essay about materialistic world

There’s no shame in being materialistic – it could benefit society

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Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester

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Charles Cui does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Bodo B. Schlegelmilch and Sandra Awanis do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Materialism gets a bad press. There is an assumption that people who prioritise “things” are inherently selfish. The stereotype is that of highly materialistic people, living in a different world, where their priority is cash, possessions and status. But is the stereotype true? Our research reveals there are two sides to this story.

Highly materialistic people believe that owning and buying things are necessary means to achieve important life goals, such as happiness, success and desirability. However, in their quest to own more, they often sideline other important goals. Research shows that highly materialistic people tend to care less about the environment and other people than “non-materialists” do. These findings lead to the assumption that highly materialistic people are largely selfish and prefer to build meaningful relationships with “stuff”, as opposed to people.

But other research shows that materialism is a natural part of being human and that people develop materialistic tendencies as an adaptive response to cope with situations that make them feel anxious and insecure, such as a difficult family relationship or even our natural fear of death .

Underlying desires

Materialism is not only found in particularly materialistic people. Even referring to people as “consumers” , as opposed to using other generic terms such as citizens, can temporarily activate a materialistic mindset. As materialism researchers James Burroughs and Aric Rindfleisch said:

Telling people to be less materialistic is like telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy sex or eat fatty foods. People can learn to control their impulses, but this does not remove the underlying desires.

As such, efforts directed towards eliminating materialism (taxing or banning advertising activities ) are unlikely to be effective. These anti-materialism views also limit business activities and places considerable tension between business and policy.

The caring materialists

Our research examined how materialism is perceived across cultures and it revealed that there is more to materialism than just self-gratification. In Asia, materialism is an important part of the “collectivistic” culture (where the emphasis is on relationships with others, in particular the groups a person belongs to).

Buying aspirational brands of goods and services is a common approach in the gift-giving traditions in East Asia. Across collectivistic communities, purchasing things that mirror the identity and style of people you regard as important can also help you to conform to social expectations that in turn blanket you with a sense of belonging. These behaviours are not unique to Asian societies. It’s just that the idea of materialism in the West is more often seen in sharp contrast to community values, rather than a part of it.

We also found that materialists in general are “meaning-seekers” rather than status seekers. They believe in the symbolic and signalling powers of products, brands and price tags. Materialists who also believe in community values use these cues to shed positive light onto themselves and others they care about, to meet social expectations, demonstrate belonging and even to fulfil their perceived social responsibilities. For example, people often flaunt their green and eco-friendly purchases of Tom’s shoes and Tesla cars in public to signal desirable qualities of altruism and social concern.

Reconciling material and collective interests

So how do we get an increasingly materialistic society to care more about the greater good (such as buying more ethically-sourced products or making more charity donations) and be less conspicuous and wasteful in its consumption? The answer is to look to our culture and what sort of collectivistic values it tries to teach us.

We found that a simple reminder of the community value that resonates with who we are as a society can help reduce materialistic tendencies. That said, the Asian and Western cultures tend to teach slightly different ideals of community value. Asian communities tend to pass on values that centre around interpersonal relationships (such as family duties). Western societies tend to pass on values that are abstract and spiritual (such as kindness, equality and social justice).

Unsurprisingly, many businesses have been quick to jump onto this bandwagon. Tear-jerking commercials from Thailand reminding people to buy insurance to protect loved ones, Christmas adverts reminding viewers to be kind to one another are just two examples. But nice commercials alone won’t be enough to do the job.

Social marketers and public policymakers should tap into society’s materialistic tendencies to promote well-meaning social programmes, such as refugee settlement, financial literacy programmes and food bank donations. The key is to promote these programmes in ways that materialists can engage with – through a public display of consumption that communicates social identity.

A perfect example is the Choose Love charity pop-up store in central London, where people get to purchase real products (blankets, children’s clothing, sleeping bags, sanitary pads) in a beautifully designed retail space akin to the Apple store, which are then distributed to refugees in Greece, Iraq and Syria.

Materialism undoubtedly has an ugly face but it is here to stay. Rather than focusing efforts to diminish it, individual consumers, businesses and policymakers should focus on using it for promoting collective interests that benefit wider society.

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A psychologist explains why materialism is making you unhappy

by Susannah Locke

Materialists lead unhappier lives — and are worse to the people around them. And it seems that social media might be fueling materialistic attitudes, too. This is all according to a fascinating interview the American Psychological Association posted in 2014 with Knox College psychologist Tim Kasser , whose research focuses on materialism and well-being.

Here are the best bits.

Materialists are sad, terrible people:

We know from research that materialism tends to be associated with treating others in more competitive, manipulative and selfish ways, as well as with being less empathetic ... [M]aterialism is associated with lower levels of well-being, less pro-social interpersonal behavior, more ecologically destructive behavior, and worse academic outcomes. It also is associated with more spending problems and debt ... We found that the more highly people endorsed materialistic values, the more they experienced unpleasant emotions, depression and anxiety, the more they reported physical health problems, such as stomachaches and headaches, and the less they experienced pleasant emotions and felt satisfied with their lives.

People become more materialistic when they feel insecure:

Research shows two sets of factors that lead people to have materialistic values. First, people are more materialistic when they are exposed to messages that suggest such pursuits are important ... Second, and somewhat less obvious — people are more materialistic when they feel insecure or threatened, whether because of rejection, economic fears or thoughts of their own death.

Materialism is linked to media exposure and national-advertising expenditures:

The research shows that the more that people watch television, the more materialistic their values are ... A study I recently published with psychologist Jean Twenge ... found that the extent to which a given year’s class of high school seniors cared about materialistic pursuits was predictable on the basis of how much of the U.S. economy came from advertising and marketing expenditures — the more that advertising dominated the economy, the more materialistic youth were.

Materialism is linked to social media use, too:

One study of American and Arab youth found that materialism is higher as social media use increases ... That makes sense, since most social media messages also contain advertising, which is how the social media companies make a profit.

Many psychologists think that materialists are unhappy because these people neglect their real psychological needs:

[M]aterialistic values are associated with living one’s life in ways that do a relatively poor job of satisfying psychological needs to feel free, competent and connected to other people. When people do not have their needs well-satisfied, they report lower levels of well-being and happiness, as well as more distress.

Check out the whole interview at the APA's website.

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• Introduction

Types distinguished by departures from the paradigm

Type distinguished by its view of history, types distinguished by their account of mind.

• Greek and Roman materialism
• Modern materialism
• Translation central-state theories
• Disappearance central-state theories
• Eastern materialism
• Reductionism, consciousness, and the brain
• Logic, intentionality, and psychical research

• Why is Denis Diderot significant?
• What was Denis Diderot’s early life like?
• How did Denis Diderot die?
• Why is Thomas Hobbes important?
• What was Thomas Hobbes’s childhood like?

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• Rebus Community Press - Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind - Materialism and Behaviorism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Physicalism
• Frontiers - The Not-So-Dark Side of Materialism: Can Public Versus Private Contexts Make
• K12 Education LibreTexts - Materialism and Idealism
• Philosophy Now - What is Materialism?
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Materialism
• University of Missouri - Department of Philosophy - Materialism
• The Basics of Philosophy - Materialism
• materialism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

materialism , in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.

The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality ) that can best be defined by saying that a theory tends to be called materialist if it is felt sufficiently to resemble a paradigmatic theory that will here be called mechanical materialism. This article covers the various types of materialism and the ways by which they are distinguished and traces the history of materialism from the Greeks and Romans to modern forms of materialism.

Types of materialist theory

Mechanical materialism is the theory that the world consists entirely of hard, massy material objects, which, though perhaps imperceptibly small, are otherwise like such things as stones. (A slight modification is to allow the void—or empty space—to exist also in its own right.) These objects interact in the sort of way that stones do: by impact and possibly also by gravitational attraction. The theory denies that immaterial or apparently immaterial things (such as minds ) exist or else explains them away as being material things or motions of material things.

In modern physics (if interpreted realistically), however, matter is conceived as made up of such things as electrons , protons , and mesons , which are very unlike the hard, massy, stonelike particles of mechanical materialism. In it the distinction between matter and energy has also broken down. It is therefore natural to extend the word materialist beyond the above paradigm case (of mechanical materialism) to cover anyone who bases his theory on whatever it is that physics asserts ultimately to exist. This sort may be called physicalistic materialism . Such a materialist allows the concept of material thing to be extended so as to include all of the elementary particles and other things that are postulated in fundamental physical theory—perhaps even continuous fields and points of space-time . Inasmuch as some cosmologists even try to define the elementary particles themselves in terms of the curvature of space-time, there is no reason why a philosophy based on such a geometricized cosmology should not be counted as materialist, provided that it does not give an independent existence to nonphysical things such as minds.

Still another departure from the paradigm is the theory that holds that everything is composed of material particles (or physical entities generally) but also holds that there are special laws applying to complexes of physical entities, such as living cells or brains , that are not reducible to the laws that apply to the fundamental physical entities. (To avoid inconsistency, such a theory may have to allow that the ordinary laws of physics do not wholly apply within such complex entities.) Such a theory, which could be called “emergent materialism,” can shade off, however, into theories that one would not wish to call materialist, such as hylozoism , which ascribes vital characteristics to all matter, and panpsychism , which attributes a mindlike character to all constituents of material things.

Another common relaxation of the paradigm is that which allows as compatible with materialism such a theory as epiphenomenalism , according to which sensations and thoughts do exist in addition to material processes but are nonetheless wholly dependent on material processes and without causal efficacy of their own. They are related to material things somewhat in the way that a thing’s shadow is related to the thing. A similar departure from the paradigm is a form of what might be called “double-aspect materialism,” according to which in inner experience one is acquainted with nonphysical properties of material processes, though these properties are not causally effective. A form of double-aspect theory in which these properties were allowed to be causally effective would be a species of emergent materialism.

Of course, more than one of these qualifications might be made at the same time. If no other qualifications are intended, it is convenient to use the word extreme and to speak, for example, of “extreme physicalist materialism”—which is probably the type most discussed among professional philosophers in English-speaking countries.

In the wider world, however, the word materialism may bring to mind dialectical materialism , which was the orthodox philosophy of communist countries. This is most importantly a theory of how changes arise in human history , though a general metaphysical theory lies in the background. Dialectical materialists contrast their view with what they call “vulgar” materialism; and it does, indeed, appear that their theory is not an extreme materialism, whether mechanical or physicalist. They seem to hold merely that mental processes are dependent on or have evolved from material ones. Though they might be akin to emergent materialists, it is hard to be sure; their assertion that something new emerges at higher levels of organization might refer only to such things as that a computer is different from a mere heap of its components. And if so, even an extreme physicalistic materialist could acquiesce in this view. The distinctive features of dialectical materialism would thus seem to lie as much in its being dialectical as in its being materialist. Its dialectical side may be epitomized in three laws: (1) that of the transformation of quantity into quality , (2) that of the interpenetration of opposites, and (3) that of the negation of the negation. Nondialectical philosophers find it hard, however, to interpret these laws in a way that does not make them into either platitudes or falsehoods.

Perhaps because of the historical determinism implicit in dialectical materialism, and perhaps because of memories of the mechanical materialist theories of the 18th and 19th centuries, when physics was deterministic, it is popularly supposed that materialism and determinism must go together. This is not so. As indicated below, even some ancient materialists were indeterminists , and a modern physicalist materialism must be indeterministic because of the indeterminism that is built into modern physics. Modern physics does imply, however, that macroscopic bodies behave in a way that is effectively deterministic, and, because even a single neuron (nerve fibre) is a macroscopic object by quantum-mechanical standards, a physicalistic materialist may still regard the human brain as coming near to being a mechanism that behaves in a deterministic way.

A rather different way of classifying materialist theories, which to some extent cuts across the classifications already made, emerges when the theories are divided according to the way in which a materialist accounts for minds. A central-state materialist identifies mental processes with processes in the brain. An analytical behaviourist , on the other hand, argues that, in talking about the mind, one is not talking about an actual entity, whether material (e.g., the brain) or immaterial (e.g., the soul ); rather, one is somehow talking about the way in which people would behave in various circumstances. According to the analytical behaviourist, there is no more of a problem for the materialist in having to identify mind with something material than there is in identifying such an abstraction as the average plumber with some concrete entity. Analytical behaviourism differs from psychological behaviourism , which is merely a methodological program to base theories on behavioral evidence and to eschew introspective reports. The analytical behaviourist usually has a theory of introspective reports according to which they are what are sometimes called “avowals”: roughly, he contends that to say “I have a pain” is to engage in a verbal surrogate for a wince. Epistemic materialism is a theory that can be developed either in the direction of central-state materialism or in that of analytical behaviourism and that rests on the contention that the only statements that are intersubjectively testable are either observation reports about macroscopic physical objects or statements that imply such observation reports (or are otherwise logically related to them).

Before leaving this survey of the family of materialistic theories, a quite different sense of the word materialism should be noted in which it denotes not a metaphysical theory but an ethical attitude. A person is a materialist in this sense if he is interested mainly in sensuous pleasures and bodily comforts and hence in the material possessions that bring these about. A person might be a materialist in this ethical and pejorative sense without being a metaphysical materialist, and conversely. An extreme physicalistic materialist, for example, might prefer a Beethoven recording to a comfortable mattress for his bed; and a person who believes in immaterial spirits might opt for the mattress.

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Work  • Consumption & Need

Is the Modern World Too ‘Materialistic’?

It’s often said that the problem with modern societies is that they are far too ‘materialistic’ – which is taken to mean that we are far too interested in buying objects. This is not entirely fair. We are indeed materialistic, but not primarily because we buy a lot; rather because we harbour an immense faith in the power of whatever we do buy to have a decisive impact on our state of mind. We aren’t so much greedy as extremely hopeful.

We may, for example, develop a faith that a certain kind of diamond ring will render us able to sustain a long-lasting and harmonious relationship.

Or that particular items of clothing will ensure the interest and acclaim of the world. 

Or that a soft drink will be able to assist us in healing the divisions in our family.

Our belief that complicated psychological ambitions might be accomplished through the possession of an object is the distinctive and poignant feature of our age. In our reverence for the transformative capacity of material things, we are a little like the Bakongo or Songye peoples of the Congo Basin, who rely on what anthropologists know as fetish objects, small wooden figures (often traded for very high sums) which are thought to be able to oversee major interventions in daily life: to sort out troubled relationships, help adolescents on the journey to adulthood, lift the moods of the downcast or dissolve family tensions. Like the Bakongos or Songyes, we too hope that our fetish objects will have success in transforming complex and elusive bits of our internal functioning: a soap might bring an end to anxiety, a bag could assist one in recovering hope, a watch could unblock a relationship with a wary child.

Almost all religions have in some way made use of material objects. They’ve invested in particular sorts of furniture, clothes, buildings, statues and images – and seen these as adjuncts to their spiritual mission. But this has not been without controversy within the religions themselves. Reliance on material forms has intermittently come under fire from a minority of believers who have argued that spiritual transformations should only ever require spiritual means; material objects being wholly redundant to the project of healing the soul. 

Such religious hostility to materialism reached its European high point in the early Reformation when outbreaks of systematic looting and destruction known as iconoclasm broke out across parts of England, the Low Countries and Germany. The spiritual opponents of materialism burnt elegant priestly robes, smashed paintings, chopped pulpits into firewood and snapped the heads off statues – in order forcefully to make the point that anyone with a spiritual goal in mind should avoid harbouring the slightest interest in material forms.

