The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things: happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
That search has taken me through medicine, psychiatry, philosophy, literature, history, and the wisdom of the ancient world.
Along the way, I’ve written books that bring these different traditions into conversation—not for the sake of scholarship alone, but to shed light on the enduring questions of how to think, how to feel, and how to live.
These are not books written to impress or overwhelm. They are written to illuminate: to challenge familiar assumptions, reveal unexpected connections, and offer new ways of understanding ourselves and the world.
My hope is that, when you finish one of them, you’ll never quite see the world in the same way again.
Here on my website you’ll find not only books and essays, but ways of understanding yourself and the world a little more clearly.
We are more connected than any generation in history. We can speak to almost anyone, at almost any time, across almost any distance. Yet all this connection feels strangely empty.
We sit in conversations, meetings, and relationships—surrounded by words and faces—and have the quiet sense that nothing is really happening between us.
Not absence.
Presence without encounter.
We have more connection than ever, but less of what makes connection feel alive.
Let’s find out why.
Presence Without Encounter
Loneliness is commonly thought of as “being alone”. But its deeper form has little to do with physical isolation. It is the experience of no longer being met by another mind.
That is why loneliness can be at its keenest within relationships, families, and social lives that appear full from the outside. Contact continues, but recognition fades. Conversation carries on, but nothing quite lands.
When this happens, loneliness often does not feel like pain.
It feels like flatness.
And this is where boredom becomes revealing.
We think of boredom as a lack of stimulation. Yet it often appears in situations where stimulation is plentiful and still nothing meaningful is happening between people. The conversation is pleasant enough. We exchange opinions, anecdotes, updates. Yet nothing surprises us, challenges us, or changes us.
Nothing happens.
Attention, finding nowhere to go, folds back upon itself.
What we call boredom in these moments is often social contact that has ceased to feel alive.
Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter
Modern life amplifies this condition.
We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.
The result is not isolation.
It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.
People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight.
We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence.
Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous.
And strangely empty.
From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition.
When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness.
When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom.
In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.
Abundant Contact, Thin Encounter
Modern life amplifies this condition.
We move through dense networks of people—workplaces, cities, cafés, airports, and digital spaces—where interaction is constant but encounter is fleeting. We know more people than ever, but are deeply engaged with very few.
The result is not isolation.
It is something subtler: abundant contact, but thin encounter.
People cease to become discoveries. They lose weight.
We mistake familiarity for knowledge, communication for conversation, and proximity for presence.
Social life grows smoother, more efficient, more continuous.
And strangely empty.
From this perspective, boredom and loneliness begin to look less like separate problems than different expressions of the same condition.
When meaningful contact is absent, we experience loneliness.
When contact is plentiful but psychologically empty, we experience boredom.
In both cases, what is missing is not company but encounter.
The End of Necessity
Why has this happened?
Technology has changed our relationships, but it has not fundamentally changed human nature.
The deeper change is that we no longer need one another as we once did.
For most of human history, our lives were interwoven by necessity. Families, neighbours, and communities depended upon one another not merely for companionship but for everyday survival. People met repeatedly, over many years and in many different contexts. They quarrelled, reconciled, forgave, relied upon one another, and could not simply disappear whenever things became uncomfortable.
Dependence demanded attention.
We pay close attention to those upon whom our lives depend. We notice their moods because they affect our own. We learn their strengths and weaknesses because they matter to us. Necessity sharpens perception.
Today, much of that necessity has quietly disappeared. We can shop without speaking to anyone, work from home, entertain ourselves alone, and replace awkward conversations with easier ones. Our relationships have become lighter, freer, and more voluntary.
This is one of the great achievements of modern society.
But every achievement carries a hidden cost.
As our dependence upon one another has diminished, so too has the sustained attention that dependence once demanded. We have become remarkably good at communicating while becoming less practised at encountering—and have grown, almost, to fear genuine encounter.
The Loss of Shared Depth
There is another, quieter shift.
Not only have we become less dependent on one another—we have also become less shared in the worlds we inhabit.
For much of history, conversation rested on a relatively common symbolic ground: shared stories, shared texts, shared moral and religious reference points. People could assume that others recognised the same narratives and allusions, and so a single phrase could carry layers of meaning.
In that sense, conversation carried implicit depth.
Today, that shared cultural background is thinner and more fragmented. We no longer reliably inhabit the same symbolic world. Our references diverge, our media diverge, our intellectual inheritances diverge. Even when we speak the same language, we often do not share the same implicit meanings.
This does not make people less intelligent or less educated.
But it does make encounter more literal.
Conversation stays closer to surface experience because there is less shared depth for it to fall into.
