Evan Hadkins’s Articles at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, Page 5

Accepting our physical dependence is easy. We rely on oxygen, nourishment and so on without a thought. Accepting our dependence on other people can often be much trickier.

The point of contemplating our future death is to bring us back to a vivid consciousness of the here and now. The purpose is to clarify the choices we have, to have a sense of our priorities so that we can take steps to shape our lives around them.

It seems to me that some things can only come to older people. I can only know some things having tried them out — my dietary preferences, or how I prefer to conduct a friendship, for instance.

Is the reason why we don’t do in a small group what we will do in a crowd, different to the reason that we will do things in a small setting we wouldn’t want to do in public?

Where does it go wrong? It seems to me that we know how to help individuals heal from trauma. It seems to me that we even know how to enable individuals to live more fulfilling lives. But this doesn’t transfer neatly and naturally into making the world a better place.