The 3 contributors discuss 2021 and whether our predictions came true , the why and the how. Lessons to learn, wisdom for the future or just croissants and coffee amongst friends

Freedom is one of those words that is used daily and the reason for many wars but as far as we can see there is no satisfactory definition of it. The dictionary definition of being free to do what you want (as long as you do no harm) is as Jordan Peterson puts it the 2 year old definition and precisely why 2 year olds need parental supervision. Yet modern society and materialism accelerated by social media has turned most of us into 2 year olds as our self obsession erodes other values of religion culture ethics etc. We are then controlled subconsciously and to the exclusion of all else by this. Modern freedom for you. Indeed the American War of Independence and the French Revolution some scholars say led to less freedom as well established minimally intrusive structures with long tradition were replaced by democracy and mob rule descending into political correctness and wokeness where everything you utter risks causing offence and being sanctioned. That is indeed a less free society. Ofcourse you can't be free in the first place if you don't know who you are. The hardest question and the most enlightening I ask my patients is to tell me who they are. Their identity. Excluding occupation. This rarely makes it into people's grave stones. Once you know your identity that is the start of power, and freedom is being able to function according to your identity in a functioning close family and community. Ofcourse modern society does its best to erode the latter but every single person when coached properly and who discovers their identity discover power and freedom. Thanks to Tahra who explained how wearing the Hijab gave her freedom by removing the expectations to live up to certain norms valued by modern society accelerated by social media and allowed her to focus on her core identity of being a loving mother wife carer housewife and designer.

Christina Costa gives a wonderful Ted Talk on the power of gratitude and how practice makes perfect. However indiscriminate positivity is neither self awareness or practical as plenty of research has shown. Furthermore gratitude in isolation implies passivity which as long as you are happy is not bad. But it also implies little control, just an acceptance and a hope that positive energy will help your lot. Of course most of what psychologists say are out of context nuggets taken from religion. We are hard wired to want to have faith as this calms the mind. The problem is we don't know what is suitable to have faith in. So gratitude and believing things will go well at least fits with human psychology. But faith in religion and gratitude in that faith is even more powerful because there is a whole network of belonging and rules and expectation and guidance versus isolated gratitude. Grateful faith in religion is indeed what we see as religious euphoria. Secondly fighting is good as long as you use the correct driver of which there are only 2. Fear of failure and motivation. So an imposed goal , a distant impossible to reach summit will fill you with fear and stress and even avoidance. A positive challenge especially where giving and collaboration with others is involved is not only infinitely more positive but it's good for you. It also allows you to enjoy the journey as much as is practical. Finally we discuss the power of pattern recognition and how this is showing increasingly clear patterns for the direction humanity is taking. Hello down there!

Humans are still evolutionary cavemen where reflex anxiety reduction was necessary for survival. In our concrete jungle there no predators for us to escape from and no basic survival needs to occupy us. We are prisoners of our need to reduce our innate anxiety most of which traps us with cycles of instant gratification and goal seeking.
This reflex is reflected on a daily basis by scapegoating. Literally a safety valve for our psychological discomfort. Simply transferring our discomfort to an external object or person or group. At least it would be a safety valve if the consequences of that transference were not destructive. It took milenia to come up with religion and the concept of a scarifical lamb in the Old Testament and laterally Jesus Christ was a masterstroke. He would shoulder all your sins and imperfections and all you needed was faith which we have evolved to have. Of course religion can use scapegoating harmfully such as the Spanish Inquisition but the increasing erosion of religion has led to the human need to scapegoat becoming either unregulated or used as a tool of mass manipulation. This is one of the commonest reasons for wars starting, to divert the psychological distress of the population for economic woes onto the evil enemy. Now of course we are seeing this exemplified as covid idiots and covid heroes and non vacc and vaccinated and vaccine passports etc. Governments have rapidly worked out that with minimal effort of virtue signalling they can achieve mass compliance with hardly any scintilla of truth of virtue or integrity.

