THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

One of the reasons why we may withdraw from the entire idea of becoming more confident are the images we carry in our minds about what a confident person might be like. Confidence can seem synonymous with brash arrogance and unthinking boosterism; with the chiselled-jaw jock we knew from university or the garrulous financier we met on holiday. We can end up taking counterproductive pride in underselling ourselves and staying quiet because we cannot find any confident characters with whom we would remotely seek to identify. Hence the importance of a group of people sitting on a lawn in a square in central London in 1915. They belonged to what we now know as the Bloomsbury Group, the most influential intellectual movement of their age responsible for pioneering developments in literature, science, economics and art. Part of what distinguished these avant garde thinkers was the extremely cautious and outwardly modest way in which they carried out their revolution. Many were known for their manners and their shyness. The painter and costume designer Duncan Grant mumbled ‘sorry’ whenever he could; the biographer Lytton Strachey (with the beard) spoke in a low, respectful mumble; and the artist Vanessa Bell tended always to ask others questions to downplay her own intelligence. Nevertheless, these men and women took a sledgehammer to the stifling verities of the Victorian age and ushered in the modern world. The economist John Maynard Keynes invented the welfare state; Virginia Woolf remade the novel, Vanessa Bell introduced abstraction into British art. But they did so with confidence of a particular sort, a kind compatible with politeness, humility, smiles — and tea. We may be in danger of gravely neglecting our potential so long as we continue to operate with a brittle concept of what confidence might look like. We can, in reality, be quiet and confident, gentle and confident, thoughtful and confident. We can remain ourselves even as we adopt an underlying steeliness that infuses our projects with power and our thoughts with resolve. We can change the world without having to be bullies — or lose our manners.

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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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