Each of us knows many languages. We use body-language; we make structured sounds with our vocal chords; we read and write mathematical symbols. We also read and write symbols taken from something called an alphabet. We form these symbols into collections called words, that define parts of the human experience of reality. These foundational parts, or concepts, can be combined according to certain rules that allow us to build composite concepts - ideas made out of other ideas.

A language is a tool for making ideas concrete, for storage and for transmission.

Let’s imagine for a minute that we can see the ideas held inside people’s minds. In the diagram above, we see that Alice is bored. This unarticulated feeling is represented by bored(me). She chooses to communicate this idea to Bob using the following string of informational symbols:

“omg im sooo bored”

It gets the message...

Children don’t care about how they look. Three-year-olds run around naked without a care in the world. But older children, teenagers and adults all care about their appearance. Self-consciousness is a learned behaviour. So what purpose does it serve?

Who is it that benefits from girls and boys (to a lesser extent) worrying about their figures? People who want to sell you their products.

If you want someone to buy your product, it needs to fix a problem they have. If they don’t have the problem your product solves, you need to make them think they have that problem. Hence the vast majority of advertising towards women (and now increasingly men) is designed to make them feel unattractive, and to drill home the idea that a very specific product will make them sexy and therefore happy.

But there’s more to it than that. People, especially women and girls, have had their appearances...

We all know what we should be doing with our lives. We should be fixing the world. Fighting inequality and oppression, ridding countries of poverty and hunger. We should be using science and technology to cure the sick and to help the elderly.

On a more personal level, we should be using this age of accessibility to improve ourselves in a way that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. An internet-connected e-book reader can place almost any piece of writing from the last 2000 years instantly in our hands. Free online courses contain lectures that were previously restricted to only fee-paying Ivy League students.

At the very least, we could be enjoying the greatest creative works of our culture. The most popular art forms of the last century are the novel, the song, the film and the TV series. The very best of these can be found in some corner of the internet, sometimes...

In real life, things happen that we have no control over. In narratives - stories that we tell in speech, film or writing - someone is in control of everything. This is a very important distinction.

If it happens to rain heavily in real life, there’s not much point in asking why. The weather is just the way it is, caused by things like atmospheric pressure and cloud formations that hold little deep interest for most of us.

But if it’s raining in a novel or a film, there is definitely a reason why. Somewhere in the process of writing the script, the writer chose to make it rain.

Why would they do this? Because usually the real effects of the weather are not physical (like snow closing the roads), but psychological. The weather affects our mood: rainy days bring us down; sunny days lift us up. The psychological context of our daily lives is incredibly complex, made up of our feelings...

It’s frustrating when someone gets distracted by their phone while we’re talking to them. We usually end up having to ask “Are you listening?” before we can continue. It’s a similar feeling when we have a Skype conversation over an unreliable connection, and have to continually check “Hello? Can you hear me?”

Talking to someone who isn’t listening is a waste of words. We hate this waste so much that it’s tempting to end the conversation if our partner is too distracted or the connection too poor for us to have a continuous dialogue.

There’s something of the opposite effect when we play games or program computers, for example. It’s easy to become engrossed, oblivious to our surroundings. The same happens when we have lively, flowing conversations: time flies.

I think the difference between these scenarios might simply be a matter of feedback. Dialogues are more engaging than...