The human mind does anything to avoid or reduce anxiety. We have the ability to think of difficult questions but lack the intelligence to solve them. In order to achieve peace of mind we deal with this cognitive dissonance by making a best guess and as time passes we become ever more attached to our chosen view point and can even justify it. Thus the cognitive discomfort and anxiety associated with it is allayed as the mind equilibrates back into calmness , also known as peace of mind. Of course materialism and instant gratification which has exponentially risen over the last 50 years is the mortal enemy of peace of mind . For millennia the agony and responsibility and consequences of choosing and justifying a decision was unnecessary as our most important tool was Faith. Indeed philosophers will expound that we evolved with a God centre in our brains as there is an evolutionary advantage to a tribe having a common focus and source of reference , authority protection and solace. God (s). The problem is in man's false confidence and arrogance of science we have assumed we no longer need faith with the result that the world has descended ever more into chaos the first casualty being the power of identity. Bring this full circle back to modern society where humans floundering in a directionless turbulent sea of information and problems to solve desperately deal with the cognitive dissonance and plump for one side or the other. There is no logic in emotional anxiety reduction and therefore no sure truth. What there for sure is conflict between different groups as we have evolved to dislike and fear those different to us. Our modern society reflects this in ever more destructive and it has to be said inventive and nonsensical ways.

Diplomacy is a skill that often takes years to teach. It is carefully crafted communication respecting the rules of the recipient. Diplomats get sent in to smooth feathers ruffled by politicians most of whom especially in the current UK government seem to care little for truth or integrity or harmony. Diplomacy is the art of making the other people feel understood and empathised with and collaborated with sprinkled with appropriate humour which is a trait unique to humans as opposed to our ape cousins. Leaders need to have diplomatic skills in addition to their specialist team behind them. It is a reflection of the disintegration of society that most modern leaders being entirely self serving care nothing about diplomacy. An example being #boris Johnson and #dominic Cummings. If you are not liked your days are numbered. Interestingly Boris Johnson got elected as he was liked and used humour. Unfortunately his true colours camouflaged by pandemic hysteria are slowly emerging.
Thanks to Alexis Ferraris who recorded Read Between the Lines with The Reason For Now
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ErMKVoHC7uFnTrpJftCNz?si=hr6bSW5MRQuRZnhUcKDXNQ&dl_branch=1

Every society has had some for religion at its core and Monarchy or dictatorship. Democracy has destroyed every society it has taken root in. God is "the word". Truth. There is nothing more powerful than truth. Logic. Hell is unregulated human emotion. Greed. Ecstasy. But the more pleasure you seek the more depressed you get because pleasure dopamine reduces peace of mind serotonin. Heaven is high serotonin and peace of mind while ecstasy in the form of ultimate pleasure is segregated to the next life. Ladies and gentlemen, make your choice. Or rather don't. Because he can't be relied upon to make the right choice. We need leadership and we already know what works.

Be inspired by Tahra who bravely and kindly narrates her story for us as part of her own therapy. We identify trauma and self esteem factors, different types of coping styles, self blame and ADHD symptoms but most importantly a happy ending. She continues to be the writer of her own story.