However, the mainstreams of most religions have never been so definitive. Interestingly for the modern age (which wrestles with its own iconoclasts around consumerism), they have allowed a place for materialism. They have, with useful caveats, hinted that there might be such a thing as ‘good materialism.’ 

Good materialism is the fruit of a search for a genuine and balanced place for material objects within the overall context of a good life. It means neither assuming, like certain iconoclasts will, that all material things must be superfluous and an interest in them therefore derisory and suspect. But nor does it mean imagining that material things must have a quasi-magical power to ease complicated psychological dilemmas. Good materialism suggests that material things can contribute to, but must never replace, the arduous psychological work inevitably required to achieve fulfilment, connection, purpose and peace of mind.

Insofar as material objects can be helpful, it is when they embody in visible form attitudes and dispositions with spiritual analogies that are prone to be forgotten in the noise of daily life – and so benefit from being made more prominent in matter. For example, a Zen Buddhist bowl might pull its viewer back to certain key tenets of Zen’s belief-system through its shape and design: its modesty, its gracious acceptance of imperfection, its dignified simplicity. Certain spiritual ideas might be easier for a believer to remember and put into practice when a material equivalent was continually available to be absorbed by their eyes.

Similarly, for a Christian, the decoration of an Alpine wooden chapel – with its slightly crooked pews and walls and a naive rendition of the Virgin above the altar – might make particular ideas of humility or patient effort feel more recognisable and real than they would have done if they had simply been explained in a book. The peace one was looking for within would have robust encouragement from outward forms. In such cases, material objects will assume the status of goads or encouragers. Their design points to an inner destination – even if it is one to which they can’t take us all on their own. 

This philosophy of material objects can be applied as much to the consumer realm. A secular object may – just like a religious one – embody an important set of values; it might be hope or courage, straightforwardness or sweetness. By having the object around us, the values it refers to, and that might otherwise have been intermittent in our thoughts, have a chance to grow more stable, resilient and convincing and to prompt pieces of inner evolution. A certain kind of chair might encourage an attitude of acceptance; a pair of sunglasses might help a shy person to keep rediscovering reserves of confidence; there might be a role for a brightly coloured new top in cementing a break with a sorrowful past.

It isn’t therefore that material objects have no role whatsoever in fulfilment. It’s that the main effort we will need to make will, unfortunately, always have to involve an engagement with our psyches and those of others. Calm isn’t going come simply from flying to a particular destination and having an outdoor bath; it will be the result of studying the feint sources of our long-buried anxieties over many patient months. Likewise, friendship won’t magically emerge from a certain sort of soft drink, it will require that we make ourselves available to someone, that we dare to be vulnerable around them and know how to interpret what they tell us with imagination. And a good family can’t spring ready-made from the acquisition of a new timepiece, it will involve being patient around the many trials of adolescence and the courage to lay down boundaries which might involve short-term tensions and recriminations. 

Modernity has made us feel less prepared for a lot of this. It has encouraged us to have excessive faith in quasi-magical solutions originating out of material things. It has encouraged us to believe that objects can have a greater effect than they ever can – which has in turn, in certain quarters, bred a furious iconoclasm which, to no good end, has rendered us guilty for our supposed greed. It can matter immensely to our state of mind that the colours and forms in our vicinity are a certain way, that there is a particular atmosphere and spirit to the things that we see and touch every day. However, beauty can only ever be the handmaiden of wisdom, it cannot be its sole catalyst. We should be careful neither to decry nor excessively to celebrate material life: we should ensure that the objects we invest in, and tire ourselves and the planet by manufacturing, are those that stand the best chance of encouraging our higher, better natures.

How to Survive the Modern World New Book Out Now

How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes — our relationship to the news media, our assumptions about money and our careers, our admiration for science and technology and our belief in individualism and secularism – that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing.

The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present, pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future.

