Life is tragic, life is comic; the glass is half-empty — no, half full. Point of view is all. Two magazines — President and Spa — represent the opposite poles of optimism and pessimism. For President, bad luck and good luck are all in the mind. The former is a failure of will, the latter always within reach. Just master a skill, develop a knack, adopt a winning mannerism and be a winner. Fail today, succeed tomorrow. Laugh and the world is funny. Laugh and your body is healthy — seriously, it's on record, as we'll see in a moment.

For Spa, that's all smoke and mirrors. Life is a losing battle with fate. Individual problems are soluble, but solutions generate new problems, generally worse ones, and the person who reaches 50 undefeated and unbowed is scarcely to be met with — certainly not in its pages.

Here's one of Spa's "case histories" — part of its feature this month on the deadly 50s. It's a dreadful decade. Life's worst assaults on individual happiness — economic, psychological, physical — all seem to hit at once; or, if they don't, you fear they will, with consequent anxiety that makes real victimhood seem almost preferable.