You are presented with a nappy filled with brown liquidy stuff. Would you be willing to taste it? What about if it was at a baby shower, and you are told it is some type of chocolate? This scenario is a more frequently occurring one in my life. When it happened this weekend I noticed …
The case for dodgy refereeing decisions
As some of you may know, yesterday my beloved Liverpool FC (LFC) played a game of football against Manchester City FC (MCFC). LFC won. This is not a match report (if you want to know more about the game, google it), but there was an incident in the game that got me thinking: A perfectly …
Morality
Is there any greater form of morality than having the power and means to exact revenge but offering forgiveness in its stead?
Plato’s chocolate fondant
I like food. I like eating it and making it. For some reason, I really like watching other people making food and then being judged by a bald man who clearly enjoys his food and his Antipodean sidekick. Whilst I love the show, this love is tempered (tempura-d?) by moments of exasperation caused by the …
“Love is the only thing that matters, everything else is just stuff”
I had lunch in a cafe in Ubud yesterday. I had a conversation with a man who has lived. He was tall, about 60 years old, herculean in build and covered in tattoos. Piercing blue eyes. He spent 25 years as a stock market trader in the City, working for one of the top US …
Continue reading "“Love is the only thing that matters, everything else is just stuff”"
Endless caves
I’m exploring issues. Across the myriad of issues that I’m exploring, one thing remains constant: Everything is more complex than it first appears. I start to explore, I enter the cave. I read things. I talk to people. What I am reading and what I hear is a narrative and, by definition, a simplification. We …
The Joneses
The reality of my existence is that it is judged not based on what I have, but what I have relative to you. Vice versa, what you care about is owning nicer stuff than me. We each think about our position in life not by where we sit on the overall spectrum but by how …
All change
Look at the chart above, showing human population over time. Take a few seconds. Just bananas, right? Something has changed. Homo sapiens go back 300,000 years, there or thereabouts. It took us almost all of that 300,000 years to reach the first billion people. The second billion? Just 130 years. The third? 30. The fourth? …
Sticks and stones… but words are really heavy
Like most people*, I listen to the Moral Maze, the most infuriating of all podcasts. I rarely get angry, but each and every episode makes me want to smash my phone into smithereens and sob softly into my pillow. This is why I love it. Last week's episode was particularly explosive - Religious orthodoxy versus …
Continue reading "Sticks and stones… but words are really heavy"
Wealthy atomisation
We are conditioned to accumulate and hoard wealth. I do not know if this because we have innate nest-building instincts or if it is a result of our economic structures. This post is not to discuss why we build wealth, but to spend a moment to consider what I think is an important implication of …
musings of an untrained mind 