offered a shallow solution where a deep solution was wanted.

This week I spoke with Jack Maden about his new book, The Philosophy Prescription. (Mini Philosophy Members can hear our full interview at the end of this newsletter.) And Jack started talking about Arne Næss’s distinction between shallow and deep thinking. Because for Næss, our governments and leaders have been dealing only in shallow solutions to problems that really need deep thinking. If there is ever a “deep space” it ought to be the corridors of power. Instead, we’ve been getting successive administrations scattering about vote-winning quick fixes. We’re plastering the cracks of a building that’s wobbling. These are the examples Jack gave:

“So, a shallow response to say famine would be to send food. These people are experiencing starvation, let’s send them food, problem solved. A deeper response would be to question why has the famine occurred in the first place? What’s driving the famine? How can we make structural changes to ensure famines don’t happen again in the future?

“Arne Næss basically says, in the context of the environment, that all of our responses are shallow, they’re all reactive. They’re all driven by this idea that we should prioritize human production. So, if an earthquake happens, we need to rebuild the area so that it can start producing again. If pollution is affecting fishing, then we need to kind of remove plastic from the ocean so that we can fish again. And he wants us to go deeper in our questioning and say, ‘Well, is placing human production on this pedestal really leading to lives worth wanting?’”

It might be, of course, that we disagree with Næss on this one. It might be that we do think we ought to prioritize human production over a more ecologically mutual position. But the point is that we need to ask ourselves why these problems keep happening, rather than offering shallow, fix-the-symptom solutions. We need something more root and branch. We need to look at the systems, values, and structures underpinning our entire worldview. But to do that requires us all to enter a deeper thinking space and to play by different rules. And not everyone wants or is willing to play that game.

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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If we look back, then we find an unfixable past. Everything we’ve done cannot be undone. All the cruel and silly things I’ve said in my life cannot be unsaid. The horse has bolted, the ship has sailed. And so, no matter how much we rage about it, we can never go back in time to live a different life. Here we are, and that’s as close to a fact as philosophy can give us.

And here, with only our present thoughts for company, we get to look the other way. We can look at the future. But where the past was frustratingly closed, the future is dizzyingly open. In fact, it’s because we’ve spent so long reflecting on just how unchangeable the past is that our future choices seem to carry so much weight — a weight that we often cannot shoulder. We cannot unsay anything, so we should be very careful about what we say. We cannot undo things, so we should spend anxious hours obsessing over every tiny action.

So, here we are on the unhappy hinge between the one-track past and the garden of infinitely forking paths. How are we to deal with this? How can we make decisions, make plans, and banish the angst of overthinking everything as long as we live on this hinge?

Last week, I gave a members-only talk with Big Think just on this topic. We explored existentialism, Stoicism, and modern psychology, and we ran through some philosophical answers to these questions.

Go well,
Jonny

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He’s known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Hello everybody,

Tomorrow (Friday, Aug 28), there is a Mini Philosophy and Big Think live event. It’s on the philosophy of decision-making and I will discuss a lot of what I write about today. This is a perk for all paid members. If you want to register to attend and ask questions, click the button below. Thanks!

What made you open this newsletter?

What shadowy undercurrents made you check in on me today? I suspect it wasn’t much of a conscious decision. You probably didn’t stare into space for five seconds weighing the pros and cons of clicking versus carrying on your internet scrolling. Surfing the web, we once called it. A different time.

No, there is something about you, something deep in your being, that pushed you to open this newsletter. And thank you for doing so. You’re very welcome.

This newsletter will carry on a bit longer, but will you? Because just as there was something that made you click, there will be something that makes you read to the end or something that pulls you away. There is no easy answer to what that thing is. The neurochemical processes underpinning decision-making are still mostly unknown to the best of modern science, let alone to me right now. And those unseen forces, those unseen hands on the strings, deserve more recognition. They deserve a newsletter.

You see, we don’t tend to call people “moody” these days. And that’s mostly for good reason. For hundreds of years, moody was a term overwhelmingly used by men to describe women. A husband tells his wife she’s being moody, and so her complaints are unjustified. A brother tells his sister to stop being moody as he steals her toy. A doctor tells a patient she’s just being moody: “Just go home, take some painkillers, I’m sure it’ll be fine in a week.”

