Australia is currently in a rather parlous position. Our economy is in trouble with rising debt and projected deficits extending out to the far horizon. Growth in the economy has stalled and consequently we are faced with high levels of unemployment. The intergenerational report depicts an aging workforce and anticipates further budget difficulties as the […]

We human beings are a gullible lot. We are often inveigled into believing the implausible when it seems attractive to us. The Spanish Conquistadores returned from the New World full of stories about El Dorado, purportedly a city of gold. The myth spurred many expeditions devoted to discovering the wealth of this fabled place. Whilst […]

It is a source of some frustration to me that as I get older I have become more conservative. I made a reasonably successful career based on pushing the envelope, doing new things and doing things differently. I was an inveterate challenger of the status quo. In my somewhat distorted imagination I am inclined to […]

Martin Seligman tells us that those of us who are pessimists have deficiencies in our self-defence mechanisms. As he puts it, such people when faced with something that is not going right in their lives convince themselves that the problem is: Personal – ie it is due to their own personal shortcomings; Pervasive – ie […]

Especially Ordinary Despite our supposed sophistication, vanity is endemic in modern society. I see no end of examples of people who want to look attractive, be seen as important or have some special world-shattering unique characteristics. It seems to me to be a comforting feature of old age to eschew such meaningless pursuits. But then […]

Crocodiles are remarkable evolutionary survivors. They have inhabited the earth in their current form for millions of years. On top of that (or maybe because of that) they are quite ubiquitous, continuing to survive in healthy populations in Africa, Asia and Australia. Their predominant diet is fish but they are very partial also, when the […]

Well it has finally happened – the two Australian drug traffickers have been executed by an Indonesian firing squad. I abhor capital punishment and this particular event seemed, because of some of the Indonesian incompetence, more barbaric than it need to have been. Despite my feelings for Chan, Sukumaran and their families and loved ones, […]

In previous essays, I have proposed that the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Because we not only have the ability to think and make decisions but are also consciously aware of these mental processes we have what is sometimes called a “theatre of mind”. Consequently we are forced to deal with two […]

Most people who have any familiarity at all with the subject of human behaviour will know of the “Nature vs Nurture” debate. The argument was about whether our biological history or our social conditioning determines how humans behave. We now know however, that both contribute to our behaviour. In fact the influences are so closely […]

My long-term, long-suffering readers will understand that I (and most likely all of us) have had an abiding interest in happiness, what promotes it and how it may be attained. Indeed if you search the archives of my blog posts you will find a number of essays on this topic. My essay this week will […]