Number of words: 114 Air travel was still thirty-five years away and he set sail on a passenger ship. Sea travel was still quite rudimentary. It was well before the time of air-conditioned cabins. Pigs, goats and a very large number of chickens were carried along as fresh food; in fact, the number of chickens … Read more
Number of words: 346 Jamsetji took up a job immediately after graduating, but Nusserwanji, wanting his son to gain international exposure, sent him to the British colony of Hong Kong, where he launched a company called Jamsetji and Ardeshir with three partners—Nusserwanji and two merchants, Kaliandas and Premchand Raichand. The Tatas, through this partnership, decided … Read more
Number of words: 359 Here’s a lesson that our culture sorely needs to relearn. Ever since the Industrial Revolution we have tried to convince ourselves that science and technology, and then shopping and self-help, would create a magic portal through which we could step, leaving all our negatives behind. It hasn’t happened. We’re still the … Read more
Number of words: 331 It’s this ‘more faster’ aspect of ‘more happy me’ that particularly disturbs Elliott, the author of The New Individualism: the Emotional Costs of Globalization. “Our quick-fix society is very different from the days of Freudianism. People used to commit to a lengthy process of self-reconstruction involving an hour’s psychoanalysis, four to … Read more
Number of words: 329 Perhaps Abe Maslow missed this possibility because he was such an idealistic intellectual. He was born in the early twentieth century, the first of seven children of illiterate but ambitious Russian Jewish parents who pushed him into being an academic success. He turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a lonely, bookish … Read more
Number of words: 768 When you come down to the dull facts, happiness is an evolutionary adaptation that exists to make us engage in certain behaviours at certain times when they might optimise our chances of surviving and reproducing. Happiness makes us tend to pursue some things and avoid others. But it’s the same story … Read more
Number of words: 210 The Mao suit plan might sound like a blatant affront to our freedom-of-choice culture, but according to investigators at Cornell University, many of the modern options we’re offered are in fact no more meaningful than swapping the buttons on a tunic. The Cornell psychologists report that free choice is useful when … Read more
Number of words: 165 How on earth can we shore up our more rational, balanced, enoughist wishes against this rampaging mob of lower-brain drives? To explore this question, I thought I would badger the original source of my enough-work inspiration, Charles Handy, not simply because I fancied meeting one of my old gurus (often it’s … Read more
Number of words: 166 We might look to the Netherlands for inspiration. Dutch employees spend the fewest hours less at work in Northern Europe – nearly four hours a week less than we do. One reason is that their idea of what’s industrially cool and clever is markedly different from ours. A pan-European study found … Read more
Number of words: 789 So, if it’s not for the money or the fun, why do people work too hard? These patients’ real thing is about avoidance of the rest of their lives, about avoiding control over those lives, Brener argues. ‘Many of them are avoiding relationships or their own feelings. These patients tend to … Read more
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