But it turns out that we are all moody. Your moods define how you perceive the world. They define how you remember the world. Your moods define what the world even means. We can all “be in the mood” to do something — you were in the mood to carry on reading until now.

So, let’s indulge that mood. Let’s explore the philosophy of moods.

Go well,
Jonny

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The lenses that tint the world

Your moods are not the same as your emotions. Emotions are temporary moments of feeling that act as a response to the world. They rumble inside in reply to some thought or experience. They might linger, as when a child watches a horror movie they’re too young to see, or they might disappear as quickly as they come, as when we mistake a tree’s shadow for a dusk-time assassin. They might be strong, as with the lust of seeing someone incredibly good-looking, or barely noticeable, as with the slow burn of falling in love. But emotions are often far more reducible to a kind of input-output model. While they might force our minds a certain way or motivate our actions, they do not define our experiences as much as our moods do.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that moods show us how far we are “thrown” into this world because moods will frame the kind of world we see. They are the unknown and unseen. They are the eyes with which to see. Or, better, they are the lenses that tint the world.

Heidegger was a fan of the Danish existentialist with the sad eyes: Søren Kierkegaard. In his 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between “fear” — the emotion — and “anxiety” — the mood. Heck, if you’re in the mood to explore this philosophical rabbit hole with me, you can even find this distinction way back in Augustine. Then Pascal uses it in his Pensées, and Kant uses it in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Which means that if you were a well-read, early-20th-century philosopher reading Heidegger and Sigmund Freud both reusing this worn distinction, you’d likely roll your eyes. And now I’m here to wear it some more.

The point is that there’s a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is a response to something out in the world. It comes and then goes when the trigger is removed.

“Okay,” the teacher says, “we’ve got time for one more presentation today.” Your heart bounds into your mouth, thump-thump-thumping along.

“And it’ll be… Cole. Come on up.” Phew. Not me. The fear subsides.

Anxiety, though, changes the world because the anxious person sees everything through their anxious lens. Things of great importance are reduced to nothing, while trifles are made into terrible catastrophes. A curtly worded email gets amplified into, “Well, I might as well look for a new job ’cause I’m getting fired on Monday.” The same could be said of the depressive, the joyful, or the restless person. All are “moody,” at least in the Heideggerian/Augustinian/Freudian sense. Moods are vantage points on the world.

We can never be rid of our moods. Even if it were possible, it would be undesirable. A life without moods? It sounds like being trapped in some kind of OpenAI hell. To experience the world objectively without any feelings about it whatsoever is inhuman. We cannot be rid of moods, so what is a life-planning, rationally inclined philosopher to do? Should we shrug our shoulders, give in to our limbic puppet masters, and say, “Couldn’t help it, guvnor, was my hormones!”

Well, there are two things to do.

The first is to recognize that being influenced is not the same as being forced. Yes, our moods might incline us to think or behave a certain way, but we still have discipline and self-control. We have our limbic system pushing us to do something, but we have our prefrontal cortex as a counterbalance. Being angry doesn’t mean you have to cheat on your partner. Being tired doesn’t mean you have to be mean to your colleague. Being anxious doesn’t mean you have to catastrophize a single event into a global conspiracy to destroy you.

The second comes with identifying the push and pull of our moods. Knowing that a certain mood can influence our thoughts allows us to try to align our moods in a certain way in order to influence our thoughts. Many addiction recovery groups will use an acronym, “HALT,” which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. They know that if you are any of these, you are more likely to make bad and ill-thought-out decisions. That’s good knowledge to have. So, eat well, take deep breaths, call a friend, and get a good night’s sleep. Our bodies respond to the environment we choose to put them in.

We are all moody. The idea of a rational, detached overseer oversimplifies what it is to have a mind. But we are not puppets, either. Some shadowy undercurrents might have motivated you to read to the end of this newsletter today, but you also have the discipline to choose to do so in the future. I thank your prefrontal cortex in advance. Unless such arrogant presumption makes you less likely to do so, of course.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Subscribe now

Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at trusting other people with .

