The other day I gazed at my Twitter feed and saw the same news item retweeted and commented upon by several of the people I follow. Making the same points with various degrees of humour or waspishness. I was literally gazing down at my own personalised echo chamber. Comforting, affirming and totally corrupting.

We all know - or at least I hope we do - that to live the good life, you should be understanding, humble, a seeker or truth and knowledge. What is a good life? Well, read my dissection of Marcus Aurelius here. We should all try to widen our sources of information, and gain new perspectives and thoughts.

This feeling grew after the election in December. I should have been happy - and I was - but a feeling in me grew that perhaps I was missing something. On a whim I trimmed my right wing and libertarian sources and upped my left wing and radical sources. I always had a few (George Galloway, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard) but now I wanted left wing voices to be more represented on the panels of my thoughts. My politics is complicated and I wanted my sources to reflect this, to challenge myself.

But last week I went further. As any reader of this blog knows, I have interests in Roman history, history generally, architecture, London and art. But my Twitter feed did not reflect this. So I actively sought out Twitter feeds that nourished what I actually like beyond the narrow prism of politics - archaeological finds and digs, art exhibitions, great architecture from around the world.

And so my twitter feed - my guilty pleasure - is now (for now) more representative of me as a whole, including the better half of my soul. When I look at my feed I want to stray from Trump’s tweets, to a campaign to save a Roman villa in Gloucestershire, to what’s happening next door at the Tate, to the painful internal process of good solid Labour MPs as they try to work out why they got the recent kicking from the UK electorate.

The same with books. The same with podcasts. The same with YouTubing. Music. 2020 has to be the year of diversity of thought, that most important but under-rated of qualities. It is a central pillar that buttresses ‘a good life’.

Next week, I discuss that how reducing your alcohol intake, eating moderately across all the food groups, quitting smoking and exercising regularly might actually make you more healthy. It’s part of my new series; Stating the Bleeding Obvious.

* Footnote - the Marx quote… This always struck me as ridiculous when I read this back at University. We all had to study Marx a lot, and this quote seemed to summarise the unrealistic nature of communism as envisaged in The German Ideology. But if one substitutes work and replaces it with thought, then, not so crazy…