Mental Health in lock-down is actually an acceleration of the decline over the last 20-30 years. The Royal College of Psychiatry raised a sentinel flag that something was up with their defeat depression campaign in the 1990s. Since then even up to 2 years ago there are papers published in the Lancet saying that depression continues to be a major epidemic and that doctors should be prescribing more antidepressants. They have missed the point. It is not depression it is the fact we are all becoming more unhappy stressed and anxious. The reason is that we are unsuited to modern life and because of the destabilising and toxic effect of social media. Make no mistake . Herd behaviour is almost always bad. At its simplest level it is seen in riots or mob lynchings. You hardly ever see a crowd driven act of charity or of goodness because that does not rally emotion. Emotion is most effectively triggered by fear. Gossip focused on shock value not on praise. We are therefore a product of our times in every way. For instance we blame the media for mis-informing us but they are simply self serving. If reporting fairly and accurately on events was what the masses wanted that is what they would do. The masses want entertainment. Look at the Roman Colosseums with gladiators and wild animals or Spanish bull fighting. The media just feed the mass public emotional appetite. Unfortunately technology exponentially accelerates that making something globally viral in seconds. So we get a toxic monster feeding on itself and growing with no stop button of which the latest manifestation is corona hysteria which subjugates democratically elected governments who appease the beast Modern democracy is nothing but avoidance of responsibility and seeking of credit. Thus 18 months ago the British government responded to Corona virus using 40 years of WHO planning and protocol and dropped it quicker than you can bat an eyelid in the face of the growing monster of social media driven toxic public narrative which then feeds on itself approving that which fits in with it and rejecting anything which does not. At its most simple it is how cavemen survived but this is exactly why humans need clear leadership and identity to maintain order and harmony and stop emotion driven chaos from running amok. How do we reach a stage where at one point it was legal to play tennis with your wife but not to have sex with your wife according to official guidelines or to be told go on holiday as long as you have been double jabbed but there is the possibility that while you have perfectly complied and are away that everything can be reversed and you cannot enter your own country without paying £1600 to stay is a substandard quarantine hotel . In more sensible days this would be called prison. We also give notice that vaccines according to the WHO definition of a pandemic are now illegal as they are experimental and since the WHO has recommended PCR amplification cycles be dropped from 34 to 25 then there has never been a pandemic because you would never have found the cases with the testing. This means that every single vaccine death is negligent homicide let alone the young people suffering from long term side effects. We need identity and leadership and that is not by democracy any longer. In the absence of that we are heading to chaos and riots and long term recession. A conspiracy with ostensibly some kind of plan would be preferable.

We are a failing civilisation, we are on the plateau of the sine wave that defines the progress of most entities which develop grow and fail. So far we have followed it to the letter. Slow start, then sudden exponential growth followed by a plateau which is where we are now followed by precipitous fall. The driving force and inspiration for the ascent of man is indeed God and it is the lack of God which has started our down-fall. Humans are tribal and religion is a transcontinental tribe joining the masses in relative peace and collaboration as well as compliance which means its power can be used for good or bad . Either way never has a Western society beaten a religious society in combat. You cannot beat dogma with bombs. The irony is that what does beat religion is its own success. The industrial revolution and unregulated capitalism. As people become more self obsessed and inward looking they are distracted from their own values from culture morals ethics religion. Materialism atomises structure and with that identity. Hence the rise of the rights of the individual. The paradigm of virtue at first glance. Not at the cost of the integrity of society. Democracy is a relatively recent example of this. Simply put: rule of the rabble. It has destroyed every society that it has been allowed to take root in starting in ancient Athens which was finished off in short order. The exponentially developing catastrophe now is a rise of public opinion bastardised by social media. Democratically elected governments are simply PR election machines. Nothing more or less. Governments have therefore been withdrawing further and further away from the electorate via decentralisation and becoming increasingly policy driven in order to avoid responsibility while at the same time taking any credit. One of the many problems of social media is that fake news travels 6 times faster than true news which by repetition becomes public opinion. So false toxic narrative becomes the official public narrative which the government then respond to. Right now of course that includes unelected public health officials most of whom as mediocre because which doctor who is any good at all would become an administrator and therefore by definition this is their ticket to significance. The two drivers to government policy are therefore mediocre people justifying their significance and toxic fake public opinion. Political correctness and wokeness is exceptionally easy to apply. It is something virtuous which costs you nothing to stand behind but that is not virtue -by defintion- it is virtue signalling which is a badge of hierarchy especially if you are comfortable doing it. Those therefore deciding and implementing public policy are the elite sitting in their comfortable offices and homes driven by self servingly mediocre advisors and toxic public opinion as the rest of the country are plunged down a rabbit hole of chaos and destruction of society and careers and families and the health of children. Vaccinate a child anyone? The government will unless we stop them.