I am sometimes asked what it actually means to be a critical realist, and this has led me to think about how I live my life as a critical realist, seeing things through that lens. It has been an interesting thought experiment, but here are my thoughts.

Living critically as a critical realist means treating your whole life as a situated, fallible inquiry into a stratified, value‑laden world, with a standing commitment to emancipation where you find avoidable harm.

1. Core stance in everyday life

Try to hold three background commitments in how you move through the world:

• Reality exists and exerts causal influence whether or not anyone recognises it (structures, mechanisms, tendencies, your own embodied limits).

• Knowledge is always partial, theory‑laden and corrigible; you treat your beliefs as best current explanations, not final truths.

• Social life is saturated with power and injustice, and your praxis ought, where possible, to “absent ills” rather than reproduce them.

A simple practice is to regularly ask of any strong opinion you hold:

“What would have to be true of the world for this to hold, and what evidence would make me revise it?”

2. Using empirical–actual–real in your day

You can consciously read situations through the empirical/actual/real triad:

• Empirical: What I can observe or experience here (words spoken in a meeting, my emotional reaction).

• Actual: What is happening beyond my observation (informal alliances, silent dissent, prior emails I have not seen).

• Real: What enduring mechanisms and structures are at work (professional cultures, gendered expectations, managerial logics, trauma histories, economic constraints).

In practice, when something puzzles or frustrates you (e.g. a reform blocked at work, a colleague resistant to using AI, a family conflict), pause and sketch a quick three‑layer note: what I saw; what else is likely happening; what deeper mechanisms might be generating this pattern.

3. Habits for identifying mechanisms

Cultivate a “mechanism‑seeking” habit in your own life as you may (in my case) already do in research:

• Look for recurrent patterns in your week (fatigue spikes, conflict themes, procrastination around certain tasks).

• Hypothesise mechanisms (e.g. perfectionism, institutional incentives, fear of evaluation, gendered division of care, time‑poverty).

• Test and refine: slightly change conditions and see whether outcomes shift (e.g., routines, boundaries, communication, or material setup).

You can treat personal change projects as small realist evaluations:

“In context X, when I introduce Y (new routine, boundary, request), what mechanisms seem to fire, producing which outcomes?”

4. Four‑planar practice: designing a CR life

Bhaskar’s four-planar social being can be translated into a weekly self‑check.

• Material transactions with nature:
• Sleep, health, embodied work conditions, environment; ask “What structural conditions of my material life are enabling or constraining my agency?”

• Interpersonal action: Day‑to‑day interactions; ask “How are my micro‑practices reproducing or challenging local power relations?”

• Social relations: Roles, organisations, wider systems (university, probation, MoJ); ask “What positions do I occupy, and how am I enacting or transforming their causal powers?”

• Intra‑subjectivity: Inner talk, identity, projects; ask “What stories am I telling about myself, and which mechanisms (class, gender, coloniality, ableism) have sedimented into them?”

Once a month, you could journal a page under these four headings and set one small, concrete action for each plane to better align your practice with your values (e.g., change a meeting format, push back on an unfair expectation, adjust your workload, seek solidarity).

5. Emancipatory axiology in personal choices

Critical realism is not ethically neutral; it carries an emancipatory orientation towards reducing avoidable suffering and structural injustice.

• In work: privilege projects, alliances and uses of your expertise that expose and challenge harmful mechanisms in AI and criminal justice, rather than merely describing them.

• In relationships: notice where you unintentionally reproduce oppressive patterns (gendered labour at home, classed expectations of success, racialised assumptions) and experiment with different practices.

• In self‑care: treat burnout, anxiety and perfectionism not just as “personal failings” but as effects of mechanisms (neoliberal academia, audit cultures, carceral rationalities) that you can partially resist and reconfigure.

A helpful heuristic is:

“Does this action help absent a concrete ill (for me, others, or future others), or does it help reproduce it?”

and to let that question quietly steer which invitations you accept, which compromises you refuse, and which conflicts you decide are worth having.

In summary

Living according to Critical Realist principles involves treating life as an ongoing inquiry into a complex, value-laden world, committed to reducing avoidable harm and injustice. This approach encourages reflection on reality, knowledge, and power dynamics in everyday actions.

• Core stance in everyday life: Maintain commitments that reality exists independently of recognition, knowledge is always partial and corrigible, and social life is imbued with power and injustice requiring praxis that aims to eliminate harm. Regularly question strong opinions by considering what evidence would revise them.

• Using empirical–actual–real triad: Analyse situations by distinguishing what is observed (empirical), what occurs beyond observation (actual), and the underlying mechanisms or structures at work (real). This practice helps understand complex social phenomena and personal frustrations by layering observations with deeper causal factors.

• Habits for identifying mechanisms: Develop a habit of seeking mechanisms by observing recurring patterns in life, hypothesising underlying causes, and testing changes to see how outcomes shift. Personal change can be approached as a realist evaluation of the contexts, interventions, and mechanisms that produce outcomes.

Four-planar practice for self-check: Use Bhaskar’s four planes, material transactions, interpersonal action, social relations, and intra-subjectivity, as a framework for monthly reflection and setting concrete actions that align life practices with emancipatory values, challenging power structures and oppressive mechanisms.