Full Article Index

• 01. Ostracism Anxiety
• 02. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 03. Why the world can seem so frightening - and how to make it feel less so
• 04. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 05. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 06. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 07. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 08. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 09. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 10. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 11. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 12. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 13. Auditing Our Worries
• 14. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 15. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 16. The Age of Agitation
• 17. How to Sleep Better
• 18. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 19. On Being 'Triggered'
• 20. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 21. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 22. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 23. On Skin Picking
• 24. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 25. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 26. After the Storm
• 27. Thoughts for the Storm
• 28. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 29. Preparing for Disaster
• 30. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 31. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 32. What Everybody Really Wants
• 33. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 34. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 35. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 36. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 37. On Anxiety
• 38. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 39. On Being Scared All the Time
• 40. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 41. On Asking for Help
• 42. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 43. On Panic Attacks
• 01. A Place for Despair
• 02. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 03. How to Make It Through
• 04. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 05. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 06. When I Am Called to Die
• 07. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 08. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 09. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 10. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 11. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 12. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 13. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 14. Building the Cathedral
• 15. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 16. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 17. How to Endure
• 18. Everything Is So Weird
• 19. Escaping Into History
• 20. The Inevitability of Choice
• 21. What Would Jesus Do?
• 22. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 23. You Still Have Time
• 24. I Will Survive!
• 25. On Trying to Control the Future
• 26. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 27. No One Knows
• 28. There is No Happily Ever After
• 29. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 30. There is Always a Plan B
• 31. The Consolations of History
• 32. The Lessons of Nature
• 33. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 34. On the Sublime
• 35. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 36. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 37. On Flowers
• 38. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 39. The Wisdom of Animals
• 40. The Lottery of Life
• 41. Untranslatable Words
• 42. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 43. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 44. The Faulty Walnut
• 45. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 46. On the Wisdom of Space
• 47. Memento Mori
• 48. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 49. On Calming Places
• 50. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 51. The Consolations of a Bath
• 52. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 53. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 54. On Sunshine
• 01. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 02. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 03. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 04. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 05. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 06. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 07. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 08. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 09. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 10. Daring to Be Simple
• 11. Haikus and Appreciation
• 12. The Call of Calm
• 13. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 14. How to Process Your Emotions
• 15. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 16. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 17. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 18. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 19. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 20. How to Live in a Hut
• 21. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 22. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 23. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 24. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 25. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 26. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 27. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 28. On Soothing
• 29. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 30. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 31. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 32. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 33. Hypervigilance
• 34. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 35. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 36. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 37. The Pursuit of Calm
• 38. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 02. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 03. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 04. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 05. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 06. Rethinking Divorce
• 07. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 08. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 09. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 10. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 11. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 12. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 13. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 15. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 16. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 17. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 18. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 19. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 20. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 21. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 22. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 23. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 24. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 25. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 26. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 27. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 28. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 29. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 30. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 31. How to Break Up
• 32. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 33. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 34. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 35. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 36. Coping with Betrayal
• 37. Can Exes be Friends?
• 38. How to Get Over Someone
• 39. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 40. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 41. How to End a Relationship
• 42. Stay or Leave?
• 43. How to Get Divorced
• 44. On Forgetting Lovers
• 45. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 02. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 03. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 04. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 05. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 06. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 07. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 08. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 09. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 11. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 12. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 13. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 14. Should I Be With Them?
• 15. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 16. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 17. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 18. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 19. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 20. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 21. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 22. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 23. Can People Change?
• 24. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 25. The Stranger You Live With
• 26. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 27. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 28. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 29. On Rescue Fantasies
• 30. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 31. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 32. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 33. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 34. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 35. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 36. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 37. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 38. How to Love Ugly People
• 39. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 40. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 41. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 42. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 43. The Partner as Child Theory
• 44. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 45. Meet the Parents
• 46. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 47. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 48. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 02. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 03. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 04. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 05. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 06. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 07. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 08. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 09. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 10. A Role for Lies
• 11. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 12. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 13. When Love Isn't Easy
• 14. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 15. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 16. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 17. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 18. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 19. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 20. On Gaslighting
• 21. Why We Play Games in Love
• 22. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 23. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 24. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 25. Do You Still Love Me?
• 26. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 27. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 28. The Art of Complaining
• 29. The Challenges of Communication
• 30. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 31. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 32. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 33. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 34. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 35. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 36. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 37. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 38. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 39. A History of Arguments
• 40. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 41. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 42. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 43. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 44. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 45. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 46. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 47. How to Argue in Relationships
• 48. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 49. Be the Change You Want To See
• 50. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 51. Love and Sulking
• 52. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 53. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 54. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 55. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 56. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 57. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 58. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 59. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 60. If It Wasn't for You...
• 61. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 62. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 02. Being Honest on a Date
• 03. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 04. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 05. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 06. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 07. A Brief History of Dating
• 08. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 09. Existentialism and Dating
• 10. What to Talk About on a Date
• 11. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 12. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 13. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 18. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 19. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 20. Loving and Being Loved
• 21. Romantic Realism
• 22. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 02. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 03. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 04. Rethinking Gender
• 05. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 06. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 07. Desire and Intimacy
• 08. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 09. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 10. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 11. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 12. On Still Being a Virgin
• 13. Love and Sex
• 14. Impotence and Respect
• 15. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 16. The Excitement of Kissing
• 17. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 18. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 19. On Art and Masturbation
• 20. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 21. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 22. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 23. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 24. Sexual Liberation
• 25. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 26. On Porn Addiction
• 27. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 28. Why We Go Off Sex
• 29. On Being a Sleazebag
• 30. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 02. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 03. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 04. The Fear of Being Touched
• 05. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 06. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 07. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 08. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 09. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 10. How to Be Less Defensive
• 11. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 12. You Might Be Mad
• 13. Fears Are Not Facts
• 14. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 15. Am I a Bad Person?
• 16. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 17. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 18. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 19. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 20. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 21. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 22. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 23. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 24. The Roots of Paranoia
• 25. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 26. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 27. How to Be Beautiful
• 28. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 29. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 30. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 31. On Despair and the Imagination
• 32. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 33. The Fear of Death
• 34. I Am Not My Body
• 35. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 36. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 37. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 38. The Problem of Shame
• 39. On Feeling Ugly
• 40. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 41. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 42. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 43. On Being Hated
• 44. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 45. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 46. On Self-Sabotage
• 47. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 48. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 02. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 03. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 04. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 05. How to Make It Through
• 06. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 07. The Breast and the Mouth
• 08. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 09. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 10. The Origins of Sanity
• 11. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 12. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 13. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 14. Locating the Trouble
• 15. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 16. Beyond Sanctimony
• 17. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 18. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 19. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 20. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 21. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 22. Self-Forgiveness
• 23. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 24. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 25. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 26. The Importance of Adolescence
• 27. How to Love Difficult People
• 28. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 29. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 30. Becoming Free
• 31. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 32. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 33. Can People Change?
• 34. When Home is Not Home...
• 35. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 36. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 37. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 38. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 39. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 40. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 41. On Bittersweet Memories
• 42. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 43. The Importance of Atonement
• 44. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 45. On Consolation
• 46. The Inner Idiot
• 47. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 48. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 49. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 50. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 51. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 52. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 53. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 02. How to Recover the Plot
• 03. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 04. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 05. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 06. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 07. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 08. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 09. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 10. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 11. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 12. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 13. Questioning Our Conscience
• 14. A Bedtime Meditation
• 15. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 16. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 17. In Praise of Introspection
• 18. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 19. What is Mental Health?
• 20. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 21. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 22. No One Cares
• 23. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 24. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 25. On Knowing Who One Is
• 26. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 27. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 28. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 29. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 30. Emotional Identity
• 31. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 32. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 33. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. We Are Made of Moods
• 02. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 03. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 04. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 05. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 06. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 07. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 08. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 09. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 10. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 11. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 12. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 13. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 14. The Window of Tolerance
• 15. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 16. Our Right to be Miserable
• 17. How to Manage One's Moods
• 18. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 19. On Disliking Oneself
• 20. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 21. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 22. On Depression
• 23. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 24. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 25. On Not Being in the Moment
• 26. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 27. Twenty Moods
• 28. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 29. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 30. On Feeling Depressed
• 31. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 32. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 33. Our Secret Thoughts
• 34. The Psychology of Colour
• 35. On Self-Pity
• 36. On Irritability
• 37. On Anger
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. Detachment
• 01. On Those Ruined by Success
• 02. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 03. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 04. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 05. Self-Forgiveness
• 06. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 07. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 08. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 09. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 10. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 11. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 12. The Perfectionist Trap
• 13. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 14. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 02. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 03. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 04. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 05. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 06. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 07. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 08. The Healing Power of Time
• 09. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 10. On Parenting Our Parents
• 11. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 12. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 13. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 14. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 15. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 16. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 17. How Music Can Heal Us
• 18. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 19. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 20. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 21. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 22. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 23. The Agonies of Shame
• 24. How Trauma Works
• 25. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 26. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 27. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 28. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 29. On Projection
• 30. Self-Archaeology
• 31. It's Not Your Fault
• 32. If Our Parents Never Listened
• 33. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
• 34. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
• 35. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
• 36. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 37. How We Should Have Been Loved
• 38. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
• 39. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 40. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 41. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 42. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 43. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 44. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
• 45. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
• 46. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
• 47. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
• 48. Sharing Our Early Wounds
• 49. Trauma and How to Overcome It
• 50. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
• 51. The Golden Child Syndrome
• 52. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
• 53. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
• 54. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
• 55. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
• 56. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 57. On Suffering in Silence
• 58. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
• 59. Daddy Issues
• 60. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
• 61. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
• 01. The Need for Processing 
• 02. The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
• 03. The Art of Good Listening
• 04. Becoming More Interesting
• 05. In Praise of Small Chats With Strangers
• 06. Why We Should Listen Rather Than Reassure
• 07. How We Can Hurt Without Thinking
• 08. Leaning in to Vulnerability
• 09. How to Become Someone People Will Confide in
• 10. How To Write An Effective Thank You Letter
• 11. How to Be a Good Listener
• 12. How to Comment Online
• 13. Listening as Editing
• 14. The Importance of Flattery
• 15. How to Narrate Your Life Story
• 16. The Art of Listening
• 17. How to Narrate Your Dreams
• 18. How to Talk About Yourself
• 19. Communication
• 20. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 21. On How to Disagree
• 22. On the Art of Conversation
• 01. On Feeling Painfully Different
• 02. Abandoning Hope
• 03. How to Leave a Party
• 04. On Becoming a Hermit
• 05. How to Have a Renaissance
• 06. Think Like an Aristocrat
• 07. Van Gogh's Neglected Genius
• 08. How to Be Quietly Confident
• 09. How to Live Like an Exile
• 10. How to Cope With Bullying
• 11. Stop Being So Nice
• 12. The Origins of Shyness
• 13. On Friendliness to Strangers
• 14. What to Do at Parties If You Hate Small Talk
• 15. How to Approach Strangers at A Party
• 16. How to Be Comfortable on Your Own in Public
• 17. Akrasia - or Why We Don't Do What We Believe
• 18. Why We Think So Much about Our Hair
• 19. Aphorisms on Confidence
• 20. How Knowledge of Difficulties Lends Confidence
• 21. How Thinking You’re an Idiot Lends Confidence
• 22. How to Overcome Shyness
• 23. The Mind-Body Problem
• 24. The Impostor Syndrome
• 25. On the Origins of Confidence
• 26. Self-Esteem
• 27. On Confidence
• 28. On Not Liking the Way One Looks
• 02. Why Losers Make the Best Friends
• 03. Our Very Best Friends
• 04. The Difficulties of Oversharing
• 05. Is It OK to Outgrow Our Friends?
• 06. Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely
• 07. On 'Complicated' Friendships
• 08. The Friend Who Can Tease Us
• 09. Don't Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends
• 10. The Forgotten Art of Making Friends
• 11. The Friend Who Balances Us
• 12. The Purpose of Friendship
• 13. Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely
• 14. How to Lose Friends
• 15. Why Misfits Make Great Friends
• 16. How to Handle an Envious Friend
• 17. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 18. Companionship and Mental Health
• 19. How Often Do We Need to Go to Parties?
• 20. Virtual Dinners: Conversation Menus
• 21. The Cleaning Party
• 22. On Talking Horizontally
• 23. Dinner Table Orchestra
• 24. On Sofa Jumping
• 25. On Studying Someone Else's Hands
• 26. What Women and Men May Learn from One Another When They are Just Friends
• 27. How to Say 'I Love You' to a Friend
• 28. How to End a Friendship
• 29. What Can Stop the Loneliness?
• 30. Why Men Are So Bad at Friendship
• 31. What Would An Ideal Friend Be Like?
• 32. 'Couldn't We Just Be Friends?'
• 33. On Acquiring an Enemy
• 34. Why Old Friends Matter
• 35. Why Not to Panic about Enemies
• 36. What Is the Purpose of Friendship?
• 37. Friendship and Vulnerability
• 38. On Socks and Friendship
• 39. The Teasing of Old Friends
• 01. The Boring Person
• 02. The Loveliest People in the World
• 03. The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
• 04. The Origins of Shifty People
• 05. The Many Faults of Other People
• 06. Why Nice People Give Us the 'Ick'
• 07. How to Become a More Interesting Person
• 08. The Challenges of Hugging
• 09. Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People
• 10. The Origins of People Pleasing
• 11. The Eyes of Love
• 12. Kindness Isn't Weakness
• 13. Why We're All Capable of Damaging Others
• 14. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 15. What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters
• 16. The Need for Kindness
• 17. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 18. What to Do When a Stranger Annoys You
• 19. How to Choose A Good Present
• 20. How to Be a Good Guest
• 21. How To Make People Feel Good about Themselves
• 22. How To Tell When You Are Being A Bore
• 23. What Is Empathy?
• 24. How Not to Rant
• 25. How Not to Be Boring
• 26. On Eggs and Compassion
• 27. How to Become an Adult
• 28. People-Pleasing: and How to Overcome It
• 29. Why Truly Sociable People Hate Parties
• 30. How to Be Diplomatic
• 31. Sane Insanity
• 32. Charity of Interpretation
• 33. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 34. The Solution to Clumsiness
• 35. How to Be a Man
• 36. Political Correctness vs. Politeness
• 37. Aphorisms on Kindness
• 38. Why We Don’t Really Want to Be Nice
• 39. The Charm of Vulnerability
• 40. The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills
• 41. How to Be Open-Minded
• 42. Why Kind People Always Lie
• 43. How to Be Warm
• 44. The Problem of Over-Friendliness
• 45. How to Forgive
• 46. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 47. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 48. On Charm
• 49. On Being Kind
• 50. On Gratitude
• 51. On Forgiveness
• 52. On Charity
• 53. On Wisdom
• 01. How to Fire Someone
• 02. Diplomacy at the Office
• 03. How to Tell a Colleague Their Breath Smells
• 04. How to Screw Up at Work
• 05. In Praise of Teamwork
• 06. How to Become an Entrepreneur
• 07. The Need for Eloquence
• 08. The Nature and Causes of Procrastination
• 09. In Praise of Networking
• 10. Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists
• 11. How to Survive Bureaucracy
• 12. Machismo and Management
• 13. What Art Can Teach Business About Being Fussy
• 14. On Novelists and Manuals
• 15. How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life
• 16. How to Sell
• 17. Innovation, Empathy and Introspection
• 18. Innovation and Creativity
• 19. Innovation and Science Fiction
• 20. The Acceptance of Change
• 21. The Collaborative Virtues
• 22. Towards Better Collaboration
• 23. How To Make Efficiency a Habit
• 24. On Raising the Prestige of 'Details'
• 25. Monasticism & How to Avoid Distraction
• 26. How to Dare to Begin
• 27. On Meaning – and Motivation
• 28. The Psychological Obstacles Holding Employees Back
• 29. On Feedback
• 30. How to Better Understand Customers
• 31. On Bounded and Unbounded Tasks
• 01. What Should Truly Motivate Us at Work
• 02. Nature as a Cure for the Sickness of Modern Times
• 03. The Difficulties of Work-Life Balance
• 04. The Challenges of Modernity
• 05. Businesses for Love; Businesses for Money
• 06. Countries for Losers; Countries for Winners
• 07. Towards a Solution to Inequality
• 08. Free Trade - or Protectionism?
• 09. Should We Work on Ourselves - or on the World?
• 10. Why Is There Unemployment?
• 11. Artists and Supermarket Tycoons
• 12. Business and the Arts
• 13. Sentimentality in Art - and Business
• 14. How to Make a Country Rich
• 15. First World Problems
• 16. On Devotion to Corporations
• 17. Good vs Classical Economics
• 18. What Is a Good Brand?
• 19. Good Economic Measures: Beyond GDP
• 20. What Good Business Should Be
• 21. On the Faultiness of Our Economic Indicators
• 22. On the Dawn of Capitalism
• 23. Utopian Capitalism
• 24. On Philanthropy
• 01. Why Do We Work So Hard?
• 02. On Eating a Friend
• 03. Is the Modern World Too 'Materialistic'?
• 04. On Consumer Capitalism
• 05. How to Choose the Perfect Gift
• 06. The Importance of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs
• 07. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 08. Money and 'Higher Things'
• 09. Why We Are All Addicts
• 10. Why We Are So Bad at Shopping
• 11. Business and the Ladder of Needs
• 12. Consumer Self-Knowledge
• 13. "Giving Customers What They Want"
• 14. The Entrepreneur and the Artist
• 15. What Advertising Can Learn from Art
• 16. What the Luxury Sector Does for Us
• 17. On Using Sex to Sell
• 18. Understanding Brand Promises
• 19. Consumer Education: On Learning How to Spend
• 20. Good Materialism
• 21. Why We Hate Cheap Things
• 22. Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things
• 23. Why Advertising Is so Annoying - but Doesn't Have to Be
• 24. On Good Demand
• 25. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 26. On the Responsibility of the Consumer
• 27. Adverts Know What We Want - They Just Can't Sell It to us
• 28. On the True Desires of the Rich
• 01. How to Be Original
• 02. When Are We Truly Productive?
• 03. The Importance of the Siesta
• 04. Career Therapy
• 05. On Meritocracy
• 06. The Vocation Myth
• 07. The Good Sides of Work
• 08. The Good Office
• 09. The EQ Office
• 10. Good Salaries: What We Earn - and What We’re Worth
• 11. What Good Business Should Be
• 12. On the Pleasures of Work
• 01. How Does An Emotionally Healthy Person Relate To Their Career?
• 02. The Concept of Voluntary Poverty
• 03. The Dangers of Having Too Little To Do
• 04. How Could a Working Life Be Meaningful?
• 05. On Learning to Live Deeply Rather than Broadly
• 06. What They Forget to Teach You at School
• 07. Authentic Work
• 08. Why We Need to Work
• 09. How We Came to Desire a Job We Could Love
• 10. Why Work Is So Much Easier than Love
• 11. Work and Maturity
• 12. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 13. Authentic Work
• 01. Do We Need to Read the News?
• 02. On Gossip
• 03. How the Media Damages Our Faith in Humanity
• 04. Why We Secretly Love Bad News
• 05. Celebrity Crushes
• 06. On Switching Off the News
• 07. We've Been Here Before
• 08. In Praise of Bias
• 09. The News from Without - and the News from Within
• 10. History as a Corrective to News
• 11. Emotional Technology
• 12. What's Wrong with the Media
• 13. On the Dangers of the Internet
• 14. On Taking Digital Sabbaths
• 15. On the Role of Censorship
• 16. On the Role of Disasters
• 17. On the Role of Art in News
• 18. Tragedies and Ordinary Lives in the Media
• 19. On the Failures of Economic News
• 20. On Health News
• 21. What State Broadcasters Should Do
• 22. On the Role of Cheerful News
• 23. On News and Kindness
• 24. On Maniacs and Murderers
• 01. The United States and Happiness
• 02. Political Emotional Maturity
• 03. On Feeling Offended
• 04. A Guide to Good Nationalism
• 05. Why We Do - After All - Care about Politics
• 06. Why Socrates Hated Democracy
• 07. The Fragility of Good Government
• 08. Romantic vs. Classical Voters
• 09. Africa after Independence
• 01. Should I Follow My Dreams?
• 02. How to Retire Early
• 03. The Agonies of Choice
• 04. The Creative Itch
• 05. Broadening the Job Search
• 06. Our Families and Our Careers
• 07. The Challenges of Choosing a Career
• 08. On Career Crises
• 09. The Output/Input Confusion
• 10. Finding a Mission
• 11. How to Serve
• 12. Why Work-Life Balance is an Illusion
• 13. On Gratitude – and Motivation
• 14. How to Find Fulfilling Work
• 15. On the Origins of Motivation at Work
• 16. On Becoming an Entrepreneur
• 17. On Being an Unemployed Arts Graduate
• 01. On Small Talk at the Office
• 02. On Falling Apart at the Office
• 03. The Sorrows of Competition
• 04. What Is That Sunday Evening Feeling?
• 05. How Parents Get in the Way of Our Career Plans
• 06. Why Modern Work Is So Boring
• 07. Why Pessimism is the Key to Good Government
• 08. The Sorrows of Colleagues
• 09. The Sorrows of Commercialisation
• 10. The Sorrows of Standardisation
• 11. Confidence in the System
• 12. Job Monogamy
• 13. The Duty Trap
• 14. The Perfectionist Trap
• 15. On Professional Failure
• 16. Nasty Businesses
• 17. The Job Investment Trap
• 18. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 19. The Pains of Leadership
• 20. Would It Be Better for Your Job If You Were Celibate?
• 21. On Stress and Inner Voices
• 22. On Being Wary of Simple-Looking Issues
• 23. On Commuting
• 24. On the Sorrows of Work
• 25. On Misemployment
• 26. On Guilt-trips and Charm
• 01. The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
• 02. Giving Up on Being Special
• 03. The Problem with Individualism
• 04. Winners and Losers in the Race of Life
• 05. Being on the Receiving End of Pity
• 06. Shakespeare: 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state...'
• 07. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 08. On the Loss of Reputation
• 09. The Secret Sorrows of Over-Achievers
• 10. You Are Not What You Earn
• 11. Artistic Philanthropy
• 12. The Need to Keep Believing in Luck
• 13. On Glamour
• 14. The Incumbent Problem
• 15. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 16. On the Dangers of Success
• 17. On Doing Better Than Our Parents
• 18. Success at School vs. Success in Life
• 19. Why We Look Down on People Who Don’t Earn Very Much
• 20. What Is 'Success'?
• 21. On Children and Power
• 22. On Pleasure in the Downfall of the Mighty
• 23. On Status and Democracy
• 24. On Failure and Success in the Game of Fame
• 25. On Envy
• 26. A Philosophical Exercise for Envy
• 27. On the Envy of Politicians
• 28. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 29. On the Desire for Fame
• 30. On Fame and Sibling Rivalry
• 01. Why Humanity Destroyed Itself
• 02. How Science Could - at Last - Properly Replace Religion
• 03. Our Forgotten Craving for Community
• 04. Why isn't the Future here yet?
• 05. On Changing the World
• 06. What Community Centres Should Be Like
• 07. On Seduction
• 08. The Importance of Utopian Thinking
• 09. Art is Advertising for What We Really Need
• 10. Why the World Stands Ready to Be Changed
• 11. On the Desire to Change the World
• 12. Utopian Collective Pride
• 13. Envy of a Utopian Future
• 14. Utopian Artificial Intelligence
• 15. Utopian Education
• 16. Utopian Marriage
• 17. Utopian Film
• 18. Utopian Culture
• 19. Utopian Festivals
• 20. Utopian Business Consultancy
• 21. Utopian Capitalism
• 22. Utopian Government
• 23. Utopian Media
• 24. Utopian Tax
• 25. Utopian Celebrity Culture
• 26. The Future of the Banking Industry
• 27. The Future of the Communications Industry
• 28. The Future of the Hotel Industry

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Materialism is one of the most intriguing and complex philosophical concepts, exploring the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and our place in it. It has been debated for centuries by philosophers, and it is still a subject of much discussion today. At its core, materialism is the belief that physical matter is the only thing that exists, and that all other forms of reality are either illusions or products of matter. In this article, we will explore materialism in depth, looking at its history, theories, implications, and how it has shaped modern thought. We will begin by examining the origins of materialism, tracing its roots back to ancient Greece and Rome.

We will then explore the various theories developed by modern philosophers and thinkers, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. We will also look at how these theories have been applied in a range of contexts, from literature to psychology. Finally, we will discuss the implications of materialism for our understanding of reality and our relationship with it. The earliest ideas of materialism can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. The Greek philosopher Democritus was one of the first to propose a materialistic worldview.

He argued that all matter was made up of tiny indivisible particles known as atoms. This idea was further developed by Epicurus and Lucretius, who argued that the world was composed of an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space. They believed that all of the events that occur in the universe were due to the random movement of these atoms. This concept was then taken up by later philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

Hobbes argued that the material world was composed of fundamental particles and that all events could be explained by their interactions. Locke took this one step further, arguing that all human behavior could be explained in terms of material causes. Materialism has been used to explain a wide range of phenomena throughout history. In economics, for example, it has been used to explain why certain markets are more efficient than others and why some countries are more prosperous than others. In psychology, it has been used to explain why humans act in certain ways and why they have certain motivations.

The Impact of Materialism

Materialism is closely linked to consumer culture, as people often use material possessions to boost their self-esteem or feel more accepted by their peers. By understanding materialism and its implications, we can better understand our own behavior and make more informed decisions. Materialism is a powerful philosophical concept that has had a profound impact on many aspects of our lives. It has been used to explain human behavior, social structures, economics, and even politics. By understanding what materialism is and how it affects us, we can make more informed decisions about our lives.

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Materialism In Society And How We Can Overcome It

A common problem we all face is not having enough money. But when looked more closely. We can see that the real problem is not (only) our limited resources. The real problem we experience – or so I hope to convince you – is that we’ve unwittingly inherited a troubling understanding of how to use our limited resources. We use money not as a tool that can generate more money – e.g., invest. But as a way to obtain more possessions so we can prove to others our worthiness.

There’s no shame in being materialistic – wanting stuff. But it’s problematic when stuff is all you pursue.

No wonder why materialism in society is affecting how we operate.

These days. We can only be happy when we know for certainty that we have what others have.

Not because we need extra things. But because we crave extra attention.

After all, acquiring something new triggers a sequence of events:

• We get to share our shiny new possession.
• This invites eyeballs to our persona.
• Thus, the pleasant sensation of recognition goes through our veins.

Every time others are looking at us, this is feeding our appetite to feel accepted. We get a sense of belonging. We feel valued. And this aspect further enables a safe feeling of being part of a group.

But when you join a group that is purely driven by inciting envy in others – by unexhaustingly talking about what’s next on their shopping list so they can appear superior. How is this a good long-term relationship?

Your day-to-day life becomes an endless struggle to earn more so you can purchase more.

Collecting bread crumbs of joy.

But never being truly satisfied.

