Talk: What makes a good life?

This isn’t the sort of thing I normally post, but a couple of weeks ago I was asked to contribute a lecture to a new series that’s running in London. It’s called LDN talks @ Night and it aims to get Londoners out to hear something a little different after work. Other speakers are talking about neuroscience, body language, UFOs, all sorts of things. I’m going to take the central theme of this blog and look at how we define wealth.

If you’re in London and free on Tuesday the 16th of May, come along. Here’s the blurb, and you’ll find all the details here.

Defining a good life: what makes life most worthwhile?

We all have our own answers to what makes life worth living. For some of us it might be lots of free time, or the presence of those we love. Others might define it as being fit and healthy, or feeling safe and secure. Given how important these things are, isn’t it strange that our politicians hardly talk about them? The things that are most precious to us are often expected to fit in around the edges, around the real business of work and earning a living.

Can we do better than that? Can we imagine a world that takes our deeper human longings seriously? What would that world look like?

This lecture will explore how we currently define progress, and how we came to be so fixated or ‘more’ rather than ‘better’. Then we’ll investigate how we could reconfigure society to deliver more of the things we value most. And since that could be quite a long project, we’ll look at some things we can do as individuals to wrestle back control and create more of what we really want.