Most of us rarely live exactly as we want to. More often, we live according to habits, expectations, and ideas we have absorbed from family, culture, and the people around us. A More Exciting Life is a collection of reflections on what happens when we begin to question these inherited assumptions and examine our lives more closely. The book invites us to see familiar things with fresh eyes.

Core Idea

A more exciting life does not begin with dramatic change, but with a deeper awareness of who we are and what truly matters to us.

The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) once remarked that what mattered less than whether someone was happy or not was whether they felt as if they were leading their own lives. This suggests how often we fall into leading the lives that other people (some of them well-meaning) want us to lead, adjusting ourselves to their needs more than is wise and bowing to socially sanctioned but incomplete ideas of what is ‘normal’.

No one said with enough conviction that we were allowed just to be. We were given convincing lessons in how not to speak our more dangerous thoughts clearly. We became experts at complying. We came to associate being good and normal with being someone else.

What everybody really wants

They have seen the weaknesses, but have only tolerance and compassion for them..

We are often in situations of wanting to help and be kind to others, but of not knowing what they might need. We would like to deepen our connection to them and be of service, yet we lack a real grasp of what we could plausibly offer them. Their minds seem impenetrable; their problems opaque.

It is easy to mistake reassurance for flattery. But flattery involves a lie to gain advantage, whereas reassurance involves revealing genuine affection — which we normally leave out from embarrassment — in order to bolster someone’s ability to endure. We flatter in order to extract benefit; we reassure in order to help. Furthermore, the flatterer tells their prey about their strengths, whereas the reassurer does something infinitely more valuable: they hint that they have seen the weaknesses, but have only tolerance and compassion for them on the basis of sharing fully in comparable examples.

Getting expectations right

Most of life will be a waste of time.

In 1905, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a telling detail about the peas in his garden: 20% of the pea pods seemed to be responsible for yielding 80% of the peas. This struck Pareto because his research into economic productivity had concurrently shown him that 20% of Italians were responsible for generating 80% of the nation’s wealth — a figure that later matched what he found to be true in France, Germany and the Netherlands.

The surprisingly widespread applicability of this principle led to the coining of what we now know as the Pareto distribution or, more casually, the 80/20 rule. This can be observed throughout economics and business and states that 80% of effects will come from 20% of causes.

• Most parts of every city will be ugly, dispiriting and an insult to our longing for order and optimism.
• Most conversations with most people will leave us feeling misunderstood and desolate.
• Most sexual opportunities will not come off.
• Most projects will go wrong.
• Most governments will be corrupt and unimaginative.
• Most of our natural habitats will be destroyed.
• Most days will be sad.
• Most marriages will be intolerable.
• Most glances in the mirror will be a catastrophe.
• Most interactions with our children will be maddening.
• Most books are terrible.
• Most of life will be a waste of time.

We would be wise to embed the 80/20 rule firmly in our worldview at the dawn of every new day.

On friendliness to strangers

The stranger might want to say hello.

Despite the surface evidence, strangers are always likely to resemble someone we already know well: us. Beneath the unfamiliar exterior, the distinctive accent, the alien occupation, the unexplored age or social bracket, the stranger is often merely a version of ourselves, the same essential human matter squeezed through a slightly different social and psychological mould:

• The stranger is pained by regrets.
• The stranger is wracked by longings.
• The stranger, despite their impassive appearance, craves love and fellowship.
• The stranger is lonely.
• The stranger loves to laugh, but hasn’t been silly and playful in a long time.
• The stranger was once a baby.
• The stranger might want to say hello.

Once you understand love, you can love anyone

At the heart of real love is an effort to see beyond the outwardly unappealing surface of another human..

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) defined what Jesus was getting at in this way of talking about love: the person who truly understands love could love anyone. In other words, true love is not specific in its target; it doesn’t fixate on particular qualities; it is open to all of humanity, even (and in a way especially) its less appealing examples.

