We have come so far as a species. We have advanced in science, technology, economics and politics. The systems we’ve created are complex, but they make prosperity possible for a great number of people.

Many people have access to free education, affordable health care, social security, and the internet, a place where information is widely made available for free. Violence has decreased in the last few hundred years, and we can now, for a price, travel almost anywhere in the world within a day. Read more…

”There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.” — Alexandre Dumas

If there is one thing to learn from volunteering at a crisis helpline, it is that emotional resilience is both perhaps the most useful thing to learn in life, and something no one teaches in school. People are just supposed to figure out for themselves that being able to healthily cope with setbacks and unfortunate events is one of the most important things to learn. A lack of emotional resilience leads to unhappiness, an inability to deal with what happens, and ultimately to mental illness. To give you an example of the difference that emotional resilience makes: Read more…

I’ve had a blog for multiple years, but I found it difficult to put anything on it – my inner critic has never been easy on me. Perfectionism can be hard to deal with. I also made the previous blog look really good, with high res images which made the site take longer to load, and made messing with the site’s layout and design a really good way to distract myself from what was actually important: the writing. After a few years of hosting that blog I realised how little I was actually doing with it, so I decided not to renew. But, here we are. What changed? Read more…