We’re constantly under attack, you could say. Our minds are being fished. We’re like fish, that the bait’s coming out at us, the hooks are coming out at us. Everybody, it seems, is trying to affect how we think. We have advertising telling us what we should want, what we really want if we just […]

Are you mainstream? Or are you alternative? These categories have been with me sort of automatically as a way of thinking since growing up in the 90s, when it was alternative rock against mainstream pop, and it became this statement of identity to be alternative. Another word was indie. Are you mainstream or indie? So

There’s nothing like that feeling on holidays, that feeling that there’s something special about the day. So I often like to think, why can’t we have that more often? There’s maybe, here in Canada, around 10 official holidays. You can add all kinds of traditional holidays, an extra 10 maybe, and throw in some other

So I tried doing this as I was watching some of these intense games, and I imagined, well, what would it be like if I didn’t care? If I didn’t mind whether England wins the championship or not. What if I don’t care? What if it makes absolutely no difference to me? And sort of

So it’s one of the most basic ideas of Stoic philosophy that you make a division and a clear separation between the things you can control and the things you cannot control. And then you only worry about the things you can control, and anything you cannot, you just throw up your hands and just

Are you a consumer? We hear a lot about consumerism, this idea of wanting more, and just feeding ourselves, gorging on luxuries and entertainment, and just buying too many things. I see this consumer mindset, it’s beyond just buying lots of physical stuff, having big houses and fancy cars and all these toys. You see

Because money is something that we all basically need, and the need for it keeps coming back, it’s easy for money to become this overriding concern that kind of takes over our whole world, our whole life. And some of it can be looked at as greed, like we want more, we want more. But

Money, money, money. This is the preoccupation of so much of our lives every day, so much of our thoughts about how to get money, and so many of the limitations around what we can do. And money, it’s so easy for it to be entirely consuming, to just be completely focused on it, getting

So continuing with these metaphors for life, another one is the idea of architecture. I’ve talked about building your life like it’s a house, and this is another comment on that. When we build something, it’s not the building itself that matters. It’s the function of the building. It’s what it’s doing, what it’s serving.

I love metaphors for life. Sailing a ship. Running a country. And one that seems to work really well is gardening. Having a garden. There’s so many ways in which that seems to capture a lot of what’s going on with life. This idea of we have this space and it’s somewhere in the middle