Where there is no common symbolic ground, there is less space for resonance.
We are not only less necessary to one another.
We are less interiorly shared with one another.
And so even when we meet, we meet more lightly.
From Aristotle to Buber
This idea is older than it may seem.
Aristotle held that friendship begins in usefulness, matures into shared pleasure, and reaches its fullest form in the mutual pursuit of virtue. We first need one another in practical ways, and only then discover deeper reasons to remain together.
More than two thousand years later, Hegel carried the thought further. We become fully ourselves only through recognition by another consciousness. The self is not something we discover alone, but something that emerges in being recognised by another self.
Martin Buber distilled the matter to its essence. Human life is built upon encounter. We become fully human not through information or interaction, but by meeting another person as a Thou rather than an It.
Across these thinkers runs a single intuition: we do not merely live alongside one another.
We become ourselves, and our best selves, through one another.
What We Have Forgotten About Connection
Perhaps this is what modernity has quietly eroded.
We have not become less social. In many ways, we have become more social than any people in history.
But we have become less necessary to one another.
Less dependent.
Less bonded.
Less anchored in common worlds of meaning.
Without necessity, we attend less closely.
Without shared depth, we encounter one another more lightly.
Without attention, recognition begins to fade.
Without recognition, encounter becomes rare.
Without encounter, other people cease to surprise us or feel fully alive.
Perhaps the deepest paradox of modernity is not that we have become less connected, but that we have forgotten what connection is.
If you’re struggling with depression, or know someone who is, I’d like you to have this book—free of charge.
What if depression were a blessing as well as a curse? This is a book about how depression can have benefits as well as costs, and how to reap those benefits while making yourself feel better—better, in fact, than ever before.
Drawing on psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and literature, Dr Neel Burton explores depression not only as an illness to be treated, but also as an opportunity for insight, growth, and transformation.
🏆Semi-finalist, the BookLife Prize
🏆Highly Commended, the BMA Book Awards
A comprehensive, sympathetic, and thought-provoking guide for those who want to explore their depression in more depth.—The British Journal of Psychiatry
Neel is an incredibly insightful and elegant writer, with a deep knowledge of all he surveys.—Dr James Davies, psychotherapist, author of Cracked
I have read most of Dr. Neel Burton’s books and have enjoyed them immensely … All in all, I found this to be a very insightful and engaging book on depression.—Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer
What the History of Love Reveals About Love Itself
The Sacrifice of Isaac, by the one and only Caravaggio
Many of us expect love to do far more than make us happy. We expect it to make us whole, to tell us who we are, and even to give our lives meaning. This understanding of love is surprisingly recent.
Love is a word with a meaning that has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest “love” stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.
When Love Belonged to God
Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.
In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.
When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.
The Rise of Romantic Love
But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.
\Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the “You complete me” scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.
In the time of God, “finding oneself”—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.
If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.
What All Love Has in Common
Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.
Having many more words for “love” enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.
But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word “love,” then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?
What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.
Intimacy, Power, and the Permeable Boundaries of the Self
Kissing is not universal among human beings and, even today, there are some cultures that have no place for it. This suggests that the behaviour is not purely innate or intuitive, as it may seem to us, but culturally shaped and historically variable—one of the ways in which human beings negotiate the boundary between self and other.
It could be that kissing is a learnt behaviour that developed from ‘kiss feeding’, the process by which mothers in some cultures feed their infants by passing masticated food from mouth to mouth. Yet, there are some present-day indigenous cultures that practise kiss feeding but not social kissing. Another possibility is that kissing is a culturally determined form of grooming behaviour, or, in the case of deep or erotic kissing, a representation of, substitute for, and complement to penetrative intercourse.
Whatever the case, kissing behaviour is not specific or unique to human beings. Primates such as Bonobo apes frequently kiss one another; dogs and cats lick and nuzzle one another and members of other species; even snails and insects engage in antennal play. It could be that, rather than kissing, these animals are in fact grooming, smelling, or communicating with one another, but even so, their behaviour implies and strengthens trust and bonding.
Ancient Kisses
Vedic texts from Ancient India seem to talk about kissing, and the Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century CE, devotes an entire chapter to modes of kissing. Certain anthropologists have suggested that the Greeks learnt about erotic kissing from the Indians after Alexander the Great invaded India in 326 BCE. But even if true, this need not mean that erotic kissing originated in India, or that it does not predate the oral roots of the Vedas.
In Homer’s Iliad, which dates back to the ninth century BCE, King Priam of Troy memorably kisses the hand of Achilles in pleading for the return of Hector’s defiled corpse:
Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.
