We tend not to think much of cheaters. In moral terms, infidelity remains as contemptible today as it was in the days of Moses.

But paradoxically, a more empathetic understanding of the psychology of cheating may help to prevent affairs before they happen.

A thread. We can hazard that what often drives cheating is a desperate sense of disconnection between two people that the cheat finds no more grown-up or ethical way to deal with than by arousing the desire of a stranger.

We worry about a lot of things – the mortgage, dentist appointments, performance reviews…

But as our pre-modern ancestors knew, there is only ever one thing to be worried about…and conversely, doing so might be the key to finally liberating ourselves from fear.

A thread. 💀 We should fear death because it comes around a great deal faster than we think; it seldom gives us much warning; it shows no consideration for what we might be in the middle of doing…

We rightly recognise friendship as one of the highest goods. Friends are a vital source of light, laughter and joy in our lives.

But friendship also serves a more basic and perhaps less optimistic function. To put it bluntly, we need friends to stop us from going mad. A thread. It might sound a little exaggerated to say that we go ‘mad’ if we spend too long in our own company, but we can fairly say that a range of distortions has a marked tendency to creep in.

We hear many so-called ‘rags-to-riches’ stories – of those who rose from humble beginnings to positions of wealth and power.

They're meant to be inspiring. But what may be far more so is the opposite: tales of those who gave up plaudits and comforts in pursuit of simplicity. 🧵 Some of what can render us excessively timid professionally is the fear of what might happen to us if things went wrong.

To be ‘in denial’ is to refuse to acknowledge a pernicious and painful reality: that one is addicted to drink or drugs; that one’s partner is having an affair…

But the most common method of denial is one that nearly all of us practise without realising – anxiety.

A thread. We don’t typically think of anxiety as a means of escape. Because there are so many genuine things to worry about, it can be hard to see that we may at points be using anxiety in a very particular and psychologically costly way.

The word ‘love’ is strongly associated with ‘kindness’ – which is why it’s surprising how long it can take until we are ready to tolerate being in a relationship with someone who can be reliably nice to us.

Why does this happen? (🧵) We tend to begin with a different set of priorities. What feels more manageable is someone who can – in complicated and often unobtrusive ways – let us down, leave us unfulfilled, keep us waiting…and make us suspect that they have someone else in the background.

What makes someone a ‘good’ parent?

Though each of us will have particular strengths and weaknesses as parents, the answer is simpler – and more definitive – than we generally assume.

Here is a 14 point guide to being a good parent (🧵) 1. Parenting is fundamentally about love, properly understood: a willingness to put one’s whole life aside for fifteen years at least in order to enter imaginatively into someone else’s boundlessly delicate and perplexing experience. It’s about an unfamiliar word: sacrifice.

One of the most infamous opening lines in poetry also happens to be among the most psychologically acute statements ever uttered – from Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse.’

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’

Here’s how Larkin came to write it – and why it matters. A thread. Born in Coventry, England in 1922, Philip Larkin’s upbringing seemed perfectly – even dully – conventional. He would later describe his childhood as a ‘forgotten boredom’, unmarked by any obvious hardship or neglect.

The secret to overcoming anxiety is much simpler – and cheaper – than we often suppose. It consists of regularly setting aside a window of time to ask: what am I worried about right now?

Here are some instructions for an anxiety-reducing interview with ourselves. (🧵) 1. Wait until the noise of the day has subsided. Find a quiet room. Preferably lie in bed – or in the bath.

One of the sadder symptoms of not having been treated well in childhood is a remarkable tolerance – perhaps even an appetite – for not being treated well by partners in adulthood.

Why does this happen? And can the pattern be broken? A thread. As graduates of rocky pasts, lacking a legacy of secure, unconditional love, we are at high risk of ending up sadly passive around partners who don’t appear to have too much interest in our true needs and aspirations.

There are couples who make it – and those who won’t. And yet it can be troublingly hard (from the outside at least) to understand why…

A thread. As outsiders, we interpret signs of friction – sulks, arguments and moments of rupture – as evidence that a couple is ultimately doomed. Yet this turns out not to be an especially reliable predictor.

One of the big assumptions of our times is that if love is real, it will by definition be eternal – and that, if it proves to be merely temporary, our belief in its authenticity was mistaken.

This is not only a narrow view of love, but a wholly wrong one. A thread. We invariably equate ‘genuine’ relationships with ‘life-long’ relationships. It therefore seems almost impossible for us to interpret the ending of a union after only a few weeks or years as something other than a regrettable failure and an emotional catastrophe.

When we feel ‘stuck’ – trapped in a job or routine that offers us neither joy nor meaning – we might compare ourselves to Sisyphus: cursed by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity.

But for Albert Camus, Sisyphus was not a tragic figure, but a heroic one. (🧵) The ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus has had a long afterlife. In his most famous essay, Camus found in it a metaphor for the human condition.

Like Sisyphus, we are condemned to an existence that is frequently cruel, arbitrary and unfair.

The kind of adolescence enjoyed by characters on film and TV – wherein one is cool, confident and sexually successful – is likely to stand in stark contrast to our own.

Thankfully, this is exactly how it should be… (🧵) There are periods in life in which it may be more or less impossible, even undesirable, to be particularly confident about oneself. The journey a human has to go through between the ages of 10 and 20 is necessarily traumatic in its degrees of oddity, intensity and embarrassment.

One of the great painters of melancholy and introversion: Gwen John (1876–1939)

There are certain things in life that are genuinely frightening: things we should run away from as fast we possibly can. Born in Berlin in 1923 Judith Kerr had a horrifically acute knowledge of true fear. When she was nine, the National Socialists threatened to arrest her father, a prominent Jewish journalist, and the family fled to the UK. There, many years later, Kerr wrote a book that - among other things - is a meditation on another sort of fear...

One of the unlikeliest ideas we can entertain about other people – especially those we are drawn to or respect – is that they might, beneath it all, be really rather lonely. (🧵) We know so much about our own sense of isolation: it has remained with us, in greater and lesser degrees, all our lives. But the loneliness of others remains an abstract, almost unreal proposition.

What happens to a child who is not loved properly? The answer one might expect is that they start to hate the person who doesn’t give them the love they need.

Far from it. The reality is that the child becomes consumed not with hate, but with shame. (🧵) Shame is the sense that one is profoundly unworthy, dirty, soiled, sinful, ugly, embarrassing – and also in danger: a fit subject of attack and ridicule by strangers.

We try - by nature - to understand as much as we can. But there is also a moment when wisdom involves realising we have no ability to grasp more and must fall silent; when the wisest thing is to know we don't know. In their mystical branches, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam all stress that many questions cannot be properly answered by human beings – and that silence is the best response to the ‘mysterium tremendum’, the awesome mystery at the heart of everything.

What are the ingredients of that always elusive state, emotional maturity? Here is a go at defining what we might be like if we did manage to become a little more mature: 1. We would understand the primordial role of self-understanding in helping us to grow into more reliable and predictable partners, parents, friends and colleagues. Our greatest ambition would be to reach a heightened understanding of our own minds.

Emotional maturity is a state few of us ever reach - or at least not for very long. But it may help us to try to lay out what some of its constituent parts are so that we have an idea what we might aim for: - We realise, at last, and with considerable good humour, that we are fools. We are idiots now, we were idiots then and we will be idiots tomorrow. There are few other options for a human being.