Andy McNab

Sartre, a Parisian who was at the height of his philosophical powers during the mid-twentieth century, is famous for his contention that, when it comes to us humans, ‘Existence precedes essence.’

Or, to put it more simply, we are born without purpose so we are free to become whoever we wish to become.

Epicurus called this preference for pleasure over pain hedonism (from the Greek word hedonismus, meaning delight) – and even the most masochistic of us are hedonists at heart.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines.

Kierkegaard came up with a brilliant analogy. Imagine that you’re standing on the edge of a cliff, he wrote.

You will experience two kinds of fear.

The first kind is the fear of falling (which is fair enough).

The second kind is the fear of throwing yourself off – the terrifying realization that whether or not you plunge into the abyss below is COMPLETELY UP TO YOU.

You have total FREEDOM OF CHOICE.

true that a lot of people don’t get what they want because they’re scared of taking the plunge.

It’s purely and simply because they have unrealistic expectations of what is actually possible.

you happen to be one of the lucky ones, like Five-Talent Man for instance, it just isn’t good enough to rest on your laurels and take it easy on yourself. If you happen to be naturally gifted, the return you get on those gifts should be consistent with the outlay.

A classic experiment conducted back in the 1960s showed that dogs repeatedly given electric shocks with no way of escaping those shocks, subsequently chose to passively accept their fate EVEN WHEN AN ESCAPE ROUTE WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO THEM.

Nietzsche railed against the way that Christianity devalued life as just a warm-up act for the infinitely more rewarding ‘life after death’ – how it advocated turning our backs on what seemed important in the here and now in readiness for life on an eternal, ethereal, more exalted plane of existence.

Research has shown that responding to nice people by being nice and to not nice people by being not nice is by far the most effective way forward.