Over the New Year, people will be looking at themselves, making resolutions, starting afresh. Do you think that this introspection is a good thing, or are we too full of anxiety when we re-evaluate our lives?

It’s important to keep asking yourself the question, what am I doing with my life? Shall I go in new directions? Throughout history there have always been people who have been interested in this question. Tolstoy, for example, was always asking himself whether he was doing the right thing with his life.

Of course, the New Year is a great peg to hang these questions. The real issue, though, is how we go about making changes in our lives. I like to make a distinction between introspection and outrospection. In the 20th century we were obsessed with introspection – the idea that the way to find meaning in our lives is to look inside us, at our drives, motivations and priorities. That introspective approach really comes out of psychoanalysis and the self-help industry.

I think that’s an old-fashioned idea. In the 21st century we need to balance introspection with outrospection – the idea that the way to discover how to live is to discover how other people see the world, to put yourself in their shoes and see how they have pursued the art of living. When it comes to New Year, I think we need a healthy dose of outrospection to explore how others have gone about dealing with the dilemmas of everyday life, whether it’s how to find love or how to deal with family tensions or career change.

What is the ultimate goal here? You say “pursue the art of living”, but what does that really mean?

It’s partly about confronting what people find difficult in their lives, and reducing human suffering on some level. To find ways to nurture our relationships, and give our lives deeper meaning. To try to deal with the practicalities of making a living, dealing with money and work and time. To think about what it means to be a creative person and to nurture the many sides of yourself. These are all different aspects of the art of living.

And of course we also need to think about the art of dying, about growing old and facing our mortality – which I think of as “deathstyle”. We need to think of deathstyle as much as lifestyle. Often people say what this is really about is happiness – how should I be happy? But I prefer to think about concrete areas of life, like love, family, time, travel and death – this whole array of areas in which we’re confronted by questions about what to do with our lives.

Is it especially difficult to confront such questions in our modern times? You write in your new book The Wonderbox that “how to pursue the art of living has become the great quandary of our age”. What is it about the day and age we live in that makes it a quandary?

I think we’re in a state of flux. Many of these areas of life are undergoing change, and often rapid change because of technology. For example, the way we fall in love and make friends has been transformed by online networks and internet dating. There are new questions about how we spend the extra years that have been granted us, through medical technologies and public health. And there are questions about the nature of materialism and consumption.

The 20th century is an age of the idea that wellbeing can be discovered through a high-consumption, luxury lifestyle. But research on life satisfaction in the last 10 or 15 years has shown that above a certain income level, your life satisfaction doesn’t go up as you consume more goods. So that raises questions such as: How do we pursue the good life? Is there an alternative to consumer culture and materialism? There are more and more questions like this. Which is partly why if you walk into a bookshop, the self-help and personal development sections are much bigger than they have ever been.

Wherever we want to get to in our lives, how do we get there? This isn’t a self-help question – I’m not after a panacea – but where should we be looking to learn this art of living?

Traditionally, there have been three major sources for wisdom on the art of living. One has been religious and spiritual thought. A second has been philosophy. And a third has been psychology, particularly in the last 100 years. So when you do walk into your local bookshop and go to the self-help section, those are the kinds of book you’ll find. Increasingly there’s a fourth category, which is books on neuroscience – the idea that if we understand better how our brains work, we can understand better about falling in love or dealing with stress and so on.

I think the gap in all of this is looking at history. I think there are inspiring answers in past civilisations and the lives of past individuals, and that is my influence in writing my new book The Wonderbox. In the 17th century the philosopher and historian Thomas Hobbes said: “The principal and proper work of history is to instruct, and to enable men by knowledge of actions past to bear themselves prudently in the present, and providently in the future.”

Historians have always thought that their work is relevant to the present, but normally in terms of political institutions or economic systems. They haven’t so much tried to think about history as being relevant for individual life and the decisions that we make every day – for the art of living. That’s something I’ve been very keen to draw on, and the books I’ve chosen reflect that desire.