About Me



Charlene Tan holds a doctorate in philosophy and writes about purpose, joy and the art of living well through the insights of classical traditions. She was previously a tenured professor at the University of Hong Kong and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Her books reflect a sustained engagement with ancient wisdom and its relevance today. They include Confucius (Bloomsbury), Confucian Philosophy for Contemporary Education (Routledge), Mindful Leadership for Schools: Wisdom from Confucius (Bloomsbury), and Mindful Education: Insights from Confucian and Christian Traditions (Springer).

Draft book chapters and academic articles are available for download on her Academia.edu page.

Charlene believes that ancient wisdom is not meant to remain in books, but to be lived. When she isn’t writing or volunteer teaching, she enjoys exploring nature trails with her husband.

Popular posts from this blog

You Are Not Lazy. You Are Lost in the Doing Trap

Image
7 min read Why do you wake up exhausted, crush your to-do list, hit your targets, a nd still feel like your life is somehow  happening off-screen, without you?    In this post, we explore what Confucius reveals about the difference between doing and being — and how shifting your focus can transform restlessness into genuine peace. You are productive. You are ambitious. You are, by most measurable standards, successful. And yet, somewhere between the morning alarm and the late-night scroll, a nagging question keeps surfacing: What is all this doing actually for? This is the Doing Trap .  Not a failure of effort because you have plenty of that. It is the creeping suspicion that you have been sprinting on a treadmill, mistaking motion for meaning. The calendar is full. The inbox never empties. The achievements stack up.  But the sense of actually living,  of being present in your own life, keeps slipping away. What if the problem is not that you are doing too ...
Read more

Why Chasing Happiness Is Making You Miserable (And What to Do Instead)

Image
8 min read You have been told that happiness is what you are after . And yet, the harder you chase it, the worse you feel. In this post, we explore what Confucian harmony and Christian shalom reveal about a deeper kind of wellbeing — one that arrives not when you chase it, but when you stop and start living differently. Here is the irony at the heart of the happiness industry: research consistently shows that people who make happiness their primary goal are, paradoxically, less happy.  The harder you pursue the feeling directly, the more it recedes. Modern psychology calls the pleasure-driven approach hedonic wellbeing, which is maximising positive emotions, minimising pain.  The result is a roller-coaster of highs and lows, with each peak slightly less satisfying than the last, and the troughs deepening with each cycle. Ancient wisdom across multiple traditions calls this by a simpler name:  the wrong question . Two traditions — Confucianism and Christianity — offe...
Read more

The Butcher Who Loved His Work: A Daoist Secret to Beating Burnout

Image
7 min read You are good at your job. So why does every Sunday evening feel like a slow walk to the gallows? In this post, we explore what the Daoist story of Cook Ding reveals about the secret to finding genuine joy at work — not by changing your job, but by changing your relationship with the work itself. Here is a number that should trouble anyone in a knowledge job: according to Gallup's 2024 survey, only 21% of employees globally are genuinely engaged at work. Nearly half of office-based workers are actively searching for another job. And here is the part that gets stranger: high-earning professionals — the ones who 'made it' by external measures — are among the most disengaged. The money works, up to a point. After that, something else has to carry the weight of meaning. And often, nothing does. The result is what psychologists call the  productivity guilt cycle : working constantly, achieving measurably, feeling hollow anyway, then working harder to fill the gap. Rep...
Read more