A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

I am not a gambling man.

Generally, I don’t enjoy that moment of breathless tension as the coin spins in the air. I get far too anxious about it. But I can vaguely understand why others do like gambling. I can understand the adrenaline rush of potential self-destruction and the joy of spending imaginary winnings.

“Well, I’ll definitely want to buy a second home, but the question is: Do we go for an alpine cabin or a villa by the sea?”

The 17th-century samurai-turned-monk Suzuki Shōsan wrote about the value of “death energy.” When you choose to sit down with the Reaper and roll the dice of death, you are filled with a vital spark. When you face down your own destruction and — ideally — come back to life, you suddenly find yourself walking with a strut and a leather jacket. The gambler’s frisson of “I might lose everything” is a kind of death energy.

But I’m not one for all that. I like to fantasize about lottery winnings as much as the next guy, but I’m a risk-averse sort. Some boats are built for the buffeting storms of an ocean in a rage. Some boats are built for the safe and peaceful shallows of a lapping shoreline. Gambling makes me anxious. I don’t like being anxious.

And yet, I’m a compulsive gambler. We all are. In every minute of every day, we are gambling.

The world is unpredictable, and the people in it are even worse. The art of living is about getting used to uncertainty and ignorance. Are we alone in the universe? Maybe. Are the laws of science an accurate reflection of reality? Maybe. Is there even such a thing as “reality”? Maybe. Am I actually typing this newsletter right now from a desk in north Oxfordshire? Maybe.

From the small to the big, from the trivial to the momentous, all our beliefs are probabilities. And how much probability we need depends on who we are. We’re all epistemological gamblers, and this week we look at the philosophy of how to gamble better.

Go well,
Jonny

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As they say in Texas

According to George W. Bush, there is an old saying in Texas, maybe in Tennessee too, that goes like this: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

A human is born as a statistical inference machine — almost all animals are. This face is nice to me; I’ll try to be near them, a baby intuits. This food is yummy; I’ll eat more of that, the child thinks. And, as the good people of Texas-maybe-Tennessee know, this is never truer than when it comes to other people.

When it comes to other people, we are constantly revising how much we should trust them. How many good or correct things does someone have to do or say before they become “trustworthy”? How many bumbling fumblings are we willing to tolerate before we stop calling them for help?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with about his new book How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic (paid members can see the full interview here). Massimo introduced me to something we’ll call the “Carneades Confidence Ladder.” Carneades was an ancient Greek Skeptic, and he argued that because we will never be 100% certain about anything, we have to settle for pithanon, which, over the ages and via the Romans, is probably best translated as “probability.”

The original idea was about our beliefs. So, how certain are you that you have two hands? How certain are you that Costa Rica is in Central America? How certain are you that Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger once dated?

For Carneades and a lot of Skeptics who came after, there are essentially four categories of pithanon:

1. Plausible: Something seems right but you’ve not checked much. For example, the news anchor telling you that there’s flooding in the next city over.

2. Convincing: You have strong reasons for believing something. It’s been raining torrentially for three days. Floods are likely.

3. Coherent: The belief agrees with most or all of your other beliefs. The news channel is generally reliable, rain causes floods, and that city always floods when it gets bad.

4. Thoroughly explored: You’ve done an extensive investigation into the matter from multiple angles. “Right, darling, I’m off to double-check Witney is flooded. Would you mind calling the Environment Agency to see what they have to say?”

There is a version of the confidence ladder that would work with other people. In other words, we can take this ancient wisdom and use it to help us identify who our most reliable friends are or which colleagues to rely on.

The first step is almost instinctive in that it comes naturally to most of our initial human interactions. And this is where we simply take people at face value. If someone seems trustworthy, then we think they are. If someone says something confidently, we believe it. If someone gives us some information, we (usually) tend to assume they’re honest. Most of the time, this works, especially when it comes to casual interactions or strangers. A festival attendant tells you where to park your car. A waiter gives you the food you ordered. Good. Fine.

