@philosophyminis: How do you know if you are unhappy? It sounds like a funny thing to ask because surely we just know. But life has an odd way of carrying on. The job, the responsibilities, the expectations - they push you along, and life doesn’t even care if you are happy or not. But according to Elaine Scarry, there are two red flags we need to watch out for. Scarry argues that when life forces us into a survival mode, we retreat into our primal and basic needs. We care only about our bodies. We live inside our heads. When we feel unsafe, insecure, and unhappy, we retreat. This can manifest in many ways, and here are two. The first is when you stop doing your hobbies. You stop making, creating, exploring, or playing. It might be charcoal drawing, playing an instrument, or reading for hours at a time, but it’s when you realise that you no longer do that which you once loved. We often blame the smartphone for this, but Scarry argues that this is a symptom and not the cause. It’s because the world is making us anxious that we retreat into ourselves. And the second is to look at your bedroom wall. Scarry argues that when the world outside is dangerous, we often live in a state of readiness. We are ready to leave, to move on, to escape. And so we don’t put up pictures. We don’t meet the neighbours, we don’t commit to any one place, and we don’t make a home out of a house. There is no easy solution to this. There is no one recipe to happiness. But these are important red flags to monitor because when something is broken, you need to fix it. And when something is going wrong in your life, it’s time to make a change.

Jonny Thomson

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Region: GB

Saturday 27 June 2026 12:58:35 GMT