Democracy in the making

Abstract

Good question, I’ve wondered myself! Speaking about my last book, Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing, I was often asked what I’d write about next. Death? one person grinned. No, I said, perhaps the opposite. That’s when I started thinking that what I’m always trying to address, for myself as much as anyone else, are our attachments to life. What promotes this and creates our well-being, I thought, is not really individual pursuits, such as pumping muscles at the gym, it’s having friends and contacts; it’s making life meaningful, together with others. Confronting the ubiquitous neoliberal rationality, endorsing only endless competitiveness individual or corporate we need to hold on to alternative ways of connecting with each other. Surely it is mainly our ties to others that make life worth living. This makes the work some people are doing around the notion of ‘the commons’ so important the idea that we need shared spaces, quite outside the commercial arena, for us to be together, if only to ponder what life is about.