But for any relationship more than a five-second flyby, we need more. We need coherence. We need the other person to be consistent in their personality and in what they say or do. And for this, we need to see them often and for longer. If Brett tells you a story about his breakup five different ways over three different meetings, that’s a cause for concern. If someone says, “I’m a gentle, loving person,” and then tries to whack a passing pigeon for a laugh, you might turn a bit suspicious. In almost all trusting relationships, we need the other person to be consistent. This doesn’t mean they are always predictable, of course. I’m fond of a great many chaotic-good people. It just means that their words and behaviors align over a period of time.

For our most important relationships, though, you need to go through some stuff. The other person needs to be tested and ideally in a variety of settings. When you were hungover, ill, or just feeling antisocial, they were still there to chat or be by your side. When they were angry, upset, or desperately sleep-deprived, they didn’t morph into some vicious gremlin in want of a pigeon to hurt. You told them a secret, and they kept it. You asked them for advice, and it was good. You said you were fine, and they knew you were not. From multiple angles, in many ways, over a great deal of time, this relationship has been tested, and it’s passed each time.

If I were thrown back to 200 B.C., I think I’d find myself among the Epicureans rather than the Skeptics, but it’s a fool who does not call on wisdom, wherever it comes from. And so, I think I will be using a version of the Carneadean Confidence Ladder when it comes to the friendships in my life.

I hope that as you were reading this newsletter, a few faces popped up in your mind’s eye — both good and bad. You could picture the unreliable, inconsistent, say-one-thing-do-another kind of person in your life. But you could also picture the steadfast, reliable, and tried-and-tested friendships you have.

Because as they say in Oxford, maybe Cambridge too, “Be true once, good on you. But true me twice… and we’ll become good friends.”

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Paul and Liam are indisputably the best quizzers there. I’ve got a good general knowledge, but it’s mostly limited to only a few sections of the library. Philosophy, obviously, but I’m decent at English literature, history, and politics. But the moment there’s a question about the Grand Prix, music, or soap operas, I’m glazing over and reaching over to steal another of Joe’s cheese and onion crisps. It’s not the flavor I’d have chosen, but Joe does Joe.

And every month, just before the drinks break (one of seven), the quizmaster will throw out one of those impossible-to-get questions that are really just testing your ability to provide an educated guess.

“How many cans of Coke get drunk every day around the world?”

“Yes, full-fat Coke, Val. No, regular 330 mL cans, Harry. No, just normal Coke, Sam. No, not Cherry. Not Vanilla. Not Raspberry… What the f*** is Raspberry Coke anyway?”

So it goes.

I used to hate these best-guess questions because I figured a pub quiz should be about knowledge, not shooting in the dark. But I’ve come to see them as a valuable exercise in the wisdom of crowds. Best-guess questions aren’t testing Paul, or Liam, or Onion-breath Joe; they test the entire team.

“I reckon 20 million,” Nick says.

“20 million?! Sod off,” Liam shouts, too loudly for the sneaky, secret whispers of huddled quiz tables. “Let’s do the maths. There are 8 billion people in the world, right? Let’s subtract the babies, the very old, and so on, so…”

The beauty of a best-guess question is that it gets to the heart of what the ancient Skeptics once knew: that we will often never know the answer to things. There might not even be an answer to things. The trick with knowledge — the trick with life — is to fumble your way to something a bit better than before, and a bit less wrong than yesterday.

And in this week’s full interview with the author and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci we explore how we can do just that.

Thank you, as always, my generous patrons and friends,
Jonny

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at Karl Jaspers' concept of "boundary situations."

A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

He nearly died.

I was sitting on the sofa talking to my mate’s dad. It’s always a little bit strange talking with your childhood friends’ parents when you’re all grown up. On the one hand, it’s nice to see them and their world with clearer eyes. It’s nice to see them as people. But on the other hand, childhood is not an easy thing to throw off.

“Hi Jonny, come on in,” he says.

“Hi Mr. Hammond! Thanks for having me stay. Can Alex come out to play?” I reply in a squeaky prepubescent voice, wearing shorts and carrying a primary school bag.

