This ‘joke’ was agreed with BBC producers before the cameras began rolling. In context, it was actually a joke about BBC balance. BBC programmes are supposed to give both sides of the story, so after offering some jokey support for the strikers – “I think they’ve been fantastic. London today has just been empty. Everybody stayed at home, you can whizz about, restaurants are empty” – he flipped to “but we have to balance this though, because this is the BBC… Frankly, I’d have them all shot.”

When the presenter clarified that this was not the BBC’s view – it was Jeremy Clarkson’s personal view – Clarkson responded: “No it’s not!”

It was clearly a joke. Not a particularly funny joke admittedly, but Jeremy Clarkson isn’t a particularly funny guy. What can we do? (Shoot him?)

As Clarkson said the next day: “I expressed two different views. Which one do I apologise for? I am just making fun of the BBC’s need to be impartial. Not about strikers. I wasn’t saying that strikers should be shot.”

Where did all the offence come from, especially from people who weren’t even watching the programme?

I think most of us were outside our comfort zone on Wednesday. Public sector workers who felt down-trodden were flexing their muscles – they were doing their best to stand up for themselves, for their families and communities. But it didn’t have as much impact as many of them hoped. Many other people were strongly against them – publicly and privately belittling them without empathy. And that was epitomised by Jeremy Clarkson – an outspoken, belligerent beast and a personal friend of David Cameron. Many people directed their frustration and anger towards him.

We lose ourselves when we try to rationalise our experience. Ask someone to explain why the joke offended them and they’ll flounder, but that doesn’t mean the offence wasn’t genuine. People are scared at the moment. They’ve worked for years believing their future would work out as planned. Now reality has punctured the plan and they feel wounded. It’s unsettling. Budgets are black and white, but people exist in a kaleidoscope of hopes and dreams. Some are worried and unsettled. Their future is uncertain. They don’t know what to do.

It’s easy to round against Jeremy Clarkson but he’s a light entertainment star with a DVD to promote. The real issue is that our country is divided and many of the people we rely on feel very let down.

Think about those guys who clear away your rubbish each week or fortnight – do you know their names or how much they get paid? The whole country would soon stink without them but they’re mostly invisible unless they don’t turn up. We want nurses to be available for us immediately when we arrive at a hospital in need, but what thought do we give to the nurse who goes home and cries because she can’t see any way out of debt, and her kids need new shoes?

As soon as we meet the bin man or nurse personally – when we see them as real human beings – then our attitude towards them tends to change instantly. It’s horrible that they do so much for us and we do so little for them. We can see that when we’re willing to think about it. But of course it’s easier not to think about it, so we shift from experience to theory and say things like “they should be grateful to have a job at all”. The kaleidoscope is reduced to black and white, and then we don’t have to consider our role in their suffering.

When I work with clients, I think it’s important to acknowledge the guilt and shame we’ve tried to keep a lid on for so long. We all know that our actions in this part of the world are part of the reason people are starving in other countries. We know we’re damaging the environment. We know we could do more to help people less fortunate than ourselves.

When we refuse to feel our own guilt, we project it out into the world – onto people like Jeremy Clarkson. We cast them as the bad guys so we can feel good by contrast.

Trouble is, we look out into a world of bad guys and think that’s reality. Then we can’t do all we want because the world is so hostile and unfair.

If you’d like to explore how your own beliefs influence your experience of the world, and even hold you back from living the life you really want, I’d love to talk with you. My coaching page will be updated in the new year but please feel free to get in touch before then. You can e-mail me – hello@chrismorris.com – to chat or find out more.

Most of us have had moments where we believe our worth as a human being is conditional on us doing the right thing, looking the right way or having the right stuff. We all do things and buy things to establish our place in an imaginary pecking order. And I think it affects us very deeply when we think we have to live that way and then we can’t make it work. We despair and lose our inner sense of worth. We start to destroy ourselves, and the destruction spills out – in small and bigger ways.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to understand the psychology of rioting. People who’ve felt powerless for years are intoxicated by a sudden surge of power. They thought they had only a few options and none of those gave them any hope. Suddenly the world opened up. They found they could totally control their environment. They dominated the streets and could smash or take anything they wanted. In those adrenaline-filled moments, they felt alive and powerful.

I grew up in care, didn’t go to school for many years and was homeless at 18. If you don’t understand what drives someone to smash up their own community, you’re fortunate. You haven’t been there and I’m glad for you. But if you think you’re better than those people, you’re wrong. You only made the best choices you knew how to make and so did they. Your life unfolded in a way that you can see more of the choices that are available to you. Some people don’t have that clarity yet.

What turned my life around was noticing I could make a difference in my own life. Relying on something that can be taken away (by government policy, benefit cuts, etc.) is a way to live in constant insecurity – that’s what leads to frustration, fear and anger. Knowing I have the power to choose my own path is what sets me free. It’s not always easy. Maybe it’s simple, but that’s not the same as easy.

