Some keen readers may have noticed that The Inkling has not published a feature article since November last year (when Sustainability was posted). There is another feature in the pipeline, but because it is bigger and better than the first two it is much harder and more time consuming to prepare. To keep you entertained in the meantime, The Inkling has decided to explain why these feature articles were chosen and to give you some idea of what goes on when The Inkling writes these articles.
How it all started: Three big questions
By The Inkling
I’ve never been much of a fan of knowing things just for the sake of knowing them. I wanted my quest to result in something useful. I wanted my answers to all these little questions to add up to something – to some big answers to big questions. I wanted to assemble the information into some sort of guide, some sort of plan. A big picture. A vision.
I needed some structure to work within so I made a couple of assumptions and came up with three big questions.
My first big question was “What makes us happy?” – and my assumption was that people want to be happy. I don’t mean the silly-grin kind of happy. I mean a content kind of happy. Where people have what they need to lead full lives. The results of this investigation can be found in the post called “Happiness”.
My second big question was “How can we be sustainable”. This was personal, but I justified it with the assumption that people don’t really want to crash and burn – that we’d like to be able to carry on without disaster, that deep down in our hearts we’d prefer not to destroy the planet and each other. The results of this investigation can be found in the post called “Sustainability”.
Then the third question, the biggest one of all, was “How can we achieve happiness and sustainability?”. To answer this question I’m looking at many things, including political and economic systems, the policies of the political parties in this country and how economies and monetary systems “work” (or how people think and expect that they work, at least). I’m learning a lot (I have to) and it is taking a long time. So you don’t get too sick of waiting, I’ll be sharing little tidbits of information with you from time to time.
The Inkling 