Posts

I used to be decisive with money, but now I’m not so sure. This is partly the cynicism of mid-life, partly the challenge of the present global ghastliness. Financial planning is all about confidence in the future. If we commit to large mortgage repayments or pension contributions, we’re making a bet that we’ll be able honour those commitments over the long term: “In 10 years’ time, I’ll definitely be able to afford £1,500 each month”. Given the uncertainty surrounding just about everything, is this realistic? How do we overcome the problem of making long-term financial decisions when the future is so uncertain? ...

As a recovering workaholic, I’m always keen to find more sensible ways of conducting myself. Before my late 40s, I could set unrealistic goals, achieve them, and recover quickly from the inevitable exhaustion. Instead of being selective about which project to pursue, I would hurl myself like a loon at all of them. Now a reformed character, I was recently drawn to the tagline: “Forget the five-year plan: achieve your ambitions through tiny experiments.” ...

In her autobiography Through the Narrow Gate, scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong recounts finding a fellow novice in fits of laughter. She was pointing at a notice in the boot room and shrieking. Peering at the wall, Armstrong discovered minute directions on how to clean a shoe: “take it up in your left hand, cover liberally with polish, brush off and shine with a soft cloth”. Perplexed, she then spotted the punchline: “Repeat for the other shoe.” Her colleague, still helpless, added: “Can you imagine! If Mother hadn’t had that last sentence printed, all the novices would be walking round with one shoe perpetually clean and one dirty!” ...

Have you ever bought a new coat and thought, “hmm, now I need a smarter bag to go with it”? If so, you’ve experienced the Diderot Effect. Denis Diderot (1713-84) was a French writer, famous for his encyclopaedia and a novel about saucy nuns. In 1765, his daughter was getting married and Diderot couldn’t afford to pay for the wedding. Fortunately, Catherine the Great (a big fan of Diderot) came to the rescue by paying him the equivalent of $150,000 for his personal library, also allowing him to retain the books. With money to spare after paying for the nuptials, Diderot bought himself a smart new scarlet robe. Swishing about in his new acquisition, he suddenly realised that everything else at home was a bit shabby. Soon he’d acquired an expensive rug, pricey sculptures, and a stylish leather chair. Diderot describes the experience in his ‘Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or, a warning to those who have more taste than fortune,’ later inspiring anthropologist Grant McCracken to coin the term the “Diderot effect”. ...

If there’s one topic guaranteed to suck all the fun out of a writing workshop, it’s signposting. Signposts include descriptive headings, cross-references, and emphasis of argument. For the writer, these mechanisms feel clunky and dull; for the reader, though, these navigational aids make the text much more digestible — especially when it’s a long document like a thesis or a monograph. Your reader or examiner is probably reading your work alongside a whole heap of other research material. They’ll be dipping in and out over weeks — maybe even months — so need frequent reminders of what you’ve already told them and a roadmap of what’s coming next. With a clear structure and frequent signposts, they’re much less likely to miss something important. ...

“On Saturday, you don’t have to be completely rational,” according to scientist Oliver Smithies. In his excellent book Range, David Epstein explains how Nobel prize-winning Smithies practised what he called Saturday Morning Experiments. Nobody else was around in the lab, so he felt free to muck about. There was no need to weigh things carefully or decide whether this was really a good use of his time. ...

I just had my first proper piano lesson. Although I knew it would be an odd experience, I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the mental and emotional challenge. Having spent a year learning from an app, suddenly I was exposing myself to the judgement of a human. Fortunately, I’d chosen an excellent human. Steve is a calm, kind, and encouraging teacher. Above all, he’s someone who clearly loves teaching. With students ranging from 5 to 76, there’s not much he hasn’t seen, either. He certainly didn’t balk at the prospect of a nervous almost-51-year-old. Indeed, the dinosaur analogies he uses with the youngsters were remarkably effective for me. ...

“The goose isn’t for dinner, she lives here.” Thanks to Duolingo, that’s just one of the phrases I’ve learned to say in German recently. And the goose is one of the more pedestrian examples. Rather than teaching you useful expressions, Duolingo mainly demonstrates how sentences are constructed and provides adaptable examples. Some of the more lurid sentences are cleverly designed to stick in your brain. “I wish you didn’t have a clown in your cellar” is certainly refusing to budge. ...

There’s a lot of focus on making ourselves as efficient as possible: cramming our days with conspicuous activities, multitasking, and listening to podcasts at double speed. This might make sense during the good times, but we come unstuck when everything gets a bit squirrely – during a pandemic or a recession, for instance – then we suddenly realise our regime isn’t really serving us. As Andrew J. Scott and Lynda Gratton explain in The New Long Life, if we’re too focused and efficient – what they refer to as tunnelling – we can end up in a place of scarcity. With few options to choose from, we make bad decisions. Furthermore, those decisions made with a scarcity mindset are both limiting and often short-term. For the basis of this idea, see Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means so Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. What we need instead is slack, a pool of personal resources that gives us more options. This could be savings, protected blocks of time for experimentation, or regularly learning new skills. The point is not to plan for exactly when we’ll need to deploy these resources, but to have them in reserve if they’re needed. And they will be at some point. ...

Tucked away behind High Street Kensington is 18 Stafford Terrace, a sumptuously preserved Victorian townhouse. This was once the home of Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist for the magazine Punch, and his wife Marian. Many of their possessions were sold after the death of their son in 1946, yet the house remains cluttered, even by Victorian standards. I learned from our tour guide that the Sambournes bought around 200 chairs. Even though they had two children and a small collection of servants, this is very a high bum-to-chair ratio (especially given the servants weren’t encouraged to sit down). What on earth was going on? ...