Our society is having a crisis of depression and anxiety not because of chemical imbalances in our brains, but because of spiritual imbalances in our lives. We have all become disconnected - from meaning and purpose, from useful work and meaningful values, but mainly, overwhelmingly, from one another....   (read more)

Why does loneliness cause depression and anxiety? Human beings evolved in Africa, where we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes. You and I exist for one reason - because they figured out how to cooperate. They only made sense as a group. And every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe....   (read more)

So, because I’m an idiot, I decided to try my first Crossfit session – six weeks before my Nepal trek. Even as we were walking down there, I idly wondered out loud to my friend, "Hmm, I wonder what the injury rate is among first-time Crossfitters…?" Well, 100% it turns out, regarding me. Yeah, I got injured....   (read more)

So I've just finished Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Here are the top four wrenching things I learned from this engrossing and heartbreaking book....   (read more)

It suddenly strikes me that the myth of Sisyphus has such profound resonance - that we have a myth of Sisyphus at all - because life itself is essentially a Sisyphean endeavour....   (read more)

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So it seems an awful lot like this song makes me cry. It certainly did on my run today....   (read more)

D.T. Max has a totally stunning piece in The New Yorker: The Unfinished - David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest....   (read more)

"He makes the rest of us feel hollow for being so unoriginal in our writing and in our lives."...   (read more)

Given that my foot/leg hurt like hell overnight, just lying in bed, I figured mountain climbing today might be out. And when Tim threw the curtains back at 7am, outside was: soup....   (read more)

Today it's February, and the sun is shining bright. We made it....   (read more)

An amateur novelist doesn't think he's done until his book is under a cover and piled on display tables across the land. Why do these people think this is likely to happen? Moreover, why do they imagine that it will be a rapturous, fulfilling, life-changing event if it does?...   (read more)

I've come to realise that, aside from all the other things - and there are a lot of other things, most of them more qualifiable and quantifiable - I seem to have lost my senses of beauty and wonder....   (read more)

"He who has a why to live can endure any how." - Nietzsche...   (read more)

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I'm just really, really bad at it....   (read more)

Is it?...   (read more)

My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable....   (read more)

Emily Bronte (lived at home her whole life), Virginia Woolf (threw herself in the Thames), Dostoyevski (epileptic), Hemingway (shotgun blast to the head), Salinger (complete withdrawal from public life), John Fowles (self-imposed exile in rural Devon), Pynchon (whereabouts unknown, only a couple of photographs exist), Camus (died in car crash - accidental?), Mark Twain (lifelong depressive), F. Scott Fitzgerald (died of alcoholism)...   (read more)

Q: Just how much Graham Greene do you intend to read, anyway? A: Every word he wrote....   (read more)

In nomadic camp life, you really do just get into the rhythm of waking at dawn. Badger! badger! badger! What I took to be a badger ran by, along the opposite edge of the field, with a crust of something in her jaws....   (read more)

So I've recently picked up a new activity: the martial art of Krav Maga. Simply translating as "close combat" in Hebrew, this form was developed specifically for, and is still taught by, the Israel Defense Forces. And this morning, I can tell you, I feel precisely as if a squad of Israeli commandoes has been beating me with lead menorahs - while I ran a half-marathon through the Negev. Jesus....   (read more)

Why is it, actually, that May always seems to find me broken up and depressed and alone and melancholy? It's a striking pattern....   (read more)

"The effortful shepherding of one's confusion and faint nausea, which I assumed was the basic existential package, turns out to have been a temporary condition." - Martin Amis...   (read more)