Empathy

For Psyche, a sense of humour is virtuous because it helps people govern and express the emotions of contempt, trust, amusement and hope. And these emotions answer to the universal flourishing-related needs of criticism, connection, coping and capability. All in all, a sense of humour is a virtue.

We often assume that laughter occurs when we hear something funny, but research has shown that it is the people doing the speaking who laugh the most - 46% more than their audience.

During dark days of worsening refugee crises and increasing populism, can we still imagine reaching a state of "xenophilia"...overcoming our "homophily", i.e. the love of that which is like us, and reaching the love of that which is different?

Indeed, if we're ever going to care enough about conflict, genocide, poverty, hunger etc. enough to act on them properly, then we need to try much harder to avoid conflict with people we might not yet fully understand.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts...half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Authoritative lists of supposed global role models provoke approval and controversy in equal measure, but also raise the more important question: who is honouring the vastly greater number of non-celebrity role models among our human family of perhaps 7.8 billion alive today?

For me the purpose of life is to know other people…is to discover what life is. Who inhabits the world? What is it to be human? What can I give to the world which it doesn’t have…a gift for tolerating my presence in this world..…and unless I know the people, I can’t know what it does not have - Theodore Zeldin

Imagining seeing how everybody else lives, just for one day.  Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.