As I sat there in the nostalgic, liminal space between adulthood and childhood, Mr. Hammond told me about how he nearly died. It wasn’t one of those “I got a diagnosis then I pulled through” kinds of stories. It was a hit-by-lightning, hungry shark-attack, act of God kind of thing. One minute he was fine, the next he was in the back of an ambulance, careening down the road to the hospital. Without oversharing another person’s story, I’ll just say it involved a lot of blood, hours on an operating table, and a few weeks in a ward.

“Do you know what, Jonny?” he said to me. “All that ‘You need to make the most of it’ stuff is pretty abstract and remote until it happens. Of course, you think it and say it, but until something like this happens, you don’t feel it.”

I told Mr. Hammond to write down his story for me — especially his post-encounter philosophy. But until that time, you have me. And so, this week we’re going to look at life-changing moments.

Go well,
Jonny

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Flying past a man with a gun in his hands

In Anton Chekhov’s play, “The Seagull,” we are asked to imagine a seagull flying over a lake. The gull is swooping and diving, fishing and cawing. It’s entirely consumed by the busyness of being a seagull. And then, in the squeeze of a trigger, it’s gone. A man on the shore holding a rifle is bored. With no game and no fun to find, he pulls up his gun and shoots the bird for no other reason than idleness.

Of course, as with any great literature, there are metaphors wrapped in allegories. In the play, we meet a cast of characters all obsessed with their plans. They have unfulfilled longings. They want fame, riches, love, or a life of pure art. Like a seagull flapping back to land, they have eyes only for the shore. And so, blinkered and distracted, they are vulnerable to the misfortune of life’s mercurial rifle.

So much of our lives is spent in planning and preparation, and yet often the most significant moments come out of the blue. These are what the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers called “boundary situations.”

A boundary situation is a rupture. It’s a transformative experience that we cannot initiate, plan, or avoid. We can only “encounter” it. The mundane, everyday parts of our life — putting on socks, ordering a pizza, planning a holiday — are what Jaspers calls “situation being.” But a boundary situation is one that thunders down to shake the foundations of your being. It changes who you are. It is what happens when you wake up in a hospital bed, having only just beaten the reaper’s odds.

Although these “boundary situations” change a bit in Jaspers’ works, he broadly sorted them into four categories:

Death: We fear our loved ones dying, and we fear the fact of our own death. When we know grief, or when we reflect on mortality, we often find some kind of revelation. As my friend’s dad told me, we always know about death, but when it’s a boundary situation, it comes crashing into our lives like some grim and unforeseen final curtain.

Suffering: As the Buddha pointed out long before Jaspers, it is impossible to avoid suffering. Our paths will hit old age, sickness, and a great deal of pain. Some of this we can see coming: a tooth filling, a long run, a fourteen-hour flight to Australia. But the rest comes unexpectedly. It hits us with such a shocking intensity that we’re almost glad we didn’t see it coming. We come home from the hospital with a new life to live.

Guilt: There will come a moment, and often in adulthood, when we feel responsible for things. It’s the sudden awareness that our actions impact all those around us — that we are the reason for those tears, that laughter, that pain, that joy. The profound pull of the heart changes how we live, and it usually comes on unexpectedly.

Chance: No matter how ordered we might want our world to be, there will always be an unpredictable exception. We can hope for the best and make all the plans we want, but we will never fully control all of the facts that affect our existence. We want order and regularity but get the capricious throes of chance.

What Chekhov’s Seagull, Jaspers, and Mr. Hammond all get right is that we are each much more vulnerable than we might want to allow. A wedding, three years and a fortune in the planning, is ruined by a stomach bug. An hour-long journey home for Christmas winds up getting you stuck in the traffic of a freak snowstorm. A lifetime achievement is overshadowed by a national disaster. A long and gentle retirement is blown off course by a near-death detour to the operating table.

Our lives are defined by the unforeseen. We have our dreams and hopes, and we are flying to some distant horizon. Yet life doesn’t care. Around every corner, at every flap of our wings, everything can change. And that’s all the more reason to enjoy the view, as long as it lasts.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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There are three people sitting on the bench: a wise man between two fools.

