Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Comedian Cariad Lloyd said of this book that it’s “like having a cup of tea and a chat with Michael himself”, and I’d have to agree. There’s no ego here, no ulterior motive, and he’s not trying to prove anything. It’s just him talking about his own experience and how he might be able to help others, and its just warming, humorous, silly, natural, and above all, honest. Really honest. And we all need that. There is also only little discussion of ecological limits or climate change – though he argues that these pose great challenges to the sustainability of current economic models, and that free market mechanisms only offer uncertain pathways to sustainability. Book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model” In Rosen’s thinking, talking about it, writing about it – it all helps. (Expel the ping-pong ball and regain agency!) Though in some ways his mother’s approach lingers in him. Eddie is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but Rosen doesn’t visit the grave. And he finds it troubling to watch videos of his son. “He did drama in the sixth form,” Rosen says near the end of our conversation, “and he’s in a video of one of the plays he wrote. I’ve never looked at it. I don’t think I can. He was wearing a helmet. It’s in that box.” Michael Rosen has got through lots of crises in his life including the death of his parents, his son, jobs and a close shave with death with Covid. He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. Their memories he unearthed from the fragments available to him to make sure they were not forgotten.

I wonder aloud why he has never previously told the story of Eddie’s death. Given what I’ve been through, I’ve done OK. If you were to mark it in terms of difficulty, I’m about a five Making and implementing a get-better plan: Making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus.This is a great read, and an excellent argument for optimism in human development, generally, and the place of targeted aid specifically. Making and implementing a get-better plan: This is about deliberately making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus. What gets measured, get improved. So, identify ways to measure “how to get better” and not just results. This is one thinker that wants the data to do the talking rather than his words. In his latest book Enlightenment Now, he continues this number fuelled charge for reason, going as far to say that the advanced benefits we’re experiencing are being “wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots”. We are far better off today than we have ever been. But we don’t seem to be paying attention.

When I ask Rosen if he would have written this book had he not almost lost his life to Covid, he says, “Probably not. No.” Becoming perilously unwell – “poorly,” as the doctors described it, as though he had a mild cold – has brought to the surface several other troubling periods in his life. “Freud’s got a word for it,” he says. “What does he call it – condensation? When one thing happens and you pour into it all your feelings from other places?” As Rosen was feeling “sad about being ill and being feeble it sort of drew in, like a vacuum cleaner, all this other stuff.” The Taleb critique is a different story altogether. It’s very hard to discern a coherent criticism beneath all of the belligerence and macho posturing. If one were to try to uncover a substance of the criticism, it would be that it’s possible for gradually improving trends to coexist with a non-zero probability of a catastrophic event. We can become fatalistic about the human condition figuring nothing anyone tries to do will be any good, but then we become more receptive to radicalism. Potentially to a charismatic strong man who claims that he alone can solve our problems.

Once the symptom is seen as a making of meaning by an organism enigmatic to itself, rather than as a malfunctioning of a potentially well-functioning system, the treatment becomes a less obviously normative project; the aims of the treatment, the concepts of cure, are there to be argued about rather than merely consented to. As we shall see, psychoanalysis – which Freud wanted to be a part of medical science – was to expose the oversimplification of the concept of cure in medicine: at least when it came to so-called mental illness. Cure being a consensus, among any given group of people, about what health is, and so about the aims and objectives of certain kinds of medical treatment; and where cure may not always be possible, it is useful as an organizing aim, a regulative target (‘How do I know if I am cured?’ becomes a question of not simply whether my suffering has been alleviated but ‘Who am I going to ask that can tell me?’ or ‘Which criteria for cure can I assent to?’). The concept of cure, in other words, is quite literally a question of criteria; of whose criteria we are meeting, and of our reasons for those particular criteria as satisfying. Where there are ideas about cure, there are shared criteria in play, however tacit or unconscious; criteria, fundamentally, about what is good, what is of value, what about ourselves and our lives should be nurtured and encouraged. get better at getting better is a great follow-up to the Catalyst. It is about building the capability, to build a model to be successful. The book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model (GBM)” to be successful. To excel in today's VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, it is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have, to improve how good you are. If you have a strong model – then you will be able to multiplicate the model and achieve success in different roles and domains throughout your career. This is my takeaway from the book GBAGB. In another chapter, he recalls a bag of letters written in Polish by two relatives to their teenage son during the Second World War, letters that come to a sudden, horrible end when the ghetto in which they were being written was “liquidated” by the Nazis. Rosen has the letters translated into English; an act of remembrance and a way to regain control of the narrative. “It felt good to do this,” he says. Of course, my argument is that I think people have to be aware of the threats and the dangers, the injustices and sufferings. No one would argue that those should be minimised. But if the improvements, success and developments are not reported I believe that is as bad as complacency, namely fatalism.

The author has not given any generalized information like stay positive, change your subconscious thinking, but dwelled on various methods to solve problems in a manner which could help not only for that given challenge but for similar challenges for which one may be future ready for. One of the ways of describing how psychoanalysis revises (and reprises) the medical model of cure, I think – though Freud was not always either explicit about this or conscious of it – is to say that it re-presents the concept of cure as if it is, unavoidably, a question of morality, a moral issue; as though the so-called ‘good life’ of ancient and traditional philosophy has been somehow all too literally replaced, or displaced, by the criteria of health of modern medical science; the good person has been redescribed as the healthy person (without the question ‘What is health good for?’ being asked, health tending to be less controversial than goodness: health as the solvent, the redescription of morality). As though shared knowledge has replaced each individual, personal hope. As though to know what it would be to be cured would be to know more or less what a good life was, if only for oneself. As though, in a sense, medical science could cure us of the perplexities of morality (by telling us who we are, it tells us who we can be); what Foucault described in Madness and Civilization as ‘the doctor–patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked and loosened’.Success is not about how good you are, but about how powerful and effective a model you have to improve how good you are. This seemed like a partial return to form for Phillips, at least in my reading. I can’t help thinking that the last essay in the collection - on William James’ notion of belief - would have been better if placed in the other, ‘companion’ book, as there seemed a kind of fundamental break between that one and what had come before in this collection. But at least it gave me an opportunity for comparison, and more specifically comparing what I liked about the essays that came before it with what made me suspicious of this last one.

Getting better by yourself: This is about deliberately getting better from what you do on a daily basis by yourself, without external help. Yes,” he nods, and goes on, “I don’t know how other people describe bereavement, but I always think of the thoughts as swirling, a bit swirly-whirly.” Whether you are a manager, entrepreneur, doctor or someone just starting out your professional journey, this book will help you to apprehend most certainly something that you have battled with – or are doing so.He also makes a very effective argument for the role of aid programs in supporting improved health and education, "The biggest success of development has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter – things like health and education – cheaper and more widely available."