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Posted on September 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
The paradox of melancholy lies in how the seeds of sadness sit latent (and ever ready to germinate) within happiness. Just as life implies death and pleasure implies pain, happiness implies sadness. It is the foresight that this momentary (and precarious) lofty feeling will soon (all too soon) descend back to the pits of despair […]
Posted on September 16, 2021 Leave a Comment
It is both a blessing and a curse that we are not privy to the private tortures, turmoils and torments which afflict the souls of those we pass by. We have enough problems of our own that we would hardly be able to shoulder the burdens of others. However, while this fact frees us, it […]
Posted on September 10, 2021 Leave a Comment
You might not be able to be great, but you can be good; you may not be able to save everyone, but you can save yourself. This is the central message found at the end of Voltaire’s inspired 1759 text Candide. It is not for nothing that the subtitle of this work was Or, Optimism, […]
Posted on September 6, 2021 Leave a Comment
We lash out because we haven’t been listened to, not because we’ve been listened to too much. At the end of the day, sometimes what we really need is not for someone to agree with us, or to give us advice, but simply to hear us; to validate our feelings, to recognise our inner turmoil, […]
Posted on September 3, 2021 Leave a Comment
To a significant extent, many of us do not know what we really want. Sometimes we think we know – maybe a girlfriend, lots of money, or something as simple as some new shoes – but upon attainment, the pleasures are momentary, and when they fade we are even more disillusioned than before. We then […]
Posted on August 30, 2021 Leave a Comment
We all tend to harbour outlandish and unreasonable expectations for just how good our life should be. In a phenomenon not resulting from but by no means helped by social media, our expectations for how life should be (and our misery at how it has so far turned out) turns on disregarding so much we […]
Posted on August 28, 2021 Leave a Comment
The hardest person to break up with is…ourselves. Each of us, in our own ways, becomes practices behaviours and espouses beliefs that while once upon a time served us, no longer do. Perhaps we had a difficult childhood and the only way we could have survived was to bottle up our emotions, put on a […]
Posted on August 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
The question – so often asked by friends, parents and prospective partners – is not a bad one. It is, however, often asked and understood far too narrowly. Do you want someone who likes to read, who watches the same television shows? Do you want someone who is intelligent, or funny, or poetic? When posed […]
Posted on August 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
Memory deceives with how it flattens experience. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than when we reminisce on a past relationship. When you were with your partner you were sometimes angry, often irritated, and while there were surely moments of ecstasy and fulfilment, there was, of course, a reason (or many) why you left them […]
Posted on August 7, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘To those human beings who are of any concern to me’ wrote Nietzsche in The Will to Power, ‘I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished’. Speaking not out of hate but of love, he continued, I […]
Proper Candor 