Not because the act of buying is not pleasantly stimulating the mind. But because there is always something new being produced and new to buy – a new line of clothes, new trendy boots, a new gadget that looks bizarrely unuseful but since others own it…

Outside might appear that we have it all. But inside we are saturated with despair.

If your goal with the money you earn is to get more stuff. I’d like to challenge your approach and hopefully lead you somewhere worthwhile.

In this post. I’m going to uncover the ugliness in our society. Our materialistic society.

What Is The Impact of Materialism On Our Society?

Apart from unstable finances and a cluttered home. The main impact materialism has on our society is the depressing feeling of never being good enough.

After all, every time you see others possessing things you don’t. A sensation of resentment grows inside of you both toward the individual for attaining this thing and toward yourself for not being capable of having it.

When this situation occurs. We usually respond by either purchasing what others have – which put us in greater debt. Or, we get eaten from our feelings until this thing is no longer fashionable.

But this is just part of the problem.

You also start to aim toward the wrong things – have wrong personal value s. 1

Instead of trying to build a stable home built upon honesty, generosity, and hard work. You knowingly or not transfer your urgers to obtain material possessions to your kids.

They become more interested in showcasing themselves as worthy citizens of the modern world – by sharing photos wearing luxurious clothes , standing beside pools, etc. But actually not being valuable – lack empathy, sense of purpose, autonomy.

When stuff is the guiding principle, a social image is projected where the person is supposedly unrealistically happy all the time while inside he’s fighting depression.

We focus not on what we have. But on what we could have.

This keeps us away from feeling joy from what’s currently in front of us. We are consumed by agony because we focus on imagining what can someday be in front of us.

And this is true not only for things. But for relationships also.

Eventually, with each year. Society becomes more focused on things rather than people.

Yes, you still need people. But not in a way you’d imagine.

People are not called community. People are not called friends.

We label them as an audience.

We talk about followers and subscribers. Words that exclude the human soul sitting behind the screen and only focus on the purchasing power of the mass.

No wonder we feel so alone in this crowded world.

And it’s not only me saying this as an observer of how humans tend to operate these days. There are numerous studies that confirm this statement – that materialistic goals are associated with decreased well-being. 2

It’s no longer about building relationships – “How can I help you?” But about the monetizing relationships – “What can you give me?”

What Causes of Materialism?

On the surface level. We can say that materialism is caused by our open world.

You can easily see what others have these days. Just open your favorite browser and your social media and you see what others are doing.

Internally though, the problem is much more subtle.

It’s not only because we have 24/7 access to what our fellow humans do. But because of internal issues – feeling insecure and not receiving enough attention from others.

As Eric Berne writes in his book Games People Play : “Recognition-hunger is far more important than food-hunger.”

Being alive is far down the list of desired features than others acknowledging your presence.

And to get people to recognize you. These days, it’s way easier to purchase something than to build something.

Not only can we show a new scarf, a new handbag much more easily, but we cannot adequately present learning a new language.

Also, in the first case, the purchase of a new item requires only pushing a couple of buttons and money – money you don’t even need to have. While in the second case, it requires grit, disciple, hard work, and showing up every day .

Since we are primarily focused on getting immediate results, we prefer the former.

The moment we feel inadequate. When the spotlight is no longer on us. When others don’t seem to care. We immediately jump into the vortex of shops to escape the vulnerable feeling that we’re not good enough.

Instead of doing something worthwhile. We choose to spend a good amount of our time and money on things to persuade others that we are worthwhile.

That’s one of the main reasons we endlessly shop.

Can Materialism Be Good for Society?

It doesn’t seem to make sense to suggest that there might be such a thing as good materialism. After all, isn’t being dependent upon physical possessions plain bad, always?

In truth, the act of acquiring things does come with certain “goodies”.

I’ve identified 3 good things in materialism that are important for the person to understand:

Materialism To Feel Good

As noted above. Gettings things is the fastest way to get a sense that you matter.

This can be a shallow and selfish drive. But it remains an important component of our personalities.

When you work hard. Save. And eventually have enough money to purchase a new car, for example. This is direct evidence that you’re a capable person. Yes, it’s kind of feels sad to compare an individual to his purchasing powers. But the sensations we get from getting stuff are too big to be neglected.

Every time you feel incapable. You can look around and see what you already have. Thus, you can feel better.

In other words, what you have is kind of like a safety net. When you feel like a loser. You can bounce back and feel better by reminding yourself of everything that’s already in your possession – “Oh, I’ve created a beautiful home. I’m not a complete disappointment.”

Materialism to Support Our Identity

Material objects that support our desired identity give us the power to continue our journey.

Say you want to become a writer. Your internal motivation is a good start to take on the long journey of improving the words you type on a page. But the initial setback can quickly discourage you.

As religion endorses the purchases of icons and medallions so you can keep believing. Physical possessions like a fancy pen or a new desk where you exercise writing can be things that support your desire to become the person you want to be.

To a visitor, your new desk is simply a place you sit to do work. But on a psychological level, this purchase supports your desire to become a writer. Every time you see it. You get reminded that this is a tool that allows you to be the person you decided – a writer.

The more you increase the set of items that are related to being a writer. The closer you feel to becoming one. This is an important part of our inner evolution. 3

Materialism Drives Innovation

From a practical perspective. It doesn’t make sense to start a website that publishes book summaries – as I do on this site. There are plenty of sites that synthesize the main topics of great books.

And yet, if there is only one place for book summaries, for clothes, only one brand of cars. This will mean that there are so few opportunities for creative work.

While shopping can be viewed as a prime evil. It can be viewed as a source that drives innovation.

The more we spent. The more we support the global economy. More goods are produced and more money is allocated for innovation.

Plus, if you happen to choose to support small businesses owners – not big monopolistic corporations. You will help more individuals do creative work.

Negative Effects of Materialism

Like everything else.

Balance is key.

Yes, as I just noted. There are good traits in materialism and consumption. But we are rarely in the middle ground.

Most commonly, we are throwing money around and sharing our new possession with the prime incentive to present ourselves are better than the rest.

Earning a decent salary may buy you some level of comfort. You will surely impress a certain group of people. And in the short term, you will certainly feel happy about yourself.

Materialism becomes problematic when we connect our happiness only to the act of purchasing.

When we buy something, our brain releases endorphins and dopamine. This improves our current state. But it quickly diminished with time. 4

When the new pair of shoes are no longer a source of joy. Or at least no longer can keep us away from our problems. We are back in the virtual or physical store wanting to get more stuff.

The core question is this: What internal switch triggers an uncontrollable shopping spree?

What makes us waste our hard-earned cash on stuff?

Primarily, it’s our inability to cope with our deep emotions.

When we are bored. When we feel sad, not good enough, depressed. Or when we have problems in the office or our relationship is in a bad state. Instead of trying to fix the situation by communicating. We turn to the local mall to soothe our feelings.

After all. Getting a new laptop, toaster, or whatever, comes with certain benefits:

• It’s fast.
• It’s an act that doesn’t require special powers.
• You can do it even if you don’t have the money.
• A new thing can’t hurt your feelings. It can only signal to others how well you’re doing in life.

This internally translates that you only need money to feel good.

Since money can buy you things. And when things make you feel good. Mathematically speaking, it means that the more you earn, the happier you will feel.

So, what do you think happens?

Oh yes, we value money more than anything else. Because money equals things. And things equals recognition.

Is this really the case?

Not exactly.

If we turn to goods every time we are in a bad state. We’ll never create a stable relationship with the person we said yes to a while back. We’ll change relationships like we change clothes.

The greatest negative effect of materialism is that it powers this fantasy world where there are no limitations. Which, in turn, will focus you not on fortifying the single relationship that matters but on trying to impress the mass that in the long term doesn’t matter.

Let me explain…

Eventually, the relationship with your partner (or a small group of friends) will start to feel uneventful. Boring even. You start to see all the ways your partner is inevitably finite. This feels deeply disappointing compared with the unlimited joys consummation can bring – and here the word consummation is not only used in a sense of getting stuff.

After all, why should you spend another evening where you’ll have the same discussion about how your days went by when you can browse the infinite online catalogs that offer new excitements?

The answer seems obvious. That’s why it’s concerning.

When we start to focus on possessions. When they are our measurement for success. Other more important things seem unimportant.

As long as there are others who are liking how we appear – even though we don’t personally know them, they are just online avatars. It doesn’t matter if the one person who happens to be our lifetime roommate is feeling lonely while being near us.

And yet, if you think about when you are actually happy. Not temporarily satisfied. But joyful for hours. How often the answer is: “When I bought a new pair of shoes!” Or, “When I received 100 likes on my new photo!”

Usually, you’ll respond with something like: “When I was hiking with my best friends.” Or, “When I was working on a painting and I lost track of time.”

The question – if we want to feel happier for longer and get a sense of meaning in this seemingly meaningless world – then becomes: How can I schedule more experiences that bring me lasting joy instead of buying things that only come with fleeting sensations and push me to get even more things?

How to Overcome Materialism?

When you identify with the things you own. You naturally become obsessed with owning more.

You see yourself as this walking billboard. The more expensive things you put. The more expensive you feel. You start to think that others should respect you more because you are increasing your value.

But say that things are to be removed. Say for a moment that you have none of the possessions you have right now. If this happens, how can you identify yourself? How can you label yourself when you have nothing?

As Erich Fromm writes in his book To Have or To Be , “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?”

The answer will reveal something you know but avoid.

It’s not what you own. But what you do that matters.

• Acquiring everything writing-related doesn’t make you a writer. Writing does.
• Spending hours online sharing photos where you’re supposedly happy with your kids doesn’t make you a good parent. Spending time with your kids does.
• Spending money on things and sharing these items with others doesn’t make you a valuable citizen. Doing valuable things without needing to tell others for others does.

With this in mind. Let’s see how we can overcome materialism:

Steps To Overcome Materialism:

First, prepare on a piece of paper a list of everything that you got to have.

Think about everything that you feel you need. All of the items that you think will supposedly make a difference in your life. Some of these things will probably be a new car, a new set of dining dishes, etc.

Second, think about how would you feel if you get these things.

What will happen if you got the new car? How your life will change?

Write these things down.

Your initial thought, probably, will be that you will feel like you’re really succeeding in life. But the thought that you’ll try to cover – the one that it’s really important for you. Is that the new purchase is primarily a tool to make others envy you. To make others like you more.

When you think about it though. Do you really want people to respect you for what you own? Not for who you are as a person?

When we demonstrate our worthiness through stuff, what we’re really doing is portraying emptiness.

We feel insecure and confused. We don’t know what we want to do with our lives and that’s why we adopt materialistic values.

Thirdly, moving beyond possessions. Do this: Write a list of things you enjoy doing.

Focus on experiences. On actions. On things you do with your hands. On conversations with people.

For example, building a chair from scratch. Writing an essay. Going for a walk with your kid and partner.

Fifth, think about how would you feel if you do more interesting things rather than purchase more physical possessions?

In other words, what do you think will feel better: Purchasing new writing equipment regularly? Or, writing a novel and discussing that novel with your partner?

I bet it’s the writing and the discussions that will count.

Finally, think about this: Can you keep doing what feels good without constantly trying to own more things?

When you choose what to devote your life to. When you are no longer looking for someone better – but choose to stay together with the person you said yes to “for better or worse”. You’re no longer trying to impress others.

The point is settling.

You settle for doing certain things. For being part of certain relationships.

This initially might seem unexciting. But eventually, will start to feel better.

You are no longer depressed because you don’t have it all. You feel liberated because you realize that you don’t need to have it all.

Spending every waking hour restlessly scouring the online shopping malls for the perfect item that will make you look superior in front of others is no longer part of your portfolio of actions.

In other words, you don’t dream about what type of joys alternative relationships or items can bring. You focus on nurturing the current relationships and using the items you already have that will support your desired calling.

Some Closing Thoughts

Will getting a new laptop make me feel good?

Absolutely.

Will this feeling going to last?

Absolutely not .

The growing materialism in society instills the wrong values in individuals. We become more resentful towards people. Towards creating useful and valuable creations. And only interested in owning more shiny stuff so we can signal to others that we are worth following.

But soon after you get something. Soon after you go somewhere. You are quickly reminded of how much more there is to possess. To visit.

So, instead of being satisfied with what you already own. Where you’ve been. You are further focusing on how less you own compared to everything available.

This is not only depressing. But it places you in a loop where you are constantly chasing things you will never have.

Thriving in our materialistic society requires being able to settle on a specific group of people, things, and activities. Not completely shut the outside world. But being able to function even when the outside world is constantly shouting “own more”.

Trouble Saying No to Temptations?

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• That’s why it’s so important to take a moment so you can define your values. See more in my piece on the importance of values .
• The original paper by Springer ( this one ) explains how changes in materialism relate to changes in well-being.
• But this doesn’t mean that you should have everything writing-related to be a writer.
• There is a whole concept of retail therapy . Shopping is commonly prescribed as a therapy to eliminate sadness. However, it’s only a short-term solution.

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What is Materialism? History and Concepts

• First Online: 05 October 2021

Cite this chapter

• Javier Pérez-Jara 12 , 13 ,
• Gustavo E. Romero 14 , 15 &
• Lino Camprubí 16  

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 447))

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Despite the central presence of materialism in the history of philosophy, there is no universal consensus on the meaning of the word “matter” nor of the doctrine of philosophical materialism. Dictionaries of philosophy often identify this philosophy with its most reductionist and even eliminative versions, in line with Robert Boyle’s seventeenth century coinage of the term. But when we take the concept back in time to Greek philosophers and forward onto our own times, we recognize more inclusive forms of materialism as well as complex interplays with non-materialist thought about the place of matter in reality, including Christian philosophy and German idealism. We define philosophical materialism in its most general way both positively (the identification of reality with matter understood as changeability and plurality) and negatively (the negation of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas). This inclusive approach to philosophical materialism offers a new light to illuminate a critical history of the concept of matter and materialism from Ancient Greece to the present that is also attentive to scientific developments. By following the most important connections and discontinuities among theoretical frameworks on the idea of matter, we present a general thread that offers a rich and plural, but highly cohesive, field of investigation. Finally, we propose building on rich non-reductionist materialist philosophies, such as Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism and Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism, to elaborate powerful theoretical alternatives to both physicalism and spiritualism.

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A Matter of Faith: Derrida, Žižek, and the Fourth ‘Overcoming of Gnosis’

Materialism without Materialism: Slavoj Žižek and the Disappearance of Matter

Some of these philosophers, as we are going to see, used the language of traditional myth to talk about abstract philosophical conceptions; that is, they used that language as a set of rhetorical devices, along with giving traditional concepts (such as “cosmos”) a new philosophical meaning. Only a minority of them still held literal beliefs in traditional mythological elements (such as reincarnation). For that reason, although the new way of thinking that they created emerged from a specific sociocultural context (rather than appearing ex nihilo ), it had enough new and revolutionary features to be considered and classified apart.

Although Hesiod started his Theogony with an impersonal chaos (a prefiguration of later metaphysical notions), he also offered anthropomorphic explanations for the rest of natural phenomena.

According to some scholars, such as Jennifer Peck, Heraclitus’ notions of logos and God, although very similar, should not be identified, since Heraclitus’ logos is the pattern present in all things, whereas God refers to the principle of unity of opposites. It is undeniable that Heraclitus’ fragments are obscure, and often difficult to interpret; but what seems clear is that for him, the notions of God and logos , if not identical, are very similar and refer to the universal impersonal mechanism and structure of reality.

This philosopher introduced an important critique of Parmenides’ view of reality as a (Euclidean) giant sphere: since a sphere necessarily implies an outer space, reality has to be infinite .

