Gloom, Gloomy, Gloomier, Gloomiest

I've never really though of Alain de Botton as a pessimist - after all as some sort of Swiss Trustafarian he does not have to work and seemingly doesn't giving him the freedom to be like a medieval polymath - simply thinking about thinking - oh - that's philosophy isn't it? Anyway after reading this characteristically-deep piece by him I am wondering whether it could be labelled "pessimism - the new optimism. As a supposed card-carrying depressive I now find that my view of the future lumps me in with the secular optimists who foresee a paradise on earth brought about by growth, science and benevolent dictatorships. And yet all my worrying about the complexity of things in the west being just too much for the human hive mind to contemplate seems to be the other side of the cusp of catastrophe in this Cognitive Dissonance. Anyway I don't have the intellectual equipment to process many things by AdB so you will have to make your mind up for yourself.

However, another thinker also brought to mind by a BBC article is the supremely-readable and also very clever Atul Gawande, an American Doctor and the author of the book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, which I picked up randomly from the library. Hence I was stopped from my normal breeze through the BBC news site by this article about Gawande's last book - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right which was of course dutifully reserved and retrieved from the library to be pushed onto the top of the reading stack (above Conference at Cold-Comfort Farm). I leave you to puzzle out examples of Simple, Complicated and Complex systems. Clue; some of this might well be Rocket Science.