ABSTRACT
As Schopenhauer mercilessly put it, ‘We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And the road from the one to the other goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill’ (1851/1970, p. 54). We live in the domain of the bodily, in family and friendship networks, in schools, jobs and personal interests or varieties of inactivity and retirement, and in thoughts, feelings and conversations about experiences, tasks and prospects. The discourses of media and academic analysis have some validity but also distort common and idiosyncratic experience and introspection. Academics have the task of balancing apparent expertise against tentativeness on matters such as developmental knowledge (see, for example, Abela et al., 2008). Neither research that triumphantly declares a certain age group to be happiest, nor a biased book on depressive realism can correspond with the unique phenomenological worlds of over seven billion human beings. Neither academic accounts of the lifeworld , paramount reality or narrative , nor popular mythologies of individual life journeys can provide the last word on actual lives. Psychological surveys tend to ask crude, positively toned questions that do not recognise the great difficulty many people have in confessing to (or even recognising) dark thoughts and experiences. Perhaps a few questions probing nuances of marital dissatisfaction, career dysphoria, health and death preoccupations and suicidal flickers, while the interviewee is linked to a lie detector, or administered sodium pentothal, might unearth quite different results.
