Womankind May 2018

Why are ‘successful’ people often miserable? By that I mean people who have risen to the top of their field, be it in television, the arts, business, and so forth. Having reached the pinnacle of their careers, some frantically pen their memoirs revealing their inner turmoil, angst, loneliness, and frustration. “Oh, I was miserable,” they cry. “I was anxiety-ridden, and in despair”. A life coach warns on his blog: it’s a lonely road to the top. “Working towards your own aspirations in life can be very lonely”. As you venture on, he warns, you will begin to feel your isolation. If reaching the top of one’s career is often accompanied by loneliness and isolation, it makes me question whether our modern definition of ‘success’ - that being to toil away…

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Antonia Case: Antonia Case is the Editor-in-Chief of Womankind and the Editorial Director of New Philosopher. In 2016 she was awarded the AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media, and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the Stack Awards in 2016 and 2017. Sara Maitland: Sara Maitland is a novelist and writer of short stories and non-fiction. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1978. She has written 16 books of fiction and 13 non-fiction books. In 1995 she worked with Stanley Kubrick on the film script for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Lucy Treloar: Lucy Treloar’s novel Salt Creek won 2016 Debut Indie Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin, Australia’s most…

Since the 1960s, roughly twenty thousand papers have been written on creativity. And today, online bookstores list over 22,000 books on creativity alone: how to spark it, explain it, guide it, or find it. Creativity, it seems, is a hot topic not least for finding personal fulfilment and happiness, but more importantly as a strategy to overcome life’s hardships, illness, breakup, loss, grief. And it’s true, creative people with meaningful projects to engage in have an advantage over the rest of us. When life becomes too much - its injustice or cruelty, its inevitable disappointments - the creative person has the studio, the laboratory, the garage, or the study, to forget about life for a bit. But can the art of creativity be learnt by everyone? In the book Wired…

Living in a turf-roofed house was fairly common in Iceland up until the late 19th century. With timber sparse and slow to regenerate, the island nation turned to turf for roofs and walls, turf being widely available and a good insulator against the winter cold. Today, urban planners are beginning to understand the wisdom behind this rather quaint architectural practice. A new law in France requires all new commercial builds to be roofed in plants or solar panels. Sydney, Australia, has recently adopted a Green Roof and Walls Policy, a necessary move as summer temperatures soar across Sydney’s rapidly expanding urban landscape, where pasturelands have been erased for rows of utility housing. A study conducted in Toronto, Canada, concluded that green roofs not only improve air quality, reduce water runoff,…

“One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfilment seems to be falling in love with something - your dream, your image of the future.”– E. Paul Torrance We spend about one third of daily life thinking beyond the here and now - a form of mental time travel where we ruminate on past events and contemplate our impending future. But according to a study by psychology researcher Jonathan Smallwood at the University of York, low moods make us more inclined to go backwards in time rather than forwards, and this mental regurgitation can cause depressive symptoms. The paper titled Imprisoned by the past: Unhappy moods lead to a retrospective bias to mind wandering suggests that while it’s normal and healthy to reflect on past events,…