Today this can sound like a strange notion of what love is, because our background ideas about love tend to be closely tied to a dramatic experience: that of falling in love; that is, finding one very specific person immensely attractive, exciting and free of any failings or drawbacks.

Love is, we feel, a response to the overt perfection of another person. However, at the heart of real love is an effort to see beyond the outwardly unappealing surface of another human, in search of the tender, interesting, scared and vulnerable person inside.

Intimacy and closeness

Where they love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love — Sigmund Freud.

Intimacy and closeness, far from fostering deeper sexual desire, can be the ingredients that destroy excitement, whereas having only recently met a person and not feeling too much for them can set up awkward yet compelling preconditions for wanting to take them to bed.

Sigmund Freud first drew attention to our difficulties connecting love with desire in the essay ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ (1912). Of many of his patients, he wrote: Where they love, they have no desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.’ In seeking to explain the division, Freud pointed to two facts connected to our upbringing: first, in childhood, we are generally brought up by people we love deeply and yet towards whom we cannot express sexual feelings (dissuaded as we are by a strict incest taboo); second, as adults, we tend to choose lovers who in certain powerful (though unconscious) ways resemble those whom we loved most dearly as children.

Together, these influences set up a devilish conundrum whereby the more deeply we come to love someone outside of our family, the more strongly we are reminded of the intimacy of our early familial bonds, and hence the less free we instinctively are to express our sexual desires without fear.

You could finally leave school

You’re doing it for someone else; an audience; your teachers, your parents and their substitutes in adult life. Make us proud. You have to shine.

These are some hallmarks of an enduring school-like way of thinking:

• A belief that those in authority know what they are doing and that one’s task is to jump through the hoops they set for us. There is a desire to please teachers and win prizes, cups and ribbons.
• A sense that there is an implicit curriculum out there – an externally mandated map of what one needs to do to succeed — and that a wise person must dutifully subscribe to its demands.
• A feeling that when it’s going well, work should feel irksome, dull and somewhat pointless. Schools teach us to forget, or ignore, the clues offered to us by our own boredom. They teach us dangerous degrees of patience. They subtly train us in intellectual masochism.
• You’re doing it for someone else; an audience; your teachers, your parents and their substitutes in adult life. Make us proud. You have to shine. We’ve given you so much. What matters is the performance, not any inner sense of satisfaction.
• Authority is benign. They want what is good for you and they speak on behalf of your long-term interests.
• Don’t think you could ever know better; distrust your instincts. We’ll look after you. If you follow our rules, you will thrive.
• The exam (and all its successors) are fundamentally accurate. Those who know have worked out the ultimate test of your value. You are what you score.
• Every school is a miniature society, equipped with a strong sense of what values to revere and codes to follow. Bullies lurk, ready to mock and identify any departures from the norm. You cant escape them; they are next to you in class every day. They will spot and persecute the weirdos; they can ruin your life. You learn to cower and adjust your attitudes. Following the herd is paramount.

What would it mean to break the mould? What would it mean finally to leave school? It would involve knowing some of the following:

• There is no one way, no one set path to fulfilment laid out by authority figures. ‘They’ don’t know. No one knows.
• The safe path may be dangerous to our flourishing.
• Our boredom is a vital tool. It tells us what is slowly killing us, and reminds us that time is monstrously short.
• Authority is not by definition benign. The teachers and their substitutes have no real plan for you except in so far as it suits their own advancement. It might look as if they want your supreme good, but in reality they want you to play their game for their own benefit. At the end, they have no proper prize to offer you. They will give you a colourful card and send you to the golf course and the grave and you will have wasted your life.
• It doesn’t matter what the bullies think. No one is normal. You can dare to make enemies; indeed, you must do so as the price to pay for having developed a character and found something to believe in.

The hard work of laziness

Busyness just serves as justification for delay in the investigation of our own direction.

