Big Ideas for Curious Minds, page 4
philosopher as well as being other things, too).
At one point, Seneca was given the most difficult job in the world—he
was appointed tutor to a really terrifying young man called Nero, who
later became emperor. If Nero got angry because someone didn’t laugh
at one of his jokes, it wasn’t unusual for him to stab the other person or
throw them in prison. Seneca realised that the problem with Emperor
Nero was that his expectations were too high. Nero expected everything
to be perfect and constantly lost his temper when it wasn’t.
Seneca told him that getting angry and upset was caused by optimism.
Optimism means thinking that things are always going to go very well
and exactly as you want. Instead of being an optimist, Seneca thought
that the best way to stay calm and be happier was to become a pessimist.
That is, someone who assumes that things will probably turn out quite
badly and generally has a negative view of the future. It’s an interesting
and strange idea: that maybe our happiness does not depend on what
actually happens, but on our expectations. Pessimists can sometimes
be happier than optimists, because pessimists are always discovering
that things are much nicer and better than they thought they would be.
BIG IDEA #7
When you are in a bad mood, you usually want to blame someone. You
feel fed up and annoyed and your brain looks around to see whose fault it
could be—your teacher, your parents, your friends, maybe your brother or
sister. But sometimes it’s not really anyone’s fault. Instead, there’s a very
different kind of explanation. Nothing is really wrong at all, you are just
feeling grumpy and bothered because you haven’t been getting enough
sleep and you are tired.
Imagine you are running and you come to a hill. If you have just started
running and you’ve got lots of energy, the hill isn’t a problem. You don’t
mind. It will be fun to see how fast you can run up it. But if you’ve been
running for quite a long way already and your legs ache and you’re out of
breath, the hill will seem horrible. You can’t face it. It’s exactly the same
hill but you feel very differently about it—and it all depends on how tired
you are. It is the same with lots of things, and not only physical things
either. Maybe you have to do quite a difficult maths sum. If you’re feeling
full of energy, you don’t mind. It’s tricky but you can have a go. But if you
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are very tired, it feels too hard. It makes you angry and upset that you have
to do it. It’s the same sum. The difference is that you’re tired.
Being told that ‘maybe you are just tired’ can be really irritating. Usually
it doesn’t feel like that’s the reason why you are in bad mood. The trouble
is that you can be tired but not notice. Once again, your brain doesn’t
realise what’s really going on.
It is not only being tired that can put you in a bad mood. It could also be
that you are hungry, or haven’t drunk enough water, or you have spent
too much time indoors and have not been running around enough. It
could even be that winter has been going on too long and you haven’t
had enough sunshine. All these things make a difference to the mood
you are in.
We don’t usually think about these things when we’re in a bad mood, and
instead, we imagine that the reason we feel upset is because of something
someone else has done. We get so wound up that we want to shout at
them and tell them how horrid they are. But what will actually make us
feel better might be a rest, a glass of water, some lunch or a play outside.
It is odd—but interesting—that you can forget there
might be very simple reasons you’re feeling upset. The
good thing about simple reasons, though, is that they
can be fixed simply, too. It isn’t that easy to make up
with a friend after an argument, get your mum to be
less busy with work or suddenly to become
brilliant at singing or basketball—but
you can get a glass of water. You can’t
make that bully at school like you, but
you can eat a sandwich.
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Adults are especially bad at seeing that they might be in a bad mood just
because they are tired. Adults like to think that if they feel upset it must
be for a big, important reason—probably something to do with politics
or world affairs, or because their boss at work is much more stupid than
they could ever be. It’s hard for them to remember that a bad feeling can
have a very simple explanation: maybe they just stayed up too late last
night or should urgently have some orange juice.
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When you suddenly feel sad, before you despair, see if the following might apply:
I have not had anything to eat for a few hours
I went to bed very late last night
I had a really busy day at school today
Add in a few other ‘small’ explanations for feeling like you have very big problems:
The philosopher Matsuo Basho was interested in the way that small,
simple things can make a big difference to our lives. He lived in Japan
over three hundred years ago. He came from a very ordinary family and
when he was quite young he worked as a servant in the house of a local
nobleman, who was a very good employer and helped a lot with Matsuo’s
education. When he was older he lived on his own in a small hut and went
for long walks in the countryside. He had a career as a poet, writing very,
very short poems called haikus. They were extremely popular, so he was
able to make quite a lot of money. But Basho didn’t want to live a fancy
life. He was very fond of nature, particularly liking trees and flowers, and
he loved watching frogs in a nearby pond. Matsuo Basho thought that
we often get bothered and upset because we forget about simple things.
We think that it must only be big, complicated things that are important.
Matsuo Basho liked to tell people how much he enjoyed little things:
having a cup of tea in the morning, eating simple vegetables on a winter’s
day (he recommended leeks), listening to a bird chirping away, looking
at clouds or watching raindrops. He was an important philosopher who
reminds people, even today, of the strange fact that our mood, and our
feeling of whether life is pleasing or horrible, can depend on such tiny
things. They seem so small, but they make a big difference to us.
BIG IDEA #8
When people say hurtful things to each other, they often use the insult
that someone isn’t ‘normal’. They call them crazy, weird or a freak—there
are lots of different ways of saying it, but they’re all trying to suggest that
someone is bad for being different.
