Does your life, which was supposed to be a journey on the Orient Express to glamour, adventure and excitement, feel more like a trip on an English branch line with long stops at Hankering, Frittering, Fretting, East and West Dithering, towards the terrible terminus of Slavering? Does your everyday routine seem dreary, trivial, meaningless, burdensome and unfulfilling? Do you wake in the small hours assailed by this terrifying thought: “Nothing is happening, I am gaining no experience, I will die without ever having really lived.”

If the answer to these questions is yes, you are not alone. I have lived a conventional, circumscribed life (not intentionally, it just turned out that way), and on many occasions felt that it was pitifully limited. On other occasions, much less frequent, I have understood that my life has been as rich and strange as any other. This alternative attitude is much more helpful – and to try to make it the default I wrote Embracing the Ordinary: Lessons from the Champions of Everyday Life.

If the problem is a perceived lack of experience, the usual solution is to embark on something excitingly new – travel, adventures, love affairs, bungee jumping. But experience may be deepened as well as widened. There are many ways of appreciating that everyday life is more interesting, comical and mysterious than we ever imagined and which bring the additional advantage of not requiring relocation or significant expenditure.

The arts are especially useful for changing perceptions of the apparently banal and monotonous, but here I concentrate on philosophy’s approach to the everyday. This has often been dismissively negative, but there are inspiring exceptions in the earliest philosophy: the Stoics were the first champions of the everyday.