Laziness feels like a sin against the bustling activity of modernity; it seems to bar us from living successfully or from thinking well of ourselves. But, to consider the matter from another perspective, it might be that the real threat to our happiness and self-development lies not in our failure to be busy, but in the opposite scenario: in our inability to be ‘lazy’ enough.

We need to distinguish between emotional and practical hard work. Someone who looks active, whose diary is filled from morning till night, who is always running to answer messages and meet clients, may appear the opposite of lazy. But, secretly, there may be a lot of avoidance going on beneath the outward frenzy. Busy people evade a different order of undertaking. They are always active, yet don’t get around to working out their real feelings about their work. They constantly delay the investigation of their own direction. They are lazy when it comes to understanding particular emotions about a partner or friend. They go to every conference, but don’t get around to thinking about what their status means to them.

They regularly catch up with colleagues, but don’t consider what the point of money might be. Their busyness is a subtle but powerful form of distraction.

Our minds are, in general, a great deal readier to execute than to reflect. They can be rendered uncomfortable by so-called large questions:

• What am I really trying to do?
• What do I actually enjoy and who am I trying to please?
• How would I feel if what I’m currently doing comes right?
• What will I regret in a decade’s time?

By contrast, the easy bit can be the running around, the never pausing to ask why, the repeatedly ensuring that there isn’t a moment to have doubts or feel sad or searching. Busyness can mask a vicious form of laziness.

The next time we feel lazy, we should imagine that a deep part of us is preparing to give birth to a big thought. As with a pregnancy, there is no point hurrying the process. We need to lie still and let the idea gestate, sure that it may eventually prove its worth. We may need to risk being accused of gross laziness in order one day to put in motion projects and initiatives we can feel proud of.

Getting more serious about pleasure

We spend far too much of our brief lives defending an impossible idea: that we are pretty much like anyone else.

We assume that what will work for others will work for us too. It doesn’t readily occur to us to take our uniqueness into account.

A corrective to this costly absence of mind comes from an unexpected quarter: the history of art. What we call a great artist is someone who has learnt to take their pleasure seriously. Most young artists don’t. They like art, of course, but they don’t drill too deeply into what they in particular, as unique beings with a highly individual history, sensory system and temperament, are inclined to like. That is why the chief characteristic of inexperienced artists is derivativeness. Their art reflects what everyone else around them tends to like and make in their particular era and circle. It’s the art of people without a capacity to take their own pleasure seriously.

To become an artist in this sense is not about technical discovery; it’s about the strength to discover and then stay faithful to one’s self.

The sexual fetishist is to the ordinary lover like the established artist to the novice: they are someone who has worked out what they really like, and how to hold on to it with rare fidelity and tenacity. While most of us go along with general suggestions of what good sex might consist of, the fetishist discerns their own proclivities. They realise that they might like a particular kind of floral material or a leather watch strap; the sound of water or the feel of a gold chain; a pair of socks or a black monogrammed briefcase. The fetishist is akin to the artist in having the stubborn presence of mind to defend their own tastes, even when these depart from the mainstream.

Great fetishists, like great artists, know the power of details to generate happiness.

We kill our uniqueness out of politeness and a fear of being odd. We spend far too much of our brief lives defending an impossible idea: that we are pretty much like anyone else.

Learning to be more selfish

We cannot be good to anyone else until we have serviced some of our own inner callings.

There is the kind of selfishness that we require to get anything substantial done; that lends us the courage to prioritise our own concerns over the flotsam and jetsam of daily life; and that lends us the spirit to be more forthright about our interests with people who claim to love us.

This type of selfishness can lead us to sidestep nagging demands, not in order to make people suffer, but so that we can husband our resources and, in time, be able to serve the world in the best way we can.