One fool is called “Pointless.” They argue that the universe is cold and uncaring to human needs. We can try as hard as we want and can plan as long as we can, but at the end of the day, the world will have its way. A bullet, a disease, a speeding truck, a single sentence from a powerful person — they’ll each determine our lives, so trying to plan is pointless.

The other fool is called “Control.” They say that we are in charge of everything. If we work hard and plan properly, we’ll achieve all of our targets. Luck is an invention of the weak and inadequate. Fortune favors only the brave. I, and only I, am in control of my life.

And in between the fools, the sage nods. They listen to Pointless and they listen to Control. They take on a bit of both. They plan but accept that plans go wrong. They think about tomorrow but never forget today. They recognize the power of choice but bow to the gods of fortune.

So how can we follow the middle path? How can we be wiser?

Here’s how to make your own luck.

The serendipity mindset

In his book, The Serendipity Mindset, the writer Christian Busch argues that there are actually two kinds of luck. There is the luck that kind of happens to you. It’s out of your control, so you have to just roll with it. There’s a traffic jam, a freak thunderstorm, a stomach bug on your wedding day. But there’s also meeting someone fun at a party, catching the last bus, and getting to witness the rare passing of a wild deer in the woods.

The other kind of luck is “serendipity,” and this is something we have more control over. According to Busch, there are three things we need to nurture a “serendipity mindset.”

First, be open. This means doing more things and experiencing more of the world. Meet new people, go to exciting places, and read books and watch programs you’d never think to try. If you experience more of the world, then you will simply witness more opportunities. As any gambling advertisement will tell you: you have to play to win. And so exposing yourself to more of the world is like throwing the dice again and again.

Second, be alert. When something pops up, be present enough to recognize it. When you are so fixated on one thing, you miss what the world offers. Back in the innocent days of the early internet, there was a viral video about missed attention. The video had you count how many basketball passes a team performed in a minute. And, as people are so intent on the task, they entirely miss a gorilla walking into the shot and then out. When you watch it again, it’s easy to be disturbed by how much we can miss. Alertness is like this — always be vigilant about the world around you.

Third, be tenacious — be ready to leap and to hold on tightly to any passing opportunity. Reply to that email right away. If something works, try it again and again and again. If you meet someone interesting at a party, carry on talking to them. I am incredibly fortunate in my life to meet and interview a lot of people. Some of the greatest opportunities, and some of my now-best friends, have come because I carried on a conversation long after the first meeting.

Wisdom on a bench

Embracing openness, alertness, and tenacity is how we hold the line between the two fools on the bench. We cannot stop the traffic jams, but we can choose the podcast to listen to. We cannot control the weather, but we can build a sail to catch its winds or a roof to stop its rain.

Cultivating a serendipity mindset doesn’t mean ignoring the reality of a chaotic universe, nor does it require the arrogant belief that we can dictate every outcome. In the ancient world, the playwrights and philosophers loved nothing so much as a story about “hubris.” If any mortal thought they could steer the world, if any human thought they were too big for their boots, a capricious god would pop along to set them right. And so, Icarus falls to the sea.

Yes, of course, some people get more luck than others — by definition that’s out of our control. But in the swirling, messy, passing opportunities of the world, the truly lucky person is the one who is paying attention and is ready to jump when the time comes.

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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

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Hello everybody,

This week we’re looking at aesthetic injustice, with Daisy Dixon.

Paid members can find the full interview here. A video version of this newsletter is found at the end.

The band was playing Oasis.

We were sitting in a beer garden overlooking the sea, and the band was playing “Wonderwall.” It was an odd choice during a “folk night,” but when it’s 11 p.m. and the crowd is getting shouty, you give the folk what they want, I suppose. And there are few things a tipsy crowd wants more than “Wonderwall.”

A pub full of strangers, arm in arm, belting out a surprisingly tuneful chorus.

“I said maybeeeeeeeee! You’re gon’ be the one that saves meeeeeee!”

Tucked away in a quiet nook at the back, my friend turned to me, and she said, “Do you know what? I never, ever sing.”

“What? You never sing?”

“Well, no, because when I was growing up, my mum would always say I had a horrible voice. She said I shouldn’t sing in case somebody hears me.”

I think about that conversation a lot. What an awful thing to tell anyone. What an evil thing to tell a young child. My friend never sang. She didn’t sing along to the radio, hum in the shower, or chant along to Oasis. She had learned to be ashamed of her own voice.

This week, we look at why this might be an example of “aesthetic injustice” and what that actually means.

Go well, beautiful songbirds,

Jonny

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Everyone is an artist until they’re told they’re not

Last week, I spoke to the philosopher of art Daisy Dixon, and she introduced me to an idea known as “aesthetic injustice.” Aesthetic injustice is when you deny somebody access to art or beauty. It argues that humans need beautiful things in order to flourish, and so to deprive someone of beauty is to deprive them as a person.

In the 1980s, philosopher Martha Nussbaum presented her version of the “capability approach,” which says there are certain things that all humans need to thrive. Yes, things like food, water, safety, and peace, but also relationships with other people, means of expression, rest, play, and so on. Dixon’s version of aesthetic injustice fits somewhere into Nussbaum’s theory.

Here’s how she put it:

“For me, aesthetic agency is our ability to experience the world aesthetically and to express ourselves aesthetically. That can include having pleasant or beautiful experiences of nature where we live. It might involve our ability to find our own bodies beautiful — or ugly. It also includes our ability to express ourselves through what we wear, the music we listen to, and the art we make.”

“All these things are part of what it is to be human. I bundle them into Nussbaum’s capability of ‘senses, imagination and thought.’ A society is just when it supports everyone’s capabilities to that threshold.”

From our conversation and from what I can garner in my research, it strikes me that there are actually three forms of “aesthetic injustice.”

The first is when you deny somebody access to their own preferences or tastes. If you tell someone that they shouldn’t watch those kinds of programs or that they’re banned from dancing in that kind of way, you are saying they can express themselves, but only in a list of predefined, acceptable ways. Sing, but only hymns. Read, but only philosophy. Draw, but only landscapes. This kind of preference denial is seen in a hundred small acts of judgment. If someone says something like “Oh, you listen to death metal music? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?” or if someone says, “I thought only kids and nerds read graphic novels!” — those are tiny moments of aesthetic injustice.

The second is when somebody is denied access to beautiful things. For example, if successive governments or authorities insist on drab, utilitarian civil spaces, we soon find ourselves living in a kind of Brutalist nightmare. No green spaces, no ornate architecture, nothing fun, curious, or beautiful. To live in a gray dystopia wears a person down. But it’s not just in urban planning. It’s when you can’t get easy or cheap access to books. It’s when you can’t hear music, see art, or hear the morning call of a bird.

Finally, aesthetic injustice is when someone is prevented from expressing themselves. It’s when they are forbidden from being creative or using their imagination. In 1969, John Lennon reportedly said that “every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist.” What a poignant thing to say. He’s absolutely right. Spend time around children, and you will see them dancing, singing, drawing, creating. Put it on the fridge, call it a masterpiece, and celebrate the child as a maestro. What a cruel thing it is to extinguish that need to create. It was said that the Romans would occasionally feature dishes made from the tiny tongues of songbirds — larks, nightingales, and thrushes. I can think of few things so brutal as cutting out the tongue of a bird that’s born to sing, just to impress your friends.

Aesthetic injustice reminds us to be angry about an increasingly artless world. It reminds us that beauty is not some luxury, reserved only for the leisure classes. We are born with a near-bottomless well of creativity and an unquenchable thirst for beauty. And so, it’s not some fringe political issue whether or not to close a library, a museum, or an art gallery. It is not a pointless waste of money to add ornaments, art, and wildlife to public spaces. It is not simply bad parenting to tell a child she should never sing. It’s a terrible injustice. And it’s one that people carry with them, forever.

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IN A QUOTE

Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.

Subscribe now