Big Ideas for Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy

There’s an old story called Androcles and the Lion, which is set in Ancient Egypt. In the story, a lion comes prowling round a village at night, roaring terribly so that everyone is very frightened. They think the lion is angry with them. Then one day, a man called Androcles is walking out in the countryside and it starts to rain. He takes shelter in a cave—where the lion lives. Androcles thinks the lion is going to eat him, but then he sees that it has a thorn in its paw. The lion didn’t really hate the people in the village. It was roaring so much because the thorn hurt, but they didn’t realise.

The story is saying something interesting. Angry people (like the angry lion) are usually bothered about something that you can’t see. There is often a thorn in there somewhere.

De Beauvoir thought that what we really want is to enjoy our lives, but we make the mistake of thinking that the objects we buy are key to our enjoyment. However, most of the time what matters much more is whether we feel like we have enough time and the freedom to do things we like.

She realised that we’re so aware of other people’s opinions that we forget to properly ask ourselves what we really like. She thought that finding out what you really want was the most important job in your life.

When things like this happen, and something does not make you feel the way you thought it would, it does not mean that there isn’t anything that really will make you happy. It just shows that (like everyone) you sometimes find it hard to know in advance what will actually be very nice in reality.

Wittgenstein said that when people don’t understand one another it’s because the pictures in their heads aren’t similar enough. When someone doesn’t understand something that seems clear in your head, instead of getting frustrated, try to describe it more carefully and see if it helps.

Kintsugi is a Japanese word, and you say it like this: kin-tsoo-gee. It’s made up of two smaller Japanese words: the first part, kin, means ‘golden’, and the second part, tsugi, means ‘fixing’. When you put the two together, it means repairing a broken thing in a beautiful way.

big problem is not that certain things are hard, it is that we keep expecting them to be easy.

You will be able to finally get down to work when the fear of maybe not doing something quite as well as you’d like is wiped out by the greater and more serious fear of not doing anything at all.

The solution to putting work off isn’t to get more and more annoyed with yourself. Instead, you have to convince yourself that things are worth doing even if they are a bit wrong.

That means there’s a big danger: other people may not understand you, but you will be thinking that they do—or at least that they should.