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.
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.”
Before We Hurry to Silence It, We Should Listen to What It Has to Say
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Grief knows its object. Depression often does not. But that does not mean that depression is always meaningless suffering. Often, it is suffering whose meaning is asking to be discovered.
Still, we must be careful not to romanticise depression. Depression can be a disabling, even deadly, illness. Such depression requires urgent and intensive treatment. But neither should the most severe cases determine how we understand all depression.
Diagnosis
Today, in England, around one person in six is prescribed antidepressants. Numbers on this scale should make us ask: is this all mental illness, that is, a biological disorder of the brain, or is it also a problem with modern life?
If at least some depression arises from a problem of living, then the depression is pointing straight at the problem. By treating it as a biological disorder of the brain, we are hiding the problem and prolonging the pain. Our depression may be telling us, look, something here is seriously wrong, something here has to change, you can’t go on like this.
Treatment
Treatment cannot simply aim at silencing it. If a fire alarm is sounding, disabling the alarm may bring relief—but it does not put out the fire.
Instead, treatment should be more like an exploration and journey. Already in the thirteenth century, Dante gave us the right image. At the beginning of Inferno, he finds himself alone in a dark forest, having lost the straight path. The forest is dark and dangerous. Yet the only way out is through it.
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place. Because the starting place may have been the problem.
Depression can be an illness, but it can also be a form of intelligence. Before we hurry to silence it, we should listen to what it has to say.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Empathy is, in a sense, the opposite of anger. In anger, we are imprisoned in ourselves and unable to see another person’s perspective. We see in people only what they have done to us. With empathy, we reach out to the other and try to see the world through their eyes.
But if we take this reaching out too far and begin to merge with them, it can become a problem. The suffering of our patients can become both corrupting and exhausting.
Sympathy vs Empathy
The danger becomes clearer if we distinguish between sympathy and empathy. If a friend has lost a parent, and I say, “I’m sorry,” that’s sympathy—which is simple concern for another person’s suffering. If I imagine what that loss feels like from within my friend’s world, that’s empathy.
The power—and the danger—of empathy lies in its particularity. It’s not merely a matter of imagining myself in someone else’s situation. I must imagine myself as them, in that situation. I need to understand who they are, where they have come from, and where they are trying to go. As John Steinbeck wrote, ‘It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.’
Why Empathy Must Remain at One Remove
Yet, to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes is not to become that person. Empathy must remain at one remove. That distance enables me to think objectively and be of help. After all, if I drown alongside a drowning person, I can hardly pull them out of the water.
If that boundary collapses, empathy can corrupt as well as exhaust us. It can lead us to favour the person before us over the many people we cannot see. And, as empathic distress, it can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout.
Regulating empathy, therefore, is not callousness but the condition of effective care.
Doctors who understand their patients without being engulfed by them are not only more effective but more fulfilled in their work.
Ultimately, the doctor’s task is not to carry the patient’s pain, but to stand close enough to understand it—and far away enough to help.
Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.
The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.
So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.
Why We Get Angry
Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.
And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.
We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.
How Anger Defeats Us
If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.
We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.
The Surest Cure for Anger
Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.
Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:
Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?
That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.
When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Happiness exists—but as a fleeting feeling, not a permanent state.
No one can remain cheerful all the time. Nor should they want to. A life without sadness would be shallow and dishonest, scarcely a human life at all. Our sadness is often the measure of what we value: we grieve because we have loved, worry because we care, and struggle because something matters.
Part of the problem with happiness is contained in the word itself. In English, happy is related to happen, which derives from the Old Norse happ, meaning fortune or luck. Like luck, happiness is something that happens to us. It comes and goes, often without asking our permission.
That is why happiness is such a poor goal. If we make a passing feeling our chief aim, we condemn ourselves to chasing it. Worse, we begin to monitor ourselves continually: Am I happy yet? Am I as happy as yesterday? Am I as happy as my friends appear to be?
The more we scrutinise our happiness, the more dissatisfied and self-absorbed we become. Happiness is turned into a performance indicator—and almost invariably found wanting.
From Happiness to Flourishing
The Spanish word for happiness points in a different direction. Feliz derives from the Latin felix, which originally meant fruitful, fertile, or productive. Whereas the English word points to fortune, the Spanish word points to fertility: not merely to how we feel, but to what we bring forth.
The Ancient Greeks aimed higher still. They called their ideal eudaimonia, which is often translated as “happiness” but is better understood as flourishing. Literally, eudaimonia means something like being possessed of a good spirit or divinity. It is not simply about feeling good, but about living well—leading a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.
Unlike happiness, flourishing can contain a great deal of unhappiness. Indeed, grief, struggle, and sacrifice may belong to our finest achievements and relationships. Raising a child, writing a book, caring for a dying parent, or standing up for a principle may bring anxiety, exhaustion, or pain. Yet we would not therefore wish these things out of our lives.
A pleasant life is not necessarily a good life, and a good life is not always pleasant. If we lived badly, what could it mean to be happy except to feel good about the wrong things?
What Cannot Be Taken Away
Socrates supplied the extreme test. The Athenians condemned him and made him drink the hemlock. But although they could put him to death, they could not take away who he was or how he had lived. They could take his life, but they could not make it a bad one.
Indeed, by killing him, they made him greater. His death became the final proof of his philosophy and transformed his life into an example for all humanity.
Aristotle, the intellectual grandson of Socrates, made flourishing an activity rather than a mood. Eudaimonia, he argued, consists in developing and exercising what is best in us—reason, judgement, and character—across the whole course of a life. It cannot be reduced to manufacturing a pleasant but insubstantial state of mind.
That’s why happiness often arrives when we are not looking for it: while absorbed in a friendship, a landscape, a piece of music, or some difficult and worthwhile work. At such moments, we are not standing apart from life to assess it. We are living it.
So, yes, happiness exists—but chiefly as a by-product, not an aim in itself.
Instead of asking, “Am I happy?” we should ask, “Am I living well?” and “What am I becoming?”
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