For a full account of the atomists, with fragments, doxography and commentaries see Taylor ( 1999 ).

It is important to note that Plato talked about the Demiurge using the explicit language of myth. Since in several Dialogues Plato used other myths as allegorical teachings rather than literalist dogmas, it is also possible that his myth of the Demiurge has a non-literalist anthropomorphic reading. But while in other Platonic myths the allegorical reading is clear, in his myth of the Demiurge it is not. For that reason, it is more than likely that Plato, as Anaxagoras and Socrates before, held a real belief in some kind of personal mind that gave form to the world.

Aristotle also considered the existence of lesser “gods” who, along with the main God, move the planets, but they do so in a completely impersonal and blind way.

Although Epicurus considered Greek mythology’s gods as human fictions, he recommended his disciples to visit Greek temples and contemplate the serenity of the gods’ statues. Such activity could have psychological and ethical benefits.

The case of the relationships between Stoicism and Christianity is very interesting. Several Stoic ideas related to ethics and politics were accepted and transformed by some Christian thinkers, at the same time that they rejected Stoic metaphysics.

This is Docetism’s theological doctrine, according to which the body of Jesus was an illusion. But, despite its partial influence in other Christian communities, Docetism was soon perceived as a dangerous heresy by more powerful and popular forms of Christianity: see Wahlde ( 2015 ), Freeman ( 2011 ), and Papandrea ( 2016 ).

Through these binary oppositions between the sins generated by matter, and the virtues generated by the spirit, St. Paul did not seem no notice the theological contradiction that it was not matter, but the pure spirit of Satan who introduced evil in reality, before the creation of matter.

Even though Plato drew from the Orphic despise of matter, he did not plea for asceticism and mortification of the flesh. On the contrary, Plato encouraged good nutrition, bodily aesthetics, and sports.

Here, we use the concept of “neophobia” in Bunge’s critical sense, i.e as the metaphysical approach that denies ontological novelty in reality: “The most popular idea about novelty is that whatever appears to be new actually existed previously in a latent form: that all things and all facts are ’pregnant’ with whatever may arise from them. An early example of such neophobia is the conception of causes as containing their effects, as expressed by the scholastic formula ’There is nothing in the effect that had not been in the cause’.” (Bunge 2010 , p. 87).

According to which everything is connected with everything else through God (Bueno 1972 ).

Aquinas even defended that matter could be eternal, despite been created by God. Only by Revelation do we know that the material universe had a beginning in time: see Aquinas ( 1948 ) and Gilson ( 1960 ).

Sharing similar theological problems and concerns, these combination between negative and positive theologies also took place in medieval Judaism and Islam: see Kars ( 2019 ) and Fagenblat ( 2017 ), respectively.

The recovery of God’s anthropomorphic attributes was achieved through cataphatic theology, which sought to understand God in positive terms, emphasizing the divine attributes that we can find through the Revelation.

Hume’s (and, later, Stuart Mill’s) psychologism is different in that it can be considered an even softer version of this hypostatization of the psyche. Both authors downplay the organic and operational side of human existence, along with reducing abstract concepts, ideas and relations to psychological processes. But the independence of the mind respect of the nervous system is not held; it just suggested as a possibility.

Kant’s pure categories of the understanding are: unity, plurality, and totality for the concept of quantity; reality, negation, and limitation, for the concept of quality; inherence and subsistence, cause and effect, and community for the concept of relation; and possibility–impossibility, existence–nonexistence, and necessity and contingency, for the concept of mode (see Kant 2008 [1787]; Heidegger 1997 [1929]; and Strawson 2018 ).

It is well-known that Kant ( 2015 [1788]) introduced this God again in the Critique of Practical Reason as a postulate for moral action. But this does not contradict that, from an epistemological point of view, Kant held that the Christian God was just an idea.

Russell ( 1972 [1945]), p. 718.

Russell ( 1972 [1945]), p. 718. Russell also contended that “Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of every-day common sense.” Russell ( 1972 [1945]), p. XXI.

Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was later reworked by Fichte in various versions. The most well-known version of the work was published in 1804, but other versions appeared posthumously.

That is, for Fichte, absolute reality cannot be (as Schelling will defend later) both subjective and objective.

The concept of Tathandlung reminds of Husserl’s Leistung . But Husserl’s transcendental idealism did not deny the Kantian “thing in it self” as Fichte did; it just placed it between brackets: see Pérez-Jara 2014 .

This book was published thanks to Kant’s support. As such, it was briefly mistaken by the public to be a fourth Kantian Critique. This confusion granted Fichte a considerable philosophical fame.

Important to note is that Schelling’s lectures on positive philosophy were attended by personalities such as Engels, Bakunin, Kierkegaard, and Humboldt.

The World as Will and Representation ’s first edition was published in late 1818, with the date 1819 on the title–page. In 1844, a second edition appeared. This edition was divided into two volumes: the first one was an edited version of the 1818 edition, while the second volume was a collection of commentaries about the ideas expounded in the first volume. In 1859, at the end of Schopenhauer’s life, a third expanded edition was published.

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexuality brilliantly anticipates many hypotheses of evolutionary biology: see Pérez-Jara ( 2011 ).

Schopenhauer agreed with Schulze’s critique of Kant’s contradictory use of causality. For Schopenhauer, the thing in it self (i.e., the Will) is not the cause of our sensations. Rather, our sensations are a (non-causal) manifestation of the Will.

Here, we use the concept of organoleptic in its usual meaning of relative to our sensory experiences, so the “organoleptic world” is the set of phenomena, from the taste of wine to the colors of the sky, filtered through our sense organs.

For a very interesting philosophical analysis on this topic, see: Bueno ( 1972 ), pp. 50, 52, 60, 72, 283, 288.

Jarochewski ( 1975 ), p. 168.

Bunge ( 2010 ), p. 127.

Notable exceptions can be found in the work of J.C.C. Smart, Graham Nerlich, and Hugh Price who worked extensively on the ontology of spacetime and related problems.

On the other hand, Bunge ( 2010 ) opposed both approaches, because for him there cannot be states or events without entities. Romero, however, points out that materialist ontologies based on concrete things or particular events are formally equivalent (Romero 2013 , 2016 ): to consider things or events as basic is rather a matter or taste and not of fact.

Bunge ( 2010 ), p. 148.

It would also be interesting to wonder if these philosophers, in their daily lives (or even in their lectures and conferences) exclusively use complex neuroscientific terminology each time that they want to express that they feel tired, forgot something, feel disappointed, or are hungry.

Also, see in this volume his chapter and his discussion with Javier Pérez-Jara.

While Bueno himself referred to his system as “philosophical materialism” in the 1970s, as he was seeking to differentiate it from historical materialism, that conceptualization is too general and common to other philosophies; in later works, Bueno spoke of “discontinuous materialism”.

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Pérez-Jara, J., Romero, G.E., Camprubí, L. (2022). What is Materialism? History and Concepts. In: Romero, G.E., Pérez-Jara, J., Camprubí, L. (eds) Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology. Synthese Library, vol 447. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89488-7_1

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Consumer Behavior

The madness of materialism, why are we so driven to accumulate possessions and wealth.

Posted March 10, 2012 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

In January 1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill by a river near present day Sacramento when he found a piece of glowing metal on the floor, which turned out to be gold. Once rumours of the discovery had spread within a few weeks, tens of thousands of people were flocking to the area, struck by "gold fever."

Ships were abandoned all over the California coast, businesses closed down, and whole towns became deserted. In a little over a year, San Francisco grew from a shanty town of 79 buildings to a city of tens of thousands. Over the next few years, at least 300,000 gold-seekers came to California.

The effect on the Native Americans of California was catastrophic. They were driven off their traditional hunting and gathering grounds, and their rivers were polluted by gravel, silt, and toxic chemicals from the new mines. Some Indian groups used force to try to protect their lands, but were massacred by the miners. Those who weren't killed by the miners slowly starved to death, or died from diseases passed on by the immigrants. Others were kept as slaves, while attractive young women were carried off to be sold. As a result, the Californian Native American population fell from around 150,000 in 1845 to 30,000 in 1870.

This savage materialism was typical of European immigrants' attitude to the "New World" of America. They saw it as a treasure-house of resources to ransack, and saw the native population as an inconvenient obstacle to be eradicated.

Some tribes were so confused by the colonists' insatiable desire for gold that they believed that the metal must be a kind of deity with supernatural powers. Why else would they go to such lengths to get hold of it? When an Indian chief in Cuba learned that Spanish sailors were about to attack his island, he started to pray to a chest full of gold, appealing to the "gold spirit" which he believed they worshipped. But the gold spirit didn't show him any mercy — the sailors invaded the island, captured the chief, and burned him alive.

Modern Materialism

In some ways, the gold diggers' rampant materialism was understandable, since they were living at a time of great poverty, and for many of them gold digging seemed to offer an escape from starvation. But most of us in the western, industrialized world don't have that excuse. Our appetite for wealth and material goods isn't driven by hardship, but by our own inner discontent. We're convinced that we can buy our way to happiness , that wealth is the path to permanent fulfillment and well-being. We still measure success in terms of the quality and price of the material goods we can buy, or in the size of our salaries.

Our mad materialism would be more forgivable if there was evidence that material goods and wealth do lead to happiness. But all the evidence fails to show this. Study after study by psychologists has shown that there is no correlation between wealth and happiness. The only exception is in cases of real poverty, when extra income does relieve suffering and brings security. But once our basic material needs are satisfied, our level of income makes little difference to our level of happiness.

Research has shown, for example, that extremely rich people such as billionaires are not significantly happier than people with an average income, and suffer from higher levels of depression . Researchers in positive psychology have concluded that true well-being does not come from wealth but from other factors such as good relationships, meaningful and challenging jobs or hobbies, and a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves (such as a religion, a political or social cause, or a sense of mission).

Explanations for Materialism

Many economists and politicians believe that acquisitiveness — the impulse to buy and possess things — is natural to human beings. This seems to make sense in terms of Darwin's theory of evolution: Since natural resources are limited, human beings have to compete over them, and try to claim as large a part of them as possible.

One of the problems with this theory is that there is actually nothing "natural" about the desire to accumulate wealth. In fact, this desire would have been disastrous for earlier human beings. For the vast majority of our time on this planet, human beings have lived as hunter-gatherers — small tribes who would usually move to a different site every few months. As we can see from modern hunter-gatherers, this way of life has to be non-materialistic, because people can't afford to be weighed down with unnecessary goods. Since they moved every few months, unnecessary goods would simply be a hindrance to them, making it more difficult for them to move.

Another theory is that the restlessness and constant wanting which fuels our materialism is a kind of evolutionary mechanism which keeps us in a state of alertness. (The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has suggested this, for example.) Dissatisfaction keeps living beings on the lookout for ways of improving their chances of survival; if they were satisfied they wouldn't be alert, and other creatures would take the advantage.

But there is no evidence that other animals live in a state of restless dissatisfaction. On the contrary, many animals seem to very slow and static lives, content to remain within their niche and to follow their instinctive patterns of behaviour. And if this is what drives our materialism, we would probably expect other animals to be acquisitive too. But again, there is no evidence — apart from some food-hoarding for the winter months — that other animals share our materialistic impulses. If it was necessary for living beings to be restless and constantly wanting then evolution would surely have ground to a halt millions of years ago.

In my view, acquisitiveness is best understood in psychological terms. Our mad materialism is partly a reaction to inner discontent. As human beings, it's normal for us to experience an underlying psychological discord, caused by the incessant chattering of our minds, which creates a disturbance inside us and often triggers negative thoughts. Another source of psychological discord is the strong sense of separateness many of us feel, the sense of being isolated individuals living in a world which is "out there," on the other side of our heads.

We look to external things to try to alleviate our inner discontent. Materialism certainly can give us a kind of happiness — the temporary thrill of buying something new, and the ego-inflating thrill of owning it afterward. And we use this kind of happiness to try to override, or compensate for, the fundamental unhappiness inside us.

In addition, our desire for wealth is a reaction to the sense of lack and vulnerability generated by our sense of separation. This generates a desire to makes ourselves more whole, more significant and powerful. We try to bolster our fragile egos and make ourselves feel more complete by accumulating wealth and possessions.

It doesn't work, of course — or at least, it only works for a very short time. The happiness of buying or owning a new item rarely lasts longer than a couple of days. The sense of ego-inflation generated by wealth or expensive possessions can be more enduring, but it's very fragile too. It depends on comparing yourself to other people who aren't as well off as you, and evaporates if you compare yourself to someone who is wealthier than you. And no matter how much we try to complete or bolster our ego, our inner discontent and incompleteness always re-emerges, generating new desires. No matter how much we get, it's never enough. As Buddhism teaches, desires are inexhaustible. The satisfaction of one desire just creates new desires, like a cell multiplying.

The only real way of alleviating this psychological discord is not by trying to escape it, but by trying to heal it. — which will have to be subject of another blog post. http://www.stevenmtaylor.com

Dr. Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. This article is adapted from his best-selling book Back to Sanity. www.stevenmtaylor.com

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of several best-selling books, including The Leap and Spiritual Science.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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Material World: A Portrait of the World’s Possessions

By maria popova.

In each of the 30 countries, Menzel found a statistically average family and photographed them outside their home, with all of their belongings. The result is an incredible cross-cultural quilt of possessions, from the utilitarian to the sentimental, revealing the faceted and varied ways in which we use “stuff” to make sense of the world and our place in it.

Freelancing in Somalia during their civil war and in Kuwait right after the first Bush War, I had some rather intense experiences that made life in the U.S. seem rather shallow and superfluous. Sitting in my office early one morning, listening to NPR, which is the way I like to start every day, I heard an amazing piece on the marketing of Madonna’s autobiographic book called SEX. The book was a sensation in the U.S. The radio report ended with Madonna singing, ‘I am living in a material world and I am just a material girl,’ or something close. I thought it was spot on. We live in an idiotic capitalist self-indulgent society where the sex life of a pop star is more important than impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa, or more interesting than the world’s biggest man-made natural disaster in oil fields of the Middle East.” ~ Peter Menzel

And for an excellent companion read, see Menzel’s 1998 follow-up, Women in the Material World — a fascinating look at an even more intimate aspect of the human family.

— Published April 8, 2011 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/04/08/material-world-peter-menzel/ —

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What is the difference between idealism and materialism?

I understand what materialism is, but idealism - not so much. I know however they are opposing views, and would like to know what are the differences.

Analogies would be greatly appreciated.

• metaphysics
• materialism

• This is the question of what is fundamental. For materialism, the basic entities of reality are material and the mental is not fundamental. For idealism the converse is true. –  Quentin Ruyant Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 14:18
• "I know however they are opposing views" - to be more precise, realism would be the opposite of idealism. –  Yechiam Weiss Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 15:36
• @QuentinRuyant I still don't understand. Care to elaborate? Do you have an example? –  Bar Akiva Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 18:31
• @YechiamWeiss and how is realism different than idealism? –  Bar Akiva Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 18:35
• 1 @YechiamWeiss I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of Berkeley's view. First, Berkeley went to great lengths to argue that by whatever standard of reality you might have, his account delivers the result that there is a real world outside of you. Second, Berkeley denies that the real world is a 'projection' of your mind, in the way that hallucinations or dreams or imaginings might be projections. Rather, real objects depend for their existence on their being perceived, but dependence doesn't entail projection (whatever exactly that amounts to) –  possibleWorld Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 20:40

4 Answers 4

It's hard to give a once-and-for-all answer to this question, because what exactly materialism and idealism amount to depends largely on the historical era you have in mind.