While I run a successful coaching practice, I spend as much time working with people from backgrounds similar to mine. There’s nothing fancy about that work. People just need to know they have as much value as everyone else – that their equal value is their birthright and it can’t be lost unless they give it away.

That message is transformative – I’m constantly amazed by the difference it makes.

As Tom Carpenter said, ‎”Every form of lack – be it lack of money, lack of self-worth or lack of peace – arises from the belief that we have lost the ability to be loved. When we know that we are loved, it is impossible to think anything is missing.”

So when I hear people say the rioters “should be shot”, I remind those people – some of them my dear friends – that they’re part of the problem the rioters are trying in their own way to solve. I know that’s a confrontational message. But those defiant people on the street are doing the best they know how to do right now. Your behaviour may be more civilised than theirs but you’re not a better person. If your response to their poorly-expressed despair is to want them dead – to extinguish their very being – how are you not part of the problem?

They are afraid and they turn to violence. You are afraid and you turn to violence.

I’ve heard other people say we should take away their benefits. As if throwing water over a drowning man will help.

The people making these suggestions are frightened by what’s happening and they want to eliminate the threat. Or they want to punish the perpetrators so much that there’s no threat in the future. It’s an understandable reaction but illogical. Who really thinks that cutting benefits will help? It will vent your anger, yes. It will assert your power over the people who frightened you, sure. But creating a new level of poverty won’t help.

Can’t we see beyond the masks and machismo? These are desperate people trying to take control of their own lives in the best way they know. They don’t express themselves as victims because they are doing this to assert their power. But clearly they are suffering and trying to improve their lives. It doesn’t take much to see that.

David Cameron messed up the presentation when he said to “hug a hoodie” but I think his sentiment was right. People need to know they’re cared about.

What can you do in your community to show that all lives are equally valuable?

We won’t be decrepit 1,000-year-olds – the bio-rejuvenation he predicts means we could have healthier bodies than we do now.

Does that sound like science-fiction to you?

In 2005, the MIT Technology Review challenged scientists to disprove the claim, offering a $20,000 prize to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that it is “so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate”. Nobody claimed the money; the learned debate continues.

I drifted in and out of understanding Dr de Grey’s scientific explanations. What interests me most is the sociological impact it could have and especially how people feel about living much longer. It’s very curious: most people look first for evidence against the possibility, not for it – they think first of the problems, not the benefits. Why is that?

When I told people I was going to meet Aubrey, the most common response was light mockery. His long beard does not help in this respect. “He looks like Gandalf de Grey”, said one chap. While most people realise that being a good gerontologist doesn’t require regular beard-trimming, I think we react flippantly to his ideas because they’re such big ideas.

Most people claim to be busy these days, but most people also feel like they’re on a treadmill. Having 10x more time… that’s a lot to take seriously.

We tend to get prematurely practical too. “What about overcrowding?”, “The pension age would have to rise”, “The planet is already struggling to cope with our excesses”.

Those concerns only make sense if you think this one technological advance could happen in isolation. It’s much more likely to happen alongside the development of clean energy and more efficient ways to live in the vast areas of our planet that are currently uninhabitable.

Then there’s the cultural hypnosis. When people think time is valuable and finite, they tend to convert their time into money and hoard it for the future. That way they can convert it back later, enjoying their last few years without any ‘work’. This seems insane to me. But if you think like that, it makes sense to want the best time:money conversion rate – so savings and pensions become important and suddenly getting more time might devalue our stock.

When you extend your life expectancy, a lot of this cultural hypnosis is exposed. The life we were taught to expect (the learning/development phase – the productivity phase – the retirement/illness phase) is much less than the life we could be enjoying.

How would you be living today if you knew you were going to live another 100, 500 or 1,000 years?

When I let my mind go quiet, I notice some of my own beliefs about ageing. My grandparents lived into their early 90s and I’ve already had about 30% of the time they had. Rightly or wrongly, I believe I’ll probably live a bit longer than them – so, on balance, I think I’m about 25% done. Those are just a cluster of beliefs, of course, but you know how much beliefs guide our lives. I also realise I’ve mentally written-off some years at the end of my life. So the race is on to contribute something to the world – I haven’t done much so far, and time is running out. Tick, tick, tick.

For Aubrey, it’s simply about health – if we can clean up the damage that comes from metabolism before it creates pathology, all kinds of illnesses that affect older people will never arise. Goodbye heart disease and Parkinsons, hello 950th birthday. Just make sure you can afford all the candles.

When I asked him about the sociological implications of such longevity, he dismissed the question brusquely. His view: “If disease is preventable, why do you want to die?”

If people won’t get behind the science until it’s put into a sociological context? “Make those people feel stupid”, he boomed.

