Hey there! 👋

There is a story about Bill Clinton, from early in his presidency. He walks through one of the rougher parts of a city, baseball cap on, Secret Service a few steps back, trying to get a feel for people. A woman recognises him and starts talking. She goes for a while. She is not quiet, and she is not short on complaints. The streets are dangerous, the schools are falling apart, the drugs are everywhere, the jobs don’t pay, nothing is working, nobody is helping....

The problem with asking yourself hard questions about your own thinking is that you are the person asking and the person being asked. Both of them want the same answer. So the honest version of self-inquiry, done alone, tends to collapse into whatever you already thought. The courtroom metaphor is a workaround. In a court, nobody expects the defence and the prosecution to agree. They are supposed to argue opposite sides....

Socrates didn’t tell people what to think. He asked them questions. The whole move of his was that if you asked a careful enough question, the person would walk their own belief into the open, look at it in daylight, and either keep it or change it, all without you having told them anything. That is still, two and a half thousand years later, the single most powerful conversational move most people never make....

Most of the stuff you regret saying, you said in the first two seconds. That tiny gap between the trigger and your mouth is where whole relationships get cheaper, where emails get sent that cannot be unsent, where you say the thing in the voice you wish you hadn’t. There is a five-letter mnemonic for that gap. It is boring, which is its best quality. In a hot moment you do not have the brain cells to run a philosophy....

Your mind twists things. All the time. Not maliciously, just reflexively, in a surprisingly small number of specific shapes. The useful discovery, once you can see it, is that these shapes have names. And a thought with a name on it is a thought you can catch. Without the name, the experience is a vague “I am spiralling again.” With the name, the same experience becomes something very specific: “I am catastrophising right now....