That said, here's one way to cash out these notions. Materialism is the view that material objects exist. Idealism is the view that every object either is, or depends for its existence upon, mental entities.

Note that, as stated, these aren't opposing views, for it could be that material objects are either identical to or depend upon mental entities for their existence. (Edit: upon reflection I decided to redact the bit about Berkeley.)

However, anti-materialism sits pretty naturally with idealism, because if you deny that material objects exist you'll need some account of what objects are, and it looks like idealism offers a neat answer to that.

• What if somebody believes mental entities (ideal objects) don't exist. I'm asking because your answer seems to imply ideal(ism) is primary. But what if materialism vs idealism is actually an opposition (two poles which cannot be conceived of separately) rather than two streams of thought? –  ttnphns Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 10:43
• @ttnphns Sure, that's one way of characterizing out the positions. Like I said, the views I characterized aren't definitive, but are just one way you might go. –  possibleWorld Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 17:05
• @ttnphns - I'd say you're on the right track. A third choice is implied. –  user20253 Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 11:44

I can offer only one angle on a many-sided question. I largely agree with the first answer. Then in my own terms :

This typically means that only ideas exist - ideas in the, or a, subject's mind. Hence Bishop Berkeley's claim that all that exist are minds or spirits and their ideas. Point to a so-called object in the external world, say a chair, and the answer from an idealist is likely to be that he chair is just a collection or complex of ideas : we say it is brown, but that means just that we have a perception of brown. We say that it is solid, but that only means that we will experience the idea - a feeling - of resistance if we touch it.

Berkeley needs careful handling. On his account ideas cannot be the effects produced in us by objects in the external world. Then how do they originate ? Among the minds or spirits is God. God produces in us all our ideas. What's more, God controls all minds or spirits simultaneously and creates the aggregates of ideas that we call chairs, the sun, and other constants and continuants in what we (or 'the vulgar') take to be the external world. Some ideas exhibit a regularity in our experience which causes us to regard them as Laws of Nature.

Though the term 'idealism' does not derive from Berkeley - Leibniz had already used it and Berkeley doesn't use it so far as I know - Berkeley's use of ideas as fundamental (along with the minds that have them) suggests the origin of the term in the notion of ideas. Idealism is idea-ism and only 'idealism' for ease of language.

▻ MATERIALISM

Various possibilities here but most, or quite, likely the view that all that exist are physical things. Everything that exists is purely physical and can be described in physical terms where the physical is whatever occupies a space/ time region.

This is an extreme form of materialism. Materialism can also refer to the view that them material has primacy, that it is fundamental and everything else dependent on or derivative from it. (Thanks to ttphns for reminding me of the distinction.)

This gives the broad contrast and I hope it helps.

• I wouldn't generally equate phenomena with ideas (although it is ok in some specific traditions of thought). –  ttnphns Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 10:49
• Materialism does not necessarily claim "everything is physical". It states material things are primary reality what exists, ideas - if there are - are secondary. –  ttnphns Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 10:53
• I didn't say 'necessarily' : I qualified my definition with 'most, or quite, likely' the view that all that exist are physical things. And there are forms of materialism that do hold precisely this. –  Geoffrey Thomas ♦ Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 11:45
• Left to myself I would not use the term, 'materialism', which is redolent of 19th-century philosophical controversies. I used the term only because the questioner had done so. –  Geoffrey Thomas ♦ Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 11:51
• @ttnphns. You are perfectly right; I should have alerted the questioner to distinctions within materialism. I have now done so - with acknowledgement. Thank you. Please excuse my earlier abruptness. –  Geoffrey Thomas ♦ Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 11:59

I would like to add another aspect of the contrast between materialism and idealism. This addition is not entirely different from what previous answers have laid out but attempts to emphasize a different perspective perhaps.

Materialism claims that the material world is real and ideas reflect the material conditions that humans find themselves in. In particular, ideas are not freely floating in the aether but necessarily reflect the material reality of the world in one way or the other, either directly or indirectly. In other words, ideas are generalizations and/or approximations that we make to organize the understanding of the material conditions in which we find ourselves. Idealism is in direct contention with materialism most prominently on this last point. Idealism views ideals as primary and the material world as either just an instantiation of a complex set of ideas or as an approximation of the ideal world, e.g. the geometric objects in the real world were seen as an approximation to the ideal objects in the Platonic world.

Oftentimes, much of the content of the analysis done in either materialism or idealism can survive in idealism or materialism respectively. One just needs to turn it on its head as Marx famously said when he gave the materialistic version of Hegel's idealist dialectic analysis.

Idealism is better than materialism because with out idealism we cannot get the science, idealism emphasis good character while materialism emphasis on the modern science and technology

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Materialism Ans Materialistic Theories

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Published: Dec 18, 2018

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• Naïve materialism. This states that the world is made up of four eternal elements, earth, water, air and fire. This was devised by Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (c. 490 – c. 430 BC).
• Metaphysical materialism. It examines separated parts of the world in a static, isolated environment.
• Dialectical materialism. It adapts the Hegelian dialectic for materialism, examining parts of the world in relation to each other within a dynamic environment.

New materialism

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Materialism refers to a collection of personality traits. The contemporary world is full of people who possess materialistic trait. They have a belief that owning and acquisition of the right properties is the vital ingredients of happiness. These people think that success is judged by the things individual possesses. Philosophers and theologians have been complaining for long that materialism is contrary to moral life. More often the goal of gaining material wealth is regarded as empty and in result it prevents a person from being involved in a normal life. The consequences of pursuing materialistic lifestyle are the inability to reach the state of happiness in one’s life. The empirical studies, carried out to find the correlation between happiness and materialism , have confirmed negative correlation between the two.

Being materialistic is bad, as it leads to the creation of the world of difference in the way people treat other human beings. The materialistic people hardly treat others as their equals and often go extra mile to show off their wealth . They hardly care about anyone but themselves and frequently tend to exploit and trample people through the process of a dog eat dog world. It is, therefore, important for people to follow the teachings of the Bible and become moral. The little things we possess, we need to share with the poor as this will ensure equality in the society. Materialism nurtures corruption and causes the society to be impoverished.

Materialistic people use every available means to ensure that the rest of the people in the society remain poor. The aspect of materialism is more pronounced in the third world countries, where leaders are driven by greed and in the process embezzle public funds to maintain their status.

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Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana during his White House visit with President Dwight D Eisenhower in July 1958. Photo by Bettmann/Getty

The route to progress

Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike.

by Frank Gerits   + BIO

In the late 1980s, my father and his friend got pulled over by an East German police officer. They had inadvertently taken a wrong turn, leaving the international road that connected West Germany to West Berlin. After some frantic back-and-forth with the officer, they were allowed to turn back.

Things get a bit more harrowing when world leaders take a wrong turn.

In 1962, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev supplied Cuba’s Fidel Castro with long-range missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and almost triggered an all-out war. The presence of weapons this close to Washington, DC violated the spheres-of-influence logic that had emerged after the Second World War. The Soviet Union and the United States each constituted their own pole around which ideological, military and economic influence coalesced.

Since the Cold War touched every aspect of peoples’ lives – from my own father to Castro – academics, journalists and pundits became obsessed with understanding the international system the Cold War had created. A new academic discipline, called international relations theory, rode the enthusiasm surrounding scientific research in the 1950s and met the need for predictability in the face of nuclear Armageddon. Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, theorists like Kenneth Waltz said that the Cold War was making the international system safer. With only two poles, a balance of power was naturally bound to occur, he argued , because states integrate weaker states within their sphere of influence and divide the cake, creating fewer opportunities for conflict.

T hese so-called international relations theorists drew on ancient thinkers and history to predict behaviour that goes with a particular type of international system. Based on Thucydides ’ account, the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens (431- 404 BCE ) came to be known as the first bipolar international system. Key political theorists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Oakeshott had already conceptualised politics as the struggle between two poles, and served as an inspiration for their colleagues who studied international politics. Yet, the precise origins of thinking in terms of bipolarity and world order are murky.

Ancient philosophers like Plato, who talked about political order, were followed by Church fathers like Augustine of Hippo who talked about the City of God, and Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant who believed two republics would never go to war with each other. Even as Cold War bipolarity became cemented in the minds of policymakers and university professors in the 1960s, there were always dissidents or contrarians from its consensus.

Already in 1944, but also after the Chinese Communist revolution of 1949, when Mao Zedong formally proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, the journalist Walter Lippman argued that China had an autonomous role, separate from the Soviets, and he viewed General Charles de Gaulle’s decision in 1966 to withdraw French troops from the military command structure of the US-dominated NATO as further proof of the end of the superpower dominance.

Boardgame thinking ignores that it’s people who determine what international affairs look like

Talk of a new international order tends to emerge at moments when new metrics for measuring power beyond hard indicators, such as military capacity and the amount of economic output, emerge to help better understand changing realities. In the 1970s, Japan’s economic growth, driven by technological advancements, positioned it as a potential major player in a multipolar world order, an argument further strengthened by the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. The messy world of diplomacy is often reduced to a bloodless boardgame of players reacting to each other’s moves. The political scientist John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago acquired global fame in February 2022 when a videoclip from 2015 resurfaced in which he predicted Russia invading Ukraine, simply because of geographical position and size difference.

Boardgame thinking, however, ignores that it is people and their ideas that determine what the world and its international affairs look like. Talking about an international system as if it is a game of Stratego clings to the fiction of foreign affairs as armchair negotiations between moustached men who have to take only each others’ concerns into account. It makes light of the rise of mass democracies and the sudden emergence of new countries that expounded their own ideologies after 1945.

Decolonisation and postwar reconstruction led to an explosion of new worldviews, highlighting that power and spheres of influence could come only to those with an ideological project, aimed at convincing a mass audience. In the 1940s, governments became the providers of free education and social security schemes to accelerate reconstruction or postcolonial state-building. The GI Bill in the US, the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, free healthcare in the Soviet Union, or the Department of Social Welfare in the Gold Coast, which was taken over by Ghana after independence, all had to prove the viability of their respective capitalist, socialist, imperial or anticolonial ways of life. After 1945, power could not simply be wielded because it came from God, a monarchical lineage, or was legitimised by bourgeois clientelist structures. Power had to be mobilised in the service of something bigger: the creation of progress. The road to modernity was paved in places like the Soviet collective farm, the US supermarket or in the schools of recently independent countries in Africa and Asia.

This struggle for the soul of mankind made the world multipolar as the Cold War – Cuban Missile Crisis and all – intensified. Decolonisation – of India in 1947, or Indonesia in 1945 – exponentially increased the number of possible modernities that were available. The US and the USSR not only faced each other, but also competed with old European empires and – more importantly – newly independent states that were keen to spread their own social model to other parts of the decolonising world.

P ostcolonial leaders did not simply undergo moves made by two players on a chessboard who provided development aid to pull them into a capitalist or a communist sphere of influence. Rather, politicians in Africa and Asia were engaged in a struggle with much higher stakes. They wanted to correct European modernity by destroying the civilising mission, the colonial idea that nonwhites were incapable of self-government, and by embracing precolonial tradition. One such leader, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, spread pan-African modernity, propagating an ‘African personality’ while seeking to unite the continent. This African personality was coined by the Americo-Liberian educator Edward Wilmot Blyden in 1893 and promoted to make the case that African precolonial traditions were not inferior but had provided the basis for the modern world. Propaganda highlighted how Africans had engaged in science and technological innovations before the arrival of Europeans. Even the Gold Coast’s name, Ghana, derived from the Ghana Empire, which had been an economic powerhouse from the 6th to the 13th century.

Unlike communist, capitalist and imperial modernisation strategies, anticolonial modernity prioritised psychological liberation, responding to a pervasive sense that underdevelopment and imperialism were deeply psychological and cultural challenges. As anticolonial intellectuals like the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, a key theorist of the Algerian War, argued in 1961: the ‘white man’ had robbed nonwhites of their self-worth and instilled psychological disease. Therefore, genuine progress required the restoration of self-confidence, the creation of a ‘new man’. Nkrumah also called upon freedom-fighters not to ignore the ‘spiritual side of the human personality’, because Africans’ ‘material needs’ made them vulnerable to subjugation.

Ghana did not shy away from projecting its brand of anticolonial modernity to other parts of Africa

In 1968, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania wanted education to liberate body and mind because ‘colonial education’ had ‘induced attitudes of human inequality.’ Whenever Soviet or US technical advisers arrived in a country they’d seen as embracing a precolonial tradition worthy of their aid, factories and dams got built while peasants were targeted because they represented tradition and supposedly slowed down the transformation of societies. In contrast, Nkrumah’s Ghana sent out special missions, like the one that left Accra on 11 November 1960 for Sudan, Kenya and Tanganyika to first study the ‘political consciousness’ and attitudes of different groups. No financial assistance should ever be given, mission delegates wrote, without first having conducted an on-the-spot analysis. Aloysius K Barden, the director of the Bureau of African Affairs in Ghana, and his team offered scholarships to Sudanese students because they possessed ‘the fire kindled by the youth’, while women were useful because of their wish to ‘exercise their political rights’. Africa could modernise on its own terms if a sense of African cultural uniqueness and pride was restored. The St Lucian economist Arthur Lewis was therefore flown into Ghana to devise an economic development strategy in line with Africa’s precolonial culture and history.

Similarly at the All-African Peoples’ Conference of December 1958, Nkrumah urged delegates to ‘develop’ the ‘African personality’ and not be ‘slavish imitators’ of other ‘ways of life’. The stress on psychology and culture in this conception of modernity meant foreign aid could be accepted from every quarter as long as it was complemented by ideological education in the service of psychological liberation: the freeing of Africans from their inferiority complex. As Tom Mboya claimed in 1961, Kenyans were ‘capable of gauging the ulterior motives’ of those who offered assistance. Moreover, Ghana did not shy away from projecting its brand of anticolonial modernity to other parts of Africa. While propping up the Ghanaian economy with British, US and Soviet funds, in September 1959 Nkrumah also set up a centre for psychological and cultural liberation from empire: Ghana’s Bureau of African Affairs. Besides relying on a printing press, library and linguistic secretariat to produce materials that conjured up a rich African past, the Bureau also produced movies that urged African countries to follow Ghana’s example by showing students and their lecturer in a building that was still under construction.

At the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, foreign students were trained in ‘positive action’, Nkrumah’s brand of political organising, while socialism was struck from the curriculum to highlight the power of Ghana’s example of modernisation that fused African culture and progress.

A nticolonial modernity was not a response to the bipolar world but was rooted in the Haitian Revolution . In 1791, a rebellion of the enslaved, eventually led by the charismatic Black general Toussaint Louverture, demanded the universal application of the French Revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. In so doing, Haitians wanted to not only gain their freedom, but also correct European modernity. The Enlightenment, which had inspired French Revolutionaries, celebrated reason but was tainted by the racist belief that only whites possessed a capacity for it. African leaders came to draw on that ambition for inspiration to define the goal of their own ideological projects. They also attracted intellectuals from the Caribbean like Aimé Césaire , who was influential in Senegal, and George Padmore, who moved to Ghana at the end of his life in 1957. In revolutionary centres in Accra, Cairo and Dar es Salaam, an idealised ‘authentic’ image of the past, found in Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism or ‘ Ujamaa ’, was held up by freedom-fighters as an important corrective to European, Soviet and US modernity, which was exclusionary and racist.