In the Histories (fifth century BCE), Herodotus speaks of kissing among the Persians, who greeted men of equal rank with a kiss on the mouth and those of slightly lower rank with a kiss on the cheek. Herodotus reports that, because the Greeks ate of the cow, which was sacred to the Egyptians, the Egyptians objected to kissing them on the mouth.
Biblical Kisses
Kissing also features in the Old Testament. Disguised as Esau, Jacob deceives his blind father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing, sealing the deception with a kiss. When Jacob returns after years of exile, Esau runs to him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him, and they weep. Naomi, insisting that her Moabite daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah remain in Moab to make new lives for themselves, kisses them farewell, and they weep. Absalom wins the hearts of Israel by kissing all who come to him seeking justice. In the Song of Songs, which celebrates sexual love, a lover implores, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.’
The Roman Art of Kissing
Under the Romans, kissing became much more commonplace. Romans kissed their partners or lovers, family and friends, and rulers. They distinguished a kiss on the hand or cheek (osculum) from a kiss on the lips (basium) and a deep or passionate kiss (suavium).
Roman kisses fulfilled a range of purposes, from the political and legal to the social and sexual. The status of a Roman citizen determined the part of the body—ranging from cheek to foot—on which he or she would be allowed to kiss the emperor. In an age of widespread illiteracy, kisses served to seal agreements—hence the ‘X’ on the dotted line, and the expression ‘to seal with a kiss.’ Couples were wed by kissing before a gathering, a practice that carries on to this day.
Kissing and Desire
Roman poets such as Catullus and Martial treat erotic kissing as something far removed from sentimental delicacy. Kissing is intensely physical, emotionally charged, and often unsettling in its implications.
In Catullus, kisses emerge within the turbulence of erotic attachment and jealousy, where intimacy is inseparable from fear of loss and replacement. ‘Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?’ is not celebratory, but a bitter imagining of desire redirected elsewhere.
In Martial, kissing becomes more explicitly corporeal and public in character, sometimes figured as excessive or intrusive—an act that overwhelms the boundaries of the self and edges into domination or comic excess.
Across both poets, kissing is less a gentle emblem of love than an occasion in which desire becomes unstable, contested, and materially insistent. In short, in Roman poetry, kissing is not a symbol of love so much as one of its problems.
The Holy Kiss
Customs changed with the decline of Rome. Early Christians often greeted one another with a ‘holy kiss’, which was believed to lead to a transfer of spirit. The Latin anima means both ‘breath of air’ and ‘soul’, and, like animus [mind], comes down from the Proto-Indo-European root ane- [to breathe, blow]. Although St Peter had spoken of the ‘kiss of charity’, and St Paul of the ‘holy kiss’, early Christian sects omitted kissing on Maundy Thursday, the day of the year on which Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Outside of the Church, kissing was used to cement rank and social order, for instance, subjects and vassals kissed the robe of the king, or the slippers or ring of the pope.
The Rise of Romantic Love
After the fall of Rome, the romantic kiss (as distinct from other types of kiss) becomes less prominent in surviving literature for several centuries, before re-emerging in new forms with the rise of courtly love from the late eleventh century. The kiss in Romeo and Juliet is emblematic of this long cultural trajectory, which sought to remove courtship from the purview of family and broader society and celebrate romantic love as a liberating, self-determining, and potentially subversive force.
Crossing Between Selves
The fate of the star-crossed lovers reminds us that such carefree abandon is not without risk, and it may be that vampirism evolved as a representation of the dangers—to health, rank, reputation, prospects, and happiness—of crossing too easily between selves.
Neel Burton is author of Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
How Humanity Learned It Was Not the Center of Everything.
For centuries, the West rested on a stable psychological foundation, with human beings firmly at the center of a purposeful cosmos.
The geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, in which the Sun, stars, and planets revolved around a fixed and unmoving Earth, did more than describe the heavens. It organised meaning. Humanity occupied a privileged position in creation, and the structure of the universe seemed to confirm it.
The Copernican Revolution shattered that certainty. Yet its significance was never merely astronomical. It was psychological. It obliged human beings to confront the unsettling possibility that we are not as central as we imagine.
That confrontation did not end with astronomy. Over the following centuries, humanity would endure a succession of intellectual revolutions, each removing another claim to exceptional status. The same drama may now be unfolding once again with artificial intelligence (AI).
Aristarchus of Samos
The parallels begin with resistance. Nearly eighteen centuries before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the Earth moved around the Sun. Anaxagoras similarly suggested that the Sun was not a divine object but another celestial body. Yet neither transformed humanity’s understanding of itself.
The obstacle was not a lack of evidence alone. Human beings are not neutral observers of reality. We are psychologically invested in narratives that place us at the center of events, and we resist discoveries that threaten that position.
