The Shrink and the Sage

Based on their Financial Times Weekend column, philosopher Julian Baggini and his psychotherapist partner Antonia Macaro offer intriguing answers to life's questions. Can infidelity be good for you? What does it mean to stay true to yourself? Must we fulfil our potential? Self-help with a distinctly cerebral edge, the shrink and the sage – aka Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro – have been dispensing advice through their FT column since October 2010. Combining practical advice on personal dilemmas with meditations on the meaning of concepts like free will, spirituality and independence, this book – their first together – expands on these columns and adds much more. Through questions of existential unease, metaphysical trauma and – for instance – how much we should care about our appearance, intellectual agony uncle and aunt team Baggini and Macaro begin to piece together the answer that we'd all like to hear: what is the good life, and how we can live it?