The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
We live in an era of rapid change and growing uncertainty. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction are being upended. Today more than ever, we must answer life’s great questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
I’ve been searching for answers across psychology and philosophy, literature and history, mythology and ancient wisdom—and sometimes in less obvious places, like a bottle of wine. The deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
Taken together, my books amount to an education in how to think, how to live, and how not to waste your life.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
We Know More and More—but Understand Less and Less
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Wisdom begins with the willingness to hear difficult truths, especially about ourselves. Our problem is not merely that we are no wiser than our ancestors; in many ways, we are less wise.
One reason for this is that we have abandoned wisdom as an ideal. The word ‘wisdom’ appears 222 times in the Old Testament, and ‘philosophy’ in the original Greek literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But today, anyone who speaks seriously about wisdom risks sounding grandiose or ridiculous—like me right now.
We admire intelligence, productivity, and innovation because they can be measured and monetised. Wisdom, however, is quieter, and often goes against the grain.
What Wisdom Is
Having replaced wisdom with expertise, we confuse knowing more with being wiser. But if wisdom simply amounted to knowledge, learning the name of every river and mountain in the world would make us wise, and every modern school-leaver would be wiser than a Socrates or a Seneca. Socrates was declared the wisest of men not because he knew everything, but because he understood what he did not know.
Aristotle took a different view. He said that wisdom is the understanding of causes: the wise person knows not merely that something is, but why it is. Wisdom consists in seeing the relations between things, for example, the immediate action and its distant consequences, the present moment and the shape of an entire life. It’s not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
Why We Lack Wisdom
If wisdom is perspective, our lack of wisdom becomes easier to explain. Today, knowledge is increasingly specialised and compartmentalised. Nobody is responsible for assembling the fragments or asking what they are for. There is no job description for someone like me, who falls between the cracks—and, unfortunately, no salary either.
In addition, we suffer from an overload of information. We’re always checking our phones, flitting from fragment to fragment, living in abstract bubbles. Our ancestors may have known far less, but they were exposed to the rain and the wind: to nature, mortality, connection… to the things that can give us perspective.
Although, to be fair, our ancestors too struggled with wisdom. Wisdom derives from the Indo-European root, weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices one eye at Mimir’s well in exchange for a higher kind of vision. Later, he hangs for nine nights from the world tree, pierced by his own spear, to win the runes. That’s what wisdom demands: the courage to see what we would rather not see.
Why the Best Friends Tell us What We Least Want to Hear
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What makes a true friend? Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue—and explains why the finest friends are so rare.
Today, everyone is obsessed with romantic love. Aristotle, however, conceived of the highest human relationship in terms of friendship—the bond through which we learn to value another person for their own sake.
For the Greeks, true friendship was a rare and precious thing. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says, “I would rather have a real friend than all the gold of Darius [the Persian emperor], or even Darius himself.” But today, on social media, we call hundreds of people our friends.
By putting romantic love on a pedestal, we have devalued friendship. Our romantic partner is also expected to be our best friend, confidant, counsellor… As a result, other friendships may be neglected or even treated as threats.
Aristotle’s Three Kinds of Friendship
Friendship is so important to Aristotle’s account of the good life that he devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. In a friendship of utility, we value them for what they can bring us. In a friendship of pleasure, we value them for the enjoyment they provide. These relationships are not necessarily base: colleagues, neighbours, and tennis partners may genuinely like and help one another.
But the limitation of these first two kinds of friendship lies in their reason for being: when the advantage or pleasure fades, the friendship fades with it.
Why Perfect Friends Are Rare
Lasting friendships, on the other hand, are based on character or virtue: each friend values the other, not for what he brings, but for who he is. The friend’s wellbeing and flourishing become part of our own.
Because we are invested in the wellbeing and flourishing of our friend, we owe them the hard truth—and expect the same thing in return. A real friend does not simply accept us as we are, but recognises our potential and helps us become what we could be.
That’s why “perfect friendship”, as Aristotle calls it, is not for everyone. Most people would sooner ghost us than listen to the truth about themselves—particularly now, when there are so many less demanding distractions around. Whereas social media affirms our public image, true friends challenge the person underneath.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
The Crucial Difference Between Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Living up to people’s expectations is a source of anxiety. But meeting those expectations cannot release us from that anxiety—because success achieved in the eyes of others leaves us dependent upon those same eyes.
The problem is not with success itself. Money can buy freedom and security; renown or recognition can create opportunities. But success cannot answer the deeper question: Am I enough?
To understand why, we need to distinguish between self-confidence and self-esteem—two things which are often confused.
Self-Confidence vs Self-Esteem
Self-confidence asks, “Can I do this?” Self-esteem asks, “Am I enough?”
Performing in the world can make us self-confident, while leaving us profoundly insecure as a human. Just think of all those celebrities who can command an audience but then struggle behind the scenes.
When we confuse self-confidence and self-esteem, ability and worth, we begin using achieving to repair self-esteem. Each new achievement brings a bit of relief, but, of course, our list of achievements, or CV, can never be long enough.
This is how ambition becomes a trap. We put our authentic lives on hold and neglect everything that’s important, in the hope that we might finally feel enough. A person can succeed brilliantly at the wrong life.
The Secret to Self-Esteem
Fame and fortune are external goods, and what comes from outside cannot establish our worth. And if this is so, our sense of worth can only come from inside us, from how we live and relate to ourselves.
The answer, then, is not to abandon ambition, but to subordinate it to our values. An ambition works for us when it expresses our values. Whenever we stand for who we are, we become someone we can love and trust. By backing ourselves, we become our best selves.
Outward success can do many things for us—but it cannot make us enough. ‘Enough’ is not a prize awarded by the crowd, but the quiet consequence of living up to our ideals.
The greatest success is to become ourselves—and no longer to need success.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Art of Failure, an unconventional exploration of success, ambition, happiness, and the good life.
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Whereas depression weighs upon life as it is, anxiety points towards the future: what might happen, what might go wrong, what might be expected of us.
Of course, some concern for the future is necessary. It motivates us to do what’s needed, pay our bills, and avoid danger. So the aim cannot be to abolish anxiety altogether—simply to prevent occasional alarm from becoming a permanent state.
Modern Life
The modern world makes this difficult because threats are seldom all-or-nothing. Our ancestors faced a predator, or did not. We have emails, deadlines, mortgages. And when we look on social media, we feel we are falling behind.
Because the pressure is diffuse and continuous, we internalise it. Eventually, nobody needs to chase us; we carry the pursuer in our head.
Once the pursuer is inside us, we try to outrun them by keeping busy. Activity gives us a sense of control, but often we are not addressing the anxiety so much as preventing ourselves from feeling it. We run faster and faster so that we never have to ask where we are going.
There is a Zen story about a horseman galloping down a path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. “Where are you heading?” hollered a bystander. “I don’t know!” came the already distant reply, “Ask the horse!”
How to Reduce Anxiety
The first step, then, is to stop running and name the anxiety. A vague anxiety can fill the whole sky; a named fear becomes one object within it. Once identified, it can be worked with, accepted, or dismissed.
In particular, we can determine what part of the anxiety is actually within our control. The ancient Stoics emphasized this distinction between what is and is not in our control. What is not in our control must simply be let go.
The Stoics had this image of an archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control. So the right-thinking archer focuses on the action, not on its result—because the first is in his control, whereas the other is not.
When dealing with our anxiety, we should all become like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”
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