The same tendency shapes our response to AI. The possibility that machines might perform tasks once regarded as uniquely human has been dawning for decades. Yet many people continue to regard intelligence as an exclusively human possession. As with heliocentrism, the deepest resistance is not empirical but existential. What is at stake is not merely a theory of intelligence, but humanity’s place within it.
Copernicus and Tycho Brahe
When, in 1543, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.
The first response was not acceptance but compromise. Tycho Brahe proposed a hybrid system in which the planets orbited the Sun while the Sun itself continued to orbit the Earth. The new evidence was accommodated without fully abandoning the old hierarchy.
We often respond to AI in a similar fashion. We describe it primarily as a tool, an assistant, or an extension of human agency. These descriptions are true in practical terms. Yet they may also serve a psychological function, allowing us to absorb the implications of machine intelligence without fundamentally reconsidering humanity’s place within the cognitive landscape.
Like Tycho’s system, such interpretations preserve the familiar hierarchy while making room for disruptive facts.
Johannes Kepler
Genuine revolutions require deeper adjustments.
Kepler provided one by replacing perfect circles with elliptical orbits governed by mathematical laws. This was more than a technical refinement. It represented the abandonment of a profound assumption: that reality must conform to human intuitions of beauty, symmetry, and perfection.
The universe no longer reflected what human beings wished to see. It followed impersonal principles.
We often anthropomorphise AI in the opposite direction, imagining it as a digital version of ourselves. Yet its operation is fundamentally unlike human thought. Contemporary AI systems identify patterns across immense quantities of data using methods that frequently defy human intuition. Their successes emerge not because they think as we do, but because they often do not.
Like Kepler’s ellipses, their effectiveness can be unsettling precisely because it does not conform to our expectations.
Galileo
Galileo’s telescope deepened the rupture.
Mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and countless previously unseen stars revealed that the heavens were neither perfect nor organised exclusively around the Earth. The cosmos appeared populated by multiple centres, multiple systems, and multiple worlds.
Today, AI may be producing a comparable shift in our understanding of cognition. For centuries, language, reasoning, and creativity were treated as evidence of humanity’s unique status. Increasingly, these capacities appear capable of emerging in different substrates and systems.
This does not necessarily mean that machine intelligence and human intelligence are identical. Yet even the appearance of machine cognition exerts a decentring effect. It forces us to confront the possibility that intelligence may not be an exclusively human phenomenon.
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno carried the implications of heliocentrism beyond anything Copernicus himself proposed.
He imagined an infinite universe populated by innumerable worlds. In such a cosmos, humanity lost not merely its central location but the very idea that any location could be central.
The significance of Bruno’s vision was philosophical as much as astronomical. If there are countless worlds, then no single perspective can claim cosmic privilege.
Today, something similar may be occurring in our conception of intelligence. The traditional hierarchy that places human cognition at the apex of all thinking systems is giving way to a more distributed landscape of minds, algorithms, networks, and machine systems.
The challenge is not simply that machines perform cognitive tasks. It is that intelligence itself may be a broader and more varied phenomenon than previously imagined.
Newton
By the time of Newton, cosmological decentring was largely complete.
Heaven and Earth were unified within a single system of mathematical relationships. The same laws that governed orbiting planets governed falling apples. Reality no longer revolved around human purposes but operated according to indifferent principles.
Just as Newton dissolved the distinction between the terrestrial and celestial realms, AI may be eroding the distinction between human and machine cognition. Capacities once regarded as uniquely human increasingly appear to be manifestations of more general informational processes.
Yet human psychology has not evolved nearly as quickly as human knowledge. We remain creatures who seek significance, narrative, and reassurance. Newton himself devoted enormous energy to alchemy and theology.
The desire for meaning survived the collapse of geocentrism. It survived Darwin and Freud as well. It will survive the rise of AI.
Nietzsche
After the Copernican Revolution, meaning could no longer be derived from occupying a privileged position in the cosmos. Meaning had to be created rather than discovered.
Now, we may have to learn this lesson anew. If intelligence is not uniquely human, then our value cannot rest on exclusivity. It must rest on how we choose to live, create, relate, and act within a reality that no longer upholds our physical and mental centrality.
The Copernican Revolution was the beginning of a long psychological transition: from a world organised around humanity to a world that simply is. The AI Revolution is simply the next stage in that journey.
Nietzsche would have recognised this moment. Copernicus removed humanity from the center of the cosmos; AI is removing it from the center of intelligence. Nietzsche argued that maturity begins when we stop demanding a privileged place in reality and instead create meaning for ourselves.
The question raised by AI is therefore not whether we remain special, but whether we can flourish without being the center of everything.
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