The thing is, people don’t really know very much about what is normal.
Everyone has an idea of ‘normal’, but it’s probably very much mistaken.
Maybe in one group of friends it’s normal to be into cars or a particular
pop group, but that is only normal among that small group of people
— and it is likely that not all of them are really that interested anyway,
they might simply pretend to fit in with what they think everyone else
likes. In another group of friends it might be normal to like completely
different things.
What seems normal can change a lot as well. It used to be normal that
children didn’t go to school—instead, most of them stayed at home and
worked with their parents, usually on a farm. They would think it was very
strange to sit in a classroom and learn about the world. But even today,
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what’s normal in one school might be strange in another one. At school in
Japan the children chat together about their pet robot dogs, but probably
if you did that people would think you were weird. If people think you’re
not quite normal, you might just be a bit unlucky—maybe the things you
like are not very popular in the corner of the world you happen to live in
right now, but they wouldn’t seem at all strange if you lived somewhere
else, or at a different time.
In fact, it is normal to be quite weird. At first that sounds crazy. How can
it be normal to be strange? But it makes sense when you think about it.
What ‘normal’ means is ‘like other people’. But what are other people
really like? It is much trickier to answer this question than you might
suppose. As we’ve already discovered earlier in this book, you don’t get to
see the whole of anyone. Everyone is much more strange and interesting
than they may seem: they have weird thoughts in the middle of the night
that they never tell other people about. When they’re on their own they
do funny things that they would never do in front of other people. They
act completely differently, too, when they are with their granny or their
mum than the way they do at school with their friends. That’s because
the way someone is at school is only a little part of who they really are.
You know this, because that’s what you are like. Other children at school
are really much more unusual than they appear. If you feel odd or weird
sometimes, don’t worry—you probably have a lot more in common with
others than you think. It is just that the others are keeping the odder bits
of themselves hidden.
You might think: ‘I do not care about being normal. What is so good
about being normal anyway?’ It’s a good question. A lot of philosophers
started to have good ideas when they stopped caring so much about what
others thought. Maybe you will, too.
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Albert Camus was a French philosopher who was born in Algeria in 1913.
At that time, Algeria was part of France. His parents were very poor—his
father worked on a farm and his mother was a cleaner. However, the local
school was very good and he got an excellent education. He loved going
to the beach and was very talented at football—he was a goalkeeper and
the team he played for was hugely successful. He felt that he learned more
about philosophy from playing football than from all the books he read.
When he was older, Camus moved to Paris. He worked as a newspaper
journalist and liked going to cafés. Camus was interested in the strange
feelings that go on inside people—especially when they are excited or sad.
One of his biggest aims was to convince people to worry a bit less about
how other people judge them. Doing this yourself can make you feel less
worried, less lonely, and give you the confidence to explore new things.
BIG IDEA #9
In lots of ways, adults can seem very impressive. They may seem to have
all the answers, but there is a big secret about them: they do not know
everything. Usually an adult only knows about a few things. One adult
might know a lot about trees or engines, but know very little about how
a phone really works or the history of the kings and queens of England.
Another might know a lot about books or electricity, but very little about
Antarctica or sports.
In fact, there are lots and lots of things—even important things—that
absolutely no one knows. No one really understands how to make cities
very nice, for instance. If they did know, all the cities in the world would
be beautiful, clean and lovely to live in. But most of them are not. No one
knows the very best way to run a school, either—that’s why there are lots
of schools in the world that aren’t very good and why not every teacher is
wonderful. This isn’t because adults are stupid, but because the problems
are so difficult. If you want to see a grown-up looking confused you could
ask them what time is. Not ‘what is the time?’ (they will probably know
that!), but what is time itself? That is a difficult question, isn’t it? Or, how
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about asking them why some jokes are funnier than others, or whether
a dog knows that it is a dog. We promise you they will not know. Hardly
anyone really knows anything about those things.
Adults disagree about a huge range of issues: how should the country
be run? What should we do about pollution? Who should get the biggest
salaries? You can have conversations about these things, too, and it does
not matter if you don’t know for sure—because adults don’t know either.
Adults do know a lot. But—and it’s important to keep reminding yourself
of this—they’re often very unsure about a lot of really important things
in their own lives. They can seem very impressive: they’ve got a job, they
are married to someone and they might own a house and a car. Inside,
though, they probably do not really know why they got married to this
person (maybe it would have been better with someone else), they wonder
if they should be doing a different job and they worry about paying the
bills. Perhaps they don’t know whether they should ask for a promotion
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at work or where it would be good to go on holiday. They feel they have to
make a lot of big decisions but they don’t know if they’re making the right
ones. That’s why they often look very serious, and sometimes get snappy.
One day, you will be an adult too. It might seem quite a long way off now,
but the strange thing is that you won’t feel so very different from the way
you do at the moment. You’ll still be you, even though you’ll have a job,
will have learnt to drive a car and might even have children of your own.
You will have done all these huge things, but there’ll still be lots of things
you don’t know—and that you may never know.
It is good to have a little part of your brain that constantly keeps in mind
that there are lots of important things that adults don’t know. This does
not mean that adults are stupid (even though it is quite nice to imagine
they have thinking problems, too), it just means that they are the same
as everyone else. Remembering that adults do not know everything can
