I’ve recently identified that I experience feelings of depression.

That wouldn’t be a surprise to my teenage self, who often complained about being “depressed,” but he misunderstood the word’s meaning. Depression (whether as a temporary feeling or a chronic, clinical issue) is not simply intense sadness. It’s more like apathy—a lack of any desire to do anything, so intense that you feel like you can’t physically muster the energy to do things you know you want or need to do. And it can even happen to people like me who, at other times, are filled with a burning desire to do things.

When I feel depressed (or sad or angry) there’s usually a particular negative thought dominating my mind. I might be missing one of the valued relationships that I’ve lost, worrying about some future challenge I’m facing, or fixating on something outside my life, such as an upsetting news story. My mood and the thing I’m thinking about go hand-in-hand, and so I naturally assumed that the object of my thoughts was the cause of my feelings and that the solution to my mood was to somehow fix the issue I was ruminating on.

There are certainly cases in which this is true. If you are facing a big challenge or have recently experienced a crushing loss, that will obviously throw your emotions off balance and you will need to focus on addressing that issue, your thoughts about it, or both. That is true also for long-term challenges such as living with a disease or in wartime. But when you regularly experience feelings of sadness and/or depression regardless of the objective quality of your life, and when the objects of your malaises are regular parts of your life such as old relationships or recurring anxieties, then trying to fix or change your thinking about those particular issues will not work without another key step.

That step is redirecting your awareness at first away from the object of your thoughts and onto the feelings you are experiencing themselves. In other words, being conscious of your emotions in the moment. That will often make you aware of countless things that were affecting your mood subconsciously before, such as:

• Physical sensations including muscle strain, headaches, and chest/stomach discomfort

• Other emotions interwoven with the dominant one, such as anxiety underlying feelings of depression or frustration underlying feelings of anxiety

• Other objects of the feelings

• Unstated premises that are driving the emotion, such as a belief that you cannot handle challenges or do not deserve affection

Sometimes, focusing your attention on the emotions you’re experiencing will, by itself, cause them to dissipate in that moment. Other times, it can give you the objectivity necessary to recognize that what you thought was the source of your feelings is actually the receptacle of an emotional cocktail that’s more deeply entrenched in your subconscious.

Directing your attention in this way can be especially difficult when you’re feeling depressed or angry. One technique I find useful for overcoming this resistance in the moment is asking myself a short list of pre-set questions:

• Will I be happier if I continue indulging these feelings right now, or if I find a way to manage them?

• Will I admire myself more for giving into the lure of these emotions or for initiating the thought process that I know can overcome them?

• Are these emotions going to help me change the things I’m unhappy about in my life, or will I be better able to do that by getting my emotions under control and taking rational action to fix those things (where appropriate)?

For me, directing my consciousness toward my emotions rather than their apparent causes has enabled me to realize that I sometimes feel depressed essentially for no reason. There are causes of course—factors in my past, premises I hold—for those emotions, but I am not experiencing them in response to particular current circumstances. They are perennial, and I am only able to deal with them if I recognize that fact and work on addressing their deeper causes, such as a lack of self-confidence stemming from feeling inadequate and trapped at school during childhood.

Other times, I realize that my mood has, in the short term, been a response to a different cause from the one I’m consciously focused on. For example, I may feel depressed thinking about someone I used to know, but when I step back and look at the emotion, I realize that a sad story I saw on social media put me in a mood that then led my mind to think about that old relationship. By maintaining consciousness of my emotions, I can see that, at other times, I think about the same old relationship in a more positive light. I may have grief I need to deal with about those memories, but they are not the driving factor of the feeling of depression—deeper issues in my subconscious need addressing to explain why I experience a sense of powerlessness when reminded of unpleasant things. (I am and have been actively addressing those issues for a long time, but that’s outside the scope of this article.)

Next time you catch yourself feeling upset, angry, depressed, or such like, try taking the particular object of your emotions out of the picture and focusing on the sensation itself instead. Try closing your eyes and homing in on the emotional and physical sensations, separating them from the specific things you’ve been thinking about. I hope the results will be as enlightening and liberating for you as they have been for me.

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Reason for Living is part of Rational Endeavour. Find out more about Rational Endeavour’s publications, events, and other projects at rationalendeavour.com

Thank you to all of you who’ve supported my work over the past two years. Thanks to you, I’m now in a position to announce the next stage of my mission to promote a rational, curious approach to living life.

Reason for Living—along with my other content channel, Trekker Tom—is now part of Rational Endeavour, a business I have set up to advance my deepest personal values: curiosity, optimism, and reason. Through Rational Endeavour, I am planning:

• A bi-weekly online meetup—Calling the Curious—where attendees will meet to stimulate their curiosity on a wide range of subjects. The first meeting will be at 1pm Eastern (6pm UK) on Thursday 27 August, where we will discuss a short passage from Carl Sagan. There is no fixed charge to attend; attendees are encouraged to donate whatever they feel the meetup is worth to them. You can sign up here.

• A bi-monthly magazine—The Endeavourist—designed to be a dose of optimism and curiosity fuel in a world where both values are too often forgotten. The Endeavourist will be a simple, accessible magazine with short articles, news features, regular columns, and more. The first issue will drop in October 2026. You can subscribe here. If you’d like to write for The Endeavourist, submission guidelines are here.

• An annual international conference—EndeavourCon—with the first taking place on May 23, 2027 in Bedford, UK. I am currently working with various partners to put together a wide-ranging speaker roster for this event. Tickets are available here and speakers will be announced at the same link in the coming weeks.

• A series of explainer booklets, beginning with “Getting Curious about…” and “Heroes of…” series covering a range of industries, sciences, and individuals.

• Regular content production for the Reason for Living and Trekker Tom Substack and Instagram pages, including a return to more philosophical articles on this Substack, which I know many of you have wanted over the past year. (The next of these is currently in editing.)

• Publication of future books, including a second edition of Reason for Living, my science-fiction series The Hands of Man, and more works from various writers.

All of this is only possible with your help. Most importantly, Rational Endeavour is launching with a very limited budget. There’s just about enough to kick off these programs, but the business needs funding in order to pay writers and speakers, take on staff, and procure all the resources needed to deliver EndeavourCon 2027—and for me to be able to commit the time needed to run and grow the company.

If you believe in the work I do and would like to see this project succeed, please donate. You can do that through the Rational Endeavour website or by taking out a paid subscription to this Substack (or, if you’re already a paid subscriber, upgrading to a Titan of Reason subscription).

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In addition to financial support, I’m also looking for people who can help me deliver Rational Endeavour’s programs, including writers, editors, speakers, fundraisers, marketers, and social media managers. If any of these are in your ballpark, please get in touch today.

Last of all, thank you! Thank you to those of you who already support my work financially and to those who share, engage with, and enjoy the content I produce. I can’t wait to expand that and invest more of my time into spreading curiosity, optimism, and reason.

Yours with gratitude,
Thomas

He regards these four things as interdependent—we can’t consistently or fully enjoy the benefits of any of them unless we have all four. Being wealthy isn’t much use without good health, and even a healthy and wealthy life wouldn’t be great for most people without the company of those we love.

When we experience personal crises, it’s easy to let our focus on these priorities slip, and that’s definitely happened to me over the past year. I focused on the areas that most needed work in my life—love and mental health—and dropped the ball to some extent on wealth and physical health. As much as I’ve succeeded in the first two areas in that time—I’ve made huge strides in improving my mental health and personal relationships—my happiness and ability to focus on what matters are constantly undermined by the fact that my physical health and financial wellbeing are not as good as they’ve been in the past, demonstrating Lopez’s point.

Recently, while walking on a Florida beach and reflecting on my past year, I began thinking again about Lopez’s formulation and came to a realization: Happiness doesn’t belong on his list. Rather, properly understood as a state of active joy in living as a human being, it is “the good life,” the goal that the other three items are essential to.

Suddenly, what had been a flat list of four priorities became a triangle in my mind, with health, wealth, and love on the corners all integrating to form happiness in the center.

The next thing I realized is that the three outside terms need some explanation to be interpreted correctly. (Lopez does this, but I needed to define them in certain ways for my own purposes.)

The key elements for me were that:

• “Health” includes mental health, which not only means looking after psychological issues but also setting aside appropriate rest and relaxation time and pursuing one’s hobbies.

• “Wealth” includes spiritual wealth, which includes the pursuit of purpose and meaning through productive work.

• “Love” includes friendship and family alongside romantic relationships.

The overlap and interdependency between these is apparent once we get this granular. For example, mental health is going to help and be helped by spiritual wealth. Likewise, friendships and romance should contribute to spiritual wealth.

Once I’d arrived at these expanded definitions, I had created a diagram that provided clear direction for how I need to live my life going forward:

Lopez is a voracious reader, including of Greek philosophy, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was the book that kick-started his self-development journey and career. In that work, Aristotle observes that achieving eudaimonia—a state of active happiness through the continuing embodiment of virtue and achievement of purpose—requires “goods of the body,” “goods of the soul,” and “external goods.” These almost directly map onto “health,” “love,” and “wealth” respectively. Perhaps Lopez put “happiness” last in recognition of the fact that the other three are prerequisites for it and that it is the ultimate goal, but Aristotle more precisely observed that happiness is fundamental—the other three get their importance from that goal.

I’m now engaged in identifying specific lifestyle changes I need to make to properly prioritize all three elements of the triangle. Here are just some of the ones I’ve listed so far:

The particular changes and goals you may need to implement will depend on your current situation. The purpose of the triangle is to help you identify which of the three broad categories you are potentially under-investing in, and whether the things you’re currently spending your time on are or are not advancing each of the three priorities. As a next step, I recommend writing out three lists:

• Your current regular time-consuming activities, identifying which of the three priorities they help and/or hinder

• Which particular aspects of the three priorities you’re currently struggling with (e.g. physical or mental health or a particular aspect of these such as cardio or emotional regulation)

• What specific changes, such as those I listed above, will help you address these struggles without hindering the other priorities

I hope the triangle will help you think about your future priorities as it has for me. It won’t be enough on its own—you need to identify your core productive purpose as well, as I’ve written about before. For me, that’s writing and producing content about science fiction, space travel, and the values of reason and curiosity. You can have other productive purposes as well (as writing about self-development is for me), provided those integrate with the core productive purpose. Underneath all of this is the ultimate purpose of your own happiness and flourishing. The function of the triangle is not to give you purpose, but rather focus your mind on the priorities that will help you achieve it.

If you value reason, curiosity, and ideas for a flourishing future, please consider subscribing to my other Substack, Trekker Tom.

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Thanks to Yevhennia Naumuk for valuable editorial assistance with this article.

Have you ever put yourself into an awkward situation because you were trying to impress someone? Perhaps you exaggerated on a date and sounded boastful. Perhaps you got caught embellishing a story to a group of friends. Perhaps you got into a conversation on a complex topic and couldn’t hold your own—but blustered on as though you knew what you were talking about.

This kind of behavior can lead to all kinds of trouble. Distorting the truth to impress people can cause us to lose touch with reality as we build up a fake image of ourselves that we then have to keep consistent. Sometimes we even start to believe our own exaggerations. Worse, we become dependent on other people’s evaluations of us—instead of evaluating ourselves by our own standards—for our sense of self-worth. That makes us even more vulnerable to painful embarrassment when our attempts to impress others fail.

The folly of such behavior is brilliantly depicted in the 1990s British sit-com Keeping Up Appearances. It follows Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced bouquet, as she regularly reminds everyone from the priest to the postman), a social climber obsessed with her image and reputation, and her dejected husband Richard, who struggles to maintain his dignity as Hyacinth ropes him into her schemes and embarrasses everyone with her attempts to appear wealthy, well-connected, and important. For example, she frequently boasts about the amount of mail she receives (“Be sure to tell everyone we received 112 Christmas cards!”), invites anyone important she meets to one of her “candlelight suppers” (which nobody wants to attend and which always end in disaster), and always answers the telephone by singing, “The Bucket residence, the lady of the house speaking!”

In one scene, Hyacinth is on her way to see her sisters, but must rely on her neighbor Elizabeth to give her a ride. This creates a problem for Hyacinth: Her sisters are poor, unkempt, and live in a run-down house in a shabby neighborhood. Letting Elizabeth see them and their house would, in Hyacinth’s mind, spoil her image of respectability, so she lies to Elizabeth about where her family lives and directs her to a more up-market street nearby. When Elizabeth drops Hyacinth off at the address, Hyacinth pretends to walk into a stranger’s house, but Elizabeth doesn’t immediately leave, and hilarity ensues as Hyacinth struggles to keep up the act:

Hyacinth is an outstanding example of what philosopher Ayn Rand called a second-hander—“one who regards the consciousness of other [people] as superior to [her] own and to the facts of reality.”1 Hyacinth, rather than set her own standards for success and virtue, judges herself according to how she thinks others regard her social status, then ends up in a constant state of stress, panic, and disarray (played for laughs in the show) as those attempts come into conflict with reality. This only intensifies her desire to improve how others see her, causing yet more trouble.

It’s not the case that it’s always wrong to care about what someone else thinks of you. If someone you respect for being a moral and virtuous person admires or disdains you, that can be a sign that you are or aren’t making the right choices in life and should reconsider them. But you should choose who you respect based on your own standards, and evaluate yourself according to those standards, only looking to others for indications that you are (or are not) living by them.

The character of Hyacinth Bucket is a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be second-handed. Although watching Keeping Up Appearances is rewarding enough for its comedy value alone, it also provides an excellent reference point for what dependence on the opinions of others looks like so that we can avoid it in our own lives.

Author’s note: This article was originally published at On Solid Ground.

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