Making people feel stupid is not my style. Besides, people already have long memories. Can you imagine if they held a grudge for 1,000 years?

The biggest thing I got from meeting Aubrey is a new perspective on what’s possible now. My generation may be on the edge of this new way of living and it may not. The options that may be available in 20-40 years may only extend our life expectancy by 20 years, but further research during those 20 years may improve the technology, and that could continue exponentially. The healthier we are when we start, the better our chances of continuing. According to Aubrey, the first 150-year-old and the first 1,000-year-old will probably be born only 20 years apart. As we tucked into our Time & Space platters – with all that deep-fried tempura, chips and chicken wings – I wondered if my lifestyle today could be knocking hundreds of years off my life. Aubrey had a burger on the side, though. So I remain hopeful.

What might life be like in 1,000 years? What might your life be like today if you knew you were going to live that long?

In many ways, it’s a gossip story and I don’t care. 30,000 people will die today from hunger and whether a quote came from an interview yesterday or a book published a year ago doesn’t really matter. Unlike some other journalists, Johann hasn’t fabricated the quotes completely. I doubt he meant any harm.

But there’s a wider point: how well do we understand our relationship with columnists and commentators?

I’ve always seen Johann as an entertainer, not a journalist. He stitches together selective arguments to create a narrative that takes his readers on a ride. In particular, his speciality is getting people who don’t know much about a topic to think they are understanding it properly now. That’s a profitable niche to be in and understandably it’s won him a lot of fans. But how often are we unsuspecting pawns in a bigger game we don’t understand?

When Johann interviewed Gideon Levy – an Israeli activist who’s made a career of criticising Israel – most of the quotes weren’t published. Why? Because Gideon Levy doesn’t make sense most of the time. He contradicts himself relentlessly and his mistakes/lies are easy to spot. So Johann ditched most of those quotes and used extracts from Gideon Levy’s own articles instead. Much more time had been spent polishing those: they’d been through fact-checking, re-writes, sub-editing and proofing. They’re still his words, probably, but we were sold the idea that he’s a lucid and well-informed interview subject – and really he’s not. We were misled.

I think of it like air-brushing pictures. If you air-brush a celebrity or model to make them look nicer, that’s one thing. If you air-brush a bomb site to show more victims, that’s something else.

Gideon Levy makes money by accusing people of genocide. His deceitful words should not be ‘word-brushed’.

Most modern journalism blurs news and opinion, fact and fiction, advertising and editorial. I’ve written news reports in the past (for The Evening Standard and The Big Issue) and been a researcher for BBC News and Newsnight. I’ve also been a guest on news programs, giving my own opinions on the news. I’ve written my opinions for newspapers and had columns in Time Out and a couple of the gay newspapers. I’ve made a short radio program for the BBC. Now I blog.

Blogging gives you absolute control over the output. There are limitless possibilities.

When you read an article – either in the mainstream media or on a personal blog – how much do you know about the writer/publisher’s agenda? Do you care?

What is my agenda for posting this?

I won’t read Johann Hari’s articles any differently in future. He’s great at what he does. The people who are outraged should look to themselves – why would you join in a game before finding out the rules?

I thought, “He survived an attack. How could he be ashamed of that?”

In the heat of the moment, few people want Yoda to pop up with “only in the mind, thoughts are” advice. But I guess it’s ok the next day…

In my life, my big challenge is to love what’s real. That means letting go of all hopes for a better past. All my suffering has come from having a story about who I am and how the world should be. When reality punctures that story, I hurt.

Isn’t that true for all of us?

We act as if our stories are real. Then it feels uncomfortable when the stories are made wrong.

If we stay attached to a story and it’s repeatedly made wrong despite our efforts to maintain it, it can feel like the whole fabric of reality is against us. The world is against us. Even our own bodies are against us.

The more we fight it, the worse we feel.

And those feelings can change in an instant.

Recently I worked with a lady who’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and was due to have a breast removed the next day. She arrived in tears, devastated.

In the context of a coaching conversation, I asked how she knew she was supposed to have two breasts. That may sound like an odd question. For some, it may even sound like an offensive question – that’s why I emphasise it was calibrated for that individual in that conversation. For her, she zoned out as she thought how to answer. Like most of us, she’d been carrying an idea of who she was, and part of that for her involved being a woman with two breasts. It felt like an attack when reality suddenly punctured her idea of herself.

A few moments later, her smile was life-changing. It was like a switch had flicked. There was no therapy needed, no nothing. She simply realised that she wasn’t supposed to be anything she isn’t. She was having a breast removed, and it didn’t mean anything more than that.

When people offered her sympathy, she understood that it was them who felt bad. Their story about her had been punctured too. She comforted them while continuing to feel comfortable herself.

Can you apply this principle in your own life? Can you love reality, even if it doesn’t match your expectations?

• If you’re interested in exploring this more and think I could be useful, please get in touch.