EVERYONE IS AN IDIOT

We often hold ourselves back from our more courageous ventures by a frightened and stern question: "What if I am — in fact — an idiot?" To which kindly voices will tend to reply that naturally we are far from being any such thing: we’re clever, we work hard, we’re beautiful inside. However — if confidence is the goal — a starkly different yet far more effective route to reassurance is to be recommended. We shouldn’t focus on whether or not we’re idiots. We can take it for granted that of course we are. But the good news is: so is everyone else. We’re on a planet of eight billion idiots. Everyone we see is substantially unreasonable and daft. There go the parents, messing up another generation by failing to understand their own minds; there are the business people, creating money out of unnecessary desires; there are the school teachers, instructing people for a life they haven’t fathomed themselves; there are the scientists, helping people to live longer who haven’t even grasped how to be good right now; there are the lovers, as passionate as they are blind about what love means. To think we have any reason to be scared of our idiocy in such company! If we tried to ask someone have dinner with us and we were rejected, or tried to write a book and no one liked it or started a business and turnover was slow, we’d only be joining a line of idiots that would snake to Jupiter and back. We don’t need to suffer from impostor syndrome; there is no one properly sensible that anyone could in truth grow into. We are all just a collection of clueless over-excited primates. No one is normal; no one is sane. To bolster our strength, we should begin every day by repeating: "I have been an idiot before, I am an idiot now, and I will be an idiot again." Thereafter, we will know to be a lot less frightened of losing our dignity. We — and the other 8 billion — never deserved any of it in the first place.

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AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...

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CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...

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IMPOSTER SYNDROME

PHILOSOPHY In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...

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