From the moment we’re born and throughout our education our brains are fired and wired to seek authority. Authority is the invisible structure that governs what we feel and how we live our lives but take it away and we quickly feel vulnerable and isolated. The biggest problem with authority is that it doesn’t innovate. For years we have been … Read More
What Next?
The older I get the more I find myself stressing out about the way people perceive me. Being twenty-five, I feel constantly on the cusp between a world where exploration and failures were acceptable and a world where I should become a responsible adult by finding a steady career and moving out of my parent’s home. “Man’s deepest fear is … Read More
Delay Gratification By Learning To Trust Yourself
We live in a society that demands instant gratification. Whether it’s through online shopping, gambling or porn, we all want something yesterday. A recent study showed that our inability to forgo a smaller reward now for a larger reward in the future may depend on how trustworthy the person perceives the reward-giver to be, but what if the reward giver … Read More
The Idol Reflection
We each have someone who we admire, someone who we wish we could look, act or think more similarly to, but are idols a positive part of our culture or do they get in the way of us learning to embrace ourselves? “Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.” – John Calvin For … Read More
Falling Off The Conveyor Belt
This week thousands of young people around the UK received their A level results and as usual the papers have been out in full patrol sharing stories about the A grade prodigies who will now go on to the worlds best universities, find their dream job and have the perfect life. On the other hand, there will also be thousands … Read More
Identifying And Repairing Your Internal Broken Windows
In 1982, Criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling came up with the Broken Window Theory. The Broken Window Theory suggests that a broken window left unrepaired will make a building look uncared for or abandoned and so is likely to attract more vandals to break all the other windows and may even escalate into a more serious crime. If … Read More
The University Killer: Online Peer–to-Peer Learning
According to a recent YouGov SixthSense report, the debt of UK university students adds up to nearly £20bn. Students starting university this year could end up paying a whopping £60k for their education. Having graduated myself just a few years ago, the prospect of paying three times the amount my Mum paid for her first home may have been enough to … Read More
Compete With Yourself Not Conformity
Everyday we’re given the option to either compete against ourselves or with conformity. Adverts constantly remind as that unless we buy their products or services we’re likely to fall behind in whatever social standard society requires, but shouldn’t we be the ones who decide which races are worth entering? When I was younger I used to think that the clothes … Read More
Reducing Stereotype Threat in the Digital Age
There is no group in society stereotyped more than young people. You can’t open a newspaper without reading a story about the young being unemployed, uneducated or depressed but other than making convenient news filler could all this negativity be causing longer lasting damage on our countries young minds? Psychologist have found that negative preconceptions of social groups can have … Read More
When I first saw my Dad cry.
We were in the hospital, waiting out side the surgery room. My little brother had been run over by a speeding driver and was having the two sides of his broken femur re-attached. I had never seen my parents embrace, not even when they were together, and now years later they held each other and helplessly sobbed into each other’s … Read More