Anticolonial modernity sought to create an international system that looked very different from the bipolar Cold War system. In the worldview of anticolonial leaders, the independence of former colonies was constantly under threat. Attaining a modernity that embraced tradition and liberated people psychologically required the creation of an African Union. This was not an empire, but a federation of liberation where small and fragile independent states could seek protection.

Third World nationalists built different types of federative and cooperative structures beyond their own postcolonial state to marshal the economic, cultural and political capacity required to attain modernity on the Global South’s terms. This is why Nkrumah believed independence was ‘meaningless’ unless it was ‘linked up totally’ with that of the ‘continent’. His finance minister Komla Agbeli Gbedemah agreed, declaring during his visit to India in September 1957 that freedom was ‘indivisible’. In the words of the All-African Peoples’ Conference steering-committee: ‘stable peace’ was ‘impossible in a world that’ was ‘politically half independent and half dependent’. If Ghana’s anticolonialism stopped at its borders, the country would not be able to remain independent.

Pan-Arabists wanted unification to reclaim the grandeur lost during Ottoman and Western occupations

Pan-African modernity had a continental focus, but aspired to remake the colonising world as a whole. In the words of the Trinidadian journalist and pan-African activist Cyril Lionel Robert James, ‘the modernisation necessary in the modern world’ could be attained only ‘in an African way’. The Federation of Liberation became a panacea for the colonial disease wherever it occurred. In 1962, in a letter to all the leaders of the disintegrating West Indian Federation, Nkrumah argued that ‘a united West Indies’ was the only way to deal with ‘problems created by colonialists’.

Instead of a superpower competition for the allegiance of newly independent states, which split the world in two, international relations in the 1950s and ’60s were in fact defined by old and new empires competing with many different federations of liberation. Pan-Africanism was only one of many pan-isms that sought the modernisation of member states, emerged in the 19th century, acquired political meaning after the First World War, and was revived in some way after the Second World War. Besides smaller federations, such as the United Arab Republic, the Ghana-Guinea Union, the Fédération du Mali, the Zanzibar-Tanganyika Union and the Arab-Maghreb Union, larger visions had a global impact. Pan-Arabists wanted unification to reclaim the grandeur lost during Ottoman and Western occupations.

Pan-Asian enthusiasts sought to build a federation of liberation to guard against Chinese or Japanese aggression. Pan-Americanism led to the Pan-American Union in 1890, which aspired to increase cooperation between the US and Latin America, but was adopted by el libertador Simón Bolívar who conceived of it as an anti-US line of defence. As Dane Kennedy writes , decolonisation was not ‘the collapse of colonial empires and the creation of new nation-states’. Rather, the post-1945 wave of independence created a world of federations that sought to bring other countries into their sphere of influence.

In short, in a decolonising world, people had more than communism and capitalism to choose from. Africa did not become the place where the Soviet and the US models competed for supremacy, but a destination for a ‘crowded safari’ as the British journalist Edward Crankshaw quipped in January 1960. The Observer even had to publish a guide to all of the African ‘isms’ to paint a clearer picture of the ‘ferment of ideas’. Anticolonial movements did not define themselves in opposition to or in alignment with US or Soviet ideology, but rather wanted to chart a truly different, inclusive route to progress. They took as a model the future promised by the Haitian Revolution.

The 20th century’s anticolonial revolutionaries resembled other radicals who had also vested their principles within the state institutions their revolutions produced. Marxists in the Soviet Union wanted to achieve the aims of the Bolshevik Revolution, capitalists in the US were eager to export the ideas of the American Revolution, and imperialists within European nation-states sought to spread the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. In ideological terms, therefore, the post-Second World War international order was one in which not only the USSR and the US had a sphere of influence. As French military staff acknowledged in April 1960, Ghana and Egypt had zones of influence on the continent, which Paris needed to take into account when planning operations.

W hile pan-African modernity might have faded in the background of common historical understanding, mid-20th-century contemporaries identified it as an alternative development model. ‘Africans’ regarded ‘Cold War issues as problems’ from which they remained ‘aloof and unaffected’; ‘[e]ven when the Cold War appears in their midst, they are reluctant to identify it as such,’ according to a US study of African attitudes in 1965. Already in 1960, the US State Department acknowledged that Africa was not primarily a Cold War problem, while the president Dwight D Eisenhower believed ‘nationalism was the most powerful force in the world today, and that the pull of independence was stronger than that of communism’.

Communist activities were seen as ancillary, at best, to the real problem, which was the ‘revolution of rising expectations’, the idea that unfulfilled, increased expectations create unstable political situations. Communism was a disease that could thrive in the development process. The US secretary of state John Foster Dulles therefore wanted to ‘pre-empt’ Africa ‘for the Bloc’. In 1968, Walt Rostow, US national security adviser to the president Lyndon B Johnson, recognised the appeal of pan-Africanism, pan-Asianism or pan-Americanism, and sought to control them. Many of the ‘postwar troubles’, he believed, ‘centred around men who were radical, ambitious revolutionaries, who carried maps in their heads of how they would like the world to look’. In Nkrumah’s map, he became ‘the Emperor Jones of Black Africa’.

In 1968, the incoming national security adviser Henry Kissinger wrote three essays on US foreign policy. He concluded that ‘the age of the superpowers’ was ‘drawing to an end’. ‘Military bipolarity’ had ‘actually encouraged political multipolarity’ because ‘weaker allies’ felt ‘protected by the rivalry of the superpowers’. ‘The new nations weigh little in the physical balance of power,’ he admitted. ‘But the forces unleashed in the emergence of so many new states may well affect the moral balance of the world – the convictions which form the structure for the world of tomorrow,’ which added ‘a new dimension to the problem of multipolarity.’ Kissinger was pessimistic about the ideological alternatives anticolonialism had created: ‘The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.’ Instead, ‘power is unrestrained by any consensus as to legitimacy; ideology and nationalism, in their different ways, deepen international schisms.’ He realised that the US had to adjust to the ‘political multipolarity of the late 1960s.’

If the pan-African project failed, modernisation would also be set back

The multipolar system that decolonisation had created also affected how international relations theory professors saw the world. In 1953, the influential international relations scholar Hans J Morgenthau, an arch realist and Jewish refugee to the US, warned against thinking in rigid Cold War terms when it came to African anticolonial struggles. Rather than choosing between ‘communist and non-communist revolution’, the US had to go beyond the bipolar logic and assess if the revolution it observed was in its ‘interests’ or not. Morgenthau maintained that Africa had little real power, but he also understood that not only superpowers mattered.

In 1965, the liberal international relations theorist Joseph Nye wrote about the appeal of pan-Africanism, which he described as a ‘modernising’ ideology ‘of its own’, allowing African countries to ‘take moralistic and critical positions on a wide number of world issues’. Nye understood that nonalignment was not only about not aligning yourself with one of the Cold War blocs, but more importantly allowed ‘pan-Africanists to be unabashedly eclectic in using outside ideas and institutions without suffering from a feeling of loss of independence in the process.’ Marxist theorists also questioned bipolar rigidity. Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in 1961 that the ‘strength of the pan-African drive’ had to be ‘attributed precisely to the fact that it is a weapon of the modernisers’. If the pan-African project failed, modernisation would also be set back.

In short, theorists, policymakers and commentators in the Global North in the 1950s and ’60s came to realise that – in ideological terms – they were living in a multipolar world. Voices in the Global South might have become more visible today as information media have become more accessible and economies have grown but, from inception, from the invention of modernity in the Enlightenment, decolonised territories have been part of an international conversation about the meaning of international systems.

Postscript on sources

Recovering how pan-African modernity affects postwar international order requires historians to take African archives, rather than repositories in the metropole, as a starting point. Caution, however, is required since documents in African archives are not rare gems waiting to be unearthed by adventurous historians. Rather, the documents will make sense only when we think about how postcolonial archives can alter the findings that come from repositories in the metropole. Increased access to postcolonial archives has produced a rush for paper reminiscent of the opening up of Soviet archives in 1991 when historians often used new materials to confirm findings they had already drawn from US and European archives. This confirmation bias is strengthened by the nature of much of the postcolonial archive.

In the first years after independence, record-keeping was chaotic. In 1965, the Office of the President in Kenya ordered ‘all cabinet minutes and memoranda’ to ‘be destroyed.’ The National Archives in Nigeria purchased a dehumidifier in July 1960 which, based on the crumbled documents, is no longer in use today. Furthermore, the postwar archival infrastructure is highly national and reflects the fantasy that decolonisation’s impact could be confined to domestic politics.

This makes the archives of decolonisation difficult to locate and colonial crimes easy to hide. Critics have therefore questioned if it is at all possible to ignore the US preponderance in the post-1945 international system, particularly since easily accessible archives in the Global North remain overrepresented in many analyses of the Global South. The use of African sources, however, enables historians to actually test the extent of that power to shape the international system.

