Thrive at Any Age
Introduction Nothingness is an existential concept most associated with Jean Paul Sartre. Have you ever had a moment where you become acutely conscious of some particularly challenging task that lies before you? Let’s say an important job interview. Can you remember how you felt? Undoubtedly, you’d have felt nervous. You
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Introduction The phrase hell is other people (L’enfer, c’est les autres) is one of the many memorable phases penned by Jean Paul Sartre. It comes from his play No Exit (Huis Clos). The phrase is often misunderstood as a poetic expression of misanthropy. It manifestly is not. In No Exit, three
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Introduction The eternal return – this is deep; very deep. Deep and thought provoking. I first encountered this idea when I was 16 and had not long left school. I was doing an apprenticeship and had to attend college on a day release scheme. Back in the 1970s, it was
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Introduction The most important question in all of philosophy, I suggest, is: Why is there something? I mean, why is there something rather than nothing? Surely the fact that there is something – the universe and everything that makes up the universe is contingent. Surely it could have been otherwise.
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Introduction To my knowledge, Jean Paul Sartre never formally named his ethical theory; so, Sartrean ethics it is. Sartre is one of the giants of 20th century philosophy. He’s regarded as an existentialist philosopher but, I think, he thought of himself as a writer first. This writer/philosopher overlap was common
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The truth about ageing and synchronicity is that as you age coincidences may appear more prominent and meaningful. That’s what synchronicity is: Meaningful coincidences. To be more accurate, it’s the occurrence of meaningful events together but there appears to be no cause. It is a concept developed by Carl Jung.
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Introduction You may be asking what on earth is this all about? Ageing and bad faith? We’ll, all the world’s a stage, according to then Bard. And on that stage, we are all players who through the seven acts of our life play many roles. Bad faith is a concept
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Introduction Here’s an interesting question about ageing and free will. As we age, does the balance between free will and determinism shift in favour of the latter? Of course, this assumes that we have free will in the first place. So, do we really have free will? or is it
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Introduction What does the phrase ageing and time conjure up in your mind? For me, time is one of those things that is endlessly compelling. It has exercised the human mind – some of the most brilliant human minds – for millennia. It is trivial to say that over time
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Introduction So, what is the truth about ageing and the meaning of life? The answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything is forty-two. Those of you of a certain age and literary bent will understand that. Those of you of a certain age but not of that
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