All posts tagged: wanting

How Ancient Greek Philosophy Can Lead to Wanting Less and Living Better

How Ancient Greek Philosophy Can Lead to Wanting Less and Living Better

Published by Sam Flores

Summary Ancient Greeks balanced the urge for more (pleonexia) with the virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) to live a measured life. Stoicism teaches using possessions without attachment, ensuring you can lose things without losing your inner peace and identity. Epicureanism focuses on reducing desire itself, finding stable pleasure by wanting little and lacking nothing truly essential. The art of living well involves letting go of the superfluous and cultivating a life measured by sufficiency, not accumulation. Show more   The urge for “more” isn’t new. Ancient Greeks saw how people leaned toward accumulating wealth, status, possessions, even knowledge, and treated it not as sin but as a matter of proportion. How much is enough, and what happens when wanting more warps one’s sense of measure? Concepts like sophrosyne and pleonexia helped philosophers show how excess could distort the self. Their varied responses, from Stoic detachment to Epicurean simplicity, all suggested that desire is natural, provided it’s shaped rather than allowed to run wild.   Pleonexia and the Problem of “More Than One’s Share” Sketch of Plato’s Symposium, by Pietro Testa, …

Parents: have you noticed younger children wanting to try skincare products? | Children

Parents: have you noticed younger children wanting to try skincare products? | Children

Published by Sam Flores

Children as young as two are appearing in TikTok videos demonstrating their skincare routines, a Guardian investigation has found, raising concerns about the beauty industry’s reach. Dermatologists say children do not need multi-step skincare and warn the trend may be fuelling anxiety about appearance from an early age. We want to hear from parents of children of primary school children or younger. Have your children asked for skincare products or felt pressure to follow routines they’ve seen online or heard about from friends? Have you noticed changes in how they think about their appearance? Do you have concerns? Share your experience You can share your submission in the form below or by messaging us. We won’t use your response without contacting you first.  Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this …

Has It Become Taboo to Admit to Wanting Children?

Has It Become Taboo to Admit to Wanting Children?

Published by Jenni Sidey

I’m going to admit to something I’m deeply ashamed of. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write this post because I’m afraid of how people will perceive me after reading it. I suspect they’ll jump to all sorts of conclusions about who I am and what I believe, based on what I’m about to tell you. Am I shooting up crack cocaine or selling drugs to teenagers on street corners? No. I have just become a parent for the first time, and I love it. That was hard to write. But now that I’ve gotten it out of the way, let me explain why I was so loath to admit it. Certain beliefs tend to cluster together and frame a person in a particular light. If I told you I believed the moon landing was faked, that climate change wasn’t real, and that vaccinations cause autism, there’s a good chance you’d clock me as being a certain type of person. Now, for better or worse, saying you want children and are enjoying the …

My Gen-Z daughter watched both versions of A Woman of Substance… but found one wanting

My Gen-Z daughter watched both versions of A Woman of Substance… but found one wanting

Published by Sam Flores

Remakes. They’re tricky territory for any broadcaster to explore, especially if the original was a rip-roaring success. In which case, you have to wonder (whisper it), why bother? Viewers – and I include myself very firmly in this category – can be quite protective of “our programmes” to the point where we stubbornly insist that they shouldn’t be monkeyed around with, on the grounds that they can’t possibly be bettered. But sometimes old favourites can be taken into a whole new captivating realm. Admittedly, Brideshead really didn’t need to be revisted in the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited, but sometimes it can be revelatory to watch a fresh lease of life being breathed into our best-loved classics. Think of Poldark with Aidan Turner, cutting a scythe through Sunday evening ratings, or the heart-warming return of All Creatures Great and Small – albeit this time to Channel 5 rather than the BBC. Then, there are those absolutely iconic series that capture not just a cultural moment, but have a huge emotional resonance to boot. A Woman of …

When Wanting Becomes Lonely | Psychology Today

When Wanting Becomes Lonely | Psychology Today

Published by Jenni Sidey

When desire no longer lives in the same place for both partners, a relationship enters a bind that cannot be solved by love alone. One person has lost interest in sex while the other has not, and there is no villain in the room, only grief, longing, and fear of loss. I’m not opposed to monogamy; I’m naming the pain I witness daily in clients who are deeply committed to it and find themselves with no honest place to put their desire. In these moments, exclusivity intensifies the loss because choosing one partner as your only erotic home means that when that home closes, even partially, the grief is real, and so is the resentment if it is not named. What’s Being Mourned That grief often gets mislabeled as neediness, selfishness, or betrayal. But what is actually being mourned is aliveness, the loss of being met, the loss of a shared erotic future that once felt possible. In monogamous bonds, there is no side door for that grief to exit. If it cannot be spoken, …

When Wanting Never Stops: A Humanist View of Schopenhauer and Billionaires

When Wanting Never Stops: A Humanist View of Schopenhauer and Billionaires

Published by Sam Flores

Arthur Schopenhauer argued that desire never rests, that satisfaction only fuels the next want. This essay takes that insight seriously in a modern setting, using billionaires as a living thought experiment to ask what happens when endless wanting is amplified by extreme power. From a Humanist perspective, the problem is not wealth itself, but what occurs when private desire reshapes shared institutions, markets and lives, forcing societies to confront the necessity of limits in a finite world. Money is supposed to be the finish line. That is the promise. Work hard, succeed, accumulate enough zeros, and eventually the engine shuts off. The wanting ends. The mind rests. The credits roll. And yet, oddly, the people who reach the far end of the scoreboard never seem to leave the game. Somewhere around the first hundred-million dollars, a quiet, polite voice clears its throat. It does not shout. It does not threaten. It simply asks, “What’s next?” This voice does not belong to the market, or ambition, or even greed in the ordinary sense. It belongs to …

Behind France’s declining birthrate, the complex question of wanting children

Behind France’s declining birthrate, the complex question of wanting children

Published by Sam Flores

LÉA GIRARDOT, LE MONDE The question of whether people want to have children has come up again in France, with the release of the latest demographic report by national statistics agency INSEE on Tuesday, January 13. The new data show 645,000 births took place in 2025, a decrease of 2.1% compared to the previous year and nearly 24% over the past 15 years. The total fertility rate has fallen to 1.56 children per woman, the lowest figure since the end of World War I. Does the drop in the birth rate, which began in 2011, simply reflect a decline in the desire to have children? Political leaders, confronted with this demographic shift and its many consequences, have seized upon the issue. From the “demographic rearmament” called for by President Emmanuel Macron in January 2024 to a parliamentary inquiry into the causes and consequences of the falling birth rate launched by the centrist Horizons & Indépendants group at the Assemblée Nationale, many have tried to understand the reasons behind the ongoing shift. In the case of …