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On a superficial level is the portrait of a perfect society. The citizens of this Utopia live in a society that is free of depression and most of the social-economic problems that trouble the today. All aspects of life are controlled for the people of this society: population numbers, ... - - 2697 - 10 On a superficial level Brave New is the portrait of a perfect society. The citizens of this Utopia live in a society that is free of depression and most of the social-economic problems that trouble the today. All aspects of life are controlled for the people of this society: population ... - - 2730 - 10 1. How does advertising reinforce gender stereotypes? Today in the late 1990’s we can not escape advertising it bombards us from all types of media and every aspect of our lives. It is a multibillion-pound industry that stereotypes genders and tells us what we could become if we use certain ... - - 758 - 3 Kalae Miller HIST 1015 Paper 1 1/29/2016 Expectations of the New European's expectations of the new were in many ways rooted in a frame of mind. "Columbus had become convinced it was possible to reach the riches of the East by sailing west" (Roark, 27). Coming ... - - 597 - 3 ? , one for women and the other for men? First of all, love would have a different emergence. On the other hand, seeing the same face over and over again would result in boredom and frustration. In addition, the confusion would be infinite, and much greater than that of today�s . Most ... - - 611 - 3 Authorial Background *Herman Hesse was born in the Black Forest town of Calw, Germany in 1877. *Herman was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries who had served in India. *He was expected to follow in their footsteps by preparing for the ministry. *He tried, but experienced a religious ... - - 1517 - 6 What would the be like if man�s common struggles never existed? It could be a full of happiness and peace with out a need to ever worry. Each person would have the freedom to express themselves with out being afraid. Each human would be provided with a suitable mate instead of ... - - 1340 - 5   Authorial Background *Herman Hesse was born in the Black Forest town of Calw, Germany in 1877. *Herman was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries who had served in India. *He was expected to follow in their footsteps by preparing for the ministry. *He tried, but experienced a ... - - 1524 - 6 A 21st century view of what a "Good Life" is would be often defined by Money, Power and Status. We live in a right now where it seems like people never have enough and is willing to do anything to have MPS (Money, Power, Status), and if they can�t get it they will be ... - - 1639 - 6 Materialism in Society Materialism in society has forced people to think about their material needs even above the God. In this article we have tried to explore the various aspects of materialism in society. The impact of materialism in society is a complex subject. Materialism can be defined ... - - 1661 - 7 The Concept of Religion What is religion? Clearly, no one, simple definition can describe the numerous religions in the . Personally, I believe religion is an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, practices, and worship that centers on one supreme God or Deity. Typically, religion ... - - 473 - 2 Description : Compaires B N W to 1984 Body of Essay : Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley's A Brave New and George Orwell's 1984, the works books though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike. A Brave New is a novel about the struggle of ... - - 1225 - 5 Lily Bart, the central character in Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth , was born into the fringes of high society in late nineteenth century New York. She developed a, “lively taste for splendour”(page 30) and a fear of, ”dinginess”.(page 35). Everything ... - - 2133 - 8 n The Diamond as big as the Ritz �Diamond � was designed utterly for my own amusement. I was in a mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story began as an attempt to feed that craving on imaginary foods.� Craving is a strong, urgent and persistent desire. According to ... - - 1285 - 5 Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley's A Brave New and George Orwell's 1984, the works books though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike. A Brave New is a novel about the struggle of Bernard Marx, who rejects the tenants of his society ... - - 1216 - 5 Cinema Assessment Task 2 Authorship, Post-Classical and Art Cinema Narration In response to Q3 and referring to Robert Altman's The Player Robert Altman's 1992 film The Player is a savagely comic film that explores the cutthroat nature of the Hollywood film industry. The film, which ... - - 2769 - 11 Assess the impact of the second war on Japan Introduction On December 8, 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt received approval from congress to declare war on Japan due to their horrendous attack on Pearl Harbor and other actions such as taking over parts of China. On December 7, 1941 ... - - 770 - 3 In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston shows how the lives of American women changed in the early 20th century. Zora Neale Hurston creates a character in her own likeness in her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. By presenting Janie's search for identity, from her ... - - 799 - 3 In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston shows how the lives of American women changed in the early 20th century. Zora Neale Hurston creates a character in her own likeness in her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. By presenting Janie's search for identity, from ... - - 799 - 3 An Understanding of the Effect of Pop Music: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of Popular Music Courtney Mullen St. Edwards University Abstract Humanity has long used music as an expressional art form to find beauty, attain a higher level of meaning, and better understand culture. The Beatle's, a ... - - 5087 - 19 » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » » | | | Copyright © 2024 Essayworld. All rights reserved 5 Important Takeaways From The 2024–2025 U.S. News And World Report Best Global University Rankings Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Harvard University This morning, U.S. News and World Report released their much-anticipated 2024-2025 Best Global University Rankings. These annual rankings are a cornerstone in the field, influencing decisions that range from student applications to institutional funding and providing a glimpse into the current state of affairs in the world of higher education. This list can provide helpful insights into the relative merits of the schools students may be considering adding to their college lists. In order to use this list effectively, however, it is important to understand the nuances of the ranking system and the factors considered therein. Here is a breakdown of the rankings’ methodology, as well as key takeaways from this year’s list: Methodology The U.S. News and World Report Best Global University Rankings are based on a comprehensive methodology that evaluates colleges and universities across thirteen key metrics. These include: Global research reputation (12.5%) Regional research reputation (12.5%) Publications (10%) Books (2.5%) Conferences (2.5%) Normalized citation impact (10%) Total citations (7.5%) Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited (12.5%) Percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited (10%) International collaboration – relative to country (5%) International collaboration (5%) Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field 5% Percentage of total publications that are among the top 1% most highly cited papers 5% In addition to the overall global rankings and country-specific rankings, U.S. News and World Report published a subject-specific ranking list , evaluating schools’ global positions in over 50 individual disciplines. Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024 Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024. These rankings offer quantitative data students can consider when building their college lists, providing a fairly comprehensive picture of universities’ academic prowess and institutional reach. That being said, students using the rankings to build their college lists should note that many of these factors do not capture the qualitative aspects of students’ experiences. Key Takeaways from the 2024–25 Rankings 1. The number of universities considered rose by more than 10%. This year, 2,250 universities across over 100 countries were considered—up more than ten percent from the 2,000 schools considered in the previous ranking. 2. Harvard University lands on top. As in the last cycle, Harvard University claimed the #1 spot in the global rankings list. This prestigious accolade reflects Harvard's unparalleled academic excellence, groundbreaking research, and global influence. Known for its distinguished faculty, cutting-edge facilities, and a tradition of innovation, Harvard continues to set the standard in higher education, making it the leading choice for students and scholars worldwide. 3. The U.S. dominates the rankings for another year. Nearly half of the top 50 schools in the ranking are located in the U.S., totaling 24 of the top 50 on the rankings list. Additionally, four out of the top five are U.S. schools: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley. This remarkable achievement underscores the global prestige of U.S. universities, known for their world-class research, innovative academic programs, and extensive resources. 4. UT Austin and Brown University dropped in the rankings. Both Brown University and The University of Texas at Austin surprisingly dropped in the rankings, falling out of the top 50. Given both schools’ excellence, this shift demonstrates the fierce competition for top spots in the rankings this year. 5. U.S. News and World Report adds new subjects to the rankings. This year, four new disciplines were added to the subject-specific rankings, including: ecology; green and sustainable science and technology; environmental engineering; and marine and freshwater biology. These additions not only demonstrate the ranking system’s commitment to reflecting the most relevant information in higher education today, but also provide a glimpse into recent trends and changes in the disciplinary offerings at the most prestigious universities in the world. The 2024–2025 U.S. News and World Report Rankings offer students valuable information regarding the trends in the global higher education landscape. While students should take their personal preferences and the intangible elements of a school’s culture that draw them to a specific school into account, these rankings can be a helpful first step for students as they set their collegiate goals and assemble their college lists. Editorial Standards Reprints & Permissions Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world The changes will be particularly profound in energy, manufacturing and medicine, says the futurist B Y THE TIME children born today are in kindergarten, artificial intelligence ( AI ) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity. When I first predicted in 1999 that we would have such artificial general intelligence ( AGI ) by 2029, most experts thought I’d switched to writing fiction. But since the spectacular breakthroughs of the past few years, many experts think we will have AGI even sooner—so I’ve technically gone from being an optimist to a pessimist, without changing my prediction at all. After working in the field for 61 years—longer than anyone else alive—I am gratified to see AI at the heart of global conversation. Yet most commentary misses how large language models like Chat GPT and Gemini fit into an even larger story. AI is about to make the leap from revolutionising just the digital world to transforming the physical world as well. This will bring countless benefits, but three areas have especially profound implications: energy, manufacturing and medicine. Sources of energy are among civilisation’s most fundamental resources. For two centuries the world has needed dirty, non-renewable fossil fuels. Yet harvesting just 0.01% of the sunlight the Earth receives would cover all human energy consumption. Since 1975, solar cells have become 99.7% cheaper per watt of capacity, allowing worldwide capacity to increase by around 2m times. So why doesn’t solar energy dominate yet? The problem is two-fold. First, photovoltaic materials remain too expensive and inefficient to replace coal and gas completely. Second, because solar generation varies on both diurnal (day/night) and annual (summer/winter) scales, huge amounts of energy need to be stored until needed—and today’s battery technology isn’t quite cost-effective enough. The laws of physics suggest that massive improvements are possible, but the range of chemical possibilities to explore is so enormous that scientists have made achingly slow progress. By contrast, AI can rapidly sift through billions of chemistries in simulation, and is already driving innovations in both photovoltaics and batteries. This is poised to accelerate dramatically. In all of history until November 2023, humans had discovered about 20,000 stable inorganic compounds for use across all technologies. Then, Google’s GN o ME AI discovered far more, increasing that figure overnight to 421,000. Yet this barely scratches the surface of materials-science applications. Once vastly smarter AGI finds fully optimal materials, photovoltaic megaprojects will become viable and solar energy can be so abundant as to be almost free. Energy abundance enables another revolution: in manufacturing. The costs of almost all goods—from food and clothing to electronics and cars—come largely from a few common factors such as energy, labour (including cognitive labour like R & D and design) and raw materials. AI is on course to vastly lower all these costs. After cheap, abundant solar energy, the next component is human labour, which is often backbreaking and dangerous. AI is making big strides in robotics that can greatly reduce labour costs. Robotics will also reduce raw-material extraction costs, and AI is finding ways to replace expensive rare-earth elements with common ones like zirconium, silicon and carbon-based graphene. Together, this means that most kinds of goods will become amazingly cheap and abundant. These advanced manufacturing capabilities will allow the price-performance of computing to maintain the exponential trajectory of the past century—a 75-quadrillion-fold improvement since 1939. This is due to a feedback loop: today’s cutting-edge AI chips are used to optimise designs for next-generation chips. In terms of calculations per second per constant dollar, the best hardware available last November could do 48bn. Nvidia’s new B 200 GPU s exceed 500bn. As we build the titanic computing power needed to simulate biology, we’ll unlock the third physical revolution from AI : medicine. Despite 200 years of dramatic progress, our understanding of the human body is still built on messy approximations that are usually mostly right for most patients, but probably aren’t totally right for you . Tens of thousands of Americans a year die from reactions to drugs that studies said should help them. Yet AI is starting to turn medicine into an exact science. Instead of painstaking trial-and-error in an experimental lab, molecular biosimulation—precise computer modelling that aids the study of the human body and how drugs work—can quickly assess billions of options to find the most promising medicines. Last summer the first drug designed end-to-end by AI entered phase-2 trials for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease. Dozens of other AI -designed drugs are now entering trials. Both the drug-discovery and trial pipelines will be supercharged as simulations incorporate the immensely richer data that AI makes possible. In all of history until 2022, science had determined the shapes of around 190,000 proteins. That year DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 discovered over 200m, which have been released free of charge to researchers to help develop new treatments. Much more laboratory research is needed to populate larger simulations accurately, but the roadmap is clear. Next, AI will simulate protein complexes, then organelles, cells, tissues, organs and—eventually—the whole body. This will ultimately replace today’s clinical trials, which are expensive, risky, slow and statistically underpowered. Even in a phase-3 trial, there’s probably not one single subject who matches you on every relevant factor of genetics, lifestyle, comorbidities, drug interactions and disease variation. Digital trials will let us tailor medicines to each individual patient. The potential is breathtaking: to cure not just diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, but the harmful effects of ageing itself. Today, scientific progress gives the average American or Briton an extra six to seven weeks of life expectancy each year. When AGI gives us full mastery over cellular biology, these gains will sharply accelerate. Once annual increases in life expectancy reach 12 months, we’ll achieve “longevity escape velocity”. For people diligent about healthy habits and using new therapies, I believe this will happen between 2029 and 2035—at which point ageing will not increase their annual chance of dying. And thanks to exponential price-performance improvement in computing, AI -driven therapies that are expensive at first will quickly become widely available. This is AI ’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings. ■ Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, inventor and the author of books including “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999) and “The Singularity is Near” (2005). His new book, “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”, will be published on June 25th. Explore more By invitation june 22nd 2024, vladimir putin’s war against ukraine is part of his revolution against the west. From the June 22nd 2024 edition Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents More from By Invitation A business leader on why he’s backing Donald Trump The Biden administration has played dirty and shown staggering incompetence, argues Joe Lonsdale A hard-right government might disrupt France’s relations with Europe Or it could try to change the EU from within—which would be worse, reckons Jean Pisani-Ferry Harriet Harman on how Parliament has changed over four decades It is more in touch with voters, says the longest-serving female MP—but there is more work to do He is leading Russia into a new phase of strategic confrontation, says Stephen Covington, a longtime NATO adviser What good are whizzy new drugs if the world can’t afford them? Bringing gene therapies and obesity drugs to the masses will require financial innovation too, says Steven Pearson Why political centrists must rediscover their passion They need to be clear about what opposing populism does and doesn’t mean, argues Yair Zivan Share full article Advertisement Supported by Michelle Goldberg Trump’s Allies Say They’ll Enforce the Comstock Act. Believe Them. By Michelle Goldberg Opinion Columnist Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it was hard for feminists to get Americans to take the threat of losing the constitutional right to abortion seriously. Describing Hillary Clinton’s inability, in 2016, to shake pro-choice voters out of their complacency, The New York Times’s Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias wrote , “Internal campaign polling and focus groups showed that the issue did not resonate strongly with key groups of voters, because they did not believe Roe was truly at risk.” It is similarly difficult to get Americans to appreciate the threat that the 19th-century Comstock Act could be resurrected . Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices and substances used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” Though never repealed, it was, until recently, considered a dead letter, made moot by Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion. But with Roe overturned, some in Donald Trump’s orbit see a chance to reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion — and maybe surgical abortion as well — without passing new federal legislation. The 920-page blueprint for a second Trump administration created by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations, calls for enforcing Comstock’s criminal prohibitions against using the mail — widely understood to include common carriers like UPS and FedEx — to provide or distribute abortion pills. Some MAGA legal minds believe that Comstock could also be wielded to prevent the mail from transporting tools used in surgical abortions. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, a crusading anti-abortion lawyer who represented Trump before the Supreme Court this year, told Lerer and Dias in February. Conservatives know this would be enormously unpopular, which is probably why, when they talk about Comstock at all, they often refer to it by its criminal code numbers rather than its common name. (“I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election,” said Mitchell.) Democrats, by contrast, need to be doing everything possible to make “Comstock” a household word. That’s why they should champion a bill introduced by Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota on Thursday to overhaul the Comstock Act. And it’s why President Biden would be wise to act on a petition from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to posthumously pardon one of Comstock’s high-profile victims. Many were shocked when the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, but as Smith, the former vice president of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, told me, they shouldn’t have been, because the right made no secret of its objectives. There is something similar going on with Comstock. “Believe them when they tell us what they want to do, because they will do it if they’re given half a chance,” she said. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber?  Log in . Want all of The Times?  Subscribe . 107 COMMENTS There's no shame in being materialistic Our research reveals there are two sides to this story. Highly materialistic people believe that owning and buying things are necessary means to achieve important life goals, such as happiness ... A psychologist explains why materialism is making you unhappy Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters ... Materialism materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.. The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical theories (i.e., theories of the nature of reality) that can best be defined by saying that a theory ... "Living in a Material World:" Materialistic People More Likely to be by: Danling Chen . We've all heard Madonna's famous and catchy eighties single "Material Girl" with a tongue-in-cheek declaration of herself as a material girl. M ost of us would agree that in today's consumerist society, we are indeed "living in a material world." W hile stores are churn ing out the latest high-priced products, and advertisements plastered across every medium ... What Causes Materialism in America? The belief that material possessions improve individuals' personal and social well-being permeates America. However, contrary to this belief, multiple studies show that materialists, compared to ... Is the Modern World Too 'Materialistic'? It's often said that the problem with modern societies is that they are far too 'materialistic' - which is taken to mean that we are far too interested in buying objects. This is not entirely fair. We are indeed materialistic, but not primarily because we buy a lot; rather because we harbour an immense faith in the power of whatever we ... Materialism: A Comprehensive Overview Materialism is a powerful philosophical concept that has had an immense impact on our lives. It has been used to explain economic systems, political systems, psychology, morality, and even consumer culture. By understanding materialism and its implications, we can better understand our own behavior and make more informed decisions. Materialism In Society And How We Can Overcome It We don't know what we want to do with our lives and that's why we adopt materialistic values. Thirdly, moving beyond possessions. Do this: Write a list of things you enjoy doing. Focus on experiences. On actions. On things you do with your hands. On conversations with people. For example, building a chair from scratch. Writing an essay. Materialism in Literature & Literary Theory Definition of Materialism as a Theoretical Term. Materialism, as a theoretical term, is a philosophical stance asserting that the physical world, composed of material substances, constitutes the fundamental and sole reality, thereby rejecting the existence of immaterial or supernatural entities. It emphasizes the reduction of all phenomena ... What is Materialism? History and Concepts Moreover, the very history of materialism is movable. This is because philosophical history of philosophy is already mobilizing conceptions of matter, being, knowledge, and truth. Rather than from the God's eye view, our reconstruction of the development of matter is grounded on our own inclusive materialist conception. The Madness of Materialism Materialism certainly can give us a kind of happiness — the temporary thrill of buying something new, and the ego-inflating thrill of owning it afterward. And we use this kind of happiness to ... Material World: A Portrait of the World's Possessions Originally published in 1995, Material World was a massive undertaking that cost Menzel $600,000, which he scrapped together by refinancing his house, ... each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below ... What is the difference between idealism and materialism? Materialism claims that the material world is real and ideas reflect the material conditions that humans find themselves in. In particular, ideas are not freely floating in the aether but necessarily reflect the material reality of the world in one way or the other, either directly or indirectly. In other words, ideas are generalizations and/or ... Materialism ans Materialistic Theories: [Essay Example], 835 words New materialism "The ontology of materialism rested on the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct"actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range." (Werner Heisenberg) New materialism has now become its own specialized subfield of knowledge, with courses being offered on the topic at major universities, as well as numerous conferences, edited ... Materialism in Society Essay Materialism in Society Essay. It is human nature for people to desire material possessions. Our material yearnings are an attempt to satisfy are need to special and wanted. In a world where most of society defines "socially acceptable" as the material possessions one owns such as, the latest clothing, the biggest house, or the fastest car one ... The Materialistic World Depicted in Huxley's the Brave New World In a time when the world we live in is becoming more and more materialistic and less and less beautiful, it seemed only fitting that Huxleys The Brave New World was to be part of the reading list in my final impression of being a kid. In The Brave New World the characteristics of their worl... A Materialistic Society Free Essay Example Views. 2459. A happy life is more important than anything someone can buy in a store. It's not a physical thing nor is it materialistic. Society has come to orbit around the quality of things they can buy to impress the neighbors and to show off how much money they have invested. They want the shinier, the bigger house, and the greener lawn. Essay on Materialism Essay on Materialism. Type of paper: Essays Subject: Psychology, Society & Family Words: 289. Materialism refers to a collection of personality traits. The contemporary world is full of people who possess materialistic trait. They have a belief that owning and acquisition of the right properties is the vital ingredients of happiness. How decolonisation created the multipolar world In the 1970s, Japan's economic growth, driven by technological advancements, positioned it as a potential major player in a multipolar world order, an argument further strengthened by the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. The messy world of diplomacy is often reduced to a bloodless boardgame of players reacting to each other's moves. I Am a Materialistic I Am a Materialistic. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. The concept of materialism involves predominantly focusing on tangible items over intellectual or spiritual values ('Materialism'). Week 7 Essay about Materialism living in material world of course, people have always shelter, and have had to work for them or rely on others to do so. when was the. Skip to document. ... Living In A Material World. Of course, people have always "consumed" life's necessities-food, shelter, and clothing-and have had to work for them or rely on ... Materialistic World Hugo Tavares Diagnostic Essay 01/19/2023 English 101. Materialistic World. Nowadays people are attached to what they have according to their materialistic beliefs. Humans would rather have more expensive objects than meaningful ones. A lot of them only care about their monetary value, not really caring if they need it. Materialistic World Essays Materialistic World Essays and Term Papers. Brave New World On a superficial level is the portrait of a perfect society. The citizens of this Utopia live in a society that is free of depression and most of the social-economic problems that trouble the world today. All aspects of life are controlled for the people of this society: population ... Today's Teenagers Have Invented a Language That Captures the World "Mid" is an obvious example. I don't think it even qualifies as teenage slang anymore — it's too useful and, by now, too widespread. In my son's usage, things that are mid are things ... 5 Important Takeaways From The 2024-2025 U.S. News And World ... Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field 5% ... The 2024-2025 U.S. News and World Report Rankings offer students valuable information ... The exponential growth of solar power will change the world Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind. Sun Machines Over the course of 2023 the world's solar cells, their panels currently covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600 terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a ... Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world For two centuries the world has needed dirty, non-renewable fossil fuels. Yet harvesting just 0.01% of the sunlight the Earth receives would cover all human energy consumption. Opinion Mrs. Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. Last week I had the time of my life at the Tony Awards introducing a song from "Suffs," the Broadway musical I co-produced about ... Opinion Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis