The Life Trap
Written by Richard Docwra
How’s your life? Busy? Stressed? Unfulfilled?
You may not know it, but you’re probably caught in the Life Trap. You live in a complex world where you are bombarded daily with a wide range of powerful messages and influences - from advertising to social media - but at no point in your life have you been given the skills or tools you need to manage this assault on your mind.
As a result, you have ended up caught in a trap, like most of us in the modern world - living a stifled and restricted life that just follows the dominant ideas of the people and society that surround you. As a consequence, you pursue career achievement and material success, worry about what other people think of you and lead a busy, distracted life. Your life feels meaningless and isolated, yet you don’t know why and are unable to take control and change it.
This book explores what causes the Life Trap and why it matters so much - not just for our own lives but for society as a whole.
It will help you to escape the Life Trap and live the way you really want. It could change your life - and bring a happier, more peaceful world.
The Life Trap
Introduction
This book is all about you. More specifically, how your view of the world, your behaviour, your life and the possibilities for it could all be limited and stifled by the society, ideas and people that surround you. And how most of us end up trapped in restricted, limited and unfulfilled lives as a result.
This book explores how this trap is created, how we can escape it and why it matters so much that we do - both to our ability to live good, fulfilled lives as individuals, and our ability to build a good, civilised and happy society.
Here is a basic outline of the arguments we’ll make in this book.
Most of us believe that we think for ourselves and shape our own destinies all the time, but in reality this is far from the case. We’ll explore some of the latest psychological and neurological research which shows that our views, beliefs and behaviour are strongly influenced and moulded by other people around us. It all adds up to a picture of human beings that aren’t as rational as we previously thought.
At the same time, we live in a world with more pressures, influences and information for each of us to deal with than ever before. We will explore some of the key things that can influence us, from education to advertising, so that we draw a picture of the overall pressures that are moulding our thoughts, attitudes and behaviour.
In a world like this we need to be taught the skills and tools to be able to see the world clearly and build up realistic, well-informed worldviews and lives. We’re not simply born with this ability. In this book, we’ll explore what these skills consist of and how they can help us - as well as what can happen to us if we’re not equipped with them.
A key argument of this book is that the society we currently live in and the institutions that surround us - including our children’s education system - don’t recognise the importance of these skills and don’t equip us with them to anywhere near the level we need. In fact, we live at a time where the external conditions in society actually militate against us developing them.
As a consequence, many people are trapped in very restricted, limited lives, only following the path that they’ve been fed by the dominant ideas of the society they live in. As we’ll see, this can have a massive effect on our lives and what we get out of them. It can also have a significant effect on how we behave towards other people and the wider world around us. It can make us more selfish, more materialistic, less willing to help others and ultimately less civilised.
So, this is a critical issue for our own lives. But this doesn’t just affect us as individuals. The repercussions of failing to provide these tools to people run to a societal level. When people grow up without these tools and skills, the more they are open to the influence of others - from negative influences like materialism through to the influence of political demagogues. At a time of political upheaval and rising populism, this is clearly an urgent issue.
This book is therefore a call to action for us to make an intervention now - and start building these skills and tools into our society’s infrastructure and our own lives.
It will also explore what we can can do about it - both as a society and as individuals. We’ll look at how we can empower ourselves with these skills so that we have a better chance of escaping our own particular ‘life traps’ and explore at how we can move towards a society that nurtures and recognises the value of these important attributes.
In short, we will find out how to escape the Life Trap - and give everyone the best chance of independent and fulfilled lives, and a good, peaceful and civilised society.
Now read or listen to the full book! Click the links at the top of this page to download it for free.
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