With a more fruitfully selfish philosophy in mind, we might fight to have an hour to ourselves each day. We may do something that could get us labelled as ‘self-indulgent’ (having psychotherapy three times a week, or writing a book), but that is vital to our spirit. We might go on a trip on our own, because so much has happened that we need to process in silence. We cannot be good to anyone else until we have serviced some of our own inner callings.
A lack of selfishness may be the fastest route to turning us into ineffective, embittered and ultimately disagreeable people.

There are years when we simply have to keep our heads down and study; years when we have to bring up children and accumulate some capital. But there are also, just as importantly, years when what we need to do above all is say ‘enough’ — enough to material and superficial demands; enough to sexual and romantic entanglements; enough to status and sociability — and instead turn our minds inwards and upwards.

Without having to don the orange robe favoured by Hindu Sannyasas, with perhaps few visible signs of our reorientation to speak of, it is open to all of us to make a psychological move into a more self-focused and inner age. We can convey to those around us that we aren’t lazy, mad or callous; we just need to avoid doing the expected things for a while. We need to fulfil our real promise by casting aside an idea that is only ever superficially wise: putting other people first.

How to lengthen your life

We have barely scratched the surface. We have grown bored of a world we haven’t begun to study properly.

The difference in pace is not mysterious; it has to do with novelty. The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. Conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur.

By middle age, things can be counted upon to have grown a lot more familiar. We may have flown around the world a few times. We no longer get excited by the idea of eating a pineapple, owning a car or flipping a light switch. We know about relationships, earning money and telling others what to do. As a result, time runs away from us without mercy.

One solution often suggested is that we should put all our efforts into discovering fresh sources of novelty. We need to become explorers and adventurers. We must go to Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, Astana or Montevideo; we need to find a way to swim with dolphins or order a thirteen-course meal at a world-famous restaurant in downtown Lima. That will finally slow down the cruel gallop of time.

However, this is to labour under an unfair, expensive and ultimately impractical notion of novelty: that it must involve seeing new things when it should really involve seeing familiar things with new eyes. By middle age we may have seen a great many things in our neighbourhoods, but we are unlikely to have properly noticed most of them. We have probably taken a few cursory glances at the miracles of existence that lie to hand and assumed, quite unjustly, that we know all there is to know about

Of course, we have barely scratched the surface. We have grown bored of a world we haven’t begun to study properly.

And that, among other things, is why time is racing by. The pioneers at making life feel longer in the way that counts are not dieticians, but artists. At its best, art is a tool that reminds us of how little we have fathomed and noticed. It reintroduces us to ordinary things and reopens our eyes to a latent beauty and interest in precisely those areas we had ceased to bother with. It helps us to recover some of the manic sensitivity we had as newborns.

We don’t need to make art in order to learn the most valuable lesson of artists, which is about noticing properly, living with our eyes open – and thereby savouring time. Without any intention to create something that could be put in a gallery, we could, as part of a goal of living more deliberately, take a walk in an unfamiliar part of town;

Twenty signs of emotional maturity

We are never done with that most precious of goals: becoming a proper grown-up. For this mission, it could help to know what being grown-up might really involve.

Here are twenty suggestions:

• You realise that most of the bad behaviour of other people really comes down to fear and anxiety, rather than (as it is generally easier to presume) nastiness or idiocy. You loosen your hold on self-righteousness and stop thinking of the world as populated by either monsters or fools. It makes things less black and white at first, but, in time, a great deal more interesting.
• You learn that what is in your head can’t automatically be understood by other people. You realise that you will have to articulate your intentions and feelings with the use of words, and can’t blame others for not getting what you mean until you’ve spoken calmly and clearly.
• You learn that you do sometimes get things wrong. With courage, you take your first faltering steps towards apologising (once in a while).
• You learn to be confident not by realising that you’re great, but by learning that everyone else is just as stupid, scared and lost as you are. We’re all making it up as we go along, and that’s fine.
• You forgive your parents because you realise that they didn’t put you on this planet in order to insult you. They were just painfully out of their depth and struggling with demons of their own. Anger turns, at points, to pity and compassion.
• You learn the enormous influence of so-called ‘small things on mood: bedtimes, blood sugar and alcohol levels, degrees of background stress. As a result, you learn never to bring up an important, contentious issue with a loved one until everyone is well rested, no one is drunk, you’ve had some food, nothing else is alarming you and you aren’t rushing to catch a train.
• You give up sulking. If someone hurts you, you don’t store up the hatred and the hurt for days. You remember you’ll be dead soon. You don’t expect others to know what’s wrong. You tell them straight and if they get it, you forgive them. If they don’t, you forgive them in a different way too.
• You cease to believe in pertection in pretty much every area. There aren’t any perfect people, perfect jobs or perfect lives. Instead, you pivot towards an appreciation of what is (to use the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s exemplary phrase) ‘good enough’. You realise that many things in your life are at once quite frustrating and yet, in many ways, eminently good enough.
• You learn the virtues of being a little more pessimistic about how things will turn out and, as a result, emerge as a calmer, more patient and more forgiving soul. You lose some of your idealism and become a far less maddening person — less impatient, less rigid, less angry.
• You learn to see that everyone’s weaknesses of character are linked to counterbalancing strengths. Rather than isolating their weaknesses, you look at the whole picture. Yes, someone is pedantic, but they’re also beautifully precise and a rock in times of turmoil. Yes, someone is a bit messy, but at the same time brilliantly creative and visionary. You realise that perfect people don’t exist and that every strength will be tagged with a weakness.
• You fall in love a bit less easily. When you were less mature, you could develop a crush in an instant. Now, you’re poignantly aware that everyone, however externally charming or accomplished, would be a bit of a pain from close up. You develop loyalty to what you already have.
• You learn that you are quite difficult to live with. You shed some of your earlier sentimentality towards your-self. You go into friendships and relationships offering others kindly warnings of how and when you might prove a challenge.
• You learn to forgive yourself for your errors and foolish-ness. You realise the unfruitful self-absorption involved in simply flogging yourself for past misdeeds. You become more of a friend to yourself. Of course you’re an idiot, but you’re still a loveable one, as we all are.
• You learn that part of what maturity involves is making peace with the stubbornly childlike bits of you that will always remain. You cease trying to be a grown-up at every occasion. You accept that we all have our regressive moments, and when the inner two-year-old you rears its head, you greet them generously and give them the attention they need.
• You cease to put too much hope in grand plans for the kind of happiness you expect can last for years. You celebrate the little things that go well. You realise that satisfaction comes in increments of minutes. You’re delighted if one day passes by without too much bother. You take a greater interest in flowers and in the evening sky. You develop a taste for small pleasures.
• What people in general think of you ceases to be such a concern. You realise the minds of others are muddled places and you don’t try so hard to polish your image in everyone else’s eyes. What counts is that you and one or two others are OK with you being you. You give up on fame and start to rely on love.
• You get better at hearing feedback. Rather than assuming that anyone who criticises you is either trying to humiliate you or is making a mistake, you accept that maybe it would be an idea to take a few things on board. You start to see that you can listen to criticism and survive it, without having to put on your armour and deny that there was ever a problem.
• You realise the extent to which you tend to live, day by day, in too great a proximity to certain of your problems and issues. You remember that you need to get perspective on things that pain you. You take more walks in nature; you might get a pet (they don’t fret like we do); and you appreciate the distant galaxies above us in the night sky.
• You recognise how your distinctive past colours your response to events, and learn to compensate for the distortions that result. You accept that, because of how your childhood went, you have a predisposition to exaggerate in certain areas. You become suspicious of your own first impulses around particular topics. You realise — sometimes — not to go with your feelings.
• When you start a friendship, you realise that other people don’t principally want to know your good news so much as gain an insight into what troubles and worries you, so that they can in turn feel less lonely with the pains of their own hearts. You become a better friend because you see that what friendship is really about is sharing vulnerability.