Week's reading round-up: 2

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading this week, which might be of interest to our readers:

Alain De Botton is a leading contemporary philosopher, and I highly recommend his book ‘Consolations of Philosophy’ where he writes about six philosophers and their impact on our day-to-day life. In this article, Mr. de Botton writes about how Seneca (who features prominently in Consolations), an ancient Stoic philosopher, came to terms with an earthquake that  ripped apart the Roman province of Campania, in 62 AD. (‘To try to prepare ourselves psychologically for disaster, Seneca asked us to perform a strange exercise every morning which he called in Latin a praemeditatio – a premedition – and which involved lying in bed before breakfast and imagining everything that could go wrong in the day ahead. This exercise was no idle fun, it was designed to prepared you if your town burnt down that evening or your children died: ‘We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die,’ ran one example of a premeditation, ‘Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. So you must reckon on everything, expect everything.’)

Recently a lot has been written about Dubai’s fakeness and the culture of vanity it promotes. The most celebrated of the articles, of course, was from Independent’s Johann Hari (which was recommended 15 thousand times on Facebook). Another insightful article on the city recently appeared in Vanity Fair, by A. A. Gill. (“Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money.”)

One of the best modern pieces on the benefits  of solitude came from William Deresiewicz, where he showed how leaders would benefit from solitude. In The Boston Globe, Leon Nayfakh argues that being alone could do wonders to our creativity. (“In the paper, Burum offers two possible theories to explain what she and Gilbert found in the study. The first invokes a well-known concept from social psychology called “social loafing,” which says that people tend not to try as hard if they think they can rely on others to pick up their slack. (If two people are pulling a rope, for example, neither will pull quite as hard as they would if they were pulling it alone.) But Burum leans toward a different explanation, which is that sharing an experience with someone is inherently distracting, because it compels us to expend energy on imagining what the other person is going through and how they’re reacting to it.”)

Lastly, an interesting piece by Tim De Lisle in More Intelligent Life wherein he compares Ryan Giggs, the veteran Manchester United footballer, and Sachin Tendulkar. Mr. De Lisle, who has extensively written about cricket before, suggests that attributes like passion, commitment and vision have hugely contributed to the seniors’ stunning success. (“Most of us hope to grow old with dignity. Giggs and Tendulkar both started showing dignity before they grew old: no scandals, no shenanigans, no sex texts. In a petulant age, they show grace under pressure. Neither has much to say, which can be dull for fans but makes sense for them and their teams: their skills do the talking. In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the meaning of life was 42. In football and cricket at the moment, it seems to be 37.” )

PS: This series is inspired form Chandrahas Choudhary's The Middle Stage, a blog that I highly recommend.