We recommend: How To Live: How We Are

How We Are is the first of a planned How To Live trilogy, looking at what makes us human and examining how resistant we are to deliberate change, yet also how each of us can and must change our lives nonetheless

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We recommend: How To Live: How We Are

‘Saming and changing’, or the patterns we learn and repeat, and how we stay in them or, crucially, break out of them, is the theme of this book by health psychologist Vincent Deary.

Deary plugs into film, philosophy and literature as well as psychology, to discuss what he calls ‘the making of ways’. Well worth a look if you like your ‘why are we here?’ questions framed using a clever collection of disparate cultural references.

We stopped over lyrical insights such as: ‘There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you can bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind. Only and.’

Deary is also lined up for talks presented by The School of Life (his first has sold out), so expect to hear more from him this autumn.