#36, the thirty sixth one.
A Philosophical approach to Identify what truly Matters, Love is Worth Believing in, A Woman Reading, To Thrive - Children need to experience Awe, and Poem - Leisure..
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Articles
You might think that knowing what matters to you is simple: just ask yourself! If you do ask, you’ll surely come up with an answer. Typically, people’s answers to the question ‘What are your values?’ will include things like family, friendship, career and health. This is a start, but it’s not enough if you want to use values to reflect on how your life is going and to give you direction for how to improve.
I propose thinking of your values not as either beliefs or desires, but as both, and more. You can think of them as special, psychologically harmonised goals. Or to put the definition in a technical way, values are relatively stable, emotionally entrenched, reflectively endorsed, important goals that exhibit patterns of mutual reinforcement.
The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, and the form of examination favoured in philosophy has been very intellectual. But, if values are partly emotional and not always entirely conscious, rational examination isn’t going to tell you everything you need to know. If you pay attention only to what you consciously say, you will miss what you love but are afraid to admit and what you hate but are in denial about hating. What to do instead?
To encourage hidden forces to reveal themselves, it can help to engage your imagination. Philosophical thought experiments could be helpful here. For example, picture that you have to vacate Earth to go live on another planet and you can only take a few things with you on the spaceship. What would you take?
Knowing what you value and making it the focus of your life will not mean you are never sad, or disappointed, or envious of other people on social media, and it won’t cure every existential crisis. The world does not always cooperate with the pursuit of what matters – there are obstacles from other people, the environment, and sometimes from our own conflicting values. But I have found that the more I’m clear about what is important to me, the less I am inclined to worry about what others are doing and whether I’m making the right choices in my limited time on earth.
Love Is Worth Believing In, 10 min
Yes, the internet made things more convenient. But sometimes I think it put everything within my generation’s reach, put the world at our fingertips, while making the only things that really matter, like romantic love, feel utterly unreachable.
Marriage is being annoyed by someone forever. Meanwhile we sneer at men expressing love. We mock love that lasts. If you want that kind of love we smile at you like you’re a naive child. You’re so young; maybe even unwell. Healthy people know romantic love is unrealistic! They’re enough on their own. They love themselves instead.
We forget that when the explosion ends, it comes back in bursts, and simmers, quietly on, in the small things. It goes from staying up until 3am talking to reaching out your arm in the night and feeling their warmth. From determined to spend every second together to the joy of just knowing they’re downstairs somewhere. It’s feeling that life is flowing a bit smoother, that music sounds better and the walk looks brighter and you’re softer and more gentle with people, more gentle with yourself. And maybe it’s hard to talk about love like that because it’s quiet. It’s not loud or theatrical like these influencers or TikToks or everything else that screams for our attention. But it’s there, it’s there.
It’s also irrational, falling in love. Hard to explain. Which is why all these checklists and calculations about what men and women want online have never made sense to me. Of all the couples I know who are in love, there’s no explaining it. They didn’t decide. There were no calculations about money, height or age; they threw out their checklists. And we know this, we know love is messy, but that’s scary, so we turn to all these dating gurus giving us graphs and statistics, analysing it all, calling it a market. Guide us toward guarantees! Feed our hunger for control that’s gotten so out of hand we’re now trying to predict the most beautifully unpredictable thing in the world. We’ve gotten so used to algorithms and machines optimising our entire lives we think we can hack something like falling in love—if we just follow the right steps life will deliver the right results. Love is so much more unthinking than that.
That beautiful, rare thing. We used to call it love, you know—your needs becoming theirs. Taking care of each other. That’s what love is supposed to be: you fall for someone and it kickstarts some selflessness in you, awakes kindness and generosity you didn’t know you had. Doesn’t matter how resistant or independent you are, it disarms you.
But I think this kind of love is real, is possible. I think it’s one of the only things left that is. If anything is an illusion, it’s all these other distractions—it’s social media, it’s dating apps, it’s the porn industry pretending it’s healthy and human to sit alone in your room and simulate intimacy with a screen. Honestly is there anything more hopeless? I don’t think the poets are lying to you about love. I do think Tinder is lying to you, and PornHub. I do think our culture is lying to you when it insists self-love is enough, that buying more and chasing fame, followers and freedom is what’s real and reliable. That believing in all that will make you happy but believing in love will get you hurt. I guess I just think if you’re going to fall for anything in modern life it should be another person.
Gen Z might have it easier in many ways but seriously, when it comes to romance we’ve had it rough. The only world we’ve ever known is one where our parents are two strangers who can barely look at each other at the doorstep. Where our partners kindly put their Tinder accounts on pause to try us out. Where porn isn’t stigmatised but supposedly benefits our relationships. So please, don’t call young people naive when against all odds, against every cultural disincentive, against constant messaging to maximise their freedom, they decide to commit to one person.
And also..
A Woman Reading, An Illustrated Graphic on Reading..
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Education
When asked what a child needs to thrive, we could each come up with a long list, across which there would likely be a lot of commonalities. A loving home life. Nutritional nourishment. Good schools. Playtime. Lots of books – fact and fiction. Physical activity. Quality sleep. Many of us might also include aspects of mental and emotional health, such as having safe places to express excitement, anger and sadness. A burgeoning line of developmental research suggests there is another form of emotional experience that belongs in this list: the experience of awe.
Awe experiences typically involve the perception of something incredibly vast or powerful, something that transcends or challenges one’s understanding of the world. These are often, but not always, encounters with nature – such as seeing the Grand Canyon, gazing over mountains from an airplane, or standing at the foot of an enormous sequoia tree. Awe-inspiring moments can move a person deeply, pushing them into a mental space beyond the usual worries and thoughts of everyday life.
If you are a parent or a caregiver, there may be plenty of opportunities to introduce awe and its benefits into a child’s day-to-day life. Oftentimes, potential moments of awe get overlooked or breezed by in our busy, modern lives. With the pressure to achieve seeping into childhood earlier and earlier, it’s easy to understand why you might be more focused on getting a child to the next activity, competition or tutor. However, as you become more attuned to sources of awe and more knowledgeable about its importance during development, you’ll likely see how children benefit when we give awe experiences greater priority.
Pause to observe awe-inspiring scenes
If you can, consider setting aside some weekend time for an ‘awe field trip’. You might drive to a hiking trail or a scenic byway where you can take in a vista together. Or you could stand along the edge of a lake or ocean, if there is one within reach, and look out at the vast expanse of water. In the evening, a pre-bedtime adventure could involve a drive to an area with little to no light pollution, where you can gaze up at the starry night sky. You and your child can take turns picking out a favourite star or constellation while you talk about how it fits in with or stands out from all the others. While out on a trail walk, you can look up at large trees together, or maybe even climb a tree and look out at a field, valley or neighbourhood from that vantage point. Plan to do nothing except observe the scene while you are there together. Afterward, ask your child how they felt or what they noticed.Check out imagery of objects at an unusual scale
Watch tales of inspiration and transformation
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Poem - Leisure, William Henry Davies
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