Do you find some aspects of contemporary culture exhausting? I am the first to admit that we have many benefits from modern technological advancement but there are also some interesting ways in which life has been made harder. For example, so much of our modern mass communication in the developed world is all about the pursuit and attainment of financial success and fame. Even the most basic maths skills makes it obvious that this is a statistical game that most of us simply cannot win. Only the tiniest subset of people become spectacularly rich or famous and even then, surprisingly, it often fails to bring the happiness and peace that they assumed it would. To some extent I think we all struggle with this same issue. We often assume that the value and meaning of our lives has much to do with what he have ‘in’ our lives rather than what we do ‘with’ our lives. In Jordan Peterson’s recent book he often talks about the need to ‘be useful’. Being useful simply means that we take stick of our various abilities and capacities and then consider how we can best